"Dinghy" Quotes from Famous Books
... dinghy," said the captain, gruffly, to the mate, "and let one of these lazy lubbers get into her with a box of figs. Get into her yourself? I ... — The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... gleamed momentarily in the eyes of the boatman. But it passed. He did not speak, but made for the dinghy, followed by the hand from the yacht. They turned the boat over, slid it down and afloat. The sailor got in and began ... — Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... are hauling in our wire hawser; the setting sun striking their wet bodies, makes them almost like ruddy gold, and their black trousers cling to their legs. It seems an elementary way of taking a line ashore; I think that with a little practise two men in a dinghy would be quicker and would look more seamanlike—but probably it was the way in the ... — From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... L'Estrange blowing out the lantern. By the time we'd fished up the kegs the fog came down so thick Dad judged it risky for me to row 'em ashore, even though we could hear the ponies stamping on the beach. So he and Uncle Lot took the dinghy and left me in the smack playing on my ... — Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... those splendid bright days which are happily so frequent on the East coast in September—so calm, indeed, that sailing was out of the question, and I spent my time in the small boat or dinghy out in the open sea a mile or more, fishing in an indolent way for whiting, etc., and ... — Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... push, and then lost the bottom. Success depended upon my resource, readiness, and courage. And what was this success? Immediately, it meant getting out of the bay, and into the open sea in a twelve-foot dinghy looted from some ship years ago by the Rio Medio pirates, if that miserable population of sordid and ragged outcasts of the Antilles deserved such a romantic name. They ... — Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... beautiful old garden or taking lunch and tea on the river, either alone, or in the company of her friends, Molly and Cynthia Peach. Punting alone was forbidden, but seeing Toni's disappointment, her husband had purchased for her a stout little dinghy in which she was perfectly safe, and this same craft was a source ... — The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... he shouted, and the 'Maid' came spinning round almost as smartly as a sailing dinghy. Next minute she and her consort were legging it southwards at the very ... — On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... with the whole of the ship's company to get up sail or hoist the dinghy on board, he whistles as well as smiles, and then the black boys laugh, and life on the trim ship is more buoyant than ever. He goes down into the doll's-house galley backwards, smiling. Now, it is no smiling matter to be jambed up against ... — Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the appearance of "Teddy," the secretary, and the Indian young gentleman, damp and genial, as they explained, "from the boats." It seemed that "down below" somewhere was a pond with a punt and an island and a toy dinghy. And while they discussed swimming and boating, Mr. Carmine appeared from the direction of the park conversing gravely with the elder son. They had been for a walk and a talk together. There were ... — Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... dangers in the spirit of a hound upon the slot, he had made a point of a big whaleboat. "Take your choice," he had said; "either new masts and rigging or that boat. I simply ain't going to sea without the one or the other. Chicken coops are good enough, no doubt, and so is a dinghy; but they ain't for Joe." And his partners had been forced to consent, and saw six and thirty pounds of their small capital vanish in the ... — The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... round me and noted that the buildings were all dark, showing that the inhabitants had retired to rest, I stole slowly, crouching, across the open and so down to the beach. Among the boats drawn up on the sand there was a small Norwegian boat, much used as a dinghy, and consequently not drawn as far up on the beach as the others; this was the craft that I was on the lookout for, and by and by I found her, half afloat, and secured by her painter to a small anchor dug well into the sand. ... — A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... any more of his company than I can help! Tell him we're going by the captain's permission, Charley. I don't want to say a word to him after that row this morning. You are still on speaking terms with him, and I'm not. And while you are settling matters with the old sneak, I'll get the dinghy ready, and fetch up the bottle of brandy I promised that jolly old Turk ... — Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... and the moon was rising when I got away and moved down toward the beach where the dinghy waited. The horizontal ray struck through the grating of the "calaboose" at the corner of the godown I was skirting. I saw the prisoner. The upright shadow of an iron bar cut his face in two, separating the high, soiled cheeks, each ... — The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to the edge of the sea. There was a little dinghy there, and the boat was anchored a couple of hundred yards off. They could just make out the loom of her through the darkness, and see her shadowy spars, dipping, rising, and falling with the wash of the waves. To right and left spread the long white line of ... — The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... saw him put off from the float in the Chickamin's dinghy. When the crew came to dinner, he had not returned. Nor was he back when they went ... — Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... meetings in the garden of the square, and sat within the dingy summer-house, so happy, that I love the London sparrows to this hour, for nothing else, and see the plumage of the tropics in their smoky feathers! When we had our first great quarrel (within a week of our betrothal), and when Dora sent me back the ring, enclosed ... — David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... owned and operated by planters residing along the shore of the Bay—were anchored in the basin, or fastened at the dock, but the Adele had been warped in against the bank, which at this point was high enough to enable us easily to step aboard over the low rail. A dingy looking white man, quite evidently from his appearance an indentured servant, was in charge, He greeted us rather surlily, staring at me with almost open hostility, yet responded swiftly enough to ... — Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... been doing his work with a candle held in his brown fingers; but as dawn-light began to enter the cabin, he quenched its dingy, yellow flicker, opened the camp-door, and surveyed the ... — Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... Lasette, "this is a digression from our subject. What I meant to say is this, that in our Ward is an excellent school house with a half score of well equipped and efficient teachers. The former colored school house was a dingy looking building about a mile and a half away with only one young school teacher, who had, it is true, passed a creditable examination. Now, when my daughter saw that the children of all other nationalities, it mattered not how low and debasing might be their environments, could ... — Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... backing into one shop or running ahead into another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he swung round countless corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare bazaar. Overhead, a slit of cloudy sky showed rarely; for the most part, he swayed along indoors, beneath a dingy lattice roof. All points of the compass vanished; all streets remained alike,—the same endless vista of mystic characters, red, black, and gold, on narrow suspended tablets, under which flowed the same current of pig-tailed men in blue and dirty white. ... — Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... outside. The jaundiced eye yellows all it beholds. The chameleon takes its color from the bark on which it clings. Man gives his color to what his thought is fastened upon. The pessimist's darkness makes all things dingy. The youth disappointed with his European trip said he was a fool for going. He was, for the reason that he was a fool before he started. He saw nothing without, because he had no vision within. He gave no ... — The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... to be magnanimous enough to think that it's all for the best, since he can do infinitely more for her than I ever could. She will be the millionaire's wife, and I'll go back to my dingy little office and write paragraphs heavy enough to sink a cork ship. Thus will end my June idyll; but should I live a century I will always feel that ... — A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... Immediately as the skirt of the last one's coat disappeared, we carefully locked and bolted our door, and, with hands trembling with joy, we took out the letter. Not very clean was its appearance, and not over correct or well-spelt was its address; and, above all, a yellow, dingy wafer filled up the place of the green wax we had expected, and the true lover's motto, "Though lost to sight, to memory dear," was supplied by the impression of a thimble. We opened it. Horror and ... — The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... lost all idea where we were. Carr, who was young and active, did all he could; but the cabman, who, I am afraid, must have been intoxicated, took not the slightest notice, and continued driving madly, Heaven knows where. At last, after getting into a very dingy neighborhood, we turned up a crooked dark street, unlit by any lamp, a street so narrow that I thought every moment the cab would be overturned. In another moment I saw two men rush out of a door-way. One seized the horse, which was much blown by this time, and brought it violently ... — The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... green doors which flank the big bench is the judge's retiring-room; pushing the crack there wider, I was able to peek in, and saw at once that the old atmosphere of Judge Colfax's study had not remained in the old dingy court-house, where the dismantlers' picks were already breaking up the ancient mortar, but had followed the personality of the man into these new pretentious quarters. The retiring-room already gave forth an alluring odor of law books and document ... — The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... little trunk that contained his worldly effects, and stalked off to a neighboring hotel, that, from its small proportions, suggested a modest bill. With a highly important man-of-the-world manner he scrawled his name in an illegible, student-like hand on the dingy, dog-eared register. With a gracious, condescending air he ordered the filthy, tobacco-stained porter to take his trunk ... — Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... green depths of the water below and around far as the eye could reach. Among the commoner kinds,—the kind with the four purple rings on the area of its flat bell, which ever vibrates without sound, and the kind with the fringe of dingy brown, and the long stinging tails, of which I have sometimes borne from my swimming excursions the nettle-like smart for hours,—there were at least two species of more unusual occurrence, both of them very minute. The one, ... — The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... through the gloom Of Market-street's opaque simoom, A queue of people, parti-sexed, Awaiting the command of "Next!" A sidewalk booth, a dingy sign: "Teeth ... — Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... "I won't have it called that. The real Maescelyn is a castle, very large, airy, and handsome to look at, and this is a dingy little house, with no windows ... — Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... 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 books which Tom had given her, and ... — We Two • Edna Lyall
... babbling of hyaline rills in pleasant woodland places! I could not see the silver threads of water winding in and out among the cool young grass; I could not guess where they were; but through the city smoke, over the dingy chimney-tops, they spake to ... — Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... venerable Church of the Holy Sepulchre, among chanting priests in coarse long robes and sandals; pilgrims of all colors and many nationalities, in all sorts of strange costumes; under dusky arches and by dingy piers and columns; through a sombre cathedral gloom freighted with smoke and incense, and faintly starred with scores of candles that appeared suddenly and as suddenly disappeared, or drifted mysteriously hither and thither about the ... — Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 but fixing his one moist eye on you ... — Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... his unknown parents, he asked them who were their parents. Then the one nearest to him gave him answer; and he told how that they were formerly flowers, but none of those who thrust their rooty hands greedily into the ground and draw nourishment from the dingy earth, only to make themselves fat and large withal; but that the light was dearer to them than anything, even at night; and while the other flowers slept, they gazed unwearied on the light, and drank it in with eager adoration— sun, and moon, and star light. And the light had so thoroughly ... — Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... by the window caught her eye. She walked over and looked at them. The lantern gave so little light that she could scarcely see anything, but she managed to make out that one was a dingy chromo with a Scriptural subject. The other was a battered "crayon enlargement," a portrait of a man, a middle-aged man with a chin beard. There was something familiar about the face in the ... — Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... elegant Wilks as Sir Charles Easy, and Cibber[A] himself in the empty-headed role of Lord Foppington, and, presto! everything is changed. The yellow leaves are white and fresh, the words stand out clear and distinct, and it takes but a slight flight of fancy to hear the dingy auditorium of Drury Lane echoing and re-echoing with laughter. For 'twas at Drury Lane that the comedy first saw the light, in December 1704, ... — The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... neither. You must consider yourself as so much public property, must do what others do—i. e. live in public, and make the best of it. No place can be better off for hotels, and few so ill off for lodgings—the latter are only to be had in small dingy houses opening upon the street. They are, of course, very noisy; nor are the let-ters of them at any pains to induce you by the modesty of their demands to drop a veil over this defect. Defect, quotha! say, rather misery, plague, torture. Can any word be an ... — Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... novelty of a residence above a saddler's shop; but now, too weary for new experiences, I was only conscious that the stairs were narrow, the room dingy and vulgar after the rooms at home, and as I wept I wished I had ... — A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... time they took it, half empty, because of the degraded character of the occupants. Its entries and corridors were blackened with smoke, and dingy and uninviting. The sinks were in dark corners, and were foul and disease-breeding. The stairways were innocent of water or broom, and throughout the entire house, from top to bottom, ceilings, walls, ... — White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... over; Og stirrer og skuer And, her eyes declining, Gyldne Luer Beholds a shining, Og rodmer og baever And red'neth and shaketh, Og skjaelvende haever And trembling uptaketh Med undrende Aand With wondering sprite Udaf sorten Muld From the dingy mould, Med snehvide Haand, With hand snow-white, Det rode Guld. The ruddy gold. En sagte Torden A gentle thunder Dundrer; Pealeth; Hele Norden The ... — The Gold Horns • Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager
... operation! Such is the naked fact. My Wife is with me; we leave no household behind us but a servant; the face of England, with its mad electioneerings, vacant tourist dilettantings, with its shady woods, green yellow harvest-fields and dingy mill-chimneys, so new and old, so beautiful and ugly, every way so abstruse and unspeakable, invites to silence; the whole world, fruitful yet disgusting to this human soul of mine, invites me to silence; to sleep, and dreams, and stagnant indifference, as if for the time ... — The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... stand near the end of the platform. Pretty soon I felt a rough brushing against my elbow. As I turned I saw a small white child, poorly clad, being thrust upon the end of the flower-laden platform. Then followed an old white man, collarless, wearing a dingy blue shirt and a coat somewhat tattered. After him came two strapping fellows, apparently his sons. All grouped themselves there and listened eagerly, freely spitting their tobacco juice on the platform steps ... — Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... to the west of the Verde road, full five hundred yards away from rock, tree or shelter, other than mere clump of cactus, pumpkin size, or bunch of dirty weed, there was lying a little heap of dingy white and brown, with a cow pony kicking at empty air in a shallow ditch—what was left of the half-breed herd guard and his mount. With most of the cavalry gone, the quartermaster had supplied their place with such mounted men as he ... — Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... to his club for dinner, changed his mind and turned down Broadway for the old Cafe Boulevard on Second Avenue. He stopped again in front of the dingy Bible House at the head of the Bowery and watched the flood of shopgirls and clerks passing across the street from the department stores. What an endless throng! Hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands, men and women, girls and boys, hurrying homeward. He had never noticed them before—this ... — The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... first visit to the scene of the crime—a high, dingy, narrow-chested house, prim, formal, and solid, like the century which gave it birth. Lestrade's bulldog features gazed out at us from the front window, and he greeted us warmly when a big constable ... — The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dandelions along the road to school, and what tales the river might have told if any one could have learned its musical speech. How certain gates were glorified by daily lingerings thereat, and what tender memories hung about dingy desks, old pens, and books illustrated with ... — On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... the third class of candidates (which seemed a small one) consisted of oldish men—some of them in frock coats, but the majority in jackets, and with no linen to be seen. These preserved a serious demeanour, sat by themselves, and had a very dingy look. The man who had afforded me consolation by being worse dressed than myself belonged to this class. Leaning forward upon his elbows, and running his fingers through his grey, dishevelled hair ... — Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... before Dan Baxter and Bradner reached a dingy looking hotel which went by the name of ... — The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... away from the low and dingy station and was in the open country of Morovenia. Kalora and her elderly guardian and the young women who were to be her companions during the period of exile had been tucked away into adjoining compartments. Each young woman was muffled ... — The Slim Princess • George Ade
... underneath the aforesaid stone, 850 Where the poor pedler's corpse was thrown, And found thereunder a jaw-bone, Though, when the crowner sat thereon, He nothing hatched, except alone Successive broods of laughter; It was a frail and dingy thing, In which a grinder or two did cling, In color like molasses, Which surgeons, called from far and wide. Upon the horror to decide, 860 Having put on their glasses, Reported thus: 'To judge by looks, These bones, by some queer hooks or crooks, May have belonged ... — The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Puritan women here, sour enough to tear the laces of Parisian finery, and eat out all the poetry of your Parisian beauties, who undermine the happiness of others while they cry up their walnuts and rancid bacon, glorify this squalid mouse-hole, and the dingy color and conventual small of ... — Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... corner, he led Tom across a vacant lot to a small, unkempt, dingy old house at the end of the path. In the yard of this dwelling a woman was hanging clothes on a line and a number of mongrel hens were taking dust baths under some lilac bushes. The breeze wafted the fragrance of these blossoms to Tom's nostrils as ... — The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... pallid face turned upwards; To and fro in silence rocking On a little mound of dark dirt. Like a veiled Nun rose the pale moon, Draped about with fleecy vapour; And the stars in solemn conclave Came to meet her—came to greet her, To their convent home to bear her: She had soared above the dingy Earth, and left the world behind her. As she passed she lookt down sadly, Gazed with silent, noble pity, At the girlish, grief-worn figure, Sitting in the darkest corner Of that small corpse-crowded graveyard, With her pallid face turned upwards, On a little mound of dark dirt. Round ... — The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... Dalton, as he turned back into the little office room, which had never looked so dim and dingy before. "For a girl that's rich ... — Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... spent in weeping over this book, especially over "Go Where Glory Waits Thee," which affected me with an incomprehensible but poignant woe. Accordingly it was I who rose cheerful in the morning and piloted a gloomy companion to breakfast and a barber, and so across Boston to the dingy station where dingy, dirty cars of ancient vintage awaited, and in one of which we rode, with innumerable stops, to a spot off the beaten tracks of travel, but which bore ... — Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... long heavy handle that always stood out stiffly; there was a knob on the top of the pump that had once been gilded but that was a long time ago, when the Pump was aristocratic and presumed itself to be a Fountain. It was dingy and broken now, but the Pump was none the less proud and dignified; it took pleasure in holding out its handle stiffly and never letting it down though people stumbled against it every day. "It had been there the longest," the Pump said, "it had a right to the way; ... — Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... interior of the town and its external aspect, was as striking as it was full of pain. With the exception of the dull high street, which had the usual characteristics of a small agricultural market town, some sombre mansions, a dingy inn, and a petty bourse, Marney mainly consisted of a variety of narrow and crowded lanes formed by cottages built of rubble, or unhewn stones without cement, and from age, or badness of the material, looking as if they ... — Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... the high stool again before the lathe and looked through the dingy window at the scraggy trees outside, beyond the ... — The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... eldest, is the head. Others come and go, but he remains. Most of his spare time is given to the garden. When the eight o'clock bell begins to swing he will leave his lettuces and soon perch himself on the little platform behind his shabby old desk in the dingy schoolroom, which even in the holidays cannot get rid of its ancient redolence of boys. The school-house, now so much like a prison, was once a mansion, and the most modern part of it is of the period which we should call in England Tudor. A Gothic doorway leads ... — Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... shutters were still in place, but rotting from the fantastic hinges that supported them. A few hard blows brought down the outer doors in a dusty heap, and as we stepped upon the marble floor within our eyes met an unexpected sight. Furniture, statues, dingy pictures in crumbling frames, images in bronze and silver, mirrors, curtains, all were there, but in every condition of decay. We knocked open the iron shutters and let the light into the rooms sealed up for centuries. In the first one ... — The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... of their own, are marginless. They 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
... lights, stole across the iron-grey water, and disappeared into the darkness of a slip. She came out again in three minutes, but the full day had come too; so she snapped off her masthead, steering and cabin electrics, and turned into a dingy white ferryboat, full of cold passengers. I spoke to a Canadian about her. 'Why, she's the old So-and-So, to Port Levis,' he answered, wondering as the Cockney wonders when a stranger stares at an ... — Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... the polite outside habiliments of external society and went into Rufe's room. He had gotten up and lit his lamp, and was pouring some milk into a tin pan on the floor for a dingy-white, half-grown, squealing pig. ... — The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... obscure part of Cumberland, I was seeking a short cut to a neighbouring village through a gentleman's grounds, in which there was a public path. Just within sight of the house (which was an old, desolate building, in the architecture of James the First, with gable-ends and dingy walls, and deep-sunk, gloomy windows,) I perceived two ladies at a little distance before me; one seemed in weak and delicate health, for she walked slowly and with pain, and stopped often as she leaned on her companion. I lingered behind, in order ... — The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... small humiliation for Mr. Rae to be forced to accept a favour from Mr. Thomlinson. "Had it been any other than Cameron," he said to himself, as he sat in his somewhat dingy and dusty office, "I would let him swither. But Cameron! I must see to it and at once." Behind the name there rose before Mr. Rae's imagination a long line of brave men and fair women for whose name and fame and for whose good estate it had been his duty and the duty of those who had ... — Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... house of the poorest class, exactly like its neighbors, which lined both sides of the dingy street. The door was always open, more than half the time hanging by one hinge, the stairways were dark and crooked, the rooms small and dirty. In a back kitchen on the topmost floor, a man sat, or rather huddled, in a chair drawn close to the stove. His eyes were ... — The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... sailor took off his hat and exhibited a head which had been trimmed down till all the scalp resembled a dingy brush, for it was cut with the most perfect regularity, for the hair to stand up in bristly fashion for about a quarter of ... — The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... other bulky articles. Besides this, she carried four boats of an arithmetical progression in point of size—the largest being known as the first cutter, the next largest the second cutter, then the third and fourth cutters. She also carried a Commodore's Barge, a Captain's Gig, and a "dingy," a small yawl, with a crew of apprentice boys. All these boats, except the "dingy," had their regular crews, who were subordinate to their cockswains—petty officers, receiving pay in addition to their ... — White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... of nature in the sounding of streams, the song of birds, and the bleating of sheep differ widely from what the susceptible and poetic mind is destined to experience amidst the clanking din of shuttles in the dingy, narrow workshop of the handloom weaver. Here the breath of the light hill breeze cannot come; the form is bowed down, and the cheek is pale. Life, however buoyant and aspiring at first, necessarily ere long becomes saddened ... — The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... upon a convenient whip-like wand, it notices for the first time a queer, square brick tower of small dimensions, rising in the center of a court-yard surrounded by trees. The tower is like an old and dingy turret that has been shorn from a castle, and set on the hilltop without apparent reason. It is two stories in height, with one window, dingy and uninviting. A door ... — Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... commander, Captain 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) ... — A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... since his protesting assertion that "Once doesn't matter, Mother, and anyway, it's school time," had been followed by flight to the many-windowed, red-brick building, and already the surroundings of dreary blackboard, dingy-green calsomine, and oft-revarnished yellow pine woodwork were becoming irksome. The spelling lesson had not been so unpleasant, for he could sense the tricky "ei-s" and "ie-s" with uncanny cleverness, but 'rithmetic—the ... — A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... comes the aid of padding to give shape where there is none, stays to compress into form the swelling chaos of flesh, and paints of all hues to rectify the dingy complexion; but useless are these attempts—for, if dissipation, late hours, immoderation, and carelessness have wrecked the loveliness of female charms, it is not in the power of Esculapius himself to refit the shattered ... — The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... and cold as city snow could make it—a dingy whirl at the window; a smoky gust through the fireplace; a shadow black as a bear's cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room, loomed really warm or familiar except a glass of stale water, and a vapid, ... — Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... time the carriage had passed along Coventry Street, turned into Prince's Street, and been pulled up opposite a commonplace-looking house in that distinctly dingy thoroughfare, Lisle Street, Soho. ... — Sunrise • William Black
... In that dingy, well-lighted room George Stratton sat busily pencilling out the lines that were to appear in next morning's paper. He was evidently very much engrossed in his task, as Speed had said. If he had looked about him, which ... — From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... 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
... the little girl in his arms, reached the door at the head of the stairs, his companion met him, and, with a meaning glance, announced that everything was ready for the reception of their small guest. They entered a dingy anteroom, which led, through heavily curved antique sliding-doors, into a vaulted ... — The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... and sometimes looking round to address her mother, who was busy among her plants and cut flowers. Surely they were know-nothings who called this woman silly, and blind who said she painted. It was a little face all of one color, dingy pale, not chubby, but retaining the soft contours of a child's face, and the features were singularly delicate. She was clad in a soft gray, and her figure was of the smallest; there was such an air of youth about her ... — Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... resort of overflow waters is the tulares, great wastes of reeds (Juncus) in sickly, slow streams. The reeds, called tules, are ghostly pale in winter, in summer deep poisonous-looking green, the waters thick and brown; the reed beds breaking into dingy pools, clumps of rotting willows, narrow winding water lanes and sinking paths. The tules grow inconceivably thick in places, standing man-high above the water; cattle, no, not any fish nor fowl can ... — The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... time the young man was likely to be found, for he was doing a dreary job on a popular encyclopaedia (V to X), and had told her what hours were dedicated to the hateful task. "Oh, if only it were a novel!" she thought as she mounted his dingy stairs; but immediately reflected that, if it were the kind that she could bear to read, it probably wouldn't bring him in much more than his encyclopaedia. Miss Branch had her standards ... — The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... wore a silver helmet with gilt ornaments, and the broad ribbon of the Rose looked well across my chest. I should be paying a poor compliment to the King if I did not set modesty aside and admit that I made a very fine figure. So the people thought; for when I, riding alone, entered the dingy, sparsely decorated, sombre streets of the Old Town, there was first a murmur, then a cheer, and a woman, from a window above a cookshop, cried the old ... — The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... Elizabeth on Christmas Eve, and were carried ashore through the surf by natives. Immediately after landing, we passed a yard full of old lumber. Protruding from a chaos of ancient rubbish was a signboard, bearing in dingy letters the legend: "Joseph Scully, Coach Painter." This is the only occasion upon which I have come across my name in South Africa. We landed at once, but some of the passengers elected to remain on board the Asia until next morning. This they had ample cause to regret, for ... — Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... hymns of the same date are, indeed, things to think upon. They affect one—the "Stabat Mater," for instance, and the "Ave Verum"—very much in the same way as the figures which stare down, dingy green and blue, from the gold of the Cosmati's mosaics: childish, dreary, all stiff and agape, but so solemn and pathetic, and full of the greatest future. For out of those Cosmati mosaics, and those barbarous ... — Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of both intentions has been a collection of dingy or faded duodecimos containing a series of impressions of what each generation thought good, religiously, morally, and educationally, for little folk. If few of them shed any light upon child nature in those long-ago ... — Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... morning, at sunrise, they told him, and had continued on her way up the coast. No such passenger as he described had been landed—no one by that name. The Bishop, leaning upon the worn counter in the dingy shipping office, scrutinised the passenger list carefully. There was a name there, certainly, that suggested his nephew's, but with two or three wrong letters. Not enough for a positive identification, but perhaps done purposely, as a disguise. Could the youth have deliberately done ... — Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... a law of our nature that we insensibly change into the likeness of that which we behold and admire. Even in outward, material things we sometimes see the working of this law. There is a gorgeous sunset. Come out of the dingy house, and gaze on the scene. The western sky is ablaze with purple and crimson and gold. The radiant clouds stretch out in feathery, fantastic forms, like angels' wings; or pile themselves up in solid blocks of glory, like celestial mountains; ... — Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... called his own, to see what there was he could exchange for the article he wanted. His eye soon fell upon a brass finger ring, and his plan was quickly formed. The ring had been tumbled about among his playthings for a year or two, and was now dull and dingy; but he remembered that he once cleaned and polished it, so that it looked very much like gold, so long as the lustre lasted. He subjected it to this process again, and it soon looked as well as the plain gold ring he wore upon ... — Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell
... eyes. The picture is (346) "Moses," by S. Solomon. I thought it finely drawn and composed. It nobly represented to my mind the dark children of the Egyptian bondage. . . . My newspaper says: "Two ludicrously ugly women, looking at a dingy baby, do not form a pleasing object," and so good-bye, Mr. S. S.' This beautiful picture, painted when the artist was only nineteen, is now in the collection of Mr. W. G. Rawlinson, and was seen quite recently ... — Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... burnt up, breakfast came, and the dingy fog began to roll away a little from before the windows. He went out and walked about the city. He stared at the public buildings without seeing them; then at the shop-windows, till he suddenly found himself ... — A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... Witherspoon's private apartment—into the calico, bombazine, hardware and universal nick-nack holy of holies. The room was not fitted up for show, but for business. Its furniture consisted mainly of a roll-top desk, a stamp with its handle sticking up like the tail of an excited cat, a dingy carpet and several chairs of a shape so ungenial to the human form as to suggest that a hint at me desirability of a visitor's early withdrawal might have been incorporated ... — The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... rose again, and like an automaton—lifeless and thoughtless—she began putting the dingy, squalid room to rights. The Abbe helped her demolish the improvised screen; with the same gentle delicacy of thought which had caused him to build it up, he refrained from speaking to her now: he would not intrude himself on her ... — The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and victories of Force brought about; it is a little ganglion, or nervous centre, in the great vital system of Immensity. Call it, if thou wilt, an unconscious Altar, kindled on the bosom of the All; whose iron sacrifice, whose iron smoke and influence reach quite through the All; whose dingy Priest, not by word, yet by brain and sinew, preaches forth the mystery of Force; nay preaches forth (exoterically enough) one little textlet from the Gospel of Freedom, the Gospel of Man's Force, commanding, and one day ... — Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... a contemptuous glance about him, a glance that embraced the dingy, cheerless room, the rain streaming down the panes of the one window, and the figure ... — McTeague • Frank Norris
... 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 ... — At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of Balong, which, as it has been visited by not less (on an avaridg) than two milliums of English since I fust saw it twenty years ago, is tolrabbly well known already. It's a dingy melumcolly place, to my mind; the only thing moving in the streets is the gutter which runs down 'em. As for wooden shoes, I saw few of 'em; and for frogs, upon my honor I never see a single Frenchman swallow one, which I had been led to beleave was their reg'lar, though beastly, custom. ... — Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... staring at the bed with a face devoid of all expression. Sitting up in the bed and staring back at him with a face of injured innocence and pain, was an unwholesome child of Keltic extraction and unneat exterior, with a dingy knitted hood in lieu of nightcap, and two chapped hands appearing from two vast ... — Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... sigh, 'how I should love a pretty home. Lady Myrtle, I am afraid you will be shocked at me, but do you know I sometimes almost feel I would rather papa and mamma went back to India next year than that we should have to go to live at that horrible dingy Barmettle.' ... — Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... in which they were imprisoned still remain as they were left on the morning in which these illustrious men were led to their execution. On the dingy walls of stone are still recorded those sentiments which they had inscribed there, and which indicate the nature of those emotions which animated and sustained them. These proverbial maxims and heroic expressions, gleaned from French tragedies or the classic page, were written with the blood ... — Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... Miss Martineau took her leave; she hurried home, and sitting down in her dingy little ... — The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... 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, ... — James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... frame strung with strips of green hide, which had been removed from the waggon, a pretty, pale-faced woman with a profusion of fair hair. Rachel always remembered that scene. The hot tent with its flaps turned up to let in whatever air there might be. Her mother in a blue dressing-gown, dingy with wear and travel, from which one of the ribbon bows hung by a thread, her face turned to the canvas and weeping silently. The gaunt form of her father with his fanatical, saint-like face, pale beneath its tan, his high forehead over which ... — The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... the moon, that the moon does to the inhabitants of the earth. The face of the latter, however, is more than twelve times as large, and it has not the same silvery appearance as the moon, but is rather of a dingy pink hue, like that of her iron when beginning to lose its red heat. As the same part of the moon is always turned to the earth, one half of her surface is perpetually illuminated by a moon ten times as large to the eye as the sun; the other hemisphere is without a moon. The favoured ... — A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... there between the houses, a glimpse might be had of the low country beyond, with its sluggish canal choked with rushes, a dingy windmill here and there, and stretching away on either side the flat meadows crinkling with yellow grain, and the green pastures dotted with huge black-and-white cattle. A narrow road, straight as a line in Euclid, and bordered by a row of trees each the counterpart of all the ... — Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... salons in Carentan; for, in order not to wound the narrow view of her guests, she denied herself the luxuries to which she was accustomed. The floor of her reception room was not even waxed, the walls were still hung with dingy tapestries; she used the country furniture, burned tallow candles, and followed the customs of the town,—adopting provincial life, and not shrinking from its pettiness or its many disagreeable privations. Knowing, however, that her guests would pardon luxuries if provided ... — The Recruit • Honore de Balzac
... truly twinned? I would take Dr. Farmer's "umber'd," which I had proposed before I ever heard of its having been already offered by him: but I do not adopt his interpretation of the word, which I think is not derived from umbra, a shade, but from umber, a dingy yellow-brown soil, which most commonly forms the mass of the sludge on the sea-shore, and on the banks of tide-rivers at low water. One other possible interpretation of this sentence has occurred to me, just barely ... — Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... suddenly arrested Captain Pott's fork in mid-air, and the morsel of untasted salt-mackerel dangled uncertainly from the points of the dingy tines as he swung about to face the open door. Fork and mackerel fell to the floor as the seaman abruptly rose and stalked outside. The stern features of the rugged old face sagged with astonishment as he blinked at the small army of men swarming ... — Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... and dingy. The brick floor had never known other cleansing than sprinkling and sweeping, the yellow-washed walls had become with time a pale, mottled brown, the paint had disappeared under a fixed dinginess which the dusting-brush alone could not remove, and the glass of the windows had never been washed except ... — Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... those sea-slugs. One, some three inches long, of a bright lemon-yellow, clouded with purple; another of a dingy grey; (16) another exquisite little creature of a pearly French White, (17) furred all over the back with what seem arms, but are really gills, of ringed white and grey and black. Put that yellow ... — Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... dark, and not very evenly trimmed—for his wife or daughter has performed the tonsure with a pair of rusty shears; and the longer locks seem changed in hue, as if his dingy wool hat did not sufficiently protect them against the wind and rain. Over his shoulder he carries a heavy rifle, heavier than a "Harper's ferry musket," running about "fifty to the pound." Around his neck are swung the powder-horn and bullet-pouch, the former protected by ... — Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... 1000 tons, and bore every mark of long and hard service. No gleam of colour sparkled about her. Her sides were rusty, her sails weather-stained; a solitary flag flew from her mizzen-peak, and even its blue had been bleached by sun and rain and wind to a dingy grey. A less romantic and more severely practical ship did not float, and her captain was of the ... — Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... great ant-eater is Myrmecophaga jubata. There are, however, several smaller ant-eaters, which are arborial—that is, have their habitations in trees. Some are only ten inches long. One species is clothed with a greyish-yellow silky hair; another is of a dingy brown colour. They are somewhat similar in their habits to the sloth; and as they are seen clinging with their claws to the trees, or moving sluggishly along, they are easily mistaken for that animal, to which, indeed, they are allied. Some are nocturnal, ... — On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... closed eyes, and her father now rested his long, lean hands upon her head. Basil Ransom watched these proceedings with much interest, for the girl amused and pleased him. She had far more colour than any one there, for whatever brightness was to be found in Miss Birdseye's rather faded and dingy human collection had gathered itself into this attractive but ambiguous young person. There was nothing ambiguous, by the way, about her confederate; Ransom simply loathed him, from the moment he opened his mouth; he was intensely familiar—that is, his type was; he ... — The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... everywhere. Sometimes the men caught an odour of burning meat, of rice and breadstuffs. In a marshy meadow a number of wrecked, canvas-topped wagons showed like a patch of mushrooms, giant and dingy. In a forest glade rested like a Siegfried smithy an abandoned travelling forge. Camp-kettles hacked in two were met with, and boxes of sutlers' wares smashed to fragments. The dead horses were many, and there was disgust with the buzzards, they rose or settled ... — The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... at 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 of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded him ... — Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dusty, musty little shop set in a dingy street, A doorsill old and scarred and worn by many tired feet, A row of cases, vaguely glassed, a safe against the wall, And, oh, the ache of many ... — Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... eyes, and gaily lifting hats and caps, twice, and twice again, and once more, to the ladies—God bless them! Major Harper, the oldest, most refined and most soldierly of them all, was also the handsomest. Old Dismukes was with them; burly, bushy, dingy, on a huge roan charger. Camille asked me who he was, and I was about to reply that he was a bloodthirsty brute without a redeeming trait, when he lifted his shaggy brows at me and smiled, and as I smiled back I told her he was our ... — The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... aint't bin 'ung with medals, like a lot o' chaps abaht; 'E's wore a little dingy but 'e isn't wearin' aht; 'Is ole tin 'at is battered, but it isn't battered in, An' if 'e ain't fergot to grouse, ... — Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... healed, the dingy color slowly yielded to many washings, the woolly coat began to knot up into little curls, a new collar handsomely marked made him a respectable dog, and Sancho was himself again. But it was evident that his sufferings were not ... — St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... great square figure of the boss, his soft hat, his flaming red beard, his dingy mackinaw coat, his dingy black-and-white checked flannel shirt, his dingy blue trousers tucked into high socks, and, instead of driving boots, his ordinary lumberman's rubbers. As a spot of colour, he wore a flaming ... — The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... him "sitting in the corner of the divan at his ease, being afflicted with gout, in the old ample Turkish costume. The white beard, the dress of the Pasha, the rich but faded carpet, the roof of elaborate but dingy wooden arabesque, were all in perfect keeping; and the dubious light of two thick wax candles rising two or three feet from the floor, but seemed to bring out the picture, which carried me a generation back to the pashas of the ... — Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... they came out to the settlement in the first ships, in 1842; others were landaus, constructed on lines substantial enough to resist collision with an armoured train; but the majority were built on a strange American plan, with a canopy of dingy leather and a step behind, so that the fare, after progressing sideways like a crab, descended, at his journey's end, as does a burglar ... — The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... outskirts of London—not quite in London, and certainly not in the country, though only a little while ago there were fields and lanes where rows of houses now stand. There are, indeed, bits of hedgerow still left where the hawthorn tries to blossom in the spring, and dingy patches and corners of field where flowers used to grow; but these have nearly all disappeared, and instead of them heaps of rubbish, old kettles, empty sardine-boxes, and broken crockery are scattered about. Only the dandelions are lowly enough to live ... — A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... being delayed; and overjoyed, with a frenzied rapture, should they be signalled in advance of their anticipated time! And then, when they had glided up New York Bay and anchored in the Hudson, how rapidly would my eager impatience bear me to the dingy old Post office "down town," where I would sometimes have to wait for hours before the letters were sorted ... — She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Long within a dingy dungeon pined that brave and noble knight, For the Saracenic warriors well they knew and feared his might; Long he lay and long he languished on his dripping bed of stone, Till the cankered iron fetters ate their ... — The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... countenance in which pity struggled with contempt, muttered, loud enough to be heard by all near him, "poor devil!" and walked off. He had not proceeded many steps, before it occurred to him that a friend—one Robert Huckaback, much such another one as himself—lived in one of the narrow, dingy streets in the neighborhood. He determined to take the chances of his being at home, and if so, of spending the remainder of the evening with him. Huckaback's quarters were in the same ambitious proximity to heaven as his ... — Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... went slowly by, the bright sun beating down fiercely on deck, and on the heads of the people in the boats, till they felt as if their brains were frying. Mr Cherry sent the dingy ahead with a breaker of water to them. It was drained to the last drop. Suddenly the royals were seen slowly to bulge out; the topgallant-sails followed ... — The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... passed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening to be in Westminster in the forenoon—I had come up to town on business—I mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street, and rang the bell. A dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient duty, admitted me, and I found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe in front of the fire. It wasn't even a good coal fire. Some austere former tenant had installed an electric radiator ... — Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the guards, blanketed like Indians, and with faces and hearts of wolves. Other Rebels—also clad in dingy butternut—slouched around lazily, crouched over diminutive fires, and talked idle gossip in the broadest of "nigger" dialect. Officers swelled and strutted hither and thither, and negro servants loitered around, striving ... — Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... scarcely more than fifteen feet in width. But they were not encumbered with carriages. Private equipages, which form one of the most imposing features of a modern city, were unknown. There was nothing attractive in a Roman street, dark, narrow, and dirty, with but few vehicles, and with dingy shops, like those of Paris in the Middle Ages. The sun scarcely ever penetrated to them. They were damp and cold. The greater part of the city belonged to wealthy and selfish capitalists, like Crassus, who thought more of their gains than the health or beauty ... — The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Baldwin's estates were not vast (he had a dreary house in South Kensington and a still drearier "Hall" somewhere in Essex, which was let), the connection was a "smarter" one than a child of hers could have aspired to form. In spite of the social bravery of her novels she took a very humble and dingy view of herself, so that of all her productions "my daughter Lady Luard" was quite the one she was proudest of. That personage thought her mother very vulgar and was distressed and perplexed by the occasional license of her pen, but had a complicated attitude in regard to this indirect ... — Greville Fane • Henry James
... and oblivious of herself; but joy on the face of that poor helot, accustomed to be nothing, to repress her ideas, her feelings, had the effect of a pale wintry sun behind a mist; it barely lighted her faded, flabby flesh. The gauze cap trimmed with dingy flowers, the hair ill-dressed, the gloomy brown gown, with no ornament but a thick gold chain—all, combined with the expression of her countenance, stimulated the affection of the young Celeste, who—alone in the world—knew ... — The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... 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, is a long glistening line of GUTTER,—not a very pleasing object ... — The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Americans adjourned for coffee to Ciret's, a little cafe in the village which nestles among the hills not far from the camp. The cafe itself was like any one of thousands of French provincial restaurants. There was a great dingy common room, with a sanded brick floor, and faded streamers of tricolor paper festooned in curious patterns from the smoky ceiling. The kitchen was clean, and filled with the appetizing odor of good cooking. ... — High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... at the steamer's smoke trail which stretched far back, a dingy smear on the blueness, across the shining lake; and the contractor watched him with a certain sympathy which, however, he carefully refrained from expressing. There had been a time in his career when it had seemed that every man of influence in his profession and all the powers of capital ... — The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... all, by sermons in every church of the province; for the heart of early New England always found voice through her pulpits. Before me lies a bundle of these sermons, rescued from sixscore years of dust, scrawled on their title-pages with names of owners dead long ago, worm-eaten, dingy, stained with the damps of time, and uttering in quaint old letterpress the emotions of a buried and forgotten past. Triumph, gratulation, hope, breathe in every line, but no ill-will against a fallen enemy. Thomas Foxcroft, pastor ... — Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... sovereigns in 1814. With this ribbon round his neck, on gala 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 with wretched druggets ... — Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mantel, washstand, or under them? "Please move a moment, Anna!" In such a hurry, do! There was Anna, "Wait! I'm in a hurry, too! Where is that pomatum? You Malvina! if you don't help me, I'll—There! take that, Miss! Now fly around!" Malvina, with a faint, dingy pink suddenly brought out on her pale sea-green face, did fly around, while I, hushing my guitar in the tumult, watch each running over the other, in silent amazement, wondering if order can come out of such confusion, and if the people downstairs ... — A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... and every joint and rivet creaking and groaning, while the curricle swung and swayed until I found myself clutching to the side-rail. My uncle eased them and glanced at his watch as we saw the grey tiles and dingy red houses of Reigate in the ... — Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... blue, with white crests, torn off in long ribbons by wind. Curious reds and blues as waves break, carrying sea-weed. Fierce gale off land. Dense fog, sun above it and to right. Everywhere yellow light. Sea strange dingy yellow. Leaves an unnatural green. Effect weird. Sense ... — Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... amiably. He nourished no tiny doubt that he was doing the right thing. He believed that Christ would be pleased with him for turning out boys and girls of fourteen, half-educated, mentally and socially, to spend their lives in dingy offices in dingy alleys of the City. There was no humbug here; impossible for a moment to doubt his sincerity. He had a childlike faith in his Great Work. He was, as he annually insisted, with painful poverty of epithet, engaged ... — Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... well-featured, but 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 Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... get out the boats. The Espriella possessed three—a gig, shaped somewhat like a whaleboat; a useful, twelve-foot dinghy; and a small cockboat, or "punt" (to use our West Country name), capable, at a pinch, of accommodating two persons. This last we carried on deck; but the larger pair at the foot of the rigging on either side, whence we unlashed and lowered them ... — Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... We were coming out of the ice-pack on our way home, with head winds and a week's southerly gale, when we picked up a little craft that had been blown north. There was one man on her—a landsman. The crew had thought she would founder and had made for the Norwegian coast in the dinghy. I guess they were all drowned. Well, we took him on board, this man, and he and the skipper had some long talks in the cabin. All the baggage we took off with him was one tin box. So far as I know, the man's name was ... — The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and Port Darwin is Port Darwin. Also Mother Gunga is Mother Gunga, and when I come back to her banks I know this and worship. In London I did poojah to the big temple by the river for the sake of the God within.... Yes, I will not take the cushions in the dinghy." ... — Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... such a bully old sailor? His eyes are as blue as the scarf at his throat; And he rolls on the bridge of his broad-beamed whaler, In yellow sou'wester and oil-skin coat. In trawler and drifter, in dinghy and dory, Wherever he signals, they leap to his call; They batter the seas to a lather of glory, With old Cap'n Storm-along ... — The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... scribble, scribble whilst adventure sat seductive upon my doorstep that I fluttered forth. At 2 o'clock boarded H.M.S. Savage (Lieutenant-Commander Homer) and, with Aspinall and Freddie, steered for Gully Beach. We didn't cast anchor but got into a cockleshell of a small dinghy and rowed ashore under the cliffs, where we were met by de Lisle. Along the beach men were either bathing or basking mother-naked on the hot sand—enjoying themselves thoroughly. I walked on the edge of the sea, as far as the point which ... — Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... the dinghy, and, with me at the tiller and two lordly tradesmen at the oars, set out in humane but hopeless quest for the mate and the Nigger. I cruised about for nigh an hour, and came back empty-handed. We had ... — The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... ventured to trust His Excellency would see his way clear to furnishing me with immediate dispatch. An interview most polite, full of mutual compliments in the best Portuguese manner, enabled us to get under way as soon as the captain had got the dinghy hauled aboard." ... — The Romance of Rubber • United States Rubber Company
... shape—on the sky." A cry of surprise expired on her lips and she could only peer downward. Lingard, alone in the brig's dinghy, with another stroke sent the light boat nearly under the yacht's counter, laid his sculls in, and rose from the thwart. His head and shoulders loomed up alongside and he had the appearance of standing upon the sea. Involuntarily Mrs. Travers ... — The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... wished him long life and victory over his enviers and his enemies; wherefore the King thanked him and wished him safety and the winning of his wish. Then he committed him to the captain, who laid him in a chest which he embarked in a dinghy, and bore him aboard, whilst the folk were busy in breaking bulk and no man doubted but the chest contained somewhat of merchandise. After this, the vessels set sail and fared on without ceasing ten days, and on the eleventh ... — The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton |