"Littered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sitting-room to the right of the hall, deposited the letters and packets which he held on a small, tumble-down sofa already littered with books and papers, and returned to the hall-table for the letter. He tore it open, read it with slightly frowning brows and a mouth that worked unconsciously, then thrust it into his pocket and ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at all, but in a flat in "Town," or at one of the subordinate centres of the urban region we have foreseen. The apartments will be more or less agreeably adorned in some decorative fashion akin to but less costly than some of the many fashions that will obtain among the wealthy. They will be littered with a miscellaneous literature, novels of an entertaining and stimulating sort predominating, and with bric-a-brac; in a childless household there must certainly be quaint dolls, pet images, and so forth, and perhaps a canary would ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... a day. I never saw natives so filthy in their dwellings as the people of Unyoro. Goats and fowls share the but with the owner, which, being littered down with straw, is a mere cattle-shed, redolent of man and beast. The natives sleep upon a mass of straw, upon a raised platform, this at night being covered with a dressed skin. Yesterday the natives brought coffee in small quantities ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... entered. He looked round. It contained only one room, but this was twenty feet square. There were three small windows, one looking into the street, one looking up the valley, and one behind. The floor was littered with the beams of the roof. The door was still in its place. Having ascertained this, he ran back to the bodies of the two men, picked up the three guns, took off their bandoliers, and removed the pistols from their sashes; and with these, and one of their swords, returned ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... littered with papers, coats, collars, ties, and underwear. Drawers had been dragged out and emptied, my trunk gutted of its contents. Evidently the captain had been engaged in a thorough search of the cabin when ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... violins, which were hidden away out of sight, fell upon her delighted ear. She followed the sound, and it took her to the glass extension, which, to her astonishment, was all alight, and fragrant with flowering plants and towering palms. The "old trunks and things" that had littered the place were gone, and in their stead was all this soft greenness and bloom, while from above hung graceful lanterns, sending out a tender light that made the leaves look shadowy and waxen, and gave the spot a peculiar air ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... from the room and Jed heard him stumbling through the littered darkness of the shops on his way to the front door, kicking at the obstacles he tripped over and swearing and sobbing as he went. It was ridiculous enough, of course, but Jed did not feel like smiling. The bitterness of the little ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... husband stole noiselessly up the stairs and entered Margaret's room. The light was turned on full. The room was somewhat disordered; bridal finery lay littered about; a rug was crumpled; a wicker basket overturned. The father's instinct was true. His first move was to open the door leading out upon the balcony. In the thin snow drifted upon this porch were ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... he stood before the littered table, he glanced out at the sun. The morning was advancing all too rapidly. His eyes drifted across to his wife. She was still reading. A light sigh escaped him. He felt he should be out on his claim. However, without further thought he took the boiler of hot water off the stove and began ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... so," Caesar is reported to have said, as he looked sadly over the littered bodies in the familiar patrician dress.[6] "After all that I had done for my country, I, Caius Caesar, should have been condemned by them as a criminal if I had not appealed ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... young Mr. Surtaine turned into an inner room, bumped against a man trailing a kite-tail of proof, who had issued from a door to the right, asked a question, got a response, and entered the editor's den. Two littered desks made up the principal furniture of the place. Impartially distributed between the further desk and a chair, the form of one lost in slumber sprawled. At the nearer one sat a dyspeptic man of middle age waving a heavy pencil ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... troopship, in which capacity, as he ruefully said, he could make no friends, and could scarcely regard his ship as his own, provided he brought her safely from port to port. He cast a disgusted glance along the stained and littered decks. ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... past would rise up to crush me. Cowper had let that wife of his coerce him into swearing my life away. I remembered vividly his blubbering protestations of friendship when I persuaded Tomas Castro to return him his black deed-box with the brass handle, on that deck littered with rubbish.... "Oh, God bless you, God bless you. You have saved me from starvation...." There had been tears in his old blue eyes. "If you need it I will go anywhere... do anything to help you. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... much!" begged Mary. "By the way, what are they doing to this building? I see the stairways and some of the elevator shafts all littered ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... sheep, But I remain to fill the water-casks, Or sweeping the hard floor, or ministering Some impious and abominable meal 35 To the fell Cyclops. I am wearied of it! And now I must scrape up the littered floor With this great iron rake, so to receive My absent master and his evening sheep In a cave neat and clean. Even now I see 40 My children tending the flocks hitherward. Ha! what is this? are your Sicinnian measures Even ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... plant cereals and sweet potatoes in order that the armies might be fed; and should any one of these women on the march fall by the wayside, her body was transfixed by the spear of one of the escort as an example to the rest. Thus the roadway was littered with the corpses of these ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... in my mind. I found myself in the great dock area. The forms of giant cranes rose dimly in the air. A distant glare of light, where nightshifts were at work, illuminated the huge shapes of ocean steamers. The quays were littered with crates and bales. A clanking of buffers and the shrill whistles of locomotives came out of the darkness. For some time I stood transfixed. In my imagination I saw these big ships, laden with cargo, slipping down the Thames and ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... then entered the palace of Angantyr. Everything seemed new and beautiful to Frithiof. Instead of planks well matched, leather embroidered in gold covered the walls. No rough hearthstone littered the centre of the hall, but a marble fireplace was built up against the side. In the windows were fitted panes of glass, and a key secured ...
— Northland Heroes • Florence Holbrook
... gave him much amusement by their naive ways. He was too occupied to be troubled with introspection. Indeed, his well-ordered home was very different from before. The trim lawn, in spite of his zealous efforts, was constantly littered with toys. In sheer mischief the youngsters got into his wardrobe and chewed off the tails of his evening dress coat. But he felt a satisfying dignity and happiness in his new status as head ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... a large destruction of property, and the Union forces on entering found public buildings, stores, warehouses, private dwellings, and cotton, on fire—a scene of distress to which some of them also further contributed.[11] I myself remember streets littered with merchants' correspondence, a mute witness to other devastation. My recollection is that the officiating clergyman saw and dodged the too evident application, reading some other chapter. Many still living ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... friendly enquiries about the young man's own work, and the report of a promising word from the great Benson, Adams took up a letter lying loose among the papers on his big littered desk. ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... it would be a good plan for you fellows to have a museum of your own; a place in which to collect all the curious and interesting things that you find, and make, and have given you. Mrs. Jo is too kind to complain, but it is rather hard for her to have the house littered up with all sorts of rattletraps, half-a-pint of dor-bugs in one of her best vases, for instance, a couple of dead bats nailed up in the back entry, wasps nests tumbling down on people's heads, and stones lying ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... certain buoyancy of spirits; a cheery, optimistic view of life; a winning personality and the power of both making and holding friends. With this came another asset—the willingness to take chances, and still a third—an absolute belief in his luck. Down at the bottom of the box littered with old papers, unpaid tax bills and protested notes—all valueless—was a fourth which his father used to fish out when every other asset failed—a certain confidence in the turn of ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... set with the flat sides up, and affording a few level places for soup-plates; on each side are crooked, unbarked poles laid in short forks, to serve as seats. The poles are worn smoothest opposite the level places on the table. The floor is littered with rubbish—old wool-bales, newspapers, boots, worn-out shearing pants, rough bedding, etc., raked out of the bunks in impatient search for missing articles—signs of a glad and eager departure with cheques when ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... exactly duplicated. How could living men and women have endured the appalling uniformity of this human beehive? Everywhere, too, were the same recurring evidences of the haste and panic that had characterized the final moments of that terrible hegira. Hats and garments, cash-boxes and account-books, littered the hallways, and were piled in little heaps at the entrances to the elevators—impedimenta that must inevitably be abandoned at the last if life itself were to be saved. And the final tragedy—an elevator cage that had jammed in its ways and so hung fixed ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... me. The three spans on the scoot dashed down the slope, but brought up abruptly on different sides of a tree. Some of them were thrown down, and the others floundered over them. Two broke away and ran with the led horses. It was a rough place, littered with large rocks and fallen trees. In their panic the horses floundered over those, but a little farther down came on a bare, shelving ledge that overhung the brook. Probably they could not see ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... to him in his cabin. On arriving there, I found him and Mr Annesley seated at the cabin-table with a decanter of port standing between them, glasses of the same at their elbows, and a large map spread out in the full light of the cabin lamp, which had just been lighted; the table being further littered with a large ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... after this crossing they came to a line of wire strung on poles. Originally a fair passageway had been cleared through low brush and dense timber alike. A pathway of sorts still remained, though dim and little trodden and littered with down trees of various ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... morning Mr. Author was at the theatre. He found that other acts had preceded him. The stage was littered with trunks and scenery, trapeze bars, animal cages and the what-not of a vaudeville show. Each performer as he came in was greeted by the doorman with the gift of a brass check, on which there was stamped a number. This number told the performer ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... tried to suggest that, the other shook his head as if despairing of making plain his real message, and again beckoned Raf to come with him. They were out on the littered street, heading away from the central building where the rest of the Terran party must still be. And Raf, seeing the lengthening shadows, the pools of dusk gathering, and remembering that spear, could not resist glancing back over his shoulder now and then. He wondered ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... Normally our shell is too thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner man ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... response was immediate. The rush of travellers from the Long Walk nearly took him off his feet. From the house came streams of silent figures, families from the shrubberies, tourists from the laurels by the scullery windows, and throngs of breathless oddities from the kitchen-garden. The lawn was littered with discarded luggage; umbrellas dropped on flower-beds, where they instantly took root and grew; animals ran scuttling among them—birds, ponies, dogs, kittens, donkeys, and white mice in trailing swarms. There was not a minute to spare. One big Newfoundland brought several Persian kittens ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... second landing. Douglas Stone followed the old nurse into it, with the merchant at his heels. Here, at least, there was furniture and to spare. The floor was littered and the corners piled with Turkish cabinets, inlaid tables, coats of chain mail, strange pipes, and grotesque weapons. A single small lamp stood upon a bracket on the wall. Douglas Stone took it down, and picking his way among the lumber, ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gave notice that the weather was lifting, and I was glad to go on deck, where the planks soon began to show white patches as the sailors began to use their swabs; but the bustle and confusion was worse than ever. For the deck was littered with packages of cargo, which had arrived late, with Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand, painted upon them in black letters, and some of these appeared to be boxes of seeds, and others ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... something in it certainly, but we none of us could determine what, until Sam, who was the boldest of us all, thrust in his hand and brought forth—something which caused the bravest to start with horror, while poor Catherine sank down, white and trembling, upon the littered floor. It was a bone, to which adhered fragments of ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and from the pile of stuff that soon littered the ground, it was evident that the three lads had taken a fair advantage of their expenses being guaranteed, for they certainly had not stinted themselves along the "grub" line ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... mending and in patching pieces of things together. Even the squat little stool in the side of the chimney corner displayed a leg, the whiteness of which, compared with the other two, told of attention to small things. There was a peg for everything, and everything seemed to be on its peg. Nothing littered the well-scrubbed floor or defiled the well-brushed hearthstone, and it did not require a second thought on the part of the beholder to ascribe all this to the tidy little middle-aged woman, who, with an expression of deep anxiety on her good-looking countenance, ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... please. We are as merry as ever when the trap sets forth again, and say farewell noisily to all the good folk going farther. Then, as we are far enough from thoughts of sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with furs, littered with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by a wood-fire in a mediaeval chimney. And then we plod back through the darkness to the inn ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such a racket that this could not be heard more than a foot or so from the speaker. Lynch himself charged into the mass, swinging his billy and his free fist, and laying others out one after the other. Pretty soon the floor was littered with cops. Lynch was doing yeoman duty, but it was hard to tell what ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... revelation to him, just as it is to every one seeing it for the first time. The shops huddled together, their show-windows littered with articles of every description, the second-hand establishments, the pawnbrokers, the peddlers and street-stand merchants, who offered everything from shoelaces to collars, books and trick novelties, were all decidedly new ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... end, soothed the child and cleared away the breakfast-table. She left the newspaper, littered with curls, spread upon the hearthrug. At last her husband gathered it up and put it at the back of the fire. She went about her work with closed mouth and very quiet. Morel was subdued. He crept about wretchedly, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... religious—what has secured her but Cisalpine Gaul? The valley of the Po, all this vast plain, appears in history as the cockpit of Europe, the battlefield of the Celt, the Phoenician, the Latin, and the Teuton, of Catholic and Arian, strewn with victories, littered with defeats, the theatre of those great wars which have built up Europe and the modern world. If the Gauls had not been broken by the plain, they would perhaps have overwhelmed Italy and Rome; if Hannibal had found there enemies instead of friends, the Oriental would not ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... students, and human driftwood. As he climbed the badly lighted stairs, a little, gray-haired man, wearing spectacles, passed him, coming down. A "pardon" was mumbled, and the little man proceeded into the restaurant, picked a Figaro from the table littered with newspapers, ensconced himself in a comfortable chair, and ordered coffee. No one gave him more than a cursory glance. The quarter was indigent, but ordinarily respectable; and it was only when some noisy Americans invaded the place that ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... raged and tore at the logs which held him so effectively. He stripped the inside of the pen entirely free of bark, and littered the floor with a bushel of splinters; but all his tearing and biting, pushing and straining, prying and growling, ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... at him as he turned up the wick of an oil lamp that stood on a mantelpiece littered with a mess of small things, and he caught a sight of my face when there was more light, and as he shut the door on us he laughed—laughed as if he knew that he had me in a trap. And before he spoke again he went over to the cupboard and took out a ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... room a narrow slit of light shows where the Fourth's room is hooked ajar. I go across and peer in. He is on watch, of course, and there is no one there. But all round I see littered the belongings of George's successor. A quiet, likeable Glasgow laddie, as I know him yet. He has put up his bunk curtains, and as they sway I catch a glimpse of a portrait. And so? Who can blame me if I look searchingly into the eyes of the girl with ribbon in her hair and a silver ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... to the door of the second room of the cabin, listened there for a minute, heard no sound and took a tablet and pencil off another shelf littered with useless things. The note which he wrote painstakingly, lest she might think him lacking in education, he laid upon the table beside Lorraine's plate; then went out, closing the door behind him as quietly as a squeaking door can ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... wide-branching horns longer than their fore-legs. Their hair is long and as coarse as a polar seal's, and they look as if they knew no more of housing against snow, rain and wintry winds, or of a littered bed, than the buffaloes beyond the upper waters of the Missouri. One would be inclined to think they had lived from calf- hood on nothing but heather or gorse, and that the prickly fodder had penetrated through their hides and covered them with ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... large rat-holes, there came up copious ammoniacal smells, which our mucous membrane resented from the first; and well it had fared with us had this been all. We had never been so near horses at night, and had no idea they made such an incessant noise. One horse stabled and littered for the night were bad enough, but we had a whole stableful; and just as we were forgetting the fleas, and forgiving the mosquitos, and sleep led on by indigestion was heavy on our eyelids, a snort, loud as a lion's roar, made us start. Then there came a long succession of chump, chump, from the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... har-r-r-rouche from Kaluna brought out a man with a female horde behind him, all shuffling into clothes as we approached, and we stiffly dismounted from the wet saddles in which we had sat for ten hours, and stiffly hobbled up into the littered verandah, the water dripping from our clothes, and squeezing out of our boots at every step. Inside there was one room about 18 x 14 feet, which looked as if the people had just arrived and had thrown down their goods promiscuously. There were mats on the floor ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... drifted several miles to the north, thus proving itself to be a free-floating berg. The glacier-tongue on the port side took a sharp turn to the east-south-east, disappearing on the horizon. As there was no pack in sight and the water was merely littered with fragments of ice, it appeared most likely that the turn in the glacier-tongue was part of a great sweeping curve ultimately joining with the southward land. On our south-south-east course we soon lost sight of the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... Washita, and then down the river through the sites of the abandoned villages, that had been strung along almost continuously for about twelve miles in the timber skirting the stream. On every hand appeared ample evidence that the Indians had intended to spend the winter here, for the ground was littered with jerked meat, bales of buffalo robes, cooking utensils, and all sorts of plunder usually accumulated in a permanent Indian camp. There were, also, lying dead near the villages hundreds of ponies, that had been ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... the direction of our line. Near a junction of by-roads I heard some funny remarks passed by ration parties trying to find the way to their sections. To pick one's way in the dark over strange ground littered with debris is not an easy task. The exact language I heard would ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... sunshine. It was an ugly house, following as it did the fashion of the late seventies; but it was not undignified, with its big door flanked by bay-windows and its narrow porch bounded by a fat wooden balustrade and heavy columns. The porch and steps were weather-stained and faded, and littered now with ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... our going through this golden weather, Where leaves have littered every forest way, If there be lovers, they should be together: For this is golden ... but the end is grey. Beyond this shimmer where the bright leaves fall, Behind this haze of silver shot with gold, There is a greyness waiting for ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... A black ruin, still smoldering, lay where the elevators had been. That wonderful wheat yield of his had been destroyed. In the gray dawn it was hard to realize. He felt a lump in his throat. Several tracks were littered with the remains of burned freight-cars. When Kurt reached the street he saw men in front of the cottages. Some one hailed him, and then several shouted. They met him half-way. Jerry and Olsen ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... hovel wherein to lay his head. It seemed to me that crape and fetters would more fittingly have adorned those whitewashed walls than a sacred Ikon encrusted with jewels, and heavily gilt oil-paintings of their Imperial Majesties! A couple of tables littered with papers occupied the centre of the room, and at one of these sat the ispravnik, a wooden-faced peremptory person in dark green tunic and gold shoulder straps. A couple of clerks, also in uniform, were busily engaged at the other desk, sorting the mail ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... stumbled through the littered end-of-track yard to where the lighted windows of the Nadia marked the berth of the president's car. Out of the shadow of the car a man rose up and confronted him. It was Frisbie, and he ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... comfortless strip of a room was Dick's armoury, den, and refuge. It was furnished with extreme simplicity. At the further end two rusty leather arm-chairs flanked a cast-iron stove in the corner, and were balanced in the other and darker corner by a knee-hole writing-desk littered with seeds and bulbs and spurs and bits of fishing tackle, and equipped for its real purpose with a forbidding-looking pen and inkpot, and a torn piece of weather-beaten blotting-paper. At about a third of the way down from the ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... we straightway can tell the mind of the master, So, when we walk through a city, we judge of the persons who rule it. For where the towers and walls are falling to ruin; where offal Lies in heaps in the gutters, and alleys with offal are littered; Where from its place has started the stone, and no one resets it; Where the timbers are rotting away, and the house is awaiting Vainly its new supports,—that place we may know is ill governed. Since if not from above work order and cleanliness downward, Easily grows ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... about the Court as well as I could through the cloud of fog and breath that was heavy in it. I noticed the black vapour hanging like a murky curtain outside the great windows, and I noticed the stifled sound of wheels on the straw or tan that was littered in the street; also, the hum of the people gathered there, which a shrill whistle, or a louder song or hail than the rest, occasionally pierced. Soon afterwards the Judges, two in number, entered, and took their seats. The buzz in the Court was awfully ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... dark corner of the library, sitting motionless before a small writing-desk, I found the Duke. The table was littered all over with papers, a ledger or two and various documents. I had met Mr. Hulshaw, the agent to the estates, in the drive, so I judged that the two had had ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his throat. He did not hear the answering cry from the girl as she flung herself, with a quick little prayer for help, on her knees in the soft, white sand beside him. He felt no movement when she raised his head in her arm and with her bare hand brushed back his sand-littered hair, revealing where the bullet had struck him. He did not know when she ran back to ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... the ill he had unwittingly done us, and was led home by William at 1.30 A.M., swearing to withdraw his infernal machines, or beat them into ploughshares, the very next day. The very next night our mess, without any sort of preliminary warning, lost its balance, sat down with a crash, and lay littered about a quarter of an acre of ground. We all turned out and miserably surveyed the ruins. What had done it? We couldn't guess. The field guns had gone to bye-bye, the Heavies had gone elsewhere. Hans, the Hun, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... for a duel. In the darkness it seemed to him to be more happily adapted for a game of blindman's-buff. There was a half-filled hay-cart in the moat, and bundles of hay were scattered hither and thither on the ground and littered the place confusingly. Lagardere began to busy himself in clearing some of this hay out of the way, so as to afford an untroubled space for the coming combat. While he was thus engaged he heard for the first time a faint sound come from the direction of the ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... not to be questioned. There cannot be another town in the world that has no shabby exteriors; no rickety gates and fences, no neglected houses crumbling to ruin, no crazy and unsightly sheds, no weed-grown front-yards of the poor, no back-yards littered with tin cans and old boots and empty bottles, no rubbish in the gutters, no clutter on the sidewalks, no outer-borders fraying out into dirty lanes and tin-patched huts. No, in Hobart all the aspects are tidy, and all a comfort to the eye; the modestest cottage looks combed and brushed, and has ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was aroused, but in her sneering visage was that which brought the actor abruptly out of his spell. She had emerged from the shadows noiselessly, and was leaning forward, her strong hands gripping the edge of the table littered with its many properties. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... a feeling of awe as we entered the rotunda of the great building. Pieces of massive furniture of another day still stood where man had placed them centuries ago. They were littered with dust and broken stone and plaster, but, otherwise, so perfect was their preservation I could hardly believe that two centuries had rolled by since human eyes ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... were for the most part empty. Others showed only fragments of broken pottery. Some had been broken in through their side walls or were open above and littered with the debris of their roofs. Lennon surmised the existence of several sealed lower chambers, ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... threat. Above clung jagged sections, trembling with their own weight; the lower walls were blackened by powder and stained with blood; the floor was strewn with dead bodies, disfigured and distorted, lying exactly as they fell, while littered all about were weapons, dropped by stricken hands. Clearly enough it had been the sudden plunge of heavy timbers and the dislodgment of those upper logs, which accounted for this havoc of death. There were dead there pierced by bullets and brained by rifle stocks, but the ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... the check, as a man watches a play; with smiling interest. In the panic, the torches had been dropped or extinguished, and now between the house and the sullen crowd which hung back, yet grew moment by moment more dangerous, the daylight fell cold on the littered street and the cripple's huddled form prone in the gutter. A priest raised on the shoulders of the lean man in black began to harangue the mob, and the dull roar of assent, the brandished arms which greeted his appeal, had their effect on Tavannes' men. They looked ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... with only five inhabitants, Lavergne with but three. Lhern, once a flourishing place, was absolutely desert, the fields covered with briars and thorns, not one house tenanted, and in the church a she-wolf had littered her cubs. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... and the hills lay miles of rough ice and long veins of thin black slob that had formed during the night. For the foreground there was my poor, gruesome pan, bobbing up and down on the edge of the open sea, stained with blood, and littered with carcasses and debris. It was smaller than last night, and I noticed also that the new ice from the water melted under the dogs' bodies had been formed at the expense of its thickness. Five dogs, myself in colored football ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... established at his evening meal, and Mrs. Macdonald was satisfied that she could provide nothing more for his comfort, she went upstairs to tidy his room, shaking her head a little over the various things that littered ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... She had never before been in the King's study, and she had fancied it very different from what it really was when she had tried to picture to herself the coming interview. She had supposed the room small, sombre, littered with books and papers, and cold; it was, on the contrary, so spacious as to be almost a hall, it was brightly illuminated and warmed by the big wood fire. Magnificent tapestries covered the walls with glowing colour, and upon one of these, ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... into an expression of anxious and rather frightened solicitude, but he waved his arm for the prisoner to precede him, and Ste. Marie began to limp down across the littered and unkempt sweep of turf. Behind him, at the distance of a dozen paces, he heard the shambling footfalls of his guard, but he had expected that, and it could not rob him of his swelling and exultant joy at treading once more upon green grass and looking ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... and down came boxes, and very soon the small counter was littered with piles of raiment variously gaudy which Spike viewed and disparaged with such knowing judgment that the salesman's respect proportionately grew, and Mr. Ravenslee, lounging in the background, was forgotten quite, the while they chaffered after ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... years these unhappy people had lived under the heel of the German, and the rotting carcases of six-months' dead horses which littered the street showed what life they had lived during that time. They had been taught to hate the English, whom they only knew as night-bombers, and yet, when the Boche was being hunted out and offered to take all civilians back to safety in motor lorries, 300 men, women and children, headed by ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... sow au naturel; they were cut as soon as the animal had littered; wild boar's head (this was the main dish); sow's teats in a ragout; the breasts and necks of roast ducks; fricasseed wild duck; roast hare, a great delicacy; roasted Phrygian chickens; ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... once he got a shock— The Go-cart speeding down, Collided with his fancy stock And littered up the town! ...
— The Slant Book • Peter Newell
... a road perfectly straight and bounded by factories, mean houses and distempered walls: a road littered with many scraps of paper, bones, dirt, and refuse) I went on for several hundred yards, having the old wall of Rome before me all this time, till I came right under it at last; and with the hesitation that befits all great actions I entered, putting the right foot first lest I should bring further ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Mr. Hatchard could recover, and the latter at once verified the information in part by walking round to his old house. Bits of straw and paper littered the front garden, the blinds were down, and a bill was pasted on the front parlor window. Aghast at such determination, he walked back to his lodgings in ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... stripped hastily, wrung out his wet clothes upon the littered floors and climbed into his bunk, threatening to tear down a whole terrace of the crazy structures as ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... celebrated a few days after this visit, and not long before the time fixed for the Bishop and his large band of emigrants to sail. Under these circumstances the ceremony was a quiet one. The old rectory was in disorder, littered with packing cases, and upset from cellar to garret. Even when the wedding was over both Phebe and Hilda were too busy for sentimental indulgence. The few remaining days were flying swiftly past them all, and keeping them in constant fear that ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... not know how far Sherlock Holmes took any sleep that night, but when I came down to breakfast I found him pale and harassed, his bright eyes the brighter for the dark shadows round them. The carpet round his chair was littered with cigarette-ends and with the early editions of the morning papers. An open telegram ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there. He found several books scattered about, but they were all old; and it was hard to tell where the overseer hung his clothes, for the back of the solitary chair of which the cabin could boast was liberally supplied with them. His trunk was open and the contents were littered about, and on the bare table, on which the overseer had left some signs of his breakfast which were still untouched, were articles that ought long ago to have been in the wash. A glance about the cabin showed Tom that there ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... into Claire's boudoir, which was still littered with last evening's apparel. She sat in a dressing-gown with resplendent red roses on it, and brushed the hair out of her eyes, and apologized for not being ready for ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... morning after our arrival, when I awoke from sleep, how sad I felt! I could see that our windows looked out upon a drab space of wall, and that the street below was littered with filth. Passers-by were few, and as they walked they kept muffling themselves up against ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to some foolery. Then I saw littered about his feet the shattered remains of the best of our electrometers. "What's up, man?" said I. "You've smashed ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... was shown into the smoky, little den. It was a scene of confusion, such as she had never beheld before. The table was heaped high with papers: books and maps strewed every chair: even the floor was littered with bulky tomes and piles of manuscript. At a knee-hole table Caspar Brooke was sitting, writing hard, as if for dear life, his loose hair falling heavily over his big forehead, his left hand grasping his thick brown beard. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... case with most of them, this one was covered with blocks of stone of all sizes, some of them weighing several tons. It was evident that the walls, which were only about thirty feet in height, had at one time been much higher, but that in the course of ages they had broken down and thus littered the little bowl-shaped depression with ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... the inn, where they found Mackenzie busy with a heap of letters and newspapers that had been sent across to him from Stornoway. The whole of the breakfast-table was littered with wrappers and big blue envelopes: where was Sheila, who usually waited on her father at such times to keep his affairs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... certainly were enormous—and discovered that the room in which the Food of the Gods was mixed with meal and bran was in a quite disgraceful order. The Skinners were the sort of people who find a use for cracked saucers and old cans and pickle jars and mustard boxes, and the place was littered with these. In one corner a great pile of apples that Skinner had saved was decaying, and from a nail in the sloping part of the ceiling hung several rabbit skins, upon which he proposed to test his gift as a furrier. ("There ithn't mutth about ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... and littered papers, and nerve-racking bustle seem indispensable to the sending of a telegram; but when the bush-folk "shake hands" with Outside all is sunshine and restfulness, soft beauty and leisurely peace. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... his work in his little study, a sanctum littered with innumerable manuscripts. He, like most authors of the day, dictates to a secretary, who types what he says. It is, I think, in many ways a pity that so many authors type their manuscripts; for not only are they machine-made, they have not the interest that they should have ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Ministers, the treachery of mankind, the insult to womanhood, the setback to civilization, the ruin of her life's work, the feelings of her father's daughter—all these topics were discussed in turn, and the office was littered with newspaper cuttings branded with the blue, if ambiguous, marks of her displeasure. She confessed herself at fault in ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... accidentally killed in a game, a quarrel ensued, and a general dispersion of mankind took place. One Indian fixed his residence on the borders of the lake, taking with him a dog big with young. The pups in due time were littered, and the Indian, when he went out to fish, carefully tied them up to prevent their straying. Several times, as he approached his tent, he heard a noise of children talking and playing; but on entering it, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... copper; but Marble wisely determined that it was inexpedient to put the vessel deeper than good ballast-trim, lest it should hurt her sailing. We had got her fairly to her bearings, and this was believed to be as low as was expedient. It is true, a great deal remained to be stowed; the deck being littered, and the hold, the ground-tier excepted, in great confusion. But our bread, water, beef, pork, and other eatables, were all there, and in abundance; and, though not to be had for the asking, they were still to be had. ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... least. Inspect what delights you in Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where did he get this? and think there was something divine ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... mere indication of red locks and a tall, thin form, stood against a pillar of the tokonoma at just the angle where the soft light of the butsu-dan shed a pale glow across it. Brushes, paints, and various small saucers littered the floor. Tatsu had stopped his work abruptly, overcome by the very power of ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... crimson wall-paper and threw into prominence the posters tacked upon it. It was a cozy room with its deep rattan chairs and pillow-strewn couch. Snow-shoes, fencing foils, boxing-gloves, and tennis racquets littered the corners, and on every side a general ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett |
