"Roofless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unpleasant odor. One might have thought that it had been ravaged by a pestilence, which had even attacked the buildings, for skeletons of dilapidated and deserted houses, or small cottages, which were left in an unfinished state, because the contractors had not been paid, reared their four roofless walls ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... grass which had isolated him from the rest of the world, and that impertinent world poured in. First came crows, from their homes in the woods beyond the pasture, to feast on the numerous hoppers and crawlers left roofless by the mowers, and to procure food for their hungry young, and alighted in the stubble, two or three or half a dozen at a time. By this the soul of the redwing was fired, and with savage war-cries ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... told him. Alessandro could not remember the words, only that after them he set his teeth, and dropping the bridle, laid his head down between Benito's ears, and whispered to him; and Benito never stopped, but galloped on all that day, till he came into Temecula; and there Alessandro saw the roofless houses, and the wagons being loaded, and the people running about, the women and children wailing; and then they showed him the place where his father lay on the ground, under the tule, and jumping off Benito he let him go, and that was the last he ever ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... itself almost in a sneer from the front teeth. Her mind skimmed leagues where Mrs. Pascoe's mind adhered to its solitary patch. Her mind skimmed leagues as the ponies climbed the hill road. Forwards and backwards she cast her mind, as if the roofless cottages, mounds of slag, and cottage gardens overgrown with foxglove and bramble cast shade upon her mind. Arrived at the summit, she stopped the carriage. The pale hills were round her, each scattered ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... year following the Norman Conquest a fire began in Canterbury, which, besides destroying many houses, reduced the unfortunate cathedral to a roofless ruin once more. Three years later, in 1070, when Lanfranc was made the first Norman archbishop, he decided that the Saxon walls were worthless, and he swept away every trace of the building, which may have been partially Roman, before ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... to read, or to write, at night. But you control this by a switch, conveniently placed, so that the darkness which aids reflection is also at your command. Then there is the window, opening right down to the floor, from which, if it please you, you may study the activity of the roofless ant-hill beneath, the restless ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... to Howard of the kid's way Joan had treated him,—a way which had left him stultified,—of how, touched by the tragedy that had reduced the poor little waif of the chorus to utter grief and despair, he had taken her out to the country to get healing in God's roofless cathedral, and of how, treating her, because of his love and admiration of Joan, with all the respect and tenderness that he would have shown a sister, it had given him the keenest pleasure and delight to help her back to optimism and sanity. He ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... of getting wood Malcolm soon explored the castle. The upper rooms were all roofless and open to the air. There were no windows on the side upon which the path ascended, and by which alone an attack upon the castle was possible. Here the walls were pierced only by narrow loopholes for arrows or musketry. On the other sides the windows were large, for ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... side, fair Wyoming! Although the wild-flower on thy ruined wall And roofless homes a sad remembrance bring Of what thy gentle people ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... walls, which are about thirty feet high and very thick, and entering by a handsome stone arch, called the Herculaneum gate, from the road leading to that city, I beheld a vista of houses or shops, and except that they were roofless, just as if they had been occupied but yesterday, although near eighteen centuries have passed away since the awful calamity which sealed the fate of their inhabitants. The facilities for excavation being great, both on account of the lightness of ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... roof from over our heads and show the black sky alone above us, we should not feel utterly homeless while this fire burned,—at least I can recall such a feeling of protection when once left suddenly roofless by night in one of the wild gorges of Mount Katahdin. There is a positive demonstrative force in an open fire, which makes it your fit ally in a storm. Settled and obdurate cold may well be encountered by the quiet heat ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... which took them to Vlammertinghe, led through level fields, lying waste and desolate with rank, overgrowing weeds. As they approached that historic village, they saw on every hand the cruel marks of war. On either side of the road were roofless and shattered cottages, grown around with nettles and briars. Among these ruins, as they found on a later day, were the old garden flowers, pansies and daisies, bravely trying to hold their own. Among the rank weeds was to be seen the half-hidden debris ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... held her for some moments, then, almost reluctantly, as though impelled by the trend of her feelings, her gaze wandered in the direction whence was wafted toward her a pungent reek of burning. It was the dimly outlined skeleton of the station house, roofless and partly fallen, white-ashed and still ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... chapel, which, as Barnardine held up the torch to light her, Emily observed to be in ruins, and she immediately recollected a former conversation of Annette, concerning it, with very unpleasant emotions. She looked fearfully on the almost roofless walls, green with damps, and on the gothic points of the windows, where the ivy and the briony had long supplied the place of glass, and ran mantling among the broken capitals of some columns, that had once supported ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... great Caesar with his legions in the field, has stood with vast and motley throngs and watched the triumphs given to victorious men, followed by uncrowned kings, the captured hosts and all the spoils of ruthless war. He has heard the shout that shook the Coliseum's roofless walls when from the reeling gladiator's hand the short sword fell, while from his bosom gushed the stream of wasted life. He has lived the life of savage men—has trod the forest's silent depths, and in the desperate name of life or death has matched his thought against the instinct ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... with him back to headquarters. They rode in near the close of day; and, as usual, from the stovepipe of the roofless kitchen a brave pillar of white smoke rose high in the shadows of the firs. Amy came forth at Bob's shout, starched and fresh, her cheeks glowing with their steady colour, her intelligent eyes alight with interest under the straight, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... warm straw of the stable, hungry and homesick, the children clung about their mother and wept themselves to sleep. But they were fortunate compared with many of their acquaintances, whom Pierre could see crowded roofless about their fires, in sheltered hollows and under the little hillside copses. The night was raw and showery, and there was not houseroom in Beausejour for a tenth part ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... on Traxt Cam's private map and the Terrans now had another five minutes march, in the middle of the road, ahead of the chieftain who must be inwardly boiling at their presence, before they came out in the clearing containing the roofless, circular erection which served the Salariki of the district as a market place and a common meeting ground for truce talks and the mending of private clan alliances. Erect on a pole in the middle, towering well above the nodding fronds of the grass trees, ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... "O thou bee, my own dear birdling, Fly thou in a new direction, Over nine lakes fly thou quickly Till thou reach a lovely island, Where the land abounds with honey, Where is Tuuri's new-built dwelling, Palvonen's own roofless dwelling. There is honey in profusion, There is ointment in perfection, 430 Fit to bind the veins together, And to heal the joints completely. From the meadow bring this ointment, And the salve from out the meadow, For upon the wounds I'll spread it, And anoint ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... of the peristyle were of dazzling alabaster, with their capitals richly gilt. The space above was roofless; but an immense awning of purple, richly embroidered in Persian looms—a spoil of some gorgeous Mede—shaded the feasters from the summer sky. The couches on which the banqueters reclined were of citron ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... dash furiously up the street, pulling up at the walk a few yards behind me. Just as they sprang out I turned to the left in a narrow lane in which I saw a gateway to the fort, just within the entrance of which a sentry was pacing, there being opposite several roofless cottages. The soldier's back being turned, quick as thought I sprang unseen within one of these, and in a moment I heard some men run around the corner and interrogate the soldier, who stoutly declared that no one had entered. ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... 12 miles northeast from Zuni. Although it is much larger than Nutria it is wholly comprised within the compact group illustrated. The tendency to build small detached houses noticed at Nutria and at Ojo Caliente has not manifested itself here. The prevalence of abandoned and roofless houses is ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... very forcibly. In 1815, I remember a large square of neat cottages, and the area, a green shaded by fine old trees. Most of the cottages are now roofless; the trees have been cut down, and on my last visit, in 1821, a crop of barley was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... Xavier, the colleague of Loyola in the foundation of the Society of Jesus, baptised the Goanese in a mass. Its once splendid capital is now a miasmatic wreck, its cathedrals and churches are ruined and roofless, and only a few black nuns remain to keep alight the sacred fire before a crumbling altar. Of all European nations the Portuguese have intermingled most freely with the dusky races over which they held dominion, with the curious result that the offspring ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... country had been gutted, and vast piles of refuse and mountains of slag suggested the mighty chambers which the labour of man had burrowed beneath. On the left the road curved up to where a huge building, roofless and dismantled, stood crumbling and forlorn, with the light shining ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... alike to cherish or chastise; and having already survived a generation, that which succeeded, having from infancy imbibed a superstitious veneration for the "cunning woman," as she was called, the sentiment could never be wholly effaced. Winding her way, she knew not how, through roofless halls, over disjointed fragments of fallen pillars, Sybil reached a flight of steps. A door, studded with iron nails, stayed her progress; it was an old, strong oaken frame, surmounted by a Gothic arch, in the keystone of which leered one of those grotesque ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... foundry. At a previous visit the Princess had received a disagreeable impression, not so much from Vedrine's work, which she scarcely looked at, as from the strange studio with trees growing in it, with lizards and wood-lice running about the walls, and all around it roofless ruins, suggesting recollections of the incendiary mob. But from the second visit the poor little woman had come back literally ill. 'My dear, it is the horror of horrors!' Such was her real opinion, as given the same evening ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... turn them out under such a tempest. Nor was this all. The scene indeed was one which ought never to be witnessed in any country. Misery in all its shapes was there—suffering in its severest pangs—sickness—disease—famine—and death—to all which was to be added bleak, houseless, homeless, roofless desolation. Had the season been summer they might have slept in the fields, made themselves temporary sheds, or carried their sick, and aged, and helpless, to distant places where humanity might aid and ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... as we would expect to find ruins, if anywhere. Coronado, as we have seen, invaded the country about three hundred and fifty years ago. At the time of his visit this was then a ruin, for his historian describes one ruin as "a single ruined and roofless house... the work of civilized people who had come from afar." This gives us a point as to the antiquity of some of the ruins in the Gila Valley. As we shall see, there is every reason to suppose that this section was at one time a ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... the castle at noon. A ruin green with ivy rose before us. The sunlight fell through the open doorways, and the swallows flitted in and out of the window-frames into roofless chambers. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... eloquent pens, have charmed us in our childhood, and still continue to excite interest in our breasts—the Sultan Saladin. Here are the remains of a palace which he once inhabited, and here is a well which bears his name. Who could sit under the broken pillars of that roofless palace, or drink the water from the deep recesses of that well, without allowing their thoughts to wander back to the days of the Crusades, those chivalric times, in which love, and war, and religion, swayed the hearts and the actions of men; when all that ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... that all motion picture scenes were photographed in the open, on roofless stages, and the idea that Southern California's perpetual sunlight gave the best service for this purpose he believed to be the reason that Los Angeles was the principal producing point of the world. It surprised him when he realized that the ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... human shelter. I remember I found empty houses, and though I used them they were most fearsome. I had more thrills in them than in the most lonely resting-places in the open. Some distance from Gagri I found an old ruined dwelling, floorless, almost roofless, but still affording shelter. I had many misgivings as I lay there. Was the house haunted? Was it some one else's shelter? Had some family lived there and all died out? You may imagine the questions that assailed ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... me in silence, the light from the chaise-lamps playing over her flushed face. Presently she turned and surveyed the darkness where, row on row, ruins of burned houses stood, the stars shining down through roofless walls. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, but she abiding;—to herself, her home. And sometimes I think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that she is seated on ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... loves, You wake no sounds of laughter here, Nor mirth in all our silent groves; On one broad waste, by hill or flood, Of ravaged lands your music falls, And where the happy homestead stood The stars look down on roofless halls. ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... went to the dressing-room, a wide roofless space enclosed with green boughs massed on end, and furnished plentifully with water in buckets, towels, basins, pin cushions, combs and brushes, face powder, even needles and thread. Thence one emerged after half an hour quite fresh—to ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... some, overhanging the narrow beach below in rude and heavy masses. Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its old might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry. On either side, the banks of the Medway, covered with corn-fields and pastures, ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... place where the beautiful had no existence. The very soil looked black and rough—the vegetation rugged. Every inclosure was of stone or knotted timber, and even a dove-cot which in its fresher days some hand had placed upon the lawn, was now roofless and shattered, and lay prone upon the ground, a shapeless mass of collapsed boards. The lawn—if such it could be named—resembled a bleak shore, blackened with stranded wrecks of ships whose passengers ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... the path was steep and tiring. At the house of Dr. S. in Podgorica we had met a young Franciscan monk, a Neapolitan and a great student. He at once invited us to visit him in Zatrijebac, where he is the spiritual shepherd, and to spend a few weeks with him. On approaching a roofless church, in the course of rebuilding, we espied this young monk rushing to meet us. With all the fervour of his race, he embraced and kissed us repeatedly, welcoming us to his home. He gave me his bed, and the other remaining one was put at P.'s disposal, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... have been made in latter years. The building bears every internal mark of neglect and dilapidation, defaced walls, broken plaster, &c. Upon entering the lecture-room, a quantity of eighteen-inch square boxes full of moisture suggest the idea of a rainy day and a roofless chamber. Be not deceived: these are merely receptacles for the discharge of the students' 'bacco juice; and the surrounding floor gives painful demonstration that their free spirits scorn the trammels of eighteen-inch boundaries, however profusely supplied. From what causes ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... long maintained their feudal warfare, with fragments of marble sculpture taken from the tomb incorporated into the plain brick walls. And on the other side of the road, in a beautiful meadow, covered with soft green grass, are the ruins of a roofless Gothic chapel, showing little more than a few bare walls and gables built of dark lava stones, with traces of pointed windows in them, and the spring of the groined arches of the roof. Like the fortress, the chapel ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... to ride on, and we penetrated into the principal street. On the right and left we could vaguely see roofless walls, which were hardly visible in the profound darkness. Here and there a light was burning in a room; some family had remained to keep its house standing as much as they were able; a family of brave, or of poor, people. The rain had begun to fall, a fine, icy ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Afterwards the Alps of Switzerland became his inspirers. "Prometheus Unbound" was written among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome; and, when he made his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him as he composed the "Witch of Atlas", "Adonais", and "Hellas". In the wild but beautiful Bay of Spezzia, the winds and waves which he loved became his playmates. His days were chiefly spent on the water; the management of his boat, its alterations and improvements, ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... in the course of the annual gathering. Each cave, or, in the case of large caves, each natural subdivision of it, is claimed as the property of some individual, who holds it during his lifetime and transmits it to his heirs. During the gathering of the nests of a large cave, the people live in roofless huts built inside it. The nests are sold to Chinese traders — the black nests for about a hundred dollars a hundredweight, and the white nests for as much as thirty or forty ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... in the corner of the composing-room, which served by night as a dormitory for numbers of otherwise roofless waifs, and here during the daytime a young Belgian and his wife set up a small factory of monkeys up sticks, which when completed they proceeded to sell in the streets. In another corner two Italians settled ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... observer can espy A noble soul, and lineage high: Alas! though both bestowed in vain, 870 Which Grief could change, and Guilt could stain, It was no vulgar tenement To which such lofty gifts were lent, And still with little less than dread On such the sight is riveted. The roofless cot, decayed and rent, Will scarce delay the passer-by; The tower by war or tempest bent, While yet may frown one battlement, Demands and daunts the stranger's eye; 880 Each ivied arch, and pillar lone, Pleads haughtily ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... foam at its base, as to recall the wasted opportunities. They stand all along the course of our years, solemn monuments of our unfaithfulness, and none of them can ever return again. Life is full of too-lates; that sad sound that moans through the roofless ruins of the past, like the wind through some deserted temple. 'Too late, too late; ye cannot enter now.' 'The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold, therefore he shall beg in harvest and have nothing.' Oh! let us see to it that we wring out of the passing moments their highest possibilities ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... through the overshadowing leafage; gaunt trunks torn up by winds and thrown across the stream with their heads to the feet of their fellows; the golden fuschia here, the green trammon there; now and again a poor old tholthan, a roofless house, with grass growing on its kitchen floor; and over all the sun peering down with a hundred eyes into the dark and slumberous gloom, and the breeze singing somewhere up in the tree-tops to the voice of the ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... Land of Beulah. We see a peaceful valley overlooked on all sides by lofty hills, whose steep sides are clothed with luxuriant woods; we see the Rye flowing past broad green meadows; and beneath the tree-covered precipice below our feet appear the solemn, roofless remains of one of the first Cistercian monasteries established in this country. There is nothing to disturb the peace that broods here, for the village consists of a mere handful of old and picturesque cottages, and we might stay on the terrace ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... slippery. As the engine snorted and the train moved away, the conductor cried out, "Forgot your cane, sonny," and threw the light gold-mounted bamboo from the car. He had a new sense of loneliness as he stood on the roofless platform, half a foot deep in gathering snow, which driven by a pitiless gale from the north blew his cloak about as he looked to see that his trunk had been delivered. A man shifted a switch and coming back said, "Gi'me your check." John ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... a long narrow street lined by roofless houses. The stones which form the pavement are uneven and much worn, the foot-walks on each side are raised very high, because in wet weather these streets were mere torrents and the water rushed down them. Here and there are stepping-stones, to ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... saw thee, Netley, as the sun Across the western wave Was sinking slow, And a golden glow To thy roofless towers he gave; And the ivy sheen With its mantle of green That wrapt thy walls around, Shone lovehly bright In that glorious light, And I ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the other towns they had passed through on their way from Tepic, by way of Jalisco, Aguascalientes and Zacatecas, was in ruins. The black trail of the incendiaries showed in the roofless houses, in the burnt arcades. Almost all the houses were closed, yet, here and there, those still open offered, in ironic contrast, portals gaunt and bare as the white skeletons of horses scattered over the roads. ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... a narrow street the mission of San Jose, or St. Joseph. Passing the squares of one-story adobe buildings once inhabited by thousands of busy Indians, but now deserted, roofless, and crumbling into ruins, we reached the plaza in front of the church, and the massive two-story edifices occupied by the padres during the flourishing epoch of the establishment. These were in good repair; but the doors and windows, ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... pulling him, the former weeping and imploring. He would go with neither, and at last they vanished both. He sat solitary on the side of a bare hill, and below him was all that remained of Castle Warlock. He had been dead so many years, that it was now but a half—shapeless ruin of roofless walls, haggard and hollow and gray and desolate. It stood on its ridge like a solitary tooth in the jaw of some skeleton beast. But where was his father? How was it he had not yet found him, if he had been so long dead? He must rise and seek him! He must be somewhere in the universe! Therewith ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... background of this hollow stood a peculiar, roofless, stone building, whose two round little windows, like the eternally watchful eyes of some underground worm, shone with a red glare which dazzled the eyes, while the slate-covered chimney belched forth a thick smoke filled with sparks into the ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... asked Jack, who had been busy with the three tents, for they had decided on Zeb's advice not to use the old roofless shack to ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... and is now the property of the Ayr Burns's Monument trustees. In the kitchen is the box bed in which the poet was born, and many of the articles of furniture belonged to his family. Adjoining the cottage is a museum of Burnsiana. The "auld haunted kirk," though roofless, is otherwise in a fair state of preservation, despite relic-hunters who have removed all the woodwork. In the churchyard is the grave of William Burness, the poet's father. Not far distant, on a conspicuous position close by the banks of the Doon, stands the Grecian monument ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... have witnessed most of the great pageants of the world thought we had never seen the like of that spectacle—the grey old ruins, roofless and partly clothed by lichen and moss, the vast multitude of spectators, the brilliant sunshine, the booming of the guns from the warships in the bay outside, the screaming of the seagulls overhead, the massed Welsh ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... in nets here, from the rocks. A bend in the river shows us Schonberg, a fine ruin. This was the family spot whence the Marshal Schomberg, of the Boyne, originated. Just over the river is the noble Gutenfels. It was spared by the French, and occupied till 1807, but is now roofless. Caub, on the left, is the place where Marshal Blucher crossed the river with his army, January 1, 1814. In the centre of the river is a castle called Pfalz, built about 1320, which was used as a toll-house by the Duke of Nassau. I think it has been used as a state prison. On our right ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... and sat down to smoke under a tree in the precincts. The big cone of the main tower was just in sight. I had seen the walls before, and was in no analytical mood; synthesis was enough for me. I took in with my delighted eyes a roofless dome worthy to be a temple of some sort, even if it were not, a blue roof that bettered mere human aspiration, debris testifying to earthly incompleteness, a broken column with its memento mori all these were simmering ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Rushbrooke's buying it in the eighteenth century, since when a legend had arisen that it was built and endowed by some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There was record neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of what manner of folk worshipped there, nor of those who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... and it was within the roofless walls of Durnovo's house that Joseph finally wrote out ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Were a house and clothing provided, even the miserable pittance provided by the Government might suffice to keep body and soul together, but this is not the case. Some of the exiles were accordingly occupying almost roofless sheds that had been vacated by the Yakutes, while many were so poorly clad that in winter time they were unable to leave their ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... and they limped forward up the roofless nave and through the door. She stared at the plain stone altar, at the eastern window, of which part was filled with ancient coloured glass and part with cheap glazed panes; at the oak choir benches, mouldy and broken; at the few wall-slabs and ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... hath pierced my hand; Fell my house I built on sand; Roofless, wounded, maimed by sin, Fightings without and ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... prospect of their enforced seclusion. "We'll have a good camp for a week, and then the snow'll melt, and we'll all go back together." The cheerful gayety of the young man and Mr. Oakhurst's calm infected the others. The Innocent, with the aid of pine boughs, extemporized a thatch for the roofless cabin, and the Duchess directed Piney in the rearrangement of the interior with a taste and tact that opened the blue eyes of that provincial maiden to their fullest extent. "I reckon now you're used to fine things at Poker Flat," said Piney. The Duchess turned ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... true, but because they are pleasing. The psychological revelation is the eager, undefinable interest aroused by any picture of ancient society. It is felt by every stranger when he first walks the streets of Pompeii, and, standing within the walls of its roofless houses, strives to picture to himself the life and the society which flourished there eighteen hundred years ago. In Mexico the Spaniards found an organized society several thousand years further back of their own than Pompeian society, in its arts, institutions, and state of advancement. It was ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... are patent to every eye—they obtrude themselves everywhere. The people are poor; they are despondent, broken-spirited. In the south of Ireland decay is written on every town. In the poorer parts you may see every fifth or sixth house tenantless, roofless, allowed from year to year to moulder and moulder away, unremoved, unrepaired.... To make room for these large-scale operations, evictions must go on, and as the process proceeds the numbers must be augmented of those who are unfit to work for hire and unable to ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... atmosphere spread in Jane's dwelling. Lola often unbent to talk. Sometimes she sewed a little on the frocks and aprons, preparing for her school career. Oftener she worked in her roofless pottery by the ditch, where many a queer jug and vase and bowl, gaudy with ochre and Indian red, came into being and passed early to dust again, for want of firing. Jane found these things engrossing. She liked to sit and watch them grow under Lola's fingers, ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... you do nothing the kind. Fully one-half of the buried city, perhaps, is completely exhumed and thrown open freely to the light of day; and there stand the long rows of solidly-built brick houses (roofless) just as they stood eighteen hundred years ago, hot with the flaming sun; and there lie their floors, clean-swept, and not a bright fragment tarnished or waiting of the labored mosaics that pictured them with the beasts, and birds, and flowers which we copy in perishable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... subterranean rooms, made their stay possible, but involved great suffering and horrible death as the siege went on. The large banquet hall of the Residency near by was converted into a hospital. Both buildings are now in ruins. But the roofless Residency with a tangle of vines (and a decrepit stairway that leads upward) furnishes a fine view of the whole scene, which in its very quietness bespeaks ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... as he is often styled, St. Fittack, at Nigg, Kincardineshire, on the opposite bank of the Dee from Aberdeen. The bay in the vicinity is known as St. Picker's Bay, and St. Fittack's Well, a clear spring near the roofless ruins of the old church, still recalls his memory. Its existence is a strong proof of the saint's residence in the neighbourhood at some time in his life. The fame of this well {125} for healing ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... provost-marshal?" "It was I!" said the colonel, to the utter confusion of the querist. Our chief was a good deal nettled at these irregularities; and, some time after, on going to his tent, which was pitched between the roofless walls of a house, conceive his astonishment at finding the calf and the goose hanging in his own larder! He looked serious for a moment, but, on receiving an explanation, and after the row he had made about them, ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... tower's south window there was a wide view up and down the Swanee and across the bridge, into Blackland. March never looked that way but he found himself staring at those unfinished smelting works. Smart saplings were growing inside the roofless walls, and you could buy the whole plant for the cost of its ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... or two roofless and moss-grown cottages, I entered the narrow and rambling street which leads through the town. This street a short distance down widens a little, as if to afford the wayfarer space to observe a remarkable old house ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... lay our advance guard. The colonel led me into a roofless house, and there I found two general officers, a map stretched over a drum in front of them, they kneeling beside it and examining it carefully by the light of a lantern. The one with the clean-shaven face and the twisted neck ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bramble, and as we peeped over this bank the ruined house stood before us—so near as to startle me by its proximity. It must have been a large house originally—if, indeed, it was ever completed. Now it stood roofless, dismantled, and windowless, and in many places whole rods of brickwork had fallen and now littered the ground about. The black gap of the front door stood plain to see, with a short flight of broken steps before it, and by the side of these a thick ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... out in Bildad's shack and burned it to the ground; and Bildad, with his roofless pack, sent up a doleful sound. And I, who lived the next door west, hard by the county jail, went over there and beat my breast, and helped poor Bildad wail. Around the ruined home I stepped, and viewed the shaking walls, and people say the way I wept would beat ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... never more than half an inch thick. When, as on this Sunday, the wind was lulled and the sky was clear, the climate was as mild as in spring on the mainland. As soon as the aspect of the sunrise showed the experienced that the day would be fair, busy hands moved into the old roofless chapel the pulpit and benches which the pastor had brought with him—the pulpit being a mere desk of unpainted wood, and the benches of the roughest sort. For these the interior space of the old building had been ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... the building yet standing. I asked him if he would guide me to the mission house. My voice roused him, and he said he would gladly do so. He sprang to his feet, and led me on by the hand. "Here it is!" he exclaimed; but, alas, it was roofless and deserted. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... made his fleet movements fleeter still. Street after street was traversed without a voice or tread, save his own, breaking the stillness of the night. At length he reached the point of the day's devastations. Dismantled and roofless houses, from which a dull glimmer showed that the fire was not yet wholly extinguished, were seen rising here and there, while in intervening spaces a charred and smouldering heap alone gave evidence that man had had his dwelling there. A rapid glance as he passed ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... that my soul might grow to thee, I lived up there on yonder mountain-side, My right leg chained into the crag, I lay Pent in a roofless ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... slow change that has dismantled that busy place, and established it as the quiet farmstead that I see, holds a hope within it. There must indeed have been a sad time when the buildings were slipping into decay, and the church stood ruined and roofless. But how soon the scars are healed! How calmly nature smiles at the eager schemes of men, breaks them short, and then sets herself to harmonise and adorn the ruin, till she makes it fairer than before, writing her patient lesson of beauty on broken choir and tottering ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Tas) of various styles, and from three to nine stories high, raised their heads on little eminences in the neighbourhood of the villages, and attracted attention at a great distance. A number of fortifications, which, however, look more like roofless houses than anything else, protect ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view, partially at least, two objects that spoke of man,—a deserted boat harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a land with which man had done for ever;—the vapor-enveloped rocks,—the waste of ebb-uncovered sand,—the deserted ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... looked as if she might have been there for some time. Evidently, at one period, the Jasper B. had played a part in some catch-coin scheme of summer entertainment; a scheme that had failed. Little trace of it remained except a rotting wooden platform, roofless and built close to the canal, and a gangway arrangement from this platform to ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... passengers from stated points. This circumstance also brought us acquainted with several very lovely locations. Beneath the old fort of Ticonderago we halted for a few minutes; and at Crown-point our stay was long enough to allow a rough sketch to be taken of the roofless barracks and the ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... the same roofs that had protected priest and people in the days of Romanist error. Is the cause of pure and undefiled religion stronger in the land because Melrose and Crossraguel and Pluscarden are desolate; St. Andrews a roofless ruin; Iona as yet open to the Atlantic winds? Is the voice of praise and prayer sweeter in the North because Mortlach is effaced and Fortrose shattered, and the bells are silent which men on the mainland used to hear when the north wind blew from Kirkwall? Granted ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... the sacristies and other rooms behind, including one lofty room lined entirely with blue-and-white tiles. While there, I heard, to my surprise, a faint and very distant sound of a sweeping broom. It echoed through those empty, roofless halls with a weird sound, for at that moment there was only an occasional growl of artillery in the air. Everything else was strangely quiet. Needless to say, an uninhabited town is never noisy, and at five ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... beside his camel on the grass in the sunshine. Here nature itself seems blasted by some dreadful flame of death. The streets preserve their contours, but on either side the houses stand like gaunt skeletons, roofless and shattered, fronts knocked out, floors smashed through or hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household treasures ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... up in front of the parroquia—now roofless and black; their heads are fastened together, so that the backs of their riders ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... Preparations were made by all the officers and several of the gentlemen for instant departure; but, of course, the ladies could not face the tempest. Most of them, however, had not much heart for dancing, when, possibly, before morning their houses would be roofless and their fathers' plantations laid low. A few persevered, in spite of the whirlwind raging over their heads, but even they had at length to give up. Their host insisted on all his female guests remaining. ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... The theatre was roofless and its walls were of grey canvas; they fluttered in the wind and would have blown down had it not been for the poles which held them. Along the sides of the ring was a railing, behind which was the audience, and in a reserved corner we perceived the two phenomena nibbling ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... It was pointed out to me that almost all the houses in the town were acquired by Lord Leitrim, by the strong hand, in the same way. Passed the house from which the Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Mr. White, was evicted. It was his own private property. It stands windowless and roofless, a monument to the dead earl. The priest of the parish had no house of his own; he was a boarder with one of his flock, who had built himself a house in the time of the good earl. When Lord Leitrim fancied that he had cause of quarrel with the priest he obliged his tenant to put ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... the dead that men forget— An old blind beggar-man, distained and gray, With ancient tales to tell, Mumbling of this and that upon his way, Strange song and muttered spell— Neither to East or West, or South or North, His habitation lies, This roofless vagabond who wanders forth Aye under alien skies— A gypsy of the air, he comes and goes Between the tall trees and the shadowed grass, And what he tells only the twilight knows ... The tall trees and the twilight hear ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... time one or two thousand feet above the present level of the river, as shown by the terraces along its banks, and fragments of drift caught in fissures of the rock. The Grande Coulee is like an immense roofless ruin, extending north and south for fifty miles. Strange forms of rock are scattered over the great bare plain. To the Indians, it is the home of evil spirits. They say there are rumblings in the earth, and that the rocks are hot, and smoke. Thunder ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... powers above him, with a hereditary undertone of distrust and envy at every man who wears a cloth suit and who eats and drinks without doing manual labor.—At this time, his clergy do not excite his envy, but his pity; monks and nuns, cure's and prelates, roofless, without bread, imprisoned, transported, guillotined, or, at best, fugitives, hunted down and more unfortunate than wild beasts—it is he who, during the persecutions of the years II, IV and VI, harbors them, conceals them, lodges them and feeds them. He sees ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... building, had been for a considerable time the terminus, and a town of respectable proportions had grown up, but with the completion of the road through this region, the terminus had moved on, and now all that was to be seen of those golden days was a group of adobe walls, roofless and forlorn. The present "city" consisted of about thirteen houses, and some of these were of such complex construction that one hesitates whether to describe them as houses with canvas roofs, or tents with board sides. The population consisted ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... cabinet—now bare, shattered, and roofless with the blasts of six score winters—were hung with portraits of ladies and statesmen of the day; conspicuous among which was a fine picture from the pencil of Vanloo of the handsome, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... not answer. His breathing could be heard also. His mind was picturing that same coronation—the shattered, roofless cathedral, the ruins of the ancient and magnificent high altar, the multitude of kneeling, famine-scourged people, the battle-worn, wounded and bandaged soldiery! And the King! And his father! Where had his father stood when the King was crowned? Surely, he had stood at the King's right ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... everybody, that Pompeii was not dead, but asleep, and her tints were so clear and gay that her dreams might be those of a ballet-girl. A solitary yellow dog chased a lizard in the sun, and the pebbles he knocked about made an absurdly disturbing noise. Beyond the vague tinted roofless walls that stretched over the pleasant little peninsula, the blue sea rippled tenderly, remembering much delight, and the place seemed to smile in its sleep. It was easy to understand why Cicero chose to have his villa ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... their covert an astonishing assemblage of ruins comes into view. Before you stands the magnificent eastern transept with its two beautiful octangular towers, still rising to the height of 120 feet, but roofless and desolate; the three stately windows, 60 feet high, as open to the sky as Glastonbury Abbey; in the rooms once adorned with choicest paintings and rarities trees are growing. Oh what a scene of desolation! What the noble poet said of ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... several days lived in reserve among the scattered farms and houses north of Estaires, over the ruins of which Crosthwaite, an officer of mature service, who had just joined the Battalion, was appointed Town Major. His task was not entirely enviable. Houses, roofless or otherwise, had to be subdivided into safe, doubtful, or certain to 'go up.' I cannot help regarding this Flanders retreat as a subject supremely dull. The constant suspicion of mines and booby-traps rendered doubly sordid ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... temples are roofless, its columns fallen, the statues of its kings lie face downward in the dust, the pyramids, stripped and bare, stand scarred and silent in the sun. The singing Memnon are as songless from their chiselled lips as the tongueless Sphynx half buried in the yellow sand. ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... ordered to dismount, and then, still under escort, was marched into the building. It was roofless, but an inner chamber had been constructed—a cellar, so to speak—under the ground-floor, with a roof of its own of rammed earth many feet thick, supported by heavy beams. This was one of the famous casemates invented ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... at the old house, and Father Payne said, "I'm not sure that I approve of the taste for ruins; there is something to be said for a deserted castle, because it is a reminder that we do not need to safeguard ourselves so much against each others' ill-will; but a roofless church or a crumbling house—there's something sad about them. It seems to me a little like leaving a man unburied in order that we may come and sentimentalise over his bones. It means, this house, the decay of an old centre ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... through another court, very large, though not so immense as the first, for no animals were kept there. Instead of stalls for camels and horses, there were roughly built rooms for pilgrims of the poorer class, with little, roofless, open-sided kitchens, where they could cook their own food. Beyond was the third court, with lodging for more important persons, and then the travellers were led through a labyrinth of corridors, some roofed with palm branches, others open to the air, and still more covered ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... monks have excavated the rocky slope on three faces so as to isolate completely, in the center, an immense block, out of which they have carved an admirable temple (see T in the plan, Fig. 2), with its annexed chapels. These temples are thus roofless and are sculptured externally in the form of pagodas. Literally covered with sculptures composed with infinite art, they form a very unique collection. These temples seem to rest upon a fantastic base ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... doesn't matter, does it, pal? We're of that breed of men With whom the world of wine and cards and women disagree; Your trouble was a roofless game of poker now and then, And "raising up my elbow", that's what got away with me. We're merely "Undesirables", artistic more or less; My horny hands are Chopin-wise; you quote your Browning well; And yet we're fooling round for gold in this damned wilderness: The joke is, if we found ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... man's ear the mingled voice That comes from her old dungeons yawning now To the black air, her amphitheatres, Where the dew gathers on the mouldering stones, And fanes of banished gods, and open tombs, And roofless palaces, and streets and hearths Of cities dug from their volcanic graves? I hear a sound of many languages, The utterance of nations now no more, Driven out by mightier, as the days of heaven Chase one another from the sky. The blood Of freemen shed by freemen, till strange lords Came in the ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant |
