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More "Tumble-down" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that terrible night Daddy Neptune had stood just where the easel was standing now; over there by the tumble-down chicken house, Jake had fallen; and the space that was now green with grass had been full of vengeful men, and howling dogs, and trampling horses. Peter took the sketch from her, looked at it for a long moment, and, as briefly as ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... thoroughly explored the shore as far as they went on the lower part of the lake. From time to time Prescott consulted his watch. In all the time that they were out they passed only one building, a tumble-down, weather-beaten shack that looked as though it had not been inhabited in twenty years. Not even a vestige of a ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... sudden twist, the road turned in at the entrance of a sadly neglected estate. The grounds of the place were overrun with rank growths and the driveway was covered with weeds. The tumble-down gables of a descrepit frame house peeped out through the trees. It was a rambling old building that once had been a mansion—the "big house" of the natives. A musty air of decay was upon it, and crazily askew window ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... of Paragot was not a palace. It stood, low and whitewashed, amid a medley of little tumble-down erections, and was guarded on one side by cowsheds and on the other by the haystack. You stepped across the threshold into the kitchen. A door on the right gave access to the bedroom. A ladder connected with a hole in the roof enabled you to reach the cockloft, the guest room of the establishment. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... lay quiet, except for the rhythmic noises coming from the big Massey Steel Mills. Suzanna looked in their direction and stood a moment watching the sparks coming from the big round chimneys. Over across fields were the tumble-down cottages occupied by the employees of the Massey Steel Mills. Suzanna did not often go in their direction. The squalor made her unhappy and set in train so many questions she was quite ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... the regiment, Mary. My father has a few hundred acres in County Mayo, and a tumble-down house; that is to say, it was a tumble-down house when I saw it four years ago, but it had been shut up for a good many years, and I should not be surprised if it has quite tumbled down now. However, my father was always talking of going to live ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... sat round a fire, in one of the tumble-down wooden cottages that dotted the outskirts of ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... of the resort into which I had determined to penetrate. Also, from my early youth I had heard Jacob Ensley and the Last Chance spoken of in tones of dread disapproval. Before I should become really frightened I hurried down the hill, past the squalid and tumble-down mill cottages which I had never really seen before, where it seemed to me millions of children swarmed in and around and about, and at last arrived at the infamous social center ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... writing from Ballydehob during the first days of January, gives the most piteous account of that village; every house he entered exhibited the same characteristics,—no clothing, no food, starvation in the looks of young and old. In a tumble-down cabin resembling a deserted forge, he found a miserable man seated at a few embers, with a starved-looking dog beside him, that was not able to crawl. The visitor asked him if he were sick; he answered that he was not, but having got swelled legs working ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... a queer thrill to hear the constant boom-boom of the guns like a continuous thunderstorm. We began to feel fearfully hungry, and stopped beside a high bank flanking a canal and not far from a small cafe. Bunny and I went to get some hot water. It was a tumble-down place enough, and as we pushed the door open (on which, by the way, was the notice in French, "During the bombardment one enters by the side door") we found the room full of men drinking coffee and smoking. ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... water front of Montreal is superbly faced with quays and locks of solid stone masonry, and thus she is clean and beautiful to the very feet. Stately piles of architecture, instead of the foul old tumble-down warehouses that dishonor the waterside in most cities, rise from the broad wharves; behind these spring the twin towers of Notre Dame, and the steeples of the other ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... discouraged. "And even if I hadn't been, I know the garage was just opposite Leffler's over there." He pointed across the street to a tumble-down stable with a blotched sign on which the words "Livery and Boarding" were ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... among the trees, a glimpse is caught of the lower part of the new villa, with scaffolding round so much as is seen of the tower. In the background the garden is bounded by an old wooden fence. Outside the fence, a street with low, tumble-down cottages. ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... commercial activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa is at present occupying ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... exclaimed Alexia, looking out at the tumble-down tenements, and garbage heaps up to the very ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... Some came because they were orphans; some because they were not. Thus, poor Sammy. The home from which he came was past description. From the outside it looked like a tumble-down shed. Inside there appeared to be but one room, which measured six by twelve feet, and a small lean-to. The family consisted of father and mother and three children. The eldest boy was about twelve, then came Sam, and lastly a wee girl of five, with pretty curly fair hair, but very ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... of study at Clinton, N. Y. Miss Barton's remarkable executive ability was manifested in the fact that she popularized the Public School System in New Jersey, by opening the first free school in Bordentown, commencing with six pupils, in an old tumble-down building, and at the close of the year, leaving six hundred in the fine ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... orphan children, the oldest of whom was perhaps ten years old, and the others but little things, almost babies. They had a tiny little tumble-down house to live in, but very little to eat. Said the eldest to his little brother and sister, "I will go yonder on the sands laid bare by the falling tide, and it may be that I shall find something that we can eat." The little ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... striking feature of antiquity met thus far on our journey were curious stone terraces built across the small gullies. They are called trincheras (trenches). Some of them do not appear to be very old, and many present the appearance of tumble-down walls, but the stones of which they are constructed were plainly used in their natural state. Although many of the boulders are huge and irregular in shape, they were used just as they were found. The building material always conformed to the surroundings: in places where conglomerate containing ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... in which I drove) were brought suddenly up to a gate with the Royal arms over it; and here we were introduced to as queer an exhibition as the eye has often looked on. This was the state-carriage house, where there is a museum of huge old tumble-down gilded coaches of the last century, lying here, mouldy and dark, in a sort of limbo. The gold has vanished from the great lumbering old wheels and panels; the velvets are wofully tarnished. When one thinks of the patches and ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... light before his eyes he dragged his weary, aching feet as quickly as he could towards the spot, and soon came to a miserable-looking little cottage. As he drew near he saw that it was in a tumble-down condition, the bamboo fence was broken and weeds and grass pushed their way through the gaps. The paper screens which serve as windows and doors in Japan were full of holes, and the posts of the house were bent with age and seemed ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... as they were poor. There was not a woman in the place excepting Mrs. Newton with whom Mrs. Unwin could associate, or to whom she could look for help in sickness or other need. The house in which the pair took up their abode was dismal, prison-like, and tumble-down; when they left it, the competitors for the succession were a cobbler and a publican. It looked upon the Market Place, but it was in the close neighbourhood of Silver End, the worst part of Olney. In winter the cellars were ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... like a whipstroke that made Lepailleur rear. And once again he poured forth all his spite. Ah! surely now, it wasn't his tumble-down old mill that would ever enrich him, since it had enriched neither his father nor his grandfather. And as for his fields, well, that was a pretty dowry that his wife had brought him, land in which nothing more would grow, and ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... visited was No. 27 Washington street. This building is also owned by 'Butcher Burke,' and is one of the most filthy and horrible places in the city. We passed under an old tumble-down doorway that seemed to have no earthly excuse for standing there, and into a dismal, dark entry, with a zig-zag wall covered with a leprous slime, our conductor crying out all the time: 'Steady, gentlemen, steady, keep to your left; place is full ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... once I saw before me a dreary church. It was old, tumble-down, and dirty—not in the least venerable—very ugly—a huge building without shape, like most of our churches. I shrank from the look of it: it was more horrible to me than I could account for; I feared it. But I ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... a warm, dark evening in late May, with the frogs piping their sweet, high note, and the first of the fireflies wheeling over the wet meadows near the tumble-down house where 'Lias lived. The girls took turns in carrying the big paper-wrapped bundle, and stole along in the shadow of the trees, full of excitement, looking over their shoulders at nothing and ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... other side of the fence, an old and long neglected apple orchard, a tumble-down log barn, and the wreck of a house with the fireplace and chimney standing stark and alone, told the story. The place was one of those old ranches, purchased by the Power Company for the water rights, and deserted by those who once had called it home. From the ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... which the others resort, and they seem to be pretty well off and independent as compared with their neighbors of the other villages (Pl. XXXIV). The houses and courts are in keeping with the general character of the people and exhibit a degree of neatness and thrift that contrasts sharply with the tumble-down appearance of some of the other villages, especially those of the Middle Mesa and Oraibi. There is a general air of newness about the place, though it is questionable whether the architecture is more recent than that of the other villages of ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... shy, sensitive fellow, as I am by nature, to have to bear the sort of assumption and insolence one meets with. I furnished my rooms well, and dressed well. Ah! you stare; but this is not the furniture I started with; I sold it all when I came to my senses, and put in this tumble-down second-hand stuff, and I have worn out my fine clothes. I know I'm not well dressed now. (Tom nodded ready acquiescence to this position.) Yes, though I still wince a little now and then—a great deal oftener than I like—I ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... outside of the dilapidated houses which overlook the Tiber and facing the Castel St. Angelo. How they ever managed to make this passage is a mystery! In the daytime one could not see the possibility of cutting through the labyrinth of these forlorn tumble-down houses. We sat trembling for fear that the shaky planks would suddenly give way and plunge us into the whirling Tiber under our feet. The fireworks were the most gorgeous display of pyrotechnics I ever saw. And ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... to Mary's astonished eyes, the garden appeared almost as well planted as her own, and from the chimney of the tumble-down cabin a lazy curl of smoke rose. Under the dark pine clump the outlines of a narrow mound could be plainly seen, and beside it lay a spade and ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... father remembers you have promised him buck and boar and moufflon—is that the right name for those strange creatures? We intend to crave your hospitality on our way to Bastia, where we are to embark, and I trust the della Rebbia Castle, which you declare is so old and tumble-down, will not fall in upon our heads! Though the prefect is so pleasant that subjects of conversation are never lacking to us—I flatter myself, by the way, that I have turned his head—we have been ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... novel conformations of objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,— nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that ruinous chateau, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite no surprise; but he—and he Peter Paul Rubens alone—handles ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... that I was right, and then I went with him up to Amelie's to see what we could do. I never realized what a ruin of a hamlet this is until that afternoon. By putting seven horses in the old grange at Pere's,—a tumble-down old shack, where he keeps lumber and dead farm wagons,—he never throws away or destroys anything— we finally found places for all the horses. There were eleven at Pere's, and it took Amelie and Pere all the rest ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... half a mile north of New Salem, just under the bluff, still stands, but long since ceased to be a dwelling-house, and is now a tumble-down old stable. Here Lincoln was a frequent boarder, especially during the period of his closest application to the study of the law. Stretched out on the cellar door of his cabin, reading a book, he met for the first time "Dick" Yates, then a college student at Jacksonville, ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... have been too glad to make a powerful friend. These royalists are in a ticklish position; I can tell her that. She calls me De Riviere; that implies nobody without a 'De' to their name would have the presumption to visit her old tumble-down house. Well, it is a lesson; I am a republican, and the Commonwealth trusts and honors me; yet I am so ungrateful as to go out of the way to be civil to her enemies, to royalists; as if those worn-out creatures had hearts, as if they could comprehend the struggle ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... a little tumble-down green door Into the dark and crowded shop; the Turk Crouching above the brasier, smiles and nods; 'Tis all his ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... all awoke the ugly little tumble-down house had disappeared, and in its place stood a splendid palace. The guests' eyes sought in vain for the bridegroom, but could only see a handsome young man, with a coat of blue velvet and silver and a gold ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... time, Elaine, acompanied by "Weepy Mary" and her "son," had arrived at the little tumble-down station and had taken the only vehicle in sight, a ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... haunts," I was greatly shocked on visiting the house to see the shameful state of dilapidation into which it has been allowed to pass. The porches and steps have fallen down, the garden is a disreputable tangle, and the graves in the yard are heaped with tumble-down stones about which the cattle graze. The only parts of the building in good repair are those parts which time has not yet succeeded in destroying. The drawing-room, containing a mantelpiece given to Washington by Lafayette, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... stirring deeds, from the market-places with the narrow gables heaped up in piles around them, from the belfries soaring to the sky, from the winding streets and the narrow lanes, in which the houses almost touch each other from the tumble-down old hostelries, from the solemn aisles where the candles glimmer and the dim red light glows before the altar, from the land of Bras-de-Fer, and Thierry d'Alsace, and Memlinc, and Van Eyck, and Rubens, the land which was at once the Temple and the Golgotha ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... proceeded for three miles or so through orange groves and sandhills to the town, a wretched tumble-down-looking place, half choked up with sand. Here, as it was now dark, we took shelter in a house called an inn, but, except in the public hall, where the eating and drinking went on, not a room contained a particle of furniture, so that we had to lie down on the floor ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... The tumble-down, two-roomed house in which the Warrens lived was across the road from the schoolhouse, and Mrs. Warren's voice was penetrating. Lem was accepted throughout his school-life at the home estimate. The ugly, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... the back of Burmah; near the Chinese Border. Such a place as you never dreamt of. Tumble-down palaces, temples, and all that sort of thing—lying out there all alone ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... know, any more than you do. The first time I saw him, was in an old tumble-down building, where the wind played hide and go seek through the timbers; and where more men, women, dogs and children were huddled together, than four walls of the like size ever ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... height on a morn at prime, Sails that laugh from a flying squall, Pomp of harmony, rapture of rhyme - Youth is the sign of them, one and all. Winter sunsets and leaves that fall, An empty flagon, a folded page, A tumble-down wheel, a tattered ball - These are a type of ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... to look at another "dividing ridge" that had neither path nor way, and henceforth I must keep to the open road or travel alone. Two hours' tramp brought us to an old clearing with some rude, tumble-down log buildings that many years before had been occupied by the bark and lumber men. The prospect for trout was so good in the stream hereabouts, and the scene so peaceful and inviting, shone upon by the dreamy August sun, that we concluded to ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Byron's, and used to be occupied by his valet or page. No doubt, in his lordship's day, these were the only comfortable bedrooms in the Abbey; and by the housekeeper's account of what Colonel Wildman has done, it is to be inferred that the place must have been in a most wild, shaggy, tumble-down condition, inside and out, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... the Hawkinses and their fortunes, and bore them a hundred and thirty miles still higher up the Mississippi, and landed them at a little tumble-down village on the Missouri shore in the twilight of ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... she went on, "we are old and tumble-down. The rain comes in; there are no shutters to the big hall, and we can't afford to put them—we can't afford even to have the pictures cleaned. I can pity the house and nurse it, as I do the village. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his whip one of the drivers had to point them out the ruins of the old Abbey of Chamont where they lay hidden among trees. It was a great sell! The ladies voted them silly. Why, they were only a heap of old stones with briers growing over them and part of a tumble-down tower. It really wasn't worth coming a couple of leagues to see that! Then the driver pointed out to them the countryseat, the park of which stretched away from the abbey, and he advised them to take a little path and follow the walls ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... getting stronger and when the girls reached the Hermit's Hut, a tumble-down shack half hidden in the brush, they gladly took shelter there ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... general every day during the next fortnight until the season was over. Already cards had appeared in one or two windows, and those who had let their houses furnished for "August month" while they found shelter in tumble-down cottages, tents or converted railway carriages, were coming back—glad now the money was in their pockets that they had borne the discomfort, though each year on departing they said "Never again!" A sea-gull flew across the sky with the pink ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... into dinginess, and the faded, patched chintz sofa, that was not only comfortable, but respectable, in the old wainscoted sitting-room, has suddenly turned into "an object," when lang syne goes by the board and the heirloom is incontinently set adrift. Undertake to move from this tumble-down old house, strewn thick with the dbris of many generations, into a tumble-up, peaky, perky, plastery, shingly, stary new one, that is not half finished, and never will be, and good enough for it, and you will perhaps comprehend how ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... all in a tumble-down state; the furniture was no better. There wasn't a chair in the whole house; even the bastofa had only a dirt floor, and it was entirely unsheathed on the inside except for a few planks nailed on the wall from the bed up ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... upon the casements of the chateau, the effect is that of painted windows. At the other end of the canal we see Blangy, the county-town, containing about sixty houses, and the village church, which is nothing more than a tumble-down building with a wooden clock-tower which appears to hold up a roof of broken tiles. One comfortable house and the parsonage are distinguishable; but the township is a large one,—about two hundred scattered houses in all, those of the village forming as it were the capital. The roads are ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... old tumble-down house jest outside of Jonesville. The father wuz, I couldn't deny, a shiftless sort of a chap, good-natured, always ready to obleege a neighbor, but he hadn'nt no faculty. And I don't know, come to think of it, as anybody is any more to blame if ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... he sat beside her, reading, as quiet as a mouse, so that she might sleep if the tumble-down Empire sofa did but woo her that way, she suddenly put up her arm and drew ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... assisted by the magnificent way he went to work. Old Tom Towler, the whip, who had toiled at his calling for twenty long years on fifty pounds and what he could 'pick up,' was advanced to a hundred and fifty, with a couple of men under him. Instead of riding worn-out, tumble-down, twenty-pound screws, he was mounted on hundred-guinea horses, for which the dealers were to have a couple of hundred, when they were paid. Everything ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... undertook to make the necessary vows in her name. In spite of this brilliant send-off, Sydney was not destined to bring good fortune to her father's house. A few years after her birth Owenson, having quarrelled with Daly, invested his savings in a tumble-down building known as the Old Music Hall, which he restored, and re-named the National Theatre. The season opened with a grand national performance, and everything promised well, when, like a bomb-shell, came the announcement ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... no architecture in particular, being but a picturesque chaos of tumble-down wooden shanties. It has no history worth speaking of, and its inhabitants are—and apparently have ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... sense of playing truant or of having an unexpected holiday. It was easier to think of himself as a boy, and to slip back into boyish thoughts, than to bear the familiar burden of his manhood. He climbed the tumble-down stone wall across the road, and went along a narrow path to the spring that bubbled up clear and cold under a great red oak. How many times he had longed for a drink of that water, and now here it was, and the thirst of that warm spring day was hard ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... How did I get here? I got here through having made them bricks what you built this tumble-down old ancient ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... as he rode to the place of coronation he had never seen before. Notwithstanding the embroidered silk and velvet hangings decorating the fronts of the rich people's houses, he caught glimpses of filthy side streets, squalid alleys, and tumble-down tenements. He saw forlorn little children scud away like rats into their holes as he drew near, and wretched, vicious-looking men and women fighting with each other for places in the crowd. Sharp, ...
— The Land of the Blue Flower • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... forward, smiling grimly in the darkness at the memory of the fact that things were now reversed; that he was following Squint Rodaine as Rodaine once had followed him. Swiftly he moved, closer—closer; the scar-faced man went through the tumble-down gate and approached the house, not knowing that his pursuer was less than ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... affectionately, one unshaven old ruffian including me in his salute. I do not appreciate the Montenegrin custom of kissing among men; it is not pleasant. An empty hut was immediately put at our disposal. It was the most primitive and tumble-down habitation that we had had as yet. Of course it rained. It was almost the first rain on the trip, and we had to lie up here a whole day as P. was unwell and unable to ride. Everyone turned out to make the hut comfortable, but it was not a success. I lay down outside ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... this tumble-down town walked every type of Gallipoli campaigner: British Tommies, grousing and cheerful; Australians, remarkable for their physique; deep-brown Maoris; bearded Frenchmen in baggy trousers; shining and grinning ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... a boat with a cabin on it, and sat on its roof on decrepit cane chairs, and the rowers below with makeshift oars gradually pulled us up and down the face of the Ghats—what oars, and what a ramshackle tub of a boat—too old and tumble-down for a fisherman's ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... started up, exclaiming that they would be late for breakfast; and they hurried back to the tumble-down house with its pointless porch and unpruned hedge of plumbago and pink geraniums where the Wellands were installed for the winter. Mr. Welland's sensitive domesticity shrank from the discomforts of the slovenly southern hotel, and at immense ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... She was a queer old woman, and lived alone in a little tumble-down house with nineteen cats. Folks called her a witch, but she wasn't, though she looked like an old rag-bag. She was real kind to me when I lived in that place, and used to let me get warm at her fire when the folks at the poorhouse were hard ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... apartment. That bookshelves lined the rectangular portion of this strange study I divined, although that end of the place was dark as a catacomb. The walls were wood-paneled, and the ceiling was oaken beamed. A small bookshelf and tumble-down cabinet stood upon either side of the table, and the celebrated American author and traveler lay propped up in a long split-cane chair. He wore smoked glasses, and had a clean-shaven, olive face, with a profusion of jet black hair. He was garbed in a dirty red dressing-gown, and a perfect ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... you never hear of it? About fifteen years ago his property was sold in lots, and the people bought all the farms. You never saw such a stir in the world.' He pointed out the houses on the hill-side which had been built to replace old tumble-down tenements, the red soil appearing under the plough, and cultivation going on with such general activity as had not been witnessed till within these last few years. The appearance of these villages was such ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... clock-face, could withstand nobly the cavil of the most exacting pedant who ever read or studied architectural forms, solely out of books. In the immediate foreground falls the before mentioned street of steps. Many old tumble-down houses have recently been cleared away, and, at the present writing, the view from this point is one which has apparently not previously existed, and one which it is to be hoped will not be marred by the erection of ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... fortune. There was not a beam, a board, a rafter, a lath, in the whole house that was not ready, upon the slightest assault, to go to wreck. Of glass windows the rumour was long since extinct. All stood open; and had Klaus been a student of meteorology, a better observatory than his loopholed, tumble-down homestead could not have been to be had. He returned from his tour of inspection more firmly resolved than ever to risk his adventure; and as soon as the sun was set, and the moon traced darker shadows upon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... his violet stockings, supported by his clerical secretary, and followed at a respectful distance by his two attendant footmen with their threadbare liveries. At last, out of the dreary waste, at the end of the interminable ill-paved sloughy road, the long line of the grey tumble-down walls rises gloomily. A few cannon-shot would batter a breach anywhere, as the events of 1849 proved only too well. However, at Rome there is neither commerce to be impeded nor building extension of any kind to be checked; ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... bad, "the wind," and kubeda, "beaten," signifying "Wind-beaten;" and this seems credible, for violent storms are prevalent along the coast. The town is essentially European in character. One can scarcely realize that only fifty years ago a tumble-down Persian settlement stood on the spot now occupied by broad, well-paved, gas-lit streets, handsome stone buildings, warehouses, and shops. Baku has, like Tiflis, a mixed population. Although Russians ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... child, a boy about nine or ten years old. They were very poor, this mother and son; and the little living they had, came mostly by means of needlework, which the woman did for people in the town, and by the sale of dried herbs and suchlike. As for the cottage itself, it was a crazy, tumble-down tenement, half in ruins, and all the outside walls of it were covered with clinging ivies and weeds and wild climbing plants. I was one of these. I grew just underneath the solitary window of the small chamber wherein the poor woman ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... along the path I was brought to a clear stand, and had to rub my eyes. There was a wall in front of me, the path passing it by a gap; it was tumble-down, and plainly very old, but built of big stones very well laid; and there is no native alive to-day upon that island that could dream of such a piece of building. Along all the top of it was a line of queer figures, idols or scarecrows, or what not. They had carved and painted faces, ugly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... something that he did not. Having skinned my bird and put the skin out in the sun to dry, I took a stroll through the small town, and found it composed mostly of huts inhabited by Mestizos, with a tumble-down church and a weed-covered plaza. Around some of the houses were planted mango and orange trees, but there was a general air of dilapidation and decay, and not a single sign of ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Peter's, look only like hen and chickens. Then in due time came the Carmo Church, still unrepaired since 1755; Blackhorse Square, still bare of trees; the Government offices, still propped to prevent a tumble-down, and the old Custom House, still a bilious yellow; the vast barrack-like pile of S. Vicente, the historic Se or cathedral with dumpy towers; the black Castle of Sao Jorge, so hardly wrung from the gallant Moors, and the huge Santa Engracia, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... made their very tumble-down barn a perfect model of neatness. They sleep within about 3 yards of the horses' heels. Hunt in particular never likes to be far away from "my 'osses," as he calls them. I have less and less say in the matter of the 'osses as time ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... they are. They've only just come here and from goodness knows where. And they live in that little tumble-down house in ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... away with a clamoring chorus behind him and he heard one brazen youngster boldly mimicking his manner of asking if the roads were good. These children lived in tumble-down houses which were all but ruins, and played in shell holes as if these cruel, ragged gaps in the earth had been made by the kind Boche for ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... vicinity to the water, was a fine large structure, inclosed by a stockade; both rather dilapidated; as if the cost of entertaining its guests, prevented outlays for repairing the place. But it was one of Borabolla's maxims, that generally your tumble-down old homesteads yield the most entertainment; their very dilapidation betokening their having seen good service in hospitality; whereas, spruce-looking, finical portals, have a phiz full of meaning; for niggards are ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... through the darkness to a tumble-down building not far from Baxter street. The front door was unlocked. He opened it, and feeling his way up—for there were no lights—knocked in a peculiar way at a door just at the head of the stairs. His knock was evidently heard, for shuffling steps were heard within, a bolt was drawn, and ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE, at Tuskegee, Alabama, is one of the most uniquely interesting institutions in America. Begun, twenty years ago, in two abandoned, tumble-down houses, with thirty untaught Negro men and women for its first students, it has become one of the famous schools of the country, with more than a thousand students each year. Students and teachers are all of the Negro race. The Principal of the school, Mr. Booker T. Washington, is the best-known ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... away, and have been running ever since, barring some few weeks we spent shut up in an old castle and a tumble-down tower," answered O'Grady. ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... a small cleared tract of land, where a pleasant greenness of young potato vines hid the sand. In the centre was a tumble-down cabin, with a mud chimney on the outside. The one window had no sash, and its rude shutter hung precariously by a single leathern hinge. The door was open, revealing that the interior was papered with newspapers. Three or four ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... body and soul into his new enterprise, Tonet, with his share in the booty—the Rector had done his best to make it as large as could be—was enjoying one of his seasons of prosperity. In the tumble-down shack where he lived with Rosario to the tune of quarrels, swear-words and cudgelings, not the slightest trace of abundance entered after the lucky trip "across the way." The poor woman was as usual up at sunrise to carry her baskets of fish to Valencia or even to Torrente or Betera, at times—always ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... what they made me think of that night. And I learned, too, how they'd been waiting ever since for that boy to go the way his father had traveled before him; they even told me that the same old jug still stood in the kitchen corner, and would have pointed out his tumble-down old place on the hill, where they had let him go on living alone, only it was too dark for any ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... he was making the usual round previous to the opening of the school, beating up unreliable scholars, and had entered a damp, noisome alley, lined on either side with tumble-down apologies for houses. Mr. McMaster took one side and Bert the other, and they proceeded to visit the different dwellers in this horrible place. Bert had knocked at several doors without getting any response, ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... remember another day, more than thirty years before, when it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... several coaches passing, and he shouted to them at the top of his voice, but no one took the slightest notice of him. At length the driver of a tumble-down looking vehicle, with a superb coat of arms on the panel, made a signal in return and drew up near ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... conditions and industries of men in town or country. If it does not actually of itself turn, it presents everything the wrong side outward. In cities, it reveals the ragged and smutty companionship of tumble-down out-houses, and mysteries of cellar and back-kitchen life which were never intended for other eyes than those that grope in them by day or night. How unnatural, and, more, almost profane and inhuman, is ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... only about himself, his own comfort, his own importance, he will not grow old gracefully. More and more his spirit, small and mean, will leave its impress on his face, and especially in his eyes. You look at him and feel that there is no jewel in the casket; that a shriveled soul is living in a tumble-down house. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... be at all reliable; and emit a peculiar fragrance, like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very hot blankets. Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there would seem to have been a lack of room in the city, for new houses are thrust in everywhere. Wherever it has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a crack or corner, in it has gone. If there be a nook or angle in the wall of a church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of any sort, there you are sure to find some kind of habitation; looking as if ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... previous evening, became still more depressing. The name of the town was Talcahuano; and the picture it presented was one of houses in ruins and silent streets. A few wretched canoes, ready to fall to pieces, were on the beach; near them loitered a few poorly clad fishermen; while in front of the tumble-down cottages and roofless huts sat women in rags employed in combing one another's hair. In contrast with this human squalor, the surrounding hills and woods, the gardens and the orchards, were clothed in the most splendid foliage; on every side flowers displayed their ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... I have never visited. The best substitute for such rambles as one can take through these mouldy boroughs (or burrows) is to be found in such towns as Salem, Newburyport, Portsmouth. Without imagination, Shakespeare's birthplace is but a queer old house, and Anne Hathaway's home a tumble-down cottage. With it, one can see the witches of Salem Village sailing out of those little square windows, which look as if they were made on purpose for them, or stroll down to Derby's wharf and gaze at "Cleopatra's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... as "Lazy-man." When he was young, he had been lazy about hunting. When the other Indians had skins to sell, the lazy Indian had nothing. He grew poor. His blanket was ragged. His leggings were worn out. His wigwam was so wretched that all the tribe laughed at its tumble-down look. ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... opened for our admission, that we stepped at once from the small front court into the drawing-room, from which a door opened into a stone kitchen. The rest of the accommodation corresponded with this primitive mode of entrance; the whole place was in what is commonly called a "tumble-down" condition: there was certainly plenty of garden, and two large meadows, but, like the rest of the place, they were sadly out of order. When we said it was not at all the house we had expected to find from reading the advertisement, ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... inn at Lorenzo Marquez. Through the kindness of one of his native or half-breed wives, who could talk a little Dutch, I managed, however, to get a lodging in a tumble-down house belonging to a dissolute person who called himself Don Jose Ximenes, but who was really himself a half-breed. Here good fortune befriended me. Don Jose, when sober, was a trader with the natives, and a year before had acquired from them two good buck wagons. Probably ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... already. No one would accept his picture of Babs as he saw her; assuredly no one would believe his account of their relationship, if he were in a mood or state to give it. He put on an overcoat and walked, with the confirmed Londoner's shivering hatred of the country in autumn, to the tumble-down shanty which did duty as general store and post office to ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... were playing marbles on the streets and sidewalks. Even Mulberry Court, shut in as it was, felt the impulse of the awakening season. The landlord came, looked over the premises, and after viewing the general shabbiness became reckless enough to order a broken windowpane to be reset, some of the tumble-down ceilings to be repaired, and the fire escapes and window frames ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... before Dick. But he could not eat it, he could only think what a fine cow it had been when it was alive. At last he slipped away unobserved out of the house, and, looking about for somewhere to sleep, he found an old tumble-down house filled ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... their enemies, the vista is almost unique for a certain scenic squalor and gypsy luxury of color: sag-roofed barns and stables, and weak-backed, sunken-chested workshops of every sort lounge along in tumble-down succession, and lean up against the cliff in every imaginable posture of worthlessness and decrepitude; light wooden galleries cross to them from the second stories of the houses which back upon the alley; and over these galleries flutters, from a labyrinth of clothes-lines, a variety of bright-colored ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... I held on to the apples. And when I faced the barn I determined I'd whistle if I died in the attempt; but, boys, I don't believe anybody could have told that 'Yankee Doodle' from 'Auld Lang Syne.' I tell you my heart jumped when I passed the tumble-down old place; but it stood still when, as I marched up the plank-road, I heard a step behind me. I wheeled around in an instant, but there was nothing to be seen. The moon shone as bright as ever, but there was ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... mother in a little villa, the roof of which is in sight from my sunny terrace in the Villa Nardi, just to the left of the square old convent tower, rising there out of the silver olive-boughs,—a tumble-down sort of villa, with a flat roof and odd angles and parapets, in the midst of a thrifty but small grove of lemons and oranges. They were poor enough, or would be in any country where physical wants are greater than here, and yet did ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to her alone. "One of Vreiboom's tumble-down old sheds fired while we were trying to clear it. The place collapsed and I got pinned inside. Piet Vreiboom didn't trouble himself, or Kieff, either. He wouldn't—naturally. Guy ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... the accusation that we use the poor simply as a means of self-improvement. An old Irish woman in a tumble-down tenement house once said to me: 'Ye'll have no chance to work out your salvation doing for me.' I believe that there are many of the poor who more or less consciously have the same idea. They think that ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... the door on the latch, so we slipped in and searched around, and found a trap-door in a cupboard—where they'd have shoved me down if they hadn't given up the idea half-way. It lets you down into a passage just like this, that runs down to the water and comes out in the courtyard of one of those tumble-down old pigeon-cotes by the Quai du Seujet. We came out there, and then tried over this side, through a trap by the Molard jetty I'd noticed before, and it led us here. There are dozens of these trappons on both sides. Lots of them are inside houses. I always thought they led only to cellars.... ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... A tumble-down couch stood against the wall, and in an opposite corner a heap of tattered quilts had been flung disdainfully. Tables and chairs and even the floor were piled with papers and cheaply covered books ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... people for whose needs they were obviously not designed, and in many cases extraordinarily crowded, ramshackle and unclean; in the country he would be amazed to find still denser congestion, sometimes a dozen people in one miserable, tumble-down, outwardly picturesque and inwardly abominable two-roomed cottage, people living up against pigsties and drawing water from wells they could not help but contaminate. Think of how the intimate glimpses from the railway train one gets into people's ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... wandered about the courtyard, shunned by some, glared at by others, but watched by all, and practically at the mercy of the first casual ragamuffin with a chopper, in there. He took possession of a small tumble-down shed to sleep in; the effluvia of filth and rotten matter incommoded him greatly: it seems he had not lost his appetite though, because—he told me—he had been hungry all the blessed time. Now and again "some fussy ass" deputed from the council-room would come out running to him, and in honeyed ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... quizzically at the tumble-down house on the cliff above them and then at the old boat, with its tattered maroon sail, anchored below. "There's not much money ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... her how him and his sister had lived in their little home, their own little nest, over there by the shore, for years and years. He led her out to where she could see the roof of his old shanty over the sand hills, and he wiped his eyes and raved over it. You'd think that tumble-down shack was a hunk out of paradise; Adam and Eve's place in the Garden was a short lobster 'longside of it. Then, he said, he was took down with an incurable disease. He tried and tried to get along, ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... nevertheless. She led him down Holborn Hill past the Fleet Market, over Blackfriars Bridge, and so, turning sharp to the right, along a somewhat narrow and very grimy street between rows of dirty, tumble-down houses, with, upon the right hand, numerous narrow courts and alley-ways that gave upon the turgid river. Down one of these alleys the fluttering cloak turned suddenly, yet when Barnabas reached the corner, behold ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... and post horses: but the master of the Poste Royale, or rather of the inn, shook his head—"Pour les chevaux, vous en aurez des meilleurs: mais, pour la voiture il n'y en a pas. Tenez, Monsieur; venez voir." I followed, with miserable forebodings—and entering a shed, where stood an old tumble-down-looking phaeton—"la voila, c'est la seule que je possede en ce moment"—exclaimed the landlord. It had never stirred from its position since the fall of last years' leaf. It had been—within and without—the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... stopping there a moment to speak with them all—when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a Christian by force of rhetoric—what should I note (after so many years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the work of ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... dreaming about that you didn't open the door for me?" she asked caressingly, throwing aside her hat and cloak, and taking a seat on the tumble-down sofa. ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... bank of the Thames, and is certainly one of the most beautiful and interesting places in the vicinity of London. From the time of Edward I., the English monarchs had a royal residence here, but by the time of Charles II., this old palace had become a rather mouldy and tumble-down affair, so he commanded that it should be demolished entirely, and a magnificent structure of freestone erected in its place. We read that "riches take to themselves wings," but King Charles's riches seem to have gone off with one wing, for he had only means ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... as Harpville, on the east bank of the Stony creek. A rudely constructed platform extends over a washed-out ditch, partially filled with debris. In the vicinity is a large barn and several smaller outhouses, thrown in a tumble-down condition. Piled against them are beams and rafters from houses smashed into kindling wood. All about the station are boxes, empty and full, scattered in confusion, and around and about these crowds ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... to be scarcely worth picking. They have, in fact, almost reverted to savagery, even as the cottage itself is crumbling back to the earth out of which it was built. On the slope above the cherry-orchards, if you moor your boat at the tumble-down quay and climb by half-obliterated pathways, you will come to a hedge of brambles, and to a broken gate with a well beside it; and beyond the gate to an orchard of apple-trees, planted in times when, regularly as Christmas Eve came round, Aunt Barbree Furnace, her maid Susannah, and the boy ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the key in the lock and ran to the window, pulling its green-paper shade aside. Nothing to be seen but tumble-down out-buildings, a dog-kennel, trampled grass, an empty clothes-line, and ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... at a time he never got around to the shabby place on the hill at all. But the boy believed that he did understand this and often he smiled to himself over it, without any bitterness—just smiled half wistfully. He lived alone in the tumble-down old house and did his own cooking and—well, even a most zealous man of the gospel might have beamed more heartily upon better cooks than was Denny, without ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... necessary for the purchase of the good-will and fixtures, with the stock of ales and spirits, of a small inn in the center of a lonely little village, perched on the summit of a hill, and called Mount Stanning. It was not a very pretty house to look at; it had something of a tumble-down, weather-beaten appearance, standing, as it did, upon high ground, sheltered only by four or five bare and overgrown poplars, that had shot up too rapidly for their strength, and had a blighted, forlorn look in consequence. The wind had had its own way with the Castle Inn, and had sometimes ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... dooryard oaks. They were not afraid of the strong-limbed, duck-clad stranger, whose manner was the manner of the town folk, but whose speech was the gentle drawl of the mountain motherland. Once he had eaten with them in the single room of the tumble-down cabin; and again he had made a grape-vine swing for the boys, and had ridden the littlest girl on his shoulder up to the steep-pitched corn patch where her father was plowing. We may bear this in mind, since it has been said that there is ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... into the Cafe de l'Opera, a tumble-down frame shack with a corrugated iron roof, to order a cooling drink and to puzzle out this utterly ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Uncle Moses, "there's somethin in that too. David's dreadful fond of old stones, and old bones, and tumble-down edifices, and old sticks an weeds. Why, he's all the time collectin; an if he keeps on, his baggage'll ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... Grotesque figures (men, women, animals) surround the base of his statue in Berlin, in Leipsic; and in Hamburg, clad in a corrugated golf costume, with a colossal two-handed sword in front of him, he is a melancholy figure, gazing out over a tumble-down beer-garden. At Wannsee, near Berlin, there is, I must admit, a really fine bust of Bismarck. On a solid square pedestal of granite, covered with ivy and surrounded by the whispering, or sighing, or creaking and cracking trees that he loved, and facing the setting sun, and alone in a secluded ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... just beyond the locality written about, was another terrible rendezvous for an equally desperate set of men. It was known as Slaughter-house Point, and a criminal here was, for a time, safe from the police, as its many intricate streets and tumble-down houses offered a safe hiding-place for every kind of outlaw, even up to very recent years. Here the terrible garroter dwelt for a long time; aye, and throve, too, until our criminal judges began sentencing every one of them convicted before them to the extreme penalty of twenty ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... superior. All the descriptions I have seen of the Land League buildings are untrue and unfair. Most of them were written by men who never saw the place, and who paraphrased and perpetuated the original error. It was described as a "mile or two from Tipperary," and the buildings were called "tumble-down shanties of wood, warped and decaying, already falling to pieces." The place adjoins and interlocks with the old town; it is not separated by more than the breadth of a street, is largely built of stone, and comprises a stone arcade, which alone cost many ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... in the mountains of western North Carolina, far up on the mountainside, at the head of a cove, there lived a fifteen-year-old boy. He had sisters and brothers and parents, but they dwelt in a little tumble-down shack and were wretchedly poor. Jake was the oldest of the children, and he had to work hard in the little patch of corn on the steep mountainside, which barely yielded ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... in the presentation of old Paris streets and tumble-down houses, Lalanne has achieved several remarkable plates of this order. One is his well-known Rue des Marmousets. This street is almost as repellent-looking as Rue Mouffetard at its worst period. Ancient and sinister, its reputation was not enticing. In it once dwelt ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... length. From the main street, with its quaint little shops sheltered from the sun by makeshift verandahs of tattered sacking, weather-stained shingles, or rotting bamboo mats, various little lanes and alleys diverged, leading one into a collection of tumble-down and ruinous huts, set up apparently by chance, and presenting the most incongruous appearance that could possibly be conceived. One or two pucca houses, that is, houses of brick and masonry, shewed where some wealthy Bunneah (trader) or usurious banker lived, but the majority ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the equipage dashingly approached the busy centre of Hanbridge, the region of fine shops, public-houses, hotels, halls, and theatres, more and more of the inhabitants knew that Iris (as they affectionately called her) was driving with a young man in a tumble-down little victoria behind a mule whose ears flapped like an elephant's. Denry being far less renowned in Hanbridge than in his native Bursley, few persons recognised him. After the victoria had gone by people who had heard the news too late ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... an old-world, tumble-down town, for about seven miles, the steamer reached Navy Bay, I thought I had never seen a more luckless, dreary spot. Three sides of the place were a mere swamp, and the town itself stood upon a sand-reef, the houses being built upon piles, which some one told me rotted regularly every three ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... rather than return to my father. To fulfil the prophecy of my teacher was my ambition. The privations that I endured, the life I led, I will not recount to you. I performed the most menial service, and worked months like a beast of burden. For want of a shelter, I slept in deserted yards and tumble-down houses. Upon a piece of bread and a drink of water I lived, saving, with miserly greediness, the money which I earned as messenger or day-laborer. At the end of a year, I had earned sufficient to buy an old suit of clothes at a second-hand clothing-store, and present myself to ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... She walked with a proud, defiant step, like a martyr to the Coliseum, but her strength was exhausted; she sank on the sofa in her blue room, as if she were ready to faint, and sat there with her eyes fixed on the tumble-down summer-house, where her daughter ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Susie was wherever it was fashionable to be. For a week or two in the summer, for a day or two at Easter, they went down to Devonshire; and Anna might wander about the old house and grounds as she chose, and feel how much better she had loved it in its tumble-down state, the state she had known as a child, when her mother lived there and was happy. Everything was aggressively spruce now, indoors and out. Susie's money and Susie's taste had rubbed off all the mellowness ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... spirit of Art that dictated them. There were no pretty, well-finished, young-ladyish sketches of tumble-down cottages, and trees whose species no botanist could ever define;—or smooth chalk heads, with very tiny mouths, and very crooked noses. Olive's productions were all as rough as rough could be; few even attaining to the dignity of drawing-paper. They ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... another lane,—or rather a footpath or cowpath, bordered with cornfields and orchards. We were still on home ground, for my father's vegetable garden and orchard were here. After a long straight stretch, the path suddenly took an abrupt turn, widening into a cart road, then to a tumble-down wharf, and there was ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... came to Craymoor Grange in the summer of 1849, my husband having discovered the place in one of his rambles, and taken a fancy to it. At first I certainly thought we could never make it our home, it was so dilapidated and tumble-down; but by the time winter came on we had had several repairs done and alterations made, and the rooms really became ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... dishonesty—none in the world. You don't suppose that I want to get the dirty old tumble-down houses. God forbid! But you would not give up everything to a Jew! Oh, I hate them! I do hate them! Anything is fair against a Jew." If such was Madame Zamenoy's ordinary doctrine, it may well be understood that she would scruple at using no weapon against a Jew who was meditating ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... to find these birds a special infliction, and complained of the invasion of his premises by "them paycocks." The word "pea" is always rendered "pay" in Worcestershire, and, like "tay" for "tea," is probably the old correct pronunciation. I lately saw a notice on some tumble-down premises near Southampton, "Pay and bane stiks for sale." Another notice, not too happily composed, is to be seen at a Forest village; after the owner's name, "Carpenter, builder ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... streets, rendering them too filthy for foot passage. Everything appears to be in a state of chronic decay; and as the city flourished twelve hundred years before Christ,—indeed may be said to have been at the zenith of its glory at that period,—it is not surprising that it should be in a tumble-down condition in our day. This very dilapidation, however, renders the river front one of the most picturesque sights imaginable. Being a British possession, there is a European quarter of the town, quite ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... lay a small cleared tract of land, where a pleasant greenness of young potato vines hid the sand. In the centre was a tumble-down cabin, with a mud chimney on the outside. The one window had no sash, and its rude shutter hung precariously by a single leathern hinge. The door was open, revealing that the interior was papered with newspapers. Three or four ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... Christ's kingdom visited St. Louis, they found it a place of two thousand inhabitants,—"a tumble-down French village,—built mainly of wooden slabs and poles set vertically, and well daubed with mortar mixed with straw, though there were many log houses." In a school-room they delivered the first Presbyterian ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker
... with excitement and the close proximity of a female form. "The Maenads and the Bassarids," murmured Gordon to himself, and cursed his luck for not knowing any of the girls. Disconsolately he wandered across to the Bijou Theatre, a tumble-down hut where a huge ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Wood-wife." This was because of a wooden staff on which she leaned to eke out the failing strength of her own limbs. The wood-wife was both feared and hated by the people, amongst whom she bore the character of a very malicious witch. The king's daughter hated not only her, but her tumble-down house, and had sent again and again, with large offers of gold, to try and purchase the cottage. But the wood-wife laughed spitefully at the messengers, and only replied that the cottage suited her, and that for no money would she quit it whilst ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... months of the year he spent at Newstead, vacated by the tenant, who had left the building in the tumble-down condition in which he found it. Byron was, by his own acknowledgment, at this time, "heavily dipped," generosities having combined with selfish extravagances to the result; he had no funds to subject the place to anything like a thorough repair, but he busied himself ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... all surroundings shall have a favorable influence; and there is nothing like example in early training. Bring up and educate a boy among those who know nothing of the refinements of life, away from the progressive examples of art and taste, in a tumble-down, unplastered, ill-heated and ventilated apartment, and he never can become, with all the aid of books and teachers, as thoroughly cultivated and fitted for the duties of life, as one who has enjoyed associations of a higher order. School architecture has a meaning in it; ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... service, because the root of his life lies there. You cannot understand that the root of Eli Tregarthen's life goes down into the soil he has tilled from childhood as his parents tilled it. To you Garrison Hill is a tumble-down fort, and Saaron Island a barren rock; yet you call them yours, because you have purchased them. And, nevertheless—to do you justice—you are not one who rates everything by its price in money. If you were, I could beg you to take a higher rent for Saaron ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... dinginess, and the faded, patched chintz sofa, that was not only comfortable, but respectable, in the old wainscoted sitting-room, has suddenly turned into "an object," when lang syne goes by the board and the heirloom is incontinently set adrift. Undertake to move from this tumble-down old house, strewn thick with the dbris of many generations, into a tumble-up, peaky, perky, plastery, shingly, stary new one, that is not half finished, and never will be, and good enough for it, and you will perhaps comprehend how it is that I find a great crack in my life. On the farther ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... lamented remains. The monument and vault in the church were then, alas! all that remained of my vast possessions; for my father had sold every stick of the property to one Notley, an attorney, and we received but a cold welcome in his house—a miserable old tumble-down place it was. [Footnote: In another part of his memoir Mr. Barry will be found to describe this mansion as one of the most splendid palaces in Europe; but this is a practice not unusual with his nation; and with respect to ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... it—a tumble-down coffee house, with A. Kuprasso above the door in queer amateur lettering. There was a lamp burning inside, and two or three men smoking ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... trimly kept as the maze of Hampton Court and three times the height. We did all sorts of other things. We stopped at wild mountain gorges alive with the rustle of water and aglow with wild-flowers. We went on foot through one-streeted, tumble-down villages and passed the time of day with the kindly inhabitants. And the August sun ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Harley P. Hennage looked over the rail fence into the feed corral at San Pasqual and discovered that Bob McGraw's horse was gone, a man on a tired horse rode up from the south, turned in through the ruined doorway of one of the roofless tumble-down adobe houses, and concealed himself and his horse in the area formed by the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... "I have remained in Rome at the will of the goddess, but I cannot endure the city. I will go to Antium. I am stifled in these narrow streets, amid these tumble-down houses, amid these alleys. Foul air flies even here to my house and my gardens. Oh, if an earthquake would destroy Rome, if some angry god would level it to the earth! I would show how a city should be built, which is the head of the ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... on a door of a tumble-down shack. Cautiously it was opened a few inches. There was ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... seen a large map of a Southern railroad, on one side of which were some highly-colored pictures. The first showed the tumble-down cabin of a colored man, himself, wife and boy carrying from it their few belongings to the favored land of promise. The next picture shows him and his family in the woods in his new location, getting ready to build his house. The third picture represents a fine log house, with green fields well ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... with Mr. McMaster he was making the usual round previous to the opening of the school, beating up unreliable scholars, and had entered a damp, noisome alley, lined on either side with tumble-down apologies for houses. Mr. McMaster took one side and Bert the other, and they proceeded to visit the different dwellers in this horrible place. Bert had knocked at several doors without getting any response, for the people were apt to lie in bed late on Sunday ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... I took a picture of the saucy girl while she was trying to stop yours," said Jasper. "So she didn't do much harm, after all. Oh, here is a splendid group! See them standing by that old tumble-down house, Polly," he ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... should like England better," declared Mary positively. "London is much finer than New York, which is very ugly, I think, and our dear little villages are so pretty. I never saw such queer tumble-down places as you have here in the country. I think our hedge-rows ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... the Cafe de l'Opera, a tumble-down frame shack with a corrugated iron roof, to order a cooling drink and to puzzle out this ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... streets of this tumble-down town walked every type of Gallipoli campaigner: British Tommies, grousing and cheerful; Australians, remarkable for their physique; deep-brown Maoris; bearded Frenchmen in baggy trousers; shining and grinning African negroes ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... St. Sennan's. You haven't heard of it, probably. It's past the Cove—on a hill looking over the sea. It's the most tumble-down old place you ever saw, and nobody goes there except a few fishermen, but we know the clergyman and like him. I like the place too—you can listen to the sea if you're bored with ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... Schools of the present. Mr. Edgeworth was, as we know, the very spirit of progress, though his experiment did not answer at the time. At the end of the village street, where two roads divide, we noticed a gap in the decent roadway—a pile of ruins in a garden. A tumble-down cottage, and beyond the cottage, a falling shed, on the thatched roof of which a hen was clucking and scraping. These cottages Mr. Edgeworth had, after long difficulty, bought up and condemned as unfit for human habitation. The plans had been considered, ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... his eyes he dragged his weary, aching feet as quickly as he could towards the spot, and soon came to a miserable-looking little cottage. As he drew near he saw that it was in a tumble-down condition, the bamboo fence was broken and weeds and grass pushed their way through the gaps. The paper screens which serve as windows and doors in Japan were full of holes, and the posts of the house were bent with age and seemed scarcely able to support the old thatched roof. The hut was open, ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... too much, my dear Mr. Cole," were his last words to me. "My own place is as ancient and as tumble-down as most ruins that you pay to see over. And I'm never there myself because—I tell you frankly—I hate it ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... stood still— listening—looking sharply about him. He knew the place well. It was the heart and centre, the core of its own particular and vicious section of the underworld. Ahead of him, flanking the two-story, tumble-down building that was the Spider's home, was a narrow alleyway, then a small and filthy courtyard, and, its rear upon this and fronting the street, the alleyway again at the side, the "The Yellow Lantern" that he had been careful to avoid a dance hall of the lowest type. ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the oldest in it. I cannot say that the first impression produced by the wharf at which we landed, or the streets we drove through in reaching our hotel, was particularly lively. Rickety, dark, dirty, tumble-down streets and warehouses, with every now and then a mansion of loftier pretensions, but equally neglected and ruinous in its appearance, would probably not have been objects of special admiration to many people on this side the water; but I belong to that infirm, decrepit, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... a recognised form of fraud among less scrupulous members of the trade. An oak chest bearing every superficial mark of age that a clever workman can give it (and the profession of wormholer, is now, I believe, recognised) is deposited in a tumble-down, half-timbered home in a country village, whose occupant is willing to take a share in the game; a ticket marked "Ginger-beer; sold Here" is placed in the window, and the trap is ready. It is almost beyond question that everyone who bids for this chest, which has, of course, been in the family for ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... silence, and finally leaving the road had turned into the fields and plodded steadily on. It was the new of the moon and the landscape was shrouded in heavy shadows. On and still on the silent procession had traveled, and when their eyes, now accustomed to the darkness, had espied the outlines of a tumble-down, one-story house that stood out against the blackness of the night a halt had been made and each dark figure had taken from under her arm a bundle. Then the faint rustle of paper accompanied by an occasional giggle or a smothered ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... is entirely too tumble-down to use,' said one of the men, sadly; and I knew he was right, for I had examined ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... one belonging to an old woman who was very poor and without a family to help her. In spite of her great age, she went to work as well as she could, in different places, but could scarcely exist on her earnings. Her house near the site selected for the new palace was old and in a tumble-down condition. They tell that one day having gone a long distance to find work she fell ill and remained a long time without being able to return to her house. Then the architects who were building the palace said, "We must not let this hovel remain standing so near the King's palace." ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... rare exceptions, was wherever Susie was, and Susie was wherever it was fashionable to be. For a week or two in the summer, for a day or two at Easter, they went down to Devonshire; and Anna might wander about the old house and grounds as she chose, and feel how much better she had loved it in its tumble-down state, the state she had known as a child, when her mother lived there and was happy. Everything was aggressively spruce now, indoors and out. Susie's money and Susie's taste had rubbed off all the ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... and not a human being was in sight. Charity paused on the threshold and tried to discover the road by which she had come the night before. Across the field surrounding Mrs. Hyatt's shanty she saw the tumble-down house in which she supposed the funeral service had taken place. The trail ran across the ground between the two houses and disappeared in the pine-wood on the flank of the Mountain; and a little way to the right, under a wind-beaten thorn, ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... few energetic individuals who have made for themselves a permanent home. In the wake of construction gangs and along the lines of railways and canals one discovers these immigrant families taking root in the soil. In the smaller cities, an immigrant day laborer will often invest his savings in a tumble-down house and an acre of land, and almost at once he becomes the nucleus for a gathering of his kind. The market gardens that surround the large cities offer work to the children of the factory operatives, and there they swarm over beet and ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... quainter of the two, and commands, moreover, a noble view. As it stands at the turn of the bay, its skirts are all waterside, and round from North Reach to the Bay Front you can follow doubtful paths from one quaint corner to another. Everywhere the same tumble-down decay and sloppy progress, new things yet unmade, old things tottering to their fall; everywhere the same out-at-elbows, many-nationed loungers at dim, irregular grog-shops; everywhere the same sea-air and isleted sea-prospect; and for a last and more romantic note, you have on the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... now a-days extremely common to style the tumble-down-dick exploits or posture masters, balancers, conjurers, &c. an art. To ridicule such an abuse of the term by applying it to mere adroitness, skill in trifles, and labour-in-vain performances, Quinctilian gives us this merry instance—"Qualis illius fuit, qui ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... look at another "dividing ridge" that had neither path nor way, and henceforth I must keep to the open road or travel alone. Two hours' tramp brought us to an old clearing with some rude, tumble-down log buildings that many years before had been occupied by the bark and lumber men. The prospect for trout was so good in the stream hereabouts, and the scene so peaceful and inviting, shone upon by the dreamy August sun, that we concluded to tarry here until the next day. It was a page ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... contributions an old worn-out farm is bought in the lady's name, and in the cheap farm-house a small school is opened. The location is in an out-of-the-way neighborhood, three or four miles from the little, old, tumble-down county seat. Now a fine building is to be secured. The lady patrons raise their offerings up to six thousand dollars. Fine architectural plans are devised at the North. Meantime, speculators on the ground, ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., June, 1888., No. 6 • Various
... generous offer, she was allowed to rent a tumble-down, unoccupied building, and opened her school with six pupils! Every one of the six became so enthusiastic over a teacher who was interested in each individual that their friends were eager to be her pupils, too, and parents were anxious to ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... till the Red Man gives him back his power again, for the happiness of France. A lot of them say that he is dead! Dead? Oh! yes, very likely. They do not know him, that is plain! They go on telling that fib to deceive the people, and to keep things quiet for their tumble-down government. Listen; this is the whole truth of the matter. His friends have left him alone in the desert to fulfil a prophecy that was made about him, for I forgot to tell you that his name Napoleon really means the ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... belong to somebody, and perhaps it would be best to find out who. Suddenly Blacky shook himself. "I must be dreaming," said he. "There couldn't, there just couldn't be an egg at this time of year, or in that old tumble-down nest! I'll just fly away and ...
— Blacky the Crow • Thornton W. Burgess
... Shire Lane, once stood a block of disreputable, tumble-down houses, used by coiners, and known as the "Smashing Lumber." Every room had a secret trap, and from the workshop above a shaft reached the cellars to hurry away by means of a basket and pulley all the apparatus at the first alarm. The first man made his fortune, but the new police soon ransacked ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... drove through the streets past the houses that had been burned down, he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The picturesqueness of the chimney stacks and tumble-down walls of the burned-out quarters of the town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of the Rhine and the Colosseum. The cabmen he met and their passengers, the carpenters cutting the timber for new ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Clinton, N. Y. Miss Barton's remarkable executive ability was manifested in the fact that she popularized the Public School System in New Jersey, by opening the first free school in Bordentown, commencing with six pupils, in an old tumble-down building, and at the close of the year, leaving six hundred in the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... carriage was heard slowly entering the yard. I could hardly wait until morning to gloat over my gentle racer! At early dawn I visited the stable and found John disgusted beyond measure with my bargain. A worn-out, tumble-down, rickety carriage with wobbling wheels, and an equally worn-out, thin, dejected, venerable animal, with an immense blood spavin on left hind leg, recently blistered! It took three weeks of constant doctoring, ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... gossamer over the furze bushes and rough grass around the camping-place, before the pair of pleasure-seekers returned. By that time, however, Tonio was sleeping soundly beside the piebalds in shelter of a tumble-down wall, with the monkey curled closely in against his dusky breast. Joe and Moll were stupid, tired, and decidedly out of sorts, as people are wont to be after a surfeit of enjoyment and a scant supply of sleep. Bruno growled ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... my cheek. I could see the river gleaming ahead, with spaces of liquid blackness in it, and a red or green light burning here and there. It was still raining, and the clouds were heavy in the south and west. We stopped almost at the river-side, before a tumble-down-looking little public-house, and here Brunow alighted hastily. A hulking fellow leaned against the door-jamb smoking a short pipe; and Brunow addressing an inquiry to him, he jerked his thumb towards the river, ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... Jack lost no time in making his way toward Hank Handcraft's tumble-down abode. He found its owner in, and likewise ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... or who they are. They've only just come here and from goodness knows where. And they live in that little tumble-down house ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... was rich, an' good, an' lubly, an' happy; fur don't yer see de birds neber sung, 'I wush you wuz,' 'I wush dey had," but all de time 'I wush I wuz,' 'I wush I had.' At last, one day dar come inter de gyarden er po' little cripple gal, who lived 'way off in er ole tumble-down house. She wuz er little po' white chile, an' she didn't hab no farder nor mudder, nor niggers ter do fur her, an' she had to do all her ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... was to Keller's Landing, an old tumble-down lumber-wharf on the Tennessee River, used during the Civil War to land soldiers. There we spent many happy hours and played at learning geography. I built dams of pebbles, made islands and lakes, and dug river-beds, all for fun, and never dreamed that I was learning a ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... David had passed the tumble-down shanty, and was hesitating where two streets crossed, when he felt a light touch on his arm. He turned to confront a small girl in a patched and faded calico dress, obviously outgrown. Her eyes were wide and frightened. ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... at the tumble-down condition of the house, as thus pointed out to her, and set about ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and in the glorious sunshine the old Barnes house did look, as their guide said, more "lifelike and cheerful." A big, rambling, gray-gabled affair, of colonial pattern, a large yard before it and a larger one behind, the tumble-down shed in which General Jackson had been tethered, a large barn, also rather tumble-down, with henhouses and corncribs beside it and attached to it in haphazard fashion. In the front yard were overgrown clusters of lilac and rose bushes ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... another day, more than thirty years before, when it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... long, wet grass, Nick leading. He took a path through a dark forest swamp, over logs that spanned the stagnant waters, and at length, just as the mist was growing pearly in the light, we came out at a tumble-down house that stood in an open glade by ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... NORMAL AND INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE, at Tuskegee, Alabama, is one of the most uniquely interesting institutions in America. Begun, twenty years ago, in two abandoned, tumble-down houses, with thirty untaught Negro men and women for its first students, it has become one of the famous schools of the country, with more than a thousand students each year. Students and teachers are all of the Negro race. The Principal of the school, Mr. Booker T. ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... rafter, a lath, in the whole house that was not ready, upon the slightest assault, to go to wreck. Of glass windows the rumour was long since extinct. All stood open; and had Klaus been a student of meteorology, a better observatory than his loopholed, tumble-down homestead could not have been to be had. He returned from his tour of inspection more firmly resolved than ever to risk his adventure; and as soon as the sun was set, and the moon traced darker shadows upon the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... back to the old haunts," I was greatly shocked on visiting the house to see the shameful state of dilapidation into which it has been allowed to pass. The porches and steps have fallen down, the garden is a disreputable tangle, and the graves in the yard are heaped with tumble-down stones about which the cattle graze. The only parts of the building in good repair are those parts which time has not yet succeeded in destroying. The drawing-room, containing a mantelpiece given to ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... that we stepped at once from the small front court into the drawing-room, from which a door opened into a stone kitchen. The rest of the accommodation corresponded with this primitive mode of entrance; the whole place was in what is commonly called a "tumble-down" condition: there was certainly plenty of garden, and two large meadows, but, like the rest of the place, they were sadly out of order. When we said it was not at all the house we had expected to find from reading the advertisement, we asked what sort of house we expected to get ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... this night without one inkling of what was about to happen. He did not know that he was to be left here without men to toil and pay him his twelve per cent. He has town debts. He has the bare acres he has foreclosed on—he has the tumble-down houses. He has the paupers on ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... lovely lake, some two miles in length. From the main street, with its quaint little shops sheltered from the sun by makeshift verandahs of tattered sacking, weather-stained shingles, or rotting bamboo mats, various little lanes and alleys diverged, leading one into a collection of tumble-down and ruinous huts, set up apparently by chance, and presenting the most incongruous appearance that could possibly be conceived. One or two pucca houses, that is, houses of brick and masonry, shewed where some wealthy Bunneah (trader) or usurious banker lived, but the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... an altogether serious man and had a little sharp-featured wife who had also a sharp voice. The two, with half a dozen thin-legged children, lived in a tumble-down frame house beside a creek at the back end of the Wills farm ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Prytania Street, at least to the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the neighbourhood. When or how they came, or how they stayed, no one knew; it was enough that they were there, like a sort of ancestral fixture to the street. The neighbourhood was fine enough to look down upon these two tumble-down shops at the corner, kept by Tony and Mrs. Murphy, the grocer. It was a semi-fashionable locality, far up-town, away from the old-time French quarter. It was the sort of neighbourhood where millionaires live before their fortunes are made and fashionable, high-priced private ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... correspondent referred was so very "private and particular," it would never do, he thought, to read the letter there in the post-office, while there were so many men standing around; so he straightway sought the privacy of his own dwelling—a little tumble-down log cabin with a dirt floor and stick chimney, which was situated in the outskirts of ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... instance, mixed with a sort of mad pity, when by chance we light upon some twisted root-trunk, to which the shadows have given outstretched arms. The vague feelings, too, so absolutely unaccountable, that the sight of a lonely gate, or weir, or park-railing, or sign-post, or ruined shed, or tumble-down sheep-fold, may suddenly arouse, when we feel that in some weird manner we are the accomplices of the Thing's tragedy, are feelings that Dickens alone among writers seems to understand. A road with no people upon it, and the wind alone sobbing there; with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead; a ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Ohio Railroad station, in the Fourth Ward, known as Harpville, on the east bank of the Stony creek. A rudely constructed platform extends over a washed-out ditch, partially filled with debris. In the vicinity is a large barn and several smaller outhouses, thrown in a tumble-down condition. Piled against them are beams and rafters from houses smashed into kindling wood. All about the station are boxes, empty and full, scattered in confusion, and around and about these crowds are clustered as best they can. A big policeman ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... beautiful or picturesque. That which is new in them is—new, and well enough; and that which is not new or newish is apt to be rather shabby than venerable. I apprehend that Old World cities would be quite intolerably shabby and tumble-down but for the fact that, when they were built, joint stock companies were unknown, and men still took real pride in the durability of their work. We have made wondrous progress, of course, and are vastly cleverer ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the stock of ales and spirits, of a small inn in the center of a lonely little village, perched on the summit of a hill, and called Mount Stanning. It was not a very pretty house to look at; it had something of a tumble-down, weather-beaten appearance, standing, as it did, upon high ground, sheltered only by four or five bare and overgrown poplars, that had shot up too rapidly for their strength, and had a blighted, forlorn look ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... at Holl were all in a tumble-down state; the furniture was no better. There wasn't a chair in the whole house; even the bastofa had only a dirt floor, and it was entirely unsheathed on the inside except for a few planks nailed on the wall from the bed up as far as the rafters. The clock was the sole manufactured article in the ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... believe his account of their relationship, if he were in a mood or state to give it. He put on an overcoat and walked, with the confirmed Londoner's shivering hatred of the country in autumn, to the tumble-down shanty which did duty as general store and post office ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... listened. There came another groan and another, and then he knocked on the door. There was no response and he opened it and went in. He had been in many dirty, dismal rooms, but never in one so dirty and so dismal as this. It looked as if it never had been clean. The only furniture was a tumble-down bed in one corner, a chair and a broken stove. On the bed, the old man was lying, covered with rags. He fixed his sunken eyes on the boy and roughly demanded what he wanted, but even as he ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... were like a whipstroke that made Lepailleur rear. And once again he poured forth all his spite. Ah! surely now, it wasn't his tumble-down old mill that would ever enrich him, since it had enriched neither his father nor his grandfather. And as for his fields, well, that was a pretty dowry that his wife had brought him, land in which nothing more would grow, and which, however ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... is due to the coal-black stem, which gives to a palm tree shorn of its head the look of a tumble-down smoke-grimed chimney. Unshorn, leaning to the wind, it is the most graceful thing in the world, especially seen against the ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... a quarrel between Grandfather Fortuny and Father Gonzales. The priest declared that a boy like that shouldn't waste his youth in the shabby, tumble-down village of Reus—he should go to Barcelona ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... to-night is near the ruins of a very old fort, and ever since we got here, the men have been hunting rattlesnakes that have undoubtedly been holding possession of the tumble-down buildings, many snake generations. Dozens and dozens have been killed, of all sizes, some of them being very large. The old quarters were evidently made of sods and dirt, and must have been dreadful places to live in even ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... people would have said," continued the Stranger. "You had not a sou between you. But, myself, I think you were justified. Youth comes to us but once. And at twenty-five our business is to live. Undoubtedly the marriage helped you. You lived an idyllic existence, for a time, in a tumble-down cottage at Suresnes, with a garden that went down to the river. Poor, of course you were; poor as church mice. But who fears poverty when hope and love are singing on the bough! I really think quite your best ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... dark, musty place, with a row of old, tumble-down tenements each side, where poor wretches live all huddled up together, fifty in a house, eh? I was told I couldn't drive up it in a carriage, so I had to walk. Do you know such ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... of Minnie Davis' yard was relieved by a single rosebush, and her small house might best be described as a "tumble-down shack." An unsteady wooden box served as a step to the fragment of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... from Ballydehob during the first days of January, gives the most piteous account of that village; every house he entered exhibited the same characteristics,—no clothing, no food, starvation in the looks of young and old. In a tumble-down cabin resembling a deserted forge, he found a miserable man seated at a few embers, with a starved-looking dog beside him, that was not able to crawl. The visitor asked him if he were sick; he answered that he was not, but having got swelled legs working on the roads, he had to give ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... little settlement, a mile or two to the south, consisting of a collection of tumble-down adobe houses which looked like a blotch on the brown hillside; a few cattle were browsing near by, and the locality seemed to be well supplied with lizards, which darted over the dusty ground in all directions. But the startling point of the landscape was that it showed no ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Paragot was not a palace. It stood, low and whitewashed, amid a medley of little tumble-down erections, and was guarded on one side by cowsheds and on the other by the haystack. You stepped across the threshold into the kitchen. A door on the right gave access to the bedroom. A ladder connected with a hole in the roof enabled ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... two young people that they might make their home with him while their house was in building. He had already had part of the material drawn, and from the brow of the hill they looked down upon the site he had chosen near the old tumble-down tenant's house. But Andrew saw that Julia ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... promised him buck and boar and moufflon—is that the right name for those strange creatures? We intend to crave your hospitality on our way to Bastia, where we are to embark, and I trust the della Rebbia Castle, which you declare is so old and tumble-down, will not fall in upon our heads! Though the prefect is so pleasant that subjects of conversation are never lacking to us—I flatter myself, by the way, that I have turned his head—we have been talking about ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... importance, he will not grow old gracefully. More and more his spirit, small and mean, will leave its impress on his face, and especially in his eyes. You look at him and feel that there is no jewel in the casket; that a shriveled soul is living in a tumble-down house. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... beautiful existence for those two dear old boys. When Uncle Cradd heard of the smash from that horrible phosphate deal he was at the door the next morning at sun-up, driving the two gray mules to one wagon himself, with old Rufus driving the gray horses hitched to that queer tumble-down, old family coach, though he hadn't spoken to father since he married mother twenty-eight ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... some sudden freak, he points out a black dirty-looking dwelling-place, with overhanging windows and a wide gabled roof. 'Yonder it stands, Becky,' he cries; 'number seven John-street, Clerkenwell; a queer dingy box of four walls, my wench—a tumble-down kennel, with a staircase that 'twould break your neck to mount, being strange to it—and half a day's journey from the court-end of town. But that house was once paradise to me; and to look at it even now, though 'tis over eighteen years since I saw the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... quay, with its irregular row of houses done in delicious sun-baked colours, in front of which women in sulphur shawls and children in variegated rags were sunning themselves and passing the time of day. On the other side, a tumble-down wall of brick, that once was red, rose out of the water in such formless dilapidation that one could not tell where the reality merged into the reflection; while masses of verdure from a hidden garden ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... Duke's property.' 'What Duke?' 'The Duke of Buckingham. Did you never hear of it? About fifteen years ago his property was sold in lots, and the people bought all the farms. You never saw such a stir in the world.' He pointed out the houses on the hill-side which had been built to replace old tumble-down tenements, the red soil appearing under the plough, and cultivation going on with such general activity as had not been witnessed till within these last few years. The appearance of these villages was such as must strike every traveller from another part of the country, ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... could not eat it, he could only think what a fine cow it had been when it was alive. At last he slipped away unobserved out of the house, and, looking about for somewhere to sleep, he found an old tumble-down house filled with peats. ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... know, sir," said the porter's wife, shaking her head; "it's a very old and tumble-down sort of place, and I've heard noises, and crackings, and rappings, sometimes, as have made my flesh creep. They do say ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... were sea-pieces. One represented a fat-looking, smoky fishing-boat, with three whiskerandoes in red caps, and their browsers legs rolled up, hauling in a seine. There was high French-like land in one corner, and a tumble-down gray lighthouse surmounting it. The waves were toasted brown, and the whole picture looked mellow and old. I used to think a piece of it ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... consequently devoted myself more closely than ever to my studies—indulged in a passing mania for genealogy and heraldry—began a collection of local geological specimens, all of which I threw away at the end of the first fortnight—and took to rearing rabbits in an old tumble-down summer-house at the end of the garden. I believe that from somewhere about this time I may also date the commencement of a great epic poem in blank verse, and Heaven knows how many cantos, which was to be called the Columbiad. It began, I remember, with a description ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... really heavy firing and it gave us a queer thrill to hear the constant boom-boom of the guns like a continuous thunderstorm. We began to feel fearfully hungry, and stopped beside a high bank flanking a canal and not far from a small cafe. Bunny and I went to get some hot water. It was a tumble-down place enough, and as we pushed the door open (on which, by the way, was the notice in French, "During the bombardment one enters by the side door") we found the room full of men drinking coffee and smoking. I bashfully made my way towards one of the oldest women ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... "there's somethin in that too. David's dreadful fond of old stones, and old bones, and tumble-down edifices, and old sticks an weeds. Why, he's all the time collectin; an if he keeps on, his baggage'll become ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... He began to make inquiries about distance and so forth. The driver of a four-wheeled cab, his purple bemuddled face lighting up with a dull sort of humour, gave him a facetious invitation to get inside the tumble-down old vehicle. The conductors of one or two passing omnibuses hailed him; and he gathered from their 'Benk! Benk!' that at least he was in the right direction. But he was not going to spend money causelessly; so he ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... be something in the nature of a drawbridge. From these a narrow path ran through a marsh, left by the receding river, to a country road of desolate appearance. Here there was a rough enclosure, or corral, with some tumble-down sheds which afforded shelter, on the night of Joseph Louden's disgrace, for a number of shaggy teams attached to those decrepit and musty vehicles known picturesquely and accurately as Night-Hawks. The presence of such questionable shapes in the corral indicated ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... and when the girls reached the Hermit's Hut, a tumble-down shack half hidden in the brush, they gladly took ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... I don't know, any more than you do. The first time I saw him, was in an old tumble-down building, where the wind played hide and go seek through the timbers; and where more men, women, dogs and children were huddled together, than four walls of the like size ever ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... wood grew denser as I advanced, but I pushed on, heedless alike of these and of what direction I took. But, as luck would have it, I presently blundered upon a path which, in a short time, brought me out very suddenly into what appeared to be a small tavern yard, for on either hand was a row of tumble-down stables and barns, while before me was a low, rambling structure which I judged was the tavern itself. I was yet standing looking about me when a man issued from the stables upon my right, bearing a hammer in one hand and a ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... asked Mrs. Elmer, looking with a feeling of keen disappointment at the dozen or so tumble-down frame buildings that, perched on piles above the low, wet land, looked like dilapidated old men with shaky legs, and formed all that was to ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... took refuge from the fire of their enemies, the vista is almost unique for a certain scenic squalor and gypsy luxury of color: sag-roofed barns and stables, and weak-backed, sunken-chested workshops of every sort lounge along in tumble-down succession, and lean up against the cliff in every imaginable posture of worthlessness and decrepitude; light wooden galleries cross to them from the second stories of the houses which back upon the alley; and over these galleries flutters, from a labyrinth of clothes-lines, a variety of bright-colored ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... grave, which was only two feet deep. The priest broke a bottle of wine over the head, the earth was loosely thrown in, and the party went away. There is no more melancholy spot to me than a Turkish cemetery. The graves are squeezed tightly together, and the headstones, generally in a tumble-down state, are shaped like a coffin standing on end, or like a round hitching-post with a fez cap carved on the top. Weeds and rank wild-flowers cover the ground, and over all sway the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... the wind. In this young wood of Taahauku, all these hues and combinations were exampled and repeated by the score. The trees grew pleasantly spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there interspersed with a rack for drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for storing it. Every here and there the stroller had a glimpse of the Casco tossing in the narrow anchorage below; and beyond he had ever before him the dark amphitheatre of the Atuona mountains and the cliffy bluff that closes it to seaward. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... drove) were brought suddenly up to a gate with the Royal arms over it; and here we were introduced to as queer an exhibition as the eye has often looked on. This was the state-carriage house, where there is a museum of huge old tumble-down gilded coaches of the last century, lying here, mouldy and dark, in a sort of limbo. The gold has vanished from the great lumbering old wheels and panels; the velvets are wofully tarnished. When one thinks of the patches and powder that have simpered ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... contained some of them, but their head-quarters were at Caius, whither they were attracted by Mr. Clayton, who was at that time senior tutor, and among the sizars of St. John's. Behind the then chapel of this last-named college was a 'labyrinth' (this was the name it bore) of dingy, tumble-down rooms," and here dwelt many Simeonites, "unprepossessing in feature, gait, and manners, unkempt and ill-dressed beyond what can be easily described. Destined most of them for the Church, the Simeonites held themselves to have received a very loud call to the ministry ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... glimmer appeared through the darkness ahead. Presently the boys were able to see that it came from a lantern held by some man standing in the open doorway of the old house. A moment later four others appeared from within and came out to the tumble-down porch. Bob and Hugh looked on with bated breath. What could ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... busy centre of Hanbridge, the region of fine shops, public-houses, hotels, halls, and theatres, more and more of the inhabitants knew that Iris (as they affectionately called her) was driving with a young man in a tumble-down little victoria behind a mule whose ears flapped like an elephant's. Denry being far less renowned in Hanbridge than in his native Bursley, few persons recognised him. After the victoria had gone by people who had heard the news too late rushed from shops and gazed ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of the wilderness stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and three or four pilgrims with their staves—all complete. Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange,—had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in the air for a while—and on we went again into the silence, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of huts, like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows. He called out men's names menacingly from the saddle, once, twice. The ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... of wild sunflowers that in the bottom lands grow thick and rank; whirled past the tumble-down corner of an old fence that enclosed a long neglected garden; and dashed recklessly through a deserted and weed-grown yard. On one side of the road was the ancient barn and stable, with sagging, weather-beaten roof, leaning walls and battered doors that hung dejectedly ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... halfpenny apiece, and the boat almost too much crowded for standing-room. This part of the river presents the water-side of London in a rather pleasanter aspect than below London Bridge,—the Temple, with its garden, Somerset House,—and generally, a less tumble-down and neglected look about the buildings; although, after all, the metropolis does not see a very stately face in its mirror. I saw Alsatia betwixt the Temple and Blackfriar's Bridge. Its precincts looked very narrow, and not particularly distinguishable, at this day, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... buried several quite respectable wax babies, though, regretting their loss afterwards, she was eventually forced to dig them up again. She put tombstones at the heads of the graves, made of slates from the roof of a tumble-down shed, and carefully wrote names, dates, and epitaphs upon them in slate pencil, being greatly distressed when the inscriptions were invariably obliterated by every fresh shower ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... pass through the whole vast length of the building in order to gain an exit. It was an all but hopeless task in the profound darkness to thread my way through the labyrinth of halls and corridors, of tumble-down stairs, of bat-haunted vaults, of purposeless angles and involutions; but I proceeded with something of a blind obstinacy, groping my way with arms held out before me. In this manner I had wandered on for perhaps a quarter of an hour, when my fingers came into distinct ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... left the house. The little town lay quiet, except for the rhythmic noises coming from the big Massey Steel Mills. Suzanna looked in their direction and stood a moment watching the sparks coming from the big round chimneys. Over across fields were the tumble-down cottages occupied by the employees of the Massey Steel Mills. Suzanna did not often go in their direction. The squalor made her unhappy and set in train so many questions she was quite ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... we crawled down the Rue Serviez and passed the entrance to the Pare Beaumont, down the hill to Bizanos; but as soon as the chateau that takes its name from the village was reached, we met with little admiration, except from the good people jogging along in tumble-down carts and shandries. The peasants seemed on the whole a good-natured lot, taking a joke with a smile often approaching a broad grin, and occasionally, but only very occasionally, attempting one in return. ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... ruins of the old Abbey of Chamont where they lay hidden among trees. It was a great sell! The ladies voted them silly. Why, they were only a heap of old stones with briers growing over them and part of a tumble-down tower. It really wasn't worth coming a couple of leagues to see that! Then the driver pointed out to them the countryseat, the park of which stretched away from the abbey, and he advised them to take a little path and follow the walls surrounding ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... to find our land-lord, a worthy farmer, waiting for us with a tumble-down conveyance, in appearance something between a circus-chariot and a bath-chair, drawn by a couple of powerful-looking horses; and in this, after a spirited skirmish between our driver and a mob of twenty or so tourists, who pretended to mistake the affair for an omnibus, and who ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... greedy capitalists who are battening on the sorrows of the poor." He was almost conscious of a feeling of guilt as he recalled the fresh, pure air of the park and contrasted it with this atmosphere. The name of Berry Hill seemed curiously inappropriate for the level streets lined with tumble-down tenements; and its suggestion of the long-ago days when vine-clad uplands swelled between the narrowing rivers, and little children steeped their fingers in nothing more harmful than the blood of berries, lent an added pathos to the gloom of the ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... people consider the best hotel in Germany, having capital restaurants, serving table-d'hote meals, attached to them. The Rose has a little terrace, looking on to the gardens, which is a pleasant supping-place. The old Kurhaus, a tumble-down building, is disappearing or has disappeared, and a new and gorgeous building is to take its place. The restaurant at the old Kurhaus always had a good reputation, and to eat one's evening meal, for every one sups and does not dine, at one of its little ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... jerked apart; and a form lurched out into the night; there, from a dance-hall came the rattle of a tinny piano, the squeak of a raspy violin, a high-pitched, hectic burst of laughter; while, flanking the street on each side, like interjected inanimate blotches, rows of squalid tenements and cheap, tumble-down frame houses silhouetted themselves in broken, jagged points against the sky-line. And now and then a man spoke to her—his untrained fingers fumbling in clumsy homage at the brim ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... letter. The Miller's widow was an old deaf woman, who lived quite alone, in a little, tumble-down cottage, just off the road, on a lonely hillside. The foot-path that Blasi took, led near her dwelling. The woman was an aunt of Jost's, and had known better days when her husband was alive; but now she had fallen into poverty, ...
— Veronica And Other Friends - Two Stories For Children • Johanna (Heusser) Spyri
... on nature, or art, or the common conditions and industries of men in town or country. If it does not actually of itself turn, it presents everything the wrong side outward. In cities, it reveals the ragged and smutty companionship of tumble-down out-houses, and mysteries of cellar and back-kitchen life which were never intended for other eyes than those that grope in them by day or night. How unnatural, and, more, almost profane and inhuman, is ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... mother," she added, in a low, melancholy tone, which had something of inexpressible sadness in it. "Why, Jenny!" said she, rousing herself, but not before her eyes were swimming with tears, "own, now, that you never saw those dismal, hateful, tumble-down old houses there look half so—what shall I call them? almost beautiful—as they do now, with that soft, pure, exquisite covering; and if they are so improved, think of what trees, and grass, and ivy must be on such a ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... neighbourhood to be exceedingly deep, and the dark still water looked mysterious enough to be so; but then this is said of every pond or lake of romantic appearance in all parts of the country, just as every tumble-down ruin or gloomy deserted house is sure to have ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... that fust sot the thing a goin' was old Mother Hokum, that used to live up in that little tumble-down shed by the cranberry-pond up beyond the spring pastur'. They had a putty bad name, them Hokums. How they got a livin' nobody knew; for they didn't seem to pay no attention to raisin' nothin' but childun, but the duce knows, there was plenty o' them. Their old hut was like a rabbit-pen: ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and after travelling some days they came to a great city, where they took up their quarters in a tumble-down house and the next morning Lela went into the city to look for work. He went to the cutcherry and enrolled himself as a muktear (attorney) and soon the litigants and the magistrates found out how clever he was and he acquired a big practice. One day the Raja said, "This fellow is very handsome, ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... most striking feature of antiquity met thus far on our journey were curious stone terraces built across the small gullies. They are called trincheras (trenches). Some of them do not appear to be very old, and many present the appearance of tumble-down walls, but the stones of which they are constructed were plainly used in their natural state. Although many of the boulders are huge and irregular in shape, they were used just as they were found. The building material always conformed to the surroundings: in ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... of a wealthy yeoman named John Cobbam, who, the absentee tenant of an absentee landlord, resided upon a small property of his own about two miles distant, leaving the large deserted house, and dilapidated outbuildings, to sink into gradual decay. Barns half unthatched, tumble-down cart-houses, palings rotting to pieces, and pigsties in ruins, contributed, together with a grand collection of substantial and dingy ricks of fine old hay—that most valuable but most gloomy looking species of agricultural ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... rambling, cross-grained little place. From the one wide street with its jumble of old, tumble-down shops, and glaring new ones, branched out narrow, up-hill or down-hill thoroughfares, edged by colliers' houses, with an occasional tiny provision shop, where bread and bacon were ranged alongside potatoes and flabby cabbages; ornithological specimens ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... worn smooth by the iron shoes of clambering horses and donkeys, it was difficult at times to prevent slipping. The irregularity of the front of the houses, and their evident want of repairs, in fact, their general tumble-down look, relieved here and there by a handsome middle-age doorway or window on the first floor, while the second story would show a confused modern wall of rubble-work and poverty-stricken style of architecture generally; all these contrasts brought ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... respectful distance by his two attendant footmen with their threadbare liveries. At last, out of the dreary waste, at the end of the interminable ill-paved sloughy road, the long line of the grey tumble-down walls rises gloomily. A few cannon-shot would batter a breach anywhere, as the events of 1849 proved only too well. However, at Rome there is neither commerce to be impeded nor building extension of any kind to be checked; the city has shrunk up until its precincts ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... better is the state of the land and the laborers. Think of Kit Downes, uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!—and those poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is one reason why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle—which you think me stupid about. I used to come from the village ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... a small, tumble-down place, set well back in an overgrown garden. The sergeant-major came to a halt just before reaching the gate, and, hidden by the hedge, unfastened his parcel and shook out ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... Mourina, fifteen versts off, where our friends have a villa. The property belongs to Prince Woronzoff, who was brought up in England; but instead of following the example of our good landlords, he imitates the bad ones, and allows his cottages to get into a very tumble-down condition. They are built of wood, so the lower part becomes rotten, and the rest sinks. Were they placed on foundations of stone, they would last far longer. They now offer no unfit epitome of the state of Russia. ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... our horses in a tumble-down shed, fed and watered them, and, as it was impossible to leave till they were rested, lay down to snatch a brief sleep on the ground. We were invited to use the floor of a hovel for a couch, but after glancing ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... his two companions thoroughly explored the shore as far as they went on the lower part of the lake. From time to time Prescott consulted his watch. In all the time that they were out they passed only one building, a tumble-down, weather-beaten shack that looked as though it had not been inhabited in twenty years. Not even a vestige of ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... that the innkeeper might be ashamed of his suspicions. What nonsense to imagine that a noted and wealthy Glasgow merchant—the bagman's tone was almost reverential—would concern himself with the affairs of a forgotten village and a tumble-down house! ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... you—a tumble-down old house, an embarrassed estate. My brother will get but a small income when it falls to him. My father fights cocks and dogs, rides to hounds, and, I grieve to say, drinks hard, like all our ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
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