"Grimy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... buildings snuggle in the valleys or straggle on the slopes. The wide and changing perspective is full of a harmony unspoiled by the jarring notes evident on solid ground. Ugliness and dirt are camouflaged by the clean top of everything. Grimy towns and jerry-built suburbs seem almost attractive when seen in mass from a height. Slums, the dead uniformity of long rows of houses, sordid back-gardens, bourgeois public statues—all these eyesores are mercifully hidden by the roofed ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... not,' said Horatia, glancing about her, and almost jumping up and down in her eagerness to see all there was to be seen, as they drove slowly along the narrow, and at this time crowded, streets of the grimy manufacturing town. ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... and contemporary of Dickens, also wrote in favour of the smoky chimneys. He says about St. Paul's: "It is really the better for all the incense which all the chimneys since the time of Wren have offered at its shrine, and are still flinging up every day from their foul and grimy censers." As a flower of speech, this is good, but as criticism it is equivalent to saying the less seen of it the better. M. Taine, the French critic, evidently thought otherwise; he ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... see if the fire was out. He stooped and peered into the darkness, and, even as he gazed, splash came the contents of the fourth pail, together with some soot with which they had formed a travelling acquaintance on the way down. Mr Seymour staggered back, grimy and dripping. There was dead silence in the study. Shoeblossom's face might ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... I could with one hand. But I was pretty grimy. I—I didn't know," and Barry grinned cheerfully, "I was going ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... bump of reverence was undeveloped, greeted him cheerfully as Boanerges. Mr. Simson, more respectful, rose and offered his small, grimy hand. Mary took his hat and cloak away from him and closed the door behind him. She felt his hands, and put him into a chair close to the fire. And then she introduced ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... a way that stirred always a smoldering resentment against them. This particular squaw had nothing to commend her to his notice. She had a dirty red bandanna tied over her dirty, matted hair and under her grimy double chin. A grimy gray blanket was draped closely over her squat shoulders and formed a pouch behind, wherein the plump form of a papoose was cradled, a little red cap ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... anything?" growled Big-foot, riding close and peering down into the boy's scarred and grimy face. "Say, don't pass that out to the bunch. Lumpy'll say you're fishin' for compliments. I don't want to thump him, but, if he passes out any talk as reflects on what you've done for this ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin
... upon the stray crumbs of conversation that fell to her. The milkman and the iceman and the butcher boy used to hold daily conversation with her. They—sociable gentlemen—would stand on her door-step, one grimy hand resting against the white of her doorpost, exchanging the time of day with Blanche in the doorway—a tea towel in one hand, perhaps, and a plate in the other. Her little house was a miracle of cleanliness. It was no uncommon sight to see her ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... and grimy, streaked with smoke and powder, turned pale at the captain's words, and sprang forward anxiously and led the object of his love down the steps to her cabin. "Wounded!" he murmured. "Oh, my love, why did no one take you to a place ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... hawthorn hedge which had lost the freshness of spring and was browned by the work of caterpillars; they were in rags and jags, their shoes had split, and their feet looked twice as wide in consequence. Their hands were black; not grimy, but absolutely black, and neither hands nor necks ever knew water, I am sure. There was not the least shape to their garments; their dresses simply hung down in straight ungraceful lines; there was no colour of ribbon or flower, to light up the dinginess. But ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... along, conversing in murmurs, as far as Waterloo Bridge, then they turned and crossed it and walked down Waterloo Road into the Borough Road, and then turned off into a narrow, grimy street which ended in a small court whose three sides were formed of wretched houses, upon which many years of misery, poverty, and crime had set their unmistakable stamp. They crossed the court diagonally ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... a grimy sweep Was creeping down the street, When Quartern Loaf, the biker's boy, Below he chanced to meet: "Sweep!" sneered the baker: and the sweep Gave Puff a sooty flout; But Puff-crumb did not deal in soot, So turned his face about; Nor did he care to soundly drub The imp of dirty ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... boisterous children, and to bringing something like quiet out of the tumult of the crowded room. She assisted the girl with her maccaroni, gravely listening to the principles which governed its equitable distribution, with her own hands giving the grimy little children the share belonging to each. An air of comfort seemed to come over the frowsy room after Edith had quietly set a chair straight here, picked up something from the floor there, and arranged the ragged shade at the window. Even the little Italians, ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... scene: the broken body of a once strong man lying under a white sheet; the children playing around and laughing (if they were too young to know what it meant); the mother frantic with the thought that her brood was now homeless; and the big grimy workers wiping their tears with a rough hand and putting silver dollars ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... about in the corners like feathers. Her corset was thrown down in a corner; shoes and stockings littered the floor; her comb was clogged with red hair like a wire fence with dead grass after a freshet; dingy, grimy underclothing lay about. I peered into a closet, in which there were more garments on the floor than on the nails. The other bedroom was quite as unkempt; looking as if the occupant must always do his chamber work at the last moment before going to ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... of a soap-boiler. The paternal manufactory was in the grimiest part of the grimy metropolis; but, remarkable to say, she had as much innate pride, self-respect, and delicacy as though "all the blood of all the Howards" flowed ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... dozing behind his bar. Yellow Barbee sat slumped over a table, his lean, grimy fingers twisting an empty glass. No one ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... elegant speech, and Pete was an uncommonly disreputable-looking lad, with his grimy face and hands and his tattered garments, but there was a ring of gratitude and earnestness in his tone that went straight to Andy's heart, and he held ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... dishes. On her feet she would barely have reached the rim of the great dish-pan, but on the soap-box she did very well. A grimy calico ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly. Children. The swancomb of the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... boy or the ape from that instant—at least no one who still lived. The proprietor of the house identified the picture of the lad as that of one who had been a frequent visitor in the room of the old man. Aside from this he knew nothing. And there, at the door of a grimy, old building in the slums of London, the searchers came to ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... possible, almost a year ago, as I took some friends through the steel rolling mill, I chanced to step directly beneath a traveling crane, lowering a steel beam; seeing my peril, I was about to step aside when I caught my foot and fell. Just then a veritable giant, black and grimy, leaped forward, and with a prodigious display of strength, placed his powerful back under the descending weight, staving it off until ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... me after luncheon; the idea being that I should spend the evening, and perhaps also pass the night, at the country-house where his family lived. Only when we had left the city and exchanged its grimy streets and the unbearably deafening clatter of its pavements for the open vista of fields and the subdued grinding of carriage-wheels on a dusty high road (while the sweet spring air and prospect enveloped us on every side) did I awake from the ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... of that luxurious baby with her dancing eyes and happy smiles "rolling in luxury," called to mind their own little puny darling, grimy with neglect, lean with want, and hollow-eyed with knowledge aforetime. Why should one baby be pampered and another starved? Why did the bank-president's daughter have any better right to those wonderful furs and that exultant smile than their own babies? A ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... never came alive from lady Ann's needle, but the old books reviving to autumnal beauty under the patient, healing touch of the craftsman, that ever drew her all the way, who can wonder! Or who will blame her but such as lady Ann, whose kind, though slowly, yet surely vanishes—melting, like the grimy snow of our streets, before the sun of ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... these women—I know!—worship here, yield yourself to the intoxicating day-dreams that make the grimy world sweeter than any heaven ever imagined. How you heart leaps with gratitude for your good fortune! How compassionately you regard your unblest fellow men! What may you not accomplish with such a mate beside you; ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... save that the mire troubled him, letting him down by slow degrees, and threatening to engulf him bodily; and he was now too weak to extricate himself. He lifted his head and glared. His face was grimy, his hair matted with mud. Alice, although brave enough and quite accustomed to startling experiences, uttered a cry when she saw those snaky eyes glistening so savagely amid the shadows. But Jean was quick to recognize Long-Hair; he had often seen him about ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... a very small room, with a ceiling so low that the tall lodger could only just stand upright with safety; perhaps three inches intervened between his head and the plaster, which was cracked, grimy, cobwebby. A small scrap of weedy carpet lay in front of the fireplace; elsewhere the chinky boards were unconcealed. The furniture consisted of a round table, which kept such imperfect balance on its central support that the lamp ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... yard," he said, and they followed. "Go down to the Rattler, then bear off to the right. The trail starts in back of the last shanty on the right-hand side. You see that gap up yonder? Not the big one, but the narrow one." He pointed with a grimy hand. "Well, you go right through that and drop down, and you'll see the camp below you. It's a stiff climb, but the trail's good, and it's just about two miles over there. It's so plain you can ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... JARVIS on steps) Ah seen eyes in there, and a cold, grimy, green, slimy smell in there. Ain't that where that broad-faced bird flew at me and I fell down them ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... is sitting behind the oven, on Nilen's grimy bed. "So you've become a cobbler?" says Nilen, to begin with, compassionately, for he feels a deucedly smart fellow himself in his fine white clothes, with his bare arms crossed over his naked breast. Pelle feels remarkably comfortable; he has been given a slice of bread and cream, and ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... expression of sickly meanness. The room into which I was shown was above the small establishment of a dyer and cleaner who had inflated kid gloves and discoloured shawls in his shop-front. There was a great deal of grimy infant life up and down the place, and there was a hot moist smell within, as of the "boiling" of dirty linen. Brooksmith sat with a blanket over his legs at a clean little window where, from behind stiff bluish-white ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... we here?" demanded the captain, a huge German. Their grimy armor and bearded faces besmeared with black marked them as Black Riders. I was overjoyed to see that they numbered ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... when the Capella left the malodorous bassin a flotte. The irksomeness of lying in the harbour at Le Havre palled upon them, even after a few hours. They yearned for the open sea almost from the time their ship made fast alongside the grimy quay. ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... picked it up. It was a bit of grimy, white paper roughly folded into a ragged square. Opening it they found a crude message printed almost illegibly, and with many evidences of ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... For fear of the "eye"; see vol. i. 123 and passim. In these days the practice is rare; but, whenever you see at Cairo an Egyptian dame daintily dressed and leading by the hand a grimy little boy whose eyes are black with flies and whose dress is torn and unclean, you see what has taken its place. And if you would praise the brat you must not say "Oh, what a pretty boy!" but "Inshallah!"—the Lord doth ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Outside, through the grimy surgery window over a foreground of blackened brick and slate, a line of enormous chimneys like Cyclopean pillars upheld the lowering, dun-coloured cloud-bank. For six days in the week they spouted smoke, but to-day the furnace fires were banked, for it ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... black petticoat. We have had a nightly accompaniment of a much larger procession, though, calling themselves 'Skellingtons,' otherwise the 'Skeletons,' an army of low women and roughs; who live vulture lives on this poor, soiled, grimy, forgotten world. Thank God, the ground of evil-doers is in danger, and they ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... Louisburgh, the little town of Sydney is a pleasant rural picture. Everybody has heard of the Sydney coal-mines: we expected to find the miner's finger-marks everywhere; but instead of the smoky, sulphurous atmosphere, and the black road, and the sulky, grimy, brick tenements, we were surprised with clean, white, picket-fences; and green lawns, and clever, little cottages, nestled in shrubbery and clover. The mines are over the bay, five miles from South Sydney. ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... on her return, was something of a shock. She remembered how vividly fresh it had looked to her on the day of that first visit, months before. Now, to eyes fresh from the crisp immaculateness of Paris and Berlin, Fifth avenue looked almost grimy, and certainly ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... wheat was stored within a willow framing beneath the chaff and straw that streamed from the chute of the great machine. Winston had around him the best men that dollars could hire, and toiled tirelessly with the grimy host in the whirling dust of the thrasher and amid the sheaves, wherever another pair of hands, or the quick decision that would save an hour's delay, was ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... and steamer station. S. Marcuola, whose facade, having never been finished, is most ragged and miserable, is a poor man's church, visited by strangers for its early Titian and a "Last Supper" by Tintoretto. The Titian, which is dark and grimy, is quite pleasing, the infant Christ, who stands between S. Andrew and S. Catherine on a little pedestal, being very real and Venetian. There are, however, who deny Titian's authorship; Mr. Ricketts, for example, gives the picture ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... stuck up—not a mite, I ain't, ef I is pore. I'se not ashamed ter shake hands wid Mr. Squar' Nimbus—Desmit—War'. I stan's by him whatever his name, an' no matter how many he's got, ef it's more'n he's got fingers an' toes." He bowed low with a solemn wave of his grimy hat, as he shook the proffered hand, amid the laughter of his audience, with whom he seemed to be ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... immediately recognize Wallie in his Western clothes, but when they did they waved grimy hands at him and ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... 1786, a stranger in the streets of the grimy colliery village of Wylam, near Newcastle, might have passed by without notice a ragged, barefooted, chubby child of five years old, Geordie Stephenson by name, playing merrily in the gutter and looking to the outward eye in no way different from any of the other colliers' children who loitered ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... Lady Alice, and I see that your conduct may be of service to my brother." Then she relapsed into a more colloquial tone. "But how on earth you mean to live in this part of London, I'm sure I can't imagine. No doubt it seems rather smoky and grimy to you after Mayfair ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... hiss of escaping steam from the cylinder-cocks or an occasional rumble from the boiler. Even murmured words seemed audible and intelligible sixty feet away, and twice big Ben Tillson, the engineer of 705, had pricked up his ears as he circled about his giant steed, oiling the grimy joints, elbows, and bearings, and pondering in his heavy, methodical way over certain parting instructions that had come to him from the lips of the division superintendent. "A young feller learning firing" would board him at Chimney Switch, forty miles out from ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... the deck, there was a wild rushing about now. Orders were shouted to the engineers below; hoarse answers came back. The engines were stopped and started again. But still the yacht did not move. A grimy engineer came up and ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart
... many years amongst people marked by the desolation of time. Eyes were turned slowly in their sockets, glancing at us. Faint murmurs were heard, "Have you got 'im after all?" The well-known faces looked strange and familiar; they seemed faded and grimy; they had a mingled expression of fatigue and eagerness. They seemed to have become much thinner during our absence, as if all these men had been starving for a long time in their abandoned attitudes. The captain, with a round turn of a rope on his wrist, and kneeling on one knee, swung with a face ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... for coaling left us gasping, whilst a fiendish din arose from the bowels of the ship, whence cargo was being extracted. The stifling air, reeking with damp, developed in the early morning a steady rain, which dripped mournfully on the grimy decks. Rain in Aden! We are told on the best authority that this is ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... explanation possible was that the distinctive tread of the expensive ones had been observed. There must, Starr reasoned, be something else in this place which it would be worth his while to discover. He therefore went carefully up the grimy stairway to the ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... observed a great difference in C. D.'s dress, for he had bought a new hat and a very handsome blue cloak, which he threw over his shoulder a l' Espagnole. . . . We walked together through Hungerford Market, where we followed a coal-heaver, who carried his little rosy but grimy child looking over his shoulder; and C. D. bought a halfpenny-worth of cherries, and as we went along he gave them one by one to the little fellow without the knowledge of the father. . . . He informed ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the escaping air above all the industry clamor; heard, and saw the car start backward. Then he had a flitting glimpse of a man in grimy overclothes scrambling terror-frenzied from beneath the Rosemary. The thing done had been overdone. The fireman had "bled" the air-brake too freely, and the liberated car, gathering momentum with every wheel-turn, surged around the circling spur track and shot out masterless on the steeper ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... he was nowhere to be seen. When he returned, he was pale and grey. His bloodless red eyes lay tearfully in grimy shadows. His voice had only a sing-song tone, with a mannered melancholy. Schulz spoke mournfully, dreamily, about despair, whoredom, and being torn apart inwardly. He said that he was fed up with the joy of life, that he would soon catch up with his own death. He avoided showing signs of tender ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... all the way over," the man replied. "Compression's gettin' worse all the time." He drew a grimy hand across his blackened forehead and squinted in the direction of the island. "No place to be foolin' round with a cripple either, I can tell you," he growled. "Reckon I'd better lay to until ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... fidelity had been proved through the varied events of a life—a friend which, in his life of celibacy, had found in his heart something of that place which a fond and faithful wife may hold in the heart of a more fortunate man. It was a little friend, a fragrant friend, a tawny and somewhat grimy friend; it was in the pocket of his coat; it was of clay; in fact, it was nothing ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... tried throughout all this story to tell things as they happened to me. In the beginning—the sheets are still here on the table, grimy and dogs-eared and old-looking—I said I wanted to tell MYSELF and the world in which I found myself, and I have done my best. But whether I have succeeded I cannot imagine. All this writing is grey now and dead and trite and unmeaning ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... would," said Anna, a little reassured by that cheerful and grimy countenance. Her eyes wandered to Axel, so cool and so vigilant, giving the necessary orders so quietly, losing no precious moments in trying to save what was past saving, and without any noise or any abuse getting what he wanted done. "It can't be a good thing, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... where now they stood, not a spark of fire was lingering, but some wood-ash still retained a feeble memory of warmth; and three little children (blest with small advance from babyhood) were huddling around, with hands, and faces, and sharp grimy knees poking in for lukewarm corners; while two rather senior young Carroways were lying fast asleep, with a jack-towel over them. But Tommy was not there; that gallant Tommy, who had ridden all the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... with the interior arrangements of which Gaston appeared to be perfectly familiar. They passed through a dirty, ill-smelling passage, went across a courtyard, cold and damp as a cell, and ascended a flight of stairs with a grimy balustrade. On the second floor Gaston made a halt before a door upon which several names were painted. They passed through into a large and lofty room. The paper on the walls of this delectable chamber was torn and spotted, ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... city and climbed a steep hill and came presently to a region of darkness and desolation as it seemed to me, in which the houses were intolerably dreary—high, black houses that shut out the sky, fallen on evil days, since they were all sooty and grimy, with windows which had not been cleaned for years, many of them broken, and twisted and rusty railings ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... neighborhood of private residences will repay a stranger for his trouble, since he will during that time see a bewildering assortment of street-venders, from a peregrinating meat-market, with a complete stock dangling from a wooden framework attached to a horse's back, to a grimy individual worrying along beneath a small mountain of charcoal, and each with cries more or less musical. The sidewalks of Constantinople are ridiculously narrow, their only practical use being to keep vehicles from running into the merchandise of the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the place the woman had designated. The house was small and dingy, and two grimy babies were ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... boys gazed upward at the high side of the ship from whence the hail had proceeded. In the figure that had addressed them they had at first no little difficulty in recognizing Captain Hazzard. In grimy overalls, with a battered woolen cap of the Tam o' Shanter variety on his head, and his face liberally smudged with grime and dust,—for on the opposite side of the Southern Cross three lighters were at work coaling her,—a figure more unlike ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... says it belongs to him, and this idea is fostered to the extent that he is allowed to pay for the seeds and cuttings and things. He is also encouraged to order the men about. But I always think of it as Miss Middleton's garden, particularly when the afternoons are hot and I see nothing but grimy bricks out of my window. She knows all the flowers by name, which ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... therefore perfectly natural. He had dug a slanting ditch perhaps a foot deep in the soft loam, and when my eyes fell upon him had stopped for a moment to get his wind. He stood planted firmly on his four short legs, his tail vibrating incessantly, like the pendulum of a clock. His muzzle was grimy with soil; his head cocked on one side, and his ears pricked, while his beady little eyes narrowly watched the hole before him. His lolling tongue was dripping, and he was panting like a lizard. And I thought to myself, if men would attack ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... day, we had said in the grimy recesses of Cliff and Dover streets. (Approaching this sentiment for the third time, perhaps we may be permitted to accomplish our thought and say what we had in mind.) But up on the airy decking of the Brooklyn Bridge, where we repaired with G—— W—— for a brief stroll, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... evening when we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret of life. I don't know what I expected, but I went out and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares. About half-past eight I passed by an absurd little theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills. A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... underneath the western window. They made a picnic of it, and her spirits skipped upon the hilltops. For the first time she ate from tin plates, drank from a tin cup, and used a tin spoon the worse for rust. What mattered it to her that the teapot was grimy and the fryingpan black with soot! It was all part of the wonderful new vista that had suddenly opened before her gaze. She had awakened into life and already she was dimly realizing that many and varied experiences lay waiting for her in that untrodden path ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... hero, indeed, presented anything but a creditable picture. The old gray sweater used by the man who took care of the furnace in Pee-wee's home, the cap which he held, and his grimy face, made him look like a terrible example of hoodlumism; a trolley-car hoodlum, an apple-stealing and stone-throwing and hooky-playing hoodlum; a hole-in-the-ball-field-fence hoodlum. Nor did the terrible scowl with which he now challenged fate and the world help ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... reply, but the former turned away to hide her tears. The lad must go and begin his new life. For a few days all was bustle and preparation, George in the seventh heaven of delight. The long voyage in a grimy and uncomfortable collier had no terrors for him; he was too much accustomed to coal dust for that. And was there not a chance that before the Thames was reached he might see a brush ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... sympathetic engine-driver lifted Mhor into the engine and, holding him up high above the furnace, told him to pull a chain, whereupon the engine gave an anguished hoot. Mhor had no words to express his pleasure, but in an ecstasy of gratitude he seized the engine-driver's grimy hand and kissed it, leaving that honest man, who was not accustomed to such ongoings ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... flame that seems to encircle the mizzen-mast. The fire now reaches to the cabin of Mrs. Kear, who, shrieking wildly, is brought on deck by Miss Herbey. A moment more, and Silas Huntly makes his appearance, his face all blackened with the grimy smoke; he bows to Curtis, as he passes, and then proceeds in the calmest manner to mount the aft-shrouds, and installs himself at the very top of ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... music, stirred her pulses with a strange telepathy. The evening wore along, until the final curtain. Shirley, with cumbersome effort helped her with her cloak, dropping his hat and stick more than once in simulated awkwardness. The electric numerals of the carriage call soon brought the grimy-faced chauffeur. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... which Milton had some interest—the town-house of the Earl of Bridgewater, ex-President of Wales, and the peer of Comus. The name "Bridgewater Gardens" still designates, without a shred of garden left there, but only grimy printing-offices and the like instead, the portion of the street which the mansion occupied. Nay more, till within a few years ago; Milton's own house in Barbican, with some modern change of frontage, and some filling-up of interstices ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... high, The dust clouds rise beneath us, and the demons seem at large— The cavaliers are charging in to conquer or to die. Grim death may claim his victims from out our whirling ranks, Our plumes may be down-trodden in the grimy, bloody sod: The cavaliers will meet their fate without a word of thanks, But they've died for good Don Carlos, for old Spain, ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... He looked for a moment over his pince-nez in Ivor's direction and then, without saying anything, returned to the grimy little sixteenth-century account books which were now his favourite reading. He knew more about Sir Ferdinando's household expenses ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... man stood by his side whom he had scarcely noticed during the evening. He was evidently a shoemaker. There was a smell of leather about him, and his hands and face were grimy. He had a slightly turned-up nose, smallish eyes, half hidden under very black eyebrows, and his lips were thin and straight. His voice was exceedingly high-pitched, and had something creaking in it like the ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... rebreathed a hundred times, charged with odours of unnameable personal uncleanness and disease, that I staggered to the gutter with a qualm which I could scarcely conquer. At the doors of the houses stood grimy women with their arms folded and their hair disordered. Grimier boys and girls had tied a rope to broken railings, and were swinging on it. The common door to a score of lodgings stood ever open, and ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... sitting-room, he seemed to himself oddly, unexpectedly in the presence of a bigger view. It was as if some interfering mass had been so displaced that he could see more sky and more country. Yet the opposite houses were naturally still there, and if the grimy little place looked lighter it was doubtless only because the rain had indeed stopped and the sun was pouring in. Peter went to the window to open it to the altered air, and in doing so beheld at the garden gate the humble "growler" in which a few hours before ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... cedar, the words, "Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men." Fresh cedar had been substituted for the yellowed branches left over from the previous Christmas, and fresh diamond dust sprinkled over the grimy cotton to give it its pristine sparkle of ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... morning, so that we spent some time over our meal. Holmes was lost in thought, and once or twice he walked over to the window and stared earnestly out. It opened on to a squalid courtyard. In the far corner was a smithy, where a grimy lad was at work. On the other side were the stables. Holmes had sat down again after one of these excursions, when he suddenly sprang out of his chair with a ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ashes of a pipe or a coal fire after a day's extinction; discoloured with the soils of many a stale debauch, and reeking yet with pot-house odours. In lieu of buckles at his knees, he wore unequal loops of packthread; and in his grimy hands he held a knotted stick, the knob of which was carved into a rough likeness of his own vile face. Such was the visitor who doffed his three-cornered hat in Gashford's presence, and ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... slowly lighted a cigar. There is a shop on the ground-floor of No. 15, where ancient pieces of stove-pipe and a few fire-irons are exposed for sale. Von Holzen, having pushed open the door, stood waiting at the foot of a narrow and grimy staircase. He knew that in such a shop in such a quarter of the town there is always a human spider lurking in the background, who steals out upon any human fly that may pause to ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... point of view there are few towns more uninviting than Birmingham; for the houses are built of brick toned down to a grimy red by smoke, in long streets crossing each other at right angles,—and the few modern stone buildings and blocks of houses seem as pert and as much out of place as the few idle dandies who are occasionally met among the crowds ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... overspread her face as she stood in front of the tall, forbidding tenement and looked up at the narrow, grimy windows. It seemed almost incredible that handsome, fastidious Jay Gardiner would even come to such a place, let alone fall in love with an ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... perliceman's; everything's the perliceman's," contradicted the girl, snapping one set of grimy fingers defiantly. ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... often thought how narrow their lives are, how cramping their environment? But suppose one of those clerks loves books and is something of a poet. What does it matter to him though his rooms in Clapham or Brixton are grimy, almost squalid, and filled with the worst kind of Victorian furniture? "Minds innocent and quiet take such for an hermitage." Once inside, the long day at the office over, and the door shut on the world, an arm-chair drawn up to the fire and his books around him he is as happy as ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... to you, Coppy," said Wee Willie Winkie, indicating Miss Allardyce with a grimy forefinger. "I knew she didn't ought to go acwoss ve wiver, and I knew ve wegiment would come to me ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... itself loomed up before me that Sunday morning as I approached it along Ballantyne Street, a diluted sunshine washing the extended, businesslike facade of grimy, yellow brick. We were proud of that hospital in the city, and many of our foremost citizens had contributed large sums of money to the building, scarcely ten years old. It had been one of Maude's interests. I was ushered into the reception room, where presently came ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Grasshopper, whose legs and wings were green; H was a grimy Handkerchief that once perhaps ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... laborer! His garb is mean, His face is grimy, but who thinks to ask The measure of his brains? 'Tis only seen He's fitted for his honorable task, And so delights the mind. But let him bask In droll prosperity, absurdly clean— Is that the man whom we admired before? ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... White Star steamships came up New York harbor the other day, a grimy coal barge floated immediately in front of her. "Clear out of the way with that old mud scow!" shouted an officer on ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... Needle, a half-hour later, that spur of rock was vacant. Demetrios had untethered his horse, had thrown away his sword and other armour, and had torn his garments; afterward he rolled in the first puddle he discovered. Thus he set out afoot, in grimy rags—for no one marks a beggar upon the highway—and thus he came again into the realm of King Theodoret, where certainly nobody looked for Demetrios to ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... revelation that made Jack feel very small indeed. He came as near blushing as was possible. The red blood actually showed through his dark, grimy skin. Bertie was sorry for him. He hastened to open the gate and bid him come in, a movement that astonished Flora. She had not another word to say. When the boy that killed the calico-rooster was invited to walk in at the gate, as if nothing had happened, ...
— Baby Pitcher's Trials - Little Pitcher Stories • Mrs. May
... distress and a dangerous spirit of discontent with the government at that time prevailed. Groans and hisses greeted the carriage, full of influential personages, in which the Duke of Wellington sat. High above the grim and grimy crowd of scowling faces a loom had been erected, at which sat a tattered, starved-looking weaver, evidently set there as a representative man, to protest against this triumph of machinery, and the gain and glory which the wealthy Liverpool and Manchester ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... then of no value in the world? Is it always to be the prey of modern progress? Is nothing to be considered sacred; nothing to be left untouched, unsmirched by the grimy fingers of ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... are light and color, the evidences of life and hope. Here the whites are white, and not a dirty drab. The streets glisten clean in the sunlight, and every window is a reflector of glad promise. In London, choked with fog, and grimy with soot-dust, the Englishman cannot see the future for smoke, cannot extract a gleam of hope from the sodden, mud-soaked thoroughfares. To be sanguine here on my housetop is to be natural and in harmony with my surroundings. To be hilarious in the Strand is to be unnatural, to ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... engine had silently moved up next the car and two grimy depot men with smoky torches had swung off the footboard to make ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... the men dried themselves in hot sunshine and cleaned their grimy accoutrements. The native regiment was to take its turn of road-making that day while the Old ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... in Perry's bend, Johnny Nelson waited with Red Connors on the platform of the branding chute and growled petulantly at the sun, the dust, but most of all at the choking, smarting odor of burned hair which filled their throats and caused them to rub the backs of grimy hands across their eyes. Chute-branding robbed them of the excitement, the leaven of fun and frolic, which they always took from open or corral branding—and the work of a day in the corral or open was condensed into an hour or two by the chute. This ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... been very great even for her, it had naturally arrived at tears and sobs, and in consequence she was not able all at once to stifle the sobs that shook her, or even by scrubbing at her poor eyes with all her might, with a rather grimy little ball which she called her "pocket-hankerwich," could she succeed in destroying all traces of the storm. She ran over to the window and stood with her back to the door, staring, or pretending to stare, down at the pretty garden beds, gay with crocuses and snowdrops. ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... agreeable localities are quite content with just looking down, and then passing on, marvelling, it may be, to themselves how such processes as washing and cooking can ever be carried on with the slightest prospect of success in the midst of such grimy and unsavoury surroundings. It was in such a street that James Barnes and his family existed, rather than lived; for life is too vigorous a term to be applied to the time dragged on by those who were unfortunate enough to breathe so polluted an atmosphere. There ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... very much alike, but one wore a red cloak and the other a blue one. In spite of the fact that they were somewhat bloused and a little grimy, and their pretty little noses were now nipped red by the icy morning, they looked attractive as they stood, pressing their handkerchiefs to their mouths and bending with laughter. The extent of their mirth was proportioned ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... it seemed that a hundred men were struggling in that narrow, smoke-filled space. A grimy, black-faced stoker leaped at me and I fired. I remember beating him over the head with my revolver and that we went down together ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... with close curling red hair and blue eyes—a kindly-looking lad. The strap of his sombrero had torn loose on one side, and except while he held it in his teeth it flapped about his chin. His face was sunburnt and grimy ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... I slept I do not know, but when I awoke the train was roaring through a tunnel. When again it flashed out into the open country I peered through the grimy, rain-stained window and saw that the storm had ceased and stars were twinkling in the sky. I stretched my legs, yawned, pushed my travelling-cap back from my forehead, and, stumbling to my feet, walked up and down the compartment until ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... of a foolish rule! It is the sweet babe that is defiled! Look, you have fouled its garments with your grimy hand and made it weep by pricking it with your beard. Would that your holy rule taught you how to handle children and to respect honest women who are their mothers, without whom there would ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... his eyes too sluggish; there was an unhealthy redness in his cheeks. In contrast to his wife's semi-formal dress, he was unkempt—unshaven and soiled. He wore spurred boots and a soft shirt; his nails were grimy. When in the city he contrived to garb himself immaculately; he was in fact something of a dandy; but at home he was a sloven, and openly reveled in a freedom of speech and a coarseness of manner that were sad trials to Alaire. His ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... three, was silent, but he climbed into Mary's lap, and, with a grimy finger, made watercourses down her cheeks for the tears ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... fine view could be had of tall grimy houses, and sooty roofs, with scarce a glint of sky between the chimney-stacks, and far down in the street below was the turmoil of city life; the roar and rush of it came echoing up even to that odd, peaceful little chamber. The man neither saw nor heard; as he stood there it ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... the idol draws from among the fortune tellers a stick or a piece of paper, from the figure on which he is supposed to tell whether his prayer will succeed, or the work he contemplates prove lucky. Entering the shrine, it is difficult to see for a few moments, so gloomy is the place and so grimy every object with the smoke of joss offerings from time immemorial. A kind of altar faces the worshippers, with a box of sand, in which are stuck the burning joss-sticks. Before this is a cushion, on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... proposed to see him. Seated just outside this evil-smelling dungeon—for the blockhouse, encased in huge sandbags, is full of dirt and ruins and has many smells—the feelings of this representative of the Chinese Government must have been charmingly mixed. Near by were grimy and work-worn men, in all manner of attire, with their rifles; in the dry canal alongside were rude structures of brick and overturned. Peking carts, line upon line, thrown down and heaped up to block the enemy's long-expected charges; and on all sides were such ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... creature since; so he despises the sheep as they run from their shearer, and calls out tauntingly, 'Cowardly, cowardly custard!' But when the man grips them between his legs David shakes a fist at him for using such big scissors. Another startling moment is when the man turns back the grimy wool from the sheep's shoulders and they look suddenly like ladies in the stalls of a theatre. The sheep are so frightened by the shearing that it makes them quite white and thin, and as soon as they are set free they begin to nibble the grass at once, ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... ball, plunged recklessly beneath the auto, emerging with the sphere in his grimy fist. West ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... influence the traveller's choice. Prague offers considerable variety in terraces suitable to every conceivable outlook on life. You may choose a terrace that looks out over the factory quarter of Prague, over grimy Smichov for instance, and make notes on the growing industrial prosperity of the city. You will probably be smoked out of your position, for a cheap and nasty variety of brown coal is used by local industries. If you belong to the eclectic you may be privileged ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... with a strong effort at self-mastery, some contempt of his weakness, and much remorse at his ungrateful envy. He gathered together the soiled manuscript and dingy proofs of his book, and thrust them through the grimy bars of his grate; then, opening his desk, he drew out a small packet, with tremulous fingers unfolding paper after paper, and gazed, with eyes still moistened, on the relics kept till then in the devotion of the only sentiment inspired ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not stop to shake the grimy hands which were thrust out to him. He pushed his way out of the crowd, and his ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... whose grey stubble fringes a weather-beaten and furrowed face with a grizzled moustache. He is smoking a grimy tchibouque in a contemplative fashion, as he stands on the outskirts of the chattering throng. To him approaches a second stalwart, lean man about the same age and appearance. He is also smoking a ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... Leaving Eastcheap and its grimy tenements, they emerged from New Fish Street and saw the gleam of the river ahead ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... pausing to question them, comes so naturally to a railroad man, that President Vanderveer himself now obeyed this grimy-faced young fireman as readily as though their positions had been reversed. With a quick movement he touched a button at one side of the car, and instantly a clear-voiced electric bell, in the cab of the locomotive that ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... the human touch. Their simple state of life and humble dress take nothing from their native courtesy. Behold yon sandalled and manta- (cheap calico) clad worker. He will never think of addressing us without taking off his grimy and battered hat, nor will he speak to his acquaintance or fellow worker save as "Don"—Don Tomas, Don Juan, or whatever it may be. His first salutation in the morning is always to ask how we have slept. Indeed this is a common ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... ever stop to think, when you see the grimy spattered desks of a public post-office, how many eager or puzzled human hearts have tried, in those dingy little ink-cups, to set themselves right with fortune? What blissful meetings have been appointed, what scribblings of pain and sorrow, out of those founts of ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Ross. "We've done our best," and he threw down the blackened bough and leaned against a tree, and covered his eyes with a grimy hand. ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... themselves at the docks, and saw the great ships ranging far and near, with their tapering masts pointing upwards to the cloudy sky. The Maid of Astolat lay close at hand, and as they went on board Dick appeared, his face black and grimy, but all aglow with a ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... she discovered that little John was the author of their grimy pilgrimages to our door. He was signalling every passing lorrie from the window in the Glasgow ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... have been to what it was. 'And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like me,' I mused. A few yards further on the engine-driver and stoker were busy with coal and grease. 'Five minutes hence, and our lives, and our correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,' I said to myself. Strange world, the world of the train de grand luxe! But a world of brothers! I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as the inhabitants of Torquay ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the pile of gravel, took the hat from his comrade, and the trickle from the brim of it splashed refreshingly upon his hot and grimy face when he tilted it to drink. It was shapeless, greasy, and thick with dust, and few men who fare daintily in the cities would have considered it a tempting cup. That, however, did not occur to Weston, but another thought flashed ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... charmingly shocking!" The honest poor go out to work; the wastrels stay at home and invent tales of woe; then, when the dusk falls on the foul court and all the sentimentalists have gone home to dinner, the woe-stricken tellers of harrowing tales creep out to the grimy little public-house at the top of the row; they spend the gifts of the sentimentalist; and, when the landlord draws out his brimming tills at midnight, he blesses the kind people who help to earn a snug income for him. I have seen forty-eight drunken people ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the lock was almost impassable; the landing-place being steep and high, and the launch at a long distance. Near a dozen grimy workmen lent us a hand. They refused any reward; and, what is much better, refused it handsomely, without conveying any sense of insult. "It is a way we have in our countryside," said they. And a very becoming way it is. In Scotland, where also you will get services for nothing, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... end of a towel and began wiping her face, grimy with blood and tears. She let him do it, just ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... drawing in a way that pleased his father mightily. The father loved this queer trick of caricature; he did not possess it himself, and so it seemed to him the most wonderful of all Hugh's little equipment of gifts. Mr. Britling used to carry these letters about until their edges got grimy; he would show them to any one he felt capable of appreciating their youthful freshness; he would quote them as final and conclusive evidence to establish this or that. He did not dream how many thousands of mothers and ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... tailored suit wrinkled and misshapen as the clothing of a tramp. She noted, too, that his movements were awkward and slow with the pain of overtaxed muscles, and that the stiff derby hat he had been forced to jam down almost to the tops of his ears had left a grimy red band across his forehead. She smiled as her eyes swept the dishevelled ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... two negroes were forced to spend the night between trains. Tump Pack piloted Peter Siner to a negro cafe where they could eat, and later they searched out a negro lodging-house on Gate Street where they could sleep. It was a grimy, smelly place, with its own odor spiked by a phosphate-reducing plant two blocks distant. The paper on the wall of the room Peter slept in looked scrofulous. There was no window, and Peter's four-years regime of open windows and fresh- air ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... feet now, hand on the throttle lever, although it was open as wide as it could be pulled. The fireman was throwing coal into the furnace, looking round over his shoulder now and then at the persistent horseman who would not be outrun, his eyes white in his grimy face. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... and helpless, it was not indifferent; and I shall never forget the haggard faces that turned by one impulse, where a dozen grimy ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... hill were falling in upon us. Little cars stood upon the track partly filled with coal, and mules were hitched to them. The forms of these animals loomed large and dark in the dim light: they seemed like some monsters of a previous geologic age. The men themselves, blackened with coal and grimy with powder-smoke, might have seemed like gnomes or trolls had we not seen their homes in the plain, familiar sunlight above, and known that they were working for daily bread for themselves and families. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... had gone out for good now, but there was plenty of chance to see even in that grimy, smoke-filled place, by the fitful glare of the flames that were reaching out and licking up the seats and the tawdry decorations now. And he had not very far to go before he found what he was looking for—the body of a little girl who had fallen and been overcome by the smoke. He picked her up ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... several smaller lumps. We could not make him out. Neither his appearance nor his personal equipment suggested necessity; and yet he laboured as hard as the rest of us. His gaudy costume was splashed and grimy with the red mud, although evidently he had made some attempt to brush it. The linen was, of course, hopeless. He showed us the blisters on his small ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... Club, and for him the swishing of the palm branches had been transformed into the long-drawn hum of Pall Mall. So the spirits went their several ways, wandering back along strange, untraced tracks of the memory, while the weary, grimy bodies lay senseless under the palm-trees in the Oasis ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... native lane. I fancied that they took but a doubtful pleasure, being half affrighted at the wide, empty space overhead and round about them, finding the air too little medicated with smoke, soot, and graveyard exhalations, to be breathed with comfort, and feeling shelterless and lost because grimy London, their slatternly and disreputable mother, had suffered them to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... their progress farther on, then Wisconsin infantry, young giants in blue, swinging forward in their long loose-limbered stride; then an interminable column of artillery, jolting slowly along, the grimy gunners swaying drowsily on their seats, officers nodding ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... the Soldier's interest," asserted Polychrome, dancing around the grimy workshop until her draperies formed a cloud around her dainty form. "For sentimental reasons a man might like to see his old head once more, just as one likes to ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... works as you, uncanny Phantom, wist!... Whose is that towering form That tears across the mist To where the shocks are sorest?—his with arm Outstretched, and grimy face, and bloodshot eye, Like one who, having ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... entered the great dining-room he saw once more his coveted picture, the image of the morning, the tall young girl with the brown ruff of hair rolling back from the smooth brow, above the clear-seeing dark eyes. Here again, by miracle, had come his friend, to meet him in the smother of the grimy way of life! Yet he thought the girl looked at him but coldly as he stood wearily apart. He felt himself unaccredited, a man of no station. Again there swept over him the feeling of his own insufficiency, his own failure of all life's things worth having. ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... the decree of silence. The day wore on to noon, and in the unbroken stillness the boys ventured out of the grimy tree and lay at full length on the turf. The great redwoods towered in endless corridors, their straight columns unbroken by branch or twig for a hundred and fifty feet. Through the green close arbours above came an ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... the closet's interior revealed only a more or less orderly array of hanging raincoats and aprons and overalls. Then, all three of the onlooking humans focused their eyes upon a pair of splayed and grimy bare feet which protruded beneath a somewhat bulging raincoat ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... librarians must live is at least as obvious in their case as in that of any other class. They must also, if they are to be of any use, be educated. In 1878 the late Mr. Robert Harrison, who for many years led a grimy life in the London Library, advocated L250 as a minimum annual salary for a competent librarian. But, as Mr. Ogle, of Bootle, pertinently asked at the Conference, 'Are his views yet accepted?' We fear not. Mr. ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... suggestion to the artist that he shall do with his art something different from that which he has himself chosen to do. It is, or should be, sufficient that Le Cousin Pons is a very agreeable book, more pathetic if less "grimy," than its companion, full of its author's idiosyncracy, and characteristic of his genius. It may not be uninteresting to add that Le Cousin Pons was originally called Le Deux Musiciens, or Le Parasite, and that the change, which is a great improvement, was due to the instances ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... stanchions as the car trundled across the State Street bridge, disappeared under fleets of tugs, of lake steamers, of lumber barges from Sheboygan and Mackinac, of grain boats from Duluth, of coal scows that filled the air with impalpable dust, of cumbersome schooners laden with produce, of grimy rowboats dodging the prows and paddles of the larger craft, while on all sides, blocking the horizon, red in color and designated by Brobdignag letters, towered the hump-shouldered ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... minutes under her stubby fingers. Then the clicking ceased with sudden abruptness, and she prodded the mechanism viciously with a hairpin. As this appeared unavailing she used her forefinger, and when at length the carriage slid along the rod with a clash there was a smear of grimy oil upon her cheek and her somewhat tilted nose. The machine, however, gave no further trouble, and she endeavoured to make up some, at least, of the time she had spent at the concert. It was necessary that it should ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... material progress and keep every furnace at full blast, it would come face to face with a serious problem. By whom would the product be enjoyed? By those who created it? What sort of pleasures, arts, and sciences would those grimy workmen have time and energy for after a day of hot and unremitting exertion? What sort of religion would fill their Sabbaths and their dreams? We see how they spend their leisure to-day, when a strong aristocratic ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... place. It isn't that the floor is not scoured, for you cannot scour dry mud into anything but wet mud. It isn't that the chairs and tables look filthy, for there are none. It isn't that the pots, and plates, and pans don't shine, for you see none to shine. All you see is a grimy, black ceiling, an uneven clay floor, a small darkened window, one or two unearthly-looking recesses, a heap of potatoes in the corner, a pile of turf against the wall, two pigs and a dog under the single dresser, three or four chickens on the window-sill, an old ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... in a narrow, dark street with high houses on either side. A grimy lamp with the word "Hotel" in half-obliterated characters painted on it hung above my head, announcing that I had arrived at my destination. As I paid off the cabman another cab passed. It was apparently the one with which my ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... him in his coach to the Vatican; and up a private stair to a luxurious little room, with a great oriel window. Here were inkstands, sloping frames for writing on, and all the instruments of art. The cardinal whispered a courtier, and presently the Pope's private secretary appeared with a glorious grimy old MS. of Plutarch's Lives. And soon Gerard was seated alone copying it, awe-struck, yet half delighted at the thought that his holiness would handle ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... is amazed and terrified, A hideous procession sordid and grimy Of men and boys, slaves of the coal-pit, Is seen on ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... built in the Spanish style,—a massive, dark, grim, huge, four-sided block, the fissure-like windows of its cells looking down into the four public streets which ran immediately under its walls. Dilapidation had followed hard behind ill-building contractors. Down its frowning masonry ran grimy streaks of leakage over peeling stucco and mould-covered brick. Weeds bloomed high aloft in the broken gutters under the scant and ragged eaves. Here and there the pale, debauched face of a prisoner peered shamelessly down through ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... other two. One was her husband, Spanish and dark too, but with a different sort of darkness; a skeleton of a man with a bony ghastly face, in old frayed workman's clothes and dust-covered boots; his hands very grimy. And the third person was their daughter, as they called her, a girl of fifteen with a clear white and pink skin, regular features, beautiful grey eyes and light brown hair. A perfect type of a nice looking English girl such as one finds in any village, in almost any cottage, in the ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson |
