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Hovel   Listen
noun
Hovel  n.  
1.
An open shed for sheltering cattle, or protecting produce, etc., from the weather.
2.
A poor cottage; a small, mean house; a hut.
3.
(Porcelain Manuf.) A large conical brick structure around which the firing kilns are grouped.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hovel" Quotes from Famous Books



... thunder—"but I have not yet done. Harry of England! your career shall be stained in blood. Your wrath shall descend upon the heads of those who love you, and your love shall be fatal. Better Anne Boleyn fled this castle, and sought shelter in the lowliest hovel in the land, than become your spouse. For you will slay her—and not her alone. Another shall fall by your hand; and so, if you had your ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... with a grin. "This is life as I understand it. The question is a simple one and may be put in different ways. How can a wretched, unwashed beggar, with not a penny in his pocket, make a fortune in twenty-four hours without setting foot outside his hovel? How can a general, with no soldiers and no ammunition left, win a battle which he has lost? In short, how shall I, Arsene Lupin, manage to be present to-morrow evening at the meeting which will be held on the Boulevard Suchet and to behave in such ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc

... breath and muscle. Now and then he slaked his thirst at a stone fountain by the wayside, not without reverencing the blue-hooded Madonna painted over it. A few lean, brown peasants, bending under faggots, and one or two carts, passed us before we gained the top, and half-way up there was a hovel where drink could be bought; but with these exceptions nothing broke the loneliness of the long, wild ascent. My man was not talkative, but answered inquiries civilly; only on one subject was he very curt—that of the two wooden crosses which we passed just before ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... was conveyed to London at the beginning of October, and lingered between life and death till January 12, 1619. Probably he expired in the Tower, though Francis Osborn, who had been master of the horse to Lord Pembroke, was told by Pembroke that he died half starved in the hovel of an old laundress in the Minories. The statement of his poverty is in conflict with the fact mentioned by Ralegh in the Prerogative of Parliaments, that the Crown allowed him L500 a year till his death for his maintenance. An explanation ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... title. Curious to see one who owns all the coal in two counties proudly signing for his sou a day; or another, who lives in a Fifth Avenue palace, contentedly sleeping on the straw-strewn floor of a hovel. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service

... opposite to a toilet of massive gold, and negligently robed in his dressing-gown, sate Reginald Glanville:—"Good Heavens," thought I, as I approached him, "can this be the man who made his residence par choix, in a miserable hovel, exposed to all the damps, winds, and vapours, that the prolific generosity of an English ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... has (O the partial lover! you will cry) the finest "wood note wild" I ever heard. I am the more particular in this lady's character, as I know she will henceforth have the honour of a share in your best wishes. She is still at Mauchline, as I am building my house; for this hovel that I shelter in, while occasionally here, is pervious to every blast that blows, and every shower that falls; and I am only preserved from being chilled to death, by being suffocated with smoke. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... convenient. It is used for fuel. There is no timber of any consequence in Palestine—none at all to waste upon fires—and neither are there any mines of coal. If my description has been intelligible, you will perceive, now, that a square, flat-roofed hovel, neatly frescoed, with its wall-tops gallantly bastioned and turreted with dried camel-refuse, gives to a landscape a feature that is exceedingly festive and picturesque, especially if one is careful to remember to stick in a cat wherever, about the premises, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... band, who have gone to Spinazzola to play at some marriage festival. He is feverish, or possibly subject to fits—to choriasis or who knows what disorder of the nervous system. A cruel trick, to leave a suffering youngster alone in this foul hovel." I mis-liked his symptoms—that anguished complexion and delirious intermittent trembling, and began to run over the scanty stock of household remedies contained in my bag, wondering which of them might apply to his complaint. There was court plaster and boot polish, quinine, corrosive sublimate ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... cleared farm, five miles from home. But cattle-tracks were discovered in dense fir woods near a large brook during the following morning; and after following them for two hours we came upon the whole herd, snugly sheltered in the ox hovel of a deserted lumber-camp. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... Through the long day a desperate duel was maintained between the two lines of riflemen. Colonel Cuningham and Major Stubbs were killed while endeavouring to recover the ground which had been lost. Hovel and Bartholomew continued to encourage their men, and the British fire became so deadly that that of the Boers was dominated. Under the direction of Hacket Pain, who commanded the nearest post, guns of J battery ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... chief officers, the husbandmen his soldiers. All that is to be feared is that the younger son may assassinate or poison the Salian lord his elder brother, in order to become in his turn the master of the hovel; but these cases are rare, because nature has so combined our instincts and our passions that we have more horror of assassinating our elder brother than we have of being envious of his position. But this law, suitable for the owners of dungeons in Chilperic's time is ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... forthwith to call out loudly for any one who had a lanthorn. Now, it chanced that an old man sleeping in a hovel on a pallet of straw was, awakened by these cries. When he heard that it was the Prince of Felicitas himself, he came hastily, carrying his lanthorn, and stood trembling beside the Prince's horse. It was so dark that the Prince could not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... Martyn got rest on damp ground in a hovel, his eyes and forehead feeling as though a great fire burnt in them. "I was almost frantic," he wrote. Martyn was, in fact, dying; yet Hassan compelled him to ride a hundred and seventy miles of mountain track to Tokat. Here, on October ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews

... as Lewis had never seen. Here were no endless sands and thorn-trees, no lonely reaches, no tropic glare. All was river and wooded glade, harvest and harvesters, spires above knotted groups of houses, castle, and hovel. Here and there and everywhere, still spirals of smoke hung above the abodes of men. It was like a vision of peace and ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... gold may buy? Doth lucre thy bright wing Unfold to hover over human hearts? Oh, no! Thy presence to our soul imparts A sweeter joy than selfishness can give, Thou givest love that thou mayst love receive; Nor asking aught of wealth, of rank, or fame. True love in palace, hovel, is the same Sweet joy, the holiest of sacred things. For this we worship Ishtar, for she brings Us happiness, when we ourselves forget In the dear arms we love; no coronet Of power, or countless gold, or rank, or fame, Or aught that life can give, or tongue can name, Can reach the heart ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... "Visions of the Real", come some sketches in the master's best style, of things seen "in the mind's eye," as Hamlet says. Among them "The Hovel" will attract attention. This sketch resembles a page from EDGAR POE, although it was written long before POE's works were ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... sad-coloured, and monotonous, fissured in every direction by channels of dark-tinted water, in which the very fish take the same sad colour. This tract is almost without trace of habitation, save where, at distant intervals, utter destitution has raised a mud-hovel, undistinguishable from the hillocks ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... Wagner sat bowed over his miserably scanty fire, dreaming of pleasure, youth, riches, and enjoyment; converting, in imagination, the myriad sparks which shone upon the extinguishing embers into piles of gold, and allowing his now uncurbed fancy to change the one single room of the wretched hovel into a splendid saloon, surrounded by resplendent mirrors and costly hangings, while the untasted fare for the stranger on the rude fir-table, became transformed, in his idea, into a magnificent banquet laid out, on a board glittering with plate, lustrous with innumerable lamps, and surrounded ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... right and left, and allowed Frank and his companions to depart, unmolested. They accompanied Lee almost to the miserable hovel he called "home," and, when about to bid him good-night, ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon

... between them and the stream, rose a miserable group of houses, huddled together as though their bulging walls and rotten roofs could only maintain themselves at all by the help and support which each wretched hovel gave to its neighbour. The mud walls were stained with yellow patches of lichen, the palings round the little gardens were broken and ruinous. Close beside them all was a sort of open drain or water-course, stagnant and noisome, which dribbled into the river a little above the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... thither in utter bewilderment, my ear caught a sound as of one hewing timber; I rode for it, and soon found that the hovel I had passed thrice was the desired homestead; truly, it was fitting that the possible descendant of the king-maker should reveal himself by ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... and the prettiest pair of ankles in Andalusia!" Oh! that Alcalde's daughter brings your heart into your mouth; she tantalizes you so horribly, that you long to spring upon the stage and offer her your thatched hovel and your heart, or thirty thousand livres per annum and your pen. The Andalusian is the loveliest actress in Paris. Coralie, for she must be called by her real name, can be a countess or a grisette, and in which part she would be more charming one cannot tell. She can be anything that she chooses; ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... heavy taxation of his estate during life: yearly this oppressed old man paid thousands of pounds to the Government. It was poor encouragement to shoulder and elbow your way from a hovel to a mansion! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... some twelve thousand years to neolithic man. Squatting in his rude hovel or gloomy cave, he listens to the sounds of a storm without. The howling of the wind, the flashes of lightning, and crashing of thunder give rise to that elemental emotion—fear. Fear was always with him, as he thought of the huge stones that ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... illustration more impressive than in Abraham Lincoln, whose life, career, and death might be chanted by a Greek chorus as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial theme of modern times? Born as lowly as the Son of God, in a hovel; of what real parentage we know not; reared in penury, squalor, with no gleam of light, nor fair surrounding; a young manhood vexed by weird dreams and visions; with scarcely a natural grace; singularly awkward, ungainly even ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... provide a home for his children. On his return, at Belle Prairie, Minnesota, midway between St. Paul and St. Joe, he met Mr. Spencer and his three motherless children, journeying four hundred miles by ox-cart to St. Paul. There in the rude hovel in which they spent the night, Mr. Barnard baptized Mr. Spencer's infant son, now an honored minister of the Congregational church in Wisconsin. On his arrival at St. Joe Mr. Barnard found another mound close by the grave ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell

... she stood hung a print of Lear—the hovel on the heath, the storm-bent trees, the figure of the old man, the shivering Fool with his "Poor Tom's a-cold." Beside her, fastened to the wall, was a letter-box with a glass front full of letters and picture-cards waiting ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... another small sign, designating it as the highest inhabitable house in England. It is a chill and desolate place for a residence. They keep a visitor's book here, and we recorded our names in it, and were not too sorry to leave the mean little hovel, smelling as it did of tobacco-smoke, and possessing all other characteristics of the humblest alehouse on the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... help from her father. Then set in a period of bitter poverty for the young pair. Akiba's heart was rent with pain to see his young wife, who had been accustomed from earliest youth to a home of luxury, pass her days in a miserable hovel, with the barest necessities and sometimes even lacking bread to eat. In winter they slept on a pallet and Akiba would pick the straws out of her wonderfully long and beautiful hair. She was beautiful even in her rags ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... Other great religious teachers—some of them very great indeed—have thought and taught contemptuously of our animal nature. "He spake of the temple of His body." That is sublime! That is the whole secret. And that is why vice is horrible: because it is the desecration, not of a hovel or a shop, of a marketplace or a place of business: but ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... everything good with money' is one which the average foreigner is apt to attribute especially to the average Britisher, and it does not raise Faust in one's estimation. I suppose he thinks he is doing the poor old couple a blessing in disguise by ejecting them out of their wretched hovel and presenting them with a sum of money of perhaps ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... meet Louise Verte, wandering about. She has gone crazy. She continues to accost men, but they do not even know what she begs for. She rambles, in the streets, and in her hovel, and on the pallet where she is crucified by drunkards. She is surrounded by general loathing. "That a woman?" says a virtuous man who is going by, "that dirty old strumpet? A woman? A sewer, yes." She is harmless. In a feeble, peaceful voice, which seems to live in some supernatural region, ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... will to think it," replied Everard; "but let me not leave you to the shelter of this wretched hovel. The night is drawing to storm—let me but conduct you to the Lodge, and expel those intruders, who can, as yet at least, have no warrant for what they do. I will not linger a moment behind them, save ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... the sound of his name into all lands throughout all the world. Every form of human sorrow, doubt, struggle, error, sin—the nun agonising in the cloister; the settler struggling for his life in Transatlantic forests; the pauper shivering over the embers in his hovel and waiting for kind death; the man of business striving to keep his honour pure amid the temptations of commerce; the prodigal son starving in the far country and recollecting the words which he learnt long ago at his mother's knee; the peasant boy trudging ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley

... miserable little hovel, built on the edge of a wide and desolate common, lived a poor widow woman, who had two sons. The eldest of them was quite young, and the least was scarcely more than an infant. They were dressed in torn and ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce

... increasing in poverty, and ran into debt on account of her daughter's virginity, as an alchemist will for the crucible in which his all is cast. As soon as his plans were arranged and perfect, one rainy day the said lord of Valennes by a mere chance came into the hovel of the two spinners, and in order to dry himself sent for some fagots to Plessis, close by. While waiting for them, he sat on a stool between the two poor women. By means of the grey shadows and half light of the cabin, he saw the sweet countenance of the maid ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... narrow-windowed and narrow-doored abode in which we now have to pass our days, and that large house, with broad windows that take in a mightier sweep and new senses that have relation with new qualities in the world then around us. Therefore let us, whilst we grope in the dark here, and live in a narrow hovel in a back street, look forward to the time when we shall dwell on the sunny heights in the great pavilion which God prepares for them ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... turn seldom upon the main point at issue between the parties; it may not even once be mentioned, while some new trifle is fought over with all the bitterness of the alienation that lies gnawing and biting and burning beneath. War is raging between kingdoms for the possession of a hovel, which possessed, the quarrel were ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... Reverend John Broad was certainly not of the Revival type. He was a big, gross-feeding, heavy person, with heavy ox-face and large mouth, who might have been bad enough for anything if nature had ordained that he should have been born in a hovel at Sheepgate or in the Black Country. As it happened, his father was a woollen draper, and John was brought up to the trade as a youth; got tired of it, thought he might do something more respectable; went to a Dissenting College; ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... ruffler, who found his representative in a very magnificently equipped, and by no means ill-favored knave, whose chin was decorated with a beard as lengthy and as black as Sultan Mahmoud's, together with the dexterous hooker, issued forth from the hovel which they termed their boozing ken, eager to catch a glimpse of the prince of the high-tobygloaks. The limping palliard tore the bandages from his mock wounds, shouldered his crutch, and trudged hastily after them. The whip-jack unbuckled his strap, threw away his timber leg, and "leapt exulting, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... not become yet more crying, when the laws decree the most cruel tortures for crimes to which the most irrational customs gave birth—which bad institutions engender—which evil examples multiply? Is not this something like building a sorry, inconvenient hovel, and then punishing the inhabitant, because he does not find all the conveniences of the most complete mansion, of the most finished structure? Man, as at cannot be too frequently repeated, is so prone to evil, only because every thing appears to urge him on to the commission of it, by too ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... the Banshee, a sad, Cassandra-like spirit, shrieked her weird warning in advance of death, but with a prejudice eminently Milesian, watched only over those of pure blood, whether their fortunes abode in hovel or hall. The more modern and grotesque personages of the Fairy world are sufficiently known ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... must be remembered that in the last few hours our situation had greatly changed. I had left a dark and dirty hovel for a cushioned couch upon a breezy deck. In the tiny cabin which had been placed at my disposal, I had, with Barbara's aid, rearranged my tangled locks and my disordered clothing; so that I was no longer ashamed of my untidy appearance. With my outward transformation there had come a reaction ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock

... Qatim gathered up the broken body of the woman from the filth of the gutter and carried her to his hovel and flung her upon the filthy straw under which he hid the ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest

... The general air of neglect and squalor surrounding it proclaimed that the habits of the miser had been too firmly grounded to be easily disturbed, and that the man remained the same, whether in the castle or the hovel. ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton

... his little uncle in a difficulty. He poured out some of his irritation on the Prefect's pet gendarme, whom he caught stealing round by the wood where, hidden behind a pile of logs in an old stone hovel, the four Royalist gentlemen were finding this official visit considerably more than ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price

... as they appeared at the door, I joined them; but on striking out a few yards into the moor, we found the maniac already in the custody of two men, who had seized and were dragging her towards her cottage, a miserable hovel, about half a mile away. She never once spoke to us, but continued singing, though in a lower and more subdued tone of voice than before, a Gaelic song. We reached her hut, and, making use of her own light, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... even by the big-wigs of modern Parnassus. They threw themselves upon the poor man's field and coined glory from his humble treasure. There are ballads scribbled under a penthouse at the street corner on a cold day by the Bohemian rhapsodist, stanzas improvised in the hovel in which the "belle qui fut haultmire" loosened her gilt girdle to all comers, which now-a-days metamorphosed into dainty gallantries scented with musk and amber, figure in the armorial bearing enriched album of some ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... detachments of bashi-bazouks raiding in the country we passed through, who looked at us with eyes of fire, and muttered in no doubtful language, interpreted by my colleague of "Le Temps," who knew Turkish, what they would be glad to do with us. As we sat eating our lunch in the shelter of a hovel by the roadside, while the horses were baiting, a party of the fanatics watched us with growing malignity and a truculent interchange of sentiments of an evidently unfriendly nature. To puzzle them as to our status, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman

... with a bundle of personal goods on her lap, and doubtless the letter in her bosom, sat impressed and subdued, opposite to her in the shifting universe of the cab, which was moving away from the empty and silent home. Florrie was being thrown back out of luxury into her original hovel, and was accepting the stroke with the fatalism of the young and of the poor. And one day Hilda and her mother and Florrie would be united again in the home now deserted, whose heavy key was in the traveller's satchel.... But ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... only realize how the laws which they have no voice in making and no power to change affect them at every point, how they enter every door, whether palace or hovel, touch, limit, and bind, every article and inmate from the smallest child up, no woman, however shrinking and delicate, can escape it, they would get beyond the meaningless cry, "I have all the rights I want." Do these women know ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.

... Pineta, quitting the city, not by the Porta Nueva, but by the next gate towards the south. He must have reached the forest before Ludovico and Bianca had left the city. He put his steaming horse into the abandoned hovel of a watcher of the cattle on the marshes; and then skulked about the edge of the wood in the vicinity of the road which enters it from the city. All this time he had, as he again and again declared in the long and repetitive document in the lawyer's hands, no formed intention ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... vigilance of the guards prevented the execution of the plan which had been laid; but one afternoon, under pretence of hawking, Charles escaped[a] from Perth, and riding forty-two miles, passed the night in a miserable hovel, called Clova, la the braes of Angus. At break of day he was overtaken by Colonel Montgomery, who advised him[b] to return, while the Viscount Dudhope urged him to proceed to the mountains, where he would be joined by seven thousand armed men. Charles ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc

... and fish of the sea, juices and spices and flavors, all bring their contributions to the perfection of the human animal, and the harmony of its functions. The sailor, kept too long upon his hard biscuit and salt junk, degenerates into scurvy. The occupant of the Irish hovel who lives upon his favorite root, and sees neither bread nor meat, grows up with weak eyes, an ugly face, and a stunted body. It is precisely thus with a man who occupies and feeds his mind with a single idea. He grows mean and small and diseased with the diet. The soul bears relation ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... still persisting in his entreaties that the king would not stay out in the open air, at last persuaded him to enter a little wretched hovel which stood upon the heath, where the fool first entering, suddenly ran back terrified, saying that he had seen a spirit. But upon examination this spirit proved to be nothing more than a poor Bedlam beggar, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... their impurity, and they presented the blood as their expiation. In so far, their act was an act of confession, deprecation, and faith. It accepted the divinely appointed means of safety. The consequence was exemption from the fatal stroke, which fell on all homes from the palace to the slaves' hovel, where that red streak was not found. If any son of Abraham had despised the provision for safety, he would have been ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... Madge had arranged herself for repose on the straw; but still in a half-sitting posture, with her back resting against the door of the hovel, which, as it opened inwards, was in this manner kept shut by ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... revelling in this chance of getting the instruction in Italian that she wanted. And as for the singing lessons, their value, she declared vehemently, was beyond price to her. Any time during the last two years she would, she said, have gladly lived in a hovel, fared on bread and water, and gone barefoot and in rags for ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler

... occur: it puts on no disguise, it comes on the appointed day and rudely lays its hand on his shoulder. The garret and the hut, as well as the farm and the farmhouse know the collector, the constable and the bailiff; no hovel escapes the detestable brood. The people sow, harvest their crops, work and undergo privation for their benefit; and, should the pennies so painfully saved each week amount, at the end of the year to a piece of silver, the mouth of their ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... better satisfied with his lot than either of us. I am raised so high that I can see how much more there is or might be beyond. I feel like one led into a splendid vestibule, only to find that the palace is wanting, or that it is a mean hovel. All that I have only mocks me, and becomes a means of torture. All that I am and have ought to be, might be, a mere prelude, an earnest and a preparation for something better beyond. But I am told, and must believe, that this is all, and I may lose this in a moment and forever. It is as ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... waters of Marah. The room in which I was born constituted our whole hut, which was black as a charred log within and without, and never saw the sunlight save through rents in the paper which covered the crossed stripes of pine that formed the windows. In winter, when the stove heated the hovel to suffocation, and the wind and rain drove back the smoke through the hole in the roof that served for chimney, the air was almost as noxious to its human inhabitants as the smoke to the vermin in the half-washed garments that hung across poles. We sat at ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... something for her little daughter, even seemed grieved that I should think it possible. I forgot to mention that while the blacksmith was repairing the car, we walked to the slate-quarry, where we saw again some of the kind creatures who had helped us in our difficulties the night before. The hovel under which they split their slates stood upon an out-jutting rock, a part of the quarry rising immediately out of the water, and commanded a fine prospect down the loch below Ballachulish, and upwards towards the grand ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth

... population that throngs the streets, the extremes of Wealth and the extremes of Poverty meet, as they meet nowhere else. In the streets themselves, the glory and the shame of architecture—the mansion and the hovel—are neighbors in situation, as they are neighbors nowhere else. London, in its social aspect, is the city ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins

... sing that at Della Scala, remember the poor devil who taught it to you in a hovel. Soaked as those old walls are with music from the most famous lips the world ever applauded, they hold no echoes sweeter than that last trill. After all, there is no passion—no pathos—comparable to a perfect contralto crescendo. It is wonderful how you Americans squander voices that ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... impediment existed. When all his little plans for her comfort had been carried into execution, he took the opportunity one day of dropping in, as if accidentally, to speak to her. By degrees he led the subject to her changed condition in life—the alteration from a cold, damp, smoky hovel, to a warm, clean, slated house—the cheerful garden before the door that replaced the mud-heap and the duck-pool—and all the other happy changes which a few weeks had effected. And he then asked, did she not feel grateful to ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... narrow, and the enthusiastic fellow was not able to crawl in; it was very lucky for him, for there is nothing more repulsive than that accumulation of things living and dead, seal flesh or Esquimaux flesh, rotten fish and infectious wearing apparel, which constitute a Greenland hovel; no window to revive the unbreathable air, only a hole at the top of the hut, which gives free passage to the smoke, but does not allow the stench to ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... died of hunger here also. He told us that their vicar, his reverence Johannes Lampius, [Footnote: The present parish archives contain several short and incomplete notices of his sufferings during these dreadful wars.] had had his house burnt down by the Imperialists, and was lying in a hovel near the church. I sent him my greeting, desiring that he would soon come to visit me (which the fellow promised he would take care to deliver to him), for the reverend Johannes is a pious and learned ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... there, peeping round one of the walls, was a ragged hungry looking infant about eight years of age. We made towards him, but he fled, and picking our way over the ruins we actually found a family in residence in a miserable hovel behind the onetime Hotel de Ville. There was an old couple, man and wife, and a flock of ragged children, the remnants of different families which had been wiped out. They only spoke Flemish and I brought out the few sentences I knew, whereupon the old dame ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp

... tax, which has no bearing on the taxpayer without any property; and the other, the personal tax, which does affect him, but lightly: calculated on the rate of rent, it is insignificant on an attic, furnished lodging, hut or any other hovel belonging to a laborer or peasant; again, when very poor or indigent, if the octroi is burdensome, the exchequer sooner or later relieves them; add to this the poll-tax which takes from them 1 franc and a half up to 4.50 francs per annum, also a very small tax on doors and windows, say 60 centimes ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... last man to represent as naturally opposite those whom God has always, even to the end of the world, made mutually dependent. He told the simple truth to each with equal frankness; helped both with equal readiness. The palace owed him no more than the hovel suggested thoughts of superiority. Nothing human, however grand, or however degraded, was a stranger to him. In the light that came to him from heaven, all stood alike children of the Great Father; earthly distinction disappearing the moment the sinking soul or the suffering body was in question. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... that he must steal it or expect to be thrashed before six o'clock. Near them a vast kiln of ware in process of firing showed a white flaming glow at each of its mouths in the black winter darkness. Darius's mentor crept up to the archway of the great hovel which protected the kiln, and pointed like a conspirator to the figure of the guardian fireman dozing near his monster. The boy had the handle-less remains of an old spade, and with it he crept into the hovel, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... the boy. "Didn't you tell me yourself that Waller R. A. wouldn't look at the cottage without the tree? What's to prevent the old woman living on where she is? Do you think there'll be a rush of new tenants for that precious old hovel? Go on! You know better ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... hovel without a chimney by the wayside, we called "bur-r-r" to the pony, which, like all good Scandinavian horses, immediately drew up, and, throwing down the knotted blue cotton reins, we hopped out, our student ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... aristocracy, grace and dignity of manner, selfrespect, and that noble sensibility which makes dishonour more terrible than death. A gentleman of this sort, whose clothes were begrimed with the accumulated filth of years, and whose hovel smelt worse than an English hogstye, would often do the honours of that hovel with a lofty courtesy worthy of the splendid circle of Versailles. Though he had as little booklearning as the most stupid ploughboys of England, it would have been a great ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... household, Mrs. Gardner said she would show us a really poor one. We followed her through a network of lanes more evil-smelling than anything I ever imagined—London can't compete with Calcutta in the way of odours—until we reached a little hovel with nothing in it but a string-bed, a few cooking-pots, and two women. Caste, it seems, has nothing to do with money, and these women, though as poor as it is possible to be, were thrice-born Brahmins, and received us with the most gracious, charming manners, ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... others to fight, and for today take care of your own hide!' But then, that word Francais! murmured within me, and I pressed forward to help my comrades. At other times, when, irritated by hunger, cold, and wounds, I have arrived at the hovel of some Meinherr, I have been seized by an itching to break the master's back, and to burn his hut; but I whispered to myself, Francais! and this name would not rhyme with either incendiary or murderer. I have, in this way, passed through kingdoms from east to west, and from north ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre

... by the richest at Newport, as to judge of the abodes of Romans in the time of Nero by the examples which appeal so strongly to the novelist or the romancing historian. Suffice it that beside the modest and frugal homes, the tenement flat, and the hovel, there were houses distinguished by immense luxury; and, since Romans have at all times sought the ostentatious and grandiose, perhaps such dwellings were larger and more pretentious in proportion to wealth than they are in most civilised countries at ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... place I stay in be no hovel," said the King of the Cats. "I shall refuse to go into a house where there are washing days—damp clothes before a ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum

... very little fear that they would be found, yet she was determined to get away somehow from this hovel. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... of upsurging joy. A similar religious exaltation marks other pictures by this master. At some time he appears to have been commissioned to illustrate the tale of Sudama the poor Brahman whose tattered hovel is changed by Krishna into a golden palace. He was evidently assisted by a weaker painter but in the pictures which are clearly his own work, the same quality of lyrical incantation appears. As Sudama journeys to Dwarka Krishna's golden city, his ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer

... had ripped away two masks, and their erstwhile wearers could no longer hold their old semblance of law-abiding philanthropists. Jesse Purvy's home was the show place of the country side. To the traveler's eye, which had grown accustomed to hovel life and squalor, it offered a reminder of the richer Bluegrass. Its walls were weather-boarded and painted, and its roof two stories high. Commodious verandahs looked out over pleasant orchards, and in the same enclosure stood the two frame ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... importance as compared with food. The people themselves are comparatively speaking indifferent to it. The "bitter cry" of India if put into words would consist simply of "Give us food to fill our stomachs. This is all we ask. As for shelter, we are content with any hovel, or willing to betake ourselves to the open air. But food ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... merely laughed at her request. It made Enoch grit his teeth in rage, and pulling open the door of the stable he quickly entered and flung the captain's saddle upon the horse. Buckling the girth tightly he backed the steed out of the hovel and was astride it before the enemy ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster

... law. Of course, in these villages there are cottages which have been built expressly for the use of labouring men, and these, like those in the open country, may be divided into three classes—the hovel, the cottage proper, and ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies

... not live alway; I ask not to stay, Where I must bear the burden and heat of the day: Where my body is cut with the lash or the cord, And a hovel and hunger are all ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark

... portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion, a few years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not represented), a mirror, and a selection of dried grasses. A large book was laid religiously on the table—"From Palace to Hovel," I believe, its name—full of the raciest experiences in England. The author had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that traveller had ill requited his reception. His book, in short, was a capital instance ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... will forget, each line the result of a reverie, each word the subject of long cogitation, while the most unbridled passion known to man feels the necessity of the most reserved utterance, and like a giant stooping to enter a hovel, speaks humbly and low, so as not ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... wind and the irregularities of the ground made us stumble at every step. The rain lashed us in the face and extorted from time to time sad lamentations from the children. But, for all that, we were in a few minutes at the door of the hovel. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... There is a single hovel at Tishialuk, occupied by two brothers—John and Sam Cove—and their sister. Their only food was flour, and a limited quantity of that. Even tea and molasses, usually found amongst the "livyeres" (live-heres) of the coast, were lacking. Sam was only too glad of the opportunity ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... my lads, I prosper, I guard the hovel, too, Thatched, as you see, by willows and reeds and grass that grew In all the marsh about it; hence me, mere stump of oak, Shaped by the farmer's hatchet, they now as god invoke. They bring me gifts devoutly, the master and his boy, Supposing me the giver of the blessings ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... the hills. Scofield's two rivals occasionally got astray with her in the perplexing wood-roads, but he never succeeded in securing such good-fortune. On this occasion, as they approached a woodchopper's cottage (or rather, hovel), there were sounds of acute distress within—the piercing cries of a child evidently in great pain. There was a moment of hesitancy in the party, and then Miss Madison's graceful indifference vanished utterly. As she ran hastily to the cabin, Scofield felt that now probably was ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... said Spenser; "it is not so far off from any one of us. Wherever is love and loyalty, great purposes, and lofty souls, even though in a hovel or ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... the particulars of the starveling's wrangling with rats for prizes in the sewers; or his crawling into an abandoned doorless house in St. Giles', where his hosts were three dead men, one pendant; into another of an alley nigh Houndsditch, where the crazy hovel, in phosphoric rottenness, fell sparkling on him one pitchy midnight, and he received that injury, which, excluding activity for no small part of the future, was an added cause of his prolongation of exile, besides not leaving his faculties unaffected by the concussion ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... rule; to nourish, not devour; To help, not crush; if need, to die, not live. O blessed day, which givest the eternal lie To self, and sense, and all the brute within; Oh, come to us, amid this war of life; To hall and hovel, come; to all who toil In senate, shop, or study; and to those Who, sundered by the wastes of half a world, Ill-warned, and sorely tempted, ever face Nature's brute powers, and men unmanned to brutes— ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley

... that there are many moments in the most naive people's experience when, as they walk in solitude along some common highway, the shape of a certain tree or the look of a certain hovel, or the indescribable melancholy of a certain road-side pool, or the way the light happens to fall upon a heap of dead leaves, or the particular manner in which some knotted and twisted root protrudes itself from the bank, awakes quite suddenly, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... lord, hard by here is a hovel; Some friendship will it lend you 'gainst the tempest: Repose you there, whilst I to this hard house,— More harder than the stones whereof 'tis rais'd; Which even but now, demanding after you, Denied me to come in,—return, and force ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... would be angry because you were not getting the other five." Everything seemed to grow quiet, and my father thought no more about it, having thought very little about it in the first place save enough to speak a few sharp words. But, would you believe it, there was an old woman living in a hovel not a mile from the castle, who kept up the scandal for twelve more months. She had never been married, and, as far as any one knew, she had never wished to be. She had never moved beyond Father Donovan's church in one direction ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane

... he made an attack to divert the attention of the Goths. The way was long, and the soldiers found themselves in the very heart of Naples, in a basin with very steep sides, impossible, as it seemed, to climb. One man however, scrambled up and found himself in a hovel, where he obtained a rope and pulled up his companions. The Goths who were resisting the escalade, threw down their arms when they were attacked from behind. Belisarius did his utmost to stop slaughter and plunder, but could not entirely succeed, for many of his soldiers were savage Huns, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... so widespread, permeating every class and condition of society, even from the sacred desk to the hovel, we hail with gratitude to God the many indications of the revival in the interest of temperance reform which exists in various portions of our country, and especially do we rejoice that the women have been awakened to the vast evils thereby entailed; and, relying upon divine ...
— Two Decades - A History of the First Twenty Years' Work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the State of New York • Frances W. Graham and Georgeanna M. Gardenier

... she. "Can it be good for a wife to leave her husband to be slain by the cruel men of York and Warwick, him who strove to save the young Lord Edmund? Master, you will suffer no such foul wrong. O master, if you did, I would stay behind, in some poor hovel on the shore, where none would track him, and tend him there. I will! I ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge

... stopping until they came to a wretched little hovel. A black pipe instead of a chimney was ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe

... trapesed back to their own quarters, like beetles scurrying to their holes, for that old woman fairly hobbles towards Waterloo, grasping a shiny bag, as if she had been out into the light and now made off with some scraped chicken bones to her hovel underground. On the other hand, though the wind is rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... sun was very bright and every white cross bearing the name of the fallen glittered in the sun. Even the worst little hovel over in France is smothered in a garden and bright with myriads of flowers, so everything was gay with blossoms and everybody had brought as ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill

... stage of culture, the first known step in Egyptian art, is encircled by a band of painted figures, borrowed, like those of the pottery, from a textile source. The doorway or rather entrance to the rude hovel of a Navajo Indian is closed by a blanket of native make, unsurpassed in execution and exhibiting conventional designs of a ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes

... Bismillah (In the name of God) with an approving nod, and Sheykh Mohammed's old father, a splendid old man in a green turban, thanked me with effusion, and prayed that my children might always find help and kindness. I suppose if I confessed to kissing a 'dirty Arab' in a 'hovel' the English travellers would execrate me; but it shows how much there is in 'Mussulman bigotry, unconquerable hatred, etc.,' for this family are Seyyids (descendents of the Prophet) and very pious. Sheykh Yussuf does not ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... up, and wayfarers lost in a flurry within hail of their own fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle of wine, which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even thus equipped he takes the road with terror. All day the family sits about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally without work or diversion. The father may carve a rude piece of furniture, but that is all that will be done until the spring sets in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It is not for nothing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of horror which issued from the convents was echoed throughout the land, from palace to hovel. The people were more indignant—they were terror-stricken; for the emperor was not only an unbeliever himself, he was forcing his people to unbelief. The very existence of religion, said they, was threatened by ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... with a young wife, and some money in his pocket. He had undoubtedly pictured in his imagination his cottage on the wild moor as an earthly paradise, and had described it as such to his wife. When she saw it, she expressed a very different opinion, and complained of the wretched hovel and savage region to which he had brought her. Poor Alec told her with all sincerity that he had believed it to be very different to what he owned it really was. He promised to take her back to the town where her father lived, ...
— Norman Vallery - How to Overcome Evil with Good • W.H.G. Kingston

... red-headed Polish Jew had been married about a month after the McTeague's picnic which had ended in such lamentable fashion. Zerkow had taken Maria home to his wretched hovel in the alley back of the flat, and the flat had been obliged to get another maid of all work. Time passed, a month, six months, a whole year went by. At length Maria gave birth to a child, a wretched, sickly child, with ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... impertinent than the colonials; but if you do get hold of a well trained colonial, she is worth her weight in gold on account of her heterogeneity. Your Irish immigrant at eight and ten shillings a week has as often as not never been inside any other household than her native hovel, and stares in astonishment to find that you don't keep a pig on your drawing-room sofa. On entering your house, she gapes in awe of what she considers the grandeur around her, and the whole of her first day's work consists of ejaculating ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... of a beautiful writer that "to have known nothing but misery is the most portentous condition under which human nature can start on its course." Has your agricultural laborer ever known anything but misery? He is born in a miserable hovel, which in mockery is termed a house or a home; he is reared in penury: he passes a life of hopeless and unrequited toil, and the jail or the union house is before him as the only asylum on this side of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... of a man of peace it is very conceivable that all this would have excited feelings exceedingly painful; in ours, such feelings were overborne by others of a very different nature. If we gazed with peculiar interest upon one hovel more than upon another, it was because some of us had there maintained ourselves; if we endeavoured to count the number of shot-holes in any wall, or the breaks in any hedge, it was because we had stood behind it ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... Emperor waiting. It was too early. He sent M. de Bismarck to Louis Bonaparte to say that he "would not" receive him yet awhile. Louis Bonaparte entered into a hovel by the side of the road. A table and two chairs were there. Bismarck and he leant their arms on the table and conversed. A mournful conversation. At the hour which suited the King, towards noon, the Emperor got back into his carriage, and went to the castle ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo

... Blake's property was ample, and strange to say for his county, unencumbered, the whole air and appearance of his house and grounds betrayed anything rather than a sufficiency of means. The gate lodge was a miserable mud-hovel with a thatched and falling roof; the gate itself, a wooden contrivance, one half of which was boarded and the other railed; the avenue was covered with weeds, and deep with ruts; and the clumps of young plantation, which had been planted and fenced with care, were now open to the cattle, and either ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... and air could only be admitted through the low doorways, but one, more pretentious than the others, was provided with an old window sash, in which the place of missing panes was filled by dried intestines tightly stretched. In every hovel a stone lamp filled with seal oil burned night and day, furnishing light, warmth, and the heat for melting ice into drinking water, boiling tea, drying wet mittens, and doing the ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe

... destinies am I; Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait. Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate Deserts and seas remote, and, passing by Hovel and mart and palace, soon or late, I knock unbidden once on every gate. If sleeping, wake; if feasting, rise before I turn away; it is the hour of fate, And they who follow me reach every state Mortals desire, and conquer every foe Save death; but those who doubt ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... these remedies were quite good in their way, and would have benefitted the patients had they been accompanied by proper shelter, food and clothing. But it was idle to attempt to arrest with blackberry root the diarrhea, or with wild cherry bark the consumption of a man lying in a cold, damp, mud hovel, devoured by vermin, and struggling to maintain life upon less than a pint of unsalted ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... you were not loved, my friend, you might be allowed to live. A cry of sorrow will be heard throughout the land, from the King's palace to the meanest hovel, when you have been shot. And that is just why I must do it! The louder the cry of sorrow, the greater will be the silence afterwards. And in that silence is to be found the answer to the question "Why?" The people will not allow themselves ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... The bark of the larger trees was stripped away. The place was a ruin. A few paces away, among the bushes, there was a bear trap with some claws in it, and an iron chain attached to the middle of a clog about four feet long. The log hovel in which the trap had been set, we found later, a little way back on an old wood road. Evidently a bear had been caught there, perhaps two or three days before we came. He had dragged the trap and the chained clog down into the thicket. ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... riches, and his magnanimous care of preserving liberty, while he refused all assistance from his friends and disciples, and avoided even the dependence of an obligation? Epictetus had not so much as a door to his little house or hovel; and therefore, soon lost his iron lamp, the only furniture which he had worth taking. But resolving to disappoint all robbers for the future, he supplied its place with an earthen lamp, of which he very ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume

... Dennis. A hovel! O fie for shame of yourself, to misbecall a genteel tavern! I'd have you to know my parlour is clean ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman

... travels, in the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinctions, and glowing with patriotic hopes, such it continued to be when, after having experienced every calamity which is in incident to our nature, old, poor, sightless and disgraced, he retired to his hovel ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Cuban nights are cool—these were perils indeed for a weak-lunged invalid. Branch began to fret. Rain filled him with more terror than fixed bayonets, a chill caused him keener consternation than did a thousand Spaniards; he began to have agonizing visions of himself lying in some leaky hovel of a hospital. It was typical of his peculiar irritability that he held O'Reilly in some way responsible, and vented upon him ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... newcomer, smiling pleasantly as he glanced round the sordid hovel. Then he added: "Times are changed, ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... night for selling papers, I had a few coppers only, and my heart sank down when I approached the hovel where we all lived. The man and woman were quarrelling violently. As I slunk in white of face and with a terrible quaking feeling inside me, I saw at once the man was worse than he had ever been, and as I entered the door ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton

... paved his way to the throne, so Liu Pi found this man in a humble cottage where he was hiding himself in the garb of a peasant, San Ku Mao Lu, say the Chinese. He "three times visited that thatched hovel" before he succeeded in persuading its occupant to commit himself to his uncertain fortunes. From that moment Chu-koh Liang served him as eyes and ears, teeth and claws, with a skill and fidelity which have won the ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... isn't of real gold, and you must throw it away. I haven't a golden crown to give you instead, but you're wicked to take pleasure in that sham thing.' They're just as comfortable, after their fashion, in a hovel as you in your fine house; they enjoy the snack of fat pork they have on Sunday just as much as you enjoy your boiled chickens and blanc-manges. They're happy, and that's ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... the practical philosopher in sandals speaks plainly enough. An allied character, but placed in other circumstances, is that of Fabio Calvi of Ravenna, the commentator of Hippocrates. He lived to a great age in Rome, eating only pulse 'like the Pythagoreans,' and dwelt in a hovel little better than the tub of Diogenes. Of the pension which Pope Leo gave him, he spent enough to keep body and soul together, and gave the rest away. He was not a healthy man, like Fra Urbano, nor is it likely that, like him, he died with a smile on his lips. At the ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... jest failed. The earnestness and devout emotion of the boy to the vision of reality which his imagination, aided by the hues of sunset, had thus exalted, were too much for the gross spirit of banter, and the speaker shrank back into his dust-hovel, and affected to be very assiduous in his work as the day was drawing to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... godfather, and on my very heart, you must put an end to my misery—for you can do it. Give me back my money and land, and make me honourable amongst my neighbours. I can't sit alone like a night-owl in my hovel. I like to have my fellow-creatures about me, to eat bread and drink water, or it may be a draught of beer with me. I can't live the life of a blessed hermit. I am, as you know, but a simple plain fellow, a boor, a foolish forlorn lad, the unhappy son of poor Mike, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... my room's but a squalid hovel, No fire there burneth, Only the cruel night wind Waileth, waileth there ever. Yet she's merry and smiling, While, remorseful, despairing, I feel that ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica

... to be done!" Jules said, as he and Henri sat outside the stable, the wooden hovel, indeed, in which they lived, in which they bedded down at night in stalls once occupied by horses, and now merely strewed with straw, cruelly cold and unfit for ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton

... tramp to the wretched hovel they at last reached. Ralph was shocked as he entered it. It was almost bare of furniture, and the poor old man who lay on a miserable cot was thin, pale and racked ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman

... I'll run up and speak to Aunt Ailsey," remarked Mrs. Pendleton with the dignity of a soul that is superior to smells; and without noticing her daughter's reproachful nod of acquiescence, she entered the alley and disappeared through the doorway of the nearest hovel. A minute later her serene face looked down at them over a patchwork quilt which hung airing at half length from the window above. "But this is not life—it has nothing to do with life," thought Virginia, while the Pendleton blood in her rose in a fierce rebellion ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... the shadows of dishonour, but conscience quails not in the gloom—The well out of which humility hath her daily drink, is nearly dried up to the very spring, but she upbraideth not Heaven—Children, those flowers that make the hovel's earthen floor delightful as the glades of Paradise, wither in a day, but there is holy comfort in the mother's tears; nor are the groans of the father altogether without relief—for they have gone whither they came, and are blooming now ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... shouldst go with her to the hovel which is her home, the only home that thou wouldst ever know? Hast a wish to become the slave of that old woman, whose mind hath already gone wandering among the shadows, and whose body will very shortly go in search of her mind? ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... much delayed epistle, tells me thrilling and awful things about the plague; says he walks through what was once a prosperous village, and now there is not a live dog to wag a friendly tail. Every house and hovel tenantless. Often unfinished meals on the table and beds just as the occupants left them. A great pit near by full of ashes and bones tells the story of the plague come to town, leaving silent, empty houses, and the dust-laden winds ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... the dampness of this wilderness is so great that the traveler's sugar and chocolate are melted into one, and envelopes seal themselves. We put up at a tambo, or wayside inn, a simple two-storied bamboo hovel, thatched with plantain leaves without and plastered with cobwebs within, yet a palace compared with what sheltered us afterward. The only habitable part was the second story, which was reached by a couple of notched bamboo sticks. A hammock, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... landed in a bay about three leagues to the northward of our station, where he disturbed some of the natives who were at supper; they all fled with the greatest precipitation at his approach, leaving some fresh sea-eggs, and a fire ready kindled, behind them, but there was neither house nor hovel near the place. We observed that although the shoals that lie just within sight of the coast, abound with shell-fish, which may be easily caught at low water; yet we saw no such shells about the fire-places on shore. This day an allegator was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... was to get the sick man transferred from the filthy hovel in which he found him to clean, comfortable quarters in an ancient adobe palace, screened, airy, spacious. The second step was to secure the services of two competent and high priced nurses from Mexico City, one an American, the other ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... instant an Irish wail burst upon the ear, and, just as one coyote will start a whole pack, just as one midnight bray will set in discordant chorus a whole "corral" of mules, so did that one wail of mourning call forth an echoing "keen" from every Hibernian hovel in all the little settlement, and in an instant the air rang ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King

... outsworn. I, however, have met one fine, noble old fellow. The other night I lost my way amongst horrible moors and wandered for miles and miles without seeing a soul. At last I saw a light which came from the window of a rude hovel. I tapped at the window and shouted, and at last an old man came out; he asked me what I wanted, and I told him I had lost my way. He asked me where I came from and where I wanted to go, and on my telling ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... the earth; and there he is, and will be, till the Red Man gives him back his power for the happiness of France. These others say he's dead. Ha, dead! 'Tis easy to see they don't know Him. They tell that fib to catch the people, and feel safe in their hovel of a government. Listen! the truth at the bottom of it all is that his friends have left him alone on the desert isle to fulfil a prophecy, for I forgot to say that his name, Napoleon, means 'lion of the desert.' Now this that I tell you is true as the ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel, quite bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the village. This hovel however, joined a cottage of a neat and pleasant appearance, but after my late dearly bought experience, I ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley

... she went to the hovel of poor Madelon Dreux, the cobbler's widow, and nursed her and her children through a malignant fever, sitting early and late, and leaving her own peaceful hearth for the desolate hut with the delirious ravings and heartrending moans of the fever-stricken. ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... mother, a woman still in the prime of life, had to wander with them into the low country, friendless and penniless, in quest of employment. And employment after a weary pilgrimage she at length succeeded in procuring from a hospitable farmer in the parish of Kilmany, in Fifeshire. An unoccupied hovel furnished her with a home; and here, with hard labour, she reared her children, till they were fitted to leave her one by one, and do something for themselves, chiefly in the way of herding cattle. Annie grew up to be employed like the rest; and when a little herd-girl ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... that society reaps every year is fearfully great, and the seed from which too large a portion of this harvest comes is its drinking customs. Men of observation and intelligence everywhere give this testimony with one consent. All around us, day and night, year by year, in palace and hovel, the gathering of this sad and bitter harvest goes on—the harvest of broken hearts and ruined lives. And still the hand of the sower is not stayed. Refined and lovely women and men of low and brutal ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur

... abundance, and was found, when cut into proper lengths, very fit for the purpose of erecting temporary huts, the posts and plates of which being made of the pine of this country, and the sides and ends filled with lengths of the cabbage-tree, plastered over with clay, formed a very good hovel. The roofs were generally thatched with the grass of the gum-rush; some were covered with clay, but several of these failed, the weight of the clay and heavy rain soon ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... find ourselves in the icy storm with Lear, Kent and the Fool, and yet in the inmost shrine of love. I am not speaking of the devotion of the others to Lear, but of Lear himself. He had consented, merely for the Fool's sake, to seek shelter in the hovel: ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... well acquainted with one whole family who neglect their persons from principle. The gentleman, who is a sort of new light in religious concerns, will tell you that the true Christian should 'slight the hovel, as beneath his care.' But there is a want of intelligence, and even common refinement in the family, that certainly does not and cannot add much to their own happiness, or recommend religion—aside ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott

... was a Chinese laundry in a little, low-framed, tumbledown hovel, and upon the front of this building was the sign, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... is purely relative, seriously. When once a man has touched the absolute, all that might be other than what it is seems to him indifferent. All these ants pursuing their private ends excite his mirth. He looks down from the moon upon his hovel; he beholds the earth from the heights of the sun; he considers his life from the point of view of the Hindoo pondering the days of Brahma; he sees the finite from the distance of the infinite, and thenceforward the insignificance ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... sovereign on earth is chosen by the majority of a body in which passion and intrigue and the influence (sometimes none of the purest) of conflicting courts are certainly not inoperative. Man is perhaps not the wisest of animals, but he has at least as keen a sense of his own advantage in a hovel as in a palace, and what is for the interest of the masses of the people is not very far from being for that of the country. It is said, to be sure, that we are inadequately represented in Congress; but a representative is apt to be a tolerably exact exponent of the merits of his constituency, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... an old boathouse at the end of the Rue de Brissac down on the banks of the river Seine. There's a cellar entrance to their hovel near the Paris-Normandy coach house. But what would you do?" ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... peasant's son, husband of the Empress of Russia. You will search history in vain for a story so strange and romantic as this of the great Empress and the lowly shepherd's son, whom her love raised from a hovel to a palace, and on whom one of the most amorous and fickle of sovereign ladies lavished honours and riches and an unwavering devotion, until her eyes, speaking their love to the ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... was growing surly, and the poor, worn-out horses were so stiff that they could barely travel any longer. The village, however, was only a few miles off, so that they were not more than an hour in reaching a miserable hovel, at the door of which was a man in the superlative degree of astonishment. He, at least, had never heard of Louvois and Louvois's orders, so that, for the promise of a gold-piece, he was easily induced to receive the desponding party. But his only bed was of straw, and he feared ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach

... things, but they can erect nothing. They can pull down a church, but they cannot build a hovel.—Cecil. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... man, and has six or seven children, under eight years of age, whom he shelters in a wretched little house that appears tired of standing up. But to and from this abode Abraham passes daily, with a face as serene as a May morning. In that weary old hovel I am satisfied that he and his swarming little brood have found what no architect can build—a home. Thither he carries his diurnal dollar, when he can get it, and on it they all manage to live and grow fat. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... make the small open space around this half ruined hovel. Almost he made, it. But just beyond a crumbling stone wall, that once must have been the enclosure of a tidy yard, the tail of his machine dipped all at once. It struck the wall, causing the heavier bow, weighted with the propellers, ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry

... me at the same moment on emerging into the open, one of which was that a heavy thunder-storm was rapidly working up against the wind, the other being that a hut or hovel of some sort stood about ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood

... of these distinguished guests, Luckie Macleary had swept her house for the first time this fortnight, tempered her turf-fire to such a heat as the season required in her damp hovel even at Midsummer, set forth her deal table newly washed, propped its lame foot with a fragment of turf, arranged four or five stools of huge and clumsy form upon the sites which best suited the inequalities of her clay floor; and having, moreover, put on her clean toy, rokelay, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... preaching of, And loves where most is the need of love; His voice is clear to the deaf man's ears, And his face sublime through the blind man's tears; The light shines out where the clouds were dim, And the widow's prayer goes up for him; The latch is clicked at the hovel door And the sick man sees the sun once more, And out o'er the barren fields he sees Springing blossoms and waving trees, Feeling as only the dying may, That God's own servant has come that way, Smoothing the path as it still winds on Through ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley

... dignitaries, are obliged to give him a feast; and all who meet him must salute him with respect. When the fortnight is at an end, the king quits his palace, strips off his crown and purple, dismisses his court, and returns to his hovel. For a length of time this pantomimical king was chosen from amongst the nobles, but at present it has devolved on the lowest of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various

... little better than a hovel, and stood on a patch of waste ground, which could scarcely have been garden within the memory of man. By one side of the house there was a wide, open ditch, fringed with rushes—a deep, black ditch, that ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... Rat repeated, looking from one face to another. "Each one will take his life in his hand when he goes forth. He may have to die a thousand deaths, but he must go. He must steal in silence and disguise from one country to another. Wherever there is one of the Secret Party, whether he is in a hovel or on a throne, the messengers must go to him in darkness and stealth and give him the sign. It will mean, 'The hour ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... whose disposition was extremely amorous, resolved to renew his practices on the heart of Dolly. He had reconnoitred the apartments in which the bodies of the knight and his squire were deposited, and discovered close by the top of the staircase a sort of a closet or hovel, just large enough to contain a truckle bed, which, from some other particulars, he supposed to be the bedchamber of his beloved Dolly, who had by this time retired to her repose. Full of this idea, and instigated by the demon of desire, Mr. Thomas crept softly upstairs, and lifting the latch ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... that they wore their hearts in their eyes as if they meant to keep the words forever. An enthusiastic critic once said of John Ruskin, "that he could discover the Apocalypse in a daisy." As noble a discovery may be claimed for Dickens. He found all the fair humanities blooming in the lowliest hovel. He never put on the good Samaritan: that character was native to him. Once while in this country, on a bitter, freezing afternoon,—night coming down in a drifting snow-storm,—he was returning with me from ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... from Saint Germains to cross the sea in a fishing boat, under the constant dread of being intercepted by a cruiser. It was no longer necessary for him to land on a desolate beach, to lodge in a thatched hovel, to dress himself like a carter, or to travel up to town on foot. He came openly by the Calais packet, walked into the best inn at Dover, and ordered posthorses for London. Meanwhile young Englishmen of quality and fortune ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay



Words linked to "Hovel" :   igloo, shelter, iglu, hut



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