"Cobwebbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pale yellow light over the cobwebbed brick walls, and the woman standing there. He looked at her. She was young, in deadly earnest; her faded eyes, and wet, ragged figure caught from their frantic eagerness a power akin ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... in a tense and excitable condition, now heightened to fever by the two cobwebbed mysteries standing against the wall, but the imperative rattle of Joel's cane on the desk quickly induced ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... of sitting in the high-backed, creaking armchair. Uncleanness met the eye on every side—in the one greasy plate, on which lay a lump of repulsive-looking food; in the broken-mouthed jug, which reeked with the smell of stale beer; in the window, whose bemired and cobwebbed panes kept out more light than they admitted; in the ceiling, between whose smoke-grimed rafters large rents allowed many an abomination to drop down from the crowded room above; in the three-legged table, which, being loose in all its decaying joints, reeled to and fro at ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... the orchard they creep back, Along by the fences, behind the stack, 5 And one by one, through a hole in the wall, In under the dusty barn they crawl, Dressed in their Sunday garments all. And a very astonishing sight was that, When each in his cobwebbed coat and hat 10 Came up through the ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... herself she was first aware of a heavily beamed cobwebbed roof, of a dim lantern beside her, of the stifling nearness of kegs and bales and boxes, and then of a very familiar figure kneeling beside her ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... grace and determined to see a little more. I opened a side-door, and entered a large room, where were, in a corner, some rusty and cobwebbed bird-cages, but nothing more. It was a wainscoted room, but a white mildew stained the panels. I looked from the window: it commanded that dismal, weed-choked quadrangle into which I had once looked from another ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... open the stable-door below me. I could hear them pounding and grumbling. Just as I heard them say, "That's it. The bar lifts up. There you are"—showing that they had found how to open the door—I came to a little door at the back, a little rotten door, locked and bolted with rusty cobwebbed iron. Very cautiously I turned the lock and drew the bolts back. The latch creaked under my thumb for the first time in many years. I was outside the door on a little, rotten, wooden landing, from which a flight ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... to the recipe, ancient in Spain, And here's to the basket of cobwebbed champagne. Again to the genius who grows the sharp spice, But ten times to King Winter who furnishes ice; For to all the mad millions Who dance at cotillons There's naught like the clink and the clank and the crunch Of ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... her crying suggested a signal which he never answered. At any rate, I had to find Maria. So I slipped out. I thought I heard her at the lake. She wasn't there. I was sure I would trap her at the deserted house, for the diffused glow of the light we had seen proved that it had come through the cobwebbed windows of the cellar, which are set in little wells below the level of the ground. The cellar explained also how she had turned her flashlight off and slipped through the hall and out while we searched the rooms. She hadn't ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... on his arm tightened. "I knew—somehow. I remember Hungary—its ancient horror. My father inherited an ancient castle. I remember long cold corridors and sticky dungeons, and cobwebbed rooms thick with dust. My real name is Burhmann. I changed it because I thought Bailey ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... a dead, heavy chill which the fire burning in the great fireplace at the other end of the vast room was powerless to lighten. The place was half underground, and what light entered was filtered through dusty and cobwebbed panes of leaded glass set high under the vaulted roof. The windows partially lighted the heavy oak beams which supported the ceiling, but the lower parts of the room lay in deep shadow. Emblems and rude pictures were scratched and chalked on the walls, ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... them into what had once been the garden room, where the lady of the house had arranged her flowers, and the tennis racquets and croquet mallets had been kept. It was very dusty, and on the cobwebbed walls still hung a few soiled garden overalls. A door beyond opened into a huge murky hall, murky, for the windows were shuttered, and the only light came through things like port-holes far up in the wall. Dougal, who seemed to know his ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... all the myths with which the biography of Rashi is cobwebbed, one finds, not a varied life, rich in incident, but an entirely intellectual life, whose ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... Kenneth Thornton as if there were sunlight in one corner of that cobwebbed room with its unwashed windows and its stale smells, and elsewhere hung the murk of little hope. A few staunch friends, at least, he had, but they were friends among enemies, and he steeled himself for ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... party—he was a ludicrous figure in the bath of late sunshine that brought out every uncomely item of the picture. Preoccupied and distraught as I was, I saw how the dust from the stable floor floated in golden clouds to the cobwebbed rafters, as the sun struck past the man in the doorway and ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... now and then, as it did, for that matter, to the Disciples and their Master. In my younger days they used to bring up the famous old wines, the White-top, the Juno, the Eclipse, the Essex Junior, and the rest, in their old cobwebbed, dusty bottles. The resurrection of one of these old sepulchred dignitaries had something of solemnity about it; it was like the disinterment of a king; the bringing to light of the Royal Martyr King Charles I., for instance, that Sir Henry Halford ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... The Precinct. Rochester The Cyclists Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M. Astigmatism The Coal Picker Storm-Racked Convalescence Patience Apology A Petition A Blockhead Stupidity Irony Happiness The Last Quarter of the Moon A Tale of Starvation The Foreigner ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... champagne!" exclaimed poor De Vlierbeck, "and not another drop of wine in my house but what is in this last bottle of claret! What shall I do? what can I do?" continued he, as he held the cobwebbed bottle in one hand and stroked his chin with the other. "But no matter: there's no time for reflection: the die is cast, and may God help ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... in, managed to prop a sack against the small cobwebbed window, fastened the door with a rusty bolt, and brought out an electric torch he always carried in ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... we get past it and look back at it, all hideous. Like some of those painted canvases upon the theatre-stage: seen from this side, with the delusive brilliancy of the footlights thrown upon them, they look beautiful works of art; seen at the back, dirty and cobwebbed canvas, all splashes and spots and uglinesses. Let us be thankful if memory can show us the reverse side of the temptations that on the near ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... conducting his search. He knocked the mud off his boots loudly on the doorsill before proceeding to attach the padlock to the outer door. He searched the loom-room, lighting a candle and peering into all its cobwebbed corners. He examined the rooms lately inhabited, unlocking and locking doors behind him noisily with increasing confidence in the good old house's emptiness. Still, in the fireplace in the loom-room there ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... the pyramids; and I, with one hand holding my lamp over head, and with the other pointing out, in the obscurity, the hoar mass of the chimney, seemed some Arab guide, showing the cobwebbed mausoleum of the great ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... friendly, interested in their nurseries and their gardens and anxious to reach their own firesides for tea. When Nancy and Bert went out with the Fieldings they had a different experience; they had dinners that were works of art, the finest box in the theatre, and wines that came cobwebbed and dusty to ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... of late afternoon crept through the cobwebbed window, and Miss Evelina stirred uneasily in her sleep. The mocking dream vanished and she awoke to feel, as always, the iron, icy hand that unmercifully clutched her heart. The room was cold and she shivered as she lay beneath her ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... orchard they creep back, Along by the fences, behind the stack, And one by one, through a hole in the wall, In under the dusty barn they crawl, Dressed in their Sunday garments all; And a very astonishing sight was that, When each in his cobwebbed coat and hat Came up through the floor like an ancient rat. And there they hid; and Reuben slid The fastenings back, and the door undid. "Keep dark," said he, "While I squint an' see what the' ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... desolate courts of the old palaces, where in cobwebbed galleries and silent chambers the Flemish ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... warehouse, with narrow, dark, cobwebbed windows, and wide, rusty iron shutters, which, as the bleak October wind swept up old Long Wharf, swung slowly on their hinges with a sharp, grating creak. I heard them in my boyhood. Perched on a tall stool at that old desk, I used to listen, in the long winter nights, to those ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... long, weary mornings, when the sun, pouring through the curtainless south windows a great blaze upon the oaken floor, lights up for Reuben only the cobwebbed corners, the faded roundabouts of fellow-martyrs, the dismal figures of Daboll, the shining tail-coat of Master Brummem, as he stalks up and down from hour to hour, collecting in this way his scattered thoughts for some new argumentative thrust of the quill ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... wind, as though it might fall apart from weakness and topple into the water. The stream plunged over the dam with a sullen roar, much as if it chafed at the barrier and longed to sweep it altogether from its course and carry its timbers with it. Once the lightning flashed into and through all the cobwebbed window-panes, and the mill gave out a ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... prevent him from crushing his hat against the low, cobwebbed ceiling, and he gave vent to a very strong but quiet anathema, which glided quietly and audibly into the remark, "Confounded ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... swine and the stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves, as curious and remote in their way, in their ideas and fears and wants and tragedies, as the brutes and feathered stock that they tended. It seemed to Elaine as if a musty store of old-world children's books had been fetched down from some cobwebbed lumber- room and brought to life. Sitting there in the little paddock, grown thickly with tall weeds and rank grasses, and shadowed by the weather-beaten old grey barn, listening to this chronicle of wonderful ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... was in the single sleeping room of the house. It contained another bed like his own, of rough macana palm strips, over which lay a straw mat and a thin red blanket. Bed springs were unknown in Simiti. On the rude door, cobwebbed and dusty, a scorpion clung torpidly. From the room beyond he heard subdued voices. His head and limbs ached dully; and frightful memories of the river trip and the awful journey from Badillo sickened him. With painful exertion he stood upon the moist dirt floor and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring bomb- shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim figures ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he heard this, gazed thoughtfully at the cobwebbed ceiling. There was yet no call for him to go to the front, and he would stay to match his wits against those of the great Mr. Sefton; he had been drawn unconsciously into a conflict—a conflict of which ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... nature—he should often have given way to paroxysms of anger. Still he kept on working. Then all of a sudden the transplendent sun sailed from its clouds and poured upon him its genial beams. He had at last found the golden Chersonese. His pockets, so long cobwebbed, now bulged with money. Publishers, who had been coy, now fought for him. All the world—or nearly all—sang his praises. [502] Lastly came the K.C.M.G., an honour that was conferred upon him owing in large measure to the noble persistency ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... me Spoke, as they grayly gazed, —First hills to speak so yet! The thin-edged breezes blew me What I, though cobwebbed, crazed, Was never to forget, My friend, Was ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... was that?" Handlon whispered. He knew it was no parrot's voice. This was a far deeper sound than that, a sound louder than anything a parrot's throat could produce. It came from the direction of a ruinous stall over near a cobwebbed window. As Perry started fearfully toward this, there issued from it a curious scraping sound, followed by a fall that shook the floor, and a threshing as of hoofs. Now the great voice could be heard again, this time uttering what ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... benches, were homespun-clad mountain children. A high-shouldered, elderly man sat at a table near the deep fireplace, where a huge backlog was smouldering. Through the cobwebbed window-panes the ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... in the most careful and elaborate manner, the wax-topped corks of certain be-cobwebbed bottles that had been delivered the night before by no less a person than Duncan's own agent, and to one of which was attached Fitz's visiting card bearing his compliments and best wishes. The contents of these crusted bottles ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... before him, served with almost incredible despatch—a small cobwebbed bottle and a glass of quaint shape, on which were beautifully emblazoned a coronet and fleur-de-lis. He drank slowly and deliberately. When he set the glass down ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... attractions! Twenty-five acres of arable land, stretching to the south; a grand old barn, with dusty, cobwebbed, hay-filled lofts, stalls for two horses and five cows; hen houses, with plenty of room to carry out a long-cherished plan of starting a ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... weary, would much rather have found himself in bed, but this desertion of good company the Baron would noways allow. So under the low cobwebbed roof of Lucky Macleary's kitchen the four gentlemen sat down to "taste the sweets of the night." But it was not long before the wine began to do its work in their heads. Each one of them, Edward excepted, ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... always valued myself on my fidelity, and I did not shrink. If not to-day, to-morrow; if not this time, next time. The dice do not always turn up aces. Bracing myself, therefore, to the occasion, I crept, as soon as the house was quiet, to the window, a small, square, open lattice, much cobwebbed, and partly stuffed with hay. I looked out. The village seemed to be asleep. The dark branches of trees hung a few feet away, and almost obscured a grey, cloudy sky, through which a wet moon sailed drearily. Looking downwards, I could ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... fascination. Therefore she arrayed herself in one of her most magnificent Paris gowns; the members of her household and eight servants were called in and the ceremony was duly performed by Dr. Bogart. A banquet followed. A dozen cobwebbed bottles of wine were brought up from the cellar, and the marriage feast went on merrily ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... place was his almonry and cloister in one: here, after looking to the feeding of his four-footed dependants, the celibate would walk and meditate of an evening till the moon's rays streamed in through the cobwebbed windows, or total darkness ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... chair I noticed high up in the roof an old cobwebbed window, the top of which was standing open for purposes of ventilation. It looked as if it had not been ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... court". Something of the nature of a rood-screen, boarded solidly up to a height of about four feet, divided the long single room of the cottage; we, with the rest of the public, were penned in the division nearest the door. The cobwebbed boards of the loft overhead almost rested on our hats; the public, not being provided with seats by the Government, shuffled on the earthen floor and unaffectedly rested on us and each other. Within the rood-screen two magistrates sat at ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... dinner as to a ceremony. It was indeed a ceremony filled for her with some occult, sacred, meaning that she could not put into words. A feast symbolical. Starling was sent to the wine-cellar to bring back a cobwebbed Madeira near a century old, brought out on rare occasions in the family. And Hugh, when his glass was filled, looked at his wife and raised it in silence to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... determined to give him a funeral with even more than grand-ducal measure of lugubrious magnificence. The place of his repose was marked out for him as officiously as if it had been the delimitation of a kingdom, in the ducal burial vault, through the cobwebbed windows of which, from the garden where he played as a child, the young Duke had often peered at the faded glories of the immense coroneted coffins, the oldest shedding their velvet tatters around them. Surrounded ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... hand that rested for a moment on David Raine's knee was red and knotted. It was the hand of a man who had lived his life in struggling with the wilderness. And the face, too, was of such a man; a face coloured and toughened by the tannin of wind and blizzard and hot northern sun, with eyes cobwebbed about by a myriad of fine lines that spoke of years spent under the strain of those things. He was not a large man. He was shorter than David Raine. There was a slight droop to his shoulders. Yet about him there was a strength, a suppressed energy ready to act, ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... Ames, the school board secretary, took Mel down to the District Office and offered to help look for the records. The old building was stifling hot and dusty with summer disuse. But down in the cool, cobwebbed basement they found it.... Alice's records from the third grade on up through the ninth. On every one: heart, o.k.; lungs, normal. Pulse and blood pressure readings were on ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... scan it. The walls and ceiling were rough and irregular; it was natural instead of excavated. Only the floor had been leveled smooth. There were a lot of things in it, machinery and vehicles, all battered and in poor condition, dusty and cobwebbed: the spaceport junkheap. A passage, still large enough for one of the gunboats, led deeper into the mountain toward the crater. They sent the snooper in and, after ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the wine- cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury, which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. Longfellow once spoke of certain old ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of servants—of acquaintances—revolved around us. The house was unchanged, the living identically the same, even to the one bottle of fine wine per day, carefully withdrawn from the cobwebbed cellar by Morton, and as carefully decanted ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... an air of mystery, and this air of mystery extended to his place of business. It was dark and dirty and ill-kept. On the brightest summer day the sunlight stole vaguely in through grimy cobwebbed windows. The dust of years had settled deep on unused shelves and, in abandoned corners, and whole days were said to pass when no one but the ancient merchant himself entered the building. Yet in spite of ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... his face toward the roof, letting his eyes sweep the cobwebbed net, the old coats upon the wall; and lastly to the stove, out of the top of ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... strange reading in the library of the Princeton Theological College. There was in one corner in a waste-room at least two cart-loads of old books in a cobwebbed dusty pile. Out of that pile I raked the thirteenth known copy of Blind Harry's famed poem, a black-letter Euphues Lely, an Erra Pater (a very weak-minded friend actually shamed me out of making a copy of this great curiosity, telling me it was silly ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... had ever been present there. This was down toward Tuttletown. In the country neighborhood thereabouts, along the dusty roads, one found at intervals the prettiest little cottage homes, snug and cozy, and so cobwebbed with vines snowed thick with roses that the doors and windows were wholly hidden from sight—sign that these were deserted homes, forsaken years ago by defeated and disappointed families who could neither sell them nor give them away. Now and then, half ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... excellent. When the feet are sore and swollen, and when the pack-straps cut the shoulder like a knife, the journey may be tiring, but the glorious rest in a musty old barn, with creaking stairs and cobwebbed rafters, amply compensates for all the strain ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... the sub-current of suggestion did not definitely fix itself in his mind until he remembered it later. He was looking into each vacant open doorway, seeing the still moonlight starkly white upon the floor; the cobwebbed and broken window-panes, through which a section of leafless trees beyond was visible; bits of furniture here and there, broken by the vandalism of the guerillas. Now and then a scurrying movement told of ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... there; the light filtered dimly through the diamond spaces, and the adventurer, crawling on hands and knees, bumped into a shadowy pile of flower-pots, sneezed violently and grovelled wrathfully among the ruins for at least five minutes, helplessly confused. Quite by accident she knocked her cobwebbed head against a narrow, outward swinging window, seized it thankfully, and plunged through it. Hanging a moment by her grimy hands she swayed, a little fearfully, then dropped with a quick breath to the concrete floor beneath, ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... large house of a dirty, faded appearance; the cobwebbed windows blocked up; the door with a broken knocker and a sad want of paint. It is evidently the ci-devant residence of a Birmingham manufacturer of the old school, before the suburbs of Edgbaston and Handsworth sprang up, now turned into a warehouse or receptacle for lumber. As to apply ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... after hour the mule- power engine drove saws, with teeth sharper than those of time, through the pine boards that soon became crates for the round quart baskets. These crates were painted green, marked with Mr. Young's name, and piled to the lofty, cobwebbed ceiling. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... place for idle eyes and ears, A cobwebbed nook of dreams; Left by the stream whose waves are years The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various |
