"Lithe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... escape the sunken rocks, the treacherous quicksands, the ravening whirlpools, the black and dark night? Lo! yonder, right across her bows, comes one of the Sea-Kings, freighted with death for the frail little bark! Woe! woe! for the lithe little bark! Nay, not death, but life. The Sea-King marks the path of the pinnace. Not death, but life. Signals flash back and forth. She discerns the voice of the Master. He, too, is steering seaward,—not ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... moment Lablache was at his best. His was a dominating personality. There was no cowardice in his nature—at least no physical cowardice. Doubtless, had it come to a struggle where agility was required, he would have fallen an easy prey to his lithe companion; but with him, somehow, it never did come to a struggle. He had a way with him that chilled any such thought that a would-be assailant might have. Will and unflinching courage are splendid assets. And, amongst others, ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... about thirty. A fellow with a handsome face and a lithe well-made figure which he managed with some grace. He had the air of one who had seen better days. I remember, one day when the captain was bestowing upon him some especially choice oaths, seeing him clap his hand to his side as though he expected to touch a ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... advancing too, so rapidly did his figure now reveal itself, beyond all doubt, as the figure of a man. A few minutes more and Arnold fancied he recognized it. Yet a little longer, and he was quite sure. There was no mistaking the lithe strength and grace of that man, and the smooth easy swiftness with which he covered his ground. It was the hero of the coming foot-race. It was Geoffrey on his way back ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... over the left elbow; and the artist has given her a more alert pose and resolute air than we find in the stiff carriage of her contemporary Tui. The little girl in the Turin Museum is a looser work, but where could one find a better example of the lithe delicacy of the young Egyptian maiden of eight or ten years old? We may see her counterpart to-day among the young Nubian girls of the cataract, before they are obliged to wear clothes; there is the same thin chest, the same undeveloped hips, the same meagre thighs, and the same demeanour, at ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of Irish descent, and middle size, but compact, lithe, and muscular, with a not unkindly face, which, however, showed but too plainly the marks of habitual dissipation. A rigger by occupation, a sailor and pilot at need, a skilful fisherman, and ready shot, with a roving experience, which had given him a smattering of ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... moment is thine To save a life, and a love to win. No! no! the dastard kestrel kite Aye hugs the earth in his stealthy flight. Hope gone! the pool at the otter's cave Will prove the Ladye Tomasine's grave. Ho! ho! see yonder comes rushing down A lithe young hind, though a simple clown— Off bonnet and shoes, and coat and vest, A plunge! and he holds her round the waist! Three strokes of his arm, with his beautiful prize All safe, although faint, on the bank she lies! A ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... yours,' he replied. 'You're jest about the very woman I'm looking for, miss. Lithe—that's what I call you. I kin put you in the way of making your pile, I kin. This is a bona-fide offer. No flies on my business! You decline it? Prejudice! Injures you; injures me! Be ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... pleased with his new acquaintance that his speech and behaviour had an easy tone of superiority, which, if indefinably felt by the home-bred lad, was not therefore to be willingly accorded. His easy carriage, his light step, his still shoulders and lithe spine, indicated ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... two subleaders: a genial, red-haired man named Ben Barber, who would have been a farmer on Athena but who made a good subleader on Ragnarok; and a lithe, ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... came the boom and thud of drums and dancing sticks, until the urge of them caused even Ellen's feet to beat time to the primitive music. She glanced at her sister. Jean's eyes were sparkling. Her lithe body was swaying and her hands moving in rhythm ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... simultaneously with the rifle, landing with both feet on Furneaux's back, and thus completing the little man's discomfiture. By that time the two policemen were nearly upon him, but he was lithe and fierce as a cobra, and had seized the rifle again before they could close with him. Jabbing the nearer adversary with the muzzle, he smashed a lamp and sent its owner sprawling backward. Then, swinging ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... drew he back a little space, and left Lying in dust his son, since now no more Lived in the once lithe limbs the olden strength, For the years' weight lay heavy on his head. Back leapt Thrasymedes likewise, spearman good, And battle-eager Phereus, and the rest Their comrades; for that slaughter-dealing ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... she whom Tarzan sought, with lithe sinews rolling beneath shimmering hide; fat and glossy came Sabor, ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... With her lithe step she continued ascending the stairs. She had remained essentially a foreigner, a Frenchwoman, too different from those among whom she lived to be influenced by her environment. On reaching the second floor she resumed: ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... would hasten up; recruits would come in from two or three other directions; as they reached the corner their countenances would quickly assume a genteel severity, and presently, with her mother, 'Tite Poulette would pass—tall, straight, lithe, her great black eyes made tender by their sweeping lashes, the faintest tint of color in her Southern cheek, her form all grace, her carriage a wonder of ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... Suffrage Association. The Woman's Journal said: "Those of us who have for years admired Mrs. Stetson's remarkably bright poems were delighted to meet her, and to find her even more interesting than her writings. She is still a young woman, tall, lithe and graceful, with fine dark eyes, and spirit and originality flashing from her at every turn like light from a diamond. She read several poems to the convention, made an address one evening and preached twice on Sunday; and the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... and often suffer from their petty depredations, consider them as mere nuisances; but I have been very much struck with their peculiarities. I like to behold their clear olive complexions, their romantic black eyes, their raven locks, their lithe, slender figures, and to hear them, in low, silver tones, dealing forth magnificent promises, of honours and estates, of world's ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... the earth evolved and grew cooler, vegetation failed, the ancestors of the present carnivora appeared, the fathers of the wolf and tiger, light, lithe and pugnacious, with senses acute and ferocious weapons of attack, who set out to destroy everybody. They destroyed pretty nearly all of the huge leaf-eating species, and only the more plastic and smaller ones, who were more keen-sensed and swift-footed (of whom the deer and antelope, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... awakened. The Rhamda left him. A few moments later he came back with a squad of men. Chick noted their discipline, movement, and uniforms, and classed them as soldiers. Two men were stationed outside the door—one, a stout, dark individual in a blue uniform; and the other a lithe, athletic chap, blond and blue-eyed, wearing a bright crimson dress. Chick instinctively preferred both man and garb in crimson; there was a touch of honour, of lightness and strength that just suited him. The other was dark, ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... sides. Here was the only natural hiding-place, but like children we all ran the other way. When we had come in again with the report of "No enemy in sight," and had shut the door against the rain, I happened to glance out of the east window. Climbing up to the street from the cliff I saw the lithe form of a young Indian. He came straight to the house and stood by the east window where he could see inside. Then with quick, springing step he walked down the slope. I crossed to the west window and watched him shutting out ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... discovered the copperhead when we were ploughing, and we saw and felt at the first long, fixed, half-charmed, admiring stare at him that he was an awfully dangerous fellow. Every fibre of his strong, lithe, quivering body, his burnished copper-colored head, and above all his fierce, able eyes, seemed to be overflowing full of deadly power, and bade us beware. And yet it is only fair to say that this terrible, beautiful reptile showed no disposition to hurt us until we threw ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... The lithe limbed mulatto gave a hop on to the portico, and another bound to the soft grass of the lawn, whence she ran, like a deer, to meet our sea-loving friend, with the high shoulders, who was crossing towards the house at a far brisker pace than was ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... thing ran the innocent hind, When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood, The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve, And the lion effulgently ramped. Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood, By right of the better in kind. But now will it breed yon bestial brood Three-fold thrice over, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the fire glanced in a thousand capricious reflections on the Diva's auburn hair and rich satin dress. It was black of the most lustrous quality, and fitted her person with a perfection that showed the shape of the bust, and the lithe suppleness of the slender waist to the utmost advantage. The dress was made low on the superb shoulders—the dazzling whiteness of which, as seen contrasted with the black satin, was now covered with a slight silk scarlet shawl,— a most artistic completion of the harmonious colouring ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of one whose strength seems to have been acquired more from athletic sports than by hard work. He was tall, broad-shouldered, slim- waisted, big-hipped and handsome; he stepped along through the clinging sand with the lithe careless grace of a mountain lion. An old greasy wide-brimmed gray felt hat, pinched to a "Montana peak," was shoved back on his curly black head; his shirt, of light gray wool, had the sleeves rolled to the elbow, revealing powerful forearms tanned to the complexion of those of the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... It was hard work, for the way was very rough, and poor Hannah weak. But Ann had a good deal of strength in her lithe young frame, and she half-carried Hannah over the worst places. Still both of the girls were pretty well spent when they came to the last of the bits of wool on the border of Bear Swamp. However, they kept on a little farther; then they had to stop and ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... as, prone on his face, the young fellow kicks, struggles and puffs up the dust. Meanwhile a tall, dour man in a straw hat is rolling up a shirt-sleeve, and alternately bending and stretching a long arm, whilst a lithe, white-headed young stripling is hopping, sparrow-like, from one onlooker to another, and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... the direction of the river-bank struck her ears with a suddenness and a portent which seemed to carry the pain of death. She was facing that way; she saw the flash of it; she saw Jerry Boyle leap with lithe agility, as if springing from the scourge of flames, and sling his pistol from ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... traveler, however faulty to the eye of the traveler's wife. When about to dance, the Alme puts on a lighter and more diaphanous dress, eschews her slippers, and with a slow and measured step advances to the centre of the room—her lithe figure undulating with a grace peculiarly serpentile. The music is that of a reed pipe or a tambourine—a number of attendants assisting with castanets. Perhaps the "argument" of her dance will be a love-passage with an imaginary young Arab. The coyness of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... road ahead of me there walked a lithe maiden of middle size, whose unexpected sight took my breath away and robbed my knees of their strength. In a dark-green woolen dress, as I had last seen her in Germany, she walked apparently absent-minded whithersoever her footsteps carried her. How many a time I had seen before me ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... and many a long tramp we have had over the hop-country together. Chatham, Rochester, Cobham Park, Maidstone,—anywhere, out under the open sky and into the free air! Then Dickens was at his best, and talked. Swinging his blackthorn stick, his lithe figure sprang forward over the ground, and it took a practised pair of legs to keep alongside of his voice. In these expeditions I heard from his own lips delightful reminiscences of his early days in the region we were then traversing, and charming ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... A lithe old man came into the parlor. His waxed moustache and his white imperial made him look like an old soldier; but his glance betrayed, under his glasses, the fine softness of eyes worn by science and voluptuousness. He was a Florentine, a friend ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... assay her first venture upon her new snow-shoes. The simple breakfast ended, and clad in her woodland suit, Sam taught her how to arrange the magic slippers upon her moccasined feet. How Dane's heart would have thrilled could he have seen her standing before the lodge, her lithe, supple body drawn to its full height, her face aglow, her eyes sparkling, and her furry cap poised lightly upon her head surrounded by a wealth of soft, billowy hair. The rude lodge, the great trees, and the fair girl standing there formed a scene of surpassing ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... Harry, from his first pony upward. And she had not gone far before a tiny hand slipped itself into hers and nestled there; moving and quivering occasionally, like a wild bird voluntarily tame. And when the drive ended, Victoria was quite sorry to lose its lithe softness. ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The lithe fingers on his arm clutched it hard for a moment, and Manetho averted his face. When he turned again, his features seemed to express exultation, mingled with a sinister flavor of some ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Detroit and had crossed the river to Canada as quickly as possible. He had been a mason but understood gardening and attending to horses and had other accomplishments. He was engaged and proved a satisfactory servant "respectful, cleanly, capable, lithe and active as a panther." His former master came from Kentucky and reclaimed him after the lapse of six months. The recognition was mutual and immediate. The Kentuckian, offered $2000 to Baby for the return of Andrew his former slave, but the offer was indignantly refused. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... beggars lay flat, or crouched in holes, and cut at the horses as they passed, to hamstring or maim them; and good-bye to the poor fellow whose horse fell! We ought to have had lances, and it would have been a very different tale. But the troopers' swords could not reach the beggars, who are as lithe as monkeys. If they had run it would have been easy to get a cut at them; so it would if they had stood up. But they were as cool as cucumbers, and dodged just at the right moment. Of course some were not quite so spry as others, and got cut down; it was a case of the ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... with festoons of orchids of the most extraordinary and undreamed-of shapes and the most gorgeous colours; of birds, insects, ay, and even fish, that flashed and glittered with all the hues of the rainbow; of monkeys who followed their course up the river in troops of a hundred or more; of the lithe and graceful jaguar lying stretched upon some trunk or branch that closely overhung the water, watching with ready paw to seize any unwary fish that might chance to swim past within reach; of alligators that basked log-like on ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the loftier pinnacles of these same Erzgebirge. Nor are the few men we meet of more promising appearance: not dwarfed nor stunted, but naturally diminutive, with sallow skins and oppressed demeanour. How different are the firm, lithe, sun-tanned mountaineers, who breathe the free air on the summits ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... when I tell of Neal's visit to Belfast. And the book is more than the recollection of a summer holiday. I go back in it to my own country—to places familiar to me in boyhood as the mountains and bays of Mayo are now; to days very long ago, when I caught cuddings and lithe off the Black Rock or Rackle Roy and learned to swim in the Blue Pool at Port Ballintrae. Yet I know that I could not, for all that I remembered of my boyhood or learned during my holiday, have written this story without your help. You told me what I wanted to know, you corrected, patiently, ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... there"—but the words died on her lips, for, as she spoke, the sounds of fire-arms reached their ears, mingled with the war-cry of the half-aroused Indians. With an exclamation of joy Millicent started in the direction of the firing, but had advanced but a step before the lithe Indian ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... than he was horribly startled. All black against the usual tall stove of white tiles gleaming in the dusk, stood a strange figure, wearing a skirted, close-fitting, brown cloth coat strapped round the waist, in long boots, and with a little Astrakhan cap on its head. It loomed lithe and martial. Razumov was utterly confounded. It was only when the figure advancing two paces asked in an untroubled, grave voice if the outer door was closed that he regained his power ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... was not so easy to describe. Her figure was tall, lithe, and serpentine; her hair the colour of a horse-chestnut fresh from its pod; her ears tiny and shell-like, her eyelashes long and silky; her mouth small when grave, large when smiling; her eyes pure hazel by day, and tinged with a little violet by night. But in jotting ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... he held her, she reminded Gordon of a venomous snake; he had never seen such a lithe, wicked hatred in any other human being. "You are a gentle object," he satirized her, loosening ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... moved abruptly as one coming out of a dream. His eyes swooped down upon the lithe, active figure at his side. They held a smile—a fiery smile that ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... champions were on their mettle, and the fight that ensued was of the keenest. Gwen was not a graceful player, but, as her friends observed, she seemed capable of being everywhere at once, she was so extremely lithe and quick. ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... black misery, an empty cupboard, which put an end to ruined families; it is the madness of drink which empties the wretched beds. Here the waltz tune was sounding the knell of an old race amid the suddenly ignited ruins of accumulated wealth, while Nana, although unseen, stretched her lithe limbs above the dancers' heads and sent corruption through their caste, drenching the hot air with the ferment of her exhalations and the vagabond lilt of ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... straightened himself to the height of a tall man. The bent contorted limbs became lithe and strong. The cringing humility slipped from him like a garment. He stood upright and faced Ralph Dacre—a man in ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... henceforward held nothing more. There was nothing to hope for in the future—except to hope that Michael might never see her again! At least, she would like to feel that his memory of her—of the Wielitzska whose lithe grace and beauty had swept him headlong even against the tide of his convictions—would ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... warning of anything barring the way that might escape the wider-ranging eye of the intrepid young pilot; and as the Cayuga pressed on, receiving the first shock of the outburst from the forts, what finer subject for the painter, than that lithe young figure standing up in bold and unflinching relief, at the extreme bow of the ship, peering ahead in the morning starlight to pilot her safely on her way, amid the blinding flame and screaming ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... like a spring leaf shed on the wind? Restrained by pure-eyed Sorrow's hand, Lithe Joy through this wondrous land Leads me; nothing have I scanned Unmixed with good. Fate's ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... among colossal bronze-green nettles, which calmly exuded blistering poison. Above them was a mighty swarm of creepers which leaped aloft in a few bounds; jasmines starred with balmy flowers; wistarias with delicate lacelike leaves; dense ivy, dentated and resembling varnished metal; lithe honeysuckle, laden with pale coral sprays; amorous clematideae, reaching out arms all tufted with white aigrettes. And among them twined yet slenderer plants, binding them more and more closely together, weaving them into a fragrant woof. Nasturtium, bare and green ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... in wondering amaze, her velvety brown eyes lustrous with emotion. Lithe, graceful, with a supple strength in every rounded limb, in the slightly compressed red lips, the broad, dimpled chin, and the straight, resolute brows. The quaint gray costume, nun-like in its plainness, cannot make ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... in his mount, and with a lithe forward-slipping action appeared to reach the ground in one long step. It was a peculiar movement in its quickness and inasmuch that while performing it the rider did not swerve in the slightest from a square front to ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... note through it all, austerity even in the pictures upon the walls. They were prints, old prints, coloured or plain, representing boxers of the old school, stripped to the waist, the ugly muscles flexed and bulging as they raised their lithe arms in the attitude of defence. There were no other pictures but these; nothing to show that he had a heart above boxing. There was one thing. In their journey around the walls, Sally's eyes fell on a little coloured miniature in ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... if to intercept the leader, a solitary herder now appeared, mounted upon a horse which very evidently was the mate of the leader. He rode magnificently, and under him the lithe mare strove resolutely to overtake and head off the leader.—All to no purpose! The halterless steeds of the prairie snorted derisively at their former companion, bridled and saddled, and carrying the weight of a master. Swiftly they thundered across the sod, dropped into a ravine, and disappeared ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... child this lithe supple young thing was as full of mischief and engaging roguery as any tortoiseshell kitten—with elfin glee her favourite sport was to fill her grandmother's bed with "ouliaries" (Good God! berries, so called because on sudden contact with bare flesh they burst with a loud explosion causing ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... vineyard was thriving in a sunny selected nook, their sheep flecked the hills all about them. A deep fish-pond had been made where now two monks sat fishing. Padraig wondered if they had caught anything as good as the lithe trout he had taken ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... peasant-girl was seized upon by some errant knight of palette and brush, and painted for her beauty. These women are what you men call fine creatures. Their limbs are rounded and shapely, their figures full and lithe; they are what I've heard you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Dick proffered. After a little, however, she recovered and went on without assistance. Dick could scarcely believe his eyes, as from time to time he stole a sidelong glance at this silent girl, who walked with lithe and rapid stride. She was wrapped in his long coat, yet it did not hide her slender grace. He could not see her face, which was concealed by ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... from his fingers, and, as darkness fell again, it hid the soldier in the strong arms of the fugitive—not a soldier bold, but a gasping, blushing, unresisting coward. The lithe form quivered and then became motionless in the fierce, straining embrace; the head dropped upon his shoulder, his hot lips caressing the burning face and pouring wild, incoherent ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... while in early morn she wonned alone And Paris slept, shrill rose her singing tone, And brave the light on kindled cheeks and eyes: Brave as her hope is, brave the flag she flies. Then, as the hour drew on when the sun's rim Should burn a sheet of gold to herald him On Ida's snowy crest, lithe as a pard For some lord's pleasuring encaged and barred She paced the hall soft-footed up and down, Lightly and feverishly with quick frown Peered shrewdly this way, that way, like a bird That on the winter grass is ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... Mediterranean Sea, hemmed in by the Libyan and Arabian deserts, whence there came to the rest of the world so much of art, science, and philosophy. The fellah or peasant, he who tills the soil, is of a fine and industrious race, well built, broad chested, and lithe of frame. He is the same figure that his ancestors were of old, as represented on the tombs and temples of Thebes, and on the slabs one sees from Gizeh, in the museum of Cairo. He still performs his work in the nineteenth century ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... with the vice of idleness. In town or out of it, his trim man-servant, Abel, would wake him at seven o'clock and see that he had a cup of tea and the morning papers by a quarter-past. Fine physical condition was one of the ambitions of this lithe shapely person, whose father had been a jockey and whose mother had not forgotten to the day of her death the manner in which measurements are taken ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature—lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... bearers missed their footing, and my heart ceased beating as we plunged toward instant death among the tangled deadwood beneath. But on both occasions those lithe, powerful tails reached out and found sustaining branches, nor did either of the creatures loosen their grasp upon me. In fact, it seemed that the incidents were of no greater moment to them than would be the stubbing of one's toe at a street crossing in the ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... superior mind to free itself from the trammels with which foolish opinion has enswathed it—not one of these celebrated persons who did not in his secret soul condemn the folly to which he lent himself. The bonds of reason, though iron-strong, are easily burst through; but those of folly, though lithe and frail as the rushes by a stream, defy the stoutest heart to snap them asunder. Colonel Thomas, an officer in the Guards, who was killed in a duel, added the following clause to his will the night before he died:—"In the first place, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the most elegant socks and tan shoes which adorned his feet. His walk was British, his stride the active, elastic, athletic stride of one of our young fellows; and the poise of his head, the erectness of his lithe figure, a symbol of what one is accustomed to in Britons wherever they are met. That one gathered from a mere casual glance; though a second glance—a more penetrating one, we will say, one with a trifle ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... they had sent him on before with Martyn. In a quarter of an hour's time his good doctor came in with Lawrence Frith, a considerable contrast to our poor Clarence, for the slim gypsy lad had developed into a strikingly handsome man, still slender and lithe, but with a fine bearing, and his bronzed complexion suiting well with his dark shining hair and beautiful eyes. They had brought some of the luggage, and the doctor insisted that his patient should go to bed directly, and rest completely before ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... width of the neck of a claret bottle. The mouth is closed either with wire gauze, or with a paper cover with a slight cut in it. Altogether, the apparatus measures twenty-five inches in height. No matter: the fall is not serious for the lithe backs of the young grubs; and, in a few days, the test-tube is filled with larvae, in which it is easy to recognize the flesh fly's family by the fringed coronet that opens and shuts at the maggot's ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... took the bow; Godefroy, the stern; Jean and I, the middle. A poise of the steel-shod steering pole, we grasped our paddles, a downward dip, quick followed by Godefroy at the stern, and out shot the canoe, swift, light, lithe, alert, like a racer to the bit, with a gurgling of waters below the gunwales, the keel athrob to the swirl of a turbulent current and a trail of eddies dimpling away on each side. A sharp breeze sprang up abeam, and M. Radisson ordered a blanket sail hoisted on the steersman's fishing-pole. But ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... luncheon, we made a descent of the steep bank until we reached the rocky bed of the stream, and then by springing from stone to stone—sometimes slipping into the water, be it said—we commenced to beat the bracken and carefully examine every bush. Progress was not swift. Once the girl, lithe and athletic as she was, slipped off a mossy stone into a hole where the water was up to her knees. But she only laughed gayly at the accident, and wringing out her wet ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... then the rays Round her soft Theban tissues! All will be as She says, When that dead past reissues. Matters not what nor where, Hark, to the moon's dim cluster! How was her heavy hair Lithe as a feather duster! Matters not when nor whence; Flittertigibbet! Sounds make the song, not sense, ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... ever-present control bade him be civilised. Jeff did not answer. He was full of a choking rage and blind desire for them to get their hands off him. Not in his imprisonment even had he felt such debasement under control as when these lithe creatures hurried him along. Yet he knew then that his rage was not against them, innocent servitors of a higher power. It was against the mean ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... hardly good-looking, and the nervous twitch of his eyebrow as it came down over his single eye-glass constantly disfigured him. What was his temper, his character, his soul, you might sit for a month before him and never discover. But from his deep massive chest, his long arms, his lithe step, and the poise of his head upon his broad shoulders, you would probably conclude that his enemy, if he had one, would do well not to frequent the same dark ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... of the men round the fire were evidently underkeepers and verderers from the forest, sunburned and bearded, with the quick restless eye and lithe movements of the deer among which they lived. Close to the corner of the chimney sat a middle-aged gleeman, clad in a faded garb of Norwich cloth, the tunic of which was so outgrown that it did not fasten at the neck and at the waist. His ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lithe swaying figure. She paused, plucked a yellow flower, looked over her shoulder. Her eyes, yellow as the flower, lucent as water-jewels, held his. Her face was utterly expressionless. She turned, tossed away the flower with a jaunty gesture, ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... he was never old-Patrick. He came to us thirty-six years ago. He was our coachman from the day that I drove my young bride to our new home. He was a young Irishman, slender, tall, lithe, honest, truthful, and he never changed in all his life. He really was with us but twenty-five years, for he did not go with us to Europe; but he never regarded that a separation. As the children grew up he was their ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... two glasses of champagne. The light came back to her eyes, she found courage again. After all, she was independent of this man, independent even of his name. She looked across the table at him appraisingly. He was still sufficiently good-looking, lithe of frame and muscular, with features well-cut although a little irregular in outline. Time, however, and anxious work were beginning to leave their marks. His hair was grey at the sides, there were deep lines in his face, he seemed to her ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and turned with his easy, lithe grace towards the gun-rack, but Briscoe sat still in pondering dismay. For it was obvious that Julian Bayne had no intention of soon relaxing the tension of the situation by the elimination of the presence of the jilted ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... pace silently to and fro, and delighted in the resentful glances they cast at each other. This joy increased as the one in the long coat, embroidered on the shoulder with birds, and then the other, whose court costume well became his lithe, powerful limbs, sat down, each on one of the chains connecting the granite posts between the street ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... before any one realised what was happening we were in the midst of a mob of pack horses, and face to face with the Quiet Stockman a strong, erect, young Scot, who carried his six foot two of bone and muscle with the lithe ease of ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the dead upon the causeway above, a dim shadow against the star-lit sky, was another figure—unperceived by, yet completing, the group below. The arms were raised, half threateningly, half imploringly, and the lithe, vigorous form swayed in unison with the wild throbbings of a heart in which sated hate did mortal battle with outraged love. Chona had conquered; but even in the first flush of her triumph she knew that love and hope and happiness, that everything which makes life worth ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... travellers saw a horseman coming towards them, and Kate recognised him as Tom Knowles, the overseer of Kaburie, for whom Gerrard had a letter from Mrs Tallis. He was a lithe, wiry little man of fifty, and Kate and her father exchanged smiles as, when he drew near, they saw that he was arrayed in his best riding "togs," was riding his best horse, and that his long grey moustache was carefully waxed. He had long been one of Kate's most ardent admirers, and ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... past the preoccupied proprietor and waiters to the entrance. Here she said, with marked civility, "Good-afternoon, Mr. Brant," and tripped away towards the hotel. Clarence lingered for a moment to look after the lithe and elegant little figure, with its shining undulations of hair that fell over the back and shoulders of her white frock like a golden mantle, and then turned away in the ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... and approached. He was a lithe, curly-haired young boy, with a reckless, humorous eye and a smooth face, now red from ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... a qualm of horror the boy saw that, attached to Mr. Carrington's cheek, to his bare arm, and to his thigh, and lashing furiously with their lithe brown muscular bodies, were three of these horrible larvae, their great jaws buried deep in his flesh and sucking for dear life. They had the grip of bulldogs, and Mr. Carrington's efforts to detach the monsters from his face had only served to lacerate the flesh to which it had attached ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... the dark night across the waste and savage moorland, and while the children were sleeping hard at the back of the van, and while the crockery was restlessly clinking in the racks and the lamp swaying, and while he held the reins, the thin, lithe, greying man contrived to take into his arms the vast and amiable creature whom he desired. And the van became a ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... before, in the shipping office, what with the bad light and his excitement at this berth obtained as if by a brusque and unscrupulous miracle, did not count. He had then seemed to him much older and heavier. He was surprised at the lithe figure, broad of shoulder, narrow at the hips, the fire of the deep-set eyes, the springiness of the walk. The captain gave him a steady stare, nodded slightly, and went on pacing the poop with an air of not being aware of what was going on, his ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... dear. So it's just as well—all things considered—that you are not going to meet. Well, I must go and get respectable." He rose with a quick, lithe movement, but paused, looking down at her quizzically to ask: "What did you think of my friend ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... above stood a bent old hag whose witch-eyes were searching the place keenly! With a curiously lithe step, for all her age, she descended, and standing behind Ah-Fang-Fu tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the outer door. He stood up and shuffled across, went up the four steps ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... early and fade ere noontide comes. Sometimes such flowers are very beautiful. As I heard the flute of Smain in the pale yellow twilight I knew that Oreida was beautiful—with one of those exquisite, lithe figures, whose movements make a song; with long, narrow dark eyes, mysterious pools of light and shadow; with thick hair falling loosely round a low, broad forehead; and perfect little hands, made for the dance of the hands that the Bedouin loves ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... and careworn expression. But, thanks to cleanliness, to wholesome and sufficient food, to a calm and well-regulated life, to the pure, healthy air they breathe, the natural hues and the joyousness of youth soon reanimate the little faces; and with lithe, invigorated limbs, and happy hearts, these young creatures join merrily in the games of their new companions. They have entered the institution old; they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... light crept over the plain little bunches of cattle followed by brown, lithe riders. Like spokes of a wheel each group moved to a hub. Old Black Ned, the cook, was the focus of their travel. For at Spring River he had waiting for them hot coffee, flaky biscuits, steaks hot from the coals. Each rider seized ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... He knew that he had hit his man, and that Rawdon was wounded in the body or in the upper part of a leg. Hurriedly he pursued, entering the strip of woodland towards the brook, when something fell upon him, and two keen qualms of pain shot through his breast. Then he lay insensible. Meanwhile, a lithe active form, leaving a horse tethered at the gate, had sprung to meet a second intruder, issuing from the front door of Bridesdale. The opposing forces met, and Mr. Bangs had his hands upon the younger gaol breaker. A loud shout brought Timotheus on the scene, and the prisoner was secured. The household ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... life and vivacity, the young wife went on from one point to another, higher and higher; her lithe figure brought out against the sky, as occasionally she plunged her iron-pointed staff deep into the snow, and turned to admire the vast panorama at her feet. Her husband was making the ascent at a slower pace, looking up to admire the boldness ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... long, his tall, lithe body slack, grim, serious lines in his lean face. He had thought of his conversation with Judge Graney concerning ambition—his ambition, the picture upon which his mind had dwelt many times. A little frame printing office in the West was not one of its features. He sighed with resignation ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... bewildered, not knowing what to believe, and prepared to set the whole village down as a lot of gossips who seemed to mind everything but its own business. And, perhaps, Lord Littimer might come riding through on his big black horse, small, lithe, brown as mahogany, and with an eye piercing as a diamond-drill. One day he looked almost boyishly young, there would be a smile on his tanned face. And then another day he would be bent in the saddle, huddled up, wizened, an old, old man, crushed with the weight ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... the house of the baroness, where he was evidently expected, for the servant asked his name and immediately ushered him into her presence. She was one of those lithe, dark women of good race, that are to be met with all over the world, and she has broken many a heart. But she was not like a snake at all, as Nino had thought at first. She was simply a very fine ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford |
