"Unpainted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bags, square piles of square boxes cased in mats, bales of airy summer stuffs, which, even in winter, scoffed at cold, and shamed it by audacious assumption of eternal sun, little specimen boxes of precious dyes that even now shine through my memory, like old Venetian schools unpainted,—these were ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... stores, grocery stores, and banks in the State and county were owned by Negroes; and then, switching from the general to the particular, he described the daily life of the ordinary, easy-going tenant farmer of the locality. He pictured what he saw when he came out of his unpainted house in the morning: that gate off the hinges, that broken window-pane with an old coat stuck into it, that cotton planted right up to the doors with no room left for a garden, and no garden; and, worse than all, the uncomfortable knowledge of debts concealed from the hard-working ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... dress now, in contrast to the gaudy, revealing garments of the pleasure house women. The beauty of her soft, unpainted lips, her golden skin and wide-set green eyes was more striking now, seen at close range, than it had been in the ...
— Bride of the Dark One • Florence Verbell Brown
... is limited to the white wooden meeting-house at 'the center.' Their art-gallery is the wagon of a travelling photographer. Their metropolitan hotel is the stoop and bar-room of the 'Uncas House.' Their university is the unpainted school-house on the hill. Their literature is the weekly newspaper from the county town. But take the majority of educated men even. What a rusty, small kind of existence they lead! They are in a rut, just ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... sheathing had not yet been covered with clapboards. I stood up in the buckboard and saw that it was a story and a half high, and could have had four or five rooms in it. The bare, curtainless windows were set in the unpainted frames, but the front door seemed not to be hung yet. The people meant to winter there, however, for the sod was banked up against the wooden underpinning; a stovepipe stuck out of the roof of a little wing behind. While I gazed a young-looking woman came to the door, as if she had been drawn by ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... edifice, newly built,—the county courthouse. It is used as a hospital, and we were told that the dead Guardsmen were lying in the basement. Colonel Eaton and myself dismounted, and entered a long, narrow room in which lay sixteen ghastly figures in open coffins of unpainted pine, ranged along the walls. All were shot to death except one. They seemed to have died easily, and many wore smiles upon their faces. Death had come so suddenly that the color still lingered in their boyish cheeks, giving them the appearance of wax-figures. Near the door was the manly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... that very morning, as she painted her face before the glass, 'I am an old woman, or nearly. How many more years? Three at most, then I shall be like Lady Castlerich.' And the five minutes she had spent looking into an undyed and unpainted old age had frightened her. She had hated the world she had worshipped so long. She had hated all things, and wished herself out of sight of all things. That she who had been so young, so beautiful, so delightful to men, should become old, ugly, ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... It was an unpainted building, partly of log. In the dining room half a dozen men waited silently for food. Lannis saluted all, named his comrade, ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... of the doctor's hands were extraordinarily large. When the hands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob pipe and after his wife's death sat all day in his empty office close by a window that was covered with cobwebs. He never opened the ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... we have been accustomed to, only enhances the impression. The meanness of its appointments—the bare and scanty pulpit, with the paltry painted pillars on either side—the women's gallery with its great heavy curtain—the men's with its unpainted benches and dingy front—the tottering little table at the altar, with the commandments on the wall above it, scarcely legible through lack of paint, and dust and damp—so unlike the velvet and gilding, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... was not more splendidly furnished, and the house itself, as described in the inventory, must have looked very much like one of those modest and unpainted little wood structures which are, to this day, to be seen in many parts of the banks of the river Mississippi, and in the Attakapas and Opelousas parishes. They are the tenements of our small planters who own only a few slaves, and they retain the appellation ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the gate, as is the fashion of the crescent, but walked up a little graveled path lined with dusty box-shrubs and tapped at the unpainted door. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... would, before entering one of these poor, unpainted huts expect to find the cheerful and brilliant interior that greets his eyes. Let us enter one of the houses, that of Reb ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... for church. C. rode his largest horse and preceded or followed me in the double sulky, an unpainted box with a seat in it, of Mr. Philbrick's manufacture and quite "tasty" for these parts, on a single pair of wheels; and though it is on springs the exercise is not slight which one gets in driving over ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... fourteen hours a day at his table of unpainted deal for the defence of the fatherland in peril, this humble Secretary of the Sectional Committee could see no disproportion between the immensity of the task and the meagreness of his means for performing it, so filled was he with a sense of the ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... have had to send to "Flight" for a new uniform coat. When they come I shall be fairly set up, though the trenches have played havoc with my riding things; but they will have to do for the present. Would you kindly look in my unpainted tin-lined box and get me out a pair of khaki puttees. If you cannot find them there, they will be in a black wooden box. Get someone to help you. Both trunks are in the box-room, but do not catch cold when watching them. ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... the long trails to the south, relays of them galloped night after night from the far ranches stretching along the sandy Arkansas. There was no want of grain to sow in the gaping furrows struck out by the hands of sin in the raw, treeless, unpainted city of Ascalon. ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... little, long, low, unpainted shanty, with a rude doorstep, almost hid amid a jungle of vines and overarching trees at the end of a long lane, where Marshall Dean lived. A sallow-faced, thin Kentuckian, he had come up here from the plains after his sister married Andrew Malden, in the hope that being ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... absent, the father and the oldest boy. The room was small, and meagerly furnished, though every thing was clean and in order. In the centre of the floor, extending, perhaps, over half thereof, was a piece of faded carpet. On this a square, unpainted pine table stood, covered with a clean cloth and a few dishes. Six common wooden chairs, one or two low stools or benches, a stained work-stand without drawers, and a few other necessary articles, including a bed ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... itself is of an irregular shape and very small, being hardly an acre in extent, and its shore covered with pebbles and boulders of granite. Near the centre, and fronting the east, stands an unpainted wood cabin of the humblest appearance, the shape and size of which is an oblong of some thirty by fifteen feet. One rude door furnishes the only means of entrance, and light is admitted through two small windows, one on the east and the other on the west side. Straggling ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... by peat-stacks, looked much larger than it really was. Its inmates were unknown to me. Their clothes were poor, their furniture simple, but I knew that the heath-dweller often hides noble rental in an unpainted box or in a miserable wardrobe, and a fat pocketbook inside a patched coat; when therefore my eyes fell on an alcove packed full of stockings, I concluded, and quite rightly, that I was in the house ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... arrived, I adjusted the tassel of my fez, put on my great coat, and proceeded to the Christian quarter; where, after various turnings and windings, I at length arrived at a high wooden gateway, new and unpainted. ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... people called on the young couple. Welford received them coldly; their invitations were unaccepted, and, what was worse, they were never returned. The devil himself could not have supported an attorney under such circumstances. Reserved, shabby, poor, rude, introductionless, a bad house, an unpainted railing, and a beautiful wife! Nevertheless, though Welford was not employed, he was, as we have said, watched. On their first arrival, which was in summer, the young pair were often seen walking together in the fields or groves which ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bleak prairie, separated from it only by a rough, unpainted picket fence, and flanked by uncouth structures of pine, one of which was used as a storehouse for quartermaster's property, the other as the post-trader's depository for skins and furs, there stood the frame cottage which Mr. Hayne had chosen ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... incline into the village, our miserable ponies commenced a shambling trot, the noise of which brought numerous idlers to the inn-door to inquire the news. This inn was a rambling, unpainted erection of wood, opposite to a "cash, credit, and barter store," kept by an enterprising Caledonian—an additional proof of the saying which ascribes ubiquity to "Scots, Newcastle grindstones, and Birmingham buttons." A ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... a big house that was unpainted; but those who had had the opportunity of seeing the inside always said he did not stint himself in the way of comfort at all, and that he was only a "peculiar" man. He had one great grudge against the world it seemed. ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... apple blossoms ended; there was a short stretch of new fence, and a new cottage-house only partly done. The yard was full of lumber, and a ladder slanted to the roof, which gleamed out with the fresh pinky yellow of unpainted pine. ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... picked his way slowly along, giving Daisy by this means an opportunity to inspect everything more closely. There was often little pleasure in the inspection. About half a mile from the church, Daisy's attention was drawn by one of these poor houses. It was very small, unpainted and dreary-looking, having a narrow courtyard between it and the road. As the gig was very slowly going past, Daisy uttered an exclamation, the first word she had ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... Michelagnolo Buonarroti had uncovered the wall with the Last Judgment in the Papal Chapel, and there remained still unpainted the base below, where there was to be fixed a screen of arras woven in silk and gold, like the tapestries that adorn the Chapel. Wherefore, the Pope having ordained that the weaving should be done in ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... of American church architecture was a square wooden building, usually unpainted, crowned with a truncated pyramidal roof, which was surmounted (if the church could afford such luxury) with a belfry or turret containing a bell. The old church at Hingham, the "Old Ship" which was built in 1681, is still standing, a well-preserved example of this second style ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... was congruous. Every part of the machine was its weakest part, and that fact gave promise of strength: an invalid never dies. Moreover, the coach suited the day: the rusty was in harmony with the dismal. It suited the damp unpainted houses and the tumble-down blacksmith's-shop. We contented ourselves with this artistic propriety. We entered, treading cautiously. The machine, with gentle spasms, got itself in motion, and steered due east for Lake ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... of his past life. I had merely preferred Parnell, then at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt who had wrecked his Irish influence by international politics. We sat round a long unpolished and unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung Rossetti's 'Pomegranate,' a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had said somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... straggling, lazy village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village of the colored folks, who lived in three- or four-room unpainted cottages, some neat and homelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly, but they centred about the twin temples of the hamlet, the Methodist, and the Hard-Shell Baptist churches. These, in turn, leaned gingerly on a sad-colored ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... passer; yet, to complete its pitiful picturesqueness, Pathos had bestowed a case of miniatures and a beautiful child. Beside the entrance of the tent a rough shingle was fastened to the canvas, and against this hung an unpainted picture-frame of pine, in humble counterpart of those gilded rosewood signs which, at the doors of Daguerreotype galleries, display fancy "specimens" to the goers-to-and-fro of Broadway. Attracted by an object so novel in San Francisco then, I paused one morning, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... of Richard and Benjamin, the long room was but an extremely inartificial temple. Benches; made in the coarsest manner, and entirely with a view to usefulness, were arranged in rows for the reception of the Congregation; while a rough, unpainted box was placed against the wall, in the centre of the length of the apartment, as an apology for a pulpit. Something like a reading-desk was in front of this rostrum; and a small mahogany table from the mansion-house, covered with a spotless damask cloth, stood a little on one side, by the way of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... City-That-Would-Be-Amused, the freedom of their unshaded side was Del's. And if he should take up an amateur— see? and bring him around—see? and, winking one of his cold blue eyes, say to the manager: "Take it from me—he's got the goods—see?" you wouldn't expect that amateur to sit on an unpainted bench sudorifically awaiting his turn, would you? So Mac strolled around largely with the nonpareil; and the seven waited, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... her personal appearance, but hers was a venerable, unforgetable, and most beautiful old face for all that, and perhaps because of it. She knew that the kingdom of God is within; and being sure of that, she was sure of herself, serene, unpainted, unpretentious. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... Winifred slowly ascended the steps of the fourth house from the corner, she made out the lines of a little door cut in the boards which protected the big one. There was no handle to break the smooth, unpainted surface of wood—old, well-seasoned wood which had evidently served the same purpose year after year—but there was a small, inconspicuous keyhole, and into this Miss Leavitt deftly fixed a key which she took from her ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... social existence. The poem intensifies that feeling of hidden terror and tragedy which sometimes strikes us on beholding a lonely farmer, enigmatical of face and sparing of words, or on spying, through the twilight, some grey, unpainted, ramshackle, cottage, perched upon a wind-swept hill or propped up against the jutting boulders of some deserted slope, miles from the town and remote ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... passing a little, unpainted, wooden building, of one and a half stories, used as a grocery. A German name was on the sign; but behind the rough counter stood the familiar ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... examination were acquitted. The best room of their boat was fitted up with carpets, hangings, and a suite of furniture taken from the chambers of the White House, soon to be deserted. The unplaned, unpainted cabin, perfumed by the sour odor of oaken planks and the scent of pine resin, was transformed into an Eastern boudoir—couches, divans, gorgeous colors and all, for the ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... was a very comfortable place of abode. From Dr. Scadding's "Toronto of Old" we learn that it was of considerable dimensions, and of oblong shape. Its walls were composed of "a number of rather small, carefully hewn logs, of short lengths. The whole wore the hue which unpainted timber, exposed to the weather, speedily assumes. At the gable end, in the direction of the roadway from the nascent capital, was the principal entrance, over which a rather imposing portico was formed by the projection of the whole roof, supported ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Sea of Marmora, and looks out across it to the green hills of Asia, just where the blue Marmora narrows into the Dardanelles. It is one of those crowded little Turkish towns set on a blazing hillside—tangled streets, unpainted, gray, weather-warped frame houses, with overhanging latticed windows and roofs of red tiles; little walled-in gardens with dark cedars or cypresses and a few dusty roses; fountains with Turkish inscriptions, where the streets fork and women come ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... was a little frame house; the other was quite a pretty, low, gray stone cottage. Neatly finished, provided with snug little kitchens and small sheds adjoining for wood; the paling fence, unpainted yet, enclosing a bare space that might ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... furniture was of the roughest kind. Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug had been set on a greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple of straw-bottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... home. It was not surprising that he had money in the bank. He worked unceasingly. The earliest risers in Little Arcady found him already busied, and those abroad latest at night would see or hear him about the little unpainted house in ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... into the avenue, and came nearer and nearer; and finally the tumble-down pony cart drew up at the house. The pony printed his uncertain feet awkwardly but firmly on the weed-grown sweep in front of the unpainted hall door, and Miss Tredgold ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... Agnew's recognizing their haven until they were fairly upon it. Even now all that Enoch could see was a wide lateral canyon with a rough unpainted shack above the waterline. A group of cottonwoods loomed dimly through the mist beside a fence ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... one who works to live, but like one who desires nothing but work, because he counts the living man as nothing, only wishes to be considered as a creator, and for the rest goes about in unobtrusive gray like an unpainted actor who is nothing so long as he has no part to play. He worked in mute isolation, excluding and despising those petty ones who used their talent as a social ornament, who either went about in barbarous raggedness, whatever ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... here, a studying how things looked in Shakespeare's time. The ground floors of the house, are covered with flagstones broken in varied forms, as accident would have it, while the rough massive timbers of the floors above stand out unpainted and unplastered. After taking a pleasant walk, with a gay party, through the garden, in which are cultivated all the flowers of which Shakespeare speaks in his works, and, (I must not fail also to mention), after having taken our turns in sitting upon Shakespeare's chair, I bade the ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... some steep stairs, leading from the kitchen to an unfinished room under the rafters. Here everything again was as neat as wax, but how desolate! An unpainted bedstead of pine wood, holding a round feather-bed covered with a blue-and-white homespun bed-quilt; a strip of rag carpet on a floor grown beautiful from the care bestowed upon it; a small table covered with a homespun linen towel, a Bible in exactly ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... the centre of this deck there was a spacious pilot-house with a dome-like roof, from the interior of which the movements of the vessel could be completely controlled. The entire hull of the vessel, excepting the double-bowed superstructure, was left unpainted, and it shone like a polished mirror. The superstructure, however, was painted a delicate grey tint, with the relief of a massive richly gilded cable moulding all round the shear- strake and the further adornment of a broad ribbon of a rich crimson hue rippling through ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... added to the small cot-bed which had been almost its sole furnishing when he saw it last. The walls, bare as his hand, stretched without relief from baseboard to ceiling, and the floor from door to window showed an unbroken expanse of unpainted boards, save for the narrow space between chair and table, where a small rug had been laid. A cheerless outlook for a tired man, but it seemed to please Hammersmith. There was paper and ink on the table, and the lamp which he took care to examine ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... the former case the pattern is not kept always the same by the individual. A peculiar form of it you find in the Rivers, where a pattern is painted on the skin, and then when the paint is dry, a wash is applied which makes the unpainted skin rise up in between the painted pattern. The cicatrices are sometimes tribal marks, but sometimes decorative. They are made by cutting the skin and then placing in the wound the fluff ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... hills in a rush, when he saw a house half lost in the shadows. It was a narrow-fronted, two-storied, unpainted, lonely place, without sign of a porch. Here, where there was no vestige of a town near, and where there was no telephone, the news of the deaths of Bill Dozier and Buck Heath could not have come. Andy accepted the house as a blessing and went ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... and from the flat at the back of the township, where a few thousand ewes and lambs were shepherded amongst the quarry holes, came another insistent droning in a deeper note, like the murmur of distant surf. No one was stirring: to the right and left along the single thin wavering line of unpainted weatherworn wooden houses nothing moved but mirage waters flickering in the hollows of the ironstone road. Equally deserted was the wide stretch of brown plain, dotted with poppet legs and here and there a whim, across the dull ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... a steep hill Williams slowed down to slip the gear into second. In the valley below them was a collection of unpainted houses, leaning towards one another as though for protection against the growing ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... middle. Another table for writing, photography, and all the little pursuits of travel. A bookshelf with some well—worn friends. Two long cushioned chairs. Two for meals, and a Bokhara rug, soft and pleasant for the feet. The interior was plain unpainted wood, but set so that the grain showed like satin in the rippling ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... was a boy of ten at school near the tall stone gate-posts immortalised by the great novelist as guarding the entrance to the Old Manse. The big gambrel-roofed building standing close to the Battle Ground as it stood on the 19th of April, 1775, was unpainted and weather-stained, the structure showing dark among the trees as one looked from the road. All the world knows it as described outside and in by its famous tenant. It is a shrine which may well evoke breathless interest. The ancient wainscoting, the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... descending to the shed in the courtyard, had found there an officer of the pay department, seated on a common kitchen chair behind a little unpainted pine table, who, without pen, ink, or paper, without taking receipts or indulging in formalities of any kind, was dispensing fortunes. He simply stuck his hand into the open mouth of the bags filled ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... precipitous peaks with green and shady groves below, amid which appeared prettily-painted picturesque cottages, not altogether unlike those of Switzerland. Many small bays were passed, in which were moored little boats, kept scrupulously clean, though unpainted. The sails consisted of three stripes of sailcloth or matting, united by a kind of lacework, thus forming one whole sail for light winds. By unlacing one portion, the sail can quickly be reduced ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... from his mind the thought of the girl—that Belinda Mary, who had called upon him in her hour of danger as he divined. Perhaps—he descended into the kitchen and was brought face to face with the unpainted door. ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... abruptly, without transition, into the town. A double row of unpainted board shanties led straight to the water's edge. This row was punctuated by four buildings different from the rest—a huge rambling structure with a wide porch over which was suspended a large bell; a neatly painted ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... descended the steps and found themselves on a rough platform with an unpainted shelter in the center that evidently did duty as a station. There were a few straggling loungers about, a team or two backed up to the platform, and a small automobile of the runabout ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... of wood dumb-bells and painted one of the balls of each dumb-bell black to stand for a sodium atom, leaving the other unpainted to stand for a chlorine atom. Now try to pile them up so that above and below each black ball, to the right and left of it, and also in front and behind it, there shall be a white ball. The pile which you would probably ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... parts of the country—yellow, red, blue, green, white. (Chicago, he recalled, already had thirty railroads terminating here, as though it were the end of the world.) The little low one and two story houses, quite new as to wood, were frequently unpainted and already smoky—in places grimy. At grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars and wagons and muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the streets were, how unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... through Golden Gate and were in the quiet water of the bay. By the time mother and Sue were on deck, we were nearing the wharf. I thought then that San Francisco was rather disappointing in its looks, with its unpainted houses of all kinds of architecture, and the streets like washouts in the hills, but soon I learned to love it with a faithfulness which was felt by many of the pioneers and will ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... fantastic prettiness of its own; nothing is exactly like anything else, and all is bewilderingly novel. But gradually, after an hour passed in the quarter, the eye begins to recognise in a vague way some general plan in the construction of these low, light, queerly-gabled wooden houses, mostly unpainted, with their first stories all open to the street, and thin strips of roofing sloping above each shop-front, like awnings, back to the miniature balconies of paper-screened second stories. You begin to understand the common plan of the tiny shops, with ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... house, where, turning an angle, we came to a staircase down which a flood of sunlight streamed from the big window on the landing. The sunlight showed walls of shimmering whitewashed purity and unpainted oaken stairs scoured white as a bone. "Old Gum Heels" stopped here, and was beginning to give me directions for finding the matron's room on the floor above, when a door at the back opened and a very little girl appeared with a very large pitcher ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... of this waste place we call a farm, is located as near as possible to the dusty highway which passes through the country. Unpainted, or unwhitewashed, without a front fence, without shade trees or flowers near it, or by it, it stands like a grim and sombre sentinel, guarding a harsh and lonely existence, at once a prophecy and a warning. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in the afternoon buggies and wagons began to arrive at the big unpainted building in front of Olaf's house. When Nils and his mother came at five, there were more than fifty people in the barn, and a great drove of children. On the ground floor stood six long tables, set with ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... was a shadeless, unpainted box. Within, whittled desks, staring windows and broken plastering made it a fit prison for the boys, whose rough ways were proof of the refining influence of their daily intercourse with the hired men. I wonder ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... be fraudulent, farcical, upon closer inspection. For one thing, its crudeness was more glaring, and its unpainted board fronts looked flimsy, transient. Compared to the substantial buildings of the East, Manti's structures were hovels. Here was the primitive town in the first flush of its creation. Miss Benham did not laugh, for a mental picture rose before her—a ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... knife, she caught a loose edge of the canvas and with one swift tug stripped it clear of the unpainted ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... drove at once to the "Christian Church." On the way he cheered me by saying "he was afraid nobody would come, for all the people said nobody would come for his asking." When we got to the house, there was not one human soul on hand, no fire in the old rusty stove, and the rude, unpainted board benches, all topsy-turvy. I called some boys playing near, asked their names, put them on paper, five of them, and said to them, "Go to every house in this town and tell everybody that 'Aunt Fanny' will speak here at 11 A.M., and if you get me fifty to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... princesses trailed their rich trains over the rough unpainted floors in their parents' poor little huts, and held their crowned heads very high and demanded to be taken to court. The princesses were mostly geese-girls when they were their proper selves, and their geese were suffering, and their poor parents did not know what they were ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... well-meaning man, but he had a hasty temper and was a poor manager. His plans seemed never to prosper, and the farm ran down, to the great sorrow and dissatisfaction of his father, Jonathan, whose good advice was wholly disregarded. The farm lapsed under a mortgage; the buildings went unrepaired, unpainted; and the older man experienced the constant grief of seeing the place that had been so dear to him going wrong and getting ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... into calculations about the cost of things. He had seen unpainted wooden tables you could put mahogany stain on, and they'd look all you'd want. He'd seen a splendid little rocking- chair in Second Avenue for five dollars, one of the padded kind that ladies like. He had seen an arm-chair for ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... way, the long feathers of the wings following the lines of the beams and falling parallel upon them and between them; and upon the black wings and body of the eagle different shields of arms were displayed in gold and colours, the eagle itself being painted upon the natural unpainted wood—oak, I think. The work belonged to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, I believe. It seemed the very antithesis of Italian finesse and fancy, but the fitness of such decoration entirely depends upon its relation to its surroundings, ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... were the first that had appeared in several miles. A two-story, unpainted frame house with several barns and sheds comprised the group. There was a sign on the front ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... walked round by a still wood-path under the Ledge to the North Village, where there was a service. It was a plain little church, with unpainted pews; but the windows looked forth upon a green mountain-side, and whispers of oaks and pines and river-music crept in, and the breath of sweet water-lilies, heaped in a great bowl upon the communion-table of ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... of the plaintiffs, he was the only man in the court-room who wore a coat. The afternoon was a sultry one; in that first bottom of the Platte there was scarcely a breath of air, and collars wilted limp as rags. Neither map nor chart graced the unplastered walls, the unpainted furniture of the room was sadly in need of repair, while a musty odor permeated the room. Outside the railing the seating capacity of the court-room was rather small, rough, bare planks serving for seats, but the spectators gladly stood along ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... tiny nook in the hills, protected by the steep walls of a canon mouth. Here were several large oaks, evidencing a richer soil. The erosion of ages from the hillside had slowly formed this deposit of fat earth. Under the oaks, almost buried in them, stood a rough, unpainted cabin, the wide verandah of which, with chairs and hammocks, advertised an out-of doors bedchamber. Daylight's keen eyes took in every thing. The clearing was irregular, following the patches of the best soil, and every fruit tree and berry bush, and even each vegetable ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... tables taken from the mess-room, and covered with horse-blankets instead of tapestry, stood upon the platform. Some unpainted wooden chairs awaited the judges; but in the centre glittered the president's chair, a superbly carved and gilded fauteuil, sent by the Duc ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... it was reflecting in shimmering waves from everything motionless, this breathless September day in Donaldsville, Texas. Main Street is a half-mile long, unpainted "box- houses" fringe either end and cluster unkemptly to the west, forming the "city's" thickly populated "darky town." Near the station stands the new three-story brick hotel, the pride of the metropolis. Not even the Court House at the county seat is as imposing. Main ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... having been established before the wealth of the far-away East discovered the peculiar charm of the Fairlands hills. The lawn, the walks, and the drive were unkempt and overgrown with weeds. The house itself,—a small cottage with a wide porch across the front and on the side to the west,—unpainted for many seasons, was tinted by the brush of the elements, ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... felt their own uprooted condition afresh, and their guests for the first time really comprehended the piteous contrast between that neat little village house, which now seemed a palace of comfort, and this cold, unpainted upper room in the remote Janes farmhouse. It was an unwelcome thought to Mrs. Trimble that the well-to-do town of Hampden could provide no better for its poor than this, and her round face flushed with resentment and the shame of personal responsibility. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... on the gas. The car leaped ahead. And then he was braking frantically. A pipe-framed gate with thinner, unpainted wire mesh filling its surface loomed before him, much too late for him to stop. There was a minor shock, a crashing and squeaking, and then a crash and shattering of glass. Tommy bent low as the top bar of the gate hit his windshield. The double ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... below him and, to the right, the high roof of the barn. Over the kitchen roof and to the left he saw little rolling hills, valleys, cranberry swamps, a pond. A road wound in and out and, scattered along it, were houses, mostly white with green blinds, but occasionally varied by the gray of unpainted, weathered shingles. A long, low-spreading building a half mile off looked as if it might be a summer hotel, now closed and shuttered. Beyond it was a cluster of gray shanties and a gleam of water, evidently a wharf and a miniature harbor. And, ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... An unpainted wooden table was set in the middle of the floor, on which was spread a simple but appetizing meal. There was a plate of meat, which appeared to have been fried; a loaf of bread, and a pot of coffee; but there was neither ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... in hiring a room in an old unpainted building near the academy for a small weekly sum. It was unfurnished, but they succeeded in borrowing a few dilapidated chairs from a neighbor who did not require them, and some straw ticks, which they spread upon the floor for sleeping purposes. ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... for the evening meal, was made of unplaned boards, rudely put together by the unskilled hands of the backwoods. Yet it was set with the finest china, the rarest glass, and the richest silver that the greatest skill of the old world could supply. The chairs placed around the table were made of unpainted wood from the forest, with seats woven out of the coarse rushes from the river. And there, between the front windows, stood Ruth's piano, the first in that part of the wilderness, and as fine as the finest of ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... he proceeded, 'there are plenty of others that would lay their heads at your feet if they were only your equals. There's that young parson—Gilbert, I think they call him—that is visiting his mother in the unpainted and threadbare-looking little house that stands behind this one. I've actually seen that fellow, in his rusty, musty coat, stop and look after you on the street; and every night, when I go home, he is sitting at the window that looks over this way. The poor fool is in love with you. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... substances have dissolved as much as they will, and become cool and settled, pour off the clear liquid and bottle it for use. Be careful not to allow any of the solid portions to pass into the bottle. Use the dregs for scouring unpainted woodwork, or to cleanse waste pipes. When a spot is found on a white tablecloth place under it an inverted plate. Apply Javelle water with a soft tooth brush (the use of the brush protects the skin and the nails). Rub gently till the stain disappears, ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... and knees were scrubbing clothes or washing dishes in a pestilential water that stained the stones on its edges black. Here was the frame of a new boat about which some carpenters were pounding, and from a distance the skeleton of unpainted timber looked like the remains of some prehistoric saurian. Across the drain, some rope-walkers, hanks of hemp about their waists, were backing away from the lathe, letting the yellow strands revolve between their deft fingers. And then the Cabanal, so called from the miserable ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... years were the happiest of Strickland's life. Ata's house stood about eight kilometres from the road that runs round the island, and you went to it along a winding pathway shaded by the luxuriant trees of the tropics. It was a bungalow of unpainted wood, consisting of two small rooms, and outside was a small shed that served as a kitchen. There was no furniture except the mats they used as beds, and a rocking-chair, which stood on the verandah. Bananas with their great ragged ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... conducted by a tired once-missionary person, just as Nairobi itself was a tired-looking township of small parallel roofs of unpainted corrugated iron, with one main street more than a mile long and perhaps a dozen side-streets varying in length from fifty feet ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... crossroads settlements—"hitch-rail towns"—unpainted and ramshackle, but nowhere was there an attempt at farming, for this part of Texas had gone hog wild over oil. Abandoned straw stacks had settled and molded, cornfields had grown up to weeds, what few head of cattle still ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the guildhall, which is used for religious services, meetings, and entertainments. And best of all, perhaps, the houses are not the rows of sad, unpainted cabins one remembers having seen in western mining camps, but are pretty cottages, touched with a slight architectural variety, and with little variations of color, so that ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... had left New England and its bright-looking wooden houses. The material of which the houses are built remains the same; but instead of being painted, and looking trim and neat as in New England, they consisted of the natural unpainted wood; though twelve hours of pouring rain may have made them more melancholy-looking than usual; for they were all of a dingy brown, and had a look bordering on poverty and dilapidation in some instances, to which we ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... the CHISERA, haggard and unpainted, her blanket trailing, and then to the Chief's daughter, and back again, all the eyes of the campody following.) Is there any comeliness in a witch, that a man ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... that Blunt's Reef Lightship would be withdrawn for fifteen days for repairs and docking interested him but little, however. In his mind's eye there loomed the picture of that great red freighter, with her foul bottom, rusty funnel and unpainted, weather-beaten upper works. ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... be sprung upon one, and few indeed are the places where there is no old public-house, or overhanging cottage, or farmhouse and barn, or bit of De Hooghe-like entry which, if one had two or three lives, one would not willingly leave unpainted. It is just the same in North Italy; there is not a village which can be passed over with ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler |
