"Sweeper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Chimney Sweeper's Day. Sootable occasion for Sweeping Reform Meetings everywhere. N. B.—Edinburgh Exhibition. Scots wha' hae. Reception of Mr. H. M. STANLEY by the eminent Explorer's tailor, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... animal which he perfectly resembled in his nastiness as well as greediness. For if he was dressed in the morning as clean as hands could make him, he would, by running into puddles and kennels, and rolling upon the ground, become as black as a chimney sweeper before noon; and I sincerely believe that he thought it as great a punishment to have his hair combed, or to wash his hands and face, as to be whipped; for he would cry and struggle as much to avoid the one as to escape the other. But, to ease his parents of their ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... champagne I have drunk! and the suppers! seven dozen of oysters, pate-de-foie-gras, heaps of truffles, salad, and then a walk home in the early morning, a few philosophical reflections suggested by the appearance of a belated street-sweeper, then sleep, quiet and ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... and other places. In five years returned home, and, after furlough, joined the Belle Isle in the Irish station. Whisky here again got hold of him, and excess ruined his constitution. On his leave he had married, and on his discharge joined his wife in Birmingham. For some time he worked as sweeper in the market, but two years ago deserted his wife and family, and came to London, settled down to a loafer's life, lived on the streets with Casual Wards for his home. Eventually came to Whitechapel Shelter, and got saved. He is now a trustworthy, reliable lad; has become reconciled to wife, who ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... said Elizabeth, 'that Knecht Ruprecht is the German terrifier of naughty children, the same as the chimney-sweeper in England, or Coeur de Lion in Palestine, or the Duke of Wellington ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sold out and left the district. The old devil left a note for us to say that he had rather be a free crossing sweeper in New York than a large mine owner under the power of a ring of blackmailers. By Gar! it was as well that he made a break for it before the note reached us! I guess he won't show his ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... favorites. One day his master, vexed by his dulness, cried out, "Smiles, you will never be fit for anything but sweeping the streets of your native borough!" From that day the boy's mates called him by the name of the street sweeper in the little town. But he ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... the pleaders would jabber in the verandahs, and his Commanding Officer would put in certificates of the prisoner's moral character, while the jury would pant and the summer uniforms of the witnesses would smell of dye and soaps; and some abject barrack-sweeper would lose his head in cross-examination, and the young barrister who always defended soldiers' cases for the credit that they never brought him, would say and do wonderful things, and would then quarrel with me because I had not reported him correctly. At the last, for he surely would ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... half anger, half ecstasy, Pinchas galloped toward the fiddling and banging orchestra. A harmless sweeper in his path was herself swept aside. But her fallen broom tripped up the runner. He fell with an echoing clamour, to which his clattering cane contributed, and clouds of dust arose and gathered where erst had ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... first of the kind ever made to me, stung me to the quick. Strange, I had never before considered myself in the light of a beggar; and yet, was I not so, just as much as a sweeper of ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... the purse out of the window to a sweeper in the courtyard, and said to his grandson, 'Then they do not teach you ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... Lascar, to Flag Street, the quarter of punch-houses;—but in Cossitollah all castes and vocations are met, whether their talk be of gold mohurs or cowries; here the Sahib gives the horrid leper a wide berth, and the Baboo walks carefully round the shadow of Mehtur, the sweeper. Therefore, reader, Cossitollah is by all means the street for you to draw profound ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... firmly, "An old man, seventy-five come Martinmass knows more o' life than a young chap, stands ter reason"; besides, his epitome of the town life he knows nothing of was a just one as far as it went; and his own son is the sweeper of a Holborn crossing, and many other things that he should not be; but that is the parson's ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... because of the death of a man, and he renewed it to the man's son. Then Mananaun told him he would take him and show him the Kingdoms of the Sea and whatever he saw that he desired there would be given to him. He took him in his boat of glass "The Ocean Sweeper" to visit ...
— The Boy Who Knew What The Birds Said • Padraic Colum
... would rather throw it out of the window. Which was actually done by the Marshal de Richelieu with a purse he had given to his grandson, and which the lad, not knowing how to use, brought back intact. Money, on this occasion, was at least of service to the passing street-sweeper that picked it up. But had there been no passer-by to pick it up, it would have been thrown into the river. One day Mme. de B—, being with the Prince de Conti, hinted that she would like a miniature of her canary bird ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... at her pension in return for her board and lodging, and he told her one morning that he had forty pounds saved up which she should have, and welcome, if she was in need." The case of the bath-chair woman was not less touching and generous, for she and her husband, a crossing-sweeper, also put their savings at the disposal of an invalid lady his wife used to wheel out every day, telling her that, though their cottage was only small, they did possess a tiny spare room, and they would be so glad if she would come to them as their honoured ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... that bench, feeding penny buns to the silly ducks—especially the black one, the one she used to like best. And I make pilgrimages to all the other places we ever visited together, and try to pretend she is with me. And I support the crossing sweeper at Lansdowne Passage because she once said she felt sorry for him. I do all the other absurd things that a man in love tortures himself by doing. But to what end? She knows how I care, and yet she won't see why we can't go on being friends as we once were. What's ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... necessary to use considerable force in scraping off the inequalities. A metal cutting edge, such as a hoe or scraper, will be found useful. A court should be swept with a coarse broom to distribute the fine material evenly. Another very good sweeper can be made from a piece of wood about six or eight feet long to which several thicknesses of bagging have been tacked or fastened. The final step in making a court consists in marking it out. Most courts are marked ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... consider the house to be defiled. According to the old rule, if a Brahman touches a man of an impure caste, as a Chamar (tanner) or Basor (basket-maker), he should bathe and change his loin-cloth, and if he touches a sweeper he should change his sacred thread. Now, however, educated Brahmans usually wear white cotton trousers and black or brown coats of cloth, alpaca or silk with the normal allowance of buttons, and European shoes and boots which they keep on indoors. Boys are even ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... plodded on into a Crescent, and still the awful Sunday solitude spread grimly humid all around him. He next entered a street with some closed shops in it; and here, at last, some consoling signs of human life attracted his attention. He now saw the crossing-sweeper of the district (off duty till church came out) smoking a pipe under the covered way that led to a mews. He detected, through half closed shutters, a chemist's apprentice yawing over a large book. He passed a navigator, an ostler, and two costermongers wandering wearily ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... saw an admirer of theirs bargaining for peanut candy at a street stand they would not know him—they would no more bow to a man so lost to all the finer sense of the comme il faut than they would nod to a street-sweeper. It is astonishing what an effect is produced upon some human beings of the tender sex by clothing them in silks cut in a certain form, and seating them in a high wooden box ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... and his partner's washing, scrubbing, mending, and cooking, and saw no degradation in it, was somewhat inconsistently irritated by menial functions in men, and although he gave extravagantly to waiters, and threw a dollar to the crossing-sweeper, there was always a certain shy avoidance of them in his manner. Coming from the theatre one night Uncle Billy was, however, seriously concerned by one of these crossing-sweepers turning hastily before ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... street crowded with fashion and frivolity, wherein the afternoon's sun, freed from its enthralling mists, which all day long had jealously obscured his beams, was gloating o'er the panels of the carriages of noblemen who were returning from race-track and park, and the towhead of the little sweeper who plied his humble trade which earned his scanty supper that he ate miles away from that gay quarter wherein Percival Holcombe, who——" Rosella paused for sheer breath. This sort did not need to be read. It was declined already. She picked up ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... them. In the summer, when the sparrows built their nests in the tall chimneys on either side, and were perpetually flying to and fro, twittering, caressing, quarrelling—this was quite a society. When a chimney-sweeper once thrust out his black face from one of these chimneys, and shouted aloud to testify the accomplishment of his ascent, it was an event that brought a shriek ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... themselves loop hounds. They know everybody by their first name and sometimes they've got all of $6.50 in their pocket at one time. And if you're out some evening with a friend—a regular fella, they pop in the next day and say, 'Hello, Peewee, who was that street sweeper I see you palling with last night? Oh, he wasn't! Well, I had him pegged either as a street sweeper or ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... of the desert, in striped burnoose and white kaftan, stretched out for the night upon their rugs of many colours. Between them lies their latest purchase, a brand-new patent carpet-sweeper, made in Ohio, and going, who knows where among the hills ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... the same time to mention, that Hugh rarely made use of a crossing on a muddy day, without finding a half-penny somewhere about him for the sweeper. He would rather walk through oceans of mud, than cross at the natural place when he had no coppers — especially if he had patent ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... was made on board the ships in the harbour, and at Spithead, and the ponds dragged in the neighbourhood, to no effect, it was concluded that the Gipsies had stolen him. The boy was found a few years afterwards, at Kingston-upon-Thames, apprenticed to a chimney sweeper. He had been enticed away by a person who had given him sweet-meats; but not ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... his naked legs or arms, thorosaque brachia, [4929]&c., like that huntsman Meleager in Philostratus, though he be all in rags, obscene and dirty, besmeared like a ruddleman, a gipsy, or a chimney-sweeper, than upon a noble gallant, Nireus, Ephestion, Alcibiades, or those embroidered courtiers full of silk and gold. [4930]Justine's wife, a citizen of Rome, fell in love with Pylades a player, and was ready to run mad for him, had not Galen himself helped her by ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... would lift us almost level with the rail of the low-built patrol boat and mine sweeper, but the next receding wave would swirl us down into a darksome gulf over which the ship's side glowered like ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... upon consulting my expense account for May that during that month alone Alice and I purchased no fewer than thirty devices of an economical character. We have three different kinds of smoke-consumers, an automatic carpet-sweeper, a bottle of lightning polish for plate-glass, a dish-washing machine, a knife-scourer, a potato-parer, two automatic lawn-hose reels, a sewer-gas consumer, a patent ashes-sifter, etc., etc. It has required a considerable outlay of money to get stocked up with these things, but we ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... that we found the guard for the day, the major's two orderlies, my own orderly, the cook and cook's mate, the district gunner (who was busy keeping our three very old guns, mounted in the tower, polished up), the office clerk and the barrack sweeper, the morning parade consisted ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... about what was passing, I went there myself. Everybody was in military uniform, everybody was shrugging his shoulders, and everybody was in the condition of a London policeman were he to see himself marched off to the station by a street-sweeper. That the Prussian should have taken the Emperor prisoner, and have vanquished the French armies, had, of course, astonished these worthy bureaucrats, but that they should have ventured to interfere with postmen had perfectly dumbfounded them. "Put your letter in that box," said a venerable ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... sees us all die knows that there is far too much of that battle, but we do not, and so continue worshipping the knife that cuts and the wheel that breaks us, as blindly as the outcast sweeper worships Lal-Beg the Glorified Broom that is the incarnation of his craft. But the sweeper has sense enough not to kill himself, and to be proud ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... can see in a demonstration of the truth of 'spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... about ten o'clock on the evening of Wednesday, October 7. The first shell to fall within the city struck a house in the Berchem district, killing a fourteen-year-old boy and wounding his mother and little sister. The second decapitated a street-sweeper as he was running for shelter. Throughout the night the rain of death continued without cessation, the shells falling at the rate of four or five a minute. The streets of the city were as deserted as those of Pompeii. The few people who remained, either because they ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... Flo', with her industry and skill in 'translating' old boots and shoes, her motherly instincts and efforts to keep her young brother Dick, the crossing-sweeper, honest, because mother had made them promise to be so when she died; the good-natured, agreeable, clever young thief Jenks, the tempter and beguiler of poor Dick; and, above all, the dear dog Scamp, with his ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... in the Rue de Rivoli, opposite No. 200, when the street was deserted. In the morning it was picked up by an honest sweeper, who took it to the prefecture of police. There it was at first supposed to be an infernal machine. And it was untied, examined, ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... will have it," he began with a laugh, which despite the weariness and anxiety of the past twenty-four hours had forced itself to his lips, "I have been sweeper and man-of-all-work at the Temple for the past few weeks, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... firelight, hearty and hale and strong, After the hard day's shearing, passing the joke along: The 'ringer' that shore a hundred, as they never were shorn before, And the novice who, toiling bravely, had tommy-hawked half a score, The tarboy, the cook, and the slushy, the sweeper that swept the board, The picker-up, and the penner, with the rest of the shearing horde. There were men from the inland stations where the skies like a furnace glow, And men from the Snowy River, the land of the frozen snow; There were swarthy Queensland ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... SWEEP, SWEEPER. The name given at Yale and other colleges to the person whose occupation it is to sweep the students' rooms, make their ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... negligent female, imperfect housekeeper, Though faultless in figure and charming of face, In ruffles of ribbon and trailings of lace Usurping the part of a common street-sweeper, You never can pose as a type of your race In frowsy appearance mid things out ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... for sanity is of no further use to you," said Paul. "Tell them to anyone you can get to believe you—tell the crossing-sweeper and the policemen, tell your grandmother, tell the horse-marines—it will amuse them. Only, you shall tell them on the other side of my front door. Shall I call anyone ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... you. She cajoles every body, the little devil. She tries it on you, on me, on poor Costigan, on the young chaps from Bartholomew's. She's got a little court of 'em already. And if there's nobody there, she practices on the old German baker in the shop, or coaxes the black sweeper at the crossing." ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... much easier to carry a carpet sweeper if you take hold near the sweeper part than it is if you take hold at the end ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... morning. I'd like to be the sweeper in that establishment. But still I don't get you. Where ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... upstairs," Hossein said, and led the way to a comfortably furnished apartment. "I think that you might stay here, for months, unsuspected. A sweeper comes, every day, to do my rooms downstairs. He believes the rest of the house to be untenanted, and you must remain perfectly quiet, during the half hour he is here. Otherwise, no one enters the house ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... schools and dispensaries [for their children], gaols [for their troublesome relations and neighbours], and courts of justice [for the benefit of their brothers who can talk and write]. He levies the rent of their fields, he fixes the tariff, and he nominates to every appointment, from that of road-sweeper or constable, to the great blood-sucking officers round the Court and Treasury. As for Boards of Revenue and Lieutenant-Governors who occasionally come sweeping across the country, with their locust hosts of servants and petty officials, they are but an occasional nightmare; while the Governor-General ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... the mines of Potosi. Burning with impatience to discuss with the great MacGrawler the feasibility of his project, he quickened his pace almost into a run, and in a very few minutes, having only overthrown one chimney-sweeper and two apple-women by the way, he arrived at ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... married she knew that my outraged honour had doomed her family to extinction. But they would wait till the war was ended. Germany, indeed, might account for Robert Redmayne; and even the elderly Bendigo, who was appointed to a mine sweeper, might give his life for his country. Meantime we volunteered also and our record of service at Princetown Moss Depot is ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... known what it was to feel such an insignificant mortal. Standing here in the rain, he saw no distinction between himself and the ragged, muddy crossing-sweeper; alike, they were lost in the huge welter of common London. On the other hand, there in the hard-fronted, exclusive-looking house sat Irene Derwent, a pearl of women, the prize of wealth, distinction, and high manliness. What was this wild dream he had been harbouring? Like ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... than when his brother came, Richard gone grey and tired. At last Richard rose and motioned towards the window. "See, Frank," he said, "it is morning." Then he went and lifted the blind. The grey, unpurged air oozed on the glass. The light was breaking over the tops of the houses. A crossing- sweeper early to his task, or holding the key of the street, went pottering by, and a policeman glanced up at them as he passed. Richard drew down the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a long time now since Diamond had seen North Wind, or even thought much about her. And as his father drove along, he was thinking not about her, but about the crossing-sweeper, and was wondering what made him feel as if he knew her quite well, when he could not remember anything of her. But a picture arose in his mind of a little girl running before the wind and dragging her broom after her; and from that, by degrees, he recalled the whole adventure ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... translated from the French a "Rambler" of Johnson's, which had been but a month before taken from the English; and thinking it right to make him his personal excuses, he went next day, and found our friend all covered with soot like a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, with an intolerable heat and strange smell, as if he had been acting Lungs in the 'Alchymist,' making aether. "Come, come," says Dr. Johnson, "dear Mur, the story is black enough now; and it was a very happy day for me that brought you first to my house, and a very happy mistake ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Journal, published on June 15, 1754; which is a translation from the French version of Johnson's Rambler, No. 190. MALONE. Mrs. Piozzi relates how Murphy, used to tell before Johnson of the first time they met. He found our friend all covered with soot, like a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, with an intolerable heat and strange smell, as if he had been acting Lungs in the Alchymist, making aether. 'Come, come,' says Dr. Johnson, 'dear Murphy, the story is black enough now; and it was a very happy day for me that brought you first ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... roar which greeted him as he came out of the Nine Elms station, and took his seat in the carriage that was to convey him to Stafford House, he looked completely disconcerted. From the heir to the throne to the crossing-sweeper, all combined to do him honour; where Garibaldi was not, through the breadth of the land the very poor bought his portrait and pasted it on their whitewashed cottage walls. London made him its citizen. The greatest living English poet invited him to plant a tree in his garden: a memory he ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... their bedroom the night before, or that they had not washed their hands clean; nay, he sometimes flogged a boy without ever telling him what it was for; and frequently, while his hand was in, he would, gnashing his large white teeth, which looked white from the same cause that a chimney-sweeper's teeth look so, merely because they were such a great contrast to his black fiend-like visage, he would dart his eye round the different classes to see which boy he should fix upon as his next victim. During ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... would recommend the profession of a street-sweeper to me!" said Rufus, beginning his ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... avoided. The dust should be removed—not by the old-fashioned feather duster which scatters the dust into the air—but by a damp or oiled cloth. Dust-catching furniture and hangings of plush, lace, etc., are not hygienic. A carpet-sweeper is more hygienic than a broom, and a vacuum cleaner is better than a carpet-sweeper. The removable rug is an improvement hygienically ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... Diabolus, with horrid familiarity, "go thy ways, old fellow, that COCK WON'T FIGHT." And he retired up the chimney, chuckling at his wit and his triumph. Gambouge heard his tail scuttling all the way up, as if he had been a sweeper ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... true, Sahib. We can see it—but d'you think he'll believe? Never! Never!] "Our food is cooked for us according to our creeds—Sikh, or Brahmin, or Mussulman and all the rest—When a man dies he is also buried according to his creed. Though he has been a groom or a sweeper, he is buried like some great land-owner. Do not let such matters trouble you henceforth. Living or dying, all is done in accordance with the ordinance of our faiths. Some low-caste men, such as sweepers, counting upon the ignorance ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling
... younger fry he treated with especial neglect. 'The son of a woman of the Kuzzilbash tribe, looked down upon by the high-bred Douranee ladies of his father's household, the boy had begun life in the degrading office of a sweeper at the sacred cenotaph of Lamech. Permitted, at a later period, to hold a menial office about the person of the powerful Wuzeer, he served the great man with water, or bore his pipe; was very zealous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... blue dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie class. Jim Gubo, with liberal display of ivory, assured the Baas, in defiance of the Baas's own eyes and the organ in juxtaposition, that the work had been regularly done. Rasu the Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, assured the Presence that such neglect as was apparent was owing to the incapacity of the hubshi and his myrmidons, Rasu's own share of the labour and that of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... select him from among the inhabitants in the vicinity of the unfortunate estates, or from among the friends of the proprietor; he is frequently a resident in one of the towns, with perhaps as little knowledge of the management of an estate as is possessed by the sweeper of the chancery office; and indeed it would not be inapplicable to distinguish such receivers by the appellation of chancery-sweepers. These gentlemen seldom if ever see the estates which they are to direct, and have no other directions to give ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... or a New Way to play an old Game, a Comedy; acted at the duke's theatre, and printed in 4to. 1682 Isabella's being deceived by the Chimney Sweeper is borrowed from Mollier's ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... usual, none of the natives would defile themselves by touching the dead body. I accordingly gave orders that one of the elephants should drag it about a mile down wind away from the camp. Lord Mayo was brought to the spot, and the sweeper, being of a low caste, attached a very thick rope to the hind legs of the ox; the other end being made fast to the elephant's pad in such a manner as to form traces. The elephant did not exhibit the slightest interest in the proceeding, and everything was ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... author's love of truth and detestation of all pretence. There can be no vulgarity without pretension. A great many novels of the day are extremely vulgar, because they describe ill-bred people and represent them to the reader as ladies and gentlemen. But Dickens' shopkeeper or street-sweeper makes no pretence to gentility, and therefore is as far from being vulgar as the man who has never known what it was to be any thing but a gentleman. The faults, like the merits, of Dickens' work resulted from the exuberance and power of his imagination. The same vividness ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... tires on carpet-sweeper wheels often become so badly worn and streched that they fail to grip the carpet firmly enough to run the sweeper. To remedy this, procure some rubber tape a little wider than the rims of the old wheels, remove the old rubber ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... the throne, you will pay me," the Baron de Grost said. "If you do not succeed, remember that I am a rich man, and that I shall miss this money no more than the sixpence which you might throw to a crossing-sweeper." ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lose nothing; I can make any Countrey mine. I have a private Coat for Italian Steeletto's, I can be treacherous with the Wallowne, drunke with the Dutch, a Chimney-sweeper with the Irish, a Gentleman with the Welsh[202] and turne arrant theefe with the English: what then is my Country ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... be considered in the last resort as true-born Britons; they are all of them just as much foreigners at bottom as the Spitalfields Huguenots or the Pembrokeshire Flemings, the Italian organ-boy and the Hindoo prince disguised as a crossing-sweeper. But surely the Welshman and the Highland Scot at least are undeniable Britishers, sprung from the soil and to the manner born! Not a bit of it; inexorable modern science, diving back remorselessly into the remoter past, traces the Cymry across the face of Germany, and fixes ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... neighbourhood of the mantle, and immediately over the fire, which is too large. This opening has hitherto been left larger than otherwise it probably would have been made, in order to give a passage to the Chimney-sweeper; but I shall show hereafter how a passage for the Chimney-sweeper may be contrived without leaving the throat of the Chimney of such enormous dimensions as to swallow up and devour all the warm air of the room, instead of merely giving a passage to the smoke and heated vapour which rise from ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... for breakfast, Rikki-tikki ran to the thorn-bush where Darzee was singing a song of triumph at the top of his voice. The news of Nag's death was all over the garden, for the sweeper had thrown ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... a poor fellow like you not to be able to get dollars for his notes; hand them out, and I'll give you specie for them myself!" The blackguard had not a cent in his pocket, and walked away looking very foolish. He reminded me of a little chimney-sweeper at the Tower Hamlets election, asking—"Vot vos my hopinions about primaginitur?"—a very important point to him certainly, he having no parents, and having been ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... are drawing nigh, And that to-morrow's sun begins the week, Which will abound with store of ale and cake, With hams of bacon, and with powder'd beef, Stuff d to give field-itinerants relief. Then I, who have within these precincts kept, And ne'er beyond the chimney-sweeper's stept, Will take a loose, and venture to be seen, Since 'twill be Sunday, upon Shanks's green; There, with erected looks and phrase sublime, To talk of unity of place and time, And with much malice, mix'd with little ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... with in the streets, and were historically thrilled by the places where people's heads were chopped off. Imagine their reflections on Charles I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot where that poor last word was uttered—'Remember.' And think of their joy when each crossing sweeper they gave disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... The street-sweeper's broom is the genuine besom, made of birch stems, cut out in the country, and brought into town tied up in bundles like fagots; suitable enough for those stalwart men who drag them along so leisurely, but burdensome for the hands of the wretched little waifs, who, tattered and unkempt, ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... in his "History of St. Clement," tells us more of this black sweeper. "Brutus Billy," or "Tim-buc-too," as he was generally called, lived in a passage leading from Stanhope Street into Drury Lane. He was a short, thick-set man, with his white-grey hair carefully brushed up into ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... millions, has had the honour of colonizing half the globe; but "these countries are our colonies no longer." Such are a few of the wonders of 2130! In the Dialogue is an admirable joke with a scientific street-sweeper and a learned beggar, who pleads necessitas non habet legem, and "embraces the profession of an operative mendicant." But ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... gods in some previous existence; or you were born a Sudra, predestined to a life of suffering and semi-starvation, because in your previous existence you failed to merit better treatment from the gods. If you are only a sweeper, be glad that you were not born a pig or a cobra. Kismet, Fate, has fixed at birth your changeless station in this life; and, more than this, it has written on your brow the things which must happen to you throughout ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... a good day. Business had been brisk. The rain had fallen steadily since daybreak, and the street-crossings in New York were ankle deep in mud. The little street-sweeper's arms ached fearfully, but his pocket was full of pennies, interspersed ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... And now, how do you all do?—you in particular, after the worry of yesterday and the day before. I hope Martha had a pleasant visit again, and that you and my mother could eat your beef-pudding. Depend upon my thinking of the chimney-sweeper as soon as I wake to-morrow. Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean that only a third and fourth row could be got; as it is in a front box, however, I hope we shall do pretty well—Shylock, a good play for Fanny—she cannot be ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... the ropes, when I volunteered to help in hoisting sail, surprised and even perplexed him. "But I thought you was a chimney-sweeper?" he insisted. I told him then of my voyages with Mr. Trapp, yet without completely reassuring him. Hitherto he had taken me on my own warrant, and Ben's, without a trace of suspicion: but henceforth I caught him eyeing me furtively from time to time, ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... with consisted of a female chimney-sweeper and her children, who, on my sitting down in the kitchen, soon drank to my health, and began a conversation with ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... indeed, I'm loath— Life's deemed a mawkish dish of broth, Without thy aid, old sweeper; So mawkish, few will put it down, Even from the cottage to the crown, Without thy salt ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... not foul and many a broad street by the Basso Porto in Naples smells far worse. The keen high atmosphere of the Calabrian mountains is a mighty purifier of nastiness, and perhaps the pig is not to be despised after all, as sanitary engineer, scavenger and street sweeper. ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... busy "temple sweeper" goes over the ground around the altar with a broom; then the regular priest, a dignified gray-headed man with a long ungirt purple chiton, and a heavy olive garland, comes forward bearing a basin of holy water. This basin is duly passed to the whole ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... to the other King, "the Lord Chief Justice condemns you to be for the rest of your natural life Master Sweeper of ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... and very black Negress sweeping the sidewalk before the three-room frame house. There was no front yard and the front steps led up from the sidewalk into the house. A vegetable garden was visible at the rear of the lot. The plump sweeper appeared to be about five feet tall. Her wooly white hair was plaited in tiny braids, and she wore a brown print dress trimmed in red and blue. A strand of red beads encircled her short neck, and a blue checked coat and high topped black shoes completed her costume. Asked if Frances Willingham ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... who had not come merely to punish Halfvorson, but also to let their wrath break loose, hardly knew how to begin. There was nothing for an angry man to do here. There was not a dog to chase, not a street-sweeper to pick a quarrel with, nor a fine gentleman at ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... green foliage; cattle finely bred, like deer, feed on either side of her, and the sapling stems draw shadows on their fawn and white hides, and across the withered, short, dry grass. She belongs to R.'s establishment, I suppose—wife of a Sweeper perhaps, but at this distance she might be a Grecian goddess for she is too far off to distinguish features. The golden brown of her face and the blue-black of the hair under the crimson and gold in full afternoon sun are splendid against the depths of green shadow. Her ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... I'm going to quit," he said to himself, "if I have to turn street-sweeper. There must be some job here in the city that I am capable of filling, and I'm pretty sure that I can at least ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... have always thought some day I'd kape a pig and live pritty in me own house," said Mrs. Kilpatrick. "But I'm the old sweeper yet in Number Two. 'Tis a worrld where some has and more wants," she added with a sigh. "I got the manes for a good buryin', the Lord be praised, and a bitteen more beside. I wouldn't have that if Father Daley was as ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... long time since Diamond had seen North Wind or even thought much about her. Now, as his father drove along, he was thinking not about her but about the crossing sweeper. He was wondering what made him feel as if he knew her quite well when he could not remember anything of her. But a picture arose in his mind of a little girl running before the wind, and dragging her broom after her. From that, ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • Elizabeth Lewis and George MacDonald
... or Queen's men in Sidney? Or have thieves no politics? Man, don't let this lie about your room for your bed sweeper or Major Domo to see, he mayn't like ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... various things to avoid, washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-gharries, heaps of rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay, when he had surmounted these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper slinking out; and the man showed him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner. It was up there, he said, that the "tamasho-mems"[2] lived. There were three tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Arnold's trivial coin, and one sahib, but this was not the time for the ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... had any definite memory on these points; they were just like other sightseers. Was there a tall woman with a brown cloak among them? Prescott put this question to several people, but drew no affirmative reply until he found an old coloured man who swept the halls. The sweeper thought that he did remember seeing such a figure on the lower floor, but he was not sure, and with that Prescott ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... gone up to Apolline, the street-sweeper. The good woman, as broad as she is long, was gaping on the edge of the causeway, her two parallel arms feebly rowing in the air, an exile in the Sabbath idleness, and awkwardly conscious of her ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... business. The thing is to be done: accept that for a certainty. It's only a question of time. Indeed, when you look at life philosophically, what is there on earth that is not a question of time? Give the crossing-sweeper between this and Chancery-lane time enough, and he might develop into a Rothschild. He might want nine hundred years or so to do it in; but there's no doubt he could do it, if ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... sees, talks, hears, and remembers well; and it is remarkable, that he performs the daily drudgery of sweeping the gravel-walks, and wheeling water in a barrow! One wonders at the ability to perform such labour, in a Centenarian; that such a one should be allowed to be the sweeper of the hospital; and still more, that his age had not recommended him to the special bounty of the officers. It might be expected, that the successive fathers of these invalids would, at all times, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... be freer and more natural than the streets outside. A man goes by gesticulating as though he practiced for a speech. A woman adjusts her stocking on the coping below the fence with the freedom of a country road. A street sweeper, patched to his office, tunes his slow work to fit the quiet surroundings. Boys skate by or cut swirls upon the pavement in the privilege ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... Shekhs about half are Kureshis, Sadikis, and Ansaris of foreign origin and high social standing. The rest are new converts to Islam, often of the sweeper caste originally. ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... lagoon itself, a certain traffic woke with the reviving breeze; and among the rest one Francois, a half-blood, set sail with the first light in his own half-decked cutter. He had held before a court appointment; being, I believe, the Residency sweeper-out. Trouble arising with the unpopular Vice-Resident, he had thrown his honours down, and fled to the far parts of the atoll to plant cabbages—or at least coco-palms. Thence he was now driven by such need as even ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Foreigners, who do not comprehend the Meaning of such enormous Outcries. Milk is generally sold in a note above Ela, and in Sounds so [exceeding [2]] shrill, that it often sets our Teeth [on [3]] Edge. The Chimney-sweeper is [confined [4]] to no certain Pitch; he sometimes utters himself in the deepest Base, and sometimes in the sharpest Treble; sometimes in the highest, and sometimes in the lowest Note of the Gamut. The same Observation might be made on the Retailers of Small-coal, not to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... other he clutched at one of the branches. He caught it, and the next moment was unexpectedly ducked overhead in the icy water. He came up gasping, and then understood. The tree was what in the voyageur's nomenclature is known as a "sweeper." Still held by its roots it bobbed up and down with the current, and the extra strain of his weight and the girl's had sunk it deeper in the water. It still moved up and down, and he had not finished spluttering when a new danger asserted itself. The suck of the current ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... the end of the street he found the entrance to a low square hall. There was a small ante-room to the place of service, and in this a dull-looking man was seated polishing a candlestick. He was a crossing-sweeper by trade and ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... families mingled at last with the very populace, sharing their ignorance and degradation, and feeling with them. These sometimes exercise the most menial employments: I knew one noble lord who had been a facchino, and I heard of another who was a street-sweeper. Conte che non conta, non conta niente, [Footnote: A count who doesn't count (money) counts for nothing.] says the sneering Italian proverb; and it would be little less than miraculous if a nobility like that of modern Venice maintained ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... help seeing the true state of things. Logic was to her but the smoke that rose from the burning truth; she saw what is altogether above and beyond logic—the right thing, whose meanest servant, the hewer of its wood, not the drawer of its water, the merest scullion and sweeper away of lies from the pavement of its ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... the gas in the two rooms, throwing wide the windows, hunting out fresh sheets and counterpanes. She could dust and run the carpet-sweeper over the rooms right away, and have them in order; and that would save time for to-morrow. Oh, it was good to have something cheerful to do once more. Just supposing she had yielded—as once that afternoon ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... preach. That's what we go there for. If we should cook or do any work of that kind, we should die; so we employ the natives, who are accustomed to the heat, to do these things for us. Then, these servants will each do only one kind of work. That is, the sweeper wont do any cooking or washing; the man who buys the food and waits on the table ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... terrier is Bran,—though he does not closely resemble the great Finn's sweet-voiced, gracefully-shaped, long-snouted hound; the coracle lying on the shore of the little lough—the coracle made of skin, like the old Irish boats—is the Wave-Sweeper; and the faithful mare that we hire by the day is, by your leave, Enbarr of the Flowing Mane. No warrior was ever killed on the back of this famous steed, for she was as swift as the clear, cold wind of spring, travelling with equal ease and speed on land ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to spend his money for a useless art, which perhaps could be used only for dirges. A music-teacher was the most unnecessary and useless of mortals, and the music-teacher felt this, and was ready to become wood-cutter, laborer, street-sweeper, anything to procure food for his sick wife, his only child, to brighten their impoverished, sorrowful lives with a ray of comfort. But it was all in vain; the poor music-teacher found employment nowhere; he might have ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... glad it is no more than that,' and Lord Chadwick threw himself into an arm-chair. 'What further eccentricity has he been guilty of? Does he want to sweep the crossing, or to wait at table in the crossing-sweeper's clothes?' 'He has bought an old overcoat ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... went up, and was so won over by Miss Galindo's merry ways, and sharp insight into the mysteries of his various kinds of business (he was a mason, chimney-sweeper, and ratcatcher), that he came home and abused his wife the next time she called the duck the name by which ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... The "aquavity man" dies (in Cripplegate), and the "dumb-man who was a fortune-teller" (Stepney, 1628), and the "King's Falkner," and Mr. Gregory Isham, who combined the professions, not frequently united, of "attorney and husbandman," in Barwell, Leicestershire (1655). "The lame chimney- sweeper," and the "King of the gypsies," and Alexander Willis, "qui calographiam docuit," the linguist, and the Tom o' Bedlam, the comfit-maker, and the panyer-man, and the tack-maker, and the suicide, they all found death; or, if they sought him, the churchyard where they were ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... not by what particular conformation of the organ it happens, but I have always found that this composition is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper—whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged practitioners; or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... heard o'er head, Like a chimney-sweeper's lofty summons; And lo! a devil right downward sped, Bringing within his claws so red Two statesmen's characters, found, he said, Last night, on the floor of the House of Commons; The which, with black official grin, He now to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... in school (not even when the principal came through the class-room) as I did in that cranky old log with a hole in it. And oh, you would have chucked a couple of chuckles if you'd seen me guiding my Indian bark with a bunch of reeds. Honest, they looked like, a street sweeper's broom. ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... awry. Appearances to save his only care; So things seem right, no matter what they are. 300 In him his parents saw themselves renew'd, Begotten by Sir Critic on Saint Prude. Then came drum, trumpet, hautboy, fiddle, flute; Next snuffer, sweeper, shifter, soldier, mute: Legions of angels all in white advance; Furies, all fire, come forward in a dance; Pantomime figures then are brought to view, Fools, hand in hand with fools, go two by two. Next came the treasurer of either house; One with full purse, t'other with not a sous. 310 ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... ones, few of the pedestrians stopped or even looked at the chain-gang. To most, if not all, it was an ordinary spectacle, and attracted no more attention than would a crossing-sweeper on a London street. Not as much as the latter, as he is often an Oriental. On that particular day, however, the party of scavengers presented a novelty, in having the two Tejanos in it; with a yet greater one in the ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... it. Go now to Lugh, and ask him for the loan of the fairy steed of Mananan, which was given him to ride over the sea into Erinn. He will refuse you, for he will say that the steed is but lent to him and he may not make a loan of a loan. Then ask him for the loan of Ocean Sweeper, which is the magic boat of Mananan, and that he must give, for it is a sacred ordinance with Lugh not to refuse ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... am sure you for one would not be a snob if you had turned chimney-sweeper, and let Tom Underwood nail me to his office; he'll never ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... She was not at all her idea of an orphan. In pictures they always wore black and looked sad, and at home there was a crossing-sweeper who said he was an orphan, and seemed to think it a hard thing, and that he was much to be pitied. Then another thought struck her: "If Aunt Hannah's your aunt as well as mine, I suppose we're cousins—ain't we?" ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... had seen once in his life the back of an anarchist that must have been the whole extent of his connection with the underworld. He was, however, a man who liked to talk with all sorts of people, and he may have gathered those illuminating facts at second or third hand, from a crossing-sweeper, from a retired police officer, from some vague man in his club, or even, perhaps, from a Minister of State met at some public or ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... collected into a heap? I look down upon the other scavengers, of whom there have been a few—mere historical drudges; Montucla, Hutton, etc.—as not fit to compete with me. I say of them what one crossing-sweeper said of the rest: "They are well enough for the common thing; but put them to a bit of fancy-work, such as sweeping round a post, and see what a mess they make of it!" Who can touch me at sweeping round a paradoxer? If I complete ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... hatched, the wax was riddled with little tunnels, coated with the dirty clothes of the caterpillars. Flannelly lines ran through the honey-stores, the pollen-larders, the foundations, and, worst of all, through the babies in their cradles, till the Sweeper Guards spent half their time tossing out useless little corpses. The lines ended in a maze of sticky webbing on the face of the comb. The caterpillars could not stop spinning as they walked, and as they ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... constructions in other cases. Such is the construction in common recoveries. The method of construction which in that case gives to the persons in remainder, for their security and representative, the door-keeper, crier, or sweeper of the court, or some other shadowy being without substance or effect, is a fiction of a very coarse texture. This was however suffered by the acquiescence of the whole kingdom, for ages; because the evasion ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
