"Scraggy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 153; 457' to Circle. The promise of yesterday has been fulfilled, the swell has continued to subside, and this afternoon we go so steadily that we have much comfort. I am truly thankful mainly for the sake of the ponies; poor things, they look thin and scraggy enough, but generally brighter and fitter. There is no doubt the forecastle is a bad place for them, but in any case some must have gone there. The four midship ponies, which were expected to be subject to the worst conditions, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... "dreary moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred "the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... led us directly into the grove, where we were obliged to dismount, as the low, scraggy branches would not permit our riding beneath them. Securing our animals, we followed the trail on foot for some distance, when Jerry called my attention to a number of ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... dreadfully ashamed of the way the Saskatchewan weather was behaving after all her boasting. She was thin at the best of times, but now she grew positively scraggy with the worry of it. I am afraid I took an unholy delight in teasing her, and abused the western weather even more than ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... no more, or if he did his words failed to reach M. Zola. The reins were jerked, the scraggy night-horse broke into a spasmodic trot turned out of the station, and pulled up in front of the caravansary which an eminent butcher has ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... Representative of Christ on earth, he had watched with sickening soul all the tawdry ceremonial so far removed from the simplicity of Christ's commands,—he had stared dully, till his brows ached, at the poor, feeble, scraggy old man with the pale, withered face and dark eyes, who was chosen to represent a "Manifestation of the Deity" to his idolatrous followers;—and as he thought of all the poverty, sorrow, pain, perplexity, and bewilderment of the "lost sheep" who were wandering ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... itself, and fly away! Long she devised: new plans the old ones chase, Until at last she hit upon a place. Was't VENUS that the strange concealment planned, Or rather PLUTUS'S irreverent hand? Good MRS. JONES was of a scraggy make; But when did woman vanity forsake? What nature sternly to her form denied, A Bustle's ample aid had well supplied, Within whose vasty depths ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... wife of a Lord can be. Lord Harold Gray's a sure enough Lord, and she's his wife but—but a chippy, just the same; that's what she is, in spite of the Gray emeralds and that great Gray rose diamond she wears on the tiniest chain around her scraggy neck. Do you know, Mag Monahan, that this Lady Harold Gray was just a chorus girl—and a sweet chorus it must have been if she sang there!—when she ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... him in the French language in a dark parlour smelling of onions. And oh! issuing from the adjoining dining-room (where was a dingy vision of a feast and pewter pots upon a darkling tablecloth), could that lean, scraggy, old, beetle-browed yellow face, who cried, "Ou es tu donc, maman?" with such a shrill nasal voice—could that elderly vixen be that blooming and divine Saltarelli? Clive drew her picture as she was, and a likeness of Madame Rogomme, her mamma; a Mosaic ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he had met on the Bowery now showed his real character, and before Herbert could further defend himself, he was pounced upon by him and a villainous looking man with a scraggy red beard and most repulsive features. They threw a thick black cloth over his head, and, after binding his hands firmly together, thrust him into a dark vault, ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... homeward by the brink of the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades. "Ah, delightful!" March took off his hat as if ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the edge of the high bluff entered a grove of scraggy pitch pines about a mile from the lighthouse and the picnic ground. Albert stalked gloomily through the shadows of the little grove and emerged on the other side. There he saw another person ahead of him on the path. This other person ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... coming from such humble family trees as the despised onion. Wild spikenard, with its crown of tiny white flowers, also reproduced beautifully in the blue-print. The Seal of Solomon and purple Twisted Stalk made scraggy ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... leisure for admiring the scenery; the light native cart, or ekka, consisting of a somewhat small body screened by a wide white hood, and capable of holding far more luggage than would at first sight seem possible, and drawn by a scraggy-looking but much enduring little horse tied up by a wild and complicated system of harness (chiefly consisting of bits of old rope) between a pair ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... you little josher! You'll be round chuckin' me under the chin before the lights come on. Gee! There goes the bell again! I'll bet my switch it's that scraggy old hen in forty-four, wantin' me to run out and buy her some hair pins, or to hook her up so she'll look like a prize winner at a wasp show. She makes me sick, she does! But I'll—Yes Ma'am! Coming right away," she answered in a honeyed voice, as the lady guest was heard calling her ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... or life, I've had to grapple and struggle for. Other men grow, inhale their being, like yonder tree God planted and watered. I think sometimes He forgot me,"—with a curious woman's tremor in his voice, gone in an instant. "I scrambled up like that scraggy parasite, without a root. Do you know now why I am sharp, wary, suspicious, doubt if there be a God? Grey," turning fiercely, "I am tired of this. God did make me. I want rest. I want love, peace, religion, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... shield nor spear, but only a black rod to which was bound the tail of a wildebeeste. Except for his moocha he was almost naked, and into his grey hair was woven a polished ring of black gum, from which hung several little bladders. Upon his scraggy neck was a necklace of baboon's teeth and amulets, whilst above the moocha was twisted a snake that might have been either ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... eradicate him from the soil as a burden if not a nuisance. That he makes a resort far more beautiful to the eye than the boarder there is no denying. He covers it with beautiful houses; he converts the scraggy, yellow pastures into smooth, green lawns; he fills the rock crevices with flowers; he introduces better food and neater clothing and the latest dodges in plumbing. But these things are only for the few—in fact, the very few. An area which supports a hundred happy ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... down. Right across from Weissenfels, lapped in this crook of the Saale, or washed by it on south side and on east, rises, with extreme laziness, a dull circular lump of country, six or eight miles in diameter; with Rossbach and half a dozen other scraggy sleepy Hamlets scattered on it;—which, till the morning of Saturday, 5th November, 1757, had not been notable to any visitor. The topmost point or points, for there are two (not discoverable except by tradition and guess), the country people do call Hills, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... further away the mountains were very dark against a yellow line of sky. Marian continued her way thoughtfully toward the garden, turned off before she reached the gate and climbed a ladder which leaned against the side of the old brick wall. From the ladder one could reach a long limb of a scraggy apple tree upon which hung early apples nearly ripe. Marian went up the ladder very carefully, taking care not to catch her frock upon a nail or a projecting twig as she crept along the stout limb to settle herself in ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... clearing on the battlefield called the "Peach Orchard" field. It was of irregular shape, and about fifteen or twenty acres in extent, as I remember. However, I cannot now be sure as to the exact size. It got its name, probably, from the fact that there were on it a few scraggy peach trees. The Union troops on Sunday had a strong line in the woods just north of the field, and the Confederates made four successive charges across this open space on our line, all of which were repulsed with frightful slaughter. I walked all over this ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... Muckle Friday, when the performers were gay and stout, and even the horses had flesh on their bones; and again in the "back-end" of the year, when cold and hunger had taken the blood from their faces, and the scraggy dogs that whined at their side were lashed for licking the paint off the caravans. While the storm-stead show was in the vicinity the villages suffered from an invasion of these dogs. Nothing told more truly the dreadful tale of the showman's life in winter. Sam'l Mann's was a big show, ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... himself so closely pursued that he seemed to have no resource but to turn and dash his coat into the dog's face. That gave him an instant's reprieve; then Lion was upon him again; and he had just time to leap to the low limb of a scraggy oak-tree, and swing his lower limbs free from the ground, when the fierce eyes and red tongue were upon ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... same flat open forest, with scraggy trees and grass three feet long in tufts. Came to a Boma. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... academy upon what are called "mutual principles"—that is to say, the expenses of his board and schooling were defrayed by his father in goods, not money; and he stood there—almost at the bottom of the school—in his scraggy corduroys and jacket, through the seams of which his great big bones were bursting, as the representative of so many pounds of tea, candles, sugar, mottled-soap, plums (of which a very mild proportion was supplied for the ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the lady Ayisha going down some of those dark places for all the wealth of ancient Bagdad. Her shibrayah pitched and rolled like a small boat in a big sea, and whenever a rock leaned out over the narrow trail, or a scraggy old thorn branch swung, it was by a combination of luck and good carpentry that she was saved from being pitched down under the following camel's feet. Whoever made that shibrayah could have built ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... patients who have been quite given over by their physicians. As sleep refreshes the weary limbs of toil, so does this milk fill up the wasted limbs and restore the vanished strength. Strange is it to see the herds feeding on this abundant pasture. They look as if it did not profit them at all. Thin and scraggy, as they wander through the thickets they look like the patients who seek their aid; yet their milk is so thick that it sticks ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... closed tightly. "Just my luck. I've never tasted it but once, and it's perfectly grand, Uncle Winthrop. Mother had it for lunch the day that scraggy-looking woman and her daughter were here from London. Mother said she was Lady somebody, but our cook is much nicer-looking on Sundays. ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... was small and miserable, with a few scraggy trees bowing low, like all trees of Sistan, towards the S.S.E., owing to the severe, N.N.W. winds. Here instead of the everlasting domes, flat roofs were again visible—wood being, no doubt, available close at hand. More curious, however, were actual gable roofs, the first I had noticed in ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the town led us over a succession of scraggy hills, with cultivation in the bottoms, and some straggling vineyards, not very flourishing. The walnut trees in the glens, and small inclosures mixed with copse wood, reminded us more of English or Welsh scenery than anything we had before seen in either of the Mediterranean islands. After ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... all are dripping with the dew, Her red-heeled shoes are torn, and stained with mire, Her tender arms the angry sharpness rue Of many a scraggy thorn and envious brier; And poor Bopeep, with no sweet pity nigh her, Wrings her small hands, and ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... the Traveller's Delight the ground dipped down into a hollow, which, even in daylight, was completely screened from the view of any one within the house or about the yard by a great clump or patch of scraggy furze bushes. In this secluded spot there stood a lime-kiln, one of those built somewhat like a low circular tower, with gaping mouth and open roof; but for many a day the kiln had not been used—not since the present tenant entered on possession of the farm at Hanleigh Heath. During ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... it will be expressed in the lineaments of his face. How much the constant use of oatmeal could produce such an effect, was plainly visible in the countenances of McGibbet and his lady-love. Both had an unmistakable equine cast; McGibbet, wild, scraggy, and scrubby, with a tuft on his poll that would not have been out of place between the ears of a plough-horse, stared at us, just as such an animal would naturally over the top of a fence; while his gentle mate, who had more of ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... were the men: busy at this moment with hurling wooden balls along the alley, at the further end of which a hollow-eyed scraggy youth, in shirt and rough linen trousers, was employed in propping up again the fallen nine-pins. Squire John Boatfield had ridden over from Eastry, Sir Timothy Harrison had come in his aunt's coach, and young Squire Pyncheon with his ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... red Zouave breeches and leggings; blue Federal caps, Federal buttons, or Federal blouses; these were the spoils of anterior battles, and had been stripped from the slain. Most of the captives were of the appearances denominated "scraggy" or "knotty." They were brown, brawny, and wiry, and their countenances were intense, fierce, and animal. They came from North Carolina, the poorest and least enterprising Southern State, and ignorance, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... fighters, half-civilized, half-savage, and almost entirely supported by the subsidies they receive. Nearly all of the able-bodied men are under arms. A few, who are too old or too young to fight, remain at home and look after the cattle and the scraggy gardens upon the gravelly hillsides. The women are as hardy and as enduring as the men and are taught to handle the rifle. The British authorities are confident of the loyalty of the Afridis and believe that the present arrangement would be absolutely ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... the old woman, becoming suddenly grave, and laying her thin scraggy hand on the man's arm; "why do you call ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... way in the bush. She knew it, and was very frightened. She was too frightened in fact to cry, but stood in the middle of a little dry, bare space, looking around her at the scraggy growths of prickly shrubs that had torn her little dress to rags, scratched her bare legs and feet till they bled, and pricked her hands and arms as she had pushed madly through the bushes, for hours, seeking her home. Sometimes she looked up to the sky. But little of it could be seen because ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... the cut on the opposite page are those you should have, and if you get two of each, you will find them useful in all sorts of places. When you buy them, see that they are elastic and firm, that they come naturally and easily to a good point, without any scraggy hairs. Test them by moistening them, and then pressing the point on the thumb-nail. They should bend evenly through the whole length of the hair. Reject any which seem "weak in the back." If it lays flat toward the point and bends all in one place near the ferrule, it is ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... shrubs or flower-beds. Beyond was a smooth, rather rapid slope towards a quiet river, beyond which there rose again a beautiful green field, crowned above by a thick wood, ending at the top in some scraggy pine-trees, with scanty dark foliage at the top of their rude russet arms. Fine trees stood out here and there upon the slope of the field; and Captain Merrifield's fine sleeked cows were licking each other, or chewing ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The village of Itaga is situated in a deep mountain hollow, finely overlooking a large extent of cultivation. The people grow sweet potatoes, manioc—out of which tapioca is made—beans, and the holcus. Not one chicken could be purchased for love or money, and, besides grain, only a lean, scraggy specimen of a goat, a long time ago imported form ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... of the moment the only vision to which she could attain was that of the Misses Rodman begging for the pitiful job of teaching Italian in a young ladies' school. She remembered them vaguely—tall, scraggy, permanently girlish in dress and manner, and looking their true fifty only about the neck and eyes. With their mother they lived in a pretty villa on the Poggio Imperiale, and had called on her occasionally when she passed through Florence. The knowledge of being indebted to them, of ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... those who belonged to the gang. Soldiers were allowed about a pound of meat a day. This would have been luxury if the meat had been good, and if they had had anything else to eat with it. But a pound of bad beef, or of scraggy horse-flesh, or some times even of flabby salt cod-fish, with a quarter of a pound of bread, and nothing else but a little Indian corn, is not a good ration for an army. The Canadians were worse off still. In the spring the ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic[obs3]; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen|!, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c. (narrow) 203; granular &c. (powdery) 330; shrunk &c. 195; brevipennate[obs3]. Adv. in a small compass, in a nutshell; on a small ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... on a peak of the Cheat. Around it the mountain is glowing in the summer sun, and appears soft and green. A gauze of shimmering blue mantles the crest, darkens in the coves, and becomes quite black in the gorges. The rugged rocks and scraggy trees, if there be any, are at this distance invisible, and nothing is seen but what delights the eye and quickens ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... who married kings' daughters, and courtesans who built pyramids. Little Thais loved Ahmes like a father, like a mother, like a nurse, and like a dog. She followed the slave into the cellar when he went to fill the amphorae, and into the poultry-yard amongst the scraggy and ragged fowls, all beak, claws, and feathers, who flew swifter than eagles before the knife of the black cook. Often at night, on the straw, instead of sleeping, he built for Thais little water-mills, and ships no bigger than his hand, with ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... wall. There were several lots of pigs, of a bad but probably hardy sort—mostly black, round-backed, long-legged, and long-eared. In selling the animals, there was the usual chaffering, in shrill patois, at the top of the voice—the seller of some poor scraggy beast extolling its merits, the intending buyer running it down as a "miserable bossu," &c., and disputing every point raised in its behalf, until the contest of words rose to such a height—men, women, and even children, on both sides, taking part in it—that ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... moment to stretch out one of her scraggy hands, which was worn and thin at the fingertips, and pricked with the sharp points ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... here there were two exquisite perspectives. The trees and houses were so arranged that a long, arrowy ray of light penetrated through a narrow space over to a small rise of ground called Berry Hill on account of its harvest of blueberries. Two old, scraggy, immense oak-trees still remained; and she used to watch them from their first faint green to the blood-red and copper tints of autumn, when the sun shone through them. Down behind he dropped when the day was done; sometimes a ball of fire, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... spot and full of charm for the two little girls whose fancies pictured all sorts of possible things. The hollows, in the scraggy willows bending over the stream, might be the hiding-places of nymphs or fairies; yonder soft sward dotted with buttercups and daisies, might be the favorite spot for a midnight revel; among those rocks queer little gnomes might live. Florence was ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... among these carcases was every kind of water-side plunderer, pulling the horns out, getting the hides off, chopping the hoofs with poleaxes, etc. etc., attended by no end of donkey carts, and spectral horses with scraggy necks, galloping wildly up and down as if there were something maddening in the stench. I never beheld such ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... country-house; and a glance assures us that to the former nation the country is a dernier ressort, and not an endeared seclusion. Yet they romance, in their way, on rural subjects: "A la campagne," says one of their poets, "ou chaque feuille qui tombe est une elegie toute faite." Through an avenue of scraggy poplars we approach a dilapidated chateau, whose owner is playing dominoes at the cafe of the nearest provincial town, or exhausting the sparse revenues of the estate at the theatres, roulette-tables, or balls of Paris. People ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he traversed, as has been said, the wooded hilltop behind his home, which was reached by various pretty climbing paths that crept under larches and pines, and scraggy, goat-like apple-trees. We could catch sight of him going back and forth up there, with now and then a pale blue gleam of sky among the trees, against which his figure passed clear. Along this path, made by his own steps only, he thought out the tragedy of "Septimius Felton," who buried the ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop |
