"Bedraggled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desperately, but before he could reach either one of the tossing white specks, they were washed beneath the surface and disappeared. Ten minutes later, his uniform bedraggled and shapeless, he ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... perhaps, in genius to Webster, surpassing him even in intense tragic passion, he was far below Webster, and, indeed, far below all his generation, in moral fibre. The sight of evil fascinates him; his conscience staggers, his sympathies are bedraggled in foulness; in the chaos of good and evil he loses his reckoning, and recognizes the superiority only of strength of passion, of passion for good or evil: the incestuous Giovanni, daring his enemies like a wild beast at bay and cheating them of their ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... all bedraggled and pale, Poor Vivy approached her own door, She went, swift and straight As a dart, through the gate, Abhorring the ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... their children able to support themselves. But it is just the reverse; the poorer folk are, the less they seem to care to try to do something. 'You come home if you don't like it;' and stay about the hovel in slatternly idleness, tails bedraggled and torn, thin boots out at the toes and down at the heels, half starved on potatoes and weak tea—stay till you fall into disgrace, and lose the only thing you possess in the world—your birthright, your character. Strange advice it was for ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... "the rose has been much bedraggled. Not only was it the erotic blossom of Paganism, but in the Middle Ages Jews and prostitutes were compelled in many places to wear a rose as a ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... breakfast in my nose, and must get up; and having gone on deck I found in the narrow, white-walled circle of the storm a little world of ice and writhing space. The Shining Light was gripped: her foremast was snapped, her sails hanging stiff and frozen; she was listed, bedraggled, incrusted with ice—drifted high with snow. 'Twas the end of the craft: I knew it. And I went below to my uncle and the fool, sad at heart because of this death, but wishing very much, indeed, for my breakfast. ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... was so great that, forgetting his own bedraggled condition, he laughed. Then he looked again to see what they were going to do. A small man, his face shaded by the broad brim of a hat, emerged from the woods and joined them. Dick was too far away to see ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... all the span of the lad's fifteen years could he recall a single instance when Mr. Coddington had broken his word. It was this knowledge that made Peter so uncomfortable as he glanced once more at the bedraggled report card. What had his father meant by saying he would grant him ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... shadows of the houses on the opposite side of the street. After half an hour he was rewarded by the sight of Mr. Shine Taylor dismounting from a taxicab. The young gentleman wore a heavy overcoat over a bedraggled suit. One of his snowy spats was missing; his hat was dripping, still, from its early immersion. He entered the building, after a cautious survey of the deserted street, with ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... found in contemplation of the wet and shiny appearance of the crew, each with a little stream of water trickling off the flap of his sou'-wester down his back, and with hair and whiskers blowing drenched and bedraggled about ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... it has come, he is the very picture of misery and unhappiness. He mopes on his perch, whether it be in a cage, or on the limb of a tree, or in the open air, with his feathers ruffled, and a very bedraggled appearance, like a hen that has been caught in a shower. In the forest he will imitate the sound of an axe cutting at a tree, and many a man has been deceived into walking a mile or more in the expectation of finding somebody ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... ring as Bud left it, bedraggled and dusty, did not interest him. He brushed himself as he went. The band was playing madly, and the young woman in the stiff skirts was standing by her horse ready to mount. The crowd did not stop laughing; Bud inclined his head to dust ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... the sun has been withering the flowers the guide brought me; how they look! blue and white Canterbury bells, harebells, clochettes, all bedraggled and wilted, like a young lady who has been up ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 1871 to 1914 considerable social changes. How far they are effective in all nations and in all classes it is very difficult for a contemporary to judge. It may be that the social structure of the decorative upper fringe or of the bedraggled hem of society is much the same as it was before communication was easy and transit rapid. But the central body of European society is certainly changed; and, after all, between the scum and the dregs is ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... round his waist, moved with difficulty among the crowded tables. A woman at a table in the corner, with dead white skin and drugged staring eyes, kept laughing hoarsely, leaning her head, in a hat with bedraggled white plumes, against the wall. There was a constant jingle of plates and glasses, and an oily fume of food and women's clothes ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... log-house of Colonel Chick, who received us with his usual bland hospitality; while his wife, who, though a little soured and stiffened by too frequent attendance on camp-meetings, was not behind him in hospitable feeling, supplied us with the means of repairing our drenched and bedraggled condition. The storm, clearing away at about sunset, opened a noble prospect from the porch of the colonel's house, which stands upon a high hill. The sun streamed from the breaking clouds upon the swift and angry Missouri, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... amphibians. Still the loosened floods came down; still the great cloud-mortars bellowed and exploded their missiles in the treetops above us. But all nervousness finally passed away, and we became dogged and resigned. Our minds became water-soaked; our thoughts were heavy and bedraggled. We were past the point of joking at one another's expense. The witticisms failed to kindle,—indeed, failed to go, like the matches in our pockets. About midnight the rain slackened, and by one o'clock ceased entirely. How the rest of the night was passed beneath the dripping ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... of the Siege was, not the gravity of doctors, lawyers, directors, etc., presenting tickets for soup—that was piquant enough—but the number of young ladies, votaries of fashion, who emerged from the melee bedraggled and flushed with their pails of nectar, to all appearances not only forgetful of the convenances, but beaming with smiles of triumph. It may have been because their charms were enhanced, artful wenches! Enhanced, in any ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... they were heroic, this line of dishevelled, bedraggled pleasure-seekers. They were all looking Death in the face, and the closer they looked the less they feared him. They were conscious rather of a feeling of curiosity, together with the nervous tingling with which one approaches a ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... would-be butterfly. They barely spoke when they met, kept asunder by a mutual embarrassment. One girl with whom she had played as a child had early taken to evil courses. Her she met one day in the street, and the bedraggled and painted creature ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... breaking of the silent dawn, shadowed in a lonely archway or on an abandoned doorstep the wet, bedraggled body of a hapless moth is sometimes found, her iridescent wings flattened in the mud. Then for a brief moment a cry of protest, or scorn, or pity goes up. The passers-by raise their hands in anger, draw their skirts aside in horror, or kneel in tenderness. It is the same the ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... chandelier stood a man in evening dress the worse for misadventure, one knee of his trousers cut open, both legs caked with a film of half-dry mud, his linen dingy with mud-stains, his top coat shockingly bedraggled. He was bareheaded, apparently having lost his hat; a black smear across one cheek added emphasis to the pallor of newly shaven jowls; and his ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... Under the influence of perverse impulse they had made up a party to come to Laure's—whom, by the by, they all treated with great familiarity—to eat the three-franc dinner while flashing their jewels of great price in the jealous and astonished eyes of poor, bedraggled prostitutes. The moment they entered, talking and laughing in their shrill, clear tones and seeming to bring sunshine with them from the outside world, Nana turned her head rapidly away. Much to her annoyance she had recognized ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... I didn't mean to hurt him," I answered, sorry now for my opponent as he scrambled at last up on his feet, looking very bedraggled and showing on his face the signs of the fray. "I only held out my hand to save the poor bird, and he ran ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... to buy some finery after the fashion of Charlotte's and Ina's. Marie had not asked for her wages many times, and never of Captain Carroll, but to-night she took courage. There was a ball that week, Thursday, and her poor, little, cheap muslin of last season was bedraggled and faded until it was no longer wearable. Marie waylaid Captain Carroll as he was returning from the stable, whither he had been to see a lame foot of one of the horses. Marie stood in her kitchen door, around which was growing ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fashionable little shoes and tight little hats and stiff little flounces that it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible triumph in their return at eventide from the congress by the sea, dishevelled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a scolding from nurse. Then too there is the freedom from "lessons." There are no more of those dreadful maps along the wall, no French exercises, no terrible arithmetic. The elder girls make a faint show of ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... equivocal; if one have them not, it is equally desperate. Should Minerva herself alight there with a purse that would not compass Willard's, one cannot imagine what would become of her. She would probably be seen wandering at late night, with bedimmed stars and bedraggled gauze, until some vigorous officer should lead her to the station-house for vagrancy. Thus when fascination and forlornness are at equal discount, when powers and penuries go down together, and common and uncommon sense ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... her as I would have wished, so I busied myself in the next room until she called to me. She was putting what touches she could to her eyes with a small and sadly bedraggled handkerchief. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... this personage, who was frightfully hoarse and constitutionally in want of shaving, they were all three put aboard the Son and Heir. And the Son and Heir was in a pretty state of confusion, with sails lying all bedraggled on the wet decks, loose ropes tripping people up, men in red shirts running barefoot to and fro, casks blockading every foot of space, and, in the thickest of the fray, a black cook in a black caboose up to his eyes in vegetables and blinded ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... road; wagons that neither physical force nor moral objurgation could move from the evil ways into which they had fallen, encumbered the track, and the way to Simpson's Bar was indicated by broken-down teams and hard swearing. And farther on, cut off and inaccessible, rained upon and bedraggled, smitten by high winds and threatened by high water, Simpson's Bar, on the eve of Christmas day, 1862, clung like a swallow's nest to the rocky entablature and splintered capitals of Table Mountain, and shook ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... needs to say that a change is observable in the appearance of the lady. Her dress is travel-stained, bedraggled by dust and rain; her hair, escaped from its coif, hangs dishevelled; her cheeks show the lily where but roses have hitherto bloomed. She is sad, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... in our minds we could see armies moving into the trenches somewhere along the "far flung battle line," and other armies moving out. The picture haunted us. It seemed to me a cinematograph of democracy. For the change of an army division from the trenches, tired, worn and bedraggled, moving wearily to its station of rest, with another army division, fresh and eager, moving up from its station of rest to the front, is indeed a social miracle. It is a fine bit of human machinery. So in terms of our modern democracy it may be well to review the interminable panorama of ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... to the skin, and there seemed no shelter. At last I discovered a wretched wine-shop; but the woman who kept it said there was no fire and no food. Then I grew very cross. I explained with heat that I had money; it is true I was bedraggled and disreputable, but when I showed some coins, to prove that I could pay for what I bought, she asked unwillingly what I required. I ordered a brasero, and dried my clothes as best I could by the burning cinders. I ate a scanty meal of eggs, and comforted myself with the ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the room, and his own apartment was out of the question. The rain had stopped, mercifully, but he couldn't walk the streets indefinitely, dirty and bedraggled as he was. He tried to think of something to do, but all of his schemes took money which he ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... mind. At which the birds resolved to try again, and, do you know, last year they very nearly succeeded. For it rained hard all Midsummer Day, and when the birds came down to the brook they were so bedraggled, and benumbed, and cold, and unhappy, that they had nothing to say for themselves, but splashed about in silence, and everything would have happened just right had not a rook, chancing to pass over, accidentally dropped something he was ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... began coming alongside one by one. Wet and bedraggled survivors were lifted aboard. Women and children ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... theatre. Here they stood upon the straw that was laid to drown the discordant noise of wheels, where the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts encircling the building looked with pallid grimness on the proceedings, and in particular at the bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their children, as at ludicrous persons who ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... to straits—almost to want, he had married the mother of Florimel, to whom for a time he endeavoured to conduct himself in some measure like a gentleman. For this he had been rewarded by a decrease in the rate of his spiritual submergence, but his bedraggled nature could no longer walk without treading on its own plumes; and the poor lady who had bartered herself for a lofty alliance, speedily found her mistake a sad one and her life uninteresting, took to ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... hurriedly. "I can't go down there." It had just struck her that Chad must not see her; but the picket thought she naturally did not wish to face a lot of soldiers in her bedraggled and torn dress, and ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... day in November of 1889, Addie arrived at the Church Street house with a forlorn parcel of a little girl and a bedraggled bag that contained her entire worldly possessions. She was ill and old. She would say little about her husband, but later it came out in the newspapers that William Scarp had been convicted of forgery and sent to prison in Indiana (where he died soon after of consumption ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... Kid," he continued, drawing a bedraggled paper from his breast pocket, "an' I 'ope as ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... frost,—all these things are utterly and everywhere lacking to the Mormon inclosure. Sometimes we passed a fence which guarded three houses instead of one. Abundant progeny played at their doors, or rolled in their yard, watched by several unkempt, bedraggled mothers owning a common husband,—and we could easily understand how neither of these should feel much interest in the looks of a demesne held by them in such unhappy partnership. The humblest New-England cottage has its climbing flowers at the door-post, or its garden-bed in front; but how quickly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... to sleep again with the amazing speed of childhood, and Mamie was looking pityingly at the bedraggled object which had emerged cautiously from behind ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... confused impressions that crowded Nan's memory after the wild night on Music Mountain, the most vivid was that of a noticeably light-stepping and not ungraceful fat man advancing, hat in hand, to greet her as she stood with de Spain, weary and bedraggled in the aspen grove. ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... have to owe it to ye, Hank! Mebbe I'll pay it some day when you git han'somer 'n you are now!" laughed Captain Ephraim dryly. He gave a piercing whistle through his teeth. Straightway Toby, sadly bedraggled, came limping up to him. The Pup let go of his dead enemy, and lifted his head to eye his master inquiringly. His whole front ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... until the light of morning struggled through this universal gloom, that the weary and bedraggled traveler entered the outskirts of the then straggling but growing and busy village of Hamilton. Tired in body and benumbed in mind, he made his way to the hotel, conscious only of his desire and determination to look once ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... her hands down from his shoulders and drew his face away from the mouldy-smelling old shawl, he looked toward the door, and Ruth stood in the entrance. Her eyes blazed with wrath, but as she saw the faded and bedraggled dress and moth-eaten shawl and looked into the tear-stained motherly old face she ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... screamed and then his eyes fell again upon the canoe. A new idea came and persisted. He looked down at himself, examining his body, and seeing the filthy loin cloth, now water soaked and more bedraggled than before, he tore it from him and flung it into the lake. "Gods do not wear dirty rags," he said aloud. "They do not wear anything but wreaths and garlands of flowers and I am a god—I am Jad-ben-Otho—and I go in state to ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... members of the troop, numbering four, was Myla, sad and forlorn of face and housing a broken heart within her bosom, for she had lost her baby. It happened early one afternoon when the four had ascended to the top of a tall tree to dry their bedraggled fur during one of those rare intervals when the clouds broke and the sun showed his brassy face for a brief time. Such an opportunity was not to be neglected. Happy and grateful they were, the four monkey mothers, sitting on the dome of green ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... steaming bath other men were posted midway and when a sheep passed they thrust the head twice under water with their crooks so that the eyes and heads—as well as the bodies—might be cleansed. At the far end of the troughs still other herders helped the bedraggled creatures out onto a draining platform where they dripped for a time and were afterward ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... disciples to buy food, He wandered forth intent on doing good, As was his wont. And in the market-place He saw a crowd, close gathered in one space, Gazing with eager eyes upon the ground. Jesus drew nearer, and thereon he found A noisome creature, a bedraggled wreck,— A dead dog with a halter round his neck. And those who stood by mocked the object there, And one said scoffing, "It pollutes the air!" Another, jeering, asked, "How long to-night Shall such a miscreant cur offend our sight?" "Look at his torn hide," sneered a Jewish wit,— "You could ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... known, and the people can point to many landmarks on it. For example, in the island of Paho there is a tree called dani, under which the departing spirits sit down and weep. When they have cried their fill and rubbed their poor tear-bedraggled faces with mud, they make little pellets of clay and throw them at the tree, and anybody can see for himself the pellets sticking to the branches. It is true that the pellets resemble the nests of insects, but this resemblance is only fortuitous. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... recounting his prison experiences, and I discovered that he had been a pilferer and pickpocket well known in all the London police courts. In his odd moments out of jail, he would hover outside the larger stations, touch a bedraggled cap with a filthy finger, and say, "Kerry yer beg, sir?" in a threatening tone to all passers-by; his main income, however, appeared to come ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... with combless chickens, begging for a grain of wheat; with large butterflies, unable to use their wings because they had sold all their lovely colors; with tailless peacocks, ashamed to show themselves; and with bedraggled pheasants, scuttling away hurriedly, grieving for their bright feathers of gold and silver, lost to ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... stock-brokers, who, resplendent in attire, and haughty of demeanor, fill the thousand offices of speculation. They disdain the meaner element, as they tool their drags over the Cliff Road to bathe in champagne, and listen to the tawdry Phrynes and bedraggled Aspasias who share their vulture feast of ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... depressing: the smirched, steadily retreating snow was leaving bare all the drab brownness it had concealed—all the dismal little gardens, and dirty corners. Houses, streets and people wore their most bedraggled air. Particularly the people: they were as ugly as the areas of roof and stone, off which the soft white coating had slid; their contours were as painful to see. And the mud—oh, God, the mud! It spread itself over every inch of the way; the roads ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... and advanced. My shoes were spoiled, and my skirts bedraggled, but I captured the moth and saw no indication of snakes. Soon after she was placed in a big pasteboard box and began dotting eggs in straight lines over the interior. They were white but changed colour as the caterpillars ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... are you?" Rather indefinitely the first speaker answers, "Here! Help! Help!" Another crashing through the underbrush, followed by a second splash, and presently, after a short pause, there enters upon the stage a tall, much bedraggled Englishman, bearing in his arms the motionless body of an extremely good-looking girl. Both of them are very wet, and a trail of water marks their progress across the scene. Reaching the clearing, the Englishman methodically deposits the girl on the ground, ...
— The Noble Lord - A Comedy in One Act • Percival Wilde
... been put out, the claim bare as the day I first saw it—save for charred grass, and a great mound of ashes, and the smell of smoke—when Sam Frye opened the mail sacks. Sitting bedraggled in his old buggy, Ida Mary distributed the mail to the patrons who had gathered. Even though the post office was gone, the mail must go on. We were ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... joy the noble animal licked her hand, her face and neck, wagging his bedraggled tail with intense satisfaction, winding up this demonstration by lying down by her side as closely as he could get, and giving a long breath, which in a human being ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... should belong to them. Labourers working in yard and field began to turn their thoughts homeward or tavernward as the case might be. And through the cold squelching slush of a water-logged meadow a weary, bedraggled, but unbeaten fox stiffly picked his way, climbed a high bramble-grown bank, and flung himself into the sheltering labyrinth of a stretching tangle of woods. The pack of fierce-mouthed things that had rattled him from copse and gorse-cover, ...
— When William Came • Saki
... yet broken when the 'watch' of the ship Vulcan, lying becalmed off the —— coast, was roused by a peculiar noise aft. Going to the spot he was surprised to find a much-bedraggled monkey rubbing itself on a pile of sail-cloth. The creature had evidently swum or drifted a long distance, and was now endeavouring to restore circulation. Jerry, being a humane man, got it some biscuit, and a saucer of grog, and waited developments. ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... I rose, and skirting the Castle, I entered the town, dishevelled and bedraggled, yet caring nothing what spectacle I might afford. And presently a grim procession overtook me, and at sight of the black, cowled and visored figures that advanced in the lurid light of their wax torches, I fell on my knees there in the street, and so remained, my knees deep in the mud, my head bowed, ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... the poor creature look with her pale and tear-stained face, her reddened eyes and disheveled hair; and her rich and elegant white evening dress with its ample skirts and lace flounces bedraggled and bedabbled with all the filth ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... frosty atmosphere. A half hour later I have seen the same women when stringy, dirty skirts had replaced the neat- fitting trousers, and Dr. Grenfell's description of them when thus clad invariably came to my mind: "A bedraggled kind of mop, soaked in oil and filth." This tendency to ape civilization by wearing civilized garments, is happily confined to their brief sojourns at the Post. When they are away at their camps and ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... and fondly try to persuade themselves, very unselfish also; but when they are honest they know quite well a misfortune is lightened when several others are in the same box. That's why, on a wet day, I console myself sitting at the window and watching folks struggling with drenched umbrellas and bedraggled skirts. It's so good to ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... prisoner," declared Tad, who, sitting upon his horse in his bedraggled, torn pajamas, presented a ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... admit a feeling of disappointment in that first trench. I don't know what I expected to see, but what I did see was just a long, crooked ditch with a low step running along one side, and with sandbags on top. Here and there was a muddy, bedraggled Tommy half asleep, nursing a dirty and muddy rifle on "sentry go." Everything was very quiet at the moment—no rifles popping, as I had expected, no bullets flying, and, as it happened, absolutely no ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... black, and yellow banner of the country-a city whose atmosphere was charged with fear and suspicion and excitement. Sometimes a crowd of a thousand or two drew one toward the Central Station where bedraggled refugee families, just arrived from Liege, Termonde, Aerschot, and Malines, stood on street corner or wagon top and thrilled the crowd with tales of atrocities and the story of their flight from their burning homes to the south. Now and then ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... soft thump against the side of the schooner, followed by a scrambling noise, made me turn round. The dripping, bedraggled figure of a man in a sleeping-suit mounted the rope ladder that hung over the side, and paused, grasping the rail. I had withdrawn my gaze so suddenly from the glow of the light in the cabin that for several moments the intruder from out of the sea was only a blurred form with ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... perpetual hurry; their time was longer now, and by the end of the month their working day had increased from five or six to twelve or fourteen hours, and the light had increased and grubs were easier to find. By April, the starlings no longer appeared to be the same species as the poor, rusty, bedraggled wretches we had been accustomed to see; they are now lively, happy birds with a splendid gloss on their feathers and beaks as bright a yellow as the blackbird's. Finally, in April they left us, not going in a body, but ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... a deck chair did look rather like a hen in a coop—a bedraggled hen, most certainly, very bedraggled. Not at all the sort of hen that should be dished up at the Carlton or the Savoy for dinner. A cheap and nasty hen, Vane decided. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... thing was disclosed to view. It was the figure of a girl of about sixteen, with a shock head of red hair, on which was stuck, all awry, a dirty little, old-fashioned servant's cap. She was clad in a cotton dress, soiled and bedraggled, and had on her feet a pair of elastic-sided boots, that looked as if they would fall to pieces each step she took. But it was her face that riveted my attention most. It was startlingly white and full of an ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... her door open, as best she could, in the violent wind, had hardly given this information to the little snow-bedraggled object standing out there in the inky darkness, through which the lantern made a faint circle of ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... transcended words. And did not allow even of sympathy, as his visitors evidently thought—not at least until he got on some clean and dry clothes. So they simply shook their heads, and took their course homewards. While the bedraggled and dripping Master Parris made his way to the house wiping the water and mud from his face with his wife's handkerchief, and stopping to shake himself well, before he entered the door, lest, as his wife said, "he should ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... on the beat rang the bell of the Florence Mission at two o'clock on Sunday morning, and waited until Mother Pringle had unbolted the door. "One for you," he said briefly, and pointed toward the bedraggled shape that crouched in the corner. It was his day off, and he had no time to trouble with prisoners. The matron drew a corner of the wet shawl aside and took one cold hand. She eyed it attentively; there was a wedding ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... from Travers in ten days, and this added to her sense of desolation. Then, one evening, coming in from a long tramp in the park, snow covered and bedraggled, she faced him in ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... when Albert left the yacht. He had exchanged his bedraggled yachting-suit for a neat gray one, and with a small satchel, his sketch-book, and a box of choice Havanas for Uncle Terry, he rowed ashore. For three hours the "Gypsy" had been the cynosure of all the Cape eyes, old or young, ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... dirty shirt, scarf, and cap, socks more like anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy "pelerine" or mangy "boa"—such is accepted as the natural costume for the heirs of all the ages. Prehistoric man, roaming through ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... careless rejoinder and the janitor went down the hall, brushing the marble dado with his bedraggled ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... "No. A bedraggled loafer, gifted with more talk than occupation. He was acquainted with the whole scheme from beginning to end, and worked upon their feelings with evidences of treason. The sudden mention of my name in connection with the plot ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... they wander, not two but one, farther into the forest, ardently believing in themselves; they are not hypocrites. The somewhat bedraggled figure of Joanna follows them, and the nightingale resumes his love-song. 'That's all you know, you bird!' thinks Joanna cynically. The nightingale, however, is not singing for them nor for her, but for another pair he has espied below. ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... his preoccupation with the exact value of oral words, he is not a singing lyrist. There is not much bel canto in his volumes. Nor do any of his poems seem spontaneous. He is a thoughtful man, given to meditation; the meanest flower or a storm-bedraggled bird will lend him material for poetry. But the expression of his poems does not seem naturally fluid. I suspect he has blotted many a line. He is as deliberate as Thomas Hardy, and cultivates the lapidary style. Even in the conversations ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... dumb-bell suburb. A bridge has been swept away by a rise of the waters, so we must approach Philadelphia by the river. Her physiognomy is not distinguished; nez camus, as a Frenchman would say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's dress that trails on the sidewalk. The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... forest of lamps. Desperately determined not to risk another struggle for the lift, I tried to find the staircase. At last, after endless enquiries and—it seemed—going back five steps for every three I had gone forward, I reached the toy department. Breathless, bedraggled, hot and exhausted, I clutched the arm of the first saleswoman I saw. ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... board walks, the low rookeries, the unshaven, blear-eyed men sitting on the thresholds of the saloons, the slattern squaws wandering abroad like bedraggled hens, made the girl stare with wonder and dismay. She had remembered the town street as a highway filled with splendid cavaliers, a list wherein heroic deeds were done ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... always thought a lot of James White and been proud of the match, weren't particular helpful, nor yet comforting. In fact, she was very disappointed about it and lost her temper with Cora. So the bedraggled maiden went out of her sight and looked as never she'd looked before. And on the evening of that day, under cover of darkness, she met Nick ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... the most woebegone, bedraggled specimen of humanity I had ever seen in my life. "Well, who under the sun are you?" ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... who mounted to the porch with the other guards, and the tattered and bedraggled Dylks in their midst. "What are you ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... the house, though, decidedly tended to damp her pleasant anticipations, for there was not a light to be seen anywhere. All the windows were gaping wide to the storm, while from more than one a bedraggled curtain ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... their outpouring. Meantime, with late September, the leaves began to hustle early to earth under great winds. Rain fell at times, but not heavily at first, and a thirsty world drank open-mouthed through deep sun-cracks in field and moor and dried-up marsh. But bedraggled autumn's robes were soon washed colorless; the heath turned pallid before it faded to sere brown; rotten banks of decaying leaves rose high under the hedges. There was no dry, crisp whirl of gold on the wind, but a sodden condition gradually overspread the land. The earth grew drunken with the later ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... inspection will probably dissipate this impression; it will be squalid and dirty, the river-stone paving of its street will be deep in the accumulation of filth, dirty Indian children will swarm in them with mangy dogs and bedraggled ducks, the gay frescoes of its walls will peel in ragged patches, revealing the 'dobe of their base, and the tile roofs will be cracked and broken. But from the heights at this distance and in the warm glow of the afternoon ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... to a bedraggled horse that had made its way to within fifty feet of the vessel. "Now what could ...
— Off Course • Mack Reynolds (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... memory of the two soaked, bedraggled, filthy specimens who had knocked on Cap'n Mike's door last night. "We were in no mood even to think about it," he said. "But we did find out one thing. Cap'n Mike said it would be easy for anyone to disconnect Smugglers' Light and then reconnect it. All he would need would ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... rather above the stature of the general run of range horses, with clean legs and a good chest. But he was a hammer-headed, white-eyed, short-maned beast, of a pale water-color yellow, like an old dish. He had a beaten-down, bedraggled, and dispirited look about him, as if he had carried men's burdens beyond his strength for a good while, and had no heart in him to take the road again. He had a scoundrelly way of rolling his eyes to watch all that went on about him ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... The barometer is rising—perhaps there is hope in that. Surely few situations could be more exasperating than this of forced inactivity when every day and indeed one hour counts. To be here watching the mottled wet green walls of our tent, the glistening wet bamboos, the bedraggled sopping socks and loose articles dangling in the middle, the saddened countenances of my companions—to hear the everlasting patter of the falling snow and the ceaseless rattle of the fluttering canvas—to feel the wet clinging dampness of clothes and everything touched, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... could shake. If she had been killed in the runaway she would have looked prim in death while awaiting the undertaker. She must have been wet almost to those unfractured bones which she had been feeling; her black silk dress, with its white ruching about the neck, was torn and bedraggled; her black hat, with its jet ornaments, was crushed and hung askew over one ear; nevertheless, Miss Pringle conveyed at once and definitely an impression of unassailable respectability and ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... at her. Could this dignified and lovely young lady be that red-cloaked, loose-haired Valkyrie whom he had seen singing at daybreak upon the prow of the sinking ship, or the piteous bedraggled person whom he had supported from the altar ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... a cat you might know it!" exclaimed Mrs. Bobbsey with a laugh." I guess they're all right. They can't have gone far. Probably they are on the other side of the street, looking at some bedraggled kitten." But a look up and down the street did not show Flossie and Freddie. By this time the auto was all ready to ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope
... Joining the bedraggled caravan over the Carson trail, he continued his course of bitter hardship in the Washoe Valley. From a patch of barren sun-baked rock and earth, three miles long and a third of a mile wide, high up on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, he beheld more ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... and all the variable beauty of fire. The very sight of it composed her; she crouched hard by on the earth floor and shivered in the glow, and looked upon the eating blaze with admiration. The woodman was still staring at his guest; at the wreck of the rich dress, the bare arms, the bedraggled laces and the gems. He found no word ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... care of its own. The rain increased and it was driven harder by the wind, but folded in their blankets they remained snug, while their clothing dried upon them. A bear that had hibernated there, fleeing from the rain sought his own den, but he was driven away by the man smell. A bedraggled panther had an idea of taking the same shelter, but he too ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... laundry, containing the unclaimed 'washings' of many years—hundreds of waiters' aprons and cooks' caps, worn hotel towels and napkins, ragged shirts and collars—not a thing worth the lumber in the box, except as old linen for the hospitals. There was a great deal of bedraggled finery, than which nothing could have been less appropriate, when nine out of every ten women who applied for clothes, wanted plain black in which to mourn for their dead. And the hats and bonnets were of every shape and style ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... corner, in promiscuous flirtation with the cock-eyed youths of the neighborhood, unconsciously revealed to me the eternal secrets of adolescence. My neighbor of the third floor, who sat on the curbstone with the scabby baby in her bedraggled lap, had things to say about the fine ladies who came in carriages to inspect the public bathhouse across the street that ought to be repeated in the lecture halls of every school of philanthropy. Instruction poured into my ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the few hours slumber, and with sharp-set appetites, the boys felt altogether different persons from the three bedraggled youths who had been jounced through the tunnel, and later thrown into such a perplexing combination ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... landing is the last picture, but one, I have to present of childhood days, ere I hasten, over the period that brought us all into our twenties and to strange, eventful times. The one remaining sketch is of an unkempt, bedraggled figure that I saw at the back hall door of the Faringfields one snowy night a week later, when, for some reason or other, I was out late in our back garden. This person, instead of knocking at the door, very cautiously tried it to see if it would open, and, finding it locked, stood timidly back ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens |
