Stable door

“ This was of oak after a design of his own, and was wide and massive, with hinges of wrought-iron and a dragon's-head knocker. Some of his neighbors admired it, others found fault with it, objecting that it was out of proportion and too large for a dwelling-house. But after a while they discovered that it was more than an ordinary door. There was some magic about it; it shed a radiance over the whole neighborhood. People when they were perplexed would look towards it, and presently their doubts would fade away. ”

“ I take the stone steps in three jumps and knock at the door. Children's voices die abruptly to silence, a step sounds over the floor, the latch clicks, and the door opening wraps us in a gust of warm air. ”

“ And it was then, as he stood, turned a little from the safe and facing the heavy door giving on the lumber room, that he straightened, tense, bending to the keyhole.
The door was sound-proof, as were the walls, but abruptly, as a sound heard in dreams, he had heard it: At the keyhole, a sound, or the shadow of a sound, faint and thin, but unmistakable, like the beating of a heart. ”

“ The company's stables are all alike, and open at each end with great doors. The stable is the best house in the place; there are three or four houses besides, and one of them is white, and has vines growing over the front door, and hollyhocks by the front gate. Three or four women, and as many barelegged girls, have come out to look at the procession, and we lounge towards the group. ”

“ When, perchance, a door stands ajar a feeble ray of light steals into a bare-walled, smoke-blackened den that has no more furnishing than a heap of dates on a mat and a skin of water hanging from the low ceiling. ”

“ It is somewhat disconcerting to the nervous incomer to be met, the door still in his hand, by a sound as of people springing suddenly into the air, followed by a weird scuttling of feet, and then to discover the occupants sitting stiffly in opposite corners, deeply engaged in book or needlework. ”

“ He had drawn back, had gathered all of the power lying in his big bulk, had thrown himself forward at the door. And, as he struck, the door flew from its hinges, as most doors would have done under the impact of his wrath-impelled body, cracked and snapped back against the wall. ”

“ The door was locked and barricaded; the window was secure. Manifestly, it was outside of the possibilities that something should have crept into the room; and yet reasoning did not remove the strange sense of physical oppression. ”

“ So much may lie behind a tightly closed door! But my hesitation, if hesitation it was, lasted but a moment. My natural impatience and the promptings of my vanity overcame the dictates of my judgment, and, reckless of consequences, perhaps disdainful of them, I soon had the knob in my grasp. I gave a slight push to the door and, on seeing a crack of light leap into life along the jamb, pushed the door wider and wider till the whole room stood revealed.
The instantaneous banging of a shutter in one of its windows proved the room to be the very one which we had seen lighted from below. ”

“ When a visitor had pulled the braided iron wire bell-cord which hung from the top of the pilaster of the doorway, and the servant-woman, coming from within, had admitted him through the side of the double-door in which was a small grated loop-hole, that half of the door escaped from her hand and swung back by its own weight with a solemn, ponderous sound that echoed along the roof of a wide paved archway and through the depths of the house, as though the door had been of iron. ”

“ And there he saw a door within the wall,
Well-hinged, close shut; nor was there in that place
Another on its hinges, therefore he
Stood there and pondered for a little space,
And thought, "Perchance some marvel I shall see,
For surely here some dweller there must be,
Because this door seems whole, and new, and sound.
While nought but ruin I can see around." ”

“ As a rule, you enter from the front door into a narrow passage-way, with perhaps an internal screen, with folding-doors which are rarely shut, and immediately opposite is the main staircase of the house, so that any one, on entering, not only commands the absolute thoroughfare of the house, but sees everybody who goes up or comes down, by which privacy is materially interfered with, and the whole house is made subject to sudden draughts of cold air, which arc driven up the-well-hole, as it is called, by the opening of the street-door. ”

“ You have a good many of them in your house, and you are moving them all day long. We are going to talk about a door.
How impossible it is to open a door and walk in, if it is locked and bolted against us! Open doors take us into delightful places, but they can also take us into prison. What important parts of a house they are! How safe you feel in bed at night knowing that all the house doors are shut and fastened inside! ”

“ It is inside one of the doors called trap-doors, which is in the barrow-way, for the purpose of forcing the stream of air which passes in its long, many-miled course from the down-shaft to the up-shaft of the pit; but which door must be opened whenever men or boys, with or without carriages, may wish to pass through. ”

“ There must be a lamp or other flame burning within. What if this were a door like the outer one, leading into a chamber perhaps inhabited by some dangerous band of outcasts? The light was a sure [Pg 130] evidence of human occupation: and yet the outer door swung rustily on its pivot as though it had never been opened for ages. I paused a moment in fear before I ventured to try the stone: and then, urged on once more by some insane impulse, I turned the massive block with all my might to the left. It gave way slowly like its neighbour, and finally opened into the central hall. ”

“ Sometimes the casing of the door is made to swing on well-oiled hinges which are not discoverable in the room, while the door itself appears to be hung in the usual manner, and well secured by bolts and lock. ”

“ I was so crippled, bruised and sore, men took me home upon a door. It shows how useful doors can be; I always carry two or three.
We’re always viewing doors, you know; they face us everywhere we go; on doors we knock, at doors we wait, and if they’re handsome, smooth and straight, they strike us as a work of art, they’re soothing to the mind and heart. ”

“ I was more anxious about this door. It is, palpably, of a more modern make than the others, and, though a stout piece of work, it has little of their ponderous strength.
I must explain here, that there is a small, raised lawn on this side of the house, upon which this door opens—the windows of the study being barred on this account. All the other entrances—excepting the great gateway which is never opened—are in the lower storey. ”

“ Whether we have stone facings or no,—whether our parlor has cornices or marble mantels or no,—whether our doors are machine-made or hand-made. All our fixtures shall be of the plainest and simplest, but we will have fresh air. We will open our door with a latch and string, if we cannot afford lock and knob and fresh air too,—but in our house we will live cleanly and Christianly. ”

“ There,—do you see that door beside the staircase?"
"Oh, yes, good, kind gentleman; I see it."
"Well, one of the farm labourers sleeps in that room. You will only just have to run to him. He never locks his door; and he will come to your father in an instant." ”

“ Where there is a door there is no window, and where a gap in the wall serves for a window, a door is dispensed with; none of the chambers, however, of this long row of low one-storied buildings communicate with each other. ”

“ Such a door can hardly be made very thick or double without rendering it heavy and difficult to open; and the single door will be scarcely capable of protecting the interior if the frost is severe and prolonged. ”

“ The street door falls not a knell in his heart, the foot on the staircase, though he lives on the third pair, sends no spasm through his anatomy; at the rap of his door he can crow 'come in,' and his pulse still beats healthfully. ”

“ Seizing it once again, I dragged it open and, while Clinton held it in that position, made a careful examination. Up to the present I saw nothing to be much alarmed about. There were fifty ways in which a door might shut of its own accord. There might be a hidden spring or tilted hinges; draught, of course, was out of the question. I looked at the hinges, they were of iron and set in the solid masonry. Nor could I discover any spring or hidden contrivance, as when the door was wide open there was an interval of several inches between it and the wall. ”

“ This door opened out instead of in,—this I also knew when planning this surreptitious intrusion, but, after pulling it open and reaching for the curtain, which hung completely across it, I found it not so easy to proceed as I had imagined. The stealthiness of my action held back my hand; then the faint sounds I heard within advised me that she was not alone, and that she might very readily regard with displeasure my unexpected entrance by a door of which she was possibly ignorant. ”

“ At the end of a silent, damp, and gloomy lane may be seen the arch of a door, or rather gate, high enough and wide enough to admit a man on horseback,—a circumstance which proves of itself that when this building was erected carriages did not exist. ”

“ And then suddenly they turned a corner and came on a mass of people, a densely packed crowd of men and women, staring at a mean-looking little door sunk into a high wall.
"Better take my arm," the inspector suggested. "Make way there! Make way!" ”

“ He said that the door of any and every room in which he was always appeared to be ajar, and round the edge of the door—I declare it frightens me even to think of it—round the corner, as it were, just coming into the room, he always saw the hand and half the face of a man—never more, and never less. ”

“ No one but a practical workman or engineer can have an adequate notion of the extent to which any mechanical operation upon the door of a safe thus circumstanced is hampered by its being set back into the wall, and with an outer door that even when open, cuts off all ready manual access to the inner door from one side. ”

“ Knock in the door—break open the door! the front door—that is the best, because it leads to all parts of the house, and we can secure any one who attempts to move from one to the other, as they come down. ”

“ A door! And why should a door be there except to lead to another room? There was a door, and that presupposed something on the other side. And what a door it was! More of a barricade than a partition. The iron hinges were built to support weight and give complete defense and support. There was a keyhole, and if the key corresponded with the size of the hole, it was the largest that I had ever heard of.
Naturally, I wanted to open the door. As master of the villa, I had a right to. Upstairs the old woman seemed unable to understand me and ended by telling me to see her husband. ”

“ He crossed the courtyard, and, reaching the line of door-stepless, poverty-stricken hovels—they appeared to be little more than that—crept stealthily along to the end house at the left, halted an instant to press his face against a black window pane, then tried the door cautiously. ”

“ The first detail that struck the observer was, that the door could never have been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window, if it had been carved out of dressed stone instead of being in rough masonry, might have been the lattice of a lordly mansion.
The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly bound together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. ”

“ The door, indeed, stood open as before; but the windows were still shuttered, the chimneys breathed no stain into the bright air, there sounded abroad none of that low stir (perhaps audible rather to the ear of the spirit than to the ear of the flesh) by which a house announces and betrays its human lodgers. ”

“ In this gable was no window, chimney, ornament, or protuberance of any kind. The single feature appertaining to it, beyond the expanse of dark green leaves, was a small door.
The situation of the door was peculiar. The sill was three or four feet above the ground, and for a moment one was at a loss for an explanation of this exceptional altitude, till ruts immediately beneath suggested that the door was used solely for the passage of articles and persons to and from the level of a vehicle standing on the outside. ”

“ The inner and outer doors, where two doors are used, are prepared in the same way, leaving a space, as above, between the inner and outer crust of each door, which space is left for a like purpose with that left between the inner and outer chest of the safe. ”

“ You notice that a door is much the same shape as auntie's mother-of-pearl card-case, and your architectural instinct, already beginning to develop, assures you that a pearly door would be a beautiful thing for a temple, if only auntie sees things in the same light as you do. You perceive that a cribbage board is straight and narrow, as a path leading to such a door might be, and that if you stick tiny tufts of southernwood or veronica into the holes along the ivory sides of your path, your path will run between two little green hedges. ”

“ Then I would let every man except those in the front rank carry a block of stone. We can get them out of the ruins not far off, and if they are piled up at the sides of the doorway—I’ll show the men how to do it—the door can’t come right down, at any rate. ”

“ Consequently streets in the fashionable parts of cities have a dreary aspect. The only breaks in the long line of dismal wall are the front doors, which are generally closed, or if not, movable screens bar the sight of all beyond the door. ”

“ The massive wooden door is equally disappointing, giving as it does on to the stone corridor that lies between the cells and inner court-yard; in the centre of each is a square aperture, which can be opened or closed at the will of the jailer, by a swinging panel, acting like a miniature portcullis, and which, when horizontal, serves as a shelf for the prisoner's food. ”