"Grimy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of smile through a grimy, unshaven mask, as he looked into the sweet face above him. Then he closed his eyes again, as if he feared the ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... beslime^, begrime, befoul; splash, stain, distain^, maculate, sully, pollute, defile, debase, contaminate, taint, leaven; corrupt &c (injure) 659; cover with dust &c n.; drabble in the mud^; roil. wallow in the mire; slobber, slabber^. Adj. dirty, filthy, grimy; unclean, impure; soiled &c v.; not to be handled with kid gloves; dusty, snuffy^, smutty, sooty, smoky; thick, turbid, dreggy; slimy; mussy [U.S.]. slovenly, untidy, messy, uncleanly. [of people] unkempt, sluttish, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... At first Tom is a real boy, a little grimy, ignorant chimney sweep, next a water baby or eft, in which character, under the tutelage of the fairies, he gains his education. Briefly at the end he is a man, an engineer, but all that is delightfully vague, for he has ceased to be the little Tom ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... greyly at the sunlit devastation that flowed past the windows. And just outside the terminus the train jolted over temporary rails, and on either side of the railway the houses were blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of London was grimy with powder of the Black Smoke, in spite of two days of thunderstorms and rain, and at Clapham Junction the line had been wrecked again; there were hundreds of out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by side ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... its mightiest defenders: a 400-millimetre gun mounted on a railway-truck. So streaked and striped and splashed and mottled with many colors was it that, monster though it was, it escaped my notice until we were almost upon it. Suddenly a score or more of grimy men, its crew, came pelting down the track, as subway laborers run for shelter when a blast is about to be set off. A moment later came a mighty bellow; from the up-turned nose of the monster burst a puff of smoke pierced by a tongue of flame, and an invisible express-train went roaring ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... COUNCIL' in dirty white lettering upon its fuel box, a mountain of duck-boards stacked on the cab roof, railway sleepers, riveting stakes and odds and ends of lumber tied on all over it. As I rode up an elderly head, grimy and perspiring, was thrust between a couple of duck-boards and nodded pleasantly to me. ''Ello,' it said, 'seen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... felt better. As I drove into the town I had to wait at the grade crossing while a wrecking train rumbled past, on its way back from Willdon. That meant that the line was clear again. I watched the grimy men on the cars, and shuddered to think what they ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... twelve hundred prisoners and a battery of small guns. The Boers had lost two fine guns and three hundred prisoners. Twelve thousand British troops had been shut up in Ladysmith, and there was no serious force between the invaders and the sea. Only in those distant transports, where the grimy stokers shoveled and strove, were there hopes for the safety of Natal and the honour of the Empire. In Cape Colony the loyalists waited with bated breath, knowing well that there was nothing to check ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one's imagination. No wonder that they creep forth from the foul mystery of their interiors, stumble down from their garrets, or scramble up out of their cellars, on the upper step of which you may see the grimy housewife, before the shower is ended, letting the rain-drops gutter down her visage; while her children (an impish progeny of cavernous recesses below the common sphere of humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that they know of personal purification ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... few days Mary learned to appreciate the character of Louise, without being in the least desirous of emulating her housewifely virtues. Limeton did not meet with her approval. She could scarcely repress her disgust as she walked the grimy streets, saw the pretentious, over-dressed people, who thus flaunted their wealth in the faces of their less fortunate neighbours, and then thought It might have been her home. To change ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... public park in the very centre of the town. In summer it is a favourite resort of the people; but in winter it is desolate enough. From the top of it one has a view not only of the whole straggling, grimy town, but of the winding valley beneath, with its scattered mines and factories blackening the snow on each side of it, and of the wooded and ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... these men are moderate enough with liquor at their meals, whatever they may be at other times. He held the bread in his left hand and the cheese was placed on it, and kept in its place by the thumb, the grimy dirt on which was shielded by a small piece of bread beneath it from the precious cheese. His plate and dish was his broad palm, his only implement a great jack-knife with a buck-horn handle. He ate slowly, ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... in the plainest of attire, though Tibble in fur cap, grimy jerkin, and leathern apron was no elegant steersman; and Edmund, who was at the age of youthful foppery, shrugged his shoulders a little, and disguised the garments of the smithy with his best flat ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... contemporary of Dickens, also wrote in favour of the smoky chimneys. He says about St. Paul's: "It is really the better for all the incense which all the chimneys since the time of Wren have offered at its shrine, and are still flinging up every day from their foul and grimy censers." As a flower of speech, this is good, but as criticism it is equivalent to saying the less seen of it the better. M. Taine, the French critic, evidently thought otherwise; he wrote ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... her eyes were red, and the servants might notice them. She would have to wait a while. Then she shivered, for a sharp wind blew from across the hills where in the hollows the snow still lingered in grimy drifts, icy on the edges, and crumbling and settling and sinking away with every day of pale sunshine. The faint fragrance of wind- beaten daffodils reached her, and she saw two crocuses, long gold bubbles, over in the grass. She put the back of her hand against her cheek—it ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... expressions of her face, revealing a mind as active as the busy hands, were a richer study. The impact of her brush was vigorous, and with looks of aversion and disgust she would cleanse away the grimy stains as if they were an essential part of the moral as well as gross material life of the former occupants. To a refined nature association forms no slight element in the constitution of a home; ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... accelerate material progress and keep every furnace at full blast, it would come face to face with a serious problem. By whom would the product be enjoyed? By those who created it? What sort of pleasures, arts, and sciences would those grimy workmen have time and energy for after a day of hot and unremitting exertion? What sort of religion would fill their Sabbaths and their dreams? We see how they spend their leisure to-day, when a strong aristocratic tradition and the presence ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... he was nowhere to be seen. When he returned, he was pale and grey. His bloodless red eyes lay tearfully in grimy shadows. His voice had only a sing-song tone, with a mannered melancholy. Schulz spoke mournfully, dreamily, about despair, whoredom, and being torn apart inwardly. He said that he was fed up with the joy of ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... men with faces grimy as his own; their lips, like his, split and purple from the alkali dust. They had had no water to drink in all that long day's twelve miles of marching and six hours of fighting. Fearful is the price paid out when the wilderness goes forth to war! ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... rested in its calm. Up the street a few steps rose the walls of the old theatre, used as a prison now for captured Confederates: it was full now; he could see them looking out from behind the bars, grimy and tattered. Far to the north, on Mount Woods, the white grave-stones stood out clear in the darkening evening. His enemies, the busy streets, the very war itself, the bones and souls of the dead yonder,—the great Peace held them all. We might call them evil, but they were sent from God, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the Vatican; and up a private stair to a luxurious little room, with a great oriel window. Here were inkstands, sloping frames for writing on, and all the instruments of art. The cardinal whispered a courtier, and presently the Pope's private secretary appeared with a glorious grimy old MS. of Plutarch's Lives. And soon Gerard was seated alone copying it, awe-struck, yet half delighted at the thought that his holiness would handle ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... landscape as their own. What a paradise! And some day civilized man would come and—spoil it! Ruthless axes would raze that age-old wood; black, sticky smoke would rise from ugly chimneys against that azure sky; grimy little boats with wheels behind or upon either side would churn the mud from the bottom of Jad-in-lul, turning its blue waters to a dirty brown; hideous piers would project into the lake from squalid buildings of corrugated ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... journalist, W.T. Stead, was born in the parish of Embleton, though his childhood was passed in very different surroundings, in the narrow streets and grimy atmosphere of Howdon-on-Tyne. His recent death on the ill-fated Titanic will be fresh in the minds ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... just a plain seat, one seat." "Sold out," he laconically replied and retired. Then I heard suspicious laughter. Rather dazed, I walked slowly to the sidewalk and was grabbed—there is no other word—by several rough men with tickets and big bunches of greenbacks in their grimy fists. "Tickets, tickets, fine seats for De Volkyure tonight." They yelled at me and I felt as if I were in the clutches of the "barkers" of a downtown clothing-house. I saw my chance and began dickering. At first I was asked fifteen dollars a seat, but seeing that I am apoplectic by temperament ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... at the mercy of the men in the house. Indeed, a rat caught in a trap, was never more firmly laid by the heels than I. At about half-past seven o'clock a small trap-door, which I had not noticed near the ground and the main door, was opened, and a grimy hand made its way in and placed upon the floor a cup of coffee and a roll. Then it was closed once more and made secure. I drank the coffee and munched the roll, and, if the truth must be confessed, poor as they were felt the better ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... mistake. "Loafer" was written all over him—from his ragged, matted hair to the fringe on the bottom of his trousers. He held a broken cork helmet, that had not seen pipe-clay for many a month, in his grimy hands, and scraped one foot and ducked his dripping head, as I turned toward him ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... the lamplighter passed, torching the grimy lamps. Miss Anna spoke almost in a whisper: "Shall I ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... tears away on his grimy knuckles and took up the tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened as he got the swing of ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... holidays to explore afoot the romantic passes connecting the Valtelline with the lake of Iseo; and my remembrance of that enchanting region made it seem impossible that Don Egidio should ever look without a reminiscent pang on the grimy perspective of his parochial streets. The transition was too complete, too ironical, from those rich glades and Titianesque acclivities to the brick hovels and fissured sidewalks ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... of fire itself, which blackens all that it burns, though itself bright, and which, though of the most beautiful colors, discolors almost all that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing fuel into grimy cinders? ... Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal, which is so brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a slight pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisture rots it, nor any time causes it to decay." City of God, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... is!—during a scuffle in the passage, and I was still rubbing them with one hand when I found that the uncle-on-approbation was half-heartedly shaking the other. A florid, elderly man, and unmistakably nervous, he dropped our grimy paws in succession, and, turning very red, with an awkward simulation of heartiness, "Well, h' are y' all?" he said, "Glad to see me, eh?" As we could hardly, in justice, be expected to have formed an opinion ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... rattled for several minutes under her stubby fingers. Then the clicking ceased with sudden abruptness, and she prodded the mechanism viciously with a hairpin. As this appeared unavailing she used her forefinger, and when at length the carriage slid along the rod with a clash there was a smear of grimy oil upon her cheek and her somewhat tilted nose. The machine, however, gave no further trouble, and she endeavoured to make up some, at least, of the time she had spent at the concert. It was necessary that it should ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... Mhor into the engine and, holding him up high above the furnace, told him to pull a chain, whereupon the engine gave an anguished hoot. Mhor had no words to express his pleasure, but in an ecstasy of gratitude he seized the engine-driver's grimy hand and kissed it, leaving that honest man, who was not accustomed to ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... what he had let himself in for. Not for worlds would he have subjected himself to such buffoonery had he known. It was not the sport of a gentleman; it was the play of a circus clown! He watched with horrified disgust as the Scot's grimy face and tousled head emerged from ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... the ground the stockmen jumped And bared each brawny arm, They tore green branches from the trees And fought for Ross's farm; And when before the gallant band The beaten flames gave way, Two grimy hands in friendship joined — ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... pipe or a coal fire after a day's extinction; discoloured with the soils of many a stale debauch, and reeking yet with pot-house odours. In lieu of buckles at his knees, he wore unequal loops of packthread; and in his grimy hands he held a knotted stick, the knob of which was carved into a rough likeness of his own vile face. Such was the visitor who doffed his three-cornered hat in Gashford's presence, and waited, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... "I have long wanted a talk with you. There are things I want to ask you. Why, for instance, do you always pretend to be a grimy slum woman?" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... the baseball diamond to see the Sophomores lying tied up beside the backstop, and what a joke it was on her own class and what a ridiculous figure Jack Smith had made in the coils of a Freshman's trunk-rope, with his face and hair all grimy with perspiration and dust, and that laundry agent, Mason, piled on top of him. Hannah left the table in secret excitement. Between recitations that morning she met Pete Halleck, a classmate from her own high school; bursting with pride, he took her up to the Row to show their very own ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... into his pocket, and dug out a very grimy little purse, out of which, sure enough, he ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... when she was wrapped in beauty, fed by delicate food, sensitive to the slim old silver under her hands, that she sometimes felt herself actually carried back to the boarding-house, and she saw the grimy tablecloth, the flaring gas jets, the tired worn faces, the dusty hair of Mrs. Banks and the rubber collar of Mr. Jenkins, and she heard little Miss Stubb uttering platitudes in her attempt to raise the mental atmosphere. There was a great clatter of knives ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... from the time the snag had struck, the injured barge was again lashed to the fleet and on her way down the Ohio. Paul was the hero of the hour. The Captain of the "Red Lion" solemnly transferred him from his damp and grimy quarters on the head to the comfortable cabin and pilot house. He confessed to the kind Captain that he had run away from home and how anxious he was about his mother. That day the Captain wrote a glowing letter to Mrs. Boyton and posted it at Paducah, Kentucky. ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... be surprised to hear he was an Anarchist,' said Mrs Pansey, who knew nothing about the man. 'Well, Mrs Mosk, I hope we've cheered you up. I'll go now. Read this tract,' bestowing a grimy little pamphlet, 'and don't see ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... and dirty enough, but I am supposed to have reached, politically, the rustic beauties of the country. Those around me, who had votes, voted for the County of Middlesex. On the other side of the invisible border I had just past the poor wretch with 3s. a day who lived in a grimy lodging or a half-built hut, but who at any rate possessed the political privilege. Now I had suddenly emerged among the aristocrats, and quite another state of things prevailed. Is that a reasonable manipulation of the votes of the people? Does that arrangement give to any man an equal ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... on the ground, and upon it he had poured the company's supply of coffee. Corporals and other representatives of the grimy and hot-throated men who lined the breastwork had ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... popular meetings which occurred all over the city, more numerous night after night. The bare, gloomy amphitheatre, lit by five tiny lights hanging from a thin wire, was packed from the ring up the steep sweep of grimy benches to the very roof-soldiers, sailors, workmen, women, all listening as if their lives depended upon it. A soldier was speaking-from the Five Hundred and Forty-eight Division, ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... disappointed. A week passed and he heard nothing. Then three more days and still no word from the New Hampshire widow. Meanwhile fresh layers of dust spread themselves over the Whittaker furniture, and the gaudy patterns of the carpets blushed dimly beneath a grimy fog. The situation was desperate; even Matilda Tripp, Come-Outer sermons and all, began to ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... grimy, and undiscoverable from the smoke and heat, his smock-frock burnt into holes and dripping with water, the ash stem of his sheep-crook charred six inches shorter, advanced with the humility stern adversity had thrust upon him up to the slight female form in the saddle. He lifted his hat with respect, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... cloud of steam. The fireman, a lad of eighteen, with a curl waving from under his cap, was leaning far out of the cab, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the snowy mountains just visible from White River. He was careless,—alive, and content this fine morning,—his grimy arms bare on the sill of the cab window, the broad earth and its hills spread before him. As the engine shot past, he looked down at Isabelle, curiously, and then up to the mountains again, as if his life were complete enough. A careless figure of the human ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... statement of the animals' lack of hostile intention. He refused to stir: nay, more, he dropped himself solidly to the earth with an ear-splitting howl, and grabbed tight hold of Pocahontas's dress with both grimy paws; the sheep, meanwhile, came hurrying up at a sharp trot, pushing against each other in their haste, and bleating in glad anticipation of a treat. Some of the boldest ventured near enough to sniff the girl's dress, gazing up at her expectantly, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... the pathway he has traversed. In the end, perhaps, he wonders if it has been worth while. David Cable was a General Manager; he had been a fireman. It had required twenty-five years of hard work on his part to break through the chrysalis. Packed away in a chest upstairs in his house there was a grimy, greasy, unwholesome suit of once-blue overalls. The garments were just as old as his railroad career, for he had worn them on his first trip with the shovel. When his wife implored him to throw away the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... consisted of two rotten old trunks, a broken chair, and a dirty volume of sermons of the old-fashioned quarto size. The grimy ceiling, slanting downward to a cracked window, was stained with rain that had found its way through the roof. The faded wall-paper, loosened by damp, was torn away in some places, and bulged loose in others. There were ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... the boy's grimy blistered hand, such a strong slender hand and so like his mother's, and sitting down in the kitchen chair, he pulled Jason ...
— Benefits Forgot - A Story of Lincoln and Mother Love • Honore Willsie
... the woods; his browned face, washed clean on the forehead and temples, showed almost white under the dirt. There were tear-stained rings about the eyes, and his pink shirt and blue trousers were grimy with dust, and the red clay of the Sycamore still was on the sides of his dust-brown bare feet. Around a big toe was a rag which showed a woman's tying—neat and ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... clamour arises that swells upon the air, a joyous babel; and forth from small and dismal homes, from narrow courts and the purlieus adjacent, his customers appear. They race, they gambol, they run and toddle, for these customers are very small and tender and grimy, but each small face is alight with joyous welcome, and they hail him with rapturous acclaim. Even the few tired-looking mothers, peeping from windows or glancing from doorways, smile and nod and forget awhile their weariness in the children's delight, as Ravenslee, the battered ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... pile of flower-pots, sneezed violently and grovelled wrathfully among the ruins for at least five minutes, helplessly confused. Quite by accident she knocked her cobwebbed head against a narrow, outward swinging window, seized it thankfully, and plunged through it. Hanging a moment by her grimy hands she swayed, a little fearfully, then dropped with a quick breath to the concrete floor beneath, and smiled with relief as the comparative brightness of a well kept cellar revealed her safety. Vegetable bins, a neat pile of kindling ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... then of no value in the world? Is it always to be the prey of modern progress? Is nothing to be considered sacred; nothing to be left untouched, unsmirched by the grimy fingers of ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... you are not nearly so immortal as you think you are is proved by these winter chills along the spine. There come occasions when you get tired of your own stars and long to feel the thrill of that royal life-blood that leaps like a ruby river of love through the grimy, toiling, battling humanitarian world beneath you. Did you once intimate to me that if ever I conjured you out of the shadows which seem to surround you, I should be horrified at the vision? Well, ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... saw nothing of all this—his eyes were fixed on other things. A small space was enclosed by four bare and grimy walls, in one of which was an iron grating. On the filthy and loathsome floor was a mat upon which an old man lay alone in the throes of death, an old man breathing with difficulty and turning his head from side to side as amid his tears he uttered a name. The old man was alone, but from ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the dark mass is then moulded into small loaves and frozen for future use. Our host was evidently desirous of treating us with every civility, and, as a mark of especial consideration, bit off several choice morsels from the large cube of venison in his grimy hand, and taking them from his mouth, offered them to me. I waived graciously the implied compliment, and indicated Dodd as the proper recipient of such attentions; but the latter revenged himself by ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... There is a shop on the ground-floor of No. 15, where ancient pieces of stove-pipe and a few fire-irons are exposed for sale. Von Holzen, having pushed open the door, stood waiting at the foot of a narrow and grimy staircase. He knew that in such a shop in such a quarter of the town there is always a human spider lurking in the background, who steals out upon any human fly that may pause to look at ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... that the razor-like tips began to look somewhat scarred and battered, as if they might perhaps retire from active service in ten years' time, or so. But the tan shoes were not Jerry's only concession to the social amenities. An unwonted attention was given to grimy knuckles and finger-nails. More than once he made his appearance with his usually frowsy hair as sleek as the coat of a water rat, and dripping, in further likeness to the animal mentioned. Peggy, whose original interest in Jerry had been intensified by the favorable impression he had made ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... attached secretly to the ganger's foot, whilst his hands were no less vigorously employed on the concertina which provided the accompanying dance music. This delighted old man was the oddest figure of the three, as the perspiration poured down his grimy face. To light on such a comedy when on the war path would have been enough to make Momus laugh; and when the laugh was spent we swept the floor, for reasons already hinted at, sought refuge in our blankets; and ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... man in a great walnut bed, a relic of the better days which this lodging house must have seen. The grimy red plush carpet, the red velvet chairs with broken springs, the double gilt-framed mirror above the mantel, had all been respectable, substantial contributions to comfort in their time. The fireplace was now empty and grateless, and an ill-smelling gas stove burned in its sooty recess under ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... For Denise persisted in seeing everything in that rose light which illumines the world when we are young. She had even a good word to say for the Perseverance, which vessel had assuredly need of such, and said that the captain was a good French sailor, despite his grimy face. ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... George Hoskins was a great, grimy ogre. George, big in all things, was big in his love for the tiny woman who was his wife. Other women George did not see though he spoke to them on the street. He had pleaded on bended knees for the love of his tiny woman and when he got her all other ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... easily-measured faith. What about the unearned increment? What about the unrealised wealth? Too many of us are like some man who has a great estate in another land. He knows nothing about it, and is living in grimy poverty in a back street. For you have all God's riches waiting for you, and 'the potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice' at your beck and call, and yet you are but poorly realising your possible riches. Alas, that when we might have so much we do have so little. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... a fog of grimy dust, they condemned Egypt and things Egyptian in no uncertain tones. They had washed and eaten, and had settled down comfortably for the afternoon, and why had this confounded blanky cyclone selected ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... small office listened to that tirade in embarrassed silence. Jason Bolt fidgeted in his chair and grew pink to the tips of his ears. Herman Krech, as became a tactful bystander, gazed at the floor, stared at the ceiling, studied the glowing tip of his cigar, peered through the grimy window at the uninspiring view of Hambleton and generally comported himself with discretion and savoir faire. Inwardly, he was wondering if he had any right to inflict this termagant tanner on his unsuspecting friend, the detective. Not by a jugful, ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... came out, a man stood by his side whom he had scarcely noticed during the evening. He was evidently a shoemaker. There was a smell of leather about him, and his hands and face were grimy. He had a slightly turned-up nose, smallish eyes, half hidden under very black eyebrows, and his lips were thin and straight. His voice was exceedingly high-pitched, and had something creaking in it like the sound of ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... the Parthenon and its contiguous temples and ruins. That wonderful tea-rose marble, with its stains of burnt sienna marking the flutings of endless broken columns, needs no varnishing of moisture to enhance its beauty. That will do for the facade of Burlington House with its grimy gray statues, or the moss-encrusted tower of the Groote Kirk, but never here. It was this fear, perhaps, that kept me at work, haunted as I was by the bogy of "Rain to-morrow. It always comes, and keeps on for a month when it starts in." Blessed be the weather clerk! It never started ...
— The Parthenon By Way Of Papendrecht - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... that the first Chukche emerged from the large igloo. At his heels roared the whole gang. Like a pack of bloodthirsty hounds, they strove each one to keep first place in the race. Their grimy hands itched for a touch of ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... granary, until the later was gorged to repletion and the wheat was stored within a willow framing beneath the chaff and straw that streamed from the chute of the great machine. Winston had around him the best men that dollars could hire, and toiled tirelessly with the grimy host in the whirling dust of the thrasher and amid the sheaves, wherever another pair of hands, or the quick decision that would save an hour's delay, was ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... persons who are fortunate enough to live in more agreeable localities are quite content with just looking down, and then passing on, marvelling, it may be, to themselves how such processes as washing and cooking can ever be carried on with the slightest prospect of success in the midst of such grimy and unsavoury surroundings. It was in such a street that James Barnes and his family existed, rather than lived; for life is too vigorous a term to be applied to the time dragged on by those who ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... the suit-case. It was securely locked. Next he seized the black box with his grimy fingers. It was fastened only with a single strap. As this finally yielded, a look of rapture spread over his Italian features, and with renewed zeal he proceeded to pry ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... have the annoyed airs and the disdainful pouts of the women who passed by me confirmed it. Will Poeri, who has inspired me with such mad passion, never love me? He would have received just as kindly an old, wrinkled woman with withered breasts, clothed in hideous rags, and with feet grimy with dust. Any one but he would at once have recognised, under the disguise of Hora, Tahoser the daughter of the high-priest Petamounoph; but he never cast his eyes upon me any more than does the basalt statue of a god upon the devotees who offer up to it quarters of antelope ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... an inch. The engineer was on his feet now, hand on the throttle lever, although it was open as wide as it could be pulled. The fireman was throwing coal into the furnace, looking round over his shoulder now and then at the persistent horseman who would not be outrun, his eyes white in his grimy face. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... Alexander in an awful voice, and even in that moment she appreciated with an added pang the feathery beauty of a slice of Barnet's sponge-cake in the grimy ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... had said in the grimy recesses of Cliff and Dover streets. (Approaching this sentiment for the third time, perhaps we may be permitted to accomplish our thought and say what we had in mind.) But up on the airy decking of the Brooklyn Bridge, where we repaired with G—— ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... the day and night the phraseology of that tiresome address fell upon our ears. Grimy sailors came down out of the foretop placidly announcing themselves as "a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for recreation and unostentatiously," etc.; the coal passers moved to their duties in the profound depths of the ship, explaining the blackness of their faces ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the fact that there are almost no playgrounds in all this congested district, you will understand that Hale House has plenty of work on its hands to carry a little sunshine into the grimy tenement homes. The beautiful story of how that is done cannot be told here, but what Hale House did for me I may not omit ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... a little reassured by that cheerful and grimy countenance. Her eyes wandered to Axel, so cool and so vigilant, giving the necessary orders so quietly, losing no precious moments in trying to save what was past saving, and without any noise or any ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... up at noon—it was the twenty-ninth of December—with grimy face and hands and a grin on his face. I had spent my morning in the towers, where it was beastly cold, to no purpose and was not in a mood for the ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... to a levity of manner which is utterly repugnant to him, in the effort to conceal from the world the tumult of emotion that so nearly makes him weep. Who that has read that inimitable page will ever forget the meeting of that genial sire and gallant son in the grimy old railway car filled with the wounded from Antietam, in Doctor Holmes's ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... and, seizing her father's shirt-bosom in both her grimy hands, she buried her face in it, and sprinkled it with tears ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... that instant—at least no one who still lived. The proprietor of the house identified the picture of the lad as that of one who had been a frequent visitor in the room of the old man. Aside from this he knew nothing. And there, at the door of a grimy, old building in the slums of London, the searchers came ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fell on the round, vacant face of her son his inevitable pasteboard box, grimy with much handling, clutched close to his big breast, and in it the soft beating and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Grimy, half-clad, and brawny, with the whites of his eyes gleaming out of his black face, Jobst the Kohler startled Christina terribly when she came into the outer room, and met him returning from his night's work, with his ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his bared fore-arms grimy, sat glancing through the Express, his feet crossed on his littered desk, a black pipe hanging from one corner of his mouth. He did not look round but ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... of a breezy site, and sloping far downward before any marshy soil is reached. The high hedge, and the trees that stand beside the cottage, give it a pleasant aspect enough to one who does not know the grimy secrets of the interior; and the summer afternoon was now so bright that I shall remember the scene with a great deal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a private tuning-fork, black and grimy, which, being about seventy years of age, and wrought before pianoforte builders had sent up the pitch to make their instruments brilliant, was nearly a note flatter than the parson's. While an argument as to the true pitch was in progress, ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... cunningly chosen, save that the mire troubled him, letting him down by slow degrees, and threatening to engulf him bodily; and he was now too weak to extricate himself. He lifted his head and glared. His face was grimy, his hair matted with mud. Alice, although brave enough and quite accustomed to startling experiences, uttered a cry when she saw those snaky eyes glistening so savagely amid the shadows. But Jean was quick to recognize Long-Hair; he ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... Commonwealth and is now deposited in the State Library, is a folio measuring eleven and one-half inches in length, seven and seven-eighths inches in width and one and one-half inches in thickness. It is bound in parchment, once white, but now grimy and much the worse for wear, being somewhat cracked and considerably scaled. Much scribbling, evidently by the Bradford family, is to be seen upon its surface, and out of the confusion may be read the name of Mercy Bradford, a daughter of the governor. On the inside of the front cover is pasted a ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... he is sitting behind the oven, on Nilen's grimy bed. "So you've become a cobbler?" says Nilen, to begin with, compassionately, for he feels a deucedly smart fellow himself in his fine white clothes, with his bare arms crossed over his naked breast. Pelle feels remarkably ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... people turned by preference to this humming and buzzing life, rather than to the quiet and lonely life in the green spaces of the country; Hugh had little doubt that the vast majority of those he saw, even the pale, patient workpeople who were peeping, as they toiled, grimy and sweat-stained, from the open windows, would choose this life rather than the other, and would have condemned the life of the country as dull. Was it he, Hugh wondered, or they that were out of joint? Ought he to accept the ordinary, sensible point of view, and try to conform himself ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... piece of paper, from the figure on which he is supposed to tell whether his prayer will succeed, or the work he contemplates prove lucky. Entering the shrine, it is difficult to see for a few moments, so gloomy is the place and so grimy every object with the smoke of joss offerings from time immemorial. A kind of altar faces the worshippers, with a box of sand, in which are stuck the burning joss-sticks. Before this is a cushion, on which they prostrate themselves, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... minutes later he sauntered down the street, saluting acquaintances, and threading his way across the Common entered a grimy brick building where a huge policeman with an insignia on his arm was seated behind a desk. Mr. Tiernan leaned on the desk, and reflectively lighted a Thomas-Jefferson-Five-Cent Cigar, Union Label, the excellencies of which were set forth ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... she most desired, which she, Mrs. Boyd could not have given her in the pretty home Lilian had been planning. She had been happy with her lover, then her husband. But, Lilian would shrink from the kiss of the grimy man fresh from his hard work, and after his brief ablutions, sitting down to supper in his shirt sleeves and then lighting his pipe and pushing his baby up and down the front walk, jesting and laughing with the neighbors. ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... out, naturally were glanced over more than once. They were slightly above the medium size for hands, and long in proportion to their breadth. The fingers were tapered like a woman's. The nails were filbert-shaped, and grimy with recent climbing. The palms were hard. The knuckle-side was very brown, and showed the tendons prominently. They were those lean, nervous sort of hands which you find out at times ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... Then, second by second, the stigmata of decay became more and more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild growth; windows staring blindly; walls splotched with lichens and grimy where the rains could not ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... grimy, with smoke and coal dust, and the sweat ran down their faces and bodies. Yet there was always plenty of water in the mines, and when hard work was over they washed and looked plain but tidy. Besides their ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... had been crossing the plains as regularly as the sun itself. Before that it had loitered, attended, so the biggest brother said, by a great company of rough men carrying shovels and picks. It was this company, stray members of which, worn and grimy, had visited the farm-house now and then and talked in broad brogue, that had kept the little girl and the herd south of the reservation road throughout the early spring; and it was not until the men had dispersed and the cloud had begun its daily trips from ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... run alongside for a while, but the immense drag of her four towers of canvas soon draws her clear, and she speedily looms once more like a cloud on the horizon. Good-bye! The squat collier lumbers along, and her leisurely grimy skipper salutes as we near him. It is marvellous to reflect that the whole of our coal-trade was carried on in those queer tubs only sixty years ago. They are passing away, and the gallant, ignorant, comical race of sailors who manned them has all but disappeared; the ugly sordid iron ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... lonely little room, where the cracks let the boisterous wind whistle through, and the smoky, grimy walls looked cheerless and unhomelike. A miserable little room in a miserable little cottage in one of the squalid streets of the Third District that nature and the city fathers seemed to ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... wherever we go," he announced triumphantly. "It's a big breathing spell for Ben Gaynor." He dumped it out; there were other lumps like the two he had brought back the first time. She wondered dully if that grimy stuff were gold! She watched him while he emptied a provision-bag and thereafter dropped into it the stuff he had brought in his coat. On top of it ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... resistance, they wilt and grow distorted, acquiring withal the sort of pathetic hardihood which a Dartmoor pony will draw out of moor life in a frozen winter. All round them, by day, by night, stretches the huge, grey, grimy waste of streets, factory walls, chimneys, murky canals, chapels, public-houses, hoardings, posters, butchers' shops—a waste where nothing beautiful exists save a pretty cat or pigeon, a blue sky, perhaps, and a few trees and open spaces. The children of the ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... whom great distress and a dangerous spirit of discontent with the government at that time prevailed. Groans and hisses greeted the carriage, full of influential personages, in which the Duke of Wellington sat. High above the grim and grimy crowd of scowling faces a loom had been erected, at which sat a tattered, starved-looking weaver, evidently set there as a representative man, to protest against this triumph of machinery, and the gain and glory which the wealthy Liverpool and Manchester men were ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... off, Heaven and Old Joe knew where! Tramp, tramp over the hot pike, sullenly southward, hot without and hot within! The knapsack was heavy, the haversack was heavy, the musket was heavy. Sweat ran down from under cap or felt hat, and made grimy trenches down cheek and chin. The men had too thick underwear. They carried overcoat and blanket—it was hot, hot, and every pound like ten! To keep—to throw away? To keep—to throw away? The beat of ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... great height, and together the two dragged him toward The Bedford Castle. As they went aboard, they were nearly run down by a body of reinforcements that Captain Peasley had finally mustered from between decks. Down the gang-plank and over the side they poured, grimy stokers, greasy oilers, and swearing deckhands, equipped with capstan-bars, wrenches, and marlin-spikes. Without waiting to observe the effect of these new-comers, Boyd and Fraser bundled Alton into the first cabin ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... man retains a somewhat uneasy apprehension when he finds women entering the union. As they become active, women introduce a new element. They may not say very much, but it is gradually discovered that they do not enjoy meeting over saloons, at the head of two or three flights of grimy backstairs, or where the street has earned ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... chubby face Has scant refinement, caste or grace,— From crown to chin, and cheek to cheek, It bears the grimy water-streak Of rinsings such as some long rain Might drool across the window-pane Wherethrough he peers, with troubled frown, As some lorn team drives by for town. His brow is elfed with wispish hair, With tangles ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... his blackened hands, made her wonder if the man who could do everything with wood and iron was above doing anything with water. She had half a mind to tell him of it, particularly as she noticed also that his throat below the line of sunburn disclosed by his open collar was quite white, and his grimy hands well made. She was wondering whether he would be affronted if she said in her politest way, "I beg your pardon, but do you know you have quite accidentally got something on your face," and offer her handkerchief, which, of course, he would decline, when ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... less flake gold than ourselves, but exhibited a half-ounce nugget and several smaller lumps. We could not make him out. Neither his appearance nor his personal equipment suggested necessity; and yet he laboured as hard as the rest of us. His gaudy costume was splashed and grimy with the red mud, although evidently he had made some attempt to brush it. The linen was, of course, hopeless. He showed us the blisters on his small ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... The room was large, and the flickering oil-lamp would have left it mostly in shadow had it not been helped by the flame of the fire. The walls were dark from smoke and long usage, for this was a very old mill. There was no sign of plenty, save the chunks of fat bacon which hung from the grimy rafters. There were several children, and one of them, almost a young woman, went out with a basket to buy us some meat. We had not a very choice meal, but it was a solid one. It commenced with a big tureen of country soup, made of all things, but chiefly of bread, and which Hugh, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... consumptive wisp; from old women of seventy, with straggling grey hair, to fifteen-year-old girls. In the cottage forges there would be but one worker, or two at most; in the shop forges four, or even five, little glowing heaps; four or five of the grimy, pale lung-bellows; and never a moment without a fiery hook about to take its place on the growing chains, never a second when the thin smoke of the forges, and of those lives consuming slowly in front of them, did not escape from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... villagers; I don't know how, but they are not,' said Horatia, glancing about her, and almost jumping up and down in her eagerness to see all there was to be seen, as they drove slowly along the narrow, and at this time crowded, streets of the grimy manufacturing town. ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... makes a move. What a lot of filthy, torn paper is scattered about the world! We walk slowly side by side towards the dirt-littered basin of the fountain, and stand regarding two grimy tramps who sit and argue on a further seat. One holds a horrible old boot in his hand, and gesticulates with it, while his other hand caresses his rag-wrapped foot. "Wot does Cham'lain si?" his words drift ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... whole history of human suffering and temptation—of the human fall—in his curt laugh. While Desiree was looking at the treasure in speechless admiration, he turned suddenly and took the bread and meat in his grimy hands. His crooked fingers closed over the loaf, making the crust crack, and for a second the expression of his face was not human. Then he hurried to the room that had been his, like a dog that seeks to hide its greed in ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... did not seem legitimate to Bep, whose grimy hands ached to the fingertips from being used as both pick and shovel. She made a dart for the "scooper"—a heavy china cup which had been smashed in so fortunate a manner as to be ideally fitted for emptying ore ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... little ravine, down which a stream—which ought to have been a lovely, wild, and frolicsome little river—flowed between its rocks and trees. The river, like so many in that district, had, however, in its earlier life been sacrificed to trade, and was grimy with paper-making. But this did not affect our pleasure in it so much as I have known it to affect other streams. Perhaps our water was more rapid; perhaps less clogged with dirt and refuse. Our side of ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... tears of self-pity rolled down his grimy cheeks. The relief of them seemed to unstopper his voice. That, and the ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... himself oddly, unexpectedly in the presence of a bigger view. It was as if some interfering mass had been so displaced that he could see more sky and more country. Yet the opposite houses were naturally still there, and if the grimy little place looked lighter it was doubtless only because the rain had indeed stopped and the sun was pouring in. Peter went to the window to open it to the altered air, and in doing so beheld at the garden gate the humble "growler" ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... before passing them through it, I make it serve instead of mangle and iron. After baking the bread and thoroughly cleaning the churn and pails, I began upon the tins and pans, the cleaning of which had fallen into arrears, and was hard at work, very greasy and grimy, when a man came in to know where to ford the river with his ox team, and as I was showing him he looked pityingly at me, saying, "Be you the new hired girl? Bless me, you're ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... "I could not. It is impossible." She looked up at him, holding the little victim pressed close in her arms, utterly regardless of its rough and grimy coat. Her eyes were swimming ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... house, standing back from the road with a few grimy bushes to support the fiction of a front garden. Tommy paid off the taxi, and accompanied Tuppence to the front door bell. As she was about to ring it, he ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... a box on rough rollers, made out of a packing-case, grimy with dirt from the hands that had rocked it. Jonah pulled it out of the corner into the light, and the child, pacified by the sight of ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... no answer; we were now close to the yawl, and he was staring expectantly at the figures on her deck. Suddenly two of these detached themselves from the rest, turned, came to the side, looked down on us. One was a grimy-faced, alert-looking young naval officer, very much alive to his job; the other, not quite so smoke-blackened, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... deserted spaces, past smoke-stained factories, across cobbled streets, past a wilderness of small houses, grimy, everywhere repellent. Soon they entered Manchester by the back way and pulled up presently at a small and ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... odd-looking girls from New York, duskily draped, sable-plumed, all but incongruously shod and gazing about them with extravagance; she might, from the curiosity she clearly excited in byways, in side-streets peopled with grimy children and costermongers carts, which she hoped were slums, literally have had her musket on her shoulder, have announced herself as freshly on the warpath. But for the fear of overdoing this character she would here and there have begun conversation, have asked ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... that Alice's marriage was quite a different thing from what hers was,—something to glorify all the petty, sordid details, to vivify the grimy struggle of keeping one's head above the ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a cathedral grandeur, even though it was a temple builded with hands for the sake of the things builded with hands. The robes of the votaries were grimy and greasy, and the prayer they poured out was sweat. They chewed tobacco and spat regardless. They eyed her as curiously as she them. They swaggered each his own way, one by extra obliviousness, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... at their stupefying monotonous tasks as though the miracle of spring were not taking place before their eyes. They were absorbed in their barnyards and kitchen sinks and bad cooking and worse dressmaking. The very children, grimy little utilitarians like their parents, only went abroad in the flood of golden sunshine, in order to rifle the hill pastures of their wild strawberries. Virginia was no longer a child to ignore all this. It was an embittering, imprisoning thought ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... and found it in a back street—a shabby, unpretentious-looking place, with a front that had once been white, but that was now grimy in the extreme. The windows were hung with little curtains in the French fashion, whose freshness had also long departed. The restaurant itself was low and teeming with the odor of past dinners. At this hour it was almost empty. Several untidy-looking waiters were rearranging tables. In ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he bent forward, and looked into the placid surface of the water in the rocky basin. But what did he behold there? A vision that appalled him, and caused him to start back abashed—himself, all grimy, with his matted hair and besmeared face! For he had still the dress of the gold mine clinging to him; and he wept for shame to feel himself so ugly in a spot where ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... an almost uncomfortable sensation. The enthusiasm for the free drinks, however, was only slightly damped, and a small forest of grimy hands was ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... blood-royal of Austria, and might in the course of Nature have succeeded to the imperial throne. For this reason they were held, though only dukes of Tuscany, to be entitled to the style and title "imperial and royal," according to the custom of the House of Austria; and thus every grimy little tobacco-shop and lottery-office in Tuscany, in the days when I first knew it, in 1841, styled itself "imperial ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... went to a small square window in the studio, pushed it open, and looked out. There was a tiny space of garden below. She saw a plane tree shivering in the wind, yellow leaves on the rain-sodden ground. A sparrow flitted by and perched on the grimy coping of a low wall. And she shivered like ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... He was dusty and grimy to a degree, his clothes were torn in a dozen places where he had gone rolling down the hill, a handkerchief was roughly knotted around his head, and there were streaks of dried blood ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... not even a broad landing like that of the Chebes, grimy with old age, but brightened by its window and the beautiful prospect presented by the factory. A narrow staircase, a narrow door, a succession of rooms with brick floors, all small and cold, and in the last an old maid with a false front and black thread mitts, reading a soiled copy of the ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... applied when the flames were leaping up the black chimney, and this made her feel at ease with the world. Her mother stayed in bed chatting with something more of gayety than usual. It was nearly six o'clock, and the early summer sun was flooding against the grimy window. The previous evening's post had brought a post-card for Mrs. Makebelieve, requesting her to call on a Mrs. O'Connor, who had a house off Harcourt Street. This, of course, meant a day's work—it also meant a ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... and rumbled monotonously over the rails. A bitter cold wind blew up through the cracks in the grimy splintered boards of the floor. The men huddled in the corners of the car, curled up together like puppies in a box. It was pitch black. Fuselli lay half asleep, his head full of curious fragmentary dreams, feeling through his sleep the aching cold and the unending clattering rumble ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... immediately recognize Wallie in his Western clothes, but when they did they waved grimy hands at him ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... was almost impassable; the landing-place being steep and high, and the launch at a long distance. Near a dozen grimy workmen lent us a hand. They refused any reward; and, what is much better, refused it handsomely, without conveying any sense of insult. "It is a way we have in our countryside," said they. And a very becoming way it is. In Scotland, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hillside with aimless leisure, and Ruth stooped to pick up a large, grimy handkerchief, with "C. W." in the corner. "Here's where we were the other ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... fight, doing as much execution as any four of his men; but he could not be everywhere at once, although he rushed here and there, encouraging and urging the defenders to fresh effort. Grimy, bleeding, and powder-stained, they did their best to obey; but the pelting rain of lead was rapidly reducing their numbers, and as their fire slackened for want of men, the troops edged in ever closer and closer until, at ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... threatened the entire city. The rich odor of the burning tobacco leaves rolled over the streets in drifting showers of ruby sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim saw a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing the retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with white-faced and despairingly calm women. He ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a grimy sweep Was creeping down the street, When Quartern Loaf, the biker's boy, Below he chanced to meet: "Sweep!" sneered the baker: and the sweep Gave Puff a sooty flout; But Puff-crumb did not deal in soot, So turned his ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... had come back to the Grange during his father's absence, and, taking the Cup from its grimy bed, had marched it away to its rightful home. For that evening at Kenmuir, James Moore ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... wiped the honest sweat from his brow, closed the shop door, and came down to the post office, where he was met by his flaxen-haired girl of three summers. She clasped her pink arms about the smith's grimy neck and told him Mama was looking for a letter from Grandma, who had gone to California for her health, and that she had come down to see how many kisses Grandma had sent her. The town doctor, with a dignified air, leaned against ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison
... spectacle that greeted her then from that which may now be witnessed near London Bridge. In those days that bridge was alone visible, not far to the East, and the tide that moves now so darkly between stone embankments beneath a myriad of grimy steamers, then flowed brightly between low banks and wooden wharves, bearing a gliding fleet of sailing-vessels. To the south were the fields and woods of the open country, save where loomed the low frame houses and the green-stained wharves of Southwark village. Behind Rebecca was ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... bodies, and wrapped them in cotton sheets. Then these bodies were taken to the Mine-Union Hall, where Constable Hancock looked after them, placing them in rows upon the floor. Handling 188 mutilated and grimy bodies in the warmth of June weather was a gruesome, depressing and difficult task, but these men, assisted by relays of miners, did this work for four days and nights until funeral services were held over the mangled remains of these unfortunate victims of the disaster. Mead, ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth |
