"Vagrant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... light. With its help they explored the tiny cellar and the upper floor. There was no sign of a recent occupancy. Everything was as Bobby had found it on awakening. A vagrant wind sighed about the place. They looked at each other with startled eyes. They filed ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... that you are a vagrant, portends poverty and misery. To see vagrants is a sign of contagion invading your community. To give to a vagrant, denotes that your generosity ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... time Dorothea was asleep. Her book slid to the floor, I shaded her face with my green umbrella, pulled down her muslin frock over her pretty ankles, and gave myself up to vagrant thoughts of ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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
... seven days she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a victim to some uncanny power. The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity against the sin of superstition; still the belief prevailed. Not a soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard the tale, would seek shelter beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... went to see the woman, Jenny, we found her in her poor little cottage, nursing a vagrant boy called Jo, a crossing-sweeper, who had tramped down from London, and was tramping he didn't know where. Jenny, who had known him in London, had found him in a corner of the town, burning with fever, and taken him home to care for, Seeing ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... and care not. She's a real vagrant, that girl is. No manner of use. She may go her own ways; I wash ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... possible but hourly imminent, the "old stander" and the volunteer were to her Navy what salt is to the sea, its perpetual salvation. Such men inculcated an example, created an esprit de corps, that infected even the vagrant and the jail-bird, to say nothing of the better-class seaman, taken mainly by gangs operating on the water, who was often content, when brought into contact with loyal men, to settle down and do his best for king and country. Amongst the pressed men, again, desertion and death made for the survival ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... my encounter with the red-headed vagrant, the following paragraph appeared in one of the local papers: "Pocklingham. In the casual ward of the Union house for this district a tramp, name unknown, died last night. He had been admitted on the previous evening, but, for some unexplained reason, it was not noticed until the ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... State officials be entrusted with the unhampered control of civil affairs, and this was more than enough to revive the bulldozing methods that had characterized the beginning of Hamilton's administration. Oppressive legislation in the shape of certain apprentice and vagrant laws quickly followed, developing a policy of gross injustice toward the colored people on the part of the courts, and a reign of lawlessness and disorder ensued which, throughout the remote districts of the State at least, continued till Congress, by what are known as the Reconstruction ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... they 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, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... wrap themself soothingly about his brain. But the sense of flight, unbelievably swift, was present and recognizable, though all else eluded him. He had the impression, however, that it was intended that all save the most vagrant, most widely differentiated, impressions elude him—that he should acquire only half pictures, which would therefore be all the more terrible ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... again, he took it many hundred yards round to the bridge. Smoaker died at the great age of eighteen years. His son Shark was also a beautiful dog. He was by Smoaker out of a common greyhound bitch, called Vagrant, who had won a cup at Swaffham. Shark was not so powerful as Smoaker; but he was, nevertheless, a large-sized dog, and was a first-rate deer greyhound and retriever. He took his father's place on the rug, and was inseparable from me. ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... He swore a little at this, but not with any poignant emotion, for in the first place fighting was not a thing that he yearned for, and in the second place he hardly anticipated a combat. The robbers, he felt certain, were only vagrant rancheros, or the cowardly Indians of some village, who would have neither the weapons nor the pluck ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... upon them before they can approach the border, but the freedom of life in the woods has for them an undefinable charm. Then as the frigid season approaches they permit themselves to be caught, and go back to their labor or confinement with hearts lightened by the enjoyment of their vagrant summer wanderings. There is in some cases another advantage to be gained. A twenty years' convict who has escaped and lets himself be caught again may give a false name, and avoid all incriminating answers through a convenient failure of memory. If not detected, he may in this way get ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... a tenderness 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 wonder ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... snow away, made the bare patches of earth quiver with coming life, sent the crows and an occasional flock of ducks overhead—vagrants of the air, calling to their vagrant brothers about the fire—there was no sorrow in the break-up of the family, but only a universal joy in ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... He gazed earnestly at the house. Nothing stirred there save the open doors swinging idly in every vagrant wind. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... little old woman jumped, and whether she broke her neck in the fall or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the three Bears never saw anything ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... as for human beings in their separate beds in a hospital. The idea of shutting up plants and pictures in a room by themselves, to be visited on state occasions, or when some member of the family in a vagrant mood chances unexpectedly among them, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... along its side a branch of unsullied day-lilies that had been filling the room with their heavy fragrance. The image-boy interested her; he was a visible creature of those foreign fairy-shores of which she had dreamed; that she did anything but show kindness to a vagrant whom she would not see again never crossed her mind; perhaps, too, she liked that Italy, in his person, should admire her,—that was pardonable. But, at the action, the shadow swept away from the boy's face ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thy balmy lips Let me, no vagrant insect, rove; O let me steal one liquid kiss, For Oh! my soul ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... passed like a vagrant breeze across the faces of the elders, and the levites were ordered to lead the prisoner to ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... dreamed, she fancied that she was mounting great solitary peaks with him to look at sunsets that blazed like the end of the world; or that he and she were strong-winged birds seeking the crags of the Andes. What girl's folly! The time had come to put such vagrant dreams from her and to become ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... impression of a group of faces in the window opposite. There were a couple of men in front, stout city personages no doubt, with crimson faces and open mouths cursing the traitorous Papist and the crafty vagrant fox trapped at last; but between them, looking over their shoulders, was a woman's face in which Anthony saw the most intense struggle of emotions. The face was quite white, the lips parted, the eyes straining, and sorrow ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... road. This dreary and desolate region seemed to have a charm. Its expanse of rigid waves of stone, pimpled with sharp excrescences, and as deeply pitted with cavernous grottoes, where no life seemed able to survive, save a stunted herbage, sparsely assembled in vagrant groups, or gathered in thirsty lines around the lip of the still pools, was full of scenic interest, but more deeply ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... corn: the bad husband's hedge is full of gaps." The state of an agricultural people appears in such proverbs as "You must not count your yearlings till May-day:" and their proverbial sentence for old age is, "An old man's end is to keep sheep?" Turn from the vagrant Arab and the agricultural Briton to a nation existing in a high state of artificial civilization: the Chinese proverbs frequently allude to magnificent buildings. Affecting a more solemn exterior than all other nations, a favourite proverb with them ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... escort from earth youthful souls who have been baptized in the Church, and who are friendless and vagrant, having inhabited while on earth such parts of New York City as the Five Points and Water street, and having neither kindred nor connection to ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... in the agony of their vagueness, haunt my mind, like vagrant clouds hovering over hills, waiting for some chance wind to relieve them of ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... mount The proudest emperors above, For I am honoured with the love Of the fair daughter of a count. A lace from Na Raymbauda's hand I value more than all the land Of Richard, with his Poctou, His rich Touraine and famed Anjou. When loup-garou the rabble call me, When vagrant shepherds hoot, Pursue, and buffet me to boot, It doth not for a moment gall me; I seek not palaces or halls, Or refuge when the winter falls; Exposed to winds and frosts at night, My soul is ravished with delight. Me claims my she-wolf (Loba) so divine: And justly she that claim ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... existence when it is for all practical purposes an individual. The theory of the 'artistic' school is that the ballads and folk-songs are the productions of skalds, minstrels, bards, troubadours, or other vagrant professional singers and reciters of various periods; it is allowed, however, that, being subject entirely to oral transmission, these ballads and songs are open ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... them, so close that they all but rested in its shadow, was one of those monster aircars, its tentacles moving to and fro as though wafted into motion by some vagrant breeze. But since neither Sarka nor Jaska could feel the breeze, Sarka knew that it was life which caused the waving motion of those ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... expressed about his eyes and lips. This man, whose air of proprietorship convinced Blake that he could be none other than P. Gibbs, had first looked sneeringly at the ten cents, but had shown some small sign of pity on hearing the ominous cough of the attenuated vagrant. He set forth ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... not much adopted amongst the learned. In the opinion of respectable authors, they are called Cingary or Cinli, because they in every respect resemble the bird cinclo, which we call in Spanish Motacilla, or aguzanieve (wagtail), which is a vagrant bird and builds no nest, (37) but broods in those of other birds, a bird restless and poor ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... 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 ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... so strange, for only a week ago they were burning and burying alive those who differed from the ruling party in regard to salvation, eviscerating in public those who had new ideas of government, and hanging old women who were accused of traffic with the devil. All of them had been no better than vagrant savages a year before. Their fuller knowledge was altogether too recent to have gone very deep, and they had many institutions and many leaders dedicated to the perpetuation of outworn notions which would otherwise have disappeared. Until recently changes had ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... way, her sails drooping heavily in the dead air while the boat's crew toiled at the oars of the whaleboat to tow her out through the narrow entrance. Once, when the ketch, swerved by some vagrant current, came close to the break of the shore-surf, the blacks on board drew toward one another in apprehension akin to that of startled sheep in a fold when a wild woods marauder howls outside. Nor was there any need for Van Horn's shout to the whaleboat: ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... to have so puzzled the few philologists who have examined it, that they have declared none but a sphinx, and that an Egyptian one, could unriddle it. I would suggest that some Maga of the gypsies should be called in to interpret. Our vagrant fortune-tellers are reputed to be of Egyptian origin, and to hold converse among themselves in a very strange and curious oriental tongue called Gibberish, which word, no doubt, is a derivative from Gebir. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... intelligent face, he entered into conversation with him, and found that he had been palsied from infancy. He had been sent forth friendless into the world from an alms-house in Maryland. In Philadelphia, he had been committed to prison as a vagrant, because he drew crowds about him in the street by his wonderful talent of imitating a hand-organ, merely by whistling tunes through his fingers. Friend Hopper, who had imbibed the Quaker idea that music was a useless and frivolous pursuit, said ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... all this while in a vagrant life, among infidels, Turks, pagans, and such sort of people. I had no minister, no Christian to converse with but poor William. He was my ghostly father or confessor, and he was all the comfort I had. As for my knowledge of ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... between the hostel and the barrier was it probable that any sentinel would patrol the empty street. At any rate I met nothing, except a market-cart coming in, the occupants of which were too busy discussing the handling they had received at the barrier to look under the shadow of the wall for a vagrant boy. ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... A vagrant breeze sighed through the trees and made Saxon shiver. The mysterious cricket-noise ceased with suspicious abruptness. Then, from the rustling noise, ensued a dull but heavy thump that caused both ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... together, she-priests, to Cybebe's dense woods, together haste, ye vagrant herd of the dame Dindymene, ye who inclining towards strange places as exiles, following in my footsteps, led by me, comrades, ye who have faced the ravening sea and truculent main, and have castrated your bodies in your utmost hate of Venus, make glad our mistress speedily ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... Wait, appointed by the Court of Burgesses for the City and Liberty of Westminster, who alone considers himself entitled, by his appointment, to apply for Christmas boxes. He also urged that the prisoners, acting as Minstrels, came under the meaning of the Vagrant Act, alluded to in the 17th Geo. II.; however, on reference to the last Vagrant Act of the present king, the word 'minstrels' is omitted; consequently, they are no longer cognizable under that Act of Parliament; ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... a new life, that three weeks' visit, and I enjoyed it extremely. We went on expeditions up the mountains, and lived a sort of vagrant life that was just what we both needed. The roar of cannon could not reach us there; the sight of bleeding, dying men was far away; and we almost forgot that the teeth of the children whom she had nourished at her breast were tugging at ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... only an old and battered harmonica, tenderly treasured and patiently repaired; but it was the best that money could buy, and out of its silver reeds he drew weird vagrant airs that men had never heard before. Then Batard, dumb of throat, with teeth tight clenched, would back away, inch by inch, to the farthest cabin corner. And Leclere, playing, playing, a stout club tucked under his arm, followed the animal ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... and as if from a book read the meaning of little Fay's trail. All the way down the knoll, through the shrubbery, round and round a cottonwood, Fay's vagrant fancy left records of her sweet musings and innocent play. Long had she lingered round a bird-nest to leave therein the gaudy wing of a butterfly. Long had she played beside the running stream sending adrift vessels freighted with pebbly ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white man's firewater had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... betrayed, and all that are rejected; 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... swarming down from out the surrounding hills and turned into a noisy, restless playground the single narrow, irregular street. Then it suddenly became a mad commixture of Babel and hell. At this hour nothing living moved within range of the watcher's vision except a vagrant dog; the heat haze hung along the near-by slopes, while a little spiral of dust rose lazily from the deserted road. But Hampton had no eyes for this dreary prospect; with contracted brows he was viewing again that which he had confidently believed to have been buried ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... old lady; 'but don't be soft-hearted and weak, Mary. It is not what I expect of you, as a sensible woman, to be harbouring a mere vagrant whom you know nothing about, ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man's fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... first great impulse to the mind 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 ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... amiable, or too plain? No, no! You are not vain. Whence comes this vagary?—well, we shall all know in good time. Were I to be with you, I should talk—perhaps maliciously—on purpose to see how your features would unsettle and shift themselves to the vagrant humour, that though one would know another from habit, and their old acquaintanceship, the painter would never be able to keep them steadily together. I should laugh to see every lineament "going ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... eager as ever to solve the mystery. The older bird and his admiring junior are perfectly contented with their home, and never leave it. They often look out from their perches upon wandering flocks of vagrant rooks, but are never tempted to new adventures. The old fellow is very wise. Like a fat old office-holder, he knows enough to appreciate a sinecure in which the rewards are liberal and the service nominal. His ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... the miles until, in the goodness of fortune, he met natives who gave him food and water. He crawled into Perth, black with the sun, bones from want; he was not recognised by friends. A Malay, daft but harmless, led a vagrant life at Perth, getting bit and sup from the open tables of the colonists. The good wife of the outermost settlement, where Sir George Grey knocked, seeking refreshment, took him ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... 1658. Heare was taken a vagrant, one Mary Parker, Widow with a Child, and she was wipped according to law, about the age of Thirty years, proper of personage; and she was to goo to the place of her birth, that is in Grauesend in Kent, and she is limitted to iiij days, and to be carried from Tithing ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... so silent, so wary, so wisely chosen, their sanctum. Before the door hung a friendly oak branch, heavy with leaves, that swayed and swung with every breeze. Now it hid the entrance from the east, now from the west, and with every change of the vagrant wind the observer must choose a ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... glow was like one luminous ghost: and buttercup, daisy, snowdrop, primrose gathered Margaret, vagrant, flighty, light to the winds that wafted her as fluff, and tossed them suddenly aloft, and back they came to be tangled in her bare hair; and now she ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood strayed with quaint inconsequence across the field of his preoccupied mind. The peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop on the floor below remained like snuff in his nostrils. Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... the state of a country be where those who are on the way to pauperism themselves are exclusively burdened with the support of the vagrant poor? It is like putting additional weight on a man already sinking under the burden he bears. The landlords suppose, that because the maintenance of the idle who are able, and of the aged and infirm who are not able to work, comes upon the renters of land, they themselves are ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... far as Miss Unity was concerned; she had seldom spent such an afternoon in her life. She had been taken out for a walk in the mud, with rain threatening; she had talked in the open High Street, under the very eye of the dean, with a little vagrant out of Anchor and Hope Alley; she had of her own accord, unadvised and unassisted, formed an original plan, and not only formed it, but taken the first step towards carrying it out. Miss Unity hardly knew herself and felt quite uncertain what she might do next, and down what unknown paths ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... of the weather." Timar went to the closet, took out his pelisse trimmed with astrakhan, and the rest of the suit, laid them on the ground between himself and Krisstyan, and pointed to them in silence. The vagrant held the gun in one hand, keeping his finger on the trigger, lifted the clothes one by one with the other, and looked them over with the air of ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... vagrant king, Neither north nor south is yours, You've no kingdom that endures! Wandering every fall and spring, With your ruby crown so slender, Are you only ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... right of Lankadomb the dogs were baying restlessly, but the hounds of the castle watchman did not answer them. They were sleeping. Some vagrant gypsy woman had fed them well ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... this outward expression of tractability, he drew her gently with him until they reached the hotel, which—in her newer aspect of a guest whose board was secured by responsible parties—had forgivingly opened its hospitable doors to the vagrant child. Here the master lingered a moment to assure her that she might count upon his assistance tomorrow; and having satisfied his conscience by this anticipated duty, bade her good- night. In the darkness of the road—going astray several times on his way home, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Too godly, though, I fear; Offset it with tobacco! Next, I'll find Hedge-roses, star-dust, and a vagrant's mind; His mother's heart now let me breathe upon; When west winds blow, I'll whisper in her ear: "Apocalypse awaits him; ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... saddle back, you will find it flanked by two others, a man's on one side with the figure of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant character of ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... window, but that one glance told him that Cleveland in Ohio possessed the men whom he was in pursuit of. He returned to his miserable lodgings with his plan of vengeance all arranged. It chanced, however, that Drebber, looking from his window, had recognized the vagrant in the street, and had read murder in his eyes. He hurried before a justice of the peace, accompanied by Stangerson, who had become his private secretary, and represented to him that they were in danger of their lives from the jealousy and hatred of ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 'Excursion.' Much ridicule, and even obloquy, did the staunch poet of Rydal incur for choosing such a character, when he might have taken Laras and Conrads by the score, and been praised for his choice. But "the vagrant merchant under a heavy load," being a portion of the mountain life which surrounded the poet's home, was better than any hero of romance for his purpose; and a younger generation has confirmed the poet's choice of a hero, and few remain now to mock at the Pedlar. Wordsworth's ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... where arms are secured, it is true that ammunition will very soon fail them; but still their bayonets will be available; and we believe that the East India infantry carry swords. A second anxiety connects itself with the vast number of vagrant marauding soldiers, having power to unite, and to assail small detached stations or private bungalows. Yet, again, in cases known specially to ourselves, the inhabitants of such small insulated stations had rapidly fortified the buildings best fitted ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... answered, sleeves tucked to the elbow, stooping over the fire, her face full of color, tucking a vagrant wisp ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... 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 ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... against the bright wires. If there was any envy between these two, it existed in the heart of the princess only. To be free like this, to come and go at will, to love where the heart spoke! She surrendered to another vagrant impulse. ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... hath lain alone And dreamed of sunlight where no vagrant gleam Of sunlight pierces, being freed, must deem This too but dreaming, and must dread the sun Whose glory dazzles,—even as such-an-one Am I whose longing was but now supreme For this high hour, and, now it strikes, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... visible, suggested what opportunities she had had for practising such arts since their last meeting. He felt that she had at last arrived at an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government, under which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced into the service ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... spectacles of the inner eye were things that he had grown ashamed of. But here was a shrewd little lady who seemed to think his fancy and confidence nothing discreditable. He was encouraged greatly to let her into his vagrant mind, so sometimes in passionate outbursts, when the words ran over the heels of each other, sometimes in shrinking, stammering, reluctant sentences he told her how the seasons affected him, and the morning and the night, the smells ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... woman the very angels leave heaven and come and sit in that house and sing for joy." I think that is nearly equal to this: "If you do not want your wife, give her a writing of divorcement," and make the mother of your children a houseless wanderer and a vagrant—nearly ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of the field, and the grass in meadow and upland, the birds which sowed not nor gathered into barns but lived on the bounty of their Maker, the foxes in their holes, the petted house dog and the vagrant cur, the hen sheltering her brood beneath protecting wings—all these had contributed to the wisdom in which He grew, as had also the moods of the weather, the recurrence of the seasons, and all the phenomena ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... affair begun when it ended; it was all over in an instant. The two who had escaped injury leaped back aboard the Drab. Those who needed assistance were helped back. The Drab drifted away, her vagrant course unheeded at first, for it looked as though all aboard had taken part in that disastrous ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... Lewes." She had no excuse for her "license." She was "full of insincerity, cant, and hypocrisy." And so on ad nauseam. To call Mr. Watkinson a liar would be to descend to his level. Let us simply look at the facts. George Eliot lived with George Henry Lewes as his wife. She had no vagrant attachments. Her connection with Lewes only terminated with his death. Why then did they not marry? Because Lewes's wife was still living, and the pious English law would not allow a divorce unless all the household secrets ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... of vagrant and destitute children to be found in the Five Points is not known. There are thousands, however. Some have placed the estimate as high as 15,000, and some higher. They are chiefly of foreign parentage. They ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... prostitution" was 3,233; in 1888, the number was only 1,475. This enormous decrease in the course of two years is not due to a diminution of the offence, but to a change in the attitude of the police. Again, in the year 1887, the Metropolitan police arrested 4,556 persons under the provisions of the Vagrant and Poor Law Acts; but in the year 1888, the number arrested by the same body under the same acts amounted to 7,052. It is perfectly obvious that this vast increase of apprehensions was not owing to a corresponding increase in the number of rogues, beggars, and vagrants; ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... ashamed of their minister, and turned him adrift. He disappeared in the great whirl of men and other circumstances which fills this wonderful country. From time to time, during five years, I had made inquiries concerning him of mineralogists, botanists, and other vagrant characters, without getting the smallest hint as to his whereabouts. At last he had turned up as the private prophet of three ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the eternal humorist The eternal enemy of the absolute, Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist With your air indifferent and imperious At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—" And—"Are we ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... again, beginning to roll down his sleeves, "suppose we do; I aren't above giving a lift to a chap as can use 'is fists,—not even if 'e is a vagrant, and a uncommon dusty one at that;—so, if you're in the same mind about it, up you get,—but no more furrin curses, mind!" With which admonition, the Waggoner nodded, grinned, and climbed back to his seat, while Bellew swung himself up ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... became a wandering pioneer, emigrated from Kentucky when the President was but seven years old, took up his residence for several years in the remote solitudes of Indiana, and drifted at a later day to Illinois. This vagrant life, by a shiftless father, and without a mother or female relative to keep alive and impress upon him the pedigree and traditions of his family, left the President without definite knowledge of his origin and that of his fathers. The deprivation he keenly felt. I heard him ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... was hopeless. Had she not seen me pilloried as a shameful vagrant? Had she not seen me persecuted, tormented—the byeword, the laughing-stock for the offals of Falmouth town? Had I not been pelted by refuse? Was I not made hideous by disfigurement? How could I win her love? Then I hated the Tresidder tribe more than ever. They had robbed me of ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... and in familiar language we will liken it after this manner. Supposing two children stand side by side in the open street, one is the child of a king, nicely drest and delicately clean, as would be expected from his noble birth and expectation, the other is the little hedge-side vagrant, to whose young face water or cleansing has probably been unknown. Imagine, then, ought passing these two children, which could pollute their persons, what would be their feelings? the one might even laugh at the filth or mud ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... who have known 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 like ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... were out, and took the opportunity of his absence from home to plunder his stables. We were told an anecdote concerning Simon the Cyrenian, which is not bad. A man was taken up in one of the villages as a vagrant, and desired by the justice to give an account of himself—to explain why he was always wandering about, and had no employment. The man, with the greatest indignation, replied, "No employment! I am substitute Cyrenian at Coyohuacan in the Holy ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... book 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 nobles gallant, soldiers frank and brave Seek thy acquaintance, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... his data from direct and positive sources: letters, diaries, account-books, or other immediate memoranda; also from the concurring testimony of eye-witnesses, supported by a unity of circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed items. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Planters Crowd the Shoar, In hue as tawny as a Moor: Figures so strange, no God design'd, To be a part of Humane kind: But wanton Nature, void of Rest, Moulded the brittle Clay in Jest. At last a Fancy very odd Took me, this was the Land of Nod; Planted at first, when Vagrant Cain, His Brother had unjustly slain; Then Conscious of the Crime he'd done From Vengeance dire, he hither run, And in a hut supinely dwelt, The first in Furs and Sot-weed dealt. And ever since his Time, the Place, Has harbour'd a detested Race; Who when they cou'd not live at ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... Autolycuses did not do half the hurt to morals or manners that one grim-visaged justice did—the curmudgeon, you called him, Eusebius, that would, were they now on earth, and sleeping all lovely with their pearly arms together, locked in leafy bower, have Cupid and Psyche taken up under the Vagrant Act, or have them lodged in a "Union House" to be disunited. You thought the superstition of the world as it was, far above the knowledge it now brags of. You admired the Saxons and Danes in their veneration ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... or thrice in a month;" and he complains that it is "poverty which alone maketh me so unconstant to my determined studies, trudging from place to place to and fro, and prosecuting the means to keep me from idlenesse." An author was then much like a vagrant. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... door, was a large slate suspended by a wire. The pencil was tied to it. Here they put down vagrant memoranda and things they planned to acquire in ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... bird, who now has a nest in our own Orchard, is the Basket-maker. As these two belong to the Blackbird and Oriole family, we may as well have them now, though in the regular family procession the 'tramp' walks next to the Bobolink, who is such a vagrant himself. ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... replied: "They always are, when you haven't got 'em." But had fallen into contemplation, and presently said—out of the blue—"Because I'm an unsettled sort of party—a vagrant. I shouldn't do for a G.P.'s wife, thank you, Jeremiah! I should like to live in a caravan, and go about the country, and wood fires out of doors." Was it, Fenwick wondered, the gipsies they had seen to-day that had made her think ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... other proofs pointing as decidedly to the determination of this long-continued controversy in favour of Scotland, as the soil from which this vagrant child of the muses sprung. No evidence seems to have been hitherto sought from the most obvious source, his writings. The writer of the memoir in the Biographia Brittanica, (who certainly dealt a well-aimed, though by no means ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... herself, nervous at first and switching with her dainty whip at the crumbling sands and pacing restlessly to and fro, had yielded gradually to the drooping influences of the hour and, seated on a rock, had buried her chin in the palm of her hand, and, with eyes no longer vagrant and searching, had drifted away into maiden dreamland. Full thirty minutes had she been there waiting for something, or somebody, and it, or he, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... The vagrant Singer, how does he, good Lord, Compete with such a money-making Horde Of tinsel rhymesters that infest the Shops? They say he makes enough to pay ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... rather, he said that they sent him backwards and forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn't want to pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and Nancy picked her up and threw her down as suited their purely vagrant moods. So there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... vitality there and 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, and ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... 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 carved, of ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... the vagrant spring breeze. It brings the tidings of flowers—the flowers that for your worship are offered ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... give information of any labouring man who, on offering himself for hire, should refuse to accept the regulated wages. As such person must be incapable of living in this country without work, he was immediately to be apprehended as a vagrant, who, having no visible means of providing honestly for his support, must have ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... servants, as well as all their tenants and cottars, with their wives, children, and servants, to abstain from conventicles, and not to receive, assist, or even speak to, any forfeited persons, intercommuned ministers, or vagrant preachers, but to use their utmost endeavours to apprehend all such? Those who took this bond were to receive an assurance that the troops should not be quartered on their lands—a matter of considerable importance—for this quartering involved great expense ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... her example, 'I am by no means such a vagrant as you suppose. I have good friends, if I could get to them, for which all I want is to be once clear of Scotland; and I have money for the road.' ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said I, "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 ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... Bertie had been said some dozens of times, and other topics began to come to the front—the extreme mustiness of the cow-house, the possibility of it catching fire, and the probability of it being a Rowton House for the vagrant rats of the neighbourhood. And still no sign of deliverance ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... Unto the weary hath been mine to-night, Slumber unbroken: now it floats away:— But whether 'twere not best to woo it still, The head thus properly disposed, the eyes In a continual dawning, mingling earth And heaven with vagrant fantasies,—one hour,— Yet for another hour? I will not break The shining woof; I will not rudely leap Out of this golden atmosphere, through which I see the forms of immortalities. Verily, soon enough the ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... an upward inclination of her vivacious shoulders, repudiated the notion. A whim of her own, she explained to Rainham confidentially, as they came abreast in the narrowing path, while Mr. Dollond strolled a little behind, cutting down vagrant weeds absently with his ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... 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, ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... set the children's imagination roving. Their first charges were not so unreasonable. Why, the vagrant Sarah Good, a social outcast, wandering about without any settled habitation; and Sarah Osburn, a bed-ridden woman, half distracted by family troubles who had seen better days. There the truth was out. Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn were the agents of the devil in this ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... flies me (as he flies me ever),[2] Do I pursue him? never, never! No, let the false deserter go, For who would court his direst foe? But when I feel my lightened mind No more by grovelling gold confined, Then loose I all such clinging cares, And cast them to the vagrant airs. Then feel I, too, the Muse's spell, And wake to life the dulcet shell, Which, roused once more, to beauty sings, While love dissolves ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Milton, Johnson records his own experience. 'Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... might walk among them. She knew, too, that the little sign on the gate, though so courteously worded, was no mere formality; for she had heard how a colored man, who had wandered into the cemetery on a hot night and fallen asleep on the flat top of a tomb, had been arrested as a vagrant and fined five dollars, which he had worked out on the streets, with a ball-and-chain attachment, at twenty-five cents a day. Since that time the cemetery gate had ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... in a tiny cabin, shaped for two, The space for happiness is just as great As in a palace. What a world were this If each soul born received a plot of ground; A little plot, whereon a home might rise, And beauteous green things grow! We give the dead, The idle vagrant dead, the Potter's Field; Yet to the living not one inch of soil. Nay, we take from them soil, and sun, and air, To fashion slums and hell-holes for the race. And to our poor we say, 'Go starve and die As beggars die; so gain ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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 the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... indifferently about his calves; a vagrant breeze disturbed the tree-tops and died of sheer lassitude; Time plodded on with measured stride. Then, abruptly, full-winged inspiration was born out of the chaos of his mind. Listening intently, he glanced with covert suspicion at the bridge: it proved untenanted, inoffensive of mien; ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... maiden. No one knew me; I was branded as a witch, and fled away. Should I go to the relatives of my husband? Thomas had spoken of them as kind and charitable. I reached the village; every one looked at me with suspicion as a vagrant. Well they might, for a vagrant I was, poor, wretched, and despised. I had been there in my happy days with Thomas; but the place itself looked strange. I inquired for his father, Farmer Holman. 'Dead many a year ago; all the rest gone away; ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... the author sets out a vagrant hunting — gets into hot water — narrowly escapes with his life — catches a host of vagabonds, but learns from experience, that, though a rascal may do to stop a bullet, 'tis only the man of honor that can ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... never before in his life; dragged himself on once more, till suddenly the whole country seems to move under the rumour, the very thunder, of "the crowning victory," as he is made to understand. Falling in with the tide of its heroes returning to English shores, his vagrant footsteps are at last directed homewards. He finds himself one afternoon at the gate, turning out of the quiet Sussex road, through the fields for whose safety he had fought with so much of undeniable ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... is instructed and directed how to conduct herself in her husband's house (1-478). An old vagrant woman relates the experiences of her life as a daughter, as a wife, and after her separation ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... fall below it, I might know as much of mirth To live and die a poet Of unacknowledged worth; For Fame is but a vagrant— Though a loyal one and brave, And his laurels ne'er so fragrant As when scattered o'er ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... like the lad who, when his father thought To clip his morning nap by hackneyed praise Of vagrant worm by early songster caught, Cried, "Served him right! 'tis not at all surprising; The worm was punished, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... fashion, and the minstrels lost their welcome in the castles, and had to betake themselves to more vulgar society for their livelihood. At the same time, epic made a stand against the new modes and a partial compliance with them; and the chansons de geste were not wholly left to the vagrant reciters, but were sometimes copied out fair in handsome books, and held their own with ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker |
