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Nursemaid   Listen
noun
Nursemaid  n.  A girl or woman employed to attend and care for children.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Nursemaid" Quotes from Famous Books



... carriage took me off—a happy little woman, really going in the puff-puff! Oh, how could I ever have felt so happy then and be so miserable now? Had I ever thought that I was coming away from them all, with nobody at all but Jane, the new nursemaid, to take care of me? Had I ever thought how quite alone I should be, never able to find my way in this great, big house, sure to get lost in some of the passages? And how could I ever go to sleep without Bobbie close by, and wouldn't Bobbie cry for me at home? And oh, nurse wouldn't ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous

... the observing eye which sisters find it difficult to evade. "He would have taken a job as nursemaid for Rosy, if it would have given him a chance to go in and out of this old house, I imagine. Rosy stuck to it, it was his infatuation for the home and the members thereof, particularly Gordon and Dorothy. He undoubtedly was struck with them—it would have been a hard heart ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond

... "That's no nursemaid's dream. You almost cashed in. Typhoid's a serious proposition at the best; but when you take a crazy streak on top of it, make a midnight getaway from the sick-ward and land up on the Slide looking as if you'd been run through a threshing machine, well, you're sure letting ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... doing a bit of writing herself. Can't you see the pencils flying? Can't you see three little pink tongues sticking out from between three pairs of purposeful lips and wriggling in time to the pencils? Can't you see the small brows furrowed with thought? And the proud parents? And the startled nursemaid? ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford

... time for her to be up and doing, and she went out to seek for employment. She wandered about in a somewhat aimless way, until, in the Ladbroke Grove Road, she found a servants' registry-office, and went in to apply for a place as nursemaid or nursery-governess. Mary had once told her that she was fit for such a place, and there was nothing else she could think of. A woman in the office took down her name and address, and promised to send for her if she had any applications. She did not know of anyone ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... let's quit this nursemaid job as soon as we can, Jeff. We're good pals of yours—and this ain't no game for a ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart

... you to have taken this trouble! You guessed that I really wished to see you. I should have come to you, but just at present I find it so difficult to get away from home. I am housekeeper, nursemaid, and governess all in one! Some women would find it rather a strain, but the dear tots are so good—so good! Cissy, you remember Miss Shepperson? Of course you do. They look a little pale, I'm afraid; don't you think so? After the life they were accustomed to—but we won't talk about ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... here she feels, as she glances round the walls of the Academy, that she is creating art as she is creating music. She dwells complacently on the home tendencies of modern painting, on the wonderful succession of squares of domestic canvas, on the nursemaid carrying children up stairs in one picture, on the nursemaid carrying children down stairs in the next. She has her little crow of triumph over the great artist who started with a lofty ideal, and has come down to painting the red stockings of little girls in green-baize ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... shipboard and of stations in the colonies, bad servants, and unwonted sicknesses, the Captain's tenderness never failed. If the life was rough, the Captain was ready. He had been, by turns, in one strait or another, sick-nurse, doctor, carpenter, nursemaid, and cook to his family, and had, moreover, an idea that nobody filled these offices quite so well as himself. Withal, his very profession kept him neat, well-dressed, and active. In the roughest of their ever-changing quarters he was a smarter ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... get a place as a nursemaid," said Emily, a fair delicate girl, looking but ill-adapted for the situation she proposed for herself. "And I, Jane, will certainly not deprive you and Mary of your hard-earned salaries, even were you to obtain what would be required," I answered, firmly. "I ought ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston

... "I will not waste another eight or ten years of my life playing nursemaid to a hunk of ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... anger. "I shall tell you exactly what I think of you, Eleanor, for, as my dear mother used to say, if I have a virtue it is candor; I think you are a puffect fool. As for Mr. Curtis, I no more thought of protectin' him than I would think of protectin' a baby in a perambulator from its nursemaid! Bingo was sick at his stomach this mornin'. You've ruined the boy's life." Eleanor cringed, but Maurice was ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... themselves hand over hand, except you? There was Sarah Jane in the shop behind the counter all yesterday afternoon. Now, I tell you what it is; if she's to come in I won't stand it. She's not there for nothing, and she with children at home. No wonder she can keep a nursemaid, if that's where she spends her time. If you would go down more into the shop, George, and write less of them little books in verse, it would be better ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope

... makes an excellent general servant in native families; in the same capacity, in European service, she is, as a rule, almost useless, but she is a good nursemaid. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... not care twopence for the lot of us," was his summing up. "She might have been nothing but the nicest possible warm-hearted nursemaid or a cottage woman who loved ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... child and his nursemaid were in an attic room where nobody could get at them,' said Felix in a hurried and awe-struck voice, causing Cherry to renew that agony of trembling and sobbing so convulsive and painful that her elder brother and sister could only devote themselves to soothing her, till at ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... lady. "It was in a very curious way that I, many years afterwards, learned many particulars of the ways and character of this little girl in her very early years, before I was personally acquainted with her. After my eldest son was born, being in want of a nursemaid, Fanny, the very servant who had waited on Miss Evelyn and Mrs. Harris, offered herself; and as I had known her well and loved her much, though I had lost sight of her for some years, I most gladly engaged her. She told me many things of Mrs. Harris and her little lady, ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood

... to be enough to teach the most intelligent of our readers! But one fancies that a rough sort of basket-making might almost be devised out of one's own head, especially if he had been taught (as we were, by a favourite nursemaid) ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... Mr Button was a person who called a spade a spade, had no more conventions than a walrus, and looked after his two charges just as a nursemaid might look after her charges, or ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... be judged from my own observations and from the account given by the parents, is perfectly normal; but attention is at once attracted by the appearance of premature development. The mother states that in the second year of life, owing to the carelessness of a nursemaid, the child fell out of her cradle, without, however, sustaining any manifest injury. The mother does not think there is any reason to suppose that the child has ever been led astray in sexual matters. For the past two years or ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll

... Full of creatures wide awake! Noiseless then, on feet or wings, Out they come, all moon-eyed things! In and out they pop and play, Have it all their own wild way, Fly and frolic, scamper, glow; Treat the moon, for all her show, State, and opal diadem, Like a nursemaid watching them. And the nightingale doth snare All the merry tumult rare, All the music and the magic, All the comic and the tragic, All the wisdom and the riot Of the midnight moonlight diet, In a diamond hoop of song, Which he ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... innocently: 'Yes, indeed! Why, what in the world can be keeping him?' A nursemaid enters and beckons Mrs. Roberts to the door with a glance. She runs to her; they whisper; and then Mrs. Roberts, over her shoulder: 'That ridiculous great boy of mine says he can't go to sleep unless I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... though their fathers earned only five gulden a week; but she would give them, and then it would be all right. One of the girls was unhappy, as she was in love with a young fisherman, and they were too poor to marry, so she expected to go to Rotterdam as a nursemaid. ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway, and his Regiment went home without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... for instance, was a place of the most dangerous approach, where ships were seized and crews kidnapped. As late as 1856, the schooner Sarah Ann sailed from Papeete and was seen no more. She had women on board, and children, the captain's wife, a nursemaid, a baby, and the two young sons of a Captain Steven on their way to the mainland for schooling. All were supposed to have perished in a squall. A year later, the captain of the Julia, coasting along ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to the country club, I'm going to say, 'No!' I'm going to say, 'Listen to me, Ed and Marcia. I don't intend to spend the rest of my life toddling children to the park and playing second assistant nursemaid. I'm too old—or too young. I've only got ten years to go, according to the Bible, and I want to have my fun. I've sown. I want to reap. My teeth are pretty good, and so is my stomach. They're better than yours will be at my age, for all your smart new dentists. So are my heart ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... | | | RANDALL GARRETT | | | | When a super-robot named Snookums discovers how to build his | | own superbombs, it becomes obvious that Earth is by no means | | the safest place for him to be. And so Dr. Fitzhugh, his | | designer, and Leda Crannon, a child psychologist acting as | | Snookums' nursemaid, agree to set up Operation Brainchild, a | | plan to transport the robot to a far distant planet. | | | | Mike the Angel—M. R. Gabriel, Power Design—has devised the | | power plant that is to propel the space ship Branchell to | | its secret destination, complete with its ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... she has done so—are given by Dr. F. G. Lee. In one of them the mother, when dying in Egypt, appears to her children at Torquay, and is clearly seen in broad daylight by all five of the children and also by the nursemaid. (Glimpses of the Supernatural, vol. ii., p. 64.) In the other a Quaker lady dying at Cockermouth is clearly seen and recognized in daylight by her three children at Settle, the remainder of the story being practically identical ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... gentleman was a Parisian, and his mother a Scotch lady. His wife is of British extraction on both sides, and my informant does not believe that she ever shrugged her shoulders in her life. His children have been reared in England, and the nursemaid is a thorough Englishwoman, who has never been seen to shrug her shoulders. Now, his eldest daughter was observed to shrug her shoulders at the age of between sixteen and eighteen months; her mother exclaiming at the time, "Look at the little French ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin

... to the nursery for baby. I found my lady asleep in the arm-chair besides the open window. She had been crying—there were tears on her cheeks and eyelashes as she slept. I did not disturb her. I lifted baby and carried him up to the nursery. I left him in charge of the under nursemaid, and returned to the room my lady was in. The clock was striking eight as I came downstairs. I was going in to awaken my lady, not liking to have her sleep in the night air. My hand was on the handle, when the door opened and Miss Inez came out. She looked paler than common, I thought but she spoke ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... Hanson," she told him, "don't you know any other words? That's the millionth time you've asked me that, at least. And for the hundredth time, I'll tell you that you're here. Look around you; see for yourself. I'm tired of playing nursemaid to you." She picked up a shirt of heavy-duty khaki from the pile on the bed and handed it to him. "Get into this," she ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey

... entered a shop in New York, a Scotch nursemaid followed him, carrying her infant charge. "Please, sir, here's a bairn was named ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various

... about 8 years old the nursemaid told me that the boy at her last place had intercourse with his sister. I thought it disgusting. About a year later I told the nurse I thought the story of Adam and Eve was not true and that when Eve gave Adam the apple he ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the trip and suggested the advisability of his accompanying us as courier and future nursemaid to Diogenes. He was intending to come anyway, but thought he'd wait for us. He had all his ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... borrow money of her; and he was always telling of the wonderful things he did, and how nothing could escape him, and how stupidly other detectives did their work. And one day, when I was in the room, he actually told how some people were looking for one Ellen Lee, a nursemaid who had been saved from shipwreck, and how one of the survivors was moving heaven and earth to find her, but hadn't succeeded; and how, if the case had been given to him, he would have done thus and so—for she never could have ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge

... way changed him, and the less so since his wife had soon departed to another world, and left behind her two children, whom he did not want, and who were therefore placed in the charge of a good-looking nursemaid. Never at any time could he remain at home for more than a single day, for his keen scent could range over scores and scores of versts, and detect any fair which promised balls and crowds. Consequently in a trice he would be there—quarrelling, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... and shouting in vain for him. Ellen confessed that she had seen him running after the Lincoln children, and supposing him with them, had given herself up to the study of a penny dreadful in company with another young nursemaid. When they had awakened to real life, the first idea had been that he must be with these children; but they were gone, and Ellen, fancying that he might have gone home with them, asked at their lodging, but no, he ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge

... first-born. Had he not courted death to save their Gazan from the fangs and talons of Sheeta? Did he not fondle and cuddle the little one with even as great a show of affection as Teeka herself displayed? Their fears were allayed and Tarzan now found himself often in the role of nursemaid to a tiny anthropoid—an avocation which he found by no means irksome, since Gazan was a never-failing fount of ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Germany, once had a strange experience when staying in the neighbourhood of the Hartz mountains. One sultry evening in August he was walking in the country, and noticed a perambulator with a white figure, which he took to be that of a remarkably tall nursemaid, bending over it. As he drew nearer, however, he found that he had been mistaken. The figure was nothing human; it had no limbs; it was cylindrical. A faint, sickly sound of sucking caused my friend to start forward with an exclamation of horror, and as he did so, the phantasm glided ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... his head instinctively motions to the corner—and he dozes! A doze in the coach is the flower of dozes, when you are alone. There, you may twist your person into any shape you please, without the fear of discomposing a silken dress, or a nursemaid's petticoats. No boisterous arguments from snuff-taking sexagenarians: all is placid —Eden-like—just as a dozer's sanctorum ought to be! The only thing attendant on the doze of an inside passenger, is the great chance of being suddenly aroused by the entrance of company. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various

... that the two children had scarlet fever. Brown happened to know that Imogene had been exposed to the disease during a surreptitious visit to the cottage of the station agent, whose wife it appears was a close friend of the nursemaid, and whose baby thrived immensely on the rich foods from the Bingle establishment. So the instant the rash appeared, Brown began packing her suitcase and trunk. She tried to get away without letting the other girls into the secret, but they suspected. ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon

... said Faith, suddenly sitting down on a chair at her mother's side. Then, with a little gulp, and a little laugh, "You can't spare me, mummy, you know you can't. We will send off Audrey to be nursemaid to the babies, and—and you and I will have a nice quiet time at home alone!" Her lip quivered just for a moment, but her big brown eyes, full of a strained look of excitement, glanced from one to the other with half-laughing ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... boy, you're sounding like an old horsefaced nursemaid. You linked minds with them, and you say you were practically a Hirlaji yourself when you went into that linkage. Well, I'm not so sure you ever came out of it. ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr

... When I was three years old I had not yet, as I imagine, been promoted beyond a silver spoon of my own wherewith to eat my bread and milk in the nursery; and I feel assured that I was under the immediate care of a nursemaid, as I gobbled up my minced mutton mixed with potatoes and gravy. But at hotel life in the States the adult infant lisps to the waiter for everything at table, handles his fish with epicurean delicacy, is choice in his selection of pickles, very particular that his beef-steak at ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... why I'm going and he hates to be taken care of. We had some words about his going day before yesterday. He's a cocky old guy, as you know, isn't afraid of any single thing on earth and it galls him to have me go along to play nursemaid. Well, he can just be sore. I'm not going to leave his side." He paused and then ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew

... Hardy and the boys. The smartness of the vessel, and the style of her fittings, alike impressed and delighted them. It has not been mentioned that Sarah, their housemaid, accompanied the party. She had been left early an orphan, and had been taken as a nursemaid by Mrs. Hardy. As time went on, and the little girls no longer required a nurse, she had remained as housemaid, and having no friends, now willingly accompanied them. Mr. Hardy had, to her great amusement, ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty

... unwholesome life, Molly was completely broken down. Anna then again took her in charge. She brought her from her work and from the woman where she lived, and put her in a hospital to stay till she was well. She found a place for her as nursemaid to a little girl out in the country, and Molly was ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein

... sweetly blarneying tongue," said she, and bestowed a parting caress impartially upon both the persons before her. "I feel a bit guilty at making a nursemaid of you for even one morning ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond

... certainty that discretion is, under these circumstances, the better part of valour is emphasised by the knowledge that any violence to the bird would probably lead to a prosecution. Even the smaller geese can inspire fear when they dash hissing at intruders; hence, no doubt, the nursemaid's favourite reproach of children too frightened to "say bo to a goose," an expression made classical ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo

... Council were disturbed by a loud and persistent rattle, like the whir of a Maxim gun, which proved, on investigation, to arise from the American lawn-mower. The vagrant was propelling it triumphantly across the lawn, and gazing down at it with the same fond pride with which a nursemaid leans over the perambulator to observe her lusty and ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... don't know me yet! I like the girl, and I've fixed things up with her. She's coming here as my nursemaid—twenty dollars a month! What do ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke

... primary expression. She observed upon the horrors of the fire which had happened at Blickley the night before. Lady Hunter had not heard of it; and the relation therefore followed of: the burning down of a house and shop in Blickley, when a nursemaid and baby ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau



Words linked to "Nursemaid" :   dry nurse, woman, mammy, wetnurse, amah, adult female, nanny, wet-nurse



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