"Vagrant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vivacious sparkle of the trim and sprightly Parisienne was a pleasant little excitement when we met with it in its own domain; but our allegiance never wandered from our brown-haired girls at home, and our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time, and when English girls were content to be what God and nature had made them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the world a race of women as utterly unlike ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... with me to prosecute the search of the picturesque in a carriage; a waggon, a spring-cart, even a post-chaise might do, but the carriage upsets everything. I longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales. Erratic and vagrant instincts tormented me, and these I was obliged to control, or rather, suppress, for fear of growing in any degree enthusiastic, and thus drawing attention to the "lioness," the authoress, the artist. Sir J. K. Shuttleworth is a man of ability and intellect, but ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... that followed the proposal of this alarming difficulty, and while he sat and waited vaguely for whatever should be going to happen next, Frank was not able to repress a sense of personal resentment towards the little vagrant sleeping so carelessly there, though at the bottom of his heart there was all imaginable tenderness for him. In the fantastic character which, to his weariness, the day's pleasure took on, it seemed an extraordinary unkindness of fate that this lost child should have been kept in reserve ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... the Council of the necessity for waiting till the Assizes before they could enjoy the spectacle of the fifty others hanging beside them. But the Government were dealing with the difficulty in a wiser and more effectual way. The old powers to enforce labour on the idle and settlement on the vagrant class which had been given by statutes of Henry the Eighth were continued; and each town and parish was held responsible for the relief of its indigent and disabled poor, as well as for the employment of able-bodied mendicants. But a more efficient machinery was gradually ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... his bet, as indeed he usually did, but for all that he remained a consistent supporter of the losing side. Daily he acknowledged in his body the power of the arm of flesh, but the vagrant butterfly humour of the male parent with the dreamy blue eyes touched him where he lived—perhaps because his, like his mother's, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... a grave-digger, whence the nick-name. Born in 1807. Frail, nervous, independent, retiring at first, she tried hiring out, but then fell into vagrant habits. Reared in a village on the outskirts of Grenoble, where Dr. Benassis came to live during the Restoration, she became an object of special attention on the part of the physician who became keenly interested in the gentle, loyal, peculiar and impressionable creature. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the exception of a few individuals of perverted intellect in some small districts or neighborhoods whose moral atmosphere has been tainted and poisoned by male and female vagrant lecturers and conventions, no party in politics, no sect of religion, or any respectable numbers or character can be found within our borders, who have viewed with approbation or have looked with any other than feelings of abhorrence ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... be a worthless, aimless vagrant without you, Marie. You are young, and I give you fatigue and heart-sickening peril instead of ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... ex-courier and adventurer in all his new glory as Grand Chamberlain and lover of a future Queen of England, as Baron della Francina, Knight of two Orders and Grand Master of a third, while every post of profit in that vagrant Court was held by ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the steeple clock of St. Giles's Church, London, under the direction of a drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an incorrigible vagrant. Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your district schools and your model schools, and your training schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, tells you plainly, ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... distrust you more than ever. Even if you came, it would be to play with me as you have done already. How can a vagrant have five pounds in her pocket when she does not have five shillings on ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON.—A few days since the Justices of South Shields sentenced a vagrant verging upon seventy years of age, to fourteen days imprisonment with hard labour—a matter to which attention was called when the Coroner held an inquest in the gaol on the poor old fellow's body. It would be interesting to know the names of these "un-worthies," ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... stoppage a volcano This love they rattle about and rave about Tooth that received a stone when it expected candy Top and bottom sin is cowardice Touch him with my hand, before he passed from our sight Trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper Vagrant compassionateness of sentimentalists Vowed never more to repeat that offence to his patience Was not one of the order whose Muse is the Public Taste We live alone, and do not much feel it till we are visited We never see ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gentlemen, some of whom, at all events, are not enclosed in envelopes, writing on their knees, evidently on account of a paucity of tables. There are, besides, sundry figures, who, if they were to appear in the streets of London, or any of our highways, would be liable to the penalties of the Vagrant Act for indecent exposure. Under the tableland by which these figures are supported, some evidence of a laudable curiosity is depicted, by three or four ladies, who are represented reading a billet doux, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... Fabius, his master of the knights, should be punished for disobedience, and denouncing the consequences which would ensue were he absolved, saying:—"Let neither God nor man be held in reverence; let the orders of captains and the Divine auspices be alike disregarded; let a vagrant soldiery range without leave through the country of friend or foe; reckless of their military oath, let them disband at their pleasure; let them forsake their deserted standards, and neither rally nor disperse at the word of command; let ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... too ill to be moved, so the mate stepped forward with a rusty old Common Prayer-book in his hands, whereon my vagrant fancy immediately fastened in frantic endeavour to imagine how it came to be there. The silence of death was over all. True, the man was but a unit of no special note among us, but death had conferred upon him a brevet rank, in virtue of which be dominated every thought. It seemed strange ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... "That of a vagrant student of manners and customs," answered the colorless voice. "Therefore, to imitate your ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... ornamentin' christenin' robes an' the like 'at's kent to naebody but hersel; an' as for stockin's, weel, though I've seen her mak sae mony, she amazes me yet. I mind o' a furry waistcoat I aince had. Weel, when it was fell dune, do you think she gae it awa to some gaen aboot body (vagrant)? Na, she made it into a richt neat coat to Jamie, wha was a bit laddie at the time. When he grew out o' it, she made a slipbody o't for hersel. Ay, I dinna ken a' the different things it became, but the last time I saw it was ben in the room, whaur she'd covered a footstool wi' 't. Yes, Jess is ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... at Palmerston, and there was an unusual amount of business that morning. A constable brought in a prisoner, and charged him with being a vagrant—having no lawful visible means of support. I entered the charge in the cause list, "Police v. John Smithers, vagrancy," and then looked at the vagrant. He was growing aged, was dressed in old clothes, faded, dirty, and ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... (and likewise foreordained) to reach the city sooner or later. My fate in that respect was settled for me when I placed my trust in the vagrant road. I thought for a time that I was more than a match for the Road, but I soon learned that the Road was more than a match for me. Sly? There's no name for it. Alluring, lovable, mysterious—as the heart of a woman. Many a time I followed the Road where it led through ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... of neglected difficulties, and occasionally conjectural solutions of such difficulties,—these are what this essay offers. It was meant as a specimen of fruits, gathered hastily and without effort, by a vagrant but thoughtful mind: through the coercion of its theme, sometimes it became ambitious; but I did not give to it an ambitious title. Still I felt that the meanest of these suggestions merited a valuation: derelicts they were, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... he to fawn, or seek for power, By doctrines fashion'd to the varying hour; Far other aims his heart had learn'd to prize, More skill'd to raise the wretched than to rise. His house was known to all the vagrant train; He chid their wand'rings, but relieved their pain: The long-remember'd beggar was his guest, Whose beard descending swept his aged breast; The ruin'd spendthrift, now no longer proud, Claim'd kindred there, and had his claims allow'd; The broken ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... which the en cas de nuit was brought into use, for the sake of one Poquelin alias Moliere;—how often has it been described and admired? This Poquelin, though king's valet-de-chambre, was by profession a vagrant; and as such, looked coldly on by the great lords of the palace, who refused to eat with him. Majesty hearing of this, ordered his en cas de nuit to be placed on the table, and positively cut off a wing with ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he mean by saying that life seemed cheap? What danger could there be in the performance of his exploits, except that of being committed as a Vagrant? What indeed could rank appear to a person thus voluntarily degraded? Or who would expect vanity to be conscious of its own loathsomeness? During this tour he seems to have been constantly exposed to the insults of the vile and the vulgar, and to have associated with persons ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... a wretched bitch waddled out from the woods into his path. It was a vagrant bitch, as thin as a skeleton, and so big in the belly that she walked with difficulty. Her dugs dragged along the snow, for she was in pup. They came from opposite directions, two lonely creatures, who are paddling their own canoes in America, and meet one cold winter ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... longing, yet dreading, to see this much-loved prodigal. Priscilla's description of 'a vagrant sort of man' had somewhat alarmed her, and she feared to see the furtive look and slouching gait that so often stamp the man who has taken long strides on the ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... authority.—"As the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do." Every soul must have a supreme source of authority in its life, if it is to have peace. Its own whim, the suggestion of passion, the vagrant impulse of the moment, are inconsistent with tranquillity. There must be for each of us one voice which is imperative, one command which is indisputable, one authority which admits of no gainsaying. If you will search your heart you will see that this is so. Compare the restlessness of the ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... add, "vagrant rogues," but she stopped short and looked at Florent. The scornful pout of her lips and the expression of her bright eyes plainly signified that in her belief only villains made such prolonged fasts. It seemed to her that a man able to remain without food for three days must necessarily ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... glow as of life on the other. From the long casement windows, opened to the mild air of the night, came the murmur of music. The orchestra was playing Strauss, the dreamy waltzes from The Queen's Lace Handkerchief. Bright uniforms and handsome gowns flashed by the opened windows. Sometimes a vagrant puff of air would find its way in, and suddenly the ball-room dimmed and the dancers moved like phantoms. The flames of the candles would struggle and, with many a flicker, right themselves, and the radiant colors and jewels would renew ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... off 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
... care not. She's a real vagrant, that girl is. No manner of use. She may go her own ways; I ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... knowing that error and human inventions in religion will not offer themselves, but with wiped lips, and a countenance as demure as may be, and also being persuaded that this opinion of Mr. K. is vagrant, yea a mere alien as to the scriptures, I being an officer, have apprehended it, and put it in the stocks, and there will keep it, till I see by what authority it has leave to pass and repass as it lists, among the godly ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... long as it fills the belly. 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 and such labour as they can easily and cheaply perform. ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... condition and their birth. She 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, welcomed ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... which was also frequently used for camp-meeting purposes. Gnarly old live-oaks spread their branches like a canopy over everything, while the sea-green moss hung from every limb and twig, excluding the light and lazily waving with every vagrant breeze. The fact that these grounds were also used for camp-meetings only proved the broad toleration of the people. On this occasion I distinctly remember that Miss Jean introduced a lady to me, who was the wife of an Episcopal minister, then visiting on a ranch near Oakville, and I danced ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... doesn't help me to three hundred francs," Nana kept repeating as she plunged her fingers into the vagrant convolutions of her back hair. "I must have three hundred francs today, at once! It's stupid not to know anyone who'll give you three ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... lies? Who fed and flattered him? What ladies bestowed their soft caresses on Sludge? And now and again in his course of fraud did he not turn a wistful eye towards any reckless tatterdemalion, if only the vagrant lived ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... a high branch for his final jump—a bit of pure bravado because he felt nervous inside—discovered, with mingled terror and joy, that his vagrant foot had narrowly shaved Aunt Jane's neat hard summer hat: Aunt Jane—of all people—at such a moment, when you couldn't properly explain. He half wished he had kicked the fierce little feather ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... there was a little hunchback girl in the court, upon whom the duke fixed his vagrant desires, and she became his unconcealed favorite. The duke was ever in the habit of talking freely with Catharine about his paramours and praising ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... dried. 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, ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... silent, facing him with that clear, disarming gaze that she knew how to achieve so perfectly. He felt a great yearning overwhelm him ... a desire to meet her halfway ... a vagrant displeasure at ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... they shut him up in jail, charging him with being a vagrant, which he undoubtedly was. But he won over all the jailers and the prisoners to his doctrine, and so the jail was emptied. Moreover, it was found that some of those who loved him most truly had come to share his power of hearing truth. The madness ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... wild day in Manila. Far over near the Escolta somebody shot at a vagrant dog lapping water from a little pool under one of the many hydrants. The soldier police essayed an arrest; the culprit broke and ran; the guard fired; a lot of coolies, taking alarm, fled jabbering to the river side. The natives, looking for trouble ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... simmering in my mind, set me wishing to go aboard one of these ideal houses of lounging, I had plenty to choose from, as I coasted one after another, and the dogs bayed at me for a vagrant. At last I saw a nice old man and his wife looking at me with some interest, so I gave them good-day and pulled up alongside. I began with a remark upon their dog, which had somewhat the look of a pointer; thence I slid into a compliment on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been sunburnt, rained, and frozen out of it. All ways it pointed, as if surcharged with electric fluid, crowning him with a wildness which was in amusing contrast with the placidity of his countenance. Perhaps the resulting queerness in the expression of the little vagrant, a look as if he had been hunted till his body and soul were nearly ruffled asunder, and had already parted company in aim and interest, might have been the first thing to strike a careless observer. But if the heart was not a careless one, the eye would look ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... against them. But a word goes out and over the earth, From the silent burying-places, Like a gentle rain in a land of dearth, And lights up the tired faces. It brings a roof and a sweet abode To many a soul that is vagrant; Their names are blossoms along the road And their lives are for ever fragrant. We who sorrow are brothers of theirs, Because of their beautiful sorrows, Wheat will grow up among the tares, And young corn grow in ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... Lemuel to himself again. He thought bitterly that no one knew better than himself how luridly wicked Boston was, and that there was probably not a soul in it more helplessly anxious to get out of it. He thought it hard to be talked to as if it were his fault; as if he wished to become a vagrant and a beggar. He sat there an hour or two longer, and then he took the officer's advice so far as concerned his going to the station for a bed, swallowing his pride as he must. He must do that, or he must go to Mr. Sewell. It was easier to accept humiliation at the ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... sun was abating its force a little, after travelling the burning roads through yams and cocoa, grenadillas and all kinds of herbs and roots and vagrant trees, Dyck Calhoun and Michael Clones came into Spanish Town. Dyck rode the unpaved streets on his horse with its high demipicque Spanish saddle, with its silver stirrups and heavy bit, and made his way ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... follow my friend's wanderings and adventures as, springing out of his world of books, he flits and glides like a vagrant, swift- winged, irresponsible butterfly about the land, sipping the nectar from a thousand flowers and doing his hundred miles in a day and feeling all the better for it, for this was a man's book, and the wheel and its magic was never a necessity in man's life. But it has ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... the centripetal force of gravitation: a most ruinous event to this planet, and one which would also obscure, though it most probably would not extinguish, the solar luminary. An unlucky stripling, one of those vagrant geniuses who seem sent into the world merely to annoy worthy men of the puddinghead order, desirous of ascertaining the correctness of the experiment, suddenly arrested the arm of the professor just at the moment that the bucket was in its ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... of genius. Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, they approached each ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... need, Unpitied, is reduced to feed; Besides, vain selfish insect, learn (If you can right and wrong discern) That he who, with industrious zeal, Contributes to the public weal, By adding to the common good, His own hath rightly understood.' So saying, with a sudden blow, He laid the noxious vagrant low. 150 Crushed in his luxury and pride, The ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... spectacles! [EVERSMANN goes out and returns again with a big pair of glasses.] The Attorney-General must make a thorough examination of this vagrant's papers.... I will not have these French clowns in my country. [He looks through one of the books.] The Crown Prince's seal—But no—no ... the vagabond must have ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... morning while Tess was doing the simple chores around the shack, she had the door open to admit the vagrant breezes of the summer day. Andy, as his custom was on such occasions, lay quietly upon the attic floor, secure from the observation of any chance passer-by. Stepping to the door to shake her dust rag, Tess saw Jake Brewer coming ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... content so great, The smell of stubble burnt, delights. Piled high The wagons silent standing take their nightly rest, On distant hills the silver birches I descry, Framed gold by fertile fields the sacred picture blest. Then with a joy unshared save by the vagrant, I see the threshing floor well filled and fragrant, The sloping straw-thatched cottage roofs again, The window panels ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... that simple, meek, semi-barbarous young scholar, his head in a state of chronic dishevelment, his harmless little round light-blue eyes, pinkish from late night reading, generally betraying the absence of his vagrant thoughts, and I know not what of goodness, as well as queerness, in his ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... women of commerce there are, of course, many secret rebels—now and then only does one make her exit from society through the courts. The vast majority of Anglo-Saxons in whatever clime or capital, suppress their "unrefined" appetites or vagrant fancies—which are vibrations from the wheel; sometimes hard jerks when the presiding genius is more than commonly out of patience—and rise to serene heights or grow morbid and irritable according to the strength ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... to the perusal of his paper, too disturbed to read; the young vagrant's words kept sounding in his ears. He raised his eyes. The plump hand of the lady with the Roman nose still rested on her lap; it had been recased in its black glove with large white stitching. Her frowning gaze was fixed on him suspiciously, as if he had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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, Marie, the worst is yet to come,' I ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... He gazed earnestly at the house. Nothing stirred there save the open doors swinging idly in every vagrant wind. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... become actually an exponent of his chief and crowning quality, his receptiveness and his expression of humanity,—that is to say, of all the humanity he then knew. At first he expressed what he could discern with the limited, inexperienced vision of the ignorant son of a wretched vagrant pioneer; later he gave expression to the humanity of a people engaged in a purpose physically and morally as vast and as grand as any enterprise which the world has seen. Thus, with perfect fairness, without wrenching or misrepresentation or sophistry, the ugliness of his ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... the age of the Romans. Each may have continued to imitate the approved ornaments of its predecessors, till we trace in the productions of this contemporary pottery, the patterns used by the nations of antiquity when just emerging from barbarism. Hunting, the most necessary of arts to the vagrant and carnivorous savage, is the employment celebrated on all these vessels, A stag, followed by ferocious quadrupeds and hungry bipeds, forms their general ornament. I have picked up the same groups among Roman ruins, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... that may be, I have thought it well to acquaint you with my way of thinking; and I venture to think—I venture to hope Mr. Kurnatovsky will be received a bras ouverts. He is no Montenegrin vagrant.' ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... you, seek speech without delay with our sublime fellow-Shade—with him who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the smell of the rose. He will comfort you. You came to me stripped of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands. Your name was the common property of the winds; it, as it were, floated naked over the waters about the equator. I wrapped round its unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics, and have essayed to put into the hollow ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... he said, with wildly flashing eyes and in an excited voice. "Monte-Cristo robbed me, ruined me and drove me into the world a penniless vagrant! ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... thereabout; for with the exact date of his birth, although from circumstances most easily ascertained, even the assistant-overseer did not take the trouble to make himself acquainted. He was a parish child born in the workhouse, the offspring of a half-witted orphan girl and a sturdy vagrant, partly tinker, partly ballad-singer, who took good care to disappear before the strong arm of justice, in the shape of a tardy warrant and a halting constable, could contrive to intercept his flight. He joined, it was said, ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... money saved they could invest As vagrant fancy might suggest, And each could then ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... on my way home. I went to uncle's, and finding aunt in the garden, slouched my hat over my face, and began my story. She ordered me off the premises instantly as a vagrant. I went round to the back door and got a penny a-piece from the servants, who were quite delighted. Then I met uncle, and telling him that I had a wonderful box of antiques to exhibit, he gave me sixpence, and with great curiosity poked his proboscis ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... human figure would a gown sit like a fan, or what female head was like a bunch of China-asters?), or, if new grocers were to fill their windows with mountains of currants and sugar, made seductive by contrast and tickets,—what security was there for Grimworth, that a vagrant spirit in shopping, once introduced, would not in the end carry the most important families to the larger market town of Cattleton, where, business being done on a system of small profits and quick returns, ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... then 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 learned, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thought, alone nor mainly; but first and chiefly for the imagination, and the seeing and interpreting eye that usually goes with it; its object is to find spirit under form, to discover what the logos expresses. For this the imagination is the chief requisite. It is not a vagrant and irresponsible faculty, but an inner eye whose vision is to be trusted like that of the outer; it has in itself the quality of thought, and is not a mere picture-making gift. Dr. Bushnell trained his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... wagoner coming from Greenville, in Tennessee, and bound for Gerardstown, Berkeley County, in the extreme northerly part of Virginia. His route lay directly over the road which David had traversed. The man's name was Adam Myers. He was a jovial fellow, and at once won the heart of the vagrant boy. David soon entered into a bargain with Myers, and turned back with him. The state of mind in which the boy was may be inferred from the following extract taken from his autobiography. I omit the profanity, which was ever ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... Excelsior; and the lawful occupant of the clothes lay back against the cushions and endeavoured rapidly to evolve some means for putting an end to the dual ownership. It was unthinkable that he should continue for the space of a whole hour in the horrible position of a Rowton House for vagrant mice (already his imagination had at least doubled the numbers of the alien invasion). On the other hand, nothing less drastic than partial disrobing would ease him of his tormentor, and to undress in the presence of a lady, even for so laudable a purpose, was an idea that made his eartips ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... brown land! It came to Casey Dunne, who was imaginative within the strict seclusion of his inner self, that she typified their land, the West, in youth, in fearlessness, in potentialities yet lying fallow, unawakened, in fruitfulness to come. What of the vagrant touch of the woman, the gold of the day, the clean, dry air and the glory of motion, the chord of romance within him vibrated and began ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... him, frowning. The Zenians have a strange way of being right about such things; their high-strung, sensitive natures seem capable of responding to those delicate, vagrant forces which even now are ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... heavenly, warm spring morning, and Sheba, having made herself ready, wandered into the garden to wait among the flowers. The rapturous first scents of the year were there, drawn by the sun and blown by vagrant puffs of wind from hyacinths and jonquils, white narcissus and blue violets. Sheba walked among the beds, every few minutes kneeling down upon the grass to bury her face in pink and yellow and white clusters, inhaling the breath of flowers and the pungent freshness of the sweet brown earth at ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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
... and other local requirements. In support of this demand, he appealed to the direct command of God, and to the universal state of destitution prevailing. If that duty were neglected, the country would be full of vagrant savages. With regard to the convents and other religious foundations, he stated that, as soon as the Papal yoke had been removed from the land, they would pass over to the prince as the supreme head; and it would then become his duty, however onerous, to regulate such ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... my city for a day And heard the music of her steepled bells, Then laughed, and passed along your vagrant way, Carrying only what the city tells To those who listen solely with their ears; You know St. Matthew's swinging harmonies, And old St. Michael's tale of golden years Far less ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... more immediate notice of our hero, and the commendation which he received, and the advice that was bestowed upon him, was probably the great cause why Joey did attend assiduously to his lessons, which his otherwise vagrant life would have disinclined him to do; and also kept a character for honesty and good principle, which he really deserved. Indeed, his father and mother, setting aside poaching, and the secrecy resorted to in consequence, ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... human breast, than that which lies in Dinah Troffater's; and whoever were in fault regarding her strange looks, they cannot criminate her as accessary. She milks the cow, and yonder come leaping like vagrant foxes, her half-wild children, with a few dry sticks for ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... War a somewhat casual visitor was present when a vagrant shell smashed the refreshment dug-out where a young Red Cross man was handling some comforts for the khaki-clad boys near the front line. And when the alarmed visitor explained to the dispenser of refreshments, "I would not stay here ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... that the planters expected to reopen the plantations using the freedmen as hired laborers. In 1865 and 1866 they tried this, only to find that the negro had got beyond control and would not work. Supervision had become hateful to him. A vagrant life appealed to his desire for change. At best, he was unintelligent and indolent. In a few years it became clear that the old type of plantation had vanished, and that the substitute was ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... after this, they had a good long period of comparative quiet, during which they held a riotous game of hide-and-seek across the lane and down among sewers and dust holes, and delightfully noisome and fetid places of a similar character; interrupted at irregular intervals by a vagrant street boy, or a daring cat, or an inquisitive cur; that this game was stopped at about ten o'clock by the advent of Mr Denham, who generally gave them, the rats, a smile of recognition as he passed to ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... and drooping Birch, And fragrant Linden Trees; No living sound E'er hovers round, Unless the vagrant breeze, The music of the merry bird, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... figure stalks silently through a corner of the San Francisco of my memory. The rest is bric-a-brac, the reminiscences of a vagrant sketcher. My delight was much in slums. "Little Italy," was a haunt of mine. There I would look in at the windows of small eating-shops transported bodily from Genoa or Naples, with their macaroni, and chianti flasks, and portraits of Garibaldi, and coloured political caricatures; or (entering ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... 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
... the trees, Oh thoughtless woodman, Hew but what you need, They give balm to vagrant breezes, For their ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... much affected by this story. He said it showed such a beautiful trait in the dog's character. The animal was a poor outcast, vagrant thing, that had perhaps never possessed a penny before in all its life, and might never have another. He said that dog's penny seemed to him to be a greater gift than the biggest cheque that the ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... art is a brief truancy from rational practice, that the artist himself should be a vagrant, and at best, as it were, an infant prodigy. The wings of genius serve him only for an escapade, enabling him to skirt the perilous edge of madness and of mystical abysses. But such an erratic workman does not deserve the name of artist or ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and it is not surprising to find—as we do find—that between the text of the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, and that of 1802, there are many important variations. This is seen, for example, in the way in which he dealt with 'The Female Vagrant', which is altered throughout. Its early redundance is pruned away; and, in many instances, the final text, sanctioned in 1845, had been adopted in 1803. Without going into further detail, it is sufficient to remark that in the year 1803 Wordsworth's critical faculty, the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... hills of pole-beans, there are usually two or three low-minded plants that will not climb the poles, but go groveling upon the ground, wandering off among the potato-vines or cucumbers, departing utterly from the traditions of their race, becoming shiftless and vagrant. When I lift them up and wind them around the poles and tie them with a wisp of grass, they rarely stay. In some way they seem to get a wrong start in life, or else are degenerates from the first. I have never known anything like ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... was a vagrant of the highroads and woods, quoting the refrain of Villon's Contreditz de Franc-Gontier, and pronouncing the French language with as soft and pure an accent as ever came out of Provence. Meanwhile, Mr. Arbroath, paying ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... persons introduced, might perhaps have been procured had sufficient time been allowed for another journey into Warwickshire. That of Shakspeare is known already in the signature to his will, but deformed by sickness; that of Sir Thomas Lucy is extant at the bottom of a commitment of a female vagrant, for having a sucking child in her arms on the public road; that of Silas Gough is affixed to the register of births and marriages, during several years, in the parishes of Hampton Lucy and Charlecote, and certifies one death,—Euseby Treen's; surmised, at ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... milder gleam, What time the may-fly haunts the pool or stream; When the still owl skims round the grassy mead, What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed; Then be the time to steal adown the vale, And listen to the vagrant cuckoo's tale; To hear the clamorous curlew call his mate, Or the soft quail his tender pain relate; To see the swallow sweep the dark'ning plain Belated, to support her infant train; To mark the swift in rapid giddy ring Dash ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... come, after all, and from that gathers courage for the rest of the way. Thirty-two years have passed since I slept in a police station lodging house, a lonely lad, and was robbed, beaten, and thrown out for protesting; and when the vagrant cur that had joined its homelessness to mine, and had sat all night at the door waiting for me to come out,—it had been clubbed away the night before,—snarled and showed its teeth at the doorman, raging and impotent I saw it beaten to death on the step. I little dreamed ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... power, has at last degenerated or grown up to (as you please) a trade. There are men who habitually set aside a portion of money which they are annually to apply to what are called "charitable purposes"—that is to say, so far as I understand it, to support some vagrant lecturer, whose purpose is agitation and mischief wherever he goes. This constitutes, therefore, a trade; a class of people are thus employed—employed for mischief, for incendiary purposes, perhaps not always understood by those who furnish the money; but such is the effect; ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... forward, were completely hidden from the intrusive glance of any casual wayfarer. The prattle of the little stream as it wound upon its sleepless journey, contributed still more to strengthen the musings of those vagrant fancies that filled the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... at finding you as you are, my boy," Captain Bayley said, "for I had feared that if you were alive it must be as a vagrant, or perhaps even a criminal, that your bodily misfortune is as nothing in my eyes. This is my ward, Miss Hardy; she is something like a granddaughter to me, and is prepared to ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... question of "What is to be done with our vagrant children?" is occupying the attention of all men of philanthropic minds, it may be worth while to give place in your pages to the following order addressed by the Lord Mayor of London to his aldermen in 1650-51, which applies, amongst ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... to one thou wert A Jew's possession, got in honest barter; Next, John the ostler's; last of all, past doubt A vagrant's hat; the equitable purchase Of an ill-sung song. Till quite worn out With rain, and wind, and sleet, and other 'ills Thy race is heir to,' the beggar cast thee From his plebeian pate—and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... of something akin to pleasure in the ardor of her ministrations. Besides, he was fighting a moral fight of his own. Great bursts of dissatisfaction swept through him every day now; and it was only by a constant vigilance that he kept his vagrant elbows close to ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... wind was in the northeast—when it broke, swift and vicious, from the sullen waste of water beyond, whipping up the grey sea, driving in the vagrant ice, spreading clammy mist over the reefs and rocky headlands of the long coast—our harbour lay unruffled in the lee of God's Warning. Skull Island and a shoulder of God's Warning broke the winds from the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... tapestry, where, from earliest Spring until the grapes were gathered colour and light were caught and imprisoned within the web. At the bend in the river, where the rushes grew thickly, the river-god kept his harp, which answered with shy, musical murmurings to every vagrant wind. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... son besides Andrew—one son and two daughters. Mary was next to Andrew, Edward came next to her, and Martha was the youngest. Edward resembled his father more than any of the other children. He was cold and calm in his temperament, and little inclined to be drawn aside by the restless, vagrant spirits that were ever luring Andrew from the strict line laid down for him by his father. Daily perceiving the great value attached by his father to external propriety of conduct, Edward made a merit of what to him was easy. This vexed Andrew, who had opportunities ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... only a few scattered gleams along the base of the cliff or atop it, showed that the sparsely settled Palisades were drawing abeam. The ceaseless, swarming activities of the metropolis were being left behind. Silence was closing in, broken only by vagrant steamer-whistles ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... that would have astonished the garment had it been capable of understanding. For a long time she watched him in silence as he paced to and fro like a caged lion. Twice she heard him mutter: "An American girl—good Lord," and she found herself smiling to herself—the strange, vagrant smile that comes of ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... have thus an imperium in imperio,[21-3] a petty, independent post in the very core of his domains. It was rendered the more galling in the present instance, from the irritable jealousy of the old governor, that took fire on the least question of authority and jurisdiction, and from the loose, vagrant character of the people that had gradually nestled themselves within the fortress as in a sanctuary, and from thence carried on a system of roguery and depredation at the expense of the honest inhabitants of the city. Thus there was a perpetual feud and heart-burning between ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of anxious elders, such vagrant ways naturally take on the colours of idleness and a love of low company. Stevenson was, however, in his own fashion an eager student of books as well as of man and nature. He read precociously and omnivorously in the belles-lettres, including a very wide range of English poetry, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who would assert the theory to bring forward positive proof of it. There is, however, one point in Mr. Darwin's view of domesticated animals which tells against his theory. The cat remains unchanged, because from its vagrant habits man has no control over its pairing [Footnote: Darwin's "Animals and Plants," vol. ii. p. 236.]. Now considering the variety of conditions under which cats exist, here is surely a great opening for natural selection. But it has produced ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... irresponsible as a monkey that swings from tree to tree, he had snatched his prize, and even Jake, who knew him better than most, could only speculate as to whether he would carry it high above disaster or tire and idly fling it away. Some vagrant sense of honour seemed to have actuated him so far, but never yet had he known such a motive to last for long. The man's face was beyond him, too fantastic for comprehension. He recognized that he was capable of greatness, but very few were the ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... freight in the shape of some pigs, which were stowed in the long- boat on top of the deck-house; three cats, two belonging to the Portuguese steward and messing in the cuddy, while the third was a vagrant Tom that had strayed on board in the docks, and making friends with the carpenter Gregory, or "old chips" as he was generally called, was allowed to take up his quarters in the forepeak, migrating to the cook's ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... admire the roses, and no one entered the cool, inviting tent. The whole place might have been dead, as far as human life was concerned; and although the smoke did ascend straight up from the kitchen chimney, a vagrant or a tramp might have been tempted to enter the house by the open hall door, were it not protected ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... rough flanks of Ben Slioch was mirrored in the unwrinkled surface of the noble loch. Ben Eay had a bright covering of Nature's whitest, softest lawn. No sounds were heard except the low droning of a vagrant bee, the whizzing of a sea-mew's pinions, or a bark from this croft answered by a bark from that other a mile away. Suddenly the repose of the morning, in which a pedestrian could hear the echo of his own feet, was startled by the voice of a girl singing. For a moment ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... one's spirituality is an unquestionable fact. Vagrant thought is well calculated to dull the finer sensibilities of the soul, thereby rendering it less capable of impression by the Spirit of God. "Keeping in touch with God," is a very familiar expression among holiness people at this present time, but what ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... contemplating the morning. It was balmy and tranquil, the vagrant breezes were laden with the odor of flowers, the murmur of bees was in the air, there was everywhere that suggestion of repose that summer woodlands bring to the senses, and the vague, pleasurable melancholy that such a time ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... saw the crater, "vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together a thousand feet under us and totally shut out ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... understanding passed like a vagrant breeze across the faces of the elders, and the levites were ordered to lead the ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... ancient blood to lift his eyes to the daughter of Solomon is to earn death, death slow and cruel for himself and all who aid and abet him. Let him remember, lastly, that this high-born lady to whom he, an unknown and vagrant Gentile, dares to talk as equal to equal, has from childhood been my affianced, who will shortly be my wife, although it may please her to seem to flout me after the fashion of maidens, and that we Abati are jealous of the honour of our ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws; and every step of intestine discord was marked by some deplorable victory of savage man over civilized society. The Moors, [3] though ignorant of justice, were impatient of oppression: their vagrant life and boundless wilderness disappointed the arms, and eluded the chains, of a conqueror; and experience had shown, that neither oaths nor obligations could secure the fidelity of their attachment. The victory of Mount Auras had awed them into momentary ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... "thanks to the Wanderer of the Roads, who built this cottage and hanged himself here, and thanks to a Highland Scot who performed wonderfully on the bagpipes, there is little chance of any common-sense vagrant venturing near Arcadia again—at least until the woman is gone, or ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... vagrant feeling of pity for the woman who had been Sir Beverley's bride. "I expect they never really understood each ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... men gave good heed to this. It is told how one summer Hall, the brother of Ingjald, the Sheepisles' Priest, came to Bjorn isles for fishing. [Sidenote: Thorolf's quarrel] He took ship as one of the crew with a man called Thorolf. He was a Broadfirth man, and was well-nigh a penniless vagrant, and yet a brisk sort of a man. Hall was there for some time, and palmed himself off as being much above other men. It happened one evening when they were come to land, Hall and Thorolf, and began to divide ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... they were holding "kangaroo" court in the New Orleans jail. Every vagrant picked up by the police was tried and sentenced and shipped out to a chain-gang camp. Nearly every man tried was convicted. And there were plenty of camp bosses ready to "buy" every vagrant the officers could run in. My bunch down at the flop house was in deadly terror of being "kangarooed" ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... tribe who possess a written language, for which they make use of the Arabic characters. They are often confused with the Avars whose empire on the Danube was broken by Charlemagne; but Komarov asserts that they are of more recent origin as a tribe, their name being Lowland Turki for "vagrant" or "refugee." ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... brought you to your knees, made you at once proud and humble, showed you your place. It simplified and unified existence: it stripped off the little accidents and ornaments which perpetually deflect our vagrant attention, and gathered up the whole being of you into one state, which felt and knew a Reality that your intelligence could not comprehend. Such an emotion is the driving power of spirit, and august and ultimate thing: and this your innermost ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... deceive, not me, but thine own self. My fate is not a wandering, vagrant elf. My fate is here, within this throbbing heart That beats alone for glory, and ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... doubt, it was very simply done, and you are a very modest man, as I do not need to tell them. Ladies, I am Sam Winnington, son of the late gallant Captain Winnington, though I should not call him so; and this is Will Locke, the vagrant child of an excellent man, engaged, I believe, in the bookselling and stationery trade. We are painters, if it please you, on a tour in search of sketches and commissions. I beg to assure you, that I do portraits on a great scale as well as ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... rotting in the rank grass and jimson-weeds beneath. This building, I learned when I bought the place, had been used as a school-house for several years prior to the breaking out of the war, since which time it had remained unoccupied, save when some stray cow or vagrant hog had sought shelter within its walls from the chill rains and ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... unsettled vagrant civilisation which existed in the North of Africa up to 1830—which in 1860 was beginning to pass away, and the traces of which still survived in the nineties— resembled very much the border forays for which Northumberland is still famous; and, walking ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... outcasts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace—all these walk with "Our Lady of Sighs." She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received her ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... comin'; he don't act as if 't were a vagrant kind o' noise; must really be somebody in our lane." And Mrs. Dallett smoothed her apron and gave an anxious housekeeper's glance round the kitchen. None of her state visitors, the minister or the deacons, ever came in the morning. Country ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... construe a neighborly act into a horse trade. About two miles out from the creek and an equal distance from the trail, I found the best bed-ground of the trip. It sloped to the northwest, was covered with old dry grass, and would catch any vagrant breeze except an eastern one. The wagon was ordered into camp, and the first and second guards were relieved just long enough to secure their night-horses. Nearly all of these two watches had been with me during the day, and on the return of Levering with the horses, we borrowed ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... many lives is that they drift along, making their election unawares, and infallibly choosing the worse by the very act of lazily or weakly allowing accident to determine their lives. Not consciously and strongly to will the right, not resolutely and with coercion of the vagrant self to will to take God for our aim, is to choose the low, the wrong. Perhaps none, or very few of us, would deliberately say 'I choose Mammon, having carefully compared the claims of the opposite ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... are traditions of Irish fortune-hunters, and in Ireland of English. The fact is, it was the vagrant class of each country that chiefly visited the other in old times; and a handsome vagabond, whether at home or abroad, I suppose, made the most of his face, which was also ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... into the open day; Happy, if made so by its garish eye. O'er earth's wide surface take thy vagrant way, To imitate thy master's genius try. The Graces three, the Muses nine salute, Should those who love them try to con thy lore. The country, city seek, grand thrones to boot, With gentle courtesy humbly bow before. Should ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... positive strength, in those lanes and cellars, put forth for evil if not drawn towards the good. We must not confound ignorance with torpor of spirit or bluntness of understanding. One of the most remarkable characteristics of vagrant children is a keen, precocious intellect. A boy of seven in the streets of a city is more developed in this respect than one of fourteen in the country—a development, of course, which is easily accounted for by the antagonisms with which the child has had to contend, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... corn rows, and asked him what it was. Adopting the waif, then and there, I dug what I called "my little garden" about it, Spotswoode tugging up the stoutest roots and clearing out the wire-grass. With an occasional hand's turn and toss from him I cultivated the vagrant into extraordinary size and vigor. Not a day passed in which I did not visit it. Not a blade of grass or a weed was allowed to invade the charmed circle, and many a spadeful of fresh mould, black with fatness, was worked about ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... eggs and hatch them out, You seek the flowers most sweet and fragrant; And, sipping honey, stroll about, At best a good for nothing vagrant." ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... one Spohf be dismissed as organist of St. Stiff's, confined in the idiot-ward, fed on water gruel, and handed over to his own parish (Vienna); proposed by Latimer, and seconded by Wellesley de Camp. The second proposition appears to be to the effect that a vagrant named Brick, dealer in hearth-stones, be confined in the refractory-ward, and fed upon bread ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... sluggishly away, through the great space which yet separated the Earth and the Moon. But the people who fell, fell aimlessly, going neither toward the Earth or the Moon, like black feathers in a vagrant breeze. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... not enough, let me instance further the attitude toward "Fashion" of that class of women who live most openly and directly upon the favor of men. These know their business. To continually attract the vagrant fancy of the male, nature's born "variant," they must not only pile on artificial charms, but change them constantly. They do. From the leaders of this profession comes a steady stream of changing fashions; the more extreme and bizarre, the more successful—and because ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Landis returned to Lancaster County he had a vagrant idea of what the South Carolina mountains are like. He would have told you that the trees there all murmur the name of Amanda, that the birds sing her name, the waterfalls cry it aloud! During his two weeks of absence from her his conviction was affirmed—he ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... vegetation could the rill persuade out of the inexorable sterility around, saving for some curdled greenish mosses that waved slowly from the sides of the basin, or pointed from root-hold on brick and shard, where the small current loitered a little. I am not a taker of notes, nor, for all my vagrant and exploring tendencies, am I a very close observer. Nevertheless, though it is now a year and a half since what I am telling of took place, the minutest details of that strange fountain, and of the scene about it, are as definitely before me as if I had been there but yesterday. I am not going ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... will the sound, familiar with their ears, Recall my vanished memory. I had hoped For better things; I hoped I should not leave This earth without a vestige. Fate decrees It shall be otherwise, and I submit. Henceforth, oh, world! no more of thy desires, No more of hope, that wanton vagrant hope; Now higher cares engross me, and my tired soul, With emulative haste, looks to its God, And ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for "Nostromo" came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... thoroughfares down to Westminster, not without much pity and sadness in his mind, also perhaps with some curious speculations—as to the lot of poor, luckless mortals, their errors and redeeming virtues, and the vagrant ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... to smooth him down but the more i tride the mader he got and finally he told me i was a defaimer of innosent persens and that he wood maik me proove it in coart. then i got mad and sed look hear you longnosed old vagrant, sue and be damned, but i have heard enuf of your chin musick and if you say 2 words moar i will smash that sankit monious old snout of yours so flat that they wont be able to see your ears. then i told him to go to hell and i come home. but it was the bigest fool performance to ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... better off without 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 ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... united their rhetoric, to prove to the constable and his assistant that he had no right to arrest the king's bedesman as a vagrant; and the mute eloquence of the miller and smith, which was vested in their clenched fists, was prepared to give Highland bail for their arbiter; his blue gown, they said, was his warrant for travelling ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... a side-glance at her face in one of the mirrors, and then tucked into place a vagrant lock of hair with a shapely finger, thereby suggesting, had there been a cynical observer present, that Miss Alma Marston never allowed any situation, no matter how crucial, to take her ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... wrote from the Wilhelmstrasse, "the first time by any means that kings have chosen to live with dancers. While such conduct is not, perhaps, strictly laudable, we can disregard it if it be accompanied by a certain measure of decorum. Still, a combination of ruler-ship and dalliance with a vagrant charmer is a phenomenon that is as much out of place as is an attempt to govern ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... are unnecessary. Is love so vagrant that it must be tied by such a chain? Better let it go. True love asks no oath; it casteth out fear, and ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... removed beyond all activity and all contact with the world. Buddhism, therefore, is not a power which makes actively for civilisation. It is a powerful agent for the taming of passion and the prevention of vagrant and lawless desires, it tends, therefore, towards peace. But it offers no stimulus to the realisation of the riches which are given to man in his own nature: it checks rather than fosters enterprise, it favours a dull conformity to rule rather than the free cultivation of various gifts. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... windows, soft and cool As Spring's young breath, the vagrant evening air, My day-worn soul is hushed. I fain would bear No burdens on my brain to-night, no rule Of anxious thought; the world has had my tears, My thoughts, my hopes, my ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... men speak of her Unmoved, and vagrant pulses stir To greet her passing-by, And I, in all her worshipper Must serve ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... my good man," and the piper tapped him gently on the shoulder, in the fashion of a professional philanthropist when he remonstrates with a professional vagrant; "don't you see you are not giving your soul any room to grow in? A great deal of joy might have reached the world across your open palm. Instead, you have crushed it in a hard, tight fist. You must pay now for all the souls you've kept from dancing. Come—fill ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... efforts to enrich themselves brought discredit upon their clerical character. The cathedral was a small church, of poor construction and meagrely furnished with the necessaries for celebrating the religious offices. One of the new Bishop's first disciplinary acts was to summon the three vagrant priests to Ciudad Real, where he might constrain them to a more sacerdotal life under his immediate authority. Las Casas lived according to the strict rule of his Order, eating only fish, eggs, and vegetables, and, though he permitted meat to the others who sat at his table, there was so little ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Squire, whistling, "you have not your usual senses about you to-day, man. Lenny Fairfield—pattern boy of the village. Hold your tongue. I dare say it is not done by any one in the parish, after all; some good-for-nothing vagrant—that cursed tinker, who goes about with a very vicious donkey—whom, by the way, I caught picking thistles out of the very eyes of the old stocks! Shows how the tinker brings up his donkeys! Well, keep a sharp look-out. To-day is Sunday; worst day of the week, I'm ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... and yet dragging a pallet out of the corner and finding or waiting for a place to throw it in, like a little vagrant, is very characteristic of East Side tenements. She paid $36 a year for lodging, and yet can scarcely be said to have received for this sum any definite space at all under a roof-tree, honestly provided for her ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... Especially for the vagrant feet of youth are the roads of Manhattan beset "with pitfall and with gin." But the civic guardians of the young have made themselves acquainted with the snares of the wicked, and most of the dangerous paths are patrolled by ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... dreariness of his country seat. I was now turned of sixteen; tall for my age, and full of idle fancies. I had a roving, inextinguishable desire to see different kinds of life, and different orders of society; and this vagrant humor had been fostered in me by Tom Dribble, the prime wag and great genius of the school, who had all the rambling ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... who watch and listen, lie in wait, Seeing the cloudy cavalcades blow past,— Happy if some bright vagrant, soon or late, May venture near the snares of sound, at last— Most fortunate captor if, from time to time, One may be ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... out, and felt much annoyed by the strange character of her brother, whom she often endeavoured to improve, with a view to his following some trade. He was twenty years of age, and if he did not "tak' himself up" now, she said, "he would be a vagrant a' his days." Geordie, on the other hand, quietly heard his sister, but he never saw—at least, he pretended not to see, which was the same thing—the force of her argument. The weak half of his constitution was always presented to any attack of logic; and the adroitness with which he ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... went to the central police station Wednesday night and asked to be locked up on a charge of vagrancy. He said he had been conducting an unsuccessful search for work for so long that he was sure he must be a vagrant. In any event, he was so hungry he must be fed. Police Judge Graham sentenced him to ninety ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... chance that one, The basest there seeing us shall exclaim— What handsome stranger of athletic form Attends the Princess? Where had she the chance To find him? We shall see them wedded soon. Either she hath received some vagrant guest From distant lands, (for no land neighbours ours) Or by her pray'rs incessant won, some God Hath left the heav'ns to be for ever hers. 'Tis well if she have found, by her own search, 350 An husband for herself, since she accounts The Nobles of Phaeacia, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer |
