"Straddling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... day we would win our way back to the country we have abandoned. I have known and loved your name, sir, since first I browsed on pictures—Being measured for your first coat in Lilliput by the little tailors:—Straddling the pinnacled city. Ay, sir, and when the farmers picked you up 'twixt finger and thumb from among ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... the wounded hare rolled head over heels on the smooth dry grass, leaped into the air, and squealed piteously in the teeth of a worrying dog. The hounds crowded about her. Like an arrow, Tchertop-hanov flew off his horse, clutched his dagger, ran straddling among the dogs with furious imprecations, snatched the mangled hare from them, and, creasing up his whole face, he buried the dagger in its throat up to the very hilt... buried it, and began hallooing. Tihon Ivanitch made his appearance on the edge of the thicket 'Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!' vociferated ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... runner drew ahead, but he was too late. The assassin, straddling the wall, struck him furiously with his arquebus, and my comrade fell. I bent over him in an agony of fright, but he struggled to his feet, saying, "It is all right, Edmond; he has raised a lump on my head, nothing more; but ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... transplanting fork, and tear or cut them apart with a knife, keeping as much soil as possible with each ball of roots. Distribute them at their positions, but not so many at a time that any will dry out before you get them in place. Get down on your hands and knees, and, straddling the row, proceed to "set." With the left hand, or a trowel or dibber if the ground is not soft, make a hole large enough to take the roots and the better part of the stem, place the plant in position and firm into ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards' start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag-end of the race she'd get excited and desperate-like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose—and always ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... light of the flames that ran up the tarry rigging, at one stride the dawn was on us; with no flush of sunshine, but with a grey, steel-coloured ray that cut the darkness like a sword. I had managed to hoist myself again to the bowsprit, and, straddling it, had time in one glance aft to take in the scene of ruin. Yet in that glance I saw it—the yawning hole, the upheaved jagged deck-planks, the dark bodies hurled to right and left into the scuppers—by three separate ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... they advanced, each with a box on his shoulder; but what those boxes might be was a puzzle; they might be hand-grenades for throwing into the cave. However, they were soon down to the rock at which the ladder was let down, and then Smallbones stood up with a musket in his hand, with his straddling legs and short petticoat, and bawled out, ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... in a tone of unspeakable terror; and her finger pointed, among the crowd of dandies, to a face so pallid, so lugubrious and so ugly, with two such deep black cavities under the straddling eyebrows, that the death's head in question ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... had a sudden vision of shaven men with clay-coloured features, run, as it were, to seed, as he had seen them once in Pentonville, when he had gone there to visit a prisoner. Larry! Whom, as a baby creature, he had watched straddling; whom, as a little fellow, he had fagged; whom he had seen through scrapes at college; to whom he had lent money time and again, and time and again admonished in his courses. Larry! Five years ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... riders. The ponies bend forward from the hips, pressing their hands against the knees, or thighs just above the knees. The knees should be stiff, not bent. The backs are thus bent forward and the riders mount, straddling the shoulders of the players ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... collar so intimately there on the dresser top. His shirt, awaiting studs, spread out on the bed—their bed. His suspenders straddling the chair back. The ordering of the evening beefsteak lurking back in her consciousness. He liked sirloin, stabbing it vertically (he had a way of holding his fork upright between first and third fingers) when he carved, and cutting it skillfully away from the T bone. After ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... of the rocks and surf was passed, came another danger of the hideous brutes in brown skins and the briefest shirts, who came towards the boat, straddling through the water with outstretched arms, grinning and yelling their Arab invitations to mount their shoulders. I think these fellows frightened the ladies still more than the rocks and the surf; but the poor creatures were obliged to submit; and, trembling, were ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... and rather thick, but that was good living. So we had plenty of time to look about us. There was one individual who amused us mightily. This was one of the bewigged gentlemen in the red robes, who was straddling before the fire in the centre of the Court, in the attitude of the brazen Colossus, to the complete exclusion of everybody else. He had gathered up his robe behind, in much the same manner as a slovenly woman would her petticoats on a very dirty day, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... putting the wrong end up! I wish Eleanor was well enough to do it," he said—and then burst into self-derisive chuckles: "Imagine Eleanor straddling that ridgepole! It would ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... long-haired followers of Braccio and the Baglioni; their handsome savage faces; their brawny limbs clad in the particoloured hose and jackets of that period; feathered caps stuck sideways on their heads; a splendid swagger in their straddling legs. Female beauty lay outside the sphere of Signorelli's sympathy; and in the Monte Oliveto cloister he was not called upon to paint it. But none of the Italian masters felt more keenly, or more powerfully represented in their work, the muscular vigour of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... tidal wave of men broke over the town. Wagons, giant motor trucks, caterpillar tractors towing long strings of trailers, lurched and groaned and creaked over the hills, following roads unfit for a horse and buggy. Straddling derricks reared themselves everywhere; their feet were set in garden patches, in plowed fields, in lonely mesquite pastures, and even high up on the crests of stony ridges. One day their timbers were raw and clean, the next day they ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... lay In a crater by High Wood: He was there with straddling legs, Staring eyes as big as eggs, Purring as he lapped my blood, His black bulk darkening the day, With a voice cruel and flat, "Cat!... Cat!... Cat!..." ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... became aware—and he jammed on his brakes and dismounted by straddling a leg to the ground—that in the narrow lane he was between two plunging horses. Their riders had divided to make way for his bemused approach. They had violently sundered, expecting him to stop, until he was almost on top of them, and one of the ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... of capsizing the dishes, began to draw his bow and let fly his arrows right and left. Being an airy sprite, though fat, and not at any time particularly visible, a careless observer might have missed seeing him; but to any one with moderate powers of observation, he was there, straddling across a dish of salad as plain as the salt-cellar before Captain Wopper's nose. His deadly shafts, too, were visibly quivering in the breasts of Lewis Stoutley, George Lawrence, and the mad artist. Particularly obvious were these shafts ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... the older apes were for finishing what they had commenced; but Taug, sullen, mighty Taug, sprang quickly to the ape-man's side and straddling the unconscious form warned back those who would have struck his childhood playmate. And Teeka, his mate, came too, taking her place with bared fangs at Taug's side. Others followed their example, until at last Tarzan was surrounded ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... I saw them straddling through the air, Alas! too late to win them; I saw them chase the clouds, as if The devil had been in them; They were my darlings and my pride, My boyhood's only riches,— "Farewell, farewell," I faintly cried,— "My breeches! O ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... small beflounced sister, who, with bold pretty innocent eyes, a torrent of fair silky hair, a crimson fez, such as is worn by male Turks, very much askew on top of it, and a way of galloping and straddling about the ship in any company she could pick up—she had long thin legs, very short skirts and stockings of every tint— was going home, in elegant French clothes, to resume an interrupted education. Pandora overlooked and directed her relatives; Vogelstein could ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... of islands in the Pacific Ocean, straddling the equator, about one-half of the way from Hawaii to Australia; note-on 1 January 1995, Kiribati unilaterally moved the International Date Line from the middle of the country to include its easternmost islands and make it the same ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... was my hostess herself; in the afternoon she made us a visit in this horrid dress,—(for horrid she appeared in my eyes)—her cloaths were white, with red cuffs and scarlet lappels; and she held in her straddling lap a large black muff, as big as a porridge-pot. By this visit she lost all that respect her superlative beauty had so justly entitled her to, and I determined she should visit me no more in man's apparel. When ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... of the man was a fine tan, against which eyes, teeth, and moustache came out in brisk relief. The moustache avoided the tropical tint of the upper hair and was content with a modest brown. The owner came right along, walking with a stiff, strong, straddling gait, like a man not used to that way ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... server shall stand behind the service line with both feet on the floor and not touching or straddling the line, and serve the ball against the front wall above the front-wall service line and below the 16-ft. [4877mm] line before it touches any other part of the court, so that it shall drop directly, or off the side wall, ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... of that day, nevertheless, found our sight-seer smoking cigarettes in Shir Ali Khan's garden at Dizful and listening to the camel bells that jingled from the direction of certain tall black pointed arches straddling the dark river. When Matthews looked at those arches by sunlight, and at the queer old flat-topped yellow town visible through them, he regretted that he had made up his mind to continue his journey so soon. However, he was coming back. So he ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... on the occasion of our several pilgrimages, in beneath the great flying, or at least straddling buttresses to the left of the mighty facade, where you enter that great idle precinct of fine dense pavement and averted and sacrificed grandeur, the reverse of the monstrous medal of the front. Here the architectural monster rears ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... thousand eggs bubbling up against rank reefs of bacon. He had escaped from her somehow, and he had been very lucky. His star had saved him. It had also saved him from a devil on a red-hot bicycle. He had stood quite still, calm and undismayed, in the awful path of the straddling Apollyon whose head was girt around with yellow fire, and had seen him swerve madly and fall off the machine. And when the devil had picked himself up, he had tried to blast him with the Great Curse of the Underworld; but Paul had shown him his cornelian heart, his talisman, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... misanthropy, this determination to prove that man is guided solely by self-interest. This Voltaire thought was the seule verite contained in the "Maximes," and in a measure he was right. The moralist saw amour-propre as an Apollyon straddling right across the pathway of mankind; he saw lies flourish everywhere, and proclaim themselves to be the truth. The conscience of mankind was seduced or browbeaten by ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... hugest tops - flapping and bulging over anyhow; above which, they encase themselves in such wonderful overalls and petticoat trousers, made to all appearance of tarry old sails, so additionally stiffened with pitch and salt, that the wearers have a walk of their own, and go straddling and swinging about among the boats and barrels and nets and rigging, a sight to see. Then, their younger women, by dint of going down to the sea barefoot, to fling their baskets into the boats as they come in with the tide, and bespeak the first fruits ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... all in bright bloom. But elsewhere all was brown sand that looked as if it might blow dust in clouds, but which also, I was glad to see, looked as if it might absorb all ordinary rains. The street, about midway of its length, rose a little, then dropped, and straddling this ridge I found Tent 8, in the best possible position should the weather turn wet. As I entered, stooping, I peered about ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... coffee I made the whole Ural region smell of tar. And when we got to Ekaterinburg there was rain, snow, and hail. I put on my leather coat. The cabs are something inconceivable, wretched, dirty, drenched, without springs, the horse's four legs straddling, huge hoofs, gaunt spines ... the droshkies here are a clumsy parody of our britchkas. A tattered top is put on to a britchka, that is all. And the more exactly I describe the cabman here and his vehicle, the more it will seem like a caricature. They drive not on ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... watched, the scan shifted automatically, to pick up the eastern border of the Estates. Stretching across the landscape was a thin line of draft saurians, each with its driver straddling its neck. The train had halted and a heavily armored riding lizard advanced toward the surrogate. Its rider ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... centre. There was a good deal of blood on the face which obscured the hole made by the entrance of the bullet. The eyes were half-closed. A big camera, pointed downwards, was mounted on a high double ladder straddling the body and was operated by a young man in a bowler hat who went on with his work without taking the slightest notice of the detective ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... lucky for you that you didn't. He'd never have forgiven you. Had he got on his grand uniform? Yes, he would have, to show himself off, and he does look comic in it too. You see it was made for him at a guess in London; and, my! it is rum to see him straddling about in it sometimes. He's just like a peacock, and as proud of his feathers. But if you had laughed it would have been horrible. So mind what you are about, for he's sure to ask you some day, and he'll call you 'goo-ood boy' if you eat enough. I taught the old cock parrot to say that. But, ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... way off. As the figure moved like clockwork, however, and could neither hasten his enormous strides nor retard them, he arrived at the port when they were just beyond the reach of his club. Nevertheless, straddling from headland to headland, as his custom was, Talus attempted to strike a blow at the vessel, and, overreaching himself, tumbled at full length into the sea, which splashed high over his gigantic shape, as when an iceberg turns a somerset. There he lies ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at sea and doing for himself, and a certain humorous perception that he was ridiculously small—little Billy presented a very remarkable appearance as he stood that day on the deck of his father's vessel, with his little legs straddling wide apart, after the fashion of nautical men, and his hands thrust deep into the pockets ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... N, 173 00 E — Oceania, group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, straddling the equator and the International Date Line, about one-half of the way from Hawaii ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... sorts of grotesque inventions, whimsical incongruities, such as those arabesques found at Herculaneum, where Anchises, AEneas, and Ascanius are burlesqued by heads of apes and pigs, or Arion, with a grotesque motion, is straddling a great trout; or like that ludicrous parody which came from the hand of Titian in a playful hour, when he sketched the Laocoon whose three figures consist of apes. Annibale had a peculiar facility in these incongruous inventions, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... corner of the state of Washington, nestled in the Bight of Tyee and straddling the Skookum River, lies the little sawmill town of Port Agnew. It is a community somewhat difficult to locate, for the Bight of Tyee is not of sufficient importance as a harbor to have won consideration by the cartographers of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and Port Agnew is not ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... the space between his feet. He intensified his glare. He might have been posing to an illustrator of "Pilgrim's Progress" for a picture of "Apollyon straddling right across ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... Fritz set foot on the plateau, after a weary climb up the toilsome staircase which the tussock-grass and irregularities of the cliff afforded, than he startled one of these birds. It was straddling on the ground in a funny fashion over a little heap of rubbish, as the pile appeared to him. The albatross was quite in the open part of the tableland, and the reason why it selected such a spot for its resting- place, instead of amid the brushwood and ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the little photograph in her hand. There was plenty of light to see it by. The little old, red, flat-bottomed boat out in midstream, with Billie standing, barelegged to his knees, straddling from the stem seat to the rear middle one, while he strove persuasively with a big pickerel. Kit was half kneeling in the other end of the boat, bailing for dear life, dressed in an old middy and wash skirt, with a boy's farm hat pulled low ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... entrance to the orchard. He took a quick aim, pointing his gun a little in the air, in the direction of the cherry tree which overhung the spring. He fired. A hoarse cry rang from the tree; and the scarecrow which had been straddling the main branch for a month past came tumbling to the ground, only to jump up at once and make off as fast as its legs could ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... standing in the water as usual, but the boys could not make out what some of the others were doing. On the flat shore were several heaps of earth, and across them some of the birds were apparently sitting with one leg straddling out each side. So comical was their aspect that the boys burst into a laugh, which so scared the flamingoes that they all took flight instantly. The boys now waded up to the spot, and then got ashore to see ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... south-lover has an eye for them all. If he perceive them at New York and Philadelphia, - we imagine him boldly as liberated from Boston, - how could he fail to perceive them at La Rochelle? The streets of this dear little city are lined with arcades, - good, big, straddling arcades of stone, such as befit a land of hot summers, and which recalled to me, not to go further, the dusky portions of Bayonne. It contains, moreover, a great wide place d'armes, which looked for all the world like the piazza of some dead ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... it proved. With two of them straddling the I-beam, the leverage was great enough to pull the plate out. Running it over to the elevator, they lowered the heavy mass, disconnected the cable, and rode down to Arcot's laboratory. Again the I-beam and handling machine were brought into ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... Straddling the log, he started to get his baited hook in motion. The wriggling worms sank a little in the swirl. At first, he was unable to just master the difficult problem of how to influence the bait to float into ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... so far and was waving his pipe-stem for the chorus when the company looked up and saw Sal straddling in the doorway with her fists on her hips. The sight daunted them for a moment: but she held up a finger, signing them to keep the news to themselves, and leaned her shoulder against the doorpost with her eyes steady on the back of her husband's scrag neck. His fate was upon ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in among the buildings of the 88 ranch his eyes were gratified by the sight of freckle-faced Bill Allen straddling a cracker-box in front of the bunkhouse and having his hair cut by ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... pallid, unreal, water-colour exhibition, a row of blurs of faintly coloured portraits of yourself, spread on space? Do you not see how unfair it is—this spinning out of one's own little dark, tired inside, a theory for a wide heaven and earth, this straddling with one temperament ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... wire he happened to have on the engine, and with this I made a flying cut in the third wire of the second cross arm. I attached the little pocket instrument, and found that upon adjusting it, I was on a commercial wire. There I was, straddling a cross arm between heaven and earth, with the instrument held on my knee, and totally ignorant of any of the calls or the wire I was on. I yelled down to the conductor and asked him if he knew any of the calls. No; of course he didn't; and he was so excited he didn't have sense enough ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... fearfully inclined to fat?); the raw-boned young surgeon with the Aberdeen accent; "the ranker," erect and grizzled, and looking ever so little not quite at his ease, you know, for the languid lad with fawn-coloured moustache straddling on the chair beside him is an Honourable; the jovial portly Yorkshireman, who is in the Highland Light Infantry, naturally; and the lively loud-voiced Irishman, laughing consumedly at his own jokes—all are here, conversing, smoking, mildly chaffing each other, and exchanging ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... The loss of the boat seemed at first to mark the end of their attempt to equal the record of their predecessors. But Monett insisted that they try his plan of straddling the stern of the remaining boat. "If we strike too rough water, I can always swing overboard," he urged. "And we've needed a drag that wouldn't get fouled ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... things. He left a piece of marble on the work for it, which he did not carve, as he was afterwards prevented. There were besides other statues, which represented those for whom the tombs were erected. All, in conclusion, were more divine than human; but above all, the Madonna, with her little child straddling across her thigh, of this I judge it better to be silent than to say but little, and so I pass it by.(51) We owe thanks to Pope Clement for these masterpieces; and if he had done no other praiseworthy ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... of 33 coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, straddling the equator; the capital Tarawa is about one-half of the way from Hawaii to Australia; note - on 1 January 1995, Kiribati proclaimed that all of its territory lies in the same time zone as its Gilbert Islands group (GMT 12) even though the Phoenix Islands and the Line Islands under its jurisdiction ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... took up the chorus with all the power of Texan lungs and even Billy joined in. The sight that met their eyes was typical of the men and the mood and the place. Leaning along the walls, lounging on the table and straddling chairs with their forearms crossed on the backs were nine cowboys, ranging from old twenty to young fifty in years, and all were shouting the song and keeping time with their hands ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... watched for and avoided—the low, square, black-browed, black-bearded Man who brandished a broom at the little girls who dropped their apple-cores and crusts on the pavements, and who shook his fist at the jeering little boys who dared to swarm to the forbidden top and sit straddling the dividing fence. That Uncle Michael, the janitor, was getting old and had rheumatic twinges was indeed Uncle Michael's excuse, but Emmy Lou did not know this, and her fear of Uncle ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... seemed to incline from the perpendicular towards the beacon. The horizontal rope-ladder before noticed was again stretched to preserve the communication, and the artificers were once more obliged to practise the awkward and straddling manner of their passage ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he said thickly. "And now let no man . . ." He jerked his arm out of my grasp. I watched his back as he went away. It was a long street, and he remained in sight for some time. He walked rather slow, and straddling his legs a little, as if he had found it difficult to keep a straight line. Just before I lost him I fancied ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Monsieur Duchemin proceeded to do away his hat and stick and chamois gloves; while his friend, straddling in front of a cold grate and extending his hands to an imaginary blaze, covered with a mild complaint the curiosity excited by a brief study of that face ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... how powerfully her arguments were working on him. That little imp of doubt which had vexed him in the cab as he drove home from Ovington Square had not died in the night. It had grown and waxed more formidable. And, now, aided by this ally from without, it had become a colossus, straddling his soul. Derek looked frequently at the clock, and cursed the unknown cabman whose delay was prolonging the scene. Something told him that only flight could serve him now. He never had been able to withstand his mother in one of her militant moods. She seemed ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... befall the Indian. He took a bee line upon his old tracks, and when the place was sighted we threaded what seemed to be a rivulet between cliffs, for a moist depressed street-center kept us straddling something like a gutter, while with outstretched hands we could brace ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Proudly straddling on its four hind-claws, the insect holds its long body almost vertical. The murderous fore-limbs, at first folded and pressed against one another on the thorax, open to their full extent, forming a cross with the body, and exhibiting the axillae ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... upon your perilous vocation. We geniuses—for I am one too—care as little for the world as it cares for us; without any ado, in the seven-league boots which we bring into the world with us, we stride on directly into eternity. A most lamentable, inconvenient straddling position this—one leg in the future, where nothing is to be discerned but the rosy morn and the faces of future children, the other leg still in the middle of Rome, in the Piazza del Popolo, where the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... climbing of trees and of gymnastic exercises on the parallel and horizontal bars. It is obvious that pressure on the genital organs will very readily arise in these ways. But cases are reported in which the child experiences sexual excitement from exercising on the horizontal bar, not when he is straddling the bar, but when he is hanging to it by the hands. It must in these cases remain doubtful whether the sexual excitement results from the pressure of the breeches, or is a direct result of the hanging posture. Where pressure is exerted on the genital organs, ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... like a ghost from the antique past, with his old bones straddling neither horse nor mule, but seated sidewise on a brindle bull, and to reach the place where he was to discourse music he had made a "soon start" yesterday morning and had slept lying by ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... his back to the player and, bending his head low, rests his hands on his knees. This is called "Giving a back." The other boy places his hands on the first boy's back and leaps over him, by straddling his legs wide apart on each side like a frog. The second boy then assumes the stooping posture, and the third boy leaps over the first and second, and the fourth over all three, one at a ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... devil of a Portuguese, looking on—swore that he would be the death of any man who laid violent hands upon his inviolable person. This threat being overheard, a band of desperadoes, coming up from behind, tripped him up in an instant, and in the twinkling of an eye the Portuguese was straddling an oar, borne aloft by an uproarious multitude, who rushed him along the deck at a railroad gallop. The living mass of arms all round and beneath him was so dense, that every time he inclined one side he was instantly pushed upright, but only to fall over again, to receive another ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... that sometimes it seemed the tigerish snarl of a rapid, and sometimes the leonine roar of a cataract. A bend of the chasm at last brought the voyagers in sight of the monster, which was frothing and howling to devour them. It was a terrific spectacle. It was like Apollyon "straddling quite across the way," to intercept Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. From one dizzy rampart to the other, and as far down the echoing cavern as eye could reach, the river was white with an arrowy rapid storming though a labyrinth ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... the napkin at a time—but that some one chesnut, of more life and rotundity than the rest, must be put in motion—it so fell out, however, that one was actually sent rolling off the table; and as Phutatorius sat straddling under—it fell perpendicularly into that particular aperture of Phutatorius's breeches, for which, to the shame and indelicacy of our language be it spoke, there is no chaste word throughout all Johnson's dictionary—let it suffice to say—it was that particular aperture which, in all good societies, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Straddling the limb, I took a firm hold with both hands in front of me, for no other boughs were close enough to be grasped, and thus inch by inch I ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... by placing his big shoulder against it, and curving his powerful neck round it, and then bending it over with his massive head. Then, too, he often rides down small trees, such as birch or poplars, just by straddling his fore legs about them and using his chest ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... figure, grotesque, peregrinate, and to the eye of a peasant certainly diabolical; then perch it on the stile in the midst of those green English fields, and in sight of that primitive English village; there let it sit straddling, its long legs dangling down, a short German pipe emitting clouds from one corner of those sardonic lips, its dark eyes glaring through the spectacles full upon the parson, yet askant upon Lenny Fairfield. Lenny Fairfield looked ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the best fellow in New Orleans, and there's only one man I'd rather see your sister marry than him; that's me. Now I'm going to select a present before the rush commences. What would you think of an onyx clock with gold cupids straddling around over it?" ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... seized by five women, each holding arm or leg or head; we were lifted like children, straddling helpless children, and borne onward, wriggling ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... situations of "The Eloquent Dempsey," a satire on the man who straddles all questions, as at one time, at any rate, did so many Irish politicians. Dempsey might have continued his career of straddling indefinitely had he not a mania for speech-making that he could not control. In the end, however, he was undone by a well-intentioned conspiracy, arranged by his wife, to get him out of politics altogether and out of his liquor-selling and into farming ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... were cheerfully lit behind their red blinds. A few straddling grooms and troopers talked and spat in the brightness of the entrance, and outside in the street was a servant leading up and down a beautiful sorrel mare, ready saddled, that was mark'd on the near hind leg with a high ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... khaki struts the limelit boards: With false moustache, set smirk and ogling eyes And straddling legs and swinging hips she tries To swagger it like a soldier, while the chords Of rampant ragtime jangle, clash, and clatter; And over the brassy blare and drumming din She strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin Spirtle ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... he complained suddenly, "so popularly unpopular as the man who butts in. I know that, but still I've always taken his side. I've always been for him." He halted, straddling with legs apart and hands deep in his trousers pockets, and ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... raised on the ranges he would not have been caught so far from his horse, but a Manitoban sometimes uses his legs to walk with, while his brother in Alberta finds them useful only for wearing schaps and straddling a saddle. By the time Travers reached the ranch buildings, caught and saddled his horse, made a fruitless search for his revolver, substituted a rifle which lay at hand, and at length found himself upon the trail, darkness was setting in, and ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... rolled. After several changes of position, in which neither man was at all damaged except in his appearance, Barber came to the top and stayed there, like the largest potato in a basket. Then straddling the lighter man, who was blowing hoarsely, Big ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... to understand that their large bodies might be in the way; at the far gate there was the mare holding her head over the bars, and beside her the liver-coloured foal with its head towards its mother's flank, apparently still much embarrassed by its own straddling existence. The way lay entirely through Mr. Poyser's own fields till they reached the main road leading to the village, and he turned a keen eye on the stock and the crops as they went along, while Mrs. Poyser was ready to supply a running commentary on them all. The woman who ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... only half-raised when Jason was upon him, and he swung wildly. Jason ducked under the blow and used Ch'aka's momentum to help throw him as he grabbed the club arm and pulled. Face down the armored man crashed against the stones and Jason was straddling his back even as he fell, clutching for his chin. He lacerated his fingers on a jagged tooth necklace then grasped the man's thick beard and pulled back. For a single long instant, before he could writhe free and roll over, Ch'aka's head was stretched back, ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... shall I be big enough to fight bars and bufflers and Injuns?" asked Noah, stopping in his play and straddling ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... said Peter; "look at the Aqueduct straddling slap across the valley like a giant centipede, and then the towns sticking their church spires up out of the trees like pens out of an inkstand. I think ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... on a price, to be paid in hides delivered at Whoop-Up. West turned and went straddling to the place where he and Morse had left their horses. On the way he came face to face with a girl, a lithe, dusky young creature, Indian brown, the tan of a hundred summer suns and winds painted on the oval of her lifted ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... of self-government and mankind. These officers were very comely, intelligent- looking people with the most good-natured faces. They came and went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel scabbards against the tables, or rising and straddling off with their long swords kicking against their legs. They are the most stylish soldiers in the world, and one has no notion how ill they can dress when left to themselves, till one sees them in ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... die!" said Apollyon, straddling over the whole breadth of the narrow way. "I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no further. Here will I spill ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... once put it, to find a reason for every decision it may wish to render; or, as experience has shown, a method to evade any question which it cannot decently decide in accordance with public opinion. The art of straddling is not confined to the political arena. The Southern situation has been well described by a colored editor in Richmond: "When we seek relief at the hands of Congress, we are informed that our plea involves a legal question, ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... of the strongest description, apparently as a relief to his feelings. Happily for the cause it had at heart, the Boys' Home was guided by large-minded counsels, and if the eyes of the master were as the eyes of Argus, they could also wink on occasion. "Hout with it!" said the bow-legged boy, straddling before Jan. "If it wos Buckingham Palace as you resided in, make a clean breast of it, and ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the veranda Mr. Van Wyk put his hands in his pockets, and, straddling his legs, stared down at a black panther skin lying on the floor before a rocking-chair. "It looks as if the fellow had not the pluck to play his own ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... when some mysterious influence awoke me, and I started up, gazing eagerly about me. There was still nothing in sight from the low elevation of the boat herself, but being awake I decided to have a look round from aloft. In another minute I was straddling the yard of the main lug, from which position, as the boat floated up on a ridge of swell, I caught a momentary glimpse of something gleaming white in the brilliant sunshine right ahead. It could, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... here and there by stone walls, with scattered grey houses at intervals. There is not a feature of any kind on which the eye can rest. In the foreground the earth is all tunnelled and tumbled; quarries stretch in every direction, with huge, gaunt, straddling, gallows-like structures emerging, a wheel spinning at the top, and ropes travelling into the abyss; heaps of grey debris, interspersed with stunted grass, huge excavations, ugly ravines with a spout of grim stone at the seaward opening, like the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed, The house-dog on his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head, The cat's dark silhouette on the wall A couchant tiger's seemed to fall; And, for the winter fireside meet, Between the andirons' straddling feet, The mug of cider simmered slow, The apples sputtered in a row, And, close at hand, the basket stood With ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... he pointed at still bore in its upper branches the remains of our tree-top retreat, a rotted beam or two straddling a crotch. "Peter Pan should rebuild it," said I. "I shall drop a line to Wendy. Do you still hesitate to turn over ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... complete good humour. "I am an actor; and if I ever had a private character, I have forgotten it. I am no more a genuine brigand than I am a genuine courier. I am only a bundle of masks, and you can't fight a duel with that." And he laughed with boyish pleasure and fell into his old straddling attitude, with his back to ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... to the oak, As well-heads to the river's height, As to the chicken the moist yolk, As to high noon the day's first white— Such is the baby to the man. There, straddling one red arm and leg, Lay my last work, in length a span, Half hatched, and conscious of the egg. A creditable child, I hoped; And half a score of joys to be Through sunny lengths of prospect sloped Smooth to the bland futurity. O, fate surpassing ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... outlined against the ceiling of the waters like thin, black, paper cutouts. Picture a forest clinging to the sides of a peak in the Harz Mountains, but a submerged forest. The trails were cluttered with algae and fucus plants, hosts of crustaceans swarming among them. I plunged on, scaling rocks, straddling fallen tree trunks, snapping marine creepers that swayed from one tree to another, startling the fish that flitted from branch to branch. Carried away, I didn't feel exhausted any more. I followed a guide who was ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... granted. This is what the Capuchin did. I was young and he was old, I undecided and he perfectly clear in his intention. There was little more—even to my too charitable eyes—in his favour, certainly not his looks. He was a huge, straddling, positive kind of a fellow with an air of specious, bluff benevolence about him which gave way to examination. He had a very ugly mouth under his beard, cut up sideways by the pressure of his long tooth to emerge; his eyes were small, greedy and near together; they looked different ways. His ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... complete battery seemed to have been driven in there and the guns and materiel piled, pell-mell, on top of one another. Deciding finally to take the bull by the horns, he leaped to the axle of a piece and so pursued his way, jumping from wheel to wheel, straddling the guns, at the imminent risk of breaking his legs, if not his neck. Afterward it was some horses that blocked his way, and he made himself lowly and stooped, creeping among the feet and underneath the bellies of the sorry jades, who were ready to die of inanition, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... hospitable reception would forever have incapacitated us for the service of the Russian American Telegraph Company! I had only time to cast a hurried glance back at the Major. He looked like a frightened landsman straddling the end of a studdingsail-boom run out to leeward on a fast clipper, and his face was screwed up into an expression of mingled pain, amusement, and astonishment, which evidently did not begin to do justice ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... well out of earshot. Then he unbolted the gate and stole up the alley on tiptoe, in the opposite direction. It led into Wordsworth Avenue just behind Weintraub's drug store, over the rear of which hung the great girders and trestles of the "L" station, a kind of Swiss chalet straddling the street on stilts. He thought it prudent to make a detour, so he turned east on Wordsworth Avenue until he reached Whittier Street, then sauntered easily down Whittier for a block, spying sharply for evidences of pursuit. Brooklyn ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... was Gimp who moved ahead of him. Looking out, Frank saw what was certainly Ramos, already straddling a drum marked with a huge red M.R., riding it like a jaunty troll on a seahorse. He saw the Kuzaks dive for their initialled drums, big men not yet as apt in this new game as in football, but ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Straddling the Rhone, where it issues from the bluest lake in the world, looking out upon green meadows and wooded hills, backed by the dark ridge of the Saleve, with the "great white mountain" visible in the distance, Geneva has the advantage ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... cried the great stolid fellow; and he made a dash forward, straddling out his legs as if on board ship, when, to his intense astonishment, his quarry bent down, dashed at him, ducked between his knees, struggling through, and throwing the great sailor headlong flat upon ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... method of operation, and it was not long before a noise in the back room signalled the break-up of the card game. Half a dozen rough-looking fellows from Redmans Creek followed one another out to the saloon, headed, as usual, by McGregor, straddling his legs and swaggering, looking round with a cynical twist on his handsome face. They went over to ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... what horses came across them, for lack of occupation for their hands. Yonder, huge Pomeranians, with bosks of beard stiffened out square from the chin, hurtled mountainous among the peaceable inhabitants. Troopers dismounted went straddling, in tight hose and loose, prepared to drink good-will to whomsoever would furnish the best quality liquor for that solemn pledge, and equally ready to pick a quarrel with them that would not. It was a scene of flaring feathers, wide-flapped bonnets, flaunting hose, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... head," said the Professor, straddling his malleable fingers across the young man's bumpy brow—"In this head we find Ideality large—abnormally large, in fact; thurby indicating—taken in conjunction with a like development of the perceptive ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... breaks, I shall come to grief in the midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip and the support does not break. With the bent switch which my brother hands me, I bring the finest clusters within my reach. I soon fill my pockets. Moving backwards, still straddling my branch, I recover terra firma. O wondrous days of litheness and assurance, when, for a few filberts, on a perilous perch we ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... Giles, straddling the wall, laid finger to lip, then dropping cat-like to his feet, drew Beltane ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... the children not on the arm, as our nurses do, but straddling on the hip, and usually supported by a cloth which ties in a knot on the opposite shoulder. This practice I have been told is common in some parts of Wales. It is much safer than the other method, less tiresome to the nurse, and the child has the advantage ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... though I was strong for my age, I found the first plank very contrary. After blowing out my candles I fixed one end of the board under my heavy four-post bed, pointing the other end out through the window, slanting upwards. Straddling across it, I very gingerly edged it out, a hand's breadth at a time, till I had some ten feet wagging about in the air over the lane. It was as much as I could do unaided, to aim the thing. It seemed to have a wild, contrary kind of life in it. Once or twice I came near to dropping it into ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... other child—was a fat-cheeked boy in his eighth year, oftenest seen on horseback, sitting fast asleep with his hands clutched in the folds of the Judge's coat and his short legs and browned feet spread wide behind the saddle. It was hard straddling, but it ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... now, it was irritating to my growing sense of self-reliance. To show how little I heeded her admonition, how well able I was to take care of myself, as I smiled loftily from my dangerous perch, with my legs hardly straddling the horse's back, I disdained to secure myself by holding to the harness, but folded my arms with the ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... threatened us. Though we felt quite secure in our "roost" we could not remain there long. It was by no means comfortable, straddling the naked branch of a tree; but the comfort was a small consideration. We were both used to riding such a stock-horse, and as for Brace, he could have gone to sleep with only the flying-jib-boom ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... and Charles Lamb had been O'er bottled porter and the Fairy Queen! In youth, one day, seeking forbidden fruit Tom tumbled from the branches with his loot, And broken bones compelled the lad to go On straddling crutches, warily and slow, Counting the pebbles on his path below. The noisy pleasures of the open air, The football kicked exuberant here and there. Cricket, beloved of sinewy juvenals, And golf with all its hazards, clubs and balls, Were not in Taylor's ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... his eyes and gazed forward. Then he came down with a thud, abruptly re-straddling his horse, and uttered one ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... finger on Ignorance as the key to the enigma? Notice, too, how Curr, being a bit of a sticker himself, is thereby disqualified from knowing that the centaurs were better constructed for firing other people over their heads than for straddling their own backs. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... slogan. That straight and narrow path was not in his religious practice. He drove a long ball, and he drove a great many that did not return in his bag. He glanced resentfully to the right, where Judge Weatherup was straddling the fence, and to the left, where Yancy ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... space, straddling the first line of sodden clothes as he fell. Even in that brief flight the thought came to his mind that it would have been infinitely better for him if the falling rain had not weighted and flattened those sagging lines of washing. Then he ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... there some moments straddling that branch. Then I descended, and went back to the place I had dropped my rifle, and securing that I stood a moment listening. The hounds had taken the chase around below me into the gorge and were drawing away. It was ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... house dog on his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head, The cat's dark silhouette on the wall A couchant tiger's seemed to fall; And, for the winter fireside meet, Between the andirons' straddling feet The mug of cider simmered slow, And apples sputtered in a row. And, close at hand, the basket stood With nuts ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... be good luck to be a woman,' she said. 'But one begins with it from a baby; one gets used to it. And I shouldn't like to be a man,—to cough so loud, and stand straddling about on a wet day, and be so wasteful with meat and drink. They're ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... was, I met the two one evening at the Provises', and with exuberant congratulation. Then straddling as a young Colossus on the hearth-rug, and with an admonitory forefinger, I proclaimed to the universe at large that Mrs. Risby had blighted my existence and beseeched for Warwick some immediate and fatal and particularly excruciating malady. In fine, I was abjectly ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... for this move, because the British were seriously threatening the position, straddling La Bassee Canal where it flows between Cuinchy and Givenchy, and there was danger that they might capture La Bassee, where the Germans held a salient of considerable strategical importance, as it covered their line of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... however, may yield either of two results. A man may take, for the reality of himself, either the low view of human nature, in which man is but "a forked straddling animal with bandy legs," or the high view, in which he is a spirit, and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries. It is the latter view which Thomas Carlyle champions, through this and many other volumes, against the materialistic ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... we reached Torquemada, home of the Grand Inquisitor; crossed the Pisuerga by a long-legged bridge straddling across the river-bed; had a fleeting glimpse of Venta de Banos; came to a straight-cut canal of beryl-green water (which Dick gloomily pronounced a surprising evidence of energy in Spain), and slowed down to wonder at a village of cave ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... see what had really happened. An hour later his brigade was in bivouac on the enemy's ground, and its idlers were examining, with something of awe, as the faithful inspect a saint's relics, a score of straddling dead horses and three disabled guns, all spiked. The fallen men had been carried away; their torn and broken bodies would have ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... inside and found Black Bart on the bed straddling the body of Whistling Dan, and growling at poor Mrs. Daniels, who crouched in a corner of the room. It required patient work before he was convinced that they actually meant no ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... it is so soon over, I should want it again and again: it's made me so randy for a fuck. Do have me, some one at once." She had pulled up her skirts and was straddling over one end of the stool, frigging herself, so to oblige Patty, I quickly pushed her backwards, and got into her longing slit. The grind did not last long, both being so hot for it, so it came off in a ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... very giantly man, and was clad in a coarse blue coat, strapped round the waist with a leathern belt, which caused the enormous skirts and pockets to set off with a very warlike sweep. His ponderous legs were cased in a pair of foxy-colored jack-boots, and he was straddling in the attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, before a bit of broken looking-glass, shaving himself with a villainously dull razor. This afflicting operation caused him to make a series of horrible grimaces, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... stands for "shuttlecock," because the large rolls (canons), tied at the knee and wide at the bottom, bore a great resemblance to shuttlecocks turned upside down. I cannot see how this can suit the words marcher carquills, for the motion of the canons of gallants, walking or straddling about, is very unlike that produced by shuttlecocks beaten by battledores; I still think "beams of a mill" right, because, though the canons did not look like beams of a mill, the legs did, when ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... merged from dusk when the boys dragged themselves in, smelling of dust and horses. They went into the water basins like ducks. Pan lighted the lantern and put it on the table. Then the boys came straddling the bench like cowboys mounting horses. Their faces were red and shiny, their ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... shout—what? What word? What phrase? No; it was impossible. Then how? . . . She frowned, discovered it, dashed at the piano, which had stood open all night, and made the rosewood monster growl savagery in an irritated bass. She struck chords as if firing shots after that straddling, broad figure in ample white trousers and a dark uniform jacket with gold shoulder- straps, and then she pursued him with the same thing she had played the evening before—a modern, fierce piece of love music which had been tried more than once against the thunderstorms of the group. She accentuated ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... to hear from Thad," explained Step Hen, as though he might himself be "up in the air," or, as he would himself have said, "straddling the fence," not knowing whether to scoff at the other's scheme, or give it his ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... remarks, while evidently spoken in a spirit of levity, aroused strenuous opposition above. There was an immediate movement of the object straddling the limb. Then two arms waved vigorously, and a high-pitched ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... first conquered the passes between Evolena and Zermatt (still one of the least overrun mountain regions of Switzerland), their sublime solitudes were awful with the mystery of unexplored loneliness. Now professors climb up them, and artists slide down them, and they are photographed with "members" straddling over their dire crevasses, or cutting capers on their scornful summits, or turning somersaults down their infinite precipices. The air of the high Alps was inhaled by few Englishmen before Arthur Malkin; one can not help thinking that now, even ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... course everybody that knew anything at all about such warfare knew that they would do just such a thing, which made it all the more bitter. But Red had cultivated the habit of thinking quickly and he saw at once that the remedy lay with him; he astonished the exultant savages by straddling his disgruntled horse as it scrambled to its feet and galloping away from them, bearing slightly to the south, because he wished to lure his pursuers to ride closer to his anxious and ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... and glimmering in the darkness. But even in the darkness a ridge of harder rock showed me a likely way. I remembered that the cliff hereabouts was of no great height and scalable in a score of places. Very cautiously, and sometimes sitting and straddling the ridge while my fingers sought a new grip, I mounted to the edge of a heathery down; and there, after pricking myself sorely among the furze-bushes that guarded it, found a passage through and cast myself at full length on the ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... away—a snugly fitting trapdoor about two feet square—there yawned beneath it, leading slantwise downward in the direction of the street, a tunnel through the soft yielding sand, braced and strengthened here and there with lids and sides of cracker-boxes. "Now, if you don't mind straddling a fence, sir, I'll show you the other end," said the captain, imperturbably leading the way, and Canker, half-dazed yet wholly in command of his stock of blasphemy, followed. At the curb, right in the midst of a lot of loose hay from ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... of Dwarfland? does thy horn Inform the gnomes and goblins of the hour When they may gambol under haw and thorn, Straddling each winking web and twinkling flower? Or bell-ringer of Elfland? whose tall tower The liriodendron is? from whence is borne The elfin music of thy bell's deep bass, To summon Faeries to their starlit maze, ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... weak, straddling beetles Shut up to be frozen In cold empty huts By the pitiless peasants. The servants are crawling All over the courtyard. Their master long since Has forgotten about them, And left them to live 150 As they can. ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... attempt to answer that fool question; Cummings spoke for me, lawyer fashion, straddling the question, bringing up the arguments pro ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... Elevated Railway structure straddling almost its entire length, Sixth Avenue, sullen as a clayey stream, flows in gloom and crash. Here, in this underworld created by man's superstructure, Mrs. Einstein, Slightly Used Gowns, nudges Mike's Eating-Place ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... obols they give you and which you have so painfully earned in the galleys, in battles and sieges. But what I stomach least is that you go to sit on the tribunal by order. Some lewd stripling, the son of Chereas, to wit, enters your house balancing his body, rotten with debauchery, on his straddling legs and charges you to come and judge at daybreak, and precisely to the minute. "He who only presents himself after the opening of the Court," says he, "will not get the triobolus." But he himself, though he arrives late, will nevertheless ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... northern New York State, was the W.H. Comstock factory, better known as the home of the celebrated Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills. This business never grew to be more than a modest undertaking in modern industrial terms, and amid the congestion of any large city its few buildings straddling a branch railroad and its work force of several dozens at most would have been little noticed, but in its rural setting the enterprise occupied a prominent role in the economic life of the community for over ninety years. ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... trade," McCallum used to remark, "and McGuffie is no' the man for an elder; but sall, naebody ever got the better o' him at a bargain." Among the lads of the Seminary he was a local hero, and on their way home from school they loitered to study him, standing in the gateway of his stables, straddling his legs, chewing a straw, and shouting his views on the Muirtown races to friends at the distance of half a street. When he was in good humour he would nod to the lads and wink to them with such acuteness and drollery that they attempted to perform ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... eagerness. He got a grip of the tree and up he went, "hand over hand," root over root. I had just time to note others of his species had dropped here and there upon the ground, and were hurrying with frantic haste to the same destination when he reached the fatal branch, and was straddling victoriously down it, blind to all but love and longing. That ill-omened bird who stood above the maiden-flower let him come within a stalk's length, so near that the white splendour of his sleeping lady gleamed within ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... more coffee was needed and proceeded to make it. Not until the pot was heating did he motion the boys to sit down at the kitchen table. He joined them, turning a chair around and straddling it, his chin resting on his hands on the back, ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... colt did not suffer. Becoming ever more confident of himself as the days passed, he soon revealed pronounced curiosity and an aptitude for play. He would stare at strutting roosters, gaze after straddling hens, blink quizzically at the burro, frown upon the grunting pigs, all as if cataloguing these specimens, listing them in his thoughts, some day to make good use of the knowledge. But most of all he showed interest in and playfulness toward his ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... triumphed, tilting up his hairless pug face and straddling his thin, long legs. "That surprises you. I am bound to do my best for my company. They have enormous expenses. Why—our agent in Horta tells me they spend fifty thousand pounds every year in advertising all over the world! One can't be too economical in working the show. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... the "thing itself" which matters—the thing which "owes the worm no silk, the cat no perfume." Forked straddling animals are we all, as the mad king says in the play, and it is mere effeminacy and affectation to cover up ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... she had just gone to her room when somebody knocked at her door. McClane stood outside, straddling, his way when he had got something important on hand. He asked if he might come in and speak ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... seems quite familiar, leaves no impression. Yes, the fences tied like that with reeds, overtopped by sprouting elders, the fat weeds on wall and tomb, the undulations of sere green plain, the white snow-masses floating, as it were, in the blue of the sky; the straddling bits of aqueduct, the lumps of masonry. Am I utterly and for ever spoilt for this? Has it given me so much that it can never give me any more?—that the sight of Arezzo and its towers beneath the ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee |
