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Roofless

adjective
1.
Not having a roof.
2.
Physically or spiritually homeless or deprived of security.  Synonyms: dispossessed, homeless.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Roofless" Quotes from Famous Books



... drawing-rooms to twice their former size, when half the expense, with a few trees from a certain outlying oak-plantation of their own, would have given them a room fit for a regal assembly. For, constituting a portion of the same front in which they lived, lay roofless, open to every wind that blew, its paved floor now and then in winter covered with snow—an ancient hall, whose massy south wall was pierced by three lovely windows, narrow and lofty, with simple, gracious tracery in their pointed heads. This hall connected the ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... fragments of marble sculpture taken from the tomb incorporated into the plain brick walls. And on the other side of the road, in a beautiful meadow, covered with soft green grass, are the ruins of a roofless Gothic chapel, showing little more than a few bare walls and gables built of dark lava stones, with traces of pointed windows in them, and the spring of the groined arches of the roof. Like the fortress, the chapel has few or no architectural features ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... pavement, As we tread its roofless halls, How alluring is the figure Which this castle still recalls! For 'tis Queen Theodelinda Whom its ruined arches frame, And the passing breeze seems laden With the ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... still.... Till the Russian turned to the right and took a branching tunnel. Here, lining the curve of the stone wall were twenty little cubicles of light wood, raised a few inches from the moist floor, and roofless except for the arch of the tunnel that ran equally above them all. These were the rooms assigned to the officers de passage, officers whom duty kept for a night in Verdun. Each cubicle held a bed, a tin basin on a tripod, a minute square of looking-glass, a chair ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold

... in progress, Nigel with Black Simon and four other men-at-arms from Bordeaux, was hastening northward to join the army. As far as Bergerac they were in a friendly land, but thence onward they rode over a blackened landscape with many a roofless house, its two bare gable-ends sticking upward—a "Knolles' miter" as it was afterward called when Sir Robert worked his stern will upon the country. For three days they rode northward, seeing many small parties of French in all directions, but too eager to reach ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... here after all," Harney laughed. He fastened the horse under a half-roofless shed, and wrapping Charity in his coat ran with her to the house. The boy had not reappeared, and as there was no response to their knocks Harney turned the door-handle and ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... to them," said the Angel, snatching me downwards in the veil through the noxious vapours rising from the city. We alighted in the Street of Pride, on the top of a great, roofless mansion with its eyes picked out by the dogs and crows, and its owners gone to England or France, there to seek what might be gotten with far less trouble at home; thus in place of the good old ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... greeting, and announced that the men would be allowed to break off for half an hour or so to go over the ruins and gardens if they wished. Everybody availed himself of the opportunity. In a few minutes a throng of officers and men who had scrambled over the debris filled the roofless rooms and packed the stairway where Gordon was struck down. I was surprised to find that even the youngest, most callow soldiers knew their Khartoum and the story of Gordon's fight and death. So deep and ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... wet hand, and dogg'd by Death; Death, as she turns her neck the kiss to seek, Breaks off the dreadful kiss with angry shriek. Snatch'd from her shoulder with despairing moan, She clasps them at that dim-seen roofless stone.— "Now ruthless Tempest launch thy deadliest dart! Fall fires—but let us perish heart ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight

... Bildad's shack and burned it to the ground; and Bildad, with his roofless pack, sent up a doleful sound. And I, who lived the next door west, hard by the county jail, went over there and beat my breast, and helped poor Bildad wail. Around the ruined home I stepped, and viewed the shaking walls, and ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason

... the misery they might have to endure if they adhered to him; the continual danger of their falling into the hands of Edward, and even could they elude this, how was it possible their delicate frames, accustomed as they were to luxury and repose, could sustain the rude fare, the roofless homes, the continued wandering amid the crags and floods and deserts of the mountains. He spoke eloquently and feelingly, and there was a brief silence when he concluded. Margaret had thrown her arms round her husband, and buried her face on his bosom; her child clung to her father's knee, ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar

... the City Disinterred; And hear the autumnal leaves like light footfalls Of spirits passing through the streets; and hear The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls." ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... rebellion, however, broke out, the Inca fled, the Prince saved the city, dethroned his father, and sent him into the country. He then adopted, from the apparition, the throne-name Uiracocha, grew a beard, and dressed like the apparition, to whom he erected a temple, roofless, and unique in construction. Therein he had an image of the god, for which he himself gave frequent sittings. When the Spaniards arrived, bearded men, the Indians called them Uiracochas (as all the Spanish ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... off, cast off; doff; peel, pare, decorticate, excoriate, skin, scalp, flay; expose, lay open; exfoliate, molt, mew; cast the skin. Adj. divested &c. v.; bare, naked, nude; undressed, undraped; denuded; exposed; in dishabille; bald, threadbare, ragged, callow, roofless. in a state of nature, in nature's garb, in the buff, in native buff, in birthday suit; in puris naturalibus[Lat]; with nothing on, stark naked, stark raving naked [joc.]; bald as a coot, bare as the back of one's hand; out at elbows; barefoot; bareback, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... bare, shattered, and roofless with the blasts of six score winters—were hung with portraits of ladies and statesmen of the day; conspicuous among which was a fine picture from the pencil of Vanloo of the handsome, voluptuous ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... entrance into the great courtyard, in the middle of which stood the roofless hall or temple, surrounded by columns and porticoes, inside and out. In some of the inner porticoes were the bookcases for the library which made Alexandria the very temple of science and learning, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... this hollow stood a peculiar, roofless, stone building, whose two round little windows, like the eternally watchful eyes of some underground worm, shone with a red glare which dazzled the eyes, while the slate-covered chimney belched forth a thick smoke filled with ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai

... interspersed with plots of beans, peanuts, melons and cucumbers, and mud and brick-walled villages whose squalid wretchedness was hidden by the abundant foliage of the trees, which are the only beauty of Chinese cities. At almost every railway station, roofless buildings, crumbling walls and broken water tanks bore painful witness to the rage of the Boxers. At Liang-hsiang-hsien the first foreign property was destroyed, and all along the line outrages were perpetrated on the inoffensive native Christians. ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... is a suite of apartments, ruinous and roofless in his day, but which Colonel Wildman has restored, and furnished most appropriately with old tapestry and antique tables and chairs. These rooms wear a ghostly aspect, and we were not surprised to learn that one, at least, had the reputation of being haunted. The great drawing-room, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... As we reached the road leading to Barcy, there was a rift in the clouds, and a long golden ray shot through an enormous breach in the church tower, flickered a moment upon a group of roofless houses, and was ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard

... the ship gave them raiment to put on. Then all together they went to the temple of Ares to offer sacrifice of sheep; and in haste they stood round the altar, which was outside the roofless temple, an altar built of pebbles; within a black stone stood fixed, a sacred thing, to which of yore the Amazons all used to pray. Nor was it lawful for them, when they came from the opposite coast, to burn on this altar offerings of sheep and oxen, but they used to slay horses ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... peculiar to itself, great plains of maguey, with its huts with uncultivated patches, that have once been gardens, still filled with flowers and choked with weeds; the huts themselves, generally of mud, yet not unfrequently of solid stone, roofless and windowless, with traces of having been fine buildings in former days; the complete solitude, unbroken except by the passing Indian, certainly as much in a state of savage nature as the lower class of Mexicans were when Cortes ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... this is what I wonder: You are thick as poisonous plants, thick the people under; Yet roofless, and homeless, and shelterless they roam, The driftwood of the town who have ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... Buckeye Hollow had never yielded entirely to improvements and the incursions of mining enterprise, and many of them had even survived the disused ditches, the scarred flats, the discarded levels, ruined flumes, and roofless cabins of the earlier occupation, so that when Jackson Wells entered the wide, straggling street of Buckeye, that summer morning was filled with the radiance of its blossoms and fragrant with their incense. His ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte

... at the need of changing cars,—gathered up their luggage and filed out onto the bare, roofless station platform. There, after a look down the long converging rails in vain hope of sighting the train they were to take, they fell to glancing about the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... consciousness sharpened not only by religious persecution, but by the violation of its territorial, juristic, and legislative rights. The authority of which its invaders boasted rests solely on an alleged Papal Bull. The symbols of attempted conquest are roofless castles, ruined ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... His breathing could be heard also. His mind was picturing that same coronation—the shattered, roofless cathedral, the ruins of the ancient and magnificent high altar, the multitude of kneeling, famine-scourged people, the battle-worn, wounded and bandaged soldiery! And the King! And his father! Where had his father ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the waste land was spread, mile upon mile: and I groaned aloud. For just below I noted a clump of roofless cabins, and beyond, upon the moors, the dotted walls of sheep-cotes, ruined also: but in all the sad-color'd leagues no living man, nor the sign of one. It was done with us. I reined up the mare—and then, in the same motion, wheeled ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch

... Rushbrooke's buying it in the eighteenth century, since when a legend had arisen that it was built and endowed by some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There was record neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of what manner of folk worshipped there, nor of those who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward as they ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... sheltering the walls from rain or eroding influences. From the dry character of the earth on the floors I suspect that for years not a drop of water has penetrated the inclosures, although they are now roofless. ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes

... fair Wyoming! Although the wild-flower on thy ruined wall And roofless homes a sad remembrance bring Of what thy ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... been sullen; but, towards his decline, The sun sent a stream of wild light up the pine. Darkly denting the red light reveal'd at its back, The old ruin'd abbey rose roofless and black. The spring that yet oozed through the moss-paven floor Had suggested, no doubt, to the monks there, of yore, The sight of that refuge where back to its God How many a heart, now at rest 'neath the sod, Had borne from the world all the same ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith

... Sunday, the wind was lulled and the sky was clear, the climate was as mild as in spring on the mainland. As soon as the aspect of the sunrise showed the experienced that the day would be fair, busy hands moved into the old roofless chapel the pulpit and benches which the pastor had brought with him—the pulpit being a mere desk of unpainted wood, and the benches of the roughest sort. For these the interior space of the old building had been cleared during the week; the floor was trodden hard and even; the walls were so far ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau

... brass handles of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the reproachful gleam of indoor articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a roofless exposure for which they were never made. Round about were deparked hills and slopes—now cut up into little paddocks—and the green foundations that showed where the d'Urberville mansion once had stood; also an outlying stretch ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... or to write, at night. But you control this by a switch, conveniently placed, so that the darkness which aids reflection is also at your command. Then there is the window, opening right down to the floor, from which, if it please you, you may study the activity of the roofless ant-hill beneath, the restless febrility of ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... one can say has been done by the will of your Royal Highnesses) that those wretched creatures have been partly killed by your forces, partly expelled by violence and driven from their home and country, so that they are now wandering, with their wives and children, houseless, roofless, poor, and destitute of all resource, through rugged and inhospitable spots and over snow-covered mountains. And, through the days of this transaction, if only the things are true that fame at present reports everywhere (would that Fame were proved a liar!), ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... Now it was stained with blood. That was all that was left—a little baby's shoe, blood spotted. He pressed it to his heart and groaned aloud. A spasm of mortal anguish shook his frame. He lifted his clenched hand toward the sky overshadowing the roofless walls. ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... emulating Wolfe's glory. But Wolfe had snatched victory out of the shadow of coming winter; and, almost before Murray's army could cut wood for fuel, the cold was upon them. For two months Quebec had been pounded with shot and shell. Her churches and hospitals stood roofless; hundreds of houses had been fired, vaults and storehouses pillaged, doors and windows riddled everywhere. There was no digging entrenchments in the frozen earth. Walls six feet thick had been breached by artillery; and the ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... former weeping and imploring. He would go with neither, and at last they vanished both. He sat solitary on the side of a bare hill, and below him was all that remained of Castle Warlock. He had been dead so many years, that it was now but a half—shapeless ruin of roofless walls, haggard and hollow and gray and desolate. It stood on its ridge like a solitary tooth in the jaw of some skeleton beast. But where was his father? How was it he had not yet found him, if he had been so long dead? He must rise and seek him! He must be somewhere in the universe! ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... gouged out of the solid earth, that faintly resembled houses. But you do nothing the kind. Fully one-half of the buried city, perhaps, is completely exhumed and thrown open freely to the light of day; and there stand the long rows of solidly-built brick houses (roofless) just as they stood eighteen hundred years ago, hot with the flaming sun; and there lie their floors, clean-swept, and not a bright fragment tarnished or waiting of the labored mosaics that pictured them with the beasts, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... might be, was apparently without doors or windows but that it was at least partially roofless was evidenced by the sight of the waving branches of a tree which spread above the top of the wall near him. Finding no other method of access, the ape-man uncoiled his rope and throwing it over the branch of the tree where it projected beyond the wall, was soon climbing ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... lodge, gentlemen?" inquired our Major, addressing us both; and when he learned that we were roofless he insisted that we remain under his roof, nor would he hear of any excuses touching the present unsuitability of ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... and let us out from his pleasant garden. We immediately hastened to Kirk Alloway, which is within two or three minutes' walk of the monument. A few steps ascend from the road-side, through a gate, into the old graveyard, in the midst of which stands the kirk. The edifice is wholly roofless, but the side-walls and gable-ends are quite entire, though portions of them are evidently modern restorations. Never was there a plainer little church, or one with smaller architectural pretension; no New England meeting-house has more simplicity in its very self, though poetry and fun have clambered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... village we found, about the old Spanish workings, ancient, roofless, stone buildings with loop-holed turrets for bandits and niches for saints. These structures, as well as the waste dumped by the Spaniards, were being "repicked for values," and broken up and sent through the stamp-mill, the never-ending rumble of which sounded ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... another door, whence they descended, a few steps, into a chapel, which, as Barnardine held up the torch to light her, Emily observed to be in ruins, and she immediately recollected a former conversation of Annette, concerning it, with very unpleasant emotions. She looked fearfully on the almost roofless walls, green with damps, and on the gothic points of the windows, where the ivy and the briony had long supplied the place of glass, and ran mantling among the broken capitals of some columns, that had once supported the roof. Barnardine stumbled over the broken pavement, and his voice, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... generally spiral, leading up and down into deep dark mystery. Certainly so far the ruins did not look as though they would protect any one from wind and rain, and we passed on, through walls that seemed impregnable, to ruined chambers, utterly roofless, in and out of which pigeons were flying happily ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... any man whatsoever, and they implored him to speak for them and to tell her the greatness of their love, and how long they had waited through the cold of winter and the heat of summer, sleepless and roofless through all weathers, without food and without rest, in the ardent hope of winning her, and they were willing to consider this long vigil as pleasure if she would but give them one chance of ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki

... loves, You wake no sounds of laughter here, Nor mirth in all our silent groves; On one broad waste, by hill or flood, Of ravaged lands your music falls, And where the happy homestead stood The stars look down on roofless halls. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... find shelter under part of the building yet standing. I asked him if he would guide me to the mission house. My voice roused him, and he said he would gladly do so. He sprang to his feet, and led me on by the hand. "Here it is!" he exclaimed; but, alas, it was roofless and deserted. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston

... passed, however, the darkness that covered the heavens increased so rapidly that it was with difficulty he could guide his steps. The flower-wreathed columns seemed to reel and tremble; and with every instant he heard the ashes fall cranchingly into the roofless peristyle. He ascended to the upper rooms—breathless he paced along, shouting out aloud the name of Ione; and at length he heard, at the end of a gallery, a voice—her voice, in wondering reply! To rush forward—to shatter the door—to seize Ione in ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... Fell Lane when I was young, A ruined mansion stood, With roofless cots filled up with sticks Brought from the Holme House Wood. And now I cross the Intake Brig Where I used to sport and play, And bathe, and plunge, and water splash Full many ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... crowned Queen of England that Richard was born. At the time of his birth, the queen was residing at a palace in Oxford. The palace has gone pretty much to ruin. The building is now used in part as a work-house. The room where Richard was born is roofless and uninhabitable. Nothing even of the interior of it remains except some traces of the fire-place. The room, however, though thus completely gone to ruin, is a place of considerable interest to the English people, who visit it in great numbers ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... issued out in a stream of flame, which expanded and whirled round them, and for a moment they were both enveloped in a faint blaze; at the same instant a sudden gust whisked off the stranger's hat, and the sexton beheld that his skull was roofless. For an instant he beheld the gaping aperture, black and shattered, and then he fell senseless into his own doorway, which his affrighted ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... Presently, however, as I stumbled along, I noticed something looming darkly through the matted forest on my left, that suggested walls. Looking closer, I saw that it was the ruin of a small stone cottage, roofless, and indescribably swallowed up in the pitiless scrub. And then, near by, I descried another such ruin, and still another—all, as it were, sunk in the terrible gloom of the vegetation, as sometimes, at low ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... back from the position they had held the night before, and established themselves in a few houses, half roofless and shattered by shell, between Champigny and the river. Most of the houses in the long straggling street of Champigny bore marks of the conflict that had raged there before the Saxons had been driven out. Fortunately large stores of straw were found in the village, ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... of stone, and so broken away in places that it was possible to gaze down to the basement of the tower, the lower floors being gone; and here, busy at work, in the half roofless place, with the furniture consisting of a short plank laid across a couple of stones beneath the window, and an old three-legged stool in the crumbling, arched hollow of what had been the fireplace, sat a wild-looking old man. The top of his head was shiny and bald, but from all round ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn

... will report that my wing is entirely intact, though a little smoky, and the main corridor is pretty nearly all right up to the center staircase; after that everything is charred and drenched. The east wing is a blackened, roofless shell. Your hated Ward F, dear Judy, is gone forever. I wish that you could obliterate it from your mind as absolutely as it is obliterated from the earth. Both in substance and in spirit the old John ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... in Asia Minor, on the seashore, that I came upon a cottage long deserted, its door hanging by one hinge, and all the glass gone from the windows. In the empty rooms numerous swallows were rearing twittering broods in roofless nests. No doubt the birds realised that they had nothing to fear from rain, and were reluctant to waste time and labour in covering ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo

... chuckled, thinking myself secure from the shells that burst overhead. It was only when the bees bounced on the floor that I looked up to discover that the house was roofless. ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... in his brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the shadows—white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his face as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the roofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses, the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains. He had willfully stayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching the constellations ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather

... man's ear the mingled voice That comes from her old dungeons yawning now To the black air, her amphitheatres, Where the dew gathers on the mouldering stones, And fanes of banished gods, and open tombs, And roofless palaces, and streets and hearths Of cities dug from their volcanic graves? I hear a sound of many languages, The utterance of nations now no more, Driven out by mightier, as the days of heaven Chase one another from the sky. The blood Of freemen shed by freemen, till strange ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant

... performances of Shakespeare during recent seasons, has reminded us of some of the main physical features of the Elizabethan theatre; and the others are so generally known that we need review them only briefly. A typical Elizabethan play-house, like the Globe or the Blackfriars, stood roofless in the air. The stage was a projecting platform surrounded on three sides by the groundlings who had paid threepence for the privilege of standing in the pit; and around this pit, or yard, were built boxes for the city madams and the gentlemen of means. Often the side edges of the stage itself ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... the Latins say; or, as Tommy would translate, "If you want to see a bit of orl-right, look at what the Navy has done to this 'ere blinking town." The Governor's palace, where is it? The bats now roost in the roofless timbers that the 12-inch shells have left. What of the three big German liners that fled to this harbour for protection and painted their upper works green to harmonise with the tops of the palm trees and thus to escape observation of our ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... the rod to turn in his fingers, although he pretended to hold it very tight."Dere is water here about, sure enough," and, turning this way and that way, as the agitation of the divining-rod seemed to increase or diminish, he at length advanced into the midst of a vacant and roofless enclosure which had been the kitchen of the priory, when the rod twisted itself so as to point almost straight downwards. "Here is de place," said the adept, "and if you do not find de water here, I will give you all leave to call me ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... dead that men forget— An old blind beggar-man, distained and gray, With ancient tales to tell, Mumbling of this and that upon his way, Strange song and muttered spell— Neither to East or West, or South or North, His habitation lies, This roofless vagabond who wanders forth Aye under alien skies— A gypsy of the air, he comes and goes Between the tall trees and the shadowed grass, And what he tells only the twilight knows ... The tall trees and the twilight ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton

... crevice where tree-fern trunks grew close together and closed in three sides of a sort of roofless cave. He seated himself grimly at the opening to wait for daybreak. He was not easy in his mind. There had been two Tubes to the Fifth-Dimension world. One had been made by Jacaro for his gunmen. That was now held by the men of the Golden City, as was proved ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... by yon roofless tower, Where the wa'flow'r scents the dery air, Where the howlet mourns in her ivy bower, And tells the midnight moon ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... enforced seclusion. "We'll have a good camp for a week, and then the snow'll melt, and we'll all go back together." The cheerful gayety of the young man, and Mr. Oakhurst's calm infected the others. The Innocent, with the aid of pine-boughs, extemporized a thatch for the roofless cabin, and the Duchess directed Piney in the rearrangement of the interior with a taste and tact that opened the blue eyes of that provincial maiden to their fullest extent. "I reckon now you're used to fine ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... Daiket 'Arar, was the shell of an old building, now roofless. Near this, and by the wayside, as we advanced, were considerable remains of foundations of houses. There must have been a town of note at that place, it is the 'Aroer of 1 Sam. xxx. 28. Our course now suddenly trended towards the east, ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... two young ladies of Berhoea, who had given up all the pleasures of life to settle themselves in a roofless cottage outside the town. They had stopped up the door with stones and clay, and allowed it only to be opened at the feast of Pentecost. Around them lived certain female slaves who had voluntarily chosen the same life, and who were taught and exhorted through ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... Sinclair passed, and the sound made his fleet movements fleeter still. Street after street was traversed without a voice or tread, save his own, breaking the stillness of the night. At length he reached the point of the day's devastations. Dismantled and roofless houses, from which a dull glimmer showed that the fire was not yet wholly extinguished, were seen rising here and there, while in intervening spaces a charred and smouldering heap alone gave evidence that man had had his dwelling there. A rapid glance as he passed without a pause over ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh

... the grave I saw a line of old women who had recited in the keen sitting in the shadow of a wall beside the roofless shell of the church. They were still sobbing and shaken with grief, yet they were beginning to talk again of the daily trifles that veil from them ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge

... soul, and lineage high: Alas! though both bestowed in vain, 870 Which Grief could change, and Guilt could stain, It was no vulgar tenement To which such lofty gifts were lent, And still with little less than dread On such the sight is riveted. The roofless cot, decayed and rent, Will scarce delay the passer-by; The tower by war or tempest bent, While yet may frown one battlement, Demands and daunts the stranger's eye; 880 Each ivied arch, and pillar lone, Pleads ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... through with ease. Behind it is the soaring Swyre Head, 670 feet high, and the third of that name in Dorset. Between this point and Nelson Fort on the west of Lulworth Cove is Stair Hole, a gloomy roofless cavern into which the tide pours with a terrifying sound, especially when a strong sou-wester ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... houses north of Estaires, over the ruins of which Crosthwaite, an officer of mature service, who had just joined the Battalion, was appointed Town Major. His task was not entirely enviable. Houses, roofless or otherwise, had to be subdivided into safe, doubtful, or certain to 'go up.' I cannot help regarding this Flanders retreat as a subject supremely dull. The constant suspicion of mines and booby-traps rendered doubly ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose

... London. Whether on the Kent or the Essex side, the cast of the scenery corresponds with equal closeness to Dickens's description. Slimy stakes stick out of the mud, and slimy stones stick out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide-marks stick out of the mud, and old roofless buildings slip into the mud, and all about is stagnation and mud! The desolate flat marshes look still more weird by reason of the tall pollards that lean over them like spectres. Far away are the rising grounds, between which and the marshes there appears no sign of life except here ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... hero of the following ballad, is a noted personage, both in history and tradition. He was, it would seem from the ballad, a brother of the laird of Mangertoun, chief of the name. His place of residence (now a roofless tower) was at the Hollows, a few miles from Langholm, where its ruins still serve to adorn a scene, which, in natural beauty, has few equals in Scotland. At the head of a desperate band of freebooters, this Armstrong is said ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott

... of for farm-houses. Fine ash trees bend over the ruined arches, ivy climbs the clustered columns, and the lancet windows with their delicate tracery are much admired. The remains consist of the church, abbot's lodgings, refectory, and dormitory. The church was cruciform, and is now nearly roofless, though the east and west ends and the southern transept are tolerably perfect, so that much of the abbey remains. It was occupied by the Cistercians, and was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The ancient cross, of which the remains are ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... platform, with a small coffee-house and some dwellings, reminded me of a prairie station in our Western country. But the eye was at once attracted by something we should not find in the Western World—to wit, some ruins, large, roofless, but with solid walls, two domes, some pinnacles and a graceful minaret. These are the ruins of the mosque of Sultan Selim, called by the Greeks the church of St. John, though it was certainly not the church under which the saint was buried. There are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... partly of her sex, partly of her passive strain is the founding, through the instrumentality of the first savage Mother, of a new and beautiful social state—Domesticity. . . . One day there appears in this roofless room that which is to teach the teachers of the ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby

... army, there runs a very old and narrow road. It connects the Limerick road to Tipperary with the old road from Limerick to Dublin, and runs by bog and pasture, hill and hollow, straw-thatched village, and roofless castle, ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu

... sensualities and evils, and pour out libations to vain and false gods. Brethren! Render unto Him that which is His; and see even upon the walls scrabbled all over with the deformities that we have painted there, lingering traces, like those of some dropping fresco in a roofless Italian church, which suggest the serene and perfect beauty of the image of the One whose likeness was originally traced there, and for whose ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... vast and often decaying timbers, hewn out of the very forests they loved, cried out with all the old associations they bore and held them. The miniature citadel contained within the trenchant stockade, the old pelt stores, roofless and worm-eaten, the armory which still suggested the clank of half-armored men, who lived only for the joy of defying death. The factor's house, whence, in the days gone by, the orders for battle had been issued, and the sentence of life and death had been handed ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... among the northern hills of Scotland, elements of more ancient architectural interest are equally absent. The solitary peel- house is hardly discernible by the windings of the stream; the roofless aisle of the priory is lost among the enclosures of the village; and the capital city of the Highlands, Inverness, placed where it might ennoble one of the sweetest landscapes, and by the shore of one of the loveliest estuaries in the world;—placed between the ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... and the fountains was split, and stained with red and green, and the very cobblestones in the courtyard where the king's elephants used to live had been thrust up and apart by grasses and young trees. From the palace you could see the rows and rows of roofless houses that made up the city looking like empty honeycombs filled with blackness; the shapeless block of stone that had been an idol in the square where four roads met; the pits and dimples at street corners where the public wells once stood, ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... the art, and those birds are so unsophisticated, I shall be sure to get some. You see if I don't. But first I must build my house. The open sky is all very well, but it might come on to rain, and then the roofless caravanserai would not be very comfortable. It is a good thing we brought ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... Moncontour; and although he knew that it had been burnt by the Royalists, shortly afterwards, it gave him a shock to see, as he rode through the gate, how great a change had taken place. The central portion had been repaired, but the walls were still blackened with smoke. The wings stood empty and roofless, and the ample stables, storehouses, and buildings for the retainers ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty

... cheek! that late was flush'd Because a people would not be his slaves, And now a, worm may mock him— This strong frame Promis'd long life, 'tis constituted well; 'Twas but a lying promise, like the rest! Dark is the world, of tyranny within Yon roofless house, where Silence holds her court Before Decay's last revel. Yet, O king, I would insult thee not. But if thy spirit Circle unseen around the guilty clay, Till it be buried, and those solemn words Give "dust to dust," leaving the soul no home On this vain ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards

... ground, grown with coarse grass and bramble, and as we peeped over this bank the ruined house stood before us—so near as to startle me by its proximity. It must have been a large house originally—if, indeed, it was ever completed. Now it stood roofless, dismantled, and windowless, and in many places whole rods of brickwork had fallen and now littered the ground about. The black gap of the front door stood plain to see, with a short flight of broken steps before it, and by the side of these a thick timber shore supported the front ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison

... there were two or three small cotton and woollen mills on the river. The oldest of them, on the banks of the Charles, is as picturesque a ruin as time, fire and neglect are able to achieve in a hundred years. The walls of heavy blocks of stone, roofless and broken in outline, are still standing. Great trees have grown up within them and now overtop them. Here and there a poplar leans forth from a broken window casement, leaving scant room for the ghosts of ancient spinners and weavers to peer into the outer world at midnight. ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... expect to find ruins, if anywhere. Coronado, as we have seen, invaded the country about three hundred and fifty years ago. At the time of his visit this was then a ruin, for his historian describes one ruin as "a single ruined and roofless house... the work of civilized people who had come from afar." This gives us a point as to the antiquity of some of the ruins in the Gila Valley. As we shall see, there is every reason to suppose that this section was at one ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... passed since Osman Digna had captured and destroyed it, but during these three years its roofless ruins had sustained another siege, and one no less persistent. The quick-growing trees had so closely girt and encroached upon it to the rear and to the right and to the left, that the traveller came upon it unexpectedly, as Childe Roland upon the Dark Tower in the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... in dismal woods their chilly life. The sky is dark, and on the huddled leaves— The restless, rustling leaves—sifts down its sleet, Till the sharp crystals pin them to the earth, And they grow still beneath the rising storm. The roofless bullock hugs the sheltering stack, With cringing head and closely gathered feet, And waits with dumb endurance for the morn. Deep in a gusty cavern of the barn The witless calf stands blatant at his chain; While the brute mother, pent within her stall, With the wild stress of instinct goes ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland

... (Fig. 2). The monks have excavated the rocky slope on three faces so as to isolate completely, in the center, an immense block, out of which they have carved an admirable temple (see T in the plan, Fig. 2), with its annexed chapels. These temples are thus roofless and are sculptured externally in the form of pagodas. Literally covered with sculptures composed with infinite art, they form a very unique collection. These temples seem to rest upon a fantastic base in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... the courts around which it is built contain funeral monuments as unutterably ugly and tasteless as any thing of the kind I ever saw at home; but the dead, for the most part, lie in graves marked merely by little iron crosses in the narrow and roofless space walled in from the lagoon, which laps sluggishly at the foot of the masonry with the impulses of the tide. The old monastery was abolished in 1810, and there is now a convent of Reformed Benedictines on the island, who perform the last ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... pleasure. You might golf if you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single penny ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... compelled them to wear the dress of my mysteries. And all the female seed of the Cadmeans, as many as are women, have I driven maddened from the house. And they, mingled with the sons of Cadmus, sit on the roofless rocks beneath the green pines. For this city must know, even though it be unwilling, that it is not initiated into my Bacchanalian rites, and that I plead the cause of my mother, Semele, in appearing manifest to mortals as ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides

... the prototype of the nave and the pointed arch. The most amazing cathedral constructed by Nature herself, with lavish outlay of the pointed aisle of branches, is at Jumieges. There, close to the splendid ruins of the Abbey, where the two towers are still intact, while the roofless nave, carpeted with flowers, ends in a chancel of foliage shut in by an apse of trees, three vast aisles of centenary boles extend in parallel lines; one in the middle, very wide, the two others, one on each side, somewhat ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... Cam's private map and the Terrans now had another five minutes march, in the middle of the road, ahead of the chieftain who must be inwardly boiling at their presence, before they came out in the clearing containing the roofless, circular erection which served the Salariki of the district as a market place and a common meeting ground for truce talks and the mending of private clan alliances. Erect on a pole in the middle, towering well above the nodding fronds of the grass trees, was the pole ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... few trees dotted this area, large and massive trees, and seemingly preserved for purposes of shade only. It was the quietest spot in the world, and inspired just that sort of feeling in the contemplative stranger which would be awakened by a ramble among the roofless ruins of the ancient abbey. It was a home for contemplation—in which one might easily forget the busy world without, and deliver himself up, without an effort, to the sweetly sad musings of ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... But the roofless night and the empty belly, consequent on an empty pocket, was a lesson which I trust was not thrown away upon me. It did not occur to me to do so, but I certainly might have picked a pocket, if - well, if I had been brought up to it. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... mile ahead of me and about the same distance back from the river there stood a ruinous house which had been fired, but whether recently or by the French I could not tell; once no doubt the country villa of some well-to-do townsman, but now roofless, and showing smears of black where the flames had licked its white outer walls. Towards this I steered my way cautiously, that behind the shelter of an outbuilding I might study the receding brigades ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... forward on the road, which was now level and wider than it had been. As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more to reveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they saw a man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively put himself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning darkly, and ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells

... ordered to dismount, and then, still under escort, was marched into the building. It was roofless, but an inner chamber had been constructed—a cellar, so to speak—under the ground-floor, with a roof of its own of rammed earth many feet thick, supported by heavy beams. This was one of the famous casemates invented by Todleben, impervious to shot and ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths

... my feet may wander now, No more awakes the slightest care; It matters not—for still wilt thou Be present 'mid my heart's despair. So springs and blooms, in lonely state, Some flow'ret on a roofless cot, And decks with smiles, though desolate, The gloomy stillness of the spot. Remember me—remember me— My latest thought ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various

... the swarthy faces of the Swampies. The woods were noisy with many tongues; the night was bright with the glare of many fires. The Indians, frightened by such a concourse of braves, had fled into the woods, and the roofless poles of their wigwams alone marked the camping-places where but the evening before I had seen the red man monarch of all he surveyed. The word had gone forth from the commander to push on with all speed for Red River, and I was now with ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler

... more. It is the same, but changed. The unapproachable elegance, the inviolable security, have witnessed invasion. The right wing of the chateau is in ruins, with traces of fire upon the blackened walls; while here and there, a broken statue or a roofless temple, are sad memorials of the Revolution. Within the restored part of the chateau, however, all looks well. Monsieur the Viscount has been fortunate, and if not so rich a man as his father, has yet regained enough of his property to live with ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade

... left, there was a little stir among them, but that proved to be a Rebel camp; then some one spied heights topped with cannon, and "Now," said they, "we are close upon it," and then stopped short for wonder, for here the road ended, ran butt against the wall of a huge roofless inclosure, made of squared pines set perpendicularly and close ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... walked among the roofless ruins. Lizards, the color of the cold, gray walls, slipped from sight on silent, clinging feet. Once a sidewinder, almost invisible against the sand, looped away from the intruders ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin

... very doorway of the great roofless chamber. Between him and the altar was the long row of priests and priestesses, awaiting with their golden cups the spilling of the warm blood of their victim. La's hand was descending slowly toward the bosom ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... time the terminus, and a town of respectable proportions had grown up, but with the completion of the road through this region, the terminus had moved on, and now all that was to be seen of those golden days was a group of adobe walls, roofless and forlorn. The present "city" consisted of about thirteen houses, and some of these were of such complex construction that one hesitates whether to describe them as houses with canvas roofs, or tents with board sides. The population consisted of a few whites, ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... gaed, over round swelling hills, over old battle-fields, past the roofless ruins of houses whose walls were crowned with tall climbing grasses, till he came to a crystal sheet of water, called St. Mary's Loch. Here he paused to take breath. The sky was dull and lowering; but at his feet were ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... its ruined ecclesiastical finery, into the sacristies and other rooms behind, including one lofty room lined entirely with blue-and-white tiles. While there, I heard, to my surprise, a faint and very distant sound of a sweeping broom. It echoed through those empty, roofless halls with a weird sound, for at that moment there was only an occasional growl of artillery in the air. Everything else was strangely quiet. Needless to say, an uninhabited town is never noisy, and at five o'clock in the morning it is not merely ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... and the red and yellow woods were merging into a ten-mile-square desert of crumbling concrete—empty and roofless sheds and warehouses and barracks, brush-choked parade grounds and landing fields, airship docks, and even a spaceport. They were more recent, dating from Poictesme's second brief and hectic prosperity, when the Terran Federation's Third Fleet-Army ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper

... about the plazas of the Spanish-American capitals,—not even a carved door-facing or trifling ornament of any description. The entire side on our right, between the two eastern streets, was occupied by the cracked and roofless walls of an ancient church or convent, which had long been a neglected ruin. The fallen stones and mortar had raised a sloping embankment high up its venerable sides; and the small trees, here and there shooting above the luxuriant grass and running vines which, covered this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... 420 Then she spoke the words which follow: "O thou bee, my own dear birdling, Fly thou in a new direction, Over nine lakes fly thou quickly Till thou reach a lovely island, Where the land abounds with honey, Where is Tuuri's new-built dwelling, Palvonen's own roofless dwelling. There is honey in profusion, There is ointment in perfection, 430 Fit to bind the veins together, And to heal the joints completely. From the meadow bring this ointment, And the salve from out the meadow, For upon the wounds I'll spread ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous

... o'clock I had joined the colonel and Hubbard at the new positions. Our only possible mess was a roofless gun-pit not far from a road. The colonel and Hubbard were covering it with scrap-heap sheets of rusty iron, and a tarpaulin that was not sufficiently expansive. Further down the road was a dug-out into which two could squeeze. The colonel said Hubbard and I had better occupy ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)

... with a brightly coloured front, and three chod-tens, or relic-holders, painted blue, red, and yellow, and daubed with coarse arabesques and representations of deities, one having a striking resemblance to Mr. Gladstone. The houses are of mud, with flat roofs; but, being summer, many of them were roofless, the poplar rods which support the mud having been used for fuel. Conical stacks of the dried excreta of animals, the chief fuel of the country, adorned the roofs, but the general aspect was ruinous and poor. The people all invited ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)

... pull all of my clothing off. I resisted to the limit of my strength. He manipulated my member for a long time, but all in vain. Gummy streams poured down his sweating forehead, and there was so much chalk in the wrinkles of his cheeks that you might have mistaken his face for a roofless wall, from which the plaster was crumbling ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... city disinterred; And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless walls." ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... I remember a happier time. Then, after many years of bondage and stiffness, and accordance with the world, I found myself at ease, like a released bird; with what zest did I join in the rude jokes and the knavish tricks, the stolen feasts and the roofless nights of those ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... part is that which was formerly the church, and which, though now roofless, is still surrounded by walls, and retains the remnants of the pillars that formerly supported the intermingling curves of the arches. The floor is all overgrown with grass strewn with fragments and capitals of pillars. It was a great and stately edifice, the length of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... scene at daybreak upon which all gazed. The half-burned roof of the farm-house, the three smoking heaps where the three stacks had stood, and the stable roofless and blackened, while the place all about the house was muddy ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... days Saaron had supported, or failed to support, five families; but of these all but Tregarthen had lost their clutch on the barren rock and drifted away to other islands. He could remember their going. He passed their roofless cottages half a dozen ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... kindling fitful lightnings of returning consciousness in her dark, mysterious eyes. Looking about her with an expression of wide-eyed surprise, she eagerly drank in the sounds of the violin; her graceful movements became more and more violent, till she whirled in ever-widening circles round about the roofless palace chamber, athwart which flurried bats swirled noiselessly through the gathering twilight. Hither and thither she glided, no sooner completing the circle in one direction than, snapping her fingers with a passionate cry, she wheeled round in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... a gallery nearly one hundred and fifty feet in length, has still several good and habitable rooms, and is now preserved with due care by its owner. The ancient kitchen, the coquina abbatis of the compotus, whence such hecatombs were served up, remains, though roofless, with two huge fire-places. On the southern side of this building is a small but very picturesque and beautiful rain mantled with ivy, which appears to have been a chapel, and was probably the abbot's private oratory. But the conventual church ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... and starving men. They would wring our hands, and say, "God bless you," and we would halt our steaming horses in the market-place, and distribute the news of the outside world, and tobacco. There would be shattered houses, roofless homes, deep pits in the roadways where the shells had burst and buried themselves. We would see the entombed miner at the moment of his deliverance, we would be among the first from the outer world to break the spell of his silence; the first to receive the brunt ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis

... not explain. The front gable of the nave was nearly all standing, but that at the back, which at one time had contained a large window, was nearly all down. The old font was in the wall about half-way down the cathedral; the vestry and chapter house were roofless. The grave-stones dated from the year 1602, but that which covered the remains of the founder was of course very much older. Beauly was formerly a burial-place of the ancient Scottish chieftains, and was still used as the burial-ground of the Mackenzies, the name reminding us of our friends ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... the village was practically intact. The face of the church tower was badly scarred, but the houses were undamaged. The little shops were open; children played in the streets. Now, if you stand at the cross-roads where the church rears its roofless walls, you will understand what the Abomination of Desolation means. Occasionally a body of troops, moving in small detachments at generous intervals, trudges by, on its way to or from the trenches. Occasionally a big howitzer shell swings lazily out of the blue and drops ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)

... of these absentees exacted the rents with bitter severity, and often the dwelling of the wretched occupier was pulled down about his sick and starving children, who frequently perished within the roofless walls. It was civil war, without any of the redeeming manhood which strips even that of its aspects of misery and horror. Frequently the police, armed as regular cavalry and infantry, were called out to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, but she abiding;—to herself, her home. And sometimes I think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that she is seated on her ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... word. As he returned to the Vatican, the Angelus was ringing from all the church bells of Rome, the city was bathed in crimson light, the sun was sinking behind Monte Mario, and the stone pines on the crest of the hill, standing out against the reddening sky, were like the roofless columns of ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... were of dazzling alabaster, with their capitals richly gilt. The space above was roofless; but an immense awning of purple, richly embroidered in Persian looms—a spoil of some gorgeous Mede—shaded the feasters from the summer sky. The couches on which the banqueters reclined were of citron wood, inlaid with ivory, and ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... down into the rampart ditch; we can see the places where they have repeatedly made frantic rushes for liberty up the almost perpendicular escarp, only to fall helplessly back to the bottom of their roofless dungeon, where they will gradually starve to death. The natives down in this part of the city greet us with curious looks; they are wondering at the sight of two Ferenghis promenading the ramparts, far away from the European quarter; we can hear them ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... me very forcibly. In 1815, I remember a large square of neat cottages, and the area, a green shaded by fine old trees. Most of the cottages are now roofless; the trees have been cut down, and on my last visit, in 1821, a crop of barley was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various

... another court, very large, though not so immense as the first, for no animals were kept there. Instead of stalls for camels and horses, there were roughly built rooms for pilgrims of the poorer class, with little, roofless, open-sided kitchens, where they could cook their own food. Beyond was the third court, with lodging for more important persons, and then the travellers were led through a labyrinth of corridors, some roofed with palm branches, others open to the air, and still more ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... he spoke they were passing by gaping walls and shattered gun-carriages. They walked through entire streets where the buildings, all more or less demolished, showed at every point the cruelties of war. At one place they heard voices coming from a roofless dwelling, which proved that its inmates still called it home, and clung to the poor shelter that ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various

... the evening before James's departure, to the ruins of Furness Abbey. It was a fine autumnal evening; the sun had set in the greatest beauty, and the moon was hastening up the eastern sky; and in the roofless choir they knelt, near where the altar formerly stood, and repeated, in the presence of Heaven, ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... seldom, where the beechen boughs That roofless tower invade, We came while her enchanting Muse The radiant moon above us held: Till by a clamorous owl compell'd She ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... dried me, as the path was steep and tiring. At the house of Dr. S. in Podgorica we had met a young Franciscan monk, a Neapolitan and a great student. He at once invited us to visit him in Zatrijebac, where he is the spiritual shepherd, and to spend a few weeks with him. On approaching a roofless church, in the course of rebuilding, we espied this young monk rushing to meet us. With all the fervour of his race, he embraced and kissed us repeatedly, welcoming us to his home. He gave me his bed, and the other remaining one was put ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... matter, does it, pal? We're of that breed of men With whom the world of wine and cards and women disagree; Your trouble was a roofless game of poker now and then, And "raising up my elbow", that's what got away with me. We're merely "Undesirables", artistic more or less; My horny hands are Chopin-wise; you quote your Browning well; And yet we're fooling round for gold in this damned ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... landscape is blotted with the grim and pitiable signs of war. The sugar cane has turned to a dirty brown where the fire has passed through it, the centrals are black ruins, and the adobe houses and the railroad stations are roofless, and their broken windows stare pathetically at you like blind eyes. War cannot alter the sunshine, but the smoke from the burning huts and the blazing corn fields seems all the more sad and terrible when it rises into such an atmosphere, and against so soft and beautiful ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis

... legend, saw in her just a shabby girl, less worthy than themselves because much poorer, whose pride and very beauty aroused their mockery and wrath. They did not dispute her possession of the castle. For what to them were four vast roofless walls, enclosing a square of greensward underfoot and another of blue air overhead, and pierced with doorless doorways and windowless casements that let in all the lights of all the quarters of the sky? What to them were these traces of old chambers ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... At any rate, the walls of the new chapel were mounting higher and higher all through February, and by the end of the first week in March there stood immediately opposite to the Vicarage gate a hideously ugly building, roofless, doorless, windowless;—with those horrid words,—"New Salem, 186—" legibly inscribed on a visible stone inserted above the doorway, a thing altogether as objectionable to the eyes of a Church of England parish clergyman ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... alone. The pigs had been removed and all was silent. A few bats flitted to and fro quickly. The light fell away greyly, the cold descended on the ruin, and it became very strange and mysterious. Presently, the roofless chapels seemed to grow alive with weird invisible things, the rank weeds exhaled chill odours; and in the lonely silence a mass began. At the ruined altar ghostly priests officiated, passing quietly from side to side, with bows and genuflections. The bell tinkled as they raised an invisible host. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... walking upon newly made graves. On either side of us were gaping cellars into which the houses had dumped themselves or, still balancing above them, were walls prettily papered, hung with engravings, paintings, mirrors, quite intact. These walls were roofless and defenseless against the rain and snow. Other houses were like those toy ones built for children, with the front open. They showed a bed with pillows, shelves supporting candles, books, a washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano, ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... have been made in latter years. The building bears every internal mark of neglect and dilapidation, defaced walls, broken plaster, &c. Upon entering the lecture-room, a quantity of eighteen-inch square boxes full of moisture suggest the idea of a rainy day and a roofless chamber. Be not deceived: these are merely receptacles for the discharge of the students' 'bacco juice; and the surrounding floor gives painful demonstration that their free spirits scorn the trammels of eighteen-inch boundaries, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... anxiety, their numbers hourly diminished by disease, privation, the terrific rays of a June sun, and the storm of shot, shell, and bullets which never ceased to be poured into them. When one looked on the ruined, roofless barracks, with their hastily constructed parapet and ditch (a mere apology for a defence), one marvelled how 465 men, not more than half of them soldiers by profession, could have held out for three long weeks against the thousands of disciplined troops and hordes of armed retainers whom ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts

... principal building of the mission, was built in the form of a cross, of rough stone, with walls several feet thick. At the time of the battle which was to witness its downfall the centre of the structure was roofless, but the ends were well covered. The sides of the church were over twenty feet high, and the windows were exceedingly narrow, for the building had been built to resist attacks by the Indians. It faced both the river and San ...
— For the Liberty of Texas • Edward Stratemeyer



Words linked to "Roofless" :   unfortunate, homeless, roofed



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