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Gable   Listen
noun
Gable  n.  A cable. (Archaic)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Gable" Quotes from Famous Books



... goodly, after the fashion of their folk and their day; not built of stone and lime, but framed of the goodliest trees of the wild-wood squared with the adze, and betwixt the framing filled with clay wattled with reeds. Long was that house, and at one end anigh the gable was the Man's-door, not so high that a man might stand on the threshold and his helmcrest clear the lintel; for such was the custom, that a tall man must bow himself as he came into the hall; which ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris

... four plain rooms of generous dimensions on each floor, in which the first delighted summer party had divided itself, glad and grateful to occupy them double and even treble bedded, had become the "hotel," with a name up across the gable of the new wing,—"Giant's Cairn House,"—and the eight original rooms made into fourteen. The wing was clapped on by its middle; rushing out at the front toward the road to meet the summer tide of travel as it should surge by, and hold up to it, arrestively, its titular ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... door in the centre, he turned the corner of the house, where the eastern gable disclosed a window opening on a sloping lawn full of bright flower-beds. The room within was lined with books and stored with signs of parish work, but with a refined orderliness reigning over the various little ornaments, and almost betokening ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... beginning of it all; to the day on which Sir Michael's letter, with a copy of his will, had reached his hands, at Stralsund on the Baltic, in his quarters beside the East Gate, in one of those Hanse houses with the tall narrow fronts which look like nothing so much as the gable-ends of churches. The cast of his thoughts at the reading rose up before him; the vivid recollections of his home, his boyhood, his father, which the old man's writing had evoked, and the firmness with which, touched by the dead man's confidence, a ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman

... swishing of wind in the gable-windows, in the poplars of the manor-house; the wind whistled through tattered bushes on the green hill of Bredbjerg. Mogens lay up there, and gazed out over the dark earth. The moon was beginning to ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen

... on unwillingly, and at the very last house of this detestable industrial slavery, a high house with a gable, I saw a window wide open, and a blonde man smoking a cigarette at a balcony. I called to him at once, and asked him to let me a bed. He put to me all the questions he could think of. Why was I there? Where had I come from? Where (if I was honest) ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... yard, the cabbage is taken from its stretcher and borne to the topmost peak of the house or barn. Whether it be a chimney, a gable, or a dove-cote that crowns the roof, the burden must, at any risk, be carried to the very highest point of the building. The "infidel" accompanies it as far as this, sets it down securely, and waters it with a great pitcher of ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand

... is furnished with mullion and gable, With altar and reredos, with gargoyle and groin, The penitents' dresses are sealskin and sable, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... precious detail, full of naivete, which will be of value in the eyes of an archaeologist. The tower in which the spiral staircase goes up is placed at the corner of a great gable wall in which there is no window. The staircase comes down to a little arched door, opening upon a gravelled yard which separates the house from the stables. This tower is repeated on the garden side by another of five sides, ending ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... shows that our ancestors were becoming more refined in their tastes. The terms of this precept were as follows, viz., "the King's great chamber at Westminster be painted a green colour like a curtain, that in the great gable or frontispiece of the said chamber, a French inscription should be painted, and that the King's little wardrobe should be painted of a green colour to ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield

... then fell into confusion. He climbed awkwardly, out of his seat, and advanced hesitatingly with shuffling feet towards the master. It was now evident that Gable was not a large boy, but a little old man, slightly built, with a round ruddy clean-shaven face and thick white hair. But his manner was that ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... a glimpse through birch and pine Of gable, roof, and porch, The tavern with its swinging sign, The sharp horn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... Leicester, in the next reign, purchased from the Earl of Leicester, their feudal lord, the right to decide their own disputes. For this they payed a yearly tax of threepence on every house having a gable on the main street. These concessions may seem small, but they prepared the way ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... the gable of a house, common in old Scotch gables as well as in the Netherlands and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... henceforth is meant the house, and not its sign—the Maypole was an old building, with more gable ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag chimneys, out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes, imparted to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables, gloomy, ruinous, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... finds a gable Where it may build its nest, The oxen know a stable For shelter, food and rest; Must then my Lord and Savior A homeless stranger be, Denied the simplest favor His ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg

... dates from a very remote period of Christianity. It stands on the very brow of the precipice which forms the last steep ascent in mounting to the Col. The building is a high, narrow, but vast, barrack-looking edifice, built of the ferruginous stone of the region, having its gable placed toward the Valais, and its front stretching in the direction of the gorge in which it stands. Immediately before its principal door, the rock rises in an ill-shapen hillock, across which runs the path to Italy. This is literally the highest point of the pass, as the building itself ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... in his own little house in Knigstrasse, a structure half brick and half wood, with a gable cut into steps; it looked upon one of those winding canals which intersect each other in the middle of the ancient quarter of Hamburg, and which the great fire of 1842 had ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... could hardly lie down straight, and we did not doubt that there was room for us there. Houses near the sea are generally low and broad. These were a story and a half high; but if you merely counted the windows in their gable-ends, you would think that there were many stories more, or, at any rate, that the half-story was the only one thought worthy of being illustrated. The great number of windows in the ends of the houses, and their irregularity in size and position, here and elsewhere on the Cape, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... forwards and upward in front of and beyond it. They differ further in the relations of the transverse diameter of the face, taken through the cheek bones, to the transverse diameter of the skull; in the more rounded or more gable-like form of the roof of the skull, and in the degree to which the hinder part of the skull is flattened or projects beyond the ridge, into and below which, the muscles of ...
— On Some Fossil Remains of Man • Thomas H. Huxley

... the self-importance of his tone, I could tell that he was an attached and faithful servant. We stopped at length at a gate, drove through it up a short avenue of limes, and then came to one of the prettiest old-fashioned farmhouses that I have ever been in. It was a long, low gable-roofed house, with latticed casements, and autumn-tinted creepers covering the old grey stone and porch. The door was open, and two large dogs darted out to welcome us. When I stepped inside a cheery-looking old woman appeared in a ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre

... speaking; a dog barked not far off and the cocks were crowing, and close by them in the meadow a cow lowed and went hustling over the bents and the long, unbitten buttercups. Day grew apace, and by then they were under the barn-gable which he had seen aloof he saw the other roofs of the grange and heard the bleating of sheep. And now he saw those six men clearly, and noted that one of them was very big and tall, and one small and slender, ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... like overgrown villages that have never made up their minds seriously to become towns. The houses are mostly of one story, standing each one alone, with the gable-end, blank and windowless, towards the road. This is ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse

... down, but concluded it wiser to descend without a light, and listen under cloak of the darkness. If he could but save Miss Tempest from a fright! He crept out of bed, and went first to the window—a small one in the narrowing of the gable-wall of his attic room: the night was warm, and, loving the night air, he had it open. Hearkening there for a moment, he thought he heard a slight movement below. Very softly he put out his head, and looked down. There was no moon, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... ventilator in the ceiling may be opened, so as to allow the vitiated air to escape into the attic, in which case there should be a free communication between the attic and the outer air by means of a lattice in the gable, or otherwise. A ventilator may also be constructed in connection with the chimney, by carrying up a partition in the middle, one half of the chimney being used for a smoke flue, and the other half for ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... as the eaves are intended to be, the top logs are bound together, from side to side, with smaller logs fitted upon the upper logs of each side and laid across as if they were to be the supports of a floor for another story. Then the gable-ends are built up of logs, shorter and shorter as the peak of the gable is approached, and kept in place by other small logs laid across, endwise of the cabin, and locked into the end of each log in the gable until all are in place. On these transverse logs, or rafters, the roof is laid. Holes ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks

... and presently a harsh grating noise acquainted him with the fact that Sudley was shovelling the ashes over the embers; then the tent-like attic was illumined only by the moonlight admitted through the little square window at the gable end—so silent, so still, it seemed that it too slept like the silent house. The winds slumbered amidst the mute woods; a bank of cloud that he could see from his lowly couch lay in the south becalmed. The bird's song had ceased. It seemed to him ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... the gable style, but is four-sided, with two smoke vents, as may be seen in Plates 4b and 6a. The four beams that form the main support for the rafters are lashed to the posts of the house at a height varying from 1.5 ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... houses of that date, this cottage was crowned by a peaked roof, forming a gable-end to the front, or half a diamond. To the great regret of historians, but two or three examples of such roofs survive in Paris. A round opening gave light to a loft, where the constable's wife dried the linen of the Chapter, for she had the honor of washing for the Cathedral—which ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac

... a diary unequalled of its kind in English writing, was born at Farnham on March 9, 1762. The house in which he was born, once a farmhouse and now the Jolly Farmer inn, stands on the outskirts of the town near the Wey, conspicuous with a white gable. As a boy, he must have been one of the busiest on any farm in the neighbourhood. His father used to boast that he had four boys, of whom the eldest was only fifteen years old—William Cobbett was the third—and yet that they would do as much work as any three men ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... harmonious tone resulting from the skilful use of many diverse materials. The effect of the frontage is completed by the cupola of the auditorium, topped with a cap of bronze sparingly adorned with gilding. Farther on, on a level with the towers of Notre-Dame, is the gable end of the roof of the stage, a 'Pegasus', by M. Lequesne, rising at either end of the roof, and a bronze group by M. Millet, representing 'Apollo lifting his golden lyre', commanding the apex. Apollo, it may here be mentioned, is useful as well as ornamental, for his lyre is tipped ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux

... cocks had ceased to send their challenges from farm to farm, after some remote church-clocks had clanged one stroke on the damp wind, they began to pass through a large village; no lights burned in the windows, but white fences gleamed through the darkness, and sharp gable ends loomed up against the dull sky, one after another, and the horse's hoofs flashed sparks from the paved street before the church, that showed its white spire, spectre-like, directly in their path. Here, by some evil chance, the child awoke, and, between cold and hunger and fear, began ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... uproar of people searching for one another and calling, the signal that the mushroom-gathering was over for the day: the uproar was not at all gloomy or funereal, as it had seemed to the Count, but a dinner uproar.57 Every noon this bell, calling from the gable, invited the guests and servants home to dinner; such had been the custom on many old estates, and in the Judge's house it had been preserved. So from the wood there came a throng carrying boxes, and baskets, and handkerchiefs with their ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... and umbrageous limes, broad sleepy canals—those liquid highways alone; which glided in phantom silence the bustle, and traffic, and countless cares of a stirring population—quaint toppling houses, with tower and gable; ancient brick churches, with slender spire and musical chimes; thatched cottages on the outskirts, with stork-nests on the roofs—the whole without fortification save the watery defences which enclosed it with long-drawn lines on every side; such was the Count's park, or 's Graven ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... it is impossible for any plan to be more simple, and that if the inner floors and walls of the stories A, B were removed, there would be left merely the form of a basilica,—two high walls, carried on ranges of shafts, and roofed by a low gable. ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin

... house is 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 ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various

... a low house built on the bank of a canal, and above the roof of which rises the gable of a second house; near these are some trees and ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet

... was the eastern wing or gable which sheltered the library, the conservatory, and Mr. Page's bedroom, and it was thither the second man's foot-prints led. I followed them round the corner ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk

... leaning on the sill, looked out into the night. The greyness of evening was falling over everything, but it was not nearly dark yet, so that she could see the windings of the chalky road which led down to the valley, and the church tower, and even one of the gable windows in Orchards Farm, where a light was twinkling. Generally this last object was a most interesting one to her, but to-night she did not notice outside things much, for her mind was too busy with its own concerns. She had, for the first time ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton

... clay. He was warned of his danger, but answered that die he must, unless he found a shelter before morning. He had kindled a small fire with some straw and bits of turf, and was crouching over it, when the whole roof or gable end of earth and stones came down upon him and his child, and crushed him to death over the slow fire. The child had been pulled out alive, and carried to the workhouse, but the father was still lying upon the dung heap of the fallen roof, slightly covered with a piece of canvass. ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt

... Transitional that we have. An extraordinary feature of the church is the wonderful series of Celtic arcades and panels filled with archaic sculptures in relief which occupy the whole external face of the west gable. ...
— The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore • Anonymous

... of the community protected him faithfully; for a man was fined in Newbury for "killing our elder's mare, and a special good beast she was." The minister's house was built by the town; in Salem it was "13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies and no gable-ends,"—so that the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody else;—and the Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day and put the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... struck with some new animal noise or unusual sound, it will be heard practising that. Starlings do exactly the same thing. When the sun begins to be hot on any fine day, summer or winter, the cock bird goes up usually alone, to a sunny branch, gable, or chimney, and there indulges in a pleasant reverie, talking aloud all the time. Its own modes of utterance are three. One is a melodious whistle, rather low and soft; another is a curious chattering, into which it introduces as many "clicks" as a Zulu talking his native language; and the third ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... curious horse bathed her startled face. He galloped away and his hurrying feet woke her to the sense that the dawn was upon them. The light was now a pale rosy glow and straight from its heart a beaming arrow struck upon a long brown gable that she took for one of the great ledges of massive rock that time and again had risen beside them. But the little maid knew better, and skipped beside ...
— In the Border Country • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... city rising from the water's edge, with roof and pinnacle, gable and turret, aflame in the light of the western sky; in front flowed the river like a stream ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless

... Cymru, with walls of gleaming white, Whose smoke curls round the valley and up the mountain height; The bees hum 'neath the gable or sheltering garden wall, While all around grow flowers, ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones

... interests of capital. Then Oliver plunged desperately into his idea of steam-motion, losing the faint vestiges of his repute for wit, and died poor and heartbroken in 1819, the hero of an unwritten tragedy. The happy hours of his life were the hours on the dusty plank in the mill-gable at Faulkland. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... call and a soft rush of wings was heard in every direction. Pigeons flew from tree-top, tower, parapet and gable, alighting on his head and arms until he looked like a little pigeon-tree in ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey

... EARLY RENAISSANCE, 1525-1600, in which the orders were infrequently used, mainly for porches and for gable decoration. The conceptions and spirit of most monuments were still ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... and gable-ended, was the tabernacle of Oh- Oh's soul. But his person was housed in as curious a structure. Built of old boughs of trees blown down in the groves, and covered over with unruly thatching, it seemed, without, some ostrich nest. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... changed the entire form of Italian architecture by his touch. So that while Niccola and Giovanni Pisano are still virtually Greek artists, experimentally introducing Gothic forms, Arnolfo and Giotto adopt the entire Gothic ideal of form, and thenceforward use the pointed arch and steep gable ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin

... where the south end of Church street turns from Bull lane toward the river. It was roughly built of timber and plaster, the black beams showing through the yellow lime in curious squares and triangles. The roof was of red tiles, and where the spreading elms leaned over it the peaked gable was green with moss. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett

... sun as it shone slantingly through the stained window over Lord Eagleye's tomb, and in the failing light thereafter and the gathering dusk of the twilight, pacing up and down the solemn old place, hanging my thoughts here on a crocket, there on a corbel; now on the gable-point over which Weir's face would gaze next morning, and now on the aspiring peaks of the organ. I thus made the place a cell of thought and prayer. And when the next day came, I found the forms around me so interwoven with the forms of my thought, that I felt almost like ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... into the loft and went to bed. I didn't sleep very sound that night, and awakened several times. About an hour before daybreak, I awoke suddenly and imagined I heard a hound baying faintly in the distance. Finally I got up and opened the board window in the gable and listened. Say, boys, I knew that hound's baying as well as I know my own saddle. It was old Keiser, and he had something treed about a mile from the house, across a ridge over in some slashes. I slipped on my clothes, crept downstairs, and taking my old ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams

... caricature of a house with two gable ends to it and a corkscrew of smoke issuing from the chimney. Then the girl's interest began to fasten itself upon the work and she forgot everything else. When it was finished, she gazed a moment, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the estate was an unpretentious frame building, with gable roof, whose white walls, with their proverbial green painted window shutters overlooking the road, showed too plainly the absence of that care and attention which is necessary for comfort and essential to preservation. It was occupied at this time by a family who ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton

... of the attic to which Maggie fled when in trouble (Mill on the Floss) is shown on the gable end, where the ...
— George Eliot Centenary, November 1919 • Coventry Libraries Committee

... modest dwelling to which Davie Forbes was wont to refer as his "hoosachie" (little house), on snow-clad Ben Sguarrach, the living-room looked cosy enough on that wild evening. By the two windows—one at the gable-end of the house, the other near the door—no icy draught could enter, for both apertures were hermetically sealed! All the ventilation deemed necessary during the daytime came through the usually open door, by which ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett

... transept. Moreover, when, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, aisles were rebuilt or widened, there was always, as at Tansor, a tendency to decide the width of the aisle by the length of an existing transept or transeptal chapel, and to build the new outer wall flush with its gable wall. In this case, the aisle would be planned to communicate with the transept, and the west wall of the transept would have to be cut through. Where, as at Arksey, there was a central tower, the old transept was structurally necessary, and only as ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson

... neatest and most cozy house in the row. The fifth is of the construction of an English country-house in the reign of William III. It is of timber, with stucco and rough-cast panels, and has a large bay-window in the second story, surmounted by a gable to the street and covering an old-fashioned stoop with seats on each side. The five houses have a pretty effect, and each has a home look. The facades only are on exhibition, the interiors being private. They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... a few break-wheels, already rusty, surrounded by a quadrangular building pierced by a number of little windows. The building was unfinished; the sky could be seen through the joists of the roofing. Attached to the stop-plank of the gable a bunch of straw mixed with corn-ears fluttered its tricoloured ribbons ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... southern parlour of the house you may have seen With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green, At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right, Stood the London-made piano ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... The building was, in short, a recently-erected chapel of red brick, with pseudo-classic ornamentation, and the white regular joints of mortar could be seen streaking its surface in geometrical oppressiveness from top to bottom. The roof was of blue slate, clean as a table, and unbroken from gable to gable; the windows were glazed with sheets of plate glass, a temporary iron stovepipe passing out near one of these, and running up to the height of the ridge, where it was finished by a covering like a parachute. Walking round to the end, he perceived an ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... continued unchanged in the family mansion,— a Dutch-built house, with a front, or rather gable end, of yellow brick, tapering to a point, with the customary iron weathercock at the top. Everything about the building bore the air of long- settled ease and security. Flights of martins peopled the little coops nailed against its walls, and swallows built their nests under the eaves, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... prevail behind those eyeless gables; there could be no suave pleasance about those walls hanging over the noisy and inhospitable wave. No pomp, no pleasant amenities; the place seemed to jut into the sea, defying man's oldest and most bitter enemy, its gable ends and one crenelated bastion or turret betraying its sinister relation to its age, its whole aspect arrogant and unfriendly, essential of war. Caught suddenly by the vision that swept the fretted curve of the coast, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... day was employed in piling up the cocoa-nut branches and wood. Ready made a square stack, like a haystack, with a gable top, over which he tied the long branches, so that the rain ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat

... furnished with the usual appurtenances. Over the door and on the "threshel" were nailed, "for luck," two horse-shoes, that had been found by accident. In a little "hole" in the wall, beneath the salt-box, lay a bottle of holy water to keep the place purified; and against the copestone of the gable, on the outside, grew a large lump of house-leek, as a specific for ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... may fairly be inferred, that the portal was also of the same date; but this porch wanted the pendant trefoils, and was altogether less ornamented than that of St. Michael, as the latter was than that at Rouen. Both those at Caen, however, agreed in the wall above the arch rising into a triangular gable covered with waving tracery, a very peculiar, and a very ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman

... what next to try on, And how to spin, I spies an ensign with a Bloody Lion, And bears away to leeward for the inn, Beats round the gable, And fetches up before the coach-horse stable: Well—there they stand, four kickers in a row. And so I just makes free to cut a brown 'un's cable. But riding isn't in a seaman's natur— So I whips out a toughish end of yarn, And gets a kind of sort of a land-waiter ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... a wide open pass-way between, and a low dark porch running along the front—constituted all that was left of a once well-known place of public refreshment. At each end a stone chimney, yellowish gray and of a massiveness now wonderful to behold, rose above the gable like a shattered tower above the salient of some old fortress. The windows still retained the little square panes and curious glazing of a century ago. Below it, fifty yards away to the eastward, a bold spring burst out of the granite rock, spread deep ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... retardataire or man born out of his own time—who should have been born in 1460, in the days of Albrecht Duerer. Celestin Nanteuil "had the air of one of those tall angels carrying a censer or playing on the sambucque, who inhabit the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed to have come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still wearing his nimbus plate behind his head in place of a hat, and without having the least suspicion that it is not perfectly natural to wear one's aureole ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... land, from whose boundary you look down on small rich valleys; and into one of these, winding his way through fields and pastures, of which the fertile soil was testified by their vigorous hedgerows, he now descended. A long, low farmhouse, with gable ends and ample porch, an antique building that in old days might have been some manorial residence, attracted his attention. Its picturesque form, its angles and twisted chimneys, its porch covered with jessamine and eglantine, its verdant homestead, and its orchard rich with ruddy fruit, its ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli

... gable-roofs, always without side-walls and often without any walls at all. They are divided into a pig-stable and a living-room, unless the owners prefer to have their pigs living in the same space ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... were in the attic overhead, huddled close about the warm stovepipe that came up through the floor, with the dogs at their backs. It was dusk there, too, for the western gable window, broken the evening before by the force of the storm, was nailed tight from within and piled high from without; while the window in the opposite end of the house was intact, but veiled with frost and hung with ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates

... sailing-vessels. To the south were the fields and woods of the open country, save where loomed the low frame houses and the green-stained wharves of Southwark village. Behind Rebecca was a vast huddle of frame buildings, none higher than three stories, sharp of gable overhanging narrow streets, while here a tower and there a steeple stood sentinel over the common herd. To the east the four great stone cylinders of the Tower, frowning over the moving world at their feet, loomed ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... girl, when they came in sight of the elms that, shaded the gable of the parsonage, "what do you think of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... said nothing, and they rambled on together. In the middle of the field rose a fragment of stone wall in the form of a gable, known as Faringdon Ruin; and when they had reached it John paused and politely asked her if she were not a little tired with walking so far. No particular reply was returned by the young lady, but they both stopped, and Anne seated ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy

... Mihell, Myhill, Mighill, and most frequently of all as Miles (Chapter VIII). The reader will remember the famous salient of Saint-Mihiel, on the Meuse, held by the Germans for so long a period of the war. From Gabriel we have Gabb, Gabbett, etc. The common rustic pronunciation Gable has given ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... in such a bewildering fashion that it would be almost impossible for me to give the exact locations of the different buildings. What we all remember distinctly is the bare, roofless hall, of which only a western gable and a vast chimney-piece remain, in which Joan had her audience with the King. This hall was the throne room, in 1429, when the fearless Maid appeared at Chinon, having journeyed one hundred and fifty leagues through a country occupied, in many places, by English ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... always choose the most agreeable and best-humored sister of the house to show it to strangers?) came tripping down the steps and across the flags of the little garden-court, and welcomed us with much courtesy into the neat little old-fashioned, red-bricked, gable-ended, shining-windowed Convent of the Angels. First she showed us a whitewashed parlor, decorated with a grim picture or two and some crucifixes and other religious emblems, where, upon stiff old chairs, the sisters sit and work. Three or four of them were still there, pattering over their ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray

... five bays, of which the lateral ones are square turrets, covered with arcades, and terminated by spires. The lower story of the central bay is composed of three pedimented porches deeply recessed, each with a niche in its gable. Above these is a story of canopied trefoiled arches, with quatrefoil lozenges in their centres. Over this arcade is the large west window, a triplet of lancets with slender shafts and chevron ornament. Above this again ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White

... immediate village, and is as ugly a place as mortal man could contrive to make, or to render uglier through a succession of untidy generations. The fashion of paving the village-street, and patching one shabby house on the gable-end of another, quite shuts out all verdure and pleasantness; but, I presume, we are not likely to see a more genuine old Scotch village, such as they used to be in Burns's time, and long before, than this of Mauchline. The church stands about midway up the street, and is built of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... began operations by poising their spears and waving us away. We waited for some little time, watching their movements, with our rifles in our hands. A flight of spears came crashing through the flimsy sides of our house, the roof and west gable being the only parts thickly covered, and they could see us jumping about inside to avoid their spears. Then a flight of spears came from the concealed enemy in the tea-tree. Mr. Tietkens and I rushed out, and fired right ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... asleep, but I thought I lay awake in bed—in the room where I still slept—that which had been my grannie's.—It was dark midnight, and the wind was howling about the gable and in the chimneys. The door opened, and some one entered. By the lamp she carried I knew my great-grandmother,—just as she looked in life, only that now she walked upright and with ease. That I was ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... depressing town I have seen as yet. Except on market and fair days, literally nothing is done. The streets are nearly deserted, the houses are tumbling down, gable-ends without side-walls or roofs are seen everywhere, nettles are growing in the old chimney corners, and the splendid ruins of the ancient abbey are the most cheerful feature of the place. A few melancholy men stand about, the picture of despondent wretchedness, a few sad-eyed girls wander about ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... It was built partly of logs and partly of driftwood and tarred canvas. Joined to one end of the main building—the ordinary log-cabin of the settler—was the half-round pilot-house of some wrecked steamer, while the other gable terminated in half of a broken whale-boat. Nailed against the boat were the dried skins of wild animals, and scattered about lay the flotsam and jetsam of many years' gathering,—bamboo crates, casks, hatches, blocks, oars, boxes, part of a whale's vertebrae, and the blades of sword-fish. ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... capitals and display type to do justice to the biggest sensation that had come in its way for years, and the appearance of the paper created the most profound amazement throughout the town and district. Gable was described as a cunning scoundrel whose affectations of almost imbecile simplicity might easily have deceived intelligences less keen than those at the service of the Mercury, and neither Messrs. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson

... spent one night alone on the ranch, even though she did believe she was doing so. Lite had a homestead a few miles away, upon which he was supposed to be sleeping occasionally to prove his good faith in the settlement. Instead of spending his nights there, however, he rode over and slept in the gable loft over the old granary, where no one ever went; and he left every morning just before the sky lightened with dawn. He did not know that Jean was frightened by the sound of footsteps, but he ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower

... reached it on the evening of a beautiful summer day. A long and gloomy avenue of elms, interlacing their thick branches, led to the dwelling-house, which was quite unequal to the imposing approach to it; for it was but an inferior construction of the past century, ornamented simply by a gable and a bull's-eye, but ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... lower Rhine and in Holland tarsia was used for great and small chests, sideboards and doors with rich gable crownings, with good drawing of flowers, and sprigs of leaves with birds and beasts among them, the ground being generally light. The doors ordered by the Swedish Chamberlain, Axel Oxenstiern, now in the drinking-room of the King's Castle ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson

... casements, latticed and filled with lozenge-shaped panes; and half-timber walls, with black beams fashioned into many forms: and with one story jutting out beyond that below, until the attic window under the gable seemed to hang in mid-air, without visible support, over the garden sloping down a ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... stately colonial type dear to the heart of every Virginian. The building was long and low, with sloping roofs of flat French tiles. A broad veranda bordered it on three sides. The symmetry of the whole was saved from ugliness by a large central gable the overhanging porch of which cast a deep and friendly shadow over the great front door and over the wide flights of steps that led ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... with cannon-shot; there was a hole in the roof as big as a bushel-basket, where the shell went in, and in the gable an opening large enough for the passage of a cart and oxen, where it came out. It exploded, and tore the end ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin

... jingling carelessly along the street in scattered twos and threes, laughing together, and singling out the maidens at the gable-shadowed windows with hawking eyes. The good citizens of Cologne did not look on them favourably. Some showed their backs and gruffly banged their doors: others scowled and pocketed their fists: not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... latitude 42 deg. 23 min. north, on a small peninsula, at the bottom of Massachusetts Bay. It was built in the manner cities were in England, at the time this settlement was formed; that is to say, with, the gable end of the houses in front, the streets are narrow, ill paved, and worse lighted. But recollect, I do not include the New Town, or West Boston, in this description; which, as well as those houses that have ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest

... master and his friend out the back door, past the long pile of cord wood, past the chicken yard to a strong box which he had built on tall legs under a mulberry tree. It was constructed of oak and the neatly turned gable roof was covered with old tin carefully painted with three coats of red. A heavy hasp, staple and ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon

... fourteen feet.[658] Two shapes occur. Some of the tombs are almost perfect cubes, the upright walls rising to a height of twelve or fifteen feet, and being then covered in by three or four long slabs of stone. Others resemble huts, having a gable at either end, and a sloping roof formed of slabs which meet and support each other. A squared doorway, from five to six feet in height, gives entrance to the tombs at one end, and has for ornament a fourfold fillet, which surrounds it on three sides. Otherwise, ornamentation ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... waited to hear mother say, in her old bright way, that she couldn't afford it, and she couldn't spare us, if she had the means, and then I flung up into our room, that was a lean-to in the garret, with a winder in the gable end, and there I set down by the winder with my chin on the sill, and begun to wonder why we couldn't have as good luck as the Perrits. After I'd got real miserable, I heerd a soft step comin' up stairs, and Major come in and looked at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... was grand. Grahame Lowe played Stonewall Jackson. They had improvised a pretty bit of scenery at the back, with a few sticks, some paint, brown carpet-paper, and a couple of mosquito-bars;—a Dutch gable with a lattice window, vines trained up over it, and bushes below. It was a moving tableau, enacted to the reading of Whittier's glorious ballad. "Only an old woman in a cap and kerchief, putting her head out at a garret window,"—that was all; but the fire was in the young eyes under the painted ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... latest architectural fashion. The new choir contained the east window, which in the eyes of contemporaries was wonderful and unrivalled for its size and painted glass. It occupies nearly all the central space of the east wall from a few feet above the ground to almost the apex of the gable. Gothic architecture was so marvellously adaptable that all these parts, built at widely different times, at various and strongly-contrasted stages of the development of this English mediaeval architecture, together make a single building that appears to possess the most felicitous ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson

... long and wide on the grassy sands, the youth walked through the tide swollen mouth of the river, and passed along the front of the village until he arrived at a house, the small window in the seaward gable of which was filled with a curious collection of things for sale—dusty looking sweets in a glass bottle; gingerbread cakes in the shape of large hearts, thickly studded with sugar plums of rainbow colours, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... The great Gavel, so called I imagine, from its resemblance to the Gable end of a house, is one of the highest of the Cumberland mountains. It stands at the head of the several vales of ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... which the pointed-gable house got a sign; and this is how the hostelry of the Medici, making a fortune, was found to be enlarged by a quarter, as we have described. And this is how there was at Blois a hostelry of that name, and had for ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... a house of dark-gray stone, with a bow-window and a richly-fretted gable. At the window stood two persons; one a woman whose head was enveloped in a black veil which set off the extreme paleness of her face, and fell in long folds around her person. Near her stood a young girl similarly ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach

... willers down the crick We could see the old mill stick Its red gable up, as if It jest knowed we'd stol'd the skiff! See the winders in the sun Blink like they wuz wonderun' What the miller ort to do With sich boys as me ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley

... occasion the spirit of the old man burst out again: it was the day when the gayly-decked fir bush was stuck upon the finished gable of the new schoolhouse.[R] The carpenters and masons came, dressed in their Sunday clothes, preceded by a band of music, to fetch "the master." The old fiddler, Hans, was the whole day long in high ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... Presbyterian. But there is no heartiness about them—they can never forgive a fair fall upon the sod—they bear malice, and that I hate as I do a black cloak, or a Geneva skull-cap, and a pair of long ears rising on each side on't, like two chimneys at the gable ends of a thatched cottage. They are as sly as the devil to boot; and, therefore, Lance Outram, take two with you, and keep after them, that they may not turn our flank, and get on the track of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... leads to a second platform, which is large enough for bedrooms, or for storing materials and tools of miners. Two others are 18 feet front and 18 feet deep, with a small extension in the rear of 8 feet. Two are 16 feet in front and 22 feet deep, with the entrance on the gable front; and the four others are 18 feet front by 14 deep. The sides of the building will be composed of a double framework of boards planed, grooved and tongued, fitting air tight on each side of the timber, the interval between them being either filled with the moss ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower

... regard her new functions as a jest. Roger, who had come expecting to be amused, found himself ignominiously set down at a table beside the amenable Tom (who had been coerced into joining the class) and directed to copy a very elementary representation of a gable of a cottage which the instructress had set up on the easel. Six times was he compelled to tackle this simple object before his copy was pronounced passable; and until that Rosalind sternly discouraged ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed

... oldest part of all. At a little distance were some very commonplace and disjointed fragments of building, one of them suggesting a certain pathos by its very commonness and the complete wreck which it showed. This was the end of a low gable, a bit of gray wall, all incrusted with lichens, in which was a common door-way. Probably it had been a servants' entrance, a backdoor, or opening into what are called "the offices" in Scotland. No offices remained to be entered,—pantry and kitchen had all been swept out of being; ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant

... a range of smooth undulating downs, were fields of grass and corn, orchards and woods, amid which appeared here and there a church steeple, the roof of a farm-house or labourer's cottage, or the tower or gable-end of some ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston

... of this book do not belie its clustering romantic title. With great enjoyment we spent almost an hour in each separate gable. This book is like a fine old chamber, abundantly but still judiciously furnished with precisely that sort of furniture best fitted to furnish it. There are rich hangings, whereon are braided scenes from tragedies. There is old china with rare devices, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... great table-land, occasionally seeing a herd of llamas stampede away at the approach of the train, now and then observing circular stone walls erected by shepherds as shelters. A gable-roofed hut was occasionally seen. Picturesque natives in their ponchos and red or yellow scarves gazed, astonished, at the train throbbing along slowly upon the steep gradient of that elevated barren country. The cold seemed intense after the tropical heat of Lima. It was snowing hard. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... constructed almost entirely of wood, the beams of which were disposed in various directions, so as to form a sort of pattern, and ornamented with carved window-sills and main-beams, were jammed together like figs in a cask, and presented one gable to the confined gangway, the other to the water, which, in many cases, their upper story overhung with a seemingly hazardous spring outward. Towards the river, also, many were adorned with wooden balconies, sheltered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... on the way, such as wealthy uncles seem to secrete and exude almost unconsciously, as toads yield moisture; but Mark paid only a moderate degree of attention to it as they spun past the low dim edges; he hardly noticed what could be seen along the road even, which was not much—a gable-end or a haystack starting out for an instant from the fog, or a shadowy labourer letting himself through a gate—he was thinking of the girl whose eyes had met his ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... poachers, and tinklers, and pottery-trampers, and ither neerdoweels, and o' huts and hovels without riggin' by the wayside, and the cottages o' honest puir men, and byres, and barns, and stackyards, and merry-makins at winter ingles, and courtship aneath trees, and at the gable-end of farm houses, 'tween lads and lasses as laigh in life as the servants in her father's ha'. That's the puzzle, and that's the praise. But ae word explains a'—Genius—Genius, wull a' the metafhizzians in the warld ever expound that mysterious ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson



Words linked to "Gable" :   role player, corbie gable, histrion, gable wall, gable roof, wall, player, pediment, thespian, William Clark Gable



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