"Hovel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bid that old tumble-down hovel good-bye; My mother she'll scold, and my sisters they'll cry: But I won't care a crow's egg for all they can say; I sha'n't go to stop ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... the fortunes of his royal master, even to the very gates of the imperial Delhi. On his return towards Persia, he had for a time intended to settle in C[a]bul, but "death, who assaults the walled fort of the chieftain as well as the defenceless hovel of the peasant," seized him for his own; the father also paid the debt of nature in the capital of Affghanist[a]n, but not before the young Khan Shereef had seen the light. Growing up to manhood and wearying of the monotonous life a residence ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... spitted upon by a whole village, feels what it is to be poor and contemned. I tell you boldly, godfather, and on my very heart, you must put an end to my misery—for you can do it. Give me back my money and land, and make me honourable amongst my neighbours. I can't sit alone like a night-owl in my hovel. I like to have my fellow-creatures about me, to eat bread and drink water, or it may be a draught of beer with me. I can't live the life of a blessed hermit. I am, as you know, but a simple plain fellow, a boor, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... children some victuals she had brought for them, she entered the hovel, furniture there was none;—a chest of tools and a heap of straw was all its contents. The grate had evidently been unconscious of a fire for weeks past,—but it was summer. She shuddered as she looked around. This was the home for which the proud lord of ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... Haddit, held. Hale, whole. Heels-ower-hurdie, heels over head. Hinney, honey. Hirstle, to bustle. Hizzie, wench. Howe, hollow. Howl, hovel. Hunkered, crouched. Hypothec, lit. in Scots law the furnishings of a house, and formerly the produce and stock of a farm hypothecated by law to the landlord as security for rent; colloquially "the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... within it. Its neighborhood, however, naturally partook of characteristics 'like its own. There was a confusion of black and hideous houses, piled massively out of the ruins of former ages; rude and destitute of plan, as a pauper would build his hovel, and yet displaying here and there an arched gateway, a cornice, a pillar, or a broken arcade, that might have adorned a palace. Many of the houses, indeed, as they stood, might once have been palaces, and possessed still a squalid kind of grandeur. Dirt was everywhere, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I heard a voice, which whispered in my ear, 'Leave the others to fight, and for today take care of your own hide!' But then, that word Francais! murmured within me, and I pressed forward to help my comrades. At other times, when, irritated by hunger, cold, and wounds, I have arrived at the hovel of some Meinherr, I have been seized by an itching to break the master's back, and to burn his hut; but I whispered to myself, Francais! and this name would not rhyme with either incendiary or murderer. ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... the first impulse of a nature, healthful and still pure, to settle in the hovel and lose itself amidst the sewers; and Lenny Fairfield turned innocently over the bad books, and selecting two of three of the best, brought them to the tinker ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... night, we carried him up to the bleak tor side, and dug his grave there; the black cat following us to look. Five feet deep we laid him, having dug down to solid rock; and having covered him over, went silently back to the hovel. Joan had not shed a ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... bottom of the descent, and, as it seemed, by the side of a brook (for Waverley heard the rushing of a considerable body of water, although its stream was invisible in the darkness), the party again stopped before a small and rudely-constructed hovel. The door was open, and the inside of the premises appeared as uncomfortable and rude as its situation and exterior foreboded. There was no appearance of a floor of any kind; the roof seemed rent in several places; the walls were composed of loose stones and turf, and the thatch of branches of ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... tell you that it is all-important that the temperature of the room should not be allowed to vary. I attended a case of it some three or four miles from here, but the damp of the cabin was so great that it was impossible to combat the disease. The cottage, or rather hovel, was built on the edge of a soft spongy bog, and so wet was it that the woman had to sweep the water every morning from the floor, where it collected in great pools. I am now going to visit an evicted family, who are living ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... sound of a fearful peal of laughter rolled heavily through the sleep of the lime-burner and his little son; dim shapes of horror and anguish haunted their dreams, and seemed still present in the rude hovel, when they opened their ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... have been told to proceed on our journey, as being too impertinent. The hosts are most ungracious and disagreeable in their manners; their houses and their persons are often filthily dirty; the want of the accommodation of forks, knives, and spoons is common; and I am sure no cottage or hovel in England could be found in a state so utterly destitute ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... Margaret knew that she was really revelling in this chance of getting the instruction in Italian that she wanted. And as for the singing lessons, their value, she declared vehemently, was beyond price to her. Any time during the last two years she would, she said, have gladly lived in a hovel, fared on bread and water, and gone barefoot and in rags for ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... of human destinies am I; Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait. Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate Deserts and seas remote, and, passing by Hovel and mart and palace, soon or late, I knock unbidden once on every gate. If sleeping, wake; if feasting, rise before I turn away; it is the hour of fate, And they who follow me reach every state Mortals desire, and conquer every foe Save death; but those who doubt or hesitate, ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... Already the tide is turning, and all who have seen the accounts of the Bank pity me; they will pity me still more if ever they hear my own flesh and blood insults me in the moment of my fall; sees me ruined by my honesty and living in a hovel, yet comes into that poor but honest abode, and stabs me to the heart by accusing me of stealing fourteen thousand pounds: a sum that would have saved me, if I could only have laid my hands ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... The old woman had flung herself down in despair in a corner of the hovel. Lancey quickly emptied the remnants of food in ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... half-naked savages, or the Graces, could not have caused more excitement in the streets of London, than we did to the amiable inmates of this lonely cottage; for I do not suppose there was another house, or hovel, within twenty miles. King, who had come with us, endeavoured to explain the object of our visit by a request, made in the Norwegian language, for milk, and by holding up the empty jug; but the old woman shook her head, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the building, in which master or mistress could find an hour's comfort, or a night's unmingled sleep. As for the devoted woman, it made very little difference to her whether she dwelt in a castle or a hovel, provided she could see her husband cheerful, and know that he was happy. This was all she looked for—cared for—lived for. He was her life. What was her money—the dross which mankind yearned after—but for its use to him, but for the power it might exercise amongst men to elevate and ennoble ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... lads, I prosper, I guard the hovel, too, Thatched, as you see, by willows and reeds and grass that grew In all the marsh about it; hence me, mere stump of oak, Shaped by the farmer's hatchet, they now as god invoke. They bring me gifts devoutly, the master and his boy, Supposing me ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... stopping until they came to a wretched little hovel. A black pipe instead of a chimney was sticking through ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... face of the earth. In the population that throngs the streets, the extremes of Wealth and the extremes of Poverty meet, as they meet nowhere else. In the streets themselves, the glory and the shame of architecture—the mansion and the hovel—are neighbors in situation, as they are neighbors nowhere else. London, in its social aspect, ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... it, so did Lavinia Pepper, and after that it might as well have been printed on the walls for all to read. It was talked over and gossiped about in every household from the lighthouse keeper's family to that of George Washington Cash, who lived in the one-room hovel in the woods near the Wellmouth line, and was a person of distinction, in his way, being the sole negro in the county. And whenever it was discussed it was considered a fine thing for both parties concerned. Almost everyone said it was ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... wealth from foreign countries except by adding to the circulating medium, and thereby diminishing the value of money? In either case, what is the benefit to the public or the community? Yet a benefit is rendered visible—a fine house has arisen where there stood before but a wretched hovel—and a paradise has been created out of a sheep pasture!—The benefit, however, is merely to the individual! His pride and taste have been gratified, and this gratification is called a benefit—yet with him the benefit, if to him it really be so, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... traditional bits of land which old Sechard used to buy as they came into the market, for old Sechard had savings—he was lucky with his vintages, and a clever salesman. Perhaps David was the only man in Angouleme who knew nothing of his father's wealth. In David's eyes Marsac was a hovel bought in 1810 for fifteen or sixteen thousand francs, a place that he saw once a year at vintage time when his father walked him up and down among the vines and boasted of an output of wine which the young printer never saw, and he ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... hours wasted on a lonely shore! How many hopes defeated by a change of weather! He was hanging there to a granite rock, his arm extended like that of an Indian fakir, while his father, sitting in their hovel, awaited, in silence and darkness, a meal of the coarsest bread and ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... in German in his presence. Emilie gave him no account of her doings and replied to his questions in an offhand way as though she had not heard them; and, worst of all, some of the rooms in Madame Fritsche's house, which was a fairly large one, though it looked like a hovel from the street, were never opened to him. For all that, Kuzma Vassilyevitch did not give up his visits; on the contrary, he paid them more and more frequently: he was seeing living people, anyway. His vanity was gratified by Emilie's ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... come to a large palace and then to a wretched hovel. Another time we see a row of little cottages of one storey standing next to a stately mansion, and in other places little streets as in ...
— A Journey in Russia in 1858 • Robert Heywood
... kiss thee, and by that kiss I give to thee dominion over sea and earth, over the peasant in his hovel, over the monarch in his palace halls, and cities crowned with towers, and those who breathe therein. Where'er the sun shakes out his spears, and the lonesome waters mirror up the moon, where'er storms roll, and Heaven's painted bows arch in the sky—from the pure North ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... like to run a knife into him under the left shoulder-blade. How dare he, a ragamuffin from some hovel of Naples, make you know ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... would have rejoiced, could they have seen him in that wretched hovel! He first wrote to General Fink, to whom he wished to leave the command of his army. He must fulfil the duties of state, before those of friendship. It was not a letter—rather an order to General ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... other folks all about you are goin' to clean up, you say you won't be driv' to it. Wa-al! I'll tell you what's going to happen to you, Bill Jones: We wimmen air goin' to trade at stores that are decently clean. Anyway, they're cleaner than this hovel of your'n. Don't expect me in it ag'in till I ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... possessionless, even if the order had beautiful churches and comfortable monasteries. A stately church was immediately constructed at Assisi to receive the remains of their humble founder, who in his lifetime had chosen a deserted hovel for his home; and a great chest was set up in the church to ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... amongst the houses in daylight, almost as dumb as an animal and apparently much more homeless. I don't know what he did with himself at night. He must have had a place, a hut, a palm-leaf shed, some sort of hovel where he kept his razor and his change of sleeping suits. An air of futile mystery hung over him, something not exactly dark but obviously ugly. The only definite statement I could extract from anybody was that it was he who ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... boathouse at the end of the Rue de Brissac down on the banks of the river Seine. There's a cellar entrance to their hovel near the Paris-Normandy coach house. But what would you do?" he ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... had that very morning done with troubling anybody. When Mr. Carnegie pulled up ten minutes later at the door of a forlorn hovel which was the present shelter of the once decent widow, he had no need to dismount. "Ride on, Bessie," he said softly, and Bessie rode on. Widow Burt came out to speak to the doctor, her lean face scorched to the color ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... head in a mound, on the summit of which lay the bridal chaplet. She smiled and seemed glad at heart, but was shamefaced and downcast. Next came the aged parents; the father too was only a servant about the farm, and the hovel, the furniture, and the clothing, all bore witness that their poverty was extreme. A dirty, squinting musician followed the train, who kept grinning and screaming, and scratching his fiddle, which was patched together ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... passions, whose threats chilled the heart to hear, whose very words seemed to poison the air, who made the great room like a cage of beasts, ravenous and ill-seeking. This and more was my first thought, as I asked myself, into what hovel of vice have I fallen, by what mischance have I come on such ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... Neponset, looking for the plant witch-hazel, bethought myself to ask of the fellow they call Indian Will. Going to the little hovel he lives in, found him lying very ill with pleurisy. By the grace of God was able to help him. His wife told me where to find what I sought. To my surprise, discovered she knew much of its virtues. It may be these people have a ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... the first awake—Hob and Piers were already busy on the outside, and Mother Doll had emerged from the box bed which made almost a separate apartment, and was raking together the peat, so as to revive the slumbering fire. The hovel, for it was hardly more, was built of rough stone and thatched with reeds, with large stones to keep the roof down in the high mountain blasts. There was only one room, earthen floored, and with no furniture save a big chest, a rude table, a ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... themselves are comparatively speaking indifferent to it. The "bitter cry" of India if put into words would consist simply of "Give us food to fill our stomachs. This is all we ask. As for shelter, we are content with any hovel, or willing to betake ourselves to the open air. But food ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... themselves by making targets of the eyes and noses of the saints' statues, the sacristan, stealthily, day by day and night after night, bore out of the church all that he dared to remove, burying some articles in cottonwood copses, hiding others in his own poor little hovel, until he had wagon-loads of sacred treasures. Then, still more stealthily, he carried them, a few at a time, concealed in the bottom of a cart, under a load of hay or of brush, to the house of the ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... philosopher in sandals speaks plainly enough. An allied character, but placed in other circumstances, is that of Fabio Calvi of Ravenna, the commentator of Hippocrates. He lived to a great age in Rome, eating only pulse 'like the Pythagoreans,' and dwelt in a hovel little better than the tub of Diogenes. Of the pension which Pope Leo gave him, he spent enough to keep body and soul together, and gave the rest away. He was not a healthy man, like Fra Urbano, nor is it likely that, like him, he died with a smile on his lips. At ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... was Virginia Royall to whom my dreams turned all the time. Whether in the keen cold of the still nights when the howl of the wolves came to me like the cries of torment, or in the howling tempests which roared across my puny hovel like trampling hosts of wild things, sifting the snow in at my window, powdering the floor, and making my cattle in their sheds as white as sheep, I went to sleep every night thinking of her, and thinking I should dream of her—but never ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... in our midst, and as is generally the case has fallen on the poorest of the community. In this instance it is a widow by the name of Kinsey, who has six children, and lives in a miserable hovel. More of her anon. Her twelve-year-old boy comes to the Home daily to get milk for the wretched baby, whom we had heard was down with the disease. When he came this morning I told him to stay outdoors while we fetched the milk, because I knew how sketchy are the precautions of ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... rolled in my light buggy, behind a nimble Arab mare, to a suburban retreat on the eastern skirt of the Black Town, where, just beyond a cluster of mean huts of the sooa-logue, the low laboring rabble, I found Karlee's genteel abode, and was refreshed by the contrast it presented to the hovel of his next neighbor, whose single windowless apartment, and walls of alternate rows of straw and reeds, plastered with mud, proclaimed most unpicturesquely the hard fate of him who springs from the soles of Brahma's feet. Karlee's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... ladder of Art from the bottom rung; nay, before I could even reach the bottom rung, what a toilsome journey was mine to get within sight of the ladder at all! The future biographer of the painter of "Faith and Love" will have to record that he was born in a hovel; that he was nursed in a smithy; that his cradle was a piece of board suspended from the smithy ceiling by a chain, which his mother—his widowed mother—kept swinging by an occasional touch in the intervals of her labours ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... not Virtues that might rebuke us all?—ay, virtues More excellent in him than all his subjects, since All Sin doth aim at Kings, to be her own. 'Tis hard for princes to outshine in worth The meanest wretch that from his road-side hovel Shouts forth with hungry voice, ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... fisherman and his wife who lived together in a hovel by the sea-shore, and the fisherman went out every day with his hook and line to catch fish, and ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... the beginning of October, and lingered between life and death till January 12, 1619. Probably he expired in the Tower, though Francis Osborn, who had been master of the horse to Lord Pembroke, was told by Pembroke that he died half starved in the hovel of an old laundress in the Minories. The statement of his poverty is in conflict with the fact mentioned by Ralegh in the Prerogative of Parliaments, that the Crown allowed him L500 a year till his death for his maintenance. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... felt herself so, also, was apparent, for there was, upon her face, a look of high contempt and keen distaste. She swept into the little room with all the majesty of a proud queen, forced, by some untoward circumstance, to call at the low hovel of a very, very ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... bosom of a man of peace it is very conceivable that all this would have excited feelings exceedingly painful; in ours, such feelings were overborne by others of a very different nature. If we gazed with peculiar interest upon one hovel more than upon another, it was because some of us had there maintained ourselves; if we endeavoured to count the number of shot-holes in any wall, or the breaks in any hedge, it was because we had stood behind it when "the iron hail" fell thick and fast around us. Our thoughts, in short, ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... when Anthony caught the first glimpse of the picturesque church of Ashton among the trees. With mingled feelings of pride, shame, and bitterness he rode past the venerable mansion of his ancestors, and alighted at the door of the sordid hovel that its miserable possessor had chosen ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... nations on this part of the continent, contenting themselves with small and incommodious hovels. A circular mud wall about four feet high, upon which is placed a conical roof, composed of the bamboo cane, and thatched with grass, forms alike the palace of the king, and the hovel of the slave. Their household furniture is equally simple. A hurdle of canes placed upon upright stakes, about two feet from the ground, upon which is spread a mat or bullock's hide, answers the purpose of a bed; a water jar, some earthen pots for dressing their food, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... his travels, in the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinctions, and glowing with patriotic hopes, such it continued to be when, after having experienced every calamity which is in incident to our nature, old, poor, sightless and disgraced, he retired to his hovel ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... charged with feloniously setting fire to a thrashing machine and a hovel, containing a quantity of oats in the straw, the property of Thos. Faulkner, jun. of Alnwick, which were all ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... arrived at a mud hovel, thatched with rushes, the roof sloping down so low that one could almost step on to it; it was surrounded with a ditch, and had a potato patch and a sheep enclosure; for old Jacob was a shepherd, and had a flock ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... conducted to the lodging prepared for us. We found a wretched hovel composed of planks and mud, containing three rooms on the ground, and a loft overhead. He had sent there six chairs, and some few necessaries ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... mourns as intensely the betrayal of her confidence, or the rude ending of her day-dreams, as either queen or princess, as either Katharine of England or Josephine of France. We do wrong to separate, as widely as we do in our thoughts, ranks and conditions of society. The palace and the hovel are nearer to each other than we usually think; and what passes beneath the fretted ceiling of the one, and the thatched roof of the other, is divided by the shadowy line of mere externalities. And so it happens that the fall of an angel may be pertinent to the state ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... she had raised her sacred burden, the man directed her to seek the venerable head from amongst the others, which lay mingled in a sack; drawing it forth, she placed it beside the body, and then hastily retired with both, to the hovel where Wallace had found her. It was a shepherd's hut, from which the desolation of the times having long ago driven away its former inhabitant, she had hoped that in so lonely an obscurity, she might have performed without notice, a chieftain's rites, to the remains ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... they had reached their room after tea, "wasn't that meal a fearful experience? Let's find a hovel, mother, and go and live in it. We can't ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... he answered, bluffly, and led the way into a small hovel rather than parlour - and then haughtily seated himself at a table, on which were pen, ink, and paper, and, while I stood before him, began an interrogation, with the decided asperity of examining a detected criminal, of whom he was to draw ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... programme of universality; and you ought to see the consistency and perseverance he puts into that idea! Only last year two hundred and fifty thousand francs dropped into his mouth as if from the skies, and he instantly bought a hovel in the rue Saint-Martin to make himself eligible for the Chamber. Then—another pretty speculation—with the rest of the money he bought stock in the 'National,' where I meet him every time I want to have a laugh over the republican Utopia. He has his flatterers on the staff of that estimable newspaper; ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... these distinguished guests, Luckie Macleary had swept her house for the first time this fortnight, tempered her turf-fire to such a heat as the season required in her damp hovel even at Midsummer, set forth her deal table newly washed, propped its lame foot with a fragment of turf, arranged four or five stools of huge and clumsy form upon the sites which best suited the inequalities of her clay floor; and having, moreover, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... constructed of fragments of brick and stone; the door, made of woven rushes, is open, and a red light streams from it, which throws its rays on the tall grass that covers the ground. Three men are assembled in this hovel, around a clay-lamp, with a wick of cocoanut ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... from the point of view of anyone for whom he worked. But more food, leisure, and money would also mean a more independent workman. A house with a decent fire and a full pantry would be a better house to make a chair or mend a clock in, even from the customer's point of view, than a hovel with a leaky roof and a cold hearth. But a house with a decent fire and a full pantry would also be a better house in which to refuse to make a chair or mend a clock—a much better house to do nothing ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... them darned and patched, as long as they would hold together. Now this good archbishop knew that the late Sieur de Poissy had left a daughter, without a sou or a rag, after having eaten, drunk, and gambled away her inheritance. This poor young lady lived in a hovel, without fire in winter or cherries in spring; and did needlework, not wishing either to marry beneath her or sell her virtue. Awaiting the time when he should be able to find a young husband for her, the prelate took it into his head to send her the outside case of one to mend, in the person ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... entered her desolate hovel at the foot of the mountain. Her neighbours shook their heads as they saw her. "She cannot live long," they said. "She has the look of death on her wrinkled face. Poor soul! she has nothing to live for, nothing to ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... embellish, had hitherto refrained from inviting Harry to visit him in his dwelling. The latter had of course noticed this omission, but had attributed it to a very pardonable desire on Jack's part to keep him in ignorance as to the real state of his finances. "He is probably living in some cheap hovel," he thought, "and he is too proud to wish me to know it. But he needn't be afraid of my intruding upon his privacy until he himself opens his door to me." Unfortunately for both, Harry was not destined to carry out this amiable intention. A hostile fate led ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Sheppard had escaped,—for, at this time, the whole of the now thickly-peopled district north of Clerkenwell Bridewell was open country, stretching out in fertile fields in the direction of Islington—and about a quarter of a mile off, stood a solitary hovel, known as Black Mary's Hole. This spot, which still retains its name, acquired the appellation from an old crone who lived there, and who, in addition to a very equivocal character for honesty, enjoyed the reputation of ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... black furniture and sombre draperies, was suggestive of the Inquisition, and I searched instinctively around me for the rack and thumbscrews. How many a poor wretch had stood in this gloomy apartment waiting patiently, after months of unspeakable suffering, for some filthy hovel wherein to lay his head. It seemed to me that crape and fetters would more fittingly have adorned those whitewashed walls than a sacred Ikon encrusted with jewels, and heavily gilt oil-paintings of their Imperial Majesties! A couple of tables littered with papers occupied the centre of the ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... him to the station, and this contretemps is aggravated when the time of departure happens to be early in the morning. Captain B—, a man of restless energy and adventurous spirit, emerged early one morning from a hovel in a distant village, where from stress of weather he had been compelled to pass the night. It was just dawn of day, and within an hour of the train he wished to go by would start from the station, about six miles distant. ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... honest liking for the splendors and the specific gravity and the manifold potentiality of the royal metal, and I understand, after a certain imperfect fashion, the delight that an old ragged wretch, starving himself in a crazy hovel, takes in stuffing guineas into old stockings and filling earthen pots with sovereigns, and every now and then visiting his hoards and fingering the fat pieces, and thinking ever all that they represent of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle of wine, which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even thus equipped he takes the road with terror. All day the family sits about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally without work or diversion. The father may carve a rude piece of furniture, but that is all that will be done until the spring sets in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It is not for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... looking all ways with his deformed eyes, which fascinated the Princess. Having ascertained that he could speak a little broken French, like many of the Tunisian Arabs, she bade Abdul wait outside, and entered the hovel of the jewel doctor, who shut close ...
— The Princess And The Jewel Doctor - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... pine frame, was the equipment in furniture. The poverty was brutal; it was the naked, unabashed poverty of the middle ages, with no hint of shame or effort of concealment. The colossus whom the low roof covered was as unconscious of the barrenness of his surroundings as were his own walls. This hovel was his home; he had made us welcome with the manners of ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the Emperor waiting. It was too early. He sent M. de Bismarck to Louis Bonaparte to say that he "would not" receive him yet awhile. Louis Bonaparte entered into a hovel by the side of the road. A table and two chairs were there. Bismarck and he leant their arms on the table and conversed. A mournful conversation. At the hour which suited the King, towards noon, the Emperor got back into his carriage, and went to the castle of ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... Canada has been more efficient than the United States in affording protection to remote and rural communities, by means of her national mounted police. "The isolated farmer and his wife slept securely in their sod hovel beyond the frontier, because they knew that a brave and swift corps of vigilant young athletes ... kept sleepless vigil. Life and property were secure ... ." [Footnote: C.R. Henderson, "Rural Police," ANNALS ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... an observation upon an argument, which had been collected from that quarter. The condition of the Negros in the West Indies had been lately compared with that of the Hindoos. But he would observe that the Hindoo, miserable as his hovel was, had sources of pride and happiness, to which not only the West Indian slave, but even his master, was a stranger. He was to be sure a peasant; and his industry was subservient to the gratifications of an European lord. But he was, in his own belief, vastly superior to him. ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... night of warning, when the beautiful quarteroon visited my hovel, I had contrived to meet this charming girl, as the only solace of my solitude. Amid all the wild, passionate, and savage surroundings of Bangalang, Esther—the Pariah—was the only golden link ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... miserable hovel, one of our company, a lieutenant of invalids, died this night; and of those who for want of room took shelter under a great tree, which stood them in very little stead, two more perished by the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... alone as patroon, but for him and his associates, dwelling in Rhode Island, at Cohanock and other places, from whom he had a power of attorney, and of whom a Mr. Smith(1) was one of the principal; for the said minister had scarcely any means of himself to build even a hovel, let alone to people a colony at his own expense; but was to be employed as minister by his associates, who were to establish him on a farm in the said colony, for which he would discharge ministerial duties among them, and live upon ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... is a thing that happened. Like wild beasts whelped, for den, In a wild part of North England, there lived once two wild men, Inhabiting one homestead, neither a hovel nor hut, Time out of mind their birthright: father and son, these,—but,— Such a son, such a father! Most wildness by degrees Softens away: yet, last of their line, the ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... same place. There were times when "home" was a Pullman car. It made no difference. One of the strange new feelings I have to get used to is the way I now look at places to live in. It used to be that Carl and I, in passing the littlest bit of a hovel, would say, "We could be perfectly happy in a place like that, couldn't we? Nothing makes any difference if we are together." But certain kinds of what we called "cuddly" houses used to make us catch our breaths, to think of the extra joy it would be living together tucked away in there. Now, when ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... no name—my home a hovel damp; I grew up from the mire; Wretched and outcast folk my family, And yet within me burns a flame ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... gloomily.) 'No one knew how she lived, if it were not on nettles and scraps of oatmeal and such-like food given her more for fear than for pity. She went double, always talking and muttering to herself. Folk said she snared birds and rabbits, in the thicket that came down to her hovel. How it came to pass I cannot say, but many a one fell sick in the village, and much cattle died one spring, when I was near four years old. I never heard much about it, for my father said it was ill talking about such things; I only know I got a sick fright one afternoon, when the maid had ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... especially to the average Britisher, and it does not raise Faust in one's estimation. I suppose he thinks he is doing the poor old couple a blessing in disguise by ejecting them out of their wretched hovel and presenting them with a sum of money of perhaps ten times ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... beneath the brown walls and mushroom-like roof of the temple. Here in the large round courtyard are the heders (Hebrew schools), where the kahals (church committees) gather. Here stands a low black house with two windows, a real mud hovel, inhabited for several centuries and for many generations by Rabbis of the family of Todros, famous in the community and even far beyond it. Here at least everything is clean, and while in other parts of the place, in the spring especially, the people nearly ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... find, instead of the miserable hovel of Sridama, a splendid and extensive town, and that Sridama is in great affliction at the disappearance of his wife, when he is seen and solicited by a Kanchuli or chamberlain, who calls himself his servant, to enter a stately ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... corner; and Mr. Clarke, whose disposition was extremely amorous, resolved to renew his practices on the heart of Dolly. He had reconnoitred the apartments in which the bodies of the knight and his squire were deposited, and discovered close by the top of the staircase a sort of a closet or hovel, just large enough to contain a truckle bed, which, from some other particulars, he supposed to be the bedchamber of his beloved Dolly, who had by this time retired to her repose. Full of this idea, and instigated by the demon of desire, Mr. Thomas crept softly ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... time in which to fix my mind. I go to Baiae; for I am not housed Here as I should be: all the palace seems To me a hovel; scarcely can I breathe. I should be roofed with gold, and walled with gold, Should tread on gold; and if I cast mine eyes Over the city, they should view a scene Of spacious avenues and breathing trees, And buildings plunged in odorous ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... the hotel on the mountain top nor the hovel cabin under the second cliff saw him ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... drop to the simplest form of existence: hut, hovel, or shanty; where my lord digs and is dirty, and her ladyship, guiltless of Italian, French, and the grand piano, cooks, scrubs, darns, and keeps the peace between the pigs and the children. Or else we must come to socialism, in the shape of Brook Farm communities, or phalansteres ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and hovel was searched, and many a poor fellow, who had contrived to hide his last skin of wine from his enemies, was obliged to abandon it to his allies. You might see the poor natives on all sides running away; some with a morsel of food, others with a skin of wine in their arms, and followed by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... becoming again foul, we put into a little place called Sâkeeah, a port of the island in the S.E. Here is nothing in the shape of a port town, only a small square ruinous hovel of mud and plaster, and a rude hut put up temporarily by a Maltese, who is building a boat. I often think the Maltese are the Irish of the South. Maltese enterprise is prevalent in all parts of the Mediterranean but in their own country. The port, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... such an artificial transition bodes good or ill for a land whose greatest wealth lies in forest and mine and farm remains to be seen. For the time it has resulted in a cost of living almost prohibitive to the very poor. The sweatshop, the tenement, the Ghetto, the cave life hovel of Europe have been reproduced in the crowded foreign quarters of Canadian cities. It means more than physical deterioration and moral contamination and degeneration of national stamina. It means if Canada is to become a great manufacturing country, feeding the human into ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... lower ranks of society find personal association much more difficult than the refined minority above them. High cultivation may help to self-command, but it multiplies the chances of irritative contact. In mansion, as in hovel, the strain of life is perpetually felt—between the married, between parents and children, between relatives of every degree, between employers and employed. They debate, they dispute, they wrangle, they explode—then nerves are relieved, and they are ready to begin over ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... is played in the home. Whether you live in a palace or a hovel, an indoor golf-course, be it only of nine holes, is well within your reach. A house offers greater facilities than an apartment, and I have found my game greatly improved since I went to live in the country. I can, ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... teachers—some of them very great indeed—have thought and taught contemptuously of our animal nature. "He spake of the temple of His body." That is sublime! That is the whole secret. And that is why vice is horrible: because it is the desecration, not of a hovel or a shop, of a marketplace or a place of business: ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... official form; and also gave orders to the head jailer, to allow me to go in and out, all times of the day, to administer medicines, &c. I now felt happy indeed, and had Mr. J. instantly removed into a little bamboo hovel, so low, that neither of us could stand upright—but a palace in comparison with ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... sir; forsooth, I was confounded! Thou see'st in me a poor and ancient Finman. Far, far away from these terrific mountains, This year I built of flags and stones my hovel; I sought for reindeer—all my wealth; they doubtless Were captured by the bear! I, wretched being! My sight is feeble, and the night surprised me; The wind, as I observe too late, has shifted, And not a star is gleaming in the heavens: Ah! far must be the way unto my hovel! ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... added knowledge, and to knowledge is being added brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity; or meanness is being added to selfishness, and greed to meanness, and impurity, malice and hatred become courses in the building. A wretched hovel, a poor, mean, squalid structure, is rising within us; and when the screen of our outward life is taken from us, this is what ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... recognisable likeness, it may be an indefinably subtle or an unmistakably broad and general one, which may be traced in faces and costumes, in tongue and literature, in courtesy and in conflict, in business and in policy, in street and in house, from hovel to palace, from prison to cathedral. Thus it is that every folk comes to have its own ways, and every town ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... a hovel with a Gothic portal; further on was an old wall with an ogive door; a leafless bush swayed there in the breeze. In the courtyard the ground is covered with heather, violets, and pebbles; you walk in, look around and go out again. This place is called ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... morning I walked to church with Sydney Smith. The edifice is not at all in keeping with the rectory. It is a miserable little hovel with a wooden belfry. It was, however, well filled, and with decent people, who seemed to take very much to their pastor. I understand that he is a very respectable apothecary; and most liberal of his skill, his medicine, his soul, and his wine, among the sick. He preached a very queer sermon—the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... appears that the beast had escaped from a caravan, which was standing on the roadside, and belonged to a menagerie, on its way to Salisbury Fair. An alarm being given, the keepers pursued and hunted the lioness, carrying the dog in her teeth, into a hovel under a granary, which served for keeping agricultural implements. About half-past eight, they had secured her effectually by barricading the place, so as to prevent her escape. The horse, when first attacked, fought with great spirit; and if he ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... haunted fairs and drove cattle home, or did anything he could pick up. He lived in a mud hovel which he and Tirzah had built for themselves on the border land, and where they kept a tall, thin, smooth-haired dog, with a grey coat, a white waistcoat, a long nose and tail, and blue eyes, which gave him a peculiarly sinister expression ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the sky to eastward was growing red, the lower clouds were flushed with rose-colour, the higher hills were warm with the coming of the sun. Here and there on the slopes which faced them a cotter's hovel stood solitary in its potato patch or its plot of oats. In more than one place three or four cottages made up a tiny hamlet, from which the smoke would presently rise. To English eyes, to our eyes, ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... ale, and tobacco," over the door, and another small sign, designating it as the highest inhabitable house in England. It is a chill and desolate place for a residence. They keep a visitor's book here, and we recorded our names in it, and were not too sorry to leave the mean little hovel, smelling as it did of tobacco-smoke, and possessing all other characteristics of the humblest ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wont to frequent the taverns. He dropped into cafes, read the papers, and strolled on the Cours Sauvaire. He played the gentleman as long as he had any money in his pocket. At times of impecuniosity he remained at home, exasperated at being kept in his hovel and prevented from taking his customary cup of coffee. On such occasions he would reproach the whole human race with his poverty, making himself ill with rage and envy, until Fine, out of pity, would often give ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... the bread like little wild animals. The mother didn't touch anything while we were there—said she was glad to have the milk for the boy. I never saw human beings living in such utter filth and poverty. A crofter's cottage in Scotland, or an Irish hovel with the pigs and children all living together, was a palace compared to that awful hole. I remonstrated vigorously with W. and the Mayor of La Ferte for allowing people to live in that way, like ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... journey. At Raynosa Stephenson carefully examined the mountain passes and ravines through which a railway could be made. He rose at break of day, and surveyed until the darkness set in; and frequently his resting-place at night was the floor of some miserable hovel. He was thus laboriously occupied for ten days, after which he proceeded across the province of Old Castile towards Madrid, surveying as he went. The proposed plan included the purchase of the Castile Canal; and that property was also surveyed. He next proceeded to El Escorial, situated ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... yet done. Harry of England! your career shall be stained in blood. Your wrath shall descend upon the heads of those who love you, and your love shall be fatal. Better Anne Boleyn fled this castle, and sought shelter in the lowliest hovel in the land, than become your spouse. For you will slay her—and not her alone. Another shall fall by your hand; and so, if you had your ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... come down to-morrow. Now there's that old woman I was talking about just now—Hullins. She's a Catholic—and my governess is always slumming about among Catholics— that's how I know. She's paid half-a-crown a week for pretty near half a century for a hovel that isn't worth eighteen-pence, and now she's going to be pitched into the street because she can't pay any more. And she's seventy if she's a day! And that's the basis of society. Nice refined ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... corncrib and a new root hovel," said their uncle, as they walked around. "And next week we are going to ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... time before I could make myself heard above the noise of drunken revelry which sounded within the hovel; but at length the door was opened by a wretched, frightened-looking woman, and a scene of indescribable misery was presented to my eyes. Around a table were seated three or four brutish-looking men, with a jug and some glasses before them. On the table ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... ask the reader's pardon for again referring to Chinese inns. I should not have made any remark upon this awful hovel had not the man laid a scheme to charge me three times as much as he should—a scheme, be it said, in which my boy took no part. It was truly a fearful den, where man and beast lived in promiscuous and insupportable filth. The dung-heap charms the sight of ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of approach; the gray gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys with wondrous modulations of light and shadow such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful. These are the things that make the gamut of joy ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... her father too was only a labourer on the farm; and the hovel, the furniture, the clothing, all bore witness that their poverty was extreme. A dirty squinting musician followed the train, grinning and screaming and scratching his fiddle, which was patcht up of wood and pasteboard, and instead of strings ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... still more numerous cases, including many in which the wages have been apparently liberal, enormous extortion has been practiced upon the laborer, in the form of rent demanded for his hovel and provision patch—L20 per annum being demanded for a shanty not worth half that money, and rent being frequently demanded from every member of a family more than should have been ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... direction of her husband. She has painted exclusively small pictures, dealing with simple and natural things, and each picture, as a rule, contains but a single figure. She believes that a dilapidated Skagen hovel may meet every demand of beauty. "Maageplukkerne"—"Gull plucking"—exhibited in 1883, has been called one of the most sympathetic and unaffected pieces of genre painting ever ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... at issue between the parties; it may not even once be mentioned, while some new trifle is fought over with all the bitterness of the alienation that lies gnawing and biting and burning beneath. War is raging between kingdoms for the possession of a hovel, which possessed, the quarrel were ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... starveling's wrangling with rats for prizes in the sewers; or his crawling into an abandoned doorless house in St. Giles', where his hosts were three dead men, one pendant; into another of an alley nigh Houndsditch, where the crazy hovel, in phosphoric rottenness, fell sparkling on him one pitchy midnight, and he received that injury, which, excluding activity for no small part of the future, was an added cause of his prolongation of exile, besides not leaving his faculties unaffected by the concussion of one of ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville |
