"Rigmarole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... does after all these years of practice. "Ah'm, Jock Furgusson frae Auchtermurrchty and Achterlony, longest maun in the forty twa," he begins—but somebody help me—I've forgotten how he goes on, a long rigmarole in broadest Doric; the words and intonation so perfect, you can so little believe your eyes that you are landed with a scarab or a string of beads before you have recovered, and he is off to another passenger, clippin' 'is g's and r's and puttin' in ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... appointment quite beyond his deserts. I was very glad to hear of it, however, and I asked the creature to contribute a paper recording his first impressions of this notable man; instead of which he begins with an opinionated rigmarole about himself, and goes on from bad to worse by describing a long conversation he had about prison reform with that horrid, masculine Mrs. C——, whom all the officers call 'Charlie,' and who thinks that for men to grow ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... as a stage financier, paused here to gasp; for the utterance of this string of banalities, this rigmarole of commonplaces, had left him breathless. He was very much dissatisfied with his performance; and ready to curse his barren imagination. He longed to hit upon swelling phrases and natural and touching gestures, but in vain. He could only look ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... I said in confusion, recalling all the highfalutin rigmarole which Americans believed—(little martyred Belgium protected by the allies from the inroads of the aggressor, etc.)—"why should the French put machine guns ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... at all! Another rigmarole in which women are mixed up! You know the little singer of Chalons, called Nichoune? She made her first appearance at La Fere, and since then the creature has roved through the rowdy dancing-saloons of Picardy, of the Ardennes—you must ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... shown to his quarters, up a huge Staircase composed of loads of hewn timber; and through long rigmarole passages, hung with blackened paintings of fruit, and fish, and game, and country frollics, and huge kitchens, and portly burgomasters, such as you see about old-fashioned Flemish inns, till at length he ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... said the Wizard, laughing merrily. "It's a rigmarole because the boy is a Rigmarole and ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... no!' said Volnay. 'The trick isn't done yet, old fellow. You've got to be formally enlisted, and to answer a rigmarole of questions, and be examined by the regimental doctor, and to take the oath. The trick isn't done yet, ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... and he will wax amazingly sentimental, and perhaps shed as many real tears as Sterne or Dickens do sham ones over their figments. This realism of Carlyle's gives a great charm to his histories and biographies. The amount he tells you is something astonishing—no platitudes, no rigmarole, no common-form, articles which are the staple of most biography, but, instead of them, all the facts and features of the case—pedigree, birth, father and mother, brothers and sisters, education, physiognomy, personal habits, dress, mode of speech; ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... not be a mere dry rigmarole, but include a certain appeal to sentiment. The subject should begin to make the entries himself when old enough to do so properly, i.e. so that the book will not be disfigured—though indeed the naivity of juvenile phrasing, etc., may be of a particular interest. From a ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... to Cap Martin, expecting to find Mary. Instead I found my brother and his wife alone. My sister-in-law, I must say in justice, seemed terribly grieved at what had happened. She could or would tell me nothing. But Angelo—my brother—began some rigmarole about Mary having run away from her convent-school years ago with a man, and—but I won't repeat the story. I refused to listen. I can ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the heat. Do you know what's happened? The chief has saddled Old Signal Corps on me. Yes, sir, I've got to take his old pet, the major, on the city staff. It seems he's succeeded in losing what little property he had—the chief told me some rigmarole about sudden financial reverses—and now he's down and out. So I'm elected. I've got to take him on as a reporter—a cub reporter sixty-odd years old, mind you, who hasn't heard of anything worth while since Robert E. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... That rigmarole is not in the guide books. Come, Dixon is waving his handkerchief down there, as a signal that ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... alive! what rigmarole 's this? Married—ay, an' so you shall be, in gude time. You 'm light-headed, lass, I do b'lieve. But ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... think I pulled down the German flag and risked my neck half a dozen times and had myself made King just to boom his Yokohama cable stock? Confound him! You might at least swear back. Tell him just what the situation is in a few words. Here, stop that rigmarole to the paper, and explain to your home office that we are awaiting developments, and that, in the meanwhile, they must put up with the best we can send them. ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin[obs3], platitude, niaiserie[obs3]; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae[Lat]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, wish-wash, fiddle-faddle; absurdity &c. 497; vagueness &c. (unintelligibility) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... art a bard completely imbued With genius not to be controlled, Be thou not untractable Within the court of thy king; Until thy rigmarole shall be known, Be thou silent, Heinin, As to the name of thy verse, And the name of thy vaunting; And as to the name of thy grandsire Prior to his being baptized. And the name of the sphere, And the name of the element, And the name of thy language, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... suppose that all this discussion of the physical conditions of existence on the various planets might have been passed over without detriment to the argument. After these efforts at proving (for M. Figuier presumably regards this rigmarole as proof) that all the members of our solar system are habitable, the interplanetary ether is forthwith peopled thickly with "souls," without any resort to argument. This, we suppose, is one of those scientific truths which as M. Figuier tells ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... a rigmarole of all sorts of stories, many of which (like the dollar he took from Mr. Tarleton’s head) were plain enough to me, but others I could make nothing of; and the thing that most surprised the Kanakas was what surprised ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... notice. They were hailed successively, as a grocer's wife upon a party of pleasure with her eldest apprentice—as an old woman carrying her grandson to school—and as a young strapping Irishman, conveying an ancient maiden to Dr. Rigmarole's, at Redriffe, who buckles beggars for a tester and a dram of Geneva. All this abuse was retorted in a similar strain of humour by Greenjacket and his companion, who maintained the war of wit with the same alacrity with ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... of brain-softening, and that a symptom of his complaint had been his addiction to making a number of wills—"two-thirds of 'em incoherent. Every two or three days he'd compose a new one and send for Huskisson, his lawyer; and Huskisson, after reading the rigmarole through, as solemn as a judge, would get it solemnly witnessed and carry it off. He had three boxes full of these lunacies when the old man died, and I'll wager he has not destroyed 'em. Lawyers never destroy ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... fifteen, years ago. He never recognised Miss Pansy, nor, knowing what he was about, would have anything to say to her; and there was no reason why he should. Osmond did, and that was better; though he had to fit on afterwards the whole rigmarole of his own wife's having died in childbirth, and of his having, in grief and horror, banished the little girl from his sight for as long as possible before taking her home from nurse. His wife had really died, you know, of quite ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... sooner out of sight, than Godmamma said, with a long rigmarole, that she felt it her duty to you to look after me, and she must tell me that it was inconvenant for a young girl to smile or speak to a man as much as I had done to the Marquis. I was so furious at that, that I said, as I found it ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... to this rigmarole. Tell the jury right away"—and he faced the prisoner—"what you know about this glass of whiskey. Get right down to the facts; we're not ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the subject gracefully introduced without unnecessary palaver or reference to family antecedents—the simple name given without a long rigmarole of dazzling titles or senseless adjectives. The Muse is neither pathetically invoked nor anathematically abused, but the author proceeds at once to describe his hero's present situation, which, it strangely appears, is in "a corner." The indefiniteness of the locality—a corner—is ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians—and how many more?—who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Songs—why (except that Spirit of the Nation which we so audaciously put together), the popular ballads and songs are the faded finery of the West End, the foul parodies of St. Giles's, the drunken rigmarole of the black Helots—or, as they are touchingly classed in the streets, "sentimental, comic, and nigger songs." Yet Banim, and Griffin, and Furlong, Lover and Ferguson, Drennan and Callanan, have written ballads and ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... points, we will call Bradbury and Evans to the council. I think it more than probable that we shall be of exactly the same mind, but I want you to be in possession of the facts and therefore send you this rigmarole." The rigmarole is not unimportant; because, though we did not differ on the wisdom of saying No to the Chronicle, the "council" spoken of was nevertheless held, and in it lay the germ of another newspaper enterprise he permitted himself to engage in twelve months later, to which he would ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... no harps and lutes in our heaven, only drums; and the preservation of all the essentials of poetry, by the simple enumeration of the utensils to be found in a back kitchen, sounded, I could not help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), not unlike rigmarole. I waited for the master to speak. He had declared that the Republic would fall if it did not become instantly naturalistic; he would not, he could not pass over in silence so important a branch of literature as poetry, no matter how contemptible he might think it. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... obliged to repeat the alphabet before they can recollect the relative place of any given letter; others repeat a column of the multiplication table before they can recollect the given sum of the number they want. There is a common rigmarole for telling the number of days in each month in the year; those who have learnt it by heart, usually repeat the whole of it before they can recollect the place of the month which they want; and sometimes in running over the lines, people miss the ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... be pancakes, a lunch . . . you'll get your cab-fare. Come along, dear chap. You spout out some rigmarole like a regular Cicero at the grave and what ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... rigmarole again. I suppose, when the fit comes on, he will telephone to headquarters for some sort of absent treatment. What charms me is the way those fellows seem to turn on the same tap, whatever the disease. A child down in Oak Street fell into boiling water, only just the other day. The ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... and justice and honesty in their dealings with one another than if they were as ignorant of the Ten Commandments as the most benighted heathens, to whom even the name of Moses was never spoken. Yet, from your looks, I see that you are wondering within yourselves what all this rigmarole about England, France, the Six Nations, and disputed territories, can have to do with George Washington. Had you held a tight rein on your impatience a little while longer, you would have found out all about it, without the inconvenience ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... an age of specialisation. We all know the profound droop of the eminent person's eyelids as he produces that discovery, the edifying deductions or the solemn warnings he unfolds from this proposition, and all the dignified, inconclusive rigmarole of that cylinder. And it is nonsense from ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... by taste, he parodied in his person the foibles of Mr. Brummell and the King. His diamonds and his equipage and other follies became the gossip of every newspaper in England. Nor did a day pass without the publication of some little rigmarole from his pen. Wherever there was a vacant theatre—were it in Cheltenham, Birmingham, or any other town—he would engage it for his productions. One night he would play his favourite part, Romeo, with reverence ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... incident was a French military officer. His services were necessarily dispensed with on the abolition of the feudal system. Memories of him still linger in Matsue; and old people remember a popular snatch about him—a sort of rapidly-vociferated rigmarole, supposed to be an imitation of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... trouble to read those portions of their diplomatic correspondence with the ministers of the allied powers at Athens, which have been published, will be convinced of their utter unfitness for the offices they have held. Let the reader contrast these precious specimens of inaccuracy and rigmarole, with the come-to-the-truth style of our own minister, or the sarcastic, let-us-go-quietly-over-your-reasoning style, in which the Russian minister ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Sancho, "that this Merlin, or those enchanters who enchanted the whole crew your worship says you saw and discoursed with down there, stuffed your imagination or your mind with all this rigmarole you have been treating us to, and all ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... their lord's last words, took courage, and proceeded to work upon his mind by the figure of speech popularly called "rigmarole." They said: "Great king! that old Brahman has been gone many days, and has not returned; he is probably dead and burnt. It is therefore right that by giving to the grand treasurer's son his daughter-in-law, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... into the office with an open letter in his hand. "Here,"—cried he, "I've received a remittance at last from that, German fellow—two good bills on the first house in the city—but I can't make top nor tail of his rigmarole. Do you know any chap among your acquaintance ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... written, and try to imagine it read by some brisk person utterly content with life, I can well understand that the whole thing would appear to him incredible, too preposterously strange for belief, a rigmarole of sick fancies beyond the power of hellebore. So be it: I expect small comprehension and no mercy, for indeed I have written caring little for such consequence, yielding to that human thirst for utterance ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... not try to grasp the inner significance of this rigmarole. He was unfeignedly glad to have escaped from ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... to discuss her husband's ways and actions with another; and, to her amazement, she found that it was easier to talk to Purdy about Richard than to Richard himself. Purdy and she saw things in the same light; no rigmarole of explanation was necessary. Now with Richard, it was not so. In conversation with him, one constantly felt that he was not speaking out, or, to put it more plainly, that he was going on meanwhile with his own, very different thoughts. And ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... to be, and he repeated to me, I dare say, exactly his lesson, which no doubt he has perfectly got by rote: of how many feet long and broad it was; how many years it was in building, and in what year built. Much of this rigmarole story, which, like a parrot, he repeated mechanically, I could willingly have dispensed with. In the part that was separated from the rest by the iron gate above mentioned, was what I call the church itself; ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... until at last he was told to have an interview with a certain general. This personage, like the King, had Marx's proposals explained to him in the minutest detail, and expressed his warmest sympathy with the undertaking. 'And there,' said Marx, at the end of this long rigmarole, 'the matter ended, and I never ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... he continued, after a very beautiful specimen of rigmarole in the way of love-making, a rigmarole that might have very fairly figured in an editor's law and logic, after he had been beaten in a libel suit, "I think, Miss Monson, you cannot have overlooked the VERY particular attentions I have endeavored to pay you, ever since ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... to have protected him from such gross insults as are poured upon him in this pamphlet. Of the author's literary talent, we shall say but little: the phrases, "setting down to count the cost"—"the rights of the man the greatest bore in nature"—the appellation of rigmarole ramble, given to a correct sentence of Dr. Priestley—which the author attempts to criticise—may serve as ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... seated herself again, weakly. It was true, she knew the fantastic rigmarole, which made absurd the secret dictates of these illiterate desperadoes. But that absurdity meant death, none the less—death for the one she loved. In her misery, she listened almost apathetically as Hodges went on talking in ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... here again my much-required "passaporte" has to be exhibited; but the police-officers of Mustapha Pasha seem to be exceptionally intelligent and quite agreeable fellows. My revolver is in plain view, in its accustomed place; but they pay no sort of attention to it, neither do they ask me a whole rigmarole of questions about my linguistic accomplishments, whither I am going, whence I came, etc., but simply glance at my passport, as though its examination were a matter of small consequence anyhow, shake hands, and smilingly request me to let them see me ride. It begins ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... landlady," Sebright chuckled. "Old but good, he says. He expected to die there in peace, a good Christian. And what's that about the priests getting hold of his very last bit of silver? I must say that sounded truest of all his rigmarole. For the salvation ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... tugging off her mask viciously, as she spoke. "Hang me if I didn't think so all the time!" she exclaimed with a sudden change of tactics. "That Jasper's a thief. I heard you say something about those deeds, and Jasper told me a long rigmarole that you wouldn't sign them. Whether that's true or not, Heaven only knows. Jasper's a bad one, an' he's sold me. He's got the coin, and I'll split on him, as I threatened. No, it's no use your trying to make me hush up, I will speak out. I'll show you what a fool he's made of you, you who ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... with all her heart. She was all he had, as he was all the world to her. And so, as she gave ear to his long, illogical rigmarole of argument and defense, she slowly found that her pity and her love were making vital decisions for her. As of old, in poignant moments, her father lapsed at last into a denunciation of the Isbels and what they had brought him to. His sufferings were real, ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed he cries,—"Drop it, drop it,—cover it up, cover it up,—pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... were also supers led by an actor of the "troupe," set up a hot pot to boil my bones in. I was bound hand and foot, while the cannibals, armed with spears, danced around me in a heathen ceremony, chanting a voodoo chant and reciting a rigmarole by which cannibals are supposed to make their human feast on a sacred rite. As they danced about me in ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... said he, "was makin' shoes in Montopolis when I come here goin' on fifteen year ago. I guess whiskey's his trouble. Once a month he gets off the track, and stays so a week. He's got a rigmarole somethin' about his bein' a Jew pedler that he tells ev'rybody. Nobody won't listen to him any more. When he's sober he ain't sich a fool—he's got a sight of books in the back room of his shop that he reads. I guess you can lay all ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... tells his dupe Roderigo that three great men of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring (falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic, whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello's side, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... of the little school histories there is but a tedious, bare narrative of apparently unconnected facts, and there is a profitless rigmarole of dates and names: but when the sequence of cause and effect is not obscured, and form and life are given to the actors, and the development of events and institutions is traced, the story of the United States becomes, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 19, March 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... glass in it, dropped nervelessly at her side. "If he uttered one single syllable of all that rigmarole, then Ollendorf is a myth, that's ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... those people would pull such a trick, Harlan—any more than the ones like you and Arv and Hank who are above suspicion. Most of them could have easily obtained the news without going through such a rigmarole." ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... excellence of the original. Particular attention should be paid to the transmutation of Antony's funeral oration into French alexandrines. In Voltaire's version, the climax of the speech is reached in the following passage; it is an excellent sample of the fatuity of the whole of his concocted rigmarole:— ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... on, in a gingling rigmarole. The more anxious I seemed to go on our way, the more likely was she to loiter. I therefore showed no signs of impatience, and I saw her consult her watch in the course of her ugly minstrelsy, and slyly glance, as if expecting something, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... "the reason I call her a dreadful old woman is that she's told you all this rigmarole. It makes me quite hot. She sha'n't amuse herself by taking you in like that. I won't ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... this mixture of rigmarole and bombast was followed by those of his sons, the Princes Maximilian Luitpold, Adalbert, and Carl. As for Maximilian, the new sovereign, he, rather than risk being thrown out of the saddle, was prepared to make a clean sweep of a number of existing grievances. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... a long rigmarole tale of an attack which had been made on his house by a party of brigands, as he called them, from Venezuela, the chief object of which, as he suspected, was to carry off his wife; however, they, or some one else, had pulled down the consular flagstaff. A half-caste, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... "What's the good of studying Latin and Greek, and all that rigmarole? It won't bring you money, ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... all this rigmarole which appealed to Master Boltay most strongly was that this worthy woman had eaten no food that day. So he considered it his Christian duty to there and then take a plate of lard-dumplings and a tumbler full of wine from a cupboard, place them ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... the better. It's very dull, all that story, and quite useless. I understand the character without all that rigmarole and that ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... retire to Hampton Court, and thence into deeper and deeper privacy, to live fifty-three years more and become very venerable, though the more rude of the country-people would persist in calling him "Tumble-Down Dick." In the week of his abdication there was on the London book-stalls a rigmarole poem on the subject, called The World in a Maze, or Oliver's Ghost. It opened with this dialogue ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child's rigmarole,—IERY FIERY ICHERY VAN, TITTLE-TOL-TAN. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap and meaningless as BOSE and ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... was beginning to be bored. Had the butler fallen prey to one of the graminophile sects like Brother Paul's and gone through all this rigmarole merely to give me notice previous ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... "Get off some rigmarole of your own, I tell you," laughed the coming bridegroom, speaking to his companion, "It's no matter what it is, only don't make me burst out laughing in the middle of it, for Estella might resent it. She's a bright little one, and that's no josh. Seriously, I don't want a bona fide marriage ceremony ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... they've a single thing to do with it, but Mr. Roger says they have, and he says a man called Darwin proved it. This is the rigmarole he got off to me the other day. The clover crop depends on there being plenty of bumble-bees, because they are the only insects with tongues long enough to—to—fer—fertilize—I think he called it the blossoms. But mice eat bumble-bees and cats eat mice and old maids keep cats. So your Uncle Roger ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to a certain distance, therefore, Cortado followed, and having overtaken him as he was mounting the steps of a church, he took him apart, and poured forth so interminable a string of rigmarole, all about the theft of the purse, and the prospect of recovering it, that the poor Sacristan could do nothing but listen with open mouth, unable to make head or tail of what he said, although he made him repeat ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... wrote him the longest rigmarole letters, that I used to read: the sly little devil; and he answered under cover to Mrs. Bonner. He was for carrying her off the first day or two, and nothing would content him but having back his child. But she ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with a friend of mine, who asked me to attend her professionally—I mean in my professional capacity. Oh! nothing serious, but we had to communicate with her people and I know all about her. She is not a normal woman. Of course, that rigmarole about the cardinal is all nonsense. She is the daughter of a fisherman of Siracusa. She did dance here once for a few nights, but only at the Biondo, and no one noticed her, she was in one of the back rows of the ballet. Did they tell you why she ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... amusing to Jack, and scarcely less so to Carlos, to observe the sympathetic courtesy with which the English Consul listened to all this rigmarole, which, from his manner, one might have believed to have been absolutely convincing—until ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... he was wont to contend that no vigor of literary expression could possibly excel his mother-in-law's curses. Not that he ever saw her again: his wife and eldest son tracked him to Breslau, but only in quest of ducats and divorce: the latter of which Maimon conceded after a legal rigmarole. But he took no advantage of his freedom. A home of his own he never possessed, save an occasional garret where he worked at an unsteady table—one leg usually supported by a folio volume—surrounded by the cats and dogs whom he had taken to solacing himself ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... might move that for rest of Session he be no longer heard; SPEAKER evidently sorely tempted; here was a short sure way out of the difficulty. Faltered a moment, then rose heroically to sense of duty; put aside proposal, and KEAY went on again for another half-hour. "A long rigmarole," JOKIM called the speech. This not ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... talk like a woman in a Shaw play. I don't like this rigmarole about "pursuit." Say you're in love, like a civilized human being. And take a cigarette, and tell me ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... became the greatest of Biblical scholars, wrote in his journal, on the threshold of manhood: "I am not myself a believer in impossibilities: I think that all the fine stories about natural ability, etc., are mere rigmarole, and that every man may, according to his opportunities and industry, render himself almost anything he wishes ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... of that. He went through the rigmarole wearily but without any sense of surprise. The one thing he hadn't been expecting was the man who was waiting for him on the other side ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of how the poor old thing had invested her money; how Mr. Jones did not pay the interest regularly, and how Mr. Stevens haggled about the percentage. After we came away, I asked mother how she could listen to such a rigmarole in patience, and what good she supposed she had done ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... for that rigmarole of yours about the cathedral—what the devil do you know about Italian Renaissance, or Botticelli or early Gothic? I never heard such rot in my life. As a matter of fact I've always heard that the glass in this cathedral ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... decrees laid down ex cathedra, and accepted without question by the poor humble public? I tell you, sir, that I have a brain of my own and that I should feel myself to be a snob and a slave if I did not use it. If it pleases you to believe this rigmarole about ether and Fraunhofer's lines upon the spectrum, do so by all means, but do not ask one who is older and wiser than yourself to share in your folly. Is it not evident that if the ether were affected to the degree which he maintains, and if it were ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... only the road but the rate they are going, continue to take a part so contrary to all his own interests and feelings, and to the feelings and interests of all the respectable part of his country.... But what is to be the end of all this rigmarole of mine? To conclude, this—to advise you, for your own sake as a tradesman, for Lord Byron's sake as a poet, for the sake of good literature and good principles, which ought to be united, to take such measures as you may be able to venture upon to ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... or, as the French would say, are coming down the stairs. Our after-dinner oratory, that sounded so telling as we delivered it before the looking-glass, falls strangely flat amidst the clinking of the glasses. The passionate torrent of words we meant to pour into her ear becomes a halting rigmarole, at which—small blame to her—she ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... run through all this rigmarole in detail; but the situation, the excuse, and the result, were present to his mind, and filled ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and a fire is kept lighted for a certain length of time. It is likewise customary for his wife or nearest relation, if at any future period they should happen to pass near the grave, to repair the hut, rekindle the fire, and utter a long rigmarole to the departed, to induce him to lie still, and not come back and torment them. Nothing will induce a stranger to go near a new grave, or to mention the name of the departed for a long time after his death. They always speak of him as So-and-so's brother, or father. If the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... fog would have been delightful. Towards the end of September, a few small, fleecy clouds appeared one day in the sky and everyone ran out and stared solemnly at them as if they were angels. But there is one phrase that sums up the prolonged effects of heat better than any scientific rigmarole. It takes the silk out of ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... wait till night if he takes as long to go through his rigmarole as he done yesterday. If I got to fight I want to hop to it, not set round in the shade o' the shelterin' palm while them guys are heatin' up the stewpot. This waitin' ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... Carlyle say a good word for any considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from Sartor, of which he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson would he grant the privilege to hold his own. Per contra, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... inspected Quentin Durward's palm, according to the form of the mystic arts which he practised, so the swarthy prophetess opened her Book of Fate, and favoured Mr. Verdant Green with choice extracts from its contents. First, she told the pretty gentleman a long rigmarole about the stars, and a planet that ought to have shone upon him, but didn't. Then she discoursed of a beautiful young lady, with a heart as full of love as a pomegranate was full of seeds, - painting, in pretty ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... rigmarole, the salutes; I could begin a duel, par exemple. It's the other man who ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... modest prototype of this elaborate rigmarole chasing itself through his mind as he walks the street in jaunty mood, and who of us would not surprise and alarm his friends if he should suddenly let go his habitual control, express his every thought and materialize ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... Napo, our travellers had an opportunity of visiting some of these old missionary establishments; and observing the odd rigmarole of superstitions there practised under the guise, and in the name of religion—a queer commingling of pagan rites with Christian ceremonies—not unlike those Buddhistic forms from which these same ceremonies ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... this long rigmarole, I have, dear B——, what you, no doubt, perceive, for the metaphysical poets as poets, the most sovereign contempt. That they ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... p. 373) has given a long detail of it, in that manner vulgarly, but significantly, called rigmarole; in which, amidst an ostentatious exhibition of arts and artists, he talks of 'proportions of a column being taken from that of the human figure, and adjusted by Nature—masculine and feminine—in a man, sesquioctave of the head, and in a woman sesquinonal;' nor has he failed to introduce ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... work, the Quarterly Review observes, "Johnson's name is made the peg on which to hang up—or rather the line on which to hang out—much hackneyed sentimentality, and some borrowed learning, with an awful and overpowering quantity of twaddle and rigmarole." The writer concludes his reviewal: "We are sorry to have had to make such an exposure of a man, who, apart from the morbid excess of vanity which has evidently led him into this scrape, may be, for aught we know, worthy and amiable. His exposure, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... of the postillions by name! Next, the tchinovniks sounded him on the question of Chichikov's possible identity with Napoleon; but before long they had reason to regret the step, for Nozdrev responded with a rambling rigmarole such as bore no resemblance to anything possibly conceivable. Finally, the majority of the audience left the room, and only the Chief of Police remained to listen (in the hope of gathering something more); but at last even he found ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... guess 't he won't find the joke 's fine 's he did at first.' But she was too used up to know when she was havin' good common-sense talked to her; she jus' kep' wipin' her eyes, 'n' then Mrs. Sperrit drove up 'n' the whole rigmarole had to be gone over again for her. I mus' say that she behaved kind of un-neighborly, f'r she laughed fit to kill herself, 'n' Mrs. Craig was nigh to put out over such doin's,—'n' the cat not dead a week yet; but when Mrs. Sperrit ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... want my opinion, I consider that there is just as much imagination in that story as in the morbid rigmarole you threw at us last night," persisted ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... of Scotch snuff on a dry leaf on the ground under it, and the rabbits, while smelling for the apple, would inhale the snuff, and sneeze themselves to death in no tune. Well, I was a child then and simple enough to be gammoned by this rigmarole. I set the apple and the snuff, but I got no rabbit, while I did get laughed at hugely for my credulity. This satisfied me that people should never impose upon the simplicity of childhood. I remember my mortification ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... not, and, of course, she didn't want to; she liked coming to Mr. Stone so much. And she got on very well, and she liked London, and she liked the shops. She mentioned neither Hughs nor Mrs. Hughs. In all this rigmarole, told with such obvious purpose, stolidity was strangely mingled with almost cunning quickness to see the effect made; but the dog-like devotion was never quite out of her eyes when they were ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... evidently intended to speak again, but thought better of it, and contented himself with staring at me very hard. In the next street a man stopped me, and started a long rigmarole, but I pushed ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... monarchical, less from any sentiment of loyalty at all either to the race of their ancient kings or to the imperial dynasty, than because the experience of the last century, to which, as I think very unwisely, the Republican Government has appealed in what I cannot but call its rigmarole about the 'Centennial of 1789,' has led them to associate with the idea of a republic the ideas of instability and of anarchy, and with the idea of a monarchy the ideas of stability and of order. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... overlooked that we may have our feelings raised by seeing the whole picture at a glance, not knowing how or why we are so charmed. I have written you a long rigmarole story about giving dignity to whatever you paint—I fear so long that I should be scarcely able to understand what I mean myself. You will, I hope, take ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... decent scholar, and when he was dreamy he would shove his scratch back from his forehead and shut his eyes and recite Homer or Virgil by the page together, while Lancelot and I listened open-mouthed, and I wondered what pleasure he got out of all that rigmarole. The heroes of Homer and of Virgil seemed to me very bloodless, boneless creatures after my kings and wizards out of Mr. Galland's book; even Ulysses, who was a thrifty, shifty fellow enough, with some touch of the sea-captain in him, was not a patch upon my hero, ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... "I never read it: would not read it for a great deal of money. The moment I saw what a senseless rigmarole it was, I flung it down and insisted on the battological author furnishing me with an English translation. He complied: the crib occupies just twenty lines; the original three folio pages, as you see. That crib, gentlemen," added he severely, "is now in my waistcoat pocket; and you shall ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... taken through the usual rigmarole such as I had at first experienced at Goch. The evidence also, as usual, was committed to paper. It was a perfunctory enquiry, however, and was soon completed. Naturally upon its conclusion I considered that I would be free to resume my journey. I ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... that were against her good, and making light of right and wrong, as if they turned on money; but Mary (such a prudent lass, although she was a fool just now) must see through all such shallow tricks, such rigmarole about Parson Beloe, who must be an idiot himself to think so much of Simon Popplewell—for Easter offerings, no doubt—but there, if Mary had the heart to go away, what use to stand maundering about it? Stephen Anerley would be dashed if he ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... most perfect. During the war in many British Embassies and in the British Foreign Office there were nearly always men, permanent officials or else special appointees, who quite successfully discounted the prevailing war mind. They discarded the rigmarole of being pro and con, of having favorite nationalities, and pet aversions, and undelivered perorations in their bosoms. They left that to the political chiefs. But in an American Embassy I once heard an ambassador say that he never reported anything to Washington ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... rigmarole," Power continued gruffly. "We've got to understand one another. There's my cheque book in that safe. A million dollars if you leave this country—alone—within twenty-four hours, and stay away for the rest of ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there, Dixie," he said, firmly. "I'm going to stick right here, and do the best I can. Folks may talk some about me and Hettie not living together, but I can't put up with all that rigmarole over ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... continued talking to himself, talked of how he had brought 'the frigate' safely to harbour, and how he had been awarded a 'gold medal' by the king. We could hear only anppets of this long rigmarole, but we never lost the drift of it. He spoke alternately in Danish and Icelandic, in many different tones of voice, and one could always tell, by the way he spoke, where he was in 'the frigate': whether he was addressing the crew on the deck, or the officers ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... managers of a steel trust? Would the paper have been so precious and costly? Would the illustrations have so enriched photographers? And would the amanuensis have made L350 more out of the thing then Mr. Murray himself? The price was not extortionate. But it was farcical. The entire rigmarole combines to throw into dazzling prominence the fact that modern literature in this country is still absolutely undemocratic. The time will come, and much sooner than many august mandarins anticipate, when such a book as the "Letters of Queen Victoria" will be issued at ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... rigmarole about "his own family," and "hard times," and "diminished resources," and all those stereotype commonplaces which are for ever on the lips of stereotype insincere people. Mr. Clifford did not perceive the dry and somewhat scornful inuendo, which lay at ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... seemeth good to me, By and large, in part and in whole. I'll put it in practice and find if it fact is, Or only a mystical rigmarole." ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... that this petrified man is nothing but a graven image, proves that he is a little soft in the upper story. There is no shadow of doubt that this is a genuine petrifaction. I would take my oath of it. Dr. Boynton writes a long rigmarole to show that he is a statue made by the Jesuits; but in my opinion the Dr. is just laying low so that he can buy the curiosity and make his pile on him. Why, you can see the very cords in his legs, where the flesh ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... to it. The peasant girl who stands inside the door, and in a sing-song voice that never varies mixes up saints, fathers, towns, corn, potatoes, bells, and "quelque chose pour le gardien," in her rigmarole, was the least attractive ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... speaking no English and about fifty words of Samoan, recently promoted from the bush work, and a most good, anxious, timid lad of 15 or 16 - looks like 17 or 18, of course - they grow fast here. In comes Mitaiele to Lloyd, and told some rigmarole about Paatalise (the steward's name) wanting to go and see his family in the bush. - 'But he has no family in the bush,' said Lloyd. 'No,' said Mitaiele. They went to the boy's bed (they sleep in the walled-in compartment of the verandah, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Captain). I declare the creature has been listening to all this rigmarole, instead of attending to me. Do you ever expect forgiveness? But now that they are all talking together, and you cannot make out a word they say, nor they hear a word that we say, I will describe the company to you. First, there is the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... frequent question, "Is not this wonderful, Aristotle?" "Not at all," said he, "but it is wonderful that anyone with a pair of legs stops here to listen to you." And to another such fellow, who said after a long rigmarole, "Did I weary you, philosopher, by my chatter?" "Not you, by Zeus," said he, "for I paid no attention to you." For even if talkative people force you to listen,[546] the mind can give them only its outward ears to deluge, while it unfolds and pursues some other ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... I remember being jealous because she was chosen by the Kappa Alpha as a candidate. Glad I wasn't one if they put all their new members through the same rigmarole." ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... talked of by the inhabitants of the towns; but I doubt whether anything is meant by them more than the grossest animal desire." In his letters from the East the keen-eyed Count von Moltke notes that the Turk "passes over all the preliminary rigmarole of falling in love, paying court, languishing, revelling in ecstatic joy, as so much faux frais, and goes straight ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... though people had talked glibly about infinity ever since the beginnings of Greek thought, nobody had ever thought of asking, What is infinity? If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all. Twenty years ago, roughly speaking, Dedekind and Cantor asked this question, and, what is more remarkable, they answered it. They found, that is to say, a perfectly precise definition of an infinite ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... eating the bread and meat he gives us, drinking his good refreshments, resting upon his warm beds, and so on.... Every day, and every day, and every day—and who among us, I, most especially for one, ever thinks, except may be by scuttling through a few rigmarole words—ever thinks, I say, of thanking Him for it—of lifting up a warm, honest heart, of true real thanking, I mean? Of loving Him the better, and trying to serve and please Him the better—when He, great ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... ones; but the natural force of both had long been much abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that of De Quincey to incessant divergences of "rigmarole," being formidable enemies to real critical competence. The greatest prosemen —not novelists—of the generation now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay, were indeed both considerable critics. But the ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... The long rigmarole speech, of which this was the substance, would have made Hemming laugh on any other occasion. However, now he merely replied, "Listen. Tell the king, or whatever he calls himself, that the English are here to punish evil-doers, to set slaves ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... precisely defined, and the social life of the foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the unassuming, practical-minded young engineer of the high title and social position who was terribly bored—as he is today—by social rigmarole, and who was thought rather queer by the conventional-minded small diplomats and miscellaneous foreign residents because, as one of them put it, "he always seems to be thinking," was glad to be out of all this as much as possible and on the road, even if it had to be ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... ruffler as yourself of much that will be a great hindrance to you on your way through life in the Indies; for believe me,' and here he looks full on me once more, 'there is no return.' At all this rigmarole, which I could not then understand, I was a good deal put aback and waited for what should come next. Says he very calmly, 'Give me your trust in man.' At that I saw how heavy would be my price, for I never doubted but that he could take from me all that he asked, and my head was, through terror ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... clearing his pipes, chanted forth, in a bold and musical voice, a rude rigmarole called "The Royal Blackbird," which, although of no intrinsic merit, yet, as it expressed sentiments hostile to British connection and British government and favourable to the house of Stewart, was very popular amongst the Catholic peasantry of Ireland, whilst, on the contrary, it was looked ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... you that in some way I had Kinney's authority to use his facts? Well, I should have done that yesterday if you had let me. In the first place, Kinney's the most helpless ass in the world. He could never have used his own facts. In the second place, there was hardly anything in his rigmarole the other day that he hadn't told me down there in the lumber camp, with full authority to use it in any way I liked; and I don't see how he could revoke that authority. That's the ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... but for all that our own home was delightful, and we had the most outrageous appetites you ever heard of. George is in ecstasies with his house, his land, his pig, and his horse.... I hope you are not sick and tired of all this rigmarole; it isn't in human nature to move into a house of its own and talk of anything else. I got a warm-hearted letter a few days ago from the city of Milwaukee, from an unknown western sister, beginning, "Whom not having seen I love," and going ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... I rushed between them, and hastily pushed back the arm-chair to the wall. Then the monk, speaking in a mournful tone, which was rendered still more terrifying by the approach of night, began to pour out some lamentable rigmarole of a confession, and ended by asking pardon for his crimes, and declaring that he was already covered by the black veil which parricides wear when ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... rigmarole," Anthony cut him short, speaking in German (which he knew I understood and trusted Bedr didn't) "is, that the fellow wants us to buy information from him. He pretends to have broken with his employers on our account (though his explanation of ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson |
