"Livered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kind of a pardner that 'ar yaller-livered Mayfield would make up on that box, partik'ly ez I heard before we started that he'd requested the kimpany's agent in Sacramento to select a driver ez didn't cuss, smoke, or drink. He ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... not meddle with your secrets—did not touch your plunder. I owed you nothing. Offal that you are! to me you owed drink, and meat, and good fellowship. I gave you mirth, and I gave you Law; and in return ye laid a plot amongst you to get rid of me;—how, ye white-livered scoundrels? Oho! not by those fists, and knives, and bludgeons. All your pigeon breasts clubbed together had not manhood for that. But to palm off upon me some dastardly deed of your own; by snares and scraps of false evidence—false oaths, too, no doubt—to smuggle ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... honour, we are bound to stick to our word; and, hark ye, you dirty one-eyed scoundrel, if you don't immadiately make way for these leedies, and this lily-livered young jontleman who's crying so, the Meejor here and I will lug out and force you." And so saying, he drew his great sword and made a pass at Mr. Sicklop; which that gentleman avoided, and which caused him and his ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... enough to make soap, Dorcas didn't.... Then there was Delia Weeks, from the lower corner.... She didn't live long.... There was some thin' wrong with Delia.... She was one o' the thin-blooded, white-livered kind.... You couldn't get her warm, no matter how hard you tried. ... She'd set over a roarin' fire in the cook-stove even in the prickliest o' the dog-days. ... The mill-folks used to say the Whittens burnt more cut-roun's 'n' stickens 'n any three fam'lies in the village. ... Well, after Delia ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "Silence! ye milk-livered slave!" cried the young laird. "Do ye pretend to bear the name o' Scott, and yet tremble like an ash leaf at the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... but if you get that in your mind how can you fight?" grandfather demanded. "Why, if any Hussar had spoken of funerals we'd called him white-livered, that's what we would! We cheered till we was hoarse; we danced and hugged one another; we rattled our sabres in our scabbards; we sang rip-roaring death-or-glory songs. When you're going to war you want to sing and shout. That's the way ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... "...dirty-livered Jew..." striking in the breast, and, as Frankl fell, he gave him one other in the temple, with "Down, down to hell, and sye I sent thee thither"; and to dead O'Hara near he gave one in the cheek, with "Go up, thou bald-head, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... him. I'll tell him to come in and get you. I'll show him the way in, you white-livered cur!" bullied the cattleman, giving way to ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... fool, his death would not save me!" Count Hannibal answered coolly. "If it would, he would die! But it will not; and we must even do again as we have done. I have spared him—he's a white-livered hound!—both once and twice, and we must go to the end with it since no better can be! I have thought it out, and it must be. Only see you, old dog, that I have the dagger hid in the splint where I can reach it. ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... Star of the Morning—one breath of whose nostrils would wither me into nonentity. So I presumed to stand up and face him, who had, in his time, scattered the hosts of heaven! If it were not for those cursed, white-livered things (angels) that stood in the way, he would swoop down and destroy me in ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... opportunity for what? To renew his old life and habits? No, no! The horrors of his recent imprisonment and escape were still too fresh in his memory; he was not safe yet. Then he wondered if he had not grown spiritless and pigeon-livered in his solitude and loneliness. The next day he searched for her with his glass, and saw her playing with one of the children on the beach,—a very picture of child or nymphlike innocence. Perhaps it was because she was not "that kind of girl" that she had attracted him. He laughed bitterly. ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... your life a burden to you, if I were! I'd learn you to ill-use a woman! I'd give it you, you white-livered dotipole [cowardly simpleton] of a Pharisee! ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... after a moment; "How dreadful does that name sound upon your lips!"—"Ha! Do you call your own cowardice God?" He raises against her his maddened hand: "Ortrud!..."—"Do you threaten me? Threaten a woman?" she sneers, unmoved; "Oh, lily-livered! Had you been equally bold in threatening him who now sends us forth to our miserable doom, full easily might you have earned victory in place of shame. Ha! He who should manfully stand up to the encounter with him would ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... niggers' heads with their white-livered eyes Glaring in fiery horror through the smoke, And monstrous dragons stained with bloody dyes, And comelier forms; but all ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... death alive! Connor, have you your seven sinsis about you? Faith, that's good; as if it was a sin to knock such a white-livered Judas upon the head! Sin!—oh hell resave the morsel o' sin in that but the contrairy. Sure its only sarvin' honest people right, to knock such a desaiver on the head. If he had parjured himself for sake of the truth, or to assist ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... spitefully ejecting a wad of tobacco from his mouth and swearing in an undertone about "white-livered Greasers." He cocked his red eye ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... growled Dan'l, with a low chuckling noise that sounded something like the slow turning of a weak watchman's rattle; and then muttering something about white-livered he subsided into his corner, and solaced ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... very sure of one thing, my friend," the duke observed. "I shall never give Lorance de Montluc to a white-livered flincher." ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... to the point, were unsuccessful. A mob is not an orderly body, and a drunken mob is hard to manage. General charges were freely made without much point. One cried out, because I refused to drink with them: "This should hang him; he is too white-livered to take a dram with gentlemen, let him swing." "Yes," shouted another; "he is a cursed Yankee teetotaler, hang him." In a quiet way I showed them that this was not the indictment, and that hanging would be ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... a white-livered scoundrel. He's a type of your Northern gentlemen. A Southern man would starve rather than act so pusillanimously. Of course I'm not going to talk of family secrets, or say anything not befitting a high-toned gentleman, but I taught that snob how ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... if I didn't believe that there was something more in you than texts and litanies and the Athanasian creed, I'll be hanged if I'd ever have let you look twice at Edith. That girl has got blood in her veins, David; she's not to be thrown away on any lantern-jawed, white-livered doctor of souls, I ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... to rue this day,' roared he, nearly choking in his wrath; 'you dog, you white-livered cur!' but Amys only smiled, and bade ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... black curs go," exclaimed the Professor as he polished his blue spectacles and mopped his face. "They are a white-livered lot of sneaks. Look! There she is, creeping off to the left. If we run round that ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... part, such a white-livered, baby-faced chap as you are would have been better off at your mother's apron strings, than coming so far from home ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... would, and good luck if you'd git plumb drownded, you white-livered son of misery. Whatever in Gawd A'mighty's world you was borned for certainly is more'n I can tell—and I your Maw at that, that orto know ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... is worth more than a Human's life, though your company's enemy, that's for you to settle as you can when the time comes you'll have to. I don't ask any favors. But if you got anny desency left in you through working for that fish-livered company of bondholders coming out here to stomp us farmers into the dirt, you will call this bizness quits. I aint in no shape to fight ditches no more. You have put me where I be, and the less said on both sides the better, it looks to me. If ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... a bad woman." There followed a coarse and vivid description of her badness and the manner of it. "That kinder thing no man can let pass by in his wife. I found her"—again the rude details of his discovery—"an' I found him, an' I let him go fer the white-livered coward he was, but her I killed. I shot her dead after she'd said her prayers an' asked God's mercy on her soul. Then I walked off, but they kotched me an' I was tried. They didn't swing me. Out in them parts they knowed I was in my rights; so the boys held, but 'twas ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... "I know I'm white-livered," I said with a species of laugh. "I never crowd and stare when somebody is hurt in the street. I ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... there's a difference, lad," Cross pointed out, setting down the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we are ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... man at the bottom of all this trouble," our host had been remarking, one second earlier. "The niggers know too much; and where did they get their rifles? People at Rozenboom's believe some black-livered traitor has been stirring up the Matabele for weeks and weeks. An enemy of Rhodes's, of course, jealous of our advance; a French agent, perhaps; but more likely one of these confounded Transvaal Dutchmen. Depend upon ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... his vassal; History holds her iron stylus as his scribe; Lachesis awaits his word to close or to suspend her fatal shears;—but the moment his vote is cast, he becomes the serf of circumstance, at the mercy of the white-livered representative's cowardice, or the venal one's itching palm. Our only safety, then, is in the aggregate fidelity to personal rectitude, which may lessen the chances of representative dishonesty, or, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... educational in character, he is frequently allured into a relapse. If a prisoner endeavours to behave himself in gaol and keep aloof from evil contagion, he is bullied by his fellow-prisoners, and even his keepers regard him with suspicion. The one twit him with being a white-livered coward, the other consider him to be either a sneak or a "deep fellow." He is almost sure to fall and identify himself with the ranks of crime. An instance that the writer has personal knowledge of is that of a man, passionate in nature, ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... fancied themselves masters of all the wealth of both Indies may easily be imagined. The Directors, in their fury, lost all self command, and, in their official letters, railed at the betrayers of Scotland, the white-livered deserters. The truth is that those who used these hard words were far more deserving of blame than the wretches whom they had sent to destruction, and whom they now reviled for not staying to be utterly destroyed. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... white-livered, Martin!" sneered Norton. "You may get some cold steel from your own countrymen for uttering such sentiments. My information is all right, it comes from his lordship himself. Washington is too dangerous to leave longer alone; should ...
— Then Marched the Brave • Harriet T. Comstock
... stamp out any upraisings in the start, now that it's likely to be a staying on, 'stead of a visit. When I select a teacher," Jude was following his guest to the outer door, "I ain't going to take up with no white-livered infant. See ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... Orangemen, because he was promise-bound and sober; but when one of the enemy, a boon companion on any other day, sought him out in the stable yard and, with the light of devilment in his eyes, walked up holding out a flask of whiskey and said: "Hartigan! Ye white-livered, weak-need papist, ye're not man enough to take a pull at that, an' tip the hat aff of me head!" Hartigan's resolutions melted like wax before the flare of his anger. Seizing the flask, he took a mouthful of the liquor and spurted it into the face of the tormentor. The ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... those chicken-livered black-hided cowards laughing to themselves about the way they fooled vessels with ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... word that perhaps he had been wrong. With all a stupid boy's slowness, I said nothing; and he had not the courage to carry reparation further. All that was fifty years ago, and it burns me now as though it were yesterday. What lily-livered curs those boys must have been not to have told the truth!—at any rate as far as I was concerned. I remember their names well, and almost wish to ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... seen thee pass on without a word, not so much as a momentary knitting of thy fist When ignorance has waxed proud, and put thee to the mock, thou hast sat meek, and uttered never a word. It must needs be thou art pigeon-livered and lack gall! There is not in thee the swagger, the rustle, the braggadocio of a true swashbuckler ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... lily-livered; seldom he witnessed what others died under; he intended nothing further then;—many men who faint at sight of blood can probe a soul to its utmost gasp. Now he motioned, and they paused. Then others lifted the woman and held her beside him, yet a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Un was possessed for the river and a lifebelt. So were the other three. The signs were responsible. Permitted, a ship's lifebelt was a subterfuge of the cowardly, white-livered skunks who were afraid of a little water; forbidden, a ship's lifebelt took on the qualities of enemy's property—to be reconnoitred, assaulted, captured and turned to ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... he said, with the utmost apparent sincerity. "Think of the disgrace! It would be in all the papers that Professor Scotch, a white-livered Northerner, after insulting Colonel La Salle Vallier and presenting his card, had taken to his heels in the most cowardly fashion, and had fled from the city without giving the colonel the satisfaction that is due from one gentleman to another. ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... Dolphin. "You're a cock-tail. In your old age you've grown white-livered. I guess, Garstang, you'd better retire, and leave those to carry out the work who don't know ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... t'ye, Joel for a lily-livered dog!" growled a great, bony fellow, "Here's good an island ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... That he still lived.... And queer how little then He seemed to care that Dick.... perhaps 't was pluck That hardened him—a man among the men— Perhaps.... Yet, only think things out a bit, And he was rabbit-livered, blue with funk! And he'd liked Dick ... and yet when Dick was hit He hadn't turned a hair. The meanest skunk He should have thought would feel it when his mate Was blown to smithereens—Dick, proud as punch, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... those words, you white-livered frog-spawn, with a speck in the middle for the black heart of you! You're going? Well, here's the bones of my fist and the toe of my boot, ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... never heard anybody stand up and call Harry white-livered, when yuh come t' that," Pink cut in tartly. "Anyway, you're a blame fool. If she was a little white-winged angel, yuh wouldn't stand no kind uh show; and I tell yuh why. She's got a little tin god that she says prayers ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... "Thou white-livered [our ancestors believed literally that cowards had white livers] dolt!" cried Dr Thorpe sharply, and took the matchlock out of his hands. "Go behind for ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... it isn't. For I'm the government in this instance. I'm standing for Uncle Sam. That's what I meant when I took those ten per cent. contracts. I'm too old to go out and fight his enemies abroad, but I can stay behind and watch for yellow-livered buzzards such as you. Call that business, do you? Fattening your dividends by sending our boys up against the Prussian guns in junky motor-tanks covered with tin armor! Bah! Your ethics need chloride ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... have the life of the man who split upon me. That's my maxim, and pass me the liquor—You wouldn't turn on a man. I know you. You're an honest feller, and will stand by a feller, and have looked death in the face like a man. But as for that lily-livered sneak—that poor lyin', swindlin', cringin' cur of a Clavering—who stands in my shoes—stands in my shoes, hang him! I'll make him pull my boots off and clean 'em, I will. Ha, ha!" Here he burst out into a wild laugh, at which Strong got up and put away ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cast in opposition to the will of the majority meant nothing; his voice raised in opposition meant much. For very soon the avowed pacifists and the secret protagonists of Kultur, the blood-eyed anarchists and the lily-livered dissenters, the conscientious objectors and the conscienceless I.W.W. group, saw in him a buttress upon which to stay their cause. The lone wolf wasn't a lone wolf any longer—he had a pack to rally about him, yelping approval of his every word. Day by day he ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... on the table and exploded. "Then sit here, damn ye! But why the hell should any one want to make friends with a white-livered pup like you? I thought you was Jack Beaudry's son, but I'll niver believe it. Jack didn't sit on a padded chair and talk about law and order. By God, no! He went out with a six-gun and made them. No gamer, whiter man ever strapped a forty-four to his hip. He niver talked ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... not much to tell, but we are to be partners once and for all. See, my beauty. He was a kite-livered captain. There was gold on board. We mutinied and put him and four others—their livers were like his own— in a boat with provisions plenty. Then we sailed for Boston. We never thought the crew of skulkers would reach land, but by God they ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "that was Monsieur's reason for coming to Azay-le-Roi! And she won't have him! All women are fools, and these great ladies seem to be the biggest fools of all. She will not find his equal among the white-livered aristocrats who swarm around her. I wish I could revenge Monsieur for this," he said, savagely, and jumping on his horse he ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... she cried, "what do I want with that! God in heaven, are you utterly devoid of all sensibility, all heart? Or are you afraid—afraid even yet, oh, very chicken-livered lover—that behind the beauty of Naples you may find the filth? It is not so, Dickie. It is not so, I tell you.—Look at me. What would you have more? Surely, for any man, my love ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... I have observed these three swashers. I am boy to them all three: but all they three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for, indeed, three such antics do not amount to a man. For Bardolph,—he is white-livered, and red-faced; by the means whereof 'a faces it out, but fights not. For Pistol,—he hath a killing tongue, and a quiet sword; by the means whereof 'a breaks words, and keeps whole weapons. For Nym,—he ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... under his eyebrows. "He's all in, but he's got to make it," he said. "I've been that way myself—and made it. What I can do, a horse can do. Come on, you yella-livered bonehead!" ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... his misdeed. For he was always most Irish when most moved. "I reckon," he went on, and the rolling intonation fell from his tongue like a faint breath from the green isle itself, "I reckon I did it just to show my friends what a measly, coyote, white-livered, tackey, ornery, spavined, colicky, mangy, blitherin' sort of a beast I am. Sure, now, Judge, I just wanted everybody to know what a gee-whillikined damn fool I can be if I try. And they know, now. Oh, yes, they ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... canvas. As for the cutter, she ran before it for New Britain, and brought up at Matupi in Blanche Bay, two hundred miles away, where old Horn knew there was a white settlement of Germans—his own kidney. He was a white-livered old swine, but a good sailor-man—as far as any man who says ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... knows our weak-kneed, white-livered bourgeois too well to be taken in by it. The League talks and Bismarck is silent. Oh, if I had a majority in the Chamber, as they have, I'd leave him to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... adventure, Aigres undertakes it very readily, and is accompanied by a knight named Acars, who has charge of a casket of jewels destined for the princess as a wedding-gift. Young Aigres encounters and kills the lions singlehanded, and the lily-livered and faithless Acars envies him the glory of his exploit. On their way back to Loquiferne with the Princess Melia, as they pass near a deep well Acars purposely allows the casket of jewels to fall into it and pretends to be distracted ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... had been received from New York announcing that a few miserable men, the remains of the colony, had arrived in the Hudson. Grief, dismay, and rage seized the nation. The directors in their rage called the colonists white-livered deserters. Accurate accounts brought the realization of the truth that hundreds of families, once in comparative opulence, were now reduced almost to beggary, and the flower of the nation had either ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... ROMANOFF stoop to mere cowardly cant? Forbid it traditions of Muscovite pride! An Autocrat's place is the Conqueror's car, But he who that chariot in triumph would ride, Must not earn a name as the White-livered CZAR! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... began to twist his head towel around his nose. With feeblest protest Isuke saw him take the torch and disappear into the passage. Soon his voice was heard. "Isuke! Isuke! Is he milk livered? How about the gold and silver? Would Isuke abandon it?" Isuke would not. In a trice he was on hands and knees, to rejoin his master who was roaring with laughter. "Gold and silver may be here," ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... out with an oath and a thud. "Hush it, you white-livered swine! Hush it, or by—" His hand went behind him ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the miscreant cry and idiot laugh, withdrew to sigh his last breath in foreign climes. The public is as envious and ungrateful as it is ignorant, stupid, and pigeon-livered— ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... looked very good. The courses appeared in portions, one for each apostle: and these being presented to the Pope, by Cardinals upon their knees, were by him handed to the Thirteen. The manner in which Judas grew more white-livered over his victuals, and languished, with his head on one side, as if he had no appetite, defies all description. Peter was a good, sound, old man, and went in, as the saying is, 'to win;' eating everything that was given him (he got the best: being first in the row) and saying ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... "Who's afraid, Black Cat? Only white-livered cowards fear the Sioux! Surely no Mandane brave fears ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... nothing strange in him. Any low hound will sell out to save his hide. No, Dan, I mean the other. I mean the old man. He's the one who used to run the blockade off Mobile, and a whiter-livered, more contemptible old grandmother I never hope to see anywhere, no, never! Yet not a month ago, the day of that Cimatario scrimmage, I found him on the battlefield, and he had been wounded. But he didn't seem to know it. He didn't even seem to know ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... a-going to cash in. Savvy? You're a-going to hop off. An' first you gotta hear why. 'Tain't for the stuff. Naw! I hooked it off'n you; you hooked it off'n me; now I got it again. That's all square.... No, 'tain't that grudge, you green-livered whelp of a cross-bred, still-born slut! No! It's becuz you laid the heft o' your dirty little finger onto my girlie. 'N' ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... know the eleventh commandment you white-livered cowards, who think you are lost when there is no leader to put himself at your head? Do you not know the eleventh commandment, saying that he who trusts in God and fights well will overpower his enemies? But you will never ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... you," she said, and banged the door in his face. "And don't tell master," she bawled after him, "else he'll be fainting again, drat him for a lily-livered duck!" ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... benefit of the cook I informed him that Scotty was a damned liar; that it was I who had been with him; that he ran like a white-livered cur under fire from his cookhouse and didn't stop until he had reached the wagon lines; that he was there without being relieved and that he would shortly ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... master says, don't 'ee?" said Ted Flaggan, who viewed the infidelity and cowardice of the interpreter with supreme disgust, as he seized him by the nape of the neck and thrust him towards the door. "Git out, ye white-livered spalpeen, or I'll multiply every bone in yer ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... cloak, leave the room, and enter the carriage; but he still hesitated. An anxiety, such as he had never known before, had crept over him; and, what had never before happened to him, his heart beat with fear. "That was just wanting to me," he murmured. "I have become a white-livered coward, whose legs are trembling, and whose heart is throbbing! What am I afraid of, then? Is that wrong which I am about to do? My heart has never acted thus even in the storm of battle. What does it mean? Bah! it is folly; no attention should be paid ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... night before the crime Booth found on whom he could rely. John Surratt was sent northward by his mother on Thursday. Sam Arnold and McLaughlin, each of whom was to kill a cabinet officer, grew pigeon-livered and ran away. Harold true to his partiality, lingered around Booth to the end; Atzerott went so far as to take his knife and pistol to Kirkwood's, where President Johnson was stopping, and hid them under the bed. But either his courage failed, or a trifling ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... comin' back," the darky blurted out. "I'm gwineter do de cookin' and de chamber-wo'k. Dere ain't 'nough to eat fo' mo'n two. When dem white-livered, no-count, onery gemmens dat stole Marse George's money git in de chain-gang, whar dey b'longs, den may be we'll hab sumpin' to go to market on, but dat ain't yit; an' don't ye tell Marse George I tol' yer or I'll ha'nt ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of its prosperity, it became completely deserted; Shaftesbury, Sturminster, and Sherborne, shared in her ruin; and Swindon became one of the most flourishing places in the kingdom." We cannot think so meanly of our countrymen, as to suppose that they will yield like white-livered cravens, and die without a struggle; and in thus raising the voice of Maga to warn them of their danger, and instruct them how to avoid it, we consider that we are doing the state some service, and pointing out new ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... was in his place. Think of the times he will have riding over the claims with those jolly cowboys, not to speak of the claims he will be staking, and the gold he will be washing out of those parish streams of his. Don't I wish I were going! I am, too, when I can persuade those old iron-livered professors to let me through. However, next year I'm to pass. Mrs. Macgregor is to see ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... Bud laughed furiously. "That bull I imported last fall for three thousand dollars," he went on, turning back to the foreman. "They shot him up and drove off his twenty-five cows from the Coyote Bluff pastures. Dirty spite an' meanness. The white-livered scum!" Then with a fierce oath the usually even-tempered Bud hurled his wrath upon the waiting man. "Gorl darn it, you're standin' around like a barbed wire fence post. What in hell's brought you around now? What they done ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... no names, Mars Lennox. If there's one mean thing I nachally despises as a stunnin' insult, it's being named white-livered; and my Confederate record is jest as good as if I wore three gilt stars on my coat collar. You might say I was a liar and a thief, and maybe I would take it as a joke; but don't call Bedney Darrington no coward! It bruises my feelins mor'n I'le stand. Lem'me tell you the Gord's truth; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... pleasant evenings last Fall with oil-cloth capes and kerosene lamps. I told you that those fellows'd be no where when the war they were trying to bring on came. I'm not at all astonished that he showed himself lily-livered when he found the people that he was willing to rob of their property standing ready to fight for their ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Martine!—she has a shrill tongue and a wild eye, and she said out flatly that she would not go, and furthermore that she would not be caught in a priest's trap, or words to that effect. And this clerk, Cazeau,—a miserable little white-livered rascal, crawled away from my door in a rage with us all, and was never seen again. The police have hunted high and low for trace of him, but can find none. But I have ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... to appear contemptible?" he shouted. "D' ye think I like to sit here like an old wife, scolding in one breath and preaching thrift in the next? A weak-kneed, chicken-livered, white-bellied old bullfrog that squeaks and jumps, plunk! into the puddle when a footstep falls in the grass! Am I not a patroon? Am I not Dutch? Granted I'm fat and slow and a glutton, and lazy as a wolverine. I can fight like ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... and, with a ringing whoop as a prelude, began whistling a clear, musical trill, while 'Pache, growling out, "Dance, dance, ye white-livered coyotes," sent a bullet through the outer edge ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... tell you, you snuffling, whimpering, white-livered cur!' he said. 'Those men have got away with ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... from ignorance and misrule.' I, for one, am grateful to see our men have so nobly shown to the women of Wilmington that they are worthy of our loyalty and devotion. I said to my husband, after reading that infamous and slanderous article in the Record, that our men were too pigeon-livered to take that Nigger out and give him what he deserves; and I think it was just such talk from our women in the households that brought about this revolution. Such as the white people of Wilmington have been compelled to resort to would never have happened had the good-for-nothing ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... he exclaimed, "we have no time to talk about such matters now; but eat you shall, or I will have you crammed, as they stuff fat-livered geese! Come, Niger, we must lose no minute. If they attack again, and miss me from the battlements, they will be suspecting something, and will perhaps come prying to the rear.—Have you seen any soldiers, girl, on this side? I trow you have been gazing from the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... parade, Men mark his coming and there bursts a babel As with new zeal the subalterns upbraid, Lecture and illustrate, and on the right Form sullen squads, and hope they're being bright— Save those white-livered ones who at the sight Hide their commands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... livered from all the sins they had committed, and acknowledged in confession. And because this indulgence was so great, the hearts of men were much moved, and many took the cross for the ...
— Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople • Geoffrey de Villehardouin
... that damned rooibaatje," he broke out. "You used not to be like this before. Curse him, the white-livered Englishman! I will be even with him yet; and I tell you what it is, Bessie: you shall marry me, whether you like or no. Look here, do you think I am the sort of man to play with? You go to Wakkerstroom and ask what sort of a man Frank Muller is. See! I want you—I must have ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... "Heru taken from the palace by a handful of men and none of you infernal rascals—none of you white-livered abortions lifted a hand to save her—curse on you a thousand times. Out of my way, you churls!" And snatching up coat and hat and sword I rushed furiously down the long, marble stairs just as the short ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... toss, darling," said Dick, sitting with an arm round her. "And the white-livered accomplice is dithering with funk in there." And he thumped the cushion of the partition. "We shall pull up at Todsmoor in a few minutes. Let's compose ourselves. You must be asleep in ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... Goon! What is it ye are, annyhow, a bunch of white-livered cowards that ye can't ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... President and the whole Republican party," he shouted, "are a lot of hogs who've chawed so much gold their digestion won't work and their brains are torpid; and there's nothing to do but to kick them into this war—the whole greedy, white-livered, Trust-owned, thieving lot of them, including that great immaculate Joss up at the White House with his manners. Damn his manners! They ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... coward as well as a fool," he said afterwards in the bosom of his family; "a white-livered fool who hasn't the nerve to look at ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... something wrong about her. If I had been a stranger, I should have said: That young woman is not easy in her mind. Perfectly useless to speak to her about it. Quite happy and quite well—there was her own account of herself. I tried her maid next, a white-livered sulky creature, one of the steadiest liars I have ever met with. 'I know of nothing amiss with my mistress, sir.' There was the maid's way of keeping the secret, whatever it may be! I don't know whether you may have noticed it, in the course of your acquaintance ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... best yet," he interrupted, slapping his knee with delight. "Sneak-livered poltroon, eh? Well, well, well. ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... the Doctor, tearing off his mask, and confronting his ruffian leader with an unquailing eye—'dare! Why, thou white-livered hound, I dare spit upon and spurn ye! And forsooth, ye call me a villain—you coward cut-throat, traitor, monster, murderer of weak women and helpless babes! I tell you, Dead Man, your Power is at an end in these Vaults. There are robbers, there may be murderers here—although ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... write me such infernal trash about the opinions of a villanous dog who can't even en a decent sentence? I've been damning you for a white-livered Austrian up and down the house. Let the fellow bark till he froths at the mouth, and scatters the virus of the beast among his filthy friends. I am mad-dog proof. The lines you quote were written in an awful hurry, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with his eyes—like a bull-dog who sees red] That's for one chake; zee un turn t'other, the white-livered buty! Whu lets another man 'ave 'is wife, an' never the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to dread,—aha, how we two laughed a-good As, stealing round the midden, he came on where I stood With billet poised and raised,—you, ready with the rope,— Ah, but that's past, that's sin repented of, we hope! Men knew us for that same, yet safe and sound stood we! The lily-livered knaves knew too (I've balked a d——) Our keeping the 'Pied Bull' was just a mere pretence: Too slow the pounds make food, drink, lodging, from out the pence! There's not a stoppage to travel has chanced, this ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... had not firmness enough to resist, they drew him into their company. Once there, they thought him within their power. When they could not induce him to violate his pledge by taking rum, they called him a "cold-water man;" "a white-livered coward;" "priest-ridden;" "afraid of his minister," and many other titles of reproach. They then told him he had not promised to drink no wine; and, after much persuasion, they induced him to take a glass. But in this glass they ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... Hecuba! What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?... But I'm a dull and muddy mettled-rascal, Who calls me coward? gives me the lie i' the throat? ... Why I should take it; for it cannot be, But I am pigeon-livered and lack ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... be damned!" ejaculated one. "What are we comin' to? That's the first time I ever see one lonesome sheriff gather in ten river-hogs without the aid of a gatlin' or an ambulance! What's the matter with that chicken-livered bunch, anyway?" ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... are, flabby, bony, white-livered, or'nary suckers. Niggers and Injuns won't touch 'em, ony in the spring; they'd ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... he bellowed, slamming his cane across the table. "He won't fight! And I stigmatized him to his face as a white-livered hound!" ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... "to get all this lot on the way, you've not got to be a lot of turnip-heads nor a lot of custards—Bon Dieu, look where you're putting your damned boots, you black-livered beast!" ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... militia promptly in the flurry of May 26th. After fairly exhausting its jeering and sneering on this subject, that portion of the Northern Fourth Estate which would be termed Satanic and traitorous were it not too utterly white-livered and cowardly to be complimented with such forcible indices of even bad character, had a cruel extinguisher clapped upon it on May 29th, by a letter to the Boston Journal from Lieutenant-Colonel Harrison Kitchie, A.D.C., in which Governor ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... said the skipper; "though I reckon I don't kinder like to be bothered with b'ys—'specially sich as are mother's darlin's. They're gen'rally powerful sassy, or else white-livered do-nuthins! I've taken a fancy to this lad, howbeit; an' thet's the reason I wants fur to hev ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... he said tonelessly. "Better do a clean job, you white-livered coward, or I'll see you hang yet for ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory |
