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More "Cheerless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... table had been hospitable, our doors open to many; but to part with our well-garnished dwelling had now become inevitable. We retired, with one servant, to a remote house of meaner dimensions, and were sought no longer by those who had come in our wealth. I looked earnestly around me; the present was cheerless, the future dark and fearful. My parents were dead, my few relatives in distant countries, where they thought perhaps but little of my happiness. Burleigh I had never loved other than as a father and protector; but he had been the benefactor of my fallen family, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... appailing. Nature in these wild regions assumes her most severe and sombre aspect. As one emerges from the precipitous and craggy ascent, upon this Valley of Desolation, as it is emphatically called, the Convent of St. Bernard presents itself to the view. This cheerless abode, the highest spot of inhabited ground in Europe, has been tenanted, for more than a thousand years, by a succession of joyless and self-denying monks, who, in that frigid retreat of granite and ice, endeavor to serve their Maker, by rescuing bewildered travelers from ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... wise Vidura serve thy mandate and behest, Let a father's pride and gladness fill this old and cheerless breast." ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... held in bondage by a Minotaur no bigger than your two fists. These good dames have a taste for travelling, but change of climate disagrees with their tyrant. They dislike house-keeping and, like good Americans, would prefer hotel life, nevertheless they keep up an establishment in a cheerless side street, with a retinue of servants, because, forsooth, their satrap exacts a back yard where he can walk of a morning. These spinsters, although loving sisters, no longer go about together, Caligula’s nerves being ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... arm presaging throbs amain, My troubled heart is sick with pain, And cheerless omens ill portend Where'er my anxious eyes I bend. Dear brother, hear my words: advance Resolved and armed for every chance, For every sign I mark to-day Foretells a peril in the way. This bird of most ill-omened note, Loud screaming ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... speak. My heart was too full for many words, but when the invitation was given to seek our Savior, many hands went up for special prayer. The meeting soon closed. Then as those terrible but necessary iron doors again unlocked and the prisoners filed past us one by one to their lonely, cheerless quarters, I made up my mind to come whenever I could, and, whenever permitted, to do and say what I could to help he "whosoever wills," also to use my influence in certain quarters for the betterment of the ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... this distance being across elevated undulating sandy plains, covered with a thick prickly scrub, about two and a half feet high; these plains were however occasionally studded with a few Banksia trees, but anything more dark, cheerless, and barren than their general appearance ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... face in a frame of a downy black beard, set with large dark eyes—he raised his shoulders and confidently stepped forward through the parlour. Strange sounds of a string instrument were calmly floating to meet him; they seemed to burst into quiet, cheerless laughter, complaining of something, tenderly stirring the heart, as though imploring it for attention and having no hopes of getting it. Foma did not like to hear music—it always filled him with sadness. Even when the ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... every outlay, to ask herself whether she could not do without a thing, was a hard trial; but it had become so painful to her to ask the Captain for money that she preferred the novel pain of self-denial to that humiliation. And then there was the cheerless prospect of the future always staring her in the face, that dreary time after Violet's majority, when it would be a question whether she and her husband could afford to go on living at the ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... along the bank of the Arragon; and we did not reach our destination, at Casada, until near midnight, where, amid torrents of rain, and in the darkness of the night, we could find nothing but ploughed fields on which to repose our weary limbs, nor could we find a particle of fuel to illuminate the cheerless scene. ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... the man That would over-live his span. Length of days brings many a moan When life's prime is past and gone; But of pleasures, never a one. Then all alike from dole to save, Comes the dark and cheerless grave. ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... even a little lonely. Once more Carlisle caught her mind at its retrospective misbehavior, and once more turned the key on it. Having laid out her dress on the bed, she stood and looked down into the cheerless light-well a minute, and then decided to wake up her mother. But she stopped on the way and turned back. Why wake up mamma half an hour too soon, just to hear the sound of ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and Worthing is a lonely piece of road, long and dreary, through bleak and bare open country, where the snow lay knee-deep, sparkling in the moonlight. It was so cheerless that I turned round to speak to my dog, more for the sake of hearing the sound of a voice than anything else. "Good Bose," I said, patting him, "there's a good dog!" Then suddenly I noticed he shivered, and shrank underneath the wraps. Then the horse required my attention, for he gave a start, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... not in the wilderness Thy fragrant virtues bloom, But in the city's crowded haunts, The alley's cheerless gloom. When hunger hid itself to die, Where guilt in darkness dwelt, Thy pleasant sunshine can by stealth Thy hand ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... must be taken into account in choosing a rug, and cold colors should not be used in north or cheerless rooms. The theory of color in regard to light has been explained in other chapters, very fully in the chapter on wallpapers, and its principles should be applied to all questions of furnishing, or ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... in the main Homeric, but one of his charms is the use of quaint allusive phrases derived, perhaps, from a pre-Hesiodic peasant poetry: thus the season when Boreas blows is the time when 'the Boneless One gnaws his foot by his fireless hearth in his cheerless house'; to cut one's nails is 'to sever the withered from the quick upon that which has five branches'; similarly the burglar is the 'day-sleeper', and the serpent is the 'hairless one'. Very similar is his reference to seasons through what happens or is done in that season: 'when ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... be in Wolverhampton, amidst grimy streets and dirty houses, in a leaden-hued atmosphere laden with damp and the fumes of chimneys, practically alone, with days of monotonous work before him, and solitary evenings to be spent in cheerless inns. What wonder if this seemed some brief vision of paradise—the golden light and glowing color, the soft strains of music, the ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Herbert heard of his departure, and the letter containing the news arrived on a cheerless afternoon during which his doctor had visited him. After the doctor left, Herbert entered the room where his wife and Sylvia were, and took his place in an easy chair by a window. Outside, the lawn ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... How bare and cheerless appeared the Indian's life to Tom's sympathetic nature then! for an Indian, when sick, has few comforts. Solitary he sits wrapped in his blanket, or lies on the ground, with no one to nurse or care for him; no nice dishes to tempt his feeble appetite, no hand to bathe his fevered brow, no medicines ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... December day Rose cheerless over hills of gray, And, darkly circled, gave at noon A sadder light than waning moon. Slow tracing down the thickening sky Its mute and ominous prophecy, A portent seeming less than threat, It sank from sight before it set. A chill no coat, however stout, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... great. More than one of the Government officers sent there to explore were either swept away by some torrent or came back half-crippled by hunger and rheumatism. One surveyor who stuck to his work for months in the soaking, cheerless bush, existing on birds, bush-rats, and roots, was thought a hero, and with cause. Even Maoris dreaded parts of this wilderness, and believed it to be the abode of dragons and a lost tribe of their own race. They valued it chiefly as the home of their ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... people who could employ a firm of solicitors which in its turn was served by the man who had received her. Romance and the clerk could never, she thought, meet under one roof. And such a roof! The room in which she sat was so dark, so gloomy, so bare and cheerless, that Juliet began to wonder whether she would not have been wiser not to have come. This was not a place, surely, which fond parents would choose for a long-deferred meeting with their child, after years of separation. She walked to the window, but the only view was of a blank wall, and that ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... we did not start again until the evening, husbanding our strength for the worst part of the way, which was yet to come. From this point the water-holes became less frequent, and the landscape particularly cheerless—monotonous stony expanses alternating with hideous thorn-thickets. Yet both men and beasts held out bravely through those three miserable days, and on the 12th of May we reached in good condition, though wetted to the skin by ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Washington that the Tuskegee village was the place for her to begin a work which should eventually include all the women of the county and of the neighboring counties. The country colored women crowd into the villages of the South on Saturday, seeking to vary the monotony of their hard and cheerless lives. Mrs. Washington determined to get hold of these women and utilize the time spent in town to some good purpose. Accordingly, the first mothers' meeting was organized in the upper story of an old store which then stood on the main street of the village. ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... Yudhishthira answered, saying 'Be not cheerless, O king; let joy fill thy heart! The desire cherished by thee hath certainly been accomplished. We are Kshatriyas, O king, and sons of the illustrious Pandu. Know me to be the eldest of the sons of Kunti and these to be Bhima and Arjuna. By ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... sort o' chap can whistle when his work is mostly fun; A hundred want the pleasant jobs to every sturdy one That'll grab the dreary duty an' the mean an' lowly task, Or the drab an' cheerless service that life often has to ask; But somebody has to do it, an' the test of me an' you Is the way we face the labor that we do ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... whom he appeared strongly attached), Mr. Dallas and his solicitor seemed to be the only persons whom, even in their very questionable degree, he could boast of as friends. Though too proud to complain of this loneliness, it was evident that he felt it; and that the state of cheerless isolation, "unguided and unfriended," to which, on entering into manhood, he had found himself abandoned, was one of the chief sources of that resentful disdain of mankind, which even their subsequent worship of him came too late to remove. The effect, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... frame of mind, Desmond turned into the library. As he crossed the hall, he noticed how cheerless the house was. Again there came to him that odor of mustiness—of all smells the most eerie and drear—which he had noticed on his arrival. Somehow, as long as Nur-el-Din had been there, he had not remarked the ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... going away, but you are cheerless, charmless, returning. What has happened to you, Gelban? But have you seen her, and are Deirdre's hue and ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... Nielsen found a poor, miserable, little fox in a trap, where it had been for days, and was nearly dead. Edd found a dead skunk in another. He had to call the hounds in. We returned to camp. That night was really the only cheerless one the men spent around the fire. They did not know what to do. Manifestly with trappers in a locality there could be no more bear chasing. Disappointment perched upon the countenances of the Haughts and Copple and Nielsen. I let them all have their ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... if he was tired. Darkness crept over the intense moonlight like a veil, and Bill realized that the moon was gone. He kept his course, however, with the aid of his indicator and the air compass and at last a new light commenced to show, the cold, cheerless, dun light of early dawn. As yet there was no ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... increasing numbers, in the growing generations; deafening their ears by its irrational clamor to the voice of the Living God which whispers in these pages, through the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. It has fathered the doubt which to-day sits, cheerless and chill, within the hearts and homes of thousands who once rejoiced in the warmth and light of God, but who now accept the alternative their teachers thrust upon them—"all or none"—and throw away the Blessed Book wherein God of old revealed ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... night. The moon shines and the stars glimmer in the midst of a serene but cheerless sky; the sharp whistlings of the north wind, that fatal, dry, and icy breeze, ever and anon burst forth in violent gusts. With its harsh and cutting breath, it sweeps Montmartre's Heights. On the highest point of the hills, a man is standing. His long shadow ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... I walk the cheerless shore. The cutting blast, the hurl of biting brine May freeze, and still, and bind the waves at war, Ere you will ever know, O! Heart of mine, That I have sought, reflected in the blue Of these sea depths, some shadow of your eyes; Have hoped ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... through the cheerless, mist-laden skies, the engine well throttled back and running as smoothly as any engine could. To make sure that all was in perfect working order, they circled for ten minutes over the town, trying the different controls, then turned ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... home, she says, "Even in this giddy place my heart is full to bursting; should I allow myself more time for meditation it would surely break, and pour forth its lava streams on the thirsty dust of human pride. In the dark, cheerless hour of midnight, my burning, throbbing brain still keeps its restless beating, scarce bestowing the poor refreshment of a feverish dream to strengthen the earthly tenement. My health is failing; there will soon ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cook shops, cobblers' stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky,—left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night,—left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man's integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wandered along, A cheerless and comfortless elf, He sought for relief in a song, Or complainingly ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... am myself stranded on a cheerless island where, against my will, I am kept captive—for how long a time I cannot guess. I was brought here at night, only forty-eight hours ago, and landed from a vessel which almost immediately departed whence it had come, into the darkness. My captors ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... paused on the threshold and took in the picture. He could see the low-lying, sunless afternoon sky, all gray and cheerless; the gray, complaining sea creeping up on the greasy shingle; the desolate expanse of road; the tongue of marshland; the strip of black pine woods—all that could be seen from the window. The prison-room looked ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... about all is silent and cheerless, Like a lonesome and desert-like plain. If but one were courageous and fearless And would cry out aloud in his pain! Neither storm-wind nor starshine by night, And the days neither cloudy nor bright: O my people, how sad is thy state, How gray and ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... and growing in the truth; but sometimes, through unwatchfulness, such a withering comes upon me, I lose all sense of good for days together, and this nether world is all I seek pleasure in. Then there is but a cold, cheerless, condemning feeling, when I look towards my Father's house; but when all life seems gone, and I am ready to conclude that I have suffered so many things in vain, how often does the gentle stirring of life bring my soul into contrition, into stillness! and He, who upbraideth not ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... It was a cheerless journey through the forest and down the lake, and the element of the grotesque did nothing to relieve it. Betty, distracted at first, soon realized that upon her lay the responsibility of averting a tragedy, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... drowsy traveller by rail how space and time are annihilated! He is barely conscious of progress, only when the brakeman with measured tone shouts the name of the station; he looks up from his paper or rouses from his doze, looks out at the cheerless prospect, and then settles himself for another thirty miles. Time passes as unobserved as the meadows or bushy pastures that flit by the jarring window at his ear. But with Greenleaf, the reader will believe, the case was far different. He had never noticed before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... as I mused, the naked room, The alien fire-light died away; And from the midst of cheerless gloom I ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... freezing as they fell, rattled harshly upon the bark roof over our heads; and the whole aspect of nature, as I caught a momentary glimpse of it when I went out to gather our evening's supply of fire-wood, was cheerless and desolate in the extreme. Our party consisted of three (or I should say four, for the Elam Storm whose name has so often been mentioned was to have shown up two days before)—Uncle Ezra Norton, who was a sheep-herder in a small way during the summer, and an untiring hunter and trapper in ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... top is painted bright green; the stones on the posts are green also, and there is the prettiest possible garden, with nicely cut borders of box. In fine, if ever there was a cheery place to look at, Sarsfield Cottage is that one; and if ever there was a cheerless gentleman, it is Mr. Jordan, who dwells there. Mrs. Wogan Odevaine commended him to us as the man of all others with whom to discuss Irish questions, if we wanted, for once in a way, to hear a thoroughly disaffected, outraged, wrong-headed, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... seemed that so withered and shrunken a life as his could hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hardly endure any subtraction but such as would put an end to it altogether. But in reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown. It had been a clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging. But now the fence was broken down—the ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... his home, and her absence was probably felt by the old gentleman with more keenness than he had anticipated at the outset. His large and beautifully furnished mansion needed the presence of just such a person of vivacious and cheery character as Clara, to prevent it from becoming cheerless in its grandeur. He intimated as much, and appeared unusually restless and low-spirited for him. He sought to make up for the absence of the sunshine and joyousness that "Miss Van" had taken away with her, by applying himself with especial diligence ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... and green For a coarse merino gown, And see her upon the scene Of her home, when coaxing down Her drunken father's frown, In his squalid cheerless den: She's a ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... around me as they did before, and I got on with the lesson very badly. I am sure Maria Perry has no gift at teaching little children, and I feel quite vexed and disappointed. This has not been a profitable Sunday, and I and now going to bed, cheerless and uneasy. ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... over the lifeless scene without as he ceased to speak. I could see a crimson beam glowing upon a crucifix that stood on the wayside by the hill-foot yonder; but the cheerless monotony of plough land and of pasture, stretching away leafless, treeless, without bud or flower, herd or herdsman, church or cottage, to the shadowed horizon, looming dark as the twilight deepened, was in sympathy with the gloom which had come upon me as Martin Hall ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... This was his starting-point in life. Never had any boy a smaller capital on which to build his fortune. He went out from his unhappy home, ignorant, poor, unfriended, and unknown. That from such a cheerless beginning he should rise to the rank of a merchant prince must be accounted one of ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... cheerless blaze of the drawing-room chandelier—Mrs. Peniston never lit the lamps unless there was "company"—Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down vistas of neutral-tinted dulness to a middle age like Grace Stepney's. When ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... lead me, queen sublime, to solemn glooms Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shades, To ruined seats, to twilight cells and bowers, Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse, Her favorite midnight haunts. . . Beneath yon ruined abbey's moss-grown piles Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, When through some western window the pale moon Pours ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... impression of ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr. Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old acquaintance ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... their pleasures rather sadly and sternly,—not like the light-hearted Florentines in song and laughter, or with the joyous abandon of the Neapolitans,—so there was no special manifestation on the part of the populace, and the day, cold, gloomy, and cheerless, did ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... was at Gravesend. The Londoners assembled in crowds to see the last of their Princess on her route to the coast by the Strand, Cheap, and London Bridge. Many persons recall to this day the sorrowful scene in the cheerless snowy weather. This was the reverse side of all the splendid wedding festivities-the bride of seventeen quitting family, home, and native country, sitting grave and sad beside her equally pale, and silent father—the couple so tenderly attached, on the eve of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... When the day's nearly done, Looks in on the cheerless floor; And falleth the rain Through the broken pane— Shrill whistles the wind at ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Criminal Investigation Department, stood before the empty grate of his cheerless office in New Scotland Yard, one hand thrust into the pocket of his blue reefer jacket and the other twirling a malacca cane, which was heavily silver-mounted and which must have excited the envy of every sergeant-major ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Darkness to me is fair, and light is cheerless. But are not you afraid in yonder walls Where the lamp's ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... which I had been so long was slowly passing away, now that the scene by the little grave that raw, cheerless morning had brought home remorselessly the truth that Marjory was indeed gone—lost ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... Upon the dewy window-sill, and perks His restless black eye here and there, in search Of crumbs, or shelter from the icy breath Of wild winds rushing from the Polar sea: For now November, with a brumal robe, Mantles the moist and desolated earth; Dim sullen clouds hang o'er the cheerless sky, And yellow leaves bestrew ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... ready-to-hand food gave him leisure. His days were all dreams. Weary of crouching over the fire before the opening of his humpy, he began to wander in the flesh as he was wont to wander in mind. He was seen a mile away from the cheerless camp, where his companions, with smoke-dried ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... blossom, the whole would present a harmonious effect. It would be hard to conceive of a more attractive sight than that presented by all those bulbs in full bloom in early April, when every thing else looked barren and cheerless. They were admired by every one who saw them. Bulbs of this character bloom and pass away in season to allow room for other plants to be set out. These may be set between the rows of bulbs, and not disturb ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... it looked to the eastward! Did ever evening close in so fast? And how black and cold the river looked! She never remembered to have seen it quite so cheerless and gloomy before. A thick white fog was rising from the marshy lands, and she could not see the friendly twinkling lights upon the bridge. Despite her exertions, which were great, she felt chill and shivery; and when at ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Ellen, at my feeling particularly cheerless, seated in worse than solitude on that inhospitable hearth, and remembering that four miles distant lay my delightful home, containing the only people I loved on earth; and there might as well be the Atlantic to part us, instead of those four miles: I could not ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... out of which my chamber opened. I had a dreamy recollection of the vast apartment. But how pleasantly it was changed! There was the bare half of the room, it is true, looking as it had done on that first afternoon, sunless and cheerless, with the long, unoccupied table, and the necessary chairs for the possible visitors; but round the windows that opened on the garden a part of the room was enclosed by the household clothes'-horses hung with great pieces of ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... the welcome shone. Its gleams and sparkles positively pursued him as he turned his face towards the road and his own dark, cheerless house. Perhaps he had better, on the whole, keep one lamp burning in the lower part after this, to show that the place ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... own, Which gives its cheer to midnight and to me. And now with noiseless step sweet Memory comes, And leads me gently through her twilight realms. What poet's tuneful lyre has ever sung, Or delicatest pencil e'er portrayed The enchanted, shadowy land where Memory dwells? It has its valleys, cheerless, lone, and drear, Dark-shaded by the lonely cypress tree. And yet its sunlit mountain tops are bathed In heaven's own blue. Upon its craggy cliffs, Robed in the dreamy light of distant years, Are clustered joys serene of other days; Upon its gently sloping hillside's bank The weeping-willows ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... to see Signor "Lib" hiding from the Captain when the weather was not all it might be, and he in consequence felt anything but well. One mate after another would be despatched with the strictest orders from the Captain to search for the cheerless chessite; but after a time the Captain's patience would be exhausted, his strident voice could be heard calling upon the caricaturist to come forth and show himself, and eventually he might be seen en route to his cabin with the box of chessmen under ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... day was no more than an easy space for the fleet Pegasus to pass over. Bellerophon was delighted with this kind of life, and would have liked nothing better than to live always in the same way, aloft in the clear atmosphere; for it was always sunny weather up there, however cheerless and rainy it might be in the lower region. But he could not forget the horrible Chimera which he had promised King Iobates to slay. So at last, when he had become well accustomed to feats of horsemanship in the air, and could manage ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... company to Virginia; and in the subsequent year, they were followed by sixty of the same description. They were received by the young planters as a blessing which substituted domestic happiness for the cheerless gloom of solitude; and the face of the country was essentially changed.[34] The prospect of becoming parents was accompanied with the anxieties for the welfare of their children; and the education of youth ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... England. Notwithstanding this change in him the Colonel insisted that he was perfectly happy and contented, but the truth was, his heart was aching with the knowledge that Clive had occupations, ideas, associates, in which the elder could take no interest. Sitting in his blank, cheerless bedroom, Newcome could hear the lad and his friends making merry and breaking out in roars of laughter from time to time. The Colonel longed to share in the merriment, but he knew that the party would ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... It was a drizzling, cheerless afternoon towards the end of summer that a hack drew up at the door of the Nutter House. The Captain and Miss Abigail hastened into the hall on hearing the carriage stop. In a moment more Miss Nelly Glentworth was seated in our sitting-room undergoing ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... held in store for him. He was fitted for no calling. Ever since his aunt had adopted him in far-away Scotland, where he was born of obscure parentage in 1833, he had led a life of complete dependence, not altogether cheerless but deadening to initiative and handicapping him terribly for the task of making his way in the world. His health was broken, his pockets were empty, he was without friends. Cast upon his own resources under such conditions, it seemed but too probable that ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... looked cold and cheerless. It was lighted by a single lamp in the middle of the table. They took their seats at opposite sides. The statesman's thin hair shone on his head like streaks of silver. John exercised a strong physical influence upon him, and all through the dinner ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... by a sunny window, and a father's chair by the wide, cheerful chimney-piece, and a place for the children to play, with plenty of room to get about. Apples and nuts always taste so good in such a place! Instead, we have a stuffy little kitchen and a cheerless dining-room, that no one wants to sit in, and every member of the family goes to his or her room, and sociability is at an end. Then we must go to theatres, lectures, and concerts, just to catch a glimpse of the members of ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... village, with guns booming in the distance and the nearer sound of water running through tall reeds and over green stones and between great mossy trees. Indeed, my life would now be, comparatively speaking, a cheerless desert, because I should never have met the most beautiful—Well, all clouds have silver linings; some have golden ones with rainbow edges. No; I am not sorry I stopped at the St. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... often would indulge in a morbid sentimental humor, dreaming over some "rare old poet" or blessed romance, to the exceeding great detriment of my household affairs, making my poor father sigh over a tough, badly cooked stake, and cheerless, dusty house; but these moods, to my credit be it told, were of rare occurrence; and I say now the best school for a dreaming, enthusiastic girl, who sighs for the realization of her fancy visions, is to place her in charge of some active duty—to make her feel it is exacted from ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... chairs, tables and couch, of the little flat had been all that was necessary to make it habitable and pleasant. A brisk fire burned on the wide hearth, of itself a furnishing without which many a sumptuous room may seem cheerless and in-hospitable. The walls were covered with a quaint old paper of white, with gold stripes about which green ivy leaves wound conventionally. This might have given the room a cold aspect, but Sally had hung curtains of Turkey-red print at the windows, and had covered the couch ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... their side seemed cheerless, what of the land on the left bank? A swamp stretching endlessly on either hand, and back from the icy flood as far as eye could see, broken only by sloughs and an occasional ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... caught him. They were in the corridor again—cold, cheerless, full of December murk and shadows—and the secretary was leaning against the clergyman's shoulder breathless and trembling as though he ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... getting her off. He then turned to where the Admiral's ship lay aground, and found that, to all appearance, she was in even a worse plight, as the rocks to leeward of her were above the water, and she was much more exposed, should bad weather come on. Never, perhaps, was there a scene more cheerless and appalling: a dark wintry sky—a sky loaded with heavy clouds—the wind cold and piercing—the whole line of the coast one mass of barren rocks, without the slightest appearance of vegetation; the inland part of the country presented an equally sombre appearance, and the higher points were capped ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... laid a red-hot iron on her palm, it would scarcely have been more scorching than the touch of his gold, and only the vision of a wan and woeful face in that far off cheerless attic room, restrained her impulse to throw it ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... bungalow episode is pretty cheerless for the heroine. She accepts an apparently harmless invitation to spend a week-end with friends in the country. When she arrives at the station there is no one to meet her. After a course of desert islands this ought to arouse her suspicions, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... and cheerless is the morn Unaccompanied by thee: Joyless is the day's return Till thy mercy's beams I see: Till thou inward light impart, Glad my eyes and warm ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... before dawn sounds to a landsman! The hated early call; the hasty breakfast with coffee-cup in one hand and time-table in the other; the dismal drive through dull, sleeping streets; the cheerless station; the gloomy train-shed with its lines of coaches wrapped in acrid ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... me down gently, Honor," he said, with a rather cheerless smile. "And you may as well save yourself the trouble. Only—this is where you must not misunderstand me, please,—no shadow of blame attaches to Ladybird if she isn't happy. I had no right to bring her up to this part of the world, knowing it as I did; and I've no right ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... and bonfires fallen to cheerless, charred embers and ashes gone gray; warm sunlight, and eyes grown heavy with the weariness of surfeited pleasure. Bullock carts creaked again, their squealing growing gradually fainter as the fat-jowled senoras lurched home to the monotony of life, while the senoritas drowsed and dreamed, ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... sink, that her crew, only six in number, had barely time to save themselves. They escaped to the jolly boat, saving nothing but their lives. They took with them neither water nor provisions; and for six days, hopeless of succor, they lay tossing to and fro, upon the bald and cheerless ocean. A dog, which swam to them from the sinking vessel, was sacrificed to their hunger. His raw flesh was their only food, his blood their only drink, during this distressing period. Two of their number perished miserably.* The survivors, on the ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... they drove up to the prison gate; and a mist beginning to gather above North Hessary, as at this time of year it often does after a clear morning. My grandfather, looking out from under the tilt of the cart, felt as he'd never felt before what a cheerless place it must seem to a new-comer, and his heart melted a little bit further towards the lad he was ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... pass, joy is out of fashion, Honest fun that fooled a dog or knew a friendly gate, Now the craft are vagabonds, sick with modern passion, Riding up and down the shore, on an aching freight; Sullen are the battered looks, cheerless talk or tipsy, Sickly in the smoky air, starving in the day, Pining for a city's noise at Kingston or Po'keepsie, Eager more for Gotham and a great ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... formless, sad, I floated through dark space,—a conscious blank! No breath of air my spirit moved; I sank I knew not where, till motionless I ceased At last to move, and yet I could not rest, Around me spread the Limitless, and Vast. My cheerless, conscious spirit,—fixed and fast In some lone spot in space was moveless, stark! An atom chained by forces stern and dark, With naught around me. Comfortless I lived In my dread loneliness! Oh, how I grieved! And thus, man's fate ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... He observed with sickening distinctness that the night had begun to fall, the river's silver ribbon had become a black snake, and that the mountain range beyond loomed chill and dark and cheerless. "I guess I ought to be getting into my things," he said, moving ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... factories for the production of sugar and oil, and warehouses for the importation of European fabrics. They found a ready market for their wares, and an aspect of thrift and comfort began to enliven the once neglected and cheerless land. ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... slipped one arm about her waist beneath it; but she was conscious that she rather suffered this than derived any satisfaction from it. She strove to assure herself that she was jaded with the journey, which was, in fact, the case, and that the lowering sky, and the cheerless waste they were crossing, had occasioned the dejection she felt, which was also possible. There was not a tree upon the vast sweep of bleached grass which ran all round her to the horizon. It was inexpressibly lonely, a lifeless desolation, with only the ploughed-up ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... some suspicious den. Flashing through the shadow of the police lamp, in "Cow Bay," a forlorn female is seen, a bottle held tightly under her shawl. Sailing as it were into the bottomless pit of the house of the Nine Nations, then suddenly returning with the drug, seeking the cheerless garret of her dissolute partner, and there striving to blunt her feelings ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Joan's brother's room—a cheerless place of hewn stone. What kind of a man could he have been? What were his reflections as he went about his farm-work and thought of his sister at the head of armies? Was he merely a lout or something worse—the prototype of our Conscientious ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... way, his apathy began to fail and his nervous excitement returned. He began to realize everything, this hideous end to his failure of a life which was so rapidly approaching. He realized that he was walking alone to his deserted home, cold and cheerless, dark and silent. It was already dusk, the days were short and the sky heavily clouded. The raw wind from the northeast smote him hard in the face like a diffused flail of wrath. He thought of his wife and children and sister speeding along to their old home ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... will never become too dry for the health of the vine. It is a sad spectacle to see the hopes of a whole summer frustrated by one cold night; to see the vines which promised an abundant crop but the day before, browned and wilted beyond all hopes of recovery, and the cheerless prospect before you, that it may occur every spring; or to see the finest crop of grapes, when just ripening, scorched and wilted by just one night's frost, fit for nothing but vinegar. Therefore, look well to this, when you choose the site of your vineyard, and rather pay five ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... himself, and gave up the distant voyages, confining himself to the long-shore fishing, and disposing of his oysters, crayfish and prawns as best he could in the more remote villages. Meanwhile, old Aimee, getting older and more feeble, would sit knitting in the cottage by a cheerless hearth, and as the supply of potatoes, chestnuts and black bread grew scantier and scantier, would furtively watch Antoine, with anxious, awe-struck glances, and then would sometimes cross herself, and wipe ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... suggest the full and passionate life which is the theme and the background of the play. Nor is this strange. A Midsummer Night's Dream is plainly beyond the powers of our theatre. Individual scenes were well done, but the whole was a cheerless ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... poor creatures have a respite, and may clothe ourselves in white garments; loose, soft, and in some degree shapely; but in the winter—the sombre winter, the depressing winter, the cheerless winter, when white clothes and bright colors are especially needed to brighten our spirits and lift them up—we all conform to the prevailing insanity, and go about in dreary black, each man doing it because the others ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... their commander. They rose together in rebellion: deprived him of his authority, and took the control of the ship into their own hands. They then placed their captain in an open boat, and throwing in to him a few articles of provision, they turned him adrift upon that wide and cheerless ocean, and he never was heard of more. Appointing one of their number as commander, they turned the ship in a different direction, and regulated all their movements by their own pleasure. After this revolt, things went on pretty ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... simple wants. Robert was right in calling him a miser, but he had not always deserved the name. The time was when he had been happily married to a good wife, and was blessed with two young children. But they were all taken from him in one week by an epidemic, and his life was made solitary and cheerless. This bereavement completely revolutionized his life. Up to this time he had been a good and respected citizen, with an interest in public affairs. Now be became morose and misanthropic, and his heart, ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... or engineer who stood there at bay those three invincible days, Bolsheozerki means deep snow, bitter cold, cheerless tents, whiz-bangs, high explosive, shrap, rat-tat-tat interminable, roar and crash, and zipp and pop of explosive bullet, with catch-as-catch-can at eats, arms lugged off with cases of ammunition, constant tension, that all ended up with luck to ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... with broken hearts. But even of that poor, melancholy, cheerless home they were denied the consolation. There was a month's rent overdue for their little home, and when Nello had paid the last sad service to the dead he had not a coin left. He went and begged grace of the owner of the hut, a cobbler who ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... there the light was of the dim and melancholy hue that instinctively gives the impression of the sick-chamber. Was Clotilde still there, feebly counting the hours of pain, while all within her hearing was festivity? The answers which I had received to my daily enquiries were cheerless. "She had not quitted the apartment where she had been first conveyed."—"The duchess insisted on her not being removed."—"Madame was inconsolable, but the doctor had hopes." Those, and other commonplaces ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Alppain only on a part. The broad crescent that reflected Branchspell's rays alone was white and brilliant; but the part that was illuminated by both suns shone with a greenish radiance that had almost solar power, and yet was cold and cheerless. On gazing at that combined light, he felt the same sense of disintegration that the afterglow of Alppain had always caused in him; but now the feeling was not physical, but merely aesthetic. The moon did not appear romantic to ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... sorrow than laughter; For a cheerless face makes a blithesome heart. 4. The heart of the wise is in the mourning-house; The heart of fools in the house ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... perseverance than did Ellen's eyes, till the lamplighter gradually disappeared from view, and the last lamp she could see was lit; and not till then did it occur to her that there was such a place as indoors. She took her face from the window. The room was dark and cheerless, and Ellen felt stiff and chilly. However, she made her way to the fire, and having found the poker, she applied it gently to the Liverpool coal with such good effect, that a bright ruddy blaze sprang up, and lighted the whole ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the town is a small gathering of sod-covered huts, where the fishermen and their families live like rabbits in a burrow. That these poor people are not all devoured by snails or crippled with rheumatism is a marvel to any stranger who takes a peep into their filthy and cheerless little cabins. The oozy slime of fish and smoke mingles with the green mould of the rocks; barnacles cover the walls, and puddles make a soft carpeting for the floors. The earth is overhead, and their heads are under the earth, and the light of day has no light ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the vicious to ensnare her, she resolutely avoided. In one of her tours, Providence favored her with a friend who, pity- ing her cheerless lot, kindly provided her with a valuable recipe, from which she might herself manufacture a useful article for her maintenance. This proved a more agreeable, and an easier way ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... attitude was what his own had been before the iron of fact had entered into his flesh and spirit. Yet somehow he had hoped that his Master's large and keen perception of human things, his judicial mind, would have lifted him above the prejudices of Reason. He sat there cheerless, his college cap between his knees; and was seeking the moment to say good-bye when the Master suddenly sat down beside him. To any one looking in at the window, the two seated side by side on the hard sofa would ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... functionaries of Nant had not existed in the same world with her. And in that tedious and constrained time of formalities he had learned much about her, but first of all, thanks to the uncompromising light of day that filled the cheerless room, that moonlight had not enhanced but rather tempered the charms of person which had the night before so ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... cover their eyes to regain their sight. A shrill wind pierced the slight covering of the litter, and blowing it aside, discovered the mist; or the gleaming of some wandering water, as it glided away over the cheerless waste. ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... sent back to life to find Him, and sent back to life to do honor to His death. Not by ointments and spices, however precious, nor at the rock-hewn tomb, could they best remember their Lord; but out in the world, which that morning had seemed so cold and cheerless, and in their lives, which then had ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... over the cosy dressing room which Anne occupied. As is the case in most of the recently built theatres, the star's dressing room had been comfortably furnished and was in direct comparison to the cheerless, barn-like rooms that make life on the road ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... her petitions. This time she persuaded Frances D. Gage of Ohio, a temperance worker and popular author of children's stories, to join her. An easy extemporaneous speaker, Mrs. Gage was an attraction to offer audiences, who drove eight or more miles to hear her; and in the cheerless hotels at night and on the long cold sleigh rides from town to town, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... In "Daniel Deronda" the cheerless philosophy of George Eliot is fully brought out. Mordecai, in his obscure and humble life, is a good representative of a patient sufferer, but "in his views and aspirations is a sort of Jewish Mazzini." The hero of the story is Mordecai's disciple, who has discovered his Hebrew ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... he got some coco-nuts, which were first-rate. With coco-nuts and an occasional ray, he ekes out an existence, hungry, cheerless, without light, without tobacco. A copy of "Barnaby Rudge" and a few old papers represent his reading matter. He is glad ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... to take better care of his health. On the 26th of the same month Benvenuto della Volpaia wrote, repeating what the Pope had written in his brief, and adding that his Holiness desired him to select some workshop more convenient for his health than the cold and cheerless sacristy. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... one of the two or three men who were watching the athletes, and whispered his message in the other's ear. Then he went back with Father Anthony. "You have seen him," he repeated, when they sat once more in the cheerless room. "Now ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... more than sixteen, sitting on a stool by the open window, looking out listlessly on the stretch of dreary fenland, shrouded in the cold and heavy mist. It was a day on which the scenery of the fen country looked desolate, cheerless, and chill. These green meadows and flat stretches have need of the sunshine to warm them always. Sitting there in the soft grey light, Gladys Graham looked more of a woman than a child, though her gown did not reach her ankles, and her hair hung in a thick golden plait down her back. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite! Friend and associate of this clay, To what unknown region borne, Wilt thou now wing thy distant flight? No more with wonted humour gay, But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn. ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... sickness to my heart. For me there was no more freedom, no more of hilarity, of thoughtlessness, or of youth. Was this the life upon which I had entered with such warm and sanguine expectation? Were my days to be wasted in this cheerless gloom; a galley-slave in the hands of the system of nature, whom death only, the death of myself or ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... to the cold, perished by hundreds. As the Spaniards huddled round their wretched bivouacs, with such scanty fuel as they could glean, and almost without food, they waited in gloomy silence the approach of morning. Yet the morning light, which gleamed coldly on the cheerless waste, brought no joy to them. It only revealed more clearly the extent of their wretchedness. Still struggling on through the winding Puertos Nevados, or Snowy Passes, their track was dismally marked by ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... own command and Willich's division were still three miles from Strawberry Plains, though Sheridan's division and part of the wagon train had reached that place and crossed the Holston. We halted the men here and went into bivouac for the night. It had been a wretchedly cheerless and uncomfortable march, but the increasing cold and flying snow made the camp scarcely less inclement. The officers were, as was frequently the case, worse off than the men, for they could not carry their rations in haversacks, and the separation ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... put out both her hands to him, with an eagerness that entirely reassured him even before she added: "I cannot tell you how glad, how restful, how content I am since your coming to-night. I was so lonely and sorrowful, the future looked so dark and cheerless because I feared I had lost you; ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... She and Alfieri were both growing elderly, and the hearth by which they were seated, alone, childless, with nothing but the ghost of their former passion, the ghost of their former ideal, to keep them company, was on the whole very bleak and cheerless. Alfieri, working off his over-excitement in a system of tremendous self-education, sitting for the greater part of the day poring over Latin and Greek and Hebrew grammars, and exercises and annotated editions, till he was ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... motionless as death. The strange confused and animated murmurs, which seemed born of, and to exist by the sun, that respiration of nature which is unceasingly heard amid all other sounds, could not be heard now, and never had the silence been so profound. The king had noticed the cheerless aspect of the heavens as he approached the window immediately after rising. But as all the necessary directions had been given respecting the promenade, and every preparation had been made accordingly, and as, which was far more imperious than everything else, Louis relied upon this ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... argument deserves always to be treated with respect. It is the oldest and clearest of all proofs, and best adapted to convince the reason of the mass of mankind. It animates us in our study of nature. And it were not only a cheerless, but an altogether vain task to attempt to detract from the persuasive authority of this proof. There is nought to urge against its rationality and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... are not, however, at all times to be relied upon; so we did our best to thrust aside the unpleasant anticipations which were beginning to crowd upon us, and recollecting that there was no other alternative than either to lodge here, or pass the night hungry and cheerless in the open air, we put a bold face ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... they are the Barrens, the bad lands of the Arctic, the deserts of the Circle, the bleak and bitter home of the musk-ox and the lean plains wolf. So Avery Van Brunt found them, treeless and cheerless, sparsely clothed with moss and lichens, and altogether uninviting. At least so he found them till he penetrated to the white blank spaces on the map, and came upon undreamed-of rich spruce forests and unrecorded Eskimo tribes. It had ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... quickly through the streets, shrouded in the dark winter-afternoon atmosphere heavy with coal-smoke, the houses on each side dripping with the fog-drops and looking dirty and cheerless with the black streaks running from the corners of each window, like tears down the face of some chimney-sweep or coal-boy, till, reaching the foot of Ludlow Street, we stood ankle-deep in mud, waiting for the little steamer, which still ploughed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... which he had set so much store by silence and good behaviour. Grief drove him to drink, and when nothing was left, even for that purpose, he retired—ill, helpless, and starving—into a broken-down, cheerless hovel. But certain of his former pupils—the same clever, witty lads whom he had once been wont to accuse of impertinence and evil conduct generally—heard of his pitiable plight, and collected for ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... mother died, five years ago. She had kept house for her brother-in-law, and had brought some brightness into his life; but since her death, his one servant had had matters in her own hands, and the house grew more lonely and cheerless each year. Mr. Denner's office was in his garden, and was of brick, like his house, but nearer the road, and without the softening touch of ivy; it was damp and mildewed, and one felt instinctively ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... and sleet, freezing as they fell, rattled harshly upon the bark roof over our heads; and the whole aspect of nature, as I caught a momentary glimpse of it when I went out to gather our evening's supply of fire-wood, was cheerless and desolate in the extreme. Our party consisted of three (or I should say four, for the Elam Storm whose name has so often been mentioned was to have shown up two days before)—Uncle Ezra Norton, who was a sheep-herder in a small way during the summer, and an untiring hunter ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... rain was falling, and the terminus looked bleak and cheerless as the train slowed down the long platform. Mason, still haggard, roused herself to step to the platform and look around as if expecting to see a familiar face, and in the midst of collecting her own impedimenta ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... rain coming down in a steady, wet, monotonous fashion. The half-dozen little dark log or frame-houses, with their double windows and turf roofs, standing about at all sorts of angles to the road, as if they had rolled down the mountain like the great bowlders beyond them, looked dark and cheerless. I was weak enough to wish for a second that I had waited a few days for the rainy spell to be over, but two little bareheaded children, coming down the road laughing and chattering, recalled me to myself. They had no wrapping whatever, and nothing on their heads but their soft flaxen hair, ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... a cheerless-looking house, painted a garish yellow, having staring windows, and devoid of a front porch, or slightest attempt at shade to render its uncomely front less unattractive. Hampton could scarcely refrain from forming a mental picture of the woman who would most naturally preside within so ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... This she had from her father, a man of quips and jokes on the surface of his seriousness. As she grew older, it threatened a decline of intimacy between her and her cousin Olga, who, never naturally buoyant, was becoming so cheerless, so turbid of temper, that Irene found it difficult to talk with her for long together. Domestic miseries might greatly account for the girl's mood, but Irene had insight enough to perceive that this was not all. And she felt uncomfortably helpless. To jest seemed ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... of life—the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme. You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... saw him,—I say we, for like myself some half-dozen others were also there, expiating their follies by a life of cheerless ennui. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... who had not paid a visit in his native village since his wife died, came at last to his friend's home to pay what seemed likely to be a final one. They carried him up the stairs to the spare room, as dismal and cheerless as spare rooms in the country generally are, undressed him as tenderly as their rough hands would allow, robed him in one of Captain Jerry's nightshirts—the buttons that fastened it had been sewed on by the Captain himself, and were all sizes and colors—and laid him in the big ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... by Karna, king Duryodhana with cheerless heart, averted his face from his counsellors. Marking all this, Karna expanding his beautiful eyes, and vehemently gesticulating in anger, haughtily addressed Duryodhana and Dussasana and Suvala's son saying, 'Ye princes, ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... a fall Sunday, misty and with a fine rain falling; the mean street in which Ashton-Kirk's house stood—once the street of the city's aristocracy, but now crowded with the hordes of East Europe—looked sodden and cheerless. Bat Scanlon, as he mounted the wide stone steps and rang the bell, looked ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... delusion. The eyes that gazed back at him were alive—alive with the spirit of mockery; they smiled, laughed, jeered; and, as they did so, the knowledge of his surroundings was brought forcibly home to him. The room in which he was seated was situated at the end of a long, cheerless, stone passage in the western wing of the College. Away from all the other rooms of the building, it was absolutely isolated; and had long borne the reputation of being haunted by a dog, which was said to appear only ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... yoke of Rome—how bitter is human life—how cheerless is the mystery of the cross to those deluded and perishing souls! How gladly they would rush into the blazing piles with the Brahmin women, if they could hope to see the end of their unspeakable miseries through the momentary ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... himself in a hay-loft, where he was so happy at roughing it and being uncomfortable that he could scarcely close an eye. The amateur outcast lay dreamily watching the silver spears of moonlight thrust through the roof of the barn, and extracting such satisfaction from his cheerless surroundings as would have astonished a professional tramp. "Poverty and hardship are merely ideas after all," said Lynde to himself softly, as he drifted off in a doze. Ah, Master Lynde, playing at poverty and hardship is one thing; but if the reality is merely ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... succeeding the capture of the "Mellish" dawned gray and cheerless. Light flurries of snow swept across the waves, and by noon a heavy snowstorm, driven by a violent north-east gale, darkened the air, and lashed the waves into fury. Jones stood dauntless at his post on deck, encouraging the sailors by cheery words, and keeping the sturdy ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... dismissed Alfred somewhat abruptly, but with an invitation to call again after three clear days. Like most ardent suitors after their first interview with passionless law, he went away sadly chilled, and so home to his cheerless lodging, to count the hours till he could see Julia, and learn ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... their rich voices, fluent language, and Angelina's fine dark eyes. The house with its wide hall, spacious apartments, deep windows, and small panes of glass was severely destitute of all tasteful, womanly touches, and though neat and orderly, had a cheerless atmosphere. Neither was there one touch of the artistic in the arrangement of the ladies' hair and dresses. They were just then in the Graham dispensation, and the peculiar table arrangements, with no tray to mark the charmed circle ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... open to many; but to part with our well-garnished dwelling had now become inevitable. We retired, with one servant, to a remote house of meaner dimensions, and were sought no longer by those who had come in our wealth. I looked earnestly around me; the present was cheerless, the future dark and fearful. My parents were dead, my few relatives in distant countries, where they thought perhaps but little of my happiness. Burleigh I had never loved other than as a father and protector; but he had been ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... a damp, cheerless morning when they got to Northfleet again. It had been raining heavily in the night, and black clouds still hung low over the river. They were not to load until the next day, and after dinner Henry and the mate exchanged a sympathetic ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... the room; And lo! it was cheerless and bare; Empty and drear as a hopeless tomb,— And the lady was not there; Yet the fire and the lamp drove out the gloom, As ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... the excitement and fatigue of Catherine's journey to N—— had considerably accelerated the progress of disease. And when she reached home, and looked round the cheerless rooms all solitary, all hushed—Sidney gone, gone from her for ever, she felt, indeed, as if the last reed on which she had leaned was broken, and her business upon earth was done. Catherine was not condemned to absolute poverty—the ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in winter, incapable of cultivation, excepting so far as water can be conveyed by kanats, which is, of course, only a short distance. The fox, the jackal, the antelope, and the wild ass possess this sterile and desolate tract, where "all is dry and cheerless," ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... terrier, toddling at her side, in her hand a stout ash-stick—regardless of the muddy roads or the wet weather. It was grey, damp, and dismal, one of those days which in the Highlands are often so very cheerless and dispiriting. Yet on, and still on, she went, her mind full of the events of the previous night; full, also, of the dread secret which prevented her from exposing her father's false friend. In order to save her father, ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... evening his servants came; Lavretsky did not care to sleep in his aunt's bed; he directed them put him up a bed in the dining-room. After extinguishing his candle he stared for a long time about him and feel into cheerless reflection; he experienced that feeling which every man knows whose lot it is to pass the night in a place long uninhabited; it seemed to him that the darkness surrounding him on all sides could not be accustomed to the new inhabitant, the very walls of the house seemed amazed. ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... consolation and reward enough for me to know that I have the fervent prayers, the sympathy and loving blessings of Ireland's truly noble and generous people, and far easier, more soothing and more comforting to me will it be to go back to my cheerless cell, than it would be to live in slavish ease and luxury—a witness to the cruel sufferings and terrible miseries of this down-trodden people. Condemn me, then, my lord—condemn me to a felon's doom. To-night ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... where Urban entertained S. Catherine, where Rienzi came, a prisoner, to be stared at. Pass by the Glaciere with a shudder, for it has still the reek of blood about it; and do not long delay in the cheerless dungeon of Rienzi. Time and regimental whitewash have swept these lurking-places of old crime very bare; but the parable of the seven devils is true in more senses than one, and the ghosts that return to haunt a deodorised, disinfected, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... could have been more cheerless and uninviting. The Mouche, under all sail, was bowling on ahead, (I suspected that the French crew would have no little difficulty in keeping her afloat) while the lugger was acting the part of a whipper-in. I cast my eyes round the horizon. Away ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... suspicious den. Flashing through the shadow of the police lamp, in "Cow Bay," a forlorn female is seen, a bottle held tightly under her shawl. Sailing as it were into the bottomless pit of the house of the Nine Nations, then suddenly returning with the drug, seeking the cheerless garret of her dissolute partner, and there striving to blunt her feelings ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... proved to be a law record or a Supreme Court decision. There was the bust of a late distinguished jurist, which apparently had never been dusted since he himself became dust, and had already grown a perceptibly dusty moustache on his severely-judicial upper lip. It was a cheerless place in the sunshine of day; at night, when it ought, by every suggestion of its dusty past, to have been left to the vengeful ghosts, the greater part of whose hopes and passions were recorded and gathered there; when ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... weak and feverish, Crittenden climbed into the dusty train and was whirled through the dusty town, out through dry marshes and dusty woods and dusty, cheerless, dead-flowered fields, but with an exhilaration that made his temple throb like ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... of the English Channel look more cheerless than they appeared to one unhappy midshipman of H.M.S. Sirius next morning, as the frigate beat down channel in the teeth of a strong westerly breeze; never before had life seemed to him a thing purposeless and void of hope. "To have and to hold from this day forward, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... the accident I had a chill which was followed by a fever and there was much pain and swelling in the knee that was hit. A ranch house, if it happens to be a "stag camp" as ours was, is a cheerless place in which to be sick, but everything considered, I was fortunate in that it was not worse. By the liberal use of hot water and such other simples as the place afforded I was soon better; but not until ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... single lamp, swinging to and fro from the beam, so dim that one can scarcely see, much less read by it;—the water dropping from the beams and carlines, and running down the sides; and the forecastle so wet, and dark, and cheerless, and so lumbered up with chests and wet clothes, that sitting up is worse than lying in the berth! These are some of the evils. Fortunately, I needed no help from any one, and no medicine; and if I had needed help, I don't know where I should have found it. Sailors are willing enough; ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... future looked black and cheerless to Barney Custer as he trudged along the rocky, moonlit way. The only bright spot was the realization that for a while at least he might be serving the one woman in ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... had dispelled some of the cheerless gloom round about them. It was still cold up in that upper strata of rarefied air; but their fur-lined garments kept them from suffering. Besides this, they were young and vigorous, and their blood was warm, and they were excited with their mission and able to ignore ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... very fairly. And the shape of the cloth when spread out, is shown in the diagram. On the whole, it is the best form of close-side tent I have found. It admits of a bright fire in front, without which a forest camp is just no camp at all to me. I have suffered enough in close, dark, cheerless, damp tents. ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... reached the mountain-top, we found it enveloped in fog and mist, and the scene was cold and cheerless. We looked down through a screen of foliage into a deep valley that seemed almost beneath us, and which is supposed to have been an ancient crater. There, on the brink, the walkers had a rude cabin, where we ate our lunch beside a ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... there, and a new scholar, but Father Olever did not come for us until four o'clock. He was a small, nervous gentleman, and lamps were already lighted in the smoky city when we started to drive twelve miles through spring mud, on a cloudy, cheerless afternoon. We knew he had no confidence in his power to manage those horses, though we also knew he would do his best to save us from harm; but as darkness closed around us, I think we felt like babes in the woods, ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... away from the little, red depot at Dry Lake and curled out of sight around a hill. The only arrival looked expectantly into the cheerless waiting room, gazed after the train, which seemed the last link between her and civilization, and walked to the edge of the platform with a distinct frown upon the bit of forehead visible under her ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... It was blackened and cheerless acres of bare and fallen trees that their swollen eyes gazed upon on the way back to camp. Thousands of feet of virgin timber had been burned. Tom Gray, whose love of the forest was almost a passion with him, gazed on the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... midst of a rainy fog. The endless black streets stretched before him in the dreary December morning like so many roads into the nether regions; the gas-lamps scattered an unseasonable light through the rain and fog; it was the quintessence of murky, cheerless winter. ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had already resumed her work. "Would that my Francis could open his arms to receive me, that I might rest by his side from the cares of life! Would that I were with him, who was my lover from earliest childhood; for cold and cheerless will be the life that is no longer lit up ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... exclaimed Widow Tobin, "them pore creatur's looks as cheerless as little birch-trees in snow-time. I hope they dresses 'em warmer this time o' year. Now, there! look at that one jumpin' through the little hoop, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... being a dead world. Branchspell shone on the whole of it, but Alppain only on a part. The broad crescent that reflected Branchspell's rays alone was white and brilliant; but the part that was illuminated by both suns shone with a greenish radiance that had almost solar power, and yet was cold and cheerless. On gazing at that combined light, he felt the same sense of disintegration that the afterglow of Alppain had always caused in him; but now the feeling was not physical, but merely aesthetic. The moon did not appear romantic to him, but disturbing ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... his Majesty's armed trawlers were plunging through the sea on their lonely beat in the Western Ocean. The Hebrides lay far to the southward, and less than two days' steam ahead lay the Arctic Circle. These cheerless surroundings, however, found no echo in the hearts of the watch below on the leading ship of the unit, who were lounging on the settees in the oil-smelling fo'c'sle discussing their prospects of long leave, ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... gloomy and desolate as could well be imagined. A rolling prairie, unvaried by forest or stream—hillock rising after hillock, at every ascent of which we vainly hoped to see a distant fringe of "timber." But the same cheerless, unbounded prospect everywhere met the eye, diversified only here and there by the oblong openings, like gigantic graves, which marked an unsuccessful search for indications of ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... exhausting character. Day and night, for month after month, the incessant fire of the Federal forces had continued, and every engine of human destruction had been put in play to wear away their strength. They fought all through the cheerless days of winter, and, when they lay down in the cold trenches at night, the shell of the Federal mortars rained down upon them, bursting, and mortally wounding them. All day long the fire of muskets and cannon—then, from sunset to dawn, the ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... fallen from the Disan's face during the struggle, and empty, frigid eyes stared into Brion's. No flicker of emotion crossed the harsh planes of the other man's face. A great puckered white scar covered one cheek and pulled up a corner of the mouth in a cheerless grimace. It was false; there was still no expression here, even when the pain must be growing ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... contrary, was growing, minute by minute, more heavy and more sad. Finally, thinking unhappily of the innumerable joyous feasts now beginning throughout the city—for late mass would be ended everywhere by now—he sat down alone to the cheerless meal which, poor though it was, but for Rubinstein he would not have had ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... John Stuart Mill's boyhood will wonder that Mill was a skeptic. And nobody who has read the story of Thomas Huxley's boyhood will wonder at his becoming an agnostic. As Edward Clodd, his biographer, says, 'his boyhood was a cheerless time. Reversing Matthew ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... garden walk in vain We seek for Flora's lovely train; When the sweet hawthorn bower is bare, And bleak and cheerless is the air; When all seems desolate around, Christmas advances ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... about me, I was busy at work sketching out my plans. After a time I grew nervous. I did not smoke then, and so I had nothing to comfort me but my thoughts; and, in spite of my efforts to make them otherwise, they were cheerless enough. The forest grew to my door. In the fiercer blasts I could hear the lashing of the pine-trees over my head, and now and then an arm of one of the moaning trees would reach down and sweep across my cabin roof with a sound that made me shudder and fear. This wilderness fear is an oppressive ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... seeks to close her weary eyes, Those eyes still swim incessantly in tears— Hope in her cheerless bosom fading dies, Distracted by a thousand cruel fears, While banish'd from his love forever ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... for I carry my own antidotes within myself, which are resolution and patience. Apprehension, which is particularly feared in this disease, does not much trouble me; and, if being alone, I should have been taken, it had been a less cheerless and more remote departure; 'tis a kind of death that I do not think of the worst sort; 'tis commonly short, stupid, without pain, and consoled by the public condition; without ceremony, without mourning, without a crowd. But as to the people ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the fact that a middle-aged man so often chooses a young girl in preference to those of his own generation, for she brings him that which he has not; she reminds him of what he used to have; she is to him like the freshness of spring, the warmth of summer, in his cheerless autumn days. Sometimes these marriages are not unhappy—far from it; and Robert Roy might ere long make such a marriage. Despite poor David's jealous contempt, he was neither old nor ugly, and then he ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... natural, unaffected, the citizen heroes. We know what happy firesides they left for the cheerless camp. We know with what pacific habits they dared the perils of the field. There is no mystery, no romance, no madness, under the name of chivalry about them. It is all resolute, manly resistance for conscience and liberty's sake not merely of an overwhelming power, but of all the force ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... of the receipt of this missive that the Captain trusted himself to the winds and waves in the cheerless December weather. He was well pleased to find that M. Fleurus had made discoveries so important; but he had no idea of letting that astute practitioner absorb all the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... then. I should make a miserable sick nurse. I will ask young Fenton, here, if it is reasonable to expect me to bury myself in such a cheerless place when it ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... were sent to the hall to bring their wraps, and then beginning with the smallest, they were all put to bed on the benches. These benches, fortunately, had backs, and by putting two of them face to face they made a bed, which, if hard and cheerless, would certainly keep them ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... called for swimming), but they crossed in fine style, Ladrone leading, his neck curving, his nostrils wide-blown. We were forced to camp in the mud of the river bank, and the gray clouds flying overhead made the land exceedingly dismal. The night closed in wet and cheerless. ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... disappointment, no desolation, no despair. The path before him was a very humble one, indeed, but he resolved to tread it royally. Because the high places and the beautiful things of earth were not for him was no reason why he should sit and mourn his fate in cheerless inactivity. He determined to be up and doing, with the light and energy that he had, looking constantly ahead for more. He knew that in America there is always something better for the very humblest toiler to anticipate, and that, with courage, hope, ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... humble fortune and spotless character, were transported by the company to Virginia; and in the subsequent year, they were followed by sixty of the same description. They were received by the young planters as a blessing which substituted domestic happiness for the cheerless gloom of solitude; and the face of the country was essentially changed.[34] The prospect of becoming parents was accompanied with the anxieties for the welfare of their children; and the education of youth soon became an object of attention. The necessity of seminaries of learning was felt, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... follows: "I do not say that there is no God: I simply say I do not know. I do not say that there is no life beyond the grave: I simply say I do not know!" What pleasure could any man find in taking from a human, heart a living faith and putting in the place of it the cold and cheerless doctrine "I do not know"? Many who call themselves agnostics are really atheists; it is easier to profess ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... Worcestershire, but here in the Forest it is a splendid feature, growing to a great size and height. In winter its bright shining leaves reflecting the sunlight enliven the woods, so that we never get the bare and cheerless look of places where the elm and the whitethorn hedge dominate the landscape. In spring its small white blossoms are thickly distributed, and at Christmas its scarlet berries are ever welcome. Its prickles protect it from browsing cattle ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... could spend the night. Our men were tired and drenched, some of them cross; fires were out of the question until fuel could be cut and brought from the edge of a swamp a mile from camp. When brought, the green wood smoked so badly that suppers were late and rather cheerless; still there was spirit enough left in those stalwart hearts to start some mirth-provoking ditty, or indulge in good-natured raillery over the joys and comforts ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up, and all the cottage warm; Which done, she rose, and from her form 10 Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soiled gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall, And, last, she sat down by my side And called me. When no voice replied, She ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... the crossings deep with slush, the pavements damp, and the chill of her wet soles made her shiver, adding the last touch to her forlornness and the depression which Bowers's desertion had induced. She dreaded returning to her cheerless room, but she could not walk the streets indefinitely, so she bought a magazine to read until it was time to dine alone in some one of the neighborhood's cheap restaurants. The night clerk was already on duty and through the fly-specked ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... all felt the influence of her pure, stainless, unselfish life, they came to esteem her as almost a saint, and no house was complete which had not in it some likeness of the sad, but inexpressibly sweet face which had a smile for every one, and which was oftenest seen in the cheerless houses where hunger and sickness were. There Lucy Grey was a ministering angel, and the good she did could never be told in words, but was known and felt by those who never breathed a prayer which did not have in it a thought of her and ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... strong, living, and lovable human beings are the only two, or almost the only two, people in the story who do not run after Little Nell. They have something better to do than to go on that shadowy chase after that cheerless phantom. They have to build up between them a true romance; perhaps the one true romance in the whole of Dickens. Dick Swiveller really has all the half-heroic characteristics which make a man respected by a woman and which are the male contribution ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... assured the world he had obtained the Rowley MSS.; and from which MSS. were carried away and destroyed, but the old chests still remain. There are seven in all, and they bear traces of great antiquity. Many have been strongly bound with iron, but all are now in a state of decay. This lonely cheerless room, strewn with antique fragments and suggestive of the boy-poet's day-dreams, is certainly the most interesting relic in Bristol. Its comfortless neglect is a true epitome of the life of him who first shaped his course ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... remember Mr Venus, by the waning moon, When stars, it will occur to you before I mention it, proclaim night's cheerless noon, On tower, fort, or tented ground, The sentry walks his ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... of Dedlow Marsh told unpleasantly on the birds, and that the season of migration was looked forward to with a feeling of relief and satisfaction by the full-grown, and of extravagant anticipation by the callow, brood. But if Dedlow Marsh was cheerless at the slack of the low tide, you should have seen it when the tide was strong and full. When the damp air blew chilly over the cold, glittering expanse, and came to the faces of those who looked seaward like another tide; when a steel-like glint marked the low hollows and the sinuous line of slough; ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... which she had been accustomed, and the few poorly furnished frontier dwellings she had entered since coming to the hinterlands of British Columbia. She had a vague impression that any dwelling occupied exclusively by a man must of necessity be dirty, disordered, and cheerless. But she had never seen a room such as the one she now found herself in. It conformed to none of her ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... she sat in her cheerless drawing-room, hating its ugly shabbiness, and penetrated with the damp chill of the house, there swept through her a vision of the Piazza del Duomo, as she had last seen it on a hot September evening. A blaze of light—delicious ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that the wind had blown down all the apples in the garden, and broken down an old plum tree. It was grey, murky, cheerless, dark enough for candles; everyone complained of the cold, and the rain lashed on the windows. After tea Nadya went into Sasha's room and without saying a word knelt down before an armchair in the corner and hid ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Casada, until near midnight, where, amid torrents of rain, and in the darkness of the night, we could find nothing but ploughed fields on which to repose our weary limbs, nor could we find a particle of fuel to illuminate the cheerless scene. ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... solemn requiem sung To the departed day, Upon whose bier The velvet pall of midnight lead been flung, And Nature mourned through one wide hemisphere Silence and darkness held their cheerless sway, Save in the haunts of riotous excess; And half the world in dreamy slumbers lay, Lost in the maze of sweet forgetfulness. When lo! upon the startled ear, There broke a sound so dread and drear,— As, like a sudden peal of thunder, Burst the bands of sleep asunder, And filled a thousand throbbing ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... late, which was a serious matter with military people, I learned. We willingly did this, for this soldier was a great story-teller, and made the time pass quickly. I met here a telegraph operator named Stanton, who took me to his boarding-house, the most cheerless I have ever been in. Nobody got enough to eat; the bedclothes were too short and too thin; it was 28 degrees below zero, and the wash-water was frozen solid. The board was cheap, being only ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... banquet, at which he himself was present. The Duke of Croy writes to me, to say he is treated as an honoured guest rather than as a prisoner, and here you disgrace us by shutting your prisoner in a cheerless cell, although he is wounded, and giving him food such as you might give to a common soldier. The Swedes will think that we are barbarians. You are released from your command, and will at once proceed to Moscow and report yourself there, when a post will be assigned ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... "friend" passed through the door, into the long, narrow "Opera House." It was a dirty, cheerless hole, in spite of the brilliance of many oil lamps, shining among the flimsy decorations. At the end of the tunnel-shaped room was a rude stage, festooned with gaudy, squalid hangings, beneath which a painted siren ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... long night spent in cheerless, unprofitable thoughts which prevented him from sleeping, and seemed to intensify the darkness and sultriness of the night, Laevsky felt listless and shattered. He felt no better for the ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... circles. I lost, I know, all count of time. I became aware of the dawn as something that had happened suddenly, as if light had succeeded darkness in a flash. It had been night; I looked about me, and it was day—a steely, cheerless day, like a December evening. And I found that I was very cold, very tired, ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... grows brittle from the snow in my dank and cheerless garden. A crust of bread gathers timid pheasants round me. The robins, I see, have made the coal-house their home. Waster Lunny's dog never barks without rousing my sluggish cat to a joyful response. It is Dutch courage with the birds and beasts of the ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... Inverness on the 9th, and thence he went to Tain, Dornoch, Wick, John o'Groat's, and to the island towns, Stromness, Kirkwall, and Lerwick. He was in Shetland on the 1st of December—altogether a bleak, cheerless journey, we may believe, even for so hardy a tramp as Borrow, and the tone of the following extract from one of his rough notebooks in my possession may perhaps be explained by the circumstance. Borrow is on the way to Loch Laggan and visits a desolate churchyard, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... pleasures rather sadly and sternly,—not like the light-hearted Florentines in song and laughter, or with the joyous abandon of the Neapolitans,—so there was no special manifestation on the part of the populace, and the day, cold, gloomy, and cheerless, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... him only his dressing-bag, so they were not detained at the Customs. His valet was following with the rest of his luggage, and as soon as she had had a few hours' sleep, he would take her to different shops. She clung on to his arm. Paris seemed very cold and cheerless, and she did not like the tall, haggard houses, nor the slattern waiter arranging chairs in front of an early cafe, nor the humble servant clattering down the pavement in wooden shoes. She saw these things with tired eyes, and she was dimly aware of a decrepit carriage ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... raining harder than it really is when you look at the weather through the window. Even in winter, though the landscape often seems cheerless and bare enough when you look at it from the fireside, still it is far better to go out, even if you have to brave the storm: when you are once out of doors the touch of earth and the breath of the fresh air gives ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... exactions, and all that is allowed them as so much taken from the family; and they seek in every way to get from them as much and to give them as little as possible. Their rooms are the neglected, ill-furnished, incommodious ones,—and the kitchen is the most cheerless and comfortless place in the house. Other families, more good-natured and liberal, provide their domestics with more suitable accommodations, and are more indulgent; but there is still a latent spirit of something like contempt for the position. That they treat their servants with so ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... pleasant in its season, with an oval patch of grass, some hollyhocks, a grape-vine trained over a pretty structure of lattice to form a sort of summer-house, and a martin-box, in a decidedly original church-pattern, mounted on a tall, white pole. Of course the scene was cheerless and unsightly now; lumpy brown patches of earth showed through the unequally melting snow, where the grass-plot should have been; a few naked and ugly sticks were all the promise of the hollyhocks' yellow glory; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... remarkable achievements which the future held in store for him. He was fitted for no calling. Ever since his aunt had adopted him in far-away Scotland, where he was born of obscure parentage in 1833, he had led a life of complete dependence, not altogether cheerless but deadening to initiative and handicapping him terribly for the task of making his way in the world. His health was broken, his pockets were empty, he was without friends. Cast upon his own resources under such conditions, it seemed but too probable ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut down on the illimitable, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... he looked over the dreary Northern field in those chill days of early March, he must have had a marvelous sensitiveness in order to perceive the generative heat and force in the depths beneath the cheerless surface and awaiting only the fullness of the near spring season to burst forth in sudden universal vigor. Yet such was his knowledge and such his faith concerning the people that we may fancy, if we will, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... it ceased altogether, how the walls were discolored, sometimes by cascades of damp, and sometimes by the outlines of picture-frames since removed, how the paper flapped loose at the corners, and a great flake of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. The room itself was a cheerless one to return to at this inauspicious hour. A flattened sofa would, later in the evening, become a bed; one of the tables concealed a washing apparatus; his clothes and boots were disagreeably mixed with books which bore the gilt of college arms; and, for decoration, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... A cold, cheerless room, bare of carpet or pictures, with just the study-table, bed, and two chairs. At the study-table, his huge bulk sprawling on, and overflowing, a frail chair, they had found the massive John Thorwald laboriously reading aloud the Latin he had translated, literally by the sweat ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... she was unworthy of his love and tenderness, was not happiness—it was grinding misery, bringing death into her soul. If he had blamed her for her incompetence; if he had scolded her for making his home cheerless; nay, if he had beaten her, she could have borne with life, and taken her outward sufferings ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... on, the sleeves of her cotton blouse were rolled up over her elbow, and she wore still the big rough apron she had donned for scrubbing. It struck her, as she crossed the river, that the wind was very cold, and that the day was grey and cheerless, now the ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... in the full glow of the setting beams of our imperial joy and chant out our farewell, and quite another to live alone in the darkness. For a little while memory may support us, but memory grows faint. On every side is the thick, cheerless pall and that stillness through which no sound comes. We are alone, quite alone, cut off from the fellowship of the day, unseeing and unseen. More especially is this so when the dungeon is of our own making, and we ourselves ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... night, in a dark, cheerless September mist, I closed my door behind me for ten months, and with three assistants went to the station to meet ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... least," said Sedgwick; then added gravely, "and heaven itself would be a cold and cheerless place to me ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... together in rebellion: deprived him of his authority, and took the control of the ship into their own hands. They then placed their captain in an open boat, and throwing in to him a few articles of provision, they turned him adrift upon that wide and cheerless ocean, and he never was heard of more. Appointing one of their number as commander, they turned the ship in a different direction, and regulated all their movements by their own pleasure. After this revolt, things went on pretty much as before. They had deprived their ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable non possumus of penury. In winter, especially, lack of work made even the provision of daily bread often difficult and sometimes impossible for him. But Friedrich Hebbel's childhood, full of hardship as it was, was not cheerless. The father did what he could; and the mother, at whatever sacrifice to herself, could nearly always do something for the children. The greatest hardship was caused by the father's hostility to these maternal concessions to childish desires; for to him, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... roads wandering through the hills. Over all this the clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing, exaggerating height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief the twisted ribbons of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one stimulating to a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and all that I beheld lay in another county—wild Gevaudan, mountainous, uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cannot lead you wrong; follow me in the bleak waste, the blackened wilderness, as well as by the green pastures and the still waters. Do you ask why I have left the sunny side of the valley—carpeted with flowers, and bathed in sunshine—leading you to some high mountain apart, some cheerless spot of sorrow? Trust me, I will lead you by paths you have not known, but they are all known to me, and selected ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... month came to my hands in Philadelphia. So long a time has elapsed since we have been separated by events, that it was like a letter from the dead, and recalled to my memory very dear recollections. My subsequent journey through life has offered nothing which, in comparison with those, is not cheerless and dreary. It is a rich comfort sometimes to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... hopeless than that felt by any of the wanderers who in early days were left upon that shore. For there is no solitude like that of a heart which dwells alone, whose memories of the past can bring no gladness, and whose future lies cheerless and blank ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... hook-pot that rattled from side to side at each lurch of the ship, the dregs of the tea it had held dripping to the weltering floor. For once in a way we were miserably silent. We sat dourly together, as cheerless a quartette as ever passed watch below. "Who wouldn't sell his farm and go to sea?" asked Hansen, throwing off his damp jacket and boots and turning into his bunk. "'A life on th' ocean wave,' eh? Egad! here's one who wishes he had learned ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... dreary and cheerless. The dark firs, the decayed urns, which flanked either side of the stone steps, the rough terrace of loose stones, the long grass of the pleasance below, where a few flowers were bravely struggling to ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... shelter for thy head, And some poor plot, with vegetables stored, Be all that Heaven allots thee for thy board,— Unsavory bread, and herbs that scattered grow Wild on the river brink or mountain brow, Yet e'en this cheerless mansion shall provide More heart's repose ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... you, I walk the cheerless shore. The cutting blast, the hurl of biting brine May freeze, and still, and bind the waves at war, Ere you will ever know, O! Heart of mine, That I have sought, reflected in the blue Of these sea depths, some shadow of your eyes; Have hoped the laughing waves would sing of you, ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... There in that cheerless abode dead Balder was enthroned, but, said Frigga, he who braves that dread journey must take no heed of him, nor of the sad ghosts flitting to and fro, like eddying leaves. First he must accost their gloomy queen and entreat ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... expected, but brought their families with them and settled down. So, driven from their homes and lands, starving in their little niches on the high cites they could only steal away during the night and wander across the cheerless uplands. To one who has traveled these steppes such a flight seems terrible, and the mind hesitates to picture the sufferings of the sad fugitives. At the 'Creston' (name of the ruin) they halted, and probably found friends, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... old-fashioned furniture of every description. "Aunt Sarah," on coming to the farm to live, had given a personal touch and cheery, homelike look to every room in the house, with one exception, the large, gloomy, old-fashioned parlor, which was cold, cheerless and damp. She confessed to Mary she always felt as if John's dead-and-gone ancestors' ghostly presences inhabited the silent room. The windows were seldom opened to allow a ray of sunlight to penetrate the dusk with which the room was always ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... the harvest ended; The out-door sports are banished— For winter comes; the air is sad and cold, it sighs Under the vaulted skies. At fall of night, none risks to walk across the fields, For each one, sad and cheerless, beelds Before the great fires blazing, Or talks of wolfish fiends{3} amazing; And sorcerers—to make one shudder with affright— That walk around the cots so wight, Or 'neath the gloomy elms, and ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... Marjorie as a very cheerless proceeding. She found an opportunity, when Irene was out of the way, to talk to her ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... ground was rising; but the outlook was cheerless enough, until the moon on a sudden emerged from a bank of cloud and disclosed the landscape. Mr. Thomasson uttered a cry of relief. Fifty paces before them the low wall on the right of the lane was broken ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... Madame Soubirons sat gazing at the flickering embers with a rueful face. "A cold hearth is more chilling than the mountains," she said; and she rose and went out of the poor little apartment, which, with all its poverty, would not have been cheerless had a bright fire glowed upon the neatly-kept hearth, and sat down upon the doorstep, where the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... and dejected than John Kenyon existed in the broad dominion of Canada, he was indeed a person to be pitied. After having sent his cablegram to Wentworth, he returned to his very cheerless hotel. Next morning when he awoke he knew that Wentworth would have received the message, but that the chances were ten thousand to one that he could not get the money in time, even if he could get it at all. Still, he resolved to stay in Ottawa, much as he detested ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... her face, and made an effort to powder away the evidence of her grief. Then she went bravely down and faced the silent crowd in the breakfast room. No one was eating anything. The very air smote chill and cheerless as she entered. As if he had been lying in wait for her, Fisher pounced upon her ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... seen that little, ruined French village, with guns booming in the distance and the nearer sound of water running through tall reeds and over green stones and between great mossy trees. Indeed, my life would now be, comparatively speaking, a cheerless desert, because I should never have met the most beautiful—Well, all clouds have silver linings; some have golden ones with rainbow edges. No; I am not sorry I stopped at the St. Ives; not ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... second examination before the magistrate on January 30. To avoid excitement, both on the part of the prisoner and the public, the court sat in one of the corridors of the Town Hall. The scene is described as dismal, dark and cheerless. The proceedings took place by candlelight, and Peace, who was seated in an armchair, complained frequently of the cold. At other times he moaned and groaned and protested against the injustice with which he was being treated. ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... afterwards to thank him for his generosity the Rabbi had disappeared. It was evident that the old man's love was as deep as ever, but that he was much hurt, and would not risk another repulse. Very likely he had walked in from Kilbogie, perhaps without breakfast, and had now started to return to his cheerless manse. It was a wetting spring rain, and he remembered that the Rabbi had no coat. A fit of remorse overtook Carmichael, and he scoured the streets of Muirtown to find the Rabbi, imagining deeds of attention—how he would capture ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... again it was spring. Nothing can keep away the change in the season. In the mountain country the change comes swiftly, unheralded. One day it was bleak and cheerless; the next day brought with it the grace of sunshine and warmth; as if by magic, verdure began to deck the hillsides, and we heard again the cheerful murmur of waters in the gulch. The hollyhocks about The Bower shot up once more and put forth their honest, rugged leaves. ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... Italian,—half-naked children, running hither and thither in the mud, and screaming like tortured wild animals,—this kind of shiftless, thriftless humanity, pictured against the background of ugly modern houses, such as one might find in a London back slum, made up a cheerless prospect, particularly as the blue sky was clouded and it was beginning to rain. One touch of colour brightened the scene for a moment, when a girl with a yellow handkerchief tied round her head passed along, carrying a huge flat basket overflowing with bunches of ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... slept for two hours when the stealthy apprentice let himself quietly into the dark and cheerless house. He bore on his back a heavy bag of flour, and carried on his arm a big basket filled with minor packages gleaned from sleepy shopkeepers, who had been awakened by the lynx-eyed youth knocking ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... in the farther outskirts, where to the north the calm, sunlit bay slept peacefully with a few scattered ships riding at anchor, and southward the luxuriance of the Sahel stretched to meet the wide and cheerless plateaus, dotted with the conical houses of hair, and desolate as though the locust-swarm had just alighted there to ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... suite, which was the chief glory of the Adriatic, had been stripped of every superfluous article of furniture or embellishment. Curtains had been removed, all evidences of luxury disposed of. Temporarily the apartment had been transformed into a bare, cheerless place. Seated on a high chair, with his back to the wall, was Sirdeller. At his right hand was a small table, on which stood a glass of milk, a phial, a stethoscope. Behind his doctor. At his left hand a smooth-faced, silent young ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stood in considerable perturbation of mind on the cheerless third-floor landing that Sunday afternoon Mrs Love found small matter for comfort in her memory of the Friday evening. She remembered that old Mrs Duncomb had spoken complainingly of the lonesomeness which had come upon ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... Later, in the autumn evenings, a lamplit replica of the same picture presented itself. Or, if the dinner was cleared away, one would see Madame Millet busy with her needle, the children at their lessons, and the painter, whom even then tradition painted a sad and cheerless misanthrope, contentedly playing at dominoes with one of the children, or his honest Norman face wreathed in smiles as the conversation took an amusing turn. This, it is true, was when the master of the house was free from his terrible enemy, the headache, which laid him low so often, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... then, accompanied by "flapjacks" and plenty of good, strong coffee. We had not yet got settled down to the regular drills, guard duty was light, and things generally seemed to run "kind of loose." And then the climate was delightful. We had just left the bleak, frozen north, where all was cold and cheerless, and we found ourselves in a clime where the air was as soft and warm as it was in Illinois in the latter part of May. The green grass was springing from the ground, the "Johnny-jump-ups" were in blossom, the trees were bursting into leaf, and the woods were full of feathered ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... which suspended wires and poles offered space for the drying of socks; they washed their clothes when the mood struck them. It was warm and comparatively clean. But it was dark, without ornament, cheerless. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... a smile, yes, only a smile, That a woman o'erburdened with grief Expected from you; 'twould have given relief, For her heart ached sore the while. But, weary and cheerless, she went away, Because, as it happened that very day, You were out ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... the morning, and before Lucy had time to think about anything Tom had kissed her for the last time, and the waggon drove away. He waved his handkerchief to her till they were out of sight; and then she went back to the house sad and pale and cheerless. ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
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