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More "Rickety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... That was a rickety screen, with many holes in it, but as I did not know there were girls behind it, I was not disturbed by that detail. If I had known, I could not have undressed in the flood of cruel moonlight that was pouring in at the curtainless windows; I should ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... and Ann closed the lid. The chest was a rickety old affair and full of cracks—there was no danger but he would have air enough. She heard the voices out in the yard, as she shut the lid. Back she crept softly into her own room, undressed and got into bed. She could hear the men out in the yard quite plainly. "We've lost ...
— The Adventures of Ann - Stories of Colonial Times • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... dropped his work and led the way upstairs, I following expectant, to the attic. A rickety ladder rose to a kind of tower (cupola, I suppose it would be called), whence the bay spread out before me like a picture, the white islands edged with the whiter lacing of the waves. There, indeed, was the fleet, but far ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... day, Tad was not allowed to go to the review, as he had not been well the day before. The review took place across the Long Bridge, and after the President's carriage had passed down the line, a rickety cart came clattering by, drawn by a shambling old horse, and driven by a grinning negro boy. In it were Tad, Willie, Budd and Hally in new Zouave uniforms, their swords at a salute! Many a soldier sighed and smiled as that cart passed by, ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... our parts well, the whole is sure to be beautiful," says the teacher. "One rickety, badly made building will spoil our village. I'm going to draw a blackboard picture of the children who live in the village. Johnny, you haven't blocks enough for a good factory, and Jennie hasn't enough for hers. Why don't you club together ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... married, to his great amusement, and her husband had taken her on a wedding-tour, which was to be at the same time professional. On this occasion he mounted, with rather a heavy tread, to his rooms, where (on the rickety writing-table in the parlour) he found a note from Mrs. Luna. I need not reproduce it in extenso; a pale reflexion of it will serve. She reproached him with neglecting her, wanted to know what had become of him, whether he had grown too fashionable ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... and open grassy places. From the top of this ridge, half an hour later, he glimpsed a haze of smoke rising from the little valley just beyond. And when he came to a place whence he could have an unobstructed view he saw a scattering flock of sheep, a tiny stream of water and a rickety board shack. It was from this shelter that the smoke rose. It was high noon and down there the ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... in. It was a tiny hall, and on entering he stumbled over an umbrella-stand that lounged forward in a rickety position. Bethel apologised. "We're in a bit of a mess," he said. "In fact, to tell the truth, we always are!" He hung his coat in the hall and led the way into the dining-room. Mrs. Bethel and her daughter came forward. The little woman was amazing ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... eyes. "Oh, experience! I could talk of experience if I wished. I never expected, for example, that experience had this in store for me." And she pointed with her bare elbow, and with a jerk of her head, at everything that surrounded her,—at the little white house, the quince-tree, the rickety ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... himself up to the window-sill (he had climbed a rickety arbor below) and motioned to the girls to unlock the sashes. They did so and Scorch forced ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... came to see what I had done, or rather left undone, she flew into a towering passion, until she had no time to go on with it. The rattle of the rickety old mail-cart, on its way to Winchester that night, was heard, and the horn of the driver ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... homeward, enter the dark hallway, and climb three rickety flights of stairs covered by an ancient carpet of long obliterated design. The hall had an ancient smell—of the vegetables of 1880, of the furniture polish in vogue when "Adam-and Eve" Bryan ran against William ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... itself begins to disintegrate. But it is let alone, as long as it does not make the house uninhabitable, while paint is unknown. So the general appearance of a Chinese town is squalid and tumbledown. Even the yamen of a district magistrate presents crumbling walls, unkempt courtyards, rickety buildings and paper-covered windows full of holes. The palaces of the rich are often expensive, but the Asiatic has little of our ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... Day and gave a boy the bridle. "I'll be back in a minute," she explained. It was a two-story frame building, dingy and in disrepair. On the street floor was a grocery. Access to the New Day was by a rickety stairway. As she ascended this, making a great noise on its unsteady boards with her boots, she began to feel cheap and foolish. She recalled what Hull had said in the carriage. "No doubt," replied she, "I'd feel much the same way if I were going to see Jesus Christ—a ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... bare at once, which he handled with that keenness of gust that abridges a ceremonial evermore tiresome than pleasing on such pressing occasions; and now, hurrying towards the main point, we found no conveniency to our purpose, two or three disabled chairs, and a rickety table, composing the whole furniture of the room. Without more ado, he plans me with my back standing against the wall, and my petticoats up; and coming out with a splitter indeed, made it shine, as he brandished it, in my eyes; and going to work with an impetuosity and eagerness, ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... to find herself in a chamber whose plastered walls were crumbling away with dampness and festooned with cobwebs, while the uncarpeted floor was checkered with green stains of mildew, and the very old four-post bedstead on which she lay was fringed around the rickety tester with rags of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... building loomed out of the mist, and they found themselves before a doorway, over which hung the sign of "The Four Seasons." A sentry, who stood beside the entrance, presented arms and let them pass. Captain Salt led the way indoors and up a rickety staircase to the right, on the first landing of which they found two ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... restless appearance. At sun-down the wind suddenly rose to half a gale, with a cross lumpy sea and drenching showers of rain. The accommodation for the men to return to the ship was degrees from being called even fair. They had hired a rickety steam launch, scarcely capable of holding her own in ordinary weather, and two smaller boats, or gigs, neither of which was in a seaworthy condition; and in these was to be found room for upwards of forty men, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... of them to us, we found that his business was fishing, and that he forked out very fat and edible-looking fish with his trident. Shaggy, undersized horses were wading in the water, nipping off the thin spears of grass. Close to the church is a rickety farmhouse. If I lived there, I would as lief be a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... tardily and sometimes absorbs it altogether too slowly for the child's good. Its absence in the system causes a disease called rickets, in which, from all lack of lime, the bones of the child become soft and yielding. The bones of a rickety child will bend rather than break. It is slow to walk and inclines to ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... loved Jefferson. Yes, she had never felt so sure of it as now. She felt that if she had him there at that moment she would throw herself in his arms crying: "Take me, Jefferson, take me away, where you will, for I love you! I love you!" But Jefferson was not there and the rickety chairs in the tiny bedroom and the cheap prints on the walls seemed to jibe at her in her misery. If he were there, she thought as she looked into a cracked mirror, he would think her very ugly with her eyes all red from crying. He would not marry her now in any case. No self-respecting ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... the track. In front, a few rotting planks proclaimed that once upon a time the place had boasted a real freight platform. Probably, back in some long-forgotten age, a station agent had also held forth in the rickety shanty. A sign hung on each end of the crumbling structure on which could still be deciphered the legend "KEEGAN." On the opposite side of the track was an old, disused siding. The only other feature ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... very sight of it excites his organ of destructiveness. Don't you understand me? You hate sin, you know. Well, I hate disease. Moral evil is your devil, and physical evil is mine. I hate it, little or big; I hate to see a fellow sick; I hate to see a child rickety and pale; I hate to see a speck of dirt in the street; I hate to see a woman's gown torn; I hate to see her stockings down at heel; I hate to see anything wasted, anything awry, anything going wrong; I ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... afterward Davis referred to the matter again. "I have a declining respect for platforms," he said. "I would sooner have an honest man on any sort of a rickety platform you could construct than to have a man I did not trust on the best platform which could be made." This stung Douglas. "If the platform is not a matter of much consequence," he demanded, "why press that question to the disruption of the party? ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of six or seven feet, and possessed neither cabin nor staterooms, the space between the superstructure and the rail being about three feet wide. You could stay there, or, if you did not incommode the engineer, you could go inside and sit on a coal pile. There was a bridge approached by a rickety stair, and I judged that my deck chair would fill it completely, leaving about six inches for the captain's promenade. Behind the superstructure there was a sort of after-deck, nearly four feet of it. ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... spent on farm-buildings, still often old and rickety, with deficient and insanitary accommodation; in Devonshire the farmer was bound by his lease to repair 'old mud and wooden houses', at a cost of 10 per cent. on his rent, and there were many such all over England. Farm-buildings were often at the extreme end ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... strength, undimmed energy, increased zest; faltering indeed he was still, not better, not more unselfish; but he had a sense of truer values, more proportion, more contentment. The mysteries of life were as dark as ever, but at least he no longer thought that he had the key; in those days his little rickety system of life, that trembled in every breeze, had seemed for him to bridge all gaps, to explain all mysteries. Now indeed chaos stretched all about him, full of huge mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the corner of the house. But the noise conveyed no meaning to her. She had just stretched out her hand to grasp that of the unknown, when there came a tremendous crash which shot her off the ice and into the water. The shock which sent her into the water, however, steadied the rickety bridge over which the stranger was crawling by jamming the ice closer under it, and the man, catching her as she took her plunge, held her fast, then dragged her up beside him by sheer strength ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... the ladder, shouldered it, and stepping to a square opening in one corner of the rickety ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... ill-furnished, its air was the pure air of the mountains and the way to it through things green and lovely. To the new we went through squalid streets, westward, toward the river; we turned into a dilapidated tenement; we climbed three flights of rickety stairs into a room which compared to mine as mine to the house of Rufus Blight. The lighted gas revealed hardly more than a narrow cell, with dirty, torn paper on the walls, a narrow bed, a cheap table, and a single chair. Giving me the chair, my host seated himself upon the bed, so close to ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... rickety stairs, and saw a little bedroom under the eaves, in which stands an old, ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... only spot whereon the divine victim of expiation could be offered up; and it soon came to be known that, to by-lanes and obscure houses in the cities numbers of persons flocked on Sundays, presided over by their own Sogarth Aroon. On one occasion, already noticed, the floor of a rickety house, where they were worshipping, gave way, to the killing and maiming of many; thenceforth, Catholics were allowed to assemble in public to the knowledge of all, and, though "discoverers" were still legally entitled ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... at last! Oh, the exhilaration of it! Admiral of three rickety ships and all the unknown seas; governor of a hundred disreputable sailors and the realms ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... within easy shot now, and I stopped to make sure of my rickety old weapon. A dragoon's musket would not have needed such constant care. "Life turns on trifles," ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... interior of the room more cheerful. The furniture had been put in during the reign of George III, and last dusted in that of William and Mary. A black horse-hair sofa ran along one wall. There was a deal table, a chair, and a rickety bookcase. It was a room for a realist to write in; and my style, such as it ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... for the first time, some four years before, from the bridge of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, more or less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning, and a slight mist—an opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens, only without the fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot from ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... more perfectly merely makes matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is frequently one of the worst of the routineers. Even machines are not altogether inflexible, and sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad deviation from the original plans is a poor rickety attempt to adapt the machine to changing conditions. Think what would have happened had we actually remained stolidly faithful to every intention of the Fathers. Think what would happen if every statute were enforced. By the sheer force of circumstances we have twisted ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... telescope. In fact, a moderately good telescope, mounted on a steady stand, working easily and conveniently, will not only enable the observer to pass his time much more pleasantly, but will absolutely exhibit more difficult objects than a finer instrument on a rickety, ill-arranged stand. A good observing-chair is also a matter of some importance, the least constraint or awkwardness of position detracting considerably from the power of distinct vision. Such, at ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... to Granton in a terribly rickety 'machine,' as our northern friends call their cabs, the first old salt we encountered on the pier replied to our anxious inquiry, 'Why, that's The Lily sailing round the harbour's mouth,' as at that moment she ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... half-a-dozen steam-engines at work, which shall turn some few thousands of spindles, spinning and twisting some few millions of pounds of yarn, by which, after nearly three quarters of a century that the cotton manufacture has been planted, "swathed, rocked, and dandled" with legislative fondness into a rickety nursling, some fifty millions of yards of cotton cloths are said to be painfully brought forth in the year; the value of which may probably be equal to the same or a larger quantity of French cottons introduced by contraband, and consumed in the provinces of Catalonia and Arragon themselves—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... 813. Scrofulous and rickety children are the most usual sufferers in this way. They are generally remarkable for large heads, great precocity of understanding, and small, delicate bodies. But in such instances, the great size of the brain, and the acuteness of the mind, are the results of ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... out and round about ran the file of children, over heaps of logs, under the jutting ends of piled planks, and just as the policeman's heavy boots trod the towing-path Gerald halted at the end of a little landing-stage of rotten boards, with a rickety handrail, cried "Pax!" and blew ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible among the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered, tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries, the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying roofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings, bursting open at doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as an overripe melon ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... himself been an expression of the fullest physical life: and now, in his five and seventieth year, since the 7th of last May, he preserves both mind and body in a magnificent vigor. If his soul had been lodged in a sickly, rickety body, he could hardly have written these lines from 'Saul'. Nor could he have written 'Caliban upon Setebos', especially the opening lines: "Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, with elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Some carried naked babes astride their hips; some smoked long, slender cigars of their own rolling. Half-clad children of all ages, mixtures of mestizo, Spaniard, and Jamaican negro, trotted along beside them; and at intervals a blustering cochero rattled around the corner in a rickety, obsolete type of trap behind ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... ran out on to the sand, for the shed was on the seashore, and he beckoned me to follow. To my astonishment, we found out there an old rickety bedstead with a much rent and rusted spring mattress—apparently left for me providentially. It was so old and useless that it could not be considered property, even in Russia. It belonged to no one. Its nights were over. I gave it one ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... the hall's strong saturation of smells of cheap cookery. The parlor furniture was rapidly going to pieces; the chromos and prints hung crazily awry; dust lay thick upon the center table, upon the chimney-piece, upon the picture frames, upon the carving in the rickety old chairs. Only by standing did Susan avoid service as a dust rag. It was typical of the profound discouragement that blights or blasts all but a small area of our modern civilization—a discouragement due in part to ignorance—but not at all to the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... town, with its lazy white people and its trifling niggers, to a place where there's music and art, and life and society—where there's something going on all the time, I'd like to marry you. But if I did so now, you'd take me out to your rickety old house, with your daffy old uncle and his dumb old housekeeper, and I should lose my own mind in a week or ten days. When you can promise to take me to New York, I'll promise to marry you, Ben. I want to travel, and to see things, to visit the art galleries and libraries, to hear Patti, and to ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Shepherd's Companion. Some of you call it Rickety Dick, or Willy Wagtail." Turning to the Kangaroo especially, it continued, "If you can bring yourself to speak to anything so obtrusive and gossiping, without any ancestry or manners whatever, you will be able to learn all you need from that bird. Humans and Wagtails fraternise together. ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... over the door; and making for this, and keeping it on my right, I found myself in a narrow, wretchedly-paved street; up which I passed for about a couple of hundred yards, when I found myself opposite a rickety little hovel, having a light burning in its window. I was directed to look for such a light in the house to which I was bound; and as this appeared to be the only place in the street so distinguished, I walked boldly up to the door, raised the ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... taking in a few fresh stores, and this time accompanied by Charles, went up another branch of the river, very similar in character, to a place called Menyille, where there were several small Dyak houses and one large one. Here the landing place was a bridge of rickety poles, over a considerable distance of water; and I thought it safer to leave my cask of arrack securely placed in the fork of a tree. To prevent the natives from drinking it, I let several of them see me put in a number of snakes and lizards; ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to the feelings and social manners which prompted such a manifestation of them. At least, in such a condition of social manners and feelings mere wealth was not installed on the throne of Mammon in the eyes of all men. If one of the old coaches was more pitiably rickety than the rest; if the ancient-fashioned coat of some long-descended marchese was itself as threadbare as the old family liveries; if some widowed contessa had crept out from the last habitable corner of her dilapidated palazzo, where she was known to live on a modicum of chicory-water, ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... as they stopped, and to him Peggy entrusted the machine. Followed by Wandering William she darted off across the plaza and made for a cab stand immediately across it and just outside the depot. As she rushed up to the solitary rickety hack that was standing there and was about to step in a tall figure came rushing out of the station. The train had just pulled in, and long before its wheels had stopped revolving he had leaped ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... days after his arrival the warm, bright bed-chamber was exchanged for a cold dark closet opening off Madame's boudoir, a cupboard furnished with a rickety cot and a broken chair, lacking any provision for heat or light, and ventilated solely by a transom over the door; and inasmuch as Madame shared the French horror of draughts and so kept her boudoir hermetically sealed ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... Venice the antiquarian can revel in examples of many centuries of diverse domestic architecture from ducal palace to humble fisherman's dwelling on an obscure "back street" canal, in Basra there abounds a great deal of rickety rubbish that never had any interest in itself and which depends for its effect on the flattering gilding of the sun and the intangible glamour of Eastern twilight. In fact Basra might be described from an architectural point of view as a great heap of insanitary and ill-built rubbish which can ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... believe that as irons support the rickety child, whilst they impede the healthy one, so rules, for the most part, are but useful to the weaker among us. Our greatest masters in language, whether prose or verse, in painting, music, architecture, or the like, have been those who preceded the rule and whose excellence ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... on horseback lately," she said, apologizing for her fears, "and so seldom in a carriage, and this is such a rickety old thing, that you must excuse my alarm. Besides, I do not know that Antonio ever played the part of postillion before. Why, the coach will run over the mules," she exclaimed presently, as it glided down a steep spot; then springing up and leaning ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... undertook to arrange all this, and, while supper was preparing, we walked together to the posada. I found that my obliging host and hostess had indeed exerted themselves to an uncommon degree. An old rickety table had been spread out in a corner of the little room as a bedstead, on top of which was propped up a grand cama de luxo, or state bed, which appeared to be the admiration of the house. I could not, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... was just falling when the Gray house party came to a narrow, rickety old bridge spanning the bed of a creek. Here they stopped the horses for a time, while Grace and Hippy gathered some branches of evergreen growing on the edge of a wood, just ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... fire had gone out. He stumbled out to get the can of coal-oil from the stable, still dazed with drink, brought it in and poured some on the wood. Some more wood was wanted. He went out to fetch it, leaving his candle alight, a broken end in a rickety candlestick, on the floor beside the coal-oil. When he got to the stable it was warm and comfortable; he forgot what he had come for, fell down on a bundle of straw, and went into a dead sleep. The candle must have fallen over into the oil, the oil exploded, and in a few seconds ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... old rickety door and gave at once before our united strength. Together we rushed into the room. It was empty. There was no furniture save a little pallet bed, a small table, and a basketful of linen. The skylight above was open, and the ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... before), in not more than two or three questionable incidents, and in practically no "improper" details—conduct almost deserving the description of magnanimity and self-denial. Moreover, the thing really is a modern novel, though a bad and rickety one; the indefinable naturaleza is present in it after a strange fashion. There is less perhaps in the very inappropriately named Tableaux de Societe—the autobiography of a certain Fanchette de Francheville, who, somewhat ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the fiddle became more distinct, the full moon rose from behind a dark mass which proved to be a ruined wall of the building; and immediately afterwards, directly in front of us, we discovered Mike Laffan seated on one of the time-worn and rickety beams which had once formed part of the fort. There he was, bow in hand, fiddling with might and main; while below him were a whole pack of wolves, their mouths open, singing an inharmonious chorus ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... reach, and each of the pickers had filled her lap from it again and again. The shed chamber was not an unpleasant place in which to sit at work, with its traces of seed corn hanging from the brown cross-beams, its spare churns, and dusty loom, and rickety wool-wheels, and a few bits of old furniture. In one far corner was a wide board of dismal use and suggestion, and close beside it an old cradle. There was a battered chest of drawers where the keeper of the poor-house kept his garden-seeds, with ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... bare in its hard-finished, smoke-tinted walls. In it, to the casual observer, there were visible but four objects: an old-fashioned walnut desk that had once borne a top, but which did so no longer; two cane-bottomed chairs with rickety arms; and, seated in one thereof, a man. The latter looked up as the visitor entered, revealing an unshaven chin and a pair of restless black eyes over the left of which the lid drooped appreciably. He was smoking a long black stogie, and scattered upon his vest and in a semicircle ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... there at her side, his problem was simple enough as he summed it up: to face the world, however it might chance to spin, that small, ridiculous, haphazard world rattling like a rickety roulette ball among the numbered nights and days where he had no longer any vital stake at hazard—no longer any ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... a chance to tell it, for Albert walked off and left him. At half-past twelve that afternoon he engaged "Vessie" Young—christened Sylvester Young and a brother to the driver of the depot wagon—to haul the Calvin lumber in his rickety, fragrant old wagon. Simpson Mullen—commonly called "Simp"—was to help in ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... side loomed a huge tank, to the brink of which a rickety wooden ladder invited the explorer to ascend. Beyond it were a series of iron gangways and ladders forming part of the fire emergency arrangements of the neighboring institution. Straight ahead a section of building jutted up and revealed two small ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... on her way. She refused quite emphatically to stay for dinner. Marian thought that she was in a hurry to catch the next coach, and accompanied her across the square. They promised to write to each other; before Eleanore got into the rickety old coach, Marian kissed her on ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... progress were not in its nature inevitably droll enough, there lay, on the top of the stairs, a wooden figure on a crucifix, resting on a sort of great iron saucer: so rickety and unsteady, that whenever an enthusiastic person kissed the figure, with more than usual devotion, or threw a coin into the saucer, with more than common readiness (for it served in this respect as a second or supplementary canister), it gave a great leap and rattle, and nearly shook the ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... labelled worthless, and exhibited to all the world, I fear that the newest pet demagogue would persuade the voters of his district, in spite of their eyes, that he had contrived an improvement to make some one of the rickety old things work. No wonder that Dr. Franklin lost patience, when he saw how sadly reason was perverted by ignorance, selfishness, and wickedness, and wished "that mankind had never been endowed with a reasoning faculty, since they know so little how to make ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... taste, and the equipment fully adequate to the needs of the service: an old table, on legs somewhat rickety; upon the table, a rude box, set on end and divided roughly into eight pigeon holes, duly numbered; in the table, a drawer, filled a little with stamps and stationery, filled mostly with scraps of leaf tobacco, and an odd company of veteran ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... whitewashed cell, without ventilation, but it was "mine own" and I was happy. The mirror was hung so high that I had to make a pyramid of three boxes on which to stand while shaving. They were quite rickety, and I was between the Scylla of cutting my throat with the razor and the Charybdis of breaking my bones by a fall on ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... in turns till the rickety little revolver nearly shook itself to pieces, and Amomma the outcast—because he might blow up at any moment—browsed in the background and wondered why stones were thrown at him. Then they found a balk of timber floating in a pool which was commanded by the seaward slope of Fort ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... misusing some woman," cried Ben, "come on!" and rushing around to the front of the building, he found the rickety stairs leading to the house floor, and bounded upward. The door at the top stood ajar and he pushed it in, with Major Morris at his heels. The room at hand was dark, the struggle was going on in the ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... all the valleys hereabout, spinning-wheels are not uncommon. I also saw a woman sitting in her room with the door opening on to the street, weaving linen at a hand-loom. The woman and the hand-loom were both very old and rickety. The first and the last specimens of anything, whether animal or vegetable organism, or machine, or institution, are seldom quite satisfactory. Some five or six years ago I saw an old gentleman sitting outside the St. Lawrence Hall at Montreal, in Canada, and wearing a pigtail, but ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... the matter with your whole body. It's a pretty rickety concern, like my old rocking-chair. Every day I'm looking for it to go to pieces under ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... the rickety wooden steps and across the road; then, after looking about irresolutely, he turned toward the weather-beaten ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... a noble sight!' exclaimed Viney to Watchorn as they sat on their horses, below a rickety green-baize-covered scaffold, labelled, 'GRAND STAND; admission, Two-and-sixpence,' raised against Scourgefield's stack-yard wall, eyeing the population pouring in from all parts. 'Dear, but it's ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... that means," Roderick answered. He turned away, threw himself on a rickety chair, and sat for some moments with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. "Work—work?" he said at last, looking up, "ah, if I could only begin!" He glanced round the room a moment and his eye encountered ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... from one county-seat to another, on the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illinois, either on the back of a raw-boned horse, or in a rickety buggy drawn by the same old "crowbait," as his legal friends called the animal. The judge and lawyers of the several courts traveled together and whiled away the time chatting and joking. Of course, Abraham Lincoln was in great demand because of his ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... the small room close to the pump did not think the state of matters either "jolly" or "prime," for, besides being very old, he was very weak and thin and cold and hungry; in addition to which Jack Frost had seated himself on the rickety chair beside the empty grate, and seemed bent on remaining—the colonel having previously blown open the door and removed a garment which had sheltered the old man's head, thus permitting the major to sprinkle a miniature drift ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... reached that sad, gloomy street known as the Rue des Pretres-Saint-Germain, she walked rapidly along until she came to the last dingy house facing the dark walls of the church, where she entered. Crossing an obscure passage, the girl ascended a rickety stairway, only dimly lighted from a small court-yard that resembled nothing more than a narrow well, and stopped at the ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... engine began to ring its warning bell, and the conductor to wave the people aboard, there was a loud clatter of hoofs, and the rickety old Lakerim carryall came dashing up, drawn by the lively horses Sawed-Off had once saved from destroying themselves and the Dozen in one fell swoop down a steep hill. The carryall lurched up to the station ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... day arrived for our departure. My father rode a steady mule, but I preferred a horse, though not so safe an animal for the narrow tracks, up and down steep mountains, on the summit of terrific precipices, and across rickety bridges which ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... on much longer. When once the leader of the House of Commons has become thoroughly disgusted and dissatisfied with his position, either a change or a dissolution of the Government may be anticipated, and in this case any attempt at change can scarcely fail to break up this rickety firm. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... a dim day that marks the beginning of things, the first remembered day of childhood. Lewis could not fasten on any memory older than the memory of a rickety cab, a tall, gloomy man, and then a white-clad group on the steps of Consolation Cottage. Black mammy, motherly Mrs. Leighton, curly-headed Shenton, and little Natalie, with her 'wumpled' skirt, who had stood on tiptoe to put ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... extraordinary type attracted all the men she came across they soon gave up their pursuit. She was quite hopeless, they said—and half-witted, some added! No woman could sit silent like that for hours, otherwise. Zara thought of all these things, as she sat on the rickety chair in the Neville Street lodging. How she had loathed that whole atmosphere! How she loathed bohemians and ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... scorching under a midday sun when he came on deck. Its low, square houses were glaring white; here and there a splotch of vivid Cuban blue stood out; the rickety, worm-eaten piling of its water-front resembled rows of rotten, snaggly teeth smiling out of a chalky face mottled with unhealthy, artificial spots of color. Gusts of wind from the shore brought feverish ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... them, without guard, went off together, Robin driving his shambling horse and rickety cart beside the ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... the Glencairn joiner, who was conducting the funeral—if, indeed, Scots funerals can ever be said to be conducted—had given it a too successful push to let the rickety hearse have plenty of sea-room between the granite pillars. It was a long and straggling funeral, silent save for the words that stand at the opening of this tale, which ran up and down the long black files like the irregular ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... Jack went down the rickety steps he looked back into the window for a last glimpse of the family, as the children gathered about their mother, showing their beautiful presents again and again,—and then upward to a window in the great house yonder. "A little child shall ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... prisoners and the prize of stores. There were twenty-three hundred prisoners, men in blue, tramping sullenly. Stonewall Jackson had made requisition of all wagons about Winchester. They were now in line, all manner of wagons, white-covered, uncovered, stout-bodied, ancient, rickety, in every condition but of fresh paint and new harness. Carts were brought, small vans of pedlars; there were stranded circus wagons with gold scrolls. Nor did there lack vehicles meant for human freight. Old family carriages, high-swung, capacious ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... on Providence Plantation 'bout three miles south o' Natchez. De trip to Natchez in a rickety old wagon is mos' too much in de hot weather. My heart's mos' wore out. I can't las' long, 'cause I's had a ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... rotten lock and its rickety accompaniments suddenly brought back a panic fear on Lucy. What if Alice Manisty and the wind, which was already rising, should burst in upon her together? She looked down upon her night-gown and her bare feet. Well, at least she would not be taken quite unawares! ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... after Miska had disappeared into the little house near the corner, the hidden door in the damp cellar below "The Pidgin House" opened and a bent old woman, a ragged, grey-haired and dirty figure, walked slowly up the rickety wooden stair and entered a bare room behind and below the shop and to the immediate left of the den of the opium-smoker. This room, which was windowless, was lighted by a tin paraffin lamp hung upon a nail in the dirty plaster wall. The floor presented a litter of straw, ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... that could be scrambled together were used by the women-folk, and the men slept on the floor, benches, and tables. Fortunately blankets were not needed, as the heat was intense, but the benches were rickety and the sand on the floor worked into the sleepers' clothes. Altogether the plight of ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... garret on the sixth floor of one of the poorest houses in the poorest quarters of Paris, does not give much opportunity for a detailed description. There is little to be said about the furniture, which in this case consisted of a rickety old table, a wooden stool, and a small charcoal stove, all of the commonest kind, but all clean, and the room was not quite without adornment. The window, to be sure, was in the roof, but pinned to the wall were a few newspaper prints in ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... place for the new field hands to occupy for sleeping apartments. They were carried to an out-building and shown their room, ten by fifteen feet, unplastered, greasy, and dusty. The odor of the "man and brother" did cling there still. A bench, a stool, an old rickety bedstead, and a bed of straw, completed the fitting out of the room. Save for the shelter of the roof, anywhere in the fields would have been far preferable. The first night disclosed the presence of fleas in abundance, and other ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... its northern side by the back windows of some rickety old wooden houses, suggestive of an easy conflagration, and dangerously near the church. They date from the time of Queen Elizabeth, and stand on a piece of the ground formerly devoted to Bartholomew Fair, the memory of which is perpetuated in the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... fortunate chance, was Saturday, and everywhere we went we encountered negroes driving in from the country to market, in their rickety old wagons. On some wagons there would be four or five men and women, and here and there one would be playing a musical instrument and they would all be singing, while the creaking of the wagon came in with an orchestral quality which ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... afterward the sultan. He gave us tea, leaf-cigars, and sirih, and, in short, showed us every attention; and what was best of all did not keep us very long. Our apartment was partitioned off from the public hall, a dark-looking place, but furnished with a table brought by us, and three rickety chairs, beside matresses and plenty of mats. We were kept up nearly all night, which, after the fatigues of the day, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... now go back to the year 1867, in which I was still living at Waltham Cross. I had some time since bought the house there which I had at first hired, and added rooms to it, and made it for our purposes very comfortable. It was, however, a rickety old place, requiring much repair, and occasionally not as weathertight as it should be. We had a domain there sufficient for the cows, and for the making of our butter and hay. For strawberries, asparagus, green peas, out-of-door ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... will be a table to set. If they were alone, they would use one or two of the high stools. But Agnes goes out into the little yard, and brings back two boards and a couple of trestles, which she sets up in the middle of the room. This is the table—rather a rickety affair, you may say; and it will be quite as well that nobody should lean his elbow on it. Next, she puts on the boards four of the cows' horns, and the two trenchers, with one bowl. She then serves out a knife and spoon for each of ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... the entire load. At first they travelled about fifteen miles a day, although delays were caused by the breaking of wheels and axles. The heat and aridity of the plains and mountains speedily made many of the cart-wheels rickety and unable to sustain their burdens without frequent repairs. Some shod the axles of their carts with old leather, others with tin from the plates and kettles of their mess outfit; and for grease they used their allowance of bacon, and even their soap, of which they had but ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... of the remaining women, what reasonable man would not throw out a hundred thousand poor girls, humpbacked, plain, cross-grained, rickety, sickly, blind, crippled in some way, well educated but penniless, all bound to be spinsters, and by no means tempted to violate ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... seem to me that Tim might insist on bearing me company, knowing as he did that I was still a bit rickety; but he saw fit to take my one refusal as final, and muttered something about reading. Then, I ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... bedroom. Here he left her to herself, and, re-entering the kitchen, got ready a meal of tea and buttered oat-cake, which he sent in to Mary Whittaker by the hands of his eldest child, a girl of seven. Then, without further intrusion on the girl's privacy, he climbed the rickety staircase to the upper chamber and set to work at his loom. Eager to make up for the time he had lost, he worked with energy, but every sound from the rooms below came up through the cracks in the raftered floor. He could hear the voices of the ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... over a dirty bed tick filled with leaves. There was only one chair, and that was a broken rocker, on which the unhappy mistress of the cottage was seated. But there were two or three rough stools, made of pieces of pine slab, standing beside the rickety table. Pointing to these stools, Mrs. Button, without quitting her chair, ...
— Aunt Amy - or, How Minnie Brown learned to be a Sunbeam • Francis Forrester
... the name, and in whom the talent of his grandfather was to reappear enriched with added graces of his own, was born in Philadelphia in 1829. He tells us that his earliest recollections are connected with a theatre in Washington. This was a rickety, old, frame-building adjoining the house in which his father lived as manager, the door at the end of the hall-way opening directly upon the stage; and as a toddling little chap in a short frock he was allowed full run of the place. Thus "behind the scenes" was his first playground; ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... all quarters, she discovered, on the fourth floor of an old rickety house, a half-crippled aunt, who never stirred from her arm-chair, and had not been out for four or five years. This poor woman, very old, seemed to have been left in the world expressly as a specimen ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the place, and it is, as you say, a rickety old house; but I suppose it is the best they can get. But here we are at school, Ally; you get out first, and I will hand sissy out to you. Take hold of her hand, for the ...
— A Child's Anti-Slavery Book - Containing a Few Words About American Slave Children and Stories - of Slave-Life. • Various
... dozen yards having been made without mishap, Derby felt that the special protection of Providence must be over them, and he leaned back contentedly, puffing at his pipe and enjoying to the full the witchery of a Sicilian sunset. The rickety conveyance clattered slowly up a winding road that seemed like a white band tied about the mountainside, holding here little terraced vineyards, there a huddling group of houses that else would surely have slipped into the ravine. For a short distance it hung out over the sea, ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... said. Then I did not disturb him but sat down on a rickety chair and waited. Ink dripped from his table on to the floor. One bottle lay on its side, the ink oozing out, other bottles stood, some filled, some ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... what they came from—nothing; the bank, based as it was on specie, backed stoutly by the government, and respected by the people for great national services, would have weathered the storm and lasted to this day. But he tied his rickety child to his healthy child, and flung them into a stormy sea, and told them to swim together: they sank together. Now observe, sir, the fatal error that ruined the great financier in 1720 is this day proposed to us. We are to connect our bank with bubble companies by the double tie of loans ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Madame de la Baudraye, side by side in the rickety old chaise, had recrossed the Loire, they both were unready to speak. In these circumstances, the first words that break the silence are full of ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... thither. The one used by the school children on week-days was called the Short Cut. It ran down The Dale lane, crossed the pond beside MacAllister's mill, went up the opposite bank, over a wild half-cleared stretch of land called The Slash, through old Sandy McLachlan's wood, and by way of his rickety gate out on to the public highway a few yards from the school. It was much shorter this way than going "down the line," though strange to say it took far longer to traverse it on a schoolday, for it was a very enjoyable road indeed, from which ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... Teriaky; and that he died a martyr to the immoderate use of opium. [Footnote: Those among the Turks who give themselves up to an immoderate use of opium are easily to be distinguished by a sort of rickety complaint, which this poison produces in course of time. Destined to live agreeably only when in a sort of drunkenness, these men present a curious spectacle, when they are assembled in a part of Constantinople called Teriaky or Tcharkissy, the market ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... but yet he felt as though he would rather ascend to where he could at least enjoy the sunshine than go further down where it became darker and colder. They walked a considerable distance along dark passages, and halted in front of a rickety iron door. A huge key was thrust into the keyhole and slowly the bolts ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... must not contemn a man for his poverty, neighbours," said Liar, gravely composing his hairless face. "Christian's was a character of beautiful simplicity—beautiful! How many rickety children did he ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... female dealer, kindly, "what made you go on like that? Why, there was no one bid against you! you'd have got it for two pounds—a rickety old thing." ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... his shop a grandson of thirteen, a hunchback, a sickly, rickety boy, who used to run his errands, and was a sort of apprentice. The boy's mother had left her family when she was seventeen to elope with a worthless fellow who had sunk into hooliganism, and before very long had been caught, sentenced, and so disappeared from the scene. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... we made our way in the direction of Maple Cottage. Nayland Smith appeared to be keenly interested in the character of the district. A high and ancient wall bordered the road along which we walked for a considerable distance. Later it gave place to a rickety fence. ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... an inkhorn and two quills from a cupboard by their bed, and placed them on a somewhat rickety table, where Bryda's few books lay—books well worn and studied, books which fed her romance—two volumes of the Rambler and Spectator, Pope's verses, and last, but not least, Bunyan's ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... villages of the Island, and as fire after fire blazes out of the darkness of that summer night, the effect is singularly striking. These fires are sometimes kept up for hours, being continually fed by the scores of bystanders, who take great delight in throwing amidst the flames some old rickety piece of furniture which they consider as lumber in their houses. Lots of happy and reckless children, and very often men, are seen merrily leaping in succession over and through the crackling flames. At the time of the Order of St. John ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... suffer in a darkness that can never be explored. The facilities offered you for approaching the picture in such cases are a mockery of your irritated wish. You stand at tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the shoulders of the custode. You do everything but see the picture. You see just enough to be sure it's beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a divine head, of a fig tree against a mellow sky, but the rest is impenetrable ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Fontaine des Eaux several times in her walks with Jack. It was a favourite spot of hers. The way lay through the village, across the rickety old bridge, and up the narrow valley to the left, following the course of the river. The green hills on each side had all the bright freshness of early spring, but the real beauty of the walk was the Fontaine des Eaux itself. Here the valley broadened out into a wild ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... well furnished nor clean: a table, three rickety chairs, an oaken bench, a few earthenware vessels near the fireplace, and a bed, constituted all the furniture. It was not, however, these common objects which fixed the gaze of the visitor. What he could not see without shuddering, was the number of strange arms suspended all ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... shops, workmen's little homes in rows like chicken-houses, then better streets, better homes, business blocks well paved, a hotel, a post-office, a Carnegie library, a gawky Civil War statue, then poorer shops, rickety pavements, shanties, and ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... extensive proportions. Nearly all of one side was occupied by the bar. Opposite was the huge fireplace, and scattered around were a number of stools, rickety chairs and strong boxes which served ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... where certain blessed Mothers in Israel, are wont to keep a vacant chair for a poor soul that might feel desolate if left alone on this sociable day. Some full-handed visits are paid on the way home to scattered and rickety houses; but by one o'clock, all the people are beneath their own roofs, never so attractive as on this glorious day. The married children from the neighboring towns have come home, and ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... bank, cross the evil-smelling lagoon at the back of the town, Frank and Harry had their hands full directing shouting, laughing Kroomen how to load up the canoes. From the canopied steam launch that lay alongside the rickety wharf the black engineer—an American Negro—watched with great contempt their labors, which they enlivened with ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... and then turned horizontally and disappeared through a clumsy hole in the scorched wall. It was a shabby stove, but not more so than the other few articles of furniture—a large table, a small desk, three deteriorated cane-chairs, two gas brackets, and an old copying-press on its rickety stand. The sole object that could emerge brightly from the ordeal of the gas-flare was a splendid freshly printed blue poster gummed with stamp-paper to the wall: which poster bore the words, in vast capitals of two sizes: "The Five Towns Chronicle and Turnhill Guardian." Copies of this poster ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... heard outside the rickety old building. Hasty steps sounded along the corridor. The landlooker merely stopped the drumming of his fingers on the broad arm of the chair. The door flew open, and Wallace Carpenter walked quickly ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... last saw the great turgid stream off the Shanghai harbor. Even as far up as Hankow the river becomes very rough on windy days. Consequently, when I wished to go across to Wuchang, I found that the motor boat couldn't go, so tempestuous were the waves, but a rather rickety looking little native canoe called a "sampan," with tattered sails, bobbing up and down like a cork, finally landed me safely across the three or four miles of sea-like waves. All the way from Hankow to Peking one encounters all sorts of Chinese junks and other odd river-craft. ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Lum got back. Smoke was coming out of his rickety chimney, and the wail of an old ballad reached his ears. Singing, the girl did not hear him coming, and through the open door he saw that the room had been tidied up and that she was cooking supper. The baby was playing on the floor. She ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... little log cabin clinging to the side of a little hollow at the head of a little creek. About each cabin was a rickety fence, a patch of garden, and a little cleared hill-side, rocky, full of stumps, and crazily traced with thin green spears of corn. On one hill-side a man was at work with a hoe, and on the other, over the spur, a boy—both ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... upon which the village stands. This ancient cemetery was laid out by the early settlers, when they made the first allotments of land. It is a square area of two acres in extent, inclosed by a mossy picket paling, so rickety that the neighbors' sheep sometimes leap through the gaps from the adjacent pastures, and feed among the graves upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... down the rickety stairs, believing somehow that she had told me the truth. But if not Zalnitch, then who? I knew that in less than a week, as soon as Helen was well enough to stand the shock, she would be indicted, unless in the meantime, I could discover the murderer. Helen had regained consciousness ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... and was gone in the dropping of an eyelid. And then there echoed through the alley loud cries of "Police! Murder! Help!" I was conscious that there was a man running through the hall and down the rickety stairs, making the building ring to the same cries. My own feelings were those of overmastering fear for my friend. He had gone on his mysterious, dangerous errand, and I felt that it was he who had been dragged into the alley, and ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... to thought, must, of necessity, become wiser every day; for either the ideas that present themselves to his mind will confirm his yet rickety theories, or observation will teach him that his previous views ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... twice at the start he had stirred, the rickety chair creaking under his weight. Then, slouched against its back, he had settled into absolute stillness. To anyone not seeing him, it might have seemed that the girl was talking to herself, pauses that she made for comment passed in silence, questions ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... The rickety old tub, straining in every plate, rolled and pitched and tossed all ways at once, like an hysterical cat, and the discomfort in which they had started rose, or rather sank, to absolute misery. Like most strong men, Derrick had the ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... up a rickety staircase, a still more rickety ladder, and came to a platform at a level with the top of the organ; and all around them, reaching up out of the dim light below, were the open pipes. Passing hurriedly around, on a ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... unpainted, frame building, while Mr. Blaisdell took Houston into the further room, and introduced him to Morgan, the general superintendent, and to his work, at the same time. Then, having seen Houston duly installed at his post of duty, perched on a wabbly stool, before a rickety, ink-bespattered desk, beside a window gray with the dust and smoke of ages, through which a few straggling sunbeams fell, Mr. Blaisdell sailed complacently forth to escort Rutherford to Jim Maverick's boarding house, whither the baggage had already been taken by ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... place the following morning. Cunningham's crew, under the temporary leadership of Cleve, proceeded to make everything shipshape. There was no exuberance; they went at the business quietly and grimly. They sensed a shadow overhead. The revolt of the six discovered to the others what a rickety bridge they were crossing, how easily and swiftly a ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... a few rickety chairs, and one less rickety than the others which is reserved for the Big Works, as he is affectionately called, on the occasion of his few but none the less disquieting visits. It has a rickety table ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... must trot in the shafts where I was put, Nor look round at the cart, but set foremost my best foot; It was rather rickety, and the axle wanted oil, But I always slept at night with the deep sleep ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... at Leyden did not think it wise to cut loose from Holland until they should have secured a foothold in America. It was but an advance guard that started out from Delft haven late in July, 1620, in the rickety ship Speedwell, with Brewster and Bradford, and sturdy Miles Standish, a trained soldier whose aid was welcome, though he does not seem to have belonged to the congregation. Robinson remained at Leyden, and never ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... in our berline, and putting all "to rights," the whips cracked, bells jingled, and away we thundered by the arrowy Rhone. I had had the idea that a diligence was a rickety, slow-moulded antediluvian nondescript, toiling patiently along over impassable roads at a snail's pace. Judge of my astonishment at finding it a full-blooded, vigorous monster, of unscrupulous railway momentum ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... doors cursing the majority, and making threats as to what they would do. So the Convention reconsidered their cases, and ADMITTED BOTH DELEGATIONS TO SEATS. They then progressed "harmoniously," much after the style of a rickety old cart on a hill-side, drawn by a balky horse, whose driver curses him when at fault, ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... we went along the Looembe westwards till we reached the bridge (rather a rickety affair), which, when the water is low may be used as a weir. The Looembe main stream is 66 feet wide, 6 feet deep, with at least 200 feet of flood beyond it. The water was knee deep on the bridge, but clear; the flooded part ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... up the now familiar mountain side. To have climbed up the footpath with Miss Merriman and their essential baggage would have been impossible, and he had, after much persuasion, finally succeeded in hiring a man in Fayville to drive them up in a springless, rickety wagon. This had necessitated their taking a much more circuitous route, and what seemed like an interminably ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... of the skull known as Parrot's nodes or bosses, and craniotabes, were formerly believed to be characteristic of inherited syphilis, but they are now known to occur, particularly in rickety children, from other causes. The bosses result from the heaping up of new spongy bone beneath the pericranium, and they may be grouped symmetrically around the anterior fontanelle, or may extend along either side of the sagittal suture, which appears as a deep groove—the "natiform skull." The ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... wife and several children. This man had been an industrious mechanic, but had for two years been pursuing the downward path to ruin, a confirmed victim of the bottle. He had been forced by the destitution thus brought upon himself to abandon a snug abode in a decent street for the squalor of a rickety shell in a mean locality, and was now prostrate on his bed, dying of rapid consumption. By what mysterious providence a new-born babe should thus be sent to such a man's door is beyond my comprehension. But the wife of Varick, softer of heart than its mother, took in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... to Pardeeville, a place I had never before seen, though it was only nine miles south of the Hickory Hill home. When we arrived at the village tavern, it seemed deserted. Not a single person was in sight. I set my clock baggage on the rickety platform. David said good-bye and started for home, leaving me alone in the world. The grinding noise made by the wagon in turning short brought out the landlord, and the first thing that caught his eye was ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... seven feet, and possessed neither cabin nor staterooms, the space between the superstructure and the rail being about three feet wide. You could stay there, or, if you did not incommode the engineer, you could go inside and sit on a coal pile. There was a bridge approached by a rickety stair, and I judged that my deck chair would fill it completely, leaving about six inches for the captain's promenade. Behind the superstructure there was a sort of after-deck, nearly four feet of it. When my trunks and boxes had been piled ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... the diver put his head through the hole in question, and gazed down into darkness visible where water was dripping and gurgling, and hissing a sort of accompaniment to the discordant clanking and jarring of the pump-rods. The rickety engine that worked them kept puffing close alongside—grinding out a horrible addition to the din. As his eyes became more accustomed to the subdued light, Baldwin could see that there was an empty space between ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... by a dealer in second-hand machinery, but at one side was a long, dingy entry with a rickety, twisting flight of stairs at the end. Ashton-Kirk rang the bell here, and while they waited a man who had been seated in the open door of the machine shop ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... "You are rickety," Black Jack told him. "Why, there ain't any danger; nobody goes up there." Laughing Bill held his breath, missing not a word. "If they did we'd pick 'em up with the glasses. It's open country, and we'd get 'em ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... though neatly and comfortably arranged about this room. A faded home-made carpet covered the floor, a threadbare crimson curtain hung before the window, a rickety walnut table, dark with age, sat under the window against the wall; old walnut chairs were placed each side of it; old plated candlesticks, with the silver all worn off, graced the mantelpiece; a good fire—a cheap comfort in that well-wooded ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... there to find a practicable way, until near the summit they become too steep for me to proceed. I search about a few minutes for an easier way, when I am surprised at finding a stairway, evidently cut in the rock by hands. At one place, where there is a vertical wall of 10 or 12 feet, I find an old, rickety ladder. It may be that this was a watchtower of that ancient people whose homes we have found in ruins. On many of the tributaries of the Colorado, I have heretofore examined their deserted dwellings. Those that show evidences of being built during ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... station, but the main street had few attractions to offer. Three stores, with strangely-assorted, dusty goods in their windows fronted the rickety plankwalk; beyond these stood a livery stable, a Chinese laundry, and a few dwelling-houses. Several dilapidated wagons and buggies were scattered about the uneven road. In the side street, disorderly rows of agricultural implements ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... such, or so comfortless, as are frequently the gaunt abodes of legal aspirants. Four chairs, a half-filled deal book-case with hangings of dingy green baize, an old office table covered with dusty papers, which are not moved once in six months, and an older Pembroke brother with rickety legs, for all daily uses; a despatcher for the preparation of lobsters and coffee, and an apparatus for the cooking of toast and mutton chops; such utensils and luxuries as these did not suffice for the well-being of Tom Towers. He indulged in four rooms on the first floor, each ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... the Fontaine des Eaux several times in her walks with Jack. It was a favourite spot of hers. The way lay through the village, across the rickety old bridge, and up the narrow valley to the left, following the course of the river. The green hills on each side had all the bright freshness of early spring, but the real beauty of the walk was the Fontaine des Eaux ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... wrapped in slumber. But at intervals a faint clicking sound could be heard. The night man threw open the door. By the light of two stage dash-lamps, one set on the dresser and the other on a window-ledge, four men sat about a rickety table in a life-and-death struggle at cards. No voice broke the tense silence, not even when the door was ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... is overlooked on its northern side by the back windows of some rickety old wooden houses, suggestive of an easy conflagration, and dangerously near the church. They date from the time of Queen Elizabeth, and stand on a piece of the ground formerly devoted to Bartholomew Fair, the memory of which is perpetuated ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... the meager and circuslike procession to enter with the keys of the bull pen, when my attention was attracted to a movement in the reserved gallery. A lady and gentleman of a quality that was evidently unfamiliar to the rest of the audience were picking their way along the rickety benches to a front seat. I recognized the geologist with some surprise, and the lady he was leading with still greater astonishment. For it was Miss Mannersley, in her precise, well-fitting walking-costume—a monotone of sober ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... vapor, with hand and foot clambered down the volcanic ruin of Chilcoot's mighty father, and stood on the bleak edge of the lake which filled the pit of the crater. The lake was angry and white-capped, and though a hundred caches were waiting ferriage, no boats were plying back and forth. A rickety skeleton of sticks, in a shell of greased canvas, lay upon the rocks. Frona sought out the owner, a bright-faced young fellow, with sharp black eyes and a salient jaw. Yes, he was the ferryman, but he had quit work for the day. Water too rough ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... summer dress effectively screening the house beyond from public view, lay between the garden and the road. Above the hedge showed an occasional shrub; at the corner nearest to the car a chestnut flourished. The wooden gate, once white, which they had passed, was grimed and rickety. The road itself was still the unpretentious country lane that the advent of the electric car had found it. When Carrados had taken in these details there seemed little else to notice. He was on the point of giving Harris the order to go on when his ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... six hundred inhabitants. Its one claim to distinction was the venerable but still active ferry that laboured back and forth across the river. Of secondary importance was the ancient dock, once upon a time the stopping place of steamboats, but now a rotten, rickety obstruction upon which the downstream drift lodged in ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... people are not disloyal to your flag and your cause," said good Father Beret next morning to Captain Helm, "but they are powerless. Winter is upon us. What would you have us do? This rickety fort is not available for defense; the men are nearly all far away on the plains. Isn't it the part of prudence and common sense to make the best of a desperate situation? Should we resist, the British and their savage allies would destroy the town ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... into the parlor. Some parlor it is, too. I don't know when I've seen a room that came so near whinin' about better days gone by. Every piece of furniture, from the threadbare sofa to the rickety center table, seems kind ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... hastily interposed Mrs. Billing. "He was always troubled with a rickety heart, and on several occasions my husband attended him for rather dangerous fainting attacks; no doubt that was partly the reason why he lived so quietly, just taken up with his books, his garden, and, when he was at home, his boy. It appears that when Mr. Shafto heard of the smash, he ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... when it is new and less and less as it grows older. In the end it is discarded because it has so deteriorated that it no longer adds anything to the marginal product of the labor and capital that are used in connection with it. A wagon has become so rickety that it no longer pays to furnish a horse, a harness, and a driver for it. The capital and labor that these represent would earn as much if they were detached from the old vehicle and added to the equipment of some person who has a stock of good ones. The ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... true to his promise. Behind a plodding pair of horses hitched to a jolting wagon, they made the journey, far out across the hills and plateau flats from Tabernacle, gradually winding into a shallow canon which led to places which Houston remembered from years long gone. Beside the road ran the rickety track which served as a spur from the main line of the railroad, five miles from camp,—the ties rotten, the plates loosened and the rails but faintly free from rust; silent testimony of the fact that cars ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... the hall, indifferent to the Kirmanshah rugs, the rare mosaic floor and stained-glass windows, the Parian fountain and the Azeglio tapestries that hung suspended up along the stairway—all old stories to him and as commonplace as rickety odds and ends of furniture might be to any toiler "cribbed, cabin'd and confined" in fetid East Side tenement or squalid room ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... thriving metropolis of Lame Gulch, Amberley knew pretty well where to look for his man, and as he sallied forth that same evening, with the purpose of investigating the "unknown quantity," he bent his steps, not in the direction of the rickety cabin in the hollow there, but toward the "Lame Gulch Opera House." This temple of the muses was easily discoverable, being situated in the main street of the town, and marked by a long transparency projecting above the door, upon which the luminous inscription, "Opera House," was ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... Edison tells the following story: "When I took the position there was a great shortage of operators. One night at 2 A.M. another operator and I were on duty. I was taking press report, and the other man was working the New York wire. We heard a heavy tramp, tramp, tramp on the rickety stairs. Suddenly the door was thrown open with great violence, dislodging it from one of the hinges. There appeared in the doorway one of the best operators we had, who worked daytime, and who was of a very quiet disposition ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... were uncarpeted, and had little feet-worn hollows in the middle of them. The banisters were rickety, and had been notched by the knives of reckless tenants. The first and second floors were occupied by different families (so Marcus inferred from the distinct set of baby cries issuing from each), and the halls were dirty, and flavored with a decided odor of washing day. But on the third story ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... and that, when the day of reckoning comes, no half-hearted and pusillanimous policy will stay our hands from the complete execution of that to which we stand pledged. The Balance of Power has gone the way of other rickety makeshifts, but there must be no makeshift in our dealings with the Turk, no compromise and no delay. What shall be done with those who planned and executed the greatest massacres known to history matters little; let them be hanged as high as Haman, and have done with them. But what ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... patronage, and decoyed a poor fellow, named Blackett, into poetry; but he died during the operation, leaving one child and two volumes of 'Remains' utterly destitute. The girl, if she don't take a poetical twist, and come forth as a shoemaking Sappho, may do well, but the 'Tragedies' are as rickety as if they had been the offspring of an Earl or a Seatonian prize-poet. The patrons of this poor lad are certainly answerable for his end, and it ought to be an indictable offence. But this is the least they have done; for, by a refinement of barbarity, they ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... a narrow garret, furnished with a bottomless chair, a rickety table and a miserable pallet bed, with two dirty curtains half drawn round it. On the table were an inkstand, a big copybook scribbled all over, a jug of lemonade, a glass, and a morsel of bread. The heat in this wretched hole was ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... of one of the meanest houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap of straw, to serve as another bed, and against the wall a much-battered sea-chest and an open basket, containing even ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... Anglo-Saxon. It was not surprising, therefore, that Norvin Blake, as the hours dragged along, should remark less and less upon the beauties of the island and more and more upon the medieval condition of the rickety railroad coach in which he was shaken and buffeted about. He shifted himself to an easier position upon the seat and lighted a cheroot; for although this was his first glimpse of Sicily, he had watched the same villages ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... to her with a rapid flow of soft liquid Spanish and the old crone, weeping and muttering, stood aside to let them enter. Thode was forced to stoop under the low, sagging doorway and he stumbled as he made his way to a rickety bed in the corner and laid ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... dared to touch them; every want attended to before it was felt. It was too wonderful to seem true. In dreams she would often return to the desolate shanty, where the winds blew through the cracks, and the rickety old stove was no better fed ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... into Clay County? how they ran off our cattle, stole our grain? how your poor old mother's mother died from exposure that night in the rain and sleet? how we lived on mast and corn, the winter, in tents and a few dugouts and rickety huts—we who had the keys of St. Peter and the gifts of the apostolic age? Do you mind the sackings and burnings at Adam-Ondi-Ahman? Do you mind the wife of Joseph's brother, Don Carlos, she that was ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... a rickety schooner, in the teeth of a gale? Besides, Miss, I am taking a cargo of powder this trip, and if I am hard pressed I shall blow up vessel and all, rather than suffer it to fall into Yankee clutches. You would not relish going up to ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... cross-bars. At the stern of the vehicle there was a low back composed of two uprights and a single bar across. The whole machine was fastened together by means of tough lashings of raw seal-hide, so that, to all appearance, it was a rickety affair, ready to fall to pieces. In reality, however, it was very strong. No metal nails of any kind could have held in the keen frost—they would have snapped like glass at the first jolt—but the sealskin ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... an old-fashioned make, bare of varnish, with rickety, mud-splashed wheels and rusty springs. It was drawn by an ill-matched pair of horses and driven by a lame coloured boy, who carried a peeled hickory branch ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... mean little room, on one side a wide bed with a gaudy coverlet, on a pine table in the centre a bucket of water, a tin cup, and a candle-stick. Five rickety rush-covered chairs completed ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... it stepped into the bar of sunshine. There it stood, poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with only the thinnest vesture of human similitude about it, through which was evident the stiff, rickety, incongruous, faded, tattered, good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a heap upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall I confess the truth? At its present point of vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of some ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... buildings—steam-heated Towers of Babel. Into each of these he has packed the population of a European market-town, has left the children to grow up on the roofs and staircases, the babies to find a blessed release through rickety fire-escapes. When a fit of reform has touched him, he has stirred up the garbage of the Tenderloin and the Red Light District, has spread it broadcast over his cities to poison ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... stairs. Half-way up she was compelled to pause. The darkness blinded her; she had lost the reflection from the lamp below and, above her, there was no light at all. She advanced slowly, step by step, feeling her way with a hand on the rickety bannisters. At the top of the stair there was a gleam of light and, turning to the right, she knocked on the second door. There was no answer and she knocked again. Listening, the noise of the sea was now so violent that she fancied that she might not have heard the answer so she ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... I climbed up the rickety staircase to that dingy room, which always had a flavor of snuff about it, to sit on a stiff-backed chair and listen for hours together to Dame Jocelyn's stories of the olden time. How she would prattle! She was bedridden—poor creature!—and had not been out of the chamber for fourteen years. Meanwhile ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... minute or two later we were drifting through a dainty little strait, with a peep of open water at the end of it. Cottages bordered either side. some overhanging the very water, some connecting with it by a rickety wooden staircase or a miniature landing-stage. Creepers and roses rioted over the walls and tiny porches. For a space on one side, a rude quay, with small smacks floating off it, spoke of some minute commercial interests; a very small tea-garden, with neglected-looking ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... my father and the prisoner seated with the bottle between them on the rickety liquor-stained table. Yet—as I remember the scene now—not all the squalor of the room could efface or diminish the majesty of their two figures. They sat like two tall old kings, eye to eye, not friends, or reconciled only in this last and lonely hour by meditation on man's common fate. If I ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... might keep together and to buy her delicacies I've parted with nearly everything in the room, as you see," and it was bare indeed. A bed from which the element of comfort had long since departed, two rickety chairs, a pine table, a rusty stove, and a few dishes and cooking utensils were about all there was left. With eyes slowly dilating Mildred took in the bleak truth, but said only a few gentle words and was very busy. She lifted Mrs. Bute's head, while Clara gave her a little bread soaked in ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... they turned to the left; and after a brief walk, mounted the rickety steps to the floor of the hut where dwelt old man North, and the winch for operating the swinging boom. Old man North was short, dark, heavy and bearded; he smoked perpetually a small black clay pipe which he always held upside ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... hall in St. Louis, the old one, which looks like a rickety tobacco warehouse, or the new one, which is a realization in material of a bad dream consequent upon too much rarebit, and you might as well be in Berlin. You are lost without an interpreter. You must talk German or a Joe Emmet dialect, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... child," I said in sudden horror, as we reached the small square landing above of slender rickety uncovered boards. ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... mean and uninviting apartment stood a table, its top littered with odds and ends, amongst which the remains of a meal, dishes and food, fraternised gregariously with a painter's palette, brushes and paint tubes. A chair or two, long since disabled, and a rickety washstand completed the appointments. ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... horse before the office of the New Day and gave a boy the bridle. "I'll be back in a minute," she explained. It was a two-story frame building, dingy and in disrepair. On the street floor was a grocery. Access to the New Day was by a rickety stairway. As she ascended this, making a great noise on its unsteady boards with her boots, she began to feel cheap and foolish. She recalled what Hull had said in the carriage. "No doubt," replied she, "I'd feel much the same way if I were going to see Jesus Christ—a ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... at the view but not especially seeing it. He felt as if he had at once enjoyed and lost an opportunity. After a while he tried to make a sketch of the old beggar-woman who sat there in a sort of palsied immobility, like a rickety statue at a church-door. But his attempt to reproduce her features was not gratifying, and he suddenly laid down his brush. She was not pretty ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... if the world had ceased to hold any beings but themselves. The pine-trees scented all the air, the snow dripped reluctantly, and sometimes far off they heard the distant boom of an avalanche. They sat together for long sunlit hours on the rickety wooden balcony of a friendly hospice, drinking hot spiced gluewein and building up their ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... of rickety, wooden stairs pitched downward from the edge of the grassy bank to a wharf at the water's edge—the mere skeleton of a wharf now, outlined only by decaying stringpieces. But here the patched-up punt was moored; and above it, nailed to a dead tree, the sign ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... The boats were rickety little tubs unfit for rough northern seas, and the crews sulky, underfed men, who threatened mutiny at every watering place and only refrained from cutting Radisson's {147} throat because he kept them busy. July 11, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... principal roads in his buggy, directing his way towards the bungalow where the Rector of St. Jude's lived with Atkins, the Sapper. The house was draped in climbing and trailing creepers, and the grass grew into the red drive that curved in a half-circle from one rickety gate to another. He came up quietly on the soft, wet clay, and looked up at the house before he called for the bearer, and as he looked up he saw a face disappear quickly from behind a window. After a few minutes the ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... giving rise to deformities of the limbs, &c. The Australian type of the disorder, however, is milder altogether, and is of a different character. The Australian child is straight-limbed almost without exception, yet the Australian type of rickety disease, as I pointed out in 1891, ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... Piedmont hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. "We've got him, we've got him," they barked. "We caught him up a tree; but he's all right now, he'll feed from the hand. Come on and see him." So I accompanied them up a dizzy hill, and in a rickety shack in the midst of a eucalyptus grove found my sunburned prophet of the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... negation, a prophetic recoil from responsibility that clogged his resolve. His eyes roved uncertainly about the familiar domestic scene, darkening now, duskily purple beneath the luminous pearly and roseate tints of the twilight sky. The old woman was a-drowse on the porch of the rickety little log-cabin beneath the gourd vines, the paralytic grandfather came hirpling unsteadily through the doorway on his supporting crutch, his pipe shaking in his shaking hand, while he muttered and mumbled to himself—who knows what?—whether of terror of ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... size of a moderate house, which had been detached from the overhanging cliff above, and had fallen together. There was a smaller cavern within, which made a capital kennel; rather more substantial than the rickety building of yesterday. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... was his gratifying reply. I was still weak, but I gathered up my remaining strength and plunged the head of the cane, a dog's head it was, into his heart. His watch, or his Bible, or something interposed, and rescued him from the fate he merited; and then we rode over the miserable, rickety farther end of the Grand Trunk Railway, and reached Island Pond at midnight,—in time to see the magnificent Northern Lights flashing, flickering, wavering, streaming, and darting over the summer sky; and as the people in the Pond were many and the rooms few, we had plenty of time to enjoy ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Davis, which resulted in the arranging for a short afternoon sermon, and after it the ceremony. We were not to enter the church until the proper moment, and Ben said he could manage it, for when the minister began his last prayer he would climb the rickety ladder into the old square box of a belfry and hang out a yard of white cloth on ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... done, called to his side General Dode de la Brunerie, an officer of the engineers, whom he had already distinguished. "They are there!" said he, without further explanation. The general easily divined the emperor's meaning. They both entered a hut, and Napoleon, spreading out his maps on a rickety table, discussed with Dode the resources still at his command. The general's plan was to ascend the course of the Berezina, declaring that he knew several fords, and that they could then advance quickly upon ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... Syracuse, gave up the trip to Palestine and returned home by Malta. Gilbert and Frances were to have dined at Admiralty House but he was too unwell to dine out and only came up one afternoon. Lady Fisher remembers going to see them at the Osborne Hotel. Gilbert was sitting on a rickety basket chair, obviously in pain and talking a good deal in order to hide it. She sympathised with him for the cold weather, his obvious physical misery, and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... them is even quieter than the outer din? There is one, indeed, that, long nursed and dozing in the lap of the State, is now roughly shaken, but is she yet awake? She has grown in bulk at least, while sleeping. Is she not like an overgrown child too big to be carried, and too rickety ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... by a man turned out of his way to ascertain the cause of the racket. There was a black coat and vest hanging on the fence, and a professional-looking man in his shirt sleeves was smashing the meeting-house. The rickety old steps were gone by the time this man, with open eyes and wide-open month, came to stare in speechless amazement. Gideon couldn't have demolished 'the altar of Baal and the grove that was by it' with more enthusiastic ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... the actual denizens! One gazed with a dull, wondering pity at the poor, pale, rickety children; the slatternly, coarse women who never smiled (except when drunk); the dull, morose, miserable men. How they lacked the grace of French deformity, the ease and lightness of French depravity, the sympathetic distinction of ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Pope to call him the fairest of critics, not content with criticising the production of Dryden, Milbourne was so ill advised as to produce, and place in opposition to it, a rickety translation of his own, probably the fragments of that which had been suppressed by Dryden's version. A short specimen, both of his criticism and poetry, will convince the reader, that the powers of the former were, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... up in front of you, on a small and rickety one-legged table, is a most trying exercise, especially if you are not used to it. George and I both felt our position keenly. We did not like to call out for help, and bring the family down. We were proud young men, and we feared lest, to the unsympathetic eye of the comparative stranger, the ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... to Corbitant perched on the rickety seat of his rattling open buggy, and bowed forward as his wont was, his rounded shoulders bringing his chin well over the dashboard. As he passed down the long sandy street, toward the corner where his own house stood, the brooding group of loafers, waiting in Hackett's store ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... domestic scenery of 1901. But your eye was caught at once by the additions made by Mrs. Rossiter. Linda conceived it was her womanly mission to lighten the severity of Michael's choice in furniture and decorations. She introduced rickety and expensive screens that were easily knocked over; photographs in frames which toppled at a breath; covers on every flat surface that could be covered—occasional tables, tops of grand pianos. If she did not put ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... grass cabin, which was on the plantation of Dr. Emmett, and had been left tenantless by some fisherman. This served for shelter during the night though the struggles and squealings of a drove of hogs attempting to enter through the rickety door did not contribute much to ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... turned over and composed himself to sleep again. He had said all he thought necessary, and had no pressing business to call him up. Julius opened the door and went out, down the rickety stairs and out through a narrow covered alleyway to the street, for the room which Jack Morgan and he occupied was in a rear tenement house. Several dirty and unsavory-looking children—they could not well be otherwise in such a locality—barefooted and bareheaded, were playing in the court. ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... of the three highways that lead from the frontiers of Holland toward Antwerp. Although the vehicle had evidently been cleaned with the utmost care, every thing about it betokened decay. Its joints were open, discolored, and weather-beaten, and it swung from side to side on its springs like a rickety skeleton. Its patched leathers shone in the sunshine with the oil that had been used to freshen them, but the borrowed lustre could not hide the cracks and repairs with which they were defaced. The ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... in 1880, or about that date. The silence of the single little street, with its one-storied, thatched or tiled cottages, is at infrequent intervals broken by an elderly dame in her sabots, or by a creaking, rickety village cart driven by a farmer-boy in blouse and hob-nailed shoes. The largest inhabited building is the mairie, a modern structure, at one end of which is the village school, where fifteen or twenty urchins enjoy the instructions of the worthy teacher. A ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... out by Sam was a small frame building, having the sign, "Oscar Cook—Barrels and Kegs," painted over the door. It was a tumbled-down, rickety affair, evidently ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... They climbed the rickety stairs, which groaned and creaked beneath their weight, and found Mother Guttersnipe lying on the bed in the corner. The elfish black-haired child was playing cards with a slatternly-looking girl at a deal table by the faint ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Nothing so easy. Scorched along bad roads on a rickety machine. Would you be kind enough to let go my arm and stop shrieking! You'll have the whole village here in a moment. So you're all right, I see! Sitting quietly here, after scaring us half out of ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Something lacking in the soil affected the feed, and some of the calves were born without hair; their bones were soft. It baffled my father and every man along that rim of the desert, but not mother. She said doctors prescribed lime for rickety human babies, and she made limewater and mixed it with the feed. It was just the thing. She was a small woman, but plucky from start to finish. And we, Dad and I, didn't know what it was costing her—till she ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... not lost all sensitiveness.... On the opposite wall, to the west, appear the words, 'A memorial unto the destruction of the Temple'. To this day I do not know what there was to commemorate the fall of the Holy Place. The rickety rafters? Or were the little creatures swarming all over the walls to remind one of 'the foxes that walk ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... and hut combined, in which his childhood had rolled along, was fastened to the bottom of the mast by thick ropes, of which the knots were visible at the wheels. Having been so long out of service, it had become dreadfully rickety; it leant over feebly on one side; it had become quite paralytic from disuse; and, moreover, it was suffering from that incurable malady—old age. Mouldy and out of shape, it tottered in decay. The materials of which ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... drawing-room, from which four windows looked out into the garden. This might have been a pretty room had any care been taken to make anything pretty at the Cedars. But the furniture was old, and the sofas were hard, and the tables were rickety, and the curtains which had once been red had become brown with the sun. The dinginess of the house had not struck Miss Mackenzie so forcibly when she first visited it, as it did now. Then she had come almost direct from Arundel Street, and the house in Arundel Street had itself been very dingy. ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... the rear of his sleeping quarters ran the wire right-of-way fence, which was also the back fence of a small piece of property on which stood a rickety old house. The house was devoid of paint, but it was a cheerful sight from where Chi Foxy reclined. He had a clear view of the kitchen window, from which the light came in a yellow glow, and he could see a woman cooking something in a frying-pan on a kitchen stove. A man sat beside the stove, his ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... Nicolai Leontievitch," I said. Then I did not disturb him but sat down on a rickety chair and waited. Ink dripped from his table on to the floor. One bottle lay on its side, the ink oozing out, other bottles stood, some ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... spread over a dirty bed tick filled with leaves. There was only one chair, and that was a broken rocker, on which the unhappy mistress of the cottage was seated. But there were two or three rough stools, made of pieces of pine slab, standing beside the rickety table. Pointing to these stools, Mrs. Button, without quitting her chair, said to ...
— Aunt Amy - or, How Minnie Brown learned to be a Sunbeam • Francis Forrester
... sultry, the heat increased by the rays of the sinking sun, which found their way in by the window, through which also entered unpleasant odours ascending from the court-yard below. One of the persons, whose handsome dress contrasted strangely with the appearance of the room, was busy writing at a rickety table. With youth, wealth, talents, a fair fame, the godson of the future monarch of England, he might, had he so willed, have been a peer of he realm, the founder of a noble family. The other, who has been described as Captain Mead, rose from his seat, and walked up and down with somewhat ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... while in the can, but the system was not well understood, and those who had it in charge only succeeded in making the can itself more plump. But now oysters are kept on ground feed and given nothing to do for a few weeks, and even the older and overworked sway-backed and rickety oysters of the dim and murky past are made to fill out, and many of them have to put a gore in the waistband of their shells. I only speak of the oyster incidentally, as one of the objects toward which science has turned its attention, and I assert with the utmost confidence that the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... to get up early next morning and give the girl a hand with the cows. There were two rickety bails in the yard. He had not forgotten how to milk, but the occupation gave him no pleasure—it brought ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... in her own presence (S395), gave the Queen a shock which left a fatal inheritance of cowardice to her son. Throughout his life he could not endure the sight of a drawn sword. If we can trust common report, his personal appearance was by no means impressive. He had a feeble, rickety body, he could not walk straight, his tongue was too large for his mouth, and he had goggle eyes. Through fear of assassination he habitually wore thickly padded and quilted clothes, usually green in color. He was a man of considerable shrewdness, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... he can't climb a tree without falling out and breaking his neck. Why, he's the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit this earth. He has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged and up holstered to be able to live at all. He is a rickety sort of a thing, anyway you take him, a regular British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always under going repairs. A machine that is as unreliable as he is would have no market. The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. The original cave man, the troglodyte, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... may have commanded Sylla's admiration, but it taught him, also, that a young man capable of assuming an attitude so bold might be dangerous to the rickety institutions which he had constructed so carefully. He tried coercion. He deprived Caesar of his priesthood. He took his wife's dowry from him, and confiscated the estate which he had inherited from his father. When this produced no effect, the rebellious youth was made over to the ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... plaster walls, once painted a harsh blue, now toned by time and damp to a hundred parti-coloured patches. A rough, uneven floor; for furniture a narrow, oaken bedstead, a heavy chair lamed by four legs of various heights, a rickety table steadied by a pad of rags beneath one foot, a long chest of painted wood: such was the sleeping-room of Wilhelmine von Graevenitz, in her mother's house at Guestrow in Mecklemburg. And here on a December morning of the year 1705 Wilhelmine sat disconsolately on ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Tim Gibbs came in—and Booligal. Tradition in New South Wales puts the climate of Hay, Hell, and Booligal in that order. Tim had driven starving, rickety sheep across his native plains when the earth's surface had been powdered to red sand and driven by shrivelling westerlies in travelling sandhills from mirage to summer mirage. Tim was used to hot places. That is why he became ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... Nickleby, the money-lender, had given Kate and her mother leave to live in a rickety, unoccupied house which he owned. It was a dingy building on an old wharf, but Noggs, the clerk, himself cleaned and furnished one of its rooms so that it was fairly comfortable. When they were settled Ralph took Kate to a dressmaker's, where he got her a situation, hoping thus they ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... at the Wilson prize-pigs. So good Mr. Herbert never fails, in due attestation of his "abhorrence of the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities," to foot it over the rocky hill and down across the rickety little bridge and past the poor-house farm, (where he stops on a little private business of his own, that perhaps makes a few old hearts and certainly one old coat-pocket the lighter,) and so on, a good piece, through the woods, to where Vestryman Wilson is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... entertainment, however. One of the columns had sent out 300 men and a pompom in pursuit of Hertzog's fugitives, and the force had just returned with quite a haul of prisoners. They had come across the rearmost of them as they were in the act of crossing the river in a rickety punt, which vessel had been scientifically rendered unseaworthy by a well-directed belt of pompom-shells. Examination of the bushes on the near bank of the river showed that dozens of Boers had literally gone to earth. The river approach was full of rain-fissures and water-cracks, ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... way to the top of a rickety stair, and knocked at one of the doors which opened on the landing. No answer was returned, but after a second application of the knuckles, accompanied by a touch of the toe, a growling voice was heard, then a sound of some one getting violently out of bed, a heavy tread on the floor, and ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... have gathered, their city have built; Where Hunger and Vice, like twin beasts of prey, Have hunted their victims to gloom and despair; Raise the rich, dainty dress, and the fine broidered skirt, Pick your delicate way through the dampness and dirt. Grope through the dark dens, climb the rickety stair To the garret, where wretches, the young and the old, Half starved and half naked, lie crouched from the cold; See those skeleton limbs, those frost-bitten feet, All bleeding and bruised by the stones of the street; Hear the sharp cry of childhood, the deep groans that swell From the poor dying ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... men. The worst factory in Europe is hardly as bad as the average farm barn. Power is utilized to the least possible degree. Not only is everything done by hand, but seldom is a thought given to logical arrangement. A farmer doing his chores will walk up and down a rickety ladder a dozen times. He will carry water for years instead of putting in a few lengths of pipe. His whole idea, when there is extra work to do, is to hire extra men. He thinks of putting money into improvements as an expense. Farm products at their ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... the eyes of the old priest. He dismissed the chief at once, and after saying farewell to Pere Victorien, who was embarking immediately for his own island of Haitheu, Pere Simeon and I entered his study, a pitifully shabby room where rickety furniture, quaking floor, tattered wall-coverings, and cracked plates and goblets spelled the story of the passing of an institution once possessing grandeur and force. Seated in the only two sound chairs, with wine ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... in its entirety, was devoted to books; nor that it housed no other people than bibliomaniacs or antiquarians! Higher, above the little shops, small rooms, reached by rickety stairways, offered quiet corners for divers and sundry gentlemen whose occupations called for discreet ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... pass he stops and questions them, and then gives them orders, or scolds them, as circumstances demand. Towards nine o'clock tea is announced, and he goes into the dining-room—a long, narrow apartment with bare wooden floor and no furniture but a table and chairs, all in a more or less rickety condition. Here he finds his wife with the tea-urn before her. In a few minutes the grandchildren come in, kiss their grandpapa's hand, and take their places round the table. As this morning meal consists merely of bread and tea, it does not last long; and all disperse ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... dinner I take a stroll in the Flower Gardens, and crossing the rickety wooden bridge over the river, I enter the hemlock grove. Here, in a sequestered spot near the river bank, I lay me on the grass and sleep for the night. I always bring my towels with me; for in ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... good humor had been restored, Dan broached the nature of his errand. As he mentioned Morton Bassett's name the huge editor's face grew blank for a moment; then he was shaken with mirth that passed from faint quivers until his whole frame was convulsed. His rickety chair trembled and rattled ominously. It was noiseless laughter so far as any vocal manifestations were concerned; but it shook the gigantic editor as though he were a mould of jelly. He closed his eyes, but otherwise his fat face ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... third day out I fell and bruised my thigh severely, and could not make my little mountain town till moonlight. And I tell you I was mighty glad when I limped across the bridge over the rushing river and dropped on the hotel sofa. Next morning I was stiff as a poker, but I struggled up the four rickety flights to the local physician, and being assured I only wanted rest, I resolved to take it with book and pipe and mug in a shady beer-garden on the river. I had been reading for about an hour when five or six Tyrolese, old men and young, in their gray and green costumes and their little ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... A shock head, and more shocky eyebrows, bore a strange resemblance to the patent chimney-sweep; while his clothes seemed rich in past memories of the profession. I had before caught sight of this individual, in a tumble-down, rickety shop near the residence of Mrs. Mountchessington Lawk. I had, in fact, seen her on more than one occasion bestowing charity upon him in the form of broken victuals; but the recollection failed entirely to account for the effect of ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... getting in my dotage—brain a little cracked—and all that. I'm a poor chap possessed of a foolish and wicked delusion. Mean well, but head rickety. Sometimes I really think I must be crazy, with all the world against me about the German danger. They call me Jeremiah and Mother Goose rolled into one. But, by God, Kirtley, as my soul's immortal, I tell you I'm right—I'm right! The deluge ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... sides were formed of wretched houses, upon which many years of misery, poverty, and crime had set their unmistakable stamp. They crossed the court diagonally and entered a house in the right-hand corner. They went up the worn, carpetless stairs with a rickety handrail on one side and the torn, peeling paper on the other, and stopped before a door which opened on to a narrow landing on the first floor. Pent-Ah knocked with his knuckles on the panel, first three times quickly, and then twice ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... fault of the lawyers, if there are criticisms of the lawyers it is the fault of the courts. They are interdependent and indissoluble. If a club house is not suitable for its purposes, is old-fashioned, rickety, and dirty, it is the fault of the members. If the members do not behave the club house ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... young ladies, in whom I discovered some slight general resemblance to the imaginary character. My fancies, I must confess, played strange pranks with me. They had been kept in a coop so many years that now, when I suddenly turned them loose, their rickety attempts ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... His wobbly, rickety little body always wore the most startling of costumes. A green paddock coat, well padded, a yellow walking stick in the thin fingers, a rakish hat, patent-leather boots, striped suits, silk shirts with handkerchiefs to match, a gold cigarette case, and a watch chain like a woman's, were a few ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... for he himself, in his glee over freedom regained, was not conspicuously sane. He scoured the town in high spirits, peering into shop-windows, riding on top of busses, going to the Zoo, taking the rickety old steamer to the Statue of Liberty, drinking afternoon tea at the Ritz, and all that sort of thing. The first three nights in town he slept in one of the little traffic-towers that perch on stilts up above Fifth Avenue. ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... that the supposed Greek 'rachitis', inflammation of the back, is an aetiological invention to serve as etymon of 'rickets', the condition of being rickety, a purely native word. ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... antique marble, and peremptorily motioned Mr. Wallace Kent to that portion of the seat left after she had wedged herself as far to one side as possible. Mr. Kent obeyed immediately, though he had just placed a rickety, stuffed chair beside the gold one occupied by Miss Blanche Grayson, the glowerer. Miss Lindsey sat on the end of an overturned box hedge before a drop curtain of a twilight night, and Mr. Reginald Leigh sat ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... side entrance to the hotel was the goat and the rickety express wagon, in charge of a red-haired, snub-nosed boy, Mike's small brother. Mike himself, rather ragged, but clean and neat enough, was in the lobby, sitting at his ease on one of the ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in a Great City • Laura Lee Hope
... mountains, lay listening for the train that, twice a day, ran out to the greater world. Round about, tied to the well-gnawed hitching rails, were rows of mules—mules with back cloths; mules with saddles; mules hitched to long wagons, buggies, and rickety gigs; mules munching golden ears of corn, and mules drooping their heads in sorrowful memory ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... once ordered his men to double, and as they dashed into the village among the wondering people, the kasid pointed out Surendra Nath's house at the far end—a small two-storied building, surrounded by a wall and approached through a rickety iron gateway. It was the first house to which ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... carefully roped, and with the caution to rest our knees on the sides of the ladder, as several of the steps were extremely weak—a remark which was equally applicable to one, at least, of the sides. We crept up the rickety old machine, however, looking down between our legs into the blue depths of the crevasse, and at 8.15 the whole party found itself satisfactorily perched on the edge of the nearly level snow plateau, looking up at the long slopes of broken neve that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... round-limbed, blond baby of two or three summers. The three stood upon the lowest bar of the gate, clinging to the upper spars. The eldest leaned her elbows on the top and looked over; the baby embraced the middle bar and looked through. They had set the rickety gate swinging petulantly, and it latched and unlatched itself with the sort of sound that the swaying of some dreary wind would give it. The children seemed to swing there, not because they were happy, but ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... taken a room for herself in a house standing in a quiet, withdrawn square in the neighbourhood of King's Road, Chelsea. To call it a room was to dignify it by a title to which it could lay no real claim. It was an attic, up the last rickety flight of stairs, with roofs that sloped down within two feet of the ground, and a diminutive window from which one could get but the barest glimpse of the skies. Still it had possibilities, its aspect was not so ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... might have resisted the nervous depression which they caused, at least well enough to maintain an active part in his undertakings. Or if his bodily weakness, resulting from his early austerities, had been accompanied with interior equanimity, he might have held up. A rickety ship can, with care and skill, get into port if the engine is sound, and so can a sound ship with a broken-down engine sail home, however slowly. But with both a rickety ship and a disabled engine the port should be ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... and while her beauty and extraordinary type attracted all the men she came across they soon gave up their pursuit. She was quite hopeless, they said—and half-witted, some added! No woman could sit silent like that for hours, otherwise. Zara thought of all these things, as she sat on the rickety chair in the Neville Street lodging. How she had loathed that whole atmosphere! How she loathed bohemians and adventurers, no words ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... time that he held the office of surveyor to the county of Salop, he erected no fewer than forty-two, five of which were of iron. Indeed, his success in iron bridge-building so much emboldened him, that in 1801, when Old London Bridge had become so rickety and inconvenient that it was found necessary to take steps to rebuild or remove it, he proposed the daring plan of a cast iron bridge of a single arch of not less than 600 feet span, the segment of a circle l450 feet in diameter. In preparing this design we find that he was associated ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... just at the rickety Age when the Gams refuse to cooerdinate. Every time he sauntered carelessly across the porch at a Summer Hotel, he gave a correct Imitation of a troop of Cavalry going over a Wooden Bridge at ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... Hill, beyond which lay the village of Hillcrest which grew in importance as St. Ange degenerated. There were scattered houses among the clumps of maple and pine growths, and there was a forlorn railroad station before which a rickety, single track branch ended. Sometime during the day a train came in, and after an uncertain period it departed; it was the only link with the outer world that St. Ange had except what came ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the ordinary plank-bridge a solid causeway composed of earth and brushwood, with a high bulwark on either side, was probably, if not unprecedented, at any rate very uncommon. Boat-bridges were usually, as they are even now in the East, somewhat rickety constructions, which animals unaccustomed to them could with difficulty be induced to cross. The bridge of Xerxes was a high-road, as AEschylus calls it along, which men, horses, and vehicles might pass with as much comfort and facility as ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... of all Stern's oiling, every journal and bearing squealed in anguish. A rickety tremble possessed the engine as it gained speed. The dynamo began to hum with wild, strange protests of racked metal. The ancient "drive" of tarred hemp strained and ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... sleep soundly. His arms were lame and sore from the strain the ponies had given them, and that may have been the reason why he dreamed half the night that he was driving runaway teams and crashing over rickety old bridges. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... and in fifteen minutes the rickety bridge was braced up with three strong trusses. Then thirty soldiers were put on the bridge and jumped six times in unison at the word of command. After this test, the passage of troops began, while the pontoniers were repairing the two public bridges. ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... world, perhaps, but Tom had exercised an admirable regard for his partner's feelings and had never cast it up to him. Thus had his consideration been repaid. However, the poor fellow's race was about run, for he couldn't stand cold or exposure. Why, a wet foot sent him to bed. How, then, could a rickety ruin of his antiquity withstand the ravages of ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... in yard of the large Ottoman house already mentioned is a trap-door. One is let down over a rickety ladder about four feet to the top of four high stone steps, which descend on the left to a platform about three and one-half feet square which projects without railing over the water. Thence fourteen steps, also without railing, conduct to another platform below, about three ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... passenger hasn't missed his train," observed the ferryman to Mr. Jimmy Fallows, who sat on the river bank with the painter of his rickety little naphtha launch ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... what can I do for you, my good woman?' said the Doctor, seating himself on a rickety ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... dining-room, the ceiling of which was so low that Mr. Yorke's head seemed but a little way off it as he walked about. On the other side of the passage was a drawing-room, wonderfully smart and uncomfortable, with groups of wax fruit under glass shades on rickety tables, crochet couvrettes over the back of almost every chair as well as on the sofa, and a wonderful festoon of green and yellow tissue paper round the glass above the mantelpiece. Mr. Yorke took ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... while a rickety old rowboat had been lying off from the Albert. A bronzed and bearded man sat alone in the boat, eyeing the strange vessel as though afraid to approach nearer. He was thin and gaunt. The evening was chilly, ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... the northeast wind. The storm of the previous night had been exactly to his liking. All his worst prognostications had been fulfilled, and quite a bit thrown in par dessus le marche. He told me that a tiny, rickety house across the harbour had first been unroofed, and then one of the walls blown in. It is a real disaster for the family, for they are poor enough without having Kismet thus ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
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