"Vagrant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... years Lite had lain aside the mystery of the footprints on the kitchen floor on the night after the inquest, as a puzzle he would probably never solve. He had come to remember them as a vagrant incident that carried no especial meaning. But now they seemed to carry a new significance,—if only he could get at the key. For three years he had gone along quietly, working and saving all he could, and looking after Jean in an ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... social disorder and lawlessness, the tyranny of the powerful, and the inroads of enemies, are a stern discipline, allowing brief intervals, or awarding a sharp penance, to sloth and sensuality. The rude food, the scanty clothing, the violent exercise, the vagrant life, the military constraint, the imperfect pharmacy, which now are the trials of only particular classes of the community, were once the lot more or less of all. In the deep woods or the wild solitudes of the medieval era, feelings of religion or superstition were naturally present to the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... luck would have it, a vagrant gust of wind, perhaps an advance courier of the prospective storm, swooped down across the road. Before the boy who was stooping over could touch the paper that had attracted his attention it ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... Yes—that is, almost woods. And more than that they failed to elicit. Nearly every day she started away by herself, and after awhile they noticed that she went in the same direction. She went briskly, alertly, like one with a definite end in view. Now, where did Billy go? Their vagrant curiosity was aroused, but not yet to ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... not new to the frontier, had not been long in the army. He and Cumnor had enlisted in a happy-go-lucky manner together at Grant, in Arizona, when the General was elsewhere. Discipline was galling to his vagrant spirit, and after each pay-day he had generally slept off the effects in the guard-house, going there for other offences between-whiles; but he was not of the stuff that deserts; also, he was excellent tempered, and his captain liked him for the way in ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... auction. At one of the sales in 1821 a Negro bought a white man and ordered him to follow his master, and the order was obeyed. But the benevolent black took his servant to the steamboat, paid his passage and restored him his freedom, making himself satisfied with sending the white vagrant out of the territory.—Niles Register, XXI, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... to get away once more and pick up the old and ever fresh business of the vagrant, loafing through new towns, learned in the manners of dogs, babies, and perambulators half the world over, and tracking the seasons by the up-growth of flowers in stranger-people's gardens. St. Paul, standing at the barn-door of the Dakota and Minnesota granaries, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... of bad and doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy: that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d. in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated bailiffs man, marfeast, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man's ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... avoided. I never heard of its being open to the public and I shall speak to some one who will see that it is made secure. Even if it is not valued by the present owners, it should not be left for tramps or any chance vagrant to ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard
... of the warm days that fell at the end of the apple harvest, when such vagrant labourers as had collected to help the farmers were loitering at liberty, Smith held his first and last public meeting in the place where his boyhood had been passed. It was near the cross-roads on the old highroad to Palmyra, where a small wooden ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... upward to wrap themself soothingly about his brain. But the sense of flight, unbelievably swift, was present and recognizable, though all else eluded him. He had the impression, however, that it was intended that all save the most vagrant, most widely differentiated, impressions elude him—that he should acquire only half pictures, which would therefore be all the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... clear instantaneous impression of a group of faces in the window opposite. There were a couple of men in front, stout city personages no doubt, with crimson faces and open mouths cursing the traitorous Papist and the crafty vagrant fox trapped at last; but between them, looking over their shoulders, was a woman's face in which Anthony saw the most intense struggle of emotions. The face was quite white, the lips parted, the eyes straining, and sorrow and compassion were in every line, as she watched the cheerful priest ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... a formal initiation, manifested in an association, and exercised in privation and pain. They were from the nature of the case proselytizing societies, for they were rising into power; nor were they local, but vagrant, restless, intrusive, and encroaching. Their pretensions to supernatural knowledge brought them into easy connection with magic and astrology, which are as attractive to the wealthy and luxurious as the more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... his governance, and roamed like a vagrant on a long, white road. Everything that he saw below him in the calm radiance of the morning pushed it from thought to thought. Yet none of these thoughts were valuable. None seemed fully formed. They resembled henids, things seen so ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... caused by a rebellion of a portion of the Hottentots of the Kat River settlement, at Fort Beaufort, and the Theopolis Missionary establishment, in Albany. It is supposed to have originated because of the application of stringent vagrant laws, and from apprehensions of being again forced into slavery. It is carried on on the eastern frontier of the country. The above are the surmised causes, but there are thought to have been other motives. A representative ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... insincerity, cant, and hypocrisy." And so on ad nauseam. To call Mr. Watkinson a liar would be to descend to his level. Let us simply look at the facts. George Eliot lived with George Henry Lewes as his wife. She had no vagrant attachments. Her connection with Lewes only terminated with his death. Why then did they not marry? Because Lewes's wife was still living, and the pious English law would not allow a divorce unless all the household secrets were dragged before a gaping public. George Eliot consulted her ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... Harley's vagrant fancy was caught. He was impressed by Lucia's tall beauty, her silence, her self-possession, and the mystery of her presence. He wished to discover more about her, who she was, whence she came, and believing Prescott to be his proper source of ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... chase, the lambkin ran, As only woolly vagrant can, Who never felt a crook; But stay'd at length, as 'twere disposed To drink, where tawny sands disclosed The ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... abest!—Donec virenti canities abest! Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have taken the call. And as for himself, slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrant affections, such as these, that ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... submitting them to Jesus, and we feed on Him when we not only say 'Lord! Lord!' but when we do the things that He says. We feed on Christ, when we let His great, sacred, all-wise, all-giving, all satisfying love flow into our restless hearts and make them still, enter into our vagrant affections and fix them on Himself. Thus when mind and conscience and will and heart all turn to Jesus, and in Him find their sustenance, we shall be filled with the feast of fat things which He has prepared for all people. With that bread we shall be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Sea Otter had never had such an experience— he, happily, having been raised in a country where, with the exception of waiters, only a pronounced vagrant expects or accepts a gratuity from a woman. He took the bill and fingered it curiously; then his white blood asserted itself and he handed the bill ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... The French sculptor has not to consider Mrs. Grundy. Maybe, the lady, raising her eyes, had been confused; perhaps for a moment angry—some little milliner or governess, one supposes. In France the jeune fille of good family does not meet her lover unattended. What had happened? Or was it but the vagrant fancy of a middle-aged bourgeois seeking in imagination the romance that reality so rarely gives us, weaving his love ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow's nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from .. the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... who also denounced the stage. The sentiment was, in fact, that of the respectable middle classes in general. The effect was to strengthen the prejudice which held that playgoing was immoral in itself, and that an actor deserved to be treated as a 'vagrant'—the class to which he legally belonged. During the next half-century, at least, that was the prevailing opinion among the solid ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... multiplicamini," and she would willingly allow the glittering stranger Knight to brise le sceau de ses petites solitudes, as the Vicar of Diane-Artemis phrases it. The landscapes of these tales are fantastically beautiful, and scattered through the narrative are fragments of verse, vagrant and witty, that light up the stories ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... be kind," said the man, "I think it would be easier. You ought to give me up, you know, and let me go to jail. I'm no good. I'm a vagrant and a drunkard, and worse. But you won't, I know that; so now let me go. I'm not fit to stay in Arthur's room or lie on his bed. Give me a little money, my dear old friend—yes, the parrot ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... Threading the mazes of the stream Like one who wanders in a dream. Long miles he ran, the stream beside, Which this way, that way, turned and sped, And called and sang, a noisy guide. At last its vagrant dances led To where the thick mimosas' shade Circled and fringed an open glade; There the wild streamlet danced away, The moon was shining strangely white, And by its fitful, gleaming ray The shepherd saw a wondrous sight; In the glade's midst, each on his ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... the Life of Milton, Johnson records his own experience. 'Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.' Johnson's Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... wall from the door to the garden gate is only one small high window. But time and nature have done much to beautify the spot. In the cracks of the roof, thatched or tiled, whichever it may be, many a vagrant seed has found lodgment. The weeds have grown up in profusion to cover the bare little place with leaf and flower. Indeed, there is here a genuine roof garden of the prettiest sort, and it extends along the ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... towards you. Inspired by breathless attention, you try ardently to do your very best. It seems to you that you could never endure a total failure, and you hardly see how you could bear, with any sort of equanimity, even the vacant gaze or restless movement that would bespeak a vagrant interest. If you are a novice, perhaps the frightful idea crosses your mind, "What if one of these children should slip out of the room?" Or, still more tragic possibility, suppose they should look ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... their faith, got ashamed of their minister, and turned him adrift. He disappeared in the great whirl of men and other circumstances which fills this wonderful country. From time to time, during five years, I had made inquiries concerning him of mineralogists, botanists, and other vagrant characters, without getting the smallest hint as to his whereabouts. At last he had turned up as the private prophet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... food and rest. He gazed earnestly at the house. Nothing stirred there save the open doors swinging idly in every vagrant wind. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... convivial glass; and Dan Loftus, that simple, meek, semi-barbarous young scholar, his head in a state of chronic dishevelment, his harmless little round light-blue eyes, pinkish from late night reading, generally betraying the absence of his vagrant thoughts, and I know not what of goodness, as well as queerness, in ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... conditions, at once charming and insidious, Damaris Verity, resting in a wicker deck-chair in the shade of the great ilex trees, found herself alone, free to follow her own vagrant thoughts, perceptions, imaginations without human let or hindrance. Free to dream undisturbed and interrogate both Nature and her ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... made arrangements with the landlady about meals and linen, and I was to take possession in two days; during which time I saw Aunt Betsey safely started on her homeward journey towards Dover, dreading to leave me, but exulting in the coming discomfiture of the vagrant donkeys. ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... verse were incoherently mixed up with ribald slang, addressed to imaginary companions. In his dreams he was evidently living over again his late revel, with episodical diversions into the poet-world, of which he was rather a vagrant nomad than a settled cultivator. Then she would silently bathe his feverish temples with the perfumed water she found on his dressing-table. And so she watched till, in the middle of the night, he woke up, and recovered the possession of his reason with a quickness that surprised Madame Rameau. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... intention, Ma'am, I assure you, of being a vagrant all my days. And if there is nothing else to keep me at home, it is highly probable that I shall be thrown on the shelf before long by Uncle Sam. When a man has served his apprenticeship, and is fully qualified to fill his office creditably, he may prepare to be turned out; and, very likely, ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... shortcomings as vagrant and rowdy found easy excuse in sina Tona's eyes, when she would see him of a holiday—and what days were not holidays for that rascal?—with that fluffy flat silk cap of his topping off a brown face with just the suggestion of a mustache showing, a blue denim coat fitting close ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... fierce sigh. "I suppose," said he, after an unquiet pause, "that the vagrant and the outlaw are strong in me, for I long to run back to my old existence, which was all action, and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... going to add, "vagrant rogues," but she stopped short and looked at Florent. The scornful pout of her lips and the expression of her bright eyes plainly signified that in her belief only villains made such prolonged fasts. It seemed to her that a man able to remain without food for three days ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... vagrant or a stroller, sir," said Jeanie, a little roused by the supposition. "I am a decent Scots lass, travelling through the land on my own business and my own expenses and I was so unhappy as to fall in with bad company, and was stopped a' night on my journey. And ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... successful required first of all to command the confidence of the community in his honesty. The ballot and the jury-box were regarded as sacred as the sacrament itself, and the criminal courts had usually little to do beyond the cases of vagrant offenders. Business was conducted as a rule without the formality of contracts, and those whose lives justly provoked scandal were shunned on every side. This community possessed the only real wealth the world can give—content; and the local newspaper of that day, even under the direction of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... means that kings have chosen to live with dancers. While such conduct is not, perhaps, strictly laudable, we can disregard it if it be accompanied by a certain measure of decorum. Still, a combination of ruler-ship and dalliance with a vagrant charmer is a phenomenon that is as much out of place as is an attempt to govern ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the world; that she should enrol herself in the brotherhood of nations, and perform her part in the great drama of life. It is upon this principle that England, France, and the United States, are requiring the same thing of China; and it is upon this principle that the vagrant is arrested in your streets and sent to ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... ten to one thou wert A Jew's possession, got in honest barter; Next, John the ostler's; last of all, past doubt A vagrant's hat; the equitable purchase Of an ill-sung song. Till quite worn out With rain, and wind, and sleet, and other 'ills Thy race is heir to,' the beggar cast thee From his plebeian ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... over the threshold John Pearse saw little save a dim, cool hall, vast and full of vagrant shadows; then, when Milo had arranged the lights so that they gradually grew in power, flooding the chamber with mellow radiance, his soul seemed to burst from his throat ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... you are not without your grievances; we sympathize with you in your distress, and we are pleased to find that the design of subjugating us has persuaded the administration to dispense to Ireland some vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. Even the tender mercies of the government have long been cruel to you. In the rich pastures of Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... shirt, tight white moleskins, cabbage-tree hat, flash riding-boots with glittering spurs. A bullock driver, when his costume would be more subdued, but when he would be fully equipped, even to the chirpy phrases in which working bullocks are accustomed to be addressed. Then as a vagrant black, when his attire would be nothing at all in camp, and little more than a frowsy blanket when visiting the town. But in all of his characters he had an unconstrained contempt for Chinese, and delighted in ridiculing and frightening them. In the part of a bullock-driver ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... footing in the word for that kind of service we have treated about above, and knowing that error and human inventions in religion will not offer themselves, but with wiped lips, and a countenance as demure as may be, and also being persuaded that this opinion of Mr. K. is vagrant, yea a mere alien as to the scriptures, I being an officer, have apprehended it, and put it in the stocks, and there will keep it, till I see by what authority it has leave to pass and repass as it lists, among ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and he had been his younger brother, he might have guessed that John might have been found beside the newest mound in the churchyard, had one sought him there. But that idea did not come to William, and after staring into the blackness for a long time, he reluctantly closed the door. Perhaps the vagrant could be found ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... a tamarack swamp brought us to the inlet of Unknown Pond, upon which we embarked our fleet, and paddled down its vagrant waters. They were at first sluggish, winding among triste fir-trees, but gradually developed a strong current. At the end of three miles a loud roar ahead warned us that we were approaching rapids, falls, and cascades. We paused. The danger was unknown. We had our choice ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the way of reading after the boating and the cricket began, than while we continued in a state of vagrant idleness, without a fixed amusement of any kind. In the first place, it was necessary to conciliate Hanmer by some show of industry in the morning, in order to keep him in good humour for the cricket ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the time when 'neath the stairs the pages their heads raise! The term of "pure brightness" is the meetest time this thing to make! The vagrant silk it snaps, and slack, without tension it strays! The East wind don't begrudge because ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... retrospect; the happy situation he had been in, and the almost assured hopes of being continued in for life, made his present one appear yet worse, than in reality it was: he now looked on himself as doomed to be a vagrant all his days, driven from his native country for ever, and the society of all his friends, and torn beyond even a possibility of recovering, from a lady, to whom he was so near being united for ever, whom he loved, and whose fortune and kindred had given him just expectation ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... tell himself this again and again, as he lay in the hot darkness with his hands clasped across his eyes. He used it as a whip with which to scourge any vagrant hopes that dared creep into his heart. Hadn't Miss Nell told him that she didn't care what he said or did, just so he left her alone? Hadn't she let him come away without expressing a regret for the past or ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... purposes within easy reach, which was also frequently used for camp-meeting purposes. Gnarly old live-oaks spread their branches like a canopy over everything, while the sea-green moss hung from every limb and twig, excluding the light and lazily waving with every vagrant breeze. The fact that these grounds were also used for camp-meetings only proved the broad toleration of the people. On this occasion I distinctly remember that Miss Jean introduced a lady to me, who was the wife of an Episcopal minister, then visiting on a ranch near Oakville, and I danced ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... be damn'd; (your father's fault.) Go, purify'd by flames, ascend the sky, My better and more Christian progeny! Unstain'd, untouch'd, and yet in maiden sheets, While all your smutty sisters walk the streets. Ye shall not beg, like gratis-given Bland, Sent with a pass and vagrant through the land; Nor sail with Ward, to Ape-and-monkey climes, Where vile Mundungus trucks for viler rhymes. Not sulphur-tipt, emblaze an ale-house fire! Not wrap up oranges, to pelt your sire! O! pass more innocent, in infant state, To the mild limbo of our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... rare lark on my way home. I went to uncle's, and finding aunt in the garden, slouched my hat over my face, and began my story. She ordered me off the premises instantly as a vagrant. I went round to the back door and got a penny a-piece from the servants, who were quite delighted. Then I met uncle, and telling him that I had a wonderful box of antiques to exhibit, he gave me sixpence, and with great curiosity poked his proboscis against ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... I understand you, Brother Henry. You begin afar off; but I know what you are coming to. You want to bring up that odious Denims again,—a man whom I hate, and whom you yourself would show out of doors, like a vagrant, if it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the real estate agent, the business man cannot afford to be without automobiles. No more can the burglar, the hold-up man, the bank robber, if he would keep up to date. The automobile has raised the robbery of country banks from a vagrant crime, infrequent and dangerous, to a steady occupation coupled with a great deal of excitement and some chance for profit. So far no one has ever suggested anything to counteract or lessen the evil effects except to increase penalties. ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... the poor man are the patrimony of God; and it taught them, also, that sometimes men entertained the Immortals unawares. It was a faith, too, which was more than words with them; for we hear of no vagrant acts or alien acts, and it was sacrilege to turn away from the gate whoever asked its hospitality. Times are changed. The world was not so crowded as it is now, and perhaps rogues were less abundant; ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Kirkburn, and why Logan needed his presence. 'The poor old gentleman has passed away suddenly, I suppose,' he reflected, 'and Logan may think that I know where he has deposited his will. It is in some place that the marquis called "the hidie hole," and that, from his vagrant remarks, appears to be a secret chamber, as his ancestor meant to keep James VI. there. I wish he had cut the throat of that prince, a bad fellow. But, of course, I don't know where the chamber is: probably some of the people about the place know, or the ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... the Major-Generals was coming into operation, he had been apprehended, on his way to Newark, by the vigilance of Major-General Haynes, and committed to prison in Yarmouth, There seems to have been no definite charge, other than that he was "the poet Cleveland" and was a questionable kind of vagrant. He had been in prison for some months when it occurred to him to address a letter to the Protector himself. "May it please your Highness," it began, "Rulers within the circle of their government have a claim to that which is said of the Deity: they have their ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... which I count the feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs dropped by some vagrant hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my pigeon friend: he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I sit quietly on my bench ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... road is lined with giant pines and you lift your face gratefully to catch the cool balsam breath of the forest. Coming from out this splendid shade, this silence too deep to be disturbed by light breezes or vagrant winds, you find yourself on the brow of a descending hill. The first thing that strikes the eye is a lake that might be a great blue sapphire dropped into the verdant hollow where it lies. When the eye reluctantly leaves the lake on the left, it turns to rest upon ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... dropping in from different corners of the globe to spread their infection among the more recent crowd of curio-hunters, gentlemen of commerce, nautical wrecks, decayed missionaries, painters, authors and other vagrant riff-raff who frequented the premises. There were rows going on all the time—insignificant rows, mostly about newspapers and gambling debts. Mr. Samuel got his eye blacked over a harmless game of ecarte; Mr. White, one of the steadiest ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... The vagrant winds and the far heaving main Breathed in thy chastened rhyme, Their latent music to the soul again, Above the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Miss Viner's vagrant trunk had finally found its way to its owner; and, clad in such modest splendour as it furnished, she shone at Darrow across their restaurant table. In the reaction of his wounded vanity he found her prettier ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... English Member of Parliament, the banker Sir Samuel Montagu (later Lord Swaythling). Despite his influential position, Montagu was ordered out of the Russian capital "within twenty-four hours," like an itinerant vagrant. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... morning while Tess was doing the simple chores around the shack, she had the door open to admit the vagrant breezes of the summer day. Andy, as his custom was on such occasions, lay quietly upon the attic floor, secure from the observation of any chance passer-by. Stepping to the door to shake her dust rag, Tess saw Jake ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... the faithful, but only at saving individual souls, which in the act of being saved are removed beyond all activity and all contact with the world. Buddhism, therefore, is not a power which makes actively for civilisation. It is a powerful agent for the taming of passion and the prevention of vagrant and lawless desires, it tends, therefore, towards peace. But it offers no stimulus to the realisation of the riches which are given to man in his own nature: it checks rather than fosters enterprise, it favours a dull ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... for them in the sewers, with hook and line, precisely as they had done a century ago in Paris, during the great German siege. A dog," he added, "was a great treat. When the authorities killed the vagrant hounds there was a big scramble among the poor ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... seemed to have second sight in regard to the invisible, latent good points in all horses and dogs, had picked him up in the pound for a mere nothing; and to him there was granted the vision of a brilliant future for the vagrant puppy. "Mark my words," he had said decisively when Spot's fate hung in the balance, "you can't go wrong on him; he'll be a credit to us all some day." And so Spot was rescued from death, or at least from a life of poverty and ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... poetical and political, and if Robert and I had but a little less modesty we are assured that we should find access to him easy. But we can't make up our minds to go to his door and introduce ourselves as vagrant minstrels, when he may probably not know our names. We never could follow the fashion of certain authors who send their books about without intimations of their being likely to be acceptable or not, of which practice poor Tennyson knows too much for his peace. If, indeed, a letter of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... catches when they're old; Rude country-minstrels, men who doctor kine, Or graft, and, out of scions ten, save nine; 400 Creatures of genius they, but never meant To keep step with the civic regiment, These Ezra welcomed, feeling in his mind Perhaps some motions of the vagrant kind; These paid no money, yet for them he drew Special Jamaica from a tap they knew, And, for their feelings, chalked behind the door With solemn face a visionary score. This thawed to life in Uncle Reuben's throat A torpid shoal of jest and anecdote, 410 Like those queer fish that doze the droughts ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... show children, who are put through excruciating practices to please a British public, and they would have done well at the same time if they had taken steps to prevent the warping influence of a vagrant's life having its full force upon the tribes of little Gipsy children, dwelling in calico tents, within the sound of church bells—if living under the body of an old cart, protected by patched coverlets, can be called living in tents—on the roadside in the midst of grass, sticks, stones, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... money saved they could invest As vagrant fancy might suggest, And each could then ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... wealth, resulting in immense fortunes on the one hand, and terrible poverty on the other, has separated the two classes by a chasm as deep and wide as ever yawned between czar and moujik, kaiser and vagrant, prince and pauper, feudal baron and serf. The immensity of the power and wealth thus concentrated into the hands of the few, to be inherited by their sons and daughters, tends to establish this class division hereditarily. Heretofore, passage ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... constable was questioned by the magistrates about the strange state of affairs in the district, and reported that the encampment was a little way from the highway, and that, therefore, the lady could not be apprehended under the Vagrant Act! A summons, however, had been taken out by the local surveyor, and would be followed by a warrant. On that summons the so-called countess was convicted; but appealed to the Court ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... of his outer cloak and remains in a sleeveless jacket. He carries an axe in his belt] A vagrant may sweat where a bear will freeze. I am hot. [Puts his axe on the floor and takes off his jacket] You get rid of a pailful of sweat while you drag one leg out of the mud. And while you are dragging it out, the other one ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... allowance after a while came to be unclaimed. The rough, cyclonic forces of the huge city caught this helpless child of a man's years in the full swing of their blind sweep and played sad tricks with him. In a period extending over nearly three years Francis Thompson led the life of a vagrant in the streets and alleys. He made one or two brave essays at regular work of the most commonplace character, but without success. The worn copies of Aeschylus and Blake in the pockets of this ragged and gaunt roustabout contained no useful ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... quite the wrong thing under a perverse appearance of attempting good works. There is nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret's stamp so much as good done in the wrong way. She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by. It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to wrap up a gypsy's baby. And it might be allowed to be trying that when believing an old man of rather doubtful antecedents to be dying from ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... first chapter has been dealt with; firstly, because in this are enunciated those radical conceptions which he afterwards argues not to, but from; and secondly, because it has been the writer's desire, avoiding all vagrant and indecisive criticism, to have a fair grapple, and come to some clear result,—like that of a wrestler, who frankly proffers himself to throw or be thrown. It only remains to indicate, so far as may be, a comprehensive estimate of Mr. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the watch, marching from the Marienthurn to the Frauenthor, gave her vagrant thoughts a new turn. The city guard was soon followed by a troop of horse, which probably belonged ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... one day, looking in at a shop window where I could see myself, that I was a most disreputable-looking object, quite eligible to be apprehended as an able-bodied vagrant.' ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... who left his wife and little children to fight against King George. He could think of but one thing to protect them against vagrant soldiers of either side, and that was to carve upon certain boards (which he nailed to the trees here and there along the boundaries ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... Arapahoe, with bands of Dog Indians and outlaws from every tribe, contested, foot by foot, for supremacy against the out-reaching civilization of the dominant Anglo-American. The lonely trails were measured off by white men's graves. The vagrant winds that bear the odor of alfalfa, and of orchard bloom to-day, were laden often with the smoke of burning homes, and often, too, they bore that sickening smell of human flesh, once caught, never to be forgotten. The story of that struggle for supremacy is a tragic drama of heroism ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... no servile passions Seek to charm thy vagrant mind; Well I know thy inclinations, Wav'ring as ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... time of Fateh Ali Shah, the mendicant dervishes, who were then as numerous and profligate in Persia as vagrant monks used to be in Spain and Italy, became such a pest that one of the first acts of his successor, Mahomed Shah, was to direct that no beggars should be tolerated except the lame, the sick, and the blind, and that all able-bodied men appearing in dervish garb were to be seized for military service. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... knew she must be made aware of his presence, then he hoped for an opportunity to explain, but he would not seek it yet. So he made his way to the village, stopped to give pennies to small white-haired children, patted the shaggy dusty heads of vagrant dogs, and finally came to anchor on the seat beside ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... all those formulas which in the past were supposed to have served the turns of those seeking adventure in a great city. There was the trick of bestowing a thousand-dollar bill upon a chance vagrant and then trailing after the recipient to note what happened to him, in his efforts to change the bill. Heretofore, in fiction at least, the following of this plan had invariably brought forth most beautiful results. Accordingly, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... appalled. Evidently I had been wasting my time, for I could have no doubt that the gallant six hundred would include a sample of every kind of pundit, stationary or vagrant, encompassed within the seven seas; and against such competition I felt my chances ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... on the positive pole, B, commences to phosphoresce, increasing in intensity until the tube refuses to conduct, its greatest brilliancy being just short of this degree of exhaustion. The probable explanation is that the vagrant molecules I introduce in the next experiment, happening to come within the sphere of influence of the positive pole, rush violently to it, and excite phosphorescence in the yttria, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... the Batlaping by the marauders, determined Mothibi and his people to leave their present place of settlement and remove to the eastward. For a considerable time, however, they remained in an unsettled state, suffering from attacks, and leading a vagrant life. ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... the unsettled vagrant civilisation which existed in the North of Africa up to 1830—which in 1860 was beginning to pass away, and the traces of which still survived in the nineties— resembled very much the border forays for which Northumberland is still famous; and, walking through the palm-groves towards the ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... more nor less. Beyond these, the personal belongings of Battersleigh of the Rile Irish were at best few and humble. In the big city, busy with reviving commerce, there were few who cared how Battersleigh lived. It was a vagrant wind of March that one day blew aside the cloak of Battersleigh as he raised his hat in salutation to a friend—a vagrant wind, cynical and merciless, which showed somewhat of the poverty with which Battersleigh had struggled like a soldier and a gentleman. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... stairway, there flashed the gleam of some rich stained glass, spots of color that were repeated, with quite a different lustre, in the dappled haunches of rows of sturdy Percherons munching their meal in the adjacent stalls. Add to such an ensemble a vagrant multitude of rose, honeysuckle, clematis, and wistaria vines, all blooming in full rivalry of perfume and color; insert in some of the corners and beneath some of the older casements archaic bits of sculpture—strange ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... night. To stay their stomachs against a protracted search, for their colloquies sat late, they ordered a plentiful dinner to be placed before them. Also, on the happy chance that success might crown the night, a row of stout Tobies was set upon the board. If the prodigal lurked without and his vagrant nose were seen at last upon the window, then musty liquor, from a Toby's three-cornered hat, would be a fitting ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... Gerardstown, Berkeley County, in the extreme northerly part of Virginia. His route lay directly over the road which David had traversed. The man's name was Adam Myers. He was a jovial fellow, and at once won the heart of the vagrant boy. David soon entered into a bargain with Myers, and turned back with him. The state of mind in which the boy was may be inferred from the following extract taken from his autobiography. I omit the profanity, which was ever sprinkled through ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... perform, shows likewise how much society is to be desired. Though the perseverance and address of the Indian excite our admiration, they nevertheless cannot procure him the conveniences which are enjoyed by the vagrant beggar of a civilized country: he hunts like a wild beast to satisfy his hunger; and when he lies down to rest after a successful chase, cannot pronounce himself secure against the danger of perishing in a few days: he is, perhaps, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... those creatures of the night—a people whose deeds were of darkness, and whose eyes shunned the light. Here the gipsies had pitched their tent; and though the place was often, in part, deserted by the vagrant horde, yet certain of the tribe, who had grown into years—over whom Barbara Lovel held queenly sway—made it their haunt, and were suffered by the authorities of the neighborhood to remain unmolested—a lenient piece of policy, which, in our infinite regard ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... spectans — Secondly, concerning the personal resentment of Mr Justice Lismahago, I may say, non flocci facio — I would not willingly vilipend any Christian, if, peradventure, he deserveth that epithet: albeit, I am much surprised that more care is not taken to exclude from the commission all such vagrant foreigners as may be justly suspected of disaffection to our happy constitution, in church and state — God forbid that I should be so uncharitable, as to affirm, positively, that the said Lismahago ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the apartment, but the shyer boy dared not seat himself upon any of those handsome satin-covered chairs. He slunk behind Molly, casting his eyes down and nervously twirling his cap. For, little vagrant though he was, his street life had already taught him that it was the correct thing for lads and men to bare the head in the presence of ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... difficult. She was without a cent, a shelter, a job, a friend, or the prospect of a meal. It was probable that there was not at that minute in New York a human being so destitute. Before nightfall she would have to find some nominal motive for living or be arrested as a vagrant. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... ideas would have more apparent connection if they could be made to correspond to 'vibratiuncles' or physical processes of some kind. But this part of Hartley's hypothesis had been dropped: and all reality is therefore reduced to the whirl of vagrant and accidentally cohering ideas in brains and clusters. His one main aim is to get rid of everything that can be called mystical and to trace all mental processes to 'experience,' as he understands experience—to show that we are never entitled to assert that two ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... figure of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant character ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... what they please in their reports to their societies, they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended ones of vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who are outcasts ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... had replied: "They always are, when you haven't got 'em." But had fallen into contemplation, and presently said—out of the blue—"Because I'm an unsettled sort of party—a vagrant. I shouldn't do for a G.P.'s wife, thank you, Jeremiah! I should like to live in a caravan, and go about the country, and wood fires out of doors." Was it, Fenwick wondered, the gipsies they had seen to-day that had made her think of this? and then he recalled how ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... ruinous arbor. Hepzibah—stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as justifying a princess-like condescension—exhibited a not ungraceful hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage counsel—lady as she was—with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner, who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally well adapted for ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to Lancaster County he had a vagrant idea of what the South Carolina mountains are like. He would have told you that the trees there all murmur the name of Amanda, that the birds sing her name, the waterfalls cry it aloud! During his two weeks of absence ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... that occurrence gory My history would be faithless here Did "Happy Jimmy" not appear, An innocent good natured soul As ever loved the flowing bowl— An institution of the day That like himself hath passed away, Was "Happy Jimmy," he who made A vagrant's life a merry trade. ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... universally understood, they would be dispersed, because never, in no instance, rising to be a people, sui juris, a nation, a distinct community, known to the public law of Europe as having the rights of peace and war, but always a mere accident and vagrant excess amongst nations, not having the bare rights of citizenship; so far from being a nation, not being an acknowledged member of any nation. This exquisite dispersion—not ethnographic only, but political—is that half of the Scriptural malediction which the Boulanger answer ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... hung wavering in the opening, the broad strait before them, and their quarry fast diminishing to small specks upon the distant horizon, a vagrant land breeze suddenly bellied the flapping sail. The prahu swung quickly about with nose pointed toward the sea, the sail filled, and the long, narrow craft shot out of the harbor and sped on over the dancing waters in ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... him who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the smell of the rose. He will comfort you. You came to me stripped of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands. Your name was the common property of the winds; it, as it were, floated naked over the waters about the equator. I wrapped round its unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics, and have essayed to put into the hollow sound the very anguish of paternity—feats ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... talked, and the end was that I am to try to put an end to these tracasseries. She was mighty glorious about her sortie upon Lambton, whom she dislikes, but she is vexed at the hornets' nest she has brought round her head. All this comes of talking. The wisest man mentioned in history was the vagrant in the Tuileries Gardens some years ago, who walked about with a gag on, and when taken up by the police and questioned why he went about in that guise, he said he was imprudent, and that he might not say anything ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... Europe, in all the islands of the Mediterranean, and in Madeira and the Azores. And then he says—(now notice the puzzle of this),—"In many parts of the Continent it is a migrant, and, contrary to what obtains with us, is there treated as a vagrant, for there is scarcely a country across the water in which it is ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... of beef from a butcher's shop, and rub your wart with it, then throw it down the necessary house, or bury it, and as the beef rots, your warts will decay."[161] Some have great faith in having a vagrant count them, mark the number on the inside of his hat, and then when he leaves the neighborhood he takes the warts with him. Coffin water was ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... over the side of the good Cunard ship 'Russia' (whom prosperity attend through all her voyages!) and surveyed the outer hull of the gracious monster that the voice had inhabited. So, perhaps, shall we all, in the spirit, one day survey the frame that held the busier voice from which my vagrant fancy ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... never in his life lived as a vagrant, but has always had a settled home, has always pursued an honest and visible means of getting his living, has always been, and is ready to prove that he always has been an industrious, a peaceable, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... denouncing the consequences which would ensue were he absolved, saying:—"Let neither God nor man be held in reverence; let the orders of captains and the Divine auspices be alike disregarded; let a vagrant soldiery range without leave through the country of friend or foe; reckless of their military oath, let them disband at their pleasure; let them forsake their deserted standards, and neither rally nor disperse at the ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli |
