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More "Ramshackle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... settlements—"hitch-rail towns"—unpainted and ramshackle, but nowhere was there an attempt at farming, for this part of Texas had gone hog wild over oil. Abandoned straw stacks had settled and molded, cornfields had grown up to weeds, what few head of cattle still remained lolled near the artificial ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... top. He could then see that there was a square space which, though similar in appearance to the rest of the gallery, concealed the entrance to the shaft. He pushed it upward. It gave easily. It was a trap-door, leading into a square, ramshackle shed! ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... social existence. The poem intensifies that feeling of hidden terror and tragedy which sometimes strikes us on beholding a lonely farmer, enigmatical of face and sparing of words, or on spying, through the twilight, some grey, unpainted, ramshackle, cottage, perched upon a wind-swept hill or propped up against the jutting boulders of some deserted slope, miles from the town and remote from ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... in the loss of three more of our ponies cast a temporary gloom over the depot party when we reassembled in the safety of the old ramshackle magnetic lean-to at Hut Point. I use the word lean-to because one could hardly describe it as a hut, for the building was with out insulation, snow filled the space between ceiling and roof, and ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... to discover that Mr. Dunn of this ramshackle tenement in Hicks Street was identical with the elegantly equipped admirer of ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... snapped Mable, addressing the group. "Mary Louise is always on the wrong side. Other schools are not criterions for this ramshackle establishment, anyhow. We have twelve boarders and four day scholars, and how Miss Stearne ever supports the place and herself on her income is an occult problem that the geometries can't solve. She pays little Miss Dandler, her assistant, ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... Spanish grandeur in the village are the two ramshackle coaches that are used for hearses at state funerals. Most of the larger houses are, however, in repair, although the canvas ceilings and the board partitions seem to be in need of paint. These houses occupy the center of the ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... through the village, crossed the dark bridge and approached a ramshackle house from which a babble of voices rose in strident argument. The excited chorus abated at Terry's sharp knock and the door was thrown open to disclose the belligerent figure of Tony Ricorro, the leader of the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... spoke the simple truth. What he had sworn to do he would do to the best of his ability. But the Texan knew, too, that the ramshackle jail would be torn to pieces and the ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... barn-like structure, built evidently with a view to economy, being scarcely more than half the height of the original: the vacant space has been very roughly filled up, and the numerous holes and crevices support a fine growth of weeds, and a strong young tree has also taken root in the ramshackle stone work. From the central tower, gargoyles grin above the elaborately carved buttresses and finials in remarkable contrast to ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... never at the mercy of one idea only, and he began to see, very soon after he had investigated the two houses—the ramshackle shop and the riverside den—that if he intended to progress he could not afford to sit in the street and drink in the cafe opposite Leh Shin's dwelling for an interminable space of weeks. He had limitless patience, ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... in a Barge, towed by three Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them—this is twenty-five years ago, reader!—a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand—and teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered—as the friendly mists rose—under a great Tarpaulin at the barge's stern. Where is that girl ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... down, and sends other men out with them. Street organs, under our fatherly County Council, are forbidden on Sundays; nevertheless, Sunday being the only day when millions of people have any chance of recreation, many organs go out. Whither do they go? East, my dears. There, in any ramshackle hall, or fit-up arch-way, or disused stables, the boys and girls, out for fun, may dance the golden hours away throughout Sunday afternoon and evening. Often the organs are hired for Eastern weddings and christenings ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... there's no other victim," said Jack. "If there is none, it will let the ice company off easier than they really deserve for allowing so ramshackle a building to stand, overhanging the river just where we like to do most of our skating ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... is the campo santo of San Gabriel; rather desolate, and very dusty. The ramshackle wooden crosses stagger wildly on the shapeless mounds; the dilapidated whitewashed railings, cracked and blistered by the sun, look much as though they might be bleached bones, tossed carelessly about; and the badly painted, ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... was pitch dark; somewhere in the lonely woods hard by the screech owl was still calling, and the brisk autumn wind, freshening as the night advanced into the wee hours, conjured up strange noises in the loose hanging sticks of the old ramshackle fence along the roadside. Dried leaves, driven by the fitful gusts of wind, sounded like someone, or some ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Mike, shaking his head a little. "I 'spects we'll git good 'nough craps for what we do for 'em. This ain't the kind of farm your lords and ladies has got. It's ramshackle, ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... brought her niece to call on me," said Mrs. Grant. "Still, if you are going there, dear, and the girl doesn't seem well, tell them I shall be only too happy to come and fetch her for a drive some afternoon. I daresay my carriage is more comfortable than that ramshackle old ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... did. How successful she has been it is hard to convey in words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, could be made, had I not seen ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... liked the open-air travelling and the sidelong motion. The new cars were also safe and well-appointed. They were drawn by good horses and driven by good coachmen. Jaunting-car travelling had before been rather unsafe. The country cars were of a ramshackle order, and the drivers were often reckless. "Will I pay the pike, or drive at it, plaise your honour?" said a driver to his passenger on approaching a turnpike-gate. Sam Lover used to tell a story of a car-driver, who, after driving his passenger ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... year after year. Mary could decorate over thirty dozen cups and saucers in a day, at three halfpence the dozen. 'Doesn't she ever do anything else?' some visitor might curiously inquire, whom Titus Price was showing over his ramshackle manufactory. 'No, always the same thing,' Titus would answer, made proud for the moment of this phenomenon of stupendous monotony. 'I wonder how she can stand it—she has a refined face,' the visitor might remark; and Mary Beechinor was left alone again. The idea that her work was monotonous ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... of us, faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too gruesome a ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... their colour seemed to him more lovely than anything he had ever seen; and he was enchanted with the canals and the long lines of poplars. When they got out of the Gare du Nord, and trundled along the cobbled streets in a ramshackle, noisy cab, it seemed to him that he was breathing a new air so intoxicating that he could hardly restrain himself from shouting aloud. They were met at the door of the hotel by the manager, a stout, pleasant man, who spoke tolerable English; Mr. Goodworthy was ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... had slipped by on the other side, and gone in at the door of a small ramshackle house of which the windows were closed by ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... store—indeed, I should like to know who would have enjoyed it. It dated back to the beginning of the last century, a tarred, coal-black, ramshackle hut. The windows were low and small, the windowpanes diminutive. The ceiling was low. Everything was arranged in such a way as to exclude the possibility of lofty flights of thought ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... remember at Chelton we had to put up for the night in an old church they were using for a fire house. But we had a fine time," and he chuckled at the recollection. "And next day we finished up without the need of a wagon. It was like camp days to scatter ourselves about the big ramshackle place." ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... that would bring her to the exact middle of the piazza, and took these steps with her usual gentle precision of movement. She had no sooner taken up the position which she felt to be the proper one for her, than round the corner came the Bywood stage,—a long, lumbering, ramshackle vehicle, in which sat Mrs. Murray, a kind-looking nurse, and the twelve convalescent children who were to have the first delights of ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... it was a fear of the elements rather than of man. One day she went along the high-road with her letters, towards the village of Casa Latina. The high-road was depressing, wherever there were houses. For the houses had that sordid, ramshackle, slummy look almost invariable on an Italian high-road. They were patched with a hideous, greenish mould-colour, blotched, as if with leprosy. It frightened her, till Pancrazio told her it was only the copper sulphate that had sprayed the vines hitched on to the walls. But none the less ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... asked no questions, and my companion vouchsafed no talk, though twice I caught him regarding me curiously as I unbridled the mare in the only vacant stall. Not a word pass'd as he took the lantern off the peg again, and led the way up a ramshackle ladder to the loft above. He was a fat, lumbering fellow, and made the old timbers creak. At the top he set down the light, and pointed to a heap ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... somewhere in the ramshackle thing I call my soul, I'm glad Sandy took you away from me. Though there are occasional moments when I feel ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... disaster. All of his fondest hopes, his dreams, all of the inner guardians of his own happiness told him to keep to his search, to journey on his way and forget he had seen the tracks. Every desire of Self spoke in warning to him. But Bill Bronson had a higher law than self. Long ago, in front of the ramshackle hotel in Bradleyburg, he had given a promise; and he had reaffirmed it in the gleam of the Northern Lights not many nights before. There was no one to hold him to his pledged word. There were none that need know; no one to whom he must answer but his own soul. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... recruits, perhaps a dozen had remained in the cars; of their non-commissioned officers, perhaps half a dozen were trying to do something, but having no directing head or hand, accomplishing little. It looked as though nothing but the bursting asunder of that ramshackle building would liberate its human charge, for even those who, battered, bleeding, and suffocated, would gladly have escaped into outer air, were packed in, sardine-like, and incapable of self-extrication. To the appeal of the ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... up on the porch rail right beside us. The others were all right there, squatting on the porch or sitting on the rail. We could see across the river and past the old ramshackle buildings there and right over the village of Little Valley to the ridge. That big tree stood up higher than all the others and it seemed just as if it were all alone off there. I guess it was ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... out here in this ramshackle old chicken-coop, when you might have a tidy flat on Paulina Street; and the doctor could have a desk in my office next door to his old boss." Dr. Leonard spoke testily, and Alves laid her hand ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... I help him," answered Eradicate promptly, as he climbed back off the seat, into the body of his ramshackle vehicle. ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... personally searched every foot of this particular building, and was confident that it afforded no hiding-place. The behavior of the dog, however, was susceptible of only one explanation; and Seton recognizing that the clue to the mystery lay somewhere within this ramshackle building, became seized with a conviction that he was ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... nothing else visible but a few dusky groves of willows and the dazzling snow. The ramshackle wooden hotel was rather more than usually badly-kept and comfortless, and Winston, who had managed to conciliate his host, felt relieved one afternoon when the latter flung down ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... Bethany, the road begins to drop, with great windings, into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,—Russians and Greeks returning from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at first, we can see a shepherd with his flock ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... neighbor. His ramshackle dwelling was an eighth of a mile from the Gould-Hamilton place. Abner had the reputation of being the meanest man in town; also he had a large family, of which Jimmie, eight years old, was ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... wondered whether—considering that we have all sorts of licensed people about us; people who are licensed to cram us upon steam-boats; to crowd us into omnibuses; to jolt us in ramshackle cabs; to supply us with bad brandy and other adulterated drinks; licentiates for practising physic; licentiates for carrying parcels; licentiates for taking money at their own doors for the diversions of singing ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... them. Moreover, Elias should compose little comedies that could be performed by their small party, and the profits were to be equally shared between them. They also put their hands together and vowed to be true and friendly, and not to separate till they came back to ramshackle Uzes. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... civilised territory; and about half an hour before sunset they marched into a small village, composed chiefly of adobe huts, where a halt was called for the night, and where our friends were confined in a ramshackle barn of a place in company with the sergeant and ten men. That the sergeant was quite determined not to get into trouble by the neglect of any possible precaution soon became perfectly evident; for when, about half an hour after the arrival of the party ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... second, built eleven years later, endured in the service for which it was designed four years; the third, which marked as big an advance on its immediate predecessor in comfort and elegance as the first had marked on the ramshackle Park Theater described by Richard Grant White, was the Astor Place Opera House, built in 1847, and the nominal home of the precious ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... inhospitable inn of its kind; and across the muddy street from it the great echoing train-shed, ridiculously out of proportion to every other building in the town, the tavern not excepted, and to the ramshackle, once-a-day train that wheezed and rattled and clanked into and out ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... handed about in glasses as "travelled liquor," to wash down biscuits, still surplus from the "sea store." Their cooking apparatus was at first worked by petroleum, but this speedily burned the metal out, and they were driven to manufacture a very ramshackle sort of oil-lamp, fed by the oil for their ship-light and their compass, and by some supplied ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... darting in and out, busy as bees, and, unlike the dumb, pathetic little people out in the hills, alert, keen-eyed, cheerful, and happy. Under the log foot-bridge the shining creek ran down past the mountain village below, where the cupola of the court-house rose above the hot dirt streets, the ramshackle hotel, and the dingy stores and frame dwellings of the town. Across the bridge her eyes rested on another neat, well- built log cabin with a grass plot around it, and, running alongside and covered with ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... offers good beds, good food, dirty floors, charges low enough to please Mr. Joseph Pennell, and a total absence of anything in the shape of modern ideas. The people are charming, and the house is a mousy, ratty, ramshackle place ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... bad farming generally, degrading it far below its possibilities and natural standard of production. Cross the Channel, and Wales looks like a trim garden. Go over to France, and you find every yard of soil carefully tilled and cultivated. Even in comparatively ramshackle Sicily, among the old lava beds of Etna, the peasants raise a handful of grain on the top of a rock no bigger than a lady's work-table. In Ireland the cultivated portion of a holding is often no bigger relatively than that work-table on an acre of waste. Will the tiller, now the owner ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... the slope, he started down the incline. He turned off part of the power, and was gliding along joyously, when from a cross-road he suddenly saw turn into the main highway a mule, drawing a ramshackle wagon, loaded with fence posts. Beside the animal walked an ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... name has long superseded Sampson Brass, by the bye. I call him so, from something skittle-playing and public-housey in his countenance.) We have been up at five every morning, and on the road before seven. We were three carriages: a sort of wagon, with a cabriolet attached, for the luggage; a ramshackle villainous old swing upon wheels (hired at Geneva), for the children; and for ourselves, that travelling chariot which I was so kind as to bring here for sale. It was very cold indeed crossing the Jura—nothing ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Cross Streets were of brick, which meant profitable business. There were a couple of other brick buildings on Main Street, and one or two with "tin" fronts, and of the other business places only one or two were so ramshackle that they looked as if their firmer neighbors were holding them up, letting the weaker structures lean against them as a strong man might support ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... were silent a moment. Perhaps the thought of that desperate convict stealing forth amid the wind and rain still gripped them; but it began to dawn upon them also that they had been trespassing and that they had taken great liberties with this ramshackle boat. ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... teachers is impossible. When we attempt improvement of both will "Ulster" fight? And there is something even more human and poignant. The National Schools of this country are in many cases no better than ramshackle barns. Unless the teacher and the manager, out of their own pockets, mend the broken glass, put plaster on the walls, and a fire in the grate, the children have got to shiver and cough for it. Winter in Ireland, like the King in constitutional ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... saxifrages and other minute plants which encrust the rocks and bear, closely set in their compact, green, velvet-like foliage, tiny flowers as brilliant as gems. A ruby-red one amongst these is "the stalkless bladder-wort" (Silene acaulis), having no more resemblance at first sight to the somewhat ramshackle bladder-wort of our fields than a fairy has to a fishwife. There are many others of these cushion-forming, diminutive plants, with white, blue, yellow, and pink florets. Examined with a good pocket lens, they reveal unexpected beauties of detail—so graceful and harmonious that one wonders that ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... if he was employed in another shop, he had no right to go into Number Thirteen. That's a violation of rules. But if he's in Rad's ramshackle stable he ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... I had been home about a week I strolled down to his place one moonlight night. I told mother not to worry about me, for I would blow my own head off before I'd ever swaller another drop of red p'ison. When I opened the door of the ramshackle cabin, Pete looked up with a grin, and said as how he was wondering where I'd kept myself so long, for he had heerd I'd got back and done unusual well. He was glad to welcome me, and asked what I'd have and the treat was on him for old ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... the proprietor was curt and had no time for us at all. From that point, still dissatisfied, we extended our investigations beyond the Plaza. We found ourselves ankle deep in sandhills on which grew coarse grass and a sort of sage. Crazy, ramshackle huts made of all sorts of material were perched in all sorts of places. Hundreds of tents had been pitched, beneath which and in front of which an extremely simple housekeeping was going on. Hunt as we might we could find no place that looked ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... huge liners, from which the feverish crowds of fashionable tourists or bewildered immigrants disembark, can compare in poetic and imaginative suggestiveness, with any ramshackle dock, east or west, where brigs and schooners and trawlers put in; and real sailors—sailors who sail their ships—enter the little smoky taverns or drift homeward down ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... to stock-feeding during the winter months. To neglect of the precaution of putting up sufficient feed to tide over the severe weather might be attributed most of the annual ranching failures in the West. The MacDavid establishment bore a well-ordered aspect, unlike many of the unthrifty, ramshackle ranches, of his neighbours. The fencing was of the best, and there were no signs of decay or dilapidation in any of the buildings. Dwarf pines were planted about and a Morning Glory vine over-ran the house, giving the place an air of restful ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... a rigid disciplinarian. Hunter wrote Powell that as York had been convicted of "the most atrocious offence without any circumstances of doubt or alleviation" he was to be hanged. When York was made aware of his fate, he promptly escaped from the ramshackle gaol at Sandwich. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest steam-roller ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... all the ages—another Imperialist—a degraded, brutalized wretch, clad in filthy, stinking rags, his toes protruding from the rotten broken boots that were tied with bits of string upon his stockingless feet. The ramshackle cart was loaded with empty bottles and putrid rags, heaped loosely in the cart and packed into a large sack. Old coats and trousers, dresses, petticoats, and under-clothing, greasy, mildewed and malodorous. As he crept along with his eyes on the ground, the man gave utterance ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... an effort to drown the sweeter, softer notes of a robin nesting in the new-green of a quaking aspen. At the hitching post before the one tiny store, an old horse nodded and blinked,—as did the sprawled figure beside the ramshackle motor-filling station, just opened after the snow-bound months of winter. Then five minutes of absolute peace ensued, except for the buzzing of an investigative bottle-fly before the figure shuffled, stretched, and raising ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... show you something better than that," he cried, as he hirpled out (for so Malise described it afterwards) and presently returned dragging a great iron pot with a strength which seemed incredible in so ramshackle a body. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... A ramshackle covered cart laden with an assortment of tinware had stopped on the outskirts of the village. The owner, a bent scarecrow of a fellow, was effecting repairs to his nag's harness with a piece of string. Evening ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... and myself should go to Laval together. We started a couple of days later, and managed to travel by rail as far as Rennes. But from that point to Laval the line was now very badly blocked, and so we hired a closed vehicle, a ramshackle affair, drawn by two scraggy Breton nags. The main roads, being still crowded with troops, artillery, and baggage waggons, and other impedimenta, were often impassable, and so we proceeded by devious ways, amidst which ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... he had purchased from a farmer the right to set on fire an old ramshackle barn, standing in the midst of a field about three miles outside of Shopton. The barn was on an untilled farm, the house having been destroyed some years before, and it was not near any other structures, so that, even in a high ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... a train composed of an assortment of ramshackle and dilapidated coaches, called by courtesy the Orient Express, which maintained an average speed of fifteen miles an hour, left Bucharest for Vincovce, a small junction town in the Banat, where it was supposed to make connections with the south-bound Simplon Express from Paris to Belgrade ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... he wished to refresh his excellent memory; the instruments he used when to the entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added the alluring chink of gold belonged also to that generous patron. There were some old clothes in the ramshackle deal wardrobe; there was some linen and underclothing in the knobless chest of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester repeating-rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and ammunition-pouch, a hunting-knife and a Colt's revolver of large calibre, in addition to the weapon ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... heads sympathetically, finger to brow, when they speak of Widow Ashby's Sabrina living alone in her ramshackle house far up at the head of Crockett's Hollow. "A forsaken girl that holds grudge and works conjure comes to be a sorry, sorry woman," ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... himself after leaving the street car. On either side were tall buildings that shut out much of the light by day, while at night they made the place a veritable canyon of gloom. There were big warehouses and factories with, here and there, a smaller building, and some ramshackle dwellings that had withstood ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... to look at the rows of loaded carts that were making their way from all sides out of Moscow, and balancing his bulky body so as not to slip out of the ramshackle old vehicle, Pierre, experiencing the joyful feeling of a boy escaping from school, began to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... a consciousness of being jolted about abominably in a ramshackle vehicle. The surroundings were vague, as they always are in dreams. Low hills and sandy waste and sparse shrubs. Where was it, the "Great Desert," or some stretch in South America or in Mexico? In my dream I was dozing, trying to forget the painful ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Into a ramshackle building on the corner of a vivaciously ugly street Lockwood led his friend in quest of the greatest artist. An old man in a skull cap, woolen shirt, baggy trousers and carpet slippers appeared in a darkened doorway. With his long ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... some other time, old friends pay when they please,' didn't you know I was getting in over my head? didn't you encourage it ... so you could get judgment on me? sell me out? Though what you settled on me for, what you see in my ramshackle house and used up ground, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... father, it appears, was a distiller of great wealth in his day, and a man of action. Unfortunately he died before he had the chance to carry out his projects in connection with the rehabilitation of Schloss Rothhoefen, even then a deserted, ramshackle resort for paying tourists and a Mecca ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... street a luxurious limousine was tooting for a ramshackle prairie schooner to turn to one side. Behind the automobile plodded a forlorn mule dragging a wagon-load of empty boxes. Behind that came an army ambulance followed by an electric truck. A handsome soldier on a restive bay mare came ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... of war between England and Germany he took the Irish case, weighty with eight centuries of history and tradition, and he threw it out of the window. He pledged Ireland to a particular course of action, and he had no authority to give this pledge and he had no guarantee that it would be met. The ramshackle intelligence of his party and his own emotional nature betrayed him and us and England. He swore Ireland to loyalty as if he had Ireland in his pocket and could answer for her. Ireland has never been disloyal to England, not even at this epoch, because she has never been loyal to England, and ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... from her dormouse-like slumber and galvanises her into a state of activity that lasts for several hours. Long before dawn, the roads leading townwards are busy with all manner of vehicles, from the great waggon drawn by four white horses driven tandem, and laden with a moving stack of hay, to the ramshackle donkey-cart conveying half a score of cabbages, a heap of dandelions grubbed from ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... restaurant. There was to be a sale on the premises on the morrow, and the lower room had that day been filled with all the 'plant' of the restaurant, and all or almost all the poor household stuff from upstairs. It was an odd, ramshackle collection; and poor Dora, who had been walking round looking at the auction tickets, was realising with a sinking heart how much debt the sale would still leave unprovided for. But she had found friends. Father Vernon had met the creditors for her. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... visit to America I was a frequent contributor to his journal, and I corresponded with him privately. I went down to Northampton and delivered a lecture at his request, under the auspices of his electoral committee. The old theatre—a dirty, ramshackle place as I recollect it—was crowded, and I had my first taste of the popularity of Mr. Bradlaugh in the borough. Every mention of his ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... an undecided second or two, faced about and began to retrace his steps. He cut through the Ellery back yard and came out on the cross street at whose corner the Fultons lived. The house was a big ramshackle affair of a dozen rooms or so, far too large a place for the Fultons, since there had been only the two of them, Tod's mother having died when he was only a little tad. Indeed, as Tod said, they only used three rooms, the kitchen and two bedrooms. But that was ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... squeezed house, with a ramshackle bowed front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp waistcoat-pocket, which he found to be number twenty-four, Mews Street, Grosvenor Square. To the sense of smell the house was like a sort of bottle filled with a strong distillation of Mews; and when the footman opened the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... where they separated from their boy friends. A great, ramshackle bus, and another vehicle, were waiting at the end of the platform. An old man in a long duster stood beside the bus to help the girls in and see to their baggage. ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... certain order of architecture, otherwise known as the Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... half hour Eben rounded up the "Eb and Flo" near the shore in front of the Grimsby house, which was a poor, ramshackle affair. The water here was deep, so he was able to run close to the bank. A long-haired, ragged, dirty boy pushed off for his father in a leaky boat, and took him ashore. In a few minutes more the "Eb and Flo" was again under way, clipping along under the light breeze, bound for ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... of the cut-away, an old Chinaman was lying nursing a damaged and bloody head, and about him was littered the wreckage of his broken wagon and scattered vegetables; while his ramshackle horse was grazing unconcernedly ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... mental ferment, which had made this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the very hour of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed a vivid picture of that approach—of the old ramshackle village trap, and the boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent, red-bearded, plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively suggestive of something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Verkan Vall—who reminded himself that here he was called Richard Lee—crossed the yard from the farmhouse to the ramshackle barn, in the early autumn darkness. It had been raining that morning when the strato-rocket from Dhergabar had landed him at the Hagraban Synthetics Works, on the First Level; unaffected by the probabilities of human history, the same rain had been ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... quite rich and an orphan. They were furious when she fell in love with papa, who was only a lieutenant with nothing but a very old name, the ruins of a castle that tourists paid francs to see, and a ramshackle house in Paris almost too dilapidated to let. It was a mere detail to them that he happened to be one of the best-looking and most agreeable young men in the world. They did nothing but say, 'I told you so!' ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... been far distanced by the competition of Sothern and Lee. It was twenty years behind the times, as the saying is. Small, darksome, dreary and dingy, it served chiefly as a living-room for Sam, his daughter, and his cronies, as well as for his workshop. He had a bench and a ramshackle lathe in one corner, where you might be sure to find him futilely pottering at almost any hour. He owned the little building—or that portion in it which it were a farce to term the equity above the ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... Stuart abandoned the bed upon which he had been restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and shortened like flapping flags ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... painfully supplemental, that train—a string of the most ramshackle carriages the line could muster, and the carriage in which I found myself smelt as if it had been in Billingsgate for a month. However, I could sit down this time. There was neither honeymoon, commercial traveller, ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... up in a narrow part of the old street, jointed to the flags, and then to the house behind them—an ancient, ramshackle place, the doors and windows of which were boarded up, the entire fabric of which showed unmistakable readiness for the pick and shovel of the house-breaker. And he laid a hand on one of the shattered windows, close by a big hole in ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... Furman house is ramshackle but it is still standin' out dere and is used as a shelter for sawmill hands dat is cuttin' down de big pines and sawin' them on ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... very nearly in its zenith, beating down on dry Arabia between racing black clouds, when he had finished talking to the local council in the ramshackle old council-house, skin and mat curtained, that faced the sheik's where the main street broadened for a hundred filthy yards into a market-place. All through his argument he had held a pure-white bull terrier between his knees as proof that ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... a good excuse for not being a gentleman and a sportsman and he did not purpose to look for any reasons for doing differently. Then unexpectedly he was invited to dinner by Mr. Ephraim Tutt in a funny old ramshackle house on West Twenty-third Street with ornamented iron piazza railings all covered with the withered stalks of long dead wistarias, and something happened to him. "Payson Clifford's Twenty-five Thousand Dollar Dinner." ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... huts, and such-like sheds, With plenty of public-houses—two Foxes, one Green Man, three Bunch of Grapes, one Crown, and six King's Heads. The Green Man is reckoned the best, as the only one that for love or money can raise A postillion, a blue jacket, two deplorable lame white horses, and a ramshackle "neat post-chaise!" There's one parish church for all the people, whatsoever may be their ranks in life or their degrees, Except one very damp, small, dark, freezing cold, a little Methodist Chapel of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... it. And in particular I've thought over this part of my life. I'm enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... saw anything like them, I'll be bound—and Naples and Florence. Would you come back by the Tyrol, and have a turn at Zurich and Lucerne, with a long ramble through the Black Forest in a trap resembling a ramshackle landau?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... The ramshackle room whereon Eldred Lenox had set his seal differed in one notable respect from others of its type. It contained no picture either of a woman or a horse. The dingy white wall was relieved by groups of barbarous weapons—Thibetan daggers, a pair of wicked-looking kookries, the jezail and Brown Bess ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... result of this tinkering and cobbling could only be a ramshackle structure, built without any reference to the canons of political architecture. It was shaped neither by the Fourteen Points nor by the canons of the balance of power and territory. It was hardly more than an abortive ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... roast beef, or whether Ralph had achieved the process which is called making up one's mind, certainly he had given up testing the good sense, the independent character, the intelligence shown in her remarks. He had been building one of those piles of thought, as ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words let fall by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his own mind, about duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Devil Judd Tolliver was in the store Hale pointed out and peering cautiously around the edge of an open window at the wooden gate of the ramshackle calaboose. Several Falins were there—led by young Buck, whom Hale recognized as the red-headed youth at the head of the tearing horsemen who had swept by him that late afternoon when he was coming back from his first ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... eyes were turned on the performer, and I took advantage of that fact to rise from the rocking-chair with the roll of paper safe in my pocket, and saunter across the room in the direction of the piano. Leaning against a corner of the ramshackle old instrument, I drank in the melody with a new sense of its wild and melancholy beauty. The room in which I stood seemed transformed into what it never could be, and the old piano shed its discord and was glorified by the marvellous playing ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... been regarded as a protection, but more likely it was due to laziness and want of care. However that may have been, the interior was surprisingly substantial, with an excellent floor like that in a ballroom. I slept in a detached ramshackle room used as a kitchen, comfortable because of being open to ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... at last stopped, Benson looked out to find that the place was well down a lonely country road, well lined with trees on either side. The house, utterly dark from the outside, was a ramshackle, roomy ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... back to New York in company with several pessimistic gentlemen—who were very open about backing their fancy; and their fancy fell on that old, ramshackle jade, Hard Times, by Speculation out of Folly. According to them there was no hope of her being scratched ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... these safely over we set out in pursuit of the Turks. The next town of importance was a ramshackle mud-walled affair called Tauq, twenty miles beyond, on the far side of a river known as the Tauq Chai. The leading cars pursued to within sight of the town and came in for ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... crew might get properly drunk on tafia, while Nick and I walked about the town and waited until his Excellency, the commandant, had finished dinner that we might present our letters and obtain his passport. Natchez at that date was a sufficiently unkempt and evil place of dirty, ramshackle houses and gambling dens, where men of the four nations gamed and quarrelled and fought. We were glad enough to get away the following morning, Xavier somewhat saddened by the loss of thirty livres of which he had no ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... but rats in that ramshackle old place, Beautiful Joe," she said, as she pulled the plank away; "and as you don't hurt them, I don't see what you want to get in for. However, you are a sensible dog, and usually have a reason for having your own way, so I am going ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... company was trying hard to obtain powers to construct a railway to Murmansk at the time of the outbreak of hostilities; but a line was not completed till more than two years had elapsed and was then of the most ramshackle character. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... is of the time when George III was king, and our scene of action lies only at an old farm-house six miles or so from Finchley —a quaint, ramshackle, commodious, old-fashioned, thatched farm-house that we see only in pictures now, and which has long since been improved off ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... saw a light in his uncle Sim's stable, and knew that Delia was being settled for the night. Uncle Sim still lived in the ramshackle house to which his father—old Dr. Masterman, as elderly people in the village called him—had taken his young wife, who had been Miss Lucy Dawes. In this house both Sim and Archie Masterman were born. It was the plainest of dwellings, painted by wind and weather to a dovelike ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... ever Julius and Rosy met was one afternoon just as the Emily—that was the little fore-and-aft South Sea trading schooner Jule was in—was casting off from the ramshackle landing at Hello Island. Where's Hello Island? Well, I'll tell you. When you get home you take your boy's geography book and find the map of the world. About amidships of the sou'western quarter ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... The cooing of the pigeons was gone forever. The muddied water from the great flume raced down through the ravine, turning many wheels, but nowhere gathering in any form or place which seemed good for trout. On either side stood shanties, and ramshackle buildings where such things as stonecutting and blacksmithing were done. Along the waterside ran the tracks of our Terminal and Belt Line System, on which trains of flat-cars always stood, engaged ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... He wondered how her fastidiousness stood the grimy house in Magpie Alley and its ramshackle habit of life, after the distinctions and beauty of Windover, but he thought it was probably very good for her, part of the experience which should mould the citizen. Gerda shrank from no experience. ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... took leave of Madame Bourrat. The rickety old vehicle started off. Presently, Fandor heard what he had expected to hear: one of his captors told the driver to take them to some other address than Police Headquarters. Owing to the rattling of the ramshackle cab—it lacked rubber tyres—Fandor, though listening with ears astretch, could not hear one ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Hugh's time, by a race of long gaunt men who seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived. They were chronically discouraged, and the merchants and artisans of the town were in the same state. The merchants, who ran their stores—poor tumble-down ramshackle affairs—on the credit system, could not get pay for the goods they handed out over their counters and the artisans, the shoemakers, carpenters and harnessmakers, could not get pay for the work they did. Only the town's two saloons prospered. The saloon keepers sold their wares for cash and, ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... its summer visitors. At the time of the death of Mr Ira Nutcombe, the only all-the-year-round inhabitants were the butcher, the grocer, the chemist, the other customary fauna of villages, and Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who rented the ramshackle farm known locally as Flack's and eked out a precarious livelihood by ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... listening. But long before the appointed time the people who dine at twelve, and never take an afternoon nap, began to arrive, on foot, in farm-wagons, smart buggies, mud-crusted carryalls, and all manner of ramshackle vehicles. They arrived as if coming to a circus, old husbands and wives, young couples and their children, pretty girls and their fellows, and hitched their horses to the tails of their wagons, and ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... Caird were in the cypress avenue when Victoria Ray drove up in a ramshackle cab, guided by an Arab driver who squinted hideously. She wore a white frock which might have cost a sovereign, and had probably been made at home. Her wide brimmed hat was of cheap straw, wound with a scarf of ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... less Caucasian. Political organization just barely above the tribal level—thousands of petty kingdoms and republics and principalities and feudal holdings and robbers' roosts. The principal industries are brigandage, piracy, slave-raiding, cattle-rustling and intercommunal warfare. They have a few ramshackle steam railways, and some steamboats on the rivers. We sell them coal and manufactured goods, mostly in exchange for foodstuffs and tobacco. Consolidated Outtime Foodstuffs has the sector franchise. That's one of the companies Thalvan ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... sultry and dark, with a leaden sky and a breathless humidity that presaged a thunder storm. The houses were mostly unlighted at this hour. There was an occasional apartment house among them, but mostly they were low, ramshackle ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... moved almost beyond control by this speech. To have a ramshackle young woman from Hampstead patting her on the back as it were, in breezy certitude that quite soon she would improve, stirred her more deeply than anything had stirred her since her first discovery that Mr. Fisher was not what he seemed. Mrs. Wilkins must certainly be curbed. But how? ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... experience. If only now she could forget the agony that Dorothy must be experiencing, it would not be so dreadful to go at this early morning hour, over the dewy roads, in the ramshackle buggy with her benefactor at ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... built over the entrance. It was closed by a ramshackle door which a child could have opened without any difficulty; there was at least no danger of the Colonel's having been locked inside. Lighting our candles, we descended the rough stone staircase into the first great vault, which forms a sort of vestibule to the caverns. ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... hunted all over London for rooms suited to my income—L120 a year—and have at last found them. Two rooms, without modern conveniences, it is true, and in an old, ramshackle building, but within a stone's throw of P— Place and in an eminently respectable street. The rent is only L25 a year. I had begun to despair when at last I found them by chance. The chance was a mere chance, and unworthy of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... endless yarn let me note the fact that there are two schools amongst our brethren afloat. Roger Keyes and those of the younger school who sport the executive curl upon their sleeves are convinced that now, when we have replaced the ramshackle old trawlers of 18th March by an unprecedented mine-sweeping service of 20-knot destroyers under disciplined crews, the forcing of the Straits has become as easy ... well; anyway; easier than what we ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... his battles. They brought an old man in out of the town to see me because he had fought in the Crimean war, and knew the English. Before it grew too hot, they took me out to see the barracks and a ramshackle old fieldpiece which they seemed to idolise. Then followed luncheon with its long array of Arab dishes, of which the soldiers had their share eventually. Rashid assured me afterwards that all the ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... since they had a grand, tough time in front of them, it was advisable to get through the black months ahead with as little wear and tear as possible. In spite of the Trio's superior talents, they built a small ramshackle cabin with a tumble-down fireplace, which served them so ill that they ultimately spent all their waking hours in the more comfortable quarters of the Colonel and the Boy. It had been agreed that these two, with the help, or, at all events, ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... berry-boxes from the store in his little hand-waggon. The rest of the afternoon he spent in making a crate to hold the boxes. Long and patiently he toiled, and at times Mrs. Royal went into the workshop to see how he was getting along. When supper time came it was a queer ramshackle affair he had constructed, which would hardly hold together long enough to reach the wharf, let alone the rough handling it would receive on ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... safely—three hundred and odd miles from Halifax, and this side of Sydney about sixty-two miles by sea. To all this did captain Capstan "seriously incline," and the result was, two berths in the "Balaklava," several cans of preserved meats and soups, a hamper of ale, two bottles of Scotch whisky, a ramshackle, Halifax van for the luggage, a general shaking of hands at departure, and another set of white sails among the many white sails in the ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... on the cuckoos. The nest of both species is a ramshackle affair — a mere bundle of twigs and sticks without a rim to keep the eggs from rolling from the bush, where they rest, to the ground. Unlike their European relative, they have the decency to rear their own young and not impose this heavy ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the pistol into my tail-pocket, and followed the sound up the ramshackle stairs. My footsteps made such a racket on their old timbers as fairly to frighten me, but it never disturbed the flute-player. He had harked back again to "Like Hermit Poor" by this time, and the dolefulness of it was fit to make ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... drawn through the streets in a small cart by four dogs. By looking at you he could see all the clockwork inside, as could a boy who was led about by his mother at the end of a string. Every Friday there was the market, when a dozen ramshackle carts containing vegetables and cheap crockery filled the centre of the square, resting in line on their shafts. A score of farmers' wives or daughters in old-world garments squatted against the town-house within walls of butter on cabbage-leaves, eggs and chickens. Towards evening the ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... already passed the outer forts; I had noted a work close to the road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the long and ugly suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the ramshackle houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... one of the most picturesque of the many pretty homes in Green Valley. It had been a ramshackle, tumbled-down old cabin lost in a tangle of bushes and hidden from the road by a shabby, unsightly row of old willows. Billy was going to rent it for temporary barn purposes but his wife, who had a nimble and a prophetic eye, made him buy ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... said no more; she went up-stairs, and got a certain disused attic into some sort of order. The attic was far away from the rest of the house; it was the top story of a wing, which had been added on to the tall, ramshackle old house. In some of the rooms underneath, the Franklin family themselves slept; in others they lived, and in others they cooked. The rest of the house, therefore, was free for ...
— Dickory Dock • L. T. Meade
... lost in the clamour, as every one, deserting breakfast, crowded about Lord Durwent, and half in jest demanded to know what the ramshackle empire had to say ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... was typical of a non-mechanical culture. Narrow, packed-dirt streets twisted between ramshackle huts. A few two-story buildings threatened to collapse at any minute. A stench filled the air, so strong that Fannia's filter couldn't quite eradicate it. The Cascellans bounded ahead of the heavily laden Earthmen, dashing around like a pack ...
— Warrior Race • Robert Sheckley
... had to sleep in was an old, ramshackle affair, absolutely over-run with rats. Great, big, black fellows, who used to chew up our leather equipment, eat our rations, and run over out bodies at night. German gas had no effect on these rodents; in fact, they seemed ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... was settled that my father and myself should go to Laval together. We started a couple of days later, and managed to travel by rail as far as Rennes. But from that point to Laval the line was now very badly blocked, and so we hired a closed vehicle, a ramshackle affair, drawn by two scraggy Breton nags. The main roads, being still crowded with troops, artillery, and baggage waggons, and other impedimenta, were often impassable, and so we proceeded by devious ways, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... of putting up sufficient feed to tide over the severe weather might be attributed most of the annual ranching failures in the West. The MacDavid establishment bore a well-ordered aspect, unlike many of the unthrifty, ramshackle ranches, of his neighbours. The fencing was of the best, and there were no signs of decay or dilapidation in any of the buildings. Dwarf pines were planted about and a Morning Glory vine over-ran the house, giving the place an air of restful domesticity. As they entered the store ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... later Devil Judd Tolliver was in the store Hale pointed out and peering cautiously around the edge of an open window at the wooden gate of the ramshackle calaboose. Several Falins were there—led by young Buck, whom Hale recognized as the red-headed youth at the head of the tearing horsemen who had swept by him that late afternoon when he was coming back from his first trip to Lonesome Cove. The old man gritted his teeth ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... a bush-clad hollow, two miles from the world in general, stood a little, old, ramshackle shanty. The location was one that seekers would hardly have found without a trail to lead them ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... by means of the footholes to the top. He could then see that there was a square space which, though similar in appearance to the rest of the gallery, concealed the entrance to the shaft. He pushed it upward. It gave easily. It was a trap-door, leading into a square, ramshackle shed! ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... pioneers of the flying-men in this country. He used to fly at country fairs in an old ramshackle bus of the Wright model—a thing of sticks and canvas and wires precariously hung together. But he flew it. And he ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... of her not to have brought her niece to call on me," said Mrs. Grant. "Still, if you are going there, dear, and the girl doesn't seem well, tell them I shall be only too happy to come and fetch her for a drive some afternoon. I daresay my carriage is more comfortable than that ramshackle old trap of theirs." ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... Gaffer Moon, smiles down upon the ashes of my camp fire, full-faced and silver. An excellent host! Never once has he grumbled about light or pay and he grants me a roof without question. Ah! it's a blessed old Tavern of Stars, Garry! Ramshackle enough in all faith, for there are gaps in the tree-walls and Dame Wind's a-sweeping night and day, but luckily I've a blanket I carry by day and ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... a precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place—poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben Blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... he moved through the black, stenchful passageways, up and down ramshackle stairs, from human warren to human warren, pausing here to question, there to peer and sniff and poke with an exploring cane. Out on the street again he drew full, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... which they have for so long occupied. I very well recollect the style of their old place of business and how the exterior strongly reminded me of the cotton warehouses in Liverpool. The interior was a big, rambling, ramshackle kind of a place with but few pretensions to being an office such as we see at the ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... out, busy as bees, and, unlike the dumb, pathetic little people out in the hills, alert, keen-eyed, cheerful, and happy. Under the log foot-bridge the shining creek ran down past the mountain village below, where the cupola of the court-house rose above the hot dirt streets, the ramshackle hotel, and the dingy stores and frame dwellings of the town. Across the bridge her eyes rested on another neat, well- built log cabin with a grass plot around it, and, running alongside and covered with honeysuckle—a pergola! That was her hospital ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... town, which was reached late the following day, Farwell engaged two rooms at the ramshackle tavern and informed Pine that he was to ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... much safety," said Aunt Georgie, as she carefully arranged her spectacles, and looked about her. "Bless my heart! what a ramshackle place. Surely ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... of which was our home, and two other single-room apartments, similarly tenanted, opened into a pitch-dark vestibule which my fancy peopled with "evil ones." A steep stairway led up to the yard, part of which was occupied by a huddle of ramshackle one-story houses. It was known as Abner's Court. During the summer months it swarmed with tattered, unkempt humanity. There was a peculiar odor to the place which I can ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... but I am getting through with it, and that's what I mean to do about our escape. Where you can't take a fair bite at anything, why, you must nibble; and I must go on nibbling now to find some way of getting out of this here ramshackle place. If I can just contrive a hole so that I can climb on the roof whenever I like, and be able to cover it up again so that these beauties don't know, I don't feel a bit doubtful of being able to slide down to the eaves, and then hold tight and get my toes in here and my toes in there, ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... protesting smile hovering about his lips, brought tears to Valerie's eyes. "Well, well.... I'm so glad I'm cleared in your eyes. I'd 've hated you to go through life thinking that I—was like that...." Suddenly he caught at her arm and pointed to the ramshackle bridge. "There's another instance of the rot we're out to stop. Another winter, and that bridge 'd be in the stream, damming it at the deepest and narrowest point. Result, the water's diverted and spreads all over the road, trying ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... a thumping heart and nerves all a-tingle that I followed Abel Crone out of his front shop into a sort of office that he had at the back of it—a little, dirty hole of a place, in which there was a ramshackle table, a chair or two, a stand-up desk, a cupboard, and a variety of odds and ends that he had picked up in his trade. The man's sudden revelation of knowledge had knocked all the confidence out of me. It had never crossed my mind that any living soul ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... which I was aware—that water was apparently dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to moisture all about you.... My ramshackle habitation had never been a very strong defence against the outside world. It seemed now to have definitely decided to abandon the struggle. The water streamed down the panes of my window opposite my bed. One patch of my ceiling (just above my only bookcase, confound it!) was coloured a mouldy ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... a luxurious limousine was tooting for a ramshackle prairie schooner to turn to one side. Behind the automobile plodded a forlorn mule dragging a wagon-load of empty boxes. Behind that came an army ambulance followed by an electric truck. A handsome ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... hour he came to Dumpling Pond, then set out for his home, straight through the woods, till he reached the Catrock line, and following that came to the farm and ramshackle house of Micky Kittering. He had been told that the man at this farm had a fresh deer hide for sale, and hoping to secure it, Quonab walked up toward the house. Micky was coming from the barn when he saw the Indian. They recognized each ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, and ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... even the oldest inhabitants breathed a deep sigh of relief, when finally they were housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... had to take hold of it, so Miss Chadwick did. How successful she has been it is hard to convey in words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, could be made, had I not seen it with my own eyes. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... of doubt and pain, and she was perplexed by the fly-man's dull eyes, his starved horse, his ramshackle vehicle, the wet road, the leaden sky. It was one of those moments when the familiar appears strange and grotesque. Then, gathering all ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... terminated in the loss of three more of our ponies cast a temporary gloom over the depot party when we reassembled in the safety of the old ramshackle magnetic lean-to at Hut Point. I use the word lean-to because one could hardly describe it as a hut, for the building was with out insulation, snow filled the space between ceiling and roof, and whenever a fire was kindled ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... lightly on the cuckoos. The nest of both species is a ramshackle affair — a mere bundle of twigs and sticks without a rim to keep the eggs from rolling from the bush, where they rest, to the ground. Unlike their European relative, they have the decency to rear their own young and not impose this heavy ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... bargains. Charles Hutt, had he lived, would have become one of the leading booksellers of the day. He was for some years at Hodgson's, and possessed a remarkable taste for, and knowledge of, books. He left Hodgson's and started on his own account in the old ramshackle house already referred to. This shop presented so unfavourable an exterior that even the Income-tax Fiend never 'called in,' although at one time there were several thousands of pounds' worth of books in it. Hutt did a very extensive ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... for the house be mortgaged sea-deep to Doctor, an' theer's other debts. Not a penny for nobody—nothin' but empty bottles—an' to think as I thought so poor o' God as to say theer weern't none! What a ramshackle ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... comedies that could be performed by their small party, and the profits were to be equally shared between them. They also put their hands together and vowed to be true and friendly, and not to separate till they came back to ramshackle Uzes. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... wave of her hand to Tom, for she was not yet quite ready. When she came down five minutes later, with a fresh ribbon in her hair and one of the new frocks that she had never worn before looking its very trimmest, Jasper Parloe had alighted from his ramshackle wagon and was talking with Tom, who still sat in ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... Clinch's Dump, plain in the starlight, every window dark. To the west the barn loomed, huge with its ramshackle outbuildings straggling ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a bit indisposed ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... road begins to drop, with great windings, into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,—Russians and Greeks returning from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at first, we can see a shepherd with his flock upon ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... some clumsily indicated buildings, possibly sheds and stables of daub and wattle, eking out the ramshackle house. Behind it and to the left of it were scrawls that might have been meant for trees. An enclosure of spiky lines might have indicated an orchard-hedge. And there were things in the middle distance, also to the left, that you might accept as beehives ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the station we halted before a ramshackle old two-storey house that was covered by roses and hidden among orange and fig trees. The approach led through an irregular plantation of cedar and pepper trees, pomegranates and other shrubs, and masses of chrysanthemums and cosmos that ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... the time when George III was king, and our scene of action lies only at an old farm-house six miles or so from Finchley —a quaint, ramshackle, commodious, old-fashioned, thatched farm-house that we see only in pictures now, and which has long since been improved off the ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... alley, between ramshackle frame buildings. The end of the alley was blocked by a one-story brick building, out of which issued the rhythmic thunder of the presses, running off the first edition of the Enquirer. He was eleven, and Cheese-Face was thirteen, and they both carried the Enquirer. That ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small—a very small—way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... so farther on there stood another group of farm buildings—this one close to the road. An unpainted barn, a long and low, rather ramshackle structure with sagging slidedoors that could no longer be closed, stood in the rear of the farm yard. The dwelling in front of it was a tall, boxlike two-story house, well painted in a rather loud green with ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... reached their destination when, as they passed a particularly ramshackle building with a saloon on the ground floor, they became conscious of a terrific hubbub going on within. There was a sound of shouting and blows, and every once in a while the whole crazy building would fairly rock as some heavy body crashed against ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... wished to refresh his excellent memory; the instruments he used when to the entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added the alluring chink of gold belonged also to that generous patron. There were some old clothes in the ramshackle deal wardrobe; there was some linen and underclothing in the knobless chest of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester repeating-rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and ammunition-pouch, a hunting-knife and a Colt's revolver of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... be written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church member's essential Confession of Faith, to be developed and expanded according to the need and circumstances, would be a real power in a chaplain's hands. The men's behaviour in billets—ramshackle barns for the most part—was almost exemplary. Only once or twice small episodes occurred in connection with hen-roosts, and on one occasion a sucking-pig was slaughtered amid its brethren at the dead of night. It must have been a temporary madness that possessed the author of this ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... to Whitechapel; a painter can pick up more food for his easel in this queer, old street—an antiquarian can find there more tales and crusts for his noddle, than in all Regent Street and Portland Place. We love a ramshackle place like this; it does one good to get out of the associations of the present century, and to retrograde a bit; it is pleasant to see how people used to pig together in ancient days, without any of the mathematical formalities of the present day; it keeps one's eye in tone ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... quiet street, he stopped and dismounted before the ever-open door of a ramshackle, one-story frame building. Tossing the reins over the flattened ears of his vicious pinto he strode into the building and leaned easily against the bar, where he drummed with his fingers and sank into ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... past civilians had crept through the gates of Metz, leading old horses, drawing ramshackle carts filled with mattresses, faded silk chairs, gilt ormolu stands, clocks and cloaks and parrot cages; all the strange things that men and women use for their lives. The furniture that had fled in other carts from villages now dust upon a dead plain was ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... have a late second breakfast at Sardi's, the little ramshackle Sausalito restaurant, whose tables, visible through green arches, hung almost directly over the water. It was a cheap meal, oily and fried, but Susan was quite happy, hanging over the rail to watch the shining surface of the water that was so near. The reflection of the ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... William Linder, as he had fondly hoped, but to an obscure address not far from the Navy Yard in Brooklyn. To this address, having looked up and gathered in the B-flat trombonist, Average Jones led the way. The pair lurked in the neighborhood of the ramshackle house watching the entrance, until toward evening, as the door opened to let out a tremulous wreck of a man, palsied ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... hand the group was moving to the rear of the station, and now came in sight of a ramshackle automobile with a Mexican at the wheel, easily distinguished by his swarthy coloring and his ragged mustaches, as well as by his peculiar dress—a steep crowned hat like a sugar loaf, with a very wide brim, a tight bolero jacket that did not reach to the waist and disclosed a dark blue silken shirt ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... hour the two boys, guided by Mayor Bradley, had examined the entire settlement. A little way down the railroad track they found a rather ramshackle building, mostly tin roof, and behind it a large plot of ground surrounded with a high corral or fence. The sign read "Buck's Corral." In the East it would have been called a livery stable. The air navigators engaged the place at five dollars a day for a week or more, ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... fashioned from green cottonwood planks. Cottonwood lumber is full of whims and caprices,—bending, twisting, cracking like brown paper, so as to be wholly unfit for ordinary carpentry; but there was no other material available. Six canoes were made to hang together somehow; and in these ramshackle structures, together with the two periogues, the party covered more than a thousand miles of the roughest water of the Missouri. Annoyance was to be expected. The boats were continually splitting, opening at the seams, ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... Jimmie Dale's lips tightened suddenly. It was very curious! There was an "upstairs" to the place, such as it was, but if Melinoff was up there alone, or with the Pippin, they were up there in the dark unless they were in the rear upstairs room; in which case they could not, in view of the ramshackle nature of the building, have made the slightest movement without making themselves heard from ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Many ramshackle old wagons were already drawn up in the barn-yard and hitched to trees along the cart track. Their owners were grouped in the dooryard around the stoves and tables and boxes of "articles too numerous to mention," chattering ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... days from Tali-fu), bleak and perched away up among the clouds, could never be called a town; it is merely a ramshackle place which gives one sleep and food in the difficult stage between ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... by with your arms folded while Austria is strangling your little brother to death." What answer did the Russian Slav give? He gave the only answer that becomes a man. ["Hear, hear!"] He turned to Austria, and said: "You lay hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle empire [loud applause and laughter] limb from limb." And he is doing ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... first on a flat beach of deep black sand, where they generally left their personal effects for lack of means of transportation. They climbed to a ragged thoroughfare of open sheds and ramshackle buildings, most of them in the course of construction. Beneath crude shelters of all sorts and in great quantities were goods brought in hastily by eager speculators on the high prices. The four hundred deserted ships lying at anchor in the harbor had dumped ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... accord and do not pretend to be in accord. The idea that variety is permissible in belief and conduct is deeply rooted in later Buddhism: there are many vehicles, some better than others no doubt and some very ramshackle, but all are capable of conveying their passengers to salvation. Nominally the Mahayana was divided into only two schools of philosophy: practically every important treatise propounds a system with features ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... known how badly he and his wife felt every time they saw the wretched hovel, the ramshackle outhouse, the stony potato patch, and the sister-in-law's ragged children, they would have understood how his heart went out to his father. The worst of all was that the father persisted in giving ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... Hanks?" repeated the lock-keeper. "I should say 'no'! young lady," shaking his head emphatically at Ruth's question. "Why, who ever would sail as a passenger on that old ramshackle thing? I reckon it'll fall to pieces some day soon and block ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... had neither legs nor arms, and was drawn through the streets in a small cart by four dogs. By looking at you he could see all the clockwork inside, as could a boy who was led about by his mother at the end of a string. Every Friday there was the market, when a dozen ramshackle carts containing vegetables and cheap crockery filled the centre of the square, resting in line on their shafts. A score of farmers' wives or daughters in old-world garments squatted against the town-house within walls of butter on cabbage-leaves, ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... straits, and the huge Cape Horners creeping out to sea, and imminent Tamalpais. Thence, on my homeward way, I might visit that strange and filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of wild animals and birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of monkeys, and a poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whisky was administered by a proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even neglect Nob Hill, which is itself a kind of slum, being the habitat of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... converging on the practical abolition of distances and the general freedom of people to live anywhere they like over large areas—will mean very frequently an actual local segregation. There will be districts that will be clearly recognized and marked as "nice," fast regions, areas of ramshackle Bohemianism, regions of earnest and active work, old-fashioned corners and Hill Tops. Whole regions will be set aside for the purposes of opulent enjoyment—a thing already happening, indeed, at points along the Riviera to-day. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... adored the sand dunes, their colour seemed to him more lovely than anything he had ever seen; and he was enchanted with the canals and the long lines of poplars. When they got out of the Gare du Nord, and trundled along the cobbled streets in a ramshackle, noisy cab, it seemed to him that he was breathing a new air so intoxicating that he could hardly restrain himself from shouting aloud. They were met at the door of the hotel by the manager, a stout, pleasant man, who spoke tolerable English; Mr. Goodworthy was an old friend and ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... are an old family,' he went on with great complacency. 'The castle, as perhaps you are aware, is a huge, ramshackle place, honeycombed underneath with cellars. I dare say in the old days some of these cellars and caves were the resort of smugglers, and the receptacle of their contraband wares, doubtless with the full knowledge of my ancestors, who, I regret to admit, as a business man, were not too particular ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... met when I were comin' back from de ash dump," Eradicate explained. One of the colored man's duties was to cart ashes away from Tom's various shops, and dump them in a certain swampy lot. With an old ramshackle cart, and his mule, Boomerang, Eradicate did this ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... opens into hall, and exactly opposite very short flight of stairs leading directly to doorway of Isaac's den above. Ramshackle old place, low ceilings. Isaac, when sitting in his den, can look down, and, by means of a transom over the rear door of the shop, see the customers as they enter from the street, while he also keeps an eye on his assistant. Latter ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... skittle-playing and public-housey in his countenance.) We have been up at five every morning, and on the road before seven. We were three carriages: a sort of wagon, with a cabriolet attached, for the luggage; a ramshackle villainous old swing upon wheels (hired at Geneva), for the children; and for ourselves, that travelling chariot which I was so kind as to bring here for sale. It was very cold indeed crossing the Jura—nothing ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... urgently of lurking assassins; of murderous Easterns armed with those curved knives which sometimes flashed before my eyes in dreams; of a deathly menace which hid in the shadows about me, in the many shadows cloaking the holes and corners of the ramshackle building, draping arches, crannies and portals to which the ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... New York. We have a studio and some other rooms up at the top of one of those queer old houses on Washington Square—you know it,—funny, ramshackle old place. Father has afternoons, and mother and I feed the lions and the lesser animals with tea and strawberry jam. It's very good fun, living ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... split halves of a little, scraggly, ramshackle town, danced in white water where the ford had been, and darted onward. Now Banneker began to hold against the current, scanning the shores until, with a quick wrench, he brought the stern around and ran it up on ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ramshackle place put together of doors and windows fitted into walls, made of boards, all taken from ruinous cottages that had been pillaged, and their wreckage pieced together as best could be managed. Here Iver knocked, and the door was opened cautiously by an old man, who would ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... matter about that, if he was employed in another shop, he had no right to go into Number Thirteen. That's a violation of rules. But if he's in Rad's ramshackle stable he can ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... they had termed "the calaboose," a big, ramshackle, one-roomed barn-like structure. Piled in so thick that we almost had to stand up, there were so many of us—we were held there till ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... dismantled restaurant. There was to be a sale on the premises on the morrow, and the lower room had that day been filled with all the 'plant' of the restaurant, and all or almost all the poor household stuff from upstairs. It was an odd, ramshackle collection; and poor Dora, who had been walking round looking at the auction tickets, was realising with a sinking heart how much debt the sale would still leave unprovided for. But she had found friends. Father Vernon had met the creditors for her. There had ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "That old ramshackle of a lumber nag whose every rib you can count through her skin is your beautiful thoroughbred?" ejaculated his friend, incredulously. "Come now, don't ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... gulch of the Lunar Appenines, a pattern of dazzling glare and harsh moonshadows. Ramshackle mine-buildings of prefabricated plastic straggled out from the shrouding blackness under a pinnacled ridge. Denver eyed the forbidding terrain with hair-raising panic. He checked the speed of the racing space sled, circled once, and tried to pick ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... first-floor windows of which announced the tenancy of a maker of gymnastic appliances; and having kissed Madame Brandt's hand with awful solemnity and bowed deeply to me, he preceded us down the passage, out into the yard, and into a ramshackle studio at the end, where ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... undecided second or two, faced about and began to retrace his steps. He cut through the Ellery back yard and came out on the cross street at whose corner the Fultons lived. The house was a big ramshackle affair of a dozen rooms or so, far too large a place for the Fultons, since there had been only the two of them, Tod's mother having died when he was only a little tad. Indeed, as Tod said, they ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... the piazza, and took these steps with her usual gentle precision of movement. She had no sooner taken up the position which she felt to be the proper one for her, than round the corner came the Bywood stage,—a long, lumbering, ramshackle vehicle, in which sat Mrs. Murray, a kind-looking nurse, and the twelve convalescent children who were to have the first ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... they were using for a fire house. But we had a fine time," and he chuckled at the recollection. "And next day we finished up without the need of a wagon. It was like camp days to scatter ourselves about the big ramshackle place." ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... spot is the campo santo of San Gabriel; rather desolate, and very dusty. The ramshackle wooden crosses stagger wildly on the shapeless mounds; the dilapidated whitewashed railings, cracked and blistered by the sun, look much as though they might be bleached bones, tossed carelessly about; and the badly painted, misspelled inscriptions yield up their brief announcements only to a ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... was, in all conscience. A single street, wide enough, almost, for a plaza, paralleled the railroad tracks, the buildings, such as they were, all strung along the further side in an irregular line. One of these, ramshackle, weather-worn, labeled laconically "The Store," stood directly opposite the station. The architecture of the "Paloma Springs Hotel," next door, was very similar. On either side of these two structures a dozen or more discouraged-looking ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... hour, week after week, year after year. Mary could decorate over thirty dozen cups and saucers in a day, at three halfpence the dozen. 'Doesn't she ever do anything else?' some visitor might curiously inquire, whom Titus Price was showing over his ramshackle manufactory. 'No, always the same thing,' Titus would answer, made proud for the moment of this phenomenon of stupendous monotony. 'I wonder how she can stand it—she has a refined face,' the visitor might remark; and Mary Beechinor ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... a state of activity that lasts for several hours. Long before dawn, the roads leading townwards are busy with all manner of vehicles, from the great waggon drawn by four white horses driven tandem, and laden with a moving stack of hay, to the ramshackle donkey-cart conveying half a score of cabbages, a heap of dandelions grubbed from the meadows, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... dodging from tree to tree along the edge of the mere, in order to keep out of view of anyone moving on the road. Over against the ale-house I crept still more warily through the wood to the edge of the road. There was no one moving in or about the ramshackle little place, but there was one unexpected thing in sight which gave me pause. Hitched by the reins to a staple in the signpost was the finest horse I had ever set eyes on, a slender, sinewy stallion, champing on his bit and pawing nervously ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... yarn let me note the fact that there are two schools amongst our brethren afloat. Roger Keyes and those of the younger school who sport the executive curl upon their sleeves are convinced that now, when we have replaced the ramshackle old trawlers of 18th March by an unprecedented mine-sweeping service of 20-knot destroyers under disciplined crews, the forcing of the Straits has become as easy ... well; anyway; easier than what we soldiers tried to do on Saturday. Upon these fire-eaters de Robeck has hitherto thrown ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... tellin' you, that there was no' be no shootin' till there was no fear o' missin'? It is not good to have to shoot; but it iss a verra great deal waur to shoot an' miss. If that's Gavin Stevenson, the muckle nowt, I declare I'll brek his ramshackle ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... inspection all of the boat-houses appeared to be deserted, except the one farthest away. This was slightly removed from the others, and more ramshackle looking; but someone was evidently there, for they could hear the sound of hammering, which seemed to come from within. Over the door hung a ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell
... mien carrying a dignified courtliness which is said to have won him a handsome compliment from Queen Victoria—a gentleman rotund, well-groomed, conspicuously elegant. Shoulder to shoulder with him rose the queer, raw-boned, ramshackle frame of the Illinoisan, draped in the artless handiwork of a prairie tailor, surmounted by the rugged, homely face. The service, which the new auditor followed reverently, being finished, the minister, leaving the pulpit, gave Lincoln ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... cobalt and silver, was tattered and discoloured, and so greasy that one might imagine that generations of squalid lodgers had made their meals off it. The furniture consisted of a small table, now covered with a perpetual litter of papers; a ramshackle wash-hand stand, on which a broken vegetable dish served as a receptacle for soap and such objects; a bed, which bred remarkable crops of fleas, and to which clung an old patchwork quilt, but which ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... mosquitoes that infest it, entirely on its summer visitors. At the time of the death of Mr Ira Nutcombe, the only all-the-year-round inhabitants were the butcher, the grocer, the chemist, the other customary fauna of villages, and Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who rented the ramshackle farm known locally as Flack's and eked out a precarious ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... need the Sultan require, Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire; And 'tis wonderful, surely, what music you get From the rickety, ramshackle, wheezy spinet. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... not been long on the road this day, when I saw coming towards me an equipage more picturesquely interesting than any I had ever met in the Champs-Elyses. It was a ramshackle little cart laden with sacks and a couple of children, and drawn by a pair of shaggy sheep-dogs. Cords served for harness. A man was running by the side, and it was as much as he could do to keep up with the animals. This use ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... and other passengers boarded a ramshackle aero-a-banc (the floor of which was covered with musty straw) with the intention of having a "joy-trip" to Rottingdean. The fare was two shillings and sixpence. We had not mounted five hundred feet into the air before the driver yelled to us, "Nah then, another 'arf-a-chrahn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... preparations for their early start. For himself, he would have had everything packed and corded long before dinner, if he was to start next day, except just a suit case that would hold the apparatus of immediate necessities, but then dear Hermy and Ursy were so ramshackle in their ways. Some time he would have bells put on all the shutters as he had determined to do a month ago, and then no sort of noise would disturb ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too gruesome a thing ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the pride of their lives as he was the darling of their hearts. All this the poor old things made apparent to me, but their story did not become really interesting till they began to speak of this house we are in, and of certain events which followed their removal to the ramshackle dwelling next door. The sale of this portion of the property had relieved them from their debts, but they were otherwise penniless, and were just planning the renting of their rooms at prices which would barely serve to provide them with a scanty living, when there came a letter ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... not prepare the boys for the farmer's sudden arrival at their club-house, on a Saturday afternoon, two weeks later. He drove up in a ramshackle old buggy, driving two of the finest horses in the county. Skinflint though he was, he loved horses. He came into the club-house and eyed the ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... of the store—indeed, I should like to know who would have enjoyed it. It dated back to the beginning of the last century, a tarred, coal-black, ramshackle hut. The windows were low and small, the windowpanes diminutive. The ceiling was low. Everything was arranged in such a way as to exclude the possibility of lofty ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... leave of Madame Bourrat. The rickety old vehicle started off. Presently, Fandor heard what he had expected to hear: one of his captors told the driver to take them to some other address than Police Headquarters. Owing to the rattling of the ramshackle cab—it lacked rubber tyres—Fandor, though listening with ears astretch, could not hear one ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... lucky traveller who falls into this paradise is seized with a certain instant jealousy of it, and communicates his knowledge only to his family and his friends. Nevertheless, its fame spreads slowly, and each year new discoverers flock in growing numbers to the one little hotel and its ramshackle bath-house, so that the community once absolutely and viciously utilitarian begins to take timid account of its aesthetic surroundings, and here and there a little log-cabin (as appropriate to this land ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... faces a wide, treeless valley and is backed by an equally bare hill. To the west the purple peaks of the Rampart range are visible. It is a group of ramshackle and dispersed cabins—not Western enough to be picturesque, and so far from being Eastern as to lack cleanliness or even comfort, and the young Englishman who rode over the hill one sunset was bitterly disappointed in the ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... a ramshackle farmhouse apparently deserted. Up the side of the dilapidated building ran a great wide stone chimney that reared its head through the gabled roof like a leaning Tower of Pisa. To this chimney led the wires ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... works which had been bought at his recommendation, when he wished to refresh his excellent memory; the instruments he used when to the entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added the alluring chink of gold belonged also to that generous patron. There were some old clothes in the ramshackle deal wardrobe; there was some linen and underclothing in the knobless chest of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester repeating-rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and ammunition-pouch, a hunting-knife and a Colt's revolver of large calibre, in addition to the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... about that? She used to live in New York City, and knew all the best families for miles around. When we first moved here, next to that ramshackle old place, I remember her telling me she'd known the people who used ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... single row of ramshackle buildings, not unlike a small Missouri River town. The citizens, so far as visible, formed a queer collection of old men addicted to rum. They all came out to admire Ladrone and to criticise my pack-saddle, ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small—a very small—way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The poultry she raised herself; for the fish, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... found Roy back in the Punjab, sharing a ramshackle bungalow with Lance and two of his brother officers; good fellows, both, in their diametrically opposite fashions; but superfluous—from Roy's point of view. When he wanted a quiet 'confab' with Lance, one or both were sure to come strolling in and hang round, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... to a ramshackle building reminiscent of the days when the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an age when the American merchantman flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven-seas. On the ground floor was ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... set La Cibot nicely on fire," Remonencq told his sister, when she came to take up her position again on the ramshackle chair. "And now," he continued, "I shall go to consult the only man that knows, our Jew, a good sort of Jew that did not ask more than fifteen per cent of ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... or two ramshackle old carriages with bony horses harnessed to them standing about the station, and in one of these Mr. Brown was soon on his way up the street toward the main ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... than half the height of the original: the vacant space has been very roughly filled up, and the numerous holes and crevices support a fine growth of weeds, and a strong young tree has also taken root in the ramshackle stone work. From the central tower, gargoyles grin above the elaborately carved buttresses and finials in remarkable contrast to ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... the outer forts; I had noted a work close to the road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the long and ugly suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the ramshackle houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... for the Prince in our ramshackle old vehicle, and he took another, being apparently very anxious to arrive at the hotel before us. He spoke to his driver, who lashed the one poor nag so furiously that Maida cried out with rage, and they flashed past us, the horse ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... babel not only of tongues but of ideals, the rise of new social conditions, the presence of agitators and mischief-makers who are experts in setting men against each other in opposing classes, the coming of destructive agents whose theories have made some old world countries into ramshackle wrecks, the persistence of the elements of lawlessness with outbreaks here and there—all these and much more have marked the unprecedented history of these years in this last new country in the world. And Canada, perhaps, will ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... coach as it drew up opposite the inn. The ostler stepped out into the street with his stable lanthorn. Signora Marta, shivering, with a huge shawl over her head, took up her position, lanthorn in hand, behind the Signor Conte, and the ramshackle old coach, rattling over the uneven round cobble-stones of the execrable pavement with a crash of noise that seemed to threaten that every jolt would be its last, came to a standstill at the ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... official, "you are no more in prison than I am; what do you mean?" "Oh," said the man, "I have only come down for a load of skins for Voivode So-and-so, but I must go into prison again when I get back to Cettinje." The prison was a ramshackle building, in the walls of which a vigorous push of several strong men would have made a breach, and I have often seen all the prisoners out in the sun with a single guard, on absolutely equal terms; and if, as sometimes happened, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... famous book-hunters had picked up bargains. Charles Hutt, had he lived, would have become one of the leading booksellers of the day. He was for some years at Hodgson's, and possessed a remarkable taste for, and knowledge of, books. He left Hodgson's and started on his own account in the old ramshackle house already referred to. This shop presented so unfavourable an exterior that even the Income-tax Fiend never 'called in,' although at one time there were several thousands of pounds' worth of books in it. Hutt did ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... practically, and proud of the work of her head and hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions. By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers. At college she had learned a trade without knowing it. The girls had found out that she was the designer of her own gowns. She had no idle moments ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was no duplicate key to apartment No. 12, citizen Rouget ordered his men to break in the door. It did not take very long: the house was old and ramshackle and the doors rickety. The next moment the party stood in the room which a while ago the Englishman had so accurately described to pere Lenegre in petite ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... face was full of doubt and pain, and she was perplexed by the fly-man's dull eyes, his starved horse, his ramshackle vehicle, the wet road, the leaden sky. It was one of those moments when the familiar appears strange and grotesque. Then, gathering all her ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... Moreover, Elias should compose little comedies that could be performed by their small party, and the profits were to be equally shared between them. They also put their hands together and vowed to be true and friendly, and not to separate till they came back to ramshackle Uzes. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... means, my dear one. I dare say I am inhuman, and supercilious, and contemptibly proud of my poor old ramshackle family; but I do honestly confess to you that I feel as if I belonged to a different species from the people who are ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Sprite! I know your pluck and perseverance. You'll get there, with bells on! Take the easiest pose you can, and hang on to that foam-crested wave near you. It sways a bit, but it's firmly anchored. I looked out for that, before I trusted you to this ramshackle old ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... little "Three-penny" edition published by Messrs. Cassell! It was in a Barge, towed by three Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them—this is twenty-five years ago, reader!—a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand—and teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered—as the friendly mists rose—under a great Tarpaulin at ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the distinguished party. Don Vincente, journeying south from Sta. Marta, had embarked at Cayta, the principal port of Costaguana, and came to Sulaco by sea. But the chairman of the railway company had courageously crossed the mountains in a ramshackle diligencia, mainly for the purpose of meeting his engineer-in-chief engaged in the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... and answer the facts were speedily brought out. Six hard customers, awaiting sentence after trial for larceny, burglary, assault with intent to kill, and finally desertion, had been cooped up together in an inner room of the ramshackle old wooden building that served for a prison, had sawed their way through to open air, and, timing their essay by the sound of the trumpets that told them the whole garrison would be out at morning drill, had slipped through ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... or so farther on there stood another group of farm buildings—this one close to the road. An unpainted barn, a long and low, rather ramshackle structure with sagging slidedoors that could no longer be closed, stood in the rear of the farm yard. The dwelling in front of it was a tall, boxlike two-story house, well painted in a rather loud green with ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... insist that you shall stand by with your arms folded while Austria is strangling your little brother to death." What answer did the Russian Slav give? He gave the only answer that becomes a man. ["Hear, hear!"] He turned to Austria, and said: "You lay hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle empire [loud applause and laughter] limb from limb." And he is doing it! ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... chieftainship apparently was that, unlike his brothers, he wore shoes and stockings; these three relatives constituted his allies and kinsmen; the so-called Spanish main was in reality an arm of the sea better known in the Hebrides as Loch Scrone; and the war-galley was an old, ramshackle, battered, and betarred boat belonging generally to the fishing-village of Erisaig; for, indeed, the boat was so old and so battered that nobody now seemed to claim any ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... us, faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too gruesome a ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the group was moving to the rear of the station, and now came in sight of a ramshackle automobile with a Mexican at the wheel, easily distinguished by his swarthy coloring and his ragged mustaches, as well as by his peculiar dress—a steep crowned hat like a sugar loaf, with a very wide brim, ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... to-morrow, as soon as I can get away. Give Molly my love, Jock, and say I was often thinking of her. He is a decent fellow, Jock Magee!" she explained to her companion, as the ramshackle vehicle trundled away in the darkness. "A decent fellow, but he has been terrible unlucky with his wives. They fall ill on him as soon as they're married, and cost him pounds in doctors and funerals. This one has asthma, and he expects she will die too before very long. He says it doesn't give ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that, if he was employed in another shop, he had no right to go into Number Thirteen. That's a violation of rules. But if he's in Rad's ramshackle stable he ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... your living out here in this ramshackle old chicken-coop, when you might have a tidy flat on Paulina Street; and the doctor could have a desk in my office next door to his old boss." Dr. Leonard spoke testily, and Alves laid her hand ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... yes; that ramshackle place near the swamp, with the gipsy-looking people hanging about. It's curious that a house with traces of real architecture should have been built in such a place. But the people were a sulky-looking lot—do you ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... between the split halves of a little, scraggly, ramshackle town, danced in white water where the ford had been, and darted onward. Now Banneker began to hold against the current, scanning the shores until, with a quick wrench, he brought the stern around and ran it up on ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the recruits, perhaps a dozen had remained in the cars; of their non-commissioned officers, perhaps half a dozen were trying to do something, but having no directing head or hand, accomplishing little. It looked as though nothing but the bursting asunder of that ramshackle building would liberate its human charge, for even those who, battered, bleeding, and suffocated, would gladly have escaped into outer air, were packed in, sardine-like, and incapable of self-extrication. To ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... House, though a most important point in the campaign, was far from attractive in feature, being made up of a half-dozen unsightly houses, a ramshackle tavern propped up on two sides with pine poles, and the weatherbeaten building that gave official name to the cross-roads. We had no tents—there were none in the command—so I took possession of the tavern for shelter for myself and staff, and just as we had finished looking over ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... either side were tall buildings that shut out much of the light by day, while at night they made the place a veritable canyon of gloom. There were big warehouses and factories with, here and there, a smaller building, and some ramshackle dwellings that had ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... life. I'm enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the water, palmettos standing as irregular sentries along the low, reeflike island which stretched away out of the picture. There was the gigantic, lonely pine he knew well, and, yes—he could just make it out—there was his own ramshackle little pier, which stretched in undulating fashion, like a long-legged, wading caterpillar, from the abrupt shore-line of eroded coquina ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... to America I was a frequent contributor to his journal, and I corresponded with him privately. I went down to Northampton and delivered a lecture at his request, under the auspices of his electoral committee. The old theatre—a dirty, ramshackle place as I recollect it—was crowded, and I had my first taste of the popularity of Mr. Bradlaugh in the borough. Every mention of his name excited ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... on the road this day, when I saw coming towards me an equipage more picturesquely interesting than any I had ever met in the Champs-Elysees. It was a ramshackle little cart laden with sacks and a couple of children, and drawn by a pair of shaggy sheep-dogs. Cords served for harness. A man was running by the side, and it was as much as he could do to keep up with the animals. This use of dogs is considered ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... weed-choked irrigation ditch paralleled the trail, its wooden flumes, like the fence posts, rotting where they stood, and its walls all but obliterated by the wash of spring freshets. The depression increased as she passed close beside the ramshackle log stable, where her horse sank to his ankles in a filthy brown seepage of mud and rotting straw before the door. Two small, slouchily built stacks of weather-stained hay occupied a fenced-off enclosure, beside which, ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... courage. His letters contained simple statements of fact, but not a word of complaint. On the other hand, they were not ebullient with joy; but then, Peggy reflected, there was not much to be joyous about in a ramshackle hut on Salisbury Plain. "Dear old thing," she would write, "although you don't grouse, I know you must be having a pretty thin time. But you're bucking up splendidly, and when you get your leave I'll do a girl's ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... every detail with fastidious distaste. To-day, for the first time, a great longing possessed him for the airy ramshackle bungalows of the Frontier he loved, for the trumpet-call to "stables," for a sight of his squadron and the feel of a ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... with extraordinary leniency; for he had already planned the Dual Alliance in his mind; knowing as he did that, though in Germany Austria might be an inconvenient rival to Prussia, in Europe she was the indispensable ally of Germany. And so, though the ramshackle old German imperial castle was divided in two, and the northern portion, at any rate, brought thoroughly up to date, the neighbours still lived side by side in a "semi-detached" kind of way. It would be a mistake then to call the war of 1866 a war of deliverance. Indeed, since ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... lining with matchboard had completely transformed the three floors of the mill, a liberal allowance of a dark stain and varnish giving the finishing touches, so that in what had been a remarkably short space of time the ramshackle old mill had become a very respectable-looking observatory, only waiting for the scientific apparatus, which had ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... in a bush-clad hollow, two miles from the world in general, stood a little, old, ramshackle shanty. The location was one that seekers would hardly have found without a trail ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... am perfectly serious, Mrs. Williams. It may raise a mutiny amongst these horrid, profane sailors, but I really don't see how we are to get rid of them else. The bo'sun has cut adrift their ramshackle, old sieve of a boat, and she's now a quarter of a mile astern, half-full of water. And we can't give them one of the ship's boats to go and get their throats cut ashore. J. Perkins, Esquire, wouldn't like it. He would swear something awful, if the boat got lost. Now, don't say no, Mrs. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Laval together. We started a couple of days later, and managed to travel by rail as far as Rennes. But from that point to Laval the line was now very badly blocked, and so we hired a closed vehicle, a ramshackle affair, drawn by two scraggy Breton nags. The main roads, being still crowded with troops, artillery, and baggage waggons, and other impedimenta, were often impassable, and so we proceeded by devious ways, amidst which our driver lost himself, in such wise ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... Pine trail two men were driving in a buckboard drawn by a pair of half-broken pinto bronchos. The outfit was a rather ramshackle affair, and the driver was like his outfit. Stewart Duff was a rancher, once a "remittance man," but since his marriage three years ago he had learned self-reliance and was disciplining himself in self-restraint. A big, lean man he was, his thick shoulders and large, hairy muscular ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... of pawnshop opens into hall, and exactly opposite very short flight of stairs leading directly to doorway of Isaac's den above. Ramshackle old place, low ceilings. Isaac, when sitting in his den, can look down, and, by means of a transom over the rear door of the shop, see the customers as they enter from the street, while he also keeps an eye on his assistant. Latter always locks up and leaves promptly at six o'clock—" Jimmie ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... up, and but for the little curling up of her lip, in which her teeth bit hard, she would have looked a picture of serene indifference. We were nearing Frenchy's shack, in front of which the path leads to the cove, and finally we were opposite the ramshackle place. It must be very dreadful to a girl, who has learned to admire a man, perhaps even to love him, to discover that her idol has feet of clay. She had allowed the best of her nature, I could see it now, to be drawn in admiration and regard towards ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... camp was reached. The money valise went with me to the mess tent, and I ate supper with my feet on it, and with the big revolver lying across my knees. After supper I lugged my responsibility over to the commissary pay-office, and by the flickering light of a miner's candle stowed the money in the ramshackle old safe which was the only ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... home, and the girls were most lively and good-natured. They heard that the Upedes were to have a picnic at a grove upon the shore of Lake Triton on the Saturday week, and that Old Dolliver and his ramshackle stage, and another vehicle of the same caliber, were engaged for ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... although she prefers to descant upon the immortal eighties, when she was a leader herself and 'money wasn't everything.' We never had so much of it anyhow. I know Grandfather Ballinger built this ramshackle old house—" ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... such-like sheds, With plenty of public-houses—two Foxes, one Green Man, three Bunch of Grapes, one Crown, and six King's Heads. The Green Man is reckoned the best, as the only one that for love or money can raise A postillion, a blue jacket, two deplorable lame white horses, and a ramshackle "neat post-chaise!" There's one parish church for all the people, whatsoever may be their ranks in life or their degrees, Except one very damp, small, dark, freezing cold, a little Methodist Chapel of Ease; And close by the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... job is hard. This 'ere bit of bread is as hard as wood, but I am getting through with it, and that's what I mean to do about our escape. Where you can't take a fair bite at anything, why, you must nibble; and I must go on nibbling now to find some way of getting out of this here ramshackle place. If I can just contrive a hole so that I can climb on the roof whenever I like, and be able to cover it up again so that these beauties don't know, I don't feel a bit doubtful of being able to slide down to the eaves, and then hold tight and get my toes in here and my toes ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... four miles brought the party to a patch of woodland where many of the tall pines had been hewn the previous winter. The roof of a ramshackle hut was outlined against a background of young birches, and a rough path made in hauling the logs to the main road led directly to ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the footholes to the top. He could then see that there was a square space which, though similar in appearance to the rest of the gallery, concealed the entrance to the shaft. He pushed it upward. It gave easily. It was a trap-door, leading into a square, ramshackle shed! ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... plants which encrust the rocks and bear, closely set in their compact, green, velvet-like foliage, tiny flowers as brilliant as gems. A ruby-red one amongst these is "the stalkless bladder-wort" (Silene acaulis), having no more resemblance at first sight to the somewhat ramshackle bladder-wort of our fields than a fairy has to a fishwife. There are many others of these cushion-forming, diminutive plants, with white, blue, yellow, and pink florets. Examined with a good pocket lens, they reveal unexpected beauties of detail—so graceful and harmonious ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... except to business men. One part of the city is very like another. I was told that some of the finest buildings were of the Italian order; but I should say that by far the greater number were of the Ramshackle order. Although the first house in the place was only built in 1835, the streets nearest to the wharves look already old and worn out. They are for the most part of wood, and their paint is covered with dirt. But though prematurely old, they ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... out and up the path toward the little ramshackle cottage she turns and flashes one of them wide smiles on Babe and ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... troops, the black troops, the blue troops of the army of priests; the snuffy regiments of Capuchins, grave and grotesque; the trim French abbes; my lord the bishop, with his footman (those wonderful footmen); my lord the cardinal, in his ramshackle coach and his two, nay three, footmen behind him;—flunkeys, that look as if they had been dressed by the costumier of a British pantomime; coach with prodigious emblazonments of hats and coats-of-arms, that seems as if it came out of the pantomime too, and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cried Switzer scornfully as Romayne took his seat, "the British Empire! at the first stern blow this ramshackle empire will fall to pieces. Then Great Britain will be forced to surrender her robber hold upon these great free states which she has stolen and which she now keeps in chains." (Cries of "Never!" "Rot!" "Shut ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... The position of the primary teachers is unsatisfactory, that of the secondary teachers is impossible. When we attempt improvement of both will "Ulster" fight? And there is something even more human and poignant. The National Schools of this country are in many cases no better than ramshackle barns. Unless the teacher and the manager, out of their own pockets, mend the broken glass, put plaster on the walls, and a fire in the grate, the children have got to shiver and cough for it. Winter in Ireland, like the King ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... home with her. He wondered how her fastidiousness stood the grimy house in Magpie Alley and its ramshackle habit of life, after the distinctions and beauty of Windover, but he thought it was probably very good for her, part of the experience which should mould the citizen. Gerda shrank from no experience. At the corner of Bouverie Street they met a painted girl out for hire, strayed for some ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... for services rendered. Anybody else in his place would long since have become a millionaire; but he had not got much beyond fastening a pair of silver spurs in his Kordovan leather boots, and making use of a ramshackle old caleche, to which he attached two horses, trained by his own hand ever since they were colts. This, moreover, was only when he wanted to cut ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... the mercy of one idea only, and he began to see, very soon after he had investigated the two houses—the ramshackle shop and the riverside den—that if he intended to progress he could not afford to sit in the street and drink in the cafe opposite Leh Shin's dwelling for an interminable space of weeks. He had limitless patience, but he was quick of action, and saw any flaw in his own system ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... disciplinarian. Hunter wrote Powell that as York had been convicted of "the most atrocious offence without any circumstances of doubt or alleviation" he was to be hanged. When York was made aware of his fate, he promptly escaped from the ramshackle gaol ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... a new experience. If only now she could forget the agony that Dorothy must be experiencing, it would not be so dreadful to go at this early morning hour, over the dewy roads, in the ramshackle buggy with her benefactor at ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... understand; unless they're made of leather in the first place, and sometimes it seems so. The squire had his nap out, I suppose, and then he woke up. When he opened his eyes, there in front of him, instead of his tall mahogany desk, was a ramshackle painted thing, with no handles to the drawers, and all covered with ink. He looked round, and what does he see but strange things everywhere; strange to his eyes, and yet he knew them. There was a haircloth sofa and three chairs, ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... springs from front to rear axle. One of the most uncomfortable conveyances to ride in ever invented, especially for the driver, for, if the coach was not heavily loaded, when the front wheels dropped into a hole the old ramshackle thing was liable to topple over on the animals; and, if the driver was not securely strapped to the seat when the rear wheels reached the hole, he would land some distance in the rear. The contractor had the old ark properly balanced before starting, so ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... their heads sympathetically, finger to brow, when they speak of Widow Ashby's Sabrina living alone in her ramshackle house far up at the head of Crockett's Hollow. "A forsaken girl that holds grudge and works conjure comes to be a sorry, sorry woman," ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... his business in any other way was allowed to use his own automobile but even these soon went out of commission and then bicycles were forbidden except for rides to and from business, work or school. A few ramshackle taxicabs still survive in Berlin at the railway stations, driven by benzol instead of gasoline and shod with spring tires. No one can keep a taxi waiting, it is subject when waiting to be commandeered ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... and went into the hotel (I lingering behind to help Brian) I noticed another car behind us. It was more like a taxi-cab than a brave, free-born automobile, but it had evidently come a long way, as it was covered with dust, and from its rather ramshackle roof waved a Red ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... quarters which they have for so long occupied. I very well recollect the style of their old place of business and how the exterior strongly reminded me of the cotton warehouses in Liverpool. The interior was a big, rambling, ramshackle kind of a place with but few pretensions to being an office such as we see at the ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... dark; somewhere in the lonely woods hard by the screech owl was still calling, and the brisk autumn wind, freshening as the night advanced into the wee hours, conjured up strange noises in the loose hanging sticks of the old ramshackle fence along the roadside. Dried leaves, driven by the fitful gusts of wind, sounded like someone, or some thing, ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... said Mrs. Carradyne; and they all looked out. "Oh, yes, that's an Evesham fly—and a ramshackle thing ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... is—idleness, unthrift, and bad farming generally, degrading it far below its possibilities and natural standard of production. Cross the Channel, and Wales looks like a trim garden. Go over to France, and you find every yard of soil carefully tilled and cultivated. Even in comparatively ramshackle Sicily, among the old lava beds of Etna, the peasants raise a handful of grain on the top of a rock no bigger than a lady's work-table. In Ireland the cultivated portion of a holding is often no bigger relatively than that work-table on an acre ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... dinner. We do the rest. As every man goes out, the butler asks him if he'll have a glass of water or of grog or a cigar; he calls his car, puts him in it, and that's the end of it. Bully good plan. But in the United States that butler, whose wages are less than the ramshackle nigger I had at Garden City to keep the place neat, would have a business of his own. But here he is a sort of duke downstairs. He sits at the head of the servants' table and orders them around and that's worth more than money to an Old ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... Roger rested for a bit, then looked about him. A trail led along the canyon from the spring, westward. Roger filled the canteen, then he and Peter took the trail. It led perhaps a quarter of a mile to a deserted mine, a mine of vast workings and huge ramshackle sheds that were innocent of either windows or doors. The engine house had been nailed up, but Roger's strength and spirits had been much revived by the water. He rested for awhile, then wrenched off some boards and went in, ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... had borrowed that uncouth word, what language it was, or what it meant. Only in the old man's tattered pocket-book there were things like this found by his minister after his death. Indeed, in a museum of such relics this is still to be read under a glass case, and in old Mr. Meditation's ramshackle hand: 'Monday, death; Tuesday, judgment; Wednesday, heaven; Thursday, hell; Friday, my past life back to my youth; Saturday, the passion of my Saviour; Lord's day, creation, salvation, and my own.—M.' And ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... it with the best and be the pride of their lives as he was the darling of their hearts. All this the poor old things made apparent to me, but their story did not become really interesting till they began to speak of this house we are in, and of certain events which followed their removal to the ramshackle dwelling next door. The sale of this portion of the property had relieved them from their debts, but they were otherwise penniless, and were just planning the renting of their rooms at prices which would barely serve to provide them with ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... good excuse for not being a gentleman and a sportsman and he did not purpose to look for any reasons for doing differently. Then unexpectedly he was invited to dinner by Mr. Ephraim Tutt in a funny old ramshackle house on West Twenty-third Street with ornamented iron piazza railings all covered with the withered stalks of long dead wistarias, and something happened to him. "Payson Clifford's Twenty-five Thousand Dollar Dinner." He had no suspicion, ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... tumble-down and derelict. If this be incorrect, how could such swarms of artistic folk paint and actually lodge in Staithes? The steep road leading past the station drops down into the village, giving a glimpse of the beck crossed by its ramshackle wooden foot-bridge—the view one has been prepared for by guide-books and picture postcards. Lower down you enter the village street. Here the smell of fish comes out to greet you, and one would forgive the place this overflowing welcome if one ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... delighted the natives of the Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hotel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and English, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a creative artist. He went; ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... as I said before. Now, will you tell me, Mr. Ross, just why Mr. Hayne chose that ramshackle old shanty out there on the prairie, all by himself, unless it was to be where he could have his chosen companions with him at night and no one ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... safety," said Aunt Georgie, as she carefully arranged her spectacles, and looked about her. "Bless my heart! what a ramshackle place. ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... after. She had been carefully reared by a most loving and thoughtful mother, even in the crude old days of the army, when its fighting force was scattered in small detachments all over the wide frontier, and men, and women, too, lived on soldier rations, eked out with game, and dwelt in tents or ramshackle, one-storied huts, "built by the labor of troops." At twelve she had been placed at school in the far East, while her father enjoyed a two years' tour on recruiting service, and there, under the care of a noble woman who taught her girls to be ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... the horse, which stood in need of no such restraint, while this composite of newspaper secured his mail, and then they jogged off through the spring sunshine, side by side, in the ramshackle old buggy on a leisurely canvass of outlying districts in search of news or advertisements, or suggestions ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... two-thirds of fullness and the air touched with frost, Stuart abandoned the bed upon which he had been restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and shortened like flapping ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... a moment. Perhaps the thought of that desperate convict stealing forth amid the wind and rain still gripped them; but it began to dawn upon them also that they had been trespassing and that they had taken great liberties with this ramshackle boat. ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... the others hastened to do their part. Two of them hunted until they found the lean-to, under which a ramshackle wagon stood that excited the laughter ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... two gongs, warning and ready, to begin with, and here we'd been shuffled in by a girl's casual remark in the passage; and beautifully appointed and served when you got there and here was—Well, there were places laid for two only and a ramshackle kind of cold picnic scattered about the cloth. Everything there, help yourself kind of show. Bit of cold meat, half a cold tart, lump of cheese, loaf of bread, assortment of ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... was our home, and two other single-room apartments, similarly tenanted, opened into a pitch-dark vestibule which my fancy peopled with "evil ones." A steep stairway led up to the yard, part of which was occupied by a huddle of ramshackle one-story houses. It was known as Abner's Court. During the summer months it swarmed with tattered, unkempt humanity. There was a peculiar odor to the place which ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... compelled to cross had long been neglected, and was now thickly overgrown with weeds. Not until we turned the corner of the great ramshackle building, which in other and more prosperous days had been dedicated to the curing of the leaf, did we perceive any signs of the presence of our antagonists. They were standing upon the farther side, directly opposite the door, and both bowed slightly as we approached. The ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... hour he moved through the black, stenchful passageways, up and down ramshackle stairs, from human warren to human warren, pausing here to question, there to peer and sniff and poke with an exploring cane. Out on the street again he ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... I borrowed Angus's ramshackle old cycle, and went into Glenelg along a road which is more noteworthy for its picturesqueness than its navigable qualities, I left Garnesk to his examination with the knowledge that he would do his utmost, and that she would help ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... was an old out-of-date car, because anyone would know that the railroad people wouldn't use a good car to stand on a side track for a makeshift station. Gee whiz, we didn't care about that, we even liked it, because it was old-fashioned and kind of ramshackle; it made it seem like a good place for camping. And if it hadn't been for that old stove in the corner of it, we could never have bunked in it and cooked our meals. Crinkums, I like old things, but not ...
— Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... that appealing twitch of the garment of Roman association of which one kept renewing one's consciousness, the half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming—with its quite shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old Roman "art-life" of one's early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, the rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of which I was aware—that water was apparently dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to moisture all about you.... My ramshackle habitation had never been a very strong defence against the outside world. It seemed now to have definitely decided to abandon the struggle. The water streamed down the panes of my window opposite my bed. One patch of my ceiling (just above my only bookcase, confound it!) ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... more; she went up-stairs, and got a certain disused attic into some sort of order. The attic was far away from the rest of the house; it was the top story of a wing, which had been added on to the tall, ramshackle old house. In some of the rooms underneath, the Franklin family themselves slept; in others they lived, and in others they cooked. The rest of the house, therefore, was free for the accommodation ...
— Dickory Dock • L. T. Meade
... was the nearest neighbor. His ramshackle dwelling was an eighth of a mile from the Gould-Hamilton place. Abner had the reputation of being the meanest man in town; also he had a large family, of which Jimmie, eight years ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... made their way back towards the old gunsmith's shop. The street was deserted save for a party of roisterers, who passed them, singing at the top of their voices. They were passing a badly lighted spot, when, from a ramshackle old three-story house, they heard a shriek followed by an ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... ore was pounded to powder and robbed of its gold, was a huge, ramshackle structure. Although it had a framework of heavy timbers, yet the strong skeleton was but loosely covered with boards. Through wide cracks and many gaps in the sides of the building a flood of light poured out, and the thunder of a hundred ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... the ashes of my camp fire, full-faced and silver. An excellent host! Never once has he grumbled about light or pay and he grants me a roof without question. Ah! it's a blessed old Tavern of Stars, Garry! Ramshackle enough in all faith, for there are gaps in the tree-walls and Dame Wind's a-sweeping night and day, but luckily I've a blanket I carry by day and need ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Range in southeastern Arizona, there is a butte, and halfway up that butte is a cave, and in front of that cave is a ramshackle porch-roof or shed. This latter makes the cave into a dwelling-house. It is inhabited by an old "alkali" and half a dozen bear dogs. I sat with the old fellow one day for nearly an hour. It was a sociable visit, but economical of the ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... the picture that met his eyes was in dingy blacks and grays. The building that held the ticket, telegraph, and train despatchers' offices was a miserably old ramshackle affair, standing well in the foreground of this scene of gloom and desolation. Its windows were so coated with smoke and grime that they seemed to have been painted over in order to secure secrecy within. Here ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... painted for the same length of time; it is of heart pine, and we train the flowers and vines to cover it as much as may be, and there are many others like it, so it is not conspicuous. Our rentable property is three ramshackle cabins on the alley at the rear of the lot, for which we get four dollars a month each, when we can collect it. Our country estate is a few acres of poor land, which we rent on shares, and from which we get a few bushels of corn, an occasional load of firewood, and a ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Caesar Martin can show you something better than that," he cried, as he hirpled out (for so Malise described it afterwards) and presently returned dragging a great iron pot with a strength which seemed incredible in so ramshackle a body. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... protection, but more likely it was due to laziness and want of care. However that may have been, the interior was surprisingly substantial, with an excellent floor like that in a ballroom. I slept in a detached ramshackle room used as a kitchen, comfortable because of being open ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... less personal and more orthodox. At the close we descended the steps carefully, groped our way out quietly, and left, wondering how ever we had got to such a place at all, and how those worshipping in it could afford to Sabbatically pen themselves up in such a mysterious, ramshackle shanty. ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... bother mamma," cried Fern, clutching Peace about the ankles as she started toward the sagging door of the ramshackle old house. "Mrs. Burnett will chase you out with the broom like she did us. And 'sides, mamma won't know you. She doesn't even know Rivers and ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... so. I know that the Turkish army is under German officers. But—if war should happen, is it likely that this ramshackle nation which was fought to a standstill by the Balkan Alliance only a few months ago would be ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Newte keeping the peace between John a Hall, with his ill-regulated tongue, and the old Parson, who, to say truth, was half the cause of their unpopularity, the church services having sunk to a public scandal; and yet they durstn't cast him over, by reason that he owned eight ramshackle houses, and his curate a couple besides, and by mock-sale could turn these into ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of grass on the top of a low ridge, which is fringed with swamp on all sides save the one we made our way to, the eastern. Shortly after passing through another plantation, we saw brown huts, and in a few minutes were standing in the middle of a ramshackle village, at the end of which, through a high stockade, with its gateway smeared with blood which hung in gouts, we saw our much longed for Rembwe River. I made for it, taking small notice of the hubbub our arrival occasioned, and passed through the gateway, setting ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... we could sit in our shirt-sleeves until any hour, without any perceptible chill in the air, playing cards, or smoking and talking, or reading by a lantern. Williams and I found picket a great resource; and many a good game of whist have I had sitting in a crowded quartette in our ramshackle battery Cape-cart, with an inch of candle guttering ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... to school, and Terry cared more for the Olympic dust than that of Backsworth. She had persuaded herself that his absence would be high treason to her father, whom she respected far more at a distance than when she had been struggling with his ramshackle, easy-going ways. Even now, she was remonstrating with him about poor Terry's present misery. His last half year had been spent under the head-master, who had cultivated his historical and poetical intelligence, whereas ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... entered the black and tan joint, I took another long look at its forbidding exterior. Below, it was a saloon and dance hall; above, it was a "hotel." It was weatherbeaten, dirty, and unsightly, without, except for the entrance; unsanitary, ramshackle, within, except for the tawdry decorations. At every window were awnings and all were down, although it was on the shady side of the street in the daytime and it was now getting late. That was the mute sign post to the initiated of the character ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... in her little castle, or rather the Liberty Realty Company's little castle. She wanted to be alone. It was very quiet. Outside the birds could be heard twittering in the vine on the ramshackle little porch. The kettle sang cheerily in the kitchen. There was that musty indoor odor of the country homestead, the odor which soldier boys remembered and longed for in trenches and dugouts. And mingling with this ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... from tree to tree along the edge of the mere, in order to keep out of view of anyone moving on the road. Over against the ale-house I crept still more warily through the wood to the edge of the road. There was no one moving in or about the ramshackle little place, but there was one unexpected thing in sight which gave me pause. Hitched by the reins to a staple in the signpost was the finest horse I had ever set eyes on, a slender, sinewy stallion, champing on his bit and pawing nervously ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
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