"Gnarled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and beeches whose gnarled and twisted arms overlapped the path the column bent its course; and as it wound along the narrow way, the shafts of sunlight, breaking through the leaves, rippled over the steel casquetels and trappings until it was as if a rivulet had suddenly gushed ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... strength that is there; A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, So earnest, so graceful, so solid, so fleet, Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet; 'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood, With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe, With a single anemone trembly and rathe; His strength is so tender; his wildness so meek, That a suitable parallel sets one to seek— He's a John Bunyan Fouque, a Puritan Tieck; When nature was shaping him, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... vine. The applications of bordeaux mixture recommended for black-rot are valuable in preventing the dead-arm disease. The disease is largely prevented by renewing the old wood of the vine as soon as the trunk begins to show a gnarled appearance. ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... with her back to the gnarled trunk, while she looked out over the half-mile of dancing blue wavelets to where, on the other side, the brown, wooden houses of the Thorley estate swept down to the shore. She rose on seeing the visitor approach, ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... bad luck at first, and was driven farther afield than he usually went; his search led him even to the edge of the River Swamp, a dismal place of evil repute, wherein cane as tall as a man grew thickly, and sluggish streamlets meandered in and out of gnarled cypress roots, and big water-snakes stretched themselves on branches overhanging the water. On the edges of the swamp the unmolested vines were thick with fruit. In the late afternoon Peter had filled his buckets to overflowing ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... seemed disinclined for action. The boys lay about on the grass, sleepily happy. Norah climbed into a tree, where the gnarled boughs made a natural arm-chair, and the Hermit propped his back against a rock and smoked a short black pipe with an air of perfect enjoyment. It was just hot enough to make one drowsy. Bees droned lazily, and ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder.— Merciful Heaven! Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man! Dress'd in a little brief authority,— Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence,—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the arid sands of Florida; for, as we rode on, we saw gigantic pine, cedar, and hiccory trees, torn up by the roots, and scattered over the surrounding country, by by-gone hurricanes, many of them hundreds of yards from the spot that nurtured their roots—while the gnarled branches lying across our track, scorched black-with the lightning, or from long exposure to a burning sun, impeded our advance, and made the ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... sharp bark of a fox rang out from a neighboring hill. The breeze started up again and a limb of a tree that rubbed against its neighbor produced a wailing sound as of some one in distress. We could see fantastic shapes out among the gnarled tree trunks and ghostly forms appeared in the velvety shadows and vanished again among the trees. The moon rose out over the rim of the eastern hills and seemed almost to pause as if some Oriental Magic was being wrought. A mist arose from the river ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... or Liriodendron Tulipifera, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but, in its riper age the bark becomes gnarled and uneven while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem. Thus the difficulty of ascension, in the present case, lay more in semblance than in reality. Embracing the huge cylinder, as closely as possible, with his ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... along the clearer parts, till we came to a part where our way seemed stopped by gorse-bushes. They rose up, thick and dark, right in front of us. Our guide stopped and told us to look down. Among the gnarled gorse-stems there seemed to be a passage or "run" made by some beast, fox or badger, going ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... slopes and for a bit of the sunshine. Among these the black oaks deserve special mention, for in places they form dense groves upon the ridges. The cedars, with their rich brown bark and flat, drooping branches, are easily recognized. As these trees grow old they become gnarled and knotty ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... tree, so green and gray, The old-time welcome gives today, With beckoning branches reaching down To mother earth all garbed in brown. Thy gnarled, bark-covered roots up-bend A further welcome to extend. Thy low-extending branches wave, As though a green-robed prelate gave A benediction, and had blessed A people weary and oppressed. And so I rest with thee today, My old beech tree, so green ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... labyrinth; wilderness, jungle; involution, raveling, entanglement; coil &c. (convolution) 248; sleave[obs3], tangled skein, knot, Gordian knot, wheels within wheels; kink, gnarl, knarl[obs3]; webwork[obs3]. [complexity if a task or action] difficulty &c. 704. V. complexify[obs3], complicate. Adj. gnarled, knarled[obs3]. complex, complexed; intricate, complicated, perplexed, involved, raveled, entangled, knotted, tangled, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... perfume, which seemed to cling faintly to his clothes, to his very skin. And again, he remembered the Thursday walks. They started at two o'clock for some verdant nook about three miles from Plassans. Often they sought a meadow on the banks of the Viorne, where the gnarled willows steeped their leaves in the stream. But he saw nothing—neither the big yellow flowers in the meadow, nor the swallows sipping as they flew by, with wings lightly touching the surface of the little river. Till six o'clock, seated in groups beneath the willows, his comrades ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... latter country seems scarcely to have come within the ancient builder's province; possibly on account of its coldness in winter and for the reason that it is open to the incursions of warlike hunting tribes. Sage brush and greasewood grow abundantly near the villages, and these curious gnarled and twisted shrubs furnish the ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... were quite alone upon the walk. Not even a hind or shart was there; and after the first two or three steps, Marlow asked his fair companion to take his arm. She did so, readily; for she needed it, not so much because the long gnarled roots of the trees crossed the path from time to time, and offered slight impediments, for usually her foot was light as air, but because she felt an unaccountable languor upon her, a tremulous, agitated sort of unknown happiness unlike ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... rivers bring to mind the trees. What and where would be the loveliness of Oxford without her trees? Some have already been mentioned—the stately elms of the Broad Walk, and the old gnarled willows along the Cherwell's banks. But there are others, needing perhaps a little looking for, but none the less an integral part of Oxford's beauty when once found. One of these, the great cedar in the Fellows' ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... the streets of Crofield and the farms around it. Jack's pull on the left rein was obeyed only too well, and it looked, for some seconds, as if the plunging beasts were about to wind up their maddened dash by a wreck among those gnarled trunks and projecting roots. Jack drew his breath hard, and there was almost a chill at his young heart, but he held ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... the most gnarled and coffee-coloured Montereno never had there been so exciting a race day. All essential conditions seemed to have held counsel and agreed to combine. Not a wreath of fog floated across the bay to dim the sparkling air. Every horse, every vaquero, was alert and physically ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... sprightly solo of the supercricket is interrupted rather than joined by a new sound—the melancholy wail of an erratically fingered flute. It is obvious that the musician is practising rather than performing, for from time to time the gnarled strain breaks off and, after an interval of indistinct ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of the Guadalquiver are Arcadian, after the prairies are passed. As we approached the beautiful basin in which the old city of Seville is built, villas and country houses were seen here and there along the shores; clumps of gnarled old olive trees wound down to the water; orange and citron trees in full blossom, and fruit, perfumed the air; sometimes a single tree stood out alone large and symmetrical as a New England pear tree; then whole orchards sloped down to the river, with great ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... it the roof crouched as if to hide its secrets. The very men that built it must have been lowering, bearded fellows; for they put into it many corners and niches and black holes. The wood, too, from which it was fashioned must have been gnarled and knotted and the nails rusty and crooked. One window cast a narrow light down the middle of this room, but at both sides was immeasurable night. When you had stooped in from the sunlight and had accustomed your ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... an apple-tree near by, where a ten-year-old girl sat perched among its gnarled branches. She had a dog-eared book of fairy tales on her knee, and was poring over it in such blissful absorption that she had forgotten there were such things in all the world as ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Goldenkernelled, goldencored, Sunset ripened, above on the tree, The world is wasted with fire and sword, But the apple of gold hangs over the sea, Five links, a golden chain, are we, Hesper, the dragon, and sisters three, Daughters three, Bound about All round about The gnarled bole of the charmed tree, The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit, Guard it well, guard it warily, Watch it warily, Singing airily, Standing ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... smile back at her. Then he went out of the castle into a starless night that was as quiet as an unvoiced menace. A small and hard and gnarled-looking moon ruled over the dusk's secrecy. The moon this night, afloat in a luminous gray void, somehow reminded Florian of a glistening and ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Goosal, approached the fallen trees. As they neared them they saw that in falling the trees had lifted with their roots a large mass of earth and imbedded rocks that had clung to the twisted and gnarled fibers. This mass was as large ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... thinking of its implications, the thought of home and all that it brought up, the thought of all the hands through which it had passed—hands of workmen, the hands of little children, the hands of beggars, even; hard hands and gnarled hands and honest hands, the hands of mine own people—it seemed to me to have been made precious by the patina of democracy, and I thought that nothing could have been more beautiful and significant than that Lincoln's noble head should ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... lingered around the clearings and stumps of the trees, in the topmost of whose branches the fear of man compelled them to rest, but young and full fed. The trees in this new land were of no stinted or gnarled growth, but shot up tall, straight, and taper. The yellow poplar here threw up into the air a column of an hundred feet shaft in a contest with the sycamore for the pre-eminence of the woods. Their wives and children would remain safe in their present ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... in on the point, and Walter steered to land some distance out from it. A few strokes of the paddle sent the light canoe gliding in amongst the mangrove bushes that fringed the shore. Climbing out upon the curious gnarled roots, Walter pulled the canoe far enough in to effectually screen it from sight. Next he examined his pistols to see that they were properly loaded, and with a parting word of cheer for his chum, he made his way ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the spicy odor of the burning cedar, the snow-white clouds and deep blue of the sky mirrored in the stream, made it a place fit at least for rural divinities. Pan might have looked in,—ah! he is dead,—his ghost then might have looked in upon them from behind some old gnarled tree, with a frown of envy at this intrusion ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... finds a sport while the hounds are yet afar, and his limbs are yet strong, in the chase which marks him for his victim, but grows desperate with rage and fear as the day nears its close, and the death-dogs pant hard upon his track. But at that moment the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to have lost every sign both of passion and the will, and to be locked in a stolid and dull repose. At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a smile like that of an old ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... white gnarled trunk makes even the young trees seem old. The olive is like an old man with skimpy legs. It seems to me a pathetic tree. One does not like to say it is ugly; it is not ugly, but it would be puzzling to say wherein lies its charm, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the old gnarled trees on the southern ramparts, a wind that sounded like the sigh of swiftly ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... lonely. I want to be alone where I can collect my thoughts, but, even when Katie is out, I cannot think, but sit by the window staring at the old women hanging up the clothes which everlastingly flap on the lines tied between the poor old gnarled willow trees. Poor old trees, their fate has been very like that of the old women. They bear their burden uncomplainingly, groan dolefully in the wind, and shake their old palsied heads. Even the sparrows, true hoboes of the air, disdain to seek shelter ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... of the north has twisted and gnarled its branches; Yet in the heat of midsummer days, when thunderclouds ring the horizon, A nation of men shall rest beneath its shade. And it shall protect them all, Hold everyone safe there, watching aloof in silence; Until at last one mad stray bolt from the zenith Shall strike it in ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... allowed to be present as a very great favour because it was Christmas Eve and snowing so hard, that the room was more crowded than he had ever seen it, and that Mother Figgis, with her round face and her gnarled and knotted hands, was at her very merriest and in the best of tempers. All these things Peter had noticed before Frosted Moses (so called because of his long white beard and wonderful age) made his remark about ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... of a less severe character, and Hester spent one of her first happy half-hours over a drawing lesson. She had a great love for drawing, and felt some pride in the really beautiful copy which she was making of the stump of an old gnarled oak-tree. Her dismay, however, was proportionately great when the drawing-master drew his pencil right across ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... day at Dartmouth, where our training-ship Albion lies, and he was so charmed by the old town with its carved and gabled houses, and its luxuriant gardens rich with pale-blossomed laurels, which no frost dwarfs, and crimson fuchsias gnarled with age, and its hill-embosomed harbour, where the people of all grades and ages, and of both sexes, flit hither and thither in their boats as landlubbers would take an evening stroll—that I felt somewhat justified in the romantic love ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... those Provencal structures of a single story, with discolored tiles and four walls washed with a bright yellow. Before the facade extended a narrow terrace shaded by ancient mulberry trees, whose thick, gnarled branches drooped down, forming an arbor. It was here that Uncle Macquart smoked his pipe in the cool shade, in summer. And on hearing the sound of the carriage, he came and stood at the edge of the terrace, straightening his tall form neatly clad in blue cloth, his head covered with the eternal ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... across the drawbridge, and were admitted by a quaint, gnarled, dried-up person, who was the butler, Ames. The poor old fellow was white and quivering from the shock. The village sergeant, a tall, formal, melancholy man, still held his vigil in the room of ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... smell, flowed down to the shore of the bay. The olive trees were of immense size, and I can well believe, as Fra Carlo informed us, that they were probably planted by the Roman colonists, established there by Titus. The gnarled, veteran boles still send forth vigorous and blossoming boughs. There were all manner of lovely lights and shades chequered over the turf and the winding path we rode. At last we reached the foot of an ascent, steeper than the Ladder of Tyre. As our horses slowly climbed ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... that in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was above the water-line, and these trees grew in the sunshine and stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the result ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... some agreed to take one portion, and some another. In about an hour he was all secure on this save one lot of two hundred barrels, which he decided to offer in one lump to a famous operator named Genderman with whom his firm did no business. The latter, a big man with curly gray hair, a gnarled and yet pudgy face, and little eyes that peeked out shrewdly through fat eyelids, looked at Cowperwood curiously when ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Will, wi' sair advice; [urged] They hecht him some fine braw ane; [promised][measured with It chanced the stack he faddom'd thrice[16] outstretched arms] Was timmer-propt for thrawin': [against leaning over] He taks a swirlie auld moss-oak [gnarled] For some black gruesome carlin; [beldam] An' loot a winze, an' drew a stroke, [uttered a curse] Till skin in blypes cam haurlin' [shreds, peeling] Aff's nieves that night. [Off ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... the town is a narrow but close belt of timber, mostly gnarled mulga and gidgee, with here and there a sprawling stunted creek gum. The cattle were making for this shelter. But already the tremendous pace was beginning to tell. The bellowing had ceased and the mob was stringing out, the stragglers no longer being ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... the crumbling base of the auld kirk tower Is the broad-leaved dock and the bright brae flower; And the adders hiss o'er the lime-bound stones, And playfully writhe round mouldering bones: The bat clingeth close to the binewood's root, Where its gnarled boughs up the belfry shoot, As, hiding the handworks of ruthless time, It garlands in grandeur and green sublime The hoary height, where the rust sae fell Bends, as with a burden, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... yet towers the Sycamore on the crown of the hill—the first great Tree in the parish that used to get green; for stony as seems the hard glebe, constricted by its bare and gnarled roots, they draw sustenance from afar; and not another knoll on which the sun so delights to pour his beams. Weeks before any other Sycamore, and almost as early as the alder or the birch—the GLORY OF MOUNT PLEASANT, for so we schoolboys called it, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... sight. Near them stood a clump of fantastic-shaped trees, their gnarled limbs covered with snow, and brilliant with the countless icicles that glistened like precious stones in the bright light that was reflected upon them from the windows of the station. A little farther on, between them and the town, flowed a small stream, the ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... kingdom will certainly not be rank and luxurious, because there is not enough sunlight or heat for that; nor will it be gnarled and tough, but more likely spongy and cactus-like. The weak gravity will oppose but a mild resistance to the activity and climbing propensities of vegetable sap, however, which is likely to result in very tall, ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... tinted photograph. His gnarled fingers trembled as he handed it over, and there was a suspicious softness in the lines of his wrinkled old face, as he looked fondly at the likeness of the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... bower could be more beautiful,—because the coppice foliage was fresh and tender overhead, and the old leaves soft and elastic to the prickles below,—because the young oaks sheltered us behind, and we had a charming outlook over the brook in front, between a gnarled alder and a young sycamore, whose embracing branches were the ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... solitary shepherds tending their piebald flocks, as David and Abner guarded their father's sheep in Judea. That these patient shepherds, watching their lean herds, these Deborahs weaving their bright blankets beneath gnarled branches of sparse cedar trees, should be living less than forty-eight hours from Chicago, was incredible, and yet here they were! Their life and landscape, though of a texture with that of Arabia, were as real as Illinois, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of a tree hut—a building that would be perfectly dry and yet shaded and cool. Bill had read of such houses in the Philippines and felt confident that we could build one. We couldn't decide at first where to locate our hut until Dutchy moved that we build it in the gnarled oak tree overlooking the "Goblins' Dancing Platform." Immediately the motion was ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... to put questions to her until, crossing a ridge, we came at last within sight of the inn, a lonely house of stone, standing in the hollow of the moor and sheltered on one side by a few gnarled trees that took off in a degree from the bleakness of its aspect. The house was of one story only, with a window on either side of the door, and no other appeared in sight; but a little smoke rising from the chimney seemed to promise a better reception ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... bank was steep, between the gnarled roots of a rugged oak one could see a narrow aperture, dark and mysterious, which was partially ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... he ordered. "I got two guns—not a woid from youse!" His erstwhile amiable physiognomy, now gnarled into an unrecognizable mask of low villainy bespoke his desperate earnestness. The men obeyed. This was apparently a gangster, of gangsters—their fear of the dire vengeance of a rival organization of cut-throats instilled an obedience more ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... with us; not that we expected to use it, but because it is not good to be entirely defenseless in those wild, out-of-the-way places. Following at first our little creek, we went on up and up, taking it slowly, until presently the pines began to thin out, the weather-beaten trees, gnarled, twisted and stunted, becoming few and far between, and pretty soon we left even these behind and emerged upon the bare rocks above timber-line. Here, too, we left ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... the peril of the black man upon this soil. I do not apprehend any uprising by Uncle Tom; but Uncle Tom is dead, and his son is here and his friends of a younger generation. These men are being gnarled and corrupted and imbruted, and are massing themselves, touching elbows one with another; and under the influences of the age in which we live are becoming a factor in our civilization which, unless we modify and change it under our Christian teaching, will render our Southland like that ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... single riders. Bullets whistled and comrades fell, but the command spurred on to increased speed—shouted, yelled and still dashed on. Over fences and gullies, and then a wide ravine; through brush and dense timber, whose gnarled and low-hanging branches literally tore men from their saddles; across a great marsh where horses almost swamped—onward the resistless force rushes and strikes the enemy fully and fairly. Sabers flash in the air, pistols and carbines belch forth sulphur smoke. The unexpected movement, the sudden ...
— Bugle Blasts - Read before the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of - the Loyal Legion of the United States • William E. Crane
... and waistcoat, white stiff cravat, gray trowsers somewhat shrunk in longitude, good serviceable shoe-leather (of the shape, if not also of the size, of river barges), and plenty of unbleached cotton stocking about the gnarled region of his ankles. All this was well enough; nature was beholden to that charity of art which hides a multitude of failings; but the face, where native man looks forth in all his unadornment, that it was which ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... green-black pines, showing in the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern; at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing line, as sharp as a knife-thrust, between the region where trees may grow and snows may hide beneath their protecting boughs and the desolate, barren, rocky, forbidding ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of Gaud's return journey, all things had already begun to fade in the nightfall, and become fused into close, compact groups. Here and there a clump of reeds strove to make way between stones, like a battle-torn flag; in a hollow, a cluster of gnarled trees formed a dark mass, or else some straw-thatched hamlet indented the moor. At the cross-roads the images of Christ on the cross, which watch over and protect the country, stretched out their black arms on their supports like real ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... with no difficulty, over the rough contorted crags, worn by the surf into deep ruts and uneven ridges, gnarled protuberances, and crater-like hollows. The fossiliferous beds are still very numerous, and largely charged with remains. We see dermal bones, spines, scales, and jaws, projecting in high relief from the sea-worn surface of the ledges ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... undertook to be our guide. By the side of the little stream, which here constitutes the first vein of the Tiber, we penetrated the wood. It was an immense beech-forest.... The trees were almost all great gnarled veterans who had borne the snows of many winters: now they stood basking above their blackened shadows in the blazing sunshine. The little stream tumbled from ledge to ledge of splintered rock, sometimes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... up the gnarled face, and Nancy remembered what Jack had so often said as to Mere Bideau's clever way of dealing with visitors, especially ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... sickening weariness and panting despair. The great roots, twined in one unbroken snarl, clung frantically to the black soil. The vines and bushes fought back with thorn and bramble. Zora stood wiping the blood from her hands and staring at Bles. She saw the long gnarled fingers of the tough little trees and they looked like the fingers of Elspeth down there beneath the earth pulling against the boy. Slowly Zora forgot her blood and pain. Who would ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the crowded fullness of his emotional life, he knew precisely what it meant. He had adventured in blossoms before to the torment of his heart and head. In Spain. He had forgotten the girl's name but it began with an "I." Now in the dusk he faced gnarled and glimmering boughs of fleece. The wind, fitful and chill since the sunset, speckled the grayness beneath the trees with dim white fragrant rain and stirred the drift of petals on the ground. Stillness and blossoms and the disillusion of ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... is," said the King, "we are both of us getting old." He tapped with his gnarled fingers on the blanket that lay over his knees. "The truth is also," he observed a moment later, "that the boy has very few pleasures. He is alone a ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... day and all night and came at last to the grim city of green stones with towers like aged fingers of gnarled wood in the midst of which the Princess Myrtle held her court in an old red castle set about with small, stiff trees. Now the Princess had not long been married to the Prince Merlin. So full of love were they for each other that for them many days had drifted away like the dreams of a night; ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... streaks of light from the rising sun, radiated across his temples. His skin was tanned to the hue of old hickory and deep down in its furrows were lines of white. He had a big nose that was always sunburned, powerful hands with a reddish fuzz on their backs, and gnarled fingers that bore the scars of innumerable nautical disasters. But the chief glory he possessed was a neatly tattooed schooner that sailed under full canvas upon his forearm and bore beneath ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... followed the avenue, under the giant pepper trees that shut out the sky with their gnarled limbs and gracefully drooping branches, to the edge of the little city; where the view to the north and northeast was unobstructed by houses. Just where the street became a road, Conrad Lagrange—putting his hand ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... at once raced, with Nellie and Rover at his heels; and, diving beneath a jungle of blackberry-bushes at the bottom, matted together with ropes of ivy that had fallen from a withered oak, whose dry and sapless gnarled old trunk still stood proudly erect in the midst of the mass of luxuriant vegetation with which it was surrounded, Nellie heard him after a bit call out from the leafy enclosure in which he had quickly found himself—"Oh, I say, I ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... blue in its main scheme, yet varying into subtle transitions of mood from rich purple to a pale and tender green. The sky was cloudless but there was that smoky, misty, impalpable thing like a dust of dreams on the distance. The girl stood with one hand resting on the gnarled bole of a pine. She wore a blue sweater, and her carmine lips were more vivid because these months of anxiety had given to her checks a creamy pallor. The man, standing at her elbow, was devouring her with his eyes. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... were sitting and standing, in various gnarled attitudes, our old acquaintance, grandfathers James and William, the tranter, Mr. Penny, two or three children, including Jimmy and Charley, besides three or four country ladies and gentlemen from a greater distance who do not require any distinction by name. Geoffrey was ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... saw at once Brimdono. And as a man tears the purple cloak of a king slain in battle to divide it with other warriors,—Brimdono tore the sea. And ever around and around him with a gnarled hand Brimdono whirled the sail of some adventurous ship, the trophy of some calamity wrought in his greed for shipwreck long ago where he sat to guard his masters from all who fare on the sea. And ever one far-reaching empty hand swung up and down so ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... men faced each other. The one a sturdy man-boy nearing twenty, with a great pair of shoulders and a clear eye, a long, quick arm and a deft hand—these last his assets as a workman. The other, gnarled, prematurely wrinkled, almost gnome-like. This one took his pipe from between his lips and began to speak. The drink he had had at Wenzel's on the way home sparked ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... them, those Scotch firs. I delight in their forms, from James the First's gnarled giants up in Bramshill Park—the only place in England where a painter can learn what Scotch firs are—down to the little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of an untoward youth. Seven years on an average ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... aspect of the place was revolutionized; but the stream and water-mill (the latter a mere picturesque ruin) were still there; the stream was, however, little more than a ditch, some ten feet deep and twenty broad, with a fringe of gnarled and twisted willows and alders, many ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... exclaimed the Marshal, banging his gnarled fist on the arm of the chair. "And as far as I c'n make out, there ain't no law ag'inst cider stayin' in the barrel long enough to get good and hard, an' what's more, there ain't no law ag'ainst sellin' cider, hard ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... but here we were in a paradise. Boats up and down the river; lovers went by, singing. On one shore the scene was quiet, with easy slopes and with houses here and there; but the other shore was wild with bluffs, with tangled vines and monstrous trees that storms had gnarled and twisted. Here a spring gushed out with a gleeful laugh, and lovers paused to listen, and in its flow the city oarsman cooled ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... with his back against a gnarled stump, which gave him some support. He had his hand to his chest, and as he breathed a ghastly whistling sound came from the wound, and spirts of blood rushed from his mouth. His glazed eyes were fixed upon the man who had shot him, and a curious ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... carrying the continental divide, is a gnarled and jagged rampart of snow-splashed granite facing the eastern plains, from which its grim summits may be seen for many miles. Standing out before it like captains in front of gray ranks at parade rise three conspicuous mountains, Longs Peak, ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... base of Caucasus, with sound That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm: Stair above stair the eddying waters rose, 380 Circling immeasurably fast, and laved With alternating dash the gnarled roots Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms In darkness over it. I' the midst was left, Reflecting, yet distorting every cloud, 385 A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm. Seized by the sway of the ascending stream, With dizzy swiftness, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... morning in his old armchair of bent hickory, between his knees a cane on the head of which his gnarled hands rested, Captain Ira Ball was the true retired mariner of the old school. His ruddy face was freshly shaven, his scant, silvery hair well smoothed; everything was neat and trig about him, including his glazed, narrow-brimmed hat, his blue pilot-cloth ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... around the island. It was almost bare of trees, rocky in many places, and partly covered with scrubby grass. We found half a dozen pits and shafts where the treasure-seekers had been at work. We climbed the little hill where the tree stood,—it was gnarled and broken, "a blasted tree" declared Mr. Daddles ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... willows in wet places and new-made land, aspens and large cottonwoods west of the characteristic spruce area (as on Seward Peninsula), are also common. Toward the Arctic circle, the timber becomes, of course, sparse, low, gnarled and distorted. The willows in the Arctic drainage basin shrink to shrubs scarcely knee-high. Bushes are common in western Alaska, but undergrowth is very scanty in the forests. Crasses grow luxuriantly in the river bottoms and wherever the tundra moss is destroyed to give them footing. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... A group of ancient, gnarled and twisted alder bushes, with trunks like trees, grew just on the margin of the pond, and by-and-by I found a comfortable arm-chair on the lower stout horizontal branches overhanging the water, and on ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... the sort that would 'botanise upon their mother's grave.' We must put off our shoes, and feel that we stand on holy ground. Though loving eyes saw something of Christ's agony, He did not let them come beside Him, but withdrew into the shadow of the gnarled olives, as if even the moonbeams must not look too closely on the mystery of such grief. We may go as near as love was allowed to go, but stop where it was stayed, while we reverently and adoringly listen to what the Evangelist tells us of that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... strikes its roots in the soil of fable, and above ground is a gnarled and twisted growth of good and bad from the time of the Great Charles to the time of the Great Frederick. Between these times she had her various rulers, ecclesiastical and secular, in various forms of vassalage to the empire; but for nearly four centuries her sovereignty was in the hands ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the forest was a little dell High overarched with the leafy sweep Of a broad oak, through whose gnarled roots there fell A slender rill that sung itself to sleep, Where its continuous toil had scooped a well To please the fairy folk; breathlessly deep The stillness was, save when the dreaming brook From its small urn ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... on biting at Rob's peculiar lure and at the pieces of salmon which the other boys used as bait. In the course of an hour they had the bow end of the dory well piled up with codfish, and Rob declared that they had enough. They also had nearly a dozen gnarled, knobby-looking fish, mostly all head, which Skookie insisted were better than codfish, to which they later all agreed. Sailors call these fish "sea-lawyers," because of their wide mouths, as they explain it. ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... not inherit it in a greater degree. But we speak about it in quite a cool way. It does not touch us with enthusiasm. If a calculating-machine had a hand to wring, it would find few to wring it warmly. The things that really move liking in human beings are the gnarled nodosities of character, vagrant humours, freaks of generosity, some little unextinguishable spark of the aboriginal savage, some little sweet savour of the old Adam. It is quite wonderful how far simple generosity ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... and brought the billy and pint-pots to the head of my camp. The moon had grown misty. The plain horizon had closed in. A couple of boughs, hanging from the gnarled and blasted timber over the billabong, were the perfect shapes of two men hanging side by side. Mitchell scratched the back of his neck and looked down at the pup curled like a glob of mud on the sand in the moonlight, and an idea struck him. He got a big old felt hat he had, lifted ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... than a mushroom is like a great old oak. London is like that; an old oak, gnarled and twisted and weather-worn, with plenty of hale life and young vigour springing out of ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... jungle everything that was hard enough was crooked or gnarled, everything that was straight enough was soft and sappy. It was not till the sun was almost over his head, and the heat was urging him back to the coolness of his grotto, that he came across something worth making a trial of. On a bleak wind-swept knoll, far ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... The Ocean-nymphs and Hamadryades, Oreads and Naiads, with long weedy locks, Offered to do her bidding through the seas, Under the earth, and in the hollow rocks, 220 And far beneath the matted roots of trees, And in the gnarled heart of stubborn oaks, So they might live for ever in the light Of her ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... been a norther during the day, and at sunset the valley, seen from Dysart's cabin on the mesa, was a soft blur of golden haze. The wind had hurled the yellow leaves from the vineyard, exposing the gnarled deformity of the vines, and the trailing branches of the pepper-trees had swept their fallen berries into coral reefs on ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... coming to think. And because he did not want to believe any good of his enemy, old Jim Sanderson, when he was alone in the corral with the horses or on a hillside driving his sheep, would shake his gnarled fist impotently and swear fluently until his surcharged ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... growing masculinity of girls is the main reason why so many of them remain unmarried; thus fulfilling the prediction: "Could we make her as the man, sweet love were slain." Let girls return to their domestic sphere, make themselves as delightfully feminine as possible, not trying to be gnarled oaks but lovely vines clinging around them, and the sturdy oaks will joyously extend their love and protection to them amid all the storms of life. In love lies the remedy for many of the economic problems of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... war, which had been fought over the region of twelve hundred miles of coast, had proved the repellent differences of the various districts. The slave-breeder and the slave-owner of Virginia and the States of the South had little in common with the gnarled descendants of the later Puritans in New England. What principle could be found to knit them together? The war had at least the advantage of bringing home to all of them the evils of war which they all instinctively desired to escape. ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... into the peculiar petrifaction of age; our second, of a Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide, clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand across his forehead, were angular and slow. We knew instinctively the quality of his work—a deliberate pause, a mighty blow, another pause, a painful recovery—labour compounded of infinite slow patience, but wonderfully effective in the week's result. It would go on without haste, without ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... afterwards over the plain, between groves of olive and almond trees with gnarled stems and branches white with dust, mounted by the twisting road, terraces upon his left and pine-clothed mountainside upon his right, past Valdemosa to the Pass. The great sweep of rock-bound coast and glittering sea burst upon his view, and the boom of water surging ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... look of command shone in the eyes of Gabriel Druse. Leadership was written all over him. Power spoke in every motion. The square, unbowed shoulders, the heavily lined face, with the patriarchal beard, the gnarled hands, the rough-hewn limbs, the eye of bright, brooding ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... white hair?—for a few minutes had shown me that I was not old enough for the child despite my forty years. She was quite happy with the little black cat, which lay in the small lap blinking its yellow eyes at the sun; and presently an old man came by, lame and bent, with gnarled twisted hands, leaning heavily ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... old shadow of a building. Its walls were stained with past rains, the roof showed depressions, the veranda steps were unsteady, in fact one was gone. Wesley mounted and seated himself in one of the gnarled old rustic chairs which defied weather. From where he sat he could see a pink and white plumage of blossoms over an orchard; even the weedy garden showed lovely lights under the triumphant June sun. Butterflies ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... him, he had discovered him lying in wait, like a fowler, to catch the sweet sounds that flew from the opened cage of her instrument. He leaned against the wall with his ear laid over the edge, and as near the window as he dared to put it, his rough face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard—his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God, when of old it moved on the face of the waters ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... cried another. "The youngsters who are gone sing well; and one of them has a harp I should be glad you should see. He made it himself from a gnarled olive-root." And he ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... Darling for the first few miles from the river exhibits the same features as on its southern bank, the soil blackish, soft, and yielding; the trees principally myall, and a species of myall, called by the squatters rosewood, interspersed with the small and gnarled forest oak. About ten miles from the river, and nearly parallel to it, is the Waramble, a sort of swamp, boggy, and difficult to cross after wet weather, directly after which water remains in the holes along its course. From thirty to forty miles beyond this is the Nareen Creek. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... lightly in the face. I threw out my hand and touched a cold, clammy substance strangely suggestive of the leafy branch of a tree. Yet nothing was to be seen. I felt again, and my fingers wandered to a broader expanse of something gnarled and uneven. I kept on exploring, and my grasp closed over something painfully prickly. I drew my hand smartly back, and, as I did so, distinctly heard the loud and angry rustling of leaves. Just then one of my friends called out to me from a window. I veered round ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the court is quiet and stately, and notably carries out its spirit, with the gray-green of foliage plants and eucalyptus trees and the gnarled stems of gray old olive trees. In its vistas from any angle or point of view, the Court ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... under the huge spreading branches of a gnarled birch, a few versts from the scene of our exploit, and early Friday morning were off for Sidanka. When about fifteen versts from the village Dodd suggested a gallop, to try the mettle of our horses and warm our blood. As we were both well ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... into the hall and reappearing in a moment with an aged, gnarled dwarf apple tree growing in a green vase, and a lacquered ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... under whose gnarled branches these stories were written, to you I dedicate the book. My head was so close to you, who can tell from whence the thoughts came? I only know that when all the other trees in the orchard were barren, there were ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Scientist there came a vision of five human figures, rising specterlike from the case they were entombed in; straight, proud young figures, two of them; two others old, like himself, and the fifth a gnarled hunchback. Very different were they, each from each other, but each face had its mark of genius; and each face, to Eliot Leithgow, was warm and smiling, for ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... kind, Joe, but I don't care about it to-day." Winfield rose and walked to the other end of the porch. The apple trees were in bloom, and every wandering wind was laden with sweetness. Even the gnarled old tree in Miss Hathaway's yard, that had been out of bearing for many a year, had put forth a bough of fragrant blossoms. He saw it from where he stood; a mass of pink and white against the turquoise sky, and thought that Miss Thorne would make a ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... way.... Behind them the tremendous glow deepens;—before them the gloom. Enormous gnarled forms of ceiba, balata, acoma, stand dimly revealed as they pass; masses of viny drooping things take, by the failing light, a sanguine tone. For a little while Fafa can plainly discern the figure of the Woman before him;—then, as the path zigzags into shadow, he can descry only the white ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... the blighted bud, the gnarled oak, the ferocious beast, - like the discords of disease, sin, 78:3 and death, - are unnatural. They are the fal- sities of sense, the changing deflections of mor- tal mind; they are not the eternal realities ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... the old woman, putting out a gnarled hand. Her eyes were bright and clear as a bird's, and she had a quick, darting way of glancing at one that was like a bird, too. "Emma's got the supper on," she announced. "She's ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... the gentle influence of the time and hour. The stillness of the spot allayed the irritation of his frame, and the dewy chillness cooled the fever of his brow. Leaning for support against the gnarled trunk of one of the trees, he gave himself up to contemplation. The events of the last hour—of his whole existence—passed in rapid review before him. The thought of the wayward, vagabond life he had led; of the wild adventures ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... pass through groves of olive trees, whose sombre and silver tinted foliage, and wonderfully gnarled and twisted trunks, give quite a foreign tone to the landscape. Also the orange trees, with their green and golden fruit and enchantingly fragrant white blossoms; and the lordly palm, with its graceful outline clearly defined against the ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... walked along, side by side, without a word. They reached a paved road that stretched out as far as the eye could see, between two lines of lanterns, between two rows of gnarled trees that held aloft handfuls of bare branches and cast their slender, motionless shadows on high blank walls. There, in the keen air, chilled by the evaporation of the snow, they walked on and on for a long time, burying themselves in the vague, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... implicitly. Deacon Goodsole is a believer—not I mean in anything in particular, but generally. He likes to believe; he enjoys it; he does it, not on evidence, but on general principles. The deacons of the stories are all crabbed, gnarled, and cross-grained. They are the terrors of the little boys, and the thorn in the flesh to the minister. But Deacon Goodsole is the most cheery, bright, and genial of men. He is like a streak of sunshine. He sensibly radiates the prayer-meeting, which would be rather cold except for him. ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... law in his hands. No matter how gnarled, warped or obscure were the paths to its lurking-places, he would find them all out, and pluck out all its meanings, and make its soul his own. He had already learned from his brother the fallacy of the vulgar judgment of the law, and he knew enough of history to know that ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle |
