"Straggling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found on each hand low buildings connected by long, white adobe walls, against which grew prickly pears in abundance, running in straggling lines away out upon ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... enough to lose interest in all that was going on, and used to insist upon the others telling her everything that happened outside—who made the biggest score at cricket, what flowers were out in her own straggling patch of garden, how many eggs the fowls laid a day, how the guinea-pigs and canaries were progressing, and what was the very latest thing in clothes or boots the new ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... touched the breast-pocket in which Polly's letters lay—he often carried them out with him to a little hill, on which a single old blue-gum had been left standing; its scraggy top-knot of leaves drooped and swayed in the wind, like the few long straggling hairs on an ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... presenting myself," said Colville, who was watching the little group from the rectory without appearing to do so. He rose as he spoke and went toward the clergyman, who was probably much younger than he looked. For he was ill-dressed and ill-shorn, with straggling grey hair hanging to his collar. He had a musty look, such as a book may have that is laid on a shelf in a deserted room and never opened or read. Septimus Marvin, the world would say, had been laid upon a shelf when he was inducted to the spiritual cure of Farlingford. ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... meet me, and pay me their respects. They had left all the troops behind them, according to my expectations. I received them with caresses, and went with them into the city; and at the very moment my people fell upon their straggling soldiers, Michelotto and his comrades each seized his man. Thus I made myself master of the domains and fortresses of those whom we deceived by pretending to assist them in subduing their enemies. The following night I caused them to be slaughtered in their dungeons. Michelotto, to ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... morning we got about early and made for the Chamber of Deputies to hear the King's speech. The Minister and I walked over together and met a few straggling colleagues headed in the same direction. Most of them had got there ahead of us, and the galleries were all jammed. The Rue Royale, from the Palace around the park to the Parliament building, was ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... upon La Bresse after our climb of two hours and more, we seem to be at the world's end. Our road has led us higher and higher by dense forests and wild granite parapets, tasselled with fern and foxglove, till we suddenly wheel round upon a little straggling town marvellously placed. Deep down it lies, amid fairy-like greenery and silvery streams, whilst high above tower the rugged forest peaks and far-off blue mountains, in ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... These gloomy boughs Had charms for him: and here he loved to sit, His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life: And, lifting up his head, he then would ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... white-headed little boy came straggling in, and after him, a red-headed lad, and then one with a flaxen poll, until the forms were occupied by a dozen boys, or thereabouts, with heads of every color but gray, and ranging in their ages from four years old to fourteen years or more; for the legs of the youngest were a ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... disembark'd, and immediately encamp'd; notwithstanding which the Number of Succours increas'd very slowly, and that after the first straggling Manner. Nor were those that did appear any way to be depended on; coming when they thought fit, and going away when they pleas'd, and not to be brought under any regular Discipline. It was then pretended, that until they saw the Artillery landed as well as Forces, they would not believe any ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... idyl of Beirut came now the wrestler from Aleppo, Ahmet Ali, and the occurrence irritated Campbell to a degree which he had not conceived possible. There he passed the door with his dreamy Syrian face, his red rose, his white burnoose, his straggling followers. And Fenzile smiled her quiet ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... this little canal were mere dykes, guarding rice-swamps, and presented no species of beauty; but in the little creek, or inlet, from which we entered it, I was charmed with the beauty and variety of the evergreens growing in thick and luxuriant underwood, beneath giant, straggling cypress trees, whose branches were almost covered with the pendant wreaths of gray moss peculiar to these southern woods. Of all parasitical plants (if, indeed, it properly belongs to that class) it assuredly is the most ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... cornmeal-barrel. The boys usually forgot about them before they were ripe; when now and then one was remembered, it was a thin, watery, sour thing at the best. But the boys gathered them every spring, in the pleasant open woods where they grew, just beyond the densest shade of the trees, among the tall, straggling grasses; and they had that joyous sense of the bounty of nature in hoarding them up which is one of the sweetest and dearest experiences of childhood. Through this the boy comes close to the heart of the mother of us all, and rejoices in the wealth she never grudges to those ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... that guard; no death-laden bark sailed by that sleepless quarantine. The small ferret-eyes which looked nervously out from under bushy brows, roaming, but never resting, were of the true Minerva tint,—yellow-green. The encircling rings told of unsettled weather. While elf-locks and straggling whiskers marked the man careless of forms, the narrow, knotted brow suggested the thinker persistent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... certainty that something had wakened him deliberately. He sat up, almost with a cry. It was exactly as though he heard himself called by name and recognized the voice that spoke it. He looked quickly round. Nothing but the crowding army of the box-trees was visible, some bushy and round, others straggling in their outline, all whispering gently together in the night. Beyond ran the immense slopes, and far overhead he saw the gleaming snow on peaks ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... and sheltered by the outbuildings from the north and east winds, lay the orchard, neglected and unpruned, but very beautiful with its moss-grown apple trees, its straggling plums, and budding walnuts, and cherries just bursting into an ethereal fairy network of delicate palest pink bloom. Primroses grew here amongst the grass, and clumps of dog violets and little tufts of bluebells were pushing their way up to take ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... hundred and fifty or sixty years of our history. New England had, it is true, been largely subjugated and reclaimed; a considerable body of emigrants, wedge-like, were driving slowly up through the Mohawk Valley towards Niagara; a weak, thin line, was straggling with difficulty across the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, towards the Ohio, and a more compact and confident battalion in Virginia, was pushing into Kentucky. But how scattered and feeble that picket-line compared to the army which was soon to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... who followed Messrs. Buxton and Kinsley to Falls Church, who built homes and made the little straggling settlement at the cross-roads the beautiful village it is to-day, space will not permit even a brief mention. But there are a number of well-known citizens still residing here who formed the nucleus of that "department colony" ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... the flower pastures, creeping through openings in the brush, scrambling over the dwarf fir, then down through the fallen timber. It was half-past seven o'clock when we descended the last slope and found the path to Glenora. Here we met a straggling party of whites and Indians just starting out to ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... whole length of Italy through the midst of enemies, while following Hannibal as he was retiring to Metapontum, were taken to Tarentum by mistaking the roads; where they were seized by some Roman foragers, who were straggling through the fields, and brought before the proprietor, Caius Claudius. At first they endeavoured to baffle him by evasive answers, but threats of applying torture being held out to them, they were compelled to confess the truth; when they fully admitted that they were the bearers of a letter ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... do give, grant to, and invest the town of Mansoul with full power and authority to seek out, take, enslave, and destroy all, and all manner of Diabolonians that at any time, from whencesoever, shall be found straggling in or about the ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... insanity or animal ferocity. The latter was his chief characteristic. His face was thin and scored with scars, mainly long and narrow. These, in a measure, testified to his past. His mouth, half hidden beneath a straggling mustache, was his worst feature. One can only liken it to a blubber-lipped gash, lined inside with two rows of yellow fangs, all in a more or less bad ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... farms, tilled their own land, lived upon their own produce, and depended for their clothing and for most of the necessaries of life upon the work of their own hands. A slender population was scattered far asunder in lonely townships and straggling villages of wooden houses, built for the most part in the formidable fashion imposed upon men who might at any time have to resist the attacks of Indians. Inside these villages the rough, rude justice of the Puritan days still persisted. The stocks and the pillory and the stool ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... hot, and I think I had fallen asleep over the cup of coffee which the servant set before me after my meal, when I was awakened by a sudden uproar from outside, and, starting up, I went out to see what was happening. Down the road I saw several straggling natives—every one of them was running, and every one of them was shouting or crying or blubbering, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... saw many curious things, meteors, comets, departed friends dancing their dances in the Northern sky; clouds of every kind and colour; spirits flying about the air. Now he felt keen winds, and now warm breezes; now he passed a company of storms marching down upon the earth; or a lightning or two straggling back again to the skies; or a thunder riding a cloud; or a troop of hail rushing to battle with a deal of bluster and fury; or a crowd of snows looking for colder weather and a roosting-place. At last, he reached the country of the stars. He found a land far more beautiful ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... it. She showed me where the Gentleman used to sit, and, at the last part of the time, the Schoolmistress next to him. The chairs were like the rest, but it was odd enough to notice that they stood close together, touching each other, while all the rest were straggling and separate. I observed that peculiar atmospheric flavor which has been described by Mr. Balzac, (the French story-teller who borrows so many things from some of our American loading writers,) under the name of odeur de pension. It is, as one may say, an olfactory perspective ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... freely, scattered themselves among the fields, he used to send out charioteers from the woods by all the well-known roads and paths, and, to the great danger of our horse, engaged with them; and this source of fear hindered them from straggling very extensively. The result was that Caesar did not allow excursions to be made to a great distance from the main body of the legions, and ordered that damage should be done to the enemy in ravaging their lands and kindling fires only so far as the legionary ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... disputes, my lords, there is at present no time: the affairs of the continent require our immediate interposition, the general oppressors of the western world are now endeavouring to extend their dominions, and exalt their power beyond the possibility of future opposition; and our allies, who were straggling against them, can no longer continue their ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... equally unfavourable comparison between the Canadian and United States sides of the western country. As she floated on the Detroit river in a little canoe made of a hollow tree, and saw on one side "a city with its towers, and spires, and animated population," and on the other "a little straggling hamlet with all the symptoms of apathy, indolence, mistrust, hopelessness," she could not help wondering at this "incredible difference between the two shores," and hoping that some of the colonial officials ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... that was kept up by a large pine, whose roots and fibres, lying partly bare, looked like some giant spider that had half buried himself in the sand. On the right of the hut was a patch of broken ground, in which were still standing a few straggling dried stalks of Indian corn; and from two dead trees hung knotted pieces of broken line, which had formerly served for a clothesline. The hut was built of half-trimmed trunks of trees laid on each other, crossing ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... found, upon the greensward Where his straggling hoofs had trod, Pure and bright, a fountain flowing From ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... to use an Africanism, and by six we were well on our way, with our escort as straggling and unconcerned as possible—as helpless-looking a caravan ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... purely military reasons. They were separated from Vienna by difficult mountain ranges through which armies struggled with difficulty. True, Mantua was a formidable stronghold, but no fortress could make the Milanese other than a weak and straggling territory, the retention of which by the Court of Vienna was a defiance to the gospel of nature of which Rousseau was the herald ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... are ever seen in the town; nothing but people on foot, or the comical little carts dragged along by the runners. Some few Europeans straggling hither and thither, wanderers from the ships in harbor; some Japanese (fortunately as yet but few) dressed up in coats; other natives who content themselves with adding to their national costume the pot-hat, from which their long, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... British garrisons at Pensacola, Mobile, and Natchez. On the Gulf coast the inhabitants were mainly French creoles. They were an indolent, pleasure-loving race, fond of dancing and merriment, living at ease in their low, square, roomy houses on the straggling, rudely farmed plantations that lay along the river banks. Their black slaves worked for them; they, themselves spent much of their time in fishing and fowling. Their favorite arm was the light fowling-piece, for they were expert wing shots;[5] unlike the American backwoodsmen, who knew nothing ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... be if I am living for myself—straggling, envying, casting an evil eye on those more fortunate than I; perhaps letting loose against them a cruel tongue? If I am doing thus, God forgive me. What have I of the mind of Christ? What likeness between me and him who emptied himself of self, who humbled himself, ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... from the heat, and some received sunstrokes. Many were obliged to fall out of the ranks, but managed to keep up with the column. At noon we were halted near a Vermont regiment that had just drawn a ration of soft bread and were boiling their coffee. As our exhausted men came straggling and staggering in, these hospitable Vermonters gave them their entire ration of bread and the hot coffee prepared for their own meal; and when the ambulances brought in the men who had been sun-struck, these generous fellows turned ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... proportionate amount of each of the subordinate runs, varying with each different river. In general, the runs are slack in the summer and increase with the first high water of autumn. By the last of August only straggling blue-backs can be found in the lower course of any stream, but both in the Columbia and the Sacramento the quinnat runs in considerable numbers till October at least. In the Sacramento the run is greatest in the fall, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... road, towards the one long, straggling street of the settlement. The few people who met him at that early hour greeted him with a kind of constrained civility; certain cautious souls hurried by without seeing him; all turned and looked after him; and a few followed him at a ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... ordinary enough—the type of landlady one sees in all back streets—greasy face, straggling hair, dirty blouse, black hands, bitten fingernails, short skirts, prodigious feet, a grubby child clinging on to her dress and every indication of ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... could be further from the truth. On the contrary, Hedda Gabler is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian of all Ibsen's plays, and it presents, not of course the highly civilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rural little straggling town of forty years ago. When I visited Norway as a lad, I received kind but sometimes rather stiff and raw hospitality in several tastefully decorated villas, which were as like that of the Tesmans as pea is like ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... continues northeasterly, holding together along its mountainous vertebrae some eight southern states; northeastern Kentucky, all of West Virginia, the eastern part of Tennessee, western North Carolina, the four northwestern counties of South Carolina, and straggling foothills in northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama. The broad valley of the Tennessee River separates the mountain system on the west from the Cumberland Plateau which is an extension of the West ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... drifted along, sometimes they saw a walrus with long tusks lying on the ice, or a soft-eyed seal. Once some strange little beings that looked like dwarfs, with goggle eyes and straggling black hair, caught hold of the block of ice, and lifting themselves out of the water made faces at Teddy, but the moment they saw the Counterpane Fairy their looked changed to one of fear, and with a queer gurgling cry they dropped from the ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... in one of the streets in the outskirts of the town of Bolton. It was about a week after the sad death of Frank Oldfield that we come upon him. Certainly this approach to the town could not be said to be prepossessing. The houses, straggling up the side of a hill, were low and sombre, being built of a greyish stone, which gave them a dull and haggard appearance. Stone was everywhere, giving a cold, comfortless look to the dwellings. Stone- paved roads, stone curbs, ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... then in being. With or without his will, he was in all the great Wars of his time,—the time of Louis XIV., who kindled Europe four times over, thrice in our Kurfurst's day. The Kurfurst's Dominions, a long straggling country, reaching from Memel to Wesel, could hardly keep out of the way of any war that might rise. He made himself available, never against the good cause of Protestantism and German Freedom, yet always in the place and way where his own best advantage was to be had. Louis ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... last, clothed in his splendid robes and holding in his hand the carbine which your emperor presented him. He was leaning on the shoulder of his favorite Selim, and he drove us all before him, as a shepherd would his straggling flock. My father," said Haidee, raising her head, "was that illustrious man known in Europe under the name of Ali Tepelini, pasha of Yanina, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... us dream of where, when, and how we would meet again. For thirty-five years I labored on unchanged, though I must own to having had some ailments now and then. About this period of my existence I overheard straggling remarks, as the worshippers passed out of the church, which led me to conclude that some change was contemplated, and my suspicions were confirmed by the rector proposing from the pulpit the erection of a new church edifice in another part of the city, to be fashioned ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... tongues bargaining for the evening provisions. Hearing of the swarms which resorted to this spot, I posted myself on a bridge some half mile distant, and attempted to count the flocks which came from a single direction to the eastward. About four o'clock in the afternoon, straggling parties began to wend towards home, and in the course of half an hour the current fairly set in. But I soon found that I had no longer distinct flocks to count, it became one living screaming stream. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... moment the Emperor stood like a statue, staring at old Luke. The expression on his face was that of a madman, but a madman through whose brain a straggling ray of realization has dawned. It was the look upon his face that held the whole assemblage ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... there are today. The Art Museum had not got much above its foundations; the new Trinity Church was still in the future; but the big organ and the bronze statue of Beethoven were in their glory, and every day at high noon a small straggling audience wandered into Music Hall to hear the instrument played. To this extempore concert Katy was taken, and to Faneuil Hall and the Athenaeum, to Doll and Richards's, where was an exhibition of pictures, to the Granary Graveyard, and the Old South. Then ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... Africa, cackled as she helped herself to a second liqueur-glass of Nixey's excellent apricot-brandy. Small, thin, restless, she presented a parched appearance, with bright, round, beady eyes continually roving in search of information from beneath the straggling fringe of a crumpled Pompadour transformation, for those horrors had recently become fashionable, and the whole world of women were vying with one another in the simulation of the criminal type of skull, with the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Marta, her old black dress for once cast aside, arrayed in yellow and red, leads the van, as she has at every wedding for twenty years. Following her come three musicians; Pedro, in the center, his gray, thin hair straggling over the collar of his well-brushed long black coat, with young Vicente and Arturo, the bridegroom's brothers, one on either side, accompanying Pedro's weird, thin-blooded strain with thrumming mandolins. Next come, ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... do so ask as to indicate a slight suspicion that I myself am the author. Beyond all question, I am not the author. I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is. Neither do I know who is the author. I met it in a straggling form in a newspaper last summer, and I remember to have seen it once before, about fifteen years ago, and this is ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... know every creature in Grasmere, down to the two-year-old babies,' said Hammond, Mary having just stopped to converse with an infantine group, straggling and struggling over the boulders. 'Pray, do you happen to know a man called Barlow, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Mormon speaks of cities with stupendous stone walls, and of battles, in which hundreds of thousands were slain. The land afterwards became a waste and howling wilderness, traversed by a few straggling bands or tribes of savages, descended from a branch of the aforesaid Jewish family, who, in consequence of their wickedness, had their complexion changed from white to red; but the emigrants from Europe and ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... trying to help Jean up the tree feet foremost?" the priest added, standing where he had halted just outside of the straggling yard fence. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... children's bread—where avenues and glades were choked with thickets, where clearings had become brakes, and vistas and prospects were screened by aged upstarts that knew no law; when they followed the broken roads, where fallen banks sprawled on the fairway, and the laborious rain had worn ruts into straggling ditches, where culverts had given way and the dammed streams had spread the track with wasting pools, where sometimes time-honoured weeds blotted the very memory of the trail into oblivion; when they stood before ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... asked the Wards, one after the other. She sighed and looked at the little troopers straggling along the highway, and replied, "Yes, partly that, too," and throwing her unnecessary hood back, turned her face into the wind and walked quickly away. The Wards watched her as she strode down the hill, and finally as he bent to his work the ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... watermelons, potatoes, and squash, while they themselves either dawdled their time away or hunted for summer furs. In the autumn, the wild rice was garnered along the sloughs and the river mouths, and the straggling field crops were gathered in—some of the product being hidden in skillfully covered pits, as a reserve, and some dried for transportation in the winter's campaign. The villagers were now ready to depart for their hunting-grounds, often hundreds of miles ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... rudely awakened from a dozing sleep by the shock of my palankeen coming to the ground, and by the most discordant shouts and screams. I jumped out to ascertain the cause of the uproar, and found, on inquiry, that a foraging party of tigers—probably speculating upon picking up a straggling bearer—had sprung off the rocks, and dashed across the road, bounding between my palankeen and that of Colonel D., who was scarcely ten yards a-head. The bearers of both palankeens were all huddled together, bellowing like bedlamites, and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... remarked more than once that the chief error of Hobbes, and the eighteenth-century philosophers as well, was to imagine that mankind began its life in the shape of small straggling families, something like the "limited and temporary" families of the bigger carnivores, while in reality it is now positively known that such was not the case. Of course, we have no direct evidence as to the modes of life of the first man-like beings. ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... It was a large, straggling cover that we drew, but the fox went away very soon. From the lower end of the wood a great pasture sloped down, at the bottom of which was a flight of post-and-rails—very high, new, and strong, with a deep cutting on the farther side. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... yon giant bens Fold o'er their rugged breasts, Grandly their straggling skirts lift up Over the ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... began the following week. The grounds were located a mile from the straggling little village which was the center of the county's activities. All religious denominations used the spacious auditorium for their services. The Methodists camped there an entire month. The Baptists stayed but two weeks. ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... the morning, took it to Mr Greeley. He was at his desk writing and at the same time giving orders in a querulous tone to some workman who sat beside him. He did not look up as he spoke. He wrote rapidly, his nose down so close to the straggling, wet lines that I felt a fear of its touching them. I stood by, waiting my opportunity. A full-bearded man in his shirt-sleeves came hurriedly out ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... a little, but it was in a straggling, desultory kind of way; and I think it was a relief to all of us when we finished the round of the gardens and went in through one of the drawing-room windows. The room was lighted with lamps and candles placed about upon the tables, and Mrs. Darrell ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... west of Cooling Castle, beyond wide fields—turnips or cabbages—of the colour of dark-green jade, the Church of Cliffe, with its lichgate, standing out boldly from its ridge of chalk, overlooks a straggling village of old and weather-boarded houses. It would be into the road from Cliffe to Rochester, at a point about half a mile from Cooling, that Uncle Pumblechook's chaise-cart would debouch when he took Mrs. Joe to Rochester market "to assist him in buying such household ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... straggling seamen bound for their ships. Across the way, the steamers at the wharves were smaller, and here and there loomed the spars of a sailing vessel, a delicate tracery upon the ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... loomed darkly and loftily through rain and mist, and wind and thunder, and "noises of the northern sea," gave me a wild welcome to these northern shores. A rocky head like Gibraltar, a cold-blooded- looking grey town, straggling up a steep hillside, a few coniferae, a great many grey junks, a few steamers and vessels of foreign rig at anchor, a number of sampans riding the rough water easily, seen in flashes between gusts of rain and spin-drift, were all I saw, but ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... rheumatic knees and a gray hardness in her leathery face, had come down the path and stood squarely before Billy Louise, her hands knuckling her flabby hips, her hair blowing in gray, straggling wisps ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... represent those whole orders, families, and genera, which have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only from having been found in a fossil state. As we here and there see a thin, straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favored and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus or Lepidosiren, which ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... docks were sufficiently defended by the factories, like Ringsend and Boland's bakery, vast straggling buildings on either side of the railway approach, and which were not only occupied, but stored with food and ammunition and loopholed and sandbagged to stand a fortnight's ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... growth is perhaps the finest in the world, often extending to the waist; but it gives infinite trouble, requiring, for instance, a bag when travelling. The Arab beard is often composed of two tufts on the chin-sides and straggling hairs upon the cheeks; and this is a severe mortification, especially to Shaykhs and elders, who not only look upon the beard as one of man's characteristics, but attach a religious importance to the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... be had in these arcaded streets; and though some of them were anything but clean or sweet, Marjorie forgave everything for the sake of the beauty and picturesqueness of the scene. She wandered here, there, and all over; she found herself in the long, straggling market, and made hasty sketches of the men and women chaffering at their stalls; of camels, with their strange, sleepy, or vicious faces, padding softly along, turning their heads this way and that. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... She was easily three inches taller than Roger and splendidly proportioned, huge of shoulder, broad of hip, but without an ounce of fat upon her. Her face was gaunt and brown: thin lips, long thin nose, gray eyes set deep, iron gray hair straggling over her forehead from under a dusty pink sunbonnet. She wore a linen duster buttoned ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... made a settlement within its limits, which had been broken up and the colony dispersed in 1613, by Captain Samuel Argall, under the authority of Sir Thomas Dale, governor of the colony at Jamestown, Virginia. A desultory and straggling French population was still in occupation, under the nominal governorship of Claude La Tour. Sir William Alexander and his associates naturally looked for more or less inconvenience and annoyance from the ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... pathway, in and out, Winds upwards like a straggling chain; And, when two toilsome miles are past, Up through the rocks it leads at last Into a high ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... were promenading up and down the wharves, among the crowd of natives and strangers who were sojourning at this once straggling village—now, thanks to the enterprise of M. Lesseps, a fast-growing town. One was the British consul at Suez, who, despite the prophecies of the English Government, and the unfavourable predictions of Stephenson, was in the habit of seeing, from his office window, English ships daily passing ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... soldiers, laborers, and truant schoolboys are passing at all hours of the day. It is so far escaping from the axe and the bushwhack as to have opened communication with the forest and mountain beyond by straggling lines of Cedar, Laurel, and Blackberry. The ground is mainly occupied with Cedar and Chestnut, with an undergrowth, in many places, of Heath and Bramble. The chief feature, however, is a dense ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... happened between straggling parties of the two armies; and the Russians went on pillaging and laying waste every thing before them, till at length the two armies having approached one another in Brandenburgh-Prussia, mareschal Lehwald, finding it impossible to spare detachments from so small a number as his was, compared ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... and required to go down and confer further with that lightning-rod man. I hurried off, boiling and surging with prodigious thoughts wombed in words of such majesty that each one of them was in itself a straggling procession of syllables that might be fifteen minutes passing a given point, and once more I confronted him—he so calm and sweet, I so hot and frenzied. He was standing in the contemplative attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, with one foot on my infant tuberose, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the word; but she was soon dry-eyed and smiling again. Afterwards, side by side, they did much journeying to and from the nearest sawmill—each trip through a day and a night—thirty odd miles away. The mill was a small, primitive affair, almost lost in the straggling box-elders and soft maples that bordered the muddy Missouri, producing, amid noisy protestations, the most despisable of all lumber on the face of ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... to open wide streets through the old crowded quarters where revolution hid itself, hatching plots and crimes. He provided fresh air and drainage. He turned the Bois de Boulogne from a mere wild wood into the magnificent pleasure-ground of a great city. He completed the Louvre, and demolished the straggling, hideous buildings which disfigured the Carrousel in Louis Philippe's time. The working population, which his improvements drove out of the Faubourg Saint Antoine emigrated to high and healthy quarters in Montmartre and Belleville, where a beautiful park was laid out for them. No part ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... minute the whole party were straggling through the camp-like town towards the outskirts, to gather together at the very ordinary shed-like house of mud wall and fluted corrugated-iron roofing, where the wife of one of the men at the mine stared in wonder at the party, and ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... darkling sweep of desert had been transformed. It was now a world of red earth and gold rocks and purple sage, with everywhere the endless straggling green cedars. A breeze whipped in, making the fire roar softly. The sun felt warm on his cheek. And at the moment he heard the whistle of ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... trees stretched endlessly to the east. Only to the northward the steep outline of the Mont des Cats with the long ridge of the Mont Noir behind broke the plain. We descended, and made our way wearily to Winnezeele, a straggling village of outlying farms, close to the Belgian frontier. Here we remained three days, and with the zeal of new troops obeyed every letter of the law. Orderly sergeants descended into the village in marching ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... of my City of Happiness as I approach—outlying villas, and gardens, and then straggling, ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... blanket answer the purpose of a head-dress; but when they wish to appear very much to advantage, they put on a cap. It is a square piece of blue cloth, profusely decorated with different-coloured beads, and merely sewed up at the top. They wear their hair in long straggling locks, which have not the slightest tendency to curl, and occasionally in queues or pigtails behind; but in this respect, as in every other, they are very careless of ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... dusk settles over our trail, and still the chief of the sowars and Kiftan Sahib lead the way. Many of the horses are pretty badly fagged, they have had nothing to eat all day and next to nothing to drink, and the party are straggling along the trail for a couple of miles back. At length lights are observed twinkling in the darkness ahead. Half an hour later we dismount in a nomad camp, and one after another the remainder of the party come straggling in, some of them leading ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... of Harrar, and about 450 m. S.W. of Jibuti on the Gulf of Aden. Adis Ababa stands on the southern slopes of the Entotto range, at an altitude of over 8000 ft., on bare, grassy undulations, watered by small streams flowing S.S.E. to the Hawash. It is a large straggling encampment rather than a town, with few buildings of any architectural merit. The Gobi or royal enclosure completely covers a small hill overlooking the whole neighbourhood, while around it are the enclosures of the abuna and principal nobles, and the residences of the foreign ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rugged seemed a song! In scattered groups upon the golden sand, They game—carouse—converse—or whet the brand; Select the arms—to each his blade assign, And careless eye the blood that dims its shine; 50 Repair the boat, replace the helm or oar, While others straggling muse along the shore; For the wild bird the busy springes set, Or spread beneath the sun the dripping net: Gaze where some distant sail a speck supplies, With all the thirsting eye of Enterprise; Tell o'er the tales of many a night of toil, And marvel where they next shall seize a spoil: No matter ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... little to show for it besides a litter of ideas heaped up into his mind anyhow. He can utter a number of truths or sophisms, as the case may be, and one is as good to him as another. He is up with a number of doctrines and a number of facts, but they are all loose and straggling, for he has no principles set up in his mind round which to aggregate and locate them. He can say a word or two on half a dozen sciences, but not a dozen words on any one. He says one thing now, and another thing ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... straggling town with a few muddy streets and about three thousand inhabitants, Jefferson would find our national capital one of the most beautiful cities on the face of the earth, with a population of nearly three hundred thousand; and on March 4 he would behold a scene ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... motion of a whirlpool that never rested. A reflection like that of dawn whitened the Basilica; while the rest of the horizon faded into deep obscurity, amidst which you only saw a few stray tapers journeying alone, like glowworms seeking their way with the help of their little lights. However, a straggling rear-guard of the procession must have climbed the Calvary height, for up there, against the sky, some moving stars could also be seen. Eventually the moment came when the last tapers appeared down below, marched round the lawns, flowed away, and were merged in the sea of flame. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... as much notice as a wretched little curtain-raiser which took me a morning to knock off, and the news of which was flashed from China to Peru immediately, whereas the eulogies of my book were dribbled out in monthly instalments, and belated testimonials kept straggling in long after its successor had been published. In those days I belonged to a Press-cutting Agency, and I discovered that—to measure Fame by the square inch—you may get many more yards of reputation by the most flippant playlet than by your literary magnum ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... volumes, and such I have read; some of the contents, though not often religious, very good; others objectionable, either for the superstition in them, such as prophecies, fortune-telling, &c., or more frequently for indelicacy. I have so much felt the influence of these straggling papers, that I have many a time wished that I had talents to produce songs, poems, and little histories that might circulate among other good things in this way, supplanting partly the bad flowers and useless herbs, and to take place of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... from Circle City, the other decayed mining town of the Yukon River, only in that the process is further advanced. Year by year there are a few less men on the creeks behind it, a few less residents in the town itself. Its long, straggling water-front consists in the main of empty buildings, the windows boarded up, the snow drifted high about the doors. One store now serves all ends of trade, one liquor shop serves all the desire for drink of the whites, ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... Adrian went into the Leonine city, but not into Rome itself, and the Englishman crowned the German. Yet the Romans would fight, and in the heat of the summer noon they crossed the bridge and killed such straggling guards as they could find; then the Germans turned and mowed them down, and killed a thousand of the best, while the Pierleoni, as often before, looked on in sullen neutrality from Sant' Angelo, waiting to take the side of the winner. Then the Emperor and the Pope departed together, leaving Rome ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Norfolk, the solitary seaport, which, with its six or seven thousand inhabitants, formed the most glaring exception that any rule solicitous of proof could possibly desire. Williamsburg, the capital, was a straggling village, somewhat overweighted with the public buildings and those of the college. It would light up into life and vivacity during the season of politics and society, and then relapse again into the country stillness. Outside of Williamsburg and Norfolk ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... tall, elderly lieutenant with an austere countenance—a Duke of Alva straggling behind in the roster of the Civil Guard—talks little, but in a harsh, curt way. One of the priests, a youthful Dominican friar, handsome, graceful, polished as the gold-mounted eyeglasses he wears, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... hidden by a gorgeous growth of sunflowers and lupines, the yellows and purples making a carpet that, in the brilliant sunlight, fairly dazzles the eye. Here and there a band of sheep may be seen, with straggling herds of cattle and horses. In the winter time it is not unusual to find snow covering the plateau, for it must not be forgotten that it has an elevation of nearly seven thousand feet. During the early summer, before the rains, it ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... the woman could not have heard her, for she was already away when she spoke, and had closed the door behind her immediately. Now Wiseli sat alone in the dark room. Every thing about her was suddenly silent,—not a sound to be heard. A straggling moonbeam shone through the little window,—enough to show the child where the bench by the stove was, upon which she must find her bed. She crossed the room, and seated herself there. For the first time that day ...
— Rico And Wiseli - Rico And Stineli, And How Wiseli Was Provided For • Johanna Spyri
... on the morning after the club dance, That hides your weary, little, washed-out face and straggling, uncurled coiffure from his critical eyes? It is the generous coffee-pot, standing like a guardian angel between you and him! And in those many vital psychological moments, during the honeymoon, which decide ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... lifting above the eastern hills, found long irregular lines of horses straggling across dewy fields to water at the rushing streams of the Manawatu River. On one bare-backed horse of every four sat a trooper, clad sketchily in shirt and breeches tugged on hastily, as a sergeant had called the roll. They played the ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... being had the unhealthy complexion, hollow eyes, slouching mien, and straggling beard common to his tribe. His yellow hair, cut closely at the back of the head, as if to save the trouble of brushing, was long in front and at the sides; being plastered down over his forehead and advancing above his ears in ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... not be neglected. Even on the score of appearance alone, it has much claim for attention. Many people would be vastly improved in this way were they only to visit their hairdresser more frequently. It is very unsightly, to say the least of it, to see the hair straggling all over the back and sides of the neck, and the beard (if a beard be worn) with a wild, untidy look. Besides this, in our semi-tropical climate, a little more care in this respect would be certainly conducive to coolness ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... Sir Francis is a thorough gentleman. They're not his boys, but her ladyship's, and she has spoiled 'em, I suppose. Let 'em grow wild, Grant. I say, my lad," he continued, looking at me with a droll twinkle in his eye, "they want us to train them, and prune them, and take off some of their straggling growths, eh? I think we could make a ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... consisting of a few straggling farm-houses and brick and timber cottages, standing apart from each other in their old gardens and orchard-crofts. Simple, old-fashioned, and almost untouched by the innovations of modern life, we are here amidst the charmed past of Shakespeare's time." ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... began to complain, and each advised me not to buy any more goods. They were too late, however, as I had bought goods enough to supply a dozen agents. Their sales amounted to simply nothing. A day or two before Christmas they began straggling in, one after another, with their trunks and sample-cases ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... after it was noised abroad By blacks, and straggling horsemen on the roads, That he was dead "who had been sick so long", There flocked a troop from far-surrounding runs, To see their neighbour, and to bury him; And men who had forgotten how to cry (Rough, flinty fellows of the native bush) Now learned the bitter way, beholding there ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... propensities fraught with the attribute of Passion, obtains much misery in this world and at last sinks into hell. One should, therefore, practise self-restraint in body, speech, and mind. Ignorant persons bearing the burdens of the world are like robbers laden with their booty of straggling sheep (secreted from herds taken out for pasture). The latter are always regardful of roads that are unfavourable to them (owing to the presence of the king's watch).[761] Indeed, as robbers have to throw away their spoil if they wish ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... strong, and, like the body of soldiers which, while advancing over the smooth road, keeps its line unbroken, but when obliged to cross a muddy, ploughed field, breaks up into a straggling file, the commonwealth of ancient Germany, with its wonderful equality and community, had so changed its form under pressure of the conditions attending the conquest of the Britons, that monarchy and slavery, and the accumulation by individuals of wealth and power, had, even ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... straggling town, of 15,000 inhabitants, a number at which it has remained stationary for ten years, built without plan, without drains, without pavement, without arrangements for common decency, stands on the borders, and was the manorial village, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... gates whose pillars were surmounted by huge griffins. He looked at the deserted lodges, the coat of arms, nothing of which remained but a few drooping fragments. He shook the iron gates, which still held together, in vain. Finally he drove the car through an opening in the straggling fence, and up the long, grass-grown avenue, until he reached the building itself. Here he descended, walked along the weed-framed flags to the arched front door, by the side of which hung the rusty and broken fragments of a bell, at which he pulled for some moments in vain. To all appearances ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... perhaps some one had beat him to it with news from the Blue Duck, but he put it from him. There were tears in her eyes and one was straggling down between the crimples of her cheeks where it looked as if she had lain on the folds of her handkerchief all night. There came a new tenderness in his voice. This was Mark's mother, and this was the way she felt. Well, of course it was silly, ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... announcement of the death of Major-General Sir Alexander Cameron, G.C.B. This heroic man had served in nearly every country of Europe, where the standard of England floated over the field of battle. At Corunna he, with Sir John Hope, carried to a boat the last wounded Highlander, that could be descried straggling near the scene of action. Marshal Soult and his staff observed this act of heroism, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... at Baltimore were entirely covered with net, I was afraid I should have been eaten alive with mosquitoes. Washington is called a capital, having a portion taken from Virginia and Maryland for the senators' use. It is a long straggling town, with very wide streets; called by some the city of magnificent distances, but, more properly speaking, it might be called the city of magnificent intentions. It is located in the district of Colombia—a territory of ten miles square, formed into a separate and detached jurisdiction ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore
... The line of the forest here receded some distance from the shore, leaving a broad rounded point, embracing a large area of low and barren ground, covered thinly with a growth of stunted shrubs, and a few straggling, solitary looking trees. The lagoon was at this point quite shallow, and low rocks and coral patches appeared above the surface, at short distances apart, nearly to the centre of the channel. The reef opposite, was entirely under water, and its ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... attends their preparations for war and their marches, displaying colours of scarlet cloth, and beating drums, gongs, and chennangs, yet their operations are carried on rather in the way of ambuscade and surprise of straggling parties than open combat, firing irregularly from behind entrenchments, which the enemy takes care not to approach ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... straggling Indians were dodging about the log houses of the town; they saw the fleeing girl, but for some reason they did not fire upon her. They may have supposed that she was returning to her home to rescue her clothes. Possibly they ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... Paul was turning the corner, coming home from Keston, he saw his mother and father, who had come to Sethley Bridge Station. They were walking in silence in the dark, tired, straggling ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... were evidently spurring hard to escape, and for the next quarter of an hour the chances seemed even, for the distance was maintained, and each party kept well together; but after that the pace began to tell, and horse and man tailed off till both parties seemed to be straggling over the ground, the better-mounted to the ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... in Western Con-naught, seven miles from the nearest railway station. It possesses a single street, straggling and very dirty, a police barrack, a chapel, which seems disproportionately large, and seven shops. One of the shops is also the post office. Another belongs to John Conerney, the butcher. The remaining five are public houses, doing their chief business in whisky and porter, ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... would occasionally be a lull for a moment, and then the uproar would break out again with increased violence. If the enemy is too strong for us to attack, what must be the fate of Rosecrans' four regiments, cut off from us, and struggling against such odds? Hours passed; and as the last straggling shots and final silence told us the battle had ended, gloom settled down on every soldier's heart, and the belief grew strong that Rosecrans had been defeated, and his brigade cut to pieces or captured. This belief grew to certain conviction soon ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... at about six o'clock. The house is one of those straggling, half new, half old, half comfortable, and half forlorn mansions, that are begun in one generation and finished in another. It is very pleasantly situated, and commands, from some points of view, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... had in his pocket the oil-can of his father's bicycle; he put the carpet down at the foot of the stairs, and he lay on his back, with his head on the top step and his feet straggling down among his young relations, and he oiled the bolt till the drops of rust and oil fell down on his face. One even went into his mouth—open, as he panted with the exertion of keeping up this unnatural position. Then he tried again, but still the bolt would not move. ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... day we were following the great tea-road, the road by which most of the twelve million pounds of brick tea consumed by the guzzling Tibetans is carried to the frontier market at Tachienlu. At all hours of the day straggling lines of men or ponies or mules were in sight, toiling along under their precious burdens. Between Ya-chou, the starting-point of this traffic, and Tachienlu there are two high passes to cross, seven thousand feet above the ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... sunk within him as the carts bearing his already large family and his few household belongings toiled through quagmire and morass; they must have fallen still farther when he gazed down the one straggling street at the rectory of mud and thatch that was to be his home; and they must have touched the zero mark, zealous High Churchman that he was, with the discovery that his peasant parishioners were Presbyterian-minded folk who hated ritualism as cordially ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... repeated the doctor with dignity, and Edward proceeded to arrange them in a long, straggling row, urging upon them that there was no cause for alarm, as, even should any of them prove 'witched, the doctor had charms with him by which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... which enclose this valley, 1 mile long and mile wide, occupied by the coal-pits, forges, and foundries of Schneider et Cie, bought by them from the former owners, Manby, Wilson, and Co. Detached straggling suburbs occupy the other slopes of the hills. In all the general feature is the same, rather untidy streets and houses, with parks, shops, and cafes to suit. The streets are full of children, but few priests, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... being able to question him, Sylvie dressed herself as coquettishly as she knew how. The old maid thought she was attractive in a green gown, a yellow shawl with a red border, and a white bonnet with straggling gray feathers. About the hour when the colonel usually came Sylvie stationed herself in the salon with her brother, whom she had compelled to stay in the house in ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... battered cement sidewalk, between irregularly placed and shabby little houses. These were of too familiar a type to interest Julia, but she presently came to a full stop before a wide, one-story brick building, with a struggling garden separating it from the street, and straggling window boxes at every one of the wide windows. A flight of steps led up from the garden to the pretty white front door, and a neat brass plate, screwed to the cement at the turn of the steps, bore the words: "Alexander Toland ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... years ago, and is still rather rare. The leaves are about 4 inches long, 2 inches wide, and distinctly undulated on the margins. Flowers bell-shaped, about 2 inches in diameter, and arranged in rather straggling terminal heads. They are sulphur-yellow, without markings, a tint distinct from ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... tide, And stems it gallantly. Eustace held Clare upon her horse, Old Hubert led her rein, Stoutly they braved the current's course, And though far downward driven per force, The southern bank they gain; Behind them straggling, came to shore, As best they might, the train; Each o'er his head his yew-bow bore, A caution not in vain; Deep need that day that every string, By wet unharmed, should sharply ring. A moment then Lord Marmion ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... most critical travellers, of the hideous contrast of his own long shapeless nankeen duster, his stiff half-clerical brown straw hat, his wisp of gingham necktie, his dusty boots, his outrageous carpet-bag, and his straggling goat-like beard. A few looked at him in grave, discreet wonder. Whether they recognized in him the advent of a civilization that was destined to supplant their own ignorant, sensuous, colorful life with austere intelligence and rigid practical improvement, ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... man's gayety left him suddenly when he looked at his father, who had seated himself on the side of the bed. He had become almost frightful to look at; old before his time, livid of complexion, his eyes bloodshot, the rebellious lock of hair straggling over his right temple. Nothing was more heartbreaking than his senile smile when he placed his bony trembling hands upon his thighs. Amedee, who knew, alas, why his father had reached such a pass, felt his heart moved ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... the river's bank. Here they ford, follow the course of the stream for a while, and then at a bend reach an open flat dotted here and there with shapely live-oaks. In this park-like opening the long straggling line comes ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... opportunities, Charles with his greatly inferior force made a hazardous night march on Ingolstadt. The movement was executed with much disorder, resembling a flight rather than an advance. The league neglected the chance of making a flank attack on the hurrying, straggling line as it followed the right bank of the Danube until it was conveyed across the river at Neustadt. To add to the Emperor's danger, his German troops were mostly Lutherans, hating the priests and the Spanish and Italian regiments. Many had early deserted from their general, the Marquis ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Day came, but brought no cessation of the fever, which rather increased than diminished. All day long he lay racked by pain on the cold sand. A mournful howl reached his ears, and he saw Neptune straggling to release himself from the rope which held him. He attempted to rise and set his dog free, but his strength was gone, and he sank back again, unable ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... Roberson of Heald's Hall, a friend of Mr. Bronte's who has left a deep impression of himself on the public mind. He lived near Heckmondwike, a large, straggling, dirty village, not two miles from Roe Head. It was principally inhabited by blanket weavers, who worked in their own cottages; and Heald's Hall is the largest house in the village, of which Mr. Roberson was the vicar. At his own ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... under the low, turf-constructed battlement, and, as we were in the act of scrambling over it, we received a straggling and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... travellers proceeded on their march. In the evening a signal fire was made on a hill adjacent to the camp, and in the morning it was replenished with fuel so as to last throughout the day. These signals are usual among the Indians, to give warnings to each other, or to call home straggling hunters; and such is the transparency of the atmosphere in those elevated plains, that a slight column of smoke can be discerned from a great distance, particularly in the evenings. Two or three days elapsed, however, without the reappearance of the three hunters; and Mr. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... had made himself famous, for he was a marked man. The last words of the straggling desperado had been that he would shoot on sight. Now half a dozen talked at once. Some advised Curly one thing, some another. He must get out of town. He must apologize at once to Stone. He must ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... the seven days left him to live, he was on the point of getting ready for his day's business, as usual, when the memory of his dream flashed upon him, and he was appalled to decide what he should do first. Breakfast was generally a hurried and silent meal with him. The children usually came straggling down at irregular intervals, and it was very seldom that the family all sat down together. This morning Mr. Hardy waited until all had appeared, and while they were eating he ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... blacks pass with Fraulein Bertha Kircher in their midst, or at least until the last straggling warrior suggested to his mind the pleasures of black-baiting—an amusement and a sport in which he had grown ever more proficient since that long-gone day when Kulonga, the son of Mbonga, the chief, had cast his unfortunate spear at Kala, ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... among the worked-to-death inhabitants of Cottontown to plant their gardens differently; for all of them had the same weedy turnip-patch on one side, straggling tomatoes on another, and half-dried mullein-stalks sentineling the corners. For years these cottages had not been painted, and now each wore the same tinge of sickly yellow paint. It was not difficult to imagine that they had had a long siege of malarial fever ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum. The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys fretted and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was "town,"—a straggling, lazy village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village of the colored folks, who lived in three- or four-room unpainted cottages, some neat ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... which are so grossly foul and bad;" and suggesting various remedies. He pointed out that much ground "is now spoiled and trampled down in all wide roads, where coaches and carts take liberty to pick and chuse for their best advantages; besides, such sprawling and straggling of coaches and carts utterly confound the road in all wide places, so that it is not only unpleasurable, but extreme perplexin and cumbersome both to themselves and all horse travellers." It would thus appear that the country on either side of the ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... chair, which was always left for the attorney. For Mr. Masters was a man much respected through all Dillsborough, partly on his own account, but more perhaps for the sake of his father and grandfather. He was a round-faced, clean-shorn man, with straggling grey hair, who always wore black clothes and a white cravat. There was something in his appearance which recommended him among his neighbours, who were disposed to say he "looked the gentleman;" but a stranger might have thought ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... the mountains. An old woman he'd seen barely hobbling, now ran like a deer. Children toddled desperately. Adults snatched them up and ran. Larger children fled on twinkling legs. The inhabitants of Ardea vanished toward the hills in a straggling, racing, panting stream. They disappeared around an outcrop of stone which was merely the nearest place that would hide ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... language, while their eyes were amused with the various and strange costumes of the wild-looking shouting people who surrounded them. Some of the officers had shaven chins, but most of the people had long beards, and straggling hair flowing from beneath their caps; but, unattractive as were their countenances generally, they wore an aspect of good-nature and simplicity which made amends for ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... was disbanded, and fully one-half came straggling in squads up the valley to Charleston to be paroled. David Goshorn's hotel was simply crammed with Confederate officers, who slept anywhere. With these I easily became friends; they seemed like Princeton Southern college mates. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... would have awakened soft compassion— almost remorse—in the present owner of that fair hill, which contained for the exile the bones of his dead, the ashes of his hopes, he observed: "They cannot be prevented from straggling back here to their old haunts. I wish they could. They ought not to be permitted to drive away our game." ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... straggling territory, has grown to be one of the leading Powers of Europe by the gradual absorption of all the surrounding small States; therefore only great Powers have a right to exist (paragraph XXII.); therefore small States are a monstrosity ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... its old historic associations, was a fitting abode for the dreamy and poetic nature of the lovely, high-born maiden. The adjoining districts, with vale and meadow, had a pleasing effect. Long neglected parks and straggling decayed mansions, afforded ample scope for the fanciful flights of her ladyship's ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... two or three of the officers advanced a little, for the first time, into the island. They met with a small straggling village, the inhabitants of which treated them with great civility; and the next morning Mr Forster and his party made another excursion inland. They met with several fine plantations of plantains, sugar-canes, yams, etc.; and ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... few straggling shooting stars appeared. The languor of fatigue overcame me, and I slept prostrate on the cushions of the deck as the murmurous reverberations from the walls of the rock-bound canal rose and fell, with the cadence of the waves, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... On the verge of a wood, which approached to within a mile of the town of Ashby, was an extensive meadow, of the finest and most beautiful green turf, surrounded on one side by the forest, and fringed on the other by straggling oak-trees, some of which had grown to an immense size. The ground, as if fashioned on purpose for the martial display which was intended, sloped gradually down on all sides to a level bottom, which was enclosed for the lists with strong palisades, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... on the rail to Portuguese Africa, received their unconditional release, with the exception of a few officers, still retained as hostages; and all the afternoon, indeed far on into the night, these men came straggling, now in small groups and now in large, into our expectant and excited camp. They told us of the crowds of disconsolate Boers, some by road, some by rail, who had passed their prison enclosure in precipitate retreat, bearing waggon loads of killed ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... for crime and outlawry. Yet some of as good men as ever it was my pleasure to know came from that State, and undaunted I held a true course for my destination. I was disappointed on seeing Fort Worth, a straggling village on the Trinity River, and, merely halting to feed my mount, passed on. I had a splendid horse and averaged thirty to forty miles a day when traveling, and early in April reached the home of my friend ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... small consternation at this sight; and, as they found that the fellows went straggling all over the shore, they made no doubt but, first or last, some of them would chop in upon their habitation, or upon some other place where they would see the token of inhabitants; and they were in great perplexity also for fear of their flock of goats, which, ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... goal for a drive in cases where there was a restaurant attached, and not far off there was a curious network of underground beer-cellars that I did not see, but which seemed to attract the men of our party sometimes. There were several inns in the straggling village, for the place lay high up amongst the dolomite hills of Upper Franconia, and people came there from the neighbouring towns for Waldluft. The summer I was there Richard Wagner passed through with his family, and we saw him more than once. He stayed at the Kurhaus, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... rising through the gloom. The sentinels with one consent gave their fire. They gave it regularly and effectively, beginning with the rifles on their left, and going off towards the 85th on their right, and then, in obedience to their orders, fell back. But they retired not unmolested. This straggling discharge on our part seemed to be the signal to the Americans to begin the battle, and they poured in such a volley, as must have proved, had any determinate object been opposed to it, absolutely murderous. But our scattered videttes almost ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... straggling street of Aspatria was lit up with gas as we passed along it in the early morning on the road towards Maryport, and we marched through a level and rather uninteresting country, staying for slight boot repairs at a village on our way. We found Maryport to be quite a modern looking seaport town, with ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor |
