"Brawny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over the bar with savage destructiveness, jerking up a tent-peg with each brawny hand, and as the old man cowered he dragged the tent forward until it threatened every moment ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... Tom Evert, Paul's father, a brawny, muscular man, who was considered one of the best miners in Raven Brook. Taking Derrick a little ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... piece of ordnance landed. Nor was even this the worst; for, strange as it may seem, there was, at first, more risk of foundering ashore than afloat. There were neither roads nor yet the means to make them. There were no horses, oxen, mules, or any other means of transport, except the brawny men themselves, who literally buckled to with anchor-cable drag-ropes—a hundred pair of straining men for each great, lumbering gun. Over the sand they went at a romp. Over the rocks they had to take care; and in the ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... was a dreamer. Not the conventional sort of a dreamer, who sees beauty in everything but an honest day's work, but a brawny, pick-swinging dreamer who had dug holes in the ground at the end of many rainbows. That he had never yet uncovered the elusive pot of gold didn't seem to bother him in the least; for him, that tender plant called ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... to the three scoundrels. And next, and swiftly, came the vision of her, alone with those same three scoundrels, on the Emily, sailing out to sea from Guvutu in the twilight with darkness coming on. Then came visions of Adamu Adam and Noa Noah and all her brawny Tahitian following, and his anxiety faded away, being replaced by irritation that she should have been capable ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... out!" yelled Jones. He grasped a stout piece of wood and pushed it at the lioness. She caught it in her mouth, making the splinters fly. Jones shoved her head back on the ground and pressed his brawny knee ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... the press was great. The fish-trade was almost monopolized by English Jews—blonde, healthy-looking fellows, with brawny, bare arms, who were approached with dread by all but the bravest foreign Jewesses. Their scale of prices and politeness varied with the status of the buyer. Esther, who had an observant eye and ear for such things, often found ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... every inner muscle as well, toning up your liver, your heart, etc. You'll have a snap to your step and a flash to your eye. You'll feel the real pep shooting up and down your old backbone. You'll stretch out your big brawny arms and crave for a chance to crush everything before you. You'll just bubble over with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... thrown out of work. A near relative of the old gentleman came to the city, and passed the night at his house. After tea he sauntered to the office to take a quiet cigar. To his surprise, he found it filled with a crowd—more than fifty—of brawny, beastly-looking men. The presence of the childlike old man, his face beaming with shrewdness and kindly humor, seemed alone to keep them from being a mob. His manner to them said,—"You poor wretches, I know how reckless you are; yet I am not sure but I should be as bad, had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... the air. The recumbent hero, whose head was framed for enterprises of this nature, soon recovered from the assault, and, after many unavailing efforts in the dark, at length succeeded in opening one of the vessels of the broad nose of his brawny assailant, whose blood, enriched by good living, streamed out most copiously. In this condition we saw these orbless combatants, who were speedily separated from each other. Some of the crowd were endeavouring ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... truly formidable; he brought to the support of his marvellous courage a superhuman strength and agility. No one dared come within reach of those brawny arms that revolved with the power and velocity of the ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... pitying look at the jury: "He was still the big, strong, able-bodied man that you had knocked down with your brawny fist, eh?" ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... a dozen or more of the savages, with spears aloft in their brawny arms. I was taken by surprise and barely had time to cut and run for ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... gown—a woman's rose-colored kimono, embroidered with golden birds, belonging to Chichi. At any other time, he would have burst into roars of laughter at beholding this scrawny, bony warrior with the cruel eyes, with his brawny braceleted arms appearing through the loose sleeves. After taking his bath, the Count had delayed putting on his uniform, luxuriating in the silky contact of the feminine tunic so like his Oriental garments in Berlin. Blumhardt did not betray the slightest astonishment at the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of the panther were set in his face. He strode like a stag, and he stood like a pine: Ten feathers he wore of the great Wanmdee; [13] With crimsoned quills of the porcupine His leggins were worked to his brawny knee. The bow he bent was a giant's bow; The swift red elk could he overtake, And the necklace that girdled his brawny neck Was the polished claws of the great Mato [14] He grappled and slew ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... charged for the boat, which now was seen to be endowed with an incredible, uncanny rocking movement of its own. Looking beneath, they saw a huge cripple straining himself, Atlas-like, to heave it over. In spite of inferior legs, his brawny shoulders had almost accomplished the feat when he was unceremoniously interrupted. While he sprawled away, a mob of blacks rushed suddenly from the cover of some rocks, the leader of the assailants being Blue Shirt, who had painted his unclad ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... distance. Down here all was on a big, rough, broken scale. Jean did not find even a few rods of level ground. Bowlders as huge as houses obstructed the stream bed; spruce trees eight feet thick tried to lord it over the brawny pines; the ravine was a veritable canyon from which occasional glimpses through the foliage showed the Rim as a lofty ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... point, he was not going to call Sheila Sheila before folks who would know what that meant. Mr. Mackenzie was evidently a most irascible old gentleman. Goodness only knew what sort of law prevailed in these wild parts; and to be seized at midnight by a couple of brawny fishermen, to be carried down to a projecting ledge of rock—! Had not Ingram already hinted that Mackenzie would straightway throw into Loch Roag the man who should offer to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... widow was silent, on which Mary Anne took her up in her brawny arms, and laid her on "Cripple Charlie's" sofa, and covered her ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... made a flourish with his brawny arm and beckoned to the young men who now were introduced, and received ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... devouring those huge slices of cold beef with so much gusto, while Langley mutters, "Will he never have done!" He with the blue jacket, bedizzened so plentifully with small pearl buttons, the calico shirt, and fancifully-knotted black silk cravat around his brawny neck. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... heart almost bursting from the combined effects of disappointment, humiliation, and grief, poor Ebony stood at the stern of the man-of-war, his arms crossed upon his brawny chest, and his great eyes swimming in irrepressible tears, a monstrous bead of which would every now and then overflow its banks and ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... "That's the chap who's going to scoop in the dollars," he said, indicating a brawny Frenchman attired in a blanket that girdled his loins, and black feathers that decorated his hair. "That fellow's got the touch of Velasquez. You should see the portrait ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... great rocky arch. At the foot of some natural steps the boat stopped. The beacon brands which had served to guide them were thrown hissing into the water, and Edward found himself lifted out of the boat by brawny arms and carried almost bodily into the depths of the cavern. Presently, however, he was allowed to walk, though still guided on either side, when suddenly at a turn of the rock passage, the cave opened out, and Edward ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... quarter-deck, to admire this or that point in the schooner's construction. As is customary with the vessels of southern nations, this stranger was full of men, but they continued at their work, some half dozen of brawny negroes among them, shouting their songs as they swayed at the falls, no one appearing to manifest jealousy or concern. At length Tier came near ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... the customary bath, they had given to them the cap and coarse gray trowsers of the convict. A phrenologist would have attentively studied these ghastly and bronzed faces, with their flat foreheads, their cruel and insidious glances, wicked mouths, and brawny necks; almost all offered a frightful resemblance to the brute. On the cunning features of this, one would find the subtle perfidy of the fox; on another, the sanguinary rapacity of the bird of prey; on ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... another Dick was full of his adventures of the week. He was learning to know his St. Etienne in all its phases. He told them of the lumber mills down by the river, where brawny men, primitive in aspect, fought with a never-ending stream of logs which came down with the current and raised themselves like uncanny water-monsters, up a long incline, finally to meet their death ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... appeal to his judgment, Dodge scratched his head, and leant both brawny arms upon ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... under a cloud," chimed in Frank. "Burrill, come, let's adjourn to the billiard room, and have a segar;" and intent upon keeping his brother-in-law in order during the time Constance should be under the roof, he slapped him cordially on his brawny shoulder, and they went out in most amiable and brotherly fashion, and entered the billiard room, where Frank permitted Burrill to cheat at the game, and eventually win it, much to the delight of ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... among them was Athalfrida, sister to the king, and wife of a brawny lord named Osuin. Though not yet five and twenty years old, Athalfrida had borne seven children, of whom five died in babyhood. A creature of magnificent form, and in earlier life of superb vigour, her paling cheek told of decline that had begun; nevertheless her spirits were undaunted; and her ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... Husky, steel-muscled lumbermen; brawny, calloused-handed fishermen; loose-jointed, easy-swinging trappers; athletes from the city foot-ball and hockey teams; and gawky, long-armed farmers joined the First Newfoundland Regiment at the outbreak of war. A rigid medical examination sorted out the best of them, and ten months of ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... and Allan crossed the deck and saw a small boat bearing towards them, rowed by a brawny ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... chestnut-tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines. You may pick the Welsh emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the windows, any day. They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny; they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure, unmixed blood, I fancy: shows itself in the slight angular bodies and sharply-cut facial lines. It is nearly thirty years ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... Rezu, for instance, who had drunk of the Cup of Life or some such rubbish, now turned out to be nothing but a brawny savage descended from generations of chiefs also called Rezu. Moreover the immemorial Ayesha, who also had drunk of Cups of Life, and according to her first story, had lived in this place for thousands of years, had come here with a mother, who filled the same mystic ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Louis, where he had seen it in a saloon. It seemed a huge, glittering, magnificent monstrosity in that coarse, bare setting. Wide mirrors, glistening bottles, paintings of nude women, row after row of polished glasses, a brawny, villainous barkeeper, with three attendants, all working fast, a line of rough, hoarse men five deep before the counter—all these things constituted a scene that had the aspects of a city and yet was redolent with an atmosphere no city ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... but one glance at Scarterfield's visitor to assure me that he was a person who had used the sea. There was the suggestion of salt water and strong winds all over him, from his grizzled hair and beard to his big, brawny hands and square set build; he looked the sort of man who all his life had been looking out across wide stretches of ocean and battling with the forces of Nature in her roughest moods. Just then there was ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... platter, enabled him to get the crisp outside, if it happened to start from his end of the table. There were judges and generals and senators and legislators of various ranks all about him. Crude, rough, wholesome fellows, most of them, with big, brawny hands like his own, and loud, hearty voices. It was impossible to stand in awe of a judge who handled his knife more deftly than his fork, and spooned the potato out of the big, earthen-ware dish with a resounding slap. He began to see that these men ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... job was still in the morning stage of his career; a big, red-headed, rosy-cheeked, and obtrusively brawny youth of five and twenty. He might be regarded as the hand of steel in the glove of velvet of the combination. He may have carried bracelets of steel in his rear pockets; but his associate earnestly assured me that such was far from being ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... swung on its hinges admitting a very tall, powerful man, dressed like a common soldier, his brawny bulk panoplied in steel and leather. He glanced about him as he entered, exchanged looks with Ren de Montigny and came down to the settle, where he flung his vast body with a clatter while he called to the landlord in a bull's bellow ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Overseer, bore him to the ground, and wrenched the shot-gun from his hand. Clubbing the weapon, he raised it to brain him. The movement occupied but a second; the gun was descending, and in another instant Moye would have met Sam in eternity, had not a brawny arm caught the Colonel's, and, winding itself around his body, pinned his limbs to his side so that motion was impossible. The woman, half frantic with excitement, thrust open the door when her husband fell, and the light which ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and waiting for that little fool, who doesn't know his way about London yet!" She emphasized those words by shaking her brawny fist at her son—who instantly returned to his place of refuge behind the tail of my coat. "Have you got the money?" inquired the terrible person, shouting at her hidden offspring over my shoulder. "Or have you lost that as well as your ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... eyes, heightened by a fringe of dark lashes; rough, ruddy cheeks, and a rosy, full-lipped, unstable mouth. She was dressed quite simply, in a black, close-fitting bodice, a little frayed at the sleeves. Her hands and neck were coarsely fashioned: her comeliness was brawny, literal, unfinished, as ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... work with the admirers of which I wholly agree. I read it with a certain awe, an undefined sense of sublimity, such as one experiences on entering, for the first time, upon those immense grassy deserts from which the work takes its name. The squatter and his family—that brawny old man and his large-limbed sons, living in a sort of primitive and patriarchal barbarism, sluggish on ordinary occasions, but terrible when roused, like the hurricane that sweeps the grand but monotonous wilderness ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... has a broad Slavic face, with prominent red cheeks. When she opens her mouth, it is tragical, but you cannot help thinking of a horse. She wears a blue flannel shirt-waist, which is now rolled up at the sleeves, disclosing her brawny arms; she has a carving fork in her hand, with which she pounds on the table to mark the time. As she roars her song, in a voice of which it is enough to say that it leaves no portion of the room vacant, the three musicians follow her, laboriously ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... went back to the school room several of the boys, Jack among the rest, were standing in front of the main building when Peter Herring, a big, brawny fellow with a disagreeable face and manner said brusquely ...
— The Hilltop Boys - A Story of School Life • Cyril Burleigh
... truths, unfringed, unfingered, that the listening stillness, strained into pauses and waits, would again and again, for years, have kept distinct, she also wondered what she would eventually decide upon to present in gratitude. She would give something better at least than the brawny Victorian bronzes. This was precisely an instance of what she felt he knew of her before he had done with her: that she was secretly romancing at that rate, in the midst of so much else that was more urgent, all over the place. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... was a man of might In the days when earth was young; By the fierce red light of his furnace bright The strokes of his hammer rung; And he lifted high his brawny hand On the iron glowing clear, Till the sparks rush'd out in scarlet showers, As he fashion'd the sword and spear. And he sang—"Hurra for my handiwork! Hurra for the Spear and Sword! Hurra for the hand that shall wield them well, For he ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... carry nobody; he must himself be carried. The doctor ordered that Logan should take him on his back and convey him as far as the poor little house they had passed on the way. A good lift it was, for Sam was a well grown, stout fellow; but Logan was a long-limbed, sinewy, brawny Scotchman, and he made no difficulty of the job. The doctor in the first place deposited his gun against a tree, and did what was needful for ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... but did not the fire flash into his honest eyes, and leap into his swarthy cheek, and nerve his brawny arm, and clinch his horny fist, as he marched straightway up to the doomed offender, fiercely denounced his dishonesty, and violently demanded redress? Ah! then and there was hurrying to and fro, and eagerness and delight on every countenance, and a ring formed, and the prospect of a lovely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... giant form like ruined tower, Though fall'n its muscles' brawny vaunt, Huge-boned, and tall, and grim, and gaunt, Seemed o'er the gaudy scene to lower: His locks and beard in silver grew; His eyebrows kept their sable hue. Near Douglas when the monarch stood, His bitter speech he thus ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... of her spinning-wheel, she pauses to listen; or, standing in her door, she looks ever wistfully along the crooked path. Across the way, the little mill clatters on as merrily as of yore; Wat heaves the great sacks upon his brawny shoulder, metes out the grist, and faithfully feeds the hopper; but, when a chance shadow falls athwart the sunny doorway, he looks up with a gleam of hope upon his stupid, honest face, then brushes his hand across his ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... were thrust into the opening, followed by an ominous growling. Mauville sprang back a step; the snarling resolved itself into a yelp, as some one unceremoniously dragged the canine back; the door was opened wider and a brawny figure, smoking a long-stemmed pipe, barred the way. The dog, but partly appeased, peered from behind the man's sturdy legs, awaiting hostilities. The latter, an imperturbable Dutchman, eyed the intruder askance, smoking as impassively in his face as one of ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... undefended spot. Grossmann, the little Jew of the grimy flannel shirt, perspired in the stress of the suspense, all but powerless to maintain silence till the signal should be given, drawing trembling fingers across his mouth. Winston, brawny, solid, unperturbed, his hands behind his back, waited immovably planted on his feet with all the gravity of a statue, his eyes preternaturally watchful, keeping Kelly—whom he had divined had some "funny business" on hand—perpetually in sight. The Porteous trio—Fairchild, Paterson, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... said Uncle Remus, pointing to Mrs. Huntingdon, "en I gin 'im deze"—holding up his own brawny arms. "En ef dem ain't nuff fer enny man den ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... coast, to the skirl of the pipes, The lift of the wave in his heels, the sea in his veins: A Cherokee Indian, as though he were one with his horse, His coppery shoulders agleam, his feathers aflame With the last of the sun, descending a gulch in Alaska; A brawny Cleveland puddler, stripped to the loins, On the cauldron's brink, stirring the molten iron In the white-hot glow, a man of white-hot metal: A Cornish ploughboy driving an easy share Through the grey, light soil of a headland, against a sea Of sapphire, gay in his new white ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... well as fear seized George Fielding, the muscles started on his brawny arm as he held it aloft with a heavy stone in it. The black was so hard pressed the last time, and so dead beat, that he could make but a short duck under the fish's back and come out at his tail. The shark ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... has come; the larva is brawny enough not to dread the movements of the caterpillars' bodies. Besides, the caterpillars, mortified by fasting and weakened by a prolonged torpor, become more and more incapable of defence. The perils of the tender babe are succeeded by the security of the lusty stripling; and the grub, henceforth ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... lay this little book at the foot of the Liberty statue, that brawny lady is not to look down her nose and bawl: "Do you see any green in my eye?" Of course I don't, dear lady. I only see the reflection of that torch—or is it a carrot?—which you are holding up to light the way into New York harbor. Well, many an ass has strayed across the uneasy paddock of the ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... peace. Presently a ship drew near to the beach. Her white sail was lowered hastily to the deck, and five of her crew leaped out and plunged through the sea-foam to the shore, near the rock on which stood Dionysos. "Come with us," they said, with rough voices, as they seized him in their brawny arms; "it is not every day that Tyrrhenian mariners fall in with youths like thee." With rude jests they dragged him into the ship, and there made ready to bind him. "A brave youth and fair he is," they said; "we shall not lack bidders when we ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... any body else. They staid dinner; after which a party of us accompanied them on shore, where we were entertained with a play, called Mididij Harramy, which signifies the Child is coming. It concluded with the representation of a woman in labour, acted by a set of great brawny fellows, one of whom at last brought forth a strapping boy, about six feet high, who ran about the stage, dragging after him a large wisp of straw which hung by a string from his middle. I had an opportunity of seeing this acted another ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... brawny, muscular ruffian, with a livid and forbidding countenance, whose dark eyes sparkled with pleasure as he bowed ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... bear the bows were knights in Arthur's reign, Twelve they, and twelve the peers of Charlemain; For bows the strength of brawny arms imply, Emblems of valour and of victory. Behold an order yet of newer date, Doubling their number, equal in their state; Our England's ornament, the Crown's defence, In battle brave, protectors of their prince; Unchang'd by fortune, to their sovereign true, For ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... that I should stand no chance in such a struggle, against his superior weight and strength. While I was doing my best to keep him off with my cutlass, and he was eagerly watching an opportunity to come to closer quarters, Morton, locked in the grasp of a brawny antagonist, came driving directly between us, where they fell together, and lay rolling and struggling upon the ground at our feet. My opponent, abandoning me for a moment, was in the act of aiming a blow at Morton's ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... half-way to the shore the barge suddenly filled with water and sank beneath us, fortunately in so shallow a sea that there was no danger of drowning. My walking-stick, which was a very necessary adjunct, as I still suffered from my accident on Marston Moor, was washed out of my hands, but brawny Arabs seized me and my fellow-passengers, and we were borne safely through the surf to the beach, where we arrived, dazed, breathless, and drenched to ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... wonder and awe. Jim rushed in and faced Sarah Thomas. "Give me little Lucy!" said he, as fiercely as any man. But he reckoned without the unreasoning love of a mother. Sarah only held little Lucy faster, and the poor little girl rolled appealing eyes at him over that brawny, grasping arm ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... said the lady, as the boys fell off right and left, to save her the trouble of clearing a passage with her brawny arms. 'What on earth are you a talking to him ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... me is very touching. I am not quite so confident about myself. No doubt I could protect her easily against five or six great brawny hulking porters ... armed with coal-hammers ... but I am seriously doubtful whether a dozen or so, aided with a little luck, mightn't get the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... strew'd with choicest herbs his scented grave! Or whether, sitting in the shepherd's shiel,[42] Thou hear'st some sounding tale of war's alarms; When at the bugle's call, with fire and steel, 50 The sturdy clans pour'd forth their brawny swarms, And hostile brothers met, to prove ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... see this hand, master,' said Hugh, 'and this arm?' baring the brawny limb to the elbow. 'It was once mere skin and bone, and would have been dust in some poor churchyard by this time, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... of the Dean of Sunrise seemed to bind the country boy to the finer things of life. It had done the same on that day after the Thanksgiving game when he sat in Fenneben's study, and understood for the first time what gives the right to pride in brawny arm and ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... the grand American expression—it is brawny enough, and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who, through all change of circumstance, was never without the idea of political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... went out—I was shoved about in Cheapside in the most remorseless manner; my right eye had a narrow escape of being poked out by the tray of a brawny butcher's boy, who, when I civilly remonstrated, turned round, and said, "Vy, I say, who are you, I vonder, as is so partiklar about your hysight." I felt an involuntary shudder—to-day, thought I, I am John Ebenezer Scropps—two days ago I was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... black beaver hat. But the most ludicrous personage of all, and one who seemed to be chief, was a tall, middle-aged man, of a mild, simple expression of countenance, who wore a white cotton shirt, a swallow-tailed coat, and a straw hat, while his black, brawny legs were totally uncovered below ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... a time longer with his brawny antagonist, till he saw others coming. Then his hand went to the long knife at his belt, and the next instant the Blackfoot lay dead at ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... the stranger on his prow; tall and broad-shouldered was he, with a torrent of ruddy hair floating in the wind. As Ulf turned to give an order to bale out the inrushing water, up rose a brawny arm, and a great spear flashed down from the high bow of the enemy and struck fairly between his shoulders. So sharp was the blow, so sudden, that Ulf pitched forward on one knee for just half a ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True
... inexpressibles and hat; His naked feet and neck, and sunburnt face, Perchance might suit alike with either race. His arms were all his own, our Europe's growth, Which two worlds bless for civilising both; The musket swung behind his shoulders broad, And somewhat stooped by his marine abode, But brawny as the boar's; and hung beneath, 490 His cutlass drooped, unconscious of a sheath, Or lost or worn away; his pistols were Linked to his belt, a matrimonial pair— (Let not this metaphor appear a scoff, Though one missed fire, the other would go off); ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... gave a bitter curse, and whispered something to his half-drunken companion. The latter turned, and with an inarticulate cry, like a wild beast, rushed at the young man and seized him by the throat with his brawny hands. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... have an effect the very reverse of what I had intended. Perhaps he thought that he had already enough to contend with, without the addition of the brawny arm of the sawyer. I was forcibly lifted up, placed in the coach, and, as it drove rapidly away, I heard, amidst the rattling of the wheels, the cries of her whom I loved as a mother, exclaiming, "My Ralph—my ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... morning broke Uncle David was gone, and was seen afterwards no more. So then they tried to keep on the old forge a little longer; but Grandfather was past work, and Cousin Jack was young and inexperienced, and customers would not come as they had done to brawny-armed Uncle David, to whose ringing blows on the anvil Maude had loved to listen. And one day she heard Aunt Elizabeth say to Grandfather that the forge brought in nothing, and they must go up to the castle and ask the great Lord there, whose vassals they were, to find them food ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... the city, six of them, with the Nurnberg fire-castle on their brawny shoulders, and went right across Munich to the railway station, and August in the dark recognized all the ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing railway noises, and thought, despite his courage and excitement, "Will ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... soap-suds, a bonnet-poke, and general dampness; three narrow-chested ribbon-weavers, in rusty black streaked with shreds of many-coloured silk, sauntered out with their hands in their pockets; and Molly Beale, a brawny old virago, descrying wiry Dame Ricketts peeping out from her entry, seized the opportunity of renewing the morning's skirmish. In short, the Bridge Way was in that state of excitement which is understood to announce a 'demonstration' on the part of the British public; and the afflux of remote ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... class of men it would be difficult to find. Handsome they are not, but quite the reverse, and the most of them have an awkward and uncouth air; but it is refreshing to look at their broad shoulders, their brawny chests, and the massive muscles of their legs and arms. During the whole voyage, I saw but one man who appeared to be diseased. Such men, I suspect, were the Vikings—rough, powerful, ugly, dirty fellows, with a few primitive virtues, and any amount of robust vices. We noticed, however, a ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... is a brawny native Maltese, with a form a Hercules might envy. He has just taken from the fire a slender rod of iron, one end of which is hissing ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... link would be one of great difficulty, much harder than the bringing of the fire, and that was the reason why he was considering so well. He could discern the figures of three of the sentinels on land. Two of them were brawny warriors naked to the waist, and painted heavily. The third was quite young, younger than himself, a mere boy, perhaps on his first war path. Henry understood the feelings of hope and ambition that probably animated the Indian boy and he trusted that they would ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and of a surety—Allah be praised!—this strangely-sparkling delicious liquor, which gives to the true believer a foretaste of the joys of Paradise, cannot be wine. At the diamond-fields of South Africa and the diggings of Australia the brawny miner who has hit upon a big bit of crystallised carbon, or a nugget of virgin ore, strolls to the "saloon" and shouts for champagne. The mild Hindoo imbibes it quietly, but approvingly, as he watches the evolutions of the Nautch girls, and his partiality for it has ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... the tumbling torrent rolls, With half a hundred drivers riding through with lunging poles; Here's huzza, for reckless chances! Here's hurrah for those who ride Through the jaws of boiling sluices, yeasty white from side to side! Our brawny fists are calloused, and we're mostly holes and hair, But if grit were golden bullion we'd have coin ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... Anton Lang, seems by nature far better fitted for this part than was his predecessor, Josef Mayr, who took that part in 1870, 1880, and 1890. Mayr is very tall, brawny, athletic. His hair was black in those days, and his countenance now is severe. He must have done it well, but I can hardly imagine him impersonating gentleness and complete submission to abuse. But Anton ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... whatever position in life he is placed, be he statesman or hod-carrier. What difference, if an honest heart beat beneath a laborer's hickory shirt, or one of fine linen? 'One hand, if it's true, is as good as another, no matter how brawny or rough.' Mary, do not think the trivial affairs of the home beneath your notice, and do not imagine any work degrading which tends to the betterment of the home. Remember, 'Who sweeps a room as for Thy law, makes that and ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... thus making for himself a great and quiet fame. But the outward tendencies around him have proved too powerful for his inward nature, and have drawn him into the arena of political tumult, there to contend at disadvantage, whether front to front, or side by side, with the brawny giants of actual life. He becomes, it may be, a name for brawling parties to bandy to and fro, a legislator of the Union; a governor of his native state; an ambassador to the courts of kings or queens; and the world ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... six feet, broad and brawny enough to be a match for almost any man. Countless yards of sprigged cotton must have gone into the making of her dress, to say nothing of her apron. A massive fichu of freshly laundered muslin went around her neck and was tucked into her bodice; a white turban was on her head, but on top ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... dead, that we could not resist the temptation. So we filled two large tin canteens with water (since we were not acquainted with the locality of the spring said to exist on the large island), and started. Higbie's brawny muscles gave the boat good speed, but by the time we reached our destination we judged that we had pulled ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... well-grown apprentices, The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log, shaping it toward the shape of a mast, The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine, The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers, The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... stevedores, and we are volunteers. We did not wait for the draft to come, to put aside our fears; We flung them away on the winds of fate, at the very first call of our land, And each of us offered a willing heart and the strength of a brawny hand. We are the army stevedores, and work as we must and may, The cross of honour will never be ours to proudly ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... is narrative in both, but of a different type; the humblest, meanest and most common-place subjects suit the one; the other requires research, splendour, and dignity. In the one you may describe the bones, muscles, and nerves of the body, in the other brawny parts and flowing manes. In oratory one wants force, invective, sustained attack; in history the charm is obtained by copiousness and agreeableness, even by sweetness of style. Lastly, the words used, the forms of speech, and the construction of the ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... a creaking of hinges, and saw an opening in the wall to my right, where I had perceived no door. Two men came forth—brawny, muscular, bearded men in coarse, black hose and leathern waistcoats cut deep at the neck and leaving their great arms entirely naked. The foremost carried a thong ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... songs, and gamble and quarrel as the evening grows and deepens into night. The firelight sheds quaint shadows on their piled-up arms and on their uncouth forms. The children of the town steal round to watch them, wondering; and brawny country wenches, laughing, draw near to bandy ale- house jest and jibe with the swaggering troopers, so unlike the village swains, who, now despised, stand apart behind, with vacant grins upon their broad, peering faces. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... quiet water at its blunt bow the barge slid up alongside of him, its gaily painted gunwale level with the towing-path, its sole occupant a big stout woman wearing a linen sun-bonnet, one brawny ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... large girl of fifteen, who was known among her companions by the pleasing title of "Sow Nance." She was a thief and prostitute of the most desperate and abandoned character, hideously ugly in person, and of a disposition the most ferocious and deceitful.—Laying her brawny hand upon Fanny's shoulder, she said, in ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... but come," answered Hillars, gayly. He bent and whispered something into the old fellow's ear. It was something which pleased him, for he screwed his lips into a smile, and took the white hand of the whisperer in his brawny fist and nigh ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... a brawny fellow, seven feet high, glaring at me as if he thought I had committed ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... by their keepers, go to the gallows reviling God. He had been in a break in which eleven of his kind were shot down. He had been through a mutiny, where, in the prison yard, with gatling guns trained upon them, three hundred convicts had been disciplined with pick handles wielded by brawny guards. ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... that gentleness is mere absence of vigor. Weakness totters and tugs at its burden. When the dwarf that attended Ivanhoe at the tournament lifted the bleeding sufferer he staggered under his heavy burden. Weakness made him stumble and caused the wounded knight intense pain. When the giant of the brawny arm and the unconquered heart came, he lifted the unconscious sufferer like a feather's weight and without a jar bore him away to a secure hiding-place for healing and recovering. He who studies the great men of yesterday ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and toughened troops, the divisions which had scattered the Americans at Bladensburg with a volley and a shout, kilted Highlanders, famous regiments which had earned the praise of the Iron Duke in the Spanish Peninsula, and brawny negro detachments recruited in the West Indies. It was such an army as would have been considered fit to withstand the finest troops in Europe. In command was one of England's most brilliant soldiers, General Sir Edward Pakenham, of whom Wellington had said, ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... he insisted upon being called, was a great, hairy-faced man, with brawny muscles and a blood-shot eye. And in these respects, his mate, Bob Topper, greatly favored him—in fact, their physical resemblance was rather marked; but their tastes were in no way similar; 'the Cap'n' was fond of his ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... of felling a pine-tree to extend his father's clearing, they found the settler's son, a brawny fellow about Cyrus's age, in buckskin leggings and coon-skin cap, who wielded his axe with arms which were tough and knotted as pine limbs. He bawled to them in the forceful language of the backwoods, which to unaccustomed ears sounded a trifle barbaric, ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... Societe des Bains de Mer de Monte Carlo that children ought not to be admitted to the tables. They asserted their opinion; and Tinker asserted his, with the result that his bolt into the Salles de Jeu and his difficult extrication from them by the brawny, but liveried officials was fast becoming one of the events of the day. Sometimes Tinker would make his bolt from the outermost portal; sometimes, with the decorous air of one going to church, he would join the throng filing into ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... appearance of such a region. The strange, grotesque-looking stems, of every imaginable shape, left standing like a company of black dwarfs and giants scattered over the land, some of them surmounted with ebony crowns; some, with heads covered like olden warriors, with jetty helmets; some with brawny, long arms stretched over the pathway as if to seize the passer by, and all with feet planted, seemingly in deep and flaming fire. How quickly nature goes about repairing her desolations! So great in this case is her haste to cover ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... combat of life and death seeming to him a thing too common to excite any emotion in his breast. Had it been daylight it is not likely he would have been attacked by one man; few that gazed upon his square muscular form, his brawny chest and strong hard hands, would have liked to cope with him in personal conflict, though his iron grey beard told that more than fifty years of storm had rolled over his head. His face had been handsome, scarred ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... her to feel at times like a raging lion. The comparative weakness of her slight and graceful frame made her at other times feel like a helpless lamb. It was an exasperating condition! When she thought of Gunrig, she wished with all her heart and soul that she had been born a big brawny man. When she thought of Bladud, nothing could make her wish to be ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. The shepherd's dog barked fiercely when one of these alien-looking men appeared on the upland, dark against the early winter sunset; for ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... one turned his meditative eyes from their focus upon the horse's back and rested them upon the open and guileleas face by his side. Then from deep down in his brawny throat came a sudden sound. It was unmistakably a chuckle. Without the slightest trace of an accompanying smile, ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... stands the executioner, armed with a hammer,—something in shape like that used to break stones for the roads in England—his shirt-sleeves turned up, so that nothing may impede the free use of his brawny arms. The time arrived, down comes the hammer with deadly accuracy on the forehead of poor piggy, generally killing but sometimes only stunning him, in which case, as he awakes to consciousness in the scalding caldron, his struggles are frightful to look at, but happily very short. A trap-hatch ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Ryswick returned to his native village, the year after his elder brother had suffered martyrdom at Montpellier. He settled for a time at Collet-de-Deze, from which his other brother had been expelled, and there he carried on the trade of an ironworker and blacksmith. He was a great, brown, brawny man, of vehement piety, a constant frequenter of the meetings in the Desert, and a mighty psalm-singer—one of those strong, massive, ardent-natured men who so powerfully draw others after them, and in times of revolution exercise a sort of popular royalty amongst the masses. The oppression ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... task like a Trojan. Bare-headed, shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up above his elbows, he swayed to and fro, a tireless, human machine. His blades entered the rough sea cleanly and came out on the feather. Admiringly, almost enviously, Percy watched the play of the banded muscles on his brawny forearms. He would have given anything to be as strong ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... to behold this family sit down to supper of an evening. The blacksmith would come in and seize little Jim in his brawny arms, and toss him up to the very beams of the ceiling, after which he would take little Molly on his knee, and fondle her, while "Old Moll," as he sometimes called his wife, spread the cloth and loaded the ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne |
