"Scraggy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a homely, impudent, scraggy little dog, sprang from among the trees and yelped at Beth. A ragged little darky followed. Beth had never seen any human being quite ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... rising to take leave, a tall, lanky man, stuck his long scraggy neck in at the cabin-door, and, in ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... picturesque and varied. For the first half-mile from our starting-point, it wound between smooth grassy banks, adorned with scattered clumps of trees. It then entered a dense wood, where its channel was a rugged ravine, inclosed between steep rocks of black basalt. Here, the scraggy, ill-conditioned trees were crowded together, and overgrown with gigantic creepers. The branches, reaching across from the opposite shores, were interlaced and matted into thick masses, almost excluding the light of ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... to do. When I came back the gallon jar was empty, and he lay as you see him, with the board in front of him with this sorry device." She raised up a panel which was leaning against the wall, and showed a rude painting of a scraggy and angular fowl, with very long ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... English saddles, but I think we should have done just as well (I should certainly have seen more of the country) if we had adopted saddles like that of our Tatar, who towered so loftily over the scraggy little beast that carried him. In taking thought for the East, whilst in England, I had made one capital hit which you must not forget—I had brought with me a pair of common spurs. These were a great comfort to me throughout my ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... plants in the window. Why her eyes should have fixed upon these, Annie tried to discover afterwards, when she was more used to thinking. But she could not tell, except it were that they were so scraggy and wretched, half drowned in the darkness, and half blanched by the miserable light, and therefore must have been very like her own feelings, as she stood before the ungentle but not ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... directly into the grove, where we were obliged to dismount, as the low, scraggy branches would not permit our riding beneath them. Securing our animals, we followed the trail on foot for some distance, when Jerry called my attention to a number of fresh tracks ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... our way by boat and on horseback to Dunvegan Castle. The great size of the castle, which is built upon a rock close to the sea, while the land around presents nothing but wild, moorish, hilly, and scraggy appearances, gave a rude magnificence to the scene. We were a jovial company, and the laird, surrounded by so many of his clan, was to me a pleasing sight. They listened with wonder and pleasure while Dr. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... said Sartello, leaving the scraggy laurel behind which he had concealed himself. "What cheer brings thou from Rome, my gallant lad'? Certes, thy look is loftier and manlier now, whatever fortune ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... stone and with slime (i.e. bitumen) for mortar—all these things belong to the flat, sun-baked lands of this alluvial plain. At Kurna, Arab tradition has placed Eve's Tree. It is a sorry looking, scraggy thing. It does not seem good for food, nor is it pleasant for the eyes and a tree to be desired. Another traditional Garden of Eden is at Amara, and the Eden of the Sumerian version of the story is thought by Sir William Willcocks to have ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... larger, it seems, than six ordinary horses, but broken down and knock-kneed, with jaws that stuck out far in advance of its head. How the heroes, idling pleasantly about in the sunshine, laughed aloud at the uncouth "foreigner" and his ugly raw-boned beast, "covered with tangled scraggy hair of a sooty black." How he came before the king and, having made obeisance, told him that his name was the Gilla Backer, and then and there took service with him for a year, desiring at the same time that special care should be paid to his horse, and the best food given ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... eyes, the crooked legs—it is impossible to perceive any grace in such a wretched animal. I can't help thinking that if it had been a young girl you had brought me—say, a sleeping nymph—full of youth and beauty, 'twould have been a vast improvement on the scraggy jeanie contained in this box. But clear away, Bristles, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... weeks after, Mrs. Pepper and Polly were busy in the kitchen. Phronsie was out in the "orchard," as the one scraggy apple-tree was called by courtesy, singing her rag doll to sleep under its sheltering branches. But "Baby" was cross and wouldn't go to sleep, and Phronsie was on the point of giving up, and returning to the house, when a strain ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... situated in a deep mountain hollow, finely overlooking a large extent of cultivation. The people grow sweet potatoes, manioc—out of which tapioca is made—beans, and the holcus. Not one chicken could be purchased for love or money, and, besides grain, only a lean, scraggy specimen of a goat, a long time ago ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... man emerged from a shed of banana-leaves. He was a scraggy man—very lightly clad—and a violent squint handicapped him seriously in the matter of first impressions. When he saw Jocelyn he dropped his burden of wood and ran towards her. The African negro does not cringe. He is a proud man in his way. If he is properly handled, he is not only trustworthy—he ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... finds them an eyesore. But I never pass the spot in August (I do not pass it at all after that) without seeing that hers is only one side of the story. My approach is sure to startle a few goldfinches (and they too are most estimable neighbors), to whom these scraggy herbs are quite as useful as my excellent lady's apple-trees and pear-trees are to her. I watch them as they circle about in musical undulations, and then drop down again to finish their repast; and I perceive that, in spite of its unsightliness, the chicory is not a weed,—its ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... continued Miss Thusa, "she heard a shoving, pushing sound in the chimney like something groaning and laboring against the sides of the bricks, and presently a great, big, bloated body came down and set itself on legs that were no larger than a pipe stem. Then a little, scraggy neck, and, last of all, a monstrous skeleton head that grinned from ear to ear. 'You want good company, and you shall have it,' said the figure, and its voice did sound awfully—but the woman put up her wheel and asked the grim thing to take a ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... like that, without your hair brushed or your hand washed and looking as rough as a pair of young colts? Look at me, now, how neat I am—I have changed my dress for the evening." As she spoke she glanced at her thin arms, bare to the elbow, and touched the gold chain that encircled her scraggy throat. "You'll never get Dublin manners, you two," she continued, "and what will you do when you go into society? Ah, it is enough to break the heart to look ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... before his own mind had sensed the change, there came the spatter of Archies by the dozen and the menacing roar of machine guns, sheltered here and there over the scraggy plain within the pill-boxes that have of late been substituted for the vanishing trench lines. Artillery bombardments by the Allies have so devastated certain regions that trenches have become impossible; hence ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... troop of babies!' he yelled. 'Ain't you goin' into the fight? Can't you lick a blamed Yankee?' And, bless your soul! those scraggy fellows stood ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... 1872.—Through scraggy bush, then open forest with short grass, over a broad rill and on good path to village ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... combined effects of the sun and their load. The last of the party was a stout man, apparently some five-and-forty years of age, dressed in a jacket and breeches of coarse brown cloth, and seated sideways on a scraggy mule, in such a position that his back was to the guard-house as he passed it. On the opposite side of the animal hung a pannier, containing cabbages and other vegetables; the unsold residue of the rider's stock in trade. The peasant's legs, naked below the knee, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... old woman, becoming suddenly grave, and laying her thin scraggy hand on the man's arm; "why do you ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... balancers. This travelling show visited us regularly twice a year: once in summer for the Muckle Friday, when the performers were gay and stout, and even the horses had flesh on their bones; and again in the "back-end" of the year, when cold and hunger had taken the blood from their faces, and the scraggy dogs that whined at their side were lashed for licking the paint off the caravans. While the storm-stayed show was in the vicinity the villages suffered from an invasion of these dogs. Nothing told more truly the dreadful tale of the showman's life in winter. Sam'l Mann's ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... of a cave was seen half blocked, some green lianas beckoning in the entrance. In front, the fissured pavement of the lava stretched into the sea and made a surfy point. A scattered village, two white churches, one Catholic, one Protestant, a grove of tall and scraggy palms, and a long bulk of ruin, occupy the end. Off the point, not a cable's length beyond the breaching surf, a schooner rode; come to discharge house-boards, and presently due at Hookena to load lepers. The village is Honaunau; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my eyes I saw that we were running down a kind of alley-way, with a row of very mean little two-storey houses on the one side, and on the other, a kind of waste ground strewn with broken bottles, broken iron pans, broken earthenware and other refuse, interspersed with tufts of long scraggy grass, which looked the more wretched because the sinking sun ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... an orchard and deteriorating into a scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... affecting type of orphanage. Around, wiry and stiff, were scanty spires of beach-grass; near by, dwarf-cedars, blown flat by wintry winds, stood like grim guardians; only at the grave-head a stunted wild-rose, wilted and scraggy, was struggling for existence. Thoughts came of the desolate childhood of many a little one in this hard world; and there was joy in the assurance, that Angelo was neither motherless nor fatherless, and that Margaret and her husband were not childless in that New World, which so suddenly ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... The cold and the exposure had, together, given it a color of uniform red. His gray eyes were glancing under a pair of shaggy brows, that overhung them in long hairs of gray mingled with their natural hue; his scraggy neck was bare, and burnt to the same tint with his face. A kind of coat, made of dressed deerskin, with the hair on, was belted close to his lank body, by a girdle of colored worsted. On his feet were deerskin moccasins, ornamented with porcupines' quills, after the manner of the ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... unburned coffee-grains or of underdone gingerbread; her nose was long; her eyes, were small and bleary; her protruding lips wrinkled up as she spoke, and displayed her poor yellow old tusks; her scant hair was dirty gray, her forehead was bald, her neck was scraggy: she was particularly and pathetically ugly. Her dress bagged about over her long waist and spidery arms. No ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... apparently made up his mind, like Mahomet, to go to the mountain, since the mountain would not come to him, and attempted to get over; but a crabbed old cherry-tree, that grew hard by, caught him by the frock in one of its crooked scraggy arms that stretched over the wall. In attempting to disengage himself his foot slipped, and down he tumbled—but not to the earth;—the tree still kept him suspended. There was a silent struggle, and then a piercing shriek;—but, in an instant, I had dropped my gun ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... friend; he unwound three or four yards of dingy woollen stuff from his scraggy throat, turned down the poodle collar, pulled his chair close to the table, squared his brows, and began business. He made very light of a brace of partridges and ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Two pounds of the scraggy part of a neck of mutton. Cut the meat from the bones, and cut off all the fat. Then cut meat into small pieces and put into soup pot with one large slice of turnip, two of carrot, one onion and ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... flat open forest, with scraggy trees and grass three feet long in tufts. Came to a ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... down the hill had been so impetuous and the horse was now running so madly under the whip that there was no such thing as checking him. With a crash of splintering wood he drove breast-on against the gate, throwing up his bony head at the end of his scraggy neck. At the crash the woman screamed and covered her eyes. But the outfit was too much of a catapult to be stopped. Through the gate it went, and the wagon roared away through the bridge, the ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... kings' daughters, and courtesans who built pyramids. Little Thais loved Ahmes like a father, like a mother, like a nurse, and like a dog. She followed the slave into the cellar when he went to fill the amphorae, and into the poultry-yard amongst the scraggy and ragged fowls, all beak, claws, and feathers, who flew swifter than eagles before the knife of the black cook. Often at night, on the straw, instead of sleeping, he built for Thais little water-mills, and ships no bigger than his ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... stopped presently before a rather ornate cottage, with several peaks and a turret, which was set down in the midst of a square lawn that looked unnaturally green to Joyce in comparison with the bareness all about it. Grass, except in long scraggy tufts here and there, or in sparse blades in some odd fence corner, was not prevalent at the Works. Joyce liked all that was trim and beautiful, but just now this house and lawn, so new and snug and smiling, jarred upon ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... whiteheaded cloud, slowly unrolling himself in the bosom of a black pine forest. Across the other side of the road a huge granite cliff has picked up a bit of gauzy silver, which he is winding round his scraggy neck. And now, here comes a cascade right over our heads; a cascade, not of water, but of cloud; for the poor little brook that makes it faints away before it gets down to us; it falls like a shimmer of moonlight, or a shower of powdered silver, while a tremulous rainbow appears ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... one looked around, and there was a white bear, very large but very lean and scraggy, which had sneaked up behind the sailors, and now had clutched one of them, whom he very speedily killed and commenced to eat, while the ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... often sheltered the wayfarer alike from the tempest and the hot summer's sun, had been hewn away, to serve the purposes of strife in the shape of spear-handles, or to the doom of the winter fire; one solitary arm of the blighted tree alone remained, extending its scraggy and shattered remnants to a considerable distance over the greensward which had been, from time immemorial, trodden by the merry morrice dancers, and broken by the curvetting of the hobby-horse and the Dragon of Wantley, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... a haggard, unkempt man who limped across the shining office floor to raise a second mortgage from the bank people. His hollow cheeks betrayed themselves through the scraggy beard, and his eyes seemed to have retired into deep caverns where they burned with cold fires. His hands were grained from exposure and hard work, and the nails were rimmed with tight-packed dirt and coal-dust. He spoke vaguely ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... beds of lava, much disintegrated, and almost entirely of the kind called pahoehoe. Countless pit craters extend over the whole mountain, all of them covered outside, and a few inside, with scraggy vegetation. The edges are often very ragged and picturesque. The depth varies from 300 to 700 feet, and the diameter from 700 to 1,200. The walls of some are of a smooth grey stone, the bottoms flat, and very deep in sand, but others resemble ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... just rising on Orange River Camp. Our tents are pitched on the slopes of white sand, soft and deep, into which you sink at every step, that stretch down to the river, dotted with a few scraggy thorn-trees. There are men round me, sleeping about on the sand, rolled in their dark brown blankets, like corpses laid out, covered from head to foot, with the tight folds drawn over their feet and over their heads. A few bestir themselves, roll, and stretch, and draw back the covering from ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... their physicians. As sleep refreshes the weary limbs of toil, so does this milk fill up the wasted limbs and restore the vanished strength. Strange is it to see the herds feeding on this abundant pasture. They look as if it did not profit them at all. Thin and scraggy, as they wander through the thickets they look like the patients who seek their aid; yet their milk is so thick that it sticks ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... represented in the house. The doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (illotum vulgus,) who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (gladio jugulati). The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,—the subject Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname of CHICK-PEA (Cicero) is said by some to be derived. As a lecturer is public property, we may remark, that his outer garment (toga) was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the aspect of affairs. In addition to having to spend the evening by himself, the cook sent him a very moderate dinner, smoked soup, sodden fish, scraggy cutlets, and sour pudding. Mr. Plummey, too, seemed to have put all the company bottle-ends together for him. This would not do. If Sponge could have satisfied himself that his host would not be better in a day or two, he would have thought seriously ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... as it is improperly called—is not a handsome tree, but it is a very useful one. It has a scraggy, stunted look, and the foliage is apt to be rusty; but it will grow in rocky, sandy places where no other tree would even try to hold up its head, and the wood, when made into timber, lasts for a great many years. Posts for fences are made of the juniper or red cedar, and ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... country was an unsettled waste known only to the Indians and a few trappers. There were neither roads nor well-marked trails, and the only timber to be found—which generally grew only along the streams—was so scraggy and worthless as hardly to deserve the name. Nor was water by any means plentiful, even though the section is traversed by important streams, the Republican, the Smoky Hill, the Arkansas, the Cimarron, and the Canadian all flowing ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... daughters-in-law would sit idle. At one time she would hear the tavern-keeper's geese going at the back of the huts to her kitchen-garden, and she would run out of the hut with a long stick and spend half an hour screaming shrilly by her cabbages, which were as gaunt and scraggy as herself; at another time she fancied that a crow had designs on her chickens, and she rushed to attack it wi th loud words of abuse. She was cross and grumbling from morning till night. And often she raised such an outcry that passers-by stopped ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... at Dirty Fingers on the porch of his Good Old Queen Bess. He was a great soft lump of a man, a giant of flabbiness. Sitting in his smooth-worn, wooden armchair, he was almost formless. His head was huge, his hair uncut and scraggy, his face smooth as a baby's, fat as a cherub's, and as expressionless as an apple. His folded arms always rested on a huge stomach, whose conspicuousness was increased by an enormous watch-chain ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... naming of this station. Indeed, we looked in vain for the "garden" appearance of the valley. There was nothing generous in the small meadows or the thin orchards; and if large trees ever grew on the bordering hills, they have given place to rather stunted evergreens; the scraggy firs and balsams, in fact, possess Nova Scotia generally as we saw it,—and there is nothing more uninteresting and wearisome than large tracts of these woods. We are bound to believe that Nova Scotia has somewhere, or had, great pines and hemlocks that murmur, but we were not blessed ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... at the Traveller's Delight the ground dipped down into a hollow, which, even in daylight, was completely screened from the view of any one within the house or about the yard by a great clump or patch of scraggy furze bushes. In this secluded spot there stood a lime-kiln, one of those built somewhat like a low circular tower, with gaping mouth and open roof; but for many a day the kiln had not been used—not since the present tenant entered on possession of the ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... could touch with a paddle the bank on either side, and in many places the birches and willows met over the stream, dropping yellow leaves upon our heads as we passed underneath. Here and there long scraggy tree-trunks hung over the bank into the water, logs green with moss thrust their ends up from the depths of the stream, and more than once we seemed about to come to a stop in the midst of an impassable swamp. ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... and dingy corner. When Fred arrived there, he saw standing beside one of the machines a medium sized man with small gray eyes, that were shaded with immense bushy brows nearly an inch in length. His features were dull and expressionless, and over the lower portion of his wrinkled face a scraggy, mud colored beard seemed struggling for existence. His clothing appeared to indicate a ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... front of the bench, Lorilleux, quite as small of stature, but more slender in the shoulders, worked with the tips of his pliers, with the vivacity of a monkey, at a labor so minute, that it was impossible to follow it between his scraggy fingers. It was the husband who first raised his head—a head with scanty locks, the face of the yellow tinge of old wax, long, and with an ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... she has lived here,—set quite a good way back from the street, and with a low stoop to one side and a piazza off that. A tall iron railing, with an ornamental gate, encloses a front yard in which are some forlorn-looking shrubs, a rosebush or two, and a couple of scraggy altheas. Workmen had been about the place for some time, putting everything in order, and of course we took the liveliest interest in all that went on, from the pruning of the shrubs to the carrying in of the furniture; and the day the new ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... to-day. I have had a wash in a thimbleful of water, and shaved, and feel another man. They gave us an hour of stables, but the horses certainly needed it, as they never get groomed now, and are a shaggy, scraggy-looking lot. I'm glad to say mine are quite free from galls and sore backs. As one never sees their backs by daylight, it is interesting to get a good look at them at last. They are very liable to sore backs (partly owing to the weight of the ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... she asked, in surprise. " Why, I 'lowed you folks from the settlemints thought hit was mighty scraggy down hyeh." ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... case was short and very thin. His dry, sallow skin showed signs of wrinkling; a thick fold lay under each eye, and at each end of his upper lip. There were no prominent cheek-bones or almond-shaped eyes, which are so distinctively seen in most of the Mongolian race. Under the scraggy mustache we could distinguish a rather benevolent though determined mouth; while his small, keen eyes, which were somewhat sunken, gave forth a flash that was perhaps but a flickering ember of the fire they once contained. The left eye, which was partly closed by a paralytic stroke several ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... the wood thinned and the beeches failed, and they came to a country, still waste, of little low hills, stony for the more part, beset with scraggy thorn-bushes, and here and there some other berry-tree sown by the birds. Then said Roger: "Now I deem us well out of the peril of them of the Burg, who if they follow the chase as far as the sundering of us and the others, will heed our slot nothing, but will follow on ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... lean, scraggy humbug," said Mr. Pynsent, with great candour. "She drags her shoulders out of her dress, she never lets her eyes alone: and she goes simpering and ogling about ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... George. He used to be so like a cat on a sunny wall; used to lie along the stern seat of the Moondaisy so lazy and content that only his ever-watchful eyes held any expression. He was deeply sunburnt: scraggy in the neck; strong and lissome, but not ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... little josher! You'll be round chuckin' me under the chin before the lights come on. Gee! There goes the bell again! I'll bet my switch it's that scraggy old hen in forty-four, wantin' me to run out and buy her some hair pins, or to hook her up so she'll look like a prize winner at a wasp show. She makes me sick, she does! But I'll—Yes Ma'am! Coming right away," she ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... side, on the top of the scraggy corn-field fence, would these three worthies, so strikingly different one from the other, while away the warm summer hours; often, too, long after old Cornwallis, there dozing so contentedly in the shade ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... troop horses and the commissary's cows from grazing off its sides, and stolen every fall by the half-breeds when the first frosts came—that served as a hitching-post for raw-boned army mounts and scraggy Indian ponies. Beyond this circle were wagons and big, clumsy, box-topped carts from far-lying farms, with oxen tied to their wheels and swaying their weary necks ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... where people are passing—or at Stornham, where the servants would overhear and Rosalie be thrown into hysterics. You will NOT run screaming across the marsh, because I should run screaming after you, and we should both look silly. Here is a rather scraggy tree. Will you sit on the mound ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... whom he had met on the Bowery now showed his real character, and before Herbert could further defend himself, he was pounced upon by him and a villainous looking man with a scraggy red beard and most repulsive features. They threw a thick black cloth over his head, and, after binding his hands firmly together, thrust him into a dark vault, or pen, in ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... or if he did his words failed to reach M. Zola. The reins were jerked, the scraggy night-horse broke into a spasmodic trot turned out of the station, and pulled up in front of the caravansary which an eminent butcher has done so ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... then down,—at her wild hair, now loosened from its convent form of pigtail, and scarcely restrained by the big sun- hat which was tied on anyhow,—at her great dark eyes,—at her thin angular figure and long scraggy legs,—legs which were still somewhat too visible, though since her arrival at Abbot's Manor Maryllia had made some thoughtful alterations in the dress of her musical protegee which had considerably improved her appearance—"Is it ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... equal Taltavull's impatience, and every minute or so out went his head and beard bidding the driver to hasten and hasten; and the driver, crouched there in his little penthouse, rumbled out fierce arr-e-ees, and prodding forth a blue-sleeved arm beneath his blanket, lashed the scraggy mules into ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... Winslow Orry," said the smiling eyes of Mrs. Dagon to that lady. "How doubly scraggy you look in that worn-out old sea-green satin!" said the smiling old ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... The trees and houses were so arranged that a long, arrowy ray of light penetrated through a narrow space over to a small rise of ground called Berry Hill on account of its harvest of blueberries. Two old, scraggy, immense oak-trees still remained; and she used to watch them from their first faint green to the blood-red and copper tints of autumn, when the sun shone through them. Down behind he dropped when the day was done; sometimes ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... law-book, the plaintiffs and defendants assembled, and took seats on a wooded bench in front. 'All persons whatsoever havin' any business whatever with this 'ere court—Squire Belhash sitting—must come for'ard now or never,' cries out at the top of a deep sonorous voice a little scraggy-looking Scotchman, who, without coat or vest (his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and the right leg of his nether garment tucked away beneath a coarse deck-boot), acted the double part of usher and constable. Again directing a few legal phrases to the ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... blue-prints, scarcely recognizable as coming from such humble family trees as the despised onion. Wild spikenard, with its crown of tiny white flowers, also reproduced beautifully in the blue-print. The Seal of Solomon and purple Twisted Stalk made scraggy pictures easy to identify. ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable. Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... little fellow that kept a small shop of hucksthery, and some groceries, and the like o' that. He was a near, penurious devil, hard and scraggy lookin', with hunger in his face and in his heart, too; ay, and besides, he had the name of not bein' honest. But then his shop was gettin' bigger and bigger, and himself richer and richer every day. Here's your man, says the old couple. Maybe not, says I. No shingawn that deals ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... scraggy woman; from a kind of float made of spars and yards lashed together, for ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... fighters, half-civilized, half-savage, and almost entirely supported by the subsidies they receive. Nearly all of the able-bodied men are under arms. A few, who are too old or too young to fight, remain at home and look after the cattle and the scraggy gardens upon the gravelly hillsides. The women are as hardy and as enduring as the men and are taught to handle the rifle. The British authorities are confident of the loyalty of the Afridis and believe that the present arrangement would be absolutely safe in time ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... poor animal could have escaped with life, but in another moment his head reappeared above water, and he made a brave struggle to gain the bank. The current, however, was too strong for him. Down he went below the foaming water, his scraggy tail making a farewell flourish as he disappeared. But again his head appeared, and once again he struggled for the bank. This time with success, for he had been swept into a shallow in which he was able to maintain his foothold and slowly drag ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... some points in common with Professor Summerlee, and others in which they are the very antithesis to each other. He is twenty years younger, but has something of the same spare, scraggy physique. As to his appearance, I have, as I recollect, described it in that portion of my narrative which I have left behind me in London. He is exceedingly neat and prim in his ways, dresses always with great ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... observe: that thin, scraggy, filthy, mangy, miserable cloud, for all the depth of it, can't turn the sun red, as a good, business-like fog does with a hundred feet or so of itself. By the plague-wind every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round the world; in a London fog the air itself is pure, though ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... Ned, they swept over the open space and plunged into the wilderness of rocks and scraggy brush beyond. One look the patrol leader gave, after they found themselves in the shelter ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... "pure"; nor is there anything tractified about her, though she is pious and generous. The contrast between her and her betrothed, the handsome but worthless Anzoleto, also a singer, is, at first, not overworked; and one scene—that in which, when Consuelo has got over the "scraggy" age and is developing actual beauty, she and Anzoleto debate, in the most natural manner, whether she is pretty or not—is quite capital, one of the things that stick in one's memory and stamp the writer's genius, or, at ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... on Orchis' loan, but China Aster gave himself not so much concern about that as about the interest now due to the old farmer. But he was glad that the principal there had yet some time to run. However, the skinny old fellow gave him some trouble by coming after him every day or two on a scraggy old white horse, furnished with a musty old saddle, and goaded into his shambling old paces with a withered old raw hide. All the neighbors said that surely Death himself on the pale horse was after poor China Aster now. And something so it proved; for, ere long, China Aster found himself ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... balloon-skirts? Reglar rot! I'm a-pinin' for it, POLLY, wich in course, my dear, I mean That convenient, cleanly cover-all, wot's called the Crinerline! It hides so much, my POLLY; wich I'm sure, my dear, you'll twig! As dear Lady JUNE informs hus, the too-little or too-big, The scraggy and the crummy ones, the lanky 'uns and the lumps, Will be grateful for a fashion as is kind to bones and 'umps. Eel-skin skirts may suit the swells, dear, and the straight, and slim, and tall, And—well, them whose wardrobe's plentiful; they don't suit me at all; Wich ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various |
