"Dingy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all her fair young beauty she stood before him, and then by some hellish magic she was slowly transformed into a hideous black hag. With agonized eyes he watched her beautiful tresses become mere wisps of coarse wool, wrapped round with dingy cotton strings; he saw her clear eyes grow bloodshot, her ivory teeth turn to unwholesome fangs. With a shudder he awoke, to find the cold gray dawn of a rainy ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... before—were very badly furnished, indeed, with comfortless, high horse-hair-seated chairs, and a sofa of the same uncomfortable material, cold and slippery, on which it was impossible to rest. The carpet was nearly threadbare, and the curtains of dark-red moreen were very dingy; the mirror over the chimney-piece seemed to have been made purposely to distort my features, and produce in me a feeling of depression. My bedroom, which communicated with this agreeable sitting-room by folding-doors, was still smaller and gloomier; and opened upon a dismal back-yard, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... dingy north-bound platform. Graham, Keith, and Twiston had been obliged to scratch owing to other more imperative plans; but five members boarded the 10 o'clock train in high spirits. Forbes, Carter, King, Blair, and Whitney— they filled a third-class ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... have been painted on the wall there, like the Fra Angelicos, and then the convent would have it still. The Child is very attractive, as almost always in this artist's work, but the picture as a whole has grown rather dingy. By the window is a Velasquez, the first we have seen in Florence, a little Philip IV on his prancing steed, rather too small for its subject, but very ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... of shops. That heap of splintered wardrobes and legless tables was once a furniture warehouse. That snug little corner house, with the tottering zinc counter and the twisted beer engine, is an obvious estaminet. You may observe the sign, "Aux Deux Amis," in dingy lettering over the doorway. Here is an oil-and-colour shop: you can still see the red ochre and white lead splashed ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... metamorphosed. A new sofa had been introduced, and horrid chintz affair, most unprelatical and almost irreligious; such a sofa as never yet stood in the study of any decent high church clergyman of the Church of England. The old curtains had also given away. They had, to be sure, become dingy, and that which had been originally a rich and goodly ruby had degenerated into a reddish brown. Mr Harding, however, thought the old reddish brown much preferable to the gaudy buff-coloured trumpery moreen which Mrs Proudie had deemed good enough for ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... specimens of the cotton-mouth moccasin attain to a length of about six feet. The full grown reptile is of a dingy brownish-black color, but the young are pinkish, with coppery bands running transversely across the body. With the exception that this reptile has no rattles, it answers in its general peculiarities to the description ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... shooting on the river, and was in excellent spirits. Game was in great demand, and he looked hopefully for good sales on the morrow. After their scanty meal he picked up the paper and began to read. Silence reigned in the little dingy shanty for some time, broken only ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... his eyes, even at this late day, and both see and hear it all again—even as he can see the unbroken row of dingy dwellings that lined his way back from Quadrant Mews to Frognall Street corner: all drab and unkempt, all sporting in their fan-lights the legend ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the window into the dingy square, where the sparrows were hopping and twittering on the wet, iron railings and the sooty branches of the trees. She reflected a few moments. She had heard it said very often that she was "clever," and ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the bank and waited for him to walk round behind the cages. The dingy old room with its walnut counter and desks seemed at once a brighter place. The four clerks made it convenient to expose themselves to Phil's smile. She planted herself at the paying teller's cage and waited for Amzi's benevolent ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... to Reuben's funeral, with his mother and Blossom at his side, walking slowly across the moist fields, in which the vivid green of the spring showed like patches of velvet on a garment of dingy cloth. In front of him his mother moved stiffly in her widow's weeds, which she still wore on occasions of ceremony, and in spite of her sincere sorrow for Reuben she cast a sharp eye more than once on the hem of her alpaca ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... the window-sill. One dry, agonized sob racked her; and then she sat on the floor, to stare vacantly at the dingy walls ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to take his leave. There had been an informal little meeting held in the dingy private office of Messrs. Samuel Weatherley & Company, ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... morning, before the Mistress appeared, the Master took a leash in his hand, and set out with Finn from the poor house that sheltered them, in the dingy quarter of the town where they lived. They walked for two miles through sunlit spacious streets, and then they came to the house of the doctor. The Master waited in the hall, and the doctor came to see him there, a finger napkin in ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... "Of course—with that dingy brown paper and the woodwork stained that hideous imitation of oak. You can scrape all that off, paint it white, put on a warm, rich paper, restore your fanlight, and you'll have ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... boys? Well, which one? Go fetch me Daniel's report.' So I went and fetched him Daniel's report. It was gray, I remember—the supposed color of failure in our school—and I stood with the grin still half frozen on my face while Pa spelt out the dingy record of poor Daniel's year. And then, 'Oh, gorry!' says Pa. 'Run away and g'long to bed. I've got to think. But first,' he says, all suddenly cautious and thrifty, 'how much does it cost to go to college?' ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... ancestors. I can introduce him, it is true, into an old and high-roofed chamber, its walls covered in three sides with black oak wainscoting, adorned with carvings of fruit and flowers long anterior to those of Grinling Gibbons; the fourth side is clothed with a curious remnant of dingy tapestry, once elucidatory of some Scriptural history, but of which not even Mrs. Botherby could determine. Mr. Simpkinson, who had examined it carefully, inclined to believe the principal figure to be either Bathsheba, or Daniel in the lions' den; while Tom ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... in the garden of the square, and sat within the dingy summer-house, so happy, that I love the London sparrows to this hour, for nothing else, and see the plumage of the tropics in their smoky feathers! When we had our first great quarrel (within a week of our betrothal), and when Dora sent me back the ring, enclosed in a despairing cocked-hat ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Kentucky group, even from Dorothy herself, that circumstance wrung no murmur of resentment and the accused stood for a moment before he took his seat with eyes ranging over the place until they came to the section of the dingy room where he encountered ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... you can't really elude the Carnival. As the days elapse it filters down into the manners of the common people, and before the week is over the very beggars at the church-doors seem to have gone to the expense of a domino. When you meet these specimens of dingy drollery capering about in dusky back-streets at all hours of the day and night, meet them flitting out of black doorways between the greasy groups that cluster about Roman thresholds, you feel that ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... white, pink, and striped flowers on the same plant, and branches with striped flowers on a red-coloured variety. On a double stock (Matthiola incana) I have seen a branch bearing single flowers; and {382} on a dingy-purple, double variety of the wall-flower (Cheiranthus cheiri) a branch which had reverted to the ordinary copper colour. On other branches of the same plant, some flowers were exactly divided across the middle, one half being purple and the other coppery; but some of the smaller ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... worth reading; for it is that of a good, brave and high-minded man, a great sailor, and a true gentleman. The author has put into these few pages what he has gleaned from many volumes, some of them stout, heavy and dingy tomes, though delightful enough to "those who like that sort of thing." He hopes that the book may for many readers touch with new meaning those old weatherworn stones at Botany Bay, and make the personality of Laperouse live again ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... for whom the triumphs of produced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth great dramas of the younger Dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. My one other reminiscence of this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the old dingy Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where I saw in my brother's company a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired Ponsard, Ce qui Plait aux Femmes; a piece that enjoyed, I believe, scant success, but that was to leave with me ineffaceable images. How was it possible, I wondered, to have ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... he gazed out over the dingy housetops toward the mass of feathery clouds, which must have been floating over the rocky ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... looked gutted; empty kegs, barrels had gone overboard, boats had been washed away, the big coal pile was scattered like pebbles and some half of it lost. And one odd trifle gripped Madden's heart—the fresh paint over which the crew had toiled so patiently looked old and dingy. ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... for a dinner, Behold these lovely variegated dyes! These are the rainbow colors of the skies, That heaven has shed upon me con amore— A Bird of Paradise?—a pretty story! I am that Saintly Fowl, thou paltry chick! Look at my crown of glory! Thou dingy, dirty, dabbled, draggled jill!" And off goes Partlett, wriggling from a kick, With bleeding scalp laid open by ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... delight it was just to breathe the air! Never had her step been so light, or her daily walk to the dingy office—dingy no longer—so bracing. And the out-of-doors—the sky and drifting clouds; the low hills, bleak in the winter's gloom—what changes had come over them? Was it the first blush of the coming spring that had softened their lines, or had her ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... admitted her. Straightway the Bishop suspended the Governor's chaplain. Then the Governor fined the Bishop in the sum of fifty pounds. The Bishop refused to pay, and was committed to Castle Rushen, and lay there two months. They show us his cell, a poor, dingy little box, so damp in his day that he lost the use of some of his fingers. After that the Bishop appealed to the Lord, who declared the imprisonment illegal. The Bishop was liberated, and half the island went to the prison gate to fetch him forth in triumph. ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... the first things to attract the attention of the reader, in the dingy files of some newspaper of 1812-15, is the grotesque names under which many of the privateers sailed. The grandiloquent style of the regular navy vanishes, and in its place we find homely names; such as "Jack's Favorite," "Lovely Lass," ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... his face radiant. "Julia, why, you won't know yourself strolling on the sands with a parasol while your poor delicate husband is toiling and moiling away in the dingy city. Good for you, father! You lift that pretty nose of hers up from the grindstone where she's held it so many years that she doesn't know anything different. Hurray, Julia!" In his enthusiasm the speaker rose and leaned over the chair of his astonished wife. "You ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... with fruit and wine, which were hovering about the steamer, and getting in the way of everybody, while crying their wares. Many of these boatmen seemed as dark in complexion as any East Indian on board, and nearly all wore ear-rings, generally of silver, in the dingy lobes of their ears. They seemed noisy and quarrelsome, and often shrieked what seemed like terrible imprecations at each other, shaking their fists and scowling darkly, only to be laughing carelessly the next minute, as if nothing mattered. Dwight was about motioning one ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... superior streets of this neighbourhood, a young man stood looking out of the window one November afternoon. It was then five o'clock, and the darkness was coming: all day a gentle, never-ceasing rain had been bringing the soot down from the dark skies upon the already dingy roofs. It was a dismal and miserable prospect upon which the watcher looked out, but not so miserable nor so dismal as the situation in which he just then found himself. The mean street beneath him was not more empty of cheerfulness than his pockets were empty of money and ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... the low and dingy station and was in the open country of Morovenia. Kalora and her elderly guardian and the young women who were to be her companions during the period of exile had been tucked away into adjoining compartments. Each young woman was muffled and veiled according ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... the little girls to school every morning, and met them near the school at one o'clock. In the meantime she made a visit to the Mail office, and perhaps spent an hour or two there, or in the markets; but at least three times a week she wandered over to Old Paloma, and spent the forenoon in the dingy streets across the river. What she did there, perhaps no one but Doctor Brown, who came to have a real affection and respect for her, fully appreciated. Mrs. Burgoyne would tell him, when they met in some hour of life or death, that she was "making ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... service was over, I went once more to the Hall, and was shown into the drawing-room—a great faded room, in which the prevailing colour was a dingy gold, hence called the yellow drawing-room when the house had more than one. It looked down upon the lawn, which, although little expense was now laid out on any of the ornamental adjuncts of the Hall, was still kept very nice. There sat Mrs Oldcastle reading, with her face to the house. ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Madame Vetu's death moans, nor beheld the ward littered with beds, and, with all its disorder, resembling some infirmary improvised after a public catastrophe. They once more found themselves in a small attic at the top of a dingy house in old Paris, where air and light only reached them through a tiny window opening on to a sea of roofs. And how charming it was to be alone there together—he who had been prostrated by fever, she who had appeared there like a good angel, who had quietly come from ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... that was almost tangible; it was a glow so real it seemed to warm and light that dingy old passageway. Certainly it warmed and lighted the young man who stood there with her. For him, too, the whole world was transfigured, and life just an orchard to walk ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... don't say that!" she exclaimed. "God has given me no greater happiness in this life than the sight of the gratitude of that poor creature, Nancy. I shall never forget the old woman's joy at the sight of her daughter. It made a palace out of that dingy furniture shop. Hand me ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the little river there was a fortress known as the White Castle. An irregular, many-angled pile of undressed stone heavily merloned on top, its remarkable feature was a tall donjon which a dingy white complexion made visible a great distance, despite its freckling of loopholes and apertures for machine artillery. Seeing its military importance, the Sultan left a garrison to hold it. He was also pleased to change ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... L10,000? Unless I receive a reply within a week, legal proceedings will be taken." The rest were similar in tone. Thereupon we resolved to call at the last address given to us by "CROESUS." It was somewhere in the Mile End Road. We arrived, entered, ascended the stairs, and found in a dingy back bed-room, three used half-penny stamps, a false nose, a pair of whiskers, and a large sheet of paper on which were written only these words: "Sold Again"—which obviously referred to some financial scheme or other. On inquiring of the landlady, we heard that her lodger had ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 12, 1891 • Various
... was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities. He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... place of very little importance, dingy and dilapidated. It is represented to have twenty thousand inhabitants, but one would not have set the figure at more than half that number. There is still something done here in the pearl fisheries, though ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... window panes, as well as the goods therein. Men and women were hastening homeward with well-filled baskets which they had provided for the festive morrow. All the ragged, dirty urchins of the village were gathered about the dingy shop windows admiring, with distended eyes and gaping mouths, the several displays of ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... of the great world, thought Mellin: no vulgar tourists or "trippers" among them; and he shuddered at the remembrance of his pension (whither it was time to return) and its conscientious students of Baedeker, its dingy halls and permanent smell of cold food. Suddenly a high resolve lit his face: he got his coat and hat from the brass-and-blue custodian in the lobby, and without hesitation ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... Gilbert is a warm-hearted, high-spirited girl, clever and ambitious, and disposed at first to look contemptuously on poor Arthur, whose humble labors appear in most dingy and sordid colors, when contrasted with the fair Fanny's gorgeous dreams. She is not a very fascinating nor a very real heroine; but she is better than most of our heroines, and some of her experiences are very ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... time, Bles entered Zora's home. It was a single low, black room, smoke-shadowed and dirty, with two dingy beds and a gaping fire-place. On one side of the fire-place sat the yellow woman, young, with traces of beauty, holding the white child in her arms; on the other, hugging the blaze, huddled a formless heap, wreathed in coils of ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... under the ground-glass roofing, the names of Smith and Hanbury were to be seen painted in large white letters across a panel, with a laconic invitation to push beneath it. Following out the suggestion, the Admiral and his companion found themselves in a dingy apartment, ill lit from a couple of glazed windows. An ink-stained table, littered with pens, papers, and almanacs, an American cloth sofa, three chairs of varying patterns, and a much-worn carpet, constituted all the furniture, save only a very large ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... joy, and his beggarly customers, a subject worth painting. Then we recall a goodly list of other commonplace subjects which he treated so truthfully that they will always stand among the great pictures of the world,—"The Spinners," where women labor in a dingy room, "The Topers," "The Lances," representing the great surrender of Breda, and the "The Maids of Honor." Nor can we forget his ideal portrait of "AEsop," with his book under his arm. How well we know that book of fables! The rugged, good-natured face, homely as can be, holds ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... exterior corresponded with its interior. Long, and consisting only of two storeys, the building had its lower half destitute of stucco; with the result that the dark-red bricks, originally more or less dingy, had grown yet dingier under the influence of atmospheric changes. As for the upper half of the building, it was, of course, painted the usual tint of unfading yellow. Within, on the ground floor, there ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... coffee-shop in Salonika which served drinkable tea. It was dark and dingy inside, though the tablecloths were spotless. He went in, and there ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the same date are, indeed, things to think upon. They affect one—the "Stabat Mater," for instance, and the "Ave Verum"—very much in the same way as the figures which stare down, dingy green and blue, from the gold of the Cosmati's mosaics: childish, dreary, all stiff and agape, but so solemn and pathetic, and full of the greatest future. For out of those Cosmati mosaics, and those barbarous frescoes of the old basilicas, will come Giotto and all the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... students live huddled up together are most hurtful to their constitutions. The houses are dirty, dingy, ill-ventilated, and crowded. Even in case of infectious sickness ... they lie in the same place as others, some of whom they actually infect. Phthisis is getting alarmingly common among students owing ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... coach, or wagon, or mail-cart toiled or rattled along, the basement storeys were bespattered freely from the gutters. The glories of gas were yet to be. After three o'clock p.m. miserable oil lamps tried to enliven the foggy street with their 'ineffectual light,' while through dingy, greenish squares of glass you might observe tall tallow candles dimly disclosing the mysteries of bank or counting-house. Passengers needed to walk with extreme caution; if you lingered on the pavement, woe to your corns; if ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... into a queer kind of semi-underground hall whose walls were painted to represent a cave, dingy cork festoons and "rocks" adding to the illusion. Here, at long tables, everyone drank innocuous French beer, that was really quite cool and good. It was rather like part of an English bank holiday. ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... who, with thin wiry legs, walked by his side, in a dingy white coat, and blue facings, and great pewter buttons, with his silver gray hair escaping from under his battered three-cocked hat; and his shrewd puckered resolute face, in which the boy could read no promise of sympathy, showing so white ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... to the dingy entrance which led to the long halls and multigenerous stairways of their abiding place. Without a word they began to climb the steps, tired and with returning discouragement. They were thinking ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... meantime, turned towards the stream, now partially enveloped in the dusky shade of twilight, but there was one spot sparkling with the rosy light of sunset, and resting snugly 'mid the pebbles at the bottom, he spied a large, dingy ball. ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the tramp of feet. Tall, gloomy, smoke-embrowned buildings, whose uniformity of dulness is not disturbed by windows incrusted with the accumulated dust of a century, hem you in on either side, and oppress your breathing as with the mildewy atmosphere of a vault. The dingy ranks of brick are broken by very narrow alleys; and here and there, peeping under archways, you may espy little paved court-yards, with great pumps scattering continual damp in the midst of them, and enclosed with just such dusky ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... passed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening to be in Westminster in the forenoon—I had come up to town on business—I mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street, and rang the bell. A dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient duty, admitted me, and I found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe in front of the fire. It wasn't even a good coal fire. Some austere former tenant had installed an electric radiator in the once comfort-giving ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... same—never a hill and never a hollow, but always the same endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings. Here and there would be a bridge crossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud shores and dingy sheds and docks along it; here and there would be a railroad crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing, and rattling freight cars filing by; here and there would be a great factory, a dingy building with ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... the weather do its worst. But London, with its low, dark, smutty brick houses and insignificant streets, settles down hopelessly into the dumps when the weather is bad. Even with the sun doing its best on the eternal cloud of smoke, it is dingy and gloomy enough, and so dirty, after spick-span, shining Paris. And there is a contrast in the matter of order and system; the lack of both in London is apparent. You detect it in public places, in crowds, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... themselves for the adventure. On the sixteenth of May, 1535, officers and sailors assembled in the cathedral of St. Malo, where, after confession and mass, they received the parting blessing of the bishop. Three days later they set sail. The dingy walls of the rude old seaport, and the white rocks that line the neighboring shores of Brittany, faded from their sight, and soon they were tossing in a furious tempest. The scattered ships escaped the danger, and, reuniting ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... found myself in a dingy, ordinary sort of Cafe, in no wise differing from any other dingy, ordinary sort of Cafe in that part of Paris. The decorations were ugly enough to be modern. The ceiling was as black with gas-fumes and tobacco ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... usual, did wonders. There was, fortunately for his employer, no time to build or paint, but some dingy rooms were hung with scarlet cloth; cart-loads of new furniture were sent down; the theatre was re-burnished; the stables put in order; and, what was of infinitely more importance in the estimation of all Englishmen, the ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... that many another woman does not. We are afraid to trust our own likings. Too many of them are but sunrise vapors, very rosy to begin with, but by mid-day as dingy as any old dead cloud with the rain all shed out of it. I never see any of those old swains of mine, without feeling profoundly thankful that I don't belong to him. I shouldn't want to look over my husband's head in any sense. So they all got wives ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and uncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presently saw us off to Westmorland. The aunt ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sluggish move adown the limbo black, With murky waves that writhe demoniac,— As ebon serpents curling through the gloom And hurl their inky crests, that silent come Toward the yawning gulf, a tide of hate; And sweep their dingy waters to Realms ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... had seen at the fair, I looked so much stouter and stronger in my seaman's dress. I did not much like the look of the forepeak, into which Peter introduced me, telling me that it was to be my house and home for the next few years of my life. I had been accustomed to the dingy obscurity of an Irish cabin, but never had I been, I thought, in a more dark ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... the sun each day came out before we had done, and broke through the dingy windows in a carnage of color. How fine a side of death, November, the month of the dead, presents here. Damp and fog and fall of the leaf doubtless the sorryness of the bad business of decay and punishment but on the other hand ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... the inner passage, by which we were two nights and a day accomplishing this most tedious navigation, creeping through cuts and small muddy rivers, where we stuck sometimes to the bottom, and sometimes to the banks, which presented a most dismal succession of dingy, low, yellow swamps, and reedy marshes, beyond expression wearisome to the eye. About the middle of the day on Friday, we touched at the island of Edisto, where some of the gentlemen-passengers had business, that being the seat of their plantations, and where the several ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... came at last. It was something between a moan and the pained cry of some mild-spirited animal stricken to death. It had no human semblance, and yet—it came from behind the dingy print curtain over the ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... but in point of fact that was the difficulty with the boy. He couldn't come. He came as far as he could: that is to say, he walked up the tow-path until he was opposite the house-boat, and then he hallooed to be taken on board, whereupon some one had to go in the dingy for him. All the time we were in the house-boat that boy was never five minutes late. Wet or fine, calm or rough, 7 A.M. found the boy on the tow-path hallooing. No sooner were we asleep than the dewy morn was made hideous by the boy. Lying in bed ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... forward like one well accustomed to the dingy labyrinth of old-fashioned stages. Presently they came upon Lalage. She was much heated by her exertions, thickly ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... into the Metternichgasse and up the steps of the Embassy and into a lofty salon where Captain Goritz bade her wait, and disappeared. A gloomy room with dingy frescoes of impossible cupids and still more impossible roses. Roses—the leit motif of her tragedy! There were mirrors—many mirrors, all of which seemed to be reflecting her pallid face. She was weary and covered with dust, but not so weary ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... much in evidence. On landing one of the guards, numerous and whose charges are fixed by law, took us in charge to show us the city. The streets generally were unimproved and irregular, both in architecture and location. Through several dingy and untidy streets he led us to the public park, which made considerable pretension to order and neatness. The turban, the wrap, the sandals and other Oriental costumes, which made up the dress, were not ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... wish that the comparison I had drawn for the Konak was a more just one, and that inside its card-board classicalism could be found the slightest approach to American hospitality. Not an inn of any kind exists in Canea: a dirty, dingy restaurant, which called itself "The Guest-House of the Spheres," offered one small bedroom, which the filth of the place, with its suggestions of bugs and fleas, forbade the title of a sleeping-room. While the yacht stayed I had a bed; but after that it was a dreary prospect for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... The Fulton Ferry—dingy and deserted now—is full of fine memories. The old waiting room, with its ornate carved ceiling and fine, massive gas brackets, peoples itself, in one's imagination, with the lively and busy throngs of fifty and sixty years ago. "My life then (1850-60) was curiously identified with ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... the sun was just lifting above the shoulder of hills that held the city of Stenton when the Greenstream stage rolled briskly from its depot, a dingy frame tavern, and commenced the long journey to its high destination. The tavern was on the outskirts of town; beyond, a broad, level plain reached to a shimmering blue silhouette of mountains printed on a silvery ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... country lay, dead, spreading to the infinite horizons; in the sky no speck floated against the dome of blue. More desolate than a derelict on the calm surface of the trackless ocean Lazette lay, its huddled buildings dingy with the dust of a continuing dry season, squatting in their dismal lonesomeness ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... bucket-loads of earth. The night before, some of these had been emptied into a large tub, which was then filled up with water and stirred briskly, after which the sailors had gone aloft and wetted the sails with muddy water, rendering their appearance dingy in the extreme. Here and there white patches had been left, which gave the sails the appearance of being old and recently mended, and with the yards set at different angles and slackened rigging, the Tigress would not have been recognized as the smart craft that had, ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... hesitated, but finally led the way up the street into a horrible-looking alley and pointed to a dingy tenement-house. ...
— The Young Oarsmen of Lakeview • Ralph Bonehill
... was too ineffectual to leave any permanent mark upon him. His readers may infer, from certain descriptions in Kipps, and The History of Mr Polly, that Wells himself sincerely regrets the inadequacies of that "private school of dingy aspect and still dingier pretensions, where there were no object lessons, and the studies of book-keeping and French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken) under the guidance of an elderly gentleman, who wore a nondescript gown and ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... all those whom it may concern, that there are, to speak in a general way, two great classes of Foreign Affairs—the shining and the dingy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... (dingy); Bot. Mag. 4443.—Stem erect, sometimes 3 ft. high, and about 4 in. wide, deeply furrowed, the furrows usually numbering about fourteen; the ridges tumid and irregular, and coloured a dingy glaucous-green. Spines embedded in a tuft of grey ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... judge's address the short November day had turned from afternoon to night, and a great change had come over the aspect of the dim and dingy court. Opaque globes turned into flaring suns; incandescent burners revealed unsuspected brackets; the place was warmed and lighted for the first time during the week. And the effect of the light and warmth was on all ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... women and one man. One of the women, as the more dangerous criminal, was to be brought separately. So, in pursuance of that order, on the 28th day of April, at eight o'clock in the morning, the jail warden entered the dingy corridor of the woman's ward. Immediately behind him came a woman with weary countenance and disheveled gray hair, wearing a crown-laced jacket, and girdled with a blue-edged sash. She was ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... could hear the dictograph repeating the conversation in the dingy little back room of Albano's, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... about him, a glance that embraced the dingy, cheerless room, the rain streaming down the panes of the one window, and the figure of ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... rays, and those on board the Seafowl were seeing the need there had been for care, for they were gazing across the clear sea at the wide-spreading mangrove-covered shore, which, monotonous and of a dingy green, stretched away to north and south as far as eye ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... market-place, as tired and dusty as might be. The woman went one way, and the priest the other, and I was left alone. I soon found the fat old host, and engaged a room for the night. He was talkative and curious, and sat by my side when he had prepared my supper in the dingy dining-room downstairs. I felt quite sure that he would be able to tell me what I wanted, or at least to give me a hint from hearsay. But he at once began to talk of last year, and how much better his business ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... thoroughfares lined with shops, and a few lanes along which the gardens and houses of the manufacturers are scattered like villas. The towns themselves are badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally bright red brick, turned black with time, which is here the universal building material. Cellar dwellings are general here; wherever it is in any way possible, these subterranean dens ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... through the wide stable doorway, across the yard into the open field. Dorry, hastily arranging her skirts and settling herself comfortably upon the grand but dingy saddle (it had been Aunt Kate's in the days gone by), laughed to herself, thinking how astonished they all must be to see her riding Lady back to them. For a moment she playfully pretended to be unconscious of their gaze. Then she ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... respectable, and then the original Asher had set up his official tent in the neighborhood; but civilization had moved westward, and Terry Street was looked on askance by fashionable solicitors. Nevertheless the firm of Asher continued to dwell in the dingy office, where their progenitors had slaved for close on a hundred years. It was quite good enough, thought the present head of the firm, for ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; for rainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings out to the full the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia. So, when next morning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in a morose palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad that Alan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of groceries and provisions, because it gave her a chance of ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... ploughing the sand. The woman never changed her posture, never seemed to realize the approach of dawn; but Winston roused up, lifting his head to gaze wearily forward. Beneath the gray, out-spreading curtain of light he saw before them the dingy red of a small section-house, with a huge, rusty water-tank outlined against the sky. Lower down a little section of vividly green grass seemed fenced about by a narrow stream of running water. At first glimpse he deemed it a mirage, and rubbed ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... Then there was another move, and this time Mrs. Forest and her little daughter found themselves in one bedroom, and things began to grow very gloomy, and food even was scarce. At last there was a change. One day a lady came into the dingy little room, and all on a sudden it seemed as if the sun had come out again. This lady brought comforts with her—toys and books for the child, good, brave words of cheer for the mother. At last Annie's mother died, and she went away to Lavender House to live with ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... those which remained unsold, in a day or two lost half their value. He asked the old women how the customers knew the turkeys were not fresh. They replied that the legs changed from a bright black to a dingy brown. Fabrice went home, was absent the next day from the halles, and on the third day returned with a bottle of liquid. Seizing hold of the first brown-legged turkey he met with, he forthwith painted its legs out of the contents of his bottle, and placing the thus decorated ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... annual rain, that we owe our vegetable mould with its rich and beauteous mantle of sward and foliage. And next, stripping from off the landscape its sands and gravels, we see its underlying boulder-clays, dingy and gray, and here presenting their vast ice-borne stones, and there its iceberg pavements. And these clays in turn stripped away, the bare rocks appear, various in colour and uneven in surface, but everywhere grooved ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... between the houses, a glimpse might be had of the low country beyond, with its sluggish canal choked with rushes, a dingy windmill here and there, and stretching away on either side the flat meadows crinkling with yellow grain, and the green pastures dotted with huge black-and-white cattle. A narrow road, straight ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... task to write the epilogue to the beautiful life and death of this father of music. The woman who had made his life so happy and aided him with hand and voice and heart,—what had she done to deserve the dingy aftermath of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... a very low ebb. She was still touring the provinces, and heartily sick of all the discomfort involved. Dingy lodgings, hurried train journeys, much bickering and jealousy in the company with which she was acting, and a great deal of domestic worry over that handsome, extravagant mother, who had once taken her, in ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... haricot beans, and cheap cherries, served and eaten in cracked plates and dishes, with the dull-looking and dull-sounding forks of German silver—was this a banquet worthy of this pretty young woman? The Baron would have wept could he have seen it. The dingy decanters could not disguise the vile hue of wine bought by the pint at the nearest wineshop. The table-napkins had seen a week's use. In short, everything betrayed undignified penury, and the equal indifference ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... opened this morning, dull, cloudy, and cool, threatening rain. A dingy veil is drawn over the face ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... were a magical change, the mist overhead grew opalescent, then lighter still, as there was a warm breath of air sweeping over the dingy, murky sea. At that moment the dull, distant murmur of water beating against an obstacle grew louder, as the fog rolled away from the ship off to the north, and five minutes later the crew burst into ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... sister Flora was too marked to be mistaken, and the little one by her side had the same flashing eyes and radiant smile with which both of her grown up sisters were endowed. Their beauty fairly glorified the dingy street as they ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... since it was put in apparently. The clerk is not writing, and has evidently no other use for his steel pen than spearing flies. Brown is out, says this young votary of commerce, and will not be in till half past five. We remark upon the fact that nobody ever is "in" these dingy warehouses, wonder when the business is done, and go out into the street to wait ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... intent on Dyce's movements, but his elbow rested on the arm of the rocking chair, and holding his hand up to screen his face from the blaze of the fire, he was closely watching Bedney. When Dyce shook out and held up a faded, dingy blue silk handkerchief, the lawyer noted a sudden twinkle in the old man's eyes, but no other feature moved, and he stooped to take a coal of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... divinest heroism is not that of the man who, holding life cheap, puts his back against a wall, and is shot by Government soldiers, assured that he will live ever afterwards as a martyr and saint: a diviner heroism is that of the poor printer, who, in dingy, smoky Rosoman Street, Clerkenwell, with forty years before him, determined to live through them, as far as he could, without a murmur, although there was to be no pleasure in them. A diviner heroism is this, but divinest of all, is that of him who can in these days do what Zachariah ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... I ordered him and Tom, "and bind the hands and feet of this pock-marked gentleman here; also of George, engineer; and also of Theodore, the deck-hand. Bind them well. And throw them into the dingy, with a bottle of water apiece, and a loaf of bread. By noon, we'll have some wind, and can make our way to Harbour Island, and there I'll have a ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... consultations over lace mantillas, which they had at once determined to adopt, and bought the gorgeous paper fans, covered with brilliant pictures of bull-fighters in suits of silver tinsel; and from these open stores he led them to a dingy little shop, where there was old silver and precious hand-painted fans of mother-of-pearl that had been pawned by families who had risked and lost all in some revolution; and then to another shop, where two old maiden ladies made ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... to, from its purely business and masculine aspect. The old "grey-haired elderly man," who officiated as waiter seems to have been touched from the very first with the quiet simplicity of the two ladies, and he tried to make them feel comfortable and at home in the long, low, dingy room up-stairs, where the meetings of the Trade were held. The high narrow windows looked into the gloomy Row; the sisters, clinging together on the most remote window-seat, (as Mr. Smith tells me he ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... canary of a more reflective character and retiring disposition than the first, could have afforded a dust of the golden hue of his feathers to make his Teneriffean cousins more presentable without being much less yellow himself—their hue, so far as Mick and I noticed, being more of a dingy white than chrome. ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... Preston Telegraph might not have been forthcoming had he not been the son of a Preston man. He had a sort of weak doggedness which I could not but admire. Neither he nor his work received the slightest encouragement; but he persisted in behaving as a personage: always he kept his dingy little flag flying. Wherever congregated the jeunes feroces of the arts, in whatever Soho restaurant they had just discovered, in whatever music-hall they were most frequenting, there was Soames in the midst of them, or rather on the ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as 1677,—not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors are,—and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two different works for his own share. Books were abundant enough at that day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester,—without whose treasures, let me add, this modest monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse, the moral sentiment of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... men look this morning. It would teach people more about war than a hundred pictures of plumed horsemen and the dashing charge. The smudgy khaki uniforms soaked through and through, stained black and green and dingy red with wet and earth and grass; the draggled great-coats, heavy with rain and thick with mud; the heavy sopping boots, the blackened, battered helmets; the blackened, battered faces below them, unwashed ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... that the man was driving wrong, once or twice, and was on the point of cursing him to that effect, from the window. But at last, with an anxious throb at his heart, he recognised the dingy archway, and the cracked brown marble tablet over the keystone, and he recognised ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... dingy little Soho cafe," Chesterton writes in the Autobiography, "that there emerged the quadruped, the twiformed monster Mr. Shaw has ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... fat white "Stoics' Club," so well known on George's letters, Mrs. Pendyce wrote what she had to say. The little dark room where she sat was without sound, save for the buzzing of a largish fly in a streak of sunlight below the blind. It was dingy in colour; its furniture was old. At the Stoics' was found neither the new art nor the resplendent drapings of those larger clubs sacred to the middle classes. The little writing-room had an air of mourning: "I am so seldom ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... continuing on his way home, while Hugh turned into a side street, and went whistling along after the manner of a boy whose mind knew no care. Presently he came to a large house. It was rather dingy on the outside, but Hugh, who had often been indoors, knew there was some elegant old mahogany furniture, as well as other mementoes of the former life of the Madame when she filled a high niche at the French court, before the republic ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... the household, for herself she had very few personal expenses to curtail. Thanks to Madame and Phebe, the house was kept in exquisite order, saving Felicita the shock of seeing the rooms she dwelt in dingy and shabby. Excepting the use of a carriage, there was no luxury that she ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... in which they were imprisoned still remain as they were left on the morning in which these illustrious men were led to their execution. On the dingy walls of stone are still recorded those sentiments which they had inscribed there, and which indicate the nature of those emotions which animated and sustained them. These proverbial maxims and heroic expressions, gleaned from French tragedies or the classic page, were written ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... smart enough, but he did not linger amongst his fellow- servants at the Cross. He hurried through the crowd, nodding sheepishly in answer to a shower of chaff and greetings, and made his way to the by-street where the Cheap Jack had a small dingy shop for the sale of coarse pottery. Some people were spiteful enough to hint that the shop-trade was of much less value to him than the store-room attached, where the goods were believed to be not all of ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... is dark, and not very evenly trimmed—for his wife or daughter has performed the tonsure with a pair of rusty shears; and the longer locks seem changed in hue, as if his dingy wool hat did not sufficiently protect them against the wind and rain. Over his shoulder he carries a heavy rifle, heavier than a "Harper's ferry musket," running about "fifty to the pound." Around his neck are swung the powder-horn and bullet-pouch, the former protected by ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... wandered on and on, past the parade ground that used to be the trottin' track, past new barracks that was being knocked together hasty, until we comes to this dingy white buildin' with all the underwear hung up to dry around it. I took one glance inside, where the cots was stacked in thick and soldiers was loafin' around in various stages of dress and undress, and then I shooed mother and sister off a ways while I went ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... hill that rose out of green meadows. It was covered with dingy pine trees except the top that was bared like a tonsure. A trail ran through the woods; a trail singularly morose and unattractive. The pines looked shabby and black in comparison to the sun on the spring meadows. This was Break-Neck Hill. Perhaps Cuddy felt his rider stiffen ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... much talk," returned the sententious black, pointing one of his crooked and dingy ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... and cursed. The window panes rattled again under another shower of gravel. Sweeny shook his wife into consciousness. He bade her get up and see who was in the back-yard. Mrs. Sweeny, a lean harassed woman with grey hair, fastened a dingy pink nightdress round her throat with a pin and ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... brasses, Carved oak and tapestry from distant Rome, Rare "blue and white" Venetian finger-glasses, Rich oriental rugs, luxurious sofa pillows, And everything that isn't old, from Gillow's. And on the other, a dark and dingy room, In some back street with stuffy children crying, Where organs yell, and clacking housewives fume, And clothes are hanging out all day a-drying. With one cracked looking-glass to see your face in, And dinner served up in ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... drift by the gateway is dingy and low; And half of yon hillside is free from the snow: Among the dead rushes the brook's flowing now. And here's Pussy Willow again on ...
— The Nursery, Volume 17, No. 100, April, 1875 • Various
... wheels of carts and wagons; furrows that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets branched off, and made intricate channels, hard to trace, in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... way through to the unfurnished and somewhat dingy kitchen. It had a low window-seat, from the extreme ends of which, as the two skippers entered, two figures—a middle-aged woman and a gawky lad— arose and saluted them; the one with a highly genteel curtsey, the other with an awkward half-pull at his forelock, and much scraping ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch |
