"Tumble-down" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a tumble-down shed, fed and watered them, and, as it was impossible to leave till they were rested, lay down to snatch a brief sleep on the ground. We were invited to use the floor of a hovel for a couch, but after glancing at it, declined with great politeness ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... quaint old village—a curious, old-fashioned scene. We feel as if we had somehow become transmogrified, and instead of being flesh-and-blood men and women from practical New York, were playing our parts in some old English novel. Odd little tumble-down houses, with peaked roofs and mullioned windows, ranged about a triangular common, look sleepily out upon a statue of Palmerston in the middle of the open place, the gray walls of Romsey Abbey, a thousand years old, against ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... him. On that terrible night Daddy Neptune had stood just where the easel was standing now; over there by the tumble-down chicken house, Jake had fallen; and the space that was now green with grass had been full of vengeful men, and howling dogs, and trampling horses. Peter took the sketch from her, looked at it for a long moment, and, as briefly as he could, and keeping ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... caught of the lower part of the new villa, with scaffolding round so much as is seen of the tower. In the background the garden is bounded by an old wooden fence. Outside the fence, a street with low, tumble-down cottages. ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... of the fence, an old and long neglected apple orchard, a tumble-down log barn, and the wreck of a house with the fireplace and chimney standing stark and alone, told the story. The place was one of those old ranches, purchased by the Power Company for the water rights, and deserted by those who once had called it home. From the gate, ancient wagon tracks, overgrown ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... fragment of brick wall topped by a marble ball or two—which had been shot at for marks—and passing, just beyond, some huge clumps of box, they came to a square brick building with a rude wooden addition at one side, and saw some tumble-down sheds a short distance beyond this, with ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Holl were all in a tumble-down state; the furniture was no better. There wasn't a chair in the whole house; even the bastofa had only a dirt floor, and it was entirely unsheathed on the inside except for a few planks nailed on the wall from the bed up as far as the rafters. The clock was the ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... he joyfully came upon a camp, but it had long been deserted; from the low, tumble-down corrals, and the unmistakable atmosphere of the place, Happy Jack knew it for a sheep camp. But nothing save the musty odor and the bare cabin walls seemed to have been left behind. He searched gloomily, thankful for the brief shade the cabin offered. Then, tossed up on the rafters and ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... a clamoring chorus behind him and he heard one brazen youngster boldly mimicking his manner of asking if the roads were good. These children lived in tumble-down houses which were all but ruins, and played in shell holes as if these cruel, ragged gaps in the earth had been made by the kind ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... up the main street, yelling and whooping like a pack of wild Indians. A queer awry figure stuck its head from the window of a tumble-down shop and, seeing the cause of the disturbance, shook his fist ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... lodged in a little, dirty, tumble-down public-house, which in those days was close to the stairs, and whose protruding wooden rooms overhung the river. The family, as emigrants, being objects of some interest in and about Hungerford, attracted so many beholders, that we were glad to take refuge ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... little church called St. Sennan's. You haven't heard of it, probably. It's past the Cove—on a hill looking over the sea. It's the most tumble-down old place you ever saw, and nobody goes there except a few fishermen, but we know the clergyman and like him. I like the place too—you can listen to the sea if ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... the others resort, and they seem to be pretty well off and independent as compared with their neighbors of the other villages (Pl. XXXIV). The houses and courts are in keeping with the general character of the people and exhibit a degree of neatness and thrift that contrasts sharply with the tumble-down appearance of some of the other villages, especially those of the Middle Mesa and Oraibi. There is a general air of newness about the place, though it is questionable whether the architecture is more recent than that of the other villages of Tusayan. This effect is partly due ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... stores of the village had each a general assortment of merchandise, including silks, broadcloths, groceries, plows, and schoolbooks. On either side of Main-st. was a hard-beaten path, which served for a sidewalk. On the south side of the street stood a number of dingy rookeries, in a half tumble-down condition. Pigs and cows roamed at large, and were only known to be home at supper-time, when old brindle, in more instances than one, might have been seen peering through the front window with a covetous look upon the family group ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... little fruit, and that of so poor a flavour as to be scarcely worth picking. They have, in fact, almost reverted to savagery, even as the cottage itself is crumbling back to the earth out of which it was built. On the slope above the cherry-orchards, if you moor your boat at the tumble-down quay and climb by half-obliterated pathways, you will come to a hedge of brambles, and to a broken gate with a well beside it; and beyond the gate to an orchard of apple-trees, planted in times when, regularly as Christmas Eve came round, ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... there, from a dance-hall came the rattle of a tinny piano, the squeak of a raspy violin, a high-pitched, hectic burst of laughter; while, flanking the street on each side, like interjected inanimate blotches, rows of squalid tenements and cheap, tumble-down frame houses silhouetted themselves in broken, jagged points against the sky-line. And now and then a man spoke to her—his untrained fingers fumbling in clumsy homage at the brim of ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... inn without more ado, and I crossed the road towards the gates. They were locked, but the little entrance by the tumble-down cottage stood open, and passing through this I started up the drive. It was a perfect afternoon; the sunshine straggled in through the leafy canopy overhead and danced upon my path. To the right were ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... before his eyes he dragged his weary, aching feet as quickly as he could towards the spot, and soon came to a miserable-looking little cottage. As he drew near he saw that it was in a tumble-down condition, the bamboo fence was broken and weeds and grass pushed their way through the gaps. The paper screens which serve as windows and doors in Japan were full of holes, and the posts of the house ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... the police; its character, we will say, was established as the headquarters for the lowest sort of rogues. The owner pretended to keep a respectable hotel. He had rooms to let, and on the first floor he ran a barroom, and although the building itself was an old tumble-down affair the barroom ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... as they were poor. There was not a woman in the place excepting Mrs. Newton with whom Mrs. Unwin could associate, or to whom she could look for help in sickness or other need. The house in which the pair took up their abode was dismal, prison-like, and tumble-down; when they left it, the competitors for the succession were a cobbler and a publican. It looked upon the Market Place, but it was in the close neighbourhood of Silver End, the worst part of Olney. In winter the cellars were full of water. There were no pleasant walks ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... in her own place, but it was precisely because she was not in the place where she belonged that she felt she could not. She had learned that the little garden was reserved for the boarders and that the factory hands were not privileged to sit there. She could not see any seats near the old tumble-down house where she was to lodge, so she left the table and sauntered down ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... the mountains of western North Carolina, far up on the mountainside, at the head of a cove, there lived a fifteen-year-old boy. He had sisters and brothers and parents, but they dwelt in a little tumble-down shack and were wretchedly poor. Jake was the oldest of the children, and he had to work hard in the little patch of corn on the steep mountainside, ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... its fleecy bosom some details of that vulgar and pitiful degradation. One place alone I found as I had hoped to find it. Ex-Mayor Tiemann's house was gone, his conservatory was a crumbling ruin; the house we decked for Lincoln's death was a filthy tenement with a tumble-down gallery where the old portico had stood, and I found very little on my upward pilgrimage that had not experienced some change—for the worse, as it seemed to me. The very cemetery that belongs to old Trinity had dandified itself ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... faces was sublime. One in particular of these winter neighbors, a somewhat speculative thinker with whom I had often conversed, was a firm believer in the cataclysmic origin of the Valley; and I now jokingly remarked that his wild tumble-down-and-engulfment hypothesis might soon be proved, since these underground rumblings and shakings might be the forerunners of another Yosemite-making cataclysm, which would perhaps double the depth of the Valley by swallowing the floor, leaving the ends ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... place on the south of Market Street, to a building which resembled a deserted, tumble-down stable or blacksmith's shop plastered with old hand-bills and posters. There were some dirty old window-frames in the second story, but I do not believe there was one whole pane ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... fountains in the assault of the wind. In this young wood of Taahauku, all these hues and combinations were exampled and repeated by the score. The trees grew pleasantly spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there interspersed with a rack for drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for storing it. Every here and there the stroller had a glimpse of the Casco tossing in the narrow anchorage below; and beyond he had ever before him the dark amphitheatre of the Atuona mountains and the cliffy bluff that closes it to seaward. The trade-wind moving in the fans made a ceaseless ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had refused to look at another "dividing ridge" that had neither path nor way, and henceforth I must keep to the open road or travel alone. Two hours' tramp brought us to an old clearing with some rude, tumble-down log buildings that many years before had been occupied by the bark and lumber men. The prospect for trout was so good in the stream hereabouts, and the scene so peaceful and inviting, shone upon by the dreamy August sun, that we concluded ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE, at Tuskegee, Alabama, is one of the most uniquely interesting institutions in America. Begun, twenty years ago, in two abandoned, tumble-down houses, with thirty untaught Negro men and women for its first students, it has become one of the famous schools of the country, with more than a thousand students each year. Students and teachers are all of the Negro race. The Principal of the school, ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... for his cottage, and was always provoked when it was spoken of as a 'tumble-down old shanty.' He always looked as if he meant to say, "Don't take it ill of me, good old house: the people only abuse you so that they may get you cheap." Hansei stood his ground. He would not sell his home for a penny less than it was worth; and besides that, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... miser selected was one called Dotheboys Hall, a long, cold-looking, tumble-down building, one story high, in a dreary part of the country. It belonged to a man named Squeers, a burly, ruffianly hypocrite, who pretended to the world to be a kind, fatherly master, but in fact treated his pupils with such cruelty that almost the only ones ever sent ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... stray far from a certain corner of Farmer Green's wood lot. He preferred to hunt where he knew the lay of the land. And since he liked especially to hunt along old stone walls, he picked out a long stretch of old tumble-down wall that reached through ...
— The Tale of Grumpy Weasel - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Craymoor Grange in the summer of 1849, my husband having discovered the place in one of his rambles, and taken a fancy to it. At first I certainly thought we could never make it our home, it was so dilapidated and tumble-down; but by the time winter came on we had had several repairs done and alterations made, and the rooms ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and in the glorious sunshine the old Barnes house did look, as their guide said, more "lifelike and cheerful." A big, rambling, gray-gabled affair, of colonial pattern, a large yard before it and a larger one behind, the tumble-down shed in which General Jackson had been tethered, a large barn, also rather tumble-down, with henhouses and corncribs beside it and attached to it in haphazard fashion. In the front yard were overgrown ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... poor people, so poor they were starving When I found them a few months ago, were now halving Their food and their home with this waif and with Benny— For he was an orphan child left by his granny, Who died in an attic just over their room, In the tumble-down house they before-time called home; Though they've four of their own, and the eldest is Jenny, The little street-sweep who would not take the penny, Yet they say, "Benny seems quite as much to belong here, And be one of our children, as if ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... wandered about the courtyard, shunned by some, glared at by others, but watched by all, and practically at the mercy of the first casual ragamuffin with a chopper, in there. He took possession of a small tumble-down shed to sleep in; the effluvia of filth and rotten matter incommoded him greatly: it seems he had not lost his appetite though, because—he told me—he had been hungry all the blessed time. Now and again "some ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... bunch," the officer said, "but not diplomats. They are Taoist priests, and the chances are that they have a tumble-down temple in this vicinity. They are not very popular in ...
— Boy Scouts on Motorcycles - With the Flying Squadron • G. Harvey Ralphson
... what or who they are. They've only just come here and from goodness knows where. And they live in that little tumble-down house in Mullen ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... moreover, a noble view. As it stands at the turn of the bay, its skirts are all waterside, and round from North Reach to the Bay Front you can follow doubtful paths from one quaint corner to another. Everywhere the same tumble-down decay and sloppy progress, new things yet unmade, old things tottering to their fall; everywhere the same out-at-elbows, many-nationed loungers at dim, irregular grog-shops; everywhere the same sea-air and isleted sea-prospect; and for a last and more romantic ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... boards taken from the tumble-down shack an extra shed had been built near the cabin, and the porch repaired and strengthened. Harlan found time to make a much larger cage for the pigeon. As he told Ellen, the bird, confined in such close quarters, ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... of ales and spirits, of a small inn in the center of a lonely little village, perched on the summit of a hill, and called Mount Stanning. It was not a very pretty house to look at; it had something of a tumble-down, weather-beaten appearance, standing, as it did, upon high ground, sheltered only by four or five bare and overgrown poplars, that had shot up too rapidly for their strength, and had a blighted, forlorn look in consequence. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... headless favourites, waxing so enthusiastic over the obsequies that she even buried several quite respectable wax babies, though, regretting their loss afterwards, she was eventually forced to dig them up again. She put tombstones at the heads of the graves, made of slates from the roof of a tumble-down shed, and carefully wrote names, dates, and epitaphs upon them in slate pencil, being greatly distressed when the inscriptions were invariably obliterated by every ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... through a little tumble-down green door Into the dark and crowded shop; the Turk Crouching above the brasier, smiles and nods; 'Tis all his ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... Mr. Ketchum. "Has he sold you that tumble-down claim on a burnt prairie, miles from any wood or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... mile, the granite rock gradually becomes a mountain surrounded by a wide plain of sand, covered with clustering houses, towers, turrets, and fortifications, and surmounted by a Gothic church nearly 400 feet above the sea. There is a little town upon the rock, old, tumble-down, irregular, and picturesque, like Bastia in Corsica—constructed by a hardy sea-faring people, who have built their dwellings in the sides of this conical rock, like the sea-birds; and there is a little inn called the Lion d'or, with windows built ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... in Little Silver. He had no relations round about and couldn't, or wouldn't, tell his new neighbours what had brought him along. But he bided a bit with Mrs. Ford, the policeman's wife, as a lodger, and then, when he'd sized up the place and found it suited him, he took a tumble-down, four-room cottage at the back-side of the village and worked upon it himself and soon had the place to his liking. A most handy little man he was and could turn his skill in many directions. And he'd do odd jobs for the neighbours and show a good bit ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... incident about to be mentioned, the picket post was on the crest of a low ridge, or slight elevation, and under some big oak trees by an old tumble-down deserted building which had at one time been a blacksmith shop. There were three of us on this post, and one of my turns came at midnight. I was standing by one of the trees, listening, looking, and meditating. The night was calm, with a full moon. The space in our front, sloping down to a ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... at Lorenzo Marquez. Through the kindness of one of his native or half-breed wives, who could talk a little Dutch, I managed, however, to get a lodging in a tumble-down house belonging to a dissolute person who called himself Don Jose Ximenes, but who was really himself a half-breed. Here good fortune befriended me. Don Jose, when sober, was a trader with the natives, and a year before had acquired from them two good buck wagons. Probably ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... upon a brisk run, and Jim still sat upon the stone watching him until he disappeared somewhere among the angles of the tumble-down buildings ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... he rode to the place of coronation he had never seen before. Notwithstanding the embroidered silk and velvet hangings decorating the fronts of the rich people's houses, he caught glimpses of filthy side streets, squalid alleys, and tumble-down tenements. He saw forlorn little children scud away like rats into their holes as he drew near, and wretched, vicious-looking men and women fighting with each other for places in the crowd. Sharp, miserable faces peered round ...
— The Land of the Blue Flower • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... side were the tumble-down stables, near which a squealing white stallion with long, red-dyed tail was tied to a peepul tree. Its rider, a blue-coated sowar, or cavalryman, with bare feet thrust into heelless native slippers, sat on the ground near it smoking a ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... this tumble-down town walked every type of Gallipoli campaigner: British Tommies, grousing and cheerful; Australians, remarkable for their physique; deep-brown Maoris; bearded Frenchmen in baggy trousers; shining and grinning African negroes ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... The tumble-down cottage was not empty, as he had thought, for two people were standing in the doorway. He stopped abruptly. The man in worn overalls and the girl beside him, with her bobbed hair, bright eyes, and faded pink gingham apron, did not look like a very forbidding pair. ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... and the colony began their existence together, and a more prosperous community of colored people it would be hard to find. They own several thousand acres of land, and are in every way ahead of their white neighbors. The school house of the latter was a poor tumble-down affair and the children were untidy, while the school house of the former was a neat, painted and well-kept building, crowded in school hours with bright, enthusiastic children—clean and polite. The teacher was from ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 1, January, 1890 • Various
... been the regiment, Mary. My father has a few hundred acres in County Mayo, and a tumble-down house; that is to say, it was a tumble-down house when I saw it four years ago, but it had been shut up for a good many years, and I should not be surprised if it has quite tumbled down now. However, my father was always talking of going to live there when he left ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... standing prominently at the corner immediately facing you. Two pollarded acacias are planted near the door of the inn, above the lintel of which a painted board scribbled over with irregular lettering invites the traveller to enter. A wooden verandah, with tumble-down roof and worm-eaten supporting beams, runs along two sides of the house, and from the roof hang a number of gaily-coloured and decorated earthenware ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... than most people in the American colony) they didn't offer to help; and mamma would have died sooner than ask. I had to be snatched out of school, to find that all the beautiful dreams of being a happy debutante must go by contraries. We lived in the tumble-down house ourselves, mamma and I, and her friends rallied round her—she was so popular and pretty. They got her chances to give singing lessons, and me to do translating, and painting menus. We were happy again, after a while, in spite of all, and people were so good to us! Mamma used to hold a kind ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... order as before; and a walk of less than fifteen minutes brought us to another tumble-down building, which appeared to have been once a court-house. Only the lower rooms were habitable, and at a door, on either side of which stood a ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... entirely too tumble-down to use,' said one of the men, sadly; and I knew he was right, for I had examined ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... its Banbury cakes and tumble-down station is passed. Hurrah for the "Flying Dutchman," running easily and smoothly, sixty miles an hour, well within himself. He is not tired, he does not pant or whistle, he goes calmly, swiftly along.... Here is Swindon—what o'clock is ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... was afraid of work. The very sight of work scared old Mr. Rabbit. You see, he was so busy minding other people's business that he didn't have time to attend to his own. So his brown and gray coat always was rumpled and tumbled and dirty. His house was a tumble-down affair in which no one but Mr. Rabbit would ever have thought of living, and his garden—oh, dear me, such a garden you never did see! It was all weeds and brambles. They filled up the yard, and old Mr. Rabbit actually couldn't have gotten into his own house if he hadn't cut a path ...
— Mother West Wind 'Why' Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... was greatly shocked on visiting the house to see the shameful state of dilapidation into which it has been allowed to pass. The porches and steps have fallen down, the garden is a disreputable tangle, and the graves in the yard are heaped with tumble-down stones about which the cattle graze. The only parts of the building in good repair are those parts which time has not yet succeeded in destroying. The drawing-room, containing a mantelpiece given to Washington by Lafayette, and the finest wood paneling ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... old ruffian including me in his salute. I do not appreciate the Montenegrin custom of kissing among men; it is not pleasant. An empty hut was immediately put at our disposal. It was the most primitive and tumble-down habitation that we had had as yet. Of course it rained. It was almost the first rain on the trip, and we had to lie up here a whole day as P. was unwell and unable to ride. Everyone turned out to make the hut comfortable, but it was not a success. I lay down outside and promptly fell asleep, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... design of the building, and, except for the ludicrously diminutive clock-face, could withstand nobly the cavil of the most exacting pedant who ever read or studied architectural forms, solely out of books. In the immediate foreground falls the before mentioned street of steps. Many old tumble-down houses have recently been cleared away, and, at the present writing, the view from this point is one which has apparently not previously existed, and one which it is to be hoped will not be marred by the erection of ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... siesta when we arrived, and we had to walk up and down in the sun, in front of his dwelling, a miserable tumble-down cottage, for two hours, before any one ventured to arouse him. At length we were admitted into his presence. We found him sitting in a room without a matting; a few chairs and benches forming its only furniture. He was ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... end of it; there he has to stop till the Red Man gives him back his power again, for the happiness of France. A lot of them say that he is dead! Dead? Oh! yes, very likely. They do not know him, that is plain! They go on telling that fib to deceive the people, and to keep things quiet for their tumble-down government. Listen; this is the whole truth of the matter. His friends have left him alone in the desert to fulfil a prophecy that was made about him, for I forgot to tell you that his name Napoleon really means the Lion ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... time they had reached the Dunns' domain. At least they had come to a broken-down gate in a tumble-down fence, which Marjorie knew was the portal of their destination. In their endeavors to open the rickety gate the girls pushed it over, and ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... in her heart never ceased. Day by day a fresh note was added; everything she touched; everything she saw was transformed. The old tumble-down house with its propped-up furniture and makeshift carpets seemed to have become already the place she planned it to be. There would be vines over the door and a new summer kitchen at the back'; and there would be a porch where her mother ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... old French portion of the town, the thoroughfares are narrow and crooked, and some of the houses are very quaint and picturesque: being built of wood, with tumble-down galleries before the windows, approachable by stairs or rather ladders from the street. There are queer little barbers' shops and drinking- houses too, in this quarter; and abundance of crazy old tenements with blinking casements, such as ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... show us exactly how everything occurred upon that fatal night. It is a long, dismal walk, the Yew Alley, between two high walls of clipped hedge, with a narrow band of grass upon either side. At the far end is an old tumble-down summer-house. Half-way down is the moor-gate, where the old gentleman left his cigar-ash. It is a white wooden gate with a latch. Beyond it lies the wide moor. I remembered your theory of the affair and ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... shaded walks of the charmille, as trimly kept as the maze of Hampton Court and three times the height. We did all sorts of other things. We stopped at wild mountain gorges alive with the rustle of water and aglow with wild-flowers. We went on foot through one-streeted, tumble-down villages and passed the time of day with the kindly inhabitants. And the August sun shone all ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... happened upon the Skull and Spectacles it attracted me at once. Its situation, in the middle of that wilderness of mouldering wharves, decaying gardens, and tumble-down cottages, was in itself an invitation to the eye. Then the devilish mockery of its sign was an allurement. It looked like some fantastical tavern in a dream, and not ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... for a while, but a thought came to console me, and I said to myself: "You can climb up the city clock-tower, and see the house of Catharine and Aunt Gredel." Thinking thus, I arrived at the house of Brainstein, the bell-ringer, who lived at the corner of the little place, in an old, tumble-down barrack. His two sons were weavers, and in their old home the noise of the loom and the whistle of the shuttle was heard from morning till night. The grandmother, old and blind, slept in an armchair, on the back of ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... they might make their home with him while their house was in building. He had already had part of the material drawn, and from the brow of the hill they looked down upon the site he had chosen near the old tumble-down tenant's house. But Andrew saw ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... continuous roar as though the earth was a hollow drum. Both travellers were drenched to the skin before they were free of Saxmundham, and one of them, when after midnight they stumbled into the poor tumble-down parody of a tavern at Glemham, was in an extreme exhaustion. It was no more than an ague, said Lance, from which he periodically suffered, but the two men slept in the same bare room, and towards morning Mitchelbourne was ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... Royale, or rather of the inn, shook his head—"Pour les chevaux, vous en aurez des meilleurs: mais, pour la voiture il n'y en a pas. Tenez, Monsieur; venez voir." I followed, with miserable forebodings—and entering a shed, where stood an old tumble-down-looking phaeton—"la voila, c'est la seule que je possede en ce moment"—exclaimed the landlord. It had never stirred from its position since the fall of last years' leaf. It had been—within and without—the roosting place for fowls and other of the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... after six o'clock when the jogging old horse turned into a lane, and finally stopped at a somewhat tumble-down porch. An old woman appeared in the doorway, wiping her ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... January day, and in all the wide plain that stretched away for miles on every side there was not a particle of shade; even the creek ran north and south, so that the hot sun sought out every nook and corner, and the bark-roofed hut, with its few tumble-down outbuildings, was ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... undertaken the job, as soon as the night set in made his preparations, and went to the place indicated—an uncanny-looking, tumble-down, lonely old shrine, all overgrown with moss and rank vegetation. However, Jiuyemon, who was afraid of nothing, cared little for the appearance of the place, and having made himself as comfortable as he could in so dreary a spot, sat down on the floor, lit his pipe, and kept a ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... broken light. It was so long since I'd seen any. I felt as if I was going to a new world. None of us spoke for a bit. Jim pulled up at a small hut by the roadside; it looked like a farm, but there was not much show of crops or anything about the place. There was a tumble-down old barn, with a strong door to it, and a padlock; it seemed the only building that there was any care taken about. A man opened the door of the ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... strand me, Hester!" replied her brother. "How you could see anything pathetic, or pitiful as you call it, in that disreputable old humbug, I can't even imagine. A more ludicrous specimen of tumble-down humanity it would be impossible to find! A drunken old thief—I'll lay you any thing! Catch me leaving a sov where he could spy ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... and stowaway in the coal-shed." The house had a back-door, or it would not have been fit for old Growler's purposes; and the door opened into what they called a garden, but it was a bit of dirty barren ground, strewn with broken bricks and crockery, and bits of rotten wood, with some tumble-down sheds on either side of it. In one of these he proposed we should hide. As we opened the door, however, to rush out, we found ourselves confronted by a dozen stout seamen; and before we could make the slightest resistance, we were all of us bound hand and foot. The front-door being ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... old man who sold umbrellas and walking-sticks in a tumble-down house which adjoined "The Ladies' Paradise." His business was ruined by the growth of that concern, and he expressed bitter hatred towards Octave Mouret, its proprietor. Denise Baudu rented a room from him after her dismissal from "The Ladies' Paradise," and he showed much kindness ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... deserted buildings, I approach one at which signs of occupation are visible, for some water. This place is simply a deserted Mussulman village, from which the inhabitants probably decamped in a body during the last Russo-Turkish war; the mosque is in a tumble-down condition, the few dwelling-houses remaining are in the last stages of dilapidation, and the one I call at is temporarily occupied by some shepherds, two of whom are regaling themselves with food of some kind ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... stretch—the same low table-topped mountains rising hours ahead, and which never seemed to get any closer, looking, moreover, in the distant, mirage-effects, like vast slabs poised in mid-air and resting on nothing. At long intervals a group of foul and tumble-down Hottentot huts, with their squalid inhabitants—lean curs and ape-like men; their raison d'etre, in the shape of a flock of prematurely aged and disappointed-looking goats, trying all they are worth to extract sustenance from the red shaly earth and ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... Craigengelt, "but I know the reason now of his unmannerly behaviour at his old tumble-down tower yonder. Ashamed of your company?—no, no! Gad, he was afraid you would cut in and ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... sparkling clearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves—Flavian at work suddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They reached land at last. The coral fishers had spread their nets on the sands, with a tumble-down of quaint, many-hued treasures, below a little shrine of Venus, fluttering and gay with the scarves and napkins and gilded shells which these people had offered to the image. Flavian and Marius sat down under the shadow of a mass ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... Rose's father, was the last to undergo this ordeal; clad only in her shift, she thrice crossed the King's Highway and was thus married to avoid payment of her first husband's debts. It is not far from the old Church Foundation of St. Paul's of Narragansett, and the tumble-down house of Sexton Martin Read, the prince of Narragansett weavers in ante-Revolutionary days. Weaver Rose learned to weave from his grandfather, who was an ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... a smart verandah, attached to Dr. HERDAL'S dwelling-house, and communicating with the Drawing-room and Dispensary by glass-doors. On the left a tumble-down rockery, with a headless plaster Mercury. In front, a lawn, with a large silvered glass globe on a stand. Chairs and tables. All the furniture is of galvanised iron. A sunset is seen going on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... you either, could count. All the little children whom the good fairies take to, because their cruel mothers and fathers will not; all who are untaught and brought up heathens, and all who come to grief by ill usage or ignorance or neglect; all the little children in alleys and courts, and tumble-down cottages, who die by fever, and cholera, and measles, and scarlatina, and nasty complaints which no one has any business to have, and which no one will have some day, when folks have common sense; and all the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... which many people consider the best hotel in Germany, having capital restaurants, serving table-d'hote meals, attached to them. The Rose has a little terrace, looking on to the gardens, which is a pleasant supping-place. The old Kurhaus, a tumble-down building, is disappearing or has disappeared, and a new and gorgeous building is to take its place. The restaurant at the old Kurhaus always had a good reputation, and to eat one's evening meal, for every one sups and does not dine, at one of its little tables ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... great firm of D. McCunn, so that the innkeeper might be ashamed of his suspicions. What nonsense to imagine that a noted and wealthy Glasgow merchant—the bagman's tone was almost reverential—would concern himself with the affairs of a forgotten village and a tumble-down house! ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... lamented remains. The monument and vault in the church were then, alas! all that remained of my vast possessions; for my father had sold every stick of the property to one Notley, an attorney, and we received but a cold welcome in his house—a miserable old tumble-down place it was. [Footnote: In another part of his memoir Mr. Barry will be found to describe this mansion as one of the most splendid palaces in Europe; but this is a practice not unusual with his nation; and with respect to the Irish principality claimed by him, it is known that Mr. Barry's ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... favorable influence; and there is nothing like example in early training. Bring up and educate a boy among those who know nothing of the refinements of life, away from the progressive examples of art and taste, in a tumble-down, unplastered, ill-heated and ventilated apartment, and he never can become, with all the aid of books and teachers, as thoroughly cultivated and fitted for the duties of life, as one who has enjoyed associations of a higher order. School architecture has a meaning in it; there is value ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old gray rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... expect too much, my dear Mr. Cole," were his last words to me. "My own place is as ancient and as tumble-down as most ruins that you pay to see over. And I'm never there myself because—I tell you frankly—I hate ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... Red Ridinghood; and the small eyes grow big at the adventures of Sinbad, the gallant tar. Will not this be better, Don Bob, than pistil and stamen and radicle? —than wearing out BBB lead pencils in drawing tumble-down castles, rickety cottages, and dumpling-shaped trees?—than acquiring a language which has no literature fit for a girl to read?—than mistressing the absurd modern piano music?—than taking diplomas from institutes, which most certainly do not express all that young women learn in those venerable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... remember another day, more than thirty years before, when it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the puppy by a genuine ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Board examinations took place at the St. Katherine's Dock House on Tower Hill, and he informed us that he had a special affection for the view of that historic locality, with the Gardens to the left, the front of the Mint to the right, the miserable tumble-down little houses farther away, a cabstand, boot-blacks squatting on the edge of the pavement and a pair of big policemen gazing with an air of superiority at the doors of the Black Horse public-house across the road. This was the part of the world, he said, his eyes first took notice ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... days, we frequently answered these hails. Sometimes there was a group of high-water-stained, tumble-down cabins, populous with colored folk, and no whites visible; with grassless patches of dry ground here and there; a few felled trees, with skeleton cattle, mules, and horses, eating the leaves and gnawing the bark—no other food for them in the flood-wasted land. Sometimes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... claret-colored paint, quite moldy. The stationer's and the tobacconist's were still there. In the rear, over some low buildings, you could see the leprous facades of several five-storied houses rearing their tumble-down outlines against the sky. The "Grand Balcony" dancing hall no longer existed; some sugar-cutting works, which hissed continually, had been installed in the hall with the ten flaming windows. And yet it was here, in this dirty den—the Hotel Boncoeur—that the whole cursed life had ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... don't know, any more than you do. The first time I saw him, was in an old tumble-down building, where the wind played hide and go seek through the timbers; and where more men, women, dogs and children were huddled together, than four walls of the like size ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... eyes, the garden appeared almost as well planted as her own, and from the chimney of the tumble-down cabin a lazy curl of smoke rose. Under the dark pine clump the outlines of a narrow mound could be plainly seen, and beside it lay a spade and a spray of ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... appearance so temporary, as well as insecure, that one might have guessed their office to be something in the nature of a drawbridge. From these a narrow path ran through a marsh, left by the receding river, to a country road of desolate appearance. Here there was a rough enclosure, or corral, with some tumble-down sheds which afforded shelter, on the night of Joseph Louden's disgrace, for a number of shaggy teams attached to those decrepit and musty vehicles known picturesquely and accurately as Night-Hawks. The presence of such ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... of Brompton! He is not a client of mine, but I have my eye on him. His earthly possessions consist of about five acres of land, a tumble-down hut near by, and a double-barrelled shotgun, and he lost his secretaryship when the new administration made its clean sweep of the offices. They said he was going to marry a rich girl once, ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... to-night is near the ruins of a very old fort, and ever since we got here, the men have been hunting rattlesnakes that have undoubtedly been holding possession of the tumble-down buildings, many snake generations. Dozens and dozens have been killed, of all sizes, some of them being very large. The old quarters were evidently made of sods and dirt, and must have been dreadful places to ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... any. She was a queer old woman, and lived alone in a little tumble-down house with nineteen cats. Folks called her a witch, but she wasn't, though she looked like an old rag-bag. She was real kind to me when I lived in that place, and used to let me get warm at her fire when the folks at the poorhouse ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... shudder that I should have to pass through the whole vast length of the building in order to gain an exit. It was an all but hopeless task in the profound darkness to thread my way through the labyrinth of halls and corridors, of tumble-down stairs, of bat-haunted vaults, of purposeless angles and involutions; but I proceeded with something of a blind obstinacy, groping my way with arms held out before me. In this manner I had wandered on for perhaps a quarter of an hour, when my fingers ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... times on a door of a tumble-down shack. Cautiously it was opened a few inches. There was another ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... the streets past the houses that had been burned down, he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The picturesqueness of the chimney stacks and tumble-down walls of the burned-out quarters of the town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of the Rhine and the Colosseum. The cabmen he met and their passengers, the carpenters cutting the timber ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... courtyard's access to the lane. He passed through, and stood still— listening—looking sharply about him. He knew the place well. It was the heart and centre, the core of its own particular and vicious section of the underworld. Ahead of him, flanking the two-story, tumble-down building that was the Spider's home, was a narrow alleyway, then a small and filthy courtyard, and, its rear upon this and fronting the street, the alleyway again at the side, the "The Yellow Lantern" that he had been careful to avoid a dance hall of ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... and on stones which no one thinks of picking up. It was so astounding to call it a pleasure resort that we could only stare and remain dumb. We saw three temples and one royal garden. Five hundred Buddhas in one building, and all the buildings tumble-down and dirty. On top of one hill is a huge building which cost a million or more to build about four hundred years ago by someone for his tomb. Then he did something wrong, probably stole from the wrong person, ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... town, very like the narrow and tumble-down parts of Florence, only more so. The streets were a seething caldron of cattle-market when we entered, which made us feel like a tea-cup in a bull-ring (or is it thunderstorm?) as we drove through needle's-eye ways bristling with ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... Moses, "there's somethin in that too. David's dreadful fond of old stones, and old bones, and tumble-down edifices, and old sticks an weeds. Why, he's all the time collectin; an if he keeps on, his baggage'll ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... three orphan children, the oldest of whom was perhaps ten years old, and the others but little things, almost babies. They had a tiny little tumble-down house to live in, but very little to eat. Said the eldest to his little brother and sister, "I will go yonder on the sands laid bare by the falling tide, and it may be that I shall find something that we can eat." The little ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... sure I should like England better," declared Mary positively. "London is much finer than New York, which is very ugly, I think, and our dear little villages are so pretty. I never saw such queer tumble-down places as you have here in the country. I think our hedge-rows and lanes ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... so mysterious about it?" she went on. "It's only a tumble-down old place, and must be very draughty to live in, even for ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... mother in a little villa, the roof of which is in sight from my sunny terrace in the Villa Nardi, just to the left of the square old convent tower, rising there out of the silver olive-boughs,—a tumble-down sort of villa, with a flat roof and odd angles and parapets, in the midst of a thrifty but small grove of lemons and oranges. They were poor enough, or would be in any country where physical wants are greater than here, and yet did not belong to that lowest class, the young girls of which are ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... acquiring philosophy enough to forget that his children went hungry. He kept himself steeped for a time in the idea that the world is vanity, and if of pleasure it has none, pain also is a delusion. Then, at last, one night he left his little ones in their tumble-down hovel, and started off ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... but I've heard no other. The curious old man who left them here is, presumably, insane on the subject of religion. He appeared on the mountain early in the summer, with these little ones, and preempted that tumble-down cottage over the bluff beyond our gates. Most of you ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... posted by Kathleen herself. After supper she went with David into the old loft over the tumble-down stables. It was not a very safe place of refuge, for the rafters were rotten and might tumble down at any time. Still, the sense of danger made it all, the more interesting to the children. There they sat side by side, and Kathleen told David about ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... moufflon—is that the right name for those strange creatures? We intend to crave your hospitality on our way to Bastia, where we are to embark, and I trust the della Rebbia Castle, which you declare is so old and tumble-down, will not fall in upon our heads! Though the prefect is so pleasant that subjects of conversation are never lacking to us—I flatter myself, by the way, that I have turned his head—we have been talking about ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... be no dishonesty—none in the world. You don't suppose that I want to get the dirty old tumble-down houses. God forbid! But you would not give up everything to a Jew! Oh, I hate them! I do hate them! Anything is fair against a Jew." If such was Madame Zamenoy's ordinary doctrine, it may well be understood that she would scruple at using no weapon against a Jew who was meditating ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... the Miners' Home in Gold City, and the speaker was an overgrown, brawny, low-browed boy of some seventeen years, who, in ragged clothes and an old slouch hat, leaned against the post that helped support the tumble-down roof of that notorious establishment. In front of him, barefooted and in overalls rolled up over well-browned legs, old blue cap, astride a little black pony whose eyes rolled appreciatively as he lovingly half leaned upon her neck, sat Job Malden, as the store-keepers called him; or ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher |
