"Basement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... soon lengthened by girls from other dormitories and extended from the front of College Hall to the library. Very few things above the first floor were saved, but many books, pictures, and papers went down this long line of students to find temporary shelter in the basement of the library. Associate Professor Shackford, who wrote the account of the fire in the College News, from which these details are taken, tells us how Miss Pendleton, patrolling this busy fire line and questioning the half-clad workers, ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... cherries, plums, peaches, and apricots, is a waste; as the slaves sit round, in the kitchen in the first court, at their coarse evening meal, the room is filled with the invading force, and news comes to them that the enemy has fallen upon the apples and pears in the basement, and is at the same time plundering and sacking the preserves of quince and pomegranate, and revelling in the jars of precious oil of Cyprus and ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... his left round the front of the house, he passed the gun-room door, and went down a short path, which led to the level of the servants' quarters. These were built on the slope of the hill, so that what was a basement in the front of the house was level with the ground at ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... moneybags," Carl said. "He bribed his way in. See, New York was bombed flat. Where the old UN buildings were, it's still hot. So The Guide donated a big tract of land outside St. Louis, built these buildings—we're in the basement of one of them, right now, if you want a good laugh—and before long, he had the whole organization eating out of his hand. They just voted him into power, and the ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... assented Nan, with obliging readiness. "It's down in my trunk. I'll go right down to the basement to-morrow after we finish our English recitation at twelve o'clock and ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... front was closed with shutters, sliding in grooves cut in the lintel and basement wall before the counter, and by the door, which is thrown far back, so as to ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... through the building. Aaron explained to Musa the function of this tobacco shed, where he would hang his lathes of long-leafed tobacco to cure from August through November. The tobacco seedlings were already sprouting in Mason jars on the sunporch window-sills. The bank-barn's basement was also dedicated to tobacco. Here, in midwinter, Aaron and Martha and Waziri would strip, size, and grade the dry leaves for sale in Datura. Tobacco had always been a prime cash-crop for Levi, Aaron's father. After testing the bitter native leaf, Aaron knew that his Pennsylvania ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... otherwise unbroken except by the deep reveals of window and door. Two huge and unsymmetrical catalpa trees stood sentinels before it, dividing curb from asphalt; and from the centres of the shrivelled, brown grass-plots flanking the stoop under the basement windows two aged Rose-of-Sharon trees bristled naked to the height of the white marble capitals of the flaking pillars supporting the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... noon Kuzundam, the second officer, wandered on ahead of us, and entered a large building in pursuit of a rabbit. He was about descending to the basement below, when he saw, close before him, a bear leisurely mounting the marble stairs. Kuzundam is no coward, but he turned and ran as he never ran before. The bear, who seemed of a sportive nature, also ran, and in close pursuit. ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... trowels, were obliged to build it in edibles, the "lesser" acting as hodmen, and bringing materials. Pails of ricotta or goat's milk cheese served for mortar, grated cheese for sand, sugar plums for gravel, cakes and pastry for bricks, the basement was of meats, ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... in regard to which such interesting preparations were being made was buried, at the hour I write of, in profound repose. As its fate and its family have something to do with my tale, I shall describe it somewhat particularly. In the basement there was an offshoot, or scullery, which communicated with the kitchen. This scullery had been set apart that day as the bedroom of my little dog. (Of course I knew nothing of this, and what I am about to relate, at that time. I learned it all afterwards.) Dumps lay sound asleep on a flannel ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... answered the lad; "but I must not stay to speak any more, for the mistress waits for this balm to make tea for the cook Jean, who is like to have a fever;" and the lad disappeared under the low archway of the basement. ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... it came to pass. For when all the lights were quenched, and all the house was quiet, I heard a low and wily whistle from a clump of trees close by; and then three figures passed between me and a whitewashed wall, and came to a window which opened into a part of the servants' basement. This window was carefully raised by some one inside the house; and after a little whispering, and something which sounded like a kiss, all the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... house of some sort that stood there was in the time of the Romans. This was probably renewed—perhaps several times at later periods. The house stands, or, rather, used to stand here when Mercia was a kingdom—I do not suppose that the basement can be later than the Norman Conquest. Some years ago, when I was President of the Mercian Archaeological Society, I went all over it very carefully. This was when it was purchased by Captain March. The house had then been done up, so as to be suitable for the bride. ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... in the basement most of the time, and boarded at the present Mrs. Garfield's father's house. During our school-days here I nursed the late President through an attack of the measles which nearly ended his life. He has often ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... said the man. "I never seen a dog yet that was worth that money, did you?" And dog and persecutor disappeared together within a sinister-looking basement door. ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... Mazey, not by the scanty directions given her, but by the sound of the veteran's cracked and quavering voice, singing in some distant seclusion a verse of the immortal sea-song—"Tom Bowling." Just as she stopped among the rambling stone passages on the basement story of the house, uncertain which way to turn next, she heard the tuneless old voice in the distance, singing ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... have indicated, Mr. S.'s economies were of a pretty close and rigid kind. By and by, when we apprentices were promoted from the basement to the ground floor and allowed to sit at the family table, along with the one journeyman, Harry H., the economies continued. Mrs. S. was a bride. She had attained to that distinction very recently, after waiting a good part of a lifetime ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Chilion Beach, the bookseller, lived, while next door, No. 814, Mr. D. D. Shattuck resided. This building was erected in 1854—Mr. Shattuck came to California via the Isthmus and resided here 47 years. On the next block (same side) stood a little one-story house with a high basement in which J. D. Spencer, a brother of Spencer the sociologist, lived for many years. Just beyond stood the old High School building. On the next block, at No. 1010, resided for many years another of the old booksellers, Mr. George B. Hitchcock, proprietor ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... burst out Mrs. Cecil Jerome. "While our care-taker was living in the basement, burglars got through our scuttle and robbed all the upper part ...
— Mrs. Christy's Bridge Party • Sara Ware Bassett
... the key in it, and inclosed it in an envelope on which he wrote Henley's name. Then he put on his overcoat, descended the narrow stairs, and opened the front-door. The landlady heard him, and screamed from the basement to know if he would ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... staircase that leads to the composing room, and then to the basement where the presses are located, the chief runs. He sets about his work with a calmness and speed that is remarkable. The first page is put on the composing table and the form opened. The head lines are removed and the copy that the editor ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... boy had to be put through the little basement window where a screen was cut out. No man could have slipped through it and then opened that door for the men. Short and Long is accused—at least, he is suspected. A policeman went to his house Friday morning; but Billy ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... of the Princess Irene, of whom we will now speak.[Footnote: During the Crimean war a military hospital was built over the basement vaults and cisterns of the palace here described. The hospital was destroyed by fire. For years it was then known as the "Khedive's Garden," being a favorite resort for festive parties from the capital. At present ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... the conflagrations, the wars, and the anarchies of fifteen hundred years, consisted of a large tumulus of earth, raised on a lofty basement of white marble, and covered on the summit with evergreens in the manner of a hanging garden. On the summit was a bronze statue of Augustus himself, and beneath the tumulus was a large central hall, round which ran a range of fourteen sepulchral chambers, opening into ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... be got together, an army of dressmakers and milliners was brought into the house, and Sir Peregrine and I were driven by them from room to room, until at length we were driven out of the house altogether; the building being, almost from basement to roof- tree, crowded with silks, muslins, ribbons, flowers, and every other imaginable species of frippery affected ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... member of his congregation who let a basement room to a married couple. "They said they had two children; when they got possession it turned out that they had four. After a while a fifth appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit. They paid no attention to it. Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the law so often, ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... ridges against a pallid background of slaty cloud, while the gaunt ribs of the hills glisten below with fitful gleams of lurid light. At sunrise, one morning, stealthy and mysterious vapours clothe the mountains from their basement to the waist, while the peaks are glistening serenely in clear daylight. Another opens with silently falling snow. A third is rosy through the length and breadth of the dawn-smitten valley. It is, however, impossible to catalogue the indescribable variety ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... she was engaged to Andrey Andreitch, the young man who was standing on the other side of the window; she liked him, the wedding was already fixed for July 7, and yet there was no joy in her heart, she was sleeping badly, her spirits drooped. . . . She could hear from the open windows of the basement where the kitchen was the hurrying servants, the clatter of knives, the banging of the swing door; there was a smell of roast turkey and pickled cherries, and for some reason it seemed to her that it would be like ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... was tired of seeing her cleaning the room; she seemed to think that that was all he needed—a nurse and a servant, since she never troubled to make herself attractive to him. Several times, coming from doing her cooking in the basement, she found Mr. King slinking along the top landing, but did not associate him with Louis. Several times she thought she smelt whisky, but told herself angrily that she was dreaming. Then, one day, coming in from the Post Office, she found Louis gone. One thing ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... was a two-storied structure, with the cupola as indispensable to the old-time Kansas courthouse as a steeple to a church. The jail was in the basement of it, thus sparing culprits a certain punishment by concealing the building's raw, red, and crude lines from the eye. Not that anybody in jail or out of it ever thought of this advantage, or appreciated it, indeed, for Ascalon ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... for the general belief that fire-built rocks were older than water-built ones was, that the former are as a rule found to lie lower than the latter. They form, as it were, the basement of the building, while the top-stories are made ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... of Canada the basement rocks of the region have been driven east for seven miles on a thrust plane, over rocks which originally lay thousands of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... the lady brigandess had, that the old man's gang had run across a bricked-up passageway down in one corner of the basement, a kind of All-Goods-Must-Be-Delivered-Here gate that had been thrown into the discards. Of course, they'd gone to work to open it up, and they'd got as far as some iron bars that called for a hack-saw. They'd sent off for their breaking and entering kit, meaning to finish the job next day. The ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... then without waitin' for anything else, I runs down to the servants' 'all, which is directly below the smoking room where the other gentlemen were talking and smoking. I peers out of the window, upward—for it's a half-basement, as perhaps you've noticed, sir—and there, in the light of the moon, I see Mr. Wynne's figure, crouched down against the gravel of the front path, and makin' funny sorts of noises. And then, all of a sudden, 'e went still as a dead man—and 'e was ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... of a type apparently common in the older work of this region. It is square and covered with a hip roof. The front is divided into three bays, the centre and wider one crowned with a low gable or pediment. The main floor is high, leaving a basement below and no cellar; and the front door, an illustration of which we give herewith, is reached by a double flight of steps protected by an iron railing. Many of the houses are provided with high fences and massive gateposts. ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various
... night I sprinkled a thin layer of flour over each stair, from basement to attic. This was a task of an hour or so, but I felt that I did not labor in vain. Then I turned in and slept soundly until midnight, when I was awakened as usual by the creaking of the stairs. It is hardly necessary to ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... I suppose you will say I am inventing it when I tell you that it used to sit round a table, in the basement of an Italian restaurant, devising schemes for getting rid of people (especially people like Charles) en bloc; that it didn't provide the Italian restaurant- keeper with as much money as he thought he could do with; that the Italian restaurant-keeper ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... remain, for nearly all have "had to go"—the term we know so well to mean that they are now in pawn, and that it will probably never be possible to redeem them. When first we visited them they were living in a basement room where rats made it difficult for them to sleep, and where, on the many unexpected calls I paid, I never once ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... these fortresses was built at Azuchi, in Omi, under the auspices of Oda Nobunaga. Commenced in 1576, the work was completed in 1579. In the centre of the castle rose a tower ninety feet high, standing on a massive stone basement seventy-two feet in height, the whole forming a structure absolutely without precedent in Japan. The tower was of wood, and had, therefore, no capacity for resisting cannon. But, as a matter of fact, artillery ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... landing. Doors, painted yellow, gaped open, smeared black around the latch from dirty hands. A sink on each landing gave forth a fetid humidity, adding its stench to the sharp flavor of the cooking of onions. From the basement, all the way to the sixth floor, you could hear dishes clattering, saucepans being rinsed, ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... is a kind of factory. The engine and the works and all the various machines are kept in the basement, and he sends down orders to them from time to time, and they do the work which has been conceived up in the headquarters. He expects the works down below to keep on doing these things without his taking any particular notice of them, while he occupies ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... then enabled to obtain distinctly audible effects. I remember an experiment made with this telephone, which at the time gave me great satisfaction and delight. One of the telephones was placed in my lecture room in the Boston University, and the other in the basement of the adjoining building. One of my students repaired to the distant telephone to observe the effects of articulate speech, while I uttered the sentence, "Do you understand what I say?" into the telephone placed in the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... basement of the church. I sat in a front seat, close by the little desk-a low platform furnished only with a light stand on which rests the minister hymn-book and a small Bible. The room was full, but it had filled ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... surprise on her freckled face, the child pointed to a fat, red-cheeked woman, who was cooling herself with a big palm-leaf fan, in a basement doorway ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... looked round. The restaurant was in an underground basement; it was damp and dark, and reeked with the stifling fumes of vodka, tobacco-smoke, tar, and some acrid odor. Facing Gavrilo at another table sat a drunken man in the dress of a sailor, with a red beard, all over coal-dust and tar. Hiccupping every minute, he was ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... I always say," said his wife. "If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it's true, as papa says,—that when we were brought up there was one extreme—we were kept in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it's just the other way—the parents are in the wash house, while the children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live at all, but to exist altogether for ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the nursery to see for herself what had happened. The empty cradle did not, however, throw much light upon it, and the servants who answered the bell, which the baroness clashed wildly, looked as scared as the sobbing Marie to find the baby had disappeared. A search from attic to basement was at once instituted, the men-servants were sent into the grounds with lanterns, the whole house was turned topsy-turvy, in the midst of which the nurse returned, and finding her baby was gone, went into violent hysterics, while the young baroness, with flying hair and dilated eyes, rushed ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... said that the modest President shrank from receiving such a compliment as that. It was too much. He hid away the stone in a storeroom of the capital, in the basement of the White House. It now constitutes a part of his monument, being one of the most impressive relics in the Memorial Hall of that structure. It is twenty-four hundred years old, and it traveled across the world to the prairies of ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... houses or tenements for several families. The majority of them cannot find individual rooms. Many are crowded into the same room, therefore, and too many into the same bed. Sometimes as many as four and five sleep in one bed, and that may be placed in the basement, dining-room or kitchen where there is neither adequate light nor air. In some cases men who work during the night sleep by day in beds used by others during the night. Some of their houses have no water inside and have toilets on the outside without sewerage ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... some one. I had not wept—for oh! I don't know how long—not since—. Then you played on the organ some variations on a tune—'The Sweet By-and-by'—and the tears started, and I seemed but a leaf in a wild storm. That was the song my little boy used to sing! There was a Sunday-school in the basement of a church next to our house, and he would stand at the window, and listen till he caught the tune, and learned the words. Oh, that hymn! Every note stung me like a whip lash when I heard it again. My ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and he had observed the little doctor's dry reception of Valentine after the struggle on the stairs, and his eager dismissal of them both to the street door on the howling excuse that rose up from the basement. Such a mood might probably be transient, and only engendered by the fatigue of excitement, or even by the physical exhaustion attendant upon the preservation of Valentine from the rage of Rupert and Mab. ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of other people around me who call themselves old,—the sexagenarians, for instance,—something like what a cellar is to the ground-floor of a house. The young people in the upper stories (American spelling, story) go down to the basement in their inquiries, and think they have got to the bottom; but I go down another flight of steps, and find myself below the surface of the earth, as are the bodies of most of my contemporaries. As ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... The lockup was a basement room under the engine-house. There were four cells, about four by eight, and into one of these Walter was put. The cell opposite was occupied by a drunken tramp, who looked up stupidly as Walter entered, and hiccoughed: "Glad to see ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... whose basement formed the glass isolating "island" which all of us who have ever seen an electrical machine know so well. The electric machine itself, a battery of Leyden jars was hidden under the altar and connected by a piece ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... he sustained such a shock that he was confined to his bed for some weeks. But a more remarkable escape occurred at a later date. Visiting the castle, a dozen or more yeans ago, while the writer was looking down to the basement from the topmost gallery, close to the foot of the small staircase which leads to the flat roof of the south-eastern turret, the son of a farmer in the parish came up to him and said, in the most ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... so paved the way for his great conception. One day Hubbard and Sanders learned that Bell had abandoned his "harmonic telegraph" and was experimenting with an entirely new idea. This was the possibility of transmitting the human voice over an electric wire. While working in Sanders's basement, Bell had obtained from a doctor a dead man's ear, and it is said that while he was minutely studying and analyzing this gruesome object, the idea of the telephone first burst upon his mind. For years Bell had been engaged in a task that seemed ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... unloading boats continued. The dull tread of moccasined feet as Indians carried pack after pack from river bank to the fort, was ceaseless. Faster than the clerks could sort the furs great bundles were heaped on the floor. By noon, warehouses were crammed from basement to attic. Ermine taken in mid-winter, when the fur was spotlessly white, but for the jet tail-tip, otter cut so deftly scarcely a tuft of fur had been wasted along the opened seam, silver fox, which had made the fortune of some lucky ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... those at the bottle factory, and the sweat-shop seemed, at first, mere child's play. She arrived at eight o'clock, helped Susan in the basement kitchen, until Miss Bobinet awoke, then went aloft to officiate at the elaborate process of that lady's toilet. For twenty years Susan had been chief priestess at this ceremony, but her increasing deafness infuriated her mistress to such ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... century. It was almost sealed to the side of the Cathedral, between two buttresses, like a wart which had pushed itself between the two toes of a Colossus. And thus supported on each side, it was admirably preserved, with its stone basement, its second story in wooden panels, ornamented with bricks, its roof, of which the framework advanced at least three feet beyond the gable, its turret for the projecting stairway at the left corner, where could still be seen in the little window the leaden setting ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... lamps quiver So far in the river, With many a light From window and casement, From garret to basement, She stood, with ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... this hesitation in the two gondoliers was one of those residences at Venice, which are quite as remarkable for their external riches and ornaments as for their singular situation amid the waters. A massive rustic basement of marble was seated as solidly in the element as if it grew from a living rock, while story was seemingly raised on story, in the wanton observance of the most capricious rules of meretricious architecture, until the pile reached an altitude that is little known, except in the dwellings ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... place. But for its attractions, and his twenty thousand pounds a year, I don't believe your grandfather would be known by any one; he is such a regular old bear. Yet he is fond of society, and is never content until he has the house crammed with people, from garret to basement, to whom he makes himself odiously disagreeable whenever occasion offers. I have an invitation there for September ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... occupied by the class in analytical chemistry. When completed, the building will be a beautiful and a convenient structure. The walls will be of pressed brick laid in red mortar, with dark granite base, and Nova Scotia sandstone trimmings. The roof will be covered with Monson slate. The basement will be eleven feet high, mostly above ground, and will serve for the force-pump, heating apparatus, and for ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... runnin' in a big circle on the outside wheels. The jerk had lifted ol' Uncle Brewer, who didn't have gumption enough to squat, plumb out in the middle o' the street, an' just as the wagon climbed the curb an' dove into the basement office of a Jew doctor the rope tightened up with me an' the brewer square behind. It didn't last long; the' was only one cinch to the saddle, an' the first jerk had purty well discouraged that; the brewer had grew suspicious an' all four of his feet was dug into ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... a restaurant under the basement of one of the larger and more celebrated saloons of the city, where a genial Gaul provides, for the modest sum of fifty cents, a course dinner, with wine. The wine is but ordinary California claret, but ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... hundred and forty feet, with a depth of about one hundred and five. There are nine rooms, each one hundred and two feet long, by forty-five wide. The height of ceilings from the floor is about seven feet. The building is also divided into three apartments by brick walls, and there is a basement below. ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... hangin' on de fence dar, an' de udder ba'el I jest ca'aed down de cellar full er oishters. De tar'pins was in dis box—seben ob 'em. Spec' dat rapscallion crawled ober de fence?" And Chad picked up the basket with the remaining half dozen, and descended the basement steps on his way through the kitchen to the front door above. Before he reached the bottom step I heard him ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 3457, who was known in private life as Bobby Wentworth, was what is technically called a basement kitchen. ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... room in the basement cleaned to-day by Samson's Betty. She is the woman whose old husband turned up and gave C. so much trouble. This thing is happening a good deal now, and must. A man who was sold six years ago to Georgia came up from St. Simon's with the troops not long ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... In the basement was the grill. It was a night when one might order something heavy and hot. A planked steak—with deviled oysters at the start and a salad at ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... herself on the ground floor adjoining her kitchen. Belle, the maid, had been given the second floor back, in order to be near to her young mistress. Bitzer, the Blakes' man-of-all-work,—like McGann, a discharged soldier,—slept in the basement at the back of the house, and there was he found, blinking, bewildered and only with difficulty aroused from stupor by a wrathful sergeant. The cook's story, in brief, was that she was awakened by Mrs. Blake's voice at her door and, thinking ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... basement to the roof it was literally covered with foliage. A confused mass of orchids, bromelias, and climbing plants, all in flower, rooted in boxes of excellent soil hidden beneath masses of verdure. The trunk of some ficus or mimosa was never covered ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... o'clock. Riley and Bok held a council of war and decided to slip out and buy some food, only to find that the front, basement, and back doors were locked and the keys missing! Field was very sober. "Thorough woman, that wife of mine," he commented. But ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... was on the point of turning into the second-class saloon, when he remembered that a large cargo of emigrants had come on board the night before, and he went down to the lower deck. There, in a sort of basement, low and dark, like a gallery in a mine, Pierre could discern some hundreds of men, women, and children, stretched on shelves fixed one above another, or lying on the floor in heaps. He could not see their faces, but ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... no very gracious mood. The chambers occupied by Mr. Harlowe were in the basement of a private dwelling once occupied and made historic by an Honorable Somebody, who, however, was remembered only by the landlord and the last tenant. There were various shelves in the walls divided into compartments, sarcastically known as "pigeon holes," in which the dove of peace had never ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... these things as one finds them. The entrance by which the Capitol is approached is such as I have described. There are mean little brick chimneys at the left hand as one walks in, attached to modern bakeries, which have been constructed in the basement for the use of the soldiers; and there is on the other hand the road by which wagons find their way to the underground region with fuel, stationery, and other matters desired by Senators and Representatives, and at present by ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... of the old Bank had been carried on in a small and dingy basement. The room was narrow, badly lit, and still worse ventilated, so that on busy days both the clerks and the customers complained of the stuffy atmosphere. The ancient fittings had become worn and defaced; the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... one of the night guards of the Treasury, buttoned to the chin, was standing in a narrowish basement door-way of the great building not fifteen feet away. The old man took his pipe out of his mouth, and seeing Storri survey the obstructing ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... groan, but the peculiar tone in which it was uttered, arrested his attention, and excited a vague yet stirring interest in his breast. On approaching closer to the temple, he found that at its immediate basement the earth had been thrown up into a sort of mound, which so elevated the footing as to admit of his reaching the bars of the window with his hands. Active as we have elsewhere shown him to be, he was not long in obtaining a full view of the interior, when a scene met his eye which rivetted him, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... and placed a cushion against the carriage for her head to rest on; then, opening a gate, he hurried through the narrow flower-garden that ran between the old Alms House and Chambers street, crossed through one of those broad halls to be found in the basement, lined on each side with public officers, and, mounting half a dozen steps, he found himself in the Park. An Irish woman sat upon the steps of the nearest entrance, holding a forlorn bundle in her lap, and with a ragged baby playing with its little soiled feet on the pavement before ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... sentences. She turned and looked at Lily with exactly the expression upon her sixteen-year-old face which had overspread it years before when the thirteen-year-old Polly had surprised the sentimental "Thusan Thwingle" exchanging osculatory favors with "one of thothe horrid boyths" in the basement of the high school at Montgentian. Then ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... tips," he remarked grimly. The man, however, ran out after him asking: "What do you require?" but with a grateful glance up at the first floor in remembrance of Captain R-'s examination room (how easy and delightful all that had been) he bolted down a flight leading to the basement and found himself in a place of dusk and mystery and many doors. He had been afraid of being stopped by some rule of no-admittance. However he ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... they stand; moreover, they are not of great value to the Museum of Cairo, but are of considerable value to various museums which do not already possess complete specimens of this class of tombs. A fine one, belonging to the chief Uerarina, is now exhibited in the Assyrian Basement of the British Museum; another is in the Museum of Leyden; a third at Berlin, and so on. Most of these are simple tombs of one chamber. In the centre of the rear wall we always see the stele or gravestone proper, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... remains On the plains, By the caper overrooted, by the gourd Overscored, 40 While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks Thro' the chinks— Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time Sprang sublime, And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced As they raced, And the monarch and his minions and his ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... remarkable. It possessed the massive portico and the imposing frontage that lend to Hellier Crescent its air of dignified repose; but there its similarity to the surrounding dwellings ended. The basement sent forth no glow of warmth and comfort, as did the neighboring basements; the ground-floor windows permitted no ray of mellow light to slip through the chinks of shutter or curtain. From attic to cellar, the house seemed in darkness, the only suggestion of ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... days," Mr. Wynne continued promptly. "He has had two men constantly on watch at my office, day and night, and two others constantly on watch at my home, day and night. There are two there now—one in a rear room of the basement, and another in the pantry, with the doors locked on the outside. Their names are ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... white muslin dress trimmed with artificial roses. I wonder if I properly appreciate the distinction of being asked to Mrs. Jones' turkey-trotting parties! My butler and the kitchen-maid are probably doing the same thing in the basement at home to the notes of the usefulman's accordion—and having a ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... Steavens and I went upstairs to the old sitting-room, while her grave, silent brother remained in the basement to read his farm papers. All the windows were open. The white summer moon was shining outside, the windmill was pumping lazily in the light breeze. My hostess put the lamp on a stand in the corner, and turned it low because of the heat. She sat down ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... shriek terminated the sentence, for the flames, gathering headway with wild rapidity, had burst-up some part of the liquor den at the basement and went roaring up the staircase, sending dense clouds of ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... founders, and she comes back to England. Both the sisters rent a nice place in the country and spend a lot of effort in decorating it. So Miss Harding has occasional spells of living as her original young self with her sister, before returning to her basement flat. As usual with this author, with her fascination with illness, a child of one of the neighbours, Billie, becomes very ill and needs roound-the-clock nursing. Miss Harding plays a big part in this. But one day a chance remark by another of the tenants in the block of flats makes it ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... place of such exceeding external neatness that even Green Gables would have suffered by contrast. The house was a very old-fashioned one, situated on a slope, which fact had necessitated the building of a stone basement under one end. The house and out-buildings were all whitewashed to a condition of blinding perfection and not a weed was visible in the prim kitchen garden surrounded by its ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Corrie snapped impatiently. "Why didn't you do as I told you? Open the basement door, won't you, Gerard, while I bring him? We'll be sure to find a fire there. Are you going to ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... was at the sign of the Stuffed Owl, down in a basement bat cave of a place and in the dusk of the evening, that they found their man. To Ginsburg's curious eyes he revealed himself as a short, swart person with enormously broad shoulders and with a chimpanzee's arm reach. Look at those arms of his and one knew why he was called ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... flitted across the basement story; and one above, more dim than the rest, shone palely from the room in which the sick man slept. The bell rang shrilly out from amidst the dark ivy that clung around the porch. The heavy door swung back—Maltravers was on the threshold. His father lived—was ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... getting farther and farther from the Hotel Dantzic, and suddenly his eyes were caught by a very taking sign, at the top of some neat steps leading down into a basement: ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... cruel deeds, and planned to tell the king, on his return, that savage wolves had devoured his consort and his children. It was her habit, however, to prowl often about the courts and alleys of the mansion, in the hope of scenting raw meat, and one evening she heard the little boy Day crying in a basement cellar. The child was weeping because his mother had threatened to whip him for some naughtiness, and she heard at the same time the voice of Dawn ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... sections of any great city are a disgrace to modern civilization, but a Chinese tenement house is as much worse than any of these as can be imagined. In one section of the Chinese quarter at San Francisco is a four-story building above ground, with a double basement below, one being under the other, and with an open court extending from the lower basement clear to the roof. In this building, which is jocularly styled by the guides, "The Palace Hotel of the Chinese quarter," and in which ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... of 28 coupled corinthian columns has the most splendid effect, the basement story being perfectly simple, whilst the central mass of the building which forms the gateway is crowned by a pediment of stones, each 52 feet in length and three in thickness; all is vast, all is grand about this noble front, which is justly the admiration ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... through all the natural—as opposed to supernatural—miseries incidental to our state. Dispiriting reports ascended (like the smoke) from the basement in volumes, and descended from the upper rooms. There was no rolling-pin, there was no salamander (which failed to surprise me, for I don't know what it is), there was nothing in the house, what there was, was broken, the last ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... scrambles over two or three steep hills, directly above the sea, in a promiscuous, many-colored, noisy fashion. It is a watering-place, pure and simple; every house has an expensive little shop in the basement, and a still more expensive set of rooms to let above stairs. The houses are blue, and pink, and green; they stick to the hillsides as they can, and being near Spain, you try to fancy they look Spanish. You succeed perhaps, even a little, and are rewarded for your zeal ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... fruits and vegetables, it is wise to store them in dark places, such as cupboards, or basement or attic shelves protected from the light. Black cambric tacked to the top shelf and suspended over the other shelves is a sufficient protection from light. A discarded window shade can be rolled down over the shelves and easily pulled up when you ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... frowningly into the fire, debated inwardly as to the advisability of engaging the girl, Susan looked timidly round the room. Curiously enough, it was placed in the basement of the cottage, and was therefore below the level of the garden. Two fairly large windows looked on to the area, which had been roofed with glass and turned into a conservatory. Here appeared scarlet geraniums and other bright-hued flowers, interspersed with ferns and ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... half-a-dozen stone steps, which were guarded on each side by a curved iron rail. Along the whole front of the house, passing under the steps, there ran a narrow, shallow area, contrived simply to give light to the kitchen and offices in the basement storey. But this area was, again, guarded by an iron rail, which was so constructed as to make it impossible that any one less expert than a practised house-breaker should get in or out of any of the windows looking that way. From the hall there were no less than four windows looking to ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... surveyed the place, in comprehensive fashion, from roof to basement,—then he scrutinisingly ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... collected some specimens of plants, which, however, are not peculiar to this range. I named it Gosse's range, after Mr. Harry Gosse. The late rains had not visited this isolated mass. It is barren and covered with spinifex from turret to basement, wherever sufficient soil can be found among the stones to admit ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... semi-Moorish architecture, size 71 by 72, with balconies above, below, and in front, the full width of the building. It contained reception halls, parlors, toilet rooms, and commissioner's office, 14 rooms in all. The building was two stories high, with basement, provided with rugs and carpets of ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... not seem to have done very much damage, but afterwards one found that although the walls were standing and apparently solid there was no inside to the house. From roof to basement the building was bare as a dog kennel. There were no floors inside, there was nothing there but blank space; and on the ground within was the tumble and rubbish that had been roof and floors and furniture. Everything inside was smashed and ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... corner for a west-bound car he thought he discerned a familiar figure in the shadow of the house he had just quitted. He walked slowly up the block and Harkavy stole out of the basement area and ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... The Commission got to work without delay, but for a space of six years had some trouble with the building in question. Either the climate hindered operations or the materials used were of the kind which prevents official edifices from ever rising higher than the basement. But, meanwhile, OTHER quarters of the town saw arise, for each member of the Commission, a handsome house of the NON-official style of architecture. Clearly the foundation afforded by the soil of those parts was better than that where the Government building ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... was an unsheeted bed. There was a rusty bucket for water, a hole kicked through the floor for waste water. Plumbing, and such luxuries, apparently hadn't existed for years—except for the small cistern and worn water-recovery plant in the basement, beside the tired-looking weeds in the hydroponic tanks that tried unsuccessfully to keep the ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... sat on the front step. One night the neighbor's husband asked the ghost what did she want, why she sat on the steps and said nothing. The ghost then spoke and told him to follow her. He followed her and she led him to the basement of the house and told him to dig in the corner. He did and pretty soon he unearthed a jar of money. The woman ghost told him to take just a certain amount and to give the rest to a certain person. The ghost told the man if he didn't give the money to the person ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... from a window of some of the fine houses before which he played, but he seemed likely to be disappointed, for he played ten minutes without apparently attracting any attention. He was about to change his position, when the basement door of one of the houses opened, and a servant came out, bareheaded, and approached him. Phil regarded her with distrust, for he was often ordered away as a nuisance. He stopped playing, and, hugging his violin closely, ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... apparently much nearer. The four tall summits of the island rose clear against the sky like a group of pyramids; its lower slopes and precipices, variegated and relieved by graceful alternations of light and shadow, and resting on their blue basement of sea, stood out with equal distinctness; but the entire middle space from end to end was hidden in a long horizontal stratum of gray cloud, edged atop with a lacing of silver. Such was the aspect of the noble breakwater ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... pedler of colored Christmas candles passed him by unheard. Women with big baskets jostled him, stopped and fingered his cabbages; he answered their inquiries mechanically. Adam's mind was not in the street, at his stand, but in the dark back basement where his wife Hansche was lying, there was no telling how sick. They could not afford a doctor. Of course, he might send to the hospital for one, but he would be sure to take her away, and then what would ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... and went down-stairs to the basement with Willy Snyders. Here there was a tidy little dining-room with a table set for eight. As in the other rooms, the floors were of brick, and the walls half-way up were hung with burlap. Where the burlap ended, a narrow shelf ran around the entire room, set with all sorts ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... great god of the heathen was sealed, but in the wide precincts of the Serapeum no one thought of surrender or of prompt defeat. The basement of the building, on which stood the grandest temple ever erected by the Hellenes, presented a smooth and slightly scarped rampart of impregnable strength to the foe. A sloping way extended up over a handsomely-decorated ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which was cutting it into slabs, and of getting off just in time to escape a sudden and gory death. But the flouring mill was much more beloved. It was full of dusky, floury places which we adored, of empty bins in which we might play house; it had a basement, with piles of bran and shorts which were almost as good as sand to play in, whenever the miller let us wet the edges of the pile with water brought in his sprinkling pot from ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... first place of concealment were discovered. At the end of the farther attic there is a small cupboard most cunningly hidden in the wall. In front of it there is a shaft, a great, horrible, yawning chasm, several feet wide and very deep, going quite to the basement of the house. It was intended as a trap to baffle pursuers, who would fall down it in the dark when ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... of prisoners, some twenty or more, I think, were collected in one of the basement work-rooms, when a fire broke out there. The smoke soon became suffocating, and crept up into the ranges above, alarming the whole prison. But conditions in the room itself were immediately intolerable; the door had been locked, and the men were jammed together ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... send letters home to let our friends know that we were still alive, but hitherto had failed. Now we had a providential opportunity. Some of the prisoners who were captured at the battle of Murfreesboro' were brought to Richmond, and confined in the basement of our building. While they remained, I wrote a note with a pencil, on the fly-leaf of a book, and when taken down to wash in the morning, slipped around to the door of the Western prisoners, and gave it to an Irishman. He concealed it until he was exchanged, and then mailed it to my father. It ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... bear it no longer. He knew where the water-bucket stood, and stepping from his bed, he groped his way down the long stairs to the basement. The spring moon was low in the western horizon, and shining through the curtained window, dimly lighted up the room. The pail was soon reached, and then in his eagerness to drink, he put his lips to the side. Lower, lower, lower it came, until he ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... rebel cavalry uniform—you've got that pile of disinfected clothing in the basement. I also want one of our own cavalry uniforms to wear over it—anything that has been cleaned. Quick, Williams; I've only a few minutes to saddle! And bring me that bundle of commissions taken from the rebel horsemen that ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... about to leave the room to go about her duties, she remarked that dinner would be served at six o'clock, and that Mona was to come down to the basement to eat with ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... put this basket in the basement in a cool, damp place, where it will keep perfectly for a week. When you make your basket we can find the squaw and bring her down with us. Lowry could display the results side by side. He could call up whomever you consider the most artistic man and woman in the city ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... silhouettes of the chimneys thrown against a greenish sky. Sometimes, through an open window on the ground-floor, I caught sight of an interior, picturesque and familiar: here a jolly-looking laundress holding her flat-iron to her cheek; there workmen sitting at tables and smoking in the basement of a cabaret, while an old Bohemian with long gray hair, standing before them, sang something about "Liberty," accompanying himself on a guitar about the color of bouillon—the scenes of ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... but that could not take the terror out of it, and it was the most dreadful sound to me that I had ever heard. It went all about, everywhere, down there: along the halls, through all the rooms, in both stories, and in the basement and the cellar; then outside, and farther and farther away—then back, and all about the house again, and I thought it would never, never stop. But at last it did, hours and hours after the vague twilight of the garret had long ago been blotted out ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... from Europe to assume command in the West was not a modest one. It still stands, a large mansion of brick with a stone front, very tall and very wide, with an elaborate cornice and plate-glass windows, both tall and broad, and a high basement. Two stately stone porches capped by elaborate iron railings adorn it in front and on the side. The chimneys are generous and proportional. In short, the house is of that type built by many wealthy gentlemen in the middle of the century, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the asylum was the nearer and most vigorous. Nor could they be stopt from climbing up the contiguous buildings, which being raised high under the idea of undisturbed peace, reach the basement of the Capitol. Here a doubt exists whether the fire was thrown upon the roofs by the storming party or the besieged, the latter being more generally supposed to have done it, to repulse those who were climbing up, and had advanced some way. The fire extended itself thence to the porticoes adjoining ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... be ten, eleven; the cafes are crowded and the traffic is great. All sorts of people roam the streets in their best attire; they follow each other, whistle after girls, and dart in and out from gateways and basement stairs. Cabbies stand at attention on the squares, on the lookout for the least sign from the passers-by; they gossip between themselves about their horses and smoke idly ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... knowledge of such matters, it had seemed rather remarkable that only such a door should guard a place that was so notorious. Once inside, however, the reason was apparent. It didn't. On the outside there was merely such a door as not to distinguish the house, a three-story and basement dwelling, of old brownstone, from the ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... accommodations for five hundred persons. The latter are on each side of the building, and separated from the library-hall stairway at the front entrance by two corridors leading to the rear vestibule, and thence to the lecture-room, still further in the rear. The basement contains the keeper's rooms, cellars, coal-vaults, air-furnaces, &c. The floors are of richly-wrought mosaic work, on iron beams. The building will not be completed, probably, for nearly a year from this time, and the books ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... stirred in its hole, and because spring will find a way, even down in the bargain basement of the Titanic Store, which is far below the level of the mole, Sadie Barnet, who had never seen a wood anemone and never sniffed of thaw or the wet wild smell of violets, felt the blood rise in her veins like sap, and across the aisle behind the white-goods counter ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... about the treasonable plot to blow up Parliament, by mining through to its lowest floor, or basement, from an adjacent house. This plot was hatched by a number of Catholic gentlemen, and was quite ingenious. These people came from a wide area of England, and numbered about thirty. One point of interest to your reviewer is ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... going on that they do not have time to grow old," she told herself with a grim little smile, and went resolutely about the business of becoming acquainted with people. Every Thursday evening when the store had closed she went to a prayer meeting in the basement of the church and on Sunday evening attended a meeting of an organization called The ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... on the sand, Comely withoutside and within; But when the winds and rains begin To beat on them, they cannot stand; They perish, quickly overthrown, Loose from the very basement stone. ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Cambridge was that it must be the only city of its size and amenity in the United States without an imposing hotel. It is difficult to imagine any city in the United States minus at least two imposing hotels, with a barber's shop in the basement and a world's fair in the hall. But one soon perceives that Cambridge is a city apart. In visual characteristics it must have changed very little, and it will never change with facility. Boston is pre-eminently ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... into cells, where linoleum and lincrusta simulated the stucco and marble of the Stentorian, and fagged business men and their families consumed the watery stews dispensed by "coloured help" in the grey twilight of a basement dining-room. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... every grate from basement to attic had a fire lighted in it, and little pans of brimstone were burning in every room and hall in the house, while we, astonished, indignant, frightened, and amused, sat enduring the torments of vapor and sulphur baths to the ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... and swells over the great four-poster. Passengers in the mail-coaches running into London in the eighteenth century looked through leafless branches and saw it flaring beneath them. The light burns behind yellow blinds and pink blinds, and above fanlights, and down in basement windows. The street market in Soho is fierce with light. Raw meat, china mugs, and silk stockings blaze in it. Raw voices wrap themselves round the flaring gas-jets. Arms akimbo, they stand on the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... and saloons, and long rows of boarding—and rooming-houses. They alighted at a certain corner, walked a little way along a street unkempt and dreary, Mr. Tiernan scrutinizing the numbers until he paused in front of a house with a basement kitchen and snow-covered, sandstone steps. Climbing these, he pulled the bell, and they stood waiting in the twilight of a half-closed vestibule until presently shuffling steps were heard within; the door ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... now and then to peep into the cool patios filled with flowers, and a murmuring fountain often in the middle, which you see through the corridor, sometimes with a door of iron trellis, sometimes open. All the windows of the basement have iron gratings and wooden shutters; and the courting and sweethearting is carried on with the lady inside and the lover outside the railing. Not that we saw anything of the kind as it takes place of an evening; ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... the basement of the great church was filling with a throng of men and women. Soon the officers and the speaker of the evening appeared. The president was a brown woman who spoke easily and well, and introduced the main speaker. ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois |
