"Ramshackle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of this tinkering and cobbling could only be a ramshackle structure, built without any reference to the canons of political architecture. It was shaped neither by the Fourteen Points nor by the canons of the balance of power and territory. It was hardly more than an abortive attempt to make a synthesis of the two. Created by force, it could be perpetuated ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... kitchen, with its hard earth floor and the sunlight drifting in through the bamboo sides, was not unclean, and a savoury smell came from the stew-pot on the ramshackle stove. In one of the bars of sunlight a mango-coloured child of two years or so was playing with his toes—he was surprisingly clean and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... entirely on its summer visitors. At the time of the death of Mr Ira Nutcombe, the only all-the-year-round inhabitants were the butcher, the grocer, the chemist, the other customary fauna of villages, and Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who rented the ramshackle farm known locally as Flack's and eked out a precarious ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... modern landing-stage for huge liners, from which the feverish crowds of fashionable tourists or bewildered immigrants disembark, can compare in poetic and imaginative suggestiveness, with any ramshackle dock, east or west, where brigs and schooners and trawlers put in; and real sailors—sailors who sail their ships—enter the little smoky taverns or drift homeward down ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... a year 'twornt used, bein' so rough an' ready, but now there's such a crowd o' motors tearin, over Countisbury 'Ill, the carts takes it, keepin' more to theirselves like, an' savin' smashin'. Miss Tranter she knew what she was a-doin' of when she got a licence an' opened 'er bizniss. 'Twas a ramshackle old farm-'ouse, goin' all to pieces when she bought it an' put up 'er sign o' the 'Trusty Man,' an' silly wenches round 'ere do say as 'ow it's 'aunted, owin' to the man as 'ad it afore Miss Tranter, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... revolt; and the Dutch of South Africa would welcome their German liberators; and the great colonies, to which Britain had granted a degree of independence that no virile state would ever have permitted, would shake off the last shreds of subordination; and the ramshackle British Empire would fall to pieces; and Germany would emerge triumphant, free to pursue all her great schemes, and to create a lasting world-power, based upon Force and System and upon 'a healthy egoism,' not upon ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... days of the army, when its fighting force was scattered in small detachments all over the wide frontier, and men, and women, too, lived on soldier rations, eked out with game, and dwelt in tents or ramshackle, one-storied huts, "built by the labor of troops." At twelve she had been placed at school in the far East, while her father enjoyed a two years' tour on recruiting service, and there, under the care of a noble woman who taught her girls to ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... announced the tenancy of a maker of gymnastic appliances; and having kissed Madame Brandt's hand with awful solemnity and bowed deeply to me, he preceded us down the passage, out into the yard, and into a ramshackle studio at the end, where ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... feet without slipping away for good; and finally, the foot-warmers are miserable wrecks, hingeless, charred, broken away about the holes. It would be impossible to give an idea of the old, rotten, shaky, cranky, worm-eaten, halt, maimed, one-eyed, rickety, and ramshackle condition of the furniture without an exhaustive description, which would delay the progress of the story to an extent that impatient people would not pardon. The red tiles of the floor are full of depressions brought about ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... sits down, and sends other men out with them. Street organs, under our fatherly County Council, are forbidden on Sundays; nevertheless, Sunday being the only day when millions of people have any chance of recreation, many organs go out. Whither do they go? East, my dears. There, in any ramshackle hall, or fit-up arch-way, or disused stables, the boys and girls, out for fun, may dance the golden hours away throughout Sunday afternoon and evening. Often the organs are hired for Eastern weddings and christenings and other ceremonials, and, by setting the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... I was aware—that water was apparently dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to moisture all about you.... My ramshackle habitation had never been a very strong defence against the outside world. It seemed now to have definitely decided to abandon the struggle. The water streamed down the panes of my window opposite my bed. One patch of my ceiling (just above my only ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... duplicate key to apartment No. 12, citizen Rouget ordered his men to break in the door. It did not take very long: the house was old and ramshackle and the doors rickety. The next moment the party stood in the room which a while ago the Englishman had so accurately described to pere Lenegre in petite ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... scarred, disfigured valley, over the mullock-heaps, from every calico tent, from out of every shaft, from the edge of the dark forest itself, bearded men, toil-stained but smiling, bent on festivity, collect in Canvas Town's one ramshackle street. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... of her head and hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions. By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers. At college she had learned a trade without knowing it. The girls had found out that she was the designer of her own gowns. She had no idle moments after that, and wanted none; for the exercise of an extraordinary ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... At the small ramshackle hot-spring inns of the remote hills the guests are mostly country folk. Many of them carefully bring their own rice and miso, and are put up at a cost of about 10 sen a day. In the passage ways one finds rough ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... Peter Hunter a rigid disciplinarian. Hunter wrote Powell that as York had been convicted of "the most atrocious offence without any circumstances of doubt or alleviation" he was to be hanged. When York was made aware of his fate, he promptly escaped from the ramshackle gaol ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... of us, faint, but all too clear, came a horrible chorus of human cries of agony. Down there in a ramshackle section of the city the wretched houses had fallen in upon the sleeping families. Down there throughout the day a fire burned the great part of whose fuel it is too gruesome a thing ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... is ramshackle but it is still standin' out dere and is used as a shelter for sawmill hands dat is cuttin' down de big pines and sawin' ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... of the land if only more could be spent on it; they want a new barn and some outhouses, and some of the fencing is disgraceful. As for the Priory itself—it is the Priory farm, you know—it is an old ramshackle place and in sore need of repair; some of the floors are rotten, and there are holes and crannies, and the mice and rats hold high ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Switch meets the proprietor of the Diamond Palace Saloon, a ramshackle affair which to the owner ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... cottonwood planks. Cottonwood lumber is full of whims and caprices,—bending, twisting, cracking like brown paper, so as to be wholly unfit for ordinary carpentry; but there was no other material available. Six canoes were made to hang together somehow; and in these ramshackle structures, together with the two periogues, the party covered more than a thousand miles of the roughest water of the Missouri. Annoyance was to be expected. The boats were continually splitting, opening at the ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... lips, brought tears to Valerie's eyes. "Well, well.... I'm so glad I'm cleared in your eyes. I'd 've hated you to go through life thinking that I—was like that...." Suddenly he caught at her arm and pointed to the ramshackle bridge. "There's another instance of the rot we're out to stop. Another winter, and that bridge 'd be in the stream, damming it at the deepest and narrowest point. Result, the water's diverted and spreads all over the road, trying to find another way into ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... access, a condition which may have been regarded as a protection, but more likely it was due to laziness and want of care. However that may have been, the interior was surprisingly substantial, with an excellent floor like that in a ballroom. I slept in a detached ramshackle room used as a kitchen, comfortable because of being open ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... did not do it as a man of the world would have done it, and in putting her into the ramshackle carryall he knew that he had not the grace of the sort of man who does nothing else. But Miss Shirley seemed to have grace enough, of a feeble and broken sort, for both, and he resolved to supply his own lack with sincerity. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... disused store building. Coldriver had one, especially well located, and not so ramshackle as it might have been. It was big; its front was crossed by a broad porch; its show windows were not show windows at all, but were put there solely to give light. Coldriver did not know there was such a thing as ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... know that the Turkish army is under German officers. But—if war should happen, is it likely that this ramshackle nation which was fought to a standstill by the Balkan Alliance only a few months ago would be ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... of wall and foliage above, and another jumble of ruined cliff, hindered his survey of the ground ahead, and he almost stumbled upon a cabin, hidden on three sides, with a small, bare clearing in front. It was an old, ramshackle structure like others he had run across in the canons. Cautiously he approached and peeped around the corner. At first swift glance it had all the appearance of long disuse. But Jean had no time for another look. A clip-clop of trotting horses on hard ground ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... sigh of relief, when finally they were housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming to the town, and they were still more fretted when the puffing, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... their non-commissioned officers, perhaps half a dozen were trying to do something, but having no directing head or hand, accomplishing little. It looked as though nothing but the bursting asunder of that ramshackle building would liberate its human charge, for even those who, battered, bleeding, and suffocated, would gladly have escaped into outer air, were packed in, sardine-like, and incapable of self-extrication. ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... the slope, he started down the incline. He turned off part of the power, and was gliding along joyously, when from a cross-road he suddenly saw turn into the main highway a mule, drawing a ramshackle wagon, loaded with fence posts. Beside the animal walked an old ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-cycle • Victor Appleton
... alert, keen-eyed, cheerful, and happy. Under the log foot-bridge the shining creek ran down past the mountain village below, where the cupola of the court-house rose above the hot dirt streets, the ramshackle hotel, and the dingy stores and frame dwellings of the town. Across the bridge her eyes rested on another neat, well- built log cabin with a grass plot around it, and, running alongside and covered with honeysuckle—a pergola! That was her hospital down there—empty, ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... Into a ramshackle building on the corner of a vivaciously ugly street Lockwood led his friend in quest of the greatest artist. An old man in a skull cap, woolen shirt, baggy trousers and carpet slippers appeared in a darkened doorway. With his long white beard he stood bent and rheumatic ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... leader, "there is a long story connected with the old ramshackle mill. No use of my going into all the details. It's been abandoned a good many years now. People have tried to live there three times since old Munsey was found dead there, but they had to give ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... were compelled to cross had long been neglected, and was now thickly overgrown with weeds. Not until we turned the corner of the great ramshackle building, which in other and more prosperous days had been dedicated to the curing of the leaf, did we perceive any signs of the presence of our antagonists. They were standing upon the farther side, directly opposite the door, and both bowed slightly as we approached. The ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... was lost in the clamour, as every one, deserting breakfast, crowded about Lord Durwent, and half in jest demanded to know what the ramshackle empire had ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... neither legs nor arms, and was drawn through the streets in a small cart by four dogs. By looking at you he could see all the clockwork inside, as could a boy who was led about by his mother at the end of a string. Every Friday there was the market, when a dozen ramshackle carts containing vegetables and cheap crockery filled the centre of the square, resting in line on their shafts. A score of farmers' wives or daughters in old-world garments squatted against the town-house within walls of butter ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... gulch of the Lunar Appenines, a pattern of dazzling glare and harsh moonshadows. Ramshackle mine-buildings of prefabricated plastic straggled out from the shrouding blackness under a pinnacled ridge. Denver eyed the forbidding terrain with hair-raising panic. He checked the speed of the racing space ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... house for me, she is—Abbie wanted me to have him do the job, but I wa'n't very particular about it, so it never come to nothin'. He done two or three places, though, and I swan 'twas nice work! He painted Sam Cahoon's old ramshackle house and barn, and you'd hardly know it, 'twas so fixed up and fine, in the picture. White paint and green grass and everything just like real. He left out the places where the pickets was off the fence and the blinds hangin' ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... lighted down out of a ramshackle Marychurch station fly, and advanced towards the rather ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... and blue spectacles awfully shading their warlike eyes, and very big sticks clenched in their National grasp. Also the Malle Poste, with only a couple of passengers, tearing along at a real good dare-devil pace, and out of sight in no time. Steady old Cures come jolting past, now and then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty, clattering coaches as no Englishman would believe in; and bony women dawdle about in solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they feed, or digging and hoeing or doing field-work of a more laborious kind, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... of this gruesome picture this author deals, and then concludes with the following: "But in the rookeries which, like their inmates, skulk and hide out of sight in the crowded street; in these ramshackle structures which line the back alleys, and there breed their human vermin amid dirt and rags—in these there is no direct sunlight throughout the long year. Rookeries close to the front windows, shutting out light and air, and rookeries close to the ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... walked the dusty road, bearing his little bag, so he had walked it for years, sometimes within a few miles of home, and again at the extreme limit of the county edge. The clocks of the region were all his clients, some regarded with compassion ("ramshackle things" that needed perpetual tinkering) and others with a holy awe. "The only thing Nicholas Oldfield bows the knee before is a double-back-action clock a thousand years old," said Brad Freeman, the regardless. "That's how he reads Ancient of Days." ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... in the heart of a very poor district, and is rather a ramshackle place to look at, but still quite suitable to its purposes. I have observed that one of the characteristics of the Salvation Army is that it never spends unnecessary money upon buildings. If it can buy a good house or other suitable ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... I met when I were comin' back from de ash dump," Eradicate explained. One of the colored man's duties was to cart ashes away from Tom's various shops, and dump them in a certain swampy lot. With an old ramshackle cart, and his mule, Boomerang, Eradicate did this ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... year. Mary could decorate over thirty dozen cups and saucers in a day, at three halfpence the dozen. 'Doesn't she ever do anything else?' some visitor might curiously inquire, whom Titus Price was showing over his ramshackle manufactory. 'No, always the same thing,' Titus would answer, made proud for the moment of this phenomenon of stupendous monotony. 'I wonder how she can stand it—she has a refined face,' the visitor might remark; and Mary Beechinor was left alone again. ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... behavior. He had personally searched every foot of this particular building, and was confident that it afforded no hiding-place. The behavior of the dog, however, was susceptible of only one explanation; and Seton recognizing that the clue to the mystery lay somewhere within this ramshackle building, became seized with a conviction that he was ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Steel Company had now two huge Bessemer converters, in which a volcano of molten flame roared all day and night. It had bought up the whole western side of the town, and cleared away half a hundred ramshackle dwellings; and here were long rows of coke-ovens, and two huge rail-mills, and a plate-mill from which arose sounds like the crashing of the day of doom. Everywhere loomed rows of towering chimneys, and pillars of rolling ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... into hall, and exactly opposite very short flight of stairs leading directly to doorway of Isaac's den above. Ramshackle old place, low ceilings. Isaac, when sitting in his den, can look down, and, by means of a transom over the rear door of the shop, see the customers as they enter from the street, while he also keeps an eye on his assistant. Latter ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... convey in words. I do not mean that she has succeeded in building up a great flourishing plant with a big endowment and all sorts of improvements. Far from it. The home stands on a tiny lot, the building is ramshackle and not nearly large enough for its purpose, and sometimes it seems doubtful where the money to keep it going will come from. Nevertheless the home is a hundred times more successful than I could have believed a home for ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... "There's a roasting fire in my den. Of course you'll have something to eat—hot coffee, anyhow—I've trained my cook to make coffee like a Frenchwoman. The housekeeper will take charge of you, if you want to tidy up, and you must excuse our ramshackle ways, please. I don't believe there's ever been a lady in this house before, ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... and derelict. If this be incorrect, how could such swarms of artistic folk paint and actually lodge in Staithes? The steep road leading past the station drops down into the village, giving a glimpse of the beck crossed by its ramshackle wooden foot-bridge—the view one has been prepared for by guide-books and picture postcards. Lower down you enter the village street. Here the smell of fish comes out to greet you, and one would forgive the place this overflowing ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... more than his usual methodical action. He smelled buffalo steak, and he was hungry. The cabin had been built years ago, and was a ramshackle shelter at best. The stone fireplace, however, appeared well preserved. A bed of red coals glowed and ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... supplemental, that train—a string of the most ramshackle carriages the line could muster, and the carriage in which I found myself smelt as if it had been in Billingsgate for a month. However, I could sit down this time. There was neither honeymoon, commercial traveller, nor man in ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... mercy of one idea only, and he began to see, very soon after he had investigated the two houses—the ramshackle shop and the riverside den—that if he intended to progress he could not afford to sit in the street and drink in the cafe opposite Leh Shin's dwelling for an interminable space of weeks. He had limitless ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... piazza, and took these steps with her usual gentle precision of movement. She had no sooner taken up the position which she felt to be the proper one for her, than round the corner came the Bywood stage,—a long, lumbering, ramshackle vehicle, in which sat Mrs. Murray, a kind-looking nurse, and the twelve convalescent children who were to have the first delights of the ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... have hunted all over London for rooms suited to my income—L120 a year—and have at last found them. Two rooms, without modern conveniences, it is true, and in an old, ramshackle building, but within a stone's throw of P— Place and in an eminently respectable street. The rent is only L25 a year. I had begun to despair when at last I found them by chance. The chance was a mere chance, and unworthy ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... from tree to tree along the edge of the mere, in order to keep out of view of anyone moving on the road. Over against the ale-house I crept still more warily through the wood to the edge of the road. There was no one moving in or about the ramshackle little place, but there was one unexpected thing in sight which gave me pause. Hitched by the reins to a staple in the signpost was the finest horse I had ever set eyes on, a slender, sinewy stallion, champing on his bit and pawing ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... October, 1863, after an absence of three months duration, during which time I had been commissioned major to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Weber, I took passage at Washington on a ramshackle train over the Orange and Alexandria railroad to go to the front again. Storrs, whose wound had healed, joined me and we made ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... job is hard. This 'ere bit of bread is as hard as wood, but I am getting through with it, and that's what I mean to do about our escape. Where you can't take a fair bite at anything, why, you must nibble; and I must go on nibbling now to find some way of getting out of this here ramshackle place. If I can just contrive a hole so that I can climb on the roof whenever I like, and be able to cover it up again so that these beauties don't know, I don't feel a bit doubtful of being able to slide down to the eaves, and then hold tight and get my toes in here and ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... guardians of his own happiness told him to keep to his search, to journey on his way and forget he had seen the tracks. Every desire of Self spoke in warning to him. But Bill Bronson had a higher law than self. Long ago, in front of the ramshackle hotel in Bradleyburg, he had given a promise; and he had reaffirmed it in the gleam of the Northern Lights not many nights before. There was no one to hold him to his pledged word. There were none that need know; no one to whom he must answer ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... chieftainship apparently was that, unlike his brothers, he wore shoes and stockings; these three relatives constituted his allies and kinsmen; the so-called Spanish main was in reality an arm of the sea better known in the Hebrides as Loch Scrone; and the war-galley was an old, ramshackle, battered, and betarred boat belonging generally to the fishing-village of Erisaig; for, indeed, the boat was so old and so battered that nobody now seemed to claim any ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... was somewhere on this end of the Rue Marcadet, but she didn't know exactly where and street numbers were often lacking on those ramshackle buildings separated by vacant lots. She wouldn't have lived on this street for all the gold in the world. It was a wide street, but dirty, black with soot from factories, with holes in the pavement and ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... gradually approaching civilised territory; and about half an hour before sunset they marched into a small village, composed chiefly of adobe huts, where a halt was called for the night, and where our friends were confined in a ramshackle barn of a place in company with the sergeant and ten men. That the sergeant was quite determined not to get into trouble by the neglect of any possible precaution soon became perfectly evident; for when, about half an hour after the arrival of the party at ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... was a ramshackle farmhouse apparently deserted. Up the side of the dilapidated building ran a great wide stone chimney that reared its head through the gabled roof like a leaning Tower of Pisa. To this chimney led the wires from ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... his middle name. He has lived more stories than I could invent. Shortly before our arrival at Jolo Jennings had learned from a native in his pay that a son of the Flowery Kingdom, the proprietor of a notorious gambling resort situated on the quarter-mile-long ramshackle wharf known as the Chinese pier, was driving a roaring trade in the forbidden drug. So one afternoon Jennings, his hands in his pockets and in each pocket a service automatic, sauntered carelessly along the pier and upon reaching the reputed opium den, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... in a box that had just been left at the kitchen door. Phil ran to the window and caught a glimpse of a man closing the gate. It was Fred Holton, in a long ulster with the collar turned up about his ears. He untied his horse, attached to a ramshackle buggy, and drove off. Phil recognized him instantly, but ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... picked up bargains. Charles Hutt, had he lived, would have become one of the leading booksellers of the day. He was for some years at Hodgson's, and possessed a remarkable taste for, and knowledge of, books. He left Hodgson's and started on his own account in the old ramshackle house already referred to. This shop presented so unfavourable an exterior that even the Income-tax Fiend never 'called in,' although at one time there were several thousands of pounds' worth of books ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... in her little castle, or rather the Liberty Realty Company's little castle. She wanted to be alone. It was very quiet. Outside the birds could be heard twittering in the vine on the ramshackle little porch. The kettle sang cheerily in the kitchen. There was that musty indoor odor of the country homestead, the odor which soldier boys remembered and longed for in trenches and dugouts. And mingling with this was the fragrance of flowers coming in through ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... souls who have lost their way in life, and, after vain resistance to molding circumstances, after the thwarting of ambitions, the quenching of ideals, admit defeat, and await, with something of feverish anticipation, the end. He had left Cartagena early that morning on the ramshackle little train which, after hours of jolting over an undulating roadbed, set him down in Calamar, exhausted with the heat and dust-begrimed. He had not seen the Bishop nor Wenceslas since the interview of the preceding day. Before his departure, however, he had made provision for the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... he went and down another, until at last he came to a great, black, ancient ramshackle house; and that was where he lived. In he walked without so much as a rap at the door, and so led the way to a great room with furnaces and books and bottles and jars and dust and cobwebs, and three grinning skulls upon the mantelpiece, ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... wandered, extending her range. Sometimes with a strange fear. But it was a fear of the elements rather than of man. One day she went along the high-road with her letters, towards the village of Casa Latina. The high-road was depressing, wherever there were houses. For the houses had that sordid, ramshackle, slummy look almost invariable on an Italian high-road. They were patched with a hideous, greenish mould-colour, blotched, as if with leprosy. It frightened her, till Pancrazio told her it was only the copper sulphate ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... is strange to me, even now when the story has grown old in my memory, to recall all that happened before the hands of that clock pointed again to twelve. And last year when I revisited the neighborhood and found a neat new house standing on the site of the ramshackle inn, I could not pass by without a queer feeling in my throat; for it was there that the results of the duchess' indiscretion finally worked themselves out to their unexpected, fatal, and momentous ending. Seldom, as I should suppose, has such a mixed skein of good ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... view to economy, being scarcely more than half the height of the original: the vacant space has been very roughly filled up, and the numerous holes and crevices support a fine growth of weeds, and a strong young tree has also taken root in the ramshackle stone work. From the central tower, gargoyles grin above the elaborately carved buttresses and finials in remarkable contrast to the ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... queer about that? She used to live in New York City, and knew all the best families for miles around. When we first moved here, next to that ramshackle old place, I remember her telling me she'd known the people who used ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... Berton, the proprietor, and finding that a train left in half an hour, threw her belongings into her box and a few minutes later was in a ramshackle cab clattering stationwards. She left a note for Theo, but she was sincerely glad that time was too short for her to make any attempt to see either him or Joyselle. They had faded into the background of her mind, and in the foreground stood, piteous ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... on the summit of one of the above-mentioned hills, a fine bird's eye view is obtained of the city below. The ramshackle houses are all built in irregular blocks or clusters, but present on either side a regular frontage to the broad river, and following its sweeping curve, form two imposing crescent, divided by a fine water-way. Behind these main crescents are various other blocks and clusters of buildings, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... tattered and discoloured, and so greasy that one might imagine that generations of squalid lodgers had made their meals off it. The furniture consisted of a small table, now covered with a perpetual litter of papers; a ramshackle wash-hand stand, on which a broken vegetable dish served as a receptacle for soap and such objects; a bed, which bred remarkable crops of fleas, and to which clung an old patchwork quilt, but which was otherwise poor in adornment; a chair, and an old travelling-box. ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... end of it was that before we parted on the quay at Brest I found myself under half a promise, and a week later, having (as I put it to myself) nothing better to do, I took the train to a little wind-swept terminus, whence a ramshackle cart jolted me to Port Lezan, on the coast, whence again by sail and oar a ferry-boat conveyed me ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was moved almost beyond control by this speech. To have a ramshackle young woman from Hampstead patting her on the back as it were, in breezy certitude that quite soon she would improve, stirred her more deeply than anything had stirred her since her first discovery that Mr. Fisher was not what he seemed. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... precipice, on the edge of a volcano; in the lion's den, on slippery ground, under fire; not out of the wood. unwarned, unadmonished, unadvised, unprepared &c 674; off one's guard &c (inexpectant) 508 [Obs.]. tottering; unstable, unsteady; shaky, top-heavy, tumbledown, ramshackle, crumbling, waterlogged; helpless, guideless^; in a bad way; reduced to the last extremity, at the last extremity; trembling in the balance; nodding to its fall &c (destruction) 162. threatening &c 909; ominous, illomened; alarming &c (fear) 860; explosive. adventurous &c (rash) 863, (bold) 861. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... thing was not brought by the flivver, and that was the suction dredge, a horrible monster, a kind of jumble of house and machinery which came on a big six-ton truck and was launched into the lake. Its whole ramshackle bulk shook and shivered when it was in operation sucking the bottom of the lake up through a big pipe and shooting it through another long pipe which terminated on the land. Thus sand and gravel were secured ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... can show you something better than that," he cried, as he hirpled out (for so Malise described it afterwards) and presently returned dragging a great iron pot with a strength which seemed incredible in so ramshackle a body. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... small hien city in the interior—and it must be remembered that a hien circuit or district corresponds to an old marquisate or feudal principality of the vassal unit type—is often a poor, dusty, dirty, depressing, ramshackle agglomeration of villages or hamlets, surrounded by a disproportionately pretentious wall, the cubic contents of which wall alone would more than suffice to build in superior style the whole mud city within; for half the area of the interior is apt to be waste land or stagnant ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... silent a moment. Perhaps the thought of that desperate convict stealing forth amid the wind and rain still gripped them; but it began to dawn upon them also that they had been trespassing and that they had taken great liberties with this ramshackle boat. ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest steam-roller ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... precarious living fishing and hunting, and lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on Hill Street. It was really an old barn of a place—poor and ramshackle even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still standing. The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time. Old drunken Ben Blankenship never ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... long on the road this day, when I saw coming towards me an equipage more picturesquely interesting than any I had ever met in the Champs-Elysees. It was a ramshackle little cart laden with sacks and a couple of children, and drawn by a pair of shaggy sheep-dogs. Cords served for harness. A man was running by the side, and it was as much as he could do to keep up with the animals. This use ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... was typical of a non-mechanical culture. Narrow, packed-dirt streets twisted between ramshackle huts. A few two-story buildings threatened to collapse at any minute. A stench filled the air, so strong that Fannia's filter couldn't quite eradicate it. The Cascellans bounded ahead of the heavily laden Earthmen, dashing around like a pack of playful ...
— Warrior Race • Robert Sheckley
... branches, and even from the edge of the forest one looked into darkness. On the top of that thin plateau between the roaring sea and the impenetrable swamp, M. Jacques had made his home. It was a ramshackle little house, run together of boards and corrugated iron, and bearing evidence of all the mistakes of which a West African native is capable. At midday the solitary thorn afforded a transparent shade; for the rest of daylight ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... help him," answered Eradicate promptly, as he climbed back off the seat, into the body of his ramshackle vehicle. ...
— Tom Swift and his Airship • Victor Appleton
... in Niksic, but in this instance we were never able to rid ourselves of the first impressions, and we left gladly, though the town was not without its humour. It contains the only brewery in Montenegro, a ramshackle place and producing very poor beer. The post office is a tumble-down outhouse, also we were shown the house which would in the course of time be ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... of the tenement by the moat. It was a ramshackle, two-story affair with shiftless tenants and ragged children. Looking back now, I think likely it was the contrast of its desolation with the green hill and the fields I loved, of its darkness and ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... serious, Mrs. Williams. It may raise a mutiny amongst these horrid, profane sailors, but I really don't see how we are to get rid of them else. The bo'sun has cut adrift their ramshackle, old sieve of a boat, and she's now a quarter of a mile astern, half-full of water. And we can't give them one of the ship's boats to go and get their throats cut ashore. J. Perkins, Esquire, wouldn't like it. He would swear something awful, if the boat ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... with the attention of the old school, backed by something warmer, gave Wilmet his arm. He and his son John never seemed to belong to so ramshackle a household as the rest, and he was so gentle and fatherly, that when Wilmet found him aware of all, it was a relief to tell her objections without being answered by a lover. After all, she could ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... half hour Eben rounded up the "Eb and Flo" near the shore in front of the Grimsby house, which was a poor, ramshackle affair. The water here was deep, so he was able to run close to the bank. A long-haired, ragged, dirty boy pushed off for his father in a leaky boat, and took him ashore. In a few minutes more the "Eb and Flo" was again under way, clipping along under the light breeze, bound for Beech ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... The ramshackle ferry-boat was firmly wedged in a dry-dock of ice on the western side of the Missouri. As Lounsbury passed it, with his horse following pluckily in spread-eagle fashion, he shouted for Old Michael. But long before the river had floored, when it was edging and covering only in the least swift ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... though a most important point in the campaign, was far from attractive in feature, being made up of a half-dozen unsightly houses, a ramshackle tavern propped up on two sides with pine poles, and the weatherbeaten building that gave official name to the cross-roads. We had no tents—there were none in the command—so I took possession of the tavern for shelter for myself and staff, and just as we had finished ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... it. And in particular I've thought over this part of my life. I'm enormously impressed by the ignorant, unguided way in which we two entangled ourselves with each other. It seems to me the queerest thing in all this network of misunderstandings and misstatements and faulty and ramshackle conventions which makes up our social order as the individual meets it, that we should have come together so accidentally and so blindly. Because we were no more than samples of the common fate. Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... he might not expect to be challenged because of his appearance. In the stable yard, between a half-awakened horse and a sleepy watchdog, who received the new guest with a blinking eye and affectionate tongue, an ostler was washing down a ramshackle chaise. Claudius guessed that it was prepared for his flight and his heart warmed at this proof of the Jew having counted on his coming, though belated. The shock-headed man, clattering over the rounded stones in wooden shoes, made to fit by the insertion of straw around his ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... else visible but a few dusky groves of willows and the dazzling snow. The ramshackle wooden hotel was rather more than usually badly-kept and comfortless, and Winston, who had managed to conciliate his host, felt relieved one afternoon when the latter flung ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... pioneers of the flying-men in this country. He used to fly at country fairs in an old ramshackle bus of the Wright model—a thing of sticks and canvas and wires precariously hung together. But he flew it. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... at first on a flat beach of deep black sand, where they generally left their personal effects for lack of means of transportation. They climbed to a ragged thoroughfare of open sheds and ramshackle buildings, most of them in the course of construction. Beneath crude shelters of all sorts and in great quantities were goods brought in hastily by eager speculators on the high prices. The four hundred ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... at his recommendation, when he wished to refresh his excellent memory; the instruments he used when to the entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added the alluring chink of gold belonged also to that generous patron. There were some old clothes in the ramshackle deal wardrobe; there was some linen and underclothing in the knobless chest of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester repeating-rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and ammunition-pouch, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... friendship, however, did not prepare the boys for the farmer's sudden arrival at their club-house, on a Saturday afternoon, two weeks later. He drove up in a ramshackle old buggy, driving two of the finest horses in the county. Skinflint though he was, he loved horses. He came into the club-house and eyed the boys standing ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... interminable, the old man came driving around the house. To a ramshackle buggy he had hitched a decrepit horse. They wedged in as best they could, the old man between them, and at a shuffling amble the nag proceeded through the gate and ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... good excuse for not being a gentleman and a sportsman and he did not purpose to look for any reasons for doing differently. Then unexpectedly he was invited to dinner by Mr. Ephraim Tutt in a funny old ramshackle house on West Twenty-third Street with ornamented iron piazza railings all covered with the withered stalks of long dead wistarias, and something happened to him. "Payson Clifford's Twenty-five Thousand Dollar Dinner." He had no suspicion, of course, what was coming to him when he went ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... I,—I saw nothing but what appeared to be an unoccupied ramshackle brick abomination. Suddenly ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... Germany. At first a man who could not reach his business in any other way was allowed to use his own automobile but even these soon went out of commission and then bicycles were forbidden except for rides to and from business, work or school. A few ramshackle taxicabs still survive in Berlin at the railway stations, driven by benzol instead of gasoline and shod with spring tires. No one can keep a taxi waiting, it is subject when waiting to be commandeered by ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... New York in company with several pessimistic gentlemen—who were very open about backing their fancy; and their fancy fell on that old, ramshackle jade, Hard Times, by Speculation out of Folly. According to them there was no hope of her being scratched or left at ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... he had been restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and shortened like flapping ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... not follow further until he had reached the corner. I heard his footsteps pass right to the end. Then the sound died away. I ran to the corner. The back of a wharf building—a high blank wall—faced a row of ramshackle tenements, some of them built of wood; but not ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... rats in that ramshackle old place, Beautiful Joe," she said, as she pulled the plank away; "and as you don't hurt them, I don't see what you want to get in for. However, you are a sensible dog, and usually have a reason for having your own way, so I am going to let ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... high-fenced enclosure behind the "Owl," the segregated district of the town. There, in tiny one-roomed houses built in rows like barracks were the girls and women who had drifted to this jumping-off place of the world. In the daytime they slept or sat on the narrow, ramshackle porches, untidy, noisy, unspeakably wretched. At night, however, they blossomed forth in tawdry finery, in the dancing-space behind the gambling-tables. Some of them were fixtures. They had drifted there from New Orleans, perhaps, or southern California, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and with a definite and entirely logical point of view. Whether they talked about war, crime, prostitution, political corruption, or any other social evil, what they wanted was to tear down the old ramshackle structure, and to put in its place something new and intelligent. You might possibly bring them to admit slight differences between capitalist governments but when it came to a practical issue, to an action you found that to these people all governments were ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... course not, as I said before. Now, will you tell me, Mr. Ross, just why Mr. Hayne chose that ramshackle old shanty out there on the prairie, all by himself, unless it was to be where he could have his chosen companions with him at night and no ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... Heir of all the ages—another Imperialist—a degraded, brutalized wretch, clad in filthy, stinking rags, his toes protruding from the rotten broken boots that were tied with bits of string upon his stockingless feet. The ramshackle cart was loaded with empty bottles and putrid rags, heaped loosely in the cart and packed into a large sack. Old coats and trousers, dresses, petticoats, and under-clothing, greasy, mildewed and malodorous. As he crept along with his eyes on the ground, ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... by all means, my dear one. I dare say I am inhuman, and supercilious, and contemptibly proud of my poor old ramshackle family; but I do honestly confess to you that I feel as if I belonged to a different species from the people who are ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... cruller received in one of the huts nearest of all to the trenches. There the old slogan of 'Soup and Salvation' has given way to 'Pies and Piety.' It might be 'Doughnuts and Doughboys.' These huts pitched within the shock of the German guns, are ramshackle and bare and few, for no organization can grow rich on the pennies and nickels that are tossed into the tambourines at the street-corners of the world. But they are doing a work that the soldiers themselves will ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... single row of ramshackle buildings, not unlike a small Missouri River town. The citizens, so far as visible, formed a queer collection of old men addicted to rum. They all came out to admire Ladrone and to criticise my pack-saddle, and as ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... removed to their present very handsome quarters which they have for so long occupied. I very well recollect the style of their old place of business and how the exterior strongly reminded me of the cotton warehouses in Liverpool. The interior was a big, rambling, ramshackle kind of a place with but few pretensions to being an office such as we ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... half miles out we come to Spooner's, once an active, bustling, roadside hotel, where in the lumbering and mining days teams lined the road four, six and eight deep. Now, nothing but a ramshackle old building remains to tell of its former greatness. Here we made a sharp turn to the left, leaving the main road and taking the special Marlette Lake road. We cross the grade of the abandoned railway—the rails, engines and equipment of which are now operating between Truckee and ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... need the Sultan require, Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire; And 'tis wonderful, surely, what music you get From the rickety, ramshackle, ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... see much safety," said Aunt Georgie, as she carefully arranged her spectacles, and looked about her. "Bless my heart! what a ramshackle place. ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... she said. "I'm Susy Drummond. 'Miss Susan Drummond, the Towers,' will soon be on my visiting cards. Isn't the place very ramshackle? Doesn't it want to be put into repair a good bit? I'm just dying to hear all about it. Oh, and here's an American swinging-chair—I just adore them. You don't mind if I see-saw gently while you talk to me. ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... that Ludgate Circus was deserted except for a ramshackle cab with a drunken driver pouring forth a hoarse story of a mean fare to a sleepy policeman leaning against a lamp post. The sight of two gentlemen on foot when all 'buses had stopped running for the night raised ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... Cibot nicely on fire," Remonencq told his sister, when she came to take up her position again on the ramshackle chair. "And now," he continued, "I shall go to consult the only man that knows, our Jew, a good sort of Jew that did not ask more than fifteen per cent of us for ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... dismounted before a ramshackle structure that bore upon its wide, high-boarded front the sign, "Hotel." There were horsemen coming and going down the wide street between its rows of old stores, saloons, and houses. Ord certainly did ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... my duty as the luckless husband of your long-suffering sister, to lay the foundation for the wabbly, rattly ramshackle stairs your pet assortment of moonstruck admirers ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... posts sagged drunkenly upon loosely strung wire. A dry weed-choked irrigation ditch paralleled the trail, its wooden flumes, like the fence posts, rotting where they stood, and its walls all but obliterated by the wash of spring freshets. The depression increased as she passed close beside the ramshackle log stable, where her horse sank to his ankles in a filthy brown seepage of mud and rotting straw before the door. Two small, slouchily built stacks of weather-stained hay occupied a fenced-off enclosure, beside which, with no attempt to protect them from ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... "That old ramshackle of a lumber nag whose every rib you can count through her skin is your beautiful thoroughbred?" ejaculated his friend, incredulously. "Come now, don't ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... also of the localities in which they lived. Of Lady Lufton herself enough, perhaps, has been written to introduce her to my readers. The Framley property belonged to her son; but as Lufton Park—an ancient ramshackle place in another county—had heretofore been the family residence of the Lufton family, Framley Court had been apportioned to her for her residence for life. Lord Lufton himself was still unmarried; and as he had no establishment at Lufton Park—which indeed had not been inhabited ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... in a narrow part of the old street, jointed to the flags, and then to the house behind them—an ancient, ramshackle place, the doors and windows of which were boarded up, the entire fabric of which showed unmistakable readiness for the pick and shovel of the house-breaker. And he laid a hand on one of the shattered windows, close by a big hole ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... Washington's footsteps. Holtzclaw has told his own story in an admirably written and most interesting book entitled, "The Black Man's Burden." Starting in 1903 with a capital of seventy-five cents, no land and no buildings in a little one-room, ramshackle log cabin, which he did not own and in which he and his wife lived as well as taught, Holtzclaw now has an annual enrollment of nearly five hundred students and a faculty of thirty teachers. The school through its varied forms of extension work influences ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... to be a sale on the premises on the morrow, and the lower room had that day been filled with all the 'plant' of the restaurant, and all or almost all the poor household stuff from upstairs. It was an odd, ramshackle collection; and poor Dora, who had been walking round looking at the auction tickets, was realising with a sinking heart how much debt the sale would still leave unprovided for. But she had found friends. Father Vernon had met the creditors for her. There had been a composition, and she ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and Lee. It was twenty years behind the times, as the saying is. Small, darksome, dreary and dingy, it served chiefly as a living-room for Sam, his daughter, and his cronies, as well as for his workshop. He had a bench and a ramshackle lathe in one corner, where you might be sure to find him futilely pottering at almost any hour. He owned the little building—or that portion in it which it were a farce to term the equity above the mortgage—and ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... curbing and with a confidential air: "We'll just get a bite to eat in here," indicating a tiny little lunch room crammed in between two ramshackle old frame buildings. "Your Aunt Loraine was a bit indisposed ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... are an old family,' he went on with great complacency. 'The castle, as perhaps you are aware, is a huge, ramshackle place, honeycombed underneath with cellars. I dare say in the old days some of these cellars and caves were the resort of smugglers, and the receptacle of their contraband wares, doubtless with the full knowledge of my ancestors, who, I regret ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... air, playing cards, or smoking and talking, or reading by a lantern. Williams and I found picket a great resource; and many a good game of whist have I had sitting in a crowded quartette in our ramshackle battery Cape-cart, with an inch of candle ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... a thumping heart and nerves all a-tingle that I followed Abel Crone out of his front shop into a sort of office that he had at the back of it—a little, dirty hole of a place, in which there was a ramshackle table, a chair or two, a stand-up desk, a cupboard, and a variety of odds and ends that he had picked up in his trade. The man's sudden revelation of knowledge had knocked all the confidence out of me. It had never crossed my mind that any living soul had a notion of my secret—for secret, ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... your father must be getting off his head to go and buy up such a miserable ramshackle piece of rubbish. It was only fit to knock to pieces and ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... amidst plenty, to the tale of the Hotel de France. This restaurant stood on California street, just east of Old St. Mary's Church. One could throw a biscuit from its back windows into Chinatown. It occupied a big ramshackle house, which had been a mansion of the gold days. Louis, the proprietor, was a Frenchman of the Bas Pyrenees; and his accent was as thick as his peasant soups. The patrons were Frenchmen of the poorer class, or young and poor ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... entered was poor enough; it was built on a mud floor, and was entirely devoid of furniture save for a ramshackle bedstead with spotless linen upon it, and a couple of chairs. There was a tiny shrine with an image of the Virgin in the corner of the room; before it burned a halfpenny night-light, and round it were ranged in a row a number of paper match-boxes with little coloured pictures upon them. They were ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... one or two ramshackle old carriages with bony horses harnessed to them standing about the station, and in one of these Mr. Brown was soon on his way up the street toward the ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... was seen rushing hither and thither.... "You and two others. Blow up or pull down that building," he indicated a sprawling, ramshackle structure. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... you two niggers wuz a-talkin' 'bout over at yo' house." He ran a fist down into his khaki, and drew out three or four one-dollar bills and about a pint of small change. It was the usual crap-shooter's offering. The two negroes sat down on the ramshackle porch of an old jeweler's shop, and Tump began a complicated tally of ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... which I may add, as another example of that tentative, that appealing twitch of the garment of Roman association of which one kept renewing one's consciousness, the half-hour at the little foundry itself was all charming—with its quite shabby and belittered and ramshackle recall of the old Roman "art-life" of one's early dreams. Everything was somehow in the picture, the rickety sheds, the loose paraphernalia, the sunny, grassy yard where a goat was browsing; then the queer interior gloom of the pits, frilled with little overlooking scaffoldings and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the little cabin of the ramshackle boat was deserted at that hour, the colonel went to a dark corner, and from it emerged, a little later, with a beard on that would have done credit to the most orthodox inhabitant ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... one of the most picturesque of the many pretty homes in Green Valley. It had been a ramshackle, tumbled-down old cabin lost in a tangle of bushes and hidden from the road by a shabby, unsightly row of old willows. Billy was going to rent it for temporary barn purposes but his wife, who had a nimble and a prophetic eye, made him buy ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Count from whom I purchased the property. The Count's father, it appears, was a distiller of great wealth in his day, and a man of action. Unfortunately he died before he had the chance to carry out his projects in connection with the rehabilitation of Schloss Rothhoefen, even then a deserted, ramshackle resort for paying tourists and a Mecca for antique ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... think you could do better than go on to the Italian lakes—you never saw anything like them, I'll be bound—and Naples and Florence. Would you come back by the Tyrol, and have a turn at Zurich and Lucerne, with a long ramble through the Black Forest in a trap resembling a ramshackle landau?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... at Paradise on the ramshackle old stage-coach late one Saturday afternoon. Ajax and I carried her small hair-trunk into the ranch-house; Mrs. Spafford received her. We retreated ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... mill, where the ore was pounded to powder and robbed of its gold, was a huge, ramshackle structure. Although it had a framework of heavy timbers, yet the strong skeleton was but loosely covered with boards. Through wide cracks and many gaps in the sides of the building a flood of light poured out, and the thunder of a hundred ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... and galvanises her into a state of activity that lasts for several hours. Long before dawn, the roads leading townwards are busy with all manner of vehicles, from the great waggon drawn by four white horses driven tandem, and laden with a moving stack of hay, to the ramshackle donkey-cart conveying half a score of cabbages, a heap of dandelions grubbed from the meadows, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... in a ramshackle, two-story, rooming house near the banks of the Savannah River. She is an old Negress with iron gray hair and a gingercake complexion. Her ill-fitting old dress was none too clean, and her bare feet exposed toe nails almost a half-inch long. Fannie ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... the inn of the "Silver Sun," a ramshackle old house, from over whose door, as proclaiming the character of the place, projected a long pole with a bunch of furze on the end, De ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... two men were driving in a buckboard drawn by a pair of half-broken pinto bronchos. The outfit was a rather ramshackle affair, and the driver was like his outfit. Stewart Duff was a rancher, once a "remittance man," but since his marriage three years ago he had learned self-reliance and was disciplining himself in self-restraint. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... narrow passageway put in between two big tenements to a ramshackle rear barrack, Nibsy, the newsboy, halted in the shadow of the doorway and stole a long ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... is a disgrace to us to see you living in a ramshackle building, half in and half out of ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... of daybreak when a slow-riding, silent group of men came to a halt and dismounted in the narrow lane some distance from the ramshackle abode of Martin Hawk, squatting unseen among the trees that lined the steep bank of the Wabash. A three hours' ride through dark, muddy roads lay behind them. There were a dozen men in all,—and one woman, at whose side rode the hunter, Stain. They had stopped at the latter's cabin on the ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... not been long on the road this day, when I saw coming towards me an equipage more picturesquely interesting than any I had ever met in the Champs-Elyses. It was a ramshackle little cart laden with sacks and a couple of children, and drawn by a pair of shaggy sheep-dogs. Cords served for harness. A man was running by the side, and it was as much as he could do to keep up with ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... time, old friends pay when they please,' didn't you know I was getting in over my head? didn't you encourage it ... so you could get judgment on me? sell me out? Though what you settled on me for, what you see in my ramshackle house and used ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... three Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them—this is twenty-five years ago, reader!—a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand—and teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered—as the friendly mists ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... during the probation and preparatory period that Marcia Lowe, the Cup-of-Cold-Water Lady, came up The Way one golden afternoon and stopped her horse before the post office, General Store and County Club of The Hollow, and, leaning out from the ramshackle buggy, gave a rather high, nasal call to ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... would have anything to do. Stires looked like a cowboy and was, in truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small—a very small—way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The poultry she raised herself; ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various |
