"Villainous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (8vo) was issued on the 5th of December 1812. Just turned twenty-four he "found himself famous," a great poet, a rising statesman. Society, which in spite of his rank had neglected him, was now at his feet. But he could not keep what he had won. It was not only "villainous company," as he put it, which was to prove his "spoil," but the opportunity for intrigue. The excitement and absorption of one reigning passion after another destroyed his peace of mind and put him out of conceit with himself. His first affair of any moment was with Lady Caroline Lamb the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... me a muffler to tie round my neck and lower part of my face and, with that greasy hat pulled down over my eyes and in those worn and shrunken clothes, I must say I looked a pretty villainous person, the very antithesis of the sleek, well-dressed young fellow that had entered the ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... applied when inferior, cheap, worthless could be used as its synonyms? To what is it applied when debased, impure, spurious, alloyed, counterfeit could be used? When mean, despicable, contemptible, shameful, disgraceful, dishonorable, discreditable, scandalous, infamous, villainous, low-minded could be used? When ignoble, servile, slavish, groveling, menial could be used? When plebeian, obscure, untitled, vulgar, lowly, nameless, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... he was following Josephine, that all the passengers in the train were cut-throats and accomplices of Loupart's mistress? Yet, five minutes after these sage reflections, Fandor started again; he had distinctly seen, passing along the corridor, two fellows with villainous faces and suspicious demeanour. One of them cast into Fandor's compartment such a murderous glance that it ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... in some instances where a man had an exceptionally villainous cast of countenance, or was exceptionally deformed, as much as twenty francs were ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... mock marriage of romance, the deceits practised on the stage and in novels upon the innocent, she believed in without hesitation, everything in the world being more comprehensible than impurity. There might be villainous men, betrayers, seducers, Lucy could not tell; there might be monsters, griffins, fiery dragons, for anything she knew; but a woman abandoned by all her natural guard of modesties and reluctances, moved by passion, capable of being seduced, she could not understand. And still more ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... broke up the grey light pleasantly too. I remembered a little shop—a little Greek affair with a windowful of pinch-beck—where I had been given a false five-franc piece years and years ago. The same villainous old Levantine stood in the doorway, perhaps the fez that he wore was the same fez. The little old woman that we strolled to was bent nearly double. Her nose touched her wares as often as not, her mittened hands sought quiveringly the papers that the correspondent asked for. I liked him ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... After the capture of Cartagena in 1697, the organization of these intrepid, daring, and able freebooters disrupted, and the glory waned and vanished; the degeneracy was rapid and complete, till cut-throats and villainous outlaws took the place of ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... however low in the scale of prices, is still lower in the scale of values. In fact, there is but one thing connected with the spurious stuff, lower in any scale, and that is the honesty of those who manufacture or knowingly sell such a villainous compound to farmers, who are utterly ignorant upon the subject, under solemn assurances, that it "is equal to any guano in market, and only a little ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... was Jack o' Judgment who—well, perhaps I'd better not tell you that, because officially, I am not supposed to know it. At any rate, Stafford," he said more seriously, "we have seen the smashing of one of the most iniquitous, villainous gangs that ever existed. God knows how many broken hearts there are in England to-day, how many poor souls who have been brought to a suicide's grave through the machinations of Colonel Boundary and his tools. I do not think there has been a more immoral ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... or, "Nannie, do that," or, "Nannie, mind the baby," all the live-long time, when he was sufficiently sober to know what was going on about him; and if the tired little feet loitered at all at his bidding, a wicked oath or a villainous blow hastened her weary steps. "What was she born for, any way?" She looked down upon the face of the sleeping babe whose cradle her foot was rocking, but it gave her no satisfactory answer. It was not a bright rosy-cheeked thing such as she met every day just round the ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... and intolerant spirit,—this over-bearing, boasting spirit, was it, that cowardly attacked a Christian Senator, while seated unsuspectingly at his desk, and felled him to the floor, bleeding and senseless? Was not the villainous blow which fell upon the honored head of CHARLES SUMNER, dealt by the infamous Brooks of South Carolina, aimed at the free speech of the entire North? Was it, think you, a personal enmity that the cowardly scoundrel had toward our worthy Northern Senator, ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... suggested his host. "Her face is her fortune. She's sitting to Brierly—that's my host—for his latest effort. He's painting her as the Madonna or Britannia—I really forget which. A new type, you know. The servants in this house are engaged for their faces. They had a villainous scoundrel of a man-servant—a returned soldier—engaged as Judas Iscariot, who bolted last week with the silver spoons. But all this is beside the point, Mr. Barrant, and I must not waste your time. You have come here for a specific purpose—to turn ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... Irish girl, when they found themselves five minutes later being rolled away in one of the villainous Zurich cabs, "begin away back in the early days of our sad separation and tell me everything that has happened ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... mahogany and rosewood, and suggest the varnish of newness which the place would otherwise sadly lack. The quarter in which it stands is not a specially suspicious one by day, but at night it is ill calculated to inspire confidence. There are villainous-looking, slouching wretches about, who eye you curiously and not too amiably. The theatre has had its day of splendor, but is now a frowzy-looking concern—very roomy, somewhat suggesting the Old Bowery Theatre, but lacking its cheerful aspect. The audience ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Young Wild West was a prisoner so elated the villainous leader of the outlaw gang that he felt like giving a ...
— Young Wild West at "Forbidden Pass" - and, How Arietta Paid the Toll • An Old Scout
... I regret is," added the vixenish Spaniard, "that the bullet of my watchman did not end your villainous life." ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... keys and presented them to him. "These keys," said I, "are not so bad after all; they cannot turn an honest soldier, like you, into a villainous sgherro." ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... sure," said the lady thoughtfully. "If they could see what I have just seen they might possibly do it There is a young woman dying this minute down in that villainous cloak-room." ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... just yet," laughed the captain. "However, as soon as this villainous weather is a bit abated, I'll be off across the Island to do your little errand, and only ask a kiss of the bride for my pains; but if the parson be at Portsmouth there will be no getting him to budge ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a good way to stop up that villainous spy-hole," said Harry, and looked around the cell for something which ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Ruggiero said, when the last had given his testimony; "and I now ask your excellencies, whether it is right that a gentleman, of good family, should be exposed to a villainous accusation of this kind, on the barest grounds ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... courage as the Keith house came into view, and breaking a long, frightened silence, "Mary, did you ever see any one so villainous-looking in your life—outside of the movies, I mean? I guess my heart will never stop thumping! I wish Virginia had been with us! She's always saying there's no one around here to harm any one. ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... wind and mist, against which we paddled three miles to Duck Point, a slender finger of wooded sand and boulder reaching half a mile out, at whose junction with the main land is a miserable village of most villainous-looking Indians. One man alone could speak a little English, and through him we negotiated for replenishing our provisions. Meantime, the storm freshened and embargoed an eight-mile journey across an open ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... cargo of slaves and villainous prisoners, found themselves in a very trying position, requiring the full exercise of all their wits and energies. Probably, had Adair had time to consider, he would not have left them with so small a force on board; but his eagerness to overtake the other dhow prevented him from reflecting on the ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... likeness of Medusa; but all her prayers and tears were ineffectual; victim of force and rage.—-The cruel leader of these fiends had just effected his diabolical intentions, when a sudden noise of the trampling of horses and the distant voices of men, forced them to fly. Fear, the companion of villainous actions, made them abandon their prey, and make off with incredible swiftness, so that the wretched Princess soon lost sight of them; but her irremediable misfortune, too present to her mind, to vanish with the authors of it, disordered her senses so cruelly, that abhorring herself, and believing ...
— The Princess of Ponthieu - (in) The New-York Weekly Magazine or Miscellaneous Repository • Unknown
... musing, until her attendants had retired; and then, throwing herself on her knees before the knight, she shewed him all the adventure. Hardly would Carogne believe the treachery of his companion; but, when convinced, he replied, "Since it is so, lady, I pardon you; but the knight shall die for this villainous deed." Accordingly, Jaques le Grys was accused of the crime, in the court of the earl of Alencon. But, as he was greatly loved of his lord, and as the evidence was very slender, the earl gave judgment against the accusers. Hereupon ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... rumors of violence were bringing much uneasiness to persons who were under responsibilities. Baltimore was the place where, and its villainous "Plug Uglies" were the persons by whom, the plot, if there was one, was to be executed. Mr. Felton, president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Company, engaged Allan Pinkerton ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... taken up with Dick of Devonshire. Then follows an unnamed play (leaves 52-73), written in a villainous hand. If I succeed in transcribing this play I shall print it in the third volume, for it seems to be an unpublished play of Heywood's. The next piece, entitled Calisto (leaves 74-95), which is written in the same hand, consists of scenes from Heywood's Golden Age ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... It was very brief, but entirely clear and to the point. His father had left to him without conditions, everything of which he died possessed. The will was dated in June of the previous summer—he recalled a two days' absence of his father's at that time—and was witnessed, in a villainous hand, by Timothy Queed. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... a billet in some pirate breast sooner or later, one of the villainous desperadoes falling over his oar here and another dropping down on the bamboo deck of a junk there; while, occasionally, some wretch would tumble overboard with a wild yell, in answer to the ping of the rifle, shot ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... determined to destroy them. When the angels came to Sodom, the people showed the most villainous and depraved appetites. The angels warned Lot to flee. Blindness (darkness?) came upon the people of the city, so that they could not find the doors of the houses. The angels took Lot and his wife and ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... memory to the days of old, when we used to sit in the garden on a summer evening at Barnes, and slip down the lawn to the boat-house, that we might launch the dear old pater's wherry, and have a moonlight trip, with soft singing of part songs, to which I know I growled a villainous bass. Dear pater, had he lived I might have stayed in the old country, and tried to keep up the old place; but I fear I should have disappointed him, and so—well, all may be for ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... thou wilt, honest Tony," replied Varney; "for be it according to thine absurd faith, or according to thy most villainous practice, it cannot choose but be rare matter to qualify this cup of Alicant. Thy conversation is relishing and poignant, and beats caviare, dried neat's-tongue, and all other provocatives that ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... to determine its origin; but our private opinion is that the word is a corruption of Punch-brook. Perhaps, at some remote period in the history of the town, before the Sons of Temperance obtained a foothold in the place, a villainous mixture, known to topers under the general appellation of "punch," may have been largely consumed by the Pinchbrookers. Though not a very aged person ourself, we have heard allusions to festive occasions where, metaphorically, ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... terrible events. Time is the best physician, and would, I trusted, heal the wounds produced by those days of torture; yet my mind to-day recoils with undiminished horror as I endeavor to speak of this dreadful subject. Heretofore I have never attempted to refute the villainous slanders which have been circulated and published about me. I feel it my duty to make this statement, however, because I am convinced of your willingness to do justice to all who were concerned in that dreadful affair, and heretofore I have ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... hands with and thanked the chief, and directed that all the loads should be placed inside the huts. I must admit my good friend was a villainous-looking savage, but he behaved most hospitably and kindly. From what I had heard of the Fan, I deemed it advisable not to make any present to him at once, but to base my claim on him on the right of an amicable stranger to hospitality. When I had seen all the baggage stowed I went outside ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... a hatred that was almost unnatural. It was a physical repulsion like that which people sometimes have for certain animals. What can have happened to change it into so great a love that it has made her capable of such villainous acts?' ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... a sense, a transition play from the dramatic satires of the war of the theatres to the purer comedy represented in the plays named above. Its subject is a struggle of wit applied to chicanery; for among its dramatis personae, from the villainous Fox himself, his rascally servant Mosca, Voltore (the vulture), Corbaccio and Corvino (the big and the little raven), to Sir Politic Would-be and the rest, there is scarcely a virtuous character in the play. Question ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage,—he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury—a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged—the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life—must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbour ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... much in appearance—with a boyish growth of beard over my chin, and my hair as long as a poet's—that a villainous-looking man who came in and asked for whiskey failed to recognize me; but I knew him at once as being the man who had escaped from ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... twenty-four hours, ordering him to select the best materials of his command, to start at once, ford the Little Tennessee, and push into Knoxville at whatever cost of life and horse-flesh. Major Audenried was ordered to go along. The distance to be traveled was about forty miles, and the roads villainous. Before day they were off, and at daylight the Fifteenth Corps was turned from Philadelphia for the Little Tennessee at Morgantown, where my maps represented the river as being very shallow; but it was found too deep for fording, and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... mysterious way are so disposed of that their masters never hear of them again. It is possible the two saw-bones, who officiate at the hospital, dissect, or desiccate, or boil them in the interest of science, or in the manufacture of the villainous compounds with which they dose us when ill. At any rate, we know that many of these sable creatures, who joined us at Bowling Green and on the road to Nashville, can not now be found. Their masters, ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... had thrust in their villainous faces for the last time, according to their custom, and all had lain down as ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... corner." The Covenanters had made a raid on the ammunition of the Cavaliers. "I have given," adds Sir Walter, "an infernal row on the subject of hiding books in this manner." Sharpe replies that the "villainous biographer of John Knox" (Dr. McCrie), "that canting rogue," is about to edite Kirkton. Sharpe therefore advertised his own edition at once, and edited Kirkton by forced marches as it were. Scott reviewed the book in the Quarterly (Jan. 1818). He remarked that Sharpe "had not escaped ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that villainous kind of courtesy which the agents of the coup d'etat willingly blended with their crime, "you must be uncomfortable with those three men in the fiacre. You are cramped; come in ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... covet and desire the honours and offices in a state for the sake of the liberty thereby given them to embezzle the public moneys, to deal violently by their fellow-creatures, and to batten in luxury themselves, may well be regarded as unjust and villainous persons incapable of harmony with one another. But if a man desire to obtain these selfsame honours in order that, being himself secure against wrong-doing, he may be able to assist his friends in what is right, and, raised to a high position, (20) may essay to confer some blessing on the land ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... made her sit down on the bench and resume her knitting; then, passing behind her with a laugh, he placed it over her own shoulders; after which he moved to and fro before her, his hands in his pockets and his cigarette in his teeth. He was ashamed of the cigarette—a villainous false note; but she allowed, liked, begged him to smoke, and what he said to her on it, in one of the pleasantries she benevolently missed, was that he did so for fear of doing worse. That only showed how the end was really in sight. "I dare say it will strike you as quite awful, what ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... wench to do his bidding. I verily believe that, but for my being on the watch and speaking a word to two or three stout yeomen of the king's guard that chanced to be crushing a pot of sack at the Garter, he would have played some villainous trick on us. They gave a hint to my Lord of York's steward and he came down and declared that the Archbishop required Quipsome Hal, and would—of his grace—send a purse of nobles to the Fire-eater, wherewith he was to be ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his way towards a copse on the squire's demesne. The quick eye of the Peregrine family was the first to view him, and forthwith both Bill and his brother screamed in unison: "What's that sneaking across Smoke Acre yonder? 'Tis a fox—a great, lanky, thieving, villainous ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... decaying timbers of the car track the boys discussed in whispers the possibility of aiding Skip to escape from his unenviable position, with never a thought of the deed with which Billings was to crown his villainous career. ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... obliged to look there, and besides she would not but be like the Arundels, and was well satisfied with the consciousness of having their features, as indeed she would have been if their noses had been turned up and their "foreheads villainous low." If her vanity was gratified, it was by standing apart from, and being able to look down on the rest of the world; and as Marian became conscious of this, her mind turned from it with the vexation of spirit, the disgust and sensation of dislike, and willingness to forget all about it, that ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... villainous-appearing ruffians I have ever set eyes upon sat about the dugout as I entered. Two of them I recognized at once as teamsters who had been employed by Simpson a few months before. Both had been charged with murdering a ranchman ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... both by history and by tradition, to the bigoted Sikander. (A.D. 1396.) He was reigning at the period of Timur's invasion of India, with whom he exchanged friendly presents, and from whom, I suppose, he may have received a present of the VILLAINOUS SALTPETRE. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... had changed her coiffure which had displeased me, and told me how she had passed the day arranging her hair to suit my taste; how she had taken down a villainous black picture frame that had offended my eye; how she had renewed the flowers; she recounted all she had done since she had known me, how she had seen me suffer and how she had suffered herself; how she had thought of leaving the country, of fleeing from her love; how she had employed ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... returned. It was a delicious winter night. Even so far as from the cab to the door they were powdered thickly with the big flakes downpouring diagonally from the east. Old Jerome growled good-naturedly about villainous cab service and blockaded streets. Nevada, colored like a rose, with sapphire eyes, babbled of the stormy nights in the mountains around dad's cabin. During all these wintry apostrophes, Barbara, cold at heart, sawed wood—the ...
— Options • O. Henry
... him. Huish sat there preening his sinister vanity, glorying in his precedency in evil; and the villainous courage and readiness of the creature shone out of him like a candle from a lantern. Dismay and a kind of respect seized hold on Davis in his own despite. Until that moment he had seen the clerk always hanging back, always ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by the sentence of the law, They had commission to seize all thy fortune.— Here stood a ruffian with a horrid face, Lording it o'er a pile of massy plate, Tumbled into a heap for public sale;—There was another, making villainous jests At thy undoing; but had tacit possession Of all thy ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... from the guilty Herbert had come so straight from the heart that even the villainous ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... mean. You've always said I go crazy when I'm—angry. Well, that's true. But it's nothing more than a villainous temper. ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... poisonous &c. (morbific) 657[obs3]; deadly &c. (killing) 361; destructive &c. (destroying) 162; inauspicious &c. 859. bad, ill, arrant, as bad as bad can be, dreadful; horrid, horrible; dire; rank, peccant, foul, fulsome; rotten, rotten at the core. vile, base, villainous; mean &c. (paltry) 643; injured &c. deteriorated &c. 659; unsatisfactory, exceptionable, indifferent; below par &c. (imperfect) 651; illcontrived, ill-conditioned; wretched, sad, grievous, deplorable, lamentable; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... one of the minora sidera of this constellation of the Lakes; the host himself, a Maecenas of the school, contributing nothing but good dinners and silence. Charles Lamb, a clever fellow, certainly, but full of villainous and abortive puns, which he miscarries of every minute. Some excellent things, however, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... nor their country would be, by the carnal judgment, counted worthy of so great labor in their behalf. For they themselves are given much to lying, theft, and drunkenness, vain babbling, and profane dancing and singing; and are still, as S. Gildas reports of them, 'more careful to shroud their villainous faces in bushy hair, than decently to cover their bodies; while their land (by reason of the tyranny of their chieftains, and the continual wars and plunderings among their tribes, which leave them weak and divided, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... to the baron, he had every other requisite for carrying on his deception successfully. Though his parents were not wealthy, he had received a good education. He was so notorious for his gentleman-like manners among the villainous associates of his crimes and excesses, that they nicknamed him "the Prince." All his early life had been passed in the neighborhood of the Chateau Franval. He knew what were the circumstances which had induced the baron to leave it. He had been in the country ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... all a matter of dollars," Vine answered contemptuously. "There are other things worth thinking about. If I strike at you and your friends, it is not for the money or the notoriety I could make out of it. It is because I want to attack a villainous system, because I consider that you and Weiss and the rest of you are really doing your best to throttle the greatest country ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... whole the first poet to apply the principle to poetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that the truth had not been told until he had seen in the villain the pure and disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... their tracks upon it and find out their skulking retreats, and this caused them to make their way to their winter quarters, about two hundred miles further from any plantations or English inhabitants. There, after a long and tedious journey, in which I was almost starved, I arrived with this villainous crew. The place where we had to stay, in their tongue, was called Alamingo, and there I found a number of wigwams full of Indian women and children. Dancing, singing, and shooting were their general amusements, and they told what successes they had had in their expeditions, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... seemed divided by absurd distances, and the faces of the negro cooks who met me at the kitchen steps and relieved me of my burden. In the beginning I was accompanied on my rounds by a fat, smudge-nosed youth some six or eight years my senior, who smoked vile tobacco and enlivened the way by villainous abuses of John Chitling and the universe. For the first months, I fear, my outlook upon the customers I served was largely coloured by his narratives, but when at last he dropped off and went on a new job at the butcher's, ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... hobnails? Why cannot he carry his zeal for topsy-turvy horticulture elsewhere? He comes and lays a brutal hand on our pet growths, snips off their graces, shapes them anew according to his own ridiculous ideal, paints and varnishes them with a villainous compound of his contrivance, and then bids us admire the effect and thank him for its production! Is any name too hard for such a creature? and could any vengeance be too deadly? If he walked into your garden and amused ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... advance of congressional authorization, began a systematic course of Indian negotiation, all having in view the relieving of Kansas from her aboriginal encumbrance. No means were too underhand, too far-fetched, too villainous to be resorted to. Every advantage was taken of the Indian's predicament, of his pitiful weakness, political and moral. The reputed treason of the southern tribes was made the most of. Reconstruction measures had begun for ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... their owners.—Has this been owing to the pride, or to the shame of the respective proprietors?—In honest truth, I think sometimes to the one, and sometimes to the other, just as the temptation has wrought. But a villainous affair it is, and will one day so blend and confound us all together, that no one shall be able to stand up and swear, 'That his own great grandfather was the man who did either this ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... had begun the war—already had the echoes of "Bunker Hill," and the smell of "villainous saltpetre," invaded and aroused the quiet dwellers in the woods and wilds of South Carolina, and the chivalric spirit that has ever characterized the men of the Palmetto state, at once responded to the tocsin of liberty. It was with no slight degree of sorrow and aching of the mother's ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... among the ruins of Panama Morgan and his villainous followers departed, one hundred and seventy-five mules carrying their more bulky spoil, while with them were six hundred prisoners, some carrying burdens, others held to ransom. Thus laden, they reached again the mouth of the Chagres, where their ships awaited ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... I, noble Prefect," replied the shepherd, boldly. "They were led on by three as villainous rascals as go unhung, and these had with them a crowd of ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... his mortar saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur. The Chinese, to be sure, had invented gunpowder long before, but they—poor innocents—did not know of anything worse to do with it than to make it into fire-crackers. With the introduction of "villainous saltpeter" war ceased to be the vocation of the nobleman and since the nobleman had no other vocation he began to become extinct. A bullet fired from a mile away is no respecter of persons. It is just as likely to kill a knight as a ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... then wavering in shadows across the high arched ceiling. A few feet back from the wide high fireplace with its roaring flame were four men playing cards. They sat around a table, and three in appearance were villainous cutthroats, probably Mexicans by their dark visages, swaggeringly armed with knives and revolvers, with gaudy handkerchiefs knotted at ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... was the end of the brigands' adventure! The Planetara's last voyage! How small and futile are human struggles! Miko's daring enterprise—so villainous, inhuman—brought all in a few moments to this silent tragedy. The Planetara had fallen thirty thousand miles. But why? What had happened to Hahn? And where was Coniston, down in this ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... enough," replied the young man as, with his lace-edged, fashionable handkerchief, he dusted a chair for Marguerite to sit on; "but I vow I never saw a more villainous hole." ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... "Pork and pone" were the staples, the latter being a rather coarse cake with little or no seasoning, baked from cornmeal. This was varied by a compound called "shortcake," a mixture of flour and lard, rapidly baked in a pan, and eaten hot. Though not distasteful, I thought it as villainous a compound as a civilized man would ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... the bottle that contained the deadly culture. Another hour, perhaps less, and no power could save Roger from a torturing death, not even the certainty of what had caused it. Once an invisible touch of the villainous stuff penetrated the raw tissues of the wound, it would work its way straight into the blood-stream. Soon, very soon afterwards the jaw muscles would begin to stiffen.... Oh, if there were any sort of weapon in reach, knife, pistol, anything! She ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... whistle; the tramp, tramp of moving thousands on the stone sidewalks; away from the heated atmosphere of the city, loaded with the smoke and dust, and gasses of furnaces, and the ten thousand manufactories of villainous smells. We are beyond even the meadows and green fields. We are here alone with nature, surrounded by old primeval things. Tall forest trees, mountain and valley are on the right hand and on the left. Before us, stretching away for miles, is a beautiful lake, its waters calm and placid, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... poor and villainous," he says to himself, "than possess all the wealth of the Indies with a clear conscience. I will be a villain," he cries. "I will, at great expense and inconvenience to myself, murder the good old man, get the hero accused of the crime, and make love to ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered, with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... bought at his stall, adorned with blue and red wood-cuts. Poor Damon cut but a sorry figure in this goodly company; for though adorned with a crook secundum artem, he looked more rawboned and ugly than Holofernes, and more villainous than the wandering Jew: fully justifying the scorn with which the stiff-skirted Henriette seemed to treat him. It is almost misplaced however to enumerate such follies in a place, which on a fine day presents perhaps one of the most varied and magnificent views in the world: and which a person ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... natural creatures and put on the oppressive shrouds, wraps and disguises which we label in the villainous aggregate civilisation, we ceased to know either how to teach or how to learn. We exchanged the freedom and spaciousness of life for a cramped existence compounded of spectacles and bad grammar, this complicated still further by the multiplication ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... lord, that I should tamely submit to be a derided, outcast husband, that I should take no vengeance upon, that villainous Pope for having made me a thing of scorn, a byword throughout Italy?" Livid hate writhed in his fair young face. "Did you think I should, indeed, remain in Pesaro, whither I fled before their threats to my life, and present ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... Sedgwick Division Hospital, where were five hundred severely wounded men, and among the number, Major-General Sedgwick. Here she commenced preparing food for the wounded, but was greatly annoyed by a gang of villainous camp followers, who hung around her fires and stole everything from them if she was engaged for a moment. At last she entered the hospital, and inquired if there was any officer there who had the authority to order her a guard. ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... the person. The villainous expression was as strongly marked upon the features in death as it had ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... most of them would be paragons in the eyes of such persons as old Mrs. Wetmore and her grand-daughter. Thus it was, that the Greenwich Street Museum gave infinite satisfaction to these two unsophisticated visitors. Kitty was most struck with certain villainous wax-figures, works of art that were much on a level with certain similar objects that were lately, if they are not now, exhibited for the benefit of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, above the tombs of the Plantagenets, and almost in contact with that marvel ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... I said in alarm. "They're such a villainous-looking lot—so dirty—and they've got so little clothing on. I wouldn't sleep a wink near them. Look at that awful old squaw with only one eye. They'd steal everything we've got left, Kate. Remember the ham—oh, pray remember the fate ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... telling me that the were well disposed towards me ; and on my side I cheated him with a promise of confidence and, friendship which I never bestowed. Ah! my friend, again and again must I exclaim, what a villainous place is a court! Whilst the duc de la Vauguyon was seeking to enlist me under the banners of heaven or the Jesuits, the marquis of Chauvelin also essayed to make me his pupil; but as frank as he was amiable, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... injury must have been it was not enough to deter the villainous reptile from its purpose. On the contrary, it seemed to increase its speed. Other marauders, however, had been attracted to the scene of the combat, first by the struggle that they sensed from a distance and now by the blood that flowed freely from the lacerated throat of the crocodile. ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... in some transactions that would not bear the light of day, and when he unfolded the present scheme to him he found him ready to be his pliant instrument—willing to enter into any scheme, no matter how villainous its nature, if he could be sure of making something ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... with resentment. His heart was going like a trip-hammer. Could it be possible that his uncle would lend himself to such a villainous scheme? He could scarcely refrain from jumping through the window and denouncing the plotters ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... that no villainous bounty had yet come from him, that if he had given his wealth away unwisely, it had not been bestowed to feed his vices, but to cherish his friends; and he bade the kind-hearted steward (who was weeping) to take comfort in the assurance that his master ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of all assurances, he showed himself desirous only to see the last of my gun and me. I dare say "villainous saltpetre," as the great playwright calls it, was never so cheap before nor since. For my shilling Master Pooke afforded me two great packages over-large to go into my pockets, as well as a mighty chunk of lead, which I bound upon Peggy's withers. And as if all this had not been enough, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... much falsity. The worst kind of them is where the words are unlike in spelling, and even somewhat so in sound, and where the same reference cannot be made to suit both. Such are puns of the "atrocious" or "villainous" class—a fertile source of bad riddles. For instance, "Why is an old shoe like ancient Greece?" "Because it had a sole on (Solon)." Here the words are very dissimilar and the allusion is imperfect—the description of an old shoe ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... said right here, however, that Jack Belllounds, rough and villainous as he is, is the kind of cow-puncher who says to his father: "I still love you, dad, despite the cruel thing you did to me." No cow-puncher who says "despite" can be entirely bad. Neither ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... daily messages of fearless British journalists, such as Mr Hugh Martin, establish it beyond possibility of contradiction—that when the "Black and Tans" were let loose on the Irish people they began a villainous campaign of cowardly murder, arson, robbery and drunken outrage, which should have made all decent Englishmen and Englishwomen shudder for the deeds committed in their name. Whenever the particulars are fully disclosed ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... deeply flushed, sat down at the table, lit a cigar, and watched his villainous accomplice place the two cups of coffee with some biscuits on a tray, take it to Miss Remington's door ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... enough, because he was usually timid, but never applied a suitable remedy, because he had more fear than wisdom. He had wit, indeed, together with a most insinuating address and a gay, courtly behaviour; but a villainous heart appeared constantly through all, to such a degree as betrayed him to be a fool in adversity and a knave in prosperity. In short, he was the first minister that could be called a complete trickster, for which reason his administration, though successful and absolute, ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... the daughter of Virginius, a brave plebeian centurion, and claimed her on the pretense that she was the daughter of one of his slaves. Standing at his judgment-seat, Virginius, seeing that he could do nothing to save his child from the clutch of the villainous judge, plunged his dagger in her heart. This was the signal for another revolt of the people, which extorted the consent of the upper class to the sacred laws and the restoration of the tribuneship. It ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, Act ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... speak to Dorothy. He sat down by Leonore and talked, till a scoundrelly, wretched, villainous, dastardly, low-born, but very good-looking fellow carried off his treasure. Then he wended his ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... blacks and mulattoes, of every shade of brown and hue of olive or copper. Never had I seen people of so many nations and tribes brought together, while every one of them to my eyes appeared most villainous cut-throats. ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... it might have ruined his last faint hope of success had the two perplexed fathers met; Simmonds's recent outburst opposed an effectual bar to farther questioning; so Vanrenen was free to deduce all sorts of possibilities from the existence of yet another villainous chauffeur. ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... has been treated in the same way by a whole nation, and not, as lady among us, by the uncultivated only. It perhaps grew into use in the half-democratic republics of Italy in the same way and for the same reasons as with us. But I admit that our abuse of the word is villainous. I know of an orator who once said in a public meeting where bonnets preponderated, that 'the ladies were last at the cross and first at the tomb'! But similar sins were committed before our day and in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... a night, man, not a week to tell them. You men of words, dealers in breath, conceit Too bravely of yourselves;—O I know why You love to make man's life a villainous thing, And pose his happiness with heavy words. You mean to puff your craft into a likeness Of what hath been in the great days of the Gods. When Tiamat, the old foul worm from hell, Lay coiled and nested in the unmade world, ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... stove in the head of a barrel and splashed the whiskey in every direction. I was literally baptized with the noxious stuff. The intention was to set it on fire, and we had brought matches for that purpose, but it would not burn! It was a villainous compound of some sort, but we had set out to have a fire, and were determined by some means or other to make it burn, so we sent for some coal oil and poured it on and we soon had a blaze. The man who could sell such ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... to Nanterre, my lad," she said to him, "and look at my kitchen garden. I have put borders of thyme everywhere. How bad your villainous Paris ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... against the queen, calculated not merely to ruin her honour but destroy her life, he resolved to interfere. He therefore requested she would return to Whitehall, where she should be safe under his protection; and feeling assured Oates had received instructions from others more villainous than their tool, he ordered a strict guard to be kept upon him. This he was, however, obliged to remove next day at request of ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... reasoning! I could understand my precious intuition now; could analyze it into its trumpery constituents. It was the old story. Unconsciously I had built up the image of a particular kind of man, and when such a man appeared I had recognized him at a glance. The villainous Tartar face: I had looked for it. The fierce, furtive, hunted manner; the restless suspicion; the mop of grayish-brown hair. I had expected them all, and there they were. My man would have those peculiarities, and here was a man who ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... honestly at his mortar, salve a broken head, carry the country news about, and lie down at night with a tolerably quiet conscience. He may have hastened a patient to his account by a trifling over-dose; but he has not hurried men into villainous litigation, that will eventuate in their ruin. His worst offense against the community shall be a mistaking of toothache for tic-douloureux, and lumbago for gout—oh, d——n the gout!"—for at that portion of his speech the poor colonel ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... no sooner revived by the warmth than it turned upon its benefactor and inflicted a fatal bite upon him; and as the poor man lay dying, he cried, "I have only got what I deserved, for taking compassion on so villainous ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... tablet in the side of the road to commemorate the spot where poor Huskisson fell; I remembered it by the pools of dark-green water that, as we passed them then, made a dismal impression on me; they looked like stony basins of verdigris. How glad I was to see Chatmoss—that villainous, treacherous, ugly, useless bog—trenched and ditched in process of draining and reclaiming, with the fair, holy, healthy grain waving in bright green patches over the brown peaty soil! Next to moral conversion, and the reclaiming to their noble uses the perverted powers of human nature, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... of convicts was discovered, and he was taxed with it, he excused himself by declaring that to send them to Lundy was the same as sending them to America, so long as they were transported anywhere out of England. The termination of his villainous career in England was owing to a conspiracy to defraud an insurance company, a vulgar and inglorious crime without the element of danger and adventure which in some slight degree may be said to have invested the exploits of the other ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... hour from the officers' arrival the battalion was mustered on Main street, and only nine absentees were reported at roll-call; but many a fez was drawn far down over a bleeding forehead, and many a villainous countenance was lighted by one eye, while the other was closed ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... new material!' Everything—keep him posted as to new material—Bah! If I write that Hicks has brought a fellow he calls 'Thor,' who spreads the regulars over the field, Jack will want to know the details, and—that villainous Hicks won't divulge ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... moment that we do nothing which we are not obliged to do? Yes, just as when led by our deceitful mind we have arrived necessarily at a false idea, the fact of this thought being necessary does not prevent it from being false; we may have been led by necessity to commit a villainous action, but that does not prevent its being immoral. The passions are our imperfections, omissions, gaps in a soul which is not full of the idea of God and of universal order and the love of God and of universal order, and which, in consequence, lives individually—that ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... men had done to offend Mr. Hewson Clarke is not known, but surely the town in whose markets he had sold meat, and in whose weekly journal he had written prose deserved better treatment. Mr. H.C. should recollect the proverb "'tis a villainous bird that defiles his own nest." He now writes in the 'Satirist'. We recommend the young man to abandon the magazines for mathematics, and to believe that a high degree at Cambridge will be more advantageous, as well as profitable in the ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... optimist. Somehow love would find the way. But the second reason—the one she hid from herself deep in the darkest sub-cellar of her mind, was the real reason. It is one matter to wish for a person's death. Only a villainous nature can harbor such a wish, can admit it except as a hastily and slyly in-crawling impulse, to be flung out the instant it is discovered. It is another matter to calculate—very secretly, very unconsciously—upon a death that seems inevitable anyhow. Jane had only to look at her father ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... heavily-built fellow, clad in rags, and had as villainous a face as any they had ...
— The Bradys Beyond Their Depth - The Great Swamp Mystery • Anonymous
... time prosecute his avowed intention of foreclosing the mortgage on Daisy Burn. Perhaps there was something to be gained by dallying with the captain still—some further value to be sucked out of him in that villainous trap, the tavern bar, whither many a disappointed settler has resorted to drown his cares, and found the intoxicating glass ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... artistic picture approached the reality of such a man as Gianpaolo Baglioni, the incestuous murderer whom the Frolliere chronicler, enthusiastic like Matarazzo, admires, for "his most beautiful person, his benign and amiable manner and lordly bearing," it is certainly not the elaborately villainous Francesco Cenci of Shelley, boasting like another Satan of his enormous wickedness, exhausting in his picture of himself the rhetoric of horror, committing his final enormity merely to complete the crown ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... for though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears. That thou art my son, I have partly thy mother's word, partly my own opinion; but chiefly, a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me, here lies the point;—Why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at? Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... been my fault just as much," he declared, "and the fault of circumstances. I couldn't tell you the whole truth, but there has been a villainous conspiracy going on here. Draconmeyer, Selingman, and the Grand Duke were all in it and I have been working like a slave. Now it's all over, finished this morning on Richard's yacht. We've done what we could. I'm a free lance now and we'll ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Salviati's daughter, the widow of Giovanni de' Medici, "delle Bande Nere," who resided near Lorenzino, certainly heard loud cries which terrified her, but it was not an unusual occurrence. Lorenzino had, in his villainous scheme, devised a cunning decoy to accustom neighbours and passers-by to noisy behaviour. He had repeatedly gathered in his house groups of young men with swords, whom he instructed to cross their weapons as in serious self-defence, and to cry out "Murder!" ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... old man had a head like a stone and only laughed at me. Of course those villainous young students were only too delighted at a prospect of war, but it was a stupid and absurd. thing for the man to take his wife and daughter there. They are up there now. I can't get a word from them or ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... deeds of the race are writ on the faded scroll, The truest rivers of good from villainous fountains roll; The perfect raptures of life are reared in the arms of care, And Hope with her joys dispels the darkness ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... carouse with Tom Dalyell; while a fourth (and that was Jean's own father) died presiding at a Hell-Fire Club, of which he was the founder. There were many heads shaken in Crossmichael at that judgment; the more so as the man had a villainous reputation among high and low, and both with the godly and the worldly. At that very hour of his demise, he had ten going pleas before the Session, eight of them oppressive. And the same doom extended even to his agents; his grieve, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... last! I knew you would be true to me, Ned, my dear lad— I said so, over and over again; did I not, Manners? And now you are come with good tidings; I can see it in your face. What is it boy! Out with it. I have been terribly shaken by this villainous mutiny, but my nerves are yet strong enough to bear the shock of good news, so out with it; do not keep us in suspense, ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... rapidly diagnosing the case. 'By Jove, if he comes rotting about with me I'll kill him.' Having to do anything in a desperate hurry always made Charteris's temper slightly villainous. He turned the corner at a sharp trot, and came upon two youths who seemed to be engaged in the harmless occupation of trying to ride a bicycle. They were of the type which he held in especial aversion, the Rural Hooligan ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... the ugliest, most villainous-looking Koraks that it would have been possible to select in all the Penzhinsk Gulf settlements, and their obstinacy and sullen stupidity kept me in a chronic state of ill-humour from the time we left Kuil until we reached Penzhina. ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the familiar faces as she met them in the street, although she felt very far from smiling, and everywhere she seemed to see the face of Timothy Smith. Then her heart gave a bound as she saw, leaning against the wicket-gate of the village inn, three men—two with the most villainous faces she had ever seen, and the third bore the face of the man that Fanny had described as the pedlar. She was not mistaken, then, when she thought they ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... needed it, for I was caked with mud up to my knees and soaking wet up to my waist. For the first time in my life I was grieved to the bone at the inadequacy of my wardrobe, and even when I had donned my Sunday best my appearance was undoubtedly villainous from the London point of view. I feathered myself as finely as my resources permitted, but it was a homely, uncouth yeoman that raced downstairs and awaited her coming. I drew the curtains, lit the candles, kicked the fire into a blaze, and built it ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... find myself the victim of such a low, villainous joke, that had not even the pretence of wit, and I could have cried to see how that greasy string wriggled and snuffled ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... Smernovaya (or some such name) Hotel, a truly villainous place, though no doubt the best in the town. The feeding was very good, and everything else very bad. It was some consolation to find that as we sat at dinner we furnished a subject of the liveliest interest to six or seven waiters, all dressed in white tunics, belted ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... come with goods for sale in quest of orders, and some are very persistent and difficult to get rid of. A man professing to sell some artificial fertilizer called upon me with a small tin sample box, containing a mixture which emitted a most villainous odour. He sniffed with appreciation at the compound, probably consisting of some nitrogenous material such as wool treated with sulphuric or hydrochloric acid, and began his address. He had not gone far before ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... morning Noozak rose to her feet, and with a grunting command for Neewa to follow she slowly climbed the sun-capped ridge. She was in no mood for travel, but away back in her head was an unexpressed fear that villainous old Makoos might return, and she knew that another fight would do her up entirely, in which event Makoos would make a breakfast of Neewa. So she urged herself down the other side of the ridge, across a new valley, and through a cut that opened like a wide door into a rolling ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... the worse for liquor, and a more wretched, miserable, disgusting group of men I had never seen in any slum. Their clothes were rags. Their faces were bloated, bloody, and dirty. I won't say they were villainous. They were merely filthy and vile. They were vile of appearance, of ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... Beyond this, I remember with affection the ill-proportioned little Place des Hommes; not at all monumental, and given over to puddles and to shabby cafes. I recall with tenderness the tortuous and featureless streets, which looked liked the streets of a village and were paved with villainous little sharp stones, making all exercise penitential. Consecrated by association is even a tiresome walk that I took the evening I arrived, with the purpose of obtaining a view of the Rhone. I had been to Arles before, years ago, and ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Jesuit Father Rochefort, in his Histoire des Antilles, "that the Caribs have degenerated from the virtues of their ancestors, but it is also true that the Europeans, by their pernicious examples, their ill-treatment of them, their villainous deceit, their dastardly breaking of every promise, their pitiless plundering and burning of their villages, their beastly violation of their girls and women, have taught them, to the eternal infamy of the name of Christian, ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... the two boys were on their way to Christopher Gunwagner's, and as they passed hurriedly along the streets they formed a hasty plan for immediate action—a plan cunningly devised for outwitting this miserable old fence and his villainous companions. ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... villainous part of the whole conspiracy. Reddon, knowing full well that exposure was possible at any time, urged my stepfather to have you kidnaped and hurried off to some part of the world where you could never be found. Even Reddon did not have the courage to kill you. Neither had the heart ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... remember how it was proposed that Charles Walsh, of the Sons of Liberty, was to negotiate a purchase of the Chicago Post, and convert it to the same villainous purpose of ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... down upon him, he fell on his knees, and essayed, with unaccustomed lips, to murmur a prayer. But he was interrupted; for amid the deep silence succeeding the awful crash, a mocking laugh was heard, and the villainous countenance of Blackadder, rendered doubly hideous by the white lightning, was seen at the casement. The sight restored Sir Thomas at once. Drawing his sword he flew to the window, but before he could reach it Blackadder was gone. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... while on the ranch were also concerned with Del Pinzo, a villainous half-breed, who nearly succeeded in bringing the career of all to a sudden close. After successfully overcoming all their difficulties, Nort and Dick decided to form a partnership with their cousin Bud, and they ...
— The Boy Ranchers on Roaring River - or Diamond X and the Chinese Smugglers • Willard F. Baker
... love! Ah cruel would it be in man, after she has thus manifested such an unshaken confidence in him, and said by her determination to abandon all the endearments and blandishments of home, to act a villainous part, and prove a traitor in the revolution of his mission, and then turn Hector over the innocent victim whom he swore to protect, in the presence of Heaven, recorded by the pen ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... over with rusty bell buttons, and garnished with shabby gold lace, is the royal drummer and pounder of the tambourine. Joe, a wooden-legged Portuguese who lost his leg by a whale, is violinist; and Mordecai, as he is called, a villainous-looking scamp, going about with his cups and balls in a side pocket, diverts the court with his jugglery. These idle rascals receive no fixed salary, being altogether dependent upon the casual bounty of their ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... you!" the girl flamed up in his face. "Oh, villainous monster of vanity! For you! Ha! I could laugh! For you! I put mon Rafe—dead in his grave—to shame before all the world, called him murderer, blackened ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... confident tread, the true port and stature of a man. But who is this that follows in his track; under the same national sky, surrounded by the same institutions, and yet with those pinched features, that stunted form, that villainous look; is it Papuan, Bushman, or Carib? Fitly representing either of these, though born in a Christian city, and bearing about not only the stamp of violated physical law, but of moral neglect and baseness. And no one needs to be told that ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... spirit, he saw a light flitting about amongst the dead bodies, and stopping every now and then; once he saw it pause, and heard a cry of expostulation, then a faint scream, and all was still; and he comprehended that this was no ministering angel, but one of those villainous beings who haunt the battlefield to prey upon the slain, and to despatch with short mercy those ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... excellent sovereign, who had been deceived by evil counsellors, and who would be grateful to those who should bring the truth to his knowledge. He vehemently denied that he had called the grant to Lady Orkney villainous. It was a word that he never used, a word that never came out of the mouth of a gentleman. These assertions will be estimated at the proper value by those who are acquainted with Trenchard's pamphlets, pamphlets in which the shocking word villainous will without difficulty be found, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
