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Examples

  • The Custom-House is the centre of attack, and critics for the most part agree that the men whose business it is to "hold up" returning citizens perform their ungracious task ungraciously.

    Americans and Others Agnes Repplier 1904

  • For example, my story "The Cubicles" is about a seemingly cushy but actually pretty dreary day job, and Hawthorne's "The Custom-House" is about his own seemingly cushy but actually pretty dreary day job.

    The Necessity of Influence: A Conversation with Damion Searls (Part I, Fiction) Omnivoracious 2009

  • For example, my story "The Cubicles" is about a seemingly cushy but actually pretty dreary day job, and Hawthorne's "The Custom-House" is about his own seemingly cushy but actually pretty dreary day job.

    Shelfari: Omnivoracious 2009

  • They had not calculated well; the Custom-House official came along presently with the usual “Open your baggage, please,” then suddenly recognizing the owner of it he said:

    Mark Twain: A Biography 2003

  • Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the tenure of office generally so fragile.

    The Scarlet Letter 2002

  • The pavement round about the above-described edifice — which we may as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port — has grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business.

    The Scarlet Letter 2002

  • Custom-House, on a regular income, and with but slight and infrequent apprehensions of removal, had no doubt contributed to make time pass lightly over him.

    The Scarlet Letter 2002

  • In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room, in which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with panelling and plaster.

    The Scarlet Letter 2002

  • It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a narrative therein contained.

    The Scarlet Letter 2002

  • He was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself; or, at all events, the mainspring that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for, in an institution like this, where its officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them.

    The Scarlet Letter 2002

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