"Tumble-down" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the people, and one of the first things to be made better is the state of the land and the laborers. Think of Kit Downes, uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!—and those poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is one reason why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle—which you think me stupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... home again. The weather was beautiful, and for the first three or four days I never enjoyed myself better in my life. The flowers were growing, the birds were singing—the robins in the sunshine and the whippoorwills at dusk—and the hours were not long enough for me. At night I slept in a tumble-down barn, or anywhere, like a born tramp. I had a mountain brook for a wash-basin and the west wind for a towel. Sometimes I invited myself to a meal at a farm-house when there wasn't a tavern handy; and when there wasn't any farm-house, ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... fire;—even to mother," she added, in a low, melancholy tone, which had something of inexpressible sadness in it. "Why, Jenny!" said she, rousing herself, but not before her eyes were swimming with tears, "own, now, that you never saw those dismal, hateful, tumble-down old houses there look half so—what shall I call them? almost beautiful—as they do now, with that soft, pure, exquisite covering; and if they are so improved, think of what trees, and grass, and ivy must be on such ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... known as "Lazy-man." When he was young, he had been lazy about hunting. When the other Indians had skins to sell, the lazy Indian had nothing. He grew poor. His blanket was ragged. His leggings were worn out. His wigwam was so wretched that all the tribe laughed at its tumble-down look. ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... rattle of a tinny piano, the squeak of a raspy violin, a high-pitched, hectic burst of laughter; while, flanking the street on each side, like interjected inanimate blotches, rows of squalid tenements and cheap, tumble-down frame houses silhouetted themselves in broken, jagged points against the sky-line. And now and then a man spoke to her—his untrained fingers fumbling in clumsy homage at ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... the fence, an old and long neglected apple orchard, a tumble-down log barn, and the wreck of a house with the fireplace and chimney standing stark and alone, told the story. The place was one of those old ranches, purchased by the Power Company for the water rights, and deserted by those who once had ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... promenade, just where the old city and the new city meet, is a tumble-down mill. It is called the Nonnen-Muehle, and it has been there ever since Ehrestadt first came into existence, as is evident from the bulging of the walls, and the wood of the casements, rotten and worm-eaten. The river winds underneath it, and the great spoked wheel turns slowly, tossing the water ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... of pocket. It's really unreasonable." He was looking at Sloyd. "It's treating me as an enemy,—and I shall have no alternative but to accept the situation. Blinkhampton is not essential to me; and your hotel and so on won't flourish much if I leave my tumble-down cottages and pigsties just behind them. Will you put ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... the air was disagreeable. Tawdry spangles and false jewels lay about on the tumble-down settees. From behind little doors that opened from the walls round came the ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... in the meeting-house as she passed, and then there was a long stretch of shining white silence unmarked by any human habitation till she came to the tumble-down black cottage inhabited by "Door-Button" Davis, as the little old man was called in the village. In the distance she could see Osh Popham's two-story house brilliantly illuminated by kerosene lamps, and as she drew nearer she even descried Ossian ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... much, for it was 'most as light as day, and the smell of smoke was terrible. We could see people runnin' in certain parts of Columbia, sometimes. Next mornin' we look over the city from the bluff and only a few houses was standin' and hundreds of tumble-down chimneys and the whole ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... amiable gentleman, but not clever or strong like his father, and he very soon found that to govern England was quite beyond his power; so he gave up, and went to live at his own home again, while the English people gave him the nick-name Tumble-down-Dick. ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Red Ridinghood; and the small eyes grow big at the adventures of Sinbad, the gallant tar. Will not this be better, Don Bob, than pistil and stamen and radicle? —than wearing out BBB lead pencils in drawing tumble-down castles, rickety cottages, and dumpling-shaped trees?—than acquiring a language which has no literature fit for a girl to read?—than mistressing the absurd modern piano music?—than taking diplomas from institutes, which most certainly do not express all that young women learn in those venerable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... after that, Halcyone had come with her own Priscilla to La Sarthe Chase to her great-aunts Ginevra and Roberta, in their tumble-down mansion which her father had not lived to inherit. Under family arrangements, it was the two old ladies' ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... her generous offer, she was allowed to rent a tumble-down, unoccupied building, and opened her school with six pupils! Every one of the six became so enthusiastic over a teacher who was interested in each individual that their friends were eager to be her pupils, too, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Railroad station, in the Fourth Ward, known as Harpville, on the east bank of the Stony creek. A rudely constructed platform extends over a washed-out ditch, partially filled with debris. In the vicinity is a large barn and several smaller outhouses, thrown in a tumble-down condition. Piled against them are beams and rafters from houses smashed into kindling wood. All about the station are boxes, empty and full, scattered in confusion, and around and about these crowds ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... with the stock of ales and spirits, of a small inn in the center of a lonely little village, perched on the summit of a hill, and called Mount Stanning. It was not a very pretty house to look at; it had something of a tumble-down, weather-beaten appearance, standing, as it did, upon high ground, sheltered only by four or five bare and overgrown poplars, that had shot up too rapidly for their strength, and had a blighted, forlorn look in consequence. The wind had had ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... missionaries. The hotel here is called the Brawner House; it has a bar in the nethermost cellar, and its patrons, carousing in that imperfect light, look like the denizens of some burglar's crib, talking robbery between their cups; its dining-room is dark and tumble-down, and the cuisine bears traces of Caffir origin; a barbecue is nothing to a dinner there. The Court House of Port Tobacco is the most superflous house in the place, except the church. It stands in the center ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... streets past the houses that had been burned down, he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The picturesqueness of the chimney stacks and tumble-down walls of the burned-out quarters of the town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of the Rhine and the Colosseum. The cabmen he met and their passengers, the carpenters cutting the timber for new houses with axes, the women hawkers, and the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... led me down the village to an old cow-house, in which we found a tumble-down sort of diligence, such as they used to run early in this century, between some of our remote villages. There were three old mules, too, none of which were strong enough to carry a man, but together they might draw ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... or who they are. They've only just come here and from goodness knows where. And they live in that little tumble-down house in Mullen ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... death-bed of the sergeant's father. I think it would be quite as good a scene for illustration as any, and will, I trust, be ready in a day or two. Is it worth Mr. B.'s while to see if R.C. would do it in shades of brown or grey? (a very chiaroscuro scene in a tumble-down cottage, light from above). All I must have is a good illustration or none at all. (I would send copy of scene to R.C. and ask him.) I think it might pay, because I am certain to want to republish it, and whoever I publish it with will ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... was rotting and crumbling away from top to bottom, with its smudgy claret-colored paint, quite moldy. The stationer's and the tobacconist's were still there. In the rear, over some low buildings, you could see the leprous facades of several five-storied houses rearing their tumble-down outlines against the sky. The "Grand Balcony" dancing hall no longer existed; some sugar-cutting works, which hissed continually, had been installed in the hall with the ten flaming windows. And yet it was here, in this dirty den—the Hotel Boncoeur—that the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... which not only sufficed to pay off the mortgages on Neesdale Park but bestowed on its owner a surplus which the practical knowledge of country life that he had acquired enabled him to devote with extraordinary profit to the general improvement of his estate. He replaced tumble-down old farm buildings with new constructions on the most approved principles; bought or pensioned off certain slovenly incompetent tenants; threw sundry petty holdings into large farms suited to the buildings he constructed; purchased here and there ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... song in her heart never ceased. Day by day a fresh note was added; everything she touched; everything she saw was transformed. The old tumble-down house with its propped-up furniture and makeshift carpets seemed to have become already the place she planned it to be. There would be vines over the door and a new summer kitchen at the back'; and there would be a porch where ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... years after The Excursion. Byron called Crabbe "Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely accurate delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... seem to be pretty well off and independent as compared with their neighbors of the other villages (Pl. XXXIV). The houses and courts are in keeping with the general character of the people and exhibit a degree of neatness and thrift that contrasts sharply with the tumble-down appearance of some of the other villages, especially those of the Middle Mesa and Oraibi. There is a general air of newness about the place, though it is questionable whether the architecture is more recent than that of the other villages of ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... was getting stronger and when the girls reached the Hermit's Hut, a tumble-down shack half hidden in the brush, they gladly took shelter ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... right as he neared them, and passing a high fragment of brick wall topped by a marble ball or two—which had been shot at for marks—and passing, just beyond, some huge clumps of box, they came to a square brick building with a rude wooden addition at one side, and saw some tumble-down sheds a short distance beyond this, with ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... caught sight of a barefooted boy trying to steal a boat. They sped over the prairie and flew past an old Dutch windmill. It was an odd sight, an un-American glimpse—a wink at a strange land. They commented on everything that whirled within sight—a bend in the road, a crooked Line, a tumble-down fence. They were boys. They talked about names that they held a prejudice against, and occasionally one of them would say, "No, I don't like a ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... boar and moufflon—is that the right name for those strange creatures? We intend to crave your hospitality on our way to Bastia, where we are to embark, and I trust the della Rebbia Castle, which you declare is so old and tumble-down, will not fall in upon our heads! Though the prefect is so pleasant that subjects of conversation are never lacking to us—I flatter myself, by the way, that I have turned his head—we have been talking about your worshipful self. The legal people at Bastia have sent him certain confessions, made ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... little way out from the shore—looking down upon them through a cleft in the rocks. The village itself we did not see, but skirted it upon high ground and came down to the foreshore a short two miles beyond it; where we found a beach and a spit of rock, and on the spit a tumble-down tower standing, as lonely as a combed louse. Above the beach ran a tolerable coast road, which divided itself into two, after crossing a bridge behind the tower; the one following the shore, the other striking inland ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... sorrows of the poor." He was almost conscious of a feeling of guilt as he recalled the fresh, pure air of the park and contrasted it with this atmosphere. The name of Berry Hill seemed curiously inappropriate for the level streets lined with tumble-down tenements; and its suggestion of the long-ago days when vine-clad uplands swelled between the narrowing rivers, and little children steeped their fingers in nothing more harmful than the blood of berries, lent an added pathos to the gloom ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... from the last bridge, a village of 800 people, on a narrow ledge between an abrupt hill and the Hirakawa, a most forlorn and tumble-down place, given up to felling timber and making shingles; and timber in all its forms—logs, planks, faggots, and shingles—is heaped and stalked about. It looks more like a lumberer's encampment than a permanent village, but it is beautifully situated, and unlike any of the innumerable ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... itself evident to him when he dismounted at the house. To the silence of the night was added the silence of slumber. No one was to be seen; a small cow, rendered lean by active climbing in search of sustenance, breathed peacefully near the tumble-down fence; the ubiquitous, long-legged, yellow dog, rendered trustful by long seclusion, aroused himself from his nap to greet the arrival with a series of heavy raps upon the rickety porch-floor with a solid but languid tail. Lennox stepped over him in reaching for the gourd hanging upon ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... them what he could do, Milo once carried an ox for several miles, and then, feeling hungry, killed it with one blow of his fist, cooked it, and ate it all at a single meal. On another occasion, Milo was sitting with several companions in a rather tumble-down house. All at once he noticed that the roof was falling in. He stretched up his great arms, spread out his hands, and held the roof up until all his companions had ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... to look at another "dividing ridge" that had neither path nor way, and henceforth I must keep to the open road or travel alone. Two hours' tramp brought us to an old clearing with some rude, tumble-down log buildings that many years before had been occupied by the bark and lumber men. The prospect for trout was so good in the stream hereabouts, and the scene so peaceful and inviting, shone upon by the dreamy August sun, that we concluded ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... of the incident about to be mentioned, the picket post was on the crest of a low ridge, or slight elevation, and under some big oak trees by an old tumble-down deserted building which had at one time been a blacksmith shop. There were three of us on this post, and one of my turns came at midnight. I was standing by one of the trees, listening, looking, and meditating. The night was calm, with a full moon. The space in our front, sloping down ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... chance had planted them unless somebody picked them and carried them away, and even then they left their roots behind them. Somehow they made her think of Miss Becky, living her little narrow, stationary life all alone in the old tumble-down farmhouse. And just at this point in her reflections a delightful scheme came ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... assumption and insolence one meets with. I furnished my rooms well, and dressed well. Ah! you stare; but this is not the furniture I started with; I sold it all when I came to my senses, and put in this tumble-down second-hand stuff, and I have worn out my fine clothes. I know I'm not well dressed now. (Tom nodded ready acquiescence to this position.) Yes, though I still wince a little now and then—a great deal oftener than I like—I don't carry any false colors. ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... and hurried out. The address the operator had given them was nearly a mile away, and they broke into a run. As they went along they noticed that the houses lining the streets began to wear a very tumble-down aspect, and to thin out ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... to St. Louis, took a look at the army then at Rolla, in Central Missouri, but discovering no signs of action in that direction made his way to Cairo where General Grant was in command. General Grant's headquarters were in the second story of a tumble-down building. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... his eyes he dragged his weary, aching feet as quickly as he could towards the spot, and soon came to a miserable-looking little cottage. As he drew near he saw that it was in a tumble-down condition, the bamboo fence was broken and weeds and grass pushed their way through the gaps. The paper screens which serve as windows and doors in Japan were full of holes, and the posts of the house were bent with age and seemed scarcely able to support the old thatched roof. ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... on; the ships were saucers; the kitten might have been the pig; the baby was an owl in an ivy-bush; and to look at the live baby in the cradle only puzzled her the more. Miss Fosbrook gave her real drawing lessons; but boxes, palings, and tumble-down sheds, done with a broad black pencil, did not seem to help her to what she wished. Yet sometimes her fingers produced what surprised and pleased herself and Christabel; and she never was happier than when safely shut into Miss Fosbrook's bed-room with her card and her paints. ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thank that rascally cousin of mine for having taught you," said Russell; "but seriously, isn't it a very moping way of spending the afternoon, to go and lie down behind some haystack, or in some frowsy tumble-down barn, as you smokers do, instead of playing ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... you have your try," said Endicott, chuckling as if it were a good joke. "Here's a little farm down in Jersey. It's swampy and thick with mosquitoes. I understand it won't grow a beanstalk. There are twelve acres and a tumble-down house on it. I've had to take it in settlement of a mortgage. The man's dead and there's nothing but the farm to lay hands on. He hasn't even left a chick or child to leave his debt to. I don't want the farm and I can't sell it without a lot of trouble. I'll give ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... as usual, watching us furtively. Ned was one of the hopeful members of a family that lived in a tumble-down shanty just across the road from the Carrolls. They were wretchedly poor, and old Brooke, as he was called, and Ned were employed a good deal by Mr. Carroll—more out of charity ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of that temple," Pei Ming explained, "really faces south, and is all in a tumble-down condition. I searched and searched till I was driven to utter despair. As soon, however, as I caught sight of it, 'that's right,' I shouted, and promptly walked in. But I at once discovered a clay figure, which gave me such a fearful ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... regiment, Mary. My father has a few hundred acres in County Mayo, and a tumble-down house; that is to say, it was a tumble-down house when I saw it four years ago, but it had been shut up for a good many years, and I should not be surprised if it has quite tumbled down now. However, my father was always talking of going to live there when he left the army. The land is not worth ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... spite and anger, bestowed every one a parting pinch on their tumble-down old bondsman; then they handed him to his son, and swung back with careless light hearts to ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... fraud among less scrupulous members of the trade. An oak chest bearing every superficial mark of age that a clever workman can give it (and the profession of wormholer, is now, I believe, recognised) is deposited in a tumble-down, half-timbered home in a country village, whose occupant is willing to take a share in the game; a ticket marked "Ginger-beer; sold Here" is placed in the window, and the trap is ready. It is almost beyond question that everyone who bids for this chest, which has, of course, been in ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... very hot blankets. Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there would seem to have been a lack of room in the City, for new houses are thrust in everywhere. Wherever it has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a crack or corner, in it has gone. If there be a nook or angle in the wall of a church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of any sort, there you are sure to find some kind of habitation: looking as if it had ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... leaned to eke out the failing strength of her own limbs. The wood-wife was both feared and hated by the people, amongst whom she bore the character of a very malicious witch. The king's daughter hated not only her, but her tumble-down house, and had sent again and again, with large offers of gold, to try and purchase the cottage. But the wood-wife laughed spitefully at the messengers, and only replied that the cottage suited her, and that for no money would she quit it whilst ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... into the 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 returned ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... greatly shocked on visiting the house to see the shameful state of dilapidation into which it has been allowed to pass. The porches and steps have fallen down, the garden is a disreputable tangle, and the graves in the yard are heaped with tumble-down stones about which the cattle graze. The only parts of the building in good repair are those parts which time has not yet succeeded in destroying. The drawing-room, containing a mantelpiece given to Washington ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... little church called St. Sennan's. You haven't heard of it, probably. It's past the Cove—on a hill looking over the sea. It's the most tumble-down old place you ever saw, and nobody goes there except a few fishermen, but we know the clergyman and like him. I like the place too—you can listen to the sea if you're bored ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... morrow—he strolled homewards after them. But as they passed on straight through the town he got a bit curious, and, keeping out of sight, followed astern, along the narrow country roads which led to nowhere special. He saw them pull up before the great tumble-down Talayot which stands opposite the big stone altar, and watched them produce lantern, shovel, and pickaxe, and begin to dig; after which, feeling that his interest had evaporated (so he said), or, more probably, being oppressed with ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... ask a question, they kneel down and kiss the border of our coats, as in the days of the serf system. We are stationed here in Poland, about eight kilometers from the so-called road, in a so-called village far from all civilization. The village consists of a number of tumble-down cottages, with rooms which we should not consider fit for stables for our horses. The rain is streaming down unceasingly, as if Heaven wished to wash away all the sins of the world. Our horses sink into the mud up to ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... he hid his ill-gotten gains under the floor of his tumble-down cottage, and went about his evil courses as usual in company with his comrade Davy Spink, who continued to fight and make it up ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... to-night is near the ruins of a very old fort, and ever since we got here, the men have been hunting rattlesnakes that have undoubtedly been holding possession of the tumble-down buildings, many snake generations. Dozens and dozens have been killed, of all sizes, some of them being very large. The old quarters were evidently made of sods and dirt, and must have been dreadful places to ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... like Florence, and that it has no commercial activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa is at ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... London with the lamented remains. The monument and vault in the church were then, alas! all that remained of my vast possessions; for my father had sold every stick of the property to one Notley, an attorney, and we received but a cold welcome in his house—a miserable old tumble-down place it was. [Footnote: In another part of his memoir Mr. Barry will be found to describe this mansion as one of the most splendid palaces in Europe; but this is a practice not unusual with his nation; and with respect to the Irish ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was but some sudden freak, he points out a black dirty-looking dwelling-place, with overhanging windows and a wide gabled roof. 'Yonder it stands, Becky,' he cries; 'number seven John-street, Clerkenwell; a queer dingy box of four walls, my wench—a tumble-down kennel, with a staircase that 'twould break your neck to mount, being strange to it—and half a day's journey from the court-end of town. But that house was once paradise to me; and to look at it even now, though 'tis over eighteen years since I saw the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... horses and men in an old tumble-down brick-kiln, in the solitude of a dense forest which surrounded the town at that time. No sooner had Sternbald, whom he had sent in disguise into the city with the mandate, brought him word that it was already known there, than he set out with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... guns like a continuous thunderstorm. We began to feel fearfully hungry, and stopped beside a high bank flanking a canal and not far from a small cafe. Bunny and I went to get some hot water. It was a tumble-down place enough, and as we pushed the door open (on which, by the way, was the notice in French, "During the bombardment one enters by the side door") we found the room full of men drinking coffee and smoking. I bashfully made my way towards one of the oldest women I have ever ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... were not rich. The shabby, delightful old rooms, the tumble-down appearance of the ancient house, the lack of luxuries proved it, but they ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... to the de Vignes. They live in a great house with lots of servants and cars. They never do a thing for themselves. I don't suppose Rose could do her hair to save her life. While we—we live in a tumble-down, ramshackle old place, and do all the work ourselves. I've never been away from home in my life before. You see, we're poor, and Billy's schooling takes up a lot of money. I had to leave school when he first went ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... shop on Prytania Street, at least to the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the neighbourhood. When or how they came, or how they stayed, no one knew; it was enough that they were there, like a sort of ancestral fixture to the street. The neighbourhood was fine enough to look down upon these two tumble-down shops at the corner, kept by Tony and Mrs. Murphy, the grocer. It was a semi-fashionable locality, far up-town, away from the old-time French quarter. It was the sort of neighbourhood where millionaires live before their fortunes are made and fashionable, high-priced private schools flourish, ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... the usual ramshackle open cab. The cathedral of Saint-Front, extolled by Aristide and restored by Abadie—a terrible fellow who has capped with tops of pepper-castors every pre-Gothic building in France—gave him no thrill; nor did the picturesque, tumble-down ancient buildings on the banks of the Dordogne, nor the delicate Renaissance facades in the cool, narrow Rue ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... the valley where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them all—when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a Christian by force of rhetoric—what should I note (after so many years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the work of some just artist ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... this country grows. This city is the oldest I have yet seen in America—I should think it must be the oldest in it. I cannot say that the first impression produced by the wharf at which we landed, or the streets we drove through in reaching our hotel, was particularly lively. Rickety, dark, dirty, tumble-down streets and warehouses, with every now and then a mansion of loftier pretensions, but equally neglected and ruinous in its appearance, would probably not have been objects of special admiration to many people on this side the water; but I belong to that infirm, decrepit, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... while, but a thought came to console me, and I said to myself: "You can climb up the city clock-tower, and see the house of Catharine and Aunt Gredel." Thinking thus, I arrived at the house of Brainstein, the bell-ringer, who lived at the corner of the little place, in an old, tumble-down barrack. His two sons were weavers, and in their old home the noise of the loom and the whistle of the shuttle was heard from morning till night. The grandmother, old and blind, slept in an armchair, on the ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... have the Swallow 'longside a private wharf farther up-stream. Rather tumble-down old shanty, but it's easier than mooring in the stream and rowing out. We'll go and leave your things aboard, and then we can come up town again and ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... followed at a respectful distance by his two attendant footmen with their threadbare liveries. At last, out of the dreary waste, at the end of the interminable ill-paved sloughy road, the long line of the grey tumble-down walls rises gloomily. A few cannon-shot would batter a breach anywhere, as the events of 1849 proved only too well. However, at Rome there is neither commerce to be impeded nor building extension of any kind to be checked; the city has shrunk up until its precincts are a ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... which overlook the Tiber and facing the Castel St. Angelo. How they ever managed to make this passage is a mystery! In the daytime one could not see the possibility of cutting through the labyrinth of these forlorn tumble-down houses. We sat trembling for fear that the shaky planks would suddenly give way and plunge us into the whirling Tiber under our feet. The fireworks were the most gorgeous display of pyrotechnics I ever saw. And the bouquet as the finale was a magnificent tornado of fire which left ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... wealthy yeoman named John Cobbam, who, the absentee tenant of an absentee landlord, resided upon a small property of his own about two miles distant, leaving the large deserted house, and dilapidated outbuildings, to sink into gradual decay. Barns half unthatched, tumble-down cart-houses, palings rotting to pieces, and pigsties in ruins, contributed, together with a grand collection of substantial and dingy ricks of fine old hay—that most valuable but most gloomy looking species of agricultural property—to the general ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... Rubens does not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,— nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that ruinous chateau, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite no surprise; but he—and he Peter Paul ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... French portion of the town, the thoroughfares are narrow and crooked, and some of the houses are very quaint and picturesque: being built of wood, with tumble-down galleries before the windows, approachable by stairs or rather ladders from the street. There are queer little barbers' shops and drinking- houses too, in this quarter; and abundance of crazy old tenements ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... the streets and their contents, except that he noted the fact under the new order of things, since the Jews had come into possession of the city, that there was scarce a Moslem of any kind to be seen, and that most of the tumble-down, smaller houses, of a few years back, had been pulled down, and that the streets in consequence had been considerably widened. Hundreds of new houses of bungalow type, had taken the places of those pulled down. Most of these were built on the "Frazzi" system, ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... like silver fountains in the assault of the wind. In this young wood of Taahauku, all these hues and combinations were exampled and repeated by the score. The trees grew pleasantly spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there interspersed with a rack for drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for storing it. Every here and there the stroller had a glimpse of the Casco tossing in the narrow anchorage below; and beyond he had ever before him the dark amphitheatre of the Atuona mountains and the cliffy bluff that closes it to seaward. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a place on the south of Market Street, to a building which resembled a deserted, tumble-down stable or blacksmith's shop plastered with old hand-bills and posters. There were some dirty old window-frames in the second story, but I do not believe there was one ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... Triton blew patiently at a conch-shell plugged with turf, she paused and dug at the mortared joints of the basin with the point of her sunshade; and I thought the confidence was coming. But it was by the tumble-down gate at the end of the chestnut avenue that she turned ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Earl of Brompton! He is not a client of mine, but I have my eye on him. His earthly possessions consist of about five acres of land, a tumble-down hut near by, and a double-barrelled shotgun, and he lost his secretaryship when the new administration made its clean sweep of the offices. They said he was going to marry a rich girl ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... subject of gallantry, and set them such a good example on two occasions, that it would be bathos to saunter back, hands in pockets, and confess I knew nothing of the lady's fate and had been daunted by the first night alone in the forest. Besides, how dull it would be in that beautiful, tumble-down old city without Heru, with no expectation day by day of seeing her sylph-like form and hearing the merry tinkle of her fairy laughter as she scoffed at the unknown learning collected by her ancestors in a thousand laborious years. No! I would go on for certain. I was young, ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... for it, lad!" I exclaimed in some excitement. "Your master's life hangs upon your speed—hold, wait! do you remember that old tumble-down shed we passed on our way here; the one which had once been a ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... the accusation that we use the poor simply as a means of self-improvement. An old Irish woman in a tumble-down tenement house once said to me: 'Ye'll have no chance to work out your salvation doing for me.' I believe that there are many of the poor who more or less consciously have the same idea. They think that we make visiting them a sort of penance, and they resent ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... Buckingham. Did you never hear of it? About fifteen years ago his property was sold in lots, and the people bought all the farms. You never saw such a stir in the world.' He pointed out the houses on the hill-side which had been built to replace old tumble-down tenements, the red soil appearing under the plough, and cultivation going on with such general activity as had not been witnessed till within these last few years. The appearance of these villages was such as must strike every traveller from another part of the country, ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... Tom Osborne, rather forlorn and miserable from his night's imprisonment in a tumble-down shack, walked out, his bonds ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... must" has ever been the motto of China, and for years the capital itself was an example of the saying. Improvements were not encouraged. There were no more public buildings in 1879 than in 1863. I doubt if a single tumble-down wall had been replaced—the dirt and smells still remained, and the roads were no smoother. Only a few more Legations had established themselves there, and, by clustering together, they formed what might by courtesy be called a Legation Quarter, which lay between the ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... Hale have made their very tumble-down barn a perfect model of neatness. They sleep within about 3 yards of the horses' heels. Hunt in particular never likes to be far away from "my 'osses," as he calls them. I have less and less say in the matter of the 'osses ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... call it living—in a tumble-down-looking house, that would not have stood many earthquakes. She had tried diligently to support her family and keep them together; but the wolf stood always at the door. Sewing by hand did not bring in quite money enough ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... Little Silver. He had no relations round about and couldn't, or wouldn't, tell his new neighbours what had brought him along. But he bided a bit with Mrs. Ford, the policeman's wife, as a lodger, and then, when he'd sized up the place and found it suited him, he took a tumble-down, four-room cottage at the back-side of the village and worked upon it himself and soon had the place to his liking. A most handy little man he was and could turn his skill in many directions. And he'd do odd jobs for the neighbours and show a good bit of kindness to the children. He lived alone ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... the demonstration. With a face beaming with happiness he turned away from the scene of his victories into a narrow side street, where the electric light still hung high, but only to exhibit a row of tumble-down ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... not a woman in the place excepting Mrs. Newton with whom Mrs. Unwin could associate, or to whom she could look for help in sickness or other need. The house in which the pair took up their abode was dismal, prison-like, and tumble-down; when they left it, the competitors for the succession were a cobbler and a publican. It looked upon the Market Place, but it was in the close neighbourhood of Silver End, the worst part of Olney. In winter ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... rare exceptions, was wherever Susie was, and Susie was wherever it was fashionable to be. For a week or two in the summer, for a day or two at Easter, they went down to Devonshire; and Anna might wander about the old house and grounds as she chose, and feel how much better she had loved it in its tumble-down state, the state she had known as a child, when her mother lived there and was happy. Everything was aggressively spruce now, indoors and out. Susie's money and Susie's taste had rubbed off all the mellowness and all the romance. Anna was glad to leave it again, and be ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... along the path I was brought to a clear stand, and had to rub my eyes. There was a wall in front of me, the path passing it by a gap; it was tumble-down, and plainly very old, but built of big stones very well laid; and there is no native alive to-day upon that island that could dream of such a piece of building. Along all the top of it was a line of queer figures, idols or scarecrows, or what not. They ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tumble-down town walked every type of Gallipoli campaigner: British Tommies, grousing and cheerful; Australians, remarkable for their physique; deep-brown Maoris; bearded Frenchmen in baggy trousers; shining and ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... a boat with a cabin on it, and sat on its roof on decrepit cane chairs, and the rowers below with makeshift oars gradually pulled us up and down the face of the Ghats—what oars, and what a ramshackle tub of a boat—too old and tumble-down for a ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... that could not talk and chatter like one. Your having lost your eye in your vocation is an honour to you, and you may be proud of it, and glory in it. But their sticking me down in the middle of their dung, where I was forced to lie like a tumble-down sheaf, or a truss of hay,—it has knockt half a dozen nails into my coffin. 'Conrad! Conrad! ninnyhammer! sack of straw!' so it seemed that everything was shouting in my ears. I have now seen the miserable, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... her shift, she thrice crossed the King's Highway and was thus married to avoid payment of her first husband's debts. It is not far from the old Church Foundation of St. Paul's of Narragansett, and the tumble-down house of Sexton Martin Read, the prince of Narragansett weavers in ante-Revolutionary days. Weaver Rose learned to weave from his grandfather, who was ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... centuries, the Chinese woman shows no ability to improve the squalor of her surroundings. She passes her life in a dark, smoke-filled dwelling with broken furniture and a mud floor, together with pigs, chickens and babies enjoying a limited sphere of action under the tables and chairs, or in the tumble-down courtyard without. Her work is actually never done and a Chinese bride, bright and attractive at twenty, will be ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... On that terrible night Daddy Neptune had stood just where the easel was standing now; over there by the tumble-down chicken house, Jake had fallen; and the space that was now green with grass had been full of vengeful men, and howling dogs, and trampling horses. Peter took the sketch from her, looked at it for a long moment, and, as briefly as he could, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... in a little villa, the roof of which is in sight from my sunny terrace in the Villa Nardi, just to the left of the square old convent tower, rising there out of the silver olive-boughs,—a tumble-down sort of villa, with a flat roof and odd angles and parapets, in the midst of a thrifty but small grove of lemons and oranges. They were poor enough, or would be in any country where physical wants are greater than here, and yet did not belong to that ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... three times on a door of a tumble-down shack. Cautiously it was opened a few inches. There ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... horse-stealing. Straggling settlers were shot. A chief, Titokowaru, hitherto insignificant, became the head and front of the resistance. In June a sudden attack was made by his people upon some militia holding a tumble-down redoubt—an attack so desperate that out of twenty-three in the work, only six remained unwounded when help came, after two hours' manful resistance. Colonel McDonnell, then in command on the coast, had proved his dash and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... tumble-down cottages, inclosure's planked round, gardens, green shutters, wine-trade signs painted in red letters, acacia trees in front of the doors, old summer arbors giving way on one side, bits of walls dazzlingly white, then some straight rows of manufactories, brick buildings ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... day, more than thirty years before, when it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the puppy by a genuine fear of life, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... parting greeting. She walked with a proud, defiant step, like a martyr to the Coliseum, but her strength was exhausted; she sank on the sofa in her blue room, as if she were ready to faint, and sat there with her eyes fixed on the tumble-down summer-house, where her daughter was ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... The Miller's widow was an old deaf woman, who lived quite alone, in a little, tumble-down cottage, just off the road, on a lonely hillside. The foot-path that Blasi took, led near her dwelling. The woman was an aunt of Jost's, and had known better days when her husband was alive; but now she had fallen into poverty, and had grown sour and bitter, ...
— Veronica And Other Friends - Two Stories For Children • Johanna (Heusser) Spyri
... about the courtyard, shunned by some, glared at by others, but watched by all, and practically at the mercy of the first casual ragamuffin with a chopper, in there. He took possession of a small tumble-down shed to sleep in; the effluvia of filth and rotten matter incommoded him greatly: it seems he had not lost his appetite though, because—he told me—he had been hungry all the blessed time. Now and again "some fussy ass" deputed ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... that we stepped at once from the small front court into the drawing-room, from which a door opened into a stone kitchen. The rest of the accommodation corresponded with this primitive mode of entrance; the whole place was in what is commonly called a "tumble-down" condition: there was certainly plenty of garden, and two large meadows, but, like the rest of the place, they were sadly out of order. When we said it was not at all the house we had expected to find from reading the advertisement, we asked what sort ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... dinginess, and the faded, patched chintz sofa, that was not only comfortable, but respectable, in the old wainscoted sitting-room, has suddenly turned into "an object," when lang syne goes by the board and the heirloom is incontinently set adrift. Undertake to move from this tumble-down old house, strewn thick with the dbris of many generations, into a tumble-up, peaky, perky, plastery, shingly, stary new one, that is not half finished, and never will be, and good enough for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... altogether, here, Miss," said Daddy Darwin, looking wistfully at the tumble-down house ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... sycamore trees, i. e., when the latter leave out, as they will soon. The soil is a fine sand, very like ashes, and the streets are ankle-deep with it already, wherever the grass doesn't grow. Dilapidated fences, tumble-down outbuildings, untrimmed trees with lots of dead branches, weedy walks and gardens and a general appearance of unthrift attendant upon the best of slaveholding towns, was aggravated here by the desolated houses, surrounded by heaps of broken furniture and broken wine and beer ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... facing you. Two pollarded acacias are planted near the door of the inn, above the lintel of which a painted board scribbled over with irregular lettering invites the traveller to enter. A wooden verandah, with tumble-down roof and worm-eaten supporting beams, runs along two sides of the house, and from the roof hang a number of gaily-coloured and decorated ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... him twice up the main street, yelling and whooping like a pack of wild Indians. A queer awry figure stuck its head from the window of a tumble-down shop and, seeing the cause of the disturbance, ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... the tumble-down stables, near which a squealing white stallion with long, red-dyed tail was tied to a peepul tree. Its rider, a blue-coated sowar, or cavalryman, with bare feet thrust into heelless native slippers, ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... We landed and found ourselves in the midst of a forsaken little frontier town. A shambling shack bore the legend, "Store," with the "S" looking backward—perhaps toward dead municipal hopes. A few tumble-down frame and log shanties sprawled up the desultory grass-grown main street, at one end of which dwelt a Mandan Indian family in the ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... old tumble-down lodge at the gates. It was inhabited by a very poor man, who, for the sake of getting a shelter over his head, now and then undertook to clean up and do odd jobs in the Rosendale gardens. Mrs. Bertram thought it well to have some ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... Moses, "there's somethin in that too. David's dreadful fond of old stones, and old bones, and tumble-down edifices, and old sticks an weeds. Why, he's all the time collectin; an if he keeps on, his baggage'll become nothin ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... map of a Southern railroad, on one side of which were some highly-colored pictures. The first showed the tumble-down cabin of a colored man, himself, wife and boy carrying from it their few belongings to the favored land of promise. The next picture shows him and his family in the woods in his new location, getting ready to build his house. The third picture represents ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... crowd and silently wended our way through a neighboring alley, at the head of which stood a tumble-down old barn, owned by one Ezra Wingate. In former days this was the stable of the mail-coach that ran between Rivermouth and Boston. When the railroad superseded that primitive mode of travel, the lumbering vehicle was rolled in the barn, and there ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... train was at rest, and the officers—who had not been seen during the journey—turned out in resplendent plumery. The station—in those days a tumble-down barrack—was already crowded with soldiery. The Caribees were aligned along the track, the officers so bewildered by the confusion that it was by a miracle some of the groups of moving men were not run over by the backing engines. After an interminable ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... forth and descended to the harbour. It was a considerable basin, lying among sandhills, and surrounded with patches of down, ancient ruinous lumber, and tumble-down slums of the town. Many decked ships and many open boats either lay there at anchor, or had been drawn up on the beach. A long duration of bad weather had driven them from the high seas into the shelter of the port; and the great trooping of black clouds, and the cold ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sublime. One in particular of these winter neighbors, a somewhat speculative thinker with whom I had often conversed, was a firm believer in the cataclysmic origin of the Valley; and I now jokingly remarked that his wild tumble-down-and-engulfment hypothesis might soon be proved, since these underground rumblings and shakings might be the forerunners of another Yosemite-making cataclysm, which would perhaps double the depth of the Valley ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... for little Lucy Rose, but it was Jim Patterson who found her, and in the most unlikely of places. A forlorn pair with a multiplicity of forlorn children lived in a tumble-down house about half a mile from the grove. The man's name was Silas Thomas, and his wife's was Sarah. Poor Sarah had lost a large part of the small wit she had originally owned several years before, when her youngest daughter, aged four, died. All the babies ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in an old tumble-down house jest outside of Jonesville. The father wuz, I couldn't deny, a shiftless sort of a chap, good-natured, always ready to obleege a neighbor, but he hadn'nt no faculty. And I don't know, come to think of it, as anybody is any more to blame if they are born without a faculty, than if they are ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley |
