"Straggle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... closer to the ground so that when a domed structure arose out of a tangle of overgrown shrubs and trees they were not more than fifty feet above it. There was no sign of life about the dwelling, if dwelling it was, and the unkempt straggle of growing things suggested that it had been left to itself through more than one season. Lablet wanted to set down and explore, but the captain was intent upon reaching the city. A solitary farm was of little value compared with what they might learn from a metropolis. So, rather ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... through a valley between two ranges of hills. All about the slopes on the river side stand snug little houses, each within its own grounds, each having a peaked roof, which strives more or less effectually to rival the steepness of its neighbour. The houses straggle for miles down the line, as if they had started out from Quebec with the intention of founding a town for themselves, and had stopped on the way, beguiled by the beauty of the situation. Sometimes a little group stand together, when be sure you shall find a church, curiously small but ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... raking—enfilading—fire, he deferred the signal to tack till his van had passed some distance beyond the French rear, because thus they would have to approach in a slanting direction. He left out of his account here the fact that all long columns tend to straggle in the rear; hence, although he waited till his three or four leading ships had passed the enemy before making signal to tack, the rear had got no farther than abreast the hostile van. Two of the clearest witnesses, Baird of the Portland, ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... would never dream of it being unprotected. He cannot be in any strength; besides, I shall want every mounted man I have got for my scheme. The transport, ox and mule, must take its chance. But see that it doesn't straggle. The mule can keep up with us as long as possible, but it must keep together. Likewise the ox-transport, taking its own time, must keep closed up. I assure you the only object of these people on this journey will be to get away. Two blocks of moving waggons will mystify them, not attract them. Right ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... light was beginning to straggle through the trees when the party, with The Loon in the lead, set off to march to the Everglade camp. There was a narrow trail, and Mr. Stonington insisted on the girls keeping to ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... I can get out of him except more chuckles. I files away the name, though; and that afternoon, while we was waitin' for a quorum of directors to straggle into the General Offices, I ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... ain't my equal, none of 'em, man to man. All men are born free an' equal, says the Constitution an' by-laws of this country of ours. Granted. But they don't stay that way long. They're all lined up to toe the mark on the start, but watch 'em straggle afore they've run ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... lowered, bashful eyes, brought coffee, ripe olives from the can, potato salad, and thick, hot steaks. Soon thereafter the boys began to straggle in. Helen heard them at the gate, noisy and eager; for them the supper hour was diurnally a time of a joyous lift of spirit. They clattered along the porch like a crowd of schoolboys just dismissed; they washed outside by the kitchen door with much splashing; ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... castle and a subject town; it wears, in fact, a baronial and old-world look. Fort Santo Antonio, a tall white house upon a bastioned terrace, crowns proudly enough a knob of black rock and low green growth. On both sides of it, north and south, stretches the town; from this distance it appears a straggle of brown thatched huts and hovels, enlivened here and there by some whitewashed establishments, mining or 'in the mercanteel.' The soil is ruddy and rusty, and we ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... talking about Mayorga and Rueda and Bennyventy.—'We made the rear-guard, after General Paget; and drove the French every time; and all the infantry did was to sit about in wine-shops till we whipped 'em out, an' steal an' straggle an' play the tom-fool in general. And when it came to a stand-up fight at Corunna, 'twas we that had to stay seasick aboard the transports, an' watch the infantry in the thick o' the caper. Very well they behaved, too—'specially the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... with the least possible abstraction of soil from the uses of cultivation. There are some side-hills so rocky and sterile as to defy human industry, and these are given up to brush-wood, which I presume is cut occasionally and bound into faggots for fuel. Some of it may straggle up, if permitted, into trees, but I saw little that would fairly justify the designation of Forest. Of Fruit-trees, save in the villages, there is a ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... mere fraction, but not to be feloniously abstracted. Through Altenburg, Zwickau, Oederon, and Chemnitz; up steep hill paths, and by the side of unpronounceable villages, until, on the morning of the fourth day, we straggle into Freiberg. ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... salt spray; but small as it was, it was a miracle of blossoms and a marvel of neatness. The trim brown paths were swept clean of every leaf or fallen petal, each of the little square beds had its border of big white quahog clamshells, and not even a sweet-pea vine would have dared to straggle from its appointed ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... inquired a particularly dirty woman, whose cap, stuck on the side of her, head, allowed locks of grey hair to straggle from under it. "Ah! is ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the enmity of Austria, which had massed troops on the Wallachian frontier, remained on the defensive, but in October Omar Pasha assumed the aggressive, sending a small force across the Danube at Vidin, and it was thought that the straggle between the contending forces would take place in 'Lesser Wallachia.' Omar Pasha, however, either intended this as a feint, or changed his plan, for he soon afterwards occupied strong positions on the Danube at Turtukai and Oltenitza, between Silistria and Rustchuk, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... "blood-red beam through the shutter's chink," which proves that morning is come. Let him open the lattice and see! He goes to open it, and no movement can he make but vexes her, as he gropes his way where the "tall, naked geraniums straggle"; pushes the lattice, which is behind a frame, so awkwardly that a shower of dust falls on her; fumbles at the slide-bolt, till she exclaims that "of course it catches!" At last he succeeds in getting the window ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... hen amid her brood, Though fledged and feathered, and well pleased to part And straggle from her presence, still a brood, And she herself from the maternal bond Still undischarged; yet doth she little more 250 Than move with them in tenderness and love, A centre to the circle which they make; And now and then, alike from need of theirs And call of her own natural appetites, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... soon recognised that this retreat was unassailable; their plan of a night attack had failed; but they did not lose the hope that they held the Romans at their mercy. The fight had become a blockade; they would coop the Romans within their narrow limits, or force them to straggle on their way under a renewal of the same merciless assault. To have withstood the legions and occupied their ground, was itself a triumph for Gaetulians and Moors. They spread their long lines round either hill and lighted ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... This is known as Grande Terre, and west of it is another island known as Grande Isle. Between these two long land gates is a broad, deep channel which serves as entrance to the bay. On the western side lies a host of smaller islands, the passes between them made by the bayous which straggle down through the land. Northward the bay stretches sixteen miles inland, and then breaks up into a medley of bayous and small lakes, cutting far into the land, and yielding an easy passage to the level of the Mississippi, opposite ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Confederate lines advanced, men dropping out of the ranks filled the woods with a penumbra of stragglers. Hunger and fatigue, stimulated by the remembrance of abandoned camps passed through, later in the day led squads—Beauregard and some of his staff say, led regiments—to straggle back from the fighting front to the restful and attractive rear. Language cannot be stronger than that used by General Beauregard. The fire of the gunboats, many of the shells passing over the high river-bank ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... the militia began to straggle in; the regular officers had long been busy getting their own troops, artillery, and military stores in readiness. The regulars felt the utmost disappointment at the appearance of the militia. They numbered ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... round an old chateau, and used as a sort of summer resort by Warsaw people, was nothing but blackened chimneys and heaps of brick. The Russians had burned everything, and the inhabitants, who had fled into the pines, were just now beginning to straggle back. Some had set up little stands in front of their burned houses and were trying to sell apples, plums, pears, about the only marketable thing left; some were cleaning brick and trying to rebuild, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... very cattle that would trample a white man to death allow themselves to be banged and bullied and shouted at by children that hardly come up to their noses. So long as the boys keep with the herds they are safe, for not even the tiger will charge a mob of cattle. But if they straggle to pick flowers or hunt lizards, they are sometimes carried off. Mowgli went through the village street in the dawn, sitting on the back of Rama, the great herd bull. The slaty-blue buffaloes, with their long, backward-sweeping horns ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... mule, doesn't care—some one'll have to keep him moving. I usually carry a little rubber sling shot in my pocket, and when Nigger gets too lazy and begins to straggle off I turn around and peck him one with a pebble. Then you ought to see him get into his place and ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... off the tops of fifty juniors, is a revelation. White pine, hemlock, and spruce share this country with maples, black and white birches, and beech. Maple seems to have few preferences, and the white birches straggle and shiver on the outskirts of every camp; but the pines hold together in solid regiments, sending out skirmishers to invade a neglected pasture on the first opportunity. There is no overcoat warmer than the pines in a gale when the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... afternoon of a very warm day. From a pile of stones there came forth a column of about five hundred reddish ants. They marched rapidly toward a field of turf, order in their ranks being kept by their sergeants. These watched the flanks, and would not permit any to straggle. ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... and poor, we have little ammunition. Our arms are out of repair. The machete and lasso are no match for their well-supplied men-of-war. I shall locate myself so far in the interior that the accursed Gringos cannot reach me with their ships or their boats. The trappers who straggle over the deserts from Texas our horsemen will lasso. They will bring them in bound ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... marked feature in the landscape. It is a town of steep streets and staircases, with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistas opening at every turn across the lowland. One of these views might be selected for especial notice. In front, irregular buildings losing themselves in country as they straggle by the roadside; then the open post-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far away a wrack of tumbling clouds. All this enclosed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... strains of the lute, the song of the bulbuls, intoned the verses of Al-Mutanabbi, and, wrapping themselves in their rugs, fell asleep. But in the morning they were rudely jostled from their dreams by a spurt from the hose of the sailors washing the deck. Complaining not, they straggle down to their bunks to change their clothes. And Khalid, as he is doing this, implores Shakib not to mention to him any more that New-World paradise. "For I have dreamt last night," he continues, "that, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... old walls of its immense abbey the town of Villeneuve has built itself a rough faubourg; the fragments with which the soil was covered having been, I suppose, a quarry of material. There are no streets; the small, shabby houses, almost hovels, straggle at random over the uneven ground. The only im- portant feature is a convent of cloistered nuns, who have a large garden (always within the walls) behind their house, and whose doleful establishment you look down into, or down at simply, from ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... water-towers give height without dignity—a quality denied to military architecture in Alaska. To the right the town begins, and an irregular row of one and two story buildings, stores, warehouses, drinking shops, straggle along the water-front. ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... of fact, we learned later that all the servants were out except the nursery governess. There were two small children. There was a servants' ball somewhere, and, with the exception of the butler, it was after two before they commenced to straggle in. Except two plain-clothes men from the central office, a physician who was with Elinor in her room, and the governess, there was no one else in the house but the children, asleep in ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... thither leads through all manner of comely rustic places, flowered fields, where the buttercups crowd their little varnished cups, and the vigilant ox-eyes are already wakefully staring up from among the grass-spears; a little wood; a deep and ruddy-colored lane, along whose unpruned hedges straggle the riches of the wild-rose, most delicately flushed, as if God in passing had called her very good, and she had reddened at his praise; where the honey-suckle, too, is holding stilly aloft the open cream-colored ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... that had taken up their residence in the rushes and flags of the upper end of the lake. These birds are not such exclusive westerners as their ebon-hued cousins just described; for I found them breeding at Lake Minnetonka, near Minneapolis, Minnesota, a few years ago, and they sometimes straggle, I believe, as far east as Ohio. A most beautiful bird is this member of the Icteridae family, a kind of Beau Brummel among his fellows, with his glossy black coat and rich yellow—and even orange, in highest feather—mantle covering the whole head, neck, and breast, and a large white, decorative ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... copying line—it isn't only he as does the copying, but she too; nurses the baby, and minds the kitchen fire, and goes on, sheet after sheet, all at the same time; and a very tidy thing they make of it, only they do straggle their words so;—well, they were saying as it's one of the most remarkablest ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... yards anywhere uncrossed; Tempest spreads all revirginate like snow, Half burying dead wood snapped off from tossed trees, Since right along the foreshore, out of reach Of furious driven waves, three hundred pines Straggle the marches between sand and soil. Like maps of stone-walled fields their branching roots Hold the silt still so that thin grass grows there, Its blades whitened with travelling powdery drift The besom of the lightest breeze sets ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... not the officers, but the common soldiers who straggle from the lines for plunder and—while the pigs of Hessians and Waldeckers, sold by their princes at so much per head, cannot be controlled, even by their own officers. See, here, is the broadside of which I spoke. I have seen every affidavit, and swear ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... other corner of our battle-stage, on the road to Landshut, is a Village of no great compass; but sticks pleasantly together, does not straggle in the usual way; climbs steep against its Gallows-Hill (now called 'SIEGESBERG, Victory Hill,' with some tower or steeple-monument on it, built by subscription); and would look better, if trimmed a little and habitually well swept. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... even rode over on horseback and pointed out to the generals that they were very badly quartered in a place where there was no harbour and no city, having to obtain all their provisions from Sestos, and, when the ships were once hauled up on shore, allowing the men to leave them unguarded and straggle where they pleased, although they were in the presence of a fleet which was trained to act in silence and good order at the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... beyond, or in what direction, we did not know. We had thirty men with us, a more or less ragtag lot, picked up anyhow in the bazaars. They were soft, ill-disciplined and uncertain. For five or six hours they marched well enough. Then the sun began to get very hot, and some of them began to straggle. They had, of course, no intention of deserting, for their only hope of surviving lay in staying with us; but their loads had become heavy, and they took too many rests. We put a good man behind, but without much avail. In open country a safari can be permitted to straggle over miles, for ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... devising means of subsistence for the widows and orphans of the men who will straggle out to be slaughtered to-night,' said Luciano; 'you have ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York—mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it turned out. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... success to his arms. If he could not take Quebec, it was time to be gone, for in the late autumn the dangers of the St. Lawrence are great. He lay before Quebec for just a week and on the 23d of October sailed away. It was late in November when his battered fleet began to straggle into Boston. The ways of God had not proved as simple as they had seemed to the Puritan faith, for the stronghold of Satan had not fallen before the attacks of the Lord's people. There were searchings of heart, recriminations, and financial distress ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... with her mate dying of some kind of sickness. They buried him ashore, and then went out again, after giving us the precise date at which the world was coming to an end, and saying what a hell of a poor millennium it was going to be for anybody save them! Oh, yes, the usual straggle of vessels that happened our way, with months between; and, once, the smoke of a steamer ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... the birches and hazels that straggle about the rude wall of the little enclosure, on the contrary, they say, you may discover the broom and the rag-wort, in which witches mysteriously delight. But ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... time the French dared not straggle. Every man who left the ranks or lagged behind was killed. The Arabs were seldom seen, but they lay concealed behind every inequality of the ground, every clump of bushes. Occasionally, when there seemed to be an opening, a horde of Arabs would ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... town, I drove C—— down. It was such a day as I hope, for the credit of nature, is seldom seen in any parts but these—muddy, foggy, wet, dark, cold, and unutterably wretched in every possible respect. Now, C—— has enormous whiskers, which straggle all down his throat in such weather, and stick out in front of him, like a partially unravelled bird's-nest; so that he looks queer enough at the best, but when he is very wet, and in a state between jollity (he is always very jolly ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... condition between prosperity and destitution. A procession was also constantly flowing from the hospital to the quartermaster's stores—the same procession, with one military touch; for this time the men did not straggle, but were marched single file in charge of a sergeant. The next procession was from the stores to the men's quarters; but now each man had a great bundle under his arms containing his entire kit ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... wayside hostelries, known to King. It was a dangerous business: we went daily under fire to satisfy our appetite, and put our head in the lion's mouth for a piece of bread. Sometimes, to minimise the risk, we would all dismount before we came in view of the house, straggle in severally, and give what orders we pleased, like disconnected strangers. In like manner we departed, to find the cart at an appointed place, some half a mile beyond. The Colonel and the Major had each a word or two of English—God help their pronunciation! But they did well enough to order a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... broad Height, called of Siptitz, the main Eminence of the Gau. Shoulder, I called it, of this Height of Siptitz; but more properly it is on a continuation, or lower ulterior height dipping into Elbe itself, that Torgau stands. Siptitz Height, nearly a mile from Elbe, drops down into a straggle of ponds; after which, on a second or final rise, comes Torgau dipping into Elbe. Not a shoulder strictly, but rather a CHEEK, with NECK intervening;—neck GOITRY for that matter, or quaggy with ponds! The old Town stands high enough, but is enlaced on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and the street children ran after her. It was just at the boundary of the parish of Ploubazlanec, where many houses straggle along the roadside. But she had the strength to rise and hobble along on ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... of Liebenstein (for the greater part timber-framed and red-tiled) straggle up the immediate hills which surround it. Those of more pretention and inevitable ugliness range themselves decently and in order along two parallel roads. Aloof as this village is from "the madding crowd's ignoble strife," it has yet been touched to ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... is to fill the heart of man to the full with affectionate satisfaction, should straggle down a hillside toward a lake and a white road where the sun shines hotly. Some of its branches should trail over an old, lichened and weather-stained stone wall, dropping their fruit into the highway for thirsty pedestrians. There should be ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... nobler portion of the town The curling billows roll their restless tide: In parties now they straggle up and down, As ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... festooned with flowering trailers. It is often difficult to tell what the architecture is, or what is house and what is vegetation; for all angles, and lattices, and balustrades, and verandahs are hidden by jessamine or passion-flowers, or the gorgeous flame-like Bougainvillea. Many of the dwellings straggle over the ground without an upper story, and have very deep verandahs, through which I caught glimpses of cool, shady rooms, with matted floors. Some look as if they had been transported from the old-fashioned villages of the Connecticut Valley, with their clap-board ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the other's energy. He was of that class who were once denominated "poor whites." The war taught him that he was as good a man to stop bullets as one that was gentler bred, and during that straggle which the non-slaveholders fought at the beck and in the interest of the slaveholding aristocracy, he had learned more of manhood than he had ever known before. In the old days his father had been an overseer on ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Up our hill straggle the more ambitious houses, that have shaken off the dust from their feet, or their foundations, and surrounded themselves with green grass, and are shaded with trees, and are called "places." There are ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... from the North and opened a grocery store at Jefferson Corners. It is a little store and there aren't many houses near it—just the railroad station and a big shed or two. Beyond the sheds a few cabins straggle along the road, and then begin the great plantations, which really aren't plantations any more, because nobody around here raises much of anything in these days. They just sit and sigh over the things that are different ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... "We've taken our place and we must stick to it. We can't afford to straggle. Hullo! it's just on twelve. Thwaite has had three hours to prepare, and he's bound to have wakened the south. I fancy the business won't quite come off ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... show themselves to be singularly obtuse to the advantage of placing emphatic material in an emphatic position. Scott is almost always careless of his chapter endings: he allows the sections of his narrative to drift and straggle, instead of rounding them to an emphatic close. But more artistic novelists, like Victor Hugo for example, never fail to take advantage of the terminal position. Consider the close of Book XI, Chapter II, of "Notre Dame de Paris." ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... she was told, into a quieter street, and hurried a little. To be free from this horrible place, it was her only thought. Before she had gone far the houses began to straggle; she was at the edge of the town. The moon was just rising, and by its misty light Barbara saw that the open country was before her. A little further on, the road began to dip, and there, in the shadow of a belt of trees, ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... boldly toward them. They moved aside, forming a reluctant lane. Some of the Zeudians in the rear shoved to close in on them, but the ones in front held them back. It wasn't until the two were nearly through that the lane began to straggle into a threatening circle around them again. The Zeudians were evidently becoming reassured by the fact that Wichter continued to see all right in spite of the little strange creature's alarming act ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... in a few moments had passed the foremost of the throng—not much of a feat, considering his advantages. He placed himself in the lead, his wooden sword still in hand, and solemnly directed the march, conforming his pace to theirs and occasionally turning as if to see that his forces did not straggle. Surely such a leader never before had ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... down the crooked trail along which straggle the cabins, I saw something white in a tree at the far end. Supposing it to be a White-rabbit in a snare, I went near and found, to my surprise, first that it was a dead house-cat, a rare species here; second, under it, eyeing it and me alternately, was a hungry-looking Lynx. I had a ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... a gallop, though the horses obtained at Windsor were already jaded, and very slowly the bluff grew higher. Glancing over his shoulder, Grant saw a few moving objects straggle across the crest of the rise. They seemed to grow plainer while he watched them, and ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... followed hers, roaming over the little flower plot in search of room for the geranium, which did not appear; prince's feather and marigolds so choked up the ground where balsams did not straggle over it. Molly looked as Daisy did at the possibilities of the case, looked again at the strange sweet little face which was so busy in her garden; and then made a sudden movement. With two or three motions of hands and knees she drew herself a few steps back to ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... make copra on their lands; women bound for the bush to gather flowers against the evening toilet; and, twice a day, the toddy-cutters, each with his knife and shell. In the first grey of the morning, and again late in the afternoon, these would straggle past about their tree-top business, strike off here and there into the bush, and vanish from the face of the earth. At about the same hour, if the tide be low in the lagoon, you are likely to be bound yourself across the island for a bath, and may enter close at their heels ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to understand the value of time— whether in their councils, their daily work, their feasts, or their attendance at church, they are generally behind the appointed hour. If a council is called to commence at noon, three or four Indians will have perhaps assembled at that hour; others straggle in as the day wears on; they sit or lie about, smoking their pipes, chewing tobacco, and talking; and it will probably be three o'clock ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... mind going in the procession, nor does Jack,—unless he's very late; but Nora thinks it's horrid, and Phil and Felix always hang back for the very last, and try to look as if they didn't belong to us at all. Nannie and Maedel go with papa, Kathie and Paul with Miss Marston, and the rest of us straggle along as we like until we get to the church. It's brown and very large, and has a good deal of ivy growing all over it. It's the church where Murray Unsworth and Helen Vassah stood sponsors for their little cousin Paul; they go there and their ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... crowd of camp followers, who straggle and scatter. We are like a comet, bright at the head but tailing away into mere gas behind. However, every man may speak for himself, and I do not feel that your charge comes home to me. I am only bigoted against bigotry, and that I hold to be as legitimate ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... of soldiers, enjoying a brief holiday from the trenches in a cantonment near the field, straggle forward and gather timidly about the airplane, listening open-mouthed for what its ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... the "newtakes" straggle up Cosdon's eastern flank and mark a struggle between man and the giant beacon, Chris Blanchard rested a while upon the grass by the highway. Tim, wrapped in a shawl, slept soundly beside his mother, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... are blue violets and white houstonia. Vines, thinly covered with fresh leaves, straggle over the walls,—Virginia creeper, poison ivy, grapevine, and at least one other, the name of which I do not know. A clump of tall blackberry vines is full of white blossoms, "bramble roses faint and pale," and in one corner is a tuft of scarlet blooms,—sage, ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... absolutely and finally, until the afternoon, when they return like thieves in the night and venture out in a desperate hope; two more come stamping back in even more offensive enthusiasm; and the remainder straggle home moody and disillusioned, reviving their sunken spirits by impossible ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... 2 Strange sights do straggle in my restless thoughts, And lively forms with orient colours clad Walk in my boundless mind, as men ybrought Into some spacious room, who when they've had A turn or two, go out, although unbade. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... entered upon a long and arduous straggle with Carthage, which ruled without a rival the western waters of the Mediterranean. This great and powerful city was founded by the Phoenicians[26] of Tyre in B.C. 814, according to the common chronology. Its inhabitants were consequently a branch of the Semitic race, to which the ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... me on the loveseat when my consciousness started to straggle back. Her hands were soothing my brow. That isn't where it had hurt. She had struck back, only twice as hard as I had managed. Fool around with somebody who had a good grip on my nervous system, would I? I was lucky to ...
— The Right Time • Walter Bupp
... you straggle in with trout or game. The camp-keeper lays aside his mending or his repairing or his note-book, and stirs up the cooking-fire. The smell of broiling and frying and boiling arises in the air. By the dancing flame of the campfire ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... friendly war, As when rival muscles tussle, Highland lad or British tar, 'Tis a furious fight a outrance, knitted, knotted each to each, Heels firm-planted, hands tense-clenching, till the knobby knuckles bleach. Federated Masters straggle, Federated Toilers strain, Each intent on selfish interest, each on individual gain, And a chasm yawns between them, and a gulf is close behind! What is the most likely issue of such conflict fierce ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various |
