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More "Squalid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reached a tiny room, quite up at the top of the house. It had a low, sloping roof, much discoloured with damp and dirt, as were also the walls. The floor was bare and black with dirt and age, the whole apartment squalid ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... moving sight. About twenty young creatures, the eldest not exceeding sixteen, many of them with angelic faces divested of every angelic expression, featured with impudence, impenitency, and profligacy, and clothed in the silken tatters of squalid finery. A magisterial—a national—opprobrium! What a disadvantageous contrast to the Spinhaus, in Amsterdam, where the confined sit under the eye of a matron, spinning or sewing, in plain and neat dresses provided ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... "It would be wise to enjoy it while you can," he said. "In another year or two the freedom may be gone, and the prairie shut off in little squares by wire fences. Then one will be permitted to ride along a trail between rows of squalid homesteads flanked by piles of old boots and provision-cans. We will have exchanged the stockrider for the slouching farmer with a swarm of unkempt children and a slatternly, scolding ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... the same trade, and that his suburban house, with its bath, its cottage piano, its drawingroom suite, and its album of photographs, would have shamed the plainness of his grandmother's. But the descendants of feudal barons, living in squalid lodgings on a salary of fifteen shillings a week instead of in castles on princely revenues, do not congratulate the world on the change. Such changes, in fact, are not to the point. It has been known, as far back as our records go, that man running wild in the woods ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... a gate in the walls they entered the town, which afforded a pleasant contrast to the squalid misery of Callao. The city, however, could not be called imposing; the houses were low and irregular, fantastically painted in squares or stripes, and almost all had great balconies shut ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... back of a long, level-topped hill, which rises solitary to the height of some five hundred feet above the far-stretching plain. Kipling likens it to a great ship, up the sides of which the steep road slopes like a gangway. At the foot lies the modern village, squalid but picturesque. ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... the gypsies', dark but beautifully lit. The actual room is scarcely seen, and although at first it appears squalid, there are flaring touches of Byzantine luxury. Gypsies are singing. FEDYA is lying on the sofa, his eyes closed, coat off. An OFFICER sits at the table, on which there are bottles of champagne and glasses. Beside him sits a musician ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... appall'd, the King Of Erebus, and with a cry his fears 80 Through hell proclaim'd, lest Neptune, o'er his head Shattering the vaulted earth, should wide disclose To mortal and immortal eyes his realm Terrible, squalid, to the Gods themselves A dreaded spectacle; with such a sound 85 The Powers eternal into battle rush'd.[4] Opposed to Neptune, King of the vast Deep, Apollo stood with his wing'd arrows arm'd; Pallas to Mars; ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... my little conductress; at the same time, pushing open a door of patched and half-rotten plank, she admitted me into the squalid chamber of death and misery. But one candle, held in the fingers of a scared and haggard-looking child, was burning in the room, and that so dim that all was twilight or darkness except within its immediate ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... stated, it appeared reasonable to expect in Lee and his army some depression of spirits. The fact was strikingly the reverse. The army was in excellent spirits, probably from the highly-agreeable contrast of the budding April woods with the squalid trenches, and the long-unfelt joy of an unfettered march through the fields of spring. General Lee shared this hopeful feeling in a very remarkable degree. His expression was animated and buoyant, his seat in the saddle erect and commanding, and he seemed to look forward ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Science and Health is good. In passages to be found in Mrs. Eddy's Autobiography (on pages 53, 57, 101, and 113), and on page 6 of her squalid preface to Science and Health, first revision, she seems to me to claim the whole and sole authorship of the book. That she wrote the Autobiography, and that preface, and the Poems, and the Plague-spot-Bacilli, we are not permitted to doubt. Indeed, we know she wrote them. But the very certainty ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in vain, but at length an old man in squalid attire, with long dishevelled gray locks and matted beard, appeared at the window ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... precipices, Mr. C. pointed out the residences of a number of poor white families, whom he described as the most degraded, vicious, and abandoned people in the island—"very far below the negroes." They live promiscuously, are drunken, licentious, and poverty-stricken,—a body of most squalid and miserable human beings. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... a perfectly legitimate part too. At any rate it has come to be an impalpable aroma through which only both the songs and their singer must henceforth be read and absorb'd. Through that view-medium of misfortune—of a noble spirit in low environments, and of a squalid and premature death—we view the undoubted facts, (giving, as we read them now, a sad kind of pungency,) that Burns's were, before all else, the lyrics of illicit loves and carousing intoxication. Perhaps even it is this strange, impalpable post-mortem ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... she opened the letters and seemed to read; and over her shoulder I saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned,—bloated, bleached, seaweed tangled in its dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of a corpse; and beside the corpse there cowered a child, a miserable, squalid child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. And as I looked in the old woman's face, the wrinkles and lines vanished, and it became a face of youth,—hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... San Fernando, but not meeting any sailor he knew, he decided to return home. As the night was beautiful, with a brilliant moon transforming the squalid city into a fantastic fairy kingdom, he went to the fair. There he wandered back and forth, passing booths without taking any notice of the articles in them, ever with the thought of Hongkong, of living free, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... the vassalage of the States; but in poor England, the asylum of the alien, all nationalities have an equal chance, and the nigger, the Chinaman, the Jew, and the German can walk arm in arm, whether in the squalid streets of Spitalfields or the aristocratic precincts of ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... David brought back an evil report. It was a filthy place, he said, unfit for respectable people. But Zinzendorf felt that, filthy or not, it was the very spot which God had chosen for his new work. It suited his high ideas. The more squalid the people, the more reason there ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... temperament of a civilized age. It is detection, not the sin, which is the crime; private life is sacred, and inquiry into it is intolerable; and decency is virtue. Scandals, vulgarities, whatever shocks, whatever disgusts, are offences of the first order. Drinking and swearing, squalid poverty, improvidence, laziness, slovenly disorder, make up the idea of profligacy: poets may say any thing, however wicked, with impunity; works of genius may be read without danger or shame, whatever their principles; ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... wondered about this interestingly. Probably the stage would be locked at night. Still, at a suitable hour, he could descreetly find out. On another stage a bedroom likewise intrigued him, though this was a squalid room in a tenement and the bed was a cheap thing sparsely covered and in sad disorder. People were working on this set, and he presently identified the play, for Muriel Mercer in a neat black dress entered to bring comfort ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... into the depths of Deptford, how he set about humanising the shoeless, starving, conscience-little waifs who were drafted into his school, and how, before many months had passed, he never walked through the squalid streets of his own quarter without two or three loving little fellows all in tatters trying to touch the hem of his garment, while a group of the more timid followed him admiringly afar off. From the children, his good influence extended to the parents; and it was an almost ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Others were squalid, ragged, and filthy, to a degree I had never before witnessed. There was apparently but little discipline on board, but a great deal of disputation and a continual jabbering. A ruffianly-looking fellow, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... in which he describes the squalid conditions under which he passed some of his life ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... these cloaks, and behind that curtain, the Nun was said to issue. I did not believe this, nor was I troubled by apprehension thereof; but I saw a very dark and large rat, with a long tail, come gliding out from that squalid alcove; and, moreover, my eye fell on many a black-beetle, dotting the floor. These objects discomposed me more, perhaps, than it would be wise to say, as also did the dust, lumber, and stifling heat of the place. The last inconvenience would soon have ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... wretched corse with sorrow worn, His squalid limbs with pond'rous fetters torn; Those eyeless orbs that shock with ghastly glare, Those ill-becoming rags — that matted hair! And shall not Heaven for this its terrors show, 35 Grasp the red bolt, and lay the guilty low? How long, how long, Almighty God of all, Shall wrath vindictive ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... winks a wicked eye on every corner; where the signs of the whiskeys and actresses flare through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across the trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more respectful vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and best, who have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and are forcing the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... crossed the street and stumbled up the uneven stone steps of a shabby-looking house, whose front door was wide open. Without a moment's hesitation she entered the dark hall, and I followed closely at her heels. Up the squalid, dirty stairs she hurried, and, without knocking, opened a door on the left-hand side of the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... volumes had been published, Charles Brockden Brown died in his house at Eleventh and George Streets, on the 19th of February, 1810. It was in this house, which was not upon the east side of Eleventh Street, as Neal asserted in Blackwood's Magazine, nor was it "a low, squalid, two-story house," that Thomas Sully saw him, and said: "I saw him a little before his death. I had never known him—never heard of him—never read any of his works. He was in a deep decline. It was in the month of November—our Indian summer, when the air is ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... women in England are laboring excessively for a bare pittance; day after day they go through the same monotonous and exhausting round of toil; and the end of it all is a bit of bread for some who are dear to them, and a squalid, cheerless existence for themselves. Sometimes, when work is scarce, and sheer starvation confronts them, they are driven to the last resource of selling their bodies, and enter the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... away from where the herds of London slept, into open spaces. For some obscure reason this made her nervous, and she turned back. After a while London closed in on her again, but this time in a more squalid quarter, a wilderness of dirty narrow streets, where even in the darkness the debasing marks and odours of squalid poverty were perceptible in the endless rows of houses which seemed to crowd in upon her. She came to ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... than from the light of Christian truth, charity consists merely in supplying the natural wants of the neighbor by making him more comfortable in his external condition; and this is well, for there is little, if any, use in trying to improve the inner man while the outer is bowed down with want or squalid with impurity. This is the basis of the higher planes of charity, the first in time, though lowest in degree. There are those who think lightly of this form of charity, because it is lowest in degree, ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... drama, in Guerrazzi's tedious novel, and Scolari's digest, the legend of Beatrice Cenci has long appealed to modern sympathy. The real facts, extracted from legal documents and public registers, reduce its poetry of horror to comparatively squalid prose.[196] Yet, shorn of romantic glamour, the bare history speaks significantly to a student of Italian customs. Monsignore Cristoforo Cenci, who died about the year 1562, was in holy orders, yet not a priest. One of the clerks of the Apostolic Camera, a Canon of S. Peter's, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... which, there remained in his mind an image of Mark Wylder, in the straw and darkness of a solitary continental mad-house—squalid, neglected, and becoming gradually that which he was said to be. And he always shaped him somehow after the outlines of a grizzly print he remembered in his boyish days, of a maniac chained in a Sicilian cell, grovelling under the lash ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the north east suburbs of London, a vast district many miles away from the London of Mayfair and St. James's, much less known there than the Paris of the Rue de Rivoli and the Champs Elysees, and much less narrow, squalid, fetid and airless in its slums; strong in comfortable, prosperous middle class life; wide-streeted, myriad-populated; well-served with ugly iron urinals, Radical clubs, tram lines, and a perpetual stream of yellow cars; enjoying in its main thoroughfares the luxury of grass-grown "front gardens," ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... was an exception to the squalid slovenliness that disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered every spot with his toys. Valerie's room and dressing-room were situated ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... the brand of the dog, as I crouch in this hideous place; To make me forget once I kindled the light of love in a lady's face, Where even the squalid Siwash now holds ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... and must yield. Slatin Pasha, by the way, had gone over the battle-field and identified many of the slain Emirs. At 4.20 p.m., with two batteries, several Maxims and Colonel Maxwell's brigade leading, the Sirdar rode down the great north thoroughfare towards the central part of the squalid town. The houses, or more accurately huts, were full of dervishes, hundreds of whom were severely wounded. Women and children flocked into the streets, raising cries of welcome to us. Of all the vile, dirty places on earth, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... daring Oar; Nor is it safe, from dread of angry Skies, Closely to press on the insidious Shore. To no excess discerning Spirits lean, They feel the blessings of the golden mean; They will not grovel in the squalid cell, Nor seek in princely domes, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... where sleep occupies the larger half of man's life. Although it was only evening, an hour when Paris and London recover, as it were, from the previous night's vigil and brighten up into vigour, the solitary Englishman passed unheeded through the squalid villages, unmolested along the winding roads. Mile after mile of scanty forest land and rich meadow were left behind, while, except for a few heavily-breathing cattle, he met no sign of life. At last he came upon a broader road which bore unmistakable ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... and the scent Of summer gardens; these can bring you all Those dreams that in the starlit silence fall: Sweet songs are full of odours. While I went Last night in drizzling dusk along a lane, I passed a squalid farm; from byre and midden Came the rank smell that brought me once again A dream of war that in ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... Poverty!" Man, hast thou traced The blood that throbs commingled in thy veins? Over thy shoulder hast thou cast a glance On thine old Celtic-Saxon-Norman sires— Huddled in squalid huts on beds of straw? Barefooted churls swine-herding in the fens, Bare-legged cowherds in their cow-skin coats, Wearing the collars of their Thane or Eorl, His serfs, his slaves, even as thy dog is thine; Harried by hunger, pillaged, ravaged, slain, By Viking robbers and the warring Jarls; Oft ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... with difficulty sustains life, and which is demonstrably calculated, from its deleterious qualities, to induce serious disease. The effects manifest in the parent descend, and visible in the youngest children; they are squalid and wretched-looking,—and how can such offspring be otherwise? They are exceedingly subject to all children's diseases, and peculiarly predisposed to pulmonary irritation ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... for I was a lonely woman, my dear. One day I received a letter written in a strange hand saying that my husband was ill and not likely to live—that he wished for me, to ask my forgiveness, and he begged me for God's sake to go to him. I went. He was in Detroit in a squalid boarding house. I was shocked at the change. I had not realized that a man could so lose his good looks as he had done. I took him to a clean place kept by a woman who had been highly recommended. Upon my arrival he wept bitterly and begged my pardon. Then I was glad that I had never divorced ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... off to the right along a dirty street of squalid, tumble-down houses; a narrow, ill-lighted street which, though comparatively quiet by day, now hummed with a ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... walk through the dimly lighted and squalid streets which intersect Miller's Point and Church Hill brought Barry out into the glare and noise of the lower part of the principal thoroughfares of the city, which, boisterous as was the night, was fairly thronged with the ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... probably been once a gentleman's house; but now the light which streamed from its enlarged front windows made clear the interior of the splendidly fitted-up room, with its painted walls, its pillared recesses, its gilded and gorgeous fittings-up, its miserable squalid inmates. It ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... ambles up the street beneath the roaring "El" between the rows of reeking sweat-shops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant, squalid, doomed to exist forever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his cigarette you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... neither a moment nor a penny to spare. Sickness, trouble, and the war of the world have been too much for them. They are right up against the wall; and they know it. But the matter does not end there. I remember once entering a dingy little dwelling in the slums of London. In the squalid room a cripple girl sat sewing, and as she ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... there is a spacious vestibule, but this, as well as the interior, though elegant in its simplicity of style, is meagre of ornament. Proceeding to the interior, I reached the criminal court, where a squalid-looking prisoner was undergoing trial for murder. The judges and officers of the court were almost entirely without insignia of office, and the counsel employed, I thought, evinced much tact in their proceedings, especially in the cross-examination of ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... stood in a new light? your soul was bared, and the grave,—a foretaste of the nakedness of the Judgment-Day? So it came before him, his life, that night. The slow tides of pain he had borne gathered themselves up and surged against his soul. His squalid daily life, the brutal coarseness eating into his brain, as the ashes into his skin: before, these things had been a dull aching into his consciousness; to-night, they were reality. He griped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiff ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... a large cotton manufacturing town—sometimes called the Manchester of Poland—but now of course all the factories were closed, and many destroyed by shell. I should not think it was a very festive place at the best of times; it looked squalid and grimy, and the large bulk of its population was made up of the most abject Jews I ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... Valley; all night long and all day long the miners worked in the mines, and all through the night and the long day the great cement factory and the glass factories belched forth their lurid fumes. The trolley cars went creaking and moaning around the curves through the mean, dirty, squalid, little streets of the mining and manufacturing towns. They whined impatiently as they sailed across the prairie grass under the befogged sunshine between the settlements, but always they brought ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... leafy tree to comfort the eye, or a bird to sing; no quiet hills, no sight of the sun coming up in the morning over dewy fields, no sound of cattle in the lane, no cheerful cackling of fowls, nor buzzing of bees! That morning, I remember, when I first went out into those squalid streets and saw everywhere the evidences of poverty, dirt, and ignorance—and the sweet, clean country not two miles away—the thought of my own home among the hills (with Harriet there in the doorway) came ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... Brilliant Theatre is a pretty little place,—comfortable, cosy, bright, and deserving of its name;—in broad day, it is none of these things. A squalid dreariness seems to have settled upon it—it has a peculiar atmosphere of its own—an atmosphere dark, heavy, and strangely flavored with odors of escaping gas and crushed orange-peel. Behind the scenes, these odors mingle ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... like Ronda, so entirely apart from the world, poverty-stricken, this desire for realism makes a curiously strong impression. The churches, coated with whitewash, are squalid, cold and depressing; and at first sight the row of images looks nothing more than a somewhat vulgar exhibition of wax-work. But presently, as I lingered, the very poverty of it all touched me; and forgetting the grotesqueness, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... Edinburgh and Glasgow had not, until 1839, any retreat or place of confinement for the insane, except six squalid stone cells attached to the public hospital of Dumfries. Violent or vagrant lunatics were physically restrained in their own houses, allowed to roam at large, or incarcerated in prisons or police stations. In the year mentioned, the Crichton ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... give an idea, urbi et orbi, of clandestine passion in the squalid style stamped on it in Paris in 1840. How far, alas! from the adulterous love, symbolized by Vulcan's ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... in the course Allen pursued, he was right. Because, though at first nothing was talked of by his captors, and nothing anticipated by himself, but his ignominious execution, or at the least, prolonged and squalid incarceration, nevertheless, these threats and prospects evaporated, and by his facetious scorn for scorn, under the extremest sufferings, he finally wrung repentant usage from his foes; and in ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... people live here. Why would we be coming, else?" retorted Barry impatiently. He was scanning the buildings. Several white-clad figures passed and repassed among the huddle of squalid huts, all apparently bound towards the river wharf ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... of ice-cream vendors, the high-pitched eloquence of medicine-men, peddlers, tired children, and scolding mothers, it is well-nigh maddening. Still the crowd elbows and jostles along, gradually growing noisier and denser. There they mingle shoulder to shoulder, the squalid and the well-to-do, lads and lasses, boys and girls, husbands and wives, grave and gay; while friendly greetings are exchanged, light jests bandied as they move backwards and forwards, intent upon the fun of the fair, with hardly a glance for the feast of beauty which nature has ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... the privilege of all writers of fiction," he declares, "more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to present the beau-ideal of their characters to the reader. This it is which constitutes poetry, and to suppose that the red man is to be represented only in the squalid misery or in the degraded moral state that certainly more or less belongs to his condition, is, we apprehend, taking a very narrow view of an author's privileges. Such criticism would have deprived the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... Italy, there is much to do for womankind. Then, as now, the skies were blue, and the sun was bright and warm; then, as now, did the peasants dance and sing all the way from water-ribbed Venice to fair and squalid Naples, but with a difference. Now, there is a measure of freedom to each and all—then, justice was not only blind but went on crutches, and women were made to suffer because they were women and because they ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... idiots, and reminded of a nature red in tooth and claw rampant in this most sordid of all possible worlds. Now that the Rationalists take up the case against war from another end, they are denounced as squalid souls, with a greengrocer's outlook, morbidly anxious about the price of peas and potatoes, and urged to remember that not by bread alone doth man live. In The Foundations of International Polity (HEINEMANN), a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... his despairing and innocent quest of a hearing he was threatened with arrest! He sneaked back to his lodgings and hid himself in the squalid apartment and nursed ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... frankly blackguardly plays, in which unscrupulous low comedians attract crowds to gaze at bevies of girls who have nothing to exhibit but their prettiness, will vanish like the obscene songs which were supposed to enliven the squalid dulness, incredible to the younger generation, of the music-halls fifteen years ago. On the other hand, plays which treat sex questions as problems for thought instead of as aphrodisiacs will be freely performed. Gentlemen ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... no suspicion of Mateo's cabin and the family that lived there in squalid content. The ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... silk hats rather dull), and haven't you often thought how narrow their lives are, how cramping their environment? But suppose one of those clerks loves books and is something of a poet. What does it matter to him though his rooms in Clapham or Brixton are grimy, almost squalid, and filled with the worst kind of Victorian furniture? "Minds innocent and quiet take such for an hermitage." Once inside, the long day at the office over, and the door shut on the world, an arm-chair drawn up to the fire and his books around him he is ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... residences. It had long ceased to look into St. James's Park, more than one row of houses, encroachments upon the public park, having grown up between. The garden-house had become a mere ordinary street house in York-street, only distinguished from the squalid houses on either side of it by a tablet affixed by Bentham, inscribed "sacred to Milton, prince of poets." Petty France lost its designation in the French Revolution, in obedience to the childish petulance ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... which are the famous streets of palaces. I never in my life was so dismayed! The wonderful novelty of everything, the unusual smells, the unaccountable filth (though it is reckoned the cleanest of Italian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one upon the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more close than any in St. Giles's or old Paris; in and out of which, not vagabonds, but well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans, were passing and repassing; the perfect absence of resemblance in any dwelling-house, or shop, or wall, or post, or pillar, to anything ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... savage fastnesses the pirates lived in squalid splendour. They had numbers of slaves to wait upon them, the finest wines and foods, the richest dress and jewels, spoils of their travels. And when they had drunk and rioted in idleness to their heart's content ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... the stairs, made his way carefully past the "poor wretch" and knocked at the door. No answer. He knocked louder, and this time a low "come in" rewarded him, and he promptly obeyed it. A woman was bending over a pile of straw and rags, and an object lying on top of them; and a squalid child, curled in one corner, with a wild, frightened look in his eyes. The woman turned as the door opened, and John Birge recognized her as ...
— Three People • Pansy
... vividly the new order of things. The State Capitol was a beautiful marble building, but unfinished without and dirty within. Approaching the hall of the House of Representatives, I found the door guarded by a negro, squalid and filthy. He evidently reveled in his new citizenship; his chair was tilted back against the wall, his feet were high in the air, and he was making everything nauseous about him with tobacco; but he ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... other side is the vicolo, dark of wall and dank of pavement, with petticoats and shirts dangling from numerous windows and fluttering like gibbeted wretches in the air; with frowzy women sewing or knitting in the sombre doorways and squalid urchins screaming everywhere; with humble vegetables and cheap wines exposed for sale in dirty windows; with usually a carriage or two undergoing a washing at some stable-door; and with almost always an amorous Romeo or two from some brighter ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... were the property of the plantation lords of the lowlands of North Carolina, who correspond to the pinchbeck barons of the rice districts of South Carolina. As there, the whites and negros we saw were of the lowest, most squalid type of humanity. The people of the middle and upland districts of North Carolina are a much superior race to the same class in South Carolina. They are mostly of Scotch-Irish descent, with a strong infusion of English-Quaker blood, and resemble much the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... college his father died suddenly, and the scanty sum required for his support stopped. Squalid poverty relieved by occasional gifts was Goldsmith's lot thenceforward. He would write street-ballads to save himself from actual starving, sell them for five shillings a-piece, and steal out of the college at night ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... to say that as he was crossing the ferry from Wall Street to Brooklyn, yesterday afternoon, he counted 117 persons reading PUNCHINELLO. He did not observe a single copy of the Sun on board, until the boat neared Brooklyn, when a man of squalid appearance produced from a dirty newspaper some soiled articles, all of which seemed to have been steeped in Lye, from contact with the sheet, which ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... about a mile to leeward. They were soon alongside, when one of the three jumped on board. This was the pilot, a slave, as I knew; and I remember the time, when, in my innocence, I would have expected to see something very squalid and miserable, but there was nothing of the kind; for I never in my life saw a more spruce saltwater dandy, in a small way. He was well dressed, according to a seaman's notion—clean white trowsers, check shirt, with white lapels, neatly fastened at the throat with a black ribbon, smart straw ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... of life is to find one's true environment, he has at any rate found his; and in finding it knows a happiness, even amid the squalid poverty of Shoreditch, such as is found ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... the government service in the lower grades, with nothing but hard work and obscurity before him,—this was at the very beginning of the reign of the Emperor Alexander. He was obliged reluctantly to return to the country to his father. How squalid, poor, and wretched his parents' home seemed to him! The stagnation and sordidness of life in the country offended him at every step. He was consumed with ennui. Moreover, every one in the house, except his mother, looked at him with ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... of the Singing King had melted; to the north was a stretch of monotonous ground overgrown with a new suburb; but that was the camp of Sennacherib, the Assyrian whom the Angel of the Lord smote and his army of one hundred and four score and five thousand, before the morning. Yonder were squalid streets, older than any others. But the Kings had walked them; the Prophets had helped wear trenches in their stones; the heroes and the strong-hearted women of the ancient days had gone that way. No house but was holy with tradition; no street but was sanctified by event. ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he might make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth handsome and bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations... Only when the family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... exterior of this remarkable church is closely hidden by a rather squalid collection of buildings. Here and there they have been cleared away, but, like much of the process of restoration, where new fabric is let into the old, the incongruity is quite as objectionably apparent as the crumbling stones of another age. Notre Dame de ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... whom stands no type or title given In all the squalid tales of gore and pelf; Though cowed by crashing thunders from all heaven. Cain never said, 'My ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... across the hills which divide Pahang from Perak. It is peopled by Malays of various races. Rawas and Menangkabaus from Sumatra, men with high-sounding titles and vain boasts, wherewith to carry off their squalid, dirty poverty; Perak men from the fair Kinta valley, prospecting for tin, or trading skilfully; fugitives from Pahang, long settled in the district; and the sweepings of Sumatra, Java, and the Peninsula. It was in this place that I heard the following story of a Were-Tiger, from Penghulu Mat ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... virtuous impulse—scorned by the honest and good, and hating and undermining the redeeming principles of her species—rushing from the high station which her ancestors had arduously laboured for generations to attain, and voluntarily taking up her abode in the dens of squalid misery and indelible pollution—closing her eyes to the might and majesty of a merciful God, beckoning her to his eternal throne in heaven, and giving heed to the fatal devices of the enemy of mankind, till she was dragged down, down to the innermost depths of a raging and ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... which gets more and more saturated with silly arrogance and puerile bragging. Somewhere deep in the Russian soul—no matter whether it is the "master's" or the muzhik's—there lives a petty and squalid demon of passive anarchism, who infects us with a careless and indifferent attitude toward ...
— The Shield • Various
... begun to call the little town of St. Gilles an "ugly hole," and wonder what St. Louis saw to love in it, when, coming out of a squalid, hilly street through which I had tried to pick my way on foot, alone, suddenly the facade of the wonderful old church burst upon my sight, a vision ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... proceeded. Passengers hesitated to address their most intimate friends on meeting; the extent of calamity had rendered men suspicious even of those they loved most. Every one assumed the coarsest dress, and the most squalid appearance; an elegant exterior would have been the certain forerunner of destruction. At one hour only were any symptoms of animation seen: it was when the victims were conveyed to execution; the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... blackness of his sin. No Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... eyes, before the gaze of a helpless girl; and the shame that is never absent from insanity bears down the pride of strength, the bloody cravings of the wild beast. The lunatic moaned and drooped his shaggy head between his gaunt, squalid hands. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... Arab's oar along the iron side, he bumped the landing-stage. Safe on deck, he became in a moment stiff and haughty, greeting a fellow passenger here and there with a half-military salute. All afternoon he sat or walked alone, unapproachable, eyeing with a fierce and gloomy stare the squalid front of wooden houses on the African side, the gray desert glare of Asia, the pale blue ribbon of the great Canal stretching southward into ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... stood for a moment's breathing space near the summit. Beneath them the squalid little town huddled in the draw and ran sprawling up the hillsides. Shaft-houses and dumps ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... with a chopped-up intellectualist picture of it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that intellectualism had already pre-empted. But he clung fast to the old rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the form of philosophy might be empirical only. His own system had to be a product of eternal reason, so the word 'logic,' with its suggestions of coercive necessity, was the only word he could find natural. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... is nothing here which impresses one more than its squalid filth, and the abject degradation of the people which crowd its streets. The temples are extremely dirty. There is not one of imposing size or of decent attractiveness. There stands the monkey-temple, where scores of mangy, tricky brutes are daily sumptuously fed by devout pilgrims. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... astrologers, the witches, and the dream-readers; she is devoted to the mystic worship of the Egyptian Isis, with its secret rites of purification, or she is a proselyte to the pestilent notions of the Jews. She is too much under the influence of some squalid Oriental who carries his pedlar's basket, or whose business is to buy broken glass for sulphur matches Meanwhile Corellia is a blue-stocking, as bad as a precieuse with a salon. As soon as you sit down to table she begins to quote Homer and Virgil and to compare their ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... never interrupted running all through our religious experience. Instead of that there is a light point here, and a great gap of darkness there, like the straggling lamps by the wayside in the half-lighted squalid suburbs of some great city. Is that your Christian life, broken by many interruptions, and having often sounding through it the solemn words of the retreating divinity which the old profound legend tells us were heard the night ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... believe nothing of the sort? Is our real opinion that these things at bottom don't matter—or matter so little that for the sake of robbing the squalid belongings of a few Arab tribes, or playing some mean game of party politics, they can be set aside in a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... under Mrs. Mornway's guidance, took on an air of sober luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating to her sister-in-law. The domestic machinery ran without a jar. There were no upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses between intervals of showy hospitality; the household moved along on lines of quiet elegance and comfort, behind which only the eye of the housekeeping sex could have detected a ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... as if there had just been an earthquake—all the roofs sunk in various places—thatch off, or overgrown with grass—no chimneys, the smoke making its way through a hole in the roof, or rising in clouds from the top of the open door—dunghills before the doors, and green standing puddles—squalid children, with scarcely rags to cover them, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... could see distinctly the whole factory, its innumerable unshaded windows, its glistening panes, its tall chimney losing itself in the depths of the sky, and nearer at hand the lovely little garden against the ancient wall of the former mansion. All about were gloomy, miserable roofs and squalid streets. Suddenly she started. Yonder, in the darkest, the ugliest of all those attics crowding so closely together, leaning against one another, as if overweighted with misery, a fifth-floor window stood wide open, showing only darkness within. ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... she said, "has been unhealthy of recent months. These lower people will not build fine houses to adorn my city, and because they choose to live on in their squalid, unsightly kennels, there have been calentures and other sicknesses amongst them, which make them disinclined for work. And then, too, for the moment, earning is not easy. Indeed, you may say trade is nearly stopped this last half-year, ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... literature would give only the perfect moments of existence, would ignore the tragedies, ironies, pettiness of life! Such an interpretation is a quite mistaken one. As the great painting uses the vivid reproduction of an ugly face, a squalid hovel, to create a beautiful picture, beautiful because all the conditions of seeing are made to contribute to our being made whole in seeing; so great literature can attain through any given set of facts to the deeper ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... disappointed. Of the city as a city I shall try to say something elsewhere; but the things which these critics have especially in mind are at once more general and more internal. They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines and those who use them. Now the mistake of critics is not that they criticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves. They compare the alien with the ideal; but they do not at the same time compare themselves with the ideal; rather they ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... of that board fence is as good a object lesson as you'll find of the cleansin' and elevatin' power of the Christian religion. There wuz two heathen families, and their cabins wuz dirty and squalid, while the Christianized homes are as clean and pure as ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... ones and twos, each with his word of congratulation or advice to the new postmaster. Seth Weaver alone lingered, leaning on the window-ledge. His eyes—shrewd blue eyes, with a twinkle in them—roamed over the rather squalid little room, with its two yellow chairs, its painted ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... or even a garment, was considered cheap as the price of murder; and so intricate were the streets, so honeycombed with secret hiding-places known only to the initiated, that attempts to enforce justice had almost invariably ended in failure. Naturally this squalid neighborhood materially swelled the yelling crowds who, in the name of patriotism, openly defied all law and order, and made outrage and murder a national duty as they drank, and danced, and sang the "Ca-ira," flaunting their ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... father of Phaeton, in squalid garb, and destitute of his comeliness, just as he is wont to be when he suffers an eclipse of his disk, abhors both the light, himself, and the day; and gives his mind up to grief, and adds resentment to his sorrow, and denies his services to the world. "My lot," says ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... was setting behind the western hills of Sicily as Fernand Wagner entered the squalid suburb which at that period stretched from the town of Syracuse to the sea. His step was elastic, and he held his head high—for his heart was full of joyous and burning hope. Hitherto the promises of the angel who had last appeared to him were completely fulfilled. The boat was wafted ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... Fetter Lane smote on my ears as I came out through the archway, and very squalid and unrestful the little street looked when contrasted with the dignity and monastic quiet of the old garden. As to the surgery, with its oilcloth floor and walls made hideous with gaudy insurance show-cards ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... to a dungeon? His senses ached as he asked himself this, and faint pictures began to piece themselves together out of the episodes of the dead night. He saw again the squalid walls of the Fircone Tavern and his mind jumped back to his recitation of the ballad and his fierce sense of indignation at the humiliation of Paris, girdled by a wall of hostile Burgundians and governed by an impotent king. Then came the vision of an angel's visit and a prayer that had more ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... is it?" he said. "Then I suppose Khartoum will be just such a city of mosques and palaces. Why, there isn't a redeeming feature in the whole spot! It's just a squalid collection of mud-houses and hovels, built anyhow by people accustomed to live in a tent or nothing at all. Why, if you took the trees away—and it wouldn't take long to do that—it would be fit for nothing but to be washed away as so much mud, if the Nile would ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... Rouche's establishment and make some inquiries of her. The mere aspect of the place chilled him. It was one of the black houses of old Paris, with a dark, evil-smelling passage, leading into a small yard which the nurse's few squalid rooms overlooked. Above the passage entrance was a yellow signboard which simply bore the name of Madame Rouche in big letters. She herself proved to be a person of five- or six-and-thirty, gowned in black and spare of figure, with a leaden complexion, scanty hair ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... their report, the baron's proffered services were accepted with a vote of thanks for his disinterestedness, and he was ordered to join the army of Valley Forge. That army, in its ragged condition and squalid quarters, presented a sorry aspect to a strict disciplinarian from Germany, accustomed to the order and appointments of European camps; and the baron often declared, that under such circumstances ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... saw coming up the walk towards him the young girl herself. His airy structure fell in ruins around him; he was again common and immeasurably beneath her; she was again in her own world, where, if she thought of him at all, it must be as a squalid vagabond and the accomplice of a thief. If he could have escaped, he would, but he could not move; he sat still and waited with fallen eyes ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... with a din As we waited and still no train came in; But the words of the child in the squalid room Had spread a glory through ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... and perceived the person who spoke to be one of two malefactors shackled together, who had been sentenced for some crime to work as labourers on the fortifications. His face was so covered with hair, and his whole appearance so disguised by the squalid habit which he wore, that the Count could not recollect his features, until he gave him to understand that his name was Ratchcali. Melvil immediately recognised his fellow-student at Vienna, and his brother-volunteer upon the Rhine, and expressed equal surprise and ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... a slope from the edge of the dorp to the little spruit, not fenced nor sundered in any way from the squalid brick which houses the lower end of Dopfontein. Full in face of it was the location of the Kafirs; around it and close at hand were the gross and dirty huts of the off-colors (half-castes). The house, which was in the middle of the plot, was ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... to the following, it must be explained that the first draft of the first part of the Amateur Emigrant, when it reached me about Christmas, had seemed to me, compared to his previous travel papers, a somewhat wordy and spiritless record of squalid experiences, little likely to advance his still only half-established reputation; and I had written to him to that effect, inopportunely enough, with a fuller measure even than usual of the frankness which always marked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... immediately above the Knight's head, the want of furniture, the Knight's own mantle and that of Gaston both called into requisition to protect him from the damp chill night air, their bright hues and rich embroidery contrasting with the squalid appearance of all around, as, indeed, did the noble though pale features of the wounded man himself, and the graceful attire and shining hair of the fair young boy who stood over him. But Sir John beheld ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... witnessed in the fortunes of the great actors by whom she was once surrounded. So here were the histories of two of the occupants of our court. The others may have had experiences no less strange; and in many another court in this great city, from the stately inclosures of the Rue de Lille to the squalid dens of the Faubourg St. Antoine, (if the names have not escaped me,) lives well worth the telling are passing away. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... Oxford Street. Not many people were stirring there. One or two men who passed him were smoking their morning's pipe, with a half-awakened air, as if they had only just got out of a snug bed, in which they always slept every moment that they lay upon it. Titmouse almost envied them! What a squalid figure he looked, as he paced up and down, till at length he saw the porter of Messrs. Tag-rag & Co. opening the shop-door. He soon entered it, and commenced another jocund day in that delightful establishment. The amiable ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... extinguished without difficulty. They were easily persuaded that their proper sphere of action was Versailles, with its Assembly, that was able to do everything, and did nothing for the poor. They played the genuine part of mothers whose children were starving in their squalid homes, and they thereby afforded to motives which they neither shared nor understood the aid of a diamond point that nothing could withstand. It was this first detachment of invading women that allowed Stanislas Maillard ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... he goads himself into madness, tears himself into shreds, and eats his own substance. Deprived of the background of the whole, his poverty loses its one great quality, which is simplicity, and becomes squalid and shamefaced. His wealth is no longer magnanimous; it grows merely extravagant. His appetites do not minister to his life, keeping to the limits of their purpose; they become an end in themselves and set fire to his life and play the fiddle in the lurid light ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... the wholesome obviousness of Dickens that we owe the atmosphere of good cheer that surrounds his characters. No writer has pictured more scenes of squalid misery, and yet we are not depressed. There is bad weather enough, but we are not "under the weather." There are characters created to be hated. It is a pleasure to hate them. As to the others, whenever their trials and tribulations abate for ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... was saying. Perhaps he was right. The man's inborn hatred of a second or inferior place in anything stung him. Were there to be any niches after all in the temple of happiness to which he could never climb? He looked back rapidly, looked down the avenue of a squalid and unlovely life, saw himself the child of drink-sodden and brutal parents, remembered the Board School with its unlovely surroundings, his struggles at a dreary trade, his running away and the fierce draughts of delight which the joy and freedom ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... proved on acquaintance the worst kind of blighter. He considered himself a genius whom it was the duty of the country to support, and he sponged on his wretched relatives and anyone who would lend him money. He was always babbling about his sins, and pretty squalid they were. I should like to have flung him among a few good old-fashioned full-blooded sinners of my acquaintance; they would have scared him considerably. He told me that he sought 'reality' and 'life' and 'truth', but it was hard to ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... reached their station, and their journey was over; but in all the years to come, never, never again would Kitty Trenire pass the long, ugly rows of squalid backs of houses just outside the station, and dull depressing streets, never again would she enter that station itself, without living through once more and tasting again the misery, the strangeness, the forlornness which filled her heart that afternoon. She might come in the height of ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Where the squalid town of Dae Irks the comfortable sea, Spreading webs to gather fish, As for wealth we set a wish, Dwelt a king by right divine, Sprung from Adam's royal line, Town of Dae by the sea, Divers kinds of ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... oil lamp here and there, and protected by nothing but the useless old watchman in his box: it is the tract of land between Grosvenor Place and Sloane Street. His lordship had a reputation for parsimony, and he fancied it a bargain if he could sell to my father those squalid fields for L2000,—so he offered them to him at that price. When my mother heard of this, she was dead against so extravagant an outlay for that desolate region; so much dreaded by her whenever her ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of GUILTY was already pronounced. Edward just glanced at the bar during the momentous pause which ensued. There was no mistaking the stately form and noble features of Fergus Mac-Ivor, although his dress was squalid and his countenance tinged with the sickly yellow hue of long and close imprisonment. By his side was Evan Maccombich. Edward felt sick and dizzy as he gazed on them; but he was recalled to himself as the Clerk of Arraigns ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... smutty, sooty, smoky; thick, turbid, dreggy; slimy; mussy [U.S.]. slovenly, untidy, messy, uncleanly. [of people] unkempt, sluttish, dowdy, draggle-tailed; uncombed. unscoured[obs3], unswept[obs3], unwiped[obs3], unwashed, unstrained, unpurified[obs3]; squalid; lutose[obs3], slammocky[obs3], slummocky[obs3], sozzly[obs3]. nasty, coarse, foul, offensive, abominable, beastly, reeky, reechy[obs3]; fetid &c. 401. [of rotting living matter] decayed, moldy, musty, mildewed, rusty, moth-eaten, mucid[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... the south—moist, undulating, and exuberant. But there is another Soudan, which some mistake for the true, whose solitudes oppress the Nile from the Egyptian frontier to Omdurman. This is the Soudan of the soldier. Destitute of wealth or future, it is rich in history. The names of its squalid villages are familiar to distant and enlightened peoples. The barrenness of its scenery has been drawn by skilful pen and pencil. Its ample deserts have tasted the blood of brave men. Its hot, black ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... novelty of everything, the unusual smells, the unaccountable filth (though it is reckoned the cleanest of Italian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one upon the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more close than any in St. Giles's or old Paris; in and out of which, not vagabonds, but well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans, were passing and repassing; the perfect absence of resemblance in any dwelling-house, or shop, or wall, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... ever-springing fountains of cool and sparkling liquid, which, as Mubarek afterwards discovered, was not water but the purest liquid glass, every dwelling was a palace. In that happy country there were no mean and squalid houses ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... St. Annie's is the remotest on the whole plantation, and I found there the wretchedest huts, and most miserably squalid, filthy and forlorn creatures I had yet seen here—certainly the condition of the slaves on this estate is infinitely more neglected and deplorable than that on the rice plantation. Perhaps it may be that the ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the children, like the cradle song of a mother, pouring hope into the cell of the captive, teaching the virtuous oppressed that a just God mercifully listened to all their secret sighs, and, leading the poor to look beyond the squalid poverty which surrounded them, pointed to them the legions of angels, which were lovingly camped around them. It is impossible to overestimate the blessed effects of such a literature, or to count the naive hearts which it may have rescued from ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and actresses flare through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across the trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more respectful vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and best, who have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and are forcing the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras. He himself remains midway between the last fall and the next ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... "we'll forego that heaven, that's all—at any rate the needle's eye sort." And she dismissed the problem. She was not going to be as poor as the Wherrys, not for all the sayings on earth—the miserable squalid Wherrys. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... under the stones of this massive tower and emerged to find themselves upon the bridge. Again and again did they pass under round-arched tunnels bored, as it were, through gloomy buildings six or seven stories high. These covered the bridge from end to end, and they swarmed with a squalid humanity, if one might judge from the calls and cries that resounded in the ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... to a certain degree, arrived at that equality which they profess to covet; and in no one, perhaps, more than in the fair distribution of good looks among the women. This is easily accounted for: there is not to be found, on the one hand, that squalid wretchedness, that half-starved growing up, that disease and misery, nor on the other, that hereditary refinement, that inoculation of the beautiful, from the constant association with the fine arts, that ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... this allusion to her Tory principles, and exclaimed, as she looked with evident disgust at the squalid surroundings: "Why will men be so cruel to men? I will tell General Howe some truths that will cause ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... I knew that in men fidelity had the importance that they gave to it. To a few—very few—it matters—but in most cases unfaithfulness is not a psychological thing at all; it is simply a temporary excess like getting drunk—squalid, if you like—but not touching your real relationships. Women bluff a lot on the subject and many are fools. They believe in the same law for both sexes. It is a ridiculous fallacy. Only Edmond was different. He loved women—psychologically. He was therefore inconstant, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... battle-fields (named 'Bed of honour') with their bodies, in quarrels which are not theirs; their hand and toil is in every possession of man; but for themselves they have little or no possession. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed; to pine dully in thick obscuration, in squalid destitution and obstruction: this is the lot of the millions; peuple taillable et corveable a merci et misericorde. In Brittany they once rose in revolt at the first introduction of Pendulum Clocks; thinking it had something to do with the Gabelle. Paris requires ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... forget the brand of the dog, as I crouch in this hideous place; To make me forget once I kindled the light of love in a lady's face, Where even the squalid Siwash now ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... never in its best days could have been white; shattered doors whose proper colour none could tell, and which, standing ajar, seemed to lead to nothing but darkness; weird women and gaunt children imparting a dismal life to the rows of ungainly dwellings;—all these made up a picture of squalid woe such as might well have appalled a stouter heart than poor Lady Oldfield's. And was she to find her delicately-nurtured son in such a place as this? They turned down one street, under the wondering ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... innumerable unshaded windows, its glistening panes, its tall chimney losing itself in the depths of the sky, and nearer at hand the lovely little garden against the ancient wall of the former mansion. All about were gloomy, miserable roofs and squalid streets. Suddenly she started. Yonder, in the darkest, the ugliest of all those attics crowding so closely together, leaning against one another, as if overweighted with misery, a fifth-floor window ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... also, that squalid love of his, was in truth no vision—was a stern, palpable reality, very difficult to get rid of, and one which he often thought to himself would very probably swallow up that other love, and drive his sweet dream far away into utter darkness ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... places, and she had never before been brought into close touch with this side of life. The sight of actual raw misery had come home to her with an added force from that circumstance. Wandering on, she had reached a street which eclipsed in cheerlessness even its squalid neighbors. All the smells and noises of the East Side seemed to be penned up here in a sort of canyon. The masses of dirty clothes hanging from the fire-escapes increased the atmosphere of depression. Groups of ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... case; and an interesting portrait of some historic statesman who presided over the department two centuries ago. But in the more modern offices all is barren. Since the late Mr. Ayrton was First Commissioner of Works a squalid cheapness has reigned supreme. Deal and paint are everywhere; doors that won't shut, bells that won't ring, and curtains that won't meet. In two articles alone there is prodigality—books and stationery. Hansard's ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... shadows, and a ruddy brownness of field and moor are the colors of Lorraine. Here and there, on the meadows of the river and the steep flanks of the hills, were ancient, red-roofed villages. Across the autumnal fields the smoke and flame of squalid Pompey loomed strangely. ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... saloons, floods of beautifullest blond-dresses and broadcloth-coats flowing past him, endless, in admiring joy. One night, nevertheless, in the splendour of one such scene, he sees himself suddenly apostrophised by a squalid unjoyful Figure, who has come in uninvited, nay despite of all lackeys; an unjoyful Figure! The Figure is come "in express mission from the Jacobins," to inquire sharply, better then than later, touching certain things: "Shaven eyebrows of Volunteer Patriots, for instance?" Also ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... his cousin by marriage, James Mason, in the lonely stone house among the hills, which had belonged to the family since the Revolution. He left it gladly, however, for the farm life seemed to him much harder and more squalid than he had remembered it to be, and he disliked James Mason's wife. As he and Laura walked down the long, rough track connecting the farm with the main road on the day of their departure, Stephen Fountain whistled so loud ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... metal were hanging from her nostrils and ears; her hair, which was adorned with glass beads, fell loosely upon her shoulders; and I saw that she was not married, for she still wore that necklace of shells which the bride always deposits on the nuptial couch. The negress was clad in squalid European garments. They all three came and seated themselves upon the banks of the fountain; and the young Indian, taking the child in her arms, lavished upon her such fond caresses as mothers give; while the negress endeavored by various little artifices to attract ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... terrific scene terminated this melancholy drama. This, the last day of Moscow, having arrived, Rostopchin collected together all whom he had been able to retain and arm. The prisons were thrown open. A squalid and disgusting crew tumultuously issued from them. These wretches rushed into the streets with ferocious joy. Two men, a Russian and a Frenchman, the one accused of treason, the other of political indiscretion, were selected from among this ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... most eager and active of all the Virtues, set off first on his journey. Justice followed, and kept up with him, though at a more even pace. Charity never heard a sigh, or saw a squalid face, but she stayed to cheer and console the sufferer,—a kindness ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Brock and Hugh explaining, steadily explaining why they had not gone! Brock and Hugh after the war, mature men, meeting returning soldiers, old friends who had borne the burden and heat, themselves with no memories of hideous, infinitely precious days, of hardships, and squalid trench life, and deadly pain—for America! Brock and Hugh going on through life into old age ashamed to hold up their heads and look their comrades in the eye! Or else—it might be—Brock and Hugh lying next year, this year, in unknown, honored graves in France! ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... the sudden inrush of armies and the wherewithal to supply and house them, soon gave the vast spaces laid out for the capital the uncouthness and incompleteness of an exaggerated mining town or series of towns. Contrasted even with its rival on the James, Washington was raw, chaotic, squalid. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... squaw, kept her a Twelve-month with her, in a Squalid Wigwam: Where, in the following Winter, she fell sick of a Feavour; but in the very height and heat of her Paroxysms, her Mistress would compel her sometimes to Spend a Winters-night, which is there a very bitter one, abroad in all the bitter Frost ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... freedom and long-remembered home. In the streets were heard quick footsteps, and loud, merry voices. Traffic went on in the crowded mart, and pleasure was pursued in the luxurious halls of the noble. Here, flower-crowned guests reclined at the banquet, listening to sweet music, while yonder the squalid miser counted his gold, and there a fair young mother smiled upon her children. Just the same passions crowded into human hearts that day, just the same delusions were followed, the same pleasures felt, arid the same griefs deplored on that ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... sheyk of the entire clan had laid claim to the principal captives, and had carried off the young lady and her uncle; and in his dwelling she had a boarded floor to sleep on, and had been made much more comfortable than in the squalid huts below. Her original master, Yakoub, had, however, come to seize her, with the force described by Murad. Then it was that again there was a threat to kill rather than resign them; but on this occasion it was averted ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... enthusiastically, that they would do. Whichever way they looked, kind ladies smiled and shouted at them. And above all rose the voice of the clever lady, crying: "Prato! They must go to Prato. That place is too sweetly squalid for words. I love it; I revel in shaking off the trammels of respectability, ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... the last cargo were on shore, and Easy was desiring the men to shove off, when one of the galleriens turned round, and cried out to Jack in a mocking tone, "Addio signor, a reveder la." Jack started, stared, and in the squalid, naked wretch who addressed him, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... by a scarcity of bread, a vast multitude from the surrounding country gather around the royal palace at Versailles, their great number, sallow faces and squalid appearance indicating widespread wretchedness and want. Their appeal for royal assistance is plainly written, in "legible hieroglyphics in their winged raggedness." The young king appears on the balcony and they are permitted to see his face. If he ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... afraid that Mrs. HODGSON BURNETT is in a little danger of overdoing it. She knows (who better?) the briskness of the popular demand for long-lost heirs; and she may well have argued that the longer he has been lost, the more squalid his present environment, and the more brilliant his heritage, the more assured would be the heir's welcome. Perhaps indeed this may be so in America; but for this side, as I say, I have my doubts. I daresay your own intuition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... hardly had time to think it as the armies came into their places. It was the third day after the regiment had reached Tien-Tsin. Along the Peiho river lay a sandy plain with scant tillage and great stretches of barren lands. Here and there were squalid villages with now and then a few more pretentious structures with adobe brick walls and tiled roofs. Everywhere was the desolation of ignorance and fear, saddening enough, without the Boxer rebellion to intensify it with months ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... dust and grime of the Flats, a woman sat on the doorstep of a wretched house. Her rounded shoulders slouched wearily—her tired hands were folded in her lap. She stared with dull, listless eyes at the squalid homes of her neighbors across the street. The Interpreter had described the woman to Helen—"a girl with fine instincts for the best things of life and a ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... of the vices of the city; and whence he was driven back upon London by disgust at the discovery of villany as elaborate and roguery as abject in the beggars and thieves of the country as the most squalid recesses of metropolitan vice or crime could supply. The narrative of this accidental discovery is very lively and spirited in its straightforward simplicity, and the subsequent revelations of rascality are sometimes humorous as well as curious: but the demand for such literature must ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... father's door and was allowed to enter. He found McEwen walking up and down his room, with the aid of a stick, irritably pushing chairs and clothes out of his way. The room was in squalid disorder, and its inmate had a flushed, exasperated look that did not escape Anderson's notice. He thought it probable that his father was already repenting his consent to go to Vancouver, and he avoided general conversation as much ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of savage men, Untamed by arts, untaught by pen; Or cower within some squalid den O'er ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... most of her set. But she was really not used to making any decision as definite and important as that of going out West alone. She had never been farther west than Jersey City; and her conception of the West was a hazy one of vast plains and rough mountains, squalid towns, cattle ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... no provision made for Colored paupers or Colored orphans. Where individual sympathy or charity did not intervene, they were left to die in the midst of squalid poverty, and were cast into the common ditch, without having medical aid or ministerial consolation. There was not simply studious neglect, but a strong prohibition against their entrance into institutions ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... new courage into his heart. When his way homeward led him again into the street of frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that now seemed to him utterly squalid ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... responsibility for all the unalleviated misery of the world. For every one who has laid the sorrows of humanity on his heart, and has felt them in any measure as his own, there are a hundred to whom these make no appeal and give no pang. Within ear-shot of our churches and chapels there are squalid aggregations of stunted and festering manhood, of whom it is only too true that they are 'drawn unto death' and 'ready to be slain,' and yet it would be an exaggeration to say that the bulk of our congregations cast even a languid eye of compassion upon those, to say ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... land-side, but I did remark the "maiangas," said to be indigo vats made by the Jesuits. After a hot depression we ascended a rough zigzag, and halting we enjoyed a charming view of St. Paul. The domed Morro concealing the squalid lower town was crowned with once lordly buildings—cathedral, palace, treasury, and fort; the colours of the ground-swell were red and white, with here and there a dot of green; and the blue sea rose in its ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... and rush and conflict of business and daily life, than it is for people like me, whom you imagine as sitting in a study, with nothing to distract us. I do not know about that; I fancy it is about equally hard for us all; but it is possible. I have been in Alpine villages where, at the end of every squalid alley, there towered up a great, pure, silent, white peak. That is what our lives may be; however noisome, crowded, petty the little lane in which we live, the Alp is at the end of it there, if we only choose to lift our eyes and look. It is possible that not only 'into the sessions ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... past the "poor wretch" and knocked at the door. No answer. He knocked louder, and this time a low "come in" rewarded him, and he promptly obeyed it. A woman was bending over a pile of straw and rags, and an object lying on top of them; and a squalid child, curled in one corner, with a wild, frightened look in his eyes. The woman turned as the door opened, and John Birge recognized ...
— Three People • Pansy
... do! She asked me to take chances in a raffle for Dave's fiddle. Yes, sir; with her kind words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home. I had to respect ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... dwelt in peace, for none came to search for the costly and beautiful Pearl-Maiden in those squalid courts, occupied by working folk of the meaner sort. By day they laboured, and at night they rested, ministering and ministered to in the community of Christian brotherhood, and, notwithstanding their fears ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... Frenchman, a cavalry lieutenant, trim and slim, with a pleasant smile and obstinate blue eyes that I liked. He looked as if he could hold on tight when it was worth his while. He had had a leg smashed, poor devil, in the first fighting in Flanders, and had been dragging on for weeks in the squalid camp-hospital where I found him. He didn't waste any words on himself, but began at once about his family. They were living, when the war broke out, at their country-place in the Vosges; his father and mother, his sister, just eighteen, and his brother Alain, two years younger. ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... light which streamed from its enlarged front windows made clear the interior of the splendidly fitted-up room, with its painted walls, its pillared recesses, its gilded and gorgeous fittings-up, its miserable squalid inmates. It was a ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... little room, where the cracks let the boisterous wind whistle through, and the smoky, grimy walls looked cheerless and unhomelike. A miserable little room in a miserable little cottage in one of the squalid streets of the Third District that nature and the city ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... the headwaters of the Miami, Scioto, and Wabash; and the Treaty of 1785 was supposed to keep them there. But it was futile to expect such an arrangement to prove lasting unless steadily backed up with force. In their squalid villages in the swampy forests of northern Ohio and Indiana the redskins grew sullen and vindictive. As they saw their favorite hunting-grounds slipping from their grasp, those who had taken part in the cession repented their generosity, ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... man rushed into the Forum on a market-day, loaded with chains, clothed with a few scanty rags, his hair and beard long and squalid; his whole appearance ghastly, as of one oppressed by long want of food and air. He was recognized as a brave soldier, the old comrade of many who thronged the Forum. He told his story, how that in the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... depths of Deptford, how he set about humanising the shoeless, starving, conscience-little waifs who were drafted into his school, and how, before many months had passed, he never walked through the squalid streets of his own quarter without two or three loving little fellows all in tatters trying to touch the hem of his garment, while a group of the more timid followed him admiringly afar off. From the children, his good influence extended to the parents; ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... remains more absolutely intact, than any other which can be identified with the early or even the middle life of the poet. That William and Dorothy, in their poverty, should have rented so noble a country property seems at first sight inexplicable, and the contrast between Alfoxden and Coleridge's squalid pot-house in Nether Stowey can never cease to be astonishing. But the sole object of the trustees in admitting Wordsworth to Alfoxden was, as Mrs. Sandford has discovered, "to keep the house inhabited during the minority of ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... We never thought of the brilliant and radiant Douglas in connection with the black river. He would have sunk Charon's boat with a shower of epigrams, one would have fancied, if the old fellow, with his squalid beard, had dared to ask him into the stern-sheets. To more than one man who knew him intimately the first announcement of his decease ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... California, and perhaps deserves less. Jaundiced hypochondriacs and neurotic wrecks shiver in California winter boarding-houses, torment themselves with ennui at the country ranches, poison themselves with "nerve foods," and perhaps finally survive to write the sad and squalid "truth about California." Doubtless it is all inexpressibly tedious to them; subjective woe is always hard to ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... worst of all, I found my mind's torment. Our kirk to-day is a building of substantiality and even grace; then it was a somewhat squalid place of worship, in whose rafters the pigeon trespassed and the swallow built her home. We sat in torturous high-backed benches so narrow that our knees rasped the boards before us, and sleep in Master ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... tying twenty or thirty poles together at the top, and spreading them out at the base so as to form a cone; these were covered with dressed moose-skins. The fire is placed in the centre, and a hole is left for the escape of the smoke. The inmates had a squalid look, and were suffering under the combined afflictions of hooping-cough and measles; but even these miseries did not keep them from an excessive indulgence in spirits, which they unhappily can procure from the traders with too much ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... fortnight the Maylies went to the country, and Oliver, whose life had been spent in squalid crowds, seemed to enter on a new existence there. The sky and the balmy air, the woods and glistening water, the rose and honeysuckle, were each a daily joy to him. Every morning he went to a white-haired old gentleman who taught him to read better and to write, ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... flattery of the crowd with abuse of the great, and of all the restrictions of society. These were the street preachers of cynicism, who found their trade by no means an unprofitable one. Often, after a few years of squalid abstinence and quack philosophy, they had picked up enough to enable them to shave their beards, don the robes of good society, and end their days in the vicious self-indulgence which was the original ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... greatly who she could be, thus sporting the polite graces of a reception-room in the midst of these squalid huts. What was her strange life-story? How ever came such a woman, with charm of face, and grace of manner, to be acknowledged leader over such a people? It was not so odd that a clever, resourceful woman, driven perhaps by necessity, should have made unscrupulous use of their dominant superstitions, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... any one save themselves, and of how to escape boredom, are toiling like chambermaids and hall porters, performing most disagreeable tasks, not for a few hours a week, but unceasingly, day after day. No task is too heavy for them or too squalid. They help all alike—Germans, English, ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... air, he fitted up for a study. A silver standish and some useful plate, which he had been prevailed on to accept as pledges of kindness from some who most esteemed him, together with furniture that would not have disgraced a better dwelling, banished those appearances of squalid indigence which, in his less happy days, disgusted those who came to see him.' Some of the plate Johnson had bought. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Cornelius accompanying him to the station; but he did not read in the train which took him back to the Fountall Theological College, as he had done on the way out. That ineradicable trouble still remained as a squalid spot in the expanse of his life. He sat with the other students in the cathedral choir next day; and the recollection of the trouble obscured the purple splendour thrown by the panes upon ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... were passed away in this lonely spot, when the boat put out to sea once more, and after many adventures and privations the travellers landed at Loch Wiskaway, in Benbecula, and made their headquarters some two miles inland at a squalid hut scarcely bigger than ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... couples stood for a moment's breathing space near the summit. Beneath them the squalid little town huddled in the draw and ran sprawling up the hillsides. Shaft-houses and dumps disfigured even the ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... long road from that squalid tenement down there to a place on the committee which was to receive the governor of the state. Over there to the left, next to Barrey's junk shop, was poor Ching Wo's laundry, into which Tom had hurled muddy barrel staves. ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... constructed by tying twenty or thirty poles together at the top, and spreading them out at the base so as to form a cone; these were covered with dressed moose-skins. The fire is placed in the centre and a hole is left for the escape of the smoke. The inmates had a squalid look and were suffering under the combined afflictions of the whooping-cough and measles; but even these miseries did not keep them from an excessive indulgence in spirits, which they unhappily can procure from the traders with too much facility; and they nightly serenaded us with ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... and Llanas Aguilaniedo (La Mala Vida en Madrid, p. 242) trace the same influence still lower in the social scale. They are describing the more squalid kind of cafe chantant, in which, in Spain and elsewhere, the most vicious and degenerate feminine creatures become waitresses (and occasionally singers and dancers), playing the part of amiable and distinguished hetairae to the public of carmen ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the figure of a man, who by the regulations of the place, was not entitled to be there, at that forbidden hour. The stranger was meanly dressed, with every appearance about his person and countenance, of squalid poverty and of the most dissolute habits. Sorrow had softened the military pride of Middleton, and, as he passed the crouching form of the intruder, he said, in tones of great mildness, or ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the riffraff of the camp, who were not tolerated elsewhere. In short, it did not have that certain indefinable something which gave to The Polka Saloon an almost homelike appearance, but was a drab, squalid, soulless place with nothing to recommend it but ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... air. On the north-eastern side the woods, broken by the stone-fall of the Sassetto, sank sharply to the river; on the other the village and the vineyards pressed upon its very doors. The great entrance gateway opened on a squalid village street, alive with ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inherit nothing else, they'll have lots of that for indemnification. It's a good system, Ned; it enables a young fellow like me to get through the best years of his life—which I take to be his youth—without that squalid poverty bothering him. You can make presents, and wear a pin or a ring, if it takes your eye. You look well, and you make yourself agreeable; and I see nothing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Plaistow and East Ham we drew out in the squalid region of Barking Creek, and I looked down on the mud and the dirty brown water with a curious feeling of satisfaction. It was like meeting an old friend again after a long separation. The lower Thames, with its wharves, its warehouses, and its never-ceasing traffic, had always had ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... a thin, straight old man with a white beard arose from a chair and approached them in greeting. The ancient, conventional, patriarchal order, Cameron thought. He could see the whole setup in a nutshell right now. Squalid communities like this where the too-old and the too-young were nurtured on the calcified traditions to which nothing was ever added. The able serving in the homes of the Markovians, providing sustenance for themselves and those who ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... dismay, And blacke Laestrigones, a people stout; Then greedie Scilla, under whom there bay Manie great bandogs, which her gird about; 540 Then doo the AEtnean Cyclops him affray, And deep Charybdis gulphing in and out; Lastly the squalid lakes of Tartarie, And griesly feends of hell ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... to fall like rushing rain into an immense marble basin. Now it was an arched doorway with traceries as fine as lace,—sole-remaining fragment of a heathen temple, flung and stranded as it were by the waves of time on the squalid shore of the present. Now it was a shrine at the meeting of three streets, where a dim lamp burned beneath the effigy of the Madonna, with always a fresh rose beside it in a vase, and at its foot a peasant woman kneeling in red bodice and blue petticoat, with ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... was done so cleverly and so cautiously, that with all his ingenuity, he failed to discover whether such was the case or not. He had already traversed a number of streets—ascending several flights of steps and descending others—when, at the corner of a narrow lane, his eye fell on a squalid-looking beggar who was lustily calling on the passers-by, in the name of all the saints, to preserve him from starvation. A broad-brimmed hat with a crown similar to those worn by Italian bandits, but sadly battered and brown with age and dirt, was worn slouchingly ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... that extra half-yard or so of shoulder that some women have their ball-dresses cut to expose. I don't find it at merry supper-tables, where half a dozen ugly men with pomatumed heads are rapidly growing uglier still with heat and wine; not when I come away and walk through these squalid black streets, and go out into the Forum and see a few old battered stone posts standing there like gnawed bones stuck into the earth. Everything is mean and dusky and shabby, and the men and women who make up this so-called brilliant society are the meanest and shabbiest of all. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and self-reliant. It is easy to talk of misery when one does not understand it. It is easy to be the martyr of an hour or a day. But to drag into a sordid and squalid martyrdom the woman one loves—well, the man does not live who would do it, if he knew what I know, had seen what I have seen. No, love is a luxury of the rich and the poor and the steady-going. It is not for my ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... to Captain Thorn, I must confess that though a stern commander and an irritable man, he paid the strictest attention to the health of his crew. His complaints of the squalid appearance of the Canadians and mechanics who were on board, can be abated of their force by giving a description of the accommodation of these people. The Tonquin was a small ship; its forecastle was destined for the crew performing duty before the mast. The room allotted for the accommodation ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
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