"Scrubby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shoulder, Ted Flaggan pursued his way, moralising as he went, until he came to a rugged hollow among the hills, in which was a chaos of large stones, mingled with scrubby bushes. Here he paused again, and the wrinkles of perplexity returned to his brow, as he peered ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... being a strayer, he managed to tie him to a small, scrubby bush, after which he moved forward, with caution and stealth, in the direction whence came the whinny that had arrested his attention. His purpose was to prevent the other animal discovering his approach—an exceedingly difficult task, as the mustangs of the Southwest are among the very ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... time, and as we descended into the desert, the air became warmer, the scrubby cedar growth began to fail, and the bunches of sage were few and far between. I turned often to gaze back at the San Francisco peaks. The snowcapped tips glistened and grew higher, and stood out in startling ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... twelve. The boy's face was unimpressive to a degree positively remarkable. His mother pushed him forward and took off his hat, and then I perceived the reason for this. He had no eyebrows whatever, and of his hair nothing remained but a scrubby dust, giving to his head the appearance of a hard-boiled egg, skinned and sprinkled with ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... of wintry grandeur and solitude, rises before my eyes. I see the frozen, snow-covered waste of the Lake of the Woods, the surrounding evergreen forests and towering hills, the low leaden sky overhead. Along the edge of the scrubby-timbered shore, five husky dogs come at a trot, harnessed in single file to a sledge. The dogs are short-legged and very hairy, with long snouts, sharp-pointed ears, and the tails of wolves; the sledge is a simple toboggan made of two pieces of birch nine feet in length, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... could see the blue, serrated ridge of highlands beyond which the surveyor has never yet run his lines,—beyond which the surveyor's lines would be superfluous, indeed, and futile; for the soil is of the barren, rocky kind, and the timber of the scrubby. Not quite so savage is this frontier, indeed, as the wild precincts described by the Nebraska editor, whose meditations for a leader used to be cut short, occasionally, by the bellowing of the shaggy bison ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... were thus engaged I thought I heard a sound of crying. We both listened, and it came again. Leaving our tasks we followed the sound and behind a scrubby willow tree came upon a most beautiful young woman crouched on the ground weeping and moaning, and at the same time digging into the earth with a small wand as if in search of something. She did not appear to heed ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... foot of the sierra, at the debouchure of the canon. We could not follow the stream any farther, as there was no path by the channel. It would be necessary to pass over the ridge that formed the southern jaw of the chasm. There was a plain trail among scrubby pines; and, following our guide, we commenced ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... stopped—then went on a few steps—then stopped a second time, and made a sign for Leon to come up. Without speaking, he pointed to a little thicket of scrubby bushes, through the leaves of which they could just make out some large brown object perfectly at rest. That ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... yet, during the several hours of their journey, to take any pleasure in the scenery or in her mount. For in the first place there was nothing to see but scrubby little gnarled cedars and drab-looking rocks; and in the second this Indian pony she rode had discovered she was not an adept horsewoman and had proceeded to take advantage of the fact. It did not help Carley's ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... CUBSON, a podgy young man with small eyes and a scrubby moustache, wearing a tailless evening-coat and a wrinkled white ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... was the harbour, with its shipping, and beyond it the ocean; the town lay behind them, and on either side of the track with its lines of ruts there were plenty of green pasture and trees scattered here and there—monsters some seemed to be—and in the openings were great patches of short, scrubby growth. ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... malice between two houses, and Aunt Rebecca's wrong-headed freak of cutting the Macnamaras (for it was not 'snobbery,' and she would talk for hours on band-days publicly and familiarly with scrubby little Mrs. Toole), involved her innocent relations in scorn and ill-will; for this sort of offence, like Chinese treason, is not visited on the arch offender only, but according to a scale of consanguinity, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... pursued was one of 180 degrees and we soon fell in with the native path which we had quitted yesterday; but it now became wide, well beaten, and differing altogether by its permanent character from any I had seen in the southern portion of this continent. For the first five miles we traversed scrubby stony hills, thickly wooded with banksia trees; but the limestone here again cropped out and we entered a very fertile valley, running north and south and terminating in a larger one which drained the country from east to west. This valley is remarkable as containing one Xanthorrhoea (grass-tree) ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... it was too sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby trees, such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this little ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was the desolating and depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked and sodden,—wild, shagged with scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like satyrs that had been converted, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... himself before the blacksmith's forge. Beside it was a rickety, unpainted gate opening into a snake-fenced lane feathered here and there with scrubby little spruces. It ran down a bare hill, crossed a little ravine full of young white-stemmed birches, and up another bare hill to an equally bare crest where a farmhouse was perched—a farmhouse painted a stark, staring yellow and the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as possible and in a voice of such coolness that Miss Adair looked at him in astonishment and then at the assembled company with great timidity. With special trepidation did she regard Mr. Rooney, who had bobbed his scrubby, black-mopped head at her with no expression at all in his little black eyes, while he refused to ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... phenomenon—being, beyond all comparison the most faithful, attached, and affectionate animal that I have ever known; and that is saying much. He seems to think it necessary to atone for his ugliness by extra good conduct, and does so dance on his lame leg, and so wag his scrubby tail, that it does any one, who has a taste for happiness, good to look at him—so that he may now be said to stand on his own footing. We are all rather ashamed of him when strangers come in the way, and think it necessary to explain that he is May's pet; but amongst ourselves, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... these obvious and startling things, a thousand other interesting matters were afoot. In the mass and texture of the jungle grew many strange trees and shrubs. One most scrubby, fat and leafless tree, looking as though it were just about to give up a discouraged existence, surprised us by putting forth, apparently directly from its bloated wood, the most wonderful red blossoms. Another ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... verses, given up to such ferocious executioners. But these literary murderers, ready to destroy a comrade's book, are more pitiless than the Inquisition. There were two inquisitors more relentless than the others; first, the little scrubby fellow who claimed for his share all the houris of a Mussulman's palace; another, the great elegist from the provinces. Truly, his heartaches must have made him gain flesh, for very soon he was obliged to let out the strap ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... its dense thickets and scrubby clumps of trees, lay below in plain sight. Once hidden there, I would be hard to find. Picking up my rifle, I ran swiftly along the base of the slope and soon gained ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... me one of those absent-treatment stares and said he'd tell all the really interesting people he knew; and the damnedest lot of scrubby, dowdy, down-at-the-heels tatterdemalions presented his card at my private view that you ever saw outside an artist's rathskeller, a lower Fifth Avenue reception, or a varnishing day! By God, I can go to the bread-line ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... hunting for minerals had started forest-fires to level the ridges. The result was the burning-over of perhaps a hundred square miles of magnificent forest. The second growth which has come up is scrubby, a wilderness of young trees and chaparral, through which progress was ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... coachwork—if one may dignify it by such a phrase—which was made from packing cases, had a thousand creaks and one abominable squeak, which made conversation impossible. The scenery was all grey rock and little scrubby trees; the road was magnificent and wound and twisted about the mountain side like a whip lash. Driving down these curves was no amateur's game, and we saw immediately that our chauffeur knew his job. We came ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... cliffs on our right hand towering up to the sky like mountains. Before us a pool of inky water, all worming with odd lights and lines of blue fire, like flakes of phosphorus on a bath, and alive with the hissing of hundreds of snakes. Upon our left hand a scrubby thicket and a marsh beneath it, I make sure; Czerny's devils, who had shot the poor folks on the Santa Cruz, at our heels, and we but four against the lot of them. Would any man, I ask, have believed that he could walk into such a trap and get ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... in her little house lived her adopted son, Prokofyi, a butcher, a huge, clumsy fellow, of about thirty, with ginger hair and scrubby moustache. When he met me in the hall, he would silently and respectfully make way for me, and when he was drunk he would salute me with his whole hand. In the evenings he used to have supper, and through the wooden ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... beach about 8 a.m. and walked up to Stopford's Headquarters, as he had gone ashore the night before. They all seemed a very lifeless crew, with but little knowledge of the general situation and no spirit in them. We made our way on across some rocky scrubby country towards Brigade Headquarters; fairly heavy rifle fire was going on, and after about two miles bullets began to ping unpleasantly all round us. I persuaded Sir Ian to lie down behind a rock, much against his will, and went on myself ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... my regiment took a conspicuous part. The close of our own share in this contest is, as it were, burned into my memory with every least detail. It was about 6 P. M., when we found ourselves in line, under cover of a long, thin row of scrubby trees, beyond which lay a gentle slope, from which, again, rose a hill rather more abrupt, and crowned with an earthwork. We received orders to cross this space and take the fort in front, while a brigade on our right was to make a like movement ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... happiness in an English post-chaise properly driven; more exhilarating than a palanquin. 'Post equitem sedet atra cura,'—true only of such scrubby hacks as old Horace could have known. Black Care does not sit behind English posters, eh, my boy?" As he spoke this, the gentleman had twice let down the glass of the vehicle, and twice put ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to the uninstructed eye was—now in April—but a wilderness of scrubby stunted thorns. In the midst of it he found Mrs Bosenna, gloved, armed with a pair of secateurs, and engaged in cutting the thorns back to a ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... nut tree planting, unless the growers are provided with proper cultural directions. The tendency in the past has been to plant nut trees in out-of-the-way places, and let nature take her course. Nature took her course; the result, scrubby trees and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... hugs him; and he, who has subsisted on a bone and a pat till there he squats decrepit, he turns his grateful old eyes up to her, and has not a notion that she is hugging sad memories in him: Hero, Poet, Painter, in one scrubby one! Then is she buried, and the village hears languid howls, and there is a paragraph in the newspapers concerning the extraordinary ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... snow into drifts that left bare ground between, Marion stopped and listened, her head turned so that she could watch the winding trail behind her. She thought she heard the scrunch of Kate's feet down there, but she was not sure. She looked at the scrubby manzanita bushes at her right, chose her route and stepped widely to one side, where a bare spot showed between two bushes. Her left foot scraped the snow in making the awkward step, but she counted on Kate being unobserving enough to pass it over. She ducked behind a chunky young ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... uninhabited, but arrow heads and stone hatchets are sometimes found; and in places there are piles of stones supposed to have been made by the aborigines. Most of the growth is scrubby, ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... see at first; the banks are lined by scrubby bushes, and on them, in a sandy open patch, we see a man falling and bowing at his evening devotions; a few camels pass along the raised bank, looking like gigantic spiders against the illuminated sky, and there comes faintly to us the ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... mother's Nursery. He found noxious weeds, rather, and brambles galore. And they were planted there, not by his father or mother, but by those who have a lien upon the souls of these poor people. For the priest here is no peeled, polished affair, but shaggy, scrubby, terrible, forbidding. And with a word he can open yet, for such as Khalid's folk, the gate which Peter keeps or the other on the opposite side of the Universe. Khalid must beware, therefore, how he conducts himself at home ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... high and low, beamed all over his face. "To make Baldassare laugh" became a stock periphrasis for the supreme degree of tragedy among his neighbours. About this traitor mouth of his he had a dew of scrubby beard, silvered black; he had bushy eyebrows, hands and arms covered with a black pelt: he was a very hairy man. Also he was a very warm man, as everybody knew, with a hoard of florins under the flags of his old-clothes shop in the ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... ax you.—Why, sir, he ain't even one o' the shoe-brigade. He 'ain't got a red coat. Bless my soul! he 'ain't even got a box—nothin' but a scrubby pair o' brushes as I'm alive! He ain't no shoeblack. He's a thief as purtends to ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... of the Sacred Heart; but to reach the house itself one had to skirt the wall and climb to the Place du Tertre, where one found the facade and the entrance. Some children were playing on the Place, which, planted as it was with a few scrubby trees, and edged with humble shops,—a fruiterer's, a grocer's and a baker's,—looked like some square in a small provincial town. In a corner, on the left, Guillaume's dwelling, which had been whitewashed during the previous ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... shivering at the idea of the superb and dainty Zette coming in contact with such abomination. He hated Bondon with a murderous hate. He drank a great gulp of absinthe and wished it were Bondon's blood. Great tears rolled down Bocardon's face, and gathering at the ends of his scrubby moustache dripped in ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... country underwent a gradual change as they progressed north, slanting a bit eastward. The heavy timber gave way to a sparser growth, and that in turn dwindled to scrubby thickets, covering great areas of comparative level. Long reaches of grassland opened before them, waving yellow in the autumn sun. They crossed other rivers of various degrees of depth and swiftness, swimming some and fording others. Hazel drew upon her ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... was usually no oppressive heat even at noon. At intervals along the trail we came on the staring skull and bleached skeleton of a mule or ox. Day after day we rode forward across endless flats of grass and of low open scrubby forest, the trees standing far apart and in most places being but little higher than the head of a horseman. Some of them carried blossoms, white, orange, yellow, pink; and there were many flowers, the most beautiful being the morning-glories. Among ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... the wildest bit of forest I had seen anywhere in this neighbourhood. At one side, not far off, rose a huge gray rock, partly covered on one side with moss, and round about were oaks and a few ash trees of a poor scrubby sort (else they would long ago have been cut out). The earth underneath was soft ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... their summits, but mainly with stately evergreens, including a brittle and worthless live oak; but the tough, enduring hickory, the lithe and springy white ash, the ironwood, beech, and sugar maple, are nowhere to be seen. A low, scrubby cedar and a small, scraggy white pine thinly cover a portion of the hills and low mountains of Utah; the former is shorter than it should be for telegraph poles, but stanch and durable, and is made to do. The detestable cotton-wood, most worthless of trees, yet a great deal ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... masquerades, during one season, the men were ordered to appear in women's dresses, and the women in the propria quae maribus,—the former hideous in large whaleboned petticoats and high feathered head-dresses, the latter looking like scrubby little boys with very thick legs,—and all that the Empress Elizabeth might show her tall and graceful figure and what beautiful things she used to walk with, which Catharine says were the handsomest that she ever saw; how in this court, where marriage was the mere shadow of a bond, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the man had come out onto the ground and the boy beheld a tall, spare-boned man, with weather-tanned face, a scrubby beard, and a mass of ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... The road was stony and deserted. On either side the rocky cliffs, with their scrubby growth, were beginning to rise from the fields, and before them ranged the bluish rocky landscape of the heath or moorland. "As soon as we've been home, I shall travel; I must cross the sea and find out what they do really intend ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... trees. Few people passed along, only folks in a hurry, who swiftly crossed the Boulevards. And on the broad, dark, deserted footway, where the sound of the revelry died away, women were standing and waiting. They remained for long intervals motionless, patient and as stiff-looking as the scrubby little plane trees; then they slowly began to move, dragging their slippers over the frozen soil, taking ten steps or so and then waiting again, rooted as it were to the ground. There was one of them with a huge body and insect-like ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... stock of provisions, and yet have spare room; the men generally having on snow-shoes and accompanied with Indians to wait on them, and dogs to drag their toboggans, while all around them are heaps of snow piled up on huge rocks, and overtopping and bearing down short scrubby pines and firs. If you have a good country I calculate that such pictures as these, no matter what may be their artistic merits, are poor advertisements, and will not get ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... landscape is scrubby, littery; ill-tilled, scratched rather than ploughed; physiognomic of Czech Populations, who are seldom trim at elbows: any beauty it has is on the farther side of the Dobrowa, which does not concern Prince Leopold, Prince Karl, or us at present. Prince Leopold's camp lies east and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... had passed out of sight, Cynthia came from the kitchen with an armful of wet linen and began spreading it upon some scrubby lilac bushes in a corner of the yard. After fifteen years it still made her uncomfortable to have Christopher around when she did the family washing, and when it was possible she waited to dry the clothes until he had gone back to the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... fitters from the railway workshops. This image fixed his wavering purpose. He would try to find old Giorgio if he could. God knows what might have happened to him! He made a few steps, then stopped again and shook his head. To the left and right, in front and behind him, the scrubby bush rustled mysteriously ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... fellow very disagreeable. But the assertions in this advertisement will gain him credit. As I live with but one set of people, I do not hear all the animadversions that are made upon this affair, but I believe there is a certain monde where my two friends pass but for very scrubby people; a bold assertion, and a great deal of dirt thrown, although by a very mean hand, must inevitably have ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... Perez and Captain Eri had taken to "dressing up" for supper, to the extent of putting on neckties and clean collars. Also they shaved every day. He stuck to the old "twice-a-week" plan for a while, but looked so scrubby by contrast that out of mere self-respect he had to follow suit. Obviously two females in the house were one too many. Something had to ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the ear during the night in a far off place like this, are peculiar. The old owl hoots mournfully, the frogs bellow hoarsely along the reedy shore, while the tree toads are quavering from among the branches of the scrubby trees that grow along the rocky banks; the whippoorwill pipes shrilly in the forest depths; the breeze murmurs among the foliage of the tall old pines, while the everlasting roar of the waters, as they go tumbling down the rocks, is always heard. However diversified ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... at first lay across a rising plain, very wild and scrubby, as I imagine, by the frequent deviations of our beast, and then through a forest of cork oaks, which keep their leaves all the year through, and here, by reason of the great shade, we went, not knowing ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... when they talk of Equality!—As for me, am I not as good as another woman, I that was one of the finest women in Paris, and was called La belle Ecaillere, and received declarations seven or eight times a day? And even now if I liked—Look here, sir, you know that little scrubby marine store-dealer downstairs? Very well, he would marry me any day, if I were a widow that is, with his eyes shut; he has had them looking wide open in my direction so often; he is always saying, 'Oh! what fine arms you have, Ma'am Cibot!—I dreamed last ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... said, drawing Nan's advertisement from his pocket; "we had come down here to surprise you girls, and to have a little fun and tennis; and I meant to have treated you to the public ground at the hotel, as I knew you had only a scrubby little bit of lawn; and this is what has met my eyes this morning! You have deceived mother and me; you have let us enjoy our holiday, which I didn't a bit, for I had a sort of nasty presentiment and a heap of uncomfortable thoughts; ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... was a short, thick-set, scrubby, wiry nag, tough as a pine knot, and self-willed as a pig. He was moreover exceedingly lazy, as well as prone to have his own way, and take his own jog—preferring a walk or gentle trot to a canter; and so deep-rooted were his prejudices in favor of the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... some logs down the creek," said Rob, "and maybe pick up some drift-wood on the beach and tow it around with the dory. And there's some drift right here at the mouth of our creek. We could build it over there just back of those scrubby trees, and with the cover of those and the tall grass no one could see it from the water unless he looked mighty close. And, as John says, it might save us a walk ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... little grub was dere, suah," put in the negro cook, with great dignity. "I'se feel mean as a pore white if yer was ebbah come to my galley an' fin' sich a scrubby lot tings! Dere was nuffin' fit fo' a decent culler'd pusson ter eat—dat feller ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... that, and being seen about with him at parties, because he was a celebrity and it made the other women, the women he wouldn't talk to, furious. But as for taking him, why, she wouldn't take him from anybody as a gift. She didn't want him, a scrubby old thing like that. She didn't like that dragged look about his mouth and the way the skin wrinkled on his eyelids. There was a sincerity about Barbara that would have ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... 11th.—Blue glass in carriage windows made the landscape look as if covered with snow. Stopped for baths and refreshments at one of the stations en route. Breakfasted later in train. Passed through a dreary country, a saltpetre desert, relieved by occasional scrubby trees. Interesting people at wayside stations—Sindhis, ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... at second hand,) Now move, and now in order stand. The building, as the Poet writ, Rose in proportion to his wit— And first the prologue built a wall; So wide as to encompass all. The scene, a wood, produc'd no more Than a few scrubby trees before. The plot as yet lay deep; and so A cellar next was dug below; But this a work so hard was found, Two acts it cost him under ground. Two other acts, we may presume, Were spent in building each a room. Thus far advanc'd, he made a shift To raise a roof with ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... the corner of the square—our house was a few doors up—and she appeared, on the opposite side of the road, by the square railings. But Gwenny was not alone. Gwenny, rigged out in the height of Bloomsbury florists' fashion, was ostentatiously accompanied by a young man, a very scrubby, pallid, ignoble young man; his arm was round her waist, and her arm was around his, in the approved enlinkment of couples in her class who are keeping company, or, in other words, are, or are about to be, engaged to be married. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... three University men in ahead of him—Khane, with a florid, arrogant face that showed worry under the arrogance; Dandrik, gray-haired and stoop-shouldered, looking irritated; Faress, young, with a scrubby red mustache, looking bellicose. He greeted them collectively and invited them to sit, and there was a brief uncomfortable silence which ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... Scrubby chaparral, tenanted by the coyote, fox, and sand rabbit, covers these fringing sand hills. North and south, Sansome, Montgomery, Kearney, Dupont, Stockton, and a faint outline of Powell Street, are roadways more or less inchoate. An embryo ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... much wished to see. I set off one morning to examine this place myself, expecting to pass through some extent of forest on my way. In this however I was much disappointed, as the whole road lies through grass and scrubby thickets, and it was only after reaching the village of Sahoe that some high forest land was perceived stretching towards the mountains to the north of it. About half-way we dad to pass a deep river on a bamboo raft, which almost sunk beneath us. This stream was said to rise a long ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... minutes through some scrubby brushwood, brought us to the base of a steep stony ridge covered with tall and thrifty hickories and a few oaks and maples intermixed, rising so steeply from the shore that it was necessary not only to strain every nerve of the leg, but to swing our bodies up from tree to tree, by dint of hand. ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... of Loyalist emigrants arrived at Navy Island, and during the summer they continued to arrive, until about 5,000 had settled between Parrtown (St. John) and St. Anne's. The peninsula now occupied by the city of St. John was then almost a wilderness, covered with shrubs, scrubby spruce, and marsh. Large numbers of emigrants also arrived at Annapolis, Port Roseway, and other points; and Governor Parr, in a letter to Lord North in September, 1783, estimates the whole number that had arrived ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... had vanished as suddenly as if the ground had opened and swallowed him up. Wondering what it all could mean, the boy rose to his feet, and peered out, parting the bushes still more and advancing a little from his concealment. The ground was quite level, covered here and there with boulders and a scrubby undergrowth, but there was nothing to be seen of the warrior. During the second or two occupied in lowering the hammer of his rifle, the Apache had disappeared, flashing out, so to ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... part of the wood since her childhood, and the transformation of outlines had been great; old trees which once were landmarks had been felled or blown down, and the bushes which then had been small and scrubby were now large and overhanging. She soon found that her ideas as to direction were vague—that she had indeed no ideas as to direction at all. If the evening had not been growing so dark, and the wind had not put on its night moan so distinctly, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... limitless wastes are covered by a scrubby plant known as mountain sage. It rises from a tough gnarled root in a number of spiral shoots, which finally form a single trunk, varying in circumference from six inches to two feet. The leaves are grey, with a strong offensive ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... this, if it existed, they would be obliged to force a path through miles of reeds. Therefore they thought it safer to follow the river bank. Their progress was very slow, since continually they must make detours to avoid a quicksand or a creek, also the stones and scrubby growth delayed them so that fifteen or at most twenty miles was a ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... "Those scrubby little pine trees hide us from the sight of the German observation posts. Their artillery won't ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... find him quite so scrubby as he sounds. He's very proper and clean-shaven, with a good pair of dark, Dutch eyes, which he gets from his mother; and I wish he had got her business ability with them, and her horse sense, if the lady will excuse me. She runs the property and he spends it, ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... the loud clank of the hoofs behind. I stepped over the horse, and drew my sword. A short distance ahead was a clump of scrubby pines; there I would ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... from equaling the horse in grace or beauty, the ass, in his wild condition, is a handsome, swift, and powerful animal, so different to the degenerated, ill-used, and scrubby creatures of this country, that they would scarcely be recognized as belonging to the same stock, if placed side by side. In Spain, and other parts of Southern Europe, and the Cape de Verde Islands, they are very superior; but they are even surpassed by those of the East. All acquainted ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... who then rubbed his scrubby, bristling chin, scratched his poll and finally broke into another grin—this time of the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... that sort of young man's neck that has two great flutings down the back, here and here—so! And a little, meanish head with scrubby hair—And rather bad ears. Shoulders bad, narrower than the hips; turn-down collar, ready-made short jacket, trousers baggy and a little frayed at the heels. That's how he took me. I came very quietly up the staircase. I did not carry a light, you know—the ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... cliff. Overhead, forty or fifty feet of rock bulged into the great masses characteristic of chalk, but at the end of the ledge a gully, a precipitous groove of discoloured rock, slashed the face of the cliff, and gave a footing to a scrubby growth, by which Eudena and Ugh-lomi ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... Pemberton's. He's got a tan shirt on, plaited in front, and every time Aunt Anne moves he's up like a jumping-jack till she gets sat down again. He says 'My word!' and 'in the States'—like that. He's got a mustache the color of your hair, Split, a scrubby, stiffy little mustache. His eyes are little twinkling things, and I believe—" she paused in her indictment to give the criminal the benefit of the doubt—"I do believe he had gloves on when he first came! I won't be sure; but, anyway, ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... had an addition to their small family. A little, wiry-haired, scrubby, melancholy Irish terrier followed O'Connell for miles. He tried to drive him away. The dog would turn and run for a few seconds and the moment O'Connell would take his eyes off him he would run along and catch ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... finding himself unfit for human society, because he had not been able to shave since he left the prison. Of course he had brought nothing with him. There was no time. His hand went unconsciously every other minute to his scrubby chin. In truth, his Norse blondness did not allow it to show as much as he supposed. But that did not detract from the pervading sensation ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... were speckled and freckled and red and brick-dust and leather-coloured, and enclosed with scrubby ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... the hall, he gave his name to a queer-looking servant with wild scrubby hair, a dirty face, a tawdry livery, worse for wear, which had manifestly been made for a larger man, and hung upon its present possessor like a coat upon a clothes-horse; his cotton stockings, meant to ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... to break people's necks." "Oh! murther! murther!" cried the poor boy, "shure, it was not me, plase your honour, only the parrot, Captain." "What parrot, you lying rascal?" "There, Captain, Sir, look forenenst you." The captain did look up, and saw me perched on the branch of a scrubby hawthorn-tree. Surprised and amused, he exclaimed, "By Jove! how odd! What a magnificent bird! Why Poll, what the deuce brought you here?" "Eh, sirs," I replied at random, "it was aw' for the love of the siller." The captain, and his little groom Midge, who had picked himself ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... branches are. We can remove them ourselves. We can't expect the Lord to do all our dirty work. Now hear it once more, you that need to hear it—and damn all such poor pussyism as sniffles and whines and rejects it! We don't want that scrubby breed here!—Listen, I say. The celestial order of marriage is necessary for our exaltation to the fulness of the Lord's glory in the world eternal. Where much is given much is required. Understand me,—those that reject polygamy ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... tail," Dan said, mentally reviewing the order of the procession, as, after dismounting, we walked round our find—a wide-spreading sheet of deep, clay—coloured water, snugly hidden behind scrubby banks. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... exactly what I did; and a terrible run I had for it, fearing at every step to hear the echo of shots in the valley, and dropping down the scrubby rocks with tearing and violent scratching. Then I crossed Bagworthy stream, not far below Doone-valley, and breasted the hill towards Slocombslade, with my heart very heavily panting. Why Jeremy chose to ride this way, instead of the more direct one (which would ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... as upon the wooded points and islands of Lake Umbagog, attaining a height of 50-60 feet, with a diameter of 10-15 inches. Extremely variable in habit. In thin soils and upon bleak sites the trunk is for the most part crooked and twisted, the head scrubby, stunted, and variously distorted, resembling in shape and proportions the pitch pine under similar conditions. In deeper soils, and in situations protected from the winds, the stem is erect, slender, and tapering, surmounted by a stately head with long, flexible branches, ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... were clothed in small tracts of scrubby pine timber, and altogether it was not a pleasant country to ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... one of them did say —I knew not which was elder of the two— "Right through the churchyard is our better way." "Ay," said the other, "past the scrubby yew. I have not seen her grave for many a day; And it is in me that with moonlight too It might be pleasant thinking of old faces, And yet I ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... And that moment of first seeing the horses that were to carry us on such long rides was an anxious and thrilling one. I have felt it many times, and it never grows any weaker from experience. Many a scrubby lot of horses had turned out well upon acquaintance, and some I had found hard to part with at the end of trips. Up to that time, however, I had not seen a bear hunter's horses; and I was much concerned by the fact that these were a sorry ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... at first as if it were to be no more fortunate than its predecessor. The covert was a patch of scrubby woodland at a little distance below the road, at the head of one of the long deep glens that were the terrors of the Broadwater country. The wind blew from the west, across the wide cleft of Gloun Kieraun, and the hounds ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... light of dawn that we saw, close on board, the metropolitan island of Hawaii. We held along the coast, as near as we could venture, with a fresh breeze and under an unclouded heaven; beholding, as we went, the arid mountain sides and scrubby cocoa-palms of that somewhat melancholy archipelago. About four of the afternoon we turned Waimanolo Point, the westerly headland of the great bight of Honolulu; showed ourselves for twenty minutes in full view; and then fell again to leeward, and put in the rest of daylight, plying under shortened ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... a ghost," he said, "unless it was one night when we boys was out with our dogs 'possum hunting. The dogs treed a possum in a little scrubby tree. I was always a good climber; so I went up the tree to shake the 'possum out. I shook and shook but the 'possum would not fall out of the tree. I shook so hard that my hat fell off and I told the niggers not to let the dogs tear my ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... you," said I, and turned away. "Buy that horse," said Mr. Petulengro, coming after me; "the dook tells me that in less than three months he will be sold for twice seventy." "I will have nothing to do with him," said I; "besides, Jasper, I don't like his tail. Did you observe what a mean scrubby tail he has?" "What a fool you are, brother," said Mr. Petulengro; "that very tail of his shows his breeding. No good bred horse ever yet carried a fine tail—'tis your scrubby-tailed horses that are your out-and-outers. Did you ever hear of ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... down annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. Some of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that I have ever seen, as well, on account ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... had a country, these soldiers did not know. Home to many, when they reached it, was graves and ashes. At any rate, there must be, somewhere on earth, a better place than a muddy, smoky camp in a piece of scrubby pines; better company than gloomy, hungry comrades and inquisitive enemies, and something in the future more exciting, if not more hopeful, than nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, nothing to do, and nowhere to ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... boom of cannon burst on the air, rolling heavily from away to the southward up from what we knew must be the neighborhood of the camps at Pittsburg Landing. It was after seven o'clock. The sun was mounting over the scrubby oak copse behind our camp, and the day grew warm apace. Another and still another ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... outside the hotel, taking his coffee at one of the little round iron tables, by the inevitable trio of scrubby orange trees in green tubs, when Caffyn, whom he had not seen since leaving the table, came up and sat down ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... for that? On and on he went. Suddenly the horse stopped. Ben doubled up the reins to give him a cut, when "WHOA!" he roared so loud that the horse in very astonishment gave a lurch that nearly flung him headlong. But he was over the wheel in a twinkling, and up with a bound to a small thicket of scrubby bushes on a high hill by the road-side. Here lay a little bundle on the ground, and close by it a big, black dog; and over the whole, standing guard, was a boy a little bigger than Ben, with honest gray eyes. ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... rock or bank of earth. Scho, she. Scone, a soft flour cake. Sconner, disgust. Sconner, sicken. Scraichin, calling hoarsely. Screed, a rip, a rent. Screed, to repeat rapidly, to rattle. Scriechin, screeching. Scriegh, skriegh, v. skriegh. Scrievin, careering. Scrimpit, scanty. Scroggie, scroggy, scrubby. Sculdudd'ry, bawdry. See'd, saw. Seisins, freehold possessions. Sel, sel', sell, self. Sell'd, sell't, sold. Semple, simple. Sen', send. Set, to set off; to start. Set, sat. Sets, becomes. Shachl'd, shapeless. Shaird, shred, shard. Shanagan, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Great brown patches, which the professor thinks are washings from the fine examples of erosion, but which look to me like patches of brown grass as we see in Penobscot Bay on the islands, vary with what is apparently a scrubby evergreen growth and bald, bare rocks. As we are about 18 miles off, the blue haze over all makes an enlarged, roughened and much more deeply indented Camden mountain coast line. The bays are in some cases so deep that we can look into narrow entrances and ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... from the Falls of St. Anthony to the Rum river, the Mississippi is a continued chain of rapids, with eddies, formed by winding channels. The land, on both sides, consists of Prairie, with scarcely any timber, except small groves of scrubby oaks. Not far from this spot is Red Cedar lake, the grounds in the vicinity of which are considered, by the Indians, extremely ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... make gaps for cattle: Such should be cut so near the earth, as till you can lay them thwart, that the top of one may rest on the root or stub of the other, as far as they extend, stopping the cavities with its boughs and branches; and thus hedges which seem to consist but only of scrubby-trees and stumps, may be reduced to a tolerable fence: But in case it be superannuated, and very old, 'tis advisable to stub all up, being quite renewed, and well guarded. We have been the longer on these descriptions, because it is of main ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... on a lonely stretch of road with gently rolling land on either side of them, dotted with a scrubby growth of trees. Not a house was in sight, and they had passed only one team, a pair of mules harnessed to a wagon filled ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... risk of meeting natives, and we were now getting so near the shore that we could hear the beat of the waves upon a reef that lay off our hut, and sheltered the boat from being washed about, when all of a sudden, as we were traversing some low, scrubby bushes which were more thorny than was pleasant, Ebo suddenly struck us both on the shoulder, forcing us down amongst the leaves and twigs, and on looking sharply round we saw that he had dropped ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... the rest of the party travelled on. They had not come up with us at about four o'clock, and being anxious to find water before dark, we proceeded along a narrow open valley covered with long grass and large pandanus trees, skirted on each side by rather scrubby forest land. At dark we reached a large waterhole. One of the men left behind shortly arrived, and stated that the rest had halted for the night. Mr. Kennedy being anxious to bring all the horses to water, and to have ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... to the mighty river a low chain of hills, fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch, willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... is so dry and light that it is lifted about by the wind. Some places it will drift several feet deep. The railroad company kept men employed all the time shoveling sand from the track. Nothing but some scattering, scrubby bushes grows in the deserts. Almost any time looking from the cars there seems to be smoke away off in the distance. This is nothing but the dry sand being blown about ...
— A Soldier in the Philippines • Needom N. Freeman
... had a country these soldiers did not know. Home to many, when they reached it, was graves and ashes. At any rate there must be, somewhere on earth, a better place than a muddy, smoky camp in a piece of scrubby pines—better company than gloomy, hungry comrades and inquisitive enemies, and something in the future more exciting, if not more hopeful, than nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, nothing to do, and nowhere to go. The disposition to start was apparent, and the preparations ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... importunate tout, also mingled with the crowd, plainly in evidence by the pronounced character of his dress, the size of his diamond studs or cravat pin, and the massive dimensions of his finger rings. No paltry, scrubby track cadger was this resplendent gentleman, but a picturesque rogue, with impudence as pronounced ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... wind-drifted sand, barely diversified by a few straggling groups of cottonwoods. To the westward extended the boundless prairie, flat and bare as a floor, except where the southern fork of the little river cut its way through the soft loam, and gave rise to a scrubby growth of cottonwood and willow; while northward, across the main body of the river, the land appeared more rugged and broken, and somewhat heavily wooded with oak and other forest trees, but equally devoid ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... against the nest were it not for the agonised, barking note of the poor mother. The male birds, however, of this species did not show any marital concern for their partners. They were usually seated near the nests, but at once took to flight upon our approach. Further on, among a thicket of scrubby vegetation, we found a rookery of many thousands of the superb red-tailed tropic bird (Phaeton phoenicurus), also engaged in incubation. Their nests were mere circular excavations in the sand, under the shade of the bushes of the ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... little man of forty, with coarse black hair and scrubby moustache, not of the type that readily appreciates the delicacies of a situation. Paul conceived a ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the name of Mrs. B., it seems, wants a teacher. I wish she would have me; and I have written to Miss W. to tell her so. Verily, it is a delightful thing to live here at home, at full liberty to do just what one pleases. But I recollect some scrubby old fable about grasshoppers and ants, by a scrubby old knave yclept AEsop; the grasshoppers sang all the summer, and starved all ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... first two hours' march from this landmark, the country was covered with scrubby bush abounding in gazelles and guinea-fowl. Here, for the first time, I saw the secretary bird, known to the Arabs as the "Devil's horse." A pair of these magnificent birds were actively employed in their useful avocation of hunting reptiles, which they chased ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... journey to us, who knew only the Western Desert, to note the difference between it and Sinai. To our eyes Sinai did not appear to be a desert at all, as there were scrubby bushes of sorts growing in nearly every hollow, various kinds of camel grass, and even a few flowers—such as poppies and one or two species of lilies. After the waste of misshaped lumps of limestone and volcanic ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... small trout there are vast numbers, excellent for the table, but in the deep pools are also huge trout, ranging in weight from three to eight pounds. The surrounding country is open; there are only clumps of scrubby timber; and the plain is covered with deep moss readily beaten into a hard path upon which the foot treads silently. Here the bears come to feed upon the berries and the Canadians have called the plain prettily the "Jardin ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... up, gleaming like curved glass in the sunlight, and broke in a million sparkles against a shelf of shingle. Above the shingle rose the soft cliffs, clothed with scrubby grass ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... rode this waste, and on the thirteenth it began to mend somewhat, and there was a little grass, and sweet waters, and they saw ahead the swelling hills of a great woodland, albeit they had to struggle through marshland and low scrubby thicket for a day longer, or ever they got to the aforesaid trees, which at first were naught but pines; but these failed in a while, and they rode a grass waste nearly treeless, but somewhat well watered, where they gat ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... distance the woods were open and clear of undergrowth, and the troops passed through, preserving their array with little difficulty; but as the point, where the fight between the pickets had commenced, was neared, the timber became dwarfed into scrubby brush, and at some places dense thickets impeded the advance. The ground, too, grew rugged and difficult of passage in unbroken line. Frequent halts to reform and dress the ranks became necessary, and at such times General Johnson's magnificent battle ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... of its tenants were indicated by a typewriting-machine beneath a rubber hood thick with dust, a folding metal music-stand and a violin-case, and a large studio easel supplemented by a number of scrubby canvases. A door in the partition wall communicated with a small bedchamber of the kind commonly termed "hall room." And in one corner a stationary wash-stand and a gas-stove for morbid cookery lurked behind a Japanese screen ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... and yet to find the track by which we did succeed in crossing the range had cost me many successive hours' walking under a burning sun. The character of the country we passed through was the same as these sandstone ranges always present; namely, sandy scrubby plains, and low ranges of ruinous, rocky hills, in trying to scramble over which the ponies received numerous and severe falls. We however had a very beautiful halting-place, shaded by lofty pines and affording fair feed ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... a casual inspection showed nothing outside but the hillside sloping away from the mine, with here and there a clump of bushes or small, scrubby trees. But every once in a while the grass would stir, or a clump of bushes would be agitated strangely, as some concealed form crept up yet closer to the stockade. Evidently, as Buck had said, the intention of Madero ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... now gliding past a safe reach of marsh, while our assailants were riding by cross-paths to attack us at the next bluff. It was Reed's Bluff where we were first attacked, and Scrubby Bluff, I think, was next. They were shelled in advance, but swarmed manfully to the banks again as we swept round one of the sharp angles of the stream beneath their fire. My men were now pretty well imprisoned below in the hot and ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... This muskeg must, at some earlier stage of the world's existence, have been a great lake full of islands; now it is a grassy swamp, the water clear as spring water, studded with groups of high rocks of varied size and shape, overgrown by tall pines, birch, scrubby underbrush, ferns, and moss. We had been getting on with such comparative ease that we began to think our fears of the "corduroy road" had been groundless; but before night we experienced the wisdom of the warning not to "halloo before ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... rear of the hall Mr. Thomas came. But the drunken rowdy of the night before had been transformed. Gone was the scrubby beard and the shabby suit. Shorn was the unkempt mop of hair and vanished the impudent swagger. He was dressed in clean linen and respectable black, and his manner was modest and subdued. Only a discoloration of one eye showed ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... be autumn on Epsilon. Everywhere the trees are a riot of scarlet and ocher, the scrubby bushes are shedding their leaves. Once we came upon a field of thistlelike plants with spiny seed-pods that opened as we watched, the purple spores drifting afield in an eddy of tinted mist. Max said it reminded him of Scotland. ...
— Competition • James Causey
... Major-General Babington that the Highlanders not only had failed to carry the Magersfontein heights, but that they required instant reinforcement. He accordingly desired Major R. Bannatine-Allason, the battery commander, to move north-east over the scrubby ground, and not to come into action until he was stopped by the bullets or could get a clear view of what was going on at the front. The battery, with an escort of 12th Lancers and mounted infantry, advanced at a trot, and its commander, having obtained information ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... of Rennell and Cartwright Sounds, and the inlets to the southward. We examined with considerable care those localities where yellow cedar had been reported, crossing on foot from Athlow to Skaloo Inlet, finding small bodies of scrubby growth on the shores of each, also on Tattoo Inlet, but much the largest quantity on ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... and with my passengers stepped on shore, leaving Rockets with the flag and two other hands in the boat. There was, for a short distance, a piece of uncultivated open ground, and then a wood of somewhat scrubby trees through which a path led. We had walked along it but a short distance, when, turning an angle, we were confronted by a body of militia, mustering some ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... the bench and hurriedly dismounted, to run to a scrubby cedar growing almost on the edge of the ledge. Round this, at no more than six inches above the ground, he twisted an end of the wire. Then he ran with the other end across the bench and snubbed it around a scrub oak growing on the slope. The branches of the little tree were thick, ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... began. They were short and scrubby as yet, but beautiful in the velvet of their dark green needles. Bob glanced at them critically. They were perhaps eighty to a hundred feet high and from a foot ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... said Mr. Waverton, with an intense sneer. "Harry Boyce, a shabby, scrubby trickster to the eye. You would take him for a starveling usher, a decayed footman. It's a lurker in holes and corners, indeed, a cringing, grovelling fellow. But with a heart full of treason and all the cunning of ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... this ravine, which was known by the name of the "Devil's Gap," Captain Bowline had caused a narrow bridge, of two planks in width, to be built, protected on the outside by a light railing. On the side next the hill, it was sufficiently guarded by the crooked branches of a knurly and scrubby oak tree, that grew on the ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames |
