"Littered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... down the ladder that conducted to those dark and littered depths of the ship's hull that were assigned to the artificers as their place of abode. But amidst a good deal of unavoidable confusion, Ruby's practised eye discerned order and ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... and down came boxes, and very soon the small counter was littered with piles of raiment variously gaudy which Spike viewed and disparaged with such knowing judgment that the salesman's respect proportionately grew, and Mr. Ravenslee, lounging in the background, was forgotten quite, the while they chaffered ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... shelter pits in which they could lie in comparative safety while they swept all the level ground around with their rifle fire. Mr. Ralph, the American correspondent, whose letters were among the most vivid of the war, has described these lairs, littered with straw and the debris of food, isolated from each other, and each containing its grim and formidable occupant. 'The eyries of birds of prey' is the phrase with which he brings them home to us. In these, with nothing ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the frantic energy of a Gladstone out of office, I plied my ax, its echoing strokes making fit accompaniment to my strains, until for many yards about me the ground was littered with white and yellow chips; then, exhausted with my efforts, I would sit down to rest and eat my simple midday fare, to admire myself in my deep-green and chocolate working-dress, and, above everything, to think and ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... glance at the faces of his father and Mr. Damon to see that something was troubling the two. The table in front of them was littered with papers covered ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... sight of all was a knot or two of decrepit veterans from the Invalides who leant against the balustrade of the grand staircase, and gazed with pinched-up lips and dry eyes at the National Guards on duty, lounging and carousing down below. The stairs were littered with bedding and cooking utensils, shirts and stockings hanging to dry over the gilt railings, while in the square at the stairs' foot were ranged benches and boards on trestles, and there the soldiers of the Guard sat in picturesque groups enough, contrasting in the carelessness and dirt ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... the table upon which we had been sitting and lay about our feet. Outside, the soil was banked high against the house. At the top of the window frame we could see an uprooted drainpipe. The floor was littered with smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen towards the house was broken into, and since the daylight shone in there, it was evident the greater part of the house had collapsed. Contrasting vividly with this ruin was the neat dresser, stained ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... to a fence and clambered over it. On the far side, the ground was littered with clothes and guns. A newspaper, folded up, lay in the dirt. A dead soldier was stretched with his face hidden in his arm. Farther off there was a group of four or five corpses keeping mournful company. A hot sun ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... unloaded, and from the pile of stuff that soon littered the ground, it was evident that the three lads had taken a fair advantage of their expenses being guaranteed, for they certainly had not stinted themselves along ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... found him and Mr Annesley seated at the cabin-table with a decanter of port standing between them, glasses of the same at their elbows, and a large map spread out in the full light of the cabin lamp, which had just been lighted; the table being further littered with a large number of ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... graveyard with new gravestones every day,— But, come, regale us with appropriate detail, Those disillusions weeping at the fountains, say, Those new disgusts, just like their brothers, littered stale, ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... bunks were built in the eastern end of the room; a fireplace occupied a portion of the wall against the hill; a table stood in the centre of the floor, and a number of mining tools littered a corner. Cooking utensils were strewn on the table liberally, while others hung against the wall or depended from hooks in the chimney. This was practically all there was, ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... stone. There are three rooms, with earthen floors, crooked ceilings, and windows that lift up and down instead of opening outwards.... The walls are covered with rifles, pistols, sabres and whips. The chest of drawers and the window-sills are littered with cartridges, instruments for mending rifles, tins of gunpowder, and bags of shot. The furniture is lame and the veneer is coming off it. I have to sleep on a consumptive sofa, very hard, and not upholstered ... Ash-trays and all such luxuries are not to be found within a radius ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... cards and counters straying Was the place littered o'er, With which sat playing, playing, playing, And wrangling evermore, A group of fellows, whose chief function Was to proclaim, In voices of surpassing unction, Their luck and losses ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... evidences in the patio, which had been converted into a manure pile. The walls, once whitewashed, were now faded and cracked, revealing the bare unbaked adobe; the floor had been torn up by the hoofs of animals; the orchard was littered with rotted branches and dead leaves. From the entrance one stumbled over broken bits of chairs and other ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... breast, his head occasionally wagging from side to side, and his hat thrown back upon his ears, like a man who was oppressed to inconvenience by a sense of his own greatness, led the way up a dark and dirty flight of stairs into a room of similar character, all littered and bestrewn with odds and ends of newspapers and other crumpled fragments, both in proof and manuscript. Behind a mangy old writing-table in this apartment sat a figure with a stump of a pen in its mouth and a great pair of scissors in its right hand, clipping and slicing at a file ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... note she warned me not to hope to keep it. It was only to imprint on my memory the size, and features, and spots of Diana, her departed greyhound, in order that I might get her exactly such another. Don't you think my memory will return well stored, if it is littered with defunct lapdogs. She is so devout, that I did not dare send her word, that I am not possessed of a twig of Jacob's broom, with which he streaked cattle as ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... was littered with papers, coats, collars, ties, and underwear. Drawers had been dragged out and emptied, my trunk gutted of its contents. Evidently the captain had been engaged in a thorough search of the cabin when my ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... second landing. Douglas Stone followed the old nurse into it, with the merchant at his heels. Here, at least, there was furniture and to spare. The floor was littered and the corners piled with Turkish cabinets, inlaid tables, coats of chain mail, strange pipes, and grotesque weapons. A single small lamp stood upon a bracket on the wall. Douglas Stone took it down, and picking his way among the lumber, ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the place of honour before the window; but there were evidences that the owner possessed more hobbies than one, for a piece of copper was in process of being beaten into a pattern of pomegranates and leaves, a work-table was littered with odds and ends, and on an old black tray was a weird medallion portrait of a gentleman, manufactured out of plasticine, a lump of which lay ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... saying good-bye. The narrow corridors of the sleeping-cars had African spears piled up on the floor against the wall, very long and inconvenient. Ladies struggled in, with rainbow-coloured baskets almost too big for their compartments. Seats were littered with snake-skins like immense, decayed apple parings; fearsome, crescent-shaped knives; leopard rugs in embryo; and strange headgear in many varieties. Stuffed crocodiles fell down from racks and got underfoot: men walked about with elephant tusks under their arms; dragomans solicited a last ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... as she was shown into the smoky, little den. It was a scene of confusion, such as she had never beheld before. The table was heaped high with papers: books and maps strewed every chair: even the floor was littered with bulky tomes and piles of manuscript. At a knee-hole table Caspar Brooke was sitting, writing hard, as if for dear life, his loose hair falling heavily over his big forehead, his left hand grasping his ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... called the "Best Household Coals" displayed in huge numerals on each of the windows. Unwashed children from the uncleanly houses which made up the rest of the street seemed to spend the whole day, and half the night, dancing to barrel organs. Garbage and paper littered the roadway, except where there was sufficient slimy black mud to cover these; but, on the other hand, there was a large and gaudy public house at the corner, opposite a similar block of flats, and a cab rank just down ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... was lined with tar-paper, on which were pinned lithographs of Robert G. Ingersoll, Karl Marx, and Napoleon. Under a gun-rack made of deer antlers was a cupboard half filled with dingy books, shotgun shells, and fishing tackle. Bone was reading by a pine table still littered with supper-dishes. Before him lay a clean-limbed English setter. The dog was asleep. In the shack was ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... you have none yourselves. I pardon the lad having done some discredit to my gray hairs, when I see him take care of that helpless creature, which ye would have trampled upon as if ye had been littered of bitch-wolves, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in the trough of the sea, and then shooting up towards Heaven like a giant javelin, shining and dripping as the rollers tossed it about. Other smaller pieces of wreckage dotted the waters, while innumerable spars and packages were littered over the sands. These were being drawn up and collected in a place of safety by gangs of peasants. I noticed that a couple of broad-winged gulls were hovering and skimming over the scene of the shipwreck, as though many strange things were visible to them beneath the waves. At times we could hear ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... littered with wallets, blankets, staffs and other foot- farers' gear. About it sat groups of men, every one with a sheath-knife or dagger in his belt. I counted forty and there were more out of sight round the shoulder of rock between ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... in broad daylight, bruised and broken by his fall. The leaves of the manuscript he had written the night before still littered the desk. He read them through again, folded and sealed them with his seal, put the roll inside his gown, and unheeding the menaces the witches had twice over given him, started to carry his revelations ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... and entered the circular doorway, and the others, one by one, followed. They found themselves in a rich and luxurious apartment, softly lighted by a hanging lamp; in the center was a table, littered with open books and scrolls of paper, and bearing notably a great round globe ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... had time to start up from the ground, his colour deepening with discomfiture as he glanced at the disarray of the room, littered with playthings, displaced cushions, newspapers, with which he had been playing bo-peep, drawing materials, all in as much confusion as the hair, which, in an unguarded moment, he had placed at the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... way changed. A mere stone shell, littered with fragments of wood and mortar. There was the rough wooden block on which Alan used to sit while he first frightened us with bogey-stories, and then calmed our excited nerves by rapid sallies of wild nonsense. There was the plank ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... thought was that a king's tent was very like a trader's booth. Spears and banners and gold-bossed shields decorated the walls, while the reed-strewn ground was littered with furs and armor, with jewelled altar-cloths and embroidered palls and wonder-ful gold-laced garments. The rude temporary benches were spread with splendid covers of purple and green, upon which silver lilies and gold-eyed peacocks had been wrought with exquisite skill. And the rough-hewn ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... pictures, his work accompanied by music or the reading of delightful books, which, untroubled by the sound of hammering and other noises, may be listened to with very great pleasure." The workshop of Neroni, when he had one of his own, was full of cobwebs and dust, littered with the remains of frugal and unsavoury meals, and resolutely closed to the rich and noble persons in whose company Leonardo delighted. And if Neroni, in his many-sided activity, eventually put ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... in a ring about the place where her feet had been when she dropped them in the dust and lint which rolled about in the corners like feathers. Her corset was thrown down in a corner; shoes and stockings littered the floor; her comb was clogged with red hair like a wire fence with dead grass after a freshet; dingy, grimy underclothing lay about. I peered into a closet, in which there were more garments on the ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... existing conditions, by any means the ideal field for a duel. In the darkness it seemed to him to be more happily adapted for a game of blindman's-buff. There was a half-filled hay-cart in the moat, and bundles of hay were scattered hither and thither on the ground and littered the place confusingly. Lagardere began to busy himself in clearing some of this hay out of the way, so as to afford an untroubled space for the coming combat. While he was thus engaged he heard for the first time a faint sound ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... reached by descending two steps at the end of the hall further from the front door. Mavis presented herself here at the expiration of the allotted time, where she found Miss Helen and Miss Annie solemnly seated behind the book-littered table, which stood in the middle of ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... said the boy, on whom the sight of the coin seemed to operate like some weird talisman, leading me to a remote part of the stage, the floor of which had been tastefully littered with orange-peel in a variety of patterns; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... going through this golden weather, Where leaves have littered every forest way, If there be lovers, they should be together: For this is golden ... but the end is grey. Beyond this shimmer where the bright leaves fall, Behind this haze of silver shot with gold, There is a greyness waiting for it all,— A little ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... artist's studio, but every object in it bore indubitable signs of unthrift and neglect. The statuettes, busts, and models of various kinds were covered with dust and cobwebs; dusty canvases were faced to the wall, and stumps of brushes and scraps of paper littered the floor. The only signs of industry consisted of a few masterly crayon drawings, and little luscious studies of color ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... vast deal of ruins and rubbish in the Eternal City. And as regards its sanitary condition, there may be a great deal of holiness in Rome, but there is very little cleanliness in it. When a shower falls, and the odour of the garbage with which the streets are littered is exhaled, the smell is insufferable. One had better not describe the spectacles that one sees every day on the marble stairs of the churches. The words of Archenholtz in the end of last century are still applicable:—"Filth," ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... reaches of consciousness back into the past. Normally our shell is too thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner man is ever ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... crushed the brave boat; all forbearance they lost; They littered with ruins the ocean so wild— Till the hulk of the parent ship, beaten and tossed, Drifted prone on the flood by the wreck of ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... littered the ground, and eggs and young were everywhere. The little ones were covered with white down, and the developing feathers on their wings were turning black. They squalled unremittingly, which squalling I decided ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... oculariums of their helmets. So they met and struck; and they struck many scores of times, and their blows were so violent that neither shield nor armor could withstand the strokes they gave. For their shields were cleft and many pieces of armor were hewn from their limbs, so that the ground was littered with them. And each knight gave the other so many grim wounds that the ground presently was all sprinkled with red ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... did Pollyanna give about her; then, with a confused vision in her eyes of crimson draperies, book-lined walls, a littered floor, an untidy desk, innumerable closed doors (any one of which might conceal a skeleton), and everywhere dust, dust, dust, she fled back through the hall to the great carved door, still half open ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... of the room, facing the bedroom door, there is a second settee, and behind the settee is an oblong table littered with books and magazines. At a little distance from this table stands an arm-chair, and against the wall at the back, on the left of the big doors, is a chair of a lighter sort. Also against the ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... evidently knew the neighbourhood quite well—and that he had been a member of the Richmond Tennis Club!) There was of course considerable confusion on board; the deck was in a state of dirt and chaos, littered with books and chairs, and some parts of it were an inch or two deep in water, and we found next morning that the bathrooms and lavatories were not in working order, as the pipes supplying these places had been shot away when the ship was shelled. ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... taking on the look of summer, and the dusty stretches of veldt were tinged here and there with thin patches of growing green. Over the hills nearest the town were scattered the lines of ruined trenches, still littered here and there with rusty tools dropped there by the Boers when, long months before, they had caught sight of the advancing armies of French and Hutton. As they drew nearer, Weldon could make out the familiar details of ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... arranging the dinner table to have both sides balanced. There is an old maxim that says, "There must be a use for everything" and this holds especially true of the table of good taste. It must not be littered with useless articles, no matter how artistic or odd, for they hamper the movements of the guests and make things unnecessarily crowded. Butter rarely appears on the table at the formal dinner; and ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... "Town," or at one of the subordinate centres of the urban region we have foreseen. The apartments will be more or less agreeably adorned in some decorative fashion akin to but less costly than some of the many fashions that will obtain among the wealthy. They will be littered with a miscellaneous literature, novels of an entertaining and stimulating sort predominating, and with bric-a-brac; in a childless household there must certainly be quaint dolls, pet images, and so ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the room was more deliberate. To my right were the big generators and the switchboards, gleaming with copper bus-bar, and intricate with their tortuous wiring. Directly before me was the long work-bench that ran the full length of the room, littered with a dozen set-ups for as many experiments. At my left was a sizable piece of apparatus that was strange to me; on a small enameled table beside it was a rather large sheet of paper, weighted down with a ...
— The Infra-Medians • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... there was no solution of the mystery for Sanda, who had waited to hear she knew not what. But at last, in a room littered with pastes and perfume bottles, and lighted by the traditional long candles wound with coloured ribbon, Ourieda spoke, in Arabic, that the hennena might not ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... carters endeavour, as far as possible, to take the pass in gangs, lest bad weather or an accident upon the road should overtake them singly. At night they hardly rest three hours, and rarely think of sleeping, but spend the time in drinking and conversation. The horses are fed and littered; but for them too the night-halt is little better than a baiting-time. In fair weather the passage of the mountain is not difficult, though tiring. But woe to men and beasts alike if they encounter storms! Not a few perish in the passes; ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... whether he called that name aloud, or whether it was one with the beat in his head. Boyd was out on that littered field, and Drew was going ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... the points of the dingy tines as he swung about to face the open door. Fork and mackerel fell to the floor as the seaman abruptly rose and stalked outside. The stern features of the rugged old face sagged with astonishment as he blinked at the small army of men swarming over his littered yard. ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... relieved itself as at Plugstreet, but had no fixed dwelling-place, sometimes extending as far to the right as Trench Bugeaud, half way up the north slope of the hill of Serre, where the ground was littered with the debris and decomposing bodies of the June fighting, sometimes as far to the left as Trench Morand, about 300 yards north of where the Bucquoy road crossed the trenches. From Morand to Hoche the lie ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... demanding immediate notice, was that the main hatchway was gaping wide-open, with a tackle dangling down it from the main-stay, evidently for the purpose of hoisting cargo out of the hold. All round the hatchway the deck was littered with bales and cases of every description, some of them intact, as they had come up out of the hold, while others had been ripped or wrenched open and their contents scattered hither and thither about the decks. There was a cask lying on its bilge, its head knocked out, and perhaps a gallon or ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... measure resembled a corral. It was a bull-ring, where the national sport of bull-fighting was carried on. Just now it appeared to be quarters for a considerable army. Ragged, unkempt rebels were everywhere, and the whole square was littered with tents, packs, wagons, arms. There were horses, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... a fake," declared Bertram. He slumped heavily into a chair, and scowled at Average Jones' well-littered desk, whereon he had just tossed a sheet of paper. His usually impeccable hair was tousled. His trousers evinced a distinct tendency to bag at the knees, and his coat was undeniably wrinkled. That the elegant and flawless dilettante of the Cosmic Club should have come forth, at eleven ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... The room was littered with wreckage. I saw that by some miracle of chance the microscope was still standing, and I had ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... nearly all his work in his little study, a sanctum littered with innumerable manuscripts. He, like most authors of the day, dictates to a secretary, who types what he says. It is, I think, in many ways a pity that so many authors type their manuscripts; for not only are they machine-made, they have not the interest that they ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... high boots, and all the trappings and harness belonging to a cowboy's outfit littered the place, and stretched out on the robes and furs, in easy, careless attitudes, ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... released my attention, and I turned and looked about me at the flush deck of the little schooner. I was already half prepared by the sounds I had heard for what I saw. Certainly I never beheld a deck so dirty. It was littered with scraps of carrot, shreds of green stuff, and indescribable filth. Fastened by chains to the mainmast were a number of grisly staghounds, who now began leaping and barking at me, and by the mizzen ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... and groceries and medicines slid with them, bursting into chemical spots of green and crimson flame; a wheel crushed in and sank, spilling more packages that flickered and hissed; the garbage of combat and murder littered the earth, and in the air hung an odor that Cumnor knew, though he had never smelled it before. Morsels of dropped booty up among the rocks showed where the Indians had gone, and one horse remained, groaning, with an accidental arrow ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... to you—I found you surrounded by sharpers—What was to be done? I became Morrington! littered with villains! practised the arts of devils! braved the assassin's steel! possessed myself of your large estates—lived hateful to myself, detested by mankind—to do what? to save an injured brother from destruction, and lay his fortune at his feet! [Places parchments ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... the old manse that afternoon there was less of sunlight and joy. Shadows hung between the walls and there were shadows, too, in the heart of one of the men who sat by a central, paper-littered table. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Let England have her trim, hawthorne lanes and pleached gardens of fruit and flower, and Italy her olive and orange; for me the New England wilding roadside, interrupted only now and then by a farmhouse and littered yard, is dearer. ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... tall man and the widow, which sufficiently denoted that the tall man was as high in favour as he was in size. Tom was fond of hot punch—I may venture to say he was VERY fond of hot punch—and after he had seen the vixenish mare well fed and well littered down, and had eaten every bit of the nice little hot dinner which the widow tossed up for him with her own hands, he just ordered a tumbler of it by way of experiment. Now, if there was one thing in the whole range of domestic art, which the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... a house near ours, down on the Back Bay at Boston, which just ruins the whole prospect," said he. "It has old chairs littered about the stoop, and the shingles are loose, and the garden runs wild; but I don't know that the neighbours are exactly justified in rushing in, and stamping around, and running the thing ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... do not go very smoothly." He himself led them to the great guest-chamber, where there had not been a guest for many years, and he noticed, as though for the first time, that the halls through which they passed were bare, and that the floor was littered with unpacked boxes and gun-cases. He also observed for the first time that maps of the colony, with the coffee-plantations and mahogany belt marked in different inks, were not perhaps so decorative as pictures and mirrors and family portraits. And he could have wished that ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... in the dressing-room, he pushed open his wife's door, and looked in. She was apparently asleep, and the child beside her. The room struck cold, and, by a candle in a basin, he saw that it was littered from end to end with the contents of two or three trunks that were standing open. The furniture was no less scanty and poor than in the sitting-rooms, and the high panelled walls closing in upon the bed gave a dungeonlike aspect to ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fitted up as a chemical laboratory. A double line of glass-stoppered bottles was drawn up upon the wall opposite the door, and the table was littered over with Bunsen burners, test-tubes, and retorts. In the corners stood carboys of acid in wicker baskets. One of these appeared to leak or to have been broken, for a stream of dark-colored liquid had trickled out from it, and the air ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said Eden easily. "I won't introduce you, because he doesn't like people. He's a recluse. Good-bye. I can't be sure about Tuesday. I'll go with you if I have time after my lesson." She nodded, left him, and went over to the seat littered with newspapers. The young man went up the ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... depressing and chaotic place he had ever seen. The cheap furniture and the cheaper wall paper went well with a long-unwhite-washed ceiling and smudged white paint. A line of empty beer bottles which stood on a mantelpiece littered with unframed photographs and dog-eared Christmas cards struck a note so blase that it might almost have been committed for a reason. On the square mission table in the center there was a lamp with a belaced pink shade at a cock-eyed ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... went up the steps he heard the sound of workmen hammering. The anteroom was in disorder and littered with boxes and trunks. The footman replied that the Countess was not at home. But as Christophe was disappointedly going away after leaving his card, the servant ran after him and asked him to come in and begged his pardon. Christophe ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... either, but I fear it will never be our home again, so why cling to it? But really, do you suppose any city family would be satisfied with this?" indicating the large, littered ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Mrs. Fountain, turning round, observes it. "Not finished yet? But I don't wonder! I wonder you've even begun. Well, now, I will take hold with you." In token of the aid she is going to give, Mrs. Fountain sinks into a chair and rolls a distracted eye over the littered and tumbled room. "It's worse than I thought it would be. You ought to have smoothed the papers out and laid them in a pile as fast as you unwrapped the things; that is the way I always do; and wound the strings up ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... cooking utensils now green with a fungus-like mould and disagreeably reminiscent of the Indian hunters who had last camped in the place, no one knew how long ago. In the corner where a stove had once stood, was a pile of damp soot and ashes, and the floor was littered with decaying woolen socks, old papers and rubber boots from which the tops had been cut to make a house-shoe known to Alaskan miners as "stags." Here and there daylight showed between the uncovered ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... of instability and hurry, would not persist long enough to establish a well-defined culture. Hence, in the present society, multitudes feel that certain finer things are excluded from their lives because the ground is so littered with possessions, and because life is too harried and too ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... a worn office chair before a littered desk. In the close air hung the smell of stale cigars and the clear ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Burgess and Blodgett were the only B's, and the General was glad. His desk was constantly littered with the "letters" of tenderfeet, and his office-tent filled with their portmanteaus, holding dress suits and ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... from stone to stone into a pool at the bottom of it. Up this breach, then, below the force they scrambled and struggled, for rough indeed was the road for them; and so came they up out of the gap on to the open hill-side, a great shoulder of the heath sloping down from the north, and littered over with big stones, borne thither belike by some ice-river of the earlier days; and one great rock was in special as great as the hall of a wealthy goodman, and shapen like to a hall with hipped gables, which same the men of the Wolf ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... elaborated copy of Ferrara's room at Oxford; infinitely more spacious, of course, and by reason of the rugs, cushions and carpets with which its floor was strewn, suggestive of great opulence. But the littered table was there, with its nameless instruments and its extraordinary silver lamp; the mummies were there; the antique volumes, rolls of papyrus, preserved snakes and cats and ibises, statuettes of Isis, Osiris and other Nile deities were there; the many photographs ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... whistling as he went. When he reached the fifth floor he was much surprised to discover that it was vacant. A great expanse it was, flooded with sunshine. Peter paused to look about. Some unused packing-cases littered one corner of the room and instantly the thought flashed into his mind—what a warm, quiet, secluded spot for him and Nat to eat their lunch! Why, they could even bring a book and curl up in the shelter of the boxes and read. As it was still too chilly to go out there ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... crammed, gentlemen sleeping on the billiard-table, or littered down in the room of the table-d'hote: the place was crowded. All the world had flocked in to assist at the Pardon of Sainte Anne-la-Palue, which was to take place the following morning. No vehicle was to be had, and we were in despair of being able to go, when a good-natured voyageur ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... morning after our arrival, when I awoke from sleep, how sad I felt! I could see that our windows looked out upon a drab space of wall, and that the street below was littered with filth. Passers-by were few, and as they walked they kept muffling themselves up ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... at each door; but received no answer. Then, having sharp ears, he tried the handle of one marked "Private." It yielded, and he entered, to be accosted angrily by a pallid, elderly, bewhiskered man, standing in front of a much littered table. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... littered premises with some curiosity. He was a tall, gray-haired man, with a long, impassive face of peculiar ashen color. He had lost his left hand somewhere above the wrist and in place of it wore a metal hook. With this he gestured stiffly in the direction of a girl ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I, sole scorched survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an air that is never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a table littered with working drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes about velocities and air and water pressures and trajectories—of an altogether different ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... besides, for the Bazaar in aid of the Conservative Young Men's Club and Coffee-Room Sustentation Fund. You couldn't call at any house in Billsbury without being nearly smothered in heaps of fancy-work of every kind. When I was at the PENFOLDS' on Monday afternoon, the drawing-room was simply littered with bonnets and hats, none of them much larger than a crown piece, which Miss PENFOLD had been constructing. She tried several of them on, in order to get my opinion as to their merits. She looked very pretty ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... accommodation that the miserable village affords is what was formerly used by robbers as a prison-house for their victims, but which is now used as a kind of store-room. There is but one room, and its earthen floor is littered over with filth of almost every description, while dust and cob-webs everywhere abound. This is the RECEPTION-ROOM for our ...
— My Three Days in Gilead • Elmer Ulysses Hoenshal
... the brilliantest of women! and you know you don't like the parlor littered with rags and cuttings. You wish to get rid of me for the evening? Well, I'll go! Hand me the work basket and the bundle, and I'll give my first lesson in dress making to our South ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... some young men being accidentally killed in a game, a quarrel ensued, and a general dispersion of mankind took place. One Indian fixed his residence on the borders of the lake, taking with him a dog big with young. The pups in due time were littered, and the Indian, when he went out to fish, carefully tied them up to prevent their straying. Several times, as he approached his tent, he heard a noise of children talking and playing; but on entering it, he only perceived the pups tied up as ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... the good old way weeks beforehand by the vast posters of former days and by a profusion of small bills which fell upon the village as from the clouds, and left it littered everywhere with their festive pink. They prophesied it in a name borne by the first circus I ever saw, which was also an animal show, but the animals must all have died during the fifty years past, for there is now no menagerie attached to it. I did not know this when I heard the band braying ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... crouched before a slow-smoking fire, in the littered ashes of a thousand fires, was an old man who blinked apathetically at the invaders. He was extremely old—so old that his withered skin hung about him in loose folds and did not look like skin. His hands were bony claws, his emaciated ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... without demur. That meant that there would be time; yet her very docility frightened him. She seemed quite relaxed now that her head could lie back against the leather cushion, and her gaze traveled about the dingy littered room with a kind of tender inquisitiveness as if ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... from the service to the picture of his mother over his brother's littered desk, to the Street, to K., to the girl who had refused to marry him because she did not trust him, to Carlotta last of all. He turned a little and ran his eyes along the ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... by crashing through the glass, when it was emptied of every article, and the shelves half-split, and half-thrust back crooked. Letters, labeled by the boys "Private," were strewn over the floor; they opened every armoir and drawer, collected every rag to be found and littered the whole house with them, until the wonder was, where so many rags had been found. Father's armoir was relieved of everything; Gibbes's handsome Damascus sword with the silver scabbard included. All his clothes, George's, Hal's, Jimmy's, were appropriated. They ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... littered about like lumber, and you practically given the office to help yourself? It's wonderful, Bill, what restraint there is in an honest mind! You can't ever ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... where every street runs into the country and one may always see the hills and the sky! But even in Athens, when they built the Parthenon, often, I think, I should have found my way into the olive gardens and vineyards about Kephisos: so to-day, leaving the dead beauty littered in the churches, the palaces, the museums, the streets of Florence, very often I seek the living beauty of the country, the whisper of the poplars beside Arno, the little lovely songs of streams. And then Florence is a city almost without suburbs;[129] at the gate you find the hills, the olive ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... massacre at Tamines took place about Aug. 28. A witness describes how he saw the public square littered with corpses, and after a search found those of his wife and child, a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... couldn't help the creaking. Then, what could the attendant want in the front room, where were still so many of the precious glass cases unharmed, and the Bugologist's favorite books and his big desk, littered with papers, etc.? Blakely thought to hail and warn him against moving about among those brittle glass things, but reflected that he, the new man, had done the reshifting under his, Blakely's, supervision, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... of rotted sandbags, filled with chalkflint, covering the burnt wood. One need only look at the ground to know that the fighting here was very grim, and to the death. Near the road and up the slope to the enemy the ground is littered with relics of our charges, mouldy packs, old shattered scabbards, rifles, bayonets, helmets curled, torn, rolled, and starred, clips of cartridges, and very many graves. Many of the graves are marked with strips of wood torn from packing cases, with pencilled inscriptions, ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... hour they arrived at a large encampment upon the bank of a broad shallow river. There were nearly an hundred lodges standing upon the plain; and the ground was littered with buffalo-horns and hides, while vast quantities of the flesh of these animals were hanging from poles in front of every lodge. There were fires, and camp-kettles, and dogs, and Indian ponies, and women, and children—all mixed up together, ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... to say that on the whole those tourists chased across the Continent by the advancing spectre of war, behaved with pluck and patience. Some of them had suffered grievous loss. From Bale and Geneva to Paris and Boulogne the railways were littered with their abandoned luggage, too bulky to be loaded into overcrowded trains. On the roads of France were broken-down motor-cars which had cost large sums of money in New York and London. But because war's stupendous evil makes all other things seem ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... Dawsey's 'mansion'—if mansion it could be called—a story-and-a-half shanty, about thirty feet square, covered with rough, unpainted boards, and lit by two small, dingy windows. It was approached by a sandy walk, and the ground around its front entrance was littered with apple peelings, potato parings, and the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... tornado of fire, and drifted forward on a broken moor, already littered with dead and wounded. Both Companies eventually lined up in shallow depressions of ground, but there was ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... the littered table, he glanced out at the sun. The morning was advancing all too rapidly. His eyes drifted across to his wife. She was still reading. A light sigh escaped him. He felt he should be out on his claim. However, without ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... Pablo, they all went to the stables, and turned out the ponies to make room for the horses; and as soon as they were all fed and littered down they returned to the cottage, and Chaloner and Grenville were introduced. Supper was soon on the table, and they were too hungry to talk while they were eating, so but little information was gleaned ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... a bedroom came out softly in the glow. A room of matting and marble-topped, bottle-littered walnut table, of white iron hospital-cot and curly horsehair divan, a dapple-marble mantelpiece of conch-shell, medicated gauze, bisque figurines, and hot-water kettle; in the sheerest of dimity, still dainty of ribbon, the figure of Miss Hoag, ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... slipped down and walked into the house. He kicked the little pail that lay in the doorway, and sent it into one corner; that did him good. Then he sat down on the box, and began cutting letters out of a piece of newspaper. Finding that the snippings littered the floor, he picked them up and began scribbling on his blotting-paper. He tried the effect of different initials before the name Rose: G. Rose, E. Rose, L. Rose, Rose, L.L., L.L. Rose. When he had covered the sheet, he looked at it discontentedly a little while, then suddenly began to ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... eye swept the littered field from which Jabez Rockwell rose, as one from the dead, to rally his comrades, alone, undaunted, pathetic beyond words. A little later two privates were carrying to the rear the wounded lad, who had been picked up alive and conscious. They halted to salute their Commander-in-chief, and laid their ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... two of his friends there one afternoon. There is no special sanctity attached to a place of business in the West, and nobody who knew Alton would have been astonished to find plates of fruit upon the papers which littered his table, and a spirit lamp burning on the big empty stove. A very winsome young lady also sat in a lounge-chair, and Forel close by glanced at her with a most unbusinesslike twinkle in his eyes. Seaforth had been married recently, and ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... my rear, I crept cautiously forward to the intercepting curtain, and drawing it aside took careful survey of the outer apartment. It was a large and handsomely furnished room, a polished mahogany writing-table littered with papers occupying a prominent position against the farther wall. A swivel chair stood beside it, and across its back hung what appeared to be a suit of clothing. I saw no other ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish |
