"Uninviting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... could be said of the place where we stopped the next night, a place called Tyson's Wells. We slept in our tent that night, for of all places on the earth a poorly kept ranch in Arizona is the most melancholy and uninviting. It reeks of everything unclean, morally and physically. Owen Wister has described such a place in his delightful story, where the young tenderfoot dances for the amusement of ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... two seemed the only pedestrians that had ventured forth that night in a locality so uninviting. On either side the houses pressed closer upon them. Touching a wall here and there, John Steele experienced the vague sensation that he had walked that way on other occasions, long, long ago. Or was it only a bad dream that again stirred him? Through ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... what she calls order? She is so good a woman, so untiring, so unselfish, so conscientious, so irritating. Her rooms are so clean, her servants so well managed, her children so well dressed, her dinners so well cooked; the whole house so uninviting. Everything about her is in ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... and brandy personage, scouted the idea, and thought the matter settled, by pointing to two or three young camels and asking the editor if he thought any man, Turk or Christian, would think of eating one so lank, meagre, and uninviting, as himself, when they had so much capital food of another sort at their elbow. "Take your share of the liquor while it is passing, man, and set your heart at ease as to the dinner, which I make no doubt ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... this side of the range are composed of brown rocks and earth, having little or no vegetation upon them, and are just as uninviting in appearance as the light-brown hills which fringe the coast of Arabia, as seen by voyagers on the Red Sea. Further up the hill, in the central folds of the range, this great sterility changes for a warm rich clothing of bush-jungle and a little grass. Gum-trees, myrrh, and some ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... longer in the uninviting and uninteresting spot, we ordered our hammocks, set out at noon, and, following the line over which we had travelled, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... very like one in England at the end of November— the air cold and damp—and I found the chill from wet clothes and an east wind anything but agreeable. The country also was extremely uninviting, and I thought its aspect more gloomy than that of Nova Scotia. Sometimes we traversed swamps swarming with bullfrogs, on corduroy roads which nearly jolted us out of the vehicle, then dreary levels abounding in spindly hacmetac, hemlock, and birch-trees; next we would go down into a ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... at the tap, then foraged for breakfast. Persistence turned up a spirit-stove, a half-bottle of methylated, a packet of tea, a tin or two of biscuit, as many more of potted meats: left-overs from the artist's stock, dismally scant and uninviting in array. With these he made the discovery that he was half-famished, and found no reason to believe that the girl would be in any better case. An expedition to the nearest charcuterie was indicated; but after he ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... curled petals are never smoothed, the hot blasts leaves its ineffaceable blight. To me, the thought of marriage comes no more than to one who knows death sits waiting only for the setting of the sun, to claim his own. That phase of life is as inaccessible and uninviting to me, as Antartic circumpolar lands; and even in thought, I have no temptation to explore it. My future and my past are so interblended, that I could as easily tear out my heart and continue to breathe, as attempt to separate ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... grammar of Mr. Kirkham furnishes a clew by which the youthful mind is guided through the intricate labyrinth of verbs, nouns and pronouns; and the path which has been heretofore so difficult and uninviting, as to dampen the ardor of youth, and waste their energies in fruitless attempts to surmount its obstacles, is cleared of these obstructions by this pioneer to the youthful mind, and planted, at every turn, with friendly guide-boards to direct them in the right road. The ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... of the window across a dull and apparently uninviting prospect of roofs and chimneys, to where in the background a faint line of silver and a wheeling flock of sea gulls became dimly visible through the branches of the distant trees. The window itself was flung wide open, but the slowly ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... burned on the great dressing-table. Faint, solitary pictures broke the blankness of each wall. The carpet was rich, the bed impressive, and the basins on the washstand as uninviting as the bed. Lawford sat down on the edge of it in complete isolation. He sat without stirring, listening to his watch ticking in his pocket. The china clock on the chimney piece pointed cheerfully to the hour of dawn. It was exactly, he computed carefully, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... surmounted with a tuft of leaves resembling corn-leaves. In various parts of the islands, when there is a scarcity of food, the natives eat the root of the fern-tree, baked. It reminded me in appearance of tobacco, was tasteless, and uninviting in its looks; but I saw native men cut off great slices of it, which they ate as if they liked it. But as I told you before, their favorite food is poi, and, with a good supply of that and raw fish, a native is as happy as a plenty of good food can ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... went back to the well he sloshed himself thoroughly in the horse-trough and went to the house. He found breakfast ready, but his wife was not in sight. The older children were clamoring around the uninviting breakfast table, spread with cheap ware and with boiled potatoes and fried salt pork as ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... dusting out the church, and the sexton is usually about, sweeping the paths or cutting the grass. The church door will in most cases be open, and you can get the guidance you want from the best possible sources. A chat with the village sexton is seldom uninviting, and he can generally point out everything worth your observation. But the faculty of finding that of which you are in search will soon come to you. In the first place, the new portion of a churchyard—there is nearly ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... ugly uninviting place to look at, with but few visible signs of wealth. The earth, which had been burrowed out by these human rabbits in their search after tin, lay around in huge ungainly heaps; the overground buildings of the establishment consisted of a few ill-arranged ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... with interest. He was a rather fine-looking fellow, with a dark, though very clear skin, but had a hard, angry look of eye, a prominence of cheek-bone, and a squareness of jaw that gave him a rather uninviting aspect. As Hewitt rattled on, however, our neighbor's expression became ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... those narrower surroundings which men construct for themselves, and which form their daily shelter, their work-shop, their place of social influence. The human interest which our author sheds about the mill, the carpenter's shop, the dairy, the village church, and even the stiff, uninviting conventicle, shows that she looks on these as having a living continuity with the people whom she sets among them. Their artistic value is but a reflection of all that they mean to those for whom they have made the nearer and habitually enclosing world." The larger influence in the environment ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Barrens, the bad lands of the Arctic, the deserts of the Circle, the bleak and bitter home of the musk-ox and the lean plains wolf. So Avery Van Brunt found them, treeless and cheerless, sparsely clothed with moss and lichens, and altogether uninviting. At least so he found them till he penetrated to the white blank spaces on the map, and came upon undreamed-of rich spruce forests and unrecorded Eskimo tribes. It had been his intention, (and his bid for fame), to break up these white blank spaces and diversify them with the black markings of ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... give capital and credit to take the place of the European supply which has failed. One need not fear that the returns will be uninviting, for Europe would hardly have been supplying credit and capital to Latin America as a mere matter of amiability. Thus our capital must regenerate Latin-American prosperity, while our bankers, merchants, and manufacturers are engaged in making solid, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... smoke did not rise; but driven here and there by the squalls of wind, swirled about close to the ground in little clouds, like a flock of scattered sheep. It seemed as though it feared to rise in the grey, damp, uninviting atmosphere. The largest of the tents, in front of which Roman sentinels paced up and down, two and two, on guard, was wide open on the side towards the sea. The slaves who came out of the broad door-way with trays on their cropped heads-loaded with gold and silver vessels, plates, wine-jars, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... appeared to me that it would be judicious, under such smarting injuries as mine, to throw myself into a certain pond which was in the meadow where I stood (my remedies had always rather an extreme tendency); but it was thickly coated with green slime studded with frogs' heads, and looked uninviting. After contemplating it for a moment, I changed my opinion as to the expediency of getting under that surface, and walked resolutely off towards London; not with any idea of seeking my father and mother, but simply with that goal in view, as the end ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... proceeded slowly towards the river, critically examining the tall, picturesque buildings on either hand, cogitating the question which of them would best answer his purpose. They all seemed uninviting enough, for their windows were dark, most of them tightly shuttered; and, indeed, the thoroughfare looked like a street of the dead, the deserted appearance enhanced, rather than relieved, by the white moonlight lying on ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... grated in the lock. Opening, the door disclosed a dark and uninviting entry-hall, through which there breathed an air heavy with the dank and dusty odor of untenanted rooms. Hesitating on the threshold, over her shoulder the girl smiled kindly upon her commandeered esquire; and ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... children would, I think, find some of old Nurse's rules very much to be complained of indeed. Of these one was, that if the children did not finish the bowl of bread and milk at breakfast it was put away in the nursery cupboard and had to be eaten, cold and uninviting-looking as it had then become, before anything else at dinner-time. This was a sore trouble to the little brother and sister, more especially as if they did not finish the bread and milk they could not expect to have the treat waiting ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... to the little marsh, but though there was plenty of water, it all appeared thick and uninviting. Being scouts, the boys were very careful of what water they drank, and they looked suspiciously ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... follow. Sometimes the ventilation of the classroom is bad, and the foul air breathed on one Sunday is carefully shut in for use the next. Basement rooms are not seldom damp, or they have a bad odor, or the lighting is unsatisfactory, or the walls are streaked, dim and uninviting. If such things seem relatively unimportant, we must remember that the child's spiritual life is closely tied up with the whole range of his experiences, and that such things as lack of oxygen in the classroom, tired ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... to Montreal is a long day's journey, and the forepart is uninviting. In three voyages out of five, the North Pacific, too big to lie altogether idle, too idle to get hands about the business of a storm, sulks and smokes like a chimney; the passengers fresh from Japan heat wither in the chill, and a clammy dew distils from the rigging. That gray monotony of sea ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... all the thousands of islands that stud the bosom of the North Pacific, from the Paumotus to the Pelews, the Kingsmill and Gilbert Islands are the most uninviting ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... merely a huge gash in the face of a cliff. It was the Boers' causeway towards the north, their highway to safety. Retief's Nek lay to the westward, and formed a grinning death trap for any general who might try the foolish hazard of a single-handed attack Naauwpoort Nek, ugly and uninviting, faced south-east towards Harrismith. Golden Gate, named by a satirist—or a satyr—was merely a narrow chasm worn by wind and weather through the girdle of mountains. It looked towards the east, and was a mere pathway, which none but ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... had been continuing its smooth whir through fields, wooded lands, and queer, dead-and-alive little villages for some time before it drew up at last at a small station. Bereft by the season of its garden bloom and green creepers, it looked a bare and uninviting little place. On the two benches against the wall of the platform a number of women sat huddled together in the dampness. Several of them held children in their laps and all stared very hard, nudging one another as he descended from the train. A number of rustics stood about ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... would condescend to a loft and a truss of straw, in default of the neat little chilly chamber that is allotted him, so sick are his very limbs with long tramping, and so uninviting figures the further stretch in the moonlight to Chatelard, with its burnt-out carcase ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... supposed that nothing more is meant than the little town or city; by Cintra must be understood the entire region, town, palace, quintas, forests, crags, Moorish ruin, which suddenly burst on the view on rounding the side of a bleak, savage, and sterile-looking mountain. Nothing is more sullen and uninviting than the south- western aspect of the stony wall which, on the side of Lisbon, seems to shield Cintra from the eye of the world, but the other side is a mingled scene of fairy beauty, artificial elegance, savage grandeur, domes, turrets, enormous trees, flowers and ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... gray hairs with sorrow to the grave; add a nail to one's coffin. Adj. causing pain, hurting &c v.; hurtful &c (bad) 649; painful; dolorific^, dolorous; unpleasant; unpleasing, displeasing; disagreeable, unpalatable, bitter, distasteful; uninviting; unwelcome; undesirable, undesired; obnoxious; unacceptable, unpopular, thankless. unsatisfactory, untoward, unlucky, uncomfortable. distressing; afflicting, afflictive; joyless, cheerless, comfortless; dismal, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... ourselves upon an old mat, and peered round. The soiled bamboos and calabashes looked so uninviting that the doctor was for pushing on to Taloo that night, notwithstanding it was near sunset. But at length we concluded to ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... company with an old companion and friend. As Paul puts it in 2nd Corinthians, 'Not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon.' All thoughts of the future which do not give prominence to the idea of a bodily life open up but a ghastly and uninviting mode of existence, which cannot but repel those who are accustomed to the fellowship of their bodies, and they feel that they cannot think of themselves as deprived of that which was their servant and instrument, through all the years ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... rolled off this imposing list of titles La Pommeraye's sense of humour got the better of him. The rugged, uninviting land which he knew so well rose vividly before him; and the high-sounding terms which were heaped upon it in no way lessened its ruggedness. He turned to Roberval, and with a merry twinkle in his blue eye exclaimed: "King Francis is truly generous, most noble Sieur de Nor—you must pardon ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... the French capital February 28, 1879. Here they met another discouraging prospect, for the weather was cold and damp, the cabmen seemed brutally ill-mannered, their first hotel was chilly, dingy, uninviting. Clemens, in his note-book, set down his impressions of their rooms. A paragraph ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... with country-houses in all styles of architecture, from the characteristic national to the uncomfortable and cold foreign type. Houses that were meant to stand in ilex-groves under a purple sky and a sun of bronze look forlorn and uninviting under the gray sky of England and amid its trees leafless for so many months in the year: home associations seem impossible in a porticoed house suggestive of outdoor living and the relegation of chambers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... accustomed, if he is still sound, than one unbroken and new. Nor has habit this power merely as to the movements of an animal, it prevails no less as to inanimate objects. We are charmed with the places though mountainous and woody, [Footnote: Therefore uninviting, for mountain and forest had not in early time the charm which we find in them. Indeed the love of nature uncultivated and unadorned is for the most part, of modern growth.] where we have made a long sojourn. But what is most remarkable in friendship ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... but which were a new revelation to a person like myself, who had led a simple country life in the house of a clergyman with small means. When I saw my host carefully lay out these occult substances of uninviting appearance on a clean napkin, and then plunge once more into profound reflection at the sight of them, my curiosity could be no longer restrained. I ventured to say, "What are those things, Mr. Dexter, and are we ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... the door behind him. The room was chilly and uninviting, with a lofty ceiling and a hideous wallpaper. There was a gas stove at the far end of the room, turned very low, and hissing softly ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... that mental culture requires from him no further effort; he relinquishes that portion of his labour and devotes all his energies to the sale of the bodily nourishment, consisting of oranges and peaches, according to season, of a very sickly and uninviting description; these he follows with sugar in various preparations of stickiness, supplementing the whole with pea-nuts and crackers. In the end he becomes without any doubt a terrible nuisance; one ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... at his command, Scott was able almost to dwell in the age of the Covenant hence the extraordinary life and brilliance of this, his first essay in fiction dealing with a remote time and obsolete manners. His opening, though it may seem long and uninviting to modern readers, is interesting for the sympathetic sketch of the gentle consumptive dominie. If there was any class of men whom Sir Walter could not away with, it was the race of schoolmasters, "black cattle" whom he neither trusted nor respected. But he could make or invent ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and we got accurate bearings. A course was laid for Royal Sound, where we supposed the whaling-station to be situated. We were going well in the fresh morning breeze, and were just about to round the last headland, when all at once a gale sprang up again, the bare and uninviting coast was hidden in heavy rain, and we had the choice of waiting for an indefinite time or continuing our voyage. Without much hesitation we chose the latter alternative. It might be tempting enough to come in contact with other men, especially as they were fellow-countrymen, but ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... listen to science than to spunk." And I resolved to heed the impartial needle. I was a little weary of the rough tramping: but it was necessary to be moving; for, with wet clothes and the night air, I was decidedly chilly. I turned towards the north, and slipped and stumbled along. A more uninviting forest to pass the night in I never saw. Every-thing was soaked. If I became exhausted, it would be necessary to build a fire; and, as I walked on, I couldn't find a dry bit of wood. Even if a little punk ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... various tasks, I knew, that should have claimed me; a visit to the police to secure a carte de sejour, the presentation of my credentials as an ambulance-driver, a polite notification to friends that I had arrived. These things should have been my duty and pleasure, but somehow they were uninviting. Nothing appealed to me, I realized with sudden enlightenment, except a certain appointment that I had ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... Redruth, near which is the lofty hill called Cairn Brea, whence they obtained a view over an extensive mining district. The country around, covered in many places with enormous blocks of granite, looked barren and uninviting in the extreme, and no one would have supposed that any portion of the soil in sight was the richest in the whole of our island. Within a few miles of the spot where they stood were, however, numerous copper and tin mines, many of which had yielded a large profit ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the vicinity of the markets on the two rivers are always dirty and crowded. The buildings themselves are outwardly dirty and uninviting. The interior, however, presents a sight worth witnessing. In the spring and summer it is filled with the most tempting displays of fruit and vegetables. One can hardly imagine that all this immense quantity will be eaten, but it does not require ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... kept from school because their parents could not get along without their help. Many of the school teachers seemed as poor as the farmers. As I passed the farm-houses in the evening they seemed bleak and uninviting. In the fire hole[214] of every house, however, there was a generous blaze and the bath tub out-of-doors was steaming for the customary evening hot dip ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... Paumanack, the Indian name of Long Island,) over a hundred miles long; shaped like a fish—plenty of sea shore, sandy, stormy, uninviting, the horizon boundless, the air too strong for invalids, the bays a wonderful resort for aquatic birds, the south-side meadows cover'd with salt hay, the soil of the island generally tough, but good for the locust-tree, the apple orchard, and the blackberry, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... uninviting, the bureau-washstand was of the cheapest, and the reflection Michael saw in its warped mirror would have made any boy with a particle of vanity actually suffer. Michael, however, was not vain. He thought little about himself, but this room was depressing. The floor ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... house which passed for a hotel received official response, and the east was breaking into a pallid rosiness before his thoughts permitted him to leave his seat by the window and stretch himself wearily on his uninviting bed. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... to keep clear of the uninviting throng caused the youth to ride on until the gathering gloom told him night was at hand. He then saw he had come to another place that had served as a camp for those who had traveled the way before him. There were the little stream of icy water, ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... dark and obscure above, but behind this foil there are wondrous tints that reward the believing eye. Those who seek him in his wild remote haunts are quite sure to get the full force of the sombre and uninviting aspects,—the wet, the cold, the toil, the broken rest, and the huge, savage, uncompromising nature,—but the true angler sees farther than these, and is never thwarted of his ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... money; let me tell you now that I always bitterly repented the bargain; and if you were still marriageable, and had a diamond bigger than your head, I should counsel even my maid against a union so uninviting and disastrous.—As for you, Mr. Hartley," she continued, turning on the secretary, "you have sufficiently exhibited your valuable qualities in this house; we are now persuaded that you equally lack manhood, sense, and self-respect; and I can see only one course open for you—to withdraw ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so hungry." The kindly look which he bestowed on Ovide as he came in with the smoking turkey will also never be difficult to conjure up. But the moment my eyes fell upon that unfortunate bird, my heart began to beat with renewed apprehensions. Never before had I seen such an ill-favored, uninviting-looking fowl placed upon a table; its naturally white, smooth skin was now as seamy, black and arid-looking as the mouth of an ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... character. Sometimes nature was too strong for art, and would break out in beauty, as the flower, rich in fragrance and delicate loveliness, when touched by the genial sun, will burst from the black and uninviting bud. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... she thrust a still dirtier beaker of milk upon us, and spat ostentatiously to emphasise the spirit of her hospitality. It takes much to stifle the honest thirst of war, but this was more than human nature could support, and the uninviting bowl passed round the staff untouched until it reached the less fastidious signallers. Five minutes at the crystal brook was worth all ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... be sat upon, some Elizabethan portraits on the walls showed stiff wooden personages, who seemed to have driven all the living persons out of the room. When the piano was opened, the black and white keys appeared cold and uninviting to the touch. ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland
... water whispered eerily; and Kerry and Seton disembarked, mounting a short flight of slimy wooden steps and crossing a roughly planked place on to a shingly slope. Climbing this, they were on damp waste ground, pathless and uninviting. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... of September the coast of Kamtchatka was reached. This coast was uninviting enough. "There the eyes rest painfully, and often fearfully, upon enormous masses of rock, which are already covered with snow in the beginning of September, and which never appear ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... a personal experience, but is told in spite of that fact and because it illustrates a side of war that is unfamiliar. It is unfamiliar for the reason that it is seamy and uninviting. With bayonet charges, bugle-calls, and aviators it ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... the comforts of the cars, it is to be said, that for the same price you can get far more comfortable riding in America. Their first class cars are beyond all praise, but also beyond all price; their second class are comfortless, cushionless, and uninviting. Agreeably with our theory of democratic equality, we have a general car, not so complete as the one, nor so bare as the other, where all ride together; and if the traveller in thus riding sees things that occasionally annoy ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... her eyes grazed his face inattentively. She followed him down the rough steps of planking and up an extremely dusty road—one could scarcely call it a street—to an uninviting building with crooked windows and a high, false front of ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... travel parallel to the Gold Coast which looks hot and uninviting, for there are but few patches of green or trees until Cape Coast Castle is reached. Here is a fort which must have impressed natives and slave dealers greatly in the past, a few houses and an imposing looking church dotted in the red sand. The whole line of the Coast ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... cliffs is wanting. The towers and walls of Castle Canon are yellowish-gray. But their forms are incomparably various and grotesque—in some instances sublime. The valley of Green River at this point is a cheerless sage-brush desert, as it is further north. To be sure, this uninviting stream, a couple of hundred miles further south, having united with the Grande, and formed the Rio Colorado, does indeed, by dint of burrowing deeper and deeper into the sunless chasms, become at last sublime. But here it gives no hint of its future somber glory. I remained ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... sidewalk; but in the rear the land sloped away till the basement-floor rose above-ground. Its unpainted walls were scorched to a rusty brown, and its sunken doors and low windows, filled here and there with a dusky pane, were cobwebbed and weather-stained, giving the whole building a most uninviting and desolate appearance. A flaxen-haired boy, in ragged "butternuts" and a Union cap, and an old man, in gray regimentals, with a bent body and a limping gait, were pacing to and fro before it, with muskets on their shoulders; but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... are, in a modern point of view, narrow and uninviting, yet if the visitor have a liking for the picturesque he will find much to interest him. There are plenty of streets crammed with old-time houses, thrusting out their upper stories beyond the lower, and with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the place had the odour of decayed wood. Mould clung to the half-plastered walls, cobwebs matted the ceilings, and rotted fungi covered the filth in the corners. Altogether it was a most uninviting hole, in which no self-respecting ghost would have made its home. When the time came to climb up to the little garret Bonner's followers rebelled. He was compelled to go alone, carrying the lantern, which one of the small boys had found. This part of the house was even ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... float on ether, or are mysteriously suspended upon nothing; where all the warm and felt accompaniments which give such an expression of strength, and life, and colour to our present habitation, are attenuated into a sort of spiritual element, that is meagre, and imperceptible, and wholly uninviting to the eye of mortals here below; where every vestige of materialism is done away with, and nothing left but certain unearthly scenes that have no power of allurement, and certain unearthly ecstasies with which it is impossible ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... now grew scattering, and the quarter of the town more neglected. Warwick felt himself wondering where the girl might be going in a neighborhood so uninviting. When she stopped to pull a half-naked negro child out of a mudhole and set him upon his feet, he thought she might be some young lady from the upper part of the town, bound on some errand of mercy, or going, perhaps, to visit an old servant or look for a new one. Once she threw a backward glance ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... to a lady. Aware of the custom of the country, he immediately resigned his seat, and went to look for another. When the lady took her seat by me I involuntarily drew my chair to a more respectful distance, there being something so particularly uninviting in her ladyship's appearance. On our arrival at Maysville, this lady, with her gentleman, told the captain that they were sorry they had not a cent wherewith to defray the expenses of their passage. Their luggage ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... until I Was rewarded by discovering a narrow bed, or cot of trellis-work, on which was a hard straw pallet and a small straw pillow; also, folded small, a kind of woolen sleeping garment. Too tired to keep out of even such an uninviting bed, I flung off my clothes, and with my moldy tweeds for only covering I laid me down, but not to sleep. The misery of it! for although my body was warm—too warm, in fact—the wind blew on my face and bare feet and legs, and made ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... ceased, and from just ahead there came back to us the stealthy padding of feet in wet soil. My hand closed on Hotchkiss' shoulder, and we listened together, warily. The steps were close by, unmistakable. The next flash of lightning showed nothing moving: the house was in full view now, dark and uninviting, looming huge above a terrace, with an Italian garden at the side. Then the blackness again. Somebody's teeth were chattering: I accused Hotchkiss ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... enough to accommodate a student's lamp, several account books and a blotting-pad, completed this uninviting galaxy. ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... eating with his father for the first time, Cook determined to remain a few days longer. A party of the officers went over to the island of Moa, where the ceremony was to be held, and found the king in a very dirty enclosure, drinking kava; and as the method of preparing this beverage was uninviting to Europeans, they went for a walk till about ten o'clock. Finding large numbers of people assembling in an open space near a large building they rejoined the king, taking off their hats and untying their hair, "that we might appear the more decent" in the eyes of the ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... groom on horseback had brought the message. The old man had led a life of indifferent repute, and that probably made him the more anxious to see my father, who proceeded at once to get ready for the uninviting journey. ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... arrived! One by one our men slipped into the communication trench. What a sense of well-being and of rest we all had! The little passage in the earth, so uninviting as a rule, seemed to us as desirable as the most sumptuous palace. We drew breath at last. We felt almost safe. But still, there was ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... were blown to bits, whilst nearly as many were badly wounded, and the rest scared out of their wits. What the airman doubtless did not know was that they were a party of Boche prisoners! Only about six British soldiers were killed. It made a ghastly mess at the cross-roads, which was a most uninviting spot ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... the Red Sea are the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. In the middle of the straits is the island of Perim, a sun-baked, bare and uninviting chunk of land that has great strategic value and little else. It absolutely commands the entrance to the Red Sea, and, naturally, is British. Nearly all strategic points in the East are British, from Gibraltar ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... Such houses, if tastefully furnished and embellished with suitable surroundings, as neat and well-kept grounds, fine trees, shrubbery, flowers, and climbing vines, will always attract more attention and admiration than the uninviting aspect of many more expensive structures. Money tastefully expended in this manner will always ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... is nicer, little baby's mother," she said graciously, having first bitten a piece of her own rather uninviting bread. "It was only packened up last night—but perhaps it was the taking it to bed. I took it to bed acos I didn't want nobody to see. But the bicsits is nice. Mayn't baby have a bicsit, little baby's mother? If I had got to the grandmother's cottage there'd have ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... deeds had reached that frosted little castle during the years she most required them. It had remained cold and uninviting, except as a place of shelter, and her soul had shrunk into a sort of knot—until Brent came. Only at his coming did her hungry nature begin to uncurl;—only at the coming of this polished gentleman from ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... of the ascent I hurriedly opened a door, and, perfectly at home, entered a small room. I paused motionless upon the threshold, and glanced feelingly around. The room contained nothing but a table covered with books and dust, a stiff oak arm-chair, a hard and uninviting-looking lounge, and on the mantel-piece, in two earthen vases, designed by Ziegler, the only ornaments of this poor retreat, a few dry, withered asters. No one expected me, I expected no one. There I remained until evening, waiting for nightfall, thinking ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... who it was, and her uninviting tone was a result of her knowledge. We are yet awaiting a systematic treatise on the psychology of women; perhaps they will some day be trained highly enough to analyze themselves. Until this happens, we must wait; for no man unites ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... not studied from the life with minute care, and whenever he did for a moment wander out of his limits, he made an egregious failure. But this task of his, to cast the sunshine of pathos and of genial mirth over the humblest, dullest, and most uninviting of our fellow-creatures, was a great social mission to which his whole genius was devoted. No waif and stray was so repulsive, no drudge was so mean, no criminal was so atrocious, but what Charles Dickens could ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... pretentious Eastern structures, was two stories in height, and perfectly quadrangular. The street on the west side was about twelve feet wide, that on the north not more than ten; so that one walking close to the walls, and looking up at them, would have been struck by the rude, unfinished, uninviting, but strong and imposing, appearance they presented; for they were of stone laid in large blocks, undressed—on the outer side, in fact, just as they were taken from the quarry. A critic of this age would have pronounced the house fortelesque in ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... in England; and with care he is sure to grow rich. The luxuries of life are in abundance, and very little dearer than in England, and most articles of food are cheaper. The climate is splendid, and perfectly healthy; but to my mind its charms are lost by the uninviting aspect of the country. Settlers possess a great advantage in finding their sons of service when very young. At the age of from sixteen to twenty, they frequently take charge of distant farming stations. This, however, must happen at the expense ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... empty of human occupants, and otherwise presented a bare and uninviting aspect, the only furniture in it consisting of a table and two chairs. It was imperfectly lighted by a small window looking out upon the cloisters which surrounded the courtyard that the prisoners had ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... not of themselves generate earnest thought. The vacant mind, that has not yet learned to think, is when thus left to solitude and stillness, quite as likely to go a wool-gathering, or to fall asleep, as to wrestle with some hard uninviting train of thought. The appliances and the invitations to mental application, if we have really learned to study, must be mainly in ourselves, not in our surroundings. Besides, the greater part of the actual thinking and study, that has to be done by those in professional ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... "What a dim, uninviting evening!" said Miss Grantley as we stood at the window looking out at the garden, where the roses seemed to droop heavy-headed in the moisture-laden air, and the song of the birds was hushed, or only an occasional chirp ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... purple cloudlands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing sheep in the Scottish Highlands under changing skies, with headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea, forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in sight of such a chill ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the Oswego river. Advancing to the southeast the emigrants struck the Hudson river, and, according to Cusick's story, followed its course southward to the ocean. Here a separation took place. A portion remained, and kept on their way toward the south; but the "main company," repelled by the uninviting soil and the turbulent waste of waves, and remembering the attractive region of valleys, lakes, and streams through which they had passed, retraced their steps northward till they reached the Mohawk river. Along this stream and ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... undressing to await the result of the errand. A minute later they were puffing and blowing in adjoining baths, with the icy-cold water raining down on their glowing bodies. A brisk drying with the borrowed towels, a return to their uninviting togs and they were ready to be off. Steve couldn't find Danny, but he left the towels on the table in the rubbing room and he and Tom climbed the stairs again. In the hall above there was a large notice board and Tom stopped to glance at some of ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... had been selected was well away from the University, and admirably adapted to an encounter such as this. The trees in the background sheltered the combatants from observation in one direction, but for the rest the common lay open and uninviting, and the chill morning air blowing across it made the onlookers think longingly ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... luxury of the noble chapters must be set the silence, the vigils, the fasts of La Trappe. This monastery stood in a gloomy valley, sunk among wooded hills. The church and the surrounding buildings were mostly old, and all sombre and uninviting. Each narrow cell was furnished with but a mattress, a blanket and a table, without chair or fire. The monks were clad in a robe and a hood, and wore shoes and stockings, but had neither shirt nor breeches. They shaved three ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... two weeks without failing once to eat at a proper table or to sleep in a comfortable bed. Sometimes we put up at the stark-looking hotels that loomed, raw and uninviting, in the larger towns; sometimes we had the pleasure of being welcomed at a little inn, where the host showed us a personal hospitality; but oftener we were forced to make ourselves "paying guests" at some house. We ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... these buildings was uninviting, the gloom and squalor of the interior cannot be described. The house No. 5 was, in a special degree, dirty and dilapidated. The water, which oozed from the wall, trickled down the dark and filthy staircase. On the second floor, a wisp of straw had been laid ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... little oil-lamp. With this feeble light he turned his back upon the lovely moonlight, and stumbled down into a low-ceilinged cabin, darksome and dirty, with berths which were as black and dingy, and altogether as uninviting as the shelves made to hold coffins ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... getting some good specimens, finer than any we had yet met with. In the same shop were also some Bajans, or sea-gipsies, whose stock-in-trade consisted of a miscellaneous collection, including dried trepang, strings of very uninviting dried fish, smaller pearl-shells, little skins of animals and birds, and rattan canes in the rough, but much cheaper and better than those to be bought at Singapore or elsewhere. The rattan is the stem of a creeping prickly palm, the scientific name of which is the calamus. The ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... himself in these difficult places often enough to begin with, and a little special study of such shots at the outset will prove a very valuable investment of time. The ball should be thrown down carelessly at different places, and should be played from the spot at which it settles, however uninviting that spot may be. ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... the room was uninviting. There was little display in the work of the police. Utility and purpose was the keynote of their lives and at the year's end the tally of work accomplished was the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... appearance of the house is uninviting, the interior is warm and dainty. The odor of delicate hot-house plants is in the slightly enervating atmosphere of the apartments. It is a Russian fancy to fill the dwelling-rooms with delicate, forced ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... terrible Kabogo around whose name mystery has been woven by the superstitious natives—not the Kabogo whose sullen thunder and awful roar were heard when crossing the Rugufu on our flight from the Wahha—-but a point in Ukaranga, on whose hard and uninviting rocks many a canoe has been wrecked. We passed close to its forbidding walls, thankful for the calm of the Tanganika. Near Kabogo are some very fine mvule trees, well adapted for canoe building, and there are no loud-mouthed natives ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... my burden on my back I turned to gaze awhile, First at the uninviting track, Then ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... stuck; there was nothing to do but follow the best ruts and go straight on, hoping for better things. The dread of coming to a standstill and being obliged to get out in that eight or ten inches of uninviting mud was a very appreciable factor in our discomfort. Fortunately, the clutch held well and the motor was not stalled. When we passed the corner beyond the cemetery the road was much better, though still so soft the high speed could be used ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... would show a gross profit of even fifteen per cent. on their gross output. If more than fair or going returns are earned, then new capital flows into competition and the surplus again shrinks to an uninviting point. The same is true in wheat, corn, and cotton—big prices invite fresh investments and the planting of broader acreage. Hence the sorry spectacle of the cotton planter who, in 1905, will receive no more for his twenty per cent. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... to turn home into a restaurant and a sleeping bunk, spending all your leisure somewhere else, and going home only when all other places are shut up." A young man, it is admitted, may find his home uninviting through causes for which he has not himself to blame. Still, even then he may do much to change its character, and by his pleasant and cheerful bearing may bring into it sunshine ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... friends who remained in the East. Presently these friends also, seized upon by some vast impulse which they could not control, in turn arranged their affairs and departed for the West. Franklin looked about him at the squat buildings of the little town, at the black loam of the monotonous and uninviting fields, at the sordid, set and undeveloping lives around him. He looked also at the white wagons moving with the sun. It seemed to him that somewhere out in the vast land beyond the Missouri there beckoned to him a mighty hand, the index finger ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... There was an uninviting coolness in the quality of Loraine's tone—almost a protest. "Won't tomorrow do?" She stood still, holding the door ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... instant cablegram, and jealously held records had been broken while the Puncher quartered those indecent seas and heated up her bearings. It was almost too much to have to come back empty-handed. It was quite too much to have to run for shelter under the lee of Adra's uninviting coral reef. And to be told by an acting engineer that he would have to stay a week was utterly beyond ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... black spot it caught the onlooker's glance at once. It was a moving black spot, though it remained in one place—on the cement seat that circled a copper-beech-tree for the convenience of villagers waiting for the cars. It was extraordinary that any one should choose this uninviting, snow-covered resting-place, unless ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... mounted an eastward-bound motor-bus. The night, as I have already stated, was exceptionally dark. There was no moon, and heavy clouds were spread over the sky; so that the deserted East End streets presented a sufficiently uninviting aspect, but one with which I was by no means unfamiliar and which certainly in ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... at each other, glanced to the south where the gray expanse of sage presented an uninviting vista, fidgeted a little and, one by one, swung down from their saddles. The officer observed his deputies and finally ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... the abstract are each and all so uninviting, not to say alarming, but, associated with certain eyes and hair and tender little gowns, it is curious how they lose their terrors; and, as with vice in the poet's image, we end by embracing what we began by dreading. You see the fault becomes a virtue when it ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... exalted above its station by being called The Day Nursery and another room equally dingy and uninviting was known as The Night Nursery. The slice of a house was inhabited by the very pretty Mrs. Gareth-Lawless, its inordinate rent being reluctantly paid by her—apparently with the assistance of those ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... form the bulk of their reading, but because the books are "dry." Those which are interesting are apt to be lengthy, and the mind consequently becomes confused by the multitude of details, while the brief ones often contain merely the dry bones of fact, uninviting and unreal. An attractive book which can be mastered in a single term, is the necessity of our schools. The present work is an attempt to meet this want in American histories. In its preparation there has been an endeavor ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... little fire is gleaming. A dead body, covered from head to foot with new white linen, is lying under a young oak-tree. A wooden ikon is lying on its breast. Beside the corpse almost on the road sits the "watch"—two peasants performing one of the most disagreeable and uninviting of peasants' duties. One, a tall young fellow with a scarcely perceptible moustache and thick black eyebrows, in a tattered sheepskin and bark shoes, is sitting on the wet grass, his feet stuck out straight in front of him, and is trying to while away the time with work. He bends his long ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... carved with scrolls and figures; the cabinet designed with architectural outline, and fitted up inside with steps and pillars like a temple; chairs which are wonderful to look upon as guardians of a stately doorway, but uninviting as seats; tables inlaid, gilded, and carved, with slabs of marble or of Florentine Mosaic work, but which from their height are as a rule impossible to use for any domestic purpose; mirrors with richly carved and gilded frames are so many evidences of a style which is palatial rather than domestic, ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... He heaved a great sigh of content and relief. The very atmosphere here seemed to be different. As far as the lodging itself was concerned, it was as bare, as devoid of comfort as those sort of places—so-called chambres garnies—usually were in these days. The chairs looked rickety and uninviting, the sofa was of black horsehair, the carpet was threadbare, and in places in actual holes; but there was a certain something in the air which revealed, in the midst of all this squalor, the presence of a man of ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... ago, the inducements to enter upon an industrial career were much more limited than they are at the present day. The industries of the West of Scotland were then few and comparatively uninviting. The iron trade was in its infancy, and those engaged in it lacked the resources for the acquisition of wealth that were evolved from the discovery of blackband mineral deposits by Mushet, the application of the hot blast by Neilson, and the introduction of other ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... the development and extension of certain well-known local firms. In fact the present appearance of the town is that of an industrial centre of the smaller and pleasanter sort, but with the inevitable accompaniment of mean houses and uninviting suburbs. The main streets of the newer parts are spacious and clean, but are reminiscent ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... by this process that they were all together in Marion's den, as Eurie called her stuffed and uninviting little room. Never was mortal more glad to be interrupted than she, as she unceremoniously tossed aside school-books and papers, and made room ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... field when plowing, or to the woods when chopping; and preaching acceptably as a local preacher in his own cabin, or in some neighboring cabin, on Sundays. Did it require any great heroism to exchange all these for the less laborious but more conspicuous calling of a traveling preacher, uninviting as that calling was at that period, yet furnishing opportunities for mental improvement such as his soul longed for? Nay, rather, was not he the greater hero who remained among the untitled and comparatively unknown laymen, and faithfully discharged the ...
— The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society • Thomas Aiken Goodwin
... and Medina in barren and uninviting Arabia. When it started on that expansion, whereby it overspread half of the known world, Syria, from its situation, was naturally the first country to tempt its restless and devoted Arab warriors. Within ten years of ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... indecision. He was going forward, would go forward in anything he undertook; that was a part of his make-up. He was merely seeking the best place to unpack and a convenient spot to tether Buck. They were going to make camp either right here or nearer the cave, perhaps in it. She looked at the uninviting hole and shivered. She would know his decision when King saw fit ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... and has several very nice buildings, and is therefore an exception, but even in the case of Wiborg the shop windows are small and uninviting, the streets are shockingly laid with enormous boulder stones and sometimes even bits of rock, while pavements, according ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... neither the grace of the latter nor the sleepy comeliness of our own sheep, black and white cows whose points would not be much thought of by judges at an agricultural show, goats of all sorts of breeds, and finally pigs of a most lanky and uninviting appearance, form the stock of the farms. Heaps of chickens of all sorts run about everywhere, and enjoy fine dust-baths by the side of ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... uninviting. It had a furtive, dishonest look about it. Captain Cable saw this. He was a man who studied weather and the outward signs of a man. He rang the bell all the louder, and stood squarely on the threshold until the door was opened by a dirty man in a dirty apron, who looked ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... the house, not even a shade tree or cultivated plant of any description, but only some large corrales, or enclosures, for the cattle, of which there were six or seven thousand head on the land. The absence of shade and greenery gave the place a desolate, uninviting aspect, but if I was ever to have any authority here this would soon be changed. The Mayordomo, or manager, Don Policarpo Santierra de Penalosa, which, roughly done into English, means Polycarp of the Holy Land abounding in Slippery Rocks, proved ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... was the name extending the whole length of the building, with a letter under each window, making the people who looked out dreadfully conspicuous. Perhaps it was that "Temperance" always suggested to my mind rusks and weak tea. It was uninviting. It might have been called the "Total Abstinence" Hotel, from the lack of anything to intoxicate or inthrall the senses. It was designed with an eye to artistic dreariness. It was so much too large for the settlement, that ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... stiffness and formality and discomfort. No wonder it was used only for weddings and funerals! The modern drawing-room is intended, primarily, as a place where a hostess may entertain her friends, and it must not be chill and uninviting, whatever else it may be. It should not be littered up with personal things—magazines, books and work-baskets and objects that belong in the living-room—but it welcomes flowers and objets d'art, collections of fans, or miniatures, or graceful ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... This uninviting picture had the effect of making Lisbeth hurry into the courtyard of the house in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, where she found a man smoking a pipe colored in a style that showed him ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... home the herring, and laid it on the bed before his sick mother. His own little heart was full, for he could not mistake the manner of Mrs.—for kindness. Mrs. Warburton looked at the uninviting food, and turned her head away. After awhile, it did seem to her as if the fish would taste good to her, and she raised herself up with an effort, and breaking off a small piece, put it languidly to her lips. The ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... domain on the banks of the Mersey almost opposite to Rock Ferry. Walking home, we looked into Mr. Thorn's Unitarian Chapel, Mr. B——'s family's place of worship. There is a little graveyard connected with the chapel, a most uninviting and unpicturesque square of ground, perhaps thirty or forty yards across, in the midst of back fronts of city buildings. About half the space was occupied by flat tombstones, level with the ground, the remainder being yet vacant. Nevertheless, there were perhaps ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... danger of the drifting ice prevented a landing. The month of August opened with calm seas and milder weather. Frobisher and his men were able to land in the ship's boat. They found before them a desolate and uninviting prospect, a rock-bound coast fringed with islands and with the ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... since I was a squat little slip of a shaver the word had a personal meaning for me. Perhaps, if the only other home of mine had been less uninviting, I should not have looked forward with such high beating of the heart to that cold home Anita was making for me. No, I withdraw that. It is fellows like me, to whom kindly looks and unsought attentions are as unfamiliar as flowers ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... out into the canal he flung them, then headlong he plunged into the dark and uninviting water and struck out to the right, in the same direction in which the canoe was going, keeping carefully in the shadow of the bank, on ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... He turned into his own street and his heart sank. Something had indeed touched his eyes and he saw new and terrible things. The row of houses looked as though they had come out of a child's playbox. They were all untrue, shoddy, uninviting. The waste space on the other side of the unmade street, a repository for all the rubbish of the neighborhood, brought a groan to his lips. He stopped before the gate of his own little dwelling. There were yellow curtains ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thieves," explained the Englishman as he guided his friend through the narrow doorway, then up a flight of rickety stairs, to a small room on the floor above. "He leaves all doors open for anyone to walk in, but, la! the interior of the house looks so uninviting that no one is ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... rooms no book is ever brought, no needle-work is introduced; from them no clatter of many tongues is ever heard. On a marble table in the middle of the room always stands a large pitcher of iced water; and from this a cold, damp, uninviting air is spread through the atmosphere ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... view in which he sees it, the neighbouring mountains lessen its effect very considerably. Excepting the Peak, the eye receives little pleasure from the general face of the country, which is sterile and uninviting to the last degree. The town, however, from its cheerful white appearance, contrasted with the dreary brownness of the back ground, makes not an unpleasing coup d'oeil. It is neither irregular in its plan, nor despicable in its style of building; and the churches and religious ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay • Watkin Tench
... become red. It is so called because of the dingy reddish color of the entire plant, and also because when the plant is handled or bruised it quickly changes to a reddish color. It is often a large bulky plant and rather uninviting. ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... fond woman's heart? Are there any remains of that clear, pure light which once looked out innocently from those bloodshot eyes? All this was so once. What does he think of now? Is he acting over the dark deed which brought him into this uninviting sleeping-place? Does he see that silent chamber into which a guilty man is stealing, with crime in his heart,—no, not in his heart; for he has none!—but in his thoughts, and remorseless ferocity to execute it? Does he see the gigantic shadows ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... average rural schoolhouse consists of one room, with perhaps a small hallway. The building is constructed without reference to architectural effect, resembling nothing so much as a large box with a roof on it. It is barren and uninviting as to its interior. The walls are often of lumber painted some dull color, and dingy through years of use. The windows are frequently dirty, and covered only by worn and tattered shades. There is ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... apartments consisted of one room, about ten by eight feet, which served as a dining-room, drawing-room, study, boudoir, kitchen, bedroom, and—from sheer force of habit, I was about to add bathroom; but as I have already hinted cold water on half-empty stomachs and chilly livers is uninviting; besides, soap costs something. Their furniture was antique but not massive; nor could any of it be fairly reckoned superfluous. All told, it consisted of a bedstead (three six-foot planks on four sugar cubes; the bedclothes—a pair of discarded overalls, a torn and ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... more than this in words, but his tone was so decidedly uninviting of further conversation that I almost concluded to say nothing more. But the drive promised to be a fairly long one, so I made ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... time we were again upon the road. It is a dreary place about the hill of Tepeyaca, or Guadalupe, and if the Virgin had not smiled upon the barren hill and made roses grow out of it, it would be as uninviting as one of the hills of the valley of Sodom. This hill is now called the "Mountain of Crosses," for upon it, in 1810, the first insurgent, Hidalgo, the priest of Dolores, won a battle against the royal troops, which should have been followed up by an entry into Mexico; but Providence ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... day that Leah first found her husband in the prison, and observed the coarse, uninviting fare that was served to the prisoners, she had daily prepared his food herself, and supplied it, too, from her scanty purse. By the permission of the jailer, this food was received twice a day from the hands ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott |
