The men staggered or lay prone, either as gigantic silhouettes or as tatterdemalions painted by the light.

The Boy at the open window above, staring down on the tatterdemalion throng, remembered his first meeting with the Big Chimney men as the Washington City steamed out of San Francisco's Golden Gate a year and a month before.

Her face was grave, like a determined child's; but the winds of the morning had whipped it to a rosy colour, so that into that clan of tatterdemalions she rode like Proserpine descending among the gloomy Shades.

The War Office Notes, under my hand, speak of these months as the "tatterdemalion stage."

The year just passed, indeedfrom March to Marchhas practically rounded our taskthough the "learning" of the Army is never over!and has seen the transformationwhether temporary or permanent, who yet can tell?of the England of 1914, with its zealous mobs of untrained and "tatterdemalion" recruits, into a great military power,[This letter was finished just as the news of the Easter Monday Battle of Arras was coming in.]

The Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street, which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation, beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch-and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at their head.

"Just to think!" cried Fanny, "how that odious old tatterdemalion has been going on!

"What's a tatterdemalion?" asked the young man, smilingly.

Let the reader, then, imagine this spectacle of torn garments, tattered hats, and brandished clubsnot forgetting the tatterdemalion negro children, who ran after the crowd in the last state of dilapidation, and he will have some slight idea of the masquerade, over which rode, in supreme majesty, the trunk-nosed Mr. O'Brallaghan.

" Within half-an-hour the estimable Lepallard had been made acquainted with his duties, and within an hour a ragged tatterdemalion of a man was selling matches on the opposite side of the road to that on which Hayle's apartments were situated.

beggar, gaberlunzie^, muckworm^, mudlark^, sans culotte, raff^, tatterdemalion, caitiff, ragamuffin, Pariah, outcast of society, tramp, vagabond, bezonian^, panhandler [Slang], sundowner^, chiffonnier, Cinderella, cinderwench^, scrub, jade; gossoon^. Goth, Vandal, Hottentot, Zulu, savage, barbarian, Yahoo; unlicked cub^, rough diamond^. barbarousness, barbarism; boeotia.

It is a whimsical caprice of fortune to present, in the grotesque person of this tatterdemalion, a namesake and descendant of the proud Alonzo de Aguilar, the mirror of Andalusian chivalry, leading an almost mendicant existence about this once haughty fortress, which his ancestor aided to reduce: yet such might have been the lot of the descendants of Agamemnon and Achilles, had they lingered about the ruins of Troy.

" "A teacher of tatterdemalions!

They do not all knock at area-doors for old clothes and broken victual, nor hold out hats at street-crossings, nor expose sharp-faced babies to win pity, nor send their infant tatterdemalions to torture the ears of the wealthy with scratchy fiddles and wheezing accordions.

One dusky tatterdemalion wore a pair of boots from which he had removed the soles, his bare, spur-clad feet projecting from beneath the uppers.

They were to have been vagrants, tatterdemalions, but I needed some dress the change of which would change their whole appearance in a moment, and there came to mind the chimney sweepers of my childhood.

It is absolutely necessary to be familiar with the names of all the editors in town, and these can easily be picked up from any of the tatterdemalions who prowl about police offices for the purpose of reporting the trials at a penny per line, which is, in most cases, exactly a penny per line too much.

Before the general setting-in of the rains, these bungalows, I am informed, assume a very damp and tatterdemalion appearance, and when the skies open their flood-gates, they are obliged to be taken down and warehoused until the following year.

The steersman pointed in front of him, and the other gave a cry of surprise and rage as he saw another tatterdemalion coming with uncertain steps toward him.

[Illustration: HE SAW ANOTHER TATTERDEMALION COMING TOWARDS HIM.]

This tatterdemalion crew of mine is all there is left of my cohorts.

II The Battalion, headed by their tatterdemalion pipers, stumped into the town in due course, and were met on the outskirts by the billeting party, who led the various companies to their appointed place.

Coronado's first bullet knocked a villainous-looking tatterdemalion clean into the happy hunting grounds.

It was a pair of worn-out tatterdemalions that Captain Jones of the Mounted Police welcomed and fed, and he afterward averred that they possessed two of the most tremendous appetites he had ever observed.