"Wainscoting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... money. The inclosure was massive, the woodwork being an effective imitation of Flemish oak, and the hanging surface a burlap of a neutral green tint; the facade, sixteen feet in height, being broken every few feet at fixed intervals by fluted pilasters with ornamental caps. On the outside a wainscoting extended three feet from the floor, above which were panels for hanging exhibit material, the whole being capped by an attractive dentulated cornice. The entranceway, which was thrown across the corner at the intersection ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... as antique as without, and, with its halls, corridors, wainscoting, and ancient mouldings, takes the visitor back to the era of powder and silk stockings. Such was the mansion to which General Harry Lee came to live after the Revolution, and the sight of the old home must have been dear to the soldier's ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... and glass aside, I dragged the table across the floor, placed it under the lighted window, mounted, and was about to peer through, when the light in that apartment was put out also. Angry and overwhelmed, I leapt down, and, stretching out my hands till they touched the wainscoting, I followed the wall around till I came to the knob of the door, which I frantically clutched. But I did not turn it immediately, I was too anxious to catch these villains at work. Would I be conscious of ...
— The Staircase At The Hearts Delight - 1894 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... breathe, and now he wondered what he had better do next. Taking infinite pains to make no sound he investigated the wall of the Hall with his finger tips. There was a door here, a secret door, he thought, hidden from the interior of the Hall in the paneling of the wainscoting. Did Goritz know of its existence? The floor of the crypt, it was true, had shown no sign of footsteps, and the door below, Renwick was sure, had not been opened for many years. But if Goritz knew of this passage, there was a chance of his entering and finding him. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... attention from observers of various descriptions. Smoky chimnies in a new house, are such, frequently, for want of air. The workmanship of the rooms being all good and just out of the workman's hands, the joints of the flooring and of the pannels of the wainscoting are all true and tight; the more so as the walls, perhaps not yet thoroughly dry, preserve a dampness in the air of the room which keeps the woodwork swelled and close: the doors and the sashes too being worked ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... he reflected. As he finally reached the ground, a scratching was heard in the corner, and he was instantly alert, and the next moment had fitted his nose, like a kind of india-rubber pad, deep into a small mouse-hole in the wainscoting, and was breathing long noisy sighs down into the delicious and ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... diminished the rations of food that could be served during the winter, for the Fortune was not well supplied. When she set sail for England, she carried a little cargo of beaver-skins and choice wood for wainscoting to the value of L500 sterling, as a first instalment of the sum due to the merchant adventurers. But this cargo never reached England, for the Fortune was overhauled by a French cruiser and robbed of everything ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... following year the foundation stone of a mean and flimsy substitute, in the "Gothic" of the period, was laid by Dr. Sumner, then Bishop of Winchester. The interior, thus limited and reduced, was fitted up with timber staircases, wainscoting, galleries, high pews, and a "three-decker" pulpit, which answered the double purpose of obscuring the sanctuary and enabling the preacher to command ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... gallery with two stairways, I can reach the windows and enjoy the beauty of the landscape, which is lovely. My bed is a simple hammock of aloes-fibre, slung in a corner; very low divans, and huge tapestry arm-chairs, for the rest of the furniture. Hung up on the wainscoting are pistols, guns, masks, foils, gloves, plastrons, dumb-bells and other gymnastic equipments. My favorite horse is installed in the opposite angle, in a box of bois des iles, a precaution that secures him from the brutalizing society of grooms, and ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... He also planted some rose bushes, and caused some oak wood to be placed on board a vessel for shipment to France, as a specimen of the wood of the new colony, which he considered suitable not only for marine wainscoting, but also ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... he had lived there himself. The smoky hovel rose before him: he could smell the odour of garlic and tallow; he could see the drunken guests—some seated round the long table, others lying under it—the damp and dripping walls, and the rough, dirty ceiling. He remembered a panel in the wainscoting against which a bottle had been broken, in the heat of some dispute; it had left a great stain of wine that resembled a human face. He remembered, too, the tavern-keeper, a little man with a dirty, red beard, whose demeanour was at once timid and impudent. ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... arrangement has been found possible, an important discovery, which, like many others that have preceded it, was probably the happy effect of necessity, that mother of invention. Mr. Wyllys having cut through the partition, was next persuaded to take down the wainscoting, and put up in its place a French paper, very pretty in its way, certainly, but we fear that Miss Agnes had no better reason to give for these changes than the fact that she was doing as her neighbours had done ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... gallery, till evening threw its melancholy twilight through the painted casements, and deepened the gloom of the oak wainscoting around her; while the distant perspective of the corridor was so much obscured, as to be discernible only by the glimmering ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the inscription "Council Chamber," a large room was crossed, furnished with a huge horse-shoe table, surrounded by green chairs. At the end of this room, which in 1793 had served as a deliberating hall for the juries of the Revolutionary Tribunal, there was a door placed in the wainscoting, which led into a little lobby where were two doors, on the right the door of the room appertaining to the President of the Criminal Chamber, on the left the door of the Refreshment Room. "Sentenced to death!—Now let us go and dine!" These two ideas, Death and Dinner, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... about which Blair had begun to be impertinent when he was eight years old, was of noble proportions and in its day must have had great dignity; but in Blair's childhood its day was over. Above the dingy white wainscoting the landscape paper his grandfather had brought from France in the thirties had faded into a blur of blues and buffs. The floor was uncarpeted save for a Persian rug, whose colors had long since dulled ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... claim to admission, and was ushered into a small parlour: all there, too, was still,—the brown oak wainscoting, the huge chairs, the few antique portraits, the uninhabited aspect of the chamber,—all were silently eloquent of quietude, but a quietude comfortless and sombre. At length my mother appeared. I sprang forward: my childhood was before me,—years, care, change were ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lustrations of every pane of glass and inch of paint in our parlors, in consequence whereof every shutter and blind must be kept closed for days to come, lest the flies should speck the freshly washed windows and wainscoting? Dear shade of Aunt Mehitabel, forgive our boldness! Have we not been driven for days, in our youth, to read our newspaper in the front veranda, in the kitchen, out in the barn,—anywhere, in fact, where sunshine could be found, because there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... goats' house. Endless passages led from this, through the rents of which the sky as well as the fields and the road outside could be seen at intervals; but at last one came to a stout oak door that led into a room that still stood intact. Here the walls and the dark wainscoting remained as good as ever, and in the corner was an immense stove reaching nearly to the ceiling, on the white tiles of which were painted large pictures in blue. These represented old castles surrounded with trees, and huntsmen riding out with their ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... had closed his shop, and made of this room of which we were speaking, a store-room for colonial provisions. As for the rest of the house, he let it ready furnished to strangers. It was with unspeakable emotion D'Artagnan recognized all the furniture of the chamber of the first story; the wainscoting, the tapestries, and even that geographical chart which Porthos had so fondly studied ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wall, stood for an instant, then stepped back, as we heard a slight clicking sound, like the snap of a spring on an old box-lid. At the same time a part of the wainscoting rolled away, ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... creature dead. But it suddenly rushes out from some part or other, looking larger and more wicked than ever,—drops to the floor, and charges at my feet: a sortie! I strike at him unsuccessfully with the stick: he retreats to the angle between wainscoting and floor, and runs along it fast as a railroad train,—dodges two or three pokes, —gains the door-frame,—glides behind a hinge, and commences to run over the wall of the stair-way. There the hand of a ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... a shining and memorable interlude that there was talk of the oldest living boy scout, who was said to have rats in his wainscoting; of the oldest living debutante, who was also a porch wren; and of the body snatcher. Little of the talk was mine; a query now and again. It was Ma Pettengill's talk, and I put it here for what it may be worth, hoping I may close-knit and harmonize its themes, so diverse as ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... taken seriously my account of the night Liddy and I were there alone, was grave enough now. He examined the paneling of the wainscoting above and below the stairs, evidently looking for a secret door, and suddenly there flashed into my mind the recollection of a scrap of paper that Mr. Jamieson had found among Arnold Armstrong's effects. As nearly as possible I repeated its contents to him, ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... possible import startled him. For the Rat's-Hole was the secret exit that existed behind the jamb of the fireplace at the upper end of the hall. So cunningly had the panelled door been joinered into the wainscoting that a man might search for hours and yet not discover the spring that threw it open. Furthermore, the wainscoting was but a screen for the real door of iron-bound oak giving passage directly through the outer wall of the keep to the open country. A jealously guarded secret, ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... after that stilly one-o'clock hour when all the sleeping noises of lath and wainscoting creak out, John Burkhardt lifted his head to the moving light of a lamp held like a torch over him, even the ridge of his body completely submerged beneath the great feather billow of ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... House. They send their volante for us, one day, and we visit them. Their house, of the inevitable Cuban pattern, is richly furnished; the marbles of the floor are pure and smooth, the rug ample and velvety; the wainscoting of the walls, so to speak, is in handsome tiling,—not in mean, washy painting; the cane chairs and sofas are fresh and elegant, and there is a fine Erard piano. The master of the house is confined to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... a stately ship, bearing the country's flag around the world. Other parts form keel and ribs of merchantmen, and having defied the mountain storms, they now equally resist the thunder of the waves and the murky threat of scowling hurricanes. Other parts are laid into floors, or wrought into wainscoting, or carved for frames of noble pictures, or fashioned into chairs that embosom the weakness of old age. Thus the tree, in dying, came not to its end, but to its beginning of life. It voyaged the world. It grew to parts of temples and dwellings. It held upon its surface the soft tread of children ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... was a good scene for such a narrative, with the oak-wainscoting, quaint, and clumsy furniture, the heavy beams that crossed its ceiling, and the tall four-post bed, with dark curtains, within which you might imagine what shadows ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Ephraim Allen just as I did the cobwebs upon the walls, and the yellow streaks in the wainscoting; afterward I began to see what a fine figure he had,—a whole head above his companions,—and how broad-shouldered and erect and manly he was; the narrow-backed, short-waisted coat that made the rest look so pinched and uncomfortable sat gracefully ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... she had been told to expect! Bare walls and floors and an empty chair! Yet she did not instantly withdraw, but stood silently contemplating the panelled wainscoting surrounding her, as though she suspected it of containing some secret hiding-place not apparent to ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... undergone in these same rooms? How many vain pleaders for mercy, do you think, have turned away heart- sick from the lawyer's office, to find a resting-place in the Thames, or a refuge in the gaol? They are no ordinary houses, those. There is not a panel in the old wainscoting but what, if it were endowed with the powers of speech and memory, could start from the wall and tell its tale of horror—the romance of life, sir, the romance of life! Commonplace as they may seem now, I tell you they are strange old places, ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... above) was so powerful, that for nearly a minute I could distinguish nothing, and I rested on a form attached to the wainscoting. I then put up my hand to shade my eyes, when—the fearful vision is even now before me—I seemed to be standing before an abyss in space, boundless and black. In the midst of this permeable pitch stood a colossal mass of gold, in shape like an altar, and girdled about by a huge serpent, gorgeous ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Walnut or Chesnut Wood, Spanish, with Embossed Leather Wooden Coffer (XVI. Century) The Steel Chair (Longford Castle) German Carved Oak Buffet Carved Oak Chest Chair of Anna Boleyn Tudor Cabinet The Glastonbury Chair Carved Oak Elizabethan Bedstead Oak Wainscoting Dining Hall in the Charterhouse Screen in the Hall of Gray's Inn Carved Oak Panels (Carpenters' Hall) Part of an Elizabethan Staircase The Entrance Hall, Hardwick Hall Shakespeare's Chair The "Great Bed of Ware" The ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... to fix the necessary attention upon his task, then grasped his study-chair to rest his folded arms on the high, perforated back, adorned with simple carving, and gazed thoughtfully at the wooden wainscoting of the ceiling. After a few minutes he pushed the chair aside with his foot, raised his hand to his mouth, separated his moustache from his thick brown beard, and went to the window. The small, round, leaden-cased ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... high wainscoting of wood about the room, and on top of this, in a narrow gilt framework, ran a row of illuminated pictures, illustrating fairy tales, all in dull blue and gold and scarlet and silver and other lovely colors. From the door ...
— The Birds' Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the bells are mediaeval. In the churchyard is the base and shaft of a cross. Close by the church is a manor house, some portions of which date from the 15th cent., but altered in the 16th cent. by John Brett, whose initials are carved on the wainscoting of the dining-room; and in the grounds are the exposed foundations of a Roman villa, discovered in 1882. Beneath an archway is a well, near which, when discovered, were traces of a Roman shrine. Old workings, supposed to be Roman mines, ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... that the will is so securely hidden there is little, if any, chance of its being discovered. That this is so we know, from the fact that although I ransacked the house from top to bottom, pulled down wainscoting, lifted floors, and tried every imaginable point which either I or the men who were working with me suspected to be a likely spot for a hiding-place, we did not succeed ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... and dining room, for instance, may be treated with a high or low wood wainscoting and wooden panels extending to a wooden cornice at the ceiling. The wood may be a weathered oak, and between the panels is a rough plaster in gray or tinted to suit the house scheme. Friezes and plastic cornices are somewhat on the ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... case the secret passage was discovered, a stone concealed the upper aperture of this shaft. Count Malonyi must have closed up the lower end when he restored the wainscoting ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... of the writer afterward resided at Hanover Hall, the place which Mr. Morris had been thus forced to leave, and a member of the family used to relate how she was shown when a child the marks of O'Leary's bullets in the doors and wainscoting. It would seem as if a desire to brave the laws of the "Saxon" was inherent in this family. A noted professor of the name in Cork appeared a few years ago at a fancy ball clad in his ancestral clothing of the sixteenth century and wearing the insignia of the chieftainship. He boasted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... the Oak Parlour. It is the only room on this floor worth showing you. My father brought the wainscoting from an old English country-house in Dorsetshire. My father's people were Torries, sir, and kept up their connection ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... intrinsically, and the most admirably preserved. Out of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved and inlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reaching from the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a ship's hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted at intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of coats-of-arms, leafage, and little ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Tudor and Jacobean periods is largely due to the beautiful paneled walls. Their woodwork has a color that only age can give and that no stain can copy. The first panels were longer than the later ones. Wide use was made of the beautiful "linen-fold" design in the wainscoting, and there was also much elaborate carving and strapwork. Scenes like the temptation of Adam and Eve were represented, heads in circular medallions, and simply decorative designs were used. In the days of Elizabeth it became the fashion to have the carving at the top ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... the darkness, but he had recognised it—the shining skin, the bright glancing eyes. The sweet breath touched his cheek. The candlestick was taken from him by a swift, deft movement. He heard it knock the wainscoting as it was set down. He went out into a pitch-black corridor, where a soft hand seized his own and led him—by a back door, it seemed—out into the open air of the hill-side immediately behind ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... as the bullet buried itself in splintering wainscoting, a cry of almost childish petulence escaped him. With but one thought, he hurled on, swung round to the head of the stairs, saw his man at the bottom, pulled ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... could make out, there was no entrance to the room except by the door, which was shaped to fit the circular walls. I noticed, however, that there was an unaccountable draught, and this I at last discovered came from below the oak wainscoting of the wall. I could not in any way account for the draught, but it existed to an unpleasant extent. The bed, I further saw, was somewhat peculiar; it had no castors on the four legs, which were let down about ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... fitted up on the ground floor. 'Sophronia,' he said, 'you must sleep!' I suppose it is necessary, but I am so used to lying awake. Such frightful noises in the walls, my dear John! Rats, I suppose? Has the wainscoting been examined lately, in the room you have put me in? Not that it matters in the least; I am the person in the world most easily suited, I suppose. A cot, a corner, a crust, as William says, and I ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... snapping of the coals. The uncovered deal tables were set back in a double line along one wall, with the chairs piled on top, leaving a wide passage of freshly scrubbed and sanded oaken floor from the door to the fireplace. Firelight danced on the dark old wainscoting and high, carved overmantel, winked on rows of drinking mugs and metal covers over cold meats on the buffet, and even picked out the gilt titles on the backs of a shelf of books in Mr. Traill's private corner ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... from a flagon that lay on the table near the Vidame. Simon took it from him with his left hand, drained it, and flung it from him, so that it struck the wainscoting of the wall, and fell with a crash on ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... suddenly appeared. It was an artistically treated Flemish-oak-panelled car with longitudinal beams and cross-beams, giving the impression of a ceiling-beamed room. Between the "beams" was a quiet tone of deep yellow. The sides of the car were wainscoting of plain surface done in a Flemish stain rubbed down to a dull finish. The grain of the wood was allowed to serve as decoration; there was no carving. The whole tone of the car was that of the rich color of the sunflower. The effect upon the travelling public was ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... Cab-horse found himself in possession of a large room with a green marble floor and carved marble wainscoting, which was so stately in its appearance that it would have awed anyone else. Jim accepted it as a mere detail, and at his command the attendants gave his coat a good rubbing, combed his mane and tail, and washed his hoofs and fetlocks. Then they ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... door, which was not locked, and peered into a small store, evidently used for filing. The wires were carried down the back of the architrave molding and along the top of the wainscoting, until finally they disappeared into the side of one of a series of cupboards which lined the wall opposite the door. The cupboard was locked, but with the help of the bent wire it soon stood open and Willis, flashing in a beam from his electric torch, saw with satisfaction ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... enter into the color scheme as the low note in the scale. It is the background for the furniture, and should be deeper than the dado or wainscoting. The wood trims—baseboard, doors, plate-rails, and everything of that character, except the picture molding—should be like the woodwork of the furniture. This brings the woodwork into contrast with the wainscoting (unless the wainscoting be wood) and into harmony ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... doors of which were painted the names of sundry learned civilians, we paused before a small, green-baized, brass-headed-nailed door, which yielding to our gentle push, at once admitted us into an old quaint-looking apartment, with sunken windows, and black carved wainscoting, at the upper end of which, seated on a raised platform, of semicircular shape, were about a dozen solemn-looking gentlemen, in ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... went more rapidly. They turned; all around them was turning—the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like a disc on a pivot. On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma's dress caught against his trousers. Their legs commingled; he looked down at her; she raised her eyes to his. A torpor seized her; she stopped. They started again, and with a more rapid movement; the Viscount, ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... bore the stamp of the time when art had not long been born again. On the walls there were broad tapestries of bold design, showing green forests populated by all sorts of animals in stiff attitudes, staring at one another in perpetual surprise. Below the tapestry a carved walnut wainscoting went round the room, and the door was panelled and flanked by fluted doorposts of the same dark wood, on which rested corbels fashioned into curling acanthus leaves, to hold up the cornice, which itself made a high shelf over the door. Three painted Italian vases, filled with last summer's ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... Outside there are dark walls and yew hedges and cypresses, and here and there a copper beech, with lawns that are never mown and copses that are never thinned, to say nothing of that stagnant moat, with its sombre and prolific vegetation; whilst within, black oak wainscoting, and heavy tapestry, and winding staircases, and small, deep-set windows, and oddly-shaped rooms, with steps at the door like going down into a bath, and doors considerably up and down hill, and queer recesses that frighten one out of one's wits to go into, form altogether a domicile that ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... this courtyard and a large uncultivated garden that extended to the edge of the oak forest. As we entered the ancient dwelling, with its whitewashed walls and old-fashioned wainscoting, I always looked eagerly for my butterfly-net that was usually to be found hanging in the place where I had left it, ready for ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... and entered a long room with high panelled wainscoting, old English fireplace with an overmantel and closets of peculiar china filling the corners. At a bare table of oak, yellow as gold, sat a woman Elnora often had watched and followed covertly around the Limberlost. The Bird Woman was holding out ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... is paved with black and white marble, and all the fittings and wainscoting are of oak. The altar-rails and the side of the wainscot compartments are carved by Grinling Gibbons. Over the altar is an immense painting, made to fit the apse-like end. It represents the Resurrection, and was executed by Sebastian Ricci. The altar ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... against the low wainscoting, and Victoria drew it over beside Hilary and sat down in it. He did not seem to notice the action, and Euphrasia continued to stand. Standing seemed to be the natural posture of this remarkable woman, Victoria thought—a posture of vigilance, of defiance. A clock of one of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... single lamp dimly lighted the wainscoting, composed of ebony, ivory, and tortoise shell, the gay rug carpet, and the giraffe and panther skins hung on the walls and doors and flung on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... residence of Colonel Lacey, who was at the time I write a colonel in the rebel army. The house was very large; its rooms almost palatial in size, had been finished in richly carved hardwood panels and wainscoting, mostly polished mahogany. They were now denuded of nearly all such elegant wood-work. The latter, with much of the carved furniture, had been appropriated for fire-wood. Pretty expensive fuel? Yes, but not nearly so expensive as the discomfort of staying there without ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... as they did so, suffered their tears to flow silently yet abundantly over him, who was no longer sensible either of human grief or of human joy. Close at the head of the bed stood an old man, with his face buried in his hands; the latter reposing against the wainscoting of the room. He, too, wept, but his weeping was more audible, more painful, and accompanied by suffocating sobs. It was the humble, yet almost paternally attached servant of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... room, the wainscoting of which was of dark oak, with a high mantelpiece, elaborately carved in the same wood, with groups of dead game and flowers, and a few choice pictures let into the panels,—upon an easy-chair, that once had been splendid with morocco and gold, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... which has the tongue, and the adjoining board has the usual flooring groove to butt against and receive the tongue. It is frequently the case that a blind bead, as in Fig. 215, runs through the middle of the board, so as to give the appearance of narrow strips when used for wainscoting, or for ceilings. The beads also serve to hide the joints ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... his sleeve and pulled him to a corner. There she pushed aside the dingy hanging and Orme saw that the wall was covered with a wainscoting that ran from floor ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... firelight showed invitingly through the chink. A fire! It was irresistible. He went in quickly and stirred the coals to a roaring blaze. The dancing flames lit up the long, low room with its few pieces of furniture, its high white wainscoting, and paper patterned with birds and trellised leaves. They lit up the low white bed and the white figure of his sleeping wife. Till then he had thought the room was empty. She lay there so deathly still and straight that he was ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... garden. The whole room suggested to Lois, watching her aunt play solitaire, and the motes dancing in the narrow streaks of sunshine which fell between the bowed shutters, and across the drab carpet to the white wainscoting on the other side, the pictures in the Harry and Lucy books, or the parlor where, on its high mantel shelf, Rosamond kept her ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... the interior of the house of a substantial citizen was more pretty than clean or sweet smelling. The high wainscoting and the furniture, in various styles, but frequently resembling what is now known as "mission," was lovely, as were the ornaments—tapestries, clocks, pictures and flowers. But the place of carpets was supplied by rushes renewed from time to time without ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... historians of the seventeenth century: "Wearing the falchion and the rapier, the cloth coat lined with plush and embroidered belt, the gold hat-band and the feathers, silk stockings and garters, besides signet rings and other jewels; wainscoting the walls of their principal rooms in black oak and loading their sideboards with a deal of rich and massive silver plate upon which was carved the arms of their ancestors;—drinking, too, strong punch and sack from 'silver sack-cups'—(sack being their favorite)—and ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the floors," Billy went on admiringly. "See how uneven they are. You'll have to walk straight here, Petronilla, to keep from falling down. That old wooden wainscoting is simply charming. That's a nice old fireplace too. And these old doors ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... young Little and Mr. Raby was slowly widening. Little found objectionable features in the Hall. "This black oak ceiling and wainscoting is not as healthful as plaster; besides, it absorbs the light. The bedroom ceiling is too low; the Elizabethan architects knew nothing of ventilation. The color of that oak paneling which you admire is due to an excess of carbon and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... vestibule contains a superb mosaic, brought home from Venice, in 1798, by one of the Boiscorans, who had degenerated, and followed the fortunes of Napoleon. The balusters of the great staircase are a masterpiece of iron work; and the wainscoting in the dining-room has no ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... his disposal to improve his appearance, and comforted by the sensation of wearing under his uniform a clean shirt of his host's, made his appearance in the spacious, high-ceiled dining room with its somber wainscoting. The elder Madame Delaherche was already there, for she was always on foot at daybreak, notwithstanding she was seventy-eight years old. Her hair was snowy white; in her long, lean face was a nose almost preternaturally thin and sharp and a mouth that had long since forgotten how to laugh. She ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... was done for a moment or so Atli stood still, and grew white beneath his ruddy skin, white as his beard. Then he staggered back against the wainscoting of ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... marble tablet had been placed on the house at the suggestion of the late Mr. George Dawson, marking the spot where 'Edmund Hector was the host, Samuel Johnson the guest.' This tablet, together with the wainscoting, the door, and the mantelpiece of one of the rooms, was set up in Aston Hall, at the Johnson Centenary, in a room that is to be known ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... room was warm, but the frost had not yet melted from the window-panes. The room looked full of hard white lines of frost, and starched curtains, and high wainscoting; but the hardest white lines of all were in Lot Gordon's face, sunken sharply in his pillows, showing between the stiff dimity slants of his bed-hangings as in a tent door. He looked already like a dead man, except for his eyes. It seemed ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 'And a quaint, old-fashioned room it is, too, with a wainscoting of oak all around it as high as a man's head. It used to be called the oak parlor, and many a time has its floor rung to the tread of the king's soldiers, who, disappointed in their search for hidden goods, consented to take a ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... too, were not infrequently secreted in these hiding places, and in the Manor House, Trent, near Sherborne, there is a strangely constructed chamber, entered from one of the upper rooms through a sliding panel in the oak wainscoting, in which tradition tells us Charles II. lay concealed for a fortnight on his escape to the coast, after the battle of Worcester. And Boscobel House, which also afforded Charles II. a safe retreat, has two secret chambers; and there are indications ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... hung round with family female insipidities by Lely, and unprepossessing male Thornes in red coats by Kneller; each Thorne having been let into a panel in the wainscoting in the proper manner. At the further end of the room was a huge fire-place, which afforded much ground of difference between the brother and sister. An antiquated grate that would hold about a hundred weight of coal, had been stuck on the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... narra, that on the left in red narra. The stairway is of a magnificent, richly figured, claret-red hardwood called tindalo, the favorite material for such construction in the islands. The panels of its wainscoting and the balusters are of a dark velvety epil, so dark and so glossy in some places that it looks almost like agate. All the columns are natural trunks of the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... wicked blow, and its force was great enough to hurl the whole body back. The man whirled away under it, and he went toppling down, with his arms thrown up wildly. As he fell, he pitched still further back, in his effort to save himself, and his head struck the wainscoting as he reached the floor. Blood gushed from his cut cheek. It was a moment or two before he clambered ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... the walls of Belshazzar's palace at Babylon. Some were probably richly ornamented in color with figures of men and animals, as well as with elegant designs; or others may have been paneled with cedar wainscoting, as the chambers in the temple and palaces of Solomon, and in the royal edifices of Babylon. Gilding, too, appears to have been extensively used in decoration, and some of the great sphinxes may have been overlaid with gold, like the cherubim in Solomon's temple. The cut on page 445 gives a beautiful ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... the top like a prison yard. In the corners, drops of humidity dripped from the stones. We opened another door. It led into a large, empty, sonorous hall; the floor was cracked in a hundred places, but there was fresh paint on the wainscoting. ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... only thing in the place that had any motion about it. When their conductor admitted the light freely, and lifting up the heavy window-sash, let in the summer air, he showed the mouldering furniture, discoloured wainscoting and ceiling, rusty stove, and ashy hearth, in all their inert neglect. Close to the door there stood a candlestick, with an extinguisher upon it; as if the last man who had been there had paused, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... my will, deary, according to what this gentleman advises; but, out of precaution, I will give you the twenty thousand francs in gold which I have in the wainscoting of the recess of my room, and two bills payable to bearer which are due to me, one from Mr. Damon, ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere
... stalls are quaintly carved with various grotesque figures, as are also the misereres; the upper parts of the panels behind the upper stalls are also carved in low relief; above these is a projecting cornice decorated with pinnacles. The stalls are late Perpendicular work, the wainscoting behind the stalls being later still, as we can see from the subjects carved on the upper part of each panel. Some of the misereres are, however, very old—one dates back to about 1200, another to 1300, others are ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... must come to see me sometime; promise me, and do not forget your promise! I shall be established somewhere in the Black Forest, high up in the snow, alone in a great house. The storm is raging and the old timbers and wainscoting are creaking and groaning. I am smoking my pipe on a bench by the stove and staring into the flame of the burning candle. All of a sudden I hear some one clapping his hands outside, and as I listen there comes a call, O da casa! ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... ramshackle studio on Washington Square shocked her,—it was so comfortless, so dingy; but the canvases on the walls, set up against the wainscoting, stacked on every available chair, gave her a new and almost appalling impression of his personality, and the peculiar poignant power of him. She could not appraise them, or get any real sense of their quality apart from the astounding revelation of ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... detract from their value. Wherever possible, the stone was taken from the quarries used by the first builders. The Purbeck marbles especially had severely suffered, and the mouldings and bases ruthlessly destroyed for the better accommodation of the wainscoting to the stalls; moreover, the differences in the nature of the stone were rendered null by a hideous yellow wash with which they had been lavishly besprinkled. During the restoration the corbels and roof-bosses were cleaned and carefully repaired. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... freakishly sombre phantasy the Great Master knew so well how to bring out by the magic of his understanding love. And the office I entered was Dickensian too. The dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its windows; early Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... bar, marble slabs, marble wainscoting, polished brass, polished silver, shining mirrors, on which there was not the smallest speck of dust, very many shining glasses, empty glasses, glasses with straws sticking in them, and glasses partially filled with bits of ice. Bar-keepers in spotless white linen prepared ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... wonderful place of green silk and chestnut wainscoting, and all the walls of its hundred feet of length were hung with canvases of value—portraits principally of those Ardayres who had gone on. Face after face looked down on Amaryllis of the same type as John's and her own—the brown hair and eyes of grey or blue. Some were a little fairer, ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre. An aged serving-woman opened the door.—"We wish to see Mademoiselle de Camargo," said Helvetius, who had great difficulty in keeping his countenance. The old woman led them into a parlor that was furnished with peculiar and grotesque-looking furniture. The wainscoting was covered with pastels representing Mademoiselle de Camargo in all her grace, and in her different characters. But the parlor was not adorned by her portraits only; there was a Christ on the Mount ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... to say, "but matters of routine are the greater part of the lives of such as we. Our success depends upon it, alone. Pardon me, but I must insist that you tell me what I have asked." He had almost backed her against the wainscoting. ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Merryweather were coming to spend the morning with her, and she wanted her own special sanctum to look its best. She was very fond of this large, bare, airy chamber, with its polished floor, its white wainscoting, and its quaint blue-dragon paper. She had made it into a picture gallery, and just now it was a flower-show, too; for every available vase and bowl was filled with flowers from wood and garden. On the round table stood ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... is iniquitous, I own—as iniquitous as a comfortable club, with nice dark wainscoting, leather chairs and couches, and little bells to touch when good cigars and other things are wanted. It is, therefore, quite the nicest place ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... sexton to the asylum." Then the men went in again into the room which had been the scene of the mysterious crime. The wind rattled the open window and blew out its white curtains. It was already dark in the corners of the room, one could see but indistinctly the carvings of the wainscoting. The light backs of the books, or the gold letters on the darker bindings, made spots of brightness in the gloom. The hideous pool of blood in the centre of the floor was still ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... tentatively. Presently she got up and opened the door to the next room. It was empty. But adjoining it was an untidy bathroom with a dark wainscoting and a grimy enameled tub and standing over near the uncurtained window was a boyish figure, wrapped in a man's overcoat, with a bottle in her hand. She had wept so long, poor girl, that Felicia couldn't tell very much about how she really looked, except that it seemed to her ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... request our small friend was now conducted to his private cabinet, and left there alone to his own devices. Hanging upon hooks in the oaken wainscoting were the several pieces of a suit of shining steel armour, covered all over with beautiful designs exquisitely inlaid in gold. This martial panoply belonged to the true prince—a recent present from Madam Parr the Queen. Tom put on the greaves, the gauntlets, the plumed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... yew-tree, and the wind wandered moaning round the house like a lost soul; but the Otis family slept unconscious of their doom, and high above the rain and storm he could hear the steady snoring of the Minister for the United States. He stepped stealthily out of the wainscoting, with an evil smile on his cruel, wrinkled mouth, and the moon hid her face in a cloud as he stole past the great oriel window, where his own arms and those of his murdered wife were blazoned in azure and gold. On and on he glided, like an evil shadow, the very darkness seeming to loathe him as ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... in sight at present," I said reassuringly, "but there is a sound of one in the offing—in the wainscoting, I mean." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... vast and full of deep shadows. The two windows set in one wall, many feet above the floor, showed two spaces of darkening sky. A single torch of aromatics flared and hissed beside the throne dais. Tremendous wainscoting covered the base of the walls, more than a foot above a man's height. It was massively carved with colossal sheaves of lotus-blooms and sword-like palm-leaves. Columns of great girth, bouquets of conventional stamens, ending in foliated capitals, supported by the lofty ceiling. The few ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... soldiers passed from room to room beating the wainscoting with pike and musket-butts, splintering and smashing heedlessly. Presses were burst open and their contents scattered; chests were broken into and emptied, the searchers appropriating such objects as took their fancy, with true military cynicism. A mirror ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... take upon the Brenta, a Palazzo, at twice the rent it was worth, and divided the surplus with the proprietor. The apartments were inlaid with mosaic, and ornamented with columns and pilasters, in the taste of the country. M. de Montaigu, had all these superbly masked by fir wainscoting, for no other reason than because at Paris apartments were thus fitted up. It was for a similar reason that he only, of all the ambassadors who were at Venice, took from his pages their swords, and from his footmen their ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... whole scheme of decorations of the immense room lent itself to the effects the financier had sought to produce. The walls were covered with rich brown leather fastened with leather-covered nails and every piece of woodwork in the floor, wainscoting, beams and panels as well as the furniture, was of solid dark red vermilion wood from the heart of a ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... different parts of the haunted wing and found, in the cellar, at a depth of some eight or nine feet, the skeletons of three men and two women; whilst in the wainscoting of the passage they discovered the bones of a boy, all of which remains they had properly interred in the churchyard. According to local tradition, handed down through many centuries by word of mouth, the house originally belonged to a knight, who, with his wife, was killed out hunting. He ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... and sewed, and measured Bobby's height as he passed by the wainscoting in the passage, and ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... observatory from which a wonderful view of the Potomac may be had. The roof contains several dormer windows. There are six rooms on the ground floor and on entering the passage way that leads from east to west through it you are at once impressed with its wainscoting and large worked cornices which present to the eye the appearance of great solidity. The parlor, library and breakfast room are on the south side of the hall; while to the north are the reception room, parlor, and drawing room. All of the ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... library at Mrs. Pitt's home was a fascinating place, the two visitors thought. The ceiling was high, the wainscoting was of dark wood, and the walls were almost entirely lined with book-cases. John was delighted with some little steps, which you could push around and climb up on to reach the highest shelves. This room suggested ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... hand toward the table, then looked around the large high-ceilinged room, with its wainscoting of mahogany, its massive old-fashioned furniture, its portraits of her great and great-great- grand-parents on the walls, the mirror over the mantel, the heavy red velvet hangings over the curtains at the long windows, ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher |
