"Rickety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... turned by and by toward the General, but Prescott thought it was time for him to be seeking home and he bade good-night. Colonel Stormont accompanied him as he went down the rickety stairs. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the just ridicule of the peacocks; in which, while every justice is done to the peacocks themselves, the splendour of their plumage, the gorgeousness of their dazzling necks, and the magnificence of their tails, exception will yet be taken to the absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert squeaking; in which lions in love will have their claws pared by sly virgins; in which rogues will sometimes triumph, and honest folks, let us hope, come by their own; in which there will be black crape and white favours; in which there will be tears ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the echoing ravine, then conceal themselves in the corridor close by, extinguish their torches, and await in silence the next coming of their assistant! He himself had been adroitly decoyed out of the way to steady the railing of the rickety bridge. The abrupt and narrow ledge had hidden them from view. The escape was easy. All was clear now, and the life of the man who had cheated him should pay the penalty. Should she continue to refuse his suit, she, too, must ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... the docks and elevators and railroad tracks On the way out of the city, I pass a tiny cottage so rickety That its neighbors crowd close To hold it up. But there it is, Its one window shining clean, and glowing With a plant in a tin can and pure white curtains. Hanging over the fence and filling the whole place With ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... to the Teriaky; and that he died a martyr to the immoderate use of opium. [Footnote: Those among the Turks who give themselves up to an immoderate use of opium are easily to be distinguished by a sort of rickety complaint, which this poison produces in course of time. Destined to live agreeably only when in a sort of drunkenness, these men present a curious spectacle, when they are assembled in a part of Constantinople called Teriaky or Tcharkissy, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Brisach, across the Rhine, had no railing; the planks were in a rickety condition, and through fissures one caught sight of the impetuous rush of waters below. We all got out of our coaches and crossed over with our eyes half shut, so dangerous did it seem; while the King rode across this wretched bridge,—one of the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... a wailing for the dirt and vice and misery which must prevail in houses where seven or eight persons, of both sexes and all ages, are penned up together for the night in the one rickety, foul, vermin-hunted bed-room. The picture of agricultural life unrolls itself before us as it is painted by those who know it best. We see the dull, clouded mind, the bovine gaze, the brutality and recklessness, and ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... headlong down as I reached the stairs, for my foot went through a hole in the boards, but I recovered myself and began to run down as fast as I dared, on account of the rickety state of the steps, while Ike came clumping down after me, and we could hear the big ruffian's voice saying something loudly as we hurried from flight ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... almost rudely, and ascended the dark rickety stairs with a light step. Her head was held very far back, and in her eyes there was a curious mixture of defiance, softness and despair. Two little boys, with the same reddish-brown hair as hers, were playing noisily on the fourth landing. They made a rush at Bet when ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... It happened to be the one with a rickety leg, but its owner was helping the reluctant Abishai remove the long-tailed blue coat which had been his wedding garment and had adorned his person on occasions of ceremony ever since. She did not ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... week, in spite of her distaste for minor parts and bad pianos, she meekly drummed out waltzes and two-steps on Mrs. Chapin's rickety instrument for a long half hour after dinner, while Betty and Roberta—who danced beautifully and showed an unexpected aptitude in imparting her accomplishment—acted as head-masters, and the rest of the girls furnished the novices with the necessary ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... of his round, looked with curiosity at this crowd of suppliants before the shrine of the oracle. He had a great desire to see how Mr. Scogan played his part. The canvas booth was a rickety, ill-made structure. Between its walls and its sagging roof were long gaping chinks and crannies. Denis went to the tea-tent and borrowed a wooden bench and a small Union Jack. With these he hurried back to the booth of Sesostris. Setting down the bench at the back of ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... of vice and poverty, they bring into the world hideous phenomena of heredity at their very birth. This one has a perforated palate, and this great copper-coloured patches on the forehead, all of them rickety. Then they are dying of hunger. Notwithstanding the spoonfuls of milk, of sweetened water, which are forced down their throats, notwithstanding the feeding-bottle employed now and then, though against orders, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... the rickety stairs, which groaned and creaked beneath their weight, and found Mother Guttersnipe lying on the bed in the corner. The elfish black-haired child was playing cards with a slatternly-looking girl at a deal table by the faint light of a ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... night a great crowd gathered around the tree; the boys who go to Master Lovell's school came with an old knocked-kneed horse and a rickety wagon with a platform in it. They fixed the effigies on the platform with cords and pulleys, so that the arms and legs would be lifted when the boys under it pulled the strings. We lighted our torches and formed in procession. The fifers played ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... inordinate desire to reach that brown stone mansion just as quickly as possible. But abruptly even to himself he swerved off instead at the yellow sassafras tree and plunged quite wildly through a mass of broken sods towards the rickety, no-account cedar summer house. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... got ready a meal of tea and buttered oat-cake, which he sent in to Mary Whittaker by the hands of his eldest child, a girl of seven. Then, without further intrusion on the girl's privacy, he climbed the rickety staircase to the upper chamber and set to work at his loom. Eager to make up for the time he had lost, he worked with energy, but every sound from the rooms below came up through the cracks in the raftered floor. He could hear the voices of ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... by the window on a rickety chair that protested under his weight, and quite mechanically he put his pipe in his mouth and dipped into the side pocket of his coat. The absence of any tobacco made him aware of his action, and, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... life? There is not a sound piece of iron about it. The wheels have been fairly worn out these ten years at least—and as for the body! Upon my soul, you might shake it to pieces yourself with a touch. It is the most devilish little rickety business I ever beheld! Thank God! we have got a better. I would not be bound to go two miles in ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... opened the front door with a great deal of ceremony the instant the rickety elevator came to a stop at the seventh floor, and gave greeting to the five Sykeses on the dark, narrow landing. He mentioned each by name and very gravely shook their red-mittened paws as they sidled past him with eager, ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... copy-books. At the end nearest the door stood a huge rusty stove, always red-hot in winter, and near it were a big wooden water-pail and tin dipper. At the other end of the room stood the master's desk, a long-legged rickety structure, with a stool to match, from which lofty throne the ruler of Number Nine could command a view of his realm and spy out its most remote region of insubordination. Behind him was the blackboard, a piece of sheep-skin used as ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... is often used as a substitute for cows' milk, is not nearly so good, since it has lost in the process of condensation one of the most important elements, that which forms bone tissue. Accordingly, babies fed upon condensed milk are apt to be "rickety," and they lack in general power to resist disease, which is primarily the mark of a baby fed on mother's milk, and to a slightly lesser degree, one fed upon ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... the war was over. The problem before him was whether the existing machine could be made to work until the British were finally driven from the country. The winter of 1780-81 was marked, therefore, on his part, by an urgent striving for union, and by unceasing efforts to mend and improve the rickety system of the confederation. It was with this view that he secured the dispatch of Laurens, whom he carefully instructed, to get money in Paris; for he was satisfied that it was only possible to tide over the financial ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... after Miska had disappeared into the little house near the corner, the hidden door in the damp cellar below "The Pidgin House" opened and a bent old woman, a ragged, grey-haired and dirty figure, walked slowly up the rickety wooden stair and entered a bare room behind and below the shop and to the immediate left of the den of the opium-smoker. This room, which was windowless, was lighted by a tin paraffin lamp hung upon a nail in ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed beneath the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... lines. Before coming to the spot, he began to hesitate on account of the possible crowd, and he asked me if he could alight in a lonely cottage by the wayside; I had it inspected by Carl, who brought word that it was mean and dirty. "N'importe," said N., and I ascended with him a rickety, narrow staircase. In an apartment of ten feet square, with a deal table and two rush-bottomed chairs, we sat for an hour; the others were below. A powerful contrast with our last meeting in the Tuileries in 1867. Our conversation was a difficult thing, if I wanted ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... ample plaid over him, and sped away towards the farmhouse. When she had reached its shelter, and was giving an account of the adventure, Dick set forth, like a primeval Highlander, the covering doing duty both for plaid and kilt. Clothes of some kind were provided for him at the cottage, a rickety old boat was fetched, and he and his stag were rowed across the river to the place where ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... to the left; and after a brief walk, mounted the rickety steps to the floor of the hut where dwelt old man North, and the winch for operating the swinging boom. Old man North was short, dark, heavy and bearded; he smoked perpetually a small black clay pipe which he always ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... vehicle and jumped in beside her, and Ahmed struck the horse. The gharry was a rickety old contrivance, every hinge creaking like some lost soul; but Ahmed had reasoned that the more dilapidated the vehicle, the less conspicuous it would be. He urged the horse. He wanted the flying mob to ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... stranger by the fireplace lifted the slender figure, bore her up the narrow rickety stairway, saying good-night to his friend as ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... disappoint them. The worthy old gentleman undertook to arrange all this, and, while supper was preparing, we walked together to the posada. I found that my obliging host and hostess had indeed exerted themselves to an uncommon degree. An old rickety table had been spread out in a corner of the little room as a bedstead, on top of which was propped up a grand cama de luxo, or state bed, which appeared to be the admiration of the house. I could not, for the soul of ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... a cafe concert. A "Grande Soiree Lyrique" is the entertainment offered us at the Maison Doucieux, as we learn from the rudely-written handbill which hangs at the entrance. Through a long, winding, narrow, dark and dirty passage, up a rickety stone staircase, through another passage, and we stand in a crowded hall, at whose lower end a rude stage is erected, on which a ragged man is bawling a comic song. In the midst of it there is a disturbance: a drunken man has climbed upon the back of a seat to light his pipe at the chandelier, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... extinct animal in Paris," said the marquis to Mrs. Brown, who had remarked that she feared she was coming to Paris too late to see the much written of type of "cab, cab horse and cabby." One sees occasionally a specimen of the old days: rickety cab, thin horse and fat, red-faced cocher; but such an equipage seems to be in demand only by the very timid who are afraid to trust themselves to the modern means of locomotion. Those poor souls are not, as a rule, on the boulevards at this hour, but shut snugly behind doors, locked and ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... both its occupants must rise simultaneously, unless dire results were to follow to the one left behind. The usual catastrophe took place: the vacant end went up, and Daisy was thrown upon the ground, the seat fortunately being so low that her fall was from no great height; but the rickety contrivance turned over upon the child, and she received quite a severe blow upon her head. This called for soothing and ministration from an older source, and, for the time, put all thought of arithmetical puzzles to ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... studio looked at first glance like many other painters' studios. A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil and water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a broader aspect still, a nobler work to be accomplished. As long as speculation continues in that great gift of God to man, land, the problem will be unsettled. So long as the landlords find that the more wretched, filthy, rickety, and loathsome a building is, the lower will be the taxes, he will continue to make some of the ever-increasing army of bread winners dwell ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... with speechlessness, but her eyes were eloquent enough as she started up—and almost overturned the rickety table at which ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... would have hesitated to offer such a room to one of the servants at Combe-Raven. But it was quiet; it gave her a few minutes alone; and it was endurable, even welcome, on that account. She locked herself in and walked mechanically, with a woman's first impulse in a strange bedroom, to the rickety little table and the dingy little looking-glass. She waited there for a moment, and then turned away with weary contempt. "What does it matter how pale I am?" she thought to herself. "Frank can't see me—what does ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... all quarters, she discovered, on the fourth floor of an old rickety house, a half-crippled aunt, who never stirred from her arm-chair, and had not been out for four or five years. This poor woman, very old, seemed to have been left in the world expressly as a specimen of hungry misery. Blind, gouty, almost deaf, she ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... less the dilapidation which is often met with in the mother land. I have myself been in a church at home where the flooring was all worn away, and gravel from the outside substituted, and where the seats were so rickety that a fall might be anticipated at any moment. The parishioners were poor Highlanders, it is true, but the owner of the soil was a man of ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... conducting from the heights of Passy to the quay. At the bottom of this descent was a dilapidated house, where Mother Fetu lived in an attic lighted by a round window, and furnished with a wretched bed, a rickety table, and a ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... naked, weatherbeaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group that had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The front yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from the sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung on one hinge and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the young stranger, noticed that something black was tied to the knob of ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... whose hasty abduction had made it impossible to dress, had been provided with odds and ends of clothing, the rags cast off by the children of the Governor's serfs, and which his excellency declared were much too good for Jews, the lads were again placed upon rickety carts, and, while the Governor proceeded to his religious services at the kiosk, they were escorted under a strong guard to the ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... the skull known as Parrot's nodes or bosses, and craniotabes, were formerly believed to be characteristic of inherited syphilis, but they are now known to occur, particularly in rickety children, from other causes. The bosses result from the heaping up of new spongy bone beneath the pericranium, and they may be grouped symmetrically around the anterior fontanelle, or may extend along either side of the sagittal suture, which appears as a deep groove—the ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... volcanic ruin of Chilcoot's mighty father, and stood on the bleak edge of the lake which filled the pit of the crater. The lake was angry and white-capped, and though a hundred caches were waiting ferriage, no boats were plying back and forth. A rickety skeleton of sticks, in a shell of greased canvas, lay upon the rocks. Frona sought out the owner, a bright-faced young fellow, with sharp black eyes and a salient jaw. Yes, he was the ferryman, but he had quit work for the day. Water too rough for freighting. He charged ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... guide led him down the street a little way, then around a corner. Here a rickety old cab with a single horse attached, waited. A gray old darkey sat on the ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... browed with ivy. Half-way through, they found an archway on the right-hand side, opening at right angles into long and badly lighted vaults. In this arch there was no door; but a black step-ladder (made of oak, no doubt), very steep and rather rickety, was planted to tempt ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... showed itself nationally proficient. A narrow aqueduct had been cut out of the side of the cliff, and along its outer embankment, which was two feet wide, the path proceeded to balance. The aqueduct had given way in spots, which caused the path to take to some rickety boards put there for its benefit. After this exhibition of daring, it descended to the stream, to rise again later. Meanwhile night came on and the river bottom began to fill with what looked to be mist, but was in reality smoke. This gave a weird effect to the now ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... nobody but a sister who is as hard as nails to look after her?—lonely, and unhappy, and dull—when I know that I could help her, turn her mind away from her trouble—make her take some pleasure in life again? You talk, Hester, as though we had a dozen lives to play with, instead of this one rickety business!' ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... paltry poor consequence; often you would think he was talking about flies, if you didn't know. Once he even said, in so many words, that our people down here were quite interesting to him, notwithstanding they were so dull and ignorant and trivial and conceited, and so diseased and rickety, and such a shabby, poor, worthless lot all around. He said it in a quite matter-of-course way and without bitterness, just as a person might talk about bricks or manure or any other thing that was of no consequence and hadn't feelings. I could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and nasty; for inferior or adulterated milk is the very essence, the conglomeration of nastiness; and, moreover, is very poisonous to a child's stomach. One and the principal reason why so many children are rickety and scrofulous, is the horrid stuff called milk that is usually given to them. It is a crying evil, and demands a thorough investigation and reformation, and the individual interference of every parent. Limited Liability Companies are the order of ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... five years after our first glimpse of him, he stepped from the express at Redding, and, bag in hand, crossed the station platform and addressed himself to a wise-looking, freckle-faced youth of fourteen occupying the front seat of a rickety carryall. ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... servants pass he stops and questions them, and then gives them orders, or scolds them, as circumstances demand. Towards nine o'clock tea is announced, and he goes into the dining-room—a long, narrow apartment with bare wooden floor and no furniture but a table and chairs, all in a more or less rickety condition. Here he finds his wife with the tea-urn before her. In a few minutes the grandchildren come in, kiss their grandpapa's hand, and take their places round the table. As this morning meal consists merely of bread and tea, it does ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... arrival the warm, bright bed-chamber was exchanged for a cold dark closet opening off Madame's boudoir, a cupboard furnished with a rickety cot and a broken chair, lacking any provision for heat or light, and ventilated solely by a transom over the door; and inasmuch as Madame shared the French horror of draughts and so kept her boudoir hermetically ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... might spare another half-hour without getting into trouble, and they crossed the city to where a row of squalid frame shacks stood on its outskirts. In the one they entered, a gaunt man with grizzled hair lay upon a rickety bed. A glance showed Vane that the man was very frail, and the harsh cough that he broke into as the colder air from outside flowed in made the fact clearer. Drayton, hastily shutting the door and explaining the cause of the visit, motioned ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... horse before the office of the New Day and gave a boy the bridle. "I'll be back in a minute," she explained. It was a two-story frame building, dingy and in disrepair. On the street floor was a grocery. Access to the New Day was by a rickety stairway. As she ascended this, making a great noise on its unsteady boards with her boots, she began to feel cheap and foolish. She recalled what Hull had said in the carriage. "No doubt," replied she, "I'd feel much the same way if I were ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... below; and where here and there a few pennyworths of gingerbread, that seemed mouldy with the mould of ages, a glass pickle-bottle of bull's-eyes or sugar-sticks, and half a dozen penny bottles of ink, indicated the commercial tendencies of Crosber. A little farther on, he came to a rickety-looking corner-house, with a steep thatched roof overgrown by stonecrop and other parasites, which was evidently the shop of the village, inasmuch as one side of the window exhibited a show of homely drapery, while the other side was devoted ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... through his hair, by way of finishing his toilet, Tip made his way down the rickety ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... passes—she is kneeling by Sir Victor Catheron's side. "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" say the urbane tones of the rector of Chesholm, and the Right Honorable the Earl of Wroatmore comes forward on two rickety old legs and gives her. "If any one here present knows any just cause or impediment why this man should not be married to this woman, I charge him," etc., but no one knows. The solemn words go on. "Wilt thou take Edith Darrell ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... baffling gloom. He guessed that something of a like nature had fallen upon the town again. The gas-light on the landings and in the melancholy hall burned feebly—so feebly that one got but a vague view of the rickety hat-stand and the shabby overcoats and head-gear hanging upon it. It was well for him that he had but a corner or so to turn before he reached the pawnshop in whose window he had seen the ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... literary, or religious, according to the company in which he found himself. Martie's thrilled interest firing him to-night, he exerted himself: told stories in Chinese dialect, in brogue, and with an excellent Scotch burr; he went to the rickety piano, and from the loose keys, usually set in motion by a nickel in the slot, he evoked brilliant songs, looking over his shoulder with his sentimental bold eyes at the company as he sang. And Martie said to herself, "Ah—this ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... to get rid of old Professors, and I am thankful to hear that there is a movement for making provision for those who are left in need when they lose their offices and their salaries. I remember one of our ancient Cambridge Doctors once asked me to get into his rickety chaise, and said to me, half humorously, half sadly, that he was like an old horse,—they had taken off his saddle and turned him out to pasture. I fear the grass was pretty short where that old servant of the public found himself grazing. If ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics as saying that "a family of five persons requires $754 a year to live on." The average number in the family of a mine worker is five or six. "This small income," Roberts observes, "drives many of our people to live in cheap and rickety houses, where the sense of shame and decency is blunted in early youth, and where men cannot find such home comforts as will counteract the attractions of the saloon." Hundreds of company houses, according to Roberts, are unfit for habitation, and "in the houses ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... the large English towns, such as Liverpool, and among the population of certain mining districts in Belgium, I have met with even worse degeneration of the human species. Modesty, morality and health are destroyed in this swarming human mass—dirty, anaemic, tuberculous, rickety, imbecile, or hysterical—and there is no distinction between the factory girl and the prostitute. In certain Belgian districts which are a prey to alcoholism, one sometimes sees human beings copulating in the streets like animals, or ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... thoroughly disgusted and dissatisfied with his position, either a change or a dissolution of the Government may be anticipated, and in this case any attempt at change can scarcely fail to break up this rickety firm. ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... of Gotham were not much worse off when they went to sea in a bowl than was Dick Lee in that rickety little old flat-bottomed punt. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... and hastened to his old resort, the village inn—but it too was gone. A large rickety wooden building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door was painted, "The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle." Instead of the great tree that used ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... on the sixth floor of one of the poorest houses in the poorest quarters of Paris, does not give much opportunity for a detailed description. There is little to be said about the furniture, which in this case consisted of a rickety old table, a wooden stool, and a small charcoal stove, all of the commonest kind, but all clean, and the room was not quite without adornment. The window, to be sure, was in the roof, but pinned to the wall were a few newspaper prints in strong blacks and whites, and—most remarkable of all—there ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... resembled as much as anything a collection of titanic wooden hour-glasses, which had been half shaken down and reduced to a state of rickety dilapidation by an earthquake. The houses—if houses they could be called—were about twenty feet in height, rudely constructed of driftwood which had been brought down by the river, and could be compared in shape to nothing but hour-glasses. ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... who was to enjoy it is gone from enjoyment, shrivelled with care, every appetite dried up. So learning devastates the scholar, is another plague of wealth, and our goodness turns out to be a hasty mistake. Is order disorder, then? Are we fools of fate? Is there only power enough to prop up this rickety old system, to keep it running and hold our noses to the grindstone? No man believes it: the madness of Time has method only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... stayed over night, but was off early in the morning. Bob and Betty watched his rickety car out of sight, and then, determined to keep busy and happy, set out to ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... said. Then I did not disturb him but sat down on a rickety chair and waited. Ink dripped from his table on to the floor. One bottle lay on its side, the ink oozing out, other bottles stood, some filled, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... into which he had dashed to hide himself, on discovering that the dining-room was in possession of the Efficient Baxter, the Honorable Freddie sat on a rickety chair, scowling. He elaborated a favorite ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Garland—a collection of eclogues not to be confounded with the more famous collection of sonnets in praise of the same real or fancied mistress which appeared later. In the first of these Drayton called himself "Rowland," or "Roland," a fact on which some rather rickety structures of guesswork have been built as to allusions to him in Spenser. His next work was Mortimeriados, afterwards refashioned and completed under the title of The Barons' Wars, and this was followed in 1597 by one of his best works, England's Heroical ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... a huge tank, to the brink of which a rickety wooden ladder invited the explorer to ascend. Beyond it were a series of iron gangways and ladders forming part of the fire emergency arrangements of the neighboring institution. Straight ahead a section of building jutted up and revealed two small ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... it's a noble sight!' exclaimed Viney to Watchorn as they sat on their horses, below a rickety green-baize-covered scaffold, labelled, 'GRAND STAND; admission, Two-and-sixpence,' raised against Scourgefield's stack-yard wall, eyeing the population pouring in from all parts. 'Dear, but it's a noble sight!' said he, shading the sun from his eyes, and endeavouring to ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... summer, as the summer is apt to be in the Housatonic valley, but when it got along into September the weather was divine, and they spent nearly the whole time out of doors, driving over the hills. They got an old horse from a native, and they hunted out a rickety buggy from the carriage-house, and they went wherever the road led. They went mostly at a walk, and that suited the horse exactly, as well as Mrs. Ormond, who had no faith in Ormond's driving, and wanted to go at a pace that would give her a chance to jump out safely if anything happened. ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... Portland Place satisfied tolerably well the advanced taste in domestic scenery of 1901. But your eye was caught at once by the additions made by Mrs. Rossiter. Linda conceived it was her womanly mission to lighten the severity of Michael's choice in furniture and decorations. She introduced rickety and expensive screens that were easily knocked over; photographs in frames which toppled at a breath; covers on every flat surface that could be covered—occasional tables, tops of grand pianos. If she did not ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap of straw, to serve as another bed, and against the wall a much-battered sea-chest ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... think 'pillion' and long to suggest it, only our diffidence prevailed. But come! Mr. Seth has piloted the servants to their stage and is waiting for us!" answered Molly Breckenridge and was the first to spring up the narrow steps at the rear of the rickety omnibus and run to its innermost corner, where she extended her arms to receive her "son" whom she had kept in charge during the ride in the car. The other Molly had passed him on to her, he submitting in wide-eyed astonishment at all ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... shut. I can see the place perfectly—a rickety old barrack. There is a tract of unoccupied land on one side, and a kitchen-garden ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... run through holes in the 2 x 4 inch pieces of lumber which formed the bed, to take the place of springs. In another corner a rusty, two-hole oil stove stood on a drygoods box; above it another box with a shelf in it for a cupboard. Two rickety, homemade chairs ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... Stern's oiling, every journal and bearing squealed in anguish. A rickety tremble possessed the engine as it gained speed. The dynamo began to hum with wild, strange protests of racked metal. The ancient "drive" of tarred hemp strained ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... about the strength of his raft. It must be admitted that, though he had done the best he could, it was rather a rickety concern. If the nails had been all whole and new and he had had a good hammer and strong boards he could easily have made a ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... is expiring, the agony of so much glory, the fearful sadness of a world which is dying of exhaustion and hunger! Yonder, under your Holiness's windows, have I not seen a district of horrors, a district of unfinished palaces stricken like rickety children who cannot attain to full growth, palaces which are already in ruins and have become places of refuge for all the woeful misery of Rome? And here, as in Paris, what a suffering multitude, what a shameless exhibition ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... strongly grated, gave them light and air, and enabled them to look out. It was, in other respects, a very undesirable residence, the furniture consisting of merely a couple of rough stools and a bench, with a rickety table. ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... make the Wiggleses eyes stick out furder than ever. They're a jealous lot at the best o' times, and its sich a silly idear for Melindy to be a-naggin' at me for goin' there when I never go nearer than the rickety ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... offered him solace of no description. The air without was heavy, dull, and thick. The street beyond the window was dark and narrow. The room contained mahogany chairs covered with horse- hair, a mahogany table, rickety in its legs, and a mahogany sideboard ornamented with inverted glasses and old cruet-stands. The Frenchman had come to the house for shelter and food, and had been asked whether he was commercial. Whereupon he shook his head. "Did he want a sitting-room?" Yes, he did. "He was a leetle ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... room was of extensive proportions. Nearly all of one side was occupied by the bar. Opposite was the huge fireplace, and scattered around were a number of stools, rickety chairs and strong boxes which served equally well ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... hardly begun to grow, was already turning yellow beneath the feet of the crowd. The dust was black; and yet, every Thursday, the cocotte aristocracy passed through on the way to the Casino, with a great show of rickety carriages and borrowed postilions. All these things gave pleasure to that fanatical Parisian, Sidonie; and then, too, in her childhood, she had heard a great deal about Asnieres from the illustrious Delobelle, who would have liked to have, like so many of his profession, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... you call Shepherd's Companion. Some of you call it Rickety Dick, or Willy Wagtail." Turning to the Kangaroo especially, it continued, "If you can bring yourself to speak to anything so obtrusive and gossiping, without any ancestry or manners whatever, you will be ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... minutes later the strange and unedifying sight of Lady Claudia Territon and Mr. Lane, mounted on a very rickety old "sociable," presented itself to the gaping gaze of several laborers in the park. Claudia was in her most boisterous spirits; Eugene, by one of the quick transitions of his nature, was hardly ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... his gaze round it in a moment's rapid survey, then he pressed to the rickety, uneven door and shot ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... box-like inn. A stuffy-looking and uninviting inn. Salt and tobacco, it announces in faint letters above the door, may be bought there. But one would prefer to buy these things elsewhere. There is a bench outside, and a rickety table with a zinc top to it, and sometimes a peasant or two drinking a glass or two of wine. The proprietress is very unkempt. To Don Quixote she would have seemed a princess, and the inn a castle, and the peasants notable magicians. Don Quixote would have paused ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... little man—wheeled in the rickety office chair to regard some one hesitating on his threshold. The tones were not agreeable; the proprietor of the diminutive, run-down establishment, "The St. Cecilia Music Emporium," was not, for certain well defined reasons, ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... run up and the floors tiled with a queer assortment of tins, empty cartridge cases and odd bits of wood. Drenched to the very skin, shivering and sneezing with cold, they gave no heed to the rain tattooing on their faces or to the enemy shells. Within the rickety shelters damp figures, huddled together for warmth, closed tired eyes and in utter weariness of limbs fell ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... years dragged on and made decades and the decades marshaled into a generation that became an era, and a city rose around a mature man. And still in his little office on a rickety side street, the Tribune, a weekly paper in a daily town, kept pointing to the sunrise; and Amos Adams, editor and proprietor, an old fool with the faith of youth, for many years had a book to write and a story to tell—a story that was ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... station, but the main street had few attractions to offer. Three stores, with strangely-assorted, dusty goods in their windows fronted the rickety plankwalk; beyond these stood a livery stable, a Chinese laundry, and a few dwelling-houses. Several dilapidated wagons and buggies were scattered about the uneven road. In the side street, disorderly rows of agricultural implements surrounded a store, and here and there little board dwellings ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... Sam was a small frame building, having the sign, "Oscar Cook—Barrels and Kegs," painted over the door. It was a tumbled-down, rickety affair, evidently having seen ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... he got to know, rickety, unwholesome geniuses, whose genius (such as it was) had allied itself to madness; and who were just as conceited about the madness as about the genius, and took more pains to cultivate it. It brought them a quicker kudos, and was so much more visible ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... lies in a thickly-populated section, not many blocks from the water front. It is in the tenement district where dozens of families are huddled together in one house. We pause in front of a rickety building and stop an urchin in the hallway, who replies to the question that we are in the right house. Then the good Doctor pulls out of his pocket the letter he received some hours ago from the grief-stricken young mother whose baby was ill and ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... think him a relative of the northeast wind. The storm of the previous night had been exactly to his liking. All his worst prognostications had been fulfilled, and quite a bit thrown in par dessus le marche. He told me that a tiny, rickety house across the harbour had first been unroofed, and then one of the walls blown in. It is a real disaster for the family, for they are poor enough without having Kismet thus descend ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... the next of kin who was—to Coombe's great objection—his heir presumptive, and was universally admitted to be a repulsive sort of person both physically and morally. He had brought into the world a weakly and rickety framework and had from mere boyhood devoted himself to a life which would have undermined a Hercules. A relative may so easily present the aspect of an unfortunate incident over which one has no control. This was the case ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... give him," said Frank, going to his basket and depositing the articles upon a rickety table that ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... the place where the right ear should be and making his way through the throng of children and goats obstructing the narrow walk between his neighbors' doors and the edge of the terrace gains the street by descending a flight of rickety stairs. Here he pauses to consult his watch and the stranger who happens to pass wonders why such a man as that can care what is the hour. Longer observations would show that the time of day is an important element ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... lofty, Gissing was meditating. It was rather impudent of him to accuse the city of being mad, for he himself, in his glee over freedom regained, was not conspicuously sane. He scoured the town in high spirits, peering into shop-windows, riding on top of busses, going to the Zoo, taking the rickety old steamer to the Statue of Liberty, drinking afternoon tea at the Ritz, and all that sort of thing. The first three nights in town he slept in one of the little traffic-towers that perch on stilts up above Fifth Avenue. As a matter of fact, it was that one near St. Patrick's Cathedral. He ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... antimacassars, tasteless round worsted-work mats for absent flower jars, and a lot of ugly cheap and vulgar china chimney ornaments, which, there being no fireplace, and consequently no chimney-piece, are set out in order on a rickety deal table. The whole life of these village folk is one piece of unreal acting. They are continually asking themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and whether they are living up to the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... street-car tracks, bad pavements, stupid shops, workmen's little homes in rows like chicken-houses, then better streets, better homes, business blocks well paved, a hotel, a post-office, a Carnegie library, a gawky Civil War statue, then poorer shops, rickety pavements, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... of them to us, we found that his business was fishing, and that he forked out very fat and edible-looking fish with his trident. Shaggy, undersized horses were wading in the water, nipping off the thin spears of grass. Close to the church is a rickety farmhouse. If I lived there, I would as lief be a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... rickety stairway, into a dingy room. The plaster had fallen from the ceiling in several places, and the room had a mouldy smell. There was a platform at one end, where the musicians sat when saltatory fetes were held, and on this I mounted to 'take a view.' I didn't ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various |
