Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Housetop   Listen
Housetop

noun
1.
The roof of a house.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Housetop" Quotes from Famous Books



... foray and slaughter continued to alternate between them until the planting season of some indefinite year came around. All the Sikytki men were to begin the season by planting the fields of their chief on a certain day, which was announced from the housetop by the Second Chief as he made his customary evening proclamations, and the Walpi, becoming aware of this, planned a fatal onslaught. Every man and woman able to draw a bow or wield a weapon were got in readiness and at night they crossed the mesa and concealed themselves along ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... ha, who wouldn't go— Up on the housetop click, click, click? Down through the chimney, With good ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter

... in the moment that it is done, and in a hundred years nothing will be there, for nothing is there now. There will be no more sum or result than accumulates from the motion of a revolving cowl on a housetop. Nor do they receive any more sunshine during their lives, for they are unconscious of ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact. A man fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen, and was brought into hospital with broken bones. He was asked what was his trade, and replied that he was a tapper. No one had ever heard of such a thing before; the officials were filled with curiosity; they besought an explanation. It appeared that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... I recall as a boy poring over the map of the world which a friend of my mother had left with her. This lady my father called 'the angel with the moulting wings,' because she was always in an ecstatic tremor over the second coming of the Messiah. She would go to the housetop at least once every six months, and there, with a band of pious deluded geese dressed in white flowing robes, would inspect the firmament for favourable signs. Nothing ever happened, as we know, yet the predictions ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... cheek on this by the ducking stool in public, and sticks no thicker than the thumb for marital correction in private. The writer of the Proverbs alludes to the perpetual dropping of a woman's tongue as an intolerable nuisance, and declares that it is better to live on the housetop than with a brawling woman in a wide house. A later writer, describing the virtuous woman, said that on her lips is the law of kindness, and after all this is the real feminine characteristic. As daughter, sister, wife, and mother—what does ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... The Court is adjourned to the housetop. (Scene changes to that locality.) Come, this is not so bad! Nice breeze up here. A little difficult to sit upon a sloping roof, perhaps; but one gets accustomed to everything. And now, Constable, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various

... and laid down a copy of the Revue des Deux Mondes in which he had been reading an essay on Mr. Gladstone's speeches about the Irish Church. "Tell the Prime Minister," he said, "that I will speak from a pedestal if I can, but if not, from a housetop. In one way or another, my voice shall reach further than his, and so long as I have a drop of blood to shed the Republic shall not fall." M. Gambetta was sentenced to four months' imprisonment for the speech in which he said that Marshal MacMahon would have to yield to the popular will or resign, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... like the pariah dogs of the Orient, they have the right of way; and they are evidently conscious of the fact, for they are tamer than barnyard fowls. They are the scavengers of the tropics. They sit upon the housetop and among the branches of the trees, awaiting the hour when the refuse of the domestic meal is thrown into the street. There is no drainage in those villages; strange to say, even in the larger cities there is none. Offal of every description is cast forth into the highways and byways; and at that ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... other stairs with no less caution (there are traps and pitfalls here, for those who are not so well escorted as ourselves) into the housetop; where the bare beams and rafters meet overhead, and calm night looks down through the crevices in the roof. Open the door of one of these cramped hutches full of sleeping negroes. Pah! They have a charcoal fire within; there is a smell of singeing ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... of protest against the amassing of enormous fortunes by the few at the expense of the many, not a single plea for justice to a despoiled people, not one word of Christian pity for their woes. It was simply a warning—foolishly flung from the housetop instead of whispered in the closet—that such reckless waste would breed discontent in the home of want—would "make demagogues and agitators dangerous!" Dr. Rainsford would not alter, but conceal, existing conditions. His theory is ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains: and let him that is on the housetop not go down into the house, neither enter therein, to take any thing out of his house: and let him that is in the field not turn back again for to take up his garment. But woe to them that are with child, and to them that give suck ...
— Jesus of Nazareth - A Biography • John Mark

... the storm burst upon the city. The streets were swept with great sheets of water, torrents flowed from the housetop, the skies darkened to ink, or were ripped asunder by vivid flashes, and the thunder rolled unceasingly. We were half drowned, as though we were dragged through a pond, and our ponies bowed and staggered before the double onslaught of wind and water. We bent our bodies to theirs, ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... will be hard to kill the little wretches, the only Old World bird we have. When I take down my gun to shoot them I shall probably remember that the Psalmist said, "I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop," and maybe the recollection will cause me to stay my hand. The sparrows have the Old World hardiness and prolificness; they are wise and tenacious of life, and we shall find it by and by no small matter to keep them in check. Our native birds are much different, less prolific, ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs

... Blitzen!— To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall, Now, dash away, dash away, dash away all!" As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, So, up to the housetop the coursers they flew, With the sleigh full of toys,—and St. Nicholas too. And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof The prancing and pawing of each little hoof. As I drew in my head and was turning around, Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous

... of the most respectable of the male population of the burgh, clothed in Sunday gloom deepened by the crape on their hats, made their way to Miss Horn's, for, despite her rough manners, she was held in high repute. It was only such as had reason to dread the secret communication between closet and housetop that feared her tongue; if she spoke loud, she never spoke false, or backbit in the dark. What chiefly conduced however to the respect in which she was held, was that she was one of their own people, her father having died minister of the parish ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... so, in chemical composition. It consists of a series of flattened horny scales, each being probably an aggregation of many cells. The scales, which have been compared to the scales of a fish or to slates on a housetop, overlap each other, the free edges protruding more or less from the fibre, while the lower or covered edges are embedded and held in the inner layer of cells. The free edges always point away from the root of the fibre, just as do the bracts of a ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech

... afraid something will happen to me before morning. I don't know what—something to keep me from coming into that money. I'm afraid a tree will fall on me—I'm afraid a cab will run over me, or a stone drop on me from a housetop, or something. I never was afraid before. I've sat in this park a hundred nights as calm as a graven image without knowing where my breakfast was to come from. But now it's different. I love money, Dawson—I'm happy as a god ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... and its wealth, or of the detectives, gone for good into military secret service at the front—she drearily smiled away the whole trivial riddle as she lay of nights contriving new searches for that inestimable, living treasure, whose perpetual "missing," right yonder "almost in sight from the housetop," was a dagger ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... whispered almost inaudibly. But it sounded to Craven as if she had shouted it from the housetop. Without a word he turned from her and stumbled toward the verandah steps. He must get away, he must be alone—alone with the night to ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... rather hard upon the failings of the ladies, "The contentions of a wife," he says, "are a continual dropping." "It is better to dwell in the corner of a housetop than with a brawling woman in a wide house." "It is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and angry woman." The meaning of all these sayings must be that women are of a very irritable and vexatious character. But did Solomon really believe in the strong terms he used towards ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... kindled with volcanic fire was permitted a solitary spark. O, such a meeting! Beautiful as parlor theatricals, but as a bold shriek for freedom or a protest against tyrant laws, not a sparrow on the housetop could have been more harmless." Miss Anthony wrote at this time: "Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... against its coarser and darker and homelier elements. Men and women stood alike in the crowd, dainty patrician and toil-stained laborer, all thrilled by a common emotion, all vivified—if in unequal degree—by the same sublime enthusiasm. Overhead, from every window and doorway and housetop, in every space and spot that could sustain one, on ropes, on staffs, in human hands, waved, and curled, and floated, flags that were in multitude like the swells of the sea; silk, and bunting, and painted calico, from the great banner spreading its folds with an indescribable majesty, to the tiny ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson

... in no immediate danger, but Mr. Swift had had a slight recurrence of his heart trouble, and it was thought best to have a doctor. So Tom started off in his air craft, rising swiftly above the housetop, and sailed off toward the old-fashioned residence of Dr. Kurtz, a sturdy, elderly German physician, who sometimes attended Mr. Swift. Tom decided that as long as Dr. Gladby did not answer his 'phone, he could not be at home, and this, he learned later, ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton

... truth, which, with him, was always. He could not stand anything like affectation, or what people were calling aestheticism and decadence. To him, literature was literature and art was art, and not puling sentiment, affected posturing, lilies and sunflowers. The National Observer was the housetop from which he shouted for all who passed to hear that it did not matter twopence what the dabbler wanted to express if he could not express it, if he had not the technique of his medium at his fingers' ends and under his perfect ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... men who were sleeping in the outer chamber. "Up, comrades!" he cried, "all is prepared, and we must embark without delay." His loud summons proved fatal to one of the company, a certain Elpenor, the youngest of them all, who, the night before, had lain down to sleep on the housetop, for the sake of the coolness, being heated with wine. Roused suddenly by the voice of Odysseus, he staggered to his feet, and, still half asleep, stumbled over the parapet in his haste, and ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell

... Lord Jesus going down stood over the head of the dead boy, and said with a loud voice, Zeinunus, Zeinunus, who threw thee down from the housetop? ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake

... past noon on Saturday, the message came which announced the surrender of the fort. The city was frantic with joy. For hours, no forms of manifestation seemed adequate to express the excitement which filled all classes of society. Standing on the housetop in the evening, a wild crowd could be seen flitting before bonfires, or ranging the streets, and shouting in the ecstasy of an excitement which none could control. Immediately on the arrival of the despatch, messengers had started into the country with the welcome tidings, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... "biology," the sciences of form and of life, who showed that differences of adult form grew out of likeness and simplicity in the young; and that the life of plants and animals was one science, their study one discipline. What Huxley had begun to proclaim from the housetop, Darwin was meditating in secret; and much more. Let us see how he states the case in the famous modest opening of the "Origin of Species" (1859): "When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... reputation of indomitable valor that the Argentine troops won at the trenches of Curupayti. Our readers may imagine the fire they suffered in the straight streets swept by Krupp guns, gatlings and mitrailleuses, while every housetop was a fortress whence a deadly fire was poured on the heads of the soldiers. Let anybody take the trouble to visit the Calles [Footnote: Streets] Cerrito, Libertad and Talcahuano, the vicinity of the Plazas Parque and Lavalle, and he will be staggered to see ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... doors well barred and the court guards alert?" the stewart questioned. "Are there watchmen on the housetop? Herod hath said he will comb Galilee with teeth of steel for such as this. Yea, one wounded and robbed brother hath spoken truly. Nor is this the worst. The Sicarii, those murderers that do so grievously afflict the whole province, these too ply their bloody ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock

... while nearly a thousand faces from window, roof, wall, yard and housetop, gazed, the scaffold behind them still densely packed with the assistants, and the four executioners beneath, standing at their swinging beams. The priests continued to murmur prayers. The ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... to find safety in flight. When the warning sign should be seen, those who would escape must make no delay. Throughout the land of Judea, as well as in Jerusalem itself, the signal for flight must be immediately obeyed. He who chanced to be upon the housetop must not go down into his house, even to save his most valued treasures. Those who were working in the fields or vineyards must not take time to return for the outer garment laid aside while they should be toiling in the heat of the day. They must not hesitate a moment, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... bloodshed. A human life he held to be a trifle in the big sum of time, and that it was of little moment when a man went, if it seemed his hour. He lived up to his creed, for he had ever held his own life as a bird upon a housetop, which a chance ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... gentlemen upon the housetop were leisuring away the time in the indulgence of a cigar, watching the water-fowl that swam and plunged on the bosom of the broad shallow stream, listening to the hoarse croakings of pelicans and the shriller screams of the guaya cranes. It was the hour of evening, when these ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... are we—lords of nature? Why, a tile drops from a housetop, which an elephant would not feel more than the fall of a sheet of pasteboard, and there lies his lordship. Or something of inconceivably minute origin, the pressure of a bone, or the inflammation of a particle of the brain takes place, and the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... the same men who had refused to secede but a few weeks before. The old flag fell from its staff on her Capitol and the new symbol of Southern unity was unfurled in its place. As if by magic the new flag fluttered from every hill, housetop and window, while crowds surged through the streets shouting and waving it aloft. Cannon boomed its advent and cheering thousands ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... several of which, like his own, were floating on the stream or stranded among shallows. Settlers were rowing about in boats and canoes in all directions, but although some of them noticed the poor man sitting beside his cat on the housetop, they were either too far off or had no time ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... and an almost summer heat reigning without. Then there was an hour of sleep, then a drive to the Pincio to see all the notable people who came up there to look at or speak to each other while the sun sank behind St. Peter's. And in the evening after dinner they went to the housetop to see the fireworks which were being displayed for some festa or other; and later there was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... theirs." Theophylact also: "God's Word," saith he, "is the candle whereby the thief is espied." And Tertullian saith, "The Holy Scripture manifestly findeth out the fraud and theft of heretics." For why do they hide, why do they keep under the Gospel which Christ would have preached aloud from the housetop? Why whelm they that light under a bushel which ought to stand on a candlestick? Why trust they more to the blindness of the unskilful multitude, and to ignorance, than to the goodness of their cause? Think they their sleights are not already perceived, and that they can walk now unespied, ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel

... venture to say that the unanimity of the preaching is only explicable on the ground of that preaching in both its parts—its assertion of Jesus' Messiahship and of His propitiatory death—being the repetition on the housetop of the lessons which they had heard ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... It is expected that the crack of a rifle from a tree or a housetop will fell the tall Lincoln from Illinois, as he faces the crowd to take the oath of office. But all was peace. The South only intended to go its way and let Lincoln do what he could, if anything. I stood with the rapt mass close to the stand where I could ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... cowardly or base, when in reality his life was pure and his motives high. "Better," sang Yoshida Shoin, the dying martyr for his principles, "to be a crystal and to be broken, than to be a tile upon the housetop and remain." ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... SUSPICION had risen to? Preternatural we often called it; seemingly in the language of exaggeration: but listen to the cold deposition of witnesses. Not a musical Patriot can blow himself a snatch of melody from the French Horn, sitting mildly pensive on the housetop, but Mercier will recognise it to be a signal which one Plotting Committee is making to another. Distraction has possessed Harmony herself; lurks in the sound of Marseillese and ca-ira. (Mercier, Nouveau ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... a moment, passed away; then again a silence, deeper than ever, so that she could hear the cattle and horses feeding in the lower paddock, a quarter of a mile off; then a low wail in the wood, then two or three wild weird yells, as of a devil in torment, and a pretty white curlew skirled over the housetop to settle ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... such lips! and get me leave to laugh! What should I do but paint and put him up Like a gilt god, a saintship in a shrine, For all fools' feast? God's mercy on men's wits! Tall as a housetop and as bare of brain— I'll have no staffs with fool-faced carven heads To hang my life on. Nay, for love, no more, For fear I laugh and set their eyes on edge To find out why I laugh. Good-night, fair lords; Bid them cease playing. Give me ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... the course of her life, Zarah dreaded a meeting with Hadassah. Though the season was now so far advanced that the heat of the sun was great, the maiden lingered on the shadeless housetop, leaning her brow against the parapet, listlessly gazing towards Jerusalem, but with her mind scarcely taking in the objects upon which her eyes were fixed. Was it a foreboding of coming sorrow, or a feeling of self-reproach, that brooded ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker

... to my words. Yet did not I take all my company safe from the dwelling of the goddess. There was a certain Elpenor [Footnote: El-pe'-nor.], who was the youngest of them all, and was neither valiant nor of an understanding mind. He was sleeping apart from his fellows, on the housetop, for he had craved for the coolness of the air. He, hearing our voices, and the sound of the men's feet, as they moved hither and thither, leapt up of a sudden, and thought not to come down by the ladder by which he had ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church

... village of the Maronites, and, being thirsty, looked in at a doorway. He saw the village priest and all his family engaged in stuffing a fat sheep with mulberry leaves. The sheep was tethered half-way up the steps which led on to the housetop. The priest and his wife, together with their eldest girl, sat on the ground below, amid a heap of mulberry boughs; and all the other children sat, one on every step, passing up the leaves, when ready, to the second daughter, whose business was to force ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall

... crowded with the experiences and vicissitudes of a most eventful nature. What he promised he fulfilled; what he attempted, he seldom, or never failed to accomplish; what he believed, he dared to proclaim upon the housetop; what he ardently desired, and incessantly labored for, was the reign of universal freedom, peace, and righteousness. He was among the manliest of men, and the gentlest of spirits. There was no form of human suffering that did not touch his heart; but his abounding sympathy was especially drawn ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... public crier proclaims in stentorian tones from the housetop the program for the day, which sends everyone to his daily task. They are inured to labor and do not count work as a hardship. It is only by incessant toil that they succeed at all in earning a living with the scanty resources at their command, and ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk

... those gardens of the Babylonish Queen. So that I quite remember my bitter disappointment (the first germ, doubtless, of a general scepticism about Gods and Men) when a cut in an indiscreet Handbook of Antiquities displayed these flowery places as resting flatly on a housetop, and no more hanging, in any intelligible sense, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... soldiery, standing elbow to elbow, erect and stalwart figures, fine and sightly in their polished steel; while from behind them on every hand stretched far away a level plain of human heads; and there was no window and no housetop within our view, howsoever distant, but was black with patches and masses ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain

... Blue-eyed Gretchen, Giuseppina, with her bare locks and rainbow-barred apron, slant-eyed O Mimosa San, all in good time would dream over the fair face on the heralding page; women shut in the zenanas of the unchanging East would gossip from housetop to housetop of the wonderful Feringhe beauty; whipped slaves in midmost Africa would carry my picture in their packs into regions where white men have never trod, and dying whalers in the far North would ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark

... Earth, a marvelous creature, moving very swiftly with feet and wings, and having many feathers upon her, and under every feather an eye and a tongue and a mouth and an ear. In the night she flieth between heaven and earth, and sleepeth not; and in the day she sitteth on some housetop or lofty tower, or spreadeth fear over mighty cities; and she loveth that which is false even as she loveth that which is true. So now she went telling through Libya how AEneas of Troy was come, and Dido was wedded to him, and how they lived careless and at ease, and thinking not ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various

... you? What can you have to say to me that you could not shout from the housetop? Yes, I'm ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... inclined to talk. Sir Arthur sat up against the parapet in a sort of stupor, the three Hindoos were grouped on one side, and Momba mutely followed his master from point to point, as with Guy and the colonel he made the circuit of the housetop. ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon

... as his ray; While their great shadows stretching from the light Look like the first colossal steps of Night Stretching across the valley to invade The distant hills of porphyry with their shade. Around, as signals of the setting beam, Gay, gilded flags on every housetop gleam: While, hark!—from all the temples a rich swell Of music ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... life was as melancholy as it was multitudinous. One day his palace with its great wide rooms and great wide doors and great wide hall was too small for him and the loud tongue of a woman belaboring him about some of his neglects, and he retreated to the housetop to get relief from the lingual bombardment. And while there he saw a poor man on one corner of the roof with a mattress for his only furniture, and the open sky his only covering. And Solomon envies him and cries out: "It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... does. You lie in your throat, as the nobles say. I know well enough how she nursed you; and Marcasse from the housetop happened to look through her window and saw her on her knees in the middle of the room at five o'clock in the morning the day that you were ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... summer of 1841, the sentinel on the housetop at Fort Pierce called out, "Indians! Indians!" Everybody sprang to his gun, the companies formed promptly on the parade-ground, and soon were reported as approaching the post, from the pine-woods in rear, four ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... been, once only: We lodged in a street together, You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely, I, a ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning

... great thing to cover the blemishes and to excuse the failings of a friend; to draw a curtain before his stains, and to display his perfections; to bury his weaknesses in silence, but to proclaim his virtues upon the housetop. ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward

... then the other two followed his example. Shortly afterward the host himself came in, and seeing the child with his mouth full and both hands, he knocked him down to the ground, so that he died on the instant. The mother, seeing this, went and threw herself headlong, from the housetop, and the father followed her example. Thus Rabbi Eliezar ben Yacob said, "There perished in this ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various

... with this distance between them Maggie dared do anything; so when the flag was again mentioned, she answered apologetically, as if it were something of which they ought to be ashamed: "We never had any, but we can soon make one, I know. 'Twill be fun to see it float from the housetop!" and, flying up the stairs to the dusty garret, she drew from a huge oaken chest a scarlet coat which had belonged to the former owner of the place, who little thought, as he sat in state, that his favorite coat would one day furnish material for the ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... her. The slight hardness of her expression was lost in the dim blue twilight which still waited for the moon. Vine, an unemotional man, felt with a curious strength the charm of this isolation on the housetop, this tranquillity, so much more suggestive of solitude than anything which could be realized within the walls of a room. He shivered a little when he saw how close she was to the low parapet, and he held out his hand. She took it at ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... am not angry when they smile and nod the head; why should I be? But, John, it is known to myself only and Him before whom all hearts are open how great is my suffering in being among my neighbours as a sparrow upon the housetop. ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... in Worcester and dared arrest. He did not proclaim his guilt from the housetop. But his friends and neighbors knew and he walked ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon

... of their own wares needs (to say the least of it) most careful handling. What they, or some anonymous admirer, say on the cover of The Worn Doorstep (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is that they should like to shout its merits from the housetop. Possibly; but let me protest that it is for me, and not for them, to do the shouting, if any; which said, I will proceed to admit that the book is one of considerable charm. It is told in the form of letters (never to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various

... King Ashmedai, preceded and followed by a noisy crowd of demons and fairies. There seemed to be millions of them, all clattering and pointing at him. They hobbled and hopped over the ground, jumped into the air, sprang from housetop to housetop, made sudden appearances from holes in the ground and vanished ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa

... it was so covered with vast viands; but the dishes were alike, and handsome. I wondered whether mother had bought the new china in Boston, and, buttering my second hot biscuit, I thought of Veronica; then, of the sea. How did it look? Hark! Its voice was in my ear! Could I climb the housetop? Might I not see the mist which hung over ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... knew the soul of the club; no amount of dissension could shake her faith in its ultimate good, and in times of crisis she presided with a serenity only accountable in the fact that she viewed from the mountain summit what her associates saw only from the housetop. What years of development she enjoyed long before the club idea possessed her, endowing her with wisdom and mental breadth, and what associations that urged and demanded that she become a student ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various

... a very pretty girl. She was somebody. And somehow she had trained people to accept her daring way of life. In Paris she did exactly what she chose, and quite openly. There was no secrecy in her methods. In London she pursued the same housetop course. She seldom troubled about a chaperon, and would calmly give a lunch at the Carlton without one if she wanted to. Indeed, she had been seen there more than once, making one of a party of six, five of whom were men. She did not care ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... the guns, Berinthia, upon the housetop with a telescope, saw a man leap up from the intrenchment and stand in full view upon the bank of earth, swinging his hat and ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... least display of his strength. He can afford to be calm and collected, for he is equal to his task. The man who frets and fumes, who is nervous and excited, who is strung up to such a pitch that energy is being dissipated in all directions— such a man proclaims his weakness from the housetop. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... even the Cigarette, while he pretended to despise my enthusiasm, was more or less a devotee himself. There is something highly absurd in the exposition of such toys to the outrages of winter on a housetop. They would be more in keeping in a glass case before a Nurnberg clock. Above all, at night, when the children are abed, and even grown people are snoring under quilts, does it not seem impertinent to leave ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson

... pursue this course unmolested; there are parties in the village that silently oppose his every footstep. If the battle were open it would be easier to win it, but it is concealed. The Church is not often denounced from the housetop, but it is certainly denounced under the roof. The poor and ignorant are instructed that the Church is their greatest enemy, the upholder of tyranny, the instrument of their subjection, synonymous with lowered wages ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... he said, for him to look for a confidential councillor, now that matters which he had wished to be kept so profoundly secret that the very earth should not hear of them, had been proclaimed aloud above the tiles of every housetop. Nevertheless, he would be cut into little pieces but his Majesty should be obeyed, while he remained alive to enforce the royal commands. There were none who had been ever faithful but Berlaymont, he said, and even he had been neutral in the affair of the tax. He had rendered therein neither ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... pursues and smites us to this day, must have been born with nothing less than genius—genius to observe, to narrate, and to judge. Even had he written as a mere recluse and critic, looking out upon his world from a monk's cell or from the corner of a housetop, the vividness, the tenderness, the sarcasm and the humour would still have been there. But Knox's genius was predominantly practical; and the difference between the transformation which befell him, and that which changed ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes

... boats—overloaded boats.... Screams of terror, choked into silence ... boats with frenzied occupants leaping into the water to find a quicker, happier death ... a woman with a babe in her arms on a housetop across the lagoon—the infant already dead; the crazed mother flinging it down into the water, herself following with a long, ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... to make the inferno visible, except that here and there an oil lamp on some housetop glowed like a blood-spot against the blackness. It was a sensation, rather than sight or sound, that betrayed the neighborhood of thousands upon thousands of human beings, sprawling, writhing, twisting upon the roofs, in ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy

... for them—I wish they could live a hundred years just to feast on the seeds and sing and be utterly happy and oblivious of everything but the moment they are passing. A black line has rushed up from the espalier apple yonder to the housetop thirty times at least. The starlings fly so swiftly and so straight that they seem to leave a black line along the air. They have a nest in the roof, they are to and fro it and the meadow the entire day, from dawn till eve. The espalier apple, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... soon you can get over feelin's like that. Inside of three minutes I'd quit grippin' the stanchion and was sittin' there peaceful, enjoyin' the ride. We seemed to be sailin' along on a level now, about housetop high, and so far as I could see we was as steady as if we'd been on a front veranda. There's no sway or rock to the machine at all. I'd been holdin' myself as rigid as if I'd been in a tippy canoe; but now I took a chance on shiftin' my position a little. I even leaned over ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... the housetop, let him not go down to take what is in his house; and he that is in the field, let him not turn back to take his ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg

... death-dealing sink. It is very probable that under their auspices the slaughter of china and of glassware will be continued; it moots not to the average hired-girl whether the sink be in the kitchen or the butler's pantry, upon the housetop or in the bowels of the earth; the work of destruction goes on at four dollars a week and ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... an instant. She would no more have been persuaded to see Jerry again, by a consideration of the material advantages to be gained, than she could have been persuaded to throw herself down from the housetop. That much was settled, not by any coherent effort of her brain, but by a co-ordination of every instinct in her, by the action of her whole being, by what her life had ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... of Aberalva, without hearing hints that the great folks at the court did not always keep their tempers; for, of family jars, as of everything else on earth, the great and just law stands true:—"What you do in the closet, shall be proclaimed on the housetop." ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, So up to the housetop the coursers they flew, With a sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too; And then in a twinkling I heard on the roof The prancing and pawing ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... with pride at being a Plummer. This kind of courage was the Plummer kind. The child's lank little figure seemed to grow taller and straighter. She held up her head splendidly and exulted. She felt like going up on the minister's housetop and proclaiming: "She's my aunt Olivia! She's mine! She's mine—I'm a Plummer, too! All o' you listen, she's my aunt Olivia, and she's ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell

... poetic formal announcement of the New Fire Ceremony, as given at sunrise from the housetop of the Crier ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett

... lived almost all the year round in the country on an estate in the North of Italy: plains, fields, little canals. From the loggia on the housetop they looked down on golden vines, from which here and there the black spikes of the cypress-trees emerged. Beyond them were fields, and again fields. Silence. The lowing of the oxen returning from the fields, and the shrill cries of the peasants at the plow ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... off up the road and Sam followed thinking him altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are men who could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he did not know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence lay ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... threw him aside in the inclement weather, he imploring them earnestly to kill him to end his misery. A compassionate Mexican at last closed the tragic scene by shooting him. Stephen Lee, brother to the general, was killed on his own housetop. Narcisse Beaubien, son of the presiding judge of the district, hid in an outhouse with his Indian slave, at the commencement of the massacre, under a straw-covered trough. The insurgents on the search, thinking that they had escaped, were ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... views from the housetop," replied the squire, angrily, as he abruptly turned away ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic

... of a perfect house-interior which few householders have had the time or experience to cope with, and yet the fact remains that each mistress of a house believes that unless she vanquishes all difficulties and comes out triumphantly with colours flying at the housetop and enjoyment and admiration following her efforts, she has failed in something which she should have been perfectly able to accomplish. But the obligation is certainly a forced one. It is the result of the modern awakening to the effect of ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler

... is the soap-box provender, too, sure of a crowd, offering creed, propaganda, patent medicine, and politics. It is the pulpit of the reformer and the housetop of the fanatic, this soapbox. From it the voice to the city is often a pious one, an impious one, and almost always a raucous one. Luther and Sophocles, and even a Citizen of Nazareth made of the four winds of the street corner the walls of a temple of wisdom. What more fitting acropolis for freedom ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... which to admire more, your ingenuity in planning this affair or the hardihood and courage with which you carried it out. Even had there been no enemy to get through, the adventure of letting yourself down by a rope from the housetop and then from the battlements, swimming three moats, crossing the river in such terrible weather, and finally making your way to Chivasso in your frozen clothes, is no slight feat of endurance. The service that you have rendered is a great one, the manner in which you have carried ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty

... noon, as they were on their way, and were coming near to Joppa, Peter went up to the housetop to pray. While he was praying, the men who were sent by Cornelius, having found the way to Simon's house, stood before the gate, and called out to ask whether Simon, whose other name was Peter, was staying there. The Spirit said to ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman

... prophetic vision was to be heralded by the encompassing of Jerusalem by armies. Then all who would escape should make haste; from Judea they should flee to the mountains; he who was on the housetop would have no time to take his goods, but should hasten down by the outer steps and flee; he who was in the field would better leave without first returning to his house even for his clothes. Terrible, indeed, would that day be for women hampered by ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... between the two species unless they are seen side by side. Is it necessary to describe the starling? Does an Englishman exist who is not well acquainted with the vivacious bird which makes itself at home in his garden or on his housetop in England? We have all admired its dark plumage, which displays a green or bronze sheen in the sunlight, and which is ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar

... keeping his head above water. He was as blue as indigo and as cold as a frog when rescued by his anxious mother. The next day the same victimized infant was seen, by a passing friend, seated on the chimney, on the highest peak of the house. Without alarming anyone, the friend hurried up to the housetop and rescued the child. Another time the three elder brothers entered into a conspiracy, and locked up the fourth, Theodore, in the smoke-house. Fortunately, he sounded the alarm loud and clear, and was set free in safety, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... Froment and his brother Pierre tried to escape by a narrow staircase which led to the roof, but before they reached it Pierre was wounded in the hip and fell; but Froment reached the roof, and sprang upon an adjacent housetop, and climbing from roof to roof, reached the college, and getting into it by a garret window, took refuge in a large room which was always unoccupied at night, being used during the day ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... idea of being engaged. She might some day go off and get married to some one, but engaged? Never! She finally agreed that they were engaged to be engaged to be engaged. One night when they sought the windy housetop, she twined his arms about her and almost went to sleep, with her hair smooth beneath his chin. He sat motionless till his arms ached with the strain, till her shoulder seemed to stick into his like a bar of iron; glad that she trusted him enough to doze into warm slumber in ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... paused at the for'ard end of the housetop and stood in a listening attitude. From the main deck below, near Number Two hatch, across the mumbling of various voices, I could recognize Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine—the three gangsters. But Steve Roberts, the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... strict letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, doing good by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affection for his womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about. Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta one day, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly and lovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just budding into maidenhood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said to me, "and yet if in public, he would never ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... as priests and bishops, paced slowly along holding aloft huge lighted tapers and singing a dirge. All the mummers wore crape, and all the horsemen carried blazing flambeaux. Down the high street, between the lofty, many-storeyed and balconied houses, where every window, every balcony, every housetop was crammed with a dense mass of spectators, all dressed and masked in fantastic gorgeousness, the procession took its melancholy way. Over the scene flashed and played the shifting cross-lights and shadows from the moving torches: ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... Paris is, in some respects, like getting out of the chimney on to the housetop,—the latter city is, by contrast, so light and airy, and so American in its roominess. I had come to Paris for my dessert after my feast of London joints, and I suspect I was a little dainty in that most dainty of cities. In fact, I had ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... everyone was quietly sleeping. None had any thought of that black spectre which is the enemy of all living creatures, which constrains the huge watch-dog to dig up graves with his hind feet, which bids the night owl utter her dismal notes on the housetop alongside of the creaking weather-cock, which sends into the vestibules and corridors its living visiting-cards in the shape of those large, black, night-moths with pale skull-like effigies painted on their backs ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... Cornelius at Caesarea, we have another testimony to the wondrous interdependence of the action of prayer and the Spirit, and another proof of what will come to a man who has given himself to prayer. Peter went up at midday to pray on the housetop. And what happened? He saw heaven opened, and there came the vision that revealed to him the cleansing of the Gentiles; with that came the message of the three men from Cornelius, a man who "prayed alway," ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray

... But the housetop was my especial admiration. It was flat, with a stone floor and high parapet. On all four sides close to this were wide, deep boxes where large plants and shrubs were growing luxuriantly. Large vases filled with vines and exotics were placed at intervals ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... tucked away in between things. Then Leslie opened a glass door in the very prettiest room of all, which she and Allison immediately decided must belong to their aunt, and exclaimed in delight; for here nestled between the gables, with a tiled wall all about it, was a delightful housetop or uncovered porch, so situated among the trees that it was entirely ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill

... the sun creeps at a few degrees only above the horizon. In these intensely cold latitudes it rises and sets with hard outlines, unsoftened by the ruddy haze elsewhere encircling it on the edge of the horizon. Yet such is the strength of its rays that the snow melts on the housetop exposed to its glare, while in the shade the temperature is 40 deg. to 50 deg. below freezing point. At night, when the firmament is not aglow with the many-tinted lights and silent coruscations ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... came true, and the Shunammite's heart leaped with joy as she nursed her little babe. Years passed, and the courtyard echoed with the shouts of the merry child, whose bare feet pattered all day about the sunny square, scaring the gray doves up to the housetop. Holding by his mother's hand, he went up the stairs to the little chamber on the wall, where the vine spread its broad leaves; and there he saw the table and the little bed, the red jar of water and the cakes of bread waiting for the ...
— Children of the Old Testament • Anonymous

... nose about the bushes for his birds, and who cares if any fellow, just for exercise, shoots a dagger a yard from his wrist and sticks you in the back? You serve me, and there's pay for you; brothers, doctors, nurses, friends,—a tight blanket if you fall from a housetop! and masses for your soul when your hour strikes. The treacherous cur lies rotting in a ditch! Do you conceive that when I employ you I am in your power? Your intelligence will open gradually. Do you know that here in this house ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... friend what he was thinking of, and what he intended to do during the day.' Here, I thought, is something that can be at once tested. I said immediately to X: 'If you wish to win to your cause an apostle, who will proclaim your principles to the world from the housetop, tell me what I am now thinking of.' X. reddened, and did not ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall



Words linked to "Housetop" :   roof



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com