"Ramshackle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neighbor. His ramshackle dwelling was an eighth of a mile from the Gould-Hamilton place. Abner had the reputation of being the meanest man in town; also he had a large family, of which Jimmie, eight years ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... dirty to be eaten, and where the house-master's wife, who sat for an hour on my floor, was sorely afflicted with skin disease. The clay houses have disappeared and the villages are now built of wood, but Abukawa is an antiquated, ramshackle place, propped up with posts and slanting beams projecting into the roadway for the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... was drawn through the streets in a small cart by four dogs. By looking at you he could see all the clockwork inside, as could a boy who was led about by his mother at the end of a string. Every Friday there was the market, when a dozen ramshackle carts containing vegetables and cheap crockery filled the centre of the square, resting in line on their shafts. A score of farmers' wives or daughters in old-world garments squatted against the town-house within walls of butter on cabbage-leaves, eggs and chickens. Towards evening ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... work of her head and hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions. By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers. At college she had learned a trade without knowing it. The girls had found out that she was the designer of her own gowns. She had no ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... but rats in that ramshackle old place, Beautiful Joe," she said, as she pulled the plank away; "and as you don't hurt them, I don't see what you want to get in for. However, you are a sensible dog, and usually have a reason for having your own way, so I am going to let ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... Into a ramshackle building on the corner of a vivaciously ugly street Lockwood led his friend in quest of the greatest artist. An old man in a skull cap, woolen shirt, baggy trousers and carpet slippers appeared in a darkened doorway. With his long white beard he stood bent and rheumatic ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... grandeur in the village are the two ramshackle coaches that are used for hearses at state funerals. Most of the larger houses are, however, in repair, although the canvas ceilings and the board partitions seem to be in need of paint. These houses occupy the center ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... small town, which was reached late the following day, Farwell engaged two rooms at the ramshackle tavern and informed Pine that he ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... to convey in words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, could be made, had ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... yet strong, Gabriel put the wounded girl down, quickly raked together a few armfuls of dead leaves, in the most sheltered corner of the ramshackle structure, and laid the heavy auto-robe upon this improvised bed. Then he helped his patient to lie down, there, and bade her wait till he got water to wash ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... bleak and perched away up among the clouds, could never be called a town; it is merely a ramshackle place which gives one sleep and food in the difficult ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... possibilities and natural standard of production. Cross the Channel, and Wales looks like a trim garden. Go over to France, and you find every yard of soil carefully tilled and cultivated. Even in comparatively ramshackle Sicily, among the old lava beds of Etna, the peasants raise a handful of grain on the top of a rock no bigger than a lady's work-table. In Ireland the cultivated portion of a holding is often no bigger relatively than that work-table ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... and removed to their present very handsome quarters which they have for so long occupied. I very well recollect the style of their old place of business and how the exterior strongly reminded me of the cotton warehouses in Liverpool. The interior was a big, rambling, ramshackle kind of a place with but few pretensions to being an office such as we see at the ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... a ramshackle cottage, with a damp and moldy air pervading it within and without. The negro messenger opened the door without knocking, held it open while she passed in, then abruptly closed it and turned a key on the outside. The woman was trapped. In a ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... outlandish sort that drop thorns - look out if your feet are bare; but I beg your pardon, you have not been long enough in the South Seas - and many oleanders in full flower. The next group of buildings is ramshackle, and quite dark; you make out a coach-house door, and look in - only some cocoanuts; you try round to the left and come to the sea front, where Venus and the moon are making luminous tracks on the water, and a great swell rolls and shines ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of which was our home, and two other single-room apartments, similarly tenanted, opened into a pitch-dark vestibule which my fancy peopled with "evil ones." A steep stairway led up to the yard, part of which was occupied by a huddle of ramshackle one-story houses. It was known as Abner's Court. During the summer months it swarmed with tattered, unkempt humanity. There was a peculiar odor to the place which ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... that appealing twitch of the garment of Roman association of which one kept renewing one's consciousness, the half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming—with its quite shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old Roman "art-life" of one's early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, the rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, frilled with little overlooking scaffoldings ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... entirely on its summer visitors. At the time of the death of Mr Ira Nutcombe, the only all-the-year-round inhabitants were the butcher, the grocer, the chemist, the other customary fauna of villages, and Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who rented the ramshackle farm known locally as Flack's and eked out a precarious livelihood ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility. The third was an upstanding, broad-shouldered youth, with his hands in his pockets, turning his back on the other two who appeared to be talking together earnestly. He stared across the empty Esplanade. A ramshackle gharry, all dust and venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the group, and the driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave himself up to the critical examination of his toes. The young chap, making no movement, not even stirring his head, just stared into the sunshine. This was ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... matter about that, if he was employed in another shop, he had no right to go into Number Thirteen. That's a violation of rules. But if he's in Rad's ramshackle stable he ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... at last stopped, Benson looked out to find that the place was well down a lonely country road, well lined with trees on either side. The house, utterly dark from the outside, was a ramshackle, roomy ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... heart and nerves all a-tingle that I followed Abel Crone out of his front shop into a sort of office that he had at the back of it—a little, dirty hole of a place, in which there was a ramshackle table, a chair or two, a stand-up desk, a cupboard, and a variety of odds and ends that he had picked up in his trade. The man's sudden revelation of knowledge had knocked all the confidence out of me. It had never crossed my mind ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... capacity for imparting instruction, and an English teacher who adds to these qualifications some skill in the chief bodily pastimes, may go on his way in peace: he shall have his reward. Let me add, however, that if he is a man of ramshackle tendencies, the offices of drill-sergeant, cricket-referee and supervisor of table-etiquette which he has to combine with his ordinary tutorial duties will in time become so irksome—especially if it is his lot to fall upon ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... lost in the clamour, as every one, deserting breakfast, crowded about Lord Durwent, and half in jest demanded to know what the ramshackle empire had to ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... train composed of an assortment of ramshackle and dilapidated coaches, called by courtesy the Orient Express, which maintained an average speed of fifteen miles an hour, left Bucharest for Vincovce, a small junction town in the Banat, where it was supposed to make connections with the south-bound Simplon Express from Paris to Belgrade ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... ramshackle, old-fashioned studio building on Broadway knew old Melville, the landscape painter, who had roughed life within its dilapidated walls for more than a score of years. In former years the studio building had been quite fashionable and respectable; ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... guardians of his own happiness told him to keep to his search, to journey on his way and forget he had seen the tracks. Every desire of Self spoke in warning to him. But Bill Bronson had a higher law than self. Long ago, in front of the ramshackle hotel in Bradleyburg, he had given a promise; and he had reaffirmed it in the gleam of the Northern Lights not many nights before. There was no one to hold him to his pledged word. There were none that need know; no one to whom he must answer ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... man I met when I were comin' back from de ash dump," Eradicate explained. One of the colored man's duties was to cart ashes away from Tom's various shops, and dump them in a certain swampy lot. With an old ramshackle cart, and his mule, Boomerang, Eradicate did this task ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... she went up-stairs, and got a certain disused attic into some sort of order. The attic was far away from the rest of the house; it was the top story of a wing, which had been added on to the tall, ramshackle old house. In some of the rooms underneath, the Franklin family themselves slept; in others they lived, and in others they cooked. The rest of the house, therefore, was free for ...
— Dickory Dock • L. T. Meade
... Westerfelt, with a laugh, as the dogs retreated behind the house, and he reached over the ramshackle gate to shake hands. ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... Foxes, one Green Man, three Bunch of Grapes, one Crown, and six King's Heads. The Green Man is reckoned the best, as the only one that for love or money can raise A postillion, a blue jacket, two deplorable lame white horses, and a ramshackle "neat post-chaise!" There's one parish church for all the people, whatsoever may be their ranks in life or their degrees, Except one very damp, small, dark, freezing cold, a little Methodist Chapel of Ease; And close by the churchyard, there's ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... then slowly passed. In front of Harrison Miller's house, however, he stopped and waited. He lighted a cigarette and made a careful survey of the old place. Strange, if this were to prove the haven where Judson Clark had taken refuge, this old brick two-story dwelling, with its ramshackle stable in the rear, its small vegetable garden, its casual beds of simple garden flowers set in a half acre or so ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of pawnshop opens into hall, and exactly opposite very short flight of stairs leading directly to doorway of Isaac's den above. Ramshackle old place, low ceilings. Isaac, when sitting in his den, can look down, and, by means of a transom over the rear door of the shop, see the customers as they enter from the street, while he also keeps an eye on his assistant. Latter always ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... result of this tinkering and cobbling could only be a ramshackle structure, built without any reference to the canons of political architecture. It was shaped neither by the Fourteen Points nor by the canons of the balance of power and territory. It was hardly more than an abortive ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as the Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... had to sleep in was an old, ramshackle affair, absolutely over-run with rats. Great, big, black fellows, who used to chew up our leather equipment, eat our rations, and run over out bodies at night. German gas had no effect on these rodents; in fact, they seemed to ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... a half hour Eben rounded up the "Eb and Flo" near the shore in front of the Grimsby house, which was a poor, ramshackle affair. The water here was deep, so he was able to run close to the bank. A long-haired, ragged, dirty boy pushed off for his father in a leaky boat, and took him ashore. In a few minutes more the "Eb and Flo" was again ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... village of Mudros East. It proved to be a collection of ramshackle dwellings, as little habitable as English cowhouses; of stores, where thieving Greeks sold groceries to the soldiers; and of taverns, whose vines hung heavily clustered over porch and window. There was an ornate and lofty Greek Orthodox Church, and a little, unconsidered cemetery, where ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... and went into the hotel (I lingering behind to help Brian) I noticed another car behind us. It was more like a taxi-cab than a brave, free-born automobile, but it had evidently come a long way, as it was covered with dust, and from its rather ramshackle roof waved a Red ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... ramshackle of a lumber nag whose every rib you can count through her skin is your beautiful thoroughbred?" ejaculated his friend, incredulously. "Come ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that the proprietor was curt and had no time for us at all. From that point, still dissatisfied, we extended our investigations beyond the Plaza. We found ourselves ankle deep in sandhills on which grew coarse grass and a sort of sage. Crazy, ramshackle huts made of all sorts of material were perched in all sorts of places. Hundreds of tents had been pitched, beneath which and in front of which an extremely simple housekeeping was going on. Hunt as we might we could find no place that looked as though it would take lodgers. Most of even the better ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... hours nothing definite seemed to happen; no one ate or drank, and the current of life at the corner of Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street ceased to flow. Boys and men who had heard of the affair, and who had the divine gift of curiosity, gazed in rapture at the 'No Admittance' notice on the ramshackle double gates in Woodisun Bank, It seemed that they might never be rewarded, but their great faith was justified when a hand-cart, bearing several beams three yards long, halted at the gates and was, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... than eight minutes every one of his burghers was on his horse, armed, provided with two days' rations of biltong, biscuit, coffee, and sugar, and ready to proceed. De Wet himself leaped into a light, ramshackle four-wheeler, and led the advance over the dusty veld. Without attempting to proceed with any semblance of military order, the burghers followed in the course of their leader, some riding rapidly, others walking beside their ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... days in Niksic, but in this instance we were never able to rid ourselves of the first impressions, and we left gladly, though the town was not without its humour. It contains the only brewery in Montenegro, a ramshackle place and producing very poor beer. The post office is a tumble-down outhouse, also we were shown the house which would in the course of time be ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... no duplicate key to apartment No. 12, citizen Rouget ordered his men to break in the door. It did not take very long: the house was old and ramshackle and the doors rickety. The next moment the party stood in the room which a while ago the Englishman had so accurately described to pere ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... of supernatural aspect, when Thorpe recalled its circumstances. His own curious mental ferment, which had made this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the very hour of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed a vivid picture of that approach—of the old ramshackle village trap, and the boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent, red-bearded, plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively suggestive of something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now that he had at the time discerned a certain fateful quality in the apparition. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... box that had just been left at the kitchen door. Phil ran to the window and caught a glimpse of a man closing the gate. It was Fred Holton, in a long ulster with the collar turned up about his ears. He untied his horse, attached to a ramshackle buggy, and drove off. Phil recognized him instantly, but made no ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... them when she was a young girl, quite rich and an orphan. They were furious when she fell in love with papa, who was only a lieutenant with nothing but a very old name, the ruins of a castle that tourists paid francs to see, and a ramshackle house in Paris almost too dilapidated to let. It was a mere detail to them that he happened to be one of the best-looking and most agreeable young men in the world. They did nothing but say, 'I told you so!' for years, whenever anything disastrous happened—as it constantly ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... received his neighbour and her English guest with rustic but cordial urbanity, at once entering into conversation. With evident pride and pleasure he watched my glances at premises and garden, house and outbuildings ramshackle enough, even poverty-stricken to look at, here not an indication of comfortable circumstances much less of independent means; the bit of land half farm, half garden, however, was fairly well kept and of ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... side were tall buildings that shut out much of the light by day, while at night they made the place a veritable canyon of gloom. There were big warehouses and factories with, here and there, a smaller building, and some ramshackle dwellings that had ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... the colorful and steep vistas that lay along the zig-zag roads where ramshackle victorias clattered at crazy speed. Below him was the world's most vivid spread of sun-kissed color; the Bay of Naples curving nobly from his point of view to Ischia's misty bulwark, in a glistening spread of sapphire. Standing guard ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the nomads had added two walls of canvas making an exact cube in form with the most startling incongruity in colour. He needs the form and he does not mind the incongruity, nor does he mind the fact that somebody else has done the solid part and he has only done the ramshackle part. You can say that he is nobly superior to jealousy, or that he is without artistic ambition, or that he is too much of a nomad to mind living half in somebody else's house and half in his own. The real quality is probably too subtle for any simple praise or blame; we can only say that ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... said to provide accommodation for travellers as the law orders, but on going to the house we were informed that the landlord or his wife was just dead, or dangerously ill, I forget which, and they could take no one in. Accordingly, we had to trudge back to Three Mile Cross and the old ramshackle, well-nigh ruinous inn there. It was a wretched place, smelling of mould and dry-rot; however, it was not so bad after a fire had been lighted in the grate, but first the young girl who waited on us brought in a bundle of newspapers, which she proceeded to thrust up the chimney-flue and kindle, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... lion's den, on slippery ground, under fire; not out of the wood. unwarned, unadmonished, unadvised, unprepared &c. 674; off one's guard &c. (inexpectant) 508[obs3]. tottering; unstable, unsteady; shaky, top-heavy, tumbledown, ramshackle, crumbling, waterlogged; helpless, guideless[obs3]; in a bad way; reduced to the last extremity, at the last extremity; trembling in the balance; nodding to its fall &c. (destruction) 162. threatening &c. 909; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... thaw. That was the first thing of which I was aware—that water was apparently dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to moisture all about you.... My ramshackle habitation had never been a very strong defence against the outside world. It seemed now to have definitely decided to abandon the struggle. The water streamed down the panes of my window opposite my bed. One patch of my ceiling (just above ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... conscience. A single street, wide enough, almost, for a plaza, paralleled the railroad tracks, the buildings, such as they were, all strung along the further side in an irregular line. One of these, ramshackle, weather-worn, labeled laconically "The Store," stood directly opposite the station. The architecture of the "Paloma Springs Hotel," next door, was very similar. On either side of these two structures a dozen or more discouraged-looking adobe houses were ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... the town selected by the Matabele for their first blow, and accordingly with Sir Frederick Carrington and two other officers B.-P. set out from Mafeking on the 23rd May in a ramshackle coach, drawn by ten mules, on a drive of ten days and nights to Buluwayo. On this journey the officers encountered the celebrated King Khama, and it interested B.-P. to find that Khama knew him as the brother of Sir George ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... though a most important point in the campaign, was far from attractive in feature, being made up of a half-dozen unsightly houses, a ramshackle tavern propped up on two sides with pine poles, and the weatherbeaten building that gave official name to the cross-roads. We had no tents—there were none in the command—so I took possession of the tavern for shelter for myself and staff, and just ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of which announced the tenancy of a maker of gymnastic appliances; and having kissed Madame Brandt's hand with awful solemnity and bowed deeply to me, he preceded us down the passage, out into the yard, and into a ramshackle studio at the end, where his cats ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... moved almost beyond control by this speech. To have a ramshackle young woman from Hampstead patting her on the back as it were, in breezy certitude that quite soon she would improve, stirred her more deeply than anything had stirred her since her first discovery that Mr. Fisher was not what he seemed. Mrs. Wilkins must certainly ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... friendship, however, did not prepare the boys for the farmer's sudden arrival at their club-house, on a Saturday afternoon, two weeks later. He drove up in a ramshackle old buggy, driving two of the finest horses in the county. Skinflint though he was, he loved horses. He came into the club-house and eyed the boys standing around ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... sigh of relief, when finally they were housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming to the town, and they were still more fretted ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the patrol leader, "there is a long story connected with the old ramshackle mill. No use of my going into all the details. It's been abandoned a good many years now. People have tried to live there three times since old Munsey was found dead there, but they had to give ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... paymaster, handing over the means of her freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened security of the Tredgold Women's College for Russell's unbridled classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume and spend the residue of the night with Widgett's ramshackle girls in some ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... pioneers of the flying-men in this country. He used to fly at country fairs in an old ramshackle bus of the Wright model—a thing of sticks and canvas and wires precariously hung together. But he flew it. And he rehabilitated ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... sells cafe noir near Cuinchy Brewery in a jumble of bricks that was once her home. Once it was cafe au lait and it cost four sous a cup, she only charges three sous now since her cow got shot in the stomach outside her ramshackle estaminet. Along with a few mates I was in the place two months ago and a bullet entered the door and smashed the coffee pot; the woman now makes ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... tidy and comfortable and a splendid brick fireplace had just been built with a brand new stove-pipe leading from it directly upward through the roof. This is really a most creditable bit of work. Instead of the ramshackle temporary structures of last season we have now a solid permanent fireplace which should last for many a year. We spent a most ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... and smiled because she could not appreciate the daily trials and troubles of the poor. These opinions were more generally shared by the good temperance folk of the neighborhood and in the town. They only saw a tall, grey-haired woman, standing amidst the surroundings of a ramshackle inn of the country road, and taking toll from the rougher classes that passed to and fro. But had they probed farther into her life they might have unearthed the beautiful from ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... admiration for his philosophic endurance of hardships. It was real courage. His letters contained simple statements of fact, but not a word of complaint. On the other hand, they were not ebullient with joy; but then, Peggy reflected, there was not much to be joyous about in a ramshackle hut on Salisbury Plain. "Dear old thing," she would write, "although you don't grouse, I know you must be having a pretty thin time. But you're bucking up splendidly, and when you get your leave I'll do a girl's very d——dest ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... he was the darling of their hearts. All this the poor old things made apparent to me, but their story did not become really interesting till they began to speak of this house we are in, and of certain events which followed their removal to the ramshackle dwelling next door. The sale of this portion of the property had relieved them from their debts, but they were otherwise penniless, and were just planning the renting of their rooms at prices which would barely serve to provide them ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... winter months. To neglect of the precaution of putting up sufficient feed to tide over the severe weather might be attributed most of the annual ranching failures in the West. The MacDavid establishment bore a well-ordered aspect, unlike many of the unthrifty, ramshackle ranches, of his neighbours. The fencing was of the best, and there were no signs of decay or dilapidation in any of the buildings. Dwarf pines were planted about and a Morning Glory vine over-ran the house, giving the place an air of restful domesticity. As ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... of a non-mechanical culture. Narrow, packed-dirt streets twisted between ramshackle huts. A few two-story buildings threatened to collapse at any minute. A stench filled the air, so strong that Fannia's filter couldn't quite eradicate it. The Cascellans bounded ahead of the heavily laden Earthmen, dashing around ...
— Warrior Race • Robert Sheckley
... had packed his bags overnight, leaving but a few necessities such as razor and tooth-brush (recent acquisitions) to complete. He left the window now with a curious sigh, and gave a last pull on the strap of the largest bag with his big, muscular hands. Even now, with the ramshackle stage-coach almost at the door, he could not bring himself to believe that the old life was over and done with. What the devil was he up to, anyway, hiking around in creased trousers and black boots? Colorado Jim ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... Mrs. Carradyne; and they all looked out. "Oh, yes, that's an Evesham fly—and a ramshackle thing ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... economy, being scarcely more than half the height of the original: the vacant space has been very roughly filled up, and the numerous holes and crevices support a fine growth of weeds, and a strong young tree has also taken root in the ramshackle stone work. From the central tower, gargoyles grin above the elaborately carved buttresses and finials in remarkable ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... mill, where the ore was pounded to powder and robbed of its gold, was a huge, ramshackle structure. Although it had a framework of heavy timbers, yet the strong skeleton was but loosely covered with boards. Through wide cracks and many gaps in the sides of the building a flood of light ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... events, it was settled that my father and myself should go to Laval together. We started a couple of days later, and managed to travel by rail as far as Rennes. But from that point to Laval the line was now very badly blocked, and so we hired a closed vehicle, a ramshackle affair, drawn by two scraggy Breton nags. The main roads, being still crowded with troops, artillery, and baggage waggons, and other impedimenta, were often impassable, and so we proceeded by devious ways, amidst which our driver lost himself, in such wise that at night we had to seek a shelter ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... can show you something better than that," he cried, as he hirpled out (for so Malise described it afterwards) and presently returned dragging a great iron pot with a strength which seemed incredible in so ramshackle a body. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... store—indeed, I should like to know who would have enjoyed it. It dated back to the beginning of the last century, a tarred, coal-black, ramshackle hut. The windows were low and small, the windowpanes diminutive. The ceiling was low. Everything was arranged in such a way as to exclude the possibility of lofty flights ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... them. I have them dished up occasionally by mother, although she prefers to descant upon the immortal eighties, when she was a leader herself and 'money wasn't everything.' We never had so much of it anyhow. I know Grandfather Ballinger built this ramshackle old house—" ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... me," said Mrs. Grant. "Still, if you are going there, dear, and the girl doesn't seem well, tell them I shall be only too happy to come and fetch her for a drive some afternoon. I daresay my carriage is more comfortable than that ramshackle old trap of theirs." ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... unlike his brothers, he wore shoes and stockings; these three relatives constituted his allies and kinsmen; the so-called Spanish main was in reality an arm of the sea better known in the Hebrides as Loch Scrone; and the war-galley was an old, ramshackle, battered, and betarred boat belonging generally to the fishing-village of Erisaig; for, indeed, the boat was so old and so battered that nobody now seemed to claim any special ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... leaning over the water, palmettos standing as irregular sentries along the low, reeflike island which stretched away out of the picture. There was the gigantic, lonely pine he knew well, and, yes—he could just make it out—there was his own ramshackle little pier, which stretched in undulating fashion, like a long-legged, wading caterpillar, from the abrupt shore-line of eroded ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... my life. I'm enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate. Love is not only the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the square, turned a corner to the right, a corner to the left, and ran down the long dingy street that skirts the foot of the precipice on which the Citadel is enthroned. The ramshackle houses, grey and grimy, huddled against the cliff that frowned above them with black scorn and menace. High against the stars loomed the impregnable walls of the fortress. Low in the shadow crouched the frail habitations of the poor, the miserable tenements, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... following morning examining the ancient ruins, for the conveyance did not start until four o'clock in the afternoon. When that hour came he made one of the travellers, all country folks, who were packed close as pigeons in a crate in the ramshackle, noisy, broken-down vehicle, which lumbered on its way behind its lean and suffering horses, through woods and hills and along mountain passes of a grandeur and a beauty on which the eyes ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... with her usual gentle precision of movement. She had no sooner taken up the position which she felt to be the proper one for her, than round the corner came the Bywood stage,—a long, lumbering, ramshackle vehicle, in which sat Mrs. Murray, a kind-looking nurse, and the twelve convalescent children who were to have the first delights ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... south of us, faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... long time—a real patch of grass on the top of a low ridge, which is fringed with swamp on all sides save the one we made our way to, the eastern. Shortly after passing through another plantation, we saw brown huts, and in a few minutes were standing in the middle of a ramshackle village, at the end of which, through a high stockade, with its gateway smeared with blood which hung in gouts, we saw our much longed for Rembwe River. I made for it, taking small notice of the hubbub ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... themselves, always more or less temporary affairs, were inferior to the cow-shed accommodations of a cattle ranch. The bunk house were over-crowded, ill-smelling and unsanitary. In these ramshackle affairs the loggers were packed like sardines. The bunks were arranged tier over tier and nearly always without mattresses. They were uniformly vermin-infested and sometimes of the "muzzle-loading" ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... cars; of their non-commissioned officers, perhaps half a dozen were trying to do something, but having no directing head or hand, accomplishing little. It looked as though nothing but the bursting asunder of that ramshackle building would liberate its human charge, for even those who, battered, bleeding, and suffocated, would gladly have escaped into outer air, were packed in, sardine-like, and incapable of self-extrication. To the appeal of the conductor that he should regain ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... wet as Verkan Vall—who reminded himself that here he was called Richard Lee—crossed the yard from the farmhouse to the ramshackle barn, in the early autumn darkness. It had been raining that morning when the strato-rocket from Dhergabar had landed him at the Hagraban Synthetics Works, on the First Level; unaffected by the probabilities of human history, the ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... but a few dusky groves of willows and the dazzling snow. The ramshackle wooden hotel was rather more than usually badly-kept and comfortless, and Winston, who had managed to conciliate his host, felt relieved one afternoon when the latter ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... course you'll have something to eat—hot coffee, anyhow—I've trained my cook to make coffee like a Frenchwoman. The housekeeper will take charge of you, if you want to tidy up, and you must excuse our ramshackle ways, please. I don't believe there's ever been a lady in this house ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... the slope, he started down the incline. He turned off part of the power, and was gliding along joyously, when from a cross-road he suddenly saw turn into the main highway a mule, drawing a ramshackle wagon, loaded with fence posts. Beside the animal walked an old ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... to let well enough alone after enlarging the house, laying turf, and planting shrubs and flowers. He found The Hollies a ramshackle place, and left it even more so, but with a new note of artistry and several unexpectedly charming vistas. Thus, the big double window opened straight into an irregular garden which merged insensibly into a sloping ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... his own horses, groomed again, and gorging their fill of good, clean grain in the Jew's ramshackle stable place. Joanna he turned loose, to sneak into any rat-hole that she chose. Then, with their swords drawn—for if trouble came it would be certain to come suddenly—he and his nine made a wide-ringed circuit of the ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... later came a loud knocking on the door. Simons opened it quickly, admitting a most strange old gentleman—tall and ramshackle—who was buttoned up in a chess-board inverness; whose trousers frayed out over his lustreless boots like much-defiled lace; whose coat-sleeves, protruding from the cape of his inverness, sought to make amends for the dullness of ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... had since taken place. The Mississippi Steel Company had now two huge Bessemer converters, in which a volcano of molten flame roared all day and night. It had bought up the whole western side of the town, and cleared away half a hundred ramshackle dwellings; and here were long rows of coke-ovens, and two huge rail-mills, and a plate-mill from which arose sounds like the crashing of the day of doom. Everywhere loomed rows of towering chimneys, and pillars of rolling black smoke. Little miniature railroad tracks ran crisscross ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... lay alongside of the little landing-stage caught his eye. Lifting Master AEsop's corpse from the ground, he trailed it to the crazy structure, and placed it in the oldest and most ramshackle of the two weather-worn vessels. After untying the rope that fastened the boat to its wharf, Lagardere caught up a boat-hook that lay hard by, and, raising it as if it were a spear, he drove it with all his strength against the bottom of the boat and knocked a ragged ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... alone in her little castle, or rather the Liberty Realty Company's little castle. She wanted to be alone. It was very quiet. Outside the birds could be heard twittering in the vine on the ramshackle little porch. The kettle sang cheerily in the kitchen. There was that musty indoor odor of the country homestead, the odor which soldier boys remembered and longed for in trenches and dugouts. And mingling with this was the fragrance of flowers coming in through the open window. The dog with ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... wondered whether—considering that we have all sorts of licensed people about us; people who are licensed to cram us upon steam-boats; to crowd us into omnibuses; to jolt us in ramshackle cabs; to supply us with bad brandy and other adulterated drinks; licentiates for practising physic; licentiates for carrying parcels; licentiates for taking money at their own doors for the diversions of singing and dancing; licentiates for killing game with gunpowder, which other ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... segregated district of the town. There, in tiny one-roomed houses built in rows like barracks were the girls and women who had drifted to this jumping-off place of the world. In the daytime they slept or sat on the narrow, ramshackle porches, untidy, noisy, unspeakably wretched. At night, however, they blossomed forth in tawdry finery, in the dancing-space behind the gambling-tables. Some of them were fixtures. They had drifted there from New Orleans, perhaps, or southern ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a light in his uncle Sim's stable, and knew that Delia was being settled for the night. Uncle Sim still lived in the ramshackle house to which his father—old Dr. Masterman, as elderly people in the village called him—had taken his young wife, who had been Miss Lucy Dawes. In this house both Sim and Archie Masterman were born. It ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... performer on the piano, flute, and violin, did conjuring tricks, and delighted the natives of the Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hotel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and English, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a creative artist. He went; and in a few years reached the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... from under your feet without slipping away for good; and finally, the foot-warmers are miserable wrecks, hingeless, charred, broken away about the holes. It would be impossible to give an idea of the old, rotten, shaky, cranky, worm-eaten, halt, maimed, one-eyed, rickety, and ramshackle condition of the furniture without an exhaustive description, which would delay the progress of the story to an extent that impatient people would not pardon. The red tiles of the floor are full of depressions brought about by ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... beyond Bethany, the road begins to drop, with great windings, into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,—Russians and Greeks returning from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at first, we can see a shepherd with his flock ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... painfully supplemental, that train—a string of the most ramshackle carriages the line could muster, and the carriage in which I found myself smelt as if it had been in Billingsgate for a month. However, I could sit down this time. There was neither honeymoon, commercial traveller, ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... home about a week I strolled down to his place one moonlight night. I told mother not to worry about me, for I would blow my own head off before I'd ever swaller another drop of red p'ison. When I opened the door of the ramshackle cabin, Pete looked up with a grin, and said as how he was wondering where I'd kept myself so long, for he had heerd I'd got back and done unusual well. He was glad to welcome me, and asked what I'd have and the treat was on him ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... that the Turkish army is under German officers. But—if war should happen, is it likely that this ramshackle nation which was fought to a standstill by the Balkan Alliance only a few months ago would be likely to ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... strangling your little brother to death." What answer did the Russian Slav give? He gave the only answer that becomes a man. ["Hear, hear!"] He turned to Austria, and said: "You lay hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle empire [loud applause and laughter] limb from limb." And he is doing it! ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... upon which he had been restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and shortened like ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Some he bullied a little, for habit is strong; some he treated with laughter and irony, some with wit, and some with kindness and deep understanding. He might have been an able shepherd going to work on a hopelessly numerous black and ramshackle flock of sheep. He couldn't expect to make model citizens out of all his old heelers; he couldn't expect to turn more than fifty per cent of his two clergymen into the paths of righteousness. But with the young criminals he took much pains, giving money where it would ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... twenty-five years; surely you must have recognised the pattern! The house has not been painted for the same length of time; it is of heart pine, and we train the flowers and vines to cover it as much as may be, and there are many others like it, so it is not conspicuous. Our rentable property is three ramshackle cabins on the alley at the rear of the lot, for which we get four dollars a month each, when we can collect it. Our country estate is a few acres of poor land, which we rent on shares, and from which we get a few bushels of corn, an occasional load of firewood, and a few barrels of potatoes. ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... revolt; and the Dutch of South Africa would welcome their German liberators; and the great colonies, to which Britain had granted a degree of independence that no virile state would ever have permitted, would shake off the last shreds of subordination; and the ramshackle British Empire would fall to pieces; and Germany would emerge triumphant, free to pursue all her great schemes, and to create a lasting world-power, based upon Force and System and upon 'a healthy egoism,' not upon 'irrational sentimentalities' ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... experience. If only now she could forget the agony that Dorothy must be experiencing, it would not be so dreadful to go at this early morning hour, over the dewy roads, in the ramshackle buggy with her benefactor ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... a single row of ramshackle buildings, not unlike a small Missouri River town. The citizens, so far as visible, formed a queer collection of old men addicted to rum. They all came out to admire Ladrone and to criticise my pack-saddle, ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... on a Sunday you would see the fashion of the neighbourhood, for the planters' ladies rode in on pillions, and the planters themselves, in gold-embroidered waistcoats and plush breeches and new-powdered wigs, leaned on the tombstones, and exchanged snuffmulls and gossip. In the old ramshackle graveyard you would see such a parade of satin bodices and tabby petticoats and lace headgear as made it blossom like the rose. I went to church one Sunday in my second summer, and, being late, went up the aisle looking for a place. The men at the seat-ends would ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... excellent memory; the instruments he used when to the entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added the alluring chink of gold belonged also to that generous patron. There were some old clothes in the ramshackle deal wardrobe; there was some linen and underclothing in the knobless chest of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester repeating-rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and ammunition-pouch, a hunting-knife and a Colt's revolver of large calibre, in addition to the weapon he carried, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... its pretentious name. And lastly, there was the Calhoun House, dreariest and most inhospitable inn of its kind; and across the muddy street from it the great echoing train-shed, ridiculously out of proportion to every other building in the town, the tavern not excepted, and to the ramshackle, once-a-day train that wheezed and rattled and clanked into and out ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... each with its little cargo of packages and women with baskets and an old man or two, to recognize acquaintances among those who sit in front, and as I go on overtaking and passing carriers and the half-gipsy, little "general dealer" in his dirty, ramshackle, little cart drawn by a rough, fast-trotting pony, all of us intent on business and pleasure, bound for Salisbury—the great market and emporium and place of all delights for all the great Plain. I remember that on my very last expedition, ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... hour he moved through the black, stenchful passageways, up and down ramshackle stairs, from human warren to human warren, pausing here to question, there to peer and sniff and poke with an exploring cane. Out on the street again ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... hollow, two miles from the world in general, stood a little, old, ramshackle shanty. The location was one that seekers would hardly have found without a trail ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... the vicinity of the spot where we had fixed our best machine-gun position, my sergeant and I discovered a sort of covered passage in a ditch in front of a communication trench. It was a sort of emergency exit back from a row of ramshackle, water-logged hovels in the ditch to the communication trench. We decided to make use of this passage, and arranged things in such a way that by scooping out the clay walls we made two caves, one behind the other. The front one was about five yards from the machine gun, and you ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... leading past the station drops down into the village, giving a glimpse of the beck crossed by its ramshackle wooden foot-bridge—the view one has been prepared for by guide-books and picture postcards. Lower down you enter the village street. Here the smell of fish comes out to greet you, and one would forgive the place this overflowing welcome if one ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... of doubt and pain, and she was perplexed by the fly-man's dull eyes, his starved horse, his ramshackle vehicle, the wet road, the leaden sky. It was one of those moments when the familiar appears strange and grotesque. Then, gathering ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... were not of alien race. Doubtless the German in the middle west of Canada was glad to be away from the cast-iron military system of his Fatherland, and the Austrian was pleased to be out of the "ramshackle Empire"; while at the same time, the Canadians around, like true British men, were willing to let these immigrants make good in this land of the second chance. But both were helped in their good intentions by the tact and firmness of the riders in ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... building is an old-fashioned two-story ramshackle affair with overhanging eaves, especially designed to obstruct light and darken the upper schoolroom. The building is in the center of a pine grove 250 x 150 feet in size, which also obstructs the light ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... was moving to the rear of the station, and now came in sight of a ramshackle automobile with a Mexican at the wheel, easily distinguished by his swarthy coloring and his ragged mustaches, as well as by his peculiar dress—a steep crowned hat like a sugar loaf, with a very wide brim, a tight bolero jacket that did not reach ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... whoa!" cried the driver, for the old white steed had caught sight of the car and was testifying to its dislike of it by grotesque prancings and sidlings that threatened to wreck the ramshackle trap. "Here, get out of my way!" he ordered Oliver, "that is, if you know how to handle that snorting locomotive ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... I perceived the ramshackle sap-house ahead of me among the maples. Then I caught sight of her whom ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... single window, depressed and heartsick. The low, rolling hills, bare and desolate, stretched to the horizon, the grass already burned brown by the sun. The town itself consisted of but one short, crooked street, flanked by rough, ramshackle frame structures, two-thirds of these apparently saloons, with dirty, flapping tents sandwiched between, and huge piles of tin cans and other rubbish stored away behind. The street was rutted and dusty, and the ceaseless wind swirled ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... ages—another Imperialist—a degraded, brutalized wretch, clad in filthy, stinking rags, his toes protruding from the rotten broken boots that were tied with bits of string upon his stockingless feet. The ramshackle cart was loaded with empty bottles and putrid rags, heaped loosely in the cart and packed into a large sack. Old coats and trousers, dresses, petticoats, and under-clothing, greasy, mildewed and malodorous. As he crept along with his ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... was trying hard to obtain powers to construct a railway to Murmansk at the time of the outbreak of hostilities; but a line was not completed till more than two years had elapsed and was then of the most ramshackle character. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... from the railroad station at Carlette, a mile away, where it had been to meet the five-thirty P. M. train. Business had not been very brisk, judging from the fact that the ramshackle old vehicle carried only one passenger, a rather elderly man dressed in black, who sat on one of the side seats with his back toward the boys. A bag of mail was on the front seat alongside the driver, a lank, slab-sided individual, ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... straits, and the huge Cape Horners creeping out to sea, and imminent Tamalpais. Thence, on my homeward way, I might visit that strange and filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of wild animals and birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of monkeys, and a poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whisky was administered by a proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even neglect Nob Hill, which is itself a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a bit indisposed ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... There came the red troops, the black troops, the blue troops of the army of priests; the snuffy regiments of Capuchins, grave and grotesque; the trim French abbes; my lord the bishop, with his footman (those wonderful footmen); my lord the cardinal, in his ramshackle coach and his two, nay three, footmen behind him;—flunkeys, that look as if they had been dressed by the costumier of a British pantomime; coach with prodigious emblazonments of hats and coats-of-arms, that seems as if it came out of the pantomime too, and was about to ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Caroline; keepin' house for me, she is—Abbie wanted me to have him do the job, but I wa'n't very particular about it, so it never come to nothin'. He done two or three places, though, and I swan 'twas nice work! He painted Sam Cahoon's old ramshackle house and barn, and you'd hardly know it, 'twas so fixed up and fine, in the picture. White paint and green grass and everything just like real. He left out the places where the pickets was off the fence and the blinds hangin' on one hinge. ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... their destination when, as they passed a particularly ramshackle building with a saloon on the ground floor, they became conscious of a terrific hubbub going on within. There was a sound of shouting and blows, and every once in a while the whole crazy building would fairly rock as some heavy body ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... at the mercy of one idea only, and he began to see, very soon after he had investigated the two houses—the ramshackle shop and the riverside den—that if he intended to progress he could not afford to sit in the street and drink in the cafe opposite Leh Shin's dwelling for an interminable space of weeks. He had limitless patience, but he ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... do,' he said. 'There's a piece of waste land the other end of the village that we've never been able to do much with, in consequence of its being so swampy. If you liked, we could run you up a dozen cottages on that, cheap—it would be all the better their being a bit ramshackle and unhealthy—and get some poor people for you, and put ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... narrow alley leading to the riverside. It was straight and deserted, and I dared not follow further until he had reached the corner. I heard his footsteps pass right to the end. Then the sound died away. I ran to the corner. The back of a wharf building—a high blank wall—faced a row of ramshackle tenements, some of them built of wood; but not a soul ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... should sing them. Moreover, Elias should compose little comedies that could be performed by their small party, and the profits were to be equally shared between them. They also put their hands together and vowed to be true and friendly, and not to separate till they came back to ramshackle Uzes. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... us to a ramshackle building reminiscent of the days when the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an age when the American merchantman flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven-seas. On the ground floor was an apparently innocent ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... dead burden or of some street accident. But of these latter there must be very few; there is not much vehicular traffic in Lisbon. It is comparatively rare to see anything like cruelty to horses. The mules which draw the primitive ramshackle trams have the worst time of it, and are obliged to pull their load every now and again off one line on to another, being urged thereto with some brutality. But these trams do not run up the very hilly parts of the city; the main lines run along the Tagus east ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... like a cowboy and was, in truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small—a very small—way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The poultry ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... into the ramshackle conveyance and was driven away. Once I looked back. The innkeeper could be seen on the porch, then he became lost to view behind the trees. Far away to my left the stones in the little cemetery on the hillside ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... along with their Madeira and port wine. But the same books show that the planter was chronically in debt and that bankruptcy was common, while accounts left by travelers reveal the fact that many of the mansion houses were shabby and run down, with rotting roofs, ramshackle doors, broken windows into which old hats or other garments had been thrust to keep the wind away. In a word, a traveler could find to-day more elegance in a back county of Arkansas than ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth |
