"Adobe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evidently well to do, and they brought with them a good-sized retinue of ranch- and herdsmen,—mainly Mexicans,—plenty of "stock," and a complete "camp outfit," which served them well until they could raise the adobe walls and finish their homesteads. Curiosity led occasional parties of officers or enlisted men to spend a day in saddle and thus to visit these enterprising neighbors. Such parties were always civilly received, ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... holding the reins on a pair of fast horses at full speed, we whirled past the old adobe wall (which the Mormons had built to defend their city from the Indians) and came out into the purple night of Utah, with its frosty starlight and its black hills—a desert night, a mountain night, a night so vast in its height ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... use every and any thing handy for the purpose; ofttimes an uprooted tree will furnish a well-made adobe wall, where the spreading roots have torn off the surface soil as the tree fell and what was the under-side is now an exposed wall of clay, against which you may rest the poles for the roof of a lean-to. Or the side of the cliff (Fig. ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... and the sand gave way to rocks. The moon, almost full, already smiled down upon us over the wall on the left. We continued along the plain between the ranges, which later receded into the distance, as if retiring for the night. Flat, mud-colored, Palestinian adobe huts stood here and there in the moonlight among patches of a ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... dive for, despised only because they are so common and so useful! But Julia, gliding about noiselessly, did not think much of the eggs, did not give much attention to the hens scratching for wheat kernels amongst the straw, nor to the barn swallows chattering over the adobe dwellings which they were building among the rafters above her. She had often listened to the love-talk of these last, but now her heart was too heavy to hear. She slid down to the edge of one of the mows, ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... which would be used with the Tob (adobe, sun-dried brick) forming the walls of Egypt and Assyria. M.G. Maspero, in his excellent booklet "L'Archeologie Egyptienne" (p. 7. Paris, Quantin, 1887), illustrates this ancient industry which endures with all its gear to the present day. The average measured 22 X 11 ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... there and dreen a spell. Lucky I made that barrel of soft soap last week. It's just the stuff to take this paint off, and what drips from you to the old adobe floor won't hurt. Pasqual's a master hand at scrubbin', and I'll give him the job of you and the floor both. Reckon you'll wish you hadn't ever seen paint pots time he gets through. Now—where's ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... deep in dust, and the cool wind whipped up little puffs. The houses along this street were all low, square, flat-roofed structures made of some kind of red cement. It occurred to her suddenly that this building-material must be the adobe she had read about. There was no person in sight. The long street appeared to have no end, though the line of houses did not extend far. Once she heard a horse trotting at some distance, and several times the ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... and during the afternoon they saw other herds in the charge of peons, showing that the party were gradually approaching civilised territory; and about half an hour before sunset they marched into a small village, composed chiefly of adobe huts, where a halt was called for the night, and where our friends were confined in a ramshackle barn of a place in company with the sergeant and ten men. That the sergeant was quite determined not to get into trouble by the neglect of any possible precaution soon became perfectly evident; ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... an adobe building. In the doorway stood a woman leaning against the jamb. She was smoking a cigar. June looked twice at her ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... city" par excellence) is plain from the language used at durbars, which were always held "outside the walls." In the loess plains there could not have been any stone whatever for building purposes, and there is little, if any, specific mention of brick. Probably the walls were of adobe, i.e. of mud, beaten down between two rigid planks, removed higher as the wall dries below. This is the way most of the houses are still built in modern Peking, and perhaps also in most parts of China, at least where stone (or brick) ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... car, this forty-mile "zephyr," as they term it in San Pasqual, sighs joyously past him, snatches his headgear, whirls it down the tracks and deposits it at the western boundary of Donna's "ranch." This boundary happens to be a seven-foot adobe wall— so the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... followed the oysters he illustrated for the Duke with two pieces of bread the essential difference in structure between the Mexican pueblo and the tribal house of the Navajos, and lest the Duke should confound either or both of them with the adobe hut of the Bimbaweh tribes he showed the difference at once with a ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... of a long shed, adobe-walled and thatch-roofed, with small barred windows set high above the earth floor. It was cool and shadowy, and the air was heavy with the fragrance of citrus fruits. There were bins along the walls, some partly full of oranges, and piles of wicker baskets. Another conveyer dome ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... the bells of San Juan has a journey yet to make. He who has not set foot upon the dusty road which is the one street of San Juan, at times the most silent and deserted of thoroughfares, at other times a mad and turbulent lane between sun-dried adobe walls, may yet learn something of man and his hopes, desires, fears and ruder passions from a pin-point upon the ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... how it came about. One hundred and thirty years ago, the port of La Paz, in Baja California, lay baking in the sun. La Paz was then, as now, a little old town, with narrow, stony streets and adobe houses, standing amidst palms, and chaparral, and cactus. To this port of La Paz came, one eventful day, Don Jose de Galvez, envoy of the King of Spain. He brought orders to the Governor of California, Don Gaspar de Portola, that he should send a vessel in search ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... did—in true Mexican fashion. With a curse of but five words—words of great scope and finest selection, however—he mercilessly raked Felipe's ancestors for five generations back; he objurgated Felipe's holdings—chickens, adobe house, money, burro, horses, pigs. He closed, snarling not obscurely at Felipe the man and at any progeny of his which might appear in the future. Then he dropped his reins and sprang off ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... stone, rising five hundred feet out of the endless waste of sand. A little adobe house, halfway up the mesa, with the desert far below and the Indian village far above. A few peach trees, and a spring—a sacred spring, which the Indians worshipped in secret. A little chapel, which my father had built with his own hands. He often spent ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... was a rough one, built of logs, with an adobe chimney. It contained two rooms and a loft. The inducements to live in such a lonely spot must have been small enough, but so many undesirable localities are inhabited, that it is hardly worth while to feel or express surprise at ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... wild, long-horned cattle that ran from their approach gave place to feeding mustangs with the mark of the saddle upon them. Later, an adobe wall confronted them; and this they followed through a grove of great live oaks and up a grassy slope beyond, to where the long, low adobe house sat solidly upon a natural terrace, with the valley lying ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... with ladders to draw above in case of attack, and only one house—that of the doves and the fruit—into which one could walk from the court. All the others were as in the other villages—terraces, and the first terrace had doors only in the roof so that a blank adobe wall faced the court and the curious. Each great house with rooms by the score, and its height from two to five stories, was the home of many, and a ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... San Fernando, some twenty miles northwest of Los Angeles, has more than once been the scene of these unhopeful quests. The visitor, who might be curious concerning sundry excavations noticed in the foundations of the massive adobe walls, would be told by the old Mexican who acted as custodian of the ruin—it is hardly more than that —that they were made by "malos hombres, ladrones, que buscaban dinero"; and, with a shrug, "Tontos! no cogieron no mas que polvo, mucho ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... it was with a view of ascertaining some facts concerning occurrences of more recent date, as well as of seeing some of the actors therein, that we paid a visit to Pueblo. We found it a rather odd mixture of the old and the new, the adobe and the "dug-out" looking across the street upon the imposing structure of brick or the often gaudily-painted frame cottage. It looked as though it might have been indulging in a Rip Van Winkle sleep, except that the duration ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... for this than our ever-faithful half canteens, and nothing wherewith to wall the wells. But a firm clay was reached a few feet below the surface, which afforded tolerable strong sides for the lower part, ana furnished material to make adobe bricks for curbs to keep out the sand of the upper part. The sides were continually giving away, however, and fellows were perpetually falling down the holes, to the great damage of their legs and arms. The ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... regions of the Red River, or through those drained by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw, Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them, In walls of adobe, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day's sport, The city sleeps and the country sleeps, The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, The old husband sleeps by his wife, and the young husband sleeps by his wife; ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... dark, shadowy rocks, grim witnesses of the battle. This spot is known by the appropriate name of "The Devil's Gate." Wherever the walls of the canon recede from the river's brink, and leave a space of cultivable land, there the industrious Mormons have built log or adobe cabins, and converted the circumscribed domain into farms, gardens, and orchards. In one of these isolated settlements I seek shelter from a passing shower at the house of a "three-ply Mormon " (a Mormon with three wives), and am introduced ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... They are truthful accounts of experiences that came into my own life with the Army in the far West, whether they be about Indians, desperadoes, or hunting—not one little thing has been stolen. They are of a life that has passed—as has passed the buffalo and the antelope—yes, and the log and adobe quarters for the Army. All flowery descriptions have been omitted, as it seemed that a simple, concise narration of events as they actually occurred, was more in keeping with the life, and that which came into it. FRANCES M. ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... a low stool over to Craig's side. He was sitting in a rough chair tilted back against the adobe ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... court containing another adobe building, baked with the solar beams of many summers. Leaving our horses in the charge of a few peons in the courtyard, who were basking lazily in the sun, we entered a low doorway, where a deep shadow and an agreeable coolness fell upon us, as sudden and grateful ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... dim light there lifted a terraced adobe building with ladders faintly outlined on the terraces. There was no sound save the barking of a dog and the ripple of the river. With a muttered admonition, Kut-le left Rhoda to the others and climbed one of the ladders. He returned with a blanketed figure ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... fell away, forming a deep, semicircular basin toward the west, at the hub of which stood bolt-upright a tall, snowy flagstaff, its shred of bunting hanging limp and lifeless from the peak, and in the dull, dirt-colored buildings of adobe, ranged in rigid lines about the dull brown, flat-topped mesa, a thousand yards up stream above the pool, drowsed a little band of martial exiles, stationed here to keep the peace 'twixt scattered settlers and swarthy, swarming Apaches. The fort was ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... glutinated with the bird's saliva and mixed with plant fibers, for the little mason does not believe in making bricks without straw. So well packed is the inch-thick wall that a stiff knife blade must be used to cut through it. While the natural color of the adobe cottage is ash-gray, and therefore harmonizes with the general hue of its surroundings, and also with the mezzotints of the builder, yet he sometimes decorates it with the gaily colored wings of moths caught in the chase and attached to the plaster while ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... spirit ere this." Whenever we would go walking together, he and I, through the streets of that old Monterey, old no longer save in memory, he would invariably take me to a certain high board fence, and looking through an opening show me the ruins of an adobe house—nothing but a broken fireplace left, moss-grown and crumbling away. "That is my old California," he would say, while his sweet voice was shaken with tears. That desolated hearth seemed to him the symbol of the ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... group of low-roofed adobe buildings blending with the abrupt red background of the hill which sheltered it from the winter winds, was a settlement in itself, providing shelter and comfort for the wives and children of the herders. Each home maintained a small garden of ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... day, of adobes, or sun-dried bricks. It was enclosed by walls twenty feet high and four feet thick, encompassing an area two hundred and fifty feet long by two hundred wide. At the diagonal northwest and southwest corners, adobe bastions were erected, commanding ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... house and across the narrow flat opposite the corrals and up on the first bench of the bluff that sheltered the ranch buildings from the worst of the desert winds. She did it very innocently, and as though she had never in her life had any thought of invading the squat, adobe building kept sacred to the leisure hours ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... to the war in April of 1917, three chambray shirts in an excellent state of repair, half of a fat steer jerked, a full bag of Bayo beans, and a string of red chilli-peppers pendant from the rafters of an adobe shack which Pablo and his wife, Carolina, occupied rent free. Certainly (thought old Don Miguel) life could hold no problems for one of Pablo's ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the line of haphazard shacks and adobe buildings that bordered the one street, into the jungle of mesquite and cactus growing in the dry waste of sand that almost surrounded the settlement—and ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... dawned as bright and beautiful as all mornings are wont to dawn in Southern California. A light mist hung over the old adobe mission church, through which, with its snow-white towers and cold, clear-cut lines, it rose like a frozen fairy castle. Bell opened her sleepy eyes with the very earliest birds, and running to the little oval window, framed with white-rose vines, looked out at the new day ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... white, brooding spring sunshine. A few trim-looking places cuddled their yards and gardens close against the life-giving channel, whose green banks, covered with vegetation and shaded by trees, bisected the town. Elsewhere, naked adobe walls flanked the dusty streets and from their stark surfaces gave back the sunshine in a blinding glare. Here and there an umbrella tree, or a locust, made a welcome splotch of green and shade down the length of the barren, ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... dress myself, and sit in my ventana. I have a good view of the plaza and the adjacent streets, with their rows of brown adobe houses, and ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Fort William after William Bent, was built of adobe or clay bricks. It was one hundred and fifty feet long and one hundred feet wide. Its walls were eighteen feet high, and six or seven feet thick at the base. The tops formed a parapet or walk. In two diagonally opposite corners were bastions of round towers, ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... moment an earthquake began, and in the first seconds even this was not so bad. The wall about the Presidio was fourteen feet high and seven feet thick and there were solid trunks of trees crossed inside the adobe. It looked like a heap of dirt, nothing more. Luis was riding up from the Battery of Yerba Buena and his horse was flung down and he saw the sand-dunes heaving toward him like waves in a storm and shiver like quicksilver. And there was a roar as if the earth had dropped and the sea gone after. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... proved to be entirely enclosed by a wall of adobe ten feet high and whitewashed. To the outside it presented a blank face. Only corrals and an alfalfa patch were not included. A wide, high gateway, that could be closed by massive doors, let into a stable yard, and seemed to be the only entrance. The buildings ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... into an adobe patch one day—at least, Big Medicine, Pink, Cal Emmett and Irish did, for they were with him—and laughed surreptitiously together while he wallowed there and came out afoot, his horse floundering behind him, mud to the ears, both ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... attractive building, made of adobe cement, in the ancient mission style; but it proved roomy ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... of sand dunes, mesquite thickets, occasional wide canons where zacatan meadows rippled like waves of the sea in the desert air, he swung his horse around a low hill and came in sight of the little adobe of Herrara, a place of straggly enclosures of stakes and wattles, with the ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... felt convinced that we were alone. But suddenly I realized it was not so. The kitchen adjoined an interior back-garden. I could see it through the opened door oval—a dim space of flowers; a little path to a pergola; an adobe fountain. It was a sort of Spanish patio out there, partially enclosed by the wings of the house. Moonlight was struggling into it. And, as I gazed idly, I thought I saw a figure lurking. Someone ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... had been home the outfit had been busy. The Circle L had a dozen line camps—little adobe cabins scattered over the range, occupied during the winter by Circle L cowboys whose duty it was to guard the cattle against the aggressions of timber wolves, rustlers, cold, ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... dressed people before the vista of a faintly lit, narrow, ascending street. The dim twilight of the closing day lingered under this roof of fog, which seemed to hang scarcely a hundred feet above them, and showed a wall or rampart of brown adobe on their right that extended nearly to the water; to the left, at the distance of a few hundred yards, another low brown wall appeared; above it rose a fringe of foliage, and, more distant and indistinct, two white towers, that were lost in ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... Colorado, from the foothills to near timber line, usually in deserted Woodpecker holes, natural cavities in trees, fissures in the sides of steep rocky cliffs, and, in the settlements, in suitable locations about and in the adobe buildings. In settled portions of the west it nests in the cornice of buildings, under the eaves of porches, in the nooks and corners of barns and outhouses, and in boxes provided for its occupation. Prof. Ridgway found the Rocky ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... the city's roaring blocks, You from the bleak New England rocks With the shingled roof in the apple boughs, You from the brown adobe house— You from the Rockies, you from the Coast, You from the burning frontier-post And you from the Klondyke's frozen flanks, You from the cedar-swamps, you from the pine, You from the cotton and you from the vine, You from the rice and the sugar-brakes, ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... brackets, and the letters are based on Adobe's Symbol font. The "markings" are not the correct symbol but rather the closest equivalent "accented" character. the encoded characters used include: AE, ae, oe, ', !, , ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... estimate, at least five thousand persons. It is true the dwellings were of the most primitive description, consisting of huts, for the most part built of wattles and palm thatch, with here and there a more pretentious structure, the walls of which were adobe, and it was indescribably filthy; yet the place was laid out with some pretension to regularity, being divided up into several wide streets, while in the centre of the town there was a wide, open space, or square, one ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... round about the fortress. It is rapidly falling to decay, but is still in a sufficiently good state of preservation to show thoroughly its former strength and conformation. The fortress is a decidedly massive building, constructed entirely of mud and adobe bricks, a hundred feet high, of circular form, and some two hundred yards in circumference. The disintegrated walls and debris of former towers form a sloping mound or foundation about fifty feet in height, and from this the perpendicular walls of the castle rise up, huge and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... stock drinking or not drinking and the darn fool diary that had to be kept, Bud opined that they needed an extra hand or two. Bud was peevish, these days. Gila Bend had exasperated him because it was not the town it called itself, but a huddle of adobe huts. He had come away in the sour mood of a thirsty man who finds an alkali spring sparkling deceptively under a rock. Furthermore, the nights had been hot and the mosquitoes a humming torment. And as a last affliction he was called upon to ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... relief to the glaring newness of the painted villas along the road, had been tastefully modified to suit the needs and habits of a later civilization; the galleries of the inner courtyard, or patio, had been transferred to the outside walls in the form of deep verandas, while the old adobe walls themselves were hidden beneath flowing Cape jessamine or bestarred passion vines, and topped by roofs ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... a bedridden crone? From the extension at times came a murmur of voices, but never the accents of adult womanhood. The gathering darkness, relieved only by a dull glow from the smouldering logs in the adobe chimney, added to my loneliness. In the circumstances I knew I ought to have put aside the repast and given myself up to gloomy and pessimistic reflection; but Nature is often inconsistent, and in that keen mountain air, I grieve to say, my physical and ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of the houses are built of bluish-gray adobe bricks, and are only one or two stories high, forming fine cottage homes which promise simple comfort within. They are set well back from the street, leaving room for a flower garden, while almost every one has a thrifty orchard at ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... consisted of two trunks, and I had only the sum of ten dollars in my pocket. I might, perhaps, have carried one trunk, but I could not manage two; so I was compelled to pay out seven of my ten dollars to have them taken to a room in an old adobe building on the west side of what is now known as Portsmouth Square. This room was about ten feet long by eight feet wide, and had a bed in it. For its occupation the sum of $35 a week was charged. Two of my fellow-passengers and myself engaged it. They took the bed, and I took the floor. ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... America. 'Around the curving shore of the Bay and upon the sides of three hills, which rise steeply from the water, the middle one receding so as to form a bold amphitheatre, the town is planted and seems scarcely yet to have taken root, for tents, canvass, plank, mud and adobe houses are mingled together with the least apparent attempt at order and durability.' However, the appearance of the city is fast improving—for churches and schools and public buildings are springing up on every side, and substantial edifices are fast taking the place of the more temporary ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... mile the tunnel had to be driven through solid granite. Then the way led through adobe hills, so soft that the sagging walls were a constant menace. Not until six workmen had died at the job was the adobe finally sealed with concrete. After the adobe came sand, spring riddled. More rough-necks gave up their lives fighting the gushing floods and falling walls, until at ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the little river, through irrigating ditches, past dozens of those deliciously quaint adobe houses, past the inevitable church, past a dead pony, ran over a chicken, made the little seven-year-old girls take their five-year-old brothers up in their arms for protection, and finally we climbed a long hill. ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... the forests, the soil and sunlight, they made the original picture-building which artists since have loved to paint, and poets loved to praise. From this same viewpoint the mission builders are seen as philanthropists who selected human materials as gross as the mud from which they made the adobe brick, and from these built up a civilization that was more wonderful than all the mission-edifices which remain as monuments ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... half acres. Where now stand substantial business blocks, a quarter of a century since there appeared only sandy beaches or mud-flats, with here and there a wooden pier reaching out into the bay. Only five years before the town contained but seventy-nine buildings—thirty-one frame, twenty-six adobe, and the rest shanties. It had grown largely since then, but even now was only a straggling village, with ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... and is a beautiful one, low and long, with all the rooms opening on the broad veranda; it is part of adobe and part of wood, the sides being covered with a network of fuchsia, heliotrope and jasmine reaching to the eaves of the brown tile roof; a broad, branching fig tree is in the little court before it, and a clump of yuccas and fan palms to the right, while down to the road and along the front stretches ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... made him feel that he was indeed far from his own land and surrounded by a thousand perils. The woman did not speak again and they moved on with an even stroke down the canal which had an uniform width of about thirty feet. They were still passing houses of stone and others of adobe, but before they had gone a mile they were halted by a sharp command from the shore. An officer and three soldiers, one of whom held a lantern, stood on ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... about two acres of high land in Fresno county that can't be irrigated. It is red adobe soil and there is hardpan in it. Which kind of fruit trees will grow and pay best? How near may the hardpan be to the surface before ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... These forces were mobile, and could easily operate away from the railroad. They lacked artillery, without which they were greatly handicapped, especially in the attack on fortified places and on stone or adobe towns. As most of the horses and mules were driven away from the railroads, the insurgents could get all the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... haven't any cause to love you, or Gerald Wynn, or Bob Katz. One of you put a bullet into my shoulder, at the old adobe near Wickenburg. The three of you, also, made off with fifteen thousand dollars belonging to me and to Lafe Wynn. Now I can put you through for all that, and put you through good and hard. Even if I can't get hands on Gerald and Katz, I've got you securely. Do ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... subdued whistle. Below him in the basin was an adobe hut. He had been through this section of the country several times but had never before stumbled upon the hut. This was not remarkable, for situated as it was, in this little basin, hidden from sight by a serried line of hills and ridges among which ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... found myself at the foot of a narrow street which passed between two tall adobe buildings and entered the plaza near the centre of its western side. I took it at a run, and when half-way through saw directly before its inner end, facing the north, a group of old, gray-haired Navajos standing ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... horse ranch was a long, low L-shaped adobe structure. The first impression Curly received was that of negligence. In places the roof sagged. A door in the rear hung from one hinge. More than one broken pane of glass was stuffed with paper. The same evidence of shiftlessness ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... time. Yerba Buena was the early name of the settlement. This was applied also, as we have learned, to Goat Island. The pueblo was then insignificant and apparently with no prospect of expansion or grandeur. There were only a few houses there, chiefly of adobe construction, clustering about the Plaza. The Presidio, west of the stray hamlet, and the Mission Dolores, to the southwest, were all that relieved a dreary landscape beyond. There were the hills covered with chaparral and the shifting sands all around, and ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... followed without difficulty the path indicated. A few hours' walk over the mountain pass brought us to a little straggling village of adobe houses, ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... they look like yaller caterpillars, Then gray hossches'nuts leetle hands unfold Softer 'n a baby's be at three days old: 70 Thet's robin-redbreast's almanick; he knows Thet arter this ther's only blossom-snows; So, choosin' out a handy crotch an' spouse, He goes to plast'rin' his adobe house. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... on horseback and reached Johnson's Ranch about the same hour in the day. As we approached, the little colony of emigrants which had settled in the neighborhood the previous Autumn crowded in and about the two-roomed adobe house which Mr. Johnson had kindly set apart as a stopping place for the several relief parties on their way to and from the mountains. All were anxious to see the sufferers for whose rescue ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... I was walking through the main street of one of the clustered adobe villages that lie in the folds of the Castilian plain not far from Madrid. The lamps were just being lit in the little shops where the people lived and worked and sold their goods, and women with beautifully shaped pottery jars on their heads were ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... manage, after strenuous efforts on Hop's part, to get to the Seabury bungalow. It was in the midst of a beautiful garden, and a long walk led up to the house, around which was an adobe wall, with a red gate. Over the gate was a roof, making a pleasant shade, and there were seats, ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young
... little attention to the arrival or departure of strangers, San Andreas in the valley merely rubbed its eyes and dozed again as Cheyenne and Bartley rode in, put up their horses at the livery, and strolled over to the adobe hotel where they engaged ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... street, the upper row being built against a cliff of rock and shale, the other row being placed halfway between this row and the river. These buildings were all of rock, of which there was no lack, plastered with adobe, or mud. One, we were told, had been Lee's stronghold, it was a square building, with a few very small windows, and with loopholes in the sides. At the time of our visit it was occupied by two men; one, a young Englishman, recently ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... dilapidated castle. Its base was formed by a mass of shapeless walls, of mud hovels, gray and dusty looking as the soil, together with some fragments of turreted walls, in whose shelter about a thousand humble huts raised their miserable adobe fronts, like anaemic and hungry faces demanding an alms from the passer-by. A shallow river surrounded the town, like a girdle of tin, refreshing, in its course, several gardens, the only vegetation that cheered the eye. People ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... one deliberate, crooked street, because the arroyo along which it straggled was crooked. Its buildings were mostly of adobe, with earthen roofs, so low that when one saw a rainstorm coming in the rainy season (when it rained invariably once a day), he went forth with a shovel and shingled his roof anew, standing on the ground as he did so. There were a few cabins built of logs, but very few. Only one or two ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... agricultural districts of the East. The inhabitants all live in towns, or "forts," as they are more commonly called, each of which is governed by a Bishop. These are invariably laid out in a square, which is surrounded by a lofty wall of mere dirt, or else of adobe. In the smaller forts there are no streets, all the dwellings backing upon the wall, and inclosing a quadrangular area, which is covered with heaps of rubbish, and alive with pigs, chickens, and children. The same stream which irrigates the fields in the vicinity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... her, Red Snake and the medicine man in the center of the adobe, the lesser chiefs behind them, and in another circle the ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... men, the representatives of every occupation, honest and dishonest, creditable and disgraceful; of every people under the sun, scattered through the gulches and ravines in the mountains, or grouped themselves at certain points in cities, towns and villages of canons or adobe. Perhaps never in the world's history did cities spring into existence so instantaneously, and certainly never was their population so strangely diverse in language, habits and customs. Of course gamblers of every kind and color; criminals of every shade ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... his prisoner into a cagelike cell, heavily guarded with bars on all sides. The adobe walls had been trusted in no direction. The steel lining was the strength of the Sour Creek jail. The sheriff himself set about shaking out the blankets. When this was done, he bade his two companions ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... upon wave, till their mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood the continent beyond. The peoples threatened by them were dimly conscious of the danger which as yet only loomed in the distance. Far off, among their quiet adobe villages, in the sun-scorched lands by the Rio Grande, the slow Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters still walked in the tranquil steps of their fathers, ignorant of the growth of the power that was to overwhelm their children and successors; but ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... beginning with the manufacture of pottery, extends to the time of the domestication of animals. The middle status includes not only the domestication of animals in the East but the practice of irrigation in the West and the building of walls from stone and adobe brick. The upper status is marked by the use of iron and extends to the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and literary composition. At this juncture civilization ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... charge of the store, caught up a Mexican sombrero, and led the way up the trail to a grove of live-oaks perched on a bluff above. Below them stretched the plain, fold on fold to the blue horizon edge. Close at hand clumps of cactus, thickets of mesquit, together with the huddled adobe buildings of the ranch, made up the details of a scene possible only in the sunburnt territory. The palpitating heat quivered above the hot brown sand. No life stirred in the valley except a circling buzzard high in the sky, and the tiny moving speck with its ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... down. We were kindly treated here, for I believe Mr. French told them about us. They sent an Indian to take our horses, and we sat down beside the great house. There were many smaller houses, and quite a large piece of ground fenced in by an adobe wall. The roof of the buildings was like that of our own buildings in having eaves on both, sides, but the covering was of semi circular tiles made and burned like brick. Rows of these were placed close together, the hollow sides up, and then another course over ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... overwhelming desire to let himself go to the devil—not to go violently as a gentleman should, but to sink safely and sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an adobe house in Mexico, half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his slender, artistic fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened to guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of Castile and an olive-skinned, carmine-lipped ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of development of the same conceptions, operating upon similar necessities. They also represent these several conditions of Indian life with reasonable completeness. Their houses will be seen to form one system of works, from the Long House of the Iroquois to the Joint Tenement houses of adobe and of stone in New Mexico, Yucatan, Chiapas, and Guatemala, with such diversities as the different degrees of advancement of these several tribes would naturally produce. Studied as one system, springing from a common experience, and similar wants, and under institutions of the ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... rocky hills curving about the valley, was the long white Mission, with its double towers, corridor of many arches, and sloping roof covered with red tiles. Between was the wild valley where cattle grazed among the trees and the massive bowlders. The red-tiled white adobe houses of the Presidio and of the little town clustered under its wing, the brown mud huts of the Indians, were grouped in the foreground of ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... N. material, raw material, stuff, stock, staple; adobe, brown stone; chinking; clapboard; daubing; puncheon; shake; shingle, bricks and mortar; metal; stone; clay, brick crockery &c. 384; compo, composition; concrete; reinforced concrete, cement; wood, ore, timber. materials; supplies, munition, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of any importance we passed was Fronteras. It is built on the summit and slopes of an elevated plateau and looks extremely picturesque at a distance. Seen close, however, it turns out to be a wretched little cluster of adobe, or sun-dried brick, houses. Not only the town itself, but also all the ranches in the neighbourhood are erected on elevations, a precaution from former ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... class II—detached family dwellings—consist sometimes of a single room; more often of several rooms. The rooms are generally built of stone, although examples constructed of mud and adobe are also found in certain regions. The average size of the room is larger than in the communal building, and there is a gradual increase in size of rooms from north to south. There are front doorways and light and air holes are larger than in the communal houses. Mr Bandolier suggests ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... made some pretense of aping the architecture of buildings in other towns. The eating-house was a two-story structure, with an outside stairway leading to its upper floor. It had a flat roof and an adobe chimney. Its second floor had been subdivided into lodging-rooms. Its windows ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Acomans, and others, having different languages, {11} but standing on the same plane of culture. In many respects they have advanced far beyond any other stock. They have specially cultivated the arts of peace. Their great stone or adobe dwellings, in which hundreds of persons live, reared with almost incredible toil on the top of nearly inaccessible rocks or on the ledges of deep gorges, were constructed to serve at the same time as dwelling-places and as strongholds against the ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... couldn't see ten feet. Before we had eaten our second sandwiches, the water was trickling through cracks in the shelf-rock roof, and dirt was washing away from the sides of our cave. Outside, the land was a stretch of yellow, liquid adobe, worked upon by the ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... street was on the banks of the bay. There was one pier at this time constructed from it in the bay, and a temporary pier by Colonel Stevenson at the north beach. The city was growing up toward Happy Valley. Portsmouth Square, the plaza, still had some of the adobe buildings on it. The best hotel was the Parker House, on the west corner of it. The plaza was sand, no ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... he rose to his full height and, with a sweeping gesture the length of his arm, pointed to the domelike summit, dazzling in the slant of the evening sunshine, that seemingly overhung the dun-colored adobe corrals on the flats to the south, yet stood full five miles away. 'Tonio so seldom opened his lips to speak that the six men listened with attention they seldom gave to one another. Yet what 'Tonio said ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... up to the small adobe house where he had lived in solitary contentment with his cat Compadre until Luck Lindsay, seeking a cheap headquarters for his free-lance company while he produced the big Western picture which filled ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... with tiles, concealed pleasant secluded gardens, from which the heavy perfume of the floribundia and other semitropical flowers poured out on the evening air. Behind such a wall and in the midst of such a garden stood the two-story adobe dwelling of the Senorita Maria Ygnacia Bonifacio, known to her intimates as Dona Nachita. In the "clean empty rooms" of this house, furnished with Spanish abstemiousness and kept in shining whiteness, "where the roar of ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... small piece of flake gold which he had kept concealed all day under his big toe, to the great discomfort of that member. But this was only a small, ordinary self-martyrdom of boyhood. He scratched a boyish hieroglyphic on the metal, and when his mother's back was turned scraped a small hole in the adobe wall, inserted the gold in it, and covered it up with a plaster made of the moistened debris. It was safe—so was his secret—for it need not, perhaps, be stated here that Johnny HAD told the truth and HAD honestly found the gold! But where?—yes, that was his ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... the revolution came to Cuba the beauty of the landscape is blotted with the grim and pitiable signs of war. The sugar cane has turned to a dirty brown where the fire has passed through it, the centrals are black ruins, and the adobe houses and the railroad stations are roofless, and their broken windows stare pathetically at you like blind eyes. War cannot alter the sunshine, but the smoke from the burning huts and the blazing corn fields seems all the more sad and terrible when it rises ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... California. At the latter place I visited the scenes of "Two Years Before the Mast.'' At the old town of San Diego I met Jack Stewart, my father's old shipmate, and as we were looking at the dreary landscape and the forlorn adobe houses and talking of California of the thirties, he burst out into an encomium of the accuracy and fidelity to details of my father's book. He said, "I have read it again and again. It all comes back to me, everything just as it happened. The seamanship is perfect.'' And then as if to emphasize ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the hotel, the girls started out to explore the settlement. "I love those adobe houses of the Mexicans," said Enid. "Let's go over and get acquainted with some of ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... is widely diffused in California, forms a simple shaft-like burrow, but, like the European Trap-door Spider, it is very skilful in forming an entrance and in concealing its presence. Its habits have lately been described by D. Cleveland of San Diego.[84] In the adobe land hillocks are numerous; they are about a foot in height, and some three or four feet in diameter. These hillocks are selected by the spiders—apparently because they afford excellent drainage, and cannot be washed ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... (brick) still survives in the Arabic Tob, and, perverted to the Iberian Adobe (Et-tob) ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... which served as a sitting-room. Flip had apparently been writing. A small inkstand was still on the board table, but her paper had evidently been concealed before she allowed them to enter. The squaw instantly squatted before the adobe hearth, warmed her bundled baby, and left the ceremony of introduction to her companion. Flip regarded the two with calm preoccupation and indifference. The only thing that touched her interest was the ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... have been omitted, and the New England severity and angularity are toned down and draped out of sight by these festoons of large-leaved, bright-blossomed, tropical climbing plants. Besides the frame houses there are houses built of blocks of a cream-coloured coral conglomerate laid in cement, of adobe, or large sun-baked bricks, plastered; houses of grass and bamboo; houses on the ground and houses raised on posts; but nothing looks prosaic, commonplace, or mean, for the glow and luxuriance of the tropics ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... of two or three miles, never far from the bay they arrived at what had evidently been a sleepy little village. The original low, picturesque, red-tiled adobe buildings still clustered about the Mission. But much had been added. The Keiths found themselves in an immense confusion. Screaming signs cried everywhere for attention—advertising bear pits, cock fights, theatrical attractions, side shows, and the like. Innumerable hotels and restaurants, ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... covered by a growth of thick, rank grass, which was kept to a navigable shortness by the machetes of the police. Stone sidewalks, little more than a ledge in width, ran along the base of the mean and monotonous adobe houses. At the outskirts of the village these streets dwindled to nothing; and here were set the palm-thatched huts of the Caribs and the poorer natives, and the shabby cabins of negroes from Jamaica ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... town, but important in that unsettled part of the great state because it was the trading-center of several hundred miles of territory. On the main street there were perhaps fifty buildings, some brick, some frame, mostly adobe, and one-third of the lot, and by far the most prosperous, were saloons. From the road Duane turned into this street. It was a wide thoroughfare lined by hitching-rails and saddled horses and vehicles of various kinds. Duane's ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... the facts. But when we see the stage set with every stately circumstance,—the Babe amid the fading splendours of earthly palaces, our Lord mocked by matter as well as man,—I dare to think that we shall do well to cease from insisting on an adobe wall, and to study those "incongruous" circumstances to which the will and not the poverty of Holbein consents. We shall, at least, no longer be dull to "the tears of ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... gulch which was an arm of Antelope Coulee. He looked down into the gulch, searched with his eyes for the stake that marked the southeast corner of the eighty lying off in this direction from the shack, and finally saw it fifty yards away on a bald patch of adobe. ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... soldier down the main street, a dusty thoroughfare lined with the usual assortment of structures which adorn Philippine provincial towns: adobe, tile-roofed business houses honeycombed with little box-like shops in which the Chinese merchants displayed their wares: square wooden houses set high on stone understructures: scores of bamboo shacks stilted on crooked timbers, unkempt, wry, powdered with ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... buildings seemed finished, and all looked as if they had just been put up, in a great hurry. They were made from canvas rudely tacked on warped boards, of rusty sheet-iron and tin, of brown clay or "adobe," of newly-sawed rough lumber, of pieces of boxes and flattened cans, and one was even built of empty boxes piled up for walls, with a canvas roof. But all these stores were full of goods, many not yet unpacked, and of buyers, and every third or fourth store ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... with high adobe wall and are at the Hospital Municipal, our objective point. A dark young man in ill-fitting clothes receives us and shows us about this primitive refuge. The floors are tiled and all the appointments ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... those houses are built of. This is all alluvial country; building stone would be almost unobtainable. I don't see anything like a brick kiln. I don't see any evidence of irrigation, either, so there must be plenty of rainfall. If they use adobe, or sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, and they would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make room for a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins, probably shifting back and forth from one end of ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... common even in California; but on account of its comparative inaccessibility, few people visit Pala, and the village has been left much to itself in these latter days of American life in the state. The Indians live the life of the poorest class of Mexicans, dwell in adobe huts, ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... we were disposed in two vacant wooden shanties about two hundred yards apart and a somewhat greater distance from the cook-camp. These shanties were mansions left over, like a group of roofless adobe ruins near by, from the opulent days of a year or two back when this place had been the terminus of the line during building operations. Little remained of its whilom grandeur; a section house, a railway station, a number of canvas-roofed ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... as an arrow! They say that his folks are rich. Come out here way over the mountains, and is just going to teach school in a log school-house—all made of logs and sods and mud-plaster, adobe they call it—a graduate of Harvard ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... rise of ground and came to the site of the dig. Here the sand tracks ended right in the middle of long trenches dug out to reveal thick adobe walls. In the partially bared ruins the outline of a small village could be seen; the detailed excavation would be done this summer by workmen who would ...
— The Hohokam Dig • Theodore Pratt
... world of alkali and adobe there was no living thing but these two. No air was astir, and a pitiless sun beat upon them unmercifully. Philip's lips were cracked, his tongue was swollen, and the burning dust almost choked him. He began to see less clearly, and visions of things he knew to be unreal came to ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... we entered, was filled with empty palanquins and coolie servants waiting for the different mandarins who had come on official visits. The yamen itself consisted of low one-story structures, built in the usual Chinese style, of wood and adobe brick, in a quadrangular form around an inner courtyard. The common Chinese paper which serves for window-glass had long since vanished from the ravages of time, and the finger-punches of vandals. Even here, at the yamen of the prime minister ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... in stealing stock, and no doubt inherit the skill of many generations in theft. The corrals are generally built of adobe, with a gate or bars at the entrance. It was a customary practice for the Apaches to saw an entrance through an adobe wall ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... "You're all standing here, croaking like crows, this fine morning. I passed YOUR farm, Johnson, not an hour ago; the wheat just climbing out of the black adobe mud as thick as rows of pins on paper—what have YOU to grumble at? I saw YOUR stock, Briggs, over on Two-Mile Bottom, waddling along, fat as the adobe they were sticking in, their coats shining like fresh paint—what's the matter with YOU? And," turning ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... further side in an irregular line. One of these, ramshackle, weather-worn, labeled laconically "The Store," stood directly opposite the station. The architecture of the "Paloma Springs Hotel," next door, was very similar. On either side of these two structures a dozen or more discouraged-looking adobe houses were set down at uneven intervals. To the eastward the street ended in the corrals and shipping-pens; in the other direction it merged into a narrow dusty trail that curved northward from the twin steel rails and quickly lost itself ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... are merry and look out for something to eat afterward; have children, nine or ten to a family, have cock-fights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes and wait for the sun to go down. And always they dance; at dusk on the smooth adobe floors, afternoons under the trellises where the earth is damp and has a fruity smell. A betrothal, a wedding, or a christening, or the mere proximity of a guitar is sufficient occasion; and if the occasion lacks, send for ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... upon a dusty road. A heat-haze lay upon the arid land that stretched away upon either hand toward gray-brown hills. A little adobe hut, backed by a few squalid outbuildings, stood out, a screaming high-light in its coat of whitewash, against a background ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the same name in Guatemala, on Lake Amatitlan, 15 m. S.W. of Guatemala city by the transcontinental railway from Puerto Barrios to San Jose. Pop. (1905) about 10,000. The town consists almost entirely of one-storeyed adobe huts inhabited by mulattoes and Indians, whose chief industry is the production of cochineal. In 1840 only a small Indian village marked its site, and its subsequent growth was due to the sugar plantations established by a Jesuit settlement. The wells of the town are strongly impregnated with salt ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the soft, swishing sound recommenced. He drew a glittering bowie-knife from his boot-leg, and in three noiseless strides was beside the pile. There he saw what he fully expected to see,—a narrow, horizontal gap between the log walls of the cabin and the adobe floor, slowly widening and deepening by the burrowing of unseen hands from without. The cold outer air which he had felt before was now plainly flowing into the heated cabin through the opening. The swishing sound recommenced, and stopped. Then the four fingers of ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... as they approached the adobe buildings of the rancho. Vaca had drifted into a dull silence. Gray with suffering and grim with hate for the gringo, he rode stolidly, praying incoherently that the gunman might be stricken dead ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... so accustomed to association with the Mexicans that some of them began to adopt the customs of that people, and when Ouray's father and mother decided to wed, they were married in the little adobe church on a hill in the village at the Red River Crossing. A priest performed the ceremony according to the Catholic ritual. When Ouray was born, he was taken to the same building and ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... here and there the stream widened, the wild tamarisk, child of the desert, disappeared and gave way to cultivated fields and wide tracts of the maguey plant, dear and valuable to the Mexican as the date-palm to the East-Indian. Rough yellow adobe huts stood here and there, their crude colouring of unbaked mud turned into gold by that great painter, the tropical sun; and sometimes a palm stood by a hut, cutting the fierce light blue of the sky with its delicate, fine, curved, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... fat prairie dog which he had shot, and he was carrying it around by a hind leg looking for Compadre and calling "Kitty, kitty, kitty," in the most seductive tones of which his desert-harshened vocal chords were capable. He looked under the squat adobe cabin which held all the odds and ends that had accumulated about the place, and which he called the "ketch-all." He went over and looked under the water tank where there was shade and coolness. He went to the stable, and from there he returned to the adobe ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... appropriateness, a native growth of the new soil. The edifices which now, whether in ruins or in restoration, still testify to the skill and energy of their pious designers, were in all cases later, in most cases much later, than the settlements themselves. At the outset, a few rude buildings of wood or adobe were deemed sufficient for the temporary accommodation of priests and converts, and the celebration of religious services. Then, little by little, substantial structures in brick or stone took the place of ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... French town was reduced to ashes. Six years later another fire equally destructive, completed the work of blotting out the French town, and the old New Orleans we now know is the Spanish city which arose in its place: a city not of wood but of adobe or brick, stuccoed and tinted, of arcaded walks, galleries, jalousies, ponderous doors, and inner courts with carriage entrances from the street, and, behind, the most charming and secluded gardens. Also, owing to premiums offered by Baron ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... colonists arrived at the hacienda they found the ground covered with snow. They were crowded into small, leaky, adobe houses, without floors and with doors which could not be closed tightly. The remainder of the winter and the following spring proved unusually rainy and unpleasant; the food which they were given was probably of a somewhat inferior quality; and their tools ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... "Ma'janah," a place for making unbaked bricks (TobSpan. Adobe) with chaff and bruised or charred straw. The use of this article in rainless lands dates from ages immemorial, and formed the outer walls of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... wattle and heather. The outer walls are of bamboo-palm fronds, the partitions are of bamboo-palm matting, and the roofs are of bamboo-palm thatch. Each place has its osafahin, or headman, and each headman has his guest-house, built of better material, swish or adobe. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... 1871, after the great earthquake of that year, I made a trip across the Sierra to Camp Independence, which had been destroyed, to consider the question of rebuilding that post. Of the buildings, brick or adobe, not one remained in condition to be occupied. Very fortunately, all in the garrison had received timely warning from the first shock, so that none were injured by the second and third shocks, which tumbled everything to the ground. Some thirty people living in small ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... built with large brick houses and small adobe houses. Pointed cobbles form the pavement, and leave a dirty open sewer ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... came out of the water, the high mountains about Santa Cruz, the low beach of the Saunas, and the strongly-marked ridge terminating in the sea in a point of dark pine-trees. Then the line of whitewashed houses of adobe, backed by the groves of dark oaks, resembling old apple-trees; and then we saw two vessels anchored close to the town. One was a small merchant-brig and another a large ship apparently dismasted. At last we saw a boat coming out to meet us, and when it came ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... once given over to the Spaniard. Here were still his forbidding abodes of concrete and adobe, standing cold and indomitable against the century. From the murky fissure, the eye saw, flung against the sky, the tangled filigree of his Moorish balconies. Through stone archways breaths of dead, vault-chilled air coughed upon him; his ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... in Gunsight, running grandly down to the station; but the rest is mostly vacant lots and scattered adobe houses, creeping out into the infinitude of the desert. At noon, when he had come to town, the street was deserted, but now it was coming to life. Wild-eyed Mexican boys, mounted on bare-backed ponies, came galloping up from the corrals; freight wagons drifted ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... otra vista!" he had hailed, but his gaze sought the little window in the adobe wall where a pair of dark, languorous eyes peered out from between the parted curtains and a dusky face dodged out of view the instant it saw it was seen. What Sancho said in answer is not recorded, but now he was watching ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... ADOBE (pronounced a-do-be; also corrupted to dobie; from the Span. adobar, to plaster, traceable through Arabic to an Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "brick''), a Spanish-American word for the sun-dried clay used by the Indians for building in some ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... establishment of the chain of Franciscan missions, the first of which was founded by the great Father Junipero Serra at San Diego in 1769. The fathers brought with them the vine and the olive, reduced the savage Indians to industrial pursuits, and opened the way for that ranchero and adobe civilization which, down to the coming of the American, in about 1840, made in this region the most picturesque life that our continent has ever seen. Following this is a period of desperado adventure and revolution, of pioneer State-building; ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... a long adobe wall to the right of the main street, and as we crouched there the sun rose like a great searchlight and pointed us out, and exposed us, and seemed to hold up each one of us to the derision of Santa Barbara. As the ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... was sharply defined. From the Mexican end of town,—the old "plaza,"—which antedated coal-mines and Americanisms, gleamed the little gold cross of the adobe Church of San Antonio. Around it were green, tall cottonwoods and the straggling mud-houses and pungent goat-corrals of its people. Toward the canyon rose the tipple and fans of the Dauntless colliery, banked in slack and slate, and surrounded by paintless mine-houses, while to the right ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... now stick their nests under the eaves of the barn. The bluebirds had been broken up in a little bird-house near by, by the rats or perhaps a weasel, and being no doubt in a bad humor, and the season being well advanced, they made forcible entrance into the adobe tenement of their neighbors, and held possession of it for some days, but I believe finally withdrew, rather than live amid such a squeaky, noisy colony. I have heard that these swallows, when ejected from their homes in that ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... of August we anchored off Mazatlan, a picturesque and ancient adobe town in old Mexico. The approach to this port was strikingly beautiful. Great rocks, cut by the surf into arches and caverns, guarded the entrance to the harbor. We anchored two miles out. A customs and a Wells-Fargo boat boarded us, and many natives came along side, bringing ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... to wait for the high winds to abate; after perils by water and danger from roving Indians, the Far West swung around the last curve of the river and behold—Fort Benton. The passengers cheered; the crowds on the levees answered, while fluttering flags blossomed from boat and adobe fort and trading posts as wild roses blossom ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... the mother bird who seems to do the plastering. Both birds work on the structure, but it appears to be the female who carries most of the mud and who uses her faded red apron for a trowel as she moves round in her nest pushing her breast against the round wall of the adobe dwelling to spread the mud evenly. The work on one particular nest was done in late April when there was nothing on the elm but the seed fringes to screen the builder as she worked. Then the four light greenish-blue eggs were laid. A red squirrel got one of them one ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... Barbara Mission, where Franciscan fathers still live, has a fine church with double towers and a long row of two-story adobe buildings enclosing a hollow square where a beautiful garden is kept. One of the brotherhood, wearing a long brown robe just as Father Serra did, takes visitors into the church, and also shows ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... Mile—the only water for twoscore of miles. Consequently it was an important station on the road between the southern country and Old Camp Grant, and the new mines north of the Mescal Range. The stunt, liquor-perfumed adobe cabin lay on the gray floor of the desert like an isolated slab of chocolate. A corral, two desolate stable-sheds, and the slowly turning windmill were all else. Here Ephraim and one or two helpers abode, armed against Indians, and selling whiskey. Variety in their vocation ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Thorough Drainage. Agricultural Exhibitions. Poultry Societies and Shows. Importation of Live Stock. Death of Distinguished Agriculturists. Inventions affecting Agriculture. Novelties in Agricultural Seeds, etc. Oats. Sanford Corn. Potato Fever. Adobe or Earth-wall Building—by E. G. Potter. Potatoes Worth Raising—by Dr. F. M. Hexamer. Yield of Potatoes in 1869. Wheat Hoe. How to Train a Heifer. Care of Hen and Chickens. Cultivation of Root Crops. Kohl Rabi. Dry Earth—the ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... minds! A long sandy beach strewn with hides and skeletons of slaughtered cattle, a few scrubby oaks, farther back low sand hills rising behind each other as a background to a few old shanties that leaned away from the wind, an old adobe barracks, a few donkeys plodding dejectedly along beneath towering bundles of wood, a few loungers stretched lazily upon the beach as though nothing could astonish them; and between the picture and the emigrants still loomed up here and there, ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock |
