"Roofless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and charm of the compact little town which clings like a limpet to its base are more than can be expressed on the written page. It is like climbing the uneven stairs of some vast and roofless ancient palace, upon each floor of which dwell families who have come in and roofed over the suites of rooms and made houses out of them. The stairs lead you, not from floor to floor, but from bakery to carpenter-shop, from the blacksmith's ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... the Lynher River, and not far from the Cornish borough of Saltash, you may find a roofless building so closely backed with cherry-orchards that the trees seem by their slow pressure to be thrusting the mud-walls down to the river's brink, there to topple and fall into the tide. The old trees, though sheeted with white blossom in the spring, bear little ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... crossly annoyed at the need of changing cars,—gathered up their luggage and filed out onto the bare, roofless station platform. There, after a look down the long converging rails in vain hope of sighting the train they were to take, they fell to glancing about the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... centre of many a slumbering town. By the shores of Donegal Bay the old Franciscan house, where the Four Masters compiled what is perhaps the most remarkable record possessed by any nation, is still clothed in ivy. At Kilconnell, in Galway, their old place is almost as they left it, but roofless, with the tears of the friars upon the altar steps. Clare Galway has a tower worth travelling half a continent to see. By the Boniet River, at Drumahaire, on the banks of Lough Gill, are the mason marks of the cloister ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... among the roofless ruins. Lizards, the color of the cold, gray walls, slipped from sight on silent, clinging feet. Once a sidewinder, almost invisible against the sand, looped away from the intruders with ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... crofters' cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives, blending almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into which she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished religion, the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their westernmost adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the Atlantic—was not this the place where Sheila picked the bunch of wild flowers and gave it to her lover? There is nothing in history, I am sure, half so real ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... imploring. He would go with neither, and at last they vanished both. He sat solitary on the side of a bare hill, and below him was all that remained of Castle Warlock. He had been dead so many years, that it was now but a half—shapeless ruin of roofless walls, haggard and hollow and gray and desolate. It stood on its ridge like a solitary tooth in the jaw of some skeleton beast. But where was his father? How was it he had not yet found him, if he had been so long dead? He must rise and seek him! He must be somewhere in the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... there, under groups of shady trees, while pagodas (called Tas) of various styles, and from three to nine stories high, raised their heads on little eminences in the neighbourhood of the villages, and attracted attention at a great distance. A number of fortifications, which, however, look more like roofless houses than anything else, protect ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... the wild meadows of the Campagna. They were weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches, and deeply pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was here and there a farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener a round, hollow, roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the dead had long been blown away, and through the top of which—fringed and overhung with grasses, and opening like a great eye—the evening sky looked marvelously sad. One of the fields was full of grim, wide-horned cattle, and in another there were four ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... and its reasonable worship offered, under the same roofs that had protected priest and people in the days of Romanist error. Is the cause of pure and undefiled religion stronger in the land because Melrose and Crossraguel and Pluscarden are desolate; St. Andrews a roofless ruin; Iona as yet open to the Atlantic winds? Is the voice of praise and prayer sweeter in the North because Mortlach is effaced and Fortrose shattered, and the bells are silent which men on the mainland used to hear when the north wind blew ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... houses in the town were acquired by Lord Leitrim, by the strong hand, in the same way. Passed the house from which the Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Mr. White, was evicted. It was his own private property. It stands windowless and roofless, a monument to the dead earl. The priest of the parish had no house of his own; he was a boarder with one of his flock, who had built himself a house in the time of the good earl. When Lord Leitrim fancied that he had cause of quarrel with the priest he obliged his tenant ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... opening through which the muzzle of a rifle or the point of an arrow might appear. The building had lately suffered either from fire or assault. Many of the palisades had been broken down, and the buildings inside were roofless. No one was to be seen, and the gate was open. We entered, still, however, keeping our rifles ready for instant use. Not a voice was heard. We soon discovered what had taken place. The small garrison had been overpowered and slaughtered to a man. ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... cathedral constructed by Nature herself, with lavish outlay of the pointed aisle of branches, is at Jumieges. There, close to the splendid ruins of the Abbey, where the two towers are still intact, while the roofless nave, carpeted with flowers, ends in a chancel of foliage shut in by an apse of trees, three vast aisles of centenary boles extend in parallel lines; one in the middle, very wide, the two others, one on each side, somewhat narrower; they exactly represent a church ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... weather. In the warm straw of the stable, hungry and homesick, the children clung about their mother and wept themselves to sleep. But they were fortunate compared with many of their acquaintances, whom Pierre could see crowded roofless about their fires, in sheltered hollows and under the little hillside copses. The night was raw and showery, and there was not houseroom in Beausejour for a tenth part of ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... cabinet—now bare, shattered, and roofless with the blasts of six score winters—were hung with portraits of ladies and statesmen of the day; conspicuous among which was a fine picture from the pencil of Vanloo of the handsome, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Gaetani family long maintained their feudal warfare, with fragments of marble sculpture taken from the tomb incorporated into the plain brick walls. And on the other side of the road, in a beautiful meadow, covered with soft green grass, are the ruins of a roofless Gothic chapel, showing little more than a few bare walls and gables built of dark lava stones, with traces of pointed windows in them, and the spring of the groined arches of the roof. Like the fortress, the chapel has few or no architectural features of interest. It is very unlike ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... On either side of us were gaping cellars into which the houses had dumped themselves or, still balancing above them, were walls prettily papered, hung with engravings, paintings, mirrors, quite intact. These walls were roofless and defenseless against the rain and snow. Other houses were like those toy ones built for children, with the front open. They showed a bed with pillows, shelves supporting candles, books, a washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano, ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... set his teeth, and dropping the bridle, laid his head down between Benito's ears, and whispered to him; and Benito never stopped, but galloped on all that day, till he came into Temecula; and there Alessandro saw the roofless houses, and the wagons being loaded, and the people running about, the women and children wailing; and then they showed him the place where his father lay on the ground, under the tule, and jumping off Benito he let him go, and that was the last he ever saw of him. ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... mansion of considerable pretension and two stories high; on the ground-floor the doors were all gone; on the upper floor the windows were open to the air; the chamber "vocata ladyes chambre" was roofless, the offices were too dilapidated to be worth repair. The enclosing walls and the moat had been utterly neglected. The offices had formerly been adapted for a large establishment; there had been extensive farm buildings, and at least six substantial houses for the bailiff and ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... immense walls it poured a current ten miles broad at the mouth; and that the water was at some time one or two thousand feet above the present level of the river, as shown by the terraces along its banks, and fragments of drift caught in fissures of the rock. The Grande Coulee is like an immense roofless ruin, extending north and south for fifty miles. Strange forms of rock are scattered over the great bare plain. To the Indians, it is the home of evil spirits. They say there are rumblings in the earth, and that the rocks are hot, and smoke. Thunder and lightning, ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... mountain down to the houses of Torre del Greco. The view from this spot is magnificent. On the left is the beautiful town of Sorento, with houses as white as snow, running in detached villas along the sea-shore up to the smoky and roofless walls of Pompeii, whose unsightly ruins lend contrast to the scene around. The azure bay seems to borrow more of the blue of heaven as it stretches far away to the horizon; the little steamers and innumerable ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... deceit and gave itself for no better or worse than it was, combined to make him a favorite among the devotees of pleasure whom Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie had gathered about them; and notwithstanding his empty pockets, his roofless chateau in Auvergne, and his sparsely braided sleeve, he was an habitue of the Austrian embassy and of the best salons in Paris, and made for himself a conspicuous place in the innermost circle ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... dining-room and drawing-rooms to twice their former size, when half the expense, with a few trees from a certain outlying oak-plantation of their own, would have given them a room fit for a regal assembly. For, constituting a portion of the same front in which they lived, lay roofless, open to every wind that blew, its paved floor now and then in winter covered with snow—an ancient hall, whose massy south wall was pierced by three lovely windows, narrow and lofty, with simple, gracious tracery ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... usual, lived in twos and threes in the roofless, half-ruined houses. The seniors tried to collect straw and potatoes and, in general, food for the men. The younger ones occupied themselves as before, some playing cards (there was plenty of money, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and endowed by some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There was record neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of what manner of folk worshipped there, nor of those who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of the west door the two ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... of spaliered roses and lemons. In the midst of these terraces and balustrades and crowded nurseries of flowers, the surprise of finding that that great vague building I have noticed from below is a ruin, roofless, full of wild fig, a castle's square keep. Mediaeval? antique? the place surely whence the imaginary Nero watched the ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... had isolated him from the rest of the world, and that impertinent world poured in. First came crows, from their homes in the woods beyond the pasture, to feast on the numerous hoppers and crawlers left roofless by the mowers, and to procure food for their hungry young, and alighted in the stubble, two or three or half a dozen at a time. By this the soul of the redwing was fired, and with savage war-cries he descended upon them. His manner was ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... Till the Russian turned to the right and took a branching tunnel. Here, lining the curve of the stone wall were twenty little cubicles of light wood, raised a few inches from the moist floor, and roofless except for the arch of the tunnel that ran equally above them all. These were the rooms assigned to the officers de passage, officers whom duty kept for a night in Verdun. Each cubicle held a bed, a tin basin on a tripod, a minute square of looking-glass, a chair and a shelf, and each bore the ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Mansart. The chteau is more reddened than blackened by the fire, and the beautiful reliefs of its gables, its statues, and the wrought-iron grilles of its balconies are still perfect. Grass, and even trees, grow in its roofless halls, in one of which the marble pillars and sculptured decorations are seen through the gaps where windows once were. The view from the terrace is ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Bildad's shack and burned it to the ground; and Bildad, with his roofless pack, sent up a doleful sound. And I, who lived the next door west, hard by the county jail, went over there and beat my breast, and helped poor Bildad wail. Around the ruined home I stepped, and viewed the shaking walls, and people say the way I wept ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... was speechless. 420 Then she spoke the words which follow: "O thou bee, my own dear birdling, Fly thou in a new direction, Over nine lakes fly thou quickly Till thou reach a lovely island, Where the land abounds with honey, Where is Tuuri's new-built dwelling, Palvonen's own roofless dwelling. There is honey in profusion, There is ointment in perfection, 430 Fit to bind the veins together, And to heal the joints completely. From the meadow bring this ointment, And the salve from out the meadow, For upon the wounds I'll ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... were so clear and gay that her dreams might be those of a ballet-girl. A solitary yellow dog chased a lizard in the sun, and the pebbles he knocked about made an absurdly disturbing noise. Beyond the vague tinted roofless walls that stretched over the pleasant little peninsula, the blue sea rippled tenderly, remembering much delight, and the place seemed to smile in its sleep. It was easy to understand why Cicero chose to have his ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... fact the remains are simply the bare ruins of a town destroyed by burning ashes, which have been extricated from the rubbish accumulated during more than seventeen centuries. The paved streets and the roofless and broken walls of the houses still remain, with here and there some building that by a fortunate chance escaped, either in whole or in part, the general catastrophe, and suffice to show the general style and ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... deadly contagion along a great national highway, like fertile seed in a fertile furrow. The bishop counted it no mercy to the aliens themselves to keep them aboard when they could be set ashore in a rough sort of roofless quarantine on some such isolated spot as Prophet's Island, which should be reached by sunrise, was heavily wooded, and lay but six miles below the small town of ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... final one. The portfolio which he carried contained a dilapidated old blank book, such as one buys in a crossroads store, a volume of verse, and an automatic pistol, carefully loaded. When the now inevitable moment came which should leave his family roofless—he would ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... visit I was alone, and, after rambling all over the ramparts, sat down to rest myself in one of the roofless barracks. These are old French structures, and appear to have occupied three sides of a large area, now overgrown with grass, nettles, and thistles. The one in which I sat was long and narrow, as all the rest had been, with peaked gables. The exterior walls ...
— Old Ticonderoga, A Picture of The Past - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... possible to the trading center marked on Traxt Cam's private map and the Terrans now had another five minutes march, in the middle of the road, ahead of the chieftain who must be inwardly boiling at their presence, before they came out in the clearing containing the roofless, circular erection which served the Salariki of the district as a market place and a common meeting ground for truce talks and the mending of private clan alliances. Erect on a pole in the middle, towering well above the nodding fronds of ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... sweaters or with burlap tied about their shoulders, slapped their feet as they jigged, or jumped at hop-scotch. Back of them in typical Dublin decay rose the stables of an anciently prosperous shipping concern; in the v dip of the roofless walls, spiky grass grew and through the barred windows the wet gray sky was slotted. Suddenly ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... manipulated my member for a long time, but all in vain. Gummy streams poured down his sweating forehead, and there was so much chalk in the wrinkles of his cheeks that you might have mistaken his face for a roofless wall, from which the plaster ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... stage scenery of the goblin cavern sort. So lofty is the opening that a sailing boat can pass through with ease. Behind it is the soaring Swyre Head, 670 feet high, and the third of that name in Dorset. Between this point and Nelson Fort on the west of Lulworth Cove is Stair Hole, a gloomy roofless cavern into which the tide pours with a terrifying sound, especially when a strong sou-wester ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... siding where the railway crossed it, but at the town itself, which it skirted on the east, a towpath began, and a piled wharf had been recently constructed. Going on to this was a red-brick building with the look of a warehouse, roofless as yet, and with workmen on its scaffolds. It sharpened ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Andaman Islands! It was a foreign country, and the ways of the people were strange to him, and it was a land of very strange things. One of the strangest was an old ruined church in the neighbourhood of the farm where he was shepherd. It was roofless, more than half fallen down, and all the standing portion, with the tower, overgrown with old ivy; the building itself stood in the centre of a huge round earthwork and trench, with large barrows on the ground outside the circle. Concerning this church he had a wonderful ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... we found, about the old Spanish workings, ancient, roofless, stone buildings with loop-holed turrets for bandits and niches for saints. These structures, as well as the waste dumped by the Spaniards, were being "repicked for values," and broken up and sent through the stamp-mill, the never-ending rumble ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... as the shower lightened; and then there came in view, partially at least, two objects that spoke of man,—a deserted boat harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a land with which man had done for ever;—the vapor-enveloped rocks,—the waste of ebb-uncovered sand,—the deserted harbor,—the ruinous house,—the melancholy rain-fretted ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... this rivulet stood the old smelting-houses and ruined ranches of the miners. Most of them were roofless and crumbling to decay. The ground about them was shaggy and choked up. There were briars, mezcal plants, and cacti—all luxuriant, hirsute, ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... a peseta—money goes a long way in Spain—and went in alone. The pigs had been removed and all was silent. A few bats flitted to and fro quickly. The light fell away greyly, the cold descended on the ruin, and it became very strange and mysterious. Presently, the roofless chapels seemed to grow alive with weird invisible things, the rank weeds exhaled chill odours; and in the lonely silence a mass began. At the ruined altar ghostly priests officiated, passing quietly from side to side, with bows and genuflections. The bell ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... to discover wherein he had failed, and why his old age found him roofless in spite of the fact that he strenuously urged the family claim with his whole conscience. At the opening of the drama he sat upon his throne, ready for the enjoyment which an indulgent parent expects when he has given gifts ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... result, partly of her sex, partly of her passive strain is the founding, through the instrumentality of the first savage Mother, of a new and beautiful social state—Domesticity. . . . One day there appears in this roofless room that which is to teach the teachers of the world—a ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... on high, amid five blazing fires, the one Towards each quarter of the sky, the fifth the full meridian sun. Mid fiercest frosts on snow he slept, the dry and withered leaves his food, Mid rains his roofless vigil kept, the soul and sense alike subdued. High on the top of Himavan the mighty Mashawara stood; And "Descend," he gave the word to the heaven-meandering water— Full of wrath the mandate heard Himavan's majestic daughter. To a giant's stature soaring and intolerable speed, From heaven's ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... had flashed upon her as she spoke. The picture of that frail wooden tenement, the Castle Inn, reduced to a roofless chaos of lath and plaster, vomiting flames from its black mouth, and spitting blazing sparks upward ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... was a cavern mouth into which the men had disappeared, but it was not. I reached it without any encounter. It loomed above me, a great archway in the cliff—an opening fifty feet high and equally as broad. And behind it was a roofless cave—a sort of irregularly circular bowl, five hundred feet across its broken, bowlder-strewn, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... granted. The vast world was chained A captive to the chariot of his pride, The blood of myriad provinces was drained To feed that fierce, insatiable red heart— Invulnerably bulwarked every part With serried legions and with close-meshed Code. Within, the burrowing worm had gnawed its home: A roofless ruin stands where once abode The ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... scrambled into one of the arched windows of what was formerly the great dining hall, where Elizabeth feasted in the midst of her lords and ladies, and where every stone had rung to the sound of merriment and revelry. The windows are broken out; it is roofless and floorless, waving and rustling with pendent ivy, and vocal with the song ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... gummas can eat holes in bone, or leave ulcerating sores in the skin where the gumma formed and died, or take the roof out of a mouth, or weaken the wall of a blood-vessel so that it bulges and bursts. The sunken noses and roofless mouths are usually syphilitic—yet if they are recognized in time and put under treatment, all these horrible things yield as by magic. There are few greater satisfactions open to the physician than to see a tertiary sore which has refused to heal for months ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... tiring. At the house of Dr. S. in Podgorica we had met a young Franciscan monk, a Neapolitan and a great student. He at once invited us to visit him in Zatrijebac, where he is the spiritual shepherd, and to spend a few weeks with him. On approaching a roofless church, in the course of rebuilding, we espied this young monk rushing to meet us. With all the fervour of his race, he embraced and kissed us repeatedly, welcoming us to his home. He gave me his bed, and the other remaining one ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... other. For this purpose they repaired, on the evening before James's departure, to the ruins of Furness Abbey. It was a fine autumnal evening; the sun had set in the greatest beauty, and the moon was hastening up the eastern sky; and in the roofless choir they knelt, near where the altar formerly stood, and repeated, in the presence of Heaven, their vows ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... reached the road leading to Barcy, there was a rift in the clouds, and a long golden ray shot through an enormous breach in the church tower, flickered a moment upon a group of roofless houses, and ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... if it was the Princess's resolution never to see any man whatsoever, and they implored him to speak for them and to tell her the greatness of their love, and how long they had waited through the cold of winter and the heat of summer, sleepless and roofless through all weathers, without food and without rest, in the ardent hope of winning her, and they were willing to consider this long vigil as pleasure if she would but give them one chance of ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... me back to days bygone, When glad its banks I strolled upon, The river Doon so bonnie; The roofless kirk and yard so green, Where many a tombstone may be seen, With Tam ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... and she was married in July. This was six months after her first interview with Darnley. The ceremony was performed in the royal chapel at Holyrood. They show, to this day, the place where she is said to have stood, in the now roofless interior. ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... even to light, the flat and spongy delta of the Ganges lay decorously screened. If now and again the hangings parted they disclosed nothing more than a brief vista of half-stagnant water or a little clearing, half-overgrown, with the crumbling red brick walls of some roofless and ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... streets of Ypres. There, at least, the birds were singing above you, and the Arab sat beside his camel on the grass in the sunshine. Here nature itself seems blasted by some dreadful flame of death. The streets preserve their contours, but on either side the houses stand like gaunt skeletons, roofless and shattered, fronts knocked out, floors smashed through or hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household treasures a forlorn wreckage, hats still hanging on the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Barnardine held up the torch to light her, Emily observed to be in ruins, and she immediately recollected a former conversation of Annette, concerning it, with very unpleasant emotions. She looked fearfully on the almost roofless walls, green with damps, and on the gothic points of the windows, where the ivy and the briony had long supplied the place of glass, and ran mantling among the broken capitals of some columns, that had once supported the roof. Barnardine stumbled over the broken pavement, and his voice, as ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... forward on the road, which was now level and wider than it had been. As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more to reveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they saw a man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively put himself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning darkly, and muttering ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... blank sides mounted to meet the walled path reaching out to its top from the abrupt hill against which it had been placed. Before it foundations could still be traced; and above, a rectangle of windowless stone walls survived, roofless and desolate. An abandoned road turned up the hill, and they followed it to where they could gaze into the upper ruin and the Furnace top below. Everywhere nature had marked or twisted aside cut stone and ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... you control this by a switch, conveniently placed, so that the darkness which aids reflection is also at your command. Then there is the window, opening right down to the floor, from which, if it please you, you may study the activity of the roofless ant-hill beneath, the restless febrility of West ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... rose a loud roar of swine-voices, and, up from the center of the roofless house, shot a vast column of blood-red flame. I saw the little, twisted towers and turrets flash into fire; yet still preserving their twisted crookedness. The beams of the Green Sun, beat upon the house, and intermingled with its lurid glows; so that it appeared a ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... wanted to know. The crumbling walls surrounded a beautiful lawn, starred with wild flowers—buttercups and forget-me-nots—and a flock of sheep grazed peacefully in the wide enclosure. We wandered through the deserted, roofless chambers where fireplaces with elaborate stone mantels and odd bits of carving told of the pristine glory of the place. The castle was of great extent, covering the highest point in Ludlow, and before the day of artillery must have ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... there was a bench, inside a sort of roofless summerhouse, where on warm days the fountain played in a rainbow. She knew the place well—she had sat there many times—with him and with another—-she would go there now and think her own thoughts. It was hidden from the driveways, and the place was sweet with memories which ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... on his head. On a journey, or when the sun was particularly strong in the roofless theatre or circus, he might put on a broad-brimmed hat, very much like that of the modern Italian priest. Instead of the hat it was common, when the weather so required, either to draw a fold of the toga over the head or to wear a hood closely resembling the monkish cowl. This might be either attached ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... broken ground, grown with coarse grass and bramble, and as we peeped over this bank the ruined house stood before us—so near as to startle me by its proximity. It must have been a large house originally—if, indeed, it was ever completed. Now it stood roofless, dismantled, and windowless, and in many places whole rods of brickwork had fallen and now littered the ground about. The black gap of the front door stood plain to see, with a short flight of broken steps before it, and by the side of these a thick timber shore supported the front wall. It struck ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... massive walls, which are about thirty feet high and very thick, and entering by a handsome stone arch, called the Herculaneum gate, from the road leading to that city, I beheld a vista of houses or shops, and except that they were roofless, just as if they had been occupied but yesterday, although near eighteen centuries have passed away since the awful calamity which sealed the fate of their inhabitants. The facilities for excavation being ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... into white foam at its base, as to recall the wasted opportunities. They stand all along the course of our years, solemn monuments of our unfaithfulness, and none of them can ever return again. Life is full of too-lates; that sad sound that moans through the roofless ruins of the past, like the wind through some deserted temple. 'Too late, too late; ye cannot enter now.' 'The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold, therefore he shall beg in harvest and have nothing.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... passed that way. Still, there was no sign of a house anywhere. Presently, however, as I stumbled along, I noticed something looming darkly through the matted forest on my left, that suggested walls. Looking closer, I saw that it was the ruin of a small stone cottage, roofless, and indescribably swallowed up in the pitiless scrub. And then, near by, I descried another such ruin, and still another—all, as it were, sunk in the terrible gloom of the vegetation, as sometimes, at low tide, one can discern the walls of a ruined village ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... anything happening—yet at about noon of the day that Harley P. Hennage looked over the rail fence into the feed corral at San Pasqual and discovered that Bob McGraw's horse was gone, a man on a tired horse rode up from the south, turned in through the ruined doorway of one of the roofless tumble-down adobe houses, and concealed himself and his horse in the area formed by the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... highest part stands what is left of the keep, and a little lower the castle-church whose bell-tower, built over the gate, served to defend the only access to the inner fortification. This church, built about the same time, with a now roofless nave which was never vaulted, is entered by a door on the south, and has a polygonal vaulted apse. The mouldings of the door as well as the apse vault and its tall two-light windows show a greater delicacy and refinement than is seen in almost any earlier building, and some of the carving ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... saved the city, dethroned his father, and sent him into the country. He then adopted, from the apparition, the throne-name Uiracocha, grew a beard, and dressed like the apparition, to whom he erected a temple, roofless, and unique in construction. Therein he had an image of the god, for which he himself gave frequent sittings. When the Spaniards arrived, bearded men, the Indians called them Uiracochas (as all the Spanish historians say), and, to flatter them, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... seasons, has reminded us of some of the main physical features of the Elizabethan theatre; and the others are so generally known that we need review them only briefly. A typical Elizabethan play-house, like the Globe or the Blackfriars, stood roofless in the air. The stage was a projecting platform surrounded on three sides by the groundlings who had paid threepence for the privilege of standing in the pit; and around this pit, or yard, were built boxes for the city madams and the gentlemen of means. Often the side ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... I saw a line of old women who had recited in the keen sitting in the shadow of a wall beside the roofless shell of the church. They were still sobbing and shaken with grief, yet they were beginning to talk again of the daily trifles that veil from them the terror ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... all his acquaintance to be one of the best fellows in the world, and to beat every one at slang, but U——y and A——se. He is the terror of the Charleys, and of the poor unfortunate roofless nightly wanderers in the streets. You perceive his long white hair, and by no means engaging features. Yet he has vanity enough to think himself handsome, and that he is taken notice of on that account; when the attractions he presents are really such as excite wonder and surprise, mingled with ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... tempest. Nor was this all. The scene indeed was one which ought never to be witnessed in any country. Misery in all its shapes was there—suffering in its severest pangs—sickness—disease—famine—and death—to all which was to be added bleak, houseless, homeless, roofless desolation. Had the season been summer they might have slept in the fields, made themselves temporary sheds, or carried their sick, and aged, and helpless, to distant places where humanity might aid and relieve them. ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... not answer. His breathing could be heard also. His mind was picturing that same coronation—the shattered, roofless cathedral, the ruins of the ancient and magnificent high altar, the multitude of kneeling, famine-scourged people, the battle-worn, wounded and bandaged soldiery! And the King! And his father! Where had his father stood when ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... result was imposing, a large rectangular excavation not unlike an empty swimming bath, with a massive table of solid clay, and benches of the same simple design and material round the walls. Though, of course, roofless, it afforded a measure of safety from shells, but one shudders to think what would have been the effect had a high explosive landed on the table while ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... through a charming country. Upon the sides of its acclivities, surrounded by the most romantic scenery of woods and corn fields, we saw ruined convents, and roofless village churches, through the shattered casements of which the wind ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... Everything that we possessed had to be surrendered to them, including a little house which my father had bought six months after our arrival in St. Petersburg. How matters were finally settled I do not know, but we found ourselves roofless, shelterless, and without a copper. My mother was grievously ill, and of means of subsistence we had none. Before us there loomed only ruin, sheer ruin. At the time I was fourteen years old. Soon ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... four hours after the first alarm was sounded, there stood on the hill above the lake, bare, roofless walls and sky-filled arches as august as any medieval castle of Europe. Like Thomas the Rhymer, they had spent the night in fairyland, and waked a thousand years old. Romance already whispered through their dismantled, endless aisles. King Arthur's castle of Camelot ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... the bead wreaths glistened in the warm sunlight. All down the road as far as he could see was a long drab worm, broken in places by strings of motor trucks, a drab worm that wriggled down the slope, through the roofless shell of the village and up into the shattered woods on the crest of the next hills. Chrisfield strained his eyes to see the hills beyond. They lay blue and very peaceful in the moon mist. The river glittered about the piers of the wrecked stone bridge, and disappeared between rows of yellow ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... is a suite of apartments, ruinous and roofless in his day, but which Colonel Wildman has restored, and furnished most appropriately with old tapestry and antique tables and chairs. These rooms wear a ghostly aspect, and we were not surprised to learn that one, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... which expanded and whirled round them, and for a moment they were both enveloped in a faint blaze; at the same instant a sudden gust whisked off the stranger's hat, and the sexton beheld that his skull was roofless. For an instant he beheld the gaping aperture, black and shattered, and then he fell senseless into his own doorway, which his affrighted ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... them in a wretched state already) is a fact creditable rather to the thrift than to the state of grace of the Reformers. After all their protestations, full of texts, the lords and lairds starved their preachers, but provided, by roofless aisles and unglazed windows, for the ventilation of the kirks. These men so bubbling over with gospel fervour were, in short, when it came to practice, traitors and hypocrites; nor did Knox spare their unseemly ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... because they are true, but because they are pleasing. The psychological revelation is the eager, undefinable interest aroused by any picture of ancient society. It is felt by every stranger when he first walks the streets of Pompeii, and, standing within the walls of its roofless houses, strives to picture to himself the life and the society which flourished there eighteen hundred years ago. In Mexico the Spaniards found an organized society several thousand years further back of their own than Pompeian society, in its ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... building, with two stories above and extensive subterranean rooms, made their stay possible, but involved great suffering and horrible death as the siege went on. The large banquet hall of the Residency near by was converted into a hospital. Both buildings are now in ruins. But the roofless Residency with a tangle of vines (and a decrepit stairway that leads upward) furnishes a fine view of the whole scene, which in its very quietness bespeaks bravery, endurance, and ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... below. One of these resembled the other houses in construction, and was surrounded by a separate enclosure; but the second, which was placed on higher ground, so far as they could judge at that distance, was roofless, and had all the characteristics of a Roman amphitheatre. At the far end of this amphitheatre stood a huge mass of polished rock, bearing a grotesque resemblance to ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... beautiful. The ruined chapel attached to the old Palace of Holyrood, seen in the twilight, with its broken altar at which Mary received the Scottish crown, overgrown with grass and ivy, and its mouldering, roofless pillars, with patches of bright sky between, gave him the first inspiration for his Scotch Symphony. But it was the Hebrides which, in their lonely grandeur and bleakness, affected him most of all. Of Iona, with its ruins of a once magnificent cathedral, and its graves of ancient Scottish ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... forfeitures. He received 3028 acres in Cork, with Kilcolman Castle, two miles from Doneraile. The estate formed part of a wide plain, well watered, and, in the sixteenth century, well wooded. The castle is now a roofless ivy-clad ruin. The poet was turning it into a pleasant residence. Ralegh came to see it and him. Spenser has described the visit in the tenderest and least artificial of his poems. Colin Clout's Come Home Again, printed in 1595, was inscribed to ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... particularly a gallery nearly one hundred and fifty feet in length, has still several good and habitable rooms, and is now preserved with due care by its owner. The ancient kitchen, the coquina abbatis of the compotus, whence such hecatombs were served up, remains, though roofless, with two huge fire-places. On the southern side of this building is a small but very picturesque and beautiful rain mantled with ivy, which appears to have been a chapel, and was probably the abbot's private oratory. But the conventual church itself, which exceeded ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... he had left the Rolls Royce, all the time peering about him to right and left. He was looking for a temporary garage for the car, but one from which, if necessary, he could depart in a hurry. The shell of an ancient barn, roofless and desolate, presently invited inspection and, as a result, a few minutes later Colonel Lord Wolverham's luxurious automobile was housed for the ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... coolies were halted, and dropping upon their hands and knees, the three leaders crawled to the top of the break. Sheltered by a couple of sage-bushes and lying flat to the ground, Wilbur looked over and down upon the beach. The first object he made out was a crazy, roofless house, built of driftwood, the chinks plastered with 'dobe mud, the ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... man's ear the mingled voice That comes from her old dungeons yawning now To the black air, her amphitheatres, Where the dew gathers on the mouldering stones, And fanes of banished gods, and open tombs, And roofless palaces, and streets and hearths Of cities dug from their volcanic graves? I hear a sound of many languages, The utterance of nations now no more, Driven out by mightier, as the days of heaven Chase ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... State. It is in just such a section as we would expect to find ruins, if anywhere. Coronado, as we have seen, invaded the country about three hundred and fifty years ago. At the time of his visit this was then a ruin, for his historian describes one ruin as "a single ruined and roofless house... the work of civilized people who had come from afar." This gives us a point as to the antiquity of some of the ruins in the Gila Valley. As we shall see, there is every reason to suppose that this section was at one time a thickly ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... good camp for a week, and then the snow'll melt, and we'll all go back together." The cheerful gayety of the young man, and Mr. Oakhurst's calm infected the others. The Innocent, with the aid of pine-boughs, extemporized a thatch for the roofless cabin, and the Duchess directed Piney in the rearrangement of the interior with a taste and tact that opened the blue eyes of that provincial maiden to their fullest extent. "I reckon now you're used to fine things at Poker Flat," said Piney. The Duchess turned ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... engine snorted and the train moved away, the conductor cried out, "Forgot your cane, sonny," and threw the light gold-mounted bamboo from the car. He had a new sense of loneliness as he stood on the roofless platform, half a foot deep in gathering snow, which driven by a pitiless gale from the north blew his cloak about as he looked to see that his trunk had been delivered. A man shifted a switch and coming back said, "Gi'me your check." John decided that this was not ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... Abbey Church, with St. Joseph's Chapel, St. Mary's Chapel, and the Abbot's Kitchen. St. Joseph's Chapel is supposed to have been erected in the time of Henry II. and Richard I. It is one of the finest specimens in existence of transitional Norman work. It is now roofless, and even the vaulting of the crypt is nearly destroyed. The windows and archways of St. Mary's Chapel are beautiful, although roofless. The Abbot's Kitchen, a square massive structure with strong buttresses, was built about 1450. The roof is of stone and is surmounted by a louvre, through ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... the beechen boughs That roofless tower invade, We came while her enchanting Muse The radiant moon above us held: Till by a clamorous owl compell'd She ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... particular mystery about the art, and those birds are so unsophisticated, I shall be sure to get some. You see if I don't. But first I must build my house. The open sky is all very well, but it might come on to rain, and then the roofless caravanserai would not be very comfortable. It is a good thing ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... changed. The unapproachable elegance, the inviolable security, have witnessed invasion. The right wing of the chateau is in ruins, with traces of fire upon the blackened walls; while here and there, a broken statue or a roofless temple, are sad memorials of the Revolution. Within the restored part of the chateau, however, all looks well. Monsieur the Viscount has been fortunate, and if not so rich a man as his father, has yet regained enough ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... these pariahs have been so unfortunate as to get down into the rampart ditch; we can see the places where they have repeatedly made frantic rushes for liberty up the almost perpendicular escarp, only to fall helplessly back to the bottom of their roofless dungeon, where they will gradually starve to death. The natives down in this part of the city greet us with curious looks; they are wondering at the sight of two Ferenghis promenading the ramparts, far ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... background of this hollow stood a peculiar, roofless, stone building, whose two round little windows, like the eternally watchful eyes of some underground worm, shone with a red glare which dazzled the eyes, while the slate-covered chimney belched forth a thick smoke filled with sparks into the ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... passed since Osman Digna had captured and destroyed it, but during these three years its roofless ruins had sustained another siege, and one no less persistent. The quick-growing trees had so closely girt and encroached upon it to the rear and to the right and to the left, that the traveller came upon it unexpectedly, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... a roofless room, open on one side where a break in the ti-trees showed the sandy bed of the creek, which, at first, to Lady Bridget's fancy, had the appearance of a broad shallow stream. On this side, low rocks with ferns growing in their crannies, edged the stream. On the opposite shore, one giant eucalyptus ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... very favorably with many mansions on the Avenue," she said, after I returned with a box and she had peered for a moment into the roofless home. ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... arched by trees. Emerging suddenly from their covert an astonishing assemblage of ruins comes into view. Before you stands the magnificent eastern transept with its two beautiful octangular towers, still rising to the height of 120 feet, but roofless and desolate; the three stately windows, 60 feet high, as open to the sky as Glastonbury Abbey; in the rooms once adorned with choicest paintings and rarities trees are growing. Oh what a scene of desolation! What the noble poet ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... I placed the packages, the cylinders of oxygen, and so forth, loosely about my feet, and soon we had everything in. He walked about the roofless shed for a time seeking anything we had overlooked, and then crawled in after me. I noted ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... and down into deep dark mystery. Certainly so far the ruins did not look as though they would protect any one from wind and rain, and we passed on, through walls that seemed impregnable, to ruined chambers, utterly roofless, in and out of which pigeons were flying happily at their ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... though both bestowed in vain, 870 Which Grief could change, and Guilt could stain, It was no vulgar tenement To which such lofty gifts were lent, And still with little less than dread On such the sight is riveted. The roofless cot, decayed and rent, Will scarce delay the passer-by; The tower by war or tempest bent, While yet may frown one battlement, Demands and daunts the stranger's eye; 880 Each ivied arch, and pillar lone, Pleads haughtily for glories gone! "His ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... and other chroniclers dwell at length on the magnificence of the interior. They especially refer to the beauty and value of a sculpture showing the arms of Castile, located in the great reception hall behind the viceroy's throne. At the present time the building is reduced to a mere shell, roofless and windowless; in a part of its interior there is a little palm thatch shelter for stabling horses; while the court yard and terrace reek with offal from ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... nothing but what appeared to be the rugged face of the cliff; but soon the eye began to make out a kind of order here and there, and that rugged ranges of stones had been built up on shelves of the rock, with windows and doors, but as far as could be made out these rock-dwellings had been roofless; and were more like fortifications than anything ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... the dressing-room, a wide roofless space enclosed with green boughs massed on end, and furnished plentifully with water in buckets, towels, basins, pin cushions, combs and brushes, face powder, even needles and thread. Thence one emerged after half an hour quite fresh—to dance on and on, till the fiddlers played ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... beside her, the never-ending stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, but she abiding;—to herself, her home. And sometimes I think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... says, this description is near enough even to-day, and is mighty nicely written to boot. I am bound to add, of my own experience, that Maybole is tumble-down and dreary. Prosperous enough in reality, it has an air of decay; and though the population has increased, a roofless house every here and there seems to protest the contrary. The women are more than well-favoured, and the men fine tall fellows; but they look slipshod and dissipated. As they slouched at street corners, or stood about gossiping ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Susquehana's side, fair Wyoming! Although the wild-flower on thy ruined wall And roofless homes a sad remembrance bring Of what thy gentle ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... and he gaed, over round swelling hills, over old battle-fields, past the roofless ruins of houses whose walls were crowned with tall climbing grasses, till he came to a crystal sheet of water, called St. Mary's Loch. Here he paused to take breath. The sky was dull and lowering; but at his feet were yellow flowers, which shone, on that gray day, like ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... When I reached the roofless house in which we had held the consultation the night before, I threw off my gown and I put on the busby and sabre which I ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that has dismantled that busy place, and established it as the quiet farmstead that I see, holds a hope within it. There must indeed have been a sad time when the buildings were slipping into decay, and the church stood ruined and roofless. But how soon the scars are healed! How calmly nature smiles at the eager schemes of men, breaks them short, and then sets herself to harmonise and adorn the ruin, till she makes it fairer than ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... grim and pitiable signs of war. The sugar cane has turned to a dirty brown where the fire has passed through it, the centrals are black ruins, and the adobe houses and the railroad stations are roofless, and their broken windows stare pathetically at you like blind eyes. War cannot alter the sunshine, but the smoke from the burning huts and the blazing corn fields seems all the more sad and terrible when it rises ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... And there they found that, having spent their money, It would not soon yield them much "milk and honey." But yet it promised, from its rich, black soil, A full reward, in time, for cash and toil. So, in good heart, without one "if," or "but," They set to work to fix a roofless hut. This done, they placed their goods in ship-board style, With furniture dispensing for awhile. Their boxes served quite well for chairs and table, And on the floor they slept—if they were able— For dread mosquitoes, ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... water by the temple's western approach, and sat down to smoke under a tree in the precincts. The big cone of the main tower was just in sight. I had seen the walls before, and was in no analytical mood; synthesis was enough for me. I took in with my delighted eyes a roofless dome worthy to be a temple of some sort, even if it were not, a blue roof that bettered mere human aspiration, debris testifying to earthly incompleteness, a broken column with its memento mori all these were simmering in my vision and my judgment. I half dozed until the voices of the lunchers began ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... the roofless, open-air auditorium, he constructed a covered circular wooden building with stories or galleries, which was made so as to contain a number of boxes for the distinguished and well-paying public, and which entirely enclosed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... district. Yet, in all that valley, which was five miles long by two in breadth, there were not two hundred houses; and there rose around them the unpopulated hillside, where a host of people might have lived in health, and where, indeed, men had once lived, as was witnessed by the roofless gables which here and ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... the olden time, Dark ruin, lone and gray?" "Full many a race from thy native clime, And the bright earth, pass away. The organ has pealed in these roofless aisles, And priests have knelt to pray At the altar, where now the daisy smiles O'er their ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... the inn; Hear the clean ring of their laughter! Cool as a hill-brook after The beat of the noon sets in! Gentlemen even in jollity— Certainly people of quality!— Waifs and estrays no less, Roofless and penniless, They are the wayside strummers Whose lips are man's renown, Those wayward brats of Summer's Who stroll from town to town; Spendthrift of life, they ravish The days of an endless store, And ever the more they lavish The heap ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... in silence, the light from the chaise-lamps playing over her flushed face. Presently she turned and surveyed the darkness where, row on row, ruins of burned houses stood, the stars shining down through roofless walls. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers |
