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More "Rickety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... procession to enter with the keys of the bull pen, when my attention was attracted to a movement in the reserved gallery. A lady and gentleman of a quality that was evidently unfamiliar to the rest of the audience were picking their way along the rickety benches to a front seat. I recognized the geologist with some surprise, and the lady he was leading with still greater astonishment. For it was Miss Mannersley, in her precise, well-fitting walking-costume—a monotone of sober color among the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... her?—lonely, and unhappy, and dull—when I know that I could help her, turn her mind away from her trouble—make her take some pleasure in life again? You talk, Hester, as though we had a dozen lives to play with, instead of this one rickety business!' ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stores, and this time accompanied by Charles, went up another branch of the river, very similar in character, to a place called Menyille, where there were several small Dyak houses and one large one. Here the landing place was a bridge of rickety poles, over a considerable distance of water; and I thought it safer to leave my cask of arrack securely placed in the fork of a tree. To prevent the natives from drinking it, I let several of them see me put in a number of snakes ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... almost perpendicular walls on all four sides, and with no roof at all. On the ground were some huge rocks, between which moss and lignon-brush and dwarfed birches grew. Here and there in the wall were projections, from which swung rickety ladders. At one side there was a dark passage, which apparently ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... Pelle threw down his work in the twilight and went off to carry out his mission. Pipman had some days earlier fallen drunk from the rickety steps, and down in the well the children of the quarter surrounded the place where he had dropped dead, and illuminated it with matches. They could quite plainly see the dark impress of a shape that looked like a man, and were all full of ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... he excited the derision of his "subjects," and a few miles farther off they had not heard of him. Dr. Mueller, after reproving us sternly for smiling at the national decoration, in several classes, with which his Highness on landing at the rickety pier was graciously pleased to gladden the meritorious natives, admits that at his second coming he will have to take various other steps. Austrians and Germans should be brought to colonize the country, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... the improvised bed, and leaned over it. The face of the occupant was turned slightly toward the left shoulder, and away from the light. The apparition raised herself, with a gesture of impatience, caught the candle from the rickety table at the head of the mattress, snuffed it hurriedly, and again stooped toward the recumbent figure, with it in ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... and extraordinary type attracted all the men she came across they soon gave up their pursuit. She was quite hopeless, they said—and half-witted, some added! No woman could sit silent like that for hours, otherwise. Zara thought of all these things, as she sat on the rickety chair in the Neville Street lodging. How she had loathed that whole atmosphere! How she loathed bohemians and ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... description of the candidate, Stephen climbed the rickety stairs to the low second story. All the bedroom doors were flung open except one, on which the number 7 was inscribed. From within came bursts of uproarious laughter, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... would trudge homeward, enter the dark hallway, and climb three rickety flights of stairs covered by an ancient carpet of long obliterated design. The hall had an ancient smell—of the vegetables of 1880, of the furniture polish in vogue when "Adam-and Eve" Bryan ran against William ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... were pounced upon by a quarter score of stalwart policemen and landed inside a rough luggage conveyance. Baxter Street was a Garden of Eden compared to the slums to which they were driven, and they were finally sheltered in a dirty tenement that arose in a series of rickety stories to a dizzy height. Their fastidious taste would not permit them to indulge in sleep amid such commonplace surroundings, where the only furniture of their room consisted of two dirty beds and a filthy ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... finishing touch of gloom to the scene. Nor was the interior of the room more cheerful. The furniture had been put in during the reign of George III, and last dusted in that of William and Mary. A black horse-hair sofa ran along one wall. There was a deal table, a chair, and a rickety bookcase. It was a room for a realist to write in; and my style, such as it was, was bright ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... up, comes towards her, but stands at far (right) side of well.] — It was not, Molly Byrne, but lying down in a little rickety shed.... Lying down across a sop of straw, and I thinking I was seeing you walk, and hearing the sound of your step on a dry road, and hearing you again, and you laughing and making great talk in a high room with dry timber lining the roof. For it's a fine sound your ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge
... poetry; but he died during the operation, leaving one child and two volumes of 'Remains' utterly destitute. The girl, if she don't take a poetical twist, and come forth as a shoemaking Sappho, may do well, but the 'Tragedies' are as rickety as if they had been the offspring of an Earl or a Seatonian prize-poet. The patrons of this poor lad are certainly answerable for his end, and it ought to be an indictable offence. But this is the least they have done; for, by a refinement of barbarity, they have made the (late) man posthumously ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the Brazos river, which is crossed in a peculiar manner. A steep inclined plane leads to a low, rickety, trestle bridge, and a similar inclined plane is cut in the opposite bank. The engine cracks on all steam, and gets sufficient impetus in going down the first incline to shoot across the bridge and up the second incline. But even in ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... narrow, plank sidewalk, they reached the Imperial hotel; a somewhat pretentious, double-storeyed building of unpainted wood, with a verandah in front of it. Here Gardner took the pony from them and gave them a room which had no furniture except a chair and two rickety iron beds. Before he went out he indicated a printed list of the things they were not allowed to do. Harding studied it with a ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... blackmailer, occasional con man, and very competent in all these activities—stood on a rickety wooden lake dock, squinting against the late afternoon sun, and waiting for his current business prospect to give up the pretense of being interested in trying ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... up the buck-saw which lay against a rickety saw horse. Never in his life had he used such an instrument. He ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... must rise simultaneously, unless dire results were to follow to the one left behind. The usual catastrophe took place: the vacant end went up, and Daisy was thrown upon the ground, the seat fortunately being so low that her fall was from no great height; but the rickety contrivance turned over upon the child, and she received quite a severe blow upon her head. This called for soothing and ministration from an older source, and, for the time, put all thought of arithmetical ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... of the fiddle became more distinct, the full moon rose from behind a dark mass which proved to be a ruined wall of the building; and immediately afterwards, directly in front of us, we discovered Mike Laffan seated on one of the time-worn and rickety beams which had once formed part of the fort. There he was, bow in hand, fiddling with might and main; while below him were a whole pack of wolves, their mouths open, singing an inharmonious chorus to his music. So entranced were they, that the brutes actually did not discover ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... at the view but not especially seeing it. He felt as if he had at once enjoyed and lost an opportunity. After a while he tried to make a sketch of the old beggar-woman who sat there in a sort of palsied immobility, like a rickety statue at a church-door. But his attempt to reproduce her features was not gratifying, and he suddenly laid down his brush. She was not pretty ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... uninviting apartment stood a table, its top littered with odds and ends, amongst which the remains of a meal, dishes and food, fraternised gregariously with a painter's palette, brushes and paint tubes. A chair or two, long since disabled, and a rickety washstand completed the appointments. ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... together through the dark alley to the end of the rickety, dismantled dock; the one thinking of the vast reward the King would lavish upon her for the information she felt sure she alone could give; the other feeling beneath his mantle for the hilt of a long dagger which ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... smokeless flue with a mockery of semblance. The fire that had wrought its devastating will in the black midnight in the deep wilderness, so far from rescue or succor, had swiftly burned out its quick fury, and was sated with the humble household belongings. The barn, rickety, weather-beaten, deserted, and vacant, still remained,—of the fashion common to the region, with a loft above, and an open wagonway between the two compartments below,—and it was here that the inquest was held. It was near the scene of the tragedy, and occasionally a man would detach himself ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... stairs. Half-way up she was compelled to pause. The darkness blinded her; she had lost the reflection from the lamp below and, above her, there was no light at all. She advanced slowly, step by step, feeling her way with a hand on the rickety bannisters. At the top of the stair there was a gleam of light and, turning to the right, she knocked on the second door. There was no answer and she knocked again. Listening, the noise of the sea was now so violent that she fancied that she might not have heard ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... had no sitting-room, and Paul and his father had to be received in one of the long public parlours, between ladies seated at rickety desks in the throes of correspondence and groups of listlessly ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... I was doing my best to write a letter, while Major B. and my brother officers O. and F., together with Captain de G., of the third squadron, took their seats at a rickety table and began a game of bridge. Here, by the way, is a thing passing the understanding of the profane, I mean the non-bridge player. This is the extraordinary, I might almost say the immoderate, attraction which the initiated find in this game, even at the height of a campaign. What inexhaustible ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... Only jest room for me; Mountings and valleys and plains and such. Ain't I got eyes that was made to see? Ain't I got ears? But they don't hear much: Only a kind of a inside song, Like when the grasshopper quits his sad, And says: 'Rickety-chick! Why, there is nothin' wrong!' And after the coffee, things ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... hush of expectation, in the awe and trepidation Of the dread approaching moment, we are well-nigh breathless all; Though the rotten bars are failing on the rickety belfry railing, We are crowding up against them like the ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... and, apparently at the stormy epoch of June 18, 1815, Thenardier belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of which we have spoken, beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and travelling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always attaching himself to the victorious army. This campaign ended, and having, as he said, "some quibus," he had come to Montfermeil and set up an ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... establishment over which Ethan Pratt presided, where the sandy beach met the waters, was a rickety little wharf like a hyphen to link the grit with the salt. Down to the outer tip of the wharf ran a narrow-gauge track of rusted iron rails, and over the track on occasion plied little straddlebug handcars. Because ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... guide's connivance, to cast a stone down the echoing ravine, then conceal themselves in the corridor close by, extinguish their torches, and await in silence the next coming of their assistant! He himself had been adroitly decoyed out of the way to steady the railing of the rickety bridge. The abrupt and narrow ledge had hidden them from view. The escape was easy. All was clear now, and the life of the man who had cheated him should pay the penalty. Should she continue to refuse his suit, she, too, must die. The should find their grave in the ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... companion up a flight of much-worn stone stairs which were built against the wall of the old dove-cot; through an open doorway twenty feet above; across a rickety floor; and up another stairway of wood, into a chamber in which was a latticed window, from which most of the glass and the ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... pouring their contents into the head, where the blood meets with no resistance? The vessels of the brain are naturally lax, and the very sutures of the skull are yet unclosed. What are the consequences of this cruel swaddling? the limbs are wasted; the joints grow rickety; the brain is compressed, and a hydrocephalus, with a great head and sore eyes, ensues. I take this abominable practice to be one great cause of the bandy legs, diminutive bodies, and large heads, so frequent in the south ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the rickety little week-end cottage he'd rented. There he showed Fran how fish with scales are cleaned, and then how they can be cooked over an ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... at Leyden did not think it wise to cut loose from Holland until they should have secured a foothold in America. It was but an advance guard that started out from Delft haven late in July, 1620, in the rickety ship Speedwell, with Brewster and Bradford, and sturdy Miles Standish, a trained soldier whose aid was welcome, though he does not seem to have belonged to the congregation. Robinson remained at Leyden, and never came to America. After a brief stop at Southampton, where they met ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... coal and was almost empty. He stepped out of it into a part of the basement which had been used apparently for storing articles not worth keeping, but too good to be thrown away—an American habit of thrift. Several decrepit chairs and rickety cabinets and old console tables were piled together in a tangled mass. Ronicky looked at them with an unaccountable shudder, as if he read in them the history of the ruin and fall and death of many an old inhabitant of this house. It seemed to his excited imagination that the man with the sneer ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... with a ragged coverlet partially spread over a dirty bed tick filled with leaves. There was only one chair, and that was a broken rocker, on which the unhappy mistress of the cottage was seated. But there were two or three rough stools, made of pieces of pine slab, standing beside the rickety table. Pointing to these stools, Mrs. Button, without quitting her chair, said ...
— Aunt Amy - or, How Minnie Brown learned to be a Sunbeam • Francis Forrester
... belts that knotted like raw hide; hairpins of jade, ivory, and plasma; arms of all sorts and kinds, and a thousand other oddments were cased, or piled, or merely thrown into the room, leaving a clear space only round the rickety deal table, where Lurgan ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... ago, but it was in '74 that they filed down the gangway of a Missouri River boat, walking as straight and stiff as if every mother's son of them had a ramrod under his tunic, and out on a rickety wharf that was groaning under the weight of a king's ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... slime and mud,—fetid and crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a ——-! And with these rickety and drivelling abortions—all having followers and adulators—your Public can still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the day when they gave laws and models to the literature of Europe; they can bear to hear ——- proclaimed a sublime ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... outside the rickety old building. Hasty steps sounded along the corridor. The landlooker merely stopped the drumming of his fingers on the broad arm of the chair. The door flew open, and Wallace Carpenter ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... rickety sign-board no learning could spell The merchant who sold, or the goods he'd to sell; But for house and for man a new title took growth, Like a fungus,—the Dirt gave its name ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... moment they gazed at a rickety old wooden stairway that, at this point in the unbroken line of cliffs, climbs zigzag up the face of the rock-buttressed wall. Then, as if moved by a common impulse, they faced each other. The quick fire of adventure kindled ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... mad, for he himself, in his glee over freedom regained, was not conspicuously sane. He scoured the town in high spirits, peering into shop-windows, riding on top of busses, going to the Zoo, taking the rickety old steamer to the Statue of Liberty, drinking afternoon tea at the Ritz, and all that sort of thing. The first three nights in town he slept in one of the little traffic-towers that perch on stilts up above Fifth Avenue. As ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... as much as anything a collection of titanic wooden hour-glasses, which had been half shaken down and reduced to a state of rickety dilapidation by an earthquake. The houses—if houses they could be called—were about twenty feet in height, rudely constructed of driftwood which had been brought down by the river, and could be compared in shape to nothing but hour-glasses. They had no doors, or windows of any kind, and could ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... The rickety building at the back of the premises, which was still the main theatre of printing activities, was empty save for Big James, the hour of seven being past. Big James was just beginning to roll his apron round his waist, in preparation for departure. This happened to be one of the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... through a rickety wire-and-sapling gate and across about a mile of bush, and suddenly came on a little slab house nestling under the side of a hill. At the back were the stockyards and the killing-pen, where a contrivance for raising dead cattle—called a gallows—waved its arms to the ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... hear that there is a movement for making provision for those who are left in need when they lose their offices and their salaries. I remember one of our ancient Cambridge Doctors once asked me to get into his rickety chaise, and said to me, half humorously, half sadly, that he was like an old horse,—they had taken off his saddle and turned him out to pasture. I fear the grass was pretty short where that old servant of the public found himself grazing. If I myself ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... out of his rickety, clattering runabout, Mrs. Fulton slipped from her smart pony, and they met with an honest kiss, like lovers long parted, and at once each began to tell the ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... establishment, near Boulogne, where, in addition to a classical and mathematical education (washing included), the young gentlemen have the benefit of learning French among THE FRENCH THEMSELVES. Accordingly, the young gentlemen are locked up in a great rickety house, two miles from Boulogne and never see a soul, except the French usher and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that Tim might insist on bearing me company, knowing as he did that I was still a bit rickety; but he saw fit to take my one refusal as final, and muttered something about reading. Then, I ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... velvet and gold, with a beauffet by her side glistening with gold and silver plate, as would have befitted her station, instead of lying on a bed of straw, with no hangings to the walls save cobwebs and hay, and wallflowers, no beauffet but the old rickety table, no attendants but Nanon and M. Gardon, no visitors but the two white owls, no provisions save the homely fare that rustic mothers lived upon—neither she nor her babe could have thriven better, and probably not half so well. She had ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some woman," cried Ben, "come on!" and rushing around to the front of the building, he found the rickety stairs leading to the house floor, and bounded upward. The door at the top stood ajar and he pushed it in, with Major Morris at his heels. The room at hand was dark, the struggle was going on in the apartment ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... that he might spare another half-hour without getting into trouble, and they crossed the city to where a row of squalid frame shacks stood on its outskirts. In the one they entered, a gaunt man with grizzled hair lay upon a rickety bed. A glance showed Vane that the man was very frail, and the harsh cough that he broke into as the colder air from outside flowed in made the fact clearer. Drayton, hastily shutting the door and explaining the cause of the visit, motioned Vane ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... great shortage of operators. One night at 2 A.M. another operator and I were on duty. I was taking press report, and the other man was working the New York wire. We heard a heavy tramp, tramp, tramp on the rickety stairs. Suddenly the door was thrown open with great violence, dislodging it from one of the hinges. There appeared in the doorway one of the best operators we had, who worked daytime, and who was of a very quiet disposition except when intoxicated. He was a great friend of the manager ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... it was neat and comfortable. It was a small room on the ground floor, with a tiny window under the stairway. The furniture could not have been much simpler: a very old chair, a rickety old bed, and a tumble-down table. A fireplace full of burning logs was painted on the wall opposite the door. Over the fire, there was painted a pot full of something which kept boiling happily away and sending up clouds of ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... dried her eyes and closed the rickety door. She slept heavily after her late watching, so heavily that she did not hear when Sara rose in the grey of the dawn. At her usual time Morva rose too, and immediately missed her mother. A wild fear throbbed through her heart as she searched in and ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... the boys begged that the kite might be allowed to go up a little higher, but the home-made reel was a trifle rickety and would need strengthening. Winding the reel by hand took quite a long time, but the kite came ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... a heterogeneous one on the edge of which I stood at eight o'clock, A.M., one scorching July morning, under an awning at the end of a rickety pier, waiting for the excursion-steamer which was to convey us to the distant sand-banks over which the clear waters lap, away down below the green-sloped highlands of Neversink,—sea-shoal banks, from which silvery fishes were warning us ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the first time, some four years before, from the bridge of a steamer moored to a rickety little wharf forty miles up, more or less, a Bornean river. It was very early morning, and a slight mist—an opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens, only without the fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the red London sun—promised to turn presently into a woolly ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... It would be difficult enough to get any money for Cromwell on such a platform, well as our conservative men know they can trust him. But for Burbank—you couldn't get a cent—not a damn cent! A rickety candidate on a rickety platform—that's ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... fall in with other girls and pass a little time in giggling and chattering; but of rational pleasure she knows nothing. Then her home is the bare dismal kitchen, with the inevitable deal table, frowsy cloth, and rickety chairs. The walls of this interesting apartment are possibly decked with a few tradesmen's almanacs, whereon Grace Darling is depicted with magnificent bluish hair, pink cheeks, and fashionable dress; or his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales assumes a heroic attitude, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Chug stood there a moment, in the centre of the floor, staring at Wanda's face that was staring back at him in vacuous surprise. He turned, without a word, and crossed the crowded floor, bumping couples blindly as he went. And so down the rickety wooden stairs, into the street, and out into the decent ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... burying-ground, lying behind the sheds, on the western slope of the ridge upon which the village stands. This ancient cemetery was laid out by the early settlers, when they made the first allotments of land. It is a square area of two acres in extent, inclosed by a mossy picket paling, so rickety that the neighbors' sheep sometimes leap through the gaps from the adjacent pastures, and feed among the graves upon the long ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... miserable apartments, but, by degrees, I became accustomed to it, and began to examine the chamber in which I sat with as strict a scrutiny as though I had intended making an inventory of its contents. Three old elbow-chairs, some rickety stools, a writing-table, on which were two or three volumes of music, some dried plants laid on white-brown paper; beside the table stood an old spinet, and, close to the latter article of furniture, sat a fat and well-looking cat. Over ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... fro across his cramped, rickety cage and looked over my head with yellow eyes—at some phantom far away. Every now and then he snarled. The contempt of his detestable indifference sank deeper and deeper into my soul. I knew that were ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... a day, a cool Sunday when it was raining softly, and the tribe were having a "perfectly lovelly" time in the barn, Elizabeth and I climbed the rickety stairway to the Land of the Long Ago. There could be no better time for it—the quiet rain overhead, no ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was dark, and it was with difficulty that the young oarsman found the rickety stairs, every step of which creaked as he trod ...
— The Young Oarsmen of Lakeview • Ralph Bonehill
... gentleman undertook to arrange all this, and, while supper was preparing, we walked together to the posada. I found that my obliging host and hostess had indeed exerted themselves to an uncommon degree. An old rickety table had been spread out in a corner of the little room as a bedstead, on top of which was propped up a grand cama de luxo, or state bed, which appeared to be the admiration of the house. I could not, for the soul of me, appear to undervalue what the poor people had prepared with such ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... more rebel who was about to 'take French,' we reached the guard house, which was a rickety old barn. As we entered the door, the rebels, with whom the house was filled, greeted us with loud yells, and slapped us on our backs, as though they looked upon our capture as a most excellent joke. The majority of our fellow-prisoners were confined ...
— Frank on the Lower Mississippi • Harry Castlemon
... her part, altogether deficient in activity. Exclusive of providing me with a sister, who from some accident or other was but a puling, wrangling, rickety young lady, she initiated me in the mysteries and pleasures of the alphabet. The rector had taken some trouble to make his daughters good English scholars; and my mother, though she had retained ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Ambrose were thus together in the upper chamber of Ford Manor, Lucy Forrester had reached the old timbered house by the lych gate of Penshurst Church, and had obtained admission at Goody Salter's door, and put the wheaten cake and two eggs on the little rickety table which stood against the wall in the dark, low room. The old woman's thanks were not very profuse, hers was by no means a grateful disposition, and, perhaps, there was no great inducement for Lucy to prolong her visit. However that might be, it was very short, and she was soon ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... and vomited; so one of the women took her by the hand and led her down the narrow rickety wooden stair out across the dirt "bing" into the pure air. In a quarter of an hour she brought her back almost well, except for the ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... it for Colin. If there was anything going on in the way of sport he wanted a share in it, and as he was wide awake, he decided to follow up and see what was going on. He slipped into his clothes as quickly as possible and tiptoed his way down the rickety stairs. But before he had gone many steps an unaccustomed thought of prudence struck him, and he walked back to a house three or four doors from where he had been staying, the home, indeed, of the villager who had given him the pet fox, and in which ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the two millions of the remaining women, what reasonable man would not throw out a hundred thousand poor girls, humpbacked, plain, cross-grained, rickety, sickly, blind, crippled in some way, well educated but penniless, all bound to be spinsters, and by no means tempted to violate the sacred laws ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... my eyes shut. I can see the place perfectly—a rickety old barrack. There is a tract of unoccupied land on one side, and ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man, the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage, a prosaically real young man wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his infinitives, and frequently having for idol a bouncing ingenue, should, in a rickety structure of wood and percale, be able to soar miles in the air and fulfil the dream of ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... cried Sanda, as the rickety vehicle rattled them toward the nearest gate of the walled town. "Have I failed ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... render their family every comfort, but they have a grate, a carpet, and chairs too fine for every day's use. What a reflection, when nursing a sick child, to think that it may be the victim of a bright grate, and a fine carpet! Or, what is equally afflicting, to see all the children perhaps rickety and diseased from the same cause! Keeping a spare bed for ornament, rather than for use, is often attended with similar consequences. A stranger or a friend is allowed to occupy it once in so many months, and he does it at the peril of his health, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... Darcy, after nonchalantly picking up the sack, dropping it within the garden hedge and closing the rickety gate, stood opposite him and quite ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... evening's fire, and brought wood to lay another. Then she turned her attention to the room which was kitchen and dining-room in one. From a neat chest of drawers she drew her best and only white table-cloth and spread it on the table. The table was a little rickety in one leg, but several folds of newspaper acted as a splendid prop, and quite removed the difficulty. Her supply of china and silver was scarce, but it would do with washing between courses. Four chairs were all she had, but they were quite enough as ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... who gives way to thought, must, of necessity, become wiser every day; for either the ideas that present themselves to his mind will confirm his yet rickety theories, or observation will teach him that his previous views of things ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... monster hove in sight with the same puffing and a long "h-o-o-ot!" A monster on the river and moving up stream steadily, with no oar and no man in sight, and the Turners and the school-master shouted again. Chad's eyes grew big with wonder and he ran forward to see the rickety little steamboat approach and, with wide eyes, devoured it, as it wheezed and labored up-stream past them—watched the thundering stern-wheel threshing the water into a wake of foam far behind it and flashing its blades, water-dripping in the sun—watched ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... said Angelica bluntly. "Is thy servant a slave of a princess that she should marry a rickety king? I have quite other views for myself. In fact, I think the wisest plan for me would be to buy a nice clean little boy, and bring him up to suit my own ideas. I needn't marry him, you know, if he doesn't turn out well." She slipped from the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... gold mine which the natives say is on the island. Enjoy the spot while you may, for bitter days are coming when its very name will sadden you. Could you but see into the unknown future as clearly as you saw into the unknown west, you would hurry away from lovely "little Spain" as fast as your rickety caravel would take you! Troubles in plenty ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... Pleasant on the New Jersey coast. But the Point Pleasant of that time had very little in common with the present well-known summer resort. In those days the place was reached after a long journey by rail followed by a three hours' drive in a rickety stagecoach over deep sandy roads, albeit the roads did lead through silent, sweet-smelling pine forests. Point Pleasant itself was then a collection of half a dozen big farms which stretched from the Manasquan River to the ocean half a mile ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... have seen pictures of them in the magazines. But have you thought that many of them are families much like yours and mine, traveling uncomfortably in rattly old jalopies while they go from one crop to another, and living crowded in rickety shacks ...
— Across the Fruited Plain • Florence Crannell Means
... five years after our first glimpse of him, he stepped from the express at Redding, and, bag in hand, crossed the station platform and addressed himself to a wise-looking, freckle-faced youth of fourteen occupying the front seat of a rickety carryall. ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the noise the attempt would make in the world that would breed the subsequent attempts, by unsettling the rickety minds of men who envy the criminal his vast notoriety—his obscure name tongued by stupendous Kings and Emperors—his picture printed everywhere, the trivialest details of his movements, what he eats, what he drinks; how he sleeps, what he says, cabled abroad over the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... place on Providence Plantation 'bout three miles south o' Natchez. De trip to Natchez in a rickety old wagon is mos' too much in de hot weather. My heart's mos' wore out. I can't las' long, 'cause I's ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... was the drawing-room, from which four windows looked out into the garden. This might have been a pretty room had any care been taken to make anything pretty at the Cedars. But the furniture was old, and the sofas were hard, and the tables were rickety, and the curtains which had once been red had become brown with the sun. The dinginess of the house had not struck Miss Mackenzie so forcibly when she first visited it, as it did now. Then she had come ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... strong officers came bearing the body of the dead father in a rude pine box. They set it down on two old rickety stools. The cries of the children were so heartrending that the officers could not endure it, and made haste out ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... he lay and that in which the Whiteboys sat, was open, and the light of the candles shone so strongly into it, that it was next to an impossibility for him to cross over to the window without being seen; in the second place, the joints of the beds were so loose and rickety that, on the slightest motion of its Occupant, it creaked and shrieked so loud, that any attempt to rise off it ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... into a dark garret, where, no doubt, the grandmother crept to sleep; the shelves on the wall, bare save for a few dishes of peasant-made pottery; the pile of dried mud on the tiled floor, which the young mother had been carefully scraping with a knife from the little worn boots in her lap; the rickety, uncovered table, with a bunch of endives on a plate, and a candle guttering in a bottle. This was the picture, redeemed from squalor only by the lithograph of the Virgin on the wall, draped with fresh wild flowers, and its perfect cleanliness; this was the home of the supposed "kidnapper," the ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... his life and hollerin' at protracted meetin's ever since he got religion, till he'd sung and hollered all the music out of his voice, and there wasn't much left but the old creaky machinery. It used to make me think of an old rickety house with the blinds flappin' in the wind. It mortified us terrible to have any of the Methodists or Babtists come to our church. We was sort o' used to the old man's capers, but people that wasn't couldn't keep a straight face when the singin' ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... have fitted me to be a preacher, but a sudden attack of mumps, with measles complicating, pulled them to one side and burned the bridge. They afterward drew tight down on the sounding board, so that now when I talk the rickety buzz is like that of a horse-fiddle played with the tremolo and the soft pedal. An aeolian harp made of rubber bands on a bicycle, aroused by the wind as the machine moves swiftly, gives the ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... He merely put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the china shepherdess that he was about to place on the rickety ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... great crowd gathered around the tree; the boys who go to Master Lovell's school came with an old knocked-kneed horse and a rickety wagon with a platform in it. They fixed the effigies on the platform with cords and pulleys, so that the arms and legs would be lifted when the boys under it pulled the strings. We lighted our torches and formed in procession. The fifers played the Rogue's ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... which he did what he knew he would do from the moment of meeting Mr. Beddoe. He bought a ticket for Bois Clair with almost the last money he had in the world, and within ten days of leaving Poussette's the steamer plying on the river to St. Ignace deposited him at the familiar rickety ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... of doubt," said the doctor. "I've had Sir Abraham Haphazard, and Sir Rickety Giggs, and old Neversaye Die, and Mr Snilam; and they are all of the same opinion. There is not the smallest doubt about it. Of course, she must administer, and all that; and I'm afraid there'll be a very heavy sum to pay for the tax; for ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... in a small attic of one of the meanest houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap of straw, to serve as another bed, and against the wall a much-battered sea-chest and an open basket, containing even now ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... lived ten miles away, and had some surplus sons; or, some seasons, he reaped it by hand, had it thrashed by travelling "steamer" (portable steam engine and machine), and carried the grain, a few bags at a time, into the mill on his rickety dray. ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... Bannon, looking out through the dusty window of the trolley car, caught sight of the elevator, the naked cribbing of its huge bins looming high above the huddled shanties and lumber piles about it. A few minutes later he was walking along a rickety plank sidewalk which seemed to lead in a general direction toward the elevator. The sidewalks at Calumet are at the theoretical grade of the district, that is, about five feet above the actual level of the ground. In winter and ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... building with a sagging roof, set amid a perfect jungle of weeds. To our eyes, the odd thing about it was that there was no entrance on the ground floor, as there should be in any respectable house. The only door was in the upper story, and was reached by a flight of rickety steps. There was no sign of life about the place except—sight of ill omen—a large black cat, sitting on the topmost step. We thought of Uncle Roger's gruesome hints. Could that black cat be Peg? ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... with a shock, how small the school was, and how dreary. Surely it had not been so mouse-gray and shabby as this when she had been there. The paint was worn from the floor, the ceiling was smoked and dirty, the desks were rickety and uneven—the blackboards gray. The same old map of North America hung tipsily between the blackboards. It had been crooked so long, that it seemed to be the correct position, and so had escaped the eye of the House-Committee, who had made ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... some rough, movable desks for them, and aided by timely but not oppressive prizes from the Messrs Wilson, and by the presence of Mr J. P. Wilson, the little self-constituted school progressed considerably, until it reached the number of thirty; then a large old building was cleared out, a rickety wooden staircase taken down, an iron one put up in its stead, and a lofty school-room, capable of holding about 100 or more, made in the place of two useless lumber-rooms. The making and furnishing that ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... as we parted at the street corner, where he climbed into the rickety carriage which his colored driver held awaiting him. "Never mind. I don't myself quite know what Calhoun wants; but he would not ask of you anything personally improper. Do his errand, then. It is part of your work. In any case—" and I thought I saw ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... city have built; Where Hunger and Vice, like twin beasts of prey, Have hunted their victims to gloom and despair; Raise the rich, dainty dress, and the fine broidered skirt, Pick your delicate way through the dampness and dirt. Grope through the dark dens, climb the rickety stair To the garret, where wretches, the young and the old, Half starved and half naked, lie crouched from the cold; See those skeleton limbs, those frost-bitten feet, All bleeding and bruised by the stones of the street; Hear the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... often used as a substitute for cows' milk, is not nearly so good, since it has lost in the process of condensation one of the most important elements, that which forms bone tissue. Accordingly, babies fed upon condensed milk are apt to be "rickety," and they lack in general power to resist disease, which is primarily the mark of a baby fed on mother's milk, and to a slightly lesser degree, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... opened by a stout, red-armed lump of a woman, who, in reply to my question, said her name was Bridget, but Biddy they calls her mostly. There was a rickety hat-stand in the entry, upon which, by the side of a schoolboy's cap, there hung a broad-brimmed white hat, somewhat fatigued by use, but looking gentle and kindly, as I have often noticed good old gentlemen's hats do, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... her, and marvelled to see the lightness and agility with which the heroic countess, although clad in armour, mounted the rickety ladders to the summit of the watch-tower. The French bowmen opened a heavy fire upon the walls, which was answered by the shafts of the little party of English bowmen. These did much execution, for the English archers shot far harder and straighter than those of France, and it was only ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... while beyond the Susquehanna there were threats of armed rebellion. On the day after Christmas, as the Federalists of Carlisle were about to light a bonfire on the common and fire a salute, they were driven off the field by a mob armed with bludgeons, their rickety old cannon was spiked, and an almanac for the new year, containing a copy of the Constitution, was duly cursed, and then burned. Next day the Federalists, armed with muskets, came back, and went through their ceremonies. ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... which had hardly begun to grow, was already turning yellow beneath the feet of the crowd. The dust was black; and yet, every Thursday, the cocotte aristocracy passed through on the way to the Casino, with a great show of rickety carriages and borrowed postilions. All these things gave pleasure to that fanatical Parisian, Sidonie; and then, too, in her childhood, she had heard a great deal about Asnieres from the illustrious Delobelle, who would have liked to have, like so many of ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... circumstances to go out into the baffling gloom. He guessed that something of a like nature had fallen upon the town again. The gas-light on the landings and in the melancholy hall burned feebly—so feebly that one got but a vague view of the rickety hat-stand and the shabby overcoats and head-gear hanging upon it. It was well for him that he had but a corner or so to turn before he reached the pawnshop in whose window he had seen the pistol he ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... this compromise—I adopt the saying of an eminent friend, who insists that it can not be called an 'amendment,' but rather a 'detriment' to the Constitution—is as bad as bad can be; and even for its avowed purpose it is uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety. Regarding it as a proposition from Congress to meet the unparalleled exigencies of the present hour, it is no better than the 'muscipular abortion' sent into the world by the 'parturient mountain.' But it is only when we look at the chance of good from ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... been was patent to all; and so the chairs got burned—but one, which was rickety. After which a story crept out, of a disjointed skeleton lying in a corner under the thatch. Though just a little suspicious that this might be a ruse to frighten us from a second attempt, we yet could not deny the possibility of its being true. Sometimes in the dusk, when I sat ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... upon the main street of Elmville within a few feet of its rickety paling-fence. Every morning the Governor would descend the steps with extreme care and deliberation—on account of his rheumatism—and then the click of his gold-headed cane would be heard as he slowly proceeded ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... it, he cared for and could eat no other. And as time went on his magnificent coat began to come off in great, unsightly patches, his eyes and mouth got sore and red, and his limbs grew weak and rickety. His roar was no longer the fierce, grand, triumphant roar that it had been; it resembled a hoarse cry of pain now, and his little ones—instead of being sturdy little cubs as they had been—had grown thin, ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... face, so I knew the goat hadn't smothered yet; an' then we went into the house an' handled the lights in just the regular way; but when the time came, instead of goin' to bed, we went out an' cooned up a big tree, about on a level with the mow-window. Ches had nailed up a kind of platform, which was rickety enough to keep a sensible man on the watch; but first I knew he was wakin' me up. He had his hand over my mouth, an' whispered, "He's in ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... regard for his partner's feelings and had never cast it up to him. Thus had his consideration been repaid. However, the poor fellow's race was about run, for he couldn't stand cold or exposure. Why, a wet foot sent him to bed. How, then, could a rickety ruin of his antiquity withstand the ravages of pneumonia— galloping pneumonia, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... same. On the dusty window sill were bottles and empty spools, broken glass chimneys, and the clock that ran ten minutes slow. The debris not only filled the room, but spilled out into the fire-escape and down the rickety iron ladders and flowed about the garbage barrels in ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... among the squids; one sees them dimly through the clear water and they impress one, as they move about, as resembling rather active rats. The cod are more partial to them than I ever shall be. Then there was a rather rickety ladder down which I scrambled. I am sure the crew had never seen silk stockings before, but their heads were politely turned away. A large, exuberantly whiskered Frenchman in picturesque rags gave me his hand and helped ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... with hideous antimacassars, tasteless round worsted-work mats for absent flower jars, and a lot of ugly cheap and vulgar china chimney ornaments, which, there being no fireplace, and consequently no chimney-piece, are set out in order on a rickety deal table. The whole life of these village folk is one piece of unreal acting. They are continually asking themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and whether they are living ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... place because of the possible crowds, and asked me if he might not stop at a lonely workman's house on the road. I had it examined by Carl, who reported that it was wretched and dirty. "N'importe," said Napoleon, and I mounted with him a narrow, rickety stairway. In a room ten feet square, with a fig-wood table and two rush-bottomed chairs, we sat an hour, the others staying below. A mighty contrast to our last interview, in '67, at the Tuileries. Our conversation was difficult, if ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... an ugly drab color; and the view out of these windows only revealed a narrow street. At Kitty's own home she had a bedroom in the Castle end; the paper hung in ribbons, the door was draughty, the bedstead rickety and old; but what a view there was from the windows! A view of Lake Coulin and the mountains in the distance, and the park lying verdant and green between the lake and the house. What a breeze ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... Stern's oiling, every journal and bearing squealed in anguish. A rickety tremble possessed the engine as it gained speed. The dynamo began to hum with wild, strange protests of racked metal. The ancient "drive" of tarred hemp ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... who is as hard as nails to look after her?—lonely, and unhappy, and dull—when I know that I could help her, turn her mind away from her trouble—make her take some pleasure in life again? You talk, Hester, as though we had a dozen lives to play with, instead of this one rickety business!' ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to enter with the keys of the bull pen, when my attention was attracted to a movement in the reserved gallery. A lady and gentleman of a quality that was evidently unfamiliar to the rest of the audience were picking their way along the rickety benches to a front seat. I recognized the geologist with some surprise, and the lady he was leading with still greater astonishment. For it was Miss Mannersley, in her precise, well-fitting walking-costume—a monotone of sober color ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... fifteen hours, roll from one end of the city to the other, every ugly specimen togged out in its finest, a mob of perspiring bodies, where side by side are tossed about the stout gossip bedecked in red, white and blue ribbons, grown fat behind her counter and panting from lack of breath, the rickety clerk with his wife and brat in tow, the laborer carrying his youngster astride his neck, the bewildered provincial with his foolish, dazed expression, the groom, barely shaved and still spreading the perfume of the stable. And the foreigners dressed ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... finger, and, his engine having by this time stopped, descended with creaks and groans to crank it up. He was so long over the operation that she began to be alarmed. However, he was not drunk, only senile. Of the two, his taxi was far worse—rickety, spavined, with every evidence of decrepitude. It started with a jerk which threw its occupant ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... back to the year 1867, in which I was still living at Waltham Cross. I had some time since bought the house there which I had at first hired, and added rooms to it, and made it for our purposes very comfortable. It was, however, a rickety old place, requiring much repair, and occasionally not as weathertight as it should be. We had a domain there sufficient for the cows, and for the making of our butter and hay. For strawberries, asparagus, green peas, out-of-door peaches, for ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... hall preparations are also being carried on for something of some sort. Macnab is there, with his coat off, mounted on a chair, which he had previously set upon a rickety table, hammering away at a festoon of pine-branches with which one end of the room is being decorated. Spooner is also there, weaving boughs into rude garlands of gigantic size. The dark-haired pale-face, Jessie, is there too, helping Spooner—who might ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... thousands of spindles, spinning and twisting some few millions of pounds of yarn, by which, after nearly three quarters of a century that the cotton manufacture has been planted, "swathed, rocked, and dandled" with legislative fondness into a rickety nursling, some fifty millions of yards of cotton cloths are said to be painfully brought forth in the year; the value of which may probably be equal to the same or a larger quantity of French cottons ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... her father's house, walking along the steaming asphalt of the quiet avenue. A few old trees had been allowed to remain on these blocks, and they drooped over the street, giving a pleasant shade to the broad houses and the little patches of sward. Just around the corner were some rickety wooden tenements, and a street so wretchedly paved that in the great holes where the blocks had rotted out stood pools of filthy, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... problem before him was whether the existing machine could be made to work until the British were finally driven from the country. The winter of 1780-81 was marked, therefore, on his part, by an urgent striving for union, and by unceasing efforts to mend and improve the rickety system of the confederation. It was with this view that he secured the dispatch of Laurens, whom he carefully instructed, to get money in Paris; for he was satisfied that it was only possible to tide over the financial ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... whom he is conducting to his establishment, near Boulogne, where, in addition to a classical and mathematical education (washing included), the young gentlemen have the benefit of learning French among THE FRENCH THEMSELVES. Accordingly, the young gentlemen are locked up in a great rickety house, two miles from Boulogne and never see a soul, except the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... took place the following morning. Cunningham's crew, under the temporary leadership of Cleve, proceeded to make everything shipshape. There was no exuberance; they went at the business quietly and grimly. They sensed a shadow overhead. The revolt of the six discovered to the others what a rickety bridge they were crossing, how easily and swiftly a jest may become ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... aspect still, a nobler work to be accomplished. As long as speculation continues in that great gift of God to man, land, the problem will be unsettled. So long as the landlords find that the more wretched, filthy, rickety, and loathsome a building is, the lower will be the taxes, he will continue to make some of the ever-increasing army of bread winners dwell in his ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... joined to that of some four or five hundred respectable ladies of both sexes besides, all sticking out around him in cubes, hexagons, and prisms, like cleft almonds in a bishop-cake. Hardly inferior in the figurative is the passage which follows: 'The Doctor (Dr. Chalmers) rides on at a rickety trot,—Messrs. Cunningham, Begg, and Candlish by turns whipping up the wornout Rosenante, and making the rider believe that windmills are Church principles, and the echoes of their thunder solid argument. A ditch will come; and when the first effects of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... those unsightly barns, and still less the dilapidation which is often met with in the mother land. I have myself been in a church at home where the flooring was all worn away, and gravel from the outside substituted, and where the seats were so rickety that a fall might be anticipated at any moment. The parishioners were poor Highlanders, it is true, but the owner of the soil was a man ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... and by toward the General, but Prescott thought it was time for him to be seeking home and he bade good-night. Colonel Stormont accompanied him as he went down the rickety stairs. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the Bowery small, shrivelled Chinamen stand by rickety tables, on which a few boxes of cheap cigars are exposed for sale. These foreigners look uneasy in their Bowery clothes, which are of the cheapest quality sold at the places just mentioned. Some of them wear the traditional ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... cafe concert. A "Grande Soiree Lyrique" is the entertainment offered us at the Maison Doucieux, as we learn from the rudely-written handbill which hangs at the entrance. Through a long, winding, narrow, dark and dirty passage, up a rickety stone staircase, through another passage, and we stand in a crowded hall, at whose lower end a rude stage is erected, on which a ragged man is bawling a comic song. In the midst of it there is a disturbance: a drunken man has climbed upon the back of a seat to light his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... The fruit of vice and poverty, they bring into the world hideous phenomena of heredity at their very birth. This one has a perforated palate, and this great copper-coloured patches on the forehead, all of them rickety. Then they are dying of hunger. Notwithstanding the spoonfuls of milk, of sweetened water, which are forced down their throats, notwithstanding the feeding-bottle employed now and then, though against orders, they perish of inanition. These little creatures, worn out ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... tackled was just about as rickety as it could very well be and I had to sit with the driver, who was a Mormon and so handsome that I was not a bit offended when he insisted on making love all the way, especially after he told me that he was a widower Mormon. But, of course, ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... back in the old days before the time of the railroads, when stage coaches were the only carriers known. I was traveling to Fort Worth on business, and was finding the journey anything but a pleasant one. The coach was old and rickety, and the way it lurched and rolled reminded me of a small boat in a rough sea. It was a terrifically hot day, too, and the stinging alkali dust got down your throat and in your eyes until life seemed an unbearable burden. We had traveled steadily all the morning, and along ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... wife promised to see to it that Billy painted the livery barn and there's a delegation of ladies appointed to wait on Mert Hagley and see if we can't get him to mend his sheds. They're so lopsided and rickety that Mrs. Brownlee says they're an eyesore and a menace ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... If there was anything going on in the way of sport he wanted a share in it, and as he was wide awake, he decided to follow up and see what was going on. He slipped into his clothes as quickly as possible and tiptoed his way down the rickety stairs. But before he had gone many steps an unaccustomed thought of prudence struck him, and he walked back to a house three or four doors from where he had been staying, the home, indeed, of the villager who had given him the pet fox, and in which Hank had taken ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... of the wharf, is lying a queer little steam-tub, the Gemini, which will convey us on the first stage of our journey. A loafer on the wharf cautions us mockingly to step aboard with care, lest we overset the little steamer, or break through her somewhat rickety planking. She is about the size of some of those steam-launches that puff up and down the English Thames, but she would look rather out of place among them; for the Gemini and her sister boat, the Eclipse, which carry on the steam service of the Waitemata, are neither handsome ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... possible that Mrs. Shelley alludes to a sentence in the Memoirs, etc., of Lord Byron. (by Dr. John Watkin), 1822, p. 46: "A malformation of one of his feet, and other indications of a rickety constitution, served as a plea for suffering him to range the hills and to wander about at his pleasure on the seashore, that his frame might be invigorated ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... the actual denizens! One gazed with a dull, wondering pity at the poor, pale, rickety children; the slatternly, coarse women who never smiled (except when drunk); the dull, morose, miserable men. How they lacked the grace of French deformity, the ease and lightness of French depravity, the sympathetic distinction ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... indeed to Mother—made her little boys get out and walk and put Bobby in with the bundles. Then she helped Mother as far as her house, gave her hot tea and some bread and butter, and kept her until Mr. Harley came home. He had a rickety old buggy and a shabby horse and he harnessed up and brought Mother and Bobby ...
— Four Little Blossoms on Apple Tree Island • Mabel C. Hawley
... had come in view of the house of these three white men; for a negro is counted a white man, and so is a Chinese! a strange idea, but common in the islands. It was a board house with a strip of rickety verandah. The store was to the front, with a counter, scales, and the poorest possible display of trade: a case or two of tinned meats; a barrel of hard bread; a few bolts of cotton stuff, not to be compared with mine; the only thing well represented being the contraband, ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it's nothing but your wanting to be loved which does it. A maudlin crying to be loved, which makes your knees all go rickety." ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... not my people. And there's a valetudinarian aspect to the place which I find slightly depressing. For this seems to be the one particular point where the worn-out old money-maker comes to die, and the antique ladies with asthma struggle for an extra year or two of the veranda rocking-chair, and rickety old beaux sit about in Panamas and white flannels and listen to the hardening of their arteries. And I haven't quite finished with life yet—not if I know it—not by a ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... young plants appear, remove the glasses and place the seed-pans in the fullest light, where air can be given without danger to them. A dry east wind blowing fiercely over them will prove a blast of death. If they have no air at all, they will be puny, rickety things, scarcely worth planting out. Choice varieties should be carefully pricked out into pans and pots as soon as large enough; this will promote a fine, stocky growth and a splendid development of flowers. Take care not to plant out until the weather is favourable, for any great check will undo ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... of entering a Malay home is by a rickety ladder six feet high, and through a four-foot opening. I am afraid that the great "Rajah and Ranee" lost some of their lately acquired dignity ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... "I entered a narrow garret, furnished with a bottomless chair, a rickety table and a miserable pallet bed, with two dirty curtains half drawn round it. On the table were an inkstand, a big copybook scribbled all over, a jug of lemonade, a glass, and a morsel of bread. The heat ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... into the room, where the three greeted him, and made room for him in front of the hearth, on which large billets of wood were burning. Anthony Steeger looked around in this wretched room, which contained nothing but a few rickety wooden chairs, and a rough-hewn pine table, and the walls and windows of which were protected from the cold by thick linings ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... second for me to see and hear and know all this, for the vision came and was gone in the dropping of an eyelid. And then there echoed through the alley loud cries of "Police! Murder! Help!" I was conscious that there was a man running through the hall and down the rickety stairs, making the building ring to the same cries. My own feelings were those of overmastering fear for my friend. He had gone on his mysterious, dangerous errand, and I felt that it was he who had been dragged into the alley, and stabbed, ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... quickly, but the last half-hour was spent in impatiently waiting for their dinner. They knew it was spread out under a newspaper on the rickety old table, but they had strict orders not to touch it until Aunt Susan sounded her signal for Uncle Billy. So they sat watching the house ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... one of intense amusement, as he replied, "Ah, you hav'n't been quite so many years about the orchards as I have, or you wouldn't have been quite so frightened. The gardener has tried that old trick upon me and mine so often that I'm quite accustomed to it. Why, it's not a gardener at all—it's a rickety old Scare-crow! However," he added, as he saw the Blackbird look rather ashamed and crestfallen, "I was quite taken in myself at first; but one day I happened to be passing the orchard just as a gale of wind was blowing, ...
— What the Blackbird said - A story in four chirps • Mrs. Frederick Locker
... been the hauling of a ship's yards, or some rickety block, but sound I did hear that came from on ship board," said ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... the day. They went down to breakfast, and during the meal Hugh would speak to nobody. When the gloomy meal was over he took his pipe and walked out to the cottage. It was an untidy-looking, rickety place, small and desolate, with a pretension about it of the lowest order, a pretension that was evidently ashamed of itself. There was a porch. And the one sitting-room had what the late Mr. Soames had always called his bow window. But the porch ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... her and went down the rickety stairs, believing somehow that she had told me the truth. But if not Zalnitch, then who? I knew that in less than a week, as soon as Helen was well enough to stand the shock, she would be indicted, ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... tracks, bad pavements, stupid shops, workmen's little homes in rows like chicken-houses, then better streets, better homes, business blocks well paved, a hotel, a post-office, a Carnegie library, a gawky Civil War statue, then poorer shops, rickety pavements, shanties, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... way the pursuit led by Captain Fuller came to Etowah Station. Here he found the old "Yonah," a locomotive belonging to the Mark A. Cooper Iron Works. The "Yonah" was a superannuated engine, but Captain Fuller pressed it and its crew into his service. The rickety old "Yonah" seemed to enter into the spirit of the pursuit, for the distance to Kingston—thirteen ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... an expanse of ground on one side of the house. Blank I call it, but it was figured over with the patches that please a painter, repaired breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick that had turned pink with time; and a few thin trees, with the poles of certain rickety trellises, were visible over the top. The place was a garden, and apparently it belonged to the house. It suddenly occurred to me that if it did belong to the house ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... fellow had in his shop a grandson of thirteen, a hunchback, a sickly, rickety boy, who used to run his errands, and was a sort of apprentice. The boy's mother had left her family when she was seventeen to elope with a worthless fellow who had sunk into hooliganism, and before very long had been caught, sentenced, and so disappeared from the scene. She was left ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... as they stopped, and to him Peggy entrusted the machine. Followed by Wandering William she darted off across the plaza and made for a cab stand immediately across it and just outside the depot. As she rushed up to the solitary rickety hack that was standing there and was about to step in a tall figure came rushing out of the station. The train had just pulled in, and long before its wheels had stopped revolving ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... sociology (of which none of us, nor indeed anybody, knew anything) for a gospel and an iron rule of life; and it was lucky enough, or there would have been more windows broken. What is apt to puzzle one at first sight in the New Youth is that, with such rickety and risky problems always at heart, they should not plunge down a Niagara of Dissolution. But let us remember the high practical timidity of youth. I was a particularly brave boy—this I think of myself, looking back—and plunged into adventures and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Thenardier belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of which we have spoken, beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and travelling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always attaching himself to the victorious army. This campaign ended, and having, as he said, "some quibus," he had come to Montfermeil and set up ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... usual name for the house—was a rickety old two-story frame of considerable size, which had been painted, some time or other, but had nearly forgotten it. It was away out in the ragged edge of Washington and had once been somebody's country place. It had a neglected yard around it, with a paling ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... block; but it's one of the old style double-deckers, with rusty fire escapes decorated with beddin' hung out to air, dark hallways that has a perfume a garbage cart would be ashamed of, rickety stairs, plasterin' all gone off the halls, and other usual signs of real estate that the agents squeeze fifteen per cent. out of. You know how it's done, by fixin' the Buildin' and Board of Health inspectors, jammin' from six to ten fam'lies in on a floor, never makin' any repairs, and ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... resisted the nervous depression which they caused, at least well enough to maintain an active part in his undertakings. Or if his bodily weakness, resulting from his early austerities, had been accompanied with interior equanimity, he might have held up. A rickety ship can, with care and skill, get into port if the engine is sound, and so can a sound ship with a broken-down engine sail home, however slowly. But with both a rickety ship and a disabled engine the port should be near ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of unknown flowers, and clenched her hands, and gazed eagerly at the two mountebanks, whom the public applauded rapturously at every feat. And contemptuously and haughtily she compared those two men, who were as vigorous as wild animals that have grown up in the open air, with the rickety limbs, which look so awkward in the dress of an English groom, that had tried ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... go on, instead of a beggar, whose father was the Lord only knows who, and whose mother was found in rags on this 'ere table. Drat the dum thing!" Peterkin roared, bringing his fist down with such force upon the poor old rickety table that it fell to pieces under the blow and went crashing to ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... came to the waste ground covered with old boots and rusted, crumpled tins. The little dirty brown house stood there behind the rickety blue palings; narrow, like the piece of a house that has been cut in two. It hid, stooping under the ivy bush on its roof. It was not like the houses people live in; there was something queer, some secret, frightening thing ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... Place satisfied tolerably well the advanced taste in domestic scenery of 1901. But your eye was caught at once by the additions made by Mrs. Rossiter. Linda conceived it was her womanly mission to lighten the severity of Michael's choice in furniture and decorations. She introduced rickety and expensive screens that were easily knocked over; photographs in frames which toppled at a breath; covers on every flat surface that could be covered—occasional tables, tops of grand pianos. If she did not put frills round piano legs, she placed tasselled poufs about ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... with ropes criss-crossed and run through holes in the 2 x 4 inch pieces of lumber which formed the bed, to take the place of springs. In another corner a rusty, two-hole oil stove stood on a drygoods box; above it another box with a shelf in it for a cupboard. Two rickety, homemade chairs completed ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... days after his arrival the warm, bright bed-chamber was exchanged for a cold dark closet opening off Madame's boudoir, a cupboard furnished with a rickety cot and a broken chair, lacking any provision for heat or light, and ventilated solely by a transom over the door; and inasmuch as Madame shared the French horror of draughts and so kept her boudoir hermetically sealed nine months of the year, the transom didn't mend matters ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... desertion of the premises was only a trick. A long time passed. The wild doves, emboldened by the stillness of the surrounding forge, fluttered about in the little clearing unheeding the motionless hunter. A cat crept cautiously over the rickety roof, and crouched like a tiger, trying ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... two millions of the remaining women, what reasonable man would not throw out a hundred thousand poor girls, humpbacked, plain, cross-grained, rickety, sickly, blind, crippled in some way, well educated but penniless, all bound to be spinsters, and by no means tempted to violate the sacred laws ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... any beings but themselves. The pine-trees scented all the air, the snow dripped reluctantly, and sometimes far off they heard the distant boom of an avalanche. They sat together for long sunlit hours on the rickety wooden balcony of a friendly hospice, drinking hot spiced gluewein and building up ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... or incautious mis-step she gained the side of the improvised bed, and leaned over it. The face of the occupant was turned slightly toward the left shoulder, and away from the light. The apparition raised herself, with a gesture of impatience, caught the candle from the rickety table at the head of the mattress, snuffed it hurriedly, and again stooped toward the recumbent figure, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... gray and dingy, which every old school-sanctum hath, With many a break on their surface, where grinned a wood-grating of lath. A patch of thick plaster, just over the school-master's rickety chair, Seemed threat'ningly o'er him suspended, like Damocles' sword, by a hair. There were tracks on the desks where the knife-blades had wandered in search of their prey; Their tops were as duskily spattered as if they drank ink every day. The square ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... unfortunately for himself, went on with a boon companion next morning to a larger settlement beside the railroad track. He intended to complete the orgie there, and then to return to camp. Accordingly it happened that, when afternoon was drawing towards a close, he sat under the veranda of a rickety wooden saloon, hurling drowsy encouragement at the freighter who was loading rock-boring tools into a big wagon. He wondered how far his remaining dollar would go towards assuaging a thirst which steadily increased, and two men, who leaned against ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Jean Baptiste Beaubien stood at this period between the gardens and the river-bank, and still farther south was a rickety tenement, built many years before by Mr. John Dean, the sutler of the post. A short time after the commencement of the growth of Chicago, the foundations of this building were undermined by the gradual encroachment of the lake, and it tumbled backward ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... Yet Roberts quotes the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics as saying that "a family of five persons requires $754 a year to live on." The average number in the family of a mine worker is five or six. "This small income," Roberts observes, "drives many of our people to live in cheap and rickety houses, where the sense of shame and decency is blunted in early youth, and where men cannot find such home comforts as will counteract the attractions of the saloon." Hundreds of company houses, according to Roberts, are unfit for habitation, and "in the houses of mine employees, of all nationalities, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... were kindly, but their eyes showed that they had often to suspect men. They gave me a bed, but it was a franc and more, and I had to pay before going upstairs to it. The walls were mildewed, the place ramshackle and evil, the rickety bed not clean, the door broken and warped, and that night I was oppressed with the vision of poverty. Dirt and clamour and inhuman conditions surrounded me. Yet the people ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... where we dined, was as other country inns (or krcma, or han, as they are locally termed from the Turkish): earthen floor, a bench, a few primitive stools and beds in the only reception-room. The table is invariably rickety, so are the stools; but a tablecloth, knives and forks are always mysteriously produced for guests even in ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... the creek averages half a mile. The quarters, universally called "nigger-houses," are strung along the bank of the creek, at about 100 feet from the water, on a ridge between the water and the corn. The "big house" is a two-story affair, old, dirty, rickety, poorly put together and shabbily kept. Here lived old Mrs. Martha E. McTureous, with a large household. The James McTureous place—the other half of this one—is all in one and the same field. On both ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... to defy its chill dominion. Not rain, but spray from huge, swashing billows, clouded the decks, biting and cutting like countless needles, each drop with the sting of a hornet behind it. Now the end of the world seemed far away, and the jumping off place was a rickety wall of white and black, leaning ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... me, then, on this calm, bright day of early March, to visit one of the plantations on Port Royal Island, a few miles out of Beaufort. The quartermaster kindly furnishes us with a carriage, somewhat shabby and rickety to be sure, but one of the best that 'Secesh' has left for our use. Our steeds, too, are only slow-moving Government mules, but there is one aristocratic feature of our establishment to remind us of the life that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... squalid, and poverty-stricken,—rickety, worn-out, rush-bottom chairs; unsold, unfinished pictures, pell-mell in the corner, covered with dust; broken casts of plaster; a lay-figure battered in its basket-work arms, with its doll-like face all smudged and besmeared. A pot of porter and a noggin of gin ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this piano one day together with an exhilarated French officer driving a lorry. No one ever found out how the piano had been secured, but since a sweet little "demoiselle" now rides "Sin-fin's" Irish hunters, we may believe, if we wish, that a rickety piano formed the basis of an ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... that in which the Whiteboys sat, was open, and the light of the candles shone so strongly into it, that it was next to an impossibility for him to cross over to the window without being seen; in the second place, the joints of the beds were so loose and rickety that, on the slightest motion of its Occupant, it creaked and shrieked so loud, that any attempt to rise off it must necessarily have ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... to as each successive owner had thought fit, with a final mixture of old and new that was neither convenient nor beautiful. Mr. Linton had apologised to his horses during his first week of occupancy and, in the second, turning them out to grass with less apology, had pulled down the rickety old sheds, replacing them with a compact and handsome building of red brick, with room for half a dozen buggies, men's quarters, harness and feed rooms, many loose boxes and a loft where a ball could have been held—and where, indeed, ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... too. Marry! I trow, neighbors, we will have a tempest," cried Louder, as he and his companions entered the old house. A burst of thunder shook the earth; the wild winds raged about the house, making the rickety old structure creak and groan, while the air about seemed on fire. For a moment all were awed to silence; then ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... he made himself surprisingly useful. He listed the doors against approaching winter breezes,—he weeded in the garden,—trimmed, tied, trained, wherever either good office was needed,—mended china with an infallible cement, and rickety chairs with the skill of a cabinet-maker; and whatever hard or dirty work he did, he always presented himself at table in a state of scrupulous neatness: his long brown hands showed no trace of labor; his iron-gray ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... teeth in the laugh at her expense, in which Mr. Hennessy joined, and Dick continued: "Look at that filly there. We all knew Paula was wrong. But look at it! She bred a rickety old thoroughbred, that we wanted to put out of her old age, to a standard stallion; got a filly; bred it back with a thoroughbred; bred its filly foal with the same standard again; knocked all ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... leading the way, three of them went down a rickety stair, not much better than a ladder, and found themselves in a sort ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... window on a rickety chair that protested under his weight, and quite mechanically he put his pipe in his mouth and dipped into the side pocket of his coat. The absence of any tobacco made him aware of his action, and, with a scowl for his forgetfulness, he put the pipe away. His movements were slow, almost hulking, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... cabins built upon them—and upon the decks of our cabin comfortable chairs were placed for our party. As soon as we were aboard the boatmen shoved off and we floated slowly down the stream, keeping as close to the shore as possible without jamming into the rickety piers of bamboo that stretched out into the water for the use ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... help it. He let out an involuntary yelp and jumped sideways, into Scotty. Scotty had no place to go but through the hotel door. He crashed into the rickety, partly hanging door, Rick on ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... said, throwing away the light. "A twisty, rickety pace for a gig. The fact is, they over-drove her at starting; we shall ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... or the other of the young ladies, in whom I discovered some slight general resemblance to the imaginary character. My fancies, I must confess, played strange pranks with me. They had been kept in a coop so many years that now, when I suddenly turned them loose, their rickety attempts at flight quite ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... of kin who was—to Coombe's great objection—his heir presumptive, and was universally admitted to be a repulsive sort of person both physically and morally. He had brought into the world a weakly and rickety framework and had from mere boyhood devoted himself to a life which would have undermined a Hercules. A relative may so easily present the aspect of an unfortunate incident over which one has no control. This was the case with Henry. His character and appearance were such that even his connection ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... short of matter to furnish out his book; yet it was neither just nor liberal on his part to expect at Sault St Marie, where, perhaps, not five travellers arrive in the course of a year, the same accommodations as at New York. The bedsteads certainly were a little rickety, but every thing was very clean and comfortable. The house was not an inn, nor, indeed, did it pretend to be one, but the fare was good and well cooked, and you were waited upon by the host's two pretty modest daughters—not only pretty, but well-informed ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... military centre, had not been chosen for any especial advantages of climate. So few indeed did it possess in the eyes of Europeans that none ever went there save those whom an inexorable fate compelled. The rickety, wooden bungalows scattered about the cantonment were temporary lodgings, not abiding-places. The women of the community, like migratory birds, dwelt in them for barely four months in the year, flitting with the coming of the pitiless heat ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... knows we struggled. We did not give in without agony. In our hopeless, staring eyes there was the anguish of the great temptation. We looked in each other's death's-head faces. We clasped skeleton hands round our rickety knees, and swayed as we tried to sit upright. Vermin crawled over us in our weakness. We were half-crazy, and muttered in ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... heard, mingled with the merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young voices. Shall we go forward unseen," he asks, "and study the approaching travellers whilst they are still upon the road? Their conveyance is no handsome carriage, but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin. His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... do for you, my good woman?' said the Doctor, seating himself on a rickety stool at ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... looked at first glance like many other painters' studios. A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil and water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with its head on one side, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Vinet. It has a box of a kitchen through which you pass into a little square room with just space enough for four tables; or you may go through the kitchen into a snug garden gay in geraniums and find a sheltered table beneath a rickety arbour. ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... the street and a bull's-eye window looking into the yard. The chief characteristic of the apartment was a cynic simplicity, due to money-making greed. The bare walls were covered with plain whitewash, the dirty brick floor had never been scoured, the furniture consisted of three rickety chairs, a round table, and a sideboard stationed between the two doors of a bedroom and a sitting-room. Windows and doors alike were dingy with accumulated grime. Reams of blank paper or printed matter usually encumbered the floor, and more frequently than not the remains ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... naked, weather-beaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group that had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The front yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from the sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung on one hinge, and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the young stranger, noticed that something black was tied to the ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... leap from your bed, waken your brothers or comrades, fling on your jackets and trousers, rush down the rickety stairways out into the cooler air of the morning, and ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... imaginations. If I had been brought here in my youth, when I shared the ideas and the enthusiasm of my dear mother, I suppose that I, too, would have been enchanted with these bare hills, these arid or marshy plains, these dilapidated farmhouses, these rickety norias, whose buckets drip water enough to sprinkle half a dozen cabbages, this wretched and barren desolation ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... when the day of reckoning comes, no half-hearted and pusillanimous policy will stay our hands from the complete execution of that to which we stand pledged. The Balance of Power has gone the way of other rickety makeshifts, but there must be no makeshift in our dealings with the Turk, no compromise and no delay. What shall be done with those who planned and executed the greatest massacres known to history matters little; let them be hanged as high as ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
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