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Rickety   Listen
adjective
Rickety  adj.  
1.
Affected with rickets.
2.
Feeble in the joints; imperfect; weak; shaky.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Rickety" Quotes from Famous Books



... hastened to his old resort, the village inn—but it, too, was gone. A large, rickety wooden building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door was painted, "The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle." Instead of the great tree that used to shelter the quiet little Dutch inn of yore, there now was ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... quickly, she crept up the rickety little stairway, built close against the wall, and leading ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks

... her books; and, best of all, a piano—or was it a harpsichord?—standing on its own legs, which Mr. Stewart heard of as for sale in New York and bought at a pretty high figure. This last was indeed a rickety, jangling old box, but Daisy learned in a way to play upon it, and we men-folk, sitting in her room in the candle-light, and listening to her voice cooing to its shrill tinkle of accompaniment, thought the music as sweet as that ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... on its northern side by the back windows of some rickety old wooden houses, suggestive of an easy conflagration, and dangerously near the church. They date from the time of Queen Elizabeth, and stand on a piece of the ground formerly devoted to Bartholomew Fair, the memory of which is perpetuated ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley

... patches of forest—all were bathed in warmth and light without languor. The breath of the snows was still ice-cool, and exhilarating as wine; its freshness penetrated and enhanced by the faint sweet scent of Banksia roses, that clothed the rickety woodwork in a fairy garment of green and ivory-white. Each least sound was crystal clear in the rarefied air; the quarrelling of two sparrows, the high-pitched chatter from the compound behind the cottages, the crooning of ring-doves among the pines. Butterflies, like detached flowers, fluttered ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... indeed, that, long nursed and dozing in the lap of the State, is now roughly shaken, but is she yet awake? She has grown in bulk at least, while sleeping. Is she not like an overgrown child too big to be carried, and too rickety to ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... of kin who was—to Coombe's great objection—his heir presumptive, and was universally admitted to be a repulsive sort of person both physically and morally. He had brought into the world a weakly and rickety framework and had from mere boyhood devoted himself to a life which would have undermined a Hercules. A relative may so easily present the aspect of an unfortunate incident over which one has no control. This was the case ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... her part, altogether deficient in activity. Exclusive of providing me with a sister, who from some accident or other was but a puling, wrangling, rickety young lady, she initiated me in the mysteries and pleasures of the alphabet. The rector had taken some trouble to make his daughters good English scholars; and my mother, though she had retained much of his solemn song, could not only read currently, and articulate clearly, but ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... larger. Supernumerary teeth, amounting sometimes to a double row, are not uncommon. In other cases there is extraordinary development of the canines. Inherited degeneracy from inebriate, syphilitic, or tuberculous parents frequently manifests itself in rickety teeth with longitudinal and transverse striae or serration of the edges, due to irregularities in the formation of the enamel. In idiots and epileptics, dentition is often backward and stunted; the milk-teeth are not replaced by others, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... could be offered up; and it soon came to be known that, to by-lanes and obscure houses in the cities numbers of persons flocked on Sundays, presided over by their own Sogarth Aroon. On one occasion, already noticed, the floor of a rickety house, where they were worshipping, gave way, to the killing and maiming of many; thenceforth, Catholics were allowed to assemble in public to the knowledge of all, and, though "discoverers" were still legally entitled to denounce and prosecute them, there was small chance of a verdict against ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... unusual sights and sounds. It was all very rustic and a delightful change from the glories of the exposition and official life. It amused me perfectly to see W. with a straw hat, sitting on a rather rickety three-legged stool, eating bread and butter and jam. Once or twice some of W.'s secretaries came down with despatches, and he had a good morning's work, but on the whole the month passed ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington

... one exception, have their natural beauties been exaggerated by travellers. This exception is the village of Belgrade, over which Mary Montague went into raptures, and set the fashion for tourists ever since. I must confess to having been wofully disappointed. The village is a miserable cluster of rickety houses, on an open piece of barren land, surrounded by the forests, or rather thickets, which keep alive the springs that supply Constantinople with water. We reached there with appetites sharpened by our morning's ride, expecting to find at least a vender of kibabs (bits of fried ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... Market. A bizarre female person admitted me to the house there. It was not unreasonable to suppose that she had a certain failing. She slip-slod before me along a remarkably dark, rough-floored and dusty hall, and up a rickety stair. The lodging which she had to let was interesting but not attractive. The tenant, it seemed, who had just moved away had many faults trying to his landlady. He was very delinquent, for one thing, in the payment of his rent. And he was somewhat ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday

... friend, who insists that it can not be called an 'amendment,' but rather a 'detriment' to the Constitution—is as bad as bad can be; and even for its avowed purpose it is uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety. Regarding it as a proposition from Congress to meet the unparalleled exigencies of the present hour, it is no better than the 'muscipular abortion' sent into the world by the 'parturient mountain.' But it is only when we look ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... by a fortunate chance, was Saturday, and everywhere we went we encountered negroes driving in from the country to market, in their rickety old wagons. On some wagons there would be four or five men and women, and here and there one would be playing a musical instrument and they would all be singing, while the creaking of the wagon came in with an orchestral quality which seemed grotesquely suitable. The ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... remarkable fidelity. The first number appeared July 17th, and the serial has lived over a decade and a half, and grown to the bulk of thirty-four or thirty-five volumes. It was not, however, built in a day. It knew a rickety infancy and hours of peril, and owes its rescue from neglect and starvation, its subsequent and constantly increasing prosperity, to the enterprising publishers,—Bradbury and Evans,—who nursed and resuscitated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... minutes' further time, Mr. Gammon was sitting at Titmouse's little rickety round table, at his lodgings, with a sheet of paper before him, and a small pencil-case in his hand, asking him a number of questions concerning his birth and family connections, and taking down his answers very carefully. Mr. Titmouse ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... somewhat comforted, dried her eyes and closed the rickety door. She slept heavily after her late watching, so heavily that she did not hear when Sara rose in the grey of the dawn. At her usual time Morva rose too, and immediately missed her mother. A wild fear throbbed through her heart as she searched ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... threshold, and settled to the enjoyment of a freshly-filled pipe while waiting for Steiner to put in an appearance. Varr strode to the farther end of the hallway and climbed the flight of narrow, rickety stairs which ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... Companion. Some of you call it Rickety Dick, or Willy Wagtail." Turning to the Kangaroo especially, it continued. "If you can bring yourself to speak to anything so obtrusive and gossiping, without any ancestry or manners whatever, you will be able to learn all you need ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley

... short, showed us every attention; and what was best of all did not keep us very long. Our apartment was partitioned off from the public hall, a dark-looking place, but furnished with a table brought by us, and three rickety chairs, beside matresses and plenty of mats. We were kept up nearly all night, which, after the fatigues of the day, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel

... of a miserable blind alley, where a dirty gas-lamp just served to make darkness visible, and show the patched windows and rickety doorways of the crazy houses, whose upper stories were lost in a brooding cloud of fog; and the pools of stagnant water at our feet; and the huge heap of cinders which filled up the waste end of the alley—a dreary, black, formless mound, on which two or three spectral dogs prowled ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... bothered with little things, but I certainly expected to hear from them once in a while. If I don't look out, they'll reduce me to the status of a rubber stamp! I'll have to stir them up," and he gloomily extracted from the rack the newly-arrived, two-days-old London paper, brought by the little rickety train which struggled through at uncertain and infrequent intervals from Zunderburg to Weet-sur-Mer, lighted a fresh cigar, and sat down to a ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson

... remained some hair-pins on the mantelpiece, with gilt cardboard boxes of buttons and lozenges, cutout pictures, and empty pomade pots that retained an odour of jasmine. Then there were some reels of thread, needles, and a missal lying by the side of a soiled Dream-book in the drawer of the rickety deal table. A white summer dress with yellow spots hung forgotten from a nail; while upon the board which served as a toilet-table a big stain behind the water-jug showed where a bottle of bandoline had been overturned. The little chamber, with ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... my friend with his two men, I pushed ahead with my natives to investigate the country beyond. But the underbrush was so dense it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. We had gone some distance, and Fedor and I had just crossed a deep stream on a rickety fallen tree, while the other native was following, when I chanced to look back and saw a small black bear just opposite. He must have smelt us, and, wanting to see what sort of creature man was, had ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various

... Point Pleasant on the New Jersey coast. But the Point Pleasant of that time had very little in common with the present well-known summer resort. In those days the place was reached after a long journey by rail followed by a three hours' drive in a rickety stagecoach over deep sandy roads, albeit the roads did lead through silent, sweet-smelling pine forests. Point Pleasant itself was then a collection of half a dozen big farms which stretched from the Manasquan River to the ocean half a mile distant. ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... which shall turn some few thousands of spindles, spinning and twisting some few millions of pounds of yarn, by which, after nearly three quarters of a century that the cotton manufacture has been planted, "swathed, rocked, and dandled" with legislative fondness into a rickety nursling, some fifty millions of yards of cotton cloths are said to be painfully brought forth in the year; the value of which may probably be equal to the same or a larger quantity of French cottons introduced by contraband, and consumed in the provinces of Catalonia and Arragon themselves—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... no reply to this remark, and followed his master to the low attic of the house, where he was pointed to a rickety bedstead, which ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic

... shouldered it, and stepping to a square opening in one corner of the rickety platform, lowered ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic[obs3], asthenic[obs3]; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate[obs3], womanly. frail, fragile, shattery[obs3]; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, cranky; craichy[obs3]; drooping, tottering &c. v.. broken, lame, withered, shattered, shaken, crazy, shaky; palsied &c. 158; decrepit. languid, poor, infirm; faint, faintish[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... beyond—the road with cushions of soft dust in the ruts and a field and the long hurdles of the hemp patches, and the grey little huts of the village, and the cackle of geese in the far-away rich meadows.... Is all this familiar to you, reader? In the house itself everything is a little awry, a little rickety—but no matter. It stands firm and keeps warm; the stoves are like elephants, the furniture is of all sorts, home-made. Little paths of white footmarks run from the doors over the painted floors. In the hall siskins and larks in tiny cages; in the corner of the dining-room an immense English ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... not make the house uninhabitable, while paint is unknown. So the general appearance of a Chinese town is squalid and tumbledown. Even the yamen of a district magistrate presents crumbling walls, unkempt courtyards, rickety buildings and paper-covered windows full of holes. The palaces of the rich are often expensive, but the Asiatic has little of our ideas of comfort ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group that had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The front yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from the sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung on one hinge, and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the young stranger, noticed that something black was tied to the knob of the ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather

... crossed the rickety bridge during the night, and now this force of several thousand infantry, with the two batteries, was moving out over the territory which the cavalry had reconnoitered on the previous day. The ground being familiar to Coleman, he no longer knew a tremour, and, regarding his ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... plaguing all the neighbors, who on their part, were not slow to punish the rascals. Thus several years went by. The son became a notorious character, the daughter an impudent, cynical little runabout who, on certain occasions, would fill their rickety abode with her chatter about affairs concerning the "man" of so-and-so or such-and-such. And thus things were going when the old man took it into his head to fall ill. An excruciating rheumatism attacked ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

... upon the rickety deal table, and the three men sat down. Valentine would have waited till his host's daughter had seated herself; but she had laid no plate or knife for herself, and it was evident that she was not expected to share the ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... the rickety bed, while Mike took up a crutch that was standing idly in a corner. She coughed resignedly and he limped about, forlorn. They had assumed their parts which were almost to the burlesque of poverty, when the door ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve

... Celtic blood in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap. The stout muscles gave an involuntary jerk. The substantial frame felt the thrill all through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing creaked ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... single wounded man worth carrying to the hospital,—and are all the murders, and massacres, and fields of wounded, and the madness, the conflagrations, the famines, the miseries of families, and the rickety frames and melancholy bloods of posterity, only fit to have an embroidered handkerchief thrown over them? Must "ladies and gentlemen" be called off, that they may not "look that way," the "sight is so shocking"? Does it become us to let others endure, what we cannot ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt

... ragged coverlet partially spread over a dirty bed tick filled with leaves. There was only one chair, and that was a broken rocker, on which the unhappy mistress of the cottage was seated. But there were two or three rough stools, made of pieces of pine slab, standing beside the rickety table. Pointing to these stools, Mrs. Button, without quitting her chair, said ...
— Aunt Amy - or, How Minnie Brown learned to be a Sunbeam • Francis Forrester

... A flight of rickety, wooden stairs pitched downward from the edge of the grassy bank to a wharf at the water's edge—the mere skeleton of a wharf now, outlined only by decaying stringpieces. But here the patched-up punt was moored; and above it, nailed to a dead tree, the sign with ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... host, we went along the Looembe westwards till we reached the bridge (rather a rickety affair), which, when the water is low may be used as a weir. The Looembe main stream is 66 feet wide, 6 feet deep, with at least 200 feet of flood beyond it. The water was knee deep on the bridge, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... dilapidated whitewashed wooden paling, and clothed, except in several mangy bare patches, with rank weedy grass, untended unwholesome shrubs, and untidy neglected trees.... Behind me is a whitewashed room about fifteen feet by twelve, containing a rickety, black horse-hair sofa, all worn and torn into prickly ridges; six rheumatic wooden chairs; a lame table covered with a plaid shawl of my own, being otherwise without cloth to hide its nakedness or the indefinite variety of dirt-spots and stains which ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... else" turned out—after more hot tramping, and several failures—to be, of all things, a little open-air place in a back street that called itself a French restaurant, and consisted in two or three rickety tables under a scarlet-runner, between a patch of zinnias and petunias and a big elm bending over from the next yard. Here they lunched on queerly flavoured things, while Harney, leaning back in a crippled rocking-chair, smoked cigarettes ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... actual denizens! One gazed with a dull, wondering pity at the poor, pale, rickety children; the slatternly, coarse women who never smiled (except when drunk); the dull, morose, miserable men. How they lacked the grace of French deformity, the ease and lightness of French depravity, the sympathetic distinction ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... know what that means," Roderick answered. He turned away, threw himself on a rickety chair, and sat for some moments with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. "Work—work?" he said at last, looking up, "ah, if I could only begin!" He glanced round the room a moment and his eye encountered on the mantel-shelf ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... mile, we came to the mill, in the valley of another large brook. It was a weathered, saddle-back old structure, situated at the foot of a huge dam, built of rough stones, like a farm wall across the brook, and holding back a considerable pond. A rickety sluice-way led the water down upon the water-wheel ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... small attic of one of the meanest houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap of straw, to serve as another bed, and against the wall a much-battered sea-chest and ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston

... the woods, dark with "black growth," and more distant hillsides, gray and black, where the leafless deciduous growth mingled with the evergreens. At infrequent intervals along the road appeared little farm-houses,—two rooms and an attic, with rickety outhouses and barns, all banked with earth to protect them from the winter. These were forlorn enough when they showed marks of life; but again and again they were deserted, with their special air of decay, the wind sucking through ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... shout and a flourish, the four horses came tearing around the court-house corner, plunged relentlessly down the hill and dragged the rickety old coach up to the hotel, with a jerk that nearly upset the poor thing and brought admiration to everybody's eyes. Fortunately for the coach, that was the only time of day the horses ever went ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher

... money-lender, had given Kate and her mother leave to live in a rickety, unoccupied house which he owned. It was a dingy building on an old wharf, but Noggs, the clerk, himself cleaned and furnished one of its rooms so that it was fairly comfortable. When they were settled Ralph took Kate to a dressmaker's, where he got her a situation, ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives

... brought the chair. It happened to be the one with a rickety leg, but its owner was helping the reluctant Abishai remove the long-tailed blue coat which had been his wedding garment and had adorned his person on occasions of ceremony ever since. She did not notice ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln

... finishing touch of gloom to the scene. Nor was the interior of the room more cheerful. The furniture had been put in during the reign of George III, and last dusted in that of William and Mary. A black horse-hair sofa ran along one wall. There was a deal table, a chair, and a rickety bookcase. It was a room for a realist to write in; and my style, such as it ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... room. He moved carefully, for the floor was piled with disused furniture, boxes, sacking, and rubbish. He was some time finding the door, but although he moved as carefully as he could he knocked over a heavy chest which was placed on a rickety chair, the two falling with a crash on the floor. At last he found the door and opened it. As he did so a light met his eyes, and he saw ascending the staircase a man with a drawn sword, and a woman holding a light above her head following ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty

... the two millions of the remaining women, what reasonable man would not throw out a hundred thousand poor girls, humpbacked, plain, cross-grained, rickety, sickly, blind, crippled in some way, well educated but penniless, all bound to be spinsters, and by no means tempted to violate ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... you should carry her a handful of pretty flowers some time when you go to school," said Mrs. West. "I'll do that to-morrow morning," said George, "if I can find my way into that rickety old house." ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... used to drop in and talk to her. But she had lately married, to his great amusement, and her husband had taken her on a wedding-tour, which was to be at the same time professional. On this occasion he mounted, with rather a heavy tread, to his rooms, where (on the rickety writing-table in the parlour) he found a note from Mrs. Luna. I need not reproduce it in extenso; a pale reflexion of it will serve. She reproached him with neglecting her, wanted to know what had become of him, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... the public life of France, in the Representative Chamber of the Orleans Monarchy, and in the Legislature of the Republic,—delivered for the benefit of readers far removed by time and distance, during the latter months of the rickety infancy of that ill-starred Government and the first period of the Second Empire. Tocqueville spoke from a point of vantage, such as few other men have attained, upon a theme which he had studied profoundly in youth, and upon which Fate had ever since been writing elaborate commentaries. He spoke ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... large, arched window opened on either side, so that one standing in the porch could be seen from the upper and lower front windows of the house. The outer woodwork and roof of the porch were covered by a woodbine, trimmed, however, so as to leave the openings clear. A few rickety steps, at the sides and between the cracks of which sprouted tall blades of grass, led down to the path which terminated in the gate. This path was distinguished by an incongruous pavement of white limestone ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... noble sight!' exclaimed Viney to Watchorn as they sat on their horses, below a rickety green-baize-covered scaffold, labelled, 'GRAND STAND; admission, Two-and-sixpence,' raised against Scourgefield's stack-yard wall, eyeing the population pouring in from all parts. 'Dear, but it's a noble sight!' ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... observed Peter Conant at breakfast the nest morning, "to ride to and from the station in a motor car than to patronize Bill Coombs' rickety, slow-going omnibus. But I can't expect our fair neighbor to run a stage line ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)

... the garments thus honored as in a manner sanctified. The Senator wrought in Bible classes, and nothing could keep him away from the Sunday Schools—neither sickness nor storms nor weariness. He even traveled a tedious thirty miles in a poor little rickety stagecoach to comply with the desire of the miserable hamlet of Cattleville that he would let its Sunday School ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... can scarcely be contented with tall, waving timothy in the front door-yard, and the rickety board-fence that enclosed a scene of almost primitive rusticity—the state of things in ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan

... succeed to the inheritance. He was not aware that for two years old Jeremiah Brohl had been in his dotage, and that his debtors mocked him while devouring his substance. A fine inheritance! it was diminished to two or three rickety chairs, four cracked walls that scarcely could stand upright, and some jewellery concealed in a hiding-place that Samuel knew of. Old Jeremiah never had been able to dispose of it for the price he required, and he preferred to keep it rather ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez

... chamber formerly occupied by half a dozen hand-looms, was crowded on Sundays, morning and evening, not only by the Brethren, but by migrants from other denominations, and the Sunday school, which was held in a little rickety garret off the main room, also received a large increase of members. It was rumoured that Mr. Dyson was specially successful with boys, and that there was an 'awakening' among some of the lowest and roughest ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... says: "I entered a narrow garret, furnished with a bottomless chair, a rickety table and a miserable pallet bed, with two dirty curtains half drawn round it. On the table were an inkstand, a big copybook scribbled all over, a jug of lemonade, a glass, and a morsel of bread. The heat in this wretched hole was stifling, and ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... the place, and it is, as you say, a rickety old house; but I suppose it is the best they can get. But here we are at school, Ally; you get out first, and I will hand sissy out to you. Take hold of her hand, ...
— A Child's Anti-Slavery Book - Containing a Few Words About American Slave Children and Stories - of Slave-Life. • Various

... quiet avenue. A few old trees had been allowed to remain on these blocks, and they drooped over the street, giving a pleasant shade to the broad houses and the little patches of sward. Just around the corner were some rickety wooden tenements, and a street so wretchedly paved that in the great holes where the blocks had rotted out stood pools ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... become thoroughly disgusted and dissatisfied with his position, either a change or a dissolution of the Government may be anticipated, and in this case any attempt at change can scarcely fail to break up this rickety firm. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... up till you reached the very topmost room in a rickety building in —— street, and there they were—a woman in neat but coarse raiment, seated by a flickering candle, stitching for the life, and with every effort for the life, stitching out the life. Near her, on a lowly bed, lay her suffering husband, ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... industrious mechanic, but had for two years been pursuing the downward path to ruin, a confirmed victim of the bottle. He had been forced by the destitution thus brought upon himself to abandon a snug abode in a decent street for the squalor of a rickety shell in a mean locality, and was now prostrate on his bed, dying of rapid consumption. By what mysterious providence a new-born babe should thus be sent to such a man's door is beyond my comprehension. But the wife of Varick, softer of heart than its mother, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... water was brought in a dirty pail. Then, without a stroke of brush or curry-comb he was led out. When he saw the wagon to which he was to be hitched Skipper hung his head. He had reached the bottom. It was unpainted and rickety as to body and frame, the wheels were unmated and dished, while the shafts were ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford

... formed by a couple of large rocks the size of a moderate house, which had been detached from the overhanging cliff above, and had fallen together. There was a smaller cavern within, which made a capital kennel; rather more substantial than the rickety building of yesterday. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... out my watch and made a calculation; Auber's train was probably at Newark. I could stand it no longer, and I went toward his room, stamping on the bare floor, whistling nervously, and rattling the rickety balustrade. I banged open the door and began to shout: "Auber! ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... the darkness, and with the help of two more that followed I saw the interior of a lofty and somewhat rickety-looking barn, erected upon a wall of grey stones that ran all round and extended to a height of perhaps four feet. Above this masonry rose the wooden sides, running up into the usual vaulted roof, and ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... lose from footpads and thieves," explained the Englishman as he guided his friend through the narrow doorway, then up a flight of rickety stairs, to a small room on the floor above. "He leaves all doors open for anyone to walk in, but, la! the interior of the house looks so uninviting that no ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... seen him for the first time, some four years before, from the bridge of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, more or less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning, and a slight mist—an opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens, only without the fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... quickly, round and round, crossing finally by the Rialto. The rooms, in the event, were unoccupied; the ancient padrona was there with her smile all a radiance but her recognition all a fable; the ancient rickety objects too, refined in their shabbiness, amiable in their decay, as to which, on his side, demonstrations were tenderly veracious; so that before he took his way again he had arranged to come in on ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... sundown when Lum got back. Smoke was coming out of his rickety chimney, and the wail of an old ballad reached his ears. Singing, the girl did not hear him coming, and through the open door he saw that the room had been tidied up and that she was cooking supper. The baby was playing on the floor. She turned at the creak of his ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox

... a stable-lantern on a kitchen-table. Their seat near the window was a rickety garden-bench rejected in the headlong sale of the furniture; and when she rose, unable to continue motionless while the hosts of illuminated cloud flew fast, she had to warn her brother to preserve his balance. He tacitly did ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... massed a large population of exceedingly ignorant, destitute and superstitious people of every colour and condition—men, women and children—crowded together in rickety hovels, where stagnant water stood the year round, the very air impregnated with the heavy sickening odour of the packing-houses. No tongue or pen can describe the wretchedness that existed in that locality, ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike

... wreck, with no hope of improvement, Too feeble to race with an invalid crab; I'm wry in the neck, with a rickety movement Peculiarly suited ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl

... crumbling away with dampness and festooned with cobwebs, while the uncarpeted floor was checkered with green stains of mildew, and the very old four-post bedstead on which she lay was fringed around the rickety tester with rags of green ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... he felt a sudden most inordinate desire to reach that brown stone mansion just as quickly as possible. But abruptly even to himself he swerved off instead at the yellow sassafras tree and plunged quite wildly through a mass of broken sods towards the rickety, no-account cedar summer house. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... Mr. Garrity is one of the owners of these ice-houses, fellows. I guess he must have come up here to-day to see for himself if the old building was as rickety as people said." ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren

... and had little feet-worn hollows in the middle of them. The banisters were rickety, and had been notched by the knives of reckless tenants. The first and second floors were occupied by different families (so Marcus inferred from the distinct set of baby cries issuing from each), and the halls were dirty, and flavored ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... his arrival the warm, bright bed-chamber was exchanged for a cold dark closet opening off Madame's boudoir, a cupboard furnished with a rickety cot and a broken chair, lacking any provision for heat or light, and ventilated solely by a transom over the door; and inasmuch as Madame shared the French horror of draughts and so kept her boudoir hermetically sealed nine months of the year, the transom didn't ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... building of a house, every detail would have to be included; but after all the pages of careful enumeration the reader would know less of how it looked than after these few words from Irving. "A large, rickety wooden building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door was painted 'The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.'" So the manual training student uses five hundred words to describe in ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... time they had reached the Dunns' domain. At least they had come to a broken-down gate in a tumble-down fence, which Marjorie knew was the portal of their destination. In their endeavors to open the rickety gate the girls pushed it over, and ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells

... British cash and patronage have raised upon the banks of the flower of German streams. On the contrary, I had early dispensed with the aid of steam, to wander on foot, with the occasional assistance of a lazy country diligence or rickety einspanner, through the many beautiful districts that lie upon either bank of the river; pedestrianising in Rhenish Bavaria, losing myself in the Odenwald, and pausing, when occasion offered, to pick a trout ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... the use of looking over those things—miserable sea-weeds? You'd better bring in some wood and draw some water: it nearly breaks my back to draw water up that rickety-rackety well." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... hour after Miska had disappeared into the little house near the corner, the hidden door in the damp cellar below "The Pidgin House" opened and a bent old woman, a ragged, grey-haired and dirty figure, walked slowly up the rickety wooden stair and entered a bare room behind and below the shop and to the immediate left of the den of the opium-smoker. This room, which was windowless, was lighted by a tin paraffin lamp hung upon a nail in the dirty plaster ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer

... ugly red cover (warranted not to betray dirt) of the rickety bed were two parcels—a big box and a little one. Somebody must have been thinking of ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... was very good indeed to Mother—made her little boys get out and walk and put Bobby in with the bundles. Then she helped Mother as far as her house, gave her hot tea and some bread and butter, and kept her until Mr. Harley came home. He had a rickety old buggy and a shabby horse and he harnessed up and brought Mother and Bobby home in ...
— Four Little Blossoms on Apple Tree Island • Mabel C. Hawley

... pictures, pipes, china, (all crack'd,) Old rickety tables, and chairs broken-backed; A twopenny treasury, wondrous to see; What matter? 'tis pleasant to you, friend, ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Boulogne, where, in addition to a classical and mathematical education (washing included), the young gentlemen have the benefit of learning French among THE FRENCH THEMSELVES. Accordingly, the young gentlemen are locked up in a great rickety house, two miles from Boulogne and never see a soul, except the French usher and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... written," I said, throwing myself back in a rickety but tolerably comfortable arm-chair which Derrick had inherited with ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall

... substantial than the Glasgow manufactory on paper. A prettier painting never charmed the eye of speculating amateur. Allcraft was caught. Ten thousand pounds, which had been sent out to bring the fifty thousand back, never were seen again. The manufacturer decamped—the rickety house gave way, and failed. From this period Allcraft entangled himself more and more in schemes for making money rapidly and by great strokes, and deeper he fell into the slough of difficulty and danger. His troubles were commencing when he heard of Mildred's serious illness, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... wonder why he should go on living up three pair of stairs with me, don't you, now? Well, it is a queer taste. But we are fond of each other; and as I can't afford to live in a grand house, he comes and stays in these rickety old chambers with me. He's a man that can afford ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... agreeing to make the baby's Christian name Hiram and to add a middle name selected at random from the Scriptures. The big, rickety family Bible was taken from the center table and opened with shaking fingers by Mrs. Baker. She read aloud the first sentence that met her ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln

... midday sun when he came on deck. Its low, square houses were glaring white; here and there a splotch of vivid Cuban blue stood out; the rickety, worm-eaten piling of its water-front resembled rows of rotten, snaggly teeth smiling out of a chalky face mottled with unhealthy, artificial spots of color. Gusts of wind from the shore brought feverish odors, as if the city were sick and exhaled a tainted ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... age, seated in a rickety old wagon, with a child on either side of her, was driving a young and half-broken horse into Oakdale. The young horse snorted, attempted to turn round, and then began to back up, cramping the wagon across the bridge. The woman struggled vainly with the reins, in a perfect panic ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott

... moment Bob pointed out a flat field marked with the welcome white T, then he aroused John and Tom while Paul was bringing the Sky-Bird down. From a rickety old pier, also from the shores where they had gathered, a crowd of curious natives rushed forward to witness the landing of the most startling object they had ever seen. They were a mixture of South ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... only two or three; in the great haymows of the old barn in the clearing back of the Inn; in the ramshackle garret under that amazing roof; or, best of all, in the abandoned bowling-alley, where they rolled dilapidated balls at rickety ten-pins. ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold

... it was with difficulty that the young oarsman found the rickety stairs, every step of which creaked as he ...
— The Young Oarsmen of Lakeview • Ralph Bonehill

... humming in the chimneys and between the window-sashes like a bumblebee as big as a whale. It made her feel so lonesome and blue that many's the time I've heard her crying to herself when she thought I was sound asleep. We were going to pull down the old house, anyhow. It was a rickety concern, and inconvenient as could be. So I got Miss Nancy to tell me how many rooms and closets and all that she'd like to have in a house that was to be built on purpose for her, and for nobody else, and I made a plan of it all on paper, and then I sent her up to stay with her mother in Buckingham ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... barrier, waiting for the meager and circuslike procession to enter with the keys of the bull pen, when my attention was attracted to a movement in the reserved gallery. A lady and gentleman of a quality that was evidently unfamiliar to the rest of the audience were picking their way along the rickety benches to a front seat. I recognized the geologist with some surprise, and the lady he was leading with still greater astonishment. For it was Miss Mannersley, in her precise, well-fitting walking-costume—a monotone of sober color ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... decorum. Sometimes, indeed, "the third person" grew slightly facetious and jocose when he represented to himself what he termed "the queer cut" that some old friend would display on presenting his cheque for payment at the rickety counter of Messrs —— & Co.; but no deeper expression of feeling escaped one of those who spoke so long and volubly on what concerned themselves so very little. I was puzzled and disturbed. The stranger had returned from Warwickshire the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, near the sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a door once was, and within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A pale blackboard crouched in the corner. My desk was made of three boards, reinforced at critical points, and my chair, borrowed from the landlady, had to be returned every night. Seats for the children—these puzzled ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... the one-eyed man, as he pitched Brown headlong into the coach, slammed the rickety door on him, sprang to his box, and lashed his sorry steeds into a gallop. In due time they arrived, and a room was engaged for the lady, and ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... had no idea that he was an old man. He had lived for so many years among men of his own stamp, who had grown grey and bald, and rickety, and weak alongside of him, that he had no opportunity of seeing that he was more grey or more rickety than his neighbours. No children had become men and women at his feet; no new race had gone out into the world and fought ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... being one of the hottest corners in the Empire in more senses than one, and Kurrumpore, the military centre, had not been chosen for any especial advantages of climate. So few indeed did it possess in the eyes of Europeans that none ever went there save those whom an inexorable fate compelled. The rickety, wooden bungalows scattered about the cantonment were temporary lodgings, not abiding-places. The women of the community, like migratory birds, dwelt in them for barely four months in the year, flitting with the coming of the pitiless heat to ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... too. "It does seem absurd. Sometimes when I pass him jogging along to town in his rickety old cart, and look at his pale, cruel face, and know that he is a broken-down gambler and man of the world, and yet considers himself infinitely superior to me—a young man in the prime of life, with a good constitution and happy prospects, ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders

... stood stationary, smelling the slaughtered cow. No longer the cautious, creeping tiger, I felt how awful a brute he was to offend. I remembered how he had worried a strong cow in half a minute, and that, with his weight alone, my poor rickety little citadel would fall to pieces. As if the excitement of the moment was insufficient, the monster, gazing down the dry watercourse, caught sight of his companion, who, advancing up the bed of the nullah, stood irresolutely about twenty yards off. The bully, who was evidently ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman

... showed the old familiar things, the chinks in the wall, the rickety table, the couch, the stairway! ... He stumbled to the stairway. He forced his leaden feet to mount it.... It was pitch dark there. The upper doors were shut.... "Her door—on the right." He said this to ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... feel quick-frozen again. Being alone at sea in a rickety craft with a possible madman had been bad enough. To have a weird creature with superhuman powers, and an impossible pet monster, added to the crew was a little ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw

... and went down the rickety stairs, believing somehow that she had told me the truth. But if not Zalnitch, then who? I knew that in less than a week, as soon as Helen was well enough to stand the shock, she would be indicted, unless in the meantime, I ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny

... since I made the last entry in my journal. J. B. was asleep in his historic bed, and I was sitting at a rickety table writing by candle-light, stopping now and then to listen to the mutter of guns on the Aisne front. It was only at night that we could hear them, and then not often, the very ghost of sound, as faint as the beating of the pulses in one's ears. That was a May evening, and this, one late ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... into the baffling gloom. He guessed that something of a like nature had fallen upon the town again. The gas-light on the landings and in the melancholy hall burned feebly—so feebly that one got but a vague view of the rickety hat-stand and the shabby overcoats and head-gear hanging upon it. It was well for him that he had but a corner or so to turn before he reached the pawnshop in whose window he had seen the pistol ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... they found an archway on the right-hand side, opening at right angles into long and badly lighted vaults. In this arch there was no door; but a black step-ladder (made of oak, no doubt), very steep and rather rickety, was planted ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... of responding, stirred the pine-knots until they gave forth a more satisfactory light, hung her bonnet on the bedpost, and seated herself wearily in a rickety chair, the loose planks of the floor rattling and shaking as ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris

... found a rickety ladder that had been placed there for the use of the village children, who were accustomed to come here with baskets, and in a small way mine coal for home use from the sides of the old gangway. Descending this, they lighted their ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe

... get a chance to tell it, for Albert walked off and left him. At half-past twelve that afternoon he engaged "Vessie" Young—christened Sylvester Young and a brother to the driver of the depot wagon—to haul the Calvin lumber in his rickety, fragrant old wagon. Simpson Mullen—commonly called "Simp"—was to help ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... been to the Fontaine des Eaux several times in her walks with Jack. It was a favourite spot of hers. The way lay through the village, across the rickety old bridge, and up the narrow valley to the left, following the course of the river. The green hills on each side had all the bright freshness of early spring, but the real beauty of the walk was ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... turn you came to the waste ground covered with old boots and rusted, crumpled tins. The little dirty brown house stood there behind the rickety blue palings; narrow, like the piece of a house that has been cut in two. It hid, stooping under the ivy bush on its roof. It was not like the houses people live in; there was something queer, some secret, frightening thing ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair

... Thompson walked into his room at the Globe. He seated himself in a rickety chair under a fly-specked incandescent lamp, beside a bed that was clean and comfortable if neither stylish nor massive. Over against the opposite wall stood a dresser which had suffered at the hands of many lodgers. Altogether it was a cheap ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... down into It'ly on a bum railroad, staying at bummer hotels, and switching off to a rickety old chaise behind a pair of animated frames that showed the S. P. C. A. hadn't got as far as It'ly yet. Think of riding from the Battery to White Plains in a Fifth Avenue stage! That would be a chariot race to what we took before we hove in sight ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... their faces, and saw the glance which accompanied them, and then he almost looked nobly born, so proud became his step and steadfast his gaze. The long market (surrounded with its fantastic gables, strange, rickety, and picturesque, which looked us though they retained the expression of the angular, quaint, rococo faces of those by whom the houses were formerly tenanted) was crowded with all that was gay and animated in Dantzic; around the fountains, somewhat rude in their execution but admirable ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... used as a substitute for cows' milk, is not nearly so good, since it has lost in the process of condensation one of the most important elements, that which forms bone tissue. Accordingly, babies fed upon condensed milk are apt to be "rickety," and they lack in general power to resist disease, which is primarily the mark of a baby fed on mother's milk, and to a slightly lesser degree, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to employers—the degree to which the poor author was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit! I remember saying to myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair: ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... because mother liked them for the house. Back of the flower beds was a patch of young corn, and behind that the vegetable garden which supplied the table. At one side of the garden was the barn where poor Genevieve was now resting her rickety bones, and next to that ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott

... of going home bareheaded, was obliged to creep up the rickety staircase with Mandoline. She likened her feelings on the occasion to those of a person whom "the mayor is putting in the lockup." Indeed, the "lock-up" was Dotty's dream of all the horrors, and she had no doubt it was the mayor himself ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May

... specimen togged out in its finest, a mob of perspiring bodies, where side by side are tossed about the stout gossip bedecked in red, white and blue ribbons, grown fat behind her counter and panting from lack of breath, the rickety clerk with his wife and brat in tow, the laborer carrying his youngster astride his neck, the bewildered provincial with his foolish, dazed expression, the groom, barely shaved and still spreading the perfume of the stable. And the foreigners dressed like monkeys, English ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... got to know, rickety, unwholesome geniuses, whose genius (such as it was) had allied itself to madness; and who were just as conceited about the madness as about the genius, and took more pains to cultivate it. It brought them a quicker kudos, and was so much more visible ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier



Words linked to "Rickety" :   shaky, feeble, wonky, sapless, ill, rachitic, sick, infirm, decrepit, ricketiness, debile, wobbly, frail, unstable



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