"Mouldy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... black ashes of several villages that had been burned, they discovered a hollow place, by sounding the earth with a stick, and, upon digging, arrived at a granary of the seed known as "tullaboon;" this was a great prize, as, although mouldy and bitter, it would keep us from starving. The women of the party were soon hard at work grinding, as many of the necessary stones had been found among ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... fortune. A few blows with the handspike shattered the top, and eagerly plunging in my hand, to my intense satisfaction I drew forth a captain's biscuit. I ate it at once and thought it deliciously sweet, though it was in reality musty and mouldy. I had now a store of food to last me for days, and even weeks, should I not obtain my liberation, provided I used the strictest economy. All I wanted was fresh air. To obtain that, supposing I could not work my way out or make myself heard, was ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... earnest, mighty voice is making itself heard more and more irresistibly every day, to the utter discomfiture and overthrow of the hydra-headed avatars of the priestcraft and kingcraft and all the other mouldy and rank-smelling relics of the dark ages. The press is the arch apostle of civilization, progress, and truth—the Greatheart, whose mission it is to combat and destroy the giants Pope and Pagan, Maul and Despair, and all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... day of stagnant air, and the church swung with sleepy influences. The very pews and desks, the pillars of the loft and the star-crowned canopy of the pulpit, seemed in their dry and mouldy antiquity to give forth soporific dry accessions to that somnolent atmosphere, and the sun-rays, slanted over the heads of the worshippers, showed full of dust. Outside, through the tall windows, could ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... church, with its echoing aisles and marble columns and giddy bell-tower and cloistered corridors, all to himself. At rare intervals, priests from Ravenna come to sing some special mass at these cold altars; pious folk make vows to pray upon their mouldy steps and kiss the relics which are shown on great occasions. But no one stays; they hurry, after muttering their prayers, from the fever-stricken spot, reserving their domestic pieties and customary devotions for the brighter and newer ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... most generalized historical ideas are made emphatic only through association and observation. How the vague sense of Roman dominion is deepened as we trace the outline of a camp, the massive ranges of a theatre, or the mouldy effigy on a coin, in some region far distant from the Imperial centre,—as at Nismes or Chester! How complete becomes the idea of mediaeval life, contemplated from the ramparts of a castle, in the "dim, religious light" of an old monastic chapel, or amid the obsolete trappings and weapons of an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... highway past the second-story windows of Allen Street, a cellar door yawns darkly in the shadow of one of the pillars that half block the narrow sidewalk. A dull gleam behind the cobweb-shrouded window pane supplements the sign over the door, in Yiddish and English: "Old Brasses." Four crooked and mouldy steps lead to utter darkness, with no friendly voice to guide the hapless customer. Fumbling along the dank wall, he is left to find the door of the shop as best he can. Not a likely place to encounter the fastidious from the Avenue! Yet ladies in furs ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... as absolute as though he had been shrouded in black velvet—even the glimmer of the refracted street lamps did not penetrate further than the doorway of the first tunnel. There was a smell of dampness in the air, as of mouldy plaster. It was the smell of underground places. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... both at Dr. Laidley's and at Kamalia, during the harmattan. Indeed, the air, during the rainy season, is so loaded with moisture, that clothes, shoes, trunks, and every thing that is not close to the fire, become damp and mouldy; and the inhabitants may be said to live in a sort of vapour bath: but this dry wind braces up the solids, which were before relaxed, gives a cheerful flow of spirits, and is even pleasant to respiration. Its ill effects are, that it ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... a wooden box, under a low and heavy ceiling, all covered with cobwebs and permeated with fine soot. Night pressed us between the two walls, spattered with spots of mud and all mouldy. We got up at five in the morning and, stupid and indifferent, began work at six o'clock. We made bread out of the dough which our comrades had prepared while we slept. The whole day, from dawn till ten at night, some of us sat at the table rolling out the dough, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... last with regret. Nothing but the recollection of his oath gave him strength to proceed. Hunger made viands once repugnant, now acceptable; he held the plate in his hand for an hour at a time, and gazed thoughtfully at the morsel of bad meat, of tainted fish, of black and mouldy bread. It was the last yearning for life contending with the resolution of despair; then his dungeon seemed less sombre, his prospects less desperate. He was still young—he was only four or five and twenty—he had nearly fifty years to live. What unforseen events might not open his prison ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... And rode triumphant through the civil broil. Thou canst not doubt its fellow's excellence, Which Thomas, ere my coming, hath declar'd So courteously unto thee. But the track, Which its smooth fellies made, is now deserted: That mouldy mother is where late were lees. His family, that wont to trace his path, Turn backward, and invert their steps; erelong To rue the gathering in of their ill crop, When the rejected tares in vain shall ask Admittance to the barn. I question not But he, who search'd our volume, leaf by leaf, Might ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... grows old and mouldy, and loses its virtues. It is then buried in a corner of the cave or the house, or taken to the place where it came from, and fresh plants are obtained instead. According to tradition, when Tata Dios went to heaven ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... bed, thinking that, after all, she might, perhaps, vouchsafe to remain in the palace; and she dreamt all night that she was being pursued by wolves in a forest, and was forced to take refuge in a miserable hut, where she had nothing to eat but a bit of mouldy cheese, and nothing to drink but ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... zany in cap and bells for a strolling variety show—drudge and Jack-of-all-trades to the matadors in the bull-fighting ring; I, that have been slave to every black beast who cared to set his foot on my neck; I, that have been starved and spat upon and trampled under foot; I, that have begged for mouldy scraps and been refused because the dogs had the first right? Oh, what is the use of all this! How can I TELL you what you have brought on me? And now—you love me! How much do you love me? Enough to give up your God for me? Oh, what has He done for you, this everlasting Jesus,—what has He suffered ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... Prickett's old shacks, and his mouldy pastures that are all burdock and fluke. If Joanna Godden had had any know, she could have beaten him down fifteen hundred—he was bound to sell, and she was a fool not to make ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... they examined the bread, and found a great deal of it had become mouldy and rotten; but even this was carefully kept and used. The boat was now near some islands, but they were afraid to go on shore, as the natives might attack them; while being in sight of land, where they might replenish their poor stock of provisions and rest themselves, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Jean, scornfully. "If there's anything in the world I thoroughly despise, it's old, mouldy, dead men's shoes. If I were you, I'd write and tell Kit that she could come home at the Christmas vacation if she ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... schooner, and the boys soon recovered their normal confidence. They went through the captain's cabin and two others that had evidently been set apart for the mates. Except one or two sodden mattresses and a huddled bunch of mouldy bed coverings, there was nothing of the slightest value. Whatever there had been at the time of the wreck had either been washed overboard or taken possession of by the authorities, ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport
... place, surrounded by rank grass, dirt, and reeking with odours pestilential. Once or twice I wandered in that grove, treading upon human bones at every step—the heaped-up remains of thousands of miserable creatures slaughtered to please the Ashanti ruler's lust for blood. Poor crumbling bones, mouldy and sodden as the rotten wood of older trees, yet once clothed with form and vigour, lay everywhere, while under the cotton wood trees skulls were heaped and ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... there," said the landlord, and pointed to the tree-tops of the park, above the opposite houses. Newman followed the first cross-road to the right—it was bordered with mouldy cottages—and in a few moments saw before him the peaked roofs of the towers. Advancing farther, he found himself before a vast iron gate, rusty and closed; here he paused a moment, looking through the bars. The chateau was near the road; this was at once its merit and its defect; but its aspect ...
— The American • Henry James
... milk and butter milk, fish scrap made from oil-free fish, beef scrap, fresh cut green bone and good grades of digester tankage are all excellent. But use only feeds of this character which are of prime quality. Oily fish, poor beef scrap and mouldy green bone will ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.
... I shall know the mint of daffodils, In darkened rooms where colour comes to birth, The mouldy chamber where the rose distils A sweetness that is Summer for the earth ... And all the strange, alchemic, secret spell, I shall discover, ... but I ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... Newcastles and Bubb Dodingtons of the present day? Or, if Cromwells and Chathams be too old-fashioned, and translate the Semitic principle into a narrow English Protestantism, may we not have some genuine revolutionary fanatic, a Cimourdain or a Gauvain, to burn up all this dry chaff of mouldy politics with the fire of a genuine human passion? Such a contrast, however effective, would have been a little awkward in the year 1844. Young England had an ideal standard of its own, and Disraeli must be the high priest of its peculiar hero-worship. Whether, in this case, political trammels ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... scraped, and Peter Provost's deliberate voice became audible. It was, however, impossible to distinguish his words; but suddenly Polder exclaimed, "Say something I can pound into you." Mariana rose, her hands clenched. "Go back to your mouldy little life!" James Polder continued. "I'm not surprised Miss Jannan wants to get out of it. I am sorry I hesitated. It seemed to me I couldn't offer her anything good enough; but that was before I'd listened to you.... And if you in particular come worming about me again ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... however, as she went away, exclaimed: "Self has burnt me; Self shall sleep till the new year!" When the Lapp had finished his repast he lay down to repose. On awaking he rummaged in his provision-sack: he found its contents mouldy and putrid. Nor could he understand this before he got home and learned that he had been missing for ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... solid wings, jutting out far beyond the main body, occupy three sides of a square, and give a cold, shadowy look to the court. On one side is a gloomy garden, with an old man digging in it, laid out in straight dark beds of vegetables, potatoes, cabbages, onions, beans; all earthy and mouldy as a newly-dug grave. Not a flower or flowering shrub! Not a rose-tree or currant-bush! Nothing but for sober, melancholy use. Oh, different from the long irregular slips of the cottage-gardens, with their gay bunches of polyanthuses ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... great danger in that hot climate. Twice during the month we received a box from Kuching, sent by a native boat. Once it contained our mail—an immense pleasure; also some bread and biscuits, but they were wet with salt water, and mouldy besides. However, Mab and Alan could eat them. I used to look with thankful astonishment at those children, both so delicate generally, but who throve all the time we were without proper food or shelter. But baby Edith shrank and pined, and at last my husband said, "We shall ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... maples threw their shadows across the broad circle, and each breath of wind set them dancing over the mounds where many an hundred skeletons crouched side by side, under the grass-grown heaps of earth, their rusted knives and hatchets and their mouldy blankets by their sides. No man came here, save when a new heap of yellow earth lay fresh-turned in the sun, and a long line of dancing, wailing redmen, led by their howling doctors, followed some body that had come to claim its seat among ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... of the gray, eagle-eyed old soldier, with his ruined tower and barren acres, and saw before me his proud, prejudiced, chivalrous boyhood, gliding through the ruins or poring over the mouldy pedigree. And this son, so disowned,—for what dark offence? An awe crept over me. And this girl,—his ewe-lamb, his all,—was she fair? had she blue eyes like my mother, or a high Roman nose and beetle brows like Captain Roland? I mused and mused and mused; ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from the edges of my puttees. But I had forgotten one important item in the daily routine: supper. And I had forgotten Private Lemley, our cook, or, to give him his due, our chef. He was not the man to waste his time in gloomy reflection. With a dozen mouldy potatoes which he had procured Heaven knows where, four tins of corned beef, and a canteen lid filled with bacon grease for raw materials, he had set to work with the enthusiasm of the born artist, the result being rissoles, brown, ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... "Yes; like all your mouldy institutions, they continue to be simply because they have been. Old Governments are like those ancient dykes which are rotten at the base, and only stay in position by their weight ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... enters triumphantly with the hospital box which is very mouldy and dusty—he has also duster ...
— Dolly Reforming Herself - A Comedy in Four Acts • Henry Arthur Jones
... are—of their nature peu communicatives. Oh! what has been thy long life, old Goody, but a dole of bread and water and a perch on a cage; a dreary swim round and round a Lethe of a pond? What are Rossbach or Jena to those mouldy ones, and do they know it is a grandchild of England who ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and daughters had gone to a preaching, the old man went to a green knoll where his grandchildren were at play, and pretending to hide, he turned up a flat hearthstone in an old stance,[86] and went out of sight. He spread out his gold on a big stone in the sunlight, and he muttered, "Ye are mouldy, ye are hoary, ye will be better for the sun." The grandchildren came sneaking over the knoll, and when they had seen and heard all that they were intended to see and hear, they came running up with, "Grandfather, what have ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... himself to the divine favour by any imperfect good works of his own, he draws a vivid picture. A lord invites his friends to a sumptuous banquet, the provision is bountiful and in rich abundance, when some of the guests take a few mouldy crusts out of their pockets and lay them on their plates, lest the prince had not provided a sufficient repast for his friends; "would it not be a high affront to, a great contempt of, and a distrust in, the goodness of the Lord." We are bound to produce good works as a fruit of faith—a proof ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "he may ha' come here not after liquor, but drawed by you. Then you see he's been alone all these years, and scriptur' saith it ain't good for a man to be that. They goes sour and mouldy—men do if unmarried. I think you'd be fulfillin' your dooty, and actin' accordin' to the word o' God if ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... The Great White Horse is famous in the neighbourhood in the same degree as a prize ox, a county paper chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig, for its enormous size. Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof as are collected together between the four walls of the Great White Horse of Ipswich.' This was the great hotel of the Ipswich ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... he issued forth to a place hard by, where sea-stores were sold, purchased a second-hand hammock, and had it slung in seamanlike fashion from the ceiling of the counting-house. He also caused to be erected, in the same mouldy cabin, an old ship's stove with a rusty funnel to carry the smoke through the roof; and these arrangements completed, surveyed them ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... whites. It need scarcely be said that the treaty was an unquestionable Indian success. They did not give up their arable lands; what they did sell to the agent they refused to exchange for extravagant-priced shoddy blankets, worthless guns, damp powder, and mouldy meal. They took pay in dollars, and were thus enabled to open more profitable commerce with the traders at the settlements for better goods and better bargains; they simply declined beads, whiskey, and Bibles at any price. The result was that the traders found it ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... Touchstone, Simpcox, Sly, Grumio, Mopsa, Pinch, Nym, Simple, Quickly, Overdone, Elbow, Froth, Dogberry, Puck, Peablossom, Taurus, Bottom, Bushy, Hotspur, Scroop, Wall, Flute, Snout, Starveling, Moonshine, Mouldy, Shallow, Wart, Bullcalf, Feeble, Quince, Snag, Dull, Mustardseed, Fang, Snare, Rumor, Tearsheet, Cobweb, Costard and Moth; but in names as well as in plot "the father of Pickwick" has distanced the Master. In fact, to give all the odd and whimsical names invented ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked; His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay, But he loved the landlord's daughter, The landlord's red-lipped daughter, Dumb as a dog he listened, and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Her father, the Vicomte Luc de Montmorency, who was a madman of a spendthrift, ended up in two bankruptcies, and was banished from Court. Cyrene was brought up in a mouldy old chateau near St. Ouen. When only thirteen her hand was sought by an ambitious financier, Trochu, for his son, Baron la Roche Vernay, who was then with his regiment in Dominica. Money was necessary ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... dead on the window-pane; The frost doth wind his shroud; Through the halls of his little summer house The north wind cries aloud. We will bury his bones in the mouldy wall, And mourn for the noble slain: A southerly wind and a sunny sky— Buzz! up he comes ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... heartily. "Tropical loveliness has its drawbacks, Jack. Perhaps some day when your clothes are moulded, and your brain feels mouldy too with damp heat, and you can neither work in the sun nor be at peace in the shade, you may wish you were sitting on a stool in your uncle's office, undisturbed by venomous insects, and ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... always known that his mother was English-born, and somehow, in his mind, there seemed to be some mystic connection between this ancient town and manor house and the green graveyard in Richmond, with its mouldy tombstones ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... him talk. He leaned his elbows on the primitive table, held his head between his hands, and kept silent. His eyes wandered about the dark, mouldy den, filled with the stench of a smoking little kerosene lamp. He saw the mildewed straw in the corner, the disconnected telephone at the entrance, an empty box of tinned food on which a crumpled map was spread out. He saw a mountain of rifles, bundles ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... vine-growers of the Rhine. A specimen of the soil is put into an earthenware vessel into which boiling water is poured to cover it, after which it is undisturbed for three days. If the water on being tasted gives a mouldy or salty taste, the soil ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... hope of anything better this side of a pauper's grave. Don't blame these old people for not keeping their den clean. Nobody could keep it clean. There is no sunshine, and only a little while in the day any light at all. It is necessarily damp and mouldy. We talk with the old man. He goes fishing and does such odd jobs as he is able. He says one of the worst things with which they have to contend is the rats; and then he points out places in the wall, down next to the ground, that he has filled ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... all I can say, then, is that the other New York hotels must be pretty mouldy, if this is the best of the lot! I took a room here last night," said Archie quivering with self-pity, "and there was a beastly tap outside somewhere which went drip-drip-drip all ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... the rummaging of this lumber-room come the odors: dry smells from musty old trunks packed with bundles of faded letters and worthless deeds tied with red tape; musty smells from dust-covered chests, iron bound, holding mouldy books, their backs loose; pungent smells from cracked wardrobes stuffed with moth-eaten hunting-coats, riding-trousers, and high boots with rusty spurs—cross-country riders these—roisterers and ...
— The Little Gray Lady - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... business, I waited for an age in an empty office where was one chair, a table dark with years of ink splotches, a mouldy inkstand, a piece of an old almanac, and an empty gin bottle. Outside, cockle-shells were piled against the wall; then there were ditches or streamlets cutting through profuse and almost loathsome vegetation, and shining slime fat and iridescent, swarming with loathsome forms of insect and reptile ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Don is always beautiful when one leaves it to go south. Nothing can efface from my mind the picture of it as I saw it when first going to the Caucasus. The sunset illumined it with the hues of romance. All the multiplicity of its dingy buildings shone as if lit up from within, and their dank and mouldy greens and blues and yellows became burning living colours. The town lay spread out upon the high banks of the Don and every segment of it was crowned with a church. The gilt domes blazed in the sunlight and the crosses above them were changed into pure fire. Round ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... Scudder smiled as he thought of the half-dismantled fort, the two mouldy brass cannon, cast in Manila a century previous, and the shiftless garrison. A wild thought of accepting the commander's offer literally, conceived in the reckless spirit of a man who never let slip an offer for trade, for a moment filled his brain, but a timely reflection of the commercial unimportance ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the interior, the sacristan conducts us out into the mouldy little burying-ground at one side, and crossing the grass, proudly points out in the surrounding wall the chief historic ear-mark of the place,—a scar among the stones, where was once a narrow opening through the wall. This was the despised entrance set apart for that singular race, the Cagots. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... fogs of Walcheren seemed to concentrate in his brain, puffing out at intervals just sufficient to affect with typhus and blindness four thousand soldiers. A cake of powder rusted their musket-pans, which they were too weak to open and wipe. Turning round upon their scanty and mouldy straw, they beheld their bayonets piled together against the green dripping wall of the chamber, which neither bayonet nor soldier ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... sat upon the very rock beneath which I lay among the mouldy leaves; so near that I could have reached out and touched the girl's silken ankle with my fingers. Jerry, I ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... three bottles of beer at my feet, while provisions enough for Dan Lambert were stored around—a sort of Homeric way of honouring me, and perhaps they made a Benjamin of me. However, I had already eaten a mouldy biscuit and had a glass of beer at the house of the Chinawoman, so I only said grace for them, and after talking a little while, I shook hands all round and went off. Their hands, being used as knives and forks, were not a little greasy; but of course one does not ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... steps, led down to it. The doorway had once been elaborately ornamented with mouldings in yellow stucco, most of which had fallen, and all but choked the stairs. The crude pale color of these fragments jarred harshly against the olive of the damp stone foundations and the stained brown of the mouldy brick. After my usual fashion, I set myself to explore this doorway, in my interest half forgetting my apprehensions. As I descended the steps the sound of the running water faded out, with a suddenness which caught my ear, though failing to fix my attention. But as I made to grasp the ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Do not fry as quickly as beefsteak. After a slice of ham has been cut from a whole ham, if lard be spread over the end of ham from which the slice has been cut, it will prevent the cut place from becoming mouldy. ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... we had the blissful security of being unknown, and were left to ourselves. Americans know Chester better than most other old towns in England, because they so frequently stop there awhile on their way from Liverpool to London. It has a mouldy old cathedral, an old wall, partly Roman, strange old houses with overhanging upper floors, which make sheltered sidewalks and dark basements. When one sees an old house in New England with the second floor projecting a foot or ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... on the French liners usually are sent. This will be no news to the Germans, nor to Americans who read the advertisements of the French liners, but it may be news to Americans who receive the mysterious cablegrams "from a French port," after their friends have landed. It is a dear old town, mouldy, and weather-beaten, and mediaeval, this Bordeaux, with high, mysterious walls along the street's over which hang dusty branches of trees or vines sneaking mischievously out of bounds. A woe-begone ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... he entered the dark, mouldy cabin and could himself hardly repress a start as he found himself facing a man who must have been of gigantic stature. The dead sea rover was seated at a rough oak table with his head resting on his hand as if in deep thought. He had a mighty yellow beard reaching almost to his waist and wore a ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... indispensable, and have withdrawn them from circulation. As the train glided out of the station Theodoric's nervous imagination accused himself of exhaling a weak odour of stable-yard, and possibly of displaying a mouldy straw or two on his usually well-brushed garments. Fortunately the only other occupant of the compartment, a lady of about the same age as himself, seemed inclined for slumber rather than scrutiny; the train was not due to stop till the terminus was reached, in about an hour's ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... front of them at unequal heights up to the edge of the pale sky; or else they walked on to the end of the avenue into a summer-house whose only furniture was a couch of grey canvas. Black specks stained the glass; the walls exhaled a mouldy smell; and they remained there chatting freely about all sorts of topics—anything that happened to arise—in a spirit of hilarity. Sometimes the rays of the sun, passing through the Venetian blind, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... at the magistrate not believing you, Jones. You are an infernal, grey-headed, mouldy old liar. That yarn is as old as the hills, and since you cannot speak the truth we will go by ourselves," said Hal, coming forward and taking the ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... measure on his own special block by the hatter in Overboro' town, and it was so hard and stout that he could sit upon it without injury. His top-boots always hung near the fireplace, that they might not get mouldy; and he rode into market upon his 'short-tail horse,' as he called his crop-tail nag. A farmer was nothing thought of unless he wore top-boots, which seemed a distinguishing mark, as it were, of the ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he peered through a chink up at the nextdoor windows. The king was in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... tired I was of hearing about the War, when there's nothing to do for ever but stop in this stuffy room. And to me it's particularly galling, because I never exploded at all. I failed. For all the good we are any more, we—we warriors—we might as well be mouldy old fossils like the home-grown things in this room, who know of war ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... sleeping-places which we visited at night (the Superintendent of Police, Captain Miller, and Symonds) we found a complete layer of human beings stretched upon the floor, often fifteen to twenty, some clad, others naked, men and women indiscriminately. Their bed was a litter of mouldy straw, mixed with rags. There was little or no furniture, and the only thing which gave these dens any shimmer of habitableness was a fire upon the hearth. Theft and prostitution form the chief means of subsistence of this population. ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... a very shabby house at the best of times, but it was particularly dreary now. Dorry was sure she never before had seen anything so dismal as the damp little parlor into which Donald escorted her. The closed blinds, the mouldy, bumpy sofa, the faded-green table-cover, the stained matting, the low-spirited rocking-chair with one arm broken off, and the cracked, dingy wall-paper ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... have felt the blood gush more joyously through our veins with the first breath of rural air; few could feel it so much as Donatello, a creature of simple elements, bred in the sweet sylvan life of Tuscany, and for months back dwelling amid the mouldy gloom and dim splendor of old Rome. Nature has been shut out for numberless centuries from those stony-hearted streets, to which he had latterly grown accustomed; there is no trace of her, except ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the lumber-room for something for Mrs Forbes, she came upon a little book lying behind a box. It was damp and swollen and mouldy, and the binding was decayed and broken. The inside was dingy and spotted with brown spots, and had too many f's in it, as she thought. Yet the first glance fascinated her. It had opened in the middle of L'Allegro. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... beggar who died, and left these orphans perishing with hunger. They thought themselves very happy when the good old woman first took them into her hut and bid them warm themselves at her small fire, and gave them a crust of mouldy bread to eat. She had not much to give, but what she had she gave with good-will. She was very kind to these poor children, and worked hard at her spinning-wheel and at her knitting, to support herself and them. She earned money also in another way. She ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... cavern seemed to return to its awful original mood. The three dwarfed humans became wholly conscious of it. They felt it almost a living thing, stretching vastly around them, tightening its unheard spell on them. Its smell, of mouldy earth and rocks down which water slowly dripped, filled their nostrils and somehow ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... the one in which Gobseck had died, a quantity of eatables of all kinds were stored—putrid pies, mouldy fish, nay, even shell-fish, the stench almost choked me. Maggots and insects swarmed. These comparatively recent presents were put down, pell-mell, among chests of tea, bags of coffee, and packing-cases of every shape. A silver soup ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... trinkets, but these trinkets could not be eaten and they would purchase no food. They were as worthless as pebbles picked from the beach. Often lumps of gold, or jewels of inestimable value, were offered by one starving wretch to another for a piece of mouldy bread. The colony would have become entirely extinct, but for the opportune arrival of vessels from Spain with provisions. Don Pedro had sent out one or two expeditions of half-famished men to seize the rice, Indian ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... commanded by Lieut. Snell, to Falmouth two large casks containing fossil bones, a small cask with fish and a box containing skins, spirit bottle, etc., and pill-boxes with beetles. Would you be kind enough to open these latter as they are apt to become mouldy. With the exception of the bones the rest of my collection looks very scanty. Recollect how great a proportion of time is spent at sea. I am always anxious to hear in what state the things come and any criticisms about quantity or kind of specimens. In the smaller ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... it happens often that the least robust are the most precious. The full fresh health of some of the folio fathers and schoolmen, ranged side by side in solemn state on the oaken shelves of some venerable repository, is apt to surprise those who expect mouldy decay; the stiff hard binding is as angular as ever,—there is no abrasion of the leaves, not a single dog-ear or a spot, or even a dust-border on the mellowed white of the margin. So, too, of those quarto civilians and canonists ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... bullet-holes in the shutters above the sandbags, and the ragged tears and holes in the upper part of the opposite wall. In an upper corner a gaping shell-hole had linen table-cloths five or six fold thick hung over to screen the light from showing through at night. In a corner lay a heap of mouldy straw and a bed-mattress; the table and fireplace were littered with dirty pots and dishes, the floor with empty jam and biscuit tins, opened and unopened bully-beef tins, more being full than empty because the British soldier must be very near starving point before he is driven ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... insisted, that as we had heard about his foreign sweetheart's death, which he appeared to have taken so much to heart, we should just bear with him once more, as he read over what he called her dirgie, which was written on a half-sheet of grey mouldy paper—as if handed down from the days of the Covenanters. It jingles well; and both Nanse and me thought it gey and pretty; but eh! if ye only had heard how James Batter ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... them some damaged bread at one quarter the usual price. It was all mouldy, you know," said Potts, trying to make Brandon see the joke. "I declare Clark and I roared over it for a couple of months, thinking how surprised they must have been when they sat down to eat their ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... wondering how he came to be out-of-doors. He was so cold and damp that some minutes of wakefulness were required to establish the fact that he was still in his own room and bed. It struck Hawkins as strange that the bedclothes, tucked about his head, seemed wet and heavy and mouldy. He pulled them tightly about his shivering body, curled his legs up until the knees almost touched the chin and—yes, Hawkins said damn twice or thrice. It was not long until he was sufficiently awake to realise that he was very much out ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... out he goes. It says, "Can bread Be made from mouldy bran? The men come swarming here in droves, But ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... round apertures that looked as though they had been punched out with an instrument. On opening these stalks, which were old, deserted nests, I discovered the cause of these very exceptional windows. Above each of them was a cell full of mouldy honey. The egg had perished and the provisions remained untouched: hence the impossibility of getting out by the ordinary road. Walled in by the unsurmountable obstacle, the Osmia on the floor below had contrived an outlet through ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... away as toadstools, these are dried in the sun or the oven, and packed in casks with a mixture of hot water and dry meal in which they ferment. The staple diet of the peasant consists of buckwheat, rye meal, sauerkraut, and coarse cured fish" (little, however, but black bread, often mouldy and sauerkraut, nearly putrid, is found in the generality of Russian peasant homes). No milk, butter, cheese, or eggs are allowed in Lent, all of which are permitted to the Roman Catholic, and the oil the peasant uses for his cooking is linseed ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... Carefully he scanned his immediate surroundings. The paper of the sho[u]ji was torn and eaten by the rats. In places the frayed tatami (mats) bent under his feet, evidence of decay of the supporting floor. There was the mouldy damp smell common to places long closed to the freedom of the outer air. It sent a chill to the bone; which Endo[u] noted with surprise as he turned to the dark inner rooms. He must have some kind of light. Almost the first step into ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... arrived famished, and therefore the more fatigued, and some of them lame. Calculating on their ravenous appetite, the graziers, instead of giving them wholesome food, make them consume the worst that the farm contains,—musty and mouldy fodder; and it is usually by the cough, which the eating of such food necessarily produces, that the disease is discovered and ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... perceived, at the end of its gloomy avenue, his chateau bathed in the white light, he found the spectacle rather enjoyable than otherwise. And when he had once more ensconced himself in the maternal domicile, and inhaled the odor of damp paper and mouldy trees that constituted its atmosphere, he found great consolation in the reflection that there existed not very far away from him a young woman who possessed a charming face, a delicious voice, and ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... the great honor of looking after your house, and will see that nothing gets mouldy during ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... I know, my lord? He cooks and evaporates his messes; then runs to his table and reads in some mouldy old parchments; then hurries back to the chimney and stirs his pipkins—then back to the table—and ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... Boyd, if you want to give me information. I've known THAT for a week.' I was too astonished to speak, and Henry, he chuckled. 'To see you coming in here,' says he, 'with your face as solemn as a tombstone and sitting down there with your hands clasped over your stomach, and passing me out a blue-mouldy old item of news like that! It'd make a cat laugh, Jim Boyd,' says he. 'Who told you?' says I, stupid like. 'Nobody,' says he. 'A week ago Tuesday night I was lying here awake—and I jest knew. I'd suspicioned it before, but ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... kitchen to the front door. A dark store-room opens out of it, and that is a place to be run past at night; for I don't know what may be among those tubs and jars and old tea-chests, when there is nobody in there with a dimly-burning light, letting a mouldy air come out of the door, in which there is the smell of soap, pickles, pepper, candles, and coffee, all at one whiff. Then there are the two parlours: the parlour in which we sit of an evening, my mother and I and Peggotty—for Peggotty ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... came, that, to a stranger, the whole isle looked care-free and beautiful. Deep among the ravines and the rocks, these beings lived in noisome caves, lairs for beasts, not human homes; or built them coops of rotten boughs—living trees were banned them—whose mouldy hearts hatched vermin. Fearing infection of some plague, born of this filth, the chiefs of Odo seldom passed that way and looking round within their green retreats, and pouring out their wine, and plucking from orchards of the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Man wheeled round. "P.M.O.! That's not the tone in which to speak to your Little Ray of Sunshine. It lacked joie de vivre." The speaker beamed on the mess. "I think we are all getting a little mouldy, if you ask me. In short, we are not the bright boys we were when war broke out. Supposing now—I say supposing—we celebrated our return to harbour, and the fact that we haven't bumped a mine-field, by asking our chummy-ship ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... out of gold piles, the coffers of nations or individuals, I hold that all the majesty of the best-spent wealth has not power to awaken such a depth of feeling in the human breast as one of these tottering huts with its mouldy walls and mud-spattered window-panes, the "Home Sweet Home" of flesh and blood as real and as ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... that perhaps you wouldn't. 'She'll come,' ay sez, 'and if she's like her father she'll come almost afore she's asked.' So ready, he was; and so kind. And how's old Essec? Got his nose buried in them mouldy books ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... bulging and lopping at every angle. Built by the half mile for a day's smartness, they were going to pieces rapidly. Here was no uniformity of cheapness, however, for every now and then little squat cottages with mouldy earth plots broke the line of more pretentious ugliness. The saloons, the shops, the sidewalks, were coated with soot and ancient grime. From the cross streets savage gusts of the fierce west wind dashed down the avenue and swirled the accumulated refuse into ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... them old grandfathers and aunts you brag of; a set of poor souls you won't let rest in their coffins; mere clay and dirt! fine things to be proud of! a parcel of old mouldy rubbish quite departed this life! raking up bones and dust, nobody knows for what! ought to be ashamed; who cares for dead carcases? nothing but [carrion]. My little Tom's ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... they limped forward up the roofless nave and through the door. She stared at the plain stone altar, at the eastern window, of which part was filled with ancient coloured glass and part with cheap glazed panes; at the oak choir benches, mouldy and broken; at the few wall-slabs and decaying monuments, and at the roof still strong ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... slice off, swallowed it, put by the rest, and then came down and mixed again with his companions. He continued this clandestine business all the week, and even then the cake was hardly half consumed. But what ensued? At last the cake grew dry, and quickly after mouldy; nay, the very maggots got into it, and by that means had their share; on which account it was not then worth eating, and our young curmudgeon was compelled to fling the rest away with great reluctance. However, no one grieved ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... mouldy old carps are, after all, a curiosity, and attract visitors," continues Mr. Warrington, gravely. "Your ladyship must allow this old wretch to remain. It won't be for long. And you may then engage the tall porter. It is very hard on us, Mr. Van den Bosch, that ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... house with their prisoners, and kept the key in their pocket. Fancy the young ladies of the family working tapestry in their "bower" with the knowledge that at the bottom of the corkscrew staircase one of their papa's enemies was sitting month after month in mouldy midnight! But Ludlow Castle has brighter associations than these, the chief of which I should have mentioned at the outset. It was for a long period the official residence of the governors—the "lords presidents" they were called—of the Marches of Wales, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... be equaled elsewhere in Italy. You hung in that family-room, reached after passage through stately vestibules and grand stairways; and O, I would be cheated to the bone, if only I might look out again from some such windows as were there, upon some such damp, mouldy, broken-statued, ruinous, enchanted garden as lay below! In that room sat the advocate's mother and hunchback sister, with their smoky scaldini and their snuffy priest; and there the wife of the foreigner, self-elected the taste of his party, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... papers, and say something about "deranging his ideas;" which made my wife believe sometimes that he was not altogether compos. Indeed, there was more than one reason to make her think so, for his room was always covered with scraps of paper and old mouldy books, lying about at sixes and sevens, which he would never let anybody touch; for he said he had laid them all away in their proper places, so that he might know where to find them; though, for that matter, he was half his time worrying about ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving |
