"Squalid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the road grew desolate. There were a few patches of corn, a few squalid-looking log or frame houses, a tract of horrible dreary blackness; and still more horrible, beyond it was a region of spectres—trees white and stripped bare, lifting their dead arms like things blasted. Averil cried out in indignant horror, 'Who ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... out long before Dave's train drew into the suburbs of Denver. It crawled interminably through squalid residence sections, warehouses, and small manufactories, coming to a halt at last in a wilderness of tracks on the border of a small, narrow stream flowing sluggishly between wide banks ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... in a room more squalid than her own, Vardri was also enduring his own private Purgatory. Hers was physical, his mental. That ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... came upon a single native, a female, young, but miserably thin and squalid, fit emblem of the sterility of the country. We could gain no information from her, she was so much alarmed, but not long after parting with her we came to a puddle of water in the plains, and encamped for the night. Our stage had been ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... eager and active of all the Virtues, set off first on his journey. Justice followed, and kept up with him, though at a more even pace. Charity never heard a sigh, or saw a squalid face, but she stayed to cheer and console the sufferer,—a kindness ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... right," he answered in a brusque, slurring stammer partaking of the timorousness of a child and the resolution of a man. He advanced fearlessly with the woman on his arm, but his lower lip dropped. Nevertheless, on the pavement of the squalid and wide thoroughfare, whose poverty in all the amenities of life stood foolishly exposed by a mad profusion of gas-lights, their resemblance to each other was so pronounced as to strike ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... fostered a half-fancied illness, he might have been more put out than he certainly was when, upon turning into the street, he felt the keen east wind nipping his ears; but it was from a poor house lying in the midst of a very labyrinth of squalid back streets and foul courts, and yet but a mere stone's-throw from ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... Lane and its immediate vicinity was their recognised locality in the earlier part of the last century. It is impossible to associate respectability, to say nothing of fashion, with this evil-smelling, squalid thoroughfare. And yet there can be no question about its having been at one time an aristocratic quarter. Until within the last few years, the Lane itself, and its numerous tributaries, contained many second-hand bookshops. The most celebrated, and, indeed, almost the ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... taken from a Sicilian tale by Giovanni Verga. It is peculiarly Italian in its motive, running a swift, sure gamut of love, flirtation, jealousy, and death,—a melodrama of a passionate and tragic sort, amid somewhat squalid environments, that particularly lends itself to music of Mascagni's forceful sort. The overture graphically presents the main themes of the opera, and these themes illustrate a very simple but strong story. Turridu, ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... town of Sorata. From this distance the red tile roofs, the soft blue, green, and yellow of its stuccoed walls, look indescribably fresh and grateful. A closer inspection will probably dissipate this impression; it will be squalid and dirty, the river-stone paving of its street will be deep in the accumulation of filth, dirty Indian children will swarm in them with mangy dogs and bedraggled ducks, the gay frescoes of its walls will peel in ragged patches, revealing the 'dobe of their base, and the tile ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... simple and sufficiently salted to know that these Turnerian dreams are generally the magical accidents of changing light and seldom the result of any intrinsic interest in the places themselves—even they had a grievance when they saw the real Basra. Was this the Venice of the East, this squalid place beside soup-coloured waters? Was this the city that reveals the past splendours of Haroun Alraschid as Venice reveals the golden age of Titian and ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... road from Moozuffernuggar fares straight across the plain towards the crumbling mountains. Behind, in the heat mist, the castle and palace on their steeply-scarped crag, with the squalid town that clustered at their feet, reminded me once more most strangely of Edinburgh, where I used to spend my vacations from Girton. But the pitiless sun differed greatly from the gray haar of ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... evening, Cornelius accompanying him to the station; but he did not read in the train which took him back to the Fountall Theological College, as he had done on the way out. That ineradicable trouble still remained as a squalid spot in the expanse of his life. He sat with the other students in the cathedral choir next day; and the recollection of the trouble obscured the purple splendour thrown by the panes upon ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... well-dressed, well-fed citizens; gone the rows of carriages which at this hour of the day were wont to circle the Plaza laden with the aristocracy of the city; gone was that air of cheerfulness and substance which had lent distinction to the place. Matanzas appeared poor and squalid, depressingly wretched; its streets were foul and the Plaza de la Libertad—grim mockery of a name—was crowded with a throng such as it had never held in O'Reilly's time, a throng of people who were, without exception, gaunt, listless, ragged. There was no afternoon parade ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... stores were the property of the plantation lords of the lowlands of North Carolina, who correspond to the pinchbeck barons of the rice districts of South Carolina. As there, the whites and negros we saw were of the lowest, most squalid type of humanity. The people of the middle and upland districts of North Carolina are a much superior race to the same class in South Carolina. They are mostly of Scotch-Irish descent, with a strong infusion of English-Quaker ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the guiding hand of 'philanthropy and five per cent.' to lead out of the congested and squalid tenement districts thousands of these poor yet industrious people who could make our deserts of Long Island sand and scrub oak blossom as the rose. Let the modern method find illustration here. Let our philanthropist choose for himself a board of trustees to whom should be delegated ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... a slave in everything but name, when the sun had burned the brains of men to madness, and the palm wine had turned them into howling devils. He told her of the natives of Bekwando, of the days they had spent amongst them in that squalid hut when their fate hung in the balance day by day, and every shout that went up from the warriors gathered round the house of the King was a cry of death. He spoke of their ultimate success, of the granting of ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... well enough, thank you! It isn't my body; bodies don't matter unless they ache, which mine doesn't, the saints be praised!" Mrs. M'Crawney exclaimed with pious fervour, as she emerged from her bedroom and seated herself in all her squalid ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... narrow "Opera House." It was a dirty, cheerless hole, in spite of the brilliance of many oil lamps, shining among the flimsy decorations. At the end of the tunnel-shaped room was a rude stage, festooned with gaudy, squalid hangings, beneath which a painted siren was singing a song which Simon did not listen to. The floor of the auditorium was filled with chairs and tables in disorderly array, the occupants of which seemed to be paying more attention to their liquor and their cards than ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... narrow way past the old Cathedral, crossed Jackson Square in the full moonlight, passed the Old Market, and threaded dark and dirty thoroughfares parallel to the river. None sought to stay us, though many paused in the gently squalid life of that section, to look after our churning car, a thing not usual there so far from ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... made his way carefully past the "poor wretch" and knocked at the door. No answer. He knocked louder, and this time a low "come in" rewarded him, and he promptly obeyed it. A woman was bending over a pile of straw and rags, and an object lying on top of them; and a squalid child, curled in one corner, with a wild, frightened look in his eyes. The woman turned as the door opened, and John Birge recognized her ...
— Three People • Pansy
... stands no type or title given In all the squalid tales of gore and pelf; Though cowed by crashing thunders from all heaven. Cain never said, 'My brother ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... luggage was got out and lifted down. Alvina descended. There she was, in a wild centre of an old, unfinished little mountain town. The facade of a church rose from a small eminence. A white road ran to the right, where a great open valley showed faintly beyond and beneath. Low, squalid sort of buildings stood around—with some high buildings. And there were bare little trees. The stars were in the sky, the air was icy. People stood darkly, excitedly about, women with an odd, shell-pattern head-dress of gofered linen, something like a parlour-maid's ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... day a terrific scene terminated this melancholy drama. This, the last day of Moscow, having arrived, Rostopchin collected together all whom he had been able to retain and arm. The prisons were thrown open. A squalid and disgusting crew tumultuously issued from them. These wretches rushed into the streets with ferocious joy. Two men, a Russian and a Frenchman, the one accused of treason, the other of political indiscretion, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... are volcanoes burnt out; on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine, and the sustaining corn. Such was the first, such the second condition of Vesuvius. But when a now fire bursts out, a face of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... from dancing and singing all day in the streets, it would be far pleasanter to drift about on the canal in the evening than to spend it tossing about on the husk mattresses in Giovanni's squalid house, and the children listened with ...
— The Italian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... volumes, and her rolling eyes, Her spotted breast, and gaping womb, imbrued With livid poison and our children's blood. 730 The crowd in stupid wonder fix'd appear, Pale ev'n in joy, nor yet forget to fear. Some with vast beams the squalid corse engage, And weary all the wild efforts of rage. The birds obscene, that nightly flock'd to taste, With hollow screeches fled the dire repast; And ravenous dogs, allured by scented blood, And starving wolves, ran ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... of his enemies unknown. But understanding his disguise was discovered, he assumed the habit of a travelling mountaineer, and wandered about among the woods and heaths, with a matted beard, and squalid looks, exposed to hunger, thirst, and weariness, and in continual danger of being apprehended. He was obliged to trust his life to the fidelity of above fifty individuals, and many of these were in the lowest ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... knew to be the proprietor of the resort into which I had determined to penetrate. Also, from my early youth I had heard Jacob Ensley and the Last Chance spoken of in tones of dread disapproval. Before I should become really frightened I hurried down the hill, past the squalid and tumble-down mill cottages which I had never really seen before, where it seemed to me millions of children swarmed in and around and about, and at last arrived at the infamous social center of ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... impatience of youth, he urged on his horse, expecting to see all the inhabitants of so fair a place themselves fair. But scarce had he entered the West-Port gate, when his feelings were shocked to witness, on every side, squalid misery and wretchedness, and every token of poverty and vice. He put up for the night at one of the many inns of the Grassmarket; and, revolving in his mind what he had already seen, retired ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... they went at break-neck speed, on! on! on! past rows and rows of houses, past wildernesses of brick and mortar. Far behind them they left churches, hospitals, buildings innumerable, the mansions of the rich and the wretched dwellings of the poor, the squalid habitations of outcast London, on! on! on! Up the great hill of Highgate, where the tender green foliage of early summer and of the great oak trees bordered the roadside, and where the almond blossoms perfumed all the heated air with ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... a positive FEELING of dread that has followed me since I threw milk into that Hindu's eyes, I should like to describe the many fascinating spots encountered in the embrace of a squalid and picturesque degeneracy.... I should linger with my brush over the opalescent lake and the sweet, calm repose of Seranagur with its purling river scouring the festooned landings and retiring abodes of tranquillity and ease,—I should like to jot down the ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... Sharks as the Squalidae family, and they are, upon the whole, as unpleasant a family as a Squalid Castaway would desire to meet with in a Squall. They are all carnivorous, cartilaginous, and cantankerous. No fish culturist, from St. ANTHONY to SETH GREEN, has thought it worth while to take them in hand, with the view of reforming them, and their Vices are as objectionable now as they were ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... day, and the prairie road was anything but pleasant to a pedestrian unaccustomed to heat and dust. After walking less than an hour, he determined to stop at a small house near the road, for rest, and some water to quench his thirst; but as he approached, the baying hounds, no less than the squalid children about the door, repelled him, and he went on to the next house. He now turned down a green lane, between rows of thrifty trees, to a neat log-cabin, whose nicely-plastered walls and the regular fence inclosing it testified to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... recent times the clergyman of the parish dare only go to visit these parishioners accompanied by two policemen in plain clothes. Now the lower half is a hive of industry, and is lined by great business houses. Further north, on the east side, the dwellings are still poor and squalid, but on one side a great part of the street has been demolished to make way for a Board school, built in a way immeasurably superior to the usual Board school style. Opposite is the Church of St. Peter, which is an early work of Sir Charles Barry. This is in light stone, in the Perpendicular style, ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... to have made the assault, or "said by the police" to have entered the house. And in order to present an unbiased story, the side of the supposed malefactor should be given. In the intense excitement resulting from a newly committed crime, or in the squalid surroundings of a prison cell, an accused person does not appear to his best advantage, and it is easy for the reporter to let prejudice sway him, perhaps causing irreparable injury to innocent persons. The race riot in Atlanta, in 1905, in which numbers ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... considerations for the "equal division of emoluments." Let us as citizens and a community see that every man has the right and the means to live; but when self-interested bodies start a rivalry in the name of their particular creeds, we know it ends in a squalid greed and fight for place, in a pursuit of luxury, the logical outcome of which must be to make the world ugly, sordid and brutal. It would be a mistake to overlook that high-minded men are allowing themselves to be committed by plausible reasons ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... the tribe, the sheyk of the entire clan had laid claim to the principal captives, and had carried off the young lady and her uncle; and in his dwelling she had a boarded floor to sleep on, and had been made much more comfortable than in the squalid huts below. Her original master, Yakoub, had, however, come to seize her, with the force described by Murad. Then it was that again there was a threat to kill rather than resign them; but on this occasion it was averted by Sheyk Abderrahman's son, a boy of about fourteen, who ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... factory, its innumerable unshaded windows, its glistening panes, its tall chimney losing itself in the depths of the sky, and nearer at hand the lovely little garden against the ancient wall of the former mansion. All about were gloomy, miserable roofs and squalid streets. Suddenly she started. Yonder, in the darkest, the ugliest of all those attics crowding so closely together, leaning against one another, as if overweighted with misery, a fifth-floor window stood wide open, showing only darkness within. She recognized it at once. It was ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... the hearth of his squalid mud hut with the mummies of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the all-powerful builders of the everlasting pyramids. Customs, conventions, codes, dynasties, states, nations come and go in incontinent succession. But, stronger than these, never disappearing, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... squalid room. Peterson had begun to pack. A suitcase lay open on the narrow bed. The wrinkled gray-white counterpane was half ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... set; When he splashes through the brae Silver streams are choked with clay, When he snorts the bright cliffs crumble and the woods go down like hay; He lairs in pleasant cities, and the haggard people fret Squalid 'mid their ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... which with difficulty sustains life, and which is demonstrably calculated, from its deleterious qualities, to induce serious disease. The effects manifest in the parent descend, and visible in the youngest children; they are squalid and wretched-looking,—and how can such offspring be otherwise? They are exceedingly subject to all children's diseases, and peculiarly predisposed to pulmonary irritation of ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... he rode to the place of coronation he had never seen before. Notwithstanding the embroidered silk and velvet hangings decorating the fronts of the rich people's houses, he caught glimpses of filthy side streets, squalid alleys, and tumble-down tenements. He saw forlorn little children scud away like rats into their holes as he drew near, and wretched, vicious-looking men and women fighting with each other for places in the crowd. Sharp, miserable faces ...
— The Land of the Blue Flower • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... hour Suvaroff rose and went out. He found a squalid wine-shop in the quarter just below the Barbary Coast. He went in and sat alone at a table. The floors had not been freshly sanded for weeks; a dank mildew covered the green wall-paper. He called for brandy, and a fat, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... splendor which charm the stranger's eye in the great central houses of New York, and which seem designed to sum up all that is most characteristic and most dazzling in the business methods of the United States. These central houses are not soiled by the touch of actual merchandise. Nothing more squalid than ink ever enters their gates. They traffic with symbols only, and the symbols, no matter what they stand for, are never in themselves sordid. The men who have created these houses seem to have realized that, from their situation ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... move. She stood at the foot of the stairs, barring the way, the chill morning light falling on her threatening attitude, her grey dishevelled hair and all the squalid disarray of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Peoria street from their day's work. On I went until I came to a little shed just north of the slum saloon occupied by one Shellstadt at the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and checking my steps, I looked around me on the squalid, wretched scene. I was in the midst of prostitution at its lowest—the heart-breaking dregs of Chicago's thirty thousand public women. Yes, there they were—the fair young American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the middle-aged, ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... and uniform of the royal guards filled him with admiration; but beyond the fashionable quarter it did not appear to him that Paris possessed many advantages over Glasgow, and the poorer class were squalid and poverty stricken to a far greater degree than anything he had seen in Scotland. But the chief points of attraction to him were the prisons. The Bastille, the Chatelet, and the Temple were points to ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... of a score of years' contact with civilization; then Cesca, the lean and stoical product of an ancient and terrible savagery; and Alchise, her mate. Finally Molly—squat, dirty Molly—the stupid, squalid aborigine, as distinct from Cesca's type as is the brown snail from the ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... us no world? Let throngs press thee to me! Up and down amid men, heart by heart fare we! 10 Welcome squalid vesture, harsh voice, hateful face! God is soul, souls I and thou; with souls should ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the thickly timbered hill-district which joins the Nivernais. There the village pastors are poor, thin, and badly fed; fairly buried in the forest, and surrounded by a population more wretched and squalid than the rats of their own churches;—they seem as it were abandoned by everybody. That which I am about to relate will prove this, and show what a deplorable existence theirs is, and the ingenious methods to which they are obliged to have recourse ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... absolute conviction in future compensation; and, meanwhile, his lively poetic impulse, the poetry of ideas, not of formal verse, and his radiant innate idealism breathe a soul into the merest matter of squalid work-a-day life and awaken the sweetest harmonies of Nature ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of our street was part of a squalid little suburb known as the Sands. It was inhabited by Gentiles exclusively. Sometimes, when a Jew chanced to visit it some of its boys would descend upon him with shouts of "Damned Jew!" "Christ-killer!" and sick their dogs at him. As we had no dogs to defend us, orthodox ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... civic authorities. At the entrance there is a spacious vestibule, but this, as well as the interior, though elegant in its simplicity of style, is meagre of ornament. Proceeding to the interior, I reached the criminal court, where a squalid-looking prisoner was undergoing trial for murder. The judges and officers of the court were almost entirely without insignia of office, and the counsel employed, I thought, evinced much tact in their proceedings, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... who passed him were smoking their morning's pipe, with a half-awakened air, as if they had only just got out of a snug bed, in which they always slept every moment that they lay upon it. Titmouse almost envied them! What a squalid figure he looked, as he paced up and down, till at length he saw the porter of Messrs. Tag-rag & Co. opening the shop-door. He soon entered it, and commenced another jocund day in that delightful establishment. The amiable ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... worse for a ballot paper. The real question is whether this old ideal of woman as the great amateur is admitted or not. There are many modern things which threaten it much more than suffragism; notably the increase of self-supporting women, even in the most severe or the most squalid employments. If there be something against nature in the idea of a horde of wild women governing, there is something truly intolerable in the idea of a herd of tame women being governed. And there are elements in human psychology that make this situation particularly ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... little lady to Elsmere by a French sentence which originally applied to the Duchesse de Choiseul. 'Une charmante petite fee sortie d'un oeuf enchante!'—so it ran. Certainly, as Elsmere looked down upon her now, fresh from those squalid death-stricken hovels behind him, he was brought more abruptly than ever upon the contrasts of life. Lady Helen wore a green velvet and fur mantle, in the production of which even Worth had felt some pride; a little green ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... brother, stood in a new light? your soul was bared, and the grave,—a foretaste of the nakedness of the Judgment-Day? So it came before him, his life, that night. The slow tides of pain he had borne gathered themselves up and surged against his soul. His squalid daily life, the brutal coarseness eating into his brain, as the ashes into his skin: before, these things had been a dull aching into his consciousness; to-night, they were reality. He griped the filthy red ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... solution of life is to find one's true environment, he has at any rate found his; and in finding it knows a happiness, even amid the squalid poverty of Shoreditch, such as is found ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... hole and corner of which is familiar to the real student of Balzac. It is situated, as everybody should know, in the Rue Neuve St.-Genevieve, just where it descends so steeply towards the Rue de l'Arbalete that horses have some trouble in climbing it. We know its squalid exterior, its creaking bell, the wall painted to represent an arcade in green marble, the crumbling statue of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... look as ridiculous as their bonnets, the only thing that was still actual for her was the elevation of the species by the reading of Emerson and the frequentation of Tremont Temple. Olive had been active enough, for years, in the city-missions; she too had scoured dirty children, and, in squalid lodging-houses, had gone into rooms where the domestic situation was strained and the noises made the neighbours turn pale. But she reflected that after such exertions she had the refreshment of a pretty house, a drawing-room full of flowers, a crackling ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... of the champagne, for Buel went back to his squalid room with his mind in the clouds. He wondered if this condition was the first indication of the swelled head Brant had talked about. Buel worked harder than ever at his proofs, and there was some growling at head-quarters because ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... fidelity had the importance that they gave to it. To a few—very few—it matters—but in most cases unfaithfulness is not a psychological thing at all; it is simply a temporary excess like getting drunk—squalid, if you like—but not touching your real relationships. Women bluff a lot on the subject and many are fools. They believe in the same law for both sexes. It is a ridiculous fallacy. Only Edmond was different. He loved women—psychologically. He was therefore inconstant, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... Geneva, though several miles off. We were greatly pleased with a few good houses, in fine positions; but Savoy is not Switzerland. Here Popery is rampant and pauperism evident. Beggars beset our carriages, and the people looked squalid. ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... were sitting in a park, a pallid child of ten asked to "shine" their shoes. In sympathy they allowed him to do it. The little fellow had a gaunt and hungry look and his movements were very sluggish. He said his name was Peter Turner and he gave some squalid east side tenement district as his home. He said that his father was dead, his mother was bedridden, and he, the oldest of three children, was the only support of the family. He got up at five and prepared their simple meal, and did what he could towards making his mother comfortable ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... extraordinary importance in the general history of English toleration, extending in its consequences far beyond the pale of the communion immediately concerned. It was a long and painful journey, often unedifying, not seldom squalid, with crooked turns not a few, and before it was over, casting men into strange companionship upon bleak and hazardous shores. Mr. Gladstone, though he probably was not one of those who are as if born by nature tolerant, was soon drawn by circumstance to look with favour ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and stain— London's squalid cope of pain— Pure as starlight, bold as love, Honouring our scant poplar-grove, That most heavenly voice of earth Thrills in passion, grief or mirth, Laves our poison'd air Life's ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... picture of it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that intellectualism had already pre-empted. But he clung fast to the old rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the form of philosophy might be empirical only. His own system had to be a product of eternal reason, so the word 'logic,' with its suggestions of coercive necessity, was the only word he could find natural. He pretended ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... was achieved. Steve desired nothing more. These Indians would take him to the place where the two white men had fought out the old, old battle for a woman. Yes, he was convinced now that An-ina's original story was the true one. His visit to these squalid creatures had served a double purpose. The old man's willingness to comply with his demands amply convinced him that the wife's belief had no foundation in the facts. Had the Indians murdered Marcel Brand and his partner, the whole attitude of ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... have known them chained barefoot and forced to run behind the Beg's carriage...." The provinces revolted and vengeance was wrecked upon them. More than a third of the population fled the country. Sir Arthur Evans[57] describes the refugees as a "squalid, half-naked swarm of women and children and old men, with faces literally eaten away with hunger and disease.... After seeing every moral mutilation," he goes on to say, "that centuries of tyranny ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... the squalid suburb to the business part of the town, which had considerably developed since the through line to Tobolsk and Tomsk had been constructed, and at length they stopped before a comfortable-looking house in the street that ends at ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... trudged through the ankle-deep mud, hungry, cold, and utterly fatigued, but possessed by the dogged resolution to carry the thing through, whatever the cost. They put up at the squalid hut of a frontier granger overnight, but Roosevelt, weary as he was, did not dare to sleep. He crowded the prisoners into the upper bunk and sat against the cabin door all night, with ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... say much, but it seemed to the young man that there was a new tenderness in her manner, the expression of a gentle kindness that went out to him because he needed it. The walk had whipped the color into her cheeks and she bloomed in that squalid cell like a desert rose. There was in the fluent grace of the slender, young body a naive, virginal sweetness that took him by the throat. He knew that she believed in him and the trouble rolled from his heart ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... signs of poverty or its attendant miseries. No ragged, dirty, squalid children, dabbling in mud or dust; but many a tidy, smart-looking lass was spinning at the cottage-doors, with bright eyes and braided locks, while the younger girls were seated on the green turf or on the threshold, knitting and singing as blithe ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... night seemed still to linger; and a curious bent figure passed picking with a spiked stick cigar-ends out of the gutter; significant it was, and so too was the starving dog which the man drove from a bone. The city was mean and squalid in the morning, and conveyed a sense of derision and reproach—the sweep-carriage-road of Regent Street; the Royal Academy, pretentious, aristocratic; the Green Park still presenting some of the graces ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... Ann Eliza had never before felt so tired. Even Miss Mellins's flow of narrative ran dry, and they sat silent, wedged between a negro woman and a pock-marked man with a bandaged head, while the car rumbled slowly down a squalid avenue to their corner. Evelina and Mr. Ramy sat together in the forward part of the car, and Ann Eliza could catch only an occasional glimpse of the forget-me-not bonnet and the clock-maker's shiny coat-collar; but when the little party got out at ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... stern emotion that was oddly contagious, telling about a certain scene at the Headquarters of the Union. Against the grey and squalid background of a Poor Women's movement, stood out in those next seconds a picture that the true historian who is to come will not neglect. A call for recruits with this result—a huddled group, all new, unproved, ignorant of the ignorant. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... earth any happier for their faith, or their blind reliance on priests? Certainly not. We do not there find more morality, more virtue, more industry, or more happiness; but, on the contrary, wherever the priests are powerful, there the people are sure to be found abject in their minds and squalid in ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... spirit and in form they are singular and remarkable. We cannot think of any poems which more show the mystic enchantment of genius. How else was a ragged sempstress in a squalid garret made immortal, nay, made universal, made to stand for an entire sisterhood of wretchedness? Here is the direst poverty, blear-eyed sorrow, dim and dismal suffering,—nothing of the romantic. A stern picture ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... obscured by oleanders and a striped awning, and over it appeared the legend, 'Entree de l'Hotel.' As a man politely explained, they had built S. Francis another church, and utilised the old one. The town itself seemed to be of the squalid style of antiquity—old, no doubt, but very dirty. It is pervaded by streams, which crop up among the houses, and flow through dark alleys and vaulted passages, rarely coming into daylight, and suggesting all manner of dark crimes. The red-legged French kettledrums are, if possible, more insolent ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... the cab for nearly half an hour before Fardell stopped and dismissed it. Then they walked up and down and across streets of small houses, pitiless in their monotony, squalid and depressing in ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... living. The house-servants in cities are generally decently clothed, and some favorite ones are richly dressed, but those on the plantations, especially in their dress, if it can be called dress, exhibit the most haggard and squalid appearance. I have frequently seen those of both sexes more than two-thirds naked. I have seen from forty to sixty, male and female, at work in a field, many of both sexes with their bodies entirely ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... our admiration for two days; then the visit to the Chilcats and the return trip commenced. Bowling down the canal before a strong north wind, we entered Stevens Passage, and visited the two villages of the Auk Indians, a squalid, miserable tribe. We camped at the site of what is now Juneau, the capital of Alaska, and no dream of the millions of gold that were to be taken from those mountains disturbed us. If we had known, ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... of every conceivable shape and color carried by wayfarers met the eye at every turn and made the whole scene appear like fairyland. But, alas, the following morning I was undeceived, for daylight revealed to my vision a very squalid and dirty city. We were carried to the largest hotel in Shanghai, where it seemed as though I were almost receiving a home greeting when the sign over the door told me that it was the Astor House! Still another surprise awaited me. Although in a strange land, one of the ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... and squalid in the extreme, and, being destitute of the means of making a coffin, had rolled the corpse up in such wretched materials as they happened to possess. One consequence of this was, that it was quite supple. On being lifted out of the canoe, the joints bent, and a sort of noise ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... a tall, swarthy woman was a small girl, so fragile as to appear almost elfin. The woman wore the garb of a gipsy, and the presence of some squalid tents and tethered horses showed our young friends at once that it was a gipsy encampment upon ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... the accumulation of rust were disturbed. The interior was essentially suggestive of the half-breed, and his guess at its purpose had been a shrewd one. Part storehouse for forage, part bedroom, and part stable, it presented a squalid appearance. The portion devoted to stable-room was far in the back; the curious apparatus which constituted the bed was ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... portico, with the avowed intention of assaulting the first person who issued forth. He was a sinister-looking, meager caitiff, with a red cap—gaunt, ugly, and unshaven; his appearance altogether more squalid and miserable than Englishmen would conceive it possible to find in such an establishment. An end, however, was put to the tragedy by the fellow throwing himself on a bench, and bursting into tears—wailing and asking pardon for his offence, and perfecting his penitence by ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... boast of their asylums; and by means of fairs and suppers, large amounts are annually collected for the support of these numerous institutions. I have been told by a directress of a Protestant orphan asylum, that on one occasion a squalid woman, accompanied by two boys, presented herself and entreated that her children might be received into the asylum. The unhappy mother informed the directress that she was a Roman Catholic, and had claimed the protection of her own sect; but, said she, tearfully, 'Indeed I had ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... rates and taxes from their day's wages, of the dim millions that toil and moil continually under the sun, we know what is the lodging and the tending. Of the Johnsons, Goldsmiths, lodged in their squalid garrets; working often enough amid famine, darkness, tumult, dust and desolation, what work they have to do:—of these as of "spiritual backwoodsmen," understood to be preappointed to such a life, and ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... the collected manner of the baron, I placed my arm mechanically in his, and suffered him to conduct me whethersoever he would. We walked in silence for some distance, passed into the meanest quarter of the city, and reached a miserable and squalid street. The baron pointed to the most wretched house in the lane, and bade me direct my eye especially ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... Groups of squalid Indians sat in the dark pits of the huts, men with bony chests, disheveled, matted hair, and ruddy cheeks; behind them, eyes shone up from ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... So saying, his tatter'd wallet o'er his back He cast, suspended by a leathern twist, Eumaeus gratified him with a staff, And forth they went, leaving the cottage kept 240 By dogs and swains. He city-ward his King Led on, in form a squalid beggar old, Halting, and in unseemly garb attired. But when, slow-travelling the craggy way, They now approach'd the town, and had attain'd The marble fountain deep, which with its streams Pellucid all the citizens supplied, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... many a so-called genius have been enshrined in literature: probably no one will ever know the parting objurgation of Narcisse. I will endeavour, however, to give you some notion as to what occurred, from the budget I have just read. I fear the tragedy was a squalid one. Madame, the victim, was elderly, unattractive in person, exacting in temper, and the owner of considerable wealth—at least, this is what came out at the trial. It was one of those tangles in which a fatal denouement is inevitable; and, if this ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... Edinburgh and Glasgow had not, until 1839, any retreat or place of confinement for the insane, except six squalid stone cells attached to the public hospital of Dumfries. Violent or vagrant lunatics were physically restrained in their own houses, allowed to roam at large, or incarcerated in prisons or police stations. In the year mentioned, the Crichton Institution was opened for the reception of patients ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Shubin, to invite Insarov to stay with him at his country lodgings. But it was some time before he found him out; from his former lodging he had moved to another, which it was not easy to discover; it was in the court at the back of a squalid stone house, built in the Petersburg style, between Arbaty Road and Povarsky Street. In vain Bersenyev wandered from one dirty staircase to another, in vain he called first to a doorkeeper, then to a passer-by. ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... hundred paces from Vendome, on the banks of the Loir," said he, "stands an old brown house, crowned with very high roofs, and so completely isolated that there is nothing near it, not even a fetid tannery or a squalid tavern, such as are commonly seen outside small towns. In front of this house is a garden down to the river, where the box shrubs, formerly clipped close to edge the walks, now straggle at their own will. A few willows, rooted in ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... will never know any other life but your present one." A great bitterness comes up, a little madness gathers behind the eyes; I walk about the room and then I sit down, stunned by the sudden conviction that life is, after all, a very squalid thing—something that I would like to kick like an old hat down ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... throng and felt my brain bereft of noble thought; I lived in a squalid home and despised the pity which the disdainful cast upon my lot; laughed at ribald jests and quaffed the liquid flame, and the dark-hued nectar which concealed the serpent beneath its foam; I held my head aloft to seem with pride imbued; I gibed at fortune's whim and grinned a soulless sneer at ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... with huge trolley boxes and motor trucks and pedestrians. For Alton was now merely a lively industrial quarter of the "greater" city. In addition to the old stove-works of enduring fame there were also foundries and factories and mills. The old, leisurely "Square" had become a knot of squalid arteries radiating into this human hive. Life teemed all over, swarmed upon the pavements, hung from the high tenement windows, infested the strange delicatessen and drink shops, many of which bore foreign names. Most marvelous fact of all was that the thin, pale American type, ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... atmosphere, and banish thence All lingering traces of the feast. Ye sick And poor, whom misery or whom hope, perchance! Has guided in the noonday to these doors. Tumultuous, naked, and unsightly throng, With mutilated limbs and squalid faces, In litters and on crutches from afar Comfort yourselves, and with expanded nostrils Drink in the nectar of the feast divine That favourable zephyrs waft to you; But do not dare besiege these ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... quittance or one for some other stone we knew not, but Elzevir spoke again, saying that the stone was ours and we had found it in England. When Mr. Aldobrand laughed again, and held the jewel up once more: were such pebbles, he asked, found on the shore by every squalid fisherman? And the great diamond flashed as he put it back into his purse, and cried to me, 'Am I not queen of all the diamonds of the world? Must I house with this base rascal?' but I was powerless now ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... were neighbors of the Sacs and Foxes, and long intimately associated with them. Twenty years ago, all of these tribes, raised annually more corn, beans and other vegetables, than were needed for their own consumption. Now they are miserable, squalid beggars, without the means of subsistence. The faithlessness of the Government, the perfidy and avarice of its agents and citizens, have brought this race of people to the horrible condition, in which they are represented in the statement ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... Annie's is the remotest on the whole plantation, and I found there the wretchedest huts, and most miserably squalid, filthy and forlorn creatures I had yet seen here—certainly the condition of the slaves on this estate is infinitely more neglected and deplorable than that on the rice plantation. Perhaps it may be that the extremely unhealthy nature of the rice cultivation makes ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... aged man rushed into the Forum on a market-day, loaded with chains, clothed with a few scanty rags, his hair and beard long and squalid; his whole appearance ghastly, as of one oppressed by long want of food and air. He was recognized as a brave soldier, the old comrade of many who thronged the Forum. He told his story, how that in the late wars the enemy had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... A squalid aboriginal swathed in an old tablecloth fresh from some breakfast started from a corner, pointing a long, dirty finger at Done, and grinning ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... the witch's prediction. A few days after she appeared in the town. The mother, who was a very proud woman, had in advance hung up an Indian cradle with very fine ornaments. The old woman was very dirty, poor, and squalid. The proud woman was furious at the visit, which mortified her in every way. She drove the witch away with bitter words, bidding her begone with her rags. The old woman went away muttering, "That woman—too proud—too ugly proud—I'll see." ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... about the iron bars that guarded his window, but the feeling of horror that suddenly seized him was remote from self-pity. He was thinking of Elizabeth. What unspeakable wretchedness he had brought into her life, and he was still to bequeath her this squalid brutal death! It was the crowning shame and misery to the long months of ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... under the bridge and along a gloomy-looking street of poor houses, huddled together like the cages of animals. The windows of many of them were broken and they were otherwise tumbledown, and the young reporter realized that he was in one of the most squalid parts of New York. He grew suspicious and was about to halt his guide and ask him some questions when the ill-favored conductor suddenly stopped in front of a particularly dark, gloomy-looking brick tenement, and beckoning to Billy, urged ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... rare; but this evening, after he had finished touching the people, a man, dressed like a peasant in a loose brown frock, worsted stockings, and brogues, apparently of the lowest order, dark, ill-looking, and squalid, approached the Confessional to reveal some great crime. The confession was very long, so was the admonition of the Cardinal which followed it. The appearance of the Cardinal is particularly dignified and noble, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... is it wise On the main Sea to ply the daring Oar; Nor is it safe, from dread of angry Skies, Closely to press on the insidious Shore. To no excess discerning Spirits lean, They feel the blessings of the golden mean; They will not grovel in the squalid cell, Nor seek in princely domes, with envied ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... latch-key. I think you will say I did pretty well when I tell you that within a few weeks I had made myself an intimate friend of Black's. I shall never forget the first time I went to his room; I hope I shall never see such abject, squalid misery again. The foul paper, from which all pattern or trace of a pattern had long vanished, subdued and penetrated with the grime of the evil street, was hanging in mouldering pennons from the wall. Only at the end of the room was it possible to stand upright, and the sight of the ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... customs of the people were concerned, were going into a foreign land. The language of the entire population was French, or a patois, as the European French term it—a provincialism which a Parisian finds it difficult to understand. The ignorance and squalid poverty of these people put their society entirely out of the question, even if their language had been comprehensible. They were amiable, kind, law-abiding, virtuous, and honest, beyond any population of similar ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... never rushed. It never leaped. It was a toy. The day came when it spread itself safe and shallow on level land, and he embarked upon it. But he was quickly tired of it. It was beginning to run muddily through a commonplace country, past squalid polluting towns and villages. The hills were long since gone. He turned to row to the shore. And, behold, his oars were gone! He had been trapped to ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... clerk by his new appearance that he was invited to remain there for another night. The shrewd man guessed that some good fortune must have befallen Archie, or he wouldn't be so happy. But the one night of misery which he had spent in the squalid hotel was enough for Archie, and he walked hastily up-town with his bundle, keeping a sharp lookout for a pleasant place where he might get a room. In his previous wanderings he had seen several nice houses with rooms to rent, but ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... make me forget the brand of the dog, as I crouch in this hideous place; To make me forget once I kindled the light of love in a lady's face, Where even the squalid Siwash now holds me ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... the Parnell divorce case onwards, the Irish question had brought to Liberals nothing but embarrassment and embitterment. The enthusiasm for Home Rule which grew steadily from 1886 up to the severance between Gladstone and Parnell had vanished in the squalid controversies of the "split." Moreover, now, by the action of Mr. Chamberlain, a new dividing line had been brought into British politics. The cry of Protection seemed in the opinion of all Liberals to menace ruin to British ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... merits, so Cruikshank's strength is far in excess of his weakness. It is not to his melodramatic heroes or wasp-waisted heroines that we must look for his triumphs; it is to his delineations, from the moralist's point of view, of vulgarity and vice,—of the "rank life of towns," with all its squalid tragedy and comedy. Here he finds his strongest ground, and possibly, notwithstanding his powers as a comic artist and caricaturist, his ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he might make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth handsome and bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations... Only when the family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... here were the histories of two of the occupants of our court. The others may have had experiences no less strange; and in many another court in this great city, from the stately inclosures of the Rue de Lille to the squalid dens of the Faubourg St. Antoine, (if the names have not escaped me,) lives well worth the telling are passing away. Such ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... may need." And the beggar said, "God reward thee, good friend, for succoring the stranger," and he asked him if the father and mother of Odysseus were yet alive. Then Eumaius told him how his mother had pined away and died after Odysseus went to Ilion, and how Laertes lingered on in a wretched and squalid old age. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... large means, the household, under Mrs. Mornway's guidance, took on an air of sober luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating to her sister-in-law. The domestic machinery ran without a jar. There were no upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses between intervals of showy hospitality; the household moved along on lines of quiet elegance and comfort, behind which only the eye of the housekeeping sex could have detected a gradually increasing scale ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the sadder conditions of life, and gives pain rather than excites sympathy in the reader. Our meaning will be best illustrated by a comparison of The Village of Crabbe with The Deserted Village of Goldsmith, and the pleasure with which we pass from the squalid scenes of the former to the gentler sorrows and sympathies ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... 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 ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... length of the old house, would have seen it also disfigured in the same way. The huge deal cases stood on bare boards; the splendid staircase was carpetless. Nothing indeed could have been more repellant than the general aspect, the squalid disarray of Threlfall Tower, as seen from the inside, on ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reached a tiny room, quite up at the top of the house. It had a low, sloping roof, much discoloured with damp and dirt, as were also the walls. The floor was bare and black with dirt and age, the whole apartment squalid and uncomfortable. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... a little squalid old house, some nights ago, I saw a light in a ground-floor window; and peeping in,—my name is not Tom, nor was it any Godiva I was espying, but I could not help a sort of curiosity to see what that eleven-o'clock light might exhibit,—I saw a pale face, and a thin, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... their poor lives in the eyes of the fastidious; and perhaps makes the angels of Him, before whose Face the stars are not spotless, turn from the cold perfection of the mansion and the castle to gaze lovingly on the squalid lowliness of the hamlet and the cabin. Well. On the morning that Mrs. Darcy gave me formal notice of her relinquishment of the solemn office she held, she bent her steps homeward with a heavy heart. She had done her duty, like all the other great ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... though it never in its best days could have been white; shattered doors whose proper colour none could tell, and which, standing ajar, seemed to lead to nothing but darkness; weird women and gaunt children imparting a dismal life to the rows of ungainly dwellings;—all these made up a picture of squalid woe such as might well have appalled a stouter heart than poor Lady Oldfield's. And was she to find her delicately-nurtured son in such a place as this? They turned down one street, under the wondering eyes of old and young, and then ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... separate quantum, its dose (as the doctrinists of rent phrase it) of anxiety, that could not be digested so soon as noon. No man will say it. He, therefore, who dined at noon, was willing to sit down squalid as he was, with his dress unchanged, his cares not washed off. And what follows from that? Why, that to him, to such a canine or cynical specimen of the genus homo, dinner existed only as a physical event, a mere animal relief, a mere ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... in blankets, bed-quilts and travelling-shawls, were disposed in all conceivable attitudes, and scattered about on the hard floor and tables, sleeping soundly. The room was a long, low apartment—extending across the entire front of the house—and had a wretched, squalid look. The fire, which was tended by the negro-woman—(she had spread a blanket on the floor, and was keeping a drowsy watch over it for the night)—had been recently replenished with green wood, and was throwing ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... the one and only picturesque feature of Paradise Street—surely so named by an individual of singularly caustic and sardonic humour, for anything less suggestive of the delights of Paradise than the squalid and malodorous street so named it would indeed be difficult to conceive—and in the course of the four years during which it had been in position that lamp had become a familiar object to every man, woman, and child within ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... exchanged a ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing inky-blue colour, and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors stood open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad children played ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... in his steps Blythe now moved rapidly through the town by way of its landward environs. He passed through the squalid quarters of the improvident negroes and on beyond the picturesque shacks of the poorer mestizos. From many points along his course he could see, through the umbrageous glades, the house of Frank Goodwin on its wooded hill. And as he crossed the little bridge over the lagoon he ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... heard of such places before, but had never visited them. Shabby women, and dirty and squalid children surrounded the young lady as she descended to the pavement. The children came very close indeed, and some even stroked her dress. One mite of three years raised, in the midst of its dirt and neglect, a face of such sweetness and innocence, that ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... their doom. Sometimes the soul is gently invited, or led, by a good spirit, sometimes beaten, or dragged away, by the squalid and savage Charun, the horrible death king, or one of his ministers; sometimes a good and an evil spirit are seen contending for the soul; sometimes the soul is seen, on its knees, beseeching the aid of its good genius and grasping at his departing wing, as, with averted ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... hatred of a second or inferior place in anything stung him. Were there to be any niches after all in the temple of happiness to which he could never climb? He looked back rapidly, looked down the avenue of a squalid and unlovely life, saw himself the child of drink-sodden and brutal parents, remembered the Board School with its unlovely surroundings, his struggles at a dreary trade, his running away and the fierce draughts of delight which the joy and freedom of the ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... want explore, And lengthen out my lays from door to door? Then let thy Fancy aid me—I repair From this tall mansion of our last year's Mayor, Till we the outskirts of the Borough reach, And these half-buried buildings next the beach, Where hang at open doors the net and cork, While squalid sea-dames mend the meshy work; Till comes the hour when fishing through the tide The weary husband throws his freight aside; A living mass which now demands the wife, Th' alternate labours of their humble life. Can scenes like these withdraw thee from thy ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... already supplied were crawling up the distant hill like loosely articulated canvas-colored worms. Outfits from Spokane and other southern towns began to drop down into the valley, and every train from the East brought other prospectors to stand dazed and wondering before the squalid little camp. Each day, each hour, increased the general ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... poorest part of the London suburbs then, and the house was a mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden abutting on a squalid court. Here was no place for new acquaintances to him: no boys were near with whom he might hope to become in any way familiar. A washerwoman lived next door, and a Bow-Street officer lived over the way. Many, many times has he spoken ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster |
