"Unpainted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the staccato pounding of the painos, the scuffling of boot heels on the dance-hall floors, the shrill mirthless outcries of rouge-bedizened women, and the resonant slapping of dobie dollars on the unpainted pine bars. Now and again the recitals were interrupted by the roaring of forty-five revolvers as the more fervid celebrants showed their expertness at marksmanship by shooting the French heels from the shoes of ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... market-house a little public square, which at this hour was well occupied by carts and wagons from the country and empty drays awaiting hire. Warwick was unable to perceive much change in the market-house. Perhaps the surface of the red brick, long unpainted, had scaled off a little more here and there. There might have been a slight accretion of the moss and lichen on the shingled roof. But the tall tower, with its four-faced clock, rose as majestically and uncompromisingly as though the land had never been subjugated. ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... first glance to be no way in, but as Winifred slowly ascended the steps of the fourth house from the corner, she made out the lines of a little door cut in the boards which protected the big one. There was no handle to break the smooth, unpainted surface of wood—old, well-seasoned wood which had evidently served the same purpose year after year—but there was a small, inconspicuous keyhole, and into this Miss Leavitt deftly fixed a key which she ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... much use: one never knows that something good is not going to be sprung upon one, and few indeed are the places where there is no old public-house, or overhanging cottage, or farmhouse and barn, or bit of De Hooghe-like entry which, if one had two or three lives, one would not willingly leave unpainted. It is just the same in North Italy; there is not a village which can be passed over ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... together, while the rest of the house is devoted to the curing of pumpkins, or storing of carrots and potatoes, and is decorated with fanciful festoons of dried apples and peaches. The outside, remaining unpainted, grows venerably black with time; the family wardrobe is laid under contribution for old hats, petticoats, and breeches, to stuff into the broken windows, while the four winds of heaven keep up a whistling and howling about ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... is the guildhall, which is used for religious services, meetings, and entertainments. And best of all, perhaps, the houses are not the rows of sad, unpainted cabins one remembers having seen in western mining camps, but are pretty cottages, touched with a slight architectural variety, and with little variations of color, so ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... walked past the unpainted little shack that but for the word "Marvin" in large letters painted across one end of it would never have been taken for a railroad station. Without looking where we were going we found ourselves in front of an immense poster on a large board back of the station. The letters ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... Hawns and Honeycutts. From the head of the main street two battered signs caught his eye—Hawn Hotel and Honeycutt Inn—the one on the right-hand side close at hand, and the other far down on the left, and each on the corner of the street. Both had double balconies, both were ramshackle and unpainted, and near each was a general store, run now by a subleader of each faction—Hiram Honeycutt and Shade Hawn—for old Jason and old Aaron, except in councils of war and business, had retired into the more or less peaceful haven ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... thus making such strenuous exertions to lift Biffen's out of the mire, Bourne was finding out the whole unpainted beauty of the situation—as ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... other warily for a moment; Byram jingled the shingle-nails in his apron-pocket; Dingman, the game-warden, took a brief but intelligent survey of the premises, which included an unpainted house, a hen-yard, and the newly ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... Kentucky known as the "Blue Grass" region, all the possibilities of a Western American girl's existence lay before her. A piano in the bare-walled house, the latest patented mower in the limitless meadows, and a silk dress sweeping the rough floor of the unpainted "meeting-house," were already the promise of those possibilities. Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors. There were small, narrow, arched feet besides ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... in cooking some fish, had raised such a smoke in the kitchen that not even the beetles were visible. Akakiy Akakievitch passed through the kitchen unperceived, even by the housewife, and at length reached a room where he beheld Petrovitch seated on a large unpainted table, with his legs tucked under him like a Turkish pasha. His feet were bare, after the fashion of tailors who sit at work; and the first thing which caught the eye was his thumb, with a deformed nail thick and strong as a turtle's shell. About Petrovitch's neck hung a skein of silk ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... boast of the people of the country school district that their school has "sent out" so many people of distinction. On a rocky hillside in a New England town there stands, between a wooded slope and a swamp, an unpainted school building. Within and without it is more forbidding than the average stable in that farming region. But the resident of that neighborhood boasts of the number of distinguished persons who have gone forth from the community, under the influence of that school. This is characteristic of ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... had not banished from his mind the thought of the girl—that Belinda Mary, who had called upon him in her hour of danger as he divined. Perhaps—he descended into the kitchen and was brought face to face with the unpainted door. ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... skilfully, tenderly cared for, and, finally, filled and rubbed till it wears a surface that is not liable to soil, is easily cleaned, resists the action of moisture, and will grow richer with age. Hence, I say, by all means finish with unpainted wood, if you are not afraid of the expense, and yet paint and varnish are good, and putty, like charity, covereth a multitude of sins. Nothing protects wood better than oil and lead, and by means of them you have unlimited choice of ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... Freight-cars were assembled here by thousands from all parts of the country—yellow, red, blue, green, white. (Chicago, he recalled, already had thirty railroads terminating here, as though it were the end of the world.) The little low one and two story houses, quite new as to wood, were frequently unpainted and already smoky—in places grimy. At grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars and wagons and muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the streets were, how unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down rhythmically—here a flight of steps, a veritable platform ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... was an air of security. Men moved slower. Their faces were less anxious and more placid; they had leisure to talk as they met at the shop door. The boss seemed farther away. But all this security did not conceal the poverty which he now saw everywhere. The houses were mainly low, unpainted buildings, containing only three or four cramped rooms. They were a little smarter in appearance than the country type, but not ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... bells. This dome or belfry was supported by pillars, and in the intervening openings were placed the bells. The roof was flat, and the dark green and gray moss clung along the sides. The interior presented a singular combination of art and rudeness; the seats were of unpainted pine, and the cement floor between was worn irregularly by the knees of devout attendants. The railing of the altar was of carved mahogany, rich and beautiful. Over this division of the long room hung a silken curtain, concealing three niches, which contained an image of the "Virgin," the ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... the end; the high woods grew squarely against an old stone wall and a sunshiny open field, and we came out suddenly into broad daylight that startled us and even startled the horse, who might have been napping as he walked, like an old soldier. The field sloped up to a low unpainted house that faced the east. Behind it were long, frost-whitened ledges that made the hill, with strips of green turf and bushes between. It was the wildest, most Titanic sort of pasture country up there; there was a sort of daring in putting a frail ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... laid on the stage of a country theatre, at night, after the play. To the right a row of rough, unpainted doors leading into the dressing-rooms. To the left and in the background the stage is encumbered with all sorts of rubbish. In the middle of the stage is an ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... bench outside the kitchen door at The Cedars, a slant-legged, unpainted bench which at one time had been used to hold milk-cans. Wade settled himself on this in company with several dozen glasses of currant jelly. From his position he could look in at the kitchen door upon Eve and Miss Mullett, who, draped ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... of the "Hawthorne," which plies back and forth across the lake in summer, regularly points out to his passengers the house where the Hathornes lived. It is easily seen from the steamer,—a severely plain, unpainted building, in appearance much like the Manning house on Herbert Street. Nearly in line with it a great cliff-like rock juts out from the centre of the lake, on which the Indians centuries ago etched and painted great warlike figures, whose significance is now known to no one. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... dangerous as that of the aspick or viper; but whose bursts of malice, and sallies of wit, often give a blow where it is not expected. The Muse of Terence, and, consequently, of Menander, is an artless and unpainted beauty, of easy gaiety, whose features are rather delicate than striking, rather soft than strong, rather plain and modest than great and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... passing a little, unpainted, wooden building, of one and a half stories, used as a grocery. A German name was on the sign; but behind the rough counter stood the familiar ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... with twinkling eyes of dry mirth, and slowly sauntered after him, watching him until he entered the little unpainted gate of the Carson house and tapped at the old gray door. Then Bi lunged across the street and entered a path that ran along the railroad track for a few rods, curving suddenly into a stretch of vacant lots. On a convenient fence rail with a good outlook toward the west ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... gray, lettered in blue; history, black, lettered in red; physics, a deep orange yellow, lettered in white; mathematics was represented in a small way by the cipher and nine digits, lettered in black upon ten plain unpainted blocks, giving in their forms that number of the principal geometrical figures, to which was added a shallow box with a broad lid, perforated by ten holes, corresponding to the blocks in number, size and shape, but large enough for the blocks ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... hush settled over the scene, and the party of naval officers, detailed to superintend the start and take the times of the competing craft, came through the crowd. They were directing their steps to an unpainted wooden structure at one end of the field. This building was equipped with various instruments for recording time accurately. From it also would presently be given out the wind velocity and any other data of interest ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... Two-room unpainted shack, leaky roof, most window panes missing, porch dangerous to walk on. House standing high on concrete blocks. Located in alley, behind ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... July day, David Robinson drew up before Martin's shack. The little old box-house was still unpainted without and unpapered within. Two chairs, a home-made table with a Kansas City Star as a cloth, a sheetless bed, a rough cupboard, a stove and floors carpeted with accumulations of untidiness completed ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... Uncle Joshua, Cousin Phoebe and cousin Paul lived in a big, square barn-like structure. Its unpainted, barren bulk sat uneasily on top of a bare hill where the clay lay so close to the top-soil that in wet weather you could hardly labour up the precipitous path that led to their house, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... been cats, and several times he got bowled over—once, indeed, he got tangled up in the string of a sled and was dragged squealing with fright down the hill. Suddenly, however, Tommy gave a jump. Among the sleds flying by, most of them painted red, and very fine looking, was a plain, unpainted one, and lying full length upon it, on his stomach, with his heels high in the air, was Johnny Stout, with a red comforter around his neck, and a big cap pulled down over his ears. ...
— Tommy Trots Visit to Santa Claus • Thomas Nelson Page
... time Michelagnolo Buonarroti had uncovered the wall with the Last Judgment in the Papal Chapel, and there remained still unpainted the base below, where there was to be fixed a screen of arras woven in silk and gold, like the tapestries that adorn the Chapel. Wherefore, the Pope having ordained that the weaving should be done in Flanders, it was arranged with the consent of ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... hours a day at his table of unpainted deal for the defence of the fatherland in peril, this humble Secretary of the Sectional Committee could see no disproportion between the immensity of the task and the meagreness of his means for performing it, so filled was he with a sense of the unity in a common effort between himself ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... almost uniformly the case in Suffolk, where little stone is to be found, and where brick constructions are apt to be thought damp: but, it was a respectable edifice, with five windows in front, and of two stories. The siding was of unpainted cedar-shingles; and, although the house had been erected long previously to the revolution, the siding had been renewed but once, about ten years before the opening of our tale, and the whole building was in a perfect state of repair. ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... stripes and a bluish tail, is seen traveling over the crumbling wall, running into crannies and out again. Now it stops to look at me with its jewel of an eye. And there, on the rustic arbor, is a third one, matching the unpainted wood in hue. Its throat is white, but when it is inflated, as happens every few seconds, it turns to the loveliest rose color. This inflated membrane should be a vocal sac, I think, but I hear no sound. Perhaps the chameleon's voice is too fine ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... the Puritan spirit was virile in New England, with an almost Greek beauty of measured lines. It has a fanlight over the front door, windows exquisitely proportion, and in the center a vast brick chimney. Even now, though weathered and unpainted, it stands four-square upon the earth with a kind of natural dignity. A majestic chestnut tree grows near it, and a large old barn and generous sheds, now somewhat dilapidated, ramble ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... morning, as she painted her face before the glass, 'I am an old woman, or nearly. How many more years? Three at most, then I shall be like Lady Castlerich.' And the five minutes she had spent looking into an undyed and unpainted old age had frightened her. She had hated the world she had worshipped so long. She had hated all things, and wished herself out of sight of all things. That she who had been so young, so beautiful, so ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... morning, which it were a satire to call the Sabbath day, as it had seemed ridiculous to us to think of the day before being the jubilee day of our boyhood, we scratched open our eyes and looked about us to see what sort of a place it was we had fallen upon. Half a dozen small, unpainted, dingy wooden cabins stuck along the road-side, an iron furnace and a few other buildings, appendages of the latter, or non-descripts, greeted our sight. But there was one thing we saw which made us glad—a fine mill-stream, where though the water was turbid and yellow we bathed, and washed ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... few crossroads settlements—"hitch-rail towns"—unpainted and ramshackle, but nowhere was there an attempt at farming, for this part of Texas had gone hog wild over oil. Abandoned straw stacks had settled and molded, cornfields had grown up to weeds, what few head of cattle still remained lolled ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... sunshiny and nice like this. And they open their doors into their poor, bare, empty rooms and bid me welcome just as beautifully as Aunt Hope would do to our house. It is beautiful. Just beautiful! It's a bit of heaven right down here in this little unpainted house." ...
— Glory and the Other Girl • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... of Mrs. Patton; of course it was not long before we returned her call, and we were much entertained; we always liked to see our friends in their own houses. Her house was a little way down the road, unpainted and gambrel-roofed, but so low that the old lilac-bushes which clustered round it were as tall as the eaves. The Widow Jim (as nearly every one called her in distinction to the widow Jack Patton, who was a tailoress and lived at the other end ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... towards the water meadows clothed with fine elm trees—one with a large and curious excrescence on the bark. There was a deep porch on the south side of the Church, with seats on each side. Then, on red tiles, one entered between two blocks of pews of old brown unpainted oak (their doors are panels to the roof of the boys' school). In the space between them were two or three low benches for the children. There were three arches leading to the chancel, but that on the south side was closed by the pulpit and reading desk, and that ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the act of sitting down he discovered that the only arm-chair in the room was unsteady on its legs, these being of unequal length. There were two other chairs without arms, and equally unsteady on their legs. These, as well as everything in the room, were made of fir-wood— as yet unpainted. In the empty fire-place Jack observed a piece of charcoal, which he took up and began, in an absent way, to sketch on the white wall. He portrayed a raving maniac as large as life, and then, sitting down, ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... Caccia, and the work seems to have got little further than the foundations, until in 1660 it was resumed; Fassola, writing in 1671, says that the chapel was "levata in alto da terra l'anno del mille, sei cento e sessanta," or about ten years before his book appeared; it was still in great part unpainted, and he makes an appeal to his readers to contribute towards its completion. From both Fassola and Torrotti it would appear that only the group of figures on the mountain was in existence when they wrote. They both of them make the extraordinary statement ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... Reef Lightship would be withdrawn for fifteen days for repairs and docking interested him but little, however. In his mind's eye there loomed the picture of that great red freighter, with her foul bottom, rusty funnel and unpainted, weather-beaten upper works. ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... on his bed. Upon his table I saw pens and pencils, paper and ink, and a battered brass candlestick with a common tallow candle in it. His changes of clothing were flung on the bed; his money was left on the unpainted wooden chimney-piece; his wretched little morsel of looking-glass (propped up near the money) had been turned with its face to the wall. He perceived that the odd position of this last object had attracted ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... determined sort of way, as if they knew it was their business to be killed. Then come hogs killed, hogs scalded, hogs scraped, hogs cut up into shoulders, hams, sides, jowls; hogs salted, hogs smoked. Underneath this sketch are a number of unpainted buggy and carriage wheels; next, a pile of pick-handles; not far off, a little mound of grindstones; after the grindstones, a platoon of clothes-wringers; next, a solitary iron wheel-barrow communing with a patent fire-extinguisher; following these ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... everywhere. Continually we were pulling up by one of the tiny two-roomed shacks wherein dwelt the small settlers. The houses were always of new boards, unpainted, perched on four-by-fours, in the middle of bare ground, perhaps surrounded by young poplars or cottonwoods, but more likely fully exposed to the sun. A trifling open shed protected a battered buggy on the thills and wheels of which perched numerous chickens. A ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... widow with two children—the elder a daughter and the younger a son. The widow went in mourning for her husband a long time. She cut off her hair, let her dress lie untidy on her body and kept her face unpainted and unwashed. ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... along the street, a half-dozen blocks, to where she got aboard her car. The factory was in a place called South Chicago and as they went along evening was coming on. The streets were lined with small unpainted frame houses and dirty-faced children ran screaming in the dusty roadway. They crossed over a bridge. Two abandoned coal barges ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... clearing (as if even the mongrel scrub had shrunk away from them) built end-to-end, of weatherboards, and roofed with galvanised iron. Little ventilation; no verandah; no attempt to create, artificially, a breath of air through the buildings. Unpainted, sordid—hideous. Outside, heaps of ashes still hot and smoking. Close at hand, "butcher's shop"—a bush and bag breakwind in the dust, under a couple of sheets of iron, with offal, grease and clotted blood blackening the surface ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... exception, were "professors," and "had jined" not a Christian church, but some one of these native mountain pastors. The accompanying illustration gives a good idea of the mountain church; it is built of logs, and is without windows; the pulpit is an unpainted board; the seats slabs from the nearest saw mill, turned flat side up, with pegs driven in for legs. The ministry is in strict keeping with the church, and intellectually little in advance of the people. They take pride in the fact that ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 8, August, 1889 • Various
... give way: to my bewilderment, it shook, it sunk, it rolled back into nothing; its vanishing left an opening arched, leading into an arched passage, with a mystic winding stair; both passage and stair were of cold stone, uncarpeted and unpainted. Down this donjon stair descended a tap, tap, like a stick; soon there fell on the steps a shadow, and last of all, I was ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... rich trains over the rough unpainted floors in their parents' poor little huts, and held their crowned heads very high and demanded to be taken to court. The princesses were mostly geese-girls when they were their proper selves, and their geese were suffering, and their poor parents ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... piles of square boxes cased in mats, bales of airy summer stuffs, which, even in winter, scoffed at cold, and shamed it by audacious assumption of eternal sun, little specimen boxes of precious dyes that even now shine through my memory, like old Venetian schools unpainted,—these were all there in ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... the common living-room also; for the next thing she did was to open a cupboard and take out cups and saucers and arrange them on a leaf table which stood toward one end of the room. The furniture was wooden and plain; the woodwork of the windows was unpainted; the cups and plates were of the commonest kind; and the floor had no covering but two strips of rag carpeting; nevertheless the whole was tidy and very clean, showing constant care. Mrs. Mathieson had sunk into a chair, as one who had no spirit to do anything; and watched ...
— The Carpenter's Daughter • Anna Bartlett Warner
... in it, that all sin arises from some kind of ignorance * * *. For were the true visage of sin seen at a full light, undressed and unpainted, it were impossible, while it so appeared, that any one soul could be in love with it, but would rather flee from it as hideous ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... shacks where the miners lived was clinging to the mountain side at the rear, while the fronts were propped up with rough posts. They were all alike with patched rubberoid roofs, broken tile chimneys, windows with broken panes. Rough plank houses unpainted, though here and there a board showed traces of once having been red or brown. Between the houses at rare intervals a fence post remained. But the pickets had long since been torn away to fire the cookstove or grate. There were no gardens. Coal companies did not encourage ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... miss them if ever I am called away," he acknowledged, looking at the poor, unpainted ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... or another; but perhaps this is largely because they give an artistic or ornamental appearance to a thousand utensils and household articles which in America would be raw and plain in their obvious practicality. The room in which I write is a fine illustration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods, entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain touches and bits of wood carving that make it a work of art. Upon this point I must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose {49} books, although often more poetic and laudatory than accurate, are nevertheless ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... see bits of paper scattered around a house or in the street that I do not want to pick them up at once. I never see a filthy yard that I do not want to clean it, a paling off of a fence that I do not want to put it on, an unpainted or unwhitewashed house that I do not want to paint or whitewash it, or a button off one's clothes, or a grease-spot on them or on a floor, that I do not want ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... from the centre of a village, on that strip of seacoast in the southeastern part of New Hampshire, lived a self-made trader, Joshua Jackson. He occupied a small, unpainted house, two stories in front, with the roof sloping down at the back part to one story. In the rear was the barn, with its generous red door, a well with its long "sweep," a pig-pen, and a hen-pen; but the hens seemed equally or more at home in the barn, with liberty of the yard, ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... broken, which, with its hard bed, scanty covering and inverted camp-stool for a pillow, was painfully suggestive of discomfort and unrest. A large chest, which was used as a receptacle for food; a small deal table, and two or three unpainted chairs, completed the inventory of the contents of the chamber in which the greater portion of his time was passed when ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... by the Gaster Beck had little to fear from their new companion. A nine-gallon cask of oil served me as a sideboard; while a square table, a deal chair and a truckle-bed completed the list of my domestic fittings. At the head of my couch hung two unpainted shelves—the lower for my dishes and cooking utensils, the upper for the few portraits which took me back to the little that was pleasant in the long, wearisome toiling for wealth and for pleasure which had marked the life ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... unpainted side of the down slithering curtain, a canvas mountain-side was already rumbling rearward on castors. An overhead of foliage jerked suddenly higher, revealed a vista of brick wall. A soldiers' encampment, tents and all, rolled up like ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... sisters felt their own uprooted condition afresh, and their guests for the first time really comprehended the piteous contrast between that neat little village house, which now seemed a palace of comfort, and this cold, unpainted upper room in the remote Janes farmhouse. It was an unwelcome thought to Mrs. Trimble that the well-to-do town of Hampden could provide no better for its poor than this, and her round face flushed with resentment and the shame of personal responsibility. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the development of latent finger impressions on paper, cardboard, and newly finished or unpainted wood may involve a slightly more complicated technique than that in which powders are utilized, but the results justify the ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... group was one that stood a little detached and behind the others, as though shrinking from such prosperous company. It was made of unpainted wood, with leather hinges, and looked shabby in comparison with the jaunty red, green, and gray paint of some of the other boxes (with their cocky little metallic flags upraised). It bore the good ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... thrill in the atmosphere had passed. She was bustling about to make them tea, if her soft, quiet movements could be called bustling. She brought a kettle from the unpainted deal cupboard which housed her utensils of every day. She disappeared for a few seconds and returned with the kettle full of water and set it on the gas-stove. She pushed the papers away from one end of the table and covered it with a dainty tea-cloth. She brought out ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... like a man lost in a dream. His wide, hungry eyes devoured the scene. The rough lawn, the little unpainted house, the field of clear yellow wheat behind it, down across which streamed the sun, now almost ready to touch the high hill to the west, the crickets crying merrily, a cat on the fence nearby, dreaming, unmmdful of the stranger ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... Scadding's "Toronto of Old" we learn that it was of considerable dimensions, and of oblong shape. Its walls were composed of "a number of rather small, carefully hewn logs, of short lengths. The whole wore the hue which unpainted timber, exposed to the weather, speedily assumes. At the gable end, in the direction of the roadway from the nascent capital, was the principal entrance, over which a rather imposing portico was formed by the projection ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the little schooner which acts as weather-cock on one of the gables, and is now heading due west, has a new top-sail. It is a story-and-a-half cottage, with a large expanse of roof, which, covered with porous, unpainted shingles, seems to repel the sunshine that now strikes full upon it. The upper and lower blinds on the main building, as well as those on the extensions, are tightly closed. The sun appears to beat in vain at the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... buildings were mere canvas-faced up for a few feet, perhaps, with sheet iron or flimsy boards; interspersed there were a few wooden structures, rough and unpainted; and whereas several of the housings were large, none was more than two stories—and when now and again I thought that I had glimpsed a substantial stone front a closer inspection told me that the stones ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... for a few moments, waiting the coming inspiration. It has been so often said that we do not like to repeat the expression, but it really would have been a study for a painter—that old, gray room (for the walls being unpainted were of the color of Miss Thusa's dress;) the antique, brass-bound wheel, the scarlet tracery over the chimney, and the three figures illuminated by the flame-light of the blazing chimney. It played, that flame-light, with rich, warm lustre on Helen's soft, brown hair and ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... from any we have been accustomed to, only enhances the impression. The meanness of its appointments—the bare and scanty pulpit, with the paltry painted pillars on either side—the women's gallery with its great heavy curtain—the men's with its unpainted benches and dingy front—the tottering little table at the altar, with the commandments on the wall above it, scarcely legible through lack of paint, and dust and damp—so unlike the velvet and gilding, the marble and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... in a uniform of duck and a rimless cap with a gold band was pacing up and down the gravelled walk. A little farther on a bevy of women and children were bathing in the tepid waters of the river, while a man in an unpainted prau was keeping ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... forward and joined his companions. There was a conversation inaudible to her ears, and while she still pondered over her inexplicable hesitation the cowboys and the golden horse, followed by Marion, approached the group of squat, unpainted houses that bore without ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... snuggled up against the northern rim of the bench land, where the bleakness was softened a bit by the sheltering hills, and a willow-fringed creek with wild rosebushes and chokecherries made a vivid green background for the meager huddle of little, unpainted buildings. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... way off the main-travelled road in the town of Raymond there stood an old house which has much in common with houses of its day, but which is distinguished from them by the more evident marks of neglect and decay. Its unpainted walls are deeply stained by time. Cornice and window-ledge and threshold are fast falling with the weight of years. The fences were long since removed from all the enclosures, the garden-wall is broken down, and the garden itself is now grown up to pines ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... what,' he proceeded, 'there are plenty of others that would lay their heads at your feet if they were only your equals. There's that young parson—Gilbert, I think they call him—that is visiting his mother in the unpainted and threadbare-looking little house that stands behind this one. I've actually seen that fellow, in his rusty, musty coat, stop and look after you on the street; and every night, when I go home, he is sitting at the window ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... bleak prairie, separated from it only by a rough, unpainted picket fence, and flanked by uncouth structures of pine, one of which was used as a storehouse for quartermaster's property, the other as the post-trader's depository for skins and furs, there stood the frame cottage which Mr. Hayne had chosen as his home. As has been said, it was ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... only gay spot, the only cheerful patch of colour, almost exulting in its grim surroundings, was the heap of freshly thrown up soil from the grave. It was rich in colour as newly-coined gold. Resting upon it was a clean, white, unpainted coffin. The only ornament was a tin breastplate on the lid and ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... bed, threw up the narrow, unpainted sash and watched his tall, awkward figure swinging the lantern as he hurried away toward the shed where the gray mare lived in solitude. Then I crept back to bed again to plan my ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... dressed woman sat on one of the unpainted benches of the shady stoop, holding a baby in her arms. As Martin had said, slow tears of helpless misery were rolling down her cheeks, while from the bundle that she held came the worn-out, tired wail of a ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... up the brook, if one followed a path through mowing-fields from Farmer Ellison's, and crossed a little foot-bridge over the brook, he would come eventually upon a house, weather-beaten and unpainted, small and showing every sign of neglect. The grass grew long in the dooryard. A few hens scratched the weeds in what once might have been flower-beds. The roof was sagging, and the chimney threatened to topple in the ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... a perpetual bottle of brown medicine beside his place. The Kembles also enjoyed segregation from the mother table, the family invariably straggling in one by one. For the Beckers was reserved the slight bulge of bay window that looked out upon the Suburban street-car tracks and a battalion of unpainted woodsheds. A red geranium, potted and wrapped around in green crepe tissue paper, sprouted center table, a small bottle of jam and two condiments lending further distinction. A napkin with self-invented fasteners dangled from Mr. Becker's ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... males" very expeditiously. Close at their heels is a pale, poetic youth, lightly skimming over the inclined plane upon a delicate craft that looks like himself, and which he calls the "Mystery." Here comes a rude, unpainted sled, with two rough but merry youngsters lying prone upon it, one over the other, and their heels working up and down in the air in a most lively manner. Anon goes by an aristocratic-looking craft, bearing upon ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell
... which was characteristic of the Barlow household, the new stairs failed to get built that day or the next either; indeed it was nearly a week before a staircase was put in place, and as it was meant to be only temporary it was made of plain unpainted wood. ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... more slowly. The path, even the front path, was rough (he had noticed that last night); but the cottage, seen now with the glamour of its outlook still in his eyes, seemed not quite so impossible as he had thought. The grace of early spring lay upon it and all around. True, it was small and unpainted and in bad repair, but its smallness and its brownness seemed not out of keeping with the mountain-side. Its narrow veranda was railed by unbarked branches from the cedars. Its walls were rough and weather-beaten, its few windows, broad and low. The door was ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... paused on the hill at twilight to look down on Bradleyburg. The sight always seemed to intrigue and mystify the wild folk,—the shadowed street, the spire of the moldering church ghostly in the half-light, the long row of unpainted shacks, and the dim, pale gleam of an occasional lighted window. The old bull moose, in rutting days, was wont to pause and call, listen an instant for such answer as the twilight city might give him, then push on through the spruce ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... let himself in and out whenever he liked, and entered the house, dim and very cold with the accumulated frigidity of the whole winter in it, and looking as if the arrest of work upon it had taken place a thousand years before. It smelt of the unpainted woods and the clean, hard surfaces of the plaster, where the experiments in decoration had left it untouched; and mingled with these odours was that of some rank pigments and metallic compositions which Seymour had used ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... longer, softly turned the knob of her mother's door and entered the room. The glow of the open fire illumined the darkest side of the poor chamber. There were no trees near the house, and a full November moon streamed in at the unblinded, uncurtained windows, lighting up the bare interior—the unpainted floor, the gray plastered walls, and ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... houses, provided by appreciative land owners or tenants; some of these houses are beautiful structures modeled after modern residences and tenanted by twenty or thirty pairs of Martins; others are plain, unpainted soap boxes or the like, but the birds seem to take to one as kindly as the other, making nests in their compartments of weeds, grass, mud, feathers, etc. They also, and most commonly in the west, nest in cavities of trees making nests of any available ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... Matilda, a nice clean-looking Negro woman, was in bed, suffering from some kind of a pain in her head. She lives in a little two-room unpainted boxed house beside the highway in Humphrey. Her house is almost in the shadow of the big tank which was put up recently when the town ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... conversation, we went below, and in due season turned in, in a place where true comfort consists in oblivion. The morning, as the doctor predicted, was clear, the fog was gone, and the little French village lay before us in all the beauty of ugliness. The houses were small, unpainted, and uninviting. Fish-flakes were spread on the beach, and the women were busy in turning the cod upon them. Boats were leaving the shore for the fishing-ground. Each of these was manned by two or three or four hands, who ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... from the circle of its mere animal wants—which has never exhibited the least inclination to develop the most ordinary arts—which not only rejects clothing, but is absolutely indifferent to ornament—which leaves its weapons uncarved, its skin unpainted, free from tattoo, we must not despair of the general efficacy of civilization. These savages of Australia, as we call them, who have adorned the rocks of Depuch Island with their drawings, have in one thing proved themselves superior to the Egyptian and the Etruscan, whose ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... nonsense in one evening than he had heard in the whole course of his past life. I had merely preferred Parnell, then at the height of his career, to Michael Davitt who had wrecked his Irish influence by international politics. We sat round a long unpolished and unpainted trestle table of new wood in a room where hung Rossetti's 'Pomegranate,' a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and where one wall and part of the ceiling were covered by a great Persian carpet. Morris had said somewhere or other that carpets were meant for people who took their ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... through the wide jalousies. The bare floor was amply strewn with cool rugs; the chairs were inviting, deep, dreamy willows; the walls were papered with a light, cheerful olive. One whole side of her sitting room was covered with books on smooth, unpainted pine shelves. She flew to these at once. Before her was a well-selected library. She caught glimpses of titles of volumes of fiction and travel not yet seasoned from the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... put together, had but one story, was unpainted, and was altogether hardly equal, architecturally, to some of the huts which are to be found among the rocks at the ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... incline into the village, our miserable ponies commenced a shambling trot, the noise of which brought numerous idlers to the inn-door to inquire the news. This inn was a rambling, unpainted erection of wood, opposite to a "cash, credit, and barter store," kept by an enterprising Caledonian—an additional proof of the saying which ascribes ubiquity to "Scots, Newcastle grindstones, and Birmingham buttons." A tidy, bustling landlady, very ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... artists then in Rome often went of an afternoon to draw from the model. But J. never saw him there with as much as a scrap of paper or a pencil in his hands, and nobody ever saw him at work anywhere. For what he did not do he made up by telling us of what he might do. His were the pictures unpainted which, like the songs unsung, are always the best. He condescended to approve of the Old Masters, assured that the masterpieces he might choose to produce must rank with theirs, but he never forgot the great gulf fixed between himself and the Modern Masters, whose ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the furniture was of the roughest kind. Three coarse china plates and a broken-nosed milk-jug had been set on a greasy table scored with knife-cuts, and a couple of straw-bottomed chairs and a kitchen dresser of unpainted pine stood meagrely ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... of this waste place we call a farm, is located as near as possible to the dusty highway which passes through the country. Unpainted, or unwhitewashed, without a front fence, without shade trees or flowers near it, or by it, it stands like a grim and sombre sentinel, guarding a harsh and lonely existence, at once a prophecy and a warning. There is no home feeling in it. Everything connected with the internal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... placed under the care of' a sergeant and six rank and file, and marched along the chief canal for a mile, where I could not help remarking the numberless large rafts—you could not call them boats—of unpainted pine timber, which had arrived from the upper Elbe, loaded with grain: with gardens, absolute gardens, and cowhouses, and piggeries on board; while their crews of Fierlanders, men, women, and children, cut ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... our usually immaculate, if unpainted front door. I saw that rich crimson stain, then observed Steiner coming out looking very businesslike, and I made sure that some one had brained my noble partner ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... with the coal trade. Aloft were dingy gray spars, slack hemp rigging, untarred for years, and tan-colored sails, mended with patch upon patch of lighter-hued canvas that seemed about to fall apart from their own weight. She was English-built, bark-rigged, bluff in the bow, square in the stern, unpainted and leaky—on the whole as unkempt and disreputable-looking a craft as ever flew the black flag; and with the clank of the pumps marking time to the wailing squeak of the tiller-ropes, she wallowed through the waves like a log in ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... water bags, throat sprays, catarrh and kidney cures, calendars, fountain pens, stationery, and handy alcohol lamps. Flanking the sidewalks, symbolizing and completing the heterogeneous and bewildering effect of the street were long rows of heavy hemlock trunks, unpainted and stripped of bark, with crosstrees bearing webs of wires. Trolley cars rattled along, banging their gongs, trucks rumbled across the tracks, automobiles uttered frenzied screeches behind startled pedestrians. Janet was always galvanized ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was a shadeless, unpainted box. Within, whittled desks, staring windows and broken plastering made it a fit prison for the boys, whose rough ways were proof of the refining influence of their daily intercourse with the hired men. I wonder ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... my consciousness when I was a boy of ten at school near the tall stone gate-posts immortalised by the great novelist as guarding the entrance to the Old Manse. The big gambrel-roofed building standing close to the Battle Ground as it stood on the 19th of April, 1775, was unpainted and weather-stained, the structure showing dark among the trees as one looked from the road. All the world knows it as described outside and in by its famous tenant. It is a shrine which may well evoke breathless interest. The ancient wainscoting, the ample low-studded ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... streets almost deserted. To Keith, whose former acquaintance with the place had been entirely after nightfall, the view of it now was almost a shock—the miserable shacks, the gaudy saloon fronts, the littered streets, the dingy, unpainted hotel, the dirty flap of canvas, the unoccupied road, the dull prairie sweeping away to the horizon, all composed a hideous picture beneath the sun glare. He could scarcely find a man to attend his horse, and at the restaurant a drowsy Chinaman had ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... over the hills in a rush, when he saw a house half lost in the shadows. It was a narrow-fronted, two-storied, unpainted, lonely place, without sign of a porch. Here, where there was no vestige of a town near, and where there was no telephone, the news of the deaths of Bill Dozier and Buck Heath could not have come. Andy accepted the house as a blessing ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... for not going up the ladder, and she began to climb. She reached the top, and it was found that the painter had spread his red mixture on only part of the roof. There was room enough to walk on the unpainted part ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Keeping Store • Laura Lee Hope
... out the various places of interest as they went along, and before they knew that the miles had been passed, they were entering the outskirts of the village. It was a typical Western village: low, squat, unpainted sheds of houses, with sandy front yards, and heaps ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... in hiring a room in an old unpainted building near the academy for a small weekly sum. It was unfurnished, but they succeeded in borrowing a few dilapidated chairs from a neighbor who did not require them, and some straw ticks, which they spread ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... miles in rear of the villa. The house itself was a long, low building, of which the white stone walls had acquired the mellow tint that time and exposure to the seasons can alone impart. A solid balcony of carved unpainted oak ran completely round the house, its breadth preventing the rays of the sun from entering the rooms on the ground floor, and thereby converting them into a cool and delightful refuge from the heats of summer. The windows of the first and only story opened upon this balcony, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... a stable. The low ceiling, smoke-blackened and dingy, was pierced by several square trap-doors with rough-hewn ladders leading up to them. The walls of bare unpainted planks were studded here and there with great wooden pins, placed at irregular intervals and heights, from which hung over-tunics, wallets, whips, bridles, and saddles. Over the fireplace were suspended six or seven ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... an unpainted one, to be had from most any store for a few pennies, but the boards should be heavy enough to put on hinges and a hasp. It should be four or five inches larger than the kettle it is to contain. The easiest stuffings to procure are hay, excelsior, or paper; among ...
— The Community Cook Book • Anonymous
... productive period. One by one certain pinnacles of his fair snow-mountain of Titanic aim melted away. He began to realise the first disenchantment of the artist: the sense of dreams never to be accomplished. That land of the great unwritten poems, the great unpainted pictures: what a heritance there for the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... those upraised beseeching eyes, and at that heavy block of wood, and at the raw place the collar had worn on the neck, then at Old Man Thornycroft's bleak, unpainted house on the hill, with the unhomelike yard and the tumble-down fences, felt a great pity, the pity of the free for the imprisoned, and a great longing to own, not ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... although they argued on every question that ever arose local or general—the doctor because he liked it, and Father Healy to humour a friend. At the gate of "Avoca," as Michael O'Connor had called his house, the doctor reined his horse in, and the two men scanned the dilapidated gate and unpainted fence, part of the general decay of what had been a pleasant villa and garden in the ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... Each member of the carpet committee had paid (as a matter of pride, however ill she could afford it) three dollars and sixty-seven cents for sufficient carpet to lay in her own pew; but these brilliant spots of conscientious effort only made the stretches of bare, unpainted floor more evident. And that was not all. Traces of former spasmodic and individual efforts desecrated the present ideals. The doctor's pew had a pink-and-blue Brussels on it; the lawyer's, striped ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cabin with an additional "lean-to" of the same material, roofed with bark, and on the other side a larger and more ambitious "extension" built of rough, unplaned, and unpainted redwood boards, lightly shingled. The "lean-to" was evidently used as a kitchen, and the central cabin as a living-room. The barking of a dog as I approached called four children of different sizes ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... were the streets of Panama till that evening when she walked down for the mail, spurning the very dust on the sidewalks—and there was plenty to spurn. An old mansion of towers and scalloped shingles, broken-shuttered now and unpainted, with a row of brick stores marching up on its once leisurely lawn. The town-hall, a square wooden barn with a sagging upper porch, from which the mayor would presumably have made proclamations, had there ever been ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... some of his friends, Pike among them, have a meeting place along the lake. It's an old house, unpainted, and with very narrow windows, so I've been told. You find that house and likely you'll find ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... distances upon the canyon sides rose the headgear of a mine, surrounded with its few unpainted houses, and topped by its never-failing feather of black smoke. On near approach one heard the prolonged thunder of the stamp-mill, the crusher, the insatiable monster, gnashing the rocks to powder with its long iron ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... strange thing for Westerfelt to do, but, seeing the door open, he went into the church. Two windows on each side let in the moonlight. The benches were unpainted, and many of ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... hers was a venerable, unforgetable, and most beautiful old face for all that, and perhaps because of it. She knew that the kingdom of God is within; and being sure of that, she was sure of herself, serene, unpainted, unpretentious. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... these habitues—if they could be called habitues, this being their first summer—were as varied as their tastes. There was a band which played mornings and afternoons in an unpainted pine pagoda planted on a plot of slowly dying grass and decorated with more hanging baskets and Chinese lanterns; there was bathing at eleven and four; and there was croquet on the square of cement fenced about by poles and clothes-lines at all hours. Besides all this there were driving parties ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to these in sedateness and self-possession. One was prepared, in this wild region of forest, to behold some savage types of men; indeed, I craved to renew the vanished scenes of old. But, alas! one beheld, instead, men with well-washed, unpainted faces, and combed and common hair; men in suits of ordinary "store-clothes," and some even with "boiled" if not laundered shirts. One felt disappointed, almost defrauded. It was not what was expected, ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... lines of the beams and falling parallel upon them and between them; and upon the black wings and body of the eagle different shields of arms were displayed in gold and colours, the eagle itself being painted upon the natural unpainted wood—oak, I think. The work belonged to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, I believe. It seemed the very antithesis of Italian finesse and fancy, but the fitness of such decoration entirely depends upon its ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... grass clearing in the midst of the woods. Chips and bits of wood were littered about, and across the clearing was a roughly-built house of unpainted boards. The front door was propped open by a stick. Some of the panes of glass in the windows were broken, and the whole house had a melancholy, dilapidated look. I thought that I had never seen ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... where there seemed to be a chance of finding it. In five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers. I could not believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the colored fringe ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... before a long one-story building, constructed roughly but substantially of unpainted boards. Supper was being served, and they were just in time to partake of a typical lumber camp meal. The big table was laden with huge joints of meat, platters of biscuits and vegetables, while strong, black coffee was served in abundance. ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... These want, in appearance, the age, experience, dignity, and respectability, which an Englishman associates with the idea of legislators, and which are possessed by the superior branch of the congress. The members sat on very common chairs, and at unpainted desks, which were placed in rows. A few of the speakers commanded attention; but others talked on as long they pleased, while the rest were occupied in writing letters or reading newspapers. A spitting-box was placed at the feet of each member, and, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... yellow; but in the late fall and winter it dropped to an inconsequential creek of clear water, hard with alkali. The inevitable "Main Street" was wide and its two business blocks consisted of one-story buildings of log and unpainted pine lumber. There was the inevitable General Merchandise Store with its huge sign on the high front, and the inevitable newspaper which always exists, like the faithful at prayer, where two or three are gathered together. There were saloons in plenty with irrelevant and picturesque names, ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... wooden-bottomed chair and a rickety table added to the small cot-bed which had been almost its sole furnishing when he saw it last. The walls, bare as his hand, stretched without relief from baseboard to ceiling, and the floor from door to window showed an unbroken expanse of unpainted boards, save for the narrow space between chair and table, where a small rug had been laid. A cheerless outlook for a tired man, but it seemed to please Hammersmith. There was paper and ink on the table, and the lamp which he took care to examine held oil enough to last ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... the low, unpainted old farm-house looked to us, as we rushed, pell-mell, into the dooryard, never noticing, in our own relief, the ungracious scowl with which the master and mistress of the house regarded ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... the features of the craft, as one by one they became more plainly revealed. Every thing seemed stranger now, than when partially visible in the dingy night. The stanchions, or posts of the bulwarks, were of rough stakes, still incased in the bark. The unpainted sides were of a dark-colored, heathenish looking wood. The tiller was a wry-necked, elbowed bough, thrusting itself through the deck, as if the tree itself was fast rooted in the hold. The binnacle, containing the compass, was defended at the sides by yellow matting. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... first bold and rough, covered with dense thickets of second-growth timber, now became smoother and more fertile. Scattered farms, with square, unpainted houses, and long, thatched barns, began to creep over the hills toward the river. There was a hamlet, called St. Charles, with a rude little church and a campanile of logs. The cure, robed in decent black and wearing a tall ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... into calculations about the cost of things. He had seen unpainted wooden tables you could put mahogany stain on, and they'd look all you'd want. He'd seen a splendid little rocking- chair in Second Avenue for five dollars, one of the padded kind that ladies like. He had seen an arm-chair for a man that was only seven; ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... through Golden Gate and were in the quiet water of the bay. By the time mother and Sue were on deck, we were nearing the wharf. I thought then that San Francisco was rather disappointing in its looks, with its unpainted houses of all kinds of architecture, and the streets like washouts in the hills, but soon I learned to love it with a faithfulness which was felt by many of the pioneers and will end only ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... washing was done and the labourers had their meals; here geese and turkey-hens were sitting on their eggs under the benches, and here were the beds of Lyubov Osipovna and her two sons. The furniture in the parlour was unpainted and evidently roughly made by a carpenter; guns, game-bags, and whips were hanging on the walls, and all this old rubbish was covered with the rust of years and looked grey with dust. There was not one picture; ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... she went about the room, picking up toys and little discarded garments left by the children, folding the clothes away, her tall, graceful figure, in the large curves of its repeated bending and straightening, seeming to exemplify some unpainted Millet-like idea of mother-work, emblematic of its unceasing round. She was hanging up a tiny cloak in the half gloom of her closet, when she heard her husband's step once more stealing into the room, and the next moment saw ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... had followed fast upon the balmy breath of May, and though the air at dawn was still iced with crystal dew, the sun that shone through the open windows of the little chapel, burned fiercely on the unpainted pine seats, the undraped reading-desk of the pulpit, the tarnished gilt pipes of the cabinet organ ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... toward me. The troop was so long it seemed almost as though there was no end to it. An officer, who was riding on the side, said to me, "You stay in there with the rest of them and you will be protected." Then they went to the shanty, a little hut made of unpainted lumber, and smashed it up, scattering all the men inside. Then the ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag
... of the house was not more splendidly furnished, and the house itself, as described in the inventory, must have looked very much like one of those modest and unpainted little wood structures which are, to this day, to be seen in many parts of the banks of the river Mississippi, and in the Attakapas and Opelousas parishes. They are the tenements of our small planters who own only a few slaves, and they retain ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... he drove out onto the west side where, in a dingy and squalid neighborhood, the taxi stopped in front of a grimy unpainted three-story brick building, from which a great deal of noise and dust were issuing. Jimmy found the office on the second floor, after ascending a narrow, dark, and dirty stairway. Jimmy's experience of manufacturing plants was extremely limited, but he needed no experience ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs |
