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More "Tumble-down" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thorough course of study at Clinton, N. Y. Miss Barton's remarkable executive ability was manifested in the fact that she popularized the Public School System in New Jersey, by opening the first free school in Bordentown, commencing with six pupils, in an old tumble-down building, and at the close of the year, leaving six hundred in the fine ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a time, there was a poor couple who lived in a tumble-down hut, in which there was nothing but black want, so that they hadn't a morsel to eat, nor a stick to burn. But though they had next to nothing of other things, they had God's blessing in the way of children, and every year they had another babe. Now, when this story begins, they were ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... mortgages on Neesdale Park but bestowed on its owner a surplus which the practical knowledge of country life that he had acquired enabled him to devote with extraordinary profit to the general improvement of his estate. He replaced tumble-down old farm buildings with new constructions on the most approved principles; bought or pensioned off certain slovenly incompetent tenants; threw sundry petty holdings into large farms suited to the buildings he constructed; purchased here and there small bits of land, ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the mystery of the wilderness stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and three or four pilgrims with their staves—all complete. Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange—had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in the air for a while—and on we went again into the silence, along empty reaches, round the still bends, between ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... smoke came from the village itself. It was a conflagration, but not a general one; the houses were too scattered and the day too still for a fire to spread. What could it be? Perhaps the blacksmith shop, perhaps the bakery, perhaps the old tumble-down barn of the little Tremblay? It was not a large fire, that was certain. But where was ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... there, his crutches under his arms, leaning on the gate, silently regarding me as I went by. Not boldly; his round dark eyes were like those of some shy animal peering inquisitively but shyly at the passer-by. His was a tumble-down old thatched cottage, leaky and miserable to live in, with about three- quarters of an acre of mixed garden and orchard surrounding it. The trees were of several kinds—cherry, apple, pear, plum, and one big walnut; ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... the right name for those strange creatures? We intend to crave your hospitality on our way to Bastia, where we are to embark, and I trust the della Rebbia Castle, which you declare is so old and tumble-down, will not fall in upon our heads! Though the prefect is so pleasant that subjects of conversation are never lacking to us—I flatter myself, by the way, that I have turned his head—we have been talking about your worshipful self. ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... at the back of Burmah; near the Chinese Border. Such a place as you never dreamt of. Tumble-down palaces, temples, and all that sort of thing—lying out there all alone ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... Pei Ming explained, "really faces south, and is all in a tumble-down condition. I searched and searched till I was driven to utter despair. As soon, however, as I caught sight of it, 'that's right,' I shouted, and promptly walked in. But I at once discovered a clay figure, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... grim power in the presentation of old Paris streets and tumble-down houses, Lalanne has achieved several remarkable plates of this order. One is his well-known Rue des Marmousets. This street is almost as repellent-looking as Rue Mouffetard at its worst period. Ancient and sinister, its reputation was not ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... back in the mountains of western North Carolina, far up on the mountainside, at the head of a cove, there lived a fifteen-year-old boy. He had sisters and brothers and parents, but they dwelt in a little tumble-down shack and were wretchedly poor. Jake was the oldest of the children, and he had to work hard in the little patch of corn on the steep mountainside, ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... let you have your try," said Endicott, chuckling as if it were a good joke. "Here's a little farm down in Jersey. It's swampy and thick with mosquitoes. I understand it won't grow a beanstalk. There are twelve acres and a tumble-down house on it. I've had to take it in settlement of a mortgage. The man's dead and there's nothing but the farm to lay hands on. He hasn't even left a chick or child to leave his debt to. I don't want the farm and I can't sell it without a lot ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... Sumner: "What you quote about the pere de famille is pretty true. It is a difficult role to play; particularly when, as in my case, it is united with that of oncle d'Amerique and general superintendent of all the dilapidated and tumble-down foreigners who pass this way!" The regulation of such a house in New England was far more difficult than it is at present, and Cambridge farther away from Boston, with its conveniences and privileges, than appeared. ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... is too good a man to mimic the Scriptures in any such way. There is a church, I believe, though it's a tumble-down one. Nobody has preached in it for years. But Squire Moyle may do something ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... dear old boys they were, who kissed Dr. S. most affectionately, one unshaven old ruffian including me in his salute. I do not appreciate the Montenegrin custom of kissing among men; it is not pleasant. An empty hut was immediately put at our disposal. It was the most primitive and tumble-down habitation that we had had as yet. Of course it rained. It was almost the first rain on the trip, and we had to lie up here a whole day as P. was unwell and unable to ride. Everyone turned out to make ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... and after travelling some days they came to a great city, where they took up their quarters in a tumble-down house and the next morning Lela went into the city to look for work. He went to the cutcherry and enrolled himself as a muktear (attorney) and soon the litigants and the magistrates found out ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... comfort, his own importance, he will not grow old gracefully. More and more his spirit, small and mean, will leave its impress on his face, and especially in his eyes. You look at him and feel that there is no jewel in the casket; that a shriveled soul is living in a tumble-down house. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... altogether serious man and had a little sharp-featured wife who had also a sharp voice. The two, with half a dozen thin-legged children, lived in a tumble-down frame house beside a creek at the back end of the Wills farm where ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... a tumble-down shed at the back of the house, made of old soap-boxes. The gentleman opened the ...
— A Collection of Beatrix Potter Stories • Beatrix Potter
... do with. A tavern is only half a house, just as one of these new-fashioned screw-propellers is only half a ship. Suppose you walk round and take a look at my place. I own quite a respectable house over yonder to the left of the town. Do you see that old wharf with the tumble-down warehouses, and the long row of elms behind it? I live right in the midst of the elms. We have the dearest little garden in the world, stretching down to the water's edge. It's all as quiet as anything can be, short of a graveyard. The back windows, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... companions thoroughly explored the shore as far as they went on the lower part of the lake. From time to time Prescott consulted his watch. In all the time that they were out they passed only one building, a tumble-down, weather-beaten shack that looked as though it had not been inhabited in twenty years. Not even a vestige of a craft ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... bid that old tumble-down hovel good-bye; My mother she'll scold, and my sisters they'll cry: But I won't care a crow's egg for all they can say; I sha'n't go to stop ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... one of the first things to be made better is the state of the land and the laborers. Think of Kit Downes, uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!—and those poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is one reason why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle—which you think me stupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... for concealment. On a small level place surrounded by high cliffs stood a tumble-down house. It was shut in from view from every point except the single ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... boys of Chestertown went to school with me, and I was invited by the least of them to visit the jail,—a tumble-down old structure with goggly windows, and so unsafe that the felons had to be ironed to almost their own weight. And into the cell where the four fiends were lying, the jailer's big boy, for a big joke, pushed me, and locked ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Craigengelt, "but I know the reason now of his unmannerly behaviour at his old tumble-down tower yonder. Ashamed of your company?—no, no! Gad, he was afraid you would cut in and ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... it stood an old tumble-down house. The basement of this house consisted of a smoky room furnished with one table, two chairs and a flickering oil lamp. A man was walking up ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... on the outskirts of the village, in an old tumble-down shanty of his own, lived a poor Jew with a lot of half-starved, forlorn-looking children, and a half-crazed, careworn, hard-working wife. The husband and father had been laid up with consumption for the last few months, and was daily ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... The long, tumble-down bridge which spans the Waccamaw at Conwayboro, trembled beneath our horse's tread, as with lengthened stride he shook the secession mud from his feet, and whirled us along into the dark, deep forest. It may have been the exhilaration ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... nobody else was rich, an' good, an' lubly, an' happy; fur don't yer see de birds neber sung,' I wush you wuz,' 'I wush dey had;' but all de time 'I wush I wuz,' 'I wush I had.' At last, one day dar come inter de gyarden er po' little cripple gal, who lived 'way off in er ole tumble-down house. She wuz er little po' white chile, an' she didn't hab no farder nor mudder, nor niggers ter do fur her, an' she had to do all ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... this mother and son; and the little living they had, came mostly by means of needlework, which the woman did for people in the town, and by the sale of dried herbs and suchlike. As for the cottage itself, it was a crazy, tumble-down tenement, half in ruins, and all the outside walls of it were covered with clinging ivies and weeds and wild climbing plants. I was one of these. I grew just underneath the solitary window of the small chamber wherein ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... a tiny house—tiny hall, tiny stairs, tiny rooms but quaint with a little tumble-down orchard behind it and that strange painted house that old mad Miss Anderson lives in on the other side of the orchard. Such a quiet little street too ... a line of the gravest trees, cobbles with only the most occasional cart and a little church ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... door of a small tumble-down house in a filthy lane, the one window it presented in front being barred with iron. Some bolts were drawn inside, and though the man who opened the door was forbidding in his aspect, he did not refuse to let Tom in. The portal was hastily closed and bolted after they had ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... effects of the Civil War were still visible; and when a beginning at teaching was actually made, the class had to be content with the accommodation of a tumble-down kind of building which was a very imperfect protection from the weather. In some respects the ex-slaves appeared to be no better off than when they were in bondage. In order to become acquainted with the people, and to understand their general condition and in what degree an effort ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... oldest in it. I cannot say that the first impression produced by the wharf at which we landed, or the streets we drove through in reaching our hotel, was particularly lively. Rickety, dark, dirty, tumble-down streets and warehouses, with every now and then a mansion of loftier pretensions, but equally neglected and ruinous in its appearance, would probably not have been objects of special admiration to many people on this side the water; ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... from the gate the road narrowed, and at the corner where the little Rue Poiree strikes off between two rows of tumble-down houses to join the Rue St. Jacques there was somewhat of a block. I had fallen back behind the sumpter horses, and halted for a moment, when I felt a hand rest lightly on my stirrup. I looked down, and, as I live, ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... one can take through these mouldy boroughs (or burrows) is to be found in such towns as Salem, Newburyport, Portsmouth. Without imagination, Shakespeare's birthplace is but a queer old house, and Anne Hathaway's home a tumble-down cottage. With it, one can see the witches of Salem Village sailing out of those little square windows, which look as if they were made on purpose for them, or stroll down to Derby's wharf and gaze at "Cleopatra's Barge," precursor of the yachts ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the equipage dashingly approached the busy centre of Hanbridge, the region of fine shops, public-houses, hotels, halls, and theatres, more and more of the inhabitants knew that Iris (as they affectionately called her) was driving with a young man in a tumble-down little victoria behind a mule whose ears flapped like an elephant's. Denry being far less renowned in Hanbridge than in his native Bursley, few persons recognised him. After the victoria had gone by people who had heard the news too late rushed from shops and gazed at the Countess's ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... took but little note of the streets and their contents, except that he noted the fact under the new order of things, since the Jews had come into possession of the city, that there was scarce a Moslem of any kind to be seen, and that most of the tumble-down, smaller houses, of a few years back, had been pulled down, and that the streets in consequence had been considerably widened. Hundreds of new houses of bungalow type, had taken the places of those pulled down. Most of these ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... low, scanty bushes, recalling vividly the representation of them on the old-fashioned maps of the times of Catherine. They came upon little streams too with hollow banks; and tiny lakes with narrow dykes; and little villages, with low hovels under dark and often tumble-down roofs, and slanting barns with walls woven of brushwood and gaping doorways beside neglected threshing-floors; and churches, some brick-built, with stucco peeling off in patches, others wooden, with crosses fallen askew, and overgrown grave-yards. Slowly Arkady's heart sunk. To ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... altogether, here, Miss," said Daddy Darwin, looking wistfully at the tumble-down house ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... bank of the Thames, and is certainly one of the most beautiful and interesting places in the vicinity of London. From the time of Edward I., the English monarchs had a royal residence here, but by the time of Charles II., this old palace had become a rather mouldy and tumble-down affair, so he commanded that it should be demolished entirely, and a magnificent structure of freestone erected in its place. We read that "riches take to themselves wings," but King Charles's riches seem ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... with them. We had smashed the bottom plate of one of the cars, so that all the oil ran out of the crank-case, but with a side of the ever-useful kerosene tin we patched the car up temporarily and pushed off at early dawn. Our route wound through groves of palms surrounding the tumble-down tomb of some holy man, occasional collections of squalid little huts, and in the intervening "despoblado" we would catch sight of a jackal crouching in the hollow or slinking off through the scrub. Deli Abbas proved a half-deserted straggling town which gave ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... the town that lay beyond, he stood contemplating the ancient school building that held so bravely its commanding position, and looked so pitiful in its shabby old age. Then passing through a gap in the tumble-down fence, and crossing the weed-filled yard, he entered ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... "And even if I hadn't been, I know the garage was just opposite Leffler's over there." He pointed across the street to a tumble-down stable with a blotched sign on which the words "Livery and Boarding" were still ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... other side of the fence, an old and long neglected apple orchard, a tumble-down log barn, and the wreck of a house with the fireplace and chimney standing stark and alone, told the story. The place was one of those old ranches, purchased by the Power Company for the water rights, and deserted by those who once had called it home. From the gate, ancient ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... Tiber and facing the Castel St. Angelo. How they ever managed to make this passage is a mystery! In the daytime one could not see the possibility of cutting through the labyrinth of these forlorn tumble-down houses. We sat trembling for fear that the shaky planks would suddenly give way and plunge us into the whirling Tiber under our feet. The fireworks were the most gorgeous display of pyrotechnics I ever saw. And the bouquet as the finale ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... so much romance, the scene of so many stirring deeds, from the market-places with the narrow gables heaped up in piles around them, from the belfries soaring to the sky, from the winding streets and the narrow lanes, in which the houses almost touch each other from the tumble-down old hostelries, from the solemn aisles where the candles glimmer and the dim red light glows before the altar, from the land of Bras-de-Fer, and Thierry d'Alsace, and Memlinc, and Van Eyck, and Rubens, the land which was at once the Temple and the Golgotha ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... Hugh's time, by a race of long gaunt men who seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived. They were chronically discouraged, and the merchants and artisans of the town were in the same state. The merchants, who ran their stores—poor tumble-down ramshackle affairs—on the credit system, could not get pay for the goods they handed out over their counters and the artisans, the shoemakers, carpenters and harnessmakers, could not get pay for the work they did. Only the town's two saloons ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... Talcahuano; and the picture it presented was one of houses in ruins and silent streets. A few wretched canoes, ready to fall to pieces, were on the beach; near them loitered a few poorly clad fishermen; while in front of the tumble-down cottages and roofless huts sat women in rags employed in combing one another's hair. In contrast with this human squalor, the surrounding hills and woods, the gardens and the orchards, were clothed in the most splendid foliage; on every side flowers displayed their ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... who, the absentee tenant of an absentee landlord, resided upon a small property of his own about two miles distant, leaving the large deserted house, and dilapidated outbuildings, to sink into gradual decay. Barns half unthatched, tumble-down cart-houses, palings rotting to pieces, and pigsties in ruins, contributed, together with a grand collection of substantial and dingy ricks of fine old hay—that most valuable but most gloomy looking species ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... lived—if you could call it living—in a tumble-down-looking house, that would not have stood many earthquakes. She had tried diligently to support her family and keep them together; but the wolf stood always at the door. Sewing by hand did not bring ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... that in this country with lovely and productive valleys whose irrigated orchards and gardens make a regular paradise, that the farming classes should be poor and ignorant, without ambition or education and be satisfied to live in comfortless, tumble-down huts without furniture or any of the improvements that make life worth living. But such is the case. Here where there are millions of coffee trees, fields of sugar cane and orchards of oranges, lemons ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... see it for yourself? I—I am a mere guttersnipe compared to the de Vignes. They live in a great house with lots of servants and cars. They never do a thing for themselves. I don't suppose Rose could do her hair to save her life. While we—we live in a tumble-down, ramshackle old place, and do all the work ourselves. I've never been away from home in my life before. You see, we're poor, and Billy's schooling takes up a lot of money. I had to leave school when he first went as ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... decidedly sooty throughout. A shock head, and more shocky eyebrows, bore a strange resemblance to the patent chimney-sweep; while his clothes seemed rich in past memories of the profession. I had before caught sight of this individual, in a tumble-down, rickety shop near the residence of Mrs. Mountchessington Lawk. I had, in fact, seen her on more than one occasion bestowing charity upon him in the form of broken victuals; but the recollection failed entirely to account for the effect of his cheers for "Jinny" ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son, Manchester warehousemen ... had its place of business in a very narrow street somewhere behind the Post Office.... A dim, dirty, smoky, tumble-down, rotten old house it was ... but here the firm ... transacted their business ... and neither the young man nor the old one ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... we all rush to the windows and look out upon the quaint old village—a curious, old-fashioned scene. We feel as if we had somehow become transmogrified, and instead of being flesh-and-blood men and women from practical New York, were playing our parts in some old English novel. Odd little tumble-down houses, with peaked roofs and mullioned windows, ranged about a triangular common, look sleepily out upon a statue of Palmerston in the middle of the open place, the gray walls of Romsey Abbey, a thousand years old, against the blue ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... was to get to a railway station, wherever it might be, and as the last train for town might leave early, the quicker we arrived the better. Looking down the road, Burnaby espied a tumble-down cart standing close into the hedge, and strode down to requisition it. The cart was full of hampers and boxes, and sitting upon the shaft was an elderly gentleman in corduroys intently gazing over the hedge at the rapidly collapsing balloon, which still fitfully swayed ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... hid from my sight within its fleecy bosom some details of that vulgar and pitiful degradation. One place alone I found as I had hoped to find it. Ex-Mayor Tiemann's house was gone, his conservatory was a crumbling ruin; the house we decked for Lincoln's death was a filthy tenement with a tumble-down gallery where the old portico had stood, and I found very little on my upward pilgrimage that had not experienced some change—for the worse, as it seemed to me. The very cemetery that belongs to old Trinity had ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... a light burning upstairs in the "Herald" office. From the street a broad, tumble-down stairway ran up on the outside of the building to the second floor, and at the stairway railing John turned and shook his companion ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... fruit, and that of so poor a flavour as to be scarcely worth picking. They have, in fact, almost reverted to savagery, even as the cottage itself is crumbling back to the earth out of which it was built. On the slope above the cherry-orchards, if you moor your boat at the tumble-down quay and climb by half-obliterated pathways, you will come to a hedge of brambles, and to a broken gate with a well beside it; and beyond the gate to an orchard of apple-trees, planted in times when, regularly as Christmas Eve came round, Aunt Barbree Furnace, her maid Susannah, and the ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Christ's kingdom visited St. Louis, they found it a place of two thousand inhabitants,—"a tumble-down French village,—built mainly of wooden slabs and poles set vertically, and well daubed with mortar mixed with straw, though there were many log houses." In a school-room they delivered the first Presbyterian or Congregational sermons ever preached on ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker
... and men in an old tumble-down brick-kiln, in the solitude of a dense forest which surrounded the town at that time. No sooner had Sternbald, whom he had sent in disguise into the city with the mandate, brought him word that it was already known there, than he set out with his troop on the eve of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... so long since I'd seen any. I felt as if I was going to a new world. None of us spoke for a bit. Jim pulled up at a small hut by the roadside; it looked like a farm, but there was not much show of crops or anything about the place. There was a tumble-down old barn, with a strong door to it, and a padlock; it seemed the only building that there was any care taken about. A man opened the door of ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... When they reach the tumble-down hut the keeper asks him cheerily to dismount and ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... obsequies that she even buried several quite respectable wax babies, though, regretting their loss afterwards, she was eventually forced to dig them up again. She put tombstones at the heads of the graves, made of slates from the roof of a tumble-down shed, and carefully wrote names, dates, and epitaphs upon them in slate pencil, being greatly distressed when the inscriptions were invariably obliterated by ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... lay a small cleared tract of land, where a pleasant greenness of young potato vines hid the sand. In the centre was a tumble-down cabin, with a mud chimney on the outside. The one window had no sash, and its rude shutter hung precariously by a single leathern hinge. The door was open, revealing that the interior was papered with ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... flat hillocks raise themselves. Both hills and plain, when we passed, served for pasturage; but from August to January they are sown with rice; and fields of batata are occasionally seen. After four hours we arrived at the little village of Maguiring (Manguirin), the church of which, a tumble-down shed, stood on an equally naked hillock; and from its neglected condition one might have guessed that the priest was ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... A tumble-down couch stood against the wall, and in an opposite corner a heap of tattered quilts had been flung disdainfully. Tables and chairs and even the floor were piled with papers and cheaply ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... have made their very tumble-down barn a perfect model of neatness. They sleep within about 3 yards of the horses' heels. Hunt in particular never likes to be far away from "my 'osses," as he calls them. I have less and less say in the matter of the 'osses as time ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... had read in her eyes, he paused again, yet followed doggedly nevertheless. She led him down Holborn Hill past the Fleet Market, over Blackfriars Bridge, and so, turning sharp to the right, along a somewhat narrow and very grimy street between rows of dirty, tumble-down houses, with, upon the right hand, numerous narrow courts and alley-ways that gave upon the turgid river. Down one of these alleys the fluttering cloak turned suddenly, yet when Barnabas reached the corner, behold the alley was quite deserted, save for a small and pallid ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... Miladi is to marry him, and they are to go to the nice new house he is building. They are to take you and me and Pani. And he will have the two Montagnais, who have been his good servants. We shall get out of this old, tumble-down post station, and be near the Heberts. Then M'sieu is getting such a nice big wheat ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa is at present occupying these pleasant ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... too tumble-down to use,' said one of the men, sadly; and I knew he was right, for I had ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... wind. In this young wood of Taahauku, all these hues and combinations were exampled and repeated by the score. The trees grew pleasantly spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there interspersed with a rack for drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for storing it. Every here and there the stroller had a glimpse of the Casco tossing in the narrow anchorage below; and beyond he had ever before him the dark amphitheatre of the Atuona mountains and the cliffy bluff that closes it to seaward. The trade-wind moving in the fans made ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as if speaking to her alone. "One of Vreiboom's tumble-down old sheds fired while we were trying to clear it. The place collapsed and I got pinned inside. Piet Vreiboom didn't trouble himself, or Kieff, either. He wouldn't—naturally. Guy ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... first is the quainter of the two, and commands, moreover, a noble view. As it stands at the turn of the bay, its skirts are all waterside, and round from North Reach to the Bay Front you can follow doubtful paths from one quaint corner to another. Everywhere the same tumble-down decay and sloppy progress, new things yet unmade, old things tottering to their fall; everywhere the same out-at-elbows, many-nationed loungers at dim, irregular grog-shops; everywhere the same sea-air and isleted sea-prospect; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... no architecture in particular, being but a picturesque chaos of tumble-down wooden shanties. It has no history worth speaking of, and its inhabitants are—and apparently have always been—a ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... three times on a door of a tumble-down shack. Cautiously it was opened a few inches. There ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... but he has sent for Chrysippus, an architect. But what are houses falling to him? He can thank Socrates and all his followers that they have taught him to disregard such worldly things. Nevertheless, he has deemed it expedient to take the advice of a certain friend as to turning the tumble-down house into profitable shape.[183] A little later he expresses his great disgust that Caesar, in the public speeches in Rome, should be spoken of as that "great and most excellent man."[184] And ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... was not a palace. It stood, low and whitewashed, amid a medley of little tumble-down erections, and was guarded on one side by cowsheds and on the other by the haystack. You stepped across the threshold into the kitchen. A door on the right gave access to the bedroom. A ladder connected with a hole in ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... getting stronger and when the girls reached the Hermit's Hut, a tumble-down shack half hidden in the brush, they gladly took shelter ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... until we reached the outskirts of the town, when we stopped before a small, tumble-down shanty, built of rough boards, and roofed with the same material. In the narrow front yard, a large iron pot, supported on two upright poles, was steaming over a light wood fire. The boiling clothes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... fare was a halfpenny apiece, and the boat almost too much crowded for standing-room. This part of the river presents the water-side of London in a rather pleasanter aspect than below London Bridge,—the Temple, with its garden, Somerset House,—and generally, a less tumble-down and neglected look about the buildings; although, after all, the metropolis does not see a very stately face in its mirror. I saw Alsatia betwixt the Temple and Blackfriar's Bridge. Its precincts looked ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... offers for his cottage, and was always provoked when it was spoken of as a 'tumble-down old shanty.' He always looked as if he meant to say, "Don't take it ill of me, good old house: the people only abuse you so that they may get you cheap." Hansei stood his ground. He would not sell his home ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Marine Board examinations took place at the St. Katherine's Dock House on Tower Hill, and he informed us that he had a special affection for the view of that historic locality, with the Gardens to the left, the front of the Mint to the right, the miserable tumble-down little houses farther away, a cabstand, boot-blacks squatting on the edge of the pavement and a pair of big policemen gazing with an air of superiority at the doors of the Black Horse public-house across the road. This was the part of the world, he said, his eyes ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... or the common conditions and industries of men in town or country. If it does not actually of itself turn, it presents everything the wrong side outward. In cities, it reveals the ragged and smutty companionship of tumble-down out-houses, and mysteries of cellar and back-kitchen life which were never intended for other eyes than those that grope in them by day or night. How unnatural, and, more, almost profane and inhuman, is the fiery locomotion of ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... Cours Sauvaire were ever swaying between fear and hope according as they fancied that they could see the blouses of insurgents or the uniforms of soldiers at the Grand'-Porte. Never had sub-prefecture, pent within tumble-down walls, endured ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... Mary's astonished eyes, the garden appeared almost as well planted as her own, and from the chimney of the tumble-down cabin a lazy curl of smoke rose. Under the dark pine clump the outlines of a narrow mound could be plainly seen, and beside it lay a spade and a ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... a moment to speak with them all—when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a Christian by force of rhetoric—what should I note (after so many years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that such a change had not ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Lorenzo Marquez. Through the kindness of one of his native or half-breed wives, who could talk a little Dutch, I managed, however, to get a lodging in a tumble-down house belonging to a dissolute person who called himself Don Jose Ximenes, but who was really himself a half-breed. Here good fortune befriended me. Don Jose, when sober, was a trader with the natives, and a year before ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... French portion of the town, the thoroughfares are narrow and crooked, and some of the houses are very quaint and picturesque: being built of wood, with tumble-down galleries before the windows, approachable by stairs or rather ladders from the street. There are queer little barbers' shops and drinking- houses too, in this quarter; and abundance of crazy old tenements with blinking ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... St. Louis, took a look at the army then at Rolla, in Central Missouri, but discovering no signs of action in that direction made his way to Cairo where General Grant was in command. General Grant's headquarters were in the second story of a tumble-down building. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... on which she leaned to eke out the failing strength of her own limbs. The wood-wife was both feared and hated by the people, amongst whom she bore the character of a very malicious witch. The king's daughter hated not only her, but her tumble-down house, and had sent again and again, with large offers of gold, to try and purchase the cottage. But the wood-wife laughed spitefully at the messengers, and only replied that the cottage suited her, and that for no money would she ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... streets of this tumble-down town walked every type of Gallipoli campaigner: British Tommies, grousing and cheerful; Australians, remarkable for their physique; deep-brown Maoris; bearded Frenchmen in baggy trousers; shining and grinning African negroes ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... This is due to the coal-black stem, which gives to a palm tree shorn of its head the look of a tumble-down smoke-grimed chimney. Unshorn, leaning to the wind, it is the most graceful thing in the world, especially seen against ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... becomes a mountain surrounded by a wide plain of sand, covered with clustering houses, towers, turrets, and fortifications, and surmounted by a Gothic church nearly 400 feet above the sea. There is a little town upon the rock, old, tumble-down, irregular, and picturesque, like Bastia in Corsica—constructed by a hardy sea-faring people, who have built their dwellings in the sides of this conical rock, like the sea-birds; and there is a little inn called the Lion d'or, with windows built out over the ramparts, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... the mission house. It was an old tumble-down shack. It was made of long twigs and branches, daubed over with mud. The roof was made of palm leaves. It was not nearly as nice a home as the one on Mission Hill in Duke Town. When Mary went inside, she found that it was whitewashed ...
— White Queen of the Cannibals: The Story of Mary Slessor • A. J. Bueltmann
... to the most secluded corner of the garden. There, in a thicket of lime-trees and old bushes of black currant, elder, snowball-tree, and lilac, there stood a tumble-down green summer-house, blackened with age. Its walls were of lattice-work, but there was still a roof which could give shelter. God knows when this summer-house was built. There was a tradition that it had been put up some ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... longer at each, so sometimes for months at a time he never got around to the shabby place on the hill at all. But the boy believed that he did understand this and often he smiled to himself over it, without any bitterness—just smiled half wistfully. He lived alone in the tumble-down old house and did his own cooking and—well, even a most zealous man of the gospel might have beamed more heartily upon better cooks than was Denny, without any great qualms ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... end of their journey she had to direct the cabman; and past the last long row or little red-brick villas, in a waste from which the agriculturalist had retired in favour of the jerry-builder, they came to the goal, three dirty, tumble-down cottages. The cab stopped at the third cottage; Selina sat back in the seat and pulled down her veil, in case Mrs. Bostock should recognise her; Sir Tancred got down and knocked at the door. A long-drawn snore was the only answer. He hammered on the door with his cane till he heard the ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... shore—looking down upon them through a cleft in the rocks. The village itself we did not see, but skirted it upon high ground and came down to the foreshore a short two miles beyond it; where we found a beach and a spit of rock, and on the spit a tumble-down tower standing, as lonely as a combed louse. Above the beach ran a tolerable coast road, which divided itself into two, after crossing a bridge behind the tower; the one following the shore, the other striking inland up the devil of a gorge. This inland road we ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... pile. Ah, when that creaking and sagging back gate closed behind me in the evening, I was happy; and when it opened for my egress thence in the morning, I was not happy. Inside that gate was a miniature farm redolent of homely, primitive life, a tumble-down house and stables and implements of agriculture and horticulture, broods of chickens, and growing pumpkins, and a thousand antidotes to the weariness of an artificial life. Outside of it were the marble and iron palaces, the paved and blistering streets, and ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... are in themselves beautiful or picturesque. That which is new in them is—new, and well enough; and that which is not new or newish is apt to be rather shabby than venerable. I apprehend that Old World cities would be quite intolerably shabby and tumble-down but for the fact that, when they were built, joint stock companies were unknown, and men still took real pride in the durability of their work. We have made wondrous progress, of course, and are vastly cleverer than our forbears; but for the bulk of the work ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... apartment. That book-shelves lined the rectangular portion of this strange study I divined, although that end of the place was dark as a catacomb. The walls were wood-panelled, and the ceiling was oaken-beamed. A small book shelf and tumble-down cabinet stood upon either side of the table, and the celebrated American author and traveller lay propped up in a long split-cane chair. He wore smoke glasses, and had a clean-shaven, olive face, with a profusion of jet-black hair. He was garbed in a dirty red dressing-gown, and ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... topped by a marble ball or two—which had been shot at for marks—and passing, just beyond, some huge clumps of box, they came to a square brick building with a rude wooden addition at one side, and saw some tumble-down sheds a short distance beyond ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... so mysterious about it?" she went on. "It's only a tumble-down old place, and must be very draughty to live in, even ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... my light was extinguished. Then I remembered with a shudder that I should have to pass through the whole vast length of the building in order to gain an exit. It was an all but hopeless task in the profound darkness to thread my way through the labyrinth of halls and corridors, of tumble-down stairs, of bat-haunted vaults, of purposeless angles and involutions; but I proceeded with something of a blind obstinacy, groping my way with arms held out before me. In this manner I had wandered on for perhaps a quarter of an hour, when my fingers came into distinct ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... who they are. They've only just come here and from goodness knows where. And they live in that little tumble-down ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... vicinity to the water, was a fine large structure, inclosed by a stockade; both rather dilapidated; as if the cost of entertaining its guests, prevented outlays for repairing the place. But it was one of Borabolla's maxims, that generally your tumble-down old homesteads yield the most entertainment; their very dilapidation betokening their having seen good service in hospitality; whereas, spruce-looking, finical portals, have a phiz full of meaning; for ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... grandfather—an old guy in a velvet skull-cap, I remember, who took snuff incessantly—and my uncle, on his part, had mortgaged them three deep again, which made six. How Carrick manages to live nobody knows. Sometimes he's in Ireland, in the tumble-down old homestead, with just a couple of servants to wait upon him; and sometimes he's on the Continent, en garcon—if you know what that means. Now and then he gets a windfall when any of his tenants can be brought to pay up; but he is the easiest-going coach ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Mr. McMaster he was making the usual round previous to the opening of the school, beating up unreliable scholars, and had entered a damp, noisome alley, lined on either side with tumble-down apologies for houses. Mr. McMaster took one side and Bert the other, and they proceeded to visit the different dwellers in this horrible place. Bert had knocked at several doors without getting any response, for the people were apt to lie in bed late on Sunday morning, ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... words were like a whipstroke that made Lepailleur rear. And once again he poured forth all his spite. Ah! surely now, it wasn't his tumble-down old mill that would ever enrich him, since it had enriched neither his father nor his grandfather. And as for his fields, well, that was a pretty dowry that his wife had brought him, land in which nothing more would grow, and which, however much one might water it with one's sweat, did not even pay ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... his riding-stick than it acted as gates without the upper hinge are known to do, to the peril of shins, whether equine or human. He was about to get down and lead his horse through the damp dirt of the hollow farmyard, shadowed drearily by the large half-timbered buildings, up to the long line of tumble-down dwelling-houses standing on a raised causeway; but the timely appearance of a cowboy saved him that frustration of a plan he had determined on,—namely, not to get down from his horse during this visit. If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... How did I get here? I got here through having made them bricks what you built this tumble-down old ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... them were completely levelled to the ground. Yet, in spite of all, moss, weeds and vines had sprung up mid the ruins, adding, if possible, the picturesque to this scene of desolation. One robust morning glory I noted had climbed along a wall right into the soot of a tumble-down chimney, and its fairylike blossoms lovingly entwined the iron bars whereon had hung and been ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... by the roadside, was a little tumble-down cottage. Robin remembered it and saw his only chance of safety. At once he doubled back through the underwood, much to the surprise of the Bishop, who thought he had truly disappeared by magic. In a few minutes Robin had come to the little ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... clamoring chorus behind him and he heard one brazen youngster boldly mimicking his manner of asking if the roads were good. These children lived in tumble-down houses which were all but ruins, and played in shell holes as if these cruel, ragged gaps in the earth had been made by the kind Boche ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the road turned in at the entrance of a sadly neglected estate. The grounds of the place were overrun with rank growths and the driveway was covered with weeds. The tumble-down gables of a descrepit frame house peeped out through the trees. It was a rambling old building that once had been a mansion—the "big house" of the natives. A musty air of decay was upon it, and crazily askew window shutters proclaimed ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... squalor of her surroundings. She passes her life in a dark, smoke-filled dwelling with broken furniture and a mud floor, together with pigs, chickens and babies enjoying a limited sphere of action under the tables and chairs, or in the tumble-down courtyard without. Her work is actually never done and a Chinese bride, bright and attractive at twenty, will be old and faded ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... play; Pan's own pipes, if you hear aright, Charm you on as you go your way; And all the Arcady folk of yore Make songs of the days that used to be, Which carry perhaps to the cottage door, The cottage that doesn't belong to me. But it's miles from town And it's tumble-down, And the woodwork's done and the slates are brown; No one could really live in the cottage That doesn't belong ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... time, Elaine, acompanied by "Weepy Mary" and her "son," had arrived at the little tumble-down station and had taken the only vehicle in sight, a ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old gray rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Holl were all in a tumble-down state; the furniture was no better. There wasn't a chair in the whole house; even the bastofa had only a dirt floor, and it was entirely unsheathed on the inside except for a few planks nailed on the wall from the bed up as far as the rafters. ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... recommend the Green Chalybeate against your next vacation. Once very long ago, it was frequented equally for the sake of gaiety and of health. In the summer that was Marian's the resort was a beautiful and tumble-down place where invalids congregated for the sake of the nauseous waters,—which infallibly demolish a solid column of strange maladies I never read quite through, although it bordered every page of the writing-paper you got there from the desk-clerk,—and a scanty leaven of persons who came thither, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... little church called St. Sennan's. You haven't heard of it, probably. It's past the Cove—on a hill looking over the sea. It's the most tumble-down old place you ever saw, and nobody goes there except a few fishermen, but we know the clergyman and like him. I like the place too—you can listen to the sea if ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... the last bridge, a village of 800 people, on a narrow ledge between an abrupt hill and the Hirakawa, a most forlorn and tumble-down place, given up to felling timber and making shingles; and timber in all its forms—logs, planks, faggots, and shingles—is heaped and stalked about. It looks more like a lumberer's encampment than a permanent village, but it is beautifully situated, and unlike any of the innumerable ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... to a new race of peasant owners, who were frugal, industrious, thrifty, and assiduous in the cultivation and improvement of the soil. In a few years the face of the country was transformed. A new life and energy were springing into being. The old tumble-down farm-houses and out-offices began to be replaced by substantial, comfortable, and commodious buildings. Personal indebtedness became almost a thing of the past, and the gombeen man—one of Ireland's national curses—was fast fading out of sight. The tenant purchasers, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... business to which his correspondent referred was so very "private and particular," it would never do, he thought, to read the letter there in the post-office, while there were so many men standing around; so he straightway sought the privacy of his own dwelling—a little tumble-down log cabin with a dirt floor and stick chimney, which was situated in the outskirts ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... the setting sun casts its orange tones mingled with amber upon the casements of the chateau, the effect is that of painted windows. At the other end of the canal we see Blangy, the county-town, containing about sixty houses, and the village church, which is nothing more than a tumble-down building with a wooden clock-tower which appears to hold up a roof of broken tiles. One comfortable house and the parsonage are distinguishable; but the township is a large one,—about two hundred scattered houses in all, those of the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... wish to ask a question, they kneel down and kiss the border of our coats, as in the days of the serf system. We are stationed here in Poland, about eight kilometers from the so-called road, in a so-called village far from all civilization. The village consists of a number of tumble-down cottages, with rooms which we should not consider fit for stables for our horses. The rain is streaming down unceasingly, as if Heaven wished to wash away all the sins of the world. Our horses sink into the mud up ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... this morning I had a conversation of which, I think, some account might interest you. I was up with a cousin who was fishing in a mill-lade, and a shower of rain drove me for shelter into a tumble-down steading attached to the mill. There I found a labourer cleaning a byre, with whom I fell into talk. The man was to all appearance as heavy, as hebete, as any English clodhopper; but I knew I was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... framed in the doorway from which streamed the glare from a big reading lamp, the man of mystery—the fellow who had escaped from the tumble-down tenement—the man he and Bailey had ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... through a patch of wild sunflowers that in the bottom lands grow thick and rank; whirled past the tumble-down corner of an old fence that enclosed a long neglected garden; and dashed recklessly through a deserted and weed-grown yard. On one side of the road was the ancient barn and stable, with sagging, weather-beaten roof, leaning walls and battered doors that hung dejectedly ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... you—a tumble-down old house, an embarrassed estate. My brother will get but a small income when it falls to him. My father fights cocks and dogs, rides to hounds, and, I grieve to say, drinks hard, ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... doing their bit to make things brighter for us, and say, maybe those girls cannot bake. Every day they furnish us with real homemade crullers and pies at a small cost, and their coffee, holy smoke! it makes me homesick to even write about it. The girls have their headquarters in an old tumble-down building and they must have some nerve, for the Boche keeps dropping shells all around them day and night, and it would only take one of those shells to blow the whole outfit ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... questions because my father remembers you have promised him buck and boar and moufflon—is that the right name for those strange creatures? We intend to crave your hospitality on our way to Bastia, where we are to embark, and I trust the della Rebbia Castle, which you declare is so old and tumble-down, will not fall in upon our heads! Though the prefect is so pleasant that subjects of conversation are never lacking to us—I flatter myself, by the way, that I have turned his head—we have been talking ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... result of her generous offer, she was allowed to rent a tumble-down, unoccupied building, and opened her school with six pupils! Every one of the six became so enthusiastic over a teacher who was interested in each individual that their friends were eager to be her pupils, too, and parents were anxious to see what the wonderful ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... something that is worth more than Edith's farm, tumble-down cottage, roses, and all. So remember that those lips were made to kiss, not to ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... for three miles or so through orange groves and sandhills to the town, a wretched tumble-down-looking place, half choked up with sand. Here, as it was now dark, we took shelter in a house called an inn, but, except in the public hall, where the eating and drinking went on, not a room contained a particle of furniture, so that we had to lie down ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... than most people in the American colony) they didn't offer to help; and mamma would have died sooner than ask. I had to be snatched out of school, to find that all the beautiful dreams of being a happy debutante must go by contraries. We lived in the tumble-down house ourselves, mamma and I, and her friends rallied round her—she was so popular and pretty. They got her chances to give singing lessons, and me to do translating, and painting menus. We were ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... glanced a little quizzically at the tumble-down house on the cliff above them and then at the old boat, with its tattered maroon sail, anchored below. "There's not much money in ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... and anger, bestowed every one a parting pinch on their tumble-down old bondsman; then they handed him to his son, and swung back with careless light hearts to ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... yet followed doggedly nevertheless. She led him down Holborn Hill past the Fleet Market, over Blackfriars Bridge, and so, turning sharp to the right, along a somewhat narrow and very grimy street between rows of dirty, tumble-down houses, with, upon the right hand, numerous narrow courts and alley-ways that gave upon the turgid river. Down one of these alleys the fluttering cloak turned suddenly, yet when Barnabas reached the corner, behold the alley was ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... Uncle Moses, "there's somethin in that too. David's dreadful fond of old stones, and old bones, and tumble-down edifices, and old sticks an weeds. Why, he's all the time collectin; an if he keeps on, his baggage'll become nothin ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... to-night is near the ruins of a very old fort, and ever since we got here, the men have been hunting rattlesnakes that have undoubtedly been holding possession of the tumble-down buildings, many snake generations. Dozens and dozens have been killed, of all sizes, some of them being very large. The old quarters were evidently made of sods and dirt, and must have been dreadful places to live in even ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... it gave us a queer thrill to hear the constant boom-boom of the guns like a continuous thunderstorm. We began to feel fearfully hungry, and stopped beside a high bank flanking a canal and not far from a small cafe. Bunny and I went to get some hot water. It was a tumble-down place enough, and as we pushed the door open (on which, by the way, was the notice in French, "During the bombardment one enters by the side door") we found the room full of men drinking coffee and smoking. I bashfully made my way ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... construction gangs and along the lines of railways and canals one discovers these immigrant families taking root in the soil. In the smaller cities, an immigrant day laborer will often invest his savings in a tumble-down house and an acre of land, and almost at once he becomes the nucleus for a gathering of his kind. The market gardens that surround the large cities offer work to the children of the factory operatives, and there they swarm over beet and onion fields like huge insects with an unerring instinct for ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... old tumble-down hovel good-bye; My mother she'll scold, and my sisters they'll cry: But I won't care a crow's egg for all they can say; I sha'n't go to stop ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... the gate the road narrowed, and at the corner where the little Rue Poiree strikes off between two rows of tumble-down houses to join the Rue St. Jacques there was somewhat of a block. I had fallen back behind the sumpter horses, and halted for a moment, when I felt a hand rest lightly on my stirrup. I looked down, and, as I live, it ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... ruin at the back of Burmah; near the Chinese Border. Such a place as you never dreamt of. Tumble-down palaces, temples, and all that sort of thing—lying out there all alone in ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... Meryon's grim power in the presentation of old Paris streets and tumble-down houses, Lalanne has achieved several remarkable plates of this order. One is his well-known Rue des Marmousets. This street is almost as repellent-looking as Rue Mouffetard at its worst period. Ancient and sinister, its reputation was not enticing. In it once dwelt a pastry cook who, taking his ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... it is!" said Hal, sighing; "I did not know there were such shocking places in the world. I've often seen terrible-looking, tumble-down places, as we drove through the town in Mamma's carriage; but then I did not know who lived in them; and I never saw the inside of any of them. It is very dreadful, indeed, to think that people are forced to live in this way. I wish Mamma ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... sufferings. She was very little, very thin, very lame, very old-looking (ninety at least, in appearance), very tremulous, very subdued, and very sweet. Even that termagant gossip, Mrs Hard-soul, who dwelt alone in a tumble-down hut near the quay, was heard upon one occasion to speak of her ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... with its Banbury cakes and tumble-down station is passed. Hurrah for the "Flying Dutchman," running easily and smoothly, sixty miles an hour, well within himself. He is not tired, he does not pant or whistle, he goes calmly, swiftly along.... Here is Swindon—what o'clock is it? Look! Twelve minutes past ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... police were the only effective missionaries. The hotel here is called the Brawner House; it has a bar in the nethermost cellar, and its patrons, carousing in that imperfect light, look like the denizens of some burglar's crib, talking robbery between their cups; its dining-room is dark and tumble-down, and the cuisine bears traces of Caffir origin; a barbecue is nothing to a dinner there. The Court House of Port Tobacco is the most superflous house in the place, except the church. It stands in the center of the town in a square, and the dwellings lie about it closely, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... looking at—mere tumble-down sheds in which Moslem boys were taught to say the Koran by heart. The places where Christian missionaries once had been were all turned into stores, and even into stables for the ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... of the poor." He was almost conscious of a feeling of guilt as he recalled the fresh, pure air of the park and contrasted it with this atmosphere. The name of Berry Hill seemed curiously inappropriate for the level streets lined with tumble-down tenements; and its suggestion of the long-ago days when vine-clad uplands swelled between the narrowing rivers, and little children steeped their fingers in nothing more harmful than the blood of berries, lent an added pathos to the gloom of the ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... disappeared to make room for street, and other structural improvements. There were no hydraulic presses in those days for the baling of jute, and the work had to be done by hand screws worked from the upper floor, on the same principle as the capstan of a sailing vessel, by gangs of coolies in old, tumble-down and dilapidated godowns. The jute was compressed into bales weighing 300 lbs. only, and it was not until the advent of the hydraulic presses in the seventies that bales containing first of all 350 and later 400 lbs. were shipped ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... Brompton! He is not a client of mine, but I have my eye on him. His earthly possessions consist of about five acres of land, a tumble-down hut near by, and a double-barrelled shotgun, and he lost his secretaryship when the new administration made its clean sweep of the offices. They said he was going to marry a rich ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... passage. Everything appears to be in a state of chronic decay; and as the city flourished twelve hundred years before Christ,—indeed may be said to have been at the zenith of its glory at that period,—it is not surprising that it should be in a tumble-down condition in our day. This very dilapidation, however, renders the river front one of the most picturesque sights imaginable. Being a British possession, there is a European quarter of the town, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... except for the rhythmic noises coming from the big Massey Steel Mills. Suzanna looked in their direction and stood a moment watching the sparks coming from the big round chimneys. Over across fields were the tumble-down cottages occupied by the employees of the Massey Steel Mills. Suzanna did not often go in their direction. The squalor made her unhappy and set in train so many questions she was ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... view. As it stands at the turn of the bay, its skirts are all waterside, and round from North Reach to the Bay Front you can follow doubtful paths from one quaint corner to another. Everywhere the same tumble-down decay and sloppy progress, new things yet unmade, old things tottering to their fall; everywhere the same out-at-elbows, many-nationed loungers at dim, irregular grog-shops; everywhere the same sea-air ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were there and the only alternative before him. It was the mills or nothing for people seldom came to live at Freeman's Falls if they did not intend to enter the factories of Fernald and Company. It was Fernald and Company that had led his father to sell the tumble-down farm in Vermont and move with his family to ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... examinations took place at the St. Katherine's Dock House on Tower Hill, and he informed us that he had a special affection for the view of that historic locality, with the Gardens to the left, the front of the Mint to the right, the miserable tumble-down little houses farther away, a cabstand, boot-blacks squatting on the edge of the pavement and a pair of big policemen gazing with an air of superiority at the doors of the Black Horse public-house across the road. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... sitting together on the mossy walk between the box-hedges, the hum of bees and the scent of roses filling the air, and the sweet monotonous murmur of the sea on the shingly beach in our ears! For, mounting still higher by terraces and another flight of steps through a tumble-down gateway, you came upon the open cliffs; and the long blue line of the sea and the fresh sea-breeze greeted you with a thousand thoughts of home. For England lay ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... off in mournful procession until we came to a small waterside tavern, whose inmates my uncle peremptorily awakened, and soon had forth a gruff, sleepy fellow to show the way and unlock a tumble-down outhouse, into which they bore their silent burden, followed by ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... coaches passing, and he shouted to them at the top of his voice, but no one took the slightest notice of him. At length the driver of a tumble-down looking vehicle, with a superb coat of arms on the panel, made a signal in return and drew up near ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... fire;—even to mother," she added, in a low, melancholy tone, which had something of inexpressible sadness in it. "Why, Jenny!" said she, rousing herself, but not before her eyes were swimming with tears, "own, now, that you never saw those dismal, hateful, tumble-down old houses there look half so—what shall I call them? almost beautiful—as they do now, with that soft, pure, exquisite covering; and if they are so improved, think of what trees, and grass, and ivy must be on such ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... into a draughty cattle-shed. The door was slammed. I sneezed. It was a bright prospect. I changed my views on the inefficiency of our Home Defenders. They now appealed to me as violently efficient. A night in a tumble-down cow-house! Desolation! Then I brightened up: the MacNeils' whisky. The cork popped in the silence of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... Swankie, he hid his ill-gotten gains under the floor of his tumble-down cottage, and went about his evil courses as usual in company with his comrade Davy Spink, who continued to fight and make it up with him ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... style of building; they have closed in what is left of the old hall now; but a few years since this old house was visible from the main road; it stood low on some vacant ground, and appeared to be half in ruins. I believe it was occupied by several poor families who rented tenements in the tumble-down dwelling. But formerly it was Gerard Hall, (what a difference between Gerard and Garratt!) and was surrounded by a park with a clear brook running through it, with pleasant fish-ponds, (the name of these was preserved until very lately, on a street near,) orchards, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... now paved with hot blocks of granite over which the carriage rattled; spread with car tracks, bordered by heterogeneous buildings of all characters and descriptions, bakeries and breweries, slaughter houses and markets, tumble-down shanties, weedy corner lots and "refreshment-houses" that announced "Lager Beer, Wines and Liquors." At last they came to a region which was neither country nor city, where the road-houses were still ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... claret-colored paint, quite moldy. The stationer's and the tobacconist's were still there. In the rear, over some low buildings, you could see the leprous facades of several five-storied houses rearing their tumble-down outlines against the sky. The "Grand Balcony" dancing hall no longer existed; some sugar-cutting works, which hissed continually, had been installed in the hall with the ten flaming windows. And yet it was here, in this dirty den—the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... the Cafe de l'Opera, a tumble-down frame shack with a corrugated iron roof, to order a cooling drink and to puzzle out this utterly ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Texas was reminded of itinerant mountain ranges. The stranger who would be so unwary as to take issue with him on this point would regret—if he lived. The unpainted shanties, the huddled, tottering dives, the tumble-down express station—all, even the maudlin masquerade of the High Card Saloon—were institutions inseparable from his thoughts, inviolable and sacred in the measure of his ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... not made a place of residence by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all recollection ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... here; he lives at Brox'on, over the hill there. The parsonage here's a tumble-down place, sir, not fit for gentry to live in. He comes here to preach of a Sunday afternoon, sir, an' puts up his hoss here. It's a grey cob, sir, an' he sets great store by't. He's allays put up his hoss here, sir, iver since before I hed the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... were disposed to wonder why Mrs. Cavers lived on in the old tumble-down Steadman house after her husband's death. "Why doesn't she go home to her own people?" they asked each other—not in any unkindly, spirit, but because they naturally expected that she would do this. Libby Anne had told the children at school so much about her mother's lovely home ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... and hurried out. The address the operator had given them was nearly a mile away, and they broke into a run. As they went along they noticed that the houses lining the streets began to wear a very tumble-down aspect, and to thin out ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... poor, this mother and son; and the little living they had, came mostly by means of needlework, which the woman did for people in the town, and by the sale of dried herbs and suchlike. As for the cottage itself, it was a crazy, tumble-down tenement, half in ruins, and all the outside walls of it were covered with clinging ivies and weeds and wild climbing plants. I was one of these. I grew just underneath the solitary window of the small chamber wherein the poor woman ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... this many times before, his eyes now took but little note of the streets and their contents, except that he noted the fact under the new order of things, since the Jews had come into possession of the city, that there was scarce a Moslem of any kind to be seen, and that most of the tumble-down, smaller houses, of a few years back, had been pulled down, and that the streets in consequence had been considerably widened. Hundreds of new houses of bungalow type, had taken the places of those pulled down. Most of these were built on the ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... that it might be used for protection to the castle which has been built on and attached to it. If I remember rightly, this was done by one of the Frangipani, and a very lovely ruin he has made of it. I know no castellated old tumble-down residence in Italy more picturesque than this baronial adjunct to the old Roman tomb, or which better tallies with the ideas engendered within our minds by Mrs. Radcliffe and "The Mysteries of Udolpho." It lies along the road, protected on the side of the city by ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... before his eyes he dragged his weary, aching feet as quickly as he could towards the spot, and soon came to a miserable-looking little cottage. As he drew near he saw that it was in a tumble-down condition, the bamboo fence was broken and weeds and grass pushed their way through the gaps. The paper screens which serve as windows and doors in Japan were full of holes, and the posts of the house were bent with age and ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... to Craymoor Grange in the summer of 1849, my husband having discovered the place in one of his rambles, and taken a fancy to it. At first I certainly thought we could never make it our home, it was so dilapidated and tumble-down; but by the time winter came on we had had several repairs done and alterations made, and the ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... remember another day, more than thirty years before, when it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... and paused to survey the property she intended to part with. She had no eye for the picturesque. A few white petals from the blossoming plum tree, scattered by the breeze, fell upon her black bonnet and shoulders. A faint scent of honey came from it and the hum of bees, for the day was warm. The tumble-down condition of the cottage engaged Mrs. de ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... most striking feature of antiquity met thus far on our journey were curious stone terraces built across the small gullies. They are called trincheras (trenches). Some of them do not appear to be very old, and many present the appearance of tumble-down walls, but the stones of which they are constructed were plainly used in their natural state. Although many of the boulders are huge and irregular in shape, they were used just as they were found. The building material ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... twice up the main street, yelling and whooping like a pack of wild Indians. A queer awry figure stuck its head from the window of a tumble-down shop and, seeing the cause of the disturbance, shook ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... is the state of the land and the laborers. Think of Kit Downes, uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!—and those poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is one reason why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle—which you think me stupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... so situated that all surroundings shall have a favorable influence; and there is nothing like example in early training. Bring up and educate a boy among those who know nothing of the refinements of life, away from the progressive examples of art and taste, in a tumble-down, unplastered, ill-heated and ventilated apartment, and he never can become, with all the aid of books and teachers, as thoroughly cultivated and fitted for the duties of life, as one who has enjoyed associations of a higher order. School architecture has a meaning in it; there is value in ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... boat with a cabin on it, and sat on its roof on decrepit cane chairs, and the rowers below with makeshift oars gradually pulled us up and down the face of the Ghats—what oars, and what a ramshackle tub of a boat—too old and tumble-down for a fisherman's ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... pity, when by chance we light upon some twisted root-trunk, to which the shadows have given outstretched arms. The vague feelings, too, so absolutely unaccountable, that the sight of a lonely gate, or weir, or park-railing, or sign-post, or ruined shed, or tumble-down sheep-fold, may suddenly arouse, when we feel that in some weird manner we are the accomplices of the Thing's tragedy, are feelings that Dickens alone among writers seems to understand. A road with no people upon it, and the wind alone sobbing there; with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead; ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... look at another "dividing ridge" that had neither path nor way, and henceforth I must keep to the open road or travel alone. Two hours' tramp brought us to an old clearing with some rude, tumble-down log buildings that many years before had been occupied by the bark and lumber men. The prospect for trout was so good in the stream hereabouts, and the scene so peaceful and inviting, shone upon by the dreamy ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... clearness, as the two lads sped rapidly over the waves—Flavian at work suddenly, from time to time, with his tablets. They reached land at last. The coral fishers had spread their nets on the sands, with a tumble-down of quaint, many-hued treasures, below a little shrine of Venus, fluttering and gay with the scarves and napkins and gilded shells which these people had offered to the image. Flavian and Marius sat down under the shadow ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... wing of the patriotic pile. Ah, when that creaking and sagging back gate closed behind me in the evening, I was happy; and when it opened for my egress thence in the morning, I was not happy. Inside that gate was a miniature farm redolent of homely, primitive life, a tumble-down house and stables and implements of agriculture and horticulture, broods of chickens, and growing pumpkins, and a thousand antidotes to the weariness of an artificial life. Outside of it were the marble and ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... we reached the outskirts of the town, when we stopped before a small, tumble-down shanty, built of rough boards, and roofed with the same material. In the narrow front yard, a large iron pot, supported on two upright poles, was steaming over a light wood fire. The boiling clothes it contained were being stirred ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... temple," Pei Ming explained, "really faces south, and is all in a tumble-down condition. I searched and searched till I was driven to utter despair. As soon, however, as I caught sight of it, 'that's right,' I shouted, and promptly walked in. But I at once discovered a clay figure, which gave me such a fearful start, that I scampered out again; for ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... each other that she no longer tried to keep them back. So she talked of their setting out upon their expedition, of the beautiful fields they crossed, of their lunch over there in the ruins of Hautecoeur, upon the flagstones of a little room whose tumble-down walls towered far above the Ligneul, which rolled gently among the willows fifty ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... started upon a brisk run, and Jim still sat upon the stone watching him until he disappeared somewhere among the angles of the tumble-down buildings that ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... opened for our admission, that we stepped at once from the small front court into the drawing-room, from which a door opened into a stone kitchen. The rest of the accommodation corresponded with this primitive mode of entrance; the whole place was in what is commonly called a "tumble-down" condition: there was certainly plenty of garden, and two large meadows, but, like the rest of the place, they were sadly out of order. When we said it was not at all the house we had expected to find from reading ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... from the crowd and silently wended our way through a neighboring alley, at the head of which stood a tumble-down old barn, owned by one Ezra Wingate. In former days this was the stable of the mail-coach that ran between Rivermouth and Boston. When the railroad superseded that primitive mode of travel, the lumbering vehicle was rolled in the barn, and there it stayed. The stage-driver, after prophesying ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... years after The Excursion. Byron called Crabbe "Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely accurate delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the imaginative ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... merchant that was, a few years ago. Quite a tumble-down their pride has had, I reckon! Why, I remember when nothing in my store was good enough for them. But they are glad enough now to work for me at any price I ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... gossamer over the furze bushes and rough grass around the camping-place, before the pair of pleasure-seekers returned. By that time, however, Tonio was sleeping soundly beside the piebalds in shelter of a tumble-down wall, with the monkey curled closely in against his dusky breast. Joe and Moll were stupid, tired, and decidedly out of sorts, as people are wont to be after a surfeit of enjoyment and a scant supply of sleep. Bruno growled as usual at ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... taking advantage of the shelter, hurried forward, smiling grimly in the darkness at the memory of the fact that things were now reversed; that he was following Squint Rodaine as Rodaine once had followed him. Swiftly he moved, closer—closer; the scar-faced man went through the tumble-down gate and approached the house, not knowing that his pursuer was less than ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... thinking it was but some sudden freak, he points out a black dirty-looking dwelling-place, with overhanging windows and a wide gabled roof. 'Yonder it stands, Becky,' he cries; 'number seven John-street, Clerkenwell; a queer dingy box of four walls, my wench—a tumble-down kennel, with a staircase that 'twould break your neck to mount, being strange to it—and half a day's journey from the court-end of town. But that house was once paradise to me; and to look at it even now, though 'tis over eighteen years since I saw the inside of it, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... letter. The Miller's widow was an old deaf woman, who lived quite alone, in a little, tumble-down cottage, just off the road, on a lonely hillside. The foot-path that Blasi took, led near her dwelling. The woman was an aunt of Jost's, and had known better days when her husband was alive; but now she had fallen into poverty, and had grown sour and bitter, and would have nothing to do with ...
— Veronica And Other Friends - Two Stories For Children • Johanna (Heusser) Spyri
... crutches under his arms, leaning on the gate, silently regarding me as I went by. Not boldly; his round dark eyes were like those of some shy animal peering inquisitively but shyly at the passer-by. His was a tumble-down old thatched cottage, leaky and miserable to live in, with about three- quarters of an acre of mixed garden and orchard surrounding it. The trees were of several kinds—cherry, apple, pear, plum, and one big walnut; and there were also shade trees, some shrubs and currant and ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... compared with their neighbors of the other villages (Pl. XXXIV). The houses and courts are in keeping with the general character of the people and exhibit a degree of neatness and thrift that contrasts sharply with the tumble-down appearance of some of the other villages, especially those of the Middle Mesa and Oraibi. There is a general air of newness about the place, though it is questionable whether the architecture is more recent than that of the other villages of Tusayan. This effect is partly due to ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... through several low streets beside the wharves until he came to a court in which stood a tumble-down tenement with the legend "Lodgings" scrawled on a board above the door. Here they entered, and Love in a few words bargained with the sour landlady for a night's lodging. She protested at first at their coming ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... who sold umbrellas and walking-sticks in a tumble-down house which adjoined "The Ladies' Paradise." His business was ruined by the growth of that concern, and he expressed bitter hatred towards Octave Mouret, its proprietor. Denise Baudu rented a room from ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... horses and men in an old tumble-down brick-kiln, in the solitude of a dense forest which surrounded the town at that time. No sooner had Sternbald, whom he had sent in disguise into the city with the mandate, brought him word that it was already ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... little fruit, and that of so poor a flavour as to be scarcely worth picking. They have, in fact, almost reverted to savagery, even as the cottage itself is crumbling back to the earth out of which it was built. On the slope above the cherry-orchards, if you moor your boat at the tumble-down quay and climb by half-obliterated pathways, you will come to a hedge of brambles, and to a broken gate with a well beside it; and beyond the gate to an orchard of apple-trees, planted in times when, regularly ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cottages has become a recognised form of fraud among less scrupulous members of the trade. An oak chest bearing every superficial mark of age that a clever workman can give it (and the profession of wormholer, is now, I believe, recognised) is deposited in a tumble-down, half-timbered home in a country village, whose occupant is willing to take a share in the game; a ticket marked "Ginger-beer; sold Here" is placed in the window, and the trap is ready. It is almost ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... steamboat received the Hawkinses and their fortunes, and bore them a hundred and thirty miles still higher up the Mississippi, and landed them at a little tumble-down village on the Missouri shore in the twilight of a mellow ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... education by a very thorough course of study at Clinton, N. Y. Miss Barton's remarkable executive ability was manifested in the fact that she popularized the Public School System in New Jersey, by opening the first free school in Bordentown, commencing with six pupils, in an old tumble-down building, and at the close of the year, leaving six hundred in the fine edifice at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... clad only in her shift, she thrice crossed the King's Highway and was thus married to avoid payment of her first husband's debts. It is not far from the old Church Foundation of St. Paul's of Narragansett, and the tumble-down house of Sexton Martin Read, the prince of Narragansett weavers in ante-Revolutionary days. Weaver Rose learned to weave from his grandfather, who was ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... water from the cold spring under the dooryard oaks. They were not afraid of the strong-limbed, duck-clad stranger, whose manner was the manner of the town folk, but whose speech was the gentle drawl of the mountain motherland. Once he had eaten with them in the single room of the tumble-down cabin; and again he had made a grape-vine swing for the boys, and had ridden the littlest girl on his shoulder up to the steep-pitched corn patch where her father was plowing. We may bear this in mind, since it has ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... the clatter of his mother's housework came from the kitchen. He didn't wish he was back there, but it was pleasant to think of it now and then, and how the yellow farmhouse looked and the red barn where his father never had been able to find time to paint the door, and the tumble-down cowshed where the shingles were always coming off. He wondered dully what it would be like out there at the front. It couldn't be green and pleasant, the way the country was here. Fellows always said it was hell out there. Well, he didn't give a damn. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... standing prominently at the corner immediately facing you. Two pollarded acacias are planted near the door of the inn, above the lintel of which a painted board scribbled over with irregular lettering invites the traveller to enter. A wooden verandah, with tumble-down roof and worm-eaten supporting beams, runs along two sides of the house, and from the roof hang a number of gaily-coloured and decorated ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... accepting without question anything they paid him, or else sat perfectly quiet, with the air of a person waiting for some one. He held only the briefest communication with anybody, and was believed by some to have intimate relations with the Evil One, and his tumble-down hut, which he was particular to keep closely daubed, was thought by such as took this view of the matter to be the temple where he practiced his unholy rites. For this reason, and because the little cabin, surrounded by dense pines and covered with ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... as he rode to the place of coronation he had never seen before. Notwithstanding the embroidered silk and velvet hangings decorating the fronts of the rich people's houses, he caught glimpses of filthy side streets, squalid alleys, and tumble-down tenements. He saw forlorn little children scud away like rats into their holes as he drew near, and wretched, vicious-looking men and women fighting with each other for places in the crowd. Sharp, miserable ...
— The Land of the Blue Flower • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... McMaster he was making the usual round previous to the opening of the school, beating up unreliable scholars, and had entered a damp, noisome alley, lined on either side with tumble-down apologies for houses. Mr. McMaster took one side and Bert the other, and they proceeded to visit the different dwellers in this horrible place. Bert had knocked at several doors without getting any response, for the people were ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... in as it was, felt the impulse of the awakening season. The landlord came, looked over the premises, and after viewing the general shabbiness became reckless enough to order a broken windowpane to be reset, some of the tumble-down ceilings to be repaired, and the fire escapes and window frames to ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... were small, tumble-down cottages, inclosure's planked round, gardens, green shutters, wine-trade signs painted in red letters, acacia trees in front of the doors, old summer arbors giving way on one side, bits of walls dazzlingly white, then some straight rows of manufactories, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... large map of a Southern railroad, on one side of which were some highly-colored pictures. The first showed the tumble-down cabin of a colored man, himself, wife and boy carrying from it their few belongings to the favored land of promise. The next picture shows him and his family in the woods in his new location, getting ready to build his house. The third ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... to settle down in Little Silver. He had no relations round about and couldn't, or wouldn't, tell his new neighbours what had brought him along. But he bided a bit with Mrs. Ford, the policeman's wife, as a lodger, and then, when he'd sized up the place and found it suited him, he took a tumble-down, four-room cottage at the back-side of the village and worked upon it himself and soon had the place to his liking. A most handy little man he was and could turn his skill in many directions. And he'd do odd jobs for the neighbours and show a good ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... appeared through the darkness ahead. Presently the boys were able to see that it came from a lantern held by some man standing in the open doorway of the old house. A moment later four others appeared from within and came out to the tumble-down porch. Bob and Hugh looked on with bated breath. What ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... this tumble-down town walked every type of Gallipoli campaigner: British Tommies, grousing and cheerful; Australians, remarkable for their physique; deep-brown Maoris; bearded Frenchmen in baggy trousers; shining and grinning African negroes from French colonies; stately Sikhs; ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... see," said Mason, turning to the map, and dismissing the sorrows of the old lord of Neopalia. "About the middle of the island, nearly a thousand feet above the sea. I'm afraid it's a tumble-down old place, and will swallow a lot of money without looking much better for the dose. To put it into repair for the reception of the future ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... Often a tumble-down hovel where three would seem a crowd yielded up more than a dozen inmates, many of whom, being at work, must be looked for later—the "back-calls" that is the bete-noire of the census enumerator. West Indians, ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... anything happening—yet at about noon of the day that Harley P. Hennage looked over the rail fence into the feed corral at San Pasqual and discovered that Bob McGraw's horse was gone, a man on a tired horse rode up from the south, turned in through the ruined doorway of one of the roofless tumble-down adobe houses, and concealed himself and his horse in the area formed by the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... neighbours, you will kindly excuse my bobby: it carries grist to your mill. [Reiterated applause.] Well, but you will say, 'What's the squire driving at?' Why this, my friends: There was only one worn-out, dilapidated, tumble-down thing in the parish of Hazeldean, and it became an eyesore to me; so I saddled my hobby, and rode at it. Oh, ho! you know what I mean now! Yes, but, neighbours, you need not have taken it so to heart. That was a scurvy trick of some of you to hang me in effigy, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... proceeded to St. Louis, took a look at the army then at Rolla, in Central Missouri, but discovering no signs of action in that direction made his way to Cairo where General Grant was in command. General Grant's headquarters were in the second story of a tumble-down building. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... had the manager on board and three or four pilgrims with their staves—all complete. Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange,—had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in the air for a while—and on we went again into the silence, along empty reaches, round the still ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,— nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that ruinous chateau, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite no surprise; but he—and he Peter Paul Rubens alone—handles these every- day ingredients of all common landscapes as they are handled ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Jasper Suggs lay in front of the tumble-down fireplace, his long body twisted grotesquely by the final spasm of pain that carried him off. The lower part of his body was covered by a filthy strip of rag carpet which some one had hastily thrown over him as Rachel Carter was on the point of entering the house. His coarse ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... tumble-down blacksmith shop was located in the main street of Eastboro, if that hit-or-miss town can be said to possess a main street. Atkins drove up to its door, before which he found Benijah and a group of loungers ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... lodged in a little, dirty, tumble-down public-house, which in those days was close to the stairs, and whose protruding wooden rooms overhung the river. The family, as emigrants, being objects of some interest in and about Hungerford, attracted so many beholders, that we were glad to take refuge in their room. It was one of the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... gesture which was Crevel's parting greeting. She walked with a proud, defiant step, like a martyr to the Coliseum, but her strength was exhausted; she sank on the sofa in her blue room, as if she were ready to faint, and sat there with her eyes fixed on the tumble-down summer-house, where her daughter was ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... reverent attitude now so familiar to her; sometimes she would turn to the right and pause at the brow of the hill, where the valley in all its panorama of loveliness lay before her; and sometimes she would walk straight ahead to the old tumble-down gate where she might face the west and watch the rose change to ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... nearly morning when we got off the bog, and as the rain was falling we took refuge in a tumble-down hut which had probably been a cowherd's. We soon saw that it was a poor shelter, and when a woman came along and looked straight at us, we began to get gooseflesh! She actually smiled at us, and we tried to smile back reassuringly, ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... Dick. But he could not eat it, he could only think what a fine cow it had been when it was alive. At last he slipped away unobserved out of the house, and, looking about for somewhere to sleep, he found an old tumble-down house filled ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... discovered that they were so far in the lead, and seating herself on a stone fence she helped herself to the blackberries which grew against it, and held out a handful to Sahwah. Opposite them was an old, tumble-down house, weatherbeaten and bare of paint, its empty window sashes gaping like eyeless sockets. The girls had named it the "Haunted House," and wove many a tale of mystery about it. Beside it was an apple orchard, its trees dying of old age, and under one of them was a grave with a headstone. Nyoda ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... this equitable distribution of his patronage; people were disposed to regard it as an ineffectual attempt to conceal his possession of so much money. That he had great hoards of ill-gotten gold buried somewhere about his tumble-down dwelling was not reasonably to be doubted by any honest soul conversant with the facts of local tradition and gifted with a sense of ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... could not talk and chatter like one. Your having lost your eye in your vocation is an honour to you, and you may be proud of it, and glory in it. But their sticking me down in the middle of their dung, where I was forced to lie like a tumble-down sheaf, or a truss of hay,—it has knockt half a dozen nails into my coffin. 'Conrad! Conrad! ninnyhammer! sack of straw!' so it seemed that everything was shouting in my ears. I have now seen the miserable, dirty ploughed ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... itself. It was a conflagration, but not a general one; the houses were too scattered and the day too still for a fire to spread. What could it be? Perhaps the blacksmith shop, perhaps the bakery, perhaps the old tumble-down barn of the little Tremblay? It was not a large fire, that was certain. But where ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... and the smell of smoke was terrible. We could see people runnin' in certain parts of Columbia, sometimes. Next mornin' we look over the city from the bluff and only a few houses was standin' and hundreds of tumble-down chimneys and the whole town ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... at. As the equipage dashingly approached the busy centre of Hanbridge, the region of fine shops, public-houses, hotels, halls, and theatres, more and more of the inhabitants knew that Iris (as they affectionately called her) was driving with a young man in a tumble-down little victoria behind a mule whose ears flapped like an elephant's. Denry being far less renowned in Hanbridge than in his native Bursley, few persons recognised him. After the victoria had gone by people who had heard the news too late rushed from shops and gazed at the Countess's back as ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... The very sight of work scared old Mr. Rabbit. You see, he was so busy minding other people's business that he didn't have time to attend to his own. So his brown and gray coat always was rumpled and tumbled and dirty. His house was a tumble-down affair in which no one but Mr. Rabbit would ever have thought of living, and his garden—oh, dear me, such a garden you never did see! It was all weeds and brambles. They filled up the yard, and old Mr. Rabbit actually couldn't have gotten into his own house ...
— Mother West Wind 'Why' Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... which many people consider the best hotel in Germany, having capital restaurants, serving table-d'hote meals, attached to them. The Rose has a little terrace, looking on to the gardens, which is a pleasant supping-place. The old Kurhaus, a tumble-down building, is disappearing or has disappeared, and a new and gorgeous building is to take its place. The restaurant at the old Kurhaus always had a good reputation, and to eat one's evening meal, for every one sups ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... degraded into dinginess, and the faded, patched chintz sofa, that was not only comfortable, but respectable, in the old wainscoted sitting-room, has suddenly turned into "an object," when lang syne goes by the board and the heirloom is incontinently set adrift. Undertake to move from this tumble-down old house, strewn thick with the debris of many generations, into a tumble-up, peaky, perky, plastery, shingly, stary new one, that is not half finished, and never will be, and good enough for it, and you will perhaps comprehend how it is that I find a great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thought as how you'd been in some break-neck tumble-down country, zur, for Tit's knuckels showed she'd had a somerset ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... have enough to eat and wear," said Cherry. "There is a family with seven children just moved into that tumble-down old house on the next road, and they look starved to death, to say nothing of the rags and ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... accusation that we use the poor simply as a means of self-improvement. An old Irish woman in a tumble-down tenement house once said to me: 'Ye'll have no chance to work out your salvation doing for me.' I believe that there are many of the poor who more or less consciously have the same idea. They think that ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... the stranger stood motionless, gazing up at the house. It was in some sort a type of the wretched dwellings in the suburb; a tumble-down hovel, built of rough stones, daubed over with a coat of yellowish stucco, and so riven with great cracks that there seemed to be danger lest the slightest puff of wind might blow it down. The roof, covered with brown moss-grown tiles, had given ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... before me a dreary church. It was old, tumble-down, and dirty—not in the least venerable—very ugly—a huge building without shape, like most of our churches. I shrank from the look of it: it was more horrible to me than I could account for; I feared ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... undertook to make the necessary vows in her name. In spite of this brilliant send-off, Sydney was not destined to bring good fortune to her father's house. A few years after her birth Owenson, having quarrelled with Daly, invested his savings in a tumble-down building known as the Old Music Hall, which he restored, and re-named the National Theatre. The season opened with a grand national performance, and everything promised well, when, like a bomb-shell, came the announcement that the ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... fields and plodded steadily on. It was the new of the moon and the landscape was shrouded in heavy shadows. On and still on the silent procession had traveled, and when their eyes, now accustomed to the darkness, had espied the outlines of a tumble-down, one-story house that stood out against the blackness of the night a halt had been made and each dark figure had taken from under her arm a bundle. Then the faint rustle of paper accompanied by an occasional giggle or a smothered exclamation ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... I don't know, any more than you do. The first time I saw him, was in an old tumble-down building, where the wind played hide and go seek through the timbers; and where more men, women, dogs and children were huddled together, than four walls of the like size ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... covered with watercress: this was green where the water was fresh, a bright yellow as far as the salt tide had prevailed. Between where they stood and the distressed waters of the bay was a stretch of yellow sand. A little to their right was a dismantled, tumble-down cottage, which served to emphasise the romantic remoteness of ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... with. A tavern is only half a house, just as one of these new-fashioned screw-propellers is only half a ship. Suppose you walk round and take a look at my place. I own quite a respectable house over yonder to the left of the town. Do you see that old wharf with the tumble-down warehouses, and the long row of elms behind it? I live right in the midst of the elms. We have the dearest little garden in the world, stretching down to the water's edge. It's all as quiet as anything can be, short of a graveyard. The back ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... ambition. The privations that I endured, the life I led, I will not recount to you. I performed the most menial service, and worked months like a beast of burden. For want of a shelter, I slept in deserted yards and tumble-down houses. Upon a piece of bread and a drink of water I lived, saving, with miserly greediness, the money which I earned as messenger or day-laborer. At the end of a year, I had earned sufficient to buy an old suit of clothes at a second-hand clothing-store, ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... drove away from Gwynne Street, Janetta was left by the tumble-down iron gate with her father, in whose hand she had laid both her own. He looked at her interrogatively, smiled a little and said—"Well, my dear?" with a softening of his whole face which made him positively beautiful in ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... and desolate. At the side of a steep lane, overgrown with grass, and seeming a mere cart-path, stood a deserted-looking, black and white, timbered cottage, which was half a ruin. Close to it was a dripping spinney, its trees forming a darkling background to the tumble-down house, whose thatch was rotting into holes, and its walls sagging forward perilously. The bit of garden about it was neglected and untidy, here and there windows were broken, and stuffed with pieces of ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... be out of pocket. It's really unreasonable." He was looking at Sloyd. "It's treating me as an enemy,—and I shall have no alternative but to accept the situation. Blinkhampton is not essential to me; and your hotel and so on won't flourish much if I leave my tumble-down cottages and pigsties just behind them. Will you put ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... country; and provided he created no open disturbance he had as much liberty as a mission preacher to speak in the streets to those who would stop to listen. He paused now in his walk at the door of one house more than commonly dingy and tumble-down in appearance, where a man lounged outside in his ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... to myself: "You can climb up the city clock-tower, and see the house of Catharine and Aunt Gredel." Thinking thus, I arrived at the house of Brainstein, the bell-ringer, who lived at the corner of the little place, in an old, tumble-down barrack. His two sons were weavers, and in their old home the noise of the loom and the whistle of the shuttle was heard from morning till night. The grandmother, old and blind, slept in an armchair, on the back of which perched a magpie. Father Brainstein, ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... drivers had to point them out the ruins of the old Abbey of Chamont where they lay hidden among trees. It was a great sell! The ladies voted them silly. Why, they were only a heap of old stones with briers growing over them and part of a tumble-down tower. It really wasn't worth coming a couple of leagues to see that! Then the driver pointed out to them the countryseat, the park of which stretched away from the abbey, and he advised them to take ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... a local expressman, owner of a rickety wagon and a tumble-down mule. He was coffee-colored in complexion. His feet projected quaintly behind as well as in front. His lips projected also, as did his eyes, wide-rimmed and bulging. His trousers were too long for him, and his coat hung limp ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... Wood-wife." This was because of a wooden staff on which she leaned to eke out the failing strength of her own limbs. The wood-wife was both feared and hated by the people, amongst whom she bore the character of a very malicious witch. The king's daughter hated not only her, but her tumble-down house, and had sent again and again, with large offers of gold, to try and purchase the cottage. But the wood-wife laughed spitefully at the messengers, and only replied that the cottage suited her, and that for no money would she quit ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... master into trouble, he desisted, and remained couched patiently before the churches until such time as the boy reappeared. It was not the fact of his going into them which disturbed Patrasche; he knew that people went to church; all the village went to the small, tumble-down, gray pile opposite the red windmill. What troubled him was that little Nello always looked strangely when he came out, always very flushed or very pale; and whenever he returned home after such visitations would sit silent ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... log cabin, half a mile north of New Salem, just under the bluff, still stands, but long since ceased to be a dwelling-house, and is now a tumble-down old stable. Here Lincoln was a frequent boarder, especially during the period of his closest application to the study of the law. Stretched out on the cellar door of his cabin, reading a book, he met for the first time "Dick" Yates, then ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... of silver reales but my Christmas dinner, built up about the nucleus of a can of what announced itself outwardly as pork and beans. Talgua, at eleven, did not seem the fitting scene for so solemn a ceremony, and I hobbled on, first over a tumble-down stone bridge, then by a hammock-bridge to which one climbed high above the river by a notched stick and of which two thirds of the cross-slats were missing, while the rest cracked or broke under the 185 pounds to ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... in the air was disagreeable. Tawdry spangles and false jewels lay about on the tumble-down settees. From behind little doors that opened from the walls round came the ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... children, the oldest of whom was perhaps ten years old, and the others but little things, almost babies. They had a tiny little tumble-down house to live in, but very little to eat. Said the eldest to his little brother and sister, "I will go yonder on the sands laid bare by the falling tide, and it may be that I shall find something that we can eat." The little ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... takes everything at a disadvantage; it does not front on nature, or art, or the common conditions and industries of men in town or country. If it does not actually of itself turn, it presents everything the wrong side outward. In cities, it reveals the ragged and smutty companionship of tumble-down out-houses, and mysteries of cellar and back-kitchen life which were never intended for other eyes than those that grope in them by day or night. How unnatural, and, more, almost profane and inhuman, is the fiery locomotion of the Iron Horse through these densely-peopled towns! now the screech, the ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... on Prytania Street, at least to the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the neighbourhood. When or how they came, or how they stayed, no one knew; it was enough that they were there, like a sort of ancestral fixture to the street. The neighbourhood was fine enough to look down upon these two tumble-down shops at the corner, kept by Tony and Mrs. Murphy, the grocer. It was a semi-fashionable locality, far up-town, away from the old-time French quarter. It was the sort of neighbourhood where millionaires live before their fortunes are made and fashionable, ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... corner of the promenade, just where the old city and the new city meet, is a tumble-down mill. It is called the Nonnen-Muehle, and it has been there ever since Ehrestadt first came into existence, as is evident from the bulging of the walls, and the wood of the casements, rotten and worm-eaten. The river winds underneath ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... was Talcahuano; and the picture it presented was one of houses in ruins and silent streets. A few wretched canoes, ready to fall to pieces, were on the beach; near them loitered a few poorly clad fishermen; while in front of the tumble-down cottages and roofless huts sat women in rags employed in combing one another's hair. In contrast with this human squalor, the surrounding hills and woods, the gardens and the orchards, were clothed in the most splendid foliage; on every side flowers displayed their ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... in this story is just what we would have if you would come to our tumble-down, jolly, improper, but joyous country,— namely, "jollitude." You write and live on so high a plane! It is all self-abnegation. We want to get you over here, and into this house, where, with closed doors, we sometimes make the rafters ring with fun, and say anything and everything, no matter ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... the pure, sun-filled air. At the top of the hill, reluctant to go back to the town that lay beyond, he stood contemplating the ancient school building that held so bravely its commanding position, and looked so pitiful in its shabby old age. Then passing through a gap in the tumble-down fence, and crossing the weed-filled yard, he ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... horse in the tumble-down stable, the roof was half off, the rafters hanging down, the walls crumbling—an old place. It had been in the family of Jean Baptistine for many years. He was a lone man, no wife, three sons fighting, and his daughter—ah well, she was where ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... Ridinghood; and the small eyes grow big at the adventures of Sinbad, the gallant tar. Will not this be better, Don Bob, than pistil and stamen and radicle? —than wearing out BBB lead pencils in drawing tumble-down castles, rickety cottages, and dumpling-shaped trees?—than acquiring a language which has no literature fit for a girl to read?—than mistressing the absurd modern piano music?—than taking diplomas ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... visited. The best substitute for such rambles as one can take through these mouldy boroughs (or burrows) is to be found in such towns as Salem, Newburyport, Portsmouth. Without imagination, Shakespeare's birthplace is but a queer old house, and Anne Hathaway's home a tumble-down cottage. With it, one can see the witches of Salem Village sailing out of those little square windows, which look as if they were made on purpose for them, or stroll down to Derby's wharf and gaze at "Cleopatra's Barge," precursor of the yachts of the Astors ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... merchandise, including silks, broadcloths, groceries, plows, and schoolbooks. On either side of Main-st. was a hard-beaten path, which served for a sidewalk. On the south side of the street stood a number of dingy rookeries, in a half tumble-down condition. Pigs and cows roamed at large, and were only known to be home at supper-time, when old brindle, in more instances than one, might have been seen peering through the front window with a covetous look upon the family group around ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... song in her heart never ceased. Day by day a fresh note was added; everything she touched; everything she saw was transformed. The old tumble-down house with its propped-up furniture and makeshift carpets seemed to have become already the place she planned it to be. There would be vines over the door and a new summer kitchen at the back'; and there would be a porch where her mother could sit, flowers all about ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
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