|
|
|
More "Squalid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where not a blade of grass is allowed to grow. As to the other symptoms of devastation and obstruction, such as deserted houses, unfenced fields, and a general aspect of nakedness and ruin, I know not how much may be due to a normal lack of neatness in the rural life of Virginia, which puts a squalid face even upon a prosperous state of things; but undoubtedly the war must have spoilt what was good, and made the bad a great deal worse. The carcasses of horses were scattered along ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... have too many foreign claims to admit a prospect of domestic relief; though never did such objects demand it. I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsula, I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country. And what are your remedies? After months of inaction, and months of action worse than inactivity, at length comes forth the grand specific, the never-failing nostrum of all state physicians, from the days ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... contact with dirt and wickedness! Squalor and the miseries of poverty had always been as closely shut out of her life as they were from the trim prosperity of the precincts, and Miss Unity considered it fitting that they should be so. She knew that these squalid folk were there, close outside; she was quite ready to give other people money to help them, or to subscribe to any fund for their improvement or relief, but it had always seemed to her unbecoming and needless for a lady to know anything about ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... of the valley, and beyond, far below us, looms the town of Sorata. From this distance the red tile roofs, the soft blue, green, and yellow of its stuccoed walls, look indescribably fresh and grateful. A closer inspection will probably dissipate this impression; it will be squalid and dirty, the river-stone paving of its street will be deep in the accumulation of filth, dirty Indian children will swarm in them with mangy dogs and bedraggled ducks, the gay frescoes of its walls will peel in ragged patches, revealing the 'dobe of their base, and the tile roofs will be cracked ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the pirates lived in squalid splendour. They had numbers of slaves to wait upon them, the finest wines and foods, the richest dress and jewels, spoils of their travels. And when they had drunk and rioted in idleness to their heart's content they would once more set sail, and roam the seas ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... day the foundations of the temple have been discovered twelve to fourteen feet below the soil; but no church of Christ remains to illuminate the minds of the few squalid and lazy dwellers in the village of Aisayalouk. One cobbler's stall represented the whole manufacturing industry of Ephesus; and four boys playing a game like drafts, with pebbles, in front of it seemed the only public likely to patronize its theater, as I took note of its people and their occupations, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... hole of a place!" said the boy. "I don't mind quite a cottage if it's clean and cheerful, but this place is so grim and squalid. I can't tell you how glad I am you're not going to stay on here alone. It really isn't fit ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... helpless girl; and the shame that is never absent from insanity bears down the pride of strength, the bloody cravings of the wild beast. The lunatic moaned and drooped his shaggy head between his gaunt, squalid hands. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... summoned it, to crown it briefly with supernal glory. Turning at last from its cold immobility to the activity around us, I saw some representatives of the fallen race of California, as Indian bucks and squaws came from their squalid hovels to sell the trifling products of their industry, and stare at what to them is a perpetual miracle,—the passing train. Five races met upon that railroad platform, and together illustrated the history of the country. First, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... up the country, City Bushman, where you went, For you sought the greener patches and you travelled like a gent; And you curse the trams and buses and the turmoil and the push, Though you know the squalid city needn't keep you from the bush; But we lately heard you singing of the 'plains where shade is not', And you mentioned it was dusty — 'all was dry and ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... thus duly neglected by the whole crowd of boon companions, the remains of Yorick were consigned to the "new burying-ground near Tyburn" of the parish of St. George's, Hanover Square. In that now squalid and long-decayed grave-yard, within sight of the Marble Arch and over against the broad expanse of Hyde Park, is still to be found a tombstone inscribed with some inferior lines to the memory of the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... will hardly repay the trouble of waiting for the concierge. We departed from Vienne with too unfavourable an impression of its dirty inn, and of the place in general, to render us desirous of spending the night there. The squalid, dispiriting appearance of the town itself, indeed, forms a strong contrast both to the fine country in which it stands, and the capital letters which decorate its name in the map of France. Instead of loitering in its smoky, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... the gloom and stain— London's squalid cope of pain— Pure as starlight, bold as love, Honouring our scant poplar-grove, That most heavenly voice of earth Thrills in passion, grief or mirth, Laves our poison'd air ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... original joint-occupants of Sincapore with the Biduanda Kallang, were the Orang Sletar, or men of the river Sletar; differing but little from the former. Of the two families they are the shyer, and the more squalid; numbering about two hundred individuals and forty boats. Their dialect is Malay, spoken with a guttural pronunciation, and with a clipping of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... the wholesome obviousness of Dickens that we owe the atmosphere of good cheer that surrounds his characters. No writer has pictured more scenes of squalid misery, and yet we are not depressed. There is bad weather enough, but we are not "under the weather." There are characters created to be hated. It is a pleasure to hate them. As to the others, whenever their trials and tribulations ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... safe to say that the position of women among the Chinese is very generally misunderstood. In the squalid huts of the poor, they are represented as ill-used drudges, drawers of water and grinders of corn, early to rise and late to bed, their path through the vale of tears uncheered by a single ray of happiness or hope, and too often embittered by terrible pangs of starvation and ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... discussed or transacted in this sky-roofed saloon, so regally hung with its sombre canopy of coal-smoke. Whatever the disadvantages of the English climate, the only comfortable or wholesome part of life, for the city poor, must be spent in the open air. The stifled and squalid rooms where they lie down at night, whole families and neighborhoods together, or sulkily elbow one another in the daytime, when a settled rain drives them within doors, are worse horrors than it is worth while (without ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... power it is reforming its old, petty, half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping; it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or injurious food is regarded ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... unchanging dream, even in the midst of their bargaining; five times a day they offer up their prayer, and their thoughts turn, to the exclusion of all besides, upon eternity and death. You will see squalid beggars with the eyes of an inspired man; ragged fellows who have noble attitudes and faces ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... picturesqueness and a kinship with Nature and the hills, utterly lacking in a mining locality. The squalid rows of the latter, arranged in wretched, heart-breaking symmetry, are an offence to the landscape. Mud and filth cumber the door-steps, runnels of malodorous water ooze along the rows, ragged and ill-kempt bairns tumble about like ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... industries," the actual remuneration of working people without limitation of age or sex. To this it has been driven by the manifest teaching of experience that liberty without equality is a name of noble sound and squalid result. ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... death—Oh, death would be welcome! For death means either (as you may imagine you believe) total extinction, or it means increased life, free from material trammels. But death in life is a monstrous thing; life, for example, spent in a chair in a squalid tailor's shop, doing over and over again the same piece of squalid, meaningless work, with ever another squalid year stretching out its length before you when the last one has been completed. Is life so endured life—the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... "I select the most pitiful cases. I am taking some things to one of them now. I wish you could see the awful misery in that home! I could take you down there, you know, and show you what a squalid existence ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... for himself. Bartley declined to drink again. He was thinking of this squalid tragedy and of its possible outcome. The erstwhile sprightly Cheyenne held a new significance for the Easterner. That a man could ride up and down the trails singing, and yet carry beneath it all the grim intent some day ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... boy to listen to salacity without blushing. Soon coarse quips and rude jests ceased to shock him. He thought to "see life" by seeing the wrecks of manhood and womanhood. But does one study architecture by visiting hovels and squalid cabins? Is not studying architecture seeing the finest mansions and galleries and cathedrals? So to see life is to see manhood at its best and womanhood when carried up to ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... appearance of a shallow platter. At three thousand it was a steep sided bowl, and Bell could look down and trace the meandering of the stream on which he had landed the night before. Not too far downstream—some fifteen miles, perhaps—were the squalid, toy sized structures of a town of the far interior of Brazil. He never learned its name, but even in his preoccupation with the management of the plane and a search for landmarks, he wondered very grimly indeed what would be the state of things in that town. If in Rio, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... looking out, when its grimy panes allowed, above one of the many squalid streets that feed the main artery of the Strand, my story begins anew. The furniture of the room relieves me of the task of word-painting, being more effectively described by catalogue, after the manner of the ships at Troy. It consisted ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was an exception to the squalid slovenliness that disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered every spot with his toys. Valerie's room and dressing-room were ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... another}, and was willing to appear guilty; and {than} thou, unhappy Lethaea, confiding in thy beauty; breasts, once most united, now rocks, which the watery Ida supports. The ferryman drove him away entreating, and, in vain, desiring again to cross {the stream}. Still, for seven days, in squalid guise[6] did he sit on the banks without the gifts of Ceres. Vexation, and sorrow of mind, and tears were his sustenance. Complaining that the Deities of Erebus[7] were cruel, he betook himself to lofty ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... all his efforts, he was unable to move. He himself was fastened by invisible bonds. And, trembling, obsessed by a monstrous vision, he watched the dismal preparations, the cutting of the condemned men's hair and shirt-collars, the squalid tragedy. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... and told him everything. She did not spare herself any fact that she thought he ought to know, and as she detailed the squalid history, it seemed to her far worse than it had ever been in her own ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... Brilliant Theatre is a pretty little place,—comfortable, cosy, bright, and deserving of its name;—in broad day, it is none of these things. A squalid dreariness seems to have settled upon it—it has a peculiar atmosphere of its own—an atmosphere dark, heavy, and strangely flavored with odors of escaping gas and crushed orange-peel. Behind the scenes, these odors mingle with a chronic, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... his beautiful ballads, and other works. During an occasional visit to London, he was introduced to Goldsmith by Grainger, and ever after continued one of his most steadfast and valued friends. The following is his description of the poet's squalid apartment: "I called on Goldsmith at his lodgings in March, 1759, and found him writing his 'Inquiry' in a miserable, dirty-looking room, in which there was but one chair; and when, from civility, he resigned it to me, he himself ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... she was sick unto death. Her little shack was no fit place for a living person, and here was one dying. Frequent visits from her teacher afforded the dying maiden her only relief. Once, after watching her through a severe paroxysm of coughing, it seemed that life had gone completely. Removing the squalid bunch of rags which served as a pillow, and lowering the head, the devoted teacher stood watching the supposed lifeless form. But she saw the lips moving, and, bending low, she heard the dying girl whisper, "What time I am afraid I will trust in Thee." Continuing, ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... enterprises, which must have been so absorbing of time and energy, this busy man found opportunity and strength to search out the squalid back streets of New York, and to go from house to house of its wretched inhabitants, giving sympathy, speaking words of Christian love and instruction, and where they would receive them leaving the word of God and ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker
... nature and uses of the bell-rope, as she would any little dairy-maid who had heard only the chime of cow-bells all the days of her life. Then she sailed out of the room, serene and majestic, like a seventy-four man-of-war, while I, a squalid, salt-hay gundalow, (Venetian blind-ed into gondola,) first sank down in confusion, and then rose up in fury and brushed all the hair out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... couple of days with his cousin by marriage, James Mason, in the lonely stone house among the hills, which had belonged to the family since the Revolution. He left it gladly, however, for the farm life seemed to him much harder and more squalid than he had remembered it to be, and he disliked James Mason's wife. As he and Laura walked down the long, rough track connecting the farm with the main road on the day of their departure, Stephen Fountain whistled so loud and merrily that the skipping child ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gave Minnie somethin' that helped her, and she seemed every mite as sick as the baby," her husband said, in a softer voice. But she turned her hopeless eyes again upon the little, squalid, quivering thing in her lap, and paid no more heed to him. She let Jerome examine the child, with a strange apathy. There was no hope, and consequently no power ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the selfish aim, To bless himself alone! Mark maiden innocence a prey To love-pretending snares, This boasted honour turns away, Shunning soft pity's rising sway, Regardless of the tears and unavailing prayers! Perhaps this hour, in misery's squalid nest, She strains your infant to her joyless breast, And with a mother's fears shrinks at the rocking blast! Oh ye! who, sunk in beds of down, Feel not a want but what yourselves create, Think, for a moment, on his wretched fate, Whom friends and fortune quite disown! Ill satisfied keen ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... silk, accompanied by Claire in a like dress, and by Shelley who walked beside. This primitive way of travelling was not without its drawbacks, especially after the disastrous wars. Their fare was of the coarsest, and their accommodation frequently of the most squalid; but they were young and enthusiastic, and could enter with delight into the fact that Napoleon had slept in their room at one inn. And the picturesque though frequently ruined French towns, with their ramparts and old cathedrals, gave them happiness and content; on the other hand, the ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... than Robert Burns.) I think it a perfectly legitimate part too. At any rate it has come to be an impalpable aroma through which only both the songs and their singer must henceforth be read and absorb'd. Through that view-medium of misfortune—of a noble spirit in low environments, and of a squalid and premature death—we view the undoubted facts, (giving, as we read them now, a sad kind of pungency,) that Burns's were, before all else, the lyrics of illicit loves and carousing intoxication. Perhaps even it is this strange, impalpable ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... not think. At present I could only see—see what? At one moment a squalid attic, the starlight shining through patched window-panes upon a lonely mattress, on which a starving girl was lying; at another moment a cellar damp and dark, in one corner of which a youthful figure was crouching; and then (most intolerable of all!) a flaring gin-palace, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... passenger, with the exception of an occasional portal, only blank walls, built, as they are at Jerusalem, of stone, and very lofty. These walls commonly enclose a court, and, though their exterior offers always a sombre and often squalid appearance, it by no means follows that within you may not be welcomed with cheerfulness and ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... here I had pictured a squalid Eastern place, devoid of ancient or modern interest; most of my fellow-countrymen probably do likewise, notwithstanding the fact that when London was a small and obscure town Ragusa was already an important center of commerce and civilization. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... starvation. But they are not soldiers, least of all to meet the hot-blooded, thorough-bred, impetuous men of the South. They are trencher-soldiers who enlisted to make war upon rations, not upon men. They are such as marched through Baltimore, squalid, wretched, ragged, half-naked, as the newspapers of that city report them; fellows who do not know the breech of a musket from its muzzle; white slaves, peddling watches; small-change knaves and vagrants. These are the levied forces which Lincoln arrays ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... of other commercial capitals, there is no metropolis in the world where the general average of comfort and luxury stands higher through all the social grades. It is further to be recollected that health and the chief comforts of life are correlative,—that the squalid family is the unhealthy family, and that, as we import our squalor, so also we import the materials and conditions of our disease. This a priori view is amply sustained by the statistics of our charitable institutions. Dr. Alanson S. Jones, whose position ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... kneeling at my knee, And emperors crouching at my feet, to sue For this great robber, still I should be blind As justice. But this very day a wife, One infant hanging at her breast, and two, Scarce bigger, first-born twins of misery, Clinging to the poor rags that scarcely hid Her squalid form, grasped at my bridle-rein To beg her husband's life; condemned to die For some vile, petty theft, some paltry scudi: And, whilst the fiery war-horse chaf'd and sear'd, Shaking his crest, and plunging to get free, There, midst the dangerous coil, unmov'd, she stood, Pleading in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... dang'rous to the foot. So saying, his tatter'd wallet o'er his back He cast, suspended by a leathern twist, Eumaeus gratified him with a staff, And forth they went, leaving the cottage kept 240 By dogs and swains. He city-ward his King Led on, in form a squalid beggar old, Halting, and in unseemly garb attired. But when, slow-travelling the craggy way, They now approach'd the town, and had attain'd The marble fountain deep, which with its streams Pellucid all the citizens supplied, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... could a climate be found more unfavourable for consumptive invalids than that of Florence, a town built in a deep ravine, almost surrounded by the Apennines, and intersected by a squalid river.... Extreme cold in winter, great heat in summer, the prevalence of the northerly winds, the chilling effects of which are not always neutralised by the antagonistic winds, rapid and violent transitions, profoundly affecting the system, even in healthy persons; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... lot, sir, in our town, a coarse lot! Among the working people, sir, you'll find nothing but brutality and squalid poverty. And we've no chance, sir, of ever finding our way out of it. For by honest labour we can never earn more than a crust of bread. And everyone with money, sir, tries all he can to get a poor ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... was decayed in many places, and covered partly with rank moss. It was situated in a hollow, and the marshy soil around bore evident proof that it was subject to be overflowed in rainy weather. Four or five squalid, ragged children, with pinched features and thin limbs, sat huddled in a heap on the muddy ground, watching the road with anxious eyes—eyes so bright with hunger that they seemed like those of so many rats. The youngest—it ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... snuffy[obs3], smutty, sooty, smoky; thick, turbid, dreggy; slimy; mussy [U.S.]. slovenly, untidy, messy, uncleanly. [of people] unkempt, sluttish, dowdy, draggle-tailed; uncombed. unscoured[obs3], unswept[obs3], unwiped[obs3], unwashed, unstrained, unpurified[obs3]; squalid; lutose[obs3], slammocky[obs3], slummocky[obs3], sozzly[obs3]. nasty, coarse, foul, offensive, abominable, beastly, reeky, reechy[obs3]; fetid &c. 401. [of rotting living matter] decayed, moldy, musty, mildewed, rusty, moth-eaten, mucid[obs3], rancid, weak, bad, gone bad, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... together in Sandford Lasher on summer afternoons. We had had supper on Kennington Island; we had cut lectures and paddled up the Cher to Islip. And here he was at Wadi Halfa, herding with that troupe, an outcast, sunk to such a depth of ill-fortune that he must come to that squalid little town and play the zither vilely before a crowd of natives and a few Greek clerks for his night's lodging and the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... midst of this forest, and then all our hopes and expectations were dashed to the ground. For we had looked to find a city in keeping with these surroundings,—of fairy palaces and stately mansions; in place whereof was nought but a wilderness of mean, low, squalid houses, with meandering, ill-paved alleys, and all past everything for unsavoury smells,—heaps of refuse lying before every door, stark naked brats of children screaming everywhere, and a pack of famished ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... grey. She wore no collar and her linen was open at the neck. On her feet were a filthy pair of white satin slippers, and on her back that same gorgeous pink satin tea-gown which Mr. Quest had observed on the occasion of his visit, now however soiled and torn. Anything more squalid or repulsive than the whole picture cannot be imagined, and though his nerves were pretty strong, and in the course of his life he had seen many a sight of utter destitution, George literally ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... this central recess, he had there fattened, like the weasel in the fable, and fed largely and foully, until he had become incapable of retreating through any of the narrow paths that terminated at his cell; and was thus compelled to remain, like a toad under the cold stone, fattening amid the squalid airs of the dungeons by which he was surrounded, which would have proved pestiferous to any other than such a congenial inhabitant. Huge iron-clasped books lay before this ominous specimen of pinguitude—the records of the realm of misery, in which office he officiated as prime minister; ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... known, but a world in which East and West were strangely mingled: much of the familiar with the unfamiliar. Here in Korea, on the contrary, I have found the real East, the Asia of romance, of tradition and of fable, almost untouched by {62} Western influences—dirty, squalid, unprogressive, and yet with a fascination all its own. Great bare mountains look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing their steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... soft-glove pugilism! Our streets swarm with able-bodied beggars— young men, most of them, whom want may drive into wickedness. Human life is cheap. Men are slain in this alleged Christian land for less silver than led Judas to betray Christ. Young girls are sold to shame, and from squalid attics comes the cry of starving babes. The Goths and Visigoths are once more gathering, imperiling civilization itself, and belief in God is fading slowly but surely from the earth. Want and wretchedness skulk in the shadows ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... bed-quilts and traveling-shawls, and disposed in all conceivable attitudes, were scattered about on the hard floor and tables, sleeping soundly. The room was a long, low apartment—extending across the whole front of the house—and had a wretched, squalid look. The fire, which was tended by the negro-woman, (she had spread a blanket on the floor, and was keeping a drowsy watch over it for the night,) had been recently replenished with green wood, and was throwing out thick volumes of black smoke, which, mixing with the effluvia ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... open with a vigour which sent her staggering into a chair, and stepped into the squalid, reeking room. Hunched up in a chair, opposite the woman, sat a ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... abusive, and took refuge in curses, with dire threats of violence. Mrs. Fry withdrew, and waiting for nightfall followed the woman: down a winding alley, past rows of rotting tenements, into a cellar below a ginshop. There, in this one squalid room, she found a dozen babies, all tied fast in cribs or chairs, starving, or dying of inattention. The woman, taken by surprise, did not grow violent this time: she fled, and Mrs. Fry, sending for two women Friends, took charge of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... And at this moment, as he was carried through the windy, squalid streets, he trembled at the remembrance of it. The horror of "what might have been" incompatible with the vengeance whose minister he fancied he was, oppressed him. The scene perpetually reconstructed itself ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the court, walked along yonder street to the House. The sight of so young a woman, and so great a sovereign, thus leveled by physical necessity with the meanest, excited some of the old enthusiasm with which she used to be greeted: the populace themselves, with their squalid faces, and in their extreme misery, greeted her; but the greatest feeling was aroused among the nobles and gentry who surrounded her, and who seemed to make a point of offering more homage, the less ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... which followed were filled with the torments of a squalid Inferno. Girls who had regarded her with envy, began to refuse to speak to her or to be seen in her company. Jack Williams's companions were either impudent or disdainful, the married women stared at her and commented on her as she ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is wholly unencroached upon. Whether or not through fear of some evil influence resting upon the spot, no house as yet disturbs this space, though the thin turf has been somewhat picked away by desultory sod-diggers. There is nothing save this squalid, lonely desolation to commemorate the fact that such unhappy and needless deaths were here endured. It is enough. Mere human sympathy takes us back with awful vividness to that time when the poor victims looked their last from this, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... the roses and the jasmines and that distinguished creeper,—which one sees nowhere at its best but in Devonshire cottage-gardens,—the stately cotoneaster, made the whole place a bower. Barton was in vivid contrast to our own harsh, open, squalid village, with its mean modern houses, its absence of all vegetation. The ancient thatched cottages of Barton were shut in by moist hills, and canopied by ancient trees; they were approached along a deep lane which was all a wonder and a revelation to me ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... brilliant the smooth, yellow sandstone walls of the temple appear in the light of the morning sun, the more squalid and mean do the dingy houses look as they crouch in the outskirts. When the winds blow round them and the hot sunbeams fall upon them, the dust rises from them in clouds as from a dry path swept by the gale. Even the rooms inside are never plastered, and as the bricks are of dried ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and kitchens, and some smaller bedrooms. On going into this building, I found one part, that nearest to the high road, converted into a poor kind of public-house, then to let, and having all the squalid appearance of a deserted place, which rendered it difficult to judge what it would look like when neatly kept up, the broken panes replaced in the windows, and the rough-cast (now cracked and discoloured) made white and ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... astrologers, the witches, and the dream-readers; she is devoted to the mystic worship of the Egyptian Isis, with its secret rites of purification, or she is a proselyte to the pestilent notions of the Jews. She is too much under the influence of some squalid Oriental who carries his pedlar's basket, or whose business is to buy broken glass for sulphur matches Meanwhile Corellia is a blue-stocking, as bad as a precieuse with a salon. As soon as you sit down to table she begins to quote Homer and Virgil and ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... you must go to the book. But I will observe here that an Immortality liable at any moment to betray itself fatuously by the forcible incantations of Mr. Stead or Professor Crookes is scarcely worth having. Can you imagine anything more squalid than an Immortality at the beck and call of Eusapia Palladino? That woman lives on the top floor of a Neapolitan house, and gets our poor, pitiful, august dead, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, who have loved, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... dragging the lees of a rather squalid Bohemia, these two boys; a Bohemia the more real because they were unconscious in it. Its components were a cheap furnished room, restaurants like this, adventurous companionship in the underworld which thrust itself to the surface here and there in that master-port ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... found, when brought in contact with them, many interesting points of dissimilarity from ourselves. His office as consul naturally took him often to the police courts, where magistrates passed upon the squalid cases cited before them, and in the consulate itself he saw specimens enough of human crime and misery. He visited the poor-house and the insane asylum, he was approached by swindlers of all types, and often he went to fairs and other resorts of public out-door amusement and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the close of his first term in the college when he was in number six. His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... picturesque Claude Duval, no chivalrous villain of romance who would tread a measure in the moonlight with the lady whose coach he had plundered, thereafter returning her jewels in recompense for the favour of the dance. He was much more often of the squalid type—in a word, a footpad—frequently a member of some wandering gipsy gang, who, attending country fair or tryst, had little difficulty in ascertaining which one of the many farmers present it would be easiest and most profitable to rob as he steered his more or less ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... the hearth of his squalid mud hut with the mummies of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the all-powerful builders of the everlasting pyramids. Customs, conventions, codes, dynasties, states, nations come and go in incontinent succession. But, stronger than ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... hieroglyphic characters, executed in red chalk and charcoal. The ceiling had, in many places, given way; the laths had been removed; and, where any plaster remained, it was either mapped and blistered with damps, or festooned with dusty cobwebs. Over an old crazy bedstead was thrown a squalid, patchwork counterpane; and upon the counterpane lay a black hood and scarf, a pair of bodice of the cumbrous form in vogue at the beginning of the last century, and some other articles of female attire. On a small shelf near the foot of the bed stood ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... most eager and active of all the Virtues, set off first on his journey. Justice followed, and kept up with him, though at a more even pace. Charity never heard a sigh, or saw a squalid face, but she stayed to cheer and console the sufferer,—a kindness which ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tell us how great a man he was, and how many Pawnees he had killed, when suddenly a motley concourse appeared wading across the creek toward us. They filed past in rapid succession, men, women, and children; some were on horseback, some on foot, but all were alike squalid and wretched. Old squaws, mounted astride of shaggy, meager little ponies, with perhaps one or two snake-eyed children seated behind them, clinging to their tattered blankets; tall lank young men on foot, with bows and arrows in their hands; and girls whose native ugliness not all the charms ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Liege. For the most part the old city of lofty houses clings to a cliffside on the left bank, crowned by an ancient citadel of no modern defensive value. Whatever picturesqueness Liege may have possessed is effaced by the squalid and dilapidated condition of its poorer quarters. To the north broad fertile plains extend into central Belgium, southward on the opposite bank of the Meuse, the Ardennes present a hilly forest, stream-watered region. In its ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... "The wretched, squalid inmate, who is assisting the fainting female, bears every mark of being naturalised to the place; out of his pocket hangs a scroll, on which is inscribed, 'A scheme to pay the National Debt, by J. L. now a prisoner in the Fleet.' So attentive was this poor gentleman to the debts of the ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... amusing street, but poor and squalid, full of small lodging-houses, and little dingy shops; very few people were about, and in spite of Joshua's warning no one seemed even to notice the ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... no world? Let throngs press thee to me! Up and down amid men, heart by heart fare we! 10 Welcome squalid vesture, harsh voice, hateful face! God is soul, souls I and thou; with souls should ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... wicket-gate of the garden. A strange, tottering old figure, his nose and chin grimacing at each other, his bleared eyes telling unmistakable truths of cider-brandy and New England rum, his scant locks of white lying in confusion over his wrinkled forehead and cheeks, his whole air squalid, hopeless, and degraded,—not so much by the poverty of vice as by its demoralizing stamp penetrating from the inner to the outer man, and levelling it even below the plane ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... nothing, and, without doubt or hesitation, this disagreeable chauffeur (or whatever an electric launch man was called) had made for the Quai du Seujet and drawn up at it, as if he knew, as doubtless he did, that Henry's lodging was in one of the squalid alleys off it. ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... destroyed and their place has been taken by boulevards and canals. The line may still be traced on the map, or walked round through a series of shipping suburbs; but it is uninteresting to follow, a great part of its course lying through the more squalid portions of the town. The only remaining gate is that known as the Rabot (1489), a very interesting and picturesque object situated in a ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... upon either side or down the center of long and tortuous Grand Avenue to arouse enthusiasm, nor was Billy particularly enthusiastic about that more or less squalid thoroughfare. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... savannah. We were followed by some of our guards and other individuals, anxious, we concluded, to watch our proceedings. Our party was but small, for alas! the greater number of the lieutenants were unable from sickness to attend the funeral. We were a melancholy party—pale, haggard, and squalid. We placed the body on the grass. What a fine, handsome young fellow he looked! We began to dig his grave. Without consideration, we began to dig it east and west. When we had proceeded some way in our work, our French masters ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... daughter, came down stairs. She had heard that her father had picked up a lost girl in the road. As she came down in her clean morning dress, she expected to have to hold her skirts away from some little squalid object of charity. She started when she saw the elegant-looking young girl who sat at the table. There was something in her air and manner that seemed to make the breakfast equipage, and the furniture of the room about her, look a little mean and poor. Yet the Doctor was very well off, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... supply a singular vitality and realism, and also a distinct interest for those who are "in the know," for Boz himself at the time was a dramatic and interesting figure, and this story of his struggle out of a state of squalid misery is truly pathetic. ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... was so narrow that the jutting bays of the houses seemed pushing their faces impudently against their neighbors. A voice in one room could have been heard as clearly in the one over the way. It was a mean little street, squalid and poor and pitiful, but it maintained its stripped dignities of screened windows and isolation. It was better not to wonder what nights were like in those ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... through the somewhat squalid district which lies between Bow Street and High Holborn, when I saw, in a small theatrical costumer's window, a hand-bill stating that a black poodle had "followed a gentleman" on a certain date, and if not claimed and the finder remunerated ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... which seemed to have been composed of a row of Ionic columns standing upon a lower row of Doric, many of the antique pillars being yet perfect; but the intervening arches built up with brickwork, and the whole once magnificent structure now tenanted by poor and squalid people, as thick as mites within the round of an old cheese. From this point I cannot very clearly trace out my course; but I passed, I think, between the Circus Maximus and the Palace of the Caesars, and near the Baths of Caracalla, and went into the cloisters of the Church of San Gregorio. All ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Clo glanced round the squalid room. Peterson had begun to pack. A suitcase lay open on the narrow bed. The wrinkled gray-white counterpane was half covered ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... bleak late twilight they were driven, past two or three squalid mining villages, along a road where the ruts showed black as coal through the freezing snow. Out of one village, the lights twinkling in the windows, they turned up a steep road, which, after a couple of hundred yards, brought them ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... a squalid section consisting of a single street; Vidal opened a door with his key; he lighted a match and the pair climbed up to a tiny room with a mattress placed ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... bear, its head mounted with open jaws, spread over the rich rug beside the bed. He wondered about this interestingly. Probably the stage would be locked at night. Still, at a suitable hour, he could descreetly find out. On another stage a bedroom likewise intrigued him, though this was a squalid room in a tenement and the bed was a cheap thing sparsely covered and in sad disorder. People were working on this set, and he presently identified the play, for Muriel Mercer in a neat black dress entered to bring comfort to the tenement dwellers. But this play, too, had ceased to interest ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... is thus noticed by Abulfeda (A.D. 1331): "Aden in the lowlands of Tehmah * * * also called Abyana from a man (who found it?), built upon the seashore, a station (for land travellers) and a sailing-place for merchant ships India-bound, is dry and sunparcht (Kashifah, squalid, scorbutic) and sweet water must be imported. * * * It lies 86 parasangs from San' but Ibn Haukal following the travellers makes it three stages. The city, built on the skirt of a wall-like mountain, has a watergate and a landgate known as Bab al-Skayn. But 'Adan L'ah (the modest, the timid, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... little stock. Many a time the hours went very slowly for the necessitous man. One Shrove Tuesday he rose in the morning, and found his pockets empty even of so much as a halfpenny. His friends had not invited him to join their squalid Bohemian revels. Hunger and thoughts of old Shrovetide merriment and feasting in the far-off home made work impossible. He hastened out of doors and walked about all day visiting such public sights as were open to the penniless. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... utterly savage in their habits and customs. So little do they care for clothing, that even the females wear only a small piece of the bark of a tree, or the net-like covering of the young leaf of the cocoanut or cabbage palm; while their appearance is squalid in the extreme. However, they cultivate cassava and other vegetables on the drier lands bordering the river. From cassava they make an intoxicating liquor, the cause of many savage murders among them. They depend ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... usual dooms were duly meted out; Some three or four were stript, transfixed, and nailed, And no great stir occurred. A day of wont It was to me, so far, and would have slid Clean from my memory at its squalid close But for an incident that ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... getting aboard the East Boston ferry-boat in the car, and hardly getting ashore before the boat started. They now gathered up their burdens once more, and walked toward the wharf they were seeking, past those squalid streets which open upon the docks. At the corners they entangled themselves in knots of truck-teams and hucksters' wagons and horse-cars; once they brought the traffic of the neighborhood to a stand-still by the thoroughness of their inability ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... twinkled a priceless mirror; shutting off Calvin's serving table was a painted screen worth its weight in gold. It was a far cry from the catsup bottles and squalid service of George's early days. The Bannisters of Huntersfield wore their ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... that week he cast up accounts with himself, as the electric car sped toward civilization. Assets, one dollar and five cents, just reduced by a grinding monopoly from a dollar-ten; liabilities, a laundry bill and six weeks' rent. Truly, a squalid failure. If he could only hold out a little longer! There was in sight a situation as consulting physician to a lodge in his father's Order, which would mean a living at least. He had the promise of it in a month's time. A ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... I was no gentleman, And bade me read my answer in the eyes Of—Heaven defend me!—such a squalid crew! One looked like death run from his winding sheet; Another like an ague clothed in rags; A third had something of the human form, But every bone was cursing at its fellow. Now, though I vow that I could read my fate In every damsel's eyes that kissed ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... inevitable discord of those who had encouraged each other to trample on their lawful and hereditary sovereign. By a pathetic appeal to their humanity, he extorted that pity which is seldom refused to the fallen fortunes of a king; and while they beheld the abject posture and squalid appearance of the prisoner, his tears, his chains, and the marks of ignominious stripes, it was impossible to forget how recently they had adored the divine splendor of his diadem and purple. But an angry murmur arose in the assembly ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... the threshold when the door resumed its former state. The hinges settled back on the panels, the posts returned to the bars, and the bolts flew back to their sockets again. I lay prostrate on the ground in a squalid plight, terrified, naked, cold, and drenched. Indeed, I was half dead, though still alive; and pursued a train of reflections like one already in the grave, or to say the least on the way to the cross, to which I was surely destined. "What," said I, "will become of me, when this man is found ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... shrill, piercing yells. Just then the crafty squaw, who had taken the necessary precaution to fire the piles, made her way through the throng, and cleared a place for herself in front of the captive. The squalid and withered person of this hag might well have obtained for her the character of possessing more than human cunning. Throwing back her light vestment, she stretched forth her long, skinny arm, in derision, and using the language of the Lenape, as more intelligible ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... accidents, because, having once grasped the principle, he felt it unnecessary to multiply, indefinitely, instances of that principle. The story of Pittsburg, so far as it has been related to me, is merely the old, squalid story of municipal graft. I have the names and the dates in an orderly and logical way—who were sent to the penitentiary, and when, and for what particular crime, and what the judge said in pronouncing sentence, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... her dress and ink on her fingers and the fumes of gas in her quivering nostrils, and her mind strained and racked by an exaggerated sense of her responsibilities, she was in heaven! She who so vehemently objected to the squalid mess of the business of domesticity, revelled in the squalid mess of this business. She whose heart would revolt because Florrie's work was never done, was delighted to wait all hours on the convenience of men who seemed to be the very incarnation of incalculable ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... the letters and seemed to read; and over her shoulder I saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned—bloated, bleached—seaweed tangled in his dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of a corpse, and beside the corpse there cowered a child, a miserable squalid child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. And as I looked in the old woman's face, the wrinkles and lines vanished, and it became a face of youth—hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the Shadow ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... cast! What pitiful, frightened looks sometimes! I saw a little mite sitting on a doorstep in a Soho slum one night, and I shall never forget the look that the gas-lamp showed me on its wizen face—a look of dull despair, as if from the squalid court the vista of its own squalid life had risen, ghostlike, and struck its heart ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... a narrative. Its various scenes are enacted on a stormy Christmas Eve; and it opens with a humorous description of a little dissenting chapel, supposed to stand at the edge of a common; and of the various types of squalid but self-satisfied humanity which find their spiritual pasture within its walls. The narrator has just "burst out" of it. He never meant to go in. But the rain had forced him to take shelter in its porch, as evening service ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... our shore-fasts falling in the water produced a complete change of feeling in me. It was like the imperfect relief of awakening from a nightmare. But when the ship's head swung down the river away from that town, Oriental and squalid, I missed the expected elation of that striven-for moment. What there was, undoubtedly, was a relaxation of tension which translated itself into a sense of weariness ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... that of these delicate ladies to the squalid apartments of their arrested kinsfolk. But they kept up bravely; only when the woman departed with her first five francs in her hand, they fell on the little shabby sofa ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... a hundred paces from Vendome, on the banks of the Loir," said he, "stands an old brown house, crowned with very high roofs, and so completely isolated that there is nothing near it, not even a fetid tannery or a squalid tavern, such as are commonly seen outside small towns. In front of this house is a garden down to the river, where the box shrubs, formerly clipped close to edge the walks, now straggle at their own ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... The thick line of trees that are near Rathnew makes the way intensely dark even on clear nights, and when one is riding quickly, the contrast, when one reaches the lights of Wicklow, is singularly abrupt. The town itself after nightfall is gloomy and squalid. Half-drunken men and women stand about, wrangling and disputing in the dull light from the windows, which is only strong enough to show the wretchedness of the figures which pass continually across them. I did my business quickly and turned back ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... blood, did not appeal to Adrian. Also from childhood he had been a member of the dissenting Church, one of the New Religion. Yet, at heart, he rejected this faith with its humble professors and pastors, its simple, and sometimes squalid rites; its long and earnest prayers offered to the Almighty in the damp of a cellar or ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... after them, but they had already disappeared into that maze of crooked, squalid streets around the Pitti. Fortunately, there was not more than a sovereign in it. I was filled with regret, however, on account of my friend's letter. He had trusted me with some secret. I had accepted ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... du Fouarre, though once a very famous thoroughfare, is to-day perhaps as squalid as any that drains its refuse by a single gutter into the Seine, and the widow had been no beauty even in the days when she followed the 106th of the Line as vivandiere and before she wedded Sergeant Jupille of that regiment. But she and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... For the most part the old city of lofty houses clings to a cliffside on the left bank, crowned by an ancient citadel of no modern defensive value. Whatever picturesqueness Liege may have possessed is effaced by the squalid and dilapidated condition of its poorer quarters. To the north broad fertile plains extend into central Belgium, southward on the opposite bank of the Meuse, the Ardennes present a hilly forest, stream-watered region. In its downward ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... chances in a raffle for Dave's fiddle. Yes, sir; with her kind words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home. I had to respect the ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... were followed by some of our guards and other individuals, anxious, we concluded, to watch our proceedings. Our party was but small, for alas! the greater number of the lieutenants were unable from sickness to attend the funeral. We were a melancholy party—pale, haggard, and squalid. We placed the body on the grass. What a fine, handsome young fellow he looked! We began to dig his grave. Without consideration, we began to dig it east and west. When we had proceeded some way in our work, our French masters ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... of power it is reforming its old, petty, half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping; it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or injurious ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... bar near the door, his liquor in his hand, lounging in his careless attitude of abstraction. But there was not a lax fiber in his body; every faculty was alert, every nerve set for any sudden development. The scene before him was disgusting, rather than diverting, in its squalid imitation of the rough-and-ready times which had passed before many of these men were old enough to carry the weight of a gun. It was just a sporadic outburst, a pustule come to a sudden head that would burst before morning and ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... over, those who love to see an army of first-class skaters will find an Oxford day ticket well worth the money—youth, health, strength, grace, and manly beauty, in hundreds, cutting round and round, with less of drawback from the admixture of a squalid mob ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... catapult. The voices of many are threatening and formidable. They are quick to anger, but quickly appeased. All are clean in their persons; nor among them is ever seen any man or woman, as elsewhere, squalid in ragged garments. At all ages they are apt for military service. The old man goes forth to the fight with equal strength of breast, with limbs as hardened by cold and assiduous labor, and as contemptuous of all dangers, as the young. Not one of them, as in Italy is often the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... And lengthen out my lays from door to door? Then let thy Fancy aid me—I repair From this tall mansion of our last year's Mayor, Till we the outskirts of the Borough reach, And these half-buried buildings next the beach, Where hang at open doors the net and cork, While squalid sea-dames mend the meshy work; Till comes the hour when fishing through the tide The weary husband throws his freight aside; A living mass which now demands the wife, Th' alternate labours of their humble life. Can scenes like these withdraw thee ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... a home-made marquee formed an excellent mess. After our first difficulty, which was to find the place at all in the utter darkness of relief night, we spent a very happy twelve days in beautiful weather. After coal mines and squalid narrow streets, the woods of Lorette, the little village of Bouvigny, and the open country were delightful, for the scenery to the south was all very pleasing. Games of all descriptions were our programme for the first two days, while our chief amusement was to ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... their horses' heads towards La Mareze. Again and again Hortense recalled the squalid sight which had met their eyes. But Renine, who was in a lively mood and full of attentions to his companion, seemed ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... true-to-life author, depicting the often squalid scenes he encountered with great care and attention to detail. His young readers looked forward eagerly to his next books, and through the 1860s and 1870s there was a flow of books from his pen, sometimes four in a year, all very good reading. The rate of production diminished ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... your brother so loved—the mother of his children—died in this squalid room, and far from her sons, in poverty, in sorrow! died of a broken heart! Was that well, father? Have you in ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... best for them? "Only," I said, "do not call it practical to encourage millions of people to waste hours and hours in mere repetition, and to spend millions and millions in supplying this cold comfort, when next door to the magnificent cathedral there are squalid streets, and squalid houses, and squalid beds to lie and ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... branches remained in the nakhil, or grove. Nothing at all was to be found in the few scrubby fields about the well now choked with masses of the insects. Whoever the people of this squalid settlement had been, all were gone. The place was almost as bare as if the sun's flames, themselves, had flared down and licked the village to dust ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the squalid room. Peterson had begun to pack. A suitcase lay open on the narrow bed. The wrinkled gray-white counterpane was half ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... taking the bottle in his hand, passed behind the table. Charity followed him, and they stood before a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A woman lay on it, but she did not look like a dead woman; she seemed to have fallen across her squalid bed in a drunken sleep, and to have been left lying where she fell, in her ragged disordered clothes. One arm was flung above her head, one leg drawn up under a torn skirt that left the other bare to the knee: a swollen glistening leg with a ragged stocking rolled down about the ankle. The woman ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... into which the Arab guide now turned was so narrow that the jutting bays of the houses seemed pushing their faces impudently against their neighbors. A voice in one room could have been heard as clearly in the one over the way. It was a mean little street, squalid and poor and pitiful, but it maintained its stripped dignities of screened windows and isolation. It was better not to wonder what nights were like in those ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... suspected she had used the magic ointment, and could now see them as they were. But it was only with the right eye, the one she had touched with the salve, that she could see thus. When she closed that eye and looked with the other, everything was just as it had been before, and seemed so mean and squalid it was difficult to believe it ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... the only one of his admission to the school, that of clean face and hands, is enforced, and the mother, in order to be relieved of the care of him during the, day, is obliged to have him washed. He then leaves the abode of filth and intemperance, and squalid poverty, and ill-temper, for a clean, airy place, pleasant in summer, warm and dry in winter; and where he sees not a face that is not lighted up with the smile of kindness towards him. His whole day is passed in amusing exercises, or interesting instruction; and he returns at ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... inboard and got out the oars from under the seats. He got the little boat out to mid-stream, and they floated down until a village of squalid huts appeared on the eastern bank. He landed, there, and with much bargaining and a haughty demeanor disposed of the boat to the skipper of a batelao in exchange for passage down-river as far as Corumba. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... tolerably safe to say that the position of women among the Chinese is very generally misunderstood. In the squalid huts of the poor, they are represented as ill-used drudges, drawers of water and grinders of corn, early to rise and late to bed, their path through the vale of tears uncheered by a single ray of happiness or hope, and too often embittered by terrible pangs of starvation and ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... with the pictured idea: 'You hit it:—not what you called the "sublimely milky," and not squalid as you'll see the faces of the gambling women at the tables below. Oblige me—may I beg?—don't clap names on the mountains we've seen. It stamps guide-book on them, English tourist, horrors. We'll moralize over the crowds at the tables ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for it is the most orderly and respectable crowd you ever saw. In fact, such a crowd would be an impossibility in England or any highly-civilized country. There are no dodging vagrants, no slatternly women, no squalid, starving babies. In fact, our civilization has not yet mounted to effervescence, so we have no dregs. Every white person on the ground was well clad, well fed, and apparently well-to-do. The "lower orders" were represented ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... middle spot of Rivas, a town of some two or three thousand inhabitants, where General Walker stood at bay many weary days against the combined Costa Ricans, Guatemalans, and Chamorristas, and was netted at last. But these observations of the squalid plaza were of another date. At present our eyes and thoughts fasten upon the crowd of melancholy, fever-eaten filibusters, who walk with heavy pace up and down the corridors, and along the paths ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... be granted: every day has its separate quantum, its dose (as the doctrinists of rent phrase it) of anxiety, that could not be digested so soon as noon. No man will say it. He, therefore, who dined at noon, was willing to sit down squalid as he was, with his dress unchanged, his cares not washed off. And what follows from that? Why, that to him, to such a canine or cynical specimen of the genus homo, dinner existed only as a physical event, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... was already crowded. Ann Eliza had never before felt so tired. Even Miss Mellins's flow of narrative ran dry, and they sat silent, wedged between a negro woman and a pock-marked man with a bandaged head, while the car rumbled slowly down a squalid avenue to their corner. Evelina and Mr. Ramy sat together in the forward part of the car, and Ann Eliza could catch only an occasional glimpse of the forget-me-not bonnet and the clock-maker's shiny coat-collar; but when the little party got out at their corner the crowd ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... Jeanne's genius was for begging for her poor people. And there is nothing more touching in the world's history than her journey in the milk-cart to the regatta. You see, dear Mother, she was accustomed to beg from door to door among squalid streets, stopping a passer-by, stooping under low doorways, intruding everywhere, daring everything among her own people, but frightened by the fashionable folk en grande toilette bent on amusement. It seems that her courage ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, look'd ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... stands no type or title given In all the squalid tales of gore and pelf; Though cowed by crashing thunders from all heaven. Cain never said, 'My ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... to the American army. Being poorly clothed, and more poorly fed, they were not in condition to meet the tried veterans of the English army. It was said of this reinforcement from Gen. Gates' army, that they were men of approved courage, and flushed with recent victory, but squalid in their appearance, from fatigue and want of necessaries. But when Col. Bigelow led his regiment into line with the main army at White Marsh, a small place about fourteen miles from Philadelphia, he was recognized by the commander-in-chief, as the very identical Capt. Bigelow whom he had seen ...
— Reminiscences of the Military Life and Sufferings of Col. Timothy Bigelow, Commander of the Fifteenth Regiment of the Massachusetts Line in the Continental Army, during the War of the Revolution • Charles Hersey
... squalid and dirty, up one of those mean streets which, by their narrow way and shelving buildings, shut out sun, air, and light from their ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... even that they had to work almost incessantly for fourteen or sixteen hours a day. There was no time for cooling and very little to cook, for they lived principally on bread and margarine and tea. Their homes were squalid, their children half-starved and raggedly clothed in grotesque garments hastily fashioned out of the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... must not hesitate, Endymion. We must never forget the great object for which we two live, for which, I believe, we were born twins—to rebuild our house; to raise it from poverty, and ignominy, and misery and squalid shame, to the rank and position which we demand, and which we believe we deserve. Did I hesitate when an offer of marriage was made to me, and the most unexpected that could have occurred? True it is, I married the best and greatest of men, but I did not know that when I ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... select tone of society could grow up amongst a body so comprehensive and so miscellaneous as the soi-disant nobility of continental states? Could it be expected that 130,000 French "nobles" of 1788, needy and squalid in their habits as many of them were, should be high-bred gentlemen? In Germany, we know that all the watering-places are infested with black-leg gamblers, fortune-hunters, chevaliers d'industrie, through all varieties of this category. Most of these bear ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... conversion, Chinese immigration, nor European conquest has ever taken from them their national dress. Civilization has introduced many articles of clothing; but no matter how many of these are adopted, the Malay, from his Highness the Sultan of Johore, to the poorest fisherman of a squalid kampong on the muddy banks of a mangrove-hidden stream, religiously ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... in my life was so dismayed! The wonderful novelty of everything, the unusual smells, the unaccountable filth (though it is reckoned the cleanest of Italian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one upon the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more close than any in St. Giles's or old Paris; in and out of which, not vagabonds, but well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans, were passing and repassing; the perfect absence of resemblance in any dwelling-house, or shop, or wall, or post, or pillar, to anything one ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... From the cheap, squalid section of town known as "railroad end," Cable's rising influence carried him to the well-earned luxury. The lines of care and toil mellowed in the face of his pretty wife, as the years rolled by; her comely figure shed the cheap raiment ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... aged man rushed into the Forum on a market-day, loaded with chains, clothed with a few scanty rags, his hair and beard long and squalid; his whole appearance ghastly, as of one oppressed by long want of food and air. He was recognized as a brave soldier, the old comrade of many who thronged the Forum. He told his story, how that in the late wars the enemy had burned his house and plundered his little farm; that to replace his losses ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... numerous; and as they are always bold when in the neighborhood of buffalo, they would approach quite near to look at me, gazing intently with their great round eyes, then suddenly leap aside, and stretch lightly away over the prairie, as swiftly as a racehorse. Squalid, ruffianlike wolves sneaked through the hollows and sandy ravines. Several times I passed through villages of prairie dogs, who sat, each at the mouth of his burrow, holding his paws before him in a supplicating attitude, and yelping away most vehemently, energetically whisking his little ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... their friends from Diamond X had joined forces with Uncle Sam's troopers and were warm on the trail of the Yaquis, the squalid, degenerate and vicious band that had captured Rosemary and Floyd still retained possession of their captives. Though disheartened and apprehensive, Rosemary and her brother had made up their minds to one thing—they would not be ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... did the phrase make him want to clear his throat? Raw—yes, that was the association—when you opened your mouth and the fog swirled in. Newsboys scampering along a foggy street that was neither elegant nor squalid, but just a street of mixed shops and mixed traffic and barrows lit with a row of flapping lights, and men and women with faces that showed they worked hard to earn a little less than they needed.... Public-houses.... Butchers' shops with great slabs of ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... company of devoted women, drawn mainly from the fashionable fringe which skirted his squalid district and banded together as a Sisterhood. For clerical help he depended entirely on the brothers of his society, and the money saved by these voluntary agencies he distributed among the poor, the sick, and the unfortunate. Money of his own he ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... street, but poor and squalid, full of small lodging-houses, and little dingy shops; very few people were about, and in spite of Joshua's warning no one seemed even to ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... black of his calling; no sooner was he beyond sight of his parish than his valise was opened, and he arrayed himself—under the hedge, no doubt—in a suit of jaunty grey. The pleasures for which he sacrificed the lives of others and his own were squalid enough, but they were the best a provincial brain might imagine; and he sinned the sins of a hedge priest with a courage and effrontery which his brethren may well envy. Indeed, the Man in the Grey Suit will be sent down the ages with a grimmer scandal, if with ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... picture of it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that intellectualism had already pre-empted. But he clung fast to the old rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the form of philosophy might be empirical only. His own system had to be a product of eternal reason, so the word 'logic,' with its suggestions of coercive necessity, was the only ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... and off they went at break-neck speed, on! on! on! past rows and rows of houses, past wildernesses of brick and mortar. Far behind them they left churches, hospitals, buildings innumerable, the mansions of the rich and the wretched dwellings of the poor, the squalid habitations of outcast London, on! on! on! Up the great hill of Highgate, where the tender green foliage of early summer and of the great oak trees bordered the roadside, and where the almond blossoms ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... been calling on the government and the legislature to put down so monstrous a nuisance. Yet still, bounded on the west by the great school of English jurisprudence, and on the east by the great mart of English trade, stood this labyrinth of squalid, tottering houses, close packed, every one, from cellar to cockloft, with outcasts whose life was one long war with society. The best part of the population consisted of debtors who were in fear of bailiffs. The rest were attorneys struck off the roll, witnesses who carried straw ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the outward semblance of a man and not of a monster," wandered hither and thither over the face of the earth, setting his mark upon it as no other creature yet had done, leaving behind him innumerable tell-tale remnants of his fierce and squalid existence, yet too scantily endowed with wit to make any written disclosure of his thoughts and deeds. If the physiological annals of that long and weary time could now be unrolled before us, the principal fact which we should ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... what I was when you rescued me from the pitiless stones of the market-place, or you would scarcely ask me such a question. I have confronted the public—not the brilliant throng of the opera-house, but the squalid crowd which gathers before the door of a gin-shop, to listen to a vagrant ballad-singer. I have sung at races, where the rich and the high-born were congregated, and have received their admiration. I know what ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... twilight dust and grime of the Flats, a woman sat on the doorstep of a wretched house. Her rounded shoulders slouched wearily—her tired hands were folded in her lap. She stared with dull, listless eyes at the squalid homes of her neighbors across the street. The Interpreter had described the woman to Helen—"a girl with fine instincts for the best things of life and a capacity for ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... All to no purpose. I was for walking, and was about to command Virginia to accompany me, when who should appear but my gentleman himself, the Cavaliere Aquamorta, inquiring the cause of the uproar. He presented a truly magnificent appearance in that squalid place. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... croquet and billiards, and all the other jolly games I mean to play. Look at those children trying to play cricket in that dirty backyard. Poor little beggars! Fancy living in one of those horrible squalid houses. But you cannot spoil to- day for me, little backyards. On Tuesday perhaps, when I am coming again to the ugly town, your misery will make me miserable; I shall ask myself hopelessly what it all means; but just now I am too happy for pity. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... man—a dreadful drowned image, all soiled and swollen—a squalid tragic form, immovable, never to move more. Nettie did not need to look at the dread, uncovered, upturned face. The moment she saw the vague shape of it rising against the side of the boat, a heap of dead limbs, recognisable ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... means of enjoyment. Those who occupy the first places in this practical competitive examination are the rich and the influential; those who fail, more or less, occupy the lower places, down to the squalid obscurity of the pauper and the criminal. Upon the most liberal estimate, I suppose the former group will not amount to two per cent. of the population. I doubt if the latter exceeds another two per cent.; but let it be supposed, for the sake of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... dismally by the sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... is a pretty little place,—comfortable, cosy, bright, and deserving of its name;—in broad day, it is none of these things. A squalid dreariness seems to have settled upon it—it has a peculiar atmosphere of its own—an atmosphere dark, heavy, and strangely flavored with odors of escaping gas and crushed orange-peel. Behind the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... pocket. Oh, no, believe me, there's no health in the People. Ground down under the iron heel of despotism, reduced to a condition of hopeless serfdom, I don't say that they might not develop redeeming virtues. But free, but sovereign, as they are in these days, they're everything that is squalid and sordid and offensive. Besides, they read such ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... and Parish House were not in the mill district itself, a place shoved aside, full of sordid hideousness, ribboned with railroad tracks, squalid with boarding-houses never free from the smell of bad cooking, sinister with pawnshops, miserable with depressingly ugly rows of small houses where the hands herded, and all of it darkened by the grim shadow of the great red brick mills themselves. Instead, our ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... yet in sunny Italy, there is much to do for womankind. Then, as now, the skies were blue, and the sun was bright and warm; then, as now, did the peasants dance and sing all the way from water-ribbed Venice to fair and squalid Naples, but with a difference. Now, there is a measure of freedom to each and all—then, justice was not only blind but went on crutches, and women were made to suffer because they were women and ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... weary from dancing and singing all day in the streets, it would be far pleasanter to drift about on the canal in the evening than to spend it tossing about on the husk mattresses in Giovanni's squalid house, and the children listened with eager ...
— The Italian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... nameless—all constitute a chapter of extraordinary importance in the general history of English toleration, extending in its consequences far beyond the pale of the communion immediately concerned. It was a long and painful journey, often unedifying, not seldom squalid, with crooked turns not a few, and before it was over, casting men into strange companionship upon bleak and hazardous shores. Mr. Gladstone, though he probably was not one of those who are as if born by nature tolerant, was soon drawn by circumstance to look with favour upon that ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... him, slipped into the alleyway, and, crouching against the tenement wall, moved noiselessly along to the side entrance. A moment more, and he had negotiated the rickety stairs with practiced, soundless tread, was inside the squalid quarters of Larry the Bat, and the door of the Sanctuary was locked and ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... through the door, into the long, narrow "Opera House." It was a dirty, cheerless hole, in spite of the brilliance of many oil lamps, shining among the flimsy decorations. At the end of the tunnel-shaped room was a rude stage, festooned with gaudy, squalid hangings, beneath which a painted siren was singing a song which Simon did not listen to. The floor of the auditorium was filled with chairs and tables in disorderly array, the occupants of which seemed to be paying more attention ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... adopted the theory that he always procured a list of expected guests beforehand and kept away from the banquets which he thus learned I was to grace. At last I gave up hope, and one day at the end of three years I received another visit from his aunt. She was drearier and dingier, almost squalid, and she was in great tribulation and want. Her sister, Mrs. Brooksmith, had been dead a year, and three months later her nephew had disappeared. He had always looked after her a bit since her troubles; I never knew what her troubles had been—and now she hadn't so much as a petticoat ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... Laeca! The days had been, while Rome was yet but young, when it stood far aloof in the gay green fields, the suburban villa of the proud Porcian house. Time passed, and fashions changed. Low streets and squalid tenements supplanted the rich fields and fruitful orchards, which had once rendered it so pleasant an abode. Its haughty lords abandoned it for a more stately palace nigh the forum, and for long years it had remained tenantless, voiceless, desolate. But dice, and wine, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... down from Pinhel under an escort of Portuguese militia; and, taking leave of them, I was handed over to a company of the 23rd Regiment—hurrying in from one of the outlying hamlets near Celorico—with whom I reached on the 7th of January the squalid village of Boden, in and around which the 52nd lay in face of the doomed fortress across ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... window to ascertain their whereabouts. His vigilance ended in their getting aboard the East Boston ferry-boat in the car, and hardly getting ashore before the boat started. They now gathered up their burdens once more, and walked toward the wharf they were seeking, past those squalid streets which open upon the docks. At the corners they entangled themselves in knots of truck-teams and hucksters' wagons and horse-cars; once they brought the traffic of the neighborhood to a stand-still ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... uncouthly around his waist and shoulders, completed the costume of the man. His wife's was equally scant and rude, but so arranged as to present the idea that even in her breast the sense of fitness, the last feeling of froward womanhood, was not quite extinguished. The squalid rags and matted hair, by a single touch of the hand, a gesture, or a shake of the head, assumed such shape as she fancied would display to greatest advantage what remained of a coarse and masculine beauty. The consciousness that she once possessed such beauty ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... forenoon, walking down the river along the squalid waterside avenues; he found them in sympathy with the squalor in himself which always followed a squabble with his wife. At the end of one of the westward streets he found himself on a pier flanked by vast flotillas of canal-boats. As he passed one ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... northern summer. The aircar lost altitude, and the hot-jet stopped firing. They came gliding in over the suburbs and the yellow-green parks, over the low one-story dwellings and shops, the lofty temples and palaces, the fantastically twisted towers, following a street that became increasingly mean and squalid as it neared the industrial district ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... floored, but only paved with common tiles. In the evening he ate nothing save a piece of bread, with some goat-cheese and figs, and quenched his thirst with a draught of muddy wine which he diluted with water. A squalid old woman brought him this wretched supper, and it cut the duchess to the heart to see him hunt about for coppers enough to pay for it. One day he seemed to have exhausted his store, for he turned his purse upside down and shook it, but not the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... bracing freshness in the air which suggested that she was getting away from where the herds of London slept, into open spaces. For some obscure reason this made her nervous, and she turned back. After a while London closed in on her again, but this time in a more squalid quarter, a wilderness of dirty narrow streets, where even in the darkness the debasing marks and odours of squalid poverty were perceptible in the endless rows of houses which seemed to crowd in upon her. She came to a bridge and crossed it into an area of gaunt and darkened ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... drink for himself. Bartley declined to drink again. He was thinking of this squalid tragedy and of its possible outcome. The erstwhile sprightly Cheyenne held a new significance for the Easterner. That a man could ride up and down the trails singing, and yet carry beneath it all the grim intent some day to ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... in which he was seated to-day. They are, however, very rare; but this evening, after he had finished touching the people, a man, dressed like a peasant in a loose brown frock, worsted stockings, and brogues, apparently of the lowest order, dark, ill-looking, and squalid, approached the Confessional to reveal some great crime. The confession was very long, so was the admonition of the Cardinal which followed it. The appearance of the Cardinal is particularly dignified and noble, and, as he bent down his head, joining it to that of this ruffian-like ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... their cloaks over the varied and glittering plunder that lay scattered about on the ground; and strange was the contrast of the sparkling jewellery, the rich stuffs, and embroidered robes, strewed on the beach, with the mean and filthy garments that partially concealed them, and the wild and squalid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... of the court, walked along yonder street to the House. The sight of so young a woman, and so great a sovereign, thus leveled by physical necessity with the meanest, excited some of the old enthusiasm with which she used to be greeted: the populace themselves, with their squalid faces, and in their extreme misery, greeted her; but the greatest feeling was aroused among the nobles and gentry who surrounded her, and who seemed to make a point of offering more homage, the less outer circumstances commanded it. There was assembled in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... come, but not in my time—it will not help me.' And so you return to your daily round of toil, you go back to be ground up for profits in the world-wide mill of economic might! To toil long hours for another's advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the specters of hunger and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease, and death. And each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more cruel; each day you have to toil a little harder, and feel the ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... ruined. The grim castle of the Desmonds, scene of the midnight murder which had brought so many woes on Ireland, still elbowed the grey Templars Cloister, and looked down, as it frowned across the bay, on the crumbling aisles and squalid graves of the Abbey. To Bale, as he scanned the dark pile, it was but a keep—a mere nothing beside Marienburg or Stettin—rising above the hovels of an Irish town. But to the Irishman it stood for many a bitter memory and many a crime, besides that murder of a guest which ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... to call the little town of St. Gilles an "ugly hole," and wonder what St. Louis saw to love in it, when, coming out of a squalid, hilly street through which I had tried to pick my way on foot, alone, suddenly the facade of the wonderful old church burst upon my sight, a vision ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... had remained there ever since, unchanged and unchangeable, steeped in poverty of the most desolate description, and living the narrowest lives possible in this great Republic. They had attracted the attention of the Rev. Arthur Hill, an Episcopalian minister, who conceived an idea that the squalid settlement near Azalia afforded a fine field for missionary labor. Mr. Hill established himself in Azalia, built and furnished a little church in the settlement, and entered on a career of the most earnest and persevering charity. To all appearances his labor was thrown away; but he was possessed ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... blots and scars in our national life; also of giving some practical help to the deserving poor. My district was such an one as would furnish him with the opportunities to satisfy him in that particular, and I was therefore asked to allow Col. Gordon to accompany me to its squalid scenes, to my Ragged School, cottage and open-air services, and to the sick and suffering, of which I had many on my list. This request was gladly complied with; for the first sight of the stranger made ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... a scarcity of bread, a vast multitude from the surrounding country gather around the royal palace at Versailles, their great number, sallow faces and squalid appearance indicating widespread wretchedness and want. Their appeal for royal assistance is plainly written, in "legible hieroglyphics in their winged raggedness." The young king appears on the balcony and they are permitted to see his face. If he does not ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... are newspaper-correspondents, who weave tissues of fiction out of the warp of rumor and the web of prevarication. The site of the United States Treasury, it is the home of everything but affluence. Its public buildings are splendid, its private dwellings generally squalid. The houses are low, the rents high; the streets are broad, the crossings narrow; the hacks are black, the horses white; the squares are triangles, except that of the Capitol, which is oval; and the water is so soft that it is hard to drink it, even with the admixture of alcohol. It has ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... is one of the most ancient streets of Florence. Long, dark, and narrow, it reaches from the extremity of the Ponte Rubaconte to the right of the Ponte Vecchio. Its old houses look decayed and squalid now; but in former days they were magnificent and orderly, full of all the state of those times, being the residences of many of the Florentine nobility. How many struggles of faction, how many scenes of civil war, have these old houses witnessed! for in the period of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... which the author had sought refuge from the turmoil and forgetfulness of the vices of the city; and whence he was driven back upon London by disgust at the discovery of villany as elaborate and roguery as abject in the beggars and thieves of the country as the most squalid recesses of metropolitan vice or crime could supply. The narrative of this accidental discovery is very lively and spirited in its straightforward simplicity, and the subsequent revelations of rascality are sometimes humorous as well as curious: but the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... brought nearer the front. 'Rest' was only a comparative term. Brigades were on the move each day in country which was one continual rise and fall, with stony beds of wadis to check progress, without a tree to lend a few moments' grateful relief from a burning sun, and nothing but the rare sight of a squalid native hut to relieve the monotony of a ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... through the heart. Further on lay our own two poor riflemen with their heads smashed like eggshells; and I suppose they had mothers or wives far away at the end of the deep-sea cables. Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... order of things. The State Capitol was a beautiful marble building, but unfinished without and dirty within. Approaching the hall of the House of Representatives, I found the door guarded by a negro, squalid and filthy. He evidently reveled in his new citizenship; his chair was tilted back against the wall, his feet were high in the air, and he was making everything nauseous about him with tobacco; but he soon became obsequious ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... want a drink of milk," said the visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... descended. There she was, in a wild centre of an old, unfinished little mountain town. The facade of a church rose from a small eminence. A white road ran to the right, where a great open valley showed faintly beyond and beneath. Low, squalid sort of buildings stood around—with some high buildings. And there were bare little trees. The stars were in the sky, the air was icy. People stood darkly, excitedly about, women with an odd, shell-pattern head-dress ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... associations. It consists of a series of vaults excavated out of the solid tufa rock, where it slopes down from the Capitoline Hill into the Forum, each lined with massive blocks of red volcanic stone. For a long time these vaults have been used as cellars under a row of tall squalid-looking houses built over them between the Via di Marforio and the Vicolo del Ghettarello; and the sense of smell gives convincing proof that where prisoners of state used to be confined, provisions of wine, cheese, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the memories of past greatness; from the hill of Montmartre the electric lights here and there give suggestive glimpses of the City of Pleasure. In Pekin, looking across the lotus-pond and the marble bridges, all that is squalid in the city is shrouded in a veil of foliage, and above the tops of the trees only what is beautiful emerges, and the city sleeps in the enjoyment of thoroughly Oriental repose; and, like a solidly-built, ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... our story that is grievous or hateful, in reflecting that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he has given no thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlorn children and trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it was Rousseau who first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for one more of the great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud, it was truly said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of thought, as we ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... willingly to roam, Lured by a traitor's vainly-trusted vow? Could they, the fond and happy, see me now, Who knew me when life's early summer smiled, They would not know 'twas I, or marvel how The laughing thing, half woman and half child, Could e'er be changed to form so squalid, wan, and wild. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... vanity, and in the majority of towns which they visited, it was the first great care of their chiefs, to impress on their minds an idea of their vast importance, which in many instances was contradicted by their ragged tobes and squalid appearance. Yet, if their own accounts were to be credited, their affluence and power were unbounded. All truth is sacrificed to this feeling of vanity and vain glory; and considering that in most cases they hold truth in great reverence, they ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Kubla Khans decreeing pleasure domes and enlarging upon them in advance of the builders, and never are they so eloquent and unmindful of rain and discomforts as when their listeners are poor and condemned to a squalid London existence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... me forget the brand of the dog, as I crouch in this hideous place; To make me forget once I kindled the light of love in a lady's face, Where even the squalid Siwash now holds me a ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... and to virtue is being added knowledge, and to knowledge is being added brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity; or meanness is being added to selfishness, and greed to meanness, and impurity, malice and hatred become courses in the building. A wretched hovel, a poor, mean, squalid structure, is rising within us; and when the screen of our outward life is taken from us, this is ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... lees of a rather squalid Bohemia, these two boys; a Bohemia the more real because they were unconscious in it. Its components were a cheap furnished room, restaurants like this, adventurous companionship in the underworld which thrust itself to the ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... to those that gallantly stormed the muddy slopes of Passchendaele; to the wonderful engineers that conquered the squalid quagmires of Langemarck and Zonnebeke; to the gunners that stuck to their guns under a rain of bombs and shells, and to the transport drivers that fed them. It is a tale of wonderful gallantry and heroic ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... fires through the tree stems away to the left, and we bore down on it, listening to its drum. Viewed through the bars of the tree stems the scene was very picturesque. The village was just a collection of palm mat-built huts, very low and squalid. In its tiny street, an affair of some sixty feet long and twenty wide, were a succession of small fires. The villagers themselves, however, were the striking features in the picture. They were painted vermilion all ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... of war in the Peninsula I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country. And what are your remedies? After months of inaction, and months of action worse than inactivity, at length comes forth the grand specific, the never-failing nostrum ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... lyrics. In spirit and in form they are singular and remarkable. We cannot think of any poems which more show the mystic enchantment of genius. How else was a ragged sempstress in a squalid garret made immortal, nay, made universal, made to stand for an entire sisterhood of wretchedness? Here is the direst poverty, blear-eyed sorrow, dim and dismal suffering,—nothing of the romantic. A stern picture it is, which ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... haughty, consequential, turned-up-nosed peacock," and that "she'd bring his pride down"), and the petty indignities this lady could inflict upon him. He bore with the bad food, dirty lodging, and daily round of squalid ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the bed. He wondered about this interestingly. Probably the stage would be locked at night. Still, at a suitable hour, he could descreetly find out. On another stage a bedroom likewise intrigued him, though this was a squalid room in a tenement and the bed was a cheap thing sparsely covered and in sad disorder. People were working on this set, and he presently identified the play, for Muriel Mercer in a neat black dress entered to bring comfort to the tenement dwellers. But this ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... loud, merry voices. Traffic went on in the crowded mart, and pleasure was pursued in the luxurious halls of the noble. Here, flower-crowned guests reclined at the banquet, listening to sweet music, while yonder the squalid miser counted his gold, and there a fair young mother smiled upon her children. Just the same passions crowded into human hearts that day, just the same delusions were followed, the same pleasures felt, arid the same griefs deplored on that bright ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... their search. The houses on either side were high and large, but very old, and tenanted by people of the poorest class: as their neglected appearance would have sufficiently denoted, without the concurrent testimony afforded by the squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies half doubled, occasionally skulked along. A great many of the tenements had shop-fronts; but these were fast closed, and mouldering away; only the upper rooms being inhabited. Some houses which had become insecure from ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... path. It never rushed. It never leaped. It was a toy. The day came when it spread itself safe and shallow on level land, and he embarked upon it. But he was quickly tired of it. It was beginning to run muddily through a commonplace country, past squalid polluting towns and villages. The hills were long since gone. He turned to row to the shore. And, behold, his oars were gone! He had been trapped ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... lessens, and we hail these kingly ideals with as intense a trust and with more joy, perhaps, than they did who were born in those purple hours, because we are emerging from centuries indescribably meagre and squalid in their thought, and every new revelation has for us the sweetness of sunlight to one after the tears and sorrow of a prison-house. The well at Ballykeele is, perhaps, a humble starting-point for the contemplation of such mighty mysteries; but here where the enchanted ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... most frightful formula for cursing. And here are our friends the Christian Scientists, proclaiming the unreality of all evil, their ability to banish disease by convincing themselves that they are perfect in God—yet tormented by a squalid phobia called "Mental Malpractice", or "Malicious ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... Alighting at the squalid little station on the American side, we went to the cheapest hotel our keen eyes could discover, and leaving our valises, we struck out immediately toward the towering white column of mist which could be seen rising like a ghostly banner behind the trees. We were like those who ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... them without whimpering; though of course I'd freely have given every farthing I was worth to have been snugly back in the Congo again. But the thing had got to be seen through, and I intended to keep my end up somehow. I couldn't afford to die like a rat in a squalid hole ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... horse's gallop, 'skimming along within a yard of the ground.' Who shall trust a man's nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have taught him? Not an inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk. But Dr. Holmes's vigilance helps him to somewhat squalid purpose in his studies of New England inland life. Much careful literature besides has been spent, after the example of Elsie Venner and the Autocrat, upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... Richard Royson, acknowledge an occult acquaintance with this unknown scene? And what was the fascination which the squalid life of the bazaar had exercised occasionally on men of exalted rank at different periods of the world's history? The mere notion that he might succumb to it—that he should even feel its glamour by the operation ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... did hear of one once; but I never met one,—not one. I have seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer famine of mental pabulum, leave undone things that ought to be done,—rush to the assembly, the lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw education run to ruin. So it seems to me that we are needlessly alarmed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... their forms and dogmas alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... when suddenly a motley concourse appeared wading across the creek toward us. They filed past in rapid succession, men, women, and children; some were on horseback, some on foot, but all were alike squalid and wretched. Old squaws, mounted astride of shaggy, meager little ponies, with perhaps one or two snake-eyed children seated behind them, clinging to their tattered blankets; tall lank young men on foot, with bows and arrows in their hands; and girls whose native ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the evening, a native Theatre Royal. None of my relations or friends seemed interested, so I availed myself of the kind offer of guidance given me by a fellow artist, an amateur painter, but a professional cutter of clothes. I expected something rather picturesque, possibly rather squalid, but found it intensely interesting and characteristic and very clean, a cross-between a little French theatre, say in Monte Parnasse, and one of the lesser London theatres. The acting was French ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... at the old man, but he never moved; then she shivered, and walked faster. It was bitterly cold, a miserable afternoon for Marcus, who was visiting his poor patients in the squalid back streets ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... through the shed, and she followed, to the kitchen, slowly, with the squalid feeling that comes of sleeping in one's day clothes, and there she found the fire low and his cup and plate on the bare table. She could see him through the window. There was the horse, hitched to the staple in the corner of the barn, there was ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... The man into whose hands wealth is given has a great task set him. He has a power denied to others. He can collect and preserve all that is beautiful in art and nature—not for himself, but for those who otherwise would never see anything but what is poor and squalid and commonplace. True, he must also strive to alleviate the sufferings of their bodies, so that their minds may be free to enjoy; but he must not sacrifice the higher for the lower task—that would surely be the work of what you call a Philistine. And his higher task ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... itself has power to hush the soul with noblest emotion, it should be that. Yet there I have seen a company of travelers spend their half-hour in senseless gabble and banter and the laughter of fools. Amid the squalid surroundings of a New York tenement-house, I have seen a poor Irish woman living with such fortitude and faith and generosity that it was a comfort and inspiration to meet her. That brave soul ennobled ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... passed from the affluent stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street. His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and squalor. The public part of it—the street and the sidewalks—was equally dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. The cool lake wind was piping down the cross streets, driving before it waste paper and dust. In his preoccupation he stumbled occasionally ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... "Although I come, I stay not; But who art thou that hast become so squalid?" "Thou seest that I am one ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... wretched, lonely little room, where the cracks let the boisterous wind whistle through, and the smoky, grimy walls looked cheerless and unhomelike. A miserable little room in a miserable little cottage in one of the squalid streets of the Third District that nature and the city fathers seemed to ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... twelve o'clock, as I passed through the region of Seven Dials. Here and there stood three or four brutal-looking men, and now and then a squalid woman with a starveling baby in her arms, in the light of the gin-shops. The babies were the saddest to see—nursery-plants already in training for the places these men and women now held, then to fill a pauper's grave, or perhaps ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... for that afternoon. He returned in the evening, Cornelius accompanying him to the station; but he did not read in the train which took him back to the Fountall Theological College, as he had done on the way out. That ineradicable trouble still remained as a squalid spot in the expanse of his life. He sat with the other students in the cathedral choir next day; and the recollection of the trouble obscured the purple splendour thrown by ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... careless respecting my fame and my repose; passed his leisure hours with the most abandoned women, and even my own servants complained of his illicit advances. I remember one, who was plain even to ugliness; she was short, ill-made, squalid, and dirty; once, on my return from a rehearsal, I found that this woman was locked with my husband in my chamber. I also knew that Mr. Robinson continued his connection with a female who lodged in Maiden Lane, and who was only one of the few ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... Any man's country could get on without him Begun to fight with want from their cradles Could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts Do not want to know about such squalid lives Early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable Encounter of old friends after the lapse of years Even a day's rest is more than most people can bear Eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future For most people choice is a curse General worsening of things, ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Street, and for the rest it was still a street of homes, where people moved in a more leisurely fashion than in the crowded thoroughfares downtown. The very air was charged with a healthier life, and here amid the opulence one could forget the near presence of the squalid alley. So it had become a habit of mine always to begin my day with a walk uptown, as a gentle tonic for my body and to give my mind a brief but more cheerful outlook than through the smutted office windows. I never tired of the life which I saw about ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... heart-rending vision, and then she sunk again to meet another still more frightful. The wind whistled gloomily through the forest trees; the wild bird screamed his death song; and a spectre rose with sunken eyes and squalid cheek, his wounds distilling blood, and his raven locks clotted with gore. It was her lover—he had left the tree on which he withered like the seared leaf of autumn, and stalked to her widowed couch smiling ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... a large cotton manufacturing town—sometimes called the Manchester of Poland—but now of course all the factories were closed, and many destroyed by shell. I should not think it was a very festive place at the best of times; it looked squalid and grimy, and the large bulk of its population was made up of the most abject ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... yard between the low houses run downhill, that, standing at the top of a worn path like a seam in some old garment, the two Europeans could look over the mud wall. Squalid as were the mud huts and the cattle-yard connecting them, the picture framed in the square enclosure blazed with colour. It was barbaric, and beautiful ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... were dreaming in the fifties of a kind of industrial millennium, with Cobden as the prophet and Macaulay as the preacher of a new gospel of commercial prosperity and universal peace and progress, Borrow's pre-railroad prejudices and low tastes appeared obscurantist, dark, squalid, unintelligible. {27b} He ran out his books upon a line directly counter to the literary current of the day, and, naturally enough, the critical billow ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... by trenches and crowned by an elaborate iron structure with two towers. This ground was the scene of the main British attack on Loos two months later, and the building was the famous Tower Bridge. The squalid little town between Houchin and Sailly, at whose busy coal-mine the enemy intermittently threw shells, was Noeux-les-Mines, where Lord French had his forward headquarters during the fighting. But even then there ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... but the streets around are mean and close; poverty and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are pent up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems, in my eyes at least, to hang about the scene, and to impart to it a squalid ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... not much upon either side or down the center of long and tortuous Grand Avenue to arouse enthusiasm, nor was Billy particularly enthusiastic about that more or less squalid thoroughfare. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with me to the Rue Mouffetard, where there is a ball frequented solely by the lowest and poorest class of Paris strugglers for bread, such as the ragpickers and the street-sweepers. At first thought it seems improbable that the squalid wretches who can barely earn sous enough to live on, to whom fifty cents a day are fine wages, should have a ball. But all things are possible in Paris in the way of popular amusements. In the Rue Mouffetard, then, near the Rue ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... was completely intrigued by her. Her performance in "The Zingara" had led him to expect a girl of much more poise and finish, and yet with all her rawness she was far from naive. His own experience recognized hers; both had lived in the world's squalid byways; he could have talked to her in their language and she would have understood. But she was not of the women of such places, she had a clean, clear quality like a flame. Daring beyond doubt, wild and elusive, but untouched by ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... In Shelley's powerful drama, in Guerrazzi's tedious novel, and Scolari's digest, the legend of Beatrice Cenci has long appealed to modern sympathy. The real facts, extracted from legal documents and public registers, reduce its poetry of horror to comparatively squalid prose.[196] Yet, shorn of romantic glamour, the bare history speaks significantly to a student of Italian customs. Monsignore Cristoforo Cenci, who died about the year 1562, was in holy orders, yet not a priest. One of the clerks of the Apostolic ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... and here and there Welled up and burst across the open flats. As yet they knew not to enkindle fire Against the cold, nor hairy pelts to use And clothe their bodies with the spoils of beasts; But huddled in groves, and mountain-caves, and woods, And 'mongst the thickets hid their squalid backs, When driven to flee the lashings of the winds And the big rains. Nor could they then regard The general good, nor did they know to use In common any customs, any laws: Whatever of booty fortune unto each Had ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... Roman severity and dignity and self-respect. The descendants of Aemilius and Gracchus—even generals and consuls and praetors—mixed familiarly with the lowest canaille of Rome in their vilest and most squalid purlieus of shameless vice. They fought as amateur gladiators in the arena. They drove as competing charioteers on the race-course. They even condescended to appear as actors on the stage. They devoted themselves with such frantic eagerness to the excitement of gambling, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... baskets piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces with a rag, and loosened their clothes to dispose them for the night's sleep. The face of the woman, her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect of her belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty. Watching her, Theron had felt curiously interested in the performance. In one sense, it was scarcely more human than the spectacle of a cat licking her kittens, or a cow giving suck to her calf. Yet, in another, was there ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... of a life. She consults the fashion-plate oftener than her Bible; she visits the dry-goods shop and the milliner oftener than the church. She speaks of Fashion oftener than of virtue, and follows it closer than she does her Saviour. She can see squalid misery and low-bred vice without a blush or a twinge of the heart; but a plume out of Fashion, or a table set in old style, would shock her into a hysteric fit. Her example! What is it but a breath of poison to ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... should find Jerusalem disappointing; and I fear it will disappoint them that I am not disappointed. Of the city as a city I shall try to say something elsewhere; but the things which these critics have especially in mind are at once more general and more internal. They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines and those who use them. Now the mistake of critics is not that they criticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves. They compare the alien with ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... shop, De Vac threaded his way through the dirty lanes and alleys of ancient London, lighted at far intervals by an occasional smoky lantern, until he came to a squalid tenement but a short ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Poverty and riches are close neighbors in New York. Only a stone's throw back of the most sumptuous parts of Broadway and Fifth avenue, want and suffering, vice and crime, hold their courts. Fine ladies can look down from their high casements upon the squalid dens of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Office and Standard Bank, the thoroughfares of the town offer scarcely any attractions. The Dutch are not an artistic race, and the fact that natives here live not in "locations" but anywhere they choose has covered some portions of the town's area with ugly and squalid houses. Nor, as a matter of fact, does the general tone of thought and feeling in Cape Colony naturally lend itself to aesthetic considerations. Even the churches fail to escape the influence of a spirit which subordinates everything else ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... altogether, and soon also the river banks. Bored by the gloom of his fellow-voyagers and depressed, Mac betook himself to his state-room, and went to sleep. He woke for lunch, went once more to sleep, awoke again in the evening when Luxor was reached, and hastened through the squalid streets to board the saloon car for Cairo. Even in the gale and the fog of sand the skipper had not managed to find a convenient mud-bank on which to ground his steamer, and Mac told him he didn't think he was much of ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... the first of Orcus' jaws, close to the doorway side, The Sorrows and Avenging Griefs have set their beds to bide; There the pale kin of Sickness dwells, and Eld, the woeful thing, And Fear, and squalid-fashioned Lack, and witless Hungering, Shapes terrible to see with eye; and Toil of Men, and Death, And Sleep, Death's brother, and the Lust of Soul that sickeneth: And War, the death-bearer, was set full in the threshold's way, And those Well-willers' ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
