"Ground-floor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... battle scenes in which he led on his troops. The library, which was formed, or at least arranged, by Casanova, and which remains as he left it, contains some twenty-five thousand volumes, some of them of considerable value . . . . The library forms part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing of the castle. The first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms are arranged, in a decorative way, covering the ceiling and the walls with strange patterns. The second room contains pottery, collected ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... house constituted practically a building by itself, with a stairway of its own, and the people living there seemed to form a world apart, with which Keith never became very well acquainted. But on the ground-floor of that part was the laundry, used in turn by every household in the entire house and regarded by the boy as a far-off, adventurous place until he had been allowed to visit it a ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... climate and the comparative cheapness of land give the colonists an aversion to height in their buildings, and even in the busiest parts of Melbourne most of the buildings have only two stories—i.e., a ground-floor and one above—and I can hardly think of any with more than three. The sums which banking companies pay for the erection of business premises are enormous. Thirty to sixty thousand pounds is the usual cost of their headquarters. The large insurance ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... glad to see him exert himself, to regret the musings she had hoped for; so out they went, after opening the window to give Charles what he called an airing, and he said, that in addition he should 'hirple about a little to explore the ground-floor of ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... glided out meekly to her own chamber, which was on the ground-floor adjoining the parlour, and there spent more than one hour in prayer, from which no present comfort seemed to come; yet who shall say ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... of the Palace along low passages, down narrow winding staircases, through painted rooms, in some of which female garments flung carelessly on the cushions seemed to indicate that they were passing through a portion of the zenana. Finally they reached a marble-paved hall on the ground-floor, where two attendants, the first persons whom they had seen on their way, lounged near a small door. They were evidently the porters and appeared to expect them, for they opened the door at Rama's approach. Through it Dermot followed his guide out into the courtyard on ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... into the hall, beckoning him with a jerk of her head. The officer bade them good-night and limped to a ground-floor flat at the end. ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... defile the under-world of Tandy's!—Next he had the roof of the main building raised, and given a less mean and meagre angle. He added a wing on the left containing pleasant bed-chambers upstairs, and good offices below; and, as crowning act of redemption, caused three large ground-floor rooms, backed by a wide corridor, to be built on the right in which to house his library and collections. This lateral extension of the house, constructed according to his own plans, was, like its designer, somewhat eccentric in character. The three rooms were semicircular, all window ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... shrieked femininely up from the ground-floor, 'am I to send the soup to the bathroom ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... at first to study the arrangements of houses and streets in Venice. Here I found that what had once been the palace of a noble, presented, first, a ground-floor about three feet above the medium level of the Adriatic, composed of a broad vestibule crossing through from front to rear, with the inferior apartments on each side; second, a floor of good apartments, with an open hall in the centre right over the vestibule—this ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... little expected: I seized the gentleman, and, having sprung with him out of the door, I gave him, in spite of the most determined resistance, a cross-buttock, and pitched him a neat somerset over the banisters, into the landing-place of the ground-floor, before my friend Davenport had scarcely left his seat. This being witnessed by some of my friends, who were standing at the bottom of the stairs, and saw the fellow come flying over the banisters, with part of my coat in his hand, which he had seized hold ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... with any other Oriental town I have ever seen. The streets were filled with foot-passengers, in bright and variegated costumes, passing busily on, or stopping to make purchases at the shops, which were on the ground-floor, with the whole front open, and the merchant sitting in the midst of his wares. The next story is inhabited, I believe, by his family; but I did not gain an entrance into any of the common houses. The outside front generally presented a mass of wood carving, each small window surrounded ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... by a reference to the ground plan and plan of the Crypt, is partly round and partly polygonal; round as regards the outer wall of the main building and the inside and outside of the small Chapels in the Crypt, but polygonal in the interior walls of the main building in the Crypt; whereas on the ground-floor the main building and the Chapels are all polygonal.[3] An examination of the remains of the Eastern Arches, as seen above the last Norman piers eastward of the Choir, shows the direction of the lines distinctly, following as they do the lines of the Crypt below, but with ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... stopped at the door of No. 15, St. Jacob Straat—one of the oldest houses in this old street—and slowly lighted a cigar. There is a shop on the ground-floor of No. 15, where ancient pieces of stove-pipe and a few fire-irons are exposed for sale. Von Holzen, having pushed open the door, stood waiting at the foot of a narrow and grimy staircase. He knew that in such a shop in such a quarter of the town there is ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... Nanny stood ready to help her to anything she required, being quickly concluded, Miss Wardhill descended to the large hall on the ground-floor, in the centre of the castle. It was a handsome room, with an arched ceiling of dark oak, supported by pillars round the wall. A long table ran down the centre, at one end of which, on a raised platform or dais, she took ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... he called Jim crept away in the darkness, while Mr. Rogers found and cautiously opened a wicket-gate leading to a courtlage, across which a solitary window shone on the ground-floor of a house lifting its gables and heavy chimneys against a sky ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of an early Saxon church, which is generally identified with the church built here by Benedict Biscop for the monastery which he founded in 672 A.D. The nave was originally aisleless, long, narrow and lofty: the entrance porch had an upper story finished with a gabled roof, and a vaulted ground-floor with entrances on three sides. There was evidently a chancel arch, and probably the chancel was rectangular. The material of the building was not Roman; but, in the decoration applied to it, Roman work was imitated. Only ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... passage was cleared, and Miss Benson took Ruth into the sitting-room. There were only two sitting-rooms on the ground-floor, one behind the other. Out of the back room the kitchen opened, and for this reason the back parlour was used as the family sitting-room; or else, being, with its garden aspect, so much the pleasanter of the two, both Sally and Miss Benson would have appropriated ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... (officially), we were interested in inspecting this. It was a favorable time for doing so, for there happened to be a man confined there, a circumstance which seemed to increase the keeper's feeling of responsibility in his office. The edifice had four rooms on the ground-floor, and an attic sleeping-room above. Three of these rooms, which were perhaps twelve feet by fifteen feet, were cells; the third was occupied by the jailer's family. The family were now also occupying the front cell,—a cheerful room commanding a view of the village street and of the bay. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the elderly body-servant, rather grandiloquently called the seneschal, into the ground-floor room known traditionally as the library. It still contained several shelves of neglected volumes, from which it derived its title, but implements of the chase—fowling-pieces, powder-horns, hunting-bags, ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... make the working man's life what it should be without the home, and it is with the home that alike M. Menier's philanthropy and organization attain the acme. These dwellings, each block containing two, are admirably arranged, with two rooms on the ground-floor, two above, a capital cellar and office, and last, but not least, a garden. The workman pays a hundred and twenty francs, rather less than five pounds, a year for this accommodation, which it is hardly necessary to say is the ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the white hairs of seventy years, had such blind confidence in Hulot—who, to the old Bonapartist, was an emanation from the Napoleonic sun—that he was calmly pacing his anteroom with the bank clerk, in the little ground-floor apartment that he rented for eight hundred francs a year as the headquarters of his extensive ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... quarter are very solidly constructed, lofty, and with flat roofs. The ground-floor seems to be appropriated to merchandize, or as domestic offices, the habitable apartments being above. The windows are supplied with outside Venetian blinds, usually painted green, which, together with the pure white of the walls, ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... won't give you land or rights to do nothing with, and it's quite likely the Charters people will file a notification that your workings are the obstacle. Still, they'd probably make you an offer first. If you let them in on the ground-floor—handed them a big slice of the valley or something of the kind—they'd let up on their timber rights. I'm not sure they could run good milling fir to ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... tables in hand-carts. In the town the bombardment, although not so heavy as it had been, was far too heavy to be pleasant. Most of the people still remaining have established themselves in their cellars, and every moment one came against some chimney emerging from the soil. Some were still on the ground-floor of their houses, and had heaped up mattresses against their windows. The inhabitants occasionally ran from one house to another, like rabbits in a warren from hole to hole. All the doors were open, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... leave the place, two men confronted them at the door. One was Mr. Scully, he of the ground-floor apartment, the other a short, thickset man, who at once announced himself as the janitor of ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... a cottage standing by the side of the road leading from the West Moor colliery to Killingworth. The railway from the West Moor Pit crosses this road close by the east end of the cottage. The dwelling originally consisted of but one apartment on the ground-floor, with the garret over-head, to which access was obtained by means of a step-ladder. But with his own hands Stephenson built an oven, and in the course of time he added rooms to the cottage, until it became a comfortable four-roomed dwelling, in which he lived as long as he remained ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... is to say, a tiled roof supported by some twenty posts, occupies of itself about half the public square of Yonville. The town hall, constructed "from the designs of a Paris architect," is a sort of Greek temple that forms the corner next to the chemist's shop. On the ground-floor are three Ionic columns and on the first floor a semicircular gallery, while the dome that crowns it is occupied by a Gallic cock, resting one foot upon the "Charte" and holding in the other the scales ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... of one of the principal rooms on the ground-floor had been opened, and through the aperture he caught the glimpse of a moving light, which was suddenly obscured. As he was about to enter, the light again flashed out: he drew back just in time, carefully screened ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... happiest memories of my childhood, and I salute that name with respect akin to that which I would show a dead man! Those who never knew the Neuilly of which I would speak must imagine to themselves a very large country house, of no architectural pretension, consisting almost exclusively of sets of ground-floor rooms, tacked one on to the other on much the same level, with delightful gardens, and standing in the middle of a very large park which stretched from the fortifications to the Seine, just where the Avenue Bineau now runs. Within the park walls there were ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... other in the forenoons, with a certain amount of secrecy. When the princess went to dine with her friend, the marquise closed her doors. Madame d'Espard treated the princess charmingly; she changed her box at the opera, leaving the first tier for a baignoire on the ground-floor, so that Madame de Cadignan could come to the theatre unseen, and depart incognito. Few women would have been capable of a delicacy which deprived them of the pleasure of bearing in their train a fallen rival, and of publicly being her benefactress. Thus relieved of the necessity for costly toilets, ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... he thought. "This forms the communication.... Let's see if my skeleton-key opens the door of the cellar that belongs to the ground-floor tenant.... Yes, capital.... Now let's examine these wine-bins.... Aha, here are places where the dust has been removed ... and footprints ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... little out of breath. He had run up-stairs two at a time. He was peacefully rummaging among old papers in his study on the ground-floor when one of his brother-lawyers, with forced congratulations, however, had made him read the famous article. He had soon got rid of his brother-lawyer, and he had come, much irritated, to his room. At first there was simply a torrent ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... low white building, and had evidently been a private house at one time. The only change made had been in the shape and size of the windows on the ground-floor; and these were protected by green persiennes, fanned out like awnings, although the house was shaded by magnolia trees. There was no name over the open door, but the word "Antiquites" was painted in large black ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... house they sought was about five minutes' walk from the wharf. It was a frame house of two storeys, with broad verandahs on both floors and a roof of corrugated iron. The owner was a half-caste named Horn, with a native wife surrounded by little brown children, and on the ground-floor he had a store where he sold canned goods and cottons. The rooms he showed them were almost bare of furniture. In the Macphails' there was nothing but a poor, worn bed with a ragged mosquito net, a rickety chair, and a washstand. They looked round ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... supporting himself from stem to stem. He came to the borders of a wide, smooth lawn, and on the farther side stood the house,—a long, two-storeyed house with level tiers of windows stretching to the right and the left, and a bowed tower in the middle. Through one of the windows in the ground-floor Wogan saw the spark of a lamp, and about that window a fan of yellow light was spread upon ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... say so, now! When was you ever so comfortable? Upon my conscience, it's more like Paradise than anything else. If ye see the dinner we sit down to every day; and as for drink,—if it wasn't that I sleep on a ground-floor, I'd seldom ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... becoming the guest of a heathen, seeing that otherwise there seemed no chance of having anything else to swallow; and after a refreshing plunge in the sea, followed the hospitable little fellow to Hypatia's door, where he dropped his daily load of fruit, and then into a narrow by-street, to the ground-floor of a huge block of lodgings with a common staircase, swarming with children, cats, and chickens; and was ushered by his host into a little room, where the savoury smell of broiling fish revived ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... performed those mysteries intrusted to him, attendant giants threw open folding doors at the farther end of the court, and the bright visions disappeared into a long gallery on the ground-floor, painted in brilliant frescoes, to the reception-room. The suite of rooms on the ground-floor are the summer apartments, specially arranged for air and coolness. Rustic chairs stand against walls painted with fruit and flowers, the stems and leaves represented as growing out of the floor, as at ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... in a low, miserably furnished room on the ground-floor, where, in the now clear light of the bright summer ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... personality was not out of place in a transplanted Parisian tenement. Madame Clementine was a Parisian; and her house, set around three sides of a quadrangle in which flowers overflowed their beds, was a bit of artisan Paris. The ground-floor consisted of various levels joined by steps and wide-jambed doors. The chambers, to which a box staircase led, wanted nothing except ...
— The Blue Man - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Taylor. "You and two hundred and fifty of the biggest planters come in on the ground-floor of the two-billion-dollar All-Cotton combine. It can easily mean two million to you ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in the afternoons, so far as her child would let her, she carried her tender presence and her practical knowledge of nursing to the sick and feeble; and on two evenings in the week she and Robert threw open a little room there was on the ground-floor between the study and the dining-room to the women and girls of the village, as a sort of drawing-room. Hard-worked mothers would come, who had put their fretful babes to sleep, and given their lords to eat, and had just ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had not stirred from the passage, slipped into the hall himself. The servants of the house, who by this time had heard of the murder, were crossing it in every direction. He went down the few stairs leading to a ground-floor landing, on which the front ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... against whom her old tongue is clacking from morning till night: she pounces on them at all hours. It was but this morning at eight, when poor Molly was brooming the steps, and the baker paying her by no means unmerited compliments, that my landlady came whirling out of the ground-floor front, and sent the poor ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... door-trim. Her husband was still sunk in the superstition that you can live anywhere you like in New York, and he would have paused at some places where her quicker eye caught the fatal sign of "Modes" in the ground-floor windows. She found that there was an east and west line beyond which they could not go if they wished to keep their self-respect, and that within the region to which they had restricted themselves there was a choice of streets. At first all the New York streets looked to them ill-paved, dirty, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... way into a hall on the ground-floor. A great fire in the ancient hearth, with its heavy heraldically carved stone chimney-piece, lit up the ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... in the second warehouse on the first floor, thirty stitched copies which we added to that of M. Derosne. In the workshops on the ground-floor, I seized a considerable quantity of printed sheets of the same work, which M. Le Normant estimates at nine thousand sheets; and thirty-one printing-forms which had been ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... from him across the House, to where Sir Timothy was talking to a man and woman in one of the ground-floor boxes. Francis recognised them with some surprise—an agricultural Duke and his daughter, Lady Cynthia Milton, one of the most, beautiful and famous ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stretched out his legs. He was beginning to feel at ease. He like this comely old man; he detected an abiding quality in his outlook and person. And he felt at home in these surroundings. There was an air of simplicity and refinement in that calm ground-floor chamber, with its subdued light filtering through windows that opened upon the courtyard, groined vaulting of noble proportions, stucco frieze stained with age to an ivory hue, and those other decorations which the Count, loyal to the traditions of old-world peasant ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... dirty home, but it was cluttered and hap-hazard. The old wooden chairs were worn with scouring, but littered with children's rags of clothing. The smell of boiling cabbage was in the air, for dinner-time was nigh. There were three rooms on the ground-floor and one of these was living-room and dining-room, the other the kitchen, and a small bedroom showed through an open door. For all its disorder it gave out a familiar odor of homeliness which profoundly ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... mind I'd go, after Meeting was over, and speak to our minister about it. I left the house about half-past eight o'clock. I didn't go out at the shop door, but at the back door, which opens into a narrow alley. I've only got the ground-floor of the house, and the kitchen and bedroom both look into the alley. I left the prisoner sitting up by the fire in the kitchen with the baby on her lap. She hadn't cried or seemed low at all, as she did the night before. I thought she ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... given a lock of his precious powdered head, to some other than Ellen. Henry is preparing the sauce for his master's wild-ducks while the engines are squirting over his own little nest and brood. Lift these figures up but a story from the basement to the ground-floor, and the fun is gone. We may be en pleine tragedie. Ellen may breathe her last sigh in blank verse, calling down blessings upon James the profligate who deserts her. Henry is a hero, and epaulettes are on his shoulders. Atqui sciebat, &c., whatever ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... consists of two large windows on either side of a very rustic-looking house door, and three dormer windows in the roof—a slate roof with two gables, prodigiously high-pitched in proportion to the low ground-floor. The house walls are washed with yellow color; and door, and first-floor shutters, all the Venetian shutters of the attic ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... were on the ground-floor, the bedroom looking into the University Square and my study into a garden. Next door to me dwelt Paulus, the king of the Rationalists. He was then, I believe, ninety- four years of age. He remained daily till about twelve or one ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... rather older date than the facade. This is the quadrangle which gives its collegiate character to Oropa. It is surrounded by cloisters on three sides, on to which the rooms in which the pilgrims are lodged open—those at least that are on the ground-floor, but there are three storeys. The chapel, which was dedicated in the year 1600, juts out into the court upon the north-east side. On the north-west and south-west sides are entrances through which one may pass to the open country. The grass at the time of our visit was for ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... I was going to dine in Rue Notre-Dame. He immediately went with four assistants, whom he left on the ground-floor, and ascended the staircase to the room where I was about to sit down to table with two females. A recruiting sergeant, who was to have made the fourth, had not yet arrived. I recognised Jacquard, who never having seen me, had not the same advantage, and besides my disguise would have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... tapped at another parlour-door on another ground-floor. Looking in, I found a man, his wife, and four children, sitting at a washing-stool by way of table, at their dinner of bread and infused tea-leaves. There was a very scanty cinderous fire in the grate by which they sat; and there was a tent bedstead ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... a few blades of grass sprouted on the discoloured gravel, the door of the house, with its ground-floor windows shuttered, faced him, wide open. He believed that his approach had been noted, because, framed in the doorway, without his tall hat, Peter Ivanovitch seemed to be waiting for ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... course better than others. Of these Mrs Wilson we know was one. But I believe I also mentioned that in the house in which she lived there were other poor people. In the room opposite to hers, on the ground-floor, lived and worked a shoemaker—a man who had neither wife nor child, nor, so far as people knew, any near relative at all. He was far from being in good health, and although he worked from morning to night, had a constant pain in his back, which was rather crooked, having ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... the old Mill House, the servants lit the lamps and drew the blinds and curtains. Behind the closing eyelids, however, like dream-chambers within a busy skull, there were rooms of various shapes and kinds, and in one of these on the ground-floor, called Daddy's Study, the three children stood, expectant and a little shy, waiting for something desirable to happen. In common with all other living things, they shared this enticing feeling—that Something Wonderful was going to happen. To be without this feeling, ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... there's one in the eating parlour,' said Mr Pecksniff, 'I can find it myself.' So he led his daughters, without waiting for any further introduction, into a room on the ground-floor, where a table-cloth (rather a tight and scanty fit in reference to the table it covered) was already spread for breakfast; displaying a mighty dish of pink boiled beef; an instance of that particular style of loaf which is known to housekeepers as a slack-baked, crummy quartern; a liberal provision ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... stands there to-day. A small, pinched, frame, ground-floor-and-attic, double tenement, with its roof sloping toward St. Mary street and overhanging its two door-steps that jut out on the sidewalk. There the Doctor's carriage stopped, and in its front room he found Mary in bed again, as ill as ever. A humble German woman, living ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... worked with more zeal than usual—faster and better than ever before. A little past noon he went down on some pretext or other to the joiner's workshop, on the ground-floor, under the story in which was his own. Sam was beloved there as every where else; but he entered it seldom. Thus it was—"Stop, here's Sam!" They got round him; it was a perfect holyday. He cast a quick glance around ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... and have traced to English town halls of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like the Fairfax County Courthouse, these town halls were two-story brick or stone buildings which presented to their front a gable-end, ground-floor arcade (or piazza) covering the main opening onto the street, an entrance set into the end wall, and, frequently, a cupola. The town halls of Blandford in Dorset (1734), and Amersham in Buckinghamshire (1682) illustrate these features ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... and by a broad double staircase to the upper stories; and at the northerly corner pavilions on Broadway and Park Row, where two great elliptical stairways lead again to the higher stories, but do not communicate with the ground-floor, being reserved for the United States Courts, and their dependencies. Besides these, there are lateral entrances to the Post-office corridor on Broadway and Park Row, and to the Post-office proper on those two sides, and also on the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... occasional visits of this kind from benighted or distressed travellers. She thought nothing of turning her two daughters out of their bedroom, which, it must be owned, was very clean, for Auntie and Olive, and a second room on the ground-floor was prepared for Rex and his uncle. She had coffee ready in five minutes, and promised them a comfortable supper before bedtime. Altogether, everything seemed very satisfactory, and when they felt a little refreshed, Auntie proposed a ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... with a hospital by means of a benefactor who desired to cooperate in a work of so great importance and mercy. Although they had no hospital in Cebu, while I was there, there was one religious, who had charge of the poor sick people, in a low apartment, or room above the ground-floor of the episcopal residence. As the land is so poor there, it is very difficult to found and preserve a hospital; and more so since scarcely a Spanish inhabitant of importance is to be found there now, for the reasons that were given in the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... A ground-floor window in an apartment building in Madison Avenue, north of Fifty-ninth street, displayed in calm black lettering the name "Dr. Braden L. Thorpe, M.D." On the panel of a door just inside the main entrance there ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... cream-coloured rough-cast walls, oak beams, richly carved overhanging eaves, and soft-red tiled roofs, show little evidence of the ravages of time. The most famous of these houses was built, in the seventeenth century, by Jens Bang, an apothecary. The chemist's shop occupies the large ground-floor room, the windows of which have appropriate key-stones. On one is carved a man's head with swollen face, another with a lolling tongue, ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... child recumbent, also elaborately sculptured in black marble, adorn the opposite niche, and under them, in alto-relievo, are several figures in religious habits. Another effigies of a knight, but much defaced, lies on the ground-floor of the choir—the whole of which was cleaned out and put in order by the present Marquis of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... three stories to a windmill, besides the ground-floor. The first floor is pretty empty; the next is nearly full of millstones and machinery, and the one above is where the corn runs down from on to ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... rise from her bed, and Olympia could not leave her alone. Kate undertook the investigation into the Jones affair alone. When she reached the hospital there was some delay before she could see the personage intrusted with the admission of guests. She was shown into an office on the ground-floor and given a seat. As she sat, distraught and eager, she heard her own name in the next room, the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... timber were almost equally abundant. The front-work is of wood with carved beams; the balconies and huge over-hanging roof recall the Swiss chalet, but the side and back walls are of stone often heavily buttressed. The cattle occupy the ground-floor, and the first storey is reached often by an outside staircase. The carven tombstones with their ornaments resemble those of Celtic countries, and are found also at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the ground plan of the pavilion. It had a ground-floor which was reached by a few steps, and above it was an attic, with which we need not concern ourselves. The plan of the ground-floor only, sketched roughly, is what I here submit ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... built with great solidity, and many still have the stucco ornaments that distinguish this style. The walls of the palace of Prince Eugene are still standing complete, but the court-yard is filled up with rubbish, at least six feet high, and what were formerly the rooms of the ground-floor have become almost cellars. The edifice is called to this day, "Princeps Konak." This mixture of the coarse, but picturesque features of oriental life, with the dilapidated stateliness of palaces in the style of the full-bottom-wigged Vanbrughs of Austria, has the ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... inscription: "The lowest price is marked on every book, and no abatement made on any article." We ascend a broad staircase, which leads to "The Lounging Rooms" and to the first of a series of circular galleries, lighted from the lantern of the dome, which also lights the ground-floor. Hundreds, even thousands, of volumes are displayed on the shelves running round their walls. As we mount higher and higher, we find commoner books in shabbier bindings; but there is still the same order preserved, each book being numbered ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... The greatest variety of trades seemed to be congregated there, and from the Portal de Escribanos to the Portal de Botoneros, there was one immense display of articles of every kind, the Plaza-Mayor serving at once as promenade, bazaar, market and fair. The ground-floor of the viceroy's palace is occupied by shops; along the first story runs an immense gallery where the crowd can promenade on days of public rejoicing; on the east side of the square rises the cathedral, with its steeples and light balustrades, proudly adorning its two towers; the basement ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... and pressed the electric bell-push. As I looked up at the windows, I noticed that nowhere was any light visible. Nor was there a light in the ground-floor windows. ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... shaping the bows with their knives, the mate, with his two assistants, having selected a flat spot a considerable height above the water, marked out the plan for the house—in front of which they intended to add a broad verandah, facing the seashore. The ground-floor they divided into two rooms, with space for a staircase to lead to the upper floor. This floor was to be divided into three rooms,—one for Alice, another for Walter, and the third for the surgeon; while the mate and the two men were to occupy one of ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... near the farm. The windows of their parlour were open, and I heard voices when I turned the corner of the house, as I passed the first window (there were two windows in their little ground-floor room). I saw Lucy distinctly; but when I had knocked at their door—the house-door stood always ajar—she was gone, and I saw only Mrs. Clarke, turning over the work-things lying on the table, in a nervous and purposeless manner. I felt by instinct ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... delay, I cried out, as I had received authority to do so, "In the name of the King, open to us!" They obeyed an order thus given; we entered pell-mell, and in the greatest haste, men and mules, into the kitchen, which was on the ground-floor; and we hurried to extinguish the lights, in order not to awaken the suspicions of the bandits who were seeking for us. Indeed, we heard them, passing and repassing near the house, vociferating with the whole force of their lungs against their unlucky fate. We did not ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... palace Conde proceeded to the hall of the Council, which was on the ground-floor; and at the termination of the sitting ascended, as was his custom, to the apartments of the Queen-mother, where Louis, who had entered eagerly into the part that had been assigned to him, and who had just distributed with his own hands the arms which had been prepared for the followers ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... "The ground-floor here," the other replied, "belongs to a prosperous cigarette manufacturer who lives himself upon the first floor. This is the second and above us are nothing but the servants' quarters. I should think," he concluded thoughtfully, "that you must have been ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... watching the fleecy clouds floating like white-sailed ships across its depths, and listening to the joyous song of the birds and the low rustling of the trees. Or, on becoming too weak to go out of doors, I should sit propped up with pillows at the open window of the ground-floor front, and look wasted and interesting, so that all the pretty girls would sigh as ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... together with those locked rooms on the ground-floor where the window-blinds are drawn down close, have been spared the general devastation. Mrs Pipchin has remained austere and stony during the proceedings, in her own room; or has occasionally looked in at the sale to see what the goods are fetching, and to bid for ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... could be found for this work, but the Headmaster made a descent upon Aberystwith and returned with the required number. A contractor was fitting the large coffee-rooms, the billiard-room and others, and the ground-floor corridor from end to end, with long narrow tables—plain deal boards on wooden trestles—for the accommodation of three hundred diners. Outside, the stables were converted into the school carpentery, ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... less than a year before, after the Ball's-Bluff accident, the Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night on our homeward journey at the Fifth-Avenue Hotel, where we were lodged on the ground-floor, and fared sumptuously. We were not so peculiarly fortunate this time, the house being really very full. Farther from the flowers and nearer to the stars,—to reach the neighborhood of which last the per ardua of three or four flights ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... first school and the chapel that adjoined it. The fields a little way off were full of boys in white flannels playing cricket. On the asphalt playing ground, just by the schoolroom windows, stood Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus, with their Argives armed behind them; but Hector stepped down out of a ground-floor window, and in the schoolroom were all Priam's sons and the Achaeans and fair Helen; and a little farther away the Ten Thousand drifted across the playground, going up into the heart of Persia to place Cyrus on his brother's throne. And the boys that I knew called to me from the fields, ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... which, however, it turned its back; in design, an oblong of two storeys, with a square tower at each of the four corners, and the towers connected by a parapet of freestone. The windows along the front were regular, and those on the ground-floor less handsome than those of the upper floor, where (it appeared) were the staterooms. For—strangest feature of all— the main entrance was in this upper storey, with a dozen broad steps leading down to the unkempt carriage-way and a lawn, across which a magnificent turkey oak ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... (used as a granary) is a cellar three steps below the ground-floor level, with a Norman shaft, introduced from some other part of the buildings, to ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... the Travellers' is a noble apartment, which was originally the coffee-room. It occupies the whole of the ground-floor front to the gardens of Carlton House Terrace, and is divided into three bays by the projection ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... them,—their "corral" he had termed it,—and, was that her footstep on the floor above? No! Too heavy and slow. The maid had just gone up with the mail; besides, her room—Her room was now on the ground-floor, off the dining-room. Why didn't she come? She must know how hard all this assumed indifference was to bear. She must know how eager he was to look once more into her sweet blue eyes and read their shy welcome; she must know how ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Louis, and insisted upon my disposing of his workmen without his interference. I therefore found the means of making of a single chamber upon the first story, a complete set of apartments consisting of a chamber, antechamber, and a water closet. Upon the ground-floor was the kitchen and the chamber of Theresa. The alcove served me for a closet by means of a glazed partition and a chimney I had made there. After my return to this habitation, I amused myself in decorating ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... with five windows to each course, rises two storeys above the ground-floor, and is particularly noticeable for a roof of four sides ending in a weather-vane, and broken here and there by tall, handsome chimneys, and oval windows. Perhaps this structure is the remains of some ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... another word and ran downstairs. In the ground-floor rooms he found the servants waiting, the two men armed, Marie wildly excited, all talking at once, for they had heard from an upper window their ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... the missile from Allington's half-extended hand, and mounting one of the little marble julep-tables, and supporting himself against a massive granite pillar that ran from the ground-floor to the base of the dome, he began reading, while the company, now increased to half a hundred morning loungers, pressed eagerly round to hear. As my poor friend is dead, and there are none whose feelings can now be wounded by its publication, here ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... rueful and supperless, half dead with cold, kept his armed watch beside his door, momently expecting the priest, for the best part of the night; but towards daybreak, his powers failing him, he lay down and slept in the ground-floor room. 'Twas hard upon tierce when he awoke, and the front door was then open; so, making as if he had just come in, he went upstairs and breakfasted. Not long afterwards he sent to his wife a young fellow, disguised as the priest's underling, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... I reached the flats. They were a small pile in a side street, and I pitied the doctor whose plate I saw upon the palings before the ground-floor windows; he must be in a very small way, I thought. I rather pitied myself as well. I had indulged in visions of better flats than these. There were no balconies. The porter was out of livery. There was no lift, and my invalid ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... greeted with cries of "Get out o' the gait!" or "Gardy loo!" which was in the French "Gardez l'eau," and which would have been understood in any language, I fancy, after a little experience. The streets then were filled with the debris flung from a hundred upper windows, while certain ground-floor tenants, such as butchers and candlemakers, contributed their full share to the fragrant heaps. As for these too seldom used narrow turnpike stairs, imagine the dames of fashion tilting their vast hoops and silken show-petticoats up and down ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... heed her sister's foreboding cry. Getting pencil and paper, she was soon engaged in sketching the ground-floor of a cottage house. It was to cost about twenty-six hundred dollars. This was years before the day of high prices, when a very cozy house could be compassed for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... before and around the cathedral has been so raised that there is not a vestige now of the twelve steps which formerly led up to it. To-day the base of the columns of the porch is on a level with the pavement; consequently what was once the ground-floor of the house of which we speak is now its cellar. A portico, reached by a few steps, leads to the entrance of the tower, in which a spiral stairway winds up round a central shaft carved with a grape-vine. This style, which recalls the stairways ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... in the bush," said the Inventor, blowing a speck of dust off his apparition; "all ground-floor houses. Anyhow, if there were stairs we could carry him up and let him fall down afterwards, or get flung down ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... that at one time I became incapable of opening my lips about anything else. My guardian said it was "hawk, hawk, hawking from morning till night." Not that I ever possessed a living falcon of any species whatever. My uncle resigned to me a corner of the outbuildings, on the ground-floor of which was a loose-box for my horse, and above it a room that I set apart for the falcons when they should arrive; but in spite of many promises from gamekeepers and naturalists and others, no birds ever came! The hoods and jesses were ready, very prettily adorned with red morocco ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Celt in him was feeling suicidal. They went into the ground-floor room of a house where ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... five gates on the south side, answering to those in the outer wall, but on the other sides the walls have only one gate each. In the centre of the enclosure made by these walls, stands the palace, the largest in the world. It has no second story, but the ground-floor is raised about eight feet above the ground. The roof is very high, the walls of the rooms are covered with gold and silver, and on this gold and silver are paintings of dragons, birds, horses, and other animals, so that ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... in a pleasant part of Headingley, which is the favorite residential suburb in the locality of Leeds. As regards accommodation, the ground-floor of each house comprises good-sized drawing and dining rooms, each with bay windows; well-lighted entrance halls, opening upon wooden verandas; kitchen, pantry, and scullery; on first floor are three good bedrooms, a bathroom, and other necessary ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... want of food, Mr. Evans yielded to the boy's suggestion, and walked in at the door which the maid held with difficulty against the wind. She took Mr. Evans for a visitor, as indeed he was, and showed him into the room on the ground-floor. Diamond, who had followed into the hall, whispered to her ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... to this was the sudden closing of a door. Mr. Sax had taken refuge from me in one of the ground-floor rooms. I was so mortified, ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... meant to go to the City before cold weather came. He had there a small and decent steam-warmed flat where he boiled his own eggs and made his own coffee, read his newspapers and kept his counsel, descending nightly to the ground-floor cafe to dine on ambiguous dishes at tables of other bank swallows who nested in the same cliff. But as the days went by, he found himself staying on in Old Trail Town, with this excuse and that, offered by himself to himself. As, for example, ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington Harris's permission, I fitted a key to the disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to have a more immediate access to the outside world than the dark stairs, ground-floor hall, and front door could give. There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground windows, ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... [8] The ground-floor of the palace was occupied by the shops of jewelers and milliners, some of whom were ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... reached home at length, we found that Ethel, or, as we commonly called her, using the other end of her name, Wynnie—for she was named after her mother—had got a room on the ground-floor, usually given to visitors, ready for her sister; and we were glad indeed not to have to carry her up the stairs. Before my wife left, she had sent the groom off to Addicehead for both physician and surgeon. A young man who had settled at Marshmallows as general practitioner ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... this time approached a small gate, which communicated with the apartments on the ground-floor of the Zenana; when, turning to me, she said, "You can return the way you came, but I must leave you here;" and, making a slight bow, she sprung like a young fawn through the gate, and was out of sight ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... had along with me, and dressed myself as well as I could. And now, when I thus made my appearance, they did not, as they had the evening before, show me into the kitchen, but into the parlour, a room that seemed to be allotted for strangers, on the ground-floor. I was also now addressed by the most respectful term, "sir;" whereas the evening before I had been called only "master": by this latter appellation, I believe, it is usual to address only farmers and ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... be latent in the name of Gilberte, looked at me as though he knew that I was one of those whose natural unworthiness would for ever prevent them from penetrating into the mysteries of the life inside, which it was his duty to guard, and over which the ground-floor windows appeared conscious of being protectingly closed, with far less resemblance, between the nobly sweeping arches of their muslin curtains, to any other windows in the world than to Gilberte's glancing eyes. On other days we ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... fair lady. From the summit of his ladder, by his eloquent Italian tongue, he brings the shy bird down at last. We hear the unbarring of the house door, and a comely maiden, in her Sunday dress, welcomes us politely to her ground-floor sitting-room. The Comus enters, in grave order, with set speeches, handshakes, and inevitable Prosits! It is a large low chamber, with a huge stone stove, wide benches fixed along the walls, and a great oval table. We sit how and where we can. Red wine is produced, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Henrik would have longed to sink into the earth for very shame, a longing which would have met with opposition, not only from the ground-floor inhabitants, but also from the assistants ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the Prince and the Minister alighted at the Khan and lodged their goods in the ground-floor magazines and there settled their servants. Then they tarried awhile till they had rested, when the Wazir arose and applied himself to devise a device for the Prince, and said to him, "I have bethought me of somewhat wherein, methinks, will ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... world's oldest order, Sir Knight of the Army of God, You have crossed the strange mystical border, The ground-floor of truth you have trod; You stand on the typical threshold Which leads to the temple above; Where you come as a stone, and a Christ-chosen one, In the Kingdom of ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... intervening hours had been spent in journeying to and from the nearest village, and obtaining the necessary services of doctor and cure. My master was smoking his porcelain pipe, as usual, but strangely silent. A faint circle of light came from the open ground-floor window of the cafe. The white road gleamed dimly, and beyond the hushed valley the hills loomed vague against a black, starlit sky. In the lighted room a few peasants from neighbouring farms drank their sour white wine and discussed the death in low voices. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... other people, the Maddens did not have their parlor on the ground-floor, opening off the front hall. Theron stood in the complete darkness of this hall, till Celia had lit one of several candles which were in their hand-sticks on a sort of sideboard next the hat-rack. She beckoned ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... a chest of drawers. No materials seemed to come amiss. A small craft laden with bricks was cast ashore, just as he was about to begin one of his rooms. This was therefore built with her cargo, as were several of the excrescences run out from the ground-floor, while rough stones, and especially wood cast on shore from wrecks, had been chiefly employed. Then his paint-brush was seldom idle; and, as he remarked, "variety is pleasant," he coloured differently every room, both inside and out, increasing ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... a small crowd gathered at night by the window of Mrs. Forsyth's drawing-room, which was on the ground-floor, listening to music such as had never before been heard in Rothieden. More than once, when Robert had not found Sandy Elshender at home on the lesson-night, and had gone to seek him, he had discovered him lying in wait, like a fowler, to catch the sweet sounds that flew from ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... should tell you, my dear fellow, exhibits the magnificence of the Louis XIV. manner, you enter a fine billiard-room unrivalled so far as I know in Paris itself. The entrance to this suite of ground-floor apartments is through a semi-circular antechamber, at the lower end of which is a fairy-like staircase, lighted from above, which leads to other parts of the house, all built at various epochs—and to think that they chopped off the heads of the wealthy ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... evening we went to an entertainment at the house of Pepita. The cross which had stood at the door was now placed in a large saloon on the ground-floor, in which there is a piano, and Pepita presented us with a simple and poetic spectacle, one that I had seen when a child, but had ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... leading into the court-yard, to be stopped by a sentry who demanded what we wanted. The lower storey had been turned into a barrack by the Government, there being a want of quarters for the soldiers. As the ground-floor under the cloisters is used for the heavier pieces of sculpture, the scene was somewhat curious. The soldiers had laid several of the smaller idols down on their faces, and were sitting on the comfortable seat ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... three of us heard to the utmost advantage, lying on iron bedsteads at the time in a cracked old room on the ground-floor, the open windows of which looked into the square. No spot could be more favourably selected for watching the humours of a garrison town by night. About midnight, the door hard by us was visited by a party of young ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... kitchen was apt to be his resort. It was a long and low apartment on the ground-floor, and its wide fireplace, with stone settle beside the hooks and cranes for pots and kettles, had doubtless been as cheery a corner for the old monks to warm their toes after a foraging expedition as it was for Leo, who liked to smell ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... which Sulla inhabited when a young man, he paid for the ground-floor a rent of 3000 sesterces, and the tenant of the upper story a rent of 2000 sesterces (Plutarch, Sull. 1); which, capitalized at two-thirds of the usual interest on capital, yields nearly the above amount. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... is no shade from high timber trees, one is bit to death by animals, gnats in particular, which here are excessively troublesome, even in the town, notwithstanding we scatter vinegar, and use all the arts in our power; but the ground-floor is coolest, and every body struggles to get themselves a terreno as ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... is this telescope hidden, dropped in that corner, at the last moment. I wonder what it was used for.... From the ground-floor windows you see nothing but the trees in the garden ... and the same, I expect, from all the windows.... We are in a valley, without the least open horizon.... To use the telescope, one would have to go up to the top of the house.... ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... the lower parts of the walls, sometimes up to the sills of the ground-floor windows, are of stone or brickwork. Above this the house is a timber structure as far as its main outline and its sustaining parts are concerned, whatever may be the character of the material with which the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... corner of the Place du Vieux Louvre, in which quarter is the present entrance to the CENTRAL MUSEUM OF THE ARTS. Here, after passing through a court, you enter a vestibule, on the left of which is the Hall of the Administration of the Museum. On the ground-floor, facing the door of this vestibule, is ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... we must pause with him for awhile at Hobart Town, which he looked upon even then as a place of remarkable importance. "Its houses," he says, "are very spacious, consisting only of one story and the ground-floor, though their cleanness and regularity give them a very pleasant appearance. Walking in the streets, which are unpaved, though some have curb stones, is very tiring; and the dust always rising in clouds is very trying to the eyes. The Government house is pleasantly ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... first rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... bring with them the amount of their bills. It was late at night, after one of such meetings, that Dr. L. was awakened by a noise at his bed-room door; he rose up, and going into the passage which led to the staircase, but which was not in the direct way from Aram's bed room to the ground-floor, he discovered the usher dressed. Having questioned him as to the object of his rising at that unseasonable hour, Aram confusedly answered that he had been taken unwell, and had been obliged to go do down stairs. The Dr. then retired, unsuspiciously, to bed. From the combined ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... being under repair, the bells on the ground-floor were taken down. The mistress of the house had an old favourite terrier, and when she wanted her servants, sent the dog to ring the bell in her dressing-room, having previously attached a bit of wood to the bell-rope. When the dog pulled at the rope, he listened, and if the ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... declined to do, and requested to be shown my bed. I was conducted to a very miserable room on the ground-floor, where, on some boards raised upon two stools, I passed the night, without bed or pillow, save my umbrella and shoe, and without any mosquito netting. Ten or eleven other lodgers were sleeping in the same room, so I could ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... one small room allotted to him on the ground-floor, and Mr Slope had another. Into this latter Mr Harding was shown, and asked to sit down. Mr Slope was not yet there. The ex-warden stood up at the window looking into the garden, and could not help thinking how very short a time had passed since the whole of that ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... feet of the walls were the natural earth, the other three of sod, with holes for windows and corn-sacks for curtains. This little lady had her Saratoga trunk, which was the chief article of furniture; yet, by means of a rug on the ground-floor, a few candle-boxes covered with red cotton calico for seats, a table improvised out of a barrel-head, and a fireplace and chimney excavated in the back wall or bank, she had transformed her "hole in the ground" into ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... white plaster, and the lower courses are often coloured in stripes of yellow, white, and red. Handsome carved doorways open from the street, and the doors are panelled in bold arabesque design, or enriched by metal studs and knockers of bronze. The windows on the ground-floor, which are usually small, are closed by a wooden or iron grating, and are placed too high in the wall for passengers to look through them, and frequently, even in the best houses, small recesses in ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... unknown, the unity of design which characterizes the work makes it probable that the original plans were adhered to till the whole was finished. Nothing could be simpler than the general idea; but the effect is very fine. The ground-floor of the facade, about 150 yards long, is pierced by a number of rectangular doors, over which are two rows of pointed windows, each exactly above the other, and all of the same style. In the upper row every second window is filled ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... the ground-floor was given up to business, but the upper floors were still let to lodgers. A quiet-looking young widow appeared in answer to Elsie's summons. "No, ma'am, I didn't know Mrs. Penn," she said civilly. "She gave up this ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... Giovanni Conti, one of the secretaries of the Lord Duke Cosimo, he made many useful and beautiful improvements in his house at Florence; although it is true that in the two ground-floor windows, supported by knee-shaped brackets, which open out upon the street, Giuliano departed from his usual method, and so cut them up with projections, little brackets, and off-sets, that they inclined ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... from what it was when Chaucer frequented it in search of good wine. The landlord eventually became insolvent; the paltry tavern was shut up, and the bedrooms were dismantled. In that plight they might be seen some years ago, may still possibly be seen—empty, dusty, dreary—ranged above ground-floor premises which do duty as a parcels' conveyance office, and abutting on a mean, ill-kept yard. Until within the last few years the coigne of the old balustraded gallery was connected on the right with the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... centre. I was conducted up stairs to my bed-room, which, though by no means large, and plainly furnished, presented the luxury of extreme cleanliness, with its beautifully polished wooden floor, and its delicately white napery and curtains. The saloon on the ground-floor opened sweetly into a little garden, with its fountain, its bit of rock-work, and its gods and nymphs of stone. The apartment had a peculiarly comfortable air at breakfast-time. The hissing urn, flanked by the tea-caddy; the rich brown coffee, the delicious butter, and the not less delicious bread, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... number of enterprises, such as dressmakers, milliners, shoemakers and tailoring "bushelers" carried on their business in the front room of a ground-floor flat and lived, often with families, in the rear rooms. In those cases, only the floor space of the room used for business purposes was included ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... furtively into the long courtyard of the Institute, full of statues, busts, half-finished marbles, plasters, and baked clays; at all of which he gazed feverishly, for his instinct was awakened, and his vocation stirred within him. He entered a room on the ground-floor, the door of which was half open; and there he saw a dozen young men drawing from a statue, who at once began to make ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... Silver Shield was first exploited. Its promoters and agents showed high-grade ore, and reports of expert mining engineers promised abundance of it. All that was needed was development. "Come in now, on the ground-floor, and you'll be coining money in a year's time," said Mr. Breifogle, and to the number of seven the commissioned force at Fort Reynolds had "come." So long as they remained close to the spot all seemed going ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... stroll along the ground-floor rooms, Colney Durance found himself beside Dr. Schlesien; the latter smoking, striding, emphasizing, but bearable, as the one of the party who was not perpetually at the gape in laudation. Colney was heard to say: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... raised; a horse shies and causes commotion. Smoke is seen to issue from one of the rooms of the ground-floor. The police extinguish it; and an attempt is made to form a cordon round the building. But it is too late. Whilst the front of the hotel occupies the attention of the majority of the crowd, a few are pulling ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... houses in Borne were of two kinds: the insula and the domus. The insula was a block of buildings several stories high, frequently let out to different families in flats. The ground-floor was generally given up to shops, which had no connection with the upper parts of the building; and one roof covered the whole. This kind of house was generally tenanted by the poorer class of tradesmen ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... there looking out at the precipitous rain, when I descried a raven walking toward me over the grass, with solemn gait, and utter disregard of the falling deluge. Suspecting who he was, I congratulated myself that I was safe on the ground-floor. At the same time I had a conviction that, if I were ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... relations and friends twice a year. The clerk of the court, too poor, he said, to fling himself into such extravagance, lived in a small way in a house standing half-way down the Grand'Rue, the ground-floor of which was let to his sister, the letter-postmistress of Nemours, a situation she owed to the doctor's kind offices. Nevertheless, in the course of the year these three families did meet together frequently, in the houses ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... entered the stage-box, and found the manager there with Finot. Matifat was in the ground-floor box exactly opposite with a friend of his, a silk-mercer named Camusot (Coralie's protector), and a worthy little old soul, his father-in-law. All three of these city men were polishing their opera-glasses, and anxiously scanning the house; certain symptoms in the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... flames lick up everything in sight, but every one was thankful that no lives were lost. The scouts, both girls and boys, had worked so faithfully that all the silver and linen were saved, and the men had removed much of the best furniture in the ground-floor rooms. ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy |
