"Dingy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... utter shame." During this year he took a house at Hammersmith, Upper Mall, the garden of which ran down to the Thames, but still retained his residence in Harley Street. In 1812 he first occupied the house No. 47 Queen Anne Street, and this house he retained for forty years. It was dull, dingy, unpainted, weather-beaten, sooty, with unwashed windows and shaky doors, and seemed the very abode of poverty, and yet when Turner died his estate was sworn as under one hundred and forty thousand pounds—seven hundred thousand dollars. When Turner's ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... attic, Or in some dingy lane— Their aprons full of weeds or flowers Gathered in sun ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... school—the grotesque and miserable teachers, the ferocious and cynical pupils, the dingy, dusty, and ink-stained rooms—saddened and displeased Amedee. Although very intelligent, he was disgusted with the sort of instruction there, which was served out in portions, like soldier's rations, and would have lost courage but for his little friend, Louise ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... submarine. boat, pinnace, launch; life boat, long boat, jolly boat, bum boat, fly boat, cock boat, ferry boat, canal boat; swamp boat, ark, bully, battery, bateau [Can.], broadhorn^, dory, droger^, drogher; dugout, durham boat, flatboat, galiot^; shallop^, gig, funny, skiff, dingy, scow, cockleshell, wherry, coble^, punt, cog, kedge, lerret^; eight oar, four oar, pair oar; randan^; outrigger; float, raft, pontoon; prame^; iceboat, ice canoe, ice yacht. catamaran, hydroplane, hovercraft, coracle, gondola, carvel^, caravel; felucca, caique^, canoe, birch bark canoe, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dormitory system in all its bearings, but only in so far as it directly affects the student. The fact is significant that a large majority of our collegians pass their term of four years, vacations excepted, in practical seclusion. They are gathered in large numbers in dingy and untidy caravanseries, where the youthful spirit is unchecked by the usual obligations to respect private property and individual quiet. President Porter, in his work on The American Colleges, endeavors to prove that the dormitory system is, upon the whole, favorable ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... our fighting told the mate what was happening, and he put food and water and a sail in the small dingy, which was so small that it was no more than twelve feet long. We came down upon the schooner, a thousand men, covering the lagoon with our canoes. Also, we were blowing conch shells, singing war songs, and striking the sides ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... success of their domestic plans, to have time for home-sickness. But when the first arrangements were made—when the taste and skill of Graeme, and the inexhaustible strength of their new maid, Nelly Anderson, had changed the dingy house into as bright and pleasant a place as might well be in a city street, then came the long days and the weariness. Then came upon Graeme that which Janet had predicted, when she so earnestly set her face against their going away from ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... variegated dyes! These are the rainbow colors of the skies, That heaven has shed upon me con amore— A Bird of Paradise?—a pretty story! I am that Saintly Fowl, thou paltry chick! Look at my crown of glory! Thou dingy, dirty, dabbled, draggled jill!" And off goes Partlett, wriggling from a kick, With bleeding scalp laid open by ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the river, and was in excellent spirits. Game was in great demand, and he looked hopefully for good sales on the morrow. After their scanty meal he picked up the paper and began to read. Silence reigned in the little dingy shanty for some time, broken only by the ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... troopers stopped joking, and watched the squad of nine and the interpreter file down the bank to visit the three hundred. The dingy overcoats and the bright green shawl passed into the thicket, and the General looked at his watch. Along the bend of the stream clear noises tinkled from the water ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... bringing thrills of some strange, remote reality they had never known at first-hand. They busied themselves at once. While Tim unbuttoned the severe black coat and pulled it off, Judy brought a jacket of dingy tweed from behind a curtain in the corner, and stood on a chair to help the figure put it on. All knew their duties; the performance went like clockwork. And Maria sat and watched in helpful silence. There was a certain air about her as though she ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... Denham family. All had accepted their lot with uncomplaining resignation, until Richard resolved he would at least have a fight for it. And now the fight had been won. Denham sat in his office staring at the dingy wall-paper so long, that Rogers, the chief clerk, put his head in and said ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... a slight shiver, she opened her saddle bags and drew out the dress she meant to wear—a dingy, earth-colored thing of gingham. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... at his heels, ran off across the cow-pasture, tumbled over the fence, and followed the direction that Jim had taken and that Mrs. Green had pointed, leading to the dingy yellow house. ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... humble usher at Milner's school. The kindly feelings of old times revived, and he accosted him with cordial familiarity, though the youth may have found some difficulty in recognizing in the personage, arrayed, perhaps, in garments of Tyrian dye, the dingy pedagogue of the Milners. "Come, my boy," cried Goldsmith, as if still speaking to a schoolboy, "Come, Sam, I am delighted to see you. I must treat you to something—what shall it be? Will you have some apples?" glancing at an old woman's stall; then, recollecting the print-shop window: ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... of the first to be built on the trail, and passing through the big front room in which two or three men were lounging, the marshal led his guests to his inner office and sleeping room. A fire was blazing in a big stone fireplace. Skins and dingy blankets were scattered about, and on the mantle stood a ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... arrival. The inn's exterior corresponded with its interior. Long, and consisting only of two storeys, the building had its lower half destitute of stucco; with the result that the dark-red bricks, originally more or less dingy, had grown yet dingier under the influence of atmospheric changes. As for the upper half of the building, it was, of course, painted the usual tint of unfading yellow. Within, on the ground floor, there stood a number of benches heaped with horse-collars, rope, and sheepskins; while ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... back through the city, and walked along watching the Zopilotes—great turkey-buzzards—with their bald heads and foul dingy-black plumage. They were sitting in compact rows on parapets of houses and churches, and seemed specially to affect the cross of the cathedral, where they perched, two on each arm, and some on the top. When some offal was thrown into the streets, they came down leisurely ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... barred and bolted in dingy bulkheads, must have opened into regions full of interest to ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... 8th of February, I had a peep at the House of Representatives of the State of Louisiana, then in session at New Orleans. The room, a dark and dingy-looking place, was fitted up with desks and seats in the form of the letter D. A desk and a spittoon were allowed to each honourable member,—the latter article being deemed as necessary as the former. Whether smoking was suffered during ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught in the fields after it was come to its full colours. In about a year it began to look dingy; and, blackening every succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hempseed. Such influence has food on the colour of animals! The pied and mottled colours of domesticated animals are supposed to be owing to high, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... have you got in your beak?' asked a dingy London Sparrow of another, just as dingy ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... receive her ladyship, who fatly rolled in, her tarnished hat askew, her torn thrice-dingy silks clutched up in ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... up Kearney street toward the Hotel Marseillaise. In their blood, a little whipped already by the two cocktails which they had felt able to afford even while they debated over the price of dinner, ran all the sparkling currents of youth. They drew on past Sutler Street to Adventurer's Lane, the dingy section of that street wherein walked the treasure-farers of all the seven seas; and as they walked, Bertram began to speak of the things which lay close ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... party of eight assembled, and our appearance was the signal for the repast being ordered in. It was laid out in the entrance hall. The table was of massive mahogany, the chairs of the same material, with stuffed bottoms, covered with a dingy—coloured morocco, which might have been red once. But devil a dish of any kind was on the snow—white table—cloth when we sat down, and our situations, or the places we were expected to fill at the board, were only ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... scarcely six. They appeared to be the daughters of respectable people, probably of tradesmen in the neighbourhood. This school was in Lisson Grove, in the north-west of London; a spot not to be pictured from its name by those ignorant of the locality; in point of fact a dingy street, with a mixture of shops and private houses. On the front door was a plate displaying Miss Rutherford's name,—nothing more. That lady herself was middle-aged, grave at all times, kindly, and, be it added, fairly competent ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... Americans adjourned for coffee to Ciret's, a little cafe in the village which nestles among the hills not far from the camp. The cafe itself was like any one of thousands of French provincial restaurants. There was a great dingy common room, with a sanded brick floor, and faded streamers of tricolor paper festooned in curious patterns from the smoky ceiling. The kitchen was clean, and filled with the appetizing odor of good cooking. Beyond ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... mere. It is our oldest road, and now has many bypaths. Near Poverty Corner is a building which recently was dismissed with a brief, humorous reference in a new guide to our City—a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a brick front topped by a clock-face: Fenchurch Street Station. Beyond its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would guess to be at the end of it. The train runs over a wilderness of tiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked and scored as though by a withering ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... revealed to them Margaret, not very far off, not in Siberia nor Teheran, but simply in Victoria Square, Pimlico, S.W. There, in a bedroom, not more than commonly dingy, on the drawing-room floor, with the rattling old green Venetian blinds drawn down, Margaret would have been displayed. The testimony of a cloud of witnesses, in the form of phials and medical vessels, ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... who have been on the other side of the Channel but have found their way along the Boulevards to the Porte St Denis, and have stared first of all at that dingy monument of Ludovican pride, and then have stared down the Rue St Denis, and then have stared up the Rue du Faubourg St Denis; but very few are ever tempted to turn either to the right hand or to the left, and so they generally poke on to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... silent awhile, gazing at the steamer's smoke trail which stretched far back, a dingy smear on the blueness, across the shining lake; and the contractor watched him with a certain sympathy which, however, he carefully refrained from expressing. There had been a time in his career when it had seemed that every man of influence in his profession and all ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... late hours and excitement she was completely worn out. She wanted to be in New York, and failing that she wanted Paul West to come and talk New York to her, and bring her roses for the big brass bowl that she had found in a dingy little shop in the Russian quarter. She threw her good resolutions to the winds, received Miss Hale's thanks for the violets very coldly, and begged Betty to forget the sentimental letter that she had written ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... smell made his heart sink within him, and his stomach heave; and his weary body, and more weary soul, gave themselves up helplessly to the depressing influence of that doleful place. The black bank of dingy leathern leaves above his head, the endless labyrinth of stems and withes (for every bough had lowered its own living cord, to take fresh hold of the foul soil below); the web of roots, which stretched ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... enter, that of the Faubourg St. Denis, presents a strange contrast to the dark uniformity of a London street, where everything, in the dingy and smoky atmosphere, looks as though it were painted in India-ink—black houses, black passengers, and black sky. Here, on the contrary, is a thousand times more life and color. Before you, shining in the sun, is a long glistening line of GUTTER,—not a very pleasing object in a city, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... green, close-clipped lawn glistening under a perpetual play of water, its great beds of white and green and cardinal foliage plants, its shut-in porches, its awnings, its flowering shrubs, its vines, its heavy iron fence. He looked with bitter attentiveness at the dingy frame cottage he was approaching, noticing each homely detail—the dish-towels spread on the bushes in the back yard, the mop hanging by the door, the kerosene can under the step, the lean hen scuttling away under the currant bushes, the vegetable garden lying parched and dry along the fence. There ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... over or to change one's scheme of life. Yet we did get excited over it, daily, and it had suddenly become a main factor in our problem of life. The thought of going back to "six rooms and improvements," with clanging bells and crashing wheels, and with an expanse of dingy roofs for scenery, became daily less attractive. True, we would have to spend a good deal more money on the old house to fit it for cold weather, but then there would be ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... cab pulled up in a narrow, ill-lit street, at the open door of a dingy house. Instructing the cabman to wait, they hustled upstairs, to be confronted at the top by a man who took a shilling from each, and then was not sure whether he would admit them. He didn't seem to like their form exactly, and muttered ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... backing into one shop or running ahead into another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he swung round countless corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare bazaar. Overhead, a slit of cloudy sky showed rarely; for the most part, he swayed along indoors, beneath a dingy lattice roof. All points of the compass vanished; all streets remained alike,—the same endless vista of mystic characters, red, black, and gold, on narrow suspended tablets, under which flowed the same current of pig-tailed men in blue and dirty white. From every shop, the same yellow faces ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Cards were anew issued to all those who had been formerly included in the invitation, and of course to Mr. Touchwood, as formerly a resident at the Well, and now in the neighbourhood; it being previously agreed among the ladies, that a Nabob, though sometimes a dingy or damaged commodity, was not to be rashly or unnecessarily neglected. As to the parson, he had been asked, of course, as an old acquaintance of the Mowbray house, not to be left out when the friends of the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... The dingy den off the Common-room was never used for anything except gowns. Its windows were ground glass; one could not see out of it, but one could hear almost every word on the gravel outside. A light and wary footstep came ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... had fled out of the fog was a little dingy tobacconist's shop opening on a narrow alley that runs from Holborn into Lincoln's-Inn Fields. It was kept by the baby farmer whom she had met at the house of Polly Love, and the memory of the address thrust upon her there had been her only resource on that day of crushing disappointment and that ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... up the dingy that was towing behind the barge, and he and Dick rowed the two boys ashore. Then he walked along with them to a spot where several craft were hauled up, pointing out to them the differences in their rig and build, and explained ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... a shabby, dingy cart, but a smart little house upon wheels, with white dimity curtains festooning the windows, and window-shutters of green picked out with panels of a staring red. Neither was it a poor caravan drawn by a single donkey or emaciated horse, for a pair of horses in pretty good condition were ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... hard earnings of a twelvemonth in as many hours, was considered frolicsome thoughtlessness, which was more than compensated by the throwing away of a purse of gold to some poor woman in distress.' Land-sharks and crimps beset the young sailor in every sea port; low music halls and dingy taverns and beer shops presented their attractions; and there the 'jolly tars' used to swallow their poisonous compounds, and roar out ribald songs, and dance their clumsy fandangoes with the vilest outcasts of society. 'It is a necessary ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... enchanted room, tenanted by the first fairy day-dreams of his genius, the day-school, where the master had already formed a good opinion of his parts, giving him Goldsmith's "Bee" as a keepsake. This pleasant land he left for a dingy house in a dingy London suburb, with squalor for companionship, no teaching but the teaching of the streets, and all around and above him the depressing hideous atmosphere of debt. With what inimitable humour and pathos has ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... appeared to much advantage, and now, with his long, lean, powerful body in splendid action, imbued with the relentless will of his rider, what a picture he presented! How he did run! With all that, the White Mustang made him look dingy and slow. Nevertheless, it was a critical time in the wild career of that king of horses. He had been penned in a space two hundred by five hundred yards, half of which was separated from him by a wide ditch, a yawning chasm that he had refused, and behind him, always keeping on ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... golden glaze) Shines like an angel-market. High aloft Over his couchant Lions, in a haze Shimmering and bland and soft, A dust of chrysoprase, Our Sailor takes the golden gaze Of the saluting sun, and flames superb, As once he flamed it on his ocean round. The dingy dreariness of the picture-place, Turned very nearly bright, Takes on a luminous transiency of grace, And shows no more a scandal to the ground. The very blind man pottering on the kerb, Among the posies ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... brilliant, vivid, glossy, fulgent, naif, lucent, glaring, garish, crystalline; intelligent, precocious, apt, acute, discerning, clever, smart, knowing; auspicious, propitious; illustrious, glorious. Antonyms: dull, lackluster, obscure, dim, opaque, murky, nebulous, dingy, tarnished, sullied. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... noticed his surroundings with eyes that were once more clear and rational, he saw that the dingy little grate had been opened and a bright fire was burning in it. The clothing he had left on the floor in a heap had been put away. The window shade no longer hung askew. He looked round half-expecting to see his Aunt Eunice or Flip, ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... with scarce visible features, seemingly kneaded (but not sufficiently pinched and modelled) out of the wet ashes of an auto da fe, in her black-and-white frock (how different from the dresses painted by Raphael and Titian!), dingy and gloomy enough for an abbess or a cameriera major, this childish personification of courtly dreariness, certainly born on an Ash Wednesday, becomes the principal strands for a marvellous tissue ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... and not very evenly trimmed—for his wife or daughter has performed the tonsure with a pair of rusty shears; and the longer locks seem changed in hue, as if his dingy wool hat did not sufficiently protect them against the wind and rain. Over his shoulder he carries a heavy rifle, heavier than a "Harper's ferry musket," running about "fifty to the pound." Around his neck are swung the powder-horn and ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... system he had been reading that he could not quite take in the wonderful success of the call. He followed Catherine's eager steps to the little square frame building a few blocks up Main Street, and turned the key she gave him. It was a dingy little room, all dirt and cobwebs. A few old straw hats and wire frames piled among some big green boxes indicated the last occupant's business, and a scurrying of tiny feet, only too clearly, the present occupants' nature. Catherine lifted her nose ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... and the use of soft coal, cause the buildings to appear dingy and rusty; but we like them all the better for that, as the city has a more foreign air, and, in some parts, quite ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... my 'Seraphim' volume, I don't complain of the 'Seagull' and 'Doves' and the simple verses, but exactly of the more ambitious ones. I have had to rewrite pages upon pages of that volume. Oh, such feeble rhymes, and turns of thought—such a dingy mistiness! Even Robert couldn't say a word for much of it. I took great pains with the whole, and made considerable portions new, only your favourites were not touched—not a word touched, I think, in the 'Seagull,' and scarcely a word ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... the sun shone brightly on pool and stream, and even lighted up the dingy corners of walled cities, as the Earl of March proceeded on foot from the castle to the port of Berwick, and embarked with ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... else than those of the very two Misses W. themselves; they lived close by, and frequently came to the store. Beneath our counter were endless packages, broken glass, refuse oils, rancid perfumes, dust, dirt, grease, charcoal, soap, and about everything else dingy and offensive to the eye and nose. The place afforded a wretched refuge for a hull so big and nice as our beau's, but there he was, much in our way too, with the mournful fact, for Charley, that if those "fine ladies" stayed less ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... rapier thrust Through the dingy school-house pane, A shining scimitar, free from rust, That cuts the cloud of the drifting dust, And scatters a golden rain; And the boy at the battered desk within Is dreaming a dream sublime, For study's a wrong, and school a ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and famous even twenty years ago throughout the south country. It is still there, I believe, although Zachary himself is dead and with him has departed most of the atmosphere of the place, and it is now smart and prosperous, although in those days it was dark and dingy enough. No one knew whence Zachary had come, and he was one of the mysteries of a place that deals, even now, in mysteries. He had arrived as a young man with a basket over his back thirty years before ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... friends. We reached Port Elizabeth on Christmas Eve, and were carried ashore through the surf by natives. Immediately after landing, we passed a yard full of old lumber. Protruding from a chaos of ancient rubbish was a signboard, bearing in dingy letters the legend: "Joseph Scully, Coach Painter." This is the only occasion upon which I have come across my name in South Africa. We landed at once, but some of the passengers elected to remain on board the Asia until ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... submission to Maggie's tyranny has become a firm habit with me, I rose. I saw then that she held a dingy ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in terror and saw where he was. It was like waking from a nightmare. He was glad to find that he was not in a temple of ancient Alexandria, but in even that dingy ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... dingy, brief, bald lines of record, I discovered official evidence of this chief's supremacy long before the Custer battle. As early as 1870 he was set down as one of the "irreconcilables," and in 1874 the Sioux most dreaded ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... sympathise with us, or tell us how the poor feel; but how he should feel in their situation, which we do not want to know. He does not weave the web of their lives of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, but clothes them all in the same dingy linsey-woolsey, or tinges them with a green and yellow melancholy. He blocks out all possibility of good, cancels the hope, or even the wish for it as a weakness; check-mates Tityrus and Virgil ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... unable to endure the confinement of the ship, he went for a lonely tramp round the streets. He hung round the Wheelers, and, after gazing at their young barbarians at play, walked round and looked at Flower's late lodgings. It was a dingy house, with broken railings and an assortment of papers and bottles in the front garden, and by no means calculated to relieve depression. From there he instinctively wandered round to the lodgings recently inhabited by ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... commonplace people in a commonplace way—and he never makes a secret of all this. No, the man was not an artist. What if his creations are illumined by the sunshine of his temperament so vividly that they stand before us infinitely more real than the dingy illusions surrounding our everyday existence? The misguided man is for ever pottering amongst them, lifting up his voice, dotting his i's in the wrong places. He takes Tartarin by the arm, he does not conceal his interest in the Nabob's ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... for the first time, Bles entered Zora's home. It was a single low, black room, smoke-shadowed and dirty, with two dingy beds and a gaping fire-place. On one side of the fire-place sat the yellow woman, young, with traces of beauty, holding the white child in her arms; on the other, hugging the blaze, huddled a formless heap, wreathed in coils of tobacco ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... sea. Now you have run past the little cape, and are abreast of the beach. Down mainsail—down jib—down foresail. Let go the anchor while she forges, eight to nine lengths from the land, and let her swing round, stern to the sand. Clear away the dingy and launch her from amidships, and send a line ashore. Overboard with everything now, for beaching, capstan, chocks and all—the swell will wash them in. As the keel grates on the pebbles, the men jump into the water from the high stern and catch the drifting wood. Some plant ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... had not taught him, he would have known it by its homely fashion, which the first unreal editor had suggested when he described it as an "old red-backed Easy Chair that has long been an ornament of our dingy office." That unreality was Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, the graceful and gracious Ik Marvel, dear to the old hearts that are still young for his Dream Life and his Reveries of a Bachelor, and never unreal in anything but ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... this was in Geoffrey Ravenslee's mind as he climbed the dingy, interminable stair behind Spike, who presently halted to get his wind ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... away the prayer-rug, and brought another from the wall; a much larger one, large enough, indeed, for twenty people to stand on. It was dingy and frayed, and in no way ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... demonstration of his wealth in the dingy hole that serves him for a shop, where a Double-Bass, a couple of Violoncellos, a Tenor or two hanging on the walls, and half-a-dozen Fiddles lying among a random collection of bows, bridges, coils of catgut, packets of purified resin, and tangled horsehair in skeins, serve for the insignia ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... the same men one finds dwelling in many an English home. Standing beside a great open hearth, on which to aid the stove a huge pile of birch logs crackled joyously, the representative of an alien race drew a cunning bow across the strings of a dingy violin. He sprang from Gallic stock, a descendant of the old coureurs who for two centuries wandered in search of furs across the wilderness, even as far as the northern barrens, before the Briton came to farm. It was a waltz he played—at least, that was ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... along a small but potent river that turned a few factory wheels with its eager current, and it drew sustenance from the hill farms that encircled it for miles about. You had to take a dingy way train up to the main line if you were going the long day's journey to New York, so that the Center of the name was often construed ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... furniture and decorated with the stags' heads and battle-prints common to English county-town hotels, they followed the 'Boots' up five red-carpeted steps, down a dingy green corridor, to a door at the very end. There was no answer to their knock. The dark little room, with striped walls, and more battle-prints, looked out on a side street and smelled dusty. On a shiny leather sofa an old valise, strapped-up ready for departure, was reposing with Felix's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... evening of the same day the same gentlemen held a second conversation, but this time it was not in a dingy lawyer's office. The scene was a neat and pretty drawing-room, with all the necessary adornments native to such an apartment, and also a higher class of adornment—that of ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... girls to school every morning, and met them near the school at one o'clock. In the meantime she made a visit to the Mail office, and perhaps spent an hour or two there, or in the markets; but at least three times a week she wandered over to Old Paloma, and spent the forenoon in the dingy streets across the river. What she did there, perhaps no one but Doctor Brown, who came to have a real affection and respect for her, fully appreciated. Mrs. Burgoyne would tell him, when they met in some hour of life or death, that she was "making friends." ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... specimens of the cotton-mouth moccasin attain to a length of about six feet. The full grown reptile is of a dingy brownish-black color, but the young are pinkish, with coppery bands running transversely across the body. With the exception that this reptile has no rattles, it answers in its general peculiarities to the description already given of its near relatives the rattlesnakes. The cotton-mouth ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... military men, the counsellors, the judges, and other officers of the Crown, while all the loyalty of the province thronged to do them honor. But the room in its present condition cannot boast even of faded magnificence. The panelled wainscot is covered with dingy paint and acquires a duskier hue from the deep shadow into which the Province House is thrown by the brick block that shuts it in from Washington street. A ray of sunshine never visits this apartment any more than the glare of the festal ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dun seen no lettah," answered the old darkey, taking a dingy pipe from his mouth and rolling his ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Quebec, with his heart full of hope and courage, John selected a dingy room in a back street, where the terms were less exorbitant than elsewhere, and conveyed thither the two boxes which contained his worldly goods. After taking up his quarters there he had half a mind to change ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and seemed to hang down over earth like drooping breasts. These bore more nearly the aspect of ordinary snow-clouds, and their dull reddish gray served to unite the leaden blackness of the higher plane with earth's drab whiteness and dingy appearance. The whole mass hung motionless over the town. The blackness increased. Two hours after midday it was already night in the streets. Dwellers on the ground floor drew down their blinds; in the windows of the upper ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... street they could see, it was the same—never a hill and never a hollow, but always the same endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings. Here and there would be a bridge crossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud shores and dingy sheds and docks along it; here and there would be a railroad crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing, and rattling freight cars filing by; here and there would be a great factory, a dingy building with innumerable windows in it, and immense volumes of smoke pouring from ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... see, as I have seen, a letter, so worn that it was cracked on all its folds and dingy with much handling, carried day after day inside a little blouse, or guimpe, and put under the pillows every night, you would understand a little what those pieces of paper, covered with very imperfectly understood characters, but carrying love and remembrance from ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... Dinah Kippen quickly, a dingy and defiant young woman carrying a tablecloth. She is a nervous creature, driven half-mad by the burden of her cares. Conceiving life, necessarily, as a path to be traversed at high speed, whenever ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... village, with a few plantations of olives and mulberry-trees,—are the only objects to be discovered throughout the whole wide expanse. Wherever I found the olive-tree—here, near Trieste, and in Sicily,— it was alike ugly. The stem is gnarled, and the leaves are narrow and of a dingy green colour. The mulberry-tree, with its luxuriant bright green foliage, forms an agreeable contrast to the olive. The silk produced in this neighbourhood is peculiarly fine in quality, and the stuffs from Brussa are renowned ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... as fine as possible is much harder than any one would think, as I said before. So is crumbling bread—especially if your loaf is new, like ours was. When we had done them the breadcrumbs and the suet were both very large and lumpy, and of a dingy gray colour, something like pale ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... at the figure of a whiskered skipper, wearing a dingy derby, who peered over the rail at this moment in response to a ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... usual; and the chair which Bacon was requested to take on entering, broke down with the publisher. Warrington burst out laughing, said that Bacon had got the game chair, and bawled out to Pen to fetch a sound one from his bedroom. And seeing the publisher looking round the dingy room with an air of profound pity and wonder, asked him whether he didn't think the apartments were elegant, and if he would like, for Mrs. Bacon's drawing-room, any of the articles of furniture? Mr. Warrington's character as a humorist, was known to Mr. Bacon: "I ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the doleful sort and went into the most unbecoming of "full mourning." When she made her appearance in church,—which she did, as usual, the very first Sunday after the funeral,—that plainest of bonnets and straitest of black delaines, unadorned save by the old-fashioned and dingy lace-cape, descended through many shifts of saving from her long-ago-dead-and-gone mother, were so manifestly a condescending concession to the conventionalities or superstitions of Hendrik, and said so plainly, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... larger and more modern dwelling, its only outlet to the main thoroughfare being through a narrow, grewsome tunnel, lighted during the day by a half-moon sawed out in the swinging gate which marked its street entrance and illumined at night by a rusty lantern with dingy glass sides. ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale's mind that that rocker didn't look in the least like Minnie Foster—the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the chair ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... your guard. Only indeed at rare times when you play. Once before when you played that overture you were off your guard. I thought that if I could get you to play it again to-night—the overture which was once strummed out in a dingy cafe at Wadi Halfa—to-night again I should find you off ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... a very dingy lead-pencil, with which he departs, abashed, and evidently revolving her dark saying in his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... come a lull in the activities which never entirely cease, night or day, in the dingy building at the foot of East Twenty-sixth Street. Across the street in the municipal lodging- house the city's homeless were housed for the night. Even ever wakeful Bellevue Hospital ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... touching beauty and modest attitude of the young girl, the scribe greeted her with paternal affability, and discreetly drawing the curtain over the dingy window, motioned her to a seat, while he sank back into his old leather-covered arm-chair and waited for her ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... occupied, Mr. Fairburn having found an excellent tenant for the place in Mr. Allan, the eminent shipping-merchant of London, the very man into whose office George was to have gone. The little group laughed merrily at the thought of the gallant Captain Fairburn wielding a long quill in a dingy office. Mr. Allan, a widower, who had taken up his abode in the mansion, bringing with him his only daughter, Janet, had not been two months in the village before he had made an offer of marriage ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... was seeing high and noble thoughts expressed in beautiful verses that gives him pleasure; and when he has a little bit of leisure, it is his great treat to open a book of that sort, and read a little bit to us, and tell us why we like it. He says it makes him young again, and takes him out of the dingy streets, and from all his cares as to how the bills are ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... It was a large dingy room, covered with a Turkey carpet, and containing a dark polished mahogany dinner-table, on very heavy carved legs, which an old messenger was preparing at two o'clock in the day for the use of her Majesty's Ministers. The table would have been large enough for fourteen ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... away the baleful eye of the first selectman spied Squire Alcander Reeves furtively regarding them through the dingy glass ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... Road, No. 79, is a fine old house with an imposing portico, which now overlooks a dingy yard. This is Blythe House, "reported to have been haunted, and many strange stories were reported of ghosts and apparitions having been seen here; but it turned out at last that a gang of smugglers had taken up their residence in it." It was once used as a school, and later ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... Consternation and deep grief fell upon all men. One week later, the remains arrived from Welbeck at Harcourt House, to be entombed in the family vault of the Bentincks, that is to be found in a small building in a dingy street, now a chapel of ease, but in old days the Parish Church among the fields of the ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... sorrel horse, leaning forward in a most unmilitary seat, and wore a sun-browned cap, dingy gray uniform, and a stock, into which he would settle his chin in a queer way, as he moved along with abstracted look. He paid little heed to camp comforts, and slept on the march, or by snatches under trees, ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... Waits Thee," which affected me with an incomprehensible but poignant woe. Accordingly it was I who rose cheerful in the morning and piloted a gloomy companion to breakfast and a barber, and so across Boston to the dingy station where dingy, dirty cars of ancient vintage awaited, and in one of which we rode, with innumerable stops, to a spot off the beaten tracks of travel, but which bore ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... writer, was born in London in 1864. He first won fame by interpreting the Jewish temperament as he saw it manifested in London's dingy, pitiful Ghetto quarter. "This Ghetto London of ours," he says, "is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality, a world of dreams as fantastic and poetic ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... like larkspur, and all fragrant of the vintage, and joyous with the songs of the vintagers," she said. "There it is dingy-brown, and songless, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... blank on the top-knot of Miss Margaret's gorgeousness, made her an imposing spectacle in the quiet street of that Puritan village. But, in spite of the bravery of her apparel, she stole guiltily along by garden walls and fences until she reached a small, dingy frame-house near the wharves, in the darkened doorway of which she quenched her burning splendor, if so ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... sword. His tall, commanding form thus set off contrasted strongly with the short figure of General Grant, clothed as he was in a soiled suit, without sword or other insignia of his position except a pair of dingy shoulder-straps. After being presented, Ord and I, and nearly all of General Grant's staff, withdrew to await the agreement as to terms, and in a little while Colonel Babcock came to the door and said, "The surrender had been made; ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... opposing element in any quarter. The daughter of a London barrister of considerable reputation, her ladyship dwelt with pride upon her fond preference for the legal profession. Her conversation was frequently interspersed with learned remarks, savoring of the inner temple, its dingy courts, volumes of dust and musty manuscripts. "Evidence and proof" were leading points always at hand. Caution was the inevitable watchword, based upon a scrutinizing and at times heartless penetration. In short, the character of Lady Bereford might be summed up in ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... yes, perhaps he was kind—at first. Until he was tired of me, or I was tired of him. I don't know on which side the disillusion was felt first. Think where I came from—from the dear old Castle, the moors, the lochs, the free fresh air of Scotland, to a dreary lodging of two little rooms in a dingy street, where I had to cut and contrive and economize to make ends meet. I was an ignorant girl, and I could not do it. I got into debt, and my husband was angry with me. Why should I tell you the petty, sordid details of my life? I soon found out that I was miserable and ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the sound of the chant and shortly a dingy campos came into view. An Indian buck made his way from the ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the Cape man, used as he was to the open spaces of both sea and land, these dingy blocks of brick houses, three and four stories in height, all quite alike in smoke and squalor and even in the pattern of the net curtains at their parlor windows, made as dreary a picture as he had ever imagined. He thought ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... other, Mrs. Scoville had time to observe that since her last visit with its accompanying inroad of the populace, the two openings which at this point gave access to the walk between the fences had been closed up with boards so rude and dingy that they must have come from some old lumber pile ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green |
