"Matted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where, sunk in deep despair, Her garments torn, her bosom bare, Impatient Freedom lies! Her matted tresses madly spread, 40 To every sod, which wraps the dead, She turns ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... possessed by the feeling that he had not heard the cry with his actual ear but with a deeper, more unaccountable sense. He went forward in a blind rush, feeling with extended hands for the opening in the tangle, groping a stumbling way through the close dark of the matted trees. He fell over an exposed root, blundered into a chill, wet trunk, and finally emerged at the side of the desolate mansion. Here his way led through saw grass, waist high, and the blades cut at him like ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... ventilated; flags fluttering on high posts in front of stores. The many human figures that went to and fro were hardly to be distinguished from the ground they trod. They were coated with earth, clay-clad in ochre and gamboge. Their faces were daubed with clauber; it matted great beards, and entangled the coarse hairs on chests and brawny arms. Where, here and there, a blue jumper had kept a tinge of blueness, it was so besmeared with yellow that it might have been expected ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... panorama, or sights to cheer my soul, than these at Chicoutimi and Ha-ha bay, and my days and nights up and down this fascinating savage river—the rounded mountains, some bare and gray, some dull red, some draped close all over with matted green verdure or vines—the ample, calm, eternal rocks everywhere—the long streaks of motley foam, a milk-white curd on the glistening breast of the stream—the little two-masted schooner, dingy ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... his head and felt that his hair was matted with blood. Then he tried to rise to his feet, but found that they were tied together, and sank back with a groan. The wall of the house was just behind him, and he edged painfully toward it, until he was able to sit up and have ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... strewed the path. The grass was bleached and dead. At our approach an old sheep-dog rattled his chain and looked out of his kennel. He was shaggy and matted with years. His bark was so weak that it broke in the middle. He was a Rip Van Winkle of a sheep-dog—the kind of dog you would picture in a fairy-tale. One couldn't help feeling that he had accompanied the shepherd ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... were covered by a thick rime frost, which looked grey in the dim light, not a crystal as yet sending off a scintillation; and tiny spicules of ice had matted the moustache and beard of Bracy where his breath had condensed during the night, sealing them to the woolly coverlet he had drawn up close; while a strange tingling sensation attacked his eyes as he opened them suddenly, waking from a morning dream ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... captivated all hearts, but chiefly that of Kays. His passion is reciprocated, but soon the fond lovers are separated. The family of Layla remove to the distant mountains of Nejd, and Kays, distracted, with matted locks and bosom bare to the scorching sun, wanders forth into the desert in quest of her abode, causing the rocks to echo his voice, constantly calling upon her name. His friends, having found him in woeful plight, bring him home, and henceforth he is called Majnun—that ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... the Parisian populace. Tignonville turned sick as he listened, and would fain have closed his ears. But for his life he dared not. And presently a cripple in a beggar's garb, a dwarfish, filthy creature with matted hair, twitched his sleeve, and ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... front was an immense cane-field, with a "paddy-field" beyond. The cane was from five to seven feet high. Along this deep fringe of bamboo and matted undergrowth, and near the edge next to the cane-field, our pickets, or Cossack posts, as they are properly called, were stationed at distances ranging from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty yards apart, one corporal and six privates at ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... (as we would have done the Duke of Albemarle) to the meeting of the Lords of Appeale in the business of one of our prizes. With them to the meeting of the Guinny Company, and there staid, and went with Lord Berkely. While I was waiting for him in the Matted Gallery, a young man was most finely working in Indian inke the great picture of the King and Queen sitting,—[Charles I. and Henrietta Maria.]—by Van Dyke; and did it very finely. Thence to Westminster Hall to hear our cause, but [it] did not come before them to-day, so went ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Genoa, and were presently installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, a fine old Italian palace, in an ancient garden looking out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills. It was a beautiful spot, though its aging walls and cypresses and matted vines gave it a rather mournful look. Mrs. Clemens's health improved there for a time, in spite of dull, rainy, depressing weather; so much so that in May, when the warmth and sun came back, Clemens was driving about the ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Lapham, and that most important of all his novels, A Hazard of New Fortunes. By the time this last novel was written, he had become thoroughly interested, not merely in the men, women, and children about him, but in that mysterious, complex order named by us society, with its roots matted together as in a swamp, and seeming to many to be sucking up maleficent, miasmatic vapors from the soil in which it was rooted. Like many another lover of his kind, he has sought to trace the evils of individual life ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... the king and queen waited to receive the Christian captives. They were assembled in the city and marshalled forth in piteous procession. Many of them had still the chains and shackles on their legs; they were wasted with famine, their hair and beards overgrown and matted, and their faces pale and haggard from long confinement. When they found themselves restored to liberty and surrounded by their countrymen, some stared wildly about as if in a dream, others gave way ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... step and folded arms Godolphin moved along. The well-remembered scenes of his childhood were all before him; the wild verdure of the fern, the broken ground, with its thousand mimic mounts and valleys, the deep dell overgrown with matted shrubs and dark as a wizard's cave; the remains of many a stately vista, where the tender green of the lime showed forth, even in that dusky light, beneath the richer leaves of the chestnut; all was familiar and home-breathing to his mind. ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and shift such pot-flowers as require it into larger pots. In doing this, rub off the moulds and matted fibres from the roots, and throw away part of the outward, loose old earth. Then, having put a little fresh earth into the old pots, with a piece of broken tile over the hole in the bottom, put in your plant, and fill all the sides round with ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... the bed; his face was violet rather than red; his eyes were swelled; his mouth was wide open. The roaring which escaped from the deep cavities of his chest made the glass of the windows vibrate. To those developed and clearly defined muscles starting from his face, to his hair matted with sweat, to the energetic heaving of his chin and shoulders, it was impossible to refuse a certain degree of admiration. Strength carried to this point is semi-divine. The Herculean legs and feet of Porthos had, by swelling, burst his stockings; ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... failed me. I could go no farther. I fell down, and lay for a considerable time. The blood was yet oozing from the wound on my head. For a time I thought I should bleed to death; and think now that I should have done so, but that the blood so matted my hair as to stop the wound. After lying there about three quarters of an hour, I nerved myself up again, and started on my way, through bogs and briers, barefooted and bareheaded, tearing my feet sometimes at nearly every step; and after ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... sun sank behind the field of orchids that grew on the matted summit of the jungle, the river monsters came wallowing out of the slime in which they had reclined during the heat of the day, and the great beasts of the jungle came down to drink. The butterflies a while since were gone to rest. In little narrow ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... was Ethie's thought, as it had been the thought of many others, when, like her, they first step into the matted hall and meet the wet, damp odor, as of sheets just washed, which seems to be inseparable from that part of ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... broken rocky country covered with forest trees and underwood, so thick and close as to be quite matted together and every here and there deep foaming streams, some of which they were forced to cross ...
— Peter Parley's Tales About America and Australia • Samuel Griswold Goodrich
... Goblin was cunningly and silently preparing for Prince Ember, keeping watch in the meanwhile for him to approach. He kept himself close to the ground, concealed by the ashes around him, so like they were in color to his dingy robe, and the cap that covered his matted grizzled hair. Occasionally he chuckled to himself at the thought of the discomfiture which lay in store for Curling Smoke, that boastful giant, whom he believed to be lying in wait for the Prince near to the Wizard's Cave. Such confidence ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... pitched, and the smoke of a struggling fire told infallibly of human neighborhood. The barking of a splenetic little terrier brought from one of the tents a man of some fifty years, lank and gaunt of visage, with matted hair, and wild, uncivilized eyes, dressed in a ragged jacket and what had once been a pair of trousers. His face wore no expression of intelligence; but a look of intense, though animal cunning lurked in his eyes. While I was gazing on this individual, who stood in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... the alarm before another could jump in and do damage, swore they saw Schillingschen, rifle in hand, stalking among the shadows. Nothing could convince them they had not seen him. They said he stooped like a man in a dream—that big beard was matted, and his shirt torn—that he strode out of darkness into darkness like a man whose mind was gone. We purposely laughed at their story, to see if we could shake them in it. But they laughed ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... neglected, if not positively ill-treated, by her husband; and she had no earthly objection to Mr. Charteris thinking likewise. Her face expressed patient resignation now, as they walked under the close-matted foliage of the beech-trees, which made a pleasant, sun-flecked ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... background of the high coast they seem to float on silvery patches of calm water, arid and grey, or dark green and rounded like clumps of evergreen bushes, with the larger ones, a mile or two long, showing the outlines of ridges, ribs of grey rock under the dank mantle of matted leafage. Unknown to trade, to travel, almost to geography, the manner of life they harbour is an unsolved secret. There must be villages—settlements of fishermen at least—on the largest of them, and some communication with the world is probably kept up by ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... evil-looking as the tortured idols of the Chinese; like theirs his eyes were beadlike, expressionless, dull; such are the eyes of dead seal. His face was brown and cracked like old leather, and was covered with a crust of dirt; his gray-streaked hair was matted and straggled over his face; it teemed with lice. He held his knotty hands motionless over the flame of his lamp. His nails were long and curled like sharp talons. As Maisanguaq saw him he could ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... remained almost tropically hot, and the moon floated in a cloudless sky. I looked down upon the closely matted leaves of the box hedge, which rose to within a few feet of my window, and to the left I could obtain a view of the close-hemmed courtyard before the doors of Cray's Folly. On the right the yews began, obstructing my view of the Tudor garden, but the night air was fragrant, and the outlook ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... other was no longer able to stand before him, and thinking it was himself that had done the deed, he tossed up his head and snorted in triumph. At this moment, the matted hair was thrown back from his eyes, and the dust having somewhat settled away, he sighted me, where I stood reloading my gun. I fancied he would take off before I could finish, and I made all the haste in my power—so ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... beer, a photograph in a tarnished silver frame of Harriet de Barry Polder with undraped shoulders and an exploited dimple, and a copy of a technical journal. A fretful, shrill barking rose at their heels; and Howat Penny swung his stick at a diminutive, silky white dog with matted, pinkish eyes, obsessed ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... chance! I went. The grass below the window had grown long and was matted down; people on the street were watching me and I did not dare to drop on my knees for fear some well-meaning and unwelcome assistance might come for the search. Nevertheless I pushed my toes, I thought, ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... bench, and on the bench sate a poorly drest woman, and by her, leaning against a tree, was a man whom I thought I'd sean befor. He was drest in a shabby blew coat, with white seems and copper buttons; a torn hat was on his head, and great quantaties of matted hair and whiskers disfiggared his countnints. He was not shaved, and as pale ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... following next, while Almos, the leader of the Ghoojurs, and his three companions, brought up the rear. Like most of the trails through the Asiatic jungles, this was inclosed on each side by a growth of trees, undergrowth and matted vegetation of such density that it was next to impossible for any one to pick his way forward or backward except by keeping within the path itself. To step aside into the jungle would immediately involve one ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... decay being heat-loving microorganisms. Decomposition happens slowly at the soil's surface with the main agents of decay being soil animals. However, if the leaves and forest duff on the floor of a forest or a thick matted sod are tilled into the topsoil, decomposition ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... vine-dresser are lost, and his pride humbled. There is a smiling farm; another sort of vine, of remarkable character, is found against the farm-house. This vine springs from one root, and has clothed and matted with its many branches the four walls; the whole of it is covered thick with long clusters, which another month will ripen:—on every grape and leaf there is a locust. Into the dry caves and pits, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... other time and country have discoverers encountered the obstacles and dangers which confronted the Spaniards who first explored Central America. Precipitous mountains, matted jungles, barren deserts, deep and swift streams, malarious bogs, and hostile natives often armed with poisoned weapons, all were in their way, and they had to make their overland journeys on foot, fully armed and often in tropical ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... reconnoitre. They soon struck the trail of Little Turtle and followed it to the scene of the massacre on Cow Creek, arriving there only two hours after the savages had finished their devilish work. Dead men were lying about in the short buffalo-grass which had been stained and matted by their flowing blood, and the agonized posture of their bodies told far more forcibly than any language the tortures which had come before a welcome death. All had been scalped; all had been mutilated in that nameless manner which seems to delight the ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... the bitter effort to repress complaint, the horrid crimson ooze marking the rough cloths thrown over them; delicate, fair-browed boys, who had gone forth a few days back so full of life and hope, now gory and livid, with clenched teeth and matted hair, and eyeballs straining for the loved faces that must be there ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... the capital flocked to witness the consummation of the ceremony. As the sad procession wound up the sides of the pyramid, the unhappy victim threw away his gay chaplets of flowers and broke in pieces his musical instruments. ... On the summit he was received by six priests, whose long and matted locks flowed in disorder over their sable robes, covered with hieroglyphic scrolls of mystic import. They led him to the sacrificial stone, a huge block of jasper, with its upper surface somewhat convex. On this ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... his face, and showed her Travis: haggard, hollow-eyed, soaked with ditch-water, and matted with mud, looking as if he had been dragged bodily through the ditch-bank, like thread through ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... at the pleasure of the inmates, through and through, and the piazzas were so arranged that there was not a single apartment in it into which the sun could not look, through one window or another, once at least in the twenty-four hours. The floors were tiled, ingrained, oiled, matted,—everything but carpeted, except that of the state drawing-room; and there the Wilton had a covering over it, removed, as I afterwards found, only on occasions of state. The whole atmosphere seemed full of health, purity, cheerfulness, warmth, and brightness. Brilliant flowers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... the largest of the dead pines was a large black bear, reared back on his haunches and striking with both paws viciously at some unseen foe. The hair of muzzle, head and paws was matted and plastered with some thick liquid, giving him a curious frowsy appearance. He was evidently in a towering rage but it was also apparent that he was suffering great pain, his ferocious growls being interspersed with long, low, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... will describe one out of many that I saw, which will serve as a specimen of the rest. Let us ascend the rickety staircase. The atmosphere is intolerably foul, and you feel that a week's confinement in such a den would cause your death. Well, these are the beds; a heap of straw, matted with long service, and a filthily foul rug for a coverlet. The sleepers have no other covering, in summer or winter. These beds change their occupants, perhaps, every night; for a tramper seldom sleeps two consecutive nights in the same place. Do not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... closer, their small dark bodies crowding the walk, six of them, chattering, leaping, cruel mouths open, eyes glittering under the moon. Closer. The shrill pipings increased, rose in volume. Closer. Now he could make out their sharp teeth and matted hair. Only a few feet from the car ... His hand was moist on the handle of the automatic; his heart thundered against his chest. Seconds ...
— Small World • William F. Nolan
... mantle of leafage, impervious to sunlight, covers the Isle of Timana, creating a region of perpetual dimness from western beach to eastern precipice, where orchids cling and palms peer on rocks below. All the vegetation is matted and interwoven, only the topmost branches of the milkwood escaping from the clinging, aspiring vines. Tradition asserts that not many years since Timana was much favoured by nutmeg pigeons, now sparsely ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... wheat come up monophyllous, but peas, beans, and chick peas polyphyllous. All leguminous plants have a single woody root, from which grow slender side roots ... but wheat, barley, and the other cereals have numerous slender roots by which they are matted together.... There is a contrast between these two kinds; the leguminous plants have a single root and have many side-growths above from the [single] stem ... while the cereals have many roots and send up many shoots, but these ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the bare windswept summit. The crumpled ground was matted with coarse grass, almost too poor for sheep-feed. The camp-fire still blazed; near it a bagpipe crooned; now and again a horse shook in its harness. The moon whipped out for a moment, and then it was ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... food for hungry mouths being prepared, there was in her, even as a child, a hunger for the life of the spirit. In her dreams women, beautifully gowned and with rings on their hands, came to brush the wet, matted hair back from her forehead. Across the little wooden bridge before her eyes came wonderful men, women, and children. The children ran forward. They cried out to her. She thought of them as brothers and sisters who were to come to live in the farmhouse ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... was unafraid of this big-bodied, black-browed men with the hairy-matted hands and fingers. She held up her ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... look upwards among the dense leaves of a gigantic maple tree whose lower branches were matted with twining ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... such that the crows gasped on the hedges; for she wanted to gather flowers for a garland she designed to wear, and which was also to be blue and yellow. Towards evening she came home with her apron filled with all manner of flowers; but her hair was quite wet, and hung all matted about her shoulders. (My God, my God, was everything to come together to destroy me, wretched man that I am!) I asked, therefore, where she had been that her hair was so wet and matted: whereupon she answered that she had gathered flowers round the Koelpin, and from thence ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... suppose them to be ordinary linsey-woolsey, are made at Kidderminster, dyed in the country, and painted, or watered, at London; the chairs, if of cane, are made at London; the ordinary matted chairs, perhaps in the place where they live; tables, chests of drawers, &c., made at London; as also looking-glass; bedding, &c., the curtains, suppose of serge from Taunton and Exeter, or of camblets, from Norwich, ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... watched—fascinated—every movement of the sleek black panther, and of those fair-skinned giants trying to escape from death; she watched the stealthy approach of the beast toward its prey; she watched, motionless and still, the while great beads of perspiration matted the fair ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... carefully as was possible from the poor fellows. Those who were too bad to go to the bathroom were washed where they lay. One orderly with soap and razors shaved every hair from each; and several plied clippers on the matted heads. Outside was one electric lamp which threw strong lights and darker shadows, making a veritable Rembrandt of the scene, lighting up the white clad forms of the assistants who were drawing out the stretchers, the big square end of the ambulance ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... comes Gurnemanz, to be recognized as a knight of the Grail only by the straight under-tunic of the Order. He has heard a groan, not to be mistaken for the cry of a hurt animal. As it is repeated, it strikes his ear as a sound known to him of old. Anxiously searching among the matted thorn-trees, he discovers Kundry, as once before, rigid and to all appearance dead. He chafes and calls and brings her back to consciousness. She is the Kundry of the first act, but so changed,—pale with the strained pallor of one lately exorcised; the wildness ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... large city a few years ago a man stood at the side door of a saloon at two o'clock in the morning. His clothes were worn and the matted hair hung about his face. He waited, hoping some one would come along and give him the price of a drink. Two young men, one of them a reporter on a leading daily, came down the street. As they neared the poor fellow, one said to the other: "Did ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... rain and mud, hidden under muddy blankets, lay there in rows upon the brick floor. Sometimes the heads were entirely covered; sometimes the eyes were bandaged; sometimes the pale faces, crowned with matted, muddy hair, turned restlessly from side to side, and parched lips asked for a sip of water. Then one by one the stretchers with their human burden would be carried to the tables in the dressing room. ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... some months before was continued This last consists of our expedition led by Miss Jackson, which twice a week visits an unpleasant little village not far from our gates. The students wash the children, which is not at all a delightful task, attend to sore eyes and matted hair and teach them games and songs, and chat with the village women about household hygiene and how to keep out of debt. One of our Sunday Schools is in this village, too, so by this time the students are welcome visitors, and whether they do ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... another's eyes. Kitty's charming face is worn and pallid, and the hand which clutches her shawl is trembling nervously as she gazes at her old lover. There he stands, dressed in old black clothes, worn and tattered looking, with his fair auburn hair all tangled and matted; his chin covered with a short stubbly beard of some weeks' growth, and his face gaunt and haggard-looking—the very same appearance as he had when he landed in Australia. Then he sought to preserve his liberty; now he is seeking to preserve his life. They ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... appearance to that feature. The man's frame was bony and powerful; the loose sheepskin jacket he wore was thrown open, and through the imperfectly fastened shirt-front, it might be seen that his breast was covered with a thick felt of matted hair. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... The matted pulp, now having sufficient body, passes on between two rolls covered with felt which deliver the web of damp paper upon an endless belt of moist felt, while the "wire" passes under and back to continue a fresh supply. The paper ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... drowned mice and an unhappy squirrel, all as dead as doornails, and horribly mauled by the sea and the breakers. Nor did we ever get a snake, a lizard, a frog, or a fresh-water fish, whose eggs I at first fondly supposed might occasionally be transported to us on bits of floating trees or matted turf, torn by floods from those prehistoric Lusitanian or African forests. No such luck was ours. Not a single terrestrial vertebrate of any sort appeared upon our shores before the advent of man with his domestic animals, who played havoc at once ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... by the labours of the beaver, which, by damming up the stream, had inundated a portion of the valley. The place was overgrown with woods and thickets, so closely matted and entangled that it was impossible to see ten paces ahead, and the three associates in peril had to crawl along, one after another, making their way by putting the branches and vines aside, but doing it with great caution, lest they should attract the eye of some lurking marksman. They ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... Elizabeth had neglected to have Jan's hair clipped. Maybe she told the servants to have it cut. Now, the long fur heated and worried the dog constantly and the fleas nearly drove him mad. Day and night, he bit and scratched, tearing out tufts of matted hair until raw, bleeding spots made his body a mass of sores. Each day he grew more savage. He hated every one now; the monks who had sold him, Mr. Pixley who had taken him from the Hospice, Miss Elizabeth who had deserted him, and the servants ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... our horses. He hardly moaned at all; from time to time he opened his eyes wide, looked round, as it were, in astonishment, and bit his lips, fast turning blue.... The lower part of his face was twitching; his hair was matted on his brow; his breast heaved irregularly: he was dying. The light shade of a young lime-tree glided softly ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... little glen of hickory and oak, through whose misty-mellow depths a small stream trickled, he paused at last and laid the boy upon a soft and matted bed of thick green myrtle, and brought water in his two hands to bathe the bruised head, whimpering the while. Then he chafed the small bare feet and warmed them in his own warm breast; and gathering ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Schroeter hurried out of his own room, and his grave face beamed with satisfaction. These were happy moments, indeed, and Anton was more moved than became such a traveled man. And on his way from the counting-house to his room, old Pluto sprang out impetuously, immoderately wagging his matted tail, so that Anton could hardly escape from his caresses. Arrived at his own door, a servant met him with a smile, and respectfully opened it. Anton gazed in wonder at the way in which ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... seen of the underlying integument. What was visible showed a skin browned by nature or by exposure. His hands were of even a darker brown, almost as dark as Cicely's own. A tangled mass of very curly black hair, matted with burs, dank with dew, and clotted with blood, fell partly over his forehead, on the edge of which, extending back into the hair, an ugly scalp wound was gaping, and, though apparently not just inflicted, was still bleeding slowly, as though reluctant to stop, in ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... weak and helpless, almost child-like in his dependence on me. I am the prop which holds up the last shreds of his self-respect. If I left him, he would drift lower and lower, I know it. Sometimes I pass some awful creature staggering along the sidewalks. He is dirty and uncared for. Long matted hair falls across his bleared and sunken eyes. I say to myself: 'But for you, Penelope Wells, that might be Julian.' And this gives me courage to take up ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... his Wife, Thus spake the homely Priest of Ennerdale. It was a July evening, and he sate Upon the long stone seat beneath the eaves Of his old cottage, as it chanced that day, Employ'd in winter's work. Upon the stone His Wife sate near him, teasing matted wool, While, from the twin cards tooth'd with glittering wire, He fed the spindle of his youngest child, Who turn'd her large round wheel in the open air With back and forward steps. Towards the field In which the parish chapel stood alone, Girt ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... mossy-sided ditch, up into the tall elm, winding in and out and round the branched buttercups, along the banks of the brook, far inside the deepest wood, away he wanders and despises nothing. His nest is under the rough grasses and the mosses of the mound; a mere tunnel beneath the fibres and matted surface. The hawthorn overhangs it, the fern grows by, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... disappointed. They hoped to wreak their vengeance on the whites, and had resolved to recapture the maiden. Where they expected to find them, the scene was silent and desolate. And they now sauntered about under the trees in the partial light of the moon that struggled through the matted branches, threatening in the most horrid manner the one who had thus baffled them. Some struck their tomahawks into the trunks of trees, while others brandished their knives, and uttered direful yells. The young chief stood in silence, with ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... was to bathe my head with warm water until the dry blood with which my hair was matted was cleared away as much as possible, and then the hair itself was shorn away until the wound was fairly exposed. The injury was then found to consist of a scalp wound some six inches in length, extending from a point above my right eye, just where the hair ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... the hateful shut-in isolation of her room Carley stretched forth her arms as if to embrace the vision. Pale close walls, gleaming placid stretches of brook, churning amber and white rapids, mossy banks and pine-matted ledges, the towers and turrets and ramparts where the eagles wheeled—she saw them all as beloved images lost to ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... purpose had I," the Jotun said with a touch of surliness. Pulling a bag from under his belt, he shook out of it upon the floor a mane of matted yellow hair. "If you want to know my errand, it is to bring you this. Yesterday it came to my ears that one of my men was suspected of having tried to give you poison through your wife's British thrall. I got them before me and questioned ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... human being, advanced from among the horsemen. He was a byraghee, or religious mendicant. His body was naked, with the exception of a narrow piece of cloth passed between the legs, and fastened before and behind to a string tied round the waist. His hair was long and matted, its bulk increased by plaits of other hair mixed with it. His body was smeared with the ashes of cowdung, giving it a most unearthly hue; while his inflamed and bleared eyes could scarcely be perceived amidst the mass of dirt which clung ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... things in profound gasps, staring at me with his yellow eyes out of a long, ravaged, brown face; he jerked his left arm; a pepper-and-salt matted beard hung almost into his lap; a dirty ragged blanket covered his legs. I had found him out in Bankok through that busybody Schomberg, the hotel-keeper, who had, confidentially, directed me where ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... stays supporting the mainmast of a line-of-battle ship; while others, sending out parallel, oblique, horizontal and perpendicular shoots in all directions, put you in mind of what travellers call a matted forest. Oftentimes a tree, above a hundred feet high, uprooted by the whirlwind, is stopped in its fall by these amazing cables of nature, and hence it is that you account for the phenomenon of seeing trees not ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... sport, and kept silence awhile, only to break it with gayer laughter, elate with life while half the world was stretched in white repose. At length they paused to rest in the lee of a cottage that seemed more like a hulk drawn up on shore than any house, but matted from ground to chimney in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... are objects!" Jim said, looking at his two companions. They were indeed; their faces were bruised and stained with blood, their hair matted together. Arthur's right eye was completely closed, and there was a huge swelling from a jagged bruise over the eyebrow. Jack had received a clear cut almost across the forehead, from which the blood was still oozing. Jim's face was swollen and bruised all over, and one of his ears was cut nearly ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... mosques, one of them, a handsome building, still entire; about twenty houses or so might be described as tenantable, but only a place of sepulchres could be more awful: it had been depopulated by the plague—all was silent, and the streets were matted with thick grass. In passing through an open space, which reminded me of a market-place, I heard the cuckoo with an indescribable sensation of pleasure mingled with solemnity. The sudden presence of a raven at a bridal banquet could scarcely ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... and looked at me sulkily from under his matted and tangled hair. "You are not of his ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... dwarf tree six feet high, with a twisted trunk sometimes as thick as a man's body; the latter, a stunted species of herbage, growing in ash-tinted spirals, only two inches from the ground, and giving the Plains an appearance of being matted with curled hair or gray corkscrews. Its other name is "buffalo-grass"; and in spite of its dinginess, with the assistance of the sage, converting all the Plains west of Fort Kearney into a model Quaker landscape, it is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... swift, confirming swoon. Up through the gates they bore her Christalan, Dressed in the garments of the neophyte, That erst were spotless white, but then were soiled, Bedraggled and dust-stained. His golden hair A matted mass, of sunny curls unkempt,— And yet how beautiful he was withal! Into the hall they brought and laid him down, While Agathar gave thanks, from her despair, That death had not yet conquered him. He lived, Although he spoke ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... that rendered it impossible to proceed, except in a very sinuous direction, and then with difficulty by pushing our horses between stiffly grown branches. Where no bushes grew the earth was naked, except where some tufts of a coarse matted weed resembling Spinifex impeded the horses, but seemed to be intended by Providence to bind down these desert sands. We saw blue ranges on our right, and I hoped that before we ascended Mount Granard we should cross some watercourse coming from them; but nothing of the kind ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... picture, here occupies a whole series of frescoes. And on this journey is concentrated all that the Renaissance knew of splendour, delightfulness, and romance. The green valleys, watered by twisting streams, with matted grasses, which Botticelli puts behind his enthroned Madonna and victorious Judith; Angelico's favourite hillsides with blossoming fruit trees and pointing cypresses; the mysterious firwoods—more mysterious for their remoteness on the high Apennines—which fascinate the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the conduct of their western cousins, which seldom came to town or even near a human residence in the country, but kept themselves ensconced in the matted copses in the banks of the Missouri River or in the deep hollows running back from the broad valley. In these sequestered haunts they were quite wary, usually scuttling out of sight at my approach. True, in Ohio many individuals also chose out-of-the-way places for habitats, ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... us down a matted passage and showed us at the end into a great library, all lined with bookcases and busts upon the top of them, where the squire and Dr. Livesey sat, pipe in hand, on either side ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... over their crafty, black eyes. They burlesqued womanhood in a way that stirred always a smoldering resentment against them. This particular squaw had nothing to commend her to his notice. She had a dirty red bandanna tied over her dirty, matted hair and under her grimy double chin. A grimy gray blanket was draped closely over her squat shoulders and formed a pouch behind, wherein the plump form of a papoose was cradled, a little red cap pulled ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... or garden, or by the roadside, on a horizontal bough or in the fork at a moderate height; sometimes in the top of the tallest trees along streams. It is bulky, ragged, and loose, but well capped and brimmed, consisting of twigs, grasses, rootlets, bits of vegetable down, and wool firmly matted together, and lined ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... from a catapult, had, unfortunately for himself, not broken a limb. That might have saved him. His head was the injured part, and Adams, running his fingers through the hair, matted with blood, came on the mischief. The right parietal bone was dented very slightly for a space nearly as broad as a penny. The skin was broken, but the bone itself, though depressed slightly, was ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... by the Thayers was a regular Italian villa. It had not been at all in order that suited English notions of comfort, or American either, when they moved in; but they had painted and matted and furnished, and filled the rooms with pretty things, pictures and statues and vases and flowers; till it looked now quite beautiful and festive. Its situation was perfect. The house stood high, on the shore overlooking the sea, with a full view of Vesuvius, and it was surrounded ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... which the palm-tree was conspicuous, and tended in a trifling degree to improve the view, which, to say the best of it, was unvaried and heavy. The low land, at least that part over which the fires had not passed, Was covered with a thickly matted broom-grass; and, where it was burnt off, the soil was observed to be composed of a hard and stiff clay, the surface of which bore the appearance of having been frequently inundated, either by high tides, or, more probably, by freshes in ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... through a dense scrub on a scanty ration of one biscuit and a slice of bacon per day. Here the count's exceeding hardihood stood them in good stead; so weakened were his companions that it was only by constant encouragement he got them along, and when forcing their way through the matted scrub, he often threw himself bodily on it, breaking a bath through for his weakened followers by the sheer weight of his body. They reached Western Port in a most wretched condition, having subsisted latterly on nothing but ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... that has been taken from me!' This, and more, he said in his rage. Ghastly horror took possession of me, as I beheld his features, streaming even yet with blood, and the ruthless hands, and the round space deprived of the eye, and his limbs, and his beard matted with human blood. Death was before my eyes, {and} yet that was the least of my woes. I imagined that[20] now he was about to seize hold of me, and that now he was on the very point of swallowing my vitals within his own; in my mind was fixed the impress of that time when ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... rolled his sheepskin cloak into a bundle for his shoulders. Behind him, from the road, came a man's voice, suddenly, singing a rollicking drinking-song. The singer brought up beside Nicanor, a black-haired man in a soiled leather jerkin and cap of shining brass, with a matted beard and narrow eyes, and a great leaf-shaped sword swinging at his thigh. This one hailed him ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... was a mighty man, greater than any Indian on the coast. His limbs were rugged as the wind-swept fir which grows upon the stormy outer shores. His thick and matted hair fell in tangles over his great shoulders, and his sullen eyes looked from out his forehead with angry stare. Cruel as the gaunt and hungry timber wolf, such was the mate of dread E-ish-so-oolth. Beside him, ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... he had last fallen down. His position, together with his torn and disarranged garments, had destroyed all semblance to human form save where a great limb protruded. His visage was terribly disfigured by the effects of drink, besides being partly concealed by his matted hair. ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... brave captain to reel and stagger as he plunged with a bound out into the matted cactus, without his tattered hat, like a wolf flying from the hounds? Had he trodden on a snake, or seen his compadre, or had that white finger waved him away? Yes, all three. But the interview with his one-eyed compadre ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... wife, he had disguised himself in the costume Otto had procured for him, which was that of a laborer about the quays; and, as he was a man who did perfectly whatever he attempted to do, he had succeeded in rendering himself unrecognizable. His hair and beard were rough and matted; his hands were soiled and grimed with dirt; he was really the abject wretch whose ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... age. They made each other happy and disappointed each other, they did good and evil to each other, they bored each other and grew accustomed to each other. As with all mortals, there were long stretches of life over which dulness lay like a covering of thickly-matted seaweed. Under this covering the waves of life could hardly move, could not break through to the light of day; only a mighty wave of joy or sorrow could break through it and send its spray up toward ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... and strode away, leaving the dog on watch to mark the place. Just below a water-hole near by was a place thickly covered with dry marsh grass, all combed over by the wind and matted down like a thatched roof, beneath which shelter opossums and rabbits ran about in tunnels of their own making. To this place he went, and having grabbed a handful of hay from the convenient mouth of a burrow, he returned ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... same time a tall, heavy man came into the light, and approached the two. Johel was powerfully built, but he looked broken down and troubled. His jacket, without sleeves, was dirty and ragged, his bare feet cut and bruised, the fiery red hair matted, and the mouth swollen. There was something defiant in his looks, and yet he seemed as if he could not look anybody straight in the face. He went near the table to take a pinch of onion to season the bread he was holding ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... lilac daisies and the delicate sea-lavender. Scores of tiny plants are turning scarlet on the brown moist earth; and when the sun goes down behind the Euganean hills, his crimson canopy of cloud, reflected on these shallows, muddy shoals, and wilderness of matted weeds, converts the common earth into a fairyland of fabulous dyes. Purple, violet, and rose are spread around us. In front stretches the lagoon, tinted with a pale light from the east, and beyond this pallid mirror shines Venice—a long ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... forces participated. Before advancing at Chateau Thierry the Germans had fortified their position in Belleau Woods which they had previously occupied. In the black recesses of this woods they established nest after nest of machine guns and in the jungle of matted underbrush, of vines, of heavy foliage they had placed themselves in a position they believed impregnable. The battle of Chateau Thierry was not rendered secure until the Germans were driven from Belleau Woods. And so for the next three weeks the battle of Belleau Woods ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... and the attics, with curious dormer windows, still higher. We come down again to the first floor. A long matted passage runs from one end of the house to the other. It sinks half a step where the newer portion is joined on. This part, containing in all four rooms, two here and two below, was built in July, 1793, as a rudely scratched tablet on the wall ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... here that it is specially true of him, if of no writer else, that the style was the man. The most vital thing he invented was a new style: founded on the patient unravelling of the tangled Victorian ideas, as if they were matted hair under a comb. He did not mind how elaborately long he made a sentence, so long as he made it clear. He would constantly repeat whole phrases word for word in the same sentence, rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation. His genius ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... his Lady were lodged on one side of the house, and she whom the gentleman loved more than himself on the other. Her apartment was so well arranged, tapestried above and matted below,(4) that it was impossible to perceive a trap-door which was by the side of her bed, and which opened into a room beneath, that was ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... moment it was plain that the occupant of the chair had been disturbed by the commotion from without, and had suddenly risen to his feet, for he stood grasping the oaken arms, his wild gray hair hanging in matted masses about his seamed and wrinkled face, and his hollow eyes, in which a fierce light blazed, turned upon the intruders in ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... who does not behold A Venus, rising from the sea of tears, Up to her native, Earth-illuming spheres? Her hair, long matted, is a flow of gold Which even the Sun might wear and feel not cold; And, oh, her heavenly smile at doubts and fears, As when she, at all depths, raised to her ears, Shells of ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... behind him penetrated even the jungle growth as a faint luminosity. Presently he writhed to a position in which he could strike a match. A thick, matted mass of climbing vines swung from the upper branches not a yard from his fingertips. Bell cursed again, frantically, and clutched at it wildly. Presently his absurd kickings set him to swaying. He redoubled his efforts ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... little devils I ever saw, he was superlative. He squinted terribly; his hair was greyish and matted with filth; he was certainly not more than four feet and a half high, and he carried a bow two feet longer than himself. He could speak no language but his own, which throughout the Veddah country is much the same, ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... said, on a camp bed, dressed in his black doublet, booted, unbelted, with his felt hat beside him, lay the king, overcome by sleep and fatigue. They advanced, and Athos, who was the first to enter, gazed a moment in silence on that pale and noble face, framed in its long and now untidy, matted hair, the blue veins showing through the transparent temples, his eyes seemingly ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... feet. The floor of the house, which is made first, was 23 feet long and about 11 broad; a narrow verandah is left at each end, and the inside length of the house is 18 feet, the breadth 10 feet, the height to the ridge pole 6 feet. The floor was of bamboo matted, the roof and sides of palm-leaf thatch. The ladders were remarkable contrivances: a pole in the centre, from 4 to 6 inches in diameter, to which were lashed by vines cross pieces of wood, about two feet long. To steady these and hold on by were double shrouds of supple-jacks. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ground, though, she, poor soul, was not making the faintest struggle. Overwrought nature had at last peremptorily asserted herself, and she lay there in a dead swoon: her eyes circled by deep purple lines, that told of long, sleepless nights, her hair matted and damp round her forehead, her lips parted in a sharp curve that spoke of ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... then we would come upon little fires, discreetly screened, built at the entrances to dugouts burrowed from the trench-walls. Over these fires soldiers in flat caps and belted greatcoats were cooking their evening meal. I had expected to see unkempt men wearing sheepskin caps, men with flat noses and matted beards, but instead I found clean-shaven, splendidly set-up giants, with the pink skins that come from perfect cleanliness and perfect health. Following the direction of the arrows on signs printed in both French and Russian, we at last reached the fire-trench, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... repeated. But the Countess recovered herself and with a little gesture bade him go on. He told his story haltingly, clinging to the Colonel to prevent himself from falling, his matted head rolling weakly from side to side. When he had finished a furious clamor broke forth from the men, the women, and the children. Neri commanded them roughly ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... pushed forward, dripping wet, drenched to the skin with the recent shower, and stumbling every now and then as their feet became entangled in the long matted grass; now swerving to the right to avoid a clump of bush, then to the left for the same purpose; but ever keeping one particular star, low down on the horizon, as nearly straight ahead as possible. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... away sharply to the right, and cut through a wide avenue of enormous pine trees, and along this he bustled his horse. Half a mile further on the avenue widened. The solemn depths about him lightened, and patches of sunlight shone down into them and lit up the matted underlay of rotting cones and ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... to worldly pleasures, and for this he did penance by living for a number of years in a cave in a desert region. The penitent St. Jerome was a popular devotional subject in early Christian art. "The scene is generally a wild rocky solitude; St. Jerome, half-naked, emaciated, with matted hair and beard, is seen on his knees before a crucifix, beating his breast with a stone." (Mrs. Jameson, Sacred ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... blown him away," said the wind; "but I only blew in the ruddy fire, and followed him through the door in to where his daughters were freezing. His dress was covered with ashes; they were to be seen in his beard, and in his matted hair. He raised his head proudly, stretched forth his rich treasure in the fragile glass, and 'Won—won! gold!' he cried, as he held high in the air the glass that glittered in the dazzling sunshine. But his hand shook, and the alchemical glass fell to the ground, and ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... a time I took the matted stairway, which was reckless speed, for the shell-paned windows were shut, and the awnings pulled down to keep out the heat of the blinding sun, making it quite dark. But I was bound to capture the little red-headed man, thrash him soundly, make him ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... one of the children would run out and open the gate; but instead of any one of them running out as soon as they hear the wheels, which would be quite time enough, what does Giles do but set all his ragged brats, with dirty faces, matted locks, and naked feet and legs, to lie all day upon a sand-bank hard by the gate, waiting for the slender chance of what may be picked up from travellers. At the sound of a carriage, a whole covey of these little scarecrows start up, rush to the gate, and all at once thrust out their ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... her eyes to rove about the shack. A slight movement in the corner attracted her attention. There, like a forlorn little lamb, a tight rag about her mouth, her curls matted and damp, crouched Elsie Waldstricker. Instantly, Tess recognized her and her heart pumped with joy. Surely, her prayer had been answered! Here was her opportunity! The child was suffering, she could see that, but the very extremity of torture could hardly repay ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... bats flew past us in the artificial darkness; and there were snakes too, ugly spotted things, which hissed at us, and put out their double tongues, and then coiled themselves away in the dim recesses of the forest. But on we went, climbing with difficulty over prostrate firs, or breaking through matted juniper, and still the spring was not, though we were "far away in the woods." But still we climbed on, through swamp and jungle, till we tore our dresses to pieces, and our hats got pulled off in a tree and some of our hair ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... short and muscular of build, with long hair and beards tangled and matted with filth. Their heads, however, were shapely, and their eyes, though fierce and warlike, ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... eyes and smelled the savor of them. Presently the cart-ruts disappeared in fine grass all bediamonded, knobbed with heather, sprouting rusty-red, and sprinkled with tussocks of coarser grass, whereon green blades sprang up above the dead ones, where they struggled, matted and bleached and sere. Rabbits flashed here and there, the white under-side of their little scuts twinkling through the gorse; and then the birds woke up; a thrush sang low, sleepy notes from the heart of a whitethorn; yellowhammers piped their mournful calls ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... most human beings, and even those did not come to him readily. In his pulpit he sought for them and struggled with them until drops of perspiration rolled from his forehead and fell upon his coarse, matted brown beard. But he believed what he said, and language was so little an accomplishment with him that he was not tempted to say more than he believed. He had been a drummer boy in the Civil War, on the losing side, and he was ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... even as he spoke he stepped forward and stopped the bearers. He brushed aside the matted hair ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Lawrence, and committed themselves to the current that was to bear them they knew not whither,—perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the South Sea or the Gulf of California. They glided calmly down the tranquil stream, by islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grape-vines; by forests, groves, and prairies,—the parks and pleasure-grounds of a prodigal nature; by thickets and marshes and broad bare sand-bars; under the shadowing trees, between whose tops looked ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin |
