"Vagrant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been ill following him wi' the beast, and I cam back to Charlies-hope to tell the gudewife, for I was uncertain what to do. It wad look unco-like, I thought, just to be sent out on a hunt-the-gowk errand wi' a land-louper [*Vagrant] like that. But, Lord! as the gudewife set up her throat about it, and said what a shame it wad be if ye was to come to ony wrang, an I could help ye; and then in cam your letter that confirmed it. So I took to the kist, and out wi' the, pickle [*A supply.] ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... understanding passed like a vagrant breeze across the faces of the elders, and the levites were ordered to lead ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... your mother for strangers—since you attempt again what you have proved yourself incapable of accomplishing—since you prefer to go out of jail to be a vagrant and a criminal in the streets, instead of accepting my offer to live a respectable and secluded life where your shame is unknown, I wash my hands of you, and shall take pains to let it be understood that I am no longer responsible for you or your actions. You must look to strangers solely until ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... alternatives were difficult. She was without a cent, a shelter, a job, a friend, or the prospect of a meal. It was probable that there was not at that minute in New York a human being so destitute. Before nightfall she would have to find some nominal motive for living or be arrested as a vagrant. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... privileges from a Government which reflected, and represented, its interests. Curiously, enough, however, if a mendicant used the same plea in begging a mite of alms on the streets, the law has invariably regarded him as a vagrant to ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... the words; and so are you," added Agatha candidly, relinquishing the wheel and strolling with languid grace about the room, hands on her hips, timing her vagrant steps to ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Secretary of State, had since he came to manhood, resided principally on the Continent, and had learned that cosmopolitan indifference to constitutions and religions which is often observable in persons whose life has been passed in vagrant diplomacy. If there was any form of government which he liked it was that of France. If there was any Church for which he felt a preference, it was that of Rome. He had some talent for conversation, and some talent also for transacting the ordinary business of office. He had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wished to change his place; Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for power, By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour; Far other aims his heart had learned to prize, More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise. His house was known to all the vagrant train; He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain; The long-remember'd beggar was his guest, Whose beard descending swept his aged breast, The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud, Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed; The ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... not be kind," said the man, "I think it would be easier. You ought to give me up, you know, and let me go to jail. I'm no good. I'm a vagrant and a drunkard, and worse. But you won't, I know that; so now let me go. I'm not fit to stay in Arthur's room or lie on his bed. Give me a little money, my dear old friend—yes, the parrot knew me!—and ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... books dealing with great industries and commodities cease to sell, the vagrant atoms and shadings of history ending with the opening of the two world-important canals might be employed by writers seeking incidents as entrancing as romances and which are capable of being woven into narrative ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... they say that some fine day This vagrant stream may serve a mill; My doggy guard a master's yard; My free heart choose another's will. How this may fare we little care, My dog and I, as still we run! Whilst by our side the brook doth glide, And laugh and sparkle ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... diameter. Coconuts are frequently seen floating upon the sea in these regions, some of which are no doubt thrown upon the shores of the new created lands; from which accidental circumstance this fruit is there propagated. Vagrant birds unconsciously deposit the germs of various other productions of the vegetable kingdom, which in due season spring up and clothe their surfaces with verdure; and the natural accumulation of dead and putrid vegetation serves to assist in the formation of a rich and productive soil, and to increase ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... wished that she might walk among them. She knew, too, that the little sign on the gate, though so courteously worded, was no mere formality; for she had heard how a colored man, who had wandered into the cemetery on a hot night and fallen asleep on the flat top of a tomb, had been arrested as a vagrant and fined five dollars, which he had worked out on the streets, with a ball-and-chain attachment, at twenty-five cents a day. Since that time the cemetery gate had been locked ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... this dark, polar world, beside which a winter storm on the Atlantic was at least exciting. On the ocean the forces of nature have it their own way; nothing comes between man and the elements; but as Esther gazed out into the night, it was not the darkness, or the sense of cold, or the vagrant snow-flakes driving against the window, or the heavy clouds drifting through the sky, or even the ghastly glimmer and reflection of the snow-fields, that, by contrast, made the grave seem cheerful; it was rather the twinkling lights from ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... there, Their angel plucked them from me by the hair. "Come then, ye other children, Nature's—share With me" (said I) "your delicate fellowship; Let me greet you lip to lip, Let me twine with you caresses, Wantoning With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses, Banqueting With her in her wind-walled palace, Underneath her azured dais, Quaffing, as your taintless way is, From a chalice Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring.' So it was done: I in their delicate fellowship was one - Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies. ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... hours of life, unheeded until passed, but never to be recalled without pleasure. About eleven the guests generally depart, and by midnight the great avenue of this city is hardly disturbed by a foot-fall; not a sound comes on the ear except the short, fierce wrangle of packs of vagrant curs crossing each other's hunting-ground, which they are as tenacious of as the Indians are of ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... the mountains, without, however, disturbing their repose. It was not till the time of William the Testy that the thunderbolt reached the Manhattoes. While the little governor was diligently protecting his eastern boundaries from the Yankees, word was brought him of the irruption of a vagrant colony of Swedes in the South, who had landed on the banks of the Delaware, and displayed the banner of that redoubtable virago Queen Christina, and taken possession of the country in her name. These had been guided in their expedition by one Peter Minuits ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... some blissful bow'r, Aghast you start, and scarce, with aching sight, Sustain th' approaching fire's tremendous light; Swift from pursuing horrours take your way, And leave your little ALL to flames a prey; [dd]Then through the world a wretched vagrant roam; For where can starving merit find a home? In vain your mournful narrative disclose, While all neglect, and most insult your woes. [ee]Should heav'n's just bolts Orgilio's wealth confound, [J]And spread his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... took to this kind of life," said the baronet, strangely interested in this vagrant girl; "how did you get ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... acclamations, I acknowledged in what is generally termed a neat and appropriate speech. Noggs was at the first ballot elected Sergeant-at-Arms and door-keeper in general, the duty of which offices he promised to fill to the very best of his abilities. A vagrant-opinion was rife that Monsieur Souley would have filled the office of door-keeper much better, himself being so easily opened and shut. However, as Noggs had been voted the office, we all reconciled ourselves to the selection, each member providing himself with a gin-sling, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... on the street her step was so light on the pavement that she was rather like a rose petal blown fluttering along by soft vagrant puffs of spring air. Under her flopping hat her eyes and lips and cheeks were so happy that more than one passer-by turned head over shoulder to look ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... my sight and my want of a fitting coadjutor. For the sustained zeal and unconquerable patience demanded from those who would tread the unbeaten paths of knowledge are still less reconcilable with the wandering, vagrant propensity of the feminine mind than with the feeble powers ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... window when they got up in the morning. Out the little old woman jumped, and whether she broke her neck in the fall or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the three Bears never saw ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... more in the way of reading after the boating and the cricket began, than while we continued in a state of vagrant idleness, without a fixed amusement of any kind. In the first place, it was necessary to conciliate Hanmer by some show of industry in the morning, in order to keep him in good humour for the cricket ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... trees, the drip of the fountain, the monumented corner where Goldsmith rests, awake even in the most casual and prosaic a fleeting touch of romance. And the wide steps with balustrades sweeping down in many turnings to the gardens, cause vagrant and hurrying steps to pause, and wander about the library and through the gardens, which lead with such charm of way to the open spaces of the King's ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... of the vagrant highwayman found a final resting-place in the desecrated churchyard of Saint George, without the Fishergate postern, a green and grassy cemetery, but withal a melancholy one. A few recent tombs mark out the spots where some of the victims of the pestilence of 1832-33 have been ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... would have been trying to anyone; to Durant they were intolerable. For limbs that had roamed the world to be tucked up under the Colonel's whist table, for a mind equally vigorous and vagrant to be tied to the apron-strings of the Colonel's intellect, was really a refinement of torture. Thrice Durant had tried to find an exit into the surrounding landscape, and thrice the Colonel had been too quick for him. He hovered perpetually round him; he watched his goings-out and his comings-in; ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... the streets and sent her out begging, rewarding her with beatings if she did not bring her at least six pence at night, until at last she ran away from Screech-Owl and hid in a wood-yard for the night. Next day she was found, taken before a magistrate and sent to a reformatory as a vagrant until she was sixteen. It was a perfect paradise compared to Screech-Owl's miserable roost. But when she came out she fell into the hands of the Ogress who kept the inn they were now in. The clothes she stood in belonged to the Ogress, she owed her for board and lodgings and could ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... fact is, sir," he said, "I've come to ask you about something. But am I disturbing you? If so, I'll go and 'pursue vagrant pieces of leather again,' as Mr Stokes says when he wants to dismiss ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... new sots, were always dropping in from different corners of the globe to spread their infection among the more recent crowd of curio-hunters, gentlemen of commerce, nautical wrecks, decayed missionaries, painters, authors and other vagrant riff-raff who frequented the premises. There were rows going on all the time—insignificant rows, mostly about newspapers and gambling debts. Mr. Samuel got his eye blacked over a harmless game of ecarte; ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the spirit. He was an American and down deep within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had brought him to nothing and had only left him more ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... proffer'd bliss!—What! fondly quit This pomp Of empire for an Arab's wand'ring tent, Where the mock chieftain leads his vagrant tribes From plain to plain, and faintly shadows out The majesty of kings!—Far other joys Here shall attend thy call: Submissive realms Shall bow the neck; and swarthy kings and Queens, From the far-distant Niger and the Nile, ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... been trying to meet Terry, but he is as elusive as any vagrant sunbeam. I feel it would do me a world of good to have a long heart-to-heart talk with him. If I could only see him once a week and have him sympathise with me in a brotherly fashion and hear him say, in his old way: 'Cheer up, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Edera cannot be touched: it can be expropriated. You think the Terra Vergine cannot be touched: it can be expropriated. Against expropriation no rights can stand. It is the concentration and crystallisation of Theft legitamised by Government; that is by Force. A vagrant may not take a sheaf of your wheat, a fowl from your hen-house: if he do so, the law protects you and punishes him. A syndicate of rich men, of powerful men, may take the whole of your land, and the State will compel you to accept ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... natives who earn their livelihood by their labour; and by dint of the most parsimonious frugality, to which the English are strangers, work at an under price; so as not only to share, but even in a manner to exclude them from all employment; that such an adoption of vagrant Jews into the community, from all parts of the world, would rob the real subjects of their birthright, disgrace the character of the nation, expose themselves to the most dishonourable participation and intrusion, endanger the constitution both in church ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Mr. Wilmot's coming was, that Dr. Spencer was cured of the vagrant habits of going to church at Abbotstoke or Fordholm, that had greatly concerned his friend. Dr. May, who could never get any answer from him except that he was not a Town Councillor, and, as to example, it was no way to set that to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... struggling crowd had lashed his pugnacity and ensanguined his temper. As an additional indignity, the saloon had been burned, and he had not had a drink for an hour. "I'll run you in for wearing boys' clothes; have you ever heard the penalty for that, miss? And I'll run in this little greaser as a vagrant." ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... agility, and alertness make them a lovely and inspiring sight. To see them feed undisturbed is wonderful; such mincing steps, such dainty nibbling is a lesson in culture. With wide, lustrous eyes, mobile ears ever listening, with moist, sensitive nostrils testing every vagrant odor in the air, they are the embodiment of hypersensitive self-preservation. And yet deer are not essentially timid animals. They will venture far through curiosity, and I have seen them from the hilltop, being run by dogs, play ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... editor went on with his erasure; and interlineations. Just as he finished them a hand grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Shekomeko, in Dutchess County, New York, they had established a flourishing Indian congregation; and now, the Assembly of New York, stirred up by some liquor sellers who were losing their business, passed an insulting Act, declaring that "all vagrant preachers, Moravians, and disguised Papists," should not be allowed to preach to the Indians unless they first took the oaths of allegiance and abjuration {1744.}. James Hutton was boiling with fury. If this Act had applied to all preachers of the Gospel he would not have minded so much; but ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... natures partook, in some measure, of the instincts of those creatures of the night—a people whose deeds were of darkness, and whose eyes shunned the light. Here the gipsies had pitched their tent; and though the place was often, in part, deserted by the vagrant horde, yet certain of the tribe, who had grown into years—over whom Barbara Lovel held queenly sway—made it their haunt, and were suffered by the authorities of the neighborhood to remain unmolested—a ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... heat. Even the girl herself, nervous at first and switching with her dainty whip at the crumbling sands and pacing restlessly to and fro, had yielded gradually to the drooping influences of the hour and, seated on a rock, had buried her chin in the palm of her hand, and, with eyes no longer vagrant and searching, had drifted away into maiden dreamland. Full thirty minutes had she been there waiting for something, or somebody, and it, or he, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... clothes in vagrant wards and hospitals for infectious diseases, on the contrary, a continued heat is necessary, and in this case the accumulation of reserve heat, which takes place slowly in a jacketed oven, becomes of value, as the gas can be turned low or out, and the ventilators closed, insuring a more complete ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... lily, and out of the stratum of crime the saint—was an article of faith with him. Nature's or God's surprises were dear to him; and nothing purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural, womanly and saintly was ever made than Pompilia, the daughter of a vagrant impurity, the child of crime, the girl who grew to womanhood in mean ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... doin' home." He must have traveled by rail, somehow, for three days later he was in the town of Whiteville, which, as you know, is a long way from Blackburg. His clothing was in pretty fair condition, but he was sinfully dirty. Unable to give any account of himself he was arrested as a vagrant and sentenced to imprisonment in the Infants' ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Thistlewood pronounced that no power on earth should induce her to open it, and drew off herself and her little girls to a safe distance from the secret poison she fancied it contained; while Sir Marmaduke was rating the constables for taking advantage of his absence to interpret the Queen's Vagrant Act in their own violent fashion; ending, however, by sending them round to the buttery-hatch to drink the young Lord's health. For the messeger, the good knight heartily grasped his hand, welcoming him and thanking him ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... good gardener's year, and I am sorry that the fall anemones and the blooming of the earliest chrysanthemums insist upon telling me that it is nearly over,—that is, as far as the reign of complete garden colour is concerned. And amid our vagrant summer wanderings among gardens of high or low degree, no one point has been so recurrent or interesting as the distribution of colour, and especially the dominance of white flowers in any landscape or garden in ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... exuberant, vagrant life it was! The blood warms and the nerves tingle after the tensions and heats of a quarter of a century as those days of sublime vagabondage come back. The melodious morning calls that waked the sleepy, lusty young bodies; the echoing bugle and the abrupt drum! And ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... disorders cast a great reproach upon the master and mistress of the family in which they happen, for it is supposed that they have failed in their duty. The reason of punishing this so severely is, because they think that if they were not strictly restrained from all vagrant appetites, very few would engage in a state in which they venture the quiet of their whole lives, by being confined to one person, and are obliged to endure all the inconveniences with which it is accompanied. In choosing their wives they use a method that would appear to us very absurd and ridiculous, ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... still hovered about Saltash's face; a smile in which cynicism and some vagrant, half-stifled emotion ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... the path of the outmost sun through utter darkness hurled — Further than ever comet flared or vagrant star-dust swirled — Live such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... begun when it ended; it was all over in an instant. The two who had escaped injury leaped back aboard the Drab. Those who needed assistance were helped back. The Drab drifted away, her vagrant course unheeded at first, for it looked as though all aboard had taken part in ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... any other place, unless by the most accustomed road, forty lashes; the same for travelling in the night without a pass; the same for being found in another negro's kitchen, or quarters; and every negro found in company with such vagrant, receives twenty lashes. ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... the room beyond he continued the conversation in his own odd manner, passing to antipodal subjects by paths of association beyond the guess of an imagination less vagrant than his own. With Cardington conversation was a fine art. He loved the adequate or picturesque word as a miner loves an ingot of gold, yet he was able to display his linguistic stores without incurring the charge of pedantry, much ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... true. He's out of humor with some vagrant Gypsies, Who have their camp here in the neighborhood. There's nothing so undignified ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... disaster not only possible but hourly imminent, the "old stander" and the volunteer were to her Navy what salt is to the sea, its perpetual salvation. Such men inculcated an example, created an esprit de corps, that infected even the vagrant and the jail-bird, to say nothing of the better-class seaman, taken mainly by gangs operating on the water, who was often content, when brought into contact with loyal men, to settle down and do his best for ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... however, Dr. Frazer's remarks in G.B. ii. p. 454. He thinks that the air might in this way be purged of vagrant spirits or baleful ghosts, as the Malay medicine man swings in front of the patient's house in order to chase away the disease. Cp. G.B. ii. 343, where a rather different explanation is attempted ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... famous Scottish minstrel who flourished in the 15th century; the few particulars of his life which have come down to us represent him as a blind and vagrant poet, living by reciting poems "before princes and peers"; to him is attributed the celebrated poem, "The Life of that Noble Champion of Scotland, Sir William Wallace, Knight," completed about 1488, a spirited, if partly apocryphal, account of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... air to witch gatherings, partaking of witch sacraments, signing a book presented by the devil, and submitting to Satanic baptism. The possessed had begun with charging their possession upon poor and vagrant old women, but ere long, emboldened by their success, they attacked higher game, struck at some of the foremost people of the region, and did not cease until several of these were condemned to death, and every man, woman, and child brought under a reign of terror. Many fled outright, and one of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... fine drizzling rain sets in. It stops by and by, and you have no sort of opinion of typhoons. Then the rain begins again with a steady downpour, which makes you wonder if there will be any left for next year. Again it stops, almost leads you to think it intends to clear. Then a little vagrant sigh of wind wafts back the deluge. A few minutes later nature sighs again with more tears. Each gust is stronger than the one before it, and at the end of eight or ten hours the blasts are terrific, and the ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... Milton, Johnson records his own experience. 'Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.' Johnson's Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... knew it not; who says Of vagrant doubt for such a cause that stirs His fancy shall not pay arrearages To all sweet names that might perhaps be hers? The doubts of love are powers. His heart obeys, The world is in them, still to love defers, Will play with him for love, but when ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... than both the Indies lies everywhere for man, if he will endure. Not his oaks only and his fruit-trees, his very heart roots itself wherever he will abide;—roots itself, draws nourishment from the deep fountains of Universal Being! Vagrant Sam-Slicks, who rove over the Earth doing 'strokes of trade,' what wealth have they? Horseloads, shiploads of white or yellow metal: in very sooth, what are these? Slick rests nowhere, he is homeless. ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... pomp which waits on greatness, Ill suits my humble, unambitious soul;— Then leave me here, to tread the safer path Of private life; here, where my peaceful course Shall be as silent as the shades around me; Nor shall one vagrant wish be e'er allow'd To stray beyond the ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... successful required first of all to command the confidence of the community in his honesty. The ballot and the jury-box were regarded as sacred as the sacrament itself, and the criminal courts had usually little to do beyond the cases of vagrant offenders. Business was conducted as a rule without the formality of contracts, and those whose lives justly provoked scandal were shunned on every side. This community possessed the only real wealth the world can give—content; ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... is the happiest vagrant's life in the world. He is usually regarded as a bona fide seeker for work, and food is readily given him for the asking. Unlike the American hobo, he is given his food raw, and is expected to cook it himself. So he carries what he calls a "tucker bag" to hold his provisions; also, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Infirmities; for where there is a numerous Family of poor Children the Vestry takes Care to bind them out Apprentices, till they are able to maintain themselves by their own Labour; by which Means they are never tormented with Vagrant, and Vagabond Beggars, there being a Reward for taking up Run-aways, that are at a small Distance from their Home; if they are not known, or are without a Pass from their Master, and can give no good Account of ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... They have no other ambition to gratify. With the stomach distended and a quid of tobacco in their mouths, they are as happy as kings, and very careless about liberty. Many of them when they leave the prison, leave home. To such men, and to all the class of vagrant and pauper criminals, a convict prison means a comfortable home, where they are fed and clothed, and bathed and physicked, and have all their wants supplied, without trouble or care, in exchange for their liberty ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... Little boaster, vagrant king, Neither north nor south is yours, You've no kingdom that endures! Wandering every fall and spring, With your ruby crown so slender, Are you only ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... our own Orchard, is the Basket-maker. As these two belong to the Blackbird and Oriole family, we may as well have them now, though in the regular family procession the 'tramp' walks next to the Bobolink, who is such a vagrant himself. ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... charming and insidious, Damaris Verity, resting in a wicker deck-chair in the shade of the great ilex trees, found herself alone, free to follow her own vagrant thoughts, perceptions, imaginations without human let or hindrance. Free to dream undisturbed and interrogate both Nature and her ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... from the Spanish-American mines, were not infrequently disastrous to those who were already living close to the margin of subsistence. As never before country roads and the streets of towns were encumbered with the vagrant poor, and the jails and almshouses were filling up, as a result of Elizabethan legislation, with petty thieves, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... needle cases lately, have you?" "I do not understand what you are referring to," the now thoroughly mystified Joe interrupted the beggar, "I have never peddled a needle case in all my life." "Trying to wiggle yourself out of your past, eh?" the vagrant scornfully retorted, and thinking that his victim was trying to slip out of his net, he continued, "guess you think you can fool this old plinger and try to work the 'innocent' game on your old ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... the serious pieces, the better part of the volume. The Foster-Mother's Tale is in the best style of dramatic narrative. The Dungeon, and the Lines upon the Yew-tree Seat, are beautiful. The Tale of the Female Vagrant is written in the stanza, not the style, of Spenser. We extract a part ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... on his back, and went, He knew not whither, nor for what intent; So stole our vagrant from his warm retreat, To rove a prowler, ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... spot where long, long years before, I had lived a happy maiden. No one knew me; I was branded as a witch, and fled away. Should I go to the relatives of my husband? Thomas had spoken of them as kind and charitable. I reached the village; every one looked at me with suspicion as a vagrant. Well they might, for a vagrant I was, poor, wretched, and despised. I had been there in my happy days with Thomas; but the place itself looked strange. I inquired for his father, Farmer Holman. 'Dead many a year ago; all the rest gone away; never ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... vagrant ray of the brilliant sun reached down through a break in the overcast of clouds and touched the shining hull of the Ancient Mariner with a finger of gold. Instantly, the ship shone like the polished mirror ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... want of employment, and the direction of their fathers, brought up in idleness—their education and morals neglected, and bad habits acquired, will be the reverse of those before noticed: and many of them will become a vagrant race, unconcerned or uninterested in the welfare of the country, and in many instances a nuisance to it. While their parents, after they get unfit for the business, will be turned off ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... benevolent man sees you as he is going home in the evening, and takes you to the overseers of the poor, and says, "Here is a little vagrant girl I found in the streets. We must send the poor little thing to the poor house, or she will ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... had charged herself with the maintenance of two former nuns, noble and well educated, who, at the fall of their community, had been recommended, or had procured a recommendation, to her. Mesdames de Brinon and du Basque were these two vagrant nuns. Madame de Maintenon, instinctively attracted to this sort of persons, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... themselves and their wives, children, and servants, as well as all their tenants and cottars, with their wives, children, and servants, to abstain from conventicles, and not to receive, assist, or even speak to, any forfeited persons, intercommuned ministers, or vagrant preachers, but to use their utmost endeavours to apprehend all such? Those who took this bond were to receive an assurance that the troops should not be quartered on their lands—a matter of considerable importance—for this quartering ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... after the girls had arrived in the metropolis. However, the mother of Low discovered that clothes had been taken away from her house, and the intended journey of the girls was of course prevented. The Bench dealt with the case under the Vagrant Act, and sentenced the woman to ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... they denounced the proposed meeting, the former promising to Thompson a lynching, while the latter endeavored to involve his associates who were to the "manner born" in the popular outbreak, which was confidently predicted in case the "foreign vagrant" wagged his tongue ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of idolatry. His kingdom was of this world, therefore did his servants fight; but they did not fight always alone, for he fought at nine battles or sieges in person, and in ten years achieved fifty military enterprizes. He united religion and plunder, by which he allured the vagrant Arabs to his standard. He asserted that the sword was the key of heaven and hell; that a drop of blood shed in the cause of God, a night spent in arms are of more account than two months of fasting and prayer. He assured those who should fall in battle, that their sins should ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... covered the last twenty miles in less than five hours, and when the brown stone village came in sight and I had thumped down the last hill and over the peaked bridge, I was a dilapidated and foot-sore vagrant and nothing more. To this day Wales for me is the land where one's feet have the ugly habit of foregathering in the end ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... materialized; but her dreams had kept pace with her growth, and it is not probable she lamented them. The floor was covered with a pretty matting, and the curtains that softened the high window and fluttered in the vagrant breezes were of pale-green art muslin. The walls, hung not with gold and silver brocade tapestry, but with a dainty apple-blossom paper, were adorned with a few good pictures given Anne by Mrs. Allan. Miss Stacy's photograph occupied the place of honor, and Anne made ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... too much stress and strain, 10 Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip Back and rejoin its source before the term— And aptest in contrivance (under God) To baffle it by deftly stopping such— The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace) Three samples of true snakestone—rarer still, One of the other sort, the melon-shaped, (But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs) And writeth ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... you see, my portmanteau contains a shirt, a pair of socks, a comb and a toothbrush. Also a copy of the works of the divine vagrant Maitre Francois Villon, which I will take out at once. He was a thief and a reprobate and got nearer hanged than any man who ever lived, and he is the dearest ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... varnish;—imagine the first consternation, and final wrath, of these cognoscenti, at being asked to contemplate, deliberately, and to the last rent of her ragged gown, and for principal object in a finished picture, a vagrant who ought at once to have been sent to the workhouse; and some really green grass and blue flowers, as they actually may any day be seen on ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... putting frozen steaks into the infra-oven as Ben walked through to crew quarters. Her coverall sleeves were rolled to the elbows as she worked and a vagrant strand of copper hair curled over her forehead. As Martin passed by, he caught a faint whisper of perfume ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... of the little green loops or bends on the banks of Corriewater, mouldered walls, and a few stunted wild plum-trees and vagrant roses, still point out the site of a cottage and garden. A well of pure spring- water leaps out from an old tree-root before the door; and here the shepherds, shading themselves in summer from the influence of ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... Inspired by breathless attention, you try ardently to do your very best. It seems to you that you could never endure a total failure, and you hardly see how you could bear, with any sort of equanimity, even the vacant gaze or restless movement that would bespeak a vagrant interest. If you are a novice, perhaps the frightful idea crosses your mind, "What if one of these children should slip out of the room?" Or, still more tragic possibility, suppose they should look ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fierce sigh. "I suppose," said he, after an unquiet pause, "that the vagrant and the outlaw are strong in me, for I long to run back to my old existence, which was all action, and therefore allowed ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... higher, when I assure you that), despite my honourable years, my hearing is as painfully acute as that of the giant fabled to watch 'Bifrost,' and who 'heard the grass growing in the fields, and the wool on the backs of young lambs.' Last night, just as I was lapsing into a preliminary doze, two vagrant nightingales undertook an opera that brought them to the large myrtle under my window, where I hoped they had reached the finale. But one of them—the female, I warrant you, from the clatter of her small tongue (if female nightingales can ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... thought I,—but among us trod A man in blue, with legal baton, And scoffed the vagrant demigod, And pushed him from the step I sat on. Doubting I mused upon the cry, "Great Pan is dead!"—and all the people Went on their ways:—and clear and high The quarter sounded from ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... meeting him in the park, and his inviting him to his house. After Middleton's appointment, the two encounter each other at the Mayor's dinner in St. Mary's Hall, and Eldredge, startled at meeting the vagrant, as he deemed him, under such a character, remembers the hints of some secret knowledge of the family history, which Middleton had thrown out. He endeavors, both in person and by the priest, to make out what Middleton really is, and what he knows, and what he intends; but Middleton is on his guard, ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the night in the streets of Oroville, he got up, and read these words, or some like them, in the village newspaper:—"The heavy frost which fell last night brings with it at least one source of congratulation for our citizens. Soon the crowd of vagrant street-sleepers, which infests our town, will be forced to go forth and work for warmer quarters. It has throughout this summer been the ever-present nuisance and eyesore of our otherwise beautiful and romantic moonlit nights." "Listen to this scoundrel!" said he; "how he can insult ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... which reconciles one to bear with it until it gives place to the individual independence of more advanced civilisation, is the fact that, with such a state of things, no "poor laws" are needed. The sick, the aged, the blind, the lame, and even the vagrant, has always a house and home, and food and raiment, as far as he considers he needs it. A stranger may, at first sight, think a Samoan one of the poorest of the poor, and yet he may live ten years with that Samoan and not be able to ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... less. He shipped with the fishing boats in the summer and cruised with any vagrant craft for the winter. When he came ashore he was as small and eel-like and shy and awkward as ever, with the same dumb ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... the long driveway that led to Tutors' Lane, Tom slowed his pace. Overhead, Betelgeuse was making the most of its recent publicity, unobstructed by vagrant clouds. Tom gazed up at it with a certain air of proprietorship. He had known Betelgeuse years ago and personally had always preferred its neighbour Rigel, which had received no publicity at all. As a small boy some one had given him a Handbook of the Stars, with diagrams of ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... any other capacity than that of an indentured apprentice or bonded and hired servant. Without such a legally ratified connection with some employer, a youth of Shakespeare's poverty and social degree, and a stranger in London, would be classed before the law as a masterless man and a vagrant. The term "servitor" then does not refer to his theatrical capacity—as stated by Halliwell-Phillipps—but to his legal relations with James Burbage, his employer. Only sharers in a company were classed as "servants" to the nobleman under whose patronage they ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... They even bait the excitement of "losing a job," and often provoke a foreman if only to see "how much he will stand." They are constitutionally unable to enjoy anything continuously and follow their vagrant wills unhindered. Unfortunately the city lends itself to this distraction. At the best, it is difficult to know what to select and what to eliminate as objects of attention among its thronged streets, ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... steady, plodding industry, witness Limus. Now the present demand for fish will not be permanent. After the war the negroes will have to fall back upon field-labor for a living, and it will be better for them if in the meanwhile they do not acquire a distaste for steady labor and get vagrant habits. I would talk this over with 'Siah and ask him in serious mood if he really thinks best to spend so much money in fishing-gear, when he could buy land with it ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... with wild flowers, gorgeously festooned with creeping and parasitical plants hanging from the branches, and secured in their leafy seclusion by walls of abundant foliage. In one of these natural parlours they paused for their mid-day repast—mid-day in the world without, but here, where only vagrant gleams of the spring sun pierced the forest solitudes, gloomy with spruce and pine, there was a sense of morning in the air. This appearance was heightened by the delicate curtains of cobweb, strung with shining pearls, which still ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... afraid of being made too amiable, or too plain? No, no! You are not vain. Whence comes this vagary?—well, we shall all know in good time. Were I to be with you, I should talk—perhaps maliciously—on purpose to see how your features would unsettle and shift themselves to the vagrant humour, that though one would know another from habit, and their old acquaintanceship, the painter would never be able to keep them steadily together. I should laugh to see every lineament "going ahead," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... on for close upon an hour, moving from one street to another with steps that were listless or rapid, as inclination prompted; then, still acting with vagrant aimlessness, he stopped in his wanderings and entered a ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... his longings were ever stilled, where he seemed at peace with himself, where he understood what he was made for, was out of doors in the woods. When he should have been poring over the sweet, palpitating mysteries of the multiplication table, his vagrant gaze was always on the open window near which he sat. He could never study when a fly buzzed on the window-pane; he was always standing on the toes of his bare feet, trying to locate and understand ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... toward ridding European society of its most turbulent elements; while at the same time they gave fresh development to the spirit of romantic adventure, and connected it with something better than vagrant freebooting.[321] By renewing the long-suspended intercourse between the minds of western Europe and the Greek culture of Constantinople, they served as a mighty stimulus to intellectual curiosity, and had a large share in bringing about that great thirteenth century ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... shadow cast. As airy shapes, beneath the moon's pale eye, People the clouds that sail the midnight sky, Dance thro the grove and flit along the glade, And cast their grisly phantoms on the shade; So move the hordes, in thickets half conceal'd, Or vagrant stalking thro the fenceless field, Here tribes untamed, who scorn to fix their home, O'er shadowy streams and trackless deserts roam; While others there in settled hamlets rest, And corn-clad vales ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... Thus vagrant beggars, to extort By charity a mean support, Their sores and putrid ulcers show, And shock our sense till ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... desperate and vagrant part of his clansmen now crowded around Rob Roy at Craig Royston, and swore obedience to him as their chieftain. The country was kept in continual awe by these marauders, who broke into houses and carried ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... who left his wife and little children to fight against King George. He could think of but one thing to protect them against vagrant soldiers of either side, and that was to carve upon certain boards (which he nailed to the trees here and there along the ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... playing the opening strains of the supper dance now, and a hundred voices were singing with it; so the neighbor woman's daughter, who had been peering from behind the fanning-mill, hurried away to the house. And thus it came about that no one but a vagrant night-hawk, perched high on the top of the stack, remained near enough to hear the sawing sound of a dull knife-blade, making its way ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... out my thoughts, and with them the conviction that stonebreaking should be allotted to minor poets or vagrant children of nature like myself, never to such tired folk as my poor mate at ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... Patroclus dead? Living, I seem'd his dearest, tenderest care, But now forgot, I wander in the air. Let my pale corse the rites of burial know, And give me entrance in the realms below: Till then the spirit finds no resting-place, But here and there the unbodied spectres chase The vagrant dead around the dark abode, Forbid to cross the irremeable flood. Now give thy hand; for to the farther shore When once we pass, the soul returns no more: When once the last funereal flames ascend, No more shall meet Achilles ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... faith the prince and queen ascribe (Replied Eumaeus) to the wandering tribe. For needy strangers still to flattery fly, And want too oft betrays the tongue to lie. Each vagrant traveller, that touches here, Deludes with fallacies the royal ear, To dear remembrance makes his image rise, And calls the springing sorrows from her eyes. Such thou mayst be. But he whose name you crave Moulders in earth, or welters on the wave, Or food for fish or dogs ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... in the calaboose, and when he frankly said that he had come to Tahiti to preach the gospel of I. W. W.-ism and that he believed the fishermen had all the right on their side, he was sentenced as "a foreigner without visible means of support, a vagrant, miscreant, vagabond, and dangerous alien," to a month on the roads, and then to be deported to the United ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... rich stained glass, spots of color that were repeated, with quite a different lustre, in the dappled haunches of rows of sturdy Percherons munching their meal in the adjacent stalls. Add to such an ensemble a vagrant multitude of rose, honeysuckle, clematis, and wistaria vines, all blooming in full rivalry of perfume and color; insert in some of the corners and beneath some of the older casements archaic bits of sculpture—strange barbaric features with ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the most hateful of all these men, to Manuel, was the head baker, who ordered him about in a despotic manner and grew angry if things weren't done in a trice. This baker was a German named Karl Schneider who had come to Spain as a vagrant, in evasion of military service. He was about twenty-four or twenty-five, with limpid eyes, and hair and moustache that were so fair as ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... creating a pale, thin vapour that clung close to the shimmering surface and dazzled the eye with an ever-shifting glaze. The air was lifeless, sultry, stifling; not a leaf, not a twig in the tall, drooping willows moved unless stirred by the passage of some vagrant bird. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... firmness and strength, woman, in whom the centrifugal force is stronger, remains a weak, vacillating, impulsive creature, feebly swayed by the tides of emotion, lacking self-poise, and aimless and vagrant. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... breath, from her haste, she ran it down at last, and came upon it—a series of small waterfalls down which a small stream tumbled recklessly along a vagrant watercourse, seeming to care little when it reached its destination, so that it contrived to have plenty of fun and exercise by the way. And on the bank, stretched recumbent, hands clasped under head, lay a long figure in gray flannels, ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a victim to some uncanny power. The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity against the sin of superstition; still the belief prevailed. Not a soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard the tale, would seek shelter beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... Cameron's vagrant mind, suddenly recalled, responded with a quick assent. Opportunity? Endowment? Yes, surely. His mind flashed back over the years of his education at the Academy and the University, long lazy years. How little he had made of them! Others had turned them into the gold of success. ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... How Jennet blush'd, how Alfred with a stride Bore off his prize, and fancied every charm, And clipp'd against his ribs her trembling arm; How mute we seniors stood, our power all gone? Completely conquer'd, Love the day had won, And the young vagrant triumph'd in our plight, And shook his roguish plumes, and laugh'd outright. Yet, by my life and hopes, I would not part With this sweet recollection from my heart; I would not now forget that tender scene To wear a crown, or make my girl a queen. Why need be told how pass'd the months along, How ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... you are wrong; this vagrant taste is unnatural, and does not lead to happiness; your eager pursuit of pleasure defeats itself; love gives no true delight but where the heart is attach'd, and you do not give yours time to fix. Such is our unhappy frailty, that the tenderest passion may wear out, and another succeed, ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... she-priests, to Cybebe's dense woods, together haste, ye vagrant herd of the dame Dindymene, ye who inclining towards strange places as exiles, following in my footsteps, led by me, comrades, ye who have faced the ravening sea and truculent main, and have castrated your bodies in your utmost hate of Venus, make glad our mistress speedily with your ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... again in the rear, as a goose does an intruder, and now and then picked something from his coat, which I supposed to be a vagrant thread, or a piece of lint or straw, and then retreated a step or two to avoid closer contact. He was compelled at last to turn again on his pursuer, and expostulate with her in no gentle terms. I heard the words "mind your own business," or ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... railroads. At the end of "The Seven Vagabonds," he represented himself as taking up the character of an itinerant story-teller on the impulse of the moment. To this he now returned, and proposed to write a series of tales on the thread of the adventures of this vagrant, and call it "The Story-Teller." The work, such as he here conceived it, exists only as a fragment, "Passages from a Relinquished Work," though he doubtless used elsewhere the stories he intended to incorporate into it. In the ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... me with a dungeon—a threat which they dared not mutter, far less attempt to execute, were it not that they see me an outcast, unprotected by the natural head of my family, and regard me rather as they would some unfriended vagrant, than as a descendant of the ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Lady, be calm! fear not this king of the buskin! 315 A king? Oh laughter! A king Bajazet! That from some vagrant actor's tiring-room, Hath stolen at once ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and turned into a noisy, restless playground the single narrow, irregular street. Then it suddenly became a mad commixture of Babel and hell. At this hour nothing living moved within range of the watcher's vision except a vagrant dog; the heat haze hung along the near-by slopes, while a little spiral of dust rose lazily from the deserted road. But Hampton had no eyes for this dreary prospect; with contracted brows he was viewing again that which ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... will hail the prospect of emancipation, but will deprecate the length of time. They will feel that it gives too little to the now living slaves. But it really gives them much. It saves them from the vagrant destitution which must largely attend immediate emancipation in localities where their numbers are very great, and it gives the inspiring assurance that their posterity shall be free forever. The plan leaves to each State choosing to act under it to abolish slavery now or at ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... of the dentist, the conventional solemnity of the schoolteacher and of the immobile Swede, the shaking, quavering terror of Mrs. Ducharme, mumbling to herself the words of the service. Why should the old woman be so upset, he wondered. But his vagrant thoughts always came back to the woman near the coffin, the woman he loved. How could she summon up such peace! Was hers one of those mighty souls that never doubted? That steadfast gaze ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and Bussorah, had in his harem eighty consorts, free and servile. Coming closer to the Prophet's household, we find that Mohammed himself at one period had in his harem no fewer than nine wives and two slave-girls. Of his grandson Hasan we read that his vagrant passion gained for him the unenviable sobriquet of The Divorcer; for it was only by continually divorcing his consorts that he could harmonize his craving for fresh nuptials with the requirements of the divine law, which limited the number ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... expert in avoiding the rattling broughams and hansoms as the veriest mongrel that ever led a vagrant life in London streets. Berekely Square?—here there was comparative quiet, with the gas lamps shining up on the thick foliage of the maples. In Grosvenor Square he had a bit of a scamper; but there was no rabbit to ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... considered that those two women used him like a shuttlecock. Or, rather, he said that they sent him backwards and forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn't want to pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and Nancy picked her up and threw her down as suited their purely vagrant moods. So there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... bitter anxiety, of fear and hope, as often falls to the lot of women.' Then comes a charming description of the three miles of straight and dusty road. 'I walked from one cottage to the other on an autumn evening when the vagrant birds, whose habit of assembling there for their annual departure, gives, I suppose, its name of Swallowfield to the village, were circling over my head, and I repeated to myself the pathetic lines of Hayley as he saw those same birds gathering ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... to be done under the circumstances. The men of the township recognised that it was their bounden duty to support the master in an affair of this kind. When occasion arose they assisted in the capture of vagrant youths, and when Joel imagined a display of force advisable they attended at the punishment and rendered such assistance as was needful in the due enforcement of discipline. It was understood by all that the school would lose prestige and efficiency if ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... The vagrant gondola had come nearer, and now it was drawn close up under the bow of the barge, just on the edge of the throng of boats. The Signorina scarcely needed to glance at the oarsman standing in the full light of the lanterns, to know that it was no other than the exile whose lament it had ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller |
