"Sills" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that this would be the way to put out a fire. But my uncles did not take up the idea, working steadily on, and shifting the line till the whole of the glazed windows had been sluiced, and a lot of the grit and rubbish washed away from the sills and places, after which the buckets were again slung in a row and the men had their beer, said "Good-night!" quite cheerily, ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... They took me to see all the places I studied about in history class. I've done the Betsy Ross House, Franklin's Grave, Old Christ Church and Old Swede's Church. I like them all. Best of all I like Independence Hall, with its wonderful stairways and wide window sills and, most important, its grand old Liberty ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... their lovers; a rifle in the corner, overlooked in the hurried moving, spoke eloquently of the armed brutality of the times; the hewn logs which supported the lintels completed the picture of primitive life; and a soft breeze, breathing in through the unglazed sills, whispered of dark canyons and ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... abundant crinoids and smaller organisms. It is polished in large slabs at Ashford, where crinoidal, black and "rosewood" marbles are produced. Volcanic rocks, locally called "Toadstone," are represented in the limestones by intrusive sills and flows of dolerite and by necks of agglomerate, notably near Tideswell, Millersdale and Matlock. Beds and nodules of chert are abundant in the upper parts of the limestone; at Bakewell it is quarried for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then, (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar,) so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... conditions should be a scattered class and not a seated listening class. This means light chairs and tables or benches where handwork can be done; low cupboards and lockers so that each child can get at his own things; broad window-sills for plants and flowers and a bookcase for reading and picture books. Here again good picture-books are as essential as, even more essential than, readers in the Transition Class. They will be a little more advanced than in the Nursery School, and will be of the type of the Pied Piper illustrated, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... unbleached linen, a piece of bleached linen, a piece of diaper linen, a piece of dyed linen, a piece of flax, a piece of thread, a piece of yarn, a piece of ticking, a piece of raw silk, a piece of twisted silk, a piece of wove silk, figured, a piece of white plain sills, and a piece of dyed silk, a piece of ribbon, a piece of silk cord, a piece of ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... lighter, disperses, evaporates. Soon, in a more and more transparent light, appears, under a leafy vault, a cheerful little peasant's cottage, covered with creepers. The door and windows are open. There are bee-hives under a shed, flower-pots on the window-sills, a cage with a sleeping blackbird. Beside the door is a bench, on which an old peasant and his wife, TYLTYL'S grandfather and grandmother, are ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the queer part of my story. About a week ago—it was the Tuesday of last week—I found on one of the window-sills a number of absurd little dancing figures, like these upon the paper. They were scrawled with chalk. I thought that it was the stable-boy who had drawn them, but the lad swore he knew nothing about ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... into a large, low-ceiled, home-like room, whose broad window sills were abloom with fresh-cut flowers. Lucile thought that only the sun was needed to make it the ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... to be on the look-out, you know, Master Austin. Magpies don't perch on folks' window-sills for nothing. You'll believe me a little ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... He had played and won. He had gone to sleep over a fashionable novel, very faithfully written, but wearisome in the extreme, and he had awakened late and somewhat heavy-headed. There were fringes of snow upon the window-sills and upon the house facing his little mansion. The roofs were hidden under a large white sheet and half lost in the grayish-white background ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... the combination of the sills, A, braces, C, and hooks or loops, i j, with the grooved posts, a c, of the panels, when the parts are constructed and arranged to form a detachable and portable fence, in the manner and ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... outhouse. John was black in the face; time and again in his wrath Gourlay swung him off the ground. Grocers coming to their doors, to scatter fresh yellow sawdust on the old, now trampled black and wet on the sills, stared sideways, chins up and mouths open, after the strange spectacle. But Gourlay splashed on amid the staring crowd, never looking to ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... when a slight fall of snow was feathering the sills and frames of the schoolroom windows, he stood at his black board, crayon in hand, about to commence with a class; when, reading in the countenances of those boys that there was something wrong, and that they seemed in alarm ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... bricks; a pathway of red bricks in the old herringbone pattern led up to the front door, with its shining brass knocker. A row of white foxgloves stood sentinel before the front of the house, on each side the entrance, their pointed spires coming well above the window-sills; before them the dark foliage of perennial lupins, tossing up a white spray of flowers, and then it seemed as if every old-fashioned flower of white, or with a white variety, ran riot down to a border of sweet alyssum. Above ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... in heavy, tangled swaths, The ripe June-grass is wanton blown; Snails slime the untrodden threshold-stone, Along the sills hang drowsy moths. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... [Hammond] wished to taunt the people of this country by calling them 'the mudsills of society,' he paid them ignorantly a true praise; for good men are as the green plain of the earth is, as the rocks and the beds of the rivers are, the foundation and flooring and sills of the State."—R. W. EMERSON, Atlantic Monthly, January, 1892, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... pass the windows beneath the sills she crept, heedless of her prisoner, to the rear door. That avenue to the near clustering woods was closed, too; she saw the glitter of ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... it never was before. Every seat was crowded. The aisles were full of men who stood patiently for more than three hours; the window-sills had their occupants, every foot of standing room was taken, and in the rear of the galleries men seemed to hang in swarms like bees. Such was the view from the stage. The stage itself and the boxes were filled with ladies, giving the speaker ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... for me, Polly did not forget the wild birds outside, which flew about in the big evergreen trees near the garden gate. She showed her thoughtfulness for the little creatures by strewing bread crumbs for them on the window sills on snowy days. She often gathered up the tablecloth after the housemaid had removed the breakfast dishes and, running out under the trees, would shake it vigorously that her wild pets might get all the little pieces of food that fell. Not ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... often a shed for the cow, that is off on her daily climb over the neighboring hills. Through the black pall of shale, a few vegetables struggle feebly to the light; in the corners of the palings, are hollyhocks and four-o'clocks; and, on window-sills, rows of battered tin cans, resplendent in blue and yellow labels, are the homes of verbenas and geraniums, in sickly bloom. Now and then, a back door in the dreary block is distinguished by an arbored trellis bearing a grape-vine, and furnishing for the ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... sturdy oak, the king of the forests. I am stout. They make beams, spars, sills, fulcrums and what not from me that require strength. I grow fairly fast. I came into usefulness as the world came into need ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... shall find the blackened roofless walls of what was most probably an unfortunate planter's once happy home, where the midnight brigand came and found peace and comfort, and all the elegancies of life, and left—blood and ashes; with the wild flowers growing on the window sills, and the prickly pear on the tops of the walls, while marble steps, and old shutters, and window hinges, and pieces of china, are strewn all about; the only tenant now being most likely an old miserable negro who has sheltered himself in a coarsely ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Dorothy sat in state, or the saloon where the latter received her servants. There are still cloisters attached to the house, at the other side of it maybe. Yes, a sleepy country house, the warm earth and her shrubs creeping close up to the very sills of the lower windows, sending in morning fragrance, I doubt not, when Dorothy thrust back the lattice after breakfast. A quiet place,—"slow" is the accurate modern epithet for it—"awfully slow;" but to Dorothy a quite suitable home, at which she ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... was. I gazed speechless. It made me think of the inside of a peasant's cottage as sometimes prettily portrayed upon the stage. It was very simple, almost bare, and yet there was a charm. At the windows hung yellowish, unbleached cotton. On the sills were red geraniums in bloom. A big clump of southern pine filled an old copper basin on a low tavern table. A queer sort of earthen lamp cast a soft light over all. In the dining-room I caught a glimpse of three sturdy little high chairs ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... the distance, her dress bedraggled with slops, a tub of water on the pavement close by, and a long-handled mop in her hand, with which she seemed to be vigorously engaged in scrubbing the green slime and tufts of moss off the window-sills; but catching a sight of the strangers, down would go the mop, and then the usual hasty attempt would be made at fixing her hair and otherwise increasing her personal charms. As I drew near, this useful member of society would naturally take a sidelong ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... good house in a street too narrow for carriages. Visitors must come in sedan chairs and there must be some place, aside from the street, where the chairs and chairmen could wait for the guests. This old fashioned house had sitting-rooms on the ground floor, and on the sills of the windows were flower-pots, in which, on this occasion, some asters and other autumn flowers ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... Every chink and crack had been stopped against the searing wind; and the atmosphere was a brew of all the sour odours, the offensive breaths, given off by the two-score odd people crushed within its walls. In spite of precautions the dust had got in: it lay thick on sills, desks and papers, gritted between the teeth, made the throat raspy ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... door to the outside stairway at the back was locked and the key was missing. In addition to the regular lock a stout bolt was in place. The catches on all the windows were properly locked, and all the shades remained drawn down close to the sills. It was an empty, locked apartment, with no outstanding evidence of having been ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... In one parting we found a parcel of old manuscript sermons, the existence of which was a mystery, until Kate remembered there had been a gifted son of the house who entered the ministry and soon died. The windows had each a pane of stained glass, and on the wide sills we used to put our immense bouquets of field-flowers. There was one place which I liked and sat in more than any other. The chimney filled nearly the whole side of the room, all but this little ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... babiche to soak for mending his snowshoes. He ran the net he had set at the edge of the eddy for late silvers and took out two fish. Old Tom had pretty well cleaned up the mice in the cellar hole, but they were still burrowing around the sills of the lean-to. Ed took a shovel and opened up a hole so Tom could get under the lean-to floor. He got out his needles, palm, thread, and wax; ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... surrounded by garlands, of Francois I. (whose long nose betrays him) and the stout, square face of Henry VIII. Both are bearded. The note of historical suggestion is struck at once. It continues still more unmistakably on the series of panels immediately beneath the window-sills of the wing on the left hand as you enter. On these is represented that useless pageant of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, by which Francois (who posed as the protector of art and the Renaissance in France, though he did singularly little for either) tried to obscure the defeat he ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... at hand. When she awoke one morning, she found the window-sills filled with potted geraniums, her favorite flowers, and a beautiful canary bird hanging above them in a pretty golden cage. The bird exactly resembled the one which she had had at home. She thanked her father in the tenderest ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... place, which stood nearly opposite to the churchyard, Bathsheba heard singing inside the church, and she knew that the singers were practising. She crossed the road, opened the gate, and entered the graveyard, the high sills of the church windows effectually screening her from the eyes of those gathered within. Her stealthy walk was to the nook wherein Troy had worked at planting flowers upon Fanny Robin's grave, and she came to ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... explained to the uninitiated, is about eight feet long—a single fire-proof bar, on which are short cross-pieces. At one end is a curiously curving serrated hook, which is used for grappling on the sills of windows or ledges above. It is the most useful weapon for the city fire-fighter, enabling him to climb diagonally across the face of a threatened structure, or even to swing horizontally from one window to a far one, where ladders ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... been up since five o'clock in the morning. For two weeks he had started off every morning at that hour with his landlord for the timberlands above the town, where they spent the day hewing out the sills and beams for a new boat-house. Unskilled at such labor, his duties were not those of the practised workman, but rather those of the "handy man" upon whom falls the most arduous tasks as a rule. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... any pleasant day, finds himself near Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage he will be in the midst of a very pretty scene. Perhaps as he reads these words and asks the question where that romantic cot may be found, he is comfortably seated in it, with his feet placidly reposing upon its window-sills. It is, indeed, in a new form. It no longer looks as it did to the early citizen of fifty years ago, driving out before breakfast upon the Bloomingdale Road, and surveying the calm river from the seclusion of Stryker's ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... ornamented iron handrails, for the security of the passenger. But the colours, originally so bright, with which the cottage had been decorated, had now faded; symptoms of rapid decay were evident in the window-sills, the door-jambs, and other wooden parts of the tenement and many of the white and blue tiles had fallen down and had not been replaced. That much care had once been bestowed upon this little tenement, was as evident as that latterly it ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... first, smashed the padlock with a shovel, and rushed into the Gray's stall. Carl seized a horse-bucket, and began sousing the window-sills of the harness-room, ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... water-clock impels the autumn rains. A lull for few nights reigned, but the wind has again risen in strength. By the lantern I weep, as if I sat with some one who must go. The small courtyard, full of bleak mist, is now become quite desolate. With quick drip drops the rain on the distant bamboos and vacant sills. What time, I wonder, will the wind and rain their howl and patter cease? The tears already I have shed have soakd ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... and four of the aftermost guns of the main-deck to be thrown overboard, together with the remainder of those on the quarter-deck; and the ship still continuing to open very much, he ordered tarred canvas and hides to be nailed fore and aft from under the sills of the ports on the main-deck under the fifth plank above, or within the water-ways, and the crew, without orders did the same on the lower deck. Her increasing complaints requiring still more to be done, the admiral directed all the guns on the upper deck, the shot, both on that and ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... Deacon inquired of the village folk Where he could find the strongest oak, That couldn't be split nor bent nor broke,— That was for spokes and floor and sills; He sent for lancewood to make the thills; The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees, The panels of whitewood, that cuts like cheese, But lasts like iron for things like these; The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum,"— Last of its timber,—they ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... to come; days in which windows stood open, and pots of plants were set out on the window-sills; days alternating as in the long, New England spring they always do, with bleak intervals of sharp winds and cold sea-storms; yet giving sweet anticipation tenderly, as a mother gives beforehand that which she cannot find in her heart to keep back till the birthday. That is the charm ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... about the city, one is impressed by the manifest love of flowers exhibited in the front yards of the dwelling-houses, and in the pleasant gardens attached to suburban villas, as well as by the blooming plants displayed on the window-sills of the homes of all classes. The admirably chosen spot for a cemetery, on the rising ground behind the city, is also finely ornamented with choice trees and flowering shrubs, among which are pines, cypresses, Australian gum trees (evergreen), mimosas, and many other blooming ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... curtains across them: through windows and shutters, the curtains waved in the penetrating blasts. The sturdy old house did not shake, for nothing under an earthquake could have made it tremble. The snow was fast gathering in sloped heaps on the window-sills, on the frames, on every smallest ledge where it could lie. In the midst of the blackness and the roaring wind, the house was being covered with spots of silent whiteness, resting on every projection, every roughness ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... its confinement between the high houses of the passage along which we have to make our way. Over-head, an inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies and chimney flues, pushed out on brackets to save room, and arched windows with projecting sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves here and there where a fig-tree branch escapes over a lower wall from some inner cortile, leading the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky high over all. On each side, a row of shops, as densely set as may be, occupying, in fact, intervals between ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... in the neighborhood, and this room the only shelter for miles around. Even Pawson's law books were completely hidden by the overflow and so were the tables, chairs, and shelves, together with the two wide window-sills. ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... hours, I cannot well describe. After I had returned to my own apartments I sat in my study without desire for sleep, staring with burning eyes at the silk curtains fluttering in the June night wind, until they seemed to be ghosts dancing on my window sills, and my straining ears listened to the hourly booming of the clock on the Fidelity Tower, until it sounded like the cruel voice of Time itself. Long after the rosy dawn I got up, drank some water, lit a strong ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... Moen-kopi, already referred to in the description of that village, is introduced for the purpose of comparing the methods adopted by the natives and by the whites in the treatment of the same class of material. Perhaps the most noteworthy contrast is seen in the sills and lintels of ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... obvious inference is that there was once a window also on the west in this same stage at the same level. The window immediately below the upper division of the tower is of the same date and character exactly as the one on the west in the like place; and it should be noticed that the sills of the upper windows run on as string-courses, which are continued round the circular angle-shafts ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... the sills belong to this class. And in Assyria where doorways were several yards deep and two or three wide, these sills were in reality the pavements of passages ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... had never yet been called upon to fulfil its original purpose, Steve came to a halt. The melting snow lay heavy upon the sloping thatch of the roof, which was battened secure by heavy logs. It was banked against the door. It was laden upon the sills of the one long window. Steve kicked it clear of the door and took down the fastenings which secured it. He passed within, with ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... by day. This was the first time he had come to it by night. In daylight it was a small and picturesque ruin washed by the laughing sea, lonely but scarcely sad. Leaping from its dark and crumbling walls the fisher-boys often plunged into the depths below; or they lay upon the broad sills of the gaping window-spaces to dry themselves in the sun. Men came with rods and lines to fish from its deserted apartments, through which, when rough weather was at hand, the screaming sea-birds flew. The waves played frivolously enough ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... announcement that its session has begun. The perky clerks and smirking pettifoggers move apart on tiptoe, those to their respective stations, these to their privileged seats facing the high dais. The lounging police slip down from their reclining attitudes on the heel-scraped and whittled window-sills. The hum of voices among the forlorn humanity that half fills the gradually rising, greasy benches behind, allotted to witnesses and prisoners' friends, is hushed. In a little square, railed space, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... and trampled snow of the street; the pavement was a sheet of ice, and the water from the engines had frozen, like streams of tears, down the face of the house, and hung in icy tags from the window-sills and copings. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... D'Orsay, for the most approved Essay on Cultivating a Flower Pot, and the Expediency of growing Mignionette in preference to Sweet Pea on the Window-sills— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... mind. "We select granite," he says, "for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the postoffice. You may depend upon it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the telephone rang, and some incoherent person mumbled an address out in the furthest suburb. It was North Baxter Court. You never saw that—a row of yellow houses with the door-sills level to the mud and ashes of the alley, and swarms of children who stare and whisper, "Here's the 'Father.'" Number 7 1/2 was marked with a membraneous croup sign—the usual lie to avoid strict quarantine and still get anti-toxin at the free dispensary; the room ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... a row of beehives. The room itself had an air of comfort, and that sort of elegance which indicates the presiding genius of feminine taste. There were shelves suspended to the wall by blue ribbons, and filled with small books neatly bound; there were flower-pots in all the window-sills; there was a small cottage piano; the walls were graced partly with engraved portraits of county magnates and prize oxen; partly with samplers in worsted-work, comprising verses of moral character ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and intolerant soul a single passion had budded and expanded into fulfillment. Stern to all mortal things, to flowers alone she softened and grew gentle. From the front steps to the back, the kitchen was filled with them. Boxes, upturned flour barrels, corners of china-shelves and window-sills, showed bowers of luxuriant leaf and blossom. Her calla lilies had long been famous in the county; they had taken first prizes at innumerable fairs, and whenever there was a wedding or a funeral in the neighbourhood, the tall green stalks were clipped bare of bloom. Many were the dead hands that ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... was early morning. Servant-maids, kneeling on the steps or standing on the window-sills, were going on with the Saturday scrubbing. Notwithstanding the keen air, they made a display of robust arms bare to the shoulder, tanned and sunburned, red with that astonishing vermilion that we see in some of Rubens' ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... had long since disappeared—and up the straight, sandy lane to the open space where a dwelling-house had once stood. But the house had fallen a victim to the fortunes of war, and nothing remained of it except the brick pillars upon which the sills had rested. We alighted, and walked about the place for a while; but on Annie's complaining of weariness I led the way back to the yard, where a pine log, lying under a spreading elm, formed a shady though somewhat hard seat. One end of the log was already occupied by a venerable-looking ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... 1851 took out letters patent for the manufacture of a number of articles from the Rowley ragstone. Furnaces were erected at Messrs. Chance Brothers, and the experiment thoroughly carried out, a number of columns, window-sills, doorways, steps, and other architectural pieces being the result. The process, however, was too expensive, and had to be given up. A number of the articles were used in the erection of Edgbaston Vestry Hall, where the curious may inspect them ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... but the crew of the castle stayed safely at home and listened to the tempest cosily, while the flowers bloomed on, and the gulls brought all their relations and colonized the balcony and window sills, fed daily by the fair hand of ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... more homelikeness in the sparrows' nests, or even the toylike railroad station at the end of the main street, for that was warmed by steam, and the station-master's wife, thriftily taking advantage of the steady heat, brought her house-plants there and kept them all winter on the broad window-sills. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Genoa. Strawberries at Genoa. Scaffold poles for the upper parts of a wall, as for the third story, rest on the window sills of the story below. Slate is used here for paving, for steps, for stairs (the rise as well as tread), and for fixed Venetian blinds. At the Palazzo Marcello Durazzo, benches with straight legs, and bottoms of cane. At the Palazzo del Prencipe Lomellino, at ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... blocks, damaged by time, have a certain air of Louis-the-Fourteenth grandeur; the courses of the facade define the storeys; panels of red brick recall the appearance of the stables at Versailles; the windows have masks carved as ornaments in the centre of their arches and below their sills. The door, of small panels in the upper half and plain below, through which, when open, the garden can be seen, is of that honest, unassuming style which was often employed in former days for the porter's lodges ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... workshop, laboratory and conservatory. Four flower-pots in which as many geraniums existed with difficulty, despite Droom's constant and unswerving care, occupied a conspicuous place on the window-sills overlooking the street. He watched aver them with all the tender solicitude of a lover, surprising as it may appear when one pauses to consider the vicious ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... Katherine Docks communicate with the river by means of an entrance tide-lock, 180 feet long and 45 feet wide, with three pairs of gates, admitting either one very large or two small vessels at a time. The lock-entrance and the sills under the two middle lock-gates were fixed at the depth of ten feet under the level of low water of ordinary spring tides. The formation of these dock-entrances was a work of much difficulty, demanding ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... village, and the gray or whitewashed houses with their red door-sills are the kind of houses, where you would say, rushing through in a motor, "Nothing can possibly happen." Yet Carlyle happened; and he was an event for the whole world, which now makes pilgrimages to his birthplace. And I think that when his memory ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... its power. They stood, as wrestlers stand before the moment for their meeting has arrived. The house, always too large for their needs, seemed now to stretch into an infinity of echoing passages and empty rooms; the many windows gathered the dust thick upon their sills. The old grandfather stayed in his chair by the fire—only at night he was wheeled out into his dreary bedroom by the cook who, now, washed and tidied him with a vigour that called forth shrill screams and oaths from her victim. He hated this woman with ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... Galligan case, which occurred some three or four years after my marriage. Aloysius Galligan was a brakeman, and his legs had become paralyzed as the result of an accident that was the result of defective sills on a freight car. He had sued, and been awarded damages of $15,000. To the amazement and indignation of Miller Gorse, the Supreme Court, to which the Railroad had appealed, affirmed the decision. It wasn't the single payment of $15,000 that the Railroad cared about, of course; a precedent ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... homeward passed through the shrubberies of Hintock House—still deserted, and still blankly confronting with its sightless shuttered windows the surrounding foliage and slopes. Grace was tired, and they approached the wall, and sat together on one of the stone sills—still warm with the sun that had been pouring its rays ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... descended still farther, and kept down until they came upon a road. This they followed until about midnight they came upon a small village. They found, as they had hoped, bread and other provisions upon several of the window-sills, and thankfully stowing these away again struck off ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... for the Union and for those who had just perpetrated such an outrage upon the rights of a free people. There was only one other passenger in the car besides myself when this young man entered. He evidently expected to find nothing but sympathy when he got away from the "mud sills" engaged in compelling a "free people" to pull down a flag they adored. He turned to me saying: "Things have come to a —— pretty pass when a free people can't choose their own flag. Where I came from if a man dares to say a word in favor of the Union we hang him ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... tramp of feet fell on his ears and a company of Foot marched down into the moonlight patch facing him and grounded arms with a clatter. They were men of his own regiment, and they formed up in the moonlight like a company of ghosts. One or two shots were fired at them, low down, from the sills of a line of doorways to his right; but no citizen showed himself and no one appeared to be hit. And ever from the direction of the Trinidad came the low roar of combat and the high ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... fill the air, and through the fog you perceive a fine melee of figures, some half dressed, some statuesquely nude, towelling themselves or preparing to wash, or shaving at bits of mirror propped on the window-sills. Pink bodies wallow voluptuously in the deep porcelain-ware tubs, which are of the shape and superb dimensions of Egyptian sarcophagi. Sometimes a patient with a wounded arm, unable to help himself, is being soaped ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... construction began to supersede stone for town houses, as it permitted of encroaching upon the street by projecting the upper stories. Many of the half-timbered houses of the fifteenth century were of elaborate design. The heavy oaken uprights were carved with slender colonnettes; the horizontal sills, bracketed out over the street, were richly moulded; picturesque dormers broke the sky-line, and the masonry filling between the beams was frequently faced ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... is once settled, the Lycosa becomes eminently domesticated. I have been living in close communion with her for the last three years. I have installed her in large earthen pans on the window-sills of my study and I have her daily under my eyes. Well, it is very rarely that I happen on her outside, a few inches from her hole, back to which she bolts ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... upright shafts along the walls, in the likeness of the trees which sprang out of the rocks above his head. He raised those walls into great cliffs. He pierced them with the arches of the triforium, as with hermits' cells. He represented in the horizontal sills of his windows, and in his horizontal string-courses, the horizontal strata of the rocks. He opened the windows into high and lofty glades, broken, as in the forest, by the tracery of stems and boughs, through which ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... saucepans, resting on the bars, exhaled various appetizing odors. In the centre, the long, massive table of solid beech was already spread with its coarse linen cloth, and the service was laid. White muslin curtains fell in front of the large windows, on the sills of which potted chrysanthemums spread their white, brown, and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and sighed deeply. The room was brimful and spilling over: trash, tin cans, and bottles overflowed the window- sills; a crippled rocking-chair, with a faded quilt over it, stood before the stove, in the open oven of which Chris's shoe was drying; an old sewing-machine stood in the middle of the floor, with Miss Hazy's ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... impression of a new day emerging, luminous and smiling, from the dense mists of the night. From a distance he descried his brother's house, already awake, the open blinds and the flowers on the window-sills. He wandered about some time before he could summon ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... opening from three sides upon the veranda so that the room itself was just like out-of-doors. One end of the veranda was enclosed in glass and used as a dining-room. Flowers in boxes were on the sills of the windows and over them the sun streamed through chintz-curtained windows. Upstairs were two rooms over the living-rooms, and opening from these were screened sleeping porches, with rows of little cots. Peggy explained that the rooms were ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... shirt factory where Marylin worked, to the long, lean house in the long, lean street where she roomed, smelled of unfastidious bedclothes airing on window sills; of garbage cans that repulsed even high-legged cats; of petty tradesmen who, mysteriously enough, with aerial clotheslines flapping their perpetually washings, worked and sweated and even slept in the same sour garments. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... vines crept in about the window-sills and over the imprisoning panes, as if to taunt the victims who were caught ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... above. Everything about it suggested straitened means, and yet the girls noticed that the small windows were clean and hung with fresh dimity curtains, and that there were little flower boxes on the sills inside. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... woodsman. "Well, you jest set them 'ere traps in three o' them holes, well under the sills an' out o' the way. Don't go fer to bait'em, mind, or Mr. Weasel'll git to suspicionin' somethin', right off. Jest sprinkle bits of straw, an' hayseed, an' sech rubbish over 'em, so it all looks no ways out o' the ordinary. ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... compelled to proceed slowly, I had ample opportunity to note the traces of the awful tragedy. Every house where a Huguenot had lived was wrecked; in many instances the window-sills were smeared with blood, and dead bodies still lay thick in the streets. I shut my eyes tightly, while my whole body was convulsed by ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... the night. They thought there was an unusual hush in the manner of those they met. Men talked on the corners or in groups in the roadway with unaccustomed earnestness. Women leaned across window sills and chatted across intervening spaces with an air of anxiety; the very dogs in the street appeared to be subdued. At the trader's there was not the usual small gathering of loungers, squatted sociably around ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... you cutthroat! Where's Miss Landcraft? If the lightest hair of her head has suffered, by God! I'll burn this house to the sills!" ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... looked. So far they were certainly within their rights. But they did not look modestly, they did not look discreetly. They looked out of wide-open windows, they even sat perilously and protrudingly on the window sills conversing across the facade from window to window, attracting attention, and once to Mrs. Pembrose's certain knowledge a man in the street joined in. It was on a Sunday morning, too, a Bloomsbury ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... propped on her hands at one of the broad sills stirred uneasily in her chair and glanced sideways at her roommate who was seated before the other window. Lucine had stopped reading aloud and was regarding the door with an irritable frown ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... angle was the small white painted iron bed, covered with a white counterpane. The walls were hung with a white paper figured with knots of pale green leaves, very gay and bright. There was a straw matting on the floor. White muslin half-curtains hung in the windows, upon the sills of which certain plants bearing pink waxen flowers of which Presley did not know the name, grew in oblong green boxes. The walls were unadorned, save by two pictures, one a reproduction of the "Reading from Homer," the other a charcoal ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the front of the station, which gave directly upon the bay; a little well-kept lawn opened to right and left, and six or eight gaily-painted old rowboats were set about, half filled with loam in which fuchsias, geraniums, and mignonettes were flowering. A cat or two dozed upon the window-sills in the sun. Upon a sort of porch overhead, two of the crew paced up and down in a manner that at once suggested the poop. Here and there was a gleam of highly polished red copper or brass trimmings. The bay was within two steps of the front door, while a little further down the beach ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... a night when the flowing roar of the gale outside filled the lamplit silence; when the snow was drifting level with the window sills; when Adoniram, unable to prowl abroad, lay curled up tight and sound asleep beside her where she sat on the carpet in the stove radiance. Wearied of drawing castles and swans, she had been listening to her father reading passages aloud from the book on his knees to her mother ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... ordinarily used is of heart sugar pine, one and a half to two inches thick, and 12 to 18 inches wide. Where the boards join, pine battens three inches wide by one and a half thick cover the seam. Sills, posts, and caps support and strengthen the flume every four feet. The posts are mortised into the caps and sills. The sills extend about 20 inches beyond the posts, and to them side braces are nailed to strengthen the structure. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... and I was sent. When I arrived and reported myself to Mr Braidwood, the two top floors were burnt out, and the fire was nearly got under. There were three engines, and the men were up on the window-sills of the second-floor with the branches, playin' on the last of the flames, while the men of the salvage-corps were getting the furniture out of the first floor. Conductor Brown was there with his escape, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... immortality. The Colonies, in the mean time, had been fighting Nature and the wild men of the forest, getting a kind of education as they went along. Out of their religious freedom, such as it was, they were rough-hewing the ground-sills of a free state: for religion and politics always play into each other's hands, and the constitution is the child of the catechism. Harvard College was dedicated to "Christ and the Church," but already, in 1742, the question was discussed at Commencement, "Whether it be lawful to resist the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Lancilly, had much to do in beautifying the old place. Dark rooms were well lit up by a white paper with a broad border of red and yellow twisted ribbons. Old stone chimneypieces, window-sills, great solid shutters, were covered ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... the town hall was crammed—men standing on all the window sills; and so many could not get in that Malcolm proposed they should occupy the square in front. A fisherman in garb and gesture, not the less a gentleman and a marquis, he stood on the steps of the town hall and spoke to his people. They ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... persons, however, cannot yet see how "public utilities" will be able to do all of our work. We may send the washing out, but we cannot send out the beds to be made, the eggs to be boiled, or the pictures, chairs, and window sills to be dusted. The table must be set at home, and the dishes washed there, until we approach the day of communal eating places, which, as we all know, will be difficult to utilize for infants and the aged, for invalids, and for the vast army of those who are averse to faring forth three times ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... a coign of vantage to which the mob did not climb. They climbed upon the roofs, the balconies, held themselves perilously upon the sloping verandas, they stood upon window-sills, and hung from electric light pillars, and tram-line standards. They shouted, and sang, and urged upon the slayers to mutilate as well ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... was thrown open, and the officer beckoned her to follow him. Back into the crowded court-room, where people pressed even into the window sills for standing room, where Judge and counsel sat gravely expectant; where the stillness of death had suddenly fallen. The officer conducted her to the bar, then drew back, and Mr. Dunbar came and stood at her side; resting his hand on the back ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... that Gypsy and I both liked best of anything. One is called the Marble Room, and the other the Fresco Room. The Marble Room is all made of marble,—walls, floor, window-sills, everything but the furniture. The marble is of different colors and patterns, and just as beautiful! The furniture ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... things as extra handkerchiefs and silk socks and fancy neckties and toilet-silver. We started with all five. It was boiling hot; the sun beat in at the windows of the transcontinental train and stifled us. Over the prairies, dust blew in great clouds, covering the window-sills with white. The Big Boy and the Middle Boy and the Little Boy referred scornfully to the flannels and sweaters on which I had been so insistent. The Head slept across the continent. The ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the colonel's room and tried there, but found it risky on account of the blinds, and that finally he entered the hall window,—what might be called neutral ground. The painters had been at work there, as you said, two days before, and the paint on the slats was not quite dry. The blinds and sills were the only things they had touched up on that front, it seems, and nothing on the sides. Now, on the fresh paint of the colonel's slats are the new imprints of masculine thumb and fingers, and on the sill of the hall window ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... young girls were left alone, they leaned two by two on the window-sills, chatting, craning out their heads, and talking from ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... rectory and vicarage. He was also a man of good social position and private means, and occupied a good house with large garden on the north side of West Street (then called Far Street), belonging to the late Mrs. Conington, within some 120 yards of the railway station, now occupied by Mr. Sills, and named "The Chestnuts." Mr. Goldie being curate at the time when Holy Trinity Church was built presented the carved oak chairs within the communion rails. After leaving Horncastle he was appointed to the vicarage of St. Ives, in ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... month passed and they were still working on the school-house. The simple plan had been drawn with but a few strokes of a pencil, the sills had been placed without delay, but they had to plane the boards by hand and that had taken time. Alf and I had again sat at the old General's table, had listened to his words so rounded out with kindliness, and upon ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... endlessly devising brain, Its braving spirit, its captain Sisera, Into the hands of another woman brought: In nets of her persuasion She that wild spirit caught, She fasten'd up that uncontrollable thought. Sisera spake, and the crops were flames; Sisera lookt, and blood ran down the door-sills. But weary, trusting his entertainment, He came to Jael, the Kenite woman; A woman who gave him death for a bed, And with base tools nailed down his murderous head Fast to the earth his rage had ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... windows had reached almost to the ground, so that the automobile with its great momentum had easily surmounted the sills and reached nearly the middle of the store. One wheel had been torn off, the windshield was shattered into fragments, and the front of the machine had been ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... some stun towers and some winders, and oh! how I do wish I could seen what them Old Cliffers looked out on when they rested their arms on the stun winder sills and looked down on ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... the bottom of the flight of giant steps that led to the first pair of swinging doors, your head was certainly lower than the feet of a being who examined you sternly from the other side of the glass. Your head was also far below the sills of the mighty windows of the ground-floor. There were two storeys above the ground-floor, and above them a projecting eave of carven stone that threatened the uplifted eye like a menace. The tenth part of a slate, the merest chip of a corner, falling from the lofty summit ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... hardly torn or otherwise defaced, for although the heavy dust of forty years lay on everything the room had been preserved from further harm. No spider web was to be seen, no trace of nibbling mice, not even a dead moth or fly on the sills of the diamond-paned windows; life seemed to have shunned ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... mail which enveloped the earth. When about dusk, an aged gentleman, in a cloak, with a sharp-pointed cane in his hand, might be observed moving along the gutter of a narrow street. Occasionally he would slip so as to come on one knee, and now he would steer himself along by taking hold of the sills of windows, and of the railings which here and there were erected in front of a few houses on the retired and deserted street on which ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... prospector's shack, long unoccupied save for occasional hunter or rancher, and the multitude of gophers that had burrowed under its rotting sills. The glass was gone from a single window looking out upon the road; the door had fallen from its hinges; the floor had been broken down in spots by the hoofs of wandering cattle. A match revealed a lantern hanging on the wall, and a few ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... open, the sister was still looking out. There was a glimpse of lofty houses, open windows, grapevines rich in purple clusters on the walls, and boxes of mignonette and gayer flowers upon the window-sills. Miss Foster asked Bessie if she would like to see what of the asylum was shown; and though Bessie's taste did not incline to painful studies, before she had the decision to refuse she found herself inside the gates and the sister was ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr |
