And to carry the simile further, if you allow too great a play between the parts, so that they fit one over the other too loosely, the engine will lose power and become a poor rickety thing.

Fortunately, he fancied that Dantes was delirious; and placing the food on the rickety table, he withdrew.

The hard, narrow, wretched, rickety bed of Don Quixote stood first in the middle of this star-lit stable, and close beside it Sancho made his, which merely consisted of a rush mat and a blanket that looked as if it was of threadbare canvas rather than of wool.

Of the shape of the room, of the cracks in the ceiling, of the paper on the walls, of the flaws in the window-glass making ripples and dimples on the prospect, of the washing-stand being rickety on its three legs, and having a discontented something about it, which reminded me of Mrs. Gummidge under the influence of the old one.

It was an old rickety door and gave at once before our united strength.

That the productions of such marriages are generally scrofulous, rickety, or deformed children; by which means the family seldom continues above three generations, unless the wife takes care to provide a healthy father, among her neighbours or domestics, in order to improve and continue the breed.

But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window, and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.

As Walker's method of farming became unsustainable, he and Stearns were forced to plan a voyage in the rickety "Iola", against prevailing winds and currents, to Fanning on Tabuaeran, a nearby atoll in Kiribati, to restock — a voyage that was somewhere between difficult and impossible without a working auxiliary engine.

He described that the miners climbed rickety ladders with sweat pouring from their bodies like "water from a bath".