"Breeched" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mocked by a wagon of empty barrels rumbling over the cobble-stones. No; it was the Washington Artillery, or the Crescent Rifles, or the Orleans Battalion, or, best of all, the blue-jacketed, white-leggined, red-breeched, and red-fezzed Zouaves; or, better than the best, it was all of them together, their captains stepping backward, sword in both hands, calling "Gauche! gauche!" ("Left! left!") "Guide right!"—"Portez armes!" and facing around again, throwing ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... returns to me. Small thanks to you, John Fry, I say, and you Bill Dadds, and you Jem Slocomb, and all the rest of your coward lot; much you care for your master's son! Afraid of that ugly beast yourselves, and you put a boy just breeched upon him!" ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Vacuum; inexpugnable, while purse and present condition of society hold out; curable by no hellebore. The doom of Fate was, Be thou a Dandy! Have thy eye-glasses, opera-glasses, thy Long-Acre cabs with white-breeched tiger, thy yawning impassivities, pococurantisms; fix thyself in Dandyhood, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... of another temper. He follows another line of ideas. He is a broth of a boy, he is; Jean is not breeched yet, but his spirit is beyond his years and there's no more rollicking blade than he. While he grips his sister's pinafore with one hand, for fear of tumbling, he shakes his whip in the other like a sturdy lad. His father's head stableman can hardly crack his any better when he meets his ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... can you tell me what all this row is about between us and these wide-breeched, red-capped niggers, the Egyptians?" asked Adair, as he stood by the side of Jack Rogers on the quarter-deck of the Racer, while the latter, with his spyglass under his arm, was doing duty as signal midshipman. ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... strange, mongrel, merry place, this town of Boulogne; the little French fishermen's children are beautiful, and the little French soldiers, four feet high, red-breeched, with huge pompons on their caps, and brown faces, and clear sharp eyes, look, for all their littleness, far more military and more intelligent than the heavy louts one has seen swaggering about the garrison towns in England. Yonder go a crowd of bare-legged ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... what I've seen,' said Paul. He was seven years old by now, breeched in corduroys, which had had time to grow rusty. The middle-aged man, sitting at his tent-door, smelt the odour of the new cords, and heard their disgusting whistle as he moved his limbs in them for the ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... likes to tell, he tells. Prying questions make false tongues. I have never questioned him since he was breeched." ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been removed from the back of the grand Kentucky steed, and replaced by the deep-tree Mexican silla, with its corona of stamped leather and wooden estribos. The mules, too, were rigged in a different manner, each having the regular alpareja, or pack-saddle, with the broad apishamores breeched upon its hips; while the spoils, no longer in loose, carelessly tied-up bundles, were made up into neat packs, as goods in regular transportation by ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... the alleged difficulty, with an untrameled and regal ease. With a sweep of hauteur she left the grinning boy and when she returned a few minutes later she was breeched and booted as usual. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... everything, of course—that sweet child is now pulling the merry thought with his maiden aunt; he is victor, and, as no one wishes to know his thoughts, seems determined to tell them,—wishing "Jemy. and Mr. Latimer would look sharp, and knock up the match Mamma spoke of; as then he should be breeched, have pockets, and money:" here the little dear turned to the Captain, saying, "You'll give me a crown, won't you?"—a question at which the maiden aunt blushed intensely, as did Mrs. Brown, who attempted to hide her emotion by saying, "What strange things children do think of!"—at the same ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... mythical ancestor. In other words, it is a signal for widening our view and for conceiving the object, not only vividly and with pause, but in an adequate historic setting. Macbeth tells us that his dagger was "unmannerly breeched in gore." Achilles would not have amused himself with such a metaphor, even if breeches had existed in his day, but would rather have told us whose blood, on other occasions, had stained the same blade, and perhaps what father ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... which occurred after lunch one day was significant. I was sitting on the terrace, ready booted and breeched, waiting for my horse to be brought round. Trix came out and sat ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... attack, which came as a complete surprise to the enemy, had met with instant success, and, with the aid of a considerable number of Tanks, the great Hindenburg line had been breeched over a distance of from 6 to 8 miles, with the result that the fall of Cambrai a centre of great importance to ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... imagine the future James the First, barelegged, in a black-belted smock, halting with his nurse, or his priest, to gaze up in awestruck delight at the great, red-breeched Zouaves lounging on guard at ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... went through the same compliment in honour of 3500 Yankee (Gettysburg) prisoners whom I saw marched through en route for Richmond. I overheard the conversation of some Confederate soldiers about these prisoners. One remarked, with respect to the Zouaves, of whom there were a few—"Those red-breeched fellows look as if they could fight, but they don't, though; no, not so well ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... every appearance of the storm increasing, prepared for a proper gale of wind; secured all the sails with spare gaskets; good rolling tackles upon the yards; squared the booms; saw the boats all made fast; new lashed the guns; double breeched the lower deckers; saw that the carpenters had the tarpawlings and battens all ready for hatchways; got the top-gallant-mast down upon the deck; jib-boom and sprit-sail-yard fore and aft; in fact every thing we could think of to make a ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... countries, however, did the general standard fall so low as here. It was owing to the savoir faire of one man that Newporters and New York first saw at home what they had admired abroad,—liveried servants in sufficient numbers, dinners served à la Russe, and breeched and booted grooms on English-built traps, innovations quickly followed by his neighbors, for the most marked characteristic of the American is his ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... ran through the class, and the biggest and stupidest boy found the joke so overwhelming that he stretched his mouth from ear to ear, and doubled himself up with laughter, till it looked as if his corduroy-breeched knee were a turnip, and he about to ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... change apparent here; albeit this has been a very gradual one. A stranger will have remarked with surprise that there are but few, very few, of the knee-breeched, top-booted, double-chinned, jolly, old-class farmers amongst the numerous groups who are either watching their sample-bags and waiting for customers, or chewing and smelling handfuls of wheat and barley, and casting what they do not swallow on ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... or two, they find he has but little money, or fight shy, they bolt, that is, brush off in quick time, leaving him to answer for the reckoning. But if he is what they term well-breeched, and full of cash, they stick to him until he is cleaned out,{2} make him drunk, and, if he turns restive, they mill him. If he should be an easy cove,{3} he perhaps give them change for their flash notes, or counterfeit coin, and they leave him as soon as possible, highly pleased with ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of the best of them don't see the joke of life like the ordinary man. They can be far greater than men, for they can go straight to the heart of things. There never was a man so near the divine as Joan of Arc. But I think, too, they can be more entirely damnable than anything that ever was breeched, for they don't stop still now and then and laugh at themselves ... There is no Superman. The poor old donkeys that fancy themselves in the part are either crackbrained professors who couldn't rule a Sunday-school class, or bristling ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... bathing suits had been of the old-style no objection to this would have been made. The woman's bathing suit of the olden days were a cumbrous swaddling garment, high-necked, long-sleeved, full-skirted, bloomer-breeched and stockinged. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... fought and traded bravely once upon a time. A broken cannon of theirs forms the threshold; and through a dark, low arch we enter upon broad terraces sloping to the centre, from which rain-water may collect and run into that well. Large-breeched French troopers lounge about and are most civil; and the whole party sit down to breakfast in a little white-washed room, from the door of which the long, mountain coastline and the sparkling sea show of an impossible blue through the openings of a white-washed rampart. I try a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... used to keep some of the great, feather-breeched, lumbering things to send to poultry shows. Some one told me that Indian com was a fine thing for them—made their plumage bright and gave them bone; so I ordered ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... shall have little more to add touching the events of the succeeding twenty years. I was baptized, nursed, breeched, schooled, horsed, confirmed, sent to the university, and graduated, much as befalls all gentlemen of the established church in the united kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, or, in other words, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Alfieri, was crowded, as usual at that hour, with the hangers-on of the noble lady's lever: the abatino in lace ruffles, handing about his latest rhymed acrostic, the jeweller displaying a set of enamelled buckles newly imported from Paris, and the black-breeched doctor with white bands who concocted remedies for the Countess's vapours and megrims. These personages, grouped about the toilet-table where the Countess sat under the hands of a Parisian hairdresser, were picturesquely ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... his professional aspect, had begun to take an interest in him as perhaps their oldest fellow-citizen. It was he that remembered the Great Fire and the Great Snow, and that had been a grown-up stripling at the terrible epoch of Witch-Times, and a child just breeched at the breaking out of King Philip's Indian War. He, too, in his school-boy days, had received a benediction from the patriarchal Governor Bradstreet, and thus could boast (somewhat as Bishops do of their unbroken succession from ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with him; scarcely do his feet [7] Disturb the summer dust; he is so still 60 In look and motion, that the cottage curs, [8] Ere he has [9] passed the door, will turn away, Weary of barking at him. Boys and girls, The vacant and the busy, maids and youths, And urchins newly breeched—all pass him by: 65 Him even the slow-paced waggon ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... love-making were to the velvet-breeched youth the real business of life. Like knights in armor, he often wore the colors of a lady who merely smiled at him from a latticed window. If she dropped for him her glove or handkerchief, he was in the seventh heaven. As his intents were not honorable ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... been called on to expiate an offence committed before he was breeched, the young gentleman could not have been more astounded. Two years had made some change in our relative positions. I was now about his equal in size, and felt a comfortable sense of my superiority, so far as strength was concerned. My shoulders had broadened, and my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... one's pulses tingle when those thirty or forty men of the wig and ermine marched in single and double file down the loftily vaulted hall, with the Lord Chancellor in wig and robes of state leading, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, knee-breeched and sword-belted, a pace or two behind him; and then, in turn, the justices; and, going on ahead of them and following on behind them, knight escorts and ushers and clerks and all the other human cogs of the great ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... love of finery ceased. A simple tunic fastened at his throat with a thorn, while his other garments defined and gave full play to his limbs, completed his costume. The Gaul, on the contrary, was so fond of dress that the Romans divided his race respectively into long-haired, breeched, and gowned Gaul; (Gallia comata, braccata, togata). He was fond of brilliant and parti-colored clothes, a taste which survives in the Highlander's costume. He covered his neck and arms with golden chains. The simple and ferocious German wore no decoration save his iron ring, from which his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... with everyone living in Lilac Valley, frank and friendly with all of them; aside from Marian she had no intimate friend. Not another girl in the valley cared to follow Linda's pursuits or to cultivate the acquaintance of the breeched, booted girl, constantly devoting herself to outdoor study with her father during his lifetime, ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Much cider is made and drank; and in old times they got their wine from France in exchange for wax and honey, as they were famous bee-keepers. Great fields of buck-wheat still afford food for the 'yellow-breeched philosophers,' and in many cottage gardens a row of queerly shaped ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... from the elevated mind of France that the folly of titles has fallen. It has outgrown the baby clothes of Count and Duke, and breeched itself in manhood. France has not levelled, it has exalted. It has put down the dwarf, to set up the man. The punyism of a senseless word like Duke, Count or Earl has ceased to please. Even those who possessed them have disowned the gibberish, and as they outgrew ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... meat and drink, but he repels them with disdain. "No morsel will I touch," said he, "for all the wealth of Spain. Let soul and body perish now; life why should I prolong, Conquered and captive at the hands of such an ill-breeched throng?" "Nay," said my Cid; "take bread and wine; eat, and thou goest free; If not, thy realms in Christendom thou never more shalt see." "Go thou, Don Roderick," said the Count, "eat if thou wilt, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... own and the envy of all neighbouring establishments; but, in process of time, the spirit of boyism began to develop itself, and Vivian not only would brush his hair straight and rebel against his nurse, but actually insisted upon being—breeched! At this crisis it was discovered that he had been spoiled, and it was determined that he should be sent to school. Mr. Grey observed, also, that the child was nearly ten years old, and did not know his alphabet, and Mrs. Grey remarked that ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... writhing, screaming,—him who grinds The hurdy-gurdy, at the fiddle weaves, 700 Rattles the salt-box, thumps the kettle-drum, And him who at the trumpet puffs his cheeks, The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel, Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls, and boys, Blue-breeched, pink-vested, with high-towering plumes.—705 All moveables of wonder, from all parts, Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs, The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig, The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire, Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, 710 The ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... a good-natured muley cow; and if by chance he should hurt anybody, he would have to achieve it much in the same manner that such a cow would, by running against him, or rolling over upon him. So that the red-breeched individual, who so valiantly gets over the railing and stands by the side of young Hippo, doesn't, after all, do a deed of such superhuman daring, for all he does it with such an air of reckless sacrifice of self for the public good. The hippopotamus ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... and I, while we enter the presence of the King. We will bow. We will make obeisances. Then, when all is over, we will laugh together at the fatted calf of a Tutor, the cunning Chancellor with his quirks of law, and the poor schoolboy scarce breeched whom they call King of Scotland. But all the while I shall be thinking of the true King of Scots—who alone shall ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... Siculus, a very dull piece, let me be given some book in a learned tongue. I faint, I starve, I die for lack of good letters. I that no day in my life have passed—nulla die sine—no day without reading five hours in goodly books since I was six and breeched. Bethink ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... moreover, intimate with all the sharp-edged Flints in the land, which was a goodly company. So when the bower was built it had therein a hornet's nest for a bridal bed, thorns for a carpet, flints for a floor, and an ant's nest for a seat, which for a bare-footed and bare-breeched Indian is indeed a sore essay. Now it had taken Master Lox the entire day to untie the hair-string, so when he came down it was dark, and he was glad when he saw the hut ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... morning after the boys had reached New York that the Indian Queen went down the harbor, her canvas drawing merrily in the spanking breeze of dawn. The intervening day had been spent at the dock-side, where wide-breeched Dutch longshoremen were stoutly hustling bales and boxes of merchandise into the hold. Jeremy had watched the passers along the river front narrowly, though he could not help having a feeling that Pharaoh Daggs was gone. The fancy would not leave his mind that there was ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... flitting and removal from Ashestiel baffled all description; we had twenty-five cartloads of the veriest trash in nature, besides dogs, pigs, ponies, poultry, cows, calves, bare-headed wenches, and bare-breeched boys."[25] ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... become, in a strong, fine sense and high degree, ladies' men? It was good for them spiritually, and good for their field artillery evolutions, to be watched by maidenly and matronly eyes. Quite as good was it, too, for their occasional heavy-gun practice with two or three huge, new-cast, big-breeched "hell-hounds," as Charlie and others called them, whose tapering black snouts lay out on the parapet's superior slope, fondled by the soft Gulf winds that came up the river, and snuffing them for ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... cabins more lovely than a church; bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in the chairs and contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I have seen one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and delight, rub herself bare-breeched ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and a party of his comrades landed in England, in all the glories of velvet waistcoats, dangling Spanish buttons of gold and silver, and forage caps of fabulous magnificence, they could hardly fancy that they belonged to the same service as the red-coated, white-breeched, black-gaitered gentlemen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... seer, Yellow-breeched philosopher! Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care, Leave the chaff, and take the wheat. When the fierce northwestern blast Cools sea and land so far and fast, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... side of her devotion and tenderness; she wants to do everything for you, to be with you and help you in every way, and in case of illness or poverty or danger, you would find how much more she had to give than your red-breeched soldier." ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... questioning anybody, without appearing to notice that he was stared at (as indeed all strangers are in rural England), as if he were walking about among a breeched and petticoated people in the character of a savage with nothing but war paint on him, Mat steadily and rapidly pursued his way down the lane to Joanna Grice's cottage. "Time enough," thought he, "to find out what all this means, when I've got quietly into the house I'm bound ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... tale itself has a bi-product, and stands as a type of much that is most human. For this inquirer who conceived himself to burn with a zeal entirely chemical, was really immersed in a design of a quite different nature; unconsciously to his own recently breeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature. Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t - that was his idea, poor little boy! So with politics and that which excites men in the present, so with history and that which rouses them in the past: there lie at the root ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... blithe creature in shiny leather coat and leather cap, with crumpling dark curls cascading beneath it? A suspicion tinkled in the breast of Spondee, in those days a valiant movie fan. Up got the young man, and hopped out of the car. Up stood the blithe creature—how neatly breeched, indeed, a heavenly forked radish—and those shining riding boots! She dismounted—lifted down (so unnecessarily it seemed) by the rogue. She stood there a moment and Spondee was convinced. DOROTHY GISH, said he to Dactyl. Miss Gish and her escort darted into the house, the camera man reeling busily. ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley |
