"Decrepit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... being the case, it was clear that he must make the most of this opportunity; but he also realised that it would be advisable to proceed circumspectly. Saying nothing, he set his shoulder to the gate, and lifting it on its decrepit hinges swung it open. ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... of all kinds, and misfortunes of every description, were ascribed to the malignant influence of some old decrepit female, and it was believed that nature's laws could be changed by these witches, that they could at will produce tempests to destroy the produce of the earth, and strike with sickness those who had incurred ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... the spring. She has been well trained, being the eldest girl, and Madame is a thrifty and excellent housekeeper. Then we all mend of youth. You will have a strong, healthy woman to care for you in your old age, instead of a decrepit body to ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... European country except Norway and Switzerland, because of the low cost of living, the sparse population, and the ability of all men and women to find work if they are willing to earn their own subsistence. Able-bodied paupers are compelled to work upon poor farms, but the aged, decrepit and invalids who are dependent upon public charity are kindly taken care of by what is called outdoor and indoor relief. In the cities are asylums and almshouses similar to those in the United States, but in the parishes, as a rule, the care ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... The piano, decrepit on its legs, though made of good wood painted black and gilded, was dirty, defaced, and scratched; and its keys, worn like the teeth of old horses, were yellowed with the fuliginous colors of the pipe. On the desk, a little heap of ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... mind at that time, and he knew of many more men who would have laughed if they had the same privilege of sight. He made no attempt to conceal from himself that the whole thing was romantic, romantic despite the little tinkling dog, the decrepit diligence, the palavering natives, the super-idiotic dragoman. It was fine, It was from another age and even the actors could not deface the purity of the picture. However it was true that upon the brigantine the previous night he had unaccountably wetted all ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... periods of youthful vigor, their manhood of sturdy strength, the tottering of decrepit age, the imbecility of superstitious dotage—and their death is final extinction. Such is man, and such is the world. What we are, we know; what we shall be, we know not, save that we only leave a pile ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... without speaking. Nothing could be gained by dwelling upon this unfortunate occurrence. At this point an aged and decrepit man was led into the room by two soldiers. He was so weak that he had to be supported on either side. General Serano looked up and scowled at him as an intruder, and turned to an aide for an explanation, when the smiling ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... splendid carnations. White ones hung over the moss-covered rims, and flaked ones thrust a bright medley of blossom between the chinks of the marble; while from the mouth of the lion, whence formerly the water-jets had spurted, a huge crimson clove now shot out so vigorously that the decrepit beast seemed to be spouting blood. Near by, the principal piece of ornamental water, a lake, on whose surface swans had glided, had now become a thicket of lilacs, beneath whose shade stocks and verbenas and day-lilies screened their ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... tints and shades, which she would study with keenest interest. She had pointed out to Aunt Eunice, upon that last drive up-mountain, at least twenty-five tones of green, and had seized the reins suddenly to stop old Dobbin that she might gaze her full upon a decrepit cedar-tree robed and garlanded with scarlet woodbine. Marsden village might seem dull to her after her city life, but nature more than compensated; so that now her fear was not that she must stay, but that ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... often, when nearly finished, tore it angrily to shreds, scattering the remnants to the winds of heaven. As personifications of time, the Norns were represented as sisters of different ages and characters, Urd (Wurd, weird) appearing very old and decrepit, continually looking backward, as if absorbed in contemplating past events and people; Verdandi, the second sister, young, active, and fearless, looked straight before her, while Skuld, the type of the future, was generally represented as closely veiled, with ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... in the Far East over the dissolution of the decrepit monarchy of Korea, upon which both Japan and China cast covetous eyes. As nominal suzerain, China in the spring of 1894 sent 2000 troops to Korea to suppress an insurrection, without observing certain treaty stipulations which required her to notify Japan. The latter nation despatched ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... had stood with her hand on my head, as immovable as a marble statue. Her voice had a deep, strong tone, and her face wore a look of calm power. Nothing about her reminded me of the weak, decrepit old woman she had ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... struck in: "You are so big, you keep the sun from us. We can't see for you, and we're so cold." Thereupon arose, on all sides, the most terrific uproar of laughter, from voices like those of children in volume, but scrannel and harsh as those of decrepit age, though, unfortunately, without its weakness. The whole pandemonium of fairy devils, of all varieties of fantastic ugliness, both in form and feature, and of all sizes from one to four feet, seemed to have suddenly assembled about me. At length, after ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... was fairly large, with two windows screened but unglazed; a canvas cot stood in one corner, a packing-box table and a decrepit chair in another. Like the kitchen it was surprisingly clean. He returned to his hostess, who showed no anxiety about ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Twenty-nine, there came into his hands a set of Callot's engravings, and the work produced on his mind a profound impression. Callot's specialty was beggardom. He pictured decrepit beggars, young beggars, handsome girl-beggars, and gallant old beggars who wore their fluttering rags with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... unpleasant disorder. The gums looked as if they were blown out like little pneumatic tyres. They were reddish-purple, ulcerated, and the stench was oppressive. Hard, woodeny swellings appeared on the legs, and the victim became very decrepit. One of the main preoccupations in the wards was the differential diagnosis between atypical malaria and typhoid fever, for the malaria that one reads of in textbooks did not exist save exceptionally. A man had an irregular temperature for days and it ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... pitcher, and take it away filled. And my pitcher is just my need. "All the fitness He requires is to feel our need of Him." The Life is all-sufficient for the needs of the race. This Life can vitalize all that is withered and dead; it can make decrepit wills muscular and mighty, and it can transfigure the leper with the glow and ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... from the north, from the pastoral regions of the Catskills, to graze upon the broad commons of the national capital. I was then the fortunate and happy lessee of an old place with an acre of ground attached, almost within the shadow of the dome of the capitol. Behind a high but aged and decrepit board fence I indulged my rural and unclerical tastes. I could look up from my homely tasks and cast a potato almost in the midst of that cataract of marble steps that flows out of the north wing of the patriotic pile. Ah, when that creaking and sagging ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... fruit. I believed him really to stand in need of help; so I took him upon my back, and having carried him over, bid him get down, and, for that end, stooped, that he might get off with ease; but, instead of that, he, who to me appeared very decrepit, clasped his legs nimbly about my neck, when I perceived his skin to be like that of a cow. He sat astride me upon my shoulders, and held my throat so strait, that I thought he would have strangled me, the fright of which made me faint away and fall down. Notwithstanding my fainting, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... that great word, 'No man is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand.' God is not a careless owner who leaves His treasures to be blown by every wind, or filched by every petty robber. He is not like the king of some decrepit monarchy, slices of whose territory his neighbours are for ever paring off and annexing. What God has God preserves. 'He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.' 'They ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... happened, for his hands trembled and his legs shook under him. His eyes that she had thought so beautiful were bleared and bloodshot, and there were deep lines about his face which she had never before seen. It seemed to her that he had suddenly become a decrepit old man. ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... her brother-in-law, Sicinius Clarus, and with this end in view threatened to exclude her sons, whose guardian he was, from the possession of any of their father's property, if she married elsewhere. She therefore suffered herself to be betrothed to Sicinius Clarus, 'a boorish and decrepit old man,' but put off the marriage, until her father-in-law's death released her from all embarrassment. Pontianus and Pudens succeeded to the property, and Pudentilla felt herself free to take a husband of her own choice. She informed ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... well built, stands about as long as he does. It begins to reel and look decrepit when he begins to do so. But it can be relaid and he cannot. One day I passed by the roadside to speak with an old man who was rebuilding a wall. "I laid this wall fifty years ago," he said. "When it is laid ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... interview with her mistress, this decrepit specimen of human infirmity half closes the door against him and doddles back. A slight whispering, and Mrs. Swiggs is heard to say—"show him into the best parlor." And into the best parlor, and into the ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... inspired girl was caught by a glance—a single glance—from one at the opposite corner of the court-room, and that glance brought her back to the full consciousness of the fearful development she was about to make. A decrepit old woman, resting with bent form upon a staff, which was planted firmly before her, seemed wrapped in the general interest pervading the court. The woman was huge of frame and rough of make; her face was large and swollen, and the ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... destroyed, swallowed up in this woman, a living sepulchre, more cruel than the grave, for it devoured the soul as well as the body. Pah! this prating about immortality was absurd, convicted of meaninglessness before a tragedy like this; for what was an immortality worth that was given to her last decrepit phase of life, after all its beauty and strength and loveliness had passed soulless away? To be aught but a mockery immortality must be as manifold as the manifold phases of life. Since life devours so many souls, why suppose death ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... comical in the aspect of these top-hatted soldiers. They reminded me of battalions of London cabbies who had ravaged the dustbins for discarded "toppers." Their double-breasted coats had just the cut of those of the ancient jehus who used to sit aloft on decrepit "growlers." Other bodies of Belgian soldiers wore ludicrous little kepis with immense eye-shades, mostly broken or hanging limp in a dejected way. In times of peace I should have laughed at the look of them. But now there was nothing humorous about these haggard, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... had penetrated his entire system. He had grown very thin; his cheeks were hollow and his eyes inflamed. Those who knew his age shuddered as they saw him pass, bent and decrepit as a man of eighty. The trembling of his hands had so increased that some days he was obliged to use them both in raising his glass to his lips. This annoyed him intensely and seemed to be the only symptom of his failing health which disturbed him. He sometimes swore ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... old. He did not know how old he was himself, although he did know that no person in his tribe had been alive when he was a young boy in the village. He remembered the days when some of the old men, still alive, had been born; and, unlike him, they were now decrepit, shaken with palsy, blear-eyed, toothless of mouth, deaf of ear, or paralysed. All his own faculties remained unimpaired. He even boasted a dozen worn fangs of teeth, gum-level, on which he could still chew. Although he no longer had the physical endurance of youth, his thinking was as original ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... plains, and probably also on account of their prominence at a distance over the flat land, some of these mud buildings look quite imposing. I remember once approaching a city with ramparts, towers, and formidable walls which, on close inspection, turned out to be a small mud enclosure of the most decrepit kind. ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... for his pains! How could they make a man commander in chief who cannot mount a horse, who drops asleep at a council, and has the very worst morals! A good reputation he made for himself at Bucharest! I don't speak of his capacity as a general, but at a time like this how they appoint a decrepit, blind old man, positively blind? A fine idea to have a blind general! He can't see anything. To play blindman's bluff? He can't see ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... with honesty of purpose, the artist or writer of original ideas, the independent scientist or explorer, the non-compromising pioneers of social changes are daily pushed to the wall by men whose learning and creative ability have become decrepit with age. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... blue of the sky could not be dimmed even by factory smoke, and the air was full of enticement, Nance slipped out at the noon hour, and, watching her chance, darted across the factory yard out through the stables, to the road beyond. A decrepit old elm-tree, which had evidently made heroic effort to keep tryst with the spring, was the one touch of green in an otherwise barren landscape. Scrambling up the bank, Nance flung herself on the ground beneath its branches, and between the bites of a dry sandwich, ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... pointing to a decrepit stem drooping over the bank, and shaking a palsied finger at ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... hurried to and fro, striving to save those of their families who by reason of infancy, age or illness were unable to help themselves. Women on the eve of child-birth were carried from their beds; mothers with infants clinging to their naked breasts fled from homes which would shelter them no more; the decrepit were borne away on the shoulders of the strong. The narrow thoroughfares were moreover obstructed by furniture dragged from houses, or lowered from windows with a reckless speed that oftentimes destroyed what it sought to preserve. Carts, drays, and horses laden with merchandise jostled each other ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... her children, are no more!—one, one only comfort remains—one friend, one solace in adversity—one ray of light in the dark hour! Amidst universal desertion, RUTH has not forsaken her; but is become her joy in sorrow, her companion in solitude, her prop in decrepit age! Can we wonder that she wishes to discard a name which awakened such recollections, and only recalled the dream of happiness? "Call me not Naomi,—call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... bishop, which was approaching. One day, as I was walking in the convent-garden, to which I had been lately admitted, a miserable old Moorish slave, who was kept to cultivate the little spot, muttered as I passed him, but still keeping his wrinkled face and decrepit form in the same angle with the earth—'There is Heart's Ease near ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... true that man's emotions, sensations and ideas change very significantly with the organic changes that occur in his body. The emotions, sensations and ideas of a child differ from those of a man, and those of a man in maturity differ from those of a man decrepit with old age. And these and similar changes are quite beyond the control ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... giving up because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that it is about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such thing. I grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I see people of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit, effete, la levre inferieure deja pendante, with what little life they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium. But as the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and everybody ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... burghs, priests, and poor men and labourers hauntind to their leisum (lawful) business either private or public. These men because of these enormities might not travel for thieves and brigands and such like: all other weak and decrepit persons who was unable to defend themselves, or yet to get food and sustentation to themselves, were most cruelly vexed in such troublous times. For when any passed to seek redress at the Chancellor of such injuries and troubles sustained by them, the thieves and brigands, feigning ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... them on condition that the matter should be kept secret from outsiders. A day was appointed for visiting her, and on arriving we found her living in a comfortable log house, built by In[^a]l[)i] himself, with her children and an ancient female relative, a decrepit old woman with snow-white hair and vacant countenance. This was the oldest woman of the tribe, and though now so feeble and childish, she had been a veritable savage in her young days, having carried a scalp in the scalp dance in the Creek ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... is no great thing; and yet the smallest are often the most difficult things to deal with. The Judge has set about seriously trying to make the impression that when we meet at different places I am literally in his clutches—that I am a poor, helpless, decrepit mouse, and that I can do nothing at all. This is one of the ways he has taken to create that impression. I don't know any other way to meet it except this. I don't want to quarrel with him—to call him a liar; but when I come square up to him I ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... had not suffered. A chopping block, a decrepit sawhorse, an axe, and a rusty bucksaw marked the spot; also three ties, hacked eloquently in places, and just five sticks of wood, evidently chopped from a tie by a man in haste. Kent looked at that woodpile, and swore. He had always known that Manley had an aversion to laboring with his ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... they carry off the weeping Freia agree to release her whenever the gods will give to them the precious and all-powerful metal. As love departs, the heavens become dark and sadness overcomes the gods. They grow suddenly old and decrepit. Fricka totters and Wotan yields to despair. Darkness and decay settle down upon them. The divine wills are broken, and they are about to surrender to what seems approaching dissolution, when Wotan suddenly arouses himself and determines to go in ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... him upon my back, and having carried him over, bade him get down, and for that end stooped, that he might get off with ease; but instead of doing so (which I laugh at every time I think of it), the old man, who to me appeared quite decrepit, threw his legs nimbly about my neck. He sat astride upon my shoulders, and held my throat so tight that I thought he would have strangled me, and ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... food the deleterious earthy matter is our constant aim. To that alone do we owe immunity from old age far in advance of that period of life when your people become decrepit and senile. The human body is like a lamp-wick, which filters the oil while it furnishes light. In time the wick becomes clogged and useless and is thrown away. If the oil could be made perfectly pure, the wick ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... pulseless hearts, and a faded Hebrew inscription on a tomb, or an unread entry on a synagogue brass is their only record. And yet, perhaps, their generation is not all dust. Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past, hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek wet with the pathos sanctifying the joys that ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... railings. As most of the experiments took place at the North London Hospital, Euston-square was his chief point of attraction, and when he was removed, it was always found necessary to break off the railings and take them away with him. This accounted for the decrepit condition of the fleur de lys that surround the inclosure, which was not, as generally supposed, the work of the university pupils residing in Gower-place. Perfect insensibility to pain supervened at the same time, and his friends took advantage of this circumstance to send him, by way ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... If I wasn't such an aged, decrepit wreck I'd come up and be one of your scholars. Anyhow, I'm real glad to have met you. No, I can't ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... mother's discipline. Her last days are full of peace; and calmer and sweeter will her spirit become, until the gates of life shall lift and let in the worn-out pilgrim into eternal springtide and youth, where the limbs never ache, and the eyes never grow dim, and the staff of the exhausted and decrepit pilgrim shall become the ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... the way up the bank of the stream toward a huge sycamore that leaned lovingly over the water. An ancient wild grape vine, its butt four inches through and its roots fairly in the water, had a strangle-hold upon this decrepit forest monarch, its tendrils reaching ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... good looks, be easy, my fine Bull. They will be easy to dispose of. The dealers in children have for their especial patrons the decrepit and surfeited Roman Senators, who love fresh fruits. By the way, they have announced the near arrival of the patrician Trymalcion, a very rich and very noble man, an old and very capricious expert. He ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... part of the Philippics"—the "Ciceronic part of the Catiline," the sublimity, against the vileness of Rousseau's Confessions. It is something akin to, but something more than these predominant partial tones of Hawthorne—"the grand old countenance of Homer; the decrepit form, but vivid face of Aesop; the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais' smile of deep-wrought mirth; the profound, pathetic humor of Cervantes; the all-glorious Shakespeare; Spenser, meet guest ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... dark, dirty, tumble-down streets and warehouses, with every now and then a mansion of loftier pretensions, but equally neglected and ruinous in its appearance, would probably not have been objects of special admiration to many people on this side the water; but I belong to that infirm, decrepit, bedridden old country, England, and must acknowledge, with a blush for the stupidity of the prejudice, that it is so very long since I have seen anything old, that the lower streets of Charleston, in all their dinginess and decay, were a refreshment ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... The others, with the possible exception of the bearded German, merely used it as a rendezvous. Therefore, why not wait in ambush for Conrad behind the door, and when he entered bring down a chair, or one of the decrepit pictures, smartly on to his head. One would, of course, be careful not to hit too hard. And then—and then, simply walk out! If he met anyone on the way down, well——Tommy brightened at the thought of an encounter with his fists. Such an affair was infinitely more in his line than the ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... Boiscoran had been hit even harder. He, who only a few weeks before looked robust and hearty, now appeared almost decrepit. He did not eat, so to say, and did not sleep. He became frightfully thin. It gave him pain to ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... cannot but think there is some small dull perception, whereby they are distinguished from perfect insensibility. And that this may be so, we have plain instances, even in mankind itself. Take one in whom decrepit old age has blotted out the memory of his past knowledge, and clearly wiped out the ideas his mind was formerly stored with, and has, by destroying his sight, hearing, and smell quite, and his taste to a great degree, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... had been, his white bow tie stiff and shapely, his cuffs clean and shining, his hair very carefully brushed back from his high and bony forehead. His sharp eyes darted all over the building, and Maggie felt as though at any moment she would be discovered. Crashaw looked more like a decrepit monkey than ever, huddled up in his chair, his back bow-shaped. He breathed into his hands as though he wanted to warm them, and looked at nobody. Miss Avies Maggie ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... all pulpits they gave forth Holy Writ, with Holy Writ they enriched immense volumes, with most faithful commentaries they unfolded the sense of Holy Writ, with Holy Writ they seasoned alike their abstinence and their meals, finally, occupied about Holy Writ they arrived at decrepit old age. And if they also frequently have argued from the Authority of Elders, from the Practice of the Church, from the Succession of Pontiffs, from ecumenical Councils, from Apostolic Traditions, from the Blood of Martyrs, from the decrees of Bishops, from Miracles, yet ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... male guest rose, napkin in hand, and said to a lady: "Can I get you anything from the sideboard?" Being refused, he went and filled his own plate. Three dogs—two fox-terriers and a decrepit Skye circled round uneasily, smelling at the visitors' napkins. And there went up a hum of talk in which sentences like these could be distinguished: "Rippin' stand that, by the wood. D'you remember your rockettin' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bent—he who used to walk so uprightly," Laura said. He seemed to have grown many years older, and was, indeed, quite a decrepit old man. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... endure from the son of Adam. And when I grow old and lean and can no longer run swiftly, he selleth me to the miller who maketh me turn in the mill, and I cease not from turning night and day till I grow decrepit. Then he in turn vendeth me to the knacker who cutteth my throat and flayeth off my hide and plucketh out my tail, which he selleth to the sieve maker; and he melteth down my fat for tallow candles.' When the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... ta teil does ta fat havril want?" Uncertain steps not long after sounded along the creaking passage; the door was opened, and presented to the impatient glance of the new proprietor the visage of the grumbling Gael. He was an old decrepit man, with bright ferocious eyes gleaming through his elf-locks. If he had succeeded in making a "swap" of his habiliments with any scarecrow south of the Tay, he would have had by far the best of the bargain, ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... table. Begging my pardon for an intrusion in my affairs, he asked me if I were not aware that the world was slipping away from me. God knows. Perhaps. I had come frisking to that restaurant. I left it broken and decrepit. The youngster had his manuscripts and his anarchy. He held the wriggling world by its futuristic tail. It was not my world, to be sure, but it was a gay world ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... in all his actions shine. Authority kept up old age secures, Whose dignity as long as life endures. Something of youth I in old age approve, But more the marks of age in youth I love. 410 Who this observes may in his body find Decrepit age, but never in his mind. The seven volumes of my own reports, Wherein are all the pleadings of our courts; All noble monuments of Greece are come Unto my hands, with those of ancient Rome. The pontificial, and the civil law, I study still, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... Cody on his second trip from Larned indicated where the villages would be found in the winter, and I decided to move on them about the 1st of November. Only the women and children and the decrepit old men were with the villages, however enough, presumably, to look after the plunder most of the warriors remaining north of the Arkansas to continue their marauding. Many severe fights occurred between our troops and these marauders, and in these affairs, before November 1 over a hundred ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... transparent veil through which the by-gone day beholds its successor; or, if not quite true of the latitude of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of the island, that Tomorrow is born before Yesterday is dead. They exist together in the golden twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may simultaneously touch them both, with one finger of recollection and another of prophecy. I cared not how long the day might be, nor how many of them. I had earned this repose by a long ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... future exploits, and demonstrate your agility, virility, salubrity, and amorosity; ha, ha, ha. I can't help laughing to think what a blessed union there will be between August and December; a jolly, buxom, wanton, wishful, plethoric female of thirty odd, to an infirm, decrepit, consumptive, gouty, rheumatic, asthmatic, phlegmatic mortal of near seventy; ha, ha. Exquisitely droll and humourous, upon my erudition. It puts me in mind of a hot bed in a hard winter, surrounded with ice, and made verdant and ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... straddling beetles Shut up to be frozen In cold empty huts By the pitiless peasants. The servants are crawling All over the courtyard. Their master long since Has forgotten about them, And left them to live 150 As they can. They are hungry, All old and decrepit, And dressed in all manners, They look like a crowd In a gipsy encampment. And some are now dragging A net through the pond: "God come to your help! Have you caught something, brothers?" "One carp—nothing more; 160 There ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... whom it has excited in a peculiar manner the sensibility of all to behold the surviving members of our Revolutionary contest, civil and military, who had shared with him in the toils and dangers of the war, many of them in a decrepit state. A more interesting spectacle, it is believed, was never witnessed, because none could be founded on purer principles, none proceed from higher or more disinterested motives. That the feelings of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Monroe • James Monroe
... packing case in those early days before London had taken the life out of him. Then, suddenly, the light upstairs was extinguished, and a few minutes later a short, stout man in a seedy frock coat and decrepit silk hat came down the steps, and ordered the ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... Caribou, and the squaw glided out of the cabin. There were two couches of the kind they used to call ottomans inside, which had evidently once formed part of the chateau furnishings for their faded splendour accorded little with the decrepit interior of ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... the tying of this particular knot was facilitated by the fact that the clergyman was hale mentally but decrepit physically, and, as might be expected, resented the conclusion, long ago arrived at by his friends, that he was unfitted for work. He burgeoned with delight when a servant announced that two young people wanting to get married were waiting in the vestibule; he hobbled out of the ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... the Creator calling forth by name His mightie Angels gave them several charge, 650 As sorted best with present things. The Sun Had first his precept so to move, so shine, As might affect the Earth with cold and heat Scarce tollerable, and from the North to call Decrepit Winter, from the South to bring Solstitial summers heat. To the blanc Moone Her office they prescrib'd, to th' other five Thir planetarie motions and aspects In Sextile, Square, and Trine, and Opposite, Of noxious efficacie, and when to joyne ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... of Northern Europe have not thrust from themselves the Christian God, is verily no honor to their religious talent, not to speak of their taste. They ought to have got the better of such a sickly and decrepit product of decadence. There lies a curse upon them, because they have not got the better of it: they have incorporated sickness, old age and contradiction into all their instincts—they have created no God since! Two millenniums almost, and not a single new ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... every now and then to stop. The old crone, however, seemed too deaf to hear; and it was not till they had reached the skirts of the forest that she turned round, when, to Little Red Riding Hood's surprise, she perceived a young and beautiful being in place of the decrepit creature she thought she was following. "Little Red Riding Hood," said the fairy, for such she was, "your goodness of heart has saved you from a great danger. Had you not helped the poor old water-cress woman, she would not have sent word to the green huntsman, ...
— Bo-Peep Story Books • Anonymous
... I saw was Anna Dorthea, the pale hyacinth. She had become old and decrepit: that was about fifty years after she had left the castle. She lived the longest—she saw ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... explained himself to this effect:—Sir, I am far from intending by this motion to fill the army with decrepit officers, or to obstruct in any manner the service of the publick; nor have I any other intention, than to secure to those whose years permit, and whose inclinations incite them to enter once more into the army, that preferment to which they have a claim, not only from their past ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... the year was personified in the ancient allegories as a decrepit old man, who, stung by a Scorpion (Scorpio), and fatally wounded by an arrow from the quiver of an archer (Saggitarius) dies at the Winter Solstice; and, after lying in the grave for the space of three days, is brought to life again. Such was the personification referred to in the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... cremation of the bodies of the illustrious Krishna and Balarama and of the principal members of the Vrishni race. Then as he was journeying from Dwaraka with the women and children, the old and the decrepit—the remnants of the Yadu race—he was met on the way by a heavy calamity. He witnessed also the disgrace of his bow Gandiva and the unpropitiousness of his celestial weapons. Seeing all this, Arjuna became despondent and, pursuant to Vyasa's advice, went to Yudhishthira and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... heedless, she went even to the very village where she would be most likely to meet one of the masters to whom she had been hired; and having stopped at the Market and bought a pair of live fowls, she went along the street with her sun-bonnet well over her face, and with the bent and decrepit air of an aged, woman. Suddenly on turning a corner, she spied her old master coming towards her. She pulled the string which tied the legs of the chickens; they began to flutter and scream, and as her master ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... replied Corvinus; "a pretty figure he would cut in the amphitheater. The people are not to be put off with decrepit old creatures, whom a single stroke of a bear's or tiger's paw kills outright. They like to see young blood flowing, and plenty of life struggling against wounds and blows before death comes to decide the contest. But there ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... lass, who changes places with an old decrepit queen. Peronella rejoices for a time in the idolatry paid to her rank, but gladly resumes her beauty, youth, and rags.—A ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... of all sorts and sizes. The house front, built of brick and stone, with no pretensions to symmetry, seemed to be bending beneath the weight of a worm-eaten roof covered with the curved pantiles in common use in the South of France. The decrepit casements were fitted with the heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it together. Try to picture ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... the Creator, calling forth by name His mighty Angels, gave them several charge, As sorted best with present things. The sun Had first his precept so to move, so shine, As might affect the earth with cold and heat Scarce tolerable; and from the north to call Decrepit winter; from the south to bring Solstitial summer's heat. To the blanc moon Her office they prescribed; to the other five Their planetary motions, and aspects, In sextile, square, and trine, and opposite, Of noxious efficacy, and when to join In synod unbenign; and taught the fixed Their ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... duties came intelligence. The only building at Houwater Drift is a ramshackle half-way house—a familiar landmark of the veldt. This winkel was managed by a half-bred German; the farm inadequately protected from the elements half-a-dozen greasy Dutch fraus of various ages and a single decrepit black boy. Here indeed was a fund of information,—such being the channels through which the British Intelligence usually is worked. The Divisional Intelligence first took them in hand. Then "A" column, then "B" column, and lastly ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... dignified by the name of a parlour, was a dingy, stuffy apartment of the true Dull Street type. The paper was faded and torn, the ceiling was discoloured, the furniture was decrepit, the carpet was threadbare, and the cheap engraving on the wall, with its title, "As Happy as a King," seemed to brood over the ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... she, cunning hag, drew near, And smelling to his herb, he recollects His wandering spirits, and with anger checks His coward fears; resolved now to outdare The worst of dangers, whatsoe'er they were; He eyed her o'er and o'er, and still his eye Found some addition to deformity. An old decrepit hag she was, grown white With frosty age, and withered with despite And self-consuming hate; in furs yclad, And on her head a thrummy cap she had. Her knotty locks, like ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... no food for it but in nature. The best colorist invents best by taking hints from natural colors; from birds, skies, or groups of figures. And if, in the delight of inventing fantastic color and form the truths of nature are wilfully neglected, the intellect becomes comparatively decrepit, and that state of art results which we find among the Chinese. The Greek designers delighted in the facts of the human form, and became great in consequence; but the facts of lower nature were disregarded by them, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... is the story of a family which had an old father who had lost his mind entirely, and had grown decrepit and childish in the extreme. The sons and daughters tended him like a baby and loved him with gentle, tender respect. There was no embarrassment for his loss of mind, no thought of being distressed or pained by it, and because his children took ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... he write me?" she stormed. "Am I too old and decrepit to be consulted any more? Is he going to follow Enid's high-handed way of deciding things without the slightest reference ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... a beautiful wife, who died; but the mother, a decrepit old dotard, remained a fixture in his house, because of the dowry. He was teased to death by her company; but, from the circumstance of the dower, he had no remedy. In the meantime some of his friends having come to comfort him, one of them ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Therefore to weep because thy course is run, Or droop like flow'rs, which lately lost the sun, I cannot yield, since Faith will not permit A tenure got by conquest to the pit. For the great Victor fought for us, and He Counts ev'ry dust that is laid up of thee. Besides, Death now grows decrepit, and hath Spent the most part both of its time and wrath. That thick, black night, which mankind fear'd, is torn By troops of stars, and the bright day's forlorn. The next glad news—most glad unto the just!— Will be the trumpet's summons from the dust. Then I'll not grieve; nay, more, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... in Bombay which is, so far as we know, unique, commending itself however, to every philanthropist, namely, An Asylum for Aged and Decrepit Animals. Here were found birds and beasts suffering under various afflictions, carefully tended and nursed as human beings are in a well-regulated hospital. The origin of the establishment was due to a philanthropic native who some years ago left a large sum of money, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... affluence and distinction, and the townsfolk used to envy them for that which God had vouchsafed them. As time went on, their fortune ceased from them and they passed away, till there remained of them but one old woman. When she grew feeble and decrepit, the townsfolk succoured her not with aught, but put her forth of the city, saying, 'This old woman shall not harbour with us, for that we do her kindness and she requiteth us with evil.' So she took shelter in a ruined place and strangers ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... you are saying," he told her, gravely. "You'd have to go as a filibuster, on some decrepit, unseaworthy freighter loaded to the guards and crowded with men of all sorts. It's dangerous business, running the Spanish blockade. If captured you would be treated just like the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?" Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend, Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime, 280 That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch And conquer Setebos, or likelier He Decrepit may doze, doze, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... thronged the windows as we drove down the street, but the greater number were weird and decrepit females, with faces like the ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... that they do not know what death can be unless it is condemnation. Further, all who have lived well, on coming into heaven, come into the state of early manhood in the world and continue in it to eternity, even those who had been old and decrepit in the world. Women, too, although they had become shrunken and old, return into the bloom and beauty ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... which Moses and Aaron show in peculiar uncouthness. The aisles were filled with family pews or private boxes, raised aloft, and approached by private doors and staircases. These were owned by the magnates of the place, who were wont to bow their recognitions across the nave. There was a decrepit west gallery for the band, and the ground floor was crammed with cranky pews of every shape. A Carolean pulpit stood against a pillar, with reading-desk and clerk's box underneath. The ante-Communion Service was read from the desk, separated ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... people are abandoned and left to die of starvation unattended. Be it said to the honor of the trading companies that they do their utmost to prevent this when it is possible, and offer the old and decrepit a haven at the Post, where they are fed ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... ready to go, she made her adieux with an agreeable sense of having been both entertaining and instructive. She forgot to take leave of her friend the aged and decrepit mastiff, which was sitting just inside the hall; but he called attention to his presence by three raps of his tail on the floor. Elsa laughed, and went through the form of shaking his huge paw,—an attention which he acknowledged by a prolonged ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... was a spotless white apron and collar of lace—and much more slender than when I had seen her last. She took me into a large room in the front of the house with a carpet and furniture, handsome once but now worn and decrepit. Old, time-stained engravings of scenes from the Bible, framed in wood, hung ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... as hereinbefore mentioned, is old and decrepit, unable to keep order in his classes, and therefore always carries with him a jumping rope, the handles of which he uses on the knuckles of his unruly pupils, while the rope itself brings to him recollections of his youthful days ...
— Silver Links • Various
... hast breathed: a life spent worthily should be measured by a nobler line; by deeds, not years. Then would'st thou murmur not, but bless the Providence, which in so short a span, made thee the instrument of wide and spreading blessings, to the helpless and oppressed! Though sinking in decrepit age, he prematurely falls, whose memory records no benefit conferred by him on man. They only have lived long, who ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... knew perfectly well that his promotion, if not his job, depended upon his employer getting a tiger. And, as the steamer was due in four days, there was no time to spare. From the director of the Singapore zoo he purchased for considerably above the market price, a decrepit and somewhat moth-eaten tiger of advanced years, which he had transported across the straits to Johore, whence it was conveyed by bullock cart to a spot in the edge of the jungle, a dozen miles outside ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... invariably heard their familiar call, as at daybreak they would pass over the chateau on their way from the swamps of the Somme to the Marais de St. Gond. The moment was almost a solemn one. It seemed to mark an epoch in the tide of our year. Claude, Benoit, George and a decrepit gardener would abandon all work and prepare boats, guns ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... bitter, blustering east winds tearing through the streets, catching the breath with a touch of ice—when the old man, who to the observant eye had become of late decrepit and very frail-looking, came shivering down from his warehouse, and, creeping to the fire, tried to warm his chilled body, saying he felt himself ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... datu he had aided in several of the yearly offerings. At the time he became datu he entertained all his people for seven days and on the morning of the last day, in the presence of his subjects, he alone sacrificed a decrepit Bila-an slave for whom he had paid three agongs. Hence, probably, no man in the tribe is better fitted to ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... A decrepit vehicle with a gaudy linen canopy hove in sight. Mr. Ducksmith hailed it as the last victims of the Flood must have hailed the Ark. He sprang into it and drove to ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... sofa, covered with an Indian shawl; behind her was a great bronze, the celebrated gift of a celebrated Rajah to her mother. Mrs. Young had been on a tour in the East with her husband, and ever since her house had been frequented by decrepit old gentlemen interested in Arabi, and other matters which they spoke ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... and yammering offspring and pick their way through the solitary stump-dotted street, past windowless, deserted buildings which were the saloons and dance-halls of better days, to foregather around the huge stove in the rear of Hod Burrage's general store, which was decrepit Hilarity's sole remaining enterprise, and there to brag and maunder over the dead ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... and his nerve was not so good as it had been, and as he had escaped hanging till now, he gave up risking it any longer. Accordingly he had parted his hair and called himself Tommaso once more, and he was now looking out for a good place with a not too decrepit prelate; for he had been used to boast that no valet in all the Roman Curia could put on a bishop's sandals at High Mass with such combined skill and unction as he, nor carry a cardinal's scarlet train at a consistory with such mingled devoutness and grace. As for serving Mass, it had been ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford |
