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Roofless   Listen
adjective
Roofless  adj.  
1.
Having no roof; as, a roofless house.
2.
Having no house or home; shelterless; homeless.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Roofless" Quotes from Famous Books



... imploring. He would go with neither, and at last they vanished both. He sat solitary on the side of a bare hill, and below him was all that remained of Castle Warlock. He had been dead so many years, that it was now but a half—shapeless ruin of roofless walls, haggard and hollow and gray and desolate. It stood on its ridge like a solitary tooth in the jaw of some skeleton beast. But where was his father? How was it he had not yet found him, if he had been so long dead? He must rise and seek him! He must ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... old Fell Lane when I was young, A ruined mansion stood, With roofless cots filled up with sticks Brought from the Holme House Wood. And now I cross the Intake Brig Where I used to sport and play, And bathe, and plunge, and water splash Full ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... instead of fluid it issued out in a stream of flame, which expanded and whirled round them, and for a moment they were both enveloped in a faint blaze; at the same instant a sudden gust whisked off the stranger's hat, and the sexton beheld that his skull was roofless. For an instant he beheld the gaping aperture, black and shattered, and then he fell senseless into his own doorway, which his affrighted wife ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... in bone, or leave ulcerating sores in the skin where the gumma formed and died, or take the roof out of a mouth, or weaken the wall of a blood-vessel so that it bulges and bursts. The sunken noses and roofless mouths are usually syphilitic—yet if they are recognized in time and put under treatment, all these horrible things yield as by magic. There are few greater satisfactions open to the physician than to see a tertiary sore which has refused ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes

... of unremembered seas And cities of the dead that men forget— An old blind beggar-man, distained and gray, With ancient tales to tell, Mumbling of this and that upon his way, Strange song and muttered spell— Neither to East or West, or South or North, His habitation lies, This roofless vagabond who wanders forth Aye under alien skies— A gypsy of the air, he comes and goes Between the tall trees and the shadowed grass, And what he tells only the twilight knows ... The tall trees and the ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton

... camp for a week, and then the snow'll melt, and we'll all go back together." The cheerful gaiety of the young man, and Mr. Oakhurst's calm, infected the others. The Innocent with the aid of pine boughs extemporized a thatch for the roofless cabin, and the Duchess directed Piney in the rearrangement of the interior with a taste and tact that opened the blue eyes of that provincial maiden to their fullest extent. "I reckon now you're used to fine things at Poker Flat," said Piney. The Duchess turned away sharply to conceal something that ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... one of the arched windows of what was formerly the great dining hall, where Elizabeth feasted in the midst of her lords and ladies, and where every stone had rung to the sound of merriment and revelry. The windows are broken out; it is roofless and floorless, waving and rustling with pendent ivy, and vocal with the song of hundreds ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... about the old Spanish workings, ancient, roofless, stone buildings with loop-holed turrets for bandits and niches for saints. These structures, as well as the waste dumped by the Spaniards, were being "repicked for values," and broken up and sent through the stamp-mill, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... doctrine had been preached, and its reasonable worship offered, under the same roofs that had protected priest and people in the days of Romanist error. Is the cause of pure and undefiled religion stronger in the land because Melrose and Crossraguel and Pluscarden are desolate; St. Andrews a roofless ruin; Iona as yet open to the Atlantic winds? Is the voice of praise and prayer sweeter in the North because Mortlach is effaced and Fortrose shattered, and the bells are silent which men on the mainland used to hear when the north wind blew from Kirkwall? Granted ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... and he gaed, over round swelling hills, over old battle-fields, past the roofless ruins of houses whose walls were crowned with tall climbing grasses, till he came to a crystal sheet of water, called St. Mary's Loch. Here he paused to take breath. The sky was dull and lowering; but at his feet were yellow flowers, ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May

... end there was a bench, inside a sort of roofless summerhouse, where on warm days the fountain played in a rainbow. She knew the place well—she had sat there many times—with him and with another—-she would go there now and think her own thoughts. It was hidden from the driveways, and the place was sweet with ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... covered with bushes and young trees. In the centre were the ruins of a temple, that had evidently existed long before the Burmese dynasty occupied the country, and had been erected by some older race. It was roofless; the walls had, in places, fallen; and the ruins were covered ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty

... A roofless kirk i' the bield o' the cliff-fit bidin', And the deid laid near the wa'; A wheen auld coupit stanes i' the sea-grass hidin', Wi' ...
— Songs of Angus and More Songs of Angus • Violet Jacob

... ruined ecclesiastical finery, into the sacristies and other rooms behind, including one lofty room lined entirely with blue-and-white tiles. While there, I heard, to my surprise, a faint and very distant sound of a sweeping broom. It echoed through those empty, roofless halls with a weird sound, for at that moment there was only an occasional growl of artillery in the air. Everything else was strangely quiet. Needless to say, an uninhabited town is never noisy, and at five o'clock ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into which she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished religion, the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their westernmost adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the Atlantic—was not this the place where Sheila picked the bunch of wild flowers and gave it to her lover? There is nothing in history, I am sure, half so real to ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... lines of trees like sentinels on either side, making the light dim through the overshadowing leafage; gaunt trunks torn up by winds and thrown across the stream with their heads to the feet of their fellows; the golden fuschia here, the green trammon there; now and again a poor old tholthan, a roofless house, with grass growing on its kitchen floor; and over all the sun peering down with a hundred eyes into the dark and slumberous gloom, and the breeze singing somewhere up in the tree-tops to the voice ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... sheltering the walls from rain or eroding influences. From the dry character of the earth on the floors I suspect that for years not a drop of water has penetrated the inclosures, although they are now roofless. ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes

... refined. But they have grown familiar with a custom that, generation after generation, has been observed by their race till it has ceased to be repugnant. They call it "consigning the dead to the element of air." For this purpose they have roofless enclosures, the walls of which are twenty-five or thirty feet high, and within are three biers—one each for men, women and children. Upon these the bodies of the dead are laid, and fastened down with chains or iron bands. Presently birds of prey, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... amazing cathedral constructed by Nature herself, with lavish outlay of the pointed aisle of branches, is at Jumieges. There, close to the splendid ruins of the Abbey, where the two towers are still intact, while the roofless nave, carpeted with flowers, ends in a chancel of foliage shut in by an apse of trees, three vast aisles of centenary boles extend in parallel lines; one in the middle, very wide, the two others, one on each side, somewhat narrower; they exactly represent a church nave with its two ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... to be a Rebel camp; then some one spied heights topped with cannon, and "Now," said they, "we are close upon it," and then stopped short for wonder, for here the road ended, ran butt against the wall of a huge roofless inclosure, made of squared pines set perpendicularly and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... lay through a charming country. Upon the sides of its acclivities, surrounded by the most romantic scenery of woods and corn fields, we saw ruined convents, and roofless village churches, through the shattered casements of which the wind ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr

... safety strap and climbed out, making his way to the ground by means of stepping on an elevated bed of flowers inside the now almost roofless house. ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach

... ruins, if anywhere. Coronado, as we have seen, invaded the country about three hundred and fifty years ago. At the time of his visit this was then a ruin, for his historian describes one ruin as "a single ruined and roofless house... the work of civilized people who had come from afar." This gives us a point as to the antiquity of some of the ruins in the Gila Valley. As we shall see, there is every reason to suppose that this section was at one time a ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... that he could have continued the story to Howard of the kid's way Joan had treated him,—a way which had left him stultified,—of how, touched by the tragedy that had reduced the poor little waif of the chorus to utter grief and despair, he had taken her out to the country to get healing in God's roofless cathedral, and of how, treating her, because of his love and admiration of Joan, with all the respect and tenderness that he would have shown a sister, it had given him the keenest pleasure and delight to help ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... to themselves, in a sort of natural prison of the rocks, a roofless cave, the captives spent the night, rolled in blankets. It was cool without a campfire, but none was allowed them. Sore, stiff and disheartened, Rosemary and Floyd arose soon after the sun was up, ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker

... particular mystery about the art, and those birds are so unsophisticated, I shall be sure to get some. You see if I don't. But first I must build my house. The open sky is all very well, but it might come on to rain, and then the roofless caravanserai would not be very comfortable. It is a good thing we brought ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... the Princess's resolution never to see any man whatsoever, and they implored him to speak for them and to tell her the greatness of their love, and how long they had waited through the cold of winter and the heat of summer, sleepless and roofless through all weathers, without food and without rest, in the ardent hope of winning her, and they were willing to consider this long vigil as pleasure if she would but give them one chance of pleading ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki

... Presently, however, as I stumbled along, I noticed something looming darkly through the matted forest on my left, that suggested walls. Looking closer, I saw that it was the ruin of a small stone cottage, roofless, and indescribably swallowed up in the pitiless scrub. And then, near by, I descried another such ruin, and still another—all, as it were, sunk in the terrible gloom of the vegetation, as sometimes, at low tide, one can discern the ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... all been wrecked, but none had been burned; their walls stood, sometimes to the second story, with smashed windows and shattered doors. The red weed grew tumultuously in their roofless rooms. Below me was the great pit, with the crows struggling for its refuse. A number of other birds hopped about among the ruins. Far away I saw a gaunt cat slink crouchingly along a wall, but traces of men there ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... of a destroyed house he disappeared. The place was evidently familiar to him, for he moved without hesitation. Broken furniture still stood in the roofless rooms, and in front of a battered bureau Henri paused. Still whistling under his breath, he took off his uniform and donned a strange one, of greenish gray. In the pocket of the blouse he stuffed a soft round cap ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the world so sought after by the Cistercian monks, who doubtless found inspiration in the grandeur of the surrounding mountains and in the peacefulness of the sweet valley below. Tho the church of the Early English abbey is roofless and the central tower gone, the noble structure, with its many graceful arches, seems to attest to the spirit of religious fervor and devotion so intimately associated with the history of its gray and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... prevailing criticisms. At any rate, the walls of the new chapel were mounting higher and higher all through February, and by the end of the first week in March there stood immediately opposite to the Vicarage gate a hideously ugly building, roofless, doorless, windowless;—with those horrid words,—"New Salem, 186—" legibly inscribed on a visible stone inserted above the doorway, a thing altogether as objectionable to the eyes of a Church of England parish clergyman as the imagination of any friend or enemy could ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... walked among the roofless ruins. Lizards, the color of the cold, gray walls, slipped from sight on silent, clinging feet. Once a sidewinder, almost invisible against the sand, looped away from the intruders ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin

... none. About a quarter of a mile ahead of me and about the same distance back from the river there stood a ruinous house which had been fired, but whether recently or by the French I could not tell; once no doubt the country villa of some well-to-do townsman, but now roofless, and showing smears of black where the flames had licked its white outer walls. Towards this I steered my way cautiously, that behind the shelter of an outbuilding I might study the receding brigades ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... Cathedral. His lips moved in prayer; but all the time it was as though he saw beside the visible structure—its ordered beauty, its proud and cherished antiquity—a ruined phantom of the great church, roofless and fissured, its sacred places open to the winds and rains, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... events had been in progress, Nigel with Black Simon and four other men-at-arms from Bordeaux, was hastening northward to join the army. As far as Bergerac they were in a friendly land, but thence onward they rode over a blackened landscape with many a roofless house, its two bare gable-ends sticking upward—a "Knolles' miter" as it was afterward called when Sir Robert worked his stern will upon the country. For three days they rode northward, seeing many small parties of French in all directions, but too eager to reach the army to ease their ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... it and had had suspicions; but to have it come to this, and so suddenly—it was more than he could bear. His throat ached and his hands were wet with perspiration. He looked up into the sky and saw nothing there to help him—nothing but a roofless expanse of drizzling gray fog. Not a bird chirped in the distance. The brook down below him ran on silently without an audible ripple. Everything was silent and motionless. If only a cow would low or a hen would cackle back in ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... shadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view, partially at least, two objects that spoke of man,—a deserted boat harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a land with which man had done for ever;—the vapor-enveloped rocks,—the waste ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... were incredibly industrious. Already they had cleaned up the yards, repaired sagging barns and roofless sheds. Curtains fluttered at the windows. Cows had appeared, and sheep, even a few horses. Somehow, perhaps from accumulated seepage, they were still bringing water from the rusty pumps. And—though it was surely an illusion—Dark ...
— The Invaders • Benjamin Ferris

... a crevice where tree-fern trunks grew close together and closed in three sides of a sort of roofless cave. He seated himself grimly at the opening to wait for daybreak. He was not easy in his mind. There had been two Tubes to the Fifth-Dimension world. One had been made by Jacaro for his gunmen. That was ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... Pompeii presents now is that of a large open village of ruined and roofless one-storied houses. Many of the houses were originally two stories high, it is true; but the upper stories have been destroyed or shaken down, and in general it is the lower ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott

... three whole houses left in the city." As he spoke they were passing by gaping walls and shattered gun-carriages. They walked through entire streets where the buildings, all more or less demolished, showed at every point the cruelties of war. At one place they heard voices coming from a roofless dwelling, which proved that its inmates still called it home, and clung to the poor ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various

... fell in great drops whose sheer weight and size carried them, at the moment of impact, through the ragged shirts to the warm flesh beneath. In a second, it seemed, a waterspout was upon them and was pouring its tide into the roofless hut. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... direction I placed the packages, the cylinders of oxygen, and so forth, loosely about my feet, and soon we had everything in. He walked about the roofless shed for a time seeking anything we had overlooked, and then crawled in after me. I ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... the stricken country: a watery plain, with here and there great patches of fields, submerged to the hedges, and houses standing out amidst the waste of waters like toy dwellings. There were whole plantations of uprooted trees. Close to the road, on their left, was a roofless house, and a family of children crying underneath a tarpaulin shelter. As they crept on, the wind came to them with a brackish flavour, salt with the sea. The chauffeur was gazing ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... But the roofless night and the empty belly, consequent on an empty pocket, was a lesson which I trust was not thrown away upon me. It did not occur to me to do so, but I certainly might have picked a pocket, if - well, if I had been brought up to it. Honesty, as I have often thought since, is dirt ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... ye bid me, I shall tell ye a' That ilk ane talks about you, but a flaw. When last the wind made Glaud a roofless barn; When last the burn bore down my mither's yarn; When Brawny, elf-shot, never mair came hame; When Tibby kirn'd, and there nae butter came; When Bessy Freetock's chuffy-cheeked wean To a fairy turn'd, and cou'dna stand its lane; When Wattie wander'd ae night thro' the shaw And tint ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... always read my thoughts. "Still," she said, "he has kept a tavern. There is no getting round that fact by all the poetry in the world. Then why try to get round it? He has furnished food and shelter to the tired and roofless—as noble a way to make money, surely, as working the bones and muscles of slaves, and accepting the gold ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various

... railway station, and surmounted by the sign: "Evacuation Hospital No. 6." The next morning we went to visit it. A part of the station buildings has been adapted to hospital use, and among them a great roofless hall, which the surgeon in charge has covered in with canvas and divided down its length into a double row of tents. Each tent contains two wooden cots, scrupulously clean and raised high above the floor; and ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... the blue waves and the distant islands, and there lay, I knew, the earthworks of an ancient fort, that the first tenants of the isle used for defence in days long past—yea, and their wall of stone circled the space this way and that, and the roofless walls of some building—a temple perhaps—stood near, wherein they worshipped the false god of the sky or the hearth; here awhile I rested, and after brake again into the path, and made for the Bay of the Saints, where ...
— The Fall Of The Grand Sarrasin • William J. Ferrar

... barricade lay our advance guard. The colonel led me into a roofless house, and there I found two general officers, a map stretched over a drum in front of them, they kneeling beside it and examining it carefully by the light of a lantern. The one with the clean-shaven face and the twisted neck was Marshal Lannes, ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... and down into deep dark mystery. Certainly so far the ruins did not look as though they would protect any one from wind and rain, and we passed on, through walls that seemed impregnable, to ruined chambers, utterly roofless, in and out of which pigeons were flying happily at their ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... merchant of bygone days had built in a pious mood a large church, which was now too great for the needs of the place; the nave had been unroofed in a heavy gale, and there was no money to repair it, so that it had fallen to decay, and the tower was joined to the choir by roofless walls. This was a sore trial to the old priest, Father Thomas, who had grown grey there; but he had no art in gathering money, which he asked for in a shamefaced way; and the vicarage was a poor one, hardly enough for the old man's needs. So the ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... other towns they had passed through on their way from Tepic, by way of Jalisco, Aguascalientes and Zacatecas, was in ruins. The black trail of the incendiaries showed in the roofless houses, in the burnt arcades. Almost all the houses were closed, yet, here and there, those still open offered, in ironic contrast, portals gaunt and bare as the white skeletons of horses scattered over ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela

... northern hills of Scotland, elements of more ancient architectural interest are equally absent. The solitary peel- house is hardly discernible by the windings of the stream; the roofless aisle of the priory is lost among the enclosures of the village; and the capital city of the Highlands, Inverness, placed where it might ennoble one of the sweetest landscapes, and by the shore of one of the loveliest estuaries in the world;—placed ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... and the red and yellow woods were merging into a ten-mile-square desert of crumbling concrete—empty and roofless sheds and warehouses and barracks, brush-choked parade grounds and landing fields, airship docks, and even a spaceport. They were more recent, dating from Poictesme's second brief and hectic prosperity, when the Terran Federation's Third Fleet-Army Force had occupied the Gartner Trisystem ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper

... to the limit of my strength. He manipulated my member for a long time, but all in vain. Gummy streams poured down his sweating forehead, and there was so much chalk in the wrinkles of his cheeks that you might have mistaken his face for a roofless wall, from which the plaster was crumbling in ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... gaping wounds, The Baths of Caracalla's roofless walls, The Forum's multitude of ruined mounds, The royal Palatine's ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... still, the silence scarce broken by the lapping of the waves, as the Wanderer went down from his fallen home to the city on the sea, walking warily, and watching for any light from the houses of the people. But they were all as dark as his own, many of them roofless and ruined, for, after the plague, an earthquake had smitten the city. There were gaping chasms in the road, here and there, and through rifts in the walls of the houses the moon shone strangely, making ragged shadows. At last the ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

... the grave I saw a line of old women who had recited in the keen sitting in the shadow of a wall beside the roofless shell of the church. They were still sobbing and shaken with grief, yet they were beginning to talk again of the daily trifles that veil from them the terror of ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge

... are destroyed. Its temples are roofless, its columns fallen, the statues of its kings lie face downward in the dust, the pyramids, stripped and bare, stand scarred and silent in the sun. The singing Memnon are as songless from their chiselled lips as the tongueless Sphynx half buried in the yellow sand. The fisheries are gone, ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... a narrow street the mission of San Jose, or St. Joseph. Passing the squares of one-story adobe buildings once inhabited by thousands of busy Indians, but now deserted, roofless, and crumbling into ruins, we reached the plaza in front of the church, and the massive two-story edifices occupied by the padres during the flourishing epoch of the establishment. These were in good repair; but the doors and windows, ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant

... it required to run through this precise bit of Barbican, and the house, with others near it, was doomed to demolition. When I was last in Barbican part of the shell of the house was still standing, roofless, disfloored, diswindowed, and pickaxed into utter raggedness, as so much rubbish yet waiting to be removed from the new railway gap. The inscription yet remained on the front-door—"This was Milton's House," or to that effect—which had been very properly put there by the contractor or ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... Gaetani family long maintained their feudal warfare, with fragments of marble sculpture taken from the tomb incorporated into the plain brick walls. And on the other side of the road, in a beautiful meadow, covered with soft green grass, are the ruins of a roofless Gothic chapel, showing little more than a few bare walls and gables built of dark lava stones, with traces of pointed windows in them, and the spring of the groined arches of the roof. Like the fortress, the chapel has few or no architectural ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... before Mr. Archer left his apartment. On the landing he found another door beside his own opening on a roofless corridor, and presently he was walking on the top of the ruins. On one hand he could look down a good depth into the green courtyard; on the other his eye roved along the downward course of the river, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... not lessen its pallor. The voices of the three children on the floor grated on the old man's mood as they were busied in defending a settler's fort, insecurely constructed of stones and sticks, and altogether roofless, garrisoned by a number of pebbles, while a poke full of wily Indian kernels of ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... are about thirty feet high and very thick, and entering by a handsome stone arch, called the Herculaneum gate, from the road leading to that city, I beheld a vista of houses or shops, and except that they were roofless, just as if they had been occupied but yesterday, although near eighteen centuries have passed away since the awful calamity which sealed the fate of their inhabitants. The facilities for excavation being great, both on account of the lightness of the material and the little ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner

... are led up in front of the parroquia—now roofless and black; their heads are fastened together, so that the backs of their riders are turned toward ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... My son bounded forward to tell his mother and sisters of my coming. On gaining the brow of the hill he leapt from the ground with a frantic cry and clasped his hands. I ran towards him—but I remember no more—though at times something crosses my mind, and I have wild visions of roofless walls, and a crowd of weeping women and silent men digging among ashes, and a beautiful body, all dropping wet, brought on a deal from the mill-dam, and of men, as it was carried by, seizing me by the arms ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... out of the place, carried off the Miya in the vain hope of raising his standard in the north as that of a rival Mikado. A few of the lesser temples and tombs, and the beautiful park-like grounds, are but the remnants of the former glory of Uyeno. Among these is a temple in the form of a roofless stage, in honour of the thousand-handed Kwannon. In the middle ages, during the civil wars between the houses of Gen and Hei, one Morihisa, a captain of the house of Hei, after the destruction ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford

... Podgorica we had met a young Franciscan monk, a Neapolitan and a great student. He at once invited us to visit him in Zatrijebac, where he is the spiritual shepherd, and to spend a few weeks with him. On approaching a roofless church, in the course of rebuilding, we espied this young monk rushing to meet us. With all the fervour of his race, he embraced and kissed us repeatedly, welcoming us to his home. He gave me his bed, and the other remaining one was put at P.'s disposal, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... lorn abbey now, the wood Stands roofless in the bitter air; In ruins on its floor is strewed The carven foliage quaint and rare, And homeless winds complain along The columned choir ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... points. This circumstance also brought us acquainted with several very lovely locations. Beneath the old fort of Ticonderago we halted for a few minutes; and at Crown-point our stay was long enough to allow a rough sketch to be taken of the roofless barracks ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power

... planted with grass and a few trees, and intersected with paths. There was a music-stand in the centre, a statue on a pedestal; and close by them, rising from the greensward, appeared a small, curious structure of stone. It was a roofless circular tower, supported on round arches, which made a series of openings about its base. Cannie had never heard of the Stone Mill before, and she listened eagerly while Mrs. Gray explained that it had stood there since the earliest days of the Colony; ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge

... grieve not for my wayward lot, My empty folds, my roofless cot; Nor hateful pity, proudly shown, Nor altered looks, nor friendship flown; Nor yet my dog, with lanken sides, Who by his master still abides; But how wilt thou prefer my boon, In tatter'd ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... nothing on his head. On a journey, or when the sun was particularly strong in the roofless theatre or circus, he might put on a broad-brimmed hat, very much like that of the modern Italian priest. Instead of the hat it was common, when the weather so required, either to draw a fold of the toga over the head or to wear a hood closely resembling ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... seldom, where the beechen boughs That roofless tower invade, We came while her enchanting Muse The radiant moon above us held: Till by a clamorous owl compell'd ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... skirt, white cotton blouse, and blue tam-o'-shanter, laughed at the man's dread. There must be a distinct cause for this noise she had heard, she argued. Yet, though they both spent half-an-hour wandering among the ruins, standing in the roofless banqueting hall, and traversing stone corridors and lichen-covered, moss-grown, ruined chambers choked with weeds, their efforts to obtain any clue ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux

... golf if you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... terminus, and a town of respectable proportions had grown up, but with the completion of the road through this region, the terminus had moved on, and now all that was to be seen of those golden days was a group of adobe walls, roofless and forlorn. The present "city" consisted of about thirteen houses, and some of these were of such complex construction that one hesitates whether to describe them as houses with canvas roofs, or tents with board sides. ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... In early life he visited the most beautiful parts of this country and Ireland. Afterwards the Alps of Switzerland became his inspirers. "Prometheus Unbound" was written among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome; and, when he made his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him as he composed the "Witch of Atlas", "Adonais", and "Hellas". In the wild but beautiful Bay of Spezzia, the winds and waves which he loved became his playmates. His days were chiefly spent on the water; the management of his boat, its alterations and improvements, were ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley

... a particular bunkhouse, and there was a great rush for places. It was floorless, doorless and in part roofless. Above the medley of voices I heard that ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... and journeyed with them for several days: never do I remember a happier time. Then, after many years of bondage and stiffness, and accordance with the world, I found myself at ease, like a released bird; with what zest did I join in the rude jokes and the knavish tricks, the stolen feasts and the roofless nights of those ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... So lofty is the opening that a sailing boat can pass through with ease. Behind it is the soaring Swyre Head, 670 feet high, and the third of that name in Dorset. Between this point and Nelson Fort on the west of Lulworth Cove is Stair Hole, a gloomy roofless cavern into which the tide pours with a terrifying sound, especially when a strong ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... this unpleasant subject, only to justify what I have said in an earlier chapter of the degradation of mind in which the savages of the mountains are sunk.] Eighteen wounded men lay side by side in a roofless hut. Their faces, drawn by pain and anxiety, looked ghastly in the pale light of the early morning. Two officers, one with his left hand smashed, the other shot through both legs, were patiently waiting for the moment when the improvised tourniquets could ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill

... Alloway, which is within two or three minutes' walk of the monument. A few steps ascend from the road-side, through a gate, into the old graveyard, in the midst of which stands the kirk. The edifice is wholly roofless, but the side-walls and gable-ends are quite entire, though portions of them are evidently modern restorations. Never was there a plainer little church, or one with smaller architectural pretension; no New England meeting-house has more simplicity in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... much struck on one occasion by the absence of any dome or roof. It was in Asia Minor, on the seashore, that I came upon a cottage long deserted, its door hanging by one hinge, and all the glass gone from the windows. In the empty rooms numerous swallows were rearing twittering broods in roofless nests. No doubt the birds realised that they had nothing to fear from rain, and were reluctant to waste time and labour in covering ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo

... of the cliff; but soon the eye began to make out a kind of order here and there, and that rugged ranges of stones had been built up on shelves of the rock, with windows and doors, but as far as could be made out these rock-dwellings had been roofless; and were more like fortifications than anything else, the ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn

... Kitchen, both of enduring gray stone, covered with yellow lichen, which gave a remarkable golden tint to their extreme old age. Architecture there was next to none. St. Kevin's so-called kitchen had a cylindrical tower, crowned by an extinguisher, and within the roofless walls was a flat stone, once the altar, and still a station for pilgrims; and the cathedral contained two broken coffin-lids with floriated crosses, but it was merely four rude roofless walls, enclosing less space than a cottage kitchen, and less ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... calmed his fears with a peseta—money goes a long way in Spain—and went in alone. The pigs had been removed and all was silent. A few bats flitted to and fro quickly. The light fell away greyly, the cold descended on the ruin, and it became very strange and mysterious. Presently, the roofless chapels seemed to grow alive with weird invisible things, the rank weeds exhaled chill odours; and in the lonely silence a mass began. At the ruined altar ghostly priests officiated, passing quietly from ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... when I came to a place where the road should have crossed a stream—not wide, but strong, smooth, and very deep. The stream ran through a glen; and above the road I had long noted the towers of a castle. But as I drew closer, I saw first that the walls were black with fire and roofless, and that carrion birds were hovering over them, some enemy having fallen upon the place: and next, behold, the bridge was broken, and there was neither ford nor ferry! All the ruin was fresh, the castle still smouldering, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang

... dreams of emulating Wolfe's glory. But Wolfe had snatched victory out of the shadow of coming winter; and, almost before Murray's army could cut wood for fuel, the cold was upon them. For two months Quebec had been pounded with shot and shell. Her churches and hospitals stood roofless; hundreds of houses had been fired, vaults and storehouses pillaged, doors and windows riddled everywhere. There was no digging entrenchments in the frozen earth. Walls six feet thick had been breached by artillery; and the ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... hot tea from nowhere, or transforming a wet-canteen marquee into a decent place for Communion (empty tobacco boxes for table, beer barrels discreetly out of sight), or building a pulpit out of sandbags in the corner of a roofless saloon bar. ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan

... will bear witness. They will tell how the enemy makes a wilderness and calls it war. It was a most weird picture. On the high ground rose the broken spires of the Church of St. Pierre and the Hotel de Ville, and descending like steps were row beneath row of houses, roofless, with windows like blind eyes. The fire had reached the last row of houses, those on the Boulevard de Jodigne. Some of these were already cold, but others sent up steady, straight columns of flame. In others at the ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis

... St. Joseph's Chapel, St. Mary's Chapel, and the Abbot's Kitchen. St. Joseph's Chapel is supposed to have been erected in the time of Henry II. and Richard I. It is one of the finest specimens in existence of transitional Norman work. It is now roofless, and even the vaulting of the crypt is nearly destroyed. The windows and archways of St. Mary's Chapel are beautiful, although roofless. The Abbot's Kitchen, a square massive structure with strong ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home

... marked on Traxt Cam's private map and the Terrans now had another five minutes march, in the middle of the road, ahead of the chieftain who must be inwardly boiling at their presence, before they came out in the clearing containing the roofless, circular erection which served the Salariki of the district as a market place and a common meeting ground for truce talks and the mending of private clan alliances. Erect on a pole in the middle, towering well above the ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... over the wooded enclosures, the little stone walls, and the copses. A small cloud had come before the sun, and its shadow was moving leisurely across the ridge where stood the roofless abbey. ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford

... styled, St. Fittack, at Nigg, Kincardineshire, on the opposite bank of the Dee from Aberdeen. The bay in the vicinity is known as St. Picker's Bay, and St. Fittack's Well, a clear spring near the roofless ruins of the old church, still recalls his memory. Its existence is a strong proof of the saint's residence in the neighbourhood at some time in his life. The fame of this well {125} for healing powers survived the downfall of religion, and it ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett

... took formal possession of the Cape, but unfortunately so much time had been lost in contesting with the natives, that, notwithstanding all their industry, the rainy and tornado season set in while the dwelling-houses were still roofless. In the island sickness began to make terrible ravages; both the Agents were among the sufferers, and it was soon evident, that unless a removal from their insalubrious situation should be speedily effected, the consequences would be finally ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman

... on this Sunday, the wind was lulled and the sky was clear, the climate was as mild as in spring on the mainland. As soon as the aspect of the sunrise showed the experienced that the day would be fair, busy hands moved into the old roofless chapel the pulpit and benches which the pastor had brought with him—the pulpit being a mere desk of unpainted wood, and the benches of the roughest sort. For these the interior space of the old building ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau

... the soldiers, "Who is the —— rascal that sent my horse to the provost-marshal?" "It was I!" said the colonel, to the utter confusion of the querist. Our chief was a good deal nettled at these irregularities; and, some time after, on going to his tent, which was pitched between the roofless walls of a house, conceive his astonishment at finding the calf and the goose hanging in his own larder! He looked serious for a moment, but, on receiving an explanation, and after the row he had made about them, the thing was too ridiculous, and he burst out laughing. ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid

... onward, and courage has carried him through, but more often than the public thinks he has suffered sharply in his progress. The impediment of speech, which in his very nervous moments would almost make one think his mouth was roofless, would have prevented many men from even attempting to enter public life; it has always been a handicap to Mr. Churchill, but he has never allowed it to stop his way, and I think it is significant both of his courage and the nervousness of his temperament that while at the ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie

... stone hedges which enclosed the old fields. In those days Saaron had supported, or failed to support, five families; but of these all but Tregarthen had lost their clutch on the barren rock and drifted away to other islands. He could remember their going. He passed their roofless cottages half a dozen ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... sneer from the front teeth. Her mind skimmed leagues where Mrs. Pascoe's mind adhered to its solitary patch. Her mind skimmed leagues as the ponies climbed the hill road. Forwards and backwards she cast her mind, as if the roofless cottages, mounds of slag, and cottage gardens overgrown with foxglove and bramble cast shade upon her mind. Arrived at the summit, she stopped the carriage. The pale hills were round her, each scattered with ancient stones; ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... and attempts at magnificence which usually centre about the plazas of the Spanish-American capitals,—not even a carved door-facing or trifling ornament of any description. The entire side on our right, between the two eastern streets, was occupied by the cracked and roofless walls of an ancient church or convent, which had long been a neglected ruin. The fallen stones and mortar had raised a sloping embankment high up its venerable sides; and the small trees, here and there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... in a day there were happy hames By the bonnie Orde's side: Nane ken how meikle peace an' love In a straw-roof'd cot can bide. But thae hames are gane, an' the hand o' time The roofless wa's doth raze; Laneness an' sweetness hand in hand Gang ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... child lay buried. On his way to this hill, which stood about half a mile distant, he passed a few houses of an humble description, with whose inhabitants he had been well acquainted. Some of these stood nearly as he remembered them; but others were roofless, with their dark mud gables either fallen in or partially broken down. He surveyed their smoke-colored walls with sorrow; and looked, with a sense of the transient character of all man's works upon the chickweed, docks, and nettles, which had shot up so rankly on the spot where ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... gathering. Each cave, or, in the case of large caves, each natural subdivision of it, is claimed as the property of some individual, who holds it during his lifetime and transmits it to his heirs. During the gathering of the nests of a large cave, the people live in roofless huts built inside it. The nests are sold to Chinese traders — the black nests for about a hundred dollars a hundredweight, and the white nests for as much as thirty or forty shillings ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... large portion of the island, they are patent to every eye—they obtrude themselves everywhere. The people are poor; they are despondent, broken-spirited. In the south of Ireland decay is written on every town. In the poorer parts you may see every fifth or sixth house tenantless, roofless, allowed from year to year to moulder and moulder away, unremoved, unrepaired.... To make room for these large-scale operations, evictions must go on, and as the process proceeds the numbers must be augmented of those who are unfit to work ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... revolution came to Cuba the beauty of the landscape is blotted with the grim and pitiable signs of war. The sugar cane has turned to a dirty brown where the fire has passed through it, the centrals are black ruins, and the adobe houses and the railroad stations are roofless, and their broken windows stare pathetically at you like blind eyes. War cannot alter the sunshine, but the smoke from the burning huts and the blazing corn fields seems all the more sad and terrible when it rises ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis

... community. The man who is a hundredfold a millionaire, and who cannot himself consume the hundredth part of the interest of his interest, even he cannot escape the sharp grip of the horrid hunger-spectre any more than the most wretched of the wretched who wanders, roofless and cold and hungry, through the streets of your great cities. The difference between the two lies not in the brain and in the heart, but simply in the stomach; the second simply endures physical suffering over and above the psychical and intellectual suffering ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... wind made such a deafening noise that you could hardly hear yourself speak; presently some of the occupants of the house thought they would have a look outside to see if things were all right; when they were surprised to see an outer building, used for stores and machinery, roofless, and the roof nowhere to be seen; it was discovered afterwards on the top of their own house, and they had ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various



Words linked to "Roofless" :   homeless, dispossessed, unfortunate



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