"Rickety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she dropped from her horse before the office of the New Day and gave a boy the bridle. "I'll be back in a minute," she explained. It was a two-story frame building, dingy and in disrepair. On the street floor was a grocery. Access to the New Day was by a rickety stairway. As she ascended this, making a great noise on its unsteady boards with her boots, she began to feel cheap and foolish. She recalled what Hull had said in the carriage. "No doubt," replied she, "I'd feel much the same way if I were going to see Jesus Christ—a ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... temples is surrounded by rickety old houses, inhabited by Bhootyas and priests. All around small images sit upon wet stones, holding in their hands everlasting tapers, and look out of their niches upon the dirty worshippers who smother them ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... took account of his assets and his liabilities. His room rent was paid until Saturday and this was Thursday, and in his pocket were one dollar and sixty cents. Opening his trunk, he drew forth a sheet of paper and an envelope, and, clearing the top of the rickety little table which stood at the head of his bed, he sat down on the soiled counterpane and wrote ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and its one dusty road, offering no apology or explanation whatever for its purposeless existence, at last was reached, and Farmer Galusha Krinklebottom, in accordance with Dr. Nevercure's arrangements, met the jaded travellers at the station in his rickety shay, prepared to take them over to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... to Wa Ssu Kou a week later a free half-day gave me a chance for a little run over the border. Guided by a respectable villager I crossed the rickety bridge over the Tarchendo and after a breathless climb came out on the top of the cliff, where I overlooked a wide rolling plateau sloping steeply to the Ta Tu on the east, and enclosed north and west by high mountains. The country seemed barren and almost ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... blankets from a rafter, behind which is our bed (or lounge in day-time), the washing-stand, a box set up longways, and a tin bason, an arm-chair which consists of two pieces of wood, and an old wolfskin, much worn, and a rickety table, at which I am writing now, lighted by a candle stuck into a bottle. On the other side of the blanket-partition is the kitchen stove, big table, store shelves, a pile of saddles, &c. Mr. W—— sleeps in a tent outside; ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... went to see some poor Italian emigrants. I threaded my way through dirty streets and alleys, and up rickety old staircases, where it was so dark that I had to feel my way, and where I coughed and choked at every step, with the tobacco smoke and ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... the docks and elevators and railroad tracks On the way out of the city, I pass a tiny cottage so rickety That its neighbors crowd close To hold it up. But there it is, Its one window shining clean, and glowing With a plant in a tin can and pure white curtains. Hanging over the fence and filling the whole place With its beauty ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... Lopez. Now within Mr. Parker's very small office there was a smaller office in which there were a safe, a small rickety Pembroke table, two chairs, and an old washing-stand with a tumbled towel. Lopez led the way into this sanctum as though he knew the place well, and Sexty Parker ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Chilcoot's mighty father, and stood on the bleak edge of the lake which filled the pit of the crater. The lake was angry and white-capped, and though a hundred caches were waiting ferriage, no boats were plying back and forth. A rickety skeleton of sticks, in a shell of greased canvas, lay upon the rocks. Frona sought out the owner, a bright-faced young fellow, with sharp black eyes and a salient jaw. Yes, he was the ferryman, but he had quit work for the day. Water too rough for freighting. He charged twenty-five ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... impresses the beholder with the belief that he thinks they would run away in a minute if he relaxed a muscle on the reins; and a small boy who acts as footman and looks decidedly depressed, lets down the rickety steps. ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... village of Hillcrest which grew in importance as St. Ange degenerated. There were scattered houses among the clumps of maple and pine growths, and there was a forlorn railroad station before which a rickety, single track branch ended. Sometime during the day a train came in, and after an uncertain period it departed; it was the only link with the outer world that St. Ange had except what ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... slightly depressing. For this seems to be the one particular point where the worn-out old money-maker comes to die, and the antique ladies with asthma struggle for an extra year or two of the veranda rocking-chair, and rickety old beaux sit about in Panamas and white flannels and listen to the hardening of their arteries. And I haven't quite finished with life yet—not if I know it—not ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap. The stout muscles gave an involuntary jerk. The substantial frame felt the thrill all through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing creaked sharply under ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... such a room to one of the servants at Combe-Raven. But it was quiet; it gave her a few minutes alone; and it was endurable, even welcome, on that account. She locked herself in and walked mechanically, with a woman's first impulse in a strange bedroom, to the rickety little table and the dingy little looking-glass. She waited there for a moment, and then turned away with weary contempt. "What does it matter how pale I am?" she thought to herself. "Frank can't see me—what ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... Ruth," croaked the old lady. "This rickety old shebang is a-fallin' to pieces at last. I allus told your ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... were thus occupants of the royal chamber stood in strong contrast to the Sovereign of England. Their large and gracefully proportioned figures were made most conspicuous by the big head, rickety legs and dwarfed body of their royal master, while the calm dignity which enveloped them set forth vividly the driveling speech, and coarseness of him whom the death of the last of the Tudors ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... upon finely minced raw meat. There are some successful breeders, indeed, who invariably give to each puppy a teaspoonful of cod liver oil in the morning and a similar dose of extract of malt in the evening, with the result that there are never any rickety or weak dogs in the kennels, whilst the development of the bones in the skull and ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... your passenger hasn't missed his train," observed the ferryman to Mr. Jimmy Fallows, who sat on the river bank with the painter of his rickety little naphtha launch ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... was no room left for the play of life. And to carry the simile further, if you allow too great a play between the parts, so that they fit one over the other too loosely, the engine will lose power and become a poor rickety thing. There must be the smallest amount of play that will allow of its working. And the more perfectly made the engine, the less will the amount ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... not lost all sensitiveness.... On the opposite wall, to the west, appear the words, 'A memorial unto the destruction of the Temple'. To this day I do not know what there was to commemorate the fall of the Holy Place. The rickety rafters? Or were the little creatures swarming all over the walls to remind one of 'the foxes that walk upon ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... ladder, shouldered it, and stepping to a square opening in one corner of the rickety platform, lowered ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... incautious mis-step she gained the side of the improvised bed, and leaned over it. The face of the occupant was turned slightly toward the left shoulder, and away from the light. The apparition raised herself, with a gesture of impatience, caught the candle from the rickety table at the head of the mattress, snuffed it hurriedly, and again stooped toward the recumbent figure, with it ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... from public view, lay between the garden and the road. Above the hedge showed an occasional shrub; at the corner nearest to the car a chestnut flourished. The wooden gate, once white, which they had passed, was grimed and rickety. The road itself was still the unpretentious country lane that the advent of the electric car had found it. When Carrados had taken in these details there seemed little else to notice. He was on the point of giving Harris the order to go on when his ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... neither cabin nor staterooms, the space between the superstructure and the rail being about three feet wide. You could stay there, or, if you did not incommode the engineer, you could go inside and sit on a coal pile. There was a bridge approached by a rickety stair, and I judged that my deck chair would fill it completely, leaving about six inches for the captain's promenade. Behind the superstructure there was a sort of after-deck, nearly four feet of it. When my trunks and boxes had been piled up ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... was within easy shot now, and I stopped to make sure of my rickety old weapon. A dragoon's musket would not have needed such constant care. "Life turns on trifles," said ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... well the advanced taste in domestic scenery of 1901. But your eye was caught at once by the additions made by Mrs. Rossiter. Linda conceived it was her womanly mission to lighten the severity of Michael's choice in furniture and decorations. She introduced rickety and expensive screens that were easily knocked over; photographs in frames which toppled at a breath; covers on every flat surface that could be covered—occasional tables, tops of grand pianos. If she did not put frills round piano legs, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... sapless, strengthless^, powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic^, asthenic^; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate^, womanly. frail, fragile, shattery^; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, cranky; craichy^; drooping, tottering &c v.. broken, lame, withered, shattered, shaken, crazy, shaky; palsied &c 158; decrepit. languid, poor, infirm; faint, faintish^; sickly &c (disease) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was undignified, a few miles away he excited the derision of his "subjects," and a few miles farther off they had not heard of him. Dr. Mueller, after reproving us sternly for smiling at the national decoration, in several classes, with which his Highness on landing at the rickety pier was graciously pleased to gladden the meritorious natives, admits that at his second coming he will have to take various other steps. Austrians and Germans should be brought to colonize the country, and not peasants, forsooth, like those who have laboriously made good in ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... principalities, will keep a carriage and go hungry; and clerks, mechanics, milliners and strumpets will go without their dinners and squander the money on a hack-ride in the Chiaja; the rag-tag and rubbish of the city stack themselves up, to the number of twenty or thirty, on a rickety little go-cart hauled by a donkey not much bigger than a cat, and they drive in the Chiaja; Dukes and bankers, in sumptuous carriages and with gorgeous drivers and footmen, turn out, also, and so the furious procession goes. For two hours ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not get a chance to tell it, for Albert walked off and left him. At half-past twelve that afternoon he engaged "Vessie" Young—christened Sylvester Young and a brother to the driver of the depot wagon—to haul the Calvin lumber in his rickety, fragrant old wagon. Simpson Mullen—commonly called "Simp"—was ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... Grimshaw to have one installed, but the old man was dead set against any such "new-fangled contraptions." So, everything from the upper lofts, when it was called for, had to be carried or rolled down the rickety stairs, a proceeding which often roused rumbles of rebellion in the breast of Sam, upon whom fell the ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... a place on Providence Plantation 'bout three miles south o' Natchez. De trip to Natchez in a rickety old wagon is mos' too much in de hot weather. My heart's mos' wore out. I can't las' long, 'cause I's ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... their breath when she came to the final stretch, and let go the last rickety nail to fling herself on ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... were thus together in the upper chamber of Ford Manor, Lucy Forrester had reached the old timbered house by the lych gate of Penshurst Church, and had obtained admission at Goody Salter's door, and put the wheaten cake and two eggs on the little rickety table which stood against the wall in the dark, low room. The old woman's thanks were not very profuse, hers was by no means a grateful disposition, and, perhaps, there was no great inducement for Lucy to prolong her visit. However that might be, it was very short, and she ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... little inured one gets to disappointments; the longing begins again; and again attainment seems so far off, so doubtful. And this though I dream at nights just now of getting out of the ice west of Iceland. Hope is a rickety craft to trust one's self to. I had a long, successful ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... eyes, that looked me through and through, sparkled when we compared notes of adventure. I marveled at some of her experiences and escapes. She told me that, along with her husband, she had voyaged in all manner of rickety craft among the islands of the Pacific, reflectively adding, ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... this remark, and followed his master to the low attic of the house, where he was pointed to a rickety bedstead, which he was ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... he said he could do better with Dolly than most drivers, for the steed started out at a fast pace, and kept it up until the rickety vehicle turned into the drive that led to the handsome cottage owned by Mr. Racer. Mrs. Racer hurried to the door as she heard the sound of wheels, and at the sight of Frank sitting in the wagon, holding ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... stood for some moments listening to his footsteps as they shuffled down the stairs. Then with a sigh he turned to his writing-case, pulled a straw-bottomed chair before the rickety table, and sat for a while, pen ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... distance from the road to the creek averages half a mile. The quarters, universally called "nigger-houses," are strung along the bank of the creek, at about 100 feet from the water, on a ridge between the water and the corn. The "big house" is a two-story affair, old, dirty, rickety, poorly put together and shabbily kept. Here lived old Mrs. Martha E. McTureous, with a large household. The James McTureous place—the other half of this one—is all in one and the same field. On both these places the houses are ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... till the rickety little revolver nearly shook itself to pieces, and Amomma the outcast—because he might blow up at any moment—browsed in the background and wondered why stones were thrown at him. Then they found a balk ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... was neither convenient nor beautiful. Mr. Linton had apologised to his horses during his first week of occupancy and, in the second, turning them out to grass with less apology, had pulled down the rickety old sheds, replacing them with a compact and handsome building of red brick, with room for half a dozen buggies, men's quarters, harness and feed rooms, many loose boxes and a loft where a ball could have been held—and where, indeed, many a one was held, when all the young farmers and stockmen ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... into the parlor. Some parlor it is, too. I don't know when I've seen a room that came so near whinin' about better days gone by. Every piece of furniture, from the threadbare sofa to the rickety center table, seems kind of sad ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... another shop that made a specialty of fishermen's "oilers," boots, and overalls. Two houses to the westward of that was the old Schofield place, a low, white house surrounded by a rickety fence and ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... of a single frame house with a rickety board walk around it, I alighted from the iron horse, just thirty miles from my mother and my brother Dawee. A strong hot wind seemed determined to blow my hat off, and return me to olden days when I roamed ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... the two millions of the remaining women, what reasonable man would not throw out a hundred thousand poor girls, humpbacked, plain, cross-grained, rickety, sickly, blind, crippled in some way, well educated but penniless, all bound to be spinsters, and by no means tempted to violate the sacred ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... "this is curious. Here I've just been answering the gentleman up stairs a heap of questions concerning that self same old place, and now you come along with another batch of them; just as if that rickety old den was the only spot of interest we had in ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... gaining on him, when suddenly eight or nine men who were sleeping beside the road, got up and began to shoot at us. They were the friends of the rebel, who believed that the whole Union army was making a charge on them. We got by the shooters alive, and then, as we passed the rickety old judge's stand, I realized that we were on a race track, and for a moment I forgot that I was a soldier, and only thought of myself as a rider of a race horse, and I gave the horse his head, and kicked him, and yelled like a Comanche ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... certainly in all true manners, and in natural grace and beauty, in sweetness and charm, their mistress beyond a dream of comparison. But they would never forget that she was the daughter of a country innkeeper, and every little cobble in the rickety pyramid, even from the daughter of the innkeeper in the town, would look down on her ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... of most meager dimensions. In one corner of the compartment stood a small iron stove, in which smoldered a bare handful of coals; in another was a trestle-board which served as a bed; two or three stools and a rickety deal table, together with a few cooking utensils, completed a stock of furniture which was worthy of ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... up and rubbed his eyes, and climbed up the rickety stairs, creak, creak, creak, holding on with both hands, till he came to the top of the house, to the top of the tower, to the top of the dovecot, and looked ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... and to be substituted in the place of the real service which they might expect from a Parliament annually sitting. It was intended, also, to corrupt that body, whenever it should be permitted to sit. It was projected in the year 1668, and it continued in a tottering and rickety childhood for about three or four years: for it died in the year 1673, a babe of as little hopes as ever swelled the bills of mortality in the article of convulsed or overlaid children who have hardly stepped ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... rickety affair, not half so roomy as the sleigh, but as the ride was short the discomfort was of little consequence. We had four ill conditioned steeds, but before we had gone twenty rods one of the brutes persistently faced about and attempted to come inside the vehicle, ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... day with not an incident to break the monotony of eating and sleeping, grazing and guarding. But near noon of the second day, we were overtaken by an old, long-whiskered man and a boy of possibly fifteen. They were riding in a light, rickety vehicle, drawn by a small Spanish mule and a rough but clean-limbed bay mare. The strangers appealed to our sympathy, for they were guileless in appearance, and asked so many questions, indicating that ours might have been the first herd of trail cattle they had ever seen. The old man was ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... stuccoed to represent antique marble, and peremptorily motioned Mr. Wallace Kent to that portion of the seat left after she had wedged herself as far to one side as possible. Mr. Kent obeyed immediately, though he had just placed a rickety, stuffed chair beside the gold one occupied by Miss Blanche Grayson, the glowerer. Miss Lindsey sat on the end of an overturned box hedge before a drop curtain of a twilight night, and Mr. Reginald Leigh sat in a wicker chair under a brilliant canvas flowering shrub ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... went down the rickety steps he looked back into the window for a last glimpse of the family, as the children gathered about their mother, showing their beautiful presents again and again,—and then upward to a window in the great house yonder. "A little child shall lead them," ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... things, but I certainly expected to hear from them once in a while. If I don't look out, they'll reduce me to the status of a rubber stamp! I'll have to stir them up," and he gloomily extracted from the rack the newly-arrived, two-days-old London paper, brought by the little rickety train which struggled through at uncertain and infrequent intervals from Zunderburg to Weet-sur-Mer, lighted a fresh cigar, and sat down to a ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... like a fan from its bow, ran tumbling and foaming along the rocky shores, keeping pace with the headlong charge of the boat, and trying to engulf everything in its path. One small catboat that was tied to a rickety, home-made landing, after a couple of dives capsized, as if it were a giant flapjack under which a housewife had slid ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... night's lodging," remarked Henry Burns. "Perhaps we'd better roost right here. I don't exactly take a fancy to the rickety ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... many cases by bending of the bones, giving rise to deformities of the limbs, &c. The Australian type of the disorder, however, is milder altogether, and is of a different character. The Australian child is straight-limbed almost without exception, yet the Australian type of rickety disease, as I pointed out in 1891, is ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... no longer the only spot whereon the divine victim of expiation could be offered up; and it soon came to be known that, to by-lanes and obscure houses in the cities numbers of persons flocked on Sundays, presided over by their own Sogarth Aroon. On one occasion, already noticed, the floor of a rickety house, where they were worshipping, gave way, to the killing and maiming of many; thenceforth, Catholics were allowed to assemble in public to the knowledge of all, and, though "discoverers" were still legally entitled to denounce and prosecute them, there ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... and who sent her no diamonds, and not even any flowers. But he was young and good-looking, and stood so retiringly, and so evidently in love, at the small side door of the Opera House every night, when she got out of her antediluvian rickety fly, and also when she got into it again after the performance, that she could not help noticing him. Soon, he began to follow her wherever she went, and once he summoned up courage to speak to her, when she had been to see a friend in a remote suburb. He was very nervous, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... week, in spite of her distaste for minor parts and bad pianos, she meekly drummed out waltzes and two-steps on Mrs. Chapin's rickety instrument for a long half hour after dinner, while Betty and Roberta—who danced beautifully and showed an unexpected aptitude in imparting her accomplishment—acted as head-masters, and the rest of the girls furnished ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... Blister, pointing. "Wait a minute—I'll have a swipe lead her out. Chick!"—this to a boy dozing on a rickety stool—"if your time ain't too much took up holdin' down that chair, this gentleman 'ud like to take a pike at the ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... zest; faltering indeed he was still, not better, not more unselfish; but he had a sense of truer values, more proportion, more contentment. The mysteries of life were as dark as ever, but at least he no longer thought that he had the key; in those days his little rickety system of life, that trembled in every breeze, had seemed for him to bridge all gaps, to explain all mysteries. Now indeed chaos stretched all about him, full of huge mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but he perceived something ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... nearly over. Gallant tin soldiers of the line lay where they had fallen; nearly the whole of a shilling box of light cavalry had paid the penalty of rashly exposing themselves in a compact body to the enemy's fire; while a rickety little field-gun, with bright red wheels, lay overturned on two infantry men, who, even in death, held their muskets firmly to their shoulders, like the grim old "die-hards" that they were. The brigade of guards, a dozen red-coated veterans of solid lead, who had ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... East Hill, just where it begins to sink towards Ecclesbourne Glen, stands a small, old, rickety house in the midst of the sweet grass of the downs. This house my husband was fortunate in finding to let, and took for three months. I am not, however, going to give any history of how we spent them; my sole reason for mentioning ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... at that moment between day and night—between four and five o'clock—as he came back into the yard. He went straight through the open gates, glancing about, to explain matters to the farmer if necessary, but, not seeing him, went up the rickety stairs, groped his way across to the window, took down his socks from the nail an which he had hung them last night, ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... long legs he was a light weight, or he would not have chosen as his favorite seat so rickety a fence. His interlocutor, a heavier man, apparently had some doubts, for he leaned only slightly against one of the projecting rails as he whittled a pine stick, and with his every movement the frail structure ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... served in happier days—when he had friends—for the escape of Union officers from Libby Prison and Andersonville. Emerging, wholly soiled, into a box-stall, he crossed the musty carriage house and ascended some rickety steps to a long vacant coachman's-room, next to the hayloft. He closed the door, bolted it, and sank moodily upon a broken, old ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... in their stead vast apartment-houses and tenement buildings—steam-heated Towers of Babel. Into each of these he has packed the population of a European market-town, has left the children to grow up on the roofs and staircases, the babies to find a blessed release through rickety fire-escapes. When a fit of reform has touched him, he has stirred up the garbage of the Tenderloin and the Red Light District, has spread it broadcast over his cities to poison his wife and ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... girl she was caught in the wave of a great temperance revival which was sweeping over the country, and, in her enthusiasm to aid in the work, she produced two drawings that caused a sensation. One, representing a rickety house with broken windows, a crooked weed-grown path leading up to a gate fallen off the hinges, and a fence with half the pickets off, she labelled "The Drunkard's Home." Then she drew a companion picture of a neat farmhouse ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... large rocks the size of a moderate house, which had been detached from the overhanging cliff above, and had fallen together. There was a smaller cavern within, which made a capital kennel; rather more substantial than the rickety ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... West. There will be chairs covered with hideous antimacassars, tasteless round worsted-work mats for absent flower jars, and a lot of ugly cheap and vulgar china chimney ornaments, which, there being no fireplace, and consequently no chimney-piece, are set out in order on a rickety deal table. The whole life of these village folk is one piece of unreal acting. They are continually asking themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and whether they are living up to the foreign garments they wear. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... frequently the gaunt abodes of legal aspirants. Four chairs, a half-filled deal book-case with hangings of dingy green baize, an old office table covered with dusty papers, which are not moved once in six months, and an older Pembroke brother with rickety legs, for all daily uses; a despatcher for the preparation of lobsters and coffee, and an apparatus for the cooking of toast and mutton chops; such utensils and luxuries as these did not suffice for the well-being of Tom Towers. He indulged in four rooms on the first ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... buried alive. No gardens, no cultivated patches, no attempt at any thing ornamental relieves the dreary monotony of the premises. Dark patches of lava, all littered with the heads and entrails of fish; a pile of turf from some neighboring bog; a rickety shed in which the fish are hung up to dry; a gang of wolfish-looking curs, horribly lean and voracious; a few prowling cats, and possibly a chicken deeply depressed in spirits—these are the most prominent objects ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Hotel de l'Angleterre, that hostelry in the street that leads up and out of the town towards Saint Riquier, which you enter from a courtyard that opens on the road and has rooms that you reach by means of narrow, rickety flights of stairs and balconies overhanging the court. The big dining-room wore an air of gloomy festivity. Its chandeliers swathed in brown paper, its faded paint, and its covered upholstery, suggested that it awaited a day yet to be when it should blossom forth ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... had given Kate and her mother leave to live in a rickety, unoccupied house which he owned. It was a dingy building on an old wharf, but Noggs, the clerk, himself cleaned and furnished one of its rooms so that it was fairly comfortable. When they were settled Ralph took Kate to a dressmaker's, where he got her a situation, hoping thus they ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... happened to you, there's always a home for her in my house. I'd do that for your sake alone, old man, putting aside the principle I go on of showing respect to any white man's wife, even if she were a Oahu girl and had rickety ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... child, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester. There are few stories in history more pathetic than that of this poor little Prince, the only one of Anne's seventeen children who survived infancy. With his unnaturally large head and rickety legs, he would in these days have been kept from all intellectual effort, and been obliged to lie down the greater part of his time. But in that age drastic treatment was in favour, and the already precocious child was crammed with knowledge, while his sickly little frame was compelled to undergo ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... promised to see to it that Billy painted the livery barn and there's a delegation of ladies appointed to wait on Mert Hagley and see if we can't get him to mend his sheds. They're so lopsided and rickety that Mrs. Brownlee says they're an eyesore and a menace ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... he got to know, rickety, unwholesome geniuses, whose genius (such as it was) had allied itself to madness; and who were just as conceited about the madness as about the genius, and took more pains to cultivate it. It brought them a quicker kudos, and was so much more ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... in the extreme. The floor, which had been of boards, had rotted away in several places, showing the bare ground beneath. A broken rickety table and a few dilapidated chairs and stools were the only furniture, with the exception of an old clock standing against one of the walls. A shelf in one corner displayed a few odd pieces of coarse crockery, for the most part chipped and cracked, and some ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... my boy; it is painful to part from him—very— very painful: but it is right, and God's will be done." She turned, as she spoke, towards a little, deformed rickety dwarf of a sofa, that seemed to hide itself in the darkest corner of the low, gloomy room; and Morton followed her. With one hand she removed the shawl that she had thrown over the child, and placing the forefinger of the other upon ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... apartment. The world as then seen by that Frenchman offered him solace of no description. The air without was heavy, dull, and thick. The street beyond the window was dark and narrow. The room contained mahogany chairs covered with horse- hair, a mahogany table, rickety in its legs, and a mahogany sideboard ornamented with inverted glasses and old cruet-stands. The Frenchman had come to the house for shelter and food, and had been asked whether he was commercial. Whereupon he shook his head. "Did he want a sitting-room?" ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... significantly at one or the other of the young ladies, in whom I discovered some slight general resemblance to the imaginary character. My fancies, I must confess, played strange pranks with me. They had been kept in a coop so many years, that now, when I suddenly turned them loose, their rickety attempts ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... that Mrs. Shelley alludes to a sentence in the Memoirs, etc., of Lord Byron. (by Dr. John Watkin), 1822, p. 46: "A malformation of one of his feet, and other indications of a rickety constitution, served as a plea for suffering him to range the hills and to wander about at his pleasure on the seashore, that his frame might be invigorated ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... which, more and more, cropped out through his noisy joviality. Now, under the coldly unwavering smile of Hade's snakelike eyes, he stammered, and his booming voice trailed away to a mumble. Again, Claire sought to mend the rickety situation. But now Gavin Brice forestalled her. Passing one hand over his bandaged ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... immediately facing the Pont Neuf; but there he certainly was on the 28th day of February, 1793, when Agnes, with eyes swollen with tears, a market basket on her arm, and a look of dreary despair on her young face, turned that selfsame angle on her way to the Pont Neuf, and nearly fell over the rickety construction which ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... a bearing may have commanded Sylla's admiration, but it taught him, also, that a young man capable of assuming an attitude so bold might be dangerous to the rickety institutions which he had constructed so carefully. He tried coercion. He deprived Caesar of his priesthood. He took his wife's dowry from him, and confiscated the estate which he had inherited from his father. When this produced no effect, the rebellious youth was ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... noisily past the cabildo and calaboza, and swung around the square, aroused the marquis. He arose, stopped the driver, and entered the rickety vehicle. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the stairs, passed through the lower hall, and entered the kitchen—a big, square room, bleak and draughty, like all the rest of the old, rickety place, but lighted by a ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... then it rocks, and we rope it down; then it sprawls, and we clamp it; then it crumbles, and we have a new underpinning,—but keep living in it all the time. To know what moving really means, you must move from just such a rickety-rackety old farmhouse, where you have clung and grown like a fungus ever since there was anything to grow,—where your life and luggage have crept into all the crevices and corners, and every wall is festooned ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... way to the top of a rickety stair, and knocked at one of the doors which opened on the landing. No answer was returned, but after a second application of the knuckles, accompanied by a touch of the toe, a growling voice was heard, then a sound of some one getting violently out of bed, a heavy tread ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... is shanghaied, however,—in the hands of buccaneers,—it is too late to withdraw. Six shoulders upheld the rear end of the Petrel, others shoved, and Thomas Jefferson's rickety horse began to move forward in spite of himself. An expression of sheer terror might have been observed on the old negro's crinkled face, but his voice was drowned, and we swept out of the alley. Scarcely had we travelled a block before we began to be joined by ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Carker and Bumball as economists. When Dickens wanted to picture ideal businessmen, he gave us the Cheeryble brothers—men with soft hearts, giving pennies to all beggars, shillings to poor widows, and coal and loaves of bread to families living in rickety tenements. The Dickens idea of betterment was the priestly plan of dole. Dickens did not know that indiscriminate almsgiving pauperizes humanity, and never did he supply the world a glimpse of a man like Robert Owen, whose charity was something more ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... rickety chairs which we had borrowed from the janitor under pretence of wanting to reach something, the minutes that ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... half over, she stole gently into the room and took her ordinary place near her father. I do believe she would have been starved, but Gann was much too good-natured to allow any difference to be made between her and her sisters in the matter of food. An old rickety wooden stool was placed for her, instead of that elegant and comfortable Windsor chair which supported every other person at table; by the side of the plate stood a curious old battered tin mug bearing the inscription "Caroline." These, in truth, were poor Caroline's mug and stool, having ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... made to work until the British were finally driven from the country. The winter of 1780-81 was marked, therefore, on his part, by an urgent striving for union, and by unceasing efforts to mend and improve the rickety system of the confederation. It was with this view that he secured the dispatch of Laurens, whom he carefully instructed, to get money in Paris; for he was satisfied that it was only possible to tide ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... was in the main street of the town, and, the town being small, their garden extended as far as the river, beyond which were fields. The house was an old mansion, with rickety pillars on either side and a broad terrace. The large gloomy garden had run to waste; it looked like some dull green cloud that had descended to earth. At night it seemed haunted. It was as if some sad spirit ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... go back to the year 1867, in which I was still living at Waltham Cross. I had some time since bought the house there which I had at first hired, and added rooms to it, and made it for our purposes very comfortable. It was, however, a rickety old place, requiring much repair, and occasionally not as weathertight as it should be. We had a domain there sufficient for the cows, and for the making of our butter and hay. For strawberries, asparagus, green peas, out-of-door peaches, for roses especially, and such everyday luxuries, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed beneath the manikin,—"Climb ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... eight feet long, and was nearly filled up by a cheap bedstead, covered by a bed about two inches thick, and surmounted at the head by a consumptive-looking pillow. The paper was torn from the walls in places. There was one rickety chair, and a wash-stand which bore marks of ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... I made the last entry in my journal. J. B. was asleep in his historic bed, and I was sitting at a rickety table writing by candle-light, stopping now and then to listen to the mutter of guns on the Aisne front. It was only at night that we could hear them, and then not often, the very ghost of sound, as faint as the beating of the pulses in one's ears. That was a May evening, and this, one ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... soundness of his judgment, the Parson replied snappishly, "Yes, solid and sound as one of those tables you buy at a broker's; the thickness of the varnish hides the defects in the joints: the whole framework is rickety." But when the Parson was indignantly urged to state the reason by which he arrived at so harsh a conclusion, he could only reply by an assertion which seemed to his questioner a ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... begun to grow, was already turning yellow beneath the feet of the crowd. The dust was black; and yet, every Thursday, the cocotte aristocracy passed through on the way to the Casino, with a great show of rickety carriages and borrowed postilions. All these things gave pleasure to that fanatical Parisian, Sidonie; and then, too, in her childhood, she had heard a great deal about Asnieres from the illustrious Delobelle, who would have liked ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... after the way he left his boarding place, if that Lindsay woman didn't lie." Pennold laid aside his pipe and frowned thoughtfully, as steps echoed from the rickety porch and a knock sounded upon the door. "He's a lightweight, every way you take him—he'd never ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... safe enough here—'s long as the wind's blowin' as 'tis now, an' I guess it allers does blow that way, round this speck of an island. It must be all o' five mile to that land either side, an' in their rickety canoes the Feweegins never venture fur out in anythin' o' a rough sea. I calculate, Captain, we needn't trouble ourselves much ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... those who had felt themselves obliged by circumstances to go out into the baffling gloom. He guessed that something of a like nature had fallen upon the town again. The gas-light on the landings and in the melancholy hall burned feebly—so feebly that one got but a vague view of the rickety hat-stand and the shabby overcoats and head-gear hanging upon it. It was well for him that he had but a corner or so to turn before he reached the pawnshop in whose window he had seen the ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rape (though there have been narrow escapes before), in not more than two or three questionable incidents, and in practically no "improper" details—conduct almost deserving the description of magnanimity and self-denial. Moreover, the thing really is a modern novel, though a bad and rickety one; the indefinable naturaleza is present in it after a strange fashion. There is less perhaps in the very inappropriately named Tableaux de Societe—the autobiography of a certain Fanchette de Francheville, who, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... little time two strong officers came bearing the body of the dead father in a rude pine box. They set it down on two old rickety stools. The cries of the children were so heartrending that the officers could not endure it, and made haste out of ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... wharf, is lying a queer little steam-tub, the Gemini, which will convey us on the first stage of our journey. A loafer on the wharf cautions us mockingly to step aboard with care, lest we overset the little steamer, or break through her somewhat rickety planking. She is about the size of some of those steam-launches that puff up and down the English Thames, but she would look rather out of place among them; for the Gemini and her sister boat, the Eclipse, ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... "You are rickety," Black Jack told him. "Why, there ain't any danger; nobody goes up there." Laughing Bill held his breath, missing not a word. "If they did we'd pick 'em up with the glasses. It's open country, and we'd get 'em before they ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... (Stekel, Spr. d. Tr., p. 398 f.): "I came through a crack between two boards out of the 'wheel room.' The walls dripped with water. Right before me is a brook in which stands a rickety, black piano. I use it to cross over the brook, as I am running away. Behind me is a crowd of men. In front of them all is my uncle. He encourages them to pursue me and roars and yells. The men have mountain sticks, which they occasionally ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... arrived for our departure. My father rode a steady mule, but I preferred a horse, though not so safe an animal for the narrow tracks, up and down steep mountains, on the summit of terrific precipices, and across rickety bridges which ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... happened in those years. The servant lit the candle, and Kellson looked round the room. Yes; just as he had expected; there was the same furniture. The wall-paper was different, that was all. He passed his hand over the foot of the iron bedstead and drew out one of the slides of the old, rickety chest of drawers. How many people had slept in that bed since that morning when he had here packed his portmanteau before carrying ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... nod; and taking their rifles, the boys accompanied the king back to the town, where, orders being given, his majesty's big canoe was prepared, and half-a-dozen great hunters, armed with throwing-spears, each entered a canoe of his own—a frail rickety-looking affair, that threatened to turn over at any moment, even with the weight of one man, but which its occupant sent through the water at a famous rate, by his clever management ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders. The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wall-paper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful; and brave indeed was the boy who would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... moseyin' down into It'ly on a bum railroad, staying at bummer hotels, and switching off to a rickety old chaise behind a pair of animated frames that showed the S. P. C. A. hadn't got as far as It'ly yet. Think of riding from the Battery to White Plains in a Fifth Avenue stage! That would be a chariot race to what we took before we hove ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford |
