"Decrepit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man had come all the way from a distant land simply to admire her wonderful treasures, of which he had heard so much, the maiden was highly flattered and gave orders that he should be admitted without delay. An aged and decrepit man, clad in a picturesque Eastern costume, was led into the room, and Richberta bade him be seated at her side. He expected to receive from the young lady the symbol of welcome—bread and salt. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... performing the Office of a Day-Watchman, followed by a Goose, which bears the Bob of his Ditty, and confirms what he says with a Quack, Quack. I gave little heed to the mention of this known Circumstance, till, being the other day in those Quarters, I passed by a decrepit old Fellow with a Pole in his Hand, who just then was bawling out, Half an Hour after one a-Clock, and immediately a dirty Goose behind him made her Response, Quack, Quack. I could not forbear attending this grave Procession for the length of half a Street, with no small amazement to find the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... bargain seemed to me to be a poor one, for I had not yet viewed this decrepit newcomer or been refreshed with tales of his prowess. But Ma Pettengill knows men, and positively will not bubble except under circumstances that justify it, so I considered the matter worth a ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... Orpheus, Homer, have taught me harmony and rhythm. I do not look about me with Love's bandage blindfolding my eyes. I judge of all things coolly. The passions of youth never influence my admiration, and when I am as withered, decrepit, wrinkled, as Tithonus in his swaddling bands, my opinion will be still the same. But I forgive your incredulity and want of sympathy. In order to understand me fully, it is necessary that you should see Nyssia in the radiant brilliancy of her shining whiteness, free from jealous drapery, even as ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... portion of its equipment is its inexhaustible human labor supply. It was Big Jim who was sufficiently intelligent to keep demanding a new derrick. It was Big Jim who was adept in managing the decrepit machinery and so it was he who was sent to the danger spots, he having the keenest wits and the best knowledge of the ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigor. That trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the present, lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... meaning a little awry. Besides, I doubt if even the ground you assume is tenable. If a woman has lived long enough to be truly young herself, she won't find a man at forty either decrepit or grotesque. He can even make himself youthful to a ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... among refined people. Did I deserve to be lifted up to heaven and then dragged down to hell by you? Was it right for you to slander my flourishing and vigorous years and land me in the shadows and lassitude of decrepit old age? Give me some sign, however faint, I beg of you, that you have returned to life!" I vented my anger ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... regions of the Catskills, to graze upon the broad commons of the national capital. I was then the fortunate and happy lessee of an old place with an acre of ground attached, almost within the shadow of the dome of the Capitol. Behind a high but aged and decrepit board fence I indulged my rural and unclerical tastes. I could look up from my homely tasks and cast a potato almost in the midst of that cataract of marble steps that flows out of the north wing of the patriotic pile. Ah! when that creaking ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... tempters of which she was freed, in which she believed, and which were real to her. The wall through which they had come and departed was vague and in the darkness remote, but presently it dissolved again, and afar in the beckoning distance was one breathing a soul into decrepit rites. "Come unto me, all ye that sorrow and are heavy-laden," she heard him say; and, as with a great sob of joy she rose to that gracious summons, night seized her. When she awoke, a ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... "When these small parties entered the settlements where they had formerly lived," says Captain McCall, "general devastation was presented to view; their aged fathers and their youthful brothers had been murdered; their decrepit grandfathers were incarcerated in prisons where most of them had been suffered to perish in filth, famine, or disease; and their mothers, wives, sisters, and young children had been robbed, insulted, and abused, and were found by them in temporary huts more resembling ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... Readers and writers would then be succeeded by human beings. The golden ante-Cadmean age would come again. Literary sanctity having become a tradition, there would be an end of its pretentious counterfeits. The alphabet, decrepit with its long and vast labors, would at last be released. The whole army of writers would take their place among the curiosities of history. The Alexandrian thaumaturgists, the Byzantine historians, the scholastic dialecticians, the serial novelists, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... been a year asleep. As soon as the Nazarene saw this, rose to his feet as he had been a scald wolf or a cat-o'-mount[FN289] at bay and, taking the saloon key, left Ali Shar prostrate and ran off to rejoin his brother. And the cause of his so doing was that the Nazarene's brother was the same decrepit old man who purposed to buy Zumurrud for a thousand dinars, but she would none of him and jeered him in verse. He was an Unbeliever inwardly, though a Moslem outwardly, and had called himself Rashid al-Din;[FN290] and when ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... situation, managed to explain, between gasps of laughter, that "Hello, my Baby, Hello, my Honey" was in its dotage in the United States. Then the laughter became general, for all were more recent arrivals from America than I, and it was hard for them to understand how so elderly and decrepit a ditty could be unfamiliar to ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... back, and having carried him over, bade him get down, and for that end stooped, that he might get off with ease; but instead of doing so (which I laugh at every time I think of it), the old man, who to me appeared quite decrepit, threw his legs nimbly about my neck. He sat astride upon my shoulders, and held my throat so tight that I thought he would have strangled me, ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... curious expression that was half-fearful, half-triumphant. When she reached the closed stable door she opened it, plunged into the dark recess within, and reappeared, dragging forth by a wisp of his ragged mane—poor, decrepit old Blackbird. ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... of Philopoemen, thinking they had done a general good to Greece, by giving him the nurture of philosophy. And indeed all Greece (which looked upon him as a kind of latter birth brought forth, after so many noble leaders, in her decrepit age) loved him wonderfully; and, as his glory grew, increased his power. And one of the Romans, to praise him, calls him the last of the Greeks; as if after him Greece had produced no great man, nor who deserved ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... at the North London Hospital, Euston-square was his chief point of attraction, and when he was removed, it was always found necessary to break off the railings and take them away with him. This accounted for the decrepit condition of the fleur de lys that surround the inclosure, which was not, as generally supposed, the work of the university pupils residing in Gower-place. Perfect insensibility to pain supervened at the same ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... by the name of a parlour, was a dingy, stuffy apartment of the true Dull Street type. The paper was faded and torn, the ceiling was discoloured, the furniture was decrepit, the carpet was threadbare, and the cheap engraving on the wall, with its title, "As Happy as a King," seemed to brood over the ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... S(team) S(hip) Company, a monthly line established in 1852, mainly by the late Macgregor Laird. In 1869 Messieurs Elder, Dempster, and Co., of Glasgow, started the B(ritish) and A(frican) to divide the spoils. The junior numbers nineteen keel, including two being built. It could easily 'eat up' the decrepit senior, which is now known as the A(frican) S(tarvation) S(teamers); but this process would produce serious competition. Both lines sail from Liverpool on alternate Saturdays, and make Funchal, with their normal unpunctuality, between Fridays ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... space, reckoning that he tells them there is a bad Planet rules at that instant. They take great notice in a Morning at their first going out, who first appears in their sight: and if they see a White Man, or a big-bellied Woman, they hold it fortunate: and to see any decrepit ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... promptly and even proudly the girls, after reaching eighteen, and the boys twenty-one, had told him hereafter to place their wages to their own credit, and not to the parent's. They seemed to take a new lease on life. Decrepit, drawn-faced, hump-shouldered and dried up before their time, the few who reached the age when the law made them their own masters, looked not like men and women who stand on the threshold of life, but rather like over-worked middle-aged beings of ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... apparatus of death in requisition. Fearful as this elevated gallows appeared, and unique in its character, it was not more so than the finisher of the law who then generally officiated upon it. No decrepit wretch, no crime-hardened ruffian, no secret and mysterious personage, who was produced occasionally disguised and masked, plied his dreadful trade here. Who, think you, gentle reader—who now, perhaps, recoils from these unpleasant but truthful minutiae—officiated ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... thousands of Spaniards, Hollanders, Venetians, and Jews, and a great many aged, decrepit people were also there. "Pray, sir," said I, "what kind of men are these?" "They have all gain in view," said he. "At the lowest extremity, on one side, you will still see the Pope; also subduers of kingdoms ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... of her "contemptible estate" as a shepherd's daughter, and afterward, denying her father, calls him "Decrepit miser! base, ignoble wretch!" (Henry VI., Part 1, Act 1, Sc. 2, and Act 5, Sc. 4.) It is hard to believe that Shakespeare would have so frequently allowed his characters to express their contempt for members of the lower orders of society if he had not had some sympathy ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... I will explain the matter to you all, children, youths, grown-ups and old men, aye, even to the decrepit dotards. My master is mad, not as you are, but with another sort of madness, quite a new kind. The livelong day he looks open-mouthed towards heaven and never stops addressing Zeus. "Ah! Zeus," he cries, "what are ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... man." Sometimes he imitated her Egyptian accent and deprecated her country women, causing her to get angry and bid him begone. Then, instead of "marry me, O Fattumah," he would say, "O old woman and decrepit, fit only to carry wood to market." This would bring a torrent of angry words, but when they met again all was forgotten and the flirtations of ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... eyes of this man, decrepit at the age of forty-seven; a faint color flushed his flaccid cold cheeks, his ill-furnished mouth was half open, and on his blackened lips a sort of foam gathered, thick, and as white as chalk. This fury in such a helpless ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... licensed in 1670, was received with peculiar interest when separately published in 1681.[112] "If there be found in an author's book one sentence of a venturous edge, uttered in the height of zeal, and who knows whether it might not be the dictate of a divine spirit, yet not suiting every low decrepit humour of their own, they will not ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... is the lawful successor of the Prophet." A prudent explanation restored his tranquillity, and he passed to a more familiar topic of conversation. "What is your age?" said he to the cadi. "Fifty years." "It would be the age of my eldest son: you see me here," continued Timur, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arms has the Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Turan, and the Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always been the authors ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a rusty, black, decrepit-looking mare hitched to a lumber sleigh which they had just passed. Erik, ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... ask your pardon," cried Temperance, with a queer set of her lips. "Yes, Madam, you are; Edith is an old woman of forty, and I a decrepit creature of forty-five; but you are a giddy young thing of thirty-nine. I'll try to mind it, at least ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... Barnes tells his readers that Lancaster was at this time so old as to be nearly decrepit; and two years later, that he was "almost blind for age." He was exactly forty-one, having been born in 1287 (Inq. Tho. Com. Lane, 1 Edward the Third 1. 88), and 53 years had not elapsed since the marriage of his parents. We may well say, after Chancellor Oxenstiern, ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... afforded Banneker his chance was of the most unpromising. An old builder, something of a local character over in the Corlears Hook vicinity, had died. The Ledger, Mr. Greenough informed Banneker, in his dry, polite manner, wanted "a sufficient obit" of the deceased. Banneker went to the queer, decrepit frame cottage at the address given, and there found a group of old Sam Corpenshire's congeners, in solemn conclave over the dead. They welcomed the reporter, and gave him a ceremonial drink of whiskey, highly superior whiskey. They were glad ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... observations or tell credible tales to detect their artifice.'[46] The act of bewitching is defined to be 'a supernatural work contrived between a corporal old woman and a spiritual devil' ('Discoverie,' vi. 2). The method of initiation is, according to a writer on the subject, as follows: A decrepit, superannuated, old woman is tempted by a man in black to sign a contract to become his, both soul and body. On the conclusion of the agreement (about which there was much cheating and haggling), he gives her a piece of money, and causes her to write her ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... appearance of the other, which still retains its legibility although the t's have begun to lose their crossing, we can say that the one was a young man and the other was advanced in years without being positively decrepit." ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Mr. Gradgrind, a white-haired, decrepit old man, he forgot all the facts on which he had so depended, and tried for ever after to mingle his life's acts with Faith, ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... Knox, still minister of Edinburgh, and now in his fifty-ninth year, was seen riding home with a second wife, 'not like a prophet or old decrepit priest as he was,' said his Catholic adversaries, 'but with his bands of taffetie fastened with golden rings.' The lady for whom he put on this state was Margaret Stewart, the daughter of his friend Lord Ochiltree, and the same ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... ourselves. The newly born child sleeps most of its time, and seems to wake merely for the purpose of feeding. Very old persons sleep much of their time; in the natural progress towards death, the animal faculties are first extinguished; accordingly, when they begin to decline in decrepit old age, the periods of their intermissions are longer. The celebrated De Moivre, when eighty-three years of age, was awake only four hours out of the twenty-four; and Thomas Parr at last slept the greatest part of his time. An eye-witness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... selections from them on condition that the matter should be kept secret from outsiders. A day was appointed for visiting her, and on arriving we found her living in a comfortable log house, built by Inl[)i] himself, with her children and an ancient female relative, a decrepit old woman with snow-white hair and vacant countenance. This was the oldest woman of the tribe, and though now so feeble and childish, she had been a veritable savage in her young days, having carried a scalp in the scalp dance in the Creek war ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... which the remnant of the army escaped; with forty-one comrades, received the praise of General Eble who singled him out particularly. Returned to Wilna, as the only survivor of the corps after the death of Eble and in the beginning of the Restoration. Unable to read or write, deaf and decrepit, Gondrin forlornly left Paris which had treated him inhospitably, and returned to the village in Dauphine, where the mayor, Dr. Benassis, gave him work as a ditcher and continued to aid him in 1829. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... aged negro of my acquaintance comes to me one day, with the astounding information that he, and a number of equally decrepit and unserviceable slaves, have been killed and buried by his master. In other words, the owners of these useless helots have hoodwinked the slave emancipators by representing their decrepit human property as ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... those men on Pancho Villa's payroll, so admirably equipped and mounted, who only get paid in those pure silver pieces Villa coins at the Chihuahua mint? Bah! Barely two dozen half-naked mangy men, some of them riding decrepit mares with the coat nibbled off from neck to withers. Can the accounts given by the Government newspapers and by myself be really true and are these so-called revolutionists simply bandits grouped together, using the revolution ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... fortunes here. He created mergers here. He started consolidated companies here that in time fought their way into the appreciated valuations of the stock market. He became Canada's greatest adventurer in creating a sort of "wealth" from the merging of small, sometimes decrepit, concerns under a new name and new issues of stock; just as Mackenzie was our greatest adventurer in creating wealth from borrowed money. Beaverbrook worked mainly with small groups to whom he left the task of raising most of the capital. Thus his personal gains came neither from the ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... crackled cheerfully on the broad hearth of an old-fashioned fireplace in an old-fashioned public house in an old fashioned village, down in that part of the Old Dominion called the "Eastern Shore." A cat and three kittens basked in the warmth, and a decrepit yellow dog, lying full in the reflection of the blaze, wrinkled his black nose approvingly, as he turned his hind feet where his fore feet had been. Over the chimney hung several fine hams and pieces of dried beef. Apples were festooned along the ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... "a more noble, or a more tragical scene was never exhibited, than that of the march of the garrison of St. Philip's through the Spanish and French armies. It consisted of no more than six hundred old decrepit soldiers, two hundred seamen, one hundred and twenty-five of the royal artillery, twenty Corsicans, and twenty-five Greeks, Turks, Moors, Jews, &c. The two armies were drawn up in two lines, the battalions fronting each other, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the word, his usually upright figure seemed suddenly bowed and shrunken, he looked indeed a very grief-stricken, decrepit old man as he stood fumbling in the pockets of his shabby coat, whence he presently drew a letter that shook and rustled in his fingers as ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... 1801, reads that Robert Richard Randall's property is left to found: "An Asylum or Marine Hospital, to be called 'The Sailors' Snug Harbour,' for the purpose of maintaining aged, decrepit, worn-out sailors." ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... Eve, gray with the portent of coming snow, crept slowly over the old plantation of Brierwood, softening the outlines of a decrepit house still rearing its roof in massive dignity and a tumbledown barn flanked by barren fields. A quiet melancholy hovered about the old house as if it brooded over a host of bygone Yuletides alive with the shouts of merry negroes and the jingle of visiting sleighs—Yuletides ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... purification by means of air and light. In the said break was a low wall where coarse plants rooted, and atop of which lay some half-dozen ragged youths, outstretched upon their stomachs, playing cards. The least decrepit of the beggars, armed with Helen's largesse of copper coin, had joined them from beneath the portico. Gambling, seasoned by shouts, imprecations, blows, grew fast and furious. In the steep roadway on the right a dray, loaded with ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... The blood of the young, healthy and vigorous, was transferred into the old and infirm, by means of a delicate tube, placed in a vein opened for that purpose. The effect of this operation was surprising and important: aged and decrepit animals were soon observed to become more lively, and to move with greater ease and rapidity. By the indefatigable exertions of Lower, in England, of Dennis in France, and of Moulz, Hoffman, and others in Germany, this artificial mode of renovating the life and spirits was ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Republic. The Monroe Doctrine is based on patriotism and self-preservation, and the crisis which called it forth was of the gravest consequence to the American people. The Spanish empire in America had never been a menace to the United States. It was too decrepit to be dangerous. Conditions would have been very different with France, for instance, or Prussia, established as a great South American power. There was the strongest reason for believing that the ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... stretched in death on the spot where they had been drinking. He then caused the cremation of the bodies of the illustrious Krishna and Balarama and of the principal members of the Vrishni race. Then as he was journeying from Dwaraka with the women and children, the old and the decrepit—the remnants of the Yadu race—he was met on the way by a heavy calamity. He witnessed also the disgrace of his bow Gandiva and the unpropitiousness of his celestial weapons. Seeing all this, Arjuna became despondent and, pursuant to Vyasa's advice, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... give thought to money, but kept his in a basket suspended by a cord from the ceiling, wherefore all his workmen and friends could take what they needed without saying a word to him. He passed his old age most joyously, and, having become decrepit, he had to be succoured by Cosimo and by others of his friends, being no longer able to work. It is said that Cosimo, being at the point of death, recommended him to the care of his son Piero, who, as a most ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... There was Pango Pete, a nigger six foot tall, who couldn't write his name, but he was a seaman from his feet up; and a Dago named Pedro Pasqualai. These two were the kind that will choke you before they ask the time of night. Then there was Sullivan, old man Sullivan, a decrepit old codger who had sailed second mate all his life, and never got a first mate's berth because he couldn't master navigation. And there was Peters, a young fellow filled up with the romance and the glory of the life at sea—rot, as you and I know, but he was enthusiastic, and that ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... points, so to speak, were not her eyes, but her hands. They lay in her lap motionless, and yet they were extraordinarily alive. Even in that light their emaciated condition testified to her extreme age; but they were not decrepit, they seemed to glow with a steady light, an inward and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hereinbefore mentioned, is old and decrepit, unable to keep order in his classes, and therefore always carries with him a jumping rope, the handles of which he uses on the knuckles of his unruly pupils, while the rope itself brings to him recollections of his youthful days when it was used for the legitimate purpose ...
— Silver Links • Various
... of man's short life, infancy, childhood, maturity, and decrepit age, not ill represented by one of the ancient artists, shew the sad but not slow progress we make to this dark abode; while the last judgment, hell, and paradise inform us what events of the utmost consequence are to follow our journey. All this a modern traveller finds out to ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... a wide dark cave, through which one has to pass by a steep rocky descent till he arrives at a gloomy grove and an unnavigable lake called Avernus, from which such poisonous vapours rise as to kill birds flying over it. Yet over this lake the souls of the dead must pass. To assist them, an old decrepit, long-bearded fellow, the oft-heard of Charon, attends with a ferry-boat to carry them to the other side, at a fare not less ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... requires some little effort. Then Heine's notion, which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman could be redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all the disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It has no essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a fact which is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact. The condition of redemption is entirely arbitrary: it might as reasonably be that the Dutchman should find a ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... the station. The scene is laid in one of the towns of the Western section. Faces of passengers, restless, way-worn, sickly, are seen in the windows. The cars are over-crowded beyond all measure. There are many black-eyed children, with curly black locks, and also old people, decrepit with age. The railway platform is crowded with Jewish youths, with representatives of the Jewish community, and a mass of curious people who eagerly scan the newcomers. A large crowd of passengers emerge from the cars rapidly and in disorder. They are Jews deported ...
— The Shield • Various
... of this particular knot was facilitated by the fact that the clergyman was hale mentally but decrepit physically, and, as might be expected, resented the conclusion, long ago arrived at by his friends, that he was unfitted for work. He burgeoned with delight when a servant announced that two young people wanting to get married were waiting ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... town government, we started on our rounds. The first house was tightly closed, and no reply was made to our demands for entrance. The second was the same; one might imagine that it had been deserted for weeks. At the third, the door was opened, and within, an aged woman, ugly, bent, decrepit. Here we measured. The next house, and the next, and the next, were shut. And then another open house contained another veritable hag. Passing several other houses, tightly closed, we found a third old woman, and I saw that ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... of juvenile illusions. In parting, however, with what it derides as illusions, does not age part with the whole of joy and by far the most important element of wisdom? The world it so sagaciously aims to inaugurate, what is it but a stationary and decrepit world,—a world which would soon decay, and drop into the abyss of nothingness, were it not for the rejuvenating vitality poured into it by the youth it cynically despises? True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... the eager note in the old man's voice. Rather he took the question as an inquiry into the further marvels of his process. "Here," he continued, enthusiastically, "I'll prove that to you also. My dog Spot is around the place somewhere. And he is a decrepit old hound, blind, lame and toothless. You've probably seen him ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... stream is as satisfying to behold as a well-fed animal or a thrifty tree. One source of charm in the English landscape is the full, placid stream the season through; no desiccated watercourses will you see there, nor any feeble, decrepit brooks, hardly able to get ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... are a generous people, usually kind and affectionate to their aged, though instances to the contrary frequently occur. Among the E-yanktons, there was a man so feeble and decrepit from age as to be totally unable to take care of himself; not being able to walk, he occasioned great trouble. When the band went out hunting, he entreated the young men to drag him along, that he might not fall a prey to the Chippeways, or to a fate equally dreaded, cold ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... chance put an 'H' into its right place. Yet men see something in her that is totally inexplicable to us, and she seems to have a mysterious influence over all ages and all sorts. One of these infatuated noblemen is decrepit and twaddling; the other a stern, reserved man that up to forty years of age was supposed to be the very impersonation of common sense; and the third, young, clever, and handsome, a man that might marry half the nicest women in ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... the steed of state which King William bestrode, though old and decrepit, still adhered to a youthful habit of shying, or the procession might never have reached the MacDonalds. But, as the old grey mare approached the raving obstacle in her path, she swerved coquettishly and King William curvetted round his enemy with royal indifference. His subjects ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... in extenuation of this Act, that it was passed to put a stop to the very prevalent habit of emancipating old and decrepit Negroes after there was no more service in them. If this be true, it reveals a practice more ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... in the library, but it is at the bleak cost of making life a wistful transaction with foreigners. In such enforced aloofness Sarah Drew had come to him—strong, beautiful, young, good and vital, all that he was not—and had serenely befriended "the great Mr. Pope," whom she viewed as a queer decrepit little gentleman of whom within a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... was dazzlingly white, as though the snow lay deep upon it. Badshah halted among the trees, and the old elephants passed him and went on in the direction of the lake. Dermot noticed that they seemed to have suddenly grown feebler and more decrepit. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... tree, struck with a sort of leprosy, like all its species, appears much older, and of course has its tradition. They say that it grew from a green stake which the first land-surveyor planted there for one of his points of sight. John was reminded of it years after when he sat under the shade of the decrepit lime-tree in Freiburg and was told that it was originally a twig which the breathless and bloody messenger carried in his hand when he dropped exhausted in the square with the word "Victory!" on his lips, announcing thus the result of the glorious battle of Morat, where the Swiss in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in style and matter, which is most eagerly read. The simplest things in life should convince one. The novelist's hero is no longer the fine, handsome young fellow of twenty years ago. He is something between forty and fifty, if not deformed, at least decrepit with dissipations, and with the gift of fascination, whatever that may mean, in place of the simpler attributes of a few decades ago. And the heroine!—There is no more book-muslin and innocence. She has, as a rule, green eyes; she is middle-aged, and if she has not been married before, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with these Indians, to destroy such persons among them as become aged and decrepit. This practice they endeavour to vindicate from their mode of life: for they assert that those who are unable to procure the necessaries requisite for their existence, ought not live ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... brightness." A second appeared, and struck in: "You are so big, you keep the sun from us. We can't see for you, and we're so cold." Thereupon arose, on all sides, the most terrific uproar of laughter, from voices like those of children in volume, but scrannel and harsh as those of decrepit age, though, unfortunately, without its weakness. The whole pandemonium of fairy devils, of all varieties of fantastic ugliness, both in form and feature, and of all sizes from one to four feet, seemed to have suddenly assembled about me. At length, after a great babble of talk among themselves, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... an interview with her mistress, this decrepit specimen of human infirmity half closes the door against him and doddles back. A slight whispering, and Mrs. Swiggs is heard to say—"show him into the best parlor." And into the best parlor, and into the august presence of Mrs. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... deal about the Crambrys, for he passed their so-called habitation in going to one of his wood-lots. It was only a month before that he had found them all sitting outside their broken-down fence, surrounded by decrepit chairs, sofas, tables, bedsteads, bits of ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... summer camp at Sultanieh, are drawn from the life. Under the present Shah they have been shorn of a good deal of their former splendour. The Grand Vizier of the narrative, 'that notorious minister, decrepit in person, and nefarious in conduct,' 'a little old man, famous for a hard and unyielding nature,' was Mirza Sheffi who was appointed by Fath Ali Shah to succeed if Ibrahim, the minister to whom his uncle had owed his throne, and whom the ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... tenants at this time, the invalid old woman, and another, well-nigh as old but less decrepit, who had been engaged to attend upon her in her sickness. How she got the money to pay her no one knew, for her middle life and the first stage of old age had been marked by poverty and distress; but somehow money seems to have a natural affinity for old age. It grows upon old people, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... tropic jungle, Miss Drexel and Juanita, her Indian maid, led the way. Her brother, carrying the three rifles, brought up the rear, while in the middle Davies and Wemple struggled with Mrs. Morgan and the two decrepit steeds. One, a flea-bitten roan, groaned continually from the moment Mrs. Morgan's burden was put upon him till she was shifted to the other horse. And this other, a mangy sorrel, invariably lay down at the end of a quarter of ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... manner the Company got rid of all petty opponents, with the exception of two who continued the unequal contest. By the latter end of August the natives had all started for the interior, leaving behind only a few decrepit old men and women. The scene was now completely changed; a death-like stillness prevailed where but a few days before all was activity, bustle and animation. Two of my brother scribes were ordered to the interior; one[1] to the ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... wanted to play safe we'd both enter some home for aged and decrepit men and sit among the halt and blind and toothless until we became even as they. Rawlings' defaulter is encumbered, most disgracefully, with the usual blonde, in this case the lily-handed cashier in a motion picture shop; and a man of ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... and indirect murder should have been committed against defenceless women and children is a thing which I should have staked my head could never have happened in a war waged by the civilized English nation. And yet it happened. Laagers containing no one but women and children and decrepit old men, were fired upon with cannon and rifles in order to compel them to stop. I could append here hundreds of declarations in proof of what I say. I do not do so, as my object is not to write on this matter. ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... it was a thoroughly furious Numa who came unexpectedly upon the scent of man. Heretofore the lord of the jungle had disdained the unpalatable flesh of the despised man-thing. Such meat was only for the old, the toothless, and the decrepit who no longer could make their kills among the fleet-footed grass-eaters. Bara, the deer, Horta, the boar, and, best and wariest, Pacco, the zebra, were for the young, the strong, and the agile, but Numa was hungry-hungrier than he ever had been in ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and over one million exclusively in out-door labor. Again, wherever the free-white labor and small-farm system of growing cotton has been tried, it has invariably proved more productive than that of employing slaves. It can not be denied that, deducting the expense of maintaining decrepit and infant slaves, every field hand costs $20 per month, and German labor could be hired for less than this, the success of such labor in Texas fully establishing its superiority,—and Texas contains cotton and sugar land enough ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... common in France, Italy, and the Romish countries, and which seems to have been painfully common in England in the seventeenth century, when, by a mariage de convenance, a young girl is married up to a rich idiot or a decrepit old man. Such things are not comedies, but tragedies; subjects for pity and for silence, not for brutal ribaldry. Therefore the men who look on them in the light which the Stuart dramatists looked are not good men, and do no good service ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... heard much foolishness," said he, "but also some wisdom. And the greatest wisdom has come from the lips of my father yonder, Alp the old." He pointed to a decrepit figure, whose bowed head was hidden under a mass of white hair. "My father's eyes are blind with age," he continued, "but behind their darkness they see many things that we cannot see. They have seen that all these disasters which have lately come upon us have come out of the east. They see ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... turns him out into the night and the storm, they cannot help feeling that it is she, not he, who has ruined the home, and that the drunken vagabond, who has just made his endearments the cover of deception, is really the victim of a virago. And when he returns, old and decrepit, and, we might hope, purged of that fatal appetite which has worked all the woe, it is his old victim, the woman whose youth his evil habits ruined, and who, in consequence of those habits was driven into the power of the tormentor, Derrick von Beekman, who hands him 'the cup ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... continually into pitfalls or over unseen obstacles. Crossing the PARVIS of the cathedral, which I remembered, we plunged in silence into an obscure street near the river, and so narrow that the decrepit houses shut out almost all view of the sky. The gloom of our surroundings, no less than my ignorance of the errand on which we were bound, filled me with anxiety and foreboding. My companions keeping strict silence, however, and ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... out at the gate, which hung by one hinge to the gatepost, into the untidy back lane upon which one end of his rocky little farm abutted. Had he glanced back at the premises he would have seen a weed-grown, untidy yard surrounding the old house, with decrepit stables and other outbuildings in the rear, a garden which was almost a jungle now, although in the earlier spring it had given much promise of a summer harvest of vegetables. Poorly tilled fields behind the front premises terraced up the ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... his job, depended upon his employer getting a tiger. And, as the steamer was due in four days, there was no time to spare. From the director of the Singapore zoo he purchased for considerably above the market price, a decrepit and somewhat moth-eaten tiger of advanced years, which he had transported across the straits to Johore, whence it was conveyed by bullock cart to a spot in the edge of the jungle, a dozen miles outside the town, where it was turned loose in an enclosure of wire and bamboo hastily constructed ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... that accompany us through our course, and which necessarily follow our absence from the chief good. Doubtless there is not such a thing as grief and sorrow known there; nor is there such a thing as a pale face, a languid body, feeble joints, unable infancy, decrepit age, peccant humours, dolorous sickness, griping fears, consuming care, nor whatsoever deserveth the name of evil. Indeed, a gale of groans and sighs, a stream of tears accompanied us to the very gates, and there bid us farewell ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... convulsions, the decrepit old man fell back into a corner, his eyes glaring with the unmistakable gleam of insanity, and his ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... and important landing place. There was a big distinction between the dock and the wharf. The latter was the decrepit old wooden structure, torn and jarred by ice and storms, that stood at the foot of Main Street, where every one of the Old Boys had fished and fallen in and nearly drowned himself many a time. But the dock, as every one knew, was the fine new landing ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... pageant opened in July 1914. Once again the rulers were feasting and the workers at toil, but the scene was enlivened by the presence of the leaders of the Second International, a group of decrepit professorial old men, who waddled in in solemn procession carrying tomes full of international learning. They sat in a row between the rulers and the people, deep in study, spectacles on nose. The call to war was the signal for a dramatic appeal from the workers to these leaders, who refused to ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... the Christmas of 1906 he was laid up with a severe cold. But he was getting over that well, when, one Sunday, a broken man, almost decrepit, came stumbling to ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... parole—following close upon their capture, frequently upon the spot—allowed them to visit home, and sojourn awhile where were pleasanter pastures than at the front. Then the Rebels grew into the habit of paroling everybody that they could constrain into being a prisoner of war. Peaceable, unwarlike and decrepit citizens of Kentucky, East Tennessee, West Virginia, Missouri and Maryland were "captured" and paroled, and setoff against regular ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Protevangelium, Jacobi, and others: Joseph a decrepit old man, no longer to be thought of as a husband; the children attributed to him are of a former marriage. More especially it is not as a bride and wife that he receives Mary; he takes ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... appeared in all its childlike trust, originality, and humour. There was something touching and grotesque about it. We seem to see a child playing with the toys of age, his green hopes and fancies weaving themselves about an antique metaphysical monument, the sanctuary of a decrepit world. The structure of that monument was at first not affected, and even when it had been undermined and partially ruined, its style could not be transformed, but, clad in its northern ivy, it wore at once a new aspect. To ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... windowless, six-by-eight rooms, always a cheap, dirty calico curtain dividing the three-foot parlor in front from the five-foot bedroom behind, the former cluttered with a van-load of useless junk, dirty blankets, decrepit furniture, glittering gewgaws, a black baby squirming naked in a basket of rags with an Episcopal prayerbook under its pillow—relic of the old demon-scaring superstitions of Voodoo worship. Every inch of the walls was "decorated," ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... their grizzled fronts expressive of that ineffable peace found only in the faces of saints and donkeys. In the middle of the enclosure a rude windlass coiled with rope stood stretching forth a decrepit lever-arm. The whippletree, dangling from the end over the beaten circular track, seemed cracked with heat and age. The stout rope that stretched tautly from the coil passed over a wooden wheel, ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... do not, we at once see that in the non-ludicrous ones the unexpected state of feeling aroused, though wholly different in kind, is not less in quantity or intensity. Among incongruities that may excite anything but a laugh, Mr. Bain instances—"A decrepit man under a heavy burden, five loaves and two fishes among a multitude, and all unfitness and gross disproportion; an instrument out of tune, a fly in ointment, snow in May, Archimedes studying geometry in a siege, and all discordant things; a wolf ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... himself to this effect:—Sir, I am far from intending by this motion to fill the army with decrepit officers, or to obstruct in any manner the service of the publick; nor have I any other intention, than to secure to those whose years permit, and whose inclinations incite them to enter once more into the army, that preferment to which they have a claim, not only from their past services, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... the group, while extra-tribal cannibalism continued unabated. And within the tribe there is a continuance of this practice in the forms which do not interfere with the efficiency and cripple the activity of the group. That is, while cannibalism in general is prohibited, the eating of the decrepit, the aged, of invalids, of deformed children, and ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... future abode that his wife felt that he had indeed taken her at her word, and that they would scarcely have a place to lay their heads, much less to live in any proper sense; and when she stopped before the quaint and decrepit house without any front door; when she followed her husband up the forlorn stairway to what seemed a side entrance with its most dismal outlook, she believed that the time for fortitude had come, in bitter truth. The hall was dark to ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... arm and prepare ourselves to go with Mars and Bellona into the field, was our sport and pastime; coaches and caroches we left unto them for whom they were first invented, for ladies and gentlemen, and decrepit ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... stake. She has nerved the frail and shrinking heart of woman for high and holy deeds. The worn and weary have rested their fainting heads upon her bosom, and gathered strength from her words and courage from her counsels. She has been the staff of decrepit age and the joy of manhood in its strength. She has bent over the form of lovely childhood, and suffered it to have a place in the Redeemer's arms. She has stood by the bed of the dying, and unveiled the glories of eternal life, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... after all?" was on Chester's lips, but the sight of something, showing white beside the door in the lamplight which streamed out upon a small, decrepit porch, drove back ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... in the spring. She has been well trained, being the eldest girl, and Madame is a thrifty and excellent housekeeper. Then we all mend of youth. You will have a strong, healthy woman to care for you in your old age, instead of a decrepit body to be ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... development, through which the more highly developed species had long since passed on the way from the primitive state of man to their present state, makes a great, fundamental mistake, the same mistake which one would make in supposing that the pale and decrepit inmates of a city hospital or a country poorhouse represented the lower stage of development from which the strong and healthy men and women in the surrounding country had been evolved. Our evolutionists are in very much ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... foreign nobles. I have to present to the reader, here, the imbecile priestcraft of the illiterate monk, there, the dark superstition that still consulted the deities of the North by runes on the elm bark and adjurations of the dead. And in contrast to those pictures of a decrepit monarchy and a fated race, I have to bring forcibly before the reader the vigorous attributes of the coming conquerors,—the stern will and deep guile of the Norman chief—the comparative knowledge of the rising Norman Church—the nascent spirit of chivalry in the Norman ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not forget that among our brutal, yet human ancestors the struggle for life demanded the cruel and wanton exposure or slaughter of all weak and decrepit individuals, and that epidemic diseases, plagues, and pests ravaged the peoples without mercy. Of course our present civilization has put up a barrier against all this. Yet, for that very reason the blind ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... with every sort of old furniture, most of it decrepit, though for many of the articles dealers would have given a good price. But at dealers Mr. Potts drew the line; not one of them had ever set a foot upon that oaken stair. To the attics the place was filled with this furniture and other ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... this sly, old, almost decrepit man laughed outright. Then he looked severely at his old friend on the newel-post, and drawing himself up with some show of dignity, made ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... later Mary put on her last year's suit, now a little shabby, kissed the baby, importuned the beaming Lily to be careful of him, and drove to the train in one of the village livery stable's inconceivably decrepit coupes. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... all the marshes thereabout, was intersected at irregular intervals by decrepit lines of fence-railing, running down from solid ground to the water's edge, half a mile away. These divisions were necessary for various reasons. In duck season the hunters who came up from San Francisco used them both as guides and as property lines, each club shooting over only a ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... back on that desperate ride now with feelings akin to horror. Surrounded with murderous savages, with only a decrepit mule to ride and fourteen miles to go, it seemed impossible that I could get through safely. My companions said good-bye to me as though I were a scaffold victim about to be executed. But get through I did—how I do not know—and the chillingly weird war-calls of the Indians howling ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... hill a few steps before him, an old, decrepit woman, who hobbled along with great difficulty. As the Emperor approached her he inquired why, infirm as she was, and apparently so fatigued, she should attempt to travel so difficult ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... Tell her the man of years, upon whose gold Her husband young so much depends—now mark: The good old man, say, the decrepit gray-beard— Desired to see her. Tell her men of years Are childish, why should this one not be so? But still a call is little. Tell her this: It is almost a grave that she would visit, A grave just barely ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... closet that had been built in with boards behind the chimney. At first glance this held nothing but decrepit brooms, a battered spittoon, and a small pile of greasewood cut to fit the heater in the larger room; but Starr went in and flashed his light around the wall. He found a door at the farther end, and he knew it for a ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... felt myself continually thrown back upon the world, by the frigidity and pomp of the poor worms around me. The only being in the whole congregation who appeared thoroughly to feel the humble and prostrate piety of a true Christian was a poor decrepit old woman, bending under the weight of years and infirmities. She bore the traces of something better than abject poverty. The lingerings of decent pride were visible in her appearance. Her dress, though humble in the extreme, was scrupulously clean. Some trivial respect, too, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... This decrepit woman was there like a suggestion of catastrophe, and represented the horrid fish's tail with which the allegorical geniuses of Greece have terminated their chimeras and sirens, whose figures, like all passions, are so ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the building, we were struck with the aspect of four or five hideous old wretches, on whose decrepit forms time and tattooing seemed to have obliterated every trace of humanity. Owing to the continued operation of this latter process, which only terminates among the warriors of the island after all the figures stretched upon their limbs in youth have been blended together—an effect, however, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... her a very old man hobbled in. He was crippled, and leaned full weight with both hands on his stick. He seemed asthmatic too, and coughed and panted woefully. A withered, decrepit old ghoul. The child stood up when he came in and touched her neck where the marriage symbol lay. Then I knew he ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... and no one more discreet {or} more temperate. But who is it that's coming this way? Heyday! surely this is Gnatho, the Captain's Parasite; he's bringing along with him the damsel as a present to her. Heavens! How beautiful! No wonder if I make but a sorry figure here to-day with this decrepit Eunuch of mine. She surpasses Thais ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... of a whole people does not spread in vain throughout an Assembly, even throughout the most decrepit. On the decisive ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... were in the vicinity. The Indians immediately, in the greatest apparent consternation, packed up their things and fled. They retreated farther into the wilderness in the most precipitate confusion. Women carried their children. Men took upon their shoulders their aged and decrepit mothers. One very heavy Indian, who was sick, was carried upon a bier. Mrs. Rowlandson endeavored to count the Indians, but they were in such a tumultuous throng, hurrying through the forest, that she was quite unable to ascertain their numbers. It will be remembered that ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... to a few bathrooms a Continental hotelkeeper has a decrepit elevator he makes more noise over it than we do over a Pompeian palmroom or an Etruscan roofgarden; he hangs a sign above his front door testifying to his magnificent enterprise in this regard. The Continental may be a born hotelkeeper, as has been frequently ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... jilt, and owns no more the folly; shall this be called a heavenly conjunction? Were I in height of youth, as now I am, forced by my parents, obliged by interest and honour, to marry the old, deformed, diseased, decrepit Count Anthonio, whose person, qualities and principles I loathe, and rather than suffer him to consummate his nuptials, suppose I should (as sure I should) kill myself, it were blasphemy to lay ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... but by tippling as often as they can fall into company in the day, and conclude with downright drunkenness at night. These gentlemen never know the satisfaction of youth, but skip the years of manhood, and are decrepit soon after they are of age. I was godfather to one of these old fellows. He is now three-and-thirty, which is the grand climacteric of a young drunkard. I went to visit the wretch this morning, with no other purpose but to rally him under the pain ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... we will never be without little toddlers and prattlers. I am fifty-three now, Mr. Flanders. We are reasonably sure to have twenty-two additions to the family. The pitiful part of getting old and decrepit lies in the fact that one's children grow up, get married, leave home—or die—and that is just what we are trying to guard against. On my seventy-fifth birthday, there will be a fine, healthy two-year-old babe crying and goo-gooing ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... whom he could question of his love, and perhaps bribe to his service. As with this resolution he was hovering round the mansion, he beheld, stealing from a small door in one of the low wings of the house, a bended and decrepit form: it supported its steps upon a staff; and, as now entering the garden, it stooped by the side of a fountain to cull flowers and herbs by the light of the moon, the Moor almost started to behold a countenance which resembled that of some ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the square of pavement, keeping close to the dark wall and avoiding the streak of light that fell on the flagstones from a window in the opposite house. Seen from that height he was of course fore-shortened and probably looked more shambling and decrepit than he was. He picked his way along with exaggerated care and looked like a silly old cat crossing a wet street. When he reached the gate that led into an alley way between two buildings, he felt about for the latch, opened the door a mere crack, and then ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... the superb traps were decrepit old dowagers wagging their feeble heads, wondering, perhaps, how much longer their millions would keep them alive. Sometimes their young heirs were with them, patient and placid. Others were pitifully ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... year past had been decrepit, died, broken-hearted, when the first news came of Austrian victories. He was sadly missed in his accustomed haunts. A younger man succeeded him as caretaker of St. Mark's, and Andrea, not old enough to be drafted for service at the front, ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... himself and his guests. There used to be one such turret near the summit of Campden Hill; but that familiar imposture was rased a year or two ago, no one protesting. Fuit the frantic factitious sentimentalism for ruins. On the other hand, the sentiment for them is as strong as ever it was. Decrepit Carisbrooke and its rivals annually tighten their ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... is a decrepit world, where nature takes a hundred years to move a foot of solid land. Men and animals go about in flocks. Originality is ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... the tree were then distributed. None of the children were omitted; some went home so loaded that they could hardly carry all, and even many of the oldest, decrepit Indians who could not be present, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 4, April, 1889 • Various
... is this, and much more in the Veda. He is supreme in the hymns of many poets, and may have been so in the prayers addressed to him by many of the ancient septs or village communities in India. Compared with him the other gods are said to be decrepit old men. Heaven, the old Heaven or Dyaus, formerly the father of all the gods, nay the father of Indra himself, bows before him, and the Earth trembles at his approach. Yet Indra never commanded the permanent allegiance of ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... thirty feet above its back door, looked in this setting for all the world like an Alpine chalet, lacking only stones on the roof to complete the picture. I took a kodak shot at this, also at a group of tousle-headed children at the door of a decrepit shanty built entirely within a crevice of the rock—their Hibernian mother, with one hand holding an apron over her head, and the other shielding her eyes, shrilly crying to a neighboring cliff-dweller: ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... have; though they may seem to you inadequate, though they may seem to the world antiquated, and decrepit, try them. They need not depart from us, these masses, to seek spiritual food, they know not where, if we have but faith. Let us give them what we have; the organization of the Church of England, and the teaching ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... will be the old age of this government, if it is thus early decrepit!" Such was the remark of Fauchet, the French minister at Philadelphia, in that famous despatch to his government, which was intercepted by one of our cruisers in the year 1794. This curious memorial may be found ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... not strictly a prisoner at the Bar T ranch-house, for this had been found impracticable from a number of standpoints. He had the run of the ranch, an old, decrepit cow pony to ride, and could go in any direction he chose under the supervision of a cowboy who carried a Winchester and was known to have impaled flies on ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... hands. The mercantile instinct of the nation was flattered with the prospect of gain, the martial quality of its patrician and of its plebeian blood was eager to confront danger, the great Protestant mutiny. Against a decrepit superstition in combination with an aggressive tyranny, all impelled the best energies of the English people against Spain, as the embodiment of all which was odious and menacing to them, and with which they felt that the life and death struggle ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... exactly remarking the pith of his last observation; "from bonds quasi- terrestrial and quasi-celestial. The full-formed limbs of the present age, running with quick streams of generous blood, will no longer bear the ligatures which past times have woven for the decrepit. Look down upon that multitude, Mackinnon; they shall all be free." And then, still clutching him by the arm, and still standing at the top of those stairs, she gave forth her prophecy with the fury of ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... Really this juvenile appearance is a species of second childhood; for, on the shores of the Great Bear Lake, four centuries are necessary for the growth of a trunk not as thick as a man's wrist. The further north the more lamentably decrepit becomes the appearance of these woodlands, until, presently, their sordidness is veiled by thick growths of gray lichens—the "caribou moss," as it is called—which clothe the trunks and hang down ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education |
