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To-do   /tu-du/   Listen
To-do

noun
1.
A disorderly outburst or tumult.  Synonyms: commotion, disruption, disturbance, flutter, hoo-ha, hoo-hah, hurly burly, kerfuffle.



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"To-do" Quotes from Famous Books



... in partnership with his brother; Crane, long and awkward and homely, of saturnine cast, slow of gesture and negligent as to dress, his humorous sense clouding a power of shrewd intelligence; and Senor Arturo Velasco, of Buenos Aires, middle-aged, apparently extremely well-to-do, a thoughtful type, more self-contained than most of ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... wealthy miller, Etienne Arnauld by name, of the race of Gotz, Quagotz, Bisigotz, Astragotz, or Gahetz, as his people are described in the legal document. He married an heiress, a Gotte (or Cagot) of Biarritz; and the newly-married well-to-do couple saw no reason why they should stand near the door in the church, nor why he should not hold some civil office in the commune, of which he was the principal inhabitant. Accordingly, he petitioned the law that he and his wife might be allowed to sit in the gallery of the church, ...
— An Accursed Race • Elizabeth Gaskell

... poor suffered extremely. Selfishness gained such ascendancy in some towns, that cruel ruses were adopted to remove the destitute that had taken refuge within their walls. It was not strange that the extraordinary mortality which soon fell upon the well-to-do burghers was viewed by many as a direct punishment sent by ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... one time go upon this pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, for it was a very favorite one. Not only was the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury very beautiful in those days, but it was also within easy distance of London. Neither costing much nor lasting long, it was a journey which well-to-do merchantmen and others like them could ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... to a hotel when I'm in the city—says I'm the only man that's company to him, and I don't know but there's some truth in it, too, because although I never like to glorify myself and make a great to-do over what I am or what I can do or what I know, I don't mind saying here among friends that I am better read up in most sciences, maybe, than the general run of professional men in these days. Well, the other day he let me into a little ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... housewife commanded the consideration always conceded to a bread-winner—even when dependent. In modern times women's economic position has been undermined by the helpless dependence engendered amongst the well-to-do by "parasitism" resulting from nineteenth-century luxury—to quote the striking word of Olive Schreiner. Similarly, dependence has been forced upon large sections of women-folk amongst the manual workers ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley

... The child of well-to-do parents, but homeless, living in hotels and boarding-houses, is awfully handicapped. Children are only little animals, and travel is their bane and scourge. They belong on the ground, among the leaves and flowers and tall ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... out to be a villa on the outskirts of the city, no bigger and hardly more pretentious than a well-to-do commuter's place at Bronxville or Mount Vernon. There was a short semi-circular drive in front, with one sentry and one small lantern burning at each gate; but their khaki uniforms and puttees didn't disguise the fact that the sentries were dark, dyed-in-wool Arabs from the desert country, ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy

... since my mother was a child. She was not young when she married, and she was nearly forty when I was born, and I'm getting on for that myself now. My grandmother had been rather above my grandfather, for she was the daughter of a well-to-do man who farmed his own land. When my mother was a child these old folk were still living, and their little place was very near Muirness; indeed, I believe it was bought several years ago by Sir Herbert, old Sir Patrick's grandson, and now belongs ...
— The Girls and I - A Veracious History • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth

... nobles are daily being ruined and reduced, the Third-Estate making all the fortunes." A number of domains, through forced or voluntary sales, thus pass into the hands of financiers, of men of the quill, of merchants, and of the well-to-do bourgeois. Before undergoing this total dispossession, however, the seignior, involved in debt, is evidently resigned to partial alienation of his property. The peasant who has bribed the steward is at hand with his hoard. "It is poor property, my lord, and it ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... next workshop door.) I'll just peep in at him through the keyhole. (He goes over and does so, and then beckons KATE over. She peeps in and grins. As they are thus occupied ALICK MCCREADY opens the door and stands gazing at them. He is a type of the young well-to-do ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne

... shown to the company "The infant mewling and puking in the nurse's arms." It was a great event for the father and mother, something of an event for Stratford-on-Avon, for John Shakespeare was a man of importance. He was a well-to-do merchant, an alderman of the little town. He seems to have done business in several ways, for we are told that he was a glover, a butcher, and a corn and wool dealer. No doubt he grew his own corn, and reared and killed his own sheep, making gloves from the skins, and selling the wool ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... "They're poky. I want real money. Now! It isn't enough to be just well-to-do in these days. It needs money. I want to be rich! Not just prosperous, but rich! So rich that I can let the bath soap float around in the water without any pricks of conscience. So successful that they'll say, 'And he's a mere ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber

... in Manchester, August 15, 1785. His father was a well-to-do merchant of literary taste, but of him the children of the household scarcely knew; he was an invalid, a prey to consumption, and during their childhood made his residence mostly in the milder climate of Lisbon or the West Indies. Thomas was seven years old when his father was brought home ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... stages—that would have given homelier fare a relish to more fastidious tongues. I miss in the wholesome but limited and unseasoned diet of the English the variety and savouriness of American food (I mean the food of the well-to-do in the large towns), which includes all the English and Scotch dishes, corrected of their insipidity, besides countless dishes French, German, and Dutch, and many native to the soil, all improved and diversified by the surprising genius for cookery which, in so few generations, ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... wait more than a minute before a rosy-cheeked boy of about eleven, wearing a warm, neat and even stylish coat, darted out to meet him. This was Smurov, a boy in the preparatory class (two classes below Kolya Krassotkin), son of a well-to-do official. Apparently he was forbidden by his parents to associate with Krassotkin, who was well known to be a desperately naughty boy, so Smurov was obviously slipping out on the sly. He was—if the reader has not forgotten—one of the group of boys who two months before had thrown ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... arrived first, took out her knitting, and in a corner went over to her neighbour all the incidents of her drive, the weather, the getting out of the waggon, the elm-tree shadow, and the raspberry vinegar. Mrs. Carpenter, a well-to-do farmer's wife, gave the details of her dairy misfortunes and success to her companion on the next seat. Mrs. Flandin discussed missions. Mrs. Bell told how the family of Mr. Hardenburgh had got away on their journey to ...
— Diana • Susan Warner

... John Hawkins was a well-to-do ship-owner of Plymouth, and as already stated, Treasurer of the Royal Navy, with a contract for the upkeep of ships. His first venture to the Spanish Main was in 1562, when he kidnapped 300 negroes on the Portuguese ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... in our version 'damsel' means a female slave. Her name, which is a Gentile name, and her servile condition, make it probable that she was not a Jewess. If one might venture to indulge in a guess, it is not at all unlikely that her mistress, Mary, John Mark's mother, Barnabas' sister, a well-to-do woman of Jerusalem, who had a house large enough to take in the members of the Church in great numbers, and to keep up a considerable establishment, had brought this slave-girl from the island of Cyprus. At all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... went with him across the fjeld, and as for Solem, why, he, too, went with him so that he might know the way for later tourists. We found the fat, short, and thin-haired stranger standing in the yard, an elderly, well-to-do man who walked for the sake of his health and the last twenty years of his life. Josephine, the dear girl, made her feet a breeze beneath her skirts, and got him into the living room, with its piano and its earthenware ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun

... ignorantly bring forth large families and who thereby enslave themselves, we find a few women who have one, two or three children or no children at all. These women, with the exception of the childless ones, live full-rounded lives. They are found not only in the ranks of the rich and the well-to-do, but in the ranks of labor as well. They have but one point of basic difference from their enslaved sisters—they are not burdened with ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... that his expenses were rather heavy and that it would probably be within two years, perhaps sooner, if his health would permit him to do some extra work which would bring in enough to provide her dowry; that there was a well-to-do family in the country, whose eldest son was her sweetheart; that they were almost agreed on it, and that fortune would one day come, like sleep, without thinking of it; that he had set aside for his sister a part ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... out that the Devotee came from a good family in the country, and that her mother was well to-do, and desired to keep her daughter. But she preferred to be a mendicant. I asked her how she made her living. She told me that her followers had given her a piece of land, and that she begged her food from door to door. She said to ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore

... at each other again, but this time with mutual feelings of pride. Bill had interested a well-to-do farmer in making a pool below a fine spring and with his consent and some materials he had furnished. The boys had stonewalled a regular gulch, afterwards stocking the crystal clear pool they had made with landlocked salmon obtained from ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron

... used his utmost endeavors to oust him, simply because he belonged to an unfashionable and unpopular race. At last he came across a landlord who was broad enough to rent him a good house, and he found a quiet resting place among a set of well-to-do and well-disposed people. ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... hair a la jeune France, who has taken a fancy to his friend's wife, and is rather embarrassed with his own, asserts that Enlightenment is proceeding towards the Rights of Women, the reign of Social Love, and the annihilation of Tyrannical Prejudice. A third, who has the air of a man well-to-do in the middle class, more modest in his hopes, because he neither wishes to have his head broken by his errand-boy, nor his wife carried off to an Agapemone by his apprentice, does not take Enlightenment a step farther than a siege on Debrett, and a cannonade on the Budget. Illiberal man! the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... he, in stentorian tones, so loud that they seemed to stun the tensely drawn drums of our hero's ears. "How now, my hearty! What's to-do here? Who is shooting pistols at this hour of the night?" Then, catching sight of the figures lying in a huddle upon the floor, his great, thick lips parted into a gape of wonder and his gray eyes rolled in his head like two balls, so that what with his flat face and the round holes of ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle

... after witnessing the departure of his son, he found sitting on the doorstep, and patiently awaiting his coming, a Canadian woman. Beside her stood her stolid-looking husband, whom the major recognized as a well-to-do farmer of the settlement, to whom he had granted some trifling favors while in command of ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... which prepared one for nothing superfluous about her. Even her dress could not have wanted another breadth from the skirt and had no fulness to spare about the body. Neat as a pin though; and a well-to-do look through it all. Miss Quackenboss Fleda recognised as an old friend, gilt beads and all. Catherine Douglass had grown up to a pretty girl during the five years since Fleda had left Queechy, and gave her a greeting half smiling, half shy. There was ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... days, to travel for his firm. The elder Mr Palmer was a man of refinement, something more than a Whig in politics, and an enthusiastic member of the Broad Church party, which was then becoming a power in the country. He was well-to-do, living in a fine old red-brick house at Stoke Newington, with half-a-dozen acres of ground round it, and, if Frank had been born thirty years later, he would probably have gone to Cambridge or Oxford. ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford

... from accepting a friendly stop-gap in his extremity. Yet he smiled in spite of the regretful thought. It was amusing to figure Griswold, who, as long as his modest patrimony had lasted had been most emphatically a man not of the people, posing as an anarchist and up in arms against the well-to-do world. None the less, ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... value in the products of the coast already; and material value is always increased by conservation. But there is more than material value involved. We still have far too much wanton destruction of wild life in Canada, not only among those who have ignorantly grown up to it, but among the well-to-do and presumably well-educated sham sportsmen who go into any unprotected wilds simply to indulge their lust of slaughter to the full. Both these classes will be stopped in their abominations and shown a better way; for whenever man is taught a lesson in conservation he rises ...
— Draft of a Plan for Beginning Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood

... others went out, and it seems to me I can still hear the sweet songs she sang to put me to sleep. I remember perfectly the day of her First Communion, and I remember also her companion, the poor child whom my Mother dressed, according to the touching custom of the well-to-do families in Alencon. This child did not leave Leonie for an instant on that happy day, and in the evening at the grand dinner she sat in the place of honour. Alas! I was too small to stay up for this feast, but I shared in it a little, thanks to Papa's goodness, for he came himself to bring ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)

... as if in the newer generations, the average housekeeper is not in the professional class at all. Usually she lacks professional training. If she was brought up in a well-to-do home where there were several servants, she knows literally nothing of cooking, or of any department of housekeeping. Even when she has had some instruction in household tasks, she almost never connects cooking with chemistry, food with dietetics, cleanliness with sanitation, ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... wrote to you there has been a continual to-do and no time for writing letters. What has been the to-do? Is it possible you have forgotten my telling you that I am studying to be a singer and that I take lessons every day? Now listen to this: Here in Palermo, a new opera was performed recently for the benefit of the victims of the ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones

... amounting to about a thousand a year. There were always fewer capable white laborers than the landowners in the colonies needed for their work, for there was much to do in clearing the land and preparing it for use. The landowners were usually well-to-do Spaniards who did not like to work in the fields themselves. A great many of the laborers who migrated to America served in the army or went to the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru. The craze for gold constantly ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton

... aristocracy so pernicious as a moneyed aristocracy—no woman so dangerous as she who has privileges and no corresponding duties. There is nothing so wasteful as wasted energies, nothing so harmful as powers wrongfully directed; and the gifts and powers of our wealthy, well-to-do women are wrongfully directed. They are employed in the interest of vanity, of worldly ambition, of public display, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... that I first saw the English close at hand. They were strong, fair, and closely shaved, like well-to-do bourgeois. They defended themselves bravely, but we were as good as they. It was not our fault—the common soldiers—if they did defeat us at last, all the world knows that we showed as much and more courage than ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann

... protest, for they feel there would be a kind of disloyalty in fighting against the Extreme Left of a movement to which they themselves belong; but they stand aloof. The women who are chiefly attracted to the ranks of the suffragettes belong to three classes: (1) Those of the well-to-do class with no outlet for their activities, who eagerly embrace an exciting occupation which has become, not only highly respectable, but even, in a sense, fashionable; they have no natural tendency to excess, but are ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... illustration, from the pen of a widely known educational expert, of the character of educational facilities in the well-to-do suburb of an Eastern city. After describing two of the newer schools (1911) Prof. Hanus continues,—"The Maple Avenue School is too small for its school population, without a suitable office for the principal or a common room for the teachers, and, of course, very ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... Massachusetts colonists to Western Africa; he appears to have been in communication with Hopkins on the subject a year later, but the effort fell through for want of funds. The other is much later. Paul Cuffee, the son of a well-to-do Massachusetts freedman, had become by his talents and industry a prosperous merchant and ship-owner. Stimulated by the colony at Sierra Leone, and longing to secure liberty to his oppressed race, he determined to transport in his own vessels, and at ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson

... hear JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY, one of the most distinguished and influential, it is said, of the English Quakers. He is a thick-set, beetle-browed man, with a well-to-do-in-the-world air of pious stolidity. I was grievously disappointed; for Quakerism has at times looked lovely to me, and I had expected at least a spiritual exposition of its doctrines from the brother of Mrs. Fry. But ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... I regard it closely, a curious reflection arises. I suppose that, fifteen hundred years ago, the child of any well-to-do Roman citizen was taught just these same things; reading and writing in his own, and, perhaps, the Greek tongue; the elements of mathematics; and the religion, morality, history, and geography current in his time. Furthermore, I do not think I err in affirming, that, if such a Christian ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... rail, half jestingly, half in earnest, at McNamara and Hills,—where he had obtained work, thanks to a letter which Sommers had procured for him,—at his companion's relations with the well-to-do, which he exaggerated offensively, and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... Leamington—in pleasant Warwickshire, at the very midmost point of England, in a good hunting neighborhood, and surrounded by country-seats and castles— continue to be a resort of transient visitors, and the more permanent abode of a class of genteel, unoccupied, well-to-do, but not very wealthy people, such as are hardly known among ourselves. Persons who have no country-houses, and whose fortunes are inadequate to a London expenditure, find here, I suppose, a sort of town and country ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... picturesque, old German virtuoso is the reverent possessor of a genuine "Cremona." He consents to take for his pupil a handsome youth who proves to have an aptitude for technique, but not the soul of an artist. The youth has led the happy, careless life of a modern, well-to-do young American and he cannot, with his meagre past, express the love, the passion and the tragedies of life and all its happy phases as can the master who has lived life in all its fulness. But a girl comes into his life—a beautiful bit of human driftwood that his aunt had taken into ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... cried, indignantly, as soon as she could get her voice; "here's a fine to-do. It is my fault, of course, that Lord Dereham should mistake the road. And my fault too, no doubt, that your miss should make an exhibition of herself riding on the box with the gentlemen at this hour of night, when I implored her to come inside with me, were it only for the sake ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... to doubt whether the crisis had been so serious after all, whether the disaffection had ever been more than skin deep. At this juncture a series of articles appeared in the Morning Chronicle on "London Labour and the London Poor," which startled the well-to-do classes out of their jubilant and scornful attitude, and disclosed a state of things which made all fair minded people wonder, not that there had been violent speaking and some rioting, but that the metropolis had escaped the scenes which had lately been enacted in Paris, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... Miss Betty, you'll find her in her bedroom," said Fanny, looking somewhat cross and puzzled. "I don't know, I'm sure, why you're making such a to-do about seeing her, when there's so much else to think on. Miss Betty's all right, and so is—Why, Miss Kitty, what's the matter? You ain't feeling bad, are you?" cried Fanny in great alarm, for poor Kitty had dropped, white and limp, and trembling uncontrollably, ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... mother wore. I thought from the material that she must have been well-to-do. She had a gentle, nice way of speaking. She looked like a woman who had never worked hard and was used to having things comfortable. That's why I can't understand how she could disappear and no one search for her. We sent notices to all the papers ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird

... she had gone out of her town and on a voyage into a strange land. In Lower Main Street or in the residence streets in the eastern part of town where lived the young men and women she had always known and where lived also the merchants, the clerks, the lawyers and the more well-to-do American workmen of Huntersburg, she felt always a secret antagonism to herself. The antagonism was not due to anything in her own character. She was sure of that. She had kept so much to herself that she was in ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson

... congregation slowly left the church. Gathered in groups in front of the "meeting-house," they were engaged in a general discussion of the affairs of the day, when the Colonel and I emerged from the doorway. The better class greeted my host with considerable cordiality, but I noticed that the well-to-do small planters, who composed the greater part of the assemblage, received him with decided coolness. These people were the "North County folks," on whom the overseer had invoked a hanging. Except that their clothing was more uncouth ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore

... nervous after Bob Darbishire's death that I did not go much to The Chequers; I hid myself most in my own rooms. The funeral was attended by all the well-to-do folks in the district; but I was not there, because I did not care to pass by The Chequers in the procession. Most people had a good word for poor Bob, and many kind fellows could not mention him without the ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman

... Americans visiting Sonora and many resident Americans stopped at the Plaza. Waring frequently picked up valuable bits of news as he lounged in the lobby. Quietly garbed when in town, he passed for a well-to-do rancher or mining man. His manner invited no confidences. He was left much to himself. Men who knew him deemed him unaccountable in that he never drank with them and seldom spoke unless spoken to. The employees ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert

... families has dropped greatly among all except two groups. One is a large group of less intelligent, isolated, shiftless, or incompetent people, among whom families of eight to fifteen children may still be found. The other is a small group of intelligent, high-minded, well-established, well-to-do families with many relatives and with a very assured position. Their children usually number from four to eight. Most of us belong to a huge intervening group in which the average number of children, including ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... that time stripped many of the Palazzi of their artistic beauties and sold them to help pay their debts. Ferrara is a city of old Palazzi, street after street of them, inhabited mainly now by well-to-do peasants, who take a pride in keeping up their exteriors. One of the most interesting sights in the city is the Palazzo Schifanoia, now used as a museum and containing frescoes by Cossa and Cosimo Tura. But what most appealed ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

... weary of an acquired possession. This huge salon with its blackened pictures, cold marbles, and large, severe-looking bookcases, presented a sober bourgeois harmony that pleased him. It was like the salon of a well-to-do notary, with its tall windows overlooking the courtyard, already full of the shadows of importunate callers and favor seekers whom the secretary-general received in a room adjoining the ministerial cabinet. The minister inhaled ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... the two explosions at Warren Vale and at Lund Hill, that "nearly one-third of the men killed, as the respective committees can testify, were thus supporting relations other than wife and child." "Have you reflected," Mr. Plimsoll added, "what this is? Rich men, even comfortably-to-do men do this, I don't doubt. But consider the difference." Consider what a sum of one shilling, subscribed by each worker to help a comrade's widow, or 6d. to help a fellow-worker to defray the extra expense of a funeral, means for one who earns 16s. a week and has a wife, and in some cases five ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... Americans, to get away from personal and domestic service and to enter fields of work with better wages, shorter hours, and more independence.[64] To this may be added the increasing custom, indicating prejudice of well-to-do Americans, of giving ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes

... hand, the revolutionary literature of the time, and more particularly Byron, increasingly interested him. The very wildness and remoteness of Byron's romance was just what suited him. It is all very well for the happy and well-to-do to talk scornfully of poetic sentimentality. Those to whom a natural outlet for their affection is denied know better. They instinctively turn to books which are the farthest removed from commonplace and are in a sense unreal. Not to the prosperous man, a dweller ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... flaming maples, now beginning to feel the autumn's breath, on the rugged mountain-side above. A little to the left was the narrow gorge through which one of the streams discharged, its bottom studded with ponds and mills, and its sharp sides flecked with the little white-painted homes of well-to-do operatives; to the right and left along the other branch and the course of the united streams, the rumble of water-wheels, the puff of laboring engines, and the groan of tortured machinery never ceased. Machine-shops and cotton-factories, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... Homestead, he removed to a neighboring farm known as the Goodrich Place,—a fine, comfortable, well-stocked and well-tilled farm, presenting an appearance of prosperity to the eye of the observer and calculated to make the impression that its owner must be well-to-do in the world. As we have heretofore hinted, however, Ward Glazier failed to prosper there. Why this was the case it is hard to tell. A late writer has suggested that "not only the higher intellectual gifts but even the ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... for distinction through consumption has set a living standard which the less well-to-do families seek to emulate. Among the leisured, there is an eager race to decide which can spend the most lavishly, while those of less economic means make a determined effort to put on front and to appear richer ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing

... "What a to-do! Lord have mercy on us!" muttered the driver in a conscience-stricken voice, setting right something in the harness at the horses' heads. "It's all that devil of a tracehorse. Cursed filly; it is only a week since she has run in harness. She goes all right, but ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... of Max Nordau and his followers never was more than a sentimental sport for the well-to-do in the ranks of the Jews. The latter-day Nationalists, however, are bent on reaching those circles of the Jewish race that have so far followed the banner of Internationalism and Revolution; and this at a moment when revolutionists of all nationalities and races are most in need of unity ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... by the Imperial Government, especially textile and coal mining, and the industrial population centering in Mulhausen was hotly and thoroughly Social Democratic. The upper or well-to-do classes were tied to France by family connections and by religion. The bourgeois remained mildly anti-German, more properly speaking, anti-government, for similar reasons, and the working men were opposed to the government on social and economic grounds. ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard

... Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster place was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises, as your well-to-do Middle-Western ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... fine libraries then, but in Allegheny City, where I lived, there was a Colonel Anderson, who was well-to-do and of a philanthropic turn. He announced, about the time I first began to work, that he would be in his library at home, every Saturday, ready to lend books to working boys and men. He had only about four hundred volumes, ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford

... when she went to them and did not realize then that they were not good people. She met them at an employment agency in St. Louis where she had gone after leaving the Smiths, the people who had brought her up. At that time the B.'s appeared fairly well-to-do, but Mr. B. had been running up debts that later carried him into bankruptcy. Inez was sick and exhausted now from having worked so hard for them. She finally ran away from that town because the B.'s wanted to go elsewhere, leaving her in a compromising position ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy

... wainscoted to the ceiling with oak; and the stairs were strong and well made. It was plainly a very tolerably respectable place; and Anthony began to think from its appearance that he had been admitted at the back door of some well-to-do house off Cheapside. The banisters were carved with some distinction; and there were the rudimentary elements of linen-pattern design on the panels that lined the opposite walls up to the height of the banisters. The woman went up and up, slowly, panting a little; ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... born in Malacca. I had tea, and was introduced to his mother, wife, and two boys and two girls. He intends to send one of his sons to England for education. He denounces opium and the other vices of his countrymen, and their secret societies. All the well-to-do Chinese agree in this, but they have not moral courage to come out against them. Indeed, I suppose they could hardly do so without great risk.... Alas! still no sign ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... from the woodhouse, and sat down facing Kate and me, with an air of certainty that he was going to hear something new and make some desirable new acquaintances, and also that he could tell something it would be worth our while to hear. He looked more and more like a well-to-do old English sparrow, and ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... there was no more influential man in the colony than Abraham Piersey. In matters of political interest he took always a leading part, and was respected and feared by his fellow colonists. He was well-to-do when he came to Virginia, having acquired property as a successful merchant, but he was in no way a man of social distinction or rank. John Chew was another man of great distinction in the colony. He too was a plain merchant attracted to the colony by the profits to be made from the planting ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker

... "Pere." He is over twenty years older than Amelie—well along in his seventies. He is a native of the commune—was born at Pont-aux-Dames, at the foot of the hill, right next to the old abbaye of that name. He is a type familiar enough to those who know French provincial life. His father was a well-to-do farmer. His mother was the typical mother of her class. She kept her sons under her thumb as long as she lived. Pere Abelard worked on his father's farm. He had his living, but never a sou in his pocket. The only diversion he ever had was ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich

... introduction. That will open the way for you, and at the same time I know you will use your delicate tact to avoid wounding Miss Irving's pride in any way. She is very sensitive about their straitened circumstances; you may have heard that they were quite well-to-do until the stroke of paralysis rendered her father helpless. All their means were exhausted in efforts to restore his health, and in the employment of nurses and physicians. I think they have found life a difficult problem since his death, as Mrs ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... better, for I left my knife in the youngling's breast, and belike he wotteth of my weapons. Well, then, if thou wilt be quit of me, thou hast but to forbear upholding me against the Toft folk, and then am I gone without any to-do of thee." ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris

... cargoes. The average value of Mang-i-lot's' sementeras, then, is 33 1/3 pesos — which is thought to be a conservative estimate of the value of the Bontoc sementera. Mang-i-lot' is rated among the lesser rich men. He is relatively, as the American says, "well-to-do." However, when a man possesses twenty ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... interest which a chewer of pan supari is able to find in life. Moreover, his taste and wealth have scope for expression in the elegance of his appointments, and by these you may generally judge of a man's rank and means. A well-to-do Mahratta cartman will carry in his waistband a sort of bijou hold-all of coloured cloth, which, when unrolled, displays neat pockets of different forms for the leaves, broken nuts, lime box, spices, etc.; but a native magistrate, who goes ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... adornment the neatly laid-out, carefully-weeded beds, between which ran footpaths that hardly seemed wide enough for the birds to hop on. Susanna, moreover, distributed her gifts with great partiality. The children of well-to-do parents received the best and were allowed to give voice to their desires, which were frequently lacking in modesty, without being reproved; the poorer had to be satisfied with what remained, and received nothing at all if they did not await ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... to the house of his brother-in-law, a German named Burkhardt, proprietor of a jeweller's and watchmaker's shop in the Strand. Herr Burkhardt, a well-to-do tradesman, with a rubicund face and an inexhaustible stock of good humour, was excessively fond of showing strangers the sights of London; and his guests had no sooner arrived, than he wanted to take them to Covent Garden theatre. John Clare was very anxious to go, on hearing ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin

... more prosperous and well-to-do than those at which the previous nights had been passed. The head of the village appeared to be a personage of some importance; and although clinging in secret to his Christian faith, he and his belongings had so far adopted the usages of the Mussulmen that apparently no thought of their ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty

... designed to take advantage of a large supply of labour close at hand, and land procurable at a lower rental. This applies also to many of the suburbs originally chosen as residential quarters of the well-to-do classes. The whole western district of London, comprised by Kensington, Notting Hill, Hammersmith, etc., contains large and designed areas of dense poverty and overcrowding. So far as the mass of poorer workers in London and other large cities are concerned, it would appear that their ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... of this city possessed of special talents, but lacking means for their cultivation, may have placed within their reach an education the best possible for the development of their powers for the benefit of themselves and of the community; and, second, to provide for the comparatively well-to-do the means of pursuing useful studies in compensation for compelling them to provide for the instruction of their less ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands

... the fair, and offered it for sale, and among those who saw it was the Tsar himself. "What dost thou ask for it?" said the Tsar.—"I ask five thousand roubles." Then the Tsar counted down the money and took the horse away. When he got to his court, he made a great to-do about his beautiful horse, and cried to his daughter, "Come and see, dear little heart, what a fine horse I have bought." Then she came forth to look at it; but the moment she saw it, she cried, "That horse will be my ruin. Thou must kill it on the spot."—"Nay, dear little heart! ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous

... lightning-like rapidity of thought. No doubt some small portion of it is the result of acquirement, for life can hardly fail to teach us all something of this sort; still I cannot but think that the larger part of it is native to him. Born of well-to-do parents, he had never had the splendid tuition of early poverty. As soon as he had left college he had studied law, and had been admitted to the bar. This he had done more to gratify the wishes of ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... approve; but her nature was pity, not justice, and she shut her eyes to much that she could not change. Her miracles, therefore, were for the most part mere evidence of her pity for those who needed it most, and these were rarely the well-to-do people of the siecle, but more commonly the helpless. Every saint performed miracles, and these are standard, not peculiar to any one intermediator; and every saint protected his own friends; but beyond these exhibitions of power, which are more or less common ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... even a portion of the house itself, as caught by his genius, had greeted her eye when a short time before she had been in New York city. Then the house had another and peculiar interest, since it had been dedicated, like a church. A relative of hers, a well-to-do sea-captain, had built it some fifty years ago, and although he was no professor of religion, yet he conceived this idea concerning it. Perhaps the size of the house had suggested this to him, since it was a large one for those days. Everybody thought it was ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various

... Carleton ordered out of the town all who could not assist to the best of their power in the defence. Some shammed illness to escape their tasks. But this was the exception. Well-to-do citizens worked zealously, took their share of sentry duty on the bitterly cold nights, and submitted to the commands of officers in the militia, their inferiors in education and fortune. On the loftiest point of Cape Diamond Carleton erected a mast, thirty feet high, with a sentry ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong

... in the street, a crowd in the door-way. Sharp elbows and angry tongues were there; street boys and soldiers, maids and scrub-women; peaceable police and stormy rabble. The army was new and the fashion. The well-to-do and the wharf-rats, everybody went to the Salvation Army. Within, the hall was low-studded. At the farthest end was an empty platform; unpainted benches, borrowed chairs, an uneven floor, blotches on the ceiling, lamps that smoked. The iron stove in the middle ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof

... the parish of St. John's, Dillsborough. The lands in Bragton and Mallingham he could not sell; but Chowton Farm which was in St. John's had been bought by Larry Twentyman's grandfather. For a time there had been some bitterness of feeling; but the Twentymans had been well-to-do respectable people, most anxious to be good neighbours, and had gradually made themselves liked by the owner of Bragton. The present Squire had of course known nothing of Chowton as a part of the Morton property, and had no more desire for it than for any of ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... into the mysteries of music than any other human being. He seemed transformed while we sat listening to the great waves of harmony bewildering our senses; for, notwithstanding Mr. Winthrop's prophecy, the concert was a success. He had a stolid face. One might take him almost for a retired, well-to-do butcher; but when the air was pulsating with delicious sounds, his face lighted up ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter

... countenance, fresh-coloured and blooming; a handsome, well-made figure, and an air that would become a senator. These are points which, in my opinion, are not to be neglected, for I regard them as meet rewards to a girl for her chastity. I don't know whether I should add that his father is a well-to-do man, for when I think of you and your brother for whom we are looking out for a son-in-law, I feel disinclined to speak of money. On the other hand, when I consider the prevailing tendencies of the day and the laws of the state which lay such prominent stress upon the matter of income, ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger

... House, with its great trees and flowers, was a dilapidated building occupied by an aged man and his sister. They had once been well-to-do, but were now very poor, earning a pittance by selling rabbits. The sister, shy and sorrowful from their reduced circumstances, was nearly inaccessible, but Mrs. Fry won her way to her heart. Then she asked how they would like to have a girls' school in a big room attached to ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... moments without my senses. When I recovered them there was a great to-do in the garden, but I had the drawing-room to myself. I sat up. Rosenthall and Purvis were rushing about outside, cursing the Kaffirs and nagging at ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung

... was thriving. After a brief sojourn with his father, who was a well-to-do hardware merchant in his own small inland city, he went to Virginia and began sheep-farming. In two years he had gained enough to find it feasible to return to New York, where he took up the business of a note-broker. People who knew him prophesied that he would prove ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... class caught their tone from the upper ranks, and took their nightly sederunts and morning headaches as privileges they dared aristocratic exclusiveness to deny them. Douce citizens, merchants, respectable tradesmen, well-to-do lawyers, forgathered when the labours of the day were done to spend a few hours in some snug back-parlour, where mine host granted them the privileges and privacy of a club. Such social beings as these, met to discuss punch, law, and literature, were no ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... his early youth an important and, in some respects, a favourable change took place in the nature of his daily occupation. Among the few well-to-do inhabitants of Helpstone was a person named Francis Gregory, who owned a small public-house, under the sign of the Blue Bell, and rented besides a few acres of land. Francis Gregory, a most kind and amiable man, was unmarried, ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry

... that these had been powerless to avert the misfortune. He was a gentleman by the grace of God and the flunkeyism of man. Montgomery was also a gentleman, but only by virtue of his position. So that, for instance, Priestley's personal fac-simile, appearing as a well-to-do squatter, would have been received on equal terms by Montgomery; whereas, Folkestone's disdain would have been scarcely lessened. The relative manliness of the two types of 'gentleman' is a question which each student will judge according ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... of warm water they need for cooking or washing has first to be boiled over the stove, and so the poor are forced to use a great deal more coal than more well-to-do people need. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 15, February 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... coffin-lid. I have often seen these touching little parties moving through the bustling streets, the peaceful small face asleep under the open sky, decked with the fading roses and withering lilies. In all well-to-do families the house of death is deserted immediately after the funeral. The stricken ones retire to some other habitation, and there pass eight days in strict and inviolable seclusion. On the ninth day ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... hair-pulling, and every other atrocity, for which, I am happy to think, a boy at an English school would be well flogged by the master, and sent to Coventry by his companions. Yet, here was as nice a looking lad as one could wish to see, evidently the son of well-to-do parents, glorying in this savage, and, as we should call it, cowardly accomplishment. I merely mention this to show how early the mind is tutored to feelings which doubtless help to pave the way for the ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... should be bound to have another one sooner or later, and the sooner the better. She went straight off to Oldcastle and bought me a spaniel pup, and there was such a to-do training it that we hadn't too much time to ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... the time we still feared he would die, so as to communicate with any friends or relatives he might have. But after he passed the crisis so well and fell asleep, the hospital people stopped worrying about him. He seems like any ordinary, well-to-do young fellow, and a couple of days in the hospital ought to put him upon his ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne

... wind continue its earlier direction toward the west, the destruction of San Francisco would be virtually complete. The district west of Van Ness Avenue and north of McAllister constitutes the finest part of the metropolis. Here are located all of the finer homes of the well-to-do and wealthier classes, and the resolution to destroy them was the last ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... name; and I haven't got a shilling: I have borne the commission of lieutenant in the service of King George, and am NOW—but never mind what I am now, for the public will know in a few pages more. My father was of the Suffolk Stubbses—a well-to-do gentleman of Bungay. My grandfather had been a respected attorney in that town, and left my papa a pretty little fortune. I was thus the inheritor of competence, and ought to be at ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray

... got-to-do-it-ness," said Cricket, stoutly. "If you had to go to church with a great, big, flappy, floppy hat on, that joggled your ears all the time, 'cause the roses were so heavy, and if you had to be careful to keep your pink organdie clean for next Sunday, and if you had a teasy cousin, who, likely ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow

... small water-course, called Rocky Creek, skirted one side of the place, and many of the most handsome houses, were situated on, or near this beautiful rivulet. The whole appearance of Atkinson, and the surrounding country, indicated a thrifty, well-to-do population. ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton

... financial position, they begin to extort hush-money, threatening to prosecute him if he does not pay what they ask. If the invert is rich or of high position he has only to yield to the extortion, emigrate or commit suicide. In this way the life of most well-to-do inverts is ruined by perpetual anxieties, emotions and torments, because their morbid appetite instinctively urges them to abandon themselves to men ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... feeling that if he had really been the irresponsible creature he was suspected of being he would have come much nearer to controlling his own destinies. He sowed a decent regard for his obligations, and reaped a perfect whirlwind of well-to-do respectability. Grand Chain is a really remarkable novel, and no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various

... couple of hours. That was of course business. Then two officers from the staff came together with some explanations or instructions to her. Then Baron H., a fellow with a pretty wife, who had made so many sacrifices for the cause, raised a great to-do about seeing her and she consented to receive him for a moment. They say he was very much frightened by her arrival, but after the interview went away all smiles. Who else? Yes, the Archbishop came. Half an hour. This is more than is necessary to give a blessing, and I can't conceive what ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... watch him, and wonder why they should not without further to-do rejoice and triumph. "Well? What's ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... had been forced by Michel into a kind of enthusiasm on behalf of the Swiss marriage, she had no very eager wishes of her own on the subject. Marie was her own niece, and was dear to her; but the girl was sure of a well-to-do husband whichever way the war went; and what aunt need desire more for her most favourite niece than ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope

... bachelor, revered the marriage-tie, and did his best, by his verses, to forward the policy of Augustus in his effort to arrest the decay of morals by enforcing the duty of marriage, which the well- to-do Romans of that day were inclined to shirk whenever they could. Nay, the charm of constancy and conjugal sympathy inspired a few of his very finest lines (Odes, I. l3)—"Felices ter et amplius, quos irrupta ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... time to this subject commensurate with what seems to me to be its importance. Dining out is the metropolitan form of social entertainment for the well-to-do. I go to such affairs at least one hundred nights each year. That is a large proportion of my whole life and at least one-half of all the time at my disposal for recreation. So far as I can see, it is totally useless and a severe drain on one's nervous centers. It has sapped and is sapping my vitality. ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train

... wife, ne Feng, possessed a worthy and virtuous disposition, and had a clear perception of moral propriety and good conduct. This family, though not in actual possession of excessive affluence and honours, was, nevertheless, in their district, conceded to be a clan of well-to-do standing. As this Chen Shih-yin was of a contented and unambitious frame of mind, and entertained no hankering after any official distinction, but day after day of his life took delight in gazing at flowers, planting bamboos, sipping ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... comrades, Nan, which is a far better thing than most relatives achieve. And if sometimes you feel sad and miss the old friendship—as I know you will—just remember that I'm only in the next room. People are apt to make a great to-do about death. But, after all, it's merely stepping from one of God's ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... the mainstay of Andorra's tiny, well-to-do economy, accounts for roughly 80% of GDP. An estimated 9 million tourists visit annually, attracted by Andorra's duty-free status and by its summer and winter resorts. Andorra's comparative advantage has recently eroded as the economies of neighboring France and ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... And, though their well-to-do friends were beginning to talk of new model cars and going abroad once more, the Quentins continued to be hard up. David seemed to have struck a dead level. One month business would be pretty good; the next he would make ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller



Words linked to "To-do" :   storm center, turmoil, earthquake, stir, uproar, storm, incident, upheaval, tumult, storm centre, splash, garboil, disorder, convulsion, tempest, tumultuousness



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