"Vagabond" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "and that abominable mischance, that foul scandalous deed of a vagabond, will be the death of me; I know it as well as you. I shall not hold out ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... their repast on the deck; the men keep an eye to windward and a hand on the tiller; the mother knots the cord that goes around the baby's waist into an iron ring, and, feeling secure against the bantling's falling overboard, chats sociably, occasionally enforcing a mild reproof to a vagabond son by a tap on the head with her chopstick. There is but one dish, rice, of a very ordinary sort and of a pink color, but all seem to thrive upon it. The meal over, the men smoke their pipes, and the wife washes her cooking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... you no, boy," he said impatiently. "It would be unjust to you to encourage you to lead such a vagabond life as mine. Say no more about it, sir," he added harshly. ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... nothing is known until the end of the story. Hannibal is charmed into tolerance of the Judge's picturesque vices, while Miss Betty, lovely and capricious, is charmed into placing all her affairs, both material and sentimental, in the hands of this delightful old vagabond. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... mercantile career had ended, and forthwith I took to the range as a preacher's son takes to vice. By the time I was twenty there was no better cow-hand in the entire country. I could, besides, speak Spanish and play the fiddle, and thought nothing of riding thirty miles to a dance. The vagabond temperament of the range ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... worships of the Mystery wandered as did men, and between filchings and borrowings the gods had as vagabond a time of it as did we. As the Sumerians took the loan of Shamashnapishtin from us, so did the Sons of Shem take him from the Sumerians and ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... lately attracted attention in Paris. Paillasse, in five acts, by MM. Dennery and Marc Fournier, produced at the Gaiete in November, was one of the greatest hits during the latter part of 1850. The character of the conventional French mountebank, Paillasse, the vagabond juggler of fairs and streets, was regarded as one of the finest creations of Frederic Lemaitre, and in one of the Christmas revues a symbol of the piece passed before the eyes of the audience as one ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... piratical exploit during the rebellion, and bravely did the militia beat off the soi-disant general and his sympathizing vagabond patriots; but this is a page of Canadian history for hereafter, and need not be repeated here. The sufferers have had a monument erected to their memory in these words by the ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... stretching out and falling back to her side with automatic regularity, and still the little figure pranced, and gesticulated, and blew kisses to right and left, at one moment a merry Irish vagabond, at the next a French marionette—all smirks and bows ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... gentleman, or village pastor, who would have held his town glorified by the distinction of having sent forth a great judge or an eminent bishop, might disdain to cherish the personal recollections which surrounded one whom custom regarded as little above a mountebank, and the illiberal law as a vagabond. The same degrading appreciation attached both to the actor in plays and to their author. The contemptuous appellation of "play-book," served as readily to degrade the mighty volume which contained Lear and Hamlet, as that of "play-actor," or ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... man in the red shawl paid the assassin villains for taking thee prisoner,—thee and thee kinswoman. His hirelings were vagabonds of all the neighbouring tribes, Shawnees, Wyandots, Delawares, and Piankeshaws, as I noted well when I crept among them; and old Wenonga is the greatest vagabond of all, having long since been degraded by his tribe for bad luck, drunkenness, and other follies, natural to an Injun. My own idea is, that that white man thirsted for thee blood, having given thee up ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... nor important less Seemed their petition, than when the ancient pair In fables old, less ancient yet than these, Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha, to restore The race of mankind drowned, before the shrine Of Themis stood devout. To Heaven their prayers Flew up, nor missed the way, by envious winds Blown vagabond or frustrate: in they passed Dimensionless through heavenly doors; then clad With incense, where the golden altar fumed, By their great intercessour, came in sight Before the Father's throne: them the glad Son ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... and coming to the harbour, they found an unlettered youth. Not caring to lead him to the holy man, they returned and declared that they had found no one, save an unlettered youth who was wandering as a vagabond in the woods. But Saint Queranus said, "Lead him hither," said he, "and despise not your future pastor." Who being led in, by the inspiration of God and by the instruction of the holy man, took on him the habit of religion, and duly learned his letters. For he is Saint Oenius, a man of venerable ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... finished his night watching and breakfast, was audibly asleep in the house. Brown rubbed and polished leisurely, his thoughts far away, and a frown on his face. For the thousandth time that week he decided that he was a loafer and a vagabond, and that it would have been much better for himself, and creation generally, if he had never risen after the ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... elasticity of the manzanito against which she was leaning threw her forward once more. He again inhaled the perfume of her hair; he saw even the tiny freckles that darkened her upper lip and brought out the moist, red curve below. A sudden recollection of a playmate of his vagabond childhood flashed across his mind; a wild inspiration of lawlessness, begotten of his past experience, his solitude, his dictatorial power, and the beauty of the woman before him, mounted to his brain. He threw his arms passionately around her, pressed his lips ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... happened to be empty till I reached Nasirabad, when a huge gentleman in shirt-sleeves entered, and, following the custom of Intermediates, passed the time of day. He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself, but with an educated taste for whiskey. He told tales of things he had seen and done, of out-of-the-way corners of the Empire into which he had penetrated, and of adventures in which he risked his ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... whose career was all marked out for him at the ministry of the interior, where, protected by his father's memory, he might have risen to be chief of a division before he was twenty-five, he, my boy, he wants to be a painter,—a vagabond! I always knew that child would give ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... as my blood with the fire of the Spring is aflame, We did well, when the red roads called, that we heeded the call and came— Came forth to the sweet wise silence where soul may speak sooth unto soul, Vine-wreathed and vagabond Love, with the goal ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... who had done some wrong, now they worry him from sheer cussedness. You must be mad, Auta Gert, to try and leave us. What is going to become of your family and your beautiful cattle. No wonder that Anna is so upset. I have been thinking that some rondlooper (vagabond) from the towns had been ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the bushes as the visitors appeared; they also lighted up the tinker's cart in the background, the browsing pony close by, the implements of the tinner's trade strewn around on the grass. It was an alluring picture of vagabond life, and Neale suddenly compared it with the dull existence of folk who, like himself, were chained to a desk. He would have liked to sit down by Tinner Creasy and ask him about his doings—but the policeman had less ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... hardships, which would shortly cause him to rue the step he had taken; that he would be only welcome in foreign countries so long as he had money to spend, and when he had none, he would be repulsed as a vagabond, and would perhaps be allowed to perish of hunger. He replied that he had a considerable sum of money with him, no less than a hundred dollars, which would last him a long time, and that when it was ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... you, you old vagabond!" the oldest brother shouted angrily. "If I gave a cup of wine to every beggar that comes along I'd ...
— The Laughing Prince - Jugoslav Folk and Fairy Tales • Parker Fillmore
... coarser being by no means excluded. Not only this: he was himself a rover—seeking daily adventure and contact with men and women of alien habit and taste and liking. His patience is supported by his humour. He was a bit of a vagabond in the good sense of the word, and always going round in search of "honest men," like Diogenes, and with no tub to retire into or the desire for it. He thus on this side touches the Chaucers and their kindred, as well as the Spensers and Dantes ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... her sluggish nest. As high as is the highest sphere in heaven. Awake, you paltry trulls of Helicon, Or, by this light, I'll swagger with you straight: You grandsire Phoebus, with your lovely eye, The firmament's eternal vagabond, The heaven's promoter, that doth peep and pry Into the acts of mortal tennis-balls, Inspire me straight with some rare delicies,[101] Or I'll dismount thee from thy radiant coach, And make thee poor[102] Cutchy ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... prisoners were separately interrogated; and two of the less guilty among them made a confession. I discovered that the Old Soldier was the master of the gambling-house—justice discovered that he had been drummed out of the army as a vagabond years ago; that he had been guilty of all sorts of villainies since; that he was in possession of stolen property, which the owners identified; and that he, the croupier, another accomplice, and the woman who had made my cup of coffee, were all in the ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... Well! poor, vagabond, peddling Christopher Risk, selling so much for another party, conceived the idea of becoming his own capitalist. He resolved to prepare a medicine of his own; and, profiting by the assistance of a young medical student, obtained bona fide prescriptions for the commonest ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... as she looked up at him, where he leant against the mantel, these vagabond memories of hers took point and shape. It was about these very men that he ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... "And that vagabond, the Due de Richelieu—but we may not wait. Again ladies, the glasses, or Bechamel will be aggrieved. And finally, though I perceive most of you have graciously unmasked, let me say that the moment has now arrived when we ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... a humour to play the fool with my pen: briefly then, from antient story first:—Dost thou not think that I am as much entitled to forgiveness on Miss Harlowe's account, as Virgil's hero was on Queen Dido's? For what an ungrateful varlet was that vagabond to the hospitable princess, who had willingly conferred upon him the last favour?—Stealing away, (whence, I suppose, the ironical phrase of trusty Trojan to this day,) like a thief—pretendedly indeed ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... Company's service: ye'll be a baronet when your father dies, and as rich as a Jew. But oh, John Chatterton, ye're an ass—a reg'lar donkey, as a body may say, to get into tiffs of passion, and send back a beautiful girl's letters, because some land-louping vagabond on the top of a coach told you some report or other about ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... you little vagabond?" said Hans, administering an educational box on the ear, as he ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... upon me. Really your organs of wonder and credulity are easily excited: you seem, by the importance of you all—my good mama included—ascribe to this matter, absolutely to believe we have a genuine witch in the house, who is in close alliance with the old gentleman. I have seen a gipsy vagabond; she has practised in hackneyed fashion the science of palmistry and told me what such people usually tell. My whim is gratified; and now I think Mr. Eshton will do well to put the hag in the stocks to-morrow morning, as ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... material benefit," Weston admitted. "After all, I think, one has to be a vagabond before one can properly ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... the roads and fields, lending a hand to the farmers, sleeping in stables and garrets, or oftener in the open air; sometimes charitably sheltered in a kind man's barn, and perhaps—oh bliss!—honestly employed with him for a week or two; at others rudely repulsed as a good-for-nothing and vagabond. Vagabond! That truly was his profession now. He forgot the charms of a fixed abode. He came to like his gypsy freedom, the open air and complete independence. He laughed at his misery, provided ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... and nobody believed that we preferred walking, if we could. So we soon gave up the idea of affording any information at all; and walked through the country comfortably as mappers, trodgers, tradesmen, guinea-pig-mongers, and poor back-burdened vagabond lads, altogether, or one at a time, just ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... me seemed to overflow my limits by its flood of wealth and service. But my necessity was more for giving than for receiving; for love is a vagabond, who can make his flowers bloom in the wayside dust, better than in the crystal ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... The Vagabond Act was too well contrived for compassing such an end, to have been an accident, and portions of it strongly suggest the hand of Norton. It was passed in May, 1661, when it was becoming evident that hanging must be abandoned, and its provisions can only be ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... enactment of laws whose design and tendency are obviously to annoy him, to make him feel, while at home, that he is a stranger and a pilgrim—nay more,—to make him "wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked;"—to make him "a hissing and a by-word," "a fugitive and a vagabond" throughout the American Union;—a system that is so irreconcilably opposed to the purpose of God in making "of one blood all nations for to dwell on all the face of the earth," that when the dying slaveholder, under ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... desperately healthy and inexorable, and all hope of the baronetcy very far off indeed; they grew tired of him and went away,—the wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an aimless, rhapsodizing vagabond. With her natural decision of mind, aided and encouraged, very likely, by her astute relatives, she thought she saw good reasons for breaking and setting aside the contract which had united them; and no doubt the poor woman must have felt the hardship of living with such ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... of Wales? The devil's grandmother! Was the like ever heard?—Captain le Harnois to alter his course, the Trois fleurs de lys to tack and wear—drop her anchor and weigh her anchor, for a smock-faced vagabond?" ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... the kitchen!" cried one of them, turning up his nose as high as he could, and snuffing eagerly. "And, as sure as I'm a half-starved vagabond, I smell roast meat ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... sacrifice, to propitiate the favor of their gods in a battle they were about to undertake. The victim was generally some strolling vagabond, who was not aware of his fate till the moment arrived, and he received his death-blow from a club. For the purpose of showing the inhabitants the use of the horses, Captains Cook and Clerke rode into the country, ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... 1292 there were twenty-six bathing establishments in Paris, and an attendant would go through the streets in the morning announcing that they were ready. One could have a vapor bath only or a hot bath to succeed it, as in the East. No woman of bad reputation, leper, or vagabond was at this time allowed to frequent the baths, which were closed on Sundays and feast-days. By the fourteenth century, however, the baths began to have a reputation for immorality, as well as luxury, and, according to Dufour, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... pleasantest things I have lately met with, in a vagabond course of shy metropolitan neighbourhoods and small shops, is the fancy of a humble artist, as exemplified in two portraits representing Mr. Thomas Sayers, of Great Britain, and Mr. John Heenan, of the United States of America. These ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... given him money enough to enable him to start afresh in life. But the money was soon gone, and the habits which, Leon had formed made any change for the better impossible. He wandered away into his former associations and became a miserable vagabond, constantly sinking down deep into misery, to be saved for a time by his mother's assistance, but ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... curse of Cain Light on his head, &c. An imprecation against the critic of Keats's Endymion in the Quarterly Review: see especially p. 39, &c. The curse of Cain was that he should be 'a fugitive and a vagabond,' as well as unsuccessful in tilling the soil. Shelley probably pays no attention to these details, but simply ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... swineherd straightway shows itself by his conduct toward this poor hungry stranger, a vagabond in appearance. To be sure, hospitality was and is a common virtue in Greece; but Eumaeus saw at once in the wretched looking man his master "wandering among people of a strange tongue, needing food." Therefore ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... blessing, "How much work have I done to-day for my dinner?" But the proper way to enforce that order on those below you, as well as on yourselves, is not to leave vagabonds and honest people to starve together, but very distinctly to discern and seize your vagabond; and shut your vagabond up out of honest people's way, and very sternly then see that, until he has worked, he does not eat. But the first thing is to be sure you have the food to give; and, therefore, to enforce the organization of vast activities ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the subjoined paragraph: "Oh, yes! Oh, we perceive! Oh, no doubt! Oh, my! Oh, goodness! Oh, tempora! Oh, Moses!" Why, the fellow is all O! That accounts for his reasoning in a circle, and explains why there is neither beginning nor end to him, nor to anything he says. We really do not believe the vagabond can write a word that hasn't an O in it. Wonder if this O-ing is a habit of his? By-the-by, he came away from Down-East in a great hurry. Wonder if he O's as much there as he does here? "O! ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... skirts of his long coat. There's Dick there, six feet if he's an inch and gone twenty last month. Well, many and many a time have I seen the strapping fellow when he was a little chap sitting astride the old vagabond's neck, with his little feet crooked in under his armpits, laughing and screaming uproariously as his human horse underneath him pranced and curvetted along the pavement, and charged through the flock of childish admirers around him, as if they were a hostile soldiery and Dick was a very Henry ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... seen it coming, but I didn't. For a moment, as a washerwoman might say, I was struck all of a heap. Then the delicious thought that I—by nature a vagabond, though by decree of the High Gods the father of a family and a Justice of the Peace—had to face the charge of being a German spy shook my soul with ribald laughter. I had been dull and torpid before the arrival of ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... and as early as '93 he became a "vagabond"—the law's ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in '94 a "regular" and properly and officially listed member of that (in those days) lightly-valued and ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... fellow, and his mother was anxious that he should receive some little education. He had not yet been taught to read; he had not even learnt his A B C. The word school frightened him. He could not bear to be shut up in a close room—he who had been accustomed to enjoy a sort of vagabond life in the open air. He could not give up his comrades, his playing at soldiers, and ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... the infant Jesus, and all approached and kissed it. Then from without came the sound of a guitar; the worshippers arose and ranged themselves against the wall; six girls dressed as shepherdesses; a man representing Lucifer; two others, a hermit and the lazy vagabond Bartola; a boy, the archangel Gabriel, entered the church. They bore banners and marched to the centre of the building, then acted their ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... my daughter the Dona Jovita picked you up, a wandering vagabond, in the streets of the Mission. (Aside.) He does not seem ashamed. (Aloud.) ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... falsifications away: I like a proper economy. Some silly persons would have you invariably speak the truth. My friends, if you were to act in this way, in what department of commerce could you succeed? How could you get on in the law? what vagabond would ever employ you to defend his cause? What practice do you think you would be likely to procure as a physician, if you were to tell every old woman who fancied herself ill, that there was nothing the matter with her, or to prescribe abstinence to an alderman, as a cure for indigestion? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... scarcely add, that his assurance was boundless, as were his powers of flattery. It is unnecessary to say, then, that a man so admirably calculated to succeed with the sex, was properly appreciated by them, and that his falsehood, flattery, and assurance were virtues which enshrined the vagabond in their hearts. In short, he had got the character of being a rake; and he was necessarily obliged to suffer the agreeable penalty of their admiration and favor in consequence. The fellow besides, was by no means ill-looking, nor ill-made, but just had enough of that kind of face and figure ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... asks, what now remains of the sovereignty it so pompously announced? "Now and then," he answers, "the accents of France on the lips of some straggling boatman, or vagabond half-breed— this ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... a vagabond in a non-professional way, I have a theory about the physiognomy of houses. Some have a forbidding, sick-the-dog-on-you aspect about them, not at all due, I am sure, to architectural design. Experience has taught me to be suspicious of such houses. Some houses have the ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... rogue, thief, and vagabond, Master Shelton," said the earl. "He hath been gallows-ripe this score of years. And, whether for one thing or another, whether to-morrow or the day after, where is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... neokupata. Vacate forlasi. Vacation libertempo. Vaccinate inokuli. Vacillate sxanceligxi. Vacillating sxanceligxa. Vacuous malplena. Vacuum malplenajxo. Vagabond sentauxgulo, vagisto. Vagary kaprico. Vagrant vagisto. Vague malpreciza. Vain (fruitless) vana. Vain (conceited) vanta. Vain, in vane. Vainly vane. Vale valeto. Valet lakeo, servisto. Valiant brava. Valid legxa. Valise valizo. Valley valo. Valorous brava. Valour ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... felt too much to care for much. Yesterday I was a vagabond exposed to every pitiless storm, and now I am the guest of Jove. While there is life there is hope, and he who laughs at Destiny will gain Fortune. I would go through the past again to enjoy the present, and feel that, after all, I am my wife's debtor, ...
— Ixion In Heaven • Benjamin Disraeli
... children or people neither; and as for Jim Clay, he wouldn't think of touchin' a thing—he was too much the other way to get on in the world. An' it ain't any fault of my rarin' that me grandson is hounded down a vagabond," said the old lady ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... . . . vagabond! And you pretend to have been a soldier, too!" And Kuvalda did not cease to belabor him with his tongue, as he snatched the blue parchment from his hands. Then, spreading the papers out in front of him, and excited all the more by Vaviloff's inquisitiveness, ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... you have congregated to see this lump of mortality put into a hole in the ground. You all know the deceased—a worthless, drunken, good-for-nothing vagabond. He lived in disgrace and infamy, and died in wretchedness. You all despised him—you all know his brother Joe, who lives on the hill? He's not a bit better though he has scrap'd together a little property by cheating his neighbours. His end will be like that of this loathsome ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... is none of your business," said the vagabond; "his lordship following the custom of royalty to vassals, gives me a coat from his own back, and your duty as serf is not to dispute, ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... yet then these, Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha to restore The Race of Mankind drownd, before the Shrine Of Themis stood devout. To Heav'n thir prayers Flew up, nor missed the way, by envious windes Blow'n vagabond or frustrate: in they passd Dimentionless through Heav'nly dores; then clad With incense, where the Golden Altar fum'd, By thir great Intercessor, came in sight Before the Fathers Throne: Them the glad Son 20 Presenting, thus to intercede ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... is overwhelmed by her situation. The lip of Simon curls, his eye flashes with fire of outraged virtue. Jesus meets his gaze with equal fire, but it is all of pure heavenly feeling. Simon moves to have the vagabond expelled; Christ interrupts the attempt. But the honor of the house is insulted. Yes, but the undying interests of the soul are at stake. But the breath of the woman is ritual poison, and her touch will bring down the curses of the law. But ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... becoming vastly sharp," said Mr. Petulengro; "and I am told that all the old-fashioned, good-tempered constables are going to be set aside, and a paid body of men to be established, who are not to permit a tramper or vagabond on the roads of England;—and talking of roads puts me in mind of a strange story I heard two nights ago, whilst drinking some beer at a public-house, in company with my cousin Sylvester. I had asked Tawno to go, but his wife would ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... before this been received of the death of Wilson, known among the natives by the name of Bun-bo-e. This young man, while a convict, and after he had served the period of his transportation, preferred the life of a vagabond to that of an industrious man. He had passed the greater part of his time in the woods with the natives, and was suspected of instructing them in those points where they could injure the settlers with the greatest effect, and most safety to themselves. In obedience, however, to a proclamation ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... become as black as it likes, the spark is still there. However low you go there is light. Light in the vagabond, light in the mendicant, light in the thief, light in the street-walker. The deeper you go the more the miraculous light persists in ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... it's old Trainard!" cried the farmer. "I thought I knew him too.... Besides, he's been hanging round the house these last three days. The old vagabond must have smelt the money. Aha, Trainard, my man, we shall see some fun! A number-one hiding in the first place; and then the police.... I say, mother, you can get up now, can't you? Then go and fetch the neighbours.... Ask them ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... hand and softly felt of Isabelle's gown, apparently finding exquisite delight in the mere contact of her finger-tips with the smooth, glossy surface of the silk. Though her touch was so light Isabelle immediately turned towards the child and smiled upon her encouragingly, but the poor little vagabond, finding herself detected, in an instant had assumed a stupid, almost idiotic look—with an instinctive amount of histrionic art that would have done honour to a finished actress. Then dropping her eyelids and leaning her shoulders ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pine and tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated with experiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contented fruition in repose? One must weary at last of being even so sublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And, besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, on the road, races and worlds interpose, ever over take each other, and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bower together by the way? A poet ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... account is undeniable, no disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies wherever they could meet them. Again and again a few thousands of them carried dismay into the heart of France. Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices, from London,[14] who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for years the terror of Normandy. In the very frolic of conscious power they fought and plundered, without pay, without reward, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... that you threaten to make upon us, we must therein defend ourselves as well as we can; and know ye, that we are not without wherewithal to bid defiance to you. And, in short, for I will not be tedious,' I tell you that we take you to be some vagabond runagate crew, that, having shaken off all obedience to your King, have gotten together in tumultuous manner, and are ranging from place to place to see if, through the flatteries you are skilled to make on the one side, and threats wherewith you think to fright on the other, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Long confinement had reduced him to idiocy. To save my life Claperon substituted the senseless being for me, on the scaffold, and he was executed in my stead. He has quitted the country, and I have been a vagabond on the face of the earth ever since that time. At length I obtained, through the assistance of my sister, the situation of concierge in the Hotel Marboeuf, in the Rue Grange-Bateliere. I entered on my new place yesterday evening, and was desired to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... But, sun, moon, and stars abstracted or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant had to fall back—we speak on the authority of old prints—upon stable lanthorns two storeys in height. Many holes, drilled in the conical turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement into the bearer's eyes; and as he paced forth in the ghostly darkness, carrying his own sun by a ring about his finger, day and night swung to and fro and up and down about his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... idle vagabond!" the mayor of the good town of Southampton said, in high wrath—"a ne'er do well, and an insolent puppy; and as to you, Mistress Alice, if I catch you exchanging words with him again, ay, or nodding ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... the windows. But he could hardly have done so if it had not been for the confused palace management, for which nobody was responsible, with its inevitable disorder, that had not yet been overcome. The boy had to be committed to the House of Correction as a rogue and vagabond for three months. Afterwards he served on board one of her Majesty's ships, where his taste for creating a sensation seems to ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... that is his portrait which hangs over the front fireplace. An original portrait of Alexander Pope I certainly never expected to possess, and I must relate how I came by it. Only a year ago I was strolling in my vagabond way up and down the London streets, and dropped in to see an old picture-shop,—kept by a man so thoroughly instructed in his calling that it is always a pleasure to talk with him and examine his collection of valuables, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... possible accomplices, and Overtop and Maltboy as guides, philosophers, and friends. All looked seedy and criminal, as if there were something in the atmosphere of station houses to give a man the semblance of a vagabond and an outcast. Marcus Wilkeson was very pale, and, when he looked across the room, as he did upon his entrance, by a singular impulse, and saw the great blood mark and the club on the floor, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... and their comrades. De la Marck found his retreat cut off, and bade his lieutenant break through if he could, and escape. "With me it is over," he added. "I am man enough now that I am brought to bay, to send some of these vagabond Scots to hell before me." About six of De la Marck's best men remained to perish with their master, and fronted the archers who were not many more ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... conducted the Pioneer with great success and advantage to the territory until the year 1851, when he published an article on Judge Cooper, censuring him for absenteeism, which is a very good specimen of the editorial style of that day. He called the judge "a sot," "a brute," "an ass," "a profligate vagabond," and closed his article in the ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... bent low over their pommels and gazed along the dark, rainswept alley to the pillared portico dimly seen beyond. Not a soul was in sight. The water was already on a level with the banquette, and would soon be running across and into the gate. A vagabond dog skulking about the place gave vent to a mournful howl. A sudden thought struck the captain. He led the way down the slope and forded across to the north ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... Margaret's son. The grandfather awaited the child's coming with mingled feelings. His heart yearned for him, yet he dreaded to meet a second edition of Martin Moore. Suppose Margaret's son resembled his handsome vagabond of a father! Or, worse still, suppose he were cursed with his father's lack of principle, his instability, his Bohemian instincts. Thus Mr. Leonard tortured himself wretchedly before the ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... embodied in these measures, that of local responsibility for local distress, and that of a distinction between the pauper and the vagabond, were more clearly defined in a statute of 1572. By this Act the justices in the country districts, and mayors and other officers in towns, were directed to register the impotent poor, to settle them in fitting habitations and to assess all inhabitants for their support. Overseers ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... passports from the authorities, pay their taxes regularly, and conduct themselves in all outward respects like loyal subjects. Their chief religious duty consists in giving food and shelter to their more zealous brethren, who have adopted a vagabond life in practise as well as in theory. It is only when they feel death approaching that they consider it necessary to separate themselves from the heretical world, and they effect this by having themselves carried out to some neighbouring wood—or ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... where their Parian and alcayceria stand, and along the whole front from the river to the sea; and, as the plan shows, this may be flooded with water at high tide, which enters through the river. As all the Sangleys had knowledge of this, and there were among them restless and vagabond people who had nothing to lose, and who on account of their crimes, evil life, and debts could not go back to China without being punished there for these things with much severity, they took this as a pretext to win over the merchants and quiet people, persuading them that the precautions ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... emperor has several regiments of these people; but, to say the truth, they are rather plunderers than soldiers; having no pay, and being obliged to furnish their own arms and horses; they rather look like vagabond gypsies, or stout beggars, than regular troops. I cannot forbear speaking a word of this race of creatures, who are very numerous all over Hungary. They have a patriarch of their own at Grand Cairo, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... The portcullis of Monte Giordano was lifted, and the mysterious gates were thrown wide to the curiosity of a populace drunk with victory; Giovanni degli Stefaneschi issued edicts of sovereign power from the sacred precincts of the Capitol; and the vagabond thieves of Rome feasted in the lordly halls of the Colonna palace. But though the tribune and the people could seize Rome, outnumbering the nobles as ten to one, they had neither the means nor the organization to besiege the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Island of Britain he would have administered the law, and his decisions would have been very different. Law has about the same relation to justice that grammar has to Shakespeare. If Shakespeare were put in the dock and tried by the grammarians he would be condemned as a rogue and vagabond, and, similarly, justice is not infrequently hanged by the lawyers. We must have law just as we must have grammar, but we have no love for either of them. They are dry, bloodless sciences, and we look askance at those who ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier. It is a chronic illusion of youth that ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... carcass doth abide a vagabond spirit whose wanderlust has no purely geographical basis. I wander the wide world over, yes! Also, I wander in and out of men's lives, in and out of men's affairs. To wander—'tis my excuse for ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... fostered, and parliamentary enactments had warranted, hostility of the most uncompromising kind to the player and his profession. To many he was still, his new liberty and privileges notwithstanding, but "a son of Belial"—ever of near kin to the rogue and the vagabond, with the stocks and the whipping-post still in his immediate neighbourhood, let him turn which way he would. And then, certainly, his occupation had its seamy side. With this the satirists, who loved censure ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... alone in the wild solitudes which surrounded the little village.. Those who knew Euthymia thought her quite equal to taking care of herself. Her very look was enough to ensure the respect of any vagabond who might cross her path, and if matters came to the worst she would prove as dangerous ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... heavy burden or a light, it must be borne. The good of the lazy race, and the good of the society into which they have been thrown, both require them to bear this burden, which is, after all and at the worst, far lighter than that of a vagabond life. "Nature cries aloud," says the abolitionist, "for freedom." Nature, we reply, demands that man shall work, and her decree must be fulfilled. For ruin, as we have seen, is the bitter fruit of disobedience to ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... slowly moving toward the setting sun. He saw them at deadly strife one with another—tribe with tribe, and kindred with kindred. He marked how they were falling away from the sober lives and pure faith of their fathers, and losing their wild independence in the slothful and corrupting habits of vagabond existence. He beheld his native wilderness gradually waning as from before a slow-approaching, far-extended fire. In terror at the sight, the animals of the chase, so needful to man in the savage state, went flitting by, outstripping ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... creature which I seem," she said; "at least, I was not born to be so. I wish I were that utter abject! I wish I were a wretched pauper of the lowest class—a starving vagabond—a wifeless mother—ignorance and insensibility would make me bear my lot like the outcast animal that dies patiently on the side of the common, where it has been half-starved during its life. But I—but I—born and bred to better things, have not lost the memory ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... meaning to shoot the weasel; if the wretch would not come out when called upon to receive the due punishment of his crimes, he would bang it off into his hole in the tree, and, perhaps, some of the shot would reach the skulking vagabond. ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... external character. I was very young when I first commenced to take stock to the fair to exhibit for premiums. I always went on the first day, and always remained until the fair came to a close, staying on the grounds night and day. There was a vagabond element in my nature which harmonized perfectly with this sort of life. The men with whom I associated were, in general, of that class who like liquor alone or in company, and each had his jug of favorite whisky, which was supposed to be a sure preventive against cold ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... of the idiom of our language, and the multifarious significations of some of our words. A French gentleman, who dined in London, in company with the celebrated author of the Rambler, wishing to show him a mark of peculiar respect, drank Dr. Johnson's health in these words: "Your health, Mr. Vagabond." Assuredly no well-judging Englishman would undervalue the Frenchman's abilities, because he mistook the meaning of the words Vagabond and Rambler; he would recollect, that in old English and modern French authors, vagabond means wanderer: des eaux vagabondes ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... heeded at all, are only picked up by some critic beadle to receive the usual treatment of vagrants. Indeed, were I disposed to draw comfort from the misfortunes of others, I might make myself happy with the reflection, that however my vagabond might deserve the lash, it would receive no more punishment than those who deserved none at all; for the gentlemen castigators seldom take the pains to distinguish Innocence from Guilt, but most liberally bestow ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... you lead such a monotonous life," I asked Bielokurov, as we went home. "My life is tedious, dull, monotonous, because I am a painter, a queer fish, and have been worried all my life with envy, discontent, disbelief in my work: I am always poor, I am a vagabond, but you are a wealthy, normal man, a landowner, a gentleman—why do you live so tamely and take so little from life? Why, for instance, haven't you fallen in love ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... country-loving citizens. Disfranchise them, and the mark of Cain is set upon them less mercifully than upon the first murderer, for no man was to hurt him. But this mark of inferiority—all the more palpable because of a difference of color—not only dooms the negro to be a vagabond, but makes him the prey of insult and outrage everywhere. While nothing may be urged here as to the past services of the negro, it is quite within the line of this appeal to remind the nation of the possibility that ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... thy cousin. She is a rare girl, and remembereth thee well. Thy brother is not attached to thee. He will give thee five hundred pounds if thou wilt swear to quit England for ever. He abuseth thee finely, saith thou art a debauched vagabond, which is an insult to me thy serving companion, whom he threatened with the stocks. ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... excuse the costumes of fighting men. We must look like ruffians, but we are honest folk. If our faces do not inspire much confidence, it is simply because our stomachs are so empty. And no one more resembles a vagabond than a poor wretch who is dying with hunger. You will not know us again after we have had a few words with the pot which gave out such a savoury smell ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... to injury, the vagabond was lying asleep upon the farmer's coat which he had thrown upon the ground, having a fine ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... own women. Look now, from the beginning it has been like to like. Thou may see in the Holy Scriptures that, after Esau married the Hittite woman, he sold his birthright, and became a wanderer and a vagabond. And it is said that it was a 'grief of mind unto Isaac and Rebekah.' I am sorry this day for Isaac and Rebekah. The heart of the father ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... vagabond he slept Or outcast from the homes of men, there crept Unto him lying in such sorry sort A something fairer than the kingliest court In all the peopled world had witness of— Even the shadow of the throne of Love, That from a height ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... illustrates the sad consequences of keeping bad company, as well as the perils of the city. He associated with the vicious in London, and became really a vagabond in consequence. ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... with him at all. She was proud, as he guessed, and the only reason she had even considered such an unusual bargain was her contempt for him. He was one who, when he might have remained respected and useful, had deliberately thrown away his chances to become a sot and vagabond. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... into every carriage—a glance which, little by little, became sullen and distrustful. But when he recognized Madame Martin, he smiled so sweetly and said good-morning to her in so caressing a voice that nothing was left of the ferocious old vagabond walking on the quay, nothing except the old carpet-bag, the handles of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... thing else. The players' voices were ten or a dozen times interrupted so that they could not be heard, and two or three fellows in the gallery were particularly scandalous. Above all the rest there was one, a finished vagabond, who spoke smut and roared it out loud, directing it to the ladies in the boxes. If any of you was there, gentlemen, you must have noticed it; if not, I can't write such filthy words as was spoken the whole evening. My wife begged me to come away on our little girl's account who was with us. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... the rage of traveling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness of affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the traveling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... my dear Emma, allow the work of brick and mortar to go on in the winter months. It can all be finished next summer; when, I hope, we shall have peace, or such an universal war as will upset that vagabond, Buonaparte. ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol II. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson
... by which they had entered"saw ony creature living e'er the like o' that!But what can we do for that puir doited deevil of a knight-baronet? Od, he showed muckle mair spunk, too, than I thought had been in himI thought he wad hae sent cauld iron through the vagabondSir Arthur wasna half sae bauld at Bessie's-apron yon nightbut then, his blood was up even now, and that makes an unco difference. I hae seen mony a man wad hae felled another an anger him, that wadna muckle ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... bad to worse. The few emigrants, with no inducement to labor, fell into a lazy apathy, lounging about the trading-houses, gaming, drinking when drink could be had, or roving into the woods on vagabond hunting excursions. The Indians could not be trusted. In the year 1617 they had murdered two men near the end of the Island of Orleans. Frightened at what they had done, and incited perhaps by other causes, the Montagnais and their kindred bands ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... nothing," another grumbled. "I have always been in rags and a vagabond. Is it my fault? Who taught ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... for our friend," he said to us. "The thing itself is of great power—money, you know—and his imagination is struck. A loyal vagabond; if only his puritanism doesn't shy at a ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... born vagabond, contrabandista, spy in armed camps, sutler at the tail of the Grande Armee (escaped, God only knows how, from the snows of Russia), beggar, guerrillero, bandit, sceptically murderous, draping his rags ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... death of that cursed young vagabond, John Camford," blurted forth the squire, in ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... been a vagabond for a good part of his life, and old as he was sometimes the spirit of what Agnes called "the wanderlust" (she was just beginning German) came over him and he would go away to visit friends for two or three ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... not bring up girls to toss them down into the first houseman's place that opens its doors, and one does not manage an estate for forty years only to hand the whole over to the first one who makes a fool of the girl. My daughter made herself ridiculous until she was allowed to marry a vagabond. He drank them both into the grave, and I had to take the child and pay for the fun; but, by my troth! it shall not be the same with my granddaughter, and now you know that! I tell you, as sure as my name is Ole ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... young vagabond, you!" he said, and went suddenly back to his anchor, keeping his head down on his breast ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... But, like the vagabond red men of to-day, the Osages were of that character that a white man would much prefer not to meet them in a lonely place, unless help was present or within call. If they should come across the two boys, their treatment of them would depend very much on the mood in which they happened to be. ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... though, only you can't depend upon him for five minutes at a time. Hadn't seen the family in more than two years. Spends one night at home, and is off again, no one knows where. Some persons like him, but I like a man with more stability. Not but what he has his good points; but he is a born vagabond. His brother expects to get him a berth at Vienna and is working rather successfully toward that end." I wondered how this bit of news ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... trustfully enough, knowing me to be Irish, and I examined him as well as I was able in the darkness. He was what I expected, a bedraggled vagabond with tear-stains on his dirty cheeks and a vast shock of hair which I well knew would look, in daylight, like a burning haycock. And as I examined him he just as carefully examined me. I could see his shrewd blue ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... Rallied at their armories, the more determined of the militia are preparing to defend them and their colors against the anticipated attack of fifty times their force in "toughs,"—Chicago's vast accumulation of outlawed, vagabond, or criminal men. The city fathers are well-nigh hopeless. Merchants and business-men gather on 'Change with blanched faces and the oft-repeated query, "What next? What next?" Every moment brings tidings of fresh dismay. New fires, and a crippled ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... you st-staring at, you idle, worthless v-vagabond?" said Nestie to Speug. "Come along and give a hand to Moossy," who was so pleased to get some help in the lonely place that he forgot the revealing of his little secret. With Speug in the shafts, who had the strength of a man in his compact little body, and Moossy ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... was excited. The experience was, to her, almost incredible. Her ideas of Indians had been drawn from newspapers, and from a book or two of narratives of massacres, and from an occasional sight of vagabond bands or families they had encountered in their journey across the plains. Here she found herself sitting side by side in friendly intercourse with an Indian man and Indian woman, whose appearance and behavior were attractive; towards whom ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... What have you to say about it? This a family matter. Would you have Saracinesca sold, to be distributed piecemeal among a herd of dogs of starving relations you never heard of, merely because you are such a vagabond, such a Bohemian, such a break-neck, crazy good-for-nothing, that you will not take the trouble to accept one of all the women who ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... conscious of and subject to the conditions of that organization, which may involve such portions of adult responsibility and duty as a child may be able to bear according to its age, and which will in any case prevent it from forming the vagabond and ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... some one shouting and pounding in the church, and thought it was some drunken vagabond who had stolen in during the service. He came to the door with his keys and ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... England must stick up for her rights! Here is your Dutchman, for instance, a ravenous cormorant; a fellow with a throat wide enough to swallow all the gold of the Great Mogul, if he could get at it; and yet a vagabond who has not even a fair footing on the earth, if the truth must be spoken! Well, Sir, shall England give up her rights to a nation of such blackguards? No, Sir; our venerable constitution and mother church itself forbid, and therefore I say, dam'me, lay them ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... to keep them in working order. There is slavery for you. And when at last they protested, when they were tormented by hunger, when they saw their children in tatters, they were shot down as if they had been so many vagabond dogs. ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... Virginia colony, its final success was not due to him, but it was owing almost entirely to his pluck and energy that it held on and maintained an existence during the two years and a half that he was with it at Jamestown. And to effect this mere holding on, with the vagabond crew that composed most of the colony, and with the extravagant and unintelligent expectations of the London Company, was a feat showing decided ability. He had the qualities fitting him to be an explorer and the leader of an expedition. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... immunities, I thought that I would repair such a great error and that he would be pleased, for he gave them without the need or occasion necessary in so vast a matter; and he gave to vagabond people what would have been excessive for a man who had brought wife and children. So I announced by word and letters that he could not use his patents because mine were those in force; and I showed them the immunities which ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... in the earliest age. The harbour takes them into its embrace; the streets with their stray livelihoods, or a wandering vagabond life, takes them; refuges, police-stations, prisons and the house of correction take them. In later years, labour also, on a great scale, has taken them into its embrace—the ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... house, entertained the general and his retinue with unwonted hospitality; though it is said it cost the family a month's scrubbing and scouring to restore all things to exact order, after this military invasion. My vagabond informant seemed to consider this one of the greatest victories of ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... does that vagabond bear?" he muttered. "Assuredly he brings a telegram; otherwise the devil himself could not induce that lazy wastrel to ride ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... inspection. Their compound is a series of roofless walled enclosures, and a visitor notes with grateful appreciation the strength of the chains anchoring the beasts to mother earth. A leviathan is straining at his tether in a mad effort to reach a vagabond who is tantalizing him with a pike, and your guide—one of the official messengers with sword and shield—says: "He no like Hindu people; last week he kill two." Beasts as docile as kittens take nuts from your hand, and evince disappointment when more are not forthcoming. Five magnificent tuskers, ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... of St David's, the theme of the best poets of the Middle Ages and the goal of generations of pilgrims, was described by its Protestant bishop—who unroofed the palace in order to get the lead—as a desolate angle frequented only by vagabond pilgrims. A Welshman is not appealed to by what is an insult to his country and a shock to his religion at the same time. The relics were ruthlessly swept away; they were taken possession of by the agents of Cromwell and destroyed, or sent to London. ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... tranquillity. He then visited the sepulchre of Manuel: the spectators were ordered to stand aloof, but as he bowed in the attitude of prayer, they heard, or thought they heard, a murmur of triumph or revenge: "I no longer fear thee, my old enemy, who hast driven me a vagabond to every climate of the earth. Thou art safety deposited under a seven-fold dome, from whence thou canst never arise till the signal of the last trumpet. It is now my turn, and speedily will I trample on thy ashes and thy posterity." From his subsequent tyranny we ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... none that I should love so well,' said Esclairmonde, smiling. 'Mayhap I have learnt to be a vagabond, but I cannot but desire to toil as well ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... feel, to express, stirred the depths of my heart. It was a sudden re-awakening of youth, a flash of poetry, a renewing of the soul, a fresh growth of the wings of desire—I was overpowered by a host of conquering, vagabond, adventurous aspirations. I forgot my age, my obligations, my duties, my vexations, and youth leaped within me as though life were beginning again. It was as though something explosive had caught fire, and one's ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what is so bright is also so brief, and it is encompassed, even within delightful Asolo, by the sins and sorrows of the world. Bluphocks, with his sniggering wit and his jingles of rhyme is a vagabond and a spy, who only covers the shame of his nakedness with these rags of devil-may-care good spirits. The genial cynicism of Ogniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... always offending and I always pardoning? Don't fancy it, impious scoundrel, for that beyond a doubt thou art, since thou hast set thy tongue going against the peerless Dulcinea. Know you not, lout, vagabond, beggar, that were it not for the might that she infuses into my arm I should not have strength enough to kill a flea? Say, scoffer with a viper's tongue, what think you has won this kingdom and cut off this giant's head and made you a marquis (for all this I count as already accomplished and ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... around our steamer in readiness to convey us to the railroad station at the upper end of the harbor about a mile away. As we approached the shore in these boats we saw on the wharf at Piraeus a motley crowd of dirty-handed, bare-footed, ill-clothed men and boys. It seemed as if all the idle and vagabond population of the city had assembled to lounge lazily in the sun, hoping, perhaps, to obtain some small coins from the tourists during the transfer from boat to cars. If this was their hope they were disappointed. ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... above. Beyond these doors and showing through them, a flagged court, bordered all around by a narrow, raised parterre under pomegranate and fruit-laden orange, and over-towered by vine-covered and latticed walls, from whose ragged eaves vagabond weeds laughed down upon the flowers of the parterre below, robbed of late and early suns. Stairs old fashioned, broad; rooms, their choice of two; one looking down into the court, the other into the street; ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... the life of a perfect vagabond, sculking from one place to another, and keeping company with none but gamesters, rakes, and sharpers, falling into all manner of dissolution; and whenever his reason remonstrated any thing to him on these vicious courses, he would then, to banish remorse for one ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... had come to live at The Ship, such a witch as had never before danced along the Spear Point sands. Her name was Maria Peck, and she was the daughter of Mrs. Peck's late lamented husband's vagabond brother—"a seafaring man and a wastrel if ever there was one," as Mrs. Peck was often heard to declare. He had picked up with and eventually married a Spanish pantomime girl up London way, so Mrs. Peck's information went, and Maria ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... never sulked. He was a charming, good-mannered bird, accustomed to the best society, whereas you, I suppose, are nothing but a heartless vagabond like myself." ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... will place the shoe that is left in the fireplace, and to-night the Christ Child will put in a rod to whip you when you wake. And to-morrow you shall have nothing to eat but water and dry bread, and we shall see if the next time you will give away your shoe to the first vagabond ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... fifth of September, felt a little sad as she worked in her neat little shop. And so it is that Love is a troublesome little vagabond, who ought to have his wings ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Friday, I think, that story was also made as clear as daylight to us; for being banished out of the town as a common thief and vagabond, down on the Musselburgh road, by order of a justice of the peace, it was the bounden duty of Daniel Search and Geordie Sharp to see her safe past the kennel, the length of Smeaton. They then tried to make her understand by writing on the wall, ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... for thy good. I would save thee from the life of an outlaw or vagabond, and foresaw that unless I renounced thee utterly, thy love would mar thy fortunes, and bring thee back to ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... night before we'll stop in his movers' pen," said Grandma Padgett with her well-known decision. "I suppose he calls every vagabond that comes along a mover, and his own house is too clean for such gentry. I've heard about the Swopes and the Dutch being stupid, but a body has to ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... life; she's never quiet a minute. I 'ont stand it any longer; now 'tis a subscription for this, now a donation for that, then sixpence for Jack such a one, or a shilling for Sal the other, till I have neither peace nor money. Come you, sir, go and turn that vagabond out directly, or I'll do it before your ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... would have revealed to him. It often cut him to the quick, when, on entering an office in his daily search for employment, he was met by hostile or suspicious glances, or when, as it occasionally happened, the door was slammed in his face, as if he were a vagabond or an impostor. Then the wolf was often roused within him, and he felt a momentary wild desire to become what the people here evidently believed him to be. Many a night he sauntered irresolutely about the gambling places in obscure ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... kettle of fish, Malcolm, about young Leslie. I have had the justices down here, asking me all sorts of questions, and they have got into their minds that I taught him not only swordplay but treason, and they have been threatening to put me in the stocks as a vagabond; but I snapped my fingers in their faces, saying I earned my money as honestly as they did, and that I concern myself in no way in politics, but teach English officers and the sons of Glasgow tradesmen as well as those of Highland gentlemen. ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... his head gravely; and, remembering the jolly, vagabond, careless, adventurous life we had led these past two months and more, with a thousand pleasant incidents of our happy junketings, we were all downcast at the prospect of living in this place—though a paradise—for a ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... impropriety of the result. With this facetious exception, Sandy had been undisturbed. A wandering mule, released from his pack, had cropped the scant herbage beside him, and sniffed curiously at the prostrate man; a vagabond dog, with that deep sympathy which the species have for drunken men, had licked his dusty boots, and curled himself up at his feet, and lay there, blinking one eye in the sunlight, with a simulation of dissipation that was ingenious and ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... arise. You know that in our good city there are plenty of handsome men. From amongst these choose one only, and be content to do with him whatever nature may incline you to do. At all events, I wish that in making your choice you should take particular care that he is not a vagabond, or dishonest, or disreputable person, for great dangers might arise from your acquaintance with such a person, inasmuch as he would, without doubt publish ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... but it led downhill, you understand. I spent three winters in Venice. Then my father died, and I came into a small fortune, which I squandered. My mother helped me; then she died. My brothers cut me, condemning me as a Bohemian and a vagabond. I confess that I did take a malicious pleasure in rubbing their sleek fur the wrong way. Then I crossed the Atlantic as the guest of an American millionaire. He took me on in his own car to California. I started a studio in San Francisco—and ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell |
