"Drab" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there to charm away the impress of coarseness settled upon it by the loafers, the habitual drunkards and the riffraff of the camp, who were not tolerated elsewhere. In short, it did not have that certain indefinable something which gave to The Polka Saloon an almost homelike appearance, but was a drab, squalid, soulless place with nothing to recommend ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city garb jostled against the red and yellow short ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... after these fish had been placed in the cistern, it became necessary to clean the latter, and the fish were taken out. They were of a dusky drab color when first taken out, but soon regained their vivid tints when placed in a white vessel containing clear water. They had evidently changed color in order to harmonize with the black walls and bottom ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Great Western from Maiden Newton makes a wide detour northwards to reach Bridport, passing through a very charming and unspoilt countryside where old "Do'set" ways still hold out against that drab uniformity that seems to be creeping over rustic England. In this out-of-the-way region are small old stone-built villages lying forgotten between the folds of the hills and rejoicing in names that makes one want ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... coats were too hot, and you can't climb with your arms held by coat-sleeves. We had our coats in the packs, for emergencies. We wore blue flannel shirts with the Scouts' emblem on the sleeves, and Scouts' drab service hats, and khaki trousers tucked into mountain-boots hob-nailed with our private pattern so that we could tell each other's tracks, and about our necks were red bandanna handkerchiefs knotted loose, and on our hands ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; Themistocles, at anchor, with the blue and white Greek ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... fast asleep in the shade, Tom, who was on the watch, observed a herd of small deer apparently coming down to drink. He roused up Desmond, and taking their rifles they crept behind two trees. The deer came on in single file. They were graceful little animals of a dark drab colour on their backs and sides, and white underneath, and pretty large antlers. Without hesitation they at once began to cross the stream, passing along close to where the midshipmen were concealed. Tom selected one animal and Gerald another, and ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... minute he was on the ridge. The Gulf opened out, a dead dull gray. The skies were hidden behind drab clouds. The air was clammy, cold, hushed, as if the god of storms were gathering his breath for ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... all decorated with wreaths and garlands, and wearing almost the same dress that we had seen at Tahiti—a coloured long-sleeved loose gown reaching to the feet. The natives here appear to affect duller colours than those we have lately been accustomed to, lilac, drab, brown, and other dark prints being the favourite tints. Whenever I stopped to look at a view, one of the girls would come behind me and throw a lei of flowers over my head, fasten it round my neck, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... rayed[42] them very euyll, that they were mych hurt therwyth. Thys Turpyn, sodeynly turnyng[43] hym and seeing[44] it, reuyled the wyfe therfore, and ran to hys mayster and told hym what she had don: wherfore master Vauesour incontinent callyd the wyf and seyd to her thus: thou drab, quod he, what hast thow don? why hast thou pourd the podage in my cloth sake and marrd my rayment and gere? O, syr, quod the wyfe, I know wel ye ar a iudge of the realme, and I perceyue by you your mind is to do ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... struck three we were led round to the front of the house. It was all very grand, and three or four times as large as the old house at Birtwick, but not half so pleasant, if a horse may have an opinion. Two footmen were standing ready, dressed in drab livery, with scarlet breeches and white stockings. Presently we heard the rustling sound of silk as my lady came down the flight of stone steps. She stepped round to look at us; she was a tall, proud-looking woman, and did not seem pleased about something, but she said nothing, ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... however, that in sibyls he had a preference. If she was to send him to the devil, she must be of the type which he qualified as a "drab." Without knowing the dictionary meaning of the word, he felt that it implied whatever would contrast most revoltingly with Barbara Walbrook. Seeing with her own eyes to what she had driven him, her heart would be wrung. That was all he asked for, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... countenance in which bluffness was singularly blended with vivacity and grimace; and with a complexion which would have been ruddy, but for a yellow hue which rather predominated. His dress consisted of a snuff- coloured coat and drab pantaloons, the former evidently seldom subjected to the annoyance of a brush, and the latter exhibiting here and there spots of something which, if not grease, bore a strong resemblance to it; add to these articles ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... back streets to the left, and came at last to a blistered front door that responded to his latch-key, one of a long series of blistered front doors with fanlights and apartment cards above. We found ourselves in a drab-coloured passage that was not only narrow and dirty but desolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt sitting at the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo occasional table before her, and "work"—a plum-coloured walking dress ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... think of having both the lamp and the shade for one day's work! Aren't you glad you wore your pink gingham now, even if mother did make you put on flannel underneath? You do look so pretty in pink and red, Rebecca, and so homely in drab ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... estranged our King. I blame you not, I say but what is true. I pray you, then, to waive your own desire, But if it please you otherwise, then speak! What flow'ry fate, what flatt'ring punishment, Is suited to the sin this drab has done? ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... reality. But, somehow, I could never quite make myself believe that it was real when a brilliant group of horsemen in pointed, yellow hats and streaming, peacock feathers dashed down the street. It seemed too impossible that I, a wandering naturalist of the drab, prosaic twentieth century, and my American wife were really a living, breathing part of this strange drama ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... himself for a fool, he had passed down into the street again and the episode had ended. There was really nothing in it—nothing at all; but it was the atmosphere, the atmosphere of romantic adventure shot suddenly across a rather drab and colourless existence, and he had liked to dwell on the possibilities of the affair and ask himself about it. Who was the woman, and why had she cried out? Why was there no one in the room? And why ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... he told her, when there came to him for the first time a realization of the hunger in the girl's heart for a change from the drab, lifeless, unchanging vistas of the open desert, "we'll take horses and pack-animals and go up into that wonderful ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... for Pies, Damsons, to Preserve, Deafness, Debility, Bitters for, Decanter, to Remove a Stopper from, Diseases, Summer, Domestics, on the Management of, Dough-nuts, Drab, to Color, Drawn Butter, Dressing, or Stuffing, Dried Beef, Dried Beef, to Stew, Dropsy, Ducks, to Roast, Dumplings, Apple, and Peach, Dumplings, Bacon, Dumplings, Corn, Dumplings, Drop, Dumplings, Large, Dumplings, Light Bread, Dumplings, Rice, Dumplings, Stew, Dumplings, Suet, Dutch-ovens, to Bake ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... was that any single colour or combination of single colours—for instance, a pair of sky blue breeches with pink insertion behind—is not regarded by a French tailor as a fantaisie or fancy. But any mingled colour, such as the ordinary drab grey of the business man is a fantaisie of the daintiest kind. To the eye of a Parisian tailor, a Quakers' meeting is a glittering panorama of fantaisies, whereas a negro ball at midnight in a yellow room with a band in scarlet, is ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... but one mood, no matter what it cheers or destroys. It always laughs. There is no melancholy note in it, no drab, dull color of death such as the flood comes tainted with. Even while it eats away our homes and possessions, it has a certain comfort in its touch and glow if we ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... regret that bread and soup luncheon, after all. It was an adventure of sorts, and quite a streak of colour in its way, across the drab background of South ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... well-dressed, middle-aged man who now paused, half in doubt, on the threshold of the Buildings, the sordid-looking vestibule, with its bare floor and drab-coloured walls, presented an epitome ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... that lay between the cove from which she had just emerged and Western Harbour, and Wink Wheeler, who was sitting on the rail on the starboard side of the deck, gave utterance to an exclamation of surprise and pointed ahead to where a drab-coloured power-boat had suddenly emerged into sight nearly ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... had been rather a drab one as seen through other people's eyes, but it had never seemed so to her till within the last few years. Her own father had been the village doctor, but of him she had no memory. Her mother's second marriage to a venerable country lawyer, John Gilman, had brought a kindly, inefficient stepfather ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was in high glee, having received a message from Captain Johnston, to inform him that the latter was pressed! The captain used to dress in a blue long-tog, drab-breeches and top-boots, when he went ashore. "He thought he could pass for a gentleman from the country," said Mr. Irish, laughing, "but them press-gang chaps smelt the tar in his very boots!" Cooper was sent to the rendezvous, with the captain's desk and papers, and the latter was liberated. ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... chang'd into the quite contrary, in less than three Months Time; and instead of pleasant Jests at Table, Dishes and Trenchers have flown about. The Husband, instead of my dear Soul, has been call'd Blockhead, Toss-Pot, Swill-Tub; and the Wife, Sow, Fool, dirty Drab. ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... drovers, immense hogs and immense men whom I took to be the gents of Wolverhampton. What huge fellows they were! almost as huge as the hogs for which they higgled; the generality of them dressed in brown sporting coats, drab breeches, yellow-topped boots, splashed all over with mud, and with low-crowned broad-brimmed hats. One enormous fellow particularly caught my notice. I guessed he must have weighed eleven score, he had a half-ruddy, half-tallowy ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... spurious passion which is the outcome of the head rather than of the heart. Thus Johnson tells us that Prior's Chloe "was probably sometimes ideal, but the woman with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab of the lowest species." The case of popular and patriotic poetry is very different. It is wholly devoid of affectation. Whatever be its literary merits or demerits, it always represents some genuine and usually deep-rooted conviction. It enables us to gauge ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Oliver and Dolly; and now that the hour was positively come he felt very light-hearted and full of spirits, defying the wind which wrestled with him at every turn. Dolly must be wrapped up well, he said to himself, and old Oliver must put on his drab great coat, with mother o' pearl buttons, which he had brought up from the country forty years ago, and which was still good for keeping out the cold. He ran down the alley, and passed through the shop ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... were like Miss Granger's morning-room. No frivolous mediaevalism here, no dainty upholsterer's work in many-coloured woods, but solid mahogany, relieved by solemn draperies of drab damask, in a style which the wise Sophia called unpretentious. The chief feature in one room was a sewing-machine that looked like a small church organ, and in the other a monster medicine-chest, from the contents ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... exceedingly simple, consisting of a coarsely-knitted blue jersey shirt that might have been the great-grandfather of the one Vince wore; and a pair of trousers, of a kind of drab drugget, so thick that they would certainly have stood up by themselves, and so cut that they came nearly up to the man's armpits, and covered his back and chest, while the braces he wore were short in the extreme. To finish the description of an individual who played a very important part ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... Salisbury's niece! and the equal of Sally herself for worthless good looks and behaviour. She is not yet well known to the town or I could not have been so took in. But you will recall that Molly Skerret observed the likeness to that drab Sally on seeing her. Good Heaven, that I had heeded, and not ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... anything now, as I would to any other woman in the world, as I would have said to you weeks ago before I knew all that you are . . . I don't say anything about the imbecility of keeping such a woman as you are here in this narrow, drab hole, this sordid prison . . . you born, if ever a human being was, to rich and warm and harmonious living! It is your birthright. Let me give it to you. All that, even that, a whole world of beauty and fullness ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... quarry, too, was overgrown again; being almost inaccessible to Wilson's cattle its undergrowth was rank and high, and as it was sheltered from the sun's rays and watered in part by a tiny spring, it was often the one green oasis in a weary land of crackling yellow and drab. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... knowledge often means increase of sorrow. It is, in truth, the sorrow of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance, often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he knows himself to be what in a sense he must remain—a cipher, ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... she used to herself; perhaps, as the butler had suggested, she had brought home some terrible ideas from the East—ideas about Kismet and fatalism and the cheapness of human life in comparison to human good. Wrong ideas, from the point of view of the queer, drab, cramped and ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... almost venerable in his aspect, but his tread was firm, and his arm still strong enough to steady his long, heavy, double-barrelled rifle. An ample coat of dark blue covered his body; his limbs were enveloped in long buttoned leggings of drab cloth, and a cap of sable surmounted his high, broad forehead. Under this his blueish grey eye glanced with a calm but clear intelligence, and a single look from it satisfied you that you were in the presence of a superior ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... under a sovereign brought in by a revolution. They made a favourite of Courtenay, but they desired to marry him to the queen, not to Elizabeth: Gardiner told the young earl that he would sooner see him the husband of the vilest drab who could be picked out of the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard Barton. His verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the sect; for from title-page to colophon, there was no sin either in the way of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse, that brewed ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... cheerfulness flooded with the soft, radiant light of returning happiness—reflected in her eyes; while the sunlight streaming down into the enclosure took on a brightness that made the girl's eyes glisten; while the drab and empty days since her father's death began to slip back into the limbo of memory—the sting and the sorrow of them removed. So does the heart of youth respond to the nearness ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... wended the wilds among, With a purse of gold and a silver tongue; His hat it was broad, and all drab were his clothes, For he hated high colors—except on his nose, And he met with a lady, the story goes. Heigho! yea thee and ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... a matter for comment that American newspaper advertising of the English packaged medicines was singularly drab. In the mother country, the proprietors or their heirs were faced with vigorous competition. It behooved them to sharpen up their adjectives and reach for their vitriol. In America the apothecary or merchant had no proprietary interest in any of ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... the brightly coloured gowns, beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... tells that he was received by Washington, and, "after ... half an hour, the General came in again, with his hair neatly powdered, a clean shirt on, a new plain drab coat, white waistcoat and white silk stockings. At three, dinner was on the table, and we were shown by the General into another room, where everything was set off with a peculiar taste and at the same time neat and plain. The ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... estimation, a low character for commercial honesty, and a certain flavor of pretentious hypocrisy. This probably has been much owing to the acerbity and pungency of Sydney Smith's witty denunciations against the drab-colored State. It is noted for repudiation of its own debts, and for sharpness in exaction of its own bargains. It has been always smart in banking. It has given Buchanan as a President to the country, ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... on them, they want wine; your true fool will never fight without it. Or a drab, a drab; Oh for a commodious drab betwixt them! would Helen had been here! then it had come to something. Dogs, lions, bulls, for females tear and gore; And the beast, man, is valiant ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... time when, posing as a purist, I thought it fine to criticise and crab CHARLES DICKENS as a crude caricaturist, Who laid his colours on too thick and slab, Who was a sort of sentimental tourist And made life lurid when it should be drab; In short I branded as a brilliant dauber The man who gave us Pecksniff ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... features; eyes like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Kruedener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... footsteps, and sounds of doors opening and shutting. They put new locks on the doors lest the villagers had procured keys, but this proved of no avail. The servants talked of seeing appearances of a gentleman in drab and of a lady in silk, which Mrs. Ricketts disregarded. Her husband went to Jamaica in the autumn of 1769, and in 1771 she was so disturbed that her brother, Captain Jervis, a witness of the phenomena, insisted on her leaving the house in August. He and Mrs. Ricketts then ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... women, or even in part for Savina. Her attitude, he knew, in that it never touched the abstract, was far simpler than his; she didn't regard herself as scarlet, but thought of the rest of the world as unendurably drab. The last thing she had said to him was that she was glad, glad, that it had happened. This, too, in Savina, had preserved them from the slightest suggestion of inferiority: the night assumed no resemblance to a disgraceful footnote on the page of righteousness. It was ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... cousins, notably of pretty little Looloo, who had kissed the visitor shyly (for a Cooney) at greeting, and said, "Oh, Cally! You do look so lovely!" Cally herself was aware of an inner buoyance oddly at variance with the drab Cooney milieu. Recent progress in the great game had more than blotted out all memory of little mishaps ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... one bred to the trade. A moment later I was aloft, casting loose the gaff-topsail. From that fine height as the barge began to move I saw the horsemen turning away foiled. I saw the lady's leathered hat, making a little dash of green among the drab of the riding coats. Then an outhouse hid them all from sight. I was in a sea-going barge, bound out, under all sail, along a waterway lined with old reeds, all blowing down with ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... the town was lost in the drab melancholy of its ancient streets amid the frightened silence of its inhabitants, who had retired very early, when Luis Cervantes reached Primitivo's general store, his arrival interrupting a party that ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... a warning sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform faded into the color of the earth on which ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... Life, stale and drab since his eyes opened, gathered to itself the pale glow of awakening interest. Ford rose painfully, inch by inch, until he was sitting upon the side of the bed, got from there to his feet, looked down and saw that he was clothed to his boots, ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... this time Master Raymond was sitting in the porch of the Red Lion, thinking over a sight he had just seen;—a man had passed by wearing on the back of his drab coat a capital I two inches long, cut out of black cloth, and sewed upon it. On inquiry he found the man had married his deceased wife's sister; and both he and the woman had been first whipped, and then condemned to wear this letter for the rest of ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... done, he would give his servants a dram, but he was by no means over-flush in this way. During the six months of his service, Clark never once saw Burns intoxicated or incapable of managing his business. The poet, when at home, used to wear a broad blue bonnet, a long-tailed coat, drab or blue, corduroy breeches, dark blue stockings, with cootikens or gaiters. In cold weather he would have a plaid of black and white check wrapped round his shoulders. The same old man described Mrs. Burns as a good and prudent housewife, keeping everything neat ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... he rode away, not giving Tom time to ask what the sweep had gone to prison for, which was a matter of interest to Tom, as he had been in prison once or twice himself. Moreover, the groom looked so very neat and clean, with his drab gaiters, drab breeches, drab jacket, snow-white tie with a smart pin in it, and clean round ruddy face, that Tom was offended and disgusted at his appearance, and considered him a stuck-up fellow, who gave himself airs because he wore smart ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... appearance. "There," was our reply, pointing at the same time to a well-cushioned and genially sequestered seat at the north-west corner, and we were ushered into it with becoming decorum. In two minutes afterwards five women and a festive infant, dressed in a drab cloak, and muffled all over to keep the cold out, stopped at the pew door. We stepped out; three of the females, with the baby, stepped in; the remainder went into the next pew; and after condensing our nerve power, we settled down in the corner from ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... Squire Bean and his wife easily. In fact, the queer aspect of the room was not calculated to dispel her nervous terror. Squire Bean's peculiarities showed forth in the arrangement of his room, as well as in other ways. His floor was painted drab, and in the center were the sun and solar system depicted in yellow. But that six-rayed yellow sun, the size of a large dinner plate, with its group of lesser six-rayed orbs as large as saucers, did not ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... return to the land of the Franks, by ordering a beef-steak, and a bottle of porter, and bespeaking the paper from a gentleman in drab leggings, who had come from Manchester to look after the affairs of a commercial house, in which he or his employers were involved. He wondered that a hotel in the Ottoman empire should be so unlike one in Europe, and asked ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... jury's careful examination a very different picture. He made no secret of the fact that, from the point of view of the ordinary unconventional man or woman, Mrs. Clarke had often acted unwisely, and, with not too fine a sarcasm, he described for the jury the average existence of "a careful drab woman" in the watchful and eternally gossiping diplomatic world. Then he contrasted with it the life led by Mrs. Clarke in the wonderful city of Stamboul—a life "full of color, of taste, of interest, of charm, of innocent, joyous and fragrant liberty. Which ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... us under a sky that would make of Job an optimist. All around are light and color, the evidences of life and hope. Here the whites are white, and not a dirty drab. The streets glisten clean in the sunlight, and every window is a reflector of glad promise. In London, choked with fog, and grimy with soot-dust, the Englishman cannot see the future for smoke, cannot extract a gleam of hope from the ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... where there followed a service which Avery regarded as downright revolting. It consisted mainly of prayers—as many prayers as the Vicar could get in, rendered in an emotionless monotone with small regard for sense and none whatever for feeling. The whole thing was drab and unattractive to the utmost limit, and Avery rose at length from her knees with a feeling of having been deliberately cheated of a thing she valued. She left the church in an unwonted spirit of exasperation, which lasted throughout the midday meal, which ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... that overlooked the chairs Where dozens sat, and where a pop—eyed daub Of Shakespeare, very like the hired man Of Christian Dallman, brow and pointed beard, Upon a drab proscenium outward stared, Sat Harmon Whitney, to that eminence, By merit raised in ribaldry and guile, And to the assembled rebels thus he spake: "Whether to lie supine and let a clique Cold-blooded, scheming, hungry, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... years they labored with this apparatus, trying every conceivable sort of disk. It is easy to pass over those three years, filled as they were with unceasing toil and patient effort, because they were drab years when little of interest occurred. But these were the years when Bell and Watson were "going to school," learning how to apply electricity to this new use, striving to make their apparatus talk. How dreary and trying these years must have been for the experimenters we may ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... impressed with the belief that her grandfather was a cunning device in wax. The chests were taken out with all convenient despatch, and taken in to be unlocked by Mrs Jarley, who, attended by George and another man in velveteen shorts and a drab hat ornamented with turnpike tickets, were waiting to dispose their contents (consisting of red festoons and other ornamental devices in upholstery work) to the best advantage in the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... glazing, that there seems to be no reason why he should have given the preference. It is said the Flemish School used white grounds—probably Rubens did so generally, not all other painters. Teniers used a light drab, and, if we were to judge from some of his skies, painted upon it when that thinly coloured ground was wet. Unless a great body of colour be used, even in the most transparent painting, white grounds are apt to give a weakness and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... the young, strong mower going forth with his mower for to mow spareth the tall and drab hornet's nest and passeth by on the other side, so Time, with his Waterbury hour-glass and his overworked hay-knife over his shoulder, and his long Mormon whiskers, and his high sleek dome of thought with its gray lambrequin of ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... the Hotel Esplanade caught my ear. I approached the table and found two flashily dressed bullies and a bedraggled drab from the streets talking ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... his bill and gone out, he stopped at the corner of the street just to look at the people passing by. A large part of the monotony of this war is occasioned, of course, by the fact that the soldier sees nothing but the everlasting drab of uniforms. When a man is in the front line, or just behind, for weeks at a time he sees nothing but soldiers, soldiers, soldiers! Each man has the same coloured uniform; each has the same pattern tunic, the same ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... the southwest, the water of a pale tawny color, and just enough motion to make things frolicsome and lively. Add to these an approaching sunset of unusual splendor, a broad tumble of clouds, with much golden haze and profusion of beaming shaft and dazzle. In the midst of all, in the clear drab of the afternoon light, there steamed up the river the large new boat, the Wenonah, as pretty an object as you could wish to see, lightly and swiftly skimming along, all trim and white, covered with flags, transparent red and blue streaming out in the breeze. ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... they could see the drab peaks of the mountains which loomed between the partly dismantled trees. Beyond lay the kingdom. Would they ever reach it? There was only one pass; this they dared not make. Yet if they attempted to cross the mountains in a deserted ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... behind any of its neighbours of the grove in conjugal and parental affection, for it builds its nest, hatches its own eggs, and rears its own young, Wilson assures us. It is about a foot in length, clothed in a dark drab suit with a silken greenish gloss. A ruddy cinnamon tints the quill-feathers of the wings; and the tail consists partly of black feathers tipped with white, the two outer ones being of the same tint as the back. The under surface is a pure white. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... was a room full of poor Turks. Picture a crowd of ragged men, some in drab turbans with loose ends hanging down their backs, but most of them in dingy red fez hats, faces unshaved, mottled, ugly—a squat people, very talkative, but terribly mirthless; and in shadowy corners of the low dark cafe ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... taken to a small, drab internment room. A half hour passed and still no word from the Major. From the moment the Patrol crew had boarded them, everything had seemed like a bad dream. The shock of the arrest, the realization that the Captain had been serious when ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... worn with a bright green bonnet; red and green, like our friend a-la-macaw; salmon colour and blue; yellow and red; green and blue. Two ill-assorted shades of the same colour, such as a dark and light blue; or a red lilac and a blue lilac; or a rose pink and a blue pink; or drab and yellow. Instances might be multiplied without end of incongruous inharmonious blending of colours, the mere sight of which is enough to give any one a bilious fever. There are colours which, in themselves, may be inoffensive, but of which only particular shades assort well together. ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... unthinkable monotony of the universal course, of the centuries wheeling in dull succession into infinity. Life seemed to him no more varied than the wire drum in which squirrels raced nowhere. His own lot, he told himself grimly, was no worse than another. Existence was all of the same drab piece. It had seemed gay enough when he was young, worked with gold and crimson ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the home of her daughter, Ida Baker. The clean-swept walks of the small yard were brightened by borders of gay colored zinnias and marigolds in front of the drab looking two-story, frame house. "Come in," answered Ida, in response to a knock at the front door. "Yessum, Mammy's here. Go right in dat dere room and you'll ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... narrow passage from the door of entrance to the room. General Washington stopped at the end to let Mr. Adams pass to the chair. The latter always wore a full suit of bright drab, with loose cuffs to his coat. General Washington's dress was a full suit of black. His military hat had the black cockade. There stood the 'Father of his Country' acknowledged by nations the first in war, first in peace, and first ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... whether the husband is a brute or a darling. What I wish to prove is that marriage guarantees woman a home only by the grace of her husband. There she moves about in HIS home, year after year, until her aspect of life and human affairs becomes as flat, narrow, and drab as her surroundings. Small wonder if she becomes a nag, petty, quarrelsome, gossipy, unbearable, thus driving the man from the house. She could not go, if she wanted to; there is no place to go. Besides, a short period of married life, of complete ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... among the second-hand clothes; every shop on both sides of the street invited him—the whole street at this sordid end of it was trying to help him. For a very few shillings he bought just the garments that he had imagined—loose and big made of drab canvas or drill, the suit of overalls that had been worn by some kind of mechanic, with two vast inside pockets to the jacket, in which the wearer had carried tools, food, and his bottle of drink. Dale also bought a common soft felt hat, a thing ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... speaker finished, he stepped to one side, bringing into view of the porch a woman seated upon the head of a barrel in the cart. A poor army drab, left behind in the evacuation, had been decked out in what Janice instantly recognised as her Mischianza costume; and with hair dressed so that it stood up not less than two feet above her forehead, splashed over with white paint, a drink-coloured face, doubly red in contrast, and bare feet, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... his desk and gazed listlessly out of the window. The day arose before him in prospect, drab, desolate, and dreary. High up overhead, through the dingy panes, he could see the little fleecy clouds floating about in peaceful unconcern. May was a slack month. And at its end came June—June, with its four weeks' inventory ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... case, though you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to yourself, when reading Gibbon's *Decline and Fall* in bed: "Well, ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... said) half the iron mines in the north of Spain, as well as a great part of the city of Bayonne. Paul's grandmother, the Comtesse de Louvance, was his next neighbour. Paul remembered him vaguely as a tall, drab, mild-mannered man, with a receding chin, and a soft, rather piping voice, who used to tip him, and have him over a good deal ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... be dispensed with; and, with their naked names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, picture-less. But the beauty of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they must degenerate into mere gambling.—Imagine a dull deal board, or drum ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... little they drew near to Los Angeles. And then they were there, sliding slowly through the yards in a drab drizzle of one of California's fall rains. Then they were in a taxicab, making for the Third Street tunnel. Then Jean stared heavy-eyed at the dripping palms along the boulevard which led away from the smoke of the city and into Hollywood, snuggled against ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... In this drab, ineffective gathering, I found one point of colour, like a red rose on a dingy white tablecloth. This was Beatrice, the daughter of Clement Blaine. I believe the man had a wife. One figures her as a worn household drudge. In any case, she made no appearance in any of the places in which I met ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... enough," said General D'Hubert, looking round at the vine-fields, framed in purple lines, and dominated by the nest of grey and drab walls of a village clustering around the top of a conical hill, so that the blunt church tower seemed but the shape of a crowning rock—"if you think this spot quiet enough, you can speak to him at once. And I beg you, comrades, to ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Mrs. Glegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated from us by changes that widen the years. War and the rumor of war had then died out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by the farmers in drab greatcoats, who shook the grain out of their sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a state of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were high. Surely the time was gone forever when the broad river could bring ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren back yards. Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face to besieging spring. But spring doesn't come with the thunder of cannon. She is a sapper and a miner, ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the two sisters, their speaking and their remaining silent, his seeing them in secret trysts, the moving about from house to house and room to room, the singing of songs, his experiences with the Doermaul opera company, the light thrown on his drab life by a mask, his friend and the help he had received from him, his separation from him, the brush-maker's house on St. James's Place, the three queer old maids in the Long Row, the days he spent at Castle ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... interview was recounted to him by Miss Leaks, the little drab-colored stenographer, who had returned from lunch when the storm was ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... all right." Strangely enough he felt now that it would. Her coming had brought rippling sunshine into a drab world. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... sedate air, and minding his own business. Not a single squash-vine could be detected tickling another squash-vine; each watermelon lay in the middle of his hill with a solemn expression on his large face; the tomatoes looked ashamed of being red; and only a suit of drab apiece seemed wanting, to make the pumpkins as respectably grave as the other members of the community. Two small boys, in wide-brimmed hats and legs of discreet tint, were weeding these decorous vegetables. They raised their heads and took one good stare as the big wagon rattled past, then they ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect; There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing Of the true lyric bard and all that ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... entered to-day, and exchanged a frigid bow with Monroe. The Senator from Virginia took a chair in the rear of the others, stretched his long legs in front of him, and folded his arms defiantly. He looked not unlike a greyhound, his preference for drab clothing enhancing the general effect of ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... of home, her spirit suddenly lightened. The narrow, drab-coloured little house, flanked each side by others exactly like it in every single particular, save that their front yards were not so well kept, looked as if it could, aye, and would, keep any ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... almost constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and the ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... She had fought through drab and solitude to dreams and formless craving, this girl of the hills. What things of vigor her life had known were cruel: a passionate shrinking from her uncle, a fear for the brother who had hotly rebelled at the meager life around him, a loneliness aloof from ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... that at Vigo?" said I. He looked at me for a moment, winked, gave a short triumphant chuckle, and then proceeded on his way, walking at a tremendous rate. The Senor Garcia was dressed in all respects as an English notary might be: he wore a white hat, brown frock coat, drab breeches buttoned at the knees, white stockings, and well blacked shoes. But I never saw an English notary walk so fast: it could scarcely be called walking: it seemed more like a succession of galvanic leaps and bounds. I found it impossible to keep up with ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... disliked seeing the place with no colour or ornament save that which the marsh wind gave it of gold and rust. She would have the eaves and the pipes painted a nice green, such as would show up well at a distance. There was plenty of money, so why should everything be drab? Alce discouraged her as well as he was able—it was the wrong time of year for painting, and the old paint was still quite good. Joanna treated his objections as she had treated his proposal—with good-humoured, almost tender, indifference. She let him make his moan at ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... darling—Naughty little dear!" he continued, his round good-humored face wrinkled all over with smiles, as he caught up the truant, "what ever do you mean by splashing through every gutter between home and here, making a little drab of yourself? Why your frock is as wet as a dish-clout!—and your ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... thee when thou suck'dst her breast, Had been a little ratsbane for thy sake! Or else, when thou didst keep my lambs a-field, I wish some ravenous wolf had eaten thee! Dost thou deny thy father, cursed drab? O, burn her, burn her! ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... Tom Purdie, the wide-mouthed, under-sized, broad-shouldered, square-made, thin-flanked woodsman, so well known afterwards by all Scott's friends as he waited for his master in his green shooting-jacket, white hat, and drab trousers. Scott first made Tom Purdie's acquaintance in his capacity as judge, the man being brought before him for poaching, at the time that Scott was living at Ashestiel. Tom gave so touching an account of his circumstances—work scarce—wife ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... father stood very near her. She was terribly agitated. There was a narrow passage from the door of entrance to the room, which was on the east, dividing the rows of benches. General Washington stopped at the end to let Mr. Adams pass to the chair. The latter always wore a full suit of bright drab, with lash or loose cuffs to his coat. He always wore wrist ruffles. He had not changed his fashions. He was a short man, with a good head. With his family he attended our church twice a day. General Washington's dress was a ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... dozen times he looked at his watch—would he be too late? He had no idea how long it would take to reach Gravesend; he knew nothing of the race track's location. As the train whirled him through Emerson, where his mother lived, he could see the little drab cottage, and wondered pathetically what the good woman would say if she knew her son was going to a race meeting. At twelve he was in ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... naked for one-third to one-half its height and from one to six feet in diameter, with a smooth bark, silvery or whitish in young trees, becoming thick and heavily fissured into rounded ridges on old trunks, and gray or drab-brown in color, it is readily distinguishable, with its companion, the red fir, by the regularity of construction of trunk, branch and branchlet. As Smeaton Chase expresses it, "The fine smooth arms, set in regular formation, divide and redivide again and again ad infinitum, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... "the Italian woman." In his "Journal to Stella" for August 6th, 1711, Swift writes: "We have a music meeting in our town [Windsor] to-night. I went to the rehearsal of it, and there was Margarita and her sister, and another drab, and a parcel of fiddlers; I was weary, and would not go to the meeting, which I am sorry for, because I heard it was a great assembly." (See present edition, vol. ii. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... the room. "Look-a-here what Mister Grannis gi' me," and she held out the yellow pitcher. Instantly Miss Baker was in a quiver of confusion. Every word spoken aloud could be perfectly heard in the next room. What a stupid drab was this Maria! Could anything be more ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... The stream was thick with red mud, the condition from which it derived its name, and it swept along with a splendid vigour that betokened a large reserve flood in the high mountains. The marble composing the walls of this canyon for most of its length is of a greyish drab colour often beautifully veined, but it must not be supposed that the walls are the same colour externally, for they are usually a deep red, due to the discoloration of their surface by disintegration of ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... many-caped drab overcoat, and fox-skin cap and gloves, sat upon the coachman's box with the proud air of a king upon his throne. And why not? It was Oliver's very first visit to the city, and the suit of clothes he wore ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... thought of getting something in the mail besides a catalogue and the speeches of his congressman, of having something actually to look forward to, appealed to him strongly the more he considered it. Bowers craved a little of the warmth of romance in his drab existence and this was the only way he knew of ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... to be something in what you say—your language may save time and money and grease the wheels of business; but, after all, we are not all business men, nor are we all out after dollars. Just think what a dull, drab uniformity your scheme would lay over the lands like a pall. By the artificial removal of natural barriers you are aiding and abetting the vulgarization of the world. You are doing what in you lies to eliminate the racy, the local, the ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... matter, Cely?—Oh!" For there stood the funniest old woman that Cely or Miss Melville had ever seen. She had on a black dress, very long and very scant, that looked as if it were made out of an old waterproof cloak. Over that, she wore a curious drab-silk sack, somewhat faded and patched, with all the edges of the seams outside. Over that, was a plaid red-and-green shawl, tied about her waist. There was a little black shawl over that, and a green tippet wound twice around her throat with the ends tucked in under the shawl. ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... still dusting. She was no longer a drab of the streets but a young lady who, thanks to Dick's check, had paid her premium and was entitled to pull beer-handles with the best. Being neatly dressed in black she did not hesitate to face Mrs. ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Joyce would call a drab blonde—washed out complexion and sallow hair. She looks drab all the way through to me, but she may be the kind that improves on acquaintance. She certainly has a good figure, and looks as stylish as one of those fashion ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... hand out and opened a door that might very well escape a stranger's notice; for it was covered with looking-glass, and matched another narrow mirror in shape and size. This door led into a very long room, as plain and even sordid as the drawing-room was inviting: the unpapered walls were a cold drab, and wanted washing; there was a thick cobweb up in one corner, and from the ceiling hung the tail of another, which the housemaid's broom had scotched not killed: that side of the room they entered by was all books. The servant said, "Stay here a moment, sir, and I'll send ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... go— You remember my lyrics translated—like "sweet bully Bottom"—from Hugo? Though I will say it's curious that simply on just that account there should be Men so bold as to say that not one of my poems was written by me. It would stir the political bile or the physical spleen of a drab or a Tory To hear critics disputing my claim to Empedocles, Maud, and the Laboratory. Yes, it's singular—nay, I can't think of a parallel (ain't it a high lark? As that Countess would say)—there are few men believe it was I wrote the Ode to a Skylark. ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... modest discretion. A green flat region, made of peat and sand; human industry needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing to mingle for some miles. Nothing of the picturesque in this country; but a good deal of the useful, of the improvable by economic science; and more of fine productions in ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... slowly faded into drab. The trees, dripping with moisture, gradually took shape. The day ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... hurried across the icy slope, the sun seemed suddenly quenched and the daylight turned to sodden drab. Heavy drifts of snow could be seen falling headlong from the clouds hanging about the peak, making ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Gallery. We shall pass out of sight of flat dreary London, drab-coloured streets full of overcoats, silk hats, dripping umbrellas, omnibuses. We shall pass out of sight of long perspectives of square houses lost in fine rain and grey mist. We shall enter an enchanted land, a land of ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... and colorful, even with all the best people away; Washington Square, cool under the trees, lovely and desirable despite the presence everywhere of alien neighbors from the district to the South. I long for home with an ardent longing; never was London so cruel, so hopeless, so drab, in my eyes. For, as I write this, a constable sits at my elbow, and he and I are shortly to start for Scotland Yard. I have been arrested as a suspect in the case of Captain ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... confessed that I liked to cheat the railway company, and I excused it on the ground that "a ten-mile journey without a ticket is the only romantic experience left in a drab world." That was a delightful bit of rationalisation. The real reason for my delinquency lay in my unconscious. As a child I impotently rebelled against the authority of parents and teachers. Later in life ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... have healthfulness and comedy as well as seriousness. We are a young people, but only in the sense of healthy-mindedness. There is no real taste among us for the erotic or the decadent. It is foreign to us because, as a people, we have not felt the corroding touch of decadence. Nor is life here all drab. Hence I expect lights as well as shadows in every play ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... his head after her. She doesn't expect to marry either of these gentlemen; she does not particularly require their flattering attentions.... Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term, after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing. She did not dream of Mark King as a possible husband; another unromantic title. She merely hungered for male admiration. It was the wine of life, the breath in her nostrils. As it happens to be to some countless millions of other girls.... All of which ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Green is dyed in a bath made with 1 lb. (p. 194) Quinoline Yellow, 1 lb. Azo Fuchsine G, 1/4 lb. Fast Green Bluish, 10 lb. Glauber's salt, and 2 lb. sulphuric acid. By using about half the above quantities of dye-stuffs a drab effect shot ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... the very thin margin somewhat incurved, disk expanded, uneven, near the center cracked into numerous small viscid brownish areoles; pileus flesh color, flesh same color except toward the gills. Gills dark drab gray, arcuate, distant, decurrent, many of them forked, separating easily from the hymenophore, peeling off in broad sheets, and leaving behind corresponding elevations of the hymenophore which extended between the laminae of the lamellae. Pileus 7 cm. in diameter; stem ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... ascent was nothing—a mere nothing, and that before another thought could pass through monsieur's mind the fifth floor would be reached. The boy followed, climbing and ever climbing, until the meagre hand-rail appeared to lengthen into dream-like coils, and the threadbare, drab-hued carpet, with its vivid red border, to assume the proportions of ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... in California prolonged beyond its appointed season. The country and the people needed rain. Claire, always responsive to the moods of wind and weather, longed for the cleansing flood to descend and wash the dust-drab town colorful again. She awoke one morning to the delicious thrill of the moisture-laden southeast wind blowing into her room and the warning voice of her mother at her bedroom door ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... his campaign hat on one of the hooks, Greg doing the same. On account of the heat of the day neither young captain wore a tunic. Each unbuttoned the top button of his olive drab Army shirt before ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... embarrassment—no bed; nothing to offer the invalid in the shape of food save a piece of thin, tough, flexible, drab-coloured cloth, made of flour and mill-stones in equal proportions, and called by the name of “bread”; then the patient, of course, had no “confidence in his medical man,” and on the whole, the best chance of saving ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... all autumn's glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty? No. I saw you—only you! If you had stood against a drab curtain it would have been the same. You were a child, too young to stir an adult heart to love or passion.... What was it then that fixed you from that ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... green, may not be used in equal quantities in the dress, as they are both so positive in tone that they divide and distract the attention. When two colors are worn in any quantity, one must approach a neutral tint, such as gray or drab. Black may be worn with any color, though it looks best with the lighter shades of the different colors. White may also be worn with any color, though it looks best with the darker tones. Thus white and crimson, black and pink, each contrast better and have a richer effect than though the ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... these little voids were but the divine hiatuses of youth. He sometimes wondered just how strong her character was. There were times when she showed a pronounced inclination for the line of least resistance ... but her youth ... her too sheltered bringing up ... those drab cramped ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... hour of their journeying drew to an end, a sudden vision of green, like an emerald dropped on the drab face of the plain, brought a flush to Honor's cheeks, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... In harvest time he, of course, employed additional help, but the harvesters were for the most part residents of the neighborhood, who found accommodation in their own homes. The house was a small frame, oblong building, of the conventional Canadian farm-house order of architecture, painted of a drab color and standing a hundred yards or so from the main road. The barn and stable stood a convenient distance to the rear. About midway between house and barn was a deep well, worked with a windlass and chain. During the preceding season a young orchard ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... old gentleman who was evidently a stranger to every lawyer present. Who was he? Who brought him? Was there any one in the room who knew him? Such were the whispers that floated about, concerning the portly old man, arrayed in blue coat and drab breeches and gaiters, who took his snuff in silence, and watched the proceedings with evident surprise and dissatisfaction. After listening to three speeches this antique, jolly stranger rose, and with much embarrassment addressed the chair. "Mr. President," he said—"excuse me; ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... brown, more or less olivaceous in some eggs, the markings even in this type being generally densest towards the large end, where they form an irregular mottled cap: in the other type the ground is a very pale greenish-drab colour; there is a dense confluent raw-sienna-coloured zone round the large end, and only a few spots and specks of the same colour scattered about the rest of the egg. All kinds of intermediate varieties occur. The texture of the shell is fine and compact, ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... Princes in the Tower,' and 'The Interment of the Bodies by torchlight,' were very forcible and dramatic works of art, and possessed more natural attractions than the pictures of many of his competitors. His pupilage with Sir Joshua prevented his falling into the washed leather and warm drab errors of tone that then distinguished the English school of historical painting. In the picture of the Burial ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions; "a meager mind," I mutter to myself, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... pliable circlet of golden scales, clearing the brows, held the cap securely in place. On each scale a ruby of great size sparkled in solitaire setting. The circlet was further provided with four strings of pearls, two by each ear, dangling well down below in front of the shoulders. A loose drab robe or gown, drawn close at the waist, clothed him, neck, arms, body and nether limbs, answering excellently as ground for a cope the color of the cap, divided before and behind into embroidered squares defined ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... gilded youth, all that curious lot of masculinity classified under the general head of "men about town," crowded into the theatre that night, and when, after being heralded at length by the chorus, the returned prima donna appeared, in shining drab tights, she had a long and ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... his choice. My poor father was quite confounded: for my master saw not any he thought too good, and my father none that he thought bad enough. And my good master, at last, (he fixed his eye upon a fine drab, which he thought looked the plainest,) would help him to try the coat and waistcoat on himself; and, indeed, one would not have thought it, because my master is taller, and rather plumper, as I thought but, as I saw afterwards, they fitted him very well. And being plain, and lined ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... had recovered a little from his shock, he went and sniffed curiously at the representative pieces of the fallen projectile. They had a distinctive flavour, oddly reminiscent of the two drab animals of the ledge. He sat up and pawed the larger lump, and walked round it several times, trying to find a man ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... look like an orphan," said the wife of the Oriel don, subsequently, on the way home. The criticism was a just one. Zuleika would have looked singular in one of those lowly double-files of straw-bonnets and drab cloaks which are so steadying a feature of our social system. Tall and lissom, she was sheathed from the bosom downwards in flamingo silk, and she was liberally festooned with emeralds. Her dark hair was not even strained back from her forehead ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... are all like this, great promisers, and after perform nothing to any. Think you to do with me as you did with Biliuzza, who went off with the ghittern-player?[368] Cock's faith, then, you shall not, for that she is turned a common drab only for that. If you have them not about you, go for them.' 'Alack,' cried the priest, 'put me not upon going all the way home. Thou seest that I have the luck just now to find thee alone, but maybe, when I return, there will be some one or other here ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the landscape. The ground was covered with springy pine needles, and squirrels and birds were everywhere. We walked past rows and rows of white tents pitched in orderly array among the pines, the canvas village of fifty or more road builders. By and by we came to a drab gray shack, weather-beaten and discouraged, hunched under the trees as if it were trying to blot itself from the scene. I was passing on, when the Chief (White Mountain) stopped me with ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... looked out into a world of grey wrack and driving rain. The Tower roof showed mistily beyond the ridge of down, but its environs were not in their prospect. The lower regions of the House had been gloomy enough, but this bleak place with its drab outlook struck a chill to Sir Archie's soul. He dolefully lit ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... narrow at the top. Her forehead was the thin edge of the wedge, and she widened slowly as she neared the ground; the first indication of a settlement showing in the lobes of her ears, then in her cheeks, and then in her drab-apparelled person. Her whole aspect gave the impression of a great self-importance, early realised and made part of life, but kept in abeyance by the society of Aunt Mary and by a religious conviction that others also had their place, a sort of back ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... appearing again farther on, and then spreading its wings for a short flight, and displaying the lovely colours with which it was dyed, the most prominent being shades of blue relieved by delicate fawn and pale warm drab. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... buried him on the hillside, just as the sun swept aside the rosy curtain of dawn. The wind, laden with fresh morning perfumes, blew up joyously from the river. From where I stood I could see the drab walls of the barracks. The windows sparkled and flashed as the gray mists sailed heavenward and vanished. The hill with its long grasses resembled a green sea. The thick forests across the river, almost black ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... into the night; A drab numbness sets in Dripping in lugubrious drops From the haggard ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... her fingers. Well, this was the end. She was to be thrust out of the new brightness, back into the drab dreariness, the emptiness that was her fate. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable tho not faultless. The ethical delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist"—as Shakespeare has been well called—do not exhibit the drab-colored Quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from "The Whole Duty of Man" or from "The Academy of Compliments!" We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various |
