"Worm-eaten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sweetness from some old Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud Which breaks to dust when once unrolled; Or shredded perfume, like a cloud From closet long to quiet vowed, With mothed and dropping arras hung, Mouldering her lute and books among, As when a queen, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... assisted at the invasion of worm-eaten cupboards, where layers of ancient smells lingered on in the stagnant air, and recalled to the reflective nose the many good things that had been kept there. The upper floors were scrubbed with such abundance of water that the old-established death-watches, wood-lice, and flour-worms were all ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... fruit before it is ripe! Allow me to remind you that very much fruit is never picked; some is nipped in the bud; some is worm-eaten and falls to the ground; some rots on the trees before it ripens; some, too slow in ripening, is bitten by the early frosts of autumn; while some rare, ripe apples hang until frozen and worthless on the leafless boughs! Really, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... horrid draught held to my lips, thirst telling me to drink, and disgust making me dash it on the ground—only to be back at my lips the next moment. Once I was a king sitting upon a great tarnished throne, dusty and worm-eaten, in a lofty room of state, the doors standing wide, and the spiders weaving webs across them, for nobody ever came in, and no sound shook the moat-filled air: on that throne I had to sit to all eternity, because I had said ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... down beside him in the window and fingered the fur on his long gown, saying that, in this light, it showed ill-favouredly worm-eaten; and he answered that he never had wishes nor money for gowning himself, who cultivated the muses upon short commons. She turned rightway to the front the medal upon his ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... look at our hero as he stands for a moment in the golden evening light on the planks of the wooden structure which, supported by ricketty, worm-eaten piles, does duty as a wharf. Like a thorough seaman as he is, he is taking a last glance at the schooner before he leaves her, to see that everything is thoroughly "ship-shape and Bristol-fashion" on board her. She is a small and somewhat insignificant craft; but as ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... woe and damnation to any who should refuse to believe their Romania; but they played a poor game—the law protected the servants of Scripture, and the priest with his beads seldom ventured to approach any but the remnant of those of the eikonolatry—representatives of worm-eaten houses, their debased dependants and a few poor crazy creatures among the middle classes—he played a poor game, and the labour was about to prove almost entirely in vain, when the English Legislature, in compassion or contempt, or, yet more probably, influenced ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... functions, and the very next day began to long for the same employment he had so often anathematized. In his endeavors to divert his mind, he began to collect old books, and heaped up mountains of tattered, worm-eaten volumes in immense oak bookcases. But despite this pastime to many so attractive, he could not shake off his weariness. He grew thin and yellow, and his income of forty thousand francs was literally killing him, ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... butterflies and moths the formation of which had been the relaxation of this complex and dangerous man. In the centre of this room there was an upright beam, which had been placed at some period as a support for the old worm-eaten baulk of timber which spanned the roof. To this post a figure was tied, so swathed and muffled in the sheets which had been used to secure it that one could not for the moment tell whether it was that of a man or a woman. One towel passed round the throat and was secured at the back of the ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... after midnight. The glow from our little stove lighted up the angle of the roof, the square window with its three cracked panes, the straw strewn about the floor, the blackened beams propped against each other, and the little firwood table that cast its uncertain shadow upon the worm-eaten ceiling. From time to time, a mouse, enticed by the warmth, would dart like an arrow along the wall. The wind howled in the chimney and whirled the snow about the gutters. I was dreaming of Annette; the silence was complete. Suddenly Wilfred exclaimed, ...
— The Dean's Watch - 1897 • Erckmann-Chatrian
... got there, I found myself in the gallery. The doors that lined it were rickety and worm-eaten; I stared weakly at them. A mere twist of practised fingers, and they could be forced open by any one who cared to try. I thought I heard a faint breathing inside the girl's room, but I was not sure; I was too rattled. Very guardedly I knocked and got no answer. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... that is all. The magpie simply came to give you my love—poor thing, she can't help having an ugly voice! And then the woodpecker—don't you see, it was just pecking out the worms from the timber—there must be no worm-eaten timber in his home! That's what ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... is its fitting destiny better than the silly flower knows for itself; so I wade in, heedless of wet trousers, and seize the shy lily by its slender stem. Thus I make prize of five or six, which are as many as usually blossom within my reach in a single morning;—some of them partially worm-eaten or blighted, like virgins with an eating sorrow at the heart; others as fair and perfect as Nature's own idea was, when she first imagined this lovely flower. A perfect pond-lily is the most satisfactory of flowers. Besides these, I gather whatever else of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... have done, the child loitered from grave to grave, now stopping to replace with careful hands the bramble which had started from some green mound it helped to keep in shape, and now peeping through one of the low latticed windows into the church, with its worm-eaten books upon the desks, and baize of whitened-green mouldering from the pew sides and leaving the naked wood to view. There were the seats where the poor old people sat, worn spare, and yellow like themselves; the rugged font where children had their ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the gloom Of this abhorr'd and musty room! Where heaven's dear light itself doth pass But dimly through the painted glass! Hemmed in by book-heaps, piled around, Worm-eaten, hid 'neath dust and mold, Which to the high vault's topmast bound, A smoke-stained paper doth enfold; With boxes round thee piled, and glass, And many a useless instrument, With old ancestral lumber blent— This is thy world! a world! alas! And dost thou ask why heaves thy heart, With ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... considered, but her freight was always as much as they could crowd into her. As she lasted very long, and that thirty years after the decease of the Father she was in being, and was used for the traffic of the Indies, they never failed of lading her with an extraordinary cargo, all worn and worm-eaten as she was. The owners into whose hands she came, during the space of those thirty years, took only this one precaution, which was to keep her off from shore; so that when she was to be refitted, that work was constantly done upon the sea. As to what remains, it is ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... an old, worm-eaten chair, in which John of Gaunt had sat; and I remember that while Lady de Brantefield expressed her just indignation against the worms, for having dared to attack this precious relique, I, kneeling to the chair, admired the curious fretwork, the dusty honeycombs, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the drawbridge into the house, and Sir Lancelot gat from his horse and tethered it to the post beside the horseblock, and so went across the bridge, which was full sodden and worm-eaten, and ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... old Apartment next the great Orchard, and the Worm-eaten Gallery that opens to the River; which place for several Years no body has frequented; there all things shall be acted ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... account for, because, though undoubtedly with far better lines, the practice of coppering the bottom had not become so general in France as in England, and among the French there were several uncoppered and worm-eaten ships.[213] The better sailing of the French was, however, remarked by the English officers, though the great gain mentioned must have been in part owing to Rodney's lying-by, after the action of the 9th, to refit, due probably ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... your credit that you should have such feelings, I'm sure. But don't you think sentiment may be carried too far? Why, we should have no new furniture at all, and should have to put up with worm-eaten horrors. Besides, my dear, Hollingford will seem very dull to Cynthia, after pretty, gay France, and I want to make the first impressions attractive. I've a notion I can settle her down near here; and I want her to come in a good temper; for, between ourselves, my dear, she is a little, ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of me with when I hurt her. By Jove, if she had been a man, she would have made her mark in the world! She had a will and a way with her! If it hadn't been that she loved me—me, do you hear, you dog!—though there's nobody left to care a worm-eaten nut about me, it makes me proud as Lucifer merely to think of it! I don't care if there's never another to love me to all eternity! I have been loved as never man was loved! All for my own sake, mind you! In the way of money ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... as he discovered afterward, the air and sunshine had a desperate struggle almost daily to obtain an entrance into the building, and after a few hours engaged in the vain attempt, old Sol would vent his baffled rage upon the worm-eaten old roof, to the decided discomfort of the ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... blind, and it was all the fairer for this. The young monk's faith that sees heaven laid open and beholds the angels, is something far below the power of the old monk who points them out to him. The ex-steward was like the old monk; he would have given his life to defend a worm-eaten shrine. ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... without furniture; a few empty boxes and hampers in a corner; a small window; the shutters closed; not even a fireplace; no other door but that by which we had entered; no carpet on the floor, and the floor seemed very old, uneven, worm-eaten, mended here and there, as was shown by the whiter patches on the wood; but no living being, and no visible place in which a living being could have hidden. As we stood gazing round, the door by which ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... hovering around the richest and silliest women, their eyes glittering with eager avarice for a chance at their millions. It seemed a joke that any sane American mother could conceive the idea of selling her daughter to these wretches in exchange for the empty sham of a worm-eaten dishonoured title. And yet it had become so common that the drain on the national resources from this cause constitutes a menace to ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... is the female alone who accomplishes this task, connected with the function of perpetuating the race. She chooses an old tree-trunk, a pole, or the post of a fence, exposed to the sun and already worm-eaten, so that her labour may be lightened. She first attacks the wood perpendicularly to the surface, then suddenly turns and directs downwards the passage, the diameter of which is about equal to the size ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... a strangely modern ring in his remarks upon this subject, in the 73d section of the Legacy: "Virtuous men have said, both in poetry and in classic works, that houses of debauch, for women of pleasure and for street-walkers, are the worm-eaten spots of cities and towns. But these are necessary evils, and if they be forcibly abolished, men of unrighteous principles will become like ravelled thread, and there will be no end to daily punishments and floggings." In many castle-towns, however, such houses were ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... mushrooms are not obtainable.) Ingredients: One-half peck of large mushrooms, two onions, twelve cloves, one-fourth ounce of pounded mace, two teaspoonfuls of white pepper. Mode. Peel the mushrooms, wipe them perfectly free from grit and dirt, remove the black fur, and reject all those that are at all worm-eaten; put them into a stewpan with the above ingredients, but without water; shake them over a clear fire till all the liquor is dried up, and be careful not to let them burn; arrange them on tins and dry them in a slow oven; pound them to a fine powder, ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... encourage the saints to hope, and to rejoice in hope of the glory of God, notwithstanding present tribulations. This is our seed-time, our winter; afflictions are to try us of what mettle we are made; yea, and to shake off worm-eaten fruit, and such as are rotten at core. Troubles for Christ's sake are but like the prick of an awl in the tip of the ear, in order to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... fostered the conviction in me that, outside of the family, the human world was as brutally selfish as the jungle, and that it was worm-eaten with hypocrisy into the bargain. From time to time the newspapers published sensational revelations concerning some pillar of society who had turned out to be a common thief on an uncommon scale. I saw that political speeches, sermons, and editorials had, with very few exceptions, no more sincerity ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... "I'll get it off." He raised his heavily booted foot, as Frank drew back, and brought it down with a crash on the massive brasswork. With a rending and tearing of the worm-eaten wood the lock ripped loose and the lid, operated by some ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... roughly put together; now they were worm-eaten, bare, save for a thick carpet of greasy dust, which deadened the sound of booted feet. The place only boasted of a couple of chairs, both of which had to be propped against the wall lest they should break, ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... including waste, is now over two hundred billion board feet;—some authorities place the amount as high as two hundred and seventy-five billion feet. This, however, probably includes firewood, one of the largest uses of wood, but taken very largely from worm-eaten wood that could not be cut into lumber. It also probably includes boughs, and other unsalable parts of ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... rays; the fields are green as far as the eye can see. The big azure dome of the sky is unclouded. The farms of Normandy, scattered over the plains and surrounded by a belt of tall beeches, look, from a distance, like little woods. On closer view, after lowering the worm-eaten wooden bars, you imagine yourself in an immense garden, for all the ancient apple-trees, as gnarled as the peasants themselves, are in bloom. The sweet scent of their blossoms mingles with the heavy smell of the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... enough courage," said the doctor; and Peter, looking very white, led the way to the foot of the ladder, went up, and the others followed him to the loft, and stood together on the old worm-eaten boards. ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... the area back of the first lines there is a wide one, crossed by many intersecting lines of trenches) he got well over them and chose a field as level as a billiard table for landing-ground. In the very center of it, however, there was one post, a small worm-eaten thing, of the color of the dead grass around it. He hit it, just as he was setting his Spad on the ground, the only post in a field acres wide, and it tore a piece of fabric from one of his lower wings. ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... nut, in which the best thing of all was said to be enclosed. He laid it carefully between the door and the door-post, and then shut the door so that the nut cracked directly. But there was not much kernel to be seen; it was what we should call hollow or worm-eaten, and looked as if it had been filled with tobacco or rich black earth. "It is just what I expected!" exclaimed Ib. "How should there be room in a little nut like this for the best thing of all? Christina will find her two nuts just the same; there will be neither fine clothes ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... wide hall at the top of the house, the unceiled rafters above their heads, carpetless boards beneath their feet. Mabel set her waiter upon a worm-eaten, iron-bound chest, and went further down the passage to get the key of the north room. Her light footstep stirred dismal echoes in the dark corners; the wind screamed through every crack and keyhole, like a legion of piping devils; rumbled lugubriously over the steep roof. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... keeping with the village, being old and worm-eaten, and the craziest craft imaginable. I would not have sailed one across a pond. However, I sought out the commander of this ragged squadron, and gave him ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... for the collector. Really, Major, you should see some of the stuff that was landed on me when I began, years ago, with a story almost as good. Reproductions, every piece of it, with as fine an imitation of worm-eaten backs as you ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... dwelt upon? Have people, now, been entirely honest in what they have said and written on this theme? When enthusiasts have told us of their prize pears, their early peas of supernatural tenderness, their asparagus, and their roses, and their strawberries, have they not hidden a good deal about their worm-eaten plums—about their cherries that were carried off by armies of burglarious birds; about their potatoes that proved watery and unpalatable; about their melons that fell victims to their neighbors' fowls; about their peaches that succumbed to the unexpected raid of Jack Frost; about their grapes ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... the way into his house under a rock. It is a mere hovel, but it has a wooden floor, and there are signs of personal dignity—what is known in England as 'respectability'—struggling with poverty. Perhaps the ancient clock, whose worm-eaten case reaches from the floor to the ceiling, and whose muffled but cheery tick-tack is like the voice of an old friend, impressed me in favour of this poor home as soon as ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... boys. So Haydn, who had surreptitiously picked up a good deal of musical knowledge apart from the art of singing, was at the age of sixteen turned out on the world. A compassionate barber, however, took him in, and Haydn dressed and powdered wigs down-stairs, while he worked away at a little worm-eaten harpsichord at night in his room. Unfortunate boy! he managed to get himself engaged to the barber's daughter, Anne Keller, who was for a good while the Xantippe of his gentle life, and he paid dearly for his ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... the fruits of the earth between the various consumers, great and little, all of whom play their part in this world. If it is good that the blackbird should flute and rejoice in the burgeoning of the spring, then it is no bad thing that acorns should be worm-eaten. In the acorn the dessert of the blackbird is prepared; the Balaninus, the tasty mouthful that puts flesh upon his flanks and ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... the "coarse side of life." Whitney had the American good sense to despise his wife, his daughter, and himself for the transaction. For years furious had been his protestations to his family, to his acquaintances, and to himself against "society," and especially against the incursions of that "worm-eaten titled crowd from the other side." So often had he repeated those protests that certain phrases had become fixedly part of his conversation, to make the most noise when he was violently agitated, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... Walpole, some haunted building. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho" it is a castle in the Apennines; in the "Romance of the Forest," a deserted abbey in the depth of the woods; in "The Italian," the cloister of the Black Penitents. The moldering battlements, the worm-eaten tapestries, the turret staircases, secret chambers, underground passages, long, dark corridors where the wind howls dismally, and distant doors which slam at midnight all derive from "Otranto." So do the supernatural fears which haunt these abodes of desolation; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... successively a journeyman printer, a footman and a cook. These were not likely to respect his desire for quiet, but the mere fact of his having a room all to himself made him oblivious of external annoyances. As he expressed it, he was "too happy to envy the lot of kings." He had his old, worm-eaten spinet, and his health and his good spirits; and although he was still poor and unknown, he was "making himself all the time," like Sir ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... story, the spare furniture dwindled down to a couple of old deal chairs, of which one, belonging to the back-room, was shorn of a leg, and bottomless. The story above, boasted no greater excess than a worm-eaten wash-tub; and the garret landing-place displayed no costlier articles than two crippled pitchers, and some ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... in the room where we had so many pleasant sittings. The ancient stamped leather on the walls is perhaps a trifle more ragged, the old oak panels not blacker—that were impossible—but a trifle more worm-eaten; it is the same room. I must have seemed a sad boor to my polite cicerone as I stood, hat in hand, and silently took in all the old familiar details. The same smell of mildewed antiquity, I could almost believe the same ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... his own landscape-painter, and engraver too. His pastoral scenes seem pricked on paper in little dotted lines. He describes the interior of a cottage like a person sent there to distrain for rent. He has an eye to the number of arms in an old worm-eaten chair, and takes care to inform himself and the reader whether a joint-stool stands upon three legs or upon four. If a settle by the fire-side stands awry, it gives him as much disturbance as a tottering world; and he records the rent in a ragged counterpane as an event in history. He ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... helmet.) Well then, hang thou scoured and bright in the Banquet Hall; for what art thou now but an empty nut-shell? The kernel—the worms have eaten that many a winter agone. What say you, Biorn—may not one call Norway's land an empty nut- shell, even like the helmet here; bright without, worm-eaten within? ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... fine fellow—a fine, sharp, enterprising modern man—I would have undertaken to find him for her without going out of the city of New York. And if she wanted a big fortune, I would have found her twenty that she would have had hard work to spend: money down—not tied up in fever-stricken lands and worm-eaten villas! What is the name of the young man? Prince Castaway, or ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... in a sagging old frame house (from which the original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From May until September you never passed the Decker place without ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... one of these fields stood an old wooden house which was not inhabited, for both wind and rain penetrated its roof and walls. On this especial night, however, any one familiar with the locality would have been astonished to see a light gleam through the worm-eaten shutters. In one room was a chair and a table. On the table was a lamp, but there was no ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... it," he was telling the audience. "But then this M. Leandre is himself akin to those who worship the worm-eaten idol of Privilege, and so he is a little afraid to believe a truth that is becoming apparent to all the world. Shall I convince him? Shall I tell him how a company of noblemen backed by their servants under arms—six hundred men in all—sought to dictate to the Third Estate of Rennes ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... all our Worm-eaten Plank, and clapt on new, by the beginning of December 1686, our Ships bottom was sheathed and tallowed, and the 10th Day went over the Bar, and took aboard the Iron and Lead that we could not sell, and began to fill our Water, and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... Ben Sion, Yevrey Reformatory, St. Petersburg, 1882. In his manifesto (Ha-Meliz, April 21, 1881) Gordon declared: "We have discarded the dusty Talmud. We cannot rest satisfied, in questions of religion, with the worm-eaten carcass, with the observances of rabbinical Judaism." See Ha-Shiloah, ii. 53. See also Kahan, Meahore ha-Pargud (reprint from Ha-Meliz, 1885), St. ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... still I see. This drear, accursed masonry, Where even the welcome daylight strains But duskly through the painted panes. Hemmed in by many a toppling heap Of books worm-eaten, gray with dust, Which to the vaulted ceiling creep, Against the smoky paper thrust,— With glasses, boxes, round me stacked, And instruments together hurled, Ancestral lumber, stuffed and packed— Such is my ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... me, this dungeon still I see, This drear accursed masonry, Where e'en the welcome daylight strains But duskly through the painted panes, Hemmed in by many a toppling heap Of books worm-eaten, grey with dust, Which to the vaulted ceiling creep Against the smoky paper thrust, With glasses, boxes, round me stacked And instruments together hurled, Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed— Such is my world! And what a world!... ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... found him at his counter, still worrying his books as a ferret worries a rat. They were beginning to mean something to him, and he saw that the bank was a worm-eaten shell. When he discovered that Brownwell's notes were not made for bona fide loans, but that they were made to cover Barclay's overdrafts, he began to find the truth, and then when he found that Colonel Culpepper had lent the money back to the bank that he borrowed from Brownwell,—also to ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... that could be read: the rest, the characters being worm-eaten, were consigned to one of the Academicians, to find out their meaning by conjectures. We are informed he has done it, after many lucubrations and much pains, and that he designs to publish them, giving us hopes of Don Quixote's ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... upon its panes, which dispensed with the necessity of curtains. The whitewashed walls presented to the eye fuliginous tones, due to the wood and peat burned by the pauper in his stove. On the fireplace were a broken water-pitcher, two bottles, and a cracked plate. A worm-eaten chest of drawers contained his linen and decent clothes. The rest of the furniture consisted of a night-table of the commonest description, another table, worth about forty sous, and two kitchen chairs with the straw seats almost gone. The extremely picturesque costume of the centenarian ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... he was not squeamish and could eat most things now with a good appetite. Some of the houses he went to, in filthy courts off a dingy street, huddled against one another without light or air, were merely squalid; but others, unexpectedly, though dilapidated, with worm-eaten floors and leaking roofs, had the grand air: you found in them oak balusters exquisitely carved, and the walls had still their panelling. These were thickly inhabited. One family lived in each room, and in the daytime there was the incessant noise of children playing in the court. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... which fell harmless on the invincibly sweet temper of Arthur, the young man continued to assist the sufferer along the narrow passage into a little old-fashioned parlour; and no sooner was the owner deposited on his worm-eaten leather chair than he fainted away. On reaching the house, Arthur had sent his servant (who had followed him with the horses) for the nearest surgeon; and while the woman was still employed, after taking off the sufferer's cravat, in burning feathers under his nose, there ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Mr. Brunel visited a ship-yard. An old ship was on the dry-dock getting repaired. A quantity of worm-eaten timber had been taken out from her sides. He picked up one of these pieces of timber, and saw a worm at work, boring its way through. If he had been a proud man, he might have thrown the timber aside, and said—"Get away you poor little worm. ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... felt when, on returning to our own room, and hastily turning the pages, only an old, battered worm-eaten Latin work greeted my eyes! Without loss of time I retraced my steps. Just when I was about to replace the book I heard a noise in the corridor outside, and the sound of footsteps approaching. Fumblingly I hastened to complete what I was about, but the tiresome book had become so tightly ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... "How gladly and willingly would I have undertaken this labor of love," says he, "and gloried in enlightening them down East, that they might keep their home-manufactured clergy at home, or give them some honorable employ, better suited to their genius than that of reading old musty and worm-eaten sermons." ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... magic snail over the lakes, a stranger often comes to the church, and visits the burial vault; he asks the names of the kings, and they have a dead and forgotten sound. He glances with a smile at the worm-eaten crowns, and if he happens to be a pious, thoughtful man, something of melancholy mingles with the smile. Slumber on, ye dead ones! The Moon thinks of you, the Moon at night sends down his rays into your silent kingdom, over which hangs the crown ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... and that timely too. Name me a profest poet, that his poetry did ever afford him so much as a competency. Ay, your god of poets there, whom all of you admire and reverence so much, Homer, he whose worm-eaten statue must not be spewed against, but with hallow'd lips and groveling adoration, what was ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... those nearest to her and sat back at last with her gauze veil in place, tall and still in her arbour, sighing happily now and again and making her little sounds of affectionate raillery as the girls finished their coffee and jested and giggled together across their worm-eaten, green-painted tables. ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... by those citizens never compelled to exist within its yawning walls, and, with its ornament of a wide commodious porch, appeared even palatial in comparison with the log stable upon its left flank, or the dingy tent whose worm-eaten canvas flapped dejectedly upon the right. Directly across the street, its front a perfect blaze of glass, stood invitingly the Occidental saloon; but the Widow Guffy, who operated the Miners' Home with ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... air, thrilled with sunshine, filled her room. It was the "best room," furnished with a curious mingling of the ancient and the modern. The pretty chintz couch laughed at the oaken, high-backed chair, stiff with a century of worm-eaten state. On either side the fireplace hung two ancient engravings, of Mary Stuart and "bonnie Prince Charlie," both garnished with verses, at once remarkable for devoted loyalty and eccentric rhythm. ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... thyng." According to Boece, then, "the nature of the seis" formed the chief element in the production of the geese, and our author proceeds to relate how "all treis (trees) that ar casein in the seis be proces of tyme apperis first wormeetin (worm-eaten), and in the small boris and hollis (holes) thairof growis small worms." Our author no doubt here alludes to the ravages of the Teredo, or ship-worm, which burrows into timber, and with which the barnacles themselves are thus confused. ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... concluded, she conducted me up a rickety, worm-eaten staircase, to a small room above that which we had just left; and indicating one of the two beds therein as the one belonging to her Jean, and the one, therefore, which I was to occupy, bade ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... smoke from ships upon our win'ard side, And the dust raised by their worm-eaten hulks, When our balls touch 'em, blind the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... at the mills, a Portuguese trader arrived with a quantity of worm-eaten logs of this cedar, which he had gathered from the floating timber in the current of the main Amazons. The tree producing this wood, which is named cedar on account of the similarity of its aroma to that ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... examined with a view to ascertain what repairs they needed. Some had been injured by the storms which they had encountered on the way from Marseilles or by accidents of the sea. Others had become worm-eaten and leaky by lying in port. Richard caused them all to be put thoroughly in repair. He also caused a number of battering engines to be constructed of timber which his men hauled from the forests around ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... for being still alive. "I cannot help it," she said. "I ought no longer to be here, but it seems I do not know anything. I do not know even how to die!" The grey, tall houses of Old Cairo do not know how to die. So there they stand, showing their haggard facades, which are broken by protruding, worm-eaten, wooden lattices not unlike the shaggy, protuberant eyebrows which sometimes sprout above bleared eyes that have seen too much. No one looked out from these lattices. Was there, could there be, any life behind them? ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... for the commencement of his great expedition, resolved to make what he called "a preliminary canter." So he and Speke set out on a cruise northward in a crazy old Arab "beden" with ragged sails and worm-eaten timbers. They carried with them, however, a galvanised iron life-boat, "The Louisa," named after Burton's old love, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... examined over and over again by experts during the past forty or fifty years, and from the first they pronounced it a hopeless case, so that it was never restored. The interior, right down to the time of demolition, was like that of most country churches of a century ago, with the old black worm-eaten pews, in which the worshippers shut themselves up as if in their own houses or castles. On account of the damp we were haunted by toads. You smile, sir, but it was no smiling matter for me during my first ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... should certainly have extended them to another dozen of people at least, had not a sudden shutting up and putting away of the worm-eaten old books, warned us that the time for closing the office had arrived; and thus deprived us of a pleasure, and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... their season, get their glow and perfume long after the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards. Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... roof; — in some apartments the very floors had given way; — the hangings were parted from the walls, and shaking in mouldy remnants; the glasses were dropping out of their frames; — the family-pictures were covered with dust. and all the chairs and tables worm-eaten and crazy. — There was not a bed in the house that could be used, except one old-fashioned machine, with a high gilt tester and fringed curtains of yellow mohair, which had been, for aught I know, two centuries in the family. — In short, there was no furniture ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... strange impression; no one could guess the existence of such a place in the upper regions of the building. He would walk through the forest of worm-eaten posts which supported the roof, through narrow passages between the cupolas of the vaulting that arose from the flooring like white and dusty tumours; sometimes there would be a shaft through which he could see down into the ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a doorway and in a few moments returned with a black box of worm-eaten wood, covered with inscriptions in the form of birds, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... them up once for all, closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the resurrection angel." And when I read it I thought, what a stupendous task awaits the angel of the resurrection, when all the countless millions of old rickety, rusty, worm-eaten clocks are to be resurrected, and wiped, and dusted, and repaired, for mansions in the skies! There will be every kind and character of clock and clockwork resurrected on that day. There will be the Catholic clock with his beads, and the Episcopalian clock ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... seemed to him that he had grown a century older. All at once he heard the creaking of the boards of the stairway; some one was ascending. The trapdoor opened once more; a light reappeared. There was a tolerably large crack in the worm-eaten door of his den; he put his face to it. In this manner he could see all that went on in the adjoining room. The cat-faced old crone was the first to emerge from the trap-door, lamp in hand; then ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... my troth, anatomise his purse in his absence. Plutus send there be jewels in it, that I may finely geld it of the stones—the best, sure, lies in the bottom; pox on't, here's nothing but a company of worm-eaten papers: what's this? Memorandum that Master Prodigo owes me four thousand pounds, and that his lands are in pawn for it. Memorandum that I owe. That he owes? 'Tis well the old slave hath some care of his credit; to whom owes he, trow I? that I owe Anamnestes; what, me? I never lent ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... Nazarites, for there the Nazarites cooked their peace-offerings, and polled their hair, and cast it under the pot. The northeast was the chamber for the wood, and there the priests with blemishes gathered out the worm-eaten wood. And every stick in which a worm was found, was unlawful for the altar. The northwest was the chamber for the lepers. The southwest? Rabbi Eleazar, the son of Jacob, said, "I forget for what it served." Abashaul said, "there they put wine, and oil." It was called ...
— Hebrew Literature
... the many sacks, in which certainly there is only wheat. "Well, I hope it's moldy enough," remarks the inspector. "Probably there is only wheat in the other sacks, and very likely even more worm-eaten." ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... some of the huts, found the carved head of a rudder, which—had manifestly belonged to a Dutch long-boat, and was very old and worm-eaten. They found also a piece of hammered iron, a piece of brass, and some small iron tools, which the ancestors of the present inhabitants of this place probably obtained from the Dutch ship to which the long-boat had belonged, all ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... fashion is? how giddily he turns about all the hot-bloods, between fourteen and five-and-thirty? sometime, fashioning them like Pharaoh's soldiers in the reechy painting; sometime, like god Bel's priests in the old church window; sometime, like the shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems as ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... you me for a spirit? I am Isaac the Jew, citizen of the world, and dealer in more rarities and valuables than you ever saw or dreamed of. Shall I open my parcels for thee?' No, said I, I would not take thy poor gewgaws for a gift. One worm-eaten book is worth them all.—'God restore thy reason!' said he, 'and give thee wisdom before thou diest; and that, by thy wrinkles and hairless pate must be soon.' What more of false he would have added I know not, for at ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... was a strange mustiness in everything. The wooden dining-room stuck out over the mud of the shore like a lacustrine dwelling; the planks of the floor seemed rotten; a decrepit old waiter tottered pathetically to and fro before an antediluvian and worm-eaten sideboard; the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one's mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... licking his hands. He turned, and Homo was behind him. Gwynplaine uttered a cry. Homo wagged his tail. Then the wolf led the way down a narrow platform to the wharf, and Gwynplaine followed him. On the vessel alongside the wharf was the old wooden tenement, very worm-eaten and rotten now, in which Ursus lived when the boy first came to him at Weymouth. Gwynplaine listened. It was Ursus ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... a bandy-legg'd, high-shoulder'd, worm-eaten seat, With a creaking old back, and twisted old feet; But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there, I bless thee, and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... and bitterly. "You think I care for the world? Then you read me wrongly at the very outset of our interview, and your once reputed skill as a Seer goes for naught! To me the world is a graveyard full of dead, worm-eaten things, and its supposititious Creator, whom you have so be praised in your orisons to-night, is the Sexton who entombs, and the Ghoul who devours his own hapless Creation! I myself am one of the tortured and dying, and I have sought you simply that you may trick me into a brief oblivion ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... set back several yards from the road and even to the casual observer presented a melancholy picture. The paint was peeling from the clapboards, leaders were hanging in rusty shreds, and the fence post to which Betty tied her horse was rotten and worm-eaten. ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... made a good fire. The roof collapsed and with the incantations of the cowboys, the stout walls, worm-eaten and bullet-splintered, falling ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... appear to be double-tongued, and believe they have done a mighty act if in their Latin orations they can but shuffle in some ends of Greek like mosaic work, though altogether by head and shoulders and less to the purpose. And if they want hard words, they run over some worm-eaten manuscript and pick out half a dozen of the most old and obsolete to confound their reader, believing, no doubt, that they that understand their meaning will like it the better, and they that do not will admire it the more by how much the less they ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... the stairs, the dark and dirty stairs, worm-eaten. A draught came through a broken pane in the skylight, and the walls were dripping. Jean-Christophe sat on one of the greasy steps; his heart was beating wildly with anger and emotion. In a low ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... picking fruit before it is ripe! Allow me to remind you that very much fruit is never picked; some gets nipped in the blossom; some gets worm-eaten and falls to the ground; some rots on the trees before it ripens; some, too slow in ripening, gets bitten by the early frosts of autumn; while some rich, rare, ripe apples hang unpicked, frozen and worthless ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... fragrant street with its cool hose-refreshed pavements, its languorous shadows athwart rose-bush and picket fence, its hopeful weeds already peering through crevices where plank sidewalks maintained their worm-eaten right of way, he was in no dewy- morning mood. He understood what those wise nods had meant, and he was in no frame of mind for such wisdom. He meant to go far, far away from the boarding-house, from the environment of schools and school-boards, from Littleburg ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... together every hole and corner of the house, which, to judge by its foundations, must be very ancient, notwithstanding the fragile appearance of its panels of white paper. It contains the blackest of cavities, little vaulted cellars with worm-eaten beams; cupboards for rice which smell of mould and decay; mysterious hollows where lies accumulated the dust of centuries. In the middle of the night, and during a hunt for thieves, this part of the house, as yet unknown to ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... the Revolution, deposed that he used to carry food to John Van Dyke, in this prison. The other prisoners would try to wrest away the food, as they were driven mad by hunger. They were frequently fed with bread made from old, worm-eaten ship biscuits, reground into meal and offensive to the smell. Many of the prisoners died, and some were put into oblong boxes, sometimes two in a box, and buried in Trinity church-yard, and the boy, himself, witnessed some of the interments. A part of Trinity church-yard was ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... subsisting on the distributions from the public stores, which had sustained great damage during their long passage. These were both scanty, and unwholesome; the allowance to each man, for a day, being only a pint of worm-eaten wheat and barley. This wretched food increased the malignity of the diseases generated by the climate, among men exposed to all its rigours. Before the month of September, fifty of the company were buried; among whom ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... roost, and flapped noisily out into the sunlight when he pushed open the door from below. Here he hunted among the mouldering things of the past until, oh, joy of joys! in an ancient oaken chest he found a great lot of worm-eaten books, that had belonged to some old chaplain of the castle in days gone by. They were not precious and beautiful volumes, such as the Father Abbot had showed him, but all the same they had their quaint painted pictures of the blessed saints ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... these. David Culross had been in the penitentiary twenty years. Now, with that worm-eaten heart, he came out into liberty and looked about him for the habiliments with which he had formerly clothed himself,—for hope, self-respect, courage, ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie |
