"Shambling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a trifle over six feet in height, with yellowish, sandy hair, high cheek bones, a rough and mottled skin, a high but narrow forehead, a pair of eyes somewhat like those of a ferret, long, ungainly limbs, and a shambling walk. A coat of rusty black, with very long tails, magnified his apparent height, and nothing that he wore seemed ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... regular intervals the sharply indented leaves of the plane trees and the shivering silver of the balsam-poplars into an arresting and artificial distinctness. Between were spaces of vacancy and gloom. And from out such a space, immediately opposite, slowly emerged a shambling and ungainly figure, in which Dominic Iglesias recognised the third of his fellow-lodgers, Mr. de Courcy Smyth. His acquaintance with the said lodger was of the slightest, since the latter had but recently entered into residence and rarely appeared at meals. Mrs. Porcher ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... But he was no longer among bog and heather. He was running—shambling now—along a road. The loping pursuit of that nameless, shapeless Something sounded like ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... bird, rather fond of talking, awkward and vacant-looking; he was excessively fond of drink, and never could sit still long; in walking he shambled along, and rolled from side to side; and yet he got over fifty miles in the day with his rolling, shambling gait. He exposed himself to the most varied adventures: spent the night in the marshes, in trees, on roofs, or under bridges; more than once he had got shut up in lofts, cellars, or barns; he sometimes lost his gun, his dog, his most indispensable garments; ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... contiguous open vowels, and of short unstressed vowels separated by a liquid consonant, in such words, for instance, as "dissolute," or "amorous." By a variety of small observances, which, when fully stated, make up a formidable code, he mended the shambling gait of the loose dramatic blank verse, and made of it a ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... awaiting his fate, did not fly, but sat gravely on the log in front of Uncle Jim's hotel, and waited for the creaking, stage, white with far-gathered dust, to climb the last pitch of the road up from the arroyo and come on with the shambling trot of a pair of tired mules for the final nourish at the end of the long, ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... walked out far enough to be quite clear of the town, upon the Ramsgate road, where there was a good path, when I was hailed, through the dust, by somebody behind me. The shambling figure, and the scanty great-coat, were not to be mistaken. I stopped, and Uriah ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... sharply pointed and lively, while the white rings around his eyes hinted at a cross, somewhere in his pedigree, with Arabian blood. A huge, bony, homely-looking horse he was as he drew the deacon and Miranda into the village on market days and Sundays, with a loose, shambling gait, making altogether an appearance so homely and peculiar that the smart village chaps, riding along in their jaunty turn-outs, used to chaff the good deacon on the character of the steed, and satirically challenge him to a brush. The deacon always took the badinage ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... by a stretch of weedy lawn was a shambling structure built years before by one Azariah Prouse, who believed among other strange matters that the earth is flat and that houses are built higher than one story only at great peril, because of the earth's proneness to tip if overbalanced. Prouse had compromised with this ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling side-long legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, "No, never was." In all these things there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was in the figures of his schoolboys. The hint of tenderness which in really fine ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... he was too dazed with sleep to stand straight, and his teeth chattered from the cold. He was also ravenously hungry. But first they must think of the fire. That must be kept up at all costs. He was so weak that he staggered, and his clothes hung from him in rags; but shambling over to where his companion lay, ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... evening with dust and straws flying past and the level sun shining full on him. He was tall and slim, with a large round smooth face and big pale-blue innocent-looking eyes, and he walked rapidly but in a peculiar jerky yet shambling manner, swinging and tossing his legs and arms about. Moving along in this disjointed manner in his loose fluttering clothes he put one in mind of a big flimsy newspaper blown along the road by the wind. This unpromising-looking person at once told us that there ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... weakened, and his legs pressing against the body of his horse, in time, makes him bowlegged. In addition he wears high-heeled Mexican boots which throw him on his toes when he walks and makes his already shambling ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... The shambling barn man, summoned gruffly by McAlpin, hesitated as he appeared at the office door and seemed to regard the situation with suspicion. He looked at de Spain tentatively, as if ready either for the discharge with which he was daily threatened or for a renewal of his earlier, friendly relations ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... than is met with in the average Southerner of his class. "A plain man but honest, sir," was what one expected him to utter at every turn. It was written in the coarse open lines of his face, half-hidden by a bushy gray beard; in his small sparkling eyes, now blue, now brown; in his looselimbed, shambling movements as he crossed the room. His very clothes spoke, to an acute observer, of a masculine sincerity naked and unashamed—as if his large coffee-spotted cravat would not alter the smallest fold to conceal the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... appeared among his friends at Streatham. The painter has straightened the wig, which was usually worn awry, but otherwise it is the very Dr. Johnson of whom we read so much, with his shabby brown coat, his big shambling shoulders, ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... toward the Academy Theatre that evening, he found himself suddenly confronted by a man who, lounging against the fence of a shabby dwelling, straightened dramatically at his approach and bent a sharp gaze upon him. He was a tall, shambling fellow with a white cloth swathed about the top of his head; and Varney, in the act of passing, suddenly recognized him as the dog man, whom Peter had knocked out the night before. His gaze was a wanton challenge for the young man ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... leap away from the midshipman's prostrate body. Despite the bear's lumbering body and shambling gait he can be spry enough ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... and heavily for the besieged boys in the tree, but the wolves, though hungry, were patient. Strong in union they were lords of the forest, and they felt no fear. A shambling black bear, lumbering through the woods, suddenly threw up his nose in the wind, and catching the strong pungent odor, wheeled abruptly, lumbering off on another course. The wild cat did not come back, but crouched lower in his tree top; the ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... crackled and the wind roared in the chimney. Above, the shambling steps of Martin Morley sounded as he made his preparations for bed. Suddenly ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... a sharp cry and a jump. A bear on its hind legs, slow, shambling, rolling its loose shoulders, was stretching a paw towards him. The bear dropped heavily on four paws again, and a laugh came ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... hunting; but greater contrast could not have been found than between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the profound salutations of the assemblage, his eye rolled round them until it alighted on Richard Assheton, and, nudging Sir ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... began to explain in a rather shambling fashion that he had been there some time and "intended to hunt him up, of course"; but he had "been so taken up with business," ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... parade at eleven. It is reported, and is probably true, that the whole Boer force has surrendered. If so we have missed little or nothing. About twenty prisoners came in in the morning, quaint, rough people, shambling along on diminutive ponies. In the afternoon Williams went foraging for the officers, and I visited our Scotch friends, the donors of the cabbage, who were very kind, and asked me in. The married son had just come in from Basutoland, where he had been hiding, a great ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... may be taken to be the central points of English or American Rome. Yet you must have passed by the Bocca della Verita on your way to your drive on the Via Appia and the tomb of Caecilia Metella. Do you not remember a large, shambling, unkempt-looking open space, a sort of cross in appearance between the piazza of a city and a farmyard, a little after passing the remains of the Teatro di Marcello, the grand old arches of which are now, in the whirligig of Time's revenges, turned into blacksmiths' shops? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... nothing for it but to stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the boat. I had no need to repeat the signal. At the first sound, Mary was at the door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the old long-legged serving-man was shambling down the gravel to the pier. For all his hurry, it took him a long while to pull across the bay; and I observed him several times to pause, go into the stern, and look over curiously into the wake. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lifetime crowds the brain of a drowning man; that same crowded my brain during the few moments which swung in to us Daniel, scowling, masterful, his raw bulk and his long shambling stride ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... that his robe was much too long and loose for him in every direction, trailing upon the ground and bagging about his ankles, so that even with trussed-up skirts he could make little progress. He ran once, but the long gown clogged him so that he slowed down into a shambling walk, and finally plumped ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... turned unsteadily on his heel and left her. The shadows among the gravestones down hill laid hands on his broken, shambling figure, and he became a shadow. Once the shadow stumbled. And as if that distant, awkward act had aroused Mary from a kind of lethargy, she broke forward a step, reaching out ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... gen'lm'n can't go in just now," said a shambling pot-boy, with a red head, "'cos Mr. Lowten's singin' a comic song, and he'll put him out. He'll be ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... hastily, to find themselves confronted with an absolute endorsement of the truth of Lennie's statements. A stranger of about fourteen was walking towards them, or perhaps "shambling" would be a better description of her method of progress. She stooped badly, swung her arms in an awkward fashion, and shuffled her feet along the grass; her eyes were vacant, her chin was retreating, and her mouth was set in a foolish smile. ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... astonished to recognize some familiar porter or shopkeeper in this ecclesiastical dress, as when discovering a pacific next-door neighbor beneath the bear-skin of an American military officer. A fit suggestion; for next follows a detachment of Portuguese troops-of-the-line,—twenty shambling men in short jackets, with hair shaved close, looking most like children's wooden monkeys, by no means live enough for the real ones. They straggle along, scarcely less irregular in aspect than the main body of the procession; they ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... again, and the shambling lad felt dimly as if the scent of the sandalwood were sweeter, and the lamp-flame clearer. But the stranger's eyes were only ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... shambling in his walk, it should be my rich old banker, Gomez, whom I knew at Barcelona: As I live 'tis he!—What, old Mammon here! ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Philemon, changed though he was. He wore a fashionable wig, and his clothes fitted well a figure that, once shambling and loose-jointed, had now all the erectness of the soldier, but the face ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... Cold and dark as mid-winter. I shall send with this two new photographs of myself for your opinion. My father regards this life "as a shambling sort of omnibus which is taking him to his hotel." Is that not well said? It came out in a rather pleasant and entirely amicable discussion which we had this afternoon on a walk. The colouring of the world, to-day is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... characterless beings who are only happy when they have merged their individuality in another's and joined their fate to his. He attached himself to John from the first, and as often as he was at liberty he was hanging about him, ready to fetch and carry in his shambling gait, which was like the roll of an old dog. The expression of his beardless face was that of a boy, and he had no conversation, for he always agreed with everything that ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... yet held its ancient creatures— the swift and graceful deer, the soft-footed panther, the shambling black bear, the wild hog, the wolf, all manner of furred creatures, great store of noble wild fowl—all these thriving after the fecund fashion of this brooding land. It was a kingdom, this wild world, a realm in the wilderness; a kingdom fit for a bold man to ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... he came opposite, and she believed from his voice that he was one of the boys on her own farm. He was followed by a shambling tramp of heavy feet, and looking through the ferns Bathsheba could just discern in the wan light of daybreak a team of her own horses. They stopped to drink at a pond on the other side of the way. She watched them flouncing into the pool, drinking, tossing up their heads, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... Seven Dials. All the questionable pursuits, fancies, foibles of silly, childish man are discussed grimly and at length in the newspapers and magazines. Our poor hobby-horses are dragged out of the stable, and made to show their shambling paces before the mob of gentlemen who read with ease. There has been much prate lately of as innocent a foible as ever served to make men self-forgetful for a few seconds of time—the collecting of first editions. Somebody hard up for 'copy' denounced this pastime, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... deaths—women, blasted by disease and drink till their shame brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying with every step they took and each breath they drew. And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... with big letters on their canvas sides make themselves conspicuous, and so do the bakers' carts; while light and neat American wagonettes glide rapidly along among less attractive vehicles. Now and then a Chinaman passes, with his peculiar shambling gait, with a pole across his shoulders balancing his baskets of "truck"; women with oranges and bananas for a penny apiece meet one at every corner, and still the sidewalks are so broad, and the streets so wide, that no one seems to be in ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... ranches, passing that of Delatour with the others. Then he drove leisurely in the direction of the woods, and, reaching them, tied his horse to a young sapling in the shade, and entered their domain with a shambling but familiar ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... the sound a creature came shambling forward, carrying what looked like a huge melon in either hand. Jim recognized the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch's house, rests upon the summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank and shambling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... school because he wishes to (no one ever "sent" a Grind to college). He has a sallow skin, a watery eye, a shambling gait, but he has the facts. His clothes are outgrown, his coat shiny, his linen a dull ecru, his hands clammy. He reads a book as he walks, and when he bumps into you, he always ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... in full, hearty voice, advancing with a shambling limp, "here cometh one to lay alongside you awhile, old Resolution Day, friend, mate o' this here noble ship Happy Despatch, comrade, and that ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... for I was active and nimble, and (which was more to the point) well made. It was the shambling, ill-proportioned lads who suffered most. The biggest boy in school rode me, as a rule, but he was not at all a bad bully, so I was lucky. He never spurred me, and he boasted of my willingness and good paces. I am sure he ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... horse and the tall, shambling white were amiably straying up and down the narrow borders of the road, ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... served my father through the year for the hire which he had promised. Poseidon built a wall, high and fair, around the city; and Apollo tended the shambling kine, and lost not one. But when they claimed their hire, Laomedon drove them away with threats, telling them that he would bind their feet and hands together, and sell them as slaves into some distant land, having first sheared off their ears with his sharp sword. And they went away with angry ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... which his quest had started. He seemed dumb with despair. He had always looked ludicrously old and shriveled; his appearance now became tragic. He would start up from hours of trancelike motionlessness, would make a tour of house and grounds; scrambling and shambling from place to place; chattering at doors he could not open, then pausing to listen; racing to the front fence and leaping to its top to crane up and down the street; always back in the old room in a few minutes, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... rang the bell and demanded that the old caretaker should be sent to him at once. The man came to him, shambling unsteadily along and breathing fast as if he had been running. His aged features were quivering with some strange excitement, as Fenwick did not fail to notice, despite ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... hard-boiled eggs, shells and all, for his breakfast; ate his prawns with their heads and their tails on, drank scalding hot tea, and performed so many horrifying acts that one almost doubted that he was human; and by Christopher Nubbles, a shock-headed, shambling, awkward, devoted lad, the only element of cheerfulness that ever came into her life. In this book appear Richard Swiveller and his Marchioness, Sampson and Sarah Brass and Mrs. Jarley, who to be ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... head drooped more and more under its tree of horns, and the shambling trot grew weak and weaker. He took to standing for long periods, with nose to the ground and dejected ears dropped limply; and Buck found more time in which to get water for himself and in which to rest. At such moments, panting with red lolling tongue and with eyes fixed upon the big bull, ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... couple of miles, perhaps, I walked thoughtfully, and I do not believe I once thought of the bear shambling silently behind me. I had been dreaming a day-dream—not building a castle in the air, for I had seen before me a castle already built. I had simply been dreaming myself into it, into its life, into its possessions, into the possession of everything ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... monstrous shambling sea, Over the Caliban sea, Bright Ariel-cloud, thou lingerest: Oh wait, oh wait, in the warm red West, — Thy ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... away and disappeared, walking with quick, shambling footsteps. Maraton looked after him thoughtfully for several moments, then he continued on ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... on as miserable a looking wretch as ever hid himself from the eyes of day—dirty, ragged, bloated, forlorn, with scarcely a trace of manhood in his swollen and disfigured face. His steps, quick from excitement a few moments before, were now shambling and made with difficulty. He had not far to walk for what he was seeking. The ministers to his appetite were all about him, a dozen in every block of that terrible district that seemed as if forsaken by God and man. Into the first that came in his way he went with nervous haste, for he had ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... coming to join us; so, when the enemy had joined hands and came on again, we of the wagon-train had two troops for our protection, who, coming on at a walk behind, readily faced round, dismounted, and poured forth a withering fire, which again sent the enemy scuttling away on their shambling ponies. ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... strolled a lad, "Foolish Joe" people called him, and he was, as usual, accompanied by a little band of fun-loving, teasing boys. In a moment they were gone; but the shambling central figure with its vacant face stayed with her to accentuate her distress. She leaned her head upon her arm, but she could not ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... easily discouraged, and that I could count upon his engrossing the attention of my offspring for a considerable period. Accordingly, I was surprised some five minutes later to observe the fisherman (who wore no skates) shambling across the pond toward the shore. Glancing from him to his late station I perceived a little group of skaters gathered around my son and heir, who was dabbling with a stick in the abandoned hole. They appeared to be diverted by something and one of them, my friend Harry Bolles, ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... under arching trees, which in wet weather poured their weight of dripping rain upon it and made it little more than a mud pool. Between straggling bushes of elder and hazel, blackberry and thorn, it made its solitary shambling way, so sunken into itself with long disuse that neither to the right nor to the left of it could anything be seen of the surrounding country. Hidden behind the intervening foliage on either hand were rich pastures and ploughed fields, but with these the old road had nothing ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... at ten o'clock, they buried Saunders on a certain little knoll among the sagebrush; buried him without much ceremony, it is true, but with more respect than he had received when he was alive and shambling sneakily among them. Good Indian was there, saying little and listening attentively to the comments made upon the subject, and when the last bit of yellow gravel had been spatted into place he rode down through the Indian camp on his way home, thankful that everyone seemed to accept the verdict ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... a long-limbed, shambling fellow named Jim Scroggles, "why, that ain't the word at all. Now, I ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... adjoining that beneath which rested Landman Bud Smith, the twelfth since How Landor had arrived to haunt the tiny railway terminus. The one train from the East was due at 8:10 of the morning. It was now eight o'clock. Within the shambling, ill-kept hotel, with its weather-stained exterior and its wind-twisted sign, the best room, paid for in advance and freshly dusted for the occasion, awaited an occupant. In a stall of the single livery, a pair of half-wild bronchos, fed and harnessed according to directions, were passively ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... terrible going it had been the last few days! Soft slush, in which the snow-shoes sink helplessly. The bear had come from the west right up to the Fram, had stopped and inspected the work that was going on, had then retreated a little, made a considerable detour, and set off eastward at its easy, shambling gait, without deigning to pay any further attention to such a trifle as a ship. It had rummaged about in every hole and corner where there seemed to be any chance of finding food, and had rooted in the snow after anything the dogs had left, or whatever else it might ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... me and below, for we had risen some fifteen hundred feet since leaving Kalgan. Before me stretched the great Mongolian plateau. The wind that cooled my face had blown over thousands of miles of prairie and desert. The long lines of stately, shambling camels, the great droves of sheep herded by wild-looking men on sturdy little ponies told of an open country. Each mile led deeper and deeper into the rolling grassland and the barren waste of Gobi, and between me and the next ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... in the best condition, and Roanoke has but a shambling gait this morning; besides, there is another reason I could mention, if it were not that Miss Wharton would never ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... blue waters now deepened to indigo, shading into wide lakes of purple, under the reflection of the setting sun, which, like a great red lantern, seemed sinking into the sea. A sharp turn inward and upward brought the conveyance shambling into a little courtyard. It halted before the doorway of a low, white-washed house smothered in semi-tropical vines, which extended from the eaves over a pergola built along the wall at the terrace edge. Beneath this arbor ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... blessed his people in a shambling manner, not at all to his own satisfaction, and had walked back to his palace with his mind very doubtful as to what he would say to his chaplain on the subject. He did not remain long in doubt. He had hardly doffed his lawn when the partner of all his toils entered his study, and ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... about fifty yards behind, and was consequently unable to overhear the conversation. He went shambling along, half whimpering and not unfrequently invoking the God of Israel; but every now and then a cunning light gleamed from his eyes, and his lips became ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... was not the stupid, shambling Brute Hennessey of a few months past. He walked surely and proudly, and the light of intelligence shone ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... "Shambling around the streets at daylight this morning. I'll be blamed if I can figure on where he ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... side by side, Jude shambling as usual, Joyce stepping as if hastening to receive ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... Edna, jumping into the cart; "you jog along behind. Don't you want to?" And off started the little cavalcade, with Cricket driving, because she was the smallest, and could perch up on the others' knees, while old Billy, all beam, jogged after, making almost as good time, with his long legs and shambling ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... not strike him that poverty and crime are near neighbours; that the circumstances which make the honest man poor, make the lazy man a thief. Leonard was too young to be suspicious. He scarcely saw a shambling poorly-dressed rather wasted man whom he passed, and who afterwards stumbled along a very little way behind him. Nor did he specially notice two rather well-dressed but coarse-looking men who kept just ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... and boards an inch thick intervened between us and the noisy tramplings of the rain and heat of the sun. The only room accommodated some primitive furniture, a bed being the denominating as well as the essential feature. A little shambling structure of rough slabs and iron walls contrived a double debt ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the trim silver mounted umbrella, and I mechanically brought up the rear. It had all happened so quickly that I too was confused. The scanty populace in the rain-filled street stared and gaped. A shambling fellow in corduroys bawled an obscene jest. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... one of our big factory towns and look at the mill-hands coming home in droves after a day's work, young girls and old women, boys and men, all fluffed over with cotton, and so dead tired that they can hardly walk. They come shambling along with all the individuality of a flock ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... glittered in the sun. Then came the angel-monarch in rich attire surrounded by his counselors and the flower of his knights. The men-at-arms and servants brought up the rear of the procession, and among them, on a shambling piebald steed, his ape perched behind him and his cloak of foxtails flapping in the wind, rode the jester-king—a strange sight which caused unbounded merriment in all the country towns ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... manor house of that interesting personality, Miss Clairville, threw him altogether on the society of the village, but, apart from Poussette, who had become mysteriously friendly again, the two individuals most in need of his ministrations were Mme. Poussette and the shambling guide, Edmund Crabbe, in whom were the dregs of a being originally more than the preacher's equal. Old world distinctions would seem to be of small account in such a hamlet as St. Ignace and yet questions of caste ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... shambling sort of house. Strangers wondered why Maurice Gorman, who owned Kilgorman as well, chose to live in this place instead of the fine mansion near the lough mouth. But to the country people this was no mystery. Kilgorman ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... prepare the reader for the presence of the "damsel"; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upon Babe Honeycutt shambling up the creek. Babe was fearless and cordial, and Jason had easily ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... that the old, whose thoughts have been all thought out, should ever love to live alone. Solitude is surely for the young, who have time before them for the execution of schemes, and who can, therefore, take delight in thinking. In these days the poor old man would wander about the rooms, shambling from one chamber to another, and would feel ashamed when the servants met him ever on the move. He would make little apologies for his uneasiness, which they would accept graciously, understanding, after a fashion, why it was that he was ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... time of the vintage, and the country roads were dotted with the shambling figures of those knights of industry who seem to spring from the hedgerows at harvest-time in any country in the world, when the Abbe Touvent sought out Marie in her cottage at ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... shambling guide seemed amused at the pace at which I walked and giggled immoderately between remarks of his own which seemed to him to be appropriate to the occasion. I hardly heard him. At one moment I was lost in a bitter ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... lo! among the menials, in mock state, Upon a piebald steed, with shambling gait, His cloak of fox-tails flapping in the wind, The solemn ape demurely perched behind, King Robert rode, making huge merriment In all the country ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... middle age. He was a widower and a man of a noticeable aspect. At the first glance you knew that he was not as other men; at the second you suspected that he took a pride in his dissimilarity. He was long, rather shambling in his gait, with a mild blue eye and fair thin hair now growing grey. But length was the chief impression left by his physical appearance. His legs, his arms, his face, even his hair, unless his son in the Coldstream happened to be at home ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... came forward over the cobbled street. He was like some immense bronze come suddenly to life and shambling. Like the brazen servant Thomas Aquinas made under the influence of particular stars. His great brown shoulders, his barreled chest, his upper arms like a man's leg, his packed forearms, his neck like a bull's, his shaven head. All seemed superhuman, and then ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... can't go in just now,' said a shambling pot-boy, with a red head, 'cos' Mr. Lowten's a-singin' a comic song, and he'll put him out. He'll be ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... things were to be had; peppermints and cotton, china-faced dolls and lemons, had dwindled into the front windows of tiny private dwelling-houses; the black-wigged crones, the greasy shambling men, were uglier and greasier than she had ever conceived them. They seemed caricatures of humanity; scarecrows in battered hats or draggled skirts. But gradually, as the scene grew upon her, she perceived that in spite of the "model dwellings" ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to any one who would listen to him. I say that he sang—I mean, of course, that he spoke his verses; it was a minstrel's simple improvisation. But there are people in the villages of southern France who still recall that ungainly, shambling figure. He had grown a beard; it crinkled thickly, hiding his mouth and chin. He laughed a great deal. He was not altogether clean. And he slept wherever he could find a bed—in farmhouses, cheap hotels, haylofts, stables, open fields. Waram's few hundred ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... grumbled out something intended as a negative, and, shambling across the room, placed himself in a corner, as far as possible from Oaklands, where he sat rubbing his knees, the very image of sulkiness and terror. Cumberland, who appeared during the whole course of the affair absorbed ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... as they at first called themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat unusual family to find in such an old-fashioned part of the country. Parson Tringham had spoken truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the only really lineal representative of the old d'Urberville family existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew very well, that the Stoke-d'Urbervilles were no more d'Urbervilles ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... enthusiasm in honor of Clive. From a flagstaff newly erected on the roof of the Four Alls on the Newport Road, a square of bunting flapped in the breeze. Inside the inn the innkeeper was drawing a pint of ale for his one solitary customer, a shambling countryman with a shock of very red hair, ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... simple and homely as its long-limbed, black-coated occupant. Releasing the hand of the general to shut a door which opened into another apartment, the President shoved an armchair towards him and sank somewhat wearily into another before the desk. But only for a moment; the long shambling limbs did not seem to adjust themselves easily to the chair; the high narrow shoulders drooped to find a more comfortable lounging attitude, shifted from side to side, and the long legs moved dispersedly. Yet the face that was turned towards Brant ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... A shambling troop of sixteen or eighteen, they quit the room, and enter a small paved yard, preceded by the young man with the lantern. There is a rough building resembling a stable, at the other end of the yard; and, in one corner, a steep ladder, with a handrail, which leads to a chamber above. ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... a faint footfall was heard approaching from the church door, walking in the gloom. It proved to be that of an old man, bent and trembling. He came slowly down the sombre church, with unsteady, shambling gait, holding in one hand a burning taper,—a mere speck. In the other he carried a rude lantern, its wavering light hovering about his feet. As he passed in his long brown cloak, the swaying light encircled his ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... houses sly-looking, houses wicked-looking, houses pompous-looking. Heaven bless us! what a rakish pump! what a self-important town-hall! what a hard-hearted prison! The dead walls are covered with advertisements of Mr. Sleary's circus. Newman Noggs comes shambling along. Mr. and the Misses Pecksniff come sailing down the sunny side of the street. Miss Mercy's parasol is gay; papa's neck-cloth is white, and terribly starched. Dick Swiveller leans against a wall, his hands in his pockets, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... a shambling sort of gait, half walk, half amble, but manage to get over the ground very quickly, and for such cumbersome animals are very nimble-footed. It is almost ludicrous to see the huge beasts picking their way along a narrow "bund" ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... beast. It has a big head and a heavy shaggy mane. The hind part of its body is much lower than its shoulders, and its hind-legs are short. This odd formation gives it an awkward shambling manner of walking, which ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the street end of the alley and gave a low whistle. Out under the lamp from behind the corner came a long, thin, shambling, hump-backed youth, with his hat down over his head like an extinguisher, dragging a small bony horse, which, in its turn, dragged a rickety cart of the tray variety, such as is used in the dead marine trade. Behind the cart was tied a mangy retriever. This affair ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... knows, your aged guide! The screws are fixed, and the straps are tied, And he looks sharp out for the shambling stagger, The elbows wobbling, the knees ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... his asistente emerge from the bodega perched between two queer-looking improvised saddlebags bulging with plunder. The pony was overloaded, but in obedience to the frantic urgings of its barelegged rider it managed to break into a shambling trot. Branch reappeared, too, looping the eight-foot string of straw hats to his saddle-horn, and balancing before him the remainder of the bedding, done up in ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... through the air. The city has disappeared. We walk down an incongruous stretch of pavement. It leads toward a forest or what looks like a forest. There are no houses. The sky asserts itself. I look up, but the shambling one whose clothes become active under water keeps her eyes to the pavement. This is disillusioning! "Here, slavey, is the sky," I think; "it becomes romantic for the moment because to you it is the symbol of lost dreams, or happy hours in fields. To me it is nothing but a ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... that said something sharp to him one day in a way that showed us boys that he thought himself as good as he was. And he stood up straight and looked him in the face, till we hardly could think he was the same man that was so bent and shambling and broken-down-looking most times. He used to live in a little hut in the township all by himself. It was just big enough to hold him and us at our lessons. He had his dinner at the inn, along ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... Bugles shrilled in the small reserve, who then pushed up to meet that long tongue of blue licking out confidently toward the city. This time there was no stopping the Yankee advance. The reserve neither broke nor followed the shambling panic-striken flight of the militia, but were pushed back by sheer weight of numbers to the unfinished second line of the ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... mastery; we ought to speak well and write well. Indeed the two powers so react upon each other that we ought to cultivate both for the sake of either. True, some men, though inexpert as writers, have made themselves proficient as speakers; or though shambling and ineffective as speakers, have made themselves proficient as writers. But this is not natural or normal. Moreover these men might have gleaned more abundantly from their chosen field had they not shut it off from the acres adjacent. Fences ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Zeus we came to proud Laomedon and served him through a year for promised recompense, and he laid on us his commands. I round their city built the Trojans a wall, wide and most fair, that the city might be unstormed, and thou Phoebus, didst herd shambling crook-horned kine among the spurs of woody many-folded Ida. But when the joyous seasons were accomplishing the term of hire, then redoubtable Laomedon robbed us of all hire, and sent us off with threats. He threatened that he would bind together ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... Julia laughed, and was snatched away, half laughing and half in tears, and hurried down to the side street, where a carriage was waiting. And here there was one more delay: Chester Cox, a thin shambling figure, came forward from a shadowy doorway, and rather timidly ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... the shambling, yet in a way facile, footsteps of Barnaby, the sporadic freedman of the household, were soothing. Colonel Sommerton turned his eyes on the comer ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... the station by the under-ground passage and wait twenty minutes for a squalid, shambling local train which took them to Shawport, at the foot ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... interchange a procession of men streaming homeward in their hundreds came walking down the Embankment in twos and threes or singly, shambling past the loosely gathered assemblage about ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... partially erect, at a shambling run. The first two, bulls close to six feet, went down under fire from Asaki's needler. A third somehow escaped, swerving to the left, and came bounding at an angle toward Dane. The Terran jerked free his force blade as that ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... the oldest horse on the farm, a shambling, half-blind creature whose days of work had long been over. In summer she reveled in clover pasture, and the warmest box stall and choicest oats were hers in winter. Sarah had ridden her around the pasture a number of times, but it had never occurred to anyone that she would ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence |
