"Ramshackle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the black and tan joint, I took another long look at its forbidding exterior. Below, it was a saloon and dance hall; above, it was a "hotel." It was weatherbeaten, dirty, and unsightly, without, except for the entrance; unsanitary, ramshackle, within, except for the tawdry decorations. At every window were awnings and all were down, although it was on the shady side of the street in the daytime and it was now getting late. That was the mute sign post to the initiated of the character ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... smile hovering about his lips, brought tears to Valerie's eyes. "Well, well.... I'm so glad I'm cleared in your eyes. I'd 've hated you to go through life thinking that I—was like that...." Suddenly he caught at her arm and pointed to the ramshackle bridge. "There's another instance of the rot we're out to stop. Another winter, and that bridge 'd be in the stream, damming it at the deepest and narrowest point. Result, the water's diverted and spreads all over the road, trying ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... disposal of the distinguished party. Don Vincente, journeying south from Sta. Marta, had embarked at Cayta, the principal port of Costaguana, and came to Sulaco by sea. But the chairman of the railway company had courageously crossed the mountains in a ramshackle diligencia, mainly for the purpose of meeting his engineer-in-chief engaged in the final survey ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... arms, and was drawn through the streets in a small cart by four dogs. By looking at you he could see all the clockwork inside, as could a boy who was led about by his mother at the end of a string. Every Friday there was the market, when a dozen ramshackle carts containing vegetables and cheap crockery filled the centre of the square, resting in line on their shafts. A score of farmers' wives or daughters in old-world garments squatted against the town-house within walls of butter ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... of Spanish grandeur in the village are the two ramshackle coaches that are used for hearses at state funerals. Most of the larger houses are, however, in repair, although the canvas ceilings and the board partitions seem to be in need of paint. These houses ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... I have them dished up occasionally by mother, although she prefers to descant upon the immortal eighties, when she was a leader herself and 'money wasn't everything.' We never had so much of it anyhow. I know Grandfather Ballinger built this ramshackle old house—" ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... "That old ramshackle of a lumber nag whose every rib you can count through her skin is your beautiful thoroughbred?" ejaculated his friend, incredulously. "Come now, don't ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 'ere bit of bread is as hard as wood, but I am getting through with it, and that's what I mean to do about our escape. Where you can't take a fair bite at anything, why, you must nibble; and I must go on nibbling now to find some way of getting out of this here ramshackle place. If I can just contrive a hole so that I can climb on the roof whenever I like, and be able to cover it up again so that these beauties don't know, I don't feel a bit doubtful of being able to slide down to the eaves, ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... rocks and bear, closely set in their compact, green, velvet-like foliage, tiny flowers as brilliant as gems. A ruby-red one amongst these is "the stalkless bladder-wort" (Silene acaulis), having no more resemblance at first sight to the somewhat ramshackle bladder-wort of our fields than a fairy has to a fishwife. There are many others of these cushion-forming, diminutive plants, with white, blue, yellow, and pink florets. Examined with a good pocket lens, they reveal unexpected beauties of detail—so graceful and harmonious that one wonders ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... train—a string of the most ramshackle carriages the line could muster, and the carriage in which I found myself smelt as if it had been in Billingsgate for a month. However, I could sit down this time. There was neither honeymoon, commercial traveller, nor man in the corner to disturb my peace; only a rollicking crowd of Irish harvest ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... temple—a temple to the god Appetite. His temple is truly a sorry looking shack, but it is good enough for the god he serves. I know a very seedy individual, going around begging a living of whomsoever will give him a dime or a nickel. He has built his temple to the god Idleness. It is a ramshackle affair, to be sure, but it is plenty good for the god he serves. I know another fellow who has built a very ordinary looking temple—rather poor inside and out. He served the god "Let Well Enough Alone." There are many temples like his, and little joy ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... him, pray remember, and leaving the place open to French attack. That is the sort of Deputy-Governor that the late Government thought fit to appoint: an epitome of its misrule, damme! He leaves Port Royal unguarded save by a ramshackle fort that can be reduced to rubble in an hour. ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... that Ludgate Circus was deserted except for a ramshackle cab with a drunken driver pouring forth a hoarse story of a mean fare to a sleepy policeman leaning against a lamp post. The sight of two gentlemen on foot when all 'buses had stopped running for the night raised fleeting hopes in the cabman's ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... were compelled to cross had long been neglected, and was now thickly overgrown with weeds. Not until we turned the corner of the great ramshackle building, which in other and more prosperous days had been dedicated to the curing of the leaf, did we perceive any signs of the presence of our antagonists. They were standing upon the farther side, directly opposite the door, and both bowed slightly ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... faces a wide, treeless valley and is backed by an equally bare hill. To the west the purple peaks of the Rampart range are visible. It is a group of ramshackle and dispersed cabins—not Western enough to be picturesque, and so far from being Eastern as to lack cleanliness or even comfort, and the young Englishman who rode over the hill one sunset was bitterly disappointed in ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... the ramshackle 'bus, and was driven a long distance through very sandy streets to the hotel on the St. Lawrence, and, securing a room, made arrangements to be called before daybreak. He engaged the same driver who had taken him out to "The Greys," as it was locally called, on ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... the Inn almost every day to play with Dan Frost, the landlord's son. They had played in the stables, then stocked with a score of horses, where now there were only two or three; in the great haymows of the old barn in the clearing back of the Inn; in the ramshackle garret under that amazing roof; or, best of all, in the abandoned bowling-alley, where they rolled dilapidated ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... war between England and Germany he took the Irish case, weighty with eight centuries of history and tradition, and he threw it out of the window. He pledged Ireland to a particular course of action, and he had no authority to give this pledge and he had no guarantee that it would be met. The ramshackle intelligence of his party and his own emotional nature betrayed him and us and England. He swore Ireland to loyalty as if he had Ireland in his pocket, and could answer for her. Ireland has never been disloyal to England, not even at this epoch, ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... of being some such ramshackle structure as might have been deduced from the Lensman's casual terminology, was in fact a fully-equipped observatory. Its staff was not large—eight men worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts of two men each—but the ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... sleep in was an old, ramshackle affair, absolutely over-run with rats. Great, big, black fellows, who used to chew up our leather equipment, eat our rations, and run over out bodies at night. German gas had no effect on these rodents; in fact, they seemed to thrive ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... his own horses, groomed again, and gorging their fill of good, clean grain in the Jew's ramshackle stable place. Joanna he turned loose, to sneak into any rat-hole that she chose. Then, with their swords drawn—for if trouble came it would be certain to come suddenly—he and his nine made a wide-ringed circuit of the city, to a point where ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... insist that you shall stand by with your arms folded while Austria is strangling your little brother to death." What answer did the Russian Slav give? He gave the only answer that becomes a man. ["Hear, hear!"] He turned to Austria, and said: "You lay hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle empire [loud applause and laughter] limb from limb." And he ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a bit ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... deteriorated in value. There is plenty to be got out of the land if only more could be spent on it; they want a new barn and some outhouses, and some of the fencing is disgraceful. As for the Priory itself—it is the Priory farm, you know—it is an old ramshackle place and in sore need of repair; some of the floors are rotten, and there are holes and crannies, and the mice and rats hold high revel in ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... their non-commissioned officers, perhaps half a dozen were trying to do something, but having no directing head or hand, accomplishing little. It looked as though nothing but the bursting asunder of that ramshackle building would liberate its human charge, for even those who, battered, bleeding, and suffocated, would gladly have escaped into outer air, were packed in, sardine-like, and incapable of self-extrication. To the appeal of the conductor that he should regain control of his men and prevent destruction ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... leaning over the water, palmettos standing as irregular sentries along the low, reeflike island which stretched away out of the picture. There was the gigantic, lonely pine he knew well, and, yes—he could just make it out—there was his own ramshackle little pier, which stretched in undulating fashion, like a long-legged, wading caterpillar, from the abrupt shore-line of ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... a flat beach of deep black sand, where they generally left their personal effects for lack of means of transportation. They climbed to a ragged thoroughfare of open sheds and ramshackle buildings, most of them in the course of construction. Beneath crude shelters of all sorts and in great quantities were goods brought in hastily by eager speculators on the high prices. The four hundred deserted ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... mercy of one idea only, and he began to see, very soon after he had investigated the two houses—the ramshackle shop and the riverside den—that if he intended to progress he could not afford to sit in the street and drink in the cafe opposite Leh Shin's dwelling for an interminable space of weeks. He had limitless patience, but he was quick ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... for proof, and although fresh paint was spread upon the panels, and the President coachman wore his hat with knowing air, on one side and handled the ribbons lightly, and dandled the drag, inviting jauntily the passer-by, the public recognized the ramshackle old "conveyance," and scoffingly refused to trust ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... long before I perceived the ramshackle sap-house ahead of me among the maples. Then I caught sight of her whom I ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... of any great interest except to business men. One part of the city is very like another. I was told that some of the finest buildings were of the Italian order; but I should say that by far the greater number were of the Ramshackle order. Although the first house in the place was only built in 1835, the streets nearest to the wharves look already old and worn out. They are for the most part of wood, and their paint is covered with dirt. But though prematurely old, they are by no means picturesque. Of ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... down upon the smoke-blackened temple; the Ghetto gates have fallen long ago, and nothing remains of its former crowded dwelling-places but a quaint ramshackle old house of Oriental aspect, and the old cemetery, Beth-Chaim, "the House of Life," as the Jews call it. This is no doubt the oldest existing and still preserved Jewish cemetery in Europe. Here tombstones stand closely ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... there's no other victim," said Jack. "If there is none, it will let the ice company off easier than they really deserve for allowing so ramshackle a building to stand, overhanging the river just where we like to do most of ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... in between two big tenements to a ramshackle rear barrack, Nibsy, the newsboy, halted in the shadow of the doorway and stole a long look ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... sixty-two miles by sea. To all this did captain Capstan "seriously incline," and the result was, two berths in the "Balaklava," several cans of preserved meats and soups, a hamper of ale, two bottles of Scotch whisky, a ramshackle, Halifax van for the luggage, a general shaking of hands at departure, and another set of white sails among the many white sails in the blue ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... gazing at the straits, and the huge Cape Horners creeping out to sea, and imminent Tamalpais. Thence, on my homeward way, I might visit that strange and filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of wild animals and birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of monkeys, and a poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whisky was administered by a proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even neglect Nob Hill, which is itself a kind of slum, being the habitat of the mere millionaire. There they dwell upon the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... two industrious mechanics named Pierre and Baptiste. They dwelt in a ramshackle tenement at Sault aux Beloeuil, where each had half-a-dozen children to support, besides their wives; who, it is grievous to relate, were drones. They were only nominally acquainted with that godly art ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... done with all the horrible little villages we used to pass through, in the DILIGENCE? What have they done with all the summer dust, with all the winter mud, with all the dreary avenues of little trees, with all the ramshackle postyards, with all the beggars (who used to turn out at night with bits of lighted candle, to look in at the coach windows), with all the long-tailed horses who were always biting one another, with all the big postilions in jack-boots - with all the mouldy cafes that we used to stop at, ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... of being jolted about abominably in a ramshackle vehicle. The surroundings were vague, as they always are in dreams. Low hills and sandy waste and sparse shrubs. Where was it, the "Great Desert," or some stretch in South America or in Mexico? In my dream I was dozing, trying ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to five-and-twenty years ago,' said a writer in a daily newspaper on Social Reform in 1910, 'when the living Sir Charles Dilke was the President of the Local Government Board, no one cared how the poor lived or fared. They could reside in the most ramshackle tenements in insanitary slums, for which, by the way, they were charged exorbitant rents, far higher than what they would now pay for the well-ventilated and well-equipped self-contained houses of the London County ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... my father and myself should go to Laval together. We started a couple of days later, and managed to travel by rail as far as Rennes. But from that point to Laval the line was now very badly blocked, and so we hired a closed vehicle, a ramshackle affair, drawn by two scraggy Breton nags. The main roads, being still crowded with troops, artillery, and baggage waggons, and other impedimenta, were often impassable, and so we proceeded by devious ways, amidst which our driver lost himself, in such wise that at night we had ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... hour Eben rounded up the "Eb and Flo" near the shore in front of the Grimsby house, which was a poor, ramshackle affair. The water here was deep, so he was able to run close to the bank. A long-haired, ragged, dirty boy pushed off for his father in a leaky boat, and took him ashore. In a few minutes more the "Eb and Flo" was again ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... offices, and removed to their present very handsome quarters which they have for so long occupied. I very well recollect the style of their old place of business and how the exterior strongly reminded me of the cotton warehouses in Liverpool. The interior was a big, rambling, ramshackle kind of a place with but few pretensions to being an office such as we see at the ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... lived, would have become one of the leading booksellers of the day. He was for some years at Hodgson's, and possessed a remarkable taste for, and knowledge of, books. He left Hodgson's and started on his own account in the old ramshackle house already referred to. This shop presented so unfavourable an exterior that even the Income-tax Fiend never 'called in,' although at one time there were several thousands of pounds' worth of books in it. Hutt did a ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... good a condition, he should be unworthy to appear before his sovereign, and should deserve chastisement before God and men. As a matter of fact this was untrue, for the French at Quebec were starving and incapable of resistance. A single well-directed broadside would have brought Champlain's ramshackle fort tumbling about his ears. His bold front, however, served its purpose for the time being; Kirke decided to postpone the attack on Quebec and to turn his attention to Roquemont's fleet. He burned the captured vessels ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... gulch of the Lunar Appenines, a pattern of dazzling glare and harsh moonshadows. Ramshackle mine-buildings of prefabricated plastic straggled out from the shrouding blackness under a pinnacled ridge. Denver eyed the forbidding terrain with hair-raising panic. He checked the speed of the racing space sled, circled once, and tried to pick out a soft spot. The ship ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... thumping heart and nerves all a-tingle that I followed Abel Crone out of his front shop into a sort of office that he had at the back of it—a little, dirty hole of a place, in which there was a ramshackle table, a chair or two, a stand-up desk, a cupboard, and a variety of odds and ends that he had picked up in his trade. The man's sudden revelation of knowledge had knocked all the confidence out of me. It had never crossed my mind that ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... up, and but for the little curling up of her lip, in which her teeth bit hard, she would have looked a picture of serene indifference. We were nearing Frenchy's shack, in front of which the path leads to the cove, and finally we were opposite the ramshackle place. It must be very dreadful to a girl, who has learned to admire a man, perhaps even to love him, to discover that her idol has feet of clay. She had allowed the best of her nature, I could see it now, to be drawn in admiration and regard towards a man she deemed unworthy. That odor of the ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... personally searched every foot of this particular building, and was confident that it afforded no hiding-place. The behavior of the dog, however, was susceptible of only one explanation; and Seton recognizing that the clue to the mystery lay somewhere within this ramshackle building, became seized with a conviction that he was ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... answered Eradicate promptly, as he climbed back off the seat, into the body of his ramshackle vehicle. ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... but rats in that ramshackle old place, Beautiful Joe," she said, as she pulled the plank away; "and as you don't hurt them, I don't see what you want to get in for. However, you are a sensible dog, and usually have a reason for having your own way, so I am going ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... entirely on its summer visitors. At the time of the death of Mr Ira Nutcombe, the only all-the-year-round inhabitants were the butcher, the grocer, the chemist, the other customary fauna of villages, and Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who rented the ramshackle farm known locally as Flack's and eked out a precarious livelihood ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... of berry-boxes from the store in his little hand-waggon. The rest of the afternoon he spent in making a crate to hold the boxes. Long and patiently he toiled, and at times Mrs. Royal went into the workshop to see how he was getting along. When supper time came it was a queer ramshackle affair he had constructed, which would hardly hold together long enough to reach the wharf, let alone the rough handling it ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... she went up-stairs, and got a certain disused attic into some sort of order. The attic was far away from the rest of the house; it was the top story of a wing, which had been added on to the tall, ramshackle old house. In some of the rooms underneath, the Franklin family themselves slept; in others they lived, and in others they cooked. The rest of the house, therefore, was free for the ...
— Dickory Dock • L. T. Meade
... half an hour of daybreak when a slow-riding, silent group of men came to a halt and dismounted in the narrow lane some distance from the ramshackle abode of Martin Hawk, squatting unseen among the trees that lined the steep bank of the Wabash. A three hours' ride through dark, muddy roads lay behind them. There were a dozen men in all,—and one woman, at whose side rode the hunter, Stain. They had stopped at the ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... Furman house is ramshackle but it is still standin' out dere and is used as a shelter for sawmill hands dat is cuttin' down de big pines and ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... colorful and steep vistas that lay along the zig-zag roads where ramshackle victorias clattered at crazy speed. Below him was the world's most vivid spread of sun-kissed color; the Bay of Naples curving nobly from his point of view to Ischia's misty bulwark, in a glistening spread ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... street a luxurious limousine was tooting for a ramshackle prairie schooner to turn to one side. Behind the automobile plodded a forlorn mule dragging a wagon-load of empty boxes. Behind that came an army ambulance followed by an electric truck. A handsome soldier on a restive ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... to-morrow, as soon as I can get away. Give Molly my love, Jock, and say I was often thinking of her. He is a decent fellow, Jock Magee!" she explained to her companion, as the ramshackle vehicle trundled away in the darkness. "A decent fellow, but he has been terrible unlucky with his wives. They fall ill on him as soon as they're married, and cost him pounds in doctors and funerals. This one has asthma, ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... no duplicate key to apartment No. 12, citizen Rouget ordered his men to break in the door. It did not take very long: the house was old and ramshackle and the doors rickety. The next moment the party stood in the room which a while ago the Englishman had so accurately described to pere Lenegre ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... a single row of ramshackle buildings, not unlike a small Missouri River town. The citizens, so far as visible, formed a queer collection of old men addicted to rum. They all came out to admire Ladrone and to criticise my pack-saddle, and as they stood about spitting and giving wise instances, they reminded me of ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... the famous Golden Horn I would have looked at it with more interest, but I saw nothing save a lot of moth-eaten barges and some queer little boats like gondolas. Then we came into busier streets, where ramshackle cabs drawn by lean horses spluttered through the mud. I saw one old fellow who looked like my notion of a Turk, but most of the population had the appearance of London old-clothes men. All but the soldiers, Turk and ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... nicely on fire," Remonencq told his sister, when she came to take up her position again on the ramshackle chair. "And now," he continued, "I shall go to consult the only man that knows, our Jew, a good sort of Jew that did not ask more than fifteen per cent of ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... ramshackle, disused store building. Coldriver had one, especially well located, and not so ramshackle as it might have been. It was big; its front was crossed by a broad porch; its show windows were not show windows at all, but were put there solely to give light. Coldriver did not know there was such ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... about that, if he was employed in another shop, he had no right to go into Number Thirteen. That's a violation of rules. But if he's in Rad's ramshackle stable he ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... in her little castle, or rather the Liberty Realty Company's little castle. She wanted to be alone. It was very quiet. Outside the birds could be heard twittering in the vine on the ramshackle little porch. The kettle sang cheerily in the kitchen. There was that musty indoor odor of the country homestead, the odor which soldier boys remembered and longed for in trenches and dugouts. And mingling with this was the fragrance of flowers coming in through the open window. The dog ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... William Linder, as he had fondly hoped, but to an obscure address not far from the Navy Yard in Brooklyn. To this address, having looked up and gathered in the B-flat trombonist, Average Jones led the way. The pair lurked in the neighborhood of the ramshackle house watching the entrance, until toward evening, as the door opened to let out a tremulous wreck of a man, palsied with ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... then see that there was a square space which, though similar in appearance to the rest of the gallery, concealed the entrance to the shaft. He pushed it upward. It gave easily. It was a trap-door, leading into a square, ramshackle shed! ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... scene Abe Switch meets the proprietor of the Diamond Palace Saloon, a ramshackle affair which to the owner ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... separated from their boy friends. A great, ramshackle bus, and another vehicle, were waiting at the end of the platform. An old man in a long duster stood beside the bus to help the girls in and see to their baggage. ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... desolate little spot is the campo santo of San Gabriel; rather desolate, and very dusty. The ramshackle wooden crosses stagger wildly on the shapeless mounds; the dilapidated whitewashed railings, cracked and blistered by the sun, look much as though they might be bleached bones, tossed carelessly about; and the badly painted, misspelled inscriptions yield up their brief announcements ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... a most important point in the campaign, was far from attractive in feature, being made up of a half-dozen unsightly houses, a ramshackle tavern propped up on two sides with pine poles, and the weatherbeaten building that gave official name to the cross-roads. We had no tents—there were none in the command—so I took possession of the tavern for shelter ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of Marion were of great mills and sawdust-burners along a wide river; of broad, sawdust-covered streets; of a single block of good, brick stores on a main thoroughfare which almost immediately petered out into the vilest and most ramshackle frame "joints"; of wide side streets flanked by small, painted houses in yards, some very neat indeed. Tally walked rapidly by the respectable business blocks, but pushed into the first of the unkempt frame saloons beyond. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... first-floor windows of which announced the tenancy of a maker of gymnastic appliances; and having kissed Madame Brandt's hand with awful solemnity and bowed deeply to me, he preceded us down the passage, out into the yard, and into a ramshackle studio at the end, where his cats ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... are delicious; we could sit in our shirt-sleeves until any hour, without any perceptible chill in the air, playing cards, or smoking and talking, or reading by a lantern. Williams and I found picket a great resource; and many a good game of whist have I had sitting in a crowded quartette in our ramshackle battery Cape-cart, with an inch of ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... town, which was reached late the following day, Farwell engaged two rooms at the ramshackle tavern and informed Pine that he was to ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... in a bush-clad hollow, two miles from the world in general, stood a little, old, ramshackle shanty. The location was one that seekers would hardly have found without a trail to lead them ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... by three Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them—this is twenty-five years ago, reader!—a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand—and teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered—as the friendly mists rose—under a great Tarpaulin at the barge's stern. Where is that girl now, I wonder? ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... All day she was American, practically, and proud of the work of her head and hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions. By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers. At college she had learned a trade without knowing it. The girls had found out that she was the designer of her own gowns. She had ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small—a very small—way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The poultry she ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... your living out here in this ramshackle old chicken-coop, when you might have a tidy flat on Paulina Street; and the doctor could have a desk in my office next door to his old boss." Dr. Leonard spoke testily, and Alves laid her hand soothingly on ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the black troops, the blue troops of the army of priests; the snuffy regiments of Capuchins, grave and grotesque; the trim French abbes; my lord the bishop, with his footman (those wonderful footmen); my lord the cardinal, in his ramshackle coach and his two, nay three, footmen behind him;—flunkeys, that look as if they had been dressed by the costumier of a British pantomime; coach with prodigious emblazonments of hats and coats-of-arms, that seems as if it came ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... else visible but a few dusky groves of willows and the dazzling snow. The ramshackle wooden hotel was rather more than usually badly-kept and comfortless, and Winston, who had managed to conciliate his host, felt relieved one afternoon when the latter flung down ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... than in all the line from Piccadilly to Whitechapel; a painter can pick up more food for his easel in this queer, old street—an antiquarian can find there more tales and crusts for his noddle, than in all Regent Street and Portland Place. We love a ramshackle place like this; it does one good to get out of the associations of the present century, and to retrograde a bit; it is pleasant to see how people used to pig together in ancient days, without any of the mathematical formalities of the present day; it keeps one's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... the height of the original: the vacant space has been very roughly filled up, and the numerous holes and crevices support a fine growth of weeds, and a strong young tree has also taken root in the ramshackle stone work. From the central tower, gargoyles grin above the elaborately carved buttresses and finials in remarkable contrast ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... the fateful part Jackson's arm was to play in my life. Jackson himself did not impress me when I hunted him out. I found him in a crazy, ramshackle* house down near the bay on the edge of the marsh. Pools of stagnant water stood around the house, their surfaces covered with a green and putrid-looking scum, while the stench that arose from ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... be a ramshackle affair with an ill-kept but powerful-looking horse between the shafts. I climbed up, and as I took my seat I observed to my companion that I wished first of all ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... the ancient ruins, for the conveyance did not start until four o'clock in the afternoon. When that hour came he made one of the travellers, all country folks, who were packed close as pigeons in a crate in the ramshackle, noisy, broken-down vehicle, which lumbered on its way behind its lean and suffering horses, through woods and hills and along mountain passes of a grandeur and a beauty on which the eyes of educated travellers ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... dodging from tree to tree along the edge of the mere, in order to keep out of view of anyone moving on the road. Over against the ale-house I crept still more warily through the wood to the edge of the road. There was no one moving in or about the ramshackle little place, but there was one unexpected thing in sight which gave me pause. Hitched by the reins to a staple in the signpost was the finest horse I had ever set eyes on, a slender, sinewy stallion, champing on his bit and pawing nervously on ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Into a ramshackle building on the corner of a vivaciously ugly street Lockwood led his friend in quest of the greatest artist. An old man in a skull cap, woolen shirt, baggy trousers and carpet slippers appeared in a darkened doorway. With his long white beard he stood bent ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... have been plenty in past ages; it seems unreal and impossible even though we know it is true; it violates all our feeling as to what a country should be in order to have a right to exist; and it seems as though it was too ramshackle to go on holding together any length of time. Yet it has survived, much in its present shape, two centuries of storms that have swept perfectly unified countries from existence and others that have brought ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... place. The Mississippi Steel Company had now two huge Bessemer converters, in which a volcano of molten flame roared all day and night. It had bought up the whole western side of the town, and cleared away half a hundred ramshackle dwellings; and here were long rows of coke-ovens, and two huge rail-mills, and a plate-mill from which arose sounds like the crashing of the day of doom. Everywhere loomed rows of towering chimneys, and pillars of rolling black ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... when it has forced physical suffering to the highest point without impairing the mental functions. Thus it was with Silas Carringer, a young man of uncommonly high spirit, when he found himself a total stranger in a ramshackle Mexican city one rainy night in November. In his possession remained not a single article that he might have pawned for a morsel of food. And he had already stripped his body of every shred of clothing ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... was content to let well enough alone after enlarging the house, laying turf, and planting shrubs and flowers. He found The Hollies a ramshackle place, and left it even more so, but with a new note of artistry and several unexpectedly charming vistas. Thus, the big double window opened straight into an irregular garden which merged insensibly into a sloping lawn ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... exact middle of the piazza, and took these steps with her usual gentle precision of movement. She had no sooner taken up the position which she felt to be the proper one for her, than round the corner came the Bywood stage,—a long, lumbering, ramshackle vehicle, in which sat Mrs. Murray, a kind-looking nurse, and the twelve convalescent children who were to have the first ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... The town kept as deserted as ever, and it seemed almost startling to me when I was posted sentry on the roof, after looking out over the wide, sandy, dusty plain, over which the sunshine was quivering and dancing, to peer down amongst the little ramshackle native huts without a sign of life amongst them, and it took but little thought for me to come to the conclusion that the natives knew of something terrible about to happen, and had made that their reason for going away. Though, all the same, it ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... sauntering in, scanned every detail with fastidious distaste. To-day, for the first time, a great longing possessed him for the airy ramshackle bungalows of the Frontier he loved, for the trumpet-call to "stables," for a sight of his squadron and the feel of a saddle ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the station we halted before a ramshackle old two-storey house that was covered by roses and hidden among orange and fig trees. The approach led through an irregular plantation of cedar and pepper trees, pomegranates and other shrubs, and masses of chrysanthemums and cosmos that flourished ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... the rattling of the ramshackle cars stopped conversation. Julie drew Peter's attention to a little scene on the platform outside, and he looked through the glass to see a big French linesman with his girl. The man had got her into a corner, and ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... holding it back, for he was coming slowly down the hill. Another Heir of all the ages—another Imperialist—a degraded, brutalized wretch, clad in filthy, stinking rags, his toes protruding from the rotten broken boots that were tied with bits of string upon his stockingless feet. The ramshackle cart was loaded with empty bottles and putrid rags, heaped loosely in the cart and packed into a large sack. Old coats and trousers, dresses, petticoats, and under-clothing, greasy, mildewed and malodorous. As he crept along with his eyes on the ground, ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the others hastened to do their part. Two of them hunted until they found the lean-to, under which a ramshackle wagon stood that excited the laughter ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church member's essential Confession of Faith, to be developed and expanded according to the need and circumstances, would be a real power in a chaplain's hands. The men's behaviour in billets—ramshackle barns for the most part—was almost exemplary. Only once or twice small episodes occurred in connection with hen-roosts, and on one occasion a sucking-pig was slaughtered amid its brethren at the dead of night. It must have been a temporary madness that possessed the ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... past the station drops down into the village, giving a glimpse of the beck crossed by its ramshackle wooden foot-bridge—the view one has been prepared for by guide-books and picture postcards. Lower down you enter the village street. Here the smell of fish comes out to greet you, and one would forgive the place this overflowing welcome if one were not so shocked at the dismal aspect of ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... automatically. The kitchen, with its hard earth floor and the sunlight drifting in through the bamboo sides, was not unclean, and a savoury smell came from the stew-pot on the ramshackle stove. In one of the bars of sunlight a mango-coloured child of two years or so was playing with his toes—he was surprisingly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... treated Prussia's ancient foe with extraordinary leniency; for he had already planned the Dual Alliance in his mind; knowing as he did that, though in Germany Austria might be an inconvenient rival to Prussia, in Europe she was the indispensable ally of Germany. And so, though the ramshackle old German imperial castle was divided in two, and the northern portion, at any rate, brought thoroughly up to date, the neighbours still lived side by side in a "semi-detached" kind of way. It would be a mistake then to ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... railroad plant was electric-lighted; the single ramshackle street-car had been turned into a chile-con-carne stand; the bank, unable to compete with the faro games and the roulette wheels, had gone into liquidation; the Building and Loan directors had long since looted the treasury ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... to Dumpling Pond, then set out for his home, straight through the woods, till he reached the Catrock line, and following that came to the farm and ramshackle house of Micky Kittering. He had been told that the man at this farm had a fresh deer hide for sale, and hoping to secure it, Quonab walked up toward the house. Micky was coming from the barn when he saw the Indian. They recognized each other at a glance. That was enough for Quonab; he ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... The ramshackle old vehicle, one of Cobb's Royal Mail Coaches, big-bodied, lumbering, scarlet, pulled by two stout horses, drew up before the door, and the driver climbed ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... the show, but as Brevoort made no move to go, he fixed his attention on the screen again. Immediately another scene jumped into the flickering square. Pete stiffened. Before him spread a wide canon. A tiny rider was coming down the trail from the rim. At the bottom was a Mexican 'dobe, a ramshackle stable and corral. And there hung the Olla beneath an acacia. A saddle lay near the corral bars. Several horses moved about lazily . . . The hero of the recent gun-fight was riding into the yard . . . Some one ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... never could understand; unless they're made of leather in the first place, and sometimes it seems so. The squire had his nap out, I suppose, and then he woke up. When he opened his eyes, there in front of him, instead of his tall mahogany desk, was a ramshackle painted thing, with no handles to the drawers, and all covered with ink. He looked round, and what does he see but strange things everywhere; strange to his eyes, and yet he knew them. There was ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... orthodox. At the close we descended the steps carefully, groped our way out quietly, and left, wondering how ever we had got to such a place at all, and how those worshipping in it could afford to Sabbatically pen themselves up in such a mysterious, ramshackle shanty. ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... patrol leader, "there is a long story connected with the old ramshackle mill. No use of my going into all the details. It's been abandoned a good many years now. People have tried to live there three times since old Munsey was found dead there, but they ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... Thorpe recalled its circumstances. His own curious mental ferment, which had made this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the very hour of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed a vivid picture of that approach—of the old ramshackle village trap, and the boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent, red-bearded, plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively suggestive of something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now that ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... another, like eyelashes, from the friendly cliffs. The cooing of the pigeons was gone forever. The muddied water from the great flume raced down through the ravine, turning many wheels, but nowhere gathering in any form or place which seemed good for trout. On either side stood shanties, and ramshackle buildings where such things as stonecutting and blacksmithing were done. Along the waterside ran the tracks of our Terminal and Belt Line System, on which trains of flat-cars always stood, engaged in the work of carrying away the cliffs, in which they were aided and abetted by giant derricks and ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place—poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben Blankenship never dreamed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the time when George III was king, and our scene of action lies only at an old farm-house six miles or so from Finchley —a quaint, ramshackle, commodious, old-fashioned, thatched farm-house that we see only in pictures now, and which has long since been improved off the face of ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... answer the facts were speedily brought out. Six hard customers, awaiting sentence after trial for larceny, burglary, assault with intent to kill, and finally desertion, had been cooped up together in an inner room of the ramshackle old wooden building that served for a prison, had sawed their way through to open air, and, timing their essay by the sound of the trumpets that told them the whole garrison would be out at morning ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... adored the sand dunes, their colour seemed to him more lovely than anything he had ever seen; and he was enchanted with the canals and the long lines of poplars. When they got out of the Gare du Nord, and trundled along the cobbled streets in a ramshackle, noisy cab, it seemed to him that he was breathing a new air so intoxicating that he could hardly restrain himself from shouting aloud. They were met at the door of the hotel by the manager, a stout, pleasant man, who spoke tolerable English; Mr. Goodworthy was an old friend and he greeted them ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... no history is not necessarily happy. There were portions of the line, it is true, which provided a great deal of comfort and very little danger. Fine dug-outs were constructed—you have probably seen them in the illustrated papers. The men were more at home in such trenches than in the ramshackle farms behind the lines. These show trenches were emphatically the exception. The average trench on the line during last winter was neither comfortable nor safe. Yellow clay, six inches to four feet or more ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... of great wealth in his day, and a man of action. Unfortunately he died before he had the chance to carry out his projects in connection with the rehabilitation of Schloss Rothhoefen, even then a deserted, ramshackle resort for paying tourists and a Mecca for ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Some he bullied a little, for habit is strong; some he treated with laughter and irony, some with wit, and some with kindness and deep understanding. He might have been an able shepherd going to work on a hopelessly numerous black and ramshackle flock of sheep. He couldn't expect to make model citizens out of all his old heelers; he couldn't expect to turn more than fifty per cent of his two clergymen into the paths of righteousness. But with the young criminals he took much pains, giving money where it would do good, and advice ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... out, busy as bees, and, unlike the dumb, pathetic little people out in the hills, alert, keen-eyed, cheerful, and happy. Under the log foot-bridge the shining creek ran down past the mountain village below, where the cupola of the court-house rose above the hot dirt streets, the ramshackle hotel, and the dingy stores and frame dwellings of the town. Across the bridge her eyes rested on another neat, well- built log cabin with a grass plot around it, and, running alongside and covered with honeysuckle—a pergola! That was her hospital ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... protection, but more likely it was due to laziness and want of care. However that may have been, the interior was surprisingly substantial, with an excellent floor like that in a ballroom. I slept in a detached ramshackle room used as a kitchen, comfortable because of being ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... a good excuse for not being a gentleman and a sportsman and he did not purpose to look for any reasons for doing differently. Then unexpectedly he was invited to dinner by Mr. Ephraim Tutt in a funny old ramshackle house on West Twenty-third Street with ornamented iron piazza railings all covered with the withered stalks of long dead wistarias, and something happened to him. "Payson Clifford's Twenty-five Thousand Dollar Dinner." He had ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... to the porch he walked. The ramshackle crate behind him had a ridiculous air of a chrysalis from which some bright thing had departed. For a shaft of sunlight was shimmering athwart the veranda floor. And into the middle of the warm bar of radiance ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... quite ready. When she came down five minutes later, with a fresh ribbon in her hair and one of the new frocks that she had never worn before looking its very trimmest, Jasper Parloe had alighted from his ramshackle wagon and was talking with Tom, who ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... things, along with their Madeira and port wine. But the same books show that the planter was chronically in debt and that bankruptcy was common, while accounts left by travelers reveal the fact that many of the mansion houses were shabby and run down, with rotting roofs, ramshackle doors, broken windows into which old hats or other garments had been thrust to keep the wind away. In a word, a traveler could find to-day more elegance in a back county of Arkansas than ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... Cabbage Patch. It was not a real cabbage patch, but a queer neighborhood, where ramshackle cottages played hop-scotch over the railroad tracks. There were no streets, so when a new house was built the owner faced it any way his fancy prompted. Mr. Bagby's grocery, it is true, conformed to convention, and presented a solid front to the railroad track, but Miss ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... father must be getting off his head to go and buy up such a miserable ramshackle piece of rubbish. It was only fit to knock to pieces and sell ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... about that? She used to live in New York City, and knew all the best families for miles around. When we first moved here, next to that ramshackle old place, I remember her telling me she'd known the people who ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... had these safely over we set out in pursuit of the Turks. The next town of importance was a ramshackle mud-walled affair called Tauq, twenty miles beyond, on the far side of a river known as the Tauq Chai. The leading cars pursued to within sight of the town and came in for a good deal ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... hard to convey in words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for orphans, colored or white, could ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... emerges from the litter of his workshop is lovable; but in spite of all Lincoln's melancholy, the dreariness of his life, sitting with his feet on the table in his unswept and untidy office at Illinois, or riding on circuit or staying at ramshackle western inns with the Illinois bar, cannot have been so unrelieved as it is in Mr. Herndon's presentation. And Herndon overdid his part. He ferreted out petty incidents which he thought might display the acute Lincoln as slightly too acute, when for ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... been carefully reared by a most loving and thoughtful mother, even in the crude old days of the army, when its fighting force was scattered in small detachments all over the wide frontier, and men, and women, too, lived on soldier rations, eked out with game, and dwelt in tents or ramshackle, one-storied huts, "built by the labor of troops." At twelve she had been placed at school in the far East, while her father enjoyed a two years' tour on recruiting service, and there, under the care of a noble woman who taught her girls to be ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... up the path toward the little ramshackle cottage she turns and flashes one of them wide smiles on Babe and ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... not prepare the boys for the farmer's sudden arrival at their club-house, on a Saturday afternoon, two weeks later. He drove up in a ramshackle old buggy, driving two of the finest horses in the county. Skinflint though he was, he loved horses. He came into the club-house and eyed the boys ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hotel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and English, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... later Devil Judd Tolliver was in the store Hale pointed out and peering cautiously around the edge of an open window at the wooden gate of the ramshackle calaboose. Several Falins were there—led by young Buck, whom Hale recognized as the red-headed youth at the head of the tearing horsemen who had swept by him that late afternoon when he was coming back from his first trip to Lonesome Cove. The old man gritted his teeth as ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... sigh of relief when she found herself at last in the ramshackle fiacre which Noel by strenuous effort had managed to commandeer. The din bewildered her. But for her husband's protecting presence she would have ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... other men out with them. Street organs, under our fatherly County Council, are forbidden on Sundays; nevertheless, Sunday being the only day when millions of people have any chance of recreation, many organs go out. Whither do they go? East, my dears. There, in any ramshackle hall, or fit-up arch-way, or disused stables, the boys and girls, out for fun, may dance the golden hours away throughout Sunday afternoon and evening. Often the organs are hired for Eastern weddings and christenings ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... a premium. Lane was forced to apply in the sordid quarter of Middleville, and the place he eventually found was a small, bare hall bedroom, in a large, ramshackle old house, of questionable repute. But beggars could not be choosers. There was no heat in this room, and Lane decided that what time he spent in it must be in bed. He would not give ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Xavier and his crew might get properly drunk on tafia, while Nick and I walked about the town and waited until his Excellency, the commandant, had finished dinner that we might present our letters and obtain his passport. Natchez at that date was a sufficiently unkempt and evil place of dirty, ramshackle houses and gambling dens, where men of the four nations gamed and quarrelled and fought. We were glad enough to get away the following morning, Xavier somewhat saddened by the loss of thirty livres of which he had no memory, and Nick and myself relieved at having the passports in our pockets. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... two men were driving in a buckboard drawn by a pair of half-broken pinto bronchos. The outfit was a rather ramshackle affair, and the driver was like his outfit. Stewart Duff was a rancher, once a "remittance man," but since his marriage three years ago he had learned self-reliance and was disciplining himself in ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... us, faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too gruesome a ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility. The third was an upstanding, broad-shouldered youth, with his hands in his pockets, turning his back on the other two who appeared to be talking together earnestly. He stared across the empty Esplanade. A ramshackle gharry, all dust and venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the group, and the driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave himself up to the critical examination of his toes. The young chap, making no movement, not even stirring his head, just stared into the sunshine. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the store—indeed, I should like to know who would have enjoyed it. It dated back to the beginning of the last century, a tarred, coal-black, ramshackle hut. The windows were low and small, the windowpanes diminutive. The ceiling was low. Everything was arranged in such a way as to exclude the possibility of lofty ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... The night was sultry and dark, with a leaden sky and a breathless humidity that presaged a thunder storm. The houses were mostly unlighted at this hour. There was an occasional apartment house among them, but mostly they were low, ramshackle ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... place that was the council chamber of perhaps the most cunning, certainly the most cold-blooded and unscrupulous, band of crooks that New York had ever harbored. And yet—why not? Wasn't there the essence of cunning in that very fact? Who would suspect anything of the sort from a ramshackle, two-story little house like this, whose front was a woe-begone little store, the proceeds of which might just barely keep the body and soul of ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... drank, and the current of life at the corner of Trafalgar Road and Wedgwood Street ceased to flow. Boys and men who had heard of the affair, and who had the divine gift of curiosity, gazed in rapture at the 'No Admittance' notice on the ramshackle double gates in Woodisun Bank, It seemed that they might never be rewarded, but their great faith was justified when a hand-cart, bearing several beams three yards long, halted at the gates and was, after a pause, laboriously pushed ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Many ramshackle old wagons were already drawn up in the barn-yard and hitched to trees along the cart track. Their owners were grouped in the dooryard around the stoves and tables and boxes of "articles too numerous to mention," chattering over the merits and flaws of mattresses and lamps, ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... group was moving to the rear of the station, and now came in sight of a ramshackle automobile with a Mexican at the wheel, easily distinguished by his swarthy coloring and his ragged mustaches, as well as by his peculiar dress—a steep crowned hat like a sugar loaf, with a very wide brim, a tight bolero jacket that did not reach to the waist and disclosed a dark blue silken shirt ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... that we have all sorts of licensed people about us; people who are licensed to cram us upon steam-boats; to crowd us into omnibuses; to jolt us in ramshackle cabs; to supply us with bad brandy and other adulterated drinks; licentiates for practising physic; licentiates for carrying parcels; licentiates for taking money at their own doors for the diversions of singing and dancing; ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... was, in all conscience. A single street, wide enough, almost, for a plaza, paralleled the railroad tracks, the buildings, such as they were, all strung along the further side in an irregular line. One of these, ramshackle, weather-worn, labeled laconically "The Store," stood directly opposite the station. The architecture of the "Paloma Springs Hotel," next door, was very similar. On either side of these two structures a dozen or more discouraged-looking ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... said. "I'm Susy Drummond. 'Miss Susan Drummond, the Towers,' will soon be on my visiting cards. Isn't the place very ramshackle? Doesn't it want to be put into repair a good bit? I'm just dying to hear all about it. Oh, and here's an American swinging-chair—I just adore them. You don't mind if I see-saw gently while you talk to me. ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... a family, in which were quite a number of children, had lately come to town, and taken the big ramshackle building. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren |
