"Drab" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the fall, she motored out to a Long Island club where the last of the season's golf was being enjoyed by some of her most intimate friends. Carley did not play. Aimlessly she walked around the grounds, finding the autumn colors subdued and drab, like her mind. The air held a promise of early winter. She thought that she would go South before the cold came. Always trying to escape anything rigorous, hard, painful, or disagreeable! Later she returned to the clubhouse to find ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... criminal stands the sullen drab figure of a girl who tries to show how loyal she is to the vagabond in the hands of the law. It all began with a misguided idea of liberty. The youth is the one who told his father he had had all the education he needed and promptly ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... third correspondent draws attention to "The School for Scandal" and Mr. Farren's performance of Sir Peter Teazle in a costume appropriate to the date of the comedy, the other players wearing dresses of the newest vogue. "Even Sir Oliver," it is added, "appeared in a fashionable modern drab greatcoat." In a note Leigh Hunt records his opinion that Mr. Farren was right, and that it was "the business of all the other performers to dress up to his costume, not for him to wrong himself into theirs," and adds, "there is one way of settling the matter which puts an end ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... precious dreams had just melted into drab reality—his mother was compelled to go ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... I am a mason? Charming! Know, then, that I am the Marquis D'Astafiorquercita. My heart is languishing for you, I seek to color my drab existence with a few pigments from your own. I must travel—but with you. That is why I have penetrated into your garden, disguised as a mason! [He throws off his workman's clothes and hat, and appears in a dazzling costume. His wig is ...
— The Romancers - A Comedy in Three Acts • Edmond Rostand
... she began and stopped. A sense of stricture in the throat stopped her, as her eyes took in the washed-out colour of the thin face, the washed-out colour of the thin hair—thin drab hair, dragged in straight, hard unbecomingness from the ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... his nephew on the one side, and the favourite housekeeper on the other. At a long interval, and beneath the salt of course, sate old Robin, a meagre, half-starved serving-man, rendered cross and cripple by rheumatism, and a dirty drab of a housemaid, whom use had rendered callous to the daily exercitations which her temper underwent at the hands of her master and Mrs Wilson. A barnman, a white-headed cow-herd boy, with Cuddie ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... uncleanly and dishevelled drab, Who there doth scratch herself with filthy nails, And crouches now, and now on foot ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... How can those roots send up the golden tints, the snowy white and the red, and never have the colors mixed? Close by is a Plutarch, deep brilliant red. The roots intermingle. How is it possible to pick out of the dull soil, Nature's eternal drab, that brilliant color for your peony? There are your iris, the new sorts absolutely undescribable. There are a dozen different shades in a single bloom. But those blind artists at work in their subterranean studios never make a mistake. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps, like other masterpieces that one loves in youth, one would now find them like those beautiful creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion and purple and gold under the waves, but are drab and ugly things when taken out of the water. This applies to some books that one reads with pleasure in early days, and wonders, later, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... there and she would scarcely notice the difference. Here and there were the same places to her, and him and him were the same person. A girl of that type comes to a bad end: he had seen it often, the type and the end, and never separate. Can one not prophesy from facts? He saw a slut in a slum, a drab hovering by a dark entry, and the vision cheered him mightily for one glowing minute and left him unoccupied for the next, into which she thronged with the flutter of wings and the sound of a ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... like them, it's only jumping into one of the deepest of them from off a wooded island and my reputation will be fixed forever." An old lady, whose guest he was, down in the country, told how he was "gay, very gay, and good looking, creating a great sensation, in a rich suit of drab with laced ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden statue, plunged into some back streets to the left, and came at last to a blistered front door that responded to his latch-key, one of a long series of blistered front doors with fanlights and apartment cards above. We found ourselves in a drab-coloured passage that was not only narrow and dirty but desolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt sitting at the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo occasional table before her, and "work"—a plum-coloured walking dress I judged at its most analytical ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... to look at her, and as he did so he found to his great joy that his stiff white collar had disappeared. So, too, had the drab serge suit and the clumsy hob-nailed boots that had hurt him so. Instead, he wore a single garment of some soft brown, the colour of earth, girdled by a broad green belt that felt like velvet. His feet were bare, and as he buried them in the thick grass on which he ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut across the ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... have strayed from the fold, Though your "thee" has grown "you," and your drab blue and gold, To the old friendly speech and the garb's sober form, Like the heart of Argyle to the tartan, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... country which have no hair on their tail. this Specis we found on the Missouri as far up it as the woody country extended. it is as large as the Common European house rat or reather larger is of a lighter Colour bordering more on the lead or drab colour, the hair longer; and the female has only four tits which are placed far back near the hinder legs. this rat I have Seen in the Southern parts of the State of Kentucky & west ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... called "Cato," which is to be acted on Friday. There were not above half a score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing them; and the drab that acts Cato's daughter, in the midst of a passionate part, calling out "What's next?" I went back ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... had been placed in the cistern, it became necessary to clean the latter, and the fish were taken out. They were of a dusky drab color when first taken out, but soon regained their vivid tints when placed in a white vessel containing clear water. They had evidently changed color in order to harmonize with the black walls and bottom ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... stars were like diamonds. Not in the light of swirling, angry, red suns, not upon the surface of any planet, so drab when you drew too near. Only in the sterile purity of remote space where he could maintain and nourish the essential purity of his day-dreams. But of course one could not explain this to the Board of Examiners; least ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there was pressing him ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... everlasting offer no great inducements to a creature that lives only on nectar. But that cocoon, compactly woven with silk and petals, which hangs from the stem, tells the story of the hunter's butterfly's presence. A brownish-drab chrysalis, or a slate-colored and black-banded little caterpillar with tufts of hairs on its back, and pretty red and white dots on the dark stripes, shows our butterfly in the earlier stages of its existence, when the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... stretching out of the radiance, as well as the houses on the western bank, but these showed out with incredible sharpness in high lights and dark shadows. From where they were lying they could not see the great curve of the quays, and the town in spite of the brilliancy of the atmosphere looked drab ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... above is so pessimistic one might suppose that a ballroom is always a chamber of torture and the young girl taken as an example above, a very drab and distorted caricature of what "a real young girl" should be and is. But remember, the young girl who is a "belle of the ballroom" needs no advice on how to manage a happy situation; no thought spent on how to make a perfect time better. The ballroom is the most wonderful ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... wagon seldom backed up before No. 28, except immediately preceding a wedding or following a funeral. And never, in twenty-two years of respectable tenancy, had the furtive lodger oozed, under darkness, through the Plush front door by night, or a huddle of sidewalk trunks and trappings staged the drab ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... Workhouse. On a low stone wall we spread our handkerchiefs, and each in his handkerchief put all his worldly possessions, with the exception of the "bit o' baccy" down his sock. And then, as the last light was fading from the drab-coloured sky, the wind blowing cheerless and cold, we stood, with our pitiful little bundles in our hands, a forlorn group ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... storm-petrel on her way. She looked up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that rose above the streets, shaded by the night lights and the congealed vapors to gray, drab, ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean tints. They were so like the wintry mountains of her Western home that she felt a satisfaction such as the hundred-thousand-dollar house ...
— Options • O. Henry
... sign of activity, but two or three untidy loungers leaned against a rude shack with "Pool Room," painted on its dirty window. All round, the rolling prairie stretched back to the horizon, washed in dingy drab and grey. The prospect ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... he could not load her with gifts, he could show his approbation by asking her to his house; and after some deliberation, she consented to accompany Mr and Miss Benson there. The house was square and massy-looking, with a great deal of drab-colour about the furniture. Mrs Bradshaw, in her lackadaisical, sweet-tempered way, seconded her husband in his desire of being kind to Ruth; and as she cherished privately a great taste for what was beautiful or interesting, as opposed to her husband's love of the purely useful, this taste ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... uncomfortable hour's wait, while the low smoke-stack belched black vapours into the dirty drab mist that lay oppressively upon everything about the harbour. From time to time the sound of the shovelling of coal arose from the engine-room. One at a time five or six passengers came on board, porters carrying their luggage. The saloon was nothing more than a glass case on deck, inside of ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... weariness of spirit, I stood within the lobby looking out upon the grayness of London in November. A slight mental effort was sufficient to blot out that drab prospect and to conjure up before my mind's eye a balcony overlooking the Nile—a glimpse of dusty palms, a white wall overgrown with purple blossoms, and above all the dazzling vault of Egypt. Upon the balcony my imagination ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... leaves, drab with age, being quite worn away at much-read verses by the forefingers of unpractised readers in former days, where they were moved along under the line as an aid to the vision. The special verse in the Book of Ruth was sought out by Bathsheba, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... first time, that the second vehicle was not a humble conveyance like the first, but a spick-and-span gig or dog-cart, highly varnished and equipped. The driver was a young man of three- or four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth, stick-up collar, and brown driving-gloves—in short, he was the handsome, horsey young buck who had visited Joan a week or two before to get her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... coats, because coats were too hot, and you can't climb with your arms held by coat-sleeves. We had our coats in the packs, for emergencies. We wore blue flannel shirts with the Scouts' emblem on the sleeves, and Scouts' drab service hats, and khaki trousers tucked into mountain-boots hob-nailed with our private pattern so that we could tell each other's tracks, and about our necks were red bandanna handkerchiefs knotted loose, and on our hands were gauntlet gloves. Little Jed Smith, who is a fatty, ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... full-rigged ships by stumpy, unlovely tramp-steamers in the Hooghly River, to which I have already referred, is only one example of the universal disappearance of the picturesque. In twenty-five years' time, every one will be living in a drab-coloured, utilitarian world, from which most of the beauty and every scrap of local colour will have been successfully eliminated. I am lucky in ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... moments before hopping away beneath the bushes and undergrowth, appearing again farther on, and then spreading its wings for a short flight, and displaying the lovely colours with which it was dyed, the most prominent being shades of blue relieved by delicate fawn and pale warm drab. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... a pretty sight. There was an artist's perception in Jeff in spite of his drab years of EI patrol duty; the white puff of sail on dark-green sea, gliding across calm water banded with lighter and darker striae where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him. The comparison it forced between Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning Fourth War scars and heritage of ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect; There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing Of the true lyric bard and all ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... glare over the place. The room in itself was by no means pretty, for the paper was the worse for wear, and the paint was nearly worn through to the woodwork. The hangings to the windows and to the two little beds were of an ugly drab color; and the view out of these windows only revealed a narrow street. At Kitty's own home she had a bedroom in the Castle end; the paper hung in ribbons, the door was draughty, the bedstead rickety and old; but ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... healthfulness and comedy as well as seriousness. We are a young people, but only in the sense of healthy-mindedness. There is no real taste among us for the erotic or the decadent. It is foreign to us because, as a people, we have not felt the corroding touch of decadence. Nor is life here all drab. Hence I expect lights as well as shadows in every ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Many colored; white, drab, green, purple or bright red; cuticle very thin, peeling from the edge, adherent toward the centre; bell-shaped, at first compressing the gills, then expanded, until finally the centre of the cap becomes depressed ...
— Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous • Anonymous
... soldiers," said Karen, pleased with her good idea. "Our flags, she says, they are, and that the world would be drab-coloured ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... but beautiful. The sandstone, reduced by ages to a crumbling marl, was of all colors. There were layers of green, reddish-brown, drab, purple, red, yellow, pinkish, slate, light-brown, orange, white, and banded. Nature, not contented with building enchanted palaces, had frescoed them. At this distance, indeed, the separate tints of the strata could not be discerned, but their general ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... and tulle mists of head dresses began to appear between the drab or tattered suits of the bystanders. Among the coming reception guests was Susan Mitchell, co-editor with George Russell ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... enough," said General D'Hubert, looking round at the vine-fields, framed in purple lines, and dominated by the nest of grey and drab walls of a village clustering around the top of a conical hill, so that the blunt church tower seemed but the shape of a crowning rock—"if you think this spot quiet enough, you can speak to him at once. And ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... It'll be all right." Strangely enough he felt now that it would. Her coming had brought rippling sunshine into a drab world. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... It used to be painted white; it was drab now, and there was a bay-window in the sitting-room. There was a new pump in the old place, and, happy omen, he discovered it was one of his own manufacture. He made his way by sheer force of habit past the kitchen windows to the side door. That was where they had quarreled ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... life has been one long changing of garments and moving from one show to another. Tuesday was Viceroy's Cup Day at the races, a very pretty sight. One side of the ground was crowded by pretty women in lovely gowns, and on the other side the natives sat in their hundreds and chattered, not the drab-coloured crowd we produce, but gay and striking as ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... to twenty inches in length, eight or ten inches in diameter, and weighing from fifteen to twenty pounds and upwards; skin thin, easily pierced or broken, of an ash-gray color, spotted, and marked with light drab and nankeen-brown,—the furrows dividing the ribs light drab; stem small; flesh deep orange-yellow, of medium thickness; seeds pure white, broader in proportion to their length than those of the Hubbard ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... retiring from her, I stoop for stones strewn thick about the sand, Aim them, fling them, And, as my idle arm resumes the knack, Score a hit and laugh To see her stumble hurt, behind the pine trunks. "Unless you work, I throw again, To it and steady at it. Mark me, drab, we Camilli Mean what we say." Stone after stone still flies, But aimed to knock chips from the pine-boles now; For she is busy gathering sticks, increasing Her distance as she may. The noon is sultry, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... pearls. When I first spoke to you—a child with all autumn's glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty? No. I saw you—only you! If you had stood against a drab curtain it would have been the same. You were a child, too young to stir an adult heart to love or passion.... What was it then that fixed you from that moment in ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... that scornful of social amenities; but he could hardly wait for the approach of sunrise to be on his way to Seafood on this brilliant Christmas morning. It was not a brilliant, shimmering day for him, however. He saw nothing beautiful in the steel-blue sky: to him it was a drab, unlovely pall. He saw no beauty in the snow-clad foliage, no splendour in the bejewelled tree-tops, no purity in the veil of white that lay upon the face of the earth. He saw only himself, and he was a drear, ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... this aristocratic argument which seeks to identify democracy with a drab utilitarianism may be found in action such as that of the Hungarian Commune—whose name I decline to repeat. This Commune did just one of those acts that prove that a separate people has a separate personality; it threw something away. A man can ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of the poor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant, as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab faces and no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy and empty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man learned more of human conditions than he had ever been taught at school. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... the threshold of the dining-room she stopped aghast. The walls had been distempered a particularly hideous drab; the curtains were mustard yellow; the carpet was a dull brown; the mottled marble mantelpiece, for which she had been intending to substitute one in walnut wood with tiles, still shone in slabs of petrified brawn; there was a huge mahogany ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... desire, for advertisement. Jimmy did not know the City, but he knew a good deal of mankind, and he gleaned something of the spirit and traditions of that office, as his eyes wandered from the rows of black, shiny deed boxes to the equally shiny pate of the managing clerk, and then to the drab-looking girl typist, pale-faced and narrow-chested, who seemed to finger the key-board as though the maddening click of her abominable machine had killed any individuality she might once have had, and turned her into a mere part of the mechanism of the City. The one spot of colour ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... blue eyes were round and earnest. He wore a blouse waist, a short jacket, and knickerbockers. Under his arm he held an old umbrella that was as tall as he was. Its covering had once been of thick, brown cloth, but the color had faded to a dull drab except in the creases, and Trot thought it looked very old-fashioned and common. The handle, though, was really curious. It was of wood and carved to resemble an elephant's head. The long trunk of the elephant was curved to make a crook for the handle. The eyes of the beast were small ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... evening in April, 191-, Clement J. Cleggett walked sedately into the news room of the New York Enterprise with a drab-colored walking-stick in his hand. He stood the cane in a corner, changed his sober street coat for a more sober office jacket, adjusted a green eyeshade below his primly brushed grayish hair, unostentatiously sat down at the copy desk, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... when an English peer finds his way to the divorce court; but nobody expounds to the nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the English people have come to think of American business ethics as being too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware that only in most exceptional cases can great or ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... walks the convent garden, cannot help asking herself why, if the crimson velvet of the rose was made by God, all colors except black and white are sinful for her; and the modest Quaker, after hanging all her house and dressing all her children in drab, cannot but marvel at the sudden outstreaking of blue and yellow and crimson in the tulip-beds under her window, and reflect how very differently the great All-Father arrays the world's housekeeping. The consequence of all this has been, that the reforms based upon these severe and exclusive views ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to the west seems inclosed by a long line of trees, which, in the distance, appear to stand in the water. Thence the vast stream sweeps boldly into the south, and with a rush discharges down the rapids, and straight over the line of precipice, in a vast tumultuous greyish-drab torrent which speedily emerges into comparatively still water below. The rock here is an exceedingly hard, mottled limestone, resembling the stone at St. Andrew's Rapids on Red River. Where exposed ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... low, olive-drab gate buildings, guidance tower, the magnesium dome of a powerhouse reactor, repair and maintenance shops, personnel-housing area carefully shielded against radiation by a huge stellene bubble, sealed and air-conditioned, with double-doored entrances and exits. ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard Barton. His verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the sect; for from title-page to colophon, there was no sin either in the way of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... jumped back. The audience was lifted fairly to its feet with excitement. What monster could it be that was giving so much trouble? The next moment, while Tomaso's whip hissed in vicious circles over his head, a plump little drab-colored pug-dog marched slowly out upon the stage, its head held arrogantly aloft. Volleys of laughter crackled around the arena, and the delighted spectators settled, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... from the ground. The space between the inn wall and the beehive curve of the hill, which was very narrow under Mr. Glenthorpe's window, but widened as the hill fell away, was covered with a russet-coloured clay, which contrasted vividly with the sombre grey and drab tints of ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... the walk, and, pointing to the captain, says, 'My husband, though he is become a blackguard jail-bird, must be allowed to be a handsome fellow still.'—On the other hand, he will frequently desire me to take notice of his rib, as she chances to pass.—'Mind that draggle-tailed drunken drab,' he will say; 'what an antidote it is—yet, for all that, Felton, she was a fine woman when I married her—Poor Bess, I have been the ruin of her, that is certain, and deserve to be d—ned for bringing her to ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... a tall Man's height, or more; No bonnet screen'd her from the heat; A long drab-colour'd Cloak she wore, A Mantle reaching to her feet: What other dress she had I could not know; Only she wore a Cap that was ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... sonorously than before. The moving mass of the Terek's rapid brown waters contrasted more vividly with its motionless banks. The waters were beginning to subside and here and there the wet sands gleamed drab on the banks and in the shallows. The other side of the river, just opposite the cordon, was deserted; only an immense waste of low-growing reeds stretched far away to the very foot of the mountains. On the low bank, a little to one ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... Aunt Jen—cloth to supply missing "breadths," yarn to mend the toes of stockings, ribbons which would transform the ancient dingy bonnet into a wonder of beauty on the day of the summer communion. She had "patterns" to buy dress-lengths of—from the byre-lasses brown or drab to stand the stress of out-of-door—checked blue and white for the daintier dairy-worker among her ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... and the deserted miniature pier of Territet, both dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow, there lay a patch of water—motionless, inconspicuous, of a faded drab colour—which at some small distance out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little further out, became part and parcel of the dull grey mist. Save for the forlorn masts of a couple of fishing boats, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... agreeable to her was a constant impulse. Objects on the way, though ever so common, became interesting the moment she called attention to them; a black swallow in the air pursued by her pointing finger went off in a halo; if a bit of quartz or a flake of mica was seen to sparkle in the drab sand under kissing of the sun, at a word he turned aside and brought it to her; and if she threw it away in disappointment, far from thinking of the trouble he had been put to, he was sorry it proved so worthless, and kept a lookout for something better—a ruby, perchance a ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Creeps into the night; A drab numbness sets in Dripping in lugubrious drops From the haggard fingers ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... this he took for feminine coquetry and his own front was serene. As he had made up his mind to be a dramatist merely because the career appealed acutely to his itching ambition, so did he in due course make up his mind to marry this handsome brunette (what hair he had was drab) who bore all the earmarks of secret wealth in spite of the fact that she lived in a small hotel. As time went on, Gisela resigned herself and put his ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... crab of the wood is sauce very good for the crab of the sea, But the wood of the crab is sauce for a drab that will not ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... torchlight,' were very forcible and dramatic works of art, and possessed more natural attractions than the pictures of many of his competitors. His pupilage with Sir Joshua prevented his falling into the washed leather and warm drab errors of tone that then distinguished the English school of historical painting. In the picture of the Burial of the Princes, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the trouble is I don't want to wait that long. Now, for instance, who lives over there on my left; the square white house with the drab blinds?" ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... it won her instant fame and a small fortune. It was gloomy, pessimistic, excoriating, merciless, drab, sordid, and hideously realistic. Its people hailed from that plebeian end of the vegetable garden devoted to turnips and cabbages. They possessed all the mean vices and weaknesses that detestable humanity has so far begotten. They were all failures ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 'Ay,' said Belcolore, 'you are all like this, great promisers, and after perform nothing to any. Think you to do with me as you did with Biliuzza, who went off with the ghittern-player?[368] Cock's faith, then, you shall not, for that she is turned a common drab only for that. If you have them not about you, go for them.' 'Alack,' cried the priest, 'put me not upon going all the way home. Thou seest that I have the luck just now to find thee alone, but maybe, when I return, there will ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... no beauty of color. God admires clouds, I doubt not, when painted by the setting sun, and stars flashing in the heavens, and the flowers of myriad hues that are scattered over the earth, but if these are objects of His special admiration, as they are of ours, what can He think of a drab Shaker bonnet? What can He think when man and woman, the glory and crown of His creation, are entirely overtopped and thrown into the shade by birds and bees and blossoms, and go poking around the world in unexampled ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... Green is dyed in a bath made with 1 lb. (p. 194) Quinoline Yellow, 1 lb. Azo Fuchsine G, 1/4 lb. Fast Green Bluish, 10 lb. Glauber's salt, and 2 lb. sulphuric acid. By using about half the above quantities of dye-stuffs a drab effect shot ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... After all, every man that lives has his great adventure, whether it come garbed in drab or radiant with the glow of the sunrise. A prosaic, money-grubbing age we call this, but by the gods! romance hammers once in a lifetime at the door of every mother's son of us. There be those too niggardly to let her in, there be those to whom the knock comes faintly; and there be ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform faded into the color of the earth on which he lay, ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... they could see he was hardly more than a boy, perhaps twenty years of age. His lean, gray body was nearly naked. Around his waist he wore a drab-colored tunic, of a substance they could not identify. His feet and legs were bare. On his chest were strapped a thin stone plate, slightly convex. His thick, wavy, black hair, cut at the base of ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... not more than one or two and twenty, tall and well-built, although he walked with a slouching gait. He wore corduroy trousers fastened round the waist by a narrow strap, and a blue shirt, with an unbuttoned jacket of fustian. On his head was a limp-brimmed, dirty, drab felt hat, and in his left hand he carried a red handkerchief, which apparently contained all his possessions, and in his right a stout stick which had been obviously cut from a hedge. His hair was extremely short and ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... railways, in a deeper St. Lawrence, in flamboyant adventures with great harbours, in the Quebec Bridge. Borden as yet was master of nothing. Such brilliance and success had never been confronted by such a demoralized party and so much drab common sense in ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... waters of the lake look pink. Fortunately they had not been hunted for their plumage and were not timid. After two days of familiarity with the boat they were willing to let me approach within twenty yards before finally taking wing. The coloring, in this land of drab grays and browns, was a delight to the eye. The head is white, the beak black, the neck white shading into salmon-pink; the body pinkish white on the back, the breast white, and the tail salmon-pink. The wings are ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... piety to much that was only Puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin, but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of color at all." Is not Adam Bede justified in saying that "to hear some preachers you'd think a man must be doing nothing all his ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... The porter told me that Mr. Krasnovsky had not yet come in, and I made my way up to the third storey. The door was opened by a tall, stout, drab-coloured flunkey with black whiskers, who in a sleepy, churlish, and apathetic voice, such as only flunkeys use in addressing other flunkeys, asked me what I wanted. Before I had time to answer, a lady dressed in black came hurriedly into the hall. She screwed up her eyes and looked ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... off without much delay, a train-load wholly of men, and all greenhorns. For all of us had nice fresh crinkly blouses, and olive-drab (properly o. d.) knees not yet worn white (as I have seen on returning Plattsburgers) while our canvas leggings were still unshaped to our manly calves. Our hats were new and stiff, and their gaudy cords were bright. And we were inquisitive ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... did not look much like Mr. Pulcifer's. Galusha's trunk had arrived at last, but the garments in it were as drab and old-fashioned and "floppy" as those he wore on his arrival. Horatio was invariably arrayed like a lily of the field—if by that term is meant a tiger lily. Raish generally finished his appraisal ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of the populous parish of Paddington, in a parallelogram bounded by Oxford and Cambridge Terrace on the south, Praed Street on the north, and by Edgware Road on the east and Spring Street on the west, lies an assemblage of mean streets, the drab dulness of which forms a remarkable contrast to the pretentious architectural grandeurs of Sussex Square and Lancaster Gate, close by. In these streets the observant will always find all those evidences of depressing semi-poverty which are more evident in London than in any other English ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... little which appeals to the imagination of posterity in the story of that drab martyrdom. Moreover Collingwood is judged, not individually but by comparison. For ever he is obscured by the more dazzling vision of Nelson. It weighs little in his favour that, devoid of the vanity and the weakness which made of the latter a lesser man even though a greater genius, ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... as though nor man nor beast had ever trodden it. It lay very near the house and I did not know it from up here; it looked now like a long strip of drab linen, which lay bleaching in a boundless meadow. And that again suited my loneliness so well! At last, I looked and saw nothing more. And ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... arm of the bench. The muscles of his face scarcely moved, but its sallow tint changed, under his father's eyes, to a sickly drab. ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were better likened to a butterfly, with its wings closed, and only the more or less drab outside showing. The veldt, somewhat uniform and colourless, with its surrounding hills, is the butterfly with its wings closed. Enter the wide hole in the ground, beside the hidden lake, and descend the rough natural staircase of rocky boulders, to ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... beyond all ordinary sensations of fear, only a drab feeling as of death—the death of the soul—stirred in his heart. His thoughts no longer even beat vainly for escape. The end was near, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Her manner showed severe disapproval of this girl so lost to the feelings of her sex as to have attempted murder. That she was young and pretty made matters worse. Alice Weaver always had worshipped her brother, by the law of opposites perhaps. She was as drab and respectable as Boston. All her tastes ran to humdrum monotony. But turbulent, lawless Buck, the brother whom she had brought up after the death of their mother, held her heart in the hollow of ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... were coming too easy, persisted through his interview with the storekeeper's wife, in the small house behind the store. She was a talkative woman, eager to discuss the one drama in a drab life, and she showed no curiosity as to the reason ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... know why they do not change the time of it; but I presume they are wise enough to feel that it would be useless. A similar attempt on the part of the Pennsylvania Quakers merely disturbed the operations of nature, but did not save the drab bonnets from the annual wetting. There is a subtle connection between such gatherings and the gathering of what are called the elements,—a sympathetic connection, which we shall, no doubt, one day understand, when we have collected facts enough on the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... tawny color, and just enough motion to make things frolicsome and lively. Add to these an approaching sunset of unusual splendor, a broad tumble of clouds, with much golden haze and profusion of beaming shaft and dazzle. In the midst of all, in the clear drab of the afternoon light, there steamed up the river the large new boat, the Wenonah, as pretty an object as you could wish to see, lightly and swiftly skimming along, all trim and white, covered with flags, transparent red and blue streaming out in the breeze. Only a new ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... homespun drab and gray Drew round his board on Monthly Meeting day, Genial, half ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... how you begin?' Robert looked round the room, but he got no ideas from the faded green curtains, or the drab Venetian blinds, or the worn brown oil-cloth on the floor. Even the new carpet suggested nothing, though its pattern was a very wonderful one, and always seemed as though it were just going to ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... mummy; maw and gulf Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark; Root of hemlock, digg'd i' the dark; Liver of blaspheming Jew; Gall of goat; and slips of yew, Silver'd in the moon's eclipse; Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips; Finger of birth-strangled babe, Ditch delivered by a drab,— Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... scaled and tailed, And drab as a dead man's hand. We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees Or trailed through the mud and sand, Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet, Writing a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... coquette. Her fancy turns from pearl to green, to amber, to pink, to blue and gold and rose, an inexhaustible wardrobe. She blushes, she frowns, she hesitates; she is like a woman in love. She casts abroad her dewy jewels on the leaves, the blades of grass, the tangled laces of the spiders, the drab cold stones. She ruffles the clouds on the face of the sleeping waters; she sweeps through the forests with a low whispering sound, taking a tithe of the resinous perfumes. Always and always she decks herself for the coming ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... people in the world are the spontaneous. We lead such drab lives ourselves and keep back so much, we like to see a little Niagara of human emotion occasionally. The Thoracic feels everything keenly. Life's experiences make vivid records on the sensitive plate of his mind. He puts them ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to yourself, when reading Gibbon's *Decline and Fall* ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... her shyly and looked quickly away. This girl was not like any woman he had known. Most of them were drab creatures with the spirit washed out of them. His sister had been an exception. She had had plenty of vitality, good looks and pride, but the somber shadow of her environment had not made for gayety. ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city garb jostled against the red and yellow short skirts of ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... there for the Volucella to disguise herself as a wasp? Any fly, whether clad in drab or motley, is admitted to the burrow directly she makes herself useful to the community. The mimicry of the bumblebee fly, which was said to be one of the most conclusive cases, is, after all, a mere childish notion. Patient observation, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... O, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion! Fie upon't! foh!—About, my brain! I have heard That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; For murder, though it have no ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... deciding to feed his stomach before I really tried to convince him. "It all comes under the heading of the drab, routine duties of a housewife. Come on ...
— Sorry: Wrong Dimension • Ross Rocklynne
... indignation in the pleasant breeze which had sprung up, he was aware of a dense crowd proceeding toward him. It was headed by an individual who shone out against the drab background like a good deed in a naughty world. Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time, and this was one of the strangest that Roland's bulging eyes had ever rested upon. He was a large, stout man, comfortably clad in a suit of white linen, relieved by a scarlet ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... at their watches, and put them back again without remark to resume the interrupted contemplation of Fifth Avenue in the waning light of a drab, drizzly day. A man in a shiny "slicker" was pushing a sweep and shovel in the centre of the thoroughfare. They wondered how long it would be before a ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... Yes, drab was the word. I am shocked to say it, but the duties of a historian are stern: and the word ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... way. Once more we sped down that devious river, now swirling under the shadow of a steep bank, now steering around a sandspit. The scenery was hideous to me, bluffs of clay with pines peeping over their rims, willow-fringed flats, swamps of niggerhead, ugly drab ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... crack of the iron casket. Mr. Beale's eyes, always rather prominent, almost resembled the eyes of the lobster or the snail as their gaze fell on the embroidered leather bag. And when Dickie opened this and showered the twenty gold coins into a hollow of the drab ticking, he closed his eyes and sighed, and opened ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... that in sibyls he had a preference. If she was to send him to the devil, she must be of the type which he qualified as a "drab." Without knowing the dictionary meaning of the word, he felt that it implied whatever would contrast most revoltingly with Barbara Walbrook. Seeing with her own eyes to what she had driven him, her heart would be wrung. That was all he asked for, the wringing of her heart. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing to mingle for some miles. Nothing of the picturesque in this country; but a good deal of the useful, of the improvable by economic science; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "4. Drab-colored, impure limestone with fibrous cavities; the 'magnesian deposit of Vanuxem.' Of these, the third is the only one that has yielded gypsum in profitable quantities. The included masses of gypsum, though, for the most part, even-bedded at their base, are usually ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... unaffected pity) made his exit from this wicked world, and where you see the hangman smoking his pipe as he reclines on the gibbet and views the hills of Harrow or Hampstead beyond—a splendid marble arch, a vast and modern city—clean, airy, painted drab, populous with nursery-maids and children, the abodes of wealth and comfort—the elegant, the prosperous, the polite Tyburnia rises, the most respectable district in the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... were the significant clouds, fleecy white clouds for the most part, but all deepening to a heavy, gray density. At any moment they might obscure that ruddy light and pour out their dismal measure of discomfort, turning the world from a smiling day-dream to a nightmare of drab regret. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... scarlet. As I stood one day in the Place de Meir in Antwerp and watched a regiment of mud-bespattered guides clatter past, it was hard to believe that I was living in the twentieth century and not in the beginning of the nineteenth, for instead of serviceable uniforms of grey or drab or khaki, these men wore the befrogged green jackets, the cherry-coloured breeches, and the huge fur busbies which characterized the ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... narrow window frame, and, lowering the glass from the top, beat a hole upward with a pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood revealed a slanting drab wall,—a ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Bodmin immediately asked him to dinner. Mr Tremayne declined the majority of the invitations; but he accepted that from Bradmond, which included his family also. So he, in a brown velvet suit, and Custance in the gravest drab, and Arbel with some bright blue ribbons neutralising her sober "sad-coloured" dress, and Robin, whose cap bore a white feather stuck in it in a style not suggestive of Quakerism, walked up to Bradmond ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... faded into drab. The trees, dripping with moisture, gradually took shape. The day ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... meet for sports was held in the afternoon before the sale, and was voted by all to be a great success. It is a far cry from the days when games were introduced here by the Mission. Then the people's lives were so drab, and they had little idea of the sporting qualities which every Englishman values so highly. In those early days if in a game of football one side kicked a goal, they had to wait till the other had done the same before the game could proceed, or the play ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... fellow-passengers were taking their fill of the good cheer afforded. Two of the number, dressed like the rest in blue flannel shirts, with trousers of lighter hue and heavier make, fanning their heated faces with their drab, broad-brimmed campaign hats, swung off the rear end of the objectionable car, and, with a quick glance about them, started briskly down the track to where the "diner" and certain sleepers of the Southern Pacific ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... Great Coat, with holes in elbows, moved the second resolution—seconded by Greasy Drab Breeches ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... for a touch of colour, So to relieve their sombre air; For me, I like my clothes to be much duller Than what the nigger minstrels wear; I hold by sable, drab and grey; I do not wish ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... causeless hatreds rise, And daily where he goes, of late, he spies The scowls of sullen and revengeful eyes; 'Tis what he knows with much contempt to bear, And serves a cause too good to let him fear: He fears no poison from incensed drab, No ruffian's five-foot sword, nor rascal's stab; Nor any other snares of mischief laid, Not a Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade; From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique all blockheads have ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... founded in 1808, was incorrectly styled the Four-in-Hand Club, and the Barouche Club. According to the Club rules, the barouches were "yellow-bodied, with 'dickies,' the horses bay, with rosettes at their heads, and the harness silver-mounted. The members wore a drab coat reaching to the ankles, with three tiers of pockets, and mother-o'-pearl buttons as large as five-shilling pieces. The waistcoat was blue, with yellow stripes an inch wide; breeches of plush, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... people appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. W. D. Howells, an American gentleman who ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... hand, thinking gratefully of her sister Mary who in addition to her work as superintendent of the neighborhood public school, supervised the household at 7 Madison Street. Hotel rooms were cold and drab, the food was uninviting, and only occasionally did she find to her delight "a Christian cup of coffee."[316] She often felt that the Lyceum Bureau drove her unnecessarily hard, routed her inefficiently, and profited too generously from her labors. Now and then she ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... attracted by nothing except brilliant color, and others who have heard so much of the vulgarity of 'high lights' and gaudy hues, that they will tolerate nothing but brown trees, russet grass, gray skies, slate rocks, drab gowns, copper skins, and shadows so deep that the discovery of the objects represented becomes a real game of 'hide and go seek.' There are also the timidly modest, who, although aware of their own preferences, are yet afraid to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I say the fabric Was wrought of faery woof, Not made in walls of drab brick Nor won with mortal oof; Delicate, dream-like, pretty As sunshine after rain, Worn by Miss Hodgson ("Kitty")— It seems a dreadful pity She spilled ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... long after everybody had gone to the north, coiled dismally over the fanlike roof of dirty glass that sheltered a blistered front door. Inside, a faint odour of mouldiness hung in the air of the rooms, which had been shut up unoccupied for a long time. The ugly drab curtains in the drawing-room smelled of the moth-powder in which they had been wrapped through the summer heat. The imitation lace drapery underneath them had been torn and not mended. Bits of thick brown paper pasted ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Thrala let fall her drab cloak, stood with arms outstretched in the crater land. Her sparkling robe sheathed her in glory and she sang softly, rapt in her own delight. Then Dandtan put his arm about her; she clung to him, staring about as might a ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... that are gifted with the sweetest of songs. In the bed of the Morogoro River lives a warbler who sings from the late afternoon until dusk, and he is one of the very few birds that have that deep contralto note, the "Jug" of the nightingale. And there are little wrens with drab bodies and crimson tails that live beside the dwellings of men and pick up crumbs from the doors of our tents, and hunt the rose trees for insects. In the thorn bushes of higher altitudes are grey finches that might ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... breasts, the mouth resolute and determined. She had now the fine expectation of her youth, her health, her optimism, her ignorance of the world. When these things left her she would perhaps be a yet plainer woman. In her dress she was not clever. Her clothes were ugly with the coarse drab grey of their material and the unskilful workmanship that had created them. And yet there would be some souls who would see in her health, her youth, the kind sympathy of her eyes and mouth, the high nobility of her forehead from which her hair ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... past tobacco factories, breweries, powder mills, scattered hovels, and unkempt streets. Here was no sun, but plenty of bare whitewash. Even Alec, accustomed to the singularly ugly etchings of Paris viewed from its chief railways, was completely disillusioned by these drab adumbrations of commerce and squalor. The Tave was no longer blue, but dull brown with the mud of recent rain. Not even the inhabitants were attractive. They were not garbed as Serbs, but wore ungainly costumes that might have passed unnoticed in the Bowery. He was irresistibly reminded of ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... drab, middle-aged type of revery, and youth might show more life and color; but the linkages between one thought and the next are typical of any revery. The linkages belong in the category of "facts previously observed". I had previously observed the ownership of this dog by my neighbor, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... appeared, brought not as usual by the footman, in scarlet and drab, but by the old butler, in threadbare but well-brushed black, who, as he was placing it on the table, said—'If you please, Sir Christopher, there's the widow Hartopp a-crying i' the still room, and begs leave to ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... sovereign brought in by a revolution. They made a favourite of Courtenay, but they desired to marry him to the queen, not to Elizabeth: Gardiner told the young earl that he would sooner see him the husband of the vilest drab who could be picked out of the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... the meantime, had come down from the woods and entered upon her duties in the mill office. The change from her dull, drab life, giving her, as it did, an opportunity for companionship with people of greater mentality and refinement than she had been used to, quickly brought about a swift transition in the girl's nature. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... curiously wrought lintels of the massive marble front, and exclaimed: "Upon my soul, gentlemen, it is so grand I begin to fear I shall not be comfortable in it." He had scarcely concluded this sentence, when a distinguished politician, habited in soiled drab trousers and a shabby brown dress coat, and a badly collapsed hat, which he wore well down over his eyes, rushed eagerly out, and was followed by a mellow faced policeman, with a green patch over his left eye and a club in his right hand. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... rising, rock-covered slope that led to the base of Quill's Window. On all sides were great, flat slabs of stone, some of them almost buried in the earth, others sticking their jagged points up above the brush and weeds. Back in ages dim these drab, moss-covered rocks had been sliced from the side of the towering mound by the forces that shaped the earth, to be hurled hither and thither with the calm disdain of the mighty. No human agency had blasted them from their insecure hold on the shoulders of the cliff. Uncounted ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon |
