"Rickety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seven feet, and possessed neither cabin nor staterooms, the space between the superstructure and the rail being about three feet wide. You could stay there, or, if you did not incommode the engineer, you could go inside and sit on a coal pile. There was a bridge approached by a rickety stair, and I judged that my deck chair would fill it completely, leaving about six inches for the captain's promenade. Behind the superstructure there was a sort of after-deck, nearly four feet of it. When my trunks and boxes had been piled ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... the diver put his head through the hole in question, and gazed down into darkness visible where water was dripping and gurgling, and hissing a sort of accompaniment to the discordant clanking and jarring of the pump-rods. The rickety engine that worked them kept puffing close alongside—grinding out a horrible addition to the din. As his eyes became more accustomed to the subdued light, Baldwin could see that there was an empty space between ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... by a dealer in second-hand machinery, but at one side was a long, dingy entry with a rickety, twisting flight of stairs at the end. Ashton-Kirk rang the bell here, and while they waited a man who had been seated in the open door of the machine shop ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... "You are rickety," Black Jack told him. "Why, there ain't any danger; nobody goes up there." Laughing Bill held his breath, missing not a word. "If they did we'd pick 'em up with the glasses. It's open country, and we'd get 'em ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... though neatly and comfortably arranged about this room. A faded home-made carpet covered the floor, a threadbare crimson curtain hung before the window, a rickety walnut table, dark with age, sat under the window against the wall; old walnut chairs were placed each side of it; old plated candlesticks, with the silver all worn off, graced the mantelpiece; a good fire—a cheap comfort in that well-wooded ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... there to find a practicable way, until near the summit they become too steep for me to proceed. I search about a few minutes for an easier way, when I am surprised at finding a stairway, evidently cut in the rock by hands. At one place, where there is a vertical wall of 10 or 12 feet, I find an old, rickety ladder. It may be that this was a watchtower of that ancient people whose homes we have found in ruins. On many of the tributaries of the Colorado, I have heretofore examined their deserted dwellings. Those that show evidences of being built during ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... station, but the main street had few attractions to offer. Three stores, with strangely-assorted, dusty goods in their windows fronted the rickety plankwalk; beyond these stood a livery stable, a Chinese laundry, and a few dwelling-houses. Several dilapidated wagons and buggies were scattered about the uneven road. In the side street, disorderly rows of agricultural implements ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... such, or so comfortless, as are frequently the gaunt abodes of legal aspirants. Four chairs, a half-filled deal book-case with hangings of dingy green baize, an old office table covered with dusty papers, which are not moved once in six months, and an older Pembroke brother with rickety legs, for all daily uses; a despatcher for the preparation of lobsters and coffee, and an apparatus for the cooking of toast and mutton chops; such utensils and luxuries as these did not suffice for the well-being of Tom Towers. He indulged in four rooms on the first floor, each ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... the Fontaine des Eaux several times in her walks with Jack. It was a favourite spot of hers. The way lay through the village, across the rickety old bridge, and up the narrow valley to the left, following the course of the river. The green hills on each side had all the bright freshness of early spring, but the real beauty of the walk was the Fontaine des Eaux ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... wrapped in slumber. But at intervals a faint clicking sound could be heard. The night man threw open the door. By the light of two stage dash-lamps, one set on the dresser and the other on a window-ledge, four men sat about a rickety table in a life-and-death struggle at cards. No voice broke the tense silence, not even when the door was ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... is overlooked on its northern side by the back windows of some rickety old wooden houses, suggestive of an easy conflagration, and dangerously near the church. They date from the time of Queen Elizabeth, and stand on a piece of the ground formerly devoted to Bartholomew Fair, the memory of which is perpetuated ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... the meager and circuslike procession to enter with the keys of the bull pen, when my attention was attracted to a movement in the reserved gallery. A lady and gentleman of a quality that was evidently unfamiliar to the rest of the audience were picking their way along the rickety benches to a front seat. I recognized the geologist with some surprise, and the lady he was leading with still greater astonishment. For it was Miss Mannersley, in her precise, well-fitting walking-costume—a monotone of sober ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... vapor, with hand and foot clambered down the volcanic ruin of Chilcoot's mighty father, and stood on the bleak edge of the lake which filled the pit of the crater. The lake was angry and white-capped, and though a hundred caches were waiting ferriage, no boats were plying back and forth. A rickety skeleton of sticks, in a shell of greased canvas, lay upon the rocks. Frona sought out the owner, a bright-faced young fellow, with sharp black eyes and a salient jaw. Yes, he was the ferryman, but he had quit work for the day. Water too rough ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... summer dress effectively screening the house beyond from public view, lay between the garden and the road. Above the hedge showed an occasional shrub; at the corner nearest to the car a chestnut flourished. The wooden gate, once white, which they had passed, was grimed and rickety. The road itself was still the unpretentious country lane that the advent of the electric car had found it. When Carrados had taken in these details there seemed little else to notice. He was on the point of giving Harris the order to go on when his ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... six hundred inhabitants. Its one claim to distinction was the venerable but still active ferry that laboured back and forth across the river. Of secondary importance was the ancient dock, once upon a time the stopping place of steamboats, but now a rotten, rickety obstruction upon which the downstream drift lodged in ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... people are not disloyal to your flag and your cause," said good Father Beret next morning to Captain Helm, "but they are powerless. Winter is upon us. What would you have us do? This rickety fort is not available for defense; the men are nearly all far away on the plains. Isn't it the part of prudence and common sense to make the best of a desperate situation? Should we resist, the British and their savage allies would destroy the town ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... into the parlor. Some parlor it is, too. I don't know when I've seen a room that came so near whinin' about better days gone by. Every piece of furniture, from the threadbare sofa to the rickety center table, seems kind ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... hastily interposed Mrs. Billing. "He was always troubled with a rickety heart, and on several occasions my husband attended him for rather dangerous fainting attacks; no doubt that was partly the reason why he lived so quietly, just taken up with his books, his garden, and, when he was at home, his boy. It appears that when Mr. Shafto heard of the smash, he ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... when it is new and less and less as it grows older. In the end it is discarded because it has so deteriorated that it no longer adds anything to the marginal product of the labor and capital that are used in connection with it. A wagon has become so rickety that it no longer pays to furnish a horse, a harness, and a driver for it. The capital and labor that these represent would earn as much if they were detached from the old vehicle and added to the equipment of some person who has a stock of good ones. The ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... true to his promise. Behind a plodding pair of horses hitched to a jolting wagon, they made the journey, far out across the hills and plateau flats from Tabernacle, gradually winding into a shallow canon which led to places which Houston remembered from years long gone. Beside the road ran the rickety track which served as a spur from the main line of the railroad, five miles from camp,—the ties rotten, the plates loosened and the rails but faintly free from rust; silent testimony of the fact that cars ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... the hall, indifferent to the Kirmanshah rugs, the rare mosaic floor and stained-glass windows, the Parian fountain and the Azeglio tapestries that hung suspended up along the stairway—all old stories to him and as commonplace as rickety odds and ends of furniture might be to any toiler "cribbed, cabin'd and confined" in fetid East Side tenement or squalid room ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... thriving metropolis of Lame Gulch, Amberley knew pretty well where to look for his man, and as he sallied forth that same evening, with the purpose of investigating the "unknown quantity," he bent his steps, not in the direction of the rickety cabin in the hollow there, but toward the "Lame Gulch Opera House." This temple of the muses was easily discoverable, being situated in the main street of the town, and marked by a long transparency projecting above the door, upon which the luminous inscription, "Opera House," was ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... Edison tells the following story: "When I took the position there was a great shortage of operators. One night at 2 A.M. another operator and I were on duty. I was taking press report, and the other man was working the New York wire. We heard a heavy tramp, tramp, tramp on the rickety stairs. Suddenly the door was thrown open with great violence, dislodging it from one of the hinges. There appeared in the doorway one of the best operators we had, who worked daytime, and who was of a very quiet disposition ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... were uncarpeted, and had little feet-worn hollows in the middle of them. The banisters were rickety, and had been notched by the knives of reckless tenants. The first and second floors were occupied by different families (so Marcus inferred from the distinct set of baby cries issuing from each), and the halls were dirty, and flavored with a decided odor of washing day. But on the third story ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... and that, when the day of reckoning comes, no half-hearted and pusillanimous policy will stay our hands from the complete execution of that to which we stand pledged. The Balance of Power has gone the way of other rickety makeshifts, but there must be no makeshift in our dealings with the Turk, no compromise and no delay. What shall be done with those who planned and executed the greatest massacres known to history matters little; let them be hanged as high as Haman, and have done with them. But what ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... patronage, and decoyed a poor fellow, named Blackett, into poetry; but he died during the operation, leaving one child and two volumes of 'Remains' utterly destitute. The girl, if she don't take a poetical twist, and come forth as a shoemaking Sappho, may do well, but the 'Tragedies' are as rickety as if they had been the offspring of an Earl or a Seatonian prize-poet. The patrons of this poor lad are certainly answerable for his end, and it ought to be an indictable offence. But this is the least they have done; for, by a refinement of barbarity, they ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... of the remaining women, what reasonable man would not throw out a hundred thousand poor girls, humpbacked, plain, cross-grained, rickety, sickly, blind, crippled in some way, well educated but penniless, all bound to be spinsters, and by no means tempted to violate the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... a narrow garret, furnished with a bottomless chair, a rickety table and a miserable pallet bed, with two dirty curtains half drawn round it. On the table were an inkstand, a big copybook scribbled all over, a jug of lemonade, a glass, and a morsel of bread. The heat in this wretched hole was ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... of one of the meanest houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap of straw, to serve as another bed, and against the wall a much-battered sea-chest and an open basket, containing even ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... Anglo-Saxon. It was not surprising, therefore, that Norvin Blake, as the hours dragged along, should remark less and less upon the beauties of the island and more and more upon the medieval condition of the rickety railroad coach in which he was shaken and buffeted about. He shifted himself to an easier position upon the seat and lighted a cheroot; for although this was his first glimpse of Sicily, he had watched the same villages ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... to her with a rapid flow of soft liquid Spanish and the old crone, weeping and muttering, stood aside to let them enter. Thode was forced to stoop under the low, sagging doorway and he stumbled as he made his way to a rickety bed in the corner and laid ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... dared to touch them; every want attended to before it was felt. It was too wonderful to seem true. In dreams she would often return to the desolate shanty, where the winds blew through the cracks, and the rickety old stove was no better fed ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... into Clay County? how they ran off our cattle, stole our grain? how your poor old mother's mother died from exposure that night in the rain and sleet? how we lived on mast and corn, the winter, in tents and a few dugouts and rickety huts—we who had the keys of St. Peter and the gifts of the apostolic age? Do you mind the sackings and burnings at Adam-Ondi-Ahman? Do you mind the wife of Joseph's brother, Don Carlos, she that was ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... a rickety schooner, in the teeth of a gale? Besides, Miss, I am taking a cargo of powder this trip, and if I am hard pressed I shall blow up vessel and all, rather than suffer it to fall into Yankee clutches. You would not relish going up to ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... cross-bars. At the stern of the vehicle there was a low back composed of two uprights and a single bar across. The whole machine was fastened together by means of tough lashings of raw seal-hide, so that, to all appearance, it was a rickety affair, ready to fall to pieces. In reality, however, it was very strong. No metal nails of any kind could have held in the keen frost—they would have snapped like glass at the first jolt—but the sealskin ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... an old-fashioned make, bare of varnish, with rickety, mud-splashed wheels and rusty springs. It was drawn by an ill-matched pair of horses and driven by a lame coloured boy, who carried a peeled hickory branch ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... mean little room, on one side a wide bed with a gaudy coverlet, on a pine table in the centre a bucket of water, a tin cup, and a candle-stick. Five rickety rush-covered chairs completed ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... it stepped into the bar of sunshine. There it stood, poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with only the thinnest vesture of human similitude about it, through which was evident the stiff, rickety, incongruous, faded, tattered, good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a heap upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall I confess the truth? At its present point of vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of some ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... buildings—steam-heated Towers of Babel. Into each of these he has packed the population of a European market-town, has left the children to grow up on the roofs and staircases, the babies to find a blessed release through rickety fire-escapes. When a fit of reform has touched him, he has stirred up the garbage of the Tenderloin and the Red Light District, has spread it broadcast over his cities to poison ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... stairs. Half-way up she was compelled to pause. The darkness blinded her; she had lost the reflection from the lamp below and, above her, there was no light at all. She advanced slowly, step by step, feeling her way with a hand on the rickety bannisters. At the top of the stair there was a gleam of light and, turning to the right, she knocked on the second door. There was no answer and she knocked again. Listening, the noise of the sea was now so violent that she fancied that she might not have heard the answer so she ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... I climbed up the rickety staircase to that dingy room, which always had a flavor of snuff about it, to sit on a stiff-backed chair and listen for hours together to Dame Jocelyn's stories of the olden time. How she would prattle! She was bedridden—poor creature!—and had not been out of the chamber for fourteen years. Meanwhile ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... minute or two later we were drifting through a dainty little strait, with a peep of open water at the end of it. Cottages bordered either side. some overhanging the very water, some connecting with it by a rickety wooden staircase or a miniature landing-stage. Creepers and roses rioted over the walls and tiny porches. For a space on one side, a rude quay, with small smacks floating off it, spoke of some minute commercial interests; a very small tea-garden, with neglected-looking ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... my father and the prisoner seated with the bottle between them on the rickety liquor-stained table. Yet—as I remember the scene now—not all the squalor of the room could efface or diminish the majesty of their two figures. They sat like two tall old kings, eye to eye, not friends, or reconciled only in this last and lonely hour by meditation on man's common fate. If I ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... might keep together and to buy her delicacies I've parted with nearly everything in the room, as you see," and it was bare indeed. A bed from which the element of comfort had long since departed, two rickety chairs, a pine table, a rusty stove, and a few dishes and cooking utensils were about all there was left. With eyes slowly dilating Mildred took in the bleak truth, but said only a few gentle words and was very busy. She lifted Mrs. Bute's head, while Clara gave her a little bread soaked in ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... they turned to the left; and after a brief walk, mounted the rickety steps to the floor of the hut where dwelt old man North, and the winch for operating the swinging boom. Old man North was short, dark, heavy and bearded; he smoked perpetually a small black clay pipe which he always held upside ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... hall in St. Louis, the old one, which looks like a rickety tobacco warehouse, or the new one, which is a realization in material of a bad dream consequent upon too much rarebit, and you might as well be in Berlin. You are lost without an interpreter. You must talk German or a Joe Emmet dialect, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the corner of the house. But the noise conveyed no meaning to her. She had just stretched out her hand to grasp that of the unknown, when there came a tremendous crash which shot her off the ice and into the water. The shock which sent her into the water, however, steadied the rickety bridge over which the stranger was crawling by jamming the ice closer under it, and the man, catching her as she took her plunge, held her fast, then dragged her up beside him by ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... child," I said in sudden horror, as we reached the small square landing above of slender rickety uncovered boards. ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the rickety steps he looked back into the window for a last glimpse of the family, as the children gathered about their mother, showing their beautiful presents again and again,—and then upward to a window in the great house yonder. "A little child shall lead them," he thought. "Well, if—if anything ever ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... mean and uninviting apartment stood a table, its top littered with odds and ends, amongst which the remains of a meal, dishes and food, fraternised gregariously with a painter's palette, brushes and paint tubes. A chair or two, long since disabled, and a rickety washstand completed the appointments. ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... horse before the office of the New Day and gave a boy the bridle. "I'll be back in a minute," she explained. It was a two-story frame building, dingy and in disrepair. On the street floor was a grocery. Access to the New Day was by a rickety stairway. As she ascended this, making a great noise on its unsteady boards with her boots, she began to feel cheap and foolish. She recalled what Hull had said in the carriage. "No doubt," replied she, "I'd feel much the same way if I were going to see Jesus Christ—a ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... at the view but not especially seeing it. He felt as if he had at once enjoyed and lost an opportunity. After a while he tried to make a sketch of the old beggar-woman who sat there in a sort of palsied immobility, like a rickety statue at a church-door. But his attempt to reproduce her features was not gratifying, and he suddenly laid down his brush. She was not pretty ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... if the world had ceased to hold any beings but themselves. The pine-trees scented all the air, the snow dripped reluctantly, and sometimes far off they heard the distant boom of an avalanche. They sat together for long sunlit hours on the rickety wooden balcony of a friendly hospice, drinking hot spiced gluewein and building up their ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... of rickety, wooden stairs pitched downward from the edge of the grassy bank to a wharf at the water's edge—the mere skeleton of a wharf now, outlined only by decaying stringpieces. But here the patched-up punt was moored; and above it, nailed to a dead tree, the sign ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... The boats were rickety little tubs unfit for rough northern seas, and the crews sulky, underfed men, who threatened mutiny at every watering place and only refrained from cutting Radisson's {147} throat because he kept them busy. July 11, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... principal roads in his buggy, directing his way towards the bungalow where the Rector of St. Jude's lived with Atkins, the Sapper. The house was draped in climbing and trailing creepers, and the grass grew into the red drive that curved in a half-circle from one rickety gate to another. He came up quietly on the soft, wet clay, and looked up at the house before he called for the bearer, and as he looked up he saw a face disappear quickly from behind a window. After a few minutes the ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... giving rise to deformities of the limbs, &c. The Australian type of the disorder, however, is milder altogether, and is of a different character. The Australian child is straight-limbed almost without exception, yet the Australian type of rickety disease, as I pointed out in 1891, ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... Piedmont hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. "We've got him, we've got him," they barked. "We caught him up a tree; but he's all right now, he'll feed from the hand. Come on and see him." So I accompanied them up a dizzy hill, and in a rickety shack in the midst of a eucalyptus grove found my sunburned prophet of the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... negation, a prophetic recoil from responsibility that clogged his resolve. His eyes roved uncertainly about the familiar domestic scene, darkening now, duskily purple beneath the luminous pearly and roseate tints of the twilight sky. The old woman was a-drowse on the porch of the rickety little log-cabin beneath the gourd vines, the paralytic grandfather came hirpling unsteadily through the doorway on his supporting crutch, his pipe shaking in his shaking hand, while he muttered and mumbled to himself—who knows what?—whether of terror of ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... rickety screen, with many holes in it, but as I did not know there were girls behind it, I was not disturbed by that detail. If I had known, I could not have undressed in the flood of cruel moonlight that was pouring in at the curtainless windows; I should have died ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... size of a moderate house, which had been detached from the overhanging cliff above, and had fallen together. There was a smaller cavern within, which made a capital kennel; rather more substantial than the rickety building of yesterday. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... was his gratifying reply. I was still weak, but I gathered up my remaining strength and plunged the head of the cane, a dog's head it was, into his heart. His watch, or his Bible, or something interposed, and rescued him from the fate he merited; and then we rode over the miserable, rickety farther end of the Grand Trunk Railway, and reached Island Pond at midnight,—in time to see the magnificent Northern Lights flashing, flickering, wavering, streaming, and darting over the summer sky; and as the people in the Pond were many and the rooms few, we had plenty of time to enjoy ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Davis, which resulted in the arranging for a short afternoon sermon, and after it the ceremony. We were not to enter the church until the proper moment, and Ben said he could manage it, for when the minister began his last prayer he would climb the rickety ladder into the old square box of a belfry and hang out a yard of white cloth on ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... done, called to his side General Dode de la Brunerie, an officer of the engineers, whom he had already distinguished. "They are there!" said he, without further explanation. The general easily divined the emperor's meaning. They both entered a hut, and Napoleon, spreading out his maps on a rickety table, discussed with Dode the resources still at his command. The general's plan was to ascend the course of the Berezina, declaring that he knew several fords, and that they could then advance quickly upon ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... Syracuse, gave up the trip to Palestine and returned home by Malta. Gilbert and Frances were to have dined at Admiralty House but he was too unwell to dine out and only came up one afternoon. Lady Fisher remembers going to see them at the Osborne Hotel. Gilbert was sitting on a rickety basket chair, obviously in pain and talking a good deal in order to hide it. She sympathised with him for the cold weather, his obvious physical misery, and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... them is even quieter than the outer din? There is one, indeed, that, long nursed and dozing in the lap of the State, is now roughly shaken, but is she yet awake? She has grown in bulk at least, while sleeping. Is she not like an overgrown child too big to be carried, and too rickety ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... by a man turned out of his way to ascertain the cause of the racket. There was a black coat and vest hanging on the fence, and a professional-looking man in his shirt sleeves was smashing the meeting-house. The rickety old steps were gone by the time this man, with open eyes and wide-open month, came to stare in speechless amazement. Gideon couldn't have demolished 'the altar of Baal and the grove that was by it' with more enthusiastic ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... the actual denizens! One gazed with a dull, wondering pity at the poor, pale, rickety children; the slatternly, coarse women who never smiled (except when drunk); the dull, morose, miserable men. How they lacked the grace of French deformity, the ease and lightness of French depravity, the sympathetic distinction of ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Pope to call him the fairest of critics, not content with criticising the production of Dryden, Milbourne was so ill advised as to produce, and place in opposition to it, a rickety translation of his own, probably the fragments of that which had been suppressed by Dryden's version. A short specimen, both of his criticism and poetry, will convince the reader, that the powers of the former were, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... up in front of you, on a small and rickety one-legged table, is a most trying exercise, especially if you are not used to it. George and I both felt our position keenly. We did not like to call out for help, and bring the family down. We were proud young men, and we feared lest, to the unsympathetic eye of the comparative stranger, the ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... to Corbitant perched on the rickety seat of his rattling open buggy, and bowed forward as his wont was, his rounded shoulders bringing his chin well over the dashboard. As he passed down the long sandy street, toward the corner where his own house stood, the brooding group of loafers, waiting in Hackett's store ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... domestic scenery of 1901. But your eye was caught at once by the additions made by Mrs. Rossiter. Linda conceived it was her womanly mission to lighten the severity of Michael's choice in furniture and decorations. She introduced rickety and expensive screens that were easily knocked over; photographs in frames which toppled at a breath; covers on every flat surface that could be covered—occasional tables, tops of grand pianos. If she did not put ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... grass cabin, which was on the plantation of Dr. Emmett, and had been left tenantless by some fisherman. This served for shelter during the night though the struggles and squealings of a drove of hogs attempting to enter through the rickety door did not contribute much to ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... turned over and composed himself to sleep again. He had said all he thought necessary, and had no pressing business to call him up. Julius opened the door and went out, down the rickety stairs and out through a narrow covered alleyway to the street, for the room which Jack Morgan and he occupied was in a rear tenement house. Several dirty and unsavory-looking children—they could not well be otherwise in such a locality—barefooted and bareheaded, were playing in the court. ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... of the three highways that lead from the frontiers of Holland toward Antwerp. Although the vehicle had evidently been cleaned with the utmost care, every thing about it betokened decay. Its joints were open, discolored, and weather-beaten, and it swung from side to side on its springs like a rickety skeleton. Its patched leathers shone in the sunshine with the oil that had been used to freshen them, but the borrowed lustre could not hide the cracks and repairs with which they were defaced. The ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... in 1880, or about that date. The silence of the single little street, with its one-storied, thatched or tiled cottages, is at infrequent intervals broken by an elderly dame in her sabots, or by a creaking, rickety village cart driven by a farmer-boy in blouse and hob-nailed shoes. The largest inhabited building is the mairie, a modern structure, at one end of which is the village school, where fifteen or twenty urchins enjoy the instructions of the worthy teacher. A ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... out by Sam was a small frame building, having the sign, "Oscar Cook—Barrels and Kegs," painted over the door. It was a tumbled-down, rickety affair, evidently ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... They climbed the rickety stairs, which groaned and creaked beneath their weight, and found Mother Guttersnipe lying on the bed in the corner. The elfish black-haired child was playing cards with a slatternly-looking girl at a deal table by the faint ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Nothing so easy. Scorched along bad roads on a rickety machine. Would you be kind enough to let go my arm and stop shrieking! You'll have the whole village here in a moment. So you're all right, I see! Sitting quietly here, after scaring us half out of ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Something lacking in the soil affected the feed, and some of the calves were born without hair; their bones were soft. It baffled my father and every man along that rim of the desert, but not mother. She said doctors prescribed lime for rickety human babies, and she made limewater and mixed it with the feed. It was just the thing. She was a small woman, but plucky from start to finish. And we, Dad and I, didn't know what it was costing her—till she ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... not lost all sensitiveness.... On the opposite wall, to the west, appear the words, 'A memorial unto the destruction of the Temple'. To this day I do not know what there was to commemorate the fall of the Holy Place. The rickety rafters? Or were the little creatures swarming all over the walls to remind one of 'the foxes that walk ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... and hut combined, in which his childhood had rolled along, was fastened to the bottom of the mast by thick ropes, of which the knots were visible at the wheels. Having been so long out of service, it had become dreadfully rickety; it leant over feebly on one side; it had become quite paralytic from disuse; and, moreover, it was suffering from that incurable malady—old age. Mouldy and out of shape, it tottered in decay. The materials of which ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... drawing-room, from which four windows looked out into the garden. This might have been a pretty room had any care been taken to make anything pretty at the Cedars. But the furniture was old, and the sofas were hard, and the tables were rickety, and the curtains which had once been red had become brown with the sun. The dinginess of the house had not struck Miss Mackenzie so forcibly when she first visited it, as it did now. Then she had come almost direct from Arundel Street, and the house in Arundel Street had itself been very dingy. ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... the rear of his sleeping quarters ran the wire right-of-way fence, which was also the back fence of a small piece of property on which stood a rickety old house. The house was devoid of paint, but it was a cheerful sight from where Chi Foxy reclined. He had a clear view of the kitchen window, from which the light came in a yellow glow, and he could see a woman cooking something in a frying-pan on a kitchen stove. A man sat beside the stove, his ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... rickety chairs which we had borrowed from the janitor under pretence of wanting to reach something, the minutes that passed seemed ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... Nicolai Leontievitch," I said. Then I did not disturb him but sat down on a rickety chair and waited. Ink dripped from his table on to the floor. One bottle lay on its side, the ink oozing out, other bottles stood, some ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... spread over a dirty bed tick filled with leaves. There was only one chair, and that was a broken rocker, on which the unhappy mistress of the cottage was seated. But there were two or three rough stools, made of pieces of pine slab, standing beside the rickety table. Pointing to these stools, Mrs. Button, without quitting her chair, said to ...
— Aunt Amy - or, How Minnie Brown learned to be a Sunbeam • Francis Forrester
... sultry, the heat increased by the rays of the sinking sun, which found their way in by the window, through which also entered unpleasant odours ascending from the court-yard below. One of the persons, whose handsome dress contrasted strangely with the appearance of the room, was busy writing at a rickety table. With youth, wealth, talents, a fair fame, the godson of the future monarch of England, he might, had he so willed, have been a peer of he realm, the founder of a noble family. The other, who has been described as Captain Mead, rose from his seat, and walked up and down with somewhat ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... while in the can, but the system was not well understood, and those who had it in charge only succeeded in making the can itself more plump. But now oysters are kept on ground feed and given nothing to do for a few weeks, and even the older and overworked sway-backed and rickety oysters of the dim and murky past are made to fill out, and many of them have to put a gore in the waistband of their shells. I only speak of the oyster incidentally, as one of the objects toward which science has turned its attention, and I assert with the utmost confidence that the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... to get up early next morning and give the girl a hand with the cows. There were two rickety bails in the yard. He had not forgotten how to milk, but the occupation gave him no pleasure—it brought ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... in her own presence (S395), gave the Queen a shock which left a fatal inheritance of cowardice to her son. Throughout his life he could not endure the sight of a drawn sword. If we can trust common report, his personal appearance was by no means impressive. He had a feeble, rickety body, he could not walk straight, his tongue was too large for his mouth, and he had goggle eyes. Through fear of assassination he habitually wore thickly padded and quilted clothes, usually green in color. He was a man of considerable shrewdness, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... he can't climb a tree without falling out and breaking his neck. Why, he's the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit this earth. He has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged and up holstered to be able to live at all. He is a rickety sort of a thing, anyway you take him, a regular British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always under going repairs. A machine that is as unreliable as he is would have no market. The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. The original cave man, the troglodyte, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... may have commanded Sylla's admiration, but it taught him, also, that a young man capable of assuming an attitude so bold might be dangerous to the rickety institutions which he had constructed so carefully. He tried coercion. He deprived Caesar of his priesthood. He took his wife's dowry from him, and confiscated the estate which he had inherited from his father. When this produced no effect, the rebellious youth was made over to the ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... plaster walls, once painted a harsh blue, now toned by time and damp to a hundred parti-coloured patches. A rough, uneven floor; for furniture a narrow, oaken bedstead, a heavy chair lamed by four legs of various heights, a rickety table steadied by a pad of rags beneath one foot, a long chest of painted wood: such was the sleeping-room of Wilhelmine von Graevenitz, in her mother's house at Guestrow in Mecklemburg. And here on a December morning of the year 1705 Wilhelmine sat disconsolately on ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Tim Gibbs came in—and Booligal. Tradition in New South Wales puts the climate of Hay, Hell, and Booligal in that order. Tim had driven starving, rickety sheep across his native plains when the earth's surface had been powdered to red sand and driven by shrivelling westerlies in travelling sandhills from mirage to summer mirage. Tim was used to hot places. That is why he became ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... Nickleby, the money-lender, had given Kate and her mother leave to live in a rickety, unoccupied house which he owned. It was a dingy building on an old wharf, but Noggs, the clerk, himself cleaned and furnished one of its rooms so that it was fairly comfortable. When they were settled Ralph took Kate to a dressmaker's, where he got her a situation, hoping thus they ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... at the Wilson prize-pigs. So good Mr. Herbert never fails, in due attestation of his "abhorrence of the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities," to foot it over the rocky hill and down across the rickety little bridge and past the poor-house farm, (where he stops on a little private business of his own, that perhaps makes a few old hearts and certainly one old coat-pocket the lighter,) and so on, a good piece, through the woods, to where Vestryman Wilson is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... entertainment, however. One of the columns had sent out 300 men and a pompom in pursuit of Hertzog's fugitives, and the force had just returned with quite a haul of prisoners. They had come across the rearmost of them as they were in the act of crossing the river in a rickety punt, which vessel had been scientifically rendered unseaworthy by a well-directed belt of pompom-shells. Examination of the bushes on the near bank of the river showed that dozens of Boers had literally gone to earth. The river approach was full of rain-fissures and water-cracks, ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... way to the top of a rickety stair, and knocked at one of the doors which opened on the landing. No answer was returned, but after a second application of the knuckles, accompanied by a touch of the toe, a growling voice was heard, then a sound of some one getting violently out of bed, a heavy tread on the floor, and ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... have gathered, their city have built; Where Hunger and Vice, like twin beasts of prey, Have hunted their victims to gloom and despair; Raise the rich, dainty dress, and the fine broidered skirt, Pick your delicate way through the dampness and dirt. Grope through the dark dens, climb the rickety stair To the garret, where wretches, the young and the old, Half starved and half naked, lie crouched from the cold; See those skeleton limbs, those frost-bitten feet, All bleeding and bruised by the stones of the street; Hear the sharp cry of childhood, the deep groans that swell From the poor dying ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... men. The worst factory in Europe is hardly as bad as the average farm barn. Power is utilized to the least possible degree. Not only is everything done by hand, but seldom is a thought given to logical arrangement. A farmer doing his chores will walk up and down a rickety ladder a dozen times. He will carry water for years instead of putting in a few lengths of pipe. His whole idea, when there is extra work to do, is to hire extra men. He thinks of putting money into improvements as an expense. Farm products at their ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... the eyes of the old priest. He dismissed the chief at once, and after saying farewell to Pere Victorien, who was embarking immediately for his own island of Haitheu, Pere Simeon and I entered his study, a pitifully shabby room where rickety furniture, quaking floor, tattered wall-coverings, and cracked plates and goblets spelled the story of the passing of an institution once possessing grandeur and force. Seated in the only two sound chairs, with wine ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... in its entirety, was devoted to books; nor that it housed no other people than bibliomaniacs or antiquarians! Higher, above the little shops, small rooms, reached by rickety stairways, offered quiet corners for divers and sundry gentlemen whose occupations called for discreet ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... pass he stops and questions them, and then gives them orders, or scolds them, as circumstances demand. Towards nine o'clock tea is announced, and he goes into the dining-room—a long, narrow apartment with bare wooden floor and no furniture but a table and chairs, all in a more or less rickety condition. Here he finds his wife with the tea-urn before her. In a few minutes the grandchildren come in, kiss their grandpapa's hand, and take their places round the table. As this morning meal consists merely of bread and tea, it does not last long; and all disperse ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... dinner I take a stroll in the Flower Gardens, and crossing the rickety wooden bridge over the river, I enter the hemlock grove. Here, in a sequestered spot near the river bank, I lay me on the grass and sleep for the night. I always bring my towels with me; for in ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... good humor had been restored, Dan broached the nature of his errand. As he mentioned Morton Bassett's name the huge editor's face grew blank for a moment; then he was shaken with mirth that passed from faint quivers until his whole frame was convulsed. His rickety chair trembled and rattled ominously. It was noiseless laughter so far as any vocal manifestations were concerned; but it shook the gigantic editor as though he were a mould of jelly. He closed his eyes, but otherwise his fat face ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... third day out I fell and bruised my thigh severely, and could not make my little mountain town till moonlight. And I tell you I was mighty glad when I limped across the bridge over the rushing river and dropped on the hotel sofa. Next morning I was stiff as a poker, but I struggled up the four rickety flights to the local physician, and being assured I only wanted rest, I resolved to take it with book and pipe and mug in a shady beer-garden on the river. I had been reading for about an hour when five or six Tyrolese, old men and young, in their gray and green costumes and their little ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... A shock head, and more shocky eyebrows, bore a strange resemblance to the patent chimney-sweep; while his clothes seemed rich in past memories of the profession. I had before caught sight of this individual, in a tumble-down, rickety shop near the residence of Mrs. Mountchessington Lawk. I had, in fact, seen her on more than one occasion bestowing charity upon him in the form of broken victuals; but the recollection failed entirely to account for the effect of ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... getting in my dotage—brain a little cracked—and all that. I'm a poor chap possessed of a foolish and wicked delusion. Mean well, but head rickety. Sometimes I really think I must be crazy, with all the world against me about the German danger. They call me Jeremiah and Mother Goose rolled into one. But, by God, Kirtley, as my soul's immortal, I tell you I'm right—I'm right! The deluge ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... 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 and entered a house in the right-hand corner. They went up the worn, carpetless stairs with a rickety handrail on one side and the torn, peeling paper on the other, and stopped before a door which opened on to a narrow landing on the first floor. Pent-Ah knocked with his knuckles on the panel, first three times quickly, and then twice ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... fault of the lawyers, if there are criticisms of the lawyers it is the fault of the courts. They are interdependent and indissoluble. If a club house is not suitable for its purposes, is old-fashioned, rickety, and dirty, it is the fault of the members. If the members do not behave the club house ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... young ladies, in whom I discovered some slight general resemblance to the imaginary character. My fancies, I must confess, played strange pranks with me. They had been kept in a coop so many years that now, when I suddenly turned them loose, their rickety attempts ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... His wobbly, rickety little body always wore the most startling of costumes. A green paddock coat, well padded, a yellow walking stick in the thin fingers, a rakish hat, patent-leather boots, striped suits, silk shirts with handkerchiefs to match, a gold cigarette case, and a watch chain like a woman's, were a few ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... for he himself, in his glee over freedom regained, was not conspicuously sane. He scoured the town in high spirits, peering into shop-windows, riding on top of busses, going to the Zoo, taking the rickety old steamer to the Statue of Liberty, drinking afternoon tea at the Ritz, and all that sort of thing. The first three nights in town he slept in one of the little traffic-towers that perch on stilts up above Fifth Avenue. ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... that the supposed Greek 'rachitis', inflammation of the back, is an aetiological invention to serve as etymon of 'rickets', the condition of being rickety, a purely native word. ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... antique marble, and peremptorily motioned Mr. Wallace Kent to that portion of the seat left after she had wedged herself as far to one side as possible. Mr. Kent obeyed immediately, though he had just placed a rickety, stuffed chair beside the gold one occupied by Miss Blanche Grayson, the glowerer. Miss Lindsey sat on the end of an overturned box hedge before a drop curtain of a twilight night, and Mr. Reginald Leigh sat ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... side entrance to the hotel was the goat and the rickety express wagon, in charge of a red-haired, snub-nosed boy, Mike's small brother. Mike himself, rather ragged, but clean and neat enough, was in the lobby, sitting at his ease on one of the ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in a Great City • Laura Lee Hope
... mountains, lay listening for the train that, twice a day, ran out to the greater world. Round about, tied to the well-gnawed hitching rails, were rows of mules—mules with back cloths; mules with saddles; mules hitched to long wagons, buggies, and rickety gigs; mules munching golden ears of corn, and mules drooping their heads in sorrowful memory ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... once ordered his men to double, and as they dashed into the village among the wondering people, the kasid pointed out Surendra Nath's house at the far end—a small two-storied building, surrounded by a wall and approached through a rickety iron gateway. It was the first house to which ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... carefully roped, and with the caution to rest our knees on the sides of the ladder, as several of the steps were extremely weak—a remark which was equally applicable to one, at least, of the sides. We crept up the rickety old machine, however, looking down between our legs into the blue depths of the crevasse, and at 8.15 the whole party found itself satisfactorily perched on the edge of the nearly level snow plateau, looking up at the long slopes of broken neve that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... round-limbed, blond baby of two or three summers. The three stood upon the lowest bar of the gate, clinging to the upper spars. The eldest leaned her elbows on the top and looked over; the baby embraced the middle bar and looked through. They had set the rickety gate swinging petulantly, and it latched and unlatched itself with the sort of sound that the swaying of some dreary wind would give it. The children seemed to swing there, not because they were happy, but ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... for the first time, some four years before, from the bridge of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, more or less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning, and a slight mist—an opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens, only without the fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the red London sun—promised to turn presently ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... taken a room for herself in a house standing in a quiet, withdrawn square in the neighbourhood of King's Road, Chelsea. To call it a room was to dignify it by a title to which it could lay no real claim. It was an attic, up the last rickety flight of stairs, with roofs that sloped down within two feet of the ground, and a diminutive window from which one could get but the barest glimpse of the skies. Still it had possibilities, its aspect was not so ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... might have resisted the nervous depression which they caused, at least well enough to maintain an active part in his undertakings. Or if his bodily weakness, resulting from his early austerities, had been accompanied with interior equanimity, he might have held up. A rickety ship can, with care and skill, get into port if the engine is sound, and so can a sound ship with a broken-down engine sail home, however slowly. But with both a rickety ship and a disabled engine the port should be ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... and while her beauty and extraordinary type attracted all the men she came across they soon gave up their pursuit. She was quite hopeless, they said—and half-witted, some added! No woman could sit silent like that for hours, otherwise. Zara thought of all these things, as she sat on the rickety chair in the Neville Street lodging. How she had loathed that whole atmosphere! How she loathed bohemians and adventurers, no words ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... time that he held the office of surveyor to the county of Salop, he erected no fewer than forty-two, five of which were of iron. Indeed, his success in iron bridge-building so much emboldened him, that in 1801, when Old London Bridge had become so rickety and inconvenient that it was found necessary to take steps to rebuild or remove it, he proposed the daring plan of a cast iron bridge of a single arch of not less than 600 feet span, the segment of a circle l450 feet in diameter. In preparing this design we find that he was associated ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... just at the rickety Age when the Gams refuse to cooerdinate. Every time he sauntered carelessly across the porch at a Summer Hotel, he gave a correct Imitation of a troop of Cavalry going over a Wooden Bridge at ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... Hill, beyond which lay the village of Hillcrest which grew in importance as St. Ange degenerated. There were scattered houses among the clumps of maple and pine growths, and there was a forlorn railroad station before which a rickety, single track branch ended. Sometime during the day a train came in, and after an uncertain period it departed; it was the only link with the outer world that St. Ange had except what came ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the ordinary plank-bridge a solid causeway composed of earth and brushwood, with a high bulwark on either side, was probably, if not unprecedented, at any rate very uncommon. Boat-bridges were usually, as they are even now in the East, somewhat rickety constructions, which animals unaccustomed to them could with difficulty be induced to cross. The bridge of Xerxes was a high-road, as AEschylus calls it along, which men, horses, and vehicles might pass with as much comfort and facility as ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... of all Stern's oiling, every journal and bearing squealed in anguish. A rickety tremble possessed the engine as it gained speed. The dynamo began to hum with wild, strange protests of racked metal. The ancient "drive" of tarred hemp strained and ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... sleep soundly. His arms were lame and sore from the strain the ponies had given them, and that may have been the reason why he dreamed half the night that he was driving runaway teams and crashing over rickety old bridges. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... and in fifteen minutes the rickety bridge was braced up with three strong trusses. Then thirty soldiers were put on the bridge and jumped six times in unison at the word of command. After this test, the passage of troops began, while the pontoniers were repairing the two public bridges. ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... world, perhaps, but Tom had exercised an admirable regard for his partner's feelings and had never cast it up to him. Thus had his consideration been repaid. However, the poor fellow's race was about run, for he couldn't stand cold or exposure. Why, a wet foot sent him to bed. How, then, could a rickety ruin of his antiquity withstand the ravages of ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... in yard of the large Ottoman house already mentioned is a trap-door. One is let down over a rickety ladder about four feet to the top of four high stone steps, which descend on the left to a platform about three and one-half feet square which projects without railing over the water. Thence fourteen steps, also without railing, conduct to another platform below, about three ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... passenger hasn't missed his train," observed the ferryman to Mr. Jimmy Fallows, who sat on the river bank with the painter of his rickety little naphtha launch ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... what can I do for you, my good woman?' said the Doctor, seating himself on a rickety ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... dining-room, the ceiling of which was so low that Mr. Yorke's head seemed but a little way off it as he walked about. On the other side of the passage was a drawing-room, wonderfully smart and uncomfortable, with groups of wax fruit under glass shades on rickety tables, crochet couvrettes over the back of almost every chair as well as on the sofa, and a wonderful festoon of green and yellow tissue paper round the glass above the mantelpiece. Mr. Yorke took ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... while a rickety old rowboat had been lying off from the Albert. A bronzed and bearded man sat alone in the boat, eyeing the strange vessel as though afraid to approach nearer. He was thin and gaunt. The evening was chilly, ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... the northeast wind. The storm of the previous night had been exactly to his liking. All his worst prognostications had been fulfilled, and quite a bit thrown in par dessus le marche. He told me that a tiny, rickety house across the harbour had first been unroofed, and then one of the walls blown in. It is a real disaster for the family, for they are poor enough without having Kismet thus ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding |
