"Vagrant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must have two qualities, mind and soul. Literature will have mind when it has that architectural sense of structure which foresees the end in the beginning and keeps all the parts related in a harmonious unity. It will have soul when it has that "vagrant sympathy" which makes it come home to us and which makes it suggest what it does not say. Test the Tale of Cinderella by this standard. As to mind, it makes one think of a bridge in which the very keystone of the structure is the condition that Cinderella ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... ease. Decidedly I find it does not agree with me to prosecute the search of the picturesque in a carriage; a waggon, a spring-cart, even a post-chaise might do, but the carriage upsets everything. I longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales. Erratic and vagrant instincts tormented me, and these I was obliged to control, or rather, suppress, for fear of growing in any degree enthusiastic, and thus drawing attention to the "lioness," the authoress, the artist. Sir J. K. Shuttleworth ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... of the period, embraced such facts as flying through the air to witch gatherings, partaking of witch sacraments, signing a book presented by the devil, and submitting to Satanic baptism. The possessed had begun with charging their possession upon poor and vagrant old women, but ere long, emboldened by their success, they attacked higher game, struck at some of the foremost people of the region, and did not cease until several of these were condemned to death, and every ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... lay eggs and hatch them out, You seek the flowers most sweet and fragrant; And, sipping honey, stroll about, At best a good for nothing vagrant." ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... slender and slightly above the middle height. A distracting dimple dented the velvet of her right cheek, and above her small mouth and perfectly formed nose a pair of hazel eyes looked frankly out upon the world. Her oval face was surmounted by a dainty toque, from under which a vagrant tendril of hair had escaped. This blew about her ears, glistening like ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... grove and it was between there and the boxwood that touched the side porch of Lenox that this hidden thing must be. Jane was by no means as brave as her carefree manner indicated, and every time she held a bush from brushing Dozia's face she took occasion to listen intently for vagrant noises. ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... like Sunday shoes,— How vast the heap, how quickly must we choose! A few small scraps from out his mountain mass We snatch in haste, and let the vagrant pass. This shrunken CRUST that Cerberus could not bite, Stamped (in one corner) "Pickwick copyright," Kneaded by youngsters, raised by flattery's yeast, Was once a loaf, and helped to make a feast. He for whose sake the glittering show appears Has sown ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in my mind, set me wishing to go aboard one of these ideal houses of lounging, I had plenty to choose from, as I coasted one after another, and the dogs bayed at me for a vagrant. At last I saw a nice old man and his wife looking at me with some interest, so I gave them good-day and pulled up alongside. I began with a remark upon their dog, which had somewhat the look of a pointer; thence I slid into a compliment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a vagrant commit me for vagrancy! I expect no mercy here! I expect no justice! You punish me first, and try me afterward, and now you can punish me again; but you ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Ireland. Forty-two years old. Single. Had two sisters in Brooklyn who were poor. In this country eighteen years. Had no regular trade but worked in hotels as porter. Out of work five months. Worked on a farm a good deal in Ireland. Looked like a vagrant. ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... better things, has its abuses. One may quote till one compiles. The ancient lawyers used to quote at the bar till they had stagnated their own cause. "Retournons a nos moutons," was the cry of the client. But these vagrant prowlers must be consigned to the beadles of criticism. Such do not always understand the authors whose names adorn their barren pages, and which are taken, too, from the third or the thirtieth hand. Those who trust to such false quoters will often learn how contrary this transmission ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Gorki's predecessors; Reaction and pessimism; Literature and society; Gorki's youth; Hard times; A vagrant life; Journalist days; Rapid success; The new heroes; Creatures once men; Vagabond philosophy; ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... kiss her hand, and after he had picked up his cane and his hat from the rack, toddled down the walk to the street, a sad, thoughtful, worried little man, white-clad and serene to outward view, who had not even a whistle nor a vagrant tune under his breath ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... my life or anything like that, did you?" she adventured like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her. She did not weigh her words. "I shouldn't like having my life saved. The necessity for feeling such a vast emotion—I shouldn't know how to cope ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... cross the Tuileries Garden I run my eyes over the groups scattered among the chestnut-trees. I see children playing and falling about; nursemaids who leave them crying; mothers who pick them up again; a vagrant guardsman. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... on Our vagrant pointer, christen'd Don; When, rising o'er a gentle slope, That gave his view a better scope, He spied, some dozen furrows distant, But in a spot as inconsistent, A second dog across his track, Without a master to his back; As if for wages, workman-like, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... to the mind of genius. Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... into the infra-oven as Ben walked through to crew quarters. Her coverall sleeves were rolled to the elbows as she worked and a vagrant strand of copper hair curled over her forehead. As Martin passed by, he caught a faint whisper of ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... "Zounds!" he stormed. "I have had enough impudence to contend with to-night. Begone; or up you go for a vagrant." ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... What an exuberant, vagrant life it was! The blood warms and the nerves tingle after the tensions and heats of a quarter of a century as those days of sublime vagabondage come back. The melodious morning calls that waked the sleepy, lusty young bodies; the echoing bugle and the abrupt drum! ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... common to all classes, to all degrees of wealth and poverty, to every grade of education and ignorance. Here, for example, is her Majesty Queen Victoria in her palace, this present blessed night, and here is Winking Charley, a sturdy vagrant, in one of her Majesty's jails. Her Majesty has fallen, many thousands of times, from that same Tower, which I claim a right to tumble off now and then. So has Winking Charley. Her Majesty in her sleep has opened or prorogued Parliament, or has held a Drawing Room, attired in some very scanty ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... Idler who hath no particular calling, or vagrant Person under pretence of a calling, be suffered to perform worship in Families, to or for the same: Seeing persons tainted with errours or aiming at division, may be ready (after that manner) to creep into houses and lead captive silly ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... modest wants, sober habits, and of a studious disposition which his friendship with Horatio Bakkus had both awakened and stimulated. Homeless from birth he never knew the nostalgia which grips even the most deliberately vagrant of men. As his ultimate goal he had indeed a vague dream of a home with wife and children—one of these days in the future, when he had put by enough money to justify such luxuries. And then there was the wife to find. In a wife sewing by lamp-light ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Jennet blush'd, how Alfred with a stride Bore off his prize, and fancied every charm, And clipp'd against his ribs her trembling arm; How mute we seniors stood, our power all gone? Completely conquer'd, Love the day had won, And the young vagrant triumph'd in our plight, And shook his roguish plumes, and laugh'd outright. Yet, by my life and hopes, I would not part With this sweet recollection from my heart; I would not now forget that tender scene To wear a crown, or make my girl a queen. Why need be told how pass'd the months along, ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... respectable young man, with a trade,—that he's got a decent house for a young woman to live in, and a decent table for her to sit at. And he's always been brought up decent, having been a regular 'prentice to his uncle, and all that sort of thing. He's never been wandering about like a vagrant, getting his money nobody knows how. William Brisket's as well known in Aldersgate Street as the Post Office. And moreover," she added, after a pause, speaking these last words in a somewhat milder breath—"And moreover, it was my sainted ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... diamond pencil, produced one miracle of dulness; it might well be feared that Kinglake's volatile pen, when linked with forceful feeling and bound to rigid task-work, might lose the charm of casual epigram, easy luxuriance, playful egotism, vagrant allusion, which established "Eothen" as a classic. On the other hand, he had been for twenty years conversant with Eastern history, geography, politics; was, more than most professional soldiers, an adept in military science; had sate in the centre of the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... by with a buzz and whirl, circling about Theron Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge, impalpable teetotum sent spinning under Sister Soulsby's resolute hands. Whenever his vagrant memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling, and ended with a ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... of anxious elders, such vagrant ways naturally take on the colours of idleness and a love of low company. Stevenson was, however, in his own fashion an eager student of books as well as of man and nature. He read precociously and omnivorously in the belles-lettres, including a very wide range of English ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so," said I, "and, I believe, of all habits, those of a vagrant are the most difficult to overcome. You used to laugh at me the first few months that I was here. I presume that I am a little improved, as I have ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... to sleep. Turning at full length upon his back, his arms above his head, he stared steadily up into the darkness until his brain, freed of all lesser problems, all vagrant thoughts, was concentrated upon the great problem which now ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... to any amount, are to be had for the catching; and the opportunity is well improved. See that sombre, ashen-colored pewee on yonder branch. A true sportsman he, who never takes his game at rest, but always on the wing. You vagrant fly, you purblind moth, beware how you come within his range! Observe his attitude, the curious movement of his head, his "eye in a fine frenzy rolling, glancing from heaven to earth, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... was also frequently used for camp-meeting purposes. Gnarly old live-oaks spread their branches like a canopy over everything, while the sea-green moss hung from every limb and twig, excluding the light and lazily waving with every vagrant breeze. The fact that these grounds were also used for camp-meetings only proved the broad toleration of the people. On this occasion I distinctly remember that Miss Jean introduced a lady to me, ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... asleep. Her book slid to the floor, I shaded her face with my green umbrella, pulled down her muslin frock over her pretty ankles, and gave myself up to vagrant ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... books, as a resource against a rainy day, he goes to some wild spot—the wilder the better—where he roves at will from point to point of interest and beauty, and spends his time in reading, sketching, and—alas, for human imperfection!—shooting. These vagrant habits first brought him into the neighborhood of Donaldson Manor, and he had for two successive summers hunted with the Colonel and sketched with the young ladies, when he was invited to join their Christmas party in 18—. Here I was introduced ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... the warm days that fell at the end of the apple harvest, when such vagrant labourers as had collected to help the farmers were loitering at liberty, Smith held his first and last public meeting in the place where his boyhood had been passed. It was near the cross-roads on the old ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... arc of sky The great stone box is cruelly displayed. The street becomes more dreary from its shade, And vagrant breezes touch its walls and die. Here sullen convicts in their chains might lie, Or slaves toil dumbly at some dreary trade. How worse than folly is their labor made Who cleft the rocks that ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... became a Vagus Quidam—a wandering student, like the Goliardi of the Middle Ages. From Noli he passed to Savona; from Savona to Turin; from Turin to Venice. There his feet might perhaps have found rest; for Venice was the harbor of all vagrant spirits in that age. But the city was laid waste with plague. Bruno wrote a little book, now lost, on 'The Signs of the Times,' and lived upon the sale of it for some two months. Then he removed to Padua. Here friends persuaded him to reassume the cowl. There were more than 40,000 monks ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... food and rest. He gazed earnestly at the house. Nothing stirred there save the open doors swinging idly in every vagrant wind. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... Lankadomb the dogs were baying restlessly, but the hounds of the castle watchman did not answer them. They were sleeping. Some vagrant gypsy woman had fed them well ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... expression of tractability, he drew her gently with him until they reached the hotel, which—in her newer aspect of a guest whose board was secured by responsible parties—had forgivingly opened its hospitable doors to the vagrant child. Here the master lingered a moment to assure her that she might count upon his assistance tomorrow; and having satisfied his conscience by this anticipated duty, bade her good- night. In the darkness ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... they have meantime played more or less agreeably on the senses. The music we make automatically we cannot help hearing incidentally; the sensation may even modify the expression, since sensation too has its physical side. The expression is reined in and kept from becoming vagrant, in proportion as its form and occasion are remembered. The automatic performer, being henceforth controlled more or less by reflection and criticism, becomes something of an artist: he trains himself to be consecutive, impressive, agreeable; he begins to compare his improvisation with its ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... too, there are some who might, probably with more reason, boast their proficiency in mysterious lore—fellows of smooth aspect and polite demeanour, whom at first you imagine to have become casual spectators from mere lack of better pastime, but whose furtive glances and vagrant attention betray the familiars of the police—that complex and mighty engine of modern structure, which, far more surely than the "ear of Dionysius," conveys to the tympanum of power each echoed sigh and reverberated whisper. It is a chilling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... secret in his heart out of dread of hearing it mocked or of finding it something common to all men. While, then, the words "Premier of Russia" still echoed through his head, there rose upon his inner ear a sudden note of melody, vagrant, sweet and melancholy as the songs of the Steppes. Known song it was not, however; but something unique, as were all the airs that came to him unbidden. Under its influence it was natural that his face should change, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... club where many things were to be studied and planned. His system of debit and credit records of facts known and needed, was one which brought finite results. As he smoked and pondered at his ease, a tapping on the study door aroused him from his vagrant speculations. At his call, a respectful Japanese servant presented a note, just left by a messenger-boy. He tore ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... admiring gaze roved over the apartment, but the shyer boy dared not seat himself upon any of those handsome satin-covered chairs. He slunk behind Molly, casting his eyes down and nervously twirling his cap. For, little vagrant though he was, his street life had already taught him that it was the correct thing for lads and men to bare the head in ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... But night was at hand; the last train to Troyes, the nearest town, had gone, no other would pass through Arcis-sur-Aube until the small hours of the morning. Unless I could procure a room, therefore, I should be in the position of a homeless vagrant. Well, not to be dismayed, I set out making inquiries right and left, to my astonishment being rebuffed rather surlily and with looks of suspicion. The fact is, during these manoeuvres, a lady arriving at head-quarters alone is apt to be looked upon with no favourable eye. ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... fear not this king of the buskin! 315 A king? Oh laughter! A king Bajazet! That from some vagrant actor's tiring-room, Hath stolen at once his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "Vagrant music is getting to that height here, and is so impossible to be escaped from, that I fear Broadstairs and I must part company in time to come. Unless it pours of rain, I cannot write half an hour without the ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... schoolteacher and of the immobile Swede, the shaking, quavering terror of Mrs. Ducharme, mumbling to herself the words of the service. Why should the old woman be so upset, he wondered. But his vagrant thoughts always came back to the woman near the coffin, the woman he loved. How could she summon up such peace! Was hers one of those mighty souls that never doubted? That steadfast gaze ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... say what they please in their reports to their societies, they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended ones of vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who are outcasts from ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... poets should, Thou hast built up thy hardihood With wondrous-varying food, Drawn in select proportion fair From solid mould and vagrant air; From terrors of the dreadful night, And joyful light; From antique ashes, whose departed flame In thee has finer life and longer fame; From wounds and balms, From storms and calms, From potsherds and dry bones, And ruin-stones. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... repeat and aggravate his grief, But they repulse him, give him no relief. He begs, they say, Begone; he will not hear, But coughs, sighs, and makes signs he still is there; They disregard him, he repeats his groans; They still say nay, and he himself bemoans. They grow more rugged, they call him vagrant; He cries the shriller, trumpets out his want. At last, when they perceive he'll take no nay, An alms they give him without ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... now—became one of our chief amusements. Meanwhile Gypsy was not forgotten. Every clear morning I was in the saddle before breakfast, and there are few roads or lanes within ten miles of Rivermouth that have not borne the print of her vagrant hoof. ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... jesuits, monks, and friars; that many new and pompous mass-houses had been erected in some of the most conspicuous parts of their great cities, where there had not been any before; and that such swarms of vagrant, immoral Romish priests had appeared, that the very papists themselves considered them ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... barking howl of a mad dog. Poor Swindle had gone mad; and I had had a narrow escape from being bitten. We lassoed him from opposite directions and dragged him outside and shot him. Swindle was a plucky little dog, and so was Crib; one day they chased a vagrant cat up on to the roof; driven to desperation, the cat made a wild leap down into the court-yard, a distance of perhaps twenty feet; without a moment's hesitation, both dogs sprang boldly after her, recking little ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... stubble burnt, delights. Piled high The wagons silent standing take their nightly rest, On distant hills the silver birches I descry, Framed gold by fertile fields the sacred picture blest. Then with a joy unshared save by the vagrant, I see the threshing floor well filled and fragrant, The sloping straw-thatched cottage roofs again, The window panels carved, ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... the right, so they are as seldom to be convinced that they are in the wrong; it being all one to go about to draw those men out of their mistakes who have no settled notions, as to dispossess a vagrant of his habitation who has no settled abode. This I guess to be so; and every one may observe in himself and others whether it be ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... idiot! Will you heed him? I believe he's more likely to become a vagrant and have to beg his bread, than to become a burgomaster. Dear Antonius! you mustn't pay attention to him, and you mustn't lose the affection you ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... eternal humorist The eternal enemy of the absolute, Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist With your air indifferent and imperious At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—" And—"Are we then ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... is it, mother; you have not told us?" Annie urged; while Mrs. Millar sank down in a low wicker chair, and her daughter Dora instinctively stooped over her, and began to set her vagrant cap right. ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... among the shifting yellow sand-dunes, he had worked six weeks along the docks as roustabout for money to take him back into the hills whence came the big fortunes and the bigger tales of fortunes. For six years he worked over the gravelly benches of the California creeks for vagrant particles of gold. Then, in the late fifties, he joined a mad stampede to the Frazer River gold-fields in British Columbia, still wild over its first knowledge of silver sulphurets, he was drawn back by the wonder-tales of ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... as far as Miss Unity was concerned; she had seldom spent such an afternoon in her life. She had been taken out for a walk in the mud, with rain threatening; she had talked in the open High Street, under the very eye of the dean, with a little vagrant out of Anchor and Hope Alley; she had of her own accord, unadvised and unassisted, formed an original plan, and not only formed it, but taken the first step towards carrying it out. Miss Unity hardly ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... herself about such things. But it looked as bright in her hair as a ruddy berry on a dark foliaged creeper, and she wore it with a pleasure, which was destined to be brief. For as she sat knitting with the quietly creeping fingers of an expert in that art, a vagrant gust maliciously whisked off her little gawd, and tossing it contumeliously on the ground, as if it were not worth carrying, began to puff it along, skimming over the heather and tussocks. Denis O'Meara all but rescued it for her, only that Hugh McInerney—the omadhawn—starting ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... "'Vagrant, your Honor,' the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, 'Ten days,' and Chi Slim ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... crime the saint—was an article of faith with him. Nature's or God's surprises were dear to him; and nothing purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural, womanly and saintly was ever made than Pompilia, the daughter of a vagrant impurity, the child of crime, the girl who grew to womanhood in mean ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that gateway toward the village burying-ground. The wheel track leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living to pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between the door of the house and the public highway were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... full of gaps." The state of an agricultural people appears in such proverbs as "You must not count your yearlings till May-day:" and their proverbial sentence for old age is, "An old man's end is to keep sheep?" Turn from the vagrant Arab and the agricultural Briton to a nation existing in a high state of artificial civilization: the Chinese proverbs frequently allude to magnificent buildings. Affecting a more solemn exterior ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... fisherman—were all known to Him. He considered the lilies of the field, and the grass in meadow and upland, the birds which sowed not nor gathered into barns but lived on the bounty of their Maker, the foxes in their holes, the petted house dog and the vagrant cur, the hen sheltering her brood beneath protecting wings—all these had contributed to the wisdom in which He grew, as had also the moods of the weather, the recurrence of the seasons, and all the phenomena of ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... works. There is nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret's stamp so much as good done in the wrong way. She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by. It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to wrap up a gypsy's baby. And it might be allowed to be trying that when believing an old man of rather doubtful ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... could scarcely keep my seat on horseback. Before we left the fort we hired another man, a long-haired Canadian, with a face like an owl's, contrasting oddly enough with Delorier's mercurial countenance. This was not the only re-enforcement to our party. A vagrant Indian trader, named Reynal, joined us, together with his squaw Margot, and her two nephews, our dandy friend, The Horse, and his younger brother, The Hail Storm. Thus accompanied, we betook ourselves to the prairie, leaving the beaten trail, and ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... waking moments when she seemed to be aware that Martha was bringing in her breakfast, or sitting beside her while she ate her dinner, but the intervening spaces, when "Ma" or Cora served, were dim, indistinct adumbrations of no more substantial quality than the vagrant dreams that ranged mistily ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... the bosom of maternal tenderness, was probably passed by Schiller; and his first awaking to the world of strife and perplexity happened in his fourteenth year. Up to that period his life had been vagrant, agreeably to the shifting necessities of the ducal service, and his education desultory and domestic. But in the year 1773 he was solemnly entered as a member of a new academical institution, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... witness Limus. Now the present demand for fish will not be permanent. After the war the negroes will have to fall back upon field-labor for a living, and it will be better for them if in the meanwhile they do not acquire a distaste for steady labor and get vagrant habits. I would talk this over with 'Siah and ask him in serious mood if he really thinks best to spend so much money in fishing-gear, when he could buy land ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... vagrant part of his clansmen now crowded around Rob Roy at Craig Royston, and swore obedience to him as their chieftain. The country was kept in continual awe by these marauders, who broke into houses and carried off the inmates to Craig Royston, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... trying to do something that he isn't fitted to, because he has failed of his hopes and expectations in the occupation dearest to his heart, Slavens heated up like a tin stove under the trashy fuel of every vagrant scheme that blew ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... to the large and friendly manner in which he rakes up, out of brothel, out of gutter, out of tenement, out of sweat-shop, out of circus-tent, out of wharf shanty, out of barge cabin, every kind and species of human derelict to immortalise their vagrant humanity in the amber of his ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... charms devised for their removal. Grose gives directions to "Steal a piece of beef from a butcher's shop, and rub your wart with it, then throw it down the necessary house, or bury it, and as the beef rots, your warts will decay."[161] Some have great faith in having a vagrant count them, mark the number on the inside of his hat, and then when he leaves the neighborhood he takes the warts with him. Coffin water was ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... conditions, at once charming and insidious, Damaris Verity, resting in a wicker deck-chair in the shade of the great ilex trees, found herself alone, free to follow her own vagrant thoughts, perceptions, imaginations without human let or hindrance. Free to dream undisturbed and interrogate both Nature and her own ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... as becomes you, over the run and drift of your thoughts. I said that many of us had minds like cities broken down. Put a guard at the gate, as they do in some Continental countries, and let in no vagrant that cannot show his passport, and a clear bill of health. Now, that is a lesson that some of you ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... slowly by, and the man who lay in bed there counted interminable hours and prayed for the coming of night with its merciful oblivion of sleep. His inaction was made bitterer by the fact that the days were days of green and gold, of breeze-stirred tree-tops without his windows, of vagrant sweet airs that stole in upon his solitude, bringing him all the warm fragrance of summer and of ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... first attack of a depressing illness I cease to be a gentleman, I am rude to ladies who do their best and kindest to serve me, and I talk to the friend who comes to cheer and comfort me as if he were an idle vagrant who wanted to sell me a worthless book with the recommendation of the pretence that he wrote it himself. Now that I am in my right mind, I am ashamed of myself, ashamed that it should be possible for me to behave so, and humiliated yet besides that I have no ground of assurance that, should my ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the roadside. The wind had lowered until it came like the breath of spring, bud-scented, caressing, provocative. Even Gabriel, whose optimism lay in his blood and bone rather than in his intellect, yielded for a moment to this call of the spring as one might yield to the delicious melancholy of a vagrant mood. The long straight road, without bend or fork, had warmed in the paling sunlight to the colour of old ivory; in a neighbouring field a young maple tree rose in a flame of buds from the ridged earth ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... failure and the beating he had received at the island, and now to be made the object of such abuse in the presence of his townsmen, and that on account of a person whom he looked down upon as a sort of vagrant, was more than his philosophy could bear. For Basset, with that kind of logic which is so common with a certain class of people, could not avoid regarding the Recluse as the culpable cause of his misfortune in both instances. "If he hadn't gone agin the law," he said to himself, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... hearing is as painfully acute as that of the giant fabled to watch 'Bifrost,' and who 'heard the grass growing in the fields, and the wool on the backs of young lambs.' Last night, just as I was lapsing into a preliminary doze, two vagrant nightingales undertook an opera that brought them to the large myrtle under my window, where I hoped they had reached the finale. But one of them—the female, I warrant you, from the clatter of her small tongue (if ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... must be trim, Must not indulge in vagrant whim, Of voice or vesture. Boudoir decorum will allow No gleaming eye, no glowing brow, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... made for the provision of the poor, and for punishing idle vagrant persons, be repealed, and one law made to continue such parts as are found useful, and to add such other restrictions, penalties, and provisions, as may effectually attain the end of this ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty
... Scottish minstrel who flourished in the 15th century; the few particulars of his life which have come down to us represent him as a blind and vagrant poet, living by reciting poems "before princes and peers"; to him is attributed the celebrated poem, "The Life of that Noble Champion of Scotland, Sir William Wallace, Knight," completed about 1488, a spirited, if partly apocryphal, account of Wallace, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... tartan." But the reason for the outburst was different. It was not because the occupation suggested was peaceful labor, for we were taught that idleness was disgraceful; but because the suggested occupation was somewhat vagrant in character and not entirely respectable in her eyes. Better death. Yes, mother would have taken her two boys, one under each arm, and perished with them rather than they should mingle with low company ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... right day, and might generally be seen on the Monday pondering over essays which every one else had sent in on the Friday night." These traits, however, as it proved later, were the index not of a vagrant mind, but of independence of thought and of preoccupation with weightier matters. To quote again from the tribute of a fellow-student: "On everything he said or wrote there was stamped the impress of a forcible individuality, a mind that thought for itself, and whose thoughts had the rugged ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... with the love Of the fair daughter of a count. A lace from Na Raymbauda's hand I value more than all the land Of Richard, with his Poctou, His rich Touraine and famed Anjou. When loup-garou the rabble call me, When vagrant shepherds hoot, Pursue, and buffet me to boot, It doth not for a moment gall me; I seek not palaces or halls, Or refuge when the winter falls; Exposed to winds and frosts at night, My soul is ravished with delight. Me ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... (A vagrant woman has wandered in their direction, one whom the shrill winds of life have lashed and bled; here and there ragged graces still cling to her, and unruly passion smoulders, but she, once a dear, fierce rebel, with eyes of storm, is now first of all a whimperer. ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... I burned at times in my youth to satiate myself with deeds of hell, and dared to run wild in many a dark love passage.... In the time of my youth I took my fill passionately among the wild beasts, and I dared to roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves beneath the shade; and my beauty consumed away and I was loathsome in Thy sight, pleasing myself and desiring to please the eyes of men.... The seething waves of my youth flowed up to the shores ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... my encounter with the red-headed vagrant, the following paragraph appeared in one of the local papers: "Pocklingham. In the casual ward of the Union house for this district a tramp, name unknown, died last night. He had been admitted on the previous evening, but, for some unexplained reason, it was not noticed until the next morning ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... their election unawares, and infallibly choosing the worse by the very act of lazily or weakly allowing accident to determine their lives. Not consciously and strongly to will the right, not resolutely and with coercion of the vagrant self to will to take God for our aim, is to choose the low, the wrong. Perhaps none, or very few of us, would deliberately say 'I choose Mammon, having carefully compared the claims of the opposite systems of life that solicit me, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... exercise and were enervated in the ease so propitious to vices. At last the eldest of those who shared the name of Grep, wishing to regulate and steady his promiscuous wantonness, ventured to seek a haven for his vagrant amours in the love of the king's sister. Yet he did amiss. For though it was right that his vagabond and straying delights should be bridled by modesty, yet it was audacious for a man of the people to covet the child of a king. She, much fearing the impudence of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... enough, let me instance further the attitude toward "Fashion" of that class of women who live most openly and directly upon the favor of men. These know their business. To continually attract the vagrant fancy of the male, nature's born "variant," they must not only pile on artificial charms, but change them constantly. They do. From the leaders of this profession comes a steady stream of changing fashions; the more extreme ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the act you are a vagrant, and the justice may commit ye; (aside to the officer) lookye, Mr. Officer—you're in the wrong box here. Can't you see plain enough, by his having lost an arm, that he earns a livelihood by the work of his hands; so lest he should be riotous for being detained, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... the fashion of the French provinces, and very low. In the long wall from the door to the garden gate is only one small high window. But time and nature have done much to beautify the spot. In the cracks of the roof, thatched or tiled, whichever it may be, many a vagrant seed has found lodgment. The weeds have grown up in profusion to cover the bare little place with leaf and flower. Indeed, there is here a genuine roof garden of the prettiest sort, and it extends along the stone wall ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... I,—but among us trod A man in blue, with legal baton, And scoffed the vagrant demigod, And pushed him from the step I sat on. Doubting, I mused upon the cry, "Great Pan is dead!"—and all the people Went on their ways:—and clear and high The quarter ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... at the Charterhouse and at Oxford; but circumstances had then, for a time, separated them widely. Steele had left college without taking a degree, had been disinherited by a rich relation, had led a vagrant life, had served in the army, had tried to find the philosopher's stone, and had written a religious treatise and several comedies. He was one of those people whom it is impossible either to hate or to respect. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nought, to be pitied if the truth were known, at any rate to be skirted. Her hair, which seemed to be of a dusty gold tinge, was knotted up in a red handkerchief; her gown was of blue faded to green, her feet were bare. If a gipsy, she was to be trusted to take care of herself; if but a sunburnt vagrant she could be let to shift; and yet he watched her curiously, while she sat as impassive as a young Sphinx, and wondered to himself ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... nights had grown perceptibly colder, but the days were still warm and dry and radiant, though with a tang in the air that stirred the blood. And a thousand perfumes, known and unknown, distilled from meadow and field and forest, scented every vagrant breeze. ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... understanding. For a long time she watched him in silence as he paced to and fro like a caged lion. Twice she heard him mutter: "An American girl—good Lord," and she found herself smiling to herself—the strange, vagrant smile that comes of ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon |
