"Grimy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... next few days he was nowhere to be seen. When he returned, he was pale and grey. His bloodless red eyes lay tearfully in grimy shadows. His voice had only a sing-song tone, with a mannered melancholy. Schulz spoke mournfully, dreamily, about despair, whoredom, and being torn apart inwardly. He said that he was fed up with the joy of life, that he would soon catch ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... issue from the front, followed by a long tongue of lambent flame that seems to encircle the mizzen-mast. The fire now reaches to the cabin of Mrs. Kear, who, shrieking wildly, is brought on deck by Miss Herbey. A moment more, and Silas Huntly makes his appearance, his face all blackened with the grimy smoke; he bows to Curtis, as he passes, and then proceeds in the calmest manner to mount the aft-shrouds, and installs himself at the very top of ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... mood to be cruel to-night. She held out the keys to him, in a disinterested fashion, and dropped them daintily into his outstretched palm, just as she might have given a coin to an unusually grimy mendicant. But the tips of her fingers grazed ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... deal with a people very much different from our own. It is rather curious that at this moment I am in vague trouble concerning the police. I am sure this place is watched, and I am also almost certain that my friend Jack is being shadowed. He dresses like a workman; his grimy blouse would delight the heart of his friend Tolstoi, but he is known to be a Prince, and I think the authorities imagine he is playing up to the laboring class, whom they despise. I lay it all to that ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... But her emotion was not at the news so rudely broken. It was the breaking of the spell which had held her. Just for one horrific moment she stood staring helplessly at the innocent picture of her four-year-old twins, beautiful in spite of their grimy exterior, beautiful as a Heaven-inspired ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... finding in it something that he wanted—namely, that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon; which, as he could easily slip it into his pocket, he took from its place, and entered the shop to pay for, expecting to see behind the counter a grimy personage showing that nonchalance about sales which seems to belong universally to the second-hand book-business. In most other trades you find generous men who are anxious to sell you their wares for your own welfare; but even ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... I'm going to saddle him myself and everything. And I want you to get me some jingling silver spurs like Mig has got, with chains that hang away down and rattle when you walk." The Kid lifted one small foot and laid a grimy finger in front of his ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... sunlit and still, and far objects stood up with sharp outlines in the clear atmosphere. Here and there the white tents of waiting trail-outfits splotched the bright green of the prairie. Horsemen galloped to and from the town at top speed, and a long, grimy red stock train had just snorted out on a siding by the stockyards where the bellowing of thirsty cattle came faintly like the roar of pounding surf in ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... one of these women—I know!—worship here, yield yourself to the intoxicating day-dreams that make the grimy world sweeter than any heaven ever imagined. How you heart leaps with gratitude for your good fortune! How compassionately you regard your unblest fellow men! What may you not accomplish with such a mate beside you; how high will be your aims, how paltry every obstacle that bars ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... a very small room, with a ceiling so low that the tall lodger could only just stand upright with safety; perhaps three inches intervened between his head and the plaster, which was cracked, grimy, cobwebby. A small scrap of weedy carpet lay in front of the fireplace; elsewhere the chinky boards were unconcealed. The furniture consisted of a round table, which kept such imperfect balance on its central support that the lamp entrusted to it looked in a ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... cried his mother, throwing up her hands. "I declare there's but one creature in all God's world that cares nothing for cleanliness! Even a pig has some manners if given half a chance, but boys!" She seized the grimy towel and held it up despairingly for Father Van Hove to see. "He's just wet his face and wiped all the dirt off on the towel. The Devil himself is not more afraid of holy water than Jan Van Hove is of water of any kind!" ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... no fairy's handiwork. It went through the hands of grimy-looking workmen before it reached ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... instantly the flesh shrivelled on his limbs, the clustering locks fell away from his head, and the keen, piercing glance of his eyes was quenched. He who a moment before had been a mighty man in his prime was now become a wrinkled, aged beggar, clad in miserable, grimy rags, with a staff, and a tattered scrip, hanging by a cord from his shoulder. For a cloak she gave him an old deer's hide, from which all the hair was gone. Thus totally disguised, he parted from the goddess, and started inland, following ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... With grimy fingers clutching and crooked, Tight skin, a nose all bony and hooked, And a shaking, sharp, suspicious way; His blinking eyes had scarcely brooked The ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... iron pump, "presented by Sir E.S. Gooch, Bart., to the inhabitants of Birmingham," as commemorated by an inscription on the dirty stone which covers the spring and its well. God's Well field is covered with workshops, stables, dirty backyards and grimy-looking houses, and ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... and all jump this. Then the second sitter adds his palm and thumb to the barrier, and the line of players attack this. It is more than likely that some one will fail to clear this last barrier, and the one who does so squats down, pressing close to the other two, and puts in his grimy little paw and thumb. So they continue to raise the height of the barrier till, at last, nobody can ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... the illusion quite destroyed by handling, for through the arch and a short passage one entered a large, domed apartment, brick-floored and dimly lighted, whose atmosphere was the breath of a dozen flashing furnaces, whose occupants were grimy gnomes wildly sporting with strange shapes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Lady Alice, and I see that your conduct may be of service to my brother." Then she relapsed into a more colloquial tone. "But how on earth you mean to live in this part of London, I'm sure I can't imagine. No doubt it seems rather smoky and grimy to you after Mayfair ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... beauty. He does his best work when he is creating something or handling something which is fine and beautiful. The coarse-textured individual is strong, vigorous, virile, and enduring. He can do hard, unpleasant work, can go through hardships, and can remain cheerful even in the midst of grimy, unpleasant and unlovely surroundings. For these reasons, fine-textured people do their best work in such lines as art, literature, music, jewelry, dry goods, millinery, and fine, delicate tools, machinery and materials; while ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... itself loomed up before me that Sunday morning as I approached it along Ballantyne Street, a diluted sunshine washing the extended, businesslike facade of grimy, yellow brick. We were proud of that hospital in the city, and many of our foremost citizens had contributed large sums of money to the building, scarcely ten years old. It had been one of Maude's interests. I was ushered into the reception room, where presently ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... idea of turning back upon Patterson and going off, Heaven and Old Joe knew where! Tramp, tramp over the hot pike, sullenly southward, hot without and hot within! The knapsack was heavy, the haversack was heavy, the musket was heavy. Sweat ran down from under cap or felt hat, and made grimy trenches down cheek and chin. The men had too thick underwear. They carried overcoat and blanket—it was hot, hot, and every pound like ten! To keep—to throw away? To keep—to throw away? The beat of feet kept time to that pressing question, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... curled up in bed, with his rosy cheek resting on one of his scratched and grimy little hands, forming altogether a perfect picture of peace and innocence, it seems hard to realize what a busy, restive, pugnacious, badly ingenious little wretch he is! There is something so comical in those funny little shoes and stockings sprawling on the floor,—they look ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... heavy footseps of coughing, and of men's voices. Then a young student from the Polytechnic School entered, very like Goschienko, except that he was dark and plain. With him, looking awkward and shy, came two workmen, with grimy hands, and wearing short jackets over their dirty red shirts. One of them was very tall and gaunt, whose clean-shaven, sallow face bore the mark of years of semi- starvation, perpetual care and suppressed hatred. The other had the ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... begrime, befoul; splash, stain, distain[obs3], maculate, sully, pollute, defile, debase, contaminate, taint, leaven; corrupt &c. (injure) 659; cover with dust &c. n.; drabble in the mud[obs3]; roil. wallow in the mire; slobber, slabber[obs3]. Adj. dirty, filthy, grimy; unclean, impure; soiled &c. v.; not to be handled with kid gloves; dusty, snuffy[obs3], smutty, sooty, smoky; thick, turbid, dreggy; slimy; mussy [U.S.]. slovenly, untidy, messy, uncleanly. [of people] unkempt, sluttish, dowdy, draggle-tailed; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... distress and a dangerous spirit of discontent with the government at that time prevailed. Groans and hisses greeted the carriage, full of influential personages, in which the Duke of Wellington sat. High above the grim and grimy crowd of scowling faces a loom had been erected, at which sat a tattered, starved-looking weaver, evidently set there as a representative man, to protest against this triumph of machinery, and the gain and glory which the wealthy Liverpool and Manchester ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... carronade, and coming up from behind, she five times discharged this pointblank into the American sloop; then in the light air the latter luffed round, firing her guns as they bore, and the two ships engaged yard-arm to yard-arm. The guns leaped and thundered as the grimy gunners hurled them out to fire and back again to load, working like demons. For a few minutes the cannonade was tremendous, and the men in the tops could hardly see the decks for the wreck of flying splinters. Then the vessels ground together, and ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... used to him now, and, nothing daunted, took a look at the grimy page in the middle of which Tom had stuck. She read it so well, that the young gentleman stopped munching to regard her with respectful astonishment, and when she stopped, he said, suspiciously, "You are a sly one, Polly, to study up ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... old lady joyfully sniffed the smoky air, gazed with tenderness on the grimy houses, and cast herself, metaphorically speaking, into the arms of a stout, ruddy-faced porter, as if at last she had found a man and ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... New York, duskily draped, sable-plumed, all but incongruously shod and gazing about them with extravagance; she might, from the curiosity she clearly excited in byways, in side-streets peopled with grimy children and costermongers carts, which she hoped were slums, literally have had her musket on her shoulder, have announced herself as freshly on the warpath. But for the fear of overdoing this character ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... the art of putting things vividly and crisply, and he possessed an extraordinary memory for those little details which give actuality to the picture. When he described the shooting of a presidential candidate, Dodgson could see the man with his grimy hands and torn collar, crumpling up as the volley from the firing party caught him. The editor himself had never come in contact with crude realities such as this—a London County Councillor escaping by a hair's ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... that wreck of a man over yonder squeezing a bit of weird melody out of an old accordion and expecting the tortured public to throw a penny into his hat now and then to pay him for his trouble. Do you suppose that man knows what happiness means, as God designed it. He was, without doubt, a sad and grimy little baby once, brought up on gin slightly adulterated with his mother's milk. He was pounded daily before he was two years old, starved and cuffed and kicked all the way up to manhood, and now his neck is ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... Vatican; and up a private stair to a luxurious little room, with a great oriel window. Here were inkstands, sloping frames for writing on, and all the instruments of art. The cardinal whispered a courtier, and presently the Pope's private secretary appeared with a glorious grimy old MS. of Plutarch's Lives. And soon Gerard was seated alone copying it, awe-struck, yet half delighted at the thought that his holiness would handle ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... helplessly. It was dark by now and cold. The little back yard was grimy and full of odors. McTeague was tired with their long walk. All his uneasiness about his affair with Trina had returned. No, surely she was not for him. Marcus or some other man would win her in the end. What could she ever ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... departed obediently. Immediately there stepped through the door of the box-office a rough-looking man in a slouch hat, with three days' stubble stippling a grimy chin. He shut the door carefully and came near. Varney, from where he stood, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Inexperienced as a parent, Gissing was probably too proud: he wanted the children always to look clean and soigne. The last cook had advertised herself as a General Houseworker, afraid of nothing; but as soon as she saw the week's wash in the hamper (including twenty-one grimy rompers), she telephoned to the station for a taxi. Gissing wondered why it was that the working classes were not willing to do one-half as much as he, who had been reared to indolent ease. Even more, ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... women of seventy, with straggling grey hair, to fifteen-year-old girls. In the cottage forges there would be but one worker, or two at most; in the shop forges four, or even five, little glowing heaps; four or five of the grimy, pale lung-bellows; and never a moment without a fiery hook about to take its place on the growing chains, never a second when the thin smoke of the forges, and of those lives consuming slowly in front of them, did not escape from out of the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... numbers which were oppressive? And further, whether it was good, for the country, the race, ay, the species, that they should be so distinctly removed from the thousands who fought the grand, and the grisly, old battle with nature for bread of life. Those grimy sails of the colliers and fishing-smacks, set them in a great sea, would have beauty for eyes and soul beyond that of elegance and refinement. And do but look on them thoughtfully, the poor are everlastingly, unrelievedly, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sooty and grimy with those chimneys all around us throwing out tons and tons of soft coal smoke to settle over everything. ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... and literary miscellany, was widely ridiculed. He survived long enough to be regarded as an exemplar of conservative and old-fashioned journalism, and became the Nestor of Cooperstown. In the office of the Freeman's Journal, with its clutter of old machinery, piles of grimy books, its floor littered with newspapers, its wall streaked with cobwebs, the aged editor seemed exactly to fit into the surroundings. Here he received his friends, for the bed-ridden wife at Carr's Hotel, where he had rooms, was unequal to much social duty. The printing-office ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... and leave him undiscovered and unmourned by the family ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the anguish of shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal at city docks. But now at last, as they took seats opposite one another in the crowded car, they seemed to have drifted infinite distances and long epochs asunder. They looked. hopelessly across the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that it seemed to Swan as if they had never existed, and his contacts had been so dull, his outlook so dreary, that he had almost no conception of beauty. His plain college room, where, by the hour, he had worked out mathematical problems, and a grimy engine-room (which was the next stage of his advancement), where he had stood in a greasy black shirt, surrounded by an unceasing whir of machinery, and bossed a gang of men—these had been the ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... grimy duties which he must fulfil are taking him to Dublin, to Liverpool, to Norway; and by the time he is twenty-two, he knows the Baltic trade well, and has heard all the pros and cons of the furious cackle which the schools have raised over that expedition of Bering's to the west coast ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Dressed in a long white cloak and flowing in sables, a white lace veil drooping about her shoulders, a sumptuous white feather curving from her brow to her back, she moved amidst the scene like a splendid, dreamy ship entering some grimy Northern harbour. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... to go; only four or five "squares." They stopped before a great grimy brick building with a ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... to you, Coppy," said Wee Willie Winkie, indicating Miss Allardyce with a grimy forefinger. "I knew she did n't ought to go acwoss ve wiver, and I knew ve wegiment would come to me if I sent ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... grimy and shining with the sweat of hours, moving about in knots of three and four—always in knots of three or four as if afraid to disintegrate—leaned upon the rail and watched the approach of the crowded boats, looked down into pallid, ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... that we spent some time over our meal. Holmes was lost in thought, and once or twice he walked over to the window and stared earnestly out. It opened on to a squalid courtyard. In the far corner was a smithy, where a grimy lad was at work. On the other side were the stables. Holmes had sat down again after one of these excursions, when he suddenly sprang out of his chair with a ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... below tramping to the telephone. Then she went to a small square window in the studio, pushed it open, and looked out. There was a tiny space of garden below. She saw a plane tree shivering in the wind, yellow leaves on the rain-sodden ground. A sparrow flitted by and perched on the grimy coping of a low wall. And she shivered like the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... farther on lay a heap of discarded bricks; scraps of mats and matting, boxes, and pieces of rope lay scattered here and there; shaggy, hungry-looking dogs wandered to and fro, too listless to bark; in a corner, under the fence, sat a grimy little boy of about four, with an enormous belly and dishevelled head, crying hopelessly, as if he had been forsaken by the whole world; close by a sow likewise besmeared in soot and surrounded by a medley of little suckling-pigs ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light the darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the heart of him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at Gower with an envy to resemble him in practice. His philosophy, too, reproached him for being outshone. Apart from his philosophy, he stood confessed a bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction. Adoration of a woman ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... paraylzed, was feeling about with his lips where he could kiss her. In the lodger she recognized the workman who had once clanked the sheet-iron before her in the forge, and had explained things to her. Evidently he had come in straight from the factory; his face looked dark and grimy, and on one cheek near his nose was a smudge of soot. His hands were perfectly black, and his unbelted shirt shone with oil and grease. He was a man of thirty, of medium height, with black hair and broad shoulders, ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... helpless victim of a civilisation which makes its food of those the heart most pities. How well if her last sigh had been drawn in infancy, if she had lain with the little brother and sister in that gaunt, grimy cemetery, under the shadow of mill chimneys! She was reserved for other griefs; for consolations, ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... of the day and night the phraseology of that tiresome address fell upon our ears. Grimy sailors came down out of the foretop placidly announcing themselves as "a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for recreation and unostentatiously," etc.; the coal passers moved to their duties in the profound depths of the ship, explaining ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Indian glare I used to have a curious wild longing, not for the Country... that was always there—but for the dull, old Tottenham Court Road! Don't laugh! It was no laughing matter. You know how dull that road looks, how ugly and grimy, and how grey, grey, grey in rainy weather? Well, amidst the glare of Eastern surroundings that scene used to come back to me as something so thoroughly, typically English, that its very dreariness made the attraction. I have stood in the midst of palm ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... outside the door, a knock, and in answer to Percival's "Come in," the landlady's daughter appeared. She explained that Emma had gone out shopping—Emma was the grimy girl who ordinarily waited on him—so, with a nervous little laugh, with a toss of the long curl, which was supposed to have got in the way somehow, and with the turquoise earrings quivering in the candlelight, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... broken body of a once strong man lying under a white sheet; the children playing around and laughing (if they were too young to know what it meant); the mother frantic with the thought that her brood was now homeless; and the big grimy workers wiping their tears with a rough hand and putting silver dollars into ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... host seized the dummy-chucker by the tattered sleeve of his grimy jacket. He drew him before ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... publishing a man's deeds, and proclaiming his allegiance to good or evil. The human face and form are clothed with dignity in that the fleshly pages of to-day show forth the soul's deeds of yesterday. Experience teaches us that occupation affects the body. Calloused hands betray the artisan. The grimy face proclaims the collier. He whose garments exhale sweet odors needs not tell us that he has lingered long in the fragrant garden. But the face and form are equally sensitive to the spirit's finer workings. Mental brightness makes facial illumination. Moral obliquity dulls and ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and the reputation had stuck to it and to him. As he had imperceptibly come into possession of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard-street, on whose grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years daily interposed itself between him and the sky, so he had insensibly found himself a personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential to screw tight to every transaction in which he engaged, whose word was never to ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... departure of the tug; its triumphant return, leading in custody a timber-laden barque from the Baltic, a little self-conscious and ashamed, as if caught red-handed in iniquity by this fussy little officer; the independent sailing of a grimy steamer bound for Sunderland and more coal; the elaborate wharfing of the barque:—all these things on a hot still day can exercise an hypnotic influence more real and strange than the open sea. The romance and mystery of the sea may indeed be more ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Exhibit B, with scratched face, tattered raiment, and grimy features, stood in the doorway. The witness for the State looked in dumb amazement at the wreck. Miss Morgan saw Bud, and her temper rose—not at him, but at his adversary. Exhibit A sulkily turned his face from Exhibit B, and Exhibit B seemed ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... He looked for a moment over his pince-nez in Ivor's direction and then, without saying anything, returned to the grimy little sixteenth-century account books which were now his favourite reading. He knew more about Sir Ferdinando's household expenses than about ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... a rush, grimy fists flying. Jerry feinted just once, side-stepped and caught him prettily on the point of the jaw. The blow was beautifully timed, and the fellow dropped like ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... promptly, shoving his grimy hands into pockets that contained several marbles, a ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... mine was a very old fashioned house, dark and dingy all day long, with heavy old chandeliers and black old oak, and dead flowers in broken flower-pots surrounding a grimy grass-plot in the rear. On this latter my bedroom window looked; and never am I likely to forget the vile music of the cats throughout my first long wakeful night there. The second night they actually woke me; doubtless they had been busy ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... they stood, not a spark of fire was lingering, but some wood-ash still retained a feeble memory of warmth; and three little children (blest with small advance from babyhood) were huddling around, with hands, and faces, and sharp grimy knees poking in for lukewarm corners; while two rather senior young Carroways were lying fast asleep, with a jack-towel over them. But Tommy was not there; that gallant Tommy, who had ridden all ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... cigar. There is a shop on the ground-floor of No. 15, where ancient pieces of stove-pipe and a few fire-irons are exposed for sale. Von Holzen, having pushed open the door, stood waiting at the foot of a narrow and grimy staircase. He knew that in such a shop in such a quarter of the town there is always a human spider lurking in the background, who steals out upon any human fly that may pause ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... flames. A man stepped quietly up to Mr. Morris, and looking at him, I saw that it was Mr. Montague. He was usually a well-dressed man, with a kind face, and a head of thick, grayish brown hair. Now his face was black and grimy, his hair was burnt from the front of his head, and his clothes were half torn from his back. Mr. Morris sprang up when he saw him, and said ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... him the swishing of the palm branches had been transformed into the long-drawn hum of Pall Mall. So the spirits went their several ways, wandering back along strange, untraced tracks of the memory, while the weary, grimy bodies lay senseless under the palm-trees in the Oasis ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... from the ragbag, too, it was so tattered and patched. But he had forgotten to take off his silver cuff-buttons, and the shoes he wore looked sadly out of place below the grimy jeans overalls. He was obliged to wear a pair of bright tan-coloured shoes, so new that they squeaked. They were the only ones he had, for his old ones had been thrown away the day before. At first he was tempted to go barefoot, but the November wind was chilly, although the ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... so." Jack turned and hastened towards the stables. He crossed the lawn, threaded his way among the low sod breastworks, where the infantry lay grimy and exhausted, and entered the garden. She was not there. He hurried to the stables; Lorraine met him, holding ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... a visit to the bedside of a sick peasant and making his way along the straggling street towards his own modest dwelling, which stood near the inn, when he met a tall stranger of most dilapidated appearance, whose clothes were creased and dirty, and whose head was encircled by a stained and grimy handkerchief. He wore no hat; his face was disfigured with blotches of an ugly colour and, maybe, an uglier significance; his trousers were most atrociously rent and tattered; he walked with a limp, and shivered in the cold night air. This unpromising-looking ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... quivered, but even at three some of the lessons of poverty had been learned. He surrendered the horse obediently, but Susan saw the little rough head go down tight against the man's collar, and saw the clutch of the grimy little hand. ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... first row, and took a bucket from the last man of the second row, to fill. Meanwhile the first bucket was being passed on from hand to hand through a dozen pairs when it reached Uncle Dick, who seized it, hurled it up against the grimy windows of the works, and then passed it to the first man of ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... the lock was almost impassable; the landing-place being steep and high, and the launch at a long distance. Near a dozen grimy workmen lent us a hand. They refused any reward; and, what is much better, refused it handsomely, without conveying any sense of insult. "It is a way we have in our countryside," said they. And a very becoming ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fallacy, which I did not know existed until I read Mr. Spielmann's "History of Punch." In that he refers to the very "oft-quoted drawing (lately used as an advertisement), the idea of which reached him from an anonymous correspondent. It is that of a grimy, unshaven, unwashed, mangy-looking tramp, who sits down to write, with a broken quill, a testimonial for a firm of soap-makers. A further point of interest about this famous sketch was that Charles Keene was deeply offended by it at first, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... days (the hot days of summer, and the cold days of winter), when we had to sit for hours on hard wooden benches, before uncomfortable desks, bending over grimy slates and ink-besprinkled "copy books," and poring over studies in which we took no interest—geography, which we learned by rote; arithmetic, which always evaded us, and grammar, which we never could ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... know?' Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbour, as Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb in the story-teller's direction meanwhile. 'Seems like a parson somehow. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... received with a hearty welcome and krapfen; and the wandering family, who were not at all respectable, but were treated with some distrust and more commiseration—the traveling tinker, his dark-eyed, dark-skinned wife and saucy, grimy children, who were barred and bolted with their barrow, their rags and their kettles in the barn that night as in a traveler's rest—ate with marvelous relish their bountiful-gleanings of this great ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... following with her handbag, stopped to look at his tennis shoes before he set foot upon the white rug, and dusted off the bag with a somewhat grimy handkerchief before he stood it on the white-tiled hearth. The Lad knows how I feel about the room, and though he races into his own with muddy feet, stands in awe of the place where only girls are made ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... I found myself in a narrow, dark street with high houses on either side. A grimy lamp with the word "Hotel" in half-obliterated characters painted on it hung above my head, announcing that I had arrived at my destination. As I paid off the cabman another cab passed. It was apparently the ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... "I could not. It is impossible." She looked up at him, holding the little victim pressed close in her arms, utterly regardless of its rough and grimy coat. Her eyes were ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... a pile of tea boxes, glancing aimlessly around, and drumming with his fingers on his walking stick, as if it were a flute. It was difficult for me, a man dressed like a tramp, with a porter's knot over my shoulders, and grimy with coal dust, to open up a conversation with such a dandy. But to my astonishment I noticed that he never took his eyes off me, and that an unpleasant, greedy, animal light shone in those eyes. I came to the conclusion that the object of my curiosity must be hungry, and after glancing ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... the talk of women, spread-eagled on the wall and hidden by the yew shade, but then, again, he might chance upon men who were looking for him and find himself very suddenly with a gunshot through him, or packed along with the cockroaches in the grimy hold of the Good Intent. Captain Penman was a singularly unsociable shipmate at the best of times for a man of Eben's profession, and might even go the length of throwing him overboard some dark night, merely, as it were, ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... they were. Grace and Baby Truscott were in readiness to welcome paterfamilias long before Mrs. Stannard, like sister Anne on the watch-tower, reported the cloud of dust that told of the coming of the Laramie stage, and when that grimy vehicle finally drew up at the gate, and two eager warriors sprang out (maybe there were not dozens of watching eyes along the row!), there was Maid Marion down the walk with a troop of the garrison children flocking about her, and Mrs. Stannard (by special arrangement and request) was ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Montagues, and Nortons of the age. Other modes of intellect bring together as strange companies. Silk-gowned professor of languages, give your arm to this sturdy blacksmith, and deem yourself honored by the conjunction, though you behold him grimy from the anvil. All varieties of human speech are like his mother tongue to this rare man. Indiscriminately let those take their places, of whatever rank they come, who possess the kingly gifts to lead armies or to sway a people—Nature's generals, her lawgivers, her kings, and with them also ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pavements. Indoors there was the steady thud of the engine, and the great hammers clanked and the belts swept through the air with a deafening whirr, while the workmen drew blackened hands across their grimy foreheads and John Randolph gave a sigh of longing for the cool forest chambers of Hollywood, as he leaned over to exchange a cheery word with Richard Trueman, beside whom he had been working for over a ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... small boy, with his face crumpled up into a grin, pointed a thin grimy finger past the young man, and he turned and saw the ladies. He doffed his cap and jumped down and tapped out his pipe, and the dogs sprang up expectant;—Punch, grave as ever but light on his feet for instant start; Scamp twisting himself into figure-eights, and rending the air with such ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... black and grimy, which, being about seventy years of age, and wrought before pianoforte builders had sent up the pitch to make their instruments brilliant, was nearly a note flatter than the parson's. While an argument as to the true pitch was in ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... being so I was completely at the mercy of the men in the house. Indeed, a rat caught in a trap, was never more firmly laid by the heels than I. At about half-past seven o'clock a small trap-door, which I had not noticed near the ground and the main door, was opened, and a grimy hand made its way in and placed upon the floor a cup of coffee and a roll. Then it was closed once more and made secure. I drank the coffee and munched the roll, and, if the truth must be confessed, poor as they were felt ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... into contact with sex in some horrible and shameful way. That is one of the greatest misfortunes that can happen to any of us, and unfortunately it happens to many. Boys and girls are allowed to grow up in ignorance. The girls perhaps know nothing till they have to know all. The boys learn from grimy sources. I was speaking on this subject at one of our great universities the other day, and afterwards many of the men came and talked to me privately. With hardly a single exception they said to me—"Our parents told us nothing. ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... a living city. Then, second by second, the stigmata of decay became more and more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild growth; windows staring blindly; walls splotched with lichens and grimy where the rains ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... necessary causeways above seas of mud, but in dry weather every one abandons them, to walk straight to his destination over the uninterrupted flats. Bannon set down his hand bag to button has ulster, for the wind was driving clouds of smoke and stinging dust and an occasional grimy snowflake out of the northwest. Then he sprang down from the sidewalk and made his way through the intervening bogs and, heedless of the shouts of the brakemen, over a freight train which was creaking its endless length across his path, ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... bare and very dirty room, which could only claim kinship with a civilized shaving-saloon by virtue of the grimy towel thrown across the back of the solitary chair. A Yiddish theatrical bill of some kind, illustrated, adorned one of the walls, and another bill, in what may have been Chinese, completed the decorations. From behind a curtain heavily brocaded with filth a little Chinaman appeared, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... out, but I declare the din rang in my ears the whole night after. A very nice, respectable-looking body she was, with jet-black eyes like diamonds, and a rosy, countrified complexion, quite a treat to see in that grimy place, her widow's cap as white as snow, but oh, such a tongue! She would give me all her spiritual experiences—how she was converted by an awakening minister in Cat-alley, and yet had a great respect for such ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... milliner's apprentice who reads this, expecting a Reginald Montressor in straits, to peruse no further. The young man was no other than Thomas McQuade, ex-coachman, discharged for drunkenness one month before, and now reduced to the grimy ranks of the ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... burning coal, through which the air was sucked with increasing roar. The round, red mouths of the hundred craters snapped their jaws for coal, which was fed them by brawny men whose faces were streaked with grimy perspiration, and their bodies almost overcome by heat. The hundred furnaces are kept at almost white heat ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... eleven days of heart-breaking lonely toil in that grimy dungeon, hampered for lack of tools, working with rotten materials, naked and sweaty, grimed, spent, profane, exhausted, everything was ready for the experiment—the strangest, surely, in the annals of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... they had been vacant only two days, I had no further interest in them, and with some excuse I made my way out, glad to escape from that fetid atmosphere of garlic and onions. So I went from house to house; stumbling over dirty children; climbing grimy stairs, catching glimpses of crowded sweat-shops; peering into all sorts of holes called rooms by courtesy; inhaling a hundred stenches in as many minutes; gaining an insight that sickened me into the squalid life of the quarter. Sometimes I began to hope that at last I was on ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... Kirkburn, the usual lair of this avaricious nobleman. It was a keep of the sixteenth century, and looked as if it had never been papered or painted since Queen Mary's time. But it was near the collieries; and within its blackened walls, and among its bleak fields and grimy trees, Lord Restalrig chose to live alone, with an old man and an old woman for his attendants. The woman had been his nurse; it was whispered in the district that she was also his illegal-aunt, or perhaps even, so to speak, his illegal stepmother. At all events, she ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copybook. The wooden fire shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when it had become too grimy for use. The logs and boards in his vicinity he covered with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft to have it at hand at ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... sobbing heard, for grimy-faced Elizabeth rushed forward, plumped down beside the boy, and took his head to her breast, to rock him to ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... Their feasts, ceremonies, griefs, are quaint and full of colour and the human touch. Their simple state of life and humble dress take nothing from their native courtesy. Behold yon sandalled and manta- (cheap calico) clad worker. He will never think of addressing us without taking off his grimy and battered hat, nor will he speak to his acquaintance or fellow worker save as "Don"—Don Tomas, Don Juan, or whatever it may be. His first salutation in the morning is always to ask how we have slept. Indeed ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... rose and filled his pipe which they had permitted him to keep. A stranger coming into the cabin might not have guessed that Casey was a prisoner. When the table was cleared and Hank set about washing the dishes, Casey picked up a grimy dish towel branded black in places where it had rubbed sooty kettles, and grinned cheerfully at Paw while he dried a tin plate. Paw eyed him dubiously over a stinking pipe, spat reflectively into the woodbox and crossed his legs the other ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... woman to be found, probably, at that hour in the whole of London, appeared from a lower storey in answer to his summons. Pushing her hair off a grimy forehead with a grimier hand, she listened to his directions, staring vacantly, as is the manner of her kind, but understanding them, nevertheless, and not incapable of remembering their purport: they were short and ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... anxiety for some tidings from California, had promised that if any letter came, she would not even wait for the post, but forward it by special messenger. And thus, that very same evening, I received a grimy epistle, in an unknown hand, with the postmark of Sacramento. Tearing it open, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... losing things, does it?" And he smiled engagingly up into the tall man's face—Johnnie's own eyes, large-pupilled, black-lashed, full of laughter in their clear depths. Gray Stoddard stared down at them silently for a moment. Then he pushed the handle of his umbrella into the boy's grimy little hand. ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... the temptations of strong drink and the many shames and sorrows that go with it. Make the life of your community cheerful and pleasant and interesting, you reformers, provide men with recreation which will not harm them, if you want to take away the power of the gilded saloon and the grimy boozing-ken. Parks and play-grounds, libraries and music-rooms, clean homes and cheerful churches,—these are the efficient foes of intemperance. And the same thing is true of gambling and lubricity and all the other ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... before. Constantly in the front was Sutro himself, coat flung aside, sleeves rolled up. In the midst of the flying dirt, great heat, bad air, dripping slush, and slippery mud he worked side by side with the grimy, half-naked miners, thus showing himself capable not only of planning a great work, but of seeing personally that it was well done, no matter with what sacrifice to ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... own door they espied the passing craft: a single boat, not six; a tiny, cabinless, one-funnelled, unclean, crawling thing, dimly made out in the early dusk of the forested shore which it servilely hugged as if doing all it could to hide its grimy ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... only did Bruce reach daintily forward and grip the grimy bit of sugar between his mighty jaws. Vivier stroked the collie's head while Bruce wagged his tail and munched the sugar and blinked gratefully up at the donor. Mahan looked on, enviously. "A dog's got forty-two teeth, ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... door on the third floor banged, and Nance Molloy, a white figure against her grimy surroundings, picked her way gingerly down the slippery steps. Her cheap, cotton skirt had exactly the proper flare, and her tailor-made shirtwaist was worn with the proud distinction of one who conforms in line, if not in material, to the mode of ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... the Soldier's interest," asserted Polychrome, dancing around the grimy workshop until her draperies formed a cloud around her dainty form. "For sentimental reasons a man might like to see his old head once more, just as one likes to revisit an ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... that Glen finished his work was very hot. He had been working hard in the hope of completing the job by nightfall and was wet and grimy with perspiration and dirt. As he carried an armful of stalks to the shock he noticed a boy standing there dressed in a ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... must have presented a quaint appearance. My hair was full of twigs and other foreign substances. My face was moist and grimy. My mouth hung open. I wanted to sit down. My legs felt as if they had ceased ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... it that Bill and his helper were as grimy as stokers of a furnace. Lenore began to choke with the fine dust and to feel her eyes smart and to see it settle on her hands and dress. She then had appreciation of the nature of a ten-hour day for workmen cutting eighteen acres of barley. How would they ever cut the two thousand acres ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... there, sure enough!" said the vergeress next morning. She took the shining coin down from the dusty niche and turned it over and over in her grimy hands. Then she put it to her mouth and ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... tears away on his grimy knuckles and took up the tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened as he got the swing ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... strong, in a flat-chested, slouching sort of way, and had grown neglectful of even decency in his dress. He wore the American farmer's customary outfit of rough brown pants, hickory shirt, and greasy white hat. It differed from his neighbors, mainly in being a little dirtier and more ragged. His grimy hands were broad and strong as the clutch of a bear, and he "was a turrible feller to turn off work," as Council said. "I druther have Sim Burns work for me one day than some men three. He's a linger." He worked with unusual ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... dusty, grimy floor, batted his eyes, ruefully rubbed the back of his head, and marvelled at ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... of all these emblems of civilized commerce. Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue: rags limp, brilliant and soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers of books soiled, grimy, but stiff-backed, in virtue, perhaps, of their European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised clothespeg. ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad |
