"Threadbare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... howl on Oonalaska's shore' is not in it with that of mine," said George Henry—for since his coat had become threadbare his language had deteriorated, and he too frequently used slang—"but I'm thankful that I alone hear my own. How different the case from what it is when one's dog barks o' nights! Then the owner is the only one who sleeps within a radius ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... scattered round the room. The open door shows us that their cupboard is unfurnished, and tenanted by a hungry and solitary mouse. In the corner hangs a long cloak, well calculated to conceal the threadbare wardrobe of its ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... of a hundred fights, who knew that this would be his last, put on his favourite ancient coat, threadbare through many a conflict with hard time and harder enemies. Its beauty, like his own, had suffered in the cause of duty; the gold embroidery had taken leave of absence in some places, and in others showed more fray of silk than gleam of yellow glory; and the four stars fastened on the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... stood looking down, he with pity, I with a mounting, sick horror, at the thing before us—the poor, huddled thing that had lain there so long. For it was not, as one might suppose at first glance, a frayed and threadbare mantle flung across one corner of the table. By the long black hair it was a woman, and a ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... with a proud gesture when he had done with a lot of customers and was about to march again at the head of his horse. That restored him from trade to his soldiership—he had saluted his Waterloo medal! There beneath his threadbare old blue coat it lay, always felt by the ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... quite familiar to him—this hotel to which a man of moderate means is forced to go in the city. The dingy walls and threadbare carpet got geometrically shabbier at each succeeding flight of stairs, until at length the boy ushered him into a little room at the head of the stairway. It was unwarmed and had no lock on the door; but the bed was clean, and, as he soon found, ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... to any other qualities. Suppleness, no doubt, often supplies the place of patience, and the man who can tack and veer was formerly not without his value; but the time for using these small wares has now passed for ever. They have been worn threadbare by a politician of our day, and are foul in the nostrils of every civilized nation. In the middle ages, and in Italian courts, such tricks may have been necessary, but they are unsuitable to constitutional ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... carriages, filled with well-dressed ladies, drove to and fro, and crowds of officers and civilians strolled under the trees, greeting their acquaintances and discussing the latest gossip of the town. As to the coming of the French, the topic was so threadbare that no one alluded to it; and no stranger could have imagined from the aspect of the scene that three great armies were lying thirty or forty miles away in readiness to engage at any moment in a desperate struggle. The great subject of talk was the ball that was to be given that evening ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... offending decoration in meekness, while Jimmy, having a taste for embossment, honestly regarded the peacocks as "handsome." From the centre of the ceiling a massive gilt chandelier, elaborately festooned with damaged garlands, shed, when it was lighted, a dim and troubled gloom down on the threadbare Axminster carpet. Above the white marble mantelpiece, the old French mirror, one of the few good things left over from a public sale of Mrs. Carr's possessions, reflected a pair of bronze candelabra with crystal pendants, and ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... for he came back that evening in time to prepare the thin gruel which made his master's supper, with a suit of black—a little threadbare, but still highly respectable—two shirt fronts, and two white cravats. But, out of all this finery, Jackeymo held the small-clothes in especial veneration; for as they had cost exactly what the medallion had sold for, so it seemed to him that San Giacomo had heard ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, as Wagner has here. It is the sea that pervades the whole of the act; but imposed on its ceaseless sound there are very splendid things—some worn a little threadbare by now, but many still fresh. In the next act the prima donna has her opportunity. Senta, the heroine, sits at her spinning-wheel amidst a number of maidens. After a conventional spinning chorus, Senta sings the ballad of the Flying Dutchman, whose ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... left the terrible scar on his face, to be garrulous. When, once in a while, employment sought him (for he never sought employment), whatever remuneration he received went its way for something that left him dingy and threadbare. He now made a lively acquaintance with his landlord, as, indeed, with every soul in the neighborhood, and told all his adventures in Mexican prisons and Cuban cities; including full details of the ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... the filmy curtain into the boys' half of the dressing room and there was Sid sitting at the star's dressing table in his threadbare yellowed undershirt, the lucky one, not making up yet but staring sternly at himself in the bulb-framed mirror and experimentally working his features a little, as actors will, and kneading the stubble on ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... man, in the threadbare brown velveteen jacket, who stood in the middle of the hall, caught Ernest's hand warmly, and held it for a moment fettered in his iron grip. There was an honesty in that grip and in those hazy blue-spectacled eyes that nobody ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... There is the pine table,—there the old flag-bottomed chair on which he sat, and at which he scribbled, during his agonies of inspiration! There is the old chest of drawers in which he kept what shirts a poor author may be supposed to have possessed! There is the closet in which was reposited his threadbare suit of black! There is the worn-out shoe-brush with which this polished writer polished his boots. There is—" but I believe, this will be pretty much all, so here I close the ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... library a long bony student in a threadbare overcoat joined him, stepping moodily by his side. Razumov answered his mumbled greeting without looking at him ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of those times reads. There he took his walks in the deserted arcades of the empty Trocadero Palace, back of which he lived; went to the Theatre Francais, where he saw the great success of the day, and was startled that "an undramatic bagatelle with threadbare scenery, stale intrigues and superannuated theatrical tricks, could be playing on the foremost stage of the world;" saw at the Palais de l'Industrie the triennial exhibition of art works, "the creme de la creme of three salons, and found not one work of consequence." After some time he ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... having to address at three o'clock precisely a committee of ladies who were meeting in Portman Square to discuss the dreadful condition of the London streets, he laid a fatherly arm on the Missioner's threadbare cassock. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... loathed the goings on at Havana, how hateful he found the Spaniards, and how villainous the American hotel-keepers. His superlatives of censure were in such constant employment that they began to have a threadbare sound before he left us; and as he has it in prospective to run the gantlet of all the inn-keepers on the continent of Europe, to say nothing of farther lands, where inn-keepers would be a relief, there is no knowing what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... America, she maintained, had not worn her feelings threadbare like Europe. She had still her story to tell; she was waiting for her Burns and Scott, her Wordsworth and Byron, her Hogarth and Turner. "You want peaches in spring," said she. "Give us our thousand years of summer, and then complain, if you please, that our peach is not as mellow as ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... subtle infamy. And yet the worker wears as fair a port As he whose life is holy Charity, Setting his footprints on the way of life Like sunshine rippling o'er the summer sea. Some wear their little merit on their sleeve, Which 'neath the friction of Time's troublous waves, Grows threadbare as the coat of beggary. Some under rugged lineaments enclose Treasures of truth and goodness, that like gems Shine through the fissures of the strong Time-quake, Showing more perfect as affliction works, And sorrow rends the earthy ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... English literature. We picture him careless of appearances, tramping along the muddy lanes with his cassock tucked up under his short great-coat.[1104] A clergyman, writing in 1722, upon 'the hardships and miseries of the inferior clergy in and about London,' compares with some bitterness the threadbare garments of the curate with 'the flaming gown and cassock' of the non-resident rector. He could wish, he said ('if the wish were canonical')[1105] that he might appear in a common habit rather than in a clerical garb which only excited derision by its squalor. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... profanation of public religion, by its notorious alliance in the governing powers with the violation of every moral rule under the stimulants of fear and vengeance; it is the perfect prostitution of the judicial office which has made it, under veils only too threadbare and transparent, the degraded recipient of the vilest and clumsiest forgeries, got up wilfully and deliberately, by the immediate advisers of the Crown, for the purpose of destroying the peace, the freedom, aye, and even, if not by capital sentences, the life of men among the most ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... circle. For we can say what we will about democracy, but when a child is born unto a man that man unconsciously puts on the purple. He becomes the ruler and sits on the throne of authority. He even seeks to cloak his weaknesses and his mistakes in that threadbare old fabrication about the divine right of kings. But I can see that he is often wrong, and even my Dinkie can see that he is not always right in his decrees. More and more often, of late, I've observed the boy studying his father, studying him with an impersonal ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... which were all fastened on with a certain liquid so firmly to the skin that it was necessary to apply vinegar in which the ashes of vine-twigs had been steeped, when they instantly fell off. My Basque was at length dressed in a torn, threadbare cassock, masked by his false beard, with an old hat upon his head, a breviary under his arm, and a tolerably thick stick in his hand, and received an order to post himself near the little gate of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... campaign were represented, the attitude of which they mainly reflected. In substance, therefore, they embodied the same medley of affirmations and denials, of charges and countercharges, of evasions and subterfuges which party discussion had worn threadbare. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... and novelty of this greatness.—In the costume of a representative, a Henry IV hat, tri-color plume, waving scarf, and saber dragging the ground, Lebon orders the bell to be rung and summons the villagers into the church, where, aloft in the pulpit in which he had formerly preached in a threadbare cassock, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... very much on the day of which I am writing. It was cold, dismal weather; a cutting east wind had swept round the corners of the streets, and had chilled the old man through and through. His threadbare coat could not keep it out; how could he expect it to do so, when he had worn it so many years he could scarcely count them? His thin, trembling old hands were so benumbed with cold that he could scarcely feel the handle of the organ, and, as he turned it, he made sundry little shakes and quavers ...
— Christie's Old Organ - Or, "Home, Sweet Home" • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... quick eye, and pleasing features. He made attitude and deportment a study, and when, on his leaving the Senate, his household furniture was sold at auction it was noticed that the carpet before a large looking-glass in his study was worn and threadbare. It was there that he ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... the doorway and stood lowering, his eyes fixed on the ground; a tall, slight man, with stooping shoulders, and delicate pointed features. He was shabbily dressed, yet there was something fastidious in his air, and it was noticeable that the threadbare ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... tall, black-clad figure, bent in stiff awkwardness over the smoking grate, and his eyes softened. Then he took fresh note of the room—the faded, threadbare carpet, the sparse old furniture that had seemed ugly to even his uninformed boyish taste, the dingy walls and begrimed low ceiling—all pathetic symbols of the bleak life to ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... room beneath, the physician was ushered to the Queen's apartment, which he entered with all due professional solemnity. Catherine had, in the meanwhile, fallen back from the Queen's bed, and taken an opportunity to whisper to Roland, "Methinks, from the information of the threadbare velvet cloak and the solemn beard, there would be little trouble in haltering yonder ass. But thy grandmother, Roland—thy grandmother's zeal will ruin us, if she get not a ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... I may have worn it. I'll rub on in it still; and your Mother and you will have the more Money for copper-coloured Clokes. But don't, at any Time, let your Father get shabby, Children. I would never be threadbare nor unclean. Let my Habitt be neat and spotless, my Bands well washed and uncrumpled, as becometh a Gentleman. As for my Sword in the Corner, your Mother may send that after my Medal as soon as she will. The Cid parted ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... his creature heart is filled; His shrunken self goes starved away. Let him wear brand-new garments still, Who has a threadbare ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... diffusible than that of the poet. He requires various mechanical means and appliances for his full success. His works must be performed in order to be felt. He cannot be read, like the poet, in the closet, or in the cottage, or on the street-stall, where the threadbare student steals from day to day, as he lingers at the spot, new draughts of delicious refreshment. Few can sit down and peruse a musical composition even for its melody; and very few, indeed, can gather ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... his difficulties is already too long, or I might mention the Laird's inexperience in the art of making the worse appear the better garnishment, of hiding a darned carpet with a new floor-cloth, and flinging an Indian shawl over a faded and threadbare sofa. But I have said enough, and more than enough, to explain his dilemma to an unassisted bachelor, who, without mother, sister, or cousin, without skilful housekeeper, or experienced clerk of the kitchen, or valet of parts and figure, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... time," cautioned the man. "He was a little chap, a white, clean, threadbare little chap, with such a big voice, so wonderfully intoned, and such a bigger principle, for which he was fighting. One of these overgrown newsboys the public won't stand for unless he is in the way when they are making a car, had hired him to sell ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... and understood. Freshmen might argue but even the Tennessee Shad wasted no time in producing the coin. There was exactly ten cents in Skippy's pocket after the most painstaking search revealed this last ray of hope in the lining of the threadbare pocket. Only ten cents to stop the deficit in his stomach! The choice was difficult. There was ginger-pop at Bill Appleby's, and jiggers at Al's, pancakes at Conover's, and the aching void within him knew no prejudice or limitations to its hospitality. ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... as if with age, leaning heavily on a crooked cane. He was the picture of poverty. His threadbare clothes had been mended in many places. His dirty, gray hair was long and uncombed. The soles of his shoes were almost wholly worn away, and the uppers were broken in two or three places. He brushed his hair back from his eyes with a ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... may have been the custom sometimes to dedicate to the goddess the garments worn by children at their presentation, just as we know that the garments in which persons had been initiated at the Greater Eleusinia were worn by them until threadbare, and then dedicated to some god. If so, the number of children's clothes mentioned in our inventory is easily explained. Or were these the clothes of children cut off by Artemis in infancy, such as bereaved mothers nowadays often treasure for years, having no temple wherein to dedicate them?" ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... whole course of his career had he encountered a subterfuge so transparent, a calumny so shameless as the attempt of the Hon. Prop., he might say the calculated and cynical attempt of the Hon. Prop., to seduce from their faith the tenacious acolytes of Sport by the now threadbare recital of the dubious and, on his own showing, the anaemic enticements of Science. The War had proved that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... and Mrs Roby, who was assisted by the Captain—for she walked with great difficulty even when aided by her crutches. In a few seconds they stood beside Mrs Leven's bed. It was a lowly bed, with scant and threadbare coverings, and she who lay on it was of a lowly spirit—one who for many years had laid her head on the bosom of Jesus, and had found Him, through a long course of poverty and mental distress, "a very present ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... an important fact. David could not understand how Abraham could possess such a love of knowledge as to lead him to forego all social pleasures, be willing to wear a threadbare coat, live on the coarsest fare, and labor hard all day, and sit up half the night, for the sake of learning. But there is just that power in the love of knowledge, and it was this that caused Lincoln to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Helen Starratt was absorbed ... a thing unusual for her. At least in her husband's hearing she always disclaimed any interest in the brutalities. She never read about murders or the sweaty stories in the human-interest columns of the paper or the unpleasant fictioning of realists. Her excuse was the threadbare one that a trivial environment always calls forth, "There are enough unpleasant things in ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... around the great wood fire in the sitting-room, and talk and tell stories by the hour together. I tell the most of the stories; for, though I am only a plain farmer, going about in a slouched hat, a rusty coat, and a pair of pantaloons so old and threadbare that you would not wear them if you were in the ash business, I have mingled with men, seen a great many places, and been ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... than continuing his career of villainy and crime," quoth the emir sternly, and then passing his eyes over the person of Mr. Middleton, he remarked the somewhat threadbare and glossy garments of that excellent young man. "If you would accept a suit of raiment from me," continued the emir with a hesitation that betrayed the delicacy which was one of the most marked of the many estimable traits that made ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... fender, scraping the perishing embers together from time to time, and occasionally adding a slight scattering of the dust and fragments of coal, just to keep them alive. As for our carpets, they in time were worn threadbare, and patched and darned even to a greater extent than our garments. To save the expense of a gardener, Mary and I undertook to keep the garden in order; and all the cooking and household work that could not easily be managed by one servant- girl, was done ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... millions, because you convert the consumer into a victim, against whom every kind of cheat is pardonable, and then you lay by farthing by farthing, refusing yourselves not only all the enjoyments of life, but even the most necessary comforts.... You brag of your threadbare clothes; but surely this extreme parsimony is a thousand times more blamable than the opposite prodigality of those of your comrades who spend their time among gipsies, and their money in feasting. You boast of your ignorance, because you do not ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... gambler, negro buyer, or fine "buck" barber. The assumption of a large and flashy pin stood in his frilled shirt-bosom. He wore watch-seals without the accompanying watch, and his pantaloons, though faded and threadbare, were once of fine material and cut in a style of extravagant elegance, and they covered his long, shrunken, but aristocratic limbs, and were strapped beneath his boots to keep them shapely. The boots themselves had ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... searching for the weak point and, having found it, delivers the attack. Squeaking Henry knew the armour plate to be thinnest on man's sympathetic side, and the hard-luck story which he told Old Man Curry would have melted the heart of a golf club handicapper. The story was overworked and threadbare in spots, but it ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... evening in March, Father M'Clane set out for a walk to Mrs. Dillon's cottage. His prospects and reflections had been of a grave and sad character throughout the day, and his threadbare coat and lean purse had been more than usually suggestive of the great truth, that all earthly comforts are ...
— Live to be Useful - or, The Story of Annie Lee and her Irish Nurse • Anonymous
... looked what he was, a gentleman of the law—there was nothing of the pettifogger about him. Somewhat under the middle size, and somewhat rotund in person, he was always dressed in a full suit of black, never worn long enough to become threadbare. His face was rubicund, and not without keenness; but the most remarkable thing about him was the crown of his head, which was bald, and shone like polished ivory, nothing more white, smooth, and lustrous. Some people have said that he wore false calves, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... These in thy threadbare Farce shall Beauties show, Shall praise thy ribald Mirth, and maudlin Woe; Praise ev'n thy imitating Chaucer's Tales, And call that merry [1] Temple, Fame's Versailles: Thy [2] Shepherd-Song with Rapture they shall see, Which rivals Philips, ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... fire; but Washington was shown into a bed-room. Fatigued with a hard day's work at surveying, he soon undressed; but instead of being nestled between sheets in a comfortable bed, as at the maternal home, or at Mount Vernon, he found himself on a couch of matted straw, under a threadbare blanket, swarming with unwelcome bedfellows. After tossing about for a few moments, he was glad to put on his clothes again, and rejoin his ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... an old man with a long beard and a threadbare cloak (the garb affected by the pagan philosophers) standing ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... not been so agreeable, or felt the world so pleasant, two hours before. It was impossible to escape memories or to hide wincing; but he had said to himself that these associations ought to have been worn threadbare by familiarity, or to have been approached gradually, and he could not conquer his awkwardness or crush his susceptibility. But youth is pliable and versatile, and Harry Jardine was determined to evince no dislike, and make no marked distinction. Very soon the Miss Crawfurds and their cousin ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... can't always earn enough to marry on; and when well-to-do men get married they seem to get worse instead of better, generally. So upon the hungry, the weary, the hopeless, girls who have to patch their own boots and go threadbare and shabby while others have pretty things, and who are despised for their shabbiness by the very hypocrites who cant about love of dress, and who have folks at home whom they love, and who are penniless as well and in that abject misery which comes when there isn't any money to buy the little things, ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... held in his hand, so closely and intently that Griselda, forgetting she was only looking at a "picture," almost held her breath for fear she should disturb him. He was a very old man, his coat was worn and threadbare in several places, looking as if he spent a great part of his life in one position. Yet he did not look poor, and his face, when at last he lifted it, was mild and intelligent ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... "Hannibal has beaten the Romans at Cannae: shall he or shall he not proceed directly to attack Rome? Examine the question as if you were Hannibal." Much of this appears theoretically sound enough. Unfortunately the subjects were generally either hopelessly threadbare or possessed no bearing upon real life. "We are learning," says Seneca, "not for life, but for the school." The only novelty which could be given to the treatment of old abstract themes or puerile questions ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... slumber which he had been enjoying under the seat of a compartment in a certain low gin-palace. He was about to stretch himself and give vent to a noisy yawn when the word "Laidlaw" smote his ear. Pale, worn-out, cadaverous, threadbare, inexpressibly mean, the man gently raised his dissolute form on one elbow and listened to two men in a box beside him. Their heads met almost over the spot where his own head rested. The men were Lockhart and Spivin, and the occasion ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... sixty years of age, short, rotund, corpulent. His head was bullet-shaped and set well down on his shoulders. His clothes were baggy and threadbare, his linen soiled and shabby. He had blue eyes, harsh red hair, and a florid complexion. When he arrived, he brought three valises. Everybody wondered what ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... and looked critically at his blue coat, which, though threadbare, was scrupulously clean. He flecked some imaginary dust from his trousers, and ran his hand lightly through his hair, bringing the snowy curl which was the pride of his heart a little farther over his forehead. ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... him and I asked him, 'Captain, is she here?' 'Yes, sir, she is, she never misses; that's the sort of a wife to have, sir; come here and let me introduce you.' He pulled me up and introduced me to a sweet little old lady, in an old, threadbare dress and wrap, and a little, faded bonnet, whom I had seen as we came up, watching eagerly for someone, but whom I had not thought of as being possibly the Captain's grand-dame. The Captain's manner, however, was beautiful. ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... picked up the tatters of his threadbare comic speech. Speed, munching a stale sandwich, came strolling over to where I stood sponging out my horse's ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... city church, are in place, the invited guests assembled, and the bridal procession immediately forms, entering the church and passing up the aisle to the strains of the wedding march. In England a lovely innovation is made on this threadbare custom by having a chorus of boy-voices sing an epithalamium, or wedding ode, during their progress. This custom has found its way here in some ritualistic churches where the vested choir march, two and two, at the head of the bridal procession, singing as they march. Sometimes as high as forty, ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... for it, I instantly drew inside my shell and remained there—thus robbing myself of much that would have done me good. Some of the girls went out of their way to be nice to me, but I kept aloof, filled with a savage resentment of my poverty and my threadbare clothing. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... packet—not much—a few threadbare garments folded around her letters, one to mark each miserable day that had passed since I spurred my horse out of Trecourt on the track of the wickedest man ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... medical works, and ornamented at the top with a skull, in place of the customary bust; a large deal table copiously splashed with ink; wooden chairs of the sort that are seen in kitchens and cottages; a threadbare drugget in the middle of the floor; a sink of water, with a basin and waste-pipe roughly let into the wall, horribly suggestive of its connection with surgical operations—comprised the entire furniture of the ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... half could hide How threadbare his patched jacket hung; They used to be his Mother's pride; She praised them with a tender tongue, And stroked them with a loving finger That smoothed and ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... under the propitious influence of a brace of carp, most opportunely presented by a neighbour. Mr. Hale had returned from his morning's round, and was awaiting his visitor just outside the wicket gate that led into the garden. He looked a complete gentleman in his rather threadbare ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... college and university there is a hall of fame, where the heroes of the past are idolized by the younger generations. Trophies, portraits, old flags and banners hang there. Threadbare though they may be, they are rich in memories. These are, however, only the material things—"the trappings and the suits" of fame—but in the hearts of university men the memory of the heroes of the past is firmly and reverently enshrined. Their achievements are a distinguished part ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... to dress; the holey stockings were replaced by others that had seen less service; the worn frills and laces were changed for others less threadbare. This done, Hermione, with many supple twists, wriggled dexterously into her best dress, pausing now and then to sigh mournfully and grieve over its many deficiencies and shortcomings, defects which only feminine eyes, so coldly critical, ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... it not, indeed; But if thou wouldst, attend this simple rede: When quite contented }thou canst dine at home Thou shall be free when } And drink a small wine of the march of Rome; When thou canst see unmoved thy neighbour's plate, And wear my threadbare toga in the gate; When thou hast learned to love a small abode, And not to choose a mistress A LA MODE: When thus contained and bridled thou shalt be, Then, Maximus, then first shalt thou ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and her recent fears, the good widow entered, and leaned anxiously over the stranger's form. A tall, gaunt man, clad in threadbare garments, which hung loosely upon the shrunken breast and arms, black hair and beard, mottled with white, ragged, and unshorn, and dank from exposure to the snow and sleet; a chalky-white face, with closed and sunken eyes, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... had seen long service, but it was neatly brushed and darned, and the ability to wear threadbare clothing with distinction was not the least of Edgar Poe's talents. Beside his worn, but cared-for apparel, costly ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare—and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... yet did I admire the power Which makes so lustrous every threadbare theme,— Which won for La Fayette one other hour, And e'en on July Fourth could cast a gleam,— As now, when I behold him play the host, With all the dignity which red men boast,— With all the courtesy the whites have lost; Assume ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... subtle charm I wish to indicate. It lies in the refreshing, short-lived pleasure of being able to look at your own land with the eyes of an alien; to see novelty blossoming on the most commonplace and familiar stems; to have the old manner and the threadbare old custom to present themselves to you as absolutely new—or if not new, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... to visit his wife. That room where she lay in pain often, in weakness always, was a mean, poorly-furnished room, with a window in the thatch, and just a glimpse of heaven beyond, but that glimpse was all reflected in the blessedness of her peaceful face. Mr. Moxon's threadbare coat hung loosely on his large lean frame, like the coat of a poor, negligent gentleman, such as he was. He had the reputation of being a capital scholar, but he had not made the way in the world that had been expected of him. He was ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... homage delights her, is fairly driven out of New York. Some, alas! cannot seek safety in flight, their avocations oblige them to remain; such, it can only be hoped, grow callous, until, the subject being well threshed out and grown threadbare, they are ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... the kitchen and said, as she pressed out her black satin and tried to hide the threadbare seams that had been showing for years: "Mrs. Van Dorn, I'm going to do something you won't like." To Laura's questioning eyes Violet answered: "I know your ma, or some one else has told you all about me—but," she shut her mouth tightly and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... artist was ever sent away from Siron's—no matter how bad his work or how threadbare his clothes—if he was a worker; if he really tried to express beauty, all of his eccentricities were pardoned and his pot-boiling granted absolution. But the would-be Bohemian, or the man in search of a thrill, or if in any manner the party ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... had a certain clean agreeable smell of wood about him, from which I judged him to have something to do with shipbuilding. Thirdly, a little sailor-boy, a mere child, with a profusion of rich dark brown hair, and deep womanly-looking eyes. Fourthly, a shabby-genteel personage in a threadbare black suit, and apparently in very bad circumstances, with a dry suspicious look; the absent buttons on his waistcoat eked out with red tape; and a bundle of extraordinarily tattered papers sticking ...
— The Seven Poor Travellers • Charles Dickens
... of her, and support her sufferings with fortitude. She believed that she could work,—work from morning till night, from week to week, from month to month, without complaining; but she did not think that she could make herself sweet as a wife should be sweet to a husband with a threadbare coat, or that she could be tender as a mother should be tender while dividing limited bread among her children. To go and die and have done with it, if that might be possible, was the panacea of ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... of the most extreme of the frequenters of the Jacobin Club. He did not recognize Harry, whom he had never noticed particularly on the occasion of his visits to the chateau, and who, in the somewhat threadbare black suit which he had assumed instead of the workman's blouse, wrote steadily at a table apart, taking apparently no notice of what was going ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... causeless—discontent. The eternal policy of massing great armies, at any sacrifice; fighting terrible battles; and then failing to close the grasp upon their fruits—apparently already in hand—had worn public patience so threadbare, that it refused to regard Chickamauga as anything more than another of those aimless killings, which had so often drenched the ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... familiarity, and it is very stupid if the game happens to send you to heaven. I wonder if there really is such a locality? I've been thinking lately I should like to go there; things don't seem to agree with me very well here. I've closed my books, walked the Thiergarten threadbare, sleep twelve hours out of twenty-four, do everything I've been told to do, with no result whatever except to grow duller." The young man yawned as he spoke. "Do excuse me; I've come to such a pass that I'm not able to look any one in the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... no means be permitted; and the Ambassador of the Republic was ready with his threadbare argument of ingratitude, with much other reasoning of which ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... give themselves time, or let time be allowed them, to give a year or two to the real study of languages, not in the threadbare phrases of the tourist and motorist, nor to mere drawing-room small talk; not with "matriculation standard" as an object, but to read the best that has been written, and try to speak according to ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... thou within thee, ere again ill-using me. Art thou aware Of nothing there Which might abuse thee, as thou art abusing me? A brain that mourns THINE unredeemed rascality? A soul that weeps at THY threadbare morality? Both grieving that THEIR ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... stockings, whose hat had its brim whimsically turned up, while snow-white tufts of hair like pigeon plumes rose at its sides. A slender queue, thin as a quill, tossed about on the back of his sallow neck, which was thick, as far as it could be seen above the turned down collar of a threadbare coat. This couple assumed the stately tread of an ambassador; and the husband, who was at least seventy, stopped complaisantly every time the terrier began to gambol. I hastened to pass this living impersonation of my Meditation, and was surprised to the last degree ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... good old Hector on the other side of the door, and you don't imagine you are really throwing dust in his eyes do you? . . . good old Hector with his threadbare livery and his ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, having a daughter of seventeen to marry, appears to have set seriously to work to find out how much money a wedding could be made to cost. In pursuing this inquiry, he caused the wedding festivals of Louis XIV's court, once so famous, to seem poverty-stricken and threadbare. He began by a burst of ostentatious charity. He subscribed money for the relief of the victims of recent inundations, and dowered a number of portionless girls; expending in these ways a quarter of a million francs. He gave his daughter a portion of five millions of francs. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... man Sage, lie thought as a Sail, set every threadbare Saint, 't would provoke a St. John mingles with my bowl Saints in crape and lawn —, his soul is with the Salt of the earth Samson, the Philistines be upon thee Satan, get thee behind me Satire's my weapon —in disguise Saul and Jonathan, ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... a little stiffly, feeling that there was nothing for him to say. There was a pause, which showed that the topic was getting threadbare. This prompted the host to call his wife's attention to the fact that one of the candles was flaring. So the current of conversation was turned, and the subject was not alluded to again, thereby anticipating Mr. Carter, who, having caught Miss Newbury's ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... buy titles, but they did not invent that idea; it had been worn threadbare several hundred centuries before America was discovered. European girls still exploit it as briskly as ever; and, when a title is not to be had for the money in hand, they buy the husband without it. They must put up the "dot," or there is no trade. The commercialization of brides is ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... everywhere enforced. The British officer was deprived of his leave and the Egyptian private of his rations, that a few pounds might be saved to the Egyptian Treasury. The clothing of the battalions wore thin and threadbare, and sometimes their boots were so bad that the soldiers' feet bled from the cutting edges of the rocks, and the convoy escorts left their trails behind them. But preparation was ever going forward. The army improved in efficiency, and the constant warfare ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... pain of things that are burdensome and painful. Men travel from a tinted morning into the sober light of common day, and with failing faculties and shattered illusions and dissipated hopes, and powers bending under the long monotony of middle life, most of them live. Now all that is the veriest threadbare morality, and I dare say while I have been speaking, some of you have been thinking that I am repeating platitudes that every old woman could preach. So I am. That is to say, I am trying to put into feeble words the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... are envious as well as rich,) See there Goody Andrews's daughter, turned home from her fine place! What a tawdry figure she makes! And how well that garb becomes her poor parents' circumstances!—And how would they look upon me, thought I to myself, when they should come to be threadbare and worn out? And how should I look, even if I could purchase homespun clothes, to dwindle into them one by one, as I got them?—May be, an old silk gown, and a linsey-woolsey petticoat, and the like. So, thought I, I had better get myself at once equipped in the ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... is described above, to put on my morning-gown and slippers, and light my pipe, then sallying forth, have strolled from Fuller's to the Capitol; and climbing its bold hill, have looked down along the sleeping city, speculating upon its possible destinies until my fancies waxed threadbare, and then quietly returned, making a distance of nearly three miles, without encountering an individual or hearing the ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... half of what His Majesty squandered on concubines and buffoons would gladden the hearts of hundreds of old Cavaliers who, after cutting down their oaks and melting their plate to help his father, now wandered about in threadbare suits, and did not know where to turn for ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was an energetic, nervous, almost humorsome mobility about his mouth; while his little beady black eyes, quick, warm, scintillant, had ten times the life one would have expected to find keeping company with his fifty years. In dress, he was very threadbare, and, sooth to say, not over-clean; yet he was jaunty, and moved with the air of a man much better clad. I was impressed with his appearance, and especially with his voice, which was vibrant, firm, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... through Cow Lane and came to the house. He rapped at the front door, which was opened by a tall man, with a pleasant but resolute countenance, whose clothes were plain and getting threadbare. His hair was beginning to be gray about the temples, and he ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... home from the station, for the first moment he did not recognize his younger daughter-in-law. As soon as her husband had driven out of the yard, Lipa was transformed and suddenly brightened up. Wearing a threadbare old petticoat, with her feet bare and her sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, she was scrubbing the stairs in the entry and singing in a silvery little voice, and when she brought out a big tub of dirty water and looked up at the ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... bandoliers apiece, which gave them the appearance of being armed to the teeth—a more determined-looking band cannot be imagined. The horses of these burghers were well bred and in good condition, and, although their clothes were threadbare, they seemed cheerful enough, smoking their pipes and ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... somewhat apart, was a broad-shouldered man, a rough-looking customer in threadbare clothes, whose dusty boots spoke of travel. He was an elderly man, for the hair, beneath the battered hat, was gray, and he leaned wearily upon a short stick. Very still he stood, and Barnabas noticed that he kept his gaze bent ever upon the horse; nor did he look away even when the Captain ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... panes and fissures; I blew into the daughters' chests where their clothes lay faded and threadbare; they had to last for ever. A song like this had never been sung over the cradles of these children. A lordly life became a woeful life! I was the only one to sing in the castle now,' said the wind. 'I snowed them ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen |
