"Unkempt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon him as he watched the worshippers, his eyes resting now on a figure of a woman on her knees before the small altar at his left, her half-naked baby flat on its back beside her; and again that of an unkempt gray-haired man, his clothes old and ragged, his body bent, his lips trembling in supplication. All at once, and for the first time in his life, he began to realize the existence of a something ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... with our camionette well laden with clothing for the inhabitants. Ah! they are all away working in the fields. Old Mademoiselle Masson, peering through the one pane of glass that is left in her window, sees us, and hobbles to the door to give us the information. She beams upon us, an unkempt yet gracious figure, and when she talks her false teeth move slightly up and down. She will run and call her sister who is up on the hill, and she will tell Madame Riflet as she goes. The news will spread. ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... the picturesque phases of the vanished era. Gone are the bullwhackers and the prairie-schooners! Gone are the stagecoaches and their drivers! Gone are the Pony Express riders! Gone are the trappers, the hardy pioneers, the explorers, and the scouts! Gone is the prairie monarch, the shaggy, unkempt buffalo! ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... Legislature, who has written a great quantity of verses first and last, but has become all but "proverbial" in his native State for his carelessness of his own poetry; so that we suppose people say there of a negligent parent, "His children are as unkempt as the Hon. Alexander M. W. Ball's poems"; or of a heartless husband, "His wife is about as well provided for as Mr. Ball's Muse." Still Mr. Ball is not altogether lost to natural feeling, and he has not thrown away all his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... windows the peasantry could now be seen, by the light of their torches, marching up the long avenue that fronted the Chateau, and headed by a single drum on which the bearer did no more than beat the step. They were a fierce, unkempt band, rudely armed—some with scythes, some with sickles, some with hedge-knives, and some with hangers; whilst here and there was one who carried a gun, and perhaps a bayonet as well. Nor were there men only in the rebellious ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... head and unkempt beard appeared above the railing, it was evident that he was drunk. But it was also evident, before he opened his lips, that the orator of Sandy Bar—the one man who could touch their vagabond sympathies (perhaps because he was not above appealing to them)—stood before them. A consciousness ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... with a scraggly beard stepped away from the corral and approached the group by the fire, his stubby fingers twining in and out of his unkempt whiskers as he walked along, his eyes fixed on the ...
— The Boy Scout Camera Club - The Confession of a Photograph • G. Harvey Ralphson
... left the room. Marjorie tumbled into her clothes in a most untidy manner, and joined her governess, looking what she was, very unkempt and tumbled. ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... began to dominate the place, cloudy with its pipe-smoke and redolent with the stale fumes of fires long dead. Like some Hogarth picture against a sombre background the ungainly figures of men stood out of shadow and melted into it: men unkempt and tribal ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... thus thinking she saw an unknown man—thin, with burning eyes and unkempt beard, and clad in a richly embroidered robe—standing before her. She let fall her mirror, and uttered a cry ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... joker stood Depressed by his neighbour's doom, And amazed that a wife struck to widowhood Thought first of her unkempt room. ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... looking out over the ceaseless roll of the Atlantic. I used to like to go down there and fraternize with the blue-fishers, or the annual squads of sea-bass takers. Sometimes, along Montauk peninsula, (it is some 15 miles long, and good grazing,) met the strange, unkempt, half-barbarous herdsmen, at that time living there entirely aloof from society or civilization, in charge, on those rich pasturages, of vast droves of horses, kine or sheep, own'd by farmers of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... ushered into a dim-lit drawing-room, where an instant later we were joined by a very tall, handsome, light-beared man of fifty, the younger brother of the dead scientist. His wild eyes, stained cheeks, and unkempt hair all spoke of the sudden blow which had fallen upon the household. He was hardly articulate as he ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... A sleepy, unkempt doctor, smelling strongly of spirits, was brought. My father died under his lancet, and the next day, utterly stupefied by grief, I stood with a candle in my hands before a table, on which lay the dead man, and listened senselessly to the bass sing-song of the deacon, interrupted from ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... loveliness of its own; but, no, it is not as beautiful as Italy or Ireland, and it isn't as tidy as England. If you keep away from the big manufacturing towns and their outskirts you may go by motor or railway through shire after shire in England and never see anything unkempt, down-at-the-heel, out-at-elbows, or ill-cared-for; no broken-down fences or stone walls; no heaps of rubbish or felled trees by the wayside; no ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... at his man, and began to frown. Strange suspicions attacked him as he saw that Jerry looked rough and unkempt. His hair was not brushed; he had evidently not washed that morning, and his Oxford mixture coat was ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... was a typical one of such communities at that period; horny-handed farmers with long shaggy beards and unkempt hair, dressed in ill-fitting black suits; matronly looking farmers' wives in their Sunday best; rosy-cheeked daughters full of fun and vivacity and chattering like magpies; tall, lank, awkward, bashful sons, and red-haired, black-haired, and tow-headed urchins of both sexes, the latter ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... suited to the likes of him," according to the innkeeper's opinion, and he found himself actually seeking a house of entertainment in the slimy, ill-lighted narrow street, when, from out the dimness, running towards him, with bare feet paddling in the sludge, came a slatternly girl, with unkempt wisps of red hair hanging over her face ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... might, after all, be some truth in what the reporter said. On the night that I had spoken at the Queen's Hall meeting I had been quite self-possessed. I pursued the narrative and smiled slightly at a description of the Russian—"a loosely-built, bearded giant, unkempt in appearance, and with huge square hands and pale Mongolian eyes which roll like those of a maniac." That was certainly unfair, unless the reporter had seen him at the restaurant when Sarakoff drank the champagne. I was about to continue, when a red brick ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... Although he had letters of credit for five thousand, he was unable to cash them in Vienna. Women hugging newspaper bundles containing expensive Paris frocks and millinery were herded in third-class carriages and compelled to stand many hours. They reached London utterly fatigued and unkempt, but mainly cheerful, only to find the hotels choked with fellow countrymen ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... lips quivered. There was the old glorious pleading in her eyes, and before it Jan bowed his unkempt head, and crushed her hands tightly in his own. For a half-minute there was silence, and in that half-minute there came a century between them. At ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... finally attaining the dignity of cities. To her, fresh from trim farmsteads and rural communities that began setting their houses in order when Washington wintered at Valley Forge, Hopyard stood forth sordid and unkempt. And as happens to many a one in like case, a wave of sickening loneliness engulfed her, and she eyed the speeding Limited as one eyes ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... night, and to sit down to such supper as might be provided in so desolate a spot. The unprepossessing look of everything was completed when the host came in and took his seat at the head of the table. A bear out of the woods could hardly have been rougher, with his unshaven hair and unkempt beard. He answered to the type of border ruffian, and his appearance suggested the dark deeds that might be done here in secret, and hidden in the forest gloom. Imagine the astonishment of the travellers when this rough backwoodsman rapped on the table and bowed his head. And such a prayer! ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... fire, four grim-looking fellows, ragged and unkempt, three of them talking together and one who ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... But the unkempt girl was not to be persuaded, and Irene presently took her leave. The conversation had perturbed her; she went away in a very unwonted frame of mind, beset with troublesome fancies and misgivings. ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... the railway lines and past unkempt hedges of Duranta in full bloom towards the group of residences reserved for officials of the Railway, each within its own garden and bounded by barbed wire as a protection ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... added, with a courtliness that was so incongruous with his unkempt appearance and patched and tattered garments;—"If the Senhora permits, the men may smoke now. In another hour the channel will not be navigable. We have a hot and tiring day before us, and I advise sleep for those to whom it is vouchsafed. If the weather continues to improve, the next tide will ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... 'compassion.' Then the king on the throne called him to come forward, and, as he went, he caught sight of himself reflected in the polished steel shield of the bodyguard, and started back in horror! He was old, decrepit, dirty, and ragged! His long white beard and locks were unkempt, and straggled all over his chest and shoulders. Only one sign of royalty remained to him, and that was the signet ring upon his right hand. He dragged it off with shaking fingers and held it ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... to speak; he was charming as in former days. His large eyes, the mirrors of love, had become tender again. And his hair, lately so dull and unkempt, had regained its soft, glossy wave, with the use of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... unkempt appearance, and other earmarks caused a little apprehension in the hearts of the girls and Mrs. Vernon; but soon after the new arrivals started their fire to cook supper, the three tramps ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... will for generations remain as the most precious ornaments of some colonial farmhouse. Then the victors gathered together and sang psalms, not jubilant but sad and quavering. The prisoners, in a downcast column, weary, spent, and unkempt, filed off to the Boer laager at Waschbank, there to take train for Pretoria. And at Ladysmith a bugler of Fusiliers, his arm bound, the marks of battle on his dress and person, burst in upon the camp with the news that two veteran regiments had covered the flank of ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Its rider was gesticulating wildly. Strange to say, though not a word had been said, as though awakened by an electric current, every man had got up and had fixed his astonished eyes on the newcomer. He was an artillery non-commissioned officer; his face was crimson, his hair unkempt, his cap had come off his head and was dangling behind by the chin-strap. With a violent jerk he pulled up his foaming horse for a second: "Where is the Colonel—the Colonel?" With one voice the whole squadron replied: "There, on ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... on the poop, saw men on the Champion waving arms and pointing a megaphone his way. He could not hear, nor could he hope to from the bow, yet he ran forward. As he reached the forecastle steps, an unkempt figure came in over the bow—a big, rawboned man in dripping rags, with blood streaming from arms and legs, with a red, round, and sorrowful face bordered by long, matted, gray hair-with the gleam of incipient ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... been transported into Louis' study, which was furnished with the few odd pieces of furniture carried away from the old home so long shared in common between the father and son. When the young man entered, the stranger was still unconscious, his white hair falling in disorder over his brow and his unkempt beard ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... persons that were sadly neglected. The subjects are chosen for me, and it does seem as if the publisher enjoyed making me eulogize frowziness. I have to describe Blessed Saints most of whom were deplorably unkempt: Labre, who was so lousy and ill-smelling as to disgust the beasts in the stables; Saint Cunegonde who 'through humility' neglected her body; Saint Oportune who never used water and who washed her bed only with her tears; Saint Silvia who never removed the grime from her face; ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... He came over to my table. He never recognized me, so dull was he with disappointment ... me with my unshaven, unkempt appearance and in my mean German shoddy ... but ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... windows, the view of the courtyard from the dining-room and of attics and chimney-cowls from the drawing-room, the closed anthracite stoves in lieu of fires, the crockery, the wine-bottle, the mustard, the grey salt, the unconventional gestures and smiles and exclamations of the unkempt maid—all these strange details enchanted him, and they all set off very vividly the intense, nice, honest, reassuring Englishness of ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... flitter 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 ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... one, with the exception of the editor of the Times, ever dreamed that there was anything out of the common in the shaggy, unkempt head upon which poor Bogg used to "do his little time," until a young English doctor came to practise at Geebung. One night the doctor and the manager of the local bank and one or two others wandered into the bar of the Diggers' Arms, where Bogg ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... heard some one coming up to the attic; the door opened, and the girl who had brought them upstairs put her unkempt head in at ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Queen-Mother of the West that she goes about with hair unkempt, with a bird's beak and tiger's teeth, and that she is skilled in playing the flute. Yet this is not her true figure, but that of a spirit who serves her, and rules over the Western sky. The Queen-Mother entertained King ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... and unkempt appearance. The atmosphere of the sitting-room was stuffy and redolent of stale tobacco smoke. Wrayson's first action was to ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was shining, and Silberbach, like every other place, appeared all the better for it. But the view from the window of our room was not encouraging. It looked out upon the village street—a rough, unkempt sort of track—and on its other side the ground rose abruptly to some height, but treeless and grassless. It seemed more like the remains of a quarry of some kind, for there was nothing to be seen but stones and ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... mought 'a' knowed it!" a voice at once fond and threatening called to Reverdy's quailing figure. The owner of the voice was a young woman unkempt as to the pale hair which escaped from the knot at her neck, and stuck out there and dangled about her face in spite of the attempts made to gather it under the control of the high horn comb holding its main strands together. ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... hill—albeit blackberries were bygone things—a troop, a flock of children were scattered up and down, picking flowers. Golden rod and asters and 'moonshine,' filled the little not-too-clean hands, and briars and wild roses combed the 'unkempt' hair somewhat roughly. Whiteheaded youngsters all of them, looking (but for small patterns of blue calico and nankeen) not unlike a drove of little pigs. Next appeared an imposing array of sunflowers, ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier; his life 'a battle and a march,' under the right General. It is forever indispensable for a man to fight: now with Necessity, with Barrenness, Scarcity, with Puddles, Bogs, tangled Forests, unkempt Cotton;—now also with the hallucinations of his poor fellow Men. Hallucinatory visions rise in the head of my poor fellow man; make him claim over me rights which are not his. All Fighting, as we noticed ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... beard it not long be shave; His hair hung all unkempt: A man most fit even for the grave, Whom spiteful love ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... so never have beautifully and smoothly arranged coiffures. Each little hirsute filament has a rebellious tendency to go in the direction nature intended it should, and refuses to "stay where it is put," giving the head in consequence, an unkempt and what is termed an "unladylike" appearance. The criss-cross effect resulting from combing and arranging the hair contrary to "the grain" is conspicuously apparent in the coiffure of no less a personage than Eleanora Duse, who, as may ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... that he tried to keep back flitted across Artois's pale face, over which the unkempt beard straggled in a way that would have appalled his Parisian barber. Hermione ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... stranger, but a full-length representation by one who knows the thing he describes intimately, and is himself a part of it. Almost every mile of the road travelled has been Dreiser's own road in life. He knew those unkempt Indiana towns in boyhood; he wandered in the Indiana woods; he came to Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo as a young man; all the roots of his existence are out there. And so he does his chronicle con amore, with many ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... himself stiffly up in his chair. His mass of brown hair seemed more unkempt than usual, his hard face sterner than ever by reason of ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... imperceptible raising of eyelid and contraction of brow, was easily transmuted into a gaze of ferocity or indignation. His bulky frame was clothed in the seal-skin garb peculiar to his people; his hair was straight, voluminous, and unkempt, and his motions gave indication of great ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... two remarkable individuals whom Uncle John saw for the first time. One was a Cappuccin monk, with shaven crown and coarse cassock fastened at the waist by a cord. He was blind in one eye and the lid of the other drooped so as to expose only a thin slit. Fat, awkward and unkempt, he stood holding to the back of his chair and swaying slightly from side to side. Next to him was a dandified appearing man who was very slight and thin of form but affected the dress and manners of extreme youth. Ferralti whispered to Uncle John ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... in the least. She had a starved-looking cat on her lap, which she was huddling against her breast. The face had fallen away almost to nothing, so small and thin it was. She was dirty and unkempt. Her still brown hair, once so daintily neat, straggled out beneath her torn cap; her print bed-gown was pinned across her, her linsey skirt was in holes; everywhere the same tale of age neglected ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Christian or quasi-Christian circumstances, you have just been traversing, with Elbe on your right hand. Innocent rural aspects of Humanity, Boor's life, Gentry's life, all the way, not in any holiday equipment; on the contrary, somewhat unkempt and scraggy, but all the more honest and inoffensive. There is sky, earth, air, and freedom for your own reflections: a really agreeable kind of Gau; pleasant, though in part ugly. Large tracts of it are pine-wood, with pleasant Villages and fine arable expanses interspersed. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of arrival and discussion and alighting had failed, curiously, to turn the head of an odd, unkempt-looking child,—a girl of nine or ten, with an old calico sun-bonnet flung back upon her shoulders, tangled, sunburnt hair tossing above it; gown, innocent of crinoline, clinging to lank, growing limbs, and bare feet, whose heels were energetically planted at a ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... eyes had a certain veiled look, as if he were hiding a bad disposition under those droopy lids. Without a saddle he betrayed his high, thin withers, the sway in his back, his high hip bones. His front legs were flat, with long, stringy-looking muscles under his unkempt buckskin hide. Even ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... march. Halt, left turn. Salute." This being done, the case was stated. The farrier-sergeant told the requisite number of lies. I denied them, but of course admitted shooting the beggar. Dirty, unwashed, unkempt, unshaven, ragged wretch that I looked, I daresay on a charge of double-murder, bigamy and suicide, I should have fared ill. The captain gave me what I suppose was a severe reprimand, told me that probably in Pretoria I should have to pay something, and ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... child, barefooted and with only one piece to hide its nakedness, dodged behind its mother as it walked to keep the wind from striking with its full force its emaciated body. The woman, though young in years, was old and haggard in face. Her woolly hair, unkempt and sprinkled with gray, the result of just three weeks of privation, apprehension and dread, bulged out from beneath the old shawl which covered her head. At the northwest corner of the hospital fence she paused, looked cheerfully toward ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... direst fashion the horrors of the road thence to Oregon and the worthlessness of Oregon if ever attained. "Old Greenwood" was the only name by which he was known. He was an old, old man, past eighty then, some said, with a deep blue eye, long white hair, a long and unkempt beard and a tongue of unparalleled profanity. He came in now, shouting and singing, as did the men of the mountains making the Rendezvous in the ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... and notwithstanding the warmth of the June day, all the windows were tightly closed. Its occupant, a lank man with a smooth but wizened face, straight white hair and dark, piercing eyes, was in accord with his surroundings,—shabby, unkempt, with cigarette ash down the front of his coat, his collar none too ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... intelligence, is readily imagined. That it will ever be understood is unlikely. As it is, the power staggers belief and makes modern psychology, with its study of brain-cells, stand aghast. As to poor Fields himself, he excites only sympathy. Homeless, unkempt, and uncouth, traveling aimlessly on a journey which he does not understand, he hugs to his heart a marvelous power, which he declares to be a gift from God. To his weak mind it lifts him above his fellow-men, and yet ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of the occasion, the centre of all this enthusiasm—thus carried as if in triumph into this assembly in evening dress, in white tulle and whiter kid, odorous of delicate sachets and scarce-perceptible perfumes—was a figure unhandsome and unkempt beyond description. His hair was long, and hanging over his eyes. A thick, uncared-for beard concealed the mouth and chin. He was dressed in a Chinaman's blouse and jeans—the latter thrust into ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... Sebastian's usual method, so far from his lax comprehension of a father's duty, that Barlasch paused and looked at him with suspicion. With the back of his hand he pushed up the unkempt hair which obscured his eyes. This unusual display of ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... the Uninhabited House. Of this fact we were satisfied, for Brenda, who gave tongue at the slightest murmur wafted over the river from the barges lying waiting for the tide, never barked as though she were on the track of living being; whilst the collie—a tawny-black, unkempt, ill-conditioned, savage-natured, but yet most true and faithful brute, which Munro insisted on keeping within doors, never raised his voice from the day he arrived at River Hall, till the night Mr. Harringford rang the visitor's-bell, ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... truth, the Indian women are homely to the last degree. "Ugly," said an Oregonian to me, as we contemplated a company of squaws—"ugly is too mild a word to apply to such faces;" and he was right. Broad-faced, flat-nosed, small-eyed, unkempt, frowzy, undersized, thickset, clumsy, they have not a trace of beauty about them, either young or old. They are just useful, nothing more; and as you look at them and at the burdens they bear, you wonder whether, when the Woman's ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... that, his personal appearance was unsatisfactory. He was slovenly in figure and habits, with a stubbly beard and unkempt hair; and although he had L150 a year his clothes were threadbare and shabby. He seemed always hard up for money. He did not go out, as most of us did, in the middle of the day to get lunch, but fortified himself with bread and cheese, which he brought in his ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... soon as we reached it we sent Toby to bring them in, not telling him that we suspected the character of the strangers. As they approached we anxiously examined their appearance, which was certainly not in their favour. They were savage-looking fellows with long beards, their unkempt hair hanging over their shoulders. They pulled up suddenly when they saw us standing with our backs to a couple of large trees, our baggage and saddles piled on the ground, and ...
— Adventures in Australia • W.H.G. Kingston
... one was looking in at the window. Pressed against the little back window was the face of an old man, so withered and wrinkled that it looked hardly human; only the eyes, bright and keen, were fixed upon the girls, with what they thought was a look of anger. Masses of wild, unkempt gray hair surrounded the face, and a fragment of old straw hat was drawn down over the brows. Altogether it was a wild vision; and perhaps it was not surprising that the gentle Rose was terrified, ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... seen from those backdoor suburbs that every railway in every land appears to regard as the only natural avenue of approach to busy communities. The line turned sharply along the right bank of the Tave and ran past tobacco factories, breweries, powder mills, scattered hovels, and unkempt streets. Here was no sun, but plenty of bare whitewash. Even Alec, accustomed to the singularly ugly etchings of Paris viewed from its chief railways, was completely disillusioned by these drab adumbrations of commerce and squalor. The Tave was no longer blue, but dull ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... limp and flabby, with eyes sunken and faded, beard unkempt, and a manifest disregard ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... morning, before the stars had quite faded in the west, or the sun had shot high his rays to gild the herald clouds, M'Hearty, looking careworn, unkempt, and weary—for he had never been to bed—entered Jack's state-room and touched him ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... passed him one night on their return from Mosman, playing in front of a public-house to an audience of three loafers. The streets had soon dragged him to their level. Unkempt and half starved, he wore the look of the vagrant who sleeps in his clothes for want of bedding. Grown childish in his distress, he had forgotten his lifelong habits of neatness and precision, going to pieces like a ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... his head. He was a tall man, with gray, unkempt hair, and long, wizened face. He wore a black suit of clothes, of ancient cut, and a stock which had literally belonged to ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Shakro, looking far from well, and with a swollen, blotchy face, walked slowly along, every now and then spitting on one side, and sighing deeply. I tried to begin a conversation with him, but he did not respond. He shook his unkempt head, as ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... unkempt appearance. Jack was eating a slice of bread and jam; Dick had Babs—somewhat in a soiled condition from watering the garden—on his back; Charlie, the incorrigible, with a tear in his knickers and a brimless hat on the back of his curly ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... an unkempt urchin with an aggressive and challenging countenance, but he had solved several problems in economy. One of these was the entire elimination of stockings and garters. This was accomplished by the use of a pair of trousers with legs of such ample diameter and of such ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... was fumbling in the money-bags, a new instance of the generosity of Drusus was presented. Down a by-path in the field filed a sorrowful company; a long row of slaves in fetters, bound together by a band and chain round the waist of each. They were a disreputable enough gang of unkempt, unshaven, half-clothed wretches: Gauls and Germans with fair hair and giant physiques; dark-haired Syrians; black-skinned Africans,—all panting and groaning, clanking their chains, and cursing softly at the two sullen overseers, who, with heavy-loaded whips, were literally driving ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... in the wilderness. His appearance was strange indeed. His hair was long and unkempt; his face tanned with the sun and the desert air; his body unnourished by the simple food of locusts and wild honey. His raiment was of the coarsest and cheapest cloth of camel's hair. His girdle was a rough band of leather, such as was worn by the poor,—most unlike ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... instant a man, unkempt and disheveled, sprang from behind a tree and with a single blow stretched the trooper unconscious upon ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... seated on a massive, simple throne of the greenish-yellow metal, the column of fire rising directly behind her like an impossible plume. In a semicircle at her feet, in massive chairs made of the odd metal, were perhaps twenty old men, their heads crowned with great, unkempt manes ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... Main, Or climb he lofty Alpine Crest and note Works monumental, Caesar's grandeur telling, 10 Rhine Gallic, horrid Ocean and remote Britons low-dwelling; All these (whatever shall the will design Of Heaven-homed Gods) Oh ye prepared to tempt; Announce your briefest to that damsel mine 15 In words unkempt:— Live she and love she wenchers several, Embrace three hundred wi' the like requitals, None truly loving and withal of all Bursting the vitals: 20 My love regard she not, my love of yore, Which fell through fault of her, as falls the fair Last meadow-floret whenas passed it o'er ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... Poor, faithful friend! I felt like a murderer in doing it, but I knew it was the kindest thing—and finished his sufferings with a bullet. There on the ridge, his bones will lie for many a long day. Brave Tommy, whose rough and unkempt exterior covered a heart that any warhorse might have envied, had covered 135 miles, without feed worth mentioning, and with only eleven gallons of water during that distance, a stage of nearly seven days' duration of very hard travelling ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... loosed the man's feet and brought him back with his hands still tied. What a figure he was—a good seven feet high, and built for business! He had a strong face; he had an unkempt shock of black hair which showed up a striking way when the officer removed his morion for him; for weapon he had a big ax in his broad leathern belt. Standing by Joan's horse, he made Joan look littler than ever, for his head was about ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with praise. We must turn to the less familiar schools of Franconia and Swabia; there we find the very opposite. As art it is savage and rough, but it lives—it weeps, nay it cries aloud, but it prays. We must look at the works of these unkempt geniuses, such as Gruenewald, whose Christs, rebellious and wrathful, grind their teeth; or Zeitblom, whose 'Veronica's veil,' in the Berlin Museum, is unpleasant, no doubt; the angels have black leather crosses on their breasts, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... justification for this attitude. The details of Polder's apparel, although acceptable in the main, were without nicety. His shoes were a crude tan, and his necktie from the outer limbo. His hands, too, had a grimy surface and the nails were broken, unkempt. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... desperate illness in Richard Watson were indeed plainly visible. His shaggy hair and thick, unkempt beard brought into relief the waxen or purple tones of the skin. The breath was laboured and the cough frequent. But the eyes were still warm, living, and passionate, the eyes of a Celt, with the Celtic gifts, and those deficiencies, also, of his race, broadly and permanently ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nor play at revolutions, but he forecast events more clearly and farther ahead than did the men who engineered them. In his mind's eye he saw Honolulu a modern, electric-lighted city at a time when it straggled, unkempt and sand-tormented, over a barren reef of uplifted coral rock. So he bought land. He bought land from merchants who needed ready cash, from impecunious natives, from riotous traders' sons, from widows and orphans and the lepers deported ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... decorated, who had, moreover, served the Emperor as an aide-de-camp in two battles, flattered the mother's vanity immensely. Coarse, blustering, and without real merit beyond the vulgar bravery of a cavalry officer, he was to her mind a man of genius; whereas Joseph, puny and sickly, with unkempt hair and absent mind, seeking peace, loving quiet, and dreaming of an artist's glory, would only bring her, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... attracted by the figure of the pilgrim, had paused near it. There was something familiar to him in that large, strong body, in that stern, dark face, in those large, calm eyes. The curly, grayish hair, falling from under the skull-cap, the unkempt bushy beard, which fell apart in thick locks, the long, hooked nose, the sharp-pointed ears, the thick lips—Foma had seen all these before, but could not recall ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... on the surface of the forest—like stars, and often covered the whole bush, so that the slopes looked like a charming carpet of the loveliest pattern. This tree, the most beautiful of the tropical forest, far surpasses the palm in elegance, whose crown too often looks yellowish and unkempt. ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... water crowded with coastwise shipping that runs far up into Weymouth town. A large foreign timber-brig lay at my feet, and under the round of her stern cowered, close to the wharf-edge, a slate-coloured, unkempt, two-funnelled craft of a type—but I am no expert—between the first-class torpedo-boat and the full-blooded destroyer. From her archaic torpedo-tubes at the stern, and quick-firers forward and amidship, she must have dated from the early nineties. Hammerings and clinkings, with spurts of steam ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... JOHNSON, 90 years or more, was born a slave of Mrs. Betty Glover, in Marengo Co., Alabama. Most of his memories are of his later boyhood in Sunnyside, Texas. He lives in an unkempt, little lean-to house, in the north end of Beaumont, Texas. There is no furniture but a broken-down bed and an equally dilapidated trunk and stove. Gus spends most of his time in the yard, working in his ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... creek bottom was alive with busy, silent, violent men, bending over the water, washing and shaking and paddling, all desperately intent upon something. They had not time to look up. They were ragged, unkempt, barearmed and bare-legged, every last one of them with back bent. For a mile or more Kells's party trotted through this part of the diggings, and everywhere, on rocky bench and gravel bar and gray slope, were holes with men picking and shoveling in them. Some were deep ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads toward Haslingfleld and Coton Where das Betreten's not verboten.... Oh, is the water sweet ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... ground, close against the hut wall, two low-looking half-breeds in gaudy shirts, and wearing their black hair long and unkempt, were filling in the time waiting for breakfast, shooting "crap dice." The only words spoken between them were the filthy epithets and slang they addressed to the dice as they threw them, and the deep-throated curses as money ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... a poet; he is dressed in a poor fitting cut- away coat; unkempt mustache and Van ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... I stood there gazing into her brave young eyes. In a trance I suffered her to lead me by the hand through the rank, dense rhododendrons. And still entranced I crouched by her side near the further side, with only unkempt grass-plot and a weedy path between us and that ponderous door, wide open still, and replaced by a section of the lighted hail within. On this we fixed our attention with mingled dread and impatience, those contending elements of suspense; but ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... quarrelled away about some point of pedigree as they sat, a towsy, unkempt pair, in a dusty corner of the byre, with beards of a most scraggy nature grown upon their chins. Their uncouthness gave a scruple of foppishness to M'I ver, and sent him seeking a razor in the widow's house. He found the late ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... his narrow shoulders, and, as La Mothe searched him in the wavering, guttered candle-light, it flashed upon him that contradiction was the note of all his characteristics. The weak chin with the unkempt straggle of a beard gave the lie to a forehead magnificent in its abundant strength of mental power: the promise of the luminous, clear eyes was robbed of fulfilment by the loose mouth with the slime of the gutter and sensuality of the beast writ large upon its thick lips. From the ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... of each dark and filthy dungeon is fixed a stone, with two iron chains, to which one or two of these wretched creatures are attached by an iron ring fastened round the neck. There they sit staring with fearfully distorted faces, their hair and beard unkempt, their bodies emaciated, and the marrow of life drying up within them. In these foul and loathsome dens they must pine until the Almighty in his mercy loosens the chains which bind them to their miserable existence by a welcome death. There is not one instance of a cure, and truly the treatment ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... the figure, the vacant space, unbuilt upon as yet, was becoming an immense human reservoir, into which turgid streams with threatening sounds were surging from the south. His eyes could separate the tumultuous atoms into ragged forms, unkempt heads, inflamed faces, animated by some powerful destructive impulse. Arms of every description proved that the purpose of the gathering was not a peaceful one. But what was ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... was the head man, swarthy-faced, clean-shaved Kusis; beside him Tulpe, his wife, a graceful young woman of about five-and-twenty, and her husband's little daughter by a former wife. This child was named Kinie, a merry-faced, laughing-voiced sprite, ten years of age, with long, wavy, and somewhat unkempt hair hanging down over her ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... in the afternoon, drawing towards the close of this memorable day. She was handed over to the governor of the prison, a short, thick-set man in black trousers and black-shag woollen shirt, and wearing a dirty red cap, with tricolour rosette on the side of his unkempt head. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... think, until one of the company, acting as spokesman for the silent reflections of the others, inquires, "Anybody know of any reeds about Katoum-abad?" Some one is about to reply, but sportsman No. 1 artfully waives further examination by heaping imprecations on the unkempt head of a dervish, who at this opportune moment commences a sing-song monotone, in a most soul-harrowing key, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... mildness passions quell, My utter ruin near at hand presage. Instead of blood which wont was to display His ruddy red upon my hairless face, By over-grieving that is fled away, Pale dying colour there hath taken place. Those curled locks which thou wast wont to twist Unkempt, unshorn, and out of order been; Since my disgrace I had of them no list, Since when these eyes no joyful day have seen Nor never shall till you renew again The mutual love which ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... face showed it haggard, unkempt, and unshorn. Plainly he had been several days in hiding; and by the gauntness of his figure, and the wolfish gleam in his eye as it roved quickly round the apartment, as if in search of food, it was plain that he was suffering keenly from ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the east end of continental churches. Thus, from the combined effects of the ecclesiastical lancet lights and the apsidal shape of the room, it occurred to Christopher that the sisters were all a delightful set of pretty saints, exhibiting themselves in a lady chapel, and backed up by unkempt major prophets, as represented by the forms of their ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... to me that he had ridden by to see if I was safe and to ask how I was getting along. I remember well how curiously those with him gazed at me, and I am sure that it must have struck them as very odd that such a dirty, ragged, unkempt youth could have been the son ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... (forgive the blank verse). Were these the features—was this the aspect—from which virtue had so often derived its encouragement and wrongdoing its reproof? Was this the figure the ladies of Troy had been wont to follow with all but idolatrous gaze? Nay, who was this man—unshaven, unkempt, unbewigged, smeared with mud from head to foot, and from scalp to jaw with commingling bloodstains? The Major groaned incredulous, horrified; gazed, shuddered, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not feel inclined to tell it all to Dick Shand. Dick had professed his intention of unravelling the mystery, but Caldigate almost thought that he would like to unravel it himself. The woman was so constantly alone! And then, though she was ill-dressed, untidy, almost unkempt on occasions, still, through it all, there was something attractive about her. There was a brightness in her eye, and a courage about her mouth, which had made him think that, in spite of her appearance, she ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... the hallway, and found it deserted. It was a rather dirty and unkempt place, and very poorly lighted—a single incandescent alone burned in the hall. Perlmer's room, so the name-plate indicated, was Number Eleven, and on the ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... same manner as in many ways he himself was obnoxious to Trent. His immaculate fatigue-uniform, his calm superciliousness, his obvious air of belonging to a superior class, were galling to Trent beyond measure. He himself felt the difference—he realised his ignorance, his unkempt and uncared-for appearance. Perhaps, as the two men walked side by side, some faint foreshadowing of the future showed to Trent another and a larger world where they two would once more walk side by side, the ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... long-eared, long-haired, dirty and unkempt trotted into the ring and spun about like a top for a ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... was a grimace to try to extract coppers from the traveller. Two miles farther on we came upon fourteen carts of gipsies, as wild a crew as one could meet all the world over. Some of the men struck me as handsome, but with a single exception the women were terribly unkempt-looking creatures. ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... great transformation they had reversed the traditional order of things in the matter of coiffure: the males allowed their hair to grow long, and the female adepts cut their hair short, adding occasionally the additional badge of blue spectacles. Their unkempt appearance naturally shocked the aesthetic feelings of ordinary people, but to this they were indifferent. They had raised themselves above the level of popular notions, took no account of so-called public opinion, gloried in Bohemianism, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... a sunshiny shady garden, with benches and tables set under the trees near the house, and beyond, an unkempt lawn, a sort of wilderness of grass and shrubs and trees, with clumps of dark and light foliage against the more uniform green of the surrounding hills, and it was still cool and pleasant when Graham wandered into it after breakfast on that Sunday ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... and shame. By reason of their hair, which they wore long and which now hung down in their eyes, and by reason also of their ridiculous loose red trousers and their long-tailed awkward blue coats, the Frenchmen showed themselves especially unkempt and frowzy-looking. Almost to a man they were dark, lean, slouchy fellows; they were from the south of France, we judged. Certainly with a week's growth of black whiskers upon their jaws they were fit now to play stage brigands without ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... lack a portrait or other plate, sometimes they have a torn or mounted title-page, or other imperfection. They are generally in cloth or calf bindings which are almost invariably somewhat decrepit, being either rubbed or perished, or cracked at the joints. They are dusty and rather unkempt, and fox-marks are common, for such volumes have passed through many hands and have not always been accorded the care that is due to good books. But it is here that one comes across books 'in the original boards uncut,' and, if expense be no object to you, you may often raise such ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... I was able to notice, may be roughly divided into the following categories:—(a) A simple crop of hair either cut quite close or allowed to grow fairly long, or anything between these two, but not dressed in any way, and probably uncombed, unkempt and untidy. This is the commonest form. (b) The same as (a), but with a band round the hair, separating the upper part of it from the lower, and giving the former a somewhat chignon-like appearance, (c) The hair ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... bloom. Where other flowers had been frightened away; where the poor crowded; where factories flared; where junk-heaps rusted; where backyards baked; where smoke defiled; where wretchedness stalked; where crime brooded; where the land was unkempt; where the human spirit was sodden—there the celestial thing multiplied its celestial growths, blessing the eyes and making the heart leap. It mattered little that so few gave it a thought or regarded it as other than a weed; there were always those few, who knew that it spelled beauty, who ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... country, and ten minutes' walk in the country brings one to real primitive woods. The town has not yet overflowed its limits like the great Northern commercial capitals, and Nature, wild and unkempt, comes up to its very threshold, and even in many places ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... to see them. Yet it was the best they could expect to find for the little rent they were able to pay. Situated in one of the cheapest parts of Harlem, the flat was in a row of tenement-like buildings, facing a street always filled with noisy, unkempt children. The corridors and staircases were gaudily decorated and the narrow halls and small rooms, shut off from proper light and air, gave one a sense of suffocation. The furnishings were of the ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... doing as bidden, the young chief visited with the head-chief's wife. The hunters were gone four days, at the end of which time they returned with much game, weary and very hungry. To their surprise they found the camp in a very unkempt condition and no bread baked in anticipation of their return. The messenger was called before the head-chief at once and questioned as to the directions he had given the women. He explained that he had told the chief of the women what they ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis |
