"Littered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bathroom his visitor's dark eyes roved nervously around the room, resting for a moment on a great English travelling bag in the corner and on a family of thick silk shirts littered on the chairs amid impressive neckties ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... fast-gathering dusk of this winter's afternoon. Men in ragged red shirts, their unkempt heads crowned with Phrygian caps adorned with a tricolour cockade, lounged against the wall, or sat in groups on the top of piles of refuse that littered the street, with a rough deal plank between them and a greasy pack of cards in their grimy fingers. Guns and bayonets were propped against the wall. The gate itself had three means of egress; each of these was guarded by two men with fixed bayonets ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... pleasant at night. Two tall, dark screens hid the two beds. In front, the piano was littered with music, the desk littered with papers. Lilly went out on to the landing, and set the chops to grill on the gas stove. Hastily he put a small table on the hearth-rug, spread it with a blue-and-white cloth, set plates and glasses. Aaron did not move. It was not his nature to concern ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... his materials, to describe which would be profitless, if it were possible. He had everything littered together in two battered deal candle-boxes, including the broken soup-plate containing the flour paste, a loathely, mouldering little mess that diffused a nauseous odour, distinctly perceptible through that of the unpronounceable ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... long we saw men starting out with sore-backed or blind or weak or mean broncos, and heard many stories of their troubles and trials. The trail was said to be littered for fifty miles with ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... content and yet expectant. In a pause of the conversation (which, entirely banal and fragmentary, had seemed to reach the acme of agreeableness), Chirac put his hand on the hand of Sophia as it rested limp on the littered table. Accidentally she caught his eye; she had not meant to do so. They both became self-conscious. His thin, bearded face had more than ever that wistfulness which always softened towards him the uncompromisingness of her character. He had the look of a child. For her, Gerald had sometimes ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... white lane through the blackness, it shone fully upon his writing-table, which was a rather fine Jacobean piece having a sort of quaint bureau superstructure containing cabinets and drawers. He could detect nothing unusual in the appearance of the littered table. A tobacco jar stood there, a pipe resting in the lid. Papers and books were scattered untidily as he had left them, surrounding a tray full of pipe and cigarette ash. Then, ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... Washita, and then down the river through the sites of the abandoned villages, that had been strung along almost continuously for about twelve miles in the timber skirting the stream. On every hand appeared ample evidence that the Indians had intended to spend the winter here, for the ground was littered with jerked meat, bales of buffalo robes, cooking utensils, and all sorts of plunder usually accumulated in a permanent Indian camp. There were, also, lying dead near the villages hundreds of ponies, that had been shot to keep them from falling ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... thought Armour would be there, but he wasn't; that is, he was absent corporeally, but the spirit and expression of him littered every convenient part. Some few things lay about that I had seen in the studio, to call it so, but most of the little wooden panels looked fresh, almost wet, and the air held strongly the fragrance of Armour's north veranda. In one corner there used to be a Madonna on a carved easel; ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... home at all, but in a flat in "Town," or at one of the subordinate centres of the urban region we have foreseen. The apartments will be more or less agreeably adorned in some decorative fashion akin to but less costly than some of the many fashions that will obtain among the wealthy. They will be littered with a miscellaneous literature, novels of an entertaining and stimulating sort predominating, and with bric-a-brac; in a childless household there must certainly be quaint dolls, pet images, and so forth, and perhaps a canary would find a place. I suspect there would be an edition or so of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... field five hundred metres wide. At night, a very dark night, I missed colliding with an enormous factory chimney (a matter of inches), glided over a line of telegraph wires, passed at a few metres' height over a field littered with huge piles of sugar beets, and settled, comme une fleur, in a little cleared space which I could never have judged accurately had I known ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... saw a room so littered and uncared for. There were books around the walls and books upon the floor, covered with dust; there was dust and dirt and debris everywhere, and spider-webs along the walls and ceiling. The impression of the whole place was ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... the most part, relieved itself as at Plugstreet, but had no fixed dwelling-place, sometimes extending as far to the right as Trench Bugeaud, half way up the north slope of the hill of Serre, where the ground was littered with the debris and decomposing bodies of the June fighting, sometimes as far to the left as Trench Morand, about 300 yards north of where the Bucquoy road crossed the trenches. From Morand to Hoche the lie of the land was all in our favour; the trenches were sited just in front of the gentle ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... as she was shown into the smoky, little den. It was a scene of confusion, such as she had never beheld before. The table was heaped high with papers: books and maps strewed every chair: even the floor was littered with bulky tomes and piles of manuscript. At a knee-hole table Caspar Brooke was sitting, writing hard, as if for dear life, his loose hair falling heavily over his big forehead, his left hand grasping his thick brown beard. He looked up as Lesley ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... face glowed with pleasure as she went about her work, or sat sewing in the shade of the house. At her instigation Shaw had put up a shed for his machinery, which formerly had littered the yard, and put his wood ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... looked out among tiled roofs and stacks of chimneys, while those of my sitting-room commanded a full view of the stable-yard. I know of nothing more calculated to make a man sick of this world, than a stable-yard on a rainy day. The place was littered with wet straw, that had been kicked about by travellers and stable-boys. In one corner was a stagnant pool of water, surrounding an island of muck; there were several half-drowned fowls crowded together ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... it off and gave it to him without demur. That meant that there would be time; yet her very docility frightened him. She seemed quite relaxed now that her head could lie back against the leather cushion, and her gaze traveled about the dingy littered room with a kind of tender inquisitiveness as if she were memorizing ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... fake," declared Bertram. He slumped heavily into a chair, and scowled at Average Jones' well-littered desk, whereon he had just tossed a sheet of paper. His usually impeccable hair was tousled. His trousers evinced a distinct tendency to bag at the knees, and his coat was undeniably wrinkled. That the elegant and flawless dilettante of the Cosmic Club should ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... so much beer that they both fell asleep I slipped quietly away and went about amid the ruins. I came upon human bodies burned to a crisp. Heaps of empty cartridge shells littered the ground, which I examined with astonishment for they were Russian, not German, shells, and must have been used ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... the air was hot. The table, littered with napkins and ash-trays, was old and stale. It was between dances as they entered, and Muriel Kane looked up ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the second landing. Douglas Stone followed the old nurse into it, with the merchant at his heels. Here, at least, there was furniture and to spare. The floor was littered and the corners piled with Turkish cabinets, inlaid tables, coats of chain mail, strange pipes, and grotesque weapons. A single small lamp stood upon a bracket on the wall. Douglas Stone took it down, and picking his way among the lumber, walked over to a ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this hope. He was a little late through lingering to take a curious look at what was left of the fire. The street had a littered look. The barns and stables were wide open, and deserted, for the horses had been led to places of safety. There seemed to be an impression that the hotel was half destroyed; but the damage had ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... there. The girls stood about idly; some were changing their clothes. They did not seem to heed his presence, except the one he was seeking, who came straight towards him. As she moved across the dirty, littered room, her limbs under their transparent covering moved, and her head was carried with the air of an empress. "Will the Sahib come with me?" she said in a low, soft tone. She raised her eyes to his face. They were wide, enquiring, like the ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... Short?" he asked the lanky man bent over the littered desk in the rough plastic bubble that ...
— Second Sight • Basil Eugene Wells
... this one last throw. If we would take the full measure of these words of his, spoken in the fullest conviction of their being final words, we must again go over the whole field, strewed with dead hopes, littered with exploded reputations, cumbered with cast-off traditions, over which the patriot army marched to its supreme trial out into the broad pathway which led ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... brought out a man with a female horde behind him, all shuffling into clothes as we approached, and we stiffly dismounted from the wet saddles in which we had sat for ten hours, and stiffly hobbled up into the littered verandah, the water dripping from our clothes, and squeezing out of our boots at every step. Inside there was one room about 18 x 14 feet, which looked as if the people had just arrived and had thrown down their goods promiscuously. There were mats on the floor ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... sets forth again, and say farewell noisily to all the good folk going farther. Then, as we are far enough from thoughts of sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with furs, littered with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by a wood-fire in a mediaeval chimney. And then we plod back through the darkness to the inn beside ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... corner. Billy lifted his head and looked once more around the cabin. The reality was depressing—doubly depressing in contrast to the memory of that other room. A stove stood in the southwest corner, but it was not black and shining; it was rust-red and ash-littered, and the ashes had overflowed the hearth and spilled to the unswept floor. A dented lard-pail without a handle did meagre duty as a teakettle, and balanced upon a corner of the stove was a dirty frying pan. The fire had gone dead and the room was chill with the ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... be taken in arranging the dinner table to have both sides balanced. There is an old maxim that says, "There must be a use for everything" and this holds especially true of the table of good taste. It must not be littered with useless articles, no matter how artistic or odd, for they hamper the movements of the guests and make things unnecessarily crowded. Butter rarely appears on the table at the formal dinner; and condiments are brought in by the servant only ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... anything at the army, trusting to his familiars when ready to trust anybody. The way he employed his day prevented any real attention to business. He was filthy in the extreme, and proud of it. Fools called it simplicity. His bed was always full of dogs and bitches, who littered at his side, the pops rolling in the clothes. He himself was under constraint in nothing. One of his theses was, that everybody resembled him, but was not honest enough to confess it as he was. He mentioned this once to the Princesse de Conti—the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was littered with papers, coats, collars, ties, and underwear. Drawers had been dragged out and emptied, my trunk gutted of its contents. Evidently the captain had been engaged in a thorough search of the cabin when ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... him too much!" begged Mary. "By the way, what are they doing to this building? I see the stairways and some of the elevator shafts all littered with building material." ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... an hour they arrived at a large encampment upon the bank of a broad shallow river. There were nearly an hundred lodges standing upon the plain; and the ground was littered with buffalo-horns and hides, while vast quantities of the flesh of these animals were hanging from poles in front of every lodge. There were fires, and camp-kettles, and dogs, and Indian ponies, and women, and children—all mixed up together, or ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... as was threatened by the way in which she had been torn and precipitated past the iceberg. At moments when she plunged the whiteness of the water creaming upon the surges on either hand threw out a phantom light of sufficient power to enable me to see that the forward part of the brig was littered with wreckage, which served to a certain extent as a breakwater by preventing the seas, which washed on to the forecastle, from cascading with their former violence aft; also that the whole length of the main and top masts lay upon the larboard rail and over the side, held in that position ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... the eyes more than the lips For a shelter for the night, And he turned and looked at the road afar Without a window light. The bridegroom came forth into the porch With, 'Let us look at the sky, And question what of the night to be, Stranger, you and I.' The woodbine leaves littered the yard, The woodbine berries were blue, Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind; 'Stranger, I wish I knew.' Within, the bride in the dusk alone Bent over the open fire, Her face rose-red with the glowing coal And the thought of the heart's desire. ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... nodded kindly, though it is likely he would have much preferred his breakfast; and the young man led him into a little sitting-room littered with the faded garlands and other tokens of the ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... lady stood by the window, having just risen from the broad seat thereof, which was littered with the trifles of a lady's work-basket. The Vicomtesse was obviously many years younger than her husband—a trim woman of fifty or thereabouts, with crinkled grey hair and the clear brown complexion of the Provencale. Beneath the grey hair there looked out at me the cleverest eyes I have ever seen ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... wastefulness of young men about town. A number of these budding aristocrats were dining at St. Alban's Tavern and found the noise of the coaches outside jar upon their sensitive nerves. So they promptly ordered the street to be littered with straw, and probably cared little that the freak cost them fifty ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... rails, and Miss Arsdale led the way without hesitation along a grass-grown road and through an old orchard. The trees were scraggly and untrimmed, littered with dead branches, but Spring, the mother, had decked them with green leaves and buds until they looked as jaunty as old people going to a fair. The sun sifted through the tender sprigs to the sprouting soil ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... the only place available; and they entered, the market being over, and the stalls and areas empty. He would have preferred a more congenial spot, but, as usually happens, in place of a romantic field or solemn aisle for his tale, it was told while they walked up and down over a floor littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable refuse. He began and finished his brief narrative, which merely led up to the information that he had married a wife some years earlier, and that his ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... "Best Household Coals" displayed in huge numerals on each of the windows. Unwashed children from the uncleanly houses which made up the rest of the street seemed to spend the whole day, and half the night, dancing to barrel organs. Garbage and paper littered the roadway, except where there was sufficient slimy black mud to cover these; but, on the other hand, there was a large and gaudy public house at the corner, opposite a similar block of flats, and a cab rank just ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... burly, thick-set man, attired in an undress military uniform. He appeared to be about forty years of age; he wore his hair cropped short, and his face was partially hidden by a heavy, unkempt beard and moustache. He had evidently just dined, for the draped extremity of the table was littered with the remains of a repast, he was smoking an immense pipe, while a tumbler of steaming vodki stood close to his hand upon the table. This individual was Count Vasilovich; and he was alone. He made no movement to rise at von Schalckenberg's entrance, but stared intently at his ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... could see the port to the east packed with lifeless vessels. The stretches of stone wharf and the mole were vacant and littered with rubbish. The yard-arms of abandoned freighters were peculiarly beaded with tiny black shapes that moved from time to time. Far out at sea, so far that a blue mist embraced its base and set its sails ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... sheath, is almost a little fortune in itself. Content in his dwelling to sit on a bullock's skull, on horseback his saddle must be mounted in silver. His own beard and hair he seldom trims, but his horse's mane and tail must be assiduously tended. The baked-mud floor of his abode is littered with filth and dirt, while he raves at a speck of mud on ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... of the Steenbeek are left behind and flickering Verey lights cast into weird relief the rugged surface of the earth. At Pommern Castle our front trenches, in which figures of men loom indistinctly, are reached. At one corner, where the trench is littered with fragments, we are cautioned by a sentry, whose voice is a little shaken, not to linger; the entrance to a pill-box (which faced the enemy) was hit a short time ago. From the trench we proceed further into No-Man's-Land, where the Bucks are said to have linked up shell-holes ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... South Seas; on the other, a hunting trophy of whip, spurs, cap and fox's brush was arranged; and pictures of celebrated horses and famous jockeys were placed here, there and everywhere. The writing-table, pushed up close to the window, was littered with papers, and letters and plans, and before this Harry was seated one morning writing a letter to Lucy, when the servant informed him that Mr Baltic was waiting without. Harry gave orders for his instant admittance, as he was curious to see again the sinner turned saint, and ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... approached the shore the glamor lent by distance disappeared. The river-bank, which had looked so alluring from the cutter's deck, proved on closer inspection to be as squalid as the back-yard of a Neapolitan tenement. It was littered with dead cats and fowls and fish and castaway vegetables and rotten fruit and tin cans and greasy ashes and refuse from fishing nets and decaying cocoanuts by the million and sodden rags. This stewing garbage was strewn ankle-deep upon the sand or was floating ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... doubt, of the poor wretch as he had been haled to execution—since, save for a missing cord, the furniture of the room was undisturbed. The room beyond was bare, uncarpeted, and furnished like a workshop. A solitary lamp burned low on a bracket, over a table littered with tools, and in the middle of the room stood a brazier, the coals in it yet glowing, with five or sick steel-handled implements left as they had been thrust into the heart of the fire. Were they, then, ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... aroused, but in her sneering visage was that which brought the actor abruptly out of his spell. She had emerged from the shadows noiselessly, and was leaning forward, her strong hands gripping the edge of the table littered with ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... fellow-tradesmen, and stood for a time staring into the littered street, with its pools of water and extinguished gas lamps. His companions in misfortune resumed a fragmentary disconnected conversation. They touched now on one aspect of the disaster and now on another, ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... "Imagine the roadway littered with guns, knapsacks, cartridge belts, Maxims and heavy cannon. There were miles ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... littered about like lumber, and you practically given the office to help yourself? It's wonderful, Bill, what restraint there is in an honest mind! You can't ever have ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... room into which we entered, the floor unswept, the chairs faded and patched. Curtains were drawn closely at the windows, while the single oil lamp stood on a center table littered with old newspapers. I dropped the grips on the carpet, not so much interested in my surroundings as in the appearance of the man in charge. The shading of the light gave me only a partial view of the ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... disorder. It was a room in which a struggle has taken place between its occupant and that burning-eyed hag, Sleeplessness. The hag, it was plain, had won. A half-emptied glass of milk was on the table by the bed. Warmed, and sipped slowly, it had evidently failed to soothe. A tray of dishes littered another table. Yesterday's dishes, their contents congealed. Books and magazines, their covers spread wide as if they had been flung, sprawled where they lay. A little heap of grey-black cigarette stubs. The window curtain awry where she had stood there during a feverish ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... cease, and advanced to negotiate the conditions of surrender. The enemy, who had invited him to approach, by the white flag, fired and wounded one of his men. He issued directions to take the place, and spare nobody. The place was taken, and nobody was spared. Twenty-seven dead bodies littered the ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... high-flying bird this was a country to be passed over quickly. It was burned and brown, littered with fragments of rock, whether vast or small, as if the refuse were tossed here after the making of the world. A passing shower drenched the bald knobs of a range of granite hills and the slant morning sun set the wet rocks aflame with ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... twisted; And there by a shop-front dimly lighted He suddenly stopped as though affrighted, Stopped and stared with his deep gaze centred On something seen, like a dream's illusion, Through the streaming glass, mid the queer confusion Of objects littered on shelf and floor, And about the counter and by the door— And then with his lips set ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... drifting islands. Trees stricken or still in leaf reared from the unfamiliar element. Many of those which were leafless had put on a strange greenness, for their boughs dripped with seaweed. Over the floods, which were littered with such flotsam as she had seen from her window, flew sea-birds and land-birds, crying and cheeping. There was no other presence in that desolation ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... occupancy, with wide and varied interests. A set of dark shelves, at the lower end, held china, and suggested that one might also eat at the refectory table, which was furnished as a desk and held a few books, many writing materials, and a foreign-looking lamp. There was also a piano, well littered with music, a sewing bag thrown down upon a cretonned window seat, and the generous fireplace was flanked by two huge baskets, one heaped with magazines, the other a perfectly round mound of yellow fur, which suddenly took form and life as a yellow tabby cat fastened ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... to see your master at once. Tell him I am here," and as the servant slowly shambled up the stairs, Folsom entered the sitting-room. A desk near the window was open and its contents littered about. The drawers in a heavy bookcase were open and papers were strewn upon the floor. The folding doors to the dining-room were open. Decanters, goblets, cigar stumps and heel taps were scattered over the table. Guest or host, or both, had left things in riotous shape. Then down came the servant, ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... people of Satricum were no less terrified by two snakes gliding into the temple of Jupiter by the very doors. A report was brought from Antium, that bloody ears of corn had been seen by the reapers. At Caere a pig with two heads had been littered, and a lamb yeaned which was both male and female. Intelligence was brought that two suns had been seen at Alba, and that light had suddenly appeared during night at Fregellae. An ox was reported to ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... hidden by the velvet curtain. Sitting by a table that was littered with a confusion of sketches, books and papers, the young man was re-tying a package of old letters that he ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... his hand when, in desperation, the Tsar granted the concession for his new Southend to Siberia railway. Something like that. But he never recked how the private investor would suffer; and there was I, sitting at home and sending out madly for all the papers, until my rooms were littered with copies of The Times, The Financial News, Answers, The Feathered World, and Home Chat. Next day we were up to 31/32, and I was ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... what delights you in Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But no; they ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... through the rubbish of the doleful spot. He ran back to the laboratory, where Peters was hunting about, hoping to find Masusaelili alive, yet fearing to find his emaciated form lying lifeless amid the mass of chemical and mechanical appliances which littered the room. Several of the large vase-like objects before alluded to stood here and there; and as the smaller of them might have hidden the body of a large-sized man, the searchers even glanced into them. Each vase sat apart upon the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... inward, supported some battered cooking utensils now green with a fungus-like mould and disagreeably reminiscent of the Indian hunters who had last camped in the place, no one knew how long ago. In the corner where a stove had once stood, was a pile of damp soot and ashes, and the floor was littered with decaying woolen socks, old papers and rubber boots from which the tops had been cut to make a house-shoe known to Alaskan miners as "stags." Here and there daylight showed between the uncovered log ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... and his mouth curled at the corners in surprising smiles. The room was like the man—morally large, void of red-tape and almost void of furniture; no tin boxes were ranged against the walls, no papers littered up the table; a single bookcase contained a complete edition of the law reports, and resting on the Law Directory was a single red rose in a glass of water. It looked the room of one with a sober magnanimity, who went to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the fashion of the late seventies; but it was not undignified, with its big door flanked by bay-windows and its narrow porch bounded by a fat wooden balustrade and heavy columns. The porch and steps were weather-stained and faded, and littered now with fallen leaves ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... Instantly uniform caps littered the platform deck. Uniform blouses followed. A group of white-shirted middies raced for ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... functionary of state, the official known as the Purser's Steward was head clerk of the frigate's fiscal affairs. Upon the berth-deck he had a regular counting-room, full of ledgers, journals, and day-books. His desk was as much littered with papers as any Pearl Street merchant's, and much time was devoted to his accounts. For hours together you would see him, through the window of his subterranean office, writing by the ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... jerk, and in a moment stumbled to his feet. He did not look at his brother, but turned aside in his blundering pathetic fashion, and went to the littered writing-desk. ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... desk and took a seat before it. He opened the desk and pulled from beneath the pile of loose papers and tissue patterns with which it was littered the large blankbook in which Mrs. Fenelby, in one of her spurts of economical system, had once begun a record of household expenditures—a bothersome business that lasted until she had to foot up the first week's figures, and then stopped. There were ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... the shore. It was littered thickly with fragments of wreck, casks, boxes, and other articles. Here, too, were nearly a score of the corpses of their shipmates. The first duty was to dig a long shallow trench in the sand, beyond high water ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... did our nightly chores,— Brought in the wood from out of doors, Littered the stalls, and from the mows Raked down the herd's-grass for the cows Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And, sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows The cattle shake their ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... lying prone and motionless on the ground whenever a star shell threw its greenish radiance over the field, the scouts were reasonably safe from detection and sniping. They would seem, if seen at all, to be just so many more objects added to the hundreds that littered up the ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... year they had blossomed and gone to seed till the harvest of flowers in their season was past gathering, and any child in the neighborhood was at liberty to pluck them by handfuls, while the wicked ones played at "chicken fighting" and littered the ground with decapitated bodies. There is no heartsease nowadays, only the magnificent pansy of which it was the modest forerunner. But one little cluster of dark, spicy blooms like those I used to gather in that old garden would ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... the next day's sermon. Never in all his life before had he experienced such strongly mingled sensations of repulsion and interest as at that moment. With a kind of inward indignation, he asked himself what business he had to be there looking curiously into a woman's room, littered with all the fripperies and expensive absurdities of a woman's apparel? Above all, why should he be so utterly ridiculous and inconsequential in his own mind as to find himself deeply fascinated by such a spectacle? In all the years he had passed with his sister, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... dressing gown, with his slippered feet resting upon a stool. In the large grate a mass of Pittsburg coal blazed and flickered restfully. At his elbow softly burned a shaded student lamp, on a table covered with a scarlet and black cloth, and littered with books. The curtains—inexpensive, but heavy—were closely drawn to shut out every suggestion of the ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... was still greater when they found in the interior of the great room a number of articles of furniture, such as chairs, tables, settees, and articles which, in their younger days, might have been rugs. Parts of bedsteads were littered around, broken articles of furniture were scattered here and there, and everywhere the place ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the difference between Blanche's bedroom and hers when she had paid her first visit to Braeside. There the walls were covered with pictures of all sorts and sizes, the table was littered with silver toilet articles, photographs and trinkets, and the bookshelf was filled with books. Most of these things were presents from her father and mother, or from relations or acquaintances, and spoke for themselves of the difference in the lives of the two girls—the ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... The one in the middle was the living-room, and had two rough tables and a few stools in it. The other two were the bedrooms for the white men. Each had a bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture. The plank floor was littered with the belongings of the white men; open half-empty boxes, torn wearing apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the things broken, that accumulate mysteriously round untidy men. There was also another dwelling-place some distance away from the buildings. ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... room. They sat on the chairs because they were really too tired to stand longer, and the reason for the occupancy of the corners of the apartment was self-evident. There was no other available space. For the center of the chamber was littered to overflowing with trunks, suitcases and valises, in various stages of being packed, and from them overflowed a variety of garments and other accessories ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... for a moment,—she did not like to be vanquished,—then shrugged her shoulders and leaned back in her chair. The little room was plainly furnished. Shelves covered three sides, and the window-seat and the table were littered with books. There were no curtains, no ornaments; but Chonita's hair, billowing to the floor, her slender voluptuous form, her white skin and green irradiating eyes, the candlelight half revealing, half concealing, made ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... room they found Mr Wopples, dressed in a light tweed suit, and just putting on his coat. It was a small room, with a flaring gas-jet, under which there was a dressing-table littered over with grease, paints, powder, vaseline and wigs, and upon it stood a small looking-glass. A great basket-box with the lid wide open stood at the end of the room, with a lot of clothes piled up on it, and numerous other garments were hung up upon ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... with powdered rotenone late in the afternoon. The spotted beetles making hash of their leaves were immediately killed. Unexpectedly, it rained rather hard that evening and still-active rotenone was washed off the leaves and deeply into the soil. The next morning the surface of the bed was thickly littered with dead earthworms. I've learned to treat rotenone with ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... head erect, through long years; and wedded; and produced tough Marquis Victor, the Friend of Men. Whereby at last in the appointed year 1749, this long-expected rough-hewn Gabriel Honore did likewise see the light: roughest lion's-whelp ever littered of that rough breed. How the old lion (for our old Marquis too was lion-like, most unconquerable, kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wonderingly on his offspring; and determined to train him as no lion had yet been! It is in vain, O Marquis! This cub, though thou slay him and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... clear view of Mt. Vesuvius could be obtained. The shape of the mountain had greatly altered and the cone had lost sixty-five feet of its altitude. But when one gazed upon the enormous bulk of volcanic deposit that littered the country for miles around, it seemed to equal a dozen mountains the size of Vesuvius. The marvel was that so much ashes and cinders could come from a single crater in so ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... two hours' provocation on her part and stern patience on Monck's. Stella, at work in the drawing-room, heard a sudden sharp exclamation from the verandah where Monck was seated before a table littered with Hindu literature, and looked up to see Tessa, with a monkey-like grin of mischief, smoking the cigarette which she had just snatched from between Monck's lips. She was dancing on one leg just out of reach, ready to take instant ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... the past. Normally our shell is too thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner man ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... and, passing through a low doorway from which the door had gone long ago, entered a wide space enclosed by ruinous and moss-grown walls. It was open to the sky and littered with debris. At one end the blocked-up entrance from the present house was distinctly visible; at the other a small door, deeply sunk into the massive masonry, gave entrance to a small round tower or bastion, which rose some feet ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... ambition thwarted in its career doth speedily lead on to madness: herein I am strengthened by what I learn in my lord of Essex, who shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly as well proveth him devoid of good reason or right mind; in my last discourse he littered such strange words, bordering on such strange designs, that made me hasten forth, and leave his presence. Thank heaven I am safe at home, and if I go in such troubles again, I deserve the gallows ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... whole week the brain concealed in Mr. Grummit's bullet-shaped head worked in vain, and his temper got correspondingly bad. The day after the Evans' arrival he had found his yard littered with tins which he recognized as old acquaintances, and since that time they had travelled backwards and forwards with monotonous regularity. They sometimes made as many as three journeys a day, and on one occasion the heavens opened to drop a battered tin bucket on ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... flashed out all around him. There were two detectives in the doorway, their revolvers covering him,—Sanford Quest, with Lenora in the background. In the sudden illumination, Macdougal's horror turned almost to hysterical rage. He had wasted his fury upon a dummy! It was sawdust, not blood, which littered the couch! ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had suffered a good deal, to be sure. The flowers lay supine, their faces beaten into the mud; the greensward was littered with fallen leaves and twigs—and even in one or two places whole branches had been broken from the trees; on the ground about each rose-bush a snow of pink rose-petals lay scattered; in the paths there were hundreds of little pools, shining in the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... an easy-chair; while ribbon garters straggled over a settee. A fan of price, half unfolded, glittered on the chimney-piece. Drawers stood open; flowers, diamonds, gloves, a bouquet, a girdle, were littered about. The room was full of vague sweet perfume. And—beneath all the luxury and disorder, beauty and incongruity, I saw Misery crouching in wait for her or for her adorer, Misery rearing its head, for the Countess had begun ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... have seemed to us; and yet there was not a sea on earth, probably, that did not bear its bounding ship sent out from that small office. And if it was still, in there, it had a cosmopolitan, aromatic smell; for every strange letter or foreign sample with which the place was littered bespoke the business of the bright, blue world outside. From the street below came noise enough, and loud voices of sailors and shipmen in many a foreign tongue. For in those days we had freedom of the sea and dealings with the world, and had not yet ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... admirable. A well-littered desk, two 'phones, code-book, directory, typewriter, file-books, a busy bookkeeper, a fair stenographer—no detail was omitted. Mitchell, pacing the floor, paused in his dictation to give him ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... him, Chamilly at one end of the skiff intent upon his sport. The old man's flat punt was littered with perch. How early he must have risen! He was small of figure, weathered of face, simple and ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... with a speculative proposal. Let me assure you such is not the case. Incompetent hands, I grant you, but the hands were my own. For the past six months I have lived practically as my uncle lived. I have rummaged that library from floor to ceiling. It was left in a frightful state, littered with old newspapers, accounts, and what-not. Then, of course, there were the books remaining in the library, ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... graveyard with new gravestones every day,— But, come, regale us with appropriate detail, Those disillusions weeping at the fountains, say, Those new disgusts, just like their brothers, littered stale, ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... tables were covered with supper; at each of which sat—as closely wedged as well could be—a great number of work-people of both sexes, and of all ages. Huge dogs were moving backwards and forwards, in the hope of receiving some charitable morsel;, and before the fire, on a littered hearth, lay stretched out two tremendous mastiffs. I walked with fear and trembling. The cooks were carrying the evening meal; and the whole place afforded such an interior—as Jan Steen would have viewed with rapture, and Wilkie have ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... you might be tempted to destroy it. It seems I was right," added Gilbert, with a glance at the torn pieces of paper which littered the carpet at ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... guests beheld the signs of the night's devastation. A huge pine, which had stood close to the gate, had been torn up by the roots and thrown down; branches and fence posts were littered over the ground; bats and owls had been crushed against the side walls ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... Ruby down the ladder that conducted to those dark and littered depths of the ship's hull that were assigned to the artificers as their place of abode. But amidst a good deal of unavoidable confusion, Ruby's practised eye discerned order ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... place called the Cross, because it was three- quarters of one, two lanes and a cattle-drive meeting there. It was the general rendezvous and arena of the surrounding village. Behind this a steep slope rose high into the sky, merging in a wide and open down, now littered with sheep newly shorn. The upland by its height completely sheltered the mill and village from north winds, making summers of springs, reducing winters to autumn temperatures, and permitting myrtle to flourish in the ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... what had happened. To my surprise, he begged that I would excuse him, and left me without a word of explanation. I found Jeanne walking up and down her little sitting-room, flushed and angry. Fragments of torn paper and heaps of flowers littered the floor; and three unopen jewel-cases appeared to have been thrown into the empty fireplace. She caught me excitedly by the hand the moment I ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... really deserved the appellation, though it was far from being as massively built as an average English country seat of like importance. It belonged to one of the oldest families in France. Wide noble staircases led to vast rooms made untenable by shell fire. Fragments of rare stained glass littered the vacant private chapel. The most valuable paintings, the best of the Louis XV. furniture, and the choicest tapestry had been removed to safety. In one room I entered some bucolic wag had clothed a bust of Venus in a ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... emerged from the abrupt little valley and was entering upon a plateau which had been left comparatively open by the removal of great trees, sacrificed to furnish ties for the new railroad building in the lowlands. The place was littered with the discarded tops of pines and other woodland rubbish and seemed forlorn and wrecked. She swept her eyes about with the glance of a proprietor, for Madge Brierly owned all of this as well as most of the land through which the ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... littered all around Avery, and a certain subdued pleasure was hers as she decked the place with the spring flowers. She was quite alone, for by the Vicar's inflexible decree all the elder children, with the exception ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... unwillingly, thrown the door wide, and he went in. The room was very hot, for a small fire, littered as to its edges with papers, burned in the grate. Although he knew that Akers had guessed the meaning of his visit at once and was on guard, there was a moment or two when each ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... which dees not belong to Knox's suite. At rear center is fireplace. At left rear door leading to Knox's bedroom. At left are windows facing on street. Near these windows is a large library table littered with books, magazines, government reports, etc. To the right of center, midway forward, is a Hat-top desk. On it is a desk telephone. Behind it, so that one sitting in it faces audience, is revolving desk-chair. Also, on desk, are letters in ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... affectionate familiarities passing between the tall man and the widow, which sufficiently denoted that the tall man was as high in favour as he was in size. Tom was fond of hot punch—I may venture to say he was VERY fond of hot punch—and after he had seen the vixenish mare well fed and well littered down, and had eaten every bit of the nice little hot dinner which the widow tossed up for him with her own hands, he just ordered a tumbler of it by way of experiment. Now, if there was one thing in the whole range of domestic art, which ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... at Tamines took place about Aug. 28. A witness describes how he saw the public square littered with corpses, and after a search found those of his wife and child, a little girl ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... his name in the sand. The children lose "all count of time," just as the Mad Hatter does. Whereas Alice grows nine feet taller, Dick sprouts "two inches taller" and Emmeline "twice as plump." Like the baby in the "Pig and Pepper," Hannah sneezes at the first sight of Dicky. The novel is artfully littered with references to wonder, curiosity, and strangeness—all evidence of Stacpoole's conscious effort to invoke and honor his ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... years, had disappeared last Christmas. The whole next day the rain continued to beat against the window. There was nothing to be done, and I spent my time in arranging the scattered but numbered sheets of the vanished schoolmaster's manuscript, which I found littered in the drawer allotted to me for my scant belongings. And then I began to read that strange man's diary, the first page of which only bore ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... more difficult thing of the two because Mrs. Jellyby and an unwholesome boy occupied the front sitting-room (the back one was a mere closet), and it was littered down with waste- paper and Borrioboolan documents, as an untidy stable might be littered with straw. Mrs. Jellyby sat there all day drinking strong coffee, dictating, and holding Borrioboolan interviews by appointment. The unwholesome boy, who seemed to me to be going into a decline, took his ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Fork and mackerel fell to the floor as the seaman abruptly rose and stalked outside. The stern features of the rugged old face sagged with astonishment as he blinked at the small army of men swarming over his littered yard. ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... important day arrived on which the survey did assemble. The large table in the cabin was duly littered over with paper and medical books, and supplied with pens and ink. Three post-captains in gallant array, with swords by their sides, our own captain being one, and three surgeons with lancets in their pockets, congregated with grave politeness, and taking their chairs according to precedency ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... furnished, but it was comfortable. A few pictures decorated the walls, mostly black and white drawings by artists who were so unfortunate as to be compelled to work for the Sponge on the cheap. Magazines and papers were littered all about, chiefly American in their origin, for Shorely had been brought up in the editorial school which teaches that it is cheaper to steal from a foreign publication than waste good money on original contributions. ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... The porch was littered with old planks and huge tubs and barrels of stagnant water. There was only room for one chair and in that sat a tall Negro woman clad in burlap bags and in her lap she held a small white flea-bitten ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... police were making such a racket that this could not be heard more than a foot or so from the speaker. Lynch himself charged into the mass, swinging his billy and his free fist and laying others out one after the other. Pretty soon the floor was littered with cops. Lynch was doing yeoman duty, but it was hard to tell what ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... skulls and bones of digested victims lay in heaps upon the sandy floor of their azure-hued caverns. Gold and jewels, too, the spoils of many a brave galley that had been lured to destruction by these charmers, likewise littered their retreat, and perhaps it was as much the glittering of this gold as their own lovely features that in certain cases enticed the wary merchant into this fatal trap. Gold and a pretty face: what male heart could be proof against the double temptation the Isles of the Sirens ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... the smoke haze, then dropped his pistol and fell slowly across the card table littered with shining cards and poker chips. An overturned tallow-dip dropped in a pool of wine and rolled down against the dead man's cheek, dabbling it with the color which would never return ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... foreign governments—a support which was hedged round with conditions—made necessary a system of petty expedients under which practically every provincial administration hypothecated every liquid asset it could lay hands upon in order to pay the inordinate number of undisciplined soldiery who littered the countryside. The issue of unguaranteed paper-money soon reached such an immense figure that the market was flooded with a worthless currency which it was unable to absorb. The Provincial leaders, being powerless ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... drive them away by firing from the jungle, but had not anticipated a victory as easily won as this. When the workers had disappeared Ned made his way to the underground room. There he found torches burning, and a fire in the forge. The place was littered with gas-pipe cut into small lengths, and the covers had been removed from the tins ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... of Narkhanda dak bungalow Roy lay alone, languidly at ease, assisted by rugs and pillows and a Madeira cane lounge at an invalid angle; walls and arches splashed with sunshine; and a table beside him littered with convalescent accessories. There were home papers; there were books; there was fruit and a syphon, cut lemons and crushed ice—everything thoughtfulness could suggest set within easy reach. But the nameless depression of convalescence ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... up my light, I scanned the place with growing interest. It had not been demolished, but neither had it been spared. The furniture was gone, save for a few scattered chairs and a table; the walls were defaced with cartoons and scrawled inscriptions; the floor was stained, and littered with empty bottles and broken plates. From the chimney-place—a medieval-art jewel topped with carved and colored enamels—pieces had been hacked away by some deliberately destructive hand. I glanced at Miss Falconer, whose eyes had been ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... his feet. He was looking very pale, and the ash-tray in front of him was littered ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fitted up as a chemical laboratory. A double line of glass-stoppered bottles was drawn up upon the wall opposite the door, and the table was littered over with Bunsen burners, test-tubes, and retorts. In the corners stood carboys of acid in wicker baskets. One of these appeared to leak or to have been broken, for a stream of dark-colored liquid had trickled out from it, and the air was heavy with a peculiarly ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there was no danger of him seeing them. The wind had shifted, and was almost in their faces. Their swift walk changed to a dog-trot, and they swung in nearer to the slope, so that for fifteen minutes a huge knoll concealed the grizzly. In another ten minutes they came to the ravine, a narrow, rock-littered and precipitous gully worn in the mountainside by centuries of spring floods gushing down from the snow-peaks above. Here they made ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... the door before he realized it was only a cat on the prowl. He shuddered, his old hatred of cats coming to the surface. For a minute, he thought of shutting the window. But he couldn't cut off his chance to retreat through the garbage-littered back-yard. ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... larder which Clowes' servants had abandoned to them. In the kitchen, as well as all over the house, they found ample signs that pilferers had been at work, for every receptacle had been thrown open, drawers dragged out, and the floor littered with whatever the despoilers elected not to take. A month before Janice would probably have been moved to tears at the discovery that her "elegant and dashy robing," as well as her Mischianza costume, had been stolen, but now she scarcely gave either of them a thought, so grateful was ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... woke up it was daylight and I found that I had landed in a dusty, untidy place, littered with old books and papers," he continued. "A small stove in the corner was choked up with ashes. I can't tell exactly why, but the first thing I did that morning was to scrape out those ashes, and ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... Not in Horatian phrase, dainty in her neatness, Marseilles does herself injustice. Lyons is clean swept, spick and span as a toy town; Bordeaux is coquettish as her charming Bordelaise; Nantes, certainly, is not particularly careful of appearances. But Marseilles is dirty, unswept, littered from end to end; you might suppose that every householder had just moved, leaving their odds and ends in the streets, if, indeed, these beautifully-shaded walks can be so called. The city in its development ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... been used for some time. The piano, a baby-grand, stood open, with dust on its dingy keys and more dust on its shining case. The centre-table held a handsome reading-lamp and some books, but was littered with piles of old newspapers and magazines without covers. A kitchen-apron was flung across an armchair; a dirty, paper-covered book lay on a little table with a plate beside it covered with cake-crumbs, and there were crumbs on the richly colored Turkish rug and on the arm of the tapestry-covered ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... citizens—groups at every corner, and a chaos of merchandise and traders in the open plaza or square beside the Presbyterian church. Now all was changed. Only a few wayfarers lifted their heads lazily as the coach rattled by, crossing the deserted square littered with empty boxes, and gliding past empty cabins or vacant shop windows, from which not only familiar faces, but even the window sashes themselves, were gone. The great unfinished serpent-like flume, crossing the river on gigantic trestles, had advanced ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... blown to kindling wood," exclaimed Danvers, himself manipulating the searchlight as they sailed through a sea littered with small wreckage. "That derelict will never menace any skipper afloat, from now on. Benson, lad, you ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... feast more eagerly than Father Hecker read a sermon, a lecture, or an editorial showing the trend of non-Catholic thought. After his death his desk was found littered with innumerable clippings of the sort, many of them pencilled with underlinings and with notes. These furnished much of the matter of his conversation, and doubtless of his prayers. Once he wrote ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... sitting-room. It was empty. He lighted the gas, which flared up, squeaking like a bagpipe. The room was square and crowded. Shelves ran all the way round it, tightly filled with books. In the center was a large writing-table, littered with papers, and on each side of the fireplace stood two worn, but comfortable, arm-chairs, each with a reading-lamp at its side. There was nothing beautiful in the furniture, and yet the room had its own charm. The house was a corner house and had once ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... moved about like lightning. In an incredibly short time, the room presented a strange appearance. The table before which the three men had kept their weary vigil was littered all over with playing cards, cigar ash, fragments of broken wine glasses. A half-empty bottle of champagne stood on the floor. Two empty ones, their contents emptied into some bowls of flowers, lay on their sides. Another pack of cards was scattered ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... back, and hiding in the mass of black hair, twisted and knotted it until their victim winced, and then with hilarious shouts dropped to the floor and went clattering away. Returning, they played hide and seek in and out of the old worn boots and shoes which littered the floor. Then the tub wherein the shoemaker wet his leather, burst its hoops and the water ran out over the floor in streams of fire. The light was out and darkness enveloped Nick and his companion. The wind went howling by, and flung gusts of hail against the cracked ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... it very likely that he might be still alive. I resolved to call at his house. When I knocked and asked if he was at home, the girl who opened the door replied in the affirmative, and I was shown into the same little study, littered with papers, into which I formerly used to bring him ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the days went by, and the breath of Spring grew heavier in the air, and the dandelions sprang up in the field down by the river, and tree blossoms littered the sidewalks, and the frogs began croaking in the marshes. When the frogs begin croaking it is time to think ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... was a small wooded ridge and towards this they made their way. The field was littered with corpses and it was necessary to exercise great care to prevent stepping on ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... dreamer. Left to her own devices from childhood, she had read all the books of chivalry, all the colourless romances of olden-time that littered the ancestral presses; and she looked upon life as a fairy-tale in which the beauteous maidens are always happy, while the others wait till death for the bridegroom who does not come. Why should she marry one of ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... she entreated. "They must all be put in place again before dinner, and it only wants a quarter to one now. I can't do it all before half-past two, to save my life, unless you help me. You know, mother dislikes a messy, littered room, and I've got your favorite pudding for dessert. Oh, dear! I'm tired to death already, and it's so warm!" The rising inflection of her voice conveyed an impression of heat intense enough to drive ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... displaying their preference. Upon half of the floor pine boughs had been cast; above this were spread the sleeping-furs, beneath lay the winter's snowfall. The remainder of the floor was moccasin-packed snow, littered with pots and pans and the general impedimenta of an Arctic camp. The stove was red and roaring hot, but only a bare three feet away lay a block of ice, as sharp-edged and dry as when first quarried from the creek bottom. ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... his work in his little study, a sanctum littered with innumerable manuscripts. He, like most authors of the day, dictates to a secretary, who types what he says. It is, I think, in many ways a pity that so many authors type their manuscripts; for not only are they machine-made, they ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... after our arrival, when I awoke from sleep, how sad I felt! I could see that our windows looked out upon a drab space of wall, and that the street below was littered with filth. Passers-by were few, and as they walked they kept muffling themselves up ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... right was a barn in which the Germans had slept. It was littered with their equipment. And in front of it was a derelict motor-car ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... you neither of you will remember that that table was never meant to be littered over with all ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sake! Can't you speak?" she asked, and extricated a thumb from the palette, and turned to lay it and the paint brush on a littered table near her easel. Inasmuch as her eyes were for the moment diverted from him he succeeded in recovering ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... with him King made what haste he could going down the cliffs. The sides of the ravine were littered with dead wood, drift and limbs that had broken off the few battered trees above. He gathered as heavy a load of dry branches as he could handle, bound them about with his rope, and, fighting his way all the ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and had only been married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had fallen, half fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings, which were at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered study, for rather more than nine weeks, she lay on a bed of fever, the consequence of blows, exhaustion, and exposure. When she got well there was no talk of her leaving. Pair couldn't let her go back to her tailor; he couldn't turn her into the streets. Besides, during ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... Once she coughed, and smothered it in her pillow. Two hours. She slipped from under the covers and over to the littered dresser. The pamphlet lay on top of her gloves; she carried it to the window and, with her limbs trembling and sending ripples down her night robe, read it. Then again, standing there by the window in the moonlight, she quivered so that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... such pause the vacant smile left his face and failed to return immediately. The monotonously inflectionless conversation was still, too, for the time, and he merely sat and stared perplexedly about him, around the small workshop, bare except for the single high-stool that held him and the littered bench on ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... camp it might more properly be called. Here and there, are seen a crowd of little tents, which would be white if they were washed, and littered about with straw. Under the tents lie National Guards; they are not seen, but plainly heard, for they are snoring. You remember the absurd old bit of chop-logic often repeated in the classes of philosophy? One might apply it thus: ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... to a fence and clambered over it. On the far side, the ground was littered with clothes and guns. A newspaper, folded up, lay in the dirt. A dead soldier was stretched with his face hidden in his arm. Farther off there was a group of four or five corpses keeping mournful company. A hot sun had blazed ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... the fireplace; no curtains except a piece of something like drugget nailed flat across all the lower half of the window to make the light fall from upwards; two or three horsehair chairs, nearly worn out; a table in a corner, littered with books and papers; a horrible lay-figure, at the present moment dressed apparently for a scarecrow; a large easel, on which stood a half-finished oil-painting—these constituted almost the whole furniture ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... morning in his humble room, with his books and papers littered all about him. This was soon after the Revolution of 1830, and the mayor had him decently interred at night. The clergy purchased the whole of his library at a nominal price and made away with it. No papers were found which served to elucidate the mystery which had always ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... him when he passed through the littered camp on his way back to where he had left his horse, but for once he was deaf to her upbraidings. Indeed, he never heard her—or if he did, her clamor was to him as the yelping of the dogs which filled his ears, but did ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... in heaven, may be, but my wife would have been just the wife for Peter the Great, or Peter the Piper. How she would have set in order that huge littered empire of the one, and with indefatigable painstaking picked the peck of pickled peppers for ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... were said to have given the signal for the burning of Cremona. In these scenes the whole tragedy of the Empire rises before us. The armies of the Danube and Rhine left the frontiers defenceless while they met in the shock of battle on Italian soil, still soaking with Roman blood and littered with unburied Roman corpses; behind them the whole armed strength of the Empire—immensa belli moles—was gathering out of Gaul, Spain, Syria, and Hungary; and before the year was out, the Roman Capitol itself, in a trifling struggle between small ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... lighted into scarlet the crimson wall-paper and threw into prominence the posters tacked upon it. It was a cozy room with its deep rattan chairs and pillow-strewn couch. Snow-shoes, fencing foils, boxing-gloves, and tennis racquets littered the corners, and on every side a general ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... daylight, bruised and broken by his fall. The leaves of the manuscript he had written the night before still littered the desk. He read them through again, folded and sealed them with his seal, put the roll inside his gown, and unheeding the menaces the witches had twice over given him, started to carry his revelations to the Lord Bishop, whose Palace lifted its battlements above the roofs in the ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... the dozen benches and the few rude, heavy chairs which completed the rough furnishings of this rough room, and she shuddered. One little foot tapped sullenly upon the disordered floor which was littered with a miscellany of rushes interspread with such bones and scraps of food as the ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was littered up with chests, barrels and old furniture. In one corner was a pile of carpets. Andy walked silently over to these, threw himself down, and found himself in darkness as the door was again ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... for light from hidden windows is splintered into the darkness by intervening wayside trees and bushes. Still that wristlet tinkles against the water-jar, and retreating steps rustle from down the lane littered with leaves. ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore |
