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Cast-off   Listen
adjective
Cast-off  adj.  Cast or laid aside; thrown away; discarded; as, cast-off clothes.
Synonyms: discarded, junked, scrap(prenominal), waste.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cast-off" Quotes from Famous Books



... the theatre, it was seen that Dickey and Mopsey had not been wasting their time, for there was such a collection of cast-off uniforms and weapons as would have furnished a much larger company than theirs with outfits. The two who had gathered this remarkable collection together were standing over it in conscious pride; but Mopsey did not give them ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis

... love could attach to the apron-strings of any woman. And in the matter of his cup he probably saw that this was what he would be obliged to do as the condition of domestic peace. The condition he rejected and, rejecting it, rejected and cast-off his wife and family and the legal and moral responsibilities ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... really pretty things, hasn't she? But I guess they're made over and cast-off, or something. Maybe the lady she lived with last gave them ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann

... dismounting he had walked his horse beside the old man. The living of Tidswell was in his own gift. It amounted, he remembered, to some L140 a year. The old man, whose name was Trevenen, had an old wife, to whom Sir Arthur thought Lady Laura had sometimes sent some cast-off clothes. ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... as a certain cure for the disease, had turned my Lady Bountiful, and was playing the pretty patroness to all Mr. Leighton's parishioners, especially a Widow Hobbs, whom she had actually taken to ride in the carriage, and to whose ragged children she had sent a bundle of cast-off party dresses; and the tears ran down Fanny's cheeks as she described the appearance of the elder Hobbs, who came to church with a soiled pink silk skirt, her black, tattered petticoat hanging down below and one of Lucy's opera hoods upon ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes

... evidence of his record and his writings, that here was a very sterling and very independent "character" of whom much more should be known. Some day I hope to know more. Meanwhile I relate one of the stories. An appeal for cast-off clothing for the poor clergy being made, some one took the line that such an appeal was infra dig. Long smoked, pondered, and thus delivered himself: "But is it not paramount that these gentlemen should ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... known that the origin of Pope's first letters given to the public, arose from the distresses of a cast-off mistress of one of his old friends (H. Cromwell),[209] who had given her the letters of Pope, which she knew how to value: these she afterwards sold to Curll, who preserved the originals in his shop, so that no suspicions ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... "A cast-off Dame, who of Intrigues can judge, Writes Scandal in Romance—A Printer's Drudge! Flush'd with Success, for Stage-Renown she pants, And melts, and swells, and pens ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher

... of the field was a tiny hut, hardly big enough for a shepherd's shelter. It looked as if it had been built of discarded things, scraps and fragments of other buildings, put together with care and pains, by some one who had tried to make the most of cast-off material. There was something pitiful and shamefaced about the hut. It shrank and drooped in its barren field, and seemed to cling only by sufferance to the edge of the ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... conceivable attitude, and, uncovering their feet, commenced pelting each other with the cast-off leathers. When the sport had lasted a few minutes, Joe ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... live in a wick-i-up three feet square, and wear your cast-off blankets," she answered, with some spirit. "I'm just about the right color for a squaw, though; that is, if I look as badly as the rest ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray

... (Berkeley, page 86.)) has particularly pleased me, for it has been generally neglected or disliked by my friends; yet I fully expect that it will some day be more successful. I believe I quite agree with you in the manner in which the cast-off atoms or so-called gemmules probably act (225/4. "Assuming the general truth of the theory that molecules endowed with certain attributes are cast off by the component cells of such infinitesimal minuteness as to be capable of circulating ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... the name of morality, she had procured the garment. I learned later that it was the joy and pride of Antoinette's existence; for once, in the days long ago, when she was femme de chambre to a luminary of the cafes concerts, it had met around her waist. She had treasured the cast-off finery of this burned-out star—she beamed in the seventies—for all these years, and now its immortal devilry transfigured Carlotta. She was also washed specklessly clean. An aroma that no soap or artificial perfume could ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... your roaming about you run across an old cast-off suit of Mr. Black Snake, or of any other member of the Snake family, I wish you would remember me and let me know. ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess

... Kedzie's cast-off clothes or from disguising as Jim's wife, but her downcast eyes revealed her bare shoulders and arms and her delicate evening gown. They had been exquisitely appropriate to night and night lights, but they were ghastly ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... that the potentates of the Guinea coast not only assume English titles, but wear under, or in place of, diadems, the cast-off wigs of our Lord Chancellors—but we were not prepared for what follows in the latitude of the Mozambique Channel, as related ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various

... assistance to Dinah in her arrangements. He might as well have provided them for a squirrel or a magpie. The more drawers and closets there were, the more hiding-holes could Dinah make for the accommodation of old rags, hair-combs, old shoes, ribbons, cast-off artificial flowers, and other articles of vertu, wherein ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... about her Person; and indeed she is very seldom out of Humour for a Woman of her Quality: But here lies my Complaint, Sir; To bear with me is all the Encouragement she is pleased to bestow upon me; for she gives her cast-off Cloaths from me to others: some she is pleased to bestow in the House to those that neither wants nor wears them, and some to Hangers-on, that frequents the House daily, who comes dressed out in them. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... the structure itself, and which, if uncultivated or neglected, any amount of expenditure in building will fail to give that completeness and perfection of character which every homestead should command. Thus the tawdry erections in imitation of a cast-off feudalism in Europe, or a copying of the massive piles of more recent date abroad, although in miniature, both in extent and cost, is the sheerest affectation, in which no sensible man should ever indulge. It is out of all keeping, or propriety ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen

... overbearing minister of nature, who snaps you with unphilosophical as the clergyman once frightened you with infidel, is still a recognized member of society, wants taming, and will get it. He wears the priest's cast-off {195} clothes, dyed to escape detection: the better sort of philosophers would gladly set him to ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... were large enough he sold them to the farmers for a trifle, an old coat or an old shirt, and when he needed nothing he gave them for nothing. He went barefoot in the warm weather, and in winter he wore cast-off shoes; when he could get none and the ways were very rough he protected his feet with rude sandals of his own making. His hats were of his own making too, and were usually of pasteboard with a broad brim in front ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... would be hers. Madame Dalmas called herself a French-woman, and signed herself "Antoinette," but she was really an English Jewess of low extraction, whose true name was Sarah Solomons. Her "profession" was to purchase—and sell—the cast-off apparel of ladies of fashion; and few of the sisterhood have carried the art of double cheating to so great a proficiency. With always a roll of bank notes in her old leathern pocket-book, and always a dirty canvas bag full of bright sovereigns in her pocket, she had ever the subtle temptation ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... watch him. She discovered that, as soon as the other people were asleep, her husband became transformed into a handsome prince and left the palace, leaving behind him his cat's dress. As soon as he had gone, Maria took the cast-off clothing of her husband and cast it into the fire. Singalong smelt it burning and returned to the palace, where he found his wife and begged her to return to him his cat's dress. This she was unable to do, since it was entirely ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,

... a cast-off water-bottle, which naturally was full of canteen rum, and drank till ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... state of mind a good dose of fishing, to be taken as suited the day. So I betook me down a by-street, where the aerial carp promised the thickest, and, selecting a house well placed for a view, asked permission to mount upon the roof. It chanced to be a cast-off clothing shop, along whose front some fine, if aged, garments were hung to catch the public eye. The camera and I were inducted up the ascent by the owner, while my boots, of course, waited dog-like in the ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell

... exile, which he reminded the king "was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the expiation of some of his greatest judgments," passed by, and the ex-chancellor died at Rouen. He had begun his history in exile as the faithful servant of a dethroned prince; he ended it in exile, as the cast-off servant of an ungrateful monarch. As a writer of contemporary history, Clarendon has given us the form and color of the time. The book is in title and handling a Royalist history. Its faults are manifest: first those of partisanship; and secondly, those which spring from his absence, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... duly introduced. Disraeli showed himself particularly gracious, and warmly congratulated the artist, whose pencil had lately been employed in satirising him in a disparaging fashion, depicting him as a nice young man for a small party, i.e. the Young England party, as a Jew dealer in cast-off notions, and as a young Gulliver before the Brobdingnag Minister (Sir R. Peel). Disraeli tried his hardest to ingratiate himself with the distinguished caricaturist, but Leech, proof against the wiles of the charmer, rejoined some months afterwards with ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... book ever written, being the principal favourite. It makes the young Jew ashamed of the young Jewess; it makes her ashamed of the young Jew. The young Jew marries an opera dancer, or if the dancer will not have him, as is frequently the case, the cast-off Miss of the Honourable Spencer So-and-so. It makes the young Jewess accept the honourable offer of a cashiered lieutenant of the Bengal Native Infantry; or if such a person does not come forward, the dishonourable ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... "Upon my word, and a very good thing you must make of it; for I see you dressed like a gentleman from top to toe. Are you not ashamed to go about the world in such a trim, with honest folk, I daresay, glad to buy your cast-off finery second-hand? Speak up, you dog," the man went on; "you can understand English, I suppose; and I mean to have a bit of talk with you before I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... swift-moving trains, day after day, without receiving some serious injury. Surely Providence must have protected me in my endeavor to save my scanty earnings. My clothing did not cost much, as I was the "happy" recipient of the cast-off clothes of the older members of ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various

... must have given thee thy pantofles," replied she. "Be they a cast-off pair of his Majesty's, or did my Lord Oxford so much alms ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... the PICTURE GALLERY. It is said to receive the overflowings of the gallery of Munich—which, in turn, has been indebted to the well known gallery of Dusseldorf for its principal treasures. However, as a receiver of cast-off apparel, this collection must be necessarily inferior to the parent wardrobe, yet I would strongly recommend every English Antiquary—at all desirous of increasing his knowledge, and improving his taste, in early German art—to pay due attention to this singular collection of pictures ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... introduction of all bull and bear similes into poetry. "Well," I replied, "whatever your antipathies may be to bulls and bears, you have no objection to wolves." "Yes," he answered, "I equally abominate the whole tribe of lion, bull, bear, boar, and wolf similes. They are more thread-bare than a beggar's cast-off coat. From their rapid transition from hand to hand, they are now more hot and sweaty than halfpence on a market day. I would as soon meet a wolf in the open field, as in a friend's poem." I then rejoined, "Your objection, once at least, to wolf similes, was not quite so strong, seeing you prevailed ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... ceremonies. For when Miss Kemp went to see the palace of the King all the decoration she saw there was a simple table and chair. A Tibetan kitchen was a very popular slide. In that country they apparently use a golf-bag to brew tea in, and cast-off bicycle wheels for plates. There prevails in Tibet some element of democracy, for Miss Kemp's cook was also a J.P., a Civil Servant, and held other such offices of fame. One of her assistants was a positive marvel—a human carpet-sweeper. If the floor was to be brushed he ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... I say, if you can; for he is too old to be caught by chaff, and you shall need as much guile as any fowler ever did. Then with patient hands bestow on his body its first baptism of clean water, a task often unspeakably shocking; reduce to fit size and shape a cast-off suit humbly begged for the occasion, and give him his first experience of decent clothing. Thereafter, proceed to the work, sometimes the most trying ever undertaken, of taming this singularly acute, desperately sly, and often ferociously savage little ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe

... stays" and "hoop-coats"! It was bad enough to "rate Negroes with Horses and Hogs," but to sell them with second-hand clothing was an incident in which is to be seen the low depth to which slavery had carried the Negro by its cruel weight. A human being could be sold like a cast-off garment, and pass without a bill of sale.[318] The announcement that a "likely Negro woman about nineteen years and a child about six months of age to be sold together or apart"[319] did not shock the Christian sensibilities of the people of Massachusetts. A babe six months old could be torn ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... squaw and together they folded the cast-off clothing. Rhoda saw that her scarf had blown near the canon edge. A quick thought came to her. Molly was fully occupied with muttering adoration of the dainty underwear. Rhoda tied a pebble into the scarf and dropped ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow

... had recently been giving me trouble. The spokes that I made of green oak, having become dry and wobbly, I had been on the outlook for a cast-off wheel, that I might appropriate the spokes. Hence it was, that, after luncheon I took my rifle, and started out across the bottom, where, within a few rods of the river, and about a half a mile off the road which turned ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole

... bound hand and foot; a chain-shot fastened to her foot, and a sentry menacing her with his bayonet. The next volume shows us the Prince President in the act of being measured by his military tailor, while he offers money to his cast-off mistress Liberte, her mother (France) looking indignantly on. Immediately behind, a priest (in allusion to the support which the Papal party were receiving from this "eldest son of the Church") helps himself from a plate of money which stands by the President's ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... and gave a soul to it; a voluptuous cloud covered my eyes." He adds that he would kiss with rage and transport whatever had come in close contact with the woman he adored, and on one occasion eagerly pressed his lips to her cast-off underlinen, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... wisdom, with the pure impassioned movements of the young heart, as yet unsullied by the tarnish of every-day life, inexperienced in its calculations, sick of its empty formalities, and indignantly determined to cast-off the mean restrictions it imposes, which bind so firmly by their number, though singly so contemptible. The idea is far from original: this is a conflict which most men have figured to themselves, which many men of ardent mind are in some degree constantly waging. To make ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... and head across them, and continued in this position for several hours. Early one morning its mournful cries aroused the household, and exactly a week, to the very hour, after its mistress's death, the poor terrier expired beside the bed, its head and paws still resting on the cast-off shoes. This story shows how keenly some animals feel the loss of those who have treated ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... Colonel William Levy, since a member of Congress from Louisiana, I made my appearance on a hand-car, the motive power of which was two negroes. Descendants of the ancient race of Abraham, dealers in cast-off raiment, would have scorned to bargain for our rusty suits of Confederate gray. General Canby met me with much urbanity. We retired to a room, and in a few moments agreed upon a truce, terminable after forty-eight ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor

... chase, mere farce. tautology &c (repetition) 104; supererogation &c (redundancy) 641. vanitas vanitatum [Lat.], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity^; triviality &c (unimportance) 643. caput mortuum [Lat.], waste paper, dead letter; blunt tool. litter, rubbish, junk, lumber, odds and ends, cast-off clothes; button top; shoddy; rags, orts^, trash, refuse, sweepings, scourings, offscourings^, waste, rubble, debris, detritus; stubble, leavings; broken meat; dregs &c (dirt) 653; weeds, tares; rubbish heap, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... into Tode's head with that suit of new clothes with which he presently arrayed himself. Not particularly new, either. Tom Roberts was in college, and they were his cast-off attire, worn before he, too, in his way became a butterfly; and he would not have been seen in them—no, nor have had it enter into the mind of one of his college mates that he ever had been seen in them, for a considerable sum ...
— Three People • Pansy

... rescued also," answered Mistress Anne in a low voice. "She found them in a thieves' haunt being trained as pickpockets. They are the cast-off offspring of a gentleman ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... soon as read. Finally and lastly, there was the bottle broken into fragments and thrown to the dust heap; but, without doubt, the counterpart of the one found at Miss Wardour's bedside on the morning of the robbery; while, among some cast-off garments, had been found the half of a handkerchief, that matched precisely the one found over the face of the heiress. All these facts Mr. Belknap had laid before her with elaborate explanations, and "notes by the way," ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... struggle of life, was with your face smiling on me from the past. All my hopes and ambitions I owe to you. The last message you spoke to me has been my guiding star. And when this man threw you from him as a cast-off garment—you, the beautiful queen of my soul—I would have killed him but for the fierce joy that ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... she said, turning to the astonished and abashed spectators, "this woman has told you the truth, mainly, concerning me, at least; but with one reservation. She is the daughter of this Mrs. Bailey, whom she represented as a servant, and the cast-off mistress of the Geoffrey Westbourne who ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock

... deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact fac-simile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry;—and this, I believe, involves the best ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... musician, was riding over that pass and down into that very region of the Dolomites. He made his living by stopping at the stronghold-castles of those times and entertaining the powerful of the earth by singing his poems set to music of his own making. Sometimes he got a suit of cast-off clothes in payment; sometimes only bed and board for a time. But he kept on singing his little poems and making more of them as he grew rich in experience of men and things; for he never grew rich ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... Hebrides, and he had a grievance to avenge. He was sprung from the Robertson clan, which did not easily forget or forgive. He still remembered his quarrel with Crooked-armed Macdonald on the Saskatchewan. In his mind was the goading thought that he was a cast-off servant of the North-West Company; and he yearned for the day when he might exact retribution for his injuries, some of ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood

... well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless in themselves, they have come to please us at last as things picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different age. Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture—types of cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to preserve—we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them the veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its more solemn and self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of individuality which ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... Travis decided to call upon the lady of his heart and demand an explanation. After some rehearsal of what he wanted to say, Ambrose betook himself to the tenement in which the Tate family dwelt. At sight of her cast-off swain, Miss Aphrodite showed the whites of her eyes and narrowed her lips to a thin straight line—perhaps an inch and a half thin. Evidently she ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... responsibility is the road to degeneration. The hermit-crab was once equipped with a hard shell and with as good means of locomotion as other crabs. But instead of courageously following the hardy life of other crustaceans it formed the bad habit of taking up its residence in the cast-off shells of mollusks. This made life easy and indolent. But it paid the price of all shirking. In time it lost four legs, while the shell over the vital portion of its body degenerated to a thin membrane which leaves it practically helpless when it is out of its captured home. And ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers

... now, since you haven't your rope along. Here's just the ticket—some old fence rails lying in a heap. Cheer up, comrade, we'll have you out of that in a jiffy now," sang out Frank, seizing one of the long, cast-off rails, and dropping it on the surface ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes

... the Shop a lot of discarded articles, purchased several discarded articles donated by Mrs. Smith, her neighbor, while Mrs. Smith eagerly bought the cast-off wares of Mrs. Brown. Either would have sneered at the bare idea of taking "truck" which the other had abandoned, had the medium of exchange not been the popular Liberty Girls' Shop. For it was a popular shop; the "best families" patronized it; society women met ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)

... I shall tell Norah plainly that I disapprove of the Cabin, the past can hatch no egg of discord in the shape of the Cast-Off Glove. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... are strong in the deeps of the lustrous night, Cold and splendid as death if his dawn be bright; Cold as the cast-off garb that is cold as clay, Splendid and strong as ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... do anything else. A man who has soldiered for nearly fourteen years isn't fit for civil life. Now, make your citizen's clothes into a bundle and take them around the corner to a little Jew store you will find there. Mose buys all the recruits' cast-off clothing. He'll not give you much for them, but the little he will give you will keep you in gingerbread as long as you stay in ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon

... three prostitutes of Bontoc, the cast-off mistresses of Spanish soldiers, have syphilis, or na-na. Formerly one civilian was afflicted, and at present four or five of the Constabulary soldiers have ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... usual run of those dignitaries, who differed chiefly from their uncrossed comrades and brethren in having no wife to be unfaithful to. He is never false to Manon—the incident of one of Manon's lovers trying vainly to tempt his rival, with a pretty cast-off mistress of his own, is one of the most striking features of the book. He positively reveres, not his mother, who is dead, and reverence for whom would be nothing in a Frenchman, but his father, and even, it would seem, his ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... upon shabbiness, the poverty of these insolvent waiters upon insolvency, was a sight to see. Such threadbare coats and trousers, such fusty gowns and shawls, such squashed hats and bonnets, such boots and shoes, such umbrellas and walking-sticks, never were seen in Rag Fair. All of them wore the cast-off clothes of other men and women, were made up of patches and pieces of other people's individuality, and had no sartorial existence of their own proper. Their walk was the walk of a race apart. They had a peculiar ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... these matters that in his novel Kasper Hauser or Sluggishness of Heart (1909) he seeks to interpret anew and on the basis of scrupulous attention to all the documents in the case the oft-treated story of the mysterious foundling who came to light in Nuremberg in 1828 and who was supposed to be a cast-off prince of Baden. Moreover, of the three narratives in the volume entitled The Sisters (1906), two are fantastically constructed criminal cases which endeavor suggestively to explain the unusual and the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... arrived at the sepulchre before any of the other women, and conversed with Jesus. Though the disciples, in visiting the tomb, saw nothing but cast-off clothes, yet Mary sees and talks with angels and with Jesus. As usual, the woman is always most ready to believe miracles and fables, however extravagant and though beyond all human comprehension. Several women purposed to be at the tomb at sunrise ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... for sixty francs. As soon as that sum was spent, the Thenardiers grew accustomed to look on the little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity; and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes, they dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the Thenardier brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the rest had left—a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat. Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... rocky point poked the smouldering embers of the fire and raking out some overdone fragments of fish made a breakfast from them and pitched the bones into the sea. Only those who have lived three days without food can understand how delicious even those cast-off fish bones looked to me. I walked away from the mouth of the cave to be where I could not see the man eat. The daylight enabled me to explore the interior of the cave more thoroughly than I had been able to do before. From a crevice, far within, ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme

... for summer clothing by those Esquimaux who have not come much in contact with the whalers. When they have been in communication with the ships, they are usually, during the summer months, clad in cast-off clothing of the sailors—that is, the men are. And funny enough they look, with the curious methods they have of wearing civilized costumes. They always choose a shirt for the exterior garment, and wear it with the tail outside. The women seldom are seen with any civilized clothing, the only exception ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... my barbarians are too low and too near home for Mrs. Brimmer's missionary zeal. She and Miss Chubb patronize the Mexican school with cast-off dresses, old bonnets retrimmed, flannel petticoats, some old novels and books of poetry—of which the Padre makes an auto-da-fe—and their own patronizing presence on fete days. Providence has given them the vague impression that leprosy and contagious ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... fine-looking negro, with grizzled woolly pate, who spoke French fairly well, and seemed much inclined to come to an understanding with us and open up his country to trade and civilisation. He came to call on me in great state, dressed in the handsome uniform of a general of the French Republic, the cast-off garments of some performer at the Cirque Olympique. He had a tricolour plume in his hat, a gold laced coat with lapels turned back on the chest, white breeches, and top boots. He wore the decoration of the ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... in it. But if you want to make the hospitals seem almost like home to the little children for a whole happy day, you can not begin too soon to look over all your little treasures, and choose all you can part with. You all have cast-off toys, story-books that have been read through, and boxes full of odds and ends, and it takes very little to brighten the face of a poor sick child lying alone in a hospital cot. A single pretty picture-card ...
— Harper's Young People, December 16, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... valets and porter belonging to the wardrobe were called in, and they carried all away in a heap, in the taffety wrappers, to the tirewoman's wardrobe, where all were folded up again, hung up, examined, and cleaned with so much regularity and care that even the cast-off clothes scarcely looked as if they had been worn. The tirewoman's wardrobe consisted of three large rooms surrounded with closets, some furnished with drawers and others with shelves; there were also large tables in each of these rooms, on which the ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... the greatest part of men are utterly destitute of this godly jewel, this treasure, the fear of the Lord. Poor vagrants, when they come straggling to a lord's house, may perhaps obtain some scraps and fragments, they may also obtain old shoes, and some sorry cast-off rags, but they get not any of his jewels, they may not touch his choicest treasure; that is kept for the children, and those that shall be his heirs. We may say the same also of this blessed grace of fear, which is called here God's treasure. It is only bestowed upon the elect, the heirs ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... had suspected, the Rousseaus were awaiting them in the apartment. They were very nice looking young people, rather shabbily attired in garments which, though clearly the cast-off apparel of more prosperous owners, were still neat and remotely fashionable. Madame Rousseau was quite a pretty woman, with a soft, restrained voice and a tendency to say "Oui, Madame," with great frequency and politeness. Her husband, poor as he was, sustained the credit of aristocracy by smoking ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon

... beyond a question an epoch, and a prolonged one, when the mill shared with household demands an immense quota of the cast-off literature of these islands. One of our early collectors of Caxtons, Ratcliff, whose books were sold in 1776, acquired his taste (one in a thousand) through his vocation as a chandler or storekeeper in the Borough. We may surmise how his ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... is first catarrhal in character, but soon a false or diphtheritic membrane is formed, with the production of shallow ulcers. There is dribbling of saliva from the mouth and discharge from the nose, at first watery, becoming thicker and mixed with blood and small masses of cast-off croupous membrane, causing a very fetid odor. These croupous areas when they form in the throat, larynx, or windpipe, may lead to narrowing of the passages, with consequent difficult breathing and even suffocation. Various respiratory murmurs may also be heard, caused by the to-and-fro movement ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... wheat, oats, and barley were added to our battle-honours. But if the spirit was willing, our reaping implements were correspondingly weak. The Corps 'Agricultural Officer' had collected from surrounding farms a fantastic assortment of cast-off scythes, jagged hooks, and rusty sickles, which fell to pieces 'in the 'ands' and refused to do more than beat down the crops to which they were opposed. The scythes seemed hardly able to stick their points, in the approved manner, into ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose

... Sunars from bile, and Kunbis from ghosts'; because the Brahman is always feasted as an act of charity and given the best food, so that he over-eats himself, while the Sunar gets bilious from sitting all day before a furnace. When somebody falls ill his family get a Brahman's cast-off sacred thread, and folding it to hold a little lamp, will wave this to and fro. If it moves in a straight line they say that the patient is possessed by a spirit, but if in a circle that his illness is due to natural causes. In the former case they promise an offering to the spirit ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... is he? The form I used to see Was but the raiment that he used to wear. The grave, that now doth press Upon that cast-off dress, Is but his ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various

... there turning it about; or it may occur owing to disease of the ear altering the character of the natural secretion. In the normal state, the purpose of the wax is, apparently, to repel insects and to glue together the little flakes of cast-off skin in the auditory canal, and these, catching on the hairs lining the canal, are thrown out of the ears upon the shoulders by the motion of the jaws ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various

... to man, a wife with the magic cestus of Venus,—not around her waist, but, if such a thing could be, in her finger-ends. All that she touches falls at once into harmony and proportion. Her eye for color and form is intuitive: let her arrange a garret, with nothing but boxes, barrels, and cast-off furniture in it, and ten to one she makes it seem the most attractive place in the house. It is a veritable "gift of good faerie," this tact of beautifying and arranging, that some women have,—and, on the present occasion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... flowing to the feet; the chitoniskos, a shorter and more ornamental garment worn over it; and the mantle, himation. Pieces of cloth or rags are also mentioned among the entries; these were probably the remnants of cast-off garments dedicated by their wearers. Some of the dresses are described as ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... Rose-Black, in a cast-off accent of jaded indifferentism, just touched with displeasure. "Yes," he added, dreamily, to Lydia, "it was divine, you know. You might say it needed training; but it had the naive sweetness we associate ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... dressed; Bloody Mike, who had 'peeled' his coat, had since become the possessor of all his other genteel raiment, giving the poor wretch in exchange as much 'blue ruin' as he could drink, and the cast-off garments of a chimney-sweep! ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn

... them, the author has a passion for circumstantiality, and, like the average Russian, such a desire for accuracy as even a German could not rival. To what the reader already knows concerning the personages in hand it is therefore necessary to add that Petrushka usually wore a cast-off brown jacket of a size too large for him, as also that he had (according to the custom of individuals of his calling) a pair of thick lips and a very prominent nose. In temperament he was taciturn ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... kitchen. It was impossible, was it not, to take a child who had lived in a den of iniquity in among my own children? And I considered myself very kind and good, because he was a care, not to me, but to the servants in the kitchen, and because not I but the cook fed him, and because I gave him some cast-off clothing to wear. The boy staid a week. During that week I said a few words to him as I passed on two occasions and in the course of my strolls, I went to a shoemaker of my acquaintance, and proposed that he should take the lad as ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi

... known as "GooseGrease," dressed in a cast-off suit of his big brother's, with his father's hat set rakishly back on his head and over his ears, was coming proudly down the ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun

... of the kingbird, the great crested fly-catcher, has one well-known peculiarity: he appears never to consider his nest finished until it contains a cast-off snake-skin. My alert correspondent one day saw him eagerly catch up an onion skin and make off with it, either deceived by it or else thinking it a good substitute for the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... with deep-set eyes under the shadow of sweeping, black lashes. Thick masses of hair framed her sad but splendid brow; and she was badly, or rather poorly dressed, never condescending to wear the cast-off clothes of her relatives, but preferring gowns of simplest material made by her own hands. These draperies gave her the ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet

... all, trailed after their leader into Vilna. Their ears and throats, their legs and feet, were swathed in rags; their bodies were wrapped in the threadbare garments of their dead comrades, or in such cast-off woman's apparel as they had been able to secure by the way. They were followed by Ney with four hundred, Wrede with two thousand, and finally by two or three thousand stragglers. After a few half-hearted and ineffectual efforts to organize ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... There you shall read, among "Distressing Scenes"— Instead of murders and burnt crinolines, The broken matches that the week's afforded; There under "goods for sale" you'll find what firms Will furnish cast-off rings on easy terms; There double, treble births will be recorded; No wedding, but our rallying rub-a-dub Shall drum to the performance all the club; No suit rejected, but we'll set it down, In letters large, with other news of weight Thus: "Amor-Moloch, we regret ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen

... as sorry for a married man, Harvey," said he, "as I do for a half-starved dog. I'm always going out of my way to feed some of these cast-off dogs around town, so why shouldn't I do the same for a poor devil of a husband? I'll make you comfortable until you get into Davis', but don't you ever let on to these damned women that you're a failure, or that you're strapped, or that that ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon

... open, and she stepped inside. It was a dingy place, filthy, and littered, without the slightest attempt at order, with a heterogeneous collection of, it seemed, every article one could think of, from scraps of old iron and bundles of rags to cast-off furniture that was in an appalling state of dissolution. The light, that of a single and dim incandescent, came from the interior of what was apparently the "office" of the establishment, a small, glassed-in partition affair, at the far end ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard

... the Compact, and who nevertheless did not hesitate to perform tasks from which the average costermonger would have shrunk in disgust. Their employers occasionally admitted them to their tables, and even to some degree of social intimacy. More frequently they presented them with their cast-off clothing, with new gowns for their wives at Christmas, or—when things were at a remarkably low ebb—with a hundredweight of flour or half a barrel of mess pork. Yet the recipients of these favours piqued themselves upon their good birth and ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... field with two holly-bushes in the middle. I arrived there: there was Betty with all the farming men, and a cleared field, and a heavily laden cart; one man at the top of the great pile ready to catch the fragrant hay which the others threw up to him with their pitchforks; a little heap of cast-off clothes in a corner of the field (for the heat, even at seven o'clock, was insufferable), a few cans and baskets, and Rover lying by them panting, and keeping watch. Plenty of loud, hearty, cheerful talking; but no minister, no Phillis, no Mr Holdsworth. Betty saw me first, and understanding who ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... took was to marry Jim Templeton, the drunken, cast-off son of a millionaire senator from Kentucky, who controlled railways and owned a bank, and had so resented his son's inebriate habits that for five years he had never permitted Jim's name to be mentioned in his presence. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... arms hugged together inside in such a way as to bring a corner across the mouth and nose, leaving their pipe-stem legs below, and wandered thus dismally about in the frequent spurts of cold rain. Now and then a lowest of the low passed in the cast-off remnants of "European" clothes, which were evidently considered far inferior to peon garb, however bedraggled. Bare or sandaled feet seemed impervious to cold, again like the Arab, as was also this fear of the raw air and half covering of the face that gave a Mohammedan touch, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... of the Northern manufacturers; in North Carolina the legislature declared the tariff law unconstitutional. At the commencement of the University of Georgia the orator of the occasion appeared in a suit of white cotton cloth, while his valet wore the cast-off suit of shining broadcloth. The "Tariff of Abominations," passed in 1828, was producing revolutionary results in all the region where tobacco, cotton, and rice were grown, and this was the ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd

... {39} nest is that made by a perfectly regular member of the family, the Great-crested Flycatcher. The straw and other substances it collects as a bed for its eggs and young is carried into some hollow tree, old Woodpecker hole, or nesting box. Often a cast-off skin of a snake is used, and sometimes the end is permitted to hang out of the hole—a sort of "scare-crow," perhaps, intended for ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson

... with some of Marty's underclothing, a pair of half-worn slippers, and a couple of Mrs. Ashford's cast-off gingham dresses, to be made into wrappers for Jennie. Edith and Cousin Alice also brought some articles for ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett

... the effect of bringing the flash and heavy, dull report of the old, cast-off military muskets which the Malays were using; and as these weapons flashed, the defenders of the various buildings seized the opportunity to return the fire, guessing at the ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... fortune grand Is yours, by dint of merest chance, - To sport HIS brow at second-hand, To wear HIS cast-off countenance! ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert

... former times, and discards the idea that one must accept evil, dam it in, and hide it as if it were some necessary sewer; for the only course for a free community to pursue is to foresee evil and grapple with it, and destroy it in the bud. To diminish the number of cast-off children one must seek out the mothers, encourage them, succor them, and give them the means to be mothers in fact as well as in name. At that moment, however, Mathieu did not reason; it was his heart that was affected, filled with growing pity and anguish at the thought of ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... the reproduction of ancient Athens. The American system is not that of any of the simple forms of government, nor any combination of them. The attempt to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of government recognized by political writers, is an attempt to clothe the future in the cast-off garments of the past. The American system, wherever practicable, is better than monarchy, better than aristocracy, better than simple democracy, better than any possible combination of these several forms, because it accords more nearly with the principles ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... way to the rear, Kline discovered a Spanish sharpshooter in a tree and shot at him. The Spaniard fell dead, and Kline picked up a silver-mounted revolver, which fell from the man's clothes, as a souvenir, which he highly prizes. Several of the Spanish sharpshooters had picked up cast-off clothing of the American soldiers, and wore them while they were ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes

... presented to Charley by a poor wandering Indian, to whom he had been in the habit of giving such little matters as his means would allow. Sometimes a little tobacco for his pipe, a pair of his father's cast-off boots or a half-worn pair of stockings, and sometimes he would beg of his mother a fourpence, which instead of purchasing candy for himself was slid into the hand of his aboriginal friend, and whenever he came, a good warm dinner ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... hardly fill out your clinging bodices, all askew, and how your hips are not yet grown to support your skirts properly—draggle-tails! I see you taking the morning's milk from the hearty milkman, or going an errand in your apron and a coat too small for you, or in your mistress's or mother's cast-off jacket, out at the seams, puffy-sleeved, years behind the fashion and awry at the shoulders because it is too big. I see your floppety hat which you cannot pin down tightly to your hair, because there isn't enough of it;—your courageous attempts ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... part in the process of menstruation; their mucous membrane is swollen, the epithelium is shed in places, and they are filled with a thin bloody fiuid, containing blood-corpuscles and cast-off epithelium cells. ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... inhabited by the unknown for the hour at which letters were distributed. In order to be able to spy at his ease and hang about the house, he had followed the example of those police officers who seek a good disguise, and bought up cast-off clothes of an Auvergnat, the appearance of whom he sought to imitate. When the postman, who went the round of the Rue Saint Lazare that morning, passed by, Laurent feigned to be a porter unable to remember the name of a person to whom he had to deliver a parcel, and consulted the postman. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... and girls were wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these little creatures wore, with an odd involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off best drew of some happier child, a gay little garment cut low in the neck and short in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesque effect of having been at a party the night before. Presently came two jaded women, a mother and a grandmother, that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... exclaimed the beetle. "Fly about as a butterfly, indeed! what of that. I have come out of the Emperor's stable, and no one there, not even the Emperor's horse, who, in fact, wears my cast-off golden shoes, has any idea of flying, excepting myself. To have wings and fly! why, I can do that already;" and so saying, he spread his wings and flew away. "I don't want to be disgusted," he said to himself, "and yet I can't help it." Soon after, he fell ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... that costume, for the boy in the black velvet might have stepped bodily from the pages of sheerest romance. There were red-topped boots upon the slim feet which the day before had been encased in Old Tom's cast-off brogans; these were ruffed cuffs of sheerest white linen at brown and sinewy wrists, and burnished silver buttons down the front of the jacket for the silken corded clasps which fastened it across his small chest—silver buttons to match upon ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... transported to Chicago. She remarked that she might find use for the material some day, and it was prudent to look to the future. I am sorry to say that Mrs. Lincoln's foresight in regard to the future was only confined to cast-off clothing, as she owed, at the time of the President's death, different store bills amounting to seventy thousand dollars. Mr. Lincoln knew nothing of these bills, and the only happy feature of his ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley

... the captive flight—had changed her woefully. Yet now, as when we had stood together at the bar of Colonel Tarleton's court, I saw her pass from mood to mood in the turning of a leaf, her natural terror slipping from her like a cast-off garment, and a sweet dignity coming to clothe her in a queenlier robe, making her, as I would think, more ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... mind wearing that beautiful crepe de chine which is not becoming to you? Well, Mate, I suppose there was a day when I would have scorned anybody's cast-off clothes, but I pledge you my word a queen in her coronation robes never felt half so grand as I feel in that dress! Somehow I seem to assume some of your personality, I look tall and graceful and dignified, and I try to imagine how it feels to be good and intellectual, and fascinating, and besides ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... Konigstein's pompous chasseur. His object in forming this connection was to gain an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the duties of a gentleman's servant, and in this he has succeeded. About a week since, he purchased from Ernstorff a large quantity of cast-off apparel of the Baron's, and other perquisites of a great man's valet; among these were some playing cards which had been borrowed one evening in great haste from the servant of that rascal De Boeffleurs, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... but with a certain amount of native talent which raised him above the level of the majority of his class. I can see him now in his place Sunday after Sunday, rigged out in a suit of my father's cast-off clerical garments—a kind of "set-off" to him at the lower end of the church. In his earlier days Wren had played a flute in the village instrumental choir, and to the last he might be heard whiling away spare moments on a Sunday in the church (for he ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... Acropolis made the whole of Europe seem tawdry. I felt ashamed of the gorgeous sights I had seen, of the rich dinners I had eaten, of the luxuries I had enjoyed. I felt as if I would like to have the whole of my past life fall away from me as a cast-off garment, and that if I could only begin over I could do so much better with my life. I could have knelt and beat my hands together in a wild, impotent prayer for the past to be given into my keeping for just one ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell

... not a flower that can compare with the laurels which fame places on the brow of the conqueror. It is well for me that I am ten years your senior, else I should have been obliged to come behind you, Eugene, and pick up your cast-off leaves." ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach

... clothes were always better than the other little fellows, who ran around in their shirttails because I was always in the house of the "Widow." They used red clay to do the dyeing with. In the winter time cracked feet were common. The grown people wore heavy shoes called brogans while I wore the cast-off shoes of the white ladies. We all wrapped our feet in bagging sacks to help them to keep warm. We were given one complete outfit of clothes each year and these had to last until the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... taking any of your cast-off louts on our side," retorted the other brother, who evidently belonged to the slighted side; "yes— shocking bad form it was—and when he turned them down at last, they found seventy-four nibs, fifty matches, and ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed

... hang back, like one in a dream, Who vainly strives to clothe himself aright, That in great presence he may seemly seem? Why call up feeling?—dress me in the faint, Worn, faded, cast-off nimbus of some saint? Why of old mood bring back a ghostly gleam— While there He waits, love's heart and ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald

... out, twisted a bit here, a bit there, ripped open seam after seam, patched and repatched with stuffs and stitches of its own; and then wore the whole thing as it had never been intended to be worn; until this cast-off poetic apparel, stretched on the freer moral limbs of natural folk, faded and stained by weather and earth into new and richer tints, had lost all its original fashionable stiffness, and crudeness of colour, and niminy-piminy fit, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... a retired shelf, and in many an odd corner, too, I saw neglected cartridge boxes, cast-off belts, discarded caps, etc., which told, not of the careless and heedless soldier, who had lost his accoutrements, but of the dead soldier, who had gone to a land where it is to be hoped he will have no further use for Minie rifle balls or pipe-clayed ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... hot for them. Captain Leisler, supported by Steve Brodie and everything south of the Harlem, but bitterly opposed by the aristocracy, who were distinguished by their ability to use new goods in making their children's clothes, whereas the democracy had to make vests for the boys from the cast-off trousers of their fathers, governed the province until Governor ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye

... illustrated novels. But rustic origin and lack of cultivation were evident from the stains on the backs of her unshapely hands; from her broad, flat, finger-nails; and from her large ungainly feet, quite out of harmony with the pair of stylish boots she was wearing—cast-off articles, doubtless, of the lady. She was pretty, nevertheless, with a fresh exuberance of youth. Her large, gray, credulous eyes were those of a stupid but playful lamb; her hair, straight, and a very ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... my life," she said; "and I was so young, so ignorant, and loved you so. You betrayed me, and left me mocking me and trampling me into the dust, a soiled cast-off. You might better have killed me then. Then I should ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... he never met Della it would be glorious to join this lion-hearted band, whose symbol was the ever-upborne Cross! But there had avalanched down upon this temporary glow such a storm of ridicule against Transubstantiation, worship of the Blessed Virgin and of dead men's bones and cast-off garments, and the putrified corruptions of the Man of Sin generally, that the one generous, struggling spark was extinguished. Of the great Protestant Foreign Missionary Society, for which so much money had been expended, so many millions of ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... way back up town, the street seemed full of Madeira. Even when some few of the satellites broke away from him and scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that could not stand the fire and the fizz and ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... my word, and a very good thing you must make of it; for I see you dressed like a gentleman from top to toe. Are you not ashamed to go about the world in such a trim, with honest folk, I dare say, glad to buy your cast-off finery second hand? Speak up, you dog," the man went on; "you can understand English, I suppose; and I mean to have a bit of talk with you before I march you ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... his indigent rooms in the Alle Petit Chat, and washed and dressed. (Fortunately, he had at no time a heavy beard, so did not have to shave in the evenings.) Well-dressed he was not, even in his evening clothes, which were a cast-off of his brother's, and not, as evening clothes should be, faultless; but still they passed, and ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay

... groping about on the top shelves of closets, peering into rag-bags, exasperating the lodgers with her persistence and importunity. She was collecting junks, bits of iron, stone jugs, glass bottles, old sacks, and cast-off garments. It was one of her perquisites. She sold the junk to Zerkow, the rags-bottles-sacks man, who lived in a filthy den in the alley just back of the flat, and who sometimes paid her as much as three cents a pound. The stone jugs, however, were worth ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... You may imagine, sir, that my blood has boiled beneath the punishment—that I have burned with indignation beneath the weight of it, undeserved and cruel as it was. Oh, sir! God has visited me these many years with sore affliction. I am a forlorn, disabled, cast-off creature—nothing lives viler than the thing I have become; and yet in this dark hour I thank my Maker with an overflowing grateful heart that He tied down my hands when they have tingled in my agony to return the father's blow. I never did—I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... said that, knowing mine, I should not either. Wasn't that it?" She fixed her eyes on him as though to hold him to the truth. Perhaps she wanted his verbal recognition of the possibility that she, too, like others, might have left things in the past she would like to forget on their merits—cast-off garments on the road of life. It may have been painful to her to feel his faith in herself an obstacle to what she wished at least to hint to him, even if she could not tell him outright. She did not want too much divine worship at her shrine—a ready recognition of her position of mortal ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... she; "I preferred to live with Mademoiselle Angelique. She is a lady, a beauty, who dresses to surpass any picture in the book of modes from Paris, which I often looked at on her dressing-table. She allowed me to imitate them, or wear her cast-off dresses, which were better than any other ladies' new ones. I have one of them on. Look, aunt!" Fanchon spread out very complacently the skirt of a pretty blue ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... SPILLER has entered shortly after MRS. KRAUSE. She is small, slightly deformed and gotten up in her mistress's cast-off garments. While MRS. KRAUSE is speaking she looks up at her with a certain devout attention. She is about fifty-five years old. Every time she exhales her breath she utters a gentle moan, which is regularly audible, even when ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... heaven could wish them to return in such wise as this? The very instinct of a sacred sorrow seems to forbid that our beautiful, our glorified ones should stoop lower than even to the medium of their cast-off bodies, to juggle, and rap, and squeak, and perform mountebank tricks with tables and chairs; to recite over in weary sameness harmless truisms, which we were wise enough to say for ourselves; to trifle, and banter, and jest, or to lead us through ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... on; we have seen your faces. We have had the carnival of the Commune, and now Ash-Wednesday is come. You disguised yourselves cunningly, Messieurs; you routed out from the old cupboards and corners of history the cast-off revolutionary rags of the men of '98; and, sticking some ornaments of the present fashion upon them,—waistcoats a la Commune and hats a la Federation,—you dressed yourselves up in them and then struck attitudes. People perceived, it is true, that the clothes ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... The yard was attractive but the house (infested by the family of a poor renter) was repulsive. The upstairs chamber in which I had slept for so many years presented a filthy clutter of chicken feathers, cast-off furniture and musty clothing. Our ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... was, a deep flush spread over her face. Mrs. Wilkins kissing her and the kiss feeling so affectionate. . . Even if she had wanted to she could not in the presence of the appreciative Mr. Briggs resume her cast-off severity and begin rebuking again; but she did not want to. Was it possible Mrs. Wilkins like her— had liked her all this time, while she had been so much disliking her herself? A queer little trickle ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... unused to even the most trivial luxuries. She had never possessed a rich or complete costume in her life; and there was a wondrous novelty in the anticipation of wearing dresses that were not remodelled from Pamela's or her mother's cast-off garments. ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett

... fork in hand for the sake of a little gentle exercise. One unhappy Jacques Bonhomme made hot and toilsome hay in thick brown clothes, plainly manufactured from a defunct Brother's gown; for, to judge from appearances, a cast-off gown is a thing unknown. It was good to see a Brother, in horn spectacles of mediaeval cut, tenderly chopping a log for firewood, and peering at it through his spectacles after each stroke, as a man examines some delicate piece of natural machinery with ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... soldiers were slowly shifted from the scene. But scarcely anyone noticed the silent man, hard at work in his shirt sleeves in a corner of the adjutant's room, and such inquiries as were made concerning him elicited the information that he was a cast-off of the regular army, with a dubious reputation for sobriety, who had been hired as a clerk. But the Governor of Illinois was an intelligent man, and he was well aware of the service which the ex-Captain of regulars was performing ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill

... there are no men in this world who so reverence good women as those who are notorious for their illicit amours. I am not, of course, speaking of the consorts of common courtesans, of human hogs; but of the men who people the red-light district with their cast-off mistresses. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... of these happenings, had just finished exercising his men on the smooth green in front of the Castle of Crichton, and had dismissed them, when a gaberlunzie or privileged beggar, a long lank rascal with a mat of tangled hair, and clad in a cast-off leathern suit which erstwhile some knight had worn under his mail, leaped suddenly from the shelter of a hedge. Instinctively Sholto laid his hand ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... seamstresses sat sewing all day in sight of the street, reminding the Parisians of seraglios, were never empty of those who had money to spend. For leaner purses, the women who sat under umbrellas in front of the Colonnade of the Louvre had bargains of cast-off clothing; and there were booths along the quays on Sunday, and a fair in the Place de la Greve on Monday.[Footnote: Mercier, viii. 269, ix. 294, v. 281, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... with certain titled people from abroad, whose shoes he had had the honor of polishing. The only person in whose presence he restrained his braggadocio style was Phillis. Her utter contempt for nonsense was too evident. Bacchus was the same size as his master, and often fell heir to his cast-off clothes. A blue dress-coat and buff vest that he thus inherited, had a great effect upon him, bodily and spiritually. Not only did he swagger more when arrayed in them, but his prayers and singing ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman

... shrunk that they would not meet the boot, displaying feet where the elastic sides wriggled like living vermin, and ankles covered with vermicelli dipped in ink; then the most impossibly threadbare and discoloured coats, made, as it seemed, of old billiard cloths, of tarpaulin worn to the canvas, of cast-off awnings; overcoats of cast iron, the surface worn off the back-seam and sleeves—glaucous waistcoats, sprigged with flowers and furnished with buttons of dry brawn-parings; and all this was as nothing; what was prodigious, beyond the bounds of belief, fabulous, positively ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... fantastically garbed in faded blue denim which had evidently been refashioned from cast-off wearing apparel of their sires, followed after him, hand in hand, as if the advent of a stranger on the Rattler grounds was an event of interest, and he found himself facing a squat, red, white-bordered, one-storied building, over whose door a white-and-black sign told the stranger, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... tree, and afraid to use more of my own clothes, I went over to Mrs. Walters, and got from her an old bonnet and veil, a dress and cape, and a pair of her cast-off yellow gaiters. These garments I strung together and prepared to look life-like, as nearly as a stuffing of hay would meet the inner requirements of the case. I them seated the dread apparition in the fork of a limb, and awaited results. The first thief ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen

... as though they were not in a wicked world at all, and then a piano-organ that redoubled his watchfulness, and spoilt some tunes for him for ever. Once he did hear shambling feet on the very steps outside. Once was quite enough, though it was but an advertisement for cast-off clothing (and false teeth) that came fluttering through the letter-box. Pocket was left in such a state that he would not have backed himself to hit the door from the stairs; and he put the chain on it, thinking to interview the doctor over that, in ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung



Words linked to "Cast-off" :   throwaway, discarded, thrown-away



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