"Toothless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exceedingly expensive instrument of torture was compounded chiefly of silk (which easily frayed) and whale-bone. Many good women of the middle class have gone to their graves for three hundred years believing that Almighty God had specially created toothless whales of the Family Balaenidae solely for the purpose of providing women with the only possible ingredient for a corset; and for three hundred years, brave seamen of the Dutch, British and Basque nations had gone to a watery grave ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... assailant, but the cub clung tenaciously, growling, clawing and biting the while. Then the ant-eater reared himself straight upright and fanned the air with his murderously armed forefeet; his long, round tongue played out of his minute, toothless mouth like a snake's. Still the Jaguar retained his footing. The ant-eater then dropped on all fours, leisurely ambled to the nearest tree and, scraping his back on the low branches soon brushed the cub off when he started unconcernedly away. No sooner did Warruk regain his feet than he again ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... shrieking senseless gibberish in its rage. Then it began to hurl its whole body madly against the glass walls and to beat its head. It appeared to have a sudden incomprehensible hatred for the three strangers. It was trying to fly at them. The toothless gums moved spasmodically, and it threw its face into horrible grimaces. That nameless, loathsome abortion was the nearest that Oliver Haddo had ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... or pale and bloated beast-men, or white-haired, toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown venerable in vice. But beautiful, youthful profligates, limbed like the gods and fauns of the old Greek sculptors; soft of skin, golden of hair, with sleepy eyes like green jewels, soft persuasive voices with which to pour poisoned ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... twice—which sent Pascal stumbling out to the backyard to finish weeding the circle of pansies before dinner—she wondered about the gash that was his mouth. She distinctly remembered carving it so that the ends curved upward into a frozen and quite harmless smile. But one end of the toothless grin seemed to sag a little, like the cynical smile of one who knows his ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... 53. "A toothless old woman then entered the hall, and was told by Utgard-Loki to take hold of Thor. The tale is shortly told. The more Thor tightened his hold on the crone the firmer she stood. At length, after a very violent struggle, Thor began to lose his footing, and was finally brought down upon one ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... supporting several feet of snow the lighting of the room was effected only by a large oil-lamp which stood on the blackened table in the centre. An old woman came forward into the light of the lamp. Her eyes were fine and black—her mouth was toothless and folded away for ever, lost in a crevice under her nose. When she smiled the oak-apples of her cheeks rose up and cut the black eyes ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... the little, blackish-green (perhaps the color gas-light imparts to faded black) clerk of Emanuel Griffin, Esq. Whether David Dubbs, such was he called, derived the power of writing from his mouth; or whether the gentle excitation of moving his lips over toothless gums assisted thought; or whether, as some said, he chewed tobacco, a position which nobody ever held long, as nobody ever proved him to have expectorated during his whole life; his mouth—always closed—moved up and down, up and down, with the motion ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... he felt himself compelled to acknowledge that he could no longer be accepted by any woman. Although almost entirely crippled, he did not appear to be so when he was seated, when he talked, or when he was at table. He had only one meal a day, and always took it alone because, being toothless and unable to eat otherwise than very slowly, he did not wish to hurry himself out of compliment to his guests, and would have been sorry to see them waiting for him. This feeling deprived him of the pleasure he would have enjoyed in entertaining at his board friendly and agreeable guests, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... fire boils my pot; with oak or beech Is piled,—dry beech logs when the snow lies deep. And storm and sunshine, I disdain them each As toothless sires a nut, when broth is ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... you are toothless, denotes your inability to advance your interests, and ill health will cast goom{sic} over ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... radiant face and alluring body of his bride could conceal or drive out. These lumbering ranchers, these tobacco-chewing, drawling lumpkins, were they to be his companions for the rest of his life? These women with their toothless, shapeless mouths, these worn and weary mothers in home-made calico and cheap millinery, were they to be the visitors at his fireside? What kind of woman would they ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... well," said a toothless, lisping old Turk, with bare brown legs, and large feet stuck in a pair of new red shining slippers: "that oval tower has not been opened for a long time. If any one were to go in, his head would be cut off by an invisible hangiar." I smiled, but was immediately assured by several by-standers ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... great canvas he keeps there. Poor, dear, strange man, he says his prayers to it! He had not been to bed, nor since then, properly! What has happened to him? Has he found out about the Serafina?" she whispered, with a glittering eye and a toothless grin. ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... preached in their parish; at any rate, it was never carried home to any man's conscience. Nobody was ever disturbed. Nobody's feelings were ever hurt. Nobody in all the parish had ever heard a voice of thunder saying, Thou art the man. Toothless and timid generalities made up all the preaching they ever heard either on the ethical or on the evangelical side: and generalities disturb no man's peace of mind. The pulpit of Kilmacolm was but too sib to the pew, and both pulpit and pew slept on together ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... "All right, I'm under arrest," he said. "But as Medical Officer of this vessel it's my duty to remind you that you can't live without a certain minimum of fresh organic food. We've got to start back now." He was pale, but determined. He couldn't bear the thought of getting bald and toothless from dietary deficiency. The girls would never give ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... of them were killed dead by a gun," said old Bounder, a toothless lion who could chew only soft scraps of meat. "Others must have been caught in traps and ...
— Nero, the Circus Lion - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum
... the long, white hair fell to his shoulders, where it curled up at the ends. His sunken eyes gleamed like a hawk's, and his dry, parchment skin was stretched tightly over the prominent bones. His nose was hooked, and his lips sunken over toothless gums—for he would not afford false teeth. His hands were as small as ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... occurring in Central America, if, indeed, the artists had any one species in mind. In the Tro-Cortesianus frogs are not uncommon. In 31a there are four (Pl. 7, fig. 1) with water coming from their mouths. They are characterized by their stout tailless bodies, flattened heads and toothless mouths. In 101d (Pl. 7, figs. 2, 3) there are two, the first painted blue with spots of darker blue and the second white and represented as broken in two in the middle. The signs of death above the latter clearly show that a dead animal is indicated. Pl. 7, fig. 6, shows the end of Altar O from ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... it very well," said a toothless old man without raising his eyes. "Something like a bank, only we must pay in time. We cannot do it; it is hard enough as it is. That will ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... haunches and insulted both her admirers impartially. She hurled taunts at them for their cowardice, and called them vile names, such as Histah, the snake, and Dango, the hyena. She threatened to call Mumga to chastise them with a stick—Mumga, who was so old that she could no longer climb and so toothless that she was forced to confine her diet almost ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sombre leaves of the sacred olives almost hid the white low walls of the rambling buildings. On the fourth side, facing the sea, the dusty road wound east toward Megara. Here, by the gate, were gathered a rustic company: brown-faced village lads and lasses, toothless graybeards, cackling old wives. Above the barred gate swung a festoon of ivy, whilst from within the court came the squeaking of pipes, the tuning of citharas, and shouted orders—signs of a mighty bustling. Then even while the company grew, a half-stripped courier flew up the road and ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees, hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield. The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate: toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub me a new name: ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... taken the baby out in her best, came in with her, and brought her to Anna. The plump, well-fed little baby, on seeing her mother, as she always did, held out her fat little hands, and with a smile on her toothless mouth, began, like a fish with a float, bobbing her fingers up and down the starched folds of her embroidered skirt, making them rustle. It was impossible not to smile, not to kiss the baby, impossible ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... be born with silver spoons in their mouths; if that means, as I suppose it does, that from their earliest days they enjoy all the luxuries of life, then I may say that when I first saw the light I must have had a very rough wooden one between my toothless gums. However, as I've often since thought, it isn't so much what a man is born to which signifies, as what he becomes by his honesty, steadiness, perseverance, and above all by his earnest desire to do right in the sight ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... had been finer. Now, there were not two hundred souls in Moonfleet, and yet the houses that held them straggled sadly over half a mile, lying at intervals along either side of the road. Nothing was ever made new in the village; if a house wanted repair badly, it was pulled down, and so there were toothless gaps in the street, and overrun gardens with broken-down walls, and many of the houses that yet stood looked as though they ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every feature of both his drivers, the toothless old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... another which Mrs. Keeley, the actress, tells of a tradesman's little boy who was often taken to stay with his grandmother and grandfather—the latter a very feeble old man, bald and toothless. This little fellow was told that his father and mother had "bought" a nice new baby brother for him. The little man was much interested by the news, and was taken to see the new arrival. He looked at it with astonishment for a few seconds, then remarked—"Why, he's got ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... of certain breeds of dogs, as certainly as to the feet of his Dorking fowls: he could probably fix, but with much more difficulty, an additional pair of molar teeth in either jaw, in the same way as he has given additional horns to certain breeds of sheep; if he wished to produce a toothless breed of dogs, having the so-called Turkish dog with its imperfect teeth to work on, he could probably do so, for he has succeeded in making hornless breeds of cattle ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... electric wires swung dangerously near the road, the poles shattered or knocked agog, while in the distance the stumps of a once-majestic row of poplars made the horizon look like a grinning toothless face. ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... up to the old man and whispered something in his ear. The wrinkled face cracked into a hideous grin that showed his almost toothless gums. ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... mistake. Here, what's this? This old toothless hag, without her wig, is unknown to me! And why does she address me as "ARCHIBALD"? I was expecting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... came to the gods; hence the weakness of women in regard to such things. Indra is the god of sacrifice; the stake of the sacrifice is Vishnu's; V[a]yu (Wind) is the leader of beasts; Bhaga is blind;[32] P[u]shan (because he eats mush) is toothless. The gods run a race to see who shall get first to the sacrifice, and Indra and Agni win; they are the warrior-caste among the gods, and the All-gods are the people (vicve, vic.). Yet, again, the Maruts are the people, and Varuna is the warrior-caste; and, again, Soma ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock; Tu-whit!—Tu-whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily he crew. Sir Leoline, the baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch; From her kennel beneath the rock She maketh answer to the clock, Four f[)o]r th[)e] quart[)e]rs [)a]nd twelve f[)o]r th[)e] hour, Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud: Some say, she ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... mind. Raising himself and pointing with an imperious finger into the black night from which he had come, he uttered the single command, "Brocken Dykes," and fainted. He had never been loved, but he had been feared in honour. At that sight, at that word, gasped out at them from a toothless and bleeding mouth, the old Elliott spirit awoke with a shout in the four sons. "Wanting the hat," continues my author, Kirstie, whom I but haltingly follow, for she told this tale like one inspired, "wanting guns, for there wasna twa grains o' pouder in the house, wi' nae mair weepons ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... went on, fiendishly, indicating the toothless, loathsome squaw, whose vindictive eyes never wavered from Burroughs' craven face. "Him both our father!" The common parent was given a fillip of ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... downward. The skull, waxed as if with siccatif, seemed to have grown up out of the hair, which was hard and like filaments of dried coconut and hung down over his neck. The nose was bony, and the nostrils opened like two hatchways, over a toothless mouth which was hidden by a moustache grizzled like the goatee springing from the short chin. At first glance one would have taken him for an art-worker, a wood engraver or a glider of saints' images, but on looking at him more closely, observing ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... toothless; upper jaw with small close teeth; tympanum hid under the skin; toes of the fore and hind feet elongate, slender, quite free; ankle with a roundish external and a small conical inner tubercle; tongue small, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... to dust; The wheels above her were eaten with rust; The hands, that over the dial swept, Grew crook'd and tarnished, but on they kept; And still there came that silver tone From the shrivelled lips of the toothless crone, (Let me never forget, to my dying day, The tone or the burden of that lay)— "PASSING AWAY! ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... Deer's peltries would be spread out, and after a half hour of silent consideration on his part and trader's talk on mine, furs to the value of so many beaver skins would be passed across for the coveted gun. I remember it was a wretched old squaw with a toothless, leathery, much-bewrinkled face and a reputation for knowledge of Indian medicines, who first opened my eyes to the sort of trade the Indians had been driving with Hamilton. The old creature was bent almost double over her ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... him that if I had a wife who attracted attention in such ways I would lock her up until she came to her senses and the public had forgotten her want of modesty and discretion. This ought to be called the Age of Fireworks. The craze for notoriety is penetrating our very almshouses, and every toothless old mumbler of ninety wants to get himself palmed off as a centenarian in the papers and have a lot of stuff printed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... doors open, the candles flaring, and nobody to guard but the toothless old hound who slept and snored ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... hands. The Sunday following, there was a conventicle of Protestants in the woods of Altefage upon Mount Bouges; where there stood up one Seguier—Spirit Seguier, as his companions called him—a wool-carder, tall, black-faced, and toothless, but a man full of prophecy. He declared, in the name of God, that the time for submission had gone by, and they must betake themselves to arms for the deliverance of their brethren and the destruction ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... impose upon you, Mrs. Dempster,' he said, with a certain toothless pomposity habitual to him: 'I want you to look over those letters again in Dempster's bureau, and see if you can find one from Poole about the mortgage on those houses at Dingley. It will be worth twenty pounds, if you can find it; ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... also, waxeth too old for his truths and triumphs; a toothless mouth hath no longer ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... resounded loudly through the silent and almost empty space, and echoed along the vaulted roof. An infirm old woman, wrapped in a threadbare hooded cloak, knelt by Lavretsky's side and prayed fervently. Her toothless, yellow, wrinkled face expressed intense emotion. Her bloodshot eyes gazed upwards, without moving, on the holy figures displayed upon the iconostasis. Her bony hand kept incessantly coming out from under her cloak, and making the sign of the cross—with a slow and sweeping gesture, ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... I. "There are men to whom all women who are not seventy and toothless and rheumy at the eyes are beautiful. Pasquale has said the same to every woman he has met. He is a Lothario and a Don Juan and a Caligula and a Faublas and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... half of the book narrates how a young volunteer came up to him and saluted. The appearance of his face was so tensely white that the officer enquires, "Are you afraid?" Suddenly a stream of blood bursts from the young man's body, and his deadly pale face turns into something unspeakable, a toothless laugh—the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... also a pair of squeezers used by the old and toothless for breaking up betel-nut. In the houses of the well-to-do is to be seen the ordinary hubble-bubble of India. Outside the houses of cultivators are wooden troughs hollowed out of the trunks of trees, which are used either as drinking troughs for cattle or for feeding pigs. A special ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... I bring you the tragedy complete, and I wrote it in eight days. Ah, sire, this is a tragedy you will enjoy! You will see no lovelorn Tullia, no infirm and toothless Cicero; you will see a fearful picture of Rome, a picture at which I myself shuddered. But, sire, when you read it, you must swear to me to read it in the same spirit in which it is written. I have left to my collegian Crebillon all his dramatic plunder; ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... And like a woman, I'll not tell you how old I am. Yet can I hold men. Yet would I hold men, toothless and a hundred, my nose touching my chin. Not the young men. They were mine in my young days. But the old men, as befits my years. And well for me the power is mine. In all this world I am without kin or cash. ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... landing, we were concerned to find that many of the draught cattle were very aged; they were, it was true, in health; but younger animals undoubtedly ought to have been procured; for of little use could toothless, old, and ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... the elder, and cast forth a toothless spear and vain, That forthwith from the griding brass was put aback all spent, And from the shield-boss' outer skin hung down, for nothing sent. Then Pyrrhus cried: 'Yea tell him this, go take the tidings down To Peleus' son my father then, of Pyrrhus worser grown And all these evil deeds of mine! ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... option of lying down and floating quietly into the day, all peril past. It seemed sweet for a minute. But it soon seemed an old, a worn, an end-of-autumn life, chill, without aim, like a something that was hungry and toothless. The bed proposing innocent sleep repelled her and drove her to the clock. The clock was awful: the hand at the hour, the finger following the minute, commanded her to stir actively, and drove her to gentle meditations on the bed. She lay down dressed, after setting her light ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this, he called for some one to wrestle with him. "My men," said King Utgard, "would think it beneath them to wrestle with thee, but let some one call my old nurse Eld, and let Thor wrestle with her." A toothless old woman entered the hall, and after a violent struggle Thor began to lose his footing, and went home excessively mortified. But it turned out afterward that all this was illusion. The three blows ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... children peeped out from behind the closed windows, beside toothless used-up old people's faces, furrowed ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... store maintained, in all neighbourhood differences, the studious attitude of an incorruptible neutral. Old Grandsire Templey, his father-in-law, sat always in the same low chair on the porch in summer and back of the stove in winter, with his palsied hands crossed on his staff-head and his toothless gums mumbling ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... flock of miserable people had come out to the Greeks, men, women and children, in crude and comic smocks, prancing here and there, uproariously embracing and kissing their deliverers. An old, tearful, toothless hag flung herself rapturously into the arms of the captain, and Coleman's brick-and-iron soul was moved to admiration at the way in which the officer administered a chaste salute upon the furrowed cheek. The dragoman told the correspondent that the ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... Reason's Light, and there were many who thought it was especially appropriate for a prince who was more qualified for a college than a palace. Most of the chroniclers of the period gave an unfavorable picture of the new ruler, who was described as "thin and toothless," and as "lank in figure, low of stature, with a haggard face, a reserved look, and a quiet exterior." He was superior to his external aspect, for it may be truly said that although he had to deal with new ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... erect, followed, and next came the graceful white form of his first friend. On its neck it supported a weird creature. Bent and wrinkled, was the little old man; a few strands of white hair flowed from his chin, and his eyebrows and lashes had almost disappeared. Toothless, almost hairless as he was, there was that about Ganassi that precluded horror, for his sparkling eyes were kind, and his mouth gently curved into a smile. Piang fell on his knees. The hermit surrounded by his pets, advanced and ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... object, very conspicuous against the vivid green. It was a giant ant-eater, or tamandua bandeira, one of the most extraordinary creatures of the latter-day world. It is about the size of a rather small black bear. It has a very long, narrow, toothless snout, with a tongue it can project a couple of feet; it is covered with coarse, black hair, save for a couple of white stripes; it has a long, bushy tail and very powerful claws on its fore feet. It walks on the sides of its fore feet with these claws curved in under the foot. The claws ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... me that on Sundays she wore bonnet and mantle after the fashion of a bourgeoise; in other words, she dressed like a lady, but that neither in summer nor winter at any other time did she cover her head. She was a pleasant-mannered, intelligent, affable woman, almost toothless, as are so many well-to-do middle-aged folks in France. Dentists must fare badly throughout the country. No one ever seems to have a guinea to ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... friend and not one penny Stored up (if ever he had any Friends; but his coppers had been many), All doors stood shut against him but The workhouse door, which cannot shut. There he droned on,—a grim old sinner, Toothless, and grumbling for his dinner, Unpitied quite, uncared for much (The rate-payers not favoring such), Hungry and gaunt, with time to spare; Perhaps the hungry, gaunt old Bear Danced back, a haunting memory. Indeed, I hope so, for you see If once the hard old ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... leave together, because in such weather there was nothing for anybody to do, unless to keep up a fire in the cabin stove. That was attended to by a snuffy and mop-headed, inconceivably dirty, and weirdly toothless Dutch ship-keeper, who could hardly speak three words of English, but who must have had some considerable knowledge of the language, since he managed invariably to interpret in the contrary sense everything that was said ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... young woman in Ireland is Juno before she was married; the old woman is Sycorax after Caliban was weaned. Wrinkled, toothless, yellow old hags are seen sitting by the roadside, rocking back and forth, crooning a song that is mate to the chant of the witches in "Macbeth" ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... dipping his finger into it, and rubbing it on his toothless gums, smiling and nodding thanks to his young master; while the little maid at his knee, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... busily swung she on; The garland beneath her had fallen to dust; The wheels above her were eaten with rust: The hands, that over the dial swept, Grew crooked and tarnished, but on they kept And still there came that silver tone From the shrivelled lips of the toothless crone (Let me never forget till my dying day The tone or the burden of her lay), "Passing away! ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... about the whole place that made it easy for me to believe in the existence of a phantasm like Miss Mehetabel's son, who, after all, was less unearthly than Mr. Jaffrey himself, and seemed more properly an inhabitant of this globe than the toothless ogre who kept the inn, not to mention the silent Witch of Endor that cooked our meals for ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the leaf. And the wheat pest appearing that year, I had the good fortune to discover some of the clusters in the sheaves, and ground our oyster-shells in time to save the crop. Many a long evening I spent on the wharves with old Stanwix, now toothless and living on his pension, with my eye on the glow of his pipe and my ear bent to his stories of the sea. It was his fancy that the gift of prophecy had come to him with the years; and at times, when his look would wander to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Richardson, in spite of the dignity of her hyphenated name, was a wee morsel. Swathed in fine linen, she showed to the unprejudiced eye no signs of great beauty. With a wrinkly-red skin, a funny round nose, a toothless mouth—she was like every other normal baby of her age, but to her family and friends she was a rare and ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... N. bluntness &c adj.. V. be blunt, render blunt &c adj.; obtund^, dull; take off the point, take off the edge; turn. Adj. blunt, obtuse, dull, bluff; edentate, toothless. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... convenable estate if it be sick, and lifteth it up now on her shoulders, now on her hands, now on her knees and lap, and lifteth it up if it cry or weep. And she cheweth meat in her mouth, and maketh it ready to the toothless child, that it may the easilier swallow that meat, and so she feedeth the child when it is an hungered, and pleaseth the child with whispering and songs when it shall sleep, and swatheth it in sweet clothes, and righteth and stretcheth out its other. A man ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... at any stroke of his pick; he might strike the rich 'lead' which was supposed to exist round there. (There was always supposed to be a rich lead round there somewhere. 'There's gold in them ridges yet—if a man can only git at it,' says the toothless old ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... disposition on the part of your human animal to dwindle. That came back in my memory vividly as I looked at the long rows of Sceptics, typical Advanced people, and marked their glistening crania. I recalled other losses. Here is Humanity, thought I, growing hairless, growing bald, growing toothless, unemotional, irreligious, losing the end joint of the little toe, dwindling in its osseous structures, its jawbone and brow ridges, losing all the full, rich curvatures of its ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... flutter back and forth through the light. The trees have put on a thin green pretense. Even the soil pretends to fecundity. Toothless jaws widen in a smile of real mirth. Bones lightened of flesh ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... with such force and accuracy as to split a bait top. This is the acme of the game and the crowning glory of the player. Often the bait consists of toothless, battered wrecks, but this does not lessen the fun ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... and mistresses, he who traffics on the future as on the past, receiving pay with both hands, who sells horoscopes and is supposed to know all things,—that semi-devil came in, saying to the old man, 'Good-day to you, brother.' With him he brought a hideous old woman,—toothless, humpbacked, twisted, bent, like a Chinese image, only worse. She was wrinkled as a withered apple; her skin was saffron-colored; her chin bit her nose; her mouth was a mere line scarcely visible; her eyes were like the black spots on a dice; her forehead emitted bitterness; her hair escaped in ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... apothecaries, sun-shunning night-birds and corner-creepers, dull-pated and base mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, prittle-prattling barbers, filthy graziers, curious bath-keepers, common shifters and cogging cavaliers, bragging soldiers, lazy clowns, one-eyed or lamed fencers, toothless and tattling old wives, chattering char-women and nurse-keepers, long-tongued midwives, 'scape-Tyburns, dog-leeches, and such-like baggage. In the next rank, to second this goodly troupe, follow poisoners, enchanters, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... eight and ten, out from morning till night in the sunny, upland pastures, but who could think of nothing but how many quarts of berries they had picked and what price could be exacted for them. There was Gran'ther Pritchard, a doddering, toothless man of seventy-odd, and his wife, a tall, lean, lame old woman with a crutch who sat all through the mealtimes speechlessly staring at the stranger, with faded gray eyes. There was Mr. Pritchard and his son Joel, gaunt Yankees, toiling with fierce concentration to "get the crops ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... flesh had so often lain. Maude and Frank stood beside it, and gazed long and silently while the matron, half-bored and half-sympathetic, waited for them to move on. It was an aquiline face, very different from any picture which they had seen, sunken cheeks, an old man's toothless mouth, a hawk nose, a hollow eye—the gaunt timbers of what had once been a goodly house. There was repose, and something of surprise also, in the features—also a very ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... senior, telumque imbelle sine ictu Conjecit.' 'So spake the elder, and cast forth a toothless spear and vain.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Small, emaciated, slightly graying, very thin kinky hair, tightly braided in small pigtails. Somewhat wrinkled, toothless. Active for her age, does ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... creature. In a strictly natural classification these animals would not come together, since many of the species are unlike the others both in appearance and habits; but in a scientific point of view the absence of incisor teeth has caused them to be ranged together in a group, known as the edentata, or toothless animals. ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... if the delicate statues and temples of the Greeks—if the broad and massive walls of the Romans, if the noble and pathetic architecture of the Middle Ages, had not been ground to dust by mere human rage. You talk of the scythe of time and the tooth of time; I tell you time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm, we who smite like the scythe. All these lost treasures of human intellect have been wholly destroyed by human industry of destruction; the marble would have stood its 2,000 years as well in ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the new uniforms of Alexander's time or the ordinary uniform of the nobility, and the general characteristic of being in uniform imparted something strange and fantastic to these diverse and familiar personalities, both old and young. The old men, dim-eyed, toothless, bald, sallow, and bloated, or gaunt and wrinkled, were especially striking. For the most part they sat quietly in their places and were silent, or, if they walked about and talked, attached themselves to someone younger. On all these faces, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... were callous to the suffering of their animals. Hal's theory, which he practised on others, was that one must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a club. At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old squaw offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the Colt's revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal's hip. A poor substitute for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped from the starved horses ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... if the newly-born infant and the man who had just died could compare their experiences, the former would have proved to be the sufferer. It is not for nothing that the first thing the newcomer into this planet does is to open its toothless mouth and protest energetically ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... once more the familiar features, on which age and sorrow have worked their will. They are distorted, disfigured, almost unrecognisable. But the free spirit is still unbroken. The eyes that meet ours are still keen and piercing; they have even the old twinkle of good-humoured irony, and the toothless mouth relaxes in frank laughter. What was the secret of this gaiety? In spite of his poverty, he had still a corner in which to paint. Beside him stand an easel and an antique bust, perhaps a relic of his former wealth. He holds his ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... that at the Court nobody except the bald and toothless marries, except for fortune. There are plenty of lovers, but no husbands. Because she is poor she is passed about in the family, sometimes as lady of honour to the Princess, sometimes to the Marechale de ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... touched the corpse; I turned the face to the light; I searched for a pulse of life, a breath. There was none: he was dead. A single blow had been given, and the blow had been sure. A ghastly grimace distended the thin lips of the toothless mouth; the eyes were starting from their orbits; the hands were clenched: it had been a death swift, silent, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... knee-deep in verdure; one had a single antler, the other none. A pair of toothless lions brooded over their lost dignity. Between their disconsolate sentry, mounted flight on flight of marble steps to the house of the manor. It lay like an old frigate storm-shattered and flung aground to rot. The hospitable doors were planked shut, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... was devoted to it as a practice: she would give her own chair to the cat and sit on the settle herself; get up at midnight, if a mew or a bark called her, though the thermometer was below zero; The tenderloin of her steak or the liver of her chicken was saved for a pining kitten or an ancient and toothless cat; and no disease or wound daunted her faithful nursing, or disgusted her devoted tenderness. It was rather hard on humanity, and rather reversive of Providence, that all this care and pains should be lavished on cats and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... coiffures were so unwashed that they emitted a sickening odour. I ordered them not to come too near us, for although these females had no claims whatever to beauty—and, as far as I could see they possessed no other charm—one being old and toothless, the other with a skin like a lizard, they actually tried to decoy us to their tents, possibly with the object of getting us robbed by their men. My men seemed little attracted by the comical speeches and gestures with which they sought ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions' mouths—now toothless—where, in the distempered horror of my sleep, I thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark. So, when I saw the council-room to which such prisoners were taken for examination, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... the promise of becoming a demi-god, is bidden in the celestial halls to perform three test-acts of prowess. He is to drain the drinking-horn of Thor. Then he must run a race with a courser so fleet that he fairly spurns the ground under his flying footsteps. Then he must wrestle with a toothless old woman, whose sinewy hands, as wiry as eagle claws in the grapple, make his very flesh to quiver. He is victorious in them all. But as the crown of success is placed upon his temples, he discovers for the first time that ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... that legal sphinx—Erle Palma? Mamma only now and then receives epistles fashioned after those once in vogue in Laconia. (I wonder if even the old toothless gossips in Sparta were ever laconic?) I am truly sorry for Erle Palma. That beautifully crystallized quartz heart of his is no doubt being ground between the upper and nether millstones of his love and his pride; and Hymen ought to charge him heavy mill-toll. My dear, have you seen ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and her worn out brogans were several sizes too large. Ill health probably accounts for this untidiness for, as she expressed it, "when I gits up I hate to set down and when I sets down, I hates to git up, my knees hurts me so," however, her face broke into a toothless ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... old woman ground away with her toothless jaws, as if she were actually chewing the end of her long nose. She made me sit down, chucked me under the chin with her lean fingers, called me "poverino," and leered at me so roguishly with her red eyes that one corner of her mouth twitched half-way up her ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... exclaimed Lydia. Begging Indians were no novelty to Lake City children, but this one was so old and thin that Lydia was horrified. Toothless, her black hair streaked with gray, her calico dress unspeakably dirty, her hands like birds' claws clasping her stick, the squaw stopped in front of ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... ruined castles rise more defiantly, and a wilder, sterner majesty prevails, there lies, like a strange and fearful tale of olden times, the gloomy and ancient town of Bacharach. But these walls, with their toothless battlements and blind turrets, in whose nooks and niches the winds whistle and the sparrows build their nests, were not always so decayed and fallen, and in these poverty-stricken, repulsive muddy lanes which one sees through the ruined gate, there did not always reign ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... as he sat before his igloo. Two signs of spring pleased him. Some tiny icicles had formed on the cliff above him, telling of the first thaw. An aged Chukche, toothless, and blind, had unwrapped his long-stemmed pipe ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... certain peeled and scorched undulations. A sweet desolation, an everlasting peace, seemed to hang in the air. A very old man (a fragment, like the castle itself) emerged from some crumbling corner to do me the honours—a very gentle, obsequious, tottering, toothless, grateful old man. He beguiled me into an ascent of the solitary tower, from which you may look down on the big sallow river and glance at diminished Tarascon and the barefaced, bald-headed hills behind it. It may appear that I insist too much upon the nudity of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... derive a certain consolation from the prayers which many of them put up in his behalf. In Italy a copper coin of minute value will often make all the difference between a vindictive curse—death by apoplexy being the favorite one-mumbled in an old witch's toothless jaws, and a prayer from the same lips, so earnest that it would seem to reward the charitable soul with at least a puff of grateful breath to help him heavenward. Good wishes being so cheap, though possibly ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had said this, he drew toward him a Syrian dancer, and kissed her neck and shoulders with his toothless mouth. Seeing this, the consul Memmius Regulus laughed, and, raising his bald head with wreath awry, exclaimed,—"Who says that Rome is perishing? What folly! I, a consul, know better. Videant consules! Thirty legions are guarding ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... question as an inquiry into the further marvels of his process. "Here," he continued, enthusiastically, "I'll prove that to you also. My dog Spot is around the place somewhere. And he is a decrepit old hound, blind, lame and toothless. You've probably seen him ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... of the city. 'What steel! alack, what steel!' Such were the bewildered cries the citizens raised. The firmness of manhood and of youth gave way at sight of the steel; and the steel paralyzed the wisdom of graybeards. That which I, poor tale-teller, mumbling and toothless, have attempted to depict in a long description, Ogger perceived at one rapid glance, and said to Didier, 'Here is what ye have so anxiously sought': and while uttering these words ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... am not sure I have a real friend in the world, for, gild a fool or a monkey, and mark what a troop of flatterers fawn around and follow admiringly at his heels! And as for choosing a wife, why, were I toothless, one-eyed, or deaf as a post, the magic of gold would ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... and wake when we would sleep, and never cease to rummage and twitch us, until they see us safe landed at the grave. We can do nothing (but be poisoned) with impunity. What is worst of all, we must marry certain relatives and connexions, be they distorted, blear-eyed, toothless, carbuncled, with hair (if any) eclipsing the reddest torch of Hymen, and with a hide outrivalling in colour and plaits his trimmest saffron robe. At the mention of this indeed, friend Plato, even thou, although resolved to stand ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... is it so small a thing to have saved a nun—even though she be neither old, nor wrinkled, nor toothless?" And behold, the nun's meek head was high and proud, her ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... shoulders heaved in his toothless laugh. "Seven o'clock," he said scornfully. "Yew look through a knot-hole in your floor any mornin' when it's handy to four o'clock and yew'll see my ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... arts! The sculptor wrests the rugged block from the rocky ribs of his mother earth;—the tailor clips the implicated "long hogs"[1] from the prolific backs of the living mutton;—the toothless saw, plied by an unweayring hand, prepares the stubborn mass for the chisel's tracery;—the loom, animated by steam (that gigantic child of Wallsend and water), twists and twines the unctuous and pliant fleece ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... highest form of all—the Mammals. But before we begin our consideration of these high forms, let us take a hasty glance at the "connecting-links" between the Birds and the Mammals. The lowest forms of the Mammals resemble Birds in many ways. Some of them are toothless, and many of them have the same primitive intestinal arrangements possessed by the birds, from which arises their name, Monotremes. These Monotremes may be called half-bird and half-mammal. One of the most characteristic of ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... stays by me a great while," Racey told him easily. "That's the beauty of being young. When you get old and toothless an' deecrepit like some people, not to mention no names of course, why then she's a cat with ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... Paddling against the current up to Eastmanville, The river loosened from the abandoned spools Of earth and heaven wanders without will, Between the rushes, like a silken streamer. And two old men who turn the bridge For passing boats sit in the sun all day, Toothless and sleepy, ancient river dogs, And smoke and talk of a glory passed away. And of the ruthless sacrilege Which mowed away the pines, And cast them in the current here as logs, To be devoured by the mills to the last sliver, Making for a little ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... what might have passed between the soul and God? It was safe to leave that little sinful soul with Him who had died to save. It was good to go out from there knowing that the pretty, sinful girl, the hardened, grizzled sot, the poor old toothless crone, the little hunchback newsboy who lay in the same row, were guarded alike and beloved by the same Presence that would go ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... watch on his toothless gums, found it not to his taste, and flung it from him with such vehemence that it would have suffered permanent injury but for the size and strength of the silver chain which attached it to Scattergood. ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... my peremptory guide from the narrow street into what appeared to be a spacious court, but as the only light it received was from a blinking candle in the window of the conciergerie, I could not determine. After exchanging some cabalistic sentences with a toothless old woman, the proprietor of the candle, Afra turned to the right, and walking a few steps came to a door opening on a stairway, which we mounted. I can think of nothing black enough for comparison ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... struggling through the curtains that cover its fantastic windows allows a mellow light to fill the expanse of the building. A toothless old woman and a young girl, both of them thinly and poorly clad, are the sole occupants of the church, and they are evidently too much absorbed in prayer to notice our presence. They have placed beside the Madonna's altar lighted tapers which glimmer feebly in a shaft ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan |
