"Mouldy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a few feet square, opening into another, equally bare, with the exception of a rough bed. "Certainly," said I, "I am not to sleep here!" "Yes," she answered, "this is the sleeping chamber," at the same time setting down the light and disappearing. I examined the place—it smelt mouldy, and the walls were cold and damp; there had been a window at the head of the bed, but it was walled up, and that at the foot was also closed to within a few inches of the top. The bed was course and dirty; and on turning down the ragged covers, I saw with horror, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... most moral of towns. You pass from the railroad station through a long, lonely suburb, with dusty rows of stunted trees on either side, and some few miserable beggars, idle boys, and ragged old women under them. Behind the trees are gaunt, mouldy houses; palaces once, where (in the days of the unbought grace of life) the cheap defence of nations gambled, ogled, swindled, intrigued; whence high-born duchesses used to issue, in old times, to act as chambermaids to lovely Du Barri; and mighty princes rolled ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... credit of manufacturing and putting into market more bad butter than all that is made in all the rest of the world together. The varieties of bad tastes and smells which prevail in it are quite a study. This has a cheesy taste, that a mouldy,—this is flavored with cabbage, and that again with turnip, and another has the strong, sharp savor of rancid animal fat. These varieties, I presume, come from the practice of churning only at long intervals, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... himself; I can only hope that I shall not do it by accident. There may be a sense in which that portrait can be called inaccurate. It may even be true that "lies—damned lies" {1} helped to make it. But nobody else knows anything like as much about the truth, and a peddling biographer's mouldy fragment of plain fact may be far more dangerous than the manly lying of one who was in possession of all the facts. In most cases the fact—to use an equivocal term—is dead and blown away in dust while Borrow's impression is as green as ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... on the south bank of the Thames, and is certainly one of the most beautiful and interesting places in the vicinity of London. From the time of Edward I., the English monarchs had a royal residence here, but by the time of Charles II., this old palace had become a rather mouldy and tumble-down affair, so he commanded that it should be demolished entirely, and a magnificent structure of freestone erected in its place. We read that "riches take to themselves wings," but King Charles's ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... above each story; this serving at once to lessen the monotony of the dead-walls, and to add to the frowning weight of the upper part. The windows were few and small, and the house looked damp and mouldy; lichens clotted the bricks, and moss filled the string-courses. A low door opening from the lane into the garden naturally attracted my attention; but it proved to be of abnormal strength, and bolted both at ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... moment, than our own little detachment, a company of rosy-cheeked, chubbed youths, who, after three months feeding on ship's dumplings, were thus thrust, at a moment of extreme activity, in the face of an advancing foe, supported by a pound of raw beef, drawn every day fresh from the bullock, and a mouldy biscuit. ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... dead on the window-pane; The frost doth wind his shroud; Through the halls of his little summer house The north wind cries aloud. We will bury his bones in the mouldy wall, And mourn for the noble slain: A southerly wind and a sunny sky— Buzz! up he comes again! ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... were busy. At last he rose and aimlessly paced the floor once or twice. In the grate a dull fire was burning, and a few fragments of blackened paper lay on the dying coals. Here and there a word stood out in a mouldy grey against a black background. Foyle did not touch the paper ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... last years, Gide tells us that "he had suffered too grievously from his imprisonment.... His will had been broken ... nothing remained in his shattered life but a mouldy ruin,[23] painful to contemplate, of his former self. At times he seemed to wish to show that his brain was still active. Humour there was; but it was far-fetched, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... is Halifax?" said I, as that quaint, mouldy old town poked its wooden gables through the fog of the second morning. "This is Halifax? This the capital of Nova Scotia? This the city that harbored those loyal heroes of the Revolution, who gallantly and gayly fought, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... denote the butchers' shops; not the pleasantest of sights at any time, least of all in Rome, where the custom of washing the meat after killing it seems never to have been introduced. Next door too is an open stable, crowded with mules and horses. Those black, mouldy loaves, exposed in a wire-work cage, to protect them from the clutches of the hungry street vagabonds, stand in front of the bakers, where the price of bread is regulated by the pontifical tariff. Then comes the "Spaccio di Vino," that gloomiest among the shrines of Bacchus, where ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... moighty little rousin' I want, sor! The ould barquey's that lively that she'd wake a man who'd been d'id for a wake, sure! I've been so rowled about in me burth and banged agin' the bulkheads that my bones fell loike jelly and I'm blue-mouldy all over. But what d'ye want, cap'en? Sure, I'm helping the youngster with ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... blood—the army, the navy, the law, and the Church. The army did not suit him, he said, as marching and counter-marching were not comfortable; the navy did not suit him, as there was little comfort in gales of wind and mouldy biscuit; the law did not suit him, as he was not sure that he would be at ease with his conscience, which would not be comfortable; the Church was also rejected, as it was, with him, connected with the idea of a small stipend, ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... them, laughter and sneers. When their carts were sent to fetch the necessaries of life, lynch-pins were loosened; in more than one case the draught oxen were houghed; the provisions, when received, were mouldy and unwholesome. At last sickness broke out, with stories of poison; then the tension became insupportable. The Voizin chief, too proud to go to his neighbours, summoned them to him; the messenger was murdered. This assassination, of which the natives denied ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... in which the gipsies told fortunes and mended the rush-bottomed chairs of the Valley goodwives came over the wall a faint odour of mouldy hay, which lingered for weeks about every apartment to which any ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... 'midst them in a line of splendour drew Long wreaths and garlands, gather'd in the dew. Some spread the snowy canvas, propp'd on high O'er shelter'd tables with their whole supply; Some swung the biting scythe with merry face, And cropp'd the daisies for a dancing space. Some roll'd the mouldy barrel in his might, From prison'd darkness into cheerful light, And fenced him round with cans; and others bore The creaking hamper with its costly store, Well cork'd, well flavour'd, and well tax'd, that came From Lusitanian mountains, dear to fame, ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... sense—than when we believed in human slavery, but we are not as orthodox as we were then. We have more principle and less piety. We care more for the right and less for the creed. The old orthodox dogmas are mouldy. You will find moss on their backs. They are only brought out when a new candidate for the ministry is to be examined. Only a little while ago in New York a candidate for the Presbyterian pulpit was examined and the following is a part of ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... moment when she came out of her swoon she never knew. The cellar was dark; but it was nothing compared to the darkness enveloping her mind. She lay there on the damp and mouldy straw, hardly able, scarcely wanting, to move, overwhelmed by the extraordinary adventure which had befallen her. Was this to be the end of the pleasant trip into the country on which she had embarked so readily only a few hours before? She tried to remember that within ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... awake, And, leaving their mouldy domain, Make poor guilty mortals to quake As pallid they glide o'er the plain! Sure, Nature's own God is oppressed, And Nature in agony cries;— The sun in his mourning is dressed, To tell the sad news ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... which it was asserted, that the opportunity had at length arrived for solving the great doubt that had long perplexed the minds of the inhabitants as to whether the soil in the neighbourhood was crustaceous or carboniferous. The crustaceous party had been long triumphing in the fact, that a mouldy piece of bread had been found at two feet below the surface, when digging for the foundation of a swing erected in a garden in the neighbourhood; but the carboniferous enthusiasts had been thrown into ecstacies, by the sexton having come upon a regular ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... gentility,—was, in fact, a veritable tramp among luggage. It sagged down as it stood on the floor. It ran here and there into strings, as of shoes untied and coat fastened together by twine in lieu of buttons. And it was trampy with mouldy discoloration and travel-stains. It was of vast dimensions, and, as was always the way with carpet-bags, bulging in all directions with its contents. I was not surprised to discover, through its orifice, that it had long ceased to be a receptacle for clothing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... a week.' I was too astonished to speak, and Henry, he chuckled. 'To see you coming in here,' says he, 'with your face as solemn as a tombstone and sitting down there with your hands clasped over your stomach, and passing me out a blue-mouldy old item of news like that! It'd make a cat laugh, Jim Boyd,' says he. 'Who told you?' says I, stupid like. 'Nobody,' says he. 'A week ago Tuesday night I was lying here awake—and I jest knew. I'd suspicioned it before, but then I KNEW. I've been keeping up for the ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... know? Old ladies, not unfrequently, wear their old coal-scuttle bonnets long past the fashion, but it is from want. This man is his own master and not poor. His companion is a negro, and his taste a mouldy hat, old as America. How happy are we that it is not necessary to pry into such minds! A little refinement is ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... roses, and are done in an exceedingly workmanlike style; but they are allegories of Fame and Plenty and other matters, such as I could never understand. Our whole accommodation is in similar style,—spacious, magnificent, and mouldy. ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... favorable. The day is sunny, and all are on deck to enjoy the air. Damp clothes hang in the rigging to-day, and mouldy boots and shoes ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... verandas, and the voices of many children ring out, clear and bird-like, floating up to the eyrie where we are perched; down towards the shore lies brown, dingy, dirty Tangier, with its mud-colored groups of tiled roofs, its teeming population, its mouldy old walls, its Moorish arched gates, and its minarets, square and dominant. On our way back we again pass through the slave market, where a bevy of dancing-girls with tambourines and castanets look wistfully at ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... driven long distances in bad weather, and frequently half starved, arrived famished, and therefore the more fatigued, and some of them lame. Calculating on their ravenous appetite, the graziers, instead of giving them wholesome food, make them consume the worst that the farm contains,—musty and mouldy fodder; and it is usually by the cough, which the eating of such food necessarily produces, that the disease is discovered ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... effect of the green and gold and red and brown produced a striking picture of sweet poetic beauty. I stood in contemplative admiration meditating, as I waited for my coolies, who sat moodily under a dilapidated roadside awning, nonchalantly picking out mouldy monkey-nuts from some coarse sweetmeat sold by a frowsy female. Then upwards we toiled in the dark, the weird groans of my exhausted men and the falling of the gravel beneath their sandalled feet alone breaking the hollow's gloom. Uncanny is ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... chopped away, how long he did not know. Suddenly his pick struck an obstacle again. He hacked at it. It gave slightly. A third time he struck it, and it seemed to recede. An odour of mouldy air filled his nostrils. In that little aperture his pick touched nothing now! He heard something fall! Then he knew! There was a hollow place in front of them! The abandoned conduit? He ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... stuff, but it takes a long time for the leaves to get mouldy, and it takes a great many, too. Arthur is rather impatient, and he used to say—"I never saw leaves stick on to branches in such a way. I mean to get into some of these old trees and give them a good shaking to remind them what time of year it is. If I don't we shan't ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of the miserable cottages they met with a repetition of their experience in the first. If the reproaches of the living could bring back the dead, old Jacob Horn should have formed one of the group in those mouldy and rotting cottages, to listen to the reiteration of the shameful story of his criminal neglect. Here the windows were bursting from their setting, like the bulging eyes of suffocating men; and here the door-frame was in a state of collapse. In one cottage the ceiling ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... how to deal with you: I hate to be Officious, it has a horrid look; and to let you alone till you die at the Vine of mildew, goes against my conscience, Don't it go against yours to keep all your family there till they are mouldy? Instead of sending you a physician, I will send you a dozen brasiers; I am persuaded that you want to be dried and aired more than physicked. For God's sake don't stay ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... in the air, waiting till the new bodies which they were to animate were made ready for their reception. The spirits of those that had been foully slain wandered about with gashed limbs; and skeletons, whose mouldy bones were held together by bits of blackened sinew, followed them as the murderer does his victim. Malignant witches with shriveled skins, horrid eyes and distorted forms, crawled and crouched over the earth; whilst spectres and goblins now stood motionless, and tall as lofty palm trees; ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... "magnificent breakfast" of sledging ration hoosh, full strength and well boiled to thicken it, with hot milk was served. Luncheon consisted of a wonderful pudding, invented by Wild, made of powdered biscuit boiled with twelve pieces of mouldy nut-food. Supper was a very finely cut seal hoosh flavoured ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... dream, but so impressed was I by the old lady's story that all the rest of the week I searched for further light upon it. Into old carven chests I dived, opening package after package of mouldy papers. In the attic trunks and boxes were rifled, until at last, about to give up in despair, I found in an old desk a letter. It was in French with the Benneville crest and seal, brown with age, and by no means easy to decipher. The place of writing, and the date, quite ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... New England on the shelves of old libraries, in the collections of antiquaries, or in the attics of old farm-houses, hidden in ancient hair-trunks or painted sea-chests or among a pile of dusty books in a barrel,—there are found dingy, mouldy, tattered psalm-books of other versions than the ones which we know were commonly used in the New England churches. Perhaps these books were never employed in public worship in the new land; they may have been brought over by some colonist, in affectionate remembrance of the church of his ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... solitary and grass-grown are these streets! We stop by an old wall, mouldy-green for centuries already. Within it stood the cloister; now there is but one of its wings remaining. There, within that now poor garden still bloom Saint Bridget's leek, and once ran flowers. King John and the Abbess, Ana Gylte, wandered one evening there, and the King cunningly asked: "If ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... Lincoln's conduct of the war, predicated upon a private letter of General Scott, the possession of which he did not satisfactorily account for. The Tribune, referring to his campaign as "a rhetorical spree," called him a "buffoon," a "political harlequin," a "repeater of mouldy jokes,"[852] and in bitter terms denounced his "low comedy performance at Tammany," his "double-shuffle dancing at Mozart Hall," his possession of a letter "by dishonourable means for a dishonourable purpose," and his wide-sweeping statements "which gentlemen over their ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Bernel, one day when they met. "Tom and his wife quarrel so that we can hear them through the walls. And Grannie sits by the hour without opening her mouth. And mother and Nance are as quiet as if they were going to be sick. And I'm getting green-mouldy. Seems as if we'd got to the end of things, and nothing was ever going to happen again. I think ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... black liquid, and proceeded to bury its lower extremity in the hot embers of the wood fire, by which means the liquid was speedily warmed up, and also thickened with unnecessary ashes. When served—in the same dusty pitcher—it had a green and mouldy taste, combined with a sour bitterness which made it utterly impossible as an article of food, and so the breakfast was confined to the rejected fragments of the loaf ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... the weights, kissed the old woman's hand, which had a mouldy feel and a nasty smell. And the old woman, seeing the courtesy of the damsel, said to her, "Hide yourself behind this door, and when Time comes home I will make him tell me all you wish to know. And as soon as he goes out again—for ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... out with his head up and his hat cocked joyously, sniffing the air of Piccadilly like a young hound loosed into covert. Jolly good biz! After that mouldy old slow ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... up a rickety stairway, into a dingy room. The plaster had fallen from the ceiling in several places, and the room had a mouldy smell. There was a platform at one end, where the musicians sat when saltatory fetes were held, and on this I mounted to 'take a view.' I didn't feel called upon to admire the hall in audible terms; but as I stood there an inspiring scene arose before my mental vision—a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ten of them, they conducted Mercier to the bureau of the Administrator, a tired, middle aged men, who shook hands without cordiality, and ordered a boy to bring a tray with a bottle and glasses and mouldy biscuits, and they all sat together and drank without merriment. It was dark in the Administrator's office, for the surrounding verandah was very wide and deep, and tall bamboos grew close against the edges of the railing, and a little way behind the bamboos grew banana trees and ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... what I have done is spoiled; if you do not believe it, send to see.' The Pope sent San Gallo, who, after inspecting the fresco, pronounced that the lime-basis had been put on too wet, and that water oozing out produced this mouldy surface. He told Michelangelo what the cause was, and bade him proceed with the work. So the excuse helped him nothing." About the fresco of the Deluge Vasari relates that, having begun to paint this compartment first, he noticed that the figures ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... fine mouldy smell," said Denys; "in such places still lurks the good wine; advance thy torch. Diable! what is that in the corner? A pile of rags? No: ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... it would be too absurd to let your opinions prevent you from earning your living. And, besides, my dear fellow, the Emperor isn't at all a bad sort of man. You don't suppose, do you, that he knew you were eating mouldy bread and tainted meat? He can't be everywhere, you know, and you can see for yourself that he hasn't prevented us here from doing pretty well. You are not at all just; indeed you ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... pile of mouldy hay across the barn the youth, heavy eyed but sleepless, watched the two through half closed lids. A qualm of disgust sent a sudden shudder through his slight frame. For the first time he almost regretted having embarked upon a life of crime. He had ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... were black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They're patch'd with ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... talk. He leaned his elbows on the primitive table, held his head between his hands, and kept silent. His eyes wandered about the dark, mouldy den, filled with the stench of a smoking little kerosene lamp. He saw the mildewed straw in the corner, the disconnected telephone at the entrance, an empty box of tinned food on which a crumpled map ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... matters to be preserved are well boiled in a tin case provided with a small hole, and this hole is soldered up when all the air in the case has been replaced by steam. By this method they may be kept for years without putrefying, fermenting, or getting mouldy. Now this is not because oxygen is excluded, inasmuch as it is now proved that free oxygen is not necessary for either fermentation or putrefaction. It is not because the tins are exhausted of ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... said Ben, "a sailor's life is well enough, if you don't mind hard beds and harder words. If you can eat salty meat and mouldy bread it's a fine life, Archie. There is no life I'd like better if they'd give you fresher water and not quite so many cruel blows. But, if you've made up your mind, Archie, and think you can go to bed nights in a rolling, tossing sea, with the wind howling and ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... moving on Ranjitgarh, or that this or the other Sirdar was about to cut the communications with Agpur, and in the society of James Antony and his intimates these were the topics that everybody discussed. But spending the mid-day hours in the damp heat of the drawing-room, where paper grew mouldy and the covers peeled off books, under the influence of the rains, with Mrs Antony occupied at a discreet distance with reading or letter-writing, Gerrard endured what would have been martyrdom but for ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... was on his feet again, saying he had forgotten something. Then he entered the next room—there were three in the suite—unlocked a closet, brought back a mouldy-looking bottle and two Venetian glasses, moved up a spider-legged, inlaid table, and said, as he placed the bottle and ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... up the stone staircase leading simply to the long gallery above the cloisters, a gallery where all the dusty worthless old pictures had been banished for the last three generations—mouldy portraits of Queen Elizabeth and her ladies, General Monk with his eye knocked out, Daniel very much in the dark among the lions, and Julius Caesar on horseback, with a high nose and laurel crown, holding his Commentaries in ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... whenever it's not turned to man's account. The kitchens and offices were too large, and too remote from each other. Above stairs and below, waste tracts of passage intervened between patches of fertility represented by rooms; and there was a mouldy old well with a green growth upon it, hiding like a murderous trap, near the bottom of the back-stairs, under the double row of bells. One of these bells was labelled, on a black ground in faded white letters, MASTER B. This, ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... RANDLE and ROOPE.] Yes, gentlemen, the books are in a mouldy cellar, also rented by Messrs. Hopwood, at 6, Carmichael Lane. There's thousands of them there, in cases—some of the cases with shipping marks on them, some marked for inland delivery. I've inspected them this afternoon—overhauled them. Mr. Sweasy ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... carefully. A little neglect will often result in failure, as mould, once given a chance to secure a foothold, is rapid in its action, and your tubers may be beyond help before you discover that there is anything the matter with them. As soon as you find a mouldy root, throw it out. If left it will speedily communicate its disease to every plant with which it comes in contact. Some persons tell me that they succeed in wintering their Dahlia tubers best by packing them in boxes of perfectly dry sand. ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... heart of a bustling, indifferent city, seen from the windows of a gloomy-looking inn, is at no time an object of enlivening suggestion; and the spectacle is not at its best when the mouldy tombstones and funereal umbrage have received the ineffectual refreshment of a dull, moist snow-fall. If, while the air is thickened by this frosty drizzle, the calendar should happen to indicate that the blessed vernal season is already six ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... not be there at all. Did you ever hear of a mouldy old castle but had its tale about a secret passage? And did anybody ever see one? Better make the ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... room, into which a ray of sun was never allowed to penetrate, was thrown open and dusted, and its mouldy air made sweet with a bouquet of pot-roses placed on the old-fashioned bureau. Kitty was busy all the forenoon washing off the sidewalk and sand-papering the great brass knocker on our front-door; and Miss Abigail was up to her elbows ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... oracle of Delphi, you old rascal," cried the Prince, with great good-humour. "That's a crumb of the mouldy bread of learning you used to cram down my throat in the old days. It makes Master Wheatman writhe to hear it. The only advantage I ever got out of being a Prince was that old Tom here never dared thrash me for gulping ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... anywhere under this shadow of Golgotha: a perpetual sway to and fro of the human tides, seething with sobs and quarrels; flowing into the planless maze of chapels and churches of all ages and architectures, that, perched on rocks or hewn into their mouldy darkness, magnificent with untold church-treasure—Armenian, Syrian, Coptic, Latin, Greek, Abyssinian—add the resonance of their special sanctities and the oppression of their individual glories of vestment and ceremonial to the surcharged atmosphere palpitant with exaltation and prayer ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Deane contrived to find a nest for his blanket in the mouldy straw of the unfinished barn loft, he could not sleep. He restlessly watched the stars through the cracks of the boarded roof, and listened to the wind that made the half-open structure as vocal as a sea-shell, until ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... there they remained doing nothing, for nothing could be done. The Republicans, under their clever, daring chiefs, had completely gained the upper hand, and the Royalist cause was lost. We meantime had to enjoy the luxuries of salt pork and mouldy biscuit, either blockading the enemy's ports or looking out ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... carthorse, which is elevated above the principal door. The Great White Horse is famous in the neighbourhood in the same degree as a prize ox, a county paper chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig, for its enormous size. Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof as are collected together between the four walls of the Great White Horse of Ipswich.' This was the great hotel of the Ipswich ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... fruitful. In the little square of the village are several fragments of marble and other relics of Roman domination; and the church, about four or five hundred years old, dedicated to St. Pancrazio, is in a state of great decay. The walls are damp and mouldy, and all the pictures and ornaments are of the rudest description, with the exception of a faded fresco of the coronation of the Virgin, which is a fair specimen of the art of the fifteenth century. The service ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Old mouldy men and books and names and lands Disgust my reason and defile my hands. I had as lief respect an ancient shoe, As love old things for age, and hate the new. I spurn the Past, my mind disdains its nod, Nor kneels in homage to so mean a God. I laugh at those who, while they gape and ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... father-fools, Had rioted his life out, and made an end. He would not do it! her sweet face and faith Held him from that: but he had powers, he knew it: Back would he to his studies, make a name, Name, fortune too: the world should ring of him To shame these mouldy Aylmers in their graves: Chancellor, or what is greatest would he be— 'O brother, I am grieved to learn your grief— Give me my fling, and let me ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... conserve made of raw Roses beaten with Sugar, which is very rough in the throat. The worst of it is, that if you put not a Paper to lie always close upon the top of the conserve, it will be apt to grow mouldy there on the top; especially apres ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... Swiftmouth. I call them hoary, because they had been built more than fifty years. To me they seemed uncommonly hoary, and I snuffed antiquity in the dusty purlieus. I now began to study, in good earnest, the wisdom of the past. I saw clearly the value of dead men and mouldy precepts, especially if the former had been entombed a thousand years, and if the latter were well done in sounding Greek and Latin. I began to reverence royal lines of deceased monarchs, and longed to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... to his still to obtain a supply of water. One of the casks was always left full, in case of emergency, should bad weather come on, and it be impossible to keep the stove alight. Again they were on a short allowance of food; the wet flour had become perfectly mouldy, and the biscuits were in very little better condition. Starving people only ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... germinating. I have sometimes wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the earth got planted; but, by the end of December, I find the chestnut of the same year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the decaying and mouldy leaves, where there is all the moisture and manure they want, for the nuts fall first. In a plentiful year, a large proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are, of course, somewhat concealed from squirrels. One winter, when the crop ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... miserly. Probably from A.-S. harian, to become mouldy or musty. The word hoard may be traced to ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... poet refers to this very case of music entering "the mouldy chambers of the dull idiot's brain;" but in support of what seems ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... And lifts with self-applause each lordly brow. In number boundless as the blooms of Spring, Behold their glaring idols, empty shades By Fancy gilded o'er, and then set up For adoration. Some in Learning's garb, With formal band, and sable-cinctured gown, And rags of mouldy volumes. Some elate With martial splendour, steely pikes and swords Of costly frame, and gay Phoenician robes 100 Inwrought with flowery gold, assume the port Of stately Valour: listening by his ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor's back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)—this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... hut. He offered us bread to eat, milk to drink, and straw to lie on: we desired nothing more, and were happy, though the bread was black, the milk sour, the straw mouldy. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... catch there. The entertaining Captain has narrated an effective anecdote of an enraged elephant, and a precious big boar speared in a savage jungle—to which he might have added, with no more personal risk than Mrs. Brown may experience when hunting for a boa in her wardrobe. And, Mr. Mouldy, the city merchant, who dealt in rags, sang about a little excitable pig, and "Mac Mullin's Lament;" whilst Mr. Snobbins—who it was hoped would sit and be silent,—has broken the spell, dared to remember old times, sleeping under a counter, and the pugnacity of Brown, when they were in a mess ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... touch to the human scene. But in the main he sticks to more seemly materials and designs. His achievement, in fact, consists precisely in the success with which he gives those materials a striking newness, and gets a novel vitality into those designs. He takes the ancient and mouldy parts of speech—the liver and lights of harangues by Dr. Harding, of editorials in the New York Times, of "Science and Health, with a Key to the Scriptures," of department-store advertisements, of college yells, of chautauqual oratory, ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... bones or mired mules, gas-pipes, miners' tools, antique statues minus the nose, Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements, grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated citizens, garbage, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... is good of you to say so; but what can a fellow do? When I rejoined the service, I expected to see some fighting. Disappointed. And now I'm parted from my daughter, and lying in this old barn positively getting mouldy. Besides—" ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... his feet touched solid ground and he found himself in a large cavernous chamber. It was a dismal place. The rocky walls were damp and mouldy; the floor was of hewn stone. There was an odour as of death ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... either been gifted with such a generous-sized cake of youth that it has lasted all their lives, or they have possessed a great art in the eating of it. Though I may add here that a cautious husbanding of your cake is no good way. That way you are liable to find it grown mouldy on your hands. No, oddly enough, it is often seen that those who all their lives have eaten their cake most eagerly have quite a little of it left at the end. There are no hard and fast rules for the eating of your cake. One can only find out by ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... in court dress. On fast days he always donned clothes of pale hue, changed his food, and moved from his wonted seat. He did not dislike his rice cleaned with care, nor his hash copped small. He would not eat sour or mouldy rice, putrid fish, or tainted meat. Aught discolored or high, badly cooked, or out of season, he would not eat. He would not eat what was badly cut, or a dish with the wrong sauce. A choice of meats could not tempt him to eat more than he had a relish ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... trowth, I needs must say't o't! The L—d be thankit that we've tint the gate o't! Gaunt, ghastly, ghaist-alluring edifices, Hanging with threat'ning jut like precipices; O'er-arching, mouldy, gloom-inspiring coves, Supporting roofs fantastic, stony groves; Windows and doors, in nameless sculpture drest, With order, symmetry, or taste unblest; Forms like some bedlam Statuary's dream, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... mouldy old carps are, after all, a curiosity, and attract visitors," continues Mr. Warrington, gravely. "Your ladyship must allow this old wretch to remain. It won't be for long. And you may then engage the tall porter. It is very hard on us, Mr. Van den Bosch, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... too late, I pray you, Captain Brand, for that sharp eye of Don Ignacio has already, perhaps, looked at the shiny cleft in the crag, and thinks he knows what lies hidden there! Oh, si! nothing but mouldy beans and paper cigars to live upon for ten years, and fond of more substantial food, even though it were yellow greenish gold, mildewed by damp, but yet solid and refreshing. Cierto—certainly! ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... life, too much artificial heat, too much clothing, impure air, limited space, indigestible food—indigestible because he did not know how to prepare it, and in itself poor food for him. He was compelled often to eat diseased cattle, mouldy flour, rancid bacon, with which he drank large quantities of strong coffee. In a word, he lived a squalid life, unclean and apathetic ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... glorious spectacle, isn't it, Bunch, to watch this mouldy writer, with a big newspaper behind him and columns of space at his command, throwing his hooks into actors and actresses who haven't a chance on earth ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... the one in which Gobseck had died, a quantity of eatables of all kinds were stored—putrid pies, mouldy fish, nay, even shell-fish, the stench almost choked me. Maggots and insects swarmed. These comparatively recent presents were put down, pell-mell, among chests of tea, bags of coffee, and packing-cases of every shape. A silver soup tureen ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... It need scarcely be said that the treaty was an unquestionable Indian success. They did not give up their arable lands; what they did sell to the agent they refused to exchange for extravagant-priced shoddy blankets, worthless guns, damp powder, and mouldy meal. They took pay in dollars, and were thus enabled to open more profitable commerce with the traders at the settlements for better goods and better bargains; they simply declined beads, whiskey, and Bibles at any price. The result was that the traders found it profitable to protect them ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... on the flagpole was no flag. It was the district schoolhouse where for nearly half his life Deborah's grandfather had taught a score of pupils. Inside were a blackboard, a rusty stove, a teacher's desk and a dozen forms, grown mouldy and worm-eaten now. A torn and faded picture of Lincoln was upon one wall, half hidden by a spider's web and by a few old dangling rags which once had been red, white and blue. Below, still clinging to the wall, was an old scrap of paper, on which in a large rugged hand ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... for the out-of-the-way places of the earth when they bristle all over with the quaint and the old and the odd, and are mouldy with the picturesque. But here is an in-the-way place, all sunshine and shimmer, with never a fringe of mould upon it, and yet you lose your heart at a glance. It is as charming in its boat life as an old Holland canal; it is as delightful in its shore ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... you 'll hev to rattle On them kittle drums o' yourn,— 'Taint a knowin' kind o' cattle Thet is ketched with mouldy corn; Put in stiff, you fifer feller, Let folks see how spry you be,— Guess you 'll toot till you are yeller 'Fore you git ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... bridge and mouldy archway tender tendrils of living green fluttered, brushing her cheeks. Beneath the thickets the under-wood world was very busy, where squirrels squatted or prowled and cunning fox-sparrows avoided the starlings and blackbirds; ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... opens out of it, and that is a place to be run past at night; for I don't know what may be among those tubs and jars and old tea-chests, when there is nobody in there with a dimly-burning light, letting a mouldy air come out of the door, in which there is the smell of soap, pickles, pepper, candles, and coffee, all at one whiff. Then there are the two parlours: the parlour in which we sit of an evening, my mother and I and Peggotty—for ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... scanned his immediate surroundings. The paper of the sho[u]ji was torn and eaten by the rats. In places the frayed tatami (mats) bent under his feet, evidence of decay of the supporting floor. There was the mouldy damp smell common to places long closed to the freedom of the outer air. It sent a chill to the bone; which Endo[u] noted with surprise as he turned to the dark inner rooms. He must have some kind of light. Almost the first step into the semi-obscurity offered the means to hand. ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... which has been allowed to stand until it is spoiled, or has become stale, musty, or mouldy, such as mouldy bread or fruit, or tainted meat, is unfit to be eaten, and is often a cause of very severe sickness. Canned fish or other meats spoil very quickly after the cans are opened, and should be eaten ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... and truth, that the Serpent assured her that the forbidden fruit was not apples, it was chestnuts. I said I was innocent, then, for I had not eaten any chestnuts. She said the Serpent informed her that "chestnut" was a figurative term meaning an aged and mouldy joke. I turned pale at that, for I have made many jokes to pass the weary time, and some of them could have been of that sort, though I had honestly supposed that they were new when I made them. She asked me if I had made one just at the time of the catastrophe. I was obliged to admit that I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... woods. But soon the chestnut trees appear stunted, and the groves become less thick, and we finally gain the last zone, the desolate expanse of naked rock and dark lava deposits of the summit, where only a few hardy weeds can thrive. Here in some damp mouldy chambers dwells a hermit, for nearly all the classic mountains of Southern Italy are tenanted by an anchorite, generally an old and ignorant, but pious peasant, of the type of Pietro Murrone, the holy recluse of the Abruzzi, who was finally dragged from his cell to be invested ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... only with your eyes,"—and they can be more eloquent than any Demosthenes of your New England Athens. Women are younger than men, and nearer to nature; they have more animal life and spirits and glee. Their lively, frolicsome, sunshiny chatter keeps existence from growing mouldy and stale. We have it on the authority of the wittiest of Frenchmen, that for the purposes of pleasant, every-day life, L'enjouement vaut mieux que l'esprit. If I wish to discuss a question of political economy, or of metaphysics, I can go to men; but the art of talking the men of to-day have lost. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... above the horizon, the tree-tops which joined overhead being interlaced by numberless creepers of various descriptions, forming a roof impenetrable by the light of day. An almost insupportable mouldy odour, like the effluvium arising from a dead body, pervaded the atmosphere; but eager to obtain the bird, Lejoillie pushed on, and I followed. The pool into which the duck had fallen was covered with a green scum; and on throwing a piece of wood into it, the green ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... over the floor, very deep on one side, where an old blanket showed that it had been a bed. Across the end there was a shelf. On it was a candlestick, with a half-burned candle in it, a pie pan with some mouldy crumbs, crusts, bones in it, and a tin can. Leon picked up the can and looked in. ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... took a rotten old leaky boat they were poor and could afford no other—they took, I say, a rotten old leaky boat whose tiller was loose and whose sails mouldy, and whose blocks were jammed and creaking, and whose rigging frayed, and they boldly set out together into the great ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... first; but in the darkest part of the hut, farthest from the door, the low, bench-like erection was piled with sea-weed apparently, till they drew closer and found that there were several mouldy bear-skins, from which the hair had rotted, and which came away in fragments upon ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... was a case of "two's company and three's none," and that Mr. Russell, after turning a deaf ear to hints to retire which had gradually increased in bluntness, had suddenly turned restive and called Mr. Tasker a "mouldy image," a "wall-eyed rabbit," and divers other obscure and contradictory things. Not content with that, he had, without any warning, kissed Miss Vickers, and when Mr. Tasker, obeying that infuriated damsel's commands, ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... it. The doorway had once been elaborately ornamented with mouldings in yellow stucco, most of which had fallen, and all but choked the stairs. The crude pale color of these fragments jarred harshly against the olive of the damp stone foundations and the stained brown of the mouldy brick. After my usual fashion, I set myself to explore this doorway, in my interest half forgetting my apprehensions. As I descended the steps the sound of the running water faded out, with a suddenness which caught ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of turnip and carrot seed out of England, or for an handful of peas and beans, and a bottle of ink: as it was, I had not the least advantage by it, or benefit from it; but there it lay in a drawer, and grew mouldy with the damp of the cave, in the wet season; and if I had had the drawer full of diamonds, it had been the same case; and they had been of no manner of value to me, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... topsy-turveydom may be attained with comparative ease, it performs a lofty philosophical function. Everything rusts by use. Our moral ideals grow mouldy if preached too much; our stories stale if told too often. Conventionality is but a living death. The other side of everything must be shown, the reverse of the medal, the silver side of the shield as well as the golden. Convex things are equally concave, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... crowd. At one point, for the sake of company, I joined a group and took a turn at shoving the family wheel-barrow. They poured out thanks in the guttural Flemish tongue, then loaded me with bread and bits of mouldy pie. When that was not accepted they feared for their hospitality. They talked and I talked, with a result that was hardly worth the effort. Finally, after a conference, one of the group disappeared into the crowd and returned ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... man still leaning back in the leather chair, there seemed for the instant to flicker up behind him some vague presentiment of that foul old dandy with his dangling seals, many-wreathed scarf, and dark satyric face. What was he now? An armful of bones in a mouldy box. But his deeds— they were living and rotting the blood in the ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... earth first cooled—the great cavern seemed to return to its awful original mood. The three dwarfed humans became wholly conscious of it. They felt it almost a living thing, stretching vastly around them, tightening its unheard spell on them. Its smell, of mouldy earth and rocks down which water slowly dripped, filled their nostrils and ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... the earth closed upon them both, and, after falling in the dark down a steep abyss, they found themselves, not at all the worse, standing in a dimly lighted cave with a large table in it piled with mouldy books. Behind the table was a smooth and perfectly round hole in the wall about the size of ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... her life was in great danger in that hot climate. Twice during the month we received a box from Kuching, sent by a native boat. Once it contained our mail—an immense pleasure; also some bread and biscuits, but they were wet with salt water, and mouldy besides. However, Mab and Alan could eat them. I used to look with thankful astonishment at those children, both so delicate generally, but who throve all the time we were without proper food or shelter. But baby Edith shrank and pined, and at last my husband said, "We shall lose this child ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... had the blissful security of being unknown, and were left to ourselves. Americans know Chester better than most other old towns in England, because they so frequently stop there awhile on their way from Liverpool to London. It has a mouldy old cathedral, an old wall, partly Roman, strange old houses with overhanging upper floors, which make sheltered sidewalks and dark basements. When one sees an old house in New England with the second floor projecting a foot or two beyond the wall of the ground floor, the country ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Mr Dennis, pulling out a mouldy pocket-handkerchief, which looked like a decomposed halter, and wiping his ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... chosen for the purpose, was a mouldy old church in a yard, hemmed in by a labyrinth of back streets and courts, with a little burying-ground round it, and itself buried in a kind of vault, formed by the neighbouring houses, and paved with echoing stones It was a great dim, shabby pile, with high old oaken pews, among ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... have looked over the interior, the sacristan conducts us out into the mouldy little burying-ground at one side, and crossing the grass, proudly points out in the surrounding wall the chief historic ear-mark of the place,—a scar among the stones, where was once a narrow opening through the wall. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... hospital at Cottbus "said that the food was good and their treatment excellent." Men in the main camp complained that bread sent to them from Switzerland and England arrived in a mouldy condition, but "as the mouldiness seemed to start in the middle of the loaf, they thought this was due to the quality of the bread itself or the manner ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... deep on the gun-platforms, and the gunners worked at their guns until their shoes, soaked for days and days, fairly fell from their feet. For bed and bedding they had the wet earth, for rations raw meat and mouldy bread. If there were glory and victory for the Union sailors, let there at least be honor and credit granted the soldiers of the gray for the dogged courage with which they bore the terrible ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... against the mouldy wall of that old stairway shivering as if I had been suddenly stricken with the ague. I had trembled in every limb before ever I heard the sound of the sudden scuffle, and from a variety of reasons—the relief of having Hollins's revolver withdrawn from my nose; the knowledge that ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher |
