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More "Toothless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... orators, he would have terrified three thousand Archers with his shouts; he would have pierced the whole line of the enemy with his shafts. Ah! but if you will not leave the aged in peace, decree that the advocates be matched; thus the old man will only be confronted with a toothless greybeard, the young will fight with the braggart, the ignoble with the son of Clinias;(8) make a law that in the future, the old man can only be summoned and convicted at the courts by the aged and the ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... the Valois, shouts of scorn from the populace, thunders from the pulpit, anathemas from monk and priest, elaborate invectives from all the pedants of the Sorbonne, distant mutterings of excommunication from Rome—not the toothless beldame of modern days, but the avenging divinity of priest-rid monarchs. Such were the results of the edicts of June. Spain and the Pope had trampled upon France, and the populace in her capital clapped their hands and jumped for joy. "Miserable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... came to look for Pierre he was in the nursery holding his baby son, who was again awake, on his huge right palm and dandling him. A blissful bright smile was fixed on the baby's broad face with its toothless open mouth. The storm was long since over and there was bright, joyous sunshine on Natasha's face as she gazed tenderly at her husband ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... imagine that it's wonderful to sit by the water, lapping and whispering as it mumbles to the shore with toothless baby mouths; to sit there and wait for the moon to come up behind those ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... was a cross baby. It did not take her long to forget all about heaven. She liked to pull hair, and she liked to scratch faces; and no matter how much you trotted her up and down, she just opened her toothless ...
— Aunt Madge's Story • Sophie May
... ran to her, frightened as young rabbits, and hid behind her skirts. Only the baby, grave and unalarmed, stood his ground and Susan snatched him up. Then the mother smiled, gratified and reassured. She had no upper front teeth, and the wide toothless grin gave her a look of old age that had in it a curious suggestion ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Yet just as busily swung she on: The garland beneath her had fallen to dust; The wheels above her were eaten with rust; The hands, that over the dial swept, Grew crook'd and tarnished, but on they kept; And still there came that silver tone From the shrivelled lips of the toothless crone, (Let me never forget, to my dying day, The tone or the burden of that lay)— "PASSING AWAY! ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... days gone past, And not one friend and not one penny Stored up (if ever he had any Friends; but his coppers had been many), All doors stood shut against him but The workhouse door, which cannot shut. There he droned on,—a grim old sinner, Toothless, and grumbling for his dinner, Unpitied quite, uncared for much (The rate-payers not favoring such), Hungry and gaunt, with time to spare; Perhaps the hungry, gaunt old Bear Danced back, a haunting memory. Indeed, I hope so, for you see If once ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... of the soul!" said Benjamin Wright; "a matter of—of a sugar-tit for a toothless baby! Which is just about what you are. That female, I tell you could have dandled you on her knee ten ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... but the private secretary went down and was admitted under the gallery on the left, to listen, with great content, while John Bright, with astonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him too, and he knew how it was done. The manner counted ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... undulations. A sweet desolation, an everlasting peace, seemed to hang in the air. A very old man (a fragment, like the castle itself) emerged from some crumbling corner to do me the honors, - a very gentle, obsequious, tottering, toothless, grateful old man. He beguiled me into an ascent of the solitary tower, from which you may look down on the big sallow river and glance at diminished Tarascon, and the barefaced, bald-headed hills behind it. It may appear that I insist too much upon the nudity of the Provencal ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... are toothless, denotes your inability to advance your interests, and ill health will ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Light, and there were many who thought it was especially appropriate for a prince who was more qualified for a college than a palace. Most of the chroniclers of the period gave an unfavorable picture of the new ruler, who was described as "thin and toothless," and as "lank in figure, low of stature, with a haggard face, a reserved look, and a quiet exterior." He was superior to his external aspect, for it may be truly said that although he had to deal with new conditions he evinced under critical circumstances a dignity of demeanor and ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... corpse; I turned the face to the light; I searched for a pulse of life, a breath. There was none: he was dead. A single blow had been given, and the blow had been sure. A ghastly grimace distended the thin lips of the toothless mouth; the eyes were starting from their orbits; the hands were clenched: it had been a death swift, silent, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... enlivening to meet a fellow-creature whose expression and accents say, "You are the hair that breaks the camel's back of my endurance, you are the last drop that makes my cup of woe run over"; persons whose heads drop on one side like those of toothless infants, whose voices recall the tones in which our old snuffling choir used to wail out the ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... so I ended. "Decrepit, toothless, shivering crone, now forgotten, going thy ways without so much as a glance from passers-by! Why art thou still alive? What doest thou in that beggar's garb, uncomely and desired of none? Where are thy riches?—for what were ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... was nearly toothless, so she was mad enough to kill me; but her brother Jonathan was at table, and he took my part, saying, 'Sarves you right, Sue;' why can't ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... nearest pathway lay Over a little hill, and on its brow A group of trees, whereof each blackened bough Bore up to heaven as if in protest mute Its clustering load of ghastly charnel fruit,[12] The swaddled forms of all the village dead— Maid, lusty warrior, and toothless hag, The infant and the conjurer with his bag, Peacefully rotting in their airy bed. As on a battle plain she saw them lie, Fouling the fairness of the moonlit sky; And heavily there flapped above her head, Some floating drapery ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... You ingrate Henry Greene, I picked you from the gutter of Houndsditch, And paid your debts, and kept you in my house, And brought you here to make a man of you! You Robert Juet, ancient, crafty man, Toothless and tremulous, how many times Have I employed you as a master's mate To give you bread? And you Abacuck Prickett, You sailor-clerk, you salted puritan, You knew the plot and silently agreed, Salving your conscience with a pious lie! Yes, ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... Catholics; and if all the seventy members returned were of the Catholic persuasion, they must still plot the destruction of our religion in the midst of 588 Protestants. Such terrors would disgrace a cook-maid, or a toothless aunt—when they fall from the lips of bearded and senatorial men, they are ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... scales are so soft that any knight with a moderate power of thrust can strike them: their claws, once strong enough to tear out a thousand eyes, only fall with a feeble pat that scarce raises the skin: their tongues, from their toothless old gums, dart a venom which is rather disagreeable than deadly. See them trailing their languid tails, and crawling home to their caverns at roosting-time! How weak are their powers of doing injury! their maleficence ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dull, dreadfully dull; and, by the necessity of his nature, incapable of being in deadly earnest, which his splendid antagonist at all times was. His encounter, therefore, with Mrs. Lee presented the distressing spectacle of an old, toothless, mumbling mastiff, fighting for the household to which he owed allegiance against a young leopardess fresh from the forests. Every touch from her, every velvety pat, drew blood. And something comic mingled with what my mother felt to be paramount tragedy. Far different was Mr. Clowes: holy, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... passed, till we were safely come to Tours, and so to their house in a street running off the great place, where the cathedral stands. It was a goodly dwelling, with fair carved-work on the beams, and in the doorway stood the old Scots kinswoman, smiling wide and toothless, to welcome us. Elliot kissed her quickly, and she fondled Elliot, and held a hand out over her shoulder ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... pretty well filled, though there were some empty boxes, sights more hideous in the eyes of actors than toothless mouths. We sat with Madame la Baronne de ——-, and nearly opposite was Madame ——-, related to the "Principe de la Paz," a handsome woman, with a fine Bohemian cast of face, dark in complexion, with glittering teeth, brilliant ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... people believed in witches. Although not always so, it was generally very old people, people who had grown ugly and witless with age who were accused of being witches. In almost any village might be seen poor old creatures, toothless, hollow cheeked, wrinkled, with nose and chin almost meeting. Bent almost double, they walked about with a crutch, shaking and mumbling as they went. If any one had an ache or a pain it was easily accounted ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... castles rise more defiantly, and a wilder, sterner majesty prevails, there lies, like a strange and fearful tale of olden times, the gloomy and ancient town of Bacharach. But these walls, with their toothless battlements and blind turrets, in whose nooks and niches the winds whistle and the sparrows build their nests, were not always so decayed and fallen, and in these poverty-stricken, repulsive muddy lanes which one ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... sun-shunning night-birds and corner-creepers, dull-pated and base mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, prittle-prattling barbers, filthy graziers, curious bath-keepers, common shifters and cogging cavaliers, bragging soldiers, lazy clowns, one-eyed or lamed fencers, toothless and tattling old wives, chattering char-women and nurse-keepers, long-tongued midwives, 'scape-Tyburns, dog-leeches, and such-like baggage. In the next rank, to second this goodly troupe, follow poisoners, enchanters, wizards, fortune-tellers, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Pascal stumbling out to the backyard to finish weeding the circle of pansies before dinner—she wondered about the gash that was his mouth. She distinctly remembered carving it so that the ends curved upward into a frozen and quite harmless smile. But one end of the toothless grin seemed to sag a little, like the cynical smile of one who knows his powers have ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... two, when, discovering his error, he'd wag his tail and go back to his den—all this being evidently done to show that he was as vigilant as ever—a sort of protest, that said, "Don't believe one word about my being blind and toothless, still less flatter yourself that the place is secure. It requires all my activity and watchfulness to protect; but go back in ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... other side of the fireplace, in the horse-hair arm-chair where Mrs Verloc's mother was generally privileged to sit, Karl Yundt giggled grimly, with a faint black grimace of a toothless mouth. The terrorist, as he called himself, was old and bald, with a narrow, snow-white wisp of a goatee hanging limply from his chin. An extraordinary expression of underhand malevolence survived in his extinguished eyes. When he rose painfully the thrusting forward of a skinny groping hand deformed ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... saw a little, bent old woman, all muffled up in grey rags. The face of the old woman alone peeped out from them; a yellow, wrinkled, sharp-nosed, toothless face. ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... intently perusing a lengthy will with the aid of a pair of horn spectacles: occasionally pausing from his task, and slily noting down some brief memorandum of the bequests contained in it. Every wrinkle about his toothless mouth, and sharp keen eyes, told of avarice and cunning. His clothes were nearly threadbare, but it was easy to see that he wore them from choice and not from necessity; all his looks and gestures down to the very small pinches of snuff ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... from his white-sweating brow; bowed old men stood in front of their doorways, leaning with one hand on short, trembling staffs, while the slaver slid unheeded along the cutties which the left hand held to their toothless mouths; white-mutched grannies were keeking past the jambs; an early urchin, standing wide-legged to stare, waved his cap and shouted, "Hooray!"—and all because John Gourlay's carts were setting off upon their morning rounds, a brave procession for a single town! Gourlay, standing ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... room was invaded by a number of old toothless hags who came in at the door and the window, and these creatures, with taloned fingers fought, screeching and ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... face that met his eye. He is said, indeed, to have kept a pony and a servant in constant readiness, in order to follow and ascertain the residence of any fair girl whose attractions particularly caught his fancy! At this period the old man was deaf with one ear, blind with one eye, nearly toothless, and labouring under multiplied infirmities. But the hideous propensities of his prime still pursued him when all enjoyment was impossible. Can there be a ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... flourish toward the train, and then turned and sped up the lane to meet the new emergency. Jake and Hannah, their faces settled once more into their accustomed expressions of good-humored placidity, leaned from their windows and waved their hands. Hannah smiled a toothless but happy smile, and Jake's eyes beamed a great content as he sat back in his seat, and, holding the rattle between his teeth, fumbled happily for a match. He looked across at his wife, and their eyes met in a rapturous smile; for at last, ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... satires are termed by the author Toothless satires, and the three last Biting satires. He has an animated idea of good poetry, and a just contempt of poetasters in the different species of it. He says of himself, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... heart's desire, and had been sneered at as a coward and a quitter; the man who having gained his heart's desire, in the very bigness of him, had unhesitatingly risked wrecking his whole life's happiness to keep his promise to an old, toothless, savage crone; and who, in brute fashion, bare-fisted, had all but pounded the life from the body of the hulking Moncrossen in defense of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... this the dancers began to arrive. They came in their strange deckings of glaring colors, and many and varied were the types which soon filled the room. There were old men and there were young men. There were girls in their early teens, and toothless hags, decrepit and faltering. Faces which, in wild loveliness, might have vied with the white beauty of the daughters of the East. Faces seared and crumpled with weight of years and nights of debauchery. Men ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... disappeared, when the Brahman, opening his toothless mouth, prepared to eat the fruit of immortality. Then his wife addressed him in these words, shedding copious ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... taunts at them for their cowardice, and called them vile names, such as Histah, the snake, and Dango, the hyena. She threatened to call Mumga to chastise them with a stick—Mumga, who was so old that she could no longer climb and so toothless that she was forced to confine her diet almost exclusively to bananas ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... consider the weather better for corn-popping! You ask for a bicycle but they had already found a very nice bargain in flannels! You beg to dine the gay-kerchiefed Scissor-Grinder's child, but they invite the Minister's toothless mother-in-law!... And when you're old enough to go courting," he sighed, "your lady-love's sentiments are outraged if you don't spend the day with her and your own family are perfectly furious if you don't spend the day with them!... And after you're married?" With a gesture of ultimate despair he ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... was supporting several feet of snow the lighting of the room was effected only by a large oil-lamp which stood on the blackened table in the centre. An old woman came forward into the light of the lamp. Her eyes were fine and black—her mouth was toothless and folded away for ever, lost in a crevice under her nose. When she smiled the oak-apples of her cheeks rose up and cut ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... the king's leech,' he said to himself, 'and bid him give me some medicament that shall strengthen my wound. For I cannot abide that I stay here like some toothless old hound, while his fellows are gone to ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... children peeped out from behind the closed windows, beside toothless used-up old people's faces, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones. Let this be granted. But "a living dog is better than a dead lion." Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion, for this work is at least a caged and toothless one. How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He don't care anything about it. His avowed mission is impressing the "public heart" to care nothing about it. A leading Douglas Democratic newspaper thinks Douglas's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... comprehension wanders lost; While fields of pleasantry amuse us there With merry descants on a nation's woes. The rest appears a wilderness of strange But gay confusion; roses for the cheeks, And lilies for the brows of faded age, Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald, Heaven, earth, and ocean, plunder'd of their sweets, Nectareous essences, Olympian dews, Sermons, and city feasts, and fav'rite airs, Ethereal journeys, submarine exploits. And Katerfelto, with ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... a sinister figure, this old steward of the Empire, thin, stubbly, covered with mud, and shouting like a Jeremiah, "It is the downfall!" with a toothless mouth, black and wide open. I felt afraid and ashamed of him, with a great desire to see him outside, and I thought: "Oh, M. Chalmette! Oh, my little ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... emaciated, slightly graying, very thin kinky hair, tightly braided in small pigtails. Somewhat wrinkled, toothless. Active for her age, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... the gleaming water trickling interminably down the high black wall. Of course he was tired after his long journey, hungry too, and depressed.... He awoke to find the Ancient Mariner watching him. He screamed. The Mariner reassured him with a toothless smile, gripped him by the arm and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... I fear. But you will meet Cesarini in London this year or the next. He is persuaded that you did not see justice done to his poems, and is coming here as soon as his indolence will let him, to proclaim your treachery in a biting preface to some toothless satire." ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to strike. O son, this breast Pillowed thine head full oft, while, drowsed with sleep, Thy toothless mouth drew mother's milk ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... more particularly. I am quite in concern for the poor prinCess,(289) and her conjugal and amorous distresses: I really pity them; were they in England, we should have all the old prudes dealing out judgments on her, and mumbling toothless ditties to the tune of Pride will have a fall. I am bringing some fans and trifles for her, si mignons! Good ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the economist of the proprietary school; "turn off that sick domestic, that toothless and worn-out servant. Put away the unserviceable beauty; to the hospital with the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... beady eyes of Running Deer. Running Deer's peltries would be spread out, and after a half hour of silent consideration on his part and trader's talk on mine, furs to the value of so many beaver skins would be passed across for the coveted gun. I remember it was a wretched old squaw with a toothless, leathery, much-bewrinkled face and a reputation for knowledge of Indian medicines, who first opened my eyes to the sort of trade the Indians had been driving with Hamilton. The old creature was bent almost double over her stout oak staff and came ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... guess they just scraped acquaintance in the Alley after dinner, like they sometimes do. A man with eyelashes like his always speaks to any woman alone who isn't pockmarked and toothless. Two minutes after he's met a girl his voice takes on the 'cello note. I know his kind. Why, say, he even tried waving those eyelashes of his at me first time he turned in his key; and goodness knows I'm so homely that pretty soon I'll be ripe for bachelor floor thirteen. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... rector desired him to look after. There was an old man and his wife who lived next door but one to Ernest himself; then there was a plumber of the name of Chesterfield; an aged lady of the name of Gover, blind and bed-ridden, who munched and munched her feeble old toothless jaws as Ernest spoke or read to her, but who could do little more; a Mr Brookes, a rag and bottle merchant in Birdsey's Rents in the last stage of dropsy, and perhaps half a dozen or so others. What did it all come to, when he did go to see ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... "Husband, husband! the wolf has got the child! Gabriel, Gabriel! don't you see? The wolf has got the child!" Then the man chased the wolf, and got back the child. "Brave old dog!" said he; "you are old and toothless, and yet you can give help in time of need, and will not let your master's child be stolen." And henceforth the woman and her husband gave the old dog a large ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... nickname was Brains, and a young Tartar, whose name nobody knew, were sitting on the bank of the river by a wood-fire. The other three ferrymen were in the hut. Simeon who was an old man of about sixty, skinny and toothless, but broad-shouldered and healthy, was drunk. He would long ago have gone to bed, but he had a bottle in his pocket and was afraid of his comrades asking him for vodka. The Tartar was ill and miserable, and, ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... queer, old, toothless fashion, about their visitors, a man who used to fish all day, every day for three weeks, fish every hour of the day, though many a day he caught nothing—nothing at all—still he fished from the boat; and so on, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... fast, but few were hurt. Their big gun was like a toothless old dog, who only makes himself hotter the more noise he makes," he remarked ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... night, and though she paid us frequent visits, she was Cousin Susan's for life. I fear indulgence dulled her moral sense. She was an immense happiness to her mistress, whose silent and lonely days she made glad with her oddity and mirth. And yet the small creature, old, toothless, and blind, domineered over her gentle friend—threatening her sometimes if she presumed to remove the small Fury from the inside of her own bed, into which it pleased her to creep. Indeed, I believe it is too true, though it was inferred only, that her mistress ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... to clean her cocoa-nut shoes with oil and to rub them up. Then he learnt to catch the little sun moths and rub them through the finest sieves, and the flour from them he made into soft bread for the toothless old woman. ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... man poured a glass of neat gin down his shrivelled throat, and the effect upon him was extraordinary. A light glimmered in each of his dull eyes, a tinge of colour came into his wax-like cheeks, and, opening his toothless mouth, he suddenly emitted a peculiar, bell-like, and most musical cry. A hoarse roar of laughter from all the company answered it, and flushed faces craned over each other to catch a glimpse ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... attire, in which a half comical, half sinister-looking old woman with a toothless mouth and a nose like an owl's, assisted her, and just as she was fixing the myrtle wreath onto her dark curls, the bell began to ring, which summoned her to her wedding. The Count himself, in full uniform, led her to the chapel of the castle, where the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the Loeki, another comes from the River Lombadzo, or Lombazo, which is west of Loeki (this may be another name for the Lomame), the country is called Nanga, and the tribe Nongo, chief Mpunzo. The Malobo tribe is under the chiefs Yunga and Lomadyo. Another toothless boy said that he came from the Lomame: the upper teeth extracted seem to say that the tribe have cattle; the knocking out the teeth is in imitation of the animals they almost worship. No traders had ever visited ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... sizes too large. Ill health probably accounts for this untidiness for, as she expressed it, "when I gits up I hate to set down and when I sets down, I hates to git up, my knees hurts me so," however, her face broke into a toothless grin on the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... sun struggling through the curtains that cover its fantastic windows allows a mellow light to fill the expanse of the building. A toothless old woman and a young girl, both of them thinly and poorly clad, are the sole occupants of the church, and they are evidently too much absorbed in prayer to notice our presence. They have placed beside the Madonna's altar ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Even then his impulse was to stagger toward the inanimate Mercer and kick him, but hands caught him and held him. He heard an amazed voice, then another—and something hard and cold shut round his wrists like a pair of toothless jaws. ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... foe. Warriors of courage do not wish to strike them that run away with speed. That is another reason why the routed foe should not be pursued hotly. Things that are immobile are devoured by those that are mobile; creatures that are toothless are devoured by those that have teeth; water is drunk by the thirsty; cowards are devoured by heroes. Cowards sustain defeat though they have, like the victors, similar backs and stomachs and arms ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... throughout the streets of the city. 'What steel! alack, what steel!' Such were the bewildered cries the citizens raised. The firmness of manhood and of youth gave way at sight of the steel; and the steel paralyzed the wisdom of graybeards. That which I, poor tale-teller, mumbling and toothless, have attempted to depict in a long description, Ogger perceived at one rapid glance, and said to Didier, 'Here is what you so anxiously sought,' and whilst uttering these words he fell down ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they wouldn't know what he was talking about." The sage laughed and champed his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose their countenances after an ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... ragged fringe might edge a garment. It was a thatched hut; yet there were circumstances in the life of the owner which had transformed the interior into a luxurious apartment. The owner of the hut was herself hanging on the edge of life; she was a toothless, bent, and withered old remnant; but her vigor and vivacity were those of a witch. Her hands and eyes were ceaselessly active; she was forever busy, fingering a fish-net, or polishing her Normandy brasses, or stirring some dark liquid in an iron pot ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions' mouths—now toothless—where, in the distempered horror of my sleep, I thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark. So, when I saw the council-room to which ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... who was, as we have said, as deaf as a post, wrinkled her visage up into the most indescribable expression of world-embracing benignity, expanded her old lips, displayed her toothless gums, and chuckled. ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... ride on it,' said the prince; but with that the witch dragged it away again, and came back with an old, wrinkled, toothless hag, whose hands trembled with age. 'You can have no other princess,' said she. 'Will you ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... nurse, after having taken the baby out in her best, came in with her, and brought her to Anna. The plump, well-fed little baby, on seeing her mother, as she always did, held out her fat little hands, and with a smile on her toothless mouth, began, like a fish with a float, bobbing her fingers up and down the starched folds of her embroidered skirt, making them rustle. It was impossible not to smile, not to kiss the baby, impossible not to hold out a finger for her to clutch, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... than otherwise. I am well convinced that if the newly-born infant and the man who had just died could compare their experiences, the former would have proved to be the sufferer. It is not for nothing that the first thing the newcomer into this planet does is to open its toothless mouth ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... time the work was completed, and Mrs. Scarlet stood up with her arms akimbo viewing her work, a satisfied smile playing about the toothless lips. ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... the right to prefix "Don" to one's baptismal name. But to be no Don and to receive coin for one's labour was a far more insurmountable barrier against intermarriage with the patriarchs than hereditary madness, toothless old age, leprosy, or lack ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... woman, infirm and toothless, yet with all the remains of great beauty, sits cowering over this hidden turf fire, mumbling to herself, it may be, of golden days now past and gone, when she had been the fairest colleen at mass or pattern, and had counted ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... hideously old, but its years inspired not respect. Old king, old ministers, old generals—if indeed there were generals,—old courtiers, old mistresses, old poets, old musicians, old opera dancers, broken down with ennui, pleasure, and idleness—toothless, faded, rouged, and wrinkled—were descending slowly to the tomb. Louis XV. formed one of the funeral procession; he was taken to St. Denis between two lines of cabarets filled with drunken revellers, madly rejoicing at being rid of this plague, which another plague had ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... came down again, it was to fall, not upon the water, but into the throat of the voracious tyrant; who, although toothless and without any means of masticating, made shorter work of it by introducing them untoothed, and at a single ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... attendants, all but three; Rooke, the head keeper, a morose burly ruffian; Hayes, a bilious subordinate, Rooke's shadow; and Vulcan, a huge mastiff that would let nobody but Rooke touch him; he was as big as a large calf, and formidable as a small lion, though nearly toothless with age. He was let loose in the yard at night, and was an element in the Restraint system; many a patient would have tried to escape but for Vulcan. He was also an invaluable howler at night, and so cooperated with Dr. Wolf's bugs and fleas to avert sleep, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... rate, it was never carried home to any man's conscience. Nobody was ever disturbed. Nobody's feelings were ever hurt. Nobody in all the parish had ever heard a voice of thunder saying, Thou art the man. Toothless and timid generalities made up all the preaching they ever heard either on the ethical or on the evangelical side: and generalities disturb no man's peace of mind. The pulpit of Kilmacolm was but too sib to the pew, and both pulpit ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock; Tu-whit!—Tu-whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily he crew. Sir Leoline, the baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch; From her kennel beneath the rock She maketh answer to the clock, Four f[)o]r th[)e] quart[)e]rs [)a]nd twelve f[)o]r th[)e] hour, Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud: Some say, she ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the incidents that attended their companionship from the time when his grandmother first gave him as a present. He was a brisk young dog then, he remembered, the terror of all strange cats and hunter of rabbits, but his affection had not swerved down to the last year of their association, when, toothless and wheezy, he could hunt no more, and cats came fearlessly beneath his very nose when he went through the feeble pretence of trying to gnaw a bone on ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... a woman smells best [6] when she smells of nothing at all. For those old women who are in the habit of anointing themselves with unguents, vampt up creatures, old hags, and toothless, who hide the blemishes of the person with paint, when the sweat has blended itself with the unguents, forthwith they stink just like when a cook has poured together a variety of broths; what they smell of, you don't know, except this ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... entered with his young assistant. The youth was dudish, with a business suit, and a very high, straight collar that struck his chin. The Cure was in long, black robes, with skirts—a yellow man, gray-haired, his mouth a thin, straight slit, almost toothless. His eyebrows turned up, as if the face were being pulled. His heavy ears lay back against his head, large wads of cotton-wool in them. He talked with the nurse, inquiring for the baby's name. There were a half-dozen names for the mite—family names of father and mother, ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... I met a servant at a public-house, who is going away, a sea chap, drinking malt like a fish, and I wormed all out of him. I think it be an easy job. The butler be fat and pursey. The Admiral be old and toothless. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... other foot and glanced casually at the canvases which leaned against the walls of the shabby studio. There was the Duchess: incredibly old, the face a web of wrinkles, the lips indrawn over toothless and shrunken gums, the nose a thin, curved beak, the eyes deep-set, gleaming, inscrutable, watching; and drawn tight over the hair—even Maggie did not know whether that hair was a wig or the Duchess's—the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... Bennett grinned a toothless grin at me and did some dialect, which I understood to mean that I might do as I liked, but that he (Bennett) was not going to catch no more ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... the following account of measures which rustic wiseacres in Suffolk are said to have adopted as a remedy for witchcraft. "A woman I knew forty-three years had been employed by my predecessor to take care of his poultry. At the time I came to make her acquaintance she was a bedridden toothless crone, with chin and nose all but meeting. She did not discourage in her neighbours the idea that she knew more than people ought to know, and had more power than others had. Many years before I knew her it happened one spring that the ducks, which were a part of her ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... mumbling her supper with toothless impotency, renewed her youth vicariously, and, while she quarrelled with her daughter from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, she added the last straw to the burden of the distracted suitors by announcing what a comfort ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... But even when they send joy, this turns to their misfortune. Some day Zeus will destroy them, these many-tongued people, when they are born with grey locks on their temples. Yes, our children are born old men already, toothless, wrinkled and with bald heads. The father is not gracious to the child, nor the child to the father, nor the guest to his host, nor servant to fellow-servant, nor brother to brother. Children dishonour their old parents, revile them ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... Abelard. Oh, yes, of course, I asked him about Heloise the first time I saw him, and I was staggered when the little old toothless chap giggled and said, "That was before my time." What do you think of that? Every one calls him "Pere Abelard," and about the house it is shortened down to "Pere." He is over twenty years older than Amelie—well along in his seventies. ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... the flight of steps, and drawing Virginia with her, she began to walk slowly toward the terraced side of the garden. An old lamplighter, carrying his ladder to a lamp-post at the corner, smiled up at them with his sunken toothless ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... with whom Meriem came in contact was, almost without exception, either indifferent to her or cruel. There was, for example, the old black hag who looked after her, Mabunu—toothless, filthy and ill tempered. She lost no opportunity to cuff the little girl, or even inflict minor tortures upon her, such as pinching, or, as she had twice done, searing the tender flesh with hot coals. ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... see that old flunkey of the Empire, gaunt and stooping, covered with filth and crying like Jeremiah: "This is the end," with his toothless mouth wide open like a great black hole. I was afraid and ashamed before him, I longed to see his back; and I thought to myself: "O Monsieur Chalmette! O my ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Angry at this, he called for some one to wrestle with him. "My men," said King Utgard, "would think it beneath them to wrestle with thee, but let some one call my old nurse Eld, and let Thor wrestle with her." A toothless old woman entered the hall, and after a violent struggle Thor began to lose his footing, and went home excessively mortified. But it turned out afterward that all this was illusion. The three blows of the mallet, instead ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... The sculptor wrests the rugged block from the rocky ribs of his mother earth;—the tailor clips the implicated "long hogs"[1] from the prolific backs of the living mutton;—the toothless saw, plied by an unweayring hand, prepares the stubborn mass for the chisel's tracery;—the loom, animated by steam (that gigantic child of Wallsend and water), twists and twines the unctuous and pliant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... makes her a victim. As the shadows begin to gather she will often turn to drink that for an hour she may recover the delusion of well-being. Slowly but certainly the morass drags her down. Often she does not reach thirty. If she lives it is to face a state in which, toothless, wrinkled, and obscene, she is seen only by those who visit the murkiest parts of our cities. She dies unmoored and unloved, and is hurried ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... that legal sphinx—Erle Palma? Mamma only now and then receives epistles fashioned after those once in vogue in Laconia. (I wonder if even the old toothless gossips in Sparta were ever laconic?) I am truly sorry for Erle Palma. That beautifully crystallized quartz heart of his is no doubt being ground between the upper and nether millstones of his love and his pride; and Hymen ought to charge him heavy mill-toll. My dear, have you seen Elliott ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... you want to know their intention, I'll tell you. To make a meal of us. First of all their spikes will pierce us, and then their mouths, which are really suckers, will drain us dry of blood—pretty thoroughly too; there are no half measures with shrowks. They are toothless beasts, so ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... own estimate. But when it's a question of that, he sits there and sucks at his toothless old gums and giggles that it's the first hundred years that are the hardest to get through with and ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... that I ever witnessed a more melancholy spectacle. Apollo playing on his stringed instrument presents a very graceful appearance; but fancy a Welsh Orpheus with a face all seamed and scarred by smallpox,—a short, fiery button in the middle of his countenance, serving for a nose,—a mouth awry and toothless,—and two long, dirty, bony hands, with claw-like fingers tipped with dark crescents,—and I do not think the picture will be a pleasant one. If the horrible-looking old fellow had concealed his ghastly eyes by colored glasses, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... myself in his, so he must be in possession of my body, of my strength, that is, and my future. But how to prove it? Then, as I thought, the thing became so incredible, even to me, that my mind reeled, and I had to pinch myself, to feel my toothless gums, to see myself in the glass, and touch the things about me, before I could steady myself to face the facts again. Was all life hallucination? Was I indeed Elvesham, and he me? Had I been dreaming ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... occupations in this world, making hay! It was a very confined patch of churchyard lying between Gracechurch-street and the Tower, capable of yielding, say an apronful of hay. By what means the old old man and woman had got into it, with an almost toothless hay-making rake, I could not fathom. No open window was within view; no window at all was within view, sufficiently near the ground to have enabled their old legs to descend from it; the rusty churchyard- gate ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... full skirt, peaked hat, cane, spectacles, mits. It is effective for her to draw her lips tight over her teeth so that her speech is that of a toothless old woman. ...
— Down the Chimney • Shepherd Knapp
... some mistake. Here, what's this? This old toothless hag, without her wig, is unknown to me! And why does she address me as "ARCHIBALD"? I was expecting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... meets her father—for how could he take the life of him who gave life to his adored one? Your hero can always hit a man just where he pleases—vide every novel in Mr C's collection. The hero becomes misanthropical, the heroine maniacal. The former marries an antiquated and toothless dowager, as an escape from the imaginary disgust he took at a sight of a matchless woman; and the latter marries an old brute, who threatens her life every night, and puts her in bodily fear every morning, as an indemnity in full for the loss of the man of her affections. They are ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... living for him and for herself, by selling sweet-stuff from door to door. She came to him twice daily, and he tore ravenously at the food, eating it with horrible noises of animal satisfaction, while she cooed at him, through toothless gums, with many endearing terms, such as Malay women use to little children. Not even his misery and degradation had been able to kill her love, though its wretched object had long ceased to understand it, or ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... much meat," she continued, more harshly than before. "But of what worth to you and me? A few bones to gnaw in our toothless old age. But the back-fat, the kidneys, and the tongues—these shall go into other mouths than thine ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... Coachman weren't niver lit tu come here," said the road-mender, slyly. His toothless mouth extended into the perpetual smile which had earned him the nickname of "Happy Jack," over sixty years since, when he had been the prettiest lad in ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... hobbling out to greet her with a toothless smile. "Ah, bella signorina, there are no more letters for you to-night. Have you come to talk to me for ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... fashion, but is niggardly of his hospitality towards his own equals, is a Dinner-giving Snob. My dear friend, Jack Tufthunt, for example, knows ONE Lord whom he met at a watering-place: old Lord Mumble, who is as toothless as a three-months-old baby, and as mum as an undertaker, and as dull as—well, we will not particularise. Tufthunt never has a dinner now but you see this solemn old toothless patrician at the right-hand of Mrs. Tufthunt—Tufthunt ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... He was glad to look up and feel the Presence there! Who knew what might have passed between the soul and God? It was safe to leave that little sinful soul with Him who had died to save. It was good to go out from there knowing that the pretty, sinful girl, the hardened, grizzled sot, the poor old toothless crone, the little hunchback newsboy who lay in the same row, were guarded alike and beloved by the same Presence that would go ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... death, you suffer in all your system. But the babies were fed. Morning, noon and evening Scott would solemnly lift them out one by one from their nest of gunny-bags under the cart-tilts. There were always many who could do no more than breathe, and the milk was dropped into their toothless mouths drop by drop, with due pauses when they choked. Each morning, too, the goats were fed; and since they would struggle without a leader, and since the natives were hirelings, Scott was forced to give up riding, and pace ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... well as respectable. There are old, gray lies that men half worship. The more toothless and drivelling, often the more venerable. They have imposed their solemn emptiness on men for generations. They have awed the souls of the fathers. They make the children tremble. Men chant their praises, call them great names, and tell each other the old scarecrows ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... till we were safely come to Tours, and so to their house in a street running off the great place, where the cathedral stands. It was a goodly dwelling, with fair carved-work on the beams, and in the doorway stood the old Scots kinswoman, smiling wide and toothless, to welcome us. Elliot kissed her quickly, and she fondled Elliot, and held a hand out over ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... consequently the killers give the cachalot a wide berth as a dangerous customer. The finback, however, swift and lengthy as he is, seldom manages to escape once he is "bailed up," and having no weapon of defence except his flukes (for he is one of the baleen or toothless whales), he has but one chance of his life, and that is to dive to such a depth that his assailants have to let go their hold of him in order to ascend ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... something grotesque in their decrepitude. Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the meagreness of the active one, and the hanging yellow cheeks of the other (the still one, whose head trembled) would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful physical degradation ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... whether the rigid manners of the old housekeeper would soften a little at the sight of the young girl. I saw her turning her lustreless eyes upon Jeanne; I saw her long wrinkled face, her toothless mouth, and that pointed chin of hers— like the chin of some puissant old fairy. And that ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... he was physically intact and bodily perfect. He had no broken nose, smashed ribs, stiff shoulder joints or weak ankles, nor was he toothless. In all his ambitious young life he had never achieved anything more enduring than a bloody nose, a cracked lip or a purple eye, and he had been compelled to struggle pretty hard for even those blessings. And to him the pity of it all was that he was as hard ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Monceau to reach their carriage, which was waiting for them on the Boulevard Malesherbes, they made the young people, Giselle and Fred, walk ahead, that they might have an opportunity of expressing themselves freely, the old dowager especially, whose toothless mouth never lost an opportunity of smirching the character and the ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... mended his pace. I guessed that he was anxious to get his mission over as quickly as possible. He barely gave himself time to shake hands with me and made a rush at the narrow glass door with the words Hotel Entrance on it. It swung to behind his back with no more noise than the snap of a toothless jaw. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... and free sermons that ever I heard anywhere. The way here of all preachers, even the best, has been to speak before the Parliament with so profound a reverence as truly took all edge from their exhortations, and made all applications of them toothless and adulatorious. That style is much changed, however: these two good men laid well about them, and charged public and Parliamentary sins strictly on the backs of the guilty." [Footnote: Baillie's Letters, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... oft Fred'rick sighed and wept; A toothless hag—his only servant kept; His kitchen cold; (where commonly he dwelled;) A pretty decent horse his stable held; A falcon too; and round about the grange, Our quondam 'squire repeatedly would range, Where oft, to melancholy, ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... other years,—who made a meagre living for him and for herself, by selling sweet-stuff from door to door. She came to him twice daily, and he tore ravenously at the food, eating it with horrible noises of animal satisfaction, while she cooed at him, through toothless gums, with many endearing terms, such as Malay women use to little children. Not even his misery and degradation had been able to kill her love, though its wretched object had long ceased to understand it, or to recognise her, save as the giver of the ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... note in the old man's voice. Rather he took the question as an inquiry into the further marvels of his process. "Here," he continued, enthusiastically, "I'll prove that to you also. My dog Spot is around the place somewhere. And he is a decrepit old hound, blind, lame and toothless. You've probably seen ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... ashen-white your eyebrows, there, and lashes, Precocious hags! The world's but dust and ashes. Wrinkles and crowsfeet next must have their turn (To limn them in let toilette artists learn), Then make each belle bald, scraggy-necked and toothless, Grey hair alone won't make Society youthless. Let belles turn beldams if they find it jolly. But they might be consistent in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... swart and shaggy, or pale and bloated beast-men, or white-haired, toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown venerable in vice. But beautiful, youthful profligates, limbed like the gods and fauns of the old Greek sculptors; soft of skin, golden of hair, with sleepy eyes like green jewels, soft persuasive voices with which to pour poisoned words into innocent ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... temperate zone—both in its seas and fresh waters; although, when you go farther south into the warmer climate, no sturgeons exist. I am sure there are some here, perhaps more than one species. Sink your bait for the sturgeon is a toothless fish, and feeds upon soft substances at ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... what appeared to be a spacious court, but as the only light it received was from a blinking candle in the window of the conciergerie, I could not determine. After exchanging some cabalistic sentences with a toothless old woman, the proprietor of the candle, Afra turned to the right, and walking a few steps came to a door opening on a stairway, which we mounted. I can think of nothing black enough for comparison with the darkness surrounding us. At last a faint glimmer showed an old lamp standing in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... fear to strike. O son, this breast Pillowed thine head full oft, while, drowsed with sleep, Thy toothless mouth ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... brother about it to-morrow, and next post you shall hear more particularly. I am quite in concern for the poor prinCess,(289) and her conjugal and amorous distresses: I really pity them; were they in England, we should have all the old prudes dealing out judgments on her, and mumbling toothless ditties to the tune of Pride will have a fall. I am bringing some fans and trifles for her, si mignons! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... that succeeds these is permanent, and has to last him for life—perhaps for centuries—for no one can tell how long the mighty elephant roams over this sublunary planet. When the tusks get broken—a not uncommon thing—he must remain toothless or "tuskless" for the rest of his life. Although the elephant may consider the loss of his huge tusks a great calamity, were he only a little wiser, he would break them off against the first tree. It would, in all probability, be the means ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... shoulders heaved in his toothless laugh. "Seven o'clock," he said scornfully. "Yew look through a knot-hole in your floor any mornin' when it's handy to four o'clock and ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... deeply into his chair, and his toothless jaws worked convulsively. The skinny hand which clutched the piece of tubing twitched and shook, so that the primitive deadly weapon ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... of refugees streaming back from the battle-fields; pitiful peasant-people with horse-carts and dog-carts and even wheelbarrows, toothless old men and women trudging alongside, children and babies stuck in amidst bedding and furniture and saucepans and bird-cages. This was war, as the common people saw it; but Jimmie could not stop now to think about it—Jimmie was on his way to the front! There were big observation balloons ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... follies continued in the same proportion. His knowledge was so contracted, and his inclinations so mean, that it was useless to reason, and almost impossible to be pleased with him. Not content with a most charming woman, he amused himself with an old red-haired, toothless waiting-maid, whose unwelcome service Madam de Warrens had the patience to endure, though it was absolutely disgusting. I soon perceived this new inclination, and was exasperated at it; but I saw something else, which affected me yet ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... visiting Italica the popular manners softened toward us; the village children offered to sell us wild narcissus flowers and were even willing to take money in charity. They followed us into the ruins, much forbidden by the fine, toothless old custodian who took possession of us as his proper prey and led us through the moldering caverns and crumbling tiers of seats which form the amphitheater. Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the masonry are broken off from the mass and lie detached, but the ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... the antique old student; he was rich; he had an income of four thousand francs; four thousand francs! a splendid scandal on Mount Sainte-Genevieve. Tholomyes was a fast man of thirty, and badly preserved. He was wrinkled and toothless, and he had the beginning of a bald spot, of which he himself said with sadness, the skull at thirty, the knee at forty. His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked by a watering in one eye. But in proportion as his youth disappeared, gayety was kindled; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... toothless old woman at present engaged in that menagerie of old women, the old-clo' market of the Temple in Paris, who might go wandering back with Lemaitre into that dead past of his if he wanted company. Fifty years ago she was a ruddy-cheeked young girl from the provinces, who had come up to Paris ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... Gothic tower of the Hotel de Ville, and wondered whether it would not be possible to "get up" something like it in San Francisco. He stood for half an hour in the crowded square before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching history of Counts Egmont and Horn; and he wrote the names of these gentlemen—for reasons best known to himself—on the back ...
— The American • Henry James
... city. 'What steel! alack, what steel!' Such were the bewildered cries the citizens raised. The firmness of manhood and of youth gave way at sight of the steel; and the steel paralyzed the wisdom of graybeards. That which I, poor tale-teller, mumbling and toothless, have attempted to depict in a long description, Ogger perceived at one rapid glance, and said to Didier, 'Here is what ye have so anxiously sought:' and whilst uttering these words ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... upon the bed smiled bravely as his father entered, but Mr. Pottigrew was shocked to see that he smiled with toothless gums. A grave professional-looking man rose from the bedside and beckoned Mr. Pottigrew out ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... such an all-comprehensive precept a mere toothless generality. Let a man try honestly to shape his life by it; and he will find soon enough how close it grips him, and how wide it stretches, and how deep it goes. The greatest principles of the gospel are to be fitted to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... forward. Instantly the space was alive with the green eyes of countless cats. The air was split with yowlings and spittings and hissing. Soft furry bodies bounced against them and bit and clawed around their legs. From the farthest corner came the lisping voice of a toothless old woman. ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... of such people, accompanied them on this occasion, and, by their cries and fury, inflamed still more the general excitement. One of them, tall, robust, with purple complexion, blood shot eyes, and toothless jaws, had a handkerchief over her head, from beneath which escaped her yellow, frowsy hair. Over her ragged gown, she wore an old plaid shawl, crossed over her bosom, and tied behind her back. This hag seemed possessed with a demon. She had tucked up her half-torn ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the head of a cow, and seeing so frolicsome and so pretty a lady by the side of so old a fellow, a peasant girl, who was squatting near the trunk of a tree and drinking water out of her stone jug inquired of a toothless old hag, who picked up a trifle by gleaning, if this princess was going to bury ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... Susan's for life. I fear indulgence dulled her moral sense. She was an immense happiness to her mistress, whose silent and lonely days she made glad with her oddity and mirth. And yet the small creature, old, toothless, and blind, domineered over her gentle friend—threatening her sometimes if she presumed to remove the small Fury from the inside of her own bed, into which it pleased her to creep. Indeed, I believe it is too true, though it was inferred only, that her mistress and friend spent a great part of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... disaffected animal had been conquered and cast out, Asako's future should be a very bright one. The family witch agreed with the Fujinami that the Dog had in all probability departed with the foreign husband. Then the toothless crone breathed three times upon the mouth, breasts and thighs of Asako; and when this operation was concluded, she stated her opinion that there was no reason, obstetrical or esoteric, why the ransomed daughter of the house of Fujinami should not become the mother ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... drawn back most of the time into the bloated mass of the body but thrusting forward now and then on a short neck not more than three hundred feet in length. When she did that the blunt turtle-like head could be observed, the gaping, toothless, suffering mouth from which the thunder came, and the soft-shining purple eyes that searched the ground but found nothing answering her need. The skin-color was mud-brown with some dull iridescence and many peculiar marks resembling weals ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... dipping his finger into it, and rubbing it on his toothless gums, smiling and nodding thanks to his young master; while the little maid at his knee, unrebuked, takes her ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... animals of this great country, so you see we are almost to the end of school. This last one is perhaps the queerest of all. It is Hardshell the Armadillo, and belongs to the order of Edentata, which means toothless." ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... They are distorted, disfigured, almost unrecognisable. But the free spirit is still unbroken. The eyes that meet ours are still keen and piercing; they have even the old twinkle of good-humoured irony, and the toothless mouth relaxes in frank laughter. What was the secret of this gaiety? In spite of his poverty, he had still a corner in which to paint. Beside him stand an easel and an antique bust, perhaps a relic of his former wealth. He holds his maul-stick in his hand, and pauses for a moment in his work. ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... that senile, expressionless face. The skin hung loose and was scored with creases like crumpled parchment. The low forehead so deeply furrowed. The small eyes so offensive in their inflamed condition. The almost toothless jaws which the lips refused to cover. It was a hateful presence with nothing of the noble red man about it. It was with relief he turned to the younger examples of what this man had ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... up one foot, and was laughed at again. Angry at this, he called for some one to wrestle with him. "My men," said King Utgard, "would think it beneath them to wrestle with thee, but let some one call my old nurse Eld, and let Thor wrestle with her." A toothless old woman entered the hall, and after a violent struggle Thor began to lose his footing, and went home excessively mortified. But it turned out afterward that all this was illusion. The three blows of the mallet, instead of striking the giant's head, had fallen on a ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... that it might have been said to resemble at that moment the cascatelles of Saint-Cloud. Water flowed everywhere; it boiled, it leaped, it murmured; it was black, white, blue, and green; it shrieked, it bubbled under the broom of the portress, a toothless old woman used to storms, who seemed to bless them as she swept into the street a mass of scraps an intelligent inventory of which would have revealed the lives and habits of every dweller in the house,—bits of printed cottons, tea-leaves, artificial flower-petals faded and worthless, ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... the high black wall. Of course he was tired after his long journey, hungry too, and depressed.... He awoke to find the Ancient Mariner watching him. He screamed. The Mariner reassured him with a toothless smile, gripped him by the arm and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... into the black night from which he had come, he uttered the single command, "Brocken Dykes," and fainted. He had never been loved, but he had been feared in honour. At that sight, at that word, gasped out at them from a toothless and bleeding mouth, the old Elliott spirit awoke with a shout in the four sons. "Wanting the hat," continues my author, Kirstie, whom I but haltingly follow, for she told this tale like one inspired, "wanting guns, for there wasna twa grains o' pouder in the house, wi' nae mair weepons than their ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... envy them their honest admiration, if it be honest—their delight, if they feel delight. I harbor no animosity toward any of them. But at the same time the thought will intrude itself upon me, How can they see what is not visible? What would you think of a man who looked at some decayed, blind, toothless, pock-marked Cleopatra, and said: "What matchless beauty! What soul! What expression!" What would you think of a man who gazed upon a dingy, foggy sunset, and said: "What sublimity! What feeling! What richness of coloring!" What would you think of a man who ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and lame, will be forgiven if he is a little late, and not fined of his dinner. In other ways consideration was shown to him, and he was often sent to dine in the infirmary, not being expected with his toothless jaws to munch the dry crusts set before the rest of the house. This, it seems, was a custom which had been learnt from St. Justina's at Padua, to put out the stale crusts first, before the new bread, to break appetite upon: just as in the old Quaker schools a hundred years ago, children were set ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Some indefinite, impersonal feelings and thoughts were springing up and vanishing within him; before him flashed the bald skull of his godfather with a little crown of silver hair and with a dark face, which resembled the faces of the ancient ikons. This face with the toothless mouth and the malicious smile, rousing in Foma hatred and fear, augmented in him the consciousness of solitude. Then he recalled the kind eyes of Medinskaya and her small, graceful figure; and beside her arose the tall, robust, and rosy-cheeked ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... always. No, not always. I know, I know. See, my friend; let us talk. I am full of talk to-night. You are a good man, and I, old Pakfa, have seen many things. Aye, many things and many lands. Aye, I, who am now old and toothless, and without oil in my knees and my elbows, can talk to you in two ...
— Pakia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... a small piece of ice from the lard can, popped it between his toothless gum, smacking enjoyment, swished at the swarming flies with a soiled ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... click of clipping shears; and presently the upper part of an old lady's body was projected out of a window upstairs. She flung her arms above her white cap, and began scolding in a thin, cracked voice. The gardener remained glued to the tree looking on, his toothless mouth open in idiotic astonishment, and a little farther up the walk the pretty girl, as if held by a spell, ran to and fro on a small grass plot, wringing her hands and muttering crazily. She did not rush between the combatants. ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... felt himself compelled to acknowledge that he could no longer be accepted by any woman. Although almost entirely crippled, he did not appear to be so when he was seated, when he talked, or when he was at table. He had only one meal a day, and always took it alone because, being toothless and unable to eat otherwise than very slowly, he did not wish to hurry himself out of compliment to his guests, and would have been sorry to see them waiting for him. This feeling deprived him of the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... decrepitude. No law, no art, no faith, no hope, no God. When round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring, Crouched on the bare-worn sod, Babbling about the unreturning spring, And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save, The toothless nations ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... seemed that the old man had already forgotten his joints, for he poured out another glass of wine and was pledging Yvonne with toothless gayety. ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... was a haunted air about the whole place that made it easy for me to believe in the existence of a phantasm like Miss Mehetabel's son, who, after all, was less unearthly than Mr. Jaffrey himself, and seemed more properly an inhabitant of this globe than the toothless ogre who kept the inn, not to mention the silent Witch of Endor that cooked our meals for ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... without fear. Mother rats brought their young ones and placed them at her feet, as if to ask her protection for them. The most remarkable thing about them was their affection for each other. Young rats would chew the crusts thrown to old toothless rats, so that they might more easily eat them, and if a young rat dared help itself before an old one, ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... when, discovering his error, he'd wag his tail and go back to his den—all this being evidently done to show that he was as vigilant as ever—a sort of protest, that said, "Don't believe one word about my being blind and toothless, still less flatter yourself that the place is secure. It requires all my activity and watchfulness to protect; but go back in peace, I'm ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... deity who is pictured in the form of an old man with an aged face and sunken, toothless mouth. He is frequently characterized by a long, pendent head ornament, in which is the sign Akbal, darkness, night, which also appears in his hieroglyph before the forehead of the deity, surrounded by dots as ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... old woman, toothless and bent, hobbled to our office and asked for Mr. Elkins. He was busy, and ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... and then turned and sped up the lane to meet the new emergency. Jake and Hannah, their faces settled once more into their accustomed expressions of good-humored placidity, leaned from their windows and waved their hands. Hannah smiled a toothless but happy smile, and Jake's eyes beamed a great content as he sat back in his seat, and, holding the rattle between his teeth, fumbled happily for a match. He looked across at his wife, and their eyes met in a rapturous smile; ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... and more emaciated than a thirteenth-century statue, opened wide her toothless mouth. Terror paralyzed her. The man, better prepared for the visit of the phantom, cocked his revolver under the table and took aim at the Colonel, crying "Vade retro, Satanas!" The exorcism and the pistol missed ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... vileness? Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the children are already purblind? Have you gauged the importance of your tremendous consumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from their sale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth and thrice loathsome age among the helot-classes? Do you know that in the course of my late journey to London, I walked from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner, during which time I observed ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... modifies character; she spoke Spanish very badly, but he himself did not speak it well; at least, the head of the Customs department had so notified him in his discharge from his position, and besides, what did it matter? What if she was old and ridiculous? He was lame, toothless and bald. When some friend jested with him, he would respond: "Give me bread and call me ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... The toothless, childish old man woman Trenholme encountered when he entered the house struck him as an odd exaggeration of the report he had just received. He did not feel at home when he sat down to eat the food Bates set before him; he perceived ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... I. "There has never been a dog grow old in our family that he didn't sooner or later develop a kind of second puppyhood. I have seen them do all manner of inexplicable things, and one old, toothless, wire-haired terrier used to snap at his shadow on ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... cold hearth, wrapped in an old torn coverlet, with his face turned towards a wasting candle that stood upon a table by his side. His right hand was raised to his lips, and as, absorbed in thought, he hit his long black nails, he disclosed among his toothless gums a few such fangs as should have ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... the cauldrons by the semi-divine entrance; the tropical humming-birds fluttered among the crows; there was a splashing of ladles and a gurgling of cascades of soup into the cans, and a hubbub of voices; a toothless, white-haired, blear-eyed hag lamented in excellent English that soup was refused her, owing to her case not having yet been investigated, and her tears moistened the one loaf she received. In like hard case a Russian ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of lying down and floating quietly into the day, all peril past. It seemed sweet for a minute. But it soon seemed an old, a worn, an end-of-autumn life, chill, without aim, like a something that was hungry and toothless. The bed proposing innocent sleep repelled her and drove her to the clock. The clock was awful: the hand at the hour, the finger following the minute, commanded her to stir actively, and drove her to gentle meditations on the bed. She lay down dressed, after setting her light beside the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... loved 'em—she loved her poor old charges with a daughter's love and with all the love a mother gives to a helpless baby, with the pity added that gray hairs and toothless gums must amount to added up over the sum of dimples and ivory and coral that makes up ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... but there was still another. Olivier Delagarde had been unmasked, and the whole island had gone tracking him down. No aged toothless tiger was ever sported through the jungle by an army of shikarris with hungrier malice than was this broken traitor by the people he had betrayed. Ensued, therefore, a commingling of patriotism with lust of man-hunting and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that if I sit very still in a moment I shall hear it again. And I can feel it is there, I know it is there, like a bat's cry, pitched too high for my ears. I know it is there, just as I should still know there was poetry somewhere if some poor toothless idiot with no roof to his mouth and no knowledge of any but the commonest words tried to read ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... eye; yet how commonly this organ requires artificial aid. The human senses are losing their tone, and if present tendencies continue, it seems almost as if the future man would be not only bald, but toothless and eyeless, unless he receives an entire artificial equipment. Only when internal, divine forces come to be relied upon, rather than outside reinforcement, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... king's leech,' he said to himself, 'and bid him give me some medicament that shall strengthen my wound. For I cannot abide that I stay here like some toothless old hound, while his fellows ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... little one?" he asked. "It's makin' the house damp and injurin' property. Property, you understand. Property. If I'd indulged in sentiment do you s'pose I'd be owner of all the land I've been showin' you?" He smiled, the semi-toothless smile, and met her horrified upturned eyes with an affectionate gaze. "However, what you say goes, little girl. You look as if you were goin' to recite—'Woodman, spare that tree.' Consider the tree ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... narrates how a young volunteer came up to him and saluted. The appearance of his face was so tensely white that the officer enquires, "Are you afraid?" Suddenly a stream of blood bursts from the young man's body, and his deadly pale face turns into something unspeakable, a toothless ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... their native hot district, but are found too tender for the Cordillera; in this case, natural selection {227} determines only the range of the variety. It is obvious that a host of artificial races could never survive in a state of nature;—such as Italian greyhounds,—hairless and almost toothless Turkish dogs,—fantail pigeons, which cannot fly well against a strong wind,—barbs with their vision impeded by their eye-wattle,—Polish fowls with their vision impeded by their great topknots,—hornless bulls ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... the rug slept the short-haired black collie, whom David had once protected from Louie's dislike—old, blind, and decrepit, but still beloved, especially by Sandy, and still capable of barking a toothless ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the old man, who could speak only a patois from over the frontier, cackled without understanding what his daughter said. He guessed well that he was the subject of the conversation, and jokingly he reproved the middle-aged Madonna with a few toothless mutterings more like Latin than Italian, more Arabic ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... limited. On each man's bed was a well-filled white canvas bag, being a present from the Good Hope and British Red Cross Societies. These were opened with no little curiosity. Strange to say one of the first things an old toothless Yorkshireman drew out was—a toothbrush. This caused general amusement. There was nothing shoddy about the contents of these bags; they contained a suit of pyjamas, shoes, a shirt, socks, towel, sponge bag with sponge, soap, and ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... doctor to an old toothless hag with a vicious leer. 'What are you doing here? You've not ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... road to the metropolis of Scotland. Having arrived there, they put up their horses at a small hostelry in the Grassmarket; and, next day, Will, leaving his friends at the inn, repaired to that seat of the law and learning of Scotland, where the "hail fifteen" sat in grim array, munching, with their toothless jaws, the thousand scraps of Latin law-maxims (borrowed from the Roman and feudal systems) which then ruled the principles of judicial ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... were concerned to find that many of the draught cattle were very aged; they were, it was true, in health; but younger animals undoubtedly ought to have been procured; for of little use could toothless, old, and blind ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... his clothes before that great canvas he keeps there. Poor, dear, strange man, he says his prayers to it! He had not been to bed, nor since then, properly! What has happened to him? Has he found out about the Serafina?" she whispered, with a glittering eye and a toothless grin. ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... the cloth. They were drinking biting poisons from tin cups—for those hands quivering with palsy could not be trusted with glass-dancing with drunken, disease-swollen or twisted legs—venting from ghastly toothless mouths strange cries of merriment that sounded like shrieks of damned souls at the licking of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... recalls another which Mrs. Keeley, the actress, tells of a tradesman's little boy who was often taken to stay with his grandmother and grandfather—the latter a very feeble old man, bald and toothless. This little fellow was told that his father and mother had "bought" a nice new baby brother for him. The little man was much interested by the news, and was taken to see the new arrival. He looked at it with astonishment for a few seconds, then remarked—"Why, ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... hour to copy,—a dazzling mass of snow, worn like that in all the classical representations of Deity. It was easy to guess from the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing the lines of the mouth, that the toothless old fellow was more given to the bottle than the trencher. His thin white beard gave a threatening expression to his profile by the stiffness of its short bristles. The eyes, too small for his enormous face, and sloping like those of a pig, betrayed cunning and also laziness; ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... with us on a single point, upon which he and we have never differed. They remind us that he is a great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones. Let this be granted. But "a living dog is better than a dead lion." Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion, for this work is at least a caged and toothless one. How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He don't care anything about it. His avowed mission is impressing the "public heart" to care nothing about it. A leading Douglas Democratic newspaper thinks Douglas's superior talent will be needed to resist the revival of the African ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In the cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam. She would sit for a quarter of an hour talking to some old woman, and apparently as pleased with the admiration of a toothless crone as if she had been listening to the compliments of a marquis; and when she tripped away, leaving nothing behind her (for her poor salary gave no scope to her benevolence), the old woman would burst out into senile raptures with her grace, beauty, and her kindliness, such as she ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... crash or slide in his time. He became accustomed to all Elsie's strange looks and ways. Old Sophy dressed her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red coral branch with silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had bitten upon for a hundred years. By an infinite effort, her father forced himself to become the companion of this child, for whom he had such a mingled feeling, but whose presence was always a trial to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... clouds on the mare's face. The foal repeated its ungainly efforts, whimpering in a deep and muffled voice, like the wind in a cave. The urge of hunger was on it, and it did not understand why it was not satisfied. Boy went to it, and thrust her thumbs into its soft and toothless mouth. The foal, entirely unafraid, sucked with quivering tail and such power that the girl thought her thumbs would be drawn off. The old mare whinnied, jealous, perhaps, of ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... was greeted by a roar that curdled the blood in at least one woman's heart there, an old Irish hag, who sat in a coign of vantage, hugging her knees and crooning, a little black pipe held in her toothless jaws, ceased her dismal hum to concentrate all her ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... east, beyond that The plantation once called Ararat; But they have gone, Forgotten as an ancient drinking song; And the old houses, dull and roofless, Gape, with their doorways Like a dumb mouth toothless, With snake-engendering rooms that wall in fear, Silent, down forest roadways loved ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... this admonition, the poor old man broke off a huge mass of pie-crust, which he began to mouth with his toothless gums, a quiet smile indicating at once his indifference to Meerta and consequences, while he mumbled something about its not being every day he ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... with toothless impotency, renewed her youth vicariously, and, while she quarrelled with her daughter from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, she added the last straw to the burden of the distracted suitors by announcing what a comfort Eudora was ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... a sinful folk, and the gods send them heavy troubles. But even when they send joy, this turns to their misfortune. Some day Zeus will destroy them, these many-tongued people, when they are born with grey locks on their temples. Yes, our children are born old men already, toothless, wrinkled and with bald heads. The father is not gracious to the child, nor the child to the father, nor the guest to his host, nor servant to fellow-servant, nor brother to brother. Children dishonour their old parents, revile them ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... away with her toothless jaws, as if she were actually chewing the end of her long nose. She made me sit down, chucked me under the chin with her lean fingers, called me "poverino," and leered at me so roguishly with her red eyes that one ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... as nearly to close it, and were fixed; the nails on that hand were almost four inches long and extended above her wrist; the nails on her large toes had grown to the thickness of a quarter of an inch; her head was covered with a thick bush of grey hair; but she was toothless and totally blind, and her eyes had sunk so deeply in the sockets as to have ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... thrilling whip of pride. It lasted but a moment. His memory threw up a home for the friendless, and upon a background of hunger, squalor and wretchedness his fancy flashed the picture of an Italian hag, crooning and toothless. ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... I am not sure I have a real friend in the world, for, gild a fool or a monkey, and mark what a troop of flatterers fawn around and follow admiringly at his heels! And as for choosing a wife, why, were I toothless, one-eyed, or deaf as a post, the magic of gold would transform me ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... superficial inches. Clearly, a storekeeper from some remote village, where he has battened on the necessities of his neighbors for years, till he has got bloated like an ancient spider in its web. He hobbles up and down, never interchanging a word with his fellows, but unceasingly mumbling his huge toothless jaws; they say he never mutters anything but curses; if so, his daily expense in blasphemy is something fearful to contemplate. I think that cleanliness is as foreign to that horrible old creature's soul as godliness: he never shows a vestige of linen, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... went on he might strike it rich at any stroke of his pick; he might strike the rich 'lead' which was supposed to exist round there. (There was always supposed to be a rich lead round there somewhere. 'There's gold in them ridges yet—if a man can only git at it,' says the toothless old relic of the ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... vicious, heredity. He looked older than his mother. Now and then she bent, and her severe face took on an expression of majestic tenderness. She pressed her handsome face close to the little, elfish, even evil face of the child, and kissed it. Then the baby smiled a fatuous, toothless smile, and he also was transformed; his little glory of infancy seemed to illuminate the face marked with the labors and sins and degradation of his progenitors. The other Hungarian woman, who had with her one child, older than the baby, very large and heavy, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and saw a little, bent old woman, all muffled up in grey rags. The face of the old woman alone peeped out from them; a yellow, wrinkled, sharp-nosed, toothless face. ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... night, as I was washing up, And just had rinsed the final cup, All of a sudden, 'midst the steam, I fell asleep and dreamt a dream. I saw myself an old, old man, Nearing the end of mortal span, Bent, bald and toothless, lean and spare, Hunched in an ancient beehive chair. Before me stood a little lad Alive with questions. "Please, Granddad, Did Daddy fight, and Uncle Joe, In the Great War of long ago?" I nodded as I made reply: "Your Dad was in the H.L.I., And Uncle Joseph sailed the sea, Commander of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... Brains, and a young Tartar, whose name nobody knew, were sitting on the bank of the river by a wood-fire. The other three ferrymen were in the hut. Simeon who was an old man of about sixty, skinny and toothless, but broad-shouldered and healthy, was drunk. He would long ago have gone to bed, but he had a bottle in his pocket and was afraid of his comrades asking him for vodka. The Tartar was ill and miserable, and, pulling his rags about him, he went on talking about ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... the doors open, the candles flaring, and nobody to guard but the toothless old hound who slept and snored ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... over. He lay facing her, and he was no longer asleep. His dark-blue, baby eyes were open; he looked as though he was peeping at his mother. And suddenly his face dimpled; it broke into a wide, toothless smile, a perfect beam, ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... so unwashed that they emitted a sickening odour. I ordered them not to come too near us, for although these females had no claims whatever to beauty—and, as far as I could see they possessed no other charm—one being old and toothless, the other with a skin like a lizard, they actually tried to decoy us to their tents, possibly with the object of getting us robbed by their men. My men seemed little attracted by the comical speeches ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions' mouths—now toothless—where, in the distempered horror of my sleep, I thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark. So, when I saw the council-room to which ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... clear eyes lit up with something like a glow of human passion. The pink spots under his eyes spread downwards over his cheeks. Some half-articulate sounds came from between his thin lips. Then they were drawn back and showed his smooth, toothless gums. He took a couple of long, swift strides towards her, and then bent forward, towering over her with long, outstretched arms, ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... pretty one, you'll get used to it by and by; you'll get used to anything in this world." It was an old woman's voice, and looking across the table, I saw a merry-eyed, toothless old crone, who was grinning and nodding ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... inspired: they eat cold joint of beef with pickled beetroot, or mutton and boiled potatoes, with unfailing regularity, finishing off at most hotels with semolina pudding, a concoction intended for, and appealing solely to, the taste of the toothless infant, who, having just graduated from rubber rings, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... old Sir Rowland. George, who whilst secretly leading a gay life under the name of Lejere, appears before his father as a demure and sober young prentice, is designed for Lady Youthly, an ancient, toothless crone, palsied and blind with extreme old age, whose grand-daughter, Teresia, is to be married to Sir Rowland himself. George, however, falls in love with Teresia, who is also pursued by Sir Merlin, and finally weds her in despite of his father, brother and the beldame. But Sir Rowland shortly relents ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... young, was nearly toothless, so she was mad enough to kill me; but her brother Jonathan was at table, and he took my part, saying, 'Sarves you right, Sue;' why can't ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... their animals. Hal's theory, which he practised on others, was that one must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a club. At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old squaw offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the Colt's revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal's hip. A poor substitute for food was this hide, just as it had ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... but, as Lieutenant Schwatka says, may be more likened to "locust sawdust and wild honey." The first time I partook of this dainty I had unfortunately seen it in course of preparation, which somewhat marred the relish with which I might otherwise have eaten it. The confectioner was a toothless old hag, who mixed the ingredients in a wooden dish dirtier than anything I ever saw before, and filled with reindeer hairs, which, however, were not conspicuous when well mingled with the half-churned grass and moss. She extracted the oil from the blubber by crunching it ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... attention to his personal appearance. Deep in the waters of Elk Creek he plunged his arms, bare to the elbow, and washed his neck and face. From one pocket he drew a soiled and folded towel, which upon being unrolled disclosed a diminutive brush and an almost toothless comb. With these he proceeded to arrange his somewhat long and dripping black hair. His two weeks' old whiskers apparently worried him, for he pulled them meditatively; but since he was far from a barber and carried no shaving appliances, the brush and comb must suffice for them also. ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... flapped his arms violently, and bestowed a toothless but affectionate grin upon the wearer of the fascinating, swaying lace, before he disappeared with the delighted ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... face, revealing gums that were toothless save for one yellow fang that rested on ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... daughter Belle, A strange, shy, lovely girl, whose face Was sweet with thought and proud with race, And bright with joy at riding there. She was as good as blowing air, But shy and difficult to know. The kittens in the barley-mow, The setter's toothless puppies sprawling, The blackbird in the apple calling, All knew her spirit more than we. So delicate these maidens be In loving ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... an almighty wide swallow for any long-eared fairy tale you liked to put on them. Mortal full of senseless questions, too, fit to make anybody laugh!—Whereat overcome by joyous memories of human folly, he opened the red cavern of his apparently toothless mouth, barking up audible mirth, brief and husky, from the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... current up to Eastmanville, The river loosened from the abandoned spools Of earth and heaven wanders without will, Between the rushes, like a silken streamer. And two old men who turn the bridge For passing boats sit in the sun all day, Toothless and sleepy, ancient river dogs, And smoke and talk of a glory passed away. And of the ruthless sacrilege Which mowed away the pines, And cast them in the current here as logs, To be devoured by the mills to the last sliver, Making for a little hour heroes ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... vessel it's my duty to remind you that you can't live without a certain minimum of fresh organic food. We've got to start back now." He was pale, but determined. He couldn't bear the thought of getting bald and toothless from dietary deficiency. The girls would never give him ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... hair met them at the door of the long dining-room. She had a tired and almost toothless smile; but had it not been for her greasy wrapper, uncombed hair and grimy nails, Mother Beasley ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... the methods of curing the leaf. And the wheat pest appearing that year, I had the good fortune to discover some of the clusters in the sheaves, and ground our oyster-shells in time to save the crop. Many a long evening I spent on the wharves with old Stanwix, now toothless and living on his pension, with my eye on the glow of his pipe and my ear bent to his stories of the sea. It was his fancy that the gift of prophecy had come to him with the years; and at times, when his look would wander ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... young rabbits, and hid behind her skirts. Only the baby, grave and unalarmed, stood his ground and Susan snatched him up. Then the mother smiled, gratified and reassured. She had no upper front teeth, and the wide toothless grin gave her a look of old age that had in it a curious ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... their parish; at any rate, it was never carried home to any man's conscience. Nobody was ever disturbed. Nobody's feelings were ever hurt. Nobody in all the parish had ever heard a voice of thunder saying, Thou art the man. Toothless and timid generalities made up all the preaching they ever heard either on the ethical or on the evangelical side: and generalities disturb no man's peace of mind. The pulpit of Kilmacolm was but too ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... work was completed, and Mrs. Scarlet stood up with her arms akimbo viewing her work, a satisfied smile playing about the toothless lips. ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... flowers, among which here and there we find a bright rose plucked but yesterday and worn for a day; and on this an old hag is always to be seen crouching—first cousin to Usury, the skinflint bargainer, bald and toothless, and ever ready to sell the contents, so well is she used to sell the covering—the gown without the woman, or the woman without ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... figure, this old steward of the Empire, thin, stubbly, covered with mud, and shouting like a Jeremiah, "It is the downfall!" with a toothless mouth, black and wide open. I felt afraid and ashamed of him, with a great desire to see him outside, and I thought: "Oh, M. Chalmette! Oh, my little vineyard ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Then Needle Rock—a desolate hut on the Desert, house and barn in one building. The station-keeper is a miserable, toothless wretch, with shaggy yellow hair, but says he's going to get married. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, prittle-prattling barbers, filthy graziers, curious bath-keepers, common shifters and cogging cavaliers, bragging soldiers, lazy clowns, one-eyed or lamed fencers, toothless and tattling old wives, chattering char-women and nurse-keepers, long-tongued midwives, 'scape-Tyburns, dog-leeches, and such-like baggage. In the next rank, to second this goodly troupe, follow poisoners, enchanters, wizards, fortune-tellers, magicians, witches and hags. Now, if you take a good ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... curved, gaping, toothless mouth, She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums, But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her, She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak. Snake-like she draws at my ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... him a wide toothless grin, and his bashful blue eyes shifted, shuttle-wise, in their sockets until he was able to survey in full the ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... belly of the animal that resembled the mouth of a pouch, but which had escaped our attention. He drew forth, as the result of his investigation, a little, struggling kangaroo, that tried to induce Smith to relinquish his grasp by snapping at his hand with its toothless mouth. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... the reverend Sanhedrim Of lawyers, priests, and Scribes and Pharisees, Like old and toothless mastiffs, that can bark But cannot bite, howling their accusations Against a mild enthusiast, who hath preached I know not what new doctrine, being King Of some vague kingdom in the other world, That hath no more to do with Rome and Caesar Than I have with the patriarch Abraham! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Crochard, rue Saint-Louis in Marais in 1822. Toothless woman of thirty years' service. Was present at her mistress' death-bed. This was the fourth she had buried. [A ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the voice of the priest was heard saying mass in the church, and Flemming saw the toothless old sexton treading the fresh earth into the grave of the little child, with his clouted shoes. He approached him, and asked the age of the deceased. The sexton leaned a moment on his spade, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... clerk vanished. The sergeant had not yet turned; every woman in the church was waiting to see his face, and he appeared to know it. At last he did turn, and stalked resolutely down the nave, braving them all, with a compressed lip. Two bowed and toothless old almsmen then looked at each other and chuckled, innocently enough; but the sound had a strange weird effect ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
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