"Grimy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... power to do what nothing else could. Viny wiped off all the tears with the backs of her grimy little paws, gave two or three concluding sniffs, sat up straight, and was immediately all right for ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... on the Thames mud, forever heaving and sweating and rotting and growing. A fungus, a sponge, sucking in the produce of continents, sending out the wealth of empires. I used to stand on London Bridge and watch the steamers loading and discharging from the grimy overhanging warehouses. A busman's holiday, you say. But there didn't seem anything else to do while I was waiting for a ship. I found my old British Museum Reading Room pass among my papers at home and I used it one day to look in upon my bygone haunts. It gave me a shock to see ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... sunshine and out of the heat, Out of the dust of the grimy street, A song fluttered down in the form of a dove, And it bore me a ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... is that calling out from Attica? there, on the lower slopes of Hymettus—a grimy squalid fellow in a smock-frock; he is bending over a spade or something; but he has a tongue in his head, and is not afraid to use it. He must be a philosopher, to judge from ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... bright hedges of holly, rounded a corner of its wall, and ran into a group of lusty children romping on the brae, below the very prettiest, thatch roofed and hill-sheltered hamlet within many a mile of Edinboro' town. The bairns were lunching from grimy, mittened hands, gypsy fashion, life being far too short and playtime too brief for formal meals. Seeing them eating, Bobby suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He rose before a well-provided laddie and politely begged for a ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... did not know, for she had forgotten Lucy's name. So there was no tangible evidence to confirm Miss Leonora's doubts, and the carriage from the Blue Boar rattled down Prickett's Lane to the much amazement of that locality. When they got to the grimy canal-banks, Miss Leonora stopped the vehicle and got out. She declined the attendance of her trembling sister, and marched along the black pavement, dispersing with the great waves of her drapery the wondering children about, who swarmed ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... I'll take the best possible care of Araminta. Shake hands on it." He went out, his shoulders shaking with suppressed merriment, and Miss Hitty watched him through the grimy ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... the hand Burns stopped his engine, now running quietly, and stood up straight. He threw out one bare arm, grimy and oily with his labours. "Two hours ago," said he in a voice now controlled and solemn, "if by cutting off that right arm at the shoulder I could have saved a human life I'd have ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... Malibran were usually followed by languid and abstemious Sundays in Washington Square. Mrs. Heeny, being unaware of this sequel to her bounties, formed the habit of appearing regularly on Saturdays, and while she chatted with his grandmother the little boy was encouraged to scatter the grimy carpet with face-creams and bunches of clippings in his thrilling quest for the sweets at the bottom ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... of wooden stairs, but when by misadventure we grazed a human being the elbow of that being shoved itself automatically and fiercely outwards, to repel. I had an impression of hats, caps, and woolly overcoats stretched in long parallel lines, and of grimy raw planks everywhere presenting possibly dangerous splinters, save where use had worn them into smooth shininess. Then gradually I became aware of the vast field, which was more brown than green. Around the field was a wide border of infinitesimal hats and pale faces, rising in tiers, and beyond ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... helplessly. It was dark by now and cold. The little back yard was grimy and full of odors. McTeague was tired with their long walk. All his uneasiness about his affair with Trina had returned. No, surely she was not for him. Marcus or some other man would win her in the end. What could she ever see ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... behind. But it does mean a love which is based on a deep understanding of man's slow struggles and of the unequal movements of life, and is expressed in both arduous and highly skillful actions. It means taking the grimy, degraded, misshapen, and trying to get them right; because we feel that essentially they can be right. And further, of course, it means getting behind them to the conditions that control their wrongness; and getting these right if we can. Consider what ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... the two negroes were forced to spend the night between trains. Tump Pack piloted Peter Siner to a negro cafe where they could eat, and later they searched out a negro lodging-house on Gate Street where they could sleep. It was a grimy, smelly place, with its own odor spiked by a phosphate-reducing plant two blocks distant. The paper on the wall of the room Peter slept in looked scrofulous. There was no window, and Peter's four-years regime ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... crave. Go down into the dark markets of the town. See the long, narrow, sordid streets lined with the cheap commodities of the poor. Mark how there is a sort of spangled gaiety, a reckless swing, a grinning exultation in the grimy, sordid caravanserai. The cheap colours of the shoddy open-air clothing-house, the blank faded green of the coster's cart; the dark bluish-red of the butcher's stall—they all take on a value not their own in the garish lights ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of a man of power by the simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his way;—the lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the meeting near midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and dark Thames magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow. There is no grasping ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cannot; and yet, still the surging locomotive bounds onward, beneath your mad career. You draw a long breath, as you dismount at last, a hundred miles away, as if you had been riding with Mazeppa or Brunechilde, and yet escaped alive. And there, by your side, stands the quiet, grimy engineer, turning already to his tobacco and his newspaper, and unconscious, while he reads of the charge at Balaklava, that his life ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... ravine, down which a stream—which ought to have been a lovely, wild, and frolicsome little river—flowed between its rocks and trees. The river, like so many in that district, had, however, in its earlier life been sacrificed to trade, and was grimy with paper-making. But this did not affect our pleasure in it so much as I have known it to affect other streams. Perhaps our water was more rapid; perhaps less clogged with dirt and refuse. Our side of the dell was charmingly accidente, and clothed ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... Victoria Villas, Hackney; and next week perhaps you were favoured with a note from some of the minor little Inns of Court, where the writer would be found getting up a company on the fourth floor in a grimy room, furnished with a high deal-desk, two three-legged stools, and illimitable foolscap, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... swept daily by the shopman's besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of his rare enjoyment. For the first time in my life it seems to me I saw this little boy as he was, squat-bodied, big-headed, thick-lipped, and with a face swept clean of all emotions save where his two great eyes glowed with a sulky fire under exaggerated eyebrows. I noticed his grimy nails, his soiled collar, his unbrushed clothes, the patent signs of defeat changing to utter rout, and from the heights of my great peace I was not sorry for him. He was like that, other boys were different, ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... aristocratic mansion in which Milton had some interest—the town-house of the Earl of Bridgewater, ex-President of Wales, and the peer of Comus. The name "Bridgewater Gardens" still designates, without a shred of garden left there, but only grimy printing-offices and the like instead, the portion of the street which the mansion occupied. Nay more, till within a few years ago; Milton's own house in Barbican, with some modern change of frontage, and ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... bonnet, was seen dropping her curtsy opposite the reading-desk. This manifestation of respect towards Mr. Gilfil's memory on the part of Dame Fripp had no theological bearing whatever. It was due to an event which had occurred some years back, and which, I am sorry to say, had left that grimy old lady as indifferent to the means of grace as ever. Dame Fripp kept leeches, and was understood to have such remarkable influence over those wilful animals in inducing them to bite under the most unpromising circumstances, that though her own leeches were usually rejected, from a suspicion ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Mr Cupples, holding out a grimy hand, that many a lady might have been pleased to possess and keep clean and white: "Hoo's the soo? And hoo's a' ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... head, and, helping himself to another cigarette, proffered the case to the worker, and, on that gentleman calling attention to the grimy condition of his hands, stuck one in his mouth and lit it for him. Considerably mollified by these attentions, the amateur gardener resumed his ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... On her feet she would barely have reached the rim of the great dish-pan, but on the soap-box she did very well. A grimy calico apron trailed ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... but accepted the decree of silence. The day wore on to noon, and in the unbroken stillness the boys ventured out of the grimy tree and lay at full length on the turf. The great redwoods towered in endless corridors, their straight columns unbroken by branch or twig for a hundred and fifty feet. Through the green close arbours above came an occasional rift of sunshine, but the aisles were full of cold green light. The ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... trembling wretch had said as he handed over a grimy envelope, "I ain't never seen his face—but here is directions how ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... house known as the Signal House. Why it is so called no one knows and very few care to inquire. It is presumably a square house of the Jacobean period—presumably because it is so hidden by trees, so wrapped in grimy ivy, so dust-laden and so impossible to get at, that its outward form is no ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... food, and sometimes without it; but whenever he had anything to eat, he always shared it with his little lame brother. I see them now, crouched close up together for the sake of warmth. Sometimes Billy cried from hunger and cold, and his tears made long lines down his grimy face. Bob never cried, he suffered quite quietly; he patted his little brother's shaggy head, and spoke kindly to him, in his dull, cheerless way. I felt more sorry for him than ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... all was still, and every light had a nimbus of illuminated vapour. There were hardly more than three present beyond the number Mr Marshal had given him to expect; and their faces, some grim, some grimy, most of them troubled, and none blissful, seemed the nervous ganglions of the monster whose faintly gelatinous bulk filled the place. He seated himself in a pew near the pulpit, communed with his own heart and was still. Presently the ministering deacon, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... a broad landing like that of the Chebes, grimy with old age, but brightened by its window and the beautiful prospect presented by the factory. A narrow staircase, a narrow door, a succession of rooms with brick floors, all small and cold, and in the last an old maid with a false front and black thread ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... my—alas! easily-measured faith. What about the unearned increment? What about the unrealised wealth? Too many of us are like some man who has a great estate in another land. He knows nothing about it, and is living in grimy poverty in a back street. For you have all God's riches waiting for you, and 'the potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice' at your beck and call, and yet you are but poorly realising your possible riches. Alas, that when we might have so much we do have so little. 'According to the riches ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... "You keep your grimy paws off these delicacies, peasant. You'll get yours in due time and perhaps it will help Kelly and me to make a more polished product of you instead of the clodlike ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... streets that slope precipitously from the Strand to the Thames Embankment, there is a door that would be all the better for a lick of paint, which bears what is perhaps the most modest and unostentatious announcement of its kind in London. The grimy ground-glass ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... shoe-vamper, and the rag-merchant, display their goods, as sign-boards to the petty thief; here, stores of old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen-stuff and linen, rust and rot in the grimy cellars. ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... out, a man stood by his side whom he had scarcely noticed during the evening. He was evidently a shoemaker. There was a smell of leather about him, and his hands and face were grimy. He had a slightly turned-up nose, smallish eyes, half hidden under very black eyebrows, and his lips were thin and straight. His voice was exceedingly high-pitched, and had something creaking in it like the sound of an ill-greased axle. He spoke with emphasis, but not quite like an Englishman, ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... you, Coppy," said Wee Willie Winkie, indicating Miss Allardyce with a grimy forefinger. "I knew she didn't ought to go acwoss ve wiver, and I knew ve wegiment would come to me ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... a hundred times, charged with odours of unnameable personal uncleanness and disease, that I staggered to the gutter with a qualm which I could scarcely conquer. At the doors of the houses stood grimy women with their arms folded and their hair disordered. Grimier boys and girls had tied a rope to broken railings, and were swinging on it. The common door to a score of lodgings stood ever open, ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... depression" Of stories that gloomily bore Received as the subtle expression Of almost unspeakable lore? In the dreary, the sickly, the grimy Say, why do our women delight, And wherefore so constantly ply me With ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... filled his pipe which they had permitted him to keep. A stranger coming into the cabin might not have guessed that Casey was a prisoner. When the table was cleared and Hank set about washing the dishes, Casey picked up a grimy dish towel branded black in places where it had rubbed sooty kettles, and grinned cheerfully at Paw while he dried a tin plate. Paw eyed him dubiously over a stinking pipe, spat reflectively into the woodbox ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... the hill climbed up men, women and children. The men grimy and toil-worn; a look of hopelessness in their eyes: the sob of misery in their voices. Dragging themselves up after them came the women—some pressing babies to their breasts, others leading little children by the hand. The men had begged them to stay at home. There might be bad work that ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... gold than ourselves, but exhibited a half-ounce nugget and several smaller lumps. We could not make him out. Neither his appearance nor his personal equipment suggested necessity; and yet he laboured as hard as the rest of us. His gaudy costume was splashed and grimy with the red mud, although evidently he had made some attempt to brush it. The linen was, of course, hopeless. He showed us the blisters on his ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... I'm going to saddle him myself and everything. And I want you to get me some jingling silver spurs like Mig has got, with chains that hang away down and rattle when you walk." The Kid lifted one small foot and laid a grimy finger in front of his heel ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... footman—carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that high speech which angels' tongues turn gold! So should her deathless beauty take no wrong, Praised in her own great kindred's fit and cognate tongue. Or if that language yet with us abode. Which Adam in the garden talked with God! But our untempered speech descends—poor heirs! Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's bricklayers: Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit, Strong but to damn, not memorise, a spirit! A cheek, a lip, a limb, a bosom, they Move with light ease in speech of working-day; And women we do use to praise even so. But here the gates we burst, and to the temple ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... which even grows into a certain tenderness. I may frankly admit that I have begun to love it since I heard about the two ragged little newsboys who came to the eminent city florist, with all their savings clenched in their grimy fists, and thus made ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... scarred and battered, as if they might perhaps retire from active service in ten years' time, or so. But the tan shoes were not Jerry's only concession to the social amenities. An unwonted attention was given to grimy knuckles and finger-nails. More than once he made his appearance with his usually frowsy hair as sleek as the coat of a water rat, and dripping, in further likeness to the animal mentioned. Peggy, whose original interest in Jerry had been intensified by the favorable impression ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... life—a friend which, in his life of celibacy, had found in his heart something of that place which a fond and faithful wife may hold in the heart of a more fortunate man. It was a little friend, a fragrant friend, a tawny and somewhat grimy friend; it was in the pocket of his coat; it was of clay; in fact, it was ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... grimy cuffs of my blouse, and felt of my dishevelled hair. "Oh, I'm afraid I can't go. I look so mussy. Haven't ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... wall-paper, torn in many spots, displayed, at intervals, grimy circles from the oil of the lodgers' hair; reclining in their seats they would rest the back of the chairs and their heads against ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... no more of her charges till tea-time, when the bell brought them from different quarters, Johnnie with such a grimy collar and dirty hands, that he was a very un-Sunday-like figure, and she would have sent him away to make himself decent, but that she was desirous ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... block-and-tackle, which was being used to hoist huge boxes and casks of provisions on board. The three men were working sturdily, and it would have been difficult to recognize in them, with their grimy faces and soiled duck uniforms, a doctor, a bank cashier, and a man-about-town well known in New York City. Near the forward hatch, industriously swabbing the deck, was a black-haired youth whose father helps to control some of the largest moves on 'Change. Scattered about the gangway were others, ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... effect on Liz was very strange. Her face grew quite red, her eyes brimmed with tears, and she threw the blanket over her head to smother the sob which broke from her lips. Then Gladys bade good-bye to the little seamstress, and slipped away down the weary stair and into the grimy street, where already the lamps were lit. Her mind was full of many new and strange thoughts as she took her way home, and it was with an effort she recovered herself sufficiently to attend to her simple duties for the evening. But when the old man and the boy came down from the ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... of the great heaps of structural steel and flooring material and of the ponderous main traveller so far out toward the end of the overhang, the glow in the sunken eyes of the brake-rider died out, and his grimy brows gathered in ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... confessed that his first feeling was one of irritation at the man's familiarity—which amounted almost to impertinence—and his second, disgust at the grimy hand so near his collar. To summarily shake it off was a natural instinct. But, when he thought a moment, he clearly saw the absurdity of professing a creed of universal brotherhood and then, as soon as some one attempted brotherly ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... segment of the life-film of Harry Barnes, old actor, as he traveled the stones of Fourteenth Street. Not the Rialto, where fat men adorned with fat diamonds smoke fat cigars in order to narcotize fat consciences; but Fourteenth Street, grimy with old, sparsely-tenanted buildings, where theatrical offices three flights up bargain for the driblets of trade among the low music-halls and the cheapest vaudeville houses, where niggardly, gray-haired agents have for two generations sat among their dusty contracts and their rusty pens, haggling ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... same grimy giant who had accosted her on the lonely road near Deadman's Grike. But she feels that she "must go through with it" now, and she follows him into ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... and burnished the panes. Then she scoured the table, then the floor, then blackened the stove before she sat down to her knitting. And of course the lily had done it all, just by showing, in its whiteness, how grimy ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... in some patois; and each thinks himself the superior of his neighbour. But as for the home life of these people, who has seen it? What is known of it? Into that long, lofty, arched-ceilinged drawing-room, lighted by its one lamp, where sits the Signora with her daughter and the grimy-looking, ill-shaven priest, there is not, perhaps, much temptation to enter, nor is the conversation of a kind one would care to join in; and there is but this, and the noisy, almost riotous, reception after the opera, where a ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... taste of ordinary people turned by preference to this humming and buzzing life, rather than to the quiet and lonely life in the green spaces of the country; Hugh had little doubt that the vast majority of those he saw, even the pale, patient workpeople who were peeping, as they toiled, grimy and sweat-stained, from the open windows, would choose this life rather than the other, and would have condemned the life of the country as dull. Was it he, Hugh wondered, or they that were out of joint? Ought ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... saw eyes in the milk train staring curiously up at him, heard Gloria and Anthony in quick controversy as to whether he should go to the city with her, then another clamor and she was gone and the three men, pale as ghosts, were standing alone upon the platform while a grimy coal-heaver went down the road on top of a motor truck, carolling ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... side of the steamer were grimy coal barges, into which was dipped an endless chain of buckets carrying the coal to the bunkers. Stevadores were running here and there, orders and counter-orders were being given, and the confusion must have been maddening to any ...
— Tom Swift in the City of Gold, or, Marvelous Adventures Underground • Victor Appleton
... treasure of Franchard," replied her husband, "See, here are the first-fruits; a pine-apple, a dress for my ever-beautiful—it will suit her—trust a husband's, trust a lover's taste! Embrace me, darling! This grimy episode is over; the butterfly unfolds its painted wings. To-morrow Casimir will come; in a week we may be in Paris—happy at last! You shall have diamonds.—Jean-Marie, take it out of the boot, with religious care, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... myrmidons, who flattered themselves that they were spying on Raffles. The imbeciles were at it still! The one hanging about Burlington Gardens looked unutterably bored, but with his blots of whisker and his grimy jowl, as flagrant a detective officer as ever I saw, even if he had not so considerately dressed the part. The other bruiser was an equally distinctive type, with a formidable fighting face and a chest like a barrel; but in Piccadilly he seemed ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... opalescent colors, too indefinable to name, too fugitive for the eye to transmit to memory. Later he picked up strange examples which, like meteoric stones from another sphere, had found their mysterious way from Chinese palaces to his grimy haunts in London, Amsterdam, or Florence, as the case might be—a blue-and-white jar of Chia-ching, or a Han ceremonial vessel in emerald green, incrusted from long burial, or a celadon bowl that resembled a cup of jade, or some gorgeously decorated bit of Famille Verte. ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... not help thinking, as he turned the sack outside in, that it would have been nicer for Mr Bickers to have the comparatively clean side of the canvas next to his face instead of the very grimy and travel-stained surface which had fallen ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... there was a wild rushing about now. Orders were shouted to the engineers below; hoarse answers came back. The engines were stopped and started again. But still the yacht did not move. A grimy engineer came up ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart
... dangers, at the peaceful multitude of roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the stream, while scattered on the outskirts of the surrounding plain the factory chimneys rose perpendicular against a grimy sky, each slender like a pencil, and belching out smoke like a volcano. He could see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his feet, with the hazy splendour of the sea in the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... snag had struck, the injured barge was again lashed to the fleet and on her way down the Ohio. Paul was the hero of the hour. The Captain of the "Red Lion" solemnly transferred him from his damp and grimy quarters on the head to the comfortable cabin and pilot house. He confessed to the kind Captain that he had run away from home and how anxious he was about his mother. That day the Captain wrote a glowing letter to Mrs. Boyton and posted it at Paducah, Kentucky. ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... his German friends, or his enemies on either side of wherever the frontier was in those far-off days. Whatever was done for him, whatever he did for himself, whatever was done against him, it seemed all one: he walked steadily on into the thickest of grimy fogs. By romping over Europe like any itinerant conductor of this day, he might earn an uncertain livelihood: as for any prospect of getting on with his Mastersingers, his Ring and a score of other plans bubbling in his head, that was a receding ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... felt the new importance of their positions. So then, imagine the indignation of the majordomo, when, summoned at dusk one evening to the carriage gates, three or four days after the portentous news had issued from the palace, he found only a ragged and grimy carter who demanded peremptorily to be admitted and taken to ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... stoppages. The train flew on at a frightful pace through the hill country, where from the windows could be seen the bare bleak peaks of Cumberland, varied with nearer slopes of soft green grass and verdant valleys. On, on through the great grimy towns of the manufacturing counties; on and on through dark tunnels, swinging round curves, over rivers, skirting woods, still rushing on, with an occasional shriek and scream, as of relentless fury; ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... it—it hurts," Danny wailed, when Pearl examined his grimy little foot, from which a trickle of blood was showing through the murk ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... the grimy, foul-smelling basement of the City Hall, where a few policemen looked at me wonderingly, a brisk walk with the cutting wind at our backs and the fog currents hurrying and whirling in eddies toward the bay, and ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... one of these women—I know!—worship here, yield yourself to the intoxicating day-dreams that make the grimy world sweeter than any heaven ever imagined. How you heart leaps with gratitude for your good fortune! How compassionately you regard your unblest fellow men! What may you not accomplish with such a mate beside ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... them with your grimy hands," she said, a little saucily; "and when you get home—let's see, ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... in the ground. But there was no place to hide in, for now they had gathered all round him in a vast crowd, so that whichever way he turned there before him they appeared—hundreds and hundreds of dark, excited faces, hundreds of grimy hands all pointing at him. Then, all at once, he caught sight of an old rag of a garment lying on the ground among the ashes and cinders, and he thought he would cover himself with it, and picking it hastily up was just going to put it ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... new grass was growing; grimy shrubbery had freshened into green; a tree was already in full leaf. Here and there cats sprawled on sun-warmed roofs, sparrows chirked under eaves from whence wisps of litter trailed, betraying ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... father says it belongs to him, and this idea is fostered to the extent that he is allowed to pay for the seeds and cuttings and things. He is also encouraged to order the men about. But I always think of it as Miss Middleton's garden, particularly when the afternoons are hot and I see nothing but grimy bricks out of my window. She knows all the flowers by name, which seems to me ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... In the second forty it is thought that the superior speed and staying power of the Southerners will tell over the heavier Scots. There seems little the matter with the latter as yet, as they stand in a group, wiping their grimy faces and discussing the state of the game; for at the end of forty minutes the goals are changed and there is a ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... no room in my thoughts for anything but volcanoes, and it will be so for some days to come. We have been all day in the crater, in fact, I left Mr. Green and his native there, and came up with the guide, sore, stiff, bruised, cut, singed, grimy, with my thick gloves shrivelled off by the touch of sulphurous acid, and my boots nearly burned off. But what are cuts, bruises, fatigue, and singed eyelashes, in comparison with the awful sublimities I have witnessed to-day? The activity of Kilauea on Jan. 31 was as child's play to its ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... jogged forward on his tired pony, leaving his followers behind, and on riding up, a smile was noticeable on his wrinkled visage. He dismounted, unearthing from his scanty breech-clout a greasy, grimy letter, ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... for Jed was at his devil's work, and only evil could come to the one who discovered him at it. He had scooped out a pile of sand from under the edge of the biggest rock, and was filling half a dozen grimy leather flasks from a jug which he had pulled from the hole. And then he paused to drink. They could hear the liquor ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... maps. "It's mighty little use to look at maps—they're all drew by guess—an'—by God, anyway," said the old fellow, as he ran his grimy forefinger over the red line which represented the trail. "We've been a slantin' hellwards ever since we crossed the Skeeny—I figure it we're on the ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... Roman pontiff beset by more vindictive and envious foes than this helpless old savage who possesses nothing save a grimy shirt and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... however, he found young Platt there ahead of him and in despair. He had good cause. The whole north end of the Applerod Addition had turned black, and over the top of Bobby's now grimy cement wall poured a broad, dark sheet of the murky swamp-water which had stained it. The pond of Silas Trimmer had overflowed in spite of all Platt's confident figuring that it could not, and in spite of the fact that dry weather had prevailed for two solid weeks. That ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... contradiction came. Instead, he appeared to read confirmation there of the landlord's plain and unembittered statement. The dull blue paper with its old-fashioned and uninteresting stripes seemed to have disfigured the walls for years. It was not only grimy with age, but showed here and there huge discoloured spots, especially around the stovepipe-hole high up on the left-hand side. Certainly he was a dreamer to doubt such ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... attic chamber, bearing the marks of the cruelest poverty, a stove, an artist's easel, a pallet spread directly on the grimy floor, and upon it a man in the last stage of consumption. He glanced up at Indiman and waved his hand feebly. He tried to speak, but his voice died away in his throat; Indiman knelt by his side to catch ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... into the cool and starry night. Not that she could see very far. The backs of houses hid half the stars in front and on either hand, making, with the back of this house and its fellows, a kind of square turned inside out. Miserable little gardens glimmered through an irregular network of grimy walls, with here and there a fair tree in autumnal tatters; but Rachel looked neither at these nor at the stars that lit them dimly. In a single window of those right opposite a single lamp had burnt all night. It was the only earthly light that Rachel could see, the ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... remain very still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb revolt;—the injustice of being found troublesome and being sent to bed early for the comfort of her elders;—the cruel necessity of straining her pretty eyes, for many long hours at a time, over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without;—the austere constrains and heavy drowsiness of warm churches, filled with the droning echoes of a voice preaching incomprehensible things;—the progressively ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... feeing portion) was kept. The felons' "garnish," as it was called, was abolished previous to 1809, but the debtors' fee remained. The prison was dirty in the extreme; the mud almost ankle deep in some parts in the passages, and the walls black and grimy. There seemed to be no system whatever tending towards cleanliness, and as to health that was utterly disregarded. Low typhoid fever was frequently prevalent, and numbers were swept off by it. The strong prisoners used ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... ostriches, judging from the places to which those incipient giants repaired on a Monday morning. Nor did the counting-house where Herbert assisted, show in my eyes as at all a good Observatory; being a back second floor up a yard, of a grimy presence in all particulars, and with a look into another back second floor, rather ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Jupp, whose black beard seemed all the blacker, surrounding his good-humoured face, as he came out of the office with Mary on his arm, and a young Master Jupp and another little Mary toddling behind them—the whilom porter no longer dressed in grimy velveteens, but in a smart black frock-coat, his Sunday best, while his wife was ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... all the same!" answered Dick, with shining eyes—eyes that gleamed amid a face dark with the tan of the western sun and grimy with the dust of ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... seemed as if the cinders upon which one trod had been newly poured from a fire. In the rooms where the furnaces blazed, Montague could not penetrate at all; he could only stand in the doorway, shading his eyes from the glare. In each of these infernos toiled hundreds of grimy, smoke-stained men, stripped to the waist ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... this mill had a most entrancing way of making their castings late in the afternoon, so as to give a boy a chance to coast or skate, an hour after school closed, before it was time to slip down to the grimy building on the river's bank, and peer through the arched doorway into the great, dark, mysterious cavern with its floor of sand marked out in a pattern of trenches that looked as if they had been made by some ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... then of no value in the world? Is it always to be the prey of modern progress? Is nothing to be considered sacred; nothing to be left untouched, unsmirched by the grimy fingers of improvement? ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... and, without a word, went to the sink. It was a greasy, filthy sink. A smell came up from the outlet. He took no notice of it. That a sink should smell was to him part of the natural order, just as it was a part of the natural order that the soap should be grimy with dish-water and hard to lather. Nor did he try very hard to make it lather. Several splashes of the cold water from the running faucet completed the function. He did not wash his teeth. For that matter he had never seen a toothbrush, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... was frightful to see as he lay there gasping, opening an enormous mouth in order to utter words which could scarcely be heard, his breath rattling, picking at his bed and moving his thin legs under a grimy sheet as though ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... out at the sight of him—blackened and ragged, his eyes red-rimmed in his grimy face, his hands, cut by the broken window glass, smeared with dried blood. His coat and shirt, burnt in a score of places, hung in singed fragments round him. There were great holes burnt in his panama hat, even in his riding breeches. Jim flung himself from ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... A dozen grimy hands were waved on high, and offers of assistance came from all sides. Mrs. Wiggs saw that now was the time ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... found themselves at the docks, and saw the great ships ranging far and near, with their tapering masts pointing upwards to the cloudy sky. The Maid of Astolat lay close at hand, and as they went on board Dick appeared, his face black and grimy, but all aglow ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... wood and iron was above doing anything with water. She had half a mind to tell him of it, particularly as she noticed also that his throat below the line of sunburn disclosed by his open collar was quite white, and his grimy hands well made. She was wondering whether he would be affronted if she said in her politest way, "I beg your pardon, but do you know you have quite accidentally got something on your face," and offer her handkerchief, which, of course, he would ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... consisted of two rotten old trunks, a broken chair, and a dirty volume of sermons of the old-fashioned quarto size. The grimy ceiling, slanting downward to a cracked window, was stained with rain that had found its way through the roof. The faded wall-paper, loosened by damp, was torn away in some places, and bulged loose in others. There were holes in the skirting-board; and ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... feet now, hand on the throttle lever, although it was open as wide as it could be pulled. The fireman was throwing coal into the furnace, looking round over his shoulder now and then at the persistent horseman who would not be outrun, his eyes white in his grimy face. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... boxes, it wouldn't 'a' meant nothin' to you. Absolutely nothin'. But with me it's different. I'm blessed with imagination enough to see right through them Chinamen tricks. Them two boxes is marked "Oriental Goods" an' consigned (here Mr. Gibney raised a grimy forefinger, and Scraggs and McGuffey eyed it very much as if they expected it to go off at any moment)—"them two boxes is consigned to the Gin Seng Company, 714 Dupont Street, ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... kitchen, where now they stood, not a spark of fire was lingering, but some wood-ash still retained a feeble memory of warmth; and three little children (blest with small advance from babyhood) were huddling around, with hands, and faces, and sharp grimy knees poking in for lukewarm corners; while two rather senior young Carroways were lying fast asleep, with a jack-towel over them. But Tommy was not there; that gallant Tommy, who had ridden all ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... comparatively simple, but when the time for reassembling came, Thurston, who found that certain cups could not by any legitimate means be induced to screw home into their places, was perforce obliged to rest the machine upon two chairs and wriggle underneath it, where he reclined upon his back with grimy oil dripping upon his forehead. Red in the face, he crawled out to breathe at intervals, and Helen made stern efforts to conceal her mingled alarm and ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... enough also to let ordinary river traffic through easily. Over the parapet showed quaint and fanciful little buildings, which I supposed to be booths or shops, beset with painted and gilded vanes and spirelets. The stone was a little weathered, but showed no marks of the grimy sootiness which I was used to on every London building more than a year old. In short, to me a wonder ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... companions to await him outside, he went in, and saw two men, swart and very huge, with horny noses, feeding their fire with any chance-given fuel. Moreover, the entrance was hideous, the door-posts were decayed, the walls grimy with mould, the roof filthy, and the floor swarming with snakes; all of which disgusted the eye as much as the mind. Then one of the giants greeted him, and said that he had begun a most difficult venture in his burning desire to visit a strange god, and his attempt to explore ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... a place called Branik on the outskirts of Prague the idea called America is alive. A worker, dressed in grimy overalls, rises to speak at the factory gates. And he begins his speech to his fellow citizens with these words, words of a distant revolution: "We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George H.W. Bush • George H.W. Bush
... under her stubby fingers. Then the clicking ceased with sudden abruptness, and she prodded the mechanism viciously with a hairpin. As this appeared unavailing she used her forefinger, and when at length the carriage slid along the rod with a clash there was a smear of grimy oil upon her cheek and her somewhat tilted nose. The machine, however, gave no further trouble, and she endeavoured to make up some, at least, of the time she had spent at the concert. It was necessary that it should be made up, but she was also conscious ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... unattractive, even repulsive figure. He seemed to have shrunken in size since his arrival in England, and his brother's clothes, always too large, hung about him loose and ungraceful. His tie was grimy; his shirt frayed; his trousers turned up, but still falling over his heels; his hat, too large for him, came almost to his ears. In the increased pallor and thinness of his face, his dark eyes seemed to have come nearer ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... beauties of the country. Those around me, who had votes, voted for the County of Middlesex. On the other side of the invisible border I had just past the poor wretch with 3s. a day who lived in a grimy lodging or a half-built hut, but who at any rate possessed the political privilege. Now I had suddenly emerged among the aristocrats, and quite another state of things prevailed. Is that a reasonable manipulation of the votes of the people? Does that arrangement give to any man an equal share ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... grimy pillow, breathing fast and painfully. Abbot stands in silence a moment. Then his voice, stern and constrained, is heard ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... before I could find a bedroom; hunting for keys, wandering up and down stone stairs and along pitch-black corridors, sounds of voices in quarrel. The room itself was utterly depressing—so bare, so grimy, so dark. Quickly I examined the bed, and was rewarded. It is the good point of Italian inns; be the house and the room howsoever sordid, the bed is almost invariably clean and dry ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... afternoon. My Utopian vision of a Chelsea in New York, outdoing the grimy salons of Greenwich Village, fell in splinters at the bottom of my mind. Sadly I looked upon the old Carl Schurz mansion on the hill, and we departed for the airy plateaus of Central Park. Desperately I pointed to the fading charms of East River Park—the convent round ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... here?" demanded the captain, a huge German. Their grimy armor and bearded faces besmeared with black marked them as Black Riders. I was overjoyed to see that they ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... finds women entering the union. As they become active, women introduce a new element. They may not say very much, but it is gradually discovered that they do not enjoy meeting over saloons, at the head of two or three flights of grimy backstairs, or where the street has ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... guns and three hundred prisoners. Twelve thousand British troops had been shut up in Ladysmith, and there was no serious force between the invaders and the sea. Only in those distant transports, where the grimy stokers shoveled and strove, were there hopes for the safety of Natal and the honour of the Empire. In Cape Colony the loyalists waited with bated breath, knowing well that there was nothing to check a Free State invasion, and that if it came no bounds could be placed ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... know?' Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbour, as Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb in the story-teller's direction meanwhile. 'Seems like a parson somehow. But ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... consumptive wisp; from old women of seventy, with straggling grey hair, to fifteen-year-old girls. In the cottage forges there would be but one worker, or two at most; in the shop forges four, or even five, little glowing heaps; four or five of the grimy, pale lung-bellows; and never a moment without a fiery hook about to take its place on the growing chains, never a second when the thin smoke of the forges, and of those lives consuming slowly in front of them, did not escape from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Instant alarm pervaded the party, and a precipitate rush was made for the cooking-stove, where Christie proved by ocular demonstration that the cake showed no signs of baking, much less of burning. The family pronounced themselves satisfied, after each member had poked a grimy little finger into the doughy delicacy, whereon one large raisin reposed in proud pre-eminence over the vulgar ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the day argued and shouted over a miserable little matter of more royalties or less and whether the Dass-Tata company might not ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... a rush, grimy fists flying. Jerry feinted just once, side-stepped and caught him prettily on the point of the jaw. The blow was beautifully timed, and the fellow ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... 'mid the pines so dark, The pines so silent and so dark at morn A ragged bird with feathers rough and torn, Whetting his grimy beak upon the bark, And croaking hoarsely ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... He was dusty and grimy to a degree, his clothes were torn in a dozen places where he had gone rolling down the hill, a handkerchief was roughly knotted around his head, and there were streaks of dried blood ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... room was large, and the flickering oil-lamp would have left it mostly in shadow had it not been helped by the flame of the fire. The walls were dark from smoke and long usage, for this was a very old mill. There was no sign of plenty, save the chunks of fat bacon which hung from the grimy rafters. There were several children, and one of them, almost a young woman, went out with a basket to buy us some meat. We had not a very choice meal, but it was a solid one. It commenced with a big tureen of country soup, made of all things, but chiefly of bread, and which ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... "Why, look-a-hyar, you ain't Mr. Briscoe!" he exclaimed insistently, as with a desire to reassure himself. His eyes large, light, distended, were starting out of his head. His jaw quivered violently. The grimy, claw-like hand he extended shook as ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... luxurious little room, with a great oriel window. Here were inkstands, sloping frames for writing on, and all the instruments of art. The cardinal whispered a courtier, and presently the Pope's private secretary appeared with a glorious grimy old MS. of Plutarch's Lives. And soon Gerard was seated alone copying it, awe-struck, yet half delighted at the thought that his holiness would handle his work ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... afternoon was softening to a rosy dimness as he came in, very tired physically, hot and grimy, and sick of soul. "Glory be, tea-time's over, and they'll be dressing for dinner," he murmured, and turned a corner on eight of "them." A glance at the gay group showed two or three new faces. More guests! McBirney set his teeth. But he had no space ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... and his handsome young face shone with the glow that was at his heart, as he gripped the grimy blackened ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... said Gladys, severely, although the tears were streaming down her own grimy cheeks. "She wouldn't be lost, would she, if folks knew where she was? Nothin' ain't never lost when you know where it is unless you drop it down a well, and you 'ain't got no well, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... later, that spur of rock was vacant. Demetrios had untethered his horse, had thrown away his sword and other armour, and had torn his garments; afterward he rolled in the first puddle he discovered. Thus he set out afoot, in grimy rags—for no one marks a beggar upon the highway—and thus he came again into the realm of King Theodoret, where certainly nobody looked ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... considerably masculated, prevails in one, and the esprit gaulois, decorously draped, in the other—seem to me to run together better than any two other novelists of our company. They do not attempt elaborate analysis; they do not grapple with thorny or grimy problems; they are not purveyors of the indecent, or dealers in the supernatural and fantastic, or poignant satirists of society at large or individuals in particular. But they can both, in their different ways, tell a plain tale uncommonly well, and season it with wit or pathos when either ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen night-cap leaned against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom house guard, belted over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the weather and the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy houses found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding with the ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... perhaps I may at the same time clear up another fallacy, which I did not know existed until I read Mr. Spielmann's "History of Punch." In that he refers to the very "oft-quoted drawing (lately used as an advertisement), the idea of which reached him from an anonymous correspondent. It is that of a grimy, unshaven, unwashed, mangy-looking tramp, who sits down to write, with a broken quill, a testimonial for a firm of soap-makers. A further point of interest about this famous sketch was that Charles Keene was deeply offended by it at first, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss |
