"Doorstep" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small restaurant near by, and returned at once ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... shut the door, though it was only striking ten on one of the city clocks. No one can go to bed at ten. Nobody was thinking of going to bed. It was January and dismal, but Mrs. Wagg stood on her doorstep, as if expecting something to happen. A barrel-organ played like an obscene nightingale beneath wet leaves. Children ran across the road. Here and there one could see brown panelling inside the hall door.... The march that the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... sobbing and sighing, And in between all a low lullaby singing. Methought I heard ancient forgotten legends, The world-old sweet stories, Which once, as a boy, I heard from my playmates, When, of a summer's evening, We crouched down to tell stories On the stones of the doorstep, With small listening hearts, And bright curious eyes; While the big grown-up girls Were sitting opposite At flowery and fragrant windows, Their ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... not out indeed to destroy life or limb—we leave that to the men who are trying to coerce women—but we mean to sweep men like Sir Wilfrid Lang out of our way! Meanwhile we can pay special attention to his meetings—we can harass him at railway stations—we can sit on his doorstep—we can put the fear of God into him in a hundred ways—in short we can make his life a tenth part as disagreeable to him as he can make ours to us. We can, if we please, make it a burden to him—and we intend to do so! And don't ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be there; he always is when it is a bright day like this. He sits in an old chair on that broad doorstep in front of his house, and leans on a big, thick ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard
... that's all!... I tried to thank 'im then," went on W. Keyse, "an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im agyne at the Hospital—an' e' wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im yesterday on 'is own doorstep, an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. So wot I'm a-going to do is—Wait! When I was a little nipper at Board School there was a fairy tyle in the Third Standard Class Reader, all about a Lion wot 'ad syved the life ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... conspicuous corner of the room, as if to ask what he should say; and to this mute question Monsieur de Frejus not only made a sign with his head signifying that it was necessary to receive his royal highness, but rose and went himself to open the door. The regent stopped a minute on the doorstep to thank Fleury, then having assured himself by a rapid glance round the room that the Marshal de Villeroy had not yet arrived, ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... provisions for the household consumption, no tradespeople save milkman and baker being allowed to call, and they remarked that they never once found the area gate unlocked. And while these two women, prim and self-contained, went on with the cooking and housework and kept the doorstep clean, the so-called Miss Adela Mimpriss went on with the woolwork flowers at the dining-room window, where she could get most light, and the world outside had no suspicion of anything being wrong in the staid, old-fashioned house opposite Sir John Drinkwater's. Even ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... the hell with Prescott! [Contrite.] Don't misunderstand me. I wouldn't refuse any job he had to offer me. I'd black his boots if that was the job. But I've been to see him as much as I can. I can't sit on his doorstep ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... Mishaps of a Foundling The first volume tells how Dorothy was found on the doorstep, taken in, and how she grew to be a lovable girl of twelve; and was then carried off by a person who held her for ransom. She made a warm friend of Jim, the nobody; and the adventures of the pair are as interesting ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... used to tell with delight of Palgrave's call on him just after he had moved into his new Queen Anne house in Kensington Square: "Palgrave called yesterday, and the first thing he said was, 'I've counted three anachronisms on your front doorstep.' " ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... his little home at all hours to minister to the sick and exhort the wicked; they give him no rest, and never let him feel he has done enough; and when he comes home weary, after a day's wrestling with his parishioners' souls, he is confronted on his doorstep by filthy abuse pasted up on his own front door. He never speaks of these things, but how shall they be hid? Everybody here knows everything that happens before the day is over, and what we have for dinner is of far greater general interest than the ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... eleven p.m. the Prophet stood upon his doorstep and, very gently indeed, inserted his latchkey into the door. A shaded lamp was burning in the deserted hall, where profound silence reigned. Clear was the night and starry. As the Prophet turned to close ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... rolling dismally home, to sleep in preparation for the morrow. Mrs. Morel, listening to their mournful singing, went indoors. Nine o'clock passed, and ten, and still "the pair" had not returned. On a doorstep somewhere a man was singing loudly, in a drawl: "Lead, kindly Light." Mrs. Morel was always indignant with the drunken men that they must sing that hymn when they ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... to the address which Fritz had given me. As I stood on the doorstep, with the bell handle still in my hand, the door was suddenly opened. It was Delora himself who appeared! He shrank away from me as though I were something poisonous. I laid my hand on his shoulder, firmly determined that this time there should be ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the perfectly cheerful contented young commercial clerk running somewhat too fast to catch the bus one morning, and feeling dazed all day long over the office work, and going home in a sort of dimness, and then at his very doorstep, recovering as it were, his ancestral consciousness. I think it was the sight of his wife and the tones of her voice that suddenly announced to him with the sound of a trumpet that he had nothing to do with this woman with the Cockney accent, or the pastor who was coming to supper, or the ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... boots clumped noisily across the rough wooden floor he ventured to look again timidly at the very pretty young lady who sat beside the stove. Her friendly nod and smile sent him stumbling clumsily out over the doorstep with reddened face and a huge grin ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... arms, and presently there began to escape from him strangled sobs sounding most grotesquely like some strange mimicry of the name the native girls had for him—"Pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh," over and over again repeated. Beyond his doorstep the life of the station hummed and throbbed, quickened into joyous activity by the coming of the steamer. He was not conscious of it. That roaring ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... splash! of the rain still sounded on the brick pavement, and as I glanced through the window, I saw an old blind negro beggar groping under the street lamp at the corner. The muffled beat of his stick in the drenched leaves passed our doorstep, and I heard it grow gradually fainter as he turned in the direction of the negro hovels that bordered our end of the town. Across the street, and on either side of us, there were rows of small boxlike frame houses built with narrow ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... a foundling was left upon a doorstep and parentage could not be traced, he was given the name of some color. Some of the most illustrious and ancient Italian families of today ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... This one smiled, yet his face had much of the sadness in it. He had perhaps walked many weary miles in the heat. Would he—with a gesture interpreting her speech—be pleased to rest awhile? Without hesitation, he would. As he sat on the doorstep gazing contentedly at the flowers bordering the path, Anita's mother appeared from some mysterious recess of the 'dobe and questioned Anita with quick low utterance. The girl's answer, interpretable to Sundown only by its ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... do that. He got home in the afternoon, and Maxwell was cleaning his gun on the doorstep, when he saw a shadow, and he looked up and there he was! Oh! I should like to have been there, but I'm sorry to say Maxwell didn't fall on his neck and kiss him. I asked Tommy very carefully about ...
— Probable Sons • Amy Le Feuvre
... the low land beside a stream of water, was a log cabin. It looked like a dilapidated cabin, for there were no windows and the door was off its leather hinges. There was a bonfire by the doorstep and a black kettle was hung over the fire from ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope
... showed, not exactly, though consternation was not lacking in their aspect, so strangely similar in all, whether they were men or women, or whether they stood in groups in the street or came out singly on the doorstep to glance about and listen, though there seemed to be nothing to listen to, for the air was ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... wreath on your doorstep this morning?" inquired a bright, hopeful woman at noon, who had brought them ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... bone just that I might possess you always. So I had dreamed of love in a cottage—an idyl of blissful poverty, where Cupid contents himself with crusts and kisses, and mocks at the proverbial wolf on the doorstep. And I give you my word that until to-day I had not suspected how blindly selfish I have been! For poor old prosaic Rudolph is in the right, after all. Your delicate, tender beauty must not be dragged down to face the unlovely realities and petty deprivations ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... in a court where the living green combined with age to glorify the buildings. We did not see the dilapidation, we did not smell the dirt, we did not feel the squalor. A woman was lighting a fire in a brazier on her doorstep. She looked hostilely at us. We beamed in counteraction. She looked more hostilely. As the Artist wanted to sketch her house, some words seemed necessary. I detailed our emotions. Was not her lot, cast in ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... village near their dwelling, and hit upon a thousand artifices for obtaining admittance. Sometimes disguised lackeys presented themselves in the garb of simple gardeners, but, fortunately, Teresa always recognized their crafty countenances, and let them cool their heels on the doorstep. At other times old gipsy women sneaked into the courtyard whenever they had the chance, and by way of diverting the innocent damsel, showed her in the cards that a terribly great gentleman was in love with her, and would ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... a favour asked. In the drowsy afternoon Helen coaxed her father into her room and dropped the shades and ordered him to sleep, telling him that he looked like a ghost of his former rugged beauty. Then she sank down listlessly upon the doorstep, brooding, her eyes wandering through the green fields of Desert Valley. Her musings were disturbed by the clatter of shod hoofs across the rugged plateau; she looked up quickly, her eyes brightening. Then she saw that it ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... else here tonight, born 79 years ago. She lives in the inner city, where she cares for infants born of mothers who are heroin addicts. The children, born in withdrawal, are sometimes even dropped on her doorstep. She helps them with love. Go to her house some night, and maybe you'll see her silhouette against the window as she walks the floor talking softly, soothing a child in her arms—Mother Hale of Harlem, and she, too, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the hill from the village without any obvious effort. At the gate of the avenue she stopped. Two small children were playing just inside it. A rather larger child set on the doorstep of the gate lodge with a baby ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... "Didn't know I was coming myself till I found myself on the doorstep. Kind of impulse, I suppose. What have you been doing ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dear Colvin! 'tis the most exquisite pleasure; a real chivalrous yarn, like the Dumas' and yet unlike. Thereafter to the meeting of the five newspaper proprietors. Business transacted, I have to gallop home and find the boys waiting to be paid at the doorstep. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beard, perplexed at the oddity of the whole thing. He pictured the steep, cobbled street leading up from the shore, and peeped into every remembered window in the row of rude thatched cottages. Slowly he recalled the names of old boy and girl companions who had played with him around the doorstep of his grandfather's house. For half the voyage the object which had prompted it was forgotten. The journey was as silent as a secret journey should be. It began in twilight and ended in darkness. The keel of the boat grated on the soft sand. Dan and Nick Johnson ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... the skis at her doorstep. She heard the sleigh-bells, but the sleigh had already vanished ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the doorstep, and he took off his hat to the cool, pine-laden breeze that came from a mountain in the distance. He liked this town at once. He liked the elm-lined village street, and the snug white houses and the quiet and content of it. Then he found himself being introduced rather jerkily ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... you any more ways to bring truck home. And don't you go see your Auntie, neither. I'll go see her my own self. But I'll just tell you one thing, Epaminondas! You see these here six mince pies I done make? You see how I done set 'em on the doorstep to cool? Well, now, you hear me, Epaminondas, you be careful how you step on ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... at the McIntyre residence for the fifth time, and wondered what had become of the faithful Grimes; the butler was usually the soul of promptness, and to keep a caller waiting on the doorstep would, in his category, rank as the height of impropriety. As Kent again raised his hand toward the bell, the door swung open suddenly and Barbara beckoned to ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... the Turkish constitution saw Germany thrown crop and heels out of his snug place at Turkey's capital, while that comfortable old suitor, Great Britain, which had been biting his finger-nails on the doorstep, was welcomed smiling once more into the parlor. Great was the rejoicing in London when Abdul Hamid's "down-and-out" performance carried his trusted friend William along. The glee changed to grief when, within a year—so quickly does the appearance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... and Arcadian, were it not for the helmets of the 3rd Dragoon Guards glittering in the sun as the patrol turns the corner of the wood, and the tall, dark figures of the Royal Irish Constabulary guarding the gate and doorstep. At present the house, the farm, and the neighbouring village are occupied by the police, and it has been thought necessary to increase the strength of the garrison in order to assure the safety of the servants who, ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... a few dropping shots; but then came the volley. The regulars shot to kill. Down came Jonas Parker to his knee, to be stabbed to death before he could reload; there fell old Munroe, the veteran of Louisburg; and Harrington, killed at his doorstep, and Muzzey, Hadley, and Brown. In all, before the stars had faded in the light of dawn, sixteen New Englanders lay dead or wounded on the village green. And the British troops had reformed, and huzzaed thrice, and marched on with drum and fife, before the sun ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... doorstep Jack Meredith looked at his watch. He had an appointment with Millicent Chyne at half-past eleven—an hour when Lady Cantourne might reasonably be expected to be absent at the weekly meeting of a society which, under the guise and nomenclature ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... of seeing her shadow on the blind. For some reason which I could not comprehend, the lovers were forbidden to meet. It rains, he sees nothing, but he returns to Paris with contentment in his heart and a terrible cold in his head. But, "I have seen the doorstep," he writes, "qu'effleurent tous les jours ces petits pieds ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... account of his roving life and unsettled habits, and that consequently there would be little sympathy for her or for Bobby in his mysterious disappearance. The wind blew and the rain fell upon these confidences, yet Randolph, walking again under that umbrella of felicity, parted with her at her own doorstep all too soon, although consoled with the permission to come and see ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... establishment was one of the utmost respectability. To that, however, our damp, cold hero gave not a thought, for all his mind was fixed upon bed. Indeed, the britchka had hardly come to a standstill before he leapt out upon the doorstep, missed his footing, and came within an ace of falling. To meet him there issued a female younger than the first, but very closely resembling her; and on his being conducted to the parlour, a couple of glances showed him that the room was hung with old striped curtains, and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the very day that he made these positive and scornful assertions to himself that he found this same mighty Mr. Lawrence Fernald on his doorstep. ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... he and Hannah bent over the unconscious young man, Philippa seemed to come out of her trance; slowly, with upraised hands, and head bent upon her breast, she stepped backward, backward, out of the room, out of the house. On the doorstep, in the darkness, she paused and listened for several minutes to certain dreadful sounds in the house. Then, suddenly, a passion of purpose swept the ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland
... Mr. Hammond took her home in his buggy, and bade her good-night at the doorstep. As she entered the house she saw several couples promenading on the veranda, and heard Estelle and Clinton Allston singing a duet from "Il Trovatore." Passing the parlor door, one quick glance showed her Mr. Murray and Mr. Leigh standing together ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... doorstep. I found that he had come to the island not to play around for the summer at the country clubs and on the bathing beach, but to live in the past—see it as it had once been—when its men went down to the sea in ships. And because there was still ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... been an ice gorge right in front of the house [he wrote "Bamie"], the swelling mass of broken fragments having been pushed almost up to our doorstep. The current then broke through the middle, leaving on each side of the stream, for some miles, a bank of huge ice-floes, tumbled over each other in the wildest confusion. No horse could by any chance get across; we men have a ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... climbed, and he climbed and he climbed and he climbed and he climbed and he climbed and he climbed till at last he reached the sky. And when he got there he found a long, broad road going as straight as a dart. So he walked along and he walked along till he came to a great big tall house, and on the doorstep there was a great big ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the subject all day as he walked to and fro across the shop, encumbered with several large pieces of bedroom furniture which they had been unable to get into the back room; he pondered it, too, as he stood on his doorstep, with his pen behind his ear, and feasted his eyes delightedly on the hurly-burly of Parisian commerce. The clerks who passed with their packages of samples under their arms, the vans of the express companies, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... doing now?" Robert Grant Burns came around the corner of the house looking for her, half an hour later, and found her sitting on the doorstep with the old atlas on her knees and her hat far back on her head, scribbling away ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... literature, towards the close of the nineteenth century, was becoming more and more the illegitimate offspring of immaturity in thought and feeling. We were the slaves of our newspapers; each morning a library was thrown on our doorstep. But what a jumbled, inconsequent, muddled-up library! It was the best that could be made in such a hurry, and it satisfied most of us, though I believe there were conservative people who opened it ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... Johnny Chuck sat on his old doorstep, with his chin in his hands, watching Old Mother West Wind gathering her Merry Little Breezes into the big bag in which she carries them to their home behind the ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... voice again, and I saw that a man was seated before me on the stone that had served as a doorstep, a man who was balancing a pistol in ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... doorstep, looked up at the symmetrical old red house-front, with its frugal marble ornament, as he might have looked into a familiar ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... a vision of some sharp-visaged female marauder insinuating the tip of a very pointed nose between the great front door and the lintel. 'I only hope,' the elder woman went on, 'that I won't be here the first time Donald encounters your new friend on the doorstep. That's all!' ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... She frowned hard while she scribbled, thumped the envelope as she closed it, then ran down to give it into the personal charge of the chauffeur. She would have added some comments for his benefit, had Miss Hampson not been standing upon the doorstep. ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... personal self-denial. Another of her lieutenants tells that, during one Self-Denial week, a friend, thinking that the officers might be depriving themselves of nourishing food, left a basket packed with fresh goodies on the doorstep. The Adjutant smiled, sold the goods and the basket, and put ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... The others are improved somethin' wonderful, but I'm kinder glad we've kept this just as it was. There's the braided rugs on the floor that I made when you was courtin' me, Howard, an' we used to set out on the doorstep together. An' the fringed tidies over the chairs an' sofa that Eliza give me for a weddin' present—they're faded considerable, but that good red wool never wears out. There's the crayon portraits we had done when we was on our honeymoon, ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... studied external ornamentation, he thought all such things, mouldings, carvings, etc., out of place in Paris. "Ah!" he would say, "those fine things would look much better at Provins." When he stood on his doorstep leaning against the lintel, digesting his morning meal, with a vacant eye, the mercer was gazing at the house of his fancy gilded by the sun of his dream; he walked in his garden; he heard the jet from his fountain falling in pearly drops upon a slab of limestone; he played on his own billiard-table; ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... upon her head, she were a kind of queen. It seemed to her as if the villagers also thought so when they looked at her as she walked through the streets, and she bore herself very proudly for a while, but at length became so tired and hungry, that she sank down on a doorstep, her head leaning on her hand; and as she watched the passers-by through her drooping lids, she noticed how very nice their shoes and stockings were. Then she saw that her own were much torn and soiled, and looking down the street, was mortified to trace her way along by ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... whole evening, trying at various times to engage him in talk; an insistent fellow who, despite rebuffs, had followed him into the street after the meeting, and, refusing to be shaken off, had led the way so skilfully that Joseph found himself at last on Nicodemus' doorstep and with no option but to accept Nicodemus' invitation to enter. He did not like the fellow, but not on account of his insistence; it was not his insistence that had prejudiced him against him as much as the young man's elaboration of raiment, his hairdressing ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... Sunday night, Tatiana had said no word, nor had she moved from her doorstep: it was only when they brought back the dripping body to the village that she stirred, and when she saw it she laughed a dreadful laugh, and the spirit went from her ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... lieutenant whose wife had received a mink stole out of thin air and didn't speak to her husband for ten days when he gave it to the Community Drive. He wouldn't do a thing like that again! There was another sergeant—not Fitzgerald—who'd found a set of four new white-walls tires on his doorstep, and was ostracized by his teen-age offspring when he turned them into the police Lost and Found. Fitzgerald gave his gifts to an orphanage, with a fine disregard of their inappropriateness. But he gloomily suspected that a great many of his friends ...
— The Ambulance Made Two Trips • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... has nothing in it which makes it incongruous with the richest or the plainest tables. It is not overcrowded by the addition of roast goose and plum-pudding; it is not harmed by the addition of herring and potatoes. Nay, it can give flavor and richness to broken bits of stale bread served on a doorstep ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... kindest-hearted, most generous, and most obstinate of men. He loved to do good deeds; but he loved to do them in his own way, and his way was certain to be the one that was contrary to the advice of everybody else. Thus it happened that he determined to adopt the year-old baby boy who was left on his doorstep one stormy night, a little more than sixteen years before this story opens. He was not fond of babies, nor did he care to have children about him. Simply because everybody advised him to send this one ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... an essayist, be it never so stricken, roves and ranges!—I remember pausing before a wide doorstep and wondering if perchance it was on this very one that the young De Quincey lay ill and faint while poor Ann flew as fast as her feet would carry her to Oxford Street, the 'stony-hearted stepmother' of them both, and ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... more sorry-looking houses and finally paused before the gate of the home of Madame's little pupil. The bare grassless yard was filled with old boxes and rubbish. A big lumbering lad of about fourteen sprawled over the doorstep playing with a string. He looked up with vacant eyes, and clutched at the visitors' skirts, muttering and jabbering in ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... had to stand aside, and Captain MacWhirr strode over the doorstep without saying a word or ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... examining the exterior of the houses, stopping now and then to look at a garden or a well-kept house, or trying to get a peep into some room. Mr and Mrs Clinton criticised as they went along, comparing the window curtains, blaming a door in want of paint, praising a well-whitened doorstep.... ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... gone, his shadow withdrawn from the doorstep, and he had his business with Honeycutt. He left the door wide open so that no one might come suddenly upon them and turned to the ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... a mild, freckled-faced girl, dropped the arm of her companion, and meekly sat down on a doorstep, and covered ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... she told me how the old man kissed me, how his eyes watered when he asked my story, how she told again of the moment when I was heard screaming on the doorstep, and how she offered to go and bring the paper which had been pinned to my bib. But the old man said it was no matter,—"only we would have called him Marquis," said he, "if his name was not provided for him. We must not leave him here," he said; "he shall grow up a farmer's lad, and not ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... had been supping in the town, and coming back late found that his father-in-law had bolted the door. At length his wife heard his knocks, and as soon as she had let him in he roundly abused the servants for keeping him so long upon the doorstep. The old man at once appeared on the scene, without much in the way of clothing, it would appear, but waving a stout club called a "marcus." With this he beat Pierre about the head and shoulders until the young man lost patience ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... pessimist, and don't begin by being epigrammatic on the very doorstep. Tea? Or coffee? I'm afraid the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... My boy, said he, I can work a great deal cheaper than you, because I keep all my goods in the lower story. You have to hoist yours into the upper chambers of the brain, and let them down again to your customers. I take mine in at the level of the ground, and send them off from my doorstep almost without lifting. I tell you, the higher a man has to carry the raw material of thought before he works it up, the more it costs him in blood, nerve, and muscle. Coleridge knew all this very well when he advised every literary man to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... and finger nails were yellow. Her chops hung low and shook when she moved. The look on her face was exactly that smileless look of fatal melancholy that you may have seen on the countenance of a hound left sitting on the doorstep of ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... hunting some one. Then, when the scent was strong, he gave tongue so fast that you wondered how he had breath enough left to run. But now that he was a prisoner of kindness, in the home of the people who had taken him in when he had crept to their doorstep, Bowser sometimes bayed from sheer homesickness. When he was tied out in the yard, he would sometimes get to thinking of his home and long to see Farmer Brown and Mrs. Brown and especially his master, Farmer Brown's ...
— Bowser The Hound • Thornton W. Burgess
... engaged in a characteristic hearty parting with one of his latest converts upon his own doorstep, with admirable al fresco effect. He had just clapped him on the shoulder. "Good-by, good-by, Charley, my boy, and keep in the right path; not up, or down, or round the gulch, you know—ha, ha!—but straight across lots to the shining gate." He had raised his voice under the stimulus of a few ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... offering of love to life and the world, in order to come into harmony with the great law of service. Our ideas of values with regard to occupations are altogether erroneous, from the "inner wisdom" point of view. The scrubbing of a doorstep, if faithfully done in a true spirit of service, is of as much value and real importance as the writing of a deathless poem, or dying for one's country. We can never truthfully say that one act of service is of greater value, or ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... penetrating, and yet the ear welcomes it; the night and the solitude are so vast that they can stand it; and when, an hour later, as the night enters into full possession, the bird comes and serenades me under my window or upon my doorstep, my heart warms toward it. Its cry is a love-call, and there is something of the ardor and persistence of love in it, and when the female responds, and comes and hovers near, there is an interchange of subdued, caressing tones between the two birds that it is a delight to hear. During ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... instance, the dead body of a man is found lying on the doorstep, or a woman is seen who has the appearance of having been outraged. So far the facts are proved by the direct evidence of the person by whom they have been seen. Information is sought for by him as to the circumstances ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... stopped sobbing, and I believe she would have heard a mouse move,—there was that kind of a listening look about her. And it was that minute—that unsuitable, inimical minute—that I heard some one move! Outside, on the doorstep, somebody stumbled. The latch lifted, the door swung in,—and I jumped to meet Macartney with not one thing on me but some fool snowshoes and a pocketful of useless cartridges. But I brought up ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... the baroness while the fete is going on. Or he may be the peasant at the fete who comes on the stage to swell the drinking chorus, and who, it may be observed, always turns his glass upside down before he begins to drink out of it. Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of the house where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the gentleman who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is precipitated into the area. Or, to come to the actresses, she may be the fairy ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... on, "because he had so much to say about his poverty. To hear him talk, you'd think the bailiffs were sitting on his doorstep. That doesn't prevent his having fast horses, and servants all over the place, and about the best shooting I've seen in the South of England. As luck would have it, I was in wonderful form. God! how ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... to the Abbe de Baliviere, who answered them in the firmest tone, and with the most cavalier air, that they were far enough from Versailles, and that we had got rid of all such bad people. At the following stage the postilion got on the doorstep and said to the Duchess, "Madame, there are some good people left in the world: I recognised you all at Sens." They gave the worthy fellow a ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... crawled out of the side of the sod house and thrust its ugly head in under the screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he knew enough of Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying coiled there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena good-by, and he ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... night." But Fenwick is wrong, for in a moment comes an imperious peal at the bell. A pair of boots, manifestly on a telegraph-boy's cold feet, play a devil's tattoo on the sheltered doorstep. They have been inaudible till now, as the snow is on the ground again at Moira Villas. In three minutes the boots are released, and they and their wearer depart, callously uninterested in the contents of the telegram they have brought. If we were a telegraph-boy, we should ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the Fleet (which then lacked the convenience of a bridge), and reached the base of Portland Hill. The steep incline before her was dotted with houses, showing the pleasant peculiarity of one man's doorstep being behind his neighbour's chimney, and slabs of stone as the common material for walls, roof, floor, pig- sty, stable-manger, door-scraper, and garden-stile. Anne gained the summit, and followed along the central track over the huge lump of freestone ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... only two to take, and one of them was seatless. Hilda dropped into the whole one. Billy sat down on the doorstep. The twins sat upon the board edge of the bottomless chair. Cricket remained standing, with the blanc-mange still in her hand. All of them, shy, as children always are in the presence of poverty ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... down the street. The poor fellow was so completely whuckered at seeing the well-known wax lady leave her window and march away from the store that he fell over in a heap and only saved himself from fainting by striking his funny bone against the doorstep. When he recovered his wits she had turned ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... old proprietor sighingly departed, leaving the new one smiling on the doorstep. I was just thinking how nicely the world is arranged, so that one man's trouble may turn out another man's blessing, (the illness in this gentleman's family, for instance, being the cause of my getting a neat country-house cheap,) when my attention was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... beast, and folk have a scunner at his goods; and Catherwood's a drucken swine, and his place but sairly guided. That's a great stroke o' policy, too, promising to deliver folk's goods on their own doorstep to them. There's a whole jing-bang of outlying clachans round Barbie that he'll get the trade of by a dodge like that. The like was never tried hereaway before. I wadna ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... rested from William. But there was something in the manner of Jane's scrubbing the front doorstep or sweeping out the rooms, a certain viciousness, that persuaded me that the story had ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... legend of "The Bloody Footstep" that he, in three separate instances, founded fictions upon it. In his romance of "Septimius" he gives this graphic account of what he saw: "On the threshold of one of the doors of Smithells Hall there is a bloody footstep impressed into the doorstep, and ruddy as if the bloody foot had just trodden there, and it is averred that on a certain night of the year, and at a certain hour of the night, if you go and look at the doorstep, you will see the mark wet with ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... curl papers, she was usually too much for the young man now on the doorstep. He was in the habit of looking at his boots and addressing them instead of her, and Mollie quite understood that, for they were shabby boots. They looked shabbier than ever to-day, and so did his shiny coat, but his eyes were steady and clear, and there was clear colour ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... out of bed in a minute. Their mother helped them put on their clothes and new wooden shoes. Then she gave them each a bowl of bread and milk for their breakfast. They ate it sitting on the kitchen doorstep. ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... Reekie and set out for the old Stevenson home at 17 Heriot Row, halting only to bestow our pneumatic steeds in the nearest and humblest available hostelry. There (for we found the house empty and "To Let") we sat on the doorstep evening by evening, smoking in the long northern twilight and spinning our youthful dreams. This lust for hunting out our favourite author's footsteps even led one of the pair to a place perhaps never visited by any other Stevensonian pilgrim—old Cockfield ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... enough decision to make it or stick to it. When I can shuffle off the responsibility on you it will be a real relief. If you won't let me cast in my lot with you I'll die of the disappointment and then I'll come back and haunt you. I'll camp on the very doorstep of Patty's Place and you won't be able to go out or come in without falling ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... know. One of those just-as-good homes which are never as satisfactory as the real kind. My father and mother both died a good many years ago. My brother and I were dumped down on the reluctant doorstep of ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... found work as a hand on a schooner running to Sandusky, Ohio. This was in the autumn of 1860. Once in a while, during the winter, he came home to stay over-night. "Often," Ellen said, "when Joe came, we hadn't seen anybody cross the doorstep since he went out of it, mother and I lived alone so much; but mother, in her worst days with pain, had a joking, laughing way with her that kept ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... when she left the church, and the strokes chimed again in her ears as she was shaping her reply to Mr. Mortimer. They sounded like half-past, and in that case it must have been a quarter to eight when she stood on her doorstep. Finally, there was the reason of reasons which superseded the necessity of any further attempt to persuade herself by any ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... ran to fish it out the girl on lawyer Royall's doorstep noticed that he was a stranger, that he wore city clothes, and that he was laughing with all his teeth, as the young and careless ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... quickly prevailed with you to make you break this devoted heart? Was it your father? Ha, he brought the bridegroom home with him. I recognised him. I forboded what is coming to pass. But you? Is it possible? You give your hand to the man who has hardly more than crossed your doorstep?"—"Oh, say no more!" pleads the girl, torn by the sight of his sorrow, and her necessity to refuse the only possible comfort, "Be silent! I must! I must!..."—"Oh, that docility, blind as your act!" he raves; "You were glad, at a ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... first opportunity punch his head. By the same post I wrote for a particular model,—a retired pugilist. As soon as he arrived next morning I placed him at the window of my studio facing the opposite house, now and then sending him down to the front door to stand on the doorstep to await some imaginary person, and to keep his eye on the house opposite. I went on with my work in peace. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... mentioned in conversation, I would hear my father say, with a smile, to my mother: "One of your uncle's friends," and I would think of the weary novitiate through which, perhaps for years on end, a grown man, even a man of real importance, might have to pass, waiting on the doorstep of some such lady, while she refused to answer his letters and made her hall-porter drive him away; and imagine that my uncle was able to dispense a little jackanapes like myself from all these sufferings by introducing me in his own home to the actress, unapproachable ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... with its windows barr'd, and its leafless fig-tree, Climbing round by the doorstep, the only one in the street; I knew where my hope had climb'd to its goal and there encircled All that those desolate walls once held, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... be found sitting hunched up on a doorstep in a back street in Belfast. Her skirt and the step are webbed with threads clipped from machine-embroidered linen, or pulled from handkerchiefs for hemstitching. A few doors away little Helen Keefe, all elbows, is ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... forehead with an immense silk handkerchief printed with the maritime flags of all nations. "A note! Who writes me notes? Some of your nonsense, boys, eh?" So he hitched up his trousers and sat down on the doorstep, placing the red handkerchief in his hat ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... constantly kept in mind, as it is a clue to much of the later action, being introduced whenever Bluebeard budges an inch from his doorstep. We do not hear in it the majestic grandeur of the Wotan or Walsungen motifs, and why? Simply because it was not intended to illustrate ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Buler's little piping voice from the doorstep haled the Dean. "I finked Vic would turn, and he don't turn, and I 's hungry for somebody. May I go wis you, Don Fonnybone?" The ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... As well abandon a month-old baby on a doorstep and expect it to earn its livelihood. She also had come to take a ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... and slammed again. Martin and the other girl stood on the pavement facing each other. The Englishman collapsed on the doorstep, and began to snore. ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... my advice, and hadn't come downstairs yet. Ellaline, too, was still in her room, sulking, no doubt, and hadn't said good-bye to Sir Lionel or any of us. I know that, because my room at this hotel has been close to hers—and to his, too; so whenever a word is murmured on a doorstep I hear. No word has been murmured this morning; and E. has had her breakfast sent ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... flung away from him angrily, and went upstairs. And old Jamie waited. He dared not smoke his pipe in the parlor, nor even on the doorstep (which was a pleasant place; there was a little park, with trees, in front), for Mercedes thought it ungenteel. The present incongruity of this regard for appearances never struck Jamie, and he waited there. After eleven o'clock he fancied he ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... "whose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper." The description in his Autobiography of his walking up Market Street munching a loaf of bread, and passing his future wife, standing on her father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as the anecdote about Whittington ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... them out, by their own doorstep, Mary Jane seemed to feel that something must be said so she remarked, "Would you like to see ...
— Mary Jane—Her Visit • Clara Ingram Judson
... and get rid of this beastly thing. It's dark enough to leave it on the clergyman's doorstep, ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... while teachers tell us that the opening of every new library witnesses a substitution of wholesome books for "yellow" novels in pupils' hands; while men in their prime remark their infrequent sight of the sensational periodicals left on every doorstep twenty years ago; while publishers of children's books are trying to give us a clean, safe, juvenile literature, and while some nickel novel publishers are even admitting a decline in the sale of their wares; in spite of these evidences of success, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... the drive. Looking back, waving their caps, the boys carried away a memory of a brave little figure, erect, smiling and lonely on the doorstep. ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... delay, I got down and walked along the line to the engine. It had stopped at a level crossing. At the side of the closed barrier, on the doorstep of her hut, with the light shining upon her, sat the wife of the gatekeeper, a child in her arms. She was a young woman, fair and pale. She seemed somewhat uneasy, and yet had no idea of quitting her post. She was talking in a low voice to the engine driver and stoker of ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... just as he was on his own doorstep, setting his face cheerfully eastwards on his way to Pall Mall. He had come back with her. He knew his duty to his brother's widow better than to do anything else. It was Wednesday, and on Wednesday there was always a particular curry at lunch which he much affected. He was a connoisseur in ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... obtained a passport from the Pope's Secretary of State, and coquetted so successfully with the Austrian Ambassador, that he gave it a double guarantee of good faith by signing it. This impetuous and eccentric female made her way uninterruptedly to Vienna, found her cousin on the doorstep, made a rush for him and seized his hand, then shouted, "Who can prevent my kissing my sovereign's hand?" She also found means to convey letters to him. There is not much said about this Napoleonic dash, but from the records that are available the incident set the heroes—comprising ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... The cook, solicitous, receives a slap in the face, and as the maid bounces out, the cook, seeking a victim, grabs away the gingerbread from the butcher's boy. And that still hungry juvenile slams the door as he leaves and kicks the slumbering cat off the back doorstep. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... the stair-like streets, which abound in Malta, with a milk cart, hence you find all over the town a man or boy with about half a dozen goats, shouting something or other, when the women appear at their doors with jugs into which the men milk the quantity required, as they sit on the doorstep. This is all very quaint and picturesque, especially when combined with the bright clothing of the men and children, the bright projecting upper windows, and the altogether foreign and tropical appearance of ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... twin fathers had had supper and were settled safely by their candles, which were beacons that led them back into past ages, I sat by myself on the front doorstep in the perfumed darkness that was only faintly lit by stars that seemed so near the earth that they were like flowers of light blossoming on the twigs of the roof elms. In a lovely dream I had just gone into the arms of Pan when I heard out beyond the orchard a soft ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess |
