"Gabble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eight av us to howld um whilst Burrage toied um hand an' fut, an' phwin we'd dhrug um into th' shtore we seed 'twuz Creed hissilf. Twuz two days befoor th' sheriff come fer um, an' in th' mane toime he'd gabble an' yell about th' greener comin' afther um, an' how he come out av th' ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... slumber? Ma'am, are you going to leave us?" he asked, seeing that Mrs. Cranceford was on her feet. "But of course you have duties to look after, even though you might not be glad to escape an old man's gabble. I call it gabble, but I know it to be wisdom. But I beg pardon for ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... argue the case, for he was like the rest of the tribe, always ready to fight with words, not acts; but in the midst of his gabble Joan interrupted ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... season began, I ceased fishing and took to the gun, for now three or four kinds of duck made their appearance, and one moonlight night an immense number alighted in the creek just below the hut, and kept up an incessant gabble and quacking till sunrise. ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... It has not seldom occurred to me (noting how in our national legislature everything runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, Indian Councils, Palavers, and the like, there is scarce a village which has not its factories of this description driven by milk-and-water power. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... she abominates. She thinks Turner might approve of Suarez in his black and white stripes, but the Guanaco crater reminds her of Gustave Dore, who always exaggerated his tone values. I learn that sort of gabble by heart. Jennie's a good sort, ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... characters of the play from a French novel, based on an Italian plot, and wove around the story a lot of glittering talk to please the lords and ladies who listened to the silly gabble of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... labours, the less dross and rubbish we have.... His tenaciousness of what is grand and lofty, is more praiseworthy than his delight in what is low and disagreeable. His pedantry accords better with didactic pomp than with illiterate and vulgar gabble; his learning engrafted on romantic tradition or classical history, looks like genius.... His tragedy of the Fall of Sejanus, in particular, is an admirable piece of ancient mosaic.... The depth of knowledge and gravity of expression sustain one another throughout: the poet has worked ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... too,' said Robert, 'for they do gabble it fast. I heard a fellow chattering in the steerage, coming up the river yesterday morning: by the way, he and Andy had struck up a friendship: and such bowing as they had to each ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... much at schools, and was really an able and spirited teacher, liking the occupation; and laying hold of the first book in her way, she requested Conrade to read. He obeyed, but in such a detestable gabble that she looked up appealingly to Fanny, who suggested, "My dear, you can read better than that." He read four lines, not badly, but then broke off, "Mamma, are not we to have ponies? Coombe heard of a pony this morning; it is to be seen at the 'Jolly Mariner,' and he will take us ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... called the obsequious and the sullen? Well, one had them, the types themselves, detected in the fact; and one had them together. Obsequiousness ran out of the first like wine out of a bottle, sullenness congested in the second. Obsequiousness was all smiles; he ran to catch your eye, he loved to gabble; and he had about a dozen words of beach English, and an eighth-of-an-inch veneer of Christianity. Sullens was industrious; a big down-looking bee. When he was spoken to, he answered with a black look and a shrug of one shoulder, ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... in the shambles." Such a soul has GAMBETTA. He is all language. If you were to cut him up in little bits and put each atom under a microscope, you would find in every molecule the text of some proclamation. The genii of syntax and prosody are his guardian angels, and the love of "gabble" is the be-all and the end-all of his political existence. He loves not GARIBALDI. He would have done violence to his grandmother rather than consent to the invitation of the Italian liberator. For short, he calls him "GARRY." Standing in front of the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... des Arts with a pretty compliment to Alice's executive energy, and added 'that it was one of the rare soirees of the season.' He must have been drunk when he wrote it. I played badly—I never can play when they gabble. It was as garrulous as a fish market in front. Enfin! It was over and we telegraphed his reverence the result; from a money standpoint it was a ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... were the only people in Homeburg who had lunch at noon, and as early as 1900 they ate it from the bare table. She was the only woman in Homeburg who could "look in" on an afternoon gabble of any kind for a few minutes and get away with it without insulting the hostess. When she shook hands with you, you always grabbed in the wrong place, no matter how much thought you put into it, and ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... by a gander and his flock of geese that stood round him; shook their wings and set up their goose-gabble. It was day then, although there was still a star in the sky. He threw furze-roots where there was a glow, and made a fire blaze up again. Then the dogs of the town came down to look at him, and ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... bestowed upon Leidesdorff street between California and Pine streets, where the "mudhens"—those bedraggled, wretched women speculators who still waited hungrily for scanty crumbs from Fortune's table—chatted with broken-down and shabby men in endless reminiscent gabble of great fortunes they had ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... now he shot his angry questions, like bullets, from the fireside. "Haven't they done anything yet, eh? How much longer do you reckon that roomful of old women will gabble in Richmond? Why, we might as well put a flock of sheep to decide ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... sympathy she felt it a distinct relief. She had not the remotest idea that she was become the centre of an awe-stricken sympathy, that her little world had fallen back and stood gaping at her and hers as they might at one abnormally stricken: if their gabble ceased very suddenly and no more idlers came in for a chat by the fireside she was not the one to fret; she had always plenty to do without idle women hindering her, and, now the girl had her sick fit on her, all the work fell ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... Friars and Jacobins, who are the two hemispheres of the Christian world; by whose gyronomonic circumbilvaginations, as by two celivagous filopendulums, all the autonomatic metagrobolism of the Romish Church, when tottering and emblustricated with the gibble-gabble gibberish of this odious error and heresy, is homocentrically poised. But what harm, in the devil's name, have these poor devils the Capuchins and Minims done unto him? Are not these beggarly devils sufficiently wretched already? Who can imagine that these poor snakes, the very extracts of ichthyophagy, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... little desultory talk and seeking of places, and then the four elder children, standing round the table, read a chapter, verse for verse. Then followed the recitation of the catechism in that queer, mechanical gabble that Bessie recollected so well. "If you stop to think you are sure to break down," was still the warning. After that Jack said the collect and epistle for the day, and Willie and Tom said the gospel, and the lesser ones said psalms and hymns ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... rattle and clash of the dice-box in the distant parlor, reached his ear amidst the laughter and gabble of the common room. The night was a hard one ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Joyce, you really are maddening; you know perfectly well that I have to revise and retype an entire short story which in itself is a nerve-racking job, and all you do is to burble and sing, and gabble. Can't ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... was utterly ignorant what the gabble was about, except that Katharine had been in very odd company, and done very strange things with those boys, and she gave a melancholy little sound in the pause; but Kate, taking breath, ran on ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Cap'n, eagerly, forgetting for the moment the presence of Constable Nute, "those wimmen might gabble a little at you and make threats and things like that—but—but—there isn't anything they can do, you understand!" He winked at Mr. Parrott. "You know ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... make his Chinese slave with the greatest industry and sets them an admirable example himself. A rather desperate lot are these servants, although most of them are professed Roman Catholics, and can gabble French learned years ago at Monseigneur F——'s. And that reminds me: no one has thought of the gallant bishop during the past few days. That shows how indifferent the abnormal makes one; the French Legation has attempted once to get into communication with the distant cathedral and failed. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... that back I went As far as Lateran and Trent, To prove that they who damned us then Ought now in turn be damned again? The silent victim still to sit Of Grattan's fire and Canning's wit, To hear even noisy Mathew gabble on, Nor mention once the Whore of Babylon! Oh! 'tis too much—who now will be The Nightman of No-Popery? What Courtier, Saint or even Bishop Such learned filth will ever fish up? If there among our ranks be one To take my place, 'tis thou, Sir John; Thou who like me art dubbed Right Hon. Like me ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... heard of Euripides' death, and an impulse, part sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the "house friendly to Euripides." The revellers retire abashed before Balaustion; he alone remains. From the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage of his opening words, he quickly passes to a more or less serious explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... was the only thing that gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action. She "babbled of green fields" and Highland glens; she prophesied "the drawing of the claymore," with a lofty disregard ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dumb, your whole being dwarfed yet transfigured; and in the glory of that moment you can even forget the gabble of the lady tourist alongside of you who, after searching her soul for the right words, comes right out and gives the Grand Canon her cordial indorsement. She pronounces it to be just perfectly lovely! But I said at the outset I was not going to undertake ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... Pompeian idlers scribbled on the walls, while Vesuvius was brooding its fiery conspiracy under their feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers' unseemly gabble in Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we are so constantly reminded how the little things of life assert their place alongside the great ones, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... rude to gabble!" she told herself resentfully. "And I know some French meself. 'J'ai, tu as, il a, nous sommes, vous etes, ils sont.' Listen at that, now!" She felt a momentary thrill of triumph in her achievement, but it quickly faded away, as further efforts showed how scanty was the knowledge upon ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hardly out of his mouth, when there flew such a volley of chalk stones as made my grandfather, though none had touched him, fall upon the path where he stood, and begin to gabble out what he could call to mind of the prayers for the dying. He was in the midst of it, when he heard a scream come from his companion as froze the very marrow in his bones. He looked up, thinkin' his hour ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... laid aside her wraps and drew a deep chair to the fire. "I move we get thawed out while we gabble," she proposed, with her deep, husky chuckle. "I'm so frozen that it'll take a week of Sundays to shed my icicles. This zero weather isn't particularly inspiring after the balmy breezes of ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... must gabble a bit, now I know that I haven't lost an eye. You see, Fraser, the beast, although he was only a ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... was a folly. The obscure hamlets of New England, which have within thirty years become beautiful towns, with lyceums, libraries, and schools, are the most striking examples on earth of the arrant folly of this gabble of 'capital as opposed to labor.' In the South, however, the old theory is held as firmly as in the days when John Randolph prophesied Northern insurrections of starving factory-slaves against manufacturing lords, and—as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... city, ere the tower Obstruct Heav'n-tow'rs, and in derision sets Upon their tongue a various spirit to rase Quite out their native language, and instead To sow a jangling noise of words unknown. Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud Among the builders; each to other calls Not understood, till hoarse, and all in rage, As mock'd, they storm: great laughter was in Heaven, And looking down, to see the hubbub strange And hear the din; thus was the building left Ridiculous, ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... now and then to buy fruit, or curios, of the merchants in the open booths, sitting cross-legged and solemn over their long pipes, and seeming so utterly indifferent to purchasers, until they were in danger of losing them, when they woke to eager gesticulation and gabble. ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... see now and then wretched election meetings, as of late in New York, where a worn-out FERNANDO WOOD and others like him gabble as much treason as they dare. It is all played out—Mozart, Tammany, and all the trash. Rummy, frowsy candidates, treating Five-Point graduates, and shoulder-hitting bravos yelling at the polls, are beginning to be disgusting and anti-national elements. Their very existence is an insult to these ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Are the folks who come With their owlish strictures— Telling why they're bum. Of all lines of babble This one has the call: Picture gallery gabble ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... Question, which appeared anonymously in the Fortnightly Review[31] in the winter of 1893-4, and of which he told me he was the writer, he had given a character sketch of what he called 'The Rhetoricians.' Their performances since the Union were summarised in the phrase 'a century of unremitting gabble,' and he regarded it as a sad commentary on Irish life that such brilliant talents so largely ran ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... stock o' them two fellers so as to gabble about 'em when their backs is turned," said John Milton gloomily to himself, with a dismal premonition of the prolonged tea-table gossip he would be obliged ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... waist and piled them in that. She sat on, silently regarding him. For a few minutes she honestly believed that he was a genuine specimen of the "little people" who were said to make green Erin their favorite home. But when he began to gabble in a hoarse, excited tone of how he had long been expecting this "find"; how he had watched his opportunity when all the household should be absent that he might disobey and use the explosive that would lessen his labor so greatly, she ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... his established custom, Herr Carovius failed to show the slightest interest in her gabble; at least he made no concessions to her. Nor did he fuss and fume; he gazed into space, and seemed to be thinking about many serious things all at the same time. His silence made Philippina raging mad. She jumped up and left without saying good-bye to him, slamming ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... together on both sides of the altar, looked as though the service was of the slightest interest and moment. Indeed, this was hardly to be wondered at; for the priest, so far as I could understand his gabble, took the larger portion for read, after muttering the first words of the rubric. A little carven image of an acolyte—a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... of Legion-Club. Such assemblies, you might swear, Meet when butchers bait a bear; Such a noise, and such haranguing, When a brother thief is hanging: Such a rout and such a rabble Run to hear Jack-pudden gabble; Such a crowd their ordure throws On a ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... after the turn of the road. Then he gave it up, and went on to the store, where he had an errand. He resolved to see Adoniram, and try to influence him to take the money for his blind son. He could not believe that he would not do so. Long before he reached the store he could hear the gabble of excited voices, and loud peals of rough laughter. "What's going on?" he thought. When he entered, he saw Simon Basset backed up against a counter, at bay, as it were, before a great throng of village men and boys. Basset was deathly white through his grime and ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... him. Having an object in view, of course Gaston made himself as charming as possible, and assisted Madame to arrange her house, told her about the people who called on her, and made cynical remarks about them, all of which amused Madame Midas mightily. She grew weary of the inane gabble and narrow understandings of people, and it was quite a relief for her to turn to Vandeloup, with his keen tongue and clever brains. Gaston was not a charitable talker—few really clever talkers are—but he saw through everyone with the uttermost ease and summed them up in a sharp incisive ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... inside his own brainpan. If he couldn't, he wouldn't amount to shucks in his trade. Give him a good, live-action story to write for an edition going to press in about nine minutes, and the rattles and slams of half a dozen typewriting machines, and the blattings of a pestered city editor, and the gabble of a couple of copy boys at his elbow, and all the rest of it won't worry him. He may not think he hears it, but he does, only instead of being distracting it is stimulating. It's all a part of the mechanism of the shop, helping him along unconsciously ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... thereof, and stumbled sundry times against the seats at the side. Babies, vociferous babies, are playing with their mothers' noses, or squalling in appalling concert. If you stir, your foot treads heavily upon the bulbous toes of some recumbent passenger; if you essay to sleep, the gabble of those around you, or the noisy gurgle of a lock, arouses you to consciousness; and then, if you are of that large class of persons in whom the old Adam is not entirely crucified, then you swear. Have you any desire for literary entertainment? Approach the table. There ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... latter now sniffed and nodded triumphantly at the others—particularly Amelia Stokes's childish old mother. She, half hidden in the frills of a great mourning-bonnet and the folds of a great black shawl, kept repeating, in a sharp little gabble, like a child's: "I smell the tea, 'Melia—I do, I smell it. Yes, I do—I told ye so. I tell ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... soubrette trilling snatches of her topical song as she creamed off her make-up, came to them through the sulky gloom of the corridor. Behind the closed door of Miss De Voe's dressing room, the gabble of the pink satin ponies was like hash in the chopping. Overhead, moving scenery created a remote sort of thunder. She stood looking up at him, her young ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... have given you a hard task. We can all gabble the Lord's Prayer, but how few have ever prayed it! But at least try, my poor soul, and I will set you an example. I will pray for my brother Robinson and my brother Hawes, and I shall pray for them all the more warmly that ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... think I'll see an' get into the Toon Cooncil some o' thae days," says Sandy to me the ither forenicht. "Me an' some o' the rest o' the chaps have been haein' a bit o' an argeyment i' the washin'-house this nicht or twa back, an' I tell you, I can gabble awa' aboot public questions as weel's some o' them i' the Cooncil. I ga'e them a bit screed on the watter question on Setarday nicht that garred them a' gape; an' Dauvit Kenawee said there an' then that I shud see an' get a haud o' the Ward Committee an' get a chance o' pettin' ...
— My Man Sandy • J. B. Salmond
... knew not what to say. Life at Bloomington supplied no parallel to the rapidity of existence in New York that evening. She was aware of statements being made in language which rang familiarly in her ears, but they had no more coherence in her clogged understanding than the gabble of dementia. ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... It isn't he who tells them what their illness is; it's they who tell him. They dispute about the medical treatment that's best for them, and the one thing they are never tired of doing is talking about their symptoms. It was an old man's gabble that kept me late to-day. However, the Squire, as they call him in these parts, is a patient with a long purse; I am ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... gabble away full tilt for an hour on this subject, unconscious that I had taken the measure of him, and was grinning broadly to myself. Then I diverted him by inquiring how long since the wire fence on our right had been ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... gabbling as fast as 'e could gabble, 'here's five or six shillings. If the other one comes and won't go away tell 'er I've gone to the Pagoda Music-'all and you'll take 'er to me, keep 'er out all the evening some'ow, if you can, if she comes back too soon ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... It was playing it too low down. She cut out poor dear Edward from sheer vanity; she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile spirit of district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst she was Edward's mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite him to his wife? She would gabble on to Leonora about forgiveness—treating the subject from the bright, American point of view. And Leonora would treat her like the whore she was. Once she said to Florence ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... Shakspeare, he said, "If the man would have come to me, I would have endeavoured to endow his purposes with words; for as it is, he doth gabble monstrously[15]."' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... "I can read and write all I've any need for. But as for you, with all your gabble and talk ... I'm ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... which rose in the centre of the footlights. The Yiddish prompter did not wait till the players 'dried up'; it was his role to read the whole play ahead of them. 'Then you are the woman who murdered my mother,' he would gabble. And the actor, hearing, invented immediately the fit attitude and emphasis, spinning out with elocutionary slowness and passion the raw material supplied to him. No mechanical crossing and recrossing the stage, no punctilious tuition by your stage-manager—all ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... Tsar' and the 'Angliskie Tsar,' and kept repeating the Russian word for defeat. The 'Angliskie Tsar' I recognised, of course, as the King of England, but my brain was too sick and dull to read any further meaning into the man's reiterated gabble. I grew so ill just then that I had to give up the struggle against fever, and make my way as best I could towards the nearest point where nursing and doctoring could be had. It was one evening, in a lonely rest-hut ...
— When William Came • Saki
... judging from the inside which other people have not—whereas you have really less opportunity because your horizon is far more limited because you have only seen it from the inside. You are rather in the position of the valet. No gossip and gabble of yours about braces and sock-suspenders will make your hero less a hero: you will only establish your title to be considered an unperceptive and low-minded creature among the only people whose opinion is ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "With gossip and gabble is built neither house nor stable!" said the Pig. "What can you do to help build ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... had everything to sell, bright beads and looking-glasses and little lacquered trays, coloured boxes, red and green and yellow, lace and silk and cloths of every colour, purple and crimson and gold. From all these men there rose a deafening gabble. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... all a-jangle from trail-strain and the depressing atmosphere of the Watts ranch, it seemed to Patty she must shriek aloud if the woman persisted in her ceaseless gabble. ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... advance was that he was one of the first (Lamb himself is, in England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of criticism which are ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, "Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you"? Yet ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... having teased his sister for a long time in vain, to play out of doors with him, the spoiled boy hissed at her, and said, "You are an ugly old cat!" Then slamming the door after him, he went into the barn-yard, where the screaming of the pigs, the gabble of the geese, and the clucking of the hens, soon proclaimed that he was venting his ill-temper on the dumb creatures who had their home there. Poor Charlie! the indulgence of his mother, and the almost ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... replied. "But you think I came here for solitude! SOLITUDE!" he repeated, with a laugh. "Why, I hold daily conversations with any blessed thing in this house, from the veranda to the chimney-stack, with any stick of furniture, from the footstool to the towel-horse. I get more out of it than the gabble at the Club. You look surprised. Listen! I took this thing up in my leisure hours in the Department. I had read much about the conversation of animals. I argued that if animals conversed, why shouldn't inanimate things communicate with each other? You cannot ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... the Barracks, around the corner, through the cloistered walk, came Captain Lemuel, whistling. He was in good spirits; ready to join his "Squad" beside the fountain and have an evening's "gabble" with the youngsters. They had been abnormally good that day. Wholly obedient to his restrictions in the length of their rides, eager to improve in their shooting—which was so far removed from "sharp"; and in every respect ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... into soliloquy; "or patients, either. A rich man who took to the profession simply for the love of it, can't complain on that score. But to have an interloping she-doctor take a family I've attended ten years, out of my hands, and to hear the hodge-podge gabble about physiological laws, and woman's rights, and no taxation without representation, they learn ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... time when they separated jerkily and became the hazy but definable figures of men in rough seaman's clothes. Johnny had never heard Breton French before; in his dazed condition the apparently insane gabble might well have been the tongue of another world and gave him little assurance. He hurt so badly and so generally that he could not have determined that he was lying down save for a view of white clouds ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... fast at this point, both at home and abroad. In one of his gossipy, confidential letters Fisher Ames remarked that Hammond was a most "petulant, impudent" man, habitually railing against the conduct of our government "with a gabble that his feelings render doubly unintelligible." But Pinckney, our representative in England, was equally undiplomatic. He was "sour and also Gallican"; although calm in manner, "he had prejudices, and unless a man has a mind ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... salt wind blew, a-yearn to drive me to the shore's edge and whirl me over! How fresh and tameless it beats against me yet, blowing the cobwebs from my brain as that real breeze outside the pier could never do! When my monitory friends gabble of change of air I inhale that wind and am strong. For the child is of the elements, elemental, and the man of the complexities, complex. And so that good salt wind blows across my childhood still, though it cannot sweep away the mist that ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... moving with any deliberation. These were men seen generally alone, or at most in pairs. They were quiet, waxy pale, dressed always neatly in soft black hat, white shirt, long black coat, and varnished boots. In the face of a general gabble they seemed to remain indifferently silent, self-contained and aloof. To occasional salutations they responded ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... 'em, pay their keep, But gabble's the short cut to ruin; It's gratis, (gals half-price,) but cheap At no rate, ef it henders doin'; Ther' 's nothin' wuss, 'less 't is to set A martyr-prem'um upon jawrin': Teapots git dangerous, ef you shet Their lids down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... French. He sat in the crowded court room, very weary and bored, listening to the unceasing, explosive French that now one official and now another uttered. It was just so much gabble to Ah Cho, and he marvelled at the stupidity of the Frenchmen who took so long to find out the murderer of Chung Ga, and who did not find him at all. The five hundred coolies on the plantation knew that Ah San had done the killing, and here was Ah San not even arrested. It ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... walk. Do him good: and Miller can fetch the luggage afterwards. You do as I tell you. Take the Times. Sit down in that chair with your face to the light and read me the leading articles and the rest of the news on Page 7. Don't gabble: read distinctly if you can—you're supposed to be an ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... forward my purposes as far as they well could. If they would speak slowly and distinctly I might understand them well enough, being perfectly familiar with the written language, and knowing the principles of its pronunciation; but, in their customary rapid utterance, it sounds like a string of mere gabble. When left to myself, therefore, I got into great difficulties. . . . . It gives a taciturn personage like myself a new conception as to the value of speech, even to him, when he finds himself unable ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Strange it is that the so-called 'poetical' trick of confusedly heaping words together regardless of meaning, should so bewilder men and deprive them of all wise and sober judgment! By my faith! ... I would as soon listen to the gabble of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddle, such mawkish sentiment, such turgid ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... closed the door, and Nan saw then that there were at least twenty girls in the room. Some had joined the procession from other corridors. Now they all began to gabble at once, and Amelia pounded frantically ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... with them that enlivens and intensifies them all. The plot is not intricate, but there is a plot—good deal more, perhaps, than is generally noticed, and more than Miss Austen herself sometimes gave, as, for instance, in Mansfield Park. It is even rather artfully worked out—the selfish gabble of John Thorpe, who may look to superficial observers like a mere outsider, playing an important part twice in the evolution. There is not lavish but amply sufficient description and scenery—the Bath vignettes, especially the Beechencliff prospect; ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... on the point of running together. There is a great family of African dialects in which a principal sound, or the chief sound of a leading word, appears in all the words of a sentence, from no grammatical reason at all, but to satisfy a sweetish ear. It is like the charming gabble of children, who love to follow the first key that the tongue strikes. Mr. Grout[L] and other missionaries note examples of this: Abantu bake bonke abakoluayo ba hlala ba de ba be ba quedile, is a sentence to illustrate this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... which last the very worst, in their opinions, were their parents, guardians, and masters. "The character of Dick," said Hodgkinson more than once to this writer, "is not overcharged." Our youngsters were quite pat at stage gabble, and ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... original idea was that several Acts should be kept by each undergraduate; for, to keep up the number (as it seemed), each student had to gabble through a ridiculous form "Si quaestiones tuae falsae sint, Cadit Quaestio:—sed quaestiones tuae falsae sunt, Ergo valent Consequentia et Argumentum." I have forgotten time and place when ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... wind was rising, and the waves of the noble Tagus began to be crested with foam. I told the boy that it was scarcely possible for the boat to carry so much sail without upsetting, upon which he laughed, and began to gabble in a most incoherent manner. He had the most harsh and rapid articulation that has ever come under my observation in any human being; it was the scream of the hyena blended with the bark of the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... on the little stage amid a universal gabble which made it impossible for anything save pantomime to be intelligible beyond the footlights. Star after star, whose services had cost $1,000 each for one hour, appeared without commanding the slightest attention. ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... face is Louis. Pierre tries to make conversation in our own language to entertain us. "Are you to Australie going?" he asks. We tell him we are going first to Egypt. "Monter au chameau!" he cries excitedly, going off into a gabble of French and beseeching us to take him with us as "boy." We tell him that he is too small and that it costs much money. "Have you money—English?" he asks. He is very much interested when we show him half a crown and explain that it is equal to three francs of his own ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... bein' found dead in 'is bed with 'is 'ands a-clutchin' a pack o' cards. An' the ace o' spades—that's death—was turned uppermost. So they goes chatterin' an' chitterin' as 'ow the old chap 'ad been playin' cards wi' the devil, an' got a bad end. But Miss Tranter, she don't listen to maids' gabble,—she's doin' well, devil or no devil—an' if any one was to talk to 'er 'bout ghosteses an' sich-like, she'd wallop 'em out of 'er bar with a broom! Ay, that she would! She's a powerful strong woman Miss Tranter, an' many's the larker what's felt 'er 'and on 'is collar a-chuckin' 'im out o' the ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Earl of Chatham:—'This surely is a sufficient answer to the feudal gabble of a man who is every day lessening that splendour of character which once illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and afterwards inflamed it; and for whom it will be happy if the nation shall at last dismiss ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the air for a quarter of an hour's spell and made their announcement, and then the copper helmets were clapped into place again, and once more like a pair of uncouth sea monsters they slowly and clumsily faded away into the depths. A gabble of excited Italian kept pace to the turning of the air-pumps, and of that language Kettle knew barely a score of words. Practically these people might have weaved any kind of plot noisily and under his very nose without ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... him, of course, they would use a different scrambler circuit than the one which was plugged into his own unit, but he would be able to hear the gabble of voices, even if he couldn't ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... schoolroom: it was really an effort for me to answer him; I felt as if I wanted only to be let alone, and I realised, without being able to control it, that my voice was very irritable as I said briefly, "One has got to be silent when you begin to gabble." ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... it excels the most outrageous pranks of the alliterative age. It is called, "Green-Room Gossip; or, Gravity Gallinipt; A Gallimaufry got up to guile Gymnastical and Gyneocratic Governments; Gathered and Garnished by Gridiron Gabble, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... bodily into half a quarter of it—would be swallowed up like a mouthful, and never seen again! Castle Warlock was twice as old—that was something! but why had not Lady Joan told him hundreds of stories about Cairncarque, instead of letting him gabble on about their little place? But she could not love her castle as he did his, for she had no such father in it! That must be what made the difference! That was why she did not care to talk about it! Was he actually ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... about a dozen yards from the bridge. A door stood open and a light showed in it, and from within came the sound of voices.... Peter had a sense of hearing like a wild animal, and he could detect even from the confused gabble ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... offer. While at the feast the party sit, And wine provokes the flow of wit, It is announced that at the gate Two men, in haste that cannot wait, Would see the bard. He leaves the table, No loss at all to 'ts noisy gabble. The men were Leda's twins, who knew What to a poet's praise was due, And, thanking, paid him by foretelling The downfall of the wrestler's dwelling. From which ill-fated pile, indeed, No sooner was the poet freed, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... time to thoroughly convince Buckhurst of my ability to gabble platitude. My desire that he should view me as ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... gown flying behind him and rustling against the pew doors, mount the pulpit like a conqueror ascending his triumphal car; then, sinking on the velvet cushion in an attitude of studied grace, remain in silent prostration for a certain time; then mutter over a Collect, and gabble through the Lord's Prayer, rise, draw off one bright lavender glove, to give the congregation the benefit of his sparkling rings, lightly pass his fingers through his well-curled hair, flourish a cambric handkerchief, ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning,[387-96] but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race, Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... rot you do gabble, Murray!" suddenly cried Alan Hawke, dropping a double barrier of the newest Times, as he prepared to leave the clubroom in disgust. "Hugh Johnstone was only called down to Calcutta on some important financial business some days ago, and he ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means,—and finally, as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the Common Law ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... understands me, and necessarily understands me—I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops—and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him.... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... reaching to the most acute notes. Leaping up to the very highest branches of the trees they began to shower down upon us broken twigs, leaves, nuts and other fruits. They seemed to be holding a meeting overhead at which each one—and they were a multitude—tried to gabble out a speech and to make himself heard ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... eats a lot, Mister Greene. Melindy says there's one on 'em struts jes' like you, 'n' makes as much gabble." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... always charming, generally insincere. She went to Kensington for her religion and to Mayfair for her morals; accepted her literature from Mudie's and her art from the Grosvenor Gallery; and could and would gabble philanthropy, philosophy, and politics with equal fluency at every five-o'clock tea-table she visited. Her ideas could always be guaranteed as the very latest, and her opinion as that of the person to whom she was talking. Asked by a famous novelist one afternoon, at the Pioneer Club, to give ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... brains dulled by the slowly acquired habit of not thinking, do wrong to torture children with these awful themes. Eternity, Heaven, Hell are meaningless words to us. We repeat them, as we gabble our prayers, telling our smug, self-satisfied selves that we are miserable sinners. But to the child, the "intelligent stranger" in the land, seeking to know, they are fearful realities. If you doubt ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... trifles had always been a source of infinite refreshment, was talking of things which he, after a solid year of monotonous warfare far from home, knew nothing. He cared to know less. He wanted the old exchange of personalities, the dear domestic gabble. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... however, that we should have two parties established upon the principles of a religious opposition to each other; it would be the worst of evils, and yet the times appear to threaten something of the sort. There is the gabble of 'the Church in danger,' the menacing and sullen disposition of the Dissenters, all armed with new power, and the restless and increasing turbulence of the Catholics, all hating one another, and the elements of discord stirred up first by ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... pushed his reserve into the breach and when his gabble-gear was again disengaged resumed ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... I'm glad to know one person in the country who doesn't gabble his head off. You haven't answered any of my questions, and you've made me feel as if you'd found a dangerous, wild woman that morning. It isn't very flattering, but I ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... that at the best are very second-rate eloquence, and at the worst are respect destroying, mind destroying gabble, there are various forms of "ethical" teaching, advocated and practised in America and in the elementary schools of this country. For example, a story of an edifying sort is told to the children, and comments are ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... wondering about that Lonesome Man and what the trees are thinking. Don't you feel how still it is? It's disrespectful to gabble before your betters." He felt it and said it without affectation, but as usual his mood of wandering thought failed to ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... first outbreak, and through Normando's gabble came the judge's voice calling for an interpreter. There was no need for the crier to demand silence; every ear was strained for ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... courtesy and frankness. Dignified, but reasonably familiar; tenacious when sure of his position, but not hard to persuade or to convince in a cause having merit, I have good reason to be incredulous when I hear persons gabble about the unwillingness of President Wilson to seek counsel or accept advice. For a really great man who must be measurably conscious of his own intellectual power, he has repeatedly done both things in an astonishing ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... liked of the Church and the dignitaries thereof. They go about setting men by the ears, bringing down to the minds of the commoner sort high matters that are not meet for such to handle, and inciting them to chatter and gabble over holy things in unseemly wise. Whereso they preach, 'tis said, the very women will leave their distaffs, and begin to talk of sacred matter—most unbecoming and scandalous it is! I avise you, my son, to have none ado with such, and to keep to the wholesome direction of your own priest, ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... they shall laugh or weep! A great people, once the noblest, the cleverest in the world, repeating the same day, at the same hour, in all the salons, and at all the crossways in the empire, the same imbecile gabble engendered the evening before in the mire of the boulevards. I tell you? Monsieur, it is humiliating that all Europe, once jealous of us, should now shrug her shoulders in our faces.—Besides, it is fatal even for Paris, which, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Not a bit like it was in the old days before I rose to being the chief glory of Calderside. Conversation was one-sided then, and all on your side instead of mine. 'Here again, Martlow,' you'd say, and then they'd gabble the evidence, and you'd say 'fourteen days' or 'twenty-one days,' if you'd got up peevish and that's all there was to our friendly intercourse. This time, I make no doubt you'll be asking me to stay at the Towers to-night. And," he went on blandly, enjoying ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... shrill ringing of a bell, the sound of feet and the gabble of a phonographic message. The man in yellow ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells |
