"Gaunt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... His gaunt but not ungraceful figure, merged in that of the dog trotting closely at his heels, was the only moving object in the dreary vista of this the most desolate block in Washington. As I neared the building, I was so impressed by the surrounding stillness that I was ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Quai Malaquais; at home on the writing-desk, a page of carefully prepared manuscript, yet sometimes covered by cigarette-ashes; upon the wall, sketches by Jules Lefebvre and Jules Breton; a little in the distance, the gaunt form of his attentive sister and companion, Annette, occupied with household cares, ever fearful of disturbing him. Within this tranquil domicile can be heard the noise of the Parisian faubourg with its thousand different dins; the bustle of the street; the clatter ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... ransacked for invidious instances of royal uncles and regents who had injured the sovereigns, and distressed the government, by their pride, cruelty, and ambition. The characters of John Lackland, and John of Gaunt, Humphrey and Richard dukes of Gloucester, were called in review, canvassed, compared, and quoted, with some odious applications; but the majority being convinced of the loyalty, virtue, integrity, and great abilities of his royal ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... superstition," which fact enabled him to give some very piquant details concerning the women in his theatrical company to Brahim Bey, who listened to him as one turns the pages of an obscene book, and to talk theology to his nearest neighbor, a young priest, cure of some little Southern village, a thin, gaunt fellow, with a complexion as dark as his cassock, with glowing cheek-bones, pointed nose, all the characteristics of an ambitious man, who said to Cardailhac, in a very loud voice, in a tone of ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... with a casement partially darkened, to the bleak north; various sketches on the walls; gaunt specimens of antique furniture, and of gorgeous Italian silks, scattered about in confused disorder; one large picture on its easel curtained; another as large, and half finished, before which stood the painter. He turned quickly, as Kenelm entered the room unannounced, let fall ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some solace Instantly; the strangling band of sorrow Will be loosen'd; tears will flow. O, hasten! Long time ago we might have been o' th' road. No rest for me till I have fled these walls: They fall upon me, some dark power repels me From them—Ha! What's this? The chamber's filling With pale gaunt shapes! No room is left for me! More! more! The crowding spectres press on me, And push me forth from ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... unrest in the United States, or at least appeared to do so. The application of power—first steam, then electricity—to machinery had not only vastly increased the productivity of mankind but had stimulated invention to still wider activity and lengthened the distance between man and that gaunt specter of famine which had dogged his footsteps from the beginning. With a constantly, growing supply of the things necessary for the maintenance of life, population increased tremendously: England, which a few centuries before had been overcrowded with fewer than four ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... the gaunt old woman got up. Harry Esmond recollected to the end of his life that figure, with the brocade dress and the white night-rail, and the gold-clocked red stockings, and white red-heeled shoes sitting up in the bed, and stepping down from it. The trunks were ready packed ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... trees, At this lank edge of haggard wood, Women with labour-loosened knees, With gaunt backs bowed by servitude, Stop, shift their loads, and pray, and fare Forth with souls ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... planned, a single glance at the exterior of the edifice shows that the builders had no lively sense of the requirements of the style they used. What can be more melancholy than those blank walls, broken by small round recesses protruding from the side chapels of the nave, those gaunt and barren angles at the east end, and those few pinnacles appended at a venture? It is clear that the spirit of the northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived. On the other hand, the interior is noble. The feeling for space possessed by ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... easier entrance Stole after him unnoticed. There I marked, 145 That mid the chequer work of light and shade With curious choice he plucked no other flowers, But those on which the moonlight fell: and once I heard him muttering o'er the plant. A wizard— Some gaunt slave prowling ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... slipped by, monotonously hot, languidly humid. And it was on these hot and humid days that Mary felt the grind of her new occupation. She grew to dread her entrance into the square close office room, with its gaunt desks and its unchanging occupants. She waxed restless through the hours of confinement, escaping thankfully at the end of a ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... like a gaunt and spectral hand, The tremulous shadow of a birch Reached out and touched ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... forest was now only a waste of blackened stumps and undergrowth, topped by the vulgar short-leaved pine and an occasional oak or juniper. Here and there they passed an expanse of cultivated land, and there were many smaller clearings in which could be seen, plowing with gaunt mules or stunted steers, some heavy-footed Negro or listless "po' white man;" or women and children, black or white. In reply to a question, the coachman said that Mr. Fetters had worked all that country for turpentine years ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... passed—the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard and hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death. It must out now! That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready to leap from every lip at last! Nature had been taxed to the utmost—she must yield. RICHARD H. GASTON of Minnesota, tall, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... alley. It was mine by right of long acquaintance. We were neighbors for twenty years. Yet I never knew why it was called Cat Alley. There was the usual number of cats, gaunt and voracious, which foraged in its ash-barrels; but beyond the family of three-legged cats, that presented its own problem of heredity,—the kittens took it from the mother, who had lost one leg under the wheels of a dray,—there ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... two days dead, rotting and stiff. Against the grey of the living street, a livid dead horse: a hot stink was his cold death against the street's clean-ness. There are two little boys, wrapped in blue coat, blue muffler, leather caps. They stand above the gaunt head of the horse and sneer at him. His flank rises red and huge. His legs are four strokes away from life. He is dead. The naughty boys pick up bricks. They stand, very close, above the head of the horse. They hurl down a brick. It strikes the horse's skull, falls sharp away. They hurl ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... summit. But the farther end of the beach faded into an uneven string of lights, soft and spectral as will-o'-the-wisps. Warmth rose from the sleeping earth; and a breeze blew in from the sea, making a strange metallic rustling, which to Japanese ears is the sweetest natural music, in the gaunt sloping pine-trees, whose height in the semi-darkness was exaggerated to monstrous and ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... elderly woman. She was over fifty, and had grown grey in the service. Her features, even in her prime, had been gaunt, like the rest of her person. But she had mellowed with age, and had become what the Germans call charakteristisch, and what we may term original and sagacious. She dressed well—that is, soberly and substantially—in soft wools ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... in each month he spent in the town, and he came to love Preshbend and the people; the tall young men, many taller than he, and the great lean-armed, gaunt-breasted Sikh women. The boys were so studious, so simple and gentle, compared with the few others he had known, and the women such adepts at mothering! Then the shy, slender girls, impassable ranges between him and any romantic sense; ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... hopes, but fears Clad in white raiment? I know not but some thin and vaporous fog, Fed with the rank excesses of the soul, Mocks the devouring hunger of my life With satisfaction: lo! the noxious gas Feeds the lank ribs of gaunt and ghastly death With double emptiness, like a balloon, Borne by its lightness o'er the shining lands, A wonder and a laughter. The creeds lie in the hollow of men's hearts Like festering pools glassing their own corruption: The slimy eyes stare up with dull approval, And ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... effeminacy of dress that characterised the reign of Richard the Second was a constant theme of contemporary authors. Shakespeare, writing two hundred years after, makes the king's fondness for gay apparel and foreign fashions a point in the play, from John of Gaunt's reproaches down to Richard's own speech in the third act on his deposition from the throne. And that Shakespeare examined Richard's tomb in Westminster Abbey seems to me certain ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... gaunt, blear-eyed, ragged, turned over on his side. His appearance was little short of repulsive. His voice when he spoke was, curiously enough, the voice of a gentleman, thick and a trifle rough ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is a tall, thin, gaunt, withered, domineering man of sixty. When excited or angry he drops into dialect, but otherwise his speech, though flat, is fairly accurate. He sits in an arm-chair by the empty hearth working calculations in a small shiny black notebook, which he carries about with him everywhere, ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... giving now, of our influence and appeals to minimize the likelihood of war and throw off the crushing burdens of armament. It is all very earnest, with a national soul impelling. But a people unemployed, and gaunt with hunger, face a situation quite as disheartening as war, and our greater obligation to-day is to do the Government's part toward resuming productivity and promoting fortunate and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... at the back of a tenement known as Ugnot's. His knock appeared to silence a hammering in the rear of the cottage. By and by the door opened—but a very little way—and through the chink old Tregenza peered out at him—gaunt, shaggy, grey of hair and of face, his beard and his very eyebrows powdered ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Guerillas were in motion, and having taken a most ceremonious leave of us, they mounted their horses and set out upon their journey. I saw their gaunt figures wind down the valley, and watched them till they disappeared in the distance. "Yes, brigands though they be," thought I, "there is something fine, something heroic in the spirit of their unrelenting vengeance." The sleuth-hound never sought ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... woe, 50 What if the lion in his rage I meet!— Oft in the dust I view his printed feet: And, fearful! oft, when day's declining light Yields her pale empire to the mourner night, By hunger roused, he scours the groaning plain, 55 Gaunt wolves and sullen tigers in his train: Before them Death with shrieks directs their way, Fills the wild yell, and leads them to their prey. 'Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day, 'When first from Schiraz' walls I bent ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... strange being; homely, hunchbacked, gaunt, with stern, staring eyes and thin, tightly compressed lips; in face, voice, and quick, angular movements, she recalled her grandmother, the gipsy, the wife of Andrei. Persistent, fond of power, she would not even hear of marriage. ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... forest-wilds of Canada West, at the head, not the rear, of an army composed of about nine hundred British regulars and two thousand Indian allies under the leadership of Tecumseh. On, in swift pursuit, with a stretch of about a half day's march between, came General Harrison—a gaunt hero—at the head, not the rear, of an army consisting of two companies of United States regulars and about three thousand volunteers, nearly all of whom were tall, stalwart Kentuckians, under the leadership of General ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... first day it was allowed? Hadn't they seen him helping her with her lessons, at night,—solving her complex problems in his head while she struggled over columns of figures, and waiting at the end of that tortuous road with a smile on his gaunt face, and the right answer, to prove hers right or wrong? But in languages, Sir Peter was left at the post. Her master in French was astonished until he learned her mother's name,—by accident, for it was rarely spoken in that house. The dead languages were alive ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... the quarrymen was lying by the wayside, with a rag of coarse cloth for all covering; and his body was disfigured by bitter marks of the biting cold and scorching heat. The bones of his shoulders and chest showed all but bare beneath the meagre flesh; and Despair looked out grim and gaunt from the black cavern ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... pernicious properties soon manifest themselves, being frequently followed by nausea, vomitings, loss of appetite, and impaired digestion. The drain of the juices has a tendency to injure the muscles of the face, to render them flaccid, to furrow and corrugate the skin, and to give a gaunt, withered, and jaundiced appearance to "the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... in that scene which is a favorite with all Trollope's readers, where the arrogant Mrs. Proudie is rebuked by the gaunt Mr. Crawley, the effect of his famous "Peace, woman!" is tremendous only because it is a dash of vivid red in a composition where the general color scheme is low ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... gatewards peer from the battlements or the shot window, and a porter espying them through a lattice, it happened in no such way, but without more ado the wicket was opened to them by a tall old woman, gaunt and grey, who greeted them courteously: Roger lighted down and Ralph did in likewise, and they led their horses through the gate into the court of the castle; the old woman going before them till they came to the hall door, which she opened to them, and taking the reins of their horses ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... season been winter, with the snow deep on the ground, the trouble from the wolves would have been more serious. Those gaunt creatures, when goaded by hunger, become exceedingly daring, and do not hesitate to attack even armed bodies of men; but it was autumn time, when the ravenous brutes, who seem always to be hungry, find the least difficulty in procuring food, and they remained true to their cowardly disposition ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... stands before the dais silently facing his judges. He is quite alone, and his thoughts go back, with some bitterness, to his previous trial, when the people crowded the doors shouting for their favorite, and John of Gaunt and the Lord Marshal of England were standing by his side. He has learned since then not to put his trust in princes. The power of his enemies has rapidly grown; even the young King (Richard II) has been won over to their cause, and patrons and friends have drawn ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... down the wagon lines, passing fourscore men shaking in their native agues, not yet conquered. Women, pale, gaunt, grim, looked at him from limp sunbonnets whose stays had been half dissolved. Children whimpered. Even the dogs, curled nose to tail under the wagons, growled surlily. But Caleb Price found at last the wagon of the bugler who ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... amused himself during the last days of his life with turning into verse some of Aesop's "myths" as he called them. Think of Socrates conning these fables in prison four hundred years before Christ, and then think of a more familiar picture in our own day—a gaunt, dark-faced, black-haired boy poring over a book as he lay by the fireside in a little Western farmhouse; for you remember that Abraham Lincoln's literary models were "Aesop's Fables," "The Pilgrim's Progress" ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... temporal, is left to the reader to imagine. The sufferings of the Dissenters were awfully severe at this time. Had it been a year later, we might have guessed it to have referred to the sufferings of that pious, excellent woman, Elizabeth Gaunt, who was burnt, October 23, 1685. She was a Baptist, and cruelly martyred. Penn, the Quaker, saw her die. 'She laid the straw about her for burning her speedily, and behaved herself in such a manner that all ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... sound Soada gathered the child quickly to her breast, and shrank back to the wall. This surely was the ghost of Mahommed Selim— this gaunt, stooping ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his side and see his deeds; Forced to behold that visage, hour by hour, In whose gaunt lines the abhorrent gazer reads A triple lust of gold, and blood, and power; A soul whom motives fierce, yet abject, urge— Rome's servile slave, and Judah's ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... succor. Rolling the strips into a ball, he threw it into the waste-paper basket under the table; then filled a glass with sherry, drank it, and dropped his head wearily on his hand. Five leaden minutes crawled away, and a long, heavy sigh quivered through Gen'l Darrington's gaunt frame. Seizing the decanter, he poured the contents into two glasses, and as he raised one to his lips, held the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to believe in the unchanging duration of His. But we know, too, of love that can change, and we know that all love must part. Few of us have reached middle life, who do not, looking back, see our track strewed with the gaunt skeletons of dead friendships, and dotted with 'oaks of weeping,' waving green and mournful over graves, and saddened by footprints striking away from the line of march, and leaving us the more ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... whom I have awaited like a lover, Strange to me like a captive in a foreign country, haunting The confines and gazing out on the land where the wind is free; White and gaunt, with wistful eyes that hover Always on the distance, as if his soul were chaunting The monotonous weird ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... gale, As the chaff beneath the flail; As before the wolf the flocks, As before the hounds the fox; As before the cat the mouse, As the rat from falling house; As the fiend before the spell Of holy water, book, and bell; As the ghost from dawning day,— So has fled, in gaunt dismay, This septemvirate of quacks From the ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... and I saw my river tawny, sinewy, gaunt—a half-starved lion. The long dry bars were like the protruding ribs of the beast when the prey is scarce, and the ropy main current was like the lean, terrible ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... his men, but could only cry: "Remember The Alamo"; how old Rusk could say not even that, but choked with a sob at the first word, and waved his hand toward the enemy; how the solitary fife struck up, "Will you come to the bower I have shaded for you?" while those seven hundred gaunt, starved, ragged phantoms, burning with rage at the thought of their comrades foully slain, deployed on the open prairie and charged the unsuspecting Mexican army. It was over in half an hour—the enemy ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... quaint little shrimp, CAPRELLA, clinging by its hind claws to sea-weed, and waving its gaunt grotesque body to and fro, while it makes mesmeric passes with its large fore claws, - one of the most ridiculous of Nature's many ridiculous forms. Those which you will find will be some quarter of an inch in length; but in the cold area of the North Atlantic, their cousins, it is now found, ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... this is a work of David's; for there is no more appalling desert than that in which he wandered as an exile. It is a land of arid mountains without a blade of verdure, blazing in their ghastly whiteness under the fierce sunshine, and with gaunt ravines in which there are no pools or streams, and therefore no sweet sound of running waters, no shadow, no songs of birds, but all is hot, dusty, glaring, pitiless; and men and beasts faint, and loll out their tongues, and die for want of water. And, says ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... are fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and isolation, of failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay. No landscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than the night-pictures in "The Revisitation," where the old soldier in barracks creeps out on to the gaunt down, and meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences) his ancient mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation of each to the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a document for the future is "Reminiscences of a Dancing Man"? If only Shakespeare could have left us ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... A local prince of Denmark has described a business errand made aboard the "Albemarle." Says the Dane: "On asking for the captain of the ship, I was shown a boy in a captain's uniform, the youngest man to look upon I ever saw holding a like position. His face was gaunt and yellow, his chest flat, and his legs absurdly thin. But on talking with him I saw he was a man born to command, and when he showed me the ship and pointed out the cannon, saying, 'These are for use if necessity ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... ordained for me To share your fate, oh finny friend! I surely were not loath to be Reserved for such a noble end; For when old Chronos, gaunt and grim, At last reels in his ruthless line, What were my ecstacy to swim In wine, in wine, ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... clear chilly evening, had returned with double fury. The wind was sweeping and howling down the lonely streets, and lashed the rain into his face, while gray clouds were rushing past the moon like terrified ghosts across the awful void of the black heaven. Above him gaunt poplars groaned and bent, like giants cowering from the wrath of Heaven, yet rooted by grim necessity to their place of torture. The roar and tumult without him harmonised strangely with the discord within. He staggered and strode along the plashy ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of the Camargue, between the blue of the sky and the blue of the Mediterranean waves, sits the gaunt, grim bourg of fisherfolk and herders of the cattle and sheep of the neighbouring plain. The lone fortress-church rises tall and severe in its outlines, and the whole may be likened to nothing as much as a desert mirage that one sees in ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... Saxons it was Andreaswald. Wolves, wild boar and deer then roamed its dark recesses. Our Ashdown Forest—all that now remains of this wild track—was for long a Royal hunting ground. Edward III. granted it to John of Gaunt, who, there's no doubt, often came hither for sport. It is supposed that he built a chapel near Nutley ("Chapel Wood" marks the site) where, on one occasion at least, John Wycliffe the reformer officiated. At Forest Row, as we have seen, the later ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Nick; "I see myself staggering from the ale-house and reeling into what should be a home, where gaunt starvation stalks the floor; where the hearth is fireless, and where a starving family die upon a ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... in his bed drinking it—slowly to make it last the longer—Pauline sat looking at him. His hands had been fat and puffy; she was filled with pity as she watched the almost scrawny hand holding the cup to his lips; there were hollows between the tendons, and the wrist was gaunt. Her gaze wandered to his face and rested there, in sympathy and tenderness. The ravages of the fever had been frightful—hollows where the swollen, sensual cheeks had been; the neck caved in behind and under the jaw-bones; ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... pace unconsciously quickened to a run. But the line of some half-dozen ragged Scotch firs, which here topped the low cliff bordering the river, to his disordered vision seemed most uncomfortably to run alongside him, stretching gaunt arms through the encircling mist to arrest ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... there were in him gathered for one superhuman and crowning effort; a flash of time, not half a second in duration, and he was lifted in the air higher, and higher, and higher in the cold, fresh, wild winter wind, stakes and rails, and thorn and water lay beneath him black and gaunt and shapeless, yawning like a grave; one bound, even in mid-air, one last convulsive impulse of the gathered limbs, and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... much Mrs. Lorimer perceived before with a sharp turn of the head he discovered her. He was on his feet in a moment, and she saw his boyish smile for an instant, only for an instant, as he came to meet her. She noted with a pang how gaunt he looked and how deep were the shadows about his eyes. Then he had reached her, and was holding both her hands ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... up as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the frontier is one of the best in the world, and traverses a level, fertile, productive country. I should say that Grass, Wheat and the Vine are the chief staples. A row of trees adorns either side of the road most of the way, not the trim, gaunt, limbless skeletons which are preferred throughout Central France, but wide-spreading, thrifty shade-trees, which I judged in the darkness to be mainly Black Walnut, with perhaps a sprinkling of Chestnut, &c. ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... side; Cappy Ricks grasped the Jacob's ladder as the launch rasped by and climbed up with an agility that caused Mr. Skinner to marvel. As his silk hat appeared over the Retriever's rail a wind-bitten, bewhiskered, gaunt, hungry-looking semi-savage reached down, grasped him under the arms, snaked him inboard and hugged him to ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... sparkling, clear water, the green skirt of undergrowth along the banks, and the restful camps, as we trudged along up the stream so many years ago. And now I saw the same channel, the same hills, and apparently the same waters swiftly passing. But where were the camp fires? Where was the herd of gaunt cattle? Where the sound of the din of bells? The hallooing for lost children? Or the little groups off on the hillside to bury the dead? ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... seemed comic; but bright against greenwood and grey cloud, they were not comic but tragic; for there are not a few things that seem fantastic in the twilight, and in the sunlight are sad. I saw that she had a grand, gaunt mask of ancient honour and endurance, and wide eyes sharpened to two shining points, as if looking for that small hope on the horizon of human life. I also saw that ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... at the faded chestnut. She had been told of a four-year-old while this gaunt animal looked fifteen at least. However, it is one thing to catch a general impression and another to read points. Marianne took heed, now, of the long slope of the shoulders, the short back, the ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... in the hospital there. From the description I had little difficulty in recognizing the young woman who had been with the murdered man in Pittsburg. But she was still unconscious. An elderly aunt had appeared, a gaunt person in black, who sat around like a buzzard on a fence, according to McKnight, and wept, in a mixed figure, into ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... warrants; its railroads to mighty fetters, binding industry in an inextricable net of feudalism; from under the showy robes of its success, flutter the unseemly rags of an ever-growing beggary; from garret and cellar of its luxurious habitations, stare out the gaunt forms of haggard want; the lash of the jailer, the gleam of swords, the glitter of bayonets, are its ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... painfully dragged himself down a residence street, he tried to collect his thoughts and form some plan for the future. He had no trade, understood no handiwork: he could fell trees! He looked at the gaunt, scrawny, transplanted specimens that met his eye, and gave himself up to the homesickness that filled his soul. He slept that night in the shelter of a stable, and spent his last money in the morning for ...
— A Michigan Man - 1891 • Elia W. Peattie
... where shouting merchants wrestled for porters, and donkeys brayed them down, the narrowed eyes of Olimpia, the sardonic grin of the gaunt Mosca, brought our lovers back into the real world. They faced their foes together with insensible meeting and holding of young hands. Angioletto did his best not to feel a detected schoolboy, and did succeed in meeting the Captain's terrific looks. Bellaroba made no attempt at ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... stood, though at a little distance. I had the curiosity, however, at some inconvenience, to ride round and examine the spot. I suppose that Heda had sold the property, for a back-veld Boer, who was absent at the time, had turned what used to be Rodd's hospital into his house. Close by, grim and gaunt, stood the burnt-out marble walls of the Temple. The verandah was still roofed over, and standing on the spot whence I had shot the pistol out of Rodd's hand, I was filled ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... head, above a hundred years before. Big alarm-bell bursting out in the middle of divine service; emptying all the Churches ('Highland rebels just at hand!')—into General Meeting of the Inhabitants, into Chaos come again, for the next forty hours. Till, in the gaunt midnight, Tuesday, 2 A.M., Lochiel with about 1,000 Camerons, waiting slight opportunity, crushed in through the Netherbow Port; and"—And, about noon of that day, a poor friend of ours, loitering expectant in the road that leads by St. Anthony's Well, saw making ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... exile, condemned to be burnt alive on false charges of embezzlement. Look at his starved features, gaunt form, melancholy, a poor wanderer; but he never gave up his idea; he poured out his very soul into his immortal poem, ever believing that right ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... to time, to dream of rich banquets and delicious fruits, but woke to hear the croaking and whistling of the different creatures of the forest, and sit up on the pile of boughs listening to the splash of the various creatures in the water, till day broke, to find them all gaunt, ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... now pushed their little boat out into the open sea. They were a sorry looking couple, with their old clothes fairly dropping from them, and their thin, gaunt figures showing the consequences of many days of privation. Watson was feverish, with an unnatural glitter in his eyes, while George's face was a sickly white. Waggie reposed at the bottom of the rickety craft, as if he cared not whether ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... left an awful, bloody trail over the country. Simon Girty, the so-called White Indian, with his keen, authoritative face turned expectantly; Elliott, the Tory deserter, from Fort Pitt, a wiry, spider-like little man; and last, the gaunt and gaudily arrayed form of the demon of the ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... gaunt man, with deeply-lined face and iron grey moustache, who had paused to smile at the conversation, feigned an expression of disapproval as she looked ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... sheep-sheds that bulked dimly in the night shadows. Farther back, he could just make out the ghost of a dwelling-hut. Beyond that, he knew, was a Mexican village of three or four houses. A windmill reared its gaunt frame in the corral. A long trough was supplied by it ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... universal in civilized communities, labour, as conducted under that regime, was a curse, and this at length came home to roost on the gaunt wreckage of imperialism. Thereafter came slowly increasing liberty under the feudal system with its small social units and its system of production for use not profits, monasticism with its doctrine and practice of the sanctity of work, and the Church with its progressive emancipation ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... that his son's surmise was right, and that the gaunt, unemotional African merchant felt an unwonted heartache as he hailed a hansom and drove out to his friend's house at Fulham. He and Harston had been charity schoolboys together, had roughed it together, risen together, and prospered together. When John ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as her wonderful faith conjured up visions of the future when the whole of humanity shall live in peace and brotherhood, and the knife, which in time of revolution had shed the blood of the oppressors, shall "cut nothing deadlier than bread." A strange gaunt figure she was, a woman who had never hesitated at shedding blood in the good Cause, nor feared to face death for it; but with her friends, and especially with children and dumb animals, she was as gentle as the gentlest ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore— What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore Meant in ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... treatise? The most productive varieties of fruit blossom and have some foliage which may not be very beautiful, any more than the departures from practical prose in this book are interesting; but, as a leafless plant or bush, laden with fruit, would appear gaunt and naked, so, to the writer, a book about them without any attempt at foliage and flowers would seem unnatural. The modern chronicler has transformed history into a fascinating story. Even science is now taught through the charms of fiction. Shall this department of knowledge, so generally ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... nave, with Early English portions, of the priory church of an Augustinian foundation of the time of Henry I. There remains also the Perpendicular gateway, serving as the town-hall. The founder of the priory was Walter de Gaunt, about 1114, and the institution [v.04 p.0560] flourished until 1537, when the last prior was executed for taking part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. A Congregational society was founded in 1662, and its old church, dating from 1702, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... inclination to descend to human level and mingle with them of earth, "it's true an' that's jus' what she is,—the Angel of this Tenement, an', as Norma says, you're free to come over and play with her, though there ain't many of you I'd say it to;" and with that the tall, gaunt Mary bearing the baby, followed Norma into the house and up the narrow, broken stairs, and along the dark halls past door after door closed upon its story of squalor and poverty, until, at last, panting with the child's weight, she reached ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... answer; blue and red there is in abundance, and good faces; but the portraits are so high, I could not distinguish them. Besides, the woman who showed me the church would pester me with Christ and King David, when I was hunting for John of Gaunt and King Edward. The greatest curiosity, at least what I had never seen before, was, the whole floor and far up the sides of the church has been, if I may call it so, wainscoted with red and yellow tiles, extremely polished, and diversified with coats of arms, and inscriptions, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... is dying!" Nas Ta Bega's low voice was deep and wonderful with its intensity of feeling. "The white man robbed the Indian of lands and homes, drove him into the deserts, made him a gaunt and sleepless spiller of blood.... The blood is all spilled now, for the Indian is broken. But the white man sells him rum and seduces his daughters.... He will not leave the Indian in peace with his own God!... Bi Nai, the ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... recall Michael Angelo personally to us, are the prominent arch of the nose, the shaggy brows, the tangled beard, the gaunt grandeur of a figure like that ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... annum into the royal exchequer. The custom dues of the Duchy of Lancaster were another source of profit, and retainers of the King were occasionally quartered on them. Thus in 1372 one Rankyn, a follower of John of Gaunt, was retained on condition that he "in time of peace shall be at board at court ... and that he shall have and take for the term of his life, in the whole, twenty-five marks sterling from the farm of the town ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... a gaunt, long-legged person with a saturnine countenance. He wore a seersucker coat with a nickel badge pinned on the ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... having upon its door a plate, "Brass, Solicitor," and a bill tied to the knocker, "First floor to let to a single gentleman," and served not only as habitation, but likewise as office for Sampson Brass,—of none too good legal repute,—and his sister; a gaunt, bony copy of her red-haired brother, who was his housekeeper, as ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... grisly were they, faint from their wounds, their hair and beard unkempt, their armour stained, and neglected, as men must look who had hardly slept without their weapons for more than three memorable months. As they saw these gaunt heroes the rescuers burst into tears; strangers clasped hands and wept together with the same overpowering emotion that mastered relievers and relieved when Havelock and Colin Campbell led the Highlanders into ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... she cut her throat?" the maid cried out, and with no warning rolled over in a faint. Baxter pushed her under the wash-basins, and leaped to hold the gaunt woman who crowed and whistled as she struggled toward the window. He took her by the shoulder, and ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... Riez, and 9 m. E. from Manosque, is Groulx, pop. 1400, a dirty village on a hill rising from the Verdon. On the top are the gaunt ruins of a castle built by the Knight-Templars. Less than m. from the village is the hotel and the bathing establishment. The rooms cost from 2 to 5 frs. Coffee in the morning, 60 cents. Breakfast and dinner, 7 frs. Service, fr. Or the lowest price per day, 10 frs., which is dear ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... another lonely stretch of country through which the ridge of Pitt Down runs to the actual suburbs of Winchester. At the western end of this ridge, and about three miles up the Test from Mottisfont, are the villages of Horsebridge and King's Somborne on the southern confines of what was once John of Gaunt's deer park. The present bridge is higher up the stream, but the railway-station is on the actual site of the ancient road between Winchester and Old Sarum and the "horse bridge" was then lower down stream and almost immediately due west of the station. Somborne gets its prefix from ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... Diamond on the road to the Peake; he was a great weight-carrier. The next was Hollow Back, who had once been a fine-paced and good jumping horse, but now only fit for packing; he was very well bred and very game. The next was Giant Despair, a perfect marvel. He was a chestnut, old, large-framed, gaunt, and bony, with screwed and lately staked feet. Life for him seemed but one unceasing round of toil, but he was made of iron; no distance and no weight was too much for him. He sauntered along after the leaders, looking not a ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... she sank her voice so that there was hardly any left—as Felix was going over there, she really must put him au courant with the heart of this matter. Lady Malloring had told her the whole story. It appeared there were two cases: A family called Gaunt, an old man, and his son, who had two daughters—one of them, Alice, quite a nice girl, was kitchen-maid here at Becket, but the other sister—Wilmet—well! she was one of those girls that, as Felix must know, were always to be found in every village. She was leading the young ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... yawned a huge cavern of a fireplace, surmounted by a towering mantel-piece of black marble. The one object of furniture (if furniture it might be called) visible far or near in the vast emptiness of the place, was a gaunt ancient tripod of curiously chased metal, standing lonely in the middle of the hall, and supporting a wide circular pan, filled deep with ashes from an extinct charcoal fire. The high ceiling, once ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... reverberated through the room—to be succeeded by an almost unnatural stillness; a silence punctured by the ticking of the cheap clock on the mantel, by the crackling of the flames in the grate, by the whistling of the wind around the corners of the gaunt gray stone building ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... he might be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, 80 And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... avoided this spot. It was fortunate that he did so; Lutra, knowing well the ways of the riverside people, often lurked in hiding under the shelf of ice beyond the stakes, and, when she had gone from sight, the big, gaunt trout came slyly from his refuge by the boulder and resumed his tireless scrutiny of everything that passed his "hover." At last a thaw set in, and Brighteye, awakening on the second day from his noontide sleep, ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... busy one, and I had an early dinner at the Savage Club with Tarp Henry, to whom I gave some account of my adventures. He listened with a sceptical smile on his gaunt face, and roared with laughter on hearing that ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... what is worse, Full angrily, men listen to thy plaint; Thou gettest many a brush and many a curse, For saying thou art gaunt, and starved, and faint. Even the old beggar, while he ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... The tall, gaunt man, whom we found deranged, had been a merchant's clerk, and had gone out to Canada in the vain hope of finding employment. Disappointed in his expectations, he was returning home. At first he appeared ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston |
