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More "Decrepit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... houses, "Femmes" on others: reminders of the Boche method of segregating the sexes before he evacuated the inhabitants he wanted to evacuate. Only five civilians remained in the village now—three old men and two feeble decrepit women, numbed and heart-sick with the war, but obstinate in clinging to their homesteads. Already some of our men were patching leaky, shrapnel-flicked roofs with biscuit-tins and strong ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... on our rounds. The first house was tightly closed, and no reply was made to our demands for entrance. The second was the same; one might imagine that it had been deserted for weeks. At the third, the door was opened, and within, an aged woman, ugly, bent, decrepit. Here we measured. The next house, and the next, and the next, were shut. And then another open house contained another veritable hag. Passing several other houses, tightly closed, we found a third ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... need of my assistance, took him upon my back, and having carried him over, bade him get down, and for that end stooped, that he might get off with ease; but instead of doing so (which I laugh at every time I think of it), the old man, who to me appeared quite decrepit, threw his legs nimbly about my neck. He sat astride upon my shoulders, and held my throat so tight that I thought he would have strangled me, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... sloppy, yellow houses; an oppressive absence of colour; a peculiar bleakness in the streets. The menagere hurries down the asphalte to market; a dreadful garcon de cafe, with a napkin tied round his throat, moves about some chairs, so decrepit and so solitary that it seems impossible to imagine a human being sitting there. Where are the Boulevards? where are the Champs Elysees? I asked myself; and feeling bound to apologise for the appearance of the city, I explained to my valet that we were passing through ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... stand a-doddering at me like that as if you were a decrepit old idiot instead of a boy; but just reach down your hat and bustle along," said old Joe; and if Worble, after looking feebly and hopelessly up at the hat on the high peg—the hat he had not worn for years—didn't hop up on ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... canyon I wandered, Far to her camp in the redwoods— The home of the Indian woman, Wrinkled and old and decrepit, Learned in the lore of the Tamals. Nearing her camp-fire, I saw her, And halted in ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... on the women's apartment. He is generally a Brahman, and usually appears in the plays as a tottering and decrepit old man, leaning on his staff of office. 76. The king of serpents on ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... unmarried girls the breasts are rounded and erect, but after marriage gradually become more and more pendant until they hang almost to the waist line. With advancing age the muscles shrink, the skin shrivels up until an individual of 40 to 50 years usually has the decrepit appearance of an octogenarian; in fact, 50 is old age with the Aeta. ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... excited, and that is why Germany knows nothing of disappointed, superfluous, or over-tired people.... The excitability of the French is always maintained at one and the same level, and makes no sudden bounds or falls, and so a Frenchman is normally excited down to a decrepit old age. In other words, the French do not have to waste their strength in over-excitement; they spend their powers sensibly, and ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... moment when the trumpets rang out, a very old woman, in a blue camlet cloak, came hobbling out of a grocer's shop some twenty yards up the pavement, and tottered down ahead of the procession as fast as her decrepit legs would move. There was no occasion for hurrying to avoid the crowd; for the javelin-men had barely rounded the corner of the long street, and were taking the goosestep very seriously and deliberately. ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... anything concerning the position of the enemy, and James Marks, a Rustenburg farmer, determined to go out of the laager and reconnoitre on his own responsibility. Marks was more than sixty-two years old, and was somewhat decrepit, a circumstance which did not prevent him from taking part in almost every one of the Natal battles, however. The old farmer had been absent from his laager less than an hour when he saw a small body of British soldiers at the foot of a kopje. He crept cautiously around the kopje, and, when he was ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... is exchanged for a cry, wild, and solemn, and piercing as that which proclaimed "Sleep no more" to the bloody house of Cawdor. "Italy seems not to feel her sufferings," exclaims her impassioned poet; "decrepit, sluggish, and languid, will she sleep forever? Will there be none to awake her? Oh that I had my ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of all well-disposed Christians. The "long-remembered beggar," who for twenty years had made his regular rounds within the neighbourhood, received rather as an humble friend than as an object of charity, was sent to the neighbouring workhouse. The decrepit dame, who travelled round the parish upon a hand-barrow, circulating from house to house like a bad shilling, which every one is in haste to pass to his neighbour; she, who used to call for her bearers as loud, or louder, than a traveller demands post-horses, even she shared the same disastrous ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... and as anxious as a spoiled boy for the thing that was denied him, Keraunus adhered to his determination to exchange the faithful old fellow for a new and more showy slave. Not for a moment did he think of the miserable fate that threatened the decrepit creature, who had grown old in his house, if he were to sell him; but he still had a feeling that it was not quite right to spend the last money that had chanced to come into the house, on a thing that really and truly was not in any way necessary. The more justifiable ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... she looked in his handsome face, flushed as it was by fever and framed in tumbled curls, her heart swelled, and she felt that she had much to thank the gods for, seeing that her lover was so full of splendid youth and in no respect resembled the prematurely decrepit and sickly wearer of the purple. Nevertheless, she thought a good deal of Caracalla, and it even occurred to her once that if it were he who was being carried instead of Diodoros, she would tend him no less carefully than her betrothed. Caesar, who had been as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... tying of this particular knot was facilitated by the fact that the clergyman was hale mentally but decrepit physically, and, as might be expected, resented the conclusion, long ago arrived at by his friends, that he was unfitted for work. He burgeoned with delight when a servant announced that two young people wanting ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... be fifteen in the spring. She has been well trained, being the eldest girl, and Madame is a thrifty and excellent housekeeper. Then we all mend of youth. You will have a strong, healthy woman to care for you in your old age, instead of a decrepit body to ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... me from participating much in social doings. I am also grieved by the unexpected effects of the Boer war, in England. There must have been shocking blundering and mismanagement somewhere. The pitying way in which "poor, stupid, decrepit old England" is talked about is galling. Some military officers remarked recently that England was hardly worth having a "scrap" with, she would be ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... to exclude her sons, whose guardian he was, from the possession of any of their father's property, if she married elsewhere. She therefore suffered herself to be betrothed to Sicinius Clarus, 'a boorish and decrepit old man,' but put off the marriage, until her father-in-law's death released her from all embarrassment. Pontianus and Pudens succeeded to the property, and Pudentilla felt herself free to take a husband of her own choice. She informed her sons of her intentions. Pontianus approved, but since ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... most scrupulous tenderness for aged and even decrepit interests, we have been trying to liberate you from certain old bad superstitions and silently laying the stones of a new School of English, which we believe to be worthy even ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... was with difficulty, as though they had been glued to the teeth. Some grinned sadly in the sunlight, shaking with cold. Others were sad and still. Charley, subdued by the sudden disclosure of the insignificance of his youth, darted fearful glances. The two smooth-faced Norwegians resembled decrepit children, staring stupidly. To leeward, on the edge of the horizon, black seas leaped up towards the glowing sun. It sank slowly, round and blazing, and the crests of waves splashed on the edge of ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... then went home before night. When the big party of 31 arrived, they had with them one other cannibal of Friday's tribe, a Spaniard, and Friday's father. It appears they always carefully unbound a victim before despatching him. They brought Friday pere for lunch, although he was old, decrepit and thin—a condition that always unfits a man among all known cannibals for serving as food. They reject them as we do stringy old roosters for spring chickens in the best society. Then Friday, born a cannibal and converted to Crusoe's peculiar ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... wave of wonder that fairly drenched me—was feeling a sort of glory in the presence of such an atmosphere of splendid and vital youth. Everything vibrated, quivered, shook about me, and I almost felt myself as an aged and decrepit man by comparison. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... body with a mighty heart,' to depend for existence on the decaying strength or the decrepit courage of the Continent? Is she only to borrow the shattered armour which has hung up for ages in the halls of continental royalty, and encumber herself with its broken and rusty panoply for the ridicule of the world? The European governments have undergone the vicissitudes of fortune. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... in an old creeper-covered and slightly decrepit house in the Spaniards' Road. It was without a bathroom until the Haverstocks took possession of it, for it had been built in the days when the middle-classes had not yet contracted the habit of frequently washing their bodies. From the front windows of the house ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... for a single week to be bullied and intrigued against and threatened and browbeaten as you are, and they have ill-used you for eleven years. If you were a simple Cit's daughter, instead of the descendant of a decrepit, bloodless family, yclept royal, you would make an end now, leave them to their shabby kingship and be a free ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... him the escort of a great grotesque shadow as he threw himself from his horse and passed the reins over a decrepit hitching-post near at hand. Then he essayed the latch of the small gate. He glanced up at Dundas, the moonlight in his dark eyes, with a smile as ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Rutherford. If I wasn't such an aged, decrepit wreck I'd come up and be one of your scholars. Anyhow, I'm real glad to have met you. No, I can't stay ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... infancy, age or illness were unable to help themselves. Women on the eve of child-birth were carried from their beds; mothers with infants clinging to their naked breasts fled from homes which would shelter them no more; the decrepit were borne away on the shoulders of the strong. The narrow thoroughfares were moreover obstructed by furniture dragged from houses, or lowered from windows with a reckless speed that oftentimes destroyed what it sought to preserve. Carts, drays, and horses laden with merchandise ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... island certain other solitary men, who lived apart from him, some of whom appeared to be youths, and others decrepit old men, with whom when Patrick had conversed, he learned that the oldest of them were the sons of the youths; and when Saint Patrick, marvelling, enquired of them the cause of so strange a miracle, they answered unto him, saying: "We from our childhood were ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... not only demands consecration, but it ensures safety. Remember that great word, 'No man is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand.' God is not a careless owner who leaves His treasures to be blown by every wind, or filched by every petty robber. He is not like the king of some decrepit monarchy, slices of whose territory his neighbours are for ever paring off and annexing. What God has God preserves. 'He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.' 'They are Mine, saith ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the obscurity of the doorway revolving these things in his mind, a ragged and decrepit beggar, who had just dragged himself with slow and weary steps to this spot, begged an alms in the professional whine common to his class. The Caliph gave him a small piece of silver, and then watched him as he crossed ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... apoplexy. The child was entitled to the viceroyship of Transylvania, while all the rest of Hungary was to pass unincumbered to Ferdinand. But Isabella, the ambitious young mother, who had married the decrepit monarch that she might enjoy wealth and station, had no intention that her babe should be less of a king than his father was. She was the daughter of Sigismond, King of Poland, and relying upon the support of her regal father she claimed the crown ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... from our food the deleterious earthy matter is our constant aim. To that alone do we owe immunity from old age far in advance of that period of life when your people become decrepit and senile. The human body is like a lamp-wick, which filters the oil while it furnishes light. In time the wick becomes clogged and useless and is thrown away. If the oil could be made perfectly pure, the wick ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... the door she could scarcely see the bed.—She made her way to it, however, got old Martha out of the room, and with great difficulty brought the bewildered, decrepit creature, safely down a small staircase, which the flames had not then reached.—Nothing could exceed her gratitude; with eyes streaming with tears, and a head shaking with strong emotion, she delighted in relating all these ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... was a thoroughly furious Numa who came unexpectedly upon the scent of man. Heretofore the lord of the jungle had disdained the unpalatable flesh of the despised man-thing. Such meat was only for the old, the toothless, and the decrepit who no longer could make their kills among the fleet-footed grass-eaters. Bara, the deer, Horta, the boar, and, best and wariest, Pacco, the zebra, were for the young, the strong, and the agile, but Numa was hungry-hungrier than he ever had been ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... intrude any new customs, we naturally followed theirs. Those nights were a hundred years long to youths accustomed to being up till twelve. We lay awake and miserable till that hour every time, and grew old and decrepit waiting through the still eternities for the clock-strikes. This was no place for town boys. So at last it was with something very like joy that we received news that the enemy were on our track again. With a new birth of the old warrior ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hands; yet he slackened his pace when he came near the cottage where he knew that he was to meet Mrs. Temple and her daughters. When he entered the cottage, the first object that he saw was Helen, sitting by the side of a decrepit old woman, who was resting her head upon a crutch, and who seemed to be in pain. This was the poor woman who had been ridden over by Lady Di. Spanker. A farmer who lived near Mrs. Temple, and who was coming ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... helped to prove the truth of this argument. I, amongst others, belonging to a large party who were waiting at a railway station for the train that was to carry us down to a garden party at one of the many lovely places on the Thames, saw an old man, a decrepit creature, bowed and palsied, making his way to where the third-class compartment would be. His arms were full of bundles of various sizes. Coming near a truck, the old man, who was half blind, marched against the edge of it, and all his little bundles fell helplessly to ...
— How to Marry Well • Mrs. Hungerford
... did not give you warning," said the count, shrugging his shoulders and smiling; "permit me! Princess Anna Chechevinski!" he continued with emphasis, indicating his poor, decrepit sister. "Of course you would not have ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... they are rather decrepit when they reach such extreme old age as that—Uncle Heath is forty you know, and see what a tottering ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... more positively gross state one cannot imagine. There are women who are by accident more degraded physically. Mutatis mutandis, there are none more degraded, morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however silly, and however evil, who ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... precepts of religion were apt to be kept rather in the letter than in the spirit. He had seen the sacred cow, which no good Hindu would venture to kill for untold gold, atrociously overworked, and, when too decrepit to be of further service, left to perish miserably of neglect and starvation. It might be that although the Marathas would not themselves lay hands on the Babu, they would be quite content to look calmly on while a Mohammedan did ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... busily occupied. Each day one group solicited donations while another stayed at the store to arrange the goods. Many articles of furniture, more or less decrepit, were received, and a man was hired to varnish and patch and put the chairs, stands, tables, desks and whatnots into the best condition possible. Alora Jones thought the stock needed "brightening," so she induced her father to make purchases of several new articles, ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... billows as if to show the turbulence of that life which those who lay below them had lately quitted. It was a relief to the somewhat studied and formal monotony of the well-ordered woodland,—every rood, of which had been paced by visitors, keepers, or poachers,—to find those decrepit and bending tombstones, lurching at every angle, or deeply sinking into the green sea of forgetfulness around them. All this, and the trodden paths of the villagers towards that common place of meeting, struck him as being more human than anything he had left ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... centuries since. They all seemed like men of middle age and said that they do not know what death can be unless it is condemnation. Further, all who have lived well, on coming into heaven, come into the state of early manhood in the world and continue in it to eternity, even those who had been old and decrepit in the world. Women, too, although they had become shrunken and old, return into the bloom ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... visit Monckton had paid to this neighborhood was to the mine. He knew that was a dangerous visit, so he came at night as a decrepit old man. He very soon saw two things which discouraged farther visits. One was a placard describing his crime in a few words, and also his person and clothes, and offering 500 guineas reward. As his pallor ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... for a year past had been decrepit, died, broken-hearted, when the first news came of Austrian victories. He was sadly missed in his accustomed haunts. A younger man succeeded him as caretaker of St. Mark's, and Andrea, not old enough to be drafted for ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... impossible to swallow any of that stuff. And indeed there was a strange mustiness in everything. The wooden dining-room stuck out over the mud of the shore like a lacustrine dwelling; the planks of the floor seemed rotten; a decrepit old waiter tottered pathetically to and fro before an antediluvian and worm-eaten sideboard; the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... Mayer gambled and had lost heavily the three men already knew from the gossip of Chinatown. The room boy's information was confined to small points of personal habit and behavior. Among Mayer's effects, concealed in the back of his closet, was a worn and decrepit suitcase which he always carried when he went on his business trips. These trips occurred at intervals of about six weeks, and in his casual allusions to them to Ned Murphy and Jim himself he had never ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... frail and shrinking heart of woman for high and holy deeds. The worn and weary have rested their fainting heads upon her bosom, and gathered strength from her words and courage from her counsels. She has been the staff of decrepit age and the joy of manhood in its strength. She has bent over the form of lovely childhood, and suffered it to have a place in the Redeemer's arms. She has stood by the bed of the dying, and unveiled the glories ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... bank note is said to average two or three years, and does not terminate until the condition is very shaky indeed—crimpled, pierced with pinholes, corner creases torn, soft, tarnished, decrepit while yet young. Some have been half-burned; one has been found half-digested in the stomach of a goat, and one boiled in a waistcoat-pocket by a laundress. No matter; the cashier at the bank will do his best to decipher it; he will ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... way. When night came it appeared that the fierce policemen, with their swords and brass buttons, were no longer needed to safeguard the people, and their place in the streets was taken by a quaint, frowsy- looking body of men, mostly old, some almost decrepit, wearing big cloaks and carrying staffs and heavy iron lanterns with a tallow candle alight inside. But what a pleasure it was to lie awake at night and listen to their voices calling the hours! The calls began at the stroke of eleven, and then from beneath the window would ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... the Fables, and it is warmer a bit; but my body is most decrepit, and I can just manage to be cheery and tread down hypochondria under foot by work. I lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure outside of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... does not measure six feet from the dilapidated wooden floor to the smoke-blackened rafters, sit four people. Two young girls, EMMA and BERTHA BAUMERT, are working at their looms; MOTHER BAUMERT, a decrepit old woman, sits on a stool beside the bed, with a winding-wheel in front of her; her idiot son AUGUST sits on a foot-stool, also winding. He is twenty, has a small body and head, and long, spider-like ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Noble, and Grandee; and the young ladies, Miss Queen, Miss Marble, and Miss Molanna—all exceedingly gay and pretty. There was also Colonel Hunchberg, an uncle; finally there was Aunt Cooley Hunchberg, a somewhat decrepit but very amiable old lady. Mr. Corley Linbridge happened to be calling at the same time; and, as it appeared to be Beasley's duty to keep the conversation going and constantly to include all of the party in its ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... strap across his forehead and two others over his shoulders; the occupant sits with his legs over the rim of the basket, and his back almost resting against the head of his bearer, who, bending forward under the weight of his load, and grasping a long stick, looks like some decrepit old man—a delusion which vanishes the instant you commence the ascent of a mountain by his side, when his endurance and vigour astonish you, if they do not knock ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... messenger came, another Tartar, a very old man with a flowing grey beard, wearing a long caftan like a dressing-gown to his heels, and an enormous sheepskin cap that came far down over his eyes, and almost hid his face. He seemed very decrepit, and was excessively stupid, probably from old age. He looked terribly frightened when brought to McKay's tent, stooping his shoulders and hanging his head in the cowering, deprecating attitude of one who expects, but would not dare to ward ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... MEMORY, an old decrepit man, in a black velvet cassock,[225] a taffeta gown furred with white grogram, a white beard, velvet slippers, a watch, staff, &c. ANAMNESTES, his page, in a grave satin suit, purple buskins, a garland of bays and rosemary, a gimmal ring[226] with one link hanging, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... young man. One critic, finding that he wanted solidity, charitably referred to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy, seemed to regard his youth as so wondrous that all other authors appeared decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be looked for from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a familiar metaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humouredly, implying that Ganymede's crudities were pardonable in one so exceedingly young. Such ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Shut up to be frozen In cold empty huts By the pitiless peasants. The servants are crawling All over the courtyard. Their master long since Has forgotten about them, And left them to live 150 As they can. They are hungry, All old and decrepit, And dressed in all manners, They look like a crowd In a gipsy encampment. And some are now dragging A net through the pond: "God come to your help! Have you caught something, brothers?" "One carp—nothing more; 160 There used once to ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... eyes of this man, decrepit at the age of forty-seven; a faint color flushed his flaccid cold cheeks, his ill-furnished mouth was half open, and on his blackened lips a sort of foam gathered, thick, and as white as chalk. This ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the priest suspected Strabo himself for his outlandish look and tongue, for only a runaway slave might murder and succeed him. Possibly it was that self-same priest whom Caligula, a few years after Christ's death, hired a stalwart ruffian to finish off, because he was growing old and decrepit, having defended himself from onslaughts too long. Upon the lake the Emperor constructed two fine house-boats, devoted to the habits that house-boats generally induce (you may still fish up bits of their ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... Goose, which bears the Bob of his Ditty, and confirms what he says with a Quack, Quack. I gave little heed to the mention of this known Circumstance, till, being the other day in those Quarters, I passed by a decrepit old Fellow with a Pole in his Hand, who just then was bawling out, Half an Hour after one a-Clock, and immediately a dirty Goose behind him made her Response, Quack, Quack. I could not forbear attending this grave Procession for the length of half ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... life a wistful transaction with foreigners. In such enforced aloofness Sarah Drew had come to him—strong, beautiful, young, good and vital, all that he was not—and had serenely befriended "the great Mr. Pope," whom she viewed as a queer decrepit little gentleman of whom within a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... season. It was winter, and yet not Winter's self. The old gentleman had lost all that bright and hilarious nature; all that sparkling and exciting stimulus which he owns and holds here so joyously in January, February, and even March. He was decrepit, yet spiteful; a hoary, old, tottering, palsied villain, hurling curses at all who ventured into his evil presence. One look outside showed me the full nature of all that was before me, and revealed the old tyrant in the full power ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... into its right place. Yet men see something in her that is totally inexplicable to us, and she seems to have a mysterious influence over all ages and all sorts. One of these infatuated noblemen is decrepit and twaddling; the other a stern, reserved man that up to forty years of age was supposed to be the very impersonation of common sense; and the third, young, clever, and handsome, a man that might marry half ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... sitting by the fier side, Decrepit with extreamity of Age, Stilling his little Grand-childe when it cride, Almost distracted with the Batteries rage: Sometimes doth speake it faire, sometimes doth chide, As thus he seekes its mourning to asswage, By chance a Bullet doth the chimney hit, Which ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... himself; nor did he give thought to money, but kept his in a basket suspended by a cord from the ceiling, wherefore all his workmen and friends could take what they needed without saying a word to him. He passed his old age most joyously, and, having become decrepit, he had to be succoured by Cosimo and by others of his friends, being no longer able to work. It is said that Cosimo, being at the point of death, recommended him to the care of his son Piero, who, as a most diligent executor of his father's wishes, gave him a farm at Cafaggiuolo, which produced ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... himself the task of serving as mediator between this deported group and the community. A man of high character and much influence, he easily obtained a relief fund with which he provided asylum for the decrepit, sustenance for the needy, and employment for those able to labor. He attended the sick, comforted the dying, and delivered over their remains the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... link completes the chain of this nomenclature of caperers. Beggars, sturdy, or decrepit, dance, as well as their credulous betters: they not only dance, but drink to excess; and their orgies are more noisy, more prolonged, and even more expensive. The mendicant, who was apparently lame in the day, at ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... like those which involve the birth of Pagan gods, she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life to make this self-same Faust. A strange mystery of Fate's necromancy this, and with strange anomalies. For opposite this living, decrepit Faust, Helena, the long dead, is young; and she is all that which Faust is not. Knowing much less than he, who has plunged his thoughts like his scalpel into all the mysteries of life and death, she yet knows much more, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... said he, "but also some wisdom. And the greatest wisdom has come from the lips of my father yonder, Alp the old." He pointed to a decrepit figure, whose bowed head was hidden under a mass of white hair. "My father's eyes are blind with age," he continued, "but behind their darkness they see many things that we cannot see. They have seen that all these ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the "Courier," and Ralph Bastin's employer, had just arrived at the "Courier" office. The whilom middle-aged, sprightly old man was as bowed and decrepit as a ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... rich,—immensely rich. That entire fortune which once belonged to Count Ville-Handry, and which he thinks has been lost in unlucky speculations,—the whole of it is in my hands. Ah! I have suffered horribly, to have to play for two long years the loving wife to this decrepit old man. But I thought of you, my much beloved, my Daniel; and that thought sustained me. I knew you would come back; and I wanted to have royal treasures to give you. And I have them. These much coveted millions are mine, and you are here; and now I can say to you, 'Take them, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... on high but the dim light of dream-land. Nevertheless here is simulated a great natural ravine in all its wild grandeur: here are caverns, abrupt rocks, a torrent, a cascade, islands. The trees, dwarfed by a Japanese process of which we have not the secret, have tiny little leaves on their decrepit and knotty branches. A pervading hue of the mossy green of antiquity harmonizes all this medley, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... successor of the prophet." A prudent explanation restored his tranquillity; and he passed to a more familiar topic of conversation. "What is your age?" said he to the cadhi. "Fifty years."—"It would be the age of my eldest son: you see me here (continued Timour) a poor lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arm has the Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Touran, and the Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness, that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... was desirous of speaking with her. When she was told that the man had come all the way from a distant land simply to admire her wonderful treasures, of which he had heard so much, the maiden was highly flattered and gave orders that he should be admitted without delay. An aged and decrepit man, clad in a picturesque Eastern costume, was led into the room, and Richberta bade him be seated at her side. He expected to receive from the young lady the symbol of welcome—bread and salt. But no such common fare was ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... semblance, being situated in one of those semi-rustic houses so indicative of suburban London, down an overstocked garden, into which you enter by means of a blistered iron gate, painted violently green, and swinging heavily on its hinges. Down a vista of decrepit dahlias one sped to the portal, alongside which was a trio of bell-handles, one above the other, showing that the Psychopathic Institution did not occupy the whole even of that modest domicile. I always approach these manifold bells with considerable diffidence, conscious that I must inevitably ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... killing Louis as certainly and deliberately as if she were feeding him slow poison. He was very weak and decrepit at best, being compelled frequently, upon public occasions, such, for example, as the coronation tournament of which I have spoken, to lie upon ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... thou hast breathed: a life spent worthily should be measured by a nobler line; by deeds, not years. Then would'st thou murmur not, but bless the Providence, which in so short a span, made thee the instrument of wide and spreading blessings, to the helpless and oppressed! Though sinking in decrepit age, he prematurely falls, whose memory records no benefit conferred by him on man. They only have lived long, ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... me in money matters, lent me books, and enlivened my confinement to a wretched room by his pleasant conversation. Mr. Sanford having described me as a person travelling about for her health, he says his old assistant in the Bank fancied I was a decrepit elderly lady who might safely be consigned to his youthful partner. His description of his surprise thus prepared was conceived in a very good strain of flattery. He is almost two-and-twenty, understands several languages, ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... Europe—Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Danubian States, Hungary, Turkey, etc. A climate of surpassing quality, a soil so luxuriant and fertile as is hardly found in the best regions of the United States, will some day furnish an abundance of food to unnumbered people. The decrepit political and social conditions of those countries cause hundreds of thousands of our own people to prefer crossing the ocean rather than to settle in those much nearer and more comfortably located States. Soon as rational social conditions and international ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... splendour of his youth, on the threshold of assured success, snatch him away without warning from the parents devoted to him, the wife who loves him and the children dependent on him; and then leave them both, the decrepit and useless old and the needed young to drop into the tongueless silence of the grave, that silence broken only by the sound of the clods as they fall on the coffin lid or the plash of tears, or the choking sob; to ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... see, we will have reared a family of thirty- three children by that time, and we will never be without little toddlers and prattlers. I am fifty-three now, Mr. Flanders. We are reasonably sure to have twenty-two additions to the family. The pitiful part of getting old and decrepit lies in the fact that one's children grow up, get married, leave home—or die—and that is just what we are trying to guard against. On my seventy-fifth birthday, there will be a fine, healthy two-year-old babe crying and goo-gooing for my especial benefit, ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... bands, as Henry gave it the gas, the decrepit vehicle gained the top of the hill and disappeared from view down the far slope, and the last thing he saw of it was a dusty plate ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... humiliated George favoured his mother and sister with innumerable half-hours in which they had to contend with scornful and exceedingly bitter opinions on the iniquity of marriage as it is practised among the elect. He fairly bawled his disapproval of the sale of Anne to the decrepit Mr. Thorpe, and there was not a day in the week that did not contain at least one unhappy hour for the women in his home, for just so often he held forth on the ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... procured for thee." So Geraint went forward. And the hoary-headed man preceded him into the hall. And in the hall he dismounted, and he left there his horse. Then he went on to the upper chamber with the hoary- headed man. And in the chamber he beheld an old decrepit woman, sitting on a cushion, with old tattered garments of satin upon her; and it seemed to him that he had never seen a woman fairer than she must have been when in the fulness of youth. And beside her ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 2 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... me by Cody on his second trip from Larned indicated where the villages would be found in the winter, and I decided to move on them about the 1st of November. Only the women and children and the decrepit old men were with the villages, however enough, presumably, to look after the plunder most of the warriors remaining north of the Arkansas to continue their marauding. Many severe fights occurred between our troops and these marauders, and in these affairs, before ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... strictly a prisoner at the Bar T ranch-house, for this had been found impracticable from a number of standpoints. He had the run of the ranch, an old, decrepit cow pony to ride, and could go in any direction he chose under the supervision of a cowboy who carried a Winchester and was known to have impaled flies on ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... the time of Daedalus, whose statues walked and spoke. Linus, Orpheus, Homer, have taught me harmony and rhythm. I do not look about me with Love's bandage blindfolding my eyes. I judge of all things coolly. The passions of youth never influence my admiration, and when I am as withered, decrepit, wrinkled, as Tithonus in his swaddling bands, my opinion will be still the same. But I forgive your incredulity and want of sympathy. In order to understand me fully, it is necessary that you should see Nyssia in the radiant brilliancy of her shining whiteness, free from ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... give pension and cottage to the widow who has lost her son; it is nothing to give food and medicine to the workman who has broken his arm, or the decrepit woman wasting in sickness. But it is something to use your time and strength in war with the waywardness and thoughtlessness of mankind to keep the erring workman in your service till you have made him an unerring one; and to direct your fellow-merchant to the opportunity ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... barn though the old mouse said: 'Little mice, beware! When the owl comes singing "Too-whoo" take care!' If you do it again we shall consider it deliberately unfriendly of you.... Well, I'll toddle my decrepit old bones out of this. Eleven o'clock! How time has flown, to be sure! Thank you for a pleasant evening. Good-by, George. Good-by, all! Be good ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... ended, I could have laughed myself to scorn to find In that decrepit man so firm a mind; God, said I, be my help and stay secure, I'll think of thee, leech-gatherer, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... his body, the confidence from his manner; consciousness of failure brooded in their stead. He had not become dissipated. Great opportunities missed; this was the memory that racked him, body and spirit, and left him nerveless and decrepit, inviting death."[1401] He died in ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... after this, Mr. and Mrs. Schutt kindly entertained all the widows of the village, about sixty in number, to a substantial dinner. It was a pleasure to see even the old and decrepit able to sit at table and enjoy their meal, and it made us enter fully into the idea of the renovating influence of Christmas blessings, to think in what dark and murderous heathenism these aged widows had been reared when young. After dinner ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... ask your pardon," cried Temperance, with a queer set of her lips. "Yes, Madam, you are; Edith is an old woman of forty, and I a decrepit creature of forty-five; but you are a giddy young thing of thirty-nine. I'll try to mind it, at ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... peaceful. One couldn't believe in it. When supper was over Robert washed up and Christine uncovered the decrepit, second-hand typewriter which she had bought, and began to copy from the letters, bending lower and lower over the crabbed writing and sighing deeply and impatiently as her fingers blundered at the keys. On odd nights, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in the uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the south-western hills there may yet linger a decrepit representative of this bygone good fellowship; but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew Fairservice,—though without his vices. He was a man whose very presence could impart a savour of quaint antiquity ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... means when it describes a heavenly chieftain whose "vesture was dipped in blood;" and what Peter, the apostle, means when he speaks of the "precious blood that cleanseth from all sin;" and what the old, worn-out, decrepit missionary Paul means when, in my text, he cries, "Without shedding of blood is no remission." By that blood you and I will be saved—or never saved at all. In all the ages of the world God has not once pardoned a single sin ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... them. They had been a great nuisance and were ordered to appear in court. But none of them turned up. M. Chassensee therefore argued that a default should not be taken because all the rats had been summoned, and some were either so young or so old and decrepit that they needed more time. The court thereupon granted him an extension. However, they didn't arrive on the day set, and this time their lawyer claimed that they were under duress and restrained by bodily fear—of the townspeople's cats. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... feeling that it is she, not he, who has ruined the home, and that the drunken vagabond, who has just made his endearments the cover of deception, is really the victim of a virago. And when he returns, old and decrepit, and, we might hope, purged of that fatal appetite which has worked all the woe, it is his old victim, the woman whose youth his evil habits ruined, and who, in consequence of those habits was driven ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... brotherhood; the object being to retain their vast accumulation of wealth within the family. Another story hinted that she was a German princess, whom, for reasons of state, it was proposed to give in marriage either to a decrepit sovereign, or a prince still in his cradle. According to a third statement, she was the off-spring of a Southern American planter, who had given her an elaborate education and endowed her with his wealth; but the one burning drop of African blood in her veins so affected her with ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in such a future for you. You will pass into strange hands, O my old friend; you will become a bedside table, laden with bowl after bowl of linseed tea, until, decrepit, rickety and broken down, you are chopped up to feed the flames for a brief moment under the simmering saucepan. You will vanish in smoke to join my labors in that other smoke, oblivion, the ultimate resting ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... annual meeting of the local branch of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals at Grantham. "Such meetings as these," she told her audience, "are valuable because they call attention to the cruelty which exists in such forms as the decrepit horse traffic, of which the general public has little or no knowledge. To be ignorant may save trouble; but if it makes us indifferent and lethargic with regard to suffering, when we ought to be helpers in the cause of humanity, the sooner we increase our knowledge the better we ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... to be diverted but by tippling as often as they can fall into company in the day, and conclude with downright drunkenness at night. These gentlemen never know the satisfaction of youth, but skip the years of manhood, and are decrepit soon after they are of age. I was godfather to one of these old fellows. He is now three-and-thirty, which is the grand climacteric of a young drunkard. I went to visit the wretch this morning, with no other purpose but to ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... care!" exclaimed Bess. "You can't have a bite of what I buy, Laura Polk!" and she marched away to the lunch counter and spent most of her remaining pocket money on greasy pies, decrepit sandwiches, soggy "pound-cake" and crullers that might have been used with success as ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... me,' replied the venerable man; 'and I wonder not at the question you propose. Not my religion, lady, but an enfeebled and decrepit frame chains me to this solitude. I have now outlasted a century, and my powers are wasted and gone. I can do little more than sit and ponder the truths of this life-giving book, and anticipate the renewed activity of that immortal being which it promises. The Christian ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... front was shuttered, and left to the rats and cockroaches, and up a flight of decrepit and shaky stairs, Shiraz had made what shift he could to provide comfort for his master in the least dilapidated room in the house. The walls were thin, and the plaster of the low ceiling was smoke-grimed and dirty. The ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... girl's body, but he cannot, with all his wealth and splendor, awaken her love, either sentimental or sensual; love, whatever its nature, will always prefer the apple-tree and the shepherd lover to the vain desires and a thousand times divided attentions of a decrepit king, though he ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... enervate the human frame, and where harassing cares are unknown, we are led to expect that disease and suffering should be comparatively rare, and that the functions of nature should not reach the close of their gradual decay till an extreme old age. The decrepit and shriveled forms of many American Indians would seem to indicate that they had long passed the ordinary time of life. But it is difficult or impossible to ascertain their exact age, as the art of counting is generally unknown among them, and they are strangely forgetful and indifferent ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... those men on Pancho Villa's payroll, so admirably equipped and mounted, who only get paid in those pure silver pieces Villa coins at the Chihuahua mint? Bah! Barely two dozen half-naked mangy men, some of them riding decrepit mares with the coat nibbled off from neck to withers. Can the accounts given by the Government newspapers and by myself be really true and are these so-called revolutionists simply bandits grouped together, using the revolution as a wonderful pretext to glut their thirst ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... situated in the narrowest part of the Rue du Four, at the far end of a decrepit, tumble-down building. Claude had to cross two evil-smelling courtyards to reach a third, across which ran a sort of big closed shed, a huge out-house of board and plaster work, which had once served as a packing-case maker's workshop. ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... other towns oh these shores, looks as though it were sloughing away. Where stones fall, there they lie. In the centre of the town is a marble triumphal arch in honour of Marcus Aurelius. Age would account for much of its ruin, but not all; yet it still stands cold, haughty, austere, though decrepit, in Tripolitan mud, with mean stucco and plaster buildings about it. The arch itself is filled in, and is used as a dwelling. Its tenant is a greengrocer, and the monument to Marcus Aurelius has an ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... this woman, a living sepulchre, more cruel than the grave, for it devoured the soul as well as the body. Pah! this prating about immortality was absurd, convicted of meaninglessness before a tragedy like this; for what was an immortality worth that was given to her last decrepit phase of life, after all its beauty and strength and loveliness had passed soulless away? To be aught but a mockery immortality must be as manifold as the manifold phases of life. Since life devours so many souls, why suppose death ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... his entire system. He had grown very thin; his cheeks were hollow and his eyes inflamed. Those who knew his age shuddered as they saw him pass, bent and decrepit as a man of eighty. The trembling of his hands had so increased that some days he was obliged to use them both in raising his glass to his lips. This annoyed him intensely and seemed to be the only symptom of his failing health which disturbed him. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... ever since stood as a sort of proverb of honesty, Nathaniel Macon. By the representations of these friends, he was led to believe that their new State capital, Raleigh, where there was only a very decrepit specimen of journalism, would afford him at once a surer competence and a happier life than Philadelphia. Coming to this conclusion, he disposed of his newspaper and printing-office, and removed to Raleigh, where he at once established the "Register." Of his late paper, the "Gazetteer," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the iron railings. As most of the experiments took place at the North London Hospital, Euston-square was his chief point of attraction, and when he was removed, it was always found necessary to break off the railings and take them away with him. This accounted for the decrepit condition of the fleur de lys that surround the inclosure, which was not, as generally supposed, the work of the university pupils residing in Gower-place. Perfect insensibility to pain supervened at the same time, and his friends ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... used to walk so uprightly," Laura said. He seemed to have grown many years older, and was, indeed, quite a decrepit old man. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lanniere is not a monster or a decrepit centenarian. He is still in his prime, and is a very agreeable and accomplished man of the world. He is well-connected, moves in the best society, and ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... length being ordered to carry water in large vessels over the rocks to the ship that rode in the bay underneath it, his feet were thereby so intolerably cut that he was soon rendered lame and incapable of doing it any longer. The family thereupon grew weary of keeping him in that decrepit state he was in, and so for what servile scullion-like labour he was able to do, a master of a ship took him on board and carried ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... One Hundredth Street is a house decrepit with a disease of the aged. Its windowed eyes are rheumy. It sags backward on gnarled joints. All its poor old bones creak when the winds shake it. To Average Jones' inquiring gaze on this summer day it opposed the secrecy of a senile indifference. He hesitated to pull at its ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... autoharp. Graham told them we thought of camping out a night or two on the mountain; at which they were much concerned and tried hard to dissuade us. At last Eliza said a comfortable air of conviction, "Mumma won't go with Puppa." He conveyed them home one on either arm, both being rather decrepit. ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... your Excellency. I have a decrepit old uncle who owns three hundred souls and two thousand roubles-worth of other property. Also, except for myself, he possesses not a single heir. Now, although his infirm state of health will not permit of his managing ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... wonder why I, not yet decrepit, did not glide ever so imperceptibly in love with Lady Auriol, who was no longer a dew-besprinkled bud of a girl and therefore beyond the pale of my sentimental inclinations. Well, just as she had avowed that she could not fall in love with a man of my type, so was it impossible ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... into the town with a yet larger 33 crowd of servants and sutlers, even more depraved than the soldiers in their readiness for cruelty and lust. Without any respect for age or for authority they added rape to murder and murder to rape. Aged men and decrepit old women, who were worthless as booty, were hustled off to make sport for them. If some grown girl or a handsome youth fell into their clutches, they would be torn to pieces in the struggle for possession, while the plunderers ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... developed species had long since passed on the way from the primitive state of man to their present state, makes a great, fundamental mistake, the same mistake which one would make in supposing that the pale and decrepit inmates of a city hospital or a country poorhouse represented the lower stage of development from which the strong and healthy men and women in the surrounding country had been evolved. Our evolutionists are in very much the ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... of the explosives of mingled fun and devilment that proceeded from a group of ragged urchins, who were busily employed in pelting with hard mud, sods and other missiles, an old and decrepit woman, whose gray hair and infirmities ought to have been her protection, but whose reputation as an evil disposed witch proved quite the contrary. Nanny, for such was her name, was leaning, or rather sitting, against a bank at the road side, shaking occasionally her crutch at her ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... founding the new university they talk about, they had better make it for the pupilage of perpetual card-players, and let them take their degrees by the cleverness in odd tricks, or their ability in shuffling. "No offence, Gregory." "No wonder they have their decrepit ones, their ranters." ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... officers, red tabbed and glorious, tried to preserve an appearance of dignity while their own servants staggering under the weight of kit bags, bumped into them. Hilarious men, going home on leave, shouted sudden snatches of song. A decrepit Frenchman, patient in the performance of duty, blew feeble blasts on a small horn. Thompson, alert and competent, found a compartment. He put me in and then he bundled in my valise. After that he found his own luggage, an enormous ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... inspired girl was caught by a glance—a single glance—from one at the opposite corner of the court-room, and that glance brought her back to the full consciousness of the fearful development she was about to make. A decrepit old woman, resting with bent form upon a staff, which was planted firmly before her, seemed wrapped in the general interest pervading the court. The woman was huge of frame and rough of make; her face was large ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... that seemed interminable, the old man came driving around the house. To a ramshackle buggy he had hitched a decrepit horse. They wedged in as best they could, the old man between them, and at a shuffling amble the nag proceeded through the gate ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... sense of hardly restrained tumult, of conflict between nature and the multiple machinery of modern civilisation, the two in opposition, alike victims of an angry mood. And Iglesias stood watching that conflict among the crowd of children, and loafers, and decrepit, who to-day—as every day—thronged the foot-way ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... inferred that the Whim's crew consisted of the ancient and decrepit. More than once my father had said that if ever he should get in a tight place there was no band of six he would rather have at his back than this one headed by Gates; nor did he except Pete, the prince ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... been assembled to greet him, among whom it has excited in a peculiar manner the sensibility of all to behold the surviving members of our Revolutionary contest, civil and military, who had shared with him in the toils and dangers of the war, many of them in a decrepit state. A more interesting spectacle, it is believed, was never witnessed, because none could be founded on purer principles, none proceed from higher or more disinterested motives. That the feelings of those who had fought and bled with him in a common cause ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Monroe • James Monroe
... Miss Rutherford. If I wasn't such an aged, decrepit wreck I'd come up and be one of your scholars. Anyhow, I'm real glad to have met you. No, I can't stay longer. ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... thy course is run, Or droop like flow'rs, which lately lost the sun, I cannot yield, since Faith will not permit A tenure got by conquest to the pit. For the great Victor fought for us, and He Counts ev'ry dust that is laid up of thee. Besides, Death now grows decrepit, and hath Spent the most part both of its time and wrath. That thick, black night, which mankind fear'd, is torn By troops of stars, and the bright day's forlorn. The next glad news—most glad unto the just!— ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... So Geraint went forward. And the hoary-headed man preceded him into the hall. And in the hall he dismounted, and he left there his horse. Then he went on to the upper chamber with the hoary-headed man. And in the chamber he beheld an old decrepit woman, sitting on a cushion, with old, tattered garments of satin upon her; and it seemed to him that he had never seen a woman fairer than she must have been, when in the fulness of youth. And beside her was a maiden, upon whom were a vest and a veil, that were ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... is not to be diverted but by tippling as often as they can fall into company in the day, and conclude with downright drunkenness at night. These gentlemen never know the satisfaction of youth, but skip the years of manhood, and are decrepit soon after they are of age. I was godfather to one of these old fellows. He is now three-and-thirty, which is the grand climacteric of a young drunkard. I went to visit the wretch this morning, with no other ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... could make a better, and would like to paint the same subject over again.' The sky in this picture is nobly done, but it reminds one too much of Wilson. The only fault, however, of any consequence is the female figure, which is too old and decrepit for one likely to frequent an eminence on such a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... in the doorway, the same old Phil, with the same kindly face. I rushed forward. Before I reached him, he had turned around toward the inside of the coach, as if he would help some one out after him. "Some decrepit fellow traveller," thought I, and looked up indifferently to see what sort of person it might be: and there, as I live, stepping out from the coach, and taking his offered hand, ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... an aged negro of my acquaintance comes to me one day, with the astounding information that he, and a number of equally decrepit and unserviceable slaves, have been killed and buried by his master. In other words, the owners of these useless helots have hoodwinked the slave emancipators by representing their decrepit human property as defunct, while they substitute ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... business transactions, in which, without running any real risk, he felt there was something to be gained. He was accordingly only able to afford the theatre a very meagre support, but one which was quite in keeping with its decrepit condition. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Dr Barnes tells his readers that Lancaster was at this time so old as to be nearly decrepit; and two years later, that he was "almost blind for age." He was exactly forty-one, having been born in 1287 (Inq. Tho. Com. Lane, 1 Edward the Third 1. 88), and 53 years had not elapsed since the marriage of his parents. We may well say, after Chancellor ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... commonplace...Doubtless form in Art is necessary to the expression of ideas and sentiments; it must be adequate, supple, free, now energetic, now graceful, delicate; sometimes even subtle and complex, but always to the exclusion of the ancient remains of decrepit formalism. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... the same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall. How novel and fine the first drifts! The old, dilapidated fence is suddenly set off with the most fantastic ruffles, scalloped and fluted after an unheard-of fashion! Looking down a long line of decrepit stone-wall, in the trimming of which the wind had fairly run riot, I saw, as for the first time, what a severe yet master artist old Winter is. Ah, a severe artist! How stern the woods look, dark and cold and as rigid against ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... vehicles of all kinds, from the new landau with a pair of magnificent Andalusian horses, or the strange omnibus drawn by mules, typical of Southern Spain, to the shabby victoria, with a broken-down hack and a decrepit coachman. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... too," he thought to himself, one day, reading of a man who, confined by disease and poverty, had lived for twelve years alone in a back bedroom attended by an old and probably decrepit housekeeper. A darning-needle forced into his heart had ended his earthly woes. "To the devil with such a life! Why twelve years? Why not at the end of the second ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... tell them I told you, Walter," he answered, looking round, with the old look of decrepit fear usurping his face, which had brightened for ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... and sizes. The house front, built of brick and stone, with no pretensions to symmetry, seemed to be bending beneath the weight of a worm-eaten roof covered with the curved pantiles in common use in the South of France. The decrepit casements were fitted with the heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it together. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of jail I saw him standing around for several days looking as lordly and unconscious as if he had been worth a million. But the pangs of hunger must have set his wits to work. For pretty soon he appeared on the streets with a wrinkled, decrepit, old Piute tied to a string. He had fastened the string to the old fellow's arm and he walked behind, holding the other end, but apparently as unconscious of the whole business as if he 'd been the sole inhabitant of Virginia City. He stalked along with his ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... intervened and bade them turn in, as I wished to make an early start in the morning. The river seemed to get broader, deeper, and more rapid as we ascended; the trackers, on the contrary, became thinner, narrower, and more decrepit. ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... with despairing eyes we looked at the old wooden houses. They seemed to be bowing themselves towards us, their upper stories projected so far, they were so decrepit. Their roofs were a wilderness of gutters and crooked gables, of tottering chimneys and wooden pinnacles and rotting beams, Amongst these I judged Kit's lover was hiding. Well, it was a good place for hide and seek—with any other ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... through the tropic jungle, Miss Drexel and Juanita, her Indian maid, led the way. Her brother, carrying the three rifles, brought up the rear, while in the middle Davies and Wemple struggled with Mrs. Morgan and the two decrepit steeds. One, a flea-bitten roan, groaned continually from the moment Mrs. Morgan's burden was put upon him till she was shifted to the other horse. And this other, a mangy sorrel, invariably lay down at the end of a quarter of a mile of ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... nearly finished, tore it angrily to shreds, scattering the remnants to the winds of heaven. As personifications of time, the Norns were represented as sisters of different ages and characters, Urd (Wurd, weird) appearing very old and decrepit, continually looking backward, as if absorbed in contemplating past events and people; Verdandi, the second sister, young, active, and fearless, looked straight before her, while Skuld, the type of the future, was generally represented as closely veiled, with head turned in the direction ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... explained himself to this effect:—Sir, I am far from intending by this motion to fill the army with decrepit officers, or to obstruct in any manner the service of the publick; nor have I any other intention, than to secure to those whose years permit, and whose inclinations incite them to enter once more into the army, that preferment to which they have a claim, not only from their past services, but ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... much to show that among quite primitive peoples there is less of shrinking from death and more of certainty about a continued life after death than we generally find among more intellectual and civilized folk. It is, or has been, quite, common among many tribes for the old and decrepit, who are becoming a burden to their fellows, to offer themselves for happy dispatch, and to take willing part in the ceremonial preparations for their own extinction; and this readiness is encouraged by their na[i:]ve and untroubled belief in a speedy transference to "happy hunting-grounds" ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... out one day to make hay, and left her baby in the cradle. Unfortunately, she did not place the tongs crossways on the cradle, and consequently the Fairies changed her baby, and by the time she came home there was nothing in the cradle but some old decrepit changeling, which looked is if it were half famished, but ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... attendant. Sir Hero is revelling in the wars, or in Armida's bowers; Mr. Poet has spied a wrinkle; the brush is for the rose in its season. She turns to her Old Dog then. She hugs him; and he, who has subsisted on a bone and a pat till there he squats decrepit, he turns his grateful old eyes up to her, and has not a notion that she is hugging sad memories in him: Hero, Poet, Painter, in one scrubby one! Then is she buried, and the village hears languid howls, and there ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... organs is older than we are, but a number of them are younger. The appendix is one of these. Now, by some curious coincidence, explain it as we may, some of our oldest organs are youngest, in the sense of most vigorous, elastic, and resisting, while some of our youngest are oldest, in the sense of decrepit, feeble, and unstable. It is perhaps only natural that an organ like the stomach, for instance, which has a record of honorable service and active duty millions of years long, should be better poised, more reliable, and more resourceful than one which, like the lung or the appendix, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... few of the explosives of mingled fun and devilment that proceeded from a group of ragged urchins, who were busily employed in pelting with hard mud, sods and other missiles, an old and decrepit woman, whose gray hair and infirmities ought to have been her protection, but whose reputation as an evil disposed witch proved quite the contrary. Nanny, for such was her name, was leaning, or rather sitting, against a bank at the road side, shaking occasionally her crutch at her ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... and raised in Powers Pond Place," said decrepit Estella Jones, "and, though I warn't but nine years old, I 'member dey had a nuss house whar dey put all de young chillun 'til dey wuz old enough to work. De chillun wuz put at dis nuss house so dey Ma and Pa could work. Dey had one old 'oman to look atter us and our [HW: some'pin] t' eat wuz ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... very fine ladies indeed; they came from Paris, and had trunks full of splendid dresses. The children did not care much for them, and liked better certain decrepit babies of rag and composition, which were thought too shabby to be ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... is a decrepit world, where nature takes a hundred years to move a foot of solid land. Men and animals go about in flocks. Originality ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... God looked down upon a finished creation he saw that it was good, yea, very good. Can this be said of our bodies now? Let the blind, the deaf, the lame, the countless sufferers on beds of affliction, the child-bearing mother, the decrepit consumptive, the rheumatic invalid, let these say whether our bodies are very good now. And how about our spirits? I use the term spirit here in the sense of its being the basis of human perception and thought. Are our spirits or minds very good? ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... stalwart form was now bowed and wizened with the passage of, as it seemed to me, hundreds of years. Yet, although in appearance a very Methuselah in age, this individual had a pair of piercing black eyes that glowed and sparkled with all the fire and passion of early manhood, and, bowed as he was, and decrepit as he appeared to be, he tottered across the intervening space with extraordinary agility, and seated himself in the second chair. Thus I found myself in the presence of the two most powerful men in the district, namely, King Banda and Mafuta, the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... the business of the nation upon his hands; yet he slackened his pace when he came near the cottage where he knew that he was to meet Mrs. Temple and her daughters. When he entered the cottage, the first object that he saw was Helen, sitting by the side of a decrepit old woman, who was resting her head upon a crutch, and who seemed to be in pain. This was the poor woman who had been ridden over by Lady Di. Spanker. A farmer who lived near Mrs. Temple, and who was coming homewards ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... of a most unexampled cruelty. They will not smile upon the fascinating O'Toole, but have locked you up on bread and water until you shall agree to marry a wealthy but decrepit ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... contentment which may even amount to very considerable happiness; but mark how they are distributed over a man's life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and few indeed to the after. Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the miseries of a decrepit age? If you are good, strong, and handsome, you have a fine fortune indeed at twenty, but how much of it will be left at sixty? For you must live on your capital; there is no investing your powers ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... he gained the heaven of her love. There might be portals yet unseen, with guardian furies waiting to entrap him, and he would brave them all for her dear sake. But his very soul rebelled against the notion that he had become her chosen knight merely to gratify the unholy ardor of some decrepit millionaire. He laughed savagely at the fantasy, and his protest burst into ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... long-wooled sheep roamed the hillsides. Many of these were black. For tilling, primitive wooden ploughs, fitted with an iron share, were used. These were drawn by oxen or, sometimes, by an ox and a donkey, both animals usually in a very decrepit condition. The ordinary means of conveyance was a curious old covered ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... Carpenters, Taylors, Sawyers, Coopers, Bricklayers, &c. The Plenty of the Country, and the good Wages given to Work-Folks occasion very few Poor, who are supported by the Parish, being such as are lame, sick, or decrepit through Age, Distempers, Accidents, or some Infirmities; for where there is a numerous Family of poor Children the Vestry takes Care to bind them out Apprentices, till they are able to maintain themselves by their own Labour; by which Means they ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... more!—one, one only comfort remains—one friend, one solace in adversity—one ray of light in the dark hour! Amidst universal desertion, RUTH has not forsaken her; but is become her joy in sorrow, her companion in solitude, her prop in decrepit age! Can we wonder that she wishes to discard a name which awakened such recollections, and only recalled the dream of happiness? "Call me not Naomi,—call me Mara; for the Almighty hath ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... churchyard, overlooking what is not quite sea, yet more than river, is one of the most restful spots I know. Of course the association with old Chaucer, who speaks of Topsham sailors, helps my mood. I came home very tired; but I am not yet decrepit, and for that ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... more degraded physically. Mutatis mutandis, there are none more degraded, morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however silly, and however evil, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... wished him God-speed with all my heart. He was a clean, honest, generous gentleman, and I admired, loved and respected him as he stood there full of his youth and hope. I suddenly felt quite old and withered at the root of my being, like some decrepit king who hands his crown to the young prince. I rose to take my leave (for what advantage was there in staying?) and felt that I was abandoning to Dale other things ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... you madman, I wouldn't change my present installation for any post, dignity, honour, or advantage conceivable to me. It fills the bill; I have the loveliest time. And as for wars and rumours of wars, you surely know enough of me to be aware that I like that also a thousand times better than decrepit peace in Middlesex? I do not quite like politics; I am too aristocratic, I fear, for that. God knows I don't care who I chum with; perhaps like sailors best; but to go round and sue and sneak to keep ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... burst, and brought the rain in earnest. It was not yet very heavy, but heavy enough, with the wind at its back, and she with no defense but her parasol, to wet her thoroughly before she could reach any shelter, the nearest being a solitary, decrepit old hawthorn-tree, about half-way across the common. She bent her head to the blast, and walked on. She had no desire for shelter. She would like to get wet to the skin, take a violent cold, go into a consumption, and die in a fortnight. The wind ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... crowd of servants and sutlers, even more depraved than the soldiers in their readiness for cruelty and lust. Without any respect for age or for authority they added rape to murder and murder to rape. Aged men and decrepit old women, who were worthless as booty, were hustled off to make sport for them. If some grown girl or a handsome youth fell into their clutches, they would be torn to pieces in the struggle for possession, while the plunderers were left to cut ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... knew of many more men who would have laughed if they had the same privilege of sight. He made no attempt to conceal from himself that the whole thing was romantic, romantic despite the little tinkling dog, the decrepit diligence, the palavering natives, the super-idiotic dragoman. It was fine, It was from another age and even the actors could not deface the purity of the picture. However it was true that upon the brigantine the previous night he had unaccountably wetted all his available matches. This ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... then, is a date of the highest importance. It marks a collision between the old principle of Lewis XIV., of the Bartholomew Massacre, of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the new rationalistic principle of spiritual emancipation. The old principle was decrepit, it was no longer able to maintain itself; the hounds were furious, but their fury was toothless. Before the new principle could achieve mastery, Rousseau had made mastery impossible. Two men came into the world at this very moment, whom destiny made incarnations of the discordant principles. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... pecking crumbs from the threshold, began to scold shrilly, and at the sound, the old servant, a decrepit negress in a blue gingham dress, hobbled out into the path and stood peering at him under her hollowed palm. Her forehead was ridged and furrowed beneath her white turban, and her bleared old eyes looked up at him with a blind and groping ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... adventure. But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre of things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring painfully about the world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages. He was being put aside, as a wine is put aside, but to deteriorate instead of gaining in the process, to lose the best time of ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... precedent, I have found it a worthy thing to spend hours in decrepit cabs loitering along side roads in the Botanical Gardens, watching herons and crocodiles, lilies and manatees, from the rusty leather seats. At first the driver looked at me in astonishment as I photographed or watched or wrote; but later ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... house. She looked very neat now—in a black gown over which was a spotless white apron and collar of lace—and much more slender than when I had seen her last. She took me into a large room in the front of the house with a carpet and furniture, handsome once but now worn and decrepit. Old, time-stained engravings of scenes from the Bible, framed in ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... family. Who or what they all are, and where they all sleep, is a profound mystery. The family tree is usually headed by a decrepit and ruminant old gentleman in a species of yachting-cap. He sits behind the stove—not exactly with one foot in the grave, but with both knees well up against the coffin—and occasionally offers a mumbled observation of which no one takes the slightest notice. ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... believe in such a future for you. You will pass into strange hands, O my old friend; you will become a bedside table, laden with bowl after bowl of linseed tea, until, decrepit, rickety and broken down, you are chopped up to feed the flames for a brief moment under the simmering saucepan. You will vanish in smoke to join my labors in that other smoke, oblivion, the ultimate resting place of ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... up his advantage with true buffalo skill, and in a very short time his enemy was in the dust and panting out his life. The fight once over, the herd moved on, leaving the dying buffalo by himself, for, in animal life, the old, sick or decrepit, are always treated ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... desperate ride now with feelings akin to horror. Surrounded with murderous savages, with only a decrepit mule to ride and fourteen miles to go, it seemed impossible that I could get through safely. My companions said good-bye to me as though I were a scaffold victim about to be executed. But get through I did—how I do not know—and the chillingly weird war-calls of the Indians howling at me ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigor. That trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the present, lost its temper and its ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... them was the young Countess of Exeter, whose magnificent black eyes did great execution. The lovely Countess was mounted on a fiery Spanish barb, given to her by De Gondomar. Forced into a union with a gouty and decrepit old husband, the Countess of Exeter might have pleaded this circumstance in extenuation of some of her follies. It was undoubtedly an argument employed by her admirers, who, in endeavouring to shake her fidelity to her lord, told her it was an ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... equipment which keep causing unnecessary pain, labor, and irritation: that leaky faucet, that worn-out washing machine, that broken light switch, that asthmatic vacuum sweeper, that torn rug, that decrepit snow shovel, that ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... It is a curious little community, with its central street adorned by a double row of plane-trees, its leaping fountains, and its almost Italian air. The houses are lime-washed, with flat roofs; and sometimes, at the side of some small or decrepit dwelling, we see the unexpected curves of a loggia. At a distance the facade of the church has the harmonious lines of a little antique temple; close at hand is the graceful campanile, an old octagonal tower surmounted by a narrow mitre ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... appear again. Nothing was seen at the window, but presently horrible shrieks penetrated even the thick walls of the castle, and rent the night air. An hour later, a dark huddled figure, like that of an old decrepit woman, carrying something in a bundle, came into the waning ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... against the door of the breakfast-room in her haste to come at him. The Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a rather pale and large- eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might well be the case with a motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful house, with no other playmates than a decrepit old man and a kitten, and no better atmosphere within- doors than the odor of decayed apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighborhood than that of the adjacent burial-ground, where all her relatives, from her great-grandmother downward, lay calling to her, "Pansie, ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... philanthropic work of Romilly and Mackintosh, largely reducing the number of offences for which capital punishment could be inflicted. He was also the first to reform the police system of London, and to substitute for a multitude of decrepit watchmen, incapable of dealing with gangs of active criminals, a disciplined body of stalwart constables, which has since been copied in every county and large town of Great Britain. Above all, while he cannot be said to have shown a statesmanlike insight or foresight of the highest order, he ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... disregard for distance expended on the way. It led, with a scramble, down the sides of ravines; it drew its followers up steep rock-faces that were baked almost to cooking heat by the sun; and finally, it broke up into fan-shape amongst decrepit banana groves, and presently ended amongst a squalid collection of grass and wattle huts ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... the summer camp at Sultanieh, are drawn from the life. Under the present Shah they have been shorn of a good deal of their former splendour. The Grand Vizier of the narrative, 'that notorious minister, decrepit in person, and nefarious in conduct,' 'a little old man, famous for a hard and unyielding nature,' was Mirza Sheffi who was appointed by Fath Ali Shah to succeed if Ibrahim, the minister to whom his uncle had owed his throne, and whom the nephew repaid by putting to ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... establishments to a wide extent, and though the proportion of the deaf to be benefited by them is small,[113] yet for a number of the deaf there is a peculiar need. These are deaf persons, usually the old and decrepit, who are without means to support themselves, and have no family or friends to look to for help. To them a special retreat in association with others in similar condition proves an immeasurable blessing, ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... beside his gravity; but he answered, They only kept it as a curiosity. I was very much scandalised at a large silver image of the Trinity, where the Father is represented under the figure of a decrepit old man, with a beard down to his knees, and triple crown on his head, holding in his arms the Son, fixed on the cross, and the Holy Ghost, in the shape of a dove, hovering over him. Madam —— is come this minute to call me to the assembly, and forces ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... 'long-remembered beggar,' who for twenty years had made his regular rounds within the neighbourhood, received rather as an humble friend than as an object of charity, was sent to the neighbouring workhouse. The decrepit dame, who travelled round the parish upon a hand-barrow, circulating from house to house like a bad shilling, which every one is in haste to pass to his neighbour,—she, who used to call for her bearers as loud, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... at this rioting, Prince Travann," one of the less decrepit Counselors, a retired general, said. "I want to see how ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... degenerate days to see any long-pig eaten, but at least I am already the possessor of a duly certified Marquesan calabash, oblong in shape, curiously carved, over a century old, from which has been drunk the blood of two shipmasters. One of those captains was a mean man. He sold a decrepit whale-boat, as good as new what of the fresh white paint, to a Marquesan chief. But no sooner had the captain sailed away than the whale-boat dropped to pieces. It was his fortune, some time afterwards, to be wrecked, of all places, on that particular island. ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... own hands. The mercantile instinct of the nation was flattered with the prospect of gain, the martial quality of its patrician and of its plebeian blood was eager to confront danger, the great Protestant mutiny. Against a decrepit superstition in combination with an aggressive tyranny, all impelled the best energies of the English people against Spain, as the embodiment of all which was odious and menacing to them, and with which they felt that the life ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... decrepit beggar, is a sign of bad management, and unless you are economical, you will lose much property. Scandalous reports will prove detrimental ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... variegated attire, and unmistakable speech showed that they were a party of those misguided creatures who were abandoning the delights of the South for the untried horrors of a life upon the plains of Kansas. These were of all ages, from the infant in arms to the decrepit patriarch, and of every shade of color, from Saxon fairness with blue eyes and brown hair to ebon blackness. They were telling their stories to a circle of curious listeners. There was no lack of variety of incident, but a wonderful ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... of 1898, with which it was intended Commodore Watson should pay a hostile visit to the coast of Spain. But for the signing of the peace protocol, that visit under its gallant and distinguished commander would have proved one that the decrepit monarchy would remember to ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... hundreders, and bailiffs of liberties, have used to grieve those which be placed under them, putting in assizes and juries men diseased and decrepit, and having continual or sudden disease; and men also that dwelled not in the country at the time of the summons; and summon also an unreasonable number of jurors, for to extort money from some of them, ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... say when he hears the Meeting means to disown us? It troubles me deeply. My father is trembling too, for since a month he is all for resisting oppression, and who has been talking to him I do not know. Miss Wynne called him a decrepit weathercock to me last month, and then was in a fury at herself, and sorry too; but she will talk with him no more. It cannot be because he has sold his Holland cloths so well to the clothier- general. I never ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... concerned. I'm going home now, and I want you to follow me; but for heaven's sake keep your distance, and don't speak to me again till I speak to you. There—give me a start." And he was off again, a decrepit vagabond, with his hands in his pockets, his elbows squared, and frayed coat-tails swinging raggedly ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... remained, and it was therefore I who shouted down a challenge presently in round English at a party who clattered to the door on blown horses, and thundered on it as if they had been shatirs* hurrying to herald the arrival of the sultan himself. There was nothing furtive about their address to the decrepit door, nor anything meek. Accordingly I couched the challenge in terms of unmistakable affront, repeating it at intervals until the leader of the new ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Singapore knew perfectly well that his promotion, if not his job, depended upon his employer getting a tiger. And, as the steamer was due in four days, there was no time to spare. From the director of the Singapore zoo he purchased for considerably above the market price, a decrepit and somewhat moth-eaten tiger of advanced years, which he had transported across the straits to Johore, whence it was conveyed by bullock cart to a spot in the edge of the jungle, a dozen miles outside the town, where it was turned ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... any communication from home, he advanced with a cheerful haste, not knowing that his only daughter then lay dead in his friend's house, and that it was for her funeral that the people were collecting in the green square at the end of the street. He was so pale, broken, and decrepit that few knew him. But there was one old neighbor who recognized him and was kind enough to lead him into a quiet place, and there tell him that he had arrived just too late to see his darling daughter alive. The shock, instead of prostrating the old ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... there was desperation in Dumiger's eye. He waited a moment, and then with a maniac's strength he flew at the man, but he found a powerful and vigorous antagonist. The stranger, who had appeared half decrepit and aged, rose up in all the strength of youth. In a moment he had grasped Dumiger's arms, very coolly taken out a handkerchief, and in spite of all Dumiger's efforts bound his hands together. After he had performed this operation he drew ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... the sunlight, shaking with cold. Others were sad and still. Charley, subdued by the sudden disclosure of the insignificance of his youth, darted fearful glances. The two smooth-faced Norwegians resembled decrepit children, staring stupidly. To leeward, on the edge of the horizon, black seas leaped up towards the glowing sun. It sank slowly, round and blazing, and the crests of waves splashed on the edge of the luminous circle. One of the Norwegians appeared ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... the two friends. They were to take their examinations for graduation. Upon the days when M. Violette—they now called him at the office "Father Violette," he had grown so aged and decrepit—was not too much "consoled" in the cafe in the Rue du Four, and when he was less silent and gloomy than usual, he would say to ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... if one individual happened to die when his body was young and strong and handsome, his spirit would have an advantage over another individual, who lasted on earth until his body was old, decrepit and ugly. ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... a man, smiled, drew up the least decrepit bench she could find, and sat down, in spite of the angry mutterings of her irritated host. Then she opened her satchel, took out the small bottle of gold, and handed it to him without a word. The old man received it somewhat contemptuously, ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... children by that time, and we will never be without little toddlers and prattlers. I am fifty-three now, Mr. Flanders. We are reasonably sure to have twenty-two additions to the family. The pitiful part of getting old and decrepit lies in the fact that one's children grow up, get married, leave home—or die—and that is just what we are trying to guard against. On my seventy-fifth birthday, there will be a fine, healthy two-year-old babe crying and goo-gooing ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... Writ they enriched immense volumes, with most faithful commentaries they unfolded the sense of Holy Writ, with Holy Writ they seasoned alike their abstinence and their meals, finally, occupied about Holy Writ they arrived at decrepit old age. And if they also frequently have argued from the Authority of Elders, from the Practice of the Church, from the Succession of Pontiffs, from ecumenical Councils, from Apostolic Traditions, from the Blood of Martyrs, from the decrees of Bishops, ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... A poor little house, that looked as if its more aspiring neighbours would certainly swallow it up and deny its right to be at all; so low and decrepit it was, among better built if not handsome edifices. Street and surroundings were dingy and mean; however, when they went in they found a decent little room under the sloping roof and with a bit of blue sky visible from its dormer window. It was ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... to leave his lodge, and to require his daughters to bring him food and wait on him, as though he had been a mere child. The garden also had the appearance of old age, with its ancient bushes and hanging branches and decrepit vines loitering lazily ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... The piano, decrepit on its legs, though made of good wood painted black and gilded, was dirty, defaced, and scratched; and its keys, worn like the teeth of old horses, were yellowed with the fuliginous colors of the pipe. On the desk, a little heap of ashes showed that the night before ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... dissuaded him from this and exhorted him to patience; so he committed his affair to Almighty Allah. Meanwhile, the Prince cast about for a means of coming to his desire; and presently, disguising himself as a decrepit old man, with a white beard over his own black beard repaired to a garden of the Princess wherein she used to walk most of her days. Here he sought out the gardener and said to him, "I am a stranger ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... speaking. Nothing could be gained by dwelling upon this unfortunate occurrence. At this point an aged and decrepit man was led into the room by two soldiers. He was so weak that he had to be supported on either side. General Serano looked up and scowled at him as an intruder, and turned to an aide for an explanation, when the smiling interpreter glided to his side and whispered in his ear. He ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... Formerly the Xenophon. Refitting of. Leakiness. Selection of crew. Sailing delayed. Sailing of. On South Coast. In Encounter Bay. In Port Phillip. Arrival at Port Jackson. Circumnavigation of Australia. Decrepit condition of. Taken to ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... around, not across the square of pavement, keeping close to the dark wall and avoiding the streak of light that fell on the flagstones from a window in the opposite house. Seen from that height he was of course fore-shortened and probably looked more shambling and decrepit than he was. He picked his way along with exaggerated care and looked like a silly old cat crossing a wet street. When he reached the gate that led into an alley way between two buildings, he felt ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... then he would be arresting. In his prime, Joan felt, he must have been a great preacher. Even now, decrepit and wheezy, he was capable of flashes of magnetism, of eloquence. The passage where he pictured the Garden of Gethsemane. The fair Jerusalem, only hidden from us by the shadows. So easy to return to. Its soft lights shining through the trees, ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... whites were resolved to make no peace, and to give no quarter to man, woman or child. The formerly peaceful settlement became inured to blood and cruelty. But the red men could not be wholly driven away. Just twenty years after the first massacre the same implacable chief, now a decrepit old man, planned a second one; some hundreds were murdered; but the colonists were readier and stronger now, and they gathered themselves up at once, and inflicted a crushing vengeance. The ancient chief was finally taken, and either died of wounds received ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... newspaper folded in one to represent the letter, and a bunch of lilac leaves in the other, which later was to clasp the lily. From under the long eyelashes lying on her cheeks, she smiled mischievously at Malcolm, who was vainly trying to put a decrepit bend into his athletic young back, as he bent over the pole in the attitude of an ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... be associated with my friend in one of those singular adventures which were the normal condition of his existence. In a few minutes I had written my note, paid Whitney's bill, led him out to the cab, and seen him driven through the darkness. In a very short time a decrepit figure had emerged from the opium den, and I was walking down the street with Sherlock Holmes. For two streets he shuffled along with a bent back and an uncertain foot. Then, glancing quickly round, he straightened himself out and burst into a ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... attracted firmly to the iron railings. As most of the experiments took place at the North London Hospital, Euston-square was his chief point of attraction, and when he was removed, it was always found necessary to break off the railings and take them away with him. This accounted for the decrepit condition of the fleur de lys that surround the inclosure, which was not, as generally supposed, the work of the university pupils residing in Gower-place. Perfect insensibility to pain supervened at the same time, and his friends ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... was situated in the narrowest part of the Rue du Four, at the far end of a decrepit, tumble-down building. Claude had to cross two evil-smelling courtyards to reach a third, across which ran a sort of big closed shed, a huge out-house of board and plaster work, which had once served as a packing-case maker's workshop. From outside, through the four large windows, whose panes ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... caused the cremation of the bodies of the illustrious Krishna and Balarama and of the principal members of the Vrishni race. Then as he was journeying from Dwaraka with the women and children, the old and the decrepit—the remnants of the Yadu race—he was met on the way by a heavy calamity. He witnessed also the disgrace of his bow Gandiva and the unpropitiousness of his celestial weapons. Seeing all this, Arjuna became despondent and, pursuant to Vyasa's advice, went ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... each other!" said Wagner. "You can now understand the meaning of the inscription beneath my portrait. 'His last day thus' signifies that it was the last day on which I wore that aged, decrepit, and sinking form." ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... morning, a handsome stately gentleman, somewhat infirm, but of a fine presence, and with a well-filled face. He lies upon his bed, an aged man with sunken cheeks, the decrepit shadow of himself. His voice was rich and mellow and he had so long been thoroughly persuaded of the weight and import to mankind of any word he said that his words really had come to sound as if there were something in them. But now ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the difference between skill and knowledge. Readers and writers would then be succeeded by human beings. The golden ante-Cadmean age would come again. Literary sanctity having become a tradition, there would be an end of its pretentious counterfeits. The alphabet, decrepit with its long and vast labors, would at last be released. The whole army of writers would take their place among the curiosities of history. The Alexandrian thaumaturgists, the Byzantine historians, the scholastic dialecticians, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... see that in the non-ludicrous ones the unexpected state of feeling aroused, though wholly different in kind, is not less in quantity or intensity. Among incongruities that may excite anything but a laugh, Mr. Bain instances—"A decrepit man under a heavy burden, five loaves and two fishes among a multitude, and all unfitness and gross disproportion; an instrument out of tune, a fly in ointment, snow in May, Archimedes studying geometry in a siege, and all discordant things; a ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Janaway's house, being surprised to see a window lighted so late. Lord Blandamer must have changed his intention of going by train, for the gates of Cullerne station had been locked for hours, and the boiler of the decrepit branch-line engine was cooling ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... their borders caused no small consternation in Holland, and De Witt's efforts to reach an understanding with King Louis proved unavailing. The States were not in a position to attempt an armed intervention, and the once formidable Spanish power was now feeble and decrepit. The only hope lay in the formation of a coalition. De Witt therefore turned to England and ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... town but a camp beside a spring, usually deserted. Three years before, a mine had built the camp for the accommodation of the truck drivers who hauled ore to Lund and were sometimes unable to make the trip in one day. Casey, having adapted his speed to that of the decrepit car of the show people, was thankful that they arrived at all. He still had a little flour and coffee and salt, and he hoped there was enough grease left on the bacon paper to grease the skillet so that bannocks would not stick to the pan. He also hoped ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... and above them a large white cross with a simple inscription. The lot was fenced around with a hawthorn hedge, and here and there a rose bush grew luxuriantly. There was room for himself and for the old grandmother who was now terribly decrepit, so that she was unable to take any care of the house, and Patrick Marsh had consented to let his little shanty and come, with good Molly his wife, to look after the lad's comfort, for they had no child, and Archie was nearer to them than any living being. ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... Shakespeare's version, only Swinburne saw, or had the courage to say, how utterly null the old play really is. To have made Shakespeare's Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created the scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that decrepit skeleton—that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no doubt, but ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... the fells, and he had already decided to start early on the morrow. That being the case, it was clear that he must make the most of this opportunity; but he also realised that it would be advisable to proceed circumspectly. Saying nothing, he set his shoulder to the gate, and lifting it on its decrepit ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... first caused great perturbation; but Svidrigailov could be very fascinating when he liked, so that the first, and indeed very intelligent surmise of the sensible parents that Svidrigailov had probably had so much to drink that he did not know what he was doing vanished immediately. The decrepit father was wheeled in to see Svidrigailov by the tender and sensible mother, who as usual began the conversation with various irrelevant questions. She never asked a direct question, but began by smiling and rubbing her hands and then, if she were obliged to ascertain something—for ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... objectionable. Mischief brewing. A hunt for spears. Attack frustrated. Taking an observation. A midnight foe. The next morning. Funeral march. A new well. Change of country. Approaching the telegraph line. The Alberga. Decrepit native women. The Neales. Mount O'Halloran. The telegraph line. Dry state of the country. Hann's Creek. Arrival ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... marked subsidence of her personal emotion, and, in compensation, a rising tide of humanitarian enthusiasm. Gradually satiated with erotic passion, gradually convinced that it is rather a mischief-maker than a reconstructive force in a decrepit society, she is groping, indeed, between her successive liaisons for an elusive felicity, for a larger mission than inspiring Musset's Alexandrines or Chopin's nocturnes. It is somewhat amusing, and at the same time indicative of her vague but deep-seated ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... here is simulated a great natural ravine in all its wild grandeur: here are caverns, abrupt rocks, a torrent, a cascade, islands. The trees, dwarfed by a Japanese process of which we have not the secret, have tiny little leaves on their decrepit and knotty branches. A pervading hue of the mossy green of antiquity harmonizes all this medley, which is undoubtedly ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... satisfactory. What would you have more of a soldier than to run away and have him cashiered as to any command in your garrison? The first he hath done and the second he must submit to. And I assure you whatsoever he was among you, he is here a kind of decrepit young ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... caravan, because of the bassourahs, which meant that there were women among the travellers. There were comparatively few women pilgrims to the Zaouia, except invalids from the town of Oued Tolga, or some Sahara encampment, who crawled on foot, or rode decrepit donkeys, hoping to be cured of ailments by the magic power of the marabout, the power of the Baraka. The woman who watched had learned by this time not to expect European tourists. She had lived for eight years in the Zaouia, and not ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... part of Chevrial was given to him, Mansfield was fascinated with his opportunity, but he kept his counsel. He applied every resource of his ability to the composition of his performance of the decrepit old rake. He sought specialists on the infirmities of roues; he studied specimens in clubs, on the avenue, and in hospitals; and in the privacy of his own room he practiced make-ups for the part every spare moment. The rehearsals themselves ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... the Hospital for Cats. This was founded long ago by a rich, cat-loving Mussulman, and is one of the best endowed institutions in the city. An old mosque is appropriated to the purpose, under the charge of several directors; and here sick cats are nursed, homeless cats find shelter, and decrepit cats gratefully purr away their declining years. The whole category embraces several hundreds, and it is quite a sight to behold the court, the corridors, and terraces of the mosque swarming with them. Here, one with a bruised limb is receiving a cataplasm; there, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... for the hermit, but he declined to come, saying that he was too old and decrepit to leave his retreat. "What shall I do?" exclaimed Genji, "shall I visit him privately?" Eventually, taking four or five attendants, he started off early one morning for the place, which was at no ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... the cheapest portion of its equipment is its inexhaustible human labor supply. It was Big Jim who was sufficiently intelligent to keep demanding a new derrick. It was Big Jim who was adept in managing the decrepit machinery and so it was he who was sent to the danger spots, he having the keenest wits and the best ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... regained her composure. In the house, several changes actually took place: the female hangers-on and drones were subjected to instant expulsion; among their number two old women suffered, one who was blind and the other crippled with paralysis, also a decrepit Major of the Otchakoff period, who, on account of his truly astonishing voracity, was fed on nothing but black bread and lentils. A decree was also issued, that the former guests were not to be received: they were superseded ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... before them and enclosing a large tract of land now well covered with lush grass, was a formidable looking wall. In former days a glorious mantle of ivy had covered the rough stones; but now there was little left, and what there was looked pitifully decrepit. They continued their progress along this barrier, finally coming upon a huge iron gate now much the worse for rust. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... In the case of unmarried girls the breasts are rounded and erect, but after marriage gradually become more and more pendant until they hang almost to the waist line. With advancing age the muscles shrink, the skin shrivels up until an individual of 40 to 50 years usually has the decrepit appearance of an octogenarian; in fact, 50 is old age ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... Arc speaks of her "contemptible estate" as a shepherd's daughter, and afterward, denying her father, calls him "Decrepit miser! base, ignoble wretch!" (Henry VI., Part 1, Act 1, Sc. 2, and Act 5, Sc. 4.) It is hard to believe that Shakespeare would have so frequently allowed his characters to express their contempt for members ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... uncouthness. The aisles were filled with family pews or private boxes, raised aloft, and approached by private doors and staircases. These were owned by the magnates of the place, who were wont to bow their recognitions across the nave. There was a decrepit west gallery for the band, and the ground floor was crammed with cranky pews of every shape. A Carolean pulpit stood against a pillar, with reading-desk and clerk's box underneath. The ante-Communion Service was read from the desk, separated from the liturgy and sermon ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... my hand on a brooding cardinal, which merely fluttered from beneath it without showing further alarm; yet no wild bird has ever evinced toward myself any special degree of friendship. When I was a lad I remember that a certain decrepit old drake would follow me like a dog, and appeared to enjoy himself in my society. I could not appreciate his friendship then, and greatly fear that I was, at times, rather cruel to the ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... But Bat hasn't built his swell hotel yet," he laughed. "And as for us here, why, we 'batch' it. There isn't a thing in skirts around this place, only a Chink cook, a half-breed secretary, and a clerk or two, and a bum sort of decrepit lumber-jack who does my chores. So you see I'm—kind of relieved. Anyway you sleeping on the Myra makes it easy. Now there's a mighty big conceit to me, and it's all for this mill in our country's wilderness. And I just ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similar applications of the fallacy are made by those who see in the increasing size of national possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
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