"Harum-scarum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but in her time poor goody Moore may have met with a Lovelace, or a Belford, or some such vile fellow? My little harum-scarum beauty knows not what strange histories every woman living, who has had the least independence of will, could tell her, were such to be as communicative as she is. But here's the thing—I have given her cause enough of offence; but not enough to make her hold ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... deranged &c 61; topsy-turvy &c (inverted) 218; shapeless &c 241; disjointed, out of joint. troublous^; riotous &c (violent) 173. complex &c 59.1. Adv. irregularly &c adj.; by fits, by fits and snatches, by fits and starts; pellmell; higgledy-piggledy; helter-skelter, harum-scarum; in a ferment; at sixes and sevens, at cross-purposes; upside down &c 218. Phr. the cart before the horse; hysteron proteron [Gr.]; chaos is come again; the wreck of matter and the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... work, Pickwick, written in a harum-scarum way, is even more typical of Dickens in its spirit of fun and laughter. He had been engaged, as we have noted, to furnish a text for some comic drawings, thus reversing the usual order of illustration. The pictures were intended to poke fun at a club ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... scow near my place," put in her husband. "Had the hold all rigged up with a piano and curtains and rugs. Harum-scarum looking lot of men and women you wouldn't trust to paint a barn. They overran the quarries and made ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... velvet lawn and with an unsatisfied air Mrs. McGregor wheeled about to collect Nell and Tim, who were already tugging at her skirts. She felt as if the events of the past half-hour were a dream. Carl, her harum-scarum son, the catastrophe worker of the family, was the acknowledged friend of Mr. John Coulter, one of the richest and most revered citizens of Baileyville. And more than that he appeared to possess the influence to have men removed from their jobs and discharged employees reinstated ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... way Jim Kendric knew of getting back among old friends and old surroundings. There was nothing subtle about him; in all things he was open and forthright and tempestuous. In a man's hardened and buffeted body he had kept the heart of a harum-scarum boy. ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... the floors ran with blood, and then pelted the passers-by with sheep's heads. They spent the money in the royal treasury like water, and played so many heedless and ruthless boy-tricks that the period of these months of folly was known, long after, as the "Gottorp Fury," because the harum-scarum young brother-in-law, who was the ringleader in all these scrapes, was Duke ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... not, write a line of dignified remonstrance to the duchess, but I should make no attempt to see her; and I should most certainly go. Moreover, it would be a long while before I accepted any of her harum-scarum invitations again. ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... caused Mrs. Baynes's bright smile a moment's hesitation; she disguised it by a quick movement, and spreading her skirts afresh, said: "Why, my dear—he's quite the most harum-scarum person; one never pays the slightest attention ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... calls a child of perdition. I was a privateersman - serving my country, I say; but he calls it pirate. He is thrifty and sober; he has a treasure, they say, and it lies so near his heart that he tumbles up in his sleep to stand watch over it. What has a harum-scarum dog like me to expect from a man like him? He won't see I'm starving for a chance to mend; 'Mend,' he'll say; 'I'll be shot if you mend at the expense of my daughter;' and the worst of it is, you see, he'll ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... My maid is an excellent cook and one is very comfortable chez-moi." And often the prospect thus sketched would piquantly allure a client. Nevertheless at intervals she could savour a fashionable restaurant as well as any harum-scarum minx there. Her secret fear was still obesity. She was capable of imagining herself at fat as Marthe—and ruined; for, though a few peculiar amateurs appreciated solidity, the great majority of men did not. However, she was not ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... look here, Captain Folsom," he said, pleadingly, advancing and laying a hand on the other's arm; "I know what you are saying to yourself. You are saying how foolish it would be for you to encumber yourself with three harum-scarum boys. But that is where you make a mistake. We have been through a lot of dangerous situations, all three of us and, I can tell you, we have been forced to learn to keep our wits about us. I can promise you that we ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... containing a report of their interview with Mrs. Coop and a neat eulogy of little Jane. But don't suspect them, I beg. I believe them to be good, honest fellows. Bench, they say, is religious; Gowen has written verses; Parsons generally harum-scarum. They're boyish in one way or another, and that'll do. The cricket of the school has been low: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fact that many of the featherbrained, harum-scarum captains endeavoured to man their vessels with men who had been trained in north-country colliers. These men were considered not only the best, but the most subordinate in the world. Perhaps this was correct, but I ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... discretion on the ground of simple loyalty. It would not only close my lips but it would to a certain extent cut me off from my usual haunts and from the society of my friends; especially of the light-hearted, young, harum-scarum kind. This was unavoidable. It was because I felt myself thrown back upon my own thoughts and forbidden to seek relief amongst other lives—it was perhaps only for that reason at first I started an irregular, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... o' rain an' snaw, An' weary winter weel awa', Noo busk me in a jacket braw, An' tak my place I' the ram-stam, harum-scarum raw, Wi' ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... description, with a harum-scarum devil of a half-bred, making his way at all risks, at a full gallop, as unmanageable in his career as his driver had been in his speculations; dust flying, women sprawling, men bawling, dogs barking, and the multitude continually increasing. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... there; if he makes one of a party at the Shakspeare or Bedford Head; if he dines at White's ordinary, and sits down to macco and lansquenet afterwards; if he boxes the watch, and makes his appearance at the Roundhouse; if he turns out for a short space a wild dissipated, harum-scarum young Harry Warrington; I, knowing the weakness of human nature, am not going to be surprised; and, quite aware of my own shortcomings, don't intend to be very savage at my neighbour's. Mr. Sampson was: in his chapel in Long Acre he whipped Vice tremendously; ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... high sense of honor, Miss Jocelyn. I will relieve you after a time, if you wish me to," and the student of human nature walked away with a peculiar smile. "When I was a harum-scarum boy," he muttered, "a girl with such a face could almost make me worship her. I don't believe ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... if he don't break your neck in the operation. The little girl will feel strange enough, anyway, coming among people that she has never seen, and I don't intend that she shall be frightened out of her wits into the bargain by your harum-scarum ways. You'd give her the impression that we were only half-civilized. So I'll drive over for her in the family sleigh, and take Alf with me. He will be nearer her own age, and help to break the ice. If you want a lark, go out by yourself, and drive where you please, ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the other hand, the groups, though equally individual, lacked this harum-scarum quality, and, if occasionally ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... be confessed that the party that arrived in the Missisquoi were not very promising-looking boys. They had a wild, harum-scarum appearance and manner, which fully justified the description Captain Vesey had given of them. In a word, they were evidently wild boys; and in this respect they did not differ ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... during the rest of the action. After this battle with the ships of the new republic, the partisans of monarchy noted with satisfaction that, among the many royal figures that surmounted the stems of the British fleet, not one lost his crown. Of a harum-scarum Irish captain are told two droll stories. After being hotly engaged for some time with a French ship, the fire of the latter slackened, and then ceased. He called to know if she had surrendered. ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... a clever fellow in his profession, the long-haired, long-legged young doctor, with his harum-scarum ways and his ready laugh. He had made a true diagnosis of his own case. Before doctors and nurses could be got to him he ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... in this pack to turn the world inside out with wonder—ah, what a sensation it will be, what an educational feature! It will send out a hundred harum-scarum expeditions to find Polaria—but there are few commanders like Captain Burrows; he could do it, the rest of 'em will die in the ice. But when I get to San Fran——. Say, captain, how long will it take to get there, and how ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... lines. His boat, the Bonnie Jean, played all sorts of pranks, rushing out into the current, ducking and diving under water, and finally floating down sideways. Then they thought they would try what Stanton calls Powell's plan of shooting a boat through and catching it below. Such a harum-scarum method was never used on our expedition, and I never heard Powell suggest that it was on the first. Stanton cites as authority one of Powell's statements in the Report. At any rate in this instance it was as disastrous as might have been expected. The poor Marie was again the ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... door, and Dubuche came in. He was a stout young fellow, dark, with regular but heavy features, close-cropped hair, and moustaches already full-blown. He shook hands with both his friends, and stopped before the picture, looking nonplussed. In reality that harum-scarum style of painting upset him, such was the even balance of his nature, such his reverence as a steady student for the established formulas of art; and it was only his feeling of friendship which, as a rule, prevented him from ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... exactly the kind of boy I want in my store," said Mr. Graham. "He's a harum-scarum sort of boy, and likes to shirk his work. Then I suspect he stops to play on the way when I send him on errands. Yesterday he was five minutes longer than he need to have been in goin' to Sam Dunning's to carry some groceries. Thomas ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the reason. That rowdy of the woods, Jasper Jay, spied upon the harum-scarum singers one day, when they were all but bursting themselves in a frenzy of song. And he saw that they were giving what ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... fast filling up by the arrival of other remarkable characters, among whom were noticed Davy Jones, the distinguished nautical personage, and a rude, carelessly dressed, harum-scarum sort of elderly fellow, known by the nickname of Old Harry. The latter, however, after being shown to a dressing-room, reappeared with his gray hair nicely combed, his clothes brushed, a clean dicky ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Exeter matrons thought this hardly proper, since Alma, in spite of her grave ways, was only twenty-four. The farm was rented, so that Alma's only responsibilities were the post office which she kept, and that harum-scarum beauty of an Anna. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the banquet-hall was going on, Simmons was busying himself putting a new bridge under the strings of his violin, tightening its bow, and testing the condition of his instrument by that see-saw, harum-scarum flourish so common to all virtuosos;—no function of the club was ever complete without music—the men meanwhile settled themselves comfortably in their seats; some occupying their old chairs, others taking possession of the divans, the gay costumes of the members, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... is as cold as a Texas norther! What on earth are you doing there without a fire? Come in here, child, and warm your frozen digits. Where are those two harum-scarum ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the family, beginning with Basil, who was only a year younger than herself, though not nearly so capable and reliable, and ending with the fat baby who had not yet found his feet, while in between came harum-scarum Milly, boisterous Robin and Wilfred, coaxing, bewitching little Kitty, and round-faced, stolid, three-year-old Rowland, whose name was generally corrupted to Roly-Poly, because it seemed so exactly to ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... him many times," said the former; "but I can't say that he has ever been a friend of ours. He's rather a wild harum-scarum sort of chap—I imagine his own worst enemy, for he drinks heavily when he can get it, and spends much of the time in the guard-house. Still, they say he's a fighter, every inch of him, and has done ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... Troy divine," which also is much scratched and interlined with Pope's corrections; a manuscript of one of Ben Jonson's masques; of the Sentimental Journey, written in much more careful and formal style than might be expected, the book pretending to be a harum-scarum; of Walter Scott's Kenilworth, bearing such an aspect of straightforward diligence that I shall hardly think of it again as a romance;—in short, I may as well drop ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... like Blackburn Tuckham, now, a man a father could leave his girl to, with confidence! He works for me like a slave; I can't guess why. He doesn't look as if he were attracted. There's a man! but, no; harum-scarum fellows take ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... right, May. Smithers is too much of a convivial harum-scarum fellow to be of much use in the way of giving sound advice. I'll go to see Jamieson instead. You can have no objection to him—surely. He's a quiet, sober sort of man, and never tries to tempt people or lead them into mischief—which is more than can ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... he exclaimed, looking at me sharply out of his small gray eyes. "It seems, 'way back in the sixteenth century, there was a harum-scarum young feller living in a neighboring castle, and he took an awful shine to Lady Katherine, daughter of the Earl of Cummyngs, who was boss of this place at that time. Now the young man who loved Miss—I mean Lady—Katherine was a sort of wild proposition. Old man wouldn't have ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... he seemed to have any liking, was Yan Yost Vanderscamp, and him he liked for his very wickedness. He in a manner took the boy under his tutelage, prompted him to all kinds of mischief, aided him in every wild, harum-scarum freak, until the lad became the complete scapegrace of the village; a pest to his uncle, and to every one else. Nor were his pranks confined to the land; he soon learned to accompany old Pluto on the water. Together these worthies would cruise about the broad bay, and all the neighboring ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... beside the doctor was his namesake and neighbor, Philip Lambert. Phil was graduating, himself, this year from the college across the river, a sturdy athlete of some note and a Phi Beta Kappa man as well. Out of a harum-scarum, willful boyhood he had emerged into a finely tempered, steady young manhood. The Dunbury wiseacres who had been wont to shake their heads over Phil's youthful escapades and prophesy a bad end for such a devil-may-care youngster now patted themselves complacently ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... that would not do at all," said Cricket, decidedly, quite disgusted with this suggestion. "We must call the meeting first, just as grown-up people do." For Cricket, with all her harum-scarum ways, had a strong ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... that he did not know what this was, but he was ashamed, and he determined to find out; he determined to get a drawing-book, and learn something about it himself. To his thinking, the room was pretty harum-scarum. There were shawls hung upon the walls, and rugs, and pieces of cloth, which sometimes had half- finished paintings fastened to them; there were paintings standing round the room on the floor, sometimes right side out, ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... had a talk with my mother. All her ideas were capsized too. Here was her eldest son, the quiet, studious, respectable elder son, out of employment, while her harum-scarum disobedient Frank was getting three hundred a year and with good prospects. She was all bewildered by it. You can't blame her. She looked at me when I told her what I was going to do. 'Take plenty of socks,' she said, quietly. 'You'll need them at sea.' And I suddenly remembered she'd done ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... "brewst" of toddy with the minister—a hare-brained ancient gentleman, long and light and still active, though his knees were loosened with age, and his voice broke continually in childish trebles—and his lady wife, a heavy, comely dame, without a word to say for herself beyond good-even and good-day. Harum-scarum, clodpole young lairds of the neighbourhood paid him the compliment of a visit. Young Hay of Romanes rode down to call, on his crop-eared pony; young Pringle of Drumanno came up on his bony grey. Hay remained on the hospitable ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... o' use to ye now, for some, they be sich friends!" said Grandma, making this observation with the most guileless enthusiasm. "And Becky, she wa'n't much brought up, and used to be as wild and harum-scarum as any of 'em; but I allus said that there was a good deal to Becky, after all. Wall, George Olver, he recognized where she was and he went down thar' and found her, and they wa'n't anybody ventured to say a word, and what need? for everybody respec's ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... remained obdurate, she waited for it to come. But nothing did come. Had she turned, she would have seen that he had grown white, that his hands were clenched and his lips compressed after a way he had and that his wild, harum-scarum soul was worked up to an extraordinary intensity; but she didn't turn. She was waiting for him to pick up the ring, creep along behind her, and seize the hand resting on the mantelpiece, according to the ritual she had mentally foreordained. But without stooping or taking ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... "Fust-rate! that harum-scarum venter er mine was the best I ever made. She's done waal by me, hes Bewlah; ben a grand good housekeeper, kin kerry on the farm better 'n me, any time, an' is as dutif'l an' lovin' a wife as,—waal, as annything that is extra ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... wondered if it ever would come true—what Eleanor had planned about Europe. In her wildest fancies she had never dared allow her thought to outline such possibilities. But here was a harum-scarum friend who seemed to get everything she wanted by merely saying, "We ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... that when a thief, in the act of stealing, leaves more behind him than he found there at first, so that the man stolen from becomes richer by the act of theft than he had been before it, the crime then becomes dupleis delicti, or one of harum-scarum, according to Doodle, and the thief deserves transportation or the gallows. And the reason is obvious: if the property of the person stolen from, under the latter category, were to be examined, and that a larger portion of ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... all felt very deeply the news brought in by that orderly, for soldiers are not such harum-scarum roughs as some people seem to imagine. For the most part, they're men with the same feelings as civilians; and I don't think many of us slept very sound that night, feeling as we did what a charge we had, and that we might be attacked at any time; ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... at which I wrote this narrative, I had gone into lodgings at Barnsbury, and shared rooms with a struggling water-colour painter, who, for the most part, in default of patrons, worked for the pawn-broker—a harum-scarum, ripe-hearted Irishman; and on the Sunday on which I turned out my first contribution to the World, he sat painting and smoking close at hand, and I read out to him, paragraph after paragraph, as I wrote. Those days are gone, but the glow, the passion, the very rage of ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... and I know that you saw the thing in the right light, or you wouldn't 'a' tried to do anything. Jeff told me every word about it. I know he was with a pretty harum-scarum crowd. But it was a lesson to him; and I wa'n't goin' to have him come back here, right away, and have folks talkin' about what they couldn't understand, after the way the paper ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... it was most ill-advised, probably some quixotic idea about not wanting to testify against his friend. If you knew the boy you would understand what a hot-headed, harum-scarum person he is. He was my pupil at one time and I grew quite fond of him. He has ability, undoubted ability, but he is a ship without a rudder; he has been drifting ever since he ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... send you three words, through my harum-scarum Peter, merely to beg that Mrs. Jourdain and yourself will feel no uneasiness concerning the military expedition which has been the principal subject of discussion in my household, and I presume in yours also, since Thursday last. The invincible ...
— Red, White, Blue Socks, Part First - Being the First Book • Sarah L Barrow
... Those "harum-scarum" expeditions, the Crusades, were perhaps influential in checking piracy, although the rabble that composed the majority of them had as little principle as the worst of the freebooters. From the time that Peter the Hermit set Europe in a blaze, all ranks, and all ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... austere and exclusive, was yielding before the onslaught of new people, who were bizarre and fantastic and promiscuous and loud. And the younger sets cared no more about anyone—nor about anything under heaven, save to have a good time in their own harum-scarum ways. In the old days one always received a neatly-written or engraved invitation to dinner, worded in impersonal and formal style; but the other day Mrs. Alden had found a message which had been taken from the telephone: "Please come to dinner, but don't come ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... the alley was contagious. With the reporters' messenger boys, a harum-scarum lot, in "the front," the alley was not on good terms for any long stretch at a time. They made a racket at night, and had sport with "old man Quinn," who was a victim of dropsy. He was "walking on dough," they asseverated, and paid no attention to the explanation ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... have come quite at random. It is not a caricatured reproduction of the poems of chivalry sung in the market, for they were probably serious, stately, and bald, with at most an occasional joke; it is the reproduction of the joint impression received from the absurd, harum-scarum, unpractical world of chivalry of the poet, and the real world of prose, of good-humoured buffoonish coarseness with which the itinerant poet was surrounded. The paladins are no Don Quixotes, the princesses no Dulcineas, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... may well say that. What other object can such a scapegrace have? The girl is handsome—well made—can show a pretty foot. How the upper story is furnished matters little. That's blinked in you women if nature has not played the niggard in other respects. Let this harum-scarum but turn over this chapter—ho! ho! his eyes will glisten like Rodney's when he got scent of a French frigate; then up with all sail and at her, and I don't blame him for it— flesh is flesh. I ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller |
