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Back street   /bæk strit/   Listen
Back street

noun
1.
A narrow street with walls on both sides.  Synonyms: alley, alleyway.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Back street" Quotes from Famous Books



... carrier's cart was standing in a little back street in the Borough waiting for Joshua; he had matters to settle, he told Tim, which might take him an hour or ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton

... Sugarman's solicitous request that he should buy a Hamburg Lottery Ticket scarcely penetrated his consciousness. Carrying the copy of the poster, he accompanied De Haan to Gluck's. It was a small shop in a back street with jargon-papers and hand-bills in the window and a pervasive heavy oleaginous odor. A hand-press occupied the centre of the interior, the back of which was partitioned of and marked "Private." Gluck came forward, grinning ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... things as that,' she replied. 'You don't wish, I suppose, that Amy should go and live in a back street at Islington, and be hungry every other day, and soon have ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... have taken a back street if he had dared, but to do so would have been a confession of doubt. The killer can afford to let nobody guess that he is afraid. When such a suspicion becomes current he might as well order his coffin. The men whom he holds in the subjection ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine

... had come in for the Saturday market. They got along as best they could, walking first on the pavement and then on the road, dodging round stout females bearing baskets, avoiding hooting motors, and finally making a dash down a back street that led to the railway bridge. They clattered down the steps to the booking office, secured their tickets and rushed on to the platform. The hands of the big clock were at 12.45 exactly, the guard was about to wave his green flag. They were too late to look ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil

... gorge. He was then wandering over the broad crest of the same hill upon which he had fallen in his entry into this strange Other-World of his. He turned to hurry down into the gorge, feeling his way hastily, and was arrested by the sight of the thing that was happening in a room in a back street near the school. Both of the people in the room he knew by sight. The windows were open, the blinds up, and the setting sun shone clearly into it, so that it came out quite brightly at first, a vivid oblong of room, lying like a magic-lantern ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... that Nick Smithers could do well, it was to run, and now he made the best possible use of his rather long legs. He darted out of a side door of the hotel, down the square, and around a corner leading into a back street lined ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.

... a poor hotel situated on a back street of the city of New Orleans, a man bent over an old trunk which had that day been unearthed from a long-time hiding-place. It had for years been left unopened. It was like opening a grave now to raise its cover. ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... at last, on what seemed a back street of the Spanish quarter, a gloomy and shabby room or two, with the faded American flags over the doorway clutched in the carven claws of a still more faded eagle. And he had waited for two patient hours, enduring the suspicious scowls of a lean and hawk-like Spanish housekeeper, to ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... he took her to dinner—a small French restaurant in a back street in Soho. He had heard about it somewhere. Edith classed it as soon as she entered. It was too retiring, too demure. ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the woods!" cried Flossie, as she saw the goat heading for the patch of trees at the end of the back street. "Stop him, Freddie!" ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island • Laura Lee Hope

... possessed a window shaded by a big tree. Opening it, I jumped out and carefully closed it after me. Then, pausing for a moment to resume my boots, I crept quietly down the path, jumped a low wall, and so passed into the back street. About fifty yards from the tradesmen's entrance, but on the opposite side of the road, there was a big Moreton Bay fig-tree. Under this I took my stand, and turned a watchful eye upon the house. It was a dark night, so that ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby

... natural attraction for "redness and juice" in life was seconded by a delightful and fantastic sense of the boundless possibilities of romance in every-day things. To a realist a hansom-cab driver is a man who makes twenty-five shillings a week, lives in a back street in Pimlico, has a wife who drinks and children who grow up with an alcoholic taint; the realist will compare his lot with other cab-drivers, and find what part of his life is the product of the cab-driving ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... greatest eagerness to any nonsense which I chose to utter, and I did not fail to utter a great deal; presently, however, becoming disgusted with the beings about me, I forced my way, not very civilly, through my crowd of admirers; and passing through an alley and a back street, at last reached an outskirt of the fair where no person appeared to know me. Here I stood, looking vacantly on what was going on, musing on the strange infatuation of my species, who judge of a person's words, not from their intrinsic merit, but from the opinion—generally an ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... a safe harbour of refuge for certain strange persons who came there, men who looked more or less decent members of society, but whose talk and whose slang was certainly that of crooks. That house in the back street of old-world Kensington, a place built before Victoria ascended the throne, was undoubtedly on a par with the flat of the Reveccas in Genoa, and the thieves' sanctuary in the shadow of ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux

... had such respect for Maurits as to-day. Now that they have left the back street, and all her friends are behind them, it seems to her that Maurits really grows to something big. His hat and collar and whiskers stiffen, and the bow of his necktie swells. His voice grows thick in his throat, and he ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof

... Katie Ryan never came out at the green gate, of a Sunday on the way to church, or of a week day to run down the little back street of an errand, but she gave a glance up at the Grubblings' windows; and if she caught sight of Glory's illumined head, nodded her own, with its pretty, dark-brown locks, quite pleasant and friendly. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... humble house. Only a flat of three rooms on the third floor of a tall tenement-house in a back street near the river. A bedroom, a tiny parlor and a kitchen, which was also an eating-room, made up the suite. The Briggses did all their daylight living in the last-named apartment. The floor was painted yellow; the walls were whitewashed; the furniture ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various

... day at a quiet house in Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road. The ladies had gone to the Soho Bazaar, leaving their carriage in Soho Square, going out by another entrance in a back street, and driving up in a cab to us in ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous

... not long left the hotel, and were passing along a back street on their way to the outfitter's, when a man came hastily out of a low public-house, and ran rather roughly ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson

... hastily erected, and still more hastily designed, building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of London, and a number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile swiftness. Within this factory companies of printers, tensely active with nimble fingers—they were always speeding up the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... I used to sit at the window in a very infantile frame of mind and watch everything that went by. It wasn't a very rowdy life, as the prisoner in solitary confinement said to Dickens. We live in a back street, where there's not much passing. The advent of the baker's cart used to be the chief excitement. It was painted red and yellow, and he baked very nice leaf-cookies. My mother would hang a napkin in the door-knocker when she wanted him to stop; and as I couldn't see ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... that morning, I bade good-by to mother and the children, and father and I pulled out in the farm wagon for our nearest railroad station, which was Alton, and, as heretofore stated, twenty miles away, where we arrived in ample time for my train. We drove into a back street and unhitched the team—the faithful old mules, Bill and Tom, tied them to the wagon and fed them, and then walked to the depot. The train came in due season, and stopped opposite the depot platform, where father and I were standing. We faced each ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell

... while Henty was writing letters, Evan went out for a walk. He wandered along a back street until he came again to the cemetery. A greybird sang its sweet song to him—but not only to him. Evan was thrilled with the sad beauty of that song, and of the Song of Life. Until the sun's rays had disappeared and the little greybird's singing was done, ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... Birmingham by men who work themselves, employing two or three journeymen. The names of these artists seldom appear. A London or Parisian tradesman undertakes an order which is passed to some noted Birmingham House, which transmits it to a hard-handed man in a back street. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... it. I went out of the back door of the house, into the narrow gully of the back street. Women glanced down at me from the top of the flights of steps, old men stood, half-turning, half-crouching under the dark shadow of the walls, to stare. It was as if the strange creatures of the under-shadow were looking at me. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... whom he sold her for a shilling, on condition that he would keep her for at least a week tied up; then he returned at once. But before he got home, he got off the fly, and going right round the yard, jumped over the fence into the yard from a back street. He was afraid to go in at the gate ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various

... mon ami, of a malgamiter," said Mrs. Vansittart, looking into Cornish's face—"lurking here in your little inn in a back street! Why do you not go to one of the larger hotels in Scheveningen, since you have ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... think of no better plan, so we followed this out. In a back street at Frankfort we found two furnished rooms to let on a sixth story. The one we entered had no light from day; a dingy lamp swung perpetually from the ceiling, and from that, or from the open door leading into the bedroom beyond, came our only light. The bedroom was more cheerful, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell

... beautiful healthy children, beautiful dying children, ugly dying children, ugly uproarious children in Petticoat Lane or Park Lane. There are people of every physical and mental type, of every sort of health and breeding, in a single back street. They have nothing in common but the wrong ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... river Tay running rapidly and cleanly upon its gravel bed. Behind the front building was the paved court where the boys played casual games in the breaks of five minutes between the hours of study, and this court had an entrance from a narrow back street along which, in snow time, a detachment of the enemy from the other schools might steal any hour and take us by disastrous surprise. There were those who wished that we had been completely walled up at the back, for then we had met the attack at a greater advantage from ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren

... perversion has probably never been quite equalled; but it remains there to show us how firmly my theory stands—that the real scoundrel never knows himself to be a scoundrel. Had Fury settled down in a back street and employed his genius in writing stories, he could have earned a livelihood, for people would have eagerly read his experiences; but he preferred thieving—and then he turned round and blamed other people for hounding ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... School plays, with the chief- justices and nobility of this country applauding him till they were black in the face, is drivelling at this minute - drivelling, sir! - in a fifth floor, up a narrow dark back street in Antwerp.' ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*

... Vauvenarde's wife to make a horse do tricks in public, and it was beneath Captain Vauvenarde's dignity to give her his name before the world. She must neither be Lola Brandt nor Madame Vauvenarde. She must give up her fairly lucrative profession and live in semi-detached obscurity up a little back street on an allowance of twopence-halfpenny a week and be happy and cheerful and devoted. Lola refused. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... this edifice, except that the Covenanters had uplifted it with pews and a gallery, and whitewash; though I doubt not it was a stately Gothic church, with innumerable enrichments and incrustations of beauty, when it passed from popish hands into theirs. Thence we wandered downward, through a back street, amid very shabby houses, some of which bore tokens of having once been the abodes of courtly and noble personages. We paused before one that displayed, I think, the sign of a spirit-retailer, and looked as disreputable as a house could, yet was built of stalwart ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... is when anything big turns up; how there's a mighty fine note-book about two foot long to be produced, and perhaps a drop of whisky and soda to whet his pencil, and then the questions and the answers and what not—all the time the thief is running hard down the back street and the gold watch is sticking out of ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton

... dingy office, in a back street in one of the darkest quarters of the city, whose name we refrain from mentioning, an elderly man sat down one foggy morning, poked the fire, blew his nose, opened his newspaper, and began to read. This man was a part-owner of the Lively ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne

... hand within his and they turned down the alley which led to the back street facing the water front. The lights still blinked in the mist—the waves still pounded against the stone walls throwing up salt spray, but they no longer came from out an unfathomable distance. They seemed like very petty waves and the two knew the boundaries, ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... those thin little legs did go. The boy trotted along beside his friend, down the hill to the flats. Jinnie chose a back street leading to the lower end ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White

... refractory—funking and flinging like old Jeroboam; but at last, with the persuasion of the treat, he came to, and, sleeking down his front hair, we all three took a step down to the far end of the close, at the back street, where Widow Thamson kept the sign of "The Tankard and the Tappit Hen;" Cursecowl, when we got ourselves seated, ordering in the spirits with a loud rap on the table with his knuckles, and a whistle on the landlady through his ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir

... end of the year 1910, Noah Quick, hailing, evidently, from nowhere in particular, but, equally evidently, being in possession of plenty of cash, became licensee of a small tavern called the Admiral Parker, in a back street in Devonport. It was a fully-licensed house, and much frequented by seamen. Noah Quick was a thick-set, sturdy, middle-aged man, reserved, taciturn, very strict in his attention to business; a steady, sober man, keen on money matters. He was a bachelor, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

... down a back street not very far from the Leyden prison, a man and a woman sat at breakfast on the morning following the burning of the Heer Jansen and his fellow martyr. These also we have met before, for they were none other than the estimable Black Meg and her companion, named the Butcher. Time, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

... blackness would come up out of the sea, and by and by a fresh storm of wind would send the people scuttling back into shelter. So it went on day after day, and when night came the sound of the ever-troubled sea grew louder, so that, shut up in our little rooms in that back street, we had it in our ears, except at intervals, when the wind howled loud enough to drown its great voice, and hurled tempests of rain and hail against the roofs ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... Raja Randhir walked through the silent city for nearly an hour without meeting anyone. As, however, he passed through a back street in the merchants' quarter, he saw what appeared to be a homeless dog, lying at the foot of a house-wall. He approached it, and up leaped a human figure, whilst a loud voice ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... had a dim idea that if he could migrate to a distant parish, he might find neighbours worthy of him; and indeed he did subsequently transfer himself to the Saracen's Head, which was doing a thriving business in the back street of a neighbouring market-town. But, oddly enough, he has found the people up that back street of precisely the same stamp as the inhabitants of Shepperton—"a poor lot, sir, big and little, and them as comes for a go o' gin are no better than them as comes ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... as soon as she opened the door I dragged the two men inside. They were Greasers, the same as the old woman what had first talked to me; an' I turned 'em over to her a' took the woman with the soft voice down to the train by a back street. She still wore a heavy veil, an' I never looked at her—not right straight—but I could see that she walked with her feet an' held her head on the top of her neck; so I was purty certain that if Dick did return an' try to finish the weddin' as ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason

... inclined—the mourning American professor has discovered it. I did not want to be an idealist living up a back street. I wanted to live in the biggest house in the best street of the town. I wanted to ride a horse, wear a fur coat, and have as much to eat and drink as ever I liked. I wanted to marry the most beautiful woman in the world, to have my ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome

... the comfortable home where she lived during her husband's lifetime to the attic in a back street of Westminster, where she finally died. She took in washing for a livelihood, and Sue, now twelve years old, was already ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade

... recent occasion in my knowledge a man was hunted down into a back street which was a cul-de-sac, with no exit from it. He turned into the door of a warehouse and went up some flights of stairs, hoping to find a refuge, but, finding none, he turned back and came down again and faced the crowd which was waiting outside, uncertain ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell

... neighbourhoods, I observe to avoid play, and to be conscious of poverty. They avoid work, too, if they can, of course; that is in the nature of all animals. I have the pleasure to know a dog in a back street in the neighbourhood of Walworth, who has greatly distinguished himself in the minor drama, and who takes his portrait with him when he makes an engagement, for the illustration of the play-bill. His portrait (which is not at ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... locality is indeed poetical. It tallies strangely little with the reality, either as re- gards position or other features; and it may be said to be, not an aid, but a direct obstacle, to a discovery of the house. A very humble edifice, in a small back street, is designated by a municipal tablet, set into its face, as the scene of Lamartine's advent into the world. He himself speaks of a vast and lofty structure, at the angle of a place, adorned with iron clamps, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... were walking through a back street leading to some handsome buildings, they heard terrible cries coming from a small ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... that had come to Berwick about three years before this, from heaven only knows where, and had set himself up in business as a marine-store dealer, in a back street which ran down to the shore of the Tweed. He was a little red-haired, pale-eyed rat of a man, with ferrety eyes and a goatee beard, quiet and peaceable in his ways and inoffensive enough, but a rare hand at gossiping about the beach and the walls—you might find him at all ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher

... the other girls laugh. Walter aided Nan out of the alley. The policeman carried Pearl out into the back street and to the nearest drug store. There she was revived, and Linda telephoned for a taxi-cab to ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr

... Feet in Front by 90 Feet in depth upon the high Street for House and Garden; but those which fronted the River had but 30 in Front, by 60 Feet in depth. Each Family had a Bower of Palmetto Leaves finished upon the back Street in their own Lands. The side toward the front Street was set out for their Houses. These Palmetto Bowers were very convenient shelters, being tight in the hardest Rains; they were about 20 Feet long and 14 Feet wide, and in regular ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston

... Stratton, puffing great clouds of smoke. "She speaks French, she reads music, she writes uncommonly good English, and in some incomprehensible way she has formed her own ideas of Art. Not bad for a dress-making girl who lives in a Sydney back street and sometimes works sixteen hours ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... actually did so—a few daily, as her strength served her. The little figures in costume, coloured prints, Swiss carvings, French knicknacks, are preserved in many a Hillside cottage as treasured relics of 'our young lady.' Many years later, Martyn recognised a Hillside native in a back street in London by a little purple-blue picture of Vesuvius, and thereby reached the soft spot in ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Montgomery (28th) Street, Greene (29th) Street, and Washington (30th) Street, all named for Generals of the Revolution. Running the other way were Gay, Dunbarton, Beall, West, Stoddert, this, for a long time was known as Back Street. West of High Street (Wisconsin Avenue) the streets became First, Second, Third, etc. Twenty-seventh Street, after being New Street for one block and Mill Street for another, finally was named for President Monroe. Madison had a street named for him too, but ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... his hand to be sure his treasures were safe, he ran breathlessly on to Paddy's lodgings, in a back street not far from ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis

... a mean door in a back street, ascended a dirty stair, and came into a suite of apartments, where a dishevelled woman in a dirty split dressing-gown received us and showed us into her husband's sanctum, crowded with rare old paintings on gold grounds. Her good man had been a collector of the early school ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... heart of a young mother is almost infantile, and I hardly know whether to laugh or cry when I think of the childish things I did and thought and said to myself in those first days when I was alone in my room in that back street in Bayswater. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... be prosperous. There is no native patronage for art, no public for literature. The very theatres, which flourish in other despotic states, are here but losing speculations, owing to the interference of clerical regulations. There are no commerce and no manufactures in the Eternal city. In a back street near the Capitol, over a gloomy, stable-looking door, you may see written up "Borsa di Roma," but I never could discover any credible evidence of business being transacted on the Roman change. There is but one private factory in Rome, the Anglo-Roman Gas Company. What ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey

... the extent of his wardrobe. His scarlet was growing plum-colour, and the rest of his hunting costume has been already glanced at. He lodged above Smallbones, the veterinary surgeon, in a little back street, where he lived in the quietest way, dining when he came in from hunting,—dressing, or rather changing, only when he was wet, hunting each fox again over his brandy-and-water, and bundling off to bed long before many of his 'field' had left the dining-room. ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... it is certain that the pair became intimate friends, and had many happy days and some practical jokes together. One story connected with their names sounds apocryphal, but there is no harm in quoting it. Haydn and Dittersdorf were strolling down a back street when they heard a fiddler scraping away in a little beer cellar. Haydn, entering, inquired, "Whose minuet is that you are playing?" "Haydn's," answered the fiddler. "It's a—bad minuet," replied Haydn, whereupon the enraged player ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden

... drinking alkali water all summer, and along about midnight they began to drop out until there was no one left to face the music except a little cattle salesman and myself. After all the others quit us, we went into a feed trough on a back street, and had a good supper. I had been drinking everything like a good fellow, and at several places there was no salt to put in the beer. The idea struck me that I would buy a sack of salt from this eating ranch and take it with me. The ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams

... his dear mistress, and immediately went and put his head out at an open window on the landing, and looked into the back street for a quarter of ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens

... small cabaret for a straitened traveller being within sight, he had to seek one round the dark corner, where the cabbage leaves lay thickest, trodden about the public cistern at which women had not yet left off drawing water. There, in the back street he found one, the Break of Day. The curtained windows clouded the Break of Day, but it seemed light and warm, and it announced in legible inscriptions with appropriate pictorial embellishment of billiard cue and ball, that at the Break of Day one could play billiards; ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... back street, beside the potato wagon, he burst into melody in as clear and rich a baritone voice ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... if I did, would you? I kinder thought I might get by a back street to the wagons. A cousin of mine's a wagon master and he ain't going ter give up easy. I kinder thought ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... palpably been examining the material, and conversing with the workman, who wore the ordinary long blouse of an iron craftsman in a small way. I judged him to be a man with a little shop of his own in some back street, who did odd jobs of engineering, assisted perhaps by a skilled helper or two, and a few apprentices. Edison looked sternly towards the door as the solemn procession filed in, and there was a trace of annoyance on his ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... Newville he slipped through the crowd at the station with the briefest possible greetings to the acquaintances he saw, and set out to gain his father's house by a back street. ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy

... see a hundred yards. He did not tell them about the extra trips and putting the tobacco in them. Dick Rail must have told about him. They said he must go. Jim turned white. He went to his little room, close up under the roof of a little dingy house in a back street, and sat down in the dark; thought about his mother and Kitty, and dimly about some one else; wrote his mother and Kitty a letter; said he was coming home—called it "a visit"; cried over the letter, but was careful not to cry on it. He was ...
— "Run To Seed" - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page

... eyes followed her keenly, while he kept at a considerable distance. But Nan seemed to be very busy at this time. Again and again he was tempted to speak to her as she came out of this or that shop, or when he saw her carrying an armful of toys into some small back street. But he was afraid. There was so much to win; so much to lose. He guessed that sooner or later the vagrant blood in Nan would drive her to seek the solitariness of the high cliffs ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black

... trained. The cars were always in order. He was used to Ruth's hurry calls, and when she reached the garage she found the car standing in the back street waiting for her. In a moment more she was rushing on her way toward the village without having aroused the suspicion of the two men who so impatiently awaited her return. Mrs. Cameron was ready, eager as a child, standing on the sidewalk ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill

... that secret passage from the Chevalier's house into the back street, and of that promenade to the Princess's house which he had spied upon. Wogan listened without any remark, and yet without any attempt to quicken his informant. But as soon as he had the story, he set off at a run towards the ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason

... support did not quite fill his children's mouths, and they had to be filled. So, behind his house there was a little yard, reached by a passage from the back street, and in that yard was a pole, and under the pole a shop of quite another description than the ornamental one in the front street. Here on Saturday nights from seven till ten he took an almost innumerable succession of twopences ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... dispatched messengers all through the City and the surrounding country, who cried aloud for Tiggle, saying that the new Boolooroo wanted him. Tiggle, hiding in the cellar of a deserted house in a back street, at last heard these cries and joyfully came forth to confront the messengers. Having heard of the old Boolooroo's downfall and disgrace, the old man consented to go to the palace again, and as soon as Trot saw him she asked ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum

... the carriage stopped in a back street of the Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down, and ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... a back street of the lower town, they discovered a tunnel running into the cliff. At its mouth ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... critic or the impressario is. No longer a merchant, no longer a shop-keeper even, he is to-day a universal provider. Fifty years ago the nice housewife still prided herself on knowing the right place for everything. There was a little man in a back street who imported just the coffee she wanted, another who blended tea to perfection, a third who could smoke a ham as a ham should be smoked. All have vanished now; and the housewife betakes herself to the stores. ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell

... object," he expostulated; "why make a fool of her?" and turning to goody Liu: "This Mr. Chou," he said, "is gone south: his house is at the back row; his wife is anyhow at home; so go round this way, until you reach the door, at the back street, where, if you will ask about her, you will be on the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... I, Master Walter, and was back nigh an hour since. Scarce had I left you when in a back street I came upon a quiet hostelry, and in the courtyard were standing half a dozen teams of cattle. Doubtless their owners had brought hay or corn into the city, and when the tumult arose and the gates were closed found themselves unable to escape. ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty

... did not realize the amazing truth—that this was the selfsame man who had stolen from me, twenty years before, the woman I had so dearly loved. He had betrayed her, and left her to starve and die in a back street in Marseilles. I concealed my outburst of feeling, yet the very next evening Poland was arrested, and Sonia, ignorant of the truth, was, with a motive already explained by Monsieur Guertin, taken ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux

... was finished in silence, and they pulled up before a handsome, though somewhat sombre-looking house in a back street. ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... fortunately was deserted at the moment. I waited long enough for him to appear. But he did not; and when I ran to the alley corner—chancing bumping squarely into him—I saw him far down its dim, narrow length where it opened into the back street which bordered his grounds to the rear. He turned to the left and shot a swift glance up the alley, which I anticipated, provided for by drawing back. When I looked again, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... useless; parsons must be either sharp or stupid, sensible or foolish; priests must be either learned or illiterate, either good, bad, or indifferent; in all, from the rector in his silken gown to the back street psalm-singer in his fustian, there must be something worth praising or condemning. And the churches and chapels, with their congregations, must likewise present some points of beauty or ugliness, some traits of grace or godlessness, some features of excellence, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... Dupre found himself alone, with the squad and their prisoner disappearing down a back street. For a moment he stood there as if dazed, then he turned and ran as fast as he could, back to the theatre again, hoping to meet a carriage for hire on the way. Arriving at the theatre, he found the lights out, and the manager ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr

... Eddie," Worth said. "His room's on the other side, toward the back street. What you saw was the light from these windows shining on the fog. Makes queer ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan

... through the floor. The boys knew at once that it was their carelessness that had caused the alarm, and two more frightened kids never got together. They could see visions of policemen, prison bars, and even Stillwater, day and night for many years. They would often get together on a back street and in whispered tones wonder if they had yet been suspected. For more than a quarter of a century these two kids kept this secret in the innermost recesses of their hearts, and it is only recently that they dared to reveal their ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore

... heavily as she could, till the time came when she would naturally be obliged to leave him—when, as she passed by his servant, she said to him that "My lord will not be ready for the candles just yet,"—and then left the Tower, and went to a little lodging in a back street, where she found her husband, and where they both lay hid while the search for Lord Nithsdale was going on, and where they heard the knell tolling when his friends, the other lords, were being led out to have their ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge

... They are, indeed, the only people who may properly be said to be alive, dreaming and building while the superior person stands by cogitating sarcasms on their swink'd and dusty appearances. More of the true spirit of romantic existence goes to the opening of a little grocer's shop in a back street in Whitechapel than to all the fine marriages at St. George's, Hanover Square, in a year. But, of course, all depends on the eye of ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... I made up my mind, and so ended the trouble. In the window of a small plumber's shop in a back street near, stood on view among brass taps, rolls of lead piping and cistern requisites, various squares of coloured glass, the sort of thing chiefly used, I believe, for lavatory doors and staircase windows. Some had stars in the centre, and others, more elaborate, were enriched with designs, severe ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... not go about this in a hole-in-a-corner way in a back street. They did not let the "cash" girl feel her artistic effort was only a blind to help her help others. They held a "salon" for ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... office was upstairs and on a back street. It had an outside stairway, one of those affairs that cling to an outer brick wall and end in a little iron platform. The only sign on the ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby

... was at the end of another morning when we had set out with the purpose of seeing the rest of Ronda for ourselves. We chose a back street parallel to the great thoroughfare leading to the new bridge, and of a squalor which we might have imagined but had not. The dwellers in the decent-looking houses did not seem to mind the sights and scents of their ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... you have made me understand this much. What a fine sense of satire the power behind the throne of the world must have. Take me—that first little two-by-four home of mine over in a back street of Newark. Talk to me of freedom! I married to get away from it. Somebody who cared whether I came or went. Somebody who cared enough to want ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... down book and duster, and went to find the laird. But he had slipped away to the town, to have a rummage in a certain little shop in a back street, which he had not rummaged for a long time enough, he thought, to have let something come in. It was no relief to Dawtie: the thing would be all the day before her instead of behind her! It burned within her, ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald

... The street cars dinned ceaselessly up and down, and back and forth; the trains of the Elevated hurtled by on the west and on the east; the troubled city roared all round with the anguish of the perpetual coming and going; but it was as much Sunday there as it would have been on the back street in Pymantoning where her mother's little house stood. The leaves that dripped down at her feet in the light warm breaths of wind passing over the square might have fallen from the maple before the gate at home. The awful unity of life for the first time appeared to her. Was it true that you ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells

... which most countries would think incongruous or comic. That is why it is only fair to read any American definitions or rules in a certain light, and relatively to a rather unique position. It is not fair to compare the position of those who may meet Turks in the back street with that of those who have never met Turks except in the Bab Ballads. It is not fair simply to compare America with England in its regulations about the Turk. In short, it is not fair to do what almost every Englishman probably does; to look at the American international examination ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... offered—he alone—first of all to make his way to the harbour and bring word if the coast (as he said) was clear. He went very cautiously, by way of a cellar leading under our house and the next, and opening on a back street—this, that his steps might not be traced to the front door; and it was well that he went, for on the quay, hiding behind a stack of timber, he saw two men in uniform posted at the head of the water-stairs. So he hastened back, ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... dustman says, I believe, with the strongest approval, and so does the marine-store shop in the back street. Gravely, Handel, for the subject is grave enough, you know how it is as well as I do. I suppose there was a time once when my father had not given matters up; but if ever there was, the time is gone. May I ask you if you have ever had an opportunity ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... who lived at Lewiston and worked as a stage-driver said that he was called between ten and twelve o'clock at night and told to drive a certain carriage into a back street alongside of another carriage which he found standing there without any horse attached to it; some men were standing near it. He drove alongside the carriage, and one or two men got out of it and got into his hack. ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... since Paul had shot her, and he still pictured her as buxom, high-colored, lively, and a little blowsy. As he drove up to her boarding-house, in a depressing back street below the wholesale district, he stopped in discomfort. At an upper window, leaning on her elbow, was a woman with the features of Zilla, but she was bloodless and aged, like a yellowed wad of old paper crumpled into wrinkles. Where Zilla had bounced and jiggled, this ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... differences in that pretty way. We must wait till he apologizes, and then we shall gladly be friends again. You see Mr. Dover was a missionary in India for many years, and we were very intimate with his mother. Our gardens join, and a gate in our fence led across their field to the back street, and was most convenient when we wanted to walk by the river or send the maids on errands in a hurry. The old lady was very neighborly, and we were quite comfortable till Thomas came home and made trouble. He'd lost his wife and children, ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott

... golden mist. That was how they sketched it under the Addison Road Station lamps; and, after one short month, came Gravesend and Dicky steaming out to his new life, and the girl crying in a thirty-shillings a week bed-and-living room, in a back street off Montpelier Square near the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... prospect now? Heavily had the merciless hand of calamity fallen on that brave old soul—and, at last, it had beaten her down! While she stood at the window, mechanically looking out, the dreary view of the back street trembled and disappeared. Teresa was crying. Happily for herself, she was unable to control her own weakness; the tears lightened her heavy heart. She waited a little, in the fear that her eyes might betray her, before she returned to Carmina. In that ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins

... on through a back street or two, and then into a huge, miserable house, which, a hundred years ago, perhaps, had witnessed the luxury, and rung to the laughter of some one great fashionable family, alone there in their glory. Now every ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... Bristol knows it! There are those who said that you got out of the scullery window into the back street. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... this, Dr. Bryce," remarked Mrs. Folliot in her deepest tones, encountering Bryce, the day after the funeral, at the corner of a back street down which she was about to sail on one of her charitable missions, to the terror of any of the women who happened to be caught gossiping. "What, now, should make Dr. Ransford cause flowers to be laid on the grave ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher

... not appear to me in her usual vivacious state of mind, and I am afraid I shall not contribute much to her enlivenment, being rather out of spirits myself, and, for the first time in my life, finding Bannisters melancholy.... Walking up a small back street from Southampton the other day, I saw a little child of about five years old standing at a poor mean kind of pastry-cook's window, looking, with eyes of poignant longing, at some baked apples, stale buns, etc. ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... such an attack a still more doubtful move. Cecil had been less well-known than Gilbert: but far better known than a Mr. Fraser and a Mr. Beamish, a pair of cranks against whom Sir Alfred Mond brought a libel action in 1919 for having—in a placard shown in a window in a back street—called him a traitor and accused him of having ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... from the Commons down to each end of the Purt, Round the Abbey, Moy, and Knather,— I wish no one any hurt; The Main Street, Back Street, College Lane, the Mall, and Portnasun, If any foes of mine are there, I pardon every one. I hope that man and womankind will do the same by me; For my heart is sore and heavy at voyaging the sea. My loving friends I'll bear in mind, and ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham

... went back to the sitter's chair, "I shall see your natural expression on your face if I can only get you to talk about that adventure." It was easy enough to lead him in the right direction. At the first hint from me, he returned to the subject of the house in the back street. Without, I hope, showing any undue curiosity, I contrived to let him see that I felt a deep interest in everything he now said. After two or three preliminary hesitations, he at last, to my great joy, fairly started ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... together they rode through the back street and to the rear entrance of the gambling-house. Here they dismounted and left their horses, ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory

... late to his midday meal. For once, the mental anaesthesia of endless figures had failed him. On his way home he had drawn his small savings from the bank, and mailed them, in cash and registered, to a back street in the slums of a distant city. He had done this before, and always with a feeling of exaltation, as if, for a time at least, the burden he carried was lightened. But to-day he experienced no compensatory relief. Life was ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... hand to demand her return to the farm. But he never came, and Mary grew more and more at ease in her new surroundings. The change from the roomy farmstead, with its wide horizons of moors and woods, to the narrow cottage in the sunless back street was a strange one for her. She missed, too, the farm work: the churning of the butter and the feeding of the calves and poultry. But youth was on her side and she soon learnt to adapt herself to her new life. Soon after six in the morning she would mount with Parfitt ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman

... Foyle presently found himself in a dingy back street where the local police station was situated. Here also a crowd of men and women had gathered, and the reserve men at the door were repelling eager women who, not knowing who had been taken in the raid, feared that their husbands might be included ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest

... table d'hote in the mangy hotel in a narrow back street where the Merveilleux troupe had their crowded being, dined at a cheap restaurant near the railway station, and filled in the evening with aimless wandering up and and down the thronged Avenue de la Gare. Once he turned ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... had, for the church where the ceremony was performed, at a very early hour in the morning, was literally crowded with the halt, the lame, the maimed, and the blind; the slums of New York, gathered from every back street and by-lane and gutter; Daisy's "people," as she calls them, who came to see her married, and who, strangest of all, brought with them a present for the bride, a beautiful family Bible, golden-clasped and bound, and costing ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes

... spoke of, consented to keep the woman there while I went to see the husband. I got to the house but found that he had removed to a little room in a little back street. There he was lying on a bit of a shake-down. I roused him up and told him where he would find his wife. He said, 'What time is it?' I said, 'Three o'clock in the afternoon.' He had one shilling left and he took a cab and went ...
— The Personal Touch • J. Wilbur Chapman

... gaze, fixed wistfully on the leafy treetops above her, suddenly dropped to earth. A man's figure was stumbling along the little path which led diagonally from the back of the Birch premises through a gateway and off toward a back street, the route by which Lanse was accustomed to take an inconspicuous short cut toward the locomotive ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond



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