"Cropper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a billet at Coxon & Woodhouse's, of Draper's Gardens, but they were let in early in the spring through the Venezuelan loan, as no doubt you remember, and came a nasty cropper. I had been with them five years, and old Coxon gave me a ripping good testimonial when the smash came, but of course we clerks were all turned adrift, the twenty-seven of us. I tried here and tried there, but there were lots of ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the protests of the clerk, the money would be handed over and the shop released from levy. Unfortunately, after working the game for several years, Levine came a cropper by carelessly trying it on one of the same clerks that he had victimized some time before. The clerk, being of an unusually vindictive disposition, followed the matter up. Having first arrested the ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... lot of men, in my line and in others, have come a cropper in their careers, because of some woman. But I'm the first to come such a cropper on account of a woman with a white soul and the eyes of a child,—a woman I scarcely know, and who has no interest in me. But, to-night, I shall telegraph my resignation. Some saner man can take charge. There are ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... like a man in the last stages of consumption. Little life as Sundry Buyers showed, Nancy showed even less life. And these were bosuns!—bosuns of the fine American sailing-ship Elsinore! Never had any illusion of mine taken a more distressing cropper. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... bad cropper. I was thrown clear of the machine, but knew nothing until I waked up, feeling like a bag of broken bones. It was night, and I saw a huge fountain of red flame and a lot of dark figures like silhouettes ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "it happened a good while ago, that business, and it's just as likely as not that it was Adam whom the devil first put up to a thing or two, and Eve got it out of him—for I grant you that women are curious—and then they both came a cropper together, and it was a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other. It mostly is, I should think, in ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... officials on the Belgian frontier. Others of the band were also under lock and key again: it really seemed as if Mother Toulouche and her circle were being strictly watched by the police ... and now here was Emilet who had come a regular cropper in his aeroplane—no ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... iesser-known English painters who had given great promise at the time it was published but who dropped completely out of notice soon afterward because of a mistaken notion of his own importance. If Booth's memory served him right, the fellow came a cropper, so to speak, in trying to ride rough shod over public opinion, and went to the dogs. He had been painting sensibly up to that time, but suddenly went in for the most violent style of impressionism. That was the ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... sympathetic, and vastly interesting all the while. Could he not divine it in her undivided attention, the quick, amused flicker of recognition animating her beautiful face when he had turned a particularly successful phrase or taken a verbal hurdle without a cropper? And above all, her kindness to him impressed him; her natural and friendly pleasure in being agreeable. Here he was already on an informal footing with one of the persons of whom he had been most shy and uncertain. If people were going to be ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... scour the pikes. Tom Cropper, find something to keep you out of mischief. As for you, Gaffer Shard, you may ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... stanza. The matter of the composition is by no means memorable, but I think I have a right to congratulate myself upon the fact that I was able at that age to manage the triple rhymes and the twelve-syllable line at the end of each stanza without coming a complete cropper. I could not do it now, even if my life depended ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... come a nasty cropper, and reaped what, sooner or later, is the inevitable reward ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... little. It was plain enough. You had come a bad cropper. Some girl, I gathered. You had lost her, you blamed yourself. You talked a great deal of nonsense. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... worst of walking carefully all your days: you do come such an awful cropper when you do come one. Two women. The Jasmine lady must have been practising on his poor little heart. Heigh-ho, I wish she could do as much for me! And the other ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... was a tributary ditch, which would have been considered a fair jump in the hunting-field: both brigands took it in splendid style. The hindmost was not ten yards ahead of the leading trooper, who came a cropper; on which the brigand reined up, fired a pistol-shot into the prostrate horse and man, and was off; but the delay cost him dear. The other trooper, who was a little ahead of me, got safely over. I followed suit. In another moment he had fired his carabine ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... him sometimes, to poke fun at him, but at bottom he was sorry for the fellow. There was something pathetic in his determination to make a job of everything. You couldn't help feeling he'd be caught out one day, and then what an almighty cropper he'd come! At that moment an immense wave lifted Jonathan, rode past him, and broke along the beach with a joyful sound. What a beauty! And now there came another. That was the way to live—carelessly, recklessly, spending oneself. ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield |
