Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




More "Matted" Quotes from Famous Books



... rock-roses, that is where the lake side is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with him, "I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will stay on it," meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not be able to go through it. So he took up "a pebble of cow-dung, and as soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music that ever was heard." They ran away, and when they had gone about two hundred yards they ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats

... And, on her cheek, my cheek enraptur'd glows. When oh, what anguish while my shame I tell! What fix'd despair, what rage my bosom swell! Here was no goddess, here no heavenly charms, A rugged mountain fill'd my eager arms, Whose rocky top, o'erhung with matted brier, Received the kisses of my am'rous fire. Wak'd from my dream, cold horror freez'd my blood; Fix'd as a rock, before the rock I stood; 'O fairest goddess of the ocean train, Behold the triumph of thy proud disdain; Yet why,' I cried, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb

... plainer, there was a thud of hoofs behind, and the curious exhilaration returned to Winston as the big black horse stretched out at a gallop. The soil was hard as granite, but the matted grasses formed a covering that rendered fast riding possible to a man who took the risks, and Winston knew there were few horses in the Government service to match the one he rode. Still, it was evident ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss

... made preparations to go to the headquarters of the American Army. In Paris also we got into our new regulation Red Cross uniforms. Ever since man first pinned a buffalo tail to the back of his belt, and stuck a rooster feather in his matted hair, he has been proud of his uniform. Sex vanity expresses itself most gorgeously in a uniform, and when they put Henry and me into uniforms, even carefully repressed Red Cross uniforms, open at the neck and ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White

... his head and found a ragged gash running almost the length of the scalp. It must have bled freely, judging from the weakness he felt and the way his hair was matted and his face smeared. But the blood had congealed now and stopped flowing. He figured from the character of the wound that it had been made by a glancing blow ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall

... forest, the other of submerged depths. Instantly I glimpsed the distant age when thousands of feet above the very spot upon which I stood, but then at sea level, bloomed a Cretaceous forest, whose broken trunks and matted foliage decayed in bogs where they slowly turned to coal; coal which, exposed and disintegrated during intervening ages, has long since—all but a few small fragments like this—washed into the headwaters of the Saskatchewan ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... long, and eleven broad, and of a proportionable height: One end was wholly open, and the other end, and the two sides, were partly inclosed with a kind of wicker work. The bier on which the corpse was deposited, was a frame of wood like that in which the sea-beds, called cotts, are placed, with a matted bottom, and supported by four posts, at the height of about five feet from the ground. The body was covered first with a matt, and then with white cloth; by the side of it lay a wooden mace, one of their weapons of war, and near the head of it, which lay next to the close ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... Paul listlessly moved about the room. Spying in a small mirror his dirty, blood-besmeared face and matted hair, Paul starts backward, grasps the new weapon, stabs at that mirrored reflection, stares about wildly, and with maniacal yell bolts ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee

... Manhattan, as well he might have done, five years before Hudson came up the harbor in the Half Moon, had settled there instead of on the sterile island of Ste. Croix in the Bay of Fundy, where, amid the "sand, the sedge, and the matted whortleberry bushes," the commissioners to fix the boundaries between the United States and Canada discovered in 1793—nearly two centuries later—the foundations of the "Habitation de l'isle Ste. Croix" that the French had built in the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... taken. He went on and on, ever deeper and deeper into the forest, until at last he came to a miserable looking hut. The door was open, and he looked in. There lay an ugly old hag fast asleep. She had only one eye in the middle of her forehead, and her gray hair was tangled and matted and fell over her face. The Prince entered in very softly, and sitting down beside her, he began to rub her head. He suspected that this was the Rakshas who had bewitched his uncles, ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle

... chosen, save that the mire troubled him, letting him down by slow degrees, and threatening to engulf him bodily; and he was now too weak to extricate himself. He lifted his head and glared. His face was grimy, his hair matted with mud. Alice, although brave enough and quite accustomed to startling experiences, uttered a cry when she saw those snaky eyes glistening so savagely amid the shadows. But Jean was quick to recognize Long-Hair; he had often seen him about ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... The Jesuit was loaded like the rest. The dogs alone floundered through the drifts unburdened. There was neither path nor level ground. Descending, climbing, stooping beneath half-fallen trees, clambering over piles of prostrate trunks, struggling through matted cedar-swamps, threading chill ravines, and crossing streams no longer visible, they toiled on till the day began to decline, then stopped to encamp. [ 1 ] Burdens were thrown down, and sledges unladen. The squaws, with knives and hatchets, ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... Orgunje, deg. deg.880 Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, And split his currents; that for many a league The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles— 885 Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere, A foil'd circuitous wanderer—till at last The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home deg. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold

... woman's attire, and even passed through the midst of his enemies unknown. But understanding his disguise was discovered, he assumed the habit of a travelling mountaineer, and wandered about among the woods and heaths, with a matted beard, and squalid looks, exposed to hunger, thirst, and weariness, and in continual danger of being apprehended. He was obliged to trust his life to the fidelity of above fifty individuals, and many of these were in the lowest paths of fortune. They knew that a price of thirty thousand pounds ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... as I was, in a union suit, and his face and hands, like mine, were stained a butternut brown. His hair was long and matted and two weeks' stubble of beard was ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock

... said Attwater, and led the way into a clean, matted room with a cot bed, a safe, or shelf or two of books in a glazed case, and an iron washing-stand. Presently he cried in the native, and there appeared for a moment in the doorway a plump and pretty young ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... plainly in view. Men almost naked, burned to hue of brick-dust; men in untanned sheepskin coats and mantles; men with every kind of headgear, turbans, handkerchiefs, cowls; men with hair and beard matted and flying; now one helped himself to a louder yell by tossing in air the dirty garment he had torn from his body, hirsute as a goat's; now one leaped up agile as a panther; now one turned topsy-turvy; now groups of them swirled ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... door to and stared at the object before them, one of the great Eskimo dogs, with its thick coat so matted and covered with ice and snow that the hairs seemed finished off with icicles, which rattled as ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn

... a vast silence of pines, redolent with balsamic breath, and muffled with the dry dust of dead bark and matted mosses. Lying on our backs, we looked upward through a hundred feet of clear, unbroken interval to the first lateral branches that formed the flat canopy above us. Here and there the fierce sun, from whose ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... natives had now unfortunately learnt to despise our weapons I was compelled to act promptly, or blood would undoubtedly have been shed. I therefore took my rifle from Coles and, directing it at a heap of closely matted dead bushes which were distant two or three yards to the right of their main body, I drove a ball right through it: the dry rotten boughs crackled, and flew in all directions, whilst our enemy, utterly confounded at this ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... they are, how their leaves enclose and caress them, how the water buoys them up and plays with them! Well, are they not better off than the poor rare flowers that live painfully in hothouse air, and are labelled, and matted, and given long names by men's petty precise laws? You are like the river-lilies. O child, do not pine for the glass house that would ennoble you, only to force you ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... once been jaunty; his hat is as rakish as it is battered; his face wears that dull reddish hue, common to fair complexions that have been long exposed to sun and wind; his hair and beard, somewhat matted, somewhat disordered, may have borne some tinge of auburn or yellow once, but they too, have, unmistakeably, battled with the sun, and have come out a light hay color. As Constance looks at him, she, mentally, confesses that ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... in blossom and fruit; its value dependent chiefly upon its matted roots for holding wet banks, and its ability to withstand considerable shade. Sold by plant collectors; ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame

... seven years, that might, unpossessed, have been beautiful, sat under the shed of a sort of curiosity-shop, among bangles and armlets, mouthpieces for pipes, leaden idols, and Brahminical cords, and made infernal faces,—his mouth foaming epileptically, his hair dishevelled and matted with sudden sweat, his eyes blood-shot, his whole aspect diabolic. And on the ground before the miserable lad were set dishes of rice mixed with blood, carcasses of rams and cocks, handfuls of red ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... moonlight black and sharp masses reflected in the water. Sails and steamers and boats of all sorts are constantly dotting this space, and I am never weary of wandering along the shore on which lie the fishermen among their boats, with mournful looking women and black, matted-haired, gypsy-like children. ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke

... was to bathe my head with warm water until the dry blood with which my hair was matted was cleared away as much as possible, and then the hair itself was shorn away until the wound was fairly exposed. The injury was then found to consist of a scalp wound some six inches in length, extending from a point above my right ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood

... and there were snakes too, ugly spotted things, which hissed at us, and put out their double tongues, and then coiled themselves away in the dim recesses of the forest. But on we went, climbing with difficulty over prostrate firs, or breaking through matted juniper, and still the spring was not, though we were "far away in the woods." But still we climbed on, through swamp and jungle, till we tore our dresses to pieces, and our hats got pulled off in a tree and some of our hair with them; but at last ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... am a revolting object. My hair is a matted chaos spread all over the floor, my beard is like a hard broom. My necktie is on the wrong way up: my bootlaces trail half-way down Fleet St. Why not? When one's attempts at reformation are "not much believed in" what other course is open but a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... is the green-wood's deep-matted shade On a mid-summer's eve, when the fresh rain is o'er; When the yellow beams slope, and sparkle thro' the glade, And swiftly in the thin air the light ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... and bay grew thick, sun spots glancing through their leaves, boughs slapping and slashing back from the passage of the rushing bodies, stones rolling under the flying feet. The heat was suffocating, the narrow cleft holding it, the matted foliage keeping out all air. The men's faces were empurpled, the gunny sacks about their necks were soaked with sweat. They spoke little—a grunt, a muttered oath as a stone turned. Doubled under the branches, crashing through a covert with closed eyes and warding arm, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... exaggerate the charm of this climate. And yet this, one thought, was equatorial Africa, which, in the popular imagination, is supposed to be synonymous with torrential rains, malignant fevers, and dense jungles of matted vegetation. It was more like the friendly stretches of Colorado scenery at the time of year when the grasses of the valley are dotted with flowers of many colors and the sun shines down ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon

... stumbled. The cause was a prairie-dog hole, concealed under a clump of matted mesquite. Ferguson lunged forward, caught at the saddle horn, missed it, and pitched head-foremost out of the saddle, turning completely over and alighting upon his feet. He stood erect for an instant, but the ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer

... shore, he was taken away from those companions of his forever, and was delivered over to a band of priests, exchanging the company of beautiful women for men clothed in black mantles, with long hair matted with blood—their ears also were mangled. These conducted him to the steps of the pyramid, and he was driven up amidst a crowd of priests, with drums beating and trumpets blowing. As he went up he broke an earthen flute on every step to show that ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... gloriously melancholy because his spirits were so high and life had so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost riotously sad. That was his youth. When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair. Kerner's hair was plentiful and carefully matted as an artist's thatch should be. He was a cigaretteur, and he audited his dinners with red wine. But, most of all, he was a fool. And, wisely, I envied him, and listened patiently while he knocked Velasquez and Tintoretto. Once he told me that he liked a story of mine that he had come ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... largest of the dead pines was a large black bear, reared back on his haunches and striking with both paws viciously at some unseen foe. The hair of muzzle, head and paws was matted and plastered with some thick liquid, giving him a curious frowsy appearance. He was evidently in a towering rage but it was also apparent that he was suffering great pain, his ferocious growls being interspersed with long, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... down to pull some matted grass from about the roots of a laburnum-tree, whose dark leaves were lighted by golden loops of blossoms, "Thirty-eight years ago," he said, "your mother and I planted this; we had just come home from our wedding journey, ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... Falmouth's visit, my Lady Lincoln singled her out, visited and invited her. The dignity of the assembly was great- Westminster Hall was illuminated for chairs; the passage from it hung with green baize and lamps, and matted. The cloister was the prettiest sight in the world, lighted with lamps and Volterra vases. The great apartment is magnificent. Sir Thomas Robinson the Long, who you know is always propriety itself, told me how ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... gallows a group of women sat, or rather squatted, in the mud; their ragged shifts and kirtles, soaked through with the drizzling rain, hung dankly on their emaciated forms; their hair, in some cases grey, and in others dark or straw-coloured, clung matted round their wet faces, on which the dirt and the damp had ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... hickory and oak, through whose misty-mellow depths a small stream trickled, he paused at last and laid the boy upon a soft and matted bed of thick green myrtle, and brought water in his two hands to bathe the bruised head, whimpering the while. Then he chafed the small bare feet and warmed them in his own warm breast; and gathering handfuls of pungent ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... imperceptibly lessened, and may be altogether intercepted, unless diligent attention is given to keep open the channels by which they enter the spirit. If the pipes are not looked to, they will be choked by masses of matted trifles, through which the 'rivers of living water,' which Christ took as a symbol of the Spirit's influences, cannot force ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... place was dank and musty and cobwebs spread across the openings where the windows had been. Much broken glass and a couple of sash weights fastened to ends of rotten sash cord lay upon the floor. In the corner was a makeshift bed of straw, matted from age, damp and unwholesome. The place was in possession of spiders. Whole boards of the flooring had rotted, yielding like mud under the feet of ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... its retrograde movement with undiminished spirit. But it was now embarrassed with the transportation of its plunder, and by the increasing difficulties of the sierra, which, as they ascended its sides, was matted over with impenetrable thickets, and broken up by formidable ravines or channels, cut deep into the soil by the mountain torrents. The Moors were now seen mustering in considerable numbers along the heights, and, as they were expert marksmen, being trained by early and assiduous practice, the ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... regiment of the fierce Shumadians leaped out of its trenches and tore across the intervening ground between its trenches and the rocks of a near-by eminence which a force of Magyars had made into a position. Haggard from pain and starvation, their hair long and matted, some still in ragged uniforms, but most of them in the sheepskin coats of peasants, their eyes bloodshot with rage, they formed not a pleasant picture to the intrenched Huns. The rifle fire from the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... eyes, and looked at me sulkily from under his matted and tangled hair. "You are not of his company?" ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... made by the axes of the Iroquois in preparing their breastwork of defence. Champlain gazed upon the scene before him with wondering eyes. In front was a circular barricade, composed of trunks of trees, boughs, and matted twigs, behind which the Iroquois stood like tigers at bay. In the edge of the forest around were clustered their yelling foes, screaming shrill defiance, yet afraid to attack, for they had already been driven back with severe loss. Their ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... of that painful, licked, snipped, repressed appearance that pleasure-ground lawns are apt to have even when viewed at a distance. And, not to mention the flowers with which they are brightened, their grasses are very much finer both in color and texture, and instead of lying flat and motionless, matted together like a dead green cloth, they respond to the touches of every breeze, rejoicing in pure wildness, blooming and ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... looking out upon them; but the windows in sight were closed and shuttered. The thick flowering creepers which almost covered the walls as high as the windows of the second story—roses, bougainvillea, plumbago, and convolvulus—were tangled and matted together, great branches trailing over the shut eyes of the windows. Cypresses and olives were untrimmed, and there was a straggling wilderness of orange trees. The place had a sad yet poetic look of having been ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... becomes dry and dusty, and the bark turns to a monstrously mottled and evil greenish-white. Carl announced to one poplar stick, "I could lick you! I'm a gen'ral, I am." The stick made no reply whatever, and he contemptuously shied it out into the chickweed which matted the grubby back yard. This necessitated his sneaking out and capturing it by stalking it from the rear, lest it rouse ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... gloomy arms athwart the horizon; but did not arrest my aerial journey. The thick boughs groaned and crashed beneath me, as I was dragged through their matted foliage; my limbs lacerated and torn, and my hair tangled amid the thorny branches. Vainly I endeavoured to cling to the twigs which impeded my passage, but they eluded my frenzied grasp, or snapped in my hands, while my cries for help were drowned in the thundering sweep ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie

... and I am all alone—all alone! Oh, mother—mother!" He threw himself down before the dead woman, and his form shook with emotion, but not a tear came to his eyes. Only that hard, stony look of hopeless despair. Mat crept up to him and took his head in her lap, smoothing softly the matted chestnut hair. ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask

... you like to see Allah?" "Yes," he said, "I should. Can I?" "Are you very sorry for the times you have been naughty and said bad words?" "Yes," he said; "if I get well, I will be better and kinder to grandmother." I parted his thick, matted hair, and, kneeling, I baptized him from the flask of water I always carried about at my side. "What is that?" asked the old woman, after a minute's silence. "It is a blessing," I answered, "and may do him ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... man in the uniform of an ambulance surgeon was kneeling beside the mud-stained figure, and a police officer was standing over both. The ambulance surgeon touched lightly the matted hair from which the blood escaped, stuck his finger in the eye of the prostrate man, and then with his open hand slapped him ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis

... entered the main apartments in order to inquire for Veronica, had passed through the long outer hall with its red walls, its matted floor and its great table covered with green baize, to the antechamber within, where, with some ostentation, as Bosio had always thought, Gregorio had hung up the escutcheon with the quartered arms ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... green place on the mountains far and near with my field-glasses, but saw no sheep, caribou, or moose, although one or two were reported to have been killed by others on the trail. The ptarmigan lived in the matted patches of willow. There were a great many of them, and they helped out our monotonous diet very opportunely. They moved about in pairs, the cock very loyal to the hen in time of danger; but not even this loyalty could save him. Hunger such as ours considered itself very humane ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... great we assisted our ascent by tufts of grass firmly rooted in the luxuriant moss that grew abundantly about the water-courses. On reaching the summit, I found that the fall was supplied from a stream winding through rugged chasms and thickly-matted clusters of plants and trees, among which the pandanus bore a conspicuous appearance and gave a picturesque richness to the place. While admiring the wildness of the scene, Mr. Montgomery joined me; we did not however succeed in following the stream for more than a hundred yards, for at that ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... deepest of all in Bassett's brain, was the dank and noisome jungle. It actually stank with evil, and it was always twilight. Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof a hundred feet overhead. And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life- forms that rooted in death and lived on death. And through all this he drifted, ever pursued by the flitting shadows ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... one day there came to the Bagree camp a mysterious message. A yogi, his hair matted with filth till it stood twisted and writhed on his head like the serpent tresses of Medusa, his lean skeleton ash-daubed body clothed in yellow, on his forehead the crescent of Eklinga, in his hand a pair of clanking iron tongs, crawled wearily ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... broad eyes roll'd in his head, And glar'd betwixt a yellow and a red; He looked a lion with a gloomy stare, And o'er his eyebrows hung his matted hair.' ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... from me, until I sank to my knees and striving to rise found I might not, and glaring wildly up saw we were come 'neath Bartlemy's cursed pimento tree. Then she, loosing herself from my fainting arms, bent down to push the matted hair from my eyes, to support my failing strength in tender arms, and to lower my heavy head to ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... his companion, and, while he was peering through, the other amused himself by feeling the flat surface which stopped farther progress, and soon made out that there was a wall of rugged stone, built up evidently to stop the entrance; and this was matted together with ivy strands and roots which ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... crimsoned with painful humiliation while she read. Philip was not now the trim and dainty stripling first introduced to the reader. He had outgrown his faded suit of funereal mourning; his long-neglected hair hung elf-like and matted down his cheeks; there was a gloomy look in his bright dark eyes. Poverty never betrays itself more than in the features and form of Pride. It was evident that his spirit endured, rather than accommodated ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... off with his arms and legs, knelt up in bed, and looked blankly at his wife. The timid light of the lamp illuminated his hirsute, pock-marked countenance and glided over his rough matted hair. ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... unwound the rough woolen scarf and as she did so a mass of red hair fell across the pillow, hair that in spite of its matted disorder ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice

... not a face which reassured him. Heavy, shaggy black eyebrows, from beneath which gleamed black and fiery eyes, a skin browned by the hot, Italian sun, and white teeth, that glistened from behind a vast matted mass of tangled beard and moustache,—such was the face that appeared. It seemed an evil and sinister face—a face that revealed a cruel and treacherous soul. No wonder that Bob's heart sank within him as he saw himself confronted by ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille

... we were winding around dark "bays" of sweet-gum and magnolia; now skirting circular ponds of delicate young cypress; now crossing narrow "branches" sunk deep in impenetrable "hummocks" of close-crowded oak and ash and maple, thick-matted with vines and undergrowth; now pausing to gather orchis and pitcher-plants and sun-kisses and andromeda; now fording the broad bend of Peter's Creek where it flows, sapphire in the sunshine, out from the moss-draped ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... divine power, so their religious character appears to be of a different order from monasticism. Perhaps, therefore, they wear their hair long in order to increase their spiritual potency. They themselves now say that they do it in imitation of the god Siva and the ancient ascetics who had long matted locks. The common Hindu practice of shaving the heads of widows may thus be interpreted as a symbol of their complete renunciation of the world and of any idea of remarriage. It was accompanied by numerous other rules designed to make a widow's life a continual penance. This barbarous ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... expecting every moment to see him roll over, a corpse, but knowing from past experiences that he would recover somehow. His recoveries always seemed to her like miracles, and she watched the long pallid face crushed under a shock of dark matted hair, a dirty nightshirt, a pair of thin legs; but for the moment the grandeur of human suffering covered him, lifting him beyond the pale of loving or loathing, investing and clothing him in the pity of tragic things. The room, too, seemed ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... of the country were evidently unmolested, and probably cared little for the change of masters. Arthur had, as yet, seen no living being; and he hastened to Annette's cottage, which stood at a short distance, half hid by the matted foliage of some sheltering pines. It no longer wore the air of open hospitality, which once distinguished it; the gay voice of its mistress ever carolling at her labour, was silent, and the closed door and ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney

... huge salient chin digging into Marcus's shoulder, the dentist heaved and tugged. His face was flaming, his huge shock of yellow hair fell over his forehead, matted with sweat. Marcus began to yield despite his frantic efforts. One shoulder was down, now the other began to go; gradually, gradually it was forced over. The little audience held its breath in the suspense of the moment. Selina broke the ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... felt the moist blood trickling down from the edge of her hair. He let out his breath slowly, the sudden relief almost choking him. It was bad enough surely, but not what he had first feared, not death. She had been struck hard—a flying splinter of wood, perhaps, or a deflected bullet—her hair matted with blood, yet it was no more than a flesh wound, although leaving her unconscious. If he hesitated it was but for an instant. The entire situation recurred to him in a flash; he must change his plans, but dare waste no time. If they were to escape it must be accomplished ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish

... brought the bitterest tears to her eyes. The grimy signal man took in the situation at once and resorted to measures that were at once as effectual as they were grotesque and amusing. Kneeling down on the floor and taking off his cap he bid the gentlemen rub her hands in his tangled and matted hair. It was a most ludicrous remedy but it worked to a charm. The gentle heat brought the blood slowly back and after half an hour's rubbing on the man's ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard

... with valuable information, has strongly tinctured it with pedantry. It is seldom that a more curious jumble is found than in the following paragraph:—'The waxen comb of the ancient figures and typical eels is fully matted and rolled up in shining tapers, to illuminate temple students in finding out the honey that couches in the carcass of the slain Lion of the tribe of Judah.' There is no fear of Bunyan's indulging his readers ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... came near to the enclosed Garden of the Clinging Vines, and walking high into the air looked down upon it with much interest. They saw a mass of tough green vines all matted together and writhing and twisting around like a nest of great snakes. Everything the vines touched they crushed, and our adventurers were indeed thankful to have escaped ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... had said unto her, and what she also had cleverly said unto him. Hearing of this gross misbehaviour of Yavakri, the mind of the sage flamed up, and he waxed exceedingly wroth. And being thus seized with passion, the great sage of a highly irascible temper, tore off a matted lock of his hair, and with holy mantras, offered it as a sacrifice on the sacred fire. At this, there sprang out of it a female exactly resembling his daughter-in-law. And then he plucked another matted lock of his hair, and again offered it as a ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... Naples and Genoa, and were presently installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, a fine old Italian palace, in an ancient garden looking out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills. It was a beautiful spot, though its aging walls and cypresses and matted vines gave it a rather mournful look. Mrs. Clemens's health improved there for a time, in spite of dull, rainy, depressing weather; so much so that in May, when the warmth and sun came back, Clemens was driving about the country, seeking a villa ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine

... stretched down to his twisted knees; he had long, yellow, overlapping horse's teeth in his mouth, with a fall-down under-lip and a drawn-back upper-lip; he had a matted rug of hair on his head. He was as high as a haystack. He carried in his twisted hand an iron spike pointed at the end. And wherever he was going he went as quickly as a ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum

... trowsers could scarcely have been told for the dust and grease which had become imbedded in their texture. His skin was begrimed until it was many shades darker, and his hair stood stiffly about his head, in matted portions, looking as if a comb had not touched it for weeks. One would hardly have imagined that so great a change could have passed upon a boy in a few weeks as had passed over him. When he left his mother's humble abode, there was something about him that instantly attracted the eye ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur

... opposing steep emerging from an entanglement of jungle on a high and open ridge which commanded an unimpeded view to the west—a scene of theatrical clarity with a single theatrical smear. From a hollow far below slothful smoke filtered through the matted, sombre, dew-bespangled foliage, rose a few feet, and drifted abruptly, dissolving from diaphanous blue to nothingness. The resonant whooping of a swamp pheasant, antiphonal to a bell-voiced, crimson-crowned ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... and decay they make. Not so this dismal moss: it does not appear to grow, or to have root, or even clinging fibre of any sort, by which it attaches itself to the bark or stem. It hangs in dark gray, drooping masses from the boughs, swinging in every breeze like matted, grizzled hair. I have seen a naked cypress with its straggling arms all hung with this banner of death, looking like a gigantic tree of monstrous cobwebs,—the most funereal spectacle in all ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... Tangier Commission, and discoursed many things thereon: but little will be done before my Lord Rutherford comes there, as to the fortification and Mole. That done, my Lord Sandwich and I walked together a good while in the matted gallery, he acquainting me with his late enquiries into the Wardrobe business to his content; and tells me how things stand. And that the first year was worth about 3000l. to him, and the next about as much: so that at this day, if he were paid, it ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys

... furtherance; while, even from an aesthetic point of view, it were desirable that, with the present dilapidated locks, and the banks in some places broken, the channel, which is in parts little more than a shallow bed of mud, befouled by garbage and carrion, or choked by a matted growth of weeds, should be superceded by a flow of water, pure ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... every bramble-matted nook Rippled and laughed with water sounds, He walked like one on sainted grounds, Fearing intrusion on the spell That kept some fountain-spirit's well, Or woodland genius, sitting where Red, racy berries ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... rang, and Rice, habited in an old coat forlornly dilapidated, with a pair of shoes composed equally of patches and places for patches on his feet, and wearing a coarse straw hat in a melancholy condition of rent and collapse over a dense black wig of matted moss, waddled into view. The extraordinary apparition produced an instant effect. The crash of peanuts ceased in the pit, and through the circles passed a murmur and a bustle of liveliest expectation. The orchestra opened with a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... whatever the composition of the underclays may be, they always agree in being unstratified. They also agree in this respect that the peculiar fossils known as stigmariae abound in them, and in some cases to such an extent that the clay is one thickly-matted mass of the filamentous rootlets of these fossils. We have seen how these gradually came to be recognised as the roots of trees which grew in this age, and whose remains have subsequently become metamorphosed into coal, and it is but one step farther to come to the conclusion that ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... Arthur Weldon. He had fewer English words at his command than most human beings, and even those did not come to him readily. In his pulpit he sought for them and struggled with them until drops of perspiration rolled from his forehead and fell upon his coarse, matted brown beard. But he believed what he said, and language was so little an accomplishment with him that he was not tempted to say more than he believed. He had been a drummer boy in the Civil War, on the losing side, and he was ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... day, had dropped off to sleep. Thus she was easily captured and carried to the Mission, where upon examination it was found that her head had been severely cut from blows administered with a meat knife, the hair was matted with blood and the child's whole body was covered with filth, and showed signs of former punishments. After the first fears of "being poisoned" were allayed, Ngun Fah expressed herself as being very happy to be rescued from the suffering ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... should attack him. But as he was climbing it, he heard some one singing with a loud voice. Listening attentively, and looking eagerly through the leaves, he saw a boy apparently older than himself, dressed in rough shaggy clothes, made from skins of wild animals. His long matted hair escaped over his cheeks from under a black bearskin cap. With a short thick stick he was driving a herd of swine through the wood. "Hey there, you black porker!" cried the boy, as he threw a stone at some pig which was running away. "Get along, you lazy long-snout!" ...
— The Gold Thread - A Story for the Young • Norman MacLeod

... through a narrow slit left in his parapet, Drummond can just see bobbing among the bowlders far down towards the willow copse two or three Apache crests,—Apache unmistakably, because of the dirty-white turban-like bandages about the matted black locks. At that distance they advance with comparative security. It is when they come closer to the defenders that they will be ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King

... the south. The powdery dust of the trail filled in and overlaid the lines and creases of Luke Tweezy's foxy-nosed and leathery visage. Layers of dust almost completely concealed the original colour of the caked and matted hide of Luke Tweezy's well-conditioned horse. It was evident that Luke ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White

... the edge of the plateau and found the Major awaiting him with Ahma and the young warrior who was to guide him down. From where they stood at the edge of a wide glade they could see far down over the tops of the trees that matted the slope. In the clear morning air the mists which gleamed over the distant Gulf shone white as billowed snow. There lay Davao! Davao, then Zamboanga, then—! A fiercely glad light blazed in Terry's gray eyes, then darkened in anticipation of leaving the Major ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... her hurry after them and so they threw down the comb. This time a forest appeared, a dark and dusky forest in which the roots were interwoven, the branches matted together, and the tree-tops touching each other. The witch tried very hard to pass through, but in vain, and so, very, ...
— Folk Tales from the Russian • Various

... people nearest the uncouth visitor had drawn away. Only the stranger held his ground; more than held it, indeed, for he edged almost imperceptibly nearer. He had noticed a fleck of red on the matted beard, where the lip had been bitten into. Also he saw that the Professor, whose gaze had so timorously shifted from his, was intent, recognizing danger; intent, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds, Is this; an uninhabited sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... seemed) not one will ever forget it or remember it without a shudder. The figure was that of a very tall man, evidently of immense natural strength, with a face shrunk to skeleton thinness and terrible staring eyes rendered more fearful by the heavy red beard and long matted hair. It was dressed in what appeared to be white trousers, but barefoot; and its upper clothing seemed to be a shirt beneath and a loose flowing white robe hanging from the shoulders. In its hand this terrible figure carried a club of green sapling ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... up. Always entertaining the same purpose, desirous of subjugating the three worlds, the brothers, after due initiation, went to the mountains of Vindhya. And severe were the ascetic penances they performed there. Exhausted with hunger and thirst, with matted locks on their heads and attired in barks of trees, they acquired sufficient ascetic merit at length. Besmearing themselves with dirt from head to foot, living upon air alone, standing on their toes, they threw pieces of the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... over which the trees threw their broad balancing sprays, and long nameless weeds hung in fringes from the impending banks, dripping with diamond drops. Sometimes it would brawl and fret along a ravine in the matted shade of a forest, filling it with murmurs; and, after this termagant career, would steal forth into open day, with the most placid, demure face imaginable; as I have seen some pestilent shrew of a housewife, after filling her home with uproar and ill-humour, come dimpling out of doors, ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke

... ever sounds and shines A pillar of white light upon the wall Of purple cliffs, aloof descried: Come from the woods that belt the grey hill-side, The seven elms, the poplars [4] four That stand beside my father's door, And chiefly from the brook [5] that loves To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, Drawing into his narrow earthen urn, In every elbow and turn, The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland. O! hither lead thy feet! Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... which nearly covered the ground, like a man who expected, at each step, to discover some object he had formerly known. The recollection of the scout did not deceive him. After penetrating through the brush, matted as it was with briars, for a few hundred feet, he entered an open space, that surrounded a low, green hillock, which was crowned by the decayed blockhouse in question. This rude and neglected building was one of those deserted works, which, having been thrown ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... She let down her hair, and with the old lady's long scissors cut a thick fringe. The hair fell softly, but the parting of years was obtrusive. A bottle of gum tragacanth stood on one corner of the dressing-table, and with its contents Abby matted the unneighborly locks together. The fringe covered her careworn brow, but her face was pallid, faded. She knew where Miss Webster had kept her cosmetics. A moment later an array of bottles, jars, and rouge-pots stood on the table ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton

... shut my eyes: but dare not, or I shall ride against a tree. Whish—whish; alas for the horse which cannot wind and turn like a hare! Plunge—stagger. What is this? A broad line of ruts; perhaps some Celtic track-way, two thousand years old, now matted over with firs; dangerous enough out on the open moor, when only masked by a line of higher and darker heath: but doubly dangerous now when masked by dark undergrowth. You must find your own way here, mare. I will positively have nothing to do with it. I disclaim ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... for this wrenching free of the boat had torn loose the long imbedded roots of the giant snag, and the plowing current getting under the vast flat back of matted roots, now slowly forced it, grinding and shuddering, down from the toe of the bar. With a sullen roll it settled down into new lines as it reached the deeper water. Then the hiss of the water among the branches ceased. Rolling and swaying, we ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... the general view that letters so intimes should never have been made public. Afterwards the book had irresistible charms for him, from the first page whereon his old friend, Mr. Bell Scott, has vigorously etched Severn's drawing of the once redundant locks of rich hair, dank and matted over the forehead cold with the death-dew, down to the last line of the letterpress. He thought Mr. Forman's work admirably done, and as for the letters themselves, he believed they placed Keats indisputably among the highest masters of English epistolary style. He ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... forest killing deer and many animals (for their food). And in the course of their wanderings they saw the countries of the Matsyas, the Trigartas, the Panchalas and then of the Kichakas, and also many beautiful woods and lakes therein. And they all had matted locks on their heads and were attired in barks of trees and the skins of animals. Indeed, with Kunti in their company those illustrious heroes were attired in the garbs of ascetics. And those mighty car-warriors sometimes proceeded in haste, carrying their mother ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... subsequent behaviour. His decorations added to his queer appearance; scarred by deep gashes on chest and arms, his body was daubed with red ochre, and his ribs picked out with white; on his head a kind of chignon formed of grass, hair, and string held his matted locks in place, like a bird's nest on his crown; he had neither beard nor whiskers, and was not blessed with any article of ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... faces. Unless wigs of long hair are to be worn, the boys wearing the feathered head-dresses should be careful to see that their lack of long hair is concealed from view. Often the Indian braves wore their long matted locks braided; and black cheesecloth cut into strips and then braided and fastened to a tight black cap will make a splendid wig of this sort—the braids of hair should hang in front of the ears. The Indian braves should carry bows, arrows, ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay

... monsters could crash their way through while the men were impeded at every step. The mottled, orange-green stalks, as he watched them, seemed to move. He dashed the sweat from his face—his hair hung matted on his forehead—and passed a grimy hand across his eyes. Plainly, one of those ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... on his oxen, and she fell more deeply in love with him than she had ever been with the shepherd Marcel. He was hunch-backed; his shoulders were higher than his ears; his body was supported by legs of different lengths; his rolling eyes flashed, from beneath his matted hair. From his throat issued a hoarse voice and strident laughter; he smelt of the cow-shed. However, to her he was beautiful. "A plant," as Gnatho says, "has been loved by one, a stream by another, ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... silence of pines, redolent with balsamic breath, and muffled with the dry dust of dead bark and matted mosses. Lying on our backs, we looked upward through a hundred feet of clear, unbroken interval to the first lateral branches that formed the flat canopy above us. Here and there the fierce sun, from whose active persecution we had just escaped, searched for us ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... little more, but they drew and matted the thick bushes over their heads in such manner that the chill winds were turned aside. Beneath were the dry leaves of last year which they had raked up into couches, and thus, every man with a blanket beneath and another above him, they did not care how ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler

... an Indian he knew, one whose gray hair was matted with blood and who stood as if dazed by terror at sound of hoofs. It was Miguel, the Pima head man of ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan

... was no longer able to stand before him, and thinking it was himself that had done the deed, he tossed up his head and snorted in triumph. At this moment, the matted hair was thrown back from his eyes, and the dust having somewhat settled away, he sighted me, where I stood reloading my gun. I fancied he would take off before I could finish, and I made all the haste in my power—so much so that I dropped the box ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... strong, but we saw another strong thing, where we had not suspected the presence of much muscular power before. A toadstool—that vegetable which springs to full growth in a single night—had torn loose and lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice its own bulk into the air, and supported it there, like a column supporting a shed. Ten thousand toadstools, with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose. But what good would ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... to sound his call in the spring. This persistence exposes the quail to hardship when the ground is covered with snow, and the fruit of the skunk-cabbage and all the berries and grain are inaccessible. He takes refuge at such times in the smilax-thickets, whose dense, matted covering leaves an open feeding-ground below. But a snowy winter always tells upon their numbers in any neighborhood. Whole coveys are said to have been found dead, frozen stiff, under the bush where they had huddled together for warmth; and even before this extremity, their hardships ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... gloom to his dark features, which, wasted by sorrow and marked by the ghastly look communicated by long illness, added to a countenance naturally somewhat stern and wild, a fierce and even savage expression. The matted and disheveled locks of hair which escaped from under his hat, together with his fixt and unmoved posture, made his head more resemble that of a marble bust than that of a living man. He said not a single word, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... words, to hybernate. When about to take this long nap, the bear seeks for himself a cave or den, in which he makes his bed with such soft substances as may be most convenient—dry leaves, grass, moss, or rushes. He collects no great store of these however— his thick matted fur serving him alike for bed and coverlet; and very often he makes no further ado about the matter than to creep into the hole he has chosen, lie down, snugly couch his head among the thickets of long hair that cover his hams, and thus go ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid

... concealed by a curtain embroidered with a large cross. The Mohammedans who created the mosques showed marvellous taste. Copts are often lacking in taste, as they have proved here and there in Abu Sargah. Above one curious and unlatticed screen, near to a matted dais, droops a hideous banner, red, purple, and yellow, with a white cross. Peeping in, through an oblong aperture, one sees a sort of minute circus, in the form of a half-moon, containing a table with an ugly red-and-white striped cloth. There the Eucharist, ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... describe one out of many that I saw, which will serve as a specimen of the rest. Let us ascend the rickety staircase. The atmosphere is intolerably foul, and you feel that a week's confinement in such a den would cause your death. Well, these are the beds; a heap of straw, matted with long service, and a filthily foul rug for a coverlet. The sleepers have no other covering, in summer or winter. These beds change their occupants, perhaps, every night; for a tramper seldom sleeps two ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... chance drew nearer. It was not a pleasant looking opportunity. Its eyes, full of dread and dreadful, peeped out from beneath a brush of matted hair; a tough, ropy foam hung from its mouth. If you put as much of that foam as would go on the point of a pin in an open cut, you would have an end that your worst enemy would shudder at. For ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips

... and she, considering them as mere wild flowers, said I might have as many as I liked. She might have thought I wanted simply the blossoms, but the next morning I went over to my house with a basket filled with great matted masses of the plants taken up with the roots and plenty of earth around them, and after twenty minutes' work in my own bed of pinks, I had taken out all the old plants and filled their places with ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton

... his own conceit, and, mimicking one greater than he, flew down forthright and lighted on the back of a fat ram with a thick fleece, that was matted by his lying till it was like woolen felt. As soon as the Sparrow pounced upon the sheep's back he flopped his wings to fly away, but his feet became tangled in the wool, and, however hard he tried, he could ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester

... matted seat beside the fire sat Lady V——; she was in black; her knees were crossed, and her white but emaciated arms flung on one side over her lap; her hands were clasped together, and her eyes fixed upon the fire: she seemed neither to hear nor see any thing round her, but, totally ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth

... direction of our agriculturists. The Kikuyu oxen struggled a little against the yoke, and at first they could not be made to keep in the furrow; but in three days we were able to work them with ease in teams of eight to a plough. This expenditure of force was necessary, as the black fat soil, matted by the thick virgin turf, was extremely difficult to break up. At first it was necessary to have a driver to every pair of oxen, and the furrows were not so straight as if ploughed by long-domesticated oxen; but at any rate the ground was broken up, and in a comparatively ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... heard behind them, and they turned back into the room. The Ensign had shaved his matted beard and combed out his hair, which now curled and shone graciously about his head and shoulders; his face, too, for all that it was wasted, had taken almost a boyish zest, and his figure, revealed in the graceful dress of his regiment, showed youth in every ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... trial. The officer led him to the prisoner's narrow dock, an enclosed bench, at each end of which sat a constable, with a long staff in his hand. There were five or six other prisoners sitting in the dock with him. Next to him was a woman, her garments ragged, her hair matted, and her face red and bloated. Next to her sat a squalid negro, who seemed totally indifferent to the scenes that were passing around him. On the other side of him was a young man, apparently about twenty ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown

... ran through every breast as they saw him. A score of years might have passed over him, and not have wrought the change of this one night. The assured carriage, the look of strength and power and pride had vanished. The broad shoulders stooped. The hair was matted over his brow, the features ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... by Thirst constrain'd, The deep recesses of the Grove he gain'd; Where in a Plain, defended by the Wood, Crept thro' the matted Grass a Crystal Flood, By which an Alabaster Fountain stood: And on the Margin of the Fount was laid, (Attended by her Slaves) a sleeping Maid, Like Dian, and her Nymphs, when, tir'd with Sport, To rest by cool Eurotas they ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... obliged to land and carry their dugouts and stores round a cataract. The peril of being swept over the falls was always imminent, and as the trail which constituted their portages had to be cut through the matted forest, their labors were increased. In the first eleven days, they progressed only sixty miles. No one knew the distance they would have to traverse nor how long the river would be broken by falls and cataracts before it came down into the plain of the Amazon. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... 'tis bloody now, their guns are filled with gore; Through scattered ranks and severed files and trampled flags they tore. The English strove with desperate strength, paused, rallied, scattered, fled; The green hillside is matted close with dying and with dead. Across the plain and far away passed on that hideous wrack, While cavalier and fantassin dash in upon their track. On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun, With bloody plumes the Irish ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... been the struggle here with nature, where rocks, tangled forest and matted roots crowned the chosen spot; but upon the broad, smooth plateau finally created the Hotel Champlain has been placed, and all the surrounding forest, its solitudes still untamed, has been converted into a superb park, threaded with drives and bridle paths. At the foot of the gradual western slope ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... parted in the middle and hung free. Their swarthy features were well cut but both of the women were dirty and ill kept. The younger, heavier squaw had a kindly face, with good eyes, but her hair was matted with clay and her fingers showed traces of recent tortilla making. The older woman was lean and wiry, with a strange gleam of maliciousness and ferocity in her eyes. Her forehead was elaborately tattooed with symbols ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow

... cases constitutes the sac. To withstand the pressure the external coat becomes thickened, and as the aneurysm increases in size it forms adhesions to surrounding tissues, so that fasciae, tendons, nerves, and other structures may be found matted together in its wall. The wall is further strengthened by the deposit on its inner aspect of blood-clot, which may ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... dark recess in which he slept. He could be heard coughing, gasping and tossing about in this hole. In order to see him, to give his medicine and to apply cupping-glasses they had to-bring a candle to the entrance. Then one could see his narrow head with his long matted beard underneath a thick lacework of spiders' webs, which hung and floated when stirred by the air. And the hands of the sick man seemed dead under ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... and brilliancy unknown in the more humid atmosphere of the temperate zones, the light that they afforded was sufficient only to reveal to the two men the clumps of bush and other objects close at hand. Moreover the grass was long and matted enough to demand the expenditure of a considerable amount of exertion to force a passage through it, and the night was close and very hot. To traverse the half-mile between the ship and the margin of the lake cost them, ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... digging into Marcus's shoulder, the dentist heaved and tugged. His face was flaming, his huge shock of yellow hair fell over his forehead, matted with sweat. Marcus began to yield despite his frantic efforts. One shoulder was down, now the other began to go; gradually, gradually it was forced over. The little audience held its breath in the suspense of the moment. Selina broke the ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... every year, soon after the time of blossoming. Prepare soil, as previously directed. Loosen the earth from the pot, by passing a knife around the sides. Turn the plant upside down, and remove the pot. Then remove all the matted fibres at the bottom, and all the earth, except that which adheres to the roots. From woody plants, like roses, shake off all the earth. Take the new pot, and put a piece of broken earthen-ware over ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... like the shafted columns of a cathedral; now through a hazel copse, matted with primroses and wild hyacinths; now under broad beeches in bright young leaves they threaded their way into the high road over Yalbury Hill, which dipped at that point directly into the village of Geoffrey Day's parish; and in the space of a quarter of an hour Fancy found herself ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy

... reached them, the hunt was away. A lantern flickered far ahead, a minute blur vanishing through files of trees. Fanny turned to the right, mounting an abrupt slope thickly wooded toward the crown. A late moon, past full, shed an unsteady light through interlaced boughs, matted grape vines, creepers flung from tree to tree; it shone on a hurrying rill, a bright thread drawn through the brush. Fanny Gilkan jumped lightly from bank to bank. She made her way with lithe ease through apparently ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... leading chiefly among low trees and over the sharp stones that had rolled from the river,—now close by the noisy stream, which babbled and foamed as if it had gone mad,—now creeping on our knees through bushes, matted with thick, twining vines,—now wading across an open morass,—now in mimosa woods, or slipping in and out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... eating the flesh of such a body, carrying a heavy stick, setting up a liquor-jar and using it as a platform for making offerings to the gods, and the like. 'A bracelet made of Rudraksha-seeds on the arm, matted hair on the head, a skull, smearing oneself with ashes, &c.'—all this is well known from the sacred writings of the Saivas. They also hold that by some special ceremonial performance men of different ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... had received a blow with a tomahawk on the head which had nearly cut off one of its ears. It had doubtless been left for dead, but had recovered itself, and crawled to the side of one of the children of the family to which it belonged. Its head was covered with matted blood, and its tongue hung out, black and parched with thirst; but it growled savagely, its hair bristled on its back, and it prepared to defend to the last the body ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... animal, spiraling to a point in front: two small openings had been drilled in it for eye holes. Great, finger-long teeth had been set in the lower edge of the shell to heighten the already fearsome appearance. The only thing at all human about the creature was the matted and filthy beard that trickled out of the shell below the teeth. There were too many other details for Jason to absorb so suddenly; something bulky slung behind one shoulder, dark objects at the waist, a heavy club reached and ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey

... in the large dark room, with the soft matted floor, and the windows high up near the carved timbered ceiling, the single lamp, burning in rum, casting a dim gleam over the well-known furniture, by which her mother had striven to give an English appearance to the room. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge

... unusual sight. That gallant commander was sitting on the bed-place, with a glass of rum and water in his hand, and the handsome waiting-maid of Mrs. Vickers was seated on a stool by his side. At a first glance it was perceptible that the captain was very drunk. His grey hair was matted all ways about his reddened face, and he was winking and blinking like an owl in the sunshine. He had drunk a larger quantity of wine than usual at dinner, in sheer delight at the approaching assignation, and having got out the rum bottle for a quiet "settler" just as the victim of his ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... service had been husbanded, 10 By exhortation of my frugal Dame,— Motley accoutrement, of power to smile At thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth, More ragged than need was! O'er pathless rocks, Through beds of matted fern and tangled thickets, 15 Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook Unvisited, where not a broken bough Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign Of devastation; but the hazels rose Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung, 20 A virgin scene! A little ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... appearance to that feature. The man's frame was bony and powerful; the loose sheepskin jacket he wore was thrown open, and through the imperfectly fastened shirt-front, it might be seen that his breast was covered with a thick felt of matted hair. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... winding high, Roofed far up with light-green flicker, Save one midmost star of sky. Underfoot 'tis all pale brown With the dead leaves matted down One on other, thick and thicker; Soft, but springing to the tread. There a youth late met a maid Running lightly,—oh, so fleetly! "Whence art thou?" the herd-boy said. Either side her long hair swayed, Half a tress and half a braid, Colored like the soft dead leaf, As she answered, laughing ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone

... they take sober colouring from lilac daisies and the delicate sea-lavender. Scores of tiny plants are turning scarlet on the brown moist earth; and when the sun goes down behind the Euganean hills, his crimson canopy of cloud, reflected on these shallows, muddy shoals, and wilderness of matted weeds, converts the common earth into a fairyland of fabulous dyes. Purple, violet, and rose are spread around us. In front stretches the lagoon, tinted with a pale light from the east, and beyond ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... artificial darkness; and there were snakes too, ugly spotted things, which hissed at us, and put out their double tongues, and then coiled themselves away in the dim recesses of the forest. But on we went, climbing with difficulty over prostrate firs, or breaking through matted juniper, and still the spring was not, though we were "far away in the woods." But still we climbed on, through swamp and jungle, till we tore our dresses to pieces, and our hats got pulled off in a tree and some of our hair with them; but at last we reached the spring. It was such a scene as one ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... elliptical in outline, with long axis longitudinal and about 9 millimeters in length. The gland presents a roughened and granular appearance, and fewer hairs grow upon it than elsewhere on the back. The hairs in the vicinity are frequently matted, as if with a secretion. In worn stage of pelage the gland may be visible from above without separating the hairs. Bailey has suggested that this functions as an oil gland for dressing the fur, and our observations bear out this view. Kangaroo rats ...
— Life History of the Kangaroo Rat • Charles T. Vorhies and Walter P. Taylor

... Old Chapel) J. G. Saxe's poem under this title is founded upon a legend of a boy, who, wandering in a churchyard, hears a musical articulate murmur from a disused bell hidden by matted grass. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... raised some three feet on posts, approached by stairs; part walled, part trellised. Trophies of advertisement- photographs were hung up within for decoration. There was a table and a recess-bed, in which Mrs. Stevenson slept; while I camped on the matted floor with Johnnie, Mrs. Johnnie, her sister, and the devil's own regiment of cockroaches. Hither was summoned an old witch, who looked the part to horror. The lamp was set on the floor; the crone squatted on the threshold, a green palm-branch in her hand, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of the children would run out and open the gate; but instead of any one of them running out as soon as they hear the wheels, which would be quite time enough, what does Giles do but set all his ragged brats, with dirty faces, matted locks, and naked feet and legs, to lie all day upon a sand-bank hard by the gate, waiting for the slender chance of what may be picked up from travellers. At the sound of a carriage, a whole covey of these little scarecrows start up, rush to ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More

... Joseph Dunn appeared, shouting, "Stop it! Stop it! She forged those letters. She broke her sister's heart. Stop it, I say!" Every person in the room seemed terror-stricken at the wild spectacle he presented. His face, wasted to a mere skeleton, was ghastly white, while his long yellow hair hung in matted locks about his brow, and a look of wild frenzy was in his eye, as darting toward the paralyzed Julia, he seized her as with a lion's grasp ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes

... Parnassia, Morina, saxifrages, Sedum, primrose, Herminium, Polygonum, Campanula, Umbelliferae, grasses and Carices: of woolly or hairy once, Anemone, Artemisia, Myosotis, Draba, Potentilla, and several Compositae, etc.] growing in matted tufts level with the ground. The greater portion had no woolly covering; nor did I find any of the cottony species of Saussurea, which are so common on the wetter mountains to the southward. Some most delicate-flowered plants even defy the biting winds of these exposed regions; such are a prickly ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... natural graves. To Jane, his Wife, Thus spake the homely Priest of Ennerdale. It was a July evening, and he sate Upon the long stone seat beneath the eaves Of his old cottage, as it chanced that day, Employ'd in winter's work. Upon the stone His Wife sate near him, teasing matted wool, While, from the twin cards tooth'd with glittering wire, He fed the spindle of his youngest child, Who turn'd her large round wheel in the open air With back and forward steps. Towards the field In which the parish chapel stood alone, ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... Winterborne lay in his clothes, just as she had seen him during the whole of her stay here, except that his hat was off, and his hair matted ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... brave captain to reel and stagger as he plunged with a bound out into the matted cactus, without his tattered hat, like a wolf flying from the hounds? Had he trodden on a snake, or seen his compadre, or had that white finger waved him away? Yes, all three. But the interview with his one-eyed compadre had ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... Where every bramble-matted nook Rippled and laughed with water sounds, He walked like one on sainted grounds, Fearing intrusion on the spell That kept some fountain-spirit's well, Or woodland genius, sitting where Red, racy ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... Eastern gauze. For she had been a beautiful woman, this poor mamma, and it had been the delight of Hugh Maynard, her proud and fond husband, to deck his lovely wife in all rare and precious stuffs. Some of them were stained with sea-water, and many of the softer stuffs were crumpled and matted hopelessly, but that mattered little to Star. Her eyes delighted in soft, rich colours, and she was never weary of turning them over and over, trying them on, and "playing ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards

... drawn to the window in spite of his resolute will. He looked once, and looked again, then checked his horse. On the bed lay a girl in the middle stages of the disease, her eyes glittering with delirium, her black hair matted and wet. She was evidently alone. Estenega spurred his horse and galloped around to the back of the hut. In the kitchen, the only other room, huddled an old crone, brown and gnarled like an old apple. She was sleeping; by her side was a bottle of aguardiente. ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... the reddening sun, Last in the shadows when the day is done, Line after line, along the bursting sod, Marks the broad acres where his feet have trod; Still, where he treads, the stubborn clods divide, The smooth, fresh furrow opens deep and wide; Matted and dense the tangled turf upheaves, Mellow and dark the ridgy cornfield cleaves; Up the steep hillside, where the laboring train Slants the long track that scores the level plain; Through the moist valley, clogged with oozing clay, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... welcome to the sovereign of the Aoon, friendly to his brethren, and ruler of this extensive desert." He then addressed him, flatteringly, in fluent language and eloquent expression. The hair of this Oone Genie hung shaggily over his eyes, and flowed in matted tresses upon his shoulders. The prince took out a pair of scissors, and having condescendingly cut his hair, pared his nails, and washed him, seated him at the cloth, and placed before him the dish dressed peculiarly ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.

... little brown mounds, each with a white wooden cross upon it. June was out that day in full bloom. All over the valley, thickly sown with those white crosses, wild flowers in rare profusion, and thickly matted, luxuriant grasses, and all the little shrubs that God Himself looks after were growing bravely in the sunlight, as though they were trying to hide ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder

... when the Macintoshes charged with all their old desperate valor upon the English. But the English were better prepared than before, and met the onslaught with such a volley as shattered the Highland attack and literally matted the ground with Highland bodies. Then the royal troops advanced, and drove the rebels in helpless rout before them. The fortunes of the fight might have gone very differently if all the Highlanders had been as true to their cause as those who formed this attacking ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... Margaret, with the little babe, to-morrow to be her godchild, lying gently in her arms, came out into the matted hall, and began to mount the broad shallow-stepped staircase, protected by low stout balusters, with a very thick, flat, and solid mahogany hand-rail, polished by the boys' constant riding up and down upon it. She was only on the first step, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... ivy, weed and wall-flower grown, Matted and mass'd together; hillocks heap'd On what were chambers, arch crushed, column strewn In fragments; choked-up vaults, and frescoes steep'd In subterranean damps, where the owl peep'd Deeming ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt

... had been unconscious for more than six hours? He had left Jean on the mountain top soon after nightfall—it was not later than nine o'clock when he had seen Meleese. Seven hours! Again he lifted his hands to his head. His hair was stiff and matted with blood. It had congealed thickly on his cheek and neck and had soaked the top of his coat. He had bled a great deal, so much that he wondered he was alive, and yet during those hours his captors had given him no assistance, had not even bound ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... blessed sleep, feeling that morning must soon put an end to his tribulations. How long he slept he had no means of knowing. It was still dark when he awoke: dark but not still. A distant footfall tinkled on the matted floor, followed by another and another in rapid, measured succession. Could there be a cat or a dog in the room? He could see nothing. The moon was gone and the room was dark as Egypt. Possibly some animal escaped from a traveling ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner

... and work it ten minutes longer, stir in the flour lightly, and the currants afterward, then take small tin pans of any shape (hearts the most usual), rub the inside of each with butter, fill and bake them a few minutes in a hot oven, on a sheet of matted wire, or on a baking-plate; when done, remove them as early ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner

... doubt," he answered, in a hollow voice, "for the clothing all corresponded exactly with your description of what she wore away; but otherwise she was past all recognition, excepting the hair, which was golden like hers, though sadly matted and disheveled by the action of the sea. What her object was in leaving the hotel we can probably never know; perhaps it was simply a walk—I hope that was her object," the young man said, something like a sob bursting from ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... into the court-yard, so reduced by loss of blood, that he was unable to dismount without assistance. As he entered the hall, leaning upon a servant, the ladies shrieked with surprise and terror; for, pale as death, stained with blood, his regimentals soiled and torn, and his hair matted and disordered, he resembled rather a spectre than a human being. But their next exclamation was that of joy ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... the hat is this:—The simplest covering for a man's head after his own unshorn locks—(do not remind us of the matted and living locks of the Indians or Hottentots)—must have been something like the Greek skull-cap. This we hold to have been the root, or nucleus, of the hat; and yet even this cap had a fault in point of utility, for it failed to shadow the eyes: and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... Johnstone had described to him the previous evening. At first he thought that his imagination must have deceived him; the light was uncertain, and his eyes had been dazzled by the lightning. Still, he could not be mistaken: there was the human face, the glaring eyeballs, the matted hair and beard, and the dress of skins and rags. The figure moved its arms and made threatening gestures at him. "I must know whether this is reality or imagination," he said to himself, again urging on his horse towards the tree under ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston

... quick-lime had been spread, about the year 1827, thickly over a field of good pasture-land, which had not since been ploughed. Some square holes were dug in this field in the beginning of October, 1837, and the sections showed a layer of turf, formed by the matted roots of the grasses, 1/2 inch in thickness, beneath which, at a depth of 21/2 inches (or 3 inches from the surface), a layer of the lime in powder or in small lumps could be distinctly seen running all round the vertical sides of the holes. The soil beneath the layer of lime was either ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... brush him up a bit," said Jeremy. "Is there a tent or anywhere where I could prepare him? His eyebrows get so matted if he's left to himself for long." He took out a ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne

... free! The terrible storm had spent itself, and the sun was beginning to shine on the thousand rain-drops caught in the matted grass. A rainbow formed just as Giles approached the plain, and the little birds came out to shake ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston

... I forget Thy beautifully storied streets; Be sure my memory bathes yet In clear Thermodon, and yet greets The blithe and liberal shepherd-boy, Whose sunny bosom swells with joy When we accept his matted rushes Upheav'd with sylvan fruit; away ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... the same manner, and with the same materials, as the roof. The other end had been open, but was now well closed with mats, which I could not prevail on the man to remove, or suffer me to do it. There hung at this end of the hut a matted bag or basket, in which was a piece of roasted yam, and some sort of leaves, all quite fresh. I had a strong desire to see the inside of the hut but the man was peremptory in refusing this, and even shewed an unwillingness to permit me to look into the ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook

... buckskin shirt and long, matted, sunburnt hair, rode back to our wagon and talked with father. The signal was given, and the head wagons of the train began to deploy in a circle. The ground favoured the evolution, and, from long practice, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... meet upon the way, Half-blind and evil-eyed, with matted hair— Workers of spells and witcheries are they— The brood of Calatin—beware! beware! They proffer of their fulsome food a share, And, 'Stay with us a while,' a false crone cries 'Unseemly is the strong who would ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie

... hunger. He went nude except for the half of a red blanket he girdled around his waist. In one tawny arm he used to carry a heavy bunch of wild sunflowers that he gathered in his aimless ramblings. His black hair was matted by the winds, and scorched into a dry red by the constant summer sun. As he took great strides, placing one brown bare foot directly in front of the other, he swung his long lean arm ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa

... and ecstasies, which Miss Austen, though no one knew it, had killed with laughter years before. (3) "Verezzi scarcely now shuddered when the slimy lizard crossed his naked and motionless limbs. The large earthworms, which twined themselves in his long and matted hair, almost ceased to excite sensations of horror"—that is the kind of stuff in which the imagination of the young Shelley rioted. And evidently it is not consciously imagined; life really presented itself to him as a romance of this kind, with himself as hero—a hero who is a hopeless lover, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow

... shadow, then in the doorway the figure of a man, a tattered scarecrow of a man whose feet were bare and whose brown calves were exposed through flapping rags. His breast was naked where thorns had tried to stay him; his beard, even his hair, were matted and unkempt, and the mud of many trails lay ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... days of the past and the evil days of the present. Wherever the native vegetation has been allowed to remain, as, for instance, here and there around a sacred temple or imperial burying ground, there are still huge trees and tangled jungle, fragments of the glorious ancient forests. The thick, matted forest growth formerly covered the mountains to their summits. All natural factors favored this dense forest growth, and as long as it was permitted to exist the plains at the foot of the mountains were among the most ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... room which one rude beam divides, And naked rafters form the sloping sides; Where the vile bands that bind the thatch are seen, And lath and mud are all that lie between, Save one dull pane that coarsely patch'd gives way To the rude tempest, yet excludes the day: There, on a matted flock with dust o'erspread, The drooping wretch reclines his languid head! For him no hand the cordial cup supplies, Nor wipes the tear which stagnates in his eyes; No friends, with soft discourse, his pangs beguile. Nor promise hope till ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... conscious of aught else we are conscious of the grief which weighs heaviest on our soul. Thus it was with Anna Vyvyan: the awaking to life brought with it the pain in all its intensity, although she lay there on the cold stones, her clothing drenched through and through, bareheaded, her hair matted together with the sea water, bruised and cut and faint from exhaustion, still the present physical suffering seemed by comparison nothing to her. Everything was buried in the sorrow of the past, the sorrow that she had lived through, but had ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul

... eyes, her tranquil eyes, in the depths of which there burned an ardent fire; he saw them in the fair, mutilated faces of the antique statues and in the riddle of their silent gaze: he saw them in the sky of Rome, lovely laughing around the matted crests of the cypress-trees and through the fingers of the lecci, black, shining, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... What a glorious scene! Suddenly, you scarcely know when, the snow has disappeared, leaving the long, dead grass lying in matted unsightliness, and you would think it was dead forever; but soon, in little clusters of from three to seven, you see dotting the landscape a purple flower, a tough, membranous, hairy sheath protecting each floweret from the chilling winds, for it ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson

... emotion. As in the tarantella he had given himself up utterly to joy, so now he gave himself up utterly to something that seemed like despair. He cried loudly. His whole body shook. The sea-water ran down from his matted hair and mingled with the tears that rushed ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... the ceremony sent him a ticket. Crowl was in the first flush of possession when Denzil Cantercot returned, after a sudden and unannounced absence of three days. His clothes were muddy and tattered, his cocked hat was deformed, his cavalier beard was matted, and his eyes were bloodshot. The cobbler nearly dropped the ticket at the sight of him. "Hullo, Cantercot!" he gasped. "Why, where have ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill

... information, has strongly tinctured it with pedantry. It is seldom that a more curious jumble is found than in the following paragraph:—'The waxen comb of the ancient figures and typical eels is fully matted and rolled up in shining tapers, to illuminate temple students in finding out the honey that couches in the carcass of the slain Lion of the tribe of Judah.' There is no fear of Bunyan's indulging his readers with the vagaries of the Jewish rabbis or Christian fathers—his converse ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... there musing and dreaming till the sun grew low in the afternoon sky, and the tide that isolated the little grotto had gone far out into the ocean, leaving long, low reefs of sunken rocks, all matted and tangled with the yellow hair of the seaweed, with little crystal pools of salt water between. He heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and Captain Kittridge came slowly picking his way round among ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... softly to the little black dog, that came eagerly, wagging his burr-matted tail. She laid her hand on its head when the dog jumped up to greet her. She smiled faintly while she ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower

... them were four little trunches knockt into the ground, and small stickes laid over on which they hung their Pots, and what they had to seeth. Round about the fire they lay on matts which are their beds. The houses were double matted, for as they were matted without so were they within, with newer and fairer matts. In the houses we found wooden Boules, Trayes & Dishes, Earthen Pots, Hand baskets made of Crab shells, wrought together; also an English Pail or Bucket; ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... already before he took her in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile ... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted virility and strength, and wore ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... which bruised his legs. He reached the top, and, parting the bushes, found what he had sought—and feared to find. On the stubbly grass lay little Mike, whining and biting at a spot on his side where the tawny hair was already matted and ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... joints on the outside, chipping away the corresponding divisions within, and laying it to dry in the sun, pressed down with weights. This is sometimes nailed onto the upright timbers or bamboos, but in the country parts it is more commonly interwoven, or matted, in breadths of six inches, and a piece, or sheet, formed at once of the size required. In some places they use for the same purpose the kulitkayu, or coolicoy, as it is pronounced by the Europeans, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... wild beasts should attack him. But as he was climbing it, he heard some one singing with a loud voice. Listening attentively, and looking eagerly through the leaves, he saw a boy apparently older than himself, dressed in rough shaggy clothes, made from skins of wild animals. His long matted hair escaped over his cheeks from under a black bearskin cap. With a short thick stick he was driving a herd of swine through the wood. "Hey there, you black porker!" cried the boy, as he threw a stone ...
— The Gold Thread - A Story for the Young • Norman MacLeod

... enacted. Here a caisson blew up, tearing the horses to pieces, and whirling a cannoneer among the clouds. There an ammunition wagon exploded, and the air seemed to be filled with fragments of wood, iron, and flesh. A boy stood at one of the fires, combing out his matted hair; suddenly his head flew off, spattering the brains, and the shell—which we could not see—exploded in a piece of woods, mutilating the trees. The effect upon the people around me was instantaneous ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... this dismal moss: it does not appear to grow, or to have root, or even clinging fibre of any sort, by which it attaches itself to the bark or stem. It hangs in dark gray, drooping masses from the boughs, swinging in every breeze like matted, grizzled hair. I have seen a naked cypress with its straggling arms all hung with this banner of death, looking like a gigantic tree of monstrous cobwebs,—the most funereal spectacle in all the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... had, is uncertain. For just then the boat touched at a houseless landing, scooped, as by a land-slide, out of sombre forests; back through which led a road, the sole one, which, from its narrowness, and its being walled up with story on story of dusk, matted foliage, presented the vista of some cavernous old gorge in a city, like haunted Cock Lane in London. Issuing from that road, and crossing that landing, there stooped his shaggy form in the door-way, and entered ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... we were met by the most hopelessly dirty, unkempt, filth-littered human being any of us had ever seen, or could ever have imagined; a white man with long matted hair and beard, who could speak very little English and that only between cries, whimperings, and whines, and whose legs were swollen out of all shape from the scurvy. He was Rudolph Franke and had been left ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson

... pillar, with one knee bent. Over it was stretched the corpse of a girl, with the face horribly decomposed. The dull and flagging winds of the vault moved her dank and matted hair. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... time I took the matted stairway, which was reckless speed, for the shell-paned windows were shut, and the awnings pulled down to keep out the heat of the blinding sun, making it quite dark. But I was bound to capture the little red-headed man, thrash him soundly, make him tell his motive in trailing me, and turn ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore

... know so much more about it than any one else?" she asked, accompanying him gingerly over the fallen masonry to gain a better view of the harem. All around them the undergrowth was dense and matted; date-palms reared themselves from thickets and mingled their drooping branches with tamarind trees, the prickly babul, and the ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... exhausted by the mere effort of unscrewing the nickel-cap of the little phial, and tell himself that he was getting stronger. Sometimes he really was so, and then the child sat on his wide hollow chest, and played with the beard that was now all grey and unkempt and matted, until some word in her baby prattle, some look of wondering inquiry in the innocent eyes, golden-hazel and black-lashed, like his own, that were almost too beautiful to be a man's, people used to say, like the weak, passionate, gentle mouth under the heavy moustache, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... only saved from falling by the close neighbourhood of the wall, on which he came with a shock that for the moment well-nigh stunned him. Meanwhile Darrell had gained the hearth, and snatched from it a large log half-burning. Jasper, recovering himself, dashed the long matted hair from his eyes, and, seeing undismayed the formidable weapon with which he was menaced, cowered for a second and ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... adjusting her dress and trying to arrange the matted curls, which were finally confined in a net until Esther's more practiced hands were ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... to the Italian. The fellow took it, surveyed it closely, felt in the pockets, and examined very critically the stiffening of the collar. Finally he put it on. He buttoned it closely around him, and passed his fingers through his matted hair. Then he felt the pockets once more. After which he yawned long and solemnly. This done, he looked earnestly at Buttons and Dick. He saw that they had nothing more. Upon which he turned on his heel, and without saying a word, good or bad, walked off with immense strides, ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille

... when we rode over a low hill and saw a small village upon our right, and on our left a high black castle, which jutted out from amongst the pine-woods. A farmer with his cart was approaching us—a matted-haired, downcast ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the warm sand in which it was buried. Or I crouched on the beach at full moon, wondering, wondering, between the two splendors of the sky and the sea. Or I ran out to meet the incoming storm, my face full in the wind, my being a-tingle with an awesome delight to the tips of my fog-matted locks flying behind; and stood clinging to some stake or upturned boat, shaken by the roar and rumble of the waves. So clinging, I pretended that I was in danger, and was deliciously frightened; I held on with both ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... building referred to. On the way I was met by the trader. He was a vile-looking man, with black, matted hair and little eyes, who did not look much higher in intelligence than the brutes he dealt in. He grinned diabolically as he led me to the little house and opened the door. I looked in. There was no ape there, but in one corner sat a dark-brown African girl. I looked ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton

... encounter proceeded, and both remained unhurt, Greif regretted that Rex should have boasted that Bauer would be disabled and laid up for a long time. Meanwhile the saturnine Rhine man grew slowly angry, as his arm became wearied by the protracted effort. His wiry locks were matted with perspiration, his shaggy brows knit themselves into an ugly frown, which was made more hideous by the black iron spectacles, he stamped his foot angrily, and made desperate efforts to get at Rex's face with his ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... their work, and carried them aloft, and they were transformed into bright stars. But still it was cold and the people murmured again, and Matcito said, "Bring me seven buffalo robes," and they brought him seven buffalo robes, and from the densely matted hair of the robes he wove another wonderful fabric, which the storm carried away into the sky, and it was transformed into the full-orbed sun. Then Matcito appointed times and seasons and ways for the heavenly bodies, and the gods of the firmament ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell

... back to London that I got a glimpse of the real Lloyd George. What Roosevelt would have called "a bully day" had left its impress upon the little man. His long grey hair hung matted over a wilted collar: there was a wistful sort of weariness in his eyes. He sank into a big chair and looked for a long time in silence at the flying landscape. Then suddenly he aroused himself and began to talk. Like many men of ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... unbelieving citizens of Sulphide, who knew that he valued his own skin far too highly to risk it seriously. He had been wont to call himself "The Wolf," desiring to be known by that title as sounding sufficiently fierce and "bad," and being of a most unprepossessing appearance, with his matted hair, retreating forehead, long, sharp nose and projecting ears, he did represent a wolf pretty well—though, still ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp

... in the pond, and its surface was heaving with the passing of many bodies beneath. Kazan came to the end of the dam. This was new. Instinctively he knew that it was the work of Broken Tooth and his tribe and for a few moments he tore fiercely at the matted sticks and limbs. Suddenly there was an upheaval of water close to the dam, fifty feet out from the bank, and Broken Tooth's big gray head appeared. For a tense half minute Broken Tooth and Kazan measured each other at that distance. Then Broken Tooth drew his wet shining body out of the ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... however, be denied; and when at length a rendezvous was agreed on, Felix, free of the dashing equipage, of which he was, to tell the truth, slightly ashamed, rang at the gates, arrived at the house door, announced himself as Mr. Underwood, asked to see his sisters; and after a long labyrinth of matted passages, found himself in a pretty countrified room, where a wiry, elderly, sensible lady, with grey hair and a keen face, gave him a friendly reception, drew a favourable, but not enthusiastic, picture of Robina's ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Hindustan. A dignified Chinaman, too, armed with letters of introduction, had presented him with a wonderful book painted upon ivory of the Trigrams of Fo-Hi. But most singular visitor of all was a sort of monk, having a black, matted beard and carrying a staff, who had gained access to the study, Paul never learned by what means, and who had thundered out an incomprehensible warning against "unveiling the shrine," had denounced what he had termed "the poison ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... my hands and knees, and threaded my way through the long grasses and matted boughs as noiselessly as I could. The two old hands watched me. When I emerged several yards off, much to their surprise, Colebrook turned to Doolittle. "Might answer," he said curtly. "Major says, 'Choose your own men.' ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... into the grisly. Through the matted undergrowth of years, over the high-spiked barriers of the deer-park, the Highflyer had seen not only the familiar Grey Lady in robes of rustling silk (through which you could discern the gravel and weeds on the path), but little green demons with chalk-white ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... woman certainly, but cutting a most ridiculous figure. His long thin arms were bare, his neck was like a crane's, and the petticoats were so short as to reach almost above his knees. Shoes and stockings he had none. His long hair was platted and matted with the salt water, and one side of his head was shaved, and exhibited a ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... and bread have also caused poisoning. Prof. Varnell states that "six horses died in three days from eating mouldy oats. There was a large amount of matted mycelium, and this when given to other horses for experiment, killed them within thirty-six hours." The writer has himself seen seven hogs die within a few days while being fed on mouldy corn. Flour which has become stale ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various

... bare strand Of hillocks heaped with ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from earth's embrace ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... down under the quarter deck were turned over to the women and children. Two of the Laconia's stewardesses passed boiling basins of navy cocoa and aided in the disentangling of wet and matted tresses. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons

... remark of the colonel's young Crossjay conceived the appearance of his matted locks in the eyes of his adorable lady. He gave her one dear look through his redness, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... part, waxy, cold, and clammy, Indian pipes rise like a company of wraiths in the dim forest that suits them well. Ghoulish parasites, uncanny saprophytes, for their matted roots prey either on the juices of living plants or on the decaying matter of dead ones, how weirdly beautiful and decorative they are! The strange plant grows also in Japan, and one can readily imagine how fascinated the native artists must be by ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al

... people, the owner of the tent came up and was much astonished to find an unexpected visitor. He followed the Lama to our tent and sat down on the wet ground outside the entrance. His name was Sampo Singi, and he was the dirtiest fellow I ever saw in my life. The rain-water dropped from his matted hair on to the ragged cloak he wore; he wore felt boots but no trousers, which indeed almost all Tibetan nomads ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... other words, to hybernate. When about to take this long nap, the bear seeks for himself a cave or den, in which he makes his bed with such soft substances as may be most convenient—dry leaves, grass, moss, or rushes. He collects no great store of these however— his thick matted fur serving him alike for bed and coverlet; and very often he makes no further ado about the matter than to creep into the hole he has chosen, lie down, snugly couch his head among the thickets of long hair that cover his hams, and thus ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid

... This is readily found, but is no distinction; its reaction before the blowpipe, however, is characteristic, it readily fusing to a transparent globule, clear and glassy, and by forming a jelly when heated with acids. The bed holding the upright crystals is also natrolite in confused matted masses. This mineral has also been found in other parts of the shaft, but only in small druses. There is a prospect at present that another bed will be uncovered soon, and some more fine ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various

... and musty and cobwebs spread across the openings where the windows had been. Much broken glass and a couple of sash weights fastened to ends of rotten sash cord lay upon the floor. In the corner was a makeshift bed of straw, matted from age, damp and unwholesome. The place was in possession of spiders. Whole boards of the flooring had rotted, yielding like mud under ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... heart whispers, well, too! Let him take his price and buy himself a rope long enough to house his soul in any Hell, rather than sit on in this one! It is all painted, or was once; all written on that sunken cheek, that matted hair and clammy brow; in that cavernous socket, that eye of lurid despair; on the whole anatomy of a lost soul. The hand that did it was very young, very immature; but it had the youth and ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue

... in Bassett's brain, was the dank and noisome jungle. It actually stank with evil, and it was always twilight. Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof a hundred feet overhead. And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life- forms that rooted in death and lived on death. And through all this he drifted, ever pursued by the flitting shadows of the anthropophagi, themselves ghosts ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... This, and more, he said in his rage. Ghastly horror took possession of me, as I beheld his features, streaming even yet with blood, and the ruthless hands, and the round space deprived of the eye, and his limbs, and his beard matted with human blood. Death was before my eyes, {and} yet that was the least of my woes. I imagined that[20] now he was about to seize hold of me, and that now he was on the very point of swallowing my vitals within his own; in my mind was fixed the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... of cirrus-clouds are first seen, which surround the center to a distance of 200 miles; the air is calm and sultry, but this is gradually supplanted by a gentle breeze, and later the wind increases to a gale, the clouds become matted, the sea rough, rain falls, and the winds are gusty and dangerous as the vortex comes on. Then comes the indescribable tempest, dealing destruction, impressing the imagination with the wild exhibition of the forces of nature, the flashes of lightning, the torrents of rain, the cold ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... boy, who now, for the first time, saw that his uncle's face was deadly pale, and that his hair was matted with blood, which was trickling down over ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon

... and knew it for red cedar. Patches of it grew thick on the high ridges, matted close for cover. As the travelers crept under it they heard the rustle of shoulder against shoulder, the moving click of horns, and the bleat of yearlings for their mothers. They had stumbled in the dark on the bedding-place of a ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

... trail to follow. Often the lay of the land forced him to a detour; for it was rough with washes, with matted cactus, and with a thick growth of netted mesquite and underbrush. But true as the needle of a compass, he turned back always to the direction he was following. He had the instinct for direction, sharpened almost ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine

... grew, and they stood very close together upon a large compass of ground. I had no sooner entered the reeds a few yards, to cut some of the longest, but (being about knee-deep in the water and mud, and every step raising my feet very high to keep them clear of the roots, which were matted together) I thought I had trod upon a trunk of one of the trees, of which, as I said, there was such plenty thereabouts; and raising my other foot to get that also upon the tree, as I fancied it, I found it move along with me; upon which ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock

... each a brawny arm, and a long sharp knife, so that all the points came together in a focus; and this action suited well with their fierce and animal features, their long neglected beards, their matted hair and their gleaming eyes. It looked the prologue to some deed of blood. This done, at another word from their ruffianly leader they turned away from the angle in the rock and plunged hastily down the ravine; but they had scarcely taken thirty ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... yards from the road, in which I found portions of the skeletons of many bodies,—skulls, bones, and matted hair,—most of which, on examination, I concluded to be those of men. Three hundred and fifty yards further on another assembly of human remains was found, which, by all appearance, had been left to decay upon ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... hours, a storm that lays the deep grass flat, beats down branches, and turns every hollow into a lake, was more than they had provided for, I fear. My heart went out to the dozens of bobolink and song-sparrow babies buried under the matted grass, the little tawny thrushes wandering around cold and comfortless on the soaked ground in the woods, the warbler infants,—redstart and chestnut-sided—that I knew were sitting humped up and miserable in some ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller

... frequent from the crowd Was heard the burst of laughter loud For still, as squire and archer stared On that dark face and matted beard Their glee and game declined. All gazed at length in silence drear, Unbroke, save when in comrade's ear Some yeoman, wondering in his fear, Thus whispered forth his mind:- "Saint Mary! saw'st thou e'er such sight? How ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott

... water seedlings, and shift such pot-flowers as require it into larger pots. In doing this, rub off the moulds and matted fibres from the roots, and throw away part of the outward, loose old earth. Then, having put a little fresh earth into the old pots, with a piece of broken tile over the hole in the bottom, put in your plant, and fill all the sides ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin

... of the hotel to reach Main Street he saw Luke Tweezy single-footing into town from the south. The powdery dust of the trail filled in and overlaid the lines and creases of Luke Tweezy's foxy-nosed and leathery visage. Layers of dust almost completely concealed the original colour of the caked and matted hide of Luke Tweezy's well-conditioned horse. It was evident that Luke ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White

... refuge under the matted trees and boughs of a huge old windrow. It wasn't like the hollow, and some water came through, but on the whole we did fairly well, and soon dried out thoroughly this morning. We were mighty glad to hear your call, ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... a stone from a catapult, had, unfortunately for himself, not broken a limb. That might have saved him. His head was the injured part, and Adams, running his fingers through the hair, matted with blood, came on the mischief. The right parietal bone was dented very slightly for a space nearly as broad as a penny. The skin was broken, but the bone itself, though depressed slightly, was not destroyed. The inner table of the skull no doubt ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... which weighs heaviest on our soul. Thus it was with Anna Vyvyan: the awaking to life brought with it the pain in all its intensity, although she lay there on the cold stones, her clothing drenched through and through, bareheaded, her hair matted together with the sea water, bruised and cut and faint from exhaustion, still the present physical suffering seemed by comparison nothing to her. Everything was buried in the sorrow of the past, the sorrow that she had lived through, but ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul

... more, but they drew and matted the thick bushes over their heads in such manner that the chill winds were turned aside. Beneath were the dry leaves of last year which they had raked up into couches, and thus, every man with a blanket beneath and another above him, they did not care how the wind blew. They were ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler

... for this he did penance by living for a number of years in a cave in a desert region. The penitent St. Jerome was a popular devotional subject in early Christian art. "The scene is generally a wild rocky solitude; St. Jerome, half-naked, emaciated, with matted hair and beard, is seen on his knees before a crucifix, beating his breast with a stone." (Mrs. Jameson, Sacred ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... bringing back to Jacopo the shirt and trousers he had lent him, that Edmond reappeared before the captain of the lugger, who had made him tell his story over and over again before he could believe him, or recognize in the neat and trim sailor the man with thick and matted beard, hair tangled with seaweed, and body soaking in seabrine, whom he had picked up naked and nearly drowned. Attracted by his prepossessing appearance, he renewed his offers of an engagement to Dantes; but Dantes, who ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... not help turning my head. I had not been used half as hard as he. It was enough to look at him to believe in the dryness of his throat. Under the matted mass of his hair, he was grinning in amiable agony, and his globular eyes yearned upon me with ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... time and country have discoverers encountered the obstacles and dangers which confronted the Spaniards who first explored Central America. Precipitous mountains, matted jungles, barren deserts, deep and swift streams, malarious bogs, and hostile natives often armed with poisoned weapons, all were in their way, and they had to make their overland journeys on foot, fully armed and often in tropical heat. Even when accompanied by Indians ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey

... of the largest of the dead pines was a large black bear, reared back on his haunches and striking with both paws viciously at some unseen foe. The hair of muzzle, head and paws was matted and plastered with some thick liquid, giving him a curious frowsy appearance. He was evidently in a towering rage but it was also apparent that he was suffering great pain, his ferocious growls being interspersed ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... last two weeks to believe that she was neglected, if not positively ill-treated, by her husband; and she had no earthly objection to Mr. Charteris thinking likewise. Her face expressed patient resignation now, as they walked under the close-matted foliage of the beech-trees, which made a pleasant, sun-flecked gloom ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... very clean, and of an interest quite beyond the promise of the rather bare outside. A painted window above the door cast a glare of fresh red and blue over the interior, and over the comfortably matted floor; and there was a quite freshly carved and gilded chapel which the pleasant youth supplementing our policeman for the time said was done by artists still living in Tarifa. The edifice was of a very flamboyant Gothic, with clusters of slender columns and a vault brilliantly swirled over with ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... were roused by a sudden ringing of the bells or crashing through the underbrush, to find that wild animals had been attracted by the smell of meat, and wolverine or wildcat was attempting to tear through the matted branches of the thatched roof. The desire for firearms has tempted Indians to murder many a trader; so Radisson and Groseillers cached all the supplies that they did not need in a hole across ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut

... contamination, he may safely view us through the folding doors, and note down our several positions around the board. At the head of the table presides, with much dignity, Mrs. Bourne; at the end opposite, sits Mr. Bourne—both of the glossiest jet; the thick matted hair of Mr. B. slightly frosted with age. He has an affable, open countenance, in which the radiance of an amiable spirit, and the lustre of a sprightly intellect, happily commingle, and illuminate the sable covering. On either hand of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... by favour of a Vine, Which grew where suns most genial shine, And formed a thick and matted bower Which might have turned a summer shower, Was saved by ruinous assault. The hunters thought their dogs at fault, And called them off. In danger now no more The Stag, a thankless wretch and vile, Began to browse his benefactress o'er. The hunters listening the while, The ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various

... had disguised himself in the costume Otto had procured for him, which was that of a laborer about the quays; and, as he was a man who did perfectly whatever he attempted to do, he had succeeded in rendering himself unrecognizable. His hair and beard were rough and matted; his hands were soiled and grimed with dirt; he was really the abject wretch whose rags ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... playing in the gutters; boys and girls and women going in to dram shops and bringing out mugs of beer; men and women drunken. One sight specially horrified him: a woman, dirty, naked shoulders and arms; feet and legs bare; a filthy skirt and bodice open at the breast; hair matted and wild; reeling along the pavement, crying out in drunken exclamations and mutterings. It was the most sickening sight the young man had ever seen, and with perhaps the exception of a fight he witnessed some days later between two such characters, ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson

... them, like a section of the deposits in the bone caverns, showed a gradual evolution of human culture. The lower strata in these great bowls were found to be made up chiefly of mosses and various plants matted together with the trunks of fallen trees, sometimes of very large diameter; and the botanical examination of the lowest layer of these trees and plants in the various bowls revealed a most important fact: for this layer, the first in point of time, was always of the Scotch fir—which now ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... the twelve only the leader saw the beauties that surrounded them or felt the strange, mysterious influence of the untracked world they trod. Chance took them toward the west until presently they emerged upon the harbor's edge, where from the matted jungle they overlooked for the first time the waters of the little bay and the broader expanse of strait beyond, until their eyes rested at last upon the blurred lines of ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... but my knees failed and let me down upon the beach. And after that I remember only having coats flung over me, and being carried off out of the wind, and laid in warmest blankets before a fire. I was numb with the cold, my hair was matted with the salt, and my flesh white and shrivelled, but they forced liquor into my mouth, and so I lay in drowsy content till utter weariness bound me ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... with satisfaction. These were happy moments, indeed, and Anton was more moved than became such a traveled man. And on his way from the counting-house to his room, old Pluto sprang out impetuously, immoderately wagging his matted tail, so that Anton could hardly escape from his caresses. Arrived at his own door, a servant met him with a smile, and respectfully opened it. Anton gazed in wonder at the way in ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... have to deal with previously healthy tissues, it is quite unnecessary to disarticulate, a better result being attained by simply sawing the foot across in the line of the articulation; and again, where we have to operate for disease, the tissues are so matted, and the bones so soft, that complete removal of the metatarsus is much easier than it appears when practising on ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... the men saw the girls approaching, they carefully closed the door and windows of the Clubhouse, and then marched into the interior of the island. Close by the lake, there was a thick jungle of trees—a place where the branches matted together, in a roof-like structure, leaving a cleared space below. The men crawled into this shelter on their hands and knees for an eighth of a mile. They stayed ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... bitterest tears to her eyes. The grimy signal man took in the situation at once and resorted to measures that were at once as effectual as they were grotesque and amusing. Kneeling down on the floor and taking off his cap he bid the gentlemen rub her hands in his tangled and matted hair. It was a most ludicrous remedy but it worked to a charm. The gentle heat brought the blood slowly back and after half an hour's rubbing on the man's big ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard

... suit wet and glistening as a shiny porpoise, his hair matted to his head, had now reached the outermost rock opposite the doomed craft, and stood near enough to catch every expression that crossed Baxter's face, who, white as chalk, was holding the tiller with all his strength, cap off, his blousy ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith

... turned his head; not from fear of contagion, however. And his eyes were drawn to the window in spite of his resolute will. He looked once, and looked again, then checked his horse. On the bed lay a girl in the middle stages of the disease, her eyes glittering with delirium, her black hair matted and wet. She was evidently alone. Estenega spurred his horse and galloped around to the back of the hut. In the kitchen, the only other room, huddled an old crone, brown and gnarled like an old apple. She was sleeping; by her side ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... motionless figures were covered by a thick rime frost, which looked grey in the dim light, not a crystal as yet sending off a scintillation; and tiny spicules of ice had matted the moustache and beard of Bracy where his breath had condensed during the night, sealing them to the woolly coverlet he had drawn up close; while a strange tingling sensation attacked his eyes as he opened them suddenly, waking from a morning dream of defending the fort and giving ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn

... weary you to hear all the further trials we had to go through. We had three other rivers to ford before reaching the base of the next mountain; and, on essaying to climb this latter, we found it so steep and matted with rank vegetation that it was impossible to ascend it. Besides, the mosquitoes stung us almost to pieces on our going into the forest here; and, seeing that our route southwards was impracticable any longer, we bent our steps due west, following the track of the last river we had crossed so ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson

... these pages entitled, "Her Voice." "Don't, oh! don't! Oh! for God's sake don't!" sobbed and shrieked that poor wanderer as she threw herself upon me and buried her head, with its tawdry covering and matted mop of dirty ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts

... spake the homely Priest of Ennerdale. It was a July evening, and he sate Upon the long stone seat beneath the eaves Of his old cottage, as it chanced that day, Employ'd in winter's work. Upon the stone His Wife sate near him, teasing matted wool, While, from the twin cards tooth'd with glittering wire, He fed the spindle of his youngest child, Who turn'd her large round wheel in the open air With back and forward steps. Towards the ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... large; then sands begin To hem his watery march and dam his streams, And split his currents; that for many a league The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles— Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had, In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere, A foil'd circuitous wanderer—till at last The long'd for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... young Engelmann spruces and one Pinus flexilis and eight Douglas firs. The accumulation of duff, mostly needles, averaged eight inches deep, and, with the exception of one bunch of kinnikinick, there was neither grass nor weed, and only tiny, thinly scattered sun-gold reached the brown matted floor." ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... the piazza wreathed thick with honeysuckles, some of them, and some with climbing roses. The breath of the salt air was smothered in perfumes. Through one of the open window-doors Diana went into a matted room, where everything gave her the instant impression of neatness and coolness and quiet, and a certain sweet summer freshness, which suited her exactly. There was no attempt at richness of furnishing. Yet the old lady who stood there waiting to receive her was a stately lady enough, ...
— Diana • Susan Warner

... rows upon the barn floors, one, a boy apparently not more than sixteen years of age, attracted the notice of one of the company, a surgeon. The lad looked more like a delicate girl than a soldier; his hair fell from his fair forehead in long flaxen curls upon his pillow of straw, some of them matted with blood; his cheek was rosy, and his soft white hand told of a youth spent amid more tender scenes than those of the camp. A piece of linen laid across his face covered a ghastly wound where a ball had passed through his face, and had torn both ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... the common, opposite the hotel, was a row of dwelling-houses, which owing to the steep descent had a sunken look, as if they were slipping into their own cellars. The grass was too green in their yards, and the thick, matted plantain-leaves grew on both edges ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson

... having purified himself and with concentrated mind. He should always bear a staff made of Vilwa or Palasa.[137] The robes of the regenerate man should be linen, or of cotton, or deer-skin, or a cloth that is entirely brown-red. There should also be a girdle made of Munja-grass. He should bear matted locks on head, and should perform his ablutions every day. He should bear the sacred thread, study the scriptures, divest himself of cupidity, and be steady in the observance of vows. He should also gratify the deities with oblations of pure water, his mind being restrained ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... were birds and beasts on the bank, fish and reptiles in the water, but the girl could spare them scarcely a glance. Great spiders hung in midair on nets that stretched from bank to bank, and Molly's face was matted with webs that she could not avoid, while her teeth were tightly clenched lest she scream when the hairy legs of a spider with a spread of five inches traveled across her face. Dick saw her trouble and ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock

... a pillar, with one knee bent. Over it was stretched the corpse of a girl, with the face horribly decomposed. The dull and flagging winds of the vault moved her dank and matted hair. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... orderly farmhouses, the tilled fields, disappeared; a rare cabin, roughly constructed of unbarked logs, dominated a parched patch, cut from the heart-breaking tangle of the wild, a thread of smoke creeping from a precarious chimney above the far, unbroken canopy of living green. Children with matted hair, beady-eyed like animals, in bag-like slips, filled the doorways; adults, gaunt-jawed and apathetic, straightened momentarily up from their toil with ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... Huron, still has the pouts. About seven o'clock I walked, or scrambled my way through close-matted spruce and brambles to get a view of the open lake. The force of the waves was not, perhaps, much different from the day before, but they were directly from the west, and blowing directly down the lake. Could I get out from the nook of a bay where I was encamped, and ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... an athletic man. His eyes, deep-sunken in their orbits, were nearly as glassy as those of a corpse; his poor attire hung loosely on his square shoulders. His matted beard rendered his sickly, greenish countenance yet more wan and livid. He crawled about the deck alone—his wife and five children, they for whom he had lived and struggled, for whose sake he was making a last desperate exertion, had all been taken from him on the voyage. We addressed him some ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... larches upon the heights; and here and there, upon some sandy eminence, a spreading beech-tree. For the most part the bottom of the glen was overgrown with brushwood, and, where its sides were too abrupt to admit the growth of larger trees, they were matted with woodbine and brambles. Out of these would sometimes start a sharp pinnacle, or fantastically-formed crag, adding greatly to the picturesque beauty of the scene. On such points were not unfrequently found perched a hawk, a falcon, or some large bird ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together. Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen a great many roses in India. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rose-bushes ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... slabs under the looking-glass at each end of the rooms were matted over with flowers, and from the top streamed down long feathery vines which ended in little bunches of red roses that swung loose before the glass, and left another vine there. Over the doors and windows these vines and flowers trailed themselves everywhere. Some beautiful pictures were ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... the sea, this narrow way between the hills gets all the sun, and on a fine summer's morning grows drowsy with the heat. The crimson and creamy-gold of the opening honeysuckle swings heavy with its own sweetness. The hart's-tongue ferns, matted all over the steep banks, hang down like the tongues of thirsty dogs. The bees blunder sleepily from flower to flower. The black and crimson butterflies take short flights and long panting rests. Even the late wild ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... "Hail! and welcome to the sovereign of the Aoon, friendly to his brethren, and ruler of this extensive desert." He then addressed him, flatteringly, in fluent language and eloquent expression. The hair of this Oone Genie hung shaggily over his eyes, and flowed in matted tresses upon his shoulders. The prince took out a pair of scissors, and having condescendingly cut his hair, pared his nails, and washed him, seated him at the cloth, and placed before him the dish dressed peculiarly ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... prairie was a wonderful sight. As the steamer ploughed its way through the matted weeds, Frank could see in the narrow openings their trailing roots hanging far down into the clear cool depths below. Above these open spaces thousands of sea-birds were hovering with shrill cries, while ever and anon one of them would swoop ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... mother, whose strength barely permitted her to rise and go through that part of the ceremony, proceeded to place the ring upon the finger of his wife, it fell, either from nervousness or accident upon the matted floor. Quick as thought, Waunangee, who had now his whole attention bent upon the passing scene, stooped, picked it up, and attempted to place it on the finger, still extended, for which it ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson

... we made our way was well-nigh impregnable; it seemed to me that for age upon age its undergrowth had run riot, untrimmed, unchecked, until at last it had become a matted growth of interwoven, strangely twisted boughs and tendrils. It was only by turning in first one, then another direction through it that we made any progress in the downward direction we desired; sometimes it was a matter of forcing ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

... has been very pertinently remarked by a friend, that, | | if young birds did observe the nest they were reared in, | | they would consider it to be a natural production like the | | leaves and branches and matted twigs that surrounded it, and | | could not possibly conclude that their parents had | | constructed the one and not the other. This may be a valid | | objection, and, if so, we shall have to depend on ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... of pines, redolent with balsamic breath, and muffled with the dry dust of dead bark and matted mosses. Lying on our backs, we looked upward through a hundred feet of clear, unbroken interval to the first lateral branches that formed the flat canopy above us. Here and there the fierce sun, from whose active persecution we had just escaped, searched for us through the woods, but ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... ask his shipmates, whether they noticed any change yet; and if so, how much of a change? And to tell the truth, there was a very great change indeed; for the constant soaking of his hair with oil, operating in conjunction with the neglect of his toilet, and want of a brush and comb, had matted his locks together like a wild horse's mane, and imparted to it a blackish and extremely glossy hue. Besides his collection of hair-oils, Blunt had also provided himself with several boxes of pills, which he had purchased from a sailor doctor in New York, who by ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... buried. Or I crouched on the beach at full moon, wondering, wondering, between the two splendors of the sky and the sea. Or I ran out to meet the incoming storm, my face full in the wind, my being a-tingle with an awesome delight to the tips of my fog-matted locks flying behind; and stood clinging to some stake or upturned boat, shaken by the roar and rumble of the waves. So clinging, I pretended that I was in danger, and was deliciously frightened; I held on with both hands, and shook my head, exulting in the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... I saw the dead body of a young woman which had been taken that morning from the river, and laid out for recognition by her friends. As I looked on her livid, bloated face, her drenched and tattered garments, her long dark hair hanging in dank matted masses, and streaming over the edge of the table on which she lay, my heart was moved with pity. Yet I half envied her position, and might have followed her example, but for my belief in a future state. Her body was free from ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... handle, which were fabricated in the neighbourhood, and bore even at this early period the name of a Sheffield whittle. The man had no covering upon his head, which was only defended by his own thick hair, matted and twisted together, and scorched by the influence of the sun into a rusty dark-red colour, forming a contrast with the overgrown beard upon his cheeks, which was rather of a yellow or amber hue. One part of his dress only remains, but it is too remarkable to be suppressed; it was a brass ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... while in our town he was at the head of his profession, so he came back and opened a room of his own. He came back in a blaze of glory; to wit: a long grey frock coat with trousers to match, pleated white shirts studded with blinding diamonds, a small white hat dented jauntily on three sides, a matted lump of red hair on the back of his head and a dashing red curl combed extravagantly low on his forehead. Before he left town for his foreign tour Red Martin used to hang about the churches Sunday evenings, peering through the blinds and making eyes at the girls; ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... him to go with me; and at the same time pulling off one of my own garments, I speedily clothed him, or at any rate covered him. I next took him to a bath, scrubbed and oiled him myself, and laboriously rubbed the matted dirt off him. Having done all I could, though tired out myself, I supported his feeble steps, and with great difficulty brought him to my inn. There I made him lie down on a bed, gave him plenty ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... at a window from which she could see any one that came down from the woods at the back of the house; and after a time she saw a shortish man, fair-haired and blue-eyed, walk stealthily down to her. He was a miserable-looking fellow, with a pinched white face, matted hair and new-grown beard, and dressed only in a shirt and a pair of light-blue soldier's trousers. She smuggled him quickly into the house and locked the door; and when after a quarter of an hour the door opened again, and after due looking round the man was let out, he ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue

... summer tempest: now we were winding around dark "bays" of sweet-gum and magnolia; now skirting circular ponds of delicate young cypress; now crossing narrow "branches" sunk deep in impenetrable "hummocks" of close-crowded oak and ash and maple, thick-matted with vines and undergrowth; now pausing to gather orchis and pitcher-plants and sun-kisses and andromeda; now fording the broad bend of Peter's Creek where it flows, sapphire in the sunshine, out from the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... In planting strawberries in matted rows, it is usual to allow a few runners to take root and thus fill the row. It is the judgment of plant growers that plants for sale should not be produced in this way, but should be grown from plants ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... the former place, each headed by a chief or captain, who drew up at some distance from us. Immediately after this, ten priests rushed out from a neighbouring temple. These men wore loose robes of white cotton, having their long hair clotted with blood, and all matted and twisted together. They bore vessels in their hands containing fire and aromatics, with which they fumigated us, and made us to understand by signs, that they would put us to death if we did not quit their country before the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr

... with sand, but whatever the composition of the underclays may be, they always agree in being unstratified. They also agree in this respect that the peculiar fossils known as stigmariae abound in them, and in some cases to such an extent that the clay is one thickly-matted mass of the filamentous rootlets of these fossils. We have seen how these gradually came to be recognised as the roots of trees which grew in this age, and whose remains have subsequently become metamorphosed into coal, and it is ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin

... suddenly faint, and, uttering a deep sigh, fell on the ground motionless: they raised him up, and, with the utmost kindness, endeavoured to restore him: his worn and haggard countenance told of long and hard suffering; his white hair, that hung in matted locks on his shoulders, seemed blanched by misery, not age; for he appeared a young man, and his emaciated hands were white and more delicate than is usual in his station. After some time he recovered a little, and, thanking them for their help, attempted to rise and ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... of the stream, some fifteen feet high. While the guides broke down the bank to allow of our horses climbing it, I was struck with a wonderful bit of water. To my right this tall bank was perforated by numerous holes, out of which flowed an immense volume of water. It bounded forth between the matted roots and welled up below from the sand, and, higher up the bank, had, with its sweet moisture, bribed the ready mosses to build it numerous green basins, out of which also ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... half-closed eyelids glancing Still the lust of quarrel mocks, From his head deep underneath him Flow the matted raven locks." ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi

... centuries have added to the rich alluvial left by some inland sea which covered all the prairie when the world was young. Nature, as those who love her know, is never in a hurry, and very slowly, little by little, working on through forgotten ages, she had stored her latent wealth under the matted sod against the time when the plowshare should convert it into food for man and beast. There is no wheat soil on the surface of the earth to beat ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... find a button-hook, they had to use their hairpins. When the terrible toilet was over, I looked at our work, and said: 'You ought to arrange his hair a little.' The girl went and brought her mistress's large-toothed comb and brush, but as she was trembling, and pulling out his long, matted hair in doing it, Madame Lelievre took the comb out of her hand, and arranged his hair as if she were caressing him. She parted it, brushed his beard, rolled his moustachios gently round her fingers, as she had no doubt been in the habit ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... rove about the shack. A slight movement in the corner attracted her attention. There, like a forlorn little lamb, a tight rag about her mouth, her curls matted and damp, crouched Elsie Waldstricker. Instantly, Tess recognized her and her heart pumped with joy. Surely, her prayer had been answered! Here was her opportunity! The child was suffering, she could see that, but the very extremity of torture could hardly ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... down with horror-stricken eyes at the body of a man stretched out on the further side of the boulders. Motionless he lay there, a long length of brown chaps and torn, disordered shirt. His face was hidden in his crooked arms; the tumbled mass of brown hair was matted with ominous dark clots. But in that single, stricken second Mary Thorne ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames

... their tracks. He zigzagged through the forest, avoiding the bare spots of dust, the dry, sun-baked flats of clay where water lay in spring, and he chose the grassy, open glades, the long, pine-needle matted aisles. Ellen rode at their heels and it pleased her to watch for their tracks. Colter manifestly had been long practiced in this game of hiding his trail, and he showed the skill of a rustler. But Ellen was not convinced that he could ever elude a real woodsman. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... the inland forests were tinted a shimmering blue, like the forests of a dream. On the seaward side the belt of great trunks and matted undergrowth came to the western shore of the oval lagoon; and in the pure freshness of the air the groups of brown houses reflected in the water or seen above the waving green of the fields, the clumps of palm trees, the fenced-in plantations, the ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... fruit as this would melt them all away. I have not tasted such fruit—no! not even in Hampshire—since I was a boy; and to boys, I fancy, all fruit is good. I remember eating sloes and crabs with a relish. Do you remember the matted-up currant bushes, Margaret, at the corner of the west-wall in the garden ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... pillar of white light upon the wall Of purple cliffs, aloof descried: Come from the woods that belt the grey hill-side, The seven elms, the poplars [4] four That stand beside my father's door, And chiefly from the brook [5] that loves To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, Drawing into his narrow earthen urn, In every elbow and turn, The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland. O! hither lead thy feet! Pour round mine ears the ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... went to the platform and saw that the head of the lady was separated from her body. Horrified at the sight, he did not know what to make of it. He saw a stream of blood trickling from the severed head, falling upon the matted head of Siva, and running into the ocean in the form of rubies. After a little two small rods, one of silver and one of gold, which were lying near the head of the lady, attracted his eyes. As he took up the rods in his hands, the golden ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... particular case the hood had been suffered to extend itself into something more like a cloak, and hung down about the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of lying flatly along the summit. The trees grew so close, and their boughs were so matted together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a bush of heather. The prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red, touched here and there with vivid yellow. But the autumn had scarce advanced beyond the outworks; it was still almost summer in the heart of the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... agreed to give him a cream cheese for his services. In the evening Jack took the cheese and went home with it on his head. By the time he got home the cheese was completely spoilt, part of it being lost and part matted with his hair. "You stupid lout," said his mother, "you should have carried it very carefully ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... know what to do, for the woman in uniform, although she made a murmuring noise, preserved that unillumined aspect which conveyed, more fully than silence could have done, that her soul was glumly silent. But they went and greeted her, and looked into the matted darkness of ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... great success, planting them in rows alternately with other vegetables. When they are all together, the haulms in wet seasons grow so rankly that they become matted together; and then, as the air is excluded from the roots, it renders them liable to disease. We have tried cutting the haulm off to within a few inches of the ground; but this, the gardener said, proved detrimental to the roots. We afterwards tried a row of potatoes, then cabbages, then ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton

... was a short, stout, thick-set man, with bull neck, broad shoulders, deep chest, low brow, flat nose, square chin, and small black eyes, in which there lay a mingled expression of ferocity and cunning. His very swarthy complexion, heavy black beard, and thick, matted, coal-black hair, together with his black eyes, were sufficiently marked to make him worthy of the name of "Black Bill." Altogether, he looked like a perfect type of perfect ruffianism; and Obed involuntarily felt a cold shudder pass over him as he thought of Zillah ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... state of uneasy slumber until daylight, when he was awakened by the noise of boats coming alongside, and loud talking on deck. All that had passed did not immediately rush into his mind; but his arm tied up with the bandage, and his hair matted, and his face stiff with the coagulated blood, soon brought to his recollection the communication of Judy Malony, that he had been impressed. The 'tween decks of the cutter appeared deserted, unless indeed there were people in the hammocks slung over his head; and Newton, anxious ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... Here a caisson blew up, tearing the horses to pieces, and whirling a cannoneer among the clouds. There an ammunition wagon exploded, and the air seemed to be filled with fragments of wood, iron, and flesh. A boy stood at one of the fires, combing out his matted hair; suddenly his head flew off, spattering the brains, and the shell—which we could not see—exploded in a piece of woods, mutilating the trees. The effect upon the people around me was instantaneous and appalling. Some, that were partially dressed, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... like that home that he had abandoned in the lonely tules. He was roused at last by a violent headache, as if his soft felt hat had been changed into a tightening crown of iron. Lifting his hand to his head to tear off its covering, he was surprised to find that he was wearing no hat, but that his matted hair, stiffened and dried with blood and ooze, was clinging like a cap to his skull in the hot morning sunlight. His eyelids and lashes were glued together and weighted down by the same sanguinary plaster. He crawled to the ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... now! No danger of hurting his audacious master, except so far as his feelings were concerned, and the stallion did not spare them. Despite the favorable ground, more than one boulder or bunch of matted undergrowth had to be leaped, and the two went over them like a couple of flying birds. But the steed steadily drew away from the fleet Shawanoe, who at the end of two or three hundred yards, finding himself hopelessly to ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... man naturally intended for town life. He was short and skinny, though he was as wiry as a monkey; his face was slightly pitted with the smallpox, and the malaria of many summers had left him with a complexion of the colour of cheap leather; he had eyes like a hawk, matted black hair, and jagged white teeth. He and his fustian clothes smelt of earth, burnt gunpowder, goat's cheese, garlic, and bad tobacco. He was no great talker, but his language was picturesque and to the point; and he feared neither man nor beast, neither tramp ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford

... chose, Alicia could not avoid passing Lindsay's room, for her own lay beyond it. In the seven o'clock half light of a February evening, in the middle of the week, she went along the matted upper hall on tiptoe, and stumbled over a veiled form squatted in the native way, near his door, profoundly asleep. "Ayah!" she exclaimed, but the face that looked confusedly up at her was white, whiter than common, Captain Filbert's face. Alicia drew her hand away and made an imperceptible ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... for, on the opposite side of the fire, there sat with folded arms a wrinkled hideous figure, with deeply sunk and bloodshot eyes, and an immensely long cadaverous face, shadowed by jagged and matted locks of coarse black hair. He wore a kind of tunic of a dull bluish colour, which, the baron observed, on regarding it attentively, was clasped or ornamented down the front with coffin handles. His legs, too, were encased in coffin plates as though in armour; and over ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... man's head was bound round with an old handkerchief, matted with blood which had dried hard. Warm disinfectant was quickly brought and the doctor proceeded to gently loosen the rough bandage from the head, revealing a nasty head wound, a gash about three inches long ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins









Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com




Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar