"Straggle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nora thinks it's horrid, and Phil and Felix always hang back for the very last, and try to look as if they didn't belong to us at all. Nannie and Maedel go with papa, Kathie and Paul with Miss Marston, and the rest of us straggle along as we like until we get to the church. It's brown and very large, and has a good deal of ivy growing all over it. It's the church where Murray Unsworth and Helen Vassah stood sponsors for their little cousin Paul; they go there and their ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... behold the noble and generous sons and daughters of Kentucky and Tennessee, conferring the boon of freedom on the African race, within their borders. Missouri and Maryland will soon follow their example; nor will North Carolina and Virginia long lag behind; South Carolina will straggle long and hard, but she must ultimately yield; and the soft zephyr of freedom will then fan the fair fields of Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas; Louisiana will feel its refreshing influence; and the Lone Star, (Texas), cannot long stand ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... to straggle in next week. Coneways' isn't due until the 31st—the very last minute! But he's always prompt, thank ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... of Kubla Khan in Xanadu, and twenty other whimsical things. At nearly midnight, when we go to bed, we take a last look at it. It is a ruin, like the Colosseum,—great gaps of darkness are there, with broken rows of splendor. The lights are gone on one side the dome,—they straggle fitfully here and there down the other and over the faade, fading even as we look. It is melancholy enough. It is a bankrupt heiress, an old and wrinkled beauty, that tells strange tales of its former wealth and charms, when the world was at its feet. It is the once mighty Catholic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... higher than if I had been overcharged separately for everything. "Mr." is the Master of the Arts of extras. He does not wish to make a profit; oh no! but—ahem—he makes it. As for the outsiders who straggle in casually for luncheon and want to be sharp with "Mr." afterwards, they are soon settled. One who won't be done, complains of a prince's ransom for a potato-salad.—"If you haf pertatas, you pay for pertatas."—TALLEYRAND could ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... before the other's energy. He was of that class who were once denominated "poor whites." The war taught him that he was as good a man to stop bullets as one that was gentler bred, and during that straggle which the non-slaveholders fought at the beck and in the interest of the slaveholding aristocracy, he had learned more of manhood than he had ever known before. In the old days his father had been an overseer on a plantation adjoining Knapp-of-Reeds, and as a boy he had ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... not to suffer their men to straggle as we may expect a sudden attack, when one is made. The Genl desires all the officers to lodge in camp, as in the critical situation of affairs, ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... showed itself on them, like a thin gauze veil. These hedges are not all so well kept and trimmed as I expected to find them. Some, it is true, are cut very carefully; these are generally hedges to ornamental grounds; but many of those which separate the fields straggle and sprawl, and have some high bushes and some low ones, and, in short, are no more like a hedge than many rows of bushes that we have at home. But such as they are, they are the only dividing lines of the fields, and it is certainly a more picturesque mode of division than our stone or ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... McClellan and other generals straggled about the country, visiting cities hundreds of miles distant from the camp. And such generals complain of straggling! Make the army fight! inspire with confidence the soldier—then he will not straggle. ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Colonel Graves sadly. "Plenty of men would volunteer, but, much as every one is suffering—the ladies almost as bad as your wounded, Morton—I dare not send them, for they would never get back with their loads. Many of the brave fellows would straggle back, of course, but instead of bringing ice, Doctor, they would be bearing ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... fact, we learned later that all the servants were out except the nursery governess. There were two small children. There was a servants' ball somewhere, and, with the exception of the butler, it was after two before they commenced to straggle in. Except two plain-clothes men from the central office, a physician who was with Elinor in her room, and the governess, there was no one else in the house but the children, asleep in ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... summer, when the sharper lines of nature are softened by the haze, some came to us from across the mountains to make up for the deserters. From time to time a little group would straggle to the gates of the station, weary and footsore, but overjoyed at the sight of white faces again: the fathers walking ahead with watchful eyes, the women and older children driving the horses, and the babies slung to the pack in hickory withes. Nay, some of our best citizens came ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... getting away. If we had cut off their retreat we might have had some hard fighting. There is nothing nastier than tackling a rat in a corner. It is a much simpler business to cut up flying men. All beaten troops straggle and desert. Irregulars, operating in their own country, simply melt away after a defeat. They sneak off home, hide their arms in hay stacks, and pretend they never left their ploughs. I know their ways, and, by God, I'll track ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... its immense abbey the town of Villeneuve has built itself a rough faubourg; the fragments with which the soil was covered having been, I suppose, a quarry of material. There are no streets; the small, shabby houses, almost hovels, straggle at random over the uneven ground. The only im- portant feature is a convent of cloistered nuns, who have a large garden (always within the walls) behind their house, and whose doleful establishment you look down into, or down ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... have guided our course by the mountain ranges. The case looked dubious, but Ollendorff said his instinct was as sensitive as any compass, and that he could "strike a bee-line" for Carson city and never diverge from it. He said that if he were to straggle a single point out of the true line his instinct would assail him like an outraged conscience. Consequently we dropped into his wake happy and content. For half an hour we poked along warily enough, but at the end of that time we came upon a fresh ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... scarlet frocks, light, hard-featured lads on well-bred lean horses, possessing marvellous dexterity in casting the points of their long, heavy whips at the thinnest part of any dog's skin who dared to straggle from the main body, or to take the slightest notice, or even so much as wink at the hares and rabbits starting ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... a brief holiday from the trenches in a cantonment near the field, straggle forward and gather timidly about the airplane, listening open-mouthed for what its rider ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... There was a straggle, and a long one, in the proud heart of Mr Austin before he could consent to this act of justice. Mary had pointed out the propriety of it early in the morning, and it was not until late in the evening, after having remained ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... 1838, which an American, or two American had now opened the way for, there was slightingly prefixed, under the title, "Testimonies of Authors," some straggle of real documents, which, now that I find it again, sets the matter into clear light and sequence:—and shall here, for removal of idle stumbling-blocks and nugatory guessings from the path of every reader, be reprinted as it stood. ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... than ours were at that period, and, secondly, no such intelligent being as the Chieftain you have named, had started up among the Indian nations until now. What Tecumseh may not effect in course of time, should he not perish in the straggle for his country's liberty, ought to be a matter of ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... Well,—if you march along one of these streets, you must ride as I rode, when I came up to you. You must not let your knights go first, and your men-at-arms straggle after in a tail a mile long, like a scratch pack of hounds, all sizes but except each others'. You must keep your footmen on the high street, and make your knights ride in two bodies, right and left, upon the wold, to ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... devising means of subsistence for the widows and orphans of the men who will straggle out to be slaughtered to-night,' said Luciano; 'you have ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "We have a compass, and can find our way back, but if we straggle off alone some of us may get lost, and none of us knows these woods well enough to ...
— Frank Roscoe's Secret • Allen Chapman
... garden, this of Anne Peace's, but every inch of space was made the most of. The little square and oblong beds lay close to the fence, and from tulip-time to the coming of frost they were ablaze with flowers. Nothing was allowed to straggle, or to take up more than its share of room. The roses were tied firmly to their neat green stakes; the crown-imperials nodded over a spot of ground barely large enough to hold their magnificence; while the phlox and sweet-william actually had ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... do straggle in my restlesse thoughts, And lively forms with orient colours clad Walk in my boundlesse mind, as men ybrought Into some spacious room, who when they've had A turn or two, go out, although unbad. All ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... content, and with regard to that I have nothing to say. But I have a word to say, which no advocate, however anxious and devoted he may be, can utter for me. I say, whatever part I may have taken in the straggle for my country's independence, whatever part I may have acted in my short career, I stand before you, my lords, with a free heart and a light conscience, to abide the issue of your sentence. And now, my lords, this is, perhaps, the fittest time to put a sentence upon record, which is ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... passed. The bit of wreck that was jammed between the rocks went to pieces and came ashore. Ben's mate came with it, but no Noll. The men began to straggle homeward, weary and worn with the night's vigil, till only Dirk and Hark Darby were left to keep the stricken master of the stone house company. Oh, such a weary waiting it was!—the ceaseless pouring of the waves upon the sand filling their ears with clamor, and the fearful ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... migrate, emigrate; trek; rove, prowl, roam, range, patrol, pace up and down, traverse; scour the country, traverse the country; peragrate|; circumambulate, perambulate; nomadize[obs3], wander, ramble, stroll, saunter, hover, go one's rounds, straggle; gad, gad about; expatiate. walk, march, step, tread, pace, plod, wend, go by shank's mare; promenade; trudge, tramp; stalk, stride, straddle, strut, foot it, hoof it, stump, bundle, bowl along, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... halting places, if possible under cover, or under the best cover available, so as to avoid making our forward rushes so long that the men will get worn out, and begin to straggle long before they get close enough to the enemy to use their rifles ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... on according to the regular routine; the fresh men were all drawn up now, armed, the order given, and the relieved tramped into the guard-room and soon began to straggle out again, eager to troop over to a kind of buttery-hatch by the great kitchen, where a mug of milk and a hunch of bread for a refresher would be waiting for distribution, by Lady Royland's orders, ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... its feudal relation to, and dependence upon, the great house behind which it nestles; some of the back-kitchens and offices of this great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and merge themselves into this quadrangle. None the less, it presents to the enquiring gaze a specific character, of as old a growth, one might think, as the oak itself. Here servants have lived, it may be, since man first learned the trick of setting ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... of Liebenstein (for the greater part timber-framed and red-tiled) straggle up the immediate hills which surround it. Those of more pretention and inevitable ugliness range themselves decently and in order along two parallel roads. Aloof as this village is from "the madding crowd's ignoble strife," it has yet been touched to its undoing by ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... staircases, with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistas opening at every turn across the lowland. One of these views might be selected for especial notice. In front, irregular buildings losing themselves in country as they straggle by the roadside; then the open post-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far away a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the Russians, fearing the enmity of Austria, which had massed troops on the Wallachian frontier, remained on the defensive, but in October Omar Pasha assumed the aggressive, sending a small force across the Danube at Vidin, and it was thought that the straggle between the contending forces would take place in 'Lesser Wallachia.' Omar Pasha, however, either intended this as a feint, or changed his plan, for he soon afterwards occupied strong positions on the Danube at Turtukai and Oltenitza, between Silistria ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... are blue violets and white houstonia. Vines, thinly covered with fresh leaves, straggle over the walls,—Virginia creeper, poison ivy, grapevine, and at least one other, the name of which I do not know. A clump of tall blackberry vines is full of white blossoms, "bramble roses faint and pale," and in one corner is a tuft of scarlet blooms,—sage, ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... roaming over the little flower plot in search of room for the geranium, which did not appear; prince's feather and marigolds so choked up the ground where balsams did not straggle over it. Molly looked as Daisy did at the possibilities of the case, looked again at the strange sweet little face which was so busy in her garden; and then made a sudden movement. With two or three motions of hands and knees she drew ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... forward, the churchyard presented a characteristic picture. Beside the usual groups who straggle through the place, to amuse themselves by reading the inscriptions on the tombs, you might see many individuals kneeling on particular graves, where some relation lay—for the benefit of whose soul they offered up their prayers with an attachment and devotion which one cannot ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... are comparatively bare and lifeless, even the Brambles and Woodbine, which straggle over the tangle ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... church and the ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens, with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such old-fashioned flowers. At one end ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Moseby's door-step, and watched them all straggle out of sight. The creak of Jonathan's wagon grew fainter and fainter, until she could hear it no longer. The dog was quiet now. Mirandy sat up straight in front ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... the lute, the song of the bulbuls, intoned the verses of Al-Mutanabbi, and, wrapping themselves in their rugs, fell asleep. But in the morning they were rudely jostled from their dreams by a spurt from the hose of the sailors washing the deck. Complaining not, they straggle down to their bunks to change their clothes. And Khalid, as he is doing this, implores Shakib not to mention to him any more that New-World paradise. "For I have dreamt last night," he continues, "that, in the multicoloured robes of an Arab amir, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... bit of it," said Trefusis. "There never was such a mark as that on a road. It may be a very bad attempt at a briar, but briars don't straggle into the middle of roads frequented as that one seems to be—judging by those overdone ruts." He put the etching away, showing no disposition to look further into the portfolio, and remarked, "The only art ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... I said, "all you have to do is to sit in your studio, while the police see that the waiting line of millionaires doesn't straggle over the pavement. ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... sail, carrying on the color of the plowed fields above the village, and elsewhere, scraps of flaming bunting flashing like flowers in a reed bed. Behind the masts, along the barbican, the cottages stand close and thick, then clamber and straggle up the acclivities behind, decreasing in their numbers as they ascend. Smoke trails inland on the wind—black as a thin crepe veil, from the funnel of a coal "tramp" about to leave the harbor, blue from the dry wood burning on a hundred cottage ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... sharply. "We've taken our place and we must stick to it. We can't afford to straggle. Hullo! it's just on twelve. Thwaite has had three hours to prepare, and he's bound to have wakened the south. I fancy the business won't quite come off ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... road that looked unnaturally white and ghostly in the pale dawn of the early morning. It was down hill for about a mile, and traveling was comparatively easy at first, but when the road reached the bottom of the valley it stopped and seemed to straggle off into numerous little foot-paths. The broadest and most traveled looking path Lucia followed, picking her way carefully for fear of stumbling and thus losing some of ...
— Lucia Rudini - Somewhere in Italy • Martha Trent
... numbered throughout; but a bare third of them were written on, and these in an unformed hand which yet was eloquent of much. A paragraph would start with every letter drawn as carefully as in a child's copy-book; would gradually straggle and let its words fall about, as though fainting by the way; and so would tail into incoherence, to be picked up—next day, no doubt—by a new effort, which, after marching for half a dozen lines, in its turn collapsed. There were lacunae, too, when the shaking hand had achieved ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... see her an' her folks but I reckon ye'll have yer hands full to-day," he remarked. "Ye don't need no scout on that kind o' reconnoiterin'. You go on ahead an' git through with yer smackin an' bym-by I'll straggle in." ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... the Celts, far more than the Anglo-Saxon temperament. To balance this there were great individual resources when alone,—a sort of Indian wiliness and subtlety of resource. Their gregariousness and love of drill made them more easy to keep in hand than white American troops, who rather like to straggle or go in little squads, looking out for themselves, without being bothered with officers. The blacks ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... her foot up tenderly and examined it with care. "My, my!" he murmured. "You poor little soldier. If I hadn't looked around that time I expect you'd been willing to walk all the way to Richmond on a foot that would make a whole regiment straggle. Just see where you've cut it—right under the second little piggie. We'll have to tie it right up and keep the bothersome old dust from getting in. By morning ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... lasted a good hour and a half, and at the end of that time they would begin to straggle out again, flushed and using toothpicks as they strolled to the tables under the trees, where the exhausted waiters would presently bring them breakfast-cups of coffee and cakes. They lingered about an hour over this, and then ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... movement has its crowd of camp followers, who straggle and scatter. We are like a comet, bright at the head but tailing away into mere gas behind. However, every man may speak for himself, and I do not feel that your charge comes home to me. I am only bigoted against bigotry, and that I hold to be as legitimate as violence to the violent. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... permission, without which he dared not cross the Border on affairs of war) attempted a retaliatory raid on Armstrongs within seven miles of the Border, the Armstrongs of Hollace, or Hollhouse. "He found only empty houses;" he "sought a prey" in vain; he let his men straggle, and returning homeward, with some fifteen companions, he was ambushed by the Armstrongs near Bewcastle, was refused shelter by a Graham, was taken prisoner, and was sent to Buccleuch at Branksome. ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... of a feat, considering his advantages. He placed himself in the lead, his wooden sword still in hand, and solemnly directed the march, conforming his pace to theirs and occasionally turning as if to see that his forces did not straggle. Surely such a leader never before had ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... to Lumley to post his letters. And he looked at Lumley. And he found it a damn god-forsaken hell of a hole. It was a long straggle of a dusty road down in the valley, with a pale-grey dust and spatter from the pottery, and big chimneys bellying forth black smoke right by the road. Then there was a short cross-way, up which one saw the iron foundry, a black ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... dirty checkered trousers that fitted his lean, bony limbs tightly. A straw sombrero, artistic in spite of being broken, covered an enormous head and allowed his dirty gray, almost red, hair to straggle out long and kinky at the end like a poet's curls. But the most notable thing about this man was not his clothing or his European features, guiltless of beard or mustache, but his fiery red face, from which he got the ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... America conspicuously allied with Oceanica in cultural achievements, whose origin he therefore assigns to that vast congeries of islands stretching from Asia toward South America in latitude 25 deg. south. These islands, closely clustered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with widening spaces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the indestructible memorials of a strange civilization, through Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the Peruvian ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... less esteemed, or perhaps loved. They do not come forth to the world as Apollos, nor shine at all, keeping what light they may have for inward purposes. Such young men are often awkward, ungainly, and not yet formed in their gait; they straggle with their limbs, and are shy; words do not come to them with ease, when words are required, among any but their accustomed associates. Social meetings are periods of penance to them, and any appearance in public will unnerve them. They go much about alone, and blush when women speak ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... they are near home, and prick up their ears, and go briskly onward. Scarcely a quarter of a mile is gone before the buildings of the "lower plantation" come into view,—a row of cabins built irregularly upon the highest points straggle along the river banks. Each cabin has its little garden with its row of coleworts and its beehives, or perhaps a pumpkin or two shows its yellow sides amid the withered vines. Outside the cabins, fish-nets are hung to dry, and from within comes ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... like Ysaye. But I do think you ought to discard that convict cut. Besides, it isn't becoming. And if you're going to be an American violinist you'll have to look it—with a foreign finish." He let his hair grow. Fanny watched with interest for the appearance of the unruly lock which had been wont to straggle over his white forehead in his schoolboy days. The new and well-cut American clothes effected surprisingly little change. Fanny, surveying him, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... went daily under fire to satisfy our appetite, and put our head in the lion's mouth for a piece of bread. Sometimes, to minimise the risk, we would all dismount before we came in view of the house, straggle in severally, and give what orders we pleased, like disconnected strangers. In like manner we departed, to find the cart at an appointed place, some half a mile beyond. The Colonel and the Major had each a word or two of English—God help their pronunciation! But they did well enough to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Kung's interpretation. Chang Yu adopts it, saying: "We must quickly bring up our rear, so that head and tail may both reach the goal." That is, they must not be allowed to straggle up a long way apart. Mei Yao-ch'en offers another equally plausible explanation: "Supposing the enemy has not yet reached the coveted position, and we are behind him, we should advance with all speed in order to dispute its possession." Ch'en Hao, on ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu |
