"Drab" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... slender throat a key that would unlock the doors of the whole world, and beside her the little boarding-house help, equally young, and with all youth's big demands pent up within her, yet ahead of her only a drab vista of other boarding-houses—some better, some worse, mayhap—but always eating the bread of servitude, her only possible way of escape by means of matrimony with some ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... be good," repeated the drab, a big, fair damsel with puckered eyes and features worn ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... 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 ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... through the branches made strange noises all about. They seemed to be shut in by a wall of blackness on every hand, except ahead where, like great streaming eyes of fire, the powerful lamps shot out their rays making weird color effects in the forest—huge tree-trunks loomed a dead drab, like mute sentinels, grim and ominous, that barred their way; now, in the full glare, the foliage took on the softest fairy shade of green; now, tapering off, heavier in color, it merged into impenetrable black; and, with the jouncing of the car, the light rays jiggling up and ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... London on a Sunday afternoon one beholds some weird and wonderful costumes. On a Sunday afternoon in a sub-suburb of a Kensington suburb I saw, passing through a drab, sad side street, a little Cockney man with the sketchy nose and unfinished features of his breed. He was presumably going to church, for he carried a large Testament under his arm. He wore, among other things, a pair of white spats, a long-tailed coat ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... baby. But you could spend long, long hours in the summerhouse, reading poetry out of the big Anthology and-this a secret-writing poetry yourself! It was heavenly to write poetry. Something soft and warm seemed to ooze through your being as you sat out there and watched the sorrow of a drab, drab sky; or else, on a bright day, a big shining cloud aloft like some silver-gold fairy palace and, down below, the smell of warm, new-cut grass, and whispers of little live things everywhere! It was then that you felt you'd have died if you ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... is our first day's trek, and we are at a place where we have been before—but not the same billets. I am in a cottage with an earth floor (which looks very odd with a hideous drab-coloured wall-paper), and small children and hens, both dirty, wander in and out of my room. It's too hot to keep the door latched. A swallow's nest in the room next door; and the people say that, although the young have flown, they still return ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... he was in the very act of removing the binoculars from his eyes his keen sight detected what appeared to be an infinitesimally small moving dot against the bare drab face of the cliff, some two miles away. Focussing his glasses afresh upon the spot, Dick watched it steadily for two or three minutes until he became certain that it was moving. Yes, moving downward along the cliff ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... perhaps I should have reached the 'point proposed' with only a loss equivalent to the proverbial 'year's growth,' had not a hidden snag unluckily lain in the way, which 'by hook or by crook' fastened itself in the part of my trowsers exactly corresponding, when dry, with that 'broad disk of drab' finally seen, after much anxiety, by the curious Geoffrey Crayon between the parted coat-skirts of a certain mysterious 'Stout Gentleman,' and inextricably held me in check ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... or twenty feet. Its leaf is somewhat longer than the laurel, and is a little broader at the point; the edges of the leaf are gently curved, and are of a dark sap green color. The nut is of the form and size of a pigeon's egg, and the kernel completely fills the shell. When fresh it is of a white drab color, but, if long kept, becomes the color of chocolate. The kernel, when new, is nearly all butter, which is extracted in the following manner:—The shell is removed from the kernel, which is ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... appreciated this long-standing antipathy as he cast about for some common ground of interest in the little reception-room of the house shared by Bernard Graves and his mother. It seemed to the waiting caller a drab and lifeless home, uninteresting in its appointments, and out of keeping with the wealth known to have been inherited by the widow and her son. The young man's study was visible down the vista of a series ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... hour before that time saw me standing before the Columbus statue in the Piazza Acquaverdi. Weems was such a mighty squeamish little creature about the proprieties that I thought an old dunnage-sack would scandalize him, and so had purchased a drab portmanteau for my kit at the cost of half my remaining capital. I intended to have no more breezes with him if it ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... knitting, and she went over to the beans. Now, never believe me, if she didn't see sitting right before her a bit of an old man, with a cocked hat on his head and a dudeen (pipe) in his mouth, smoking away! He had on a drab-coloured coat with big brass buttons on it, and a pair of silver buckles on his shoes, and he working away as hard as ever he could, heeling a ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the old women hastened, though with infirm steps, across her little garden towards the road, and stood by the edge of it among tall stalks of red valerian and a great plant of periwinkle which hung down over the wall. And there came along the road a tall man with grizzled hair, dressed in drab breeches and gaiters just like any other man, but wearing on his head a flat blue cap, widening out from brim to crown, with a yellow band round the forehead—the watering cap of a Light Dragoon. He walked very erect, though he limped slightly with one leg; and over one shoulder he carried ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... old Skirmish; let this warrant thee, Facilis Descensus Averni, 'tis an easy journey to a Knave; thou mayest be a Knave when thou wilt; and Peace is a good Madam to all other professions, and an arrant Drab to us, let us handle her accordingly, and by our wits thrive in despite of her; for since the law lives by quarrels, the Courtier by smooth God-morrows; and every profession makes it self greater by imperfections, why not we then by shifts, wiles, and forgeries? and seeing our brains ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... exhortation as some of the time may have been, and drab- colored as most of the days certainly were, there were, bright passages here and there, and one reminiscence was related in later years, in her poem "In Honour of Du Bartas," the delight ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... said Bess, still dusting. She was no longer a drab of the streets but a young lady who, thanks to Dick's check, had paid her premium and was entitled to pull beer-handles with the best. Being neatly dressed in black she did not hesitate to face Mrs. Beeton, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... feelings of a romantic maiden who, prone to choose her novels by title, has set down on her library list The Price of Love (METHUEN), and finds herself landed with one of Mr. ARNOLD BENNETT'S intimate little guides to "Bursley" and the four other drab towns. And yet if she will set her teeth and read the first fifty pages without skipping she will discover that she is being let into real secrets of real human hearts; that handsome Rachel (penniless companion to a benign ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... her. "Say, yer all right!" He turned, swiftly, and ran through the crowd, and in a moment had disappeared like a small drab-coloured ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... name of the Hotel Esplanade caught my ear. I approached the table and found two flashily dressed bullies and a bedraggled drab from the streets talking in ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... of a sheep-dog—that is, as his class are generally portrayed in coloured prints—might possibly have been brought up as a water-spaniel, or he might have been the darling of a semi-detached villa and have learnt to walk drab, unlovely streets without endangering his life: it is all a matter of education, fortified by environment. As it was, he was brought up with a cottage for a home and learnt the mysteries of sheep, the tending and the care of them, what the stretching ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... bracelets, with gold coins about the forehead —and one was Dicky Donovan. He had done the rare thing: he had trusted absolutely that class of woman who is called a "rag" in that far country, and a "drab" in ours. But he was a judge of human nature, and judges of human nature know you are pretty safe to trust a woman who never trusts, no matter how bad she is, if she has no influence over you. He used to say that the better you are and the worse she is, the more you can trust ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... man and the hobbling old mare, making their way across the bare lot, made as drab a picture in the early morning as a Millet. At a distance their moving shapes would have seemed like shadows only. There was no other sign of life ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... Prussian; who cannot be got to see that we are all white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the North-East Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colourless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the grey or the drab. Yet he will explain, in serious official documents, that the difference between him and us is a difference between "the master-race and the inferior-race." The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an argument; and the difficulty here is that ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... morning; there was only one coach on the stand; one Crane drove the coach; I saw the gentleman get out of the chaise into the coach, he stepped out of the one into the other; I opened the door, and let down the step for him; he had a brown cap on, a dark drab military great coat, and a scarlet coat under it; I only took notice of the lace under it. The gentleman ordered the coach to drive up to Grosvenor-square; I do not remember that he told me the street ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... of daylight you are used to being called in, and all were in their own beds. Kathleen had framed the wish most sensibly. The only mistake had been in saying "in our own beds" because, of course, Mabel's own bed was at Yalding Towers, and to this day Mabel's drab-haired aunt cannot understand how Mabel, who was staying the night with that child in the town she was so taken up with, hadn't come home at eleven, when the aunt locked up, and yet she was in her bed in the ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... 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 of ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... Words have been chang'd into the quite contrary, in less than three Months Time; and instead of pleasant Jests at Table, Dishes and Trenchers have flown about. The Husband, instead of my dear Soul, has been call'd Blockhead, Toss-Pot, Swill-Tub; and the Wife, Sow, Fool, dirty Drab. ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... Drab and dying amber and the dapple of walnut wood. Chairs dressed in pallid chintz, holding out their skirts with an air of anxiety. Stuffed love-birds on a branch under a tall glass shade. On the chimney-piece sand-white pampas ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... failings was an inability to estimate the true value of things. He possessed something of the spirit of adventure and a desire to escape from the drab monotony of his early life, but these found expression in betting on the exploits of others on the football field and the turf, a haunting of the music-halls, and the cultivation of acquaintances on the lowest rung of the dramatic profession. All this offered him some ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... ice traversed the soft snow like a gigantic wall bulging up and towering aloft and, as it were, reaching out with its arms to the right and the left. It was covered by snow on top, but at its sides there were gleams of blue and green and drab and black, aye, even of yellow and red. They could now see to larger distances, as the enormous and unceasing snowfall had abated somewhat and was only as heavy as on ordinary snowy days. With the audacity of ignorance they clambered up on the ice in order to cross the interposing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... warning sound 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 ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs along upper ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... was down to breakfast early, leaving Dorothy to be served in her room. The hotel was drab and decayed exteriorly; but the dining room was a continental elegance of marble, gilt, and mirrors. Douglas was not stopping here, as I had already learned. I concluded that he would be at one of the better known hotels on the Prado, and I hurried thither as fast as I could. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... quality of the Roman faith—that its forms and customs, learned in youth, remain in the affections of Papists to their dying day, even after many years of neglect and unbelief; whereas in the severe, Spanish-drab Protestantism to which I was reared, if one once loses interest in the tenets themselves, there is nothing whatever left upon which the mind ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... monument, presented a continuous sea of heads. We marked, among the flags exhibited, the Royal Standard of Scotland, apparently a piece of venerable antiquity, for the field of gold had degenerated into a field of drab, and the figure in the centre showed less of leonine nobleness than of art in that imperfect state in which men are fain to content themselves with semblances doubtful and inexpressive, and less than half the result of chance. The entire pageant was such a one as Sir Walter ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... you stay awhile, and you find that the woman you've been thinking of as Queen of Sheba is no more nor a common drab. And the publican you thought of as the grand generous fellow has no more use for you and your bit silver gone. It's a queer thing, but they on land think of nothing but money. And one day you think, and the woman beside you is pastier ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... distant harbour where his ship has just been signalled. Softly the humming of the priests at worship ceases, and the curtain descends on what must always remain a masterpiece of delicate pathos—a story that will never lose its appeal while woman's trust in man lends its charm to drab existence. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the view, then struck into a bridle-track across the heath, and regained the high-road about a mile from Beechhurst. Scudding along in front of them was the familiar figure of Miss Wort in her work-a-day costume—a drab cloak and poke bonnet, her back up, and limp petticoats dragging in the dust. She turned swiftly in at the neat garden-gate that had a green space before it, where numerous boles of trees, lopt of their branches, lay about in picturesque confusion. A wheelwright's ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... bound by the ties of a common nature, affinity, sympathy or worth, that is the luminary of the moral world. Without it there would have been "a huge eclipse of sun and moon;" or at best, as a well-known writer(29) expresses it in reference to another subject, we should have lived in "a silent and drab-coloured creation." We are prepared by the power that made us for feelings and emotions; and, unless these come to diversify and elevate our existence, we should waste our days in melancholy, and scarcely be able ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... time the naval aviator had been watching the testing of the cable, a tall, broad-shouldered, well-dressed, clean-shaven, broad-browed young man in a drab tweed golf suit and cap, a man whose great, dark, deep-set eyes wore a keen, intense look, and whose countenance was one which once seen would be easily remembered, lounged into the Old Ship Hotel. He was accompanied by a pretty, dark-haired girl in a summer gown of cream serge and wearing ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... that, at the end of the eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely from making a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalism was not of this drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying the connections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes out in the distaste he felt for history—and his conception of the ideal at which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a city to live in. The millionaires were building white-marble palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops. But in spite of all this, in spite of its pretty girls—and Jefferson insisted that in this one important particular ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... created, in immigration, in great 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 ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... there soldiers moved in bands at their work of clearing. But the black hat, the drab coat of the civilian had long been left behind —and here the face of a woman was unknown as the flying dragons of ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... yellow of Imperial Germany, everywhere the black eagles spread their wings. Even without these indications, the large vigorous neatness of everything would have marked it German. Vast multitudes of men went to and fro, many in white and drab fatigue uniforms busy about the balloons, others drilling in sensible drab. Here and there a full uniform glittered. The airships chiefly engaged his attention, and he knew at once it was three of these he had seen on the previous night, taking advantage of the cloud welkin to manoeuvre unobserved. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... the contrary is strongly suggested. A gloomy day, in a drab room, sparsely tenanted by listeners, invites platform disaster. Everyone feels it in the air. But let the speaker walk squarely up to the issue and suggest by all his feeling, manner and words that this is going to be a great gathering in every vital sense, and see how the suggestive ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... sailing until our pith helmets arrived on the 26th, when, at 10 o'clock on a clear moonlight night, we steamed away escorted by two T.B.Ds. The Bay was crossed in calm weather. Gibraltar passed on the 30th and Malta reached on the 2nd June. Our clothing, consisting of the ordinary drab khaki, now began to prove ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... political reports, how gradually they grew and grew, until at last the eclipse was complete, and the diplomacy had been thrust into the tiny paragraphs while the war filled the journal. Under July 7th comes the first glint of arms amid the drab monotony of the state papers. On that date it was announced that two companies of Royal Engineers and departmental corps with reserves of supplies and ammunition were being dispatched. Two companies of engineers! Who could have ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and stood looking out at the rain-washed earth and the falling leaves. The sky was heavy and drab. He thought of Betty and her picnic and of how gay and sweet she was, and how altogether desirable, and the thought wrought a change in his spirit. He went downstairs and kissed his mother; then he, too, put on his rubber overshoes ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... in at that moment, and Mrs. Moon's attention was distracted by the really amazing spectacle presented by her niece. And Miss Juliana, who for five-and-twenty years had never appeared in anything but frowsy drab or dingy grey, Miss Juliana flaunting in silk at four o'clock in the afternoon, Miss Juliana, all shining and shimmering like a silver and mauve chameleon, was a sight to take anybody's breath away. Martha ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... load of grain creaked up the hill and stopped at the mill door. The driver, seeing Friend Barton's broad-brimmed drab felt hat against the dark interior of the barn, came down the short lane leading from the mill, past the house ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... and the entrance darkened, and the whispering voices of the hornets, the most frightful robbers and murderers in the insect world, penetrated into the hive, then the faces of the valiant little bees turned pale as if washed over by a drab light falling upon their ranks. They gazed at one another with eyes in which death sat waiting, and those who were ranged at the entrance knew full well that one moment more and all ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... Bartahlinsky's Seagull amongst them. It was not there; but presently she became conscious of some one standing beside her, and on looking up she recognised Black Gard, the Count's confidential man. He was dressed like the fishermen in drab trousers and a dark blue jersey, but wore a blue cloth cap, with the name of the yacht on ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... I had had the devil's own luck in my capture of a post on The Spectator. Indeed, I very much preferred that, to the thought that the good fortune that was mine was the reward of a grinding and ignoble perseverance. I was in no mood for the drab virtues. I hugged the thought that it was not through my merits but because I possessed a conquering star that I ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... wrathfully strode out myself, and tried to shake myself as I have seen a Newfoundland dog do. The shake was not a success—it caused my trouser-leg to flap dismally about my ankles, and sent the streams of loathsome ooze trickling down into my shoes. My hat, of drab felt, had fallen off by the brookside, and been plentifully spattered as I got out. I looked at my youngest nephew with ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... villain! 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 scold, unpack my heart with words, And fall a cursing, like a very drab, A scullion! Fye upon't! fye! About, my brains![72] 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; ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... Allerdyke and Partners, Limited, he had set himself up in two rooms in a Bloomsbury lodging-house. He knew little of London life at that time, or he would have known that he was thus condemning himself to a drab and dreary existence. As it was, he quickly learnt by experience, and within six months, having picked up a comfortable knowledge of things, he transferred himself to one of those well-equipped boarding establishments in ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... "cow-bird." It is also called the "yellow-billed cuckoo." It is in no respect behind any of its neighbours of the grove in conjugal and parental affection, for it builds its nest, hatches its own eggs, and rears its own young, Wilson assures us. It is about a foot in length, clothed in a dark drab suit with a silken greenish gloss. A ruddy cinnamon tints the quill-feathers of the wings; and the tail consists partly of black feathers tipped with white, the two outer ones being of the same tint ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... rapid glances, especially when he was engaged in debate, and his high-toned and thin voice would ring through the Senate Chamber like the shrill scream of an angry vixen. He generally wore a full suit of heavy, drab-colored English broadcloth, the high, rolling collar of his surtout coat almost concealing his head, while the skirts hung in voluminous folds about his knee-breeches and the white leather tops of his boots. He used to enter the Senate Chamber wearing ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... gentleman refused admission to the opera on the score of his imperfect costume, much to his amazement; "for," he writes, "I was dressed in a superfine blue coat with gold buttons, white waistcoat, fashionable tight drab pantaloons, white silk stockings and dress shoes, all worn but once, a few days before, at a dress concert, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern." He proceeds to express his indignation at the idea of the manager presuming to enact sumptuary laws without the intervention ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the next trial!" exclaimed the dwarf, briskly breaking in upon his drab-colored meditations, and bustling past. "We will get it over at once, and ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... tells that he was received by Washington, and, "after ... half an hour, the General came in again, with his hair neatly powdered, a clean shirt on, a new plain drab coat, white waistcoat and white silk stockings. At three, dinner was on the table, and we were shown by the General into another room, where everything was set off with a peculiar taste and at the same time neat and plain. The General sent the bottle about pretty ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... this quiet 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 I beg you, comrades, to ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... hero represents in a fashion the adventures of the whole Italian race coming to America: its natural southern gayety set in contrast to the drab East Side. The gondolier becomes boot-black. The grape-gathering peasant girl becomes the suffering slum mother. They are not specialized characters like Pendennis or Becky Sharp in the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... and vicious creatures who lacked even the sort of tawdry finery that their sisters in western mining camps affect. There was here no shimmer of even the slaziest satin. In dress as in character they were drab. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... scream? Why are her eyes fastened—not on her lover—not on the madman, but upon another object? What is that object? Is it a man? Can any man move as that thing moves? Surely that cannot be a man, that streak of drab color—yonder thing that casts to the ground a garment, then shoots backward twenty feet from the abyss—swifter than a panther, as silent as death, with two balls of living fire glaring from—from a face? Surely not a human face! Yes, it is a human face. She ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... be said of Mr. Willings that his happy smile always walks in front of him. This smile makes music of his life, it means that once again he has been chosen, in his opinion, as the central figure in romance. No one can well have led a more drab existence, but he will never know it; he will always think of himself, humbly though elatedly, as the chosen of the gods. Of him must it have been originally written that adventures are for the adventurous. He ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... from the Gamma Psi dance at Delmonico's except for several chorus girls from a midnight revue who sat at a side table and wished they'd taken off a little more make-up after the show. Here and there a drab, mouse-like figure, desperately out of place, watched the butterflies with a weary, puzzled curiosity. But the drab figure was the exception. This was the morning after May Day, and celebration was ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... "the world goes forward through the heart rather than through the head. Happiness, to my mind, is emotional, not mental. And the movie has brought happiness to millions whose lives were formerly drab and sordid. I love to go into these little halls in out-of-the-way places, and see the men, women, and children packed there of an evening. Theatrical companies never reached the villages, and the men had no place but the saloon, the women no place but the kitchen or the ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... hung around the post. The sun and the leaves made spots come down; I looked close at him through the fence; The post was drab and ...
— Under the Tree • Elizabeth Madox Roberts
... memorable, when the book was a copy of Burns. On Whittier's first visit to Boston, an occasion honored by his wearing "boughten buttons" on his homespun coat, and a broad-brim hat made by his aunt out of pasteboard covered with drab velvet, he purchased ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... snug beneath their lids with well-trained reverence; and this genius of the fire always appeared as soon as the glow began to fade, as if by inspiration. In my large chamber, draped with white muslin over rose color and drab damask, a superb fire glowed. I must make ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... lengthened as I sped along, the tired yellow sun slipped down behind the hills like a penny-into-the-slot machine, and the early April twilight touched all inanimate objects with its own drab lack of coloring. I had no fear of losing my way in the darkness—I had too much locality sense for that—but the possibilities of my being ambushed appeared too many to be pleasant. A hurrying man, who is also heavily-laden, cannot ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... things must dazzle us by their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when beneath ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... hurriedly along quiet by-streets to the ROSENTAL. But before she had advanced a hundred yards, her courage began to fail, and the further she went, the more her spirits sank. Her surroundings were indescribably depressing: the smirched, steadily retreating snow was leaving bare all the drab brownness it had concealed—all the dismal little gardens, and dirty corners. Houses, streets and people wore their most bedraggled air. Particularly the people: they were as ugly as the areas of roof and stone, off ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... voice from the bottom of one of the long mugs at a street breakfast stall, which the fog almost concealed from their view, and presently an urchin in a drab coat and blue collar came towing a wretched, ewe-necked, hungry-looking, roan rosinante along from where he had been regaling himself with a mug of undeniable bohea, sweetened with a composition of ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... departed, leaving Powers and Mazechazz staring at each other in the council chamber, their gaudy uniforms looking a little dull and drab. ...
— Join Our Gang? • Sterling E. Lanier
... simple, consisting of a coarsely-knitted blue jersey shirt that might have been the great-grandfather of the one Vince wore; and a pair of trousers, of a kind of drab drugget, so thick that they would certainly have stood up by themselves, and so cut that they came nearly up to the man's armpits, and covered his back and chest, while the braces he wore were short ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... emaciated, 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
... species. Mentioning this to a friend of large experience, he told me that he had known several instances where the eggs of the two kinds had been found laid in the same nest. The eggs are, of course, easily distinguishable, those of the common partridge being of a greenish drab colour, while those of the red-leg are of a dull, cream colour, covered with small brown spots. I have been informed by another authority that the eggs of the red-leg have also been found in the nest of an outlying pheasant. ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... out alone!' A woman's figure in front had induced this thought. Her walk seemed oddly familiar, and when she turned the corner for which he was bound, his heart began to beat. He hastened on to the corner to make certain. Yes! It was Irene; he could not mistake her walk in that little drab street. She threaded two more turnings, and from the last corner he saw her enter her block of flats. To make sure of her now, he ran those few paces, hurried up the stairs, and caught her standing at her door. He heard the latchkey ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... fate had of deciding great issues. Four weeks ago he was something of a piece of mechanism, fairly content with his drab-colored life; and now a girl had entered it and brought to him visions too fair and beautiful to be viewed unveiled, and he knew at last the mystery and power of love. Almost a week of her stay had gone before he met her. In those that followed, he had seen her ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... day. If anybody can see that my tuft is dyed, may I be—" When the door was flung open, and a large lady with a curl on her forehead, yellow shawl, a green-velvet bonnet with feathers, half-boots, and a drab gown with tulips and other large exotics painted on it—when, in a word, Mrs. Crump and her daughter bounced into ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to him by a young lady who liked him very much. It was wrought in a Persian pattern slightly mingled with the Greek, and was embroidered with purple, yellow, crimson, Magenta, sage green, invisible blue, ecru, old gold, drab, and other shaded worsteds, dotted with stitches of shining silk and beads of silver, the tassel alone containing skeins of ecru sewing silk. The young lady lived not very far from Mr. Stimpcett's, and she was that other reason why Mr. St. Clair became ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the soft downy wool growing next the body of the goat. In color it is white, dark gray, or drab; and of this many of the finest India rugs are woven. Large-tailed sheep are common in Kabul, Peshawar, and other districts; these furnish wool from which many a rug is woven. It is possible that the very sheep watched over by the shepherds of Judea ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... the iron 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
... watch—would he be too late? He had no idea how long it would take to reach Gravesend; he knew nothing of the race track's location. As the train whirled him through Emerson, where his mother lived, he could see the little drab cottage, and wondered pathetically what the good woman would say if she knew her son was going to a race meeting. At twelve he was ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... little from his shock, he went and sniffed curiously at the representative pieces of the fallen projectile. They had a distinctive flavour, oddly reminiscent of the two drab animals of the ledge. He sat up and pawed the larger lump, and walked round it several times, trying to find a ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... the heavy object being dragged away from the door at the top of the steps. They both sprang to their feet. An oblong patch of drab, gray light ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... vouchsafing no more, and soon left the breakfast-table, to take up the work she had laid out to do. And she accomplished it, though many times her hands dropped idle and her eyes peered out of her window at the drab slides ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... drab scows, along the canoe's route, looked up from their lines, in bovine wonder at the vision of loveliness which swept resonantly past them. For the quartet were warbling. They were also doing queer musical stunts which are ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... be added, that 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 to return. Perhaps she told him that she was about to ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... stopped at one of those frank little restaurants that brighten Chicago's drab side streets. Its windows were full of pans that held baked beans, all crusty and brown, and falsely tempting, and of baked apples swimming in a pool of syrup. These flanked by ketchup bottles and geometrical pyramids of ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... 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 on The ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar with the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon, the drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all the goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one wishes that one's dear friends would only be friends also with each other. Why should Borrow snarl so churlishly ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... under it, and how perfectly darn beautiful she was, and what a shame that it was almost midnight! She and her hub were going to Washington. Everybody was, of course. Why wasn't Marie Louise there? And Polly's husband was to be a major—think of it! He was going to be all dolled up in olive drab and things and— "Damn the clock, anyway; if we miss that train we can't get on another for days. And what's your address? Write it on the edge of that bill of fare and tear it off, and I'll write you the minute I get settled, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... 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
... shot bump grab fled ship blot lump drab sled whip spot pump slab sped slip plot jump stab then drip trot hump brag bent spit clog bulk cram best crib frog just clan hemp gift plod drug clad vest king stop shut dash west grit ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... these people passing up and down the river, when employed on a steamer between Natchez and New Orleans, and had heard that they disliked slavery. He, therefore, hastened toward the drab-coated men, who, on his approach, opened the barn-door, and told ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... elergant? And wasn't it lovely of him to buy us out? And just think of having both the lamp and the shade for one day's work! Aren't you glad you wore your pink gingham now, even if mother did make you put on flannel underneath? You do look so pretty in pink and red, Rebecca, and so homely in drab and brown!" ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... able yet, during the several hours of their journey, to take any pleasure in the scenery or in her mount. For in the first place there was nothing to see but scrubby little gnarled cedars and drab-looking rocks; and in the second this Indian pony she rode had discovered she was not an adept horsewoman and had proceeded to take advantage of the fact. It did not help Carley's predicament to remember that Glenn had decidedly advised ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... drops and all. 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. The standards must have just such colors, the ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... dishevelled drab, Who there doth scratch herself with filthy nails, And crouches now, and ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... Land, Paradise, and what not; while the minds of saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as union with their deity. For it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form is the reality ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... of narrow, winding streets, we came to Poplar 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 ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... On the spot where Tom Idle (for whom I have an 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 ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the bystanders were very varied regarding them. Some were full of tender pity and compassion; some denounced the system as a cruel and oppressive tyranny; others deplored it as an unhappy necessity; and a few well-to-do-looking old citizens, in drab shorts and wide-brimmed hats, grew marvelously indignant at the recreant poltroonery of "the scoundrels who were not proud to fight ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... naked for one-third to one-half its height and from one to six feet in diameter, with a smooth bark, silvery or whitish in young trees, becoming thick and heavily fissured into rounded ridges on old trunks, and gray or drab-brown in color, it is readily distinguishable, with its companion, the red fir, by the regularity of construction of trunk, branch and branchlet. As Smeaton Chase expresses it, "The fine smooth arms, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... 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. Inside ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... beating his horse—a white man, for no Indian used such language, no Indian beat an animal that served him. We-hro looked up. Stuck in the mud of the river road was a huge wagon, grain-filled. The driver, purple of face, was whaling the poor team, and shouting to a cringing little drab-white dog, of fox-terrier lineage, to "Get out ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... dazzling morning nearly five weeks after the dispatching of Ma Sampson's letter to Rosebud. The heralds of spring, the warm, southern breezes, which brought trailing flights of geese and wild duck winging northward, and turned the pallor of the snow to a dirty drab hue, like a soiled white dress, had already swept across the plains. The sunlight was fiercely blinding. Even the plainsman is wary at this time of the year, for the perils of snow-blindness are as real to him as to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... a short, stout man, in drab-coloured breeches, and gaiters to match; a black coat and waistcoat; he wore a large watch-chain, with a prodigious bunch of seals, alternated by small keys and old-fashioned mourning-rings. His complexion was pale and sodden, and his hair short, dark, and sleek. The bookseller valued himself on ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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, and ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Master Raymond was sitting in the porch of the Red Lion, thinking over a sight he had just seen;—a man had passed by wearing on the back of his drab coat a capital I two inches long, cut out of black cloth, and sewed upon it. On inquiry he found the man had married his deceased wife's sister; and both he and the woman had been first whipped, and then condemned to wear this letter for the rest of their lives, according ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... A computer or peripheral device that has been designed and built to military specifications for field equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab 'uniform' paint ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... supper Hugh arrived at the Cooks', and the two boys accompanied by Harold set out. They felt very proud to be walking with a real live soldier, a man in the olive drab uniform of the American Army. Harold carried a rifle, with an ugly looking bayonet affixed to the barrel, the whole thing being nearly as ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... a 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, and this ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... in his many-caped drab overcoat, and fox-skin cap and gloves, sat upon the coachman's box with the proud air of a king upon his throne. And why not? It was Oliver's very first visit to the city, and the suit of clothes he ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... The eggs are greenish-drab in color, spotted, blotched, and dotted irregularly and thickly with yellowish and umber brown. The eggs are two or four, abruptly ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... and honor is humbug; and Gentlemanhood is an extinct folly; and Ambition is madness; and desire of distinction is criminal vanity; and glory is bosh; and fair fame is idleness; and nothing is true but two and two; and the color of all the world is drab; and all men are equal; and one man is as tall as another; and one man is as good as another—and a great dale betther, as the Irish ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... low-ceilinged room above a baker's shop in the village, and had strewn it about with books and photographs and nick-nacks until the drab surroundings seemed to reflect a little of her dainty personality. Thither, later in the day, she took Betty off to tea and introduced her to a tall fair girl with abundant hair and a gentle, rippling laugh that had in it the quality of ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... to repeat; "Morleena, child, my hat! Morleena, my hat!" until Mrs. Kenwigs sunk back in her chair, overcome with grief, while the four little girls (privately instructed to that effect) clasped their uncle's drab shorts in their arms, and ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... stare! but such is absolutely the rubbish which has been shot from the Chiswick Press. Next—hear it, ye powers of impudence!—Allan Cunningham's beautiful ballad of Lady Anne, makes its appearance as "Lady Nell." We need scarcely add that in such hands the virgin degenerates into a drab. The other remodelments are trash. The "Merchant's Garland" is a new version by Sheldon of a street ditty called the "Factor's Garland," of which we happen to have a copy in a collection of penny histories. It is as much an ancient ballad as the Murder ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... 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
... swarthy features; eyes like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Kruedener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty thousand francs ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... it is, here in the great German out-of-doors, on the border of the Hundekehlen lake, with a nimble kellner at my elbow, with the plain, homely German people to the right and left of me, with the stars beginning to silver in the silent water, with the band lifting me, a drab and absurd American, into the spirit of this kaiserwelt, and with the innocent eyes of the fair fraeulein under yonder tree intermittently englishing their coquettish glances from the eisschokolade ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... one the plumper, and one decidedly the younger of the three; then, although they were dressed so exactly alike,—according to what be, I suspect, a sumptuary law in England—and although their stout travelling-dresses, drab cloaks, thick boots, the shaggy shawls severally carried by each on one arm, the faded blue cravats tied round their throats, were so precisely alike and had been subjected to so exactly the same amount ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... Rupert the most especial dandy I had ever seen; but that, evidently, was my limited experience: even Rupert cannot display so perfect a fit in bottle-green coats, so faultless a silken stock, buckskins of such matchless drab!" ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... hotels, however, there is great temptation. On the north-eastern coast, in particular, when the weather has, as the phrase goes, 'broken up,' and the sky and sea have both become one durable drab, the best of women grow irritable, the men morose. At the table d'hote, which even the most exclusive are driven to frequent for company, as sheep huddle together in storm, Dislike ripens to Hate with frightful rapidity. Our ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... called in question, we think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable tho not faultless. The ethical delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist"—as Shakespeare has been well called—do not exhibit the drab-colored Quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from "The Whole Duty of Man" or from "The Academy of Compliments!" We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... phrase about Greeley's old white coat had some foundation in fact, but not much. He did wear a light drab overcoat when I first saw him, with the full pockets spreading out on each side. As it suited him he wore it many years afterward, and when it was quite worn out he had another one made just like it which he wore many years more. I doubt if he ever had more than two of these ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... the Siward story suggested the further development of the story in the Hrlfssaga. Olrik says: "I n henseende bar Sivard den digres kamp dog noget eget. De almindelige norrne dragekampe lige fra Sigurds drab p Fvne har stadig til ml at vinde dragens guld. For Sivard digre eksisterer dette motiv ikke; han vil frelse de hjemsgte mennesker. Af alle de islandske dragekampe har kun Bjrn Hitdlekmpes noget tilsvarende, og her er det nppe tilfldigt at ogs den er henlagt til de engelske ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... either in stiff cones or in long spines and ridges, whose perpendicular wall-like crests are impossible to climb. The snowy cliffs rest upon shoulders disposed at the "angle of rest," and the prevailing dull drab-yellow of the base is mottled only where accidental fracture or fall exposes the glittering salt-like interior. The gashes in the flank made by wind and rain disclose the core—grey granite or sandstone coloured ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... of one; and in it she is to labor for his comfort or to manifest his ability to maintain her in idleness. The house is the physical expression of the limitations of women; and as such it fills the world with a small drab ugliness. A dwelling house is rarely a beautiful object. In order to be such, it should truly express simple and natural relations; or grow in larger beauty ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... small door in the yard gate was opened, and a sturdy-looking grey-haired man in snuff-coloured coat and cocked hat, drab breeches and gaiters, entered unseen by the pair, who ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... Lark and Sandy Rowl came to the crest of Black Cliff, a drizzle of rain was falling in advance of the fog. The wind was clipping past in soggy gusts that rose at intervals to the screaming pitch of a squall. A drab mist had crept around Point-o'-Bay and was spreading over the ice in Scalawag Run. Presently it would lie thick between Scalawag Island and ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... atmosphere that comes in the smoke of burning oils,—an atmosphere that is never to be found outside the low walls of a dressing-tent. He experienced a sudden feeling of suffocation. The whole world seemed to have closed in upon him; a drab sky almost touched his head; the horizon seemed to have rushed up to within ten feet ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... madrigal in slow and dirge-like tones. "She" was still wayward and unkind, and "He" was setting out on the morrow in search of treasure to lay at a maiden's feet. The young fellow's visions of the Indies were no longer rosy, but drab as November skies. He was pledged to set his face westward ho! but the zest was gone out of the enterprise. He leaned over a gate, and watched the gulls ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... further slope by a narrow gulley. Here the shell-holes were less frequent. A miry path led through an abandoned camp—a chaos of riddled and shattered boards and contorted iron sheeting. Dead Frenchmen were lying everywhere. From a drab heap of mud and clothing a human arm projected. The terminal finger-joints had dropped off. The blackened skin was drawn tightly over the back of the hand which seemed to clutch ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... hairdresser himself, that he and his family sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on the pavement outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by, with lazy dignity. The family had retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight; but the hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there, with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently couldn't bear to have the ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... 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 became a street corner type, and the girl, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... weather came in the night. That day he started to clean-up. A chill wind was blowing from the east and the sky was dark with drab, low-hanging clouds when Bruce put on his hip-boots and began to take up riffles. A thin sheet of water flowed through the boxes, just sufficient to keep the sand and gravel moving down as he took up the riffles one at a time and recovered the ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... hero. She could see him now in the glow of the fire as he had been when in the holidays he had come and snatched her away from a home already drab and difficult for a matinee and an orgy of cream cakes at Gunter's afterwards. He was then a long, slim, handsome boy of irrepressible spirits and impulsive generosity which usually left him, after the first few days of his ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... 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 ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... creature of a past generation; and whenever in time he had chanced to exist he would always have lagged a generation behind. But there was that one colourful streak which somehow, as if by a mistake in creation, had shot a narrow rainbow vein through his drab soul, like a glittering opal in ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... 'She' was a drab belltopper, in perfect preservation, with a crown nothing less than a foot and a half high, and a narrow, wavy brim. She proved a perfect fit when I 'bent' her. I wore her afterward for many a week, till one night she ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... with red mud, the condition from which it derived its name, and it swept along with a splendid vigour that betokened a large reserve flood in the high mountains. The marble composing the walls of this canyon for most of its length is of a greyish drab colour often beautifully veined, but it must not be supposed that the walls are the same colour externally, for they are usually a deep red, due to the discoloration of their surface by disintegration ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... his 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 ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... which were distributed small cut pieces of very yellow cake with very black currants, sandwiches, made of rather warm thin bread and butter, pink and white cocoanut biscuits, and constant relays of strong dark tea made in a drab china teapot. On crowded afternoons—in fact, every other Thursday—little coffee cups containing lumpy iced coffee were also handed round. When they had music there were lemonade, mustard and cress ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... loveliness of the spring-time found a hiding-place anywhere in the well-ordered chambers of his heart, it never relaxed or softened the straight, inflexible lines of his face. As easily could his collarless drab coat and waistcoat have flushed with a sudden ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... over and staring down into the swift black waters of the river, he planned out his drab ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... notorious for the unaccountable noises which disturbed the peace of mind of the new tenants. Not only were there violent knocks, hammerings, groanings, and sounds of footsteps in the ceilings and walls, out strange sights frightened the servants out of their wits. A ghostly visitant dressed in drab would appear and disappear mysteriously, a female figure was often seen to rush through the apartments, and other supernatural occurrences at length became so intolerable that the inmates of the house sought refuge in flight. ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... 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, Heated and clammy, I, Towards the live waves turning, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Mrs. Green had already called up the staircase that dinner was nearly ready before Mopsey had commenced to clothe himself in such garments as he supposed Richard the Third wore. First he put on a thin pair of cotton pants that had once been white, but were now a drab, and which fitted quite closely to his skin. On the outside seams of these he pinned a strip of gilt paper, and then drew on a pair of boots, the tops of which came up quite as high on him as the rubber ones did on Paul. Around these boots was ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... one of these colloquies. He was a 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. His thoughts flew from ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... distance, through the avenue of elms to church, with their small, solemn faces, just now and then slightly nodding to a buttercup and snatching it up; while he, with me and his three-cornered hat on his head, and his gold-headed cane in his hand, and his light drab suit of clothes, all his dress of the same cloth, and his shoes with gold buckles, strode along, while Cato, dressed in some of the Squire's old clothes, walked close behind him like his shadow. You would have thought my master ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... trees the ding of the old church bell, reminding Mr. Bumpkin that he must "goo and smarten oop a bit" for church. He already had on his purple cord trousers, and, as Joe termed it, his hell-fire waistcoat with the flames coming out of it in all directions; but he had to put on his drab "cooat" and white smock-frock, and then walk half a mile before service commenced. He always liked to be there before the Squire, and see him and his daughters, Miss Judith and Miss Mary, ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... white sails of the fishermen winging across the sapphire waters, leaving ribboned pathways behind that crossed and recrossed like a chart of the stars; proud white pleasure-yachts, great vessels from all ports in the world; and an occasional battle-ship, drab and stealthy. And the hundred pink and white villages, the jade and amethyst of the near and far islands, the smiling terraces above the city, the ruined temples, the grim ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... odious to Friends. As I smiled, hearing her, I was aware of my father in the open doorway of the sitting-room, tall, strong, with much iron-gray hair. Within I saw several Friends, large rosy men in drab, with horn buttons and straight collars, their stout legs clad in dark silk hose, without the paste or silver buckles then in use. All wore broad-brimmed, low beavers, and their gold-headed canes rested ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell |
