"Dinghy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wear trousers. But she wore a sailor's blue stocking-cap, and it brightened existence when, for economy's sake and for the sake of general tidiness, she was allowed to wear a white woollen jersey. Then somebody who had a dinghy that he did not want asked her if she would like to have a boat. Would she like to have paradise, or pastry cakes, or anything that was heavenly! After that she wore a sailor's jacket and a sou'wester ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... without a breath of wind, and the moon just going down. Over on the black shore I made out two lights in a village, like a pair of eyes watching. Lonely? My, yes! Lonely and nervous. I had a horror of her, sir. The dinghy-boat hung on its davits just there in front of the door, and for a minute I had an awful hankering to climb into it, lower away, and row off, no ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... before the days of Sennacherib! Assyrian sculptures in the British Museum show this boat in use exactly as it is to-day, and although we have no records, it probably was in use for ages previously. Noah, possibly, had one as dinghy to the Ark. The goufa is made like a basket and then coated with bitumen. This type of boat gives a touch of fantasy to the scenery of the Tigris and Euphrates, especially when filled with watermelons and paddled by a man whose appearance suggests Abraham ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... evening, at 7.30, the anchor was dropped in North-East Bay, Macquarie Island, and we were immediately boarded by our land party who were all well. They had become very clever boatmen during their stay, using a small dinghy to ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... it, and causing considerable profanity for the extra work given us by Fritz. Instant orders were given us to take cover as a strafing was in sight, and we shot out of the gun pit, jumped into the trench and ran along. Two of the fellows were immediately ahead of me, Dinghy and Graham, and Graham's footwork was so slow that I jumped up on the parapet of the trench to get past him, and over the top I skedaddled toward our 30-foot dugout, which had formerly been the home of the Germans; like most of their quarters it was large, roomy and comfortable. ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... walked down to the edge of the sea. There was a little dinghy there, and the boat was anchored a couple of hundred yards off. They could just make out the loom of her through the darkness, and see her shadowy spars, dipping, rising, and falling with the wash of the waves. To right and left spread the long white line of thundering foam, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... getting some of Selkirk's men to take the king's shilling, and now was trying to lead these men away from the ships as 'deserters from His Majesty's service.' One day this trouble-maker brought his dinghy alongside one of the vessels. A sailor on deck, who saw Captain Mackenzie in the boat and was eager for a lark, picked up a nine-pound shot, poised it carefully, and let it fall. There was a splintering thud. Captain Mackenzie suddenly ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... Soldiers, I felt sure, involved my becoming a German prisoner and parading the garden paths with my arms up, crying "Kamerad!" while Betty, gun in hand, shepherded and prodded me from behind. Just sailors, on the other hand, smacked of gentle sculling exercise in the dinghy on the lake, so I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... see the water swirling round the coral piers, for the tide was flooding into the lagoon; it had seized the little dinghy and was bearing it along far swifter than the sculls could have driven it. Seagulls screamed about them, the boat rocked and swayed. Dick shouted with excitement, and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Tinker suggested that they should cross over to the strip of sand which at that point separates the Gulf from the Bay, and the others fell in with his humour. They crossed over and landed in the yacht's dinghy. Tinker insisted on taking two rugs, though both Dorothy and his father objected that the sand was quite dry enough to sit on. However, when they came to the beach of the Bay, Sir Tancred spread ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... ordinary tenement house of the poorest class, exactly like its neighbors, which lined both sides of the dingy street. The door was always open, more than half the time hanging by one hinge, the stairways were dark and crooked, the rooms small and dirty. In a back kitchen on the topmost floor, a man sat, or ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... Lighthouse Island and one or two more small islands scattered about near the coast was a small but tidy little vessel that was really capable of better speed than most people gave her credit for. She was painted a sort of dingy white, and large black letters along her bow proclaimed her to be none ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... square figure of the boss, his soft hat, his flaming red beard, his dingy mackinaw coat, his dingy black-and-white checked flannel shirt, his dingy blue trousers tucked into high socks, and, instead of driving boots, his ordinary lumberman's rubbers. As a spot of colour, ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... letter and groaned. 'Was she never to have a good time!' he wondered, thinking of the dull room and the half-finished blouses upon the table, the economical gas jets in the fireplace in lieu of the glow of a bright fire, and the dingy paper on the walls. The whole thing was too hard on her, he thought, and everything in the world ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... the window-sill. One dry, agonized sob racked her; and then she sat on the floor, to stare vacantly at the dingy walls of the room. ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... down from town, with an intimation that it behoved the squire himself to go up that he might see certain learned pundits, and be badgered in his own person at various dingy, dismal chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields, the Temple, and Gray's Inn Lane. It was an invitation exactly of that sort which a good many years ago was given to a ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... an old sorrel horse, leaning forward in a most unmilitary seat, and wore a sun-browned cap, dingy gray uniform, and a stock, into which he would settle his chin in a queer way, as he moved along with abstracted look. He paid little heed to camp comforts, and slept on the march, or by snatches under trees, as he might find occasion; often begging ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... but contrast our spacious galleries in that magnificent capitol at Washington, as well as in our grand State capitols, where hundreds of women can sit to see and hear their rulers at their ease, with these dark, dingy buildings, and such inadequate accommodations for the people. My son, who had a seat on the floor just opposite the ladies' gallery, said he could compare our appearance to nothing better than birds in a cage. He could not distinguish an outline of anybody. All he could see was the moving of feathers ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the gesture conveying the generous sentiment "This one's on me," the spinning of a coin on the bar, the raising of the elbow, the final toss that dispatched the fluid—all these were done to the life. The audience followed suit with a will. A whispering rustle ran through the dingy hall as each man murmured his favorite catchwords. "Give it a name," "Set 'em up again," "Here's luck," and such archaic phrases were faintly audible. Miss Chuff kept her gaze fastened on ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... the bird that wears a black cravat, which he changes once a year? It is the English Sparrow, the commonest of all our birds. His hair is gray, but he must have been red-headed once, for just back of his ears there is still a band of red; and his collar, maybe, was white once, but it is very dingy now. His shirt and vest are gray; his coat is brown with black streaks—a sort of sporting tweed. The new cravat comes when the new feathers grow in late summer; and, at first, it is barred with gray as if in half mourning for his sins. As the gray tips wear off, it becomes solid black; that ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... was dingy, dirty, earthy. The spectacle which it was expecting was evidently one of the sort which possess the privilege of bringing out and calling together the vilest among the populace. Nothing is so hideous ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... and pleasure and their tongues busy with questions, the girls cantered down the narrow, crooked wagon road called "Main Street." They read the names over the doors of the dingy little shops, ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... dictionaries of prudery. You see, I know almost all the swearwords there are. And I read the newspapers, and medical books, and even the things that boys chalk up on fences. In consequence I am not a bit whiteminded, because if you use your mind at all it gets more or less dingy, just like ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... and in every street.[*] The ordinary Chinese visiting-card —a piece of red paper about six inches by three, inscribed with its owner's name in large characters—changes to a dusky brown; and the very lines on letter paper, usually red, are printed of a dingy blue. Official seals are also universally stamped in blue instead of the vermilion or mauve otherwise used according to the rank of the holder. Red is absolutely tabooed; it is the emblem of mirth and joy, and the colour of every Chinese ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... streets of the great city, in all the lofty workshops and yards and factories, huge hammers smote and clashed, and men, naked to the waist, reeking in dingy interiors, bent like gnomes at their tasks, while saws creaked, wheels turned, planes and mallets, and chisels shoved and cut and struck; and down in damp cellars sallow ghastly men and women wove rag-carpets, and twisted baskets in the ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... bright brown had faded, and she wore it tightly strained back from her seamed forehead, although it was thin. One had only to look at her hair to realize that she was a woman who had given up, who no longer cared. She was humbly clad in a blue-cotton wrapper, she wore a dingy black hat, and she carried a tin pail half full of raspberries. When the man and woman met they stopped with a sort of shock, and each changed face grew like the other in its pallor. She recognized ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... being bankrupt, moves to London, and in the course of time George, now a student of science, follows him. New vistas of life open up in the midst of this vast, overgrown, "purposeless," "dingy" city. Nobody since Dickens has given us the impression of London in all its multitudinous, dismal-gay activities as Mr. Wells gives it us. But it is no longer the London of Dickens. It is a "great, stupid ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... on outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as to invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very existence of the otherwise inattentive ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... neighborhood waked up, a freshly-painted sign had taken the place over the door of the dingy old black and white one. The lettering was gilt, the background a skyey blue. ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... recovered consciousness, she found herself breathing an atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her from her death-like faintness. The scene around her looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful apartments, not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman. The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted the combination of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... farthest from the chief thoroughfare, but nearest to the quiet and respectable street beyond, a very modest-looking little shop-window, containing a few newspapers, some rather yellow packets of stationery, and two or three books of ballads. Above the door was painted, in very small, dingy letters, the words, "James Oliver, ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... form the capacious estuary of High Holborn. Whoever has sailed along, or cast anchor in this confluence, must have seen the individual I allude to. He sits—I should perhaps say sat, inasmuch as he is since defunct—bolt upright, with a pen behind his ear, in the centre of a dingy, spectral-looking shop, quaintly hung round with clothes, of divers forms and patterns, in every stage of existence—from the first crude conception of the incipient surtout or pantaloons, down to the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... dingy room. Like most poets, he was not averse to an audience, and like most poets he was quite willing that such audience should help defray his incidental expenses—indirectly, of course. Prospects were pretty thin just then. Two Mexican herders loafed at the other ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... the blazing logs; and there were queer tables and old-gold curtains looped back with brass rosettes—ears really—behind which the tresses of the parted curtains were tucked; and there were more old portraits in dingy frames, and samplers under glass, and a rug which some aunt had made with her own hands from odds and ends; and a huge work-basket spilling worsteds, and last, and by no manner of means least, a big chintz-covered ...
— The Little Gray Lady - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... skull was filled with living fire, which would either burn or burst it. He ceased to understand what was happening; he ceased to understand why Christ, the Merciful, the Divine, did not come with aid to His adherents; why the dingy walls of the Palatine did not sink through the earth, and with them Nero, the Augustians, the pretorian camp, and all that city of crime. He thought that it could not and should not be otherwise; and all that his eyes saw, and because of which his heart was ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Clairville down again before he fainted. However, the next day he was slightly stronger and the next and the next, so that on the fifth day he was nearly as well as ever, and again demanding the suit, she went to the room upstairs and hunted for it. Its colour was a faded claret, and lacings of dingy silver appeared on the front and round the stiffened skirt that stood out from the waist—a kind of cut to make even a meagre man look well among his fellows; a three-cornered hat went with it, and into this relic of strenuous days, madame ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... had reached the rather dingy-looking house of their deceased relative. The front door was open. They passed through the gate, and, entering, took ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... another trick of his enemies to deprive him of the means of sustaining his hard-earned reputation. His wife now, evincing great grief at the sad misfortune, held the lantern while he counted his skins and tin ware, which he found to tally exactly with his account of stock, which he kept on a dingy slip of paper, with the exactness of a cotton broker. "Curse on these enemies of mine; they are all an evil minded set of blockheads!" ejaculated the major, pausing to consider a moment, and then heaving a sigh. "Husband, curse ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... row of dignified houses on Oxford Street—yet not on Oxford Street. A miniature park, some forty feet in depth, acts as a buffer-state between the street itself and the little group of town houses. It is an oasis in the great plains of London's dingy dwelling-places, a spot where the owners are rarely seen unless the season is at its height, when gaily cloaked women and stiff-bosomed men emerge at theatre-hour and are driven to the opera. Throughout the day ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... struck a macadamised road and rattled gaily along to see the town. It is almost pure Burmah here, and the native of India is beautifully scarce; but Chinese abound, and are uncommonly nice-looking people. We drive a mile or so with rather dingy teak and matting houses on trestle legs on either side of the road, overhung with palms and trees, and see the domestic arrangements through open verandahs—women and children winding yellow silk in skeins and cooking, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... even to some Sahibs of his acquaintance—that wonderful old man-at-arms, horseman, shikarri, athlete, gentleman. (Yet how strange and sad to see him out of his splendid uniform, in sandals, dhotie, untrammelled shirt-tails, dingy old cotton coat and loose puggri, undistinguishable from a school-master, clerk, or ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... for me, Darry, back in the old Annapolis days, so we are even," answered Jetson gently. "However, we won't keep books on the subject of brotherly aid. All I can say, Darry, is that I am glad I chose this night to call on an artist who lives in dingy quarters half a mile beyond where I found you. And I am also glad that I did not accept his invitation to supper, or I should have come along too late to ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... man and his woes. Goriot, on the spot, is one of Maman Vauquer's boarders, and the mere fact is enough, by now, to differentiate him, to single him out among miserable old men. Whatever he does he carries with him the daily experience of the dingy house and the clattering meals and the frowzy company, with Maman Vauquer, hard and hungry and harassed—Mrs. Todgers would have met her sympathetically, they would have understood each other—at the head of it. Into ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... smoke-embrowned buildings, whose uniformity of dulness is not disturbed by windows incrusted with the accumulated dust of a century, hem you in on either side, and oppress your breathing as with the mildewy atmosphere of a vault. The dingy ranks of brick are broken by very narrow alleys; and here and there, peeping under archways, you may espy little paved court-yards, with great pumps scattering continual damp in the midst of them, and enclosed with just such dusky walls and dirty windows as you have already ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... moral nature a most disgusting expedition; namely, to help a lucrative client take the poor debtor's oath, and so avoid a partially unjust debt. On his return home he stopped at a country store to make a small purchase, and there at the end of the shelf he saw a cheap dingy copy of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus." He purchased it, and read it in his wagon by the evening light. He had tried to read it before, but failed to make his way in it. It was the first clear message and sure token of a spiritual life that had yet reached ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... the port wing of Vindictive's bridge, its iron sides freckled with rents from machine-gun bullets and shell-splinters; the tall white cross which commemorates the martyrdom of the Londoners is sister to the dingy, pierced White Ensign which floated over the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... very unhappy!" The young girl turned away and rested her elbow on the table, supporting her chin in her hand. She stared absently at the old bookcases as though she were trying to read the titles upon the dingy bindings. Montevarchi understood her words to convey a submission and changed his tone ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... London seemed very remote from us, as side by side we crept up the narrow path to the studio. This was a starry but moonless night, and the little dingy white building with a solitary tree peeping, in silhouette above its glazed roof, bore an odd resemblance to one of those tombs which form a city of the dead so near to the city of feverish life, on the slopes of the Mokattam Hills. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... fortune at Angel's Camp, a place well known to readers of Bret Harte. But it rained pretty steadily, and they put in most of their time huddled around the single stove of the dingy hotel of Angel's, telling yarns. Among the stories was one told by a dreary narrator named Ben Coon. It was about a frog that had been trained to jump, but failed to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded him with shot. The story had been circulated ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the wide bending sky blue above, the voice of nature in the sounding of streams, the song of birds, and the bleating of sheep differ widely from what the susceptible and poetic mind is destined to experience amidst the clanking din of shuttles in the dingy, narrow workshop of the handloom weaver. Here the breath of the light hill breeze cannot come; the form is bowed down, and the cheek is pale. Life, however buoyant and aspiring at first, necessarily ere long becomes saddened and subdued. To poor Tannahill it became ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... green doors which flank the big bench is the judge's retiring-room; pushing the crack there wider, I was able to peek in, and saw at once that the old atmosphere of Judge Colfax's study had not remained in the old dingy court-house, where the dismantlers' picks were already breaking up the ancient mortar, but had followed the personality of the man into these new pretentious quarters. The retiring-room already gave forth an alluring odor of law books and document files, the floor ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... flower and of its intrinsic beauty; for instance, in the case of the big pendulous pink and white flowers of Dielytra. In the same way he had an affection, half- artistic, half-botanical, for the little blue Lobelia. In admiring flowers, he would often laugh at the dingy high-art colours, and contrast them with the bright tints of nature. I used to like to hear him admire the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and colour. I seem to remember him gently ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... their prisoners through the doorway of a dingy-looking old house, and then Andre saw that he was not at the regular police-station. The whole party entered an office, where a superintendent and two clerks were at work. The ruffian who had assaulted Andre changed his manner directly he entered the office; he ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... in the first month of his term, it gave him a popular title, it compelled his renomination and reflection. Nowadays chairmen always introduced him as the "Champion of Canals," and even at this moment the catchword with cries of "speech" greeted him from every quarter of the dingy convention hall. He unfleshed his strong teeth in a wide-mouthed smile, rose, squared his shoulders, and walked alertly down an aisle to the platform. Brought thus into the open, under the yellow glare of a gas-light ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... splendid harmony of pale tints. Again, the poor little baby princess, with scarce visible features, seemingly kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and modelled) out of the wet ashes of an auto da fe, in her black-and-white frock (how different from the dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and gloomy enough for an abbess or a cameriera major, this childish personification of courtly dreariness, certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the principal strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and ashy light, tinged yellowish in the hair, bluish ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... over-grown with weeds. The sink in the kitchen was badly rotted. One of the parlor blinds was off. There was a bad leak over the back porch, and the plastering looked just ready to fall, and the whole looked dingy,—it ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... it is—the horrid rickety houses in some dingy suburb of London, the grinning cobbler, the smothered butcher, the very trees which are covered with dust—it is fine to look at the different expressions of the two interesting fugitives. The fiery charioteer who ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sluggish move adown the limbo black, With murky waves that writhe demoniac,— As ebon serpents curling through the gloom And hurl their inky crests, that silent come Toward the yawning gulf, a tide of hate; And sweep their dingy ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... although built of wood; and the wrinkled and crazy appearance of the front was eminently suggestive of the face of an old woman on which time had long been plowing furrows to plant disease. The interior of the house, when we entered it by the dingy and narrow hall-way, that night, well corresponded with the exterior. A tallow candle in a tin sconce was burning on the wall, half hiding and half revealing the grime on the plastering, the cobwebs in the corners, and the rickety stairs by which it might ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... reached the globe's centre, in which conflicting attractions might keep him for ever fixed. In his despair he essayed to put one foot upon the ladder, and then looked piteously up to the guide's face. Even in that dark, dingy atmosphere the light of the farthing candle on his head revealed the agony of his heart. His companions, though they were miners, were still men. They saw his misery, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... The dingy den off the Common-room was never used for anything except gowns. Its windows were ground glass; one could not see out of it, but one could hear almost every word on the gravel outside. A light and wary footstep came ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... when I came back to the office after my visit at home, and took my seat at the old day-book opposite the dingy window that looks into Birchin Lane, I pretty soon let the fellows know that Mrs. Hoggarty, though she had not given me a large sum of money, as I expected—indeed, I had promised a dozen of them a treat down the river, should the promised riches have come to me—I let them know, ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... swing-door (through which issues a whiff of hot air charged with a combination of greasy smells that might knock down a rhinoceros), our hero enters the long, low, dingy room, and is instantly relieved of his coat and cap by half a dozen ready hands, while as many voices greet him with the stereotyped formula, "Be happy,[B] barin! What are you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... the dining-room, and looked cursorily at about a dozen large dingy pictures of the Italian school, which a man who knew anything about art would have condemned at a glance. Fine examples of brown varnish, all of them. Thence to the library, lined with its carved-oak dwarf bookcases, containing books which nobody had opened for a generation—Livy, Gibbon, ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... thee over to the other shore? For the sea is the sea of separation, and the other shore is our former birth. Far away over the setting sun hides the red land[27] of our old sweet love. And I can take thee back to it, out of this dim and dingy wood. Only I can carry thee back to the land beyond the sunset hill, where love is lying dead. Over the sea where monsters lurk, and great pearls grow in sunless deeps, I can carry thee back again ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... trod the dreary miles which bring us to Haworth. The village street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude stones, upon which the wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an unfamiliar sound. The dingy houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in architecture, are huddled along the incline and encroach upon the narrow street. The place and its situation are a proverb of ugliness in all the countryside; one dweller in Airedale told us that late in the evening of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... is miserably housed. It is dingy, badly lighted and badly ventilated. These defects constitute a serious menace to the physical welfare of pupils and teachers and, of course, seriously interfere with good work. It is crowded. Intercommunication ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... a mark of a dingy hue, that remains long upon a light-coloured, absorbent surface, as upon the face ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... escape from the central valley, bringing a much closer and better view of the two snow-clads, first on one, then on the farther side. By choice I should have climbed up over the "saddle" between them, as Cortez first entered the realms of Montezuma. A dingy branch line bore us off across broken country with much corn toward Puebla. On the left was a view of Malinche, famous in the story of the Conquest, its summit hidden in clouds. I was now in the Rhode Island of Mexico, the ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... in the great drawing-room on the first floor. It was a room of rich furniture, grown dingy with dust and inattention, and crowded from end to end with tables and chairs and sofas, on which were heaped in a confused medley, pictures, statues of marble, fans and buckles from Spain, queer barbaric ornaments, ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... unfolded the dingy scrap, but the changes of her expressive face did not bear out Jerry's optimistic conjecture that the "inside" was all right. Judging from Peggy's crestfallen air, it was all wrong. The note was not written in Lucy's usual regular ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on—ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield shall be this dingy inglorious one of the ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... solicitous faces had been no more than a glimpse, and then she had gone off into the dreams again. The curious thing had been that the dreams had seemed to be her vivid waking life, and the other things—the anxious faces, the details of her dingy bedroom, the thermometer under her tongue—had been the dream. And, though she had come back to actuality, the dreams had never quite vanished. She could remember no more of them than that they had seemed to hold a high singing and jocundity, issuing from some region of haze and golden light; and ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... mantelpiece; a large ugly oaken structure with closed doors, something between a cabinet and a wardrobe, rose on one side to the ceiling; a turning lathe stood against the opposite wall. Above the lathe were hung in a row four prints, in dingy old frames of black wood, which especially attracted the attention of Amelius. Mostly foreign prints, they were all discoloured by time, and they all strangely represented different aspects of the same subject—infants parted from their parents by desertion or robbery. The young Moses was there, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... Ladies and Gentlemen," said the dingy dealer in delicacies, and almost as soon disappeared among the crowd, where he found better ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... now time to examine the points of our team. It was composed of three tiny Battak ponies. Two were brown, and one a piebald in which a dingy chestnut strove for mastery with a dingier white. No two ponies were the same in size. One was in the shafts; the other two were in traces alongside. They tapered in size from right to left—the piebald on the left. The giant of the group had a nasty temper, and when lashed, as he was ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... winter dusk When the pavements were gleaming with rain, I walked thru a dingy street Hurried, harassed, Thinking of all my problems that never are solved. Suddenly out of the mist, a flaring gas-jet Shone from a huddled shop. I saw thru the bleary window A mass of playthings: False-faces hung on strings, Valentines, paper and tinsel, ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... approach and change of shadows, the dusky hue of the broad Potomac, that seemed to drink in the feeble light, which its snow-covered banks gave back to the air, the gradual change of every object from the colouring of bright sunshine to one sad universal tint of dingy purple, the melancholy lowing of the cattle, and the short, but remarkable suspension of all labour, gave something of mystery and awe to the scene that we shall ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... dreary. Had any one ever laughed in this shrouded desert? The long lines of stalls huddled under their wrinkled coverings stretched before and behind her. The boxes were shapeless holes of pallid grime. It was as if a London fog had trailed its dingy veil over everything. There was a fog outside as well, and the few electric lights which had been turned up peered blurred and yellow. An immense ladder, three ladders tied together, reared itself from the stalls to the roof. Something was being done to the lights on the ceiling. Tired-looking ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... conscious of a sudden feeling of pity for her newly made acquaintance. She called this meal, partaken of in the dusty, dingy little waiting-room of a noisy junction in company with a girl whom an hour ago she had never met, ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... of the room and upon the faces of this family group,—endeavor to picture to your minds the Cruchots. All three took snuff, and had long ceased to repress the habit of snivelling or to remove the brown blotches which strewed the frills of their dingy shirts and the yellowing creases of their crumpled collars. Their flabby cravats were twisted into ropes as soon as they wound them about their throats. The enormous quantity of linen which allowed these ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... the dingy Bloomsbury studio, where they were both at work, also put down palette and brush, examining the canvas before him with a ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her heroism and extraordinary efforts, after, as she feared, offending Providence—after facing Tailordom—the Countess was rolled away in a dingy fly unrewarded even by a penny, for what she had gone through. For she possessed eminently the practical nature of her sex; and though she would have scorned, and would have declined to handle coin so base, its absence was upbraidingly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a plain of dingy black, unbroken by a single prominence, undisturbed by living creatures except themselves. As Hubert remarked to his father, 'It looked as if it had been snowing ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... Lammermuir and the country of Mid-Lothian lay before us. It was all Scott-land. The inn of Torsonce, beside the Gala Water, was our resting-place for the night. As we approached Galashiels the next morning, where the bed of the silver Gala is nearly emptied by a number of dingy manufactories, the hills opened, disclosing the sweet vale of the Tweed, guarded by the triple peak of the Eildon, at whose base lay ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... up the stairs and down the long corridor Marjorie felt her heart beat a little faster. Her low spirits of the early morning began to rise. How good it seemed actually to be in school again! And what a beautiful school it was! Even Franklin would appear dingy beside it. She gazed appreciatively at the high ceiling and the shining oak wainscotings of the wide corridor through which she was passing. When her guide, who was tall, thin and plain of face, opened the last door on the right and ushered her into a beautiful sunshiny office ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... her, but never could the sight of it all, the smells, and the sounds, fail to bring back to Kitty memories of that supremely miserable day, and through any happiness make her taste again for a moment the forlornness, the black misery which swamped her as she first stood on that draughty, dingy platform. ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... slow shepherd threading his way down one of the winding paths on a hillside, with his flock close behind him, necessarily expanded, yet keeping just at his heels, bending and twisting as it goes and looking rather like the tail of a dingy comet. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Lamps burning and waiting. Nighties laid out and bedcovers turned back. And then—me. Second-rate hotels. That walk through the dark downtown streets. Passing men who address you through closed lips. The dingy lobby. There's no applause lasts long enough, Marcia, to reach over that moment when you unlock your hotel room and the smell of disinfectant and unturned mattress comes ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... but rather slighter of build, but all the same more manly of aspect. He was better dressed too, and wore a white flower in his button-hole, and a very glossy hat. One glove was off, displaying a signet-ring, and he brought with him into the dingy office a strong odour of scent, whose source was probably the white pocket-handkerchief prominently ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... that he was off the track and that his quarry had unconsciously doubled and eluded him. An instant later he drew a quick breath of relief, his gaze following a slender black figure as it mounted the steps of an old church which stood, dingy but still dignified, close by the highway, its open doors indicating that it had remained in this downtown district for a purpose. King sprang up the steps, then paused in the great doorway, beyond which ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... familiarly known among the braes and crofts of Portray. He had a heavy stiff hat, which he carried in his hand. He wore a black swallow-tail coat and black trousers, and a heavy red waistcoat buttoned up nearly to his throat, round which was tightly tied a dingy black silk handkerchief. At Portray no man was more voluble, no man more self-confident, no man more equal to his daily occupations than Andy Gowran; but the unaccustomed clothes, and the journey to London, and the town houses overcame him, and for a while almost silenced him. Mrs. Hittaway ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... the horsehair easy-chair and slipped on to the floor. Pamela calmly closed her ring, stooped over him, withdrew the key from his pocket, crossed the room and the dingy little hall with swift footsteps, and, without waiting for the lift, fled down the stone steps. Before she reached the bottom, she heard the shrill ringing of the lift bell, the angry shouting of the ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... First of all, I have an account to settle with Mrs. Stanton. In her speech on taking the chair, she said that editors are not good housekeepers—a remark which no editor would think of retorting upon herself. [Laughter]. But, however dingy my editorial office may sometimes be, it is always a cheerful place when Mrs. Stanton visits it. [Applause]. Moreover, I think the place she invited me out of is no darker than this place which she invited me into! [Laughter]. In fact, I think the press has generally as much illumination as ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... resemblance to her sister Flora was too marked to be mistaken, and the little one by her side had the same flashing eyes and radiant smile with which both of her grown up sisters were endowed. Their beauty fairly glorified the dingy street as they walked ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of the many floors was a large sort of office and lounging-room. It had been extended, as necessity demanded, by the simple process of taking down partition walls. It was low-ceiled and dingy. Its walls were mostly panelled with dull, shabby graining over many coats of paint. The floor was bare and unscrubbed, and littered with frowsy-looking wooden cuspidors filled with cinders. There were many small tables scattered about, and the rest of the space seemed to be ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... she sat, and she tilted her pink silk parasol between them as though to keep the dust from settling thick upon her stained khaki skirt and her desert-dingy high-laced boots. She was not interested in him, and her manner of expressing indifference could not have misled a horned toad. She was too fresh from city life to have fallen into the habit of speaking to strangers easily and as a matter of country courtesy. Even when the buggy stopped ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... eyes wandered about the many canvases which leaned against the dingy walls, he sighed again. Usually they showed their brown backs, but to-day he had turned them all to face outward. Twilight, sunset, moonlight (the Court-house in moonlight), dawn, morning, noon (Main Street at noon), high summer, first spring, ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... dish; a great chub; and three horned pouts, which swallow the hook into their lowest entrails. Several dozen fish were taken in an hour or two, and then we returned to the shop where we had left our horse and wagon, the pilot very eccentric behind us. It was a small, dingy shop, dimly lighted by a single inch of candle, faintly disclosing various boxes, barrels standing on end, articles hanging from the ceiling; the proprietor at the counter, whereon appear gin and brandy, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... the prosaic business of his daily work in Parliament with picturesque traditions, and of peopling the dingy streets of London with great figures of the past, gave colour and character to his town life. He entertained still—at 76, Sloane Street, or ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... amazement of a man faced by the impossible, and uncertain whether it is sight or reason that is tricking him. She had gone into the bedroom not only homely but commonplace, not only commonplace but common, a dingy washed-out blonde girl whom it would be a humiliation to present as his wife. She was standing there, in the majesty of such proud pale beauty as poets delight to ascribe to a sorrowful princess. Her wonderful skin was clear and translucent, giving her an ethereal ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... won't have it called that. The real Maescelyn is a castle, very large, airy, and handsome to look at, and this is a dingy little house, ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... Robert Fairchild," he said, as he faced a white-haired, Cupid-faced man in the rather dingy offices of the Princess Building. A slow smile spread over the pudgy features of the genial appearing attorney, and he waved a fat hand toward ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... from a small bonfire of sticks in a sheltered thicket, where a miraculous being—who was, as a matter of fact, a rather ragged and dingy vagabond—was cooking a tin ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... dismissal of office holders large and small, and replacement of them by sound Democrats, soon took place. Once started, the "spoils system" could hardly be stopped. Thenceforward there was a standing danger that the party machine would be in the hands of a crew of jobbers and dingy hunters after petty offices. England, of course, has had and now has practices theoretically as indefensible, but none possessing any such sinister importance. It is hard, therefore, for us to conceive how little of really vicious intent was necessary ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... fingering her dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin and loving eyes peering from out a tangled wilderness of hair. John rose gloomily as the train stopped, for he was thinking of the "Jim Crow" car; he stepped to the platform, and paused: a little dingy station, a black crowd gaudy and dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch of mud. An overwhelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it all seized him; he looked in vain for his mother, ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... done she went directly to a small dingy office building and entered a room, over which was the sign, "Joseph Aldrich, ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... meant to go straight to Jimmy, first, and give him back that money; only, those Vienna hats, displayed in the shop-windows, those dresses, those boots, when she saw all that, Lily understood that she could not return to London, to her parents, with dingy-looking clothes, after her successes on the continent! Pa and Ma would have ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... by him to support the popular side; and King Charles having met him once in private, was so delighted with his wit and agreeable manners, that he thought him worth trying to bribe. He sent Lord Danby to offer him a mark of his Majesty's consideration. Marvell, who was seated in a dingy room up several flights of stairs, declined the proffer, and, it is said, called his servant to witness that he had dined for three successive days on the same shoulder of mutton, and was not likely, therefore, to care ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... goes off in darkness—downward. It was but the other evening as we were seated about the fire that there came upward from the basement a gibbering squeak. Then the woodpile fell over, for so we judged the clatter. Is it fantastic to think that some dark and muffled Persian, after his dingy tunneling from the banks of the Tigris, had climbed the pile of wood for a breath of night at the window and, his foot slipping, the pile fell over? Plainly, we heard him scuttling back to ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... are noted for their vanity in brass wire, which is wound in spiral rings round their wrists and ankles, and the varieties of style which their hispid heads exhibit; while their poor lords, obliged to be contented with dingy torn clouts and split ears, show what wide sway Asmodeus holds over this terrestrial sphere—for it must have been an unhappy time when the hard-besieged husbands finally gave way before their spouses. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... into a most attractive place with palms and flags and coloured lanterns, while just outside the broad windows a wonderful tropic sky, hung with silver stars, added its enchantment to the scene. No carriage being available in the town, we walked from the dingy little wharf to the Headquarters Building, arrayed in our very best, and followed by a guard of armed soldiers, ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... and cursed. The window panes rattled again under another shower of gravel. Sweeny shook his wife into consciousness. He bade her get up and see who was in the back-yard. Mrs. Sweeny, a lean harassed woman with grey hair, fastened a dingy pink nightdress round her throat with a pin ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... out of the Park, and turning into one of the streets on the upper West Side stopped presently before a small dingy apartment house, where a dozen ragged children were playing leapfrog on ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... brought something into their lives—lives that were scorned by the Telegraph and by these people on the avenue. Could he make new friends here where the cartoons he drew and the Post that printed them had been contemned, if not despised? His mind flew back to the dingy office of the Post; to the boys there, the whole good-natured, happy-go-lucky gang; and to Hardy—ah, Hardy!—who had been so good to him, and given him his big chance, had taken such pains and interest, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... going and nobody paid particular attention to the youth until he gained the dingy office, where two men were smoking and talking over the merits of ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... rundown parking strips and yards, dilapidated fences, broken windows, smoking automobiles, dingy working places, all should be the object of our ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... comparatively old; it was there that the first cotton mills were built, and the crowded alleys and back streets of the neighbourhood made a fire there particularly to be dreaded. The staircase of the mill ascended from the entrance at the western end, which faced into a wide, dingy-looking street, consisting principally of public-houses, pawnbrokers' shops, rag and bone warehouses, and dirty provision shops. The other, the east end of the factory, fronted into a very narrow back street, not twenty feet wide, and miserably lighted ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... distant, and will be at ——, still more distant, till spring. No one else, except Augusta, cares for me; no ties—no trammels—andiamo dunque—se torniamo, bene—se non, ch' importa? Old William of Orange talked of dying in "the last ditch" of his dingy country. It is lucky I can swim, or I suppose I should not well weather the first. But let us see. I have heard hyeenas and jackalls in the ruins of Asia; and bull-frogs in the marshes; besides wolves and angry Mussulmans. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... parlour, which she had appropriated to herself. Her brow contracted as his name was announced, and the maid-servant lighted the candle on the table, stirred the fire, and gave a tug at the curtains. Her eye, glancing from his, round the mean room, with its dingy horsehair furniture, involuntarily implied the contrast between the past state and the present, which his sight could scarcely help to impress on her. But she welcomed him with her usual stately composure, and without ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who sees only cobblestones beneath his feet, whose view is contracted by rows of dingy houses, or who plays on a lot used both as a dump-pile and as a baseball ground, the privilege of working in a garden plat is a great one and the products ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... accustomed to think of Judith a great deal, and that was not the way to think of her. "Dear Judith!" said Peter, half unconsciously to himself, and looked again at the fellow, who had gone back to his dingy letter and continued to reread it in the fire-light as if he hoped to extract some further meaning from the now familiar words. Nature had fitted him out with a rag-bag assortment of features—the nose of a clown, the eyes of a ferret, the mouth ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... from ourselves that the unequal surfaces, given by such a use of the hot iron to parts of the work, expose it to the danger of being worn by friction more than other parts, and soon betray the damage by their threadbare, dingy look, as is the case in the example just cited. The method for grounding the quatrefoils is remarkable for being done in a long zigzag ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... for a little time he must still be known—moodily seized the late Estelle St. Clair under his arm and withdrew from the dingy back storeroom. Down between the counters of the emporium he went with his fair burden and left her outside its portals, staring from her very definitely lashed eyes across the slumbering street at the Simsbury post office. She was tastefully arrayed in one of those new checked gingham house frocks ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... us, the skipper struck a hand-bell which stood on the cabin table; in response to which summons a black steward, clad, like his master, in dingy white, made his appearance from the neighbouring pantry. Our host thereupon formed his right hand into the shape of a cup and raised it to his mouth, at the same time exhibiting three fingers of his left hand; and the steward, ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... horses; and one day when the king walked in the orchard, which was between the foss and the forest, he heard his voice among the salley bushes which hid the waters of the foss. 'My blossom,' it said, 'I hate them for making you weave these dingy feathers into your beautiful hair, and all that the bird of prey upon the throne may sleep easy o' nights'; and then the low, musical voice he loved answered: 'My hair is not beautiful like yours; and now that I have ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... of the kitchen fire issues from a sort of wooden cabin where several human beings breathe, eat, sleep, are born and die, sometimes without hardly ever having set foot upon the land. Pots of geranium or begonia give a bit of bright color to the dingy surroundings; and the boats travel slowly along the river, impelled by enormous oars, which throw ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... were black with age and with the arcing effects of lightning, which, to young Edison, seemed particularly partial to Louisville. "It would strike on the wires," he says, "with an explosion like a cannon-shot, making that office no place for an operator with heart-disease." Around the dingy walls were a dozen tables, the ends next to the wall. They were about the size of those seen in old-fashioned country hotels for holding the wash-bowl and pitcher. The copper wires connecting the instruments to the switchboard were small, crystallized, and rotten. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... aloud in peculiar sing-song tones to the crowd, who listen with all-absorbing attention. He then orders the people to direct me to a certain inn. This inn blossoms forth upon my as yet unaccustomed vision as a peculiarly vile and dingy little hovel, smoke-blackened and untidy as a village smithy. Half a dozen rude benches covered with reed mats and provided with uncomfortable wooden pillows represent what sleeping accommodations the place affords. The ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... got into Piccadilly, he put himself into a cab, and had himself driven to the corner of Munster Court. It was a little street, gloomy to look at, with dingy doors and small houses, but with windows looking into St. James's Park. There was no way through it, so that he who entered it must either make his way into some house, or come back. He walked up to the door, and then taking out his watch, saw that it was half-past six. ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... standing back in side streets, houses with porticoed front doors monstrously disproportioned to their size. Nobody ever knocks at those front doors; nobody ever passes down those side streets if they can possibly help it. The houses are all exactly alike; they melt and merge into each other in dingy perspective, each with its slag-bordered six foot of garden uttering a faint suburban protest against the advances of the pavement. Miss Quincey lived in half of one of them (number ninety, Camden Street North) ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... Dyce's movements, but his elbow rested on the arm of the rocking chair, and holding his hand up to screen his face from the blaze of the fire, he was closely watching Bedney. When Dyce shook out and held up a faded, dingy blue silk handkerchief, the lawyer noted a sudden twinkle in the old man's eyes, but no other feature moved, and he stooped to take a coal of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and half-a-dozen common wooden chairs stood against the opposite wall, three on each side of a pretty-well-filled book-case; while an old rickety sofa, covered with soiled chintz, leaned against the wall which fronted the window, as if to rest its lame leg. The carpet and rug were dingy, and decidedly the worse for wear; and the college had evidently neglected to paper the room or whitewash the ceiling for several generations. On the mantle-piece reposed a few long clay pipes, and a brown earthenware receptacle for tobacco, together with a japanned ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Street apartment about six o'clock in the evening, and, after studying the dingy name-plates, took the five flights of stairs with uncommendable speed, and presented himself at the rear ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... noisy party arrived at the Fleur-de-Lis, they entered without ceremony into a spacious room—low, with heavy beams and with roughly plastered walls, which were stuck over with proclamations of governors and intendants and dingy ballads brought by sailors from ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of September the factory town still seemed a blot on the face of nature; yet here and there, on all sides, Justine's eye saw signs of humanizing change. The rough banks along the street had been levelled and sodded; young maples, set in rows, already made a long festoon of gold against the dingy house-fronts; and the houses themselves—once so irreclaimably outlawed and degraded—showed, in their white-curtained windows, their flowery white-railed yards, a growing approach ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... exceedingly delicious to those who are extremely fond of smoking." On the evening of the election at Eatanswill, Tupman and Snodgrass resort to the commercial room of the Peacock Inn, where "the atmosphere was redolent of tobacco-smoke, the fumes of which had communicated a rather dingy hue to the whole room, and more especially to the dusty red curtains which shaded the windows." Here, among others, were the dirty-faced man with a clay pipe, the very red-faced man behind a cigar, and the man with a black eye, who slowly filled a large Dutch ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... explain. Cards were anew issued to all those who had been formerly included in the invitation, and of course to Mr. Touchwood, as formerly a resident at the Well, and now in the neighbourhood; it being previously agreed among the ladies, that a Nabob, though sometimes a dingy or damaged commodity, was not to be rashly or unnecessarily neglected. As to the parson, he had been asked, of course, as an old acquaintance of the Mowbray house, not to be left out when the friends of the family were invited on a great scale; but his habits were well known, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... wife of the Archduke Albert, vowed not to change her linen till Ostend was taken; this siege, unluckily for her comfort, lasted three years; and the supposed colour of the archduchess's linen gave rise to a fashionable colour, hence called l'Isabeau, or the Isabella; a kind of whitish-yellow-dingy. Sometimes they originate in some temporary event; as after the battle of Steenkirk, where the allies wore large cravats, by which the French frequently seized hold of them, a circumstance perpetuated on the medals of Louis XIV., cravats were called Steenkirks; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... companion's eyes were upon her, she turned, and looking out of the window found no encouragement in what she saw. The snow had gone, and a vast expanse of grass ran back to the horizon; but it was a dingy, greyish-white, and not green as it had been in England. The sky was low and grey, too, and the only thing that broke the dreary monotony of lifeless colour was when the formless, darker smear of a birch bluff rose out of the empty levels. Her heart throbbed unpleasantly ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... in among my captors, shouting aloud in a language which I took to be Turkish, since he bellowed "Effendi" as he pointed to me. He had thrown away his billycock and substituted a fez, which he afterwards told me he always carried in case of accidents, and in one hand he waved a dingy piece of parchment with a seal dangling from it, which I assumed was some obsolete firman. The result was truly amazing, and the scene had some real humour in it. With profound salaams, the Turks unhanded me, helped me to mount, ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... mourning." When she made her appearance in church,—which she did, as usual, the very first Sunday after the funeral,—that plainest of bonnets and straitest of black delaines, unadorned save by the old-fashioned and dingy lace-cape, descended through many shifts of saving from her long-ago-dead-and-gone mother, were so manifestly a condescending concession to the conventionalities or superstitions of Hendrik, and said so plainly, "This is for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... of rock and snow. His path led across it, and after a word or two with the men on the line he began his journey, breaking through the thin, frozen crust. The sounds behind him grew fainter and ceased; the trail of dingy smoke which had followed him melted away, and he was alone in the wilderness. His course was marked, however, by a pile of stones here, a blazed tree there, and he plodded on all day. When night came he found a hollow free from snow ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... not very evenly trimmed—for his wife or daughter has performed the tonsure with a pair of rusty shears; and the longer locks seem changed in hue, as if his dingy wool hat did not sufficiently protect them against the wind and rain. Over his shoulder he carries a heavy rifle, heavier than a "Harper's ferry musket," running about "fifty to the pound." Around his neck are swung the powder-horn ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... hurried by. Mr. Pickwick remembered to have very often observed them lounging under the archway when he had been walking past; and his curiosity was quite excited to know to what branch of the profession these dingy-looking loungers could possibly belong. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... looked very dingy and old, and the men in blouses who pushed their clods about on this or that errand upon the troopship, were old, too, and had sad, worn faces. ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... dressing-gown over a pair of angular knees encased in threadbare felt. The robe was an ancient printed cotton garment, lined with wadding which took the liberty of protruding itself through various slits in it here and there; the weight of this lining had pulled the skirts aside, disclosing a dingy-hued flannel waistcoat beneath. With something of a coxcomb's manner, Fraisier fastened this refractory article of dress, tightening the girdle to define his reedy figure; then with a blow of the tongs, he effected a reconciliation ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the same greenish white as the outside, but it was soiled and dingy, and the whole place looked dirty and untidy. There was a smell ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... shoulders, dropped wearily into a chair. He wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue flannel shirt, a Navy revolver; his trousers were hanging on his boot tops. A tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders, and a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... did nothing. He sat in the dingy little pool room and talked with the black-haired boy or walked over the hills swinging a stick in his hand and thinking of the city to which he would presently go to start his career. As he walked in the streets women stopped to look at him, thinking of the beauty and strength of his maturing ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... a very dingy, dirty place, but it was as warm as the engine- room of a steamboat, and the steak was perfectly done and tender. It was too late to go to bed, so they sat around the table, with their chairs tipped back and their knees against its edge. The two club men had thrown off ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... into a room which seemed to have been the kitchen. There was a stove dimly visible at one side, and an old broken kettle on the floor, over which we stumbled. The back door was locked. But it swung outward as I broke it open. We stood upon a narrow, dingy beach, where the small ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... being recognized she caused him to assume the form of an aged mendicant. His limbs became decrepid, his brown locks vanished, his eyes grew dim and bleared, and the regal robes given to him by king Alcinous were replaced by a tattered garb of dingy hue, which hung loosely round his shrunken form. Athene then desired him to seek shelter in the hut ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... an alley near by, where he turned in, and with some difficulty found his way to the dingy staircase. Opening the door to Jennie's gentle "Come in," he said, "I have brought you a handful of flowers to look ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... back, rose and felt her way to the long corridor. Down this she stole as silently as any ghost, wholly indifferent to the eerie influences of the desolate place, spectrally illuminated as it was with faded chequers of moonlight falling through dingy windows, alive as it was with the groans and complaints of uneasy planks and timbers and the frou-frou, like that of silken skirts, of rats and mice scuttling between its flimsy walls. These counted for nothing to her; but all her soul hung on the continuance of that noise ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... in this part of the town, I asked myself? Did he propose to leave that priceless cabinet in this dingy quarter? And then I paused abruptly and slipped into an area-way, for the van had stopped some distance ahead and was backing ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... heart-sick for the sun, for the sunny South—for grassy plains, blue mountains, sweeps of mountain bush and sunny ocean beaches. I walked hard; I walked till I was mud-splashed to the shoulders; I walked through the squalid, maddening sameness of miles of dingy, grimy-walled blocks and rows of four-storied houses till I felt smothered—jailed, hopelessly. "Best get home and in, and draw the blinds on it," I said, "or ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... dingy envelope, lay the whip by which he could drive Brown to public apology. As far as fearing any publicity with which Brown could retaliate, Enoch felt immune. He believed that he had sounded the uttermost depths of humiliation. And at first he gloated over the thought ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... sinner, Doomed to be roasted for a dinner, Behold these lovely variegated dyes! These are the rainbow colors of the skies, That heaven has shed upon me con amore— A Bird of Paradise?—a pretty story! I am that Saintly Fowl, thou paltry chick! Look at my crown of glory! Thou dingy, dirty, dabbled, draggled jill!" And off goes Partlett, wriggling from a kick, With bleeding scalp laid open ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... torch, stuck into a cleft in the table, cast a red and flickering light over a rude interior, furnished with the table, the settle, a chest and a straw pallet. From the walls and rafters hung nets, torn or mended. In one corner was a great heap of dingy sail, in another a sheaf of oars, and a third was wholly in darkness. Lying about the earthen floor were several small casks to which ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... turned away. There was a bit of dingy veiling attached to the front of her old-fashioned hat, and Wyn saw her pull this down quickly over her face. The listener knew why, and she had to wink her own eyes hard to ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... found under the latter heading. Nevertheless, it is still a significant fact that while many of the butchers' establishments possess quite an attractive and inviting appearance, on the contrary those devoted to the sale of greengrocery are represented by dingy-looking places, and by a collection of faded vegetables which seem always to be apologising for being on view at all. The show of meat which is to be found in our Australian capitals is certainly worthy city ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... night, found the party comfortably established in their new quarters, on the very bank of the willow-bordered creek that plunged into the river, forty feet away. Across the creek and six hundred feet down the valley, dingy and brown with much service stood the tents of the engineering corps; but the officers' tent was deserted, for its occupants had come over to pay their respects at Camp Burnam, as the children had christened it. The site for the camp had been fixed upon, two days beforehand, and ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray |
