"Worm-eaten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... long greenish stains from roof to ground, like tear streaks on the crumbling plaster. Indoors there was a dank graveyard smell in the low corridors and narrow stair-cases. Floors and ceilings were equally worm-eaten and rotten. Broad flakes of plaster from the walls lay littered about in the passages. The wind, too, penetrated the building through many cracks and crannies, so that there was a constant sighing and soughing in the big dreary rooms, which had a most eerie ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing the ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... founded on a packet of worm-eaten letters and documents found in an old French-Canadian house on the banks of the St. Lawrence. The romance they rudely outline, its intrigues, its brilliancy of surroundings, its intensity of feelings, ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... know what is its fitting destiny better than the silly flower knows for itself; so I wade in, heedless of wet trousers, and seize the shy lily by its slender stem. Thus I make prize of five or six, which are as many as usually blossom within my reach in a single morning;—some of them partially worm-eaten or blighted, like virgins with an eating sorrow at the heart; others as fair and perfect as Nature's own idea was, when she first imagined this lovely flower. A perfect pond-lily is the most satisfactory of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... still I see. This drear, accursed masonry, Where even the welcome daylight strains But duskly through the painted panes. Hemmed in by many a toppling heap Of books worm-eaten, gray with dust, Which to the vaulted ceiling creep, Against the smoky paper thrust,— With glasses, boxes, round me stacked, And instruments together hurled, Ancestral lumber, stuffed and packed— Such is my world: and ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... had been a man, she would have made her mark in the world! She had a will and a way with her! If it hadn't been that she loved me—me, do you hear, you dog!—though there's nobody left to care a worm-eaten nut about me, it makes me proud as Lucifer merely to think of it! I don't care if there's never another to love me to all eternity! I have been loved as never man was loved! All for my own sake, mind you! In the way ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... gun, but in place of the clean, well-oiled fowling-piece, he found an old firelock lying by him, the barrel incrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the stock worm-eaten. He now suspected that the grave roisters of the mountain had put a trick upon him, and, having dosed him with liquor, had robbed him of his gun. Wolf, too, had disappeared, but he might have strayed away after ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... last he said: "There has been something worm-eaten in you from your birth." He used ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... with sunshine, filled her room. It was the "best room," furnished with a curious mingling of the ancient and the modern. The pretty chintz couch laughed at the oaken, high-backed chair, stiff with a century of worm-eaten state. On either side the fireplace hung two ancient engravings, of Mary Stuart and "bonnie Prince Charlie," both garnished with verses, at once remarkable for devoted loyalty and eccentric rhythm. Between the two was Sir William Ross's sweet, maidenly portrait ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... should certainly have extended them to another dozen of people at least, had not a sudden shutting up and putting away of the worm-eaten old books, warned us that the time for closing the office had arrived; and thus deprived us of a pleasure, and spared our ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... me, this dungeon still I see, This drear accursed masonry, Where e'en the welcome daylight strains But duskly through the painted panes, Hemmed in by many a toppling heap Of books worm-eaten, grey with dust, Which to the vaulted ceiling creep Against the smoky paper thrust, With glasses, boxes, round me stacked And instruments together hurled, Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed— Such is my world! And what a world!... Alas! In living Nature's stead, Where God his human ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... a stranger on horseback rode up the straggling red road that formed the principal business thoroughfare of Gullettsville, and made his way toward the establishment known as the Gullettsville Hotel. The chief advertisement of the hotel was the lack of one. A tall worm-eaten post stood in front of the building, but the frame in which the sign had swung was empty. This post, with its empty frame, was as significant as the art of blazonry could have made it. At any rate, the stranger on horseback—a young man—pressed forward without hesitation. The proprietor ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... could well believe was haunted, for she had never seen another equally gloomy. The ceiling was low and sloping, the window tiny, and the walls exhibited all sorts of odd nooks and crannies. A bed, antique and worm-eaten, stood in one recess, a black oak chest in another, and at right angles with the door, in another recess, stood a wardrobe that used to creak and groan alarmingly every time Letty walked a long the passage. Once she heard a chuckle, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... the pool and narrow wharf he went, Seeking a tavern which of old he knew, A front of timber-crost antiquity, So propt, worm-eaten, ruinously old, He thought it must have gone; but he was gone Who kept it; and his widow, Miriam Lane, With daily-dwindling profits held the house; A haunt of brawling seamen once, but now Stiller, with yet a bed for wandering men. There ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... Communion," and there I should see all that remained of the only woman I had ever loved. I passed by the reading desk, then came to the pulpit, but I did not pause either to examine the curious carvings on its front or the ancient worm-eaten wood of which it ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly bound together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. It opened directly on a steep staircase of lofty steps, muddy, chalky, plaster-stained, dusty steps, of the same width as itself, which could ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... rooms, which had been annexed one by one as the squire wanted them, and in which there was nothing at all—neither chair, nor table, nor carpet—but books only. All the doors leading from room to room had been taken off; the old worm-eaten boards had been roughly stained; a few old French engravings had been hung here and there where the encroaching books left an opening; but otherwise all was bare. There was a curious charm in the space and air of these empty rooms, with their ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... steps. At the top they found themselves in a huge garret, how big they could not tell, for the corners were completely lost in black nothingness. The floor was thick with dust (such old dust!), and was so worm-eaten and rotten that it felt quite soft and ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... division of the fruits of the earth between the various consumers, great and little, all of whom play their part in this world. If it is good that the blackbird should flute and rejoice in the burgeoning of the spring, then it is no bad thing that acorns should be worm-eaten. In the acorn the dessert of the blackbird is prepared; the Balaninus, the tasty mouthful that puts flesh upon his flanks and music into ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... Hetfalu was still in mourning. The doctor from town looked in every day. There were two invalids to be seen to. Young Szephalmi was able indeed to go about, but he was like a worm-eaten plant, there seemed to be but little life within him. Old Hetfalusy, on the other hand, had altogether succumbed to his woe, he had taken to his bed, and was frequently tormented by ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... familiarly known) under the direct personal superintendence of George III. It was a favorite and pet creation; and his care extended even to the dressing of the books in appropriate bindings, and (as one man told me) to their health; explaining himself to mean, that in any case where a book was worm-eaten, or touched however slightly with the worm, the king was anxious to prevent the injury from extending, or from infecting others by close neighborhood; for it is supposed by many that such injuries spread rapidly ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... here seated himself also on an old worm-eaten Gothic chest, rumpling and chafing the golden or tinselled threads of the embroidered silk, so rare and so time-worn, flung over the Gothic chest, so rare also, and ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thought prostitution was melodramatic and silly, his idea of purity mere foolishness. If the body was excrement, as from his youth he had been taught, what could it matter how one used it! Did anything matter, when a few years would see the flesh he had thought divine corrupt and worm-eaten? James was willing now to float along the stream, sociably, with his fellows, and had no doubt that he would soon find a set of high-sounding phrases to justify his degradation. What importance could his actions ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... her, stooped on one knee and kissed the fingers that rested on the old worm-eaten bench. She looked up suddenly, blushing scarlet, and they both rose to their feet and stood quite still, looking into each other's eyes. They did not speak; there was nothing to say, except "I love you," ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... to take down from the shelves of a worm-eaten wardrobe a quantity of frouzy garments, one by one; to subject each to a careful and minute inspection by holding it up against the light, and after folding it with great exactness, to lay it on one or other of two little heaps beside him. ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... the street, the floors, as may happen, will still hang on by the mere beam-ends, and coherency of old carpentry, though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor rusty nails and worm-eaten dovetailings give way:—but is it cheering, in such circumstances, that the whole household burst forth into celebrating the new joys of light and ventilation, liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that now they have got a house to their mind? My dear household, cease singing ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... soup. MM. Favreau, Piscatory, Larabit, and Vatimesnil took refuge in a corner. In the opposite corner drunken soldiers chatted with the maids of the barracks. M. de Keratry, bent with his eighty years, was seated near the stove on an old worm-eaten chair; the chair tottered; ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... two ships nigh to foundering. When wind sank and blue came back, we left Puerto Bello and turned again south by east, but now with crazy, crazy ships, weather-wrenched and worm-eaten, teredo pierced. They looked old, so old, with their whipped and darkened sails. And when we dropped anchor in some bight there was no gold, but all night we heard that harsh blowing of shells ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... and bitterly. "You think I care for the world? Then you read me wrongly at the very outset of our interview, and your once reputed skill as a Seer goes for naught! To me the world is a graveyard full of dead, worm-eaten things, and its supposititious Creator, whom you have so be praised in your orisons to-night, is the Sexton who entombs, and the Ghoul who devours his own hapless Creation! I myself am one of the tortured and dying, and I have sought you simply that you ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... mutilated fragment rescued from the binding of another work; this revelation brought to light, after an interval, a second of a different issue; anon at some auction occurred a perfect copy; and now the poor damaged worm-eaten leaves, once so reverently and so tenderly regarded, awake no further interest; the mystery and romance have vanished; and when we examine the book as a whole, we do not find its merits so striking as when we strained our eyes to decipher the old ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... and weaving were revived arts in the Confederate cities; and, as ever in earlier days, proved a most valuable economic resource under restricted conditions. In the home of a friend in Charleston, South Carolina, an old, worm-eaten loom was found in a garret where it had lain since the embargo in 1812. It was set up in 1863, and plantation carpenters made many like it for neighbors and fellow-citizens. All women in the mountain districts knew ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... adjusted; yet she hesitated, her eyes upon a busy silver clock that already marked the appointed hour. The room was large, wainscoted in dark paneling; a capacious fireplace jutted far out, and was made further conspicuous by two settees of worm-eaten oak. The chairs that backed along the walls were of stalwart pattern. A collection of English silver tankards was the chief decoration, save straight hangings of Cordova leather at the windows, and a Spanish embroidery, tarnished with age, that ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... compartments, separated by horizontal partitions. It is the female alone who accomplishes this task, connected with the function of perpetuating the race. She chooses an old tree-trunk, a pole, or the post of a fence, exposed to the sun and already worm-eaten, so that her labour may be lightened. She first attacks the wood perpendicularly to the surface, then suddenly turns and directs downwards the passage, the diameter of which is about equal to the size of the insect's body. The Xylocopa thus forms a tube about ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... trodden earth. The walls, sweating salt-petre, green with mould, and full of cracks, were so excessively damp that on the side where the Colonel's bed was a reed mat had been nailed. The famous box-coat hung on a nail. Two pairs of old boots lay in a corner. There was not a sign of linen. On the worm-eaten table the Bulletins de la Grande Armee, reprinted by Plancher, lay open, and seemed to be the Colonel's reading; his countenance was calm and serene in the midst of this squalor. His visit to Derville seemed to have altered his features; the lawyer perceived in ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... passion for buying possessed them. Sandoz satisfied the longings of his youth, the romanticist ambitions which the first books he had read had given birth to. Thus this writer, so fiercely modern, lived amid the worm-eaten middle ages which he had dreamt of when he was a lad of fifteen. As an excuse, he laughingly declared that handsome modern furniture cost too much, whilst with old things, even common ones, you immediately obtained ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... property of Apellicon, to whom the saying was first applied that he was 'rather a bibliophile than a lover of learning.' While the collection was at Athens he did much damage to the scrolls by his attempt to restore their worm-eaten paragraphs. Sulla took the city soon afterwards, and carried the books to Rome, and here more damage was done by the careless editing of Tyrannion, who made a trade of copying 'Aristotle's books' for the libraries that were rising on all ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... a regulated temperature, in a well-sunned house, in a duly moistened air, with good sidewalks to go about on in all weather, and four months of the cream of summer and the fresh milk of Jersey cows, make the little sham organizations—the worm-eaten wind-falls, for that 's what they look like—hang on to the boughs of life like "froze-n-thaws"; regular struldbrugs they come to be, a ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... furniture—a few empty boxes and hampers in a corner—a small window—the shutters closed—not even a fireplace—no other door but that by which we had entered—no carpet on the floor, and the floor seemed very old, uneven, worm-eaten, mended here and there, as was shown by the whiter patches on the wood; but no living being, and no visible place in which a living being could have hidden. As we stood gazing around, the door by which ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... now hung, a few worm-eaten planks and splintered bits of wood, barely supported by ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... thyself a little, while thou art out of the prison of his company. What shall I do? by my troth, anatomise his purse in his absence. Plutus send there be jewels in it, that I may finely geld it of the stones—the best, sure, lies in the bottom; pox on't, here's nothing but a company of worm-eaten papers: what's this? Memorandum that Master Prodigo owes me four thousand pounds, and that his lands are in pawn for it. Memorandum that I owe. That he owes? 'Tis well the old slave hath some care of his credit; to whom owes he, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... red anemones. Everything basked in sunlight and glittered with exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white chapel stood in a corner of the enclosure. Two iron-grated windows let me see inside: it was a bare place, containing nothing but a wooden praying-desk, black and worm-eaten, an altar with its candles and no flowers, and above the altar a square picture brown with age. On the floor were scattered several pence, and in a vase above the holy-water vessel stood some withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed to the gloom, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to him from their wear and tear in his service, and they were deposited successively in his dressing-room, though mamma thought them quite unfit for him. He averred that he required his old hunting-suits for accidents; his summer jackets and vests, though faded, were the coolest in the world; his worm-eaten but warm roquelaure was admirable for riding about the fields, etc. In vain mamma represented the economy of cutting up some for the boys, and giving others to the servants; he would not consent, nor part with articles ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... "I'll get it off." He raised his heavily booted foot, as Frank drew back, and brought it down with a crash on the massive brasswork. With a rending and tearing of the worm-eaten wood the lock ripped loose and the lid, operated by some concealed spring, ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... sitting-room. Still an air of dilapidation, as obvious as it was uncomfortable, pervaded the large apartment, and announced the neglect from which the knowledge which its walls contained had not been able to exempt it. The tattered tapestry, the worm-eaten shelves, the huge and clumsy, yet tottering, tables, desks, and chairs, the rusty grate, seldom gladdened by either sea-coal or faggots, intimated the contempt of the lords of Osbaldistone Hall for learning, and for the volumes which record ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... [311] since there are still, a league up the river, remains of what seems to have been a chimney, the foundation of which has been found, and indications of there having been ditches surrounding their dwelling, which was small. We found, also, large pieces of hewn, worm-eaten timber, and some three or four cannon-balls. All these things show clearly that there was a settlement there founded by Christians; and what leads me to say and believe that it was that of Jacques Cartier is the fact that there is no evidence whatever that any one wintered ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... And think no more of wall-builders than fools. Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit, She scorns a pasture withering to the root. She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten. She leaves them bitten when she has to fly. She bellows on a knoll against the sky. Her udder shrivels ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... governments are incomparably better and more surely directed to the good of mankind than in any other; that the courage of such a people is the aptest tinder to noble fire; that the genius of such a soil is that wherein the roots of good literature are least worm-eaten with pedantism, and where their fruits have ever come to the greatest maturity and highest relish, conceived such a loathing of their ambition and tyranny, who, usurping the liberty of their native countries, become slaves to themselves, inasmuch as (be it never so contrary to their own ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... them perfectly free from grit and dirt, remove the black fur, and reject all those that are at all worm-eaten; put them into a stewpan with the above ingredients, but without water; shake them over a clear fire, till all the liquor is dried up, and be careful not to let them burn; arrange them on tins, and dry them in a slow oven; pound them to a fine powder, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... was dead ahead, and the area back of the first lines there is a wide one, crossed by many intersecting lines of trenches) he got well over them and chose a field as level as a billiard table for landing-ground. In the very center of it, however, there was one post, a small worm-eaten thing, of the color of the dead grass around it. He hit it, just as he was setting his Spad on the ground, the only post in a field acres wide, and it tore a piece of fabric from one of his lower wings. No doubt the crack battery has been given credit for disabling an enemy ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... literature. "One of our keenest pleasures," writes one of the family, "was to go in a body to the old book-shops, and on Sunday morning to the 'Thieves Market', to rummage for treasures; and many were the Elzevirs and worm-eaten, vellum-bound volumes from the old convent libraries that fell into our hands. At that time we issued a home magazine called 'The Prophet', in honour of a large painting that we had acquired and chose to consider ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... being wiped away, are renewed a hundred times a day the most disgusting libations, close in a square space reserved for what they call the dancers. At the further end of this infected cave there is, supported by four worm-eaten pillars, a sort of alcove, constructed from broken-up ship timber, which is graced by the appearance of two or three rags of old tapestry. It is on this chicken coop that the music is perched: two clarinets, a hurdy-gurdy, a cracked trumpet, and a grumbling bassoon—five instruments whose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... than ten feet above the ground. In the centre, between two pillars of masonry surmounted by cast-iron vases, the railing formed a gate opening in the middle, filled in across its lower part, and furnished, on the inside, with worm-eaten slatted shutters. ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... and labor have done everything. How great the contrast between all this and the aspect of a small town on the shores of the Mediterranean, so neglected and filthy, where the lower middle class exist like worms in a worm-eaten beam! ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... soil was green; and the sky was blue to the verge of the horizon. The Norman farms scattered through the plain seemed at a distance like little woods inclosed each in a circle of thin beech-trees. Coming closer, on opening the worm-eaten stile, one fancied that he saw a giant garden, for all the old apple-trees, as knotted as the peasants, were in blossom. The weather-beaten black trunks, crooked, twisted, ranged along the inclosure, displayed beneath the ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... was of planks roughly put together; now they were worm-eaten, bare, save for a thick carpet of greasy dust, which deadened the sound of booted feet. The place only boasted of a couple of chairs, both of which had to be propped against the wall lest they should break, and bring the sitter down upon the floor; otherwise a number of empty wine barrels did ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Things dear to each child's heart. Stones, sticks, anything that cannot be—explained." Sandy gave a low laugh. He was harking back to the old shed beside his father's cabin and the gay prints tacked to the worm-eaten boards. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... of decay, incoherence, and makeshift, varnish and gilding upon worm-eaten furniture, and mouldering wainscot, was that same Ancien Regime. And for that very reason a picturesque age; like one of its own landscapes. A picturesque bit of uncultivated mountain, swarming ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... like a dustman loading his cart, and apparently without the most distant perception of what he is swallowing,—then bleats forth another unnatural set of tones, by way of returning thanks, stalks out of the room, and immerses himself among a parcel of huge worm-eaten folios that are as uncouth as himself! I could endure the creature well enough, had I anybody to laugh at him along with me; but Lucy Bertram, if I but verge on the border of a jest affecting this same Mr. Sampson (such is the horrid man's horrid name), looks so piteous, that it deprives ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... all was said to be enclosed. He laid it carefully between the door and the door-post, and then shut the door so that the nut cracked directly. But there was not much kernel to be seen; it was what we should call hollow or worm-eaten, and looked as if it had been filled with tobacco or rich black earth. "It is just what I expected!" exclaimed Ib. "How should there be room in a little nut like this for the best thing of all? Christina will find her two nuts just the same; there will be neither fine clothes ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... wistful translucence. And on the teapoy in the window stood two dainty baskets of clean willow, in which we had that day brought home chestnuts from the wood;—mine was full of nuts, but they were small and angular and worm-eaten, as the fruitage of a wet season might well be; hers scantily freighted, but every nut round, full, and glossy, perfect from its cruel husk, a specimen, a type of its kind. And on the handle of the basket hung a little kid ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... double, triple, and more for it. And then we have to see so much, notably a cartoon of twelve designs by old masters, which Ardea did not even suspect he had, and which Fossati discovered—would you believe?—worm-eaten, in a cupboard in one ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... the windings of the little Vale till they came to a great wall of rock that rose across it. In the rock was an opening closed by a sagging, worm-eaten door, and in front of the door hung ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... nights, working by day on rock-pile or in field, sleeping by night in the corner of a friendly fence of worm-eaten rails, fanned by the delicate hair of the pale blue ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... that is what that stranger was, that is what he did on that platform! At his word, which at certain moments was as the thunder, prejudices, fictions, abuses, superstitions, fallacies, intolerance, ignorance, fiscal infamies, barbarous punishments, outworn authorities, worm-eaten magistracy, discrepit codes, rotten laws, everything that was doomed to perish, trembled, and the downfall of those things began. That formidable apparition has left a name in the memory of men; he should be called ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... be honest, be sober. "I will" fluttered from the worm-eaten ships of Columbus; "I will" blazed upon the banners of Washington and Grant; "I will" stamped the walls of Hudson river tunnel, and dug the canal of Panama. Young man, write "I will" upon your brow, give your heart to God and hope will herald your way to victory ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... There was a ricketty, worm-eaten bench in the vestry, and here they sat down together. Cardo trying to keep up a cheerful demeanour, as he saw her face sadden and her eyes ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... a passage, and thus find their way to land. But these are not mere conjectures and possibilities; for one of my people actually did see some wood in one of the houses at Wymoa, which he judged to be fir. It was worm-eaten, and the natives gave him to understand, that it had been driven ashore by the waves of the sea; and we had their own express testimony, that they had got the inconsiderable specimens of iron, found amongst them, from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... the old Fort Falconbridge. A worm-eaten gun or two, far more dangerous to those in rear than to those in front, rises en barbette. The affair would fall in half an hour before the mildest of gunboats. Yet by fortifying three points at an expense of some 6,000L to 8,000L Sa Leone might be decently defended. The ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... wisdom, or overshadow the light of the present, is a paradox peculiar to our system of jurisprudence. There are lawyers and judges, who enjoy a high reputation, whose fame rests upon their profound research among the worm-eaten tomes of black-letter law, and whose glory consists in their familiarity with the opinions and axioms of men who lived and died so long ago that their very tombs are forgotten. This class of lawyers and jurists hold ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... fairer for this. The young monk's faith that sees heaven laid open and beholds the angels, is something far below the power of the old monk who points them out to him. The ex-steward was like the old monk; he would have given his life to defend a worm-eaten shrine. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... discovered. It was an old wooden shed built over the lower end of the stream which washed the village from end to end, draining successively the typhus barracks, the baths, and all the hospitals. The shed itself was old and worm-eaten. The walls were caked with the blood of years, yet the meat was always hung against them after having been well soused in the filthy water. Mr. Berry decided to build a new one: some of the money was subscribed through Mr. Blease by the Liverpool Liberal ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... conducted me up a rickety, worm-eaten staircase, to a small room above that which we had just left; and indicating one of the two beds therein as the one belonging to her Jean, and the one, therefore, which I was to occupy, bade me ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... therefore, let your Herby Ingredients be exquisitely cull'd, and cleans'd of all worm-eaten, slimy, canker'd, dry, spotted, or any ways vitiated Leaves. And then that they be rather discreetly sprinkl'd, than over-much sob'd with Spring-Water, especially Lettuce, which Dr. [57]Muffet thinks impairs their Vertue; but this, I suppose he means of the Cabbage-kind, whose ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... half clad in a tattered and moldy shroud, whose shreds were flapping about the ribby latticework of its person, swung by me with a stately stride and disappeared in the gray gloom of the starlight. It had a broken and worm-eaten coffin on its shoulder and a bundle of something in its hand. I knew what the clack-clacking was then; it was this party's joints working together, and his elbows knocking against his sides as he walked. I may say I was surprised. Before I could collect my thoughts and enter ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pine had acquired the villainous air of the uncanny repositor of secrets too dreadful to reveal, as it groaned and murmured to itself in the keen east wind. Dark deeds and foul wrong seemed written all over the fearful place, from the long strings of black moss that clung to the worm-eaten eaves, to the worn stone with its great blotch of something,—could it have been blood?—that served as a threshold to the door. Suddenly with the quickness of lightning the thought flashed across me, what could Mr. Blake, the aristocratic representative of New York's ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... impression upon the dreamer. Every line traced by the "lean annuitant" was as familiar to Tom Folio as if he had written it himself. Stray scraps, which had escaped the vigilance of able editors, were known to him, and it was his to unearth amid a heap of mouldy, worm-eaten magazines, a handful of leaves hitherto forgotten of all men. Trifles, yes—but Charles Lamb's! "The king's chaff is as good as other people's corn," says ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... enough; but I expect visitors this summer who are quite fastidious, and this old worm-eaten wood-work wouldn't do for them. What makes you look so dark? Don't you like the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... the art of singing, was at the age of sixteen turned out on the world. A compassionate barber, however, took him in, and Haydn dressed and powdered wigs down-stairs, while he worked away at a little worm-eaten harpsichord at night in his room. Unfortunate boy! he managed to get himself engaged to the barber's daughter, Anne Keller, who was for a good while the Xantippe of his gentle life, and he paid dearly for his ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... the right, in a sharp curve, and Constans's heart bounded wildly; he had forgotten how close he must be to the crossing of the Swiftwater. Now the rotting and worm-eaten timbers of the open trestle-work were under his feet; mechanically, he avoided the numerous gaps, where a misstep meant destruction, and so at last gained the farther bank and sank down panting on the short, ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... let loose such a thunder of applause that the old shed rocked with it, and a cloud of acrid and thick dust fell from its filthy walls and worm-eaten beams and ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... To the right and left stretched ancient ramparts, and behind, rows of houses. We were posted in covered roads, near this gate, which the sappers had strongly barricaded. Captain Vidal then commanded the battalion, reduced to three hundred and twenty-five men. A few worm-eaten palisades served us for intrenchments, and, on all the roads before us, the enemy were advancing. This time they wore white coats and flat caps, with a raised piece in front, on which we could see the two-headed eagle of the ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... with marble in squares of black and white, which was entered on the park side through a door with small leaded panes, such as might still be seen at Versailles before Louis-Philippe turned that Chateau into an asylum for the glories of France. The pavilion is divided inside by an old staircase of worm-eaten wood, full of character, which leads to the first story. Above that is an immense garret. This venerable edifice is covered by one of those vast roofs with four sides, a ridgepole decorated with leaden ornaments, and a round projecting window on each side, such as Mansart very justly delighted ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... taken root and shown real vitality. The experiment of resuscitation has been tried of late years with great pertinacity. The forgotten images of our seventeenth-century ancestors have been brought out of the lumber-room amidst immense flourishes of trumpets, but they are terribly worm-eaten; and all efforts to make their statues once more stand firmly on their pedestals have generally failed. Landor himself refused to see the merits of the mere 'mushrooms,' as he somewhere called them, which grew beneath the Shakespearian oak; and though such men ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... cried, "for I must. A thing built on cruelty, cemented with blood, and worm-eaten with lies is hateful to me ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... chair nor table were there—an old stool and a box were the only seats. In the corner farthest from the light, and where the ceiling sloped down to the floor, was the only thing that could claim the name of a bedstead. Low and curtainless, its crazy, worm-eaten frame groaned and creaked ominously under the tossings to and fro of the poor sufferer, who occupied the mass of ragged coverings spread upon it. In the opposite corner was a heap of mingled shavings, straw, and sacking, the present couch of the aged tenant of ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... up some of this driftwood. In a little time she came aboard with a great tree in a tow, which we could hardly hoist in with all our tackles. We cut up the tree and split it for firewood. It was much worm-eaten and had in it some live worms above an inch long, and about the bigness of a goose-quill, and having their heads crusted ...
— A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... management is, that it never goes the length of wearying, but only of giving a comic air of downright Wapping and Rotherhithe verisimilitude. All men grow dull, and ought to be dull, that live under a solemn sense of eternal danger, one inch only of plank (often worm-eaten) between themselves and the grave; and, also, that see for ever one wilderness of waters—sublime, but (like the wilderness on shore) monotonous. All sublime people, being monotonous, have a tendency ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... but this was her bed-room, and that, the madam's dressing-room," said the servant, a little impatient of delay. Both rooms were furnished, but cold and gloomy; the floor of what the girl called her dressing-room was chippy and worm-eaten. "And there," persisted the servant, "in that corner just by, if not in that little cupboard, the money was found." "What money?" "The money the madam, or some one about her, forgot, fifteen thousand good pounds, I am told; and a gentleman came here once, who told me he had ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the shovel of one of the men struck upon something hard, and the man, dropping upon his knees, went to work to scrape the sand away with his hands, presently laying bare to view what was apparently part of a spar of some kind, not old or worm-eaten, but seemingly almost new. Having located this, they started to clear the sand away from the whole length of the piece of timber, and, while doing so, found that there were two other poles or spars laid alongside it. ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... of the high road, at the bottom of a ravine, close to the rivulet and village of Ghorodinia, in the habitation of a weaver, an old, crazy, filthy, wooden hut. Here he was half a league from Malo-Yaroslawetz, at the commencement of the bend of the Louja. It was in this worm-eaten dwelling, and in a dirty dark room, parted off into two by a cloth, that the fate of the army and of Europe was about ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... level place of sand and sea grass, about six yards square, defended on the south-west by a miniature cliff. There a lot of seaweed had accumulated, and the driftings of many gales collected. Several barrel staves, a large worm-eaten ship's knee, part of a vessel's stern, with all but the letters "Conq" obliterated, (the name had probably been Conqueror, conquered now, as Alfred observed, by old ocean); and many pieces and splinters of spar. The Captain made the discovery with ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... with its worm-eaten steps groaned beneath our weight, like a sensitive woman under a new disillusion. At the top was a room with a door that closed on the outside with a hook. We slept there. The plaster on the once yellow walls was crumbling away; the beams of the ceiling bent beneath the weight of the slated ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... the mills, a Portuguese trader arrived with a quantity of worm-eaten logs of this cedar, which he had gathered from the floating timber in the current of the main Amazons. The tree producing this wood, which is named cedar on account of the similarity of its aroma to that of the true cedars, is not, of course, a coniferous tree, as no member of that class is found ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... It must have been them nasty jiggers, that got in there; they tell me they are dreadful thick in the West Indies; Joe Crow had them in his feet, and lost two of his toes. Worm-eaten, dear, dear! but still that ain't so bad as having them great he-fellows strip one. I promise you if them Gulards had undertaken to strip me, I'd a taught them different guess manners; I'd a died ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... and worm-eaten apples likewise fall of themselves, so in this ease of execution the falsest work may agree with the best. That the similarity is purely specious needs not be urged; yet in practically distinguishing between the two there are not a few that fail. The most precious work is performed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... home. The vast and often decaying timbers, hewn out of the very forests they loved, cried out with all the old associations they bore and held them. The miniature citadel contained within the trenchant stockade, the old pelt stores, roofless and worm-eaten, the armory which still suggested the clank of half-armored men, who lived only for the joy of defying death. The factor's house, whence, in the days gone by, the orders for battle had been issued, and the sentence of life and death had ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... glass-topped cases full of that collection of butterflies and moths the formation of which had been the relaxation of this complex and dangerous man. In the centre of this room there was an upright beam, which had been placed at some period as a support for the old worm-eaten baulk of timber which spanned the roof. To this post a figure was tied, so swathed and muffled in the sheets which had been used to secure it that one could not for the moment tell whether it was that of a man or a woman. One towel passed round the throat and was secured at the back of the ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... excellence if, in addition to the ravages of time, it had not been further damaged in the year 1560, through the fathers who, not being able to use the chapter-house on account of the damp, and throwing down the little that remained of the paintings of this man, in replacing a worm-eaten floor by vaulting. About the same time Simone painted in tempera on a panel Our Lady and a St Luke with other saints, which is to-day in the chapel of the Gondi in S. Maria Novella, signed with his name. Simone ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... wreaths of delicate Dresden china—mouldering old portraits of dead-and-gone court beauties in powder and patches, warriors in wigs, and prelates in point-lace—whole suites of furniture in old stamped leather and worm-eaten Utrecht velvet; broken toilette services in pink and blue Sevres; screens, wardrobes, cornices—in short, all kinds of luxurious lumber going fast to dust, like those who once upon a time enjoyed and ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... left-hand side of the window. These articles, with two small wicker-work chairs, made up all the furniture in the room save for a square of Wilton carpet in the centre. The boards round and the panelling of the walls were of brown, worm-eaten oak, so old and discoloured that it may have dated from the original building of the house. Holmes drew one of the chairs into a corner and sat silent, while his eyes travelled round and round and up and down, taking in ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... loved the rooms—and now I hate them. It seems to me it was another woman who lived in them—in another world. 'Tis so long ago that 'tis ghostly. Make ready the old red chambers for me," to her woman; "I will live there. They have been long closed, and are worm-eaten and mouldy perchance; but a great fire will warm them. And I will have furnishings from London to make ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... shack made a good fire. The roof collapsed and with the incantations of the cowboys, the stout walls, worm-eaten and bullet-splintered, falling ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... following. My boy did not venture to sleep at all. He stayed up outside my bedroom door—I say bedroom, but actually it was an apartment which in Europe I would not put a horse into, and the door was merely a wide, worm-eaten board placed on end. In the middle of the night I heard a noise—yea, a rattle. The said board fell down, inwards, almost upon me. A light was flashed swiftly into my eyes, and desultory remarks which ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the story is commonly, as in Walpole, some haunted building. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho" it is a castle in the Apennines; in the "Romance of the Forest," a deserted abbey in the depth of the woods; in "The Italian," the cloister of the Black Penitents. The moldering battlements, the worm-eaten tapestries, the turret staircases, secret chambers, underground passages, long, dark corridors where the wind howls dismally, and distant doors which slam at midnight all derive from "Otranto." So do the supernatural fears which haunt these abodes of desolation; the strains of mysterious ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... am worm-eaten and my club is no longer to be relied upon.... But the Elm and the ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... is complete without the rats. In stories of ghosts and murderers they scamper through the echoing rooms, and the gnawing of their teeth is heard behind the wainscot, and their gleaming eyes peer through the holes in the worm-eaten tapestry, and they scream in shrill, unearthly notes in the dead of night, while the moaning wind sweeps, sobbing, round the ruined turret towers, and passes wailing like a woman through ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... there it was. The road was narrow, and the coachman pulled up to let me work my way past. The vehicle was a queer old affair, that looked as if it had been dug out of some antediluvian stable yard. The curtains were brown with age and dust, and riddled with holes; the body was bare and worm-eaten, and the springs perfectly green with mould. The horses were thin and lank, and the harness in as sorry a condition as the coach. The driver's clothes, which were very old fashioned, hung about him in loose folds, and he gazed upon me with a strange, stony stare that was ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... several parts of the roof; — in some apartments the very floors had given way; — the hangings were parted from the walls, and shaking in mouldy remnants; the glasses were dropping out of their frames; — the family-pictures were covered with dust. and all the chairs and tables worm-eaten and crazy. — There was not a bed in the house that could be used, except one old-fashioned machine, with a high gilt tester and fringed curtains of yellow mohair, which had been, for aught I know, two centuries in the ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the dead trees, and the worm-eaten, powder-posted ones, will fall in the high winds, naturally. But old Bullion is safe. No rotten hollow in his old white-oak trunk;—sound ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... and fell. In one of these fields stood an old wooden house which was not inhabited, for both wind and rain penetrated its roof and walls. On this especial night, however, any one familiar with the locality would have been astonished to see a light gleam through the worm-eaten shutters. In one room was a chair and a table. On the table was a lamp, but ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... spite of his pleading, was seized and his hands bound behind him. Then, while one man held guard over the captive's wife and children, the other ransacked the house, rummaging through filthy and worm-eaten closets, and exploring dirty coffers, into which had been thrust a wretched assortment of rags—the garb of slavery. Every scrap of paper was captured and jealously guarded. During this time, the greatest silence was preserved. Other arrests were to be made, and it ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... dignity that stands on the lying breaths of winking courtiers? What is this farcical, factitious glamour that will not bear the light of day? The Grace of God? Ay, give me god-like manhood, and I will bend the knee. But to ask me to worship a stuffed purple robe on a worm-eaten throne! 'Tis an insult to manhood and reason. Hereditary kingship! When you can breed souls as you breed racehorses it will be time to consider that. Stand here by my side before this mirror. Is not that a proud, a royal couple? ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... verses that could be read: the rest, the characters being worm-eaten, were consigned to one of the Academicians, to find out their meaning by conjectures. We are informed he has done it, after many lucubrations and much pains, and that he designs to publish them, giving us hopes of ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... where to pass through this mess, on the top of the water, with masts and spars pointing every way. After having rounded the line of mines and the Brindisi, an Italian vessel that had struck a mine some days before, we made the port. Ten houses and a wretched wharf on worm-eaten piling at the end of a funnel of mountains with terrible rocks is ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... unnoticed the jokes and teasing, by means of which we tried to keep ourselves awake. Not even the flies were buzzing, except the very small ones which are always lively, when all of a sudden the first thunderclap sounded and reverberated, crashing and roaring, among the worm-eaten rafters of the old, dilapidated house. In the most desperate combination, such as only occurs during storms in the north, a clatter of hail stones now followed, which in less than a minute demolished all the window-panes on the windy side, and immediately ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... quarters of St. Petersburg there is a street on a back canal, and over the street an arch. To the right of the arch is a flight of steps, ancient and worm-eaten, difficult of climbing by day by reason of a hole here, a worn place there, and the perilous tilting of the boards; at night well nigh impassable without a lantern. The steps wind and end in a tenement, once a palace, ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... arm-chair, covered with green cotton velvet (Agricola's first present to his mother), a few rush bottomed chairs, and a worktable on which lay several bags of coarse, brown cloth, completed the furniture of this room, badly secured by a worm-eaten door. The adjoining closet contained a few kitchen and ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... hardest day of all to Fulk, for this was the only one on which he could not be busy enough to tire himself out. We were a mile from church, and when we got to the worm-eaten farm pew there was a smell, as Jaquey said, as if generations of farmers had been eating cheese there, and generations of mice eating after them; and she always longed to shut up a ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strew faint sweetness from some old Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud Which breaks to dust when once unrolled; Or shredded perfume, like a cloud From closet long to quiet vowed, With mothed and dropping arras hung, Mouldering her lute and books among, As when a queen, long ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... so surprised that he hesitated to enter, surprised as a deceived husband who beholds his wife's crime. A confusion of anger and mingled emotion suffocated him, revealing to him the fact that his heart was worm-eaten with love! All that they had hidden from him, and all that he had concealed from himself appeared before him as he perceived the Marquis installed in the ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... suddenly as they shook hands, and Ethne wondered why. She followed the direction of his eyes towards the violin which lay upon a table at her side. It was pale in colour; there was a mark, too, close to the bridge, where a morsel of worm-eaten wood had ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... rheum in the eyes, no knocking together of the knees, no hobbling on crutches with what polite society terms rheumatism in the feet, but what everybody knows is nothing but gout. Death came, not to fell the gnarled trunk of a tree worm-eaten and lightning-blasted, but to hew down a Lebanon cedar, whose fall made the mountains tremble and the heavens ring. But physical health could not account for half of this sunshine. Sixty-four years ago a coal from the heavenly altar ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... small grain in his heart, which very quickly turned to a lump of ice. He felt no more pain, but the glass was there still. "Why do you cry?" said he at last; "it makes you look ugly. There is nothing the matter with me now. Oh, see!" he cried suddenly, "that rose is worm-eaten, and this one is quite crooked. After all they are ugly roses, just like the box in which they stand," and then he kicked the boxes with his foot, and pulled off the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... produced very little change in the room where we had so many pleasant sittings. The ancient stamped leather on the walls is perhaps a trifle more ragged, the old oak panels not blacker—that were impossible—but a trifle more worm-eaten; it is the same room. I must have seemed a sad boor to my polite cicerone as I stood, hat in hand, and silently took in all the old familiar details. The same smell of mildewed antiquity, I could almost believe the same furniture. ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... entirely dominated by the sense of colour. He manipulates the French language with a freedom sometimes barbarous, 'dragging his images by the heels or the hair' (in the admirable phrase of Leon Bloy) 'up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax,' gaining, certainly, the effects at which he aims. He possesses, in the highest degree, that style tachete et faisande—high-flavoured and spotted with corruption—that he attributes to Goncourt ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... old door, supported by a couple of benches, had been placed in the chamber for a table. He hammered at the worm-eaten wood and knocked off a strip which he split in half. One of these substitutes for rapiers he gave to Trenck, retaining the other himself, and both placed themselves ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... unprofitable by-courses, and that timely too. Name me a profest poet, that his poetry did ever afford him so much as a competency. Ay, your god of poets there, whom all of you admire and reverence so much, Homer, he whose worm-eaten statue must not be spewed against, but with hallow'd lips and groveling adoration, what ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... strew faint sweetness from some old Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud, Which breaks to dust when once unrolled; Or shredded perfume, like a cloud From closet long to quiet vowed, With mothed and dropping arras hung, Mouldering her lute and books among, As when a ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... He is not an indifferent, callous spectator of the scenes which he himself pourtrays, but without seeming to feel them. There is no look of patch-work and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness of borrowed wealth; no tracery-work from worm-eaten manuscripts, from forgotten chronicles, nor piecing out of vague traditions with fragments and snatches of old ballads, so that the result resembles a gaudy, staring transparency, in which you cannot distinguish the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... spied a heap of worm-eaten parchment covers, and many clippings and parings. And whereas the rolls of manuscripts did smell like unto old cheese; so these relics did marvelously resemble the rinds ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... weeks in the darkest corner of the shed, Frederick Plunger, Esq. was reposing. It had been selected as the most suitable hiding-place by the conspirators. It was large and commodious, and there were so many cracks and crannies in the worm-eaten, dilapidated lid that there was ample ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... a time there was a lad who was walking along a road cracking nuts, so he found one that was worm-eaten, and just at that very moment ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... hall in front of the open fireplace, reckless of his drippings, at first only mildly amused by the half cynical, half angry survey of the very elegant young man who had just descended the splendid oak staircase, with its finely carved balustrade, black and worm-eaten, Cecil de la Borne stared at his brother with the angry disgust of one whose sense of all that is holiest stands outraged. Slim, of graceful though somewhat undersized figure, he was conscious of having ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... turnes about all the Hotblouds, betweene, foureteene & fiue & thirtie, sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoes souldiours in the rechie painting, sometime like god Bels priests in the old Church window, sometime like the shauen Hercules in the smircht worm-eaten tapestrie, where his cod-peece seemes as massie as ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Land. He now caused all his ships to be examined with a view to ascertain what repairs they needed. Some had been injured by the storms which they had encountered on the way from Marseilles or by accidents of the sea. Others had become worm-eaten and leaky by lying in port. Richard caused them all to be put thoroughly in repair. He also caused a number of battering engines to be constructed of timber which his men hauled from the forests around the base of Mount AEtna. These ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... done, the child loitered from grave to grave, now stopping to replace with careful hands the bramble which had started from some green mound it helped to keep in shape, and now peeping through one of the low latticed windows into the church, with its worm-eaten books upon the desks, and baize of whitened-green mouldering from the pew sides and leaving the naked wood to view. There were the seats where the poor old people sat, worn spare, and yellow like themselves; the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... wheelbarrow, an old-fashioned square arm-chair, a book-case, an old oak chest, a Dutch cradle, and many other articles of furniture can be imitated. In selecting copies for imitation it is best to choose those of old date, made of oak, for the cork resembles old worm-eaten oak when its first freshness has gone and its complexion becomes darker. A very pretty and uncommon object to copy is that of an old-fashioned clock, a veritable "my grandfather's clock," an upright tall eight-day clock that has a long chain and ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... wore a strange look, with half unpacked boxes serving for wardrobes, piles of band boxes, and for seats there was an array of worm-eaten armchairs, into which bits of velvet and silk, which had been cut from old dresses, had been festooned anyhow, and along the walls there were rows of rusty nails which made one think of old portraits and of pictures full of associations, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... doorway and in a few moments returned with a black box of worm-eaten wood, covered with inscriptions in the form of birds, beasts, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... triangular cupboard of old worm-eaten walnut-wood fixed high in a corner of the room. Mrs. Lecount tried the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... When cold, bottle it, and tie a bladder over the cork. In three months boil it again with fresh spice, and it will then keep a twelvemonth.—Another way. Fill a stewpan with large flap mushrooms, that are not worm-eaten, and the skins and fringe of such as have been pickled. Throw a handful of salt among them, and set them by a slow fire. They will produce a great deal of liquor, which must be strained; then add four ounces of shalots, two cloves of garlic, a good deal of whole pepper, ginger, mace, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... soft, thin and brittle, splitting easily, and are often opaque and lustreless, and may have a worm-eaten appearance. Several or ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... a bandy-legg'd, high-shoulder'd, worm-eaten seat, With a creaking old back, and twisted old feet; But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there, I bless thee, and love thee, old ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... from clearing off at noon, the storm increased in violence, and as night set in, the wind whistled in a spiteful falsetto key, and the rain lashed the old tavern as if it were a balky horse that refused to move on. The windows rattled in the worm-eaten frames, and the doors of remote rooms, where nobody ever went, slammed to in the maddest way. Now and then the tornado, sweeping down the side of Mount Agamenticus, bowled across the open country, and struck the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... put his shoulder to the worm-eaten door, and in a moment the lock gave way. The bystanders shrank instinctively back; they were frightened. The door was wide open, and masses of vapors rolled out. Soon, however, curiosity triumphed over fear. No one doubted any longer that the poor girl was ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... a ruined cabin after awhile; it was buried in deep shade; the logs were worm-eaten, and the clay chimney had fallen down. They climbed by a creaking ladder into the loft and laid Paul upon a ragged bed. A young negro woman and her child were there, and the boy saw that her foot was shackled to ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... hard ascent. Now when she looked, with love's benign delight After great ecstasy, along the plains, What foulest impregnation of her sight Transformed the scene to multitudinous troops Of human sketches, quaver-figures, bent, As were they winter sedges, broken hoops, Dry udder, vineless poles, worm-eaten posts, With features like the flowers defaced by deluge rains? Recked she that some perverting devil had limned Earth's proudest to spout scorn of the Maker's hand, Who could a day behold these deathly hosts, And see, decked, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that most appealed to them, and in the maze must surely have retraced their own footsteps. Of a sudden, however, they broke into a sort of rough stone passage, with concrete floor that ran on for a few yards and ended at a flight of well-made stone steps, above which was a square of polished oak, worm-eaten, heavily-carved, and surely not of ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... were his hobby, especially this which they approached,—a narrow, long building of unhewn stone, facing on the street, the lintels and doors worm-eaten, and green ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... midday sun when he came on deck. Its low, square houses were glaring white; here and there a splotch of vivid Cuban blue stood out; the rickety, worm-eaten piling of its water-front resembled rows of rotten, snaggly teeth smiling out of a chalky face mottled with unhealthy, artificial spots of color. Gusts of wind from the shore brought feverish odors, as if the city were sick and exhaled a tainted breath. But beyond, the hills were ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach |
