"Weedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was attracted by a new arrival. The boy Freedham, having listlessly wandered across from Kensingtowe, slouched on to the Nursery playground. He was a tall, weedy youth of sixteen; and the unhealthiness of his growth was shown by the long, graceless neck, the spare chest, and the thin wrists. There was a weakness, too, at his knees which caused me to think that they had once worked on springs which now were broken. But the greatest abnormality was seen ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... by a weedy looking young man rushing down the street at a great pace. It was the expression on his face that was extraordinary—a curious mingling of terror ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... the head of his army, and received an immense ovation, as did all his regiments and artillery as they passed through the lines of the weedy, sickly-looking garrison. These with their thin, pale faces cheered to the full bent of their power, but after standing in the sun for some time they became exhausted, and Sir Redvers sent back word for them to sit down, which they gladly did, whilst ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... now in forest shades; The Indian hunter strings his bow, To track through dark entangling glades The antlered deer and bounding doe, Or launch at night the birch canoe, To spear the finny tribes that dwell On sandy bank, in weedy cell, Or pool, the fisher knows right well— Seen by the red and vivid glow Of pine torch ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... effect was not inferior to the weathered parts, even to those of which the design had in some parts almost disappeared. On the front of the church of San Michele at Lucca, the mosaics have fallen out of half the columns, and lie in weedy ruin beneath; in many, the frost has torn large masses of the entire coating away, leaving a scarred unsightly surface. Two of the shafts of the upper star window are eaten entirely away by the sea wind, the rest have lost their proportions, the edges of the arches are hacked into deep hollows, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... cart and a horse to draw it. The farmer wanted working horses, for wasn't hay sixty or seventy pounds a ton, and corn what you liked to ask for it? Every kind of harness horse was worth forty, fifty, a hundred pounds apiece, and only to ask it; some of 'em weedy and bad enough, Heaven knows. So between the horse trade and the road trade we could see a fortune sticking out, ready for us to catch hold of whenever we ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... disfavor. It is not uncommon for them, beached or tied up, to remain unmolested in one spot for years, with their pigs, chickens, and little garden patch about them, mayhap a swarm or two of bees, and a cow enjoying free pasturage along the weedy bank or on neighboring hills. Occasionally, however, as the result of spasmodic local agitation, they are by wholesale ordered to betake themselves to some more hospitable shore; and not a few farmers, like our friend at Beaver River, are quick to pattern ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... genealogies, which were from time to time adjusted and collated with so much skill and scrupulous accuracy by the official antiquaries who met in the Hall of Tara? The reader unacquainted with such an out-of-the-way and rather weedy corner of literature, may think this vague exaggeration; and I shall finish it by quoting the latest printed, so far as I know, of the numerous solemn and methodical statements about the manner in which the records of these very ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... head, behind each came a hound, With slow and noiseless paws upon the road. What is that shining on the weedy ground? Nought but the bright eyes of the dingy toad. The silent pines range every way around; A deep stream on the left side hardly flowed. Their path is towards the moon, dying alone— It touches the horizon, dips, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road and thrust its fringe of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I am speaking of it was mid-summer, and from these canes and weeds and waterplants there came ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... claim another look. Our brattling river tumbles through the one; The second spans a shallow, weedy brook; Beneath the others, and beneath the sun, Lie two long stilly pools, and on their breasts Picture their wooden ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... desolation saddens all thy green; One only master grasps the whole domain, And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain. No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, But choked with sedges, works its weedy way; Along thy glades, a solitary guest, The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest; Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies, And tires their echoes with unvaried cries. Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... it bore Was broken reedy stalks, Bent hither, thither, drooping o'er, Like flowers o'er weedy walks. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... plashy brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocky billows rise and sink On the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... nature was so white, it was not the face of death. There was a sense of movement and life which was in accord with their own spirits and rapid motion. Snow-birds fluttered and twittered in weedy thickets by the way-side, breakfasting on the seeds that fell like black specks upon the snow. The bright sunlight had lured the red squirrels from their moss-lined nests in hollow trees, and their barking was sometimes heard above the chime of ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... in the water lanes through which the machine had been driven. One large triangle in the vent of the bait was sufficient tackle. I am not certain that more elaborate flights are better anywhere; for weedy water I should have no reservation. From ten o'clock till five, with half an hour for luncheon, I toiled on, acquired a grand shoulder-ache that lasted me three days, and covered the bottom of the ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... understand men. Those were their faults. Had she learned better by now? Did she realize that she had far better marry a man who had loved her for herself, and who still loved her, rather than some fortune-hunter, like that weedy fellow Scarlett. (Mr. Tristram called all slender men weedy.) He would frankly own his fault and ask for forgiveness. He glanced for a moment at the ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... the village we gathered a considerable procession of little boys and girls, and so went in some state to the castle. It proved to be an extensive pile of crumbling walls, arches, and towers, massive, properly grouped for picturesque effect, weedy, grass-grown, and satisfactory. The children acted as guides; they walked us along the top of the highest walls, then took us up into a high tower and showed us a wide and beautiful landscape, made up of wavy distances of woody hills, and a nearer prospect of undulating ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I saw the mighty sea expand Like Time's unmeasured and unfathomed waves, One with its tide-marks on the ridgy sand, The other with its line of weedy graves; And as beyond the outstretched wave of time, The eye of Faith a brighter land may meet, So did I dream of some more sunny clime Beyond the waste of waters ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... nosing and sniffing as he went along. At times, he stopped to investigate. Here, it would be a bullet-hole in the pathway, or, perhaps, a powder stained wad. Anon, it might be a piece of torn sod, or a disturbed patch of weedy path; but, save for such trifles, he found nothing. I observed him, critically, as he went along, and could discover nothing of uneasiness, in his demeanor, to indicate that he felt the nearness of any of the creatures. By this, I was assured ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... made up the football crowds on Saturday afternoons. They made the countryside hideous on bank holiday afternoons. They were the despair of church and chapel, of the social reformer, and often of the police. This boy was under-sized, of poor chest development, thin-limbed, weedy; but there was a curious light in those staring eyes ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... ghosts—phantoms of people with whom upon this road he had walked and ridden and laughed, ghosts of old thoughts and recollected words. He came to a thick grove of trees, a broken fence, a gateway with no gate. Inattentive to these evidences of desertion, he turned in at the gate and rode along a weedy and neglected drive. At the end of it he came to an open space before a ruined house. The aspect of the tumbling walls and unroofed rooms roused him at last completely from his absorption. He dismounted, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... bed. There she sat waiting, out of breath.... Yes, his heavy shoes had found the steps; and, still growling, he entered the room. He felt the bed, lay down flat on his stomach and reached out with his arms; then he found her sitting sighing. She felt those two weedy arms grasp her and was caught in them as in an iron band. She moaned and screamed for help. His dirty, slimy mouth pressed her lips ... and then she felt herself sink away, out of the world. The people who heard the cries came to see what was the matter. They ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... see such webs on the wet grass, maybe, As a pixie-mother weaves for her baby, You will find such flame at the wave's weedy ebb As flashes in the meshes of a ...
— A Few Figs from Thistles • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... about our English schools, that parents may see for themselves what are the consequences of refusing both teaching and warning to their boys, under the delusion that God's lilies will grow up in the weedy garden of the human heart without strenuous ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... I could see it. There was a strong family likeness in 'em all—the same ugly features, the same cast o' countenance. The "black knob" was discernible, there was no mistake: barn doors broken off, fences burnt up, glass out of windows; more white crops than green, and both lookin' poor and weedy; no wood pile, no sarse garden, no compost, no stock; moss in the mowin lands, thistles in the ploughed lands, and neglect every where; skinnin' had commenced—takin' all out and puttin' nothin' in—gittin' ready for a move, SO AS TO HAVE NOTHIN' BEHIND. Flittin' time had come. Foregatherin', ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... her lay the little island of Delginish with a sharply shelving gravel shore. On the northern side of it stood two warning red perches. There were rocks inside them, rocks which were covered at full tide and half tide, but pushed up their brown sea-weedy backs when the tide was low. Priscilla put down her tiller, hauled on her sheet and slipped in through a narrow passage. She rounded the eastern corner of the island and ran her boat ashore in a little bay. She lowered the sail, slipped off her shoes and ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... the names required to distinguish the little slate-colored Carolina Rail from its brethren, Sora, Common Rail, and, on the Potomac river, Ortolan, being among them. He is found throughout temperate North America, in the weedy swamps of the Atlantic states in great abundance, in the Middle states, and in California. In Ohio he is a common summer resident, breeding in the extensive swamps and wet meadows. The nest is a rude affair made of grass and weeds, placed on the ground in a tussock of grass ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... pewter plate, On the grey disk of the unrippling sea, Beneath an airless, sullen sky of slate Dazzled destroyers zig-zag restlessly, While underneath the sleek and livid tide, Blind monsters nosing through the soundless deep, Lean submarines among blind fishes glide And through primeval weedy forests sweep. ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... was a frail-looking, weedy, pale-faced boy, fifteen years of age and about four feet nine inches in height. His trousers were part of a suit that he had once worn for best, but that was so long ago that they had become too small for him, fitting rather lightly and scarcely reaching the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... as they went. Then they struck a dim trail that ended at a grass-grown and little-used road. Crossing this, they entered the grounds of what had evidently been a fine plantation, though a young forest growth was now rapidly spreading over its once well-cultivated fields. A weedy approach between rows of noble trees led to the blackened ruins of a large house and outlying buildings. The stone walls were already over-run with a tangle of vines from which flamed blood-red ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... from this, if even in inferior things, there can be gratitude from you to me!—or rather, do not judge—but listen when I say that I am delighted to have met your wishes in writing as I wrote; only that you are surely wrong in refusing to see a single wrongness in all that heap of weedy thoughts, and that when you look again, you must come to the admission of it. One of the thistles is the ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... from behind, and slightly to the left of her. Now there came a hurried rush and scramble on the right; there was the sound of a match being scratched, a blob of light in the grey of the mist, and she saw standing in front of her, a ragged, weedy, red-headed youth, with the blazing match in his ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... dumb, aqueous silence, fish-like and aloof, about him. He seemed to swim like a fish in his own little element. Strange it all was, like Alice in Wonderland. Alvina understood now Lottie's strained sort of thinness, a haggard, sinewy, sea-weedy look. The poor thing was all the time swimming for ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... to the Fine Arts. If these opinions read like a medley of hastily crystallised judgments jotted down after the manner of a traveller pressed for time, they are none the less sincere. My garden is only a straggling weedy plot, but I have traversed it with delight; in it I have promenaded my dearest prejudices, my most absurd illusions. And central in this garden may be found the image of the supreme illusionist ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. The valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey upon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat earth is wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the kitchen-garden. The country does not suggest a single Greek idea. It has no form or outline—no barren peaks, no spare and difficult vegetation. The beauty is rich but tame—valleys green ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... than once walking three miles alone (it was not going on an errand) in the dark, along a road thickly shaded with trees. I was a little fellow; but I got over the distance in half an hour. Part of the way was along the wall of a church-yard, one of those ghastly, weedy, neglected, accursed-looking spots where stupidity has done what it can to add circumstances of disgust and horror to the Christian's long sleep. Nobody ever supposed that this walk was a trial to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... the face of France in many counties. The fields lay weedy and untilled; the starving peasant-folk took to the highway, every man preying on his neighbour. Woods had grown up, and broken in upon the roads. Howbeit, though robbers harboured therein, none of them held to ransom a wandering poor ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... neat carriage splashed and floundered in muddy pools along the road. The great sweep in front of the terrace and entrance stair was black and covered with mosses; the once trim flower-beds rank and weedy. Shutters were up along almost the whole line of the house; the great hall-door was unbarred after much ringing of the bell; an individual in ribbons was seen flitting up the black oak stair, as Horrocks at length admitted the heir of Queen's Crawley and his bride into the halls of their ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... plowed in the fall, and early in the spring, as soon as the soil is in good tilth; sow broadcast two bushels (or twenty-eight pounds) of seed to the acre; cover well with the harrow, both lengthways and across the piece of ground sown. Should the ground prove weedy, cut the weeds down with the mowing machine in June, and leave them upon the surface, and they will afford shade to ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... through the wooden gate. They were now in a little weedy plantation of undersized trees. The ground was full of rabbit holes, and Jeanne stumbled more ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 'carrot burrs,' are very injurious to wool, the hooked spines with which the seeds are armed attaching themselves to the fleece, rendering portions of it quite stiff and rigid. The common carrot belongs, of course, to this genus, and the fact that it is descended from an apparently worthless, weedy plant, indicates that the present species is capable of much improvement ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Hardy mounted; he had taken off his coat, waistcoat, and braces, and Garth had tied a blue silk handkerchief on his head. There was a quiet look of efficiency about John Hardy that was a contrast to the heavy mustachios cultivated by the cavalry officers and their rather weedy steeds. There was trouble in getting a start from the restiveness of one of the cavalry horses and the difficulty his rider experienced in managing it, but once away they swept down the slope, Buffalo two horse lengths behind. ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... for aught that age or storms might wreak: Such ending is not Death: such living shows What wide illumination brightness sheds From one big heart—to conquer man's old foes: The coward, and the tyrant, and the force Of all those weedy monsters raising heads When Song is murk from ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... 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 the black was slow to reappear; and my eyes stole home to my sweet ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... as one climbs from water up to land Fumbling for weedy steps with foot and hand, So I for yesterdays whereon to climb To this remote and new-struck isle of time. But I ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... a loss just where to look for Dotty until he remembered a certain weedy field along the edge of which the bushes had been left growing. "Perhaps I'll find him there," thought Peter, for he remembered that Dotty lives almost wholly on seeds, chiefly weed seeds, and that he ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... amounted to service. He waited about to meet and help his love, he hastened to defend her and to guide her; and if the favored one knew her role she humored his fancies, permitting him to aid her in finding her way across a weedy pasture lot or over a tiny little brook which he was pleased to call a torrent. A smile of derision was fatal. He would not submit to ridicule or joking. At the first jocular word his hands clinched and his eyes flamed with anger. His was not a face of laughter; for the most ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... along the banks of the Turnuk: where I found twenty-six species not obtained before. Some cultivation was observed, but as usual weedy, abounding with two species of Centaurea. In ditches two species of Epilobium, Sparganium, Mentha, Polygonum natans, Ranunculus aquaticus, Lotus, Carex, Astragaloid on swards, on the sandy moist banks of the Turnuk: Epilobium, two Veronicae, several ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... be weedy. I maintain it's a grand thing for our English nobs that their slips of sons have taken to marrying young women of the stamp of Maidie Trevail and Gwennie Harker— or Lil; keen-witted young women full of the joy of life, with ...
— The 'Mind the Paint' Girl - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... time—magazines, vacuums, old gold, nearnylons—and I must have been aware of green spaces before most of the houses, but now for the first time I saw lawns. Neat, sharply confined, smoothshaven lawns. Sagging, slipping, eager-to-keep-up-appearances but fighting-a-losing-game lawns. Ragged, weedy, dissolute lawns. Halfbare, repulsively crippled, hummocky lawns. Bright lawns, insistent on former respectability and trimness; yellow and gray lawns, touched with the craziness of age, quite beyond all interest in looks, content to doze easily in the sun. If Miss Francis' mixture ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... from the unbearable influence of the ranch foreman. The afternoon was hot, but it was bright with the sunshine, which, in the shadow of the mountains, is so bracing. The pastures he was working in were different from the lank weedy-grown prairie, although of the same origin. They were irrigated, and had been sown and re-sown with timothy grass and clover. The grass rose high up to the horse's knees as he rode, and the quiet, hard-working animal, ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them. There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes; As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... a great broad-shouldered countryman, with a rainy smell in his cumbrous overcoat, cleared his throat vehemently, looked startled at the sound, and again settled forward, his weedy chin resting on the knuckles of his hands as they tightly clutched the seat before him. And it was like being taken into a childish confidence as the ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... the period. Fig. 86, by Cima da Conegliano, a Venetian, No. 173 in the Louvre, compared with Fig. 3 of Plate 10 (Flemish), will show the kind of received tradition about rocks current throughout Europe. Claude takes up this tradition, and, merely making the rocks a little clumsier, and more weedy, produces such conditions as Fig. 87 (Liber Veritatis, No. 91, with Fig. 84 above); while the orthodox door or archway at the bottom is developed into the Homeric cave, shaded with laurels, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... his own room. "Tell the police to have the main line stations watched without a moment's delay. The man's game would be to get to one or other of them across country. There'll be no marks on him—he fired from a distance—but his boots are muddy. About five foot ten I should think—a weedy kind of fellow. Go and wake Tonson, and be back as quick as you possibly can. And listen!—on your way to the stables call the gardener. Send him for the farm men, and tell them to search the garden, and the woods by the river. They'll find me there. Or stay—one ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... query "Can you load a rifle unaided?" addressed to a weedy youth of seventeen who stood like a ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... weeds very different from each other. The most extensive is a little west of the meridian of Fayal, one of the Azores, between the twenty-fifth and thirty-sixth degrees of latitude.* (* It would appear that Phoenician vessels came "in thirty days' sail, with an easterly wind," to the weedy sea, which the Portuguese and Spaniards call mar de zargasso. I have shown, in another place (Views of Nature Bohn's edition page 46), that the passage of Aristotle, De Mirabil. (ed. Duval page 1157), can scarcely be applied to the coasts of Africa, like an analogous passage of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... floating between the green vault above, and the green weedy depths below, his thoughts searched the five weeks that lay between him and that first week-end when he had scolded Helena for her offences. It seemed to him that his love for her had first begun that day of the Dansworth riot. She had provoked and interested him before that—but ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... kinds; Johnson's Rambler had introduced the fashion of periodical essays, which he had followed up in his Adventurer and Idler. Imitations had sprung up on every side, under every variety of name; until British literature was entirely overrun by a weedy and transient efflorescence. Many of these rival periodicals choked each other almost at the outset, and few of them ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... The night is very still, and a young and inexperienced moon is making a somewhat premature appearance behind the Bosche trenches. The ground is covered with weedy grass—disappointed hay—which makes silent progress a fairly simple matter. The bombers move forward in extended order searching for the saphead. Simson, in the centre, pauses occasionally to listen, and his well-drilled line pauses with ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... together amidst the weedy flowery ruins. The lizards which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the sunshine. The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his black fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... waggons in our front, and a Frenchman's four-horse team in our rear. At 4 P.M. we reached the "Weedy," a creek which, to our sorrow, was perfectly dry. We drove on till 7 P.M., and halted at some good grass. There being a report of water in the neighbourhood, Mr Sargent, the Judge, Ward, and the Frenchman, started to explore; and when, at length, they did discover a wretched little mud-hole, ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... underpaid clerks from city offices had had no voice in the declaration of war. What could they know about international politics? Why should they be the pawns of the political chessboard, played without any regard for human life by diplomats and war lords and high financiers? These poor weedy little men with the sallow faces of the clerical class, in uniforms which hung loose round their undeveloped frames, why should they be caught in the trap of this horrible machine called "War" and let loose like a lot of mice against the ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... first plunged her bows into the tangled 'ocean meadow,' and the sailors, naturally enough, were ready to mutiny, fearing hidden shoals, ignorant that they had four miles of blue water beneath their keel, and half recollecting old Greek and Phoenician legends of a weedy sea off the coast of Africa, where the vegetation stopped the ships and kept them entangled till all on board ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... growth of fragrant herbage carpeted a certain narrow terrace, edging a deep ravine, from whose rifted gloom was heard a sound like the spirit of the lonely watercourse, moaning amongst its wet stones, and between its weedy banks, and under its dark bower ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... glance, rose quickly, dropped her sewing, and hurried out and down the stairs. The front door was open, she knew, and though there was never anything to be afraid of, still the house was in her charge. At the door she met him, just lifting his hand to touch the knocker. He was a tall, weedy fellow of something more than her own age, with light hair and blue eyes and a strangely arrested look, as if he obstinately, and against his own advantage, continued ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... Peter Boyer was discussed one July day as a subject of more practical interest. All the men in Sevier—a dozen, all told—were gathered as usual under the great oak which stood by the pump in the middle of the square. It was a grassy, weedy square: one or two cows lay chewing the cud on it, as they did all day long. Why not? There was never enough noise in the little street which ran round its four sides to disturb them. In the evening the women went out and milked them just where ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... the fringe of a gathering composed largely of weedy youths and wastrel old men. A few there were who looked like decent artizans, but more who bore the unmistakable aspect of the beery out-of-work. Among the strangely few women, were two or three girls of the domestic servant or Strand Restaurant ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... to some sorrow about his money; and my friend John Merivale was staying with me for a day or two. As we were taking a walk in that most uninteresting country, we turned up through a deserted gateway, along a weedy, grass-grown avenue, till we came to the modern ruins of a country house. It was one of the most melancholy spots I ever visited. I will not describe it here, because I have done so in the first chapter of my first novel. We wandered about the ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... the beach and get warm. Thank you very much, little mermaid. Tell papa to bring his daughter to see me any time. Good-bye'; and with a wave of her hand the tragedy queen dismissed her court, but remained on her weedy throne watching the two lithe figures race over the sand with twinkling feet till they were out of sight. Then, as she calmly bobbed up and down in the water, she said to herself: 'The child has a good stage face, vivid, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... heel and a reliable ash plant, was getting her head round, her sister Muriel, on a raw-boned well-bred colt—Sir Thomas, as he said, made the best of a bad job, and utilised his daughters as roughriders—shot past her down the leafy road, closely followed by a stranger on a weedy bay horse, which Nora instantly recognised as the solitary ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... growths of this jungle might be, I could not tell, yet I had the feeling that they were tall indeed. They were not trees, these pale, weedy arms that reached towards the dark sky. They were soft and pulpy, and without leaves; just long naked sickly arms that divided and subdivided and ended in little smooth ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... end of Salt Lake, the two northmost peaks of the Oquirrh Range are seen swelling calmly into the cool sky without any marked character, excepting only their snow crowns, and a few weedy-looking patches of spruce and fir, the simplicity of their slopes preventing their real loftiness from being appreciated. Gray, sagey plains circle around their bases, and up to a height of a thousand feet or more their sides are tinged with purple, which I afterwards ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... inches wide with the plough, manuring in the furrow, dropping the kernels about two inches apart, and covering with the hoe. In this mode of culture, the cultivator may be used between the rows when the corn is from six to twelve inches high, and, unless the ground is very weedy, no other after culture is needed. The first sowing usually takes place about the middle of May, and this is succeeded by other sowings, at intervals of a week or ten days, till July, in order to have a succession of green fodder; but, if it is designed to cut it up to cure for winter use, ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... cloudy November morning I thought I had caught a pair of nuthatches that had betrayed their trust. I had followed an old rail fence that bordered a weedy cornfield next to an open woods, and the only birds seen were a few juncos and tree sparrows. After walking about thirty rods, a pair of nuthatches were found; the next ten minutes were spent listening and looking for the other birds ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... irregularly by innumerable unseen mouths. But there was no wind astir; and the brown-black, glistening current beneath the white folds was glassy smooth save where the occasional big swirls boiled up with a swishing gurgle, or the running wave broke musically around an upthrust shoulder of rock or a weedy snag. The river was not wide—not more than fifty yards from bank to bank; but from the birch canoe slipping quietly down along one shore, just outside the fringe of alder branches, the opposite ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... howling "HISTORICUS,"—he's but a sorry cuss! WEG, too, that grandest of all grand old men; He's ridden some races; of chances and paces, Of crocks versus cracks he did ought to be judge. He sees you are speedy; when MORLEY sneers "Weedy," Or LAB doubts your staying, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... Tiler's weedy horse began to show signs of distress, for my sturdy pair had outpaced him sorely, I relented and reentered the town, meaning to make a long halt at the office of Messrs. Cook and Son, the universal ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... Inhabits weedy places in deep water, and along sandy bays. Sometimes taken by the natives on the edge of banks. Excellent eating. Caught by hook, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... him. It was one of the large boats built for traffic on the greater canals and the open waters of the Scheldt estuary. It was laden from end to end with little square boxes bearing only a number and a port mark in black stencil. A pleasant odor of sealing-wax dominated the weedy smell of the canal. ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... their own barrage, and several were shot for refusing to go into action thereafter!" And now here we were looking through a peep-hole in the camouflage at the battlefield! We were half way up the hill; below us lay a weedy piece of bottom land, all kneaded and pock-marked by shells, stretching away to another range of hills perhaps five miles, perhaps ten miles away, as the valley widened or narrowed. The white clay of the soil erupting under ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... bottom springs. Its only constant tributaries are two small streams, whose entire volume is not half that of its outlet, the Susquehanna River, which here begins its long journey to Chesapeake Bay. The upper and lower portions of the lake, being shallow and weedy, afford ample pickerel grounds, while the middle portion and whole eastern shore are admirably adapted, by deep water and soft marl bottom, to the coregoni and salmon trout, and nearer shore, by rocky bottom and sharp ledges, to the rock bass, black bass, and yellow perch. Large fish find ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... blast of scorched July Drives the pelting hail, 50 From thunderous lightning-clouds, that blot Blue heaven grown lurid-pale. Weedy waves are tossed ashore, Sea-things strange to sight Gasp upon the barren shore And fade ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... just before the first flush of dawn, the two men entered the weedy courtyard, and Ansell let himself in with his key. Their movements were stealthy; but, nevertheless, Mother Brouet, in suspicion of the truth, for she had known Fil-en-Quatre for several years, put her head ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... were crusted with rust and grime; boots, buttons, and clothing were innocent of the brush as the horses' coats of the curry-comb. The most careful grooming could not have made the generality of these animals look anything but ragged and weedy—rather dear at the Government price of 115-120 dollars,—and their housings were not calculated to set them off to advantage. The saddle—a modification of the Mexican principle of raw-hide stretched over a wooden frame—carries ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... it looked a good deal worse," Asher replied. "The Coburn Reports must have helped to turn bare prairie and weedy ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... is gone, Leaving a weedy space; The bushes that veiled it once have grown Gaunt trees that interlace, Through whose lank limbs I see too clearly ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... reputed to be learned, particularly in the modern languages; had a profusion of long, wild hair of a greenish-drab hue, which matched his complexion exactly,—this prevalent tint being infused also into the cornea or "white" of his eye,—and, in physical proportions, was of weedy and unwholesome growth. He was not a young man of cheerful disposition. On the contrary, his deportment at table, where alone his fellow-boarders had any opportunity of observing him, was such as to induce a very ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... twelve when David Tyson came limping up the path. He had a basket in one hand, and a cane in the other. Behind him trotted a weedy-looking foxhound. The dog Toby, charging out of the door as Nancy opened it, fell, as it were, upon the neck of the hound. His overtures of friendship were met with a dignified aloofness which merged ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... like troops of ghosts, with the fireflies throwing up ever and anon signals of their coming. But the Brook was far more attractive, for it had sheltered bathing-places, clear and white sanded, and weedy stretches, where the shy pickerel loved to linger, and deep pools, where the stupid sucker stirred the black mud with his fins. I had followed it all the way from its birthplace among the pleasant New Hampshire hills, through the sunshine of broad, open ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... corpse for its clothes. And sometimes it leads to the Northland, and the scurvy softens your bones, And your flesh dints in like putty, and you spit out your teeth like stones. And sometimes it leads to a coral reef in the wash of a weedy sea, And you sit and stare at the empty glare where the gulls wait greedily. And sometimes it leads to an Arctic trail, and the snows where your torn feet freeze, And you whittle away the useless clay, and crawl on your hands and ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... wooden suspension-bridge, broader than the ancient one, and doubtless more than supplies its place; else, unquestionably, St. Benezet would think it necessary to repair his own. The view from the inner side of this ruined structure, grass-grown and weedy, and leading to such a precipitous plunge into the swift river, is very picturesque, in connection with the gray town and above it, the great, massive bulk of the cliff, the towers of the church, and of a vast old edifice, shapeless, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bits, if you will be a child. Here's a green piece, long, of the stone they cut those green weedy brooches out of, and a nice mouse-colored natural agate, and a great black and white one, stained with sulphuric acid, black but very fine always, and ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... him. On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar, Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... on the curved dish We lay the reeking entrails. If to rear Cattle delight thee rather, steers, or lambs, Or goats that kill the tender plants, then seek Full-fed Tarentum's glades and distant fields, Or such a plain as luckless Mantua lost Whose weedy water feeds the snow-white swan: There nor clear springs nor grass the flocks will fail, And all the day-long browsing of thy herds Shall the cool dews of one brief night repair. Land which the burrowing share shows ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... weary green of the weedy waste, The thickening scum of the frothy foam, And the torpid heart by the reeds embraced And shrouded and held ...
— Poems • Sophia M. Almon
... mill, a big, timbered place, with a tiled roof, odd galleries and projecting pent-houses, all pleasantly dusted with flour, where a great wheel turned dripping in a fern-clad cavern of its own, with the scent of the weedy river-water blown back from the plunging leat. Oh, the joyful place of streams! River and leat and back-water here ran clear among willow-clad islands, all fringed deep with meadow-sweet and comfrey ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in the service, decorations, salaries, he smiled good-naturedly and repeated Prutkov's aphorism: "It's only in the Government service you learn the truth." He had a little wife with a wrinkled face, who was very jealous of him, and five weedy-looking children. He was unfaithful to his wife, he was only fond of his children when he saw them, and on the whole was rather indifferent to his family, and made fun of them. He and his family existed on credit, borrowing wherever they could at every opportunity, even from ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... them nearly had me as I was bringing the mail-bags," snorted a weedy youth scarcely out of his teens, looking over the top of his coffee pot. "I always said that was a dangerous gap where the communication ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... don't go so far as that, Daniel Barnett, but paths go a long way. So you're ashamed of their being so weedy, eh?" ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... fish is generally found in foul and weedy waters, and in such places as are well supplied with rushes. They thrive best in standing waters, and are more numerous in pools and ponds than in rivers. Those taken in the latter, however, are preferable for the table. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... and the pillars were lying where they had fallen; the steps of the terrace had grass growing in the interstices of the stones; one of the lions which had flanked the steps had disappeared, and the remaining one was short of a front leg. The grass on the lawn was long and unkempt, the flower beds weedy and straggly, and the flowers themselves growing wild ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... over a few times, the trout there seemed to grow more shy, and there was a certain monotony in walking this tiny quarter-deck of space. So I went round to the west side, where the water-lilies are. Fish were rising about three yards beyond the weedy beds, and I foolishly thought I would try for them. Now, you cannot overestimate the difficulty of casting a fly across yards of water-lilies. You catch in the weeds as you lift your line for a fresh cast, and then you have ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... by the Fontana Trevi to watch the children disporting themselves in the water and diving for pennies—a pretty scene which has now been banished from the politer regions of Rome (the town has grown painfully proper). There, at the foot of that weedy and vacuous and yet charming old Neptune—how perfectly he suits his age!—there, if you look, you will see certain gigantic leaves sculptured into the rock. I once overheard a German she-tourist saying to her ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... we beat the willow thicket for driftwood. By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen, and the pungent, weedy smell from the shore increased with the coolness. We threw ourselves down about the fire and made another futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it often before, but he could never be got ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... "Can it be possible that you, a man worth millions of piasters, an exalted ruler, a Noble of the Mystic Shrine, have deliberately chosen this waspy, weedy——" ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... brought by the scullion. At last, Rough Ruddy found out that the sight of such horrid jumping would make her children vulgar; and, as soon as he was old enough, she sent Fairyfoot every day to watch some sickly sheep that grazed on a wild, weedy pasture, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... however, were not altogether satisfactory. Dickens owns to a pang when he was "set down" at Albaro, a suburb of Genoa, "in a rank, dull, weedy courtyard, attached to a kind of pink jail, and told he lived there." But he immediately adds: "I little thought that day that I should ever come to have an attachment for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to look back upon the city with affection, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... or two across the landes brought him into a green lane with tall wild hedges, full of enormous blackberries, behind which were the vineyards, rather weedy as to soil, but loaded with the small black and white grapes which made the good ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... 'little Aline prefers cake to bread and butter! Dear, dear, this is very sad. If she eats three pieces of bread and butter she may have cake, but not till then. Well, I think I should advise her to eat those three pieces. Little girls who eat only cake grow up to be weedy and weak, and unable to do half the good things of life: they can't skate, and they can't dance, and they can't play games. So I should advise Aline to eat the ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... and discovered on their further side a wide grassy plain with scarcely a tree on it, stretching away into the blue distance. On this vast plain he gazed with wonderment and delight. Behind the orchard and weedy waste the ground sloped down to a stream of running water, full of tall rushes with dark green polished stems, and yellow water-lilies. All along the moist banks grew other flowers that were never seen in the dry ground above—the blue ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... to aid me in choosing a two-acre plot of ground for corn and potatoes. This we marked out from the upper and eastern slope of a large meadow. The grass was running out and growing weedy. ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... of the Madura country: "The horse is a miserable, weedy, and vicious pony; having but one good quality, endurance. The breed is not indigenous, but the result of constant importations and a very limited amount of breeding." (The Madura Country, Pt. II. p. 94.) The ill success in breeding horses was exaggerated to impossibility, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... look at the stables. So they lighted their cigars, and went out. Mr. Wurley had taken of late to the turf, and they inspected several young horses which were entered for country stakes. Tom thought them weedy-looking animals, but patiently listened to their praises and pedigrees, upon which his host was eloquent enough; and, rubbing up his latest readings in Bell's Life, and the racing talk which he had been in the habit of hearing in Drysdale's rooms, managed to hold ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... course, as it was everywhere. It dotted the grass in Florida very much as five-fingers do in Massachusetts, I sometimes thought. And the creeping, round-leaved houstonia was here, with a superfluity of a weedy blue sage (Salvia lyrata). Here, also, as in Daytona, I found a strikingly handsome tufted plant, a highly varnished evergreen, which I persisted in taking for a fern—the sterile fronds—in spite of repeated failures ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... and Betty had been far enough in the rear to escape this general stampede, but they, too, saw the dark object trying to skirt the newly broken-down embankment, and they slid quickly down the wet weedy bank to get away from this ghostlike ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... with a bit of ribbon she had worn about her neck. And Richard took it in his hand, an exclamation escaping him as he saw and smelled the fragrant pinks, whose perfume carried him first to Olney and Andy's weedy beds in the front yard, and then to Chicopee, where in Aunt Barbara's pretty garden, a large plant of them had been growing when he went after his bride. A high wind had blown them down upon the walk, and he had come upon Ethie one day trying to tie them up. He had ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... beard was long, And weedy and long was he, And I heard this wight on the shore recite, ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... a weedy specimen physically, and I doubted whether he could pull through if escape should mean a fight with Nature for food and water and ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... beaches, he pursued the retreating breakers. The merest broken plank or rag of cordage was a treasure in his eyes to be secured at the peril of his life. To see him, with weak and stumbling footsteps, expose himself to the pursuit of the surf, or the snares and pitfalls of the weedy rock, kept me in a perpetual terror. My arm was ready to support him, my hand clutched him by the skirt, I helped him to draw his pitiful discoveries beyond the reach of the returning wave; a nurse accompanying a child of seven would have ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a small breed, hardy, active, staunch, and strong, are bred in great numbers, and are held in great estimation for agricultural requirements; but in these Koosee jungles the bulls are often ill-bred weedy brutes, and the cows being much in excess of a fair proportion of bulls, a deal of in-breeding takes place; unmatured young bulls roam about with the herd, and the result is a crowd of cattle that succumb to the first ailment, so that the land ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... of a comber and landing with a swash and a splutter as the big wave went whirling far up the beach; or standing up on his tail and scratching his head as the old people did; or playing "I'm the King of the Castle" on slippery, weedy rocks that just stuck out of the wash. Now and then he would see a thin fin, like a big shark's fin, drifting along close to shore, and he knew that that was the Killer Whale, the Grampus, who eats young seals when he can get them; and Kotick would head for the beach like an arrow, and ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... heart of Widow Precious by taking up his quarters at the Thornwick Inn, as she at first imagined, but loyally brought himself and his horse to her sign-post for their Sunday dinner. Nor was this all, but he ordered the very best bedroom, and the "coral parlor"—as he elegantly called the sea-weedy room—gave every child, whether male or female, sixpence of new mintage, and created such impression on her widowed heart that he even won the privilege of basting his own duck. Whatever this gentleman ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... very large 'field'. Two weedy-looking youths of about Charteris's age, dressed in blushing pink, put in an appearance, and a very tall, thin man came up almost immediately afterwards. Charteris had just removed his coat, and was about to get to his place on the line, when another competitor arrived, and, to judge by ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... way, toward the lake and the old town; and this was the pleasantest approach to the house. There was a high wall, with a double gate in the middle, flanked by a couple of ancient massive posts; the big rusty grille contained some old-fashioned iron-work. The garden was rather mouldy and weedy, tangled and untended; but it contained a little thin—flowing fountain, several green benches, a rickety little table of the same complexion, and three orange-trees, in tubs, which were deposited as effectively as possible in front of the windows ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... in some horrid dream, ghost-like glide abroad, and fright the wakeful world; so that night, with death-glazed eyes, to and fro I flitted on the damp and weedy beach. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... yet another. The rain began to fall in sheets, and the wind nearly blew me over, but who could run away from such fishing? The surface of the river, deep blue-gray, seemed rising everywhere in little jets to meet the rain. Rapids, eddies, still waters, weedy edges, all looked alike; there were neither waves nor swirls nor glassy slicks, but all were roughly furry under the multitudinous assaults of the fierce rain-drops. The sky was mottled lead-color, the wind blew less strongly, but cold—cold. And under that water the ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... little flower amongst a weedy world, Where art thou now? In deepest forest shade? Or onward where the Sumach stands arrayed In autumn splendour, its alluring form Fruited, yet odious with the hidden worm? Or, farther, by some still ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... with some care. Then he fell a-meditating on his beauty. He considered himself, three-quarter face, left and right. An expression of distaste crept over his features. "Looking won't alter it, Hoopdriver," he remarked. "You're a weedy customer, my man. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... sun had set redly when at last he reached the outskirts of the town, opened up the wicket gate, and walked up the weedy, unkept path leading to ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... smoke and to inspect him critically: "You're a bit seedy and a bit weedy, Clive, but you'll come around with feeding. You're really all right. I'd have you myself if I was marrying ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... the most part, Lister undertook the diving, but for long his efforts to reach the floor of the engine-room were baffled. To crawl across slanted gratings and down weedy ladders, while air-pipe and signal-line trailed about the machinery, was horribly dangerous, but he kept it up, although he got slacker and felt his pluck was breaking. Then one afternoon he knew he could not go down again, and he stayed under ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... we took our bait—small fish the size of white-bait, with big, staring eyes, and bodies of a transparent pink with silvery scales. They were easily caught by running one's hand through the weedy edges, and in ten minutes we had ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke |
