"Rickety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such a progress were not in its nature inevitably droll enough, there lay, on the top of the stairs, a wooden figure on a crucifix, resting on a sort of great iron saucer: so rickety and unsteady, that whenever an enthusiastic person kissed the figure, with more than usual devotion, or threw a coin into the saucer, with more than common readiness (for it served in this respect as a second or supplementary canister), ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... seriously; only that everything tells when one is afflicted by such a rickety body as this," and the young officer smiled his peculiarly brilliant smile, which made the chief charm of his pale, unusual face. "I got both a wound and a severe strain in my last campaign, which has bothered me ever since, and still keeps me to my couch ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... family creeps), of respectable people, who never took lodgers until this juncture. Their furniture, however, is of the true lodging-house pattern, sofas and chairs which have no possibility of repose in them; rickety tables; an old piano and old music, with "Lady Helen Elizabeth" somebody's name written on it. It is very strange how nothing but a genuine home can ever look homelike. They appear to be good people; a little girl of twelve, a daughter, waits on table; and there is an elder daughter, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ye'd understand it? Wal, I ain't sure whether ye will er not. It's most too much fer me," Mr. Simpkins replied, as he made his way cautiously down the rickety steps. ...
— Randy and Her Friends • Amy Brooks
... pointed out by Sam was a small frame building, having the sign, "Oscar Cook—Barrels and Kegs," painted over the door. It was a tumbled-down, rickety affair, evidently having seen ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... once her home! She opened a disreputable door, and we climbed a dirty and fearfully rickety stairway; next we groped our way along a dark passage. "Mind, there's a broken board! Look out you don't break your ankle," said Callie. She spoke none too soon. I narrowly escaped an accident. Now we turned a corner and got a little better ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... the insides rubbed together from the crotch to the knees ... and he wore old patches, hanging there actually in strips ... and, I think, had his trouser-seat patched, too ... and though he could have afforded a car, he drove about, he and his family, in a rickety old two-seated rig, deliberately kept, it seemed, in ill-repair ... and it was such an old ex-plow horse that ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... whitewashed cell, without ventilation, but it was "mine own" and I was happy. The mirror was hung so high that I had to make a pyramid of three boxes on which to stand while shaving. They were quite rickety, and I was between the Scylla of cutting my throat with the razor and the Charybdis of breaking my bones by a fall on ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... lattice gate, the vine-covered arbor leading through the garden to the cracked and blistered-faced front door, the stack of hop-vines in the garden-corner, and the rickety veranda where, when a boy, he used to sit beside his father of a summer evening, for it was here Hanz welcomed his friends and smoked his pipe. It was here, too, that Angeline, the spirit of whose sweet face had been with him in his wanderings, used to sit at her flax-wheel, spinning ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... gipsy caravans stuck on poles. I expect that village has known what it means to be swamped by the rising river; it looks as if it had, very hastily in the middle of some night, taken to stilts, which I am sure, from their present rickety condition, will not last through the next wet season, and then some unfortunate spirit will get the blame of the collapse. I also learn that it is the natal spot of my friend Kabinda, the carpenter ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... ruined building and, by means of a rickety staircase, gained the floor above. It moved beneath them unsafely, but from the divan which occupied one end of the apartment an uninterrupted view of the door ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... their hats came off. Miss Schuyler, on her part, noticed that most of the stores were shut, and felt that she had left New York a long way behind as she glanced at the bare wooden houses cracked by frost and sun, rickety plank walks, whirling wisps of dust, and groups of men, splendid in their lean, muscular symmetry and picturesque apparel. There was a boldness in their carriage, and a grace that approached the statuesque in every poise. Still, she started when they passed one wooden building ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... an old rickety chest standing in the wall and took out of it a copper coin, bearing the effigy of the late king, and called our attention to a round stain crossing the coin ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... to his establishment, near Boulogne, where, in addition to a classical and mathematical education (washing included), the young gentlemen have the benefit of learning French among THE FRENCH THEMSELVES. Accordingly, the young gentlemen are locked up in a great rickety house, two miles from Boulogne and never see a soul, except the French usher ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... streets, which make you think that Polonius lies unburied in every house, and that you nose him as you pass the door and window-gratings. With this exclamation and remembrance, you lower yourself into one of Mr. Ensor's rocking-chairs,—twelve of which, with a rickety table and a piano, four crimson tidies and six white ones, form the furniture of the Ensor drawing-room,—you lean your head on your hand, close your eyes, and wish for a comfortable room, with a bed in it. A tolerable room you shall have; but for a bed, only a cot-bedstead with a sacking bottom,—further, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... not kept down the neighbors across the area could see and be seen. If the window were left open they could be heard; and when the curtain flapped in the occasional little puffs of hot air, it gave brief glimpses of family life next door. That family had a squalling child, too. Somewhere above, a rickety phonograph was at work; and somewhere below, a piano was being mauled; and somewhere else a ukelele was being thumped and a doleful singer was snarling "The Beach at Waikiki." This racket was their only epithalamium. It was more like the "chivaree" ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... well carved desks, at which the elder pupils sat when they wrote in their copy-books. At the end nearest the door stood a huge rusty stove, always red-hot in winter, and near it were a big wooden water-pail and tin dipper. At the other end of the room stood the master's desk, a long-legged rickety structure, with a stool to match, from which lofty throne the ruler of Number Nine could command a view of his realm and spy out its most remote region of insubordination. Behind him was the blackboard, a piece of sheep-skin used as an eraser, ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... to deformities of the limbs, &c. The Australian type of the disorder, however, is milder altogether, and is of a different character. The Australian child is straight-limbed almost without exception, yet the Australian type of rickety disease, as I pointed out in 1891, is quite ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... circumstances which preceded and accompanied the birth of Etienne d'Herouville. If the count had no other reason for wishing the death of this disowned son poor Etienne would still have been the object of his aversion. In his eyes the misfortune of a rickety, sickly constitution was a flagrant offence to his self-love as a father. If he execrated handsome men, he also detested weakly ones, in whom mental capacity took the place of physical strength. To please him a man should ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... long as the wind's blowin' as 'tis now, an' I guess it allers does blow that way, round this speck of an island. It must be all o' five mile to that land either side, an' in their rickety canoes the Feweegins never venture fur out in anythin' o' a rough sea. I calculate, Captain, we needn't trouble ourselves much about 'em—leastways, ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... her laughing teeth in the laugh at her expense, in which Mr. Hennessy joined, and Dick continued: "Look at that filly there. We all knew Paula was wrong. But look at it! She bred a rickety old thoroughbred, that we wanted to put out of her old age, to a standard stallion; got a filly; bred it back with a thoroughbred; bred its filly foal with the same standard again; knocked all our prognostications ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... being mad, for he himself, in his glee over freedom regained, was not conspicuously sane. He scoured the town in high spirits, peering into shop-windows, riding on top of busses, going to the Zoo, taking the rickety old steamer to the Statue of Liberty, drinking afternoon tea at the Ritz, and all that sort of thing. The first three nights in town he slept in one of the little traffic-towers that perch on stilts up ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... Sometimes, indeed, "the third person" grew slightly facetious and jocose when he represented to himself what he termed "the queer cut" that some old friend would display on presenting his cheque for payment at the rickety counter of Messrs —— & Co.; but no deeper expression of feeling escaped one of those who spoke so long and volubly on what concerned themselves so very little. I was puzzled and disturbed. The stranger ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... well be called cheap and nasty; for inferior or adulterated milk is the very essence, the conglomeration of nastiness; and, moreover, is very poisonous to a child's stomach. One and the principal reason why so many children are rickety and scrofulous, is the horrid stuff called milk that is usually given to them. It is a crying evil, and demands a thorough investigation and reformation, and the individual interference of every parent. Limited Liability Companies are the order of ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... (says Mr. Timbs), was a large dining-house, where, some forty years ago, Colton, the author, used to dine, and publicly boast that he wrote the whole of his "Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words," upon a small rickety deal table, with one pen. Another frequenter of this place was one Webb, who seems to have been so well up in the topics of the day that he was a sort of walking newspaper, who was much with the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands when ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... my mother, on her part, altogether deficient in activity. Exclusive of providing me with a sister, who from some accident or other was but a puling, wrangling, rickety young lady, she initiated me in the mysteries and pleasures of the alphabet. The rector had taken some trouble to make his daughters good English scholars; and my mother, though she had retained much of his solemn ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... you that I would stand here idly if our boat could live in such a sea as now rolls on the rocks? The Wasp must have been washed over the reef by this time. She may pass the next without being dashed to pieces, but she is too rickety to stand the third. No, ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... If there was anything going on in the way of sport he wanted a share in it, and as he was wide awake, he decided to follow up and see what was going on. He slipped into his clothes as quickly as possible and tiptoed his way down the rickety stairs. But before he had gone many steps an unaccustomed thought of prudence struck him, and he walked back to a house three or four doors from where he had been staying, the home, indeed, of the villager who had given him the pet fox, and in which Hank had taken up quarters. He ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... pushed open the rickety gate impatiently, and strode up the walk to "Page Hall" with jingling spurs and clanking saber. The rambling old house, with shutters askew, bore mute testimony to the fallen fortunes of its owner. The paint was peeling off the tall pillars, and the boards of the gallery shook ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... was we sought. When told, he looked triumphant, bade us get into his cab, lashed his horse and after several rapidly made turns, dashed into an out-of-the-way street and drew up before a sort of junk store-house, full of rickety, dusty odds and ends of furniture, presided over by a stupid old woman who sat outside the door, knitting,—wrapped head and all in a shawl. We entered and, there, to our immense relief, stood the dressing ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... I was doing my best to write a letter, while Major B. and my brother officers O. and F., together with Captain de G., of the third squadron, took their seats at a rickety table and began a game of bridge. Here, by the way, is a thing passing the understanding of the profane, I mean the non-bridge player. This is the extraordinary, I might almost say the immoderate, attraction which the initiated find in this game, even at the ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... go on much longer. When once the leader of the House of Commons has become thoroughly disgusted and dissatisfied with his position, either a change or a dissolution of the Government may be anticipated, and in this case any attempt at change can scarcely fail to break up this rickety firm. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... we had come in view of the house of these three white men; for a negro is counted a white man, and so is a Chinese! a strange idea, but common in the islands. It was a board house with a strip of rickety verandah. The store was to the front, with a counter, scales, and the poorest possible display of trade: a case or two of tinned meats, a barrel of hard bread, a few bolts of cotton stuff, not to be compared with mine; the only thing well represented being ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... room as of yore, but alone, without the tax-gatherer; for Binet, tired of waiting for the "Hirondelle," had definitely put forward his meal one hour, and now he dined punctually at five, and yet he declared usually the rickety old ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... Sumo, which is going on in every school and college of the country, exhibits its perfect flower twice a year in the January and May ten-days-long tournaments in the capital. The immense rotunda of the wrestlers' association suggests a rather rickety Albert Hall and holds 13,000 people.[216] On the day I went in I paid 2 yen and had only standing room. Everybody knows the more than Herculean proportions of the wrestlers in comparison with the rest of their countrymen. The rigorous training, Gargantuan feeding and somewhat severe ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible among the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered, tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries, the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying roofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings, bursting ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... and it was with difficulty that the young oarsman found the rickety stairs, every step of which creaked as ...
— The Young Oarsmen of Lakeview • Ralph Bonehill
... gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed beneath the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... had asked after the governor, now re-descended the rickety steps, and announced that the Bey was still asleep; so I walked out, but in the course of our ramble learned that he was afraid to see us, on account of the fanatics in the town: for, from the immediate vicinity of this place to Servia, the inhabitants entertain a stronger hatred of Christians than ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... mansion worthy the residence of a landholder. A huge palace of pine boards immediately springs up in the midst of the wilderness, large enough for a parish church, and furnished with windows of all dimensions, but so rickety and flimsy withal, that every blast gives it a ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... absurdity. People snivel over the deaths of babies; I see nothing to grieve about. If a child dies, why, the probabilities are it ought to die; if it lives, it lives, and you get survival of the fittest. We don't want to choke the world with people, most of them rickety and wheezing; let us be healthy, and have ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... plans, the holding of the reins after such a steed proved anything but a sinecure. Spain, indeed, rode in a high chariot for a time, but at length, in that unlucky Armada drive, crashed against English oak on the ocean highways, and came off creaking and rickety,—grew thenceforth ever more unsteady,—finally, came utterly to the ground, with contusions, fractures, and much mishap,—and now the poor nation hobbles hypochondriacally upon crutches, all its brave charioteering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the Imprudent are not recorded; it is known only that he became a daily visitor to the Teriaky; and that he died a martyr to the immoderate use of opium. [Footnote: Those among the Turks who give themselves up to an immoderate use of opium are easily to be distinguished by a sort of rickety complaint, which this poison produces in course of time. Destined to live agreeably only when in a sort of drunkenness, these men present a curious spectacle, when they are assembled in a part of Constantinople called Teriaky or Tcharkissy, the market of opium-eaters. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... have been the hauling of a ship's yards, or some rickety block, but sound I did hear that came from on ship board," said ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... fingers through his hair, by way of finishing his toilet, Tip made his way down the rickety stairs to the kitchen. ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... laughed and the broker shook his head. "Mrs. Forbes, Mrs. Forbes, I'm afraid your orthodoxy is getting rickety," he said. ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... gave us tea, leaf-cigars, and sirih, and, in short, showed us every attention; and what was best of all did not keep us very long. Our apartment was partitioned off from the public hall, a dark-looking place, but furnished with a table brought by us, and three rickety chairs, beside matresses and plenty of mats. We were kept up nearly all night, which, after the fatigues of the day, was ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... of cowardice to her son. Throughout his life he could not endure the sight of a drawn sword. If we can trust common report, his personal appearance was by no means impressive. He had a feeble, rickety body, he could not walk straight, his tongue was too large for his mouth, and he had goggle eyes. Through fear of assassination he habitually wore thickly padded and quilted clothes, usually green in color. He was a man of considerable ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... walked into his room at the Globe. He seated himself in a rickety chair under a fly-specked incandescent lamp, beside a bed that was clean and comfortable if neither stylish nor massive. Over against the opposite wall stood a dresser which had suffered at the hands of many lodgers. Altogether it was a cheap and cheerless abode, ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... daily before the guillotine and had taken an active part among the women who signalised themselves by their violence in the revolution. While we were talking she said suddenly: 'But m'sieur must be tired standing,' and dusted a rickety old stool for me to sit down. I hardly liked to do so for many reasons; but the poor old woman was so civil that I did not like to run the risk of hurting her by refusing, and moreover the conversation of one who had been at the taking of the ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... of her freight being for that end of the town, and we had to traverse the entire length of Winnipeg to reach Mrs. T——, who had kindly invited us to remain with her until Mrs. C—— could find a suitable house. Up narrow, rickety planks, through mud and mire, past two log-houses fast falling into ruin—which were pointed out as having been the only houses in Winnipeg, besides the Fort Garry settlement, ten years before, and within three years used as custom-houses—we made our way to the broad main street. This is lined ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... to his place in the Stamp and Sealing Wax. If he could only get that task, he would in a few weeks, with his hundred dollars' allowance a week and his salary, have a considerable sum to give his system another chance, taking care to avoid tipsy greenhorns this time. He felt too rickety to face the President until he had drank several more glasses of brandy. This done, he hailed a cab and drove straight to Buckingham Palace. Immediately he sent in his name by the policeman; he was shown into the President's private room, where the ruler of England was seated at a large ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... make the baby's Christian name Hiram and to add a middle name selected at random from the Scriptures. The big, rickety family Bible was taken from the center table and opened with shaking fingers by Mrs. Baker. She read aloud the first sentence that met her eye: "The son ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... had surmised, the hall-way was quite dark. He heard Ferris mounting the rickety stairs, and like a shadow he followed, fairly holding his breath, lest some sound might betray ...
— The Missing Tin Box - or, The Stolen Railroad Bonds • Arthur M. Winfield
... the wind humming in the chimneys and between the window-sashes like a bumblebee as big as a whale. It made her feel so lonesome and blue that many's the time I've heard her crying to herself when she thought I was sound asleep. We were going to pull down the old house, anyhow. It was a rickety concern, and inconvenient as could be. So I got Miss Nancy to tell me how many rooms and closets and all that she'd like to have in a house that was to be built on purpose for her, and for nobody else, and I made a plan of it all on paper, and then I sent her up to stay with her mother in Buckingham ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... bed in the small room close to the pump did not think the state of matters either "jolly" or "prime," for, besides being very old, he was very weak and thin and cold and hungry; in addition to which Jack Frost had seated himself on the rickety chair beside the empty grate, and seemed bent on remaining—the colonel having previously blown open the door and removed a garment which had sheltered the old man's head, thus permitting the major to sprinkle a ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... its northern side by the back windows of some rickety old wooden houses, suggestive of an easy conflagration, and dangerously near the church. They date from the time of Queen Elizabeth, and stand on a piece of the ground formerly devoted to Bartholomew Fair, the memory of which is perpetuated in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... what kind of dormitories these people resort to when their dancing is finished? I will describe one out of many that I saw, which will serve as a specimen of the rest. Let us ascend the rickety staircase. The atmosphere is intolerably foul, and you feel that a week's confinement in such a den would cause your death. Well, these are the beds; a heap of straw, matted with long service, and a filthily foul rug for a coverlet. The sleepers have no other covering, in summer or winter. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... after Sheen's conversation with Linton, Stanning came into Seymour's senior day-room and sat down on the table. The senior day-room objected to members of other houses coming and sitting on their table as if they had bought that rickety piece of furniture; but Stanning's reputation as a bruiser kept their resentment ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... near sundown when Lum got back. Smoke was coming out of his rickety chimney, and the wail of an old ballad reached his ears. Singing, the girl did not hear him coming, and through the open door he saw that the room had been tidied up and that she was cooking supper. The baby was playing on the floor. She turned at the creak ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... shore a grass cabin, which was on the plantation of Dr. Emmett, and had been left tenantless by some fisherman. This served for shelter during the night though the struggles and squealings of a drove of hogs attempting to enter through the rickety door did not ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... On the rickety uprights (for the arbor like everything else on the old place was going to ruin under the alien blight) large baskets hung here and there. At intervals the structure sagged so that they had to stoop to pass under it, and here and there it was broken or uncovered and they caught ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... an hour later. Sir Marmaduke's guests had departed, Dame Harrison in her rickety coach, Mistress Pyncheon in her chaise, whilst Squire Boatfield was ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... farmhouse. When she had reached its shelter, and was giving an account of the adventure, Dick set forth, like a primeval Highlander, the covering doing duty both for plaid and kilt. Clothes of some kind were provided for him at the cottage, a rickety old boat was fetched, and he and his stag were rowed across the river to the place where his ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... and two quills from a cupboard by their bed, and placed them on a somewhat rickety table, where Bryda's few books lay—books well worn and studied, books which fed her romance—two volumes of the Rambler and Spectator, Pope's verses, and last, but not least, Bunyan's ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... partially spread over a dirty bed tick filled with leaves. There was only one chair, and that was a broken rocker, on which the unhappy mistress of the cottage was seated. But there were two or three rough stools, made of pieces of pine slab, standing beside the rickety table. Pointing to these stools, Mrs. Button, without quitting her chair, said to ...
— Aunt Amy - or, How Minnie Brown learned to be a Sunbeam • Francis Forrester
... Castle, where Waldemar Daae dwelt. His enemy, Ove Ramel, from Basnaes, was there, with the mortgage bonds upon the property and the dwelling-house, which he had purchased. I thundered against the cracked window-panes, slammed the rickety doors, whistled through the cracks and crevices, 'Wheu-gh!' Herr Ove should have no pleasure in the prospect of living there. Ide and Anna Dorthea wept bitterly. Johanne stood erect and composed; but she looked ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... there have been narrow escapes before), in not more than two or three questionable incidents, and in practically no "improper" details—conduct almost deserving the description of magnanimity and self-denial. Moreover, the thing really is a modern novel, though a bad and rickety one; the indefinable naturaleza is present in it after a strange fashion. There is less perhaps in the very inappropriately named Tableaux de Societe—the autobiography of a certain Fanchette de Francheville, who, somewhat originally for a French ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... thirty-seven—financier, entrepreneur, occasional blackmailer, occasional con man, and very competent in all these activities—stood on a rickety wooden lake dock, squinting against the late afternoon sun, and waiting for his current business prospect to give up the pretense of being interested in trying ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... himself up to the window-sill (he had climbed a rickety arbor below) and motioned to the girls to unlock the sashes. They did so and Scorch forced up the ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... woman," cried Ben, "come on!" and rushing around to the front of the building, he found the rickety stairs leading to the house floor, and bounded upward. The door at the top stood ajar and he pushed it in, with Major Morris at his heels. The room at hand was dark, the struggle was going on in ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... of the paymaster with his strong box, and the payment of bounties to veterans re-enlisting. Major H. is here to-day, with a small mountain of greenbacks, rejoicing the hearts of the 2d division of the First corps. In the midst of a rickety shanty, behind a little table, sit the major and clerk Eldridge, with the rolls before them, and much moneys. A re-enlisted man gets in cash about $200 down, (and heavy instalments following, as the pay-days arrive, one after another.) The show of the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... almost destitute of furniture, and dirty in the extreme, evidently not having been cleaned out since its last occupant was dismissed. In one corner was a truckle bed, covered with a cloth and a pile of loose straw. There was a rickety table of rough boards, with three legs, and a couple of stools of the same character. The window was long and narrow, with bars across it; though a moderately stout man could not have squeezed through, even had the bars ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... the two millions of the remaining women, what reasonable man would not throw out a hundred thousand poor girls, humpbacked, plain, cross-grained, rickety, sickly, blind, crippled in some way, well educated but penniless, all bound to be spinsters, and by no means tempted to violate the sacred ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... bank. This she expended in building an ell with extra sleeping rooms, painting the structure cream colour with brown trimmings, and replacing old furniture with that of modern make. This latter, she confessed within a year, was a great mistake, for the new chairs became rickety, the castors would not hold in the bed posts, the bureau drawers became unmanageable, and the rooms, as she expressed it, had a "second-hand" appearance. Then it was that the old mahogany furniture, that had been relegated to the attic, was brought down, furbished up, and ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man, the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage, a prosaically real young man wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his infinitives, and frequently having for idol a bouncing ingenue, should, in a rickety structure of wood and percale, be able to soar miles in the air and fulfil the dream ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... please, and it will never be half so fine to look at. But the most absurd, disgusting, contemptible sight in the world would you and I be, leaving the barn-door for my lady's flower-garden, forsaking our natural sturdy walk for the peacock's genteel rickety stride, and adopting the squeak of his voice in the place of ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")
... as we had seen for the last three days of our journey. The river was swift and deep. The colony was on the opposite side of the water. We shouted until an Indian appeared and took us across in a rickety canoe belonging to the friars, which he paddled with the stalk of ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... money-lender, had given Kate and her mother leave to live in a rickety, unoccupied house which he owned. It was a dingy building on an old wharf, but Noggs, the clerk, himself cleaned and furnished one of its rooms so that it was fairly comfortable. When they were settled Ralph took Kate to a dressmaker's, where he got her a situation, ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... rickety wooden bridge spans the stream, for here the highway from Chary Junction reaches the village of Millville and passes the wooden structures grouped on either side its main street on the way to Thompson's Crossing, nine miles farther along. The town boasts exactly eleven buildings, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... out through the rear door, found himself in a small, brick-paved yard hemmed in by a high wall thickly fringed on the top with a hedge of broken bottles. At one time in its history the house had been occupied by a catgut maker, and the rickety shed in which he had carried on his calling still clung, sagging and broken-roofed, to the building itself, its rotten slates all but vanished, and its interior piled high with mildewed bedding, mouldy old carpet, broken furniture, ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... West. There will be chairs covered with hideous antimacassars, tasteless round worsted-work mats for absent flower jars, and a lot of ugly cheap and vulgar china chimney ornaments, which, there being no fireplace, and consequently no chimney-piece, are set out in order on a rickety deal table. The whole life of these village folk is one piece of unreal acting. They are continually asking themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and whether they are living up to the foreign garments they wear. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... cried one, and instantly the three turned back into the room. As Barney fled from the courtyard he heard the rattle of hasty footsteps upon the rickety ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... there's nothing for any of us to do now, until after I see Christie. You remain here! Do you understand?—remain here. Damn me, if that drunken fool isn't waking up." There was a rattling of the rickety bed, and then the sound of Willoughby's ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... house not fit for a chicken coop." "A sorry looking house for so much money, $15 a month; doors off the hinges, water in the cellar, two families in five rooms." "Indescribable; so dark they must keep the light burning all day." "This family lives in three rooms on the second floor of a rickety frame house, built on the side of a hill, so that the back rooms are just above the ground. The entrance is in a muddy, disorderly yard and is through a tunnel in the house. The rooms are hard to heat because of cracks. A boy of eighteen was in bed breathing heavily, very ill with pneumonia, ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... female dealer, kindly, "what made you go on like that? Why, there was no one bid against you! you'd have got it for two pounds—a rickety old thing." ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... taste in domestic scenery of 1901. But your eye was caught at once by the additions made by Mrs. Rossiter. Linda conceived it was her womanly mission to lighten the severity of Michael's choice in furniture and decorations. She introduced rickety and expensive screens that were easily knocked over; photographs in frames which toppled at a breath; covers on every flat surface that could be covered—occasional tables, tops of grand pianos. If she did not ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... clear, an old Irishman, driving a rickety express waggon and lashing his one horse to a gallop, had locked wheels with the auto. Drummond recognized both horse and waggon, for he had driven them often himself. The Irishman was Pat Morrissey. On the other side a brewery waggon ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... Deep down in his lurching heart he felt a sudden most inordinate desire to reach that brown stone mansion just as quickly as possible. But abruptly even to himself he swerved off instead at the yellow sassafras tree and plunged quite wildly through a mass of broken sods towards the rickety, no-account ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... wrong fermentation, and turned to folly instead of wisdom. But he did not do much harm, for he had a great respect for his respectability. Perhaps if he had been a craftsman, he might even have done more harm—making rickety wheelbarrows, asthmatic pumps, ill-fitting window-frames, or boots with a lurking divorce in each welt. He had no turn for farming, and therefore let all his land, yet liked to interfere, and as much as possible kept ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... arranged for the delivery of our stuff, we did not care to look elsewhere, and therefore inspected the rooms in this hotel. To reach them, we went through a barber-shop into a narrow patio, and, mounting some rickety stairs, found our quarters, which were filthy, vile-smelling, hot and uncared for. Yet for these choice quarters, with two beds in each of two rooms, leaving no space practically between, we were expected to pay four dollars. Upon remonstrating with the proprietor at ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... horse nervously withdrew his head, turned tail, and made a rickety flight up the alley, while Sam and Penrod, perfectly obedient to inherited impulse, ran out into the drizzle and uproariously pursued. They were but automatons of instinct, meaning no evil. Certainly they did not know the singular and pathetic ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... them to us, we found that his business was fishing, and that he forked out very fat and edible-looking fish with his trident. Shaggy, undersized horses were wading in the water, nipping off the thin spears of grass. Close to the church is a rickety farmhouse. If I lived there, I would as lief be a fish ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that Tim might insist on bearing me company, knowing as he did that I was still a bit rickety; but he saw fit to take my one refusal as final, and muttered something about reading. ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... steady stand, working easily and conveniently, will not only enable the observer to pass his time much more pleasantly, but will absolutely exhibit more difficult objects than a finer instrument on a rickety, ill-arranged stand. A good observing-chair is also a matter of some importance, the least constraint or awkwardness of position detracting considerably from the power of distinct vision. Such, at least, is ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... out my watch and made a calculation; Auber's train was probably at Newark. I could stand it no longer, and I went toward his room, stamping on the bare floor, whistling nervously, and rattling the rickety balustrade. I banged open the door and began to shout: ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... village of Ossetes at the bottom looked like a swallow's nest. I shuddered, as the thought occurred to me that often in the depth of night, on that very road, where two wagons could not pass, a courier drives some ten times a year without climbing down from his rickety vehicle. One of our drivers was a Russian peasant from Yaroslavl, the other, an Ossete. The latter took out the leaders in good time and led the shaft-horse by the reins, using every possible precaution—but our heedless compatriot did not ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... stayed over night, but was off early in the morning. Bob and Betty watched his rickety car out of sight, and then, determined to keep busy and happy, set out to explore ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... laughs—he laughs at all your whips. That for your hickories. Ha! ha! ha! Chub don't mind the hickories—you can't catch Chub, to whip him with your hickories. Try now, if you can. Try—" and as he spoke he darted along with a rickety, waddling motion, half earnest in his flight, yet seemingly, partly with the desire to provoke pursuit. Something irritated with what was so unusual in the habit of the boy, and what he conceived only so much impertinence, the ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... There were no children about, no noisy cackling of cocks and hens, no flowers in the yard, not a sound to break the awful silence of the accompanying hills. It was as if life died there long ago and left behind only the rickety skeleton of a ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... were huddled together more than thirty men and women of all ranks and ages; some staring round them with looks of blank despair; some laughing and gossiping recklessly. Near them lounged a guard of "Patriots," smoking, spitting, and swearing. Between the patriots and the prisoners sat, on a rickety stool, the second jailer—a humpbacked man, with an immense red mustache—finishing his breakfast of broad beans, which he scooped out of a basin with his knife, and washed down with copious draughts of wine from a bottle. Carelessly as Lomaque looked at the shocking scene before him, his quick ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... spent on farm-buildings, still often old and rickety, with deficient and insanitary accommodation; in Devonshire the farmer was bound by his lease to repair 'old mud and wooden houses', at a cost of 10 per cent. on his rent, and there were many such all over England. Farm-buildings were often at the extreme end of the holding, the cattle ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... was always a faint vague recollection of a time when her surroundings had been bright and cheerful, where there had been a mother who had taught her to love beautiful things. To-day she climbed the rickety stairs to her home and pushed open the latchless door with a revolt brooding in ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Leyden did not think it wise to cut loose from Holland until they should have secured a foothold in America. It was but an advance guard that started out from Delft haven late in July, 1620, in the rickety ship Speedwell, with Brewster and Bradford, and sturdy Miles Standish, a trained soldier whose aid was welcome, though he does not seem to have belonged to the congregation. Robinson remained at Leyden, and never came to ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... at the speaker, and in spite of her excitement, of her sorrow and of her anxieties, she could not help smiling at the whimsical little figure which sat opposite to her, on a very rickety chair, solemnly striving with slow and measured movement of hand and arm, and a large supply of breath, to get up a polish on the worn-out surface of an ancient pair ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... day arrived for our departure. My father rode a steady mule, but I preferred a horse, though not so safe an animal for the narrow tracks, up and down steep mountains, on the summit of terrific precipices, and across rickety bridges which we ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... of extensive proportions. Nearly all of one side was occupied by the bar. Opposite was the huge fireplace, and scattered around were a number of stools, rickety chairs and strong boxes which served equally well ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... his amazement, a gleaming eye was looking out upon the room from beyond this narrow crack. He looked long and found that he was not mistaken. There was an eye, glued close to the opposite side of the rickety door, and its gaze was ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... had indeed been busy on it. The vestiges of its former glory were still apparent, but the ornaments were crumbled and dim. The prismatic lantern over the door was a mixture of garishness and dust. The bowers were broken, the vines and plants dead, the walks draggled and uneven, the gates rickety, the fences tottering or prostrate. The numerous tokens of art and care in the past made the present ruinousness and desolation more pathetic. I could not help recalling the final couplet of Miss Seward's poem, prophesying the fame ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... look behind at his prison and sprang down the rickety stairs. He had but one thought—to reach home in time to unmask the villain who was impersonating him—to be in time to make the journey ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... in Venice the antiquarian can revel in examples of many centuries of diverse domestic architecture from ducal palace to humble fisherman's dwelling on an obscure "back street" canal, in Basra there abounds a great deal of rickety rubbish that never had any interest in itself and which depends for its effect on the flattering gilding of the sun and the intangible glamour of Eastern twilight. In fact Basra might be described from an architectural point of view as a great heap ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... of a house, every detail would have to be included; but after all the pages of careful enumeration the reader would know less of how it looked than after these few words from Irving. "A large, rickety wooden building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door was painted 'The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.'" So the manual training student ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... place resolved itself into a bare and dirty room, with a couple of windows, whereof a tenth part might be of glass, the remainder being stopped up with old copy-books and paper. There were a couple of long old rickety desks, cut and notched, and inked, and damaged, in every possible way; two or three forms; a detached desk for Squeers; and another for his assistant. The ceiling was supported, like that of a barn, by cross-beams and rafters; and the walls were so stained and discoloured, that it was impossible ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... Pope to call him the fairest of critics, not content with criticising the production of Dryden, Milbourne was so ill advised as to produce, and place in opposition to it, a rickety translation of his own, probably the fragments of that which had been suppressed by Dryden's version. A short specimen, both of his criticism and poetry, will convince the reader, that the powers of the former were, as has been often the case, neutralised ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... events, was necessary, and so he sold the tavern and a considerable portion of his land. With part of the proceeds he appeased the blood-suckers; and with what remained, he purposed repairing his cracked and rickety tenement. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... the heat increased by the rays of the sinking sun, which found their way in by the window, through which also entered unpleasant odours ascending from the court-yard below. One of the persons, whose handsome dress contrasted strangely with the appearance of the room, was busy writing at a rickety table. With youth, wealth, talents, a fair fame, the godson of the future monarch of England, he might, had he so willed, have been a peer of he realm, the founder of a noble family. The other, who has ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... while he nodded to the lackey, who stood there with red face and deep embarrassment of manner—"by my faith! it was a piece of good luck for me that you were standing so near the door, my friend, else I should probably have had a bad fall. This rickety old castle must be repaired. One can not even lean against the doors ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... as this might be it was even so. No wheel was forthcoming. They could not find a carriage even. There was nothing but two ancient caleches, whose wheels were not only rickety but utterly disproportioned to the size of the vettura, and any quantity of bullock carts, which moved on contrivances that could scarcely be called wheels ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... if I wished. I never expected, for example, that experience had this in store for me." And she pointed with her bare elbow, and with a jerk of her head, at everything that surrounded her,—at the little white house, the quince-tree, the rickety paling, even ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... St. Louis must have felt that his armies were getting away from him, and began to send dispatches to me at Paducah, to be forwarded by boat, or by a rickety telegraph-line up to Fort Henry, which lay entirely in a hostile country, and was consequently always out of repair. On the 1st of March I received the following dispatch, and forwarded it to General Grant, both by the telegraph ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... down the rickety stairs, believing somehow that she had told me the truth. But if not Zalnitch, then who? I knew that in less than a week, as soon as Helen was well enough to stand the shock, she would be indicted, unless in the meantime, I could discover the ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... proceeded, on foot, through the maze of ugly little streets, wherein the spring sunshine only showed up all the more pitilessly their meanness, and filth, and ugliness. Once at the house in which the brother and sister lodged, he went up the rickety stairs unheeding any of the customary sights and sounds, till, arriving at Sergius' door, he started a little to find it wide open. Five minutes later he returned to that door in a state of yet greater bewilderment; for both rooms ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... with its few glaring white houses and its one dusty road, offering no apology or explanation whatever for its purposeless existence, at last was reached, and Farmer Galusha Krinklebottom, in accordance with Dr. Nevercure's arrangements, met the jaded travellers at the station in his rickety shay, prepared to take them ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... into a sizable town, street-car tracks, bad pavements, stupid shops, workmen's little homes in rows like chicken-houses, then better streets, better homes, business blocks well paved, a hotel, a post-office, a Carnegie library, a gawky Civil War statue, then poorer shops, rickety pavements, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... floors tiled with a queer assortment of tins, empty cartridge cases and odd bits of wood. Drenched to the very skin, shivering and sneezing with cold, they gave no heed to the rain tattooing on their faces or to the enemy shells. Within the rickety shelters damp figures, huddled together for warmth, closed tired eyes and in utter weariness of limbs ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... At the foot of the rickety stairs leading to the high porch from which I had seen the girl come I stopped. All I had been repressing, fighting, resisting for days past, had in a moment yielded to horror, and hurt that seemed past healing, and ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... broader aspect still, a nobler work to be accomplished. As long as speculation continues in that great gift of God to man, land, the problem will be unsettled. So long as the landlords find that the more wretched, filthy, rickety, and loathsome a building is, the lower will be the taxes, he will continue to make some of the ever-increasing army of bread winners dwell ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... or rather an unlevelled angle of the hill, and reached by a long rickety flight of steps, was an old ugly wooden house. It was unpainted; the shutters were shaking on their rusty hinges; the chimneys had been blown off long since; but it had cost much gold in its time. It had been the home of a "Forty-niner," and he was dead ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... chair of modern form seen in Zuni is illustrated in Fig. 108. It was difficult to determine the antiquity of this specimen, as its rickety condition may have been due to the clumsy workmanship quite as much as to the effects of age. Rude as is the workmanship, however, it was far beyond the unaided skill of the native craftsman to join and mortise the various pieces that go to make up this chair. Some decorative effect ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... middle age, seated in a rickety old wagon, with a child on either side of her, was driving a young and half-broken horse into Oakdale. The young horse snorted, attempted to turn round, and then began to back up, cramping the wagon across the bridge. The woman struggled vainly with the reins, in a perfect panic of terror, and ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... wended her way home again, somewhat relieved, and yet considerably alarmed over the doctor's words. Down to the barn she wandered, and up the rickety ladder she climbed into the cobwebby loft. A figure moved impatiently at the far end of the loose boards, and as Peace's eyes became accustomed to the dim light, she saw it was Faith, curled up among a lot of ragged papers and coverless magazines, ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... the burying-ground, lying behind the sheds, on the western slope of the ridge upon which the village stands. This ancient cemetery was laid out by the early settlers, when they made the first allotments of land. It is a square area of two acres in extent, inclosed by a mossy picket paling, so rickety that the neighbors' sheep sometimes leap through the gaps from the adjacent pastures, and feed among the graves upon the long ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... fails the possessor; and she, who would scarcely have set foot on the ground for very delicacy, and who would not have been seen riding out, unless in a fine carriage, drawn by fine horses, elegantly harnessed, is now heard calling for any old horse or mule, and any rickety wagon or cart, with rope harness—any thing—any thing to take her out of the reach of the Yankees! Masters and mistresses are ...
— Mary S. Peake - The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe • Lewis C. Lockwood
... narrow casement on the street and a bull's-eye window looking into the yard. The chief characteristic of the apartment was a cynic simplicity, due to money-making greed. The bare walls were covered with plain whitewash, the dirty brick floor had never been scoured, the furniture consisted of three rickety chairs, a round table, and a sideboard stationed between the two doors of a bedroom and a sitting-room. Windows and doors alike were dingy with accumulated grime. Reams of blank paper or printed matter usually encumbered the floor, and more frequently than not the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... even quieter than the outer din? There is one, indeed, that, long nursed and dozing in the lap of the State, is now roughly shaken, but is she yet awake? She has grown in bulk at least, while sleeping. Is she not like an overgrown child too big to be carried, and too rickety to ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... his rickety wagon down near where the belongings of the Meadow-Brook Girls lay in a tumbled heap. Jane assisted him in loading the equipment, amazing the country boy by ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... getting out timber, was on hand, large and good-humored, sitting beside Phrony Tripper in her pink ribbons, and fanning her hard enough to keep a mine fresh. A little later in the day quite a number of the fathers and mothers of the children arrived in their rickety vehicles. They had come to take leave of the young teacher. There were almost as many as were present at the school celebration. Keith was quite overcome, and when the hour arrived for closing the school, instead of, as he had expected, tying up the half-dozen books he kept in his desk, shaking ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... impossible to move then without making noise enough to excite the attention of the person who had entered; for the stable was old and rickety, and the boards creaked at every step they took. The fugitives listened with breathless interest to the movements of the unwelcome visitor. The horse whinnied again; and the person entered the stall, and spoke to him. The sound of his voice filled the occupants of the loft with consternation; ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... for the dirt and vice and misery which must prevail in houses where seven or eight persons, of both sexes and all ages, are penned up together for the night in the one rickety, foul, vermin-hunted bed-room. The picture of agricultural life unrolls itself before us as it is painted by those who know it best. We see the dull, clouded mind, the bovine gaze, the brutality and recklessness, and the simple audacity, and the confessed hatred of his betters, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... question of Cost! that was a difficulty. But all the same Something would have to be done. Some Experiments must be tried! Great caution was necessary in dealing with such difficult problems! We must go slow, and if in the meantime a few thousand children die of starvation, or become 'rickety' or consumptive through lack of proper nutrition it is, of course, very regrettable, but after all they are only working-class children, so it doesn't matter a ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... to the same authority, was the third son of Chimkin; but the eldest, Kambala, squinted; the second, Tarmah (properly Tarmabala for Dharmaphala, a Buddhist Sanskrit name) was rickety in constitution; and on the death of the old Kaan (1294) Teimur was unanimously named to the Throne, after some opposition from Kambala, which was put down by the decided bearing of the great soldier Bayan. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the drivers of two rather rickety old carriages, somewhat resembling in form the old English chaise, she put all the girls in one, and seated herself beside Mrs. Fordyce ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... doctor's ascent, the two boys strained their necks over the rickety banisters, which had been polished black by trousers of the past, and sometimes they lost him, and then ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... with smiles chasing away the tears, the happy child took hold of one side of the basket, while Nettie carried the other, and together they wended their way to a poor tenement-house in a dark narrow street, and climbed the rickety stairs to a back ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... no book in the library which had not been read many times. Some were falling apart, and others had been carefully sewn together and awkwardly rebound. Still open, on a rickety table in the corner, was that ponderous volume with an extremely limited circulation: The Publishers' Trade List Annual. Pencilled crosses here and there indicated books to be purchased, or at least sent on approval, to "customers ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... sir; that is accounted for in one way—the property is very old and rickety, and perhaps even rotten, so that some allowance must be ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... out on to the pavement. The postern door in front of them was opened, in response to Monsieur Jesen's vigorous knocking, from some invisible place by a string. The three of them climbed four flights of rickety stairs. They reached at last a stone landing. Monsieur Jesen threw open a door and led the way ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... slowly driving the Antoine all night, there came the cry, "All hands on deck!" and "Lower the boats!" for the Antoine's time had come, and within a hand-reach of shore almost she found the end of her rickety life. Not more than three-fourths of the passengers and crew were got into the boats. Jean Jacques was not one of these; but he saw Carmen Dolores and her father safely bestowed, though in different boats. To the girl's appeal ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "You are rickety," Black Jack told him. "Why, there ain't any danger; nobody goes up there." Laughing Bill held his breath, missing not a word. "If they did we'd pick 'em up with the glasses. It's open country, and we'd get ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... And there's a valetudinarian aspect to the place which I find slightly depressing. For this seems to be the one particular point where the worn-out old money-maker comes to die, and the antique ladies with asthma struggle for an extra year or two of the veranda rocking-chair, and rickety old beaux sit about in Panamas and white flannels and listen to the hardening of their arteries. And I haven't quite finished with life yet—not if I know it—not by ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer |
