Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
His manners may be charming he is a plausible devil; but lean upon him, and he turns out to be as jerry-built as his own crumbling whitewashed walls.
Another eager human soul on the threshold longing to find some suitable high work in the world, all unwitting of the fact that ideal strivings are everywhere despised and discouraged jerry-built cottages for the million being the day's demand and not oratories or palaces of art or temples for the spirit. Not the time for a "professor of æsthetics," one would say, and assuredly not the place.
There were rows and rows of jerry-built houses running at right angles to the High Street, houses with small rooms and big rates, occupied by tired-looking men who hurried to the station about half-past eight every morning, and did not get back again till after seven in the evening, when you would meet them walking homewards rather slowly, shuffling a little perhaps, as overworked clerks are prone to do, and still carrying the halfpenny paper which they had bought on their way to town.
As he passed down the crooked, uneven stone steps that led to the Cove, he felt indignant, almost unhappy. It was as if a friend had been insulted in his presence and he had been unable to defend him. They said that the Cove must go, must make way for modern jerry-built lodging-houses, in order that middle-class families from London and Manchester might be sufficiently accommodated.
Even the most imposing Egyptian temples have jerry-built foundations; usually they are built on the top of the wall-stumps of earlier buildings of different plan, filled in with a confused mass of earlier slabs and weak rubbish of all kinds. Had the Egyptian buildings been built on sure foundations, they would have been preserved to a much greater extent even than they are.
It was one of those dreadful jerry-built houses which, while they are still new, look old. It had quite possibly only been built a year or two, and yet, owing to neglect, or to poverty of construction, or to a combination of the two, it was already threatening to tumble down. It was a small place, a couple of storeys high, and would have been dear I should think! at thirty pounds a year.
The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition-walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps only candles in long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bath-room.
The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps only candles in long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.
And I thought to myself that each of these glaring, gaping, new jerry-built boxes was indeed a rickety stage erected for the acting of a real miracle play; that human family that is almost the holy one, and that human death that is near to the last judgment. For some foolish reason the last house but one in that imperfect row especially haunted me with its hollow grin and empty window-eyes.
On, on it pants through Bishop's Wood, by tangled Churchyard Bottom, where now the railway shrieks; down sloppy lanes, bordering Muswell Hill, where now stand rows of jerry-built, prim villas.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking