The lowering clouds outside, the creakings of the beams and rafters under the east wind, nor even the drab gloom of her surroundings seemed to dampen her sudden access of good nature.

I feel that you will be a very blithe and active gentleman in time, and there are not so many left in these drab days.

The white boys enjoy immensely the wit of the colored comrades, and many a bleak and drab day of privation and suffering is made a bit brighter by the humor that comes spontaneously to the lips of the 'bronze boys.' "The children of France love them.

" "Ay, it lay between that and an invisible green," the gentleman answered, losing his momentary spleen in his natural love of the ludicrous"but finding that the latter would be only too conspicuous in the droughts that sometimes prevail in this climate, I settled down into the yellowish drab, that is, indeed, not unlike some of the richer volumes of the clouds.

Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term, after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing.

The Colonel's dress was completed by drab overgaiters and poorly draped trousers of the same once-delicate hue.

But those there were who stood out from the rank and file, for whom she watched, whom she missed if they failed to put in appearance at their accustomed hours, about whom her idle but able imagination wove wonderful fantasies, enduing them with histories and environments as far removed from fact as the drab dreams of the realists are from the picturesque commonplaces of everyday.

She was worn out now, a tired, drab little woman, with no strength left to stand against adversity.

His high color had faded to a drab olive.

[Illustration: L'Envoi] Heavy skies lowered above us, the landscape seen through the driving mist-wreaths showed a depressing repetition of drabs and greys as we journeyed towards Calais.

" "How does thee do?" said Grandma Effingham, drawing her little drab shawl more closely around her shapely shoulders as she laid down her knitting.

The gleam of uniforms in a drab world, the upright bearing, the rattle of a kettledrum, the boom of a salute, the murmur of the "Dead March," the goodnight of the "Last Post" sounding over the home-faring traffic and the quiet cradlesone does not know by what substitutes eternal peace could exactly replace them.

She wore drab riding clothes.

For some days past our table has been glittering with these caskets of song and tale in their gay attire of silken sheen and burnished goldtill their splendour has fairly put out the light of our sinumbra, and the drabs, blues, and yellows of sober, business-like quartos and octavos.

Nearly every Quaker is descended on both sides solely from members of a group of men and women who segregated themselves from the rest of the world five or six generations ago; one of their strongest opinions being that the fine arts were worldly snares, and their most conspicuous practice being to dress in drabs.

I was ordained to be a wretched laughing-stock to all the world; and it is fit that our drabs and our servant wenches should have their share of the amusement.

Drabs and servant wenches!

[Footnote 19: 'He knew the narrowly religious, the mental barrenness of the poor dissenters, the people of the slums that he observed so carefully, and many of those on the borders of the Bohemia of which he at least was an initiate, and he was soaked and stained, as he might himself have said, with the dull drabs of the lower middle class that he hated.

He takes existence sadlytoo sadly, it may well be; but his drabs and greys provide an atmosphere that is almost inseparable to some of us from our gaunt London streets.

Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry, and loved the sober drabs and grays of life.

There were delicate ladies with their hats awry and their hair dishevelled, and their beautiful clothes bespattered and torn, so that they were like the drabs of the slums and stews.

We each had a sheath knife, and our hats were small brimmed, drab affairs fitting close to the head and not very conspicuous to an enemy as we might rise up from behind a hill into possible views.

Drab habitation of whom? Tabernacle or tomb, Or dome of worm, Or porch of gnome, Or some elf's catacomb?

Around him are grouped his satellitesthe Quartermaster-Sergeant, four Company Sergeants, some odd orderlies, and a forlorn little man in a neat drab uniform with light blue facings,the regimental interpreter.

Even the Quakers themselves, who affect such supercilious contempt for dress, are very particular about the cut of their headgear, about the shade of their greys and their drabs and their browns, and, in their scrupulous neatness, show that they think as much of a grease-spot or a stain as many a damsel does of the ribbon in her cap or the set of her collar and cuffs.