"Ramshackle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... steal, but was by no means willing to even receive presents except for services rendered. Anybody else in his place would long since have become a millionaire; but he had not got much beyond fastening a pair of silver spurs in his Kordovan leather boots, and making use of a ramshackle old caleche, to which he attached two horses, trained by his own hand ever since they were colts. This, moreover, was only when he ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... swiftness, hour after hour, week after week, year after year. Mary could decorate over thirty dozen cups and saucers in a day, at three halfpence the dozen. 'Doesn't she ever do anything else?' some visitor might curiously inquire, whom Titus Price was showing over his ramshackle manufactory. 'No, always the same thing,' Titus would answer, made proud for the moment of this phenomenon of stupendous monotony. 'I wonder how she can stand it—she has a refined face,' the visitor might remark; ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of their non-commissioned officers, perhaps half a dozen were trying to do something, but having no directing head or hand, accomplishing little. It looked as though nothing but the bursting asunder of that ramshackle building would liberate its human charge, for even those who, battered, bleeding, and suffocated, would gladly have escaped into outer air, were packed in, sardine-like, and incapable of self-extrication. To the appeal of the conductor that he should regain control of his men and prevent destruction ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... so late that Ludgate Circus was deserted except for a ramshackle cab with a drunken driver pouring forth a hoarse story of a mean fare to a sleepy policeman leaning against a lamp post. The sight of two gentlemen on foot when all 'buses had stopped running for the night raised fleeting hopes in the cabman's pessimistic breast, and changed the flow of ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... a most important point in the campaign, was far from attractive in feature, being made up of a half-dozen unsightly houses, a ramshackle tavern propped up on two sides with pine poles, and the weatherbeaten building that gave official name to the cross-roads. We had no tents—there were none in the command—so I took possession of the tavern for shelter for myself and staff, and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... uncouth word, what language it was, or what it meant. Only in the old man's tattered pocket-book there were things like this found by his minister after his death. Indeed, in a museum of such relics this is still to be read under a glass case, and in old Mr. Meditation's ramshackle hand: 'Monday, death; Tuesday, judgment; Wednesday, heaven; Thursday, hell; Friday, my past life back to my youth; Saturday, the passion of my Saviour; Lord's day, creation, salvation, and my own.—M.' ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... tricks, and delighted the natives of the Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hotel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and English, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a creative artist. He ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... I've thought over this part of my life. I'm enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... evidently with a view to economy, being scarcely more than half the height of the original: the vacant space has been very roughly filled up, and the numerous holes and crevices support a fine growth of weeds, and a strong young tree has also taken root in the ramshackle stone work. From the central tower, gargoyles grin above the elaborately carved buttresses and finials in remarkable contrast to the ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... of the slope, he started down the incline. He turned off part of the power, and was gliding along joyously, when from a cross-road he suddenly saw turn into the main highway a mule, drawing a ramshackle wagon, loaded with fence posts. Beside the animal walked an old ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... good excuse for not being a gentleman and a sportsman and he did not purpose to look for any reasons for doing differently. Then unexpectedly he was invited to dinner by Mr. Ephraim Tutt in a funny old ramshackle house on West Twenty-third Street with ornamented iron piazza railings all covered with the withered stalks of long dead wistarias, and something happened to him. "Payson Clifford's Twenty-five Thousand Dollar Dinner." He had no suspicion, of course, ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... such a ramshackle affair that it is a miracle how it holds together. The roof does not fit properly on to the walls, and in these latter there are cracks and chinks galore. Perhaps it is due to these defects that hill houses do not fall down more ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... be sufficiently tumble-down and derelict. If this be incorrect, how could such swarms of artistic folk paint and actually lodge in Staithes? The steep road leading past the station drops down into the village, giving a glimpse of the beck crossed by its ramshackle wooden foot-bridge—the view one has been prepared for by guide-books and picture postcards. Lower down you enter the village street. Here the smell of fish comes out to greet you, and one would forgive the place this overflowing welcome if one ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... wash down biscuits, still surplus from the "sea store." Their cooking apparatus was at first worked by petroleum, but this speedily burned the metal out, and they were driven to manufacture a very ramshackle sort of oil-lamp, fed by the oil for their ship-light and their compass, and by ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... dream the fateful part Jackson's arm was to play in my life. Jackson himself did not impress me when I hunted him out. I found him in a crazy, ramshackle* house down near the bay on the edge of the marsh. Pools of stagnant water stood around the house, their surfaces covered with a green and putrid-looking scum, while the stench that arose ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... hostile belligerents—was anything done. A British company was trying hard to obtain powers to construct a railway to Murmansk at the time of the outbreak of hostilities; but a line was not completed till more than two years had elapsed and was then of the most ramshackle character. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Our hotel, situated in the middle of the town, offers good beds, good food, dirty floors, charges low enough to please Mr. Joseph Pennell, and a total absence of anything in the shape of modern ideas. The people are charming, and the house is a mousy, ratty, ramshackle place hundreds of ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... comedies that could be performed by their small party, and the profits were to be equally shared between them. They also put their hands together and vowed to be true and friendly, and not to separate till they came back to ramshackle Uzes. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... top. He could then see that there was a square space which, though similar in appearance to the rest of the gallery, concealed the entrance to the shaft. He pushed it upward. It gave easily. It was a trap-door, leading into a square, ramshackle shed! ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... into a state of activity that lasts for several hours. Long before dawn, the roads leading townwards are busy with all manner of vehicles, from the great waggon drawn by four white horses driven tandem, and laden with a moving stack of hay, to the ramshackle donkey-cart conveying half a score of cabbages, a heap of dandelions grubbed from ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... a man I met when I were comin' back from de ash dump," Eradicate explained. One of the colored man's duties was to cart ashes away from Tom's various shops, and dump them in a certain swampy lot. With an old ramshackle cart, and his mule, Boomerang, Eradicate did this ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... now was a ramshackle farmhouse apparently deserted. Up the side of the dilapidated building ran a great wide stone chimney that reared its head through the gabled roof like a leaning Tower of Pisa. To this chimney led the wires from ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... imbecility. The third was an upstanding, broad-shouldered youth, with his hands in his pockets, turning his back on the other two who appeared to be talking together earnestly. He stared across the empty Esplanade. A ramshackle gharry, all dust and venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the group, and the driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave himself up to the critical examination of his toes. The young chap, making ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... square, turned a corner to the right, a corner to the left, and ran down the long dingy street that skirts the foot of the precipice on which the Citadel is enthroned. The ramshackle houses, grey and grimy, huddled against the cliff that frowned above them with black scorn and menace. High against the stars loomed the impregnable walls of the fortress. Low in the shadow crouched the frail habitations of the poor, the miserable tenements, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... part of which was our home, and two other single-room apartments, similarly tenanted, opened into a pitch-dark vestibule which my fancy peopled with "evil ones." A steep stairway led up to the yard, part of which was occupied by a huddle of ramshackle one-story houses. It was known as Abner's Court. During the summer months it swarmed with tattered, unkempt humanity. There was a peculiar odor to the place which ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... was a distiller of great wealth in his day, and a man of action. Unfortunately he died before he had the chance to carry out his projects in connection with the rehabilitation of Schloss Rothhoefen, even then a deserted, ramshackle resort for paying tourists and a Mecca for antique and ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... somewhere in the ramshackle thing I call my soul, I'm glad Sandy took you away from me. Though there are occasional moments when I feel murderous ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... little spot is the campo santo of San Gabriel; rather desolate, and very dusty. The ramshackle wooden crosses stagger wildly on the shapeless mounds; the dilapidated whitewashed railings, cracked and blistered by the sun, look much as though they might be bleached bones, tossed carelessly about; and the badly painted, misspelled inscriptions yield ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... long before I perceived the ramshackle sap-house ahead of me among the maples. Then I caught sight of her whom ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Brandt spoke the simple truth. What he had sworn to do he would do to the best of his ability. But the Texan knew, too, that the ramshackle jail would be torn to pieces ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... of steps that would bring her to the exact middle of the piazza, and took these steps with her usual gentle precision of movement. She had no sooner taken up the position which she felt to be the proper one for her, than round the corner came the Bywood stage,—a long, lumbering, ramshackle vehicle, in which sat Mrs. Murray, a kind-looking nurse, and the twelve convalescent children who were to have the first delights ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... Oh, yes; that ramshackle place near the swamp, with the gipsy-looking people hanging about. It's curious that a house with traces of real architecture should have been built in such a place. But the people were a sulky-looking lot—do you suppose ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... of doubt and pain, and she was perplexed by the fly-man's dull eyes, his starved horse, his ramshackle vehicle, the wet road, the leaden sky. It was one of those moments when the familiar appears strange and grotesque. Then, gathering all her ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... hour of daybreak when a slow-riding, silent group of men came to a halt and dismounted in the narrow lane some distance from the ramshackle abode of Martin Hawk, squatting unseen among the trees that lined the steep bank of the Wabash. A three hours' ride through dark, muddy roads lay behind them. There were a dozen men in all,—and one woman, at whose side rode the hunter, Stain. They had stopped at the ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... precarious access, a condition which may have been regarded as a protection, but more likely it was due to laziness and want of care. However that may have been, the interior was surprisingly substantial, with an excellent floor like that in a ballroom. I slept in a detached ramshackle room used as a kitchen, comfortable because of ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... unsatisfactory, that of the secondary teachers is impossible. When we attempt improvement of both will "Ulster" fight? And there is something even more human and poignant. The National Schools of this country are in many cases no better than ramshackle barns. Unless the teacher and the manager, out of their own pockets, mend the broken glass, put plaster on the walls, and a fire in the grate, the children have got to shiver and cough for it. Winter in Ireland, like the King in constitutional theory, ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... arms folded while Austria is strangling your little brother to death." What answer did the Russian Slav give? He gave the only answer that becomes a man. ["Hear, hear!"] He turned to Austria, and said: "You lay hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle empire [loud applause and laughter] limb from limb." And he is doing it! ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... bullet proof. I propose that as she is safer than your ramshackle old wooden affair, all hands get inside of her, and let ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... brought in a box that had just been left at the kitchen door. Phil ran to the window and caught a glimpse of a man closing the gate. It was Fred Holton, in a long ulster with the collar turned up about his ears. He untied his horse, attached to a ramshackle buggy, and drove off. Phil recognized him instantly, but made no ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... public-houses—two Foxes, one Green Man, three Bunch of Grapes, one Crown, and six King's Heads. The Green Man is reckoned the best, as the only one that for love or money can raise A postillion, a blue jacket, two deplorable lame white horses, and a ramshackle "neat post-chaise!" There's one parish church for all the people, whatsoever may be their ranks in life or their degrees, Except one very damp, small, dark, freezing cold, a little Methodist Chapel of Ease; And close by the churchyard, there's a stone-mason's yard, that when the time is seasonable ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... The ramshackle ferry-boat was firmly wedged in a dry-dock of ice on the western side of the Missouri. As Lounsbury passed it, with his horse following pluckily in spread-eagle fashion, he shouted for Old Michael. But long before the river had floored, when it was edging and covering only in the least ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... streets now to be found in all large Chinese cities; but a small hien city in the interior—and it must be remembered that a hien circuit or district corresponds to an old marquisate or feudal principality of the vassal unit type—is often a poor, dusty, dirty, depressing, ramshackle agglomeration of villages or hamlets, surrounded by a disproportionately pretentious wall, the cubic contents of which wall alone would more than suffice to build in superior style the whole mud city within; for half the area of the interior is apt to be waste land or stagnant ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... unlike the dumb, pathetic little people out in the hills, alert, keen-eyed, cheerful, and happy. Under the log foot-bridge the shining creek ran down past the mountain village below, where the cupola of the court-house rose above the hot dirt streets, the ramshackle hotel, and the dingy stores and frame dwellings of the town. Across the bridge her eyes rested on another neat, well- built log cabin with a grass plot around it, and, running alongside and covered with honeysuckle—a pergola! ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... unless they're made of leather in the first place, and sometimes it seems so. The squire had his nap out, I suppose, and then he woke up. When he opened his eyes, there in front of him, instead of his tall mahogany desk, was a ramshackle painted thing, with no handles to the drawers, and all covered with ink. He looked round, and what does he see but strange things everywhere; strange to his eyes, and yet he knew them. There was a haircloth sofa and three chairs, and on the walls, in place of his fine prints, was ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... The ramshackle old vehicle, one of Cobb's Royal Mail Coaches, big-bodied, lumbering, scarlet, pulled by two stout horses, drew up before the door, and the driver climbed down ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... small ramshackle hot-spring inns of the remote hills the guests are mostly country folk. Many of them carefully bring their own rice and miso, and are put up at a cost of about 10 sen a day. In the passage ways one finds rough boxes about 4 ft. square full of wood ash in the centre of which charcoal ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... being some such ramshackle structure as might have been deduced from the Lensman's casual terminology, was in fact a fully-equipped observatory. Its staff was not large—eight men worked in three staggered eight-hour shifts of two men each—but the instruments! To develop them had required hundreds of man-years ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... of putting up sufficient feed to tide over the severe weather might be attributed most of the annual ranching failures in the West. The MacDavid establishment bore a well-ordered aspect, unlike many of the unthrifty, ramshackle ranches, of his neighbours. The fencing was of the best, and there were no signs of decay or dilapidation in any of the buildings. Dwarf pines were planted about and a Morning Glory vine over-ran the house, giving the place an air of restful domesticity. As they entered ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... on, the others hastened to do their part. Two of them hunted until they found the lean-to, under which a ramshackle wagon stood that ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... rats in that ramshackle old place, Beautiful Joe," she said, as she pulled the plank away; "and as you don't hurt them, I don't see what you want to get in for. However, you are a sensible dog, and usually have a reason for having your own way, so I am going to let ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... Furman house is ramshackle but it is still standin' out dere and is used as a shelter for sawmill hands dat is cuttin' down de big pines and ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... came a loud knocking on the door. Simons opened it quickly, admitting a most strange old gentleman—tall and ramshackle—who was buttoned up in a chess-board inverness; whose trousers frayed out over his lustreless boots like much-defiled lace; whose coat-sleeves, protruding from the cape of his inverness, sought to make amends for the dullness of his footwear. He wore ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... of the little landing-stage caught his eye. Lifting Master AEsop's corpse from the ground, he trailed it to the crazy structure, and placed it in the oldest and most ramshackle of the two weather-worn vessels. After untying the rope that fastened the boat to its wharf, Lagardere caught up a boat-hook that lay hard by, and, raising it as if it were a spear, he drove it with all his strength ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... at the rows of loaded carts that were making their way from all sides out of Moscow, and balancing his bulky body so as not to slip out of the ramshackle old vehicle, Pierre, experiencing the joyful feeling of a boy escaping from school, began to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... in one of the huts nearest of all to the trenches. There the old slogan of 'Soup and Salvation' has given way to 'Pies and Piety.' It might be 'Doughnuts and Doughboys.' These huts pitched within the shock of the German guns, are ramshackle and bare and few, for no organization can grow rich on the pennies and nickels that are tossed into the tambourines at the street-corners of the world. But they are doing a work that the soldiers themselves will never forget, and it is an especial pleasure to say so ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... unthrift, and bad farming generally, degrading it far below its possibilities and natural standard of production. Cross the Channel, and Wales looks like a trim garden. Go over to France, and you find every yard of soil carefully tilled and cultivated. Even in comparatively ramshackle Sicily, among the old lava beds of Etna, the peasants raise a handful of grain on the top of a rock no bigger than a lady's work-table. In Ireland the cultivated portion of a holding is often no bigger relatively than that work-table ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... voice was lost in the clamour, as every one, deserting breakfast, crowded about Lord Durwent, and half in jest demanded to know what the ramshackle empire had ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... Cibot nicely on fire," Remonencq told his sister, when she came to take up her position again on the ramshackle chair. "And now," he continued, "I shall go to consult the only man that knows, our Jew, a good sort of Jew that did not ask more than fifteen per cent of us ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... did me a world of good. At all events, it was settled that my father and myself should go to Laval together. We started a couple of days later, and managed to travel by rail as far as Rennes. But from that point to Laval the line was now very badly blocked, and so we hired a closed vehicle, a ramshackle affair, drawn by two scraggy Breton nags. The main roads, being still crowded with troops, artillery, and baggage waggons, and other impedimenta, were often impassable, and so we proceeded by devious ways, amidst which our ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... William Linder, as he had fondly hoped, but to an obscure address not far from the Navy Yard in Brooklyn. To this address, having looked up and gathered in the B-flat trombonist, Average Jones led the way. The pair lurked in the neighborhood of the ramshackle house watching the entrance, until toward evening, as the door opened to let out a tremulous wreck of a man, palsied with debauch, ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... so. I know that the Turkish army is under German officers. But—if war should happen, is it likely that this ramshackle nation which was fought to a standstill by the Balkan Alliance only a few months ago would be likely ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... two niggers wuz a-talkin' 'bout over at yo' house." He ran a fist down into his khaki, and drew out three or four one-dollar bills and about a pint of small change. It was the usual crap-shooter's offering. The two negroes sat down on the ramshackle porch of an old jeweler's shop, and Tump began a ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... The ramshackle room whereon Eldred Lenox had set his seal differed in one notable respect from others of its type. It contained no picture either of a woman or a horse. The dingy white wall was relieved by groups of barbarous weapons—Thibetan daggers, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... better divan need the Sultan require, Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire; And 'tis wonderful, surely, what music you get From the rickety, ramshackle, wheezy spinet. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... a ramshackle place put together of doors and windows fitted into walls, made of boards, all taken from ruinous cottages that had been pillaged, and their wreckage pieced together as best could be managed. Here Iver knocked, and the door was opened cautiously by ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... the luggage, and engaged a ramshackle Perugian cab; for the public vehicles of Perugia are perhaps, as a class, the most precarious and incoherent known to science. However, the luggage was bundled on to the top by Our Lady's grace, without dissolution of continuity; ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... almost reached their destination when, as they passed a particularly ramshackle building with a saloon on the ground floor, they became conscious of a terrific hubbub going on within. There was a sound of shouting and blows, and every once in a while the whole crazy building would fairly rock as some heavy body crashed ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... Brackton's ramshackle establishment stood down at the end of the village street. There was not a sawed board in all that structure, and some of the pine logs showed how they had been dropped from the bluff. Brackton, a little old gray man, with scant ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... your living out here in this ramshackle old chicken-coop, when you might have a tidy flat on Paulina Street; and the doctor could have a desk in my office next door to his old boss." Dr. Leonard spoke testily, and Alves laid her hand ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... at Damanhour George was conducted by his guards straight to the prison where he was to be confined. The gaol was one of the many ramshackle buildings which the village was comprised of. As the little party slowly made their way through the unpaved streets, they were intently watched by crowds of men, women, and children; the men were principally rebel soldiers, mixed with a smattering of insurgent townspeople, the women and ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... jubilant himself, though, boylike, he tried to play the cynic; and when the ramshackle fly drove through the picturesque village, and they came in sight of a huge palace of a house which gleamed redly through the trees of an English park, and the flyman, pointing with his whip, informed them that it was ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... has its ramshackle, disused store building. Coldriver had one, especially well located, and not so ramshackle as it might have been. It was big; its front was crossed by a broad porch; its show windows were not show windows at all, but were put there solely ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... is strange to me, even now when the story has grown old in my memory, to recall all that happened before the hands of that clock pointed again to twelve. And last year when I revisited the neighborhood and found a neat new house standing on the site of the ramshackle inn, I could not pass by without a queer feeling in my throat; for it was there that the results of the duchess' indiscretion finally worked themselves out to their unexpected, fatal, and momentous ending. Seldom, as I ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... vain resistance to molding circumstances, after the thwarting of ambitions, the quenching of ideals, admit defeat, and await, with something of feverish anticipation, the end. He had left Cartagena early that morning on the ramshackle little train which, after hours of jolting over an undulating roadbed, set him down in Calamar, exhausted with the heat and dust-begrimed. He had not seen the Bishop nor Wenceslas since the interview of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... borrowed Angus's ramshackle old cycle, and went into Glenelg along a road which is more noteworthy for its picturesqueness than its navigable qualities, I left Garnesk to his examination with the knowledge that he would do his utmost, and that she would help him ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... to drown the sweeter, softer notes of a robin nesting in the new-green of a quaking aspen. At the hitching post before the one tiny store, an old horse nodded and blinked,—as did the sprawled figure beside the ramshackle motor-filling station, just opened after the snow-bound months of winter. Then five minutes of absolute peace ensued, except for the buzzing of an investigative bottle-fly before the figure shuffled, stretched, ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... the lake. It was beautiful as paradise, as the first creation. On the shores were the ruined lemon-pillars standing out in melancholy, the clumsy, enclosed lemon-houses seemed ramshackle, bulging among vine stocks and olive trees. The villages, too, clustered upon their churches, seemed to belong to the past. They seemed to ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... ladies rode in on pillions, and the planters themselves, in gold-embroidered waistcoats and plush breeches and new-powdered wigs, leaned on the tombstones, and exchanged snuffmulls and gossip. In the old ramshackle graveyard you would see such a parade of satin bodices and tabby petticoats and lace headgear as made it blossom like the rose. I went to church one Sunday in my second summer, and, being late, went up the aisle ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... gaze rested again on the somewhat displeasing pile on the corner, this time with a seeing eye. Her fascinated stare took in with one sweep a dirty ramshackle building of weather-worn gray brick, spilling over the sidewalk and staggering away (as it looked) down the littered side-street: rather a small building, obviously old, certainly not fragrant, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... out and up the path toward the little ramshackle cottage she turns and flashes one of them wide smiles on Babe and ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... warlike eyes, and very big sticks clenched in their National grasp. Also the Malle Poste, with only a couple of passengers, tearing along at a real good dare-devil pace, and out of sight in no time. Steady old Cures come jolting past, now and then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty, clattering coaches as no Englishman would believe in; and bony women dawdle about in solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they feed, or digging and hoeing or doing field-work of a more laborious kind, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... I help him," answered Eradicate promptly, as he climbed back off the seat, into the body of his ramshackle vehicle. ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... in a bush-clad hollow, two miles from the world in general, stood a little, old, ramshackle shanty. The location was one that seekers would hardly have found without a trail to ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... that he did not do it as a man of the world would have done it, and in putting her into the ramshackle carryall he knew that he had not the grace of the sort of man who does nothing else. But Miss Shirley seemed to have grace enough, of a feeble and broken sort, for both, and he resolved to supply his own lack with sincerity. He therefore set ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... cabin of the ramshackle boat was deserted at that hour, the colonel went to a dark corner, and from it emerged, a little later, with a beard on that would have done credit to the most orthodox inhabitant ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... fashioned from green cottonwood planks. Cottonwood lumber is full of whims and caprices,—bending, twisting, cracking like brown paper, so as to be wholly unfit for ordinary carpentry; but there was no other material available. Six canoes were made to hang together somehow; and in these ramshackle structures, together with the two periogues, the party covered more than a thousand miles of the roughest water of the Missouri. Annoyance was to be expected. The boats were continually splitting, opening ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... that Peggy had driven into Annapolis upon one of these market days, and having driven down to the dock to make inquiry for some delayed freight, was on her way back when she noticed a pair of flea- bitten gray horses harnessed to a ramshackle farm wagon. The wagon wheels were inches thick with dry mud, for the wagon had probably never been washed since it had become its present owner's property. The harness was tied in a dozen places with bits of twine, and the horses were so thin and apparently half-starved that Peggy's heart ached ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... incessant blaring of a raucous horn, old Dan Flannagan's jitney-bus moved up the driveway. The genial Irish Jehu, who for over twenty years had transported Bannister collegians and alumni to and from College Hill in a ramshackle hack drawn by Lord Nelson, an antiquated, somnambulistic horse, had yielded to modern invention at last. Lord Nelson having become defunct during vacation, Old Dan, with a collection taken up by several alumni at Commencement, had bought a battered Ford, and ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... to sleep in was an old, ramshackle affair, absolutely over-run with rats. Great, big, black fellows, who used to chew up our leather equipment, eat our rations, and run over out bodies at night. German gas had no effect on these rodents; in fact, they seemed to thrive ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... patrol leader, "there is a long story connected with the old ramshackle mill. No use of my going into all the details. It's been abandoned a good many years now. People have tried to live there three times since old Munsey was found dead there, but they had ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... pawnshop opens into hall, and exactly opposite very short flight of stairs leading directly to doorway of Isaac's den above. Ramshackle old place, low ceilings. Isaac, when sitting in his den, can look down, and, by means of a transom over the rear door of the shop, see the customers as they enter from the street, while he also keeps an eye on his assistant. Latter always locks up and leaves promptly at ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... always in accord and do not pretend to be in accord. The idea that variety is permissible in belief and conduct is deeply rooted in later Buddhism: there are many vehicles, some better than others no doubt and some very ramshackle, but all are capable of conveying their passengers to salvation. Nominally the Mahayana was divided into only two schools of philosophy: practically every important treatise propounds a system with features of its own. The two schools are the Yogacaras and Madhyamikas.[101] Both are idealists and ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the Parker House; except that the proprietor was curt and had no time for us at all. From that point, still dissatisfied, we extended our investigations beyond the Plaza. We found ourselves ankle deep in sandhills on which grew coarse grass and a sort of sage. Crazy, ramshackle huts made of all sorts of material were perched in all sorts of places. Hundreds of tents had been pitched, beneath which and in front of which an extremely simple housekeeping was going on. Hunt as we might we could find no place that looked as though it would take lodgers. ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... and where the house-master's wife, who sat for an hour on my floor, was sorely afflicted with skin disease. The clay houses have disappeared and the villages are now built of wood, but Abukawa is an antiquated, ramshackle place, propped up with posts and slanting beams projecting into the roadway for the entanglement of ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... passageway put in between two big tenements to a ramshackle rear barrack, Nibsy, the newsboy, halted in the shadow of the doorway and stole a long look ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... arms, and was drawn through the streets in a small cart by four dogs. By looking at you he could see all the clockwork inside, as could a boy who was led about by his mother at the end of a string. Every Friday there was the market, when a dozen ramshackle carts containing vegetables and cheap crockery filled the centre of the square, resting in line on their shafts. A score of farmers' wives or daughters in old-world garments squatted against the town-house within walls of butter on cabbage-leaves, eggs and chickens. Towards evening the voice ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... fleet with him, pray remember, and leaving the place open to French attack. That is the sort of Deputy-Governor that the late Government thought fit to appoint: an epitome of its misrule, damme! He leaves Port Royal unguarded save by a ramshackle fort that can be reduced to rubble in an hour. ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... sprinkling-cart jarred heavily past, spurting ineffectually at the yellow dust which rose perversely under its baptism and surged beneath the awnings of the shops. It was Saturday, universal shopping-day in the farmland, and a ramshackle line of rustic vehicles—buggies, democrats, sulkies, lumber wagons—with graceless plough horses slumbering in the thills, stretched in ragged alignment down the curb. Shelby's smart turnout seemed fairly urban by contrast, and Ruth saw that it ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of the death of Mr Ira Nutcombe, the only all-the-year-round inhabitants were the butcher, the grocer, the chemist, the other customary fauna of villages, and Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who rented the ramshackle farm known locally as Flack's and eked out a precarious ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... is a disgrace to us to see you living in a ramshackle building, half in and half out ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... much better, was it not, to be paying my bill? Bill more moderate, under the circumstances, no man ever discharged; Calabrian honesty came well out of the transaction. So I tumbled once more into the dirty, ramshackle diligenza, passed along the dusty road between the barred and padlocked warehouses, and arrived in good time at the station. No sooner had I set foot on the platform than I felt an immense relief. Even here, it seemed to me, the air was fresher. I lifted my eyes to the hills and seemed ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... consciousness of being jolted about abominably in a ramshackle vehicle. The surroundings were vague, as they always are in dreams. Low hills and sandy waste and sparse shrubs. Where was it, the "Great Desert," or some stretch in South America or in Mexico? In my dream I was dozing, trying to forget the painful bumping and twisting. A familiar voice brought ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... bleak and perched away up among the clouds, could never be called a town; it is merely a ramshackle place which gives one sleep and food in the difficult ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... people to live anywhere they like over large areas—will mean very frequently an actual local segregation. There will be districts that will be clearly recognized and marked as "nice," fast regions, areas of ramshackle Bohemianism, regions of earnest and active work, old-fashioned corners and Hill Tops. Whole regions will be set aside for the purposes of opulent enjoyment—a thing already happening, indeed, at points along the Riviera to-day. Already the superficial possibilities of such a segregation have ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... first visit to America I was a frequent contributor to his journal, and I corresponded with him privately. I went down to Northampton and delivered a lecture at his request, under the auspices of his electoral committee. The old theatre—a dirty, ramshackle place as I recollect it—was crowded, and I had my first taste of the popularity of Mr. Bradlaugh in the borough. Every mention of his name excited the ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... much safety," said Aunt Georgie, as she carefully arranged her spectacles, and looked about her. "Bless my heart! what a ramshackle place. Surely this ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... at the curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a bit ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... extreme peril dawned upon him. He dropped the thing—he says—"like a hot potato," and walked out hastily, without the slightest idea of what he would, or indeed could, do. He only knew that the position was intolerable. He strolled aimlessly beyond a sort of ramshackle little granary on posts, and his eyes fell on the broken stakes of the palisade; and then—he says—at once, without any mental process as it were, without any stir of emotion, he set about his escape as if executing ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... wandered, extending her range. Sometimes with a strange fear. But it was a fear of the elements rather than of man. One day she went along the high-road with her letters, towards the village of Casa Latina. The high-road was depressing, wherever there were houses. For the houses had that sordid, ramshackle, slummy look almost invariable on an Italian high-road. They were patched with a hideous, greenish mould-colour, blotched, as if with leprosy. It frightened her, till Pancrazio told her it was only the copper sulphate that had sprayed the vines hitched ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... the summit of one of the above-mentioned hills, a fine bird's eye view is obtained of the city below. The ramshackle houses are all built in irregular blocks or clusters, but present on either side a regular frontage to the broad river, and following its sweeping curve, form two imposing crescent, divided by a fine water-way. Behind these main crescents are various ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... begin to assemble in anticipation of a "spree." Across the scarred, disfigured valley, over the mullock-heaps, from every calico tent, from out of every shaft, from the edge of the dark forest itself, bearded men, toil-stained but smiling, bent on festivity, collect in Canvas Town's one ramshackle street. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... store—indeed, I should like to know who would have enjoyed it. It dated back to the beginning of the last century, a tarred, coal-black, ramshackle hut. The windows were low and small, the windowpanes diminutive. The ceiling was low. Everything was arranged in such a way as to exclude the possibility of lofty flights of ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... was in Doom, the place of a small landowner, Lamond, whose castle—it is but a ramshackle old bigging now—you may have noticed on your left as you rode round. Lamond himself is a man I have a sort of softness for, though, to tell the truth, he has forced me into more litigation than he had money to pay for and I had patience to take ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... behind the "Owl," the segregated district of the town. There, in tiny one-roomed houses built in rows like barracks were the girls and women who had drifted to this jumping-off place of the world. In the daytime they slept or sat on the narrow, ramshackle porches, untidy, noisy, unspeakably wretched. At night, however, they blossomed forth in tawdry finery, in the dancing-space behind the gambling-tables. Some of them were fixtures. They had drifted there from New Orleans, perhaps, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as the Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... examination without a question; made it as though she were daily in the habit of dealing with wounded men; specifically called for boiling water, laid out sponges and bottles and oddly shaped trinkets of steel, and the Governor's room in the ramshackle hotel was quickly transformed into a surgery. Perky had gone aboard the tug, which was to remain in the bay until the outcome of the Governor's injury could be learned. Putney Congdon kept Archie company in the ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... looked like a cowboy and was, in truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small—a very small—way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The poultry she raised herself; for the fish, she was a middleman ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... guardians of his own happiness told him to keep to his search, to journey on his way and forget he had seen the tracks. Every desire of Self spoke in warning to him. But Bill Bronson had a higher law than self. Long ago, in front of the ramshackle hotel in Bradleyburg, he had given a promise; and he had reaffirmed it in the gleam of the Northern Lights not many nights before. There was no one to hold him to his pledged word. There were none that need know; no one to whom he must answer but his own soul. Yet ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... bought at his recommendation, when he wished to refresh his excellent memory; the instruments he used when to the entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added the alluring chink of gold belonged also to that generous patron. There were some old clothes in the ramshackle deal wardrobe; there was some linen and underclothing in the knobless chest of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester repeating-rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and ammunition-pouch, a hunting-knife and a Colt's revolver of large calibre, in addition to the weapon he carried, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... volcano; in the lion's den, on slippery ground, under fire; not out of the wood. unwarned, unadmonished, unadvised, unprepared &c. 674; off one's guard &c. (inexpectant) 508[obs3]. tottering; unstable, unsteady; shaky, top-heavy, tumbledown, ramshackle, crumbling, waterlogged; helpless, guideless[obs3]; in a bad way; reduced to the last extremity, at the last extremity; trembling in the balance; nodding to its fall &c. (destruction) 162. threatening &c. 909; ominous, illomened; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... days later, The Laird looked across the Bight of Tyee from his home on Tyee Head, and through his marine glasses studied the Sawdust Pile. He chuckled as he observed that the ramshackle shanty had disappeared almost as soon as it had been started and in its place a small cottage was being erected. There was a pile of lumber in the yard—bright lumber, fresh from the saws—and old Caleb Brent and the motherless Nan ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... heart and nerves all a-tingle that I followed Abel Crone out of his front shop into a sort of office that he had at the back of it—a little, dirty hole of a place, in which there was a ramshackle table, a chair or two, a stand-up desk, a cupboard, and a variety of odds and ends that he had picked up in his trade. The man's sudden revelation of knowledge had knocked all the confidence out of me. It had never crossed my mind that any living ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... us, faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... conditions. A Credo which could be written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church member's essential Confession of Faith, to be developed and expanded according to the need and circumstances, would be a real power in a chaplain's hands. The men's behaviour in billets—ramshackle barns for the most part—was almost exemplary. Only once or twice small episodes occurred in connection with hen-roosts, and on one occasion a sucking-pig was slaughtered amid its brethren at the dead of night. It must have been a temporary ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... charge of peons, showing that the party were gradually approaching civilised territory; and about half an hour before sunset they marched into a small village, composed chiefly of adobe huts, where a halt was called for the night, and where our friends were confined in a ramshackle barn of a place in company with the sergeant and ten men. That the sergeant was quite determined not to get into trouble by the neglect of any possible precaution soon became perfectly evident; for ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the mail-boat Juno at the disposal of the distinguished party. Don Vincente, journeying south from Sta. Marta, had embarked at Cayta, the principal port of Costaguana, and came to Sulaco by sea. But the chairman of the railway company had courageously crossed the mountains in a ramshackle diligencia, mainly for the purpose of meeting his engineer-in-chief engaged in the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... himself. "There's a roasting fire in my den. Of course you'll have something to eat—hot coffee, anyhow—I've trained my cook to make coffee like a Frenchwoman. The housekeeper will take charge of you, if you want to tidy up, and you must excuse our ramshackle ways, please. I don't believe there's ever been a lady in this house before, ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... said Mrs. Carradyne; and they all looked out. "Oh, yes, that's an Evesham fly—and a ramshackle thing it appears." ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... a ramshackle building reminiscent of the days when the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an age when the American merchantman flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven-seas. On the ground floor was an apparently innocent junk dealer's shop, in reality the ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... in, scanned every detail with fastidious distaste. To-day, for the first time, a great longing possessed him for the airy ramshackle bungalows of the Frontier he loved, for the trumpet-call to "stables," for a sight of his squadron and the feel of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... hurried through the village, crossed the dark bridge and approached a ramshackle house from which a babble of voices rose in strident argument. The excited chorus abated at Terry's sharp knock and the door was thrown open to disclose the belligerent figure of Tony Ricorro, the leader of the Italian colony. Recognizing the reefered figure that smiled up at him through ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson |
