"One-horse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which he had assisted Mr. Fairfield in finding his money. He had done all that an honest man and a good neighbor should do to help a feeble old man; and it wasn't right for "one-horse lawyers" to insult him. ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... until ideas that men once were burned at the stake for entertaining are now the commonplace axioms of every school boy's thought; our economics change until schools of thought shaped to old industrial conditions are as outmoded as a one-horse shay beside an automobile; our philosophy changes like our science when Kant, for example, starts a revolution in man's thinking, worthy, as he claimed, to be called Copernican; our cultural habits change until marooned communities in the Kentucky mountains, "our contemporary ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... the risk of our bones, of the nature of French crossroads. Having understood that the road from Montelimart to Grignan was inaccessible to four-wheeled carriages, we set off at four in the morning in a patache, the most genteel description of one-horse chair which the town afforded. Let no one imagine that a patache bears that relation to a cabriolet which a dennet does to a tilbury; for ours, at least, would in England have been called a very sorry higgler's cart. The inside accommodations were so arranged, that we sat back to back, and nearly ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... by the tavern, without pausing, in the direction of Fleetwood, when just as he reached the eastern suburbs of the town a small one-horse wagon, leaving the place, attracted his attention. There was just sufficient light to make out the figures in the wagon. There were two. One was a portly and plainly clad old countryman, with a prominent nose, a double chin, and fat hands decorated ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... cried the witty Mr. Coverley, "why, my Lord Orville is as careful,-egad, as careful as an old woman! Why, I'd drive a one-horse cart against my Lord's phaeton for a ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... horse, is $150, and the price of the larger size, worked by two horses, $200. Professor Mapes says he saw this machine in operation and considers it "perfect in all its parts." The patentees claim that they can make, with the one-horse machine, 5,000 large tiles a day. They state also that "two horses will make tiles about as cheap as bricks are usually made, and as fast, with ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... polished, says HONORARY CONSULATE OF JAPAN. Beside immense motor trucks stood a shabby little horse and buggy, restored to service, perhaps, by the war-time shortage of gasoline. It was a typical one-horse ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... dwelling upon his comic poems, such as the logical catastrophe of the "One-Horse Shay," as they are fully appreciated, so much so that they have doubtless led to the undervaluing of his more ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... strong one-horse dray which we loaded with about 10 cwt. of provisions, in the form of flour, tea, sugar, salt, ship biscuits, a small quantity of spirits for medicinal use and tobacco. Also two small calico tents, some cooking ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... little front porch one summer afternoon, one on the little bench on one side of the door, and the other on the little bench on the other side of the door, each waiting until she should hear the clock strike five, to prepare tea. But it was not yet a quarter to five when a one-horse wagon containing four men came slowly down the street. Dorcas first saw the wagon, and she ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... twelve commenced their duties. When it came my turn to receive the property necessary to take me out of the State I was told to fit myself out comfortably. I told them that I had a wife and one child; that I had two good wagons, one a heavy one-horse wagon, with thills, and that I had a large mare which was equal to a common span; that the mare and wagon would do me. I wanted some bedding and our clothing, and some other traps of little value. I had a good milk cow that I wished to give to a friend who had lost all his cattle. His ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... Lieutenant Smallweed, Corporal Bledsoe of our old company, and two or three others, to see the famous 'Seventh' drill, out at Camp Cameron, which I suppose nearly everybody knows is situated about a mile and a half north of the President's house, on the 14th-street road, and just opposite to a one-horse affair that used to call itself 'Columbian College,' but which, after passing through a course of weak semi-religio-secessionism, gradually dried up, leaving its skin to the surgeon-general for a hospital. The afternoon we selected to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Lottie Prince will do that, and you are to take the one-horse wagon for the trunks. Did you go to Mr. Laugh's and engage it, as ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... a smart little one-horse brougham at the curb. "Sorry—but I can't," said he. "I've my sister with me. She brought me down in ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... They've quite ceased to attract him. But we're displaying an entirely new spirit. By erecting a public statue in a town like this we are showing that we've arrived at an advanced stage of culture. There isn't another potty little one-horse town in Ireland that has ever shown the slightest desire to set up a great and elevating work of art in its midst. You may not appreciate that aspect of the ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... the mother and wife partially reassured, the old father slipped out and down the track, cut deeply in the sand by the one-horse carts, to "Uncle Will'amses," as fast as the storm would permit. But no Jim had been seen there; and still more anxiously the stout old man fought his way back against winds that seemed strong" enough to blow him like a feather over the cliff's edge, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... veterinary surgeon. No, indeed, no use in your going out there, Dot; the men appear to be doing all they can for him. It's out of the question for us to travel with that pony to-night; the last train that stops at this one-horse station has gone by, and I can't ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... somewhat grumpy-countenanced young man, made no answer. He began to pace the hall with looks of eminent dissatisfaction. But he had only taken a turn or two when a quietly appointed one-horse coupe brougham came up to the open door, and a well-known face was seen at its window. Mr. Gabriel Chestermarke, senior proprietor, had come an ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... An ordinary one-horse cart holds twenty bushels, so then a full crop of potatoes from that space would fill ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... reader will be satisfied to know that two days after found me in an open carriage on my way to Rochester. The road lay entirely through cultivated land, and had no peculiar features. The only thing I saw worth noticing, was two men in a light four-wheel one-horse shay, attached to which were at least a dozen others, some on two wheels, some on four. I of course thought they were some country productions going to a city manufacturer. What was my astonishment at ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... B. and Miss Z. returned from a drive with Plantagenet Gaunt in their one-horse fly, and being informed of Davison's arrival, and that he was closeted with Miss Raby in the little school-room, of course made for that apartment at once. I was coming into it from the other door. I wanted to know whether ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... before I was married about a thing as foolish as anything I ever heard of. I had calls to pay, and I asked Bee to go with me. She said she'd go if I'd get a carriage, so I said I would, and told her to order it. But it seems that all the good ones were engaged for a funeral, and they sent us a one-horse brougham with the driver not in livery. We didn't notice it until we opened the front door. Then Bee sailed in. 'Why are you not in livery?' she demanded. 'I shall certainly report you to Mr. Overman. He ought to be ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... the cheque. We don't know what it may come to yet." Mr Snapper, with a heavy heart, left his patron, not at all liking the task that was before him. But his wife encouraged him to be obedient. He was the owner of a one-horse carriage, and the work was not, therefore, so hard on him as it would have been and had been to poor Mr Thumble. And, moreover, his wife promised to go with him. Mr Snapper and Mrs Snapper did go over to Hogglestock, and the duty was done. Mrs Snapper spoke a word or ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... ever pull off her periwig and cease to be court-ridden? Shall we see something of France and England besides Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne tearing down the Park slopes after her staghounds, in her one-horse chaise—a hot redfaced woman.... She was neither better bred nor wiser than you and me, though we knelt to hand her a letter or a washhand basin. Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time? I am for having her rise off her knees, and take her natural posture, not to be for ever performing ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... worth of clams without trouble and a quarrel. One "course," in a two-horse carriage, costs a franc—that is law—but the hackman always demands more, on some pretence or other, and if he gets it he makes a new demand. It is said that a stranger took a one-horse carriage for a course —tariff, half a franc. He gave the man five francs, by way of experiment. He demanded more, and received another franc. Again he demanded more, and got a franc—demanded more, and it was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... knoll, surrounded by the quaint devices and rude makeshifts of these quaint and rude people. A few poles stuck in the ground, clapboarded with cedar-boughs and cornstalks, and supporting a roof of the same, gave shelter to a rickety one-horse wagon and some farm implements. Near this there was a large, compact tent, made entirely of cornstalks, with, for door, a bundle of the same, in the dry, warm, nest-like interior of which the husking of the corn crop seemed to have ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... tendency to praise me for my sacrifices, for my willingness to surrender to strangers the land which had once been our home, the acres on which we'd once been happy and heavy-hearted. He merely remarked that under the circumstances it seemed the most sensible thing to do. There's a one-horse lawyer in Buckhorn who has been asking about the Harris Ranch and Dinky-Dunk says he suspects this inquiring one has ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... the morning toils were over, the wide kitchen cool and still, and the one-horse wagon standing at the door, into which climbed Mary, her mother, and the Doctor; for, though invested with no spiritual authority, and charged with no ritual or form for hours of affliction, the religion of New England ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... Uncle Ephraim aroused her, and going out into the square entry she tied his gingham cravat, and then handing him the big umbrella, an appendage he took with him in sunshine and in storm, she watched him as he stepped into his one-horse wagon and drove briskly away in the direction of the depot, where he was to ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... why such a good man at his job should be practicing in a little one-horse place like Monkshaven," retorted ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... BANKRUPT CART. A one-horse chaise, said to be so called by a Lord Chief Justice, from their being so frequently used on Sunday jaunts by extravagant ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... This morning the parson takes a drive. Now, small boys, get out of the way! Here comes the wonderful one-horse-shay, Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay. "Huddup!" said ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... days younger than you were, but will go on growing older for the future in the regular and human manner from one 13th November to the next. The effect on me is more doubtful; I may, as you suggest, live for ever; I might, on the other hand, come to pieces like the one-horse shay at a moment's notice; doubtless the step was risky, but I do not the least regret that which enables me to sign myself your ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such fun at funerals" he soliloquized while returning from the cemetery. He bit a large piece out of his "chewing" and gazed around him. "Doggone it" he muttered, "if this ain't the worst town in California for killin's. I never did see such a one-horse camp with such a big potter's field. If I wasn't a inquisitive old hunks I'd get out of such a pesky hole P. D. Q. I wouldn't a' come back in the first place if it hadn't a' been for that Joe ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... smaller towns. As soon as the element of wages enters into the question the result is very different: carriage-hire is usually twice as high as in England and often more. However that may be, it is certainly very striking to see the immense number of one-horse "teams" that turn out for an afternoon or evening spin in the parks and suburban roads of places like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Many of these teams are of a plainness, not to say shabbiness, which would make an English ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... next, parson! What between cocked hats and epaulettes, and other knee-buckle matters, she was a sort of no-man's land before; and now, what with the women and their bandboxes, they'll make another Noah's ark of her. I wonder they didn't all come aboard in a coach and six, or a one-horse shay!" ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... better horse?" said Laura, whose pride was always touched when her parents came to visit her with the old mare and the one-horse wagon. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... this singing, an old gentleman might have been seen to alight from a little one-horse brougham, and enter the door of Knollsea parsonage. He was bent upon obtaining an entrance to the vicar's study without giving ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... your swing— Bon Ton is Life, my boy! Bon Ton's the thing! "Ah, I loves Life and all the joys it yields— (Says Madam Fussock. warm from Spitalfields; ) Bon Ton's the space 'twixt Saturday and Monday, And riding out in one-horse shay o' Sunday; 'Tis drinking tea on summer afternoons At Bagnigge Wells, with china and gilt spoons; 'Tis laying by our stuffs, red cloaks and pattens, To dance cowtillions all in silks and satins." "Vulgar! (cries ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... unceremoniously dismissed in a twinkling, in spite of a vehement remonstrance. Behold, however, presently another arrival—Mr. Tag-rag!! who had come to announce that his carriage (i. e. a queer, rickety, little one-horse chaise, with a tallow-faced boy in it, in faded livery) was waiting to convey Mr. Titmouse to Satin Lodge, and take him a long drive in the country! Each of these four worthies could have spit in the other's face: first, for detecting, and secondly, for ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... last fall," he said, "my wife and I bought and moved onto the farm where we now reside. We went on there in debt $3,700, on which we had to pay seven per cent. interest. I had one horse, an old one, and it had the heaves, a one-horse harness, and a one-horse wagon, three tillage implements, and nine cows that were paid for; and a wife and two babies, but no money. Now that was the condition in which we started on this farm, thirty-six years ago, in debt heavily, and no money; but that is not the worst of it. ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... way of Education Bill, as some will have it. OLD MORALITY back to-night; came down in a penny 'bus, in final effort to elude discovery of his place of recent retreat. PARNELL also absent; news comes to-night that his business is matrimonial; graphic accounts current of his expedition "in a one-horse vehicle" from ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... got into a low one-horse chair, ordered for us by the duke, in which we drove about the place. Dr Johnson was much struck by the grandeur and elegance of this princely seat. He thought, however, the castle too low, and wished it had been a story higher. He said, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... what a man gets for running around in such one-horse countries. In Leipzig they sat a nigger down beside me at the table. In Amsterdam they had cheese for breakfast. In Munich the head waiter had never heard of buckwheat cakes. In Mannheim they charged me ten pfennigs extra for ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... they were on it at all, and were seemingly trying to hide. We could scarcely see their outfit after we found it, for they were camped in tall grass, and their little shanty was not much larger than a dry-goods box. Their one horse was staked out a little way off, their one-horse wagon was standing with its cover on beside a mound of earth which marked where a shallow well had been dug for water. I heard a rustling in the wagon as we passed it, like that of a bird stirring in ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood. I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but autobiographically, like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person. If I went on now, and took him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him. It is not a boy's book at all. It will only be read by adults. It is ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... boasts no public conveyance, except a one-horse gig that carries the mail in tri-weekly trips to Charleston. That vehicle, originally used by some New England doctor, in the early part of the past century, had but one seat, and besides, was not going the way I intended to take, so I was forced to seek a conveyance ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... grave, there ain't a man, woman, or child that will be kept away. Don't you go back on your luck, now; it's something awful and nigger-like. You've got this crowd where the hair is short; excuse me, but it's so. Talk of revivals! You could give that one-horse show in Tasajara a hundred points, and skunk them easily." Indeed, had Gideon been accessible to vanity, the spontaneous homage he met with everywhere would have touched him more sympathetically and kindly than it did; but in the utter unconsciousness of his own ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... Wilmot, who has been at Chatsworth, pronounces it. The Duke perceived it coming, and directed what to have done, and it was over in four minutes. The next event was much more real. I had been half round the garden with the Duke in his one-horse chair; we were passing to the other side of the house, when George Onslow met us, arrived on purpose to advertise the Duke of the sudden death of the Duchess of Leeds,(641) who expired yesterday at dinner in a moment: he called it apoplectic; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... stay buried in this burg for? Why, look how you drudge! and what do you get out of it? New York or some other big city is the place for you. There's where you can become famous instead of being a newspaper woman in a one-horse town." ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... fair First Days, Rattled down our one-horse chaise, Through the blossomed apple-boughs To the old, brown meeting-house, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... muff and umbrella, and hastened into the inn-passage: a man was standing by the open door, and in the lamp-lit street I dimly saw a one-horse conveyance. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... had a photo-engraving plant of my own, I could do a good deal of outside jobbing as well, and the investment would pay ten per cent. But it takes money to make money. I wouldn't want to put in any dinky, one-horse affair. I want a good plant. I've been figuring out the business. Besides the plant, there would be the expense of a high grade paper. Can't print half-tones on anything but coated paper, and that COSTS. Well, what with this and with that ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... spindle-legged kids in my life. Look at them! Scared to death! That fellow never swung at a ball before—that one never heard of a bunt—they throw like girls—Oh! this is sickening, fellows. I see where Worry goes to his grave this year and old Wayne gets humbled by one-horse colleges." ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... in the midst of rude plenty. If further demonstration be needed, I will point to the groceries and wine stores of Ennis. There are at least three of these almost on the scale of Fortnum and Mason's or Hedges and Butler's. Now Ennis is what an American traveller might be tempted to call a "one-horse" town of some six or seven thousand inhabitants, yet its grocery and drapery stores would hardly be beaten in York or Chester. Every imaginable eatable or drinkable can be obtained always for ready money, and very ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... the food programme as far as makin' a choice between tapioca puddin' and canned peaches, when in drifts a couple that I knew, the minute I gets my eyes on 'em, must be Mr. and Mrs. Bob Cathaway. Who else in that little one-horse town would be sportin' a pair of puttee leggin's and doeskin ridin' breeches? That was Bob's makeup, includin' a flap-pocketed cutaway of Harris tweed and a corduroy vest. They fit him a little snug, showin' ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... was 12 to 18 ft., and the stone was crushed to 2-in. size. Owing to the seamy character of the rock it was broken by blasting into comparatively small pieces requiring very little sledging. The stone was loaded into one-horse dump carts, the driver taking one cart to the crusher while the other was being loaded. The haul was 100 ft. The carts were dumped into an inclined chute leading to a No. 5 Gates crusher. The stone was elevated by a bucket elevator and screened. All ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... the Indian Creek section of Newberry County. After about 1880 when things got natural, some of the slaves from this section rented small one-horse farms and made their own money and living. Some would rent small tracts of land on shares, giving the landlord one-half the crop ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... to where the road ended, and from there, a little one-horse ambulance took them on to almost the last trees of the forest. There was no life to be seen anywhere. During the last mile, they had passed through a continuous double line of graves; here and there a group of tiny crosses keeping ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... our progress was retarded and our rest greatly broken—particularly at night—by tea caravans. With the establishment of the winter road, in November, hundreds of low, one-horse sledges, loaded with hide-bound boxes of tea that had come across the desert of Gobi from Peking, left Irkutsk, every day, for Nizhni Novgorod. They moved in solid caravans, a quarter of a mile to a mile in length, and ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... here in about a fortnight. Could you not contrive to put yourself in a Bridgwater coach, and T. Poole would fetch you in a one-horse chaise to Stowey. What delight would it not give ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... in the morning, took a one-horse waggon of some one that had staid overnight at his house, and, accompanied by his wife, repaired to the hill which contained the book. He left his wife in the waggon by the road, and went alone to the hill, a distance of thirty or forty rods. He then took ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... mind it, for it will be a pleasing relaxation to wash, after the ten years of torch-light procession and Mardi Gras frolic she has had with us. It is tiresome, of course, to chase a pillow case up and down the wash-board all day, but it is easier and pleasanter than it is to run a one-horse Inebriate Home for ten years ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... to hunt him by relays, bivouacking upon the ground wherever night should find us, and taking up the chase again upon the following morning, until continual fatigue should wear out the fierce brute. I had two horses with me, and Tim Matlock; so I made up my mind at once, got a light one-horse sleigh up in the village, rigged it with all my bear-skins, good store of whiskey, eatables, and so forth, saddled the gray with my best Somerset, holsters and surcingle attached, and made one of the party ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... highroad near Narbonne, "for thirty-six miles," he says, "I came across but one cabriolet, half a dozen carts and a few women leading asses." Elsewhere, near St. Girons, he notices that in two hundred and fifty miles he encountered in all, "two cabriolets and three miserable things similar to our old one-horse post chaise, and not one gentleman." Throughout this country the inns are execrable; it is impossible to hire a wagon, while in England, even in a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand inhabitants, there are comfortable hotels and every means of transport. This proves that in France "there is ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... thirty years ago that the twin curses of Kansas were the land agent and the one-horse ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... in boyhood, going to and from school, are unknown in the gay French capital to children of well-to-do parents. Instead of starting early and lingering on the way, they watch from the window until a black one-horse omnibus arrives, when a sub-master takes charge of the pupil, and the omnibus goes from house to house, collecting all the scholars, who are brought home in the same manner, the sub-master sitting next the door, giving no chance to slip out to ride on top, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... a detective, and know my business without receiving instructions from the police of a one-horse town," retorted Dyke Darrel in anger. "I am willing, however, to visit your chief, ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... now appeared that someone else—an outsider and a parvenu at that—had linked her name with that of Joe Hooper's to send her word through him. It gave her rank displeasure. To be officially tagged as "Such and such" by a "one-horse" little town. Yes it was a "one-horse" little town. Her assurance slipped from her and in confusion she sought to investigate ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... that my host was as full of his speculative schemes as ever; and soon he made the driver of the one-horse fly turn aside from the unfenced road and take the turf. "Coachman," he cried, "just drive along the railway; you won't ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... where the commander in chief was, he rode up to a convoy. Directly opposite to him came a strange one-horse vehicle, evidently rigged up by soldiers out of any available materials and looking like something between a cart, a cabriolet, and a caleche. A soldier was driving, and a woman enveloped in shawls sat behind the apron under the leather hood ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... On Wednesday last a son and two daughters of the Widow Curtis, of Wimpole, in this county, were returning from Royston Fair in a one-horse tilted cart. They were stopped in the street at Royston by a concourse of people surrounding some recruiting sergeants who had been parading the streets with a flag and playing "God Save the King." The young man, being in liquor, attempted to drive through the crowd. The horse ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... found dry. He killed a bullock, skinned it, and, filling the skin with water (which held 150 gallons), sent it by an ox dray 30 miles, with orders to bury it and to return. Shortly after he dispatched a light one-horse cart, carrying 36 gallons of water; the horse and man were to drink at the hide and go on. Thus they had 36 gallons to supply them for a journey of 176 miles, or six days at 30 miles a day, at the close ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... And I mean to have him, do you hear? I've suffered enough and to spare. I've done everything since he left me. Look here, at Caracas people used to offer me twopence to let them black my eye, sometimes, when my brother was locked up at the police-station. And there were the one-horse circuses where we slept in a heap on the straw, in Chili or some such country. And, sometimes, I lost my balance on the wire, because of my cough. And my brother: you know him! And the cattle-men, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... I took a tender and confidin' woman away from a happy home (Mother Smith's, in the east part of Jonesville), and transplanted her (carried her in a one-horse wagon and a mare) into my own home. And I feel that it is my first duty to make that home the brightest spot on earth to her. That home is my dearest and most sacred treasure. And how can I disturb its sweet ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... head-stall, and was quietly grazing along the road-side. A minute or two might have been thus occupied, when the trotting of a horse and the sound of wheels announced the near approach of one of those vehicles which have got to be almost national; a dearborn, or a one-horse wagon. As it came out from behind a screen of bushes formed by a curvature in the road, I saw that it contained the Rev. Mr. Warren and ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... their respective wives on the back seat of the Cole's double wagon, were passed by Deacon Baxter and his daughters, Waitstill being due at meeting earlier than others by reason of her singing in the choir. The Deacon's one-horse, two-wheeled "shay" could hold three persons, with comfort on its broad seat, and the twenty-year-old mare, although she was always as hollow as a gourd, could generally do the mile, uphill all the way, in half an hour, ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... primitive. Scarcely a person in it had ever known life in a great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper, of Boston, and perhaps one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed in that sort of world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The one-horse tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met to bid good-bye to its friends going off on the single express. The State Department was lodged in an infant asylum far out on Fourteenth Street while Mr. Mullett was constructing ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... have different ways of telling a story," he said. "Mine is the methodical way—I begin at the beginning. We will start, if you please, in the railway—we will proceed in a one-horse chaise—and we will stop at a village, situated in a hole. It was the nearest place to Sir Jervis's house, and it was therefore my destination. I picked out the biggest of the cottages—I mean the huts—and asked the woman ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... cheapest of one-horse vehicles, with but one half-naked syce running at the pony's head, and never a footman near, passes the spanking Arabs; the plain turban of a respectable accountant in the Honorable Company's coal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the generals. The colonels might every now and then have understood a word, and maybe a few of the captains and lieutenants, because Lieutenant Lansdown told me he understood every word the preacher said, and further informed me that it was none of your one-horse, old-fashioned country prayers that privates knew anything about, but was bang-up, ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... found myself with Minna in a one-horse carriage on the way to the Erzgebirge, we frequently met armed reinforcements on their way to Dresden. The sight of them always kindled an involuntary joy in us; even my wife could not refrain from addressing words of encouragement to the men; ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... were champions of the District several times. In the first administration of President Cleveland, Mrs. Cleveland, a bride, used to drive her husband in from Oak View or, as it was popularly called, Red Top, to his office at the White House nearly every morning in a low, one-horse phaeton. No secret-service entourage in those days! In the evenings she came again in style in a Victoria, and frequently they would stop opposite Tudor Place and watch the game in progress. There was a good deal of intimacy ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... deprecatingly. "There! there!" she interrupted. "I guess it's a good thing I'm goin' away. Here's you and I praisin' up each other's beliefs, just as if that wasn't a crime here in Trumet. Sometimes when I see how the two societies in this little one-horse place row with each other, I declare if it doesn't look as if they'd crossed out the first word of 'Love your neighbor' and wrote in 'Fight,' instead. Yet I'm a pretty good Regular, too, and when it comes to whoopin' and ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... it is to see a brother human downright soggy drunk; drunk all over; drunk in the eyes, in the mouth, in the small of his back, in his knees, in his boots, clear down to his toes! How one's heart is drawn toward him by this common bond of human infirmity! How it recalls the camp, the one-horse mining town, the social gathering of the "boys" at Dan's, or Jim's, or Jack's; and the clink of dimes and glasses at the bar; how distances are annihilated and time set back! Of a verity, when I saw that man, with reason dethroned and the garb of self-respect ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Norfolk, and it was imperative to make the portage from this place instead of from Cape Charles, which, though more than fifteen miles further south, and nearer to my starting-point on the other side, did not possess facilities for transportation. The slow one-horse conveyance arrived at Cherrystone half an hour after the steamer N. P. Banks had left the landing, though I heard that the kind-hearted captain, being told I was coming, waited and whistled for me till his ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... noticed, back behind the rest, By cart and wagon rudely prest, The parson's lean and bony bay Stood harnessed in his one-horse shay— Lent to his sexton for the day; (A funeral—so the sexton said; His mother's uncle's wife ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... thirty feet long, applying screw propellers. He used, for the most part, small planes, carrying loads of only two or three pounds, and, under these circumstances, the weight carried was at the rate of 250 lbs. per horse power. His important statements with regard to these trials are that one-horse power will transport a larger weight at twenty miles an hour than at ten, and a still larger at forty miles than at twenty, and so on; that "the sustaining pressure of the air on a plane moving at a small angle ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... 930; sorry, mean, meager, shabby, miserable, wretched, vile, scrubby, scrannel[obs3], weedy, niggardly, scurvy, putid[obs3], beggarly, worthless, twopennyhalfpenny, cheap, trashy, catchpenny, gimcrack, trumpery; one-horse [U. S.]. not worth the pains, not worth while, not worth mentioning, not worth speaking of, not worth a thought, not worth a curse, not worth a straw &c. n.;1 beneath notice, unworthy of notice, beneath regard, unworthy of regard, beneath consideration, unworthy of consideration; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the pleasure of his boys in blue. It was their school yard in which to learn the science of war. My father helped to grade this enclosure. They drew in sand from the sand ridge back of the yard, from where the government barn now stands, with one-horse carts. ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... by Messrs. Lawrence and Bullen) the chief drawings are entirely in wash, and yet are singularly decorative in their effect. The "Story of Jack Bannister's Fortunes" shows the artist's "colonial" style, "Men of Iron," "A Modern Aladdin," Oliver Wendell Holmes' "One-Horse Shay," are other fairly recent volumes. His illustrations have not been confined to his own stories as "In the Valley," by Harold Frederic, "Stops of Various Quills" (poems by W. ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... with them," replied Billina. "It is that cross old Princess who is to blame. But I was raised in the United States, and I won't allow any one-horse chicken of the Land of Ev to run over me and put on airs, as long as I can ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... used as a hospital since the battle—seems to have receiv'd only the worst cases. Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each cover'd with its brown woolen blanket. In the door-yard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of arrel-staves or broken boards, stuck in the dirt. (Most of these bodies were subsequently taken up and transported ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Quintus he invited Caesar's criticisms on his own very poor verses, and wrote a letter, obviously meant to be shown, expressing boundless gratification at a favourable notice: "If he thinks well of my poetry, I shall know it is no mere one-horse concern, but a real four-in-hand." "Caesar tells me he never read better Greek. But why does he write [Greek: rhathumotera] ['rather careless'] against one passage? He really does. ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... A one-horse barouche was called, and a commissionaire—a kind of guide or interpreter, who assists strangers in doing their business, or in seeing the sights of the city—presented himself to be employed; but Dr. Winstock, who was familiar with the ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... wife, his son, Murdock, his daughter-in-law, Rose, and seven grandchildren. They live near White Oak, S.C., in a two-room frame house with a one-room box board annex. He works a one-horse farm for Mr. Cathcart and piddles a little at the planing mills at Adgers. His son does the ploughing. The daughter-in-law and grandchildren hoe and pick cotton and assist in the farm work. Henry is of medium ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... visit to Eric Cobbley. A miserable Gallery had refused to let that straight-haired genius have his one-man show after all. Its impudent manager, after visiting his studio, had expressed the opinion that it would only be a 'one-horse show from the selling point of view.' This crowning example of commercial cowardice towards her favourite lame duck—and he so hard up, with a wife and two children, that he had caused her account to be overdrawn—was still making the blood glow in her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... this—the Jubilee of man! London! right well thou know'st the day of prayer: Then thy spruce citizen, washed artisan, And smug apprentice gulp their weekly air: Thy coach of hackney, whiskey,[87] one-horse chair, And humblest gig through sundry suburbs whirl,[da] To Hampstead, Brentford, Harrow make repair; Till the tired jade the wheel forgets to hurl, Provoking envious gibe ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... condition, involving a hitherto undescribed sensation, (as it supposed,) all of which could have been sufficiently explained by the participle—bored. I have seen a country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely, in developing an opinion of a brother-minister's discourse which would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped sophomore in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... as shooting!" he blustered. "If that machine isn't going to come up to the maker's guarantee, I will make my dad get me one that will. I won't tinker round with any one-horse bunch of junk like ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... his opinion—which generally means that there is none yet to reserve—but in his case there would be a great deal by-and-by. Master Popplewell had made up his mind and his wife's, long ago, and confirmed it in the one-horse shay, while Mary was riding Lord Keppel in the rear; and the mind of the tanner was as tough as good oak bark. His premises had been intruded upon—the property which he had bought with his own money saved by years of honest trade, his private garden, his ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... this county had removed the wheat straw from between its huckleberry-stained teeth and emitted a derisive and bucolic laugh as old man Walmsley's freckle-faced "Bob" abandoned the certain three-per-diem meals of the one-horse farm for the discontinuous quick lunch counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end of the six years no murder trial, coaching party, automobile accident or cotillion was complete in which the name of Robert Walmsley ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... right by with nary a clinch. They figure I'm the town badman. Always will be, I guess. It'll have to be Olaf who goes on. 'And sometimes——Blamed if I don't feel like coming out and saying, 'I've been conservative. Nothing to it. Now I'm going to start something in these rotten one-horse lumber-camps west of town.' But Bea's got me hypnotized. Lord, Mrs. Kennicott, do you re'lize what a jolly, square, faithful woman she is? And I love Olaf——Oh well, I won't go ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... partner in the well-known City firm of Hornaday, Grimes, and Grimmer, dried fruit brokers, nodded with an affectation of sympathy which she did not feel—the Marlows had a touring car and a motor-brougham, whilst she had only a one-horse carriage—and held out her cup to be refilled. She had known her hostess for a good many years, over thirty in fact, ever since she and May Marlow, who was then May Grierson and had thick flaxen plaits tied ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... host in loading, carting and stacking or ricking his grain. The operation was really performed like clock-work. Two or three men were stationed at the rick to unload the carts, two in the fields to load them, and several boys to lead them back and forth to the two parties. They were all one-horse carts, and so timed that a loaded one was always at the rick and an empty one always in the field; thus keeping the men at both ends fully employed from morning until night, pitching on and pitching off; while boys, at 6d. or 8d. a day, led ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... in Pike County, in Missouri, where I was born, and they all died off but me and pa and my brother Ike. Pa, he 'lowed he'd break up and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who's got a little one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile below Orleans. Pa was pretty poor, and had some debts; so when he'd squared up there warn't nothing left but sixteen dollars and our nigger, Jim. That warn't enough to take us fourteen ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dilate upon the occurrences that ensued. How Mr. Theodosius and Miss Lavinia danced, and talked, and sighed for the remainder of the evening—how the Miss Crumptons were delighted thereat. How the writing-master continued to frisk about with one-horse power, and how his wife, from some unaccountable freak, left the whist-table in the little back-parlour, and persisted in displaying her green head-dress in the most conspicuous part of the drawing-room. How the supper consisted of small triangular sandwiches ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... houses on the east side but no signs of habitation on the west bank. We crossed the river in a canoe and then walked seven miles before we came to a house where we staid all night and inquired for work. None was to be had and so we tramped on again. The next day we met a real live Yankee with a one-horse wagon, peddling tin ware in regular Eastern style, We inquired of him about the road and prospects, and he gave us an encouraging idea—said all was good. He told us where to stop the next night at a small town called Sugar Creek. It had but a few houses and was being built up as a mining town, ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... said. "Fact is, I ain't up-to-date enough, myself, that's what's the matter. She's a mighty able, ambitious woman, your mother is, Gertie, and I don't wonder she gets to thinkin', sometimes, that Trumet is a kind of one-horse town. I like it; I AM one-horse, I suppose. But she ain't, and she ain't satisfied to be satisfied, like me. It's a good thing she ain't, I guess. Somebody's got to live up to the responsibilities of ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln |
