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One-horse   /wən-hɔrs/   Listen
One-horse

adjective
1.
Small and remote and insignificant.  Synonyms: jerkwater, pokey, poky.  "Passed a series of poky little one-horse towns"






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"One-horse" Quotes from Famous Books



... and the young, rose. As Maxime got into his one-horse equipage, he thought to himself: "Madame d'Espard can't endure Beatrix; she will help me. Hotel de Grandlieu," he called out to the coachman, observing that Rastignac was just ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... man, woman, or child that will be kept away. Don't you go back on your luck, now; it's something awful and nigger-like. You've got this crowd where the hair is short; excuse me, but it's so. Talk of revivals! You could give that one-horse show in Tasajara a hundred points, and skunk them easily." Indeed, had Gideon been accessible to vanity, the spontaneous homage he met with everywhere would have touched him more sympathetically and kindly than it did; but in the utter unconsciousness of his own ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte

... rarely walks a step farther than he can help, and of course laziness is well provided with cabs and omnibuses. You can take your choice between one-horse waggonettes and hansoms, though a suspicion of Bohemia still lingers about the latter. Happily Mrs. Grundy has never introduced 'growlers.' The waggonettes are light boxes on wheels, covered in with oil-cloth, which can be rolled up in a few seconds if the weather is fine or warm. It is strange ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... that there were "two RICHMONDS in the field." Singularly coincidental with this, and well worth the attention of Shakespearean scholars, is the fact that Richmond, Va., is now running two mayors. Of course, Richmond, Va., cannot now be looked upon as a "one-horse" town. ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various

... as a product of its soil. Six years earlier this county had removed the wheat straw from between its huckleberry-stained teeth and emitted a derisive and bucolic laugh as old man Walmsley's freckle-faced "Bob" abandoned the certain three-per-diem meals of the one-horse farm for the discontinuous quick lunch counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end of the six years no murder trial, coaching party, automobile accident or cotillion was complete in which the name of Robert ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... the old deacon in Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem started in to build the one-horse shay, he said, "Every shay that has ever been made has broken down, because there was always a weakest spot in it; now I am going to make a shay that never will break down, because I am going to make the weakest part just as strong as the rest." ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... his opinion—which generally means that there is none yet to reserve—but in his case there would be a great deal by-and-by. Master Popplewell had made up his mind and his wife's, long ago, and confirmed it in the one-horse shay, while Mary was riding Lord Keppel in the rear; and the mind of the tanner was as tough as good oak bark. His premises had been intruded upon—the property which he had bought with his own money saved by years of honest trade, his private garden, his ornamental bower, his wife's ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... illustrate well the primitive nature and the isolation of the Colony. They are the vehicles in universal use, and are built on the general pattern of our one-horse tip-carts, though they do not tip, and not a scrap of iron enters into them. They are without springs, of course, and rawhide and wooden pins serve to keep together the pieces out of which they are constructed. As they have no tires, and ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce

... of the junior partner in the well-known City firm of Hornaday, Grimes, and Grimmer, dried fruit brokers, nodded with an affectation of sympathy which she did not feel—the Marlows had a touring car and a motor-brougham, whilst she had only a one-horse carriage—and held out her cup to be refilled. She had known her hostess for a good many years, over thirty in fact, ever since she and May Marlow, who was then May Grierson and had thick flaxen plaits tied with ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... go on growing older for the future in the regular and human manner from one 13th November to the next. The effect on me is more doubtful; I may, as you suggest, live for ever; I might, on the other hand, come to pieces like the one-horse shay at a moment's notice; doubtless the step was risky, but I do not the least regret that which enables me to sign myself your revered and ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... better horse?" said Laura, whose pride was always touched when her parents came to visit her with the old mare and the one-horse wagon. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... the morning toils were over, the wide kitchen cool and still, and the one-horse wagon standing at the door, into which climbed Mary, her mother, and the Doctor; for, though invested with no spiritual authority, and charged with no ritual or form for hours of affliction, the religion of New England always expects ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... got to the first corner before the old mare and her companion flew past, and I just had time to notice that the men were completing their toilet as they were hurled by. Quickly followed the officer of the night in his one-horse trap, and by the time we got to the fire, which was only round a block of buildings, an exhibition of fire engines and appliances was collected there which beggars description. The water tower, a huge ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... Melbourne cab was a kind of Irish car, popularly known as a jingle. . . . The jingle has been ousted by the one-horse waggonette." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... delay then took place; first, Pikey had to find his glasses, as he called his spectacles, to look out a one-horse-chaise ticket. Then he had to look out the tickets, when he found he had all sorts except a one-horse-chaise one ready—waggons, hearses, mourning-coaches, saddle-horses, chaises and pair, mules, asses, every sort but the one ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... himself in a queue, behind Donovan, of officers who were passing a small window like a ticket office. Arriving, he handed in papers, and was given them back with a brief "All right." Beyond, Donovan had secured a broken-down-looking one-horse cab. "You'll be coming to the club, padre?" he asked. "Chuck in your stuff. This chap'll take it down and Bevan with it. Let's walk. It ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable

... Norfolk, and it was imperative to make the portage from this place instead of from Cape Charles, which, though more than fifteen miles further south, and nearer to my starting-point on the other side, did not possess facilities for transportation. The slow one-horse conveyance arrived at Cherrystone half an hour after the steamer N. P. Banks had left the landing, though I heard that the kind-hearted captain, being told I was coming, waited and whistled for me till ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... mother and wife partially reassured, the old father slipped out and down the track, cut deeply in the sand by the one-horse carts, to "Uncle Will'amses," as fast as the storm would permit. But no Jim had been seen there; and still more anxiously the stout old man fought his way back against winds that seemed strong" enough to blow him like a feather over the cliff's edge, and against the spray which shot up ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... stream slope. They will do no harm there, but the layers of earth must not approach 3 ft. in thickness nor 1 ft.—the maximum should be six in., and this applies also to the puddle. Let the soil be brought on by say one-horse carts, spread in six inch layers, and well watered. The traffic of the carts will consolidate it, and in places where carts cannot traverse it should be punned. In the Parvy reservoir dam a roller was employed for this purpose. It comprised a small lorry body holding about a yard and a half of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various

... have different ways of telling a story," he said. "Mine is the methodical way—I begin at the beginning. We will start, if you please, in the railway—we will proceed in a one-horse chaise—and we will stop at a village, situated in a hole. It was the nearest place to Sir Jervis's house, and it was therefore my destination. I picked out the biggest of the cottages—I mean the huts—and asked the woman at the door if she had a bed to let. She evidently thought ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins

... miles, our progress was retarded and our rest greatly broken—particularly at night—by tea caravans. With the establishment of the winter road, in November, hundreds of low, one-horse sledges, loaded with hide-bound boxes of tea that had come across the desert of Gobi from Peking, left Irkutsk, every day, for Nizhni Novgorod. They moved in solid caravans, a quarter of a mile to a mile in length, and in every such caravan there were from fifty to two hundred ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... here in about a fortnight. Could you not contrive to put yourself in a Bridgwater coach, and T. Poole would fetch you in a one-horse chaise to Stowey. What delight would it not ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... bench on one side of the door, and the other on the little bench on the other side of the door, each waiting until she should hear the clock strike five, to prepare tea. But it was not yet a quarter to five when a one-horse wagon containing four men came slowly down the street. Dorcas first saw the wagon, ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton

... you can do it better yourself, I won't. Sorry to keep you waiting, Hester. And look here, James, you ought to bicycle more. Strengthen your legs for playing the harmonium on Sundays. Well, I could not tell you had an organ in that little one-horse church. Good-bye, Fraeulein; good-bye, James. Home, Coleman. And look here," said Dick, putting his mischievous face out of the window as the carriage turned, "if you are getting up steam for another temperance ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... Discovery of Gold near Pike's Peak—Exodus from Missouri—The Creation of the Overland Stage Route to the Pacific Coast—Messrs. Russell and Jones' Failure— Russell, Majors, & Waddell's Successful Establishment of a New Line— Hockaday and Liggett's “One-horse” Affair—Advent of the First Stage-coach into Denver—Financial Embarrassment—Ben Holliday— Description of the Outfit of ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... Chapman's calculations. Indeed, he had already begun to talk of the necessity of economy. Topman was already drawing heavily on the income of the firm to keep up appearances, and the future must not be overlooked. The lady had, therefore, to content herself with a one-horse turn-out, an establishment not very popular in Bowling Green even at that day. Although the lady had to accept the necessity, there was no getting along without a coachman, and Mr. Napoleon Bowles was engaged ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams

... we could get it furniture like this up in Bridgetown," Feigenbaum said. "A one-horse place like Bridgetown you can't get nothing there. Everything you got to come to New York for. We are dead ones in Bridgetown. We don't know nothing and we ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass

... road. In all the weeks she had spent at Bramble Farm a horse had never been offered for her convenience, and all of her trips to town had been either afoot, or taken with Bob in the rattling, shabby, one-horse work wagon. ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson

... his one-horse van journeyed from Milbrook to Seacombe every Tuesday and Friday, passing Mrs. Barnes' cottage on their way; and on Wednesdays and Saturdays he journeyed home again. The two places were only ten miles apart, ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... with a quick half-suppressed sigh, "and as I adore children, I am afraid I can't quite sympathize—O Ermie, what a queer old shandrydan is coming up the avenue! Who can be in it? Who can be coming here at this hour? Why, I do declare it's the one-horse fly from the station! Noah's Ark, we call that fly, it's so rusty and fusty, and so little in demand; for you know, when people come to Glendower, we always send for them, and I don't think the station is any use ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade

... Heath, where there was a Roman camp. The Roman road, now hardly traceable, cuts the road from Cranleigh near Ewhurst. Ewhurst lives comfortably fifty years behind Cranleigh, and is still, happily, what the late Louis Jennings called it in Field Paths and Green Lanes, "a one-horse place." When Mr. Jennings was at Ewhurst everybody was half-asleep. "At the post-office a woman and a girl turned out in some consternation to look at me, thinking, perhaps, that I had a letter concealed about me, and was about to post it, and thus overwhelm ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... and his niece arrived early in the day at Glenford station. The captain engaged a little one-horse vehicle which had frequently brought people to the toll-gate, and informed the driver that there was no baggage. The man, gazing at Olive, but scarcely daring to raise his eyes to her face, proceeded with solemn tread toward his ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton

... Lane, by the Chapels (which might have taught me better), and then to be deposited like a dead log at Gaffar Westwood's, who it seems does not "insure" against intoxication. Not that the mode of conveyance is objectionable. On the contrary, it is more easy than a one-horse chaise. Ariel ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... aren't you," goes on Old Hickory. "Well, here's an opportunity to spread yourself. One of the manufacturing units we control out in Ohio. Three thousand men, in a little one-horse town where there's nothing better to do in their spare time than go to cheap movies and listen to cheaper walking delegates. I guess they need you more than we do in the bond room. Organize 'em as much as you like. Show 'em how to play. Give that He-Crab act if you wish. We'll start you ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford

... boarding schools in Yorkshire, and, for many years, he was well known at Doncaster market as a gentleman farmer; nor is it a great while ago, since this very man might be seen dashing along those streets in his one-horse chaise. But, alas! what is he now? A crawler from door to door with matches, or, when he can raise sufficient pence to purchase a stock of ballads, may be seen standing in the streets, straining himself to amuse the rabble—the inmate of a cadging house, ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown

... dwelling upon his comic poems, such as the logical catastrophe of the "One-Horse Shay," as they are fully appreciated, so much so that they have doubtless led to the undervaluing of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... judgment given us for if not to control our appetites? If Appetite be paramount to judgment why do we hang rape-fiends? Let me tell you the idea that the brainiest men of the world die drunkards is the merest moonshine. If only men of genius drank liquor a one-horse still would supply the demand and be idle six months in the year. Take the thousand greatest men the world has produced —the Thousand Immortelles—and not 2 per cent. of them died drunkards, yet 98 per ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... the rest, By cart and wagon rudely prest, The parson's lean and bony bay Stood harnessed in his one-horse shay— Lent to his sexton for the day; (A funeral—so the sexton said; His mother's uncle's ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... programme as far as makin' a choice between tapioca puddin' and canned peaches, when in drifts a couple that I knew, the minute I gets my eyes on 'em, must be Mr. and Mrs. Bob Cathaway. Who else in that little one-horse town would be sportin' a pair of puttee leggin's and doeskin ridin' breeches? That was Bob's makeup, includin' a flap-pocketed cutaway of Harris tweed and a corduroy vest. They fit him a little snug, showin' he's laid on some flesh since ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... empress Eugenie's visit. European carriages were also introduced at that time. The ladies of the sultan's harem drive out in very handsome coupes, with coachmen wearing the sultan's livery, but you more frequently see the queer one-horse Turkish carriage, and sometimes a "cow-carriage." This last is drawn by cows or oxen: it is an open wagon, with a white cloth awning ornamented with gay fringes and tassels. Many people go in caiques, and all carry bright-colored rugs, which they spread on the grass. There they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... Mrs Gowan repaired on a visit of self-condolence, after having given the gracious consent aforesaid. She drove into town for the purpose in a one-horse carriage irreverently called at that period of English history, a pill-box. It belonged to a job-master in a small way, who drove it himself, and who jobbed it by the day, or hour, to most of the old ladies in Hampton Court Palace; ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... Mangles, slowly, "that at this hour in the morning it appears to be a one-horse country. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... hitherto by modest degrees, foisting upon me an additional button, recommending gaiters; but to come upon me thus in a full tide of luxury, neither becomes him as a tailor nor the ninth of a man. My meek gentleman was robbed the other day, coming with his wife and family in a one-horse shay from Hampstead; the villains rifled him of four guineas, some shillings and half-pence, and a bundle of customers' measures, which they swore were bank-notes. They did not shoot him, and when they rode off he addrest them with profound gratitude, making a congee: "Gentlemen, I ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas



Words linked to "One-horse" :   jerkwater, provincial



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