"Dingy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plan we could hit on—and had him well cried '|Missing|!! Stolen or Strayed, Lost or Mislaid, |A Gentleman|;—middle-aged, sober and staid; Stoops slightly;—and when he left home was arrayed In a sad-colored suit, somewhat dingy and frayed; Had spectacles on with a tortoise-shell rim, And a hat rather low crowned, and broad in the brim. Whoe'er shall bear, Or send him with care, (Right side uppermost) home; or shall give notice where Said middle-aged |Gentleman| is; or shall state Any fact, that may tend ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... carriage rolling round the square, almost as fine as the countess's, which has whisked away her ladyship to other regions. A boarding-house mayhap succeeds the physician, who has followed after his sick folks into the new country; and then Dick Tinto comes with his dingy brass plate, and breaks in his north window, and sets up his sitters' throne. I love his honest moustache, and jaunty velvet jacket; his queer figure, his queer vanities, and his kind heart. Why should he not ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The big dingy tent where the performance was to come off was lighted. Philemon followed Mons. Duval into the small tent behind the large one, where those who were to take ...
— Harper's Young People, July 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... possible detail concerning the latest arrival. The inn's exterior corresponded with its interior. Long, and consisting only of two storeys, the building had its lower half destitute of stucco; with the result that the dark-red bricks, originally more or less dingy, had grown yet dingier under the influence of atmospheric changes. As for the upper half of the building, it was, of course, painted the usual tint of unfading yellow. Within, on the ground floor, there stood a number of benches heaped ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... that's wot it is. Wy, blimy, Narrer ill-lighted streets is our best friends. Yer dingy nooks and slums, sombre and slimy, Is gifts wot Prowidence most kyindly sends To give hus chaps a chance of perks and pickins; But if the Town's chock-full of "arc" and "glow," With you and me, NAN, it will play the dickens. We must turn 'onest, NAN, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 21, 1891 • Various
... all shivered in its awful grasp. Upon stately avenues and noisome alleys it fell with the like blackness of darkness. Women cried aloud to God with the same agonized entreaty from knees bent on velvet carpets or bare and dingy floors. Men wandered up and down, prisoners in their own homes, and cursed or prayed with equal fury or intensity whether the homes were simple or splendid. Here one surveyed all his costly store of rare and exquisite surroundings, and shook his head ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... all round; Captain Whalley filling the depths of the wicker-chair seemed to sit benumbed in a canvas tent crudely lighted, and used for the storing of nautical objects; a shabby steering-wheel, a battered brass binnacle on a stout mahogany stand, two dingy life-buoys, an old cork fender lying in a corner, dilapidated deck-lockers with loops of thin rope ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... sufferer, but is convinced it is all for the best. Well, let her continue in her dreary beliefs; she has no garden to teach her the beauty and the happiness of holiness, nor does she in the least desire to possess one; her convictions have the sad gray colouring of the dingy streets and houses she lives amongst—the sad colour of humanity in masses. Submission to what people call their "lot" is simply ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don't listen to the ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... large gloomy chamber while she mounted the stair leading directly from the front. The blackened fireplace gaping uncovered for the summer, the woodwork, painted yellow with an artificial graining, and a stiff set of ebonized chairs, their dingy crimson plush backs protected by elaborate thread antimacassars, seemed to hold and reflect the misfortunes of their owner. Jeremy picked up an ostrich egg, painted with a clump of viciously green coconut ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... her. Straightway the Bishop suspended the Governor's chaplain. Then the Governor fined the Bishop in the sum of fifty pounds. The Bishop refused to pay, and was committed to Castle Rushen, and lay there two months. They show us his cell, a poor, dingy little box, so damp in his day that he lost the use of some of his fingers. After that the Bishop appealed to the Lord, who declared the imprisonment illegal. The Bishop was liberated, and half the island went to the prison gate to fetch him forth in triumph. The only result was ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... own business," interrupted the mistress, whose candle was already lighting up the passageway. I had barely time to squat down again behind the cask, when the old woman, stooping beneath the low, dingy ceiling, passed from one keg to another, mumbling as she went: "Oh! the little wretch. How she lets the wine leak. I'll teach her to close the spigots tighter; did ever any one see the like?" The candle threw great shadows against the damp ...
— The Dean's Watch - 1897 • Erckmann-Chatrian
... the wake of the tug-boat Platypus, slow and toil some, set Jim in an itch of impatience. He was longing to feel land under his feet once more, and was leaning over the side, his awkwardly-packed canvas bag of belongings at his feet, watching the line of Liardit Beach, with its few dingy buildings standing back from the sea, apprehensive lest this, after all, should prove to be Melbourne, his brave city of refuge, when Lucy Woodrow approached him ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... wears a lively aspect. You see a thousand boatmen, raftmen, and millmen, some warping dingy scows, others loading huge square-sided ships; busy gangs of men in fustian jackets, engaged in running off the newly sawed timber; and the streets bustling with storekeepers, lumber- merchants, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... who was born to sing! They have made him a cage; they have clipped his wing; They have shut him up in a dingy street, And they praise his singing and call it sweet; But his heart and his song are saddened and filled With the woods and the nest he never will build, And the wild young dawn coming into the tree, And the mate that never his mate will be; And day by day, when his notes are heard, They ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... opposite the church, fell rapidly for a hundred yards, and then, recovering its balance, sauntered easily down the slope till it met Botany Road on level ground. It was a street of small houses and large families, and struck the eye as mean and dingy, for most of the houses were standing on their last legs, and paint was scarce. The children used to kick and scrape it off the fences, and their parents rub it off the walls by leaning against them in a ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... wandered on a few steps farther up the dingy road, and then collapsed, a mere bundle of rags, under the ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and a red nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... small, plain one. The floor was bare, save for a couple of braided rugs, the plaster discolored, the walls dingy and glaring. There had never been much beauty in Naomi Holland's environment, and, now that she was dying, there ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... notes of the dog's remonstrance had died away, the oaken stairs in the higher regions of the house creaked under slowly-descending footsteps. In a minute more the first of the female servants made her appearance, with a dingy woolen shawl over her shoulders—for the March morning was bleak; and rheumatism and the cook were ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... with Lady Henry's story fresh in his memory, was somehow poignantly conscious of the old man. Did their two minds hold the same image—of Lady Rose drawing her last breath in some dingy room beside one of the canals that wind through Bruges, laying down there the last relics of that life, beauty, and intelligence that had once made her the darling of the father, who, for some reason still hard to understand, had let her suffer ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fish, Jack!" Tom Raymond remarked several hours later, as he came into the dingy dugout where ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... fruits, jams, jellies, or relishes may have a good bright color, but never have the brilliant reds and greens so often shown in the artificially colored products.[4] The same is true of canned peas, beans, or Brussels sprouts; here the natural product is a dull, rather dingy green, and all bright green samples must be suspected. Foreign articles of this class are ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... rug, done in cross-stitch, black ground and design colours, was discovered in a forgotten corner of a shop, its condition so dingy from the dust of ages that only an expert would ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... all that morning in the great drawing-room on the first floor. It was a room of rich furniture, grown dingy with dust and inattention, and crowded from end to end with tables and chairs and sofas, on which were heaped in a confused medley, pictures, statues of marble, fans and buckles from Spain, queer barbaric ornaments, ivory carvings from the Chinese. Sir Charles could hardly ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... lunch with us, and packed ourselves and our dingy packages on to the wet floor. The motor buzzed up and downhill, incessantly twisting and turning: what we could see of the view from the back waved to and fro like Alpine scenery seen in the cinematograph. Stajitch became violently ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... appearance of the Bishop of Devizes; a portly courtly man, he brought to the dingy little Mission House in Lima Street that very sense of richness and grandeur which Mark had anticipated. The Bishop's pink plump hands of which he made such use contrasted with the lean, scratched, and grimy hands of his father; the Bishop's hair white and glossy made his ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... Lester, her jewels flashing in a chance ray of sunlight which had found its way through the dingy court. "Where ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... opinions, having quite as much to do with their formation as the responsible father—Reason. Think of certain hideous manufacturing towns where the piety is chiefly a belief in copious perdition, and the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy surface of wall pierced by the ugliest windows, the staring shop-fronts, paper-hangings, carpets, brass and gilt mouldings, and advertising placards, have an effect akin to that of malaria; it is easy to understand that with such ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Angel's Camp, a place well known to readers of Bret Harte. But it rained pretty steadily, and they put in most of their time huddled around the single stove of the dingy hotel of Angel's, telling yarns. Among the stories was one told by a dreary narrator named Ben Coon. It was about a frog that had been trained to jump, but failed to win a wager because the owner ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... never forget—women, shivering in ragged clothing, with babes in their arms and gaunt, unhappy faces and eyes that looked at you as if they were eternally asking something and afraid to ask! Most of them had some scrap of dingy crepe somewhere about them—had lost their men at the battle-front! And little children gulping down the hot soup as though they were starved! Tante said it was the only meal most of them had during the day. After her work was over she and I went into a little room to ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... overseer of the party, was the first to dash up to the middle in the water. "Hi," exclaimed that dingy individual, making a torrent of remarks in Portuguese, while he darted his long pole hither and thither; then, observing that Martin and Barney were gazing at him open mouthed, he shouted, "Look out, boys! here Jim comes! Take care, ole feller, or he ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... it so,—and that it was the Maker's gift and will. Whose else is it? It remains a religious duty, from oldest times, in the East.—Nor could Herr Professor Strauss, when I put the question, deny that for us at present it is still such here in the West! To that dingy fuliginous Operative, emerging from his soot-mill, what is the first duty I will prescribe, and offer help towards? That he clean the skin of him. Can he pray, by any ascertained method? One knows not entirely:—but with soap and a sufficiency of water, he can wash. Even the dull English feel ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... booth I could hear the dictagraph repeating the conversation in the dingy little back room of Albano's, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... from home to make it worth while to leave the school for the eight weeks of holiday. It was dreary indeed sitting in the great school-room, with its long rows of empty desks, with nothing before one to break the monotony of the four walls but the great map of France and the big dusty cross with its dingy wreath of immortelles. It is true, we did not bewail the absence of our companions. In fact, it was with a tranquil sense of security that I began my work every morning in vacation, knowing that I should find all my books in my desk, and my pens and pencils undisturbed; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... elves had been hovering about the dingy hall just then, they would have seen the mother's tired face brighten beautifully when she discovered the gifts, and found that her little girls had been so kindly remembered. Something more brilliant than the mock diamonds in Miss ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... handsome set of sanctuary lamps, after a Florentine design, hang across the chancel. In Formosa Street are the Church schools of St. Saviour's, and in Amberley Road there is a Board School. At the north of Shirland Road is a dingy brick building like a large meeting-room. This is the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church; in it the services are held in Welsh. Across Sutherland Avenue, at the corner of Shirland Road, is a very large brick building faced with red ...
— Mayfair, Belgravia, and Bayswater - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... twenty years. Because of this same mourning, and because she was always talking of the dead, she was called "Widow Anne," and looked on the appellation as a compliment to her fidelity. At the present moment she stood at the gate of her tiny garden, mopping her red eyes with a dingy handkerchief. ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... further to compress the walls of horizon. The sea was not what could be called rough, but merely choppy and fretful, with short waves that would not have troubled a larger craft. The steamer proved to be a small, undistinguished dingy-looking boat, more like a commercial tramp than a government vessel. An officer, apparently the mate, stood on the bridge, sinewy hands grasping the rail, peering ahead into the white mist that was almost a fog. The promenade deck afforded ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... black with age and with the arcing effects of lightning, which, to young Edison, seemed particularly partial to Louisville. "It would strike on the wires," he says, "with an explosion like a cannon-shot, making that office no place for an operator with heart-disease." Around the dingy walls were a dozen tables, the ends next to the wall. They were about the size of those seen in old-fashioned country hotels for holding the wash-bowl and pitcher. The copper wires connecting the instruments to the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... perched on a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me, that I wondered how I could ever have considered the little 'Paul Jones' a large craft. There were other differences, too. The 'Paul Jones's' pilot-house was a cheap, dingy, battered rattle-trap, cramped for room: but here was a sumptuous glass temple; room enough to have a dance in; showy red and gold window-curtains; an imposing sofa; leather cushions and a back to the high bench where visiting ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... expect to get on well with women. Unless with very intimate friends, he was a trifle silent and reserved. Often he was inclined to be pragmatic and sententious, and had a habit of saying unpleasantly bitter things when some careless joke was being made. He was a little dingy in appearance; and a man who had a somewhat cold manner, who was sallow of face, who was obviously getting gray, and who was generally insignificant in appearance, was not the sort of man, one would think, to fascinate an exceptionally handsome girl, who had brains enough to know the fineness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... saw other stately old houses like the one she was in. At first she was never tired of admiring the miracle of spring in London. She realised that no country greenness is equal to the glory of the new leaf against the dingy house-fronts, the green freshness about the black stems and boughs ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... corrected Aileen, firmly. "Now what's the use getting mad about it? It's old and cheap and dingy. The furniture is all worn out. That old piano in there ought to be given away. I won't play on it ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... somewhere, he thought for a moment, and then he remembered that it was in one of Harding's novels. He could detect no difference in the loafers that leaned over the counter talking to the barmaids; they were dingy and dull, whereas the young men from the stalls of the theatre were black and white and clean; but the keenest eye could note nothing further, and a closer inspection showed that even a first division rested on no deeper basis than the chance of evening dress. Civilisation ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... advantages the average middle-class "young gentleman" may reasonably look forward to from emigration to New Zealand. In the first place, he may expect to enjoy robust health, more perfect and enjoyable than he could hope for if tied down to a counting-house stool in the dingy atmosphere of a city. He will exchange the dull monotony of a sedentary occupation in the chill and varying climate of Britain, for a life of vigorous action in a land whose climate is simply superb. When he gets through the briars that must necessarily ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... sat in the dingy, little backroom of the bank, while Robinson's pen scratched busily drawing up the papers, he was conscious of an odd thrill. The land—it was all his own! But with this thrill welled a wave of resentment ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... experience chose this very spot to be the site of Fort Duquesne, afterwards so famous in the border history of our country. Near the close of the war, this post fell into the hands of the English, who changed its name to that of Fort Pitt; which in time gave rise to the busy, thriving, noisy, dingy, fine young town of Pittsburg, a smoky-looking picture of which you may see any time you ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... affection of their fellow men, and I envied the lads I had known in college who led clean lives and who had shunned me—they knew not why—and the happy-go-lucky Quirk and his busy wife; and even old Tuckerman Toddleham, in his dingy ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... from the mainland to Lighthouse Island and one or two more small islands scattered about near the coast was a small but tidy little vessel that was really capable of better speed than most people gave her credit for. She was painted a sort of dingy white, and large black letters along her bow proclaimed her to be none ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... look back. Why should they? To see a barefoot man beside a woman in dingy volante and casaquin, with two or three lads of ten or twelve in front, whose feet have known sunburn and frost but never a shoe, and a damsel or two in cotton homespun dress made of one piece from collar to hem, and pantalettes of the ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... new dress, the vrouw produced her vatdoek from a capacious pocket, and doubled up that dingy article for Marie to kneel on, which she did. Then Pieter Retief, flinging down the book, clasped his hands and uttered this simple, earnest prayer, whereof, strangely enough, every word remains fast in my mind. Coming as it did, not from a printed page, but from ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... time, Bles entered Zora's home. It was a single low, black room, smoke-shadowed and dirty, with two dingy beds and a gaping fire-place. On one side of the fire-place sat the yellow woman, young, with traces of beauty, holding the white child in her arms; on the other, hugging the blaze, huddled a formless heap, wreathed in coils ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... London he attended at the Petty Bag Office. It was situated in the close neighbourhood of Downing Street and the higher governmental gods; and though the building itself was not much, seeing that it was shored up on one side, that it bulged out in the front, was foul with smoke, dingy with dirt, and was devoid of any single architectural grace or modern scientific improvement, nevertheless its position gave it a status in the world which made the clerks in the Lord Petty Bag's office quite respectable ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... entrance. Then one could see his narrow head with his long matted beard underneath a thick lacework of spiders' webs, which hung and floated when stirred by the air. And the hands of the sick man seemed dead under the dingy sheets. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... climbed up to her little attic room. It was cold and comfortless enough, bare of all luxuries, but even here the walls were lined with books, and Erica's little iron bedstead looked somewhat incongruous surrounded as it was with dingy-looking volumes, dusky old legal books, works of reference, books atheistical, theological, metaphysical, or scientific. On one shelf, amid this strangely heterogeneous collection, she kept her own particular treasures—Brian's Longfellow, one or two of Dickens's ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... C——. At least I heard his name distinctly pronounced several times in a lot of talk in Malay language. Oh, yes, I heard it quite distinctly—Almayer, Almayer—and saw Captain C—— smile, while the fat, dingy Rajah laughed audibly. To hear a Malay Rajah laugh outright is a rare experience, I can as sure you. And I overheard more of Almayer's name among our deck passengers (mostly wandering traders of good repute) as they sat all ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... was to sail at daylight, our friends remained with us, and, sitting in the dingy cabin, chatted with Jose about the state of the country. By listening to the talk I learned that General San Martin was a great soldier from Buenos Ayres, who, having overthrown the Spanish power in Chili, was collecting ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... dark enough the next morning to allow the great chimneys to show off their colored fires effectively, when Lynde passed through the dingy main street of K—-and struck into a road which led to the hill country. A short distance beyond the town, while he was turning in the saddle to observe the singular effect of the lurid light upon the landscape, a freight-train ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... overheard one summer night some years ago. The people were late that night, and indeed, it was pleasant to be out. Not as yet were there any of those street lamps along the road which now make all nights alike dingy; but one felt as if walking into the unspoiled country. For though it was after ten, and the sky overcast, still one could see very clearly the glimmering road and the hedgerows in the soft midsummer twilight. Enjoying this tranquillity, I passed by a man ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... to attend mass; being also otherwise distinguished by the half-holiday which permitted the privilege of walking out, shopping, or paying visits in the afternoon: these combined considerations induced a general smartness and freshness of dress. Clean collars were in vogue; the ordinary dingy woollen classe-dress was exchanged for something lighter and clearer. Mademoiselle Zelie St. Pierre, on this particular Thursday, even assumed a "robe de soie," deemed in economical Labassecour an article of hazardous splendour ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... approach and change of shadows, the dusky hue of the broad Potomac, that seemed to drink in the feeble light, which its snow-covered banks gave back to the air, the gradual change of every object from the colouring of bright sunshine to one sad universal tint of dingy purple, the melancholy lowing of the cattle, and the short, but remarkable suspension of all labour, gave something of mystery and awe to the scene that we ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... macadamised road and rattled gaily along to see the town. It is almost pure Burmah here, and the native of India is beautifully scarce; but Chinese abound, and are uncommonly nice-looking people. We drive a mile or so with rather dingy teak and matting houses on trestle legs on either side of the road, overhung with palms and trees, and see the domestic arrangements through open verandahs—women and children winding yellow silk in skeins and cooking, the ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... should say that my mind was, and has always remained, with my mother on such matters. If God gives food for the use of His creatures, it is to His honour and glory to serve it handsomely, so far as may be; and I see little religion in a slovenly piece of meat, or a shapeless hunch of butter on a dingy plate. ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... been for the scent he might have thought it was some animal dodging about among the ditches and dry grasses. Dick could not know that when it had slipped through a gap in the hedge it became, instead of a shadow, a solid little dingy ...
— Dick and Brownie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... built on the trail, and passing through the big front room in which two or three men were lounging, the marshal led his guests to his inner office and sleeping room. A fire was blazing in a big stone fireplace. Skins and dingy blankets were scattered about, and on the mantle stood a ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; for rainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings out to the full the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia. So, when next morning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in a morose palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad that Alan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of groceries and provisions, because it gave her a chance of flinging herself on her bed in a perfect ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... incessantly, sometimes in a soft, unintelligible murmur, sometimes in loud and emphatic tones. His eyes were brilliant but wandering, his movements were abrupt or violent, heedless or feeble, as the moment decreed. He talked about the dingy, nasty fo'cas'le, the absurdity of his not being able to get around, the fine outfit of the Sea Gull, the chill of the water. He sometimes swore softly, almost apologetically, and he uttered most unchristian sentiments ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... harmony of pale tints. Again, the poor little baby princess, with scarce visible features, seemingly kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and modelled) out of the wet ashes of an auto da fe, in her black-and-white frock (how different from the dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and gloomy enough for an abbess or a cameriera major, this childish personification of courtly dreariness, certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the principal strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and ashy light, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... blow. Under the name of Fort Pitt, it was soon rebuilt, and garrisoned with two hundred of Washington's men; and, from that time to the war of the Revolution, it was held by the English, chiefly as a trading-post; and hence the dingy, smoky, noisy, thriving, fast young city ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... material of the doleful sort and went into the most unbecoming of "full mourning." When she made her appearance in church,—which she did, as usual, the very first Sunday after the funeral,—that plainest of bonnets and straitest of black delaines, unadorned save by the old-fashioned and dingy lace-cape, descended through many shifts of saving from her long-ago-dead-and-gone mother, were so manifestly a condescending concession to the conventionalities or superstitions of Hendrik, and said so plainly, "This is for your 'decencies,'—it is all that I can honestly spare, and more than you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... he sighed, "as you will. Pride and bilge-water go well together!" which said he brought me to a dark unlovely hole abaft the mizzen. "'Tis none too clean, Martin," says he, casting the light round the dingy place, "but that shall be remedied and Godby shall bring ye bedding and the like, so although 'tis plaguy dark and wi' rats a-plenty still, despite the stench, you'll lie snug as your pride will permit of. As for me, shipmate, I shall scarce close an eye till we be clear o' the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of this rabble was dingy, dirty, earthy. The spectacle which it was expecting was evidently one of the sort which possess the privilege of bringing out and calling together the vilest among the populace. Nothing is so hideous as the noise which was made by that swarm of yellow caps ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... in the hands of a seventh son's seventh son, and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old Aladdin's lamp. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... purple and argent as at delicious rare sips of a wine. Breath of violet, and ladysmock, and valley-lily, mingled and fluttered about her. Farina was as a man working the day's intent in a dream. He could see the heart in her translucent, hanging like a cold dingy ruby. By the purity of his nature he felt that such a presence must have come but to help. It might be Margarita's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... she was to come, every one began at once to wear his best suit, and to take the greatest care of it. Old King Bear appeared every day in a suit of glossy black. Lightfoot the Deer, threw away his dingy gray suit, and put on a coat of beautiful red and fawn. Mr. Mink, Mr. Otter, Mr. Muskrat, Mr. Rabbit, Mr. Woodchuck, Mr. Coon, who you know was first cousin to old King Bear, Mr. Gray Squirrel, Mr. Fox Squirrel, Mr. Red Squirrel, all put ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... the little dingy building not far from the south end of the horse-sheds are seen standing open, it is a pretty sure sign that somebody lies dead in the parish. In this gloomy place the sexton keeps his dismal apparatus,—the hearse, with its curtains of rusty sable, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... his day, one of the strongest intellectual forces then at work, one of the greatest personalities then alive. But it would no more have occurred to him to dream of administrative honors and a place in a Ministry than it would have occurred to George the Third to send one of his equerries to the dingy lodgings of an author with the request that Dr. Johnson would step round to St. James's Palace and favor his Majesty with his opinion on this subject or on that. It is not certain that the King would have gained ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... they reached the open prairie, and struck a harder bottom, the horses mended their paces, she felt sensibly relieved. At length they entered a small, new town, and drew up before a large, awkward building. The steps were lowered and Annie alighted, and soon found herself in a long, dingy apartment, with a bright pine-wood fire blazing and crackling in a huge, yawning fire-place at its farthest extremity. She was chilled, and sat down before the glowing hearth to warm her benumbed fingers. Presently a tall woman, in a short-sleeved ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... for granted that a sweep must inhabit a dingy hovel, and certainly the crowded filth of the Barbican promised nothing better as we threaded our way among fishermen, fish-jowters, blowzy women, and children playing hop-scotch with the heads of decaying fish. At the seaward end ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mission come to render to the manufacture of paper in course of time, giving the name of Serampore to a variety known all over India. At first Carey was compelled to print his Bengali Testament on a dingy, porous, rough substance called Patna paper. Then he began to depend on supplies from England, which in those days reached the press at irregular times, often impeding the work, and was most costly. This was not ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... and heavy bushes. On the opposite side is a small, square veranda. The building, which is two stories and a half high, was apparently a cheerful yellow color in the beginning, but it has become dingy with time and weather. The scars of its long battle with fate give it the appearance of being about to crumble and crash, after the fashion of the "House of Usher." It has windows with gloomy casements, ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... by side with the consulting-room made her speculate. She imagined the doctor's wife, probably in that kitchen, a hard-browed bony North German woman. She saw the clear-eyed man at his meals; and imagined his slippers. There were dingy books in the room ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... were coming and going and nobody paid particular attention to the youth until he gained the dingy office, where two men were smoking and talking over the merits of ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... it, it was a long, low room, with streets and cross-streets of pine book-shelves, unpainted, all filled with books to their utmost capacity—a wilderness of books, in print and in manuscript, mostly old and dingy, and almost all of them relating in some way to American history. The place had a very musty smell; and as most of its treasures were in the original bindings, or without bindings, few persons would have suspected ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... reflected fellow-feeling which lent a charm to his spoken sermons; and on the table-land of his controversial treatises, sentence follows sentence like a file of ironsides, in buff and rusty steel, a sturdy procession, but a dingy uniform; and it is only here and there where a son of Anak has burst his rags, that you glimpse a thought of uncommon stature or wonderful proportions. Like candidates for the modern ministry, in his youth Owen had learned to write Latin, Greek, and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... cried Bob excitedly; and, rising from a stooping position, in which his shoulder was right underneath, he threw a dingy-looking little fresh-water ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... fire originated, and which we were assured was surrounded on all sides by the water casks, we ventured to cherish hopes that it might be subdued; but no sooner was the light blue vapour that at first arose succeeded by volumes of thick, dingy smoke—which speedily ascending through all the four hatchways, rolled over every part of the ship—than all further concealment became impossible, and almost all hope of preserving the vessel was abandoned. "The flames have reached the cable tier," was exclaimed by some individuals, ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... romance of steel? There isn't any, yet. Generations hence, when the last turbine comes puffing into port, taking its place like a dingy collier in the midst of ether-driven hydroplanes—some youth on the waterfront, perhaps, will turn his back on the crowd, and from his own tossing emotions at sight of the old steamer—emotions which defy ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... private doors of the brotherhood, as some visitors were in the habit of doing. Under her guidance, I went into what was formerly the great hall of the establishment, where King James I. had once been feasted by an Earl of Warwick, as is commemorated by an inscription on the cobwebbed and dingy wall. It is a very spacious and barn-like apartment, with a brick floor, and a vaulted roof, the rafters of which are oaken beams, wonderfully carved, but hardly visible in the duskiness that broods aloft. The hall may have made a splendid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... as the train drew forth beyond the purlieus and dingy suburbs of the great seaport and out into the country—our south country, all green and glorious with summer. Can this world show the like of it, for ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... can't make us any worse trouble than we are having. As for myself, I'd rather go to jail with a shirt on, than to sit here in this dingy, gloomy old room half ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... echoed from the dingy walls. She lay on her knees and wrung her hands. "Nicholas, Nicholas, constable, God in heaven, what has he done? I swear he is as innocent as a new-born babe! He never cuts grass in other people's fields, he ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... had been white then and there was scarcely a day but what the passers-by saw the slender girl, in soft fluttering things that contrasted painfully with their dingy calico, the thick gleaming mass of hair that crowned her head wind-tossed into her eyes, standing with her face buried in an armful of crimson blossoms in the same garden where the weeds were now breast high, or running with mad, childish abandon between the high hedgerows. And many a night ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... decided talent for drawing, had sat up late into the night to make her two sketches. One pictured the shanty boat as it was, dingy and dirty, with a broken-down cabin of two rooms at the stern. In the second drawing Madge's fairy wand, which was her gift of imagination, had quite transformed the ugly boat. The deck of the canal boat was about forty feet ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... meantime she made a visit to the Mail office, and perhaps spent an hour or two there, or in the markets; but at least three times a week she wandered over to Old Paloma, and spent the forenoon in the dingy streets across the river. What she did there, perhaps no one but Doctor Brown, who came to have a real affection and respect for her, fully appreciated. Mrs. Burgoyne would tell him, when they met in some hour ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... was the oddest society I have met. The premises consisted of one long dingy room with two dingy windows: the furniture of a long table covered with dirty American cloth, a multitude of wooden chairs, an old sofa, two dilapidated dinner-waggons, and a frame against the wall from which, by means of ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... world has grown since then. Now, behind those hills lie naught but smoky towns and dingy villages; but then they screened a land of wonder where princesses dwelt in castles, where the cities were of gold. Now the ocean is but six days' journey wide, ending at the New York Custom House. Then, had one set one's sail upon it, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... been shut, saw her dimly through the smoky glass, and the mistiness in her eyes; saw her shabby dress, and faded face, and half-longed to go back; remembered sadly how many years had passed since she had left the dingy sea-port town to go to London, and meet her fate, and lose it, and grow old before her time in mourning it; saw her, last of all, and so was whirled up the street, and out of sight. And in like ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... felt her way to the long corridor. Down this she stole as silently as any ghost, wholly indifferent to the eerie influences of the desolate place, spectrally illuminated as it was with faded chequers of moonlight falling through dingy windows, alive as it was with the groans and complaints of uneasy planks and timbers and the frou-frou, like that of silken skirts, of rats and mice scuttling between its flimsy walls. These counted ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... interrupted Miss Debby, "only I heard Matilda Shipley say yesterday, that there would be no use in dressing much for Mrs. Pelby Smith's party, as her low rooms, with their dingy, dirt-colored paper, could never be lighted up to make any ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the capital is the place in which to seek one's fortune, and to find it. He had not expected streets paved with gold, nor yet with the metaphorical plenty of penny loaves; but an indefinite disappointment weighs upon him as he passes through quarters fully as dingy and poverty-stricken as those in his ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... the midst of its own darkness," frowning out upon us like the Past disturbed, and far off in the clear ether, as in another and a better world, the dim Shepherds of Etive pointing, like ghosts at noonday, to the weird shadows of Glencoe;—not greater was this change, than is that from the dingy, oppressive, weary "cemetery" of mere word-knowledge to the open air, the light and liberty, the divine infinity and richness of nature and ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... hundred yards when we saw before us a group of mounted officers in handsome uniforms, with plumes nodding and arms glittering. I had somehow or other pictured to myself the rebel generals as a dingy-looking set, like the Covenanters of old, or Cromwell's Invincibles, and I could scarcely persuade myself that those I saw were officers of the enemy's army. Among them rode one whom the eye would not fail to single out from the rest—tall, handsome, and graceful—the noble ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... You give them grace, they nothing give to you. Why, after all, you make the wreath look well; But somewhat dingy, where it lies against Your pulsing temple, sullen with disgrace. Ah! well, your Count should be the proudest man That ever led a lady into church, Were he a modern Alexander. Poh! What are his trophies to a ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... forward, as if intent on Dyce's movements, but his elbow rested on the arm of the rocking chair, and holding his hand up to screen his face from the blaze of the fire, he was closely watching Bedney. When Dyce shook out and held up a faded, dingy blue silk handkerchief, the lawyer noted a sudden twinkle in the old man's eyes, but no other feature moved, and he stooped to take a coal of fire ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... way up the river the Americans had passed, at long intervals, a few small rubber estates, whose headquarters consisted mainly of a crude shack or two, hardly better than the dingy houses of Remate de Males. This place was more imposing. They had observed, while crossing the cleared space, that it was at least half a mile square; that its warehouse for supplies was big and solid; that a goodly number of barracaos, or rubber workers' huts, surrounded ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... gloomy back bedroom on the third story of the boarding-house he lay on a bed hung with dingy curtains, but in the dignity which was one of his inheritances. Under the dark, close-cut moustache, his lips seemed to smile faintly, perhaps in amusement at the folly of his life, perhaps in surprise at finding ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... trembled as he tore open the dingy packet. Old Moreno came forth with a light, his white teeth gleaming, his black eyes flashing from one to another of the group. Holding the pencilled page close to the lantern, the ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... of his dingy straw hat a white bandage was drawn tight around his head—so tight that from its under edge the coarse black hair bristled out in a distinct fringe. The blow of the wrench, then, must have cut through ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... come out because she was restless and was tired of the dingy and uncomfortable room. Without any definite intentions, she naturally followed the trail that Swiftwater had broken the day before. No wind stirred and the sky was clear. But it was very cold. The sun would not be up for half ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... which travelled a single rusty hand. In its shadow to the right lay the home of the Archdeacon, a stately mansion with Corinthian columns reaching to the roof and surrounded by a spacious garden filled with damask roses and bushes of sweet syringa. To the left crouched a row of dingy houses built of brick, their iron balconies hung in flowering vines, the windows glistening with panes of ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... it, I retreated to the deserted picture gallery. The only person there was one who interested me more than the scarlet patriot, Bulwer-Lytton the First. He was sauntering to and fro with his hands behind his back, looking dingy in his black satin scarf, and dejected. Was he envying the Italian hero the obsequious reverence paid to his miner's shirt? (Nine tenths of the men, and still more of the women there, knew nothing of the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... of the maison meublee—worn carpet, discoloured and dingy wallpaper, faded rep curtains and mahogany bedstead with a vast edredon, like a giant pincushion. My candle, guttering wildly in the unaccustomed breeze blowing dankly through the chamber, was the sole illuminant. There was neither gas nor ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... the floor, which also was littered with dingy masculine apparel flung about at random. Pockets of trousers and of coats had been turned inside out, in what apparently had been a hasty ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... of Lost Valley. It was an utter alien. Its colour was a dingy black, as if it had recently been through fire, its coat rough and unkempt. Its long head was heavy and slug-like, its nose of the type known among horsemen as Roman. It was roughly built, raw-boned and angular, and of so stupendous a size that the man atop, ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... with a want of glow and colour. The thick masses of dark hair were plaited into a very long thick tail behind, hanging down over a black evening frock, whose white trimmings were, like everything else about the place, rather dingy. She was far less absorbed than her father, and raised a quick, wistful brown eye whenever he made the least sound, or shuffled his papers. Indeed, it seemed that she was reading in order to distract her anxiety rather than for the sake ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the lamentable weakness of much in my 'Seraphim' volume, I don't complain of the 'Seagull' and 'Doves' and the simple verses, but exactly of the more ambitious ones. I have had to rewrite pages upon pages of that volume. Oh, such feeble rhymes, and turns of thought—such a dingy mistiness! Even Robert couldn't say a word for much of it. I took great pains with the whole, and made considerable portions new, only your favourites were not touched—not a word touched, I think, in the 'Seagull,' ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Kakisa, however, an incredibly ragged and dirty old man with a dingy cotton fillet around his snaky locks, hailed them with wild shouts of laughter, paddled to meet them, and clung to the dug-out, fondly stroking Stonor's sleeve. The sight of Clare caused him to go off into fresh shrieks of good-natured merriment. His name, he informed them, ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... roundabouts, sword-swallowers in purple fleshings, Amazons in green plush and spangles were gay enough. Booths, roundabouts, Amazon queens, and the rest are the only chance of colour the English people have, and no wonder they love them. But in themselves and in mass the crowds were drab, dingy, and black. Even "ostridges" and "pearlies," that used to break the monotony like the exchange of men's and women's hats, are thought to be declining. America may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say nothing of the East and Africa, could so colourless a ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... at the Fleur-de-Lis, they entered without ceremony into a spacious room—low, with heavy beams and with roughly plastered walls, which were stuck over with proclamations of governors and intendants and dingy ballads brought by sailors ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... standing desolate in mouldering, unoccupied rooms, or stored away in this place. One or two immense packing-boxes, in which this furniture was brought, stood against the sides of the garret. There was a small window there, which let in, through its dingy, dusty panes, a scanty, uncertain light on the tall, high-backed chairs and dusty tables, that had once seen better days. Altogether, it was a weird and ghostly place; but, ghostly as it was, it wanted not in legends among ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... once a year? It is the English Sparrow, the commonest of all our birds. His hair is gray, but he must have been red-headed once, for just back of his ears there is still a band of red; and his collar, maybe, was white once, but it is very dingy now. His shirt and vest are gray; his coat is brown with black streaks—a sort of sporting tweed. The new cravat comes when the new feathers grow in late summer; and, at first, it is barred with gray as ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... were signs of animation about the caravan. Heads of women performers began to protrude from a couple of dingy-covered wagons, and every eye was turned up to the rocky hillside where the flags fluttered in the ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... still littered the ground in the vicinity. A board walk led from the street to the wide, arched entrance. From the steps one could look down the street at the station and the other buildings squatting in the sunlight, dingy with the dust of many dry days. Except for the cowponies and the buckboard and the prairie schooner there was a total absence of life or movement, offering a striking contrast to the bustling cities to which the young man ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... full gathers of her cotton skirt. Around her neck was one of the garish-colored kerchiefs which had come with her from her own country. It was an ugly thing, but gave a picturesque bit of color to her otherwise dingy garb. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... until, at last, just under the ground-glass roofing, the names of Smith and Hanbury were to be seen painted in large white letters across a panel, with a laconic invitation to push beneath it. Following out the suggestion, the Admiral and his companion found themselves in a dingy apartment, ill lit from a couple of glazed windows. An ink-stained table, littered with pens, papers, and almanacs, an American cloth sofa, three chairs of varying patterns, and a much-worn carpet, constituted all the furniture, save only a very large and obtrusive porcelain ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... my cup of wine!" As he ended this rude chant Jacques saw the long finger run back into the shrivelled hand, as a telescope slips back into its case, and then the hand was wrapped up in the dingy garment, and with a dreadful shiver, and a chattering of teeth as loud as the noise of the anvils now heard on the same spot, the ugly man was wafted away round the corner of the building like a thick gust of smoke from a newly ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... Randon, went up at once, but he lingered, facing the Cuban. Venalez had a long brown countenance, with a disordered moustache. His trousers were thrust into the customary dingy boots, but his shirt was confined at the waist, and he had dispensed with a machete. He grew uneasy under Lee's stare, and shuffled his feet; then, behind a soiled thin hand, he coughed. It was clear that ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... straggling country village, between low wooded hills, with a canal passing through it. Old Japanese cottages, dingy, neutral-tinted, with roofs of thatch, very steeply sloping, above their wooden walls and paper shoji. Green patches on all the roof-slopes, some sort of grass; and on the very summits, on the ridges, luxurious growths of yaneshobu, [1] the roof-plant, bearing pretty ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... her trunk, trying to run through the last hundred pages of a novel from the Hotel Library before her departure. PODBURY is in the Hotel, negotiating for sandwiches. CULCHARD is practising his Italian upon a very dingy gentleman in smoked spectacles, with ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... up the stairs, sobbing. Howard followed her. They shared a dressing room now. It was small, and Freddy was in the way, although he tried to squeeze himself into the corner by the dingy stationary washstand. Howard shoved Freddy. Florette protested. The quarrelling broke out afresh. Howard tipped over a bottle of liquid white. Florette screamed at him, and he raised his fist. Freddy darted out of ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... sanctum, scanning a still damp sheet of proof. His brow was furrowed, but the lines were those of conscious power. In the broken chair by the littered desk sat Billy Durgin, his eyes ablaze with the lust of the chase. As I pushed into the dingy little room Solon halted in his walk and, with a flourish that did not entirely lack the dramatic, he handed me the narrow strip of paper. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... large, dingy, dirty, water-stained and somewhat dilapidated hall to which the stone stair, ascending immediately from the door, led them; and it would have looked considerably worse but for the obscurity belonging to the nature of the entertainment, through which it took some pains to discover ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... and walks rapidly southward up the street two squares, turns to the right and as he approaches the next corner fixes his eyes on an upper window in a three-story building across the way. This is a somewhat dingy structure, originally of red brick and now gray. It shows the touch of age and dust. Built for a dwelling, it is now a factory. I do not know what is made there; the things that are commonly made in a factory, I suppose. I only know ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... first fairy day-dreams of his genius, the day-school, where the master had already formed a good opinion of his parts, giving him Goldsmith's "Bee" as a keepsake. This pleasant land he left for a dingy house in a dingy London suburb, with squalor for companionship, no teaching but the teaching of the streets, and all around and above him the depressing hideous atmosphere of debt. With what inimitable humour and pathos has he told ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... window of a dingy looking brick building, which bore on its time-worn exterior its true character of that resort for friendless poverty, "a cheap lodging house," sat Clemence Graystone, gazing abstractedly into the gathering gloom of the night. The fair, ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... the Asiatic riff-raff from the docks— was silent, save for the squealing and scuffling of the rats. The melancholy lapping of the water frequently reached my ears, and a more or less continuous din from the wharves and workshops upon the further bank of the Thames; but in the narrow, dingy streets immediately surrounding the house, quietude reigned and no solitary footstep ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... given object lessons upon sealing wax and silk-worms and potato bugs and ginger and iron and such like things, and taught various other subjects his mind refused to entertain, and afterwards, when he was about twelve, he was jerked by his parent to "finish off" in a private school of dingy aspect and still dingier pretensions, where there were no object lessons, and the studies of book-keeping and French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken) under the guidance of an elderly gentleman who wore a nondescript gown and took snuff, wrote copperplate, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... fresh paint; nor does it seek to attract notice by posters and bills. On the contrary, it retains the old, small, and unpretending panes of glass which it has always had; in the evening it is dimly lighted, and it closes early; its door is always shut, and although the name over the shop is dingy, one feels that a coat of paint, while it would certainly freshen up the place, would take something from its character. For a second-hand bookseller who respects himself must present an exterior which has something of faded splendor, of worn paint and shabbiness. Within ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... to Fleet-st. As the result of inquiries Spencer was deposited at the entrance to a dingy court, the depths of which, he was assured, were illumined by "The Firefly." There is nothing that so mystifies the citizen of the New World as the hole-and-corner aspect of some of the business establishments of London. He soon learns, however, to differentiate between the spidery ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... And shutting in, with its damp, strong hands, The rosy faces in curls, and bands Of girls who think, with unwonted frown Of the charming laces and things down-town, That might as well for this tiresome rain, Be in the rose land of Almahain: The horrid rain, the tedious rain, The never-ending, dingy rain! ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... which we enter, that of the Faubourg St. Denis, presents a strange contrast to the dark uniformity of a London street, where everything, in the dingy and smoky atmosphere, looks as though it were painted in India-ink—black houses, black passengers, and black sky. Here, on the contrary, is a thousand times more life and color. Before you, shining in the sun, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in toward shore, looked like a giant butterfly; and her name, emblazoned in gold on her prow, was, appropriately, the Farfalla. Earlier in the season, with a green hull and a dingy brown sail, she had been, prosaically enough, the Maria. But since the advent of the girl all this had been changed. The Farfalla dropped her yellow wings with the air of a salute, and lighted at the foot of the water-steps under the terrace. ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... a pity," said Mary. "I prefer the green fields, and the woods, and the gay flowers, and the songs of birds, to the narrow streets, the dingy houses, and the cries of London; but yet I opine that happiness comes from within, and that, if the heart is at rest, contentment may ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... flabby neck, the squire could make out the unwholesome contour of the huge bird. He could see the ragged black wings—a buzzard's wings are so often ragged and uneven—and the naked throat; the slim, naked head; the big feet folded up against the dingy belly. And he could see a bell too—an undersized cowbell—that dangled at the creature's breast and jangled incessantly. All his life nearly Squire Gathers had been hearing about the Belled Buzzard. Now with his own eye ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... yacht was so great that before the two dazed salts on board realized what had happened their master was far astern. They bustled to bring the Enchantress about and to come to his rescue in the dingy. Stunned by the blow of the—spar, he had gone down like a stone; so, in all probability, they would have been too late. When he came up the second time it was on the port bow of the Firefly, but completely out of reach. Giving the tiller to her ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... on him perch, Quickened with guilty lightnings—there It shall in vain for terror search, Where a child's eyes beneath bloody hair Gaze purely through the dingy air. ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... my room, that I was bordering upon, if not within, the oldest portion of the pile. In sudden horror, lest I should hear a light footfall upon the awful stair, I withdrew hurriedly, and having secured both the doors, betook myself to my bedroom; in whose dingy four-post bed, with its carving and plumes reminding me of a hearse, I was soon ensconced amidst the snowiest linen, with the sweet and clean odour of lavender. In spite of novelty, antiquity, speculation, and dread, I was soon fast asleep; becoming thereby a fitter inhabitant of such ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... a squint," said a dingy gray old man sitting apart. For some reason of his own Beale let the old man take the box into his hand. But he kept very close to him and he kept his ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... all turned like needles to the north, and stared as the spider-light wagon, glistening with varnish, bore down on them, looking singularly distinguished and costly among the dingy business-vehicles which made up the traffic of the crowded street. The young driver guided the high-stepping gray with a reckless, competent hand through the most incredibly narrow openings and sent ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... to wish that the comparison I had drawn for the Konak was a more just one, and that inside its card-board classicalism could be found the slightest approach to American hospitality. Not an inn of any kind exists in Canea: a dirty, dingy restaurant, which called itself "The Guest-House of the Spheres," offered one small bedroom, which the filth of the place, with its suggestions of bugs and fleas, forbade the title of a sleeping-room. While the yacht stayed I had a bed; but after that it was a dreary prospect for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... sofa had been introduced, and horrid chintz affair, most unprelatical and almost irreligious; such a sofa as never yet stood in the study of any decent high church clergyman of the Church of England. The old curtains had also given away. They had, to be sure, become dingy, and that which had been originally a rich and goodly ruby had degenerated into a reddish brown. Mr Harding, however, thought the old reddish brown much preferable to the gaudy buff-coloured trumpery moreen which Mrs Proudie had deemed ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... another time. I was on sentry go at a dingy place, a village where the people make their living by selling bad beer and weak wine to one another. Nearly every house in the place is an estaminet. I slept in the guard-room and as my cartridge pouches had ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... As the days elapse it filters down into the manners of the common people, and before the week is over the very beggars at the church-doors seem to have gone to the expense of a domino. When you meet these specimens of dingy drollery capering about in dusky back-streets at all hours of the day and night, meet them flitting out of black doorways between the greasy groups that cluster about Roman thresholds, you feel that a love of "pranks," the more vivid the better, must from far back have been implanted ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... meagre bloom,—every half-tint of the lichens, that scantily fed from the relentless granite rock, yet clung to its stern face with fearless persistence,—the rough seams and velvet green moss-tufts of the oak-trunks,—the light that pierced the dingy hue of oak-leaves with vivid and informing crimson: all these stamped themselves on my mind with inevitable minuteness; the great wheel of Fate rolled over me, and I bore the marks even of its ornamental rim; the grooves in its tire left traces ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... had forgotten one caution: avoid kippered sturgeon as you would the very devil!" The unfortunate Joseph was cut to the pattern of Sir Faraday in every button; he was shod with the health boot; his suit was of genuine ventilating cloth; his shirt of hygienic flannel, a somewhat dingy fabric; and he was draped to the knees in the inevitable greatcoat of marten's fur. The very railway porters at Bournemouth (which was a favourite station of the doctor's) marked the old gentleman for a creature of Sir Faraday. There was but one evidence of personal ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a boat not long ago—a beautiful boat, with a sail and a dingy and everything complete, and it was to be between us. So we took off our shoes and stockings and went down by the quay to sail our boat. It sailed as nicely as any boat could, and we were so pleased with it, but in spite of that we began ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... have neither a moment nor a penny to spare. Sickness, trouble, and the war of the world have been too much for them. They are right up against the wall; and they know it. But the matter does not end there. I remember once entering a dingy little dwelling in the slums of London. In the squalid room a cripple girl sat sewing, and as ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... if her heart and her strength and all her life's hope had gone with the dingy vessel—and emerging on the narrow, crowded street, looked for some shop at which she could buy a roll of bread. Presently she saw a baker's at the opposite side of the road to that on which she was walking, and she was crossing, ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... into a confidence: "Cy, my boy, come aft and splice the main-brace. Cyrus, what a female! She knocked me higher than Gilroy's kite. And her mother was as sweet a girl as you ever saw!" He drew his son into a little, low-browed, dingy room at the end of the hall. Its grimy untidiness matched the old Captain's clothes, but it was his one spot of refuge in his own house; here he could scatter his tobacco ashes almost unrebuked, and play on his harmonicon without seeing Gussie ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... about wis o' Lunda and wir ploys and vaidges, and hoo he wanted tae hae the like too;—weel, the Laird o' Boden mused like upo' what I said; and then he took oot his pocketbook and wrate a peerie letter wi' his pencil. And then he bade me come inta the dingy, and I was tae row ower tae Lunda wi' him. Sae I did as I was bid—after asking his leave tae pit yon message for you upo' the rod. He asked me a heap aboot wis a'—I mean aboot the Manse folk, and Dr. Holtum's bairns, and maist aboot our young Laird and Miss ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... Glory had fled out of the fog was a little dingy tobacconist's shop opening on a narrow alley that runs from Holborn into Lincoln's-Inn Fields. It was kept by the baby farmer whom she had met at the house of Polly Love, and the memory of the address thrust upon her there ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... over, and Lucretia was still in the parlour, which she had appropriated to herself. Her brow contracted as his name was announced, and the maid-servant lighted the candle on the table, stirred the fire, and gave a tug at the curtains. Her eye, glancing from his, round the mean room, with its dingy horsehair furniture, involuntarily implied the contrast between the past state and the present, which his sight could scarcely help to impress on her. But she welcomed him with her usual stately composure, and without reference to what had been. Dalibard was secretly anxious to discover if she suspected ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... yells. The heavy train rolled slowly onward; pipes were alight and men could no longer see one another through the dense clouds of smoke; the heat and odor that emanated from that mass of perspiring human flesh were unendurable, while from the jolting, dingy van came volleys of shouts and laughter that drowned the monotonous rattle of the wheels and were lost amid the silence of the deserted fields. And it was not until they reached Langres that the troops learned that they were being carried ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... but the hush of the summer's stillness was broken by the merry voices of the girls as they made their way through the old castle and peeped out of the windows at their friends in the tennis court below. There was a continual flutter of light dresses through the low doorways and up the dingy stairs, and merry sounds of laughter echoed through the empty chambers. It was the first castle that romantic little Ruth had ever seen; and although she could not gather much of its history from the little books sold at the gate, she tried to imagine the scenes ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... our ever-dropping climate, with its hundred and fifty-two days of annual rain, that we owe our vegetable mould with its rich and beauteous mantle of sward and foliage. And next, stripping from off the landscape its sands and gravels, we see its underlying boulder-clays, dingy and gray, and here presenting their vast ice-borne stones, and there its iceberg pavements. And these clays in turn stripped away, the bare rocks appear, various in colour and uneven in surface, but everywhere grooved and polished, from the sea level and beneath it, to the height of more than a ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... glare. No flowers graced the square ugly rooms, no decorations of any sort; but the parlours were canvased, the best band in town was tuning up, and the supper would be irreproachable. The dark-brown paper of the hall looked very old and dingy, the carpet was threadbare in places, the big teak-wood tables were in everybody's way and looked as if they were meant for the dead to rest on; but when gay gowns were billowing one ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... days, and in a white waistcoat, the old gentleman looked splendid as he moved along in a blue coat with the Windsor button, and neat black small-clothes, and silk stockings. He lived in an old tall dingy house, furnished in the reign of George III., his beloved master, and not much more cheerful now than a family vault. They are awfully funereal, those ornaments of the close of the last century—tall gloomy horse-hair chairs, mouldy Turkey carpets ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Maynard hiking from Oak Creek Station to Pebbly Pit—most likely she will wear French heeled shoes!" said Anne, and she laughed so merrily that waiting passengers in the dingy cars glanced from the tiny windows and felt better for ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy |
