no-thoroughfares

They were free-souled creatures, excellent company: sensitive, cheerful, and profane; liars, braggarts, and hustlers; with an air of making slow old England hum which never left them even when, as often happened, they were wrestling with difficulties of their own making, or struggling in no-thoroughfares from which they had to be retrieved like strayed sheep by Englishmen without imagination enough to go wrong.

The Irrational Knot Being the Second Novel of His Nonage George Bernard Shaw 1903

We had a few whiffs from brickfields and other ugly industries that scar the banks, but the windings of the Issel bore us swiftly to regions of grassy meadows, and waving reeds, threatening sometimes to lose us in strange no-thoroughfares of water more like separate lakes and round ponds, than the flowing reaches of a river.

The Chauffeur and the Chaperon Karl Anderson 1901

But he found more than his share of no-thoroughfares.

The Desire of the Moth; and the Come On Eugene Manlove Rhodes 1901

In the same way, in the narratives concerning the relations between St. Francis and Ugolini, we find ourselves every moment shut up in no-thoroughfares, coming up against contradictory indications, just so long as we try to refer everything to two or three meetings, as we are at first led to do.

Life of St. Francis of Assisi Paul Sabatier 1893

Others have wandered into strange byways and no-thoroughfares.

Artist and Public And Other Essays On Art Subjects Kenyon Cox 1887

The turnings and windings, the no-thoroughfares, the marches and marches, turned that insignificant distance into at least three leagues.

Voyage au centre de la terre. English Jules Verne 1866

In the throats and maws of dark no-thoroughfares near Todgers's, individual wine-merchants and wholesale dealers in grocery-ware had perfect little towns of their own; and, deep among the foundations of these buildings, the ground was undermined and burrowed out into stables, where cart-horses, troubled by rats, might be heard on a quiet Sunday rattling their halters, as disturbed spirits in tales of haunted houses are said to clank their chains.

Martin Chuzzlewit Charles Dickens 1841

From time to time, at a sharp turn in the street, she would come upon lanes that seemed to plunge into dark holes a few steps from their beginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from a cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with the rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in the distance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there at long intervals upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.

Germinie Lacerteux Edmond de Goncourt 1859

England hum, which never left them even when, as often happened, they were wrestling with difficulties of their own making, or struggling in no-thoroughfares, from which they had to be retrieved like stray sheep by Englishmen without imagination enough to go wrong. "

Edison, His Life and Inventions Frank Lewis Dyer 1905