gobe-mouches

For though a certain neatness, or precision, carelessness, or other habit, may be discovered by handwriting, to describe from it all the minutiæ of character is only feeding the love of the marvelous, so much on the increase in these days, when a reaction of credulity bids fair to make nothing too extravagant for our modern _gobe-mouches_.

Museum of Antiquity A Description of Ancient Life

It is the greatest failure to take these little _gobe-mouches_ to a good conjurer.

Essays Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell 1884

For the _gobe-mouches_ and starers, noticing a stranger talking with _ces zigains_, had begun to gather in a dense crowd around us, and the two ladies and the gentleman who were with us were seriously inconvenienced.

The Gypsies Charles Godfrey Leland 1863