"Dingy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was to sail at daylight, our friends remained with us, and, sitting in the dingy cabin, chatted with Jose about the state of the country. By listening to the talk I learned that General San Martin was a great soldier from Buenos Ayres, who, having overthrown the Spanish power in Chili, was collecting ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... forget—women, shivering in ragged clothing, with babes in their arms and gaunt, unhappy faces and eyes that looked at you as if they were eternally asking something and afraid to ask! Most of them had some scrap of dingy crepe somewhere about them—had lost their men at the battle-front! And little children gulping down the hot soup as though they were starved! Tante said it was the only meal most of them had during the day. After her work was over she and I went into ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... Grosvenor Street; but, as she hated what is called London society, it had long been let to different tenants, for nothing would induce the Cardews to leave their delightful home, with its fresh air and country pursuits, for the dingy old house in town. They knew that when the girls came out—a far-distant date as yet—they would have to occupy the house in Grosvenor Street for the season; but Mrs. Cardew's suggestion that they should go there almost ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... wings, iron palisades before, and a fish-pond opposite, which still goes by the name of New Place, and is balanced, at the east end of the street, by an erection of nearly the same date, a large square dingy mansion enclosed within high walls, inhabited by three maiden sisters, and called, probably by way of nickname, the Nunnery. New Place being on the left of the road, and the Nunnery on the right, the T has now something of the air of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... numerically the unspeakable Turk is very much in evidence. On landing one of the guards, numerous and whose charges are fixed by law, took us in charge to show us the city. The streets generally were unimproved and irregular, both in architecture and location. Through several dingy and untidy streets he led us to the public park, which made considerable pretension to order and neatness. The turban, the wrap, the sandals and other Oriental costumes, which made up the dress, were not more varied than the complexion of the people, but their features ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... farthys in the yaler spelin buk on the sheluff nere the side windy levin all my property to my saley Tryphena. I wud of kist u of i had dard beefor I leff wen I am more prospuz i wil dar of I get slaped for it The capen has fyred the blungeybush and i must go ashore with the dingy and get the tavun boy to get ma a ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... her feet, fast asleep. The child refused to go to bed till 'Uncle Rowland' came back. There was a bright fire in the grate, and a supper was spread on a table drawn close to it. Candles replaced the gas-lamp, and the room looked almost cheerful, in spite of its faded red curtains and dingy furniture. ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... consists only of a loin-cloth, another cloth thrown over the shoulders and upper part of the body, which except for this is often bare, and a third rough cloth wound loosely round the head. All these, originally white, soon assume a very dingy hue. There is thus no colour in a man's everyday attire, but the gala dress for holidays consists of a red pagri or turban, a black, coloured or white coat, and a white loin-cloth with red silk borders if he can afford it. The Kunbi is seldom or never seen with his head bare; this ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... find there I hardly know. What I did find was a large chamber, as dingy as the rest of the house, and as much in need of refreshing, with a long table down the middle, at which some twenty persons sat eating, with the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... panes rattled again under another shower of gravel. Sweeny shook his wife into consciousness. He bade her get up and see who was in the back-yard. Mrs. Sweeny, a lean harassed woman with grey hair, fastened a dingy pink nightdress round her throat with a pin and obeyed ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... boy, I see them!" continued Hawkeye; "they are gathering for the rush, or they would keep their dingy backs below the logs. Well, let them," he added, examining his flint; "the leading man certainly comes on to his death, though it should ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... that whereon his eyes were fastened,—fastened beyond the possibility of withdrawal. How glossy black was that hair with its diadem of white roses! How miserably poor appeared the hues of the carnations and the pinks that formed her necklace, when in contrast with her flushing cheeks! How dingy were the lilies at her waist, ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... she coughed a good deal as she worked. Then there was another move, and this time Mrs. Forest and her little daughter found themselves in one bedroom, and things began to grow very gloomy, and food even was scarce. At last there was a change. One day a lady came into the dingy little room, and all on a sudden it seemed as if the sun had come out again. This lady brought comforts with her—toys and books for the child, good, brave words of cheer for the mother. At last Annie's mother died, and she went away to Lavender House to live ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... dingy straw hat a white bandage was drawn tight around his head—so tight that from its under edge the coarse black hair bristled out in a distinct fringe. The blow of the wrench, then, must have cut through ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... little handbill announcing the sale of his father-in-law's furniture. He noted its date, which came and passed without Jude's going near the place, or perceiving that the traffic out of Alfredston by the southern road was materially increased by the auction. A few days later he entered a dingy broker's shop in the main street of the town, and amid a heterogeneous collection of saucepans, a clothes-horse, rolling-pin, brass candlestick, swing looking-glass, and other things at the back of the shop, evidently just ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... his shoulders, dropped wearily into a chair. He wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue flannel shirt, a Navy revolver; his trousers were hanging on his boot tops. A tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders, and a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and they are occasionally seen herding with shoals of Smolts in May. In this state they will take a worm very readily, and are, many of them, caught with the fly in the deeps; but they are unfit to eat, the flesh being white, loose, and insipid; although they have lost the red dingy appearance which they had when about to spawn, and are almost as bright as the fresh fish, their large heads and lank bodies render it sufficiently easy to distinguish them from fish which are only ascending the river, even if the latter were plentiful at this season; but this ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... healed, the dingy color slowly yielded to many washings, the woolly coat began to knot up into little curls, a new collar handsomely marked made him a respectable dog, and Sancho was himself again. But it was evident that his sufferings were not forgotten; his once sweet temper was a trifle soured, and, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... it was "no dacent." But the hair gave her its own theory before she had done with it, and this was the result. She had also washed her face and hands and neck, made the best she could of her poor, dingy dress, and put one of her own Sunday collars ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the fortunes of more than one middle-class husband and father—for the Duke always paid well for what he appropriated. He had grown old in his pleasant sins, and these, as such raiment will, had grown old and dingy with him; but if no longer splendid he was still splendour-loving, and drew to his court the most brilliant adventurers of Italy. Spite of his preference for such company, he had a nobler side, the ruins of a fine but uncultivated intelligence, and a taste for all that was young, generous ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... slightest details—such things as the slight difference in the length of the arms of the Chinaman who kept the "joint," the number of buttons down the front of the waist of the girl in the bunk opposite mine, across the dingy, little, sweet-scented room. Nothing escaped me, and also I was conscious of each passing second, or, rather, ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... on the dusty flat, was the little cow-town, looking, in the distance, like a scattered herd of dingy sheep. He was glad his ride was ended for the day. He was thirsty, hot, and ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... so picturesque as the tartan. Her clothes were dingy and dust-stained. But they could not eclipse the divine, dusky youth of her. She was slender, as a panther is, and her movements had more than a suggestion of the same ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... then to bend his great height to squeeze through the little door. Once inside, he was at the corner of the Saint Margaret Chapel and could see, in the faint half-light, the rosy colours of the beautiful Saint Margaret window that glimmered ever so dimly upon the rows of cane-bottomed chairs, the dingy red hassocks, and the brass tablets upon the grey stone walls. He walked through, picking his way carefully in the dusk, saw for an instant the high, vast expanse of the nave with its few twinkling lights that blew in the windy air, then ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... century ago, tell me that it was pretty much then as it is now. Another thing discomposes the sensitive nerves of the English; especially those of our notable housewives. I allude to the rubbishing appearance of their grates—and the dingy and sometimes disgusting aspect of carpets and flowered furniture. A good mahogany dining table is a perfect rarity[199]—and let him, who stands upon a chair to take down a quarto or octavo, beware how he encounter a broken shin or bruised elbow, from the perpendicularity ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... central figure. I love to think of him as he seemed to me, when in the fresh dawn of manhood he sat with me in the old Haverhill farmhouse, revolving even then schemes of benevolence; or, with cheery smile, welcoming me to his frugal meal of bread and milk in the dingy Boston printing-room; or, as I found him in the gray December morning in the small attic of a colored man, in Philadelphia, finishing his night-long task of drafting his immortal Declaration of Sentiments of the American ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... coat, fitting like a sack, with the well-filled pockets bagging behind, like a poor man's dinner wallet. In lieu of the shrunk and darned white moleskins, receding in apparent disgust from the dingy tops, he had got his nether man enveloped in a pair of fine cinnamon-coloured tweeds, with broad blue stripes down the sides, and shaped out over ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... of the first to be built on the trail, and passing through the big front room in which two or three men were lounging, the marshal led his guests to his inner office and sleeping room. A fire was blazing in a big stone fireplace. Skins and dingy blankets were scattered about, and on the mantle stood a ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... a slow shepherd threading his way down one of the winding paths on a hillside, with his flock close behind him, necessarily expanded, yet keeping just at his heels, bending and twisting as it goes and looking rather like the tail of a dingy comet. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... to correct the fault in the manner I have previously hinted at." In the following remark, we can see the great defect in the colouring of Murillo's pictures, especially in his backgrounds, who appears always to have painted on a wet and dingy day. "But nothing can correct the cold of a sky concealed by the kind of clouds last mentioned, or rendered totally invisible by mist." He rescues the clear-obscure from the meaning commonly attached to it as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... yacht was so great that before the two dazed salts on board realized what had happened their master was far astern. They bustled to bring the Enchantress about and to come to his rescue in the dingy. Stunned by the blow of the—spar, he had gone down like a stone; so, in all probability, they would have been too late. When he came up the second time it was on the port bow of the Firefly, but completely out of reach. Giving the tiller to her friend, and stripping off ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... Misses W. themselves; they lived close by, and frequently came to the store. Beneath our counter were endless packages, broken glass, refuse oils, rancid perfumes, dust, dirt, grease, charcoal, soap, and about everything else dingy and offensive to the eye and nose. The place afforded a wretched refuge for a hull so big and nice as our beau's, but there he was, much in our way too, with the mournful fact, for Charley, that if those "fine ladies" stayed less ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... called the "Venice of the East," and, inasmuch as waterways form the main thoroughfares in both, there is a certain resemblance. Shikaras (the Kashmiri canoes) are first-cousins to gondolas—rather poor relations perhaps; both are dingy and clumsy in appearance, and both are managed with an extraordinary ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... angler, and an admirable dish; a great chub; and three horned pouts, which swallow the hook into their lowest entrails. Several dozen fish were taken in an hour or two, and then we returned to the shop where we had left our horse and wagon, the pilot very eccentric behind us. It was a small, dingy shop, dimly lighted by a single inch of candle, faintly disclosing various boxes, barrels standing on end, articles hanging from the ceiling; the proprietor at the counter, whereon appear gin and brandy, respectively contained in a tin pint-measure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... and way stations!" shouted the conductor of a railroad train, as the steamhorse, harnessed for his twenty mile trip, stood chafing, snorting, and coughing, throwing up angry puffs of mingled gray and dingy vapor from his sturdy lungs. "Cars ready for ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... procession filed through the streets to the collector's office. At its head was the admiral of the navy. Somewhere Felipe had raked together a pitiful semblance of a military uniform—a pair of red trousers, a dingy blue short jacket heavily ornamented with gold braid, and an old fatigue cap that must have been cast away by one of the British soldiers in Belize and brought away by Felipe on one of his coasting ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... her at the door, and took her down to Walter in the dingy dining room, upon whose shoulder ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... rain, that we owe our vegetable mould with its rich and beauteous mantle of sward and foliage. And next, stripping from off the landscape its sands and gravels, we see its underlying boulder-clays, dingy and gray, and here presenting their vast ice-borne stones, and there its iceberg pavements. And these clays in turn stripped away, the bare rocks appear, various in colour and uneven in surface, but everywhere grooved and polished, from the sea level and beneath it, to the height of more than ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... lower and lower, and the houses shabbier and shabbier—for all these shabby houses, burning soft coal, did their best to help in the destruction of their own value. They helped to make the quarter so dingy and the air so foul to breathe that no one would live there who had money enough to get "farther out" where there were glimpses of ungrayed sky and breaths of cleaner winds. And with the coming of the new speed, "farther out" was now as close to business as the Addition ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... mine, a delightful old lady, fresh, genial, and inquisitive, has in her possession an old volume, a family heir-loom, which is not the less dear to her for being somewhat dingy and dilapidated, and touching which she would gladly receive such information as your correspondents ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... threw up his hands, with the dingy suit flapping in them like a bed-quilt shaken from a tenement window. He looked Milt all over, coldly. His red but shining eyes hinted that Milt was a clodhopper and no honest wearer of evening clothes. Milt felt humble, but he snapped, "No good. Want ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the same day the same gentlemen held a second conversation, but this time it was not in a dingy lawyer's office. The scene was a neat and pretty drawing-room, with all the necessary adornments native to such an apartment, and also a higher class of adornment—that of several interesting and ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... princess, with scarce visible features, seemingly kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and modelled) out of the wet ashes of an auto da fe, in her black-and-white frock (how different from the dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and gloomy enough for an abbess or a cameriera major, this childish personification of courtly dreariness, certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the principal strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and ashy light, tinged yellowish in the hair, bluish in the eyes and downy cheeks, pale red ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... down a side-street, between rows of bare houses, houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some naked window-square hung golden in a ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... her. Straightway the Bishop suspended the Governor's chaplain. Then the Governor fined the Bishop in the sum of fifty pounds. The Bishop refused to pay, and was committed to Castle Rushen, and lay there two months. They show us his cell, a poor, dingy little box, so damp in his day that he lost the use of some of his fingers. After that the Bishop appealed to the Lord, who declared the imprisonment illegal. The Bishop was liberated, and half the island went to the prison gate to fetch him forth ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... had never been too poor to deny themselves the luxury of a tree. And a tree to Mrs. Robson meant none of the scant, indifferent affairs that most of the neighbors found acceptable strung with a few strands of dingy popcorn and pasteboard ornaments. No, the Robson tree was always an opulent work of art, freighted with bursting cornucopias and heavy glass balls and yards of quivering tinsel. The money for all this dazzling beauty usually came a fortnight or so before the eventful day in the shape ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... a shabby, dingy cart, but a smart little house upon wheels, with white dimity curtains festooning the windows, and window-shutters of green picked out with panels of a staring red. Neither was it a poor caravan drawn by a single donkey or emaciated horse, for a pair of horses in pretty good condition were released ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... place the woman had designated. The house was small and dingy, and two grimy babies were playing on ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... a small bonfire of sticks in a sheltered thicket, where a miraculous being—who was, as a matter of fact, a rather ragged and dingy vagabond—was cooking a tin of stew ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... account. So was it in every department. The Thunderer lies low, as I have said; much of her is below water, therefore light is scarce and valuable. During our perambulation we came to some machinery and bulkheads, etcetera, which were dingy in colour. 'Paint them white,' said the captain to the officer of each department; 'I don't point out details, but use as much white paint as you can. It makes the ship look light and cheerful.' Every order given was emphatic ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... rose again, and like an automaton—lifeless and thoughtless—she began putting the dingy, squalid room to rights. The Abbe helped her demolish the improvised screen; with the same gentle delicacy of thought which had caused him to build it up, he refrained from speaking to her now: he would not intrude himself on her grief ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... give one glimpses of genuine native life. Some of these streets are reached by scores of granite steps that climb the steep mountainside. These streets are not over twelve or fifteen feet wide, and the shops are mere holes in the wall, with a frontage of eight or ten feet. Yet many of these dingy shops contain thousands of dollars' worth of decorated silks and linens, artistic carvings, laces, curios and many other articles of Chinese manufacture. Unlike the Japanese, who will follow the tourist to the sidewalk and urge him to buy, these Chinese storekeepers show no eagerness ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... the Maker's gift and will. Whose else is it? It remains a religious duty, from oldest times, in the East.—Nor could Herr Professor Strauss, when I put the question, deny that for us at present it is still such here in the West! To that dingy fuliginous Operative, emerging from his soot-mill, what is the first duty I will prescribe, and offer help towards? That he clean the skin of him. Can he pray, by any ascertained method? One knows not entirely:—but with soap and a sufficiency of water, he can wash. Even the dull English feel ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... of the great city, in all the lofty workshops and yards and factories, huge hammers smote and clashed, and men, naked to the waist, reeking in dingy interiors, bent like gnomes at their tasks, while saws creaked, wheels turned, planes and mallets, and chisels shoved and cut and struck; and down in damp cellars sallow ghastly men and women wove rag-carpets, and twisted baskets in the midst of litters of puny, pale children, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... the interior of the town and its external aspect, was as striking as it was full of pain. With the exception of the dull high street, which had the usual characteristics of a small agricultural market town, some sombre mansions, a dingy inn, and a petty bourse, Marney mainly consisted of a variety of narrow and crowded lanes formed by cottages built of rubble, or unhewn stones without cement, and from age, or badness of the material, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... I thought I did, speaking rather knowing. But when he asked if I'd been to sea, I had to say I hadn't; not on the high seas, nor in any such vessel as the Hebe Maitland. She was painted dingy black, like most of the others, and I judged from her lines that she was a fleet sailer and built for that purpose, rather than for the amount of cargo ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... been forthcoming had he not been the son of a Preston man. He had a sort of weak doggedness which I could not but admire. Neither he nor his work received the slightest encouragement; but he persisted in behaving as a personage: always he kept his dingy little flag flying. Wherever congregated the jeunes feroces of the arts, in whatever Soho restaurant they had just discovered, in whatever music-hall they were most frequenting, there was Soames in the midst of them, or rather on the fringe of ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... here too his visits could be but brief, for on the opposite side the court was shut in and overshadowed by the tall backs of great houses. They seemed, to Betty's fancy, to cast as much moral as physical shadow over the place. The houses in this court were small and dingy. If one looked straight up, there was a space of grey cloud visible; some days it would no doubt be a space of blue sky. No other thing even dimly suggesting refreshment or purity was within the range of vision. Pitt slowly paced along the row ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... Alsatia, the sanctuary of blackguard ruffianism in bygone times; then there is a smell of gas, and a vision of enormous gasometers; and then down goes the funnel again, and Blackfriars Bridge jumps over us. On we go, now at the top of our speed, past the dingy brick warehouses that lie under the shadow of St Paul's, whose black dome looks down upon us as we scud along. Then Southwark Bridge, with its Cyclopean masses of gloomy metal, disdains to return the slightest response to the fussy ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... yoke to bear; Surrender all the careless ease of home, And be forbid from schoolyard bounds to roam; For this with blandest smiles he softly asks That they with him will prosecute their tasks; Receives them in his solemn chilly lair, The rigid lot of discipline to share. At dingy desks they toil by day; at night To gloomy chambers go uncheered by light, Where pillars rudely grayed by rusty nail Of heavy hours reveal the weary tale; Where spiteful ushers grin, all pleased to make Long scribbled lines the price of each mistake. By four unpitying ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... rooms after the Fletchers' ball. The dawn was breaking as I let myself in. The air was heavy with the peculiar desolation of a London winter morning. The houses looked dead and untenanted. A cart rumbled past, and across the grey street a dingy black cat, moving furtively along the pavement, gave an additional touch of ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... changed, and unable to endure the confinement of the ship, he went for a lonely tramp round the streets. He hung round the Wheelers, and, after gazing at their young barbarians at play, walked round and looked at Flower's late lodgings. It was a dingy house, with broken railings and an assortment of papers and bottles in the front garden, and by no means calculated to relieve depression. From there he instinctively wandered round to the lodgings recently ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... all the way through. Everything—financially speaking, I mean,—has been against him. They have had continual anxiety and curtailment, until at last they have had to let their pretty house and go into dingy lodgings. My father is very down on Jack. He is a successful man himself, and don't you think it needs a very fine nature to keep up faith in a person who seems persistently to fail? But my sister never doubts. She loves her husband more, and idealises him more, ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... consciousness she found herself breathing an atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman. The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... larch becomes green long before the native trees; and its green is so peculiar and vivid, that, finding nothing to harmonise with it, wherever it comes forth, a disagreeable speck is produced. In summer, when all other trees are in their pride, it is of a dingy, lifeless hue; in autumn of a spiritless unvaried yellow, and in winter it is still more lamentably distinguished from every other deciduous tree of the forest, for they seem only to sleep, but the larch appears absolutely ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... a dingy little street, a cul-de-sac of very small houses in a row, each with an almost flattened bow window and a blistered brown door with a black knocker. He poised his bright new bicycle against the window, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... could take as many as three whole steps. After a time he managed to get into communication with Bollman who was in the room above. With a knotted handkerchief Bollman lowered a little ink in a walnut shell from his window, together with a scrap of dingy paper. Huger then wrote a letter of a few lines only to General Thomas Pinckney, then American Minister at London. His entreaty was to let his mother know that he was still alive; also to let Lafayette's friends know that he would certainly have escaped but that he had been recognized ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... dark and heavy bushes. On the opposite side is a small, square veranda. The building, which is two stories and a half high, was apparently a cheerful yellow color in the beginning, but it has become dingy with time and weather. The scars of its long battle with fate give it the appearance of being about to crumble and crash, after the fashion of the "House of Usher." It has windows with gloomy casements, opening ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don't make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we can't keep it up alone, we ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... heroic forms of the builders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly hurling red-hot rivets through space, are so many young gods at play with elemental forces. The sweat-shop is transmuted into as grim and glorious a battlefield as any Tours or Gettysburg of them all. And the dingy, battered old "L" train, as it clatters through the East Side early on "morose, gray Monday morning," ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... intervals by a monotonous and expostulatory "allons donc!" thrown in by another dissentient southerner. He was an enormously fat man, the new disputant, and wore a mass of very greasy hair, hanging down over his shoulders. His flannel shirt, an exceedingly dingy specimen of British manufacture, did duty for a waistcoat also; but he was decore, though it was very doubtful to what order the medal on his breast ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... world. Each sees what is in himself, not what is outside. The jaundiced eye yellows all it beholds. The chameleon takes its color from the bark on which it clings. Man gives his color to what his thought is fastened upon. The pessimist's darkness makes all things dingy. The youth disappointed with his European trip said he was a fool for going. He was, for the reason that he was a fool before he started. He saw nothing without, because he had no vision within. He gave ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... of light has a direct bearing on the children's behavior. Ask any school teacher, if you have never had occasion to notice it yourself, which days are the noisiest in her school-room, the bright, sunny ones, or the dingy days when it is difficult to see clearly across the room. Ask her if the pencils don't drop on the floor oftener, if small feet do not tramp and scrape more, if chairs don't tip over with louder reports, if tempers ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... to bed, and then with slow steps climbed up to her little attic room. It was cold and comfortless enough, bare of all luxuries, but even here the walls were lined with books, and Erica's little iron bedstead looked somewhat incongruous surrounded as it was with dingy-looking volumes, dusky old legal books, works of reference, books atheistical, theological, metaphysical, or scientific. On one shelf, amid this strangely heterogeneous collection, she kept her own particular treasures—Brian's ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... a horizontal, they revolve with a velocity which frequently reaches 1200 a minute. The damp, dingy looking pile instantly spreads, a broad circle of yellow is first visible on the inner rim of the machine, and this slowly whitening finally becomes a shining ring of snowy sugar. To effect this result requires the aid of nine ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... both stooped down to pick up the pieces, Alice noticed that there was a hollow space back of where the tile had been, and that it contained something of a dingy white color. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... fruit and wine, which were hovering about the steamer, and getting in the way of everybody, while crying their wares. Many of these boatmen seemed as dark in complexion as any East Indian on board, and nearly all wore ear-rings, generally of silver, in the dingy lobes of their ears. They seemed noisy and quarrelsome, and often shrieked what seemed like terrible imprecations at each other, shaking their fists and scowling darkly, only to be laughing carelessly the next minute, as if nothing mattered. Dwight ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... it is always an inevitable inference that authors are,—and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two different works for his own share. Books were abundant enough at that day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester,—without whose treasures, let me add, this modest monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse, the moral sentiment ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a grey northern night, with a bitter wind driving the sea mist in billows over the marshes, and a waning half moon shining fitfully through the dingy clouds which scudded across a lead-coloured sky. By the light of the moon he saw the figure of the girl, already some distance from the house, swiftly making her way along the reedy canal path which threaded ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... we visit the dear old man in his dingy little house in old England while he peruses the foregoing letter? Yes, let us go. It is worth while travelling between four and five thousand miles to see him read it. Perhaps, if you are a critical ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... to where five or six narrow, crooked streets ran together, branching out like the fingers from my palm. I paused now uncertain which way to go amid so many devious courses, and deciding almost at hazard, turned down the best paved of all those dingy streets. I had hardly gone past more than two cross streets, when there stood at a corner, looking timidly this way and that, a slight girl, with blonde hair and eyes of Breton blue. She seemed so brave, yet so out of place and helpless at that hour of the night, ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... day at Denderah, which had secretly depressed her. She looked out of the window of their compartment at the green plains of doura, at the almost naked brown men bending rhythmically by the shadufs, at the children passing on donkeys, and the women standing at gaze with corners of their dingy garments held fast between their teeth; and she felt as if she still saw the dark courts of Hathor's dwelling, as if she still heard the cries of the enormous bats that inhabit them. When the train stopped, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... between the houses, a glimpse might be had of the low country beyond, with its sluggish canal choked with rushes, a dingy windmill here and there, and stretching away on either side the flat meadows crinkling with yellow grain, and the green pastures dotted with huge black-and-white cattle. A narrow road, straight as a line in Euclid, and bordered by a row of trees each the counterpart of ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... in another of a bluish-green tint—which supplied me with soldiers enough to execute all the evolutions figured and described in the "Medley." The warmly-hued yellow shells represented Britons in their scarlet—the more dingy ones, the French in their uniforms of dirty blue; well-selected specimens of Purpura lapillus, just tipped on their backs with a speck of paint, blue or red, from my box, made capital dragoons; while a few dozens of the slender pyramidal shells ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... bats, extinguishing the flambeau, and leaving us in darkness, like Belzoni deserted by his Arabs in the heart of a pyramid. The torch at last relumed, we entered a tomb-like excavation, at every step raising clouds of dust; and at last stood before long rows of musty, mummyish parcels, so dingy-red, and so rolled upon sticks, that they looked like stiff sausages of Bologna; but smelt like some fine old ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... one bound outward, with her white breasts swelling and heaving, as if with a reaching expectancy, does not feel his own heart swell with a longing impulse to go with her to the far-off shores? Even at dingy, crowded wharves, amid the stir and tumult of great cities, the coming in of a ship is an event that never can lose its interest. But on these romantic shores of Maine, where all is so wild and still, and the blue sea lies embraced in the arms of dark, solitary forests, the sudden ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... at the denouement. For now we were in Paris, rather meanly lodged in a dingy hotel on a narrow street leading from what with us might have been Piccadilly Circus. Our rooms were rather a good height with a carved cornice and plaster enrichments, but the furnishings were musty and the general air depressing, notwithstanding the effect of a few ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... which they wear, and the thinness of their limbs. Their dress consists of a dirty piece of cloth, or skin of kangaroo, tied about their waists, leaving the upper and lower parts of their bodies naked. Their color is a dingy black, although what exact shade they would represent were they washed quite clean is a matter of conjecture. A more filthy race of beings I never saw; and if we adopt the hypothetical theory of eminent medical gentlemen, that when the pores of the skin are closed, ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... That's my best platter, is it? Broke all to bits, eh? I'll break—" But there was a flurry of dingy apron and dingier petticoats, and the little Princess had fled. She did not stop till she was in her Secret Place among the willows. Her small lean face was ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... saw the intrepid old man hurriedly collecting his few belongings, preparatory to making a welcome end to the long, tiresome ride in the train. Mrs. Gray had already telegraphed David Nesbit to be on hand at the dingy little station to meet him. The train rolled into it, puffing and clanging a noisy protest against the indignity of being obliged to stay its flight, even momentarily, before the scattered collection of frame dwellings dignified by the name ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... she turned off into a narrow lane, of that obscure and comfortless class which is to be found in almost all small oldfashioned towns, chill, without ventilation, reeking with all manner of offensive effluviae, and lined by dingy, smoky, sickly and pent-up buildings, frequently not only in a wretched but ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... come to the love part of my story, I am suddenly conscious of dingy common colors on the palette with which I have been painting. I wish I had some brilliant dyes. I wish, with all my heart, I could take you back to that "Once upon a time" in which the souls of our grandmothers delighted,—the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... off in darkness—downward. It was but the other evening as we were seated about the fire that there came upward from the basement a gibbering squeak. Then the woodpile fell over, for so we judged the clatter. Is it fantastic to think that some dark and muffled Persian, after his dingy tunneling from the banks of the Tigris, had climbed the pile of wood for a breath of night at the window and, his foot slipping, the pile fell over? Plainly, we heard him ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... back of the yards, was a good two miles; the distance had never seemed longer to Jurgis, and when he saw the familiar dingy-gray shanty his heart was beating fast. He ran up the steps and began to hammer upon ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... burthen. At the bow and stern she was decked, and those quarters were fairly raised. Amidship she was low and open, and pierced for twenty oars, ten to a side, all swaying listlessly from the narrow ports in which they were hung. Sometimes they knocked against each other. One sail, square and of a dingy white, drooped from a broad yard-arm, which was itself tilted, and now and then creaked against the yellow mast complainingly, unmindful of the simple tackle designed to keep it in control. A watchman crouched in the meagre shade of a ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... paused to blow one of his favorite little smoke rings and watch it float to the dingy ridge-pole, where it flickered and faded into a blue haze "—and so, I'm going to say right out in meeting what I think of this town and the Committee they let measure out justice. Justice!" He laughed sardonically. ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... fire; And a butcher of the town Had lost a flitch of bacon; And well the friar knew That the Gypsies it had taken; So suddenly he shouted: "Gypsy, ho! Hie home, and from the pot! Take the flitch of bacon out, The flitch good and fat, And in its place throw A clout, a dingy clout of thy brat, Of thy brat, A clout, a dingy ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... light of a frosty full moon. Between the shafts of his cart a trim-looking mare of about fifteen hands trotted lazily, forging, shying, and generally comporting herself in a way only possible to a grass-fed animal who has been in the hands of such as Mr. William Fennessy. The thick and dingy mane that had hung impartially on each side of her neck, now, together with the major portion of her voluminous tail, adorned the manure heap in the rear of the Fennessy public-house. The pallid fleece in which she had been muffled had given ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... enough?" And with this, the faithful waiter, who knew and remembered every officer who used the house, and with whom ten years were but as yesterday, led the way up to Dobbin's old room, where stood the great moreen bed, and the shabby carpet, a thought more dingy, and all the old black furniture covered with faded chintz, just as the Major recollected them ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... could see the hidden springs at the very heart of the world. Moreover, the fact that he was a clerk in a fire insurance office, and did his work with strict attention, never allowed him to forget for one moment that, just beyond the dingy brick walls where the hundred men scribbled with pointed pens beneath the electric lamps, there existed this glorious region where the important part of himself dwelt and moved and had its being. For in this region he pictured himself playing ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... boats. The smoke of the kitchen fire issues from a sort of wooden cabin where several human beings breathe, eat, sleep, are born and die, sometimes without hardly ever having set foot upon the land. Pots of geranium or begonia give a bit of bright color to the dingy surroundings; and the boats travel slowly along the river, impelled by enormous oars, which throw long shadows upon ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and grim, at the corner of a gay street and a dingy vicolo, the street and alley contrasting in color like a Claude Lorraine with a Nicholas Poussin. Past one side of the palace drifts all day a bright tide of foreign sightseers, prosperous Romans, gay models and flower-venders, handsome carriages, dark-eyed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... One dingy little shop in the square interested him. It was directly opposite the Royal Cafe (with American bar attached), and the contents of its grimy little windows presented a peculiarly fascinating interest to him. Time and again, ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... fastened it. He gave the candle to Lord Hartfield to hold, and then opened the box. It seemed to be full of books, which he began to remove, heaping them on the floor beside him; and it was not till he had cleared away a layer of dingy volumes that he came to a large metal strong box, so heavy that he could not lift it ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... shaking hands, Ovid took a chair, and looked about him. Even here he discovered but little furniture, and that little of the heavy old-fashioned sort. Besides the sideboard, he perceived a dining-table, six chairs, and a dingy brown carpet. There were no curtains on the window, and no pictures or prints on the drab-coloured walls. The empty grate showed its bleak black cavity undisguised; and the mantelpiece had nothing on it but the doctor's dirty and strong-smelling ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... approach, stared at us with their rolling eyes, and then scuttled away to hide themselves behind the house. Ha! Old Sybille! Is it you? She was standing before a caldron, suspended, gipsy-fashion, from a triangle of sticks—looking, for all the world, like a dingy parody of one of Macbeth's witches. She, too, stared at us, but without moving. I must introduce myself, I suppose. Now she has recognised me, and comes towards us with her enormous spoon in her hand. I wonder that her shriveled old turkey's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... to believe that any good thing could be in store for them, the burgesses and others assembled, and crowded into the place of meeting. Twenty-two delegates from the eleven plantations were there, clad in their dingy and dilapidated raiment, and wide-brimmed hats; most of them with swords at their sides, and some with rusty muskets in their hands. Their cheeks were lank and their faces sunburned; their bearing was listless, yet marked with some touch of curiosity ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... than one most felicitous suggestion, especially that of the admirable finale to the second act of the "Barbiere." It was during this visit of his to London, while Weber lay disappointed and dying in the dingy house in Great Portland Street, that this same Duchess of Canizzaro, better known by her earlier title of Countess St. Antonio, as a prominent leader of fashionable taste in musical matters, invited all the great and gay and distinguished ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... 4443.—Stem erect, sometimes 3 ft. high, and about 4 in. wide, deeply furrowed, the furrows usually numbering about fourteen; the ridges tumid and irregular, and coloured a dingy glaucous-green. Spines embedded in a tuft of grey wool, about a dozen spines in each cluster, 1 in. long, a few of them only half that length. Flowers on the top of the stem, three or four opening together, each being 3 in. long and wide; the tube short and scaly, with overlapping sepals ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... find something, however, in a sort of a nest fashioned among the bales near the middle of the wagon. What would have escaped an eye less trained to look for trifles attracted his at once. It was a dingy metal tag. Scott picked it up. It bore the name of a Medicine Bend saloon and the heads of three horses, from the design of which the saloon itself took a widely known and ill name. He laid his hand on the blanket from which ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... Philip. It was as if a bright strange world had been spread before him compared with which the old was tarnished and dingy. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... real kindness in that poor little Cockney's finger than there is in your whole body!" Cecilia whispered, apparently addressing the unoffending cloth—which, having begun life as a dingy green and black, did not seem greatly the worse for its new decoration. "Hateful old thing!" A smile suddenly twitched the corners of her mouth. "Well, she can't stop the money for a new cloth out of this quarter's allowance, because I've just got it. That's luck, anyhow. I'll give it to Bob ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... John was carried was in the Brixton Road, near to the White House public-house. Fifty years ago it had been a rich merchant's home and was almost a country house, but now, like many similar houses, it had fallen to a dingy estate: it was, without embroidery of description, a lodging-house. Miss Squibb, who opened the door to him, had a look of settled depression on her face that was not, as he at first imagined, due to disapproval of him, but, as he speedily discovered, to a deeply-rooted ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... Row, Bloomsbury, there is a small alley or passage leading into Queen Square, and rendered inaccessible to all but foot passengers by some iron posts. The shops in this passage are of a subdued exterior, and are overshadowed by a dingy old edifice dedicated to St. George the Martyr, which seems to have begun its existence as a rather handsome chapel, and to have improved itself, by a sort of evolution, into ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... morning Fred did not present himself at the dingy old building until nearly time for the whistle to sound, and those whom he had good cause to look upon as enemies were already at their places by ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... colours are all of what artists call middle tint (neither dark nor light), cannot fail to look dull and dingy, even ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... the open prairie, and struck a harder bottom, the horses mended their paces, she felt sensibly relieved. At length they entered a small, new town, and drew up before a large, awkward building. The steps were lowered and Annie alighted, and soon found herself in a long, dingy apartment, with a bright pine-wood fire blazing and crackling in a huge, yawning fire-place at its farthest extremity. She was chilled, and sat down before the glowing hearth to warm her benumbed fingers. Presently ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... increased. It had ceased snowing, and a keen wind had arisen, tearing the clouds into shreds through which the stars gleamed. And presently the moon climbed up behind the belfry of the old church across the square, and sent one broad white ray through the dingy window and across the floor. All at once the great bell began to strike the midnight hour, its mingled vibrations filling the garret with tumultuous sounds. The vision of the fair girl faded, and old Marg was herself again, a hard, bitter, rebellious old woman, with a burning care ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... square figure of the boss, his soft hat, his flaming red beard, his dingy mackinaw coat, his dingy black-and-white checked flannel shirt, his dingy blue trousers tucked into high socks, and, instead of driving boots, his ordinary lumberman's rubbers. As a spot of colour, he wore a ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... lay along a small but potent river that turned a few factory wheels with its eager current, and it drew sustenance from the hill farms that encircled it for miles about. You had to take a dingy way train up to the main line if you were going the long day's journey to New York, so that the Center of the name was often ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... the lights. Adj. dark, darksome^, darkling; obscure, tenebrious^, sombrous^, pitch dark, pitchy, pitch black; caliginous^; black &c (in color) 431. sunless, lightless &c (sun) (light), &c 423; somber, dusky; unilluminated &c (illuminate) &c 420 [Obs.]; nocturnal; dingy, lurid, gloomy; murky, murksome^; shady, umbrageous; overcast &c (dim) 422; cloudy &c (opaque) 426; darkened; &c v.. dark as pitch, dark as a pit, dark as Erebus [Lat.]. benighted; noctivagant^, noctivagous^. Adv. in the dark, in the shade. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the room? It was stuffy and dingy and the pictures were of doubtful taste, but there were things to drink and smoke. The imperturbable Ikla would be sitting in his chair pulling at one of his impossibly luxurious pipes. You would ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... rolled away from the low and dingy station and was in the open country of Morovenia. Kalora and her elderly guardian and the young women who were to be her companions during the period of exile had been tucked away into adjoining compartments. Each young woman was muffled and veiled according to the most discreet ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... Thames, and thought proper to reserve it for private meditation. The relationship of the two was kept a profound secret, for reasons best known to themselves; but to the eye at least it was revealed by their striking resemblance, both being small, spare, dingy-complexioned men, with keen, cunning eyes, and faces that looked as hard and sharp as steel. Ever since they first heard of the prophecy, they had half ridiculed, half flattered, and kept remarkably familiar with Bill. That ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... washing her hands and patting her hair before the glass, put on her hat and descended to the rather dingy, old-fashioned drawing-room over the shop, where stood her lover alone at the open window, looking down upon the traffic in the broad, brilliantly-lit ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... boats had been washed away, the big coal pile was scattered like pebbles and some half of it lost. And one odd trifle gripped Madden's heart—the fresh paint over which the crew had toiled so patiently looked old and dingy. ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... to etiquette to receive visits by day during the Ramadan—and found him "sitting in the corner of the divan at his ease, being afflicted with gout, in the old ample Turkish costume. The white beard, the dress of the Pasha, the rich but faded carpet, the roof of elaborate but dingy wooden arabesque, were all in perfect keeping; and the dubious light of two thick wax candles rising two or three feet from the floor, but seemed to bring out the picture, which carried me a generation back to the pashas of the old school." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... and dinner at seven, at a dingy little inn through a smelly back yard; there is not much to eat, and you fill up with rather nasty bread and unripe pears, and drink a sort of flat cider, as the water is ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... rain that drove into windows ever so slightly raised, and hurled itself angrily into your face whenever you ventured to open a door. It was a day in which fires didn't like to burn, but smoldered, and sizzled, and smoked; and people went around shivering, their shoulders shrugged up under little dingy, unbecoming shawls, and the clouds were low, and gray, and heavy—and every thing and every body seemed generally out ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... out because she was restless and was tired of the dingy and uncomfortable room. Without any definite intentions, she naturally followed the trail that Swiftwater had broken the day before. No wind stirred and the sky was clear. But it was very cold. The sun would not be up for ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... years ago throughout the south country. It is still there, I believe, although Zachary himself is dead and with him has departed most of the atmosphere of the place, and it is now smart and prosperous, although in those days it was dark and dingy enough. No one knew whence Zachary had come, and he was one of the mysteries of a place that deals, even now, in mysteries. He had arrived as a young man with a basket over his back thirty years before Peter saw the light, when Treliss was a little ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... frame buildings. Down every side street they could see, it was the same—never a hill and never a hollow, but always the same endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings. Here and there would be a bridge crossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud shores and dingy sheds and docks along it; here and there would be a railroad crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing, and rattling freight cars filing by; here and there would be a great factory, a dingy building ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... told us that his family had taken a large old house that had stood vacant ever since we had come to live with Mrs. Handsomebody. How often we had timidly passed its dingy front, wondering what might be within its closed ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... were covered with plain whitewash, the dirty brick floor had never been scoured, the furniture consisted of three rickety chairs, a round table, and a sideboard stationed between the two doors of a bedroom and a sitting-room. Windows and doors alike were dingy with accumulated grime. Reams of blank paper or printed matter usually encumbered the floor, and more frequently than not the remains of Sechard's dinner, empty bottles and plates, were lying about on ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... shoulders shrugged up to her ears, her dark eyes glancing around the tiny room with every expression of marked disapproval. It was certainly not a luxurious apartment. The low walls were of rough logs, the roof was a ragged piece of very dingy canvas, held in place by stones here and there. In one corner was a pile of dried grass and leaves, with a blanket thrown over it,—evidently Don Carlos's bed. There was a camp-stool, a rude box set on end, that seemed to do duty both for dressing and writing table, ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... the hall was Uncle Geoffrey's study—a somewhat grim, dingy apartment, with brown shelves full of ponderous tomes, a pipe-rack filled with fantastic pipes, deep old cupboards full of hetereogeneous rubbish, and wide easy-chairs that one could hardly lift, one of which was always occupied ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... with a new plaything, in our beautiful house; but how, after it, shall we ever be able to reconcile ourselves to the comparatively dingy rooms in St. James's Square, which no furniture or decoration could render any thing like the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... This little house was "double" also—that Is, it was entered in the centre by a small square passage just big enough for the outer door to swing in. On one side of this entry was a tiny parlor, as dismal as rag carpet, fireless hearth, dingy paper and dark-green paper shades to the small windows could make it. On the other side of the entry was the tiny and cold bedroom of the senior Starbucks. In the centre of the house rose a massive chimney, big enough to retain all the heat from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... was a dingy, cut-throat place, which the delicate Gonzaga had not entered without a tremor, invoking the saints' protection, and crossing himself ere he set foot across the threshold. Some pieces of goat were being cooked on the embers, ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... again, and look brightly forward to another expedition to the Great St. Bernard, when Mrs. Cerjat and I shall laugh as I fancy I have never laughed since, in one of those one-sided cars; and when we shall again learn from Haldimand, in a little dingy cabaret, at lunch-time, how to secure a door in travelling (do you remember?) by balancing a chair against it on its ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... looked quite as dingy and dirty as when she visited it before. Solomon himself was just as shabby and he pulled at his ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... prolonged and shrieking, brought both of them to their feet. She glanced at the tin alarm-clock on the shelf. The hands stood at half-past five. The rest of the factory world was just arousing from sleep. She drew a shawl about her shoulders, and on her head put a dingy hat, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... she didn't; for this crippled little child Had lived within a dingy court, where sunshine never smiled; And for weary, weary days and months, the little one had lain Confined within a narrow room, and on a ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... eager, dark man, with too much "way." He dressed in black and rusty iron grey; had jet-black beads for eyes, a scrubby little black chin, wiry black hair striking out from his head in prongs like hair-pins, and a complexion that was very dingy by nature, or very dirty by art, or a compound of both. He had dirty hands, and dirty, broken nails, and looked as if he had been in the coals. He snorted and sniffed, and puffed and blew, and was generally in a perspiration. It was Mr. Pancks who "moled out" the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... quilted-satin poke bonnet. The beauty which had been hers in her youth was still hers although everybody could not see it. Uncle Billy could see it and Jeff Bucknor glimpsed it, as his old cousin stepped from her dingy coach. He had never realized before that Cousin Ann Peyton had lines and proportions that must always be beautiful—a set of the head, a slope of shoulder, a length of limb, a curve of wrist and a turn of ankle. The old purple poke bonnet might have been a diadem, so high did ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... about a dozen, all told. They were to leave Springfield February 11, and to consume about two weeks on the way. It was a dreary morning, partly drizzling, and partly snowing. A large crowd of neighbors had assembled at the dingy railway station to bid him good-by. The process of handshaking was interrupted by the arrival of the train. After the party had entered the car, the President reappeared on the rear platform. He raised his hand to speak, but ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... to fiction. Putting one thing aside, it is not one of its author's greatest triumphs. It begins with a good deal of that rather nauseous gush about the adorable candour of young persons which, in a French novel, too often means that the "blanche colombe" will become a very dingy dunghill hen before long—as duly happens here. There is, however, a chance for the novel reader of comparing the departure of two of these white doves[377] from their school-dovecot with that of Becky and Amelia from Miss Pinkerton's. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... short November day had turned from afternoon to night, and a great change had come over the aspect of the dim and dingy court. Opaque globes turned into flaring suns; incandescent burners revealed unsuspected brackets; the place was warmed and lighted for the first time during the week. And the effect of the light and warmth was on all the faces that rose as one while the ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... inches. Mother McGinnis stood there with white eyes—they were white, I say—and a yellow face, holding together at her throat with one hand a dingy pink flannel dressing-sack. Tripp thrust the dollar through the space without a word, ...
— Options • O. Henry
... utter shame." During this year he took a house at Hammersmith, Upper Mall, the garden of which ran down to the Thames, but still retained his residence in Harley Street. In 1812 he first occupied the house No. 47 Queen Anne Street, and this house he retained for forty years. It was dull, dingy, unpainted, weather-beaten, sooty, with unwashed windows and shaky doors, and seemed the very abode of poverty, and yet when Turner died his estate was sworn as under one hundred and forty thousand ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... Private equipages, which form one of the most imposing features of a modern city, were unknown. There was nothing attractive in a Roman street, dark, narrow, and dirty, with but few vehicles, and with dingy shops, like those of Paris in the Middle Ages. The sun scarcely ever penetrated to them. They were damp and cold. The greater part of the city belonged to wealthy and selfish capitalists, like Crassus, who thought more of their gains than the health or beauty of the city. The Subura, the Sub ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... side, and like all the American river-sides that I remember. Grimy business piles, sagging sheds, and frowsy wharves and docks grieve the eye, which the shipping in the stream does little to console. That is mostly of dingy tramp-steamers, or inferior Dutch liners, clumsy barges, and here and there a stately brig or shapely schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the forest of masts and chimneys that fringe the North River and East River. The foul tide rises and falls between low shores where, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the hotel the landlord was asleep in the chair before the door. He arose with a yawn, rubbed his eyes, and led the way into the office where a dingy kerosene lamp was burning dimly. He stretched his arms as he looked at the clock that stood above the dusty pigeon holes back ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... at the figure of a whiskered skipper, wearing a dingy derby, who peered over the rail at this moment in response to a hail ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... is already more than the tale of a certain old man and his woes. Goriot, on the spot, is one of Maman Vauquer's boarders, and the mere fact is enough, by now, to differentiate him, to single him out among miserable old men. Whatever he does he carries with him the daily experience of the dingy house and the clattering meals and the frowzy company, with Maman Vauquer, hard and hungry and harassed—Mrs. Todgers would have met her sympathetically, they would have understood each other—at the head of it. Into ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... whoso entereth within this town, That, sheening far, celestial seems to be, Disconsolate will wander up and down, Mid many things unsightly to strange e'e; For hut and palace show like filthily; The dingy denizens are reared in dirt; No personage of high or mean degree Doth care for cleanness of surtout or shirt, Though shent with Egypt's plague, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... enter, that of the Faubourg St. Denis, presents a strange contrast to the dark uniformity of a London street, where everything, in the dingy and smoky atmosphere, looks as though it were painted in India-ink—black houses, black passengers, and black sky. Here, on the contrary, is a thousand times more life and color. Before you, shining in the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... screw loose with Lacey," the owner of this place. It was going down hill like its master. A general air of neglect and growing dilapidation impressed the most casual observer. The front gate hung on one hinge; boards were off the shackly barn, and the house had grown dingy and weather-stained from lack of paint. But as you entered and passed from the province of the master to that of the mistress a new element was apparent, struggling with, but unable to overcome, the predominant tendency to unthrift and seediness. ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... or so passed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening to be in Westminster in the forenoon—I had come up to town on business—I mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street, and rang the bell. A dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient duty, admitted me, and I found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe in front of the fire. It wasn't even a good coal fire. Some austere former tenant had ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke |
