"Ready-made" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... West Turns to Industry.—Nor was this vast enterprise confined to the old Northeast where, as Madison had sagely remarked, commerce was early dominant. "Cincinnati," runs an official report in 1854, "appears to be a great central depot for ready-made clothing and its manufacture for the Western markets may be said to be one of the great trades of that city." There, wrote another traveler, "I heard the crack of the cattle driver's whip and the ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... into the army means, for Roland, going into every possible temptation and expense—that would not do. But he ought to be away from this little town. He will be making mischief if he cannot find it ready-made." ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... for their sex the world over, with here and there a short coat that also went to church; but there some departures from orthodoxy in the matter of collars and ties, and where white bows were achieved, I fear none of the wearers would have dreamed of defending them from the charge of being ready-made. ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the washing, cooking, and sewing of each household be done by its women? We have laundries, ready-made clothing, and bakeries, and now it is proposed in Boston to furnish a complete supply of ready-cooked food. This can be done cheaper than families can supply themselves, if we leave out the American propensity ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... the casual observer his weight would have been catalogued at about a hundred and forty. At a glance Carroll knew that it was nearer a hundred and eighty. Normal breadth of shoulder was more than made up for by unusual depth of chest. Ready-made trousers bulged with the enormous muscular development of calf and thigh. The face, clean-shaven, was sullen with the fear inspired by the sudden entrance of Carroll and Leverage; and there was more ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... many little low-browed old shops in that street, of a wretched kind; and some are unchanged now. I looked into one a few weeks ago, where I used to buy bootlaces on Saturday nights, and saw the corner where I once sat down on a stool to have a pair of ready-made half-boots fitted on. I have been seduced more than once, in that street on a Saturday night, by a show-van at a corner; and have gone in, with a very motley assemblage, to see the Fat Pig, the Wild Indian, and the Little ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... shape of a cottage, of planed wood, painted white on the outside. There were two rooms in it with a round door in the dividing wall. One was half full of soft, sweet-smelling hay for Darby and Joan to sleep upon. Their names were ready-made, too. The other room was a parlor where they were to eat and to live in the daytime. Broad leather straps by which the box could be carried were made to look ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... "A collar an' a tie an' all, too! Them boots ain't so dusty, neither: they fit me a treat. Goin' 'ome to my missus in Sunday clobber, I am." You would have said that he thought he had emerged from his hazards with rather a good bargain. A jumble of ready-made clothes—and a pension! The visible world gone for ever! These were his souvenirs of the great war. And, "Ah," he said, when I ventured on some allusion to his blindness, "it might ha' bin worse. I don' know what I'd ha' done if I'd lost a leg, same as ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... weather cleared; they weighed anchor, and at two o'clock in the afternoon, Gilbert disembarked at a station two leagues from Geierfels. He was in no haste to arrive, and even though "born with a ready-made consolation for anything," as M. Lerins sometimes reproachfully said to him, he dreaded the moment when his prison doors should close behind him, and he was disposed to enjoy yet a few hours of his dear liberty. ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... eliminate its most incongruous elements. The priests of Heliopolis took this work in hand, as they had already taken in hand the same task with regard to the myths referring to the creation; and the Enneads provided them with a ready-made framework. They changed the gods of the Ennead into so many kings, determined with minute accuracy the lengths of their reigns, and compiled their biographies from popular tales. The duality of the feudal god supplied an admirable expedient for connecting the history of the world with that of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... James W. Toumey, Director of the School of Forestry, possesses a natural, ready-made protector of wild life. From forestry to wild life is an easy step. We hopefully look forward to the development of Professor Toumey into a militant protectionist, fighting for the helpless creatures that must be protected by man or perish! If Yale ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... and shapely foot, he found boots ready-made without any difficulty. He was promised, too, that all the linen he required should be sent home in the evening. But when he came to explain to the hatter what sort of an apparatus he intended to plant on his head, he encountered great difficulties. His ideal ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... especially since death lurked everywhere. So we continued across a shell-torn slope, toward the enemy line, going from shell-hole to shell-hole and giving a word of good cheer, a bit of chocolate, and some smokes to the boys who had taken temporary refuge in these ready-made "dug-ins" (a ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... said Horry, looking very hard at me, "so it is, so it is. Your hand, Mr. Carvel. You have only to remain in London, sir, to discover that your reputation is ready-made. I contributed my mite. For you must know that I am a sort of circulating library of odd news which those devils, the printers, contrive to get sooner or later—Heaven knows how! And Miss Manners herself has completed your fame. Yes, the story of your gallant rescue is in all ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... mountains border rainless tracts, their piedmont districts regularly develop permanent cultivation. Here periodic rains or melting snows on the ranges fill the drainage streams, whose inundation often converts their alluvial banks into ready-made fields. The reliability of the water supply anchors here the winter villages of the nomads, which become centers of a limited agriculture, while the pasture lands beyond the irrigated strips support his flocks ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... did not entirely confine their attention to planting colonists in a ready-made state on the island. As soon as they had settled themselves and built their barracks and Government House, they set to work and cleared away the bush for an area of from four to six miles round ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... demanding higher wages, and just as he had a job in hand going off and leaving it half finished—shoemaker's tricks these. Sometimes, indeed, he could not get a workman, and then there was the competition of the ready-made boot from Northampton; really, it was ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... letter-writers, the direct command style of opening is popular: "Get more advertising. How? This letter answers the question." "Wear tailor-made clothes at the price of ready-made." "Make your money earn you six per cent." If these openings are chosen with the care that the advertising man uses in selecting headings for advertisements, attention will ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... had not yet come up, was frustrated by the activity of St. Vrain's volunteers. A charge all along the line was then ordered and handsomely executed; the houses, which, being of adobe, had been practically so many ready-made forts, were successively carried, and St. Vrain started in advance to gain the Mexican rear. Seeing this manoeuvre, and fearing its effects, the Mexicans retreated, leaving thirty-six dead on the field. Among those killed was General ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... heard," I continued, "that our professional reciters keep a book full of all kinds of ready-made discourses, which can be fitted into any subject. ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... coarsely-woven sack-cloth. With this the shirt is made, simply by cutting two holes in the sides to admit the arms, and the body being passed into it, it is worn in time of rain. Hence the saying of the old missionaries, that in the "forests of America garments were found ready-made on ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... Ready-made talk was, for the moment, beyond him; and he departed something hastily, leaving Honor and his friend alone ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the proof? sent ready-made by the hand of the Lord. Why, there's one among us here now, that has got all the learning that can be crammed into him. I got him all the learning that could be crammed into him. His grandfather' (this I had never heard before) 'was a brother of ours. He was Brother ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... divined more, even in that first tragic moment, when he had borne her maimed child into the house and laid his burden tenderly on the lounge. As he came and went, telephoning, doing the little that could be done, she saw more than the commonplace figure, clothed in ready-made garments; more than the dull, bearded face, the strong, thin hands, the rumpled hair. Something out of that vast beyond which this stranger had in common with her had spoken through the husk, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... me—no, no!" sighed the long-visaged person. "Not here, lad, not here! We build garments for gentlemen only, no ready-made goods here; we deal strictly with the nobility and gentry of the county—go away, lad, go away!" Here he flapped his tape-measure at me, the stout gentleman stared at me, and I crept forth into the ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... cold air from coming in; and also porous enough to let the perspiration out. Your feet are not exactly like those of any one else; and yet you expect to find at any shoe store a comfortable shoe ready-made. You expect that shoe to come close to your foot, and yet allow you to move it with perfect freedom. You expect all these good qualities, and what is more remarkable, it does not seem difficult ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... was young, I made Monsieur Beaurain's acquaintance one Sunday in this neighborhood. He was employed in a draper's shop, and I was a saleswoman in a ready-made clothing establishment. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I used to come and spend Sundays here occasionally with a friend of mine, Rose Levque, with whom I lived in the Rue Pigalle, and Rose had a sweetheart, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... for the sale of ready-made clothing, suits, upholstery, etc., and the third floor is the carpet salesroom. The other floors are closed to visitors, and are ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... character of small or artisan production is this: Either the need is awaited before production—as, for example, a tailor waits for my order before he makes me a coat, a locksmith before he makes me a lock; or even if some goods are manufactured to be sold ready-made, on the whole this ready-made business is limited to a minimum of what is definitely known from experience to be the needs of the immediate locality and its nearest neighborhood—as, for instance, a tinsmith makes up a certain ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... climate wholesome and delightful, frost even in winter almost entirely unknown, a river called, by way of eminence, the beautiful and abounding in excellent fish of a vast size; noble forests consisting of trees that spontaneously produce sugar, and a plant that yields ready-made candles; venison in plenty, the pursuit of which is uninterrupted by wolves, foxes, lions, or tigers; no taxes to pay, no military ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... the soul of such a movement. "It was my strong conviction that the development of such a social movement should come from the people themselves, not that a ready-made program or plan should be given them, but that they should develop their own." One by one centers are being formed. The Board of Education furnishes the building, the local social center organization pays the immediate expenses ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... and we'll need it on this ice." He placed it in a corner; then, removing the canvas cover from one of the wrecked boats, he hung it over the open side and end of the bridge, crawled within, and donned his coat—a ready-made, slop-chest garment, designed for a larger man—and buttoning it around himself and the little girl, lay down on the hard woodwork. She was still crying, but soon, under the influence of the warmth of his body, ceased ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... to make proof of itself. The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collected all the motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that any one wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system mapped out for him in any one of a number of ready-made manuals.[181] The dominant Church notion of perfection is of course the negative one of avoidance of sin. Sin proceeds from concupiscence, and concupiscence from our carnal passions and temptations, chief of which are pride, sensuality ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the grand central porch, and a corresponding doorway on the northern side, were destroyed with the nave. More probable is the conjecture that it was merely the entrance to the monastic enclosure, turned to account as a ready-made structure when the work at the church was the reverse of constructive, as it seems too large and too high for a mere doorway at the end of an aisle, besides being rather too far from the church to agree with ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... brought up as a son of old Michael Joliffe, a yeoman who died fifteen years ago. But Michael married a woman who called herself a widow, and brought a three-year-old son ready-made to his wedding; and that son was Martin. Old Michael made the boy his own, was proud of his cleverness, would have him go to college, and left him all he had. There was no talk of Martin being anything but a Joliffe till Oxford puffed him up, and then he got this crank, and spent the rest of ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... advanced state of our archaeological knowledge has made the principal characteristic of modern design consists in the fatal facility thus afforded us of availing ourselves of vast resources of forms and combinations ready-made to suit almost all the exigencies of composition, as we have understood it. The public has thus been made so familiar with the set variations of classic orders and Palladian windows and cornices, with all manner of Gothic chamfers and cuspidations and foliations, and the other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... note some fundamental facts and principles of the cattle industry which our American cattlemen took over ready-made ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... he walked up slowly on the west side, looking in at the shop-windows. In the lower part of this busy street are many wholesale houses, while the upper part is devoted principally to retail shops. Coming to a large warehouse for the sale of ready-made clothing, Ben thought he might as well begin there. In such a large place there must be a ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... type of character is to be found in the young man who consistently refuses good offers or even small chances of work because they are not good enough for him. He expects that Luck will suddenly bestow on him a ready-made position or a gorgeous chance suitable to the high opinions he holds of his own capacities. After a time people tire of giving him any openings at all. In wooing the Goddess of Luck he has neglected the Goddess ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... at least, stopped to look over the saddle animals. He saw that there were two promising travelers, but it would be necessary to impress an indifferent third to carry the baggage. Besides, judging from all he had seen, the resources of Kittitas did not include a ready-made lady's habit. He returned and stood another silent moment watching the lithe, impatient bays. Finally his eyes moved to the entrance and down the road to the railroad station where Miss Armitage was waiting. She was seated on a bench near the door. He could distinguish her gray figure ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... were still sitting when there was a knock, which Mr. Pyecroft answered. The cabinet-maker entered. He wore a slouching, ready-made suit and a celluloid collar with ready-made bow tie snapped by an elastic over his collar-button—the conventional garb of the artisan who aspires for the air of gentlemanliness while at work. His face, though fresh-shaven, was dark with the sub-cutaneous stubble of a heavy beard; ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... not expected, if engaged, to begin work the next moment. She had supposed that she would be told to return the next morning before the opening hour for customers; otherwise it might have occurred to her that it would be well to get a ready-made black dress. But she must not throw away this chance which seemed to be ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... wide streets is given up to sidewalk trading, and rows of booths, two or three miles in length, occupy the curbstones, with all kinds of goods; everything that anybody could possibly want, fruits, vegetables, groceries, provisions, boots and shoes, ready-made clothing, hats and caps, cotton goods and every article of wearing apparel you can think of, household articles, furniture, drugs and medicines, jewelry, stationery, toys—everything is sold by these sidewalk merchants, who squat upon ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... never failed to reproduce him. What was more curious, was the capriciousness with which his portrait seemed to light itself up in my mind, elsewhere. I might be walking in the Palais Royal, lazily enjoying the shop windows, and might be regaling myself with one of the ready-made clothes shops that are set out there. My eyes, wandering over impossible-waisted dressing-gowns and luminous waistcoats, would fall upon the master, or the shopman, or even the very dummy at the door, and would suggest to me, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... released from all obligations as to that food supply? It is a long step also from the primitive mother making slowly with her thorn needle the only garment her child may wear, and even a long step from the home spinning, weaving and dyeing of later handicraft, to the modern use of the "ready-made" shop and the division of all garment-making into innumerable specialties of labor. Is the modern mother thereby released from ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... beyond good will should so disappoint the expectation her first appearance had aroused. The background was a room—it seemed to have been in every case the same—expensively overfurnished, inexpressive, ill-fitting its uses, like a badly chosen ready-made coat. The day was not without its humors, or what would have been humors if her spirit could have rebounded to them. Chiefly, the violent antagonism she found aroused in two or three cases by the color ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the same thing as reason. This thing is good and that is evil, because it is good and because it is evil, and not because of what has been said or written. It is the opposite of traditional bidding. There is no tradition of the good. Wealth and power must be earned, not taken ready-made; the idea of what is just or right must be reconstructed on every occasion and ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... of Aronce, Horatius, and Clelie. The way in which Aronce is kept an "unknown" for some time, and that in which his actual relationship to Porsena is treated, have also too much of the replica; and though a lively skirmish with a pirate which occurs is not quite so absurd as that ready-made series of encores which was described above (pp. 181-2), there is something a little like it in the way in which the hero and his men alternately reduce the enemy to extremity, and run over the deck to rescue friends who are in the pirates' power from being butchered or flung overboard. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... imagine me set to justify all the additions now before him! In truth these reviews are the repositories of many odds and ends: they were not made to the books; the materials were in my notes, and the books came as to a ready-made clothes shop, and found what would fit them. Many remember Curll's[444] bequest of some very good titles {280} which only wanted treatises written to them. Well! here were some tolerable reviews—as times go—which only wanted books fitted to them. Accordingly, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... personality excites in ourselves. Will went along with a small book under his arm and a hand in each side-pocket, never reading, but chanting a little, as he made scenes of what would happen in church and coming out. He was experimenting in tunes to suit some words of his own, sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimes improvising. The words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... things we depend upon the key-note of the soul. Knowledge thereby becomes an intimate personal concern. But this is what it really is to the Mystic. Tell some one the solution of the riddle of the universe! Give it him ready-made! The Mystic will find it to be nothing but empty sound, if the personality does not meet the solution half-way in the right manner. The solution in itself is nothing; it vanishes if the necessary feeling ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... teasel must be cut from their places and modified to some extent before they can be called tools), the word "tool" implies not only a purpose and a purposer, but a purposer who can see in what manner his purpose can be achieved, and who can contrive (or find ready-made and fetch and employ) the tool which ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... cheap, ready-made blouse, with absurd little bows tacked on down the front, which Ethel longed to abolish with one sweep, and her skirt, which had shrunk considerably in front, sagged in a dejected ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... world, was compatible with good and wise government, with respect for social order, and the preservation of national character and custom. The ideas which captured and convulsed the French people were mostly ready-made for them, and much that is familiar to you now, much of that which I have put before you from other than French sources, will meet us again next week with the old faces, when we ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... special mental disposition, we should have to presuppose dispositions for everything which possibly can come into our surroundings. Every smell, every word, every face which comes anew to us would need its special ready-made disposition. In other words, our mind would contain the disposition for every possible idea and that would mean that these dispositions would be in no way helps for explanation. If the disposition exists for everything, no one particular thing ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... phenomena are all after the fact; they do not account for the fact; they start with the ready-made organism and then reduce its activities and processes to their physical equivalents. Vitality is given, and then the vital processes are fitted into mechanical and chemical concepts, or into moulds derived from inert matter—not a difficult ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... weight, of starch; and as all starch has to be changed into it before it can be used by the body, it is evident that sugar is more easily digested and absorbed than starch, and furnishes practically a ready-made fuel for our muscles. ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... vans were still making regular trips through New England and the Middle States, leaving at farmhouses bundles of straw plait, which the members of the household fashioned into hats. The farmers' wives and daughters still supplemented the family income by working on goods for city dealers in ready-made clothing. We can still see in Massachusetts rural towns the little shoe shops in which the predecessors of the existing factory workers soled and heeled the shoes which shod our armies in the early days ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... he behaved very handsomely. He dressed Flavia out to kill, as he said, in lace hoods and embroidered long-clothes, for which he tossed over half the ready-made stock of the great dry-goods stores; and he made Marcia get herself a new suit throughout, with a bonnet to match, which she thought she could not afford, but he said he should manage it somehow. ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... as in religion, he made the past a law for the present, and resisted doctrines which are ready-made, and are not derived from experience. Consequently, he undervalued work which would never have been done from disinterested motives; and there were three of his most eminent contemporaries whom he decidedly underestimated. Having known Thiers, and heard him speak, he felt profoundly the talent ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... sugar, rice, cotton, boots and half-boots, coffee, nails of all kinds, leather of most kinds, flour, cotton yarn and thread, soap of all kinds, common earthenware, lard, molasses, timber of all kinds, saddles of all kinds, coarse woolen cloth, cloths for cloaks, ready-made clothing of all kinds, salt, tobacco of all kinds, cotton goods or textures, chiefly such as are made by ourselves; pork, fresh or salted, smoked or corned; woolen or cotton blankets or counterpanes, shoes and slippers, wheat and grain of all kinds. Such is a list of but part of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... had made his "barrel" in ready-made clothing, felt in no position to contradict him when he stated his belief in the theory of transmigration as expounded by Pythagoras, and expressed the opinion that by chance the soul of Cleopatra might be occupying the graceful body of the club cat. Abe was ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... I say, if you find everything in my sayings is not exactly new. You can't possibly mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I once read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for its latitude. On examination, I found all its erudition was taken ready-made from D'Israeli. If I had been ill-natured, I should have shown up the little great man, who had once belabored me in his feeble way. But one can generally tell these wholesale thieves easily enough, and they are not worth the trouble of putting them in the pillory. I doubt the entire novelty ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... ready-made. Leave all to me; and to-morrow, when you awake, you shall find a collection of costumes with which ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... as such after the fashion of Rousseau and Senancour and the author of Jacopo Ortis, naturally enough find in letters the outlet for communication with their fellows[37] which others find in conversation, and the occupation which those others have ready-made, in society, business of all kinds etc. That some copious and excellent letter-writers, such as for instance Southey, have been extremely busy, and "family men" of the most unblemished character, merely shows that the rule is not universal. But it may be observed that their ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... from; but no sooner was my sign nailed up, with four iron hold-fasts, by Johnny Hammer, painted in black letters on a blue ground, with a picture of a jacket on one side and a pair of shears on the other,—and my shop-door opened to the public, with a wheen ready-made waistcoats, gallowses, leather-caps, and Kilmarnock cowls, hung up at the window, than business flowed in upon us in a perfect torrent. First one came in for his measure, and then another. A wife came in for a pair of red worsted boots for her bairn, but would not take them for they had ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... quite as many casualties,' quoth Tom, indulging in some of the current ready-made wit on the dangers of volunteering, for the pure purpose of teasing; but he was vigorously fallen upon by Harry and Ethel, and Averil brightened as she heard him put to the rout. The shots were already heard, when two more black figures were seen ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are the only implements the native does not find ready-made in nature. Cooking is done with heated stones heaped around the food, which has been previously wrapped up in banana leaves. Lime-stones naturally cannot be used for that purpose, and volcanic stones have often to be brought from quite a distance, so that these cooking-stones ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... practising for nine hundred hours, I cannot acquire a good degree of facility in manipulating a piano or a violin, I must be too dull to ever aspire to the favor of Terpsichore. If I but measure up to my hopes during this year I shall be saved the expense of buying my music ready-made. The next year I shall devote to art, and by spending one entire evening with a single artist I shall thus become acquainted with three hundred of them. If I become intimate with this number I shall not be lonesome, even if I do not know the others. I think ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... for the actors; the rabble—always the larger and more enthusiastic part of the audience—could be accommodated with standing-room about the stage; while the more aristocratic members of the audience could be comfortably seated in the galleries overhead. Thus a ready-made and very serviceable theatre was always at the command of the players; and it seems to have been frequently made use of from the very beginning ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... Strand as if it were his private bridle-path. He walks across an Insurance Bill or a National Theatre scheme or a policy for giving self-government to Englishmen as a man who might be treading the weeds in his own garden. But the intellectual stage-properties were all prepared for him and presented ready-made in those times when he went night after night to lecture in the city and suburbs of London. He had, indeed, the social cosmopolitanism which made him dissociate himself from small literary coteries and gain a practical knowledge of publicly-minded men. But one cannot ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... translator by careful attention to philological niceties. Under the inspiration of Meshullam, he spent the years 1161 to 1186 in making a series of translations from Arabic into Hebrew. His translations were difficult and forced in style, but he had no ready-made language at his command. He had to create a new Hebrew. Classical Hebrew was naturally destitute of the technical terms of philosophy, and Ibn Tibbon invented expressions modelled on the Greek and the Arabic. He made Hebrew once more a living language ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... have waited and given 'em a chance?" foamed the proprietor; and commanding Holly to turn the empty wagon and follow, he strode off in the direction of the Wharf. The afternoon was hot. His furred coat oppressed him; his shoes—of patent leather, bought ready-made—pinched his feet. On the road he came to a public-house, entered, and gulped down two "goes" of whisky. Still the wagon lagged behind. Re-emerging, he took the road again, his whole man hot within his furred coat as ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to take a big horse-blanket and sit on the grass a little to the left of the lower end, where there is a dip in the ground and where the occupied graves stop short and the ready-made ones are not ready. Each well- regulated India Cemetery keeps half a dozen graves permanently open for contingencies and incidental wear and tear. In the Hills these are more usually baby's size, because children who come up weakened and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Scarborough folk used Oliver's Mount, the isolated hill at the back of the town, as a ready-made barometer, for they ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... mind suddenly became enlightened. "What a fool I am!" he added with a simper; "I couldn't for the moment even remember the lines, ready-made though they were and staring at me in my very eyes! Sister, you really can be styled my teacher, little though you may have taught me, and I'll henceforward address you by no other name than 'teacher,' and not ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... difficult to construct an outline of the "formula" by which thousands of current narratives are being whipped into shape. Indeed, by turning to the nearest textbook on "Selling the Short Story," I could find one ready-made. (There could be no clearer symptom of the disease I wish to diagnose than these many "practical" textbooks, with their over-emphasis upon technique and their under-estimate of all else that makes literature.) The story must begin, it appears, with action or with ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... goose! oh! thanks, thanks a thousand times, with all my heart—for, after all, how could I have got along with the ewe? I have neither card nor comb, and spinning is a heavy job, at best. When you've spun, too, you have to cut and fit and sew. It's far easier to buy our clothes ready-made, as we've always done. But a goose—a fat one, too, no doubt—why, that's the very thing I want! I've need of down for our quilt, and my mouth has watered this many a day for a bit of roast goose. Put the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... once and for all, gave the coup de grace to finiteness of results of human thought and action. Truth, which it is the province of philosophy to recognize, was no longer, according to Hegel, a collection of ready-made dogmatic statements, which once discovered must only be thoroughly learned; truth lay now in the process of knowledge itself, in the long historical development of learning, which climbs from lower to ever higher heights of knowledge, without ever reaching the point of so-called absolute truth, ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... another more important appointment. Indeed he had thought no more of ordering a suit than of ordering a whiskey and soda. Nay, he had on one occasion fallen incredibly low, and his memory held the horrid secret for ever,—on one occasion he had actually bought a ready-made suit. It had fitted him, for he was slimmish and of a good stock size, but he had told nobody, not even his wife, of this shocking defection from the code of true British gentlemanliness,—and he had never repeated the crime; the secret would die with him. ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... of cloaks and suits applies also to skirts and dresses, the production of which is a branch of our trade. It was the Russian Jew who had introduced the factory-made gown, constantly perfecting it and reducing the cost of its production. The ready-made silk dress which the American woman of small means now buys for a few dollars is of the very latest style and as tasteful in its lines, color scheme, and trimming as a high-class designer can make it. A ten-dollar gown is copied from a ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... The inner solidarity of the national character, the positive assurance of the fulfillment of all national duties, and the absolute silence of the people towards strangers—these are the weapons with which Japan enters the arena, clothed in a rattling ready-made steel armor, the like of which her opponents have yet to manufacture. The discretion shown by the Japanese press in all questions relating to foreign policy is regarded as the fulfillment of a patriotic duty just as much as the joyous self-sacrifice ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... remembered now—it was Langrishe's regiment. How extraordinary that he should not have remembered before! It was the regiment sent in pursuit. Langrishe would fall in for some fighting—he would find it ready-made to his hand. Those little frontier wars were endless things once they started. And what toll they took of precious human lives! In the last one more young fellows of the General's acquaintance had been killed than he liked to remember. ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... by invisible hands,—when people see ghosts through stone walls, and know what is passing in the heart of Africa,—how easily you unlock your wardrobe of terms and clap on the back of every eccentric fact your ready-made phrase-coat,—Animal Magnetism, Biology, Odic Force, Optical Illusion, Second Sight, Spirits, and what not! It is a wonderful labor-saving and faith-saving process. People say, "Oh, is that all?" and pass on complacently. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... ordinary and normal. Before the war they were shop-assistants, cab-drivers, plumbers, lawyers, vaudeville artists. They were men of no heroic training. Their civilian callings and their previous social status were too various for any one to suppose that they were heroes ready-made at birth. Something has happened to them since they marched away in khaki—something that has changed them. They're as completely re-made as St. Paul was after he had had his vision of the opening heavens on the road to Damascus. ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... but a preordained order of question and response? In birth and in burial, in joy and in sorrow, for those who have escaped shipwreck and those who have escaped the plague, the practice of the ages has laid down formulae which the soul does not find the less adequate because they are ready-made. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... total of one hundred and twenty-eight hours in the course of nine calendar months, and I was compelled to listen in hang-dog silence to Josephine's sibilant commentary, that this was the natural result of buying a ready-made house. Still, I must admit that on the whole she behaved extraordinarily well under these trying circumstances, and said nothing more tart than that, if she ever were so foolish as to move again, she should insist on building ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... just now that we looked at the shops, and that I made a purchase in the town? A boy's ready-made suit—not at all a bad fit for Kitty! Mrs. Linley put on the suit, and tucked up the child's hair under a straw hat, in an empty yard—no idlers about in that bad weather. We said good-by, and parted, with grievous misgivings on ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... A ready-made nest, a family heirloom which needs but a little restoring, is a precious thing for the Mason, ever sparing of her time. We find so many of the old homes repaired and restocked that I suspect the Bee of laying new foundations only when there are no secondhand nests to be had. To have the chambers ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... morning of the next day, the Doctor, a mere spectre of himself, was brought back in the custody of Casimir. They found Anastasie and the boy sitting together by the fire; and Desprez, who had exchanged his toilette for a ready-made rig-out of poor materials, waved his hand as he entered, and sank speechless on the nearest chair. Madame ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hands at home. This one, I learned afterward, had come with the last batch and was not yet accustomed to his surroundings; the others had been awaiting trial for months. All of them wore homespun clothes—not the ready-made clothes sold at the stores, but those that some woman at home had ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and Janet, fervent in piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both to appreciate and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the other hand, seems to have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith. It is, perhaps, easy to exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the tired woman must have done much to fashion girls who were under ten; the man, lusty and opinionated, must have stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen. But the cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of character and interest produced between the two ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the brief remainder of his life, did Samuel eat a mouthful of common bread without recalling that midnight apparition. He had lived for half a century, and thoughtlessly eaten bread as though loaves grew ready-made on trees. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... assurance and dignity, Mr. Hardy says: "The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation, even in verse, and excluded the celestial machinery of, say, Paradise Lost, as peremptorily as that of the Iliad or the Eddas. And the abandonment of the Masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy seemed a necessary and logical ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... plainly dressed. His clothing was of the cheap, ready-made variety, worn nearly to shabbiness and matched by a gray flannel shirt with a flowing black tie, knotted at the throat, and a soft gray hat that was a bit weatherstained. His shoes were shabby and unshined. His whole appearance ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... legislation, the tendency of statute-making, the spirit of statutes that we have made, that we are making, and that we are likely to make, or that are now being proposed; so it is concerned, in a sense, with the last and most recent and most ready-made of all legal or political matters. The subject of statute-making is not thought difficult; it is supposed to be perfectly capable of discussion by any one of our State legislators, with or without legal training; ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Now I have not myself the least objection to idealism,—an hypothesis which voluminous considerations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be cleared away any day by new discriminations or discoveries. But I object to proving by these patent ready-made a priori methods that which can only be the fruit of a wide and patient induction. For the truth is that our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing at all, and are anything but consubstantial. An affirmation says something about an objective existence. A negation says something ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the cool answer. "I suppose, however, that a great many children dress alike in these days when clothing is bought ready-made." ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... done there—had they known it, and known Jones's Alley, one or two of them, who were medical students, might probably have objected. The landlady charged them just twice as much for repairing their shirts as she paid the haggard woman, who, therefore, being unable to buy the cuffs and collar-bands ready-made for sewing on, had no lack of employment with which to fill ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... loathsome disease, and then sink them into hideous, worm-infested graves! The human mind does not want its undemonstrable beliefs challenged. It does not want the light of unbiased investigation thrown upon the views which it has accepted ready-made from doctor and theologian. Again, why? Because, my friends, the human mind is inert, despite its seemingly tremendous material activity. And its inertia is the result of its own self-mesmerism, its own servile submission to beliefs which, as Balfour has shown, have ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... civilisation had laid a heavy hand upon him during the last few years, was certainly not a man whose outward appearance denoted any advance in either culture or taste. His morning clothes, although he had recently abandoned the habit of dealing at a ready-made emporium, were neither well chosen nor well worn. His evening attire was, if possible, worse. He met Catherine that evening in the lobby of what he believed to be a fashionable grillroom, in a swallow-tailed coat, a badly fitting shirt with ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... United States the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust; and if we look ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville |
