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More "Dingy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sounded, the great engine gave several vehement not to say petulant snorts, and the long train glided slowly out of the terminus. Gaining speed with every second, it whirled along through the maze of buildings which form the ramparts of London—on past rows of dingy backyards where stunted bushes show no brighter colour than that of the family washing which they support every week—on through the suburbs where the backyards give place to gardens trim or otherwise, and beds of gay flowers ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... remained standing desolate in mouldering, unoccupied rooms, or stored away in this place. One or two immense packing-boxes, in which this furniture was brought, stood against the sides of the garret. There was a small window there, which let in, through its dingy, dusty panes, a scanty, uncertain light on the tall, high-backed chairs and dusty tables, that had once seen better days. Altogether, it was a weird and ghostly place; but, ghostly as it was, it wanted not in legends among the superstitious negroes, to increase it terrors. Some ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the Texan deposited a quart bottle, a rack of chips, and a deck of cards on a little deal table in the dingy back room of ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... margin straight or slightly concave; tragus lunate; feet small; wing membrane attached to the base of the toes; fur short, above dingy brown, the hairs tipped with a ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... inhabitants of the moon, that the moon does to the inhabitants of the earth. The face of the latter, however, is more than twelve times as large, and it has not the same silvery appearance as the moon, but is rather of a dingy pink hue, like that of her iron when beginning to lose its red heat. As the same part of the moon is always turned to the earth, one half of her surface is perpetually illuminated by a moon ten times as large to the eye as the ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... He loved it, calling it God's country, as he called the smoke Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And when soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. "It's good! It's good!" he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. "Good, clean soot; it's our life-blood, God bless it!" The smoke was one of his great enthusiasms; he laughed at a ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... He has one of those rigid, horselike faces that never tell anything; a long nose, flattened as if it had been tied down; a scornful chin; long, white teeth; flat cheeks, yellow as a Mongolian's; tiny, black eyes, with puffy lids and no lashes; dingy, dead-looking hair—looks as if it ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... gentleman of my own age, gouty, a bad sleeper, kicking in his old dreams, and snoring; to march down my vale of years at word of command, accommodating my tottering old steps to those of the other prisoners in my dingy, hopeless old gang; to hold out a trembling hand for a sickly pittance of gruel, and say, "Thank you, ma'am," to Miss Prim, when she has done reading her sermon. John! when Goody Twoshoes comes next Friday, I desire she may not ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... Revolution. And why not? * * is distant, and will be at * *, still more distant, till spring. No one else, except Augusta, cares for me; no ties—no trammels—andiamo dunque—se torniamo, bene—se non, ch' importa? Old William of Orange talked of dying in 'the last ditch' of his dingy country. It is lucky I can swim, or I suppose I should not well weather the first. But let us see. I have heard hyaenas and jackalls in the ruins of Asia; and bull-frogs in the marshes; besides wolves and angry Mussulmans. Now, I should ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the bowels of wall, beam and rafter, I had a new birth into the outside. In making fresh acquaintance with things, the dingy covering of petty habits seemed to drop off the world. I am sure that the sugar-cane molasses, which I had with cold luchis for my breakfast, could not have tasted different from the ambrosia which Indra[15] quaffs in his heaven; for, the immortality ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... was when his feet touched bottom, no one but himself ever knew! His ears hummed from the water in them, and the roar of the river was to him as the roar of the sea; his eyes smarted from the clammy touch of the dingy froth that went hurrying by in monster flakes; his lungs ached and his heart pounded heavily against his ribs when he stopped, gasping, beyond reach of the ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... that pyramid of tawny rock which formed the rear bulwark, as it were, of every landscape of Athens. The dwellings in the suburb were poor, though few even in the richer quarters were at all handsome; the streets barely sixteen feet wide, ill-paved, filthy, dingy. A line of dirty gray stucco house-fronts was broken only by the small doors and the smaller windows in the second story. Occasionally a two-faced bust of Hermes stood before a portal, or a marble lion's head spouted into a corner water ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... beauty and of music. Beautiful gardens, lovely flowers, green woods, pleasant lakes, domestic pets—all of these things are fully described in the messages of the pioneer travellers who have at last got news back to those who loiter in the old dingy home. There are no poor and no rich. The craftsman may still pursue his craft, but he does it for the joy of his work. Each serves the community as best he can, while from above come higher ministers of grace, the "Angels" ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... elves had been hovering about the dingy hall just then, they would have seen the mother's tired face brighten beautifully when she discovered the gifts, and found that her little girls had been so kindly remembered. Something more brilliant ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... in this part of the town, I asked myself? Did he propose to leave that priceless cabinet in this dingy quarter? And then I paused abruptly and slipped into an area-way, for the van had stopped some distance ahead and was backing up ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... are many: washing-house boats (it is a good old unexploded theory in Petersburg that clothes are clean only when rinsed in running water, even though our eyes and noses inform us, unaided by chart, where the drainage goes); little flotillas of dingy flat-boats, anchored around the "Fish-Gardens," and containing the latter's stock in trade, where persons of taste pick their second dinner-course out of the flopping inmates of a temporary scoop-net; huge, unwieldy, wood barks, put ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... gods Who plague us for sins we never sinned But who avenge us. That's why I'll never have a child, Never shut up in a chrysalis in a match-box For the moth to spoil and crush its bright colours, Beating its wings against the dingy prison-wall. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... was a small, plain one. The floor was bare, save for a couple of braided rugs, the plaster discolored, the walls dingy and glaring. There had never been much beauty in Naomi Holland's environment, and, now that she was dying, there ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the young gentleman, suddenly seating himself at a dingy table in a very dark corner and motioning Sweetwater to do the same; "I've been looking for a man all day to go up to Boston for me, and I think you'll ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... forth to a band of young "spongers," on whom he was spending his last napoleons. I can also see Gambetta—young, slim, black-haired and bearded, with a full sensual underlip—seated at the same table as Delescluze, whose hair and beard, once red, had become a dingy white, whose figure was emaciated and angular, and whose yellowish, wrinkled face seemed to betoken that he was possessed by some fixed idea. What that idea was, the Commune subsequently showed. Again, I can see Henri Rochefort and Gustave Flourens together: ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... she, Ruth, loved Jack—by no manner of means—not in that way, at least. But she would have liked to know what he said, and how he said it, and whether his eyes had lost that terrible look which they wore when he turned away at the station to go back to his sick bed in the dingy hotel. All these things her Aunt Felicia knew about and yet she could not drag a ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... back through the city, and walked along watching the Zopilotes—great turkey-buzzards—with their bald heads and foul dingy-black plumage. They were sitting in compact rows on parapets of houses and churches, and seemed specially to affect the cross of the cathedral, where they perched, two on each arm, and some on the top. When some offal was thrown into the streets, they came down ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Straightway the Bishop suspended the Governor's chaplain. Then the Governor fined the Bishop in the sum of fifty pounds. The Bishop refused to pay, and was committed to Castle Rushen, and lay there two months. They show us his cell, a poor, dingy little box, so damp in his day that he lost the use of some of his fingers. After that the Bishop appealed to the Lord, who declared the imprisonment illegal. The Bishop was liberated, and half the island went to the prison gate to fetch him forth in triumph. ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... from his horse, and waited for them. He looked weary, and there were dark circles round his eyes, as though he had had an illness; but he stood erect and quiet. His uniform was that of a general of the Empire. It was rather dingy, yet it was of rich material, and he wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honour on his breast. His paleness was not of fear, for when his eyes met Monsieur De la Riviere's, there was in them waiting, inquiry—nothing more. He greeted them all politely, and Medallion warmly, shaking his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... drifted snow against the mountains of brick and stone. Caught for a moment on a transient breeze, it swirled around a towering pile on lower Broadway, and eddied up to the windows of the Ketchim Realty Company, where it sifted through the chinks in the loose frames and settled like a pall over the dingy ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... for the day. I say he came; but in point of fact that was the difficulty with the boy. He couldn't come. He came as far as he could: that is to say, he walked up the tow-path until he was opposite the house-boat, and then he hallooed to be taken on board, whereupon some one had to go in the dingy for him. All the time we were in the house-boat that boy was never five minutes late. Wet or fine, calm or rough, 7 A.M. found the boy on the tow-path hallooing. No sooner were we asleep than the dewy morn was made hideous by the boy. Lying in bed with the blankets over our ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... to spend that next evenin' trottin' up and down this block in the sixties between Ninth and Amsterdam. I must say it didn't look specially promisin' as a place to work up community spirit and that sort of thing. Just a dingy row of old style dumb-bell flats, most of 'em with "Room to Rent" signs hung out and little basement shops tucked in here and there. Maybe you know the kind—the asphalt always littered with paper, garbage cans ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... James Starbuck brought his happy bride. This little house was "double" also—that Is, it was entered in the centre by a small square passage just big enough for the outer door to swing in. On one side of this entry was a tiny parlor, as dismal as rag carpet, fireless hearth, dingy paper and dark-green paper shades to the small windows could make it. On the other side of the entry was the tiny and cold bedroom of the senior Starbucks. In the centre of the house rose a massive chimney, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself down, after exploring the dak-bungalow. There were three rooms, beside my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition-walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... work.[16] 'But,' said he, 'they were well plundered in their turn by your troops at Bharatpur; retribution always follows the wicked sooner or later.'[17] He showed us the little roof of stone tiles, close to the original little dingy mosque of the old hermit, where the Empress gave birth to Jahangir;[18] and told us that she was a very sensible woman, whose counsels had great weight with the Emperor.[19] 'His majesty's only fault was', he said, 'an inclination to learn the art ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... as to be concealed from any surmise, except that it was gaunt and wiry. Hands gnarled, twisted, veined, brown, seemed less like flesh than like some skilful Japanese carving. On his head he wore a visored cap with an extraordinary high crown; on his back a rather dingy coat cut from a Mackinaw blanket; on his legs trousers that had been "stagged" off just below the knees, heavy German socks, and shoes nailed with sharp spikes at least three-quarters of an ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the North River, nor any cocoanut palms wavin' over West Thirty-fourth Street. As our taxis bumped us along, we dodged between coffee-colored heaps of slush that had once been snow, and overhead all that waved in the breeze was dingy blankets hung out on the fire-escapes. Also we finds Broadway ripped up in new spots, with the sewer ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... bed was Lord Lashmore, his face a dingy grey and his open eyes, though filming over, yet faintly alight with a stark horror ... dead. An electric torch was still gripped in ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... number of sprawling Cupids, some of them scattering flowers, others weaving leafy chaplets, presumably to crown the inane-looking goddess reclining in their midst on a bank of impossible cloud. But both Cupids and goddess were dingy with age, and seemed to have grown too old for ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... we managed to enjoy a tolerable night's rest. The post-house was warm at any rate, being windowless. Patchinar was evidently a favourite halting-place, for the dingy walls of the guest-room were covered with writing and pencil sketches, the work of travellers trying to kill time, from the Frenchman who warned one (in rhyme) to beware of the thieving propensities of the postmaster, to the more practical Englishman, who, in a bold hand, ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... are not thinking of leaving London?" with gaiety perhaps a trifle forced, "of deserting your dingy metropolis?" ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... matter, and of much less consequence than the question of space. What few horse stalls had once occupied the building had been removed, and the mangers alone remained, with the odor of horse, to remind the guests of the original purpose of their ballroom. A careful manipulation of dingy Turkey red, and material which had once been white, struggled vainly to hide these mangers from view, while coarse, rough boards which had at one time floored some of the stalls, served to cover in the tops and convert them into seats. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... bedroom on the third story of the boarding-house he lay on a bed hung with dingy curtains, but in the dignity which was one of his inheritances. Under the dark, close-cut moustache, his lips seemed to smile faintly, perhaps in amusement at the folly of his life, perhaps in surprise at finding himself so still; the narrow beard of a foreign cut was slightly tilted towards ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... short November day had turned from afternoon to night, and a great change had come over the aspect of the dim and dingy court. Opaque globes turned into flaring suns; incandescent burners revealed unsuspected brackets; the place was warmed and lighted for the first time during the week. And the effect of the light and warmth was on all the ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the house was one merciless glare. No flowers graced the square ugly rooms, no decorations of any sort; but the parlours were canvased, the best band in town was tuning up, and the supper would be irreproachable. The dark-brown paper of the hall looked very old and dingy, the carpet was threadbare in places, the big teak-wood tables were in everybody's way and looked as if they were meant for the dead to rest on; but when gay gowns were billowing one would ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and going and nobody paid particular attention to the youth until he gained the dingy office, where two men were smoking and talking over the merits ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... from whence she soon after saw the party winding among the mountains to the west, appearing and disappearing between the woods, till distance confused their figures, consolidated their numbers, and only a dingy mass appeared moving along ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... it can't make us any worse trouble than we are having. As for myself, I'd rather go to jail with a shirt on, than to sit here in this dingy, gloomy old room half of ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... In the dingy office of the city prison, with its sand boxes and barrel stove, its hacked old desks, dusty books and papers, I watched Bronson Vandeman, and wondered to see how the man I had known played in and out across his face with the man ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... he saw no more pretty playhouses along the shores—only dingy factories. Great heaps of coal and wood were stacked behind tall planks, and alongside black, sooty docks lay bulky freight steamers; but over all was spread a shimmering, transparent mist, which made everything appear so big and strong and wonderful ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... Of Market-street's opaque simoom, A queue of people, parti-sexed, Awaiting the command of "Next!" A sidewalk booth, a dingy sign: "Teeth ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... The more frequently it is practiced, the more injurious it is. It is more injurious than when practiced by boys, because the effects are usually more permanent. Girls who indulge in the habit of masturbation to excess not only weaken themselves, become anemic and get a dingy, pimply complexion, but they lose their desire for normal sexual relations when they grow up, and are unable to derive any pleasure from the sexual act when they get married. In fact, many girls who masturbated excessively get a strong aversion to the normal sexual act, and their married ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... our previous experience, this day touched high-water mark. Many of these fish were of a size undreamed of by the ordinary seafarer, some of them full thirty feet in length, more like whales than sharks. Most of them were striped diagonally with bands of yellow, contrasting curiously with the dingy grey of their normal colour. From this marking is derived their popular name—"tiger sharks," not, as might be supposed, from their ferocity. That attribute cannot properly be applied to the SQUALUS at all, which is one of the most timid fish afloat, and whose ill name, as far as regards ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... hidden under the winter's snow, and before the spring comes the husbandman may have gone to his rest. It is not every public worker who, like Rowland Hill, sees his great idea bring forth fruit in his life-time. Adam Smith sowed the seeds of a great social amelioration in that dingy old University of Glasgow where he so long laboured, and laid the foundations of his 'Wealth of Nations;' but seventy years passed before his work bore substantial fruits, nor indeed are they ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... ploughing the sand. The woman never changed her posture, never seemed to realize the approach of dawn; but Winston roused up, lifting his head to gaze wearily forward. Beneath the gray, out-spreading curtain of light he saw before them the dingy red of a small section-house, with a huge, rusty water-tank outlined against the sky. Lower down a little section of vividly green grass seemed fenced about by a narrow stream of running water. At first glimpse he deemed it a mirage, and rubbed his half-blinded eyes to make sure. Then he ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... ridden a hundred yards when we saw before us a group of mounted officers in handsome uniforms, with plumes nodding and arms glittering. I had somehow or other pictured to myself the rebel generals as a dingy-looking set, like the Covenanters of old, or Cromwell's Invincibles, and I could scarcely persuade myself that those I saw were officers of the enemy's army. Among them rode one whom the eye would not fail to single out from the rest—tall, handsome, and graceful—the ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... had considered the situation in all its phases before leaving home and the one hundred and ten dollars was but a small item compared to his expected profit on the sale of the North Inlet land. He reached into his pocket, produced a long, dingy leather pocketbook wound about with twine, unwound the twine, opened the pocketbook ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the floors were covered with thick carpets, and yet everything was absolutely smothered in dust. A thick, white, blankety cloud of it lay everywhere. It obscured the china, it dimmed the glasses of the pictures, it piled in little drifts on the heads and arms of the dingy statues there. Many years must have passed since a housemaid's brush or duster had touched anything in Longdean Grange. It was like a palace of the Sleeping Beauty, wherein people walked as in a ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... returned, and, strangely enough, this seemed farther removed from him than all the rest. He had been particularly strong, well, and happy this time last year. Nora was dismissed from his mind, and he had thrown all his energies into his work. His tastes were sane and simple, and his dingy, furnished rooms had become through habit very pleasant to him. In being his own, they were invested with a greater charm than another man's castle. Here he had smoked and studied, here he had made many a glorious voyage into the land of books. Many a homecoming, too, rose ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... bears hooted and shouted "ha-ha!" to see the beggar fall upon his face. There was one, however, who did not even smile. He was the youngest cub. His fur coat was not as black and glossy as those his elders wore. The hair was dry and dingy. It looked much more like kinky wool. He was the ugly cub. Poor little baby bear! he had always been laughed at by his older brothers. He could not help being himself. He could not change the differences between himself and his brothers. Thus again, though the rest ...
— Old Indian Legends • Zitkala-Sa
... her figure drooping into an ungainly pose. She gazed at the surgeon steadily, as if puzzled at his intense preoccupation over the common case of a man "shot in a row." Her eyes travelled over the surgeon's neat-fitting evening dress, which was so bizarre here in the dingy receiving room, redolent of bloody tasks. Evidently he had been out to some dinner or party, and when the injured man was brought in had merely donned his rumpled linen jacket with its right sleeve half torn from the socket. A spot of blood ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... which I became a member held its meetings in Morton Hall, a large, barn-like room over a saloon. Its furniture was of the canonical kind: dingy benches, spittoons, a dais at one end with a table and chair and a stout pitcher for iced water, and on the walls pictures of General Grant, and of Levi P. Morton, to whose generosity we owed the room. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... how much frequently depends upon the reputation of an engineering firm for honor and judgment. In New York City, downtown, is an almost dingy suite of offices. It is the business headquarters of a firm of mining engineers known and trusted the world over. Probably the entire equipment of these offices, including the laboratories and assay rooms, could be purchased for seven or eight thousand dollars. The real asset of this ...
— The Young Engineers in Mexico • H. Irving Hancock
... of years. Why, just before the wife and I were married, an uncle of mine died up in the North and left me his furniture. I was thinking of furnishing at the time, and I thought the things might come in handy; but I assure you there wasn't a single article that I cared to give house-room to. All dingy, old mahogany; big bookcases and bureaus, and claw-legged chairs and tables. As I said to the wife (as she was soon afterwards), "We don't exactly want to set up a chamber of horrors, do we?" So I sold off the lot ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... bird who was born to sing! They have made him a cage; they have clipped his wing; They have shut him up in a dingy street, And they praise his singing and call it sweet; But his heart and his song are saddened and filled With the woods and the nest he never will build, And the wild young dawn coming into the tree, And the mate that never his mate will be; And day by day, when his notes are heard, They freshen ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... Pommeraye, and other gentlemen of birth, enrolled themselves for the adventure. On the sixteenth of May, 1535, officers and sailors assembled in the cathedral of St. Malo, where, after confession and mass, they received the parting blessing of the bishop. Three days later they set sail. The dingy walls of the rude old seaport, and the white rocks that line the neighboring shores of Brittany, faded from their sight, and soon they were tossing in a furious tempest. The scattered ships escaped the danger, and, reuniting at the Straits of Belle Isle, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the seventh evening as he sat thus, came Sir Pertolepe according to his wont, but to-night he leaned upon the shoulder of Beda the Jester, whose motley flared 'gainst rugged wall and dingy flagstone and whose bells rang loud and merry ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... have I climbed up the rickety staircase to that dingy room, which always had a flavor of snuff about it, to sit on a stiff-backed chair and listen for hours together to Dame Jocelyn's stories of the olden time. How she would prattle! She was bedridden—poor ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... principle advocated by the general body of the Independents. Not only did Helwisse's folk differ from the Independents generally on the subject of Infant Baptism and Dipping; they differed also on the power of the magistrate in matters of belief and conscience. It was, in short, from their little dingy meeting-house, somewhere in Old London, that there flashed out, first in England, the absolute doctrine of Religious Liberty. "Religious Peace: or, A Plea for Liberty of Conscience" is the title of a little tract first printed in 1614, and presented to King James and the English Parliament, by ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... kitchen fire issues from a sort of wooden cabin where several human beings breathe, eat, sleep, are born and die, sometimes without hardly ever having set foot upon the land. Pots of geranium or begonia give a bit of bright color to the dingy surroundings; and the boats travel slowly along the river, impelled by enormous oars, which throw ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... was her old maid-of-all-work, Assunta, commonly called Suntarella, without whom she rarely stirred abroad—a little old woman, in neat but dingy-coloured garments, with a grey woollen shawl drawn over her head like a cowl, instead of ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... of all who were obliged to pass through these canyons of robbery and often death. The bunch that we harbored were undoubtedly as bold a band of robbers and murderers as ever infested the silent caves of the Rockies. Could their dingy walls but talk they would reveal crimes unspeakable. I knew there were many strangers in town and was almost certain their every movement was watched; nor was I mistaken. The seventh day after their arrival a young school ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... chap here, in the dingy parlour of his Montana ranch, playing these indescribable melodies to the stars, his cowmen outside wondering what was the matter with their "inards." Somehow this ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... later Dick's eyelids fluttered. For a moment he stared up at the dingy lamp swinging overhead; then his lips parted in a ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... put upon his right eye, enabled him to see through the walls of houses. If the Arabian despot had passed along a narrow street leading into a main thoroughfare of London one night, just before the clock struck twelve, he would have beheld, in a dingy back room of a large building, a very strange sight. He would have seen King Charles the First seated in friendly converse with none ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... day, one of the strongest intellectual forces then at work, one of the greatest personalities then alive. But it would no more have occurred to him to dream of administrative honors and a place in a Ministry than it would have occurred to George the Third to send one of his equerries to the dingy lodgings of an author with the request that Dr. Johnson would step round to St. James's Palace and favor his Majesty with his opinion on this subject or on that. It is not certain that the King would have gained very much if he had done anything so unusual. Dr. Johnson's views were very much ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the crop had been gathered—which is the time when the buds for next year's crop are developing on the crowns of the plants—and finally dying off naturally in beautiful feathery plumes of green and gold, it presented a dingy and rusty appearance, eventually turning black. Asparagus cannot stand long-continued summer and autumn drought; it likes plenty of moisture, in free circulation but not stagnant. The crops that followed the appearance I have described were very deficient, proving that the growing season ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... to them. They no longer heard Madame Vetu's death moans, nor beheld the ward littered with beds, and, with all its disorder, resembling some infirmary improvised after a public catastrophe. They once more found themselves in a small attic at the top of a dingy house in old Paris, where air and light only reached them through a tiny window opening on to a sea of roofs. And how charming it was to be alone there together—he who had been prostrated by fever, she who had appeared ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... mourning." When she made her appearance in church,—which she did, as usual, the very first Sunday after the funeral,—that plainest of bonnets and straitest of black delaines, unadorned save by the old-fashioned and dingy lace-cape, descended through many shifts of saving from her long-ago-dead-and-gone mother, were so manifestly a condescending concession to the conventionalities or superstitions of Hendrik, and said so plainly, "This is for your 'decencies,'—it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... him that I did,—that I had seen these jewelled miniatures eight years before on the dressing-table of a bride, and I implored him to tell me how they came into his possession. He fitted them into a dingy, worn case, which seemed to have been composed of purple velvet, and informed me that he purchased the whole from an Irish lad, who asserted that he picked it up on the beach, where it had evidently drifted in a high tide. On examination, he found that the case had indeed been saturated ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... themselves in a dingy kitchen whose belongings remained as they had been left years before. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling; dust was everywhere. The stove rusty and falling to pieces, still held one or two pots and pans. There was crockery on the dresser, and a lamp on ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard
... Leam bent her sad head with pathetic patience—pathetic indeed to those who knew the proud spirit that it reported broken and humbled for ever. Following the red-armed, touzled, ragged maid to the dingy cabin that was to be her room, she left her friend to explain to his sister, so far as he chose and could, the necessity under which he found himself of leaving his adopted daughter, Leonora Darley, in her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... Liverpool. I called at his house, but he was not at home. The next day he did me the honor to call on me at Morley's Hotel, and, not finding me in, invited me up to his house near York Gate, Regents Park. It was a dingy, brick house surrounded by a high wall, but cheerful and cozy within. I found him in his sanctum, a singularly shaped room, with statuettes of Sam Weller and others of his creations on the mantelpiece. A portrait of his beautiful wife was upon the wall—that wife, the separation ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... a conventional history of the early 'Edinburgh Review,' repeated without hesitation in all literary histories and assumed in a thousand allusions, which becomes a little incredible when we take down the dusty old volumes, where dingy calf has replaced the original splendours of the blue and yellow, and which have inevitably lost much of their savour during more than half a century's repose. The story of the original publication ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... an old sorrel horse, leaning forward in a most unmilitary seat, and wore a sun-browned cap, dingy gray uniform, and a stock, into which he would settle his chin in a queer way, as he moved along with abstracted look. He paid little heed to camp comforts, and slept on the march, or by snatches under trees, as he might find occasion; often begging a cup of bean-coffee ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... at her now as they drove along in silence and noticed her thin black gown, her short jacket, her bit of black veil drawn over her bonnet, and her dingy travelling-bag with its tarnished clasp, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... read what she had written to the man she loved—he pushed the paper back into its envelope—he did not look at it again till he had finished his pretence of a meal, then he took it out with him into the rather dingy winter garden and sat down in the quietest corner he ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... were Aunt Maria's family? The carriage, when it left the wharf, had been driven up a long narrow street, quite different from any the children had ever seen before. On either side irregularly built houses, most of them old and dingy, stood close together. Here and there was a new one, which had the air of having dropped down by mistake. They left this street, and turning into another, crossed a bridge, which spanned an arm of the river that ran through part of the town. Now the houses began to be large and stately, and were ...
— Five Happy Weeks • Margaret E. Sangster
... Mouse came and sat near by. Undoubtedly the room was dingy to the last degree. The dust lay thick upon the corner of the table. It crusted the window ledge and hung upon the sallow wall. What was the use, things being as they were, to disturb the dust? Let it lie in all its bitterness. And let the charred ends of the fagots roll out ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... lamentable weakness of much in my 'Seraphim' volume, I don't complain of the 'Seagull' and 'Doves' and the simple verses, but exactly of the more ambitious ones. I have had to rewrite pages upon pages of that volume. Oh, such feeble rhymes, and turns of thought—such a dingy mistiness! Even Robert couldn't say a word for much of it. I took great pains with the whole, and made considerable portions new, only your favourites were not touched—not a word touched, I think, in the 'Seagull,' and scarcely a word in the 'Doves.' You won't ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... barred and bolted in dingy bulkheads, must have opened into regions full of interest to ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... true, into an old and high-roofed chamber, its walls covered in three sides with black oak wainscoting, adorned with carvings of fruit and flowers long anterior to those of Grinling Gibbons; the fourth side is clothed with a curious remnant of dingy tapestry, once elucidatory of some Scriptural history, but of which not even Mrs. Botherby could determine. Mr. Simpkinson, who had examined it carefully, inclined to believe the principal figure to be either Bathsheba, or Daniel in the lions' den; while Tom Ingoldsby decided in favor of the king ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... flow into and form the capacious estuary of High Holborn. Whoever has sailed along, or cast anchor in this confluence, must have seen the individual I allude to. He sits—I should perhaps say sat, inasmuch as he is since defunct—bolt upright, with a pen behind his ear, in the centre of a dingy, spectral-looking shop, quaintly hung round with clothes, of divers forms and patterns, in every stage of existence—from the first crude conception of the incipient surtout or pantaloons, down to the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... structure of a flower and of its intrinsic beauty; for instance, in the case of the big pendulous pink and white flowers of Dielytra. In the same way he had an affection, half- artistic, half-botanical, for the little blue Lobelia. In admiring flowers, he would often laugh at the dingy high-art colours, and contrast them with the bright tints of nature. I used to like to hear him admire the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and colour. I seem to remember him gently touching ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... morning, while Sir Richard and I were sipping our morning draught in the dingy little library, he brought up the ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... happiness that was almost tangible; it was a glow so real it seemed to warm and light that dingy old passageway. Certainly it warmed and lighted the young man who stood there with her. For him, too, the whole world was transfigured, and life just an orchard to walk ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... narrow, crooked streets ran together, branching out like the fingers from my palm. I paused now uncertain which way to go amid so many devious courses, and deciding almost at hazard, turned down the best paved of all those dingy streets. I had hardly gone past more than two cross streets, when there stood at a corner, looking timidly this way and that, a slight girl, with blonde hair and eyes of Breton blue. She seemed so brave, yet so out of place and helpless at that hour of the night, on ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... habit of resorting to all the noted quacks that infested the city, or whom money would tempt to journey thither from a distance. By one of these persons, in the exultation of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed far and wide, by dint of handbills and little pamphlets on dingy paper, that a distinguished gentleman, Roderick Elliston, Esq., had been relieved of a SNAKE in his stomach! So here was the monstrous secret, ejected from its lurking place into public view, in all its ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and of the ancient edifice in which the monarchs of England are crowned. We quitted our hotel at nine o'clock, and, pushing our way through the hurrying crowds of the Strand, speedily arrived at Temple Bar. We then turned down a dingy, narrow passage, on our right hand; this led us to the Temple, which is like a little town of itself, and is almost exclusively inhabited by lawyers. It was amusing enough to notice the gentlemen in powdered horse-hair ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... They do not use this expression as they would say black dog or white dog, but with almost as definite a meaning as when they speak of a terrier or a spaniel. A "yallah dog" is a large canine brute, of a dingy old-flannel color, of no particular breed except his own, who hangs round a tavern or a butcher's shop, or trots alongside of a team, looking as if he were disgusted with the world, and the world with him. Our inland population, while they tolerate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... disconsolately at a great wooden emblem of a key, painted in vivid yellow to resemble gold, which dangled from the house-front, and swung to and fro with a mournful creaking noise, as if complaining that it had nothing to unlock. Sometimes, he looked over his shoulder into the shop, which was so dark and dingy with numerous tokens of his trade, and so blackened by the smoke of a little forge, near which his 'prentice was at work, that it would have been difficult for one unused to such espials to have distinguished anything ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... lived, as it were, in two worlds. The one her office, dingy and curtailed as to proportions, but from whence she could wander away through the medium of that slender telegraph wire, on a sort of electric wings, to distant cities and towns; where, although alone all day, she did not lack social intercourse, and where she could ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... toiled up the staircase panting, for she was asthmatic, and Phil followed. The interior of the house was as dingy as the exterior, and it was quite dark on ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... her gentle voice. In all her fair young beauty she stood before him, and then by some hellish magic she was slowly transformed into a hideous black hag. With agonized eyes he watched her beautiful tresses become mere wisps of coarse wool, wrapped round with dingy cotton strings; he saw her clear eyes grow bloodshot, her ivory teeth turn to unwholesome fangs. With a shudder he awoke, to find the cold gray dawn of a rainy day stealing through ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... untidy condition of the six-by-nine window panes, as well as the goods therein. Men and women were hastening homeward with well-filled baskets which they had provided for the festive morrow. All the ragged, dirty urchins of the village were gathered about the dingy shop windows admiring, with distended eyes and gaping mouths, the several displays of ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... of the shops of grocers, block-makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... These rooms were in keeping with the dilapidated appearance of the outside of the house. The walnut panels, polished by age, but rough and coarse in design and badly executed, were loose in their places and ready to fall. Their dingy color added to the gloom of these apartments, which were barren of curtains and mirrors; a few venerable bits of furniture in the last stages of decay alone remained, and harmonized with the general destruction. Marie noticed maps ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... I ought to be magnanimous enough to think that it's all for the best, since he can do infinitely more for her than I ever could. She will be the millionaire's wife, and I'll go back to my dingy little office and write paragraphs heavy enough to sink a cork ship. Thus will end my June idyll; but should I live a century I will always feel that Gilbert ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... soon healed, the dingy color slowly yielded to many washings, the woolly coat began to knot up into little curls, a new collar handsomely marked made him a respectable dog, and Sancho was himself again. But it was evident that his sufferings were not forgotten; his once sweet temper was a trifle ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... silent awhile, gazing at the steamer's smoke trail which stretched far back, a dingy smear on the blueness, across the shining lake; and the contractor watched him with a certain sympathy which, however, he carefully refrained from expressing. There had been a time in his career when it had seemed that every man of influence in his profession and all the powers of capital had ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... for them, though they have lost their heritage, to sympathise, in their beautiful Asian cities or in their Moorish and Arabian gardens, with the graceful rights that are, at least, an homage to a benignant nature. But picture to yourself the child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the squalid quarter of some bleak northern town, where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes. Yet he must celebrate the vintage of purple Palestine! The law has told him, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... being already on edge, it was almost intolerable. They passed from the drawing-room into a tiny dining-room—a room that was as dingy and faded as the rest, with a dull red paper on the walls and an old blue carpet. The old woman waited; the food was ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... was resplendent indeed in the simple, unaccustomed eyes upon which it flashed with a buff silken glory. Matrons stared at it; maidens gazed with fascinated and jealous vision; men young and old let their eyes take full liberty. It was as if a queen, arrayed in a robe of state, had entered that dingy log edifice, an apparition of dazzling and awe-inspiring beauty. Oncle Jazon caught sight of her, and snapped his tune short off. The dancers swung together and stopped in confusion. But she, fortified by a woman's strongest bulwark, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they imitated the stripes of the squire. It is a curious and perhaps melancholy truth that the world is imitating our worst, our weariness and our dingy decline, when it did not imitate our best and the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundery poker. O that face! a face kat' emphasin! I have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... advanced, some twenty or thirty of the most uncouth-looking fellows imaginable came forward to meet me. In their appearance they showed nothing of the Bedouin blood; they were of many colours, from dingy brown to jet black, and some of these last had much of the negro look about them. They were tall, powerful fellows, but awfully ugly. They wore nothing but the Arab shirts, confined at the waist by ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... Rissaldar-Major even to some Sahibs of his acquaintance—that wonderful old man-at-arms, horseman, shikarri, athlete, gentleman. (Yet how strange and sad to see him out of his splendid uniform, in sandals, dhotie, untrammelled shirt-tails, dingy old cotton coat and loose puggri, undistinguishable from a school-master, clerk, or post-man; ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... girl in the boxes had not quite liked to read. Singing them at the top of her sweet voice,—trying to bring them out distinctly and with full effect. It was only a queen, to be sure; but somehow (missing the royal robes) Miriam could see only a woman. Close upon this came another shock. These dingy, untidy, soiled-looking men were now making love to the young Prima Donna,—first one and then another; this one in bass, and that one in baritone, and she answering in her clear soprano. Answering,—sometimes ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... virtue, was in this home made to appear almost a vice. She would not let the sunshine in, lest it would fade the carpet. She made her room dingy and unpleasant in the evening, to save gas. She would not make a fire in the parlour in the winter, because it wasted coal. She would not open it in summer because dust ruined the furniture. To make matters worse, ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... poor Sir John Bland's extravagance,(711) his house and garden, which he left orders to make without once looking at either plan. The house is a bastard- Gothic, but Of not near the extent I had heard. We lay at Leeds, a dingy large town; and through very bad black roads, (for the whole country is a colliery, or a quarry,) we went to Kirkstall Abbey, where are vast Saxon ruins, in a most picturesque situation, on the banks of a river that falls into a cascade among ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... but little demonstration of his wealth in the dingy hole that serves him for a shop, where a Double-Bass, a couple of Violoncellos, a Tenor or two hanging on the walls, and half-a-dozen Fiddles lying among a random collection of bows, bridges, coils of catgut, packets of purified resin, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... on the following day Mr. Mason was in Bedford Row. "Mr. Furnival is with Mr. Round," said the clerk, "and will see you in two minutes." Then he was shown into the dingy office waiting-room, where he sat with his hat in his hand, for rather more than ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... that on the west of Mrs. Handsomebody's house stood the broad, ivy-clad mansion of the Bishop, grey stone, like the Cathedral; on the east was a dingy white brick house, exactly like Mrs. Handsomebody's. In it lived Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Pegg and ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... heart, and meanwhile I was growing used to the peasants, and I felt more and more drawn to them. For the most part they were nervous, irritable, downtrodden people; they were people whose imagination had been stifled, ignorant, with a poor, dingy outlook on life, whose thoughts were ever the same—of the grey earth, of grey days, of black bread, people who cheated, but like birds hiding nothing but their head behind the tree—people who could not count. They would ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... archbishops, one at London and one at York. But we cannot regret that this scheme was not carried out, as an archiepiscopal see is much more picturesquely framed by the hills which encircle Canterbury than it could have been by the dingy vastness of the ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... my papers, dingy with age, the correspondence with Col. Curtis, and also the subsequent correspondence between Mr. Wall and myself, in respect to my removal. My letter to Mr. Wall was a disclaimer of any intention of disrespect to him in our letter to ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... full of rain and sleet, A dingy fog obscures the street; I watch the pane and wonder will The sun be shining on Boar's Hill, Rekindling on his western course The dying splendour of the gorse And kissing hands in joyous mood To ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... as you would the very devil.' The unfortunate Joseph was cut to the pattern of Sir Faraday in every button; he was shod with the health boot; his suit was of genuine ventilating cloth; his shirt of hygienic flannel, a somewhat dingy fabric; and he was draped to the knees in the inevitable greatcoat of marten's fur. The very railway porters at Bournemouth (which was a favourite station of the doctor's) marked the old gentleman for a creature of Sir Faraday. ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the kitchen looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale's mind that that rocker didn't look in the least like Minnie Foster—the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the chair sagged ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... saw dealers, as the ordinary painters see them, to be the authors of all evil! Now he understood by what methods Mr. Oxford had achieved his splendid car, clothes, club, and minions. These things were earned, not by Mr. Oxford, but for Mr. Oxford in dingy studios, even in attics, by shabby industrious painters! Mr. Oxford was nothing but an opulent thief, a grinder of the face of genius. Mr. Oxford was, in a word, the spawn of the devil, and Priam silently but sincerely consigned him to his ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... two-story brick houses; little homes of infinite tenderness and quiet, along tree-lined streets, where the children played on the cobble-stones, and at night the horse cars, and later the cable system, brought home tired clerks and storekeepers to small havens, already growing dingy from the smoke ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... dome of St. Paul's. The upper slopes of the island are brown and moory, and present little on which the eye may rest, save a few trap terraces, with rudely columnar fronts; its middle space is mottled with patches of green, and studded with dingy cottages, each of which this morning, just a little before the breakfast hour, had its own blue cloudlet of smoke diffused around it; while along the beach, patches of level sand, alternated with tracts ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... but contrast our spacious galleries in that magnificent capitol at Washington, as well as in our grand State capitols, where hundreds of women can sit to see and hear their rulers at their ease, with these dark, dingy buildings, and such inadequate accommodations for the people. My son, who had a seat on the floor just opposite the ladies' gallery, said he could compare our appearance to nothing better than birds in a cage. He could not distinguish an outline of anybody. All he could ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... been hovering about the dingy hall just then, they would have seen the mother's tired face brighten beautifully when she discovered the gifts, and found that her little girls had been so kindly remembered. Something more brilliant than the mock diamonds ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... there is a constant din by day and night. Patches of white heat glare from the opened furnace doors like the teeth of some great dark, dingy devil grinning across the smoky vapors of the Pit. Half naked, soot-smeared fellows fight the furnace hearths with hooks, rabbles and paddles. Their scowling faces are lit with fire, like sailors manning their guns in a night fight when a blazing fire ship is bearing down ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... necessary to dwell on the familiar auction pool, with its close, stifling, dingy room; its crowd of solemn, stupid, wide-awake gentlemen seated in chairs before a platform, backed with a blackboard, on which are inscribed the names of the horses expected to start; and its alert, chattering ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... sundry whiffs of the mysterious city reached the children's nostrils, bringing thrills of some strange, remote reality they had never known at first-hand. They busied themselves at once. While Tim unbuttoned the severe black coat and pulled it off, Judy brought a jacket of dingy tweed from behind a curtain in the corner, and stood on a chair to help the figure put it on. All knew their duties; the performance went like clockwork. And Maria sat and watched in helpful silence. There was a certain air about her as though she ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... his warehouse as a dingy, and not very extensive place, heaped with iron of all sorts, sizes, and forms, with barely a passage through the chaos of rusty bars into the inner sanctum, at once, study, counting-house, library, and general ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... anticipated, Heaven only knows. Shabby and tarnished as we were, the language of our hand-bills made up in gaudiness for the dingy reality. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... active fingers, alert and sensitive, feeling over the dingy cloth they had exposed. Suddenly, with a movement too swift to be followed, they rent the covering away, and on the instant, rearing upwards, she beheld ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... seats together in a far corner of the dingy room, where the Syrian barkeeper could not ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... fact, already a conventional history of the early 'Edinburgh Review,' repeated without hesitation in all literary histories and assumed in a thousand allusions, which becomes a little incredible when we take down the dusty old volumes, where dingy calf has replaced the original splendours of the blue and yellow, and which have inevitably lost much of their savour during more than half a century's repose. The story of the original publication has been given by the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... usual; and the chair which Bacon was requested to take on entering, broke down with the publisher. Warrington burst out laughing, said that Bacon had got the game chair, and bawled out to Pen to fetch a sound one from his bedroom. And seeing the publisher looking round the dingy room with an air of profound pity and wonder, asked him whether he didn't think the apartments were elegant, and if he would like, for Mrs. Bacon's drawing-room, any of the articles of furniture? Mr. Warrington's character as a humorist, was known to Mr. Bacon: "I never ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... chill, and dark, as they came into it at exactly a quarter to two in the morning. Lit by the oil lamps that flared a dull red light over the dingy benches, the waiting room was not an inviting place. The younger man went off to look up a hotel, while the rest remained and prepared to camp down on the floor and benches. Smith was attended to tenderly by the other men, who spread their blankets on the bench for him, and by robbing themselves ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... the dresser ate their last meal in the dingy kitchen of Russell House. It was nothing but sandwiches, but it was the most delicious food they had tasted there. It is a mistake if you are old to go back to the village in which you were born and bred. Ghosts meet you in every lane and ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... himself, not what is outside. The jaundiced eye yellows all it beholds. The chameleon takes its color from the bark on which it clings. Man gives his color to what his thought is fastened upon. The pessimist's darkness makes all things dingy. The youth disappointed with his European trip said he was a fool for going. He was, for the reason that he was a fool before he started. He saw nothing without, because he had no vision within. He gave no sight, he received no vision. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Bishop suspended the Governor's chaplain. Then the Governor fined the Bishop in the sum of fifty pounds. The Bishop refused to pay, and was committed to Castle Rushen, and lay there two months. They show us his cell, a poor, dingy little box, so damp in his day that he lost the use of some of his fingers. After that the Bishop appealed to the Lord, who declared the imprisonment illegal. The Bishop was liberated, and half the island went to the prison gate to fetch him forth ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... transferred me to the guidance of a hired nurse, who led me up the stairs, and, before I was well aware of it, into the room in which Dr. Lloyd had died. Widely different, indeed, the aspect of the walls, the character of the furniture! The dingy paperhangings were replaced by airy muslins, showing a rose-coloured ground through their fanciful openwork; luxurious fauteuils, gilded wardrobes, full-length mirrors, a toilet-table tricked out with lace and ribbons; and glittering with an array of silver gewgaws ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the inhabitants of the moon, that the moon does to the inhabitants of the earth. The face of the latter, however, is more than twelve times as large, and it has not the same silvery appearance as the moon, but is rather of a dingy pink hue, like that of her iron when beginning to lose its red heat. As the same part of the moon is always turned to the earth, one half of her surface is perpetually illuminated by a moon ten times as large ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... The Fulton Ferry—dingy and deserted now—is full of fine memories. The old waiting room, with its ornate carved ceiling and fine, massive gas brackets, peoples itself, in one's imagination, with the lively and busy throngs of fifty and sixty years ago. "My life then (1850-60) ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... even this cost her; but it was better, she reflected, to get it over and know the very worst. However, she was spared this ordeal for the present; as they returned to the hall, they found themselves suddenly face to face with a dingy man, whose face was surrounded by a fringe of black whiskers and crowned by a shock ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... daughter near the Porte de Menin, and one day, when the next cottage to hers had been blown to bits, I tried to persuade her to leave. For a long time she shook her head, and then she took me to show me her bedroom—such a poor little bedroom, with a crucifix hanging over the bed and a dingy rosebush growing up outside the window. "It was here that my husband died, five years ago," she said. "He would not like me to go away and leave the house ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... streets of the great city, in all the lofty workshops and yards and factories, huge hammers smote and clashed, and men, naked to the waist, reeking in dingy interiors, bent like gnomes at their tasks, while saws creaked, wheels turned, planes and mallets, and chisels shoved and cut and struck; and down in damp cellars sallow ghastly men and women wove rag-carpets, and twisted baskets ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... within a given type and the same intermediate types between the two ends of the scale. But the general distinction is quite as well marked, though the necessity for seaworthy hulls brings about a closer resemblance along the water-line. There is the cargo boat, long, comparatively low, and rather dingy; with derricks and vast holds, which remind one of the tentacles and stomach of an octopus. The opposite extreme is the great passenger liner, much larger and more shapely in the hull; but best distinguished, at any ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... the red, coarse-skinned face, the tight mouth and opaque brown eyes and the low, stupid forehead with its old-fashioned narrow fringe of dingy hair. He knew that in spite of Sir Godfrey and the family estate of which she was always talking, she was common to the heart—not a lady like Christine and his mother—and her occasionally adopted pose of authority ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... you what you do," he said, laying down his rifle and slipping on his dingy black alpaca coat. "You come along, Mr. Plunkett, and I'll take you up to see the boys. If you can tell which one of 'em your description fits better than it does the other you have the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... the morbid fancies were gone; she was keenly alive; the homely real life of this huckster had fired her, touched her blood with a more vital stimulus than any tale of crusader. As she went down the crooked maze of dingy lanes, she could hear Lois's little cracked bell far off: it sounded like a Christmas song to her. She half smiled, remembering how sometimes in her distempered brain the world had seemed a gray, dismal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... the hot winds grew vengeful. They swept across the prairies with a hissing sound as of flames sizzling through the heat of a furnace. The tassels, burnt now to a dingy brown, hung in wisps. The leaves drooped like tired arms. They no longer sang in the wind. They rattled, a hoarse, harsh rattle ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... were the same tawdry ornaments on the mantel-piece, and the same books on the dusty shelf. Nothing was altered except the tenant of that room; but how great a change had taken place in him! What a face the dingy mirror offered him in place of that which it had shown him last! When the inn-keeper returned his mind involuntarily conjured up old Trevethick, as he had received from him the key of the ruin, and doggedly taken his compliments upon its workmanship. Truly, "there is no such thing as ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... a call of duty which increased my perturbations; yet something must have said to me, "Courage! all will yet be well. You are bound to have your own, whatever happens." Doubtless this feeling had been nurtured in me by the brave words of Emerson. At any rate, there in a little dingy back room of Dr. Hull's office, I paused in my study of anatomy and wrote "Waiting." I had at that time had some literary correspondence with David A. Wasson whose essays in the "Atlantic" I had read with deep interest. I sent him a copy of the poem. He spoke of it as a vigorous piece ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... from her window and saw other stately old houses like the one she was in. At first she was never tired of admiring the miracle of spring in London. She realised that no country greenness is equal to the glory of the new leaf against the dingy house-fronts, the green freshness about the black stems ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... Lacey," the owner of this place. It was going down hill like its master. A general air of neglect and growing dilapidation impressed the most casual observer. The front gate hung on one hinge; boards were off the shackly barn, and the house had grown dingy and weather-stained from lack of paint. But as you entered and passed from the province of the master to that of the mistress a new element was apparent, struggling with, but unable to overcome, the predominant tendency to unthrift and seediness. But everything that Mrs. Lacey controlled was as ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... entrance. Then one could see his narrow head with his long matted beard underneath a thick lacework of spiders' webs, which hung and floated when stirred by the air. And the hands of the sick man seemed dead under the dingy sheets. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... over all day, as he sat in his dingy shop, which was only a few rods from Mr. Chrome's, where Paul was painting wagons, singing snatches of songs, and psalms and hymns. Mr. Leatherby loved to hear him. It made the days seem shorter. It rested him when he was tired, cheered him when he was discouraged. It was like sunshine in ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... loitering crowd which obstructs the corner at the Angel, found some one to direct her to the street she sought. She had to walk some distance down St. John Street Road, in the direction of the City, before discovering the house she desired to find. When she reached it, it proved to be a very dingy tenement, the ground-floor apparently used as offices; a much-worn plate on the door exhibited the name of the gentleman to whom her visit was, with his professional description added. Mr. ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... and now observed that a dozen of the men with whom he had marched during the two previous days were collected in a little group by the door. He was taken by the arms and hustled forward to join them. As he came close and could see their faces in the dingy twilight, he saw also that, though big, strapping fellows, the most of them were weeping, and shivering like conies ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... whose great name was still in the germ, when I had last seen his present dwelling. The Parks, a gateway or two excepted, were unchanged. In the row of noble houses that line Piccadilly—in that hospital-looking edifice, Devonshire House—in the dingy, mean, irregular, and yet interesting front of St. James's—in Brookes's, White's, the Thatched House, and various other historical monuments, I saw no change. Buckingham House had disappeared, and an unintelligible pile was rising on its ruins. A noble "palazzo-non-finito" stood at the angle ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in the dingy restaurant, smoking and laughing and grumbling till the next train was announced. At four that afternoon they arrived without further mishap at the most interesting station of its size in Europe—Monte Carlo. And Merrihew saw gold whichever way he looked: in ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... the horses mended their paces, she felt sensibly relieved. At length they entered a small, new town, and drew up before a large, awkward building. The steps were lowered and Annie alighted, and soon found herself in a long, dingy apartment, with a bright pine-wood fire blazing and crackling in a huge, yawning fire-place at its farthest extremity. She was chilled, and sat down before the glowing hearth to warm her benumbed fingers. Presently ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... A small and dingy schooner lay snug against the quay, with which it was connected by a plank. On the forward deck, under a spot of awning, five Kanakas who made up the crew, were squatted round a basin of fried feis, and drinking coffee ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... which below was tin and sallow, well-featured, but with a want of glow and colour. The thick masses of dark hair were plaited into a very long thick tail behind, hanging down over a black evening frock, whose white trimmings were, like everything else about the place, rather dingy. She was far less absorbed than her father, and raised a quick, wistful brown eye whenever he made the least sound, or shuffled his papers. Indeed, it seemed that she was reading in order to distract her anxiety rather than for the ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... grace to the examiners of printing paper, he took leave of them, and mounted to the sanctum of the man who he had been told was the arbiter of his fate. A girl with soiled hands pointed out the room, for there was nothing to indicate it upon the dingy panel of the door; and presently Roseleaf stood in the presence of the individual he believed at that moment ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... of meteorology, are collections of partly condensed water vapour or of fine ice crystals. Clouds, mentioned in terms of the newspaper and the club, are dingy masses of nebulousness under which the dubious politician, company promoter, or other merchant of hot air is hidden from open attack and exposure. Clouds, to the flying officer on active service, are either ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... contemptuous glance about him, a glance that embraced the dingy, cheerless room, the rain streaming down the panes of the one window, and the figure of ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... sorrow in silence, they themselves experienced the rigors of uncertainty and agitation when the log cabin came into view amidst the laurel, and every man of them trooped in, following her, when the door opened and she was ushered into the little, low-ceiled room, so mean, so rough, so dingy of hue. But for her it held the wealth of the universe, the joy of all the ages. There upon the bed lay her sleeping child, larger, more vigorous, than she remembered him, garbed in a quaint little ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and I wonder how came they here? How came the show- case of Dr. Merrifield, Surgeon-Chiropodist here? How came here yon Italian painting?—a poor, silly, little affected Madonna, simpering at me from her dingy gilt frame till I buy her, a great bargain, at a dollar. From what country church or family oratory, in what revolution, or stress of private fortunes,—then from what various cabinets of antiquities, in what dear Vicenza, or Ferrara, or Mantua, earnest thou, O Madonna? ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... At a dingy, fly-infested place called "Red's Quick Lunch" whither Johnny, mindful of his low finances, piloted him, Bland ordered largely and complained because his "T bone" was too rare, and afterwards because it was tough. Johnny dined ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... within this town, That sheening for celestial seems to be, Disconsolate will wander up and down, 'Mid many things unsightly strange to see, For hut and palace show like filthily; The dingy denizens are reared in dirt; No personage of high or mean degree Doth care for cleanness of surtout and shirt, Though shent with ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... thought on his unknown parents, he asked them who were their parents. Then the one nearest to him gave him answer; and he told how that they were formerly flowers, but none of those who thrust their rooty hands greedily into the ground and draw nourishment from the dingy earth, only to make themselves fat and large withal; but that the light was dearer to them than anything, even at night; and while the other flowers slept, they gazed unwearied on the light, and drank it in with eager adoration— ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... annual rain, that we owe our vegetable mould with its rich and beauteous mantle of sward and foliage. And next, stripping from off the landscape its sands and gravels, we see its underlying boulder-clays, dingy and gray, and here presenting their vast ice-borne stones, and there its iceberg pavements. And these clays in turn stripped away, the bare rocks appear, various in colour and uneven in surface, but everywhere grooved and polished, from the sea level and beneath it, to the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... vessels on the lakes formed another class. The rough earthworks and stockades of the fort were guarded by a few light guns. Within, the red-coated regulars held sway, their bright uniforms varied here and there by the dingy hunting-shirt, leggings, and fur cap of some Tory ranger or French partisan leader. Indians lounged about the fort, the stores, and the houses, begging, or gazing stolidly at the troops as they drilled, at the creaking carts from the outlying farms as they plied ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... gaping Englishmen who have been on the other side of the Channel but have found their way along the Boulevards to the Porte St Denis, and have stared first of all at that dingy monument of Ludovican pride, and then have stared down the Rue St Denis, and then have stared up the Rue du Faubourg St Denis; but very few are ever tempted to turn either to the right hand or to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... unchanged. Dickens was pleased to call it "Cook's Court." By some it has been called dirty and dingy; it is hardly that, but it may well have been a more sordid looking place in days gone by. At any rate, it was a suitable enough environment for Snagsby, identified to-day as the stationer's shop next ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... Eighty-second Street apartment about six o'clock in the evening, and, after studying the dingy name-plates, took the five flights of stairs with uncommendable speed, and presented himself at the rear door ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... river dying away in the distance, or some of the words of the endless song his mother had read to him on the sea-shore. Sometimes he thought it must have been the twittering of the swallows—over the shallows, you, know; but it may have been the chirping of the dingy sparrows picking up their breakfast in the yard—how can I tell? I don't know what I know, I only know what I think; and to tell the truth, I am more for the swallows than the sparrows. When he knew he was coming awake, he would sometimes try ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... been brought up in no extravagant ways. Now that she had to earn most of the income of the household, for herself she had very few personal expenses to curtail. Thanks to Madame and Phebe, the house was kept in exquisite order, saving Felicita the shock of seeing the rooms she dwelt in dingy and shabby. Excepting the use of a carriage, there was no luxury ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... look better in black," said Mrs. Drake, "or pure white. Colors as full of life as this dress has would die dead on a dingy complexion like Mary's, or any of the Cobb women, for that matter. They look for the world as if they lived on coffee and couldn't git it out of their systems. Dolly, shuck off your dress ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... in Washington, had come to the International to interview the new Senator, to describe for his paper what kind of a citizen Langdon was. He glanced around at the dingy woodwork, the worn cushions, the nicked and uneven tiles of the hotel lobby, and smiled at the clerk. "Well, if this is the new Senator's idea of princely luxury he will fit right into the senatorial atmosphere." Both laughed derisively. "By the way," added Haines, "I suppose ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... slanting flight up the wind toward the grey desolate east. A squall, marked by dingy clouds, and clouds brick-red, like smoke from a burning building, appeared ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... forth his best things to do honor to his guests, and prepared the meal with no ordinary luxury. The table was carefully laid. The warmth of a large fire took the dampness from the room. The linen, glass, and china were not too dingy. Corentin saw at once that the landlord had, as they say familiarly, cut himself into quarters to please the strangers. "Consequently," thought he, "these people are not what they pretend to be. That young man is clever. I took him for ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... drumming of sleepless London seemed very remote from us, as side by side we crept up the narrow path to the studio. This was a starry but moonless night, and the little dingy white building with a solitary tree peeping, in silhouette above its glazed roof, bore an odd resemblance to one of those tombs which form a city of the dead so near to the city of feverish life, on the slopes of the Mokattam Hills. This line of reflection ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... which in his eagerness he neglected to cock, and, with one in each hand, rushed yelling after the jaguars. Lawrence cocked his gun and followed at a smart, though more sedate, pace. Leetle Cub, who probably thought them both fools, ran after them with a broad grin on his dingy countenance. ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... youngest scarcely six. They appeared to be the daughters of respectable people, probably of tradesmen in the neighbourhood. This school was in Lisson Grove, in the north-west of London; a spot not to be pictured from its name by those ignorant of the locality; in point of fact a dingy street, with a mixture of shops and private houses. On the front door was a plate displaying Miss Rutherford's name,—nothing more. That lady herself was middle-aged, grave at all times, kindly, and, be it added, fairly competent as things go in the world of school. The room ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... don't say that!" she exclaimed. "God has given me no greater happiness in this life than the sight of the gratitude of that poor creature, Nancy. I shall never forget the old woman's joy at the sight of her daughter. It made a palace out of that dingy furniture shop. Hand ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... head, understood. She stooped, said something in her ear, then in that of the Postmaster, and left the room. When she came back, two minutes later, Mr. Jones was with her. What she had done to him to sober him no one ever knew. But he had a book in his hand, and on the dingy black of his waistcoat there shone a little gold cross. He came to where the two lay. Vic drew from her finger a ring. What then occurred was never forgotten by any who saw it; and you could feel the stillness, it was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... dingy basin of soup with fragments of onion and spots of fat floating therein. But it was the first real meal of ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... steeples counted from the waters of the Thames, in the heart of the City, and grudged by modern economy as cumberers of the soil of Mammon, may be remarked an abortive little dingy cupola, surmounting two large round eyes which have evidently stared over the adjacent roofs ever since the Fire that began at ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... called it, as he went in among the first and sat down in a corner. It was scarcely barer or more dingy and dim than the rest of the kirks in country places were in those days; but it was very small, and it had windows only on one side. On that dark day it was dismal, and it could not have been beautiful at any time. The chill ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the stage. (A remarkable continent, Europe!) Apart from this most important point, American theaters are not, either without or within, very attractive. The auditoriums, to a European, have a somewhat dingy air. Which air is no doubt partly due to the non-existence of a rule in favor of evening dress (never again shall I gird against the rule in Europe!), but it is due also to the oddly inefficient illumination during the entr'actes, and to the ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... century and probably the oldest temple on the Continent of Europe. The present fane itself is of venerable age and aspect; its building fell into the reign of King Wenceslaus I and Ottokar II, and took ten years, from 1250 to 1260. Men only are allowed to worship in the inner temple, dingy and dark; whatever light penetrates through the narrow windows calls forth reluctant glints from the many brass candelabra, work of long centuries ago. Women may look on from an outer court through glazed openings ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... had fallen so heavily, that the drifts gathered by the night wind, in its rude sport, were piled to the very windows, obscuring the misty light of the winter's morn. How beautiful were those snow-wreaths in their perfect purity! The brown and knotted fences, the dingy out-buildings, were all covered with dazzling drapery; and the leafless trees were bowed beneath the weight of a fantastic foliage that glittered in the clear beams of the rising sun with a splendor that was ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... Millard, with a hardly concealed repulsion at the notion of Phillida climbing these populous stairs and threading the dingy and malodorous ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... old-fashioned stoop in front, over which the roof came down in a long sweep. It must have been built a hundred years ago, he thought, and it might have seemed a charming, comfortable old place were it not so unutterably dejected and dingy. Its windows were cracked, the grass grew tall and ragged upon its lawns, a litter of rubbish lay about the back door, and the woodwork, that should have been white, was gray from ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... this one, the eldest, is the head. Others come and go, but he remains. Most of his spare time is given to the garden. When the eight o'clock bell begins to swing he will leave his lettuces and soon perch himself on the little platform behind his shabby old desk in the dingy schoolroom, which even in the holidays cannot get rid of its ancient redolence of boys. The school-house, now so much like a prison, was once a mansion, and the most modern part of it is of the period ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... richly embroidered. It struck Roger that, as his white skin excited so much admiration, it would be as well to show it. He was, too, somewhat ashamed of his garments; which were much worn, had turned a dingy hue from the sun and salt water, and had, moreover, shrunk much from their recent immersion. Taking up the robe, therefore, he motioned to the chiefs to stay where they were and, returning into the room, stripped to his waist; and then, ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... confidence: "Cy, my boy, come aft and splice the main-brace. Cyrus, what a female! She knocked me higher than Gilroy's kite. And her mother was as sweet a girl as you ever saw!" He drew his son into a little, low-browed, dingy room at the end of the hall. Its grimy untidiness matched the old Captain's clothes, but it was his one spot of refuge in his own house; here he could scatter his tobacco ashes almost unrebuked, and play on his harmonicon without seeing Gussie wince and draw in her breath; ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... judging, excepting in a few instances, of this his excellence. Some few years ago, his pictures, to a considerable amount in number, were exhibited at the British Institution. We are forced to confess that they generally looked too brown—many of them dingy, many loaded with colour, that, when put on, was probably rich and transparent: we concluded that they had changed. Though Sir Joshua, as Northcote in his very amusing Memoirs of the President assures us, would not allow those under him to try experiments, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... road along which we met a couple of carriages yesterday became as brilliant and animated as the Bois de Boulogne. It was a perpetual coming and going of fashionable personages. The emperor used to drive over to Remiremont and dine at the little dingy commercial hotel, the best in the place, making himself agreeable to everybody. But all this is past, and nowhere throughout France is patriotism more ardent or the democratic spirit more alert than in the Vosges. The reasons are obvious. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... to a dead halt before a dingy-looking restaurant. Both men leaned against the window and gazed wolfishly at the food. A warm, foetid rush of air from under the grating at their feet tickled their nostrils and mocked their hunger with a mockery past endurance. Arranged ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... itself is small, low, and dark; it contains a full-length portrait in oil of Tycho de Brahe. Nearly all the upper part of the building is converted into a kind of bazaar, and the lower portion contains a number of small and dingy booths. ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... purple and argent as at delicious rare sips of a wine. Breath of violet, and ladysmock, and valley-lily, mingled and fluttered about her. Farina was as a man working the day's intent in a dream. He could see the heart in her translucent, hanging like a cold dingy ruby. By the purity of his nature he felt that such a presence must have come but to help. It might be Margarita's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not fall into the trap of a dingy bilious- looking yellow-green, a colour to which I have a special and personal hatred, because (if you will excuse my mentioning personal matters) I have been supposed to have somewhat brought it into vogue. I assure you I am ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... M. Batifol's school—the grotesque and miserable teachers, the ferocious and cynical pupils, the dingy, dusty, and ink-stained rooms—saddened and displeased Amedee. Although very intelligent, he was disgusted with the sort of instruction there, which was served out in portions, like soldier's rations, and would have lost ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... and chattels," which he called his own, to see what there was he could exchange for the article he wanted. His eye soon fell upon a brass finger ring, and his plan was quickly formed. The ring had been tumbled about among his playthings for a year or two, and was now dull and dingy; but he remembered that he once cleaned and polished it, so that it looked very much like gold, so long as the lustre lasted. He subjected it to this process again, and it soon looked as well as the plain gold ring he wore upon his finger, which it somewhat resembled in size and color. ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell
... the houses, a glimpse might be had of the low country beyond, with its sluggish canal choked with rushes, a dingy windmill here and there, and stretching away on either side the flat meadows crinkling with yellow grain, and the green pastures dotted with huge black-and-white cattle. A narrow road, straight as a line in Euclid, and bordered by a row of trees each the counterpart of all the others, ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... an ordinary tenement house of the poorest class, exactly like its neighbors, which lined both sides of the dingy street. The door was always open, more than half the time hanging by one hinge, the stairways were dark and crooked, the rooms small and dirty. In a back kitchen on the topmost floor, a man sat, or rather huddled, in a chair drawn close to the stove. His eyes were closed and his head drooped ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... a strange procession filed through the streets to the collector's office. At its head was the admiral of the navy. Somewhere Felipe had raked together a pitiful semblance of a military uniform—a pair of red trousers, a dingy blue short jacket heavily ornamented with gold braid, and an old fatigue cap that must have been cast away by one of the British soldiers in Belize and brought away by Felipe on one of his coasting voyages. Buckled around his waist was an ancient ship's cutlass contributed to his equipment ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... the students live huddled up together are most hurtful to their constitutions. The houses are dirty, dingy, ill-ventilated, and crowded. Even in case of infectious sickness ... they lie in the same place as others, some of whom they actually infect. Phthisis is getting alarmingly common among students owing to the sputum of infected persons being allowed ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Maynard hiking from Oak Creek Station to Pebbly Pit—most likely she will wear French heeled shoes!" said Anne, and she laughed so merrily that waiting passengers in the dingy cars glanced from the tiny windows and felt better for ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... a great unprepossessing building, washed and dried by the rain and sun into a dark, dingy colour, the only one that had ever supplanted the original hue of the freshsawn boards. This, indeed, was not an uncommon thing in the country; near all the houses of the Deepwater settlement were in the same case. ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... everyone flocked into a queer kind of semi-underground hall whose walls were painted to represent a cave, dingy cork festoons and "rocks" adding to the illusion. Here, at long tables, everyone drank innocuous French beer, that was really quite cool and good. It was rather like part of an English bank holiday. Everybody spoke to everybody else, and there were no classes and distinctions. You ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... they were intruding in some fairy domain. It was all exquisite, though rather tiny; but such luxury was as far removed from the dingy rooms they had occupied as could well be imagined. The Major coughed and ahemmed continually; Patsy ah'd and oh'd and seemed half frightened; Uncle John walked after them silently, but with a pleased smile that was almost childish upon ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... argument that if I got tired of it as a pet I could have it cooked, as they were excellent eating, failed to lead me to a purchase. There was a fine, healthy toucan, with his marvellous bill, looking sadly out of place in a small cage in such a dingy place. Did he ever think of his tropical forest home, I wondered, and wish himself in happier surroundings? A long wooden box with wire front contained rows and rows of Grass Parrakeets: many hundreds ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... he strolled across the square into the somber hall of the studio building on its southwest corner. The hall was empty, but he found and rang a bell at the entrance of a dingy elevator shaft. The elevator descended without haste. When it had reached the floor, the colored youth in charge of it inhospitably filled its doorway and regarded the visitor with indifference. This young man was easy to look at, but he was ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... laden with fruit and wine, which were hovering about the steamer, and getting in the way of everybody, while crying their wares. Many of these boatmen seemed as dark in complexion as any East Indian on board, and nearly all wore ear-rings, generally of silver, in the dingy lobes of their ears. They seemed noisy and quarrelsome, and often shrieked what seemed like terrible imprecations at each other, shaking their fists and scowling darkly, only to be laughing carelessly the next minute, as if nothing mattered. Dwight was about motioning one man to fling him up a ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... is the white. They are low on the legs, of a dingy white colour, and much smaller than the other two. They neither attack cattle nor game, though fond of hunting rabbits. This dog is, in fact, a scavenger, living upon the carcases of dead sheep and animals, which are found picked clean in the night. For this purpose it haunts the neighbourhood ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... numerically the unspeakable Turk is very much in evidence. On landing one of the guards, numerous and whose charges are fixed by law, took us in charge to show us the city. The streets generally were unimproved and irregular, both in architecture and location. Through several dingy and untidy streets he led us to the public park, which made considerable pretension to order and neatness. The turban, the wrap, the sandals and other Oriental costumes, which made up the dress, were not more varied than the complexion ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... means pleasant. Their front window looked out upon a long, straggling, ill-paved street, with its due proportion of mud heaps and duck pools. The houses on either side were, for the most part, dingy-looking edifices, with half-doors, and such pretensions to being shops as the display of a quart of meal, salt, or string of red peppers confers. A more wretched, gloomy-looking picture of ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... showed themselves at the windows, and the children that played in the yards, and the women that went to the pumps, till she had become pretty well acquainted with the neighbourhood; and though they were for the most part dingy, dirty, and disagreeable—women, children, houses, and all—she certainly had taken a good deal of interest in their proceedings. It was all gone now. She could not bear to look at them; she felt as if it made her sick; and turning ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... He had considered the situation in all its phases before leaving home and the one hundred and ten dollars was but a small item compared to his expected profit on the sale of the North Inlet land. He reached into his pocket, produced a long, dingy leather pocketbook wound about with twine, unwound the twine, opened the pocketbook and produced a ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and cheap cherries, served and eaten in cracked plates and dishes, with the dull-looking and dull-sounding forks of German silver—was this a banquet worthy of this pretty young woman? The Baron would have wept could he have seen it. The dingy decanters could not disguise the vile hue of wine bought by the pint at the nearest wineshop. The table-napkins had seen a week's use. In short, everything betrayed undignified penury, and the equal indifference of the husband and wife ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the exasperated damsel punched her right hand ferociously into the pillow, as if that had been in fault, and added half a dozen more feathers to those already encamped in her dingy tresses. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... in the oldest quarter of that old house. It was wainscoted, in black panels, up to the ceiling, which was stuccoed over in the fanciful diagrams of James the First's time. Several dingy portraits, banished from time to time from other statelier rooms, found a temporary abode in this quiet spot, where they had come finally to settle and drop out of remembrance. There is a lady in white satin ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... do not know. He went to the city by the eight o'clock omnibus every morning, dived into a court, entered a little square, rushed up two flights of stairs to a couple of rooms, and sat down in the back one before an office table on a hair-seated chair. It was a dingy place—not so dirty as it looked, I daresay. Even the windows, being of bad glass, did, I believe, look dirtier than they were. It was a place where, so far as the eye of an outsider could tell, much or nothing might be doing. Its occupant always wore his hat ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... bungalow; from the wobbly teapoy[4] at his elbow to the board of printed rules that adorned the empty mantelpiece. The only cheering thing in the room was the log fire that made companionable noises and danced shadow-dances on the dingy white walls. But the optimism of the fire was discounted by the pessimism of the lamp that seemed specially constructed to produce a minimum of light with a maximum of smell—and rank kerosene ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
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