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More "Staircase" Quotes from Famous Books



... mother's room, as she went up the great staircase and down the upper hall. The light was burning there, and the servant who always waited on Mrs. Sterling was ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon

... serpent, in the Ancient Monuments, is very often found associated the Cross. The Serpent upon a Cross was an Egyptian Standard. It occurs repeatedly upon the Grand Staircase of the Temple of Osiris at Philæ; and on the pyramid of Ghizeh are represented two kneeling figures erecting a Cross, on the top of which is a serpent erect. The Crux Ansata was a Cross with a coiled Serpent above it; and it is perhaps the most common of all emblems on the Egyptian Monuments, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... manages to get word back to the king of what has taken place. By literally begging Madame in tears, Louis manages to secure Louise's return to court—but Madame still places every obstacle possible before the lovers. They have to resort to building a secret staircase and meeting in the apartments of M. de Saint-Aignan, where Louis has a painter create a portrait of Louise. But Madame recalls Raoul from London and shows him these proofs of Louise's infidelity. Raoul, crushed, challenges Saint-Aignan to a duel, which the ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... both sides of his mustache at once, and Truchen was looking at him with a most bewitching smile. The sparkling wine of Anjou very soon produced a remarkable effect upon the three companions. D'Artagnan had hardly strength enough left to take a candlestick to light Planchet up his own staircase. Planchet was pulling Porthos along, who was following Truchen, who was herself jovial enough. It was D'Artagnan who found out the rooms and the beds. Porthos threw himself into the one destined for him, after his friend had undressed him. D'Artagnan got into his own bed, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... be out on the rock, but Peter Bligh was close upon my heels, and, wonderful to tell, the Italian almost as quick as any of us. To what gate of the sea the staircase was carrying me I knew no more than the others. The time was gone by when anything in Czerny's house could surprise me; and when at the stairs' head we found that which looked for all the world like a great port-hole ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton

... look in his half-blind eyes. But we couldn't make out what he wanted. At last he dragged himself as far as the door, and we set it open and watched him, poor, dear beast. He got across the lobby to the bottom of the little staircase——" ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... hurried away just as she was at her breakfast, and all she knew of him was the resounding slam of the hall door, which came echoing up the staircase. Very often in the evening he came hastily into the nursery to say good-bye on his way out to some dinner-party, and at night she woke up to hear his step on the stairs as he came back late. But when he dined at home Ruth always went downstairs to ...
— The Kitchen Cat, and other Tales • Amy Walton

... the contracting pinch of the frost; what a rattling there was of windows, what a concerted attack upon the clapboards; how the floors squeaked, and what gusts from round corners came to snatch the feeble flame of the candle from the boy's hand. How he shivered, as he paused at the staircase window to look out upon the great fields of snow, upon the stripped forest, through which he could hear the wind raving in a kind of fury, and up at the black flying clouds, amid which the young moon was dashing ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... lunch that Mrs. Laudersdale, having grown weary of the needle-women's thread of discourse, left the sewing-room and proceeded toward her own apartment. Just as she crossed the head of the staircase, the hall-door was flung open, admitting a gleeful blast of the boisterous gale, and an object that, puffing and blowing like a sad-hued dolphin, and shaking like a Newfoundland, appeared at first to be the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... behaved so well, and turned themselves into amateur firemen. No thanks to the War Office that there aren't twenty-two deaths, instead of two. Why, only six months ago, I warned 'em that the place was "unfit for human habitation," and a regular death-trap in case of fire, with only one narrow wooden staircase to the whole block. I wrote that, "if a fire occurred at night, there must be many deaths." Yet nothing ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various

... Though it's such nonsense, it's a great blow to me. I feel like Famusov in the last scene of Sorrow from Wit. You are Tchatsky and she is Sofya, and, only fancy, I've run down to meet you on the stairs, and in the play the fatal scene takes place on the staircase. I heard it all; I almost dropped. So this is the explanation of her dreadful night and her hysterics of late! It means love to the daughter but death to the mother. I might as well be in my grave at once. And a more serious matter still, what is this letter she has written? Show ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... would have left her in possession of her own peace and the confidence of her friends, which will always prove enough for those who confess themselves to be strangers and pilgrims on the earth—those who regard it as a grand staircase they have to climb, not a plain on which to build their houses and plant ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... (NEAR).—NECROPOLIS.—M. Botti has discovered between Chatbi and Ibrahimieh a Roman necropolis of the first or second century A.D.. at a depth of fourteen metres. It is excavated in soft calcareous stone and its chambers and corridors are Page 102 reached by a rock-cut staircase. ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various

... a long and narrow hall, upon which doors opened from either side. At the end of the hall was a staircase with a balustrade which ended in a sweeping curve. The balustrade was covered with heavy, Persian rugs, and the walls of the hall were also hung with them. The door on my left was closed, but the one nearer me on the right was open, and, as I stepped ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis

... to the newel-post of the staircase and, when she looked into Daniel's face, blushed like the red, red rose, losing her ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... in their apartment on Thursday evenings really fine musical festivals which my surviving contemporaries still remember. From the salon in which the famous portrait by Ary Scheffer was hung and which was devoted to ordinary instrumental and vocal music, we went down a short staircase to a gallery filled with valuable paintings, and finally to an exquisite organ, one of Cavaille-Coll's masterpieces. In this temple dedicated to music we listened to arias from the oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn. She had sung them in London, but could not ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens

... log-and-frame house of somewhat more than average picturesque character. The projecting centres and wing-towers, the outside staircase, and roofs conical, flat, pyramidal, bulbous and Oriental, give it a miscellaneous toyshop appearance, characteristic perhaps of the mosaic character of the nation. Barge-boards and brackets of various cheap patterns are plentifully strewed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... my dear boy—of course," said the doctor, and they went out together, to be closely followed by Jerry, who reached the staircase first, and sprung up to light candles, though they were ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn

... to place the irrelevant tray on the floor, but now Dorothy was half-way down the staircase. He caught her on the landing, and taking both her hands, drew her down on ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... words, Jimmie darted out of the door and then his steps were heard on the staircase. Fremont had never in all his life had a key turned on him before. He threw himself into a chair, then, realizing how selfish he was, he hastened to the north room and again bent over the ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson

... Roland Graeme led Mary to the boat and to brief liberty and hope unfulfilled. Only a kind of ground- plan remains of the halls where Lindesay and Ruthven browbeat her forlorn Majesty. But you may climb the staircase where Roland Graeme stood sentinel, and feel a touch, of what Pepys felt when he kissed a dead Queen—Katherine of Valois. Like Roland Graeme, the Queen may have been "wearied to death of this Castle of Loch Leven," where, in spring, all seems so beautiful, the trees budding freshly above the ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang

... asked me to go for a walk with her? Oh, what an unfortunate wretch I am! We rode through the forest together to one of the most magnificent monuments in Brittany, the Castle of Elven. Finding the door unlocked, we tethered our horses in the deserted courtyard, and climbed up the narrow, winding staircase to the battlements. The sea of autumnal foliage below was bathed in the light of the setting sun, and for a long time we sat side by side in silence, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... as of a maniac, he was at the door, pounding, rattling, and uttering hoarse and furious outcries. Even through his fury he heard quickened footsteps—her light, reckless, half-hysterical laugh—a bound upon the staircase—the hurried unbolting and opening of distant doors, as the lighter one with which he was struggling at last yielded to his blind rage, and threw him crashing into the sitting-room. The back door was wide open. He could hear the rustling and crackling of twigs ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... laugh at me." However, he took heart, and went on with his labour, nor had he cause to repent; for on a sudden he discovered a white slab, which he took up, and under it found a door, made fast with a steel padlock, which he broke with the pick-axe, and opened the door, which covered a staircase of white marble. He immediately lighted a lamp, and went down the stairs into a room, the floor whereof was laid with tiles of chinaware, and the roof and walls were of crystal; but he particularly fixed his eyes on four shelves, a ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.

... who were in the chapel at the right of the corridor started. "April weather!" growled the corporal of the Imperial Halberdiers to the comrade with whom he was keeping; guard at the foot of the staircase leading to the apartments of Charles V, in the second story of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... not seen Augustus, as I had come straight from a room near McGreggor's, where I had spent the night. As I was leaving the dining-room I went towards the staircase, ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn

... have provoked the criticism of the captious. It became the fashion in college to chant this martial ode whenever Hyacinth was seen approaching. It was thundered out by a choir who marched in step up and down his staircase. Bars of it were softly hummed in his ear while he tried to note the important truths which the lecturers impressed upon their classes. One night five musicians relieved each other at the task of playing the tune on a concertina ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... When I listened I heard her speaking of me as of an insane person. She really believes that I am ill. When the man went away he must have been angry. He stamped down the stairs until the steps creaked under his tread: I know it is a wooden staircase therefore. ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner

... by a winding stone staircase, are spacious, and consist of a series of parallel and uniform galleries hewn in the chalk without either masonry supports or facings. Among the solid piles of bottles which here hem us in on all sides are a considerable number of magnums and imperial pints ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly

... a steel sword-sheath. They did bear their reins tightened, and their heels ornamented with spurs, as if ready to spring forth at a word, and great tribulation came over my soul. Howbeit I mounted the grand staircase, and following the western corridor, I opened the door of the green-damask withdrawing-room, and found myself in the middle of a large and silent company. There were, perhaps, a dozen persons there assembled—motionless in their ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... deep old voice of Mr. Clifford outside his door inquiring from Mrs. Nixey if Mr. Merle was gone down-stairs yet. He made haste to go down, treading the old staircase with something of the alacrity of former days. Phebe was in the dining-room, and the servants came in to prayer as they had been used to do forty years ago when he was a child. An old-world tranquillity and peacefulness ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... single word, then, the lively Miss Fanny had uttered the emphatic words, "Oh, me!—my goodness gracious!" because she had heard upon the staircase the noise of a masculine footstep, and caught sight of a masculine cocked-hat ascending;—which phenomenon, arguing again upon the theories of cause and effect, plainly indicated that a head was under the chapeau—the head of one of ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke

... the room and opened her door quietly. The passage without was dark save for a blur of light at the end where the top of the staircase was. Walking on tiptoe, she went toward this light. She would at least make an effort to discover ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner

... this house. Some phase of his work, some vision of his wife or daughters started forth from each bit of furniture, picture, doorway. Noiseless, in his slippers, he stole up and down between the study, diningroom, drawing-room, and anyone seeing him at his work in the dim light which visited the staircase from above the front door and the upper-passage window, would have thought: 'A ghost, a ghost gone into mourning for the condition of the world.' He had to make this reckoning to-night, while the exaltation of his new ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... to break into a crown of drooping green leaves some fifty feet above their heads. All round were a series of Moorish arches, in jade and serpentine marble, with heavy curtains of the deepest purple to cover the doors which lay between them. In front, to right and to left, a broad staircase of marble, carpeted with rich thick Smyrna rug work, led upwards to the upper storeys, which were arranged around the central court. The temperature within was warm and yet fresh, like the air ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle

... up the left-hand staircase, past rows of ancient wooden mummy cases, and came to the upper landing. A few minutes were spent inspecting the last resting place of a one-time Egyptian lord, with frequent ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... her, so fascinated, so completely at my ease with her, that I could have stayed on without taking note of time had not Amy remembered that it was our dinner-hour. We took our leave, and met Mrs. Leare on the staircase ascending to her apartment. She greeted Amy with as much effusion as was compatible with her ideas of fashion, and said she was "right glad" to hear we had been passing the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... with perplexed faces and despairing gestures. As he approached the town-house—one of those magnificent, many-towered, highly-decorated, municipal palaces of the Netherlands—he found troops all around it; troops guarding the main entrance, troops on the great external staircase leading to the front balcony, and officers, in yellow jerkin and black bandoleer, grouped in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... the boy answered enthusiastically. "The salt winds from over three thousand miles of ocean blow around them; in their steel walls there are lots of windows; lightning speed elevators make the top floor easier to get at than the second story of a dark, old-fashioned staircase building; and I've heard that the marble mosaic entrances of the larger of them put the Italian palaces to shame. I don't know Europe, but I do know New York, and I believe, Mr. Burns, if you knew it as I do, you'd be as ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... followed him to the back of the shop, where there was a winding staircase. She knocked over a few things in her passage and stooped to pick them up, but the dealer kept muttering, "It does not matter—surely it does not matter." He ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... placed it carefully beneath the bench. Then, closing and bolting the door, he took the lamp from Carraway and motioned him up the dusky staircase to the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... the house; he said we could, and that the housekeeper would show it to us in a little time but that at present she was engaged. We entered a large quadrangular court: on the left-hand side was a door and staircase leading into the interior of the building, and farther on was a gateway, which was no doubt the principal entrance from the park. On the eastern side of the spacious court was a kennel, chained to which ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... Heron and followed by Janet, had ascended the broad oaken staircase, and passed through the long gallery, the housekeeper paused in a recess ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... armchair the man of medicine stared into the glowing coals and thought deeply and long, but apparently to little purpose, for he frequently rose and opening a door leading to the staircase, listened intently; then resumed his seat. Presently, however, he fell asleep, and when he woke it was past midnight. He stirred the failing fire, lifted a book from the table at his side and looked at the title. It was Denneker's "Meditations." ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... grunt, followed by a flabby groan and a straining and squeaking of the jerry-built staircase as Kasheed Hassoun vigorously applied a lath to the horny ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... hailed a motor-omnibus, and Marjorie carefully climbed the spiral staircase at the back. Her father followed, and sitting up on top of the 'bus, in the crisp, wintry air and bright sunshine, they ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells

... 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 the children and, when the loom was silent ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman

... her liking. She was very pale. The scene in the Circus, followed by the sudden confession of her faith, had taxed her strength. This, her anxiety for her mother and the unusual heat of the evening caused her to feel faint, so that she excused herself and went away, climbing a narrow staircase to the flat, tiled roof. Here were many plants, blossoming vines and the gurgling of cool water, as it passed through the mouth of a hideous gorgan mask and fell into a basin where soft green mosses clung and ferns waved ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark

... examine the first floor, which doubtless was innocent enough, but turned quickly up a flight of steps. At the foot of the broad staircase Kennedy paused to examine some rich carvings, and I felt him nudge me. I turned. It was an enclosed staircase, with walls that looked to be of re-enforced concrete. Swung back on hinges concealed like those of a modern burglar-proof safe was the ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve

... part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial ground of the family, I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... women who compete for these prizes will be assembled on the grand staircase before the orchestra. The nude, as always, ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith

... musingly, "she could have run upstairs. The staircase is so far back in the hall, that the guests in the parlor would not have seen her. This is a very deep house, ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells

... up a wide staircase to a door with a screen just inside, and heard her name announced for the first time in her life. Sara Lee took a long breath and went inside, to ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... shilling per night—"Board and residence for respectable single men, fifteen shillings per week." I was a respectable single man then. I boarded and resided there. I boarded at a greasy little table in the greasy little corner under the fluffy little staircase in the hot and greasy little dining-room or restaurant downstairs. They called it dining-rooms, but it was only one room, and them wasn't half enough room in it to work your elbows when the seven little tables and forty-nine chairs ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... methodical, unfinished, and palatial. But there is an old town; and, though the old town be not of surpassing interest, it is as dingy, crooked, intricate, and dark as other old towns in Germany. Here, in the old Market-place, up one long broad staircase, were situated the two rooms in which was held the ...
— The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich • Anthony Trollope

... he was by the man's words, Tommy did not hesitate. If audacity had successfully carried him so far, it was to be hoped it would carry him yet farther. He quietly passed into the house and mounted the ramshackle staircase. Everything in the house was filthy beyond words. The grimy paper, of a pattern now indistinguishable, hung in loose festoons from the wall. In every angle was a ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie

... slowly and with impressiveness; then breaking off abruptly he led the way up a winding iron staircase and the boys, still pondering his words, ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett

... wanted to go to the top of the spire, in spite of her high heels, and long dress which swept the stairs or was caught in a corner of the staircase; she did not worry about it, but pulled the stuff which split, and went on climbing, holding it up. She wanted very much to ring the bells. From the top of the tower she declaimed Victor Hugo (he did not understand it), and sang a popular French ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... I have lost my way,"—and I was going on with my explanation, when he, as if quite indifferent to it, led the way up a great stone staircase, as wide as many rooms, and having on each landing-place massive iron wickets, in a heavy framework; these the porter unlocked with the solemn slowness of age. Indeed, a strange, mysterious awe of the centuries that had passed away since this chateau was built, came ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell

... Spanish Don—who was not, apparently, my elder in age—she had recognised a man. However, I said nothing further till I reached the summit. One cannot speak with manly dignity while one is out of breath on a staircase. ...
— John Bull on the Guadalquivir from Tales from all Countries • Anthony Trollope

... off, and stood for a while in the dark. Then he opened the door and went out and stood on the landing. The servants were sitting huddled together on the staircase, nervous looking, indeed, but not frightened. It seemed to him to be remarkable that these girls should have kept their nerve as finely as they had. He smiled at them, as he ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... in a wide hall-way; on their left was the open door of a spacious dining-room, and in front the hall ran, ever narrowing, into a long, dark passage that led apparently to the top of the kitchen stairs. The broad uncarpeted staircase rose in a sweep before them, everywhere draped in shadows, except for a single spot about half-way up where the moonlight came in through the window and fell on a bright patch on the boards. This shaft of light ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... trellised porches, but these had been found inconvenient and were removed, and the lower story consisted of a large hall, and strong vault, with a spacious room behind it containing a baking-oven, and a staircase leading to a wooden gallery, where the family used to dine. It seems they slept in the room below, though they had upstairs ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of our hotel was prepossessing. We entered through a wide gateway into a hall opening upon a small court, in the centre of which stood a large vase, very well sculptured, from the stone of the island, and filled with flowers. A wide handsome staircase, also of stone, with richly-carved balustrades, and adorned with statues and vases, conducted us to a gallery, two sides of which were open, and the other two closed, running round the court-yard, ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts

... as give pauper dormitories such a cheerful look. Looney and Clem slept side by side. Before midnight the dormitory was full of suffocating smoke. The alarm was raised. For a time it was thought that all the boys had escaped down an iron staircase lately erected outside the building. But when the flames had been put out in the store-room below, the bodies of Looney and Clem were found clasped together on Clem's bed. Looney's arms were twisted very tightly around Clem's neck, and people said he had perished ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... very profusely, like a great lady whose visit was an honour to the family. She was taken upstairs, up a newly-built wooden staircase, to see the room above, which was the glory of the home. She remembered the history of its construction; it was after the finding of a derelict vessel in the channel, which luck had befallen Yann's father and his ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... room, and descending the staircase let himself out by the front door, thinking he might obtain a glimpse of the approaching horseman. But that traveller had in the meantime gone stealthily round to the back of the homestead, and peering along the pinion-end ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... fortifications, could only be entered from the north, but the first thing done by Dom Manoel was to build on the south side a large platform or terrace reached from the garden on the east by a great staircase. This terrace is now bounded on the west by the Cloister dos Filippes, on the south by a high wall and by the chapter-house, begun by Dom Manoel but never finished, and on the north by the round church and by ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson

... shop over the way, a tall young figure in a tweed suit marched from one unlighted lamp-post to another; the girl drew back to the staircase, snatching a space for consideration. The next moment she was crossing the street with the air of an art patron anxious to ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge

... her head; the smile dies away.] Life to me then was like a glorious staircase, and I mounted happy step after step led by your hand till everything seemed to culminate on the day of our wedding. You men don't, can't realize, what that service means to a girl. In those few moments she parts from all that have cherished her, made her life, and gives her ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch

... astonishing to think that we so readily accept a position when we once understand it. You buy a new house. You are fool enough to take out a staircase that you may put in a bathing-room. This will be done in a fortnight, everybody tells you, and then everybody begins. Plumbers, masons, carpenters, plasterers, skimmers, bell-hangers, speaking-tube men, men who make furnace-pipe, paper-hangers, men who scrape ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... back a curtain. A long passage was revealed, leading to the kitchen. Ganimard ran down it and found that the door of the servants' staircase was double-locked. ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc

... paws, turn over on his back, and try to rip it open with his hind paws. I suppose that was the way his tiger ancestors ripped open their prey. He would carry the cork, attached to the post at the foot of the staircase, as far up the stairs as the string would allow him, lay it down and touch it gently to make it roll down the stairs so that he could spring after it and catch it before it reached the bottom. All this was most satisfactory. ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich

... was an unbending look of resolve which said plainly, "Tell me where to find her, or I shall search for her at once." Secretly pleased at the prospect of reconciliation, the matron no longer hesitated, and, pointing to the staircase, said: "She is in ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... on the estate at Levetinczy. In one wing lived the steward and his wife, while the other was given up to Timar. A staircase from this wing led to the park, and by this means he could gain access to the room which he had chosen as an office. Michael must pay attention to the trivial details if he wished to carry out his wearisome deceit consistently. He has been absent for five months, ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... no conflagration to hasten her preparations for descent on this occasion. She met Marty at the foot of the staircase. The boy's face was actually pallid, and against this background his freckles seemed twice their ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long

... is driven mad by the loss of his friend and, seeking to join him by the sea, is overwhelmed and drawn out by the undertow. As the officers come to arrest her, Mrs. Font hangs herself from the landing of the great staircase of Font Hill with the rope Guy ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... with him now, in front of the horses, stepping up the crooking staircase of stones, sounding him on the weather and the way. Unexpectedly the key is hit upon. A chance comparison I make of a view in the Alps lights up the old fellow's face, and when I happen to mention an exploit of Whymper, his tongue is loosed. It is ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... we should have the upper platform running round the circle at a pace of twenty-eight miles an hour. If, further, we adopt an ingenious suggestion of Professor Perry's, and imagine the descent to the line made down a very slowly rotating staircase at the centre of a big rotating wheel-shaped platform, against a portion of whose rim the slowest platform runs in a curve, one could very easily add a speed of six or eight miles an hour more, and to that ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... Dickenson. "Here's another hole in the floor. Lantern here. Yes, there's another private staircase with a flight of steps ready. This ought to be the well. Yes; come and listen. You ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn

... to send off his patients without a stumble. But as the stair inexorably lowered them into the bowels of the earth he realised, only too vividly, what might happen at the foot of the descent. The evening rush of suburb-bound passengers had begun and the staircase was rather crowded. Nobody seemed to realise that the khaki-overcoated men who stood so still upon the steps were not the usual hospital convalescents out on leave and able to look after themselves. Corporal Smith, delayed by one man who had hesitated at the top before taking the plunge, ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir

... of the Stand is to have a balustrade the whole width of the front. With reference to the interior arrangements, there are four large and well-proportioned rooms for refreshments, &c.; a spacious hall, leading through a screen of Doric columns to a large and elegant staircase of stone, and on each side of the staircase are retiring rooms of convenience for gentlemen. The entrance to this floor is from the abovementioned terrace and portico in front; and also, at the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various

... superfluous, he shut them out upon the staircase, and they groped their way into the street again. The interview had done so little to remove the mystery in which Tom's new engagement was involved, and had done so much to thicken it, that neither could help smiling at the puzzled looks of the other. They ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... Twelfth-Night King of Art. For a brief span his success seemed to be without limits. His house was daily besieged by beaux and belles of quality. 'Horses and grooms,' says Miss Hawkins in her Memoirs, 'were cooling before the door; carriages stopped the passage of the street; and the narrow staircase ill sufficed for the number that waited the cautious descent or the laborious ascent of others.' But, of course, this state of things did not last very long. Mr. Sherwin, by his indolence—and indolence in his situation was a sort of insolence—soon put himself out of fashion. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... conformity with my own wishes, we accepted the scheme of the Commissioners; 5thly, in dining with an old friend at Clare College; 6thly, in adjourning to the weekly meeting of the Ray Club, from which I returned at 10 P.M., dog-tired, and hardly able to climb my staircase. Lastly, in looking through the "Times" to see what was going on in ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... broad, royal staircase, and before it, where, in by-gone times, Oluf Skoetkonge stretched the iron chains across the mouth of the Maelar Lake, there is now a splendid bridge with shops above and the Streamparterre below: there we see the little steamer 'Nocken,'[K] steering ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... enough to discern Mrs. Dyer from the other comely gentlewoman who lives up at staircase No. 5; or, if you should make a blunder in the twilight, Mrs. Dyer has too much good sense to be jealous for a mere effect of imperfect optics. But don't try to write the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... very Sun and Rain that give her life. If I go up to Heaven she is there, enthroned in Christ, on the Right Hand of God; if I go down to Hell she is there also, drawing back souls from the brink from which she alone can rescue them. For she is that very ladder which Jacob saw so long ago, that staircase planted here in the blood and the slime of earth, rising there into the stainless Light of the Lamb. Holiness and unholiness are both alike hers and she is ashamed of neither—the holiness of her own Divinity which is Christ's ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson

... hall to which I have alluded has been removed, and a new central entrance inclusive of the lounge has been driven right through the middle, greatly enhancing the appearance and conveniences of the hotel. The old south-west staircase has also been done away with, and the empty space on the ground floor let out as a shop. The erection of the arcade with a spacious verandah on the top forms one of the most striking and effective of the new improvements that have been initiated. ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey

... stealthily past this latter door, reached the staircase, and went swiftly up to the landing above. Here another door barred his way, and here again he placed his ear to the panel—but this time to listen, it seemed, interminably. Every faculty was strained and alert now. He could take no chances here, ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... was reached at last. It was the keep of a castle of very ancient date, built in the centre of a Roman encampment. The walls were of enormous thickness, allowing a staircase ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... as he saw how perfectly the plan was calculated to drive them out of the staircase into the open room above, where the numbers of the Kachins could ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... on our route was—Paris. While there, strolling out one morning alone, accident directed my steps to the Arc d'Etoile, that magnificent memorial of the greatness of a great man. Ascending its gloomy staircase to the roof, I seated myself, to enjoy the fine view it affords of ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore

... name at the door, the footman went to see if his master was at home, and, by the tardiness of his return, gave me reason to suspect that time was taken to deliberate. He then informed me, that Prospero desired my company, and shewed the staircase carefully secured by mats from the pollution of my feet. The best apartments were ostentatiously set open, that I might have a distant view of the magnificence which I was not permitted to approach; ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... natural eyes, I shall not disclose. It is built in the form of a square, and has five churches attached to it. You enter a gate, pass through the great, silent, and grass-grown court—up the broad staircase, and enter the long, arched cloisters, lighted by one dim lamp, where everything seems to ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... chasm, but could not, for more than an hour, see sufficiently well to discover its nature. At last I saw it was almost a perpendicular opening, like a roughly excavated well, only very large. I could perceive no bottom; and it was not till the sun actually rose, that I discovered a sort of natural staircase, in many parts little more than suggested, which led round and round the gulf, descending spirally into its abyss. I saw at once that this was my path; and without a moment's hesitation, glad to quit the sunlight, which stared at me most heartlessly, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... couldn't stand upright in the room. There was no ventilation in the place. There was no fireplace, and only a small window. When the window was open, you could nearly touch the houses at the back, and if the room had not been at the top of the house, the men could not have seen at all in the place. The staircase was so narrow, steep, and dark, that it was difficult to grope your way to the top of the house—it was like going up a steeple. This is the usual kind of place in which the sweater's men are lodged. ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... surrounding country, and is in a state of perfect preservation. It is said to have been founded by Roger de Berkeley soon after the Norman Conquest. About the year 1150 it was granted by Henry II. to Robert Fitzhardinge, Governor of Bristol, who strengthened and enlarged it. On the right of the great staircase leading to the keep, and approached by a gallery, is the room in which it is supposed that Edward II. was murdered, Sept. 21, 1327. The king, during his captivity here, composed a dolorous poem, of which the following ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray

... the confused and self-tortured girl had to go forward to meet the emperor, who waited at the foot of the great staircase to conduct her to the presence of the empress. Maria Theresa came gracefully forward, surrounded by her beautiful daughters and a dazzling train of lords and ladies. Josepha's head reeled when she saw them, and almost fainting, she sank down at ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... notice the New York Sun says: "To readers who care for a really good detective story 'The Circular Staircase' can be recommended without reservation." The Philadelphia Record declares that "The Circular Staircase" deserves the laurels for thrills, for weirdness ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow

... his consent to this proposal, they made the best of their way to the Monument, where having deposited the customary entrance money with the door-keeper, they were allowed to ascend by the winding staircase to the top, when a prospect was presented to the eye of Tallyho, of which he could not have formed any previous conception. The view of the river as far as the eye could reach, each way, the moving ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... accommodation in a triangular cabin under the cock- loft, with a corner fireplace which Master B. must have been exceedingly small if he were ever able to warm himself at, and a corner chimney-piece like a pyramidal staircase to the ceiling for Tom Thumb. The papering of one side of the room had dropped down bodily, with fragments of plaster adhering to it, and almost blocked up the door. It appeared that Master B., in his spiritual condition, always made a point of pulling the ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... stately military music was heard far off, in gusty splendour, in the little town, or the fifes and drums of some detachment swept blithely past, he would throw down his pen and go down the little staircase to the road, the boys crowding round him. "Brats, the British army!" he would say, and stand, looking and listening, his eyes filled with gathering tears, and his heart full of proud memories, while the rhythmical beat of the footsteps ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... Railway Co., /1/ the plaintiff slipped on the defendant's stairs and was severely hurt. The cause of his slipping was that the brass nosing of the stairs had been worn smooth by travel over it, and a builder testified that in his opinion the staircase was unsafe by reason of this circumstance and the absence of a hand-rail. There was nothing to contradict this except that great numbers of persons had passed over the stairs and that no accident had happened there, and the plaintiff had a verdict. The court set the verdict ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... one of the office chairs, and amused herself for about the space of ten minutes in studying the shipping advertisements that were hung round the walls. She turned eagerly at last when a footstep was heard upon the staircase. Was it the manager of the Tower Line, she wondered, and would he after all be willing to engage her for the work she desired? Her heart beat and throbbed as the door swung open. But instead of a stranger appeared the familiar figure of her ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil

... that she would thus save him the mortification of an interview. But it turned out otherwise: the contessina was at home, and De Pretis was expected, as usual, to give the lesson. Slowly he climbed the great staircase, and was admitted. ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford

... of which is such a venerable and now deserted kitchen as I have above alluded to, and, on the same level, a cellar, with low stone pillars and intersecting arches, like the crypt of a cathedral. Passing up a well-worn staircase, the oaken balustrade of which is as black as ebony, you enter the fine old hall, some sixty feet in length, and broad and lofty in proportion. It is lighted by six windows of modern stained glass, on one side, and by the immense and magnificent arch of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... and friezes in enameled bricks which give evidence of an advanced stage of art. The palace of Persepolis has left ruins of considerable mass. The rock of the hill had been fashioned into an enormous platform on which the palace was built. The approach to it was by a gently rising staircase so broad that ten horsemen could ascend riding side ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... scene, as Bonaparte has since stated, was long and painful, and the two children at length introduced their mother, and placed her in his arms. The unhappy woman had awaited his decision at the door of a small back staircase, extended at almost full length upon the stairs, suffering the acutest ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... maidens she guided, for reproof, counsel, or tender comforting. At the back of this room, partitioned by a curtain, was a nook, where Wrestling, a delicate child of six, and Love, his sturdier brother, two years older, nestled like kittens in a little cot. Above in the loft, reached by a ladder-like staircase, was a comfortable room appropriated to Mary Chilton, Priscilla Molines, and Elizabeth Tilley, all orphaned within three months, and at once adopted by the Elder's wife as her ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... was published in the Tagliche Rundschau [Daily Review], and afterwards in the Neue Berline Musikzeitung [Berlin New Musical Paper] of March 19th, 1891. It is well known that Liszt derived his inspiration to write the Hunnenschlachl [Battle of the Huns] from Kaulbach's celebrated picture on the staircase of the New Museum in Berlin. He intended to work up the six pictures of Kaulbach's which are there, in a similar symphonic manner, probably for theatrical performance in Weimar. Dingelstedt appears also to have planned an after-poem in verses. Kaulbach's letter to his friend is as follows: ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated

... at twelve o'clock a daintily attired damsel ascended a dusty staircase in Fleet Street and desired to see the Editor in his den. The dragon who guarded the fastness inquired of her if she had an appointment, and, unsoftened by the charm of her appearance, volunteered the information that Mr Elgood would ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... said that the organist of St. Peter's visited her father's store frequently to buy nutmeg, that she would ask him to write out the music of the song, and that I might call for it in a few days. Thereupon she took up her basket and went, while I accompanied her as far as the staircase. As I was making a final bow on the top step, I was surprised by the director, who bade me go to my work and railed against the girl, in whom, he asserted, there wasn't a vestige of good. I was very angry at this and was about to retort that I begged to differ with him, when I realized ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... the doors were thrown open as usual, and "The Emperor" was announced; but no sooner was the word uttered than he turned back again. However, he soon reappeared, rapidly crossed the gallery, and descended the staircase, and at twelve o'clock precisely he stood at the head of his Guard, as if at a review in the court of the Tuileries in the brilliant days of the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... working of any part of which necessarily has an influence on the working of the rest. I had always looked upon the lower, secondary, and higher grades as the first, second, and third storeys of the educational house, and I am not quite sure that I attached sufficient importance to the staircase. My view has now changed, and I find myself regarding the University as a foundation and support of the ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... through the spacious court, up the noble staircase, and through the long suites of apartments of this splendid edifice, most of them silent and vacant, the casements closed to keep out the heat, so that a twilight reigned throughout the mighty pile, not a little emblematical of the dubious fortunes of its inmates. It ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... was pleased with the old house in the Rue Pirouette. On the ground floor he passed through the faint odours pervading the premises of the purveyor of cooked vegetables. Big pans of boiled spinach and sorrel stood cooling in the little backyard. Then he ascended the winding staircase, greasy and dark, with worn and bulging steps which sloped in a disquieting manner. The Mehudins occupied the whole of the second floor. Even when they had attained to comfortable circumstances the old mother ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... at the box office grew serious again as Lucien followed Mme. de Bargeton. On their way up the great staircase the lady introduced M. de Rubempre to her cousin. The box belonging to the First Gentleman of the Bedchamber is situated in one of the angles at the back of the house, so that its occupants see and are seen all over the theatre. Lucien took his seat on a chair behind ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... at them in blank amazement, thinking they must all have lost their wits together, I was unconsciously being dragged and pulled along till we came to a kind of ruined marble staircase, down which they hurried me into something still resembling a spacious chamber; for though the wild fig-tree and cactus pushed their fantastic branches through gaps in the walls, these stood ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... itself through the folds of a window-curtain. Knocking loudly at the front door, it was presently opened, and giving some hasty directions concerning his horse, he hurried through a dark, narrow entry, and guiding his way up a creaking staircase by the aid of a balustrade which ran along either side, at length stood before a small door, through whose key-hole issued a narrow stream of light, slightly illuminating the thick gloom around him. Here he paused for a short time to recuperate his exhausted energies, and to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various

... up a staircase to the flat roof, where Dick ran to the parapet. Looking across the town, he saw in the distance a dim white light and a long smear of smoke that trailed across the glittering sea. He frowned as he watched it, for the ship was English and he felt himself responsible ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss

... of an obsolete fashion—the genius loci—received the party. She scrutinized Lucille with a protracted stare of audacious inquisitiveness, and when she had quite satisfied her curiosity, she led the way through several halls and lobbies up the great staircase, along a corridor, through a suite of rooms, upon another lobby up a second staircase, into a great dreary passage, through half a dozen waste and desolate chambers, and so at last into a room which had a few pieces of furniture ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... Ox Lease Farm. There are three doors. One opens to the staircase, one to the garden and a third into the back kitchen. At a table in the middle of the room EMILY stands ironing some net window curtains. JESSIE and ROBIN lean against the table watching her. By the open doorway, ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin

... He hastily descended the northern staircase, famous for the massacre of the Strelitzes,[149] and requested to be conducted out of the city, to the distance of a league on the road to St. Petersburg, towards ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote

... a gross injustice, and defending him warmly, both as a financier and statesman. Mr. Morris still clinging to his hastily formed opinion, the two gentlemen continued to argue the matter until, Mr. Morris's carriage having been announced, he took his final leave and stumped his way down the broad staircase, attended to the ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe

... her duty to go forward and second this invitation. Davenant, who was standing at the foot of the staircase, murmured something ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... much as they liked. Bella, hearing that Clarence was engaged in the library and would not be down for a little while, slipped away in search of him. Her heart beat painfully fast as she went up the wide staircase, but she was outwardly very collected—a slender, attractive figure—when she entered the room. In her dress as well as in her manner Bella was usually distinguished by something unconventional and picturesque. She was not pleased ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss

... large entrance hall or vestibule, 40 ft. by 44 ft., forming, with the cloakroom, the principal staircase, the rooms for the concierge, and the area, the whole front of the building. This large vestibule is vaulted over by means of one of the systems of cement arm to be described. The floor is constructed on another similar system, and will be paved with mosaic work. The ground floor of the courtyard ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various

... young face she saw left in her a taste of poison. But when she compared herself with the specimens of her sex who plied their languid industries under the palms, or looked away as she passed them in hall or staircase, her spirits rose, and she rang for her maid and dressed herself in her newest and vividest. These were unprofitable triumphs, however. She never made one of her attacks on the organized disapproval of the community without feeling ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... the secret staircase to the chambers of her old friend, whom she found in his night-cap, smiling, for he was reading La ...
— The Story Of The Duchess Of Cicogne And Of Monsieur De Boulingrin - 1920 • Anatole France

... staircase at the upper end of the hall, which is very large; at the foot of the staircase you have a Bacchus as large as life, done in fine Peloponnesian marble, carrying a young Bacchus on his arm, the young one eating grapes, and letting you see ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe

... whiskers, out she passed; 325 And after her—making (he hoped) a face Like Emperor Nero or Sultan Saladin, Stalked the Duke's self with the austere grace Of ancient hero or modern paladin, From door to staircase—oh, such a solemn 330 Unbending of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... slept; but they were up and out of the room. The ball come through the window, which it mashed to pieces, with part of the framework; went through the opposite wall near the head of the bedstead; crossed the staircase to another room; but meeting with a beam in the wall, came back and went a part through the side wall, and then dropt down on the stairs. A thirty-two pounder, supposed coming from the Powlis Hook battery, fell into Sr. Barnard's garden, just before her ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston

... stood at the foot of a small back-staircase which had been prepared in Russian fashion for the reception of the Madonna. Both the steps and banisters of the stairs were entirely draped in clean white sheets, to which little sprigs of fir branches had been attached. On a landing, also draped ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... passageway eight or ten yards long, having two doors at the farther end. The door to the right, I soon learned, led to the little parley room where Max and Hymbercourt had gone. The door to the left opened into a staircase that led to the apartments of the duchess. A narrow flight of stone steps that led from the ladies' gallery opened into the passage, and, just as the duke entered in advance of me, two ladies emerged ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major

... twin halves of a perfect staircase. To the right, a charming morning room, where Petticoat ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells

... without taking off her shoe; it was the first time the manoeuvre gave him any pleasure, and an association was thus established which led to shoe-fetichism (Hammond, Sexual Impotence, p. 44). A government official whose first coitus in youth took place on a staircase; the sound of his partner's creaking shoes against the stairs, produced by her efforts to accelerate orgasm, formed an association which developed into an auditory shoe-fetichism; in the streets he was compelled to follow ladies whose ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... did not keep them waiting. She came down the staircase to Mark King standing at the bottom. In her pink dress, like a thistledown, floating down to him. He was thinking—she, too, remembered—how for the first time they had met thus. She smiled at him; ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... visiting my aunts at Workington, where my grandfather had been rector, and was asked to preach on Sunday evening in St. John's, a wretched modern church—a plain oblong with galleries, and a pulpit like a very tall wineglass, with a very narrow little straight staircase leading up to it, in the middle of the east part of the church. When the hymn before the sermon was given out I went as usual to the vestry to put on the black gown. Not knowing that the clergyman generally stayed there till the end of the hymn, I emerged as soon as I had vested myself ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... made a search, and discovered a staircase leading up to the roof. It was somewhat besprent with blacks; but there the child could take an airing, unterrified, in a solitude a trois, and in a very fresh air, when a ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... again in the gallery; and ah! more plainly we recognised the voice of our excellent Fortini: "Unfortunate as I am! excuse it? go out! I have forgotten a volume of my breviary!" And we then heard him run back to fetch the book mentioned, and rejoin the police. The door of the staircase opened, and we heard them go down. In the midst of our alarm we learnt that our two good friends had just received a pardon; and although we regretted we could not follow them, we rejoiced in ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico

... o'clock on. During the boarders' recreation hours, from the lower hallway of the spacious entrance up to the main floor, there was a bubbling of laughter, shouts, and movement. Boys in scanty clothing played sipa or practised gymnastic exercises on improvised trapezes, while on the staircase a fight was in progress between eight or nine armed with canes, sticks, and ropes, but neither attackers nor attacked did any great damage, their blows generally falling sidewise upon the shoulders of the Chinese pedler who was there selling ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... divided the house from front to rear and a staircase went up at either side of the entrance, meeting in a bridge on the first floor. The huge drawing-room was on the ground floor to the right and was hung with tapestries representing birds and foliage. All the furniture was covered with fine needlework tapestry illustrating ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... door, when in we rushed, and he, stepping back, tumbled head over heels, and upset two or three of the first men who got in. Amid shouts of laughter from us, and shrieks and cries from a whole posse of negroes who ran out from their own dormitories, we hurried up to the principal staircase. The hubbub, as well it might, roused the master of the house and his better half from their drowsy slumbers—so we concluded—for a gruff voice in tones irate began scolding away from the top of the stairs at the blacks, ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... pretty sound it is on the staircase to hear 'Mr. and Mrs. 'Odge and Miss 'Odges' pronounced by Billiter, who always leaves his h's out. No, no: see attorneys at your chambers, my dear—but what could the poor creatures do in OUR society?" And so, one by ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray

... so amused by her, so fascinated, so completely at my ease with her, that I could have stayed on without taking note of time had not Amy remembered that it was our dinner-hour. We took our leave, and met Mrs. Leare on the staircase ascending to her apartment. She greeted Amy with as much effusion as was compatible with her ideas of fashion, and said she was "right glad" to hear we had been ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... of Devonshire gave the famous fancy dress ball at Devonshire House, Henry attended it in the robes which had appealed so strongly to Burne-Jones's imaginative eye. I was told by one who was present at this ball that as the Cardinal swept up the staircase, his long train held magnificently over his arm, a sudden wave of reality seemed to sweep upstairs with him, and reduce to the prettiest make-believe all the ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... and see him," I said. We ascended the dark staircase—the rest of the household were plunged in slumber—turned the handle of the bedroom door, and could just make out in the darkness a little figure in pyjamas, leaning precipitously ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... dim lamp, and the ample form of Rosalie. With a finger on her lips, she closed the door behind him. His heart beat fast, less with a sense of impending adventure than with the thought, which struck him as he mounted the servants' staircase, that he was divided but by thin walls from the object of all these strivings and diplomacies—that for the second time in his life he was under her home roof with Annette. It was a firm, old house. Their footsteps made not the slightest creak on ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin

... of Napoleon, and those of his wife, which were immediately over them, at the Tuileries, had communication by means of a private staircase; and it was the custom of the Emperor himself to signify, by a tap on the door of Josephine's sitting-room, his desire to converse with her in his cabinet below. In the days of their cordial union the signal was often made, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... of the little lavatory and of the staircase leading up to the attic, Rouletabille—to whom we seemed no longer to exist—entered the laboratory. I followed him. It was, I confess, in a state of great excitement. Robert Darzac lost none of my friend's movements. As for me, my ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux

... their fruitage. We afterward visited Pilate's House, as it is called—a fine Spanish-Moresco palace, now belonging to the Duke of Medina Coeli. It is very rich and elegant, but stands in the same relation to the Alcazar as a good copy does to the original picture. The grand staircase, nevertheless, is a marvel of tile work, unlike anything else in Seville, and exhibits a genius in the invention of elaborate ornamental patterns, which is truly wonderful. A number of workmen were busy in restoring the palace, to fit it for the residence of the young Duke. The Moorish sculptures ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... went from them, Went down the staircase grim, With trembling heart and limb; Her footfalls echoed In the silence vast and dead, Like the notes of a requiem, Not sung, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge

... are iron bars," declared the sergeant. "I examined it the other day. The small staircase window at the side is the best means of entry." And he took the novelist round and showed him a long narrow window about ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux

... who is this?" And the answer is: "It is R[a] when at the beginning he rose in the city of Suten-henen (Heracleopolis Magna) crowned like a king in rising. The pillars of the god Shu were not as yet created when he was upon the staircase of him that dwelleth in Khemennu (Hermopolis Magna)." From these statements we learn that Temu and R[a] were one and the same god, and that he was the first offspring of the god Nu, the primeval watery mass out of which all the gods came into being. The text continues: "I am the great god ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge

... outer door of his apartment on the fifth floor. It opens upon a spacious landing, to which a wide staircase ascends at one side. At the other is seen the grated door to the shaft of the elevator. He peers about on all sides, and listens for ...
— The Elevator • William D. Howells

... be haunted; but whether by a spectral illusion or a real spectre, she could not know. In the glow of the fire light, in the shadow of the bed-curtains in the illuminated drawing-room, on the dark staircase, wherever and whenever she found herself alone, the vision of the girl in the red cloak crossed her path. She did not speak to it, or try to stop it again. She did not wish to risk another such an electric shock as should 'cast her shuddering on her face.' But her health wasted under the ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... leering eyes looking into the second-floor rooms, and huge splay feet, through which mesdames et mesdemoiselles were to be conducted. We made a rush at the first open door, and passed comfortably under the heels of some horses gathered under the arched court, and up a stone staircase, which turned out to be that of the Russian consul's house. His people welcomed us most cordially to his abode, and the ladies and the luggage (objects of our solicitude) were led up many stairs and across several terraces to a most ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... secret is not yet solved. In the fourteenth volume, then, of my Archives occurs this long note, accompanied by the drawing which I made years ago of the weird-looking key: with a loose ring handle, a threefold staircase body, and a strangely ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... of the principal entrance a doorway opens into two square rooms with gratings, where the wild beasts were probably kept. Another very narrow corridor ran from the street to the arena, near which it ascended, by a small staircase, to a little round apartment apparently the spoliatorium, where they stripped the dead gladiators. The arena formed an oval of sixty-eight yards by thirty-six. It was surrounded by a wall of two yards in height, above which may still be seen the holes where gratings and thick iron bars ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier

... luxury. The ruler of the place is an owl—an owl standing upon a skull and cross-bones, showing forth grimly the wisdom of the man of letters and the end of his hopes for immortality. The owl stands on the staircase, a statue four feet high; is carved in the wood-work, flutters on the frescoed ceiling, is stamped on the note-paper, and hangs on the walls. He is an ancient and honorable bird. Under his wing 'twas my privilege to meet with white men whose lives were not chained down to routine of toil, ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling

... the Gazetteer, the descent of Amoskeag Falls, which are the most considerable in the Merrimack, is fifty-four feet in half a mile. We locked ourselves through here with much ado, surmounting the successive watery steps of this river's staircase in the midst of a crowd of villagers, jumping into the canal to their amusement, to save our boat from upsetting, and consuming much river-water in our service. Amoskeag, or Namaskeak, is said to mean ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... brought from the attic by the boys, had been set on the broad landing at the turn of the open staircase, and in the next scene Anne appeared, alone, and discovering the chest climbed gleefully into it and drew the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower

... when the round of decorous pleasures and solemn gaieties in which Mr. Jos Sedley's family indulged was interrupted by an event which happens in most houses. As you ascend the staircase of your house from the drawing towards the bedroom floors, you may have remarked a little arch in the wall right before you, which at once gives light to the stair which leads from the second story to the third (where the nursery and servants' chambers commonly are) and serves for ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... with fire. No one was playing with fire that day, it is true, or doing anything really naughty at all—but however naughty we had been the thing that happened couldn't have been much worse. For the flying machine as it came rushing round the curve of the staircase banged against the legs of Hilda. She screamed and stumbled back. Her pink paper wings went into the gas that hadn't a globe. They flamed up, her hair frizzled, and her lace collar caught fire. Rupert could ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit

... abroad. There are shrubs against the wall, on one side; and on another is a cloistered walk, adorned with stags' heads and antlers, and running beneath a covered gallery, up to which ascends a balustraded staircase. In the portion of the edifice opposite the entrance-arch are the apartments of the Master; and looking into the window, (as the old woman, at no request of mine, had specially informed me that I might,) I saw a low, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... question is very ancient; and it is certainly worthy the magnificence of the most powerful kings of Egypt. This well has, as it were, two stories, cut out of the solid rock to a prodigious depth. The descent to the reservoir of water, between the two wells, is by a staircase seven or eight feet broad, consisting of two hundred and twenty steps, and so contrived, that the oxen employed to throw up the water, go down with all imaginable ease, the descent being scarcely perceptible. The well is supplied from a spring, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... had approached the house by a gentle slope, which certainly was long and winding, but had occasioned no feeling in my mind that I had reached any considerable height. And I had come up that one beautiful staircase; no more; and yet now, when I looked from this window, I found myself on the edge of a precipice—not a very deep one, certainly, yet with all the effect of many a deeper. For below the house on this side lay a great hollow, with steep sides, up which, as far as they could reach, the ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... garden, bounded by a very high wall. We entered by the grand entrance, which has a flagged pavement, each flag consisting of a slab of granite twelve feet long by three broad, and were received at the foot of the grand staircase by the directors and their chairman, the six resident doctors, and Mr. Ng Choy, a rising, Chinese barrister, educated at Lincoln's Inn, who interpreted for us in admirable English. He is the man who goes between the Governor and the Chinese ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... even as he spoke he burst in the door, darted up the staircase, and returned with the trembling child in his arms, followed by aunt Dorothy ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford

... square, where were the Capitol building and principal stores. The lobby was large and had been recently redecorated. Both floor and wainscot were of white marble, kept shiny by frequent polishing. There was an imposing staircase with hand-rails of walnut and toe-strips of brass. An inviting corner was devoted to a news and cigar-stand. Where the staircase curved upward the clerk's desk and offices had been located, all done in hardwood and ornamented by ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... to order my death, madam, your guards who have entered my court, and whose spurs and halberts I hear upon the staircase, may overpower my domestics; and, seeing no such escape as becomes my dignity, I submit to you. Behold my sword and gauntlet at your feet! Some formalities, I trust, will be used in the proceedings against me. Entitle me, in my attainder, not John ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... I come, besides, direct from the torture-chamber. After I had escaped from my torturer I was standing in a damp, narrow, totally dark passage. By groping along I reached a descending staircase; I slowly walked on and only stopped when I felt the moisture under my feet. But what could I do? I cautiously groped ahead, and soon my shoes were filled with water. It shortly afterward rose to my calves; and then, oh ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... lying on a marble table; and wishing to carry away something wherewith to accredit his story, he reached out his hand to take it; but no sooner had he touched it than all was dark. The archer had shot with his arrow, the bright jewel was shivered into a thousand pieces, the staircase had fled, and the priest ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... he read in her eyes? A confession of insecurity, fear; a mute appeal? Before it all his doubts and misgivings vanished; the look they exchanged was like that when she had stood on the staircase in the inn. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... to take out any patents. He did all he could to induce workers to follow his example and communicate their ideas freely, so that progress might be quickened. His own ideas, his own inventions, and his own carefully recorded experiments were a solid step in that staircase of knowledge from which at last man launched himself ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... to cross the vestibule, the others deliberately followed me, and in all likelihood I should have fled never to return if a well-known figure in a white billycock and grey suit had not suddenly advanced towards us from the direction of the staircase. In another moment I had exchanged greetings with M. Zola, and my suspicious scrutinisers had been introduced to me as friends. One of them was none other than M. Fernand Desmoulin. They had arrived from Paris that morning, and were about ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... frame, in the midst of which hangs a scaldino filled with burning ashes—a most comforting ecclesiastic, I can assure you. All the inns we visited had certain characteristics in common. The entrance is always dirty, and the staircase too, the dining rooms fairly comfortable, the bedrooms always clean and good, and the food much better than you would expect to find in such out-of-the-way places; indeed I cannot think of any inn where it was not good and wholesome, while often it was delicious. In short, Lady Considine, ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters

... us till she came to a large tenement building, and then directed us to a room in the upper story. We thanked her, and entered the narrow hall, and passed up the still narrower staircase. ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various

... daughter—their own mother—and of how they had sailed the seas and seen many people and many lands. There was the story of the old house within the iron gates—built by convicts more than fifty years ago—and of how the sea-captain had bought it and built a tower and spiral staircase and a roof promenade, which he called his "deck." And of how he and his small daughter settled down in the great house together; and how her wardrobe was always full of beautiful clothes and her purse full of real sovereigns; and two ponies she had to her name, and ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner

... words were uttered in a small shriek, for apparently there had been but one step to the staircase. ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards

... the hand, Miss Manning led the way down the narrow staircase. It was far from a handsome house in which they had thus far made their home. The wall-paper was torn from the walls in places, revealing patches of bare plastering; there was a faded and worn oil-cloth upon the ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr

... without farther expostulation, bade me follow him. He conducted me to a house under the piazzas in Covert Garden, which we entered, and having delivered our swords to a grim fellow who demanded them at the foot of the staircase, ascended to the second story, where I saw multitudes of people standing round two gaming-tables, loaded, in a manner, with gold and silver. My conductor told me this was the house of a worthy Scotch lord, who, using the privilege ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... closed the door behind them. It was growing quite dark and Frank searched for the light switch. This was near the door, and, at pressure on the upper button, the spacious old hall with its open staircase was revealed dimly by the single remaining bulb in a cluster set in the center of the high ceiling. The hall was unfurnished, excepting for a telephone table and chair, the chair having fallen to the floor and the receiver of the telephone ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... access must have been extremely difficult. Indeed, so much greater was the regard paid to security than to convenience, that in former times the only access to the mansion arose through a vaulted cavern in a rock, up which a staircase ascended from the sea-shore, like the buildings we read of in the romances ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... compliments they paid her, so eagerly did she desire to see what was in the closet her husband had forbidden her to open. So great indeed was her curiosity, that, without recollecting how uncivil it would be to leave her guests, she descended a private staircase that led to it, and in such a hurry, that she was two or three times in danger ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford

... Villette. Every class of Parisian society was represented in the throng that swayed and hustled through the rooms, but the saddest sight of all was a knot or two of decrepit veterans from the Invalides who leant against the balustrade of the grand staircase, and gazed with pinched-up lips and dry eyes at the National Guards on duty, lounging and carousing down below. The stairs were littered with bedding and cooking utensils, shirts and stockings hanging to dry over the gilt railings, while in the square at ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... and, in all probability, a few minutes would introduce him to that presence before which he had, ere this, trembled. The Marquess was at home, and anxious to see Mr. Rigby. In a few minutes that gentleman was ascending the private staircase, entering the antechamber, and waiting to be received in the little saloon, exactly as our Coningsby did more than five years ago, scarcely less agitated, but by feelings ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... some of them cried out to him, 'My lord, the people wait for their king, and thou showest them a beggar,' and others were wroth and said, 'He brings shame upon our state, and is unworthy to be our master.' But he answered them not a word, but passed on, and went down the bright porphyry staircase, and out through the gates of bronze, and mounted upon his horse, and rode towards the cathedral, the little ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde

... luck, you see that this dangerous apartment communicates with that of your wife by a back staircase, earnestly consult your architect; let his genius exhaust itself in rendering this dangerous staircase as innocent as the primitive garret ladder; we conjure you let not this staircase have appended to it any treacherous lurking-place; its stiff and angular steps must not be ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... the time I speak of, he stood in profound silence, and had that statue-like air which mental greatness alone can bestow. As he turned to enter the building, and was ascending the staircase leading to the Congressional hall, I glided along unperceived, almost tinder cover of the skirts of his dress, and entered instantly after him into the lobby of the house, which was of course in session to receive him. On either hand, from the ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... of introduction is seen in the presentation of Mr. Tomkins, American tourist, to H.E. the Viceroy of India. An aide-de-camp in uniform at the foot of a grand staircase shouts, "Mr. Tomkins!" An aide-de-camp at the top (one minute later) calls "Mr. Thompson"; another aide, four feet further on, calls ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... It is said that he never missed attendance on morning and evening prayers but once. The class were determined that Lane should not go through college without missing prayers once. So one night a cord was fastened to the handle of his door and attached to the rail of the staircase. But Lane succeeded in wrenching open the door and got to morning prayers in time. He was the monitor, whose duty it was to mark the students who were absent from prayers and who were punished for absence by a deduction from their rank and, if the absences were frequent enough, by a more severe ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... where even I, his son, had never been at night, and indeed but seldom in the day. For it was the Hereditary Justicer's fancy to lodge himself in the high garret which ran right across the top of the Red Tower, and was entered only by a little ladder from the first turning of the same staircase by which I had run out upon ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... out en masse to bring in the mangled remains of the victim, but had the happiness to meet him upon the staircase, coming up in an unaccountable hurry, brimful of the most ardent philosophy, and more than ever impressed with the necessity of prosecuting our experiment with vigor and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... wall, and read an evening paper. At every sound of approaching feet his eyes watched with covert eagerness. Presently he heard a laugh, echoing from below, and recognised Patty's voice; then Miss Ringrose appeared round the winding in the staircase, and was followed by Eve Madeley. Patty glanced up, and smiled consciously as she discovered the face she had expected to see; but Eve remained for some minutes unaware of her acquaintance's proximity. Scrutinising her appearance, as he could at his ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing

... out of window; saw the reflection of the flame, but knew not where it was; ran to my wife's chamber with one stocking on and my breeches in my hand; would have broken open the door, which was bolted within, but could not. My two eldest children were with her. They rose, and ran towards the staircase, to raise the rest of the house. There I saw it was my own house, all in a light blaze, and nothing but a door between ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the telephone at the foot of the circular staircase. She was giving a very tactfully worded account of the incident to the president, and it was very evident the whole occurrence would be conspiciously free of sensation if the matron's verbal report were embodied ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... car before it had stopped, and nearly fell again. His nerves were not steady from his other fall yet. He tore into the station and out through the passageway past the beckoning hand of the ticket-man who sat in the booth at the staircase, and strode up three steps at a time. The guard shouted: "Hurry! You may get it; she's just starting!" and a friendly hand reached out, and hauled him up on the platform of ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill

... not in bed! Crouched on the staircase overhead, Like ghost she gloats, her lean hand laid On alabaster balustrade, And gazes on and on Down on that wondrous to and fro Till finger and foot are cold as snow, And half the night is gone; And dazzled eyes are sore bestead; Nods drowsily the sleek-locked head; And, vague and far, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various

... packed men and women had advanced along a corridor on the other side of the doorway, it began mounting a fireproof staircase. Up and up it went, slowly, steadily rising from story to story, but it did not spread across the whole width of the wide, shallow steps. Other men and women, in single file and with no attention to order, pushed themselves down, the ascending gang flattening them against ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... woman, not a poet qui court apres l'esprit, but a woman who looked at the world through conciliatory and poetical glasses. She was a good conversationalist, and there was always a poetic charm in all she did. There hung on the staircase a most beautiful sea picture, which I greatly admired while the Queen talked to me about the sea, about her little villa at Constanza, which, built on the extreme end of the quay, seems almost to lie ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... inwards it faces the chimney. In fact, the opposite wall of the landing-place is formed solely by the chimney; and hence-owing to the gradual tapering of the chimney—is a little less than twelve feet in width. Climbing the chimney in this part, is the principal staircase—which, by three abrupt turns, and three minor landing-places, mounts to the second floor, where, over the front door, runs a sort of narrow gallery, something less than twelve feet long, leading to chambers on either ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville

... Doge's fleet, two of Othello's strongest war-ships, could scarcely carry the mast of my Australian clipper. At a guess it is four feet through; it is of iron, tubular; there is room for a winding spiral staircase within it; as for its height, I will not risk a guess at it. Could Othello's war-ships carry it they would consider it a feat, as the bringing of the Egyptian obelisk to London was thought a feat. The petty ripples of ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... smoke and sulphurous fumes, Peggy had a hard task before her. But she pluckily plunged forward, feeling her way by the walls, and keeping her head low, where the smoke was not so thick. As she reached what she deemed was the top of the staircase, she thought she heard a tiny ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham

... by the arm led him to the staircase, looked him in the white of the eye and said without any nonsense—"Ventredieu! You are a nice little fellow, and I should not like to have to let your master know the weight of your carcass. My revenge might ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... and singularly handsome, came forward and greeted him with an air at once courtly and affectionate. Hundreds of candles, of the finest wax, lit up a room that was perfumed, like the staircase, with a profusion of rare and beautiful flowering shrubs. A side-table was loaded with tempting viands. Several servants went to and fro with fruits and goblets of champagne. The company was perhaps sixteen in number, all men, few beyond the prime of life, and with hardly an exception, of a dashing ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... exquisite fruits, which were abandoned to the populace for the entertainment of the prince. He enjoyed this tumultuous spectacle from a throne resplendent with gold and gems, which was raised by a marble staircase to the height of a lofty terrace. Below the throne were seated the officers of his guards, the magistrates, the chiefs of the factions of the circus; the inferior steps were occupied by the people, and the place below was covered with troops of dancers, singers, and pantomimes. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... of tobacco and promised him an Oriental sixpence if he would manage the business for me. The man was interested by the tobacco and the pence; he took my hand, and inquiring the while he went along, led me from place to place till, mounting a grand staircase, I stood in the presence of Abbas Effendi, the governor's Naib ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... amount to an entire rebuilding, in the style considered then fashionable; the result is the present dreary building with stuccoed frontage. The interior is handsome enough, and, like that of many a London house of less importance, is considerably more cheerful than the exterior. The chief staircase is of white marble, and the rooms are richly decorated. The state apartments include drawing-rooms, saloons, and the throne-room, which is sixty-four feet in length. The picture-gallery contains a collection of pictures made ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... cold night had come upon the earth when he signified to the lurking dragoman that he was in readiness to depart with him to Nora's abode. They passed finally into a dark court-yard, up a winding staircase, across an embowered balcony, and Coleman entered alone a room where ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... of deepest gratitude and veneration, Giulia Fiorini, her child clasped in her arms, passed out of the room and moved swiftly toward the grand staircase leading to the lower part of the house; while Edith, closing and locking the door after her, stood listening until she should reach the library, where she was sure Emil ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... quitted the broad terrace, and entered the hall. They passed through a long suite of magnificent apartments, up the broad marble staircase, through long corridors, until they reached the picture gallery, one of the finest in England. Nearly every great master was represented there. Murillo, Guido, Raphael, Claude Lorraine, Salvator Rosa, Correggio, and Tintoretto. The lords of Earlescourt had ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme

... up in his bed. The great clock at the head of the staircase, an old and respected heirloom ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... enunciate a couple of platitudes and attest them. It is always a solemn moment in life when one can sincerely subscribe to a platitude. Platitudes are the things which people of plain minds shout from the steps of the staircase of life as they ascend; and to discover the truth of a platitude by experience means that you have climbed ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... spot he could find on the place, and there the old man built his house. Well, to be sure, what a queer house it was! in the first place, there were three separate flights of stairs, one for old Jonas himself, one for his cat, and one for his dog. His own staircase was very easy, with broad low steps, and two landings, though the distance was very short from the first story to the second; but the poor cat and dog must have had a hard time of it. The other two staircases were so crooked it ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards

... completed the cartoon, the only part of the composition which he eventually executed in colour was an incident in the foreground which dealt with the "Battle of the Standard." One of the many supposed copies of a study of this mural painting now hangs on the south-east staircase in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It depicts the Florentines under Cardinal Ludovico Mezzarota Scarampo fighting against the Milanese under Niccolo Piccinino, the General of Filippo Maria ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell

... and in a moment found himself in the apartment where all were nearly assembled. Lord Ruthven was the first to perceive him: lie immediately approached, and, taking his arm by force, hurried him from the room, speechless with rage. When on the staircase, Lord Ruthven whispered in his ear—"Remember your oath, and know, if not my bride to day, your sister is dishonoured. Women are frail!" So saying, he pushed him towards his attendants, who, roused by the old woman, had come in search of him. Aubrey could ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori

... the little slums behind Hopital de la Pitie, [Footnote: Hopital de la Pitie: literally, "Hospital of Pity."] and I saw him disappear into a dirty old house. I waited outside a minute or two and then I groped my way through the pitch-dark entrance, climbed up a filthy staircase, and found a door slightly ajar. An icy, dark room, in the middle three ragged little children crouched together around a half-extinct braziero, [Footnote: Brazier: a pan for burning coals. Tuscan. Tuscany is one of the divisions of northern Italy.] in the corner the ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... its bell still rattled and sounded. The young man walked back to the alley and saw the woman reach the farther end, where she began to mount—not without receiving the obsequious bow of an old portress—a winding staircase, the lower steps of which were strongly lighted; she went up ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... her toilet, and save that she was very pale, she looked her usual lovely self as she left her room and walked towards the staircase. She halted for a moment in indecision as she saw Antony Standish on the landing, evidently waiting ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage

... rang out and the smoke drifted up the great staircase, the subaltern's hands tossed high above his head, his body sank into itself and toppled backward, and, like a tired child falling to sleep, the defeated soldier of fortune dropped back into the ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... With it the features glow with warmth and color; without it they are cold and ghostlike. Accordingly, where water ripples over these gigantic steps, towering one above another toward the sky, they look like beautiful cascades of color; and when the liquid has deserted them, they stand out like a staircase of Carrara marble. Hence, through the changing centuries, they pass in slow succession, from light to shade, from brilliancy to pallor, and from life to death. This mineral water is not only a mysterious architect; it is, also, an artist that no man can equal. Its magic touch has intermingled ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... for this outward beauty that Widow Shanks, stuck to her house, and paid the rent at intervals. To her steadfast and well-managed mind, the number of rooms, and the separate staircase which a solvent lodger might enjoy, were the choicest grant of the household gods. The times were bad—as they always are when conscientious people think of them—and poor Mrs. Shanks was desirous of paying her rent, by the payment of somebody. Every ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... and lumbered into the inn, and I, having guided him up the narrow staircase to his room, descended to my bunk in a corner of the tiny salon. My sleeping arrangements were ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... the street level. Of these two rooms, the left, as you face the building, is fitted up as a lecture-room. In the year 1849 it was the lecture-room of Professor Webster. Behind the lecture-room is a laboratory, known as the upper laboratory, communicating by a private staircase with the lower laboratory, which occupies the left wing of the ground floor. A small passage, entered by a door on the left-hand side of the front of the building, separated this lower laboratory from the dissecting-room, an out-house built on to the west wall of the college, but now ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... followed; and Plon fled precipitously to his den, double-bolted his door, and rolled his mattress round him for protection. Marie Didier slowly turned her head, and, as if recognising the wisdom of his advice, felt her way along the wall and groped up the dark staircase. No one had lit the small oil lamp on the premier, but light from burning houses flashed in at windows; a child had been killed by the fragment of a shell, and the mother was loudly wailing; some were peering out ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... one day to remain at the Cedars. It was a Thursday, and on the Friday she was to go to her brother's house on her way to Littlebath. On the Thursday morning Mr Ball waylaid her on the staircase, as she came down to breakfast, and took her with him into the drawing-room. There he made his request, standing with her in the ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope

... profusely, like a great lady whose visit was an honour to the family. She was taken upstairs, up a newly-built wooden staircase, to see the room above, which was the glory of the home. She remembered the history of its construction; it was after the finding of a derelict vessel in the channel, which luck had befallen Yann's father and his ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... manners these dear people have!" said Zaidie, as they dismounted at the foot of the staircase. "I wonder what would happen if a couple of them were to be landed from a motor-car in front of the Capitol at Washington. I suppose this is their Capitol, and we've been brought here to be put through our facings. What a pity we can't talk to them! I wonder if they'd believe ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith

... lights shed a sudden bright glare down the spiral staircase, Sir Guy cowered and stopped short again, turning pale with a fear irrepressible. But Phoebe put one arm about his neck and drew his head down to hers, whispering in his ear. What she said none heard save him, but the spell of her words was potent, for the young knight ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... afterwards, standing alone in the hall, with my heart beating fast and my mind misgiving me sadly. Then I went on to the staircase, and ascended slowly to ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... a pleasant confusion of good nights and good wishes, the great hall doors are shut, and they all troop up the wide walnut staircase quite as if an evening party had broken up. Floyd Grandon, though not a demonstrative man, lingers to give his mother a parting kiss, and is glad that he has ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... not thought safe to use a staircase for in case of a rush or a panic people might have tumbled and that would have meant ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon

... I thought the staircase would never have an end. Round! Yes, they went round and up, and round and up and round and up, until I could not help surmising, with the sagacious Pompey, upon whose supporting arm I leaned in all the confidence of early affection—I could not help surmising that the upper end of the continuous ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... back staircase? Oh, is there?" whispered Mrs. Lee. "Is there?" The odor of a cigar stole softly through the house. "I can smell his cigar," whispered Mrs. Lee, in ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... elegant in its decorations. The porcelain walls and floors glittered and shone with the reflection from many lamps. Beautiful flowers, shaking their silvery bells, were banked in rich profusion on each side of the great staircase. Indeed, what with the passing of many feet and the great draught, the bells tinkled so loudly you could ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various

... Square, and expected to be surprised. But it lay in a hollow, a dignified, secluded square, exactly as she had imagined it. Nor did the great doorway, and the carpet that stretched across the pavement for her to walk upon, surprise her, nor the lines of footmen, nor the natural grace of the wide staircase. She seemed to have seen it all before, only she could not remember where. It came back to her like a dream. She seemed to recognise the pictures of the goddesses, the Holy Families and the gold mirrors; and lifting her ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... flew open, though so well were its hinges polished and oiled, that it made not the slightest noise in revolving. The opposite side of the door was secured by very strong bolts and bars, beside which hung one or two keys, designed apparently to undo fetterlocks. A narrow staircase, ascending up through the thickness of the castle-wall, landed, as the Marquis had truly informed him, behind the tapestry of his private apartment. Such communications were frequent in old feudal castles, as they gave the lord ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott

... mouth, the flesh on his chest bruised and bleeding from the vehemence with which he had smitten himself. A broken torch-handle lay by his side, and his quivering lips murmured, "Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!" as I stooped over him. I pushed him a few steps up the staircase, threw a pebble at Lalun's City ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... Beside the staircase that has known her hand And in the hall her presence made complete, The home her life endowed with memories sweet Where everything has heard her sweet command And seems to wear her beauty, I shall stand Wondering just how to greet ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest

... head bearing aloft its tower of long white feathers. Yet with most of her life passed at the great lonely country-house by the bright river: qazing wistfully out of the deep-mullioned windows of diamond panes; flitting up and down the wide staircase of carven oak; buried in its library, with its wainscoted walls crossed with swords and hung with portraits of soldierly faces: all of which pleased him best, he being a home-lover. So that when facts ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen

... may intertain missionaries in the attics and hold meetings of the Dorcas Society in the basement. She may give reformed burglars the run of the silver-closet, and allow curates and chorus-girls to mingle in sweet companionship on the staircase. But she must leave the library alone, and neither she nor her following must overflow through its double doors during what I ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... joined Madame Lalaurie's premises on the eastern side had a staircase window that looked down into her little courtyard. One day all by chance the lady of that adjoining house was going up those stairs just when the keen scream of a terrified child resounded from the next yard. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... and unpatched boots to reassure himself he was not waiting for Martha's shrill order to "come up out of the dirt." But assured once more of his own present personality he could not resist exploring further, and went right up to the foot of the iron staircase and looked up. It was all just as sordid and dirty and unlovely as ever, though he had not known before the measure of its undesirableness. Leaning over the railing of the top landing was an untidy-looking woman in a brown skirt and ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... half-hour's walk, they came to a winding staircase cut in the rock, which led them a zigzag course up through galleries and grottos looking out through curious windows and loop-holes upon the sea, till finally they emerged at the old sculptured portal of a shady garden which was surrounded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... have been the companion and soother of his exile? that the bread of the foreigner shared with her would not have seemed less bitter? and that he would not have found it less fatiguing to mount, leaning on her, the staircase ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... balaustion], or wild pomegranate; the word has been corrupted in English into "banister"), a small moulded shaft, square or circular, in stone or wood and sometimes in metal, supporting the coping of a parapet or the rail of a staircase, an assemblage of them being known as a balustrade. The earliest examples are those shown in the bas-reliefs representing the Assyrian palaces, where they were employed as window balustrades and apparently had Ionic capitals. They do not seem to have been known to either the Greeks or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... in your bedroom," she said, "that you must have forgotten the rest of the house. Take my arm—and come along. Now we are out in the passage. Mind! there is a step down, just at this place. And now a step up again. Here is a sharp corner to turn at the top of the staircase. And there is a rod out of the stair-carpet, and an awkward fold in it that might throw you down." So she took him into his own drawing-room, as if it was he that was blind, and she who had the use of ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... Turkey carpet, and a sort of cathedral gloom around him. He was disconcerted, but the Turkey carpet assured him somewhat. As his eyes grew habituated to the light he saw that the cathedral was very narrow, and that instead of the choir was a staircase, also clothed in Turkey carpet. On the lowest step reposed an object whose nature he could ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... hardly uttered the words when the trampling of his two horses on the staircase was distinctly heard. A moment or two later he looked from the casement and saw the steeds at an upper window, and he could doubt no longer. Rushing to the door, he received his shivering wife into his arms. The ring she still wore would have removed ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... that hemmed them round. In the landing outside the rooms his name appeared above his door, but the paint had been soiled by time, and the letters for the most part reduced to shadows; so that, taken in conjunction with the gaunt staircase and bare walls, the place had ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston









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