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More "Ramshackle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I have them dished up occasionally by mother, although she prefers to descant upon the immortal eighties, when she was a leader herself and 'money wasn't everything.' We never had so much of it anyhow. I know Grandfather Ballinger built this ramshackle old house—" ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... "That old ramshackle of a lumber nag whose every rib you can count through her skin is your beautiful thoroughbred?" ejaculated his friend, incredulously. "Come now, don't ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 'ere bit of bread is as hard as wood, but I am getting through with it, and that's what I mean to do about our escape. Where you can't take a fair bite at anything, why, you must nibble; and I must go on nibbling now to find some way of getting out of this here ramshackle place. If I can just contrive a hole so that I can climb on the roof whenever I like, and be able to cover it up again so that these beauties don't know, I don't feel a bit doubtful of being able to slide down to the eaves, ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... rocks and bear, closely set in their compact, green, velvet-like foliage, tiny flowers as brilliant as gems. A ruby-red one amongst these is "the stalkless bladder-wort" (Silene acaulis), having no more resemblance at first sight to the somewhat ramshackle bladder-wort of our fields than a fairy has to a fishwife. There are many others of these cushion-forming, diminutive plants, with white, blue, yellow, and pink florets. Examined with a good pocket lens, they reveal unexpected beauties of detail—so graceful and harmonious that one wonders ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... train—a string of the most ramshackle carriages the line could muster, and the carriage in which I found myself smelt as if it had been in Billingsgate for a month. However, I could sit down this time. There was neither honeymoon, commercial traveller, nor man in the corner to disturb my peace; only a rollicking crowd of Irish harvest ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... temple—a temple to the god Appetite. His temple is truly a sorry looking shack, but it is good enough for the god he serves. I know a very seedy individual, going around begging a living of whomsoever will give him a dime or a nickel. He has built his temple to the god Idleness. It is a ramshackle affair, to be sure, but it is plenty good for the god he serves. I know another fellow who has built a very ordinary looking temple—rather poor inside and out. He served the god "Let Well Enough Alone." There are many temples like his, and little joy ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... him, pray remember, and leaving the place open to French attack. That is the sort of Deputy-Governor that the late Government thought fit to appoint: an epitome of its misrule, damme! He leaves Port Royal unguarded save by a ramshackle fort that can be reduced to rubble in an hour. ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... that Ludgate Circus was deserted except for a ramshackle cab with a drunken driver pouring forth a hoarse story of a mean fare to a sleepy policeman leaning against a lamp post. The sight of two gentlemen on foot when all 'buses had stopped running for the night raised fleeting hopes in the cabman's ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... were compelled to cross had long been neglected, and was now thickly overgrown with weeds. Not until we turned the corner of the great ramshackle building, which in other and more prosperous days had been dedicated to the curing of the leaf, did we perceive any signs of the presence of our antagonists. They were standing upon the farther side, directly opposite the door, and both bowed slightly ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... faces a wide, treeless valley and is backed by an equally bare hill. To the west the purple peaks of the Rampart range are visible. It is a group of ramshackle and dispersed cabins—not Western enough to be picturesque, and so far from being Eastern as to lack cleanliness or even comfort, and the young Englishman who rode over the hill one sunset was bitterly disappointed in ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... the ramshackle 'bus, and was driven a long distance through very sandy streets to the hotel on the St. Lawrence, and, securing a room, made arrangements to be called before daybreak. He engaged the same driver who had taken him out to "The Greys," as it was locally called, on ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... the Inn almost every day to play with Dan Frost, the landlord's son. They had played in the stables, then stocked with a score of horses, where now there were only two or three; in the great haymows of the old barn in the clearing back of the Inn; in the ramshackle garret under that amazing roof; or, best of all, in the abandoned bowling-alley, where they rolled dilapidated ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... war between England and Germany he took the Irish case, weighty with eight centuries of history and tradition, and he threw it out of the window. He pledged Ireland to a particular course of action, and he had no authority to give this pledge and he had no guarantee that it would be met. The ramshackle intelligence of his party and his own emotional nature betrayed him and us and England. He swore Ireland to loyalty as if he had Ireland in his pocket, and could answer for her. Ireland has never been disloyal to England, not even at this epoch, ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... of being some such ramshackle structure as might have been deduced from the Lensman's casual terminology, was in fact a fully-equipped observatory. Its staff was not large—eight men worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts of two men each—but the ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... sleep in was an old, ramshackle affair, absolutely over-run with rats. Great, big, black fellows, who used to chew up our leather equipment, eat our rations, and run over out bodies at night. German gas had no effect on these rodents; in fact, they seemed to thrive ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... his own horses, groomed again, and gorging their fill of good, clean grain in the Jew's ramshackle stable place. Joanna he turned loose, to sneak into any rat-hole that she chose. Then, with their swords drawn—for if trouble came it would be certain to come suddenly—he and his nine made a wide-ringed circuit of the city, to a point where ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... insist that you shall stand by with your arms folded while Austria is strangling your little brother to death." What answer did the Russian Slav give? He gave the only answer that becomes a man. ["Hear, hear!"] He turned to Austria, and said: "You lay hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle empire [loud applause and laughter] limb from limb." And he ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a bit ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... deteriorated in value. There is plenty to be got out of the land if only more could be spent on it; they want a new barn and some outhouses, and some of the fencing is disgraceful. As for the Priory itself—it is the Priory farm, you know—it is an old ramshackle place and in sore need of repair; some of the floors are rotten, and there are holes and crannies, and the mice and rats hold high revel in ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... their non-commissioned officers, perhaps half a dozen were trying to do something, but having no directing head or hand, accomplishing little. It looked as though nothing but the bursting asunder of that ramshackle building would liberate its human charge, for even those who, battered, bleeding, and suffocated, would gladly have escaped into outer air, were packed in, sardine-like, and incapable of self-extrication. To the appeal of the conductor that he should regain control of his men and prevent destruction ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... leaning over the water, palmettos standing as irregular sentries along the low, reeflike island which stretched away out of the picture. There was the gigantic, lonely pine he knew well, and, yes—he could just make it out—there was his own ramshackle little pier, which stretched in undulating fashion, like a long-legged, wading caterpillar, from the abrupt shore-line of ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... a flat beach of deep black sand, where they generally left their personal effects for lack of means of transportation. They climbed to a ragged thoroughfare of open sheds and ramshackle buildings, most of them in the course of construction. Beneath crude shelters of all sorts and in great quantities were goods brought in hastily by eager speculators on the high prices. The four hundred deserted ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... mercy of one idea only, and he began to see, very soon after he had investigated the two houses—the ramshackle shop and the riverside den—that if he intended to progress he could not afford to sit in the street and drink in the cafe opposite Leh Shin's dwelling for an interminable space of weeks. He had limitless patience, but he was quick ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... for proof, and although fresh paint was spread upon the panels, and the President coachman wore his hat with knowing air, on one side and handled the ribbons lightly, and dandled the drag, inviting jauntily the passer-by, the public recognized the ramshackle old "conveyance," and scoffingly refused to trust ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... long before I perceived the ramshackle sap-house ahead of me among the maples. Then I caught sight of her whom I ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... of any great interest except to business men. One part of the city is very like another. I was told that some of the finest buildings were of the Italian order; but I should say that by far the greater number were of the Ramshackle order. Although the first house in the place was only built in 1835, the streets nearest to the wharves look already old and worn out. They are for the most part of wood, and their paint is covered with dirt. But though prematurely old, they are by no means picturesque. Of ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... down upon the smoke-blackened temple; the Ghetto gates have fallen long ago, and nothing remains of its former crowded dwelling-places but a quaint ramshackle old house of Oriental aspect, and the old cemetery, Beth-Chaim, "the House of Life," as the Jews call it. This is no doubt the oldest existing and still preserved Jewish cemetery in Europe. Here tombstones stand closely ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... there's no other victim," said Jack. "If there is none, it will let the ice company off easier than they really deserve for allowing so ramshackle a building to stand, overhanging the river just where we like to do most of ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... in between two big tenements to a ramshackle rear barrack, Nibsy, the newsboy, halted in the shadow of the doorway and stole a long look ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... sixty-two miles by sea. To all this did captain Capstan "seriously incline," and the result was, two berths in the "Balaklava," several cans of preserved meats and soups, a hamper of ale, two bottles of Scotch whisky, a ramshackle, Halifax van for the luggage, a general shaking of hands at departure, and another set of white sails among the many white sails in the blue ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... gazing at the straits, and the huge Cape Horners creeping out to sea, and imminent Tamalpais. Thence, on my homeward way, I might visit that strange and filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of wild animals and birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of monkeys, and a poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whisky was administered by a proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even neglect Nob Hill, which is itself a kind of slum, being the habitat of the mere millionaire. There they dwell upon the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... two industrious mechanics named Pierre and Baptiste. They dwelt in a ramshackle tenement at Sault aux Beloeuil, where each had half-a-dozen children to support, besides their wives; who, it is grievous to relate, were drones. They were only nominally acquainted with that godly art ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... done with all the horrible little villages we used to pass through, in the DILIGENCE? What have they done with all the summer dust, with all the winter mud, with all the dreary avenues of little trees, with all the ramshackle postyards, with all the beggars (who used to turn out at night with bits of lighted candle, to look in at the coach windows), with all the long-tailed horses who were always biting one another, with all the big postilions in jack-boots - with all the mouldy cafes that we used to stop at, ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... of being jolted about abominably in a ramshackle vehicle. The surroundings were vague, as they always are in dreams. Low hills and sandy waste and sparse shrubs. Where was it, the "Great Desert," or some stretch in South America or in Mexico? In my dream I was dozing, trying ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to five-and-twenty years ago,' said a writer in a daily newspaper on Social Reform in 1910, 'when the living Sir Charles Dilke was the President of the Local Government Board, no one cared how the poor lived or fared. They could reside in the most ramshackle tenements in insanitary slums, for which, by the way, they were charged exorbitant rents, far higher than what they would now pay for the well-ventilated and well-equipped self-contained houses of the London County ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... my father and myself should go to Laval together. We started a couple of days later, and managed to travel by rail as far as Rennes. But from that point to Laval the line was now very badly blocked, and so we hired a closed vehicle, a ramshackle affair, drawn by two scraggy Breton nags. The main roads, being still crowded with troops, artillery, and baggage waggons, and other impedimenta, were often impassable, and so we proceeded by devious ways, amidst which our driver lost himself, in such wise that at night we had ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... hour Eben rounded up the "Eb and Flo" near the shore in front of the Grimsby house, which was a poor, ramshackle affair. The water here was deep, so he was able to run close to the bank. A long-haired, ragged, dirty boy pushed off for his father in a leaky boat, and took him ashore. In a few minutes more the "Eb and Flo" was again ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... offices, and removed to their present very handsome quarters which they have for so long occupied. I very well recollect the style of their old place of business and how the exterior strongly reminded me of the cotton warehouses in Liverpool. The interior was a big, rambling, ramshackle kind of a place with but few pretensions to being an office such as we see at the ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... lived, would have become one of the leading booksellers of the day. He was for some years at Hodgson's, and possessed a remarkable taste for, and knowledge of, books. He left Hodgson's and started on his own account in the old ramshackle house already referred to. This shop presented so unfavourable an exterior that even the Income-tax Fiend never 'called in,' although at one time there were several thousands of pounds' worth of books in it. Hutt did a ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... good a condition, he should be unworthy to appear before his sovereign, and should deserve chastisement before God and men. As a matter of fact this was untrue, for the French at Quebec were starving and incapable of resistance. A single well-directed broadside would have brought Champlain's ramshackle fort tumbling about his ears. His bold front, however, served its purpose for the time being; Kirke decided to postpone the attack on Quebec and to turn his attention to Roquemont's fleet. He burned the captured vessels ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... gulch of the Lunar Appenines, a pattern of dazzling glare and harsh moonshadows. Ramshackle mine-buildings of prefabricated plastic straggled out from the shrouding blackness under a pinnacled ridge. Denver eyed the forbidding terrain with hair-raising panic. He checked the speed of the racing space sled, circled once, and tried to pick out a soft spot. The ship ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... thumping heart and nerves all a-tingle that I followed Abel Crone out of his front shop into a sort of office that he had at the back of it—a little, dirty hole of a place, in which there was a ramshackle table, a chair or two, a stand-up desk, a cupboard, and a variety of odds and ends that he had picked up in his trade. The man's sudden revelation of knowledge had knocked all the confidence out of me. It had never crossed my mind that ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... up, and but for the little curling up of her lip, in which her teeth bit hard, she would have looked a picture of serene indifference. We were nearing Frenchy's shack, in front of which the path leads to the cove, and finally we were opposite the ramshackle place. It must be very dreadful to a girl, who has learned to admire a man, perhaps even to love him, to discover that her idol has feet of clay. She had allowed the best of her nature, I could see it now, to be drawn in admiration and regard towards a man she deemed unworthy. That odor of the ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... personally searched every foot of this particular building, and was confident that it afforded no hiding-place. The behavior of the dog, however, was susceptible of only one explanation; and Seton recognizing that the clue to the mystery lay somewhere within this ramshackle building, became seized with a conviction that he was ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... answered Eradicate promptly, as he climbed back off the seat, into the body of his ramshackle vehicle. ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... but rats in that ramshackle old place, Beautiful Joe," she said, as she pulled the plank away; "and as you don't hurt them, I don't see what you want to get in for. However, you are a sensible dog, and usually have a reason for having your own way, so I am going ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... entirely on its summer visitors. At the time of the death of Mr Ira Nutcombe, the only all-the-year-round inhabitants were the butcher, the grocer, the chemist, the other customary fauna of villages, and Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who rented the ramshackle farm known locally as Flack's and eked out a precarious livelihood ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... of berry-boxes from the store in his little hand-waggon. The rest of the afternoon he spent in making a crate to hold the boxes. Long and patiently he toiled, and at times Mrs. Royal went into the workshop to see how he was getting along. When supper time came it was a queer ramshackle affair he had constructed, which would hardly hold together long enough to reach the wharf, let alone the rough handling it ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... she went up-stairs, and got a certain disused attic into some sort of order. The attic was far away from the rest of the house; it was the top story of a wing, which had been added on to the tall, ramshackle old house. In some of the rooms underneath, the Franklin family themselves slept; in others they lived, and in others they cooked. The rest of the house, therefore, was free for the ...
— Dickory Dock • L. T. Meade
... half an hour of daybreak when a slow-riding, silent group of men came to a halt and dismounted in the narrow lane some distance from the ramshackle abode of Martin Hawk, squatting unseen among the trees that lined the steep bank of the Wabash. A three hours' ride through dark, muddy roads lay behind them. There were a dozen men in all,—and one woman, at whose side rode the hunter, Stain. They had stopped at the ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... Furman house is ramshackle but it is still standin' out dere and is used as a shelter for sawmill hands dat is cuttin' down de big pines and ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... colorful and steep vistas that lay along the zig-zag roads where ramshackle victorias clattered at crazy speed. Below him was the world's most vivid spread of sun-kissed color; the Bay of Naples curving nobly from his point of view to Ischia's misty bulwark, in a glistening spread ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... street a luxurious limousine was tooting for a ramshackle prairie schooner to turn to one side. Behind the automobile plodded a forlorn mule dragging a wagon-load of empty boxes. Behind that came an army ambulance followed by an electric truck. A handsome soldier on a restive ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... to-morrow, as soon as I can get away. Give Molly my love, Jock, and say I was often thinking of her. He is a decent fellow, Jock Magee!" she explained to her companion, as the ramshackle vehicle trundled away in the darkness. "A decent fellow, but he has been terrible unlucky with his wives. They fall ill on him as soon as they're married, and cost him pounds in doctors and funerals. This one has asthma, ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... no duplicate key to apartment No. 12, citizen Rouget ordered his men to break in the door. It did not take very long: the house was old and ramshackle and the doors rickety. The next moment the party stood in the room which a while ago the Englishman had so accurately described to pere Lenegre ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... a single row of ramshackle buildings, not unlike a small Missouri River town. The citizens, so far as visible, formed a queer collection of old men addicted to rum. They all came out to admire Ladrone and to criticise my pack-saddle, and as they stood about spitting and giving wise instances, they reminded me of ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... the famous Golden Horn I would have looked at it with more interest, but I saw nothing save a lot of moth-eaten barges and some queer little boats like gondolas. Then we came into busier streets, where ramshackle cabs drawn by lean horses spluttered through the mud. I saw one old fellow who looked like my notion of a Turk, but most of the population had the appearance of London old-clothes men. All but the soldiers, Turk and ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... nicely on fire," Remonencq told his sister, when she came to take up her position again on the ramshackle chair. "And now," he continued, "I shall go to consult the only man that knows, our Jew, a good sort of Jew that did not ask more than fifteen per cent of ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... ramshackle, disused store building. Coldriver had one, especially well located, and not so ramshackle as it might have been. It was big; its front was crossed by a broad porch; its show windows were not show windows at all, but were put there solely to give light. Coldriver did not know there was such ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... about that, if he was employed in another shop, he had no right to go into Number Thirteen. That's a violation of rules. But if he's in Rad's ramshackle stable he ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... in her little castle, or rather the Liberty Realty Company's little castle. She wanted to be alone. It was very quiet. Outside the birds could be heard twittering in the vine on the ramshackle little porch. The kettle sang cheerily in the kitchen. There was that musty indoor odor of the country homestead, the odor which soldier boys remembered and longed for in trenches and dugouts. And mingling with this was the fragrance of flowers coming in through the open window. The dog ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... William Linder, as he had fondly hoped, but to an obscure address not far from the Navy Yard in Brooklyn. To this address, having looked up and gathered in the B-flat trombonist, Average Jones led the way. The pair lurked in the neighborhood of the ramshackle house watching the entrance, until toward evening, as the door opened to let out a tremulous wreck of a man, palsied with ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... then see that there was a square space which, though similar in appearance to the rest of the gallery, concealed the entrance to the shaft. He pushed it upward. It gave easily. It was a trap-door, leading into a square, ramshackle shed! ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... scene Abe Switch meets the proprietor of the Diamond Palace Saloon, a ramshackle affair which to the owner ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... separated from their boy friends. A great, ramshackle bus, and another vehicle, were waiting at the end of the platform. An old man in a long duster stood beside the bus to help the girls in and see to their baggage. ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... desolate little spot is the campo santo of San Gabriel; rather desolate, and very dusty. The ramshackle wooden crosses stagger wildly on the shapeless mounds; the dilapidated whitewashed railings, cracked and blistered by the sun, look much as though they might be bleached bones, tossed carelessly about; and the badly painted, misspelled inscriptions yield up their brief announcements ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... a most important point in the campaign, was far from attractive in feature, being made up of a half-dozen unsightly houses, a ramshackle tavern propped up on two sides with pine poles, and the weatherbeaten building that gave official name to the cross-roads. We had no tents—there were none in the command—so I took possession of the tavern for shelter ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of Marion were of great mills and sawdust-burners along a wide river; of broad, sawdust-covered streets; of a single block of good, brick stores on a main thoroughfare which almost immediately petered out into the vilest and most ramshackle frame "joints"; of wide side streets flanked by small, painted houses in yards, some very neat indeed. Tally walked rapidly by the respectable business blocks, but pushed into the first of the unkempt frame saloons beyond. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... first-floor windows of which announced the tenancy of a maker of gymnastic appliances; and having kissed Madame Brandt's hand with awful solemnity and bowed deeply to me, he preceded us down the passage, out into the yard, and into a ramshackle studio at the end, where his cats ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... are delicious; we could sit in our shirt-sleeves until any hour, without any perceptible chill in the air, playing cards, or smoking and talking, or reading by a lantern. Williams and I found picket a great resource; and many a good game of whist have I had sitting in a crowded quartette in our ramshackle battery Cape-cart, with an inch of ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... town, which was reached late the following day, Farwell engaged two rooms at the ramshackle tavern and informed Pine that he was to ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... in a bush-clad hollow, two miles from the world in general, stood a little, old, ramshackle shanty. The location was one that seekers would hardly have found without a trail to lead them ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... by three Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them—this is twenty-five years ago, reader!—a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand—and teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered—as the friendly mists rose—under a great Tarpaulin at the barge's stern. Where is that girl now, I wonder? ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... All day she was American, practically, and proud of the work of her head and hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions. By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers. At college she had learned a trade without knowing it. The girls had found out that she was the designer of her own gowns. She had ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small—a very small—way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The poultry she ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... your living out here in this ramshackle old chicken-coop, when you might have a tidy flat on Paulina Street; and the doctor could have a desk in my office next door to his old boss." Dr. Leonard spoke testily, and Alves laid her hand soothingly on ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the black troops, the blue troops of the army of priests; the snuffy regiments of Capuchins, grave and grotesque; the trim French abbes; my lord the bishop, with his footman (those wonderful footmen); my lord the cardinal, in his ramshackle coach and his two, nay three, footmen behind him;—flunkeys, that look as if they had been dressed by the costumier of a British pantomime; coach with prodigious emblazonments of hats and coats-of-arms, that seems as if it came ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... else visible but a few dusky groves of willows and the dazzling snow. The ramshackle wooden hotel was rather more than usually badly-kept and comfortless, and Winston, who had managed to conciliate his host, felt relieved one afternoon when the latter flung down ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... than in all the line from Piccadilly to Whitechapel; a painter can pick up more food for his easel in this queer, old street—an antiquarian can find there more tales and crusts for his noddle, than in all Regent Street and Portland Place. We love a ramshackle place like this; it does one good to get out of the associations of the present century, and to retrograde a bit; it is pleasant to see how people used to pig together in ancient days, without any of the mathematical formalities of the present day; it keeps one's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... the height of the original: the vacant space has been very roughly filled up, and the numerous holes and crevices support a fine growth of weeds, and a strong young tree has also taken root in the ramshackle stone work. From the central tower, gargoyles grin above the elaborately carved buttresses and finials in remarkable contrast ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... the fateful part Jackson's arm was to play in my life. Jackson himself did not impress me when I hunted him out. I found him in a crazy, ramshackle* house down near the bay on the edge of the marsh. Pools of stagnant water stood around the house, their surfaces covered with a green and putrid-looking scum, while the stench that arose from ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... be a ramshackle affair with an ill-kept but powerful-looking horse between the shafts. I climbed up, and as I took my seat I observed to my companion that I wished first of all ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... the ancient ruins, for the conveyance did not start until four o'clock in the afternoon. When that hour came he made one of the travellers, all country folks, who were packed close as pigeons in a crate in the ramshackle, noisy, broken-down vehicle, which lumbered on its way behind its lean and suffering horses, through woods and hills and along mountain passes of a grandeur and a beauty on which the eyes of educated travellers ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... dodging from tree to tree along the edge of the mere, in order to keep out of view of anyone moving on the road. Over against the ale-house I crept still more warily through the wood to the edge of the road. There was no one moving in or about the ramshackle little place, but there was one unexpected thing in sight which gave me pause. Hitched by the reins to a staple in the signpost was the finest horse I had ever set eyes on, a slender, sinewy stallion, champing on his bit and pawing nervously on ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Into a ramshackle building on the corner of a vivaciously ugly street Lockwood led his friend in quest of the greatest artist. An old man in a skull cap, woolen shirt, baggy trousers and carpet slippers appeared in a darkened doorway. With his long white beard he stood bent ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... have been plenty in past ages; it seems unreal and impossible even though we know it is true; it violates all our feeling as to what a country should be in order to have a right to exist; and it seems as though it was too ramshackle to go on holding together any length of time. Yet it has survived, much in its present shape, two centuries of storms that have swept perfectly unified countries from existence and others that have brought ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... place. The Mississippi Steel Company had now two huge Bessemer converters, in which a volcano of molten flame roared all day and night. It had bought up the whole western side of the town, and cleared away half a hundred ramshackle dwellings; and here were long rows of coke-ovens, and two huge rail-mills, and a plate-mill from which arose sounds like the crashing of the day of doom. Everywhere loomed rows of towering chimneys, and pillars of rolling black ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... when it has forced physical suffering to the highest point without impairing the mental functions. Thus it was with Silas Carringer, a young man of uncommonly high spirit, when he found himself a total stranger in a ramshackle Mexican city one rainy night in November. In his possession remained not a single article that he might have pawned for a morsel of food. And he had already stripped his body of every shred of clothing ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... was content to let well enough alone after enlarging the house, laying turf, and planting shrubs and flowers. He found The Hollies a ramshackle place, and left it even more so, but with a new note of artistry and several unexpectedly charming vistas. Thus, the big double window opened straight into an irregular garden which merged insensibly into a sloping lawn ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... exact middle of the piazza, and took these steps with her usual gentle precision of movement. She had no sooner taken up the position which she felt to be the proper one for her, than round the corner came the Bywood stage,—a long, lumbering, ramshackle vehicle, in which sat Mrs. Murray, a kind-looking nurse, and the twelve convalescent children who were to have the first ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... The town kept as deserted as ever, and it seemed almost startling to me when I was posted sentry on the roof, after looking out over the wide, sandy, dusty plain, over which the sunshine was quivering and dancing, to peer down amongst the little ramshackle native huts without a sign of life amongst them, and it took but little thought for me to come to the conclusion that the natives knew of something terrible about to happen, and had made that their reason for going away. Though, all the same, it ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... sauntering in, scanned every detail with fastidious distaste. To-day, for the first time, a great longing possessed him for the airy ramshackle bungalows of the Frontier he loved, for the trumpet-call to "stables," for a sight of his squadron and the feel of a saddle ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the station we halted before a ramshackle old two-storey house that was covered by roses and hidden among orange and fig trees. The approach led through an irregular plantation of cedar and pepper trees, pomegranates and other shrubs, and masses of chrysanthemums and cosmos that flourished ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... the rattling of the ramshackle cars stopped conversation. Julie drew Peter's attention to a little scene on the platform outside, and he looked through the glass to see a big French linesman with his girl. The man had got her into a corner, and ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... holding it back, for he was coming slowly down the hill. Another Heir of all the ages—another Imperialist—a degraded, brutalized wretch, clad in filthy, stinking rags, his toes protruding from the rotten broken boots that were tied with bits of string upon his stockingless feet. The ramshackle cart was loaded with empty bottles and putrid rags, heaped loosely in the cart and packed into a large sack. Old coats and trousers, dresses, petticoats, and under-clothing, greasy, mildewed and malodorous. As he crept along with his eyes on the ground, ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the others hastened to do their part. Two of them hunted until they found the lean-to, under which a ramshackle wagon stood that excited the laughter ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church member's essential Confession of Faith, to be developed and expanded according to the need and circumstances, would be a real power in a chaplain's hands. The men's behaviour in billets—ramshackle barns for the most part—was almost exemplary. Only once or twice small episodes occurred in connection with hen-roosts, and on one occasion a sucking-pig was slaughtered amid its brethren at the dead of night. It must have been a temporary madness that possessed the ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... past the station drops down into the village, giving a glimpse of the beck crossed by its ramshackle wooden foot-bridge—the view one has been prepared for by guide-books and picture postcards. Lower down you enter the village street. Here the smell of fish comes out to greet you, and one would forgive the place this overflowing welcome if one were not so shocked at the dismal aspect of ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... automatically. The kitchen, with its hard earth floor and the sunlight drifting in through the bamboo sides, was not unclean, and a savoury smell came from the stew-pot on the ramshackle stove. In one of the bars of sunlight a mango-coloured child of two years or so was playing with his toes—he was surprisingly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... treated Prussia's ancient foe with extraordinary leniency; for he had already planned the Dual Alliance in his mind; knowing as he did that, though in Germany Austria might be an inconvenient rival to Prussia, in Europe she was the indispensable ally of Germany. And so, though the ramshackle old German imperial castle was divided in two, and the northern portion, at any rate, brought thoroughly up to date, the neighbours still lived side by side in a "semi-detached" kind of way. It would be a mistake then to ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... railroad plant was electric-lighted; the single ramshackle street-car had been turned into a chile-con-carne stand; the bank, unable to compete with the faro games and the roulette wheels, had gone into liquidation; the Building and Loan directors had long since looted the treasury ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... to Dumpling Pond, then set out for his home, straight through the woods, till he reached the Catrock line, and following that came to the farm and ramshackle house of Micky Kittering. He had been told that the man at this farm had a fresh deer hide for sale, and hoping to secure it, Quonab walked up toward the house. Micky was coming from the barn when he saw the Indian. They recognized each other at a glance. That was enough for Quonab; he ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... The ramshackle old vehicle, one of Cobb's Royal Mail Coaches, big-bodied, lumbering, scarlet, pulled by two stout horses, drew up before the door, and the driver climbed ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... the show, but as Brevoort made no move to go, he fixed his attention on the screen again. Immediately another scene jumped into the flickering square. Pete stiffened. Before him spread a wide canon. A tiny rider was coming down the trail from the rim. At the bottom was a Mexican 'dobe, a ramshackle stable and corral. And there hung the Olla beneath an acacia. A saddle lay near the corral bars. Several horses moved about lazily . . . The hero of the recent gun-fight was riding into the yard . . . Some one ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... never could understand; unless they're made of leather in the first place, and sometimes it seems so. The squire had his nap out, I suppose, and then he woke up. When he opened his eyes, there in front of him, instead of his tall mahogany desk, was a ramshackle painted thing, with no handles to the drawers, and all covered with ink. He looked round, and what does he see but strange things everywhere; strange to his eyes, and yet he knew them. There was ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... orthodox. At the close we descended the steps carefully, groped our way out quietly, and left, wondering how ever we had got to such a place at all, and how those worshipping in it could afford to Sabbatically pen themselves up in such a mysterious, ramshackle shanty. ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... patrol leader, "there is a long story connected with the old ramshackle mill. No use of my going into all the details. It's been abandoned a good many years now. People have tried to live there three times since old Munsey was found dead there, but they ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... Thorpe recalled its circumstances. His own curious mental ferment, which had made this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the very hour of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed a vivid picture of that approach—of the old ramshackle village trap, and the boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent, red-bearded, plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively suggestive of something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now that ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... another, like eyelashes, from the friendly cliffs. The cooing of the pigeons was gone forever. The muddied water from the great flume raced down through the ravine, turning many wheels, but nowhere gathering in any form or place which seemed good for trout. On either side stood shanties, and ramshackle buildings where such things as stonecutting and blacksmithing were done. Along the waterside ran the tracks of our Terminal and Belt Line System, on which trains of flat-cars always stood, engaged in the work of carrying away the cliffs, in which they were aided and abetted by giant derricks and ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place—poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben Blankenship never dreamed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the time when George III was king, and our scene of action lies only at an old farm-house six miles or so from Finchley —a quaint, ramshackle, commodious, old-fashioned, thatched farm-house that we see only in pictures now, and which has long since been improved off the face of ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... answer the facts were speedily brought out. Six hard customers, awaiting sentence after trial for larceny, burglary, assault with intent to kill, and finally desertion, had been cooped up together in an inner room of the ramshackle old wooden building that served for a prison, had sawed their way through to open air, and, timing their essay by the sound of the trumpets that told them the whole garrison would be out at morning ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... adored the sand dunes, their colour seemed to him more lovely than anything he had ever seen; and he was enchanted with the canals and the long lines of poplars. When they got out of the Gare du Nord, and trundled along the cobbled streets in a ramshackle, noisy cab, it seemed to him that he was breathing a new air so intoxicating that he could hardly restrain himself from shouting aloud. They were met at the door of the hotel by the manager, a stout, pleasant man, who spoke tolerable English; Mr. Goodworthy was an old friend and he greeted them ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... no history is not necessarily happy. There were portions of the line, it is true, which provided a great deal of comfort and very little danger. Fine dug-outs were constructed—you have probably seen them in the illustrated papers. The men were more at home in such trenches than in the ramshackle farms behind the lines. These show trenches were emphatically the exception. The average trench on the line during last winter was neither comfortable nor safe. Yellow clay, six inches to four feet or more ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... of great wealth in his day, and a man of action. Unfortunately he died before he had the chance to carry out his projects in connection with the rehabilitation of Schloss Rothhoefen, even then a deserted, ramshackle resort for paying tourists and a Mecca for ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Some he bullied a little, for habit is strong; some he treated with laughter and irony, some with wit, and some with kindness and deep understanding. He might have been an able shepherd going to work on a hopelessly numerous black and ramshackle flock of sheep. He couldn't expect to make model citizens out of all his old heelers; he couldn't expect to turn more than fifty per cent of his two clergymen into the paths of righteousness. But with the young criminals he took much pains, giving money where it would do good, and advice ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... out, busy as bees, and, unlike the dumb, pathetic little people out in the hills, alert, keen-eyed, cheerful, and happy. Under the log foot-bridge the shining creek ran down past the mountain village below, where the cupola of the court-house rose above the hot dirt streets, the ramshackle hotel, and the dingy stores and frame dwellings of the town. Across the bridge her eyes rested on another neat, well- built log cabin with a grass plot around it, and, running alongside and covered with honeysuckle—a pergola! That was her hospital ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... protection, but more likely it was due to laziness and want of care. However that may have been, the interior was surprisingly substantial, with an excellent floor like that in a ballroom. I slept in a detached ramshackle room used as a kitchen, comfortable because of being ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... a good excuse for not being a gentleman and a sportsman and he did not purpose to look for any reasons for doing differently. Then unexpectedly he was invited to dinner by Mr. Ephraim Tutt in a funny old ramshackle house on West Twenty-third Street with ornamented iron piazza railings all covered with the withered stalks of long dead wistarias, and something happened to him. "Payson Clifford's Twenty-five Thousand Dollar Dinner." He had ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... to the porch he walked. The ramshackle crate behind him had a ridiculous air of a chrysalis from which some bright thing had departed. For a shaft of sunlight was shimmering athwart the veranda floor. And into the middle of the warm bar of radiance ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... quite ready. When she came down five minutes later, with a fresh ribbon in her hair and one of the new frocks that she had never worn before looking its very trimmest, Jasper Parloe had alighted from his ramshackle wagon and was talking with Tom, who ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... things, along with their Madeira and port wine. But the same books show that the planter was chronically in debt and that bankruptcy was common, while accounts left by travelers reveal the fact that many of the mansion houses were shabby and run down, with rotting roofs, ramshackle doors, broken windows into which old hats or other garments had been thrust to keep the wind away. In a word, a traveler could find to-day more elegance in a back county of Arkansas than ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... Cabbage Patch. It was not a real cabbage patch, but a queer neighborhood, where ramshackle cottages played hop-scotch over the railroad tracks. There were no streets, so when a new house was built the owner faced it any way his fancy prompted. Mr. Bagby's grocery, it is true, conformed to convention, and presented a solid front to the railroad track, but Miss ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... father must be getting off his head to go and buy up such a miserable ramshackle piece of rubbish. It was only fit to knock to pieces and sell ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... about that? She used to live in New York City, and knew all the best families for miles around. When we first moved here, next to that ramshackle old place, I remember her telling me she'd known the people who ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... had these safely over we set out in pursuit of the Turks. The next town of importance was a ramshackle mud-walled affair called Tauq, twenty miles beyond, on the far side of a river known as the Tauq Chai. The leading cars pursued to within sight of the town and came in for a good deal ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... hard to convey in words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, could ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... emerges from the litter of his workshop is lovable; but in spite of all Lincoln's melancholy, the dreariness of his life, sitting with his feet on the table in his unswept and untidy office at Illinois, or riding on circuit or staying at ramshackle western inns with the Illinois bar, cannot have been so unrelieved as it is in Mr. Herndon's presentation. And Herndon overdid his part. He ferreted out petty incidents which he thought might display the acute Lincoln as slightly too acute, when for ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... been carefully reared by a most loving and thoughtful mother, even in the crude old days of the army, when its fighting force was scattered in small detachments all over the wide frontier, and men, and women, too, lived on soldier rations, eked out with game, and dwelt in tents or ramshackle, one-storied huts, "built by the labor of troops." At twelve she had been placed at school in the far East, while her father enjoyed a two years' tour on recruiting service, and there, under the care of a noble woman who taught her girls to be ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... up the path toward the little ramshackle cottage she turns and flashes one of them wide smiles on Babe and ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... not prepare the boys for the farmer's sudden arrival at their club-house, on a Saturday afternoon, two weeks later. He drove up in a ramshackle old buggy, driving two of the finest horses in the county. Skinflint though he was, he loved horses. He came into the club-house and eyed the boys ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hotel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and English, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... later Devil Judd Tolliver was in the store Hale pointed out and peering cautiously around the edge of an open window at the wooden gate of the ramshackle calaboose. Several Falins were there—led by young Buck, whom Hale recognized as the red-headed youth at the head of the tearing horsemen who had swept by him that late afternoon when he was coming back from his first trip to Lonesome Cove. The old man gritted his teeth as ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... sigh of relief when she found herself at last in the ramshackle fiacre which Noel by strenuous effort had managed to commandeer. The din bewildered her. But for her husband's protecting presence she would have ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... other men out with them. Street organs, under our fatherly County Council, are forbidden on Sundays; nevertheless, Sunday being the only day when millions of people have any chance of recreation, many organs go out. Whither do they go? East, my dears. There, in any ramshackle hall, or fit-up arch-way, or disused stables, the boys and girls, out for fun, may dance the golden hours away throughout Sunday afternoon and evening. Often the organs are hired for Eastern weddings and christenings ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... a premium. Lane was forced to apply in the sordid quarter of Middleville, and the place he eventually found was a small, bare hall bedroom, in a large, ramshackle old house, of questionable repute. But beggars could not be choosers. There was no heat in this room, and Lane decided that what time he spent in it must be in bed. He would not give ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Xavier and his crew might get properly drunk on tafia, while Nick and I walked about the town and waited until his Excellency, the commandant, had finished dinner that we might present our letters and obtain his passport. Natchez at that date was a sufficiently unkempt and evil place of dirty, ramshackle houses and gambling dens, where men of the four nations gamed and quarrelled and fought. We were glad enough to get away the following morning, Xavier somewhat saddened by the loss of thirty livres of which he had no memory, and Nick and myself relieved at having the passports in our pockets. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... two men were driving in a buckboard drawn by a pair of half-broken pinto bronchos. The outfit was a rather ramshackle affair, and the driver was like his outfit. Stewart Duff was a rancher, once a "remittance man," but since his marriage three years ago he had learned self-reliance and was disciplining himself in ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... us, faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too gruesome a ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility. The third was an upstanding, broad-shouldered youth, with his hands in his pockets, turning his back on the other two who appeared to be talking together earnestly. He stared across the empty Esplanade. A ramshackle gharry, all dust and venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the group, and the driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave himself up to the critical examination of his toes. The young chap, making no movement, not even stirring his head, just stared into the sunshine. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the store—indeed, I should like to know who would have enjoyed it. It dated back to the beginning of the last century, a tarred, coal-black, ramshackle hut. The windows were low and small, the windowpanes diminutive. The ceiling was low. Everything was arranged in such a way as to exclude the possibility of lofty ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... The night was sultry and dark, with a leaden sky and a breathless humidity that presaged a thunder storm. The houses were mostly unlighted at this hour. There was an occasional apartment house among them, but mostly they were low, ramshackle ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... place that was the council chamber of perhaps the most cunning, certainly the most cold-blooded and unscrupulous, band of crooks that New York had ever harbored. And yet—why not? Wasn't there the essence of cunning in that very fact? Who would suspect anything of the sort from a ramshackle, two-story little house like this, whose front was a woe-begone little store, the proceeds of which might just barely keep the body and soul of ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... drank, and the current of life at the corner of Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street ceased to flow. Boys and men who had heard of the affair, and who had the divine gift of curiosity, gazed in rapture at the 'No Admittance' notice on the ramshackle double gates in Woodisun Bank, It seemed that they might never be rewarded, but their great faith was justified when a hand-cart, bearing several beams three yards long, halted at the gates and was, after a pause, laboriously pushed ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Many ramshackle old wagons were already drawn up in the barn-yard and hitched to trees along the cart track. Their owners were grouped in the dooryard around the stoves and tables and boxes of "articles too numerous to mention," chattering over the merits and flaws of mattresses and lamps, ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... group was moving to the rear of the station, and now came in sight of a ramshackle automobile with a Mexican at the wheel, easily distinguished by his swarthy coloring and his ragged mustaches, as well as by his peculiar dress—a steep crowned hat like a sugar loaf, with a very wide brim, a tight bolero jacket that did not reach to the waist and disclosed a dark blue silken shirt ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... that we have all sorts of licensed people about us; people who are licensed to cram us upon steam-boats; to crowd us into omnibuses; to jolt us in ramshackle cabs; to supply us with bad brandy and other adulterated drinks; licentiates for practising physic; licentiates for carrying parcels; licentiates for taking money at their own doors for the diversions of singing and dancing; ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... was, in all conscience. A single street, wide enough, almost, for a plaza, paralleled the railroad tracks, the buildings, such as they were, all strung along the further side in an irregular line. One of these, ramshackle, weather-worn, labeled laconically "The Store," stood directly opposite the station. The architecture of the "Paloma Springs Hotel," next door, was very similar. On either side of these two structures a dozen or more discouraged-looking ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... said. "I'm Susy Drummond. 'Miss Susan Drummond, the Towers,' will soon be on my visiting cards. Isn't the place very ramshackle? Doesn't it want to be put into repair a good bit? I'm just dying to hear all about it. Oh, and here's an American swinging-chair—I just adore them. You don't mind if I see-saw gently while you talk to me. ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... a family, in which were quite a number of children, had lately come to town, and taken the big ramshackle building. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... in the loss of three more of our ponies cast a temporary gloom over the depot party when we reassembled in the safety of the old ramshackle magnetic lean-to at Hut Point. I use the word lean-to because one could hardly describe it as a hut, for the building was with out insulation, snow filled the space between ceiling and roof, and whenever a fire was kindled or ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... should deserve chastisement before God and men. As a matter of fact this was untrue, for the French at Quebec were starving and incapable of resistance. A single well-directed broadside would have brought Champlain's ramshackle fort tumbling about his ears. His bold front, however, served its purpose for the time being; Kirke decided to postpone the attack on Quebec and to turn his attention to Roquemont's fleet. He burned the captured vessels and plundered ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... brother to death." What answer did the Russian Slav give? He gave the only answer that becomes a man. ["Hear, hear!"] He turned to Austria, and said: "You lay hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle empire [loud applause and laughter] limb from limb." And he ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... between snow-capped mountains glistening under the January sun; a cluster of ramshackle, weather-beaten wooden houses elbowing each other on either side of a single straggling street, with here and there a newer concrete building planted firmly like respectable citizens in a disreputable mob. Stray dogs sniffing ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... nothing but what appeared to be an unoccupied ramshackle brick abomination. Suddenly Sydney ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... and the Dutch of South Africa would welcome their German liberators; and the great colonies, to which Britain had granted a degree of independence that no virile state would ever have permitted, would shake off the last shreds of subordination; and the ramshackle British Empire would fall to pieces; and Germany would emerge triumphant, free to pursue all her great schemes, and to create a lasting world-power, based upon Force and System and upon ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... performer on the piano, flute, and violin, did conjuring tricks, and delighted the natives of the Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hotel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and English, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a creative artist. He went; and in a few years reached the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... cried Fern, clutching Peace about the ankles as she started toward the sagging door of the ramshackle old house. "Mrs. Burnett will chase you out with the broom like she did us. And 'sides, mamma won't know you. She doesn't even know Rivers ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... crest of the slope, he started down the incline. He turned off part of the power, and was gliding along joyously, when from a cross-road he suddenly saw turn into the main highway a mule, drawing a ramshackle wagon, loaded with fence posts. Beside the animal walked an old ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... which we passed in coming up. I spent an hour among them, and I never saw any house whose area could be more than twelve feet square, while many were certainly not more than seven feet by six. Such primitive, ramshackle, shaky-looking dwellings I never before have seen. As compared with them, an Aino hut, even of the poorest kind, is a model of solidity and architectural beauty. They looked as if a single gust would topple them and their human contents into the water. Yet, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... passed. In front of Harrison Miller's house, however, he stopped and waited. He lighted a cigarette and made a careful survey of the old place. Strange, if this were to prove the haven where Judson Clark had taken refuge, this old brick two-story dwelling, with its ramshackle stable in the rear, its small vegetable garden, its casual beds of simple garden flowers set in a half acre or so ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... quite alone in her little castle, or rather the Liberty Realty Company's little castle. She wanted to be alone. It was very quiet. Outside the birds could be heard twittering in the vine on the ramshackle little porch. The kettle sang cheerily in the kitchen. There was that musty indoor odor of the country homestead, the odor which soldier boys remembered and longed for in trenches and dugouts. And mingling with this was the ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... getting through with it, and that's what I mean to do about our escape. Where you can't take a fair bite at anything, why, you must nibble; and I must go on nibbling now to find some way of getting out of this here ramshackle place. If I can just contrive a hole so that I can climb on the roof whenever I like, and be able to cover it up again so that these beauties don't know, I don't feel a bit doubtful of being able to slide down to the eaves, and then hold tight and ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... Mary could decorate over thirty dozen cups and saucers in a day, at three halfpence the dozen. 'Doesn't she ever do anything else?' some visitor might curiously inquire, whom Titus Price was showing over his ramshackle manufactory. 'No, always the same thing,' Titus would answer, made proud for the moment of this phenomenon of stupendous monotony. 'I wonder how she can stand it—she has a refined face,' the visitor might remark; and Mary ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... seemed interminable, the old man came driving around the house. To a ramshackle buggy he had hitched a decrepit horse. They wedged in as best they could, the old man between them, and at a shuffling amble the nag proceeded through the gate and ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... evidently with a view to economy, being scarcely more than half the height of the original: the vacant space has been very roughly filled up, and the numerous holes and crevices support a fine growth of weeds, and a strong young tree has also taken root in the ramshackle stone work. From the central tower, gargoyles grin above the elaborately carved buttresses and finials in remarkable ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... contracted an alliance that promised to be permanent, that Lightmark had decided his study should certainly be the river. Rainham had a set of rooms in the house of his foreman, an eighteenth-century house, full of carved oak mantels and curious alcoves, a ramshackle structure within the dock-gates, with a quaint balcony staircase, like the approach to a Swiss chalet, leading down into the yard. In London these apartments were his sole domicile; though, to his friends, none of whom lived nearer to him than Bloomsbury, this seemed a piece of conduct ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... was trying hard to obtain powers to construct a railway to Murmansk at the time of the outbreak of hostilities; but a line was not completed till more than two years had elapsed and was then of the most ramshackle character. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Westerfelt, with a laugh, as the dogs retreated behind the house, and he reached over the ramshackle gate to shake hands. ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... small town, which was reached late the following day, Farwell engaged two rooms at the ramshackle tavern and informed Pine that he was to ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath the windows. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Judd Tolliver was in the store Hale pointed out and peering cautiously around the edge of an open window at the wooden gate of the ramshackle calaboose. Several Falins were there—led by young Buck, whom Hale recognized as the red-headed youth at the head of the tearing horsemen who had swept by him that late afternoon when he was coming back from his first trip to Lonesome ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... all the sort of place that was the council chamber of perhaps the most cunning, certainly the most cold-blooded and unscrupulous, band of crooks that New York had ever harbored. And yet—why not? Wasn't there the essence of cunning in that very fact? Who would suspect anything of the sort from a ramshackle, two-story little house like this, whose front was a woe-begone little store, the proceeds of which might just barely keep the body and soul of its ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... always more or less temporary affairs, were inferior to the cow-shed accommodations of a cattle ranch. The bunk house were over-crowded, ill-smelling and unsanitary. In these ramshackle affairs the loggers were packed like sardines. The bunks were arranged tier over tier and nearly always without mattresses. They were uniformly vermin-infested and sometimes of the "muzzle-loading" variety. No blankets were furnished, each logger being compelled to supply his own. There were no facilities ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... a consciousness of being jolted about abominably in a ramshackle vehicle. The surroundings were vague, as they always are in dreams. Low hills and sandy waste and sparse shrubs. Where was it, the "Great Desert," or some stretch in South America or in Mexico? In my dream I was ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... to have brought her niece to call on me," said Mrs. Grant. "Still, if you are going there, dear, and the girl doesn't seem well, tell them I shall be only too happy to come and fetch her for a drive some afternoon. I daresay my carriage is more comfortable than that ramshackle old trap of theirs." ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... would have burned him alive at a stake. Cregeen, in particular, consistently referred to him in terms which could not have been more severe had Denry been the assassin of Cregeen's wife and seven children. In daring to make over a hundred pounds a week out of a ramshackle old lifeboat that Cregeen had sold to him for thirty-five pounds, Denry was outraging Cregeen's moral code. Cregeen had paid thirty-five pounds for the Fleetwinz, a craft immeasurably superior to Denry's nameless tub. And was Cregeen making a hundred pounds a week ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... gaze rested again on the somewhat displeasing pile on the corner, this time with a seeing eye. Her fascinated stare took in with one sweep a dirty ramshackle building of weather-worn gray brick, spilling over the sidewalk and staggering away (as it looked) down the littered side-street: rather a small building, obviously old, certainly not fragrant, quite ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Mississippi Steel Company had now two huge Bessemer converters, in which a volcano of molten flame roared all day and night. It had bought up the whole western side of the town, and cleared away half a hundred ramshackle dwellings; and here were long rows of coke-ovens, and two huge rail-mills, and a plate-mill from which arose sounds like the crashing of the day of doom. Everywhere loomed rows of towering chimneys, and pillars of rolling black smoke. Little miniature railroad tracks ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... time was General Peter Hunter a rigid disciplinarian. Hunter wrote Powell that as York had been convicted of "the most atrocious offence without any circumstances of doubt or alleviation" he was to be hanged. When York was made aware of his fate, he promptly escaped from the ramshackle gaol at Sandwich. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... woods behind them. But the touch of the dust was as the touch of nature upon their faces and hands. They would not have been free of it as they rode towards Athens, and came to the region of the vineyards, of the olive groves and the cypresses. Now and then they passed ramshackle cafes made of boards roughly nailed together anyhow, with a straggle of vine sprawling over them, and the earth for a flooring. Tables were set out before them, or in their shadows; a few bottles were visible within; ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... journeying south from Sta. Marta, had embarked at Cayta, the principal port of Costaguana, and came to Sulaco by sea. But the chairman of the railway company had courageously crossed the mountains in a ramshackle diligencia, mainly for the purpose of meeting his engineer-in-chief engaged in the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... proud of the work of her head and hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions. By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers. At college she had learned a trade without knowing it. The girls had found out that she was the designer of her own gowns. She had no idle moments after that, and wanted ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... though a most important point in the campaign, was far from attractive in feature, being made up of a half-dozen unsightly houses, a ramshackle tavern propped up on two sides with pine poles, and the weatherbeaten building that gave official name to the cross-roads. We had no tents—there were none in the command—so I took possession of the tavern for shelter for myself and staff, and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Koeniggraetz, Bismarck treated Prussia's ancient foe with extraordinary leniency; for he had already planned the Dual Alliance in his mind; knowing as he did that, though in Germany Austria might be an inconvenient rival to Prussia, in Europe she was the indispensable ally of Germany. And so, though the ramshackle old German imperial castle was divided in two, and the northern portion, at any rate, brought thoroughly up to date, the neighbours still lived side by side in a "semi-detached" kind of way. It would be a mistake then to call the war of 1866 a war of ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... hour he came to Dumpling Pond, then set out for his home, straight through the woods, till he reached the Catrock line, and following that came to the farm and ramshackle house of Micky Kittering. He had been told that the man at this farm had a fresh deer hide for sale, and hoping to secure it, Quonab walked up toward the house. Micky was coming from the barn when he saw the Indian. They recognized each other at a glance. That was enough ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... valise went with me to the mess tent, and I ate supper with my feet on it, and with the big revolver lying across my knees. After supper I lugged my responsibility over to the commissary pay-office, and by the flickering light of a miner's candle stowed the money in the ramshackle old safe which was the only security ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... difficult to restore, waited for proof, and although fresh paint was spread upon the panels, and the President coachman wore his hat with knowing air, on one side and handled the ribbons lightly, and dandled the drag, inviting jauntily the passer-by, the public recognized the ramshackle old "conveyance," and scoffingly refused to trust themselves in ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... did not prepare the boys for the farmer's sudden arrival at their club-house, on a Saturday afternoon, two weeks later. He drove up in a ramshackle old buggy, driving two of the finest horses in the county. Skinflint though he was, he loved horses. He came into the club-house and eyed the boys standing around ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... either side were tall buildings that shut out much of the light by day, while at night they made the place a veritable canyon of gloom. There were big warehouses and factories with, here and there, a smaller building, and some ramshackle dwellings that had withstood ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... two ramshackle old carriages with bony horses harnessed to them standing about the station, and in one of these Mr. Brown was soon on his way up the street toward the main ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... known how badly he and his wife felt every time they saw the wretched hovel, the ramshackle outhouse, the stony potato patch, and the sister-in-law's ragged children, they would have understood how his heart went out to his father. The worst of all was that the father persisted in giving a big party in their honour. Every time they bade the old ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... can show you something better than that," he cried, as he hirpled out (for so Malise described it afterwards) and presently returned dragging a great iron pot with a strength which seemed incredible in so ramshackle ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... the ore was pounded to powder and robbed of its gold, was a huge, ramshackle structure. Although it had a framework of heavy timbers, yet the strong skeleton was but loosely covered with boards. Through wide cracks and many gaps in the sides of the building a flood of light poured out, and the thunder of a hundred stamps filled ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... restaurant. There was to be a sale on the premises on the morrow, and the lower room had that day been filled with all the 'plant' of the restaurant, and all or almost all the poor household stuff from upstairs. It was an odd, ramshackle collection; and poor Dora, who had been walking round looking at the auction tickets, was realising with a sinking heart how much debt the sale would still leave unprovided for. But she had found friends. Father Vernon had met the creditors for her. There had been ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in all conscience. A single street, wide enough, almost, for a plaza, paralleled the railroad tracks, the buildings, such as they were, all strung along the further side in an irregular line. One of these, ramshackle, weather-worn, labeled laconically "The Store," stood directly opposite the station. The architecture of the "Paloma Springs Hotel," next door, was very similar. On either side of these two structures a dozen or more discouraged-looking adobe houses were set down at uneven intervals. ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... much better, was it not, to be paying my bill? Bill more moderate, under the circumstances, no man ever discharged; Calabrian honesty came well out of the transaction. So I tumbled once more into the dirty, ramshackle diligenza, passed along the dusty road between the barred and padlocked warehouses, and arrived in good time at the station. No sooner had I set foot on the platform than I felt an immense relief. Even here, it seemed ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... teachers is impossible. When we attempt improvement of both will "Ulster" fight? And there is something even more human and poignant. The National Schools of this country are in many cases no better than ramshackle barns. Unless the teacher and the manager, out of their own pockets, mend the broken glass, put plaster on the walls, and a fire in the grate, the children have got to shiver and cough for it. Winter in Ireland, like the King in ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... over we set out in pursuit of the Turks. The next town of importance was a ramshackle mud-walled affair called Tauq, twenty miles beyond, on the far side of a river known as the Tauq Chai. The leading cars pursued to within sight of the town and came in for a ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... get the sleigh runners!" he exclaimed. "Dad has an old ramshackle sleigh in the barn that is just falling to pieces with dry rot. I'll ask him for ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... finger to brow, when they speak of Widow Ashby's Sabrina living alone in her ramshackle house far up at the head of Crockett's Hollow. "A forsaken girl that holds grudge and works conjure comes to be a sorry, sorry ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... in dust, which meant much trade, and the four buildings at the corners of Main and Cross Streets were of brick, which meant profitable business. There were a couple of other brick buildings on Main Street, and one or two with "tin" fronts, and of the other business places only one or two were so ramshackle that they looked as if their firmer neighbors were holding them up, letting the weaker structures lean against them as a strong ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... of us, faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too gruesome a thing ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... across the square, turned a corner to the right, a corner to the left, and ran down the long dingy street that skirts the foot of the precipice on which the Citadel is enthroned. The ramshackle houses, grey and grimy, huddled against the cliff that frowned above them with black scorn and menace. High against the stars loomed the impregnable walls of the fortress. Low in the shadow crouched the frail habitations of the poor, the miserable tenements, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... La Cibot nicely on fire," Remonencq told his sister, when she came to take up her position again on the ramshackle chair. "And now," he continued, "I shall go to consult the only man that knows, our Jew, a good sort of Jew that did not ask more than fifteen per cent ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... perfectly serious, Mrs. Williams. It may raise a mutiny amongst these horrid, profane sailors, but I really don't see how we are to get rid of them else. The bo'sun has cut adrift their ramshackle, old sieve of a boat, and she's now a quarter of a mile astern, half-full of water. And we can't give them one of the ship's boats to go and get their throats cut ashore. J. Perkins, Esquire, wouldn't like ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... been long on the road this day, when I saw coming towards me an equipage more picturesquely interesting than any I had ever met in the Champs-Elyses. It was a ramshackle little cart laden with sacks and a couple of children, and drawn by a pair of shaggy sheep-dogs. Cords served for harness. A man was running by the side, and it was as much as he could do to keep up with the animals. This use ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... word, what language it was, or what it meant. Only in the old man's tattered pocket-book there were things like this found by his minister after his death. Indeed, in a museum of such relics this is still to be read under a glass case, and in old Mr. Meditation's ramshackle hand: 'Monday, death; Tuesday, judgment; Wednesday, heaven; Thursday, hell; Friday, my past life back to my youth; Saturday, the passion of my Saviour; Lord's day, creation, salvation, and my own.—M.' And then, on an utterly illegible page, this: 'Jesus, Thy life and Thy words ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... yard the walls were agreeably decorated by trellised vines, a tempting bit of color, considering the owner's reputation. On the one side of the space stood the kitchen, on the other the woodshed, and in a ramshackle penthouse against the hall at the back, the paper was trimmed and damped down. Here, too, the forms, or, in ordinary language, the masses of set-up type, were washed. Inky streams issuing thence blended with the ooze from the kitchen sink, and found ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... and up the path toward the little ramshackle cottage she turns and flashes one of them wide smiles on Babe and gives ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... a ramshackle building reminiscent of the days when the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an age when the American merchantman flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven-seas. On the ground floor was an apparently ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... almost reached their destination when, as they passed a particularly ramshackle building with a saloon on the ground floor, they became conscious of a terrific hubbub going on within. There was a sound of shouting and blows, and every once in a while the whole crazy building would fairly rock as some heavy body crashed against ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... commercial streets now to be found in all large Chinese cities; but a small hien city in the interior—and it must be remembered that a hien circuit or district corresponds to an old marquisate or feudal principality of the vassal unit type—is often a poor, dusty, dirty, depressing, ramshackle agglomeration of villages or hamlets, surrounded by a disproportionately pretentious wall, the cubic contents of which wall alone would more than suffice to build in superior style the whole mud city within; for half the area of the interior is apt to be waste land or stagnant puddles: it was ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... lightly on the cuckoos. The nest of both species is a ramshackle affair — a mere bundle of twigs and sticks without a rim to keep the eggs from rolling from the bush, where they rest, to the ground. Unlike their European relative, they have the decency to rear ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... down, and sends other men out with them. Street organs, under our fatherly County Council, are forbidden on Sundays; nevertheless, Sunday being the only day when millions of people have any chance of recreation, many organs go out. Whither do they go? East, my dears. There, in any ramshackle hall, or fit-up arch-way, or disused stables, the boys and girls, out for fun, may dance the golden hours away throughout Sunday afternoon and evening. Often the organs are hired for Eastern weddings and christenings ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Fong Wu, heavily laden with his effects, had slipped out of the stage from Redding and found his way to a forsaken, ramshackle building below Whiskeytown. His coming had proved of small interest. When the news finally got about that "a monkey" was living in "Sam Kennedy's old place," it was thought, for a while, that laundering, thereafter, would be cheaply done. This hope, however, was soon dispelled. For, shortly after ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... near Cuinchy Brewery in a jumble of bricks that was once her home. Once it was cafe au lait and it cost four sous a cup, she only charges three sous now since her cow got shot in the stomach outside her ramshackle estaminet. Along with a few mates I was in the place two months ago and a bullet entered the door and smashed the coffee pot; the woman now makes coffee in ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... any armour, my boy, but I do want a well-found schooner—a new one if I can get it; if not, one that will stand a thorough examination; and I don't know that such a boat's to be got just now it's wanted. There are plenty of ramshackle old things lying about here, but I want everything spick-and-span ready for the extra fitting out I shall give her. Copper-fastened, quick-sailing, roomy, and with good cabin accommodation so that we can have a big workshop for ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... man I met when I were comin' back from de ash dump," Eradicate explained. One of the colored man's duties was to cart ashes away from Tom's various shops, and dump them in a certain swampy lot. With an old ramshackle cart, and his mule, Boomerang, Eradicate did this task ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... endless yarn let me note the fact that there are two schools amongst our brethren afloat. Roger Keyes and those of the younger school who sport the executive curl upon their sleeves are convinced that now, when we have replaced the ramshackle old trawlers of 18th March by an unprecedented mine-sweeping service of 20-knot destroyers under disciplined crews, the forcing of the Straits has become as easy ... well; anyway; easier than what ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... and went into the hotel (I lingering behind to help Brian) I noticed another car behind us. It was more like a taxi-cab than a brave, free-born automobile, but it had evidently come a long way, as it was covered with dust, and from its rather ramshackle roof waved a Red ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a luxurious limousine was tooting for a ramshackle prairie schooner to turn to one side. Behind the automobile plodded a forlorn mule dragging a wagon-load of empty boxes. Behind that came an army ambulance followed by an electric truck. A handsome soldier ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... two-thirds of fullness and the air touched with frost, Stuart abandoned the bed upon which he had been restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and shortened ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... end of the alley, wedged in between two towering warehouses, was Number One, a ramshackle tenement which in some forgotten day had been a fine old colonial residence. The city had long since hemmed it in completely, and all that remained of its former grandeur were a flight of broad steps that once boasted a portico and the imposing, ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... not brought by the flivver, and that was the suction dredge, a horrible monster, a kind of jumble of house and machinery which came on a big six-ton truck and was launched into the lake. Its whole ramshackle bulk shook and shivered when it was in operation sucking the bottom of the lake up through a big pipe and shooting it through another long pipe which terminated on the land. Thus sand and gravel were secured and at the same ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... was by no means willing to even receive presents except for services rendered. Anybody else in his place would long since have become a millionaire; but he had not got much beyond fastening a pair of silver spurs in his Kordovan leather boots, and making use of a ramshackle old caleche, to which he attached two horses, trained by his own hand ever since they were colts. This, moreover, was only when he wanted to ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... Sprite! I know your pluck and perseverance. You'll get there, with bells on! Take the easiest pose you can, and hang on to that foam-crested wave near you. It sways a bit, but it's firmly anchored. I looked out for that, before I trusted you to this ramshackle ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... here in this ramshackle old chicken-coop, when you might have a tidy flat on Paulina Street; and the doctor could have a desk in my office next door to his old boss." Dr. Leonard spoke testily, and Alves laid her ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... dandy. He's free, but has stuck to the Harrises because his father belonged to old Mrs. Harris. He is smarter than chain lightnin', if he is a nigger, and knows more than a dozen of some white men. He drives a white mule, and has managed to put a top of sail cloth on an old ramshackle buggy, which he calls a 'shay.' You'll go to the funeral ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... from their boy friends. A great, ramshackle bus, and another vehicle, were waiting at the end of the platform. An old man in a long duster stood beside the bus to help the girls in and see to their baggage. This ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... that there was a thaw. That was the first thing of which I was aware—that water was apparently dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to moisture all about you.... My ramshackle habitation had never been a very strong defence against the outside world. It seemed now to have definitely decided to abandon the struggle. The water streamed down the panes of my window opposite my ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... the close we descended the steps carefully, groped our way out quietly, and left, wondering how ever we had got to such a place at all, and how those worshipping in it could afford to Sabbatically pen themselves up in such a mysterious, ramshackle shanty. ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... in, scanned every detail with fastidious distaste. To-day, for the first time, a great longing possessed him for the airy ramshackle bungalows of the Frontier he loved, for the trumpet-call to "stables," for a sight of his squadron and the feel of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... visit to America I was a frequent contributor to his journal, and I corresponded with him privately. I went down to Northampton and delivered a lecture at his request, under the auspices of his electoral committee. The old theatre—a dirty, ramshackle place as I recollect it—was crowded, and I had my first taste of the popularity of Mr. Bradlaugh in the borough. Every mention of his name excited ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... is of the time when George III was king, and our scene of action lies only at an old farm-house six miles or so from Finchley —a quaint, ramshackle, commodious, old-fashioned, thatched farm-house that we see only in pictures now, and which has long since been improved off the face ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... his business in any other way was allowed to use his own automobile but even these soon went out of commission and then bicycles were forbidden except for rides to and from business, work or school. A few ramshackle taxicabs still survive in Berlin at the railway stations, driven by benzol instead of gasoline and shod with spring tires. No one can keep a taxi waiting, it is subject when waiting to be commandeered by ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... hand the group was moving to the rear of the station, and now came in sight of a ramshackle automobile with a Mexican at the wheel, easily distinguished by his swarthy coloring and his ragged mustaches, as well as by his peculiar dress—a steep crowned hat like a sugar loaf, with a very wide brim, a tight bolero jacket that did not reach to the waist and disclosed a dark ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... is ramshackle but it is still standin' out dere and is used as a shelter for sawmill hands dat is cuttin' down de big pines and sawin' them on ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... days from Tali-fu), bleak and perched away up among the clouds, could never be called a town; it is merely a ramshackle place which gives one sleep and food in the difficult stage between ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... deep sigh of relief, when finally they were housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming to the town, and they were still more fretted when the puffing, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... his brothers, he wore shoes and stockings; these three relatives constituted his allies and kinsmen; the so-called Spanish main was in reality an arm of the sea better known in the Hebrides as Loch Scrone; and the war-galley was an old, ramshackle, battered, and betarred boat belonging generally to the fishing-village of Erisaig; for, indeed, the boat was so old and so battered that nobody now seemed to claim ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... A ramshackle covered cart laden with an assortment of tinware had stopped on the outskirts of the village. The owner, a bent scarecrow of a fellow, was effecting repairs to his nag's harness with a piece of string. Evening was setting in, and the south-east wind swept a grey haze ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Bethany, the road begins to drop, with great windings, into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,—Russians and Greeks returning from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at first, we can see a shepherd with his flock ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... footsteps. Holtzclaw has told his own story in an admirably written and most interesting book entitled, "The Black Man's Burden." Starting in 1903 with a capital of seventy-five cents, no land and no buildings in a little one-room, ramshackle log cabin, which he did not own and in which he and his wife lived as well as taught, Holtzclaw now has an annual enrollment of nearly five hundred students and a faculty of thirty teachers. The school through its varied forms of extension work influences yearly ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... range. Sometimes with a strange fear. But it was a fear of the elements rather than of man. One day she went along the high-road with her letters, towards the village of Casa Latina. The high-road was depressing, wherever there were houses. For the houses had that sordid, ramshackle, slummy look almost invariable on an Italian high-road. They were patched with a hideous, greenish mould-colour, blotched, as if with leprosy. It frightened her, till Pancrazio told her it was only ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... was reached. The money valise went with me to the mess tent, and I ate supper with my feet on it, and with the big revolver lying across my knees. After supper I lugged my responsibility over to the commissary pay-office, and by the flickering light of a miner's candle stowed the money in the ramshackle old safe which was the only security the ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... was one of the most picturesque of the many pretty homes in Green Valley. It had been a ramshackle, tumbled-down old cabin lost in a tangle of bushes and hidden from the road by a shabby, unsightly row of old willows. Billy was going to rent it for temporary barn purposes but his wife, who had a nimble and a prophetic eye, made him buy it. Then, under her supervision ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... lay alongside of the little landing-stage caught his eye. Lifting Master AEsop's corpse from the ground, he trailed it to the crazy structure, and placed it in the oldest and most ramshackle of the two weather-worn vessels. After untying the rope that fastened the boat to its wharf, Lagardere caught up a boat-hook that lay hard by, and, raising it as if it were a spear, he drove it with all his strength against the bottom of the boat and knocked a ragged hole in its rotting timbers. ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... be a lantern upon the little porch of a ramshackle shanty. An old man with immense horn-rimmed spectacles was reading by it out of a tattered magazine. When the couple came close, the old man looked up from his reading, and blessed his soul ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... father, it appears, was a distiller of great wealth in his day, and a man of action. Unfortunately he died before he had the chance to carry out his projects in connection with the rehabilitation of Schloss Rothhoefen, even then a deserted, ramshackle resort for paying tourists and a Mecca for antique ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... perhaps a dozen had remained in the cars; of their non-commissioned officers, perhaps half a dozen were trying to do something, but having no directing head or hand, accomplishing little. It looked as though nothing but the bursting asunder of that ramshackle building would liberate its human charge, for even those who, battered, bleeding, and suffocated, would gladly have escaped into outer air, were packed in, sardine-like, and incapable of self-extrication. To the appeal of the conductor that he should regain control of his men and ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... had neither legs nor arms, and was drawn through the streets in a small cart by four dogs. By looking at you he could see all the clockwork inside, as could a boy who was led about by his mother at the end of a string. Every Friday there was the market, when a dozen ramshackle carts containing vegetables and cheap crockery filled the centre of the square, resting in line on their shafts. A score of farmers' wives or daughters in old-world garments squatted against the town-house within walls of butter on cabbage-leaves, eggs and chickens. ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... top of a low ridge, which is fringed with swamp on all sides save the one we made our way to, the eastern. Shortly after passing through another plantation, we saw brown huts, and in a few minutes were standing in the middle of a ramshackle village, at the end of which, through a high stockade, with its gateway smeared with blood which hung in gouts, we saw our much longed for Rembwe River. I made for it, taking small notice of the hubbub our arrival occasioned, and passed through the gateway, setting its guarding ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... said. 'There's a piece of waste land the other end of the village that we've never been able to do much with, in consequence of its being so swampy. If you liked, we could run you up a dozen cottages on that, cheap—it would be all the better their being a bit ramshackle and unhealthy—and get some poor people for you, and put ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... cuffed in corners by the maternal hand, but he held his own. He would run away, he declared, he would drown himself, he would do anything rather than submit to that. So finally he was turned into the ramshackle old printing-office, where all his elder brothers had been before him, and learned to sort pie, and to roll at press, and to sweep the floors, and to blow old dusty type-cases clean. He wore a brown-paper apron tied about ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... ghost of a protesting smile hovering about his lips, brought tears to Valerie's eyes. "Well, well.... I'm so glad I'm cleared in your eyes. I'd 've hated you to go through life thinking that I—was like that...." Suddenly he caught at her arm and pointed to the ramshackle bridge. "There's another instance of the rot we're out to stop. Another winter, and that bridge 'd be in the stream, damming it at the deepest and narrowest point. Result, the water's diverted and spreads all over the road, trying to ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... every day to play with Dan Frost, the landlord's son. They had played in the stables, then stocked with a score of horses, where now there were only two or three; in the great haymows of the old barn in the clearing back of the Inn; in the ramshackle garret under that amazing roof; or, best of all, in the abandoned bowling-alley, where they rolled dilapidated ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... field we were compelled to cross had long been neglected, and was now thickly overgrown with weeds. Not until we turned the corner of the great ramshackle building, which in other and more prosperous days had been dedicated to the curing of the leaf, did we perceive any signs of the presence of our antagonists. They were standing upon the farther side, directly opposite the door, and both bowed slightly ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... but a small hien city in the interior—and it must be remembered that a hien circuit or district corresponds to an old marquisate or feudal principality of the vassal unit type—is often a poor, dusty, dirty, depressing, ramshackle agglomeration of villages or hamlets, surrounded by a disproportionately pretentious wall, the cubic contents of which wall alone would more than suffice to build in superior style the whole mud city within; for half the area of the interior is apt ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... noir near Cuinchy Brewery in a jumble of bricks that was once her home. Once it was cafe au lait and it cost four sous a cup, she only charges three sous now since her cow got shot in the stomach outside her ramshackle estaminet. Along with a few mates I was in the place two months ago and a bullet entered the door and smashed the coffee pot; the woman now makes coffee in a ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... box that had just been left at the kitchen door. Phil ran to the window and caught a glimpse of a man closing the gate. It was Fred Holton, in a long ulster with the collar turned up about his ears. He untied his horse, attached to a ramshackle buggy, and drove off. Phil recognized him instantly, but ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... life, and, after vain resistance to molding circumstances, after the thwarting of ambitions, the quenching of ideals, admit defeat, and await, with something of feverish anticipation, the end. He had left Cartagena early that morning on the ramshackle little train which, after hours of jolting over an undulating roadbed, set him down in Calamar, exhausted with the heat and dust-begrimed. He had not seen the Bishop nor Wenceslas since the interview of the preceding day. Before his departure, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the loss of three more of our ponies cast a temporary gloom over the depot party when we reassembled in the safety of the old ramshackle magnetic lean-to at Hut Point. I use the word lean-to because one could hardly describe it as a hut, for the building was with out insulation, snow filled the space between ceiling and roof, and whenever a fire was kindled or heat generated, ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... of their lives as he was the darling of their hearts. All this the poor old things made apparent to me, but their story did not become really interesting till they began to speak of this house we are in, and of certain events which followed their removal to the ramshackle dwelling next door. The sale of this portion of the property had relieved them from their debts, but they were otherwise penniless, and were just planning the renting of their rooms at prices which would barely serve to provide them with a scanty living, ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... Oh, yes; that ramshackle place near the swamp, with the gipsy-looking people hanging about. It's curious that a house with traces of real architecture should have been built in such a place. But the people were a sulky-looking lot—do you suppose they'll let ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... them. Street organs, under our fatherly County Council, are forbidden on Sundays; nevertheless, Sunday being the only day when millions of people have any chance of recreation, many organs go out. Whither do they go? East, my dears. There, in any ramshackle hall, or fit-up arch-way, or disused stables, the boys and girls, out for fun, may dance the golden hours away throughout Sunday afternoon and evening. Often the organs are hired for Eastern weddings ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... with lichen, the mauve-grey tower of the church held up its bells against the sky in a belfry of broad pointed arches. In front of the church Andrews turned down a little lane towards the river again, to come out in a moment on a quay shaded by skinny acacia trees. On the corner house, a ramshackle house with roofs and gables projecting in all directions, was a sign: "Rendezvous de la Marine." The room he stepped into was so low, Andrews had to stoop under the heavy brown beams as he crossed it. Stairs went ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... of putting up sufficient feed to tide over the severe weather might be attributed most of the annual ranching failures in the West. The MacDavid establishment bore a well-ordered aspect, unlike many of the unthrifty, ramshackle ranches, of his neighbours. The fencing was of the best, and there were no signs of decay or dilapidation in any of the buildings. Dwarf pines were planted about and a Morning Glory vine over-ran the house, giving the place an air of restful ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... through with it, and that's what I mean to do about our escape. Where you can't take a fair bite at anything, why, you must nibble; and I must go on nibbling now to find some way of getting out of this here ramshackle place. If I can just contrive a hole so that I can climb on the roof whenever I like, and be able to cover it up again so that these beauties don't know, I don't feel a bit doubtful of being able to slide down to ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... with Titania to a ramshackle country hotel which calls itself The Mansion House, looking forward to a fine robust meal. It was a transparent, sunny, cool evening, and when we saw on the bill of fare half broiled chicken, we innocently supposed that the word half was an adjective ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... Austria is strangling your little brother to death." What answer did the Russian Slav give? He gave the only answer that becomes a man. ["Hear, hear!"] He turned to Austria, and said: "You lay hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle empire [loud applause and laughter] limb from limb." And he is doing it! ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... 1833, and was the home of Italian Opera for two seasons; the second, built eleven years later, endured in the service for which it was designed four years; the third, which marked as big an advance on its immediate predecessor in comfort and elegance as the first had marked on the ramshackle Park Theater described by Richard Grant White, was the Astor Place Opera House, built in 1847, and the nominal home of ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... situated in the heart of a very poor district, and is rather a ramshackle place to look at, but still quite suitable to its purposes. I have observed that one of the characteristics of the Salvation Army is that it never spends unnecessary money upon buildings. If it can buy a good house or other suitable structure cheap it does so. If it cannot, it makes use ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... alone in her little castle, or rather the Liberty Realty Company's little castle. She wanted to be alone. It was very quiet. Outside the birds could be heard twittering in the vine on the ramshackle little porch. The kettle sang cheerily in the kitchen. There was that musty indoor odor of the country homestead, the odor which soldier boys remembered and longed for in trenches and dugouts. And mingling with this was the fragrance of flowers coming in through ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... given the town its pretentious name. And lastly, there was the Calhoun House, dreariest and most inhospitable inn of its kind; and across the muddy street from it the great echoing train-shed, ridiculously out of proportion to every other building in the town, the tavern not excepted, and to the ramshackle, once-a-day train that wheezed and rattled and clanked into and out ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... darting in and out, busy as bees, and, unlike the dumb, pathetic little people out in the hills, alert, keen-eyed, cheerful, and happy. Under the log foot-bridge the shining creek ran down past the mountain village below, where the cupola of the court-house rose above the hot dirt streets, the ramshackle hotel, and the dingy stores and frame dwellings of the town. Across the bridge her eyes rested on another neat, well- built log cabin with a grass plot around it, and, running alongside and covered with honeysuckle—a pergola! That was her hospital down ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... ran alongside a ramshackle pier, up the slippery poles of which Bennie was instructed to clamber. Then, dodging rotten boards and treacherous places, he gained the sand of the beach and stood at last on Labrador. A group of Montagnais picked up the professor's luggage and, headed ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... four miles brought the party to a patch of woodland where many of the tall pines had been hewn the previous winter. The roof of a ramshackle hut was outlined against a background of young birches, and a rough path made in hauling the logs to the main road led directly to ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... see much safety," said Aunt Georgie, as she carefully arranged her spectacles, and looked about her. "Bless my heart! what a ramshackle place. Surely ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... faithfully and effectively in Booker Washington's footsteps. Holtzclaw has told his own story in an admirably written and most interesting book entitled, "The Black Man's Burden." Starting in 1903 with a capital of seventy-five cents, no land and no buildings in a little one-room, ramshackle log cabin, which he did not own and in which he and his wife lived as well as taught, Holtzclaw now has an annual enrollment of nearly five hundred students and a faculty of thirty teachers. The school through its varied forms ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... anything but rats in that ramshackle old place, Beautiful Joe," she said, as she pulled the plank away; "and as you don't hurt them, I don't see what you want to get in for. However, you are a sensible dog, and usually have a reason for having your own way, so I am going to let you ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... German liberators; and the great colonies, to which Britain had granted a degree of independence that no virile state would ever have permitted, would shake off the last shreds of subordination; and the ramshackle British Empire would fall to pieces; and Germany would emerge triumphant, free to pursue all her great schemes, and to create a lasting world-power, based upon Force and System and upon 'a healthy egoism,' not upon 'irrational ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... moved down to Perro Creek, ten miles nearer Kennard. In an endless procession streamed northward automobiles crammed with labourers, wagons heaped with lumber, cement, implements, food, tents, forage, and long lines of fresnos. From distant Mexican settlements came natives in ramshackle wagons and driving half-wild ponies. Out of the hills came sheep-herders and prospectors. The word of big wages ran everywhere. The drive ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... distinguished party. Don Vincente, journeying south from Sta. Marta, had embarked at Cayta, the principal port of Costaguana, and came to Sulaco by sea. But the chairman of the railway company had courageously crossed the mountains in a ramshackle diligencia, mainly for the purpose of meeting his engineer-in-chief engaged in the final ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... settled that my father and myself should go to Laval together. We started a couple of days later, and managed to travel by rail as far as Rennes. But from that point to Laval the line was now very badly blocked, and so we hired a closed vehicle, a ramshackle affair, drawn by two scraggy Breton nags. The main roads, being still crowded with troops, artillery, and baggage waggons, and other impedimenta, were often impassable, and so we proceeded by devious ways, amidst which our ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... There was to be a sale on the premises on the morrow, and the lower room had that day been filled with all the 'plant' of the restaurant, and all or almost all the poor household stuff from upstairs. It was an odd, ramshackle collection; and poor Dora, who had been walking round looking at the auction tickets, was realising with a sinking heart how much debt the sale would still leave unprovided for. But she had found friends. Father Vernon had met the creditors for her. There had been a composition, and she had ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to a ramshackle building reminiscent of the days when the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an age when the American merchantman flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven-seas. On the ground floor was an apparently innocent junk dealer's shop, in reality the meeting-place of the ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... her freckled face and tightly braided red hair and thin legs with wrinkled cotton stockings, protested against that. She had a simple mind with a touch of superstition. It was a kind of morbid dread of the institution she had left which had conjured that ramshackle old bridge up on the highway into an ominous voice of warning, She hated the bridge and dreaded it ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... composed of an assortment of ramshackle and dilapidated coaches, called by courtesy the Orient Express, which maintained an average speed of fifteen miles an hour, left Bucharest for Vincovce, a small junction town in the Banat, where it was supposed to make connections with the south-bound ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... had since taken place. The Mississippi Steel Company had now two huge Bessemer converters, in which a volcano of molten flame roared all day and night. It had bought up the whole western side of the town, and cleared away half a hundred ramshackle dwellings; and here were long rows of coke-ovens, and two huge rail-mills, and a plate-mill from which arose sounds like the crashing of the day of doom. Everywhere loomed rows of towering chimneys, and pillars of rolling black ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... niece to call on me," said Mrs. Grant. "Still, if you are going there, dear, and the girl doesn't seem well, tell them I shall be only too happy to come and fetch her for a drive some afternoon. I daresay my carriage is more comfortable than that ramshackle old ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... line, are they?" said Sebastian, and began to improvise one, while Judith, in her corner, closed her eyes contentedly. Whether there was any truth or not in the report that he had been playing a ramshackle piano in an East Side restaurant in New York when the Colonel picked him up, Sebastian could do charming things with quite simple little tunes, if you did not inquire into problems of harmony and counterpoint ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... that time was General Peter Hunter a rigid disciplinarian. Hunter wrote Powell that as York had been convicted of "the most atrocious offence without any circumstances of doubt or alleviation" he was to be hanged. When York was made aware of his fate, he promptly escaped from the ramshackle gaol at Sandwich. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... barn-like structure, built evidently with a view to economy, being scarcely more than half the height of the original: the vacant space has been very roughly filled up, and the numerous holes and crevices support a fine growth of weeds, and a strong young tree has also taken root in the ramshackle stone work. From the central tower, gargoyles grin above the elaborately carved buttresses and finials in remarkable contrast to the ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... by the studied assumption that England's desire, if any, to intervene would be effectively checked by her domestic situation. Agents from Ulster were buying munitions to fight Home Rule with official connivance in Germany, and it was confidently expected that war would shake a ramshackle British Empire to its foundations; there would be rebellions in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and the self-governing Dominions would at least refuse to participate in Great Britain's European adventures. In such circumstances ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... looked like a cowboy and was, in truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small—a very small—way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The poultry she raised herself; for the fish, she was a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... on the road this day, when I saw coming towards me an equipage more picturesquely interesting than any I had ever met in the Champs-Elyses. It was a ramshackle little cart laden with sacks and a couple of children, and drawn by a pair of shaggy sheep-dogs. Cords served for harness. A man was running by the side, and it was as much as he could do to keep up with the animals. This use of dogs ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... expensive things, along with their Madeira and port wine. But the same books show that the planter was chronically in debt and that bankruptcy was common, while accounts left by travelers reveal the fact that many of the mansion houses were shabby and run down, with rotting roofs, ramshackle doors, broken windows into which old hats or other garments had been thrust to keep the wind away. In a word, a traveler could find to-day more elegance in a back county of Arkansas than then ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... when Thorpe recalled its circumstances. His own curious mental ferment, which had made this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the very hour of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed a vivid picture of that approach—of the old ramshackle village trap, and the boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent, red-bearded, plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively suggestive of something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now that he ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... same conditions as did the Parker House; except that the proprietor was curt and had no time for us at all. From that point, still dissatisfied, we extended our investigations beyond the Plaza. We found ourselves ankle deep in sandhills on which grew coarse grass and a sort of sage. Crazy, ramshackle huts made of all sorts of material were perched in all sorts of places. Hundreds of tents had been pitched, beneath which and in front of which an extremely simple housekeeping was going on. Hunt as we might we could find no place that looked as ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... head and hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions. By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers. At college she had learned a trade without knowing it. The girls had found out that she was the designer of her own gowns. She had no idle moments after that, and wanted none; for the exercise of an extraordinary ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... they made their way back towards the old gunsmith's shop. The street was deserted save for a party of roisterers, who passed them, singing at the top of their voices. They were passing a badly lighted spot, when, from a ramshackle old three-story house, they heard a shriek followed by an ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... never saw anything like them, I'll be bound—and Naples and Florence. Would you come back by the Tyrol, and have a turn at Zurich and Lucerne, with a long ramble through the Black Forest in a trap resembling a ramshackle landau?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... Savannah, Kobe and New Orleans have in my memory their old book-stores, where I could browse in peace. And here in Alexandria I found one that might have been lifted out of Royal Street or Lafayette Square. A ramshackle wooden building, bleached and blistered by many a dust-storm and torrid sun, its cracked and distorted window-panes were curtained with decayed illustrated papers in many tongues, discoloured Greek and Italian penny-dreadfuls, and a few shelves of cheap curios. Over the door a long shingle displayed ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... had got together the luggage, and engaged a ramshackle Perugian cab; for the public vehicles of Perugia are perhaps, as a class, the most precarious and incoherent known to science. However, the luggage was bundled on to the top by Our Lady's grace, without dissolution of continuity; the lean-limbed horses were induced by explosive volleys of ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... where we can get the sleigh runners!" he exclaimed. "Dad has an old ramshackle sleigh in the barn that is just falling to pieces with dry rot. I'll ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... standing as irregular sentries along the low, reeflike island which stretched away out of the picture. There was the gigantic, lonely pine he knew well, and, yes—he could just make it out—there was his own ramshackle little pier, which stretched in undulating fashion, like a long-legged, wading caterpillar, from the abrupt shore-line of eroded coquina ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... precarious access, a condition which may have been regarded as a protection, but more likely it was due to laziness and want of care. However that may have been, the interior was surprisingly substantial, with an excellent floor like that in a ballroom. I slept in a detached ramshackle room used as a kitchen, comfortable because of being ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... roses into her cheeks; her pure ultramarine eyes made the blue of her suit look commonplace and dull. Dusk had fallen over the city, and Queed cleverly bethought him to snap on an electric light. It revealed a very shabby, ramshackle, and dingy office; but the long table in it was new, oaken, and handsome. In fact, it was one of the repairs introduced by ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... safely over we set out in pursuit of the Turks. The next town of importance was a ramshackle mud-walled affair called Tauq, twenty miles beyond, on the far side of a river known as the Tauq Chai. The leading cars pursued to within sight of the town and came in for a good deal ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... she has been it is hard to convey in words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, could ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... deal boards and whitewash order made hideous many of the village churches that required repairs at this time, and if one discovers a ramshackle little porch such as that just removed at Ellerburne, or a big window with decayed wooden mullions cut in a wall, regardless of symmetry, one may be quite safe in attributing it to the early years of the nineteenth century. One of the staple industries of Pickering ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... for M. Berton, the proprietor, and finding that a train left in half an hour, threw her belongings into her box and a few minutes later was in a ramshackle cab clattering stationwards. She left a note for Theo, but she was sincerely glad that time was too short for her to make any attempt to see either him or Joyselle. They had faded into the background of her mind, and in the ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... activity that lasts for several hours. Long before dawn, the roads leading townwards are busy with all manner of vehicles, from the great waggon drawn by four white horses driven tandem, and laden with a moving stack of hay, to the ramshackle donkey-cart conveying half a score of cabbages, a heap of dandelions grubbed from ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... cared more for the Olympic dust than that of Backsworth. She had persuaded herself that his absence would be high treason to her father, whom she respected far more at a distance than when she had been struggling with his ramshackle, easy-going ways. Even now, she was remonstrating with him about poor Terry's present misery. His last half year had been spent under the head-master, who had cultivated his historical and poetical intelligence, whereas Mr. Driver was nothing but an able crammer; ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at the back; the foreman sat in state in the one, the master printer in the other. Out in the yard the walls were agreeably decorated by trellised vines, a tempting bit of color, considering the owner's reputation. On the one side of the space stood the kitchen, on the other the woodshed, and in a ramshackle penthouse against the hall at the back, the paper was trimmed and damped down. Here, too, the forms, or, in ordinary language, the masses of set-up type, were washed. Inky streams issuing thence blended with the ooze from the ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... their destination when, as they passed a particularly ramshackle building with a saloon on the ground floor, they became conscious of a terrific hubbub going on within. There was a sound of shouting and blows, and every once in a while the whole crazy building would fairly rock as some heavy body crashed ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... than a half hour Eben rounded up the "Eb and Flo" near the shore in front of the Grimsby house, which was a poor, ramshackle affair. The water here was deep, so he was able to run close to the bank. A long-haired, ragged, dirty boy pushed off for his father in a leaky boat, and took him ashore. In a few minutes more the "Eb and Flo" was again under way, clipping along ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... uncouth word, what language it was, or what it meant. Only in the old man's tattered pocket-book there were things like this found by his minister after his death. Indeed, in a museum of such relics this is still to be read under a glass case, and in old Mr. Meditation's ramshackle hand: 'Monday, death; Tuesday, judgment; Wednesday, heaven; Thursday, hell; Friday, my past life back to my youth; Saturday, the passion of my Saviour; Lord's day, creation, salvation, and my own.—M.' And then, on an utterly illegible ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... let him out of prison. "But," said the Russian official, "you are no more in prison than I am; what do you mean?" "Oh," said the man, "I have only come down for a load of skins for Voivode So-and-so, but I must go into prison again when I get back to Cettinje." The prison was a ramshackle building, in the walls of which a vigorous push of several strong men would have made a breach, and I have often seen all the prisoners out in the sun with a single guard, on absolutely equal terms; and if, as sometimes ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... a race of long gaunt men who seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived. They were chronically discouraged, and the merchants and artisans of the town were in the same state. The merchants, who ran their stores—poor tumble-down ramshackle affairs—on the credit system, could not get pay for the goods they handed out over their counters and the artisans, the shoemakers, carpenters and harnessmakers, could not get pay for the work they did. ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... had been home about a week I strolled down to his place one moonlight night. I told mother not to worry about me, for I would blow my own head off before I'd ever swaller another drop of red p'ison. When I opened the door of the ramshackle cabin, Pete looked up with a grin, and said as how he was wondering where I'd kept myself so long, for he had heerd I'd got back and done unusual well. He was glad to welcome me, and asked what I'd have and the treat was on him for old ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... famous book-hunters had picked up bargains. Charles Hutt, had he lived, would have become one of the leading booksellers of the day. He was for some years at Hodgson's, and possessed a remarkable taste for, and knowledge of, books. He left Hodgson's and started on his own account in the old ramshackle house already referred to. This shop presented so unfavourable an exterior that even the Income-tax Fiend never 'called in,' although at one time there were several thousands of pounds' worth of books in it. Hutt did a very extensive trade, not only in this country, but in America. He had ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... carrying a dignified courtliness which is said to have won him a handsome compliment from Queen Victoria—a gentleman rotund, well-groomed, conspicuously elegant. Shoulder to shoulder with him rose the queer, raw-boned, ramshackle frame of the Illinoisan, draped in the artless handiwork of a prairie tailor, surmounted by the rugged, homely face. The service, which the new auditor followed reverently, being finished, the minister, leaving the pulpit, gave Lincoln God-speed—and so he passed on to his greatness. My ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... house is ramshackle but it is still standin' out dere and is used as a shelter for sawmill hands dat is cuttin' down de big pines and sawin' them on ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... circuses the old-fashioned overland coach hung by heavy springs from front to rear axle. One of the most uncomfortable conveyances to ride in ever invented, especially for the driver, for, if the coach was not heavily loaded, when the front wheels dropped into a hole the old ramshackle thing was liable to topple over on the animals; and, if the driver was not securely strapped to the seat when the rear wheels reached the hole, he would land some distance in the rear. The contractor had the old ark properly balanced before ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... hour later, bags and boxes having been stored in a state-room, a hasty survey of the boat made, and a few words exchanged with a blue-coated man of friendly manners concerning the hour of departure, Laine again got in the old ramshackle hack and for two hours was shown the honors and glories of the little town which had hitherto been but a name and forever after was to be a smiling memory. Snow and slush covered its sidewalks, mud was deep in the middle of the streets, but the air went to the head with its stinging freshness, ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... Church member's essential Confession of Faith, to be developed and expanded according to the need and circumstances, would be a real power in a chaplain's hands. The men's behaviour in billets—ramshackle barns for the most part—was almost exemplary. Only once or twice small episodes occurred in connection with hen-roosts, and on one occasion a sucking-pig was slaughtered amid its brethren at the dead of ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... obvious evils. The position of the primary teachers is unsatisfactory, that of the secondary teachers is impossible. When we attempt improvement of both will "Ulster" fight? And there is something even more human and poignant. The National Schools of this country are in many cases no better than ramshackle barns. Unless the teacher and the manager, out of their own pockets, mend the broken glass, put plaster on the walls, and a fire in the grate, the children have got to shiver and cough for it. Winter ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... is—idleness, unthrift, and bad farming generally, degrading it far below its possibilities and natural standard of production. Cross the Channel, and Wales looks like a trim garden. Go over to France, and you find every yard of soil carefully tilled and cultivated. Even in comparatively ramshackle Sicily, among the old lava beds of Etna, the peasants raise a handful of grain on the top of a rock no bigger than a lady's work-table. In Ireland the cultivated portion of a holding is often no bigger relatively than that work-table on an acre of waste. Will the tiller, now the owner and no ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... story of a wild and roaming career of a ramshackle old railroad car which has been given Roy and his companions for a troop meeting place. The boys fall asleep in the car. In the night, and by a singular error of the railroad people, the car is "taken up" by a freight train and is carried westward, so ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... limousine was tooting for a ramshackle prairie schooner to turn to one side. Behind the automobile plodded a forlorn mule dragging a wagon-load of empty boxes. Behind that came an army ambulance followed by an electric truck. A handsome soldier on a restive bay mare ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... to discover that Mr. Dunn of this ramshackle tenement in Hicks Street was identical with the elegantly equipped admirer ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... Dolly a chance to protest, or even to voice her surprise, Bessie slipped from the car and ran lightly to the side of the ramshackle old building that served as a store. Crouching down there, she was able to hear what Holmes, inside, was saying, as she had hoped. And the very first words she heard sent a thrill through her, and banished any lingering regrets she might ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... a narrow part of the old street, jointed to the flags, and then to the house behind them—an ancient, ramshackle place, the doors and windows of which were boarded up, the entire fabric of which showed unmistakable readiness for the pick and shovel of the house-breaker. And he laid a hand on one of the shattered windows, close by a big hole in ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... man goes out, the butler asks him if he'll have a glass of water or of grog or a cigar; he calls his car, puts him in it, and that's the end of it. Bully good plan. But in the United States that butler, whose wages are less than the ramshackle nigger I had at Garden City to keep the place neat, would have a business of his own. But here he is a sort of duke downstairs. He sits at the head of the servants' table and orders them around and that's worth more than money to an Old World ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... remains of Spanish grandeur in the village are the two ramshackle coaches that are used for hearses at state funerals. Most of the larger houses are, however, in repair, although the canvas ceilings and the board partitions seem to be in need of paint. These houses ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... cottonwood planks. Cottonwood lumber is full of whims and caprices,—bending, twisting, cracking like brown paper, so as to be wholly unfit for ordinary carpentry; but there was no other material available. Six canoes were made to hang together somehow; and in these ramshackle structures, together with the two periogues, the party covered more than a thousand miles of the roughest water of the Missouri. Annoyance was to be expected. The boats were continually splitting, opening at the seams, filling, ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... natives of the Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hotel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and English, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a creative artist. He went; and in a few years reached ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... despite infirmities, he received his neighbour and her English guest with rustic but cordial urbanity, at once entering into conversation. With evident pride and pleasure he watched my glances at premises and garden, house and outbuildings ramshackle enough, even poverty-stricken to look at, here not an indication of comfortable circumstances much less of independent means; the bit of land half farm, half garden, however, was fairly well kept ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... all conscience. A single street, wide enough, almost, for a plaza, paralleled the railroad tracks, the buildings, such as they were, all strung along the further side in an irregular line. One of these, ramshackle, weather-worn, labeled laconically "The Store," stood directly opposite the station. The architecture of the "Paloma Springs Hotel," next door, was very similar. On either side of these two structures a dozen or more discouraged-looking ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... were of great mills and sawdust-burners along a wide river; of broad, sawdust-covered streets; of a single block of good, brick stores on a main thoroughfare which almost immediately petered out into the vilest and most ramshackle frame "joints"; of wide side streets flanked by small, painted houses in yards, some very neat indeed. Tally walked rapidly by the respectable business blocks, but pushed into the first of the unkempt frame saloons beyond. Bob followed close at his heels. He found ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... rested again on the somewhat displeasing pile on the corner, this time with a seeing eye. Her fascinated stare took in with one sweep a dirty ramshackle building of weather-worn gray brick, spilling over the sidewalk and staggering away (as it looked) down the littered side-street: rather a small building, obviously old, certainly not fragrant, quite ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Pierre should sing them. Moreover, Elias should compose little comedies that could be performed by their small party, and the profits were to be equally shared between them. They also put their hands together and vowed to be true and friendly, and not to separate till they came back to ramshackle Uzes. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... up two flights of ramshackle stairs and set it inside the door she indicated. Then he unwillingly withdrew to the car, where he sat waiting—and wondering. It was not long he had to wait, in point of time, but his impatience was growing upon him. All this was very well, and threw interesting lights upon a girl's character, ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... row of ramshackle buildings, not unlike a small Missouri River town. The citizens, so far as visible, formed a queer collection of old men addicted to rum. They all came out to admire Ladrone and to criticise my pack-saddle, and as they stood about ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... got much money, that's sure, but there's lots of quality that ain't got money; and he's got sense, and that's better than money. When he fust come here, I jes' goes to him, and ses I, 'How's you goin' to run this farm, sir,—ramshackle or reg'lar?' He looked at me kinder bothered, and then I 'splained. 'Well,' said he, 'reg'lar will cost more money than I've got, and I reckon we'll have to run it ramshackle.' That's what we did, and we're gittin' along fust rate. He works and I work, and what ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... at a premium. Lane was forced to apply in the sordid quarter of Middleville, and the place he eventually found was a small, bare hall bedroom, in a large, ramshackle old house, of questionable repute. But beggars could not be choosers. There was no heat in this room, and Lane decided that what time he spent in it must be in bed. He would not give ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... the facts were speedily brought out. Six hard customers, awaiting sentence after trial for larceny, burglary, assault with intent to kill, and finally desertion, had been cooped up together in an inner room of the ramshackle old wooden building that served for a prison, had sawed their way through to open air, and, timing their essay by the sound of the trumpets that told them the whole garrison would be out at morning drill, had slipped through the gap at the right moment, slid down the hill into ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... brought by the flivver, and that was the suction dredge, a horrible monster, a kind of jumble of house and machinery which came on a big six-ton truck and was launched into the lake. Its whole ramshackle bulk shook and shivered when it was in operation sucking the bottom of the lake up through a big pipe and shooting it through another long pipe which terminated on the land. Thus sand and gravel were secured and at the same time the lake was dredged by this mammoth vacuum ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... lived more stories than I could invent. Shortly before our arrival at Jolo Jennings had learned from a native in his pay that a son of the Flowery Kingdom, the proprietor of a notorious gambling resort situated on the quarter-mile-long ramshackle wharf known as the Chinese pier, was driving a roaring trade in the forbidden drug. So one afternoon Jennings, his hands in his pockets and in each pocket a service automatic, sauntered carelessly along the pier ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... I'm enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... river-dwellings, little, if at all, superior to those which we passed in coming up. I spent an hour among them, and I never saw any house whose area could be more than twelve feet square, while many were certainly not more than seven feet by six. Such primitive, ramshackle, shaky-looking dwellings I never before have seen. As compared with them, an Aino hut, even of the poorest kind, is a model of solidity and architectural beauty. They looked as if a single gust would topple them and their human contents ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... tourists' headquarters. Our hotel, situated in the middle of the town, offers good beds, good food, dirty floors, charges low enough to please Mr. Joseph Pennell, and a total absence of anything in the shape of modern ideas. The people are charming, and the house is a mousy, ratty, ramshackle place ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... nothing. Jimmie Dale's lips tightened suddenly. It was very curious! There was an "upstairs" to the place, such as it was, but if Melinoff was up there alone, or with the Pippin, they were up there in the dark unless they were in the rear upstairs room; in which case they could not, in view of the ramshackle nature of the building, have made the slightest movement without making themselves heard ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... one of the city's worst sections and near the river-front there stood an old ramshackle building. Why it had not been condemned by the building inspectors was a mystery. But it stood in all its squalid ugliness. The door and the windows were locked and shuttered. One could see at a glance that the ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... the group was moving to the rear of the station, and now came in sight of a ramshackle automobile with a Mexican at the wheel, easily distinguished by his swarthy coloring and his ragged mustaches, as well as by his peculiar dress—a steep crowned hat like a sugar loaf, with a very wide brim, a tight bolero ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... ever, and it seemed almost startling to me when I was posted sentry on the roof, after looking out over the wide, sandy, dusty plain, over which the sunshine was quivering and dancing, to peer down amongst the little ramshackle native huts without a sign of life amongst them, and it took but little thought for me to come to the conclusion that the natives knew of something terrible about to happen, and had made that their reason for going away. Though, all the same, it might have ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... Port Royal had been less severe than the terrible first winter of the settlement, on the St. Croix, but the two leaders decided to take one of the ramshackle little ships and make another exploring voyage along the coast, to see whether some more comfortable site for the colony could not be found. There was plenty of leeway to the southward, for De Monts was supposed to control everything as far south as the present site of Philadelphia; but the ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... of the store—indeed, I should like to know who would have enjoyed it. It dated back to the beginning of the last century, a tarred, coal-black, ramshackle hut. The windows were low and small, the windowpanes diminutive. The ceiling was low. Everything was arranged in such a way as to exclude the possibility of lofty flights of thought ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... Government of ours is not a mere machine with the motive power at Washington. You've got to feel that you've been sent here to make up for the indifference of the outside world—that the kiddies out in those ramshackle cabins and cold tepees are not going to be lonely, and suffer and die, if you can help it. You've got to feel that it's your help that's going to save the feeble and sick—sometimes from their own superstitions. There's no reason why we can't in time get a hospital here for Indians, like ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... result of this tinkering and cobbling could only be a ramshackle structure, built without any reference to the canons of political architecture. It was shaped neither by the Fourteen Points nor by the canons of the balance of power and territory. It was hardly more than an abortive attempt ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... so farther on there stood another group of farm buildings—this one close to the road. An unpainted barn, a long and low, rather ramshackle structure with sagging slidedoors that could no longer be closed, stood in the rear of the farm yard. The dwelling in front of it was a tall, boxlike two-story house, well painted in a rather loud green with white door and window ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... an old mattress, and soon smoke was pouring out in dense volumes. It filled the interior of the ramshackle structure, and it was evident that the upper story would soon become untenable. An interval of tense excitement followed, and all eyes were strained for a glimpse of ...
— Mob Rule in New Orleans • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... after week, year after year. Mary could decorate over thirty dozen cups and saucers in a day, at three halfpence the dozen. 'Doesn't she ever do anything else?' some visitor might curiously inquire, whom Titus Price was showing over his ramshackle manufactory. 'No, always the same thing,' Titus would answer, made proud for the moment of this phenomenon of stupendous monotony. 'I wonder how she can stand it—she has a refined face,' the visitor might ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... all of the inner guardians of his own happiness told him to keep to his search, to journey on his way and forget he had seen the tracks. Every desire of Self spoke in warning to him. But Bill Bronson had a higher law than self. Long ago, in front of the ramshackle hotel in Bradleyburg, he had given a promise; and he had reaffirmed it in the gleam of the Northern Lights not many nights before. There was no one to hold him to his pledged word. There were none that need know; no one to whom he must answer but his own soul. Yet even while he stood, seemingly ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... show, but as Brevoort made no move to go, he fixed his attention on the screen again. Immediately another scene jumped into the flickering square. Pete stiffened. Before him spread a wide canon. A tiny rider was coming down the trail from the rim. At the bottom was a Mexican 'dobe, a ramshackle stable and corral. And there hung the Olla beneath an acacia. A saddle lay near the corral bars. Several horses moved about lazily . . . The hero of the recent gun-fight was riding into the yard . . . Some one was ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the porch rail right beside us. The others were all right there, squatting on the porch or sitting on the rail. We could see across the river and past the old ramshackle buildings there and right over the village of Little Valley to the ridge. That big tree stood up higher than all the others and it seemed just as if it were all alone off there. I guess it was about one ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... territory; and about half an hour before sunset they marched into a small village, composed chiefly of adobe huts, where a halt was called for the night, and where our friends were confined in a ramshackle barn of a place in company with the sergeant and ten men. That the sergeant was quite determined not to get into trouble by the neglect of any possible precaution soon became perfectly evident; for when, about half an hour after the arrival of the party at the village, supper was served, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... amidst plenty, to the tale of the Hotel de France. This restaurant stood on California street, just east of Old St. Mary's Church. One could throw a biscuit from its back windows into Chinatown. It occupied a big ramshackle house, which had been a mansion of the gold days. Louis, the proprietor, was a Frenchman of the Bas Pyrenees; and his accent was as thick as his peasant soups. The patrons were Frenchmen of the poorer class, or young and poor clerks and journalists who had discovered the delights of his ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... was wet as Verkan Vall—who reminded himself that here he was called Richard Lee—crossed the yard from the farmhouse to the ramshackle barn, in the early autumn darkness. It had been raining that morning when the strato-rocket from Dhergabar had landed him at the Hagraban Synthetics Works, on the First Level; unaffected by the probabilities of human history, the same rain had been coming down on ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... I know that the Turkish army is under German officers. But—if war should happen, is it likely that this ramshackle nation which was fought to a standstill by the Balkan Alliance only a few months ago would be ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... an old family,' he went on with great complacency. 'The castle, as perhaps you are aware, is a huge, ramshackle place, honeycombed underneath with cellars. I dare say in the old days some of these cellars and caves were the resort of smugglers, and the receptacle of their contraband wares, doubtless with the full knowledge of ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... then there's no other victim," said Jack. "If there is none, it will let the ice company off easier than they really deserve for allowing so ramshackle a building to stand, overhanging the river just where we like to do most of our ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... quickly made his way by means of the footholes to the top. He could then see that there was a square space which, though similar in appearance to the rest of the gallery, concealed the entrance to the shaft. He pushed it upward. It gave easily. It was a trap-door, leading into a square, ramshackle shed! ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... jealousy of it, and communicates his knowledge only to his family and his friends. Nevertheless, its fame spreads slowly, and each year new discoverers flock in growing numbers to the one little hotel and its ramshackle bath-house, so that the community once absolutely and viciously utilitarian begins to take timid account of its aesthetic surroundings, and here and there a little log-cabin (as appropriate to this land as the chalet to the Alps) is built beside ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... skittle-playing and public-housey in his countenance.) We have been up at five every morning, and on the road before seven. We were three carriages: a sort of wagon, with a cabriolet attached, for the luggage; a ramshackle villainous old swing upon wheels (hired at Geneva), for the children; and for ourselves, that travelling chariot which I was so kind as to bring here for sale. It was very cold indeed crossing the Jura—nothing but fog and frost; but when we were out ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... trap; it rests flat on the axle; it is an actual fact that the seats were suspended inside it by leather thongs; the rain came into it; the wheels were rusted and eaten with moisture; it would not go much further than the tilbury; a regular ramshackle old stage-wagon; the gentleman would make a great mistake if he trusted himself to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... ignorance regarding the driver of that ramshackle conveyance; to being utterly at sea in the neighbourhood; to having walked like any country bumpkin from the railroad station, lugging an unconscionably heavy bag; and yet, despite all this, she seemed amazingly sure of herself. He recalled her frivolous remark about her jewels, and now wondered ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... for he was coming slowly down the hill. Another Heir of all the ages—another Imperialist—a degraded, brutalized wretch, clad in filthy, stinking rags, his toes protruding from the rotten broken boots that were tied with bits of string upon his stockingless feet. The ramshackle cart was loaded with empty bottles and putrid rags, heaped loosely in the cart and packed into a large sack. Old coats and trousers, dresses, petticoats, and under-clothing, greasy, mildewed and malodorous. As he crept along ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... cabin of the ramshackle boat was deserted at that hour, the colonel went to a dark corner, and from it emerged, a little later, with a beard on that would have done credit to the most orthodox inhabitant of ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... crude old days of the army, when its fighting force was scattered in small detachments all over the wide frontier, and men, and women, too, lived on soldier rations, eked out with game, and dwelt in tents or ramshackle, one-storied huts, "built by the labor of troops." At twelve she had been placed at school in the far East, while her father enjoyed a two years' tour on recruiting service, and there, under the care of a noble woman who taught her girls to be women indeed—not vapid votaries ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... lie without shadow of foundation, and I call upon you all to beware you give credence to the malicious inventions of this ramshackle slander-mill that has been doing its best to destroy my character for years, and will grind up your own reputations for you next. I got off to tighten my saddle-girth—I wish I may die in my tracks if it isn't so—and whoever ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... on a flat beach of deep black sand, where they generally left their personal effects for lack of means of transportation. They climbed to a ragged thoroughfare of open sheds and ramshackle buildings, most of them in the course of construction. Beneath crude shelters of all sorts and in great quantities were goods brought in hastily by eager speculators on the high prices. The four hundred deserted ships lying at anchor in the harbor had dumped down on the new community the most ridiculous ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... strange to me, even now when the story has grown old in my memory, to recall all that happened before the hands of that clock pointed again to twelve. And last year when I revisited the neighborhood and found a neat new house standing on the site of the ramshackle inn, I could not pass by without a queer feeling in my throat; for it was there that the results of the duchess' indiscretion finally worked themselves out to their unexpected, fatal, and momentous ending. Seldom, as I should suppose, ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... or two, faced about and began to retrace his steps. He cut through the Ellery back yard and came out on the cross street at whose corner the Fultons lived. The house was a big ramshackle affair of a dozen rooms or so, far too large a place for the Fultons, since there had been only the two of them, Tod's mother having died when he was only a little tad. Indeed, as Tod said, they only used three rooms, the kitchen and two bedrooms. But that was hardly true; ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
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