"Dingy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shouldered the little trunk that contained his worldly effects, and stalked off to a neighboring hotel, that, from its small proportions, suggested a modest bill. With a highly important man-of-the-world manner he scrawled his name in an illegible, student-like hand on the dingy, dog-eared register. With a gracious, condescending air he ordered the filthy, tobacco-stained porter to take his ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the water in which these cloths are, or should be, washed everyday; rub soap on the towels. Put them in the water; let them stand half an hour or so; then rub them out thoroughly, rinse faithfully, and dry outdoors in clear air and sun, and dish-cloths and towels need never look gray and dingy—a ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... venturesome Miss Polly nor by her athlete servitor was the episode to be so readily dismissed. Late that afternoon, when the Brewster party were sitting about iced fruit drinks amid the dingy and soiled elegance of the Kast's one private parlor, Mr. Sherwen's card arrived, followed shortly by Mr. Sherwen's immaculate self, creaseless except for one furrow ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was of three storeys, painted a dingy drab and trimmed with dull green shutters. The restaurant occupied almost all of the street front of the ground floor, a blank, non-committal double doorway at one extreme of its plate-glass windows was seldom open and even ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... not been, like the dawn stealing in at his window, followed by a burst of sunlight. As the morning enters the stained, foul, dingy places of dissipation, which early in the evening had been the gas-lighted, garish scenes of riot and senseless laughter, and later the fighting ground of all the vile vermin of the night with their uncanny noises—as when, the doors and windows having been at last opened, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... "Moses," by Mr. S. Solomon. I thought it had a great intention, I thought it finely drawn and composed. It nobly represented, to my mind, the dark children of the Egyptian bondage, and suggested the touching story. My newspaper says: "Two ludicrously ugly women, looking at a dingy baby, do not form a pleasing object;" and so good-by, Mr. Solomon. Are not most of our babies served so in life? and doesn't Mr. Robinson consider Mr. Brown's cherub an ugly, squalling little brat? So cheer up, Mr. S. S. It may be the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Premier of Canada long enough, no doubt some really apocryphal yarns will arise out of these little idiosyncracies, just as legends wove themselves about John A. Macdonald, and Laurier. I remember that the clothes Meighen wore the day I shook hands with him were dingy brown that made him look like a moulting bobolink; that he had not taken the trouble to shave because a sleeping car is such an awkward place for a razor, and it is much better for a Premier to wear bristles than ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... in the afternoon the meeting took place at Brykov, that is, in a little copse in the outskirts of the town, lying between Skvoreshniki and the Shpigulin factory. The rain of the previous night was over, but it was damp, grey, and windy. Low, ragged, dingy clouds moved rapidly across the cold sky. The tree-tops roared with a deep droning sound, and creaked on their roots; it was ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... than ten dollars in his wallet, and most of that had gone for cab fares. He'd barely had enough left for this dingy room, the later edition of the newspaper, and the coffee and donuts that ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... houses were emerald with the fresh, unrivaled green of spring. Fragrant lilacs sweetened the soft air. The walks under the thick-leafed elms were thronged with talking, laughing groups. Bright-colored dresses dotted the campus before the dingy brick buildings. Tennis-courts and ball-field were alive with active figures. A few days more and students and strangers would be gone, and the old town would sink into the drowsy quiet of ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... district. There is a peculiar green color in vegetation which is an unmistakable sign that it is living upon the fat of the land. I need hardly say that, in this case, the color of the vegetation gave unmistakable signs of the poverty of the soil; but in the midst of the dingy yellowish-green of the herbage, I came upon one square of bright green grass. In answer to my enquiry I was told that, a "lambing-fold had been there last year," and my informant added his opinion, "that the manure would be so strong that it would kill anything!" It ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... lay before her? She sat down and put her elbows on the dressing table with its dingy cheap lace cover, and in doing so her eyes fell on a letter, a letter that had been placed ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... all her life to dingy hotels and lodgings, glanced up at the grand staircase and imposing hall in rapturous surprise. Mme. Walraven stood graciously ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... hung over the water meadows, and barred the dark trunks of the huge elms and poplars, whose fast-yellowing leaves came showering down at the very rustle of the western breeze, spotting the grass below. The river swirled along, glassy no more, but dingy grey with autumn rains and rotten leaves. All beyond the garden told of autumn; bright and peaceful, even in decay: but up the sunny slope of the garden itself, and to the very window sill, summer still lingered. The beds of red ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... a large, dingy, dirty, water-stained and somewhat dilapidated hall to which the stone stair, ascending immediately from the door, led them; and it would have looked considerably worse but for the obscurity belonging to the nature of the entertainment, through which it took some ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... earth answers the same purpose to half the inhabitants of the moon, that the moon does to the inhabitants of the earth. The face of the latter, however, is more than twelve times as large, and it has not the same silvery appearance as the moon, but is rather of a dingy pink hue, like that of her iron when beginning to lose its red heat. As the same part of the moon is always turned to the earth, one half of her surface is perpetually illuminated by a moon ten times as large to the eye as the sun; the other ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... night, in earliest morning, when MEN sleep, all over the world, in ice huts North, in southern tents, in big houses and in dingy tenements, you find women awake, cheerfully and gladly ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... bedroom on the third story of the boarding-house he lay on a bed hung with dingy curtains, but in the dignity which was one of his inheritances. Under the dark, close-cut moustache, his lips seemed to smile faintly, perhaps in amusement at the folly of his life, perhaps in surprise ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... believe that any good thing could be in store for them, the burgesses and others assembled, and crowded into the place of meeting. Twenty-two delegates from the eleven plantations were there, clad in their dingy and dilapidated raiment, and wide-brimmed hats; most of them with swords at their sides, and some with rusty muskets in their hands. Their cheeks were lank and their faces sunburned; their bearing was listless, yet marked with ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... Does he ever receive a letter, or take a ride upon the railway, or see anything but the Dodo? Perhaps he has seen the Berlin Wool. He appears to have a silent sorrow on him, and it may be that. He clears the table; draws the dingy curtains of the great bow window, which so unwillingly consent to meet, that they must be pinned together; leaves me by the fire with my pint decanter, and a little thin funnel-shaped wine-glass, and a plate of pale biscuits - ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... struggle to keep herself and me. If a fortune had come to us in those days it would have been a godsend, and she would probably be with me now; but she died eight years ago, and I am alone in the world, with no one to think of but myself. I have dingy diggings and a garrulous landlady, but, like you, I manage to have a very good time. I am interested in my work—I'm interested in life generally. I mean to make something out of it ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... I ought to be magnanimous enough to think that it's all for the best, since he can do infinitely more for her than I ever could. She will be the millionaire's wife, and I'll go back to my dingy little office and write paragraphs heavy enough to sink a cork ship. Thus will end my June idyll; but should I live a century I will always feel that Gilbert Hearn married ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... which was inclosed in a wonderfully dingy yellow envelope, and she read the superscription, and then called to ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... this: 'Do you know, there are passengers who sleep in bunks below, over and across each other? I saw them, billah! And I was told they pay more than we do for such a low passage—the fools! Think on it. I peeped into a little room, a dingy, smelling box, which had in it six berths placed across and above each other like the shelves of the reed manchons we build for our silk-worms at home. I wouldn't sleep in one of them, billah! even though they bribe me. This bovine fragrance, the sight of these fine horses, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... in the dingy restaurant, smoking and laughing and grumbling till the next train was announced. At four that afternoon they arrived without further mishap at the most interesting station of its size in Europe—Monte Carlo. And Merrihew saw gold whichever way he looked: in the sunshine ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... which was in Curzon Street, was not pretty, Apparently neither Mrs. Wolfstein nor her husband, who was a financier and company promoter on a very large scale, had good taste in furniture and decoration. The mansion was spacious but dingy. There was a great deal of chocolate and fiery yellow paint. There were many stuffy brown carpets, and tables which were unnecessarily solid. In the hall were pillars which looked as if they were made of brawn, and arches ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... to sail at daylight, our friends remained with us, and, sitting in the dingy cabin, chatted with Jose about the state of the country. By listening to the talk I learned that General San Martin was a great soldier from Buenos Ayres, who, having overthrown the Spanish power in Chili, was collecting an ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... service did the mission come to render to the manufacture of paper in course of time, giving the name of Serampore to a variety known all over India. At first Carey was compelled to print his Bengali Testament on a dingy, porous, rough substance called Patna paper. Then he began to depend on supplies from England, which in those days reached the press at irregular times, often impeding the work, and was most costly. This was not all. Native paper, whether mill or hand-made, being sized with rice paste, ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... comedy was evidently her natural line. Against her reputation, rumour, always an inquisitive censor, often a mean libeller, of ladies of her profession, had as yet, so far as I could learn, found nothing to allege. Her mother, a dingy old dowager, with bad teeth, dowdy gowns, a profusion of artificial flowers, and a strong addiction to tea and knitting, perfectly understood the duties of duennaship, and did propriety by her daughter's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... stars, if I had been an astronomer; and I dare say that the spot which formed my position would have been capital for an observatory; but the torches which danced up and down through the old and very dingy casements of the mansion, were a matter of much more curious remark to me than if I had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... were spent in weeping over this book, especially over "Go Where Glory Waits Thee," which affected me with an incomprehensible but poignant woe. Accordingly it was I who rose cheerful in the morning and piloted a gloomy companion to breakfast and a barber, and so across Boston to the dingy station where dingy, dirty cars of ancient vintage awaited, and in one of which we rode, with innumerable stops, to a spot off the beaten tracks of travel, but which bore a name that ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... her. He hated the red, coarse-skinned face, the tight mouth and opaque brown eyes and the low, stupid forehead with its old-fashioned narrow fringe of dingy hair. He knew that in spite of Sir Godfrey and the family estate of which she was always talking, she was common to the heart—not a lady like Christine and his mother—and her occasionally adopted pose of authority convulsed ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... spirits rose again, for he was sure that he had seen the little old lady before. She stopped on the side-walk, and looked vaguely about her, in the manner of a person waiting for an omnibus or a street-car; she had a dingy, loosely-habited air, as if she had worn her clothes for many years and yet was even now imperfectly acquainted with them; a large, benignant face, caged in by the glass of her spectacles, which seemed to cover it almost equally everywhere, and a ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... at the Eighty-second Street apartment about six o'clock in the evening, and, after studying the dingy name-plates, took the five flights of stairs with uncommendable speed, and presented himself at the rear door on the ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... she paused for a moment, her head forward, listening. Then at the sound of a light step she sprang to the door and threw it open. A wee slip of a girl, almost one with the shadows of the dingy hallway, ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... of Mid-Lothian lay before us. It was all Scott-land. The inn of Torsonce, beside the Gala Water, was our resting-place for the night. As we approached Galashiels the next morning, where the bed of the silver Gala is nearly emptied by a number of dingy manufactories, the hills opened, disclosing the sweet vale of the Tweed, guarded by the triple peak of the Eildon, at whose base lay nestled the ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... we cross the hills between the Wear and the Tyne, and come to the New Castle which gives its name to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the great coal shipping port. This is a strange-looking town, with red-tiled roofs, narrow, dingy, crooked streets, and myriads of chimneys belching forth smoke from the many iron-works. These mills and furnaces are numerous also in the surrounding country, while the neighborhood is a network of railways carrying coal from the various lines ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... opening a dingy cupboard, took thence a small crock over which she muttered spells and incantations with look and gesture so evil that Lobkyn eyed her askance, Will the Tanner cowered and whispered fragments of prayers, and even Jocelyn ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Harte died, many stories were written by San Franciscans who knew him when he first put in an appearance on the Pacific Coast. One contemporary described minutely how Bret would come silently up the stairs of the old Alta office, glide down the dingy hallway through the exchange room, and seat himself at the now historic desk. It took Bret fifteen minutes to sharpen a lead pencil, one hour for sober reflection, and three hours to write a one-stick paragraph, after which he would carefully tear it up, gaze out of ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... they reached Trenton, but before the machine crossed the bridge, it passed a certain dingy little boat-house, and Ruth and Harold exchanged significant glances, unobserved by the occupants of the ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell
... applications of the comb had straightened the close curls of his forehead, until they stood erect in a stiff and formal brush, that gave at least two inches to his stature. The shining black of his youth had lost its glistening hue, and it had been succeeded by a dingy brown. His eyes, which stood at a most formidable distance from each other, were small, and characterized by an expression of good feeling, occasionally interrupted by the petulance of an indulged servant; they, however, now danced with inward delight. His nose possessed, in an ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... with him in the dream There was a voice that fleered upon the king: 'This is the man who makes much of himself For filling the common eyes with palaces Gorgeously bragging out his royalty: Whereas he hath not one that seemeth not In work, in height, in posture on the ground, A hut, a peasant's dingy shed, to mine. And all his excellent woods, metals, and stones, The things he's filched out of the earth's old pockets And hoised up into walls and domes; the gold, Ebony, agate stairs, wainscots of jade, The windows of jargoon, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... specimens the bulb is quite prominent and abrupt, while in the smaller specimens it is not always proportionally so large. The stem is usually smooth and the color is white, except in the dark forms, when it is dingy or partakes more or less of the color of the pileus, though much lighter in shade. There is a tendency in these forms to a discoloration of the stem where handled or bruised, and this should caution one in comparing such forms with the ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... see, as I have seen, a letter, so worn that it was cracked on all its folds and dingy with much handling, carried day after day inside a little blouse, or guimpe, and put under the pillows every night, you would understand a little what those pieces of paper, covered with very imperfectly ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... a small, plain one. The floor was bare, save for a couple of braided rugs, the plaster discolored, the walls dingy and glaring. There had never been much beauty in Naomi Holland's environment, and, now that she was dying, there was ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as ever but with an anxious care-worn expression round her face. She no longer lives in the pretty cottage in Senbury Glen for Mr. Langton has lost a great deal of money farming, and he and his family have changed their quarters and live in a dingy little house in a London back street. It would take too long to relate all that has happened in the last years, so I will describe the events as briefly as possible. To begin with little Tina who was always a delicate child has died within the last four years and rests in the ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... began to swell, swelled to an immense size, and melted into the dingy atmosphere of the study—only her moving mouth was visible; then she suddenly dwindled to the size of a bottle, swayed from side to side, and with the table retreated to the further end of ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Quarterly Meeting was held at Fond du Lac. The Church edifice was unfinished, and the celebrated school house having been burned, as stated in a former chapter, the Meeting was held in the Court House. At that time the building, though now so dingy, was new, and aspired to be the most respectable edifice in the village. To prepare the Court House especially for the Quarterly Meeting, the floors were newly carpeted with sawdust, even then a famous product of the village, and the seats well broomed. The place was crowded with ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... pressing on through The Desert, my thoughts still lag behind, and as I turn often to look back upon The City of Merchants and Marabouts, its palms being only now visible in the dingy red of the setting sun, I endeavour to form a correct opinion of its singular inhabitants. I see in them the mixture of the religious and commercial character, blended in a most extraordinary manner and degree, for here the possession of wealth scarcely interferes with the highest state of ascetic ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... pray with my father. He is to be hanged tomorrow for the murder of my mother. My father was a good man, but whisky did it. I have three little sisters younger than myself. We are very, very poor, and have no friends. We live in a dark and dingy room. I do the best I can to support my sisters by selling papers, blacking boots, and doing odd jobs; but Mr. Hoagland, we are very poor. Will you come and be with us when father's body is brought home? The governor says we may have his ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... dingy old sign. It had hung there in sun and rain till its letters were faint and its face was furrowed. It had looked down on a generation that had passed away, and seen those who placed it there go out of that doorway never to return; still it clung to that dingy old warehouse, and still ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... witch-hazel rod in the hands of a seventh son's seventh son, and the water is the sweeter to him for the wonder that is mixed with it. After all, it seems that our scientific gas, be it never so brilliant, is not equal to the dingy ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... shipmate," he sighed, "as you will. Pride and bilge-water go well together!" which said he brought me to a dark unlovely hole abaft the mizzen. "'Tis none too clean, Martin," says he, casting the light round the dingy place, "but that shall be remedied and Godby shall bring ye bedding and the like, so although 'tis plaguy dark and wi' rats a-plenty still, despite the stench, you'll lie snug as your pride will permit of. As for me, shipmate, I shall scarce close an eye till we be clear o' the Downs, so ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... harmony of pale tints. Again, the poor little baby princess, with scarce visible features, seemingly kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and modelled) out of the wet ashes of an auto da fe, in her black-and-white frock (how different from the dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and gloomy enough for an abbess or a cameriera major, this childish personification of courtly dreariness, certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the principal strands for a marvellous tissue of silvery and ashy light, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... The coal-yards and dingy quays looked gray and chill. Here were gray-painted Government sheds, with white numbers on the sliding doors, dull gray trucks, ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... In those dingy, brief, bald lines of record, I discovered official evidence of this chief's supremacy long before the Custer battle. As early as 1870 he was set down as one of the "irreconcilables," and in 1874 the Sioux most dreaded by the whites was "Sitting Bull's Band." To Sitting Bull all couriers ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... reason to believe that sheep in their early domesticated condition were "brown or dingy black;" but even in the time of David certain flocks were spoken of as white as snow. During the classical period the sheep of Spain are described by several ancient authors as being black, red, or tawny.[68] At the present day, notwithstanding the great care which is taken ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... don't know!" he broke out, with a return to something of his old childlike impatience. "Sometimes I think it is all a dream, and directly I shall wake up and find myself in my dingy old law office. But you are not a dream. These mountains are not a dream. Lassie barking down below there is not a dream; and these callous spots on my hands are real enough in all conscience, and no dream could last ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... when Dorothy entered the smithy, there was her own little horse being shod, and Marquis and he interchanged a whine and a whinny of salutation, while the men stared at the bright apparition of a young lady in their dingy regions. Having heard her business, the head-smith abandoned everything else to alter an iron collar, of which there were several lying about, to fit the mastiff, the presence of whose mistress proved entirely necessary. ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... sleigh, albeit somewhat battered and dingy, turning in at the gate. A good-looking girl was driving it; a thin, pale lady sat at her side. Both were much enveloped in faded furs. Over the seats of the sleigh and over their knees were spread ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... took a step to obey, and kicked against something which rattled as it flew forward, and struck the wainscot board, while the next moment a dim, blue spark of light in a ground-glass burst into a flame, and lit up a dingy-looking, old-fashioned surgery just as the kneeling girl ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... a hateful twinkle of the eyes. "So you're out for a spree," he continued, winking in a knowing way. "Won't you walk into the back parlour while I get them?" And he showed them into a dingy horrid room behind the house, stale with smoke, and begrimed ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... Broccoli are exposed to light, and especially to the direct influence of the sun, the color is soon changed to a dingy or yellowish hue. It is, therefore, necessary to guard against this as much as possible by frequently examining the plants; and, when any heads are not naturally screened, one or two of the adjoining side-leaves should be bent over the flower-head to shade it from the light, ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... probably of tradesmen in the neighbourhood. This school was in Lisson Grove, in the north-west of London; a spot not to be pictured from its name by those ignorant of the locality; in point of fact a dingy street, with a mixture of shops and private houses. On the front door was a plate displaying Miss Rutherford's name,—nothing more. That lady herself was middle-aged, grave at all times, kindly, and, ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... threw up his hands, with the dingy suit flapping in them like a bed-quilt shaken from a tenement window. He looked Milt all over, coldly. His red but shining eyes hinted that Milt was a clodhopper and no honest wearer of evening clothes. Milt felt humble, but he snapped, "No good. ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... (Antirrhinum majus) white, pink, and striped flowers on the same plant, and branches with striped flowers on a red-coloured variety. On a double stock (Matthiola incana) I have seen a branch bearing single flowers; and {382} on a dingy-purple, double variety of the wall-flower (Cheiranthus cheiri) a branch which had reverted to the ordinary copper colour. On other branches of the same plant, some flowers were exactly divided across the middle, one half being purple and ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... the bow and stern she was decked, and those quarters were fairly raised. Amidship she was low and open, and pierced for twenty oars, ten to a side, all swaying listlessly from the narrow ports in which they were hung. Sometimes they knocked against each other. One sail, square and of a dingy white, drooped from a broad yard-arm, which was itself tilted, and now and then creaked against the yellow mast complainingly, unmindful of the simple tackle designed to keep it in control. A watchman ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Charlottesville, in its downtown parts, is no more and no less dingy and dismal than many another town of six or seven thousand inhabitants, be it North or South. It has a long main street, lined with little shops and moving-picture shows, and the theatrical posters which thrill one at first sight ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... day laborers. Some of them were old and feeble, and others were young men, broken down in the prime of life. Their limbs were shrunken and drawn. They had been digging in the earth, and working on high buildings, and confined in dingy basements, and had done all kinds of hard labor for other men. They had given their lives and strength for others, and this was the end of it—to die poor and forsaken. I looked at them, and they reminded me of the martyrs ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... slowly trundling in among a maze of tracks and sidings, with long trains of gondolas, coal-cars, and dingy-brown freight-boxes on both sides. Cullin was shouting to invisible switchmen, and presently the train came bumping to a stand. Another minute and two or three early birds among the yardmen were climbing ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... solid iron. Here and there the oblique strata suggest the daring architecture of the Titans. At the next turn we are met by the portal of a Gothic cathedral, with its pointed gables, its clustered basaltic columns. Out of the dingy wall shines now and again a golden speck like a glimpse of the Ark of the Covenant—there sulphur blooms, the ore-flower. But living blossoms also deck the crags. From the crevices of the cornice hang green festoons. These are great foliage-trees and pines, whose ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... earthen floor, her shoulders shrugged up to her ears, her dark eyes glancing around the tiny room with every expression of marked disapproval. It was certainly not a luxurious apartment. The low walls were of rough logs, the roof was a ragged piece of very dingy canvas, held in place by stones here and there. In one corner was a pile of dried grass and leaves, with a blanket thrown over it,—evidently Don Carlos's bed. There was a camp-stool, a rude box set on end, ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... rundown parking strips and yards, dilapidated fences, broken windows, smoking automobiles, dingy working places, all should be the object of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon
... lives on board these big, heavy boats. The smoke of the kitchen fire issues from a sort of wooden cabin where several human beings breathe, eat, sleep, are born and die, sometimes without hardly ever having set foot upon the land. Pots of geranium or begonia give a bit of bright color to the dingy surroundings; and the boats travel slowly along the river, impelled by enormous oars, which throw ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... the platform had emptied its contents into the high, dingy-looking carriages of the Paris-Lyons Express. A gong clanged. Honor put out an ungloved hand and had some ado not to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... trod the dreary miles which bring us to Haworth. The village street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude stones, upon which the wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an unfamiliar sound. The dingy houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in architecture, are huddled along the incline and encroach upon the narrow street. The place and its situation are a proverb of ugliness in all the countryside; one dweller in Airedale told us that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... was the oddest society I have met. The premises consisted of one long dingy room with two dingy windows: the furniture of a long table covered with dirty American cloth, a multitude of wooden chairs, an old sofa, two dilapidated dinner-waggons, and a frame against the wall from which, by means of clips, churchwarden pipes depended stem downwards; ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... perhaps they might sup on him after all; for a heavy sickening graveyard smell made his heart sink within him, and his stomach heave; and his weary body, and more weary soul, gave themselves up helplessly to the depressing influence of that doleful place. The black bank of dingy leathern leaves above his head, the endless labyrinth of stems and withes (for every bough had lowered its own living cord, to take fresh hold of the foul soil below); the web of roots, which stretched away inland till it was lost in the shades ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... of the forest is a dingy green, save when a deeper shade here and there shows where the mighty bhur uprears its towering height, or where the crimson flowers of the seemul or cotton tree, and the bronze-coloured foliage of the sunpul (a tree ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... on the bit of street were all three-storied and all of a uniform, dingy, scaling redness. The house of the Duchess, on the left side as you came down the street toward the little Square which squatted beside the East River, differed from the others only in that three balls of tarnished gilt swung before it and unredeemed ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... her hands, and, turning away, looked out of the window. Lane rather weakly sat down. What had come over him? His blood seemed bursting in his veins. Then he gazed round the dingy little parlor and at this girl of twenty, whose beauty did not harmonize with her surroundings. Fair-haired, white-faced, violet-eyed, she emanated tragedy. He watched her profile, clear cut as a cameo, fine ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Aunt Maria's family? The carriage, when it left the wharf, had been driven up a long narrow street, quite different from any the children had ever seen before. On either side irregularly built houses, most of them old and dingy, stood close together. Here and there was a new one, which had the air of having dropped down by mistake. They left this street, and turning into another, crossed a bridge, which spanned an arm of the river that ran through part of the town. Now the houses began to be large and stately, and ...
— Five Happy Weeks • Margaret E. Sangster
... have.) Now he saw dealers, as the ordinary painters see them, to be the authors of all evil! Now he understood by what methods Mr. Oxford had achieved his splendid car, clothes, club, and minions. These things were earned, not by Mr. Oxford, but for Mr. Oxford in dingy studios, even in attics, by shabby industrious painters! Mr. Oxford was nothing but an opulent thief, a grinder of the face of genius. Mr. Oxford was, in a word, the spawn of the devil, and Priam silently but sincerely consigned him to his ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... she wasn't in the least used to being good-natured, and it took a great deal of coaxing to make her give other than short, sharp answers to all that was said. But, for all that, she went to work, after Tip had poured some water in the dingy little tea-kettle and set it over the fire, cutting the two slices of bread, and getting them ready to toast when there should be ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... in Passy I used one of the three lines of tramcars that converge at La Muette (it is almost immoral to take a taxi these days); and I often amused myself watching the women conductors. They are quick, keen, and competent, but, whether it was owing to the dingy black uniforms and distressingly unbecoming Scotch military cap or not, it never did occur to me that there would be any mad scramble for them when the men of France once more found the leisure for love ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Wilkins, as her guest went away with a much happier face than the one she brought. "And ef I know her, which I think I do, she'll find that Cinthy Wilkins ain't fur from right, ef her experience is good for any thing," added the matron with a sigh, and a glance at a dingy photograph of her Lisha on the wall, a sigh that seemed to say there had been a good deal of "wuss" in her bargain, though she was too loyal ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... in a dingy room with grey walls, the only window being high up and criss-crossed by bars. It was a very small window. On a cot in a corner of the room sat a man. He turned his head toward them and when he saw the dog, he jumped ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... could hit on—and had him well cried '|Missing|!! Stolen or Strayed, Lost or Mislaid, |A Gentleman|;—middle-aged, sober and staid; Stoops slightly;—and when he left home was arrayed In a sad-colored suit, somewhat dingy and frayed; Had spectacles on with a tortoise-shell rim, And a hat rather low crowned, and broad in the brim. Whoe'er shall bear, Or send him with care, (Right side uppermost) home; or shall give notice where Said middle-aged |Gentleman| is; or shall state Any ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the obstructions. The obstructions are many: washing-house boats (it is a good old unexploded theory in Petersburg that clothes are clean only when rinsed in running water, even though our eyes and noses inform us, unaided by chart, where the drainage goes); little flotillas of dingy flat-boats, anchored around the "Fish-Gardens," and containing the latter's stock in trade, where persons of taste pick their second dinner-course out of the flopping inmates of a temporary scoop-net; huge, unwieldy, wood barks, put together with wooden pegs, and steered with long, clumsy ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... these streets are reached by scores of granite steps that climb the steep mountainside. These streets are not over twelve or fifteen feet wide, and the shops are mere holes in the wall, with a frontage of eight or ten feet. Yet many of these dingy shops contain thousands of dollars' worth of decorated silks and linens, artistic carvings, laces, curios and many other articles of Chinese manufacture. Unlike the Japanese, who will follow the tourist to the sidewalk and urge him to buy, these ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... picks up the dust and grit and gradually scours off the fine finish. In dusting never use a feather duster, nor rub the piano hard with anything. The dust should be whipped off, and not rubbed into the varnish. If the piano is dingy, smoky or dirty looking, it should be washed carefully with lukewarm water with a little ammonia in it to soften it. Never use soap. Use nothing but a small, soft sponge and a chamois skin. Wipe over a small part at a time with the ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... time, Bles entered Zora's home. It was a single low, black room, smoke-shadowed and dirty, with two dingy beds and a gaping fire-place. On one side of the fire-place sat the yellow woman, young, with traces of beauty, holding the white child in her arms; on the other, hugging the blaze, huddled a formless heap, wreathed in ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... now as if they were intruding in some fairy domain. It was all exquisite, though rather tiny; but such luxury was as far removed from the dingy rooms they had occupied as could well be imagined. The Major coughed and ahemmed continually; Patsy ah'd and oh'd and seemed half frightened; Uncle John walked after them silently, but with a pleased smile that was almost childish upon ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... and aching limbs, into the abandoned desolation of the Chinese quarter, and back through the still, deadly ways which Amber had threaded in the footsteps of Pink Satin—where the houses towered high and were ornamented with dingy, crumbling stucco and rusty, empty, treacherous balconies of iron, and the air hung in stagnation as if the very winds here halted to eavesdrop upon the iniquities that were housed behind the jealous, rotting blinds of ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... departing as mysteriously as they had come. In the blighting heat the country lay, dead, spreading to the infinite horizons; in the sky no speck floated against the dome of blue. More desolate than a derelict on the calm surface of the trackless ocean Lazette lay, its huddled buildings dingy with the dust of a continuing dry season, squatting in their dismal lonesomeness in the ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... ruffianism in bygone times; then there is a smell of gas, and a vision of enormous gasometers; and then down goes the funnel again, and Blackfriars Bridge jumps over us. On we go, now at the top of our speed, past the dingy brick warehouses that lie under the shadow of St Paul's, whose black dome looks down upon us as we scud along. Then Southwark Bridge, with its Cyclopean masses of gloomy metal, disdains to return the slightest response to the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... back through the city, and walked along watching the Zopilotes—great turkey-buzzards—with their bald heads and foul dingy-black plumage. They were sitting in compact rows on parapets of houses and churches, and seemed specially to affect the cross of the cathedral, where they perched, two on each arm, and some on the top. When some ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... together in a far corner of the dingy room, where the Syrian barkeeper could not ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... between the interior of the town and its external aspect, was as striking as it was full of pain. With the exception of the dull high street, which had the usual characteristics of a small agricultural market town, some sombre mansions, a dingy inn, and a petty bourse, Marney mainly consisted of a variety of narrow and crowded lanes formed by cottages built of rubble, or unhewn stones without cement, and from age, or badness of the material, looking as if they could scarcely hold together. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... for the management of their fountains. Of the four great buildings just noticed, that of the Mint, or rather its facade, pleases me most. It is a beautiful elevation, in pure good taste; but the stone is unfortunately of a coarse grain and of a dingy colour. Of the BRIDGES thrown across the Seine, connecting all the fine objects on either side, it must be allowed that they are generally in good taste: light, yet firm; but those, in iron, of Louis XVI. and des Arts, are perhaps to be preferred. The Pont Neuf, where ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... half-open drawer a rich glimpse of an Indian fan; a pair of delicate kid gloves, which only a woman's hands could have worn, were thrown carelessly on the table. There were still the little wrinkles in the fingers, but time had changed the pristine white to dingy yellow. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... dropped ashes on the floor, but now—you should hear her scold! And she doesn't curl her hair any longer. Amasai, who used to be so obliging about beating rugs and carrying wood, grumbles if you suggest such a thing. Also his neckties are quite dingy—black and brown, where they used to be scarlet and purple. I've determined never to marry. ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... at the figure of a whiskered skipper, wearing a dingy derby, who peered over the rail at this moment in response to a hail from ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... dealer in the darkest side street of the smallest village but hopes some day to leave his dingy shop behind and to climb into the class economically above him. He counts himself a man of business, and thinks and acts and goes down to failure, individualistically. He hates and fears his competitors, ascribes most of his wrongs to them or to the highly paid skilled workers, and ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... them the images of the loved and lost. Historical pictures enlarged the mind of his people, keeping before it the high deeds of its children and stimulating to noble prowess. His landscapes warmed the dingy city homes, bringing even there the blue sky, the clouds, the streams, the forests, the mountains, moss, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... sovereigns in 1814. With this ribbon round his neck, on gala days, and in a white waistcoat, the old gentleman looked splendid as he moved along in a blue coat with the Windsor button, and neat black small-clothes, and silk stockings. He lived in an old tall dingy house, furnished in the reign of George III., his beloved master, and not much more cheerful now than a family vault. They are awfully funereal, those ornaments of the close of the last century—tall gloomy horse-hair chairs, mouldy Turkey carpets ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... some Sahibs of his acquaintance—that wonderful old man-at-arms, horseman, shikarri, athlete, gentleman. (Yet how strange and sad to see him out of his splendid uniform, in sandals, dhotie, untrammelled shirt-tails, dingy old cotton coat and loose puggri, undistinguishable from a school-master, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... proceeded to the Birthplace, where a very gentlewomanly female exhibited the apartment in which the Infant Bard first saw the light. Alack! there was but little light to behold, being a shockingly low and dingy room, meagrely furnished with two chairs and a table, on which was another of the busts. As I came in, I uttered a remark which I had prepared for the occasion. "It was here," I said, reverently, "here that the Swan of Avon was hatched!" ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... he asked as soon as Grey entered the dingy little room, not in Chancery Lane, but in its neighbourhood, which was allocated to him for ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... of the first to be built on the trail, and passing through the big front room in which two or three men were lounging, the marshal led his guests to his inner office and sleeping room. A fire was blazing in a big stone fireplace. Skins and dingy blankets were scattered about, and on the mantle stood a bottle and ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... sent me to Madame Albina de Rhona, who had not long taken over the management of the Royal Soho Theater and changed its name to the Royalty. The improvement did not stop at the new play. French workmen had swept and garnished the dusty, dingy place and transformed it into a theater as dainty and pretty as Madame de Rhona herself. Dancing was Madame's strong point, but she had been very successful as an actress too, first in Paris and Petersburg, and then in London at the St. James's and Drury ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... A bird-call from the dingy brick building where Turner died, and two blocks from the old home of Carlyle, is Cheyne Walk—a broad avenue facing the river. The houses are old, but they have a look of gracious gentility that speaks of ease and plenty. High iron fences are in front, but they do not shut off from view ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... knocking them, but he has actually knocked them; and Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they imitated the stripes of the squire. It is a curious and perhaps melancholy truth that the world is imitating our worst, our weariness and our dingy decline, when it did not imitate our best and the high moment ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... once more occupied, Mr. Fairburn having found an excellent tenant for the place in Mr. Allan, the eminent shipping-merchant of London, the very man into whose office George was to have gone. The little group laughed merrily at the thought of the gallant Captain Fairburn wielding a long quill in a dingy office. Mr. Allan, a widower, who had taken up his abode in the mansion, bringing with him his only daughter, Janet, had not been two months in the village before he had made an offer of marriage to the devoted Mrs. Maynard, and the old lady was now mistress of Binfield Towers. Mary ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... dilettante finds his game. And there is nothing more characteristic and original than the outlying quarters of San Francisco. The Chinese district is the most famous; but it is far from the only truffle in the pie. There is many another dingy corner, many a young antiquity, many a terrain vague with that stamp of quaintness that the city lover seeks and dwells on; and the indefinite prolongation of its streets, up hill and down dale, makes San ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... annual rain, that we owe our vegetable mould with its rich and beauteous mantle of sward and foliage. And next, stripping from off the landscape its sands and gravels, we see its underlying boulder-clays, dingy and gray, and here presenting their vast ice-borne stones, and there its iceberg pavements. And these clays in turn stripped away, the bare rocks appear, various in colour and uneven in surface, but everywhere grooved and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... if it were a magical change, the mist overhead grew opalescent, then lighter still, as there was a warm breath of air sweeping over the dingy, murky sea. At that moment the dull, distant murmur of water beating against an obstacle grew louder, as the fog rolled away from the ship off to the north, and five minutes later the crew burst into a loud cheer; for, flashing ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... wrought changes; the walls were now darkened with smoke, the windows dingy, the floor sunken in; there was nothing cheery in the ill-kept room, or in the face of Aunt Ruth. Some natures become shriveled and cramped when left to themselves, and hers was such an one; I am afraid it was also ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... somewhat dingy hall at 34 Brutton Square on her return from visiting Adrienne, the first person she encountered was Olga Lermontof. She still retained her dislike of the accompanist and was preparing to pass by with a casual remark upon ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... yacht was so great that before the two dazed salts on board realized what had happened their master was far astern. They bustled to bring the Enchantress about and to come to his rescue in the dingy. Stunned by the blow of the—spar, he had gone down like a stone; so, in all probability, they would have been too late. When he came up the second time it was on the port bow of the Firefly, but completely out of reach. Giving the tiller to her friend, and stripping off superfluous apparel, ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... at the denouement. For now we were in Paris, rather meanly lodged in a dingy hotel on a narrow street leading from what with us might have been Piccadilly Circus. Our rooms were rather a good height with a carved cornice and plaster enrichments, but the furnishings were musty and the general air depressing, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Northwold baths upon Louisa's health. As the carriage stopped, she cast one glance at the row of houses, they struck her as dreary and dilapidated; she drew her mantle closer, shivered, and walked into the house. 'Small rooms, dingy furniture-that is mamma's affair,' passed through her mind, as she made a courteous acknowledgment of Miss Mercy's greeting, and stood by the drawing-room fire. 'Roland slowly awoke from his swoon; a white-robed old man, with a red eight-pointed cross on his breast, was bending over ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pouts, which swallow the hook into their lowest entrails. Several dozen fish were taken in an hour or two, and then we returned to the shop where we had left our horse and wagon, the pilot very eccentric behind us. It was a small, dingy shop, dimly lighted by a single inch of candle, faintly disclosing various boxes, barrels standing on end, articles hanging from the ceiling; the proprietor at the counter, whereon appear gin and brandy, respectively contained in a tin pint-measure and an earthenware jug, with two or ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had been introduced, and horrid chintz affair, most unprelatical and almost irreligious; such a sofa as never yet stood in the study of any decent high church clergyman of the Church of England. The old curtains had also given away. They had, to be sure, become dingy, and that which had been originally a rich and goodly ruby had degenerated into a reddish brown. Mr Harding, however, thought the old reddish brown much preferable to the gaudy buff-coloured trumpery moreen which Mrs Proudie had deemed good enough for her husband's ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... was nowhere to be seen, but a new element pervaded the dingy place, and it hardly needed the presence of four or five richly dressed ladies bearing sheaves of flowers, or that of two silk-hatted impresario-looking gentlemen with Jewish noses, to lead Gregory to infer that the element ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... chapels;—which once, no doubt, had been adorned with marble-work and lighted with ever-burning lamps and tapers. All such illumination and ornament, however, had long since been extinguished and stript away; except, indeed, that the low roofs of a few of these ancient sites of worship were covered with dingy stucco, and frescoed with scriptural scenes and subjects, in the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dingy schooner lay snug against the quay, with which it was connected by a plank. On the forward deck, under a spot of awning, five Kanakas, who made up the crew, were squatted round a basin of fried feis,[2] and drinking ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... departed. Before sundown all are spent and weary. Some of the birds begin to darken on the sides of the upper part of the breasts. The purple sheen on the back of the neck is more brilliant. There is a glowing patch, too, at the base of the tail, though the other parts of the back are dingy with a green tinge in reflected light. The nuptial costume is fast becoming, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the cotton-mouth moccasin attain to a length of about six feet. The full grown reptile is of a dingy brownish-black color, but the young are pinkish, with coppery bands running transversely across the body. With the exception that this reptile has no rattles, it answers in its general peculiarities to the ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... hard battle, and it resulted in no victory. The dingy shop in Little Britain was, of course, out of the question; and Mr. Brown assisted Robinson in preventing that insane attempt at aping the unprofitable glories of Regent Street. The matter ended ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope |
