"Rag" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other hand the advanced orthodox party, most bitter haters of Barneveld, and whom in his correspondence with England he uniformly and perhaps designedly called the Puritans, knowing that the very word was a scarlet rag to James, were growing louder and louder in their demands. "Some thirty of these Puritans," said he, "of whom at least twenty are Flemings or other foreigners equally violent, proclaim that they and the like of them mean alone to govern the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... gentleman, not I. They went into my rag-bag, like as not, and are all thrown away and lost, sir, many a day agone, for ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... called a bullock-car in English, and a carro in Portuguese. We got into one of them, with a great deal of laughter, and drove to the hotel. The driver walked by the side of the carro, and threw the end of a greasy rag first under one runner and then under the other, to make it ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... rubbing her cheeks with a vicious force. "Aunt Jane wants me to wear a veil and keep white; but I'd rather be black and speckled all over, than make a mummy of myself. I think fresh air and sunshine were made to be enjoyed, and not to be peeked out at through a rag." ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... with "Southern outrages" as its electoral stock-in-trade and the maintenance of the odious non-American State Governments as its programme. The surrender of 1876 put an end even to this link. The "bloody shirt" disappeared, and with it the last rag of the old Republican garment. A formal protest against the use of "intimidation" in the "Solid South" continued to figure piously for some decades in the quadrennial platform of the party. At last even this was dropped, and ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... hired by the city, came and threw up an earthwork on the opposite side of the street, which they said was a sidewalk, and would add to the value of property in the neighborhood. Not being dressed with coal- ashes, however, during the winter, the sidewalk vanished next summer under a growth of rag-weed, and hid the increased values with it, and it is now an even question whether this monument of municipal grandeur will finally be held by Art or resumed by Nature,—who indeed has a perpetual motherly longing for her own, and may be seen in all outlying and suburban places, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... you after, grasshopper?" said the mistress, and growing angry she seized a piece of rag to beat him off; but he crept underneath her thimble, and then peeped at her, and put his tongue out at her. She took up the thimble, and would have seized him, but he hopped among the rags, and as the mistress turned ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... that I recollect was my pulling myself out of a river just at nightfall. I had not a rag of clothing and knew nothing of my whereabouts, but all that night I traveled, cold and footsore, toward the north. At daybreak I found myself at Fort C. F. Smith, my destination, but without my dispatches. The first man that I met was a sergeant named William Briscoe, whom I knew very well. You ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... hear the low hum of the volley, we see the fierce bomb-burst of red; Still the rock in the forehead of Lookout through the rents of the windy mist shows The horrible flag of the Crossbar, the counterfeit rag of our foes: Portentous it looks through the vapor, then melts to the eye, but it tells That the rebels still cling to their stronghold, and hope for the moment dispels. But the roll of the thunder seems louder, flame angrier smites ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... crushing his cap in his big hands and glowering at the rag-mat under his feet. Two kinds of love, several kinds of devils, pride, anger and despair ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... sharp arrows of sarkasm and argument through his coat armor of dignified complacency and self-esteem, for truly his idees wuz to her like a red rag to a bull. ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... fish," Bunny said. To the bent pin hook, on the end of the string, he tied a piece of rag. He had brought all these things with him, hoping he might get a chance to fish ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Aunt Lu's City Home • Laura Lee Hope
... she would say, "ye will carry even to the grave some rag of the Scarlet Woman. And at the end I will not be surprised to find ye sitting on some knowetap amang the ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... a few weeks after, Mrs. Pepper and Polly were busy in the kitchen. Phronsie was out in the "orchard," as the one scraggy apple-tree was called by courtesy, singing her rag doll to sleep under its sheltering branches. But "Baby" was cross and wouldn't go to sleep, and Phronsie was on the point of giving up, and returning to the house, when a strain of music made her pause with dolly in her apron. There she stood with her finger in her mouth, in utter astonishment, ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... the man, smug, cynical, shameless, sprawling luxuriously on the sofa, with his tunic unbuttoned, filled him with sudden fury: such fury as Oliver's insult had aroused, such as had impelled him during a vicious rag in the mess to clutch a man's hair and almost pull it out ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... it gradually walked toward him until so near that he was assured that his piece would carry that far. It actually came within thirty yards of him, and he shot it while lying prone on the ground, the graceful animal noticing nothing but the white rag ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... something about the second: he will show us the working of the crucible wherein all things are melted to begin anew. A truce to nice delicacy! Odi profanum vulgus et arceo; hence, ye profane: you would not understand the mighty lesson of the rag tank. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... says he, drawing me out of the wind. "Look yonder, d'ye see aught of a rag o' sail, Martin?" Following his pointing finger, I stared away into the distance across a tumbling spume of waters vague in the half-light. ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... myself with certain necessaries for the way. These were not numerous. The silver-mounted dressing-case is here supplied by a rag containing a miswak, a bit of soap, and a comb—wooden, for bone and tortoise-shell are not, religiously speaking, correct. Equally simple was my wardrobe: a change or two of clothing. The only article of canteen description was a zemzemiyah, a goatskin water-bag, which communicates ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... The rag and bone men go from door to door filling an old bag with scraps of linen, and so innumerable agents of bankers and financiers, vampires that suck gold, are for ever prowling about collecting every golden coin ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... France; the Hindoo maiden who burned her lamp upon the banks of the Ganges in order to see if her lover was alive; the little maid who was penitent because she laughed at the lame duckling with a red rag around its leg—who does not know the whole inimitable gallery from beginning to end? The tenderest, the softest, the most virginal spirit breathes through all these sketches. They are sentimental, no doubt, and a trifle too sweet. But then they belong ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... William Henry. With that the record is broken off: we can less definitely associate his name with the humiliation of the French in America than with their brief triumphs. Yet it is quite certain, says Robert de Crevecoeur, his descendant, that he did not return to France with the rag-tag of the defeated army. Quebec fell before Wolfe's attack in September 1759; at some time in the course of the year 1760 we may suppose the young officer to have entered the British colonies; to have adopted his family name of "Saint John" ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... before it had hated. And their impatient hopes of this "made the scholars talk aloud, drink healths, and curse Meroz in the very streets; insomuch that when the King came in, they were not only like them that dream, but like them who are out of their wits, mad, stark, staring mad." This unholy 'rag' (to modernise the old gentleman's language) continued for a twelvemonth: that is to say, until the Vice-Chancellor—holding that the demonstration, like Miss Mary Bennet's pianoforte playing in Pride and Prejudice, had ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... month here. You can't imagine what a queer place it is, nor what a queer employer I have struck. There might be no war—as far as Mannering is concerned. The Squire is always engaged in mopping it out, like Mrs. Partington. He takes no newspaper, except a rag called the Lanchester Mail, which attacks the Government, the Army—as far as it dare—and "secret diplomacy." It comes out about once a week with a black page, because the Censor has been sitting on it. Desmond Mannering—that's ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... His angels to comfort and sustain them who from love to Him go out into rightous warfare. But I don't believe they come through a seansy. I don't, honestly. I don't believe Daniel would have felt strengthened a mite, by seein' a materialized rag-baby hung out by a wire in front of a hemlock box, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... a rag on me body nor a whole bone in me skin when we get out of this!" he gasped, as they reached high ground between two spreading deeps of mingled weeds and water. "The sight of us'd frighten the whole rebel army, if we don't come on them aisy loike, as the fox ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... complexion, distinguish them alike from the Shankallas and the Barias, and from the mixed races of the plateaus. They wear a piece of cloth a few yards in length, folded round the body, with an elegance peculiar to the savage. Even with this dirty rag, they must be admired, like the Italian beggar, not only for their beautiful forms, but also for the look of impudence and roguery displayed in the bright glare of their dark eyes. The Beni Amers retain ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... and most interesting part of the garden, is that devoted to wax dolls. There are other beds for the commoner dolls—for the rag dolls, and the china dolls, and the rubber dolls, but of course wax dolls would look much handsomer growing. Wax dolls have to be planted quite early in the season; for they need a good start before the sun is very high. ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... done me, and yourself too, a lot of good. It would ha' been horrid for the men to think you was scared. I never thought of frightening my lady with the row. Tell the lads to sponge the guns out with a bit o' rag, and then we'll run 'em back to ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... the brown man curtly. He was an even-tempered youth, as genial and friendly as a half-grown pup, but just now the word "pay" irritated him as a red rag does ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... lord,' said the scribe. 'I have a tattered rag around my hips, and on the road I have lost my sandals; but my papyrus and reed I bear with me at all times, as I do the heart in my body. Both while rising in the morning and lying down at night, I repeat ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... which Mrs. Birtwell passed was narrow and had a rag carpet on the floor. But the carpet was clean and the atmosphere pure. Ascending the stairs, Mrs. Birtwell knocked at the door, and was answered by a faint "Come in" from ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... exclaimed Mrs. Hightower from the inside of the house. "Don't set her atter me, Abe—don't, fer mercy's sake. Get her in the notion, an' she'll be a-yerkin' me aroun' thereckly like I wuz a rag-baby. I'm a-gittin' too ole fer ter be romped aroun' by a great big double-j'inted gal like Babe. Projick wi' 'er yourself, but make 'er let ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... rag Of that old war-rent flag Of Liberty! Flag of great Washington! Flag of brave Anderson! Flag of each mother's son Who ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... sneered the other squirting a jet of blinding steam in the face of the client he was treating, "he ain't got no more go in him than dat rag,"—and he slapped a wet towel ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... there, on the left of the principal pathway, are indeed, not five stone lozenges, but ten in one row and three more at the back of them, such peculiarly-shaped and curiously-arranged little monuments as we never before beheld. They consist of a grey stone (Kentish-rag, probably, but lichen-encrusted by time) of cylindrical shape, widening at the shoulders, coffin-like, and about a yard in length, the diameter being about eight inches, including the portion buried in the earth. Four little foot-stones are placed in front, and separating the ten little ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... and MILLED away one, two, right and left—like a little hero as he is, with all his dear mother's spirit in him. First came a crack which sent a long dusky white hat—that looked damp and deep like a well, and had a long black crape-rag twisted round it—first came a crack which sent this white hat spinning over the gentleman's cab and scattered among the crowd a vast number of things which the cabman kept in it,—such as a ball of string, a piece of candle, a comb, a whip-lash, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the vagina (Greek kteis comb pudenda muliebria). (The carpet is still more specifically marked as a female symbol in that the brothers take it from the body of a shepherdess. Shepherdess—a coarse "rag"—coarse "cloth"—in contrast to the fine carpet of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... streamers around his neck. They tied a red one on the little white hen. They tried to decorate the turkey, too, but he was in no mood for it, and gobbled and pecked at them so savagely that Dona Teresa had to tie up his head in a rag! ...
— The Mexican Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... voice and instrument; none recalled in a better way the tone of Gaussin or the accent of Clairon; none could tell a story better. And there where others could vie with her in coquetry, she carried off the honors by her genius of toilette, by the graceful turn she gave to a mere rag, by the air she imparted to a mere nothing which ornamented her, by the characteristic signature which her taste gave ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... your beauty to this flout and scorn By dressing it in rags? Amazed am I, Beholding how ye butt against my wish, That I forbear you thus: cross me no more. At least put off to please me this poor gown, This silken rag, this beggar-woman's weed: I love that beauty should go beautifully: For see ye not my gentlewomen here, How gay, how suited to the house of one Who loves that beauty should go beautifully? Rise therefore; robe yourself ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... had reached the bank of the stream. In he plunged, splashing and cursing, and seized the struggling puppy; then waded back, the waters surging about his waist, and Red Wull, limp as a wet rag, in his hand. The little man's hair was dripping, for his cap was gone; his clothes clung to him, exposing the miserableness of his figure; and his eyes blazed like hot ashes in his ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... door closed gently enough, and separated Mrs. Pratt from the whole moving mass of animate confusion that reigned in the streets outside. As she stopped, on her way through the narrow passage within, to straighten the rag mat at the door of the front room, she sighed ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... and, as in bowing, one should at the same time look into the countenance of the person whose hand one takes. In giving her hand to a foreigner, a married woman always relaxes her arm and fingers, as it is customary for him to lift her hand to his lips. But by a relaxed hand is not meant a wet rag; a hand should have life even though it be passive. A woman should always allow a man who is only an acquaintance to shake her hand; she should never shake his. To a very old friend she gives a much firmer clasp, but he shakes her hand more than she shakes his. Younger women usually shake ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... disposed of the last rag or ribbon when the tramp of horses was heard, followed by loud shouts and ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... can give you something much better than that cotton rag." And she tripped up the shop and came back presently, and as she passed the boy whispered something in his ear, and he nodded and got up and went out. The girl held up in her finger and thumb a red morocco bag, gaily embroidered, and said, "There, ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... alaborin' in the Gulf o' Mexico, The skipper on the quarter, with eyes aloft and low. Says he, 'My bucko boys, it's asurely goin' to blow— Take every blessed rag from her, strip her from truck to toe, And we'll see what she can make of it.' And O, my eyes, it blew! And blew and blew, And blew and blew! My soul, how it did blow! Aboard the Flying Walrus in ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... of Vermelles, where many young Frenchmen had fallen in fighting through the walls and gardens. One could see the track of their strife, in trampled bushes and broken walls. Bits of red rag—the red pantaloons of the first French soldiers—were still fastened to brambles and barbed wire. Broken rifles, cartouches, water-bottles, torn letters, twisted bayonets, and German stick-bombs littered the ditches which had been ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... You should be ashamed of yourself!" It was his grandfather this time. Grandpa moved over to the piano and removed the rag-time from off the hymnal, pausing to pat ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... string and has to be liberated by his ally, the cook, with a kitchen knife. Edward calls it his "garden coat," and swears he only wears it on dirty jobs, to save his new mackintosh, but nevertheless he is sincerely attached to the rag, and once attempted to travel to London to a Royal Society beano in it, and was only frustrated in the nick ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... managed to get Polly's head round again—for she had availed herself of our pause to whisk homeward—we proceed on our way to Ragland. Welsh precisians, we perceive, call it Rhaglan—and probably attach a nobler meaning to the name than can be forced out of the Saxon Rag and Land; but as novelists and historians have agreed in calling it Ragland, we shall keep to the old spelling in spite of sennachie and bard. A short way beyond Llansaintfraed is the handsome gate and beautiful park of Clytha; the gate surmounted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... demand men of good taste who care for the best they know. Vulgarity is satisfaction with mean things. That is vulgar which is poor of its kind. There is a kind of music called rag-time,—vulgar music, with catchy tunes—catchy to those who do not know nor care for things better. There are men satisfied with rag-time music, with rag-time theatres, with rag-time politics, rag-time knowledge, rag-time religion. "It was my duty to have loved the highest." The ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... directions I took the tray down to a kind of scullery on the floor below. The wet plates and cups I dried on a greasy rag which I found lying on the sink; and this seemed to me a refinement of luxurious living; for at home, when we did wash plates, we merely held them under the tap till the remains of food ran off, and we never thought of drying them. When I returned to the bedroom Paragot was dressed for ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... The barber himself, an unwashed, greasy, but foppishly dressed youth of three and twenty, is busy clearing up; there is really nothing to be cleared away, but he is perspiring with his exertions. In one place he polishes with a rag, in another he scrapes with his finger or catches a bug and brushes it off ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... overcome by the toothsomeness of beefsteak, falls to again, while the others dance a sort of fandango, and turn up the rag carpet, and rattle the dishes on the dresser, and lift Dolly high in the air to the improvised tune of "Tom's coming home! Tom's coming ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... of him, and walked towards the city. On my way thither, as I passed a Buddhist monastery, I was struck by the appearance of a man sitting at the side of the road near it. He was extraordinarily ugly; his body naked, with the exception of a rag round his waist; and his face so covered with dirt, that the tears he was shedding left furrows as they rolled down ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... a pneumatic beer-pump, by means of which the bar-tender can flood the bar with beer. Afterwards he wipes up the beer with a rag. By this means he polishes the bar. Some of the beer that is pumped up spills into glasses and ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... propter verba tua; naught beyond that and another circumstance, which went to show that the knight had been slain by an eastern enemy. The dog, as he re-entered the castle, called attention to some pieces of blood-stained rag, which, from their appearance, had dropped from his mouth; one of these, the innermost, was in texture and pattern evidently part ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting hog! Thou that wast seal'd in thy nativity The slave of nature and the son of hell! Thou slander of thy heavy mother's womb! Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins! Thou rag ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... functions are intimately related to our highest powers. Sir William's couplet gives a hint of the dominance of the classical method of his day. It overemphasized the importance of reason and too often converted the youthful mind into a rag bag of useless information. The educators of that time and since have thought more highly of human reason than experience justifies. With their medieval bias for a world of will and reason, they drove the young with the whip and spur of emulation toward what to them seemed the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the adjacent temple accompanied us, and I found my people affecting great solemnity as they approached its sacred bounds; they incessantly muttered "Om mani," etc., kotowed to trees and stones, and hung bits of rag on the bushes. A pretence of opposing our progress was made by the priest, who of course wanted money; this I did not appear to notice, and after a steep descent, we were soon on the shores of what is, for Sikkim, a grand ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... I must accept the punishment I have incurred lest a worse overtake me—to put it at its lowest. I must voluntarily go forward and denounce myself before another denounces me. It is the only way to save some rag ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... leaned forward from the path and slid out her hand to a tiny mound of earth that lay near the compound wall—a little mound that might very well have been pushed up by a mole on the other side—dived her fingers into the earth, and withdrew a small package wrapped in a dirty rag. Then, swiftly she thrust something back into the earth, smoothed the little heap level, rose from tying her shoe, and lightly sauntered on her way. The next time she had occasion to use her handkerchief she slipped the little package into her pocket, and so, empty-handed ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... types of our own time their relation to their native land has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that flags are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very men who have said it for half their lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for a fiction even as I write. When the battle-trumpet blew in 1914 modern humanity had grouped itself into nations almost before it knew what it had done. If the same sound is heard a thousand years hence, there is no sign in the world to suggest ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the lounge was a light-stand, as they called it, and on it was a very brightly polished brass candlestick and a brass tray, with snuffers. That is all I remember of her describing, except that there was a braided rag rug on the floor, and on the wall was a beautiful flowered paper—roses and morning-glories in a wreath on a light-blue ground. The same paper was in ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... dust and landed among the dog fennel of a fence corner, in a flying leap. Then I looked. It was the Princess' father, tall, and gray, and grim, riding a big black horse that seemed as if it had been curried with the fine comb and brushed with the grease rag. ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... lovely to climb into. Connie knew that by experience. Belonging to a family that wore its clothes as long as they possessed any wearing virtue, she found nothing in her immediate wardrobe fitted for the venture. But from a rag-bag in the closet at the head of the stairs, she resurrected some remains of last summer's apparel. First she put on a blue calico, but the skirt was so badly torn in places that it proved insufficiently protecting. ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... she owned to me that she had some connection with this underground railway, principally in the way of providing with old clothing the destitute creatures who were arriving—generally at unexpected moments—barefoot, and with scarce a rag upon their backs to protect them from the bitter cold of the Canadian winter, which even under the best circumstances is so sadly ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... also qualify for children of Europe? Was there ever such outrageous folly? One is sure, in the fine picturesque words of Chaucer, that, 'for very filth and shame,' neither admiral nor the youngest middy would disgrace himself by such ridiculous finery from the rag-fair of cosmopolitan swindling. The real origin of so savage an absurdity is this:—Amongst the commercial bodies of the three presidencies in all the leading cities, it became a matter of difficulty often to describe special individuals in any way ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... as creaking as her joints, she sang, "For the Master said there is work to do!" Such was Aunt Hannah's creed, and it pleased her while she moiled over the work to announce in song that she acted upon divine command. To Aunt Hannah's mind, this lent an august dignity to a dust-rag. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... a reward, and I'll give it with a good will; and if we can get hold of him when we have our feast, he shall have a pot of soup and a hen to himself and those women and children.'—'That is right enough,' said she; 'and I will give them a rag or so, or a few ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... dirty, ragged set, principally consisting of boys and girls; two of them were barefooted, and had scarce a rag to cover them, and did not seem to have been washed for a month. The theatre was of the most wretched description; there was a temporary stage, and bits of scenery. The boys said they were errand boys and servants. Brierly and Smith said they were country actors out of an engagement, and had visited ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... without water. The sky was now as black as pitch; it thundered and lightened, and there was every appearance of a fall of rain, but only a light mist or heavy dew fell for an hour or two; it was so light and the temperature so hot that we all lay without a rag on ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... wide circle floated the two sea-warriors, for the wind was light and just drove them along at the rate of a snail's pace. The rag-tag-and-bob-tail crew on the Saint George stood to their guns like veterans and poured in such a hot fire that the French captain speedily realized that his only chance for victory was to board and overwhelm the English by ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... then took out an old dirty rag, which I suppose he called a handkerchief, unfolded it, and produced three cards, saying, "Them thar fellows gave me these ar cards, and I'm going to larn that ar game, so as when I get back to Texas I can beat ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... extreme effect of re-discovery, a remarkable novelty. "What have I been all this time?" she asked herself, and answered, "Just stark egotism, crude assertion of Ann Veronica, without a modest rag of religion or discipline or respect ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... of Warrender's sight, all this swept across his little soul like a tempest. He remembered the suffocating sensation in his throat, the red mist in his eyes, the feeling that he had but a moment left in which to deliver his message; and then the giddy whirl of movement as he was flung away like a rag or a stone, the crash in his ears, the sharp blow which brought back his scattered faculties for a moment, only to banish them again in the momentary unconsciousness which brought all the tingling and thrilling into his ears of which he had not yet ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... debt, and of which I do not understand the management, and am too old to learn; a source of lawsuits among my near relations, though not affecting me; endless conversations with lawyers, and packets of letters to read every day and answer,—all this weight of new business is too much for the rag of life that yet hangs about me, and was preceded by three weeks of anxiety about my unfortunate nephew, and daily correspondence with physicians and mad-doctors, falling upon me when I had been out ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... you," said Theodosia, getting down from the shelf a mug and a tin teapot wrapped in a rag, "but I'm afraid it is quite cold." The liquid was quite cold and tasted more of tin than of tea, yet Maslova filled the mug and began drinking it with her roll. "Finashka, here you are," she said, breaking off a bit ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... idea," said he. "You and Barriero—Barriero is wonderfully strong—stroll down to him presently. Pretend you want to ask him a question. That will put him off his guard. What happens? You spring on him suddenly, clap a rag in his mouth, and with our help hold him so that he cannot struggle. Then you exchange clothes and stand on guard. When the relief comes you ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... 'Thou rag of a man,' roared a neighbour of the indignant butcher's, 'dost thou frown upon the guests of thy master, the very scrapings of whose skin are worth more than thy whole carcase! It is easier to make a drinking-vessel of the skull of a flea than to make ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... in the front room on the second floor, peering through the blinds. It was the "best room." There was a very new rag carpet on the floor. The edges of it had been dyed with alternate stripes of red and green. Upon the wooden mantel there were two little puffy figures in clay—a shepherd and a shepherdess probably. A triangle of pink and white ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... He lived in a mud hut somewhere about the barren hill now consecrated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The attempt to make out that it was Saint Thomas, or the Wandering Jew who here had an interview with the Virgin Mary, and that the old rag on which the picture is painted is really a part of the cloak of Saint Thomas, is, by a very verbose proclamation of the Archbishop of Mexico, dated 25th March, 1795, pronounced a damnable heresy. I have in my possession a copy ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... adults were hardly clothed with a rag of that bark stuff, produced by certain trees, and called "mbouzon" in the country. Thus the state of this troop of human beings, women covered with wounds from the "havildars'" whips, children ghastly and ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... hair pins, pins, matches, toothpicks and lead pencils. Never pick the ear with anything. Often the ear drum is pierced in this way. The normal ear does not require anything more than the usual cleansing with the wash rag over the ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... a ghostly crew, In tempests she appears; And before the gale, or against the gale, She sails without a rag of sail, Without ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... himself be dunned? Truly, truly, Providence—his Providence, was a sorry jade! Tricks enough she had certainly played him: him, to whom she had given so enormous a secret capability for spending! With a crust for food, a rag for his covering, a garret for shelter, she had endowed him with artist-dreams of luxury, with every extravagant desire, and but one, faint possibility of attainment. One, however, he had; together with a higher ambition than that for material things. He longed for the best sort of fame: was ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... anything the matter, Howard? You look as if things had gone wrong. You don't mind that nonsense of Guthrie's, do you? I was an ass to get him to do it; I hate doing a stupid thing, and he is simply wild with me. It's no good saying it is not like, because it is in a way, but of course it's only a rag. It isn't absurd when you do it, only when someone ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... week that Nellie was preparing to go to the city, Betty had lessons in sewing. Nellie would bring down an old garment, so faded and worn that it would seem only fit for the rag-bag. She would rip and wash, dye with a mysterious little package of stuff, press, and behold, there would come forth pretty breadths of cloth, blue or brown or green, or whatever color was desired. It seemed like magic. And then ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... and set himself resolutely to hammer out something which, though it might not be literature, would at least be capable of being printed. A search through his commonplace book brought no balm. A commonplace book is the author's rag bag. In it he places all the insane ideas that come to him, in the groundless hope that some day he will be able to convert them with ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... thought, his foot stumbled and he fell on his face, striking his forehead against the stump of a tree. The blow cut it open and his blood ran down and blent with his tears. He rose and wiping away the blood, dried his tears and bound his forehead with a piece of rag; then continued his melancholy walk about the garden. Presently, he saw two birds quarrelling on a tree, and one of them smote the other on the neck with its beak and cut off its head, with which it flew away, whilst ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... be better, sir, to send the men away," said he to the colonel, for he was a much-privileged subaltern. He put his arms round the rag-bound horror as he spoke, and dropped him into a chair. It may not have been explained that the littleness of Mildred lay in his being six feet four, and big in proportion. The corporal, seeing that an officer was disposed to look after the capture, and that the colonel's eye was beginning ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... of the tumble unharmed, but Jimmie lay like a rag in his arms as he straightened out and looked upward. The Vixen was ...
— Boy Scouts in an Airship • G. Harvey Ralphson
... Heaven's sake, waste that handkerchief," cautioned her companion. "It's the only towel between us. Mine's impossible!" He showed her the murky rag which was his own; and as they spoke, they reached the top of the road, heard the sound of water, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... make guns, and then they shoot you with them! They own the political parties, and they name the candidates, and trick you into voting for them—and they call it the law! They herd you into armies and send you to shoot your brothers—and they call it order! They take a piece of coloured rag and call it the flag and teach you to let yourself be shot—and they call it patriotism! First, last, and all the time, you do the work and they get the benefit—they, the masters and owners, ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... yesterday, just above the camp. The whole plain was a wilderness. Straw and paper possessed it merely, except that here and there a destitute Kaffir groped among the debris in hopes of finding a shiny tin pot for his furniture or some rag of old uniform to harmonise with his savage dress. In one corner of the empty iron huts a few of the cavalry were still trying to carry off some remnants of forage. It was a pitiful sight, and yet the rapidity of the ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... wounded of the war, brought in from second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburgh. To-night, beautiful women, perfumes, the violin's sweetness, the polka and the waltz; then the amputation, the blue face, the groan, the glassy eye of the dying, the clotted rag, the odor of wounds and blood, and many a mother's son amid strangers, passing away untended there, (for the crowd of the badly hurt was great, and much for nurse to do, and much ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... "You have to be a millionaire, don't you, and a great political bug, before they'd let you in? No place for poor soldiers! I have to be content with the Rag." ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... And, meanwhile, his granddaughter grew up with no one to care for her, or clothe her; only the old nurse, when no one was by, would sometimes give her a dish of scraps from the kitchen, or a torn petticoat from the rag-bag; while the other servants of the Palace would drive her from the house with blows and mocking words, calling her "Tattercoats," and pointing at her bare feet and shoulders, till she ran away crying, to hide ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... church, gray and ancient, but strong as if designed for eternity; with its saints and virgins, and martyrs and relics, its gold and silver and precious stones, whose value would buy up all the spare lots in the New England village; the lpero with scarce a rag to cover him, kneeling on that marble pavement. Leave the enclosure of the church, observe the stone wall that bounds the road for more than a mile; the fruit trees overtopping it, high though it be, with their loaded ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... was my dress this morning," said Jenny, "but here can't any body play in the mud and not get dirty. My pantalet hung by a few threads, and as I wanted a rag to wash my earthens with, I tore it off. ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... everything that we can and there is no use working yourself up.... If anybody's to blame in this business, I don't think it's Tewfick—he's done the handsome thing by her—but the fool Frenchman who took his baby and his wife into the desert, and it's too late to rag him. Cheer up, old top, and forget it. There's nothing ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... neither of them wore any shoes or stockings. Even the richer peasants, who possess shoes or fur-lined boots for winter use, more often than not walk barefoot in the summer, while stockings are unknown luxuries, a piece of rag ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... new in her time, might have been pretty. Every article of their dress, however, looks as if it had descended from generation to generation, till every bit of colour or brilliancy had departed from it, leaving only a threadbare rag, which imagination alone can invest with grace ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... her into seeming lack of courtesy, but even this was a failing which "leaned to virtue's side." I chanced to know of her once calling with a friend on a country neighbor, and finding the good housewife busy over a rag-carpet. Mrs. Prentiss, who had never chanced to see one of these bits of rural manufacture in its elementary processes, was full of questions and interest, thereby quite evidently pleasing the unassuming artist in assorted rags and home-made ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... scandal about Semiramis or Nitocris, and then we have a thousand and one poems written upon it by all the warblers big and little. But I don't care a straw about the faux pas of the mummies. You do, though. You are one of the historical men—more interested in a lady when she's got a rag face and skeleton toes peeping out. Does ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... fashionable Back Bay section of Boston, rag peddlers came to buy odds and ends from the homes of the people. The chauffeurs or the furnace men usually attended to the selling of this, being allowed to keep whatever ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Aunt Jo's • Laura Lee Hope
... Ingolby's mouth. "We've got to have a try. We've got to draw off the bull with a red rag somehow." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Cantabrigiam (1824), quoted in Century Dictionary: "Snobs.—A term applied indiscriminately to all who have not the honour of being members of the university; but in a more particular manner to the 'profanum vulgus,' the tag-rag and bob-tail, who vegetate on the sedgy banks of Camus." This use is in De Quincey's mind. Later, in the strikes of that time, the workmen who accepted lower wages were called snobs; those who ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... that he left no rag or scrap behind him by which he could be possibly identified. But he did. He left a bundle of ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... was square-rigged on her foremast, like a ship, while her main and mizzen masts carried only fore-and-aft sails, including gaff-topsails. The shrill pipe of the boatswain immediately sounded through the vessel, and twenty-four able seamen dashed to their stations. In a few minutes, every rag of canvas which the steamer could carry was set. But the commander did not wait for this to be done, but ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... under the trellis, nodded as she seeded the raisins for the frozen pudding of the six-o'clock dinner; the waiter had succumbed in clearing the lunch-table and made mesmeric passes with the dish-rag in a fantasy of washing the plates; the stable-boy slumbered in the hay, high in the loft, while the fat old coachman, with a chamois-skin in his hand, dozed as he sat on the step of the surrey, between the fenders; the old dog snored on the veranda floor, and Mrs. Keene's special attendant, ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... to be made the occasion of a demonstration, especially as the proposed route of the procession lay through the Piazza di Venezia, under the windows of the Austrian Embassy, Austria being always a red rag to the Italian bull and peculiarly irritating through the reservation of the Palazzo Venezia to the ancient enemy at the cession of Venice to Italy. The mourners were therefore forbidden to pass that way, and the police forces were drawn up in the Piazza Gesu, before ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... only enough for herself and my little sister, Christina. When Garofoli came to beautiful Lucca last year he brought me back with him. Oh, it was hard to leave my little sister.... Signor Garofoli has a lot of boys here, some of them are chimney sweeps, others rag pickers, and those who are not strong enough to work, sing in the streets or beg. Garofoli gave me two little white mice to show to the public and I had to bring him back thirty sous every night. As many sous as you are short a day, so many blows you get. It ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... at all. Away off the bed, over the bright rag carpet, and past the red fire, safely and swiftly they trotted. Below the window they paused. Pretty silver ferns and trees covered the panes and sparkled in the firelight. The window was closed, but that did ...
— Seven O'Clock Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... boy—the son of the freedman who came here from Damascus with the daughter of the great Thomas—and they went quite mad in his father's room: Heaven and earth! what a howling and barking and yelping. They poked their noses into every old rag, and now we knew where the hole in the wine-skin was.—I am sorry for the man. He stammered horribly, but as a trainer, and in all that has to do with horses, all honor to him!—The shoes are Hiram's as surely as my eyes are in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... at stages averaging from ten to twelve miles apart. The baggage was also conveyed by coolies, who kept up an incessant chatter, and the procession was lighted on its way by a torch-bearer, whose torch consisted of bits of rag tied round the end of a stick, upon which he continually poured the most malodorous of oils. If the palankin-bearers were very good, they shuffled along at the rate of about three miles an hour, and if there were no delays, forty ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... whether we are or not! Those rag-tag and bobtail vermin are calling us names!—and, if I can't fight, ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... their supper—the eight elderly women and the three elderly men, all that were left of the community. The room had the austere and shining cleanness which Athalia had called a perfume, but it was full of homely comfort. A blue-and-white rag carpet in the centre left a border of bare floor, painted pumpkin-yellow; there was a glittering airtight stove with isinglass windows that shone like square, red eyes; a gay patchwork cushion in the seat of a rocking-chair was given up to the black cat, whose sleek fur ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... a poor, puny, washed-out little rag of a woman, whose one distinction was the number of her children. They had always great appetites to be satisfied. As soon as they began to run about, the rapidity with which they wore out their boots and the knees of their trousers, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... for our treatment a fair trial on our lines. We claim that ours are common sense methods. Anyone can see that if a head is hot and fevered the application of a cold towel is likely to lower that heat and reduce the fever. But it is no use putting a little bit of wet rag on and then saying our treatment has failed. Large towels repeatedly changed for an hour or more may be needed, and this will give more trouble than administering some dose from the chemist's shop, but the results are well worth the ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... a kindred character, is unfit for perusal by inexperienced and unsophisticated young ladies. Some of this literature is actually too vile for any one to read, and if written to-day by any poet of note would cause his works to be committed to the stove and the rag-bag in spite ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... a minute that there was some sarcasm done up in that rag somewheres, but I never let on. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... herding cattle, white and cream coloured cows, and black hairless buffaloes, whose skins reflect the blue sky. The mud banks are brown and the water yellow, and there's bright green grass between the red mud and the soft green of the bamboos. Put in the little brown-skinned herds, one with a pink rag on his black hair, and that is as near as I can get it with the A.B.C., and there is not time nor sufficient ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... cleanliness. The furniture was rough-hewn and built for use, not ornamentation; the walls were hung with English prints, antlers, mementoes of the hunt and the field of sport; the floor was covered with skins and great "carpet rag" rugs. The whole aspect was so distinctly mannish that her heart fluttered ridiculously in its loneliness. Her cogitations were running seriously toward riot when he came hurriedly down the hall ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long, the desire of good is at their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... good sleep may put him all right by to-morrow morning. The chances are, however, that the O. C. will send him down for a few days' rest and change. If so, the chap will be as happy as a clam. The boys will rag him half to death down there, so that he will be keen to get back again, and the chances are may get his V. C. Oh, we all get scared stiff," laughed Gregg. "We are none of us proud about here. That hero stuff ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... order of the day, and in that atmosphere it was impossible to feel anything but quite at home. Before tea was over we new arrivals were infected with the same spirit of joviality, and were ready for the first 'rag.' ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... old Griggs with me, for they say he can bend a good horse-shoe double, even now, and the fellow had the strength of a lunatic in him. It was rather lively for a few seconds, and then he broke down again, and was as limp as a rag, and trembled with fright, as if he saw queer things ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... spirit swell against God?" as well as by considering the imperfection of the goods on which man prides himself, according to Isa. 40:6, "All flesh is grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of the field"; and farther on (Isa. 64:6), "all our justices" are become "like the rag ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... now, as you see, the 10th of October, and there has not reached the Island of Upolu one single copy, or rag of a copy, of the Samoa book. I lie; there has come one, and that in the pocket of a missionary man who is at daggers drawn with me, who lends it to all my enemies, conceals it from all my friends, and is bringing a lawsuit against ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was interrupted by a person who appeared in the background and resembled a judicial official. Voltaire saw who it was, and became furious: "Your Majesty, how can you allow this rag-tag and bob-tail to enter the castle-park? Why do you not enclose it with iron ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... to look black with wear; she asked whether he would always stay a Garibaldi and offered to sew a new one for him, if he would let her remove the old. He agreed; nobody noticed the glow and the tension in his eyes. When she had unfastened the little red rag and was running away with it laughing, he quickly grabbed her hand and caught it between his crooked horse-teeth. Spiele cried out and tore herself away. Victor laughed with embarrassment and excitement. Hoeflinger looked up startled. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... to Rome, according to the Bishop, who won't be content with running at every red rag of Ritualism that flutters in his own diocese, but keeps up the character of belligerent Broad Churchman by writing pamphlets and asking questions in the House of Lords with reference to affairs which are the business of other people. According to him, the red cassocks of the acolytes at ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... grumbled, taking off his coat to examine the tear by the light of the lantern. "Nice-lookin' rag-bag ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... said he would like to try too; to be sure, it was scarcely worth while to try falls with a walking-stick, with legs like pipe-stems and calves like fly-specks. With his brown hairy arms he grasped Uli as if he would pull him apart like an old rag. But Uli held his ground and the milker made no headway. He grew more and more angry, took hold with ever greater venom, spared neither arms nor legs, and butted with his head like an animal, until at last Uli had enough of it, collected ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... they are exactly square. Nothing is more trying, in a small way, than to get a diaper that cannot be folded true. These should be made double and the edges turned in and sewed around. By the time the baby has outgrown them they will be fit only for the rag- bag, and may be thrown aside. The second size diaper, also the third should be many times washed to make them soft enough for use. These may be used at first folded eight times and put under the baby next the damask diaper, between that and the pinning blanket, and will often save ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... cries Goblin. Mash, mash, mash! An endless routine of heavy hammers. Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer's limbs. See the stone trough! says Goblin. For the water torture! Gurgle, swill, bloat, burst, for the Redeemer's honour! Suck the bloody rag, deep down into your unbelieving body, Heretic, at every breath you draw! And when the executioner plucks it out, reeking with the smaller mysteries of God's own Image, know us for His chosen servants, true ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... rags, in your day, were as good as ours; as the Carrie Nation rag, for instance, when five hundred people sat through a temperance lecture and never guessed they were listening to a ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... citing Mr. Matthew Arnold's citation of the words 'Ragg is in custody,' and his comment that 'there was no Ragg by the Ilyssus.' 'Ragg' has not an ugly sound in itself. Mr. Arnold was jarred merely by its suggestion of something ugly, a rag, and by the cold brutality of the police-court reporter in withholding the prefix 'Miss' from a poor girl who had got into trouble. If 'Ragg' had been brought to his notice as the name of some illustrious old family, Mr. Arnold would never have dragged in the Ilyssus. The name would have ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... in the East before they smoked? From the many-robed Pacha, with his amber-mouthed and jewelled chibouque, longer than a lancer's spear, to the Arab clothed only in a blue rag, and puffing through a short piece of hollowed date-wood, there is, from Stamboul to Grand Cairo, only one source of physical solace. If you pay a visit in the East, a pipe is brought to you with the same regularity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... cyanide of potassium. Dissolve one ounce of the drug in a quarter of a pint of water. This will be sufficient to destroy several nests, but it is a deadly poison, and must be kept in a place of safety. Soak a piece of rag in the fluid, and lay it over the entrance to the nest. There is no occasion to run away; not a Wasp will venture out, and those which return from foraging will not lose their tempers and find yours, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... nothing different from the run of poor houses in the country; unpainted of course, outside and inside; a rag carpet on the floor, a gay patchwork coverlet on the bed. Sally herself was in the rocking-chair before a little wood fire. But there was not the look of even poor comfort which may sometimes be seen; want, that told of lack of means and that also went deeper, ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... see those poor souls lying about like rag dolls," she explained. "The only thing that keeps me sane is the hope ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... large quantity of onions into a pan full of water to soften. In about half an hour she thrust her dirty hands into the water, and mixed the whole together, now and then taking a mouthful, and, after chewing it, spitting it back again into the pan! She then took a dirty rag, strained off the juice, and poured it over the flesh in the caldron. Madame Pfeiffer had firmly resolved to refuse the dish, but when it was ready her appetite was so keen, and the smell so savoury, that her resolution ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... unscrupulous in outraging the small conventions of society. And, unfortunately, Norburn was a man to encourage instead of discouraging her in this course, for conventions and respectability had always been a red rag to him. In the result the isolation of the Medland household from most of the families of their own level in the town, and from all of a higher, if there were any such, grew from day to day, until it seemed that Daisy's "We three against the ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... if they were hers, to punish her for shirking me, by the Lord, I'd have every rag she has in the world out in the middle of the floor in ten minutes! You don't know me—I'm a terrible person ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... a bunch of crippled rag-a-muffins? Look at them for yourselves. There's hardly a whole man among them. I give him a month to go to the wall. It's the old saying of a 'fool and ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... growing even angrier when she found the rain had really stopped, so that her indignation sounded only like acquiescence. She strode ahead of him, silent, through the wet bracken, her frock growing a limp rag as it brushed aside ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the moral North! Where all is virtue, and the winter season Sends sin, without a rag on, shivering forth ('T was snow that brought St. Anthony[47] to reason); Where juries cast up what a wife is worth, By laying whate'er sum, in mulct, they please on The lover, who must pay a handsome price, Because ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron |
