"Bric-a-brac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over the table, filled with a burning curiosity to know the whole contents of the letter, and while so doing her hair became entangled in the metal bric-a-brac of the hanging lamp. Gertrude ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... of getting drunk upon rare and costly vintages, and the new parlour-maid had turned out to be a Sunday reporter in disguise. The man who had come every day for ten years to wind the clocks of the establishment was dead, and the one who took care of the bric-a-brac was sick, and the housekeeper was in a panic over the prospect of having ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... after the purchase of the old Mainwaring estate, which they had heard could be bought at a comparatively low figure, the present owner being somewhat embarrassed financially; while Mrs. Mainwaring was making a careful inventory of the furniture, paintings, and bric-a-brac at Fair Oaks, with a view of ascertaining whether there were any articles which she would care to retain for their ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... shades, and representing large jardinieres filled with gorgeous, impossible flowers. There was a large pier-glass mirror between the two windows. A large, soft, green, plush-covered couch occupied one corner, and several rocking-chairs were set about. Some pictures, several rugs, a few small pieces of bric-a-brac, and the tale of ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... are going abroad; and when do you return? But that's a useless question. You hardly know when you are coming back, You will find so much to learn." My smile falls heavily among the bric-a-brac. ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... Delicate bric-a-brac occupied gilded brackets on the walls, or crowded the statuettes upon the floor; a laughing faun held back the silken curtain that concealed the entrance to that inner room where the goddess herself presided; ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... to come back to sometimes; and so we let it to an old gentleman, a friend of Grandfather's and Guardy's, who has only himself and his wife and servants, and will take beautiful care of it. But I went around and picked out anything I wanted, rugs and pictures and some bric-a-brac, and a few bits of old mahogany that I love, just small things that would pack easily. Guardy said we might buy our own things. He set a limit on our spending, of course; but he said it would be good experience for us to learn how to buy ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... about. There were various bronzes, marbles, and casts, all requiring explanation, and so fulfilling their purpose of promoting conversation, and exhibiting the erudition of their owner. There were souvenirs of travel with a history, old bric-a-brac with a pedigree, but little or nothing that challenged attention for itself alone. In all cases the superiority of the owner to his possessions was admitted. As a natural result, nobody ever lingered there, the servants avoided ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... as a survival of the last political campaign,—the Tammany tiger,—threatening to swallow it at a gulp if one as much as takes one's eyes off it. A miniature Santa Claus, a pasteboard monkey, and several other articles of bric-a-brac of the kind the tenement affords, complete the outfit. The background is a picture of St. Donato, their village saint, with the Madonna "whom they worship most." But the incongruity harbors no suggestion of disrespect. The children view the strange show with genuine reverence, bowing and crossing ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... difficult to find a more delightful collection of fairy tales. The children who are fortunate enough to possess 'Bric-a-Brac Stories' will pass their holidays as pleasantly and as profitably as Rigi passed his. The book is illustrated with twenty-four fascinating drawings by ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... mediocrity, and mistaking mystification for mastery, enters the fog of dilettantism, and, graduating connoisseur, ends its days in a bewilderment of bric-a-brac and Brummagem! ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... will be attested to by the hotel keeper and high-grade restaurant owner, whose yearly losses of linen, silver and bric-a-brac are enormous. The "best" people do not think it really wrong to do this, especially if the things taken have a souvenir value. Farmers whose fruit trees adjoin a public thoroughfare will also state that the average automobilist has quite a different code of morals ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... judge and jury and defeat the ends of justice. Likewise, we still use the word "Court," signifying the place where lives royalty, even for the dingy office of a country J. P., where sawdust spittoons are the bric-a-brac and patent-office reports loom large, and justice is dispensed with. We now also commonly call ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... entirely admirable specimen of Flemish domestic work of the best period, and the internal decoration and the furniture matched to a nicety the exterior. It was in that grave and silent abode, with Alresca, that I first acquired a taste for bric-a-brac. Ah! the Dutch marquetry, the French cabinetry, the Belgian brassware, the curious panellings, the oak-frames, the faience, the silver candlesticks, the Amsterdam toys in silver, the Antwerp incunables, ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... AN INFECTED ROOM.—Carpets, upholstered furniture, hangings, bric-a-brac, or any personal clothing, the color of which may be destroyed by disinfection, should have been removed from the room at the ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... us not fail to be duly grateful. Let us not fail to give thanks for the fact that setting forever is the conception of music as an after-dinner cordial, a box of assorted bonbons, bric-a-brac, a titillation, a tepid bath, a performance that amuses and caresses and whiles away a half-hour, an enchantment for boarding-school misses, an opportunity for virtuosi ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the native Tagals, humble yet cleanly; along the broad, shaded avenues, bordered by stately old Spanish mansions, many of them still occupied by their Castilian owners, the Yankee invaders wandered at will, brimful of curiosity and good nature, eager to gather in acquaintance, information, and bric-a-brac, making themselves perfectly at home, filling the souls of the late lords of the soil with disdain, and those of the natives with wonderment through their lavish, jovial, free and easy ways. Within a ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... a model for a candlestick or a clock, and the bourgeois who wanted a portrait, failed him. What was to be done? Antonin Moyne struggled on as best he could, used his old clothes, lived upon beans and potatoes, sold his knick-knacks to bric-a-brac dealers, pawned first his ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... warmth will so often make even a ready-made library the actual "living-room" of a family to whom the shelved volumes are indeed sealed. Thus it was with Sheridan, who read nothing except newspapers, business letters, and figures; who looked upon books as he looked upon bric-a-brac or crocheting—when he was at home, and not abed or eating, he was ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... Barbel, "is my cook-stove, which you can't see unless I light the candle in the bottle which stands by it. But if you don't care particularly to examine it, I won't go to the expense of lighting up. You might pick up a good many odd pieces of bric-a-brac, around here, if you chose to strike a match and investigate. But I would not advise you to do so. It would pay better to throw the things out of the window than to carry them down-stairs. The particular piece of indoor decoration to which I wish to call your attention ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... legacy, it was a gold-mine; what she had had in view, as a matter of fact, had been one of those little fancy shops which are called Ye Blue Bird or Ye Corner Shoppe, or something like that, where you sell exotic bric-a-brac to the wealthy at extortionate prices. She knew two girls who were doing splendidly in that line. As Fillmore spoke those words, Ye Corner Shoppe suddenly looked ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... for a free-for-all fight. Del Mar and Smith leaped at the intruder. Over and over they rolled, breaking furniture, overturning and smashing bric-a-brac. ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... held out to her. The turn of the stairs brought her fronting the little drawing-room and the figure of Girard, who sat leaning forward, smoking, in the Morris chair, with his elbow resting on the arm of it and his head on his hand. The books and bric-a-brac on the table beside him had been pushed back to make room for the tray containing the coffee-pot, a cup and saucer, and a plate with some biscuits. A newspaper lay on the floor at his feet. Notwithstanding the light in the hallway and the room, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... studio, music hall to cafe chantant, Brighton to Monte Carlo, Sandown to Goodwood, were shifty, too well-dressed, too near neutrality in sex, without defined professions, known by nicknames only, spend-thrifts, spongers, bankrupts, and collectors of needless bric-a-brac.] ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... wall-ornaments. Moqui basketware serves equally well for useful purposes, such as scrap-baskets, and for ornamentation. The pottery of the Pueblo Indians, being naive and primitive in design, is much more intimate and therefore appropriate than the Japanese bric-a-brac which it replaces. ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... art." ("Essay on Style.") Your Chelsea manikin would never dream of these things as great art: his whole soul is expressed in ballads and canzonets, in strange esoteric contes, in nocturnes and colour-symphonies, in the bric-a-brac of aesthetics. Furthermore let the soi-disant disciples ponder this explicit statement of the Master: "Given the conditions I haye tried to explain as constituting good art,—then, if it be devoted further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... young children when making formal calls; the hostess will be in terror as to the fate of her bric-a-brac, and the mother in dread as to what her young ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... stood in his studio gazing up at the ceiling, or, to be more exact, at a Venetian church-lamp—which he had just hung and to which he had just attached a red silk tassel bought that morning of a bric-a-brac dealer whose shop was in the next street. There was a bare spot in that corner of his sumptuously appointed room which offended Waldo's sensitive taste—a spot needing a touch of yellow brass and a note of red—and the silk tassel completed the color-scheme. The ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... vases from the Society of Engineers of Japan, and a striking desk-set of writing apparatus from Krupp, all the pieces being made out of tiny but massive guns and shells of Krupp steel. In addition to such bric-a-brac and bibelots of all kinds are many pictures and photographs, including the original sketches of the reception given to Edison in 1889 by the Paris Figaro, and a letter from Madame Carnot, placing the Presidential opera-box ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... each had a tidy of snowy thread or crochet cotton fastened primly over the back. The high bed and bureau and a shining mahogany table suggested an era of "plain living" far, far remote from the day of Turkish rugs and Japanese bric-a-brac, and Aunt Jane was in perfect correspondence with her environment. She wore a purple calico dress, rather short and scant; a gingham apron, with a capacious pocket, in which she always carried knitting or some other "handy work"; a white handkerchief was laid primly around the wrinkled ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... Aleta, dry-eyed, frantic, pacing up and down her little sitting room which always looked so quaintly attractive with its jumble of paintings and bric-a-brac, its distinctive furniture and draperies—all symbolic of the helter-skelter artistry which was a part of Aleta's nature. She took Frank's ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... between living-room and dining-room and small hall, so that the three rooms, with their light-reflecting walls, gave an effect of spaciousness to rather a cramped and old-fashioned apartment. There were not many pictures and no bric-a-brac, yet the rooms were not bare, but clean and trim and distinguished, with the large davenport and the wing-chair, chintz-cushioned brown willow chairs, and Ruth's upright piano, excellent mahogany, and a few good ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... all over our Western World, and saw how comfortable and happy sensible people could be, living in most straitened circumstances, with none of the luxuries of life. If most housekeepers could get rid of one-half their clothes and furniture and put their bric-a-brac in the town museum, life would be simplified and they would begin to know what leisure means. When I see so many of our American women struggling to be artists, who cannot make a good loaf of bread nor a palatable cup of coffee, I think of what Theodore Parker said when art was ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Chamber in the spring—used to drive out and bring W. home. Versailles was very animated and interesting during all that time, so many people always about. Quite a number of women followed the debates. One met plenty of people one knew in the streets, at the Patissiers, or at some of the bric-a-brac shops, where there were still bargains to be found in very old furniture, prints, and china. There is a large garrison. There were always officers riding, squads of soldiers moving about, bugle-calls in ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... peace to herself or her friends. My mother's exquisitely absurd. You understand that all these painters, poets, art collectors (and dealers in bric-a-brac, he interjected through his teeth) of my mother are not in my way; but Versoy lives more like a man of the world. One day I met him at the fencing school. He was furious. He asked me to tell my mother that this was the last effort of his chivalry. The jobs she gave ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... where it is. It seemed to me I was in fairyland. Here was a large house and yet so filled that it seemed small, from the top of the very attic down to the first story, with articles of vertu and bric-a-brac, with tapestry that had come from all parts of the globe, with ivories, carved in Japan as nowhere else, with mosaics from all sections of the world, with beautiful chairs, with embroidery that had graced ...
— Silver Links • Various
... that her father had become possessed of a phrase, and that he was anxious to flutter it before her to see how it went. He was a connoisseur in the bric-a-brac ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... picturesque-looking building and there were a number of Germans in and about it, many of them evidently sight-seers like our friends. It was furnished in truly German style, with quaint old-fashioned mantels, holding old pieces of bric-a-brac, and quaint dishes and cabinets ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... is generally rather painful. Kindly soul that she is, she has considered it necessary to preserve and exhibit there the many gifts of a long lifetime. Photographs long outgrown, onyx tables, a clutter of odd chairs and groups of discordant bric-a-brac usually make the progress of her chair through it a precarious and perilous matter. We paused ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... was where the table was set. The other half of the attic had curious chairs and divans and four little iron beds enameled in white and gold, and each bed was so smoothly made up that I asked what they were for. White Pigeon said they were bric-a-brac—that the Attic Philosophers rolled themselves up in the rugs on the floor when they wished to sleep; but I have thought since that White ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... she told Yuan Yang to go and fetch several bric-a-brac. She next went on to call lady Feng ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... a home of luxury, evidenced by the rich carpets, elegant pieces of furniture, paintings of well-known artists and beautiful bric-a-brac in an ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... and unfit for daily wear. The guardian of these defunct old carriages tells some prodigious fibs concerning them: he pointed out one carriage that was six hundred years old in his calendar; but any connoisseur in bric-a-brac can see it was built at Paris in ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... accessories necessary to the actress—powder box and puff, a rouge box and a rabbit's paw, a hand mirror, a small alcohol curling-iron heater, and a bottle of cheap perfume, purple in color, and nearly empty. On the mantelpiece were arranged photographs of actors and actresses and pieces of cheap bric-a-brac. Conspicuous in a corner was a huge theatrical trunk, plastered with the labels of hotels and theatres. Had the lid been raised, a caller might have seen in the tray, among the remnants of a once elaborate wardrobe, one little token ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... emptied the contents of all bureaus, closets, and desks upon the floor, the more easily to pick and choose what they wanted. The floors were covered ankle-deep in the resulting litter which was composed of everything from lace to daguerreotypes, from bric-a-brac to hosiery. The relics and treasures of past generations of the owner's family carpeted the house, until each room seemed in a worse state than the last, and the whole was altogether a most superlative mess. M. Guyot had shoveled paths through the different ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... metal pot ornament wealthy homes; you have work to do in those of the poor. If you let yourself be broken, you will have no place in either, but merely return to the dust; or, at best, you may secure a corner in a bric-a-brac cabinet—as a curiosity, and it is more glorious far to be used for fetching water by the meanest of ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... said she wished to do some shopping on Via dei Fossi, which was close at hand—that street whose shop windows are ever filled with most fascinating groups of sculptured marbles and bronzes, and all kinds of artistic bric-a-brac—and begged her uncle to ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... wear and the gestures he would make. The nickname his English cousins had given this heir to all the glories was the "White Rabbit." He was the backbone of the war party at court. And presently he stole bric-a-brac. That will help posterity to the proper values of things in 1914. And the Teutonic generals and admirals and strategists with their patient and perfect plans, who were so confident of victory, each within ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... gift is something of use and ornament for the new house. Silver, linen, cut glass, or china for the dining-room, furniture, rugs, lamps, clocks, vases, books, and pictures, or bric-a-brac for the rest of the ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... his eyes, within reach of his hands, where none might borrow or lose or destroy. In order to provide for the needs which grew and changed daily, he fitted up rude shelf above shelf, till the corners of the room were transformed into rough bric-a-brac stands. Mr. Madigan had the unsuccessful man's pride in trifling successes in amateur carpentering, in husbandry of any sort unrelated to the real issues of his life; and every tool he needed for the exercise of his skill he kept under lock and key. He believed in, he trusted no ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... mantel board flounced with fringed dimity, (venerable prototype of macrame and Arrasene lambrequins), would have filled with covetousness the soul of the bric-a-brac devotee; and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... review, are nothing more than the old salon furniture of the Empire. Beat it, dust it, sweep away the cobwebs, splash it over with stains of French blood, and you have the establishment of 1852. This bric-a-brac governs ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... there, often at places that it seems physically impossible to get at, and yet always with the same diabolical skill and success. One night he will take some baubles worth thousands, the next pass them by for something apparently of no value at all, a piece of bric-a-brac, ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... stood scanning her with interest and approval. He was a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac. He glanced up interrogatively at the porch of ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Bellingham did not exact anything more of him. He talked at him, and left Lemuel to make his mental inventory of the dense Turkey rugs on the slippery hardwood floor, the pictures on the Avails, the deep, leather-lined seats, the bric-a-brac on the mantel, the tall, coloured chests of drawers in two corners, the delicate china and quaint ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... to this conclusion all at once. There were days when the minds of mother and daughter were too full of sorrow and anxiety to occupy themselves with upholstery and bric-a-brac. And the day of the adjourned inquest, when Caspar Brooke was allowed to go to his own house on bail, was one of the worst ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of a room as it was! Odds and ends of furniture, the survival of various household wrecks; chipped bric-a-brac; a rug from which the pattern had long ago vanished; an old couch piled with shabby cushions; a piano with scattered music sheets. On the walls, from ceiling to foot-board, hung faded photographs ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... city of New York an odd piece of bric-a-brac which I am sometimes tempted to wish was in my own possession. On a bracket in Edwin Booth's bedroom at The Players—the apartment remains as he left it that solemn June day ten years ago—stands a sadly dilapidated skull which the elder Booth, and afterward ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the house itself—not large as "show" houses go—was perfect of its kind, with carved stone mantels, elaborate oak panelling and staircases, leaded windows, and treasures of portraits, armour, ancient books, and bric-a-brac which would have remade the family fortune if all had not ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room at the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery: no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in a picture weekly—above all, no least sign of ever having been used ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... my bric-a-brac dealer was a veritable Capharnaum. All ages and all nations seemed to have made their rendezvous there. An Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet, with ebony panels, brightly striped by lines of inlaid brass; a duchess of the court of Louis XV. nonchalantly ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... it would be better not to put temptation in his way. He's crazy about old bric-a-brac, you know. And Dad didn't know what he might ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... it. Seems to me taxidermy is a promising third course to burial or cremation. You could keep all your dear ones by you. Bric-a-brac of that sort stuck about the house would be as good as most company, and much less expensive. You might have them fitted up ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... purpose; he admits no adventitious dainties, there is nothing to quote. Happy touches are not in his way. Should he find some part of his picture empty he will not fill it with nicely balancing daisies, clouds, or bric-a-brac; he will begin it again. To him it will seem either that he has failed to conceive his work as a whole or that he has failed to realize his conception. Similarly, you will not easily discover a favourite ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... number of articles such as pillows, books, handkerchiefs, inexpensive bric-a-brac, etc., on the floor. One person acts as leader and walks in a zigzag path around the obstacles, followed by the others. Then one of the party is blindfolded and told by the leader to "follow my foot-steps and if you do not break or mar anything you ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... report are divided into two sections: First, the discoveries and finds of precious stones in the United States and the mineral specimens sold for museums and private collections or for bric-a-brac purposes; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... its massive crown is too big for any house. Hung stupidly on a wall, in a room full of bric-a-brac, as you usually see it, with its shriveled ears that were once living trumpets, its bulging eyes that were once so small and keen, and its huge muzzle stretched out of all proportion, it is but misplaced, misshapen ugliness. It has no more, and scarcely any higher, significance than a scalp ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... thought less. The utensils and furniture of the middle class were fashioned only with a view to utility; there was a popular belief that beautiful things were expensive, and the thrifty housekeeper who had no money to put into bric-a-brac never thought of such things as an artistic lamp shade or a well-coloured sofa cushion. Decorative art is well defined by Mr. Russell Sturgis: "Fine art applied to the making beautiful or interesting that which is made for ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... stood upon a rise of ground, commanding a view of the sea two miles away, and the pretty village on the shore with a background of wooded hills stretching to the west. It was full of pictures and bric-a-brac, and statuary from all parts of the world, for the Colonel's father had travelled extensively, and brought home souvenirs from every country visited. Florida had furnished her quota, and stuffed parokeets and red birds, and a huge alligator skin adorned the walls of the wide hall, ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... of the atelier—the first she had ever been in in her life— disappointed her. She had expected to behold a gorgeous collection of bric-a-brac, according to accounts she had heard of the studios of several celebrated masters. That of Marien was remarkable only for its vast dimensions and its abundance of light. Studies and sketches hung on the walls, were piled one over another in corners, were scattered ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... in which the ceremony was to take place was the ordinary cottage parlor, with crochet work on the chairs, and a profusion of vases and bric-a-brac on the tables. The Rev. John Langdon requested Anna and Sanderson to stand by a little marble table from which the housekeeper brushed a profusion of knick-knacks. There was no Bible. Anna was the first to notice the omission. This seemed to deprive the young clergyman ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... down from the wall, where Miss Swan allowed him to keep it as bric-a-brac, and began ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... furniture began to go, then the plate, then ail the priceless bric-a-brac. Piece by piece it disappeared until the apartments were empty and he had squandered almost all of the $40,350 arising from the sales. The servants were paid off, the apartments relinquished, and he was beginning to know what it meant ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... there before the end comes. At the present rate of progress there is not more than a year's purchase of bric-a-brac left in the empire. I must hurry over and get my share. What can I do for you?" he continued, seeing that she sat silent, twisting her white fingers together. "Shall I not bring you the loot of a temple or two? They say the priests have become very corruptible since our missionaries ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... in Siminol a long time, and was possibly stolen from a trading-post on some piratical expedition, or looted from a Spanish planter's home during a raid on a coast town, or more prosaically acquired in exchange for curios. However that may be, it was considered a rare bit of bric-a-brac in Siminol, and the possessor was counted a most ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... the last gate of the enclosure, we halt in a sort of small bazaar, of whose existence we were not previously aware. It is that of the bric-a-brac merchants, and the Lord only knows what queer oddities this kind of shop can display. Ancient arms constitute the principal stock in trade; rusty yataghans, long Souss muskets; then old leather amulets for war or for the chase; ridiculous powder-horns, and also musical ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... Bellegarde's visit, he hinted that HIS lodging was at least as much a laughing matter as his own. But its oddities were of a different cast from those of our hero's gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky, contracted, and crowded with curious bric-a-brac. Bellegarde, penniless patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts. Here and there was one of those uncomfortable ...
— The American • Henry James
... Frederik, puzzled. "Oh—you mean all this junk?" with a comprehensive hand wave that included Dutch clock, Dutch warming pans, Dutch bric-a-brac, and Dutch furniture. "This junk all over the house? Oh, I'll have it carted to the nearest ash heap. It isn't worth a red cent ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... Mrs. Makely's piano-forte. The place is rather too richly and densely rugged, and there is rather more curtaining and shading of the windows than we should like; but Mrs. Makely is too well up-to-date, as she would say, to have much of the bric-a-brac about which she tells me used to clutter people's houses here. There are some pretty good pictures on the walls, and a few vases and bronzes, and she says she has produced a greater effect of space by quelling the furniture—she means, ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... the Joyeuse family was gathered in the little drawing-room, last relic of its splendour, still containing two upholstered chairs, many crochet decorations, a piano, two lamps crowned with little green shades, and a what-not covered with bric-a-brac. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... ordinary observer, there was nothing awful about the fireplace. Everything in the way of bric-a-brac possessed by the Santa Maria flatters was artistic. It may have been in the Lease that only people with esthetic tastes were to be admitted to the apartments. However that may be, the fireplace, with its vases and pictures and trinkets, ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... artificial, modern life. Suppose that instead of increasing their wants and their desires, instead of loading themselves down on life's journey with so many bags and parcels and boxes of superfluous luggage and bric-a-brac that they are forced to sit down by the roadside and gasp for breath, instead of wearing themselves out in the dusty ways of ostentation and vain show or embittering their hearts because they can not succeed in getting into the weary race of wealth and fashion,—suppose instead of all this, they ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... bracingness and bareness; and the beauty in them was not for eyes like Netta's. She had wandered out forlornly on the dank paths descending to the stream. Edmund as usual was interminably busy fitting up one of the lower rooms for some of his minor bric-a-brac—ironwork, small bronzes, watches, and clocks. Anastasia ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I was asked to lecture in many places near New York, always in delightful homes. Had a class of married ladies at the home of Dr. J.G. Holland, where I gave an idea of the newest books. Doctor Holland gave me a department, "Bric-a-brac," in his magazine—Scribner's Magazine; and I was honoured by a request from the editors of the Galaxy to take the "Club Room" from which Mark Twain had just resigned. Meeting him soon after at a dinner, he said with his characteristic drawl: "Awful ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the next, longing for it: though I never had rated myself as ardent over gladiatorial games, but rather as lukewarm towards them, and considered myself much more interested in paintings, statuary, reliefs, ornaments, bric-a-brac, furniture, fine fabrics and all artistries and artisanries. Yet I confessed to myself that, from the time I saw first a bout between them, anticipation of seeing them fence, or enjoyment of it, came very high among ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White |
