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Whitewash   /wˈaɪtwˌɑʃ/  /hwˈaɪtwˌɑʃ/   Listen
Whitewash

noun
1.
A defeat in which the losing person or team fails to score.
2.
Wash consisting of lime and size in water; used for whitening walls and other surfaces.
3.
A specious or deceptive clearing that attempts to gloss over failings and defects.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Whitewash" Quotes from Famous Books



... leisurely place, abounding in shade and deep doorways and cafes, having some thirty churches (mostly baroque), a fine Palazzo della Ragione in the principal square, and the remains of a cathedral of the ninth century glooming behind a monstrous facade of the seventeenth, all whitewash, cornucopias, and sprawling Apostles. Thus it seems now to the strayed traveller who, breaking his journey at Castel Bolognese, simmers for four hours in an omnibus along with priests, flies, fleas, and old women. The cortege from ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... terminating in a steep bluff at the river side. It overlooked the village and the river a long way up and down. It was a brown-looking, antiquated mansion, built by the Doctor's grandfather in the earlier days of the settlement. The rooms were large and low, with great beams, scaly with whitewash, running across them, scarcely above the reach of a tall man's head. Great-throated fireplaces, filled with pine-boughs and flower-pots, gave promise of winter fires, roaring and crackling in boisterous hilarity, as if laughing to scorn the folly and discomfort of our modern stoves. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... of tent may be reproduced by tacking tar paper to sticks arranged in the proper manner, but if you make a wigwam of tar paper, do paint it red, green, or yellow, or whitewash it; do anything which will take off the civilized, funereal ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard

... I think, turn rather to the—eh—er—living," said Lord Ferriby, turning over the papers in front of him with a slightly reproachful countenance. He evidently thought it rather bad form of White to pour cold water over his new whitewash. For Lord Ferriby's was that charity which hopeth all things, and closeth her eye to practical facts, if these be discouraging. "I have here the result of ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... frescos! Those were perpetrated by Marsham's father. They represent, as you see, the different processes of the Iron Trade. Old Henry Marsham liked them, because, as he said, they explained him, and the house. Oliver would like to whitewash them—but for filial piety. People might suppose him ashamed of his origin. No, no!—I mean those two or three old pictures at the end of the room. Come and look at them—they ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... spared the "restorers" were guilty of strange enormities in the embellishment and decoration of the sacred building. Whitewash was vigorously applied to the walls and pews, carvings, pulpit, and font. If curious mural paintings adorned the walls, the hideous whitewash soon obliterated every trace and produced "those modest hues which the native appearance of the stone ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield

... up to the mills. Going to send one of my girls to you to-morrow and thought I'd drop in." Then he looked around and said: "Want another coat of whitewash on these walls, don't you, and—and a new stove? This don't seem to be drawin' like it ought to. If them trustees won't get ugly about it, I got a new stove up to the mill I don't want, and I'll send it down." ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith

... work. With the coming of the Americans it was different. Cleanliness is a strictly enforced rule with the fellows of our fighting force, and from a standpoint of sanitation we are literally introducing soap, water and whitewash into France. ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... him and returned to their lodging, where they passed the night; and when it was the next day, the Minister sent for a plasterer and a painter and a skilful goldsmith and, furnishing them with all the tools they wanted, carried them to the garden, where he bade them whitewash the walls of the pavilion and decorate it with various kinds of paintings. Moreover he sent for gold and lapis lazuli[FN40] and said to the painter, "Figure me on the wall, at the upper end of this hall, a man fowler with his nets spread and birds falling into them and a female ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... over what may truly be called "The Little Bible of New England," and reads its stern lessons, the Puritan mood is caught with absolute faithfulness. Here was no easy road to knowledge and salvation; but with prose as bare of beauty as the whitewash of their churches, with poetry as rough and stern as their storm-torn coast, with pictures as crude and unfinished as their own glacial-smoothed boulders, between stiff oak covers which symbolized the contents, the children were tutored, until, from being unregenerate, and as Jonathan ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... imported from other countries; but yet in many places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the Renaissance as plainly as you see the tattered linen fluttering from the twisted iron hooks (made for the display of precious brocades and carpets on pageant days) which still remain in the stained whitewash, the seams of battered bricks of the solid old escutcheoned palaces; see them sometimes displayed like the worm-eaten squares of discoloured embroidery which the curiosity dealers take out of their musty ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... won't!" exclaimed the colored man. "Ef he do, I'll hab Boomerang kick him t' pieces, an' den I'll whitewash him so his own folks won't know him! Oh, don't you worry, Massa Tom. Dat Andy won't do no funny business ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton

... dust yo' a bit, William,' said she, suiting the action to the word. 'You've been leanin' again some whitewash, a'll be bound. Ay, Philip,' continued she, turning him round with motherly freedom, 'yo'll do if yo'll but gi' your shoon a polishin' wipe on yon other mat. This'n for takin' t' roughest mud off. Measter allays ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell

... and action. Nobody questions the commonplace phenomena of the shaping of individuality and character. Habits, occupation, tastes, and desires mould a distinct personality out of the common clay. The experience of death cannot dissolve the personality. The death-process can neither whitewash a man's sin nor exalt him beyond ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... ancestor of the Raja by whom it was built, Ram Chand, had lately become a god, and was there worshipped. The roof is of stone, supported on carved stone pillars. On the centre pillar, upon a ground of whitewash, is a hand or trident. This is the only sign of a sacred character the building has yet assumed; and I found that it owed this character of sanctity to the circumstance of some one having vowed an offering to the manes of the builder, if he obtained what his soul most desired; and, having ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... unfamiliar with either the history of the chapel, its memories, or the feelings of the Indians; and to their intense indignation, they found that without consulting them, or his own superiors, he had destroyed nearly all the interior decorations by covering them with a coating of whitewash. ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James

... handsome enough, to satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of madness and an odd nostalgic passion—expressing itself in an inimitable white—for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron of the Parisian suburbs. Towards the end, when he was already very ill, he began to concoct a formula for dealing with these melancholy scenes which might have been his undoing. His career ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell

... succession, so that we have it to-day in all its pristine glory and expressiveness. Some have spoken against the time-honored custom, and claim to mark its decadence. Connecticut forbade it by law on Sundays, and frowned upon it "Fridays, Saturdays, and all"; but when it dies, the Lord will whitewash this old earth and let it out as a moon to shine upon happier worlds where ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... like stealthy footsteps moving from room to room, and tiptoeing along the passages and down the staircase. Once my heart almost stopped beating as I saw what, at first, I took to be a white face peering at me from a far recess, but which I eventually discovered was only a daub of whitewash; and, once again, my hair all but rose on end, when one of the doors at which I was looking swung open and something came forth. Oh, the horror of that moment, as long as I live I shall never forget it. The something was a cat, just a rather lean but otherwise material, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... down, stood up with the incrustations of lime that had been trowelled round their bases, projecting uselessly out from them; some of the quoins had fallen from the gable; the plaster came off the walls in several places, and the whitewash ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton

... inside walls. Lampblack in small quantities will make slate color. Finely pulverized clay mixed with Spanish brown, makes lilac. Yellow chrome or yellow ochre makes yellow. Green must not be used; lime destroys the color, and makes the whitewash peel. ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... and bracing that of the roof. A two-story country house, or a Mansard roof, I do not remember to have seen in Canada; but in places they have become so enamored of the white of the snow that they even whitewash the roofs of their buildings, giving a cluster of them the impression, at a distance, of an encampment ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... back at an angle of forty-five degrees, so that the hiding-place should not appear to be hollow. When at last the doll's house was finished, it defied all efforts to whiten it, and seemed to have a rooted objection to being made to resemble the dirty whitewash of the bath-room. I tried melting old whitewash (scraped off the walls) with gum and hot water, but it either fell off when dry or showed the wet cardboard plainly through. Chloride of lime proved equally ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight

... with a front so modest that you hardly recognise it till you see the leather curtain. I never see a leather curtain without lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted scene of some sort—good, bad or indifferent. The scene this time was meagre—whitewash and tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers being its principal features. I shouldn't have remained if I hadn't been struck with the attitude of the single worshipper—a young priest kneeling before ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... unlikely, unless it can be shown that Winwaloe and Winnow or Winoc were the same person. The church is interesting in itself, and beautifully placed, giving traces of many periods of architecture, from Norman to Perpendicular. The font, which happily was preserved by former coats of whitewash, is Early English; it bears the inscription "Ric. Bolham me fecit." The lofty south doorway is a very good specimen of Norman; the pulpit, which is modern, is of serpentine, and there are serpentine tombstones in the ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... executed those figures in such a manner that they appeared to be the men themselves, real and alive. The soldiers, who were painted on the facade of the old Mercatanzia in the Piazza, near the Condotta, were covered with whitewash many years ago, that they might be seen no longer; and the citizens, whom he painted entirely with his own hand on the Palace of the Podesta, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari

... smiled at the assumption that a mere change of residence would alter his matured political convictions. His friends seemed to look upon them, so far as they differed from their own, as a mere veneer, which would scale off in time, as had the multiplied coats of whitewash over the pencil drawing made on the school-house wall in his ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... beauty to the church of Studenitza. Above one of the doors is carved the double eagle, the insignium of empire. The great solidity of this edifice recommended it to the Turks as an arsenal; hence its careful preservation. The late Servian governor had the Vandalism to whitewash the exterior, so that at a distance it looks like a vulgar parish church. Within is a great deal of gilding and bad painting; pity that the late governor did not whitewash the inside instead of the out. The Natchalnik ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton

... cut two holes in the walls for windows, and she covered them with greased paper to let in the light. He made a wooden door that could be shut against the cold winter winds. Abe and Dennis gave the walls and low ceiling a coat of whitewash, and Sarah spread her bright rag rugs on ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah

... decorations of the interior are ascribed to Yusef I., who died in 1354. Immediately after the expulsion of the Moors in 1492, their conquerors began, by successive acts of vandalism, to spoil the marvellous beauty of the Alhambra. The open work was filled up with whitewash, the painting and gilding effaced, the furniture soiled, torn or removed. Charles V. (1516-1556) rebuilt portions in the modern style of the period, and destroyed the greater part of the winter palace to make room for a modern structure which has never been completed. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... hockey a level field is required about 100 yards long and 50 yards wide. The space is marked out in whitewash lines and small flags are placed at each corner. The long lines are called side lines, and the shorter ones goal lines. Across the center, 50 yards from either goal, is the center line. This divides the ground in half. These halves ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger

... point. Behind the resolution of the sophs to win they demonstrated a peculiarly personal antagonistic force which their opponents felt, dimly at first, keenly afterward. It was the fastest game that had been played for many a year at Hamilton and it ended in a complete whitewash for the juniors. They retired from the floor too utterly vanquished to do other than indulge in a dismal cry in concert once the door of their dressing ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... his letter had on their minds was a pained uprootal of their respect and long affection for him. And they both died some years later, and (presumably) went up to heaven, convinced of my guilt, in spite of the unscrupulous parental ruridiaconal effort to whitewash me. ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley

... all our misery, as a Church, arisen from people being afraid to look difficulties in the face? They have palliated acts, when they should have denounced them. There is that good fellow, Worcester Palmer, can whitewash the Ecclesiastical Commission and the Jerusalem Bishopric. And what is the consequence? that our Church has, through centuries, ever been sinking lower and lower, till good part of its pretensions and ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... box for Harvard, could not have been in better condition, and the first three Yale men to face him went out in one-two-three order, making the first inning a whitewash for ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish

... round the rooms, to note what progress had been made since the day before. Half-a-dozen men were at work, or, to be strictly accurate, were engaged to work, at the house; but beyond the fact that it grew steadily dirtier and dirtier, and that the splashes of whitewash and shavings of paper stretched further and further down the drive, it was difficult to see what progress was ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey

... thought, from looking at Puebla, that it had just been undergoing a siege; for, beyond a few patches of whitewash in the great square, where the cannon-balls had knocked the houses about, there were ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... sight of money to be layin' out on larnin'," pursued old Paddy; "I dunno where you'd be gettin' the vally of it that-a-way, onless he was larnin' everythin' twyste over, same as you put two coats of whitewash on a wall if you're after mixin' a drop more than you want. You ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... sickens a man to have to buy these fellows off. What? Poor devils, they don't get anything like what they ought to get, do they? Wait till you see how the Railroad Commission'll whitewash that case. It makes a man want to be ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... whisper of what I divulged ever went outside the prison walls. The Senate Committee gave a beautiful whitewash to Warden Atherton and San Quentin. The crusading San Francisco newspaper assured its working- class readers that San Quentin was whiter than snow, and further, that while it was true that the strait-jacket ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... world seems to accept always with a relish. One does not expect it so much from your sex. Mrs. Mannering was born one of us, and she has had an unhappy life. If she has been indiscreet she has her excuses. I choose to whitewash her. Do you understand? I pay dearly enough for my social position, and I certainly claim its privileges. I recognize Mrs. Mannering, and I require my friends ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of Faith on the top (strange symbol for a weather-vane), while threading through tortuous streets, mere strips of pavement veiled with blue shadow, and walled with secretive, flat-fronted houses, old and new, pearly with fresh whitewash, or painted pale lemon, faded orange, or a green ethereal as the tints of seaweed. Even at first sight the quaint town was singularly lovable, in its mingling of simplicity and mystery, and as Spanish in this mixture ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... crowning and indelible shame of our politics. It admits of neither defense or palliation, and I am sorry to find Henry Wilson's "History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power" disfigured by his elaborate efforts to whitewash it into respectability, and give it a decent place in the records ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian

... happiness—not in his way, but in the way she had chosen, even, last abnegation of all, to make the man worthy of her who had never been worthy. Even his own indignation and wrath against that man were subservient in John's honest breast to the desire of somehow finding that it might be possible to whitewash him, nay to reform him, to make him as near as possible something which she could tolerate for life. I doubt if a woman, notwithstanding the much more ready power of sacrifice which women possess, could have so fully desired this renewal ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant

... stories of St. Peter and St. Andrew; in the Bellaci chapel, too, and above all in this the chapel of the Baroncelli family. But when Giotto, being long dead, other and newer painters arose, Taddeo's work, out of fashion at last, suffered the oblivion of whitewash, sharing this fate with some of the best work in Italy: so that there is to-day but little left of it in S. Croce save these frescoes, where he has painted, not without a certain vigour and almost a gift for composition, the story of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... were no paths, no lamps, no aggressively new fences and raw brick houses. Susan, stepping down the slight incline, passed into quite an old world, smacking of the Georgian times, leisurely and quaint. On either side of the lane, old-fashioned cottages, with whitewash walls and thatched roofs, stood amidst gardens filled with unclipped greenery and homely flowers. Quickset hedges, ragged and untrimmed, divided these from the roadway, and to add to the rural look ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume

... letter from the Editor of The Quarterly Review. It would give him great pleasure if I would contribute a Renaissance article, taking as my text a German, a Russian, and an English attempt to whitewash the Borgia family. Six months ago the compliment would have filled me with gratification. To-day what to me are the whitewashed Borgias or the solemn denizens of the Athenaeum reading-room who will slumber over my account of the blameless poisonings ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... I ask rewards; my life was beautiful, I bless Him for every prayer. I ask Him not that He cover the fair painting with whitewash. ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair

... the boy, looking very hard at Rich's white hand. "I wouldn't ha' done it, on'y she was took bad, and they put her in one of the workas 'firmaries, and wouldn't let me stop along with her. They shoved me in a school as was all whitewash, with a lot more boys; and I got in a row with some on 'em, and we had a fight, and the master caned me, and I hooked it; and please, Miss, ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn

... 1807—the year of the abominable business of Tilsit— that my churchwarden, the late Mr. Ephraim Pollard, and I, in cleaning the south wall of Lanihale Church for a fresh coat of whitewash, discovered the frescoes and charcoal drawings, as well as the brass plaque of which I sent you a tracing; and I think not above a fortnight later that, on your suggestion, I set to work to decipher and copy out the old churchwardens' accounts. On the Monday after ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... and not fiction we shall scarcely find the subject inferior in interest. Truth often enough is stranger, and some of the tricks and devices employed by the smuggling communities may well surprise us. And while we shall not make any vain attempt to whitewash a class of men who were lawless, reckless, and sometimes even brutal in their efforts, yet we shall not hesitate to give the fullest prominence to the great skill and downright cleverness of a singularly virile and unique kind of British manhood. In much the same way as a spectator ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton

... Built of four-inch scantling, the plates and sills being connected only by the upright plank, and the wings thoroughly bracing the upright posts; when lumber is cheap, it may be built for one hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars, with cellar, well, and cistern. Occasional whitewash is as good as paint. With cellar under the whole, filled in with brick, and having blinds, it may cost three hundred and fifty dollars. The plan of ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... display a rich profusion and variety of ornament, once beautified with colouring and gilding, but some years ago covered with whitewash; a few faint traces of its former splendour may yet be found in various parts of the chapel, enough perhaps to shew that it must have ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous

... was time only for exploration of the city before sunset. We came down at the tower opposite the one from which we had started on our round. On the road to the electric tram, we saw the restaurant-hotel, a cube of whitewash, but we were far from the temptation of banalities. Tea or something, and a place to spend the night, could be found ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... disease, pack up your traps and your good lady, and go and live in the watch-house across the river. As for the men's houses, I'll set them to rights in a day, if you'll get the commander of the district to allow you a little chloride of lime and whitewash." ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... workwoman at our place, without my daughter's knowing who she was; and, gracious goodness! but that girl turned the whole place topsy-turvy; she got all those poor girls into mischief—impossible to whitewash them, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... Chancellor said to himself to whitewash his conduct in his own eyes, who can tell? The Duke, old vice-sodden reprobate as he was, had that one remnant of manhood left, a determination to face the last and most absolute contingency of life rather than sell ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard

... bombastic. In truth, so very remarkable, so contradictory, so incongruous have I found the American that I hesitate. Shall I give you a satire; shall I devote myself to eulogy; shall I tear what they call the "whitewash" aside and expose them to the winds of excoriation; or shall I devote myself to an introspective, analytical divertissement? But I do not wish to educate you on the Americans, but to entertain, to make you laugh by the recital of comical truths; so without system ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous

... best in point of cheapness is boiling water. Give the chicken-house a thorough cleaning and scald by throwing dippers of hot water in all places where the mites can find lodgment. Hot water destroys the eggs as well as the mites. Whitewash is a good remedy, as it buries both mites and eggs beneath a coating of lime from which they cannot emerge. Pure kerosene or a solution of carbolic acid in kerosene, at the rate of a pint of acid to a gallon of oil, is an effective lice-paint. Another substance ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings

... still sitting ruefully on the floor, "what do you think of it? Am I rightly served? Shall I send for a big pail of whitewash, and blot it ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... compelled all the inhabitants of Constantinople, by force and persuasion, to displace the images of the Saviour as well as of His holy mother, and of all saints, wherever they were, and (what is horrible to tell) to burn them in the fire in the middle of the city, and to whitewash all the painted churches. Because very many of the people of the city withstood the commission of such an enormity, they were subjected to punishment; some were beheaded, others lost a part of their body. For this reason also, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... She is also able to call attention to the fact that Mr. Kirkup had recently made the discovery of the head of Dante Alighieri, painted by Giotto, on the wall of the Chapel of the Palace of the Podesta at Florence. The fact was mentioned by Vasari, and Kirkup was enabled to remove the whitewash and uncover this inestimable treasure. Giotto, in the act of painting this portrait, is the subject of one of the finest designs of the English school—alas! not painted in any form of ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... glaring instances pointed out in the letters just quoted. The other alterations made in the interior may be briefly summarized as follows: The level of the floor was raised by a thick deposit of earth; the walls were enveloped in whitewash, to the concealment of the ancient mural paintings and certain delicate sculptured ornament; and high pews were erected, which reached almost to the capitals of the piers. The openings of the triforium were bricked up—in some cases entirely obliterated—and at the east end, above ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley

... himself back and waited grimly for the curry. The half-closed jalousies darkened the room pervaded by the smell of fresh whitewash: a swarm of flies buzzed and settled in turns, and poor Mrs. Schomberg's smile seemed to express the quintessence of all the imbecility that had ever spoken, had ever breathed, had ever been fed on infamous buffalo meat within these ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... of short turf, where a man may walk with his hands in his pockets; and here, with many ups and downs, runs the track used by the coastguard, who blaze the stones beside it at intervals with splashes of whitewash, for guidance on dark nights. Above this plateau, which here expands to a width of twenty or thirty feet and anon contracts almost to nothing, the cliff takes another climb, right away now to the ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... Jacob Dolph came in front of the low, hip-roofed house, whose lower story of undressed stone shone with fresh whitewash, Mr. Van Riper stood on his stoop and checked his guest at the front gate, a dozen yards away. From this distance he jabbed his big gold-headed cane toward the young man, as though ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner

... fierce as an Italian vendetta. This animosity crystallises the more general hatred of the respective States—Victoria and New South Wales. Both sides think they are the Lord's Anointed. A Governor-General in any speech must be careful to whitewash both States with the same degree of eyewash. Friendships, fortunes, and reputations have been lost in this really amusing controversy. Indeed, they are like the farmers of Kerry—they go to law if a hen roosts for a second in ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell

... will brick up the rest of it, but using mud instead of mortar, so that the bricks can be easily removed when the time comes, or one or two can be taken out to pass in food, and then replaced as before. After you are in I will whitewash the whole cellar, and no one would then guess the wall had ever been disturbed. I shall leave two bricks out in the bottom row of all to give air. They will be covered over by the wood. However hard up ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty

... & L. A. gathered in force. Even Tom Davis, brother of Bertha and Agnes, asked for a half-day's vacation and helped Algernon whitewash. Bert had impressed Max into carpentering, and the work of bookcase-building went on noisily inside the shed. The girls sat on the weedy patch of ground outside, sewing ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett

... it, he rose slowly on his toes. "Do you know that exercise? It is excellent for the calves of the legs, and for the lumbar regions." So saying, Mr. Stone left the wall, and began again to pace the room; the whitewash had also left the wall, and clung in a large square patch on his shaggy coat. "I have seen sheep in Spring," he said, "actually imitate their lambs in rising from the ground with all four legs at once." He stood still. A thought had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... his eye round and saw a crowd of heads, the schoolmaster, and besides these—whitewash. The walls, the ceiling, the beams were all whitewashed. The floor was hearth-stoned, but it seemed to be whitewashed, and even the boys' faces appeared to have been touched over with a thin solution laid ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn

... expression on our faces, and intervened in pure good-heartedness to snatch me as a brand from the burning; for she threw herself into talk about the church, crying out against the hideous havoc we Protestants had wrought with whitewash ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... footnote, it would go." Jock was all attention. "But I have my doubts as to whether Pete Falstar will take kindly to his place of residence being classified as a human pig-sty. That's laying the local colour on, with a whitewash brush, don't you think? A little dirt and disorder don't seem ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... I ain't got any more work to do than I ever had, and I always managed to do that, no matter how you did clean up after me and mix up my papers. I'm like old Nigger Pomeroy. He was doin' a job of whitewashin' one day, and he had an old whitewash brush with most of the hair gone out of it. I says to him, 'Pomeroy, why don't you get you a new brush? you could do twice as much work.' And Pomeroy says, 'That's right, Mr. Bines, but the trouble is I ain't got twice as much work to do.' So don't ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... the farmers who had lost cattle were requested to whitewash their barns thoroughly, and some tons of a disinfecting powder were purchased for the advantage of the persons who wished to use it. An early application was advised, that the barns might be in readiness for ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings

... was large, with a floor of clay, and a black ceiling resting on walls out of the perpendicular; these had lost their whitewash, and were pierced by two small windows half-choked up with straw. Directly opposite the latter, behind a wooden railing, stood a cask resting on other barrels, above which smoked the red glare of a naphtha lamp. Over the room lay a dense darkness, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... goes to-night and no mistake! I'll nuss him no longer—and the landlord wants the room. The men are comin' to whitewash it at ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... and proportions of the lower chapel, and the decoration, copied, as in the upper chapel, from traces of the original colouring found under the whitewash, the visitor will doubtless prefer to ascend, after a cursory inspection, the narrow, winding stairway to the resplendent upper sanctuary, whose dazzling brilliancy moved an ancient writer to declare that "in the contest between light and darkness in architecture, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... the officers and they certainly gave no suggestion of men contemplating retreat, for the mess-hall in which dinner was served had been completed only that afternoon. It was of rough stones and cement, and the interior walls were covered with whitewash. The cement was not yet dry, nor, as John McCutcheon later discovered when he drew caricatures on it, neither was the whitewash. There were twenty men around the dinner-table, seated on ammunition-boxes and Standard ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... term which would perhaps designate most concisely the section of German war literature treating of Belgium's violated neutrality. Should that designation appear unfitting, then the author has only one other to suggest—"whitewash." ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... In the smooth surface of the yellow wall was a rough space, following approximately the shape of the other cell windows, not plastered like the rest of the wall, but showing the shapes of bricks through its thick coatings of whitewash. I turned with a gasp of excitement and satisfaction: yes, the embrasure of the wall was deep enough; what a wall it was!—four feet at least, and the opening of the window reached to the floor, though the ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram

... niche of S. Apollinaris are remains of frescoes of two dates found in 1892, and thought to belong to the sixth and the tenth centuries; other remains of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, found under whitewash, prove that the whole church was ornamented with painting as the "Acts" relate. When the roof was raised the exterior of the drum of S. Giusto was enclosed within the church. The trilobate roof of the nave was mediaeval, but has lately been restored. The facade also was restored in 1843, and the ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson

... steps were taken looking to a thorough renovation and restoration of the venerable pile. The purity of the marble columns had been sullied by several coats of paint and whitewash, while many of the foliated capitals of the columns supporting the "Round" bore traces of gilding. These latter were scraped and cleaned; an eight-feet-high oak wainscot was removed; light, movable seats were substituted for the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various

... her husband about six months only. Father Florez (Reynas Catholicas, tom. ii. pp. 760-786) has made a flimsy attempt to whitewash her character; but, to say nothing of almost every contemporary historian, as well as of the official documents of that day (see Marina, Teoria, tom. iii. part. 2, num. 11), the stain has been too deeply fixed by the repeated testimony of Castillo, the loyal ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... be readily made by adding one part silicate of soda (or potash) to every five parts of whitewash. The addition of a solution of alum to whitewash is recommended as a means to prevent the rubbing off of the wash. A coating of a good glue size made by dissolving half a pound of glue in a gallon of water is employed when the wall ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various

... enough to have purged her of vanities. She had grown fat and sad and yellow and dull. But when the means came, she felt a rekindled desire to assume the perquisites of her sex—to sit at tea tables; to buy futile things; to whitewash the hideous veracity of life with a little form and ceremony. So she coldly vetoed Pike's proposed system of fortifications, and announced that they would descend upon ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... his very best trousers, and had heavily oiled the little fringe at the back of his head, which, however, refused to become darker. But what distressed him most was his nose—it was very red. He rubbed his finger and thumb on the wall, and put a little whitewash on it; but, finding it rather made matters worse, he rubbed it off again. Then he looked carefully into his own eyes. They certainly were a little pulled down at the outer corners, which gave them the appearance of looking crosswise; but then they were a nice blue. So ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner

... surface, and curves and angles of no precision or delicacy; and in general, in all common and unthinking persons with an imperfect rendering of that which might be pure and fine, as church-wardens are content to lose the sharp lines of stone carving under clogging obliterations of whitewash, and as the modern Italians scrape away and polish white all the sharpness and glory of the carvings on their old churches, as most miserably and pitifully on St. Mark's at Venice, and the Baptisteries ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... judgment supplied the strongest testimony to the truth of a religion that survived such scandals, exist no longer. Rome is, externally, the most moral and decorous of European cities. In reality, she may be only a whited sepulchre, but at any rate, the whitewash is laid on very thick, and the plaster looks uncommonly like stone. From various motives, this feature is, I think, but seldom brought prominently forward in descriptions of the Papal city. Protestant and ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey

... lives with are the fallen and the lost ones—those that the rich would not set up in business, or help them to emigrate, or lift them out of the gutter with a pair of tongs, for fear they should stain their own whitewash in ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... which, after sundry ejaculations of surprise, the peasant retorts: "Who gave to you the power? I well hear ye have another God than we poor people. We have our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath forbidden such money-lending for gain." Hence it comes, he goes on, that land is no longer free; to attempt to whitewash usury under the name of due or interest, he says, is just the same as if one were to call a child christened Friedrich or Hansel, Fritz or Hans, and then maintain it was no longer the same child. They require no more Jews, he says, since the Christians have taken ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... there was an expense of a few dollars on this account, which the State treasurer figured up with agonies of terror, and which the opposition roared at as if the administration could have helped it. The State-Houses were two mere deformities of patched plaster and leprous whitewash; they were such shapeless, graceless, dilapidated wigwams, that no sensitive patriot could look at them without wanting to fly to the uttermost parts of the earth; and yet it was not possible to build new ones, and hardly possible to obtain appropriations ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... Emporium" was to be found in Poorthing Lane. Finding that this increased his business considerably, he hit upon a plan of advertising which has been practised rather extensively of late years in London. He sent out an army of boys with pots of whitewash and brushes, with directions to print in rough but large legible letters the words, "Who's Boone?" on all the blank walls of the metropolis, and in the papers he answered the question by having printed ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne

... on probation, during which her conduct must be satisfactory, her paramour also being put out of caste for the same time. Both are then shaved and invested with the necklaces of tulsi beads. In Mandla a new convert must clean and whitewash his house and then vacate it with his family while the Panch or caste committee come and stay there for some time in order to purify it. While they are there neither the owner nor any member of his family may enter the house. The Panch then proceed to ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... discourages the maggot-fly. To discourage him still further cover the cut sides of hams and shoulders before hanging up with molasses made very thick with ground black pepper. They will not absolutely require canvassing and dipping in whitewash after if the peppering is thorough. But to be on the safe side—canvas and dip. Make the whitewash with a foundation of thick paste—and be sure it covers every thread of the canvas. Hams perfectly cured and canvassed keep indefinitely in the right sort ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams

... she, 'if ye'll go to the expense of a few buckets of whitewash, an' give a lick o' paint to the door here, I think it 'ull do very well.' So they settled the day ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)

... chair beside the cradle in which she had sat in the morning, for she had called Nanna to move the box at a time when the child had been taken out for its second airing. She leaned back, resting her auburn hair against the bare wall, the waxen whiteness of her face contrasting with the bluish whitewash. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... general and his staff, and instead of getting him, we have broken up a nigger funeral and captured the gospel sharp, armed with a picket fence, and a kicking mule. Shall we hang him for engaging in uncivilized, warfare, by stabbing us with pickets poisoned with whitewash, or shall we take the red-headed slim-jim back with us as a curiosity." The boys all said not to hang me, but to take me along. I saw that it was all day with me this time. I felt that I was helping put down the rebellion rapidly, as I had been a soldier four weeks, been captured ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck

... the whitewash on the wall! Whi—ter than the whitewash on the wall! If yer leadin' us to slaughter Let us 'ave our soap an' water—FIRST! Then we'll be whiter than the ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall

... birth, and have known that the brightest feather in his cap was the fact that having been humbly born he had made himself what he was,—he had never ceased to be ashamed of the stable-yard. And as he felt himself to be degraded by that from which he had sprung, so did he think that the only whitewash against such dirt was to be found in the aggrandisement of his daughter and the nobility of her children. He had, perhaps, been happier than he deserved. He might have sold her to some lord who would have scorned her after a while and despised himself. As it was, the Marquis, who was his ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... she had a long whitewash brush she would advertise her book, the "Twin Crimes," by paintin' a drunken man in a hovel beatin' his wife and children, whilst America wuz furnishin' him with the clubs, and the "Wild and Warlike Deeds of Men" in ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... the three were instantly drawn down to earth again by the near, sharp click of opening bolts and locks, and the green gates swung heavily in before them. The jail-yard was light with whitewash, and two great lamps in front of round reflectors shone with blinding force in their faces, and made them start suddenly backward, as though they had been caught in the act and held in the circle ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis

... from the earliest work by Giotto of which we have any knowledge. In it were the portraits of Dante, Latini, and several others. This picture was painted on a wall of the Podesta at Florence, and when Dante was exiled from that city his portrait was covered with whitewash; in 1841 it was restored to the light, having been hidden for centuries. It is a precious memento of the friendship between the great artist and the divine poet, who expressed his admiration ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement

... something's going on there; nobody seems to know just what. Inventory, maybe, or getting ready for a bankrupt sale. The Benson sign's still up just as it was before Hugh's father died. Windows covered with white soap or whitewash. Some say the store's going to open up under new parties—guess nobody knows exactly. Hullo! ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond

... break out then about Joe; but she never mentioned him, except to tell me that she had heard of his death. She did not whitewash the next day, for Charles came down with the measles, and was tended by her with a fretful tenderness. Veronica was seized soon after, and then Arthur, and then I had them. Veronica was the worst patient. ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... seasons and the wretched trading system have impoverished the fishermen, while the opening of the southern mines has taken away some of the most able-bodied. Here and there a braver cottage still boasts a coat of whitewash and a mixture of cod oil and red dust on the roof. But for the most part there is a sombre, dejected look about the human part of the harbour that suggests nothing ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... consisted merely of the entrance of one man after another carrying silver dishes; for everything was cold, although exceedingly sumptuous and solid. There were chickens all covered with a beautiful thick whitewash, on which little hearts and stars cut out of truffles were sprinkled. There was a tongue all over varnish, like the dainty foot of a giant Cinderella. There were custards and tarts and jellies. There were also bottles exactly like ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas

... chapels from the ambulatory. During the time that succeeded the Reformation many changes were made in the fittings of the church, galleries were erected in the transept and at the west end of the nave where the organ was placed. The walls were covered with whitewash, and probably with a view to make it easier to warm the church, walls were built behind the triforium arcading all round the church. These walls are shown in some of the illustrations made a few ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins

... that fact will whitewash me in your eyes; not that I wasn't working for myself, too, and not that I'm trying to make more excuses by explaining this. But I'd like you to understand, at least for the sake of your own pride, that you haven't been cheated ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... warm rain water, will prove a safe and easy antacid, etc., and will change, if carefully applied, discolored spots upon carpets, and indeed, all spots, whether produced by acids or alkalies. If one has the misfortune to have a carpet injured by whitewash, this will ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... Popish practice; accordingly, the most clumsy heathen sculptures decorate that edifice at present. It is fortunate that the paintings, too, were spared, for painting and drawing were wofully unsound at the close of the last century; and it is far better for our eyes to contemplate whitewash (when we turn them away from the clergyman) than to look at Opie's pitchy ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... two teaspoonfuls of chalk (or whiting, or whitewash scraped from the wall or a fence) mixed with a wineglass of water. Beat four eggs in a glass of milk, add a tablespoonful of ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various

... taken such superhuman pains, to be torn away from her like this! It was to have brought her such credit from Miss Roscoe, for even if it did not win the prize, it would surely be highly commended. And she had made herself a party to a fraud, for however much she might try to whitewash her act, she knew she had no right to allow Netta to ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil

... is said to have been the place where the Lady Mabel was condemned to render penance, by walking hither from Haighhall barefooted and barelegged for the performance of her devotions. This relic, to which an anecdote so curious is annexed, is now unfortunately ruinous. Time and whitewash, says Mr. Roby, have altogether defaced the effigies of the knight and lady on the tomb. The particulars are preserved in Mr. Roby's Traditions of Lancashire, [Footnote: A very elegant work, 2 vols. 1829. By J. Roby, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... their further advance would intimidate his inexperienced burghers, gave the order to fire. Immediately a storm of bullets and shells burst on the British guns, both field and Naval. The Boers knew the exact range from whitewash marks on the railway fence and adjacent stones; their fire was therefore from the outset accurate.[232] The field batteries, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Hunt, continued to go forward at a steady trot and came into action ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice

... mine now, Rufus, and then I want you to get me a—a hammer and some nails. Also a bucket of whitewash," I said as I closed the door upon the Birds and preceded him to ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess

... marked the ceiling over the north-east corner of the apartment, said to have dropped down from the room above, where an unfortunate poacher, who had been much injured by a gun, was confined. It is asserted that for many years no water could remove nor whitewash ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls

... confraternita appended to it. One portion of the building was painted with the history of the saint; and very lovely must this work have been, to judge by the fragments which have recently been rescued from whitewash, damp, and ruthless mutilation. What wonderful Lombard faces, half obliterated on the broken wall and mouldering plaster, smile upon us like drowned memories swimming up from the depths of oblivion! Wherever three or four are grouped together, we find ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... pupil not to study his arithmetic lesson but an hour a day, on penalty. Of course it might happen occasionally that the pupil in an earnest desire to please, might not study at all, yet there are exceptions to all rules, and we must remember that when Tom Sawyer forbade the boys using his whitewash-brush, the scheme ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... whitewash brush was handed to the leader. Si dipped it deeply into the pot of hot tar, and approached the ...
— The Young Oarsmen of Lakeview • Ralph Bonehill

... and the whole rank of cigar-boxes slid from their place, turned gracefully over as they shot through the air, and emptied themselves plump upon the head of the slapped manager. Breathless, dirty, pale as whitewash, he gasped a threat to be heard from again, and, getting round the corner as quick as he could walk, left Kristian Koppig, standing motionless, the most ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... excitement; and the well-known fact that factory towns are very immoral is no accident, but the direct result of monotony and opportunity. It's bad enough that men and women have to become parts of the machine and thus lowered in dignity, worth and achievement; it is adding cruelty to this to whitewash windows, prohibit any conversation and count every movement. Before you may expect loyalty you must deserve it, and the record of the owners of industry warrants no great loyalty on the part of their employees. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... face with a gaunt and bleached world. Then we stirred from our stupor, and sat looking at each other's stale faces. We had shrieked and clanked our way into some great naked station, shivering raw and cold under the electric lights, streaked with black shadows on its whitewash and patched with coarse advertisements. The porters' voices echoed in the void, shouting "Piacensa," "Parma," "Reggio," "Modena," "Bologna," with infinite relish for the varied hues of a final a. One or two ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett



Words linked to "Whitewash" :   licking, exculpate, assoil, defeat, discharge, cover up, clearing, gloss over, clear, calcimine, acquit, wash, cover, exonerate, sleek over, hush up



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