"Unsightly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lay on the shore; The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave, And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam— I fetch'd my sea-born treasures home; But the poor unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... there generally in the daytime and from larger and sprightlier centres of civilization, one is prone to notice only its defects. But night, especially a southern night, has a wizard touch. It transforms into objects of mysterious beauty all unsightly things, or hides them clean away; while the nobler works of man, those facades and cornices and full-bellied balconies of cunningly wrought iron rise up, under its enchantment, ethereal as the palace of fairies. And coming, as ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... realized that not only would the beauty of the river be destroyed but that navigation would be rendered precarious and uncertain. The project, in fact, would have changed our noble St. John into a tidal river, unsightly mud flats alternating with rushing currents of turbid waters, while so far as protection of the low-lying lands goes the remedy would in all probability have proved worse than the disease, for instead ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... looking at the fair tapestry of human Life, with its royal and even sacred figures, he dwells not on the obverse alone, but here chiefly on the reverse; and indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, and manifold thrums of that unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolic patience and indifference, which must have sunk him in the estimation of most readers,—there is that within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all other past and present Sansculottists. The grand unparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdroeckh ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... It is winter now, and these hyacinth bulbs are unsightly, but spring will bring flowers to them, as time and patience will to us. Are we glad? These roses and geraniums glow in the sunbeams, and we rejoice together. Are we dull? That beautiful Greek form rouses us into activity again. Are we weary of climbing, and dissatisfied ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... the pleasing intelligence that the train we were to join had broken down, and would certainly be four hours late; so we had to get through a very weary wait at this most unattractive little township, whose only interesting features were the distant chimneys and unsightly shafts of the Simmer and Jack and the Rose Deep Mines, and far away, on the horizon, the little white house, amid a grove of trees, which had been Lord Roberts's headquarters barely a month ago, and from which he had sent the summons to Johannesburg to surrender. ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... assembled in a Church building that was plain in its interior, the plainness being emphasized, and at times rendered unsightly, by reason of the removal of the statues and pictures which in pre-Reformation times had decorated the walls and pillars. The building was, however, as required by the Book of Discipline, rendered comfortable and suitable for purposes of worship. ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... looks denote her desires! how deplorably she appears! The paint on her sides, burnt up by the scorching sun, is puffed out and cracked. See the weeds she trails along with her, and what an unsightly bunch of those horrid barnacles has formed about her stern-piece; and every time she rises on a sea, she shows her copper torn away, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... disgusted at this unsightly wreckage wished to rebuild at once. But the old grandfather had objected that this spot of misfortune was situated in the northeast corner of the mansion, a quarter notoriously exposed to the attacks of oni (evil spirits). He was in ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... animals, and even the most cherished slaves and dependents of the master. Vast monuments of stone or piles of earth were raised above the ashes of the dead. Scattered relics of the Celtic age are yet visible throughout Europe, in these huge but unsightly memorials. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... been allowed to take place without the displacement having been reduced, an unsightly deformity results. In young subjects whose occupation is likely to be interfered with, and in women for aesthetic reasons, the fracture is reproduced and the displacement of the lower fragment corrected. This is conveniently done by ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... and deliberate method of performing their daily duties—carelessness and precipitation being never more out of place than in an insane asylum. Loud talking, hurrying up and down stairs, rude forms of address to one another, and unsightly styles of dress, are wholly misplaced where everything should be strictly decorous ...
— Rules and Regulations of the Insane Asylum of California - Prescribed by the Resident Physician, August 1, 1861 • Stockton State Hospital
... of Niagara Falls are excellent ciceroni. We drove through the handsome village to Prospect Park, a property owned by the State of New York, and included in the Niagara Reservation, which the State acquired by purchase in 1885. All the unsightly buildings, heretofore obstructing the view, have been removed, and a terrace was erected for a distance of half a mile, affording uncountable attractions to the visitor with its venerable trees, comfortable seats, ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... that this, and many other books, are published volume by volume makes it somewhat difficult to know whether to bind them at once or not to do so. In the case of the new edition of Pepys' Diary, as neither the binding of the large or small paper is unsightly, it should be left until complete, one good reason for this being that, if it be bound volume by volume as published, the binder will require a pattern volume each time, and your pattern volume will be lying about his ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... to replace them at night. It is not only in China that coquetry or fashion stimulates its victims to torture and disfigure God's handiwork: the unnaturally small feet of the Chinese women are at least not more injurious or unsightly than the unnaturally small waists ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... their sore old feet. Anything more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed, dirtier, drearier, poorer, it would be impossible to conceive. They look as if fifty years ago the liquid mud had risen over their chimneys and then subsided again and left them coated for ever with its unsightly slime. And yet forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is yellow, and here and there, elsewhere, some mellow mouldering surface, some hint of colour, some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and repeats the note—because, in short, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... a wretched, prosaic place, that apparently had lost its value even to the owner, and had become to the public at large only an unsightly blot upon the street. There was no danger of his being disturbed here, for the walls were not sufficiently advanced to have ears, and even a modern ghost would scorn to haunt a place whose stains were not those of age, and whose crumbling ruins resulted only from ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... alphabet that was adequate and competent, instead of inadequate and incompetent, things would be different. Spelling reform has only made it bald-headed and unsightly. There is the whole tribe of them, "row" and "read" and "lead"—a whole family who don't know who they are. I ask you to pronounce s-o-w, and you ask me what ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... turnip, a head of celery, and season with whole pepper, allspice, two or three cloves, and salt; let it stew till the meat is tender enough to leave the bones, then remove it from them, as the bones are unsightly in the soup; thicken if necessary with browned flour, and just before serving, add a glass or more of port wine, and a little ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... three of the blackened heaps that lay before him. But they were only vestiges of clothing, bedding, and crockery—there was no human trace that he could detect. Nor was there any suggestion of the original condition and quality of the house, except its size: whether the ordinary unsightly cabin of frontier "partners," or some sylvan cottage—there was nothing left but the usual ignoble and unsavory ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... was approaching. And peering forward through the folds of the curtains, she beheld, amidst a slowly-advancing crowd, a meanly clad, simple looking country youth wearing a ragged broad-brim, and mounted on an unsightly, donkey-like beast, whose long tail and mane were stuck full of briers, and whose hair, lying in every direction, seemed besmeared with mange and dirt; all combining to give both horse and rider a most ungainly and poverty-struck appearance. The fellow was ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... tree may be particularly noticed. The ants are, it would seem, confined to the sandstone country, and are very troublesome. The gouty stem tree is so named from the resemblance borne by its immense trunk to the limb of a gouty person. It is an unsightly but very useful tree, producing an agreeable and nourishing fruit, as well as a gum and bark that may be prepared for food. Upon some of these trees were found the first rude efforts of savages to ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... the beams may not touch one another, but equal spaces intervening, each row of beams is kept firmly in its place by a row of stones. In this manner the whole wall is consolidated, until the regular height of the wall be completed. This work, with respect to appearance and variety, is not unsightly, owing to the alternate rows of beams and stones, which preserve their order in right lines; and, besides, it possesses great advantages as regards utility and the defence of cities; for the stone protects it from fire, and ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... that there is always room at the top. Journalism is just the reverse. The room is all at the bottom—easy to enter, hard to achieve, impossible to leave. It is all bottom, no top." Sewell nodded, smiled attractively in spite of his swollen face and his unsightly teeth, and went ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... of bringing his wares before the world. Doubtless it was done in order that the low price might appeal to a large audience, but we doubt whether the sale of "Bells and Pomegranates" was ever large. The series is exceedingly rare now, and the curious who prefer to read those noble poems in this unsightly form have to pay L10 or L12 for the privilege of possessing them. In this first series appeared all the author's plays except "Strafford," namely, "Pippa Passes," "King Victor and King Charles," "The Return of the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... respect not so well known as Liege. To the west, however, up the valley of the Sambre, the country presents the usual features of a mining region—pit shafts, tall chimneys issuing clouds of black smoke, and huge piles of unsightly debris. While away to the north stretches the great plain of Central Belgium, southward the Central Meuse offers a more picturesque prospect in wooded slopes rising to view-commanding hilltops. Directly east, the Meuse flows into ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... wife, imagining him dead, and lording it over his palace and people, as if they were owners of both. That he might be able to take vengeance upon them, it was important that he should not be recognized. Minerva accordingly metamorphosed him into an unsightly beggar, and as such he was kindly received by Eumaeus, the swine-herd, a ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... day of the Pardon, many of the beggars of Brittany, the extreme poor afflicted with lameness and all sorts of unsightly diseases, make a pilgrimage to the church. A religious service is held, during which they press forward and crowd upon each other that the priest may touch their eyes with the finger of St. John, which is supposed to possess ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... be most happy to help me, but when she saw how much was wanted, she did look a little dismayed. She went and fetched her work-basket at once, however, and set about it, tacking the edges to a strip of canvas, in preparation for some kind of darning, which would not, she hoped, be unsightly. ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... he continued, "is not unsightly. The man is not conspicuously vulgar. The man does not eat peas with his knife. The man pronounces his aitches with meticulous care and accuracy. The man, moreover, is worth rather more than a quarter of a million pounds. I repeat, ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... a most unsightly thing, is finished, and a creeper or two will soon disguise its ugliness. There seem to be a great number of mummy apples[39] springing up through the clearing, of which I am glad for the sake of the prospective ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... two boys, who were buried in the same place. Well had it been, if he had been allowed to rest undisturbed in this grave where his family had laid him. But well-meaning, though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to be so. Nearly twenty years after the poet's death, a huge, cumbrous, unsightly mausoleum was, by public subscription, erected at a little distance from his original resting-place. This structure was adorned with an ungraceful figure in marble, representing, "The muse of Coila ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... grog, and complains of dyspepsia; the old fat major of marines, with a brown wig not pretending to imitate natural hair, but only to cover his baldness and grayness with something that he imagines will be less unsightly: he has a potent odor of snuff, but has left off wine and strong drink for the last twenty-seven years. A Southerner, all astray among our New England manners, but reconciling himself to them, like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... against the nipping March wind. Through the beclouding veil he could dimly make out that the eyes were swollen, the cheeks were mottled; even the nose—with regret I state it—was red and puffy. An unsightly, melancholy little spectacle to which the Tyro's young heart went out in prompt pity. It had a habit of going out in friendly and helpful wise to forlorn and unconsidered people, to the kind of folk that nobody else had time ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a dark unsightly door Beyond the grave, there stood his secret thought. It was the mansion he had built and brought To dwell in, on ...
— New Thought Pastels • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... others that we would fain believe it the reanimated spirit of a race that flourished in former ages, with those hideous monsters whose bones alone remain to tell the history of their existence." It is quite true that in the cultivated Mamillarias there is nothing unsightly, or rough, or unfinished. Without foliage, their stems globose, or short cylinders, or arranged in little cushion-like tufts, and enveloped in silky spines, like tiny red stars, always looking the same, except when ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... years back. Although it may now be justly considered one of the most correct and pleasing specimens of architecture in the union, yet, until the recent transformation of its outward form and proportions, it was one of the most unsightly of buildings. It was not, however, of republican origin—having been erected early in the reign of his late most excellent Majesty, King George the Third, as a place of confinement for such of his refractory subjects ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... little iron bowl in company with a sweep. She asked him if she might drink first, and he said, "Oh, laws, yes! you ain't near so smutty as me," which speech Fluff took as a compliment. But she had fallen down twice, and her nice white frock had got unsightly patches of green ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the old lady sharply, and to allay the unsightly terror in the other's face, and also because she believed in using an axe in felling a tree, repeated her last remark. "You are suffering now through the selfishness of love. Women who marry without giving a thought to the result of the marriage, to the good or ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... is displaced downward, and in the sac above and in front of it may be felt the form and movements of the fetus. In other cases the womb escapes through a great laceration of the abdominal muscles to one side of the udder, and the hernial mass extends down to one side of that organ. However unsightly, this often allows the animal to complete its pregnancy naturally, and a broad, supporting bandage placed around the abdomen is about all that can be recommended. After calving it is best to ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... things unsightly, Life's the day and life goes lightly; Science lays aside her sway— Love rules Dr. ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Christian, and no miracle been wrought, Would in itself be such a miracle, The rest were not an hundredth part so great. E'en thou wentst forth in poverty and hunger To set the goodly plant, that from the vine, It once was, now is grown unsightly bramble." That ended, through the high celestial court Resounded all the spheres. "Praise we one God!" In song of most unearthly melody. And when that Worthy thus, from branch to branch, Examining, had led me, that we now Approach'd the topmost bough, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... half-filled oblong extending east and west from the Capitol to the White House, and north and south from the line of the Maryland hills to the Potomac River. One does not wonder that the early Britishers, led by Tom Moore, made game of it, for it was both unpromising and unsightly. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... increase the efficiency of the flues, the heat from one flue assisting the up-draught in those adjoining it. It is also desirable from an aesthetic point of view, for a number of single flue chimneys sticking up from various parts of the roof would appear most unsightly. The architects of the Elizabethan and later periods were masters of this difficult art of treating a stack or stacks as an architectural feature. The shaft should be carried well above the roof, higher, if possible, than adjacent buildings, which are apt to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... while one man is shaving the customer, others black his boots; brush his clothes, darn his socks, point his nails, enamel his teeth, polish his eyes, and alter the shape of any of his joints which they think unsightly. During this operation they often stand seven or eight deep round a customer, fighting for a chance to get ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... observe that the Last of the Rookes was contorting his face in an unsightly manner that seemed to be an attempt at a wink, pregnant with hidden meaning. She took her cue dutifully, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... becalmed for fifty-four hours, so utterly devoid of movement that the ash-dust and galley refuse hove overboard by the cook during that time collected into an unsightly patch alongside, just abaft the larboard fore-rigging, in the exact spot where they had been thrown. The weather was now excessively hot, and those of us who could swim took advantage of so favourable an opportunity ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... imposing figure; His eyes were large and as black as coal, For a cinder was placed in each round hole. And the sight of his teeth would have made yours ache, Being simply the teeth of an ancient rake. They smoothed his forehead, they patted his back, There wasn't a single unsightly crack; And when they had given the final pat, They crowned his head ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... along the sides of the bill; if, therefore, you fail to open on the crown, or by the side of the face, you must of necessity miss these, or have ten times more trouble in feeling your way to it. If the processes by the side of the face are entirely missed, the consequences are an unsightly and inartistic shrivelling; it is as well, therefore, to make a note of all ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... while on Top Notch, that he really had no personal objections to having the stones mined from Rainbow Cliffs, but all unsightly machinery and the riff-raff of miners that would be necessary in such work, must be kept out of sight of the house. He explained that most of the working ends of the project could be stationed back of the cliffs down in the ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the diving, an experience I burned to taste of. But this was not to be, at least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a change of scene to the sub-arctic town of Wick. You can never have dwelt in a country more unsightly than that part of Caithness, the land faintly swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow, the fields divided by single slate stones set upon their edge, the wind always singing in your ears and (down ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be more unsightly than a napkin tucked carefully in the top of one's waistcoat? And still, how often one sees it done among men who believe that they are impressively well-bred! The proper way to use a napkin, whether it is at a formal dinner, or in a restaurant, is to unfold it only half, leaving the center fold ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... years, at the end of which it was abandoned for want of funds, forty-five thousand pounds having been expended, including the legacy of eight thousand. For nearly twenty years the towers and abutments stood, unsightly objects in a lovely scene, until in 1860 the Hungerford suspension bridge in London was taken down, and it was found that its chains might be made use of to carry out the uncompleted plan at Clifton. A new company was formed with a capital of thirty-five thousand pounds, in ten-pound ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... of his lordship's rent-roll! It is my father's, and was left by him, In case his heir should die without a son, Then to be opened. Heaven did send a son To bless the heir. Heaven took its gift away, He died—his father died. And Master Walter— The unsightly agent of his lordship there— The Hunchback whom your lordship would have stripped Of his agency—is now the ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... moist soils; of little value under cultivation; young plants seldom preserving the broad-based, cone-like, symmetrical heads common in the spruce swamps, the lower branches dying out and the whole tree becoming scraggly and unsightly. ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... Screen, and a book in which names, together with the amount of the donation, may be entered. It will be seen that the need of Restoration is urgent, the central tower being much shattered, and its south-eastern pier presenting a very unsightly appearance. One of the most striking features of the Cathedral, the beautiful groined roof of this tower is at present entirely concealed by a scaffolding put up some years ago when the work of Restoration was suspended ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... exhausted. We had turtle dressed in different ways, though our flat friend made his first appearance in the guise of an appetising soup. We had stewed guanna, a large sort of delicious lizard, that most amply repairs the offence done to the eye by his unsightly appearance in conciliating in a wonderful manner all those minute yet important nerves that Providence has so bountifully and so numerously spread over the palate, the tongue, and the uvula. The very contemplation of this beneficent ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... villages of the country and are doing inestimable damage both by driving out native insect eating birds and by their own destructiveness. They nest in all sorts of places but preferably behind blinds, where their unsightly masses of straw protrude from between the slats, and their droppings besmirch the buildings below; they breed at all seasons of the year, eggs having often been found in January, with several feet of snow on the ground and the mercury below zero. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... beautiful green in front of the town high school, and which was generally known as the campus. It was kept mowed by the town authorities; but numerous scraps of paper and trash, blowing hither and thither in the wind, gave it an unsightly appearance. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... Sallow Skin. I have been dry, hot, and chilled by 431:27 turns since the night of the liver-attack. I have lost my healthy hue and become unsightly, although nothing on my part has occasioned this change. I practise daily ablutions 431:30 and perform my functions as usual, but I am ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... is caused by the development of various species of bacteria which find their way into the milk after it is drawn. These defects are liable to occur at any season of the year. Their presence in a dairy is a source of much trouble, as the unsightly appearance of the milk precludes its use as food, although there is no evidence that these ropy fermentations ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... superior officer, however, soon ordered him to be released, and gave him two soldiers as a protection whilst he finished his drawing. [Sidenote: ST. SOPHIA.] Thence our course lay to St. Sophia, which is a confused heap of unsightly buildings; the centre having enormous buttresses built against it, and the dome is much too low in proportion to the great size of this edifice. The principal entrance to the seraglio is also situated in the square, ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... brick with a tin roof and a wooden steeple stood in the middle of an untilled space. At the end of one street a glimpse could be caught of the waste country beyond, not yet claimed by the ferry-builder. A railway embankment bulked against the horizon, and closed the view in an unsightly manner. Rexton was as ugly as ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... a friend. He had ferns from Ceylon, the branches of which were in some cases not much thicker than an ordinary pin—hard, smooth, and cylindrical—often leafless for a foot or more. But at the end of every one of them the unsightly twig unlocked the exuberant beauty hidden within it, and broke forth into a mass of fronds, almost large enough to fill the arms. We stand here upon a higher level of the wonderful: we are conscious of a music subtler than that ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... bring about unfruitfulness. In other cases, the rootstock may cause a dwarfing habit in the future tree, with the resulting top being a scant producer of nuts. Then there is the combination where rootstock and top vary too much in their growth rate, thus making an unsightly tree. The ideal rootstock is one that attains a diameter nearly equal to the diameter of its partner, and is capable of producing a moderate amount of top growth, together with the production of heavy crops of nuts. Such a rootstock should also accept buds or grafts readily, and be compatible ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... on the throne is sold, And thus the beautiful are sold for gold. The richest thus select the beautiful, The poor must take alone the dutiful And homely with a dower which beauty bought, And ugliness with gold becomes his lot. The ugliest, unsightly, and deformed, Is now brought forth; with many wriggles squirmed She to the throne, where beauty late had sat: Her ugliness distorted thus; whereat The herald cries: "Who will this woman take With smallest dowry? She can cook and bake, And many household duties well perform, Although she does not ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... hour she was miserable, and then the reaction came. She began to think it all over, and all the years she had known him from his boyhood passed in review. And in all those years there was not one unsightly fact, or one hour, or one word she could wish were blotted out. And they said he had loved her from the days of short dresses! Well, what if he had? It was no disgrace. Then pride came in and she began to feel thankful he had, and as the recollection ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave, And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar. The lover watched his graceful maid, As 'mid the virgin train she strayed, Nor knew her beauty's best attire Was woven still by the snow-white choir. At last she ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... say that I see any objection to good music and elegantly built churches, which it is their chief aim to introduce for the purpose of forwarding the cause of religion and devotion. Many people are dissatisfied with the untrained attempts at harmony in our too often unsightly churches." ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... thou fondly deem'st a nose, Unsightly though it be,— In spite of all the cold world's scorn, It may be much ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a most important point in the campaign, was far from attractive in feature, being made up of a half-dozen unsightly houses, a ramshackle tavern propped up on two sides with pine poles, and the weatherbeaten building that gave official name to the cross-roads. We had no tents—there were none in the command—so I took possession of the ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 4 • P. H. Sheridan
... heretofore, keep them, or if subdued 365 Beneath us, the Achaians flight intend, And worn with labor have no will to watch. So Hector spake, but answer none return'd. There was a certain Trojan, Dolon named,[13] Son of Eumedes herald of the Gods, 370 Rich both in gold and brass, but in his form Unsightly; yet the man was swift of foot, Sole brother of five sisters; he his speech To Hector and the Trojans thus address'd. My spirit, Hector, prompts me, and my mind 375 Endued with manly vigor, to approach Yon gallant ships, that I may tidings hear. But come. For my assurance, lifting high ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... blind fury at the ships. It narrowly escaped lighting upon the bark in which Ulysses sat, but with the fall it raised so fierce an ebb as bore back the ship till it almost touched the shore. "Cyclop," said Ulysses, "if any ask thee who imposed on thee that unsightly blemish in thine eye, say it was Ulysses, son of Laertes: the king of Ithaca am I called, the waster of cities." Then they crowded sail, and beat the old sea, and forth they went with a forward gale; sad for fore-past losses, yet glad to have escaped ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... courageous darling, could accept the unspoken between them, and spare him definitions and declarations. A situation undefined is so often a situation saved. Life grows over and around it. It becomes a mere mummied fly, preserved in amber; unsightly perhaps; but unpernicious. After all, he told himself—and he went on thinking over the incidents of the afternoon while he dressed—after all, Madame von Marwitz might not be much in London; she was a comet and her course would lead her streaming all over ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... out into a large entry, which went up stairs, by what had formerly been a superb winding staircase; but the passage-way was dirty and dreary, encumbered with boxes and unsightly litter. The stairs, uncarpeted, seemed winding up, in the gloom, to nobody knew where! The pale moonlight streamed through a shattered fanlight over the door; the air was unwholesome and chilly, like ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... its base. Small pieces of grass will periodically need mowing, and this ought to be done with a proper mowing-machine, as a pair of shears invariably causes an irregular and jagged after-growth. All unsightly vegetation, such as dead leaves or flowers, dried up stems, &c., must be promptly removed; weeds ought not to be allowed to grow a second pair of leaves—much less to flower—before being exterminated. Trailing ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... is out, the rocks along the shore, covered with seaweed and moss, present an unsightly appearance; but when the tide comes in, these unsightly things are all covered with water, which present the appearance of a sea of glass. When the grace of God is low in our soul, the unseemly parts of human ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... She is a great reforming agent. She looks so unsightly, that if all her sisters were dressed like her flirtation would die out of the land and there would be ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... boot of leather, which acknowledges that it has ill-treated the delicate slipper of Mercury. This boot, of course, is Gifford, who had been a shoemaker's apprentice in Ashburton. Mercury curses this unsightly object, and part of his malediction ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... it was,—but very tedious. An untrue stitch spoiled the smooth continuance of the embroidery that was to represent tied ribbon bows. An untrue stitch—and she made several—had to be picked out and done over, and this often meant frayed silk, or an unsightly needle hole in ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... of a neighbor who had caught him up from the floor in a fit of tipsy fondness. The child's back and hip were severely injured. He had not walked a step until he was five years of age, and would be lame always. He was now twelve—a dwarf in statue, hump-backed, weazen-faced and shrill-voiced, unsightly in all eyes but those of his parents. To them he was a miracle of precocity and beauty. His mother took in fine ironing to pay for his private tuition from a public school-teacher who lived in the neighborhood. He learned fast and eagerly. His father, at the teacher's ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... penetrate them. There were viscid sloughs, from whose black depths bubbles arose wearily, with grey tree-roots like the legs of spiders clutching the slimy mud of their banks. There were oozy bottoms, rankly speared with rush-grass. There were leprous marshes spotted with unsightly niggerheads. Dripping with sweat, we fought our way under the hot sun. Thorny boughs tore at us detainingly. Fallen trees delighted to bar our way. Without let or cease we toiled, yet at the day's end our progress was but ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... that man shall be the eternal slave who says to Duty I WILL NOT. Nor do I care to tell such a man of the "THOUSAND FOLD"—of the truth concerning that altar, that it is indeed the nest of God's heart, in which the poor, unsightly, unfledged offering shall lie, until they come to shape and loveliness, and wings grow upon them to bear them back to us divinely precious. Cosmo THOUGHT none of all this now—it had vanished from his consciousness, but was present in ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... foliage and the profusion of its luscious fruit. You speak to your friend of the beauty of the tree and of the goodness of God in bestowing such a gift to men; but perhaps you do not speak nor even think of the coarse, unsightly roots hidden deep in the ground. But that tree owes its beauty and its life to roots. The foliage is bright and fresh and green because the roots are burrowing deep in a rich and well-watered soil. The flavoring of the fruit is ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... baptism of love which evinces itself not only in the household, and to those naturally lovable, but goes out to all the world, and embraces in its tenderness such as have no natural traits of beauty. Thus the soft waters of the Southern Ocean lap against unsightly rocks and stretches of ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... feet, hands, and limbs are almost entirely useless, besides having an unsightly appearance. Their condition has been helpless so long, their treatment so varied, and their hopes of relief or cure have been so often disappointed, that few can believe the truth of our statement, when we positively ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... looks!' Audrey said to herself, as she went on. 'Michael is doing good work there.' But somehow she could not forget those frayed wristbands all the remainder of the day; there was a button off his jacket, too—she had noticed the unsightly gap. 'I wish Mrs. Blake had a little more method,' she thought; 'Mollie and Kester are certainly rather neglected. How could poor Mollie go to ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Heaven would sure grow weary of a world Productive only of a race like us, A monitor is wood—plank shaven thin. We wear it at our backs. There, closely braced And neatly fitted, it compresses hard The prominent and most unsightly bones, And binds the shoulders flat. We prove its use Sovereign and most effectual to secure A form, not now gymnastic as of yore, From rickets and distortion, else, our lot. But thus admonished we can walk erect, One proof at least of manhood; while the friend ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... monstrous object. It is observed of the Scythians, their ancestors, who, as I have mentioned, came down upon Asia in the Median times, that they were a frightful set of men. "The persons of the Scythians," says a living historian,[7] "naturally unsightly, were rendered hideous by indolent habits, only occasionally interrupted by violent exertions; and the same cause subjected them to disgusting diseases, in which they themselves revered the finger ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... uncomfortable; being thrown well off the spine and withers, there is little danger of sore backs with ordinary care in settling the cloth or blanket. The heavy clog of wood and leather, closed in front, and only admitting the fore-part of the foot, which serves as a stirrup, is unsightly in the extreme; its advantages are said to be, protection from the weather, and the impossibility of the rider's entanglement: but the sole has no grip whatever, and rising to give full effect to a sabre-cut would be out of the question. Besides a halter, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... this individual originality, this perfect freedom of thought and expression, that might be adapted to express the American character? And if more pleasing, why cling to the effete and cumbrous tyrannies of a soulless classicism? Why crush out all symptoms of natural growth to make room for the unsightly exotic? ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... towards the building by his mother, Mrs. Anne Jennens. Lord Fielding also gave L120 to pay for an altar-piece, which is greatly admired. Surrounded for very many years by a barren-looking graveyard, the huge brick-built edifice was very unsightly, and being close to the Park Street burial ground it was nicknamed "the paupers' church." Since the laying out of the grounds, however, it has much improved in appearance. The Rector of St. Martin's presents, and the living ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... excrement, is a fine manure for grain and grass. Worms probably provide new soil for hills and slopes where the rain washes the earth away; and they affect slopes, probably to avoid being flooded. Gardeners and farmers express their detestation of worms; the former because they render their walks unsightly, and make them much work: and the latter because, as they think, worms eat their green corn. But these men would find that the earth without worms would soon become cold, hard-bound, and void of fermentation; and consequently sterile: and besides, in favour of worms, it should be hinted ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... before him, All are clad in scanty raiment, Dressed in soiled and ragged linens. Spake the stranger Lemminkainen: "Wherefore sit ye, forest-mothers, In your old and simple garments, In your soiled and ragged linen? Ye, forsooth! are too untidy, Too unsightly your appearance In your tattered gowns appareled. When I lived within the forest, There were then three mountain castles, One of horn and one of ivory, And the third of wood constructed; In their walls were golden windows, Six ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... covered in with matting in rather a dilapidated state, and having many holes and crevices for the admission of air; this gives to the whole a ragged appearance, and we were told that the Pasha had determined not to allow in future awnings of these frail and unsightly materials. The Frank quarter, which is much better contrived, is the model for subsequent erections. This avenue has a roof of wood sufficiently high to allow of a free circulation of air, and having apertures, at regular ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... fortune. He must deal in dead bones only so far as the keeper of a financial fortune must deal in dry documents. Behind those documents glitters the gold, and behind those bones shines the wonder of the things that were. And when an object once beautiful has by age become unsightly, one might suppose that he would wish to show it to none save his colleagues or the reasonably curious layman. When a man makes the statement that his grandmother, now in her ninety-ninth year, was once a beautiful woman, he does not go and find her to prove his words ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... merciless peltings of the clouds of shot-like dust. The dampness in this valley, hemmed in by the now dripping, then brook covered mountains, is far from pleasant, and covers many of the buildings with unsightly mosses. In Washington and Oregon those who survive the climatic trials are a strong, energetic race, rapidly building up powerful empires in the great aggregation of states of our grandest nation ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... unsightly than the surface of a sauce in a frozen state, or garnished with grease on the top. The best way to get rid of this, is to pass it through a tamis or napkin previously soaked in cold water; the coldness of the napkin will coagulate ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... the pervasive twinkle of a thousand hanging lamps of silver, was wedged and blent a suffocating mass of palm-bearing humanity of all nations and races, the sumptuously clothed and the ragged, the hale and the unsightly; the rainbow colors of the East relieved by the white of the shrouded females, toned down by the sombre shabbiness of the Russian moujiks and peasant-women, and pierced by a vivid circular line of red fezzes on the unbared, unreverential heads of the Turkish regiment keeping ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... consequently became necessary, in keeping with the aesthetic spirit of the whole Dufferin scheme, to fill up in some way this unsightly gap without interfering with the traffic. It was finally decided to erect here one of the proposed memorial gates, which is altogether therefore an addition to the number of the existing gates or their intended substitutes. This edifice, has been ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the blackened logs were piled in heaps, and the ground was prepared for its first crop of grain. The green blades soon sprang up and covered the ground, where a short time before was only to be seen the unsightly fallow or the remains ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... food of the people. The boat in which he sailed was an old, black, dingy affair, which needed to be baled out more than once a day to keep her afloat. The sail was almost as black as the hull, and had been patched and darned in a hundred places. The skipper and crew of this unsightly old craft was Leopold Bennington, the only son of the landlord of the Cliff House, ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... facility you here forget all ugly objects! I believe I passed at Castellamare some unsightly modern structures, a railroad station, hotels, a guard-house, and a number of rickety vehicles hurrying along in quest of fares. This is all effaced from my mind; nothing remains but impressions of obscure porches with glimpses of bright courts filled with glossy ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... of cutting past the centre at each fold is to avoid the unsightly creasing that results from folding two or more thicknesses of paper when ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... be found some morning with a deep and permanent green stain discoloring the water. This unsightly appearance is owing to the simultaneous development of the spores of multitudes of minute Algae and Confervae, and can be obviated by passing the water through a charcoal filter. When any of the fishes give signs ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... climbed dizzy heights on the southern, affording the spectator an uninterrupted view of the Dartmoor Tors. The front of the house faced seawards and, in bad weather, the spindrift, hurled over the cliff, drenched the windows and the rather unsightly stucco which the position of the house ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... the road which wound from nowhere between the unsightly shacks was ankle deep in dust. The day was unseasonably warm, the air still. The dust lay on the young leaves of the occasional clumps of cottonwoods, and seemed to impregnate the air so that it was perceptible to the nostrils—a warm, dry, midsummer smell, elusive, but pervasive. The whole ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... comfort to a house will, if rightly treated, enhance its beauty. Steam-pipes or radiators may stand under windows, behind an open screen or grill of polished brass, or they may be incorporated with the chimney piece, and need not, in either case, be unsightly or liable to work mischief upon the carpets or ceilings under them. Wherever placed, a flue to bring in fresh air should be provided and fitted with a damper to control ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... to see Mr. Rayne?" she stammered, dragging the unsightly spectacles off her nose, and throwing them back on ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... History for the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that popular work Goldsmith's Animated Nature. In the abridged London edition of , there are plates of an alleged whale and a narwhale. I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys. Then, again, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... language—make the hexameter incapable of transplantation; and this magnificent metre loses with us all its majesty, its ease, its beauty. The very line can hardly be printed on an ordinary page, for the immense number of letters in each English verse causes an unsightly doubling of the lines, chokes the voice, and wearies the ear. In the hexameter line of Homer there are usually about thirty letters, of which only twelve are consonants; in the English hexameter there are often sixty letters, of which ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... trunk formed like a cone; but occasionally they are to be seen of very stunted growth. Around the full-sized tree are frequently to be found a whole family of dwarfs, nature having arrested their growth when from one to ten feet high. These would present an unsightly look, were it not for the mantle of Spanish moss that envelops, and gives them ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... intended. And the stricken camp is a melancholy sight. The woods have been despoiled; the stumps are ugly; the bushes are scorched; the pine-leaf-strewn earth is trodden into mire; the landing looks like a cattle-ford; the ground is littered with all the unsightly dibris of a hand-to-hand life; the dismantled shanty is a shabby object; the charred and blackened logs, where the fire blazed, suggest the extinction of family life. Man has wrought his usual wrong upon Nature, and he can save his self-respect only ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... coming to appreciate these truths, not only in our cities, but in the country, and the ugly, unsightly, and unseemly structures which have so long deformed the land are giving place to edifices in which the true ideas of harmony, grace, proportion, symmetry and expression, which make what we call Beauty, are brought out ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... on what was once a lonely strip of sand and sea, a memorial—if one can only believe the stone story, now nearly a hundred years old—of a great love and a great sorrow; and one can envy the one and pity the other just as much when looking at this queer, unsightly monument as when one stands on the pure marble threshold of the exquisite Taj Mahal at Agra, and reads that it too, in all its grace and beauty, was reared "in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... his wits' ends what to do. Not only was his cheek unsightly and painful, but his neighbours began to jeer and make fun of him, which hurt his feelings ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... had been provided as a cure for bites of gnats and flies; Peggy flicked a towel more hastily than usual, and down it fell, the contents streaming over the wood, and splashing on to the wardrobe near at hand, with the consequence that every sign of polish was removed, and replaced by white unsightly stains. The glass stopper of a smelling-salts bottle became fixed in its socket, and, being anointed with oil and placed before the fire to melt, popped out suddenly with a noise as of a cannon shot, aimed accurately for the centre of the mirror, ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... skin, and the prominency of my nose. They insisted that both were artificial. The first, they said, was produced when I was an infant, by dipping me in milk; and they insisted that my nose had been pinched every day, till it had acquired its present unsightly and unnatural conformation. On my part, without disputing my own deformity, I paid them many compliments on African beauty, I praised the glossy jet of their skins, and the lovely depression of their noses; but they said that flattery, or (as they emphatically termed it) honey-mouth, was not ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... favours the beauty of the facial line; for what can be deduced from the great fact, apparent in all the states of antiquity, that straight noses were the ancient custom, but the logical assumption that the constant habit of turning up the nose at unsightly objects—such as the National Gallery and other offensive and obtrusive things—has produced the modern divergence from the true and proper line of profile? I rejoice to think that we ourselves are exempt. I attribute this to our love of Pompeian Pots (on account of the beauty and distinction ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of Schiller's first acquaintance—arrived there July 21, 1787—consisted of a petty provincial court plus an unsightly village. The inhabitants numbered about six thousand. Of the space built over about one-third was occupied by the buildings of the court, much of the outlying modern Weimar being then under water. The streets were narrow, muddy lanes, the houses plain and poor. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... town. The meat is still distributed, but the bulls are no longer baited. Here at Wokingham there was a picturesque old town hall with an open undercroft, supported on pillars; but the townsfolk must needs pull it down and erect an unsightly brick building in its stead. It contains some interesting portraits of royal and distinguished folk dating from the time of Charles I, but how the town became possessed of ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... can be performed with little pain to the animal, by means of sharp scissors or a knife; but never allow any one to bite the tail off, as is often done by some dirty and unfeeling stable-men. Although a long tail is inconvenient, a too short one is more unsightly; care should therefore be taken not to remove too much. The quantity should be regulated by the size of the breed: for a medium breed, an inch is sufficient to be cut off at this age. Some sportsmen in England, Mr. Blain also informs us, draw out the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... easily guessed. When the last portion of the earth gave way, the waters of the lake precipitated themselves upon the beautiful and peaceful glen, carrying death and destruction in their course, and leaving nothing but a dark unsightly morass behind them. So is it with the mind of man. When he gives the first slight assent to a wrong tendency, or a vicious resolution, he resembles the shepherd's boy, who, unconscious of the consequences that followed, made the first small ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... Chadwyke, or (Ceddevyc, from the common appellation Cedde, and vyc, a mansion or vill, signifying Cedde's fort, peel, or fortified mansion) married Alice, eldest daughter and co-heir of Adam Okeden of Heley; and in her right settled at the mansion of Heley (or Healey) Hall, then a huge unsightly structure of wood and plaster, built according to the fashion of those days. An ancestor of Adam Okeden having married "Hawise, heir of Thomas de Heley," in the reign of Edward III., became possessed ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... but unsightly spring-wagon, with mud six inches deep on the wheels, seemed the goal, and we trailed out to it, picking up layers of soil as we went. The ground did not look muddy, but it was; I have since learned that that particular phase of nature's hypocrisy is called "doby." I don't ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... center of the residential section of the town is a big, unsightly, hummocky vacant place, vaguely known as the park—or the place where they are going to have a park, when the city gets around to it. At present it is a convenient spot wherein to dump tin cans, empty bottles, broken crockery, ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... cottage doors, may be seen rubbing their linen against the flat stones over which the stream flows, bending down their heads which, except on grand occasions, are no longer adorned with the high fly-caps which are so becoming to their faces, but are covered with a somewhat unsightly cotton nightcap, a species of head-gear much in vogue in this part of lower Normandy, and a manufacture for which Falaise is celebrated, and has consequently obtained the name of the city of cotton nightcaps. ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... was one of the most picturesque of the many pretty homes in Green Valley. It had been a ramshackle, tumbled-down old cabin lost in a tangle of bushes and hidden from the road by a shabby, unsightly row of old willows. Billy was going to rent it for temporary barn purposes but his wife, who had a nimble and a prophetic eye, made him buy it. Then, under her supervision Billy enlarged and remodeled it and Billy's ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... had its floor fired, but the fire had mysteriously gone out, without doing much damage. A large new building, a little out of town, was also standing uninjured. But the most of the village was a charred ruin; the unsightly chimneys, and a few more or less dilapidated walls, surviving to tell the story ...
— Mary S. Peake - The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe • Lewis C. Lockwood
... said: I wish I could find even one such, even in the entire senate. For he is really a wise politician who, as we have often seen in Africa, while seated on a huge and unsightly elephant, can guide and rule the monster, and turn him whichever way he likes by a slight admonition, without ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... distance was through a low, slimy swamp land, giving rank growth to an almost continuous forest of sycamore, cottonwood, and other trees which love a damp, alluvial soil, whose massive trunks were yet foul and unsightly with filth and scum deposited by the receding waters at the subsidence of the river's great spring freshet a month before. Stagnant ponds and mimic lagoons lay all about us and in our very pathway, some of the deeper ones, however, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... inert medium alone that Miss Arsdale could pay the debt to the father who had been so good to her; and it was only through this same unsightly shell that he, Donaldson, could in his turn repay his debt for the dreams she ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... and columns, and in each square were figures in black and red. Upon one end of the table at which the old man sat was a cup-shaped, circular affair of very dark wood—teak, it resembled—once delicately inlaid with pearl. But now most of the inlay had disappeared, leaving unsightly holes. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... instinct of a gray squirrel, at the approach of winter, is to seek out a deep, warm, hollow limb, or trunk. Nowadays, however, these are not to be found in every grove. The precepts of modern forestry decree that all such unsightly places must be filled with cement and creosote and well sealed against the entrance of rain and snow. When hollows are not available, these hardy squirrels prepare their winter home in another way. Before the leaves ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... great shame for his unsightly attire, which he thought was the only possible device to disguise his birth. So he rejoined, "That slaves were not always found to lack manhood; that a strong hand was often hidden under squalid raiment, and sometimes a stout arm was muffled trader a dusky cloak; thus the fault of nature was ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... was the centre of Freddy Leveson's social life—at least until the death of his uncle, the sixth Duke, in 1858. That unsightly but comfortable mansion was then in its days of glory, and those who frequented it had no reason to regret the past. "Poodle Byng," who carried down to 1871 the social conditions of the eighteenth century, declared that nothing could be duller than Devonshire House in his youth. ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... cropping the grass and green weeds that grew in the very heart of old Rome. When Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, listening to the vespers of the Franciscan friars in the dim church of Ara Coeli in the neighbourhood, the Forum was an unsightly piece of ground, covered with rubbish-heaps, with only a pillar or two emerging from the general filth. When Byron stood beside the "nameless column with the buried base," commemorated in Childe Harold, he little dreamt what a ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... be a troublesome visitor, but we invited him to come, and he is not to blame for some of his disagreeable ways. He is by no means useless, for he clears the gutters of quantities of unsavory and unsightly fragments which would decay and become a nuisance if not removed. The English sparrow eats also a great many of the army worms which have done so much harm in some parts of the country, and he has in many places ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... unsightly, loathsome, hideous, grewsome, frightful; (Colloq.) crossgrained, ill-natured, unamiable, inaffable, surly, refractory, vicious, indocile, spiteful, sullen, morose; uncomely, hard-visaged, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... page to repeating the word "dismal." Devastation always appears to be more complete of a morning I have observed in my years of experience. A plasterer's scaffolding that looks fairly nobby at sunset is a grim, unsightly skeleton at breakfast-time. A couple of joiners' horses, a matrix or two, a pile of shavings and some sawed-off blocks scattered over the floor produce a matutinal conception of chaos that hangs over one like a pall until his aesthetic ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... without gloves. He always puts them on before entering the ballroom. A man should dance easily and gracefully, and look as if he were enjoying himself. He should be careful about guiding and not running into people. Swinging the hands is vulgar and unsightly. The waltz seems to survive all other forms of dancing, but there is every now and then a revival of the polka. Two steps and fancy dances are the vogue at summer hotels, ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... neglect must have been on his own side, where indeed it did take form in that of as signal an opportunity to become "spoiled," probably, as ever fell in a brilliant young man's way: so that to help out my comprehension of the unsightly and unsavoury, sufficiently wondered at, with which his muse repeatedly embraced the occasion to associate herself, I take the thing for a declaration of the idea that he might himself prevent the spoiling ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the shop windows, as if the life of trade had concentered itself in that one article; wet leaves of the horse-chestnut or elm trees, torn off untimely by the blast, and scattered along the public way; an unsightly accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew the more unclean for its long and laborious washing;—these were the more definable points of a very somber picture. In the way of movement, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... called impertinent. In fact any talk at all from him is resented. Then he is at the unattractive, growing age. He grows out of his clothes with indecent haste; his voice grows hoarse and breaks and quavers; his face grows suddenly angular and unsightly. It is easy to excuse the shortcomings of early childhood, but it is hard to tolerate even unavoidable lapses in a boy of fourteen. The lad himself becomes painfully self-conscious. When he talks with elderly people he is either ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... proportion of light admitted to buildings is generally inadequate to their cubical contents, and means for estimating the numerical value of that which really does enter, he states that the defect may be remedied by the use of reflectors, contrived so as to be 'neither obstructive nor unsightly.' He explains, that 'a single reflector may generally be placed on either the outside or inside of a window or skylight, so as to throw the light from the (perhaps small) portion of sky which remains unobscured overhead, to any part in which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... sequence of an incident occurring when he was very young, an accidental and too intimate acquaintance with a species of wildcat which infested the region and from which the babe had been rescued none too soon. The name of Ab's mother was Red-Spot, and she had been so called because of a not unsightly but conspicuous birthmark appearing on her left shoulder. As to ancestry, Ab's father could distinctly remember his own grandfather as the old gentleman had appeared just previous to his consumption by ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... and brown in good oven, or under the gas grill. If the latter, turn to toast the under side. Be very careful not to burn. If toasted on an ashet serve on same dish. One can now have fire-proof ware which is not unsightly. There is a very artistic white fire-proof ware which is specially suitable for using in this way, so that besides the saving of trouble, one can have the food hot and crisp from the oven—a rather difficult, or at least uncertain consummation if there ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... soft wind!" he exclaimed, removing his unsightly hat. "Really, I think that when we get a sunny day like this, April is almost our ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
