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More "Sinewy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the basin, the doctor had already ripped up the captain's sleeve and exposed his great sinewy arm. It was tattooed in several places. "Here's luck," "A fair wind," and "Billy Bones his fancy," were very neatly and clearly executed on the forearm; and up near the shoulder there was a sketch of a gallows and a man hanging from it—done, as I ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the celestial halls to perform three test-acts of prowess. He is to drain the drinking-horn of Thor. Then he must run a race with a courser so fleet that he fairly spurns the ground under his flying footsteps. Then he must wrestle with a toothless old woman, whose sinewy hands, as wiry as eagle claws in the grapple, make his very flesh to quiver. He is victorious in them all. But as the crown of success is placed upon his temples, he discovers for the first time that ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... of the water-skin must have been great at first, but it grew lighter as the man went on; and one moment I was thinking of what strength there was in his thin sinewy legs and arms, the next of the clever way in which the pattern was formed upon the pavement, and lastly of what a clumsy mode it was of watering the place, and how much pleasanter it would be if there were greater power in the fountain, and it sent up a great spray ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... pebbles rattling over stones and falling into water flowed from the singsong lips of Chuan Kai. The waiter went away and came back with a broad-shouldered Chinaman whose sleeves were rolled up, revealing sinewy yellow muscles. Campbell and Bassett guessed that he came from the kitchen where he had been cutting meat, for his hands were red and the apron he wore was stained. Chuan Kai spoke to these two hench-men at some length; they replied in ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... stranger round him gazed, 560 And next the fallen weapon raised— Few were the arms whose sinewy strength, Sufficed to stretch it forth at length. And as the brand he poised and swayed, "I never knew but one," he said, 565 "Whose stalwart arm might brook to wield A blade like this in battle-field." She sighed, then smiled and took the word: "You ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... body; plump and ruddy—or as some would say, bloated—of face; with resolute mouth and heavy animal jaws; expressive nose, and piercing blue-eyes; brown hair, mustache, and eyebrows; a fair forehead, and short sinewy neck, a man of apparently thirty years of age, stood in the doorway, smoking a cigar, and trotting his sword fretfully in the scabbard. He wore the regulation blue cap, but trimmed plentifully with gold lace, and his sleeves were slashed in the same ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... boy!" The foreman's joy was almost like that of a big dog at sight of his master. "By the great horned toad, I knew it!" With his sinewy hands he tore the blanket into strips as easily as though the wool had been paper. "Now for him, ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... antagonist's forces, directing the fire of continually shifting great guns upon the apparatus and supports in the rear of his fighting line, forecasting his night plans and seeking some tactical or strategic weakness in that sinewy line ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... day the paddles plied by sinewy arms drove the canoes up the stream. A lake {301} was passed, which later was called Lake Pepin, in honor of one of a party of their countrymen whom they met a short time afterward.[2] On the nineteenth day after their capture, the prisoners landed, along with their masters, ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... together, straining long Against each other with their massive strength, Hard-panting in the fierce rage of their strife, While from their mouths drip foam-flakes to the ground; So strained they twain with grapple of brawny hands. 'Neath that hard grip their backs and sinewy necks Cracked, even as when in mountain-glades the trees Dash storm-tormented boughs together. Oft Tydeides clutched at Aias' brawny thighs, But could not stir his steadfast-rooted feet. Oft Aias hurled his whole weight on him, ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... extended feebly. Ducie took it in his sinewy palms and pressed it gently. "You have this day done for me what I can never forget," whispered the Russian, brokenly. Then he closed his eyes, and seemed to sink off into a sleep ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... dog-days came, and I saw my river tawny, sinewy, gaunt—a half-starved lion. The long dry bars were like the protruding ribs of the beast when the prey is scarce, and the ropy main current was like the lean, terrible muscles of ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... the emotion of his visitor, and their hands met in a hearty clasp. Monsieur de la Vallee was a young man, of four or five and twenty, well proportioned, and active and sinewy from his devotion to field sports. He was about the same height as Desmond himself, but the latter, who had not yet finished growing, was larger boned, and would broaden into a much bigger and more ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... garish semblance made The chequered trews and belted plaid, And varying notes the war-pipes brayed To every varying clan; Wild through their red or sable hair Looked out their eyes with savage stare On Marmion as he passed; Their legs above the knee were bare; Their frame was sinewy, short, and spare, And hardened to the blast; Of taller race, the chiefs they own Were by the eagle's plumage known. The hunted red-deer's undressed hide Their hairy buskins well supplied; The graceful bonnet decked their head; Back from their shoulders hung the plaid; ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... Walter de Montreal: a life of vicissitude and war had at length done its work. His bearing was now abrupt and imperious, as that of one accustomed to rule wild spirits, and he had exchanged the grace of persuasion for the sternness of command. His athletic form had grown more spare and sinewy, and instead of the brow half shaded by fair and clustering curls, his forehead, though yet but slightly wrinkled, was completely bald at the temples; and by its unwonted height, increased the dignity and manliness of his aspect. The bloom of his complexion was faded, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... is force-the force of righteousness. The New Testament, you remember, speaks of the 'power of Elias.' The outward appearance of the man corresponds to his function and his character. Gaunt and sinewy, dwelling in the desert, feeding on locusts and wild honey, with a girdle of camel's skin about his loins, he bursts into the history, amongst all that corrupt state of society, with the force of a hammer that God's hand wields. The whole of his career is marked by this one ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... came across the field, walking carefully between the furrows. As he approached, Yourii saw that he was a burly, grey- haired peasant with a long beard and sinewy arms. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... of the approaching marriage of his sister Bell, to attend which he had hastened home; and knew, also, that some of the Cedar Creek household would be there. Sinewy athlete as Sam Holt was, he could not frame his lips to ask whether Linda might be one of them. But how often had he to put the question resolutely away during that and the next day's travelling? And ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... sinewy, hard-favoured savage, whose native ugliness was enhanced by two scars that seamed his broad squat face, repeated the words he had before uttered, in a higher key, and with a still more imperative air, accompanying what he said, with gestures, which ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... drew back in dismay as the bull drew near: and she was right; for, in his agony and amazement, the unwieldy but sinewy brute leaped the five-barred gate, and cleared it all but the top rail; that he burst through, as if it had been paper, and dragged Uxmoor after him, and pulled him down, and tore him some yards along the hard road on his ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... himself on guard. Like many small men, he was very powerful, as his broad shoulders and sinewy arms would have made evident to a teacher of gymnastics. He clearly understood that this opponent was in deadly earnest, and he put out all the strength which he possessed. The result was that his large-framed antagonist went down once more, striking his ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... Driscoll rose among the crags, the dark tufts curling stubbornly on his bared head. He looked a sinewy, toughened Ajax. But he only spoiled it. For, raising his arms, he stretched himself, stretched long and luxuriously. His very animal revelling in the huge elongation of cramped limbs was exasperating. Next he clapped the slouch on his head, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... ember in its dusky depths. The only radical dissimilarity was the hue of the prince's complexion. It was a strange, un-Egyptian pallor, an opaque whiteness with dark shadows that belied the testimony of vigor in his sinewy frame. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... were, with the exception of a man of fifty years of age, all young men, and fine types of the Micronesian. Although much slighter in build than the average Polynesian of the south-eastern islands of the Pacific, they were extremely muscular and sinewy, and as active and fleet of foot as wild goats. Their skins, where not tanned a darker hue by the sun, were of a light reddish-brown, and the blue tatooing on their bodies showed out very clearly; most of them had a very Semitic and regular cast ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... both male and female stood together, stretching their bodies out to their full length, and lashing their flanks with their long sinewy tails. Then, uttering another prolonged roar, they bounded simultaneously forward, passing, at a single leap, over a space of full twenty feet. A second spring brought them upon the crest of the ridge, upon which they had scarce rested an instant, before the ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... out, we took our places and prepared for the dramatic encounter, upon which depended something more precious to me than even my own life. Although outwardly cool and even haughty, I was really in a state of most terrible anxiety. I fixed my eyes intently upon the spare but sinewy chief, and without moving a muscle allowed him to throw his spears first. The formidable weapons came whizzing through the air with extraordinary rapidity one after the other; but long experience ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... man, about fifty years of age, as gnarled and sinewy as the stem of an old grape-vine. At the first glance one would not have taken him for a scoundrel. His manner was humble, and even gentle; but the restlessness of his eye and the expression of his thin lips betrayed diabolical ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... of battle and comparing notes, they mounted Dodd on Vespasian's horse, and walked quietly till Dodd's head got better; and then they cantered on three abreast, Vespasian in the middle with one sinewy hand on each horse's mane; and such was his muscular power, that he often relieved his feet by lifting himself clean into the air, and the rest of the time his toe but touched the ground, and he sailed like an ostrich and grinned and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... they dread alive. Shylock? So brand him, boors and babbling wags, Who scorn him, yet would share his money-bags; Who hate him, yet can stoop to such appeal! Beneath his meekness there's a soul of steel. High-featured, amply-bearded, see he stands Facing the Autocrat; those sinewy hands, Shaped but for clutching—so his slanderers say— The huckster bait can coldly put away "Blood against bullion." The Jew-baiting band Howl frantic execration o'er the land; Malign and menace, pillage, persecute; Though the heart's hot, the mouth must fain be mute. The edict fulminates, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... His nervous, sinewy hand clenched itself and fell with a crash upon the table, overturning a flagon and sending a lake of wine across the board, to trickle over at a dozen points and form in puddles at the feet of Valerie. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... The sinewy sentry shifted his gun and tramped off, his blue eyes marvelling at the unaccustomed sights of the great city, all the panoply of the civilization that ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... as men came to load it, he fired. Sometimes a dozen soldiers rushed upon the muzzle of the field-piece surrounding it. At such moments Davy Crockett's arms swept back and forth with smooth unhurried swiftness and his sinewy fingers relaxed from one walnut stock only to clutch another; his hands were never empty. Always a little red flame licked the smoke fog before him like the tongue of an angered snake. He was getting on in years but in all his full life his technic had never been so perfect, his ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... A.G. Spalding's great book upon the diamond sport, is now upon the market and receiving well merited attention. It tells the story as Mr. Spalding saw it, and no man has been in position to see more. When 'Al' Spalding, the sinewy pitcher of nearly forty years ago, came into the arena, the game was young, and through all the changing seasons that have seen it mature into full bloom, its closest watcher and strongest friend has been the same ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... member of the party, a lean, wide-shouldered, sinewy youth, blue silk kerchief knotted loosely around his neck, broke in with a gesture that swept the sky. "Funny about all them buzzards. What are they doing ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... characteristic of the native American; the teeth were strong, indicating and befitting a largely carnivorous diet, little worn by sandy foods, and seldom mutilated; the hands and feet were commonly large and sinewy. The Siouan Indians were among those who impressed white pioneers by the parallel placing of the feet; for, as among other walkers and runners, who rest sitting and lying, the feet assumed the pedestrian attitude of approximate parallelism rather than the standing attitude ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... once, therefore, that delicate as he often was, and sweet as he was more often, although he could write melodies which are mere iridescent filaments of tone, he never became flabby or other than crisp, and could, and did, write themes as flexible, sinewy, unbreakable as perfectly tempered steel bands. And these themes he could lay together and weld into choruses of gigantic strength. The subject and counter-subject of "Thou art the King of Glory" (in the "Te ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... way, and farewell to your path and your bride. He will exhort you to imitate these ancients, and offer you antiquated models that lend themselves as little to imitation as old sculpture, say the clean-cut, sinewy, hard, firmly outlined productions of Hegesias, or the school of Critius and Nesiotes; and he will tell you that toil and vigilance, abstinence and perseverance, are indispensable, if you would accomplish ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... kindled at his taunts, And he too drew his sword; at once they rushed Together, as two eagles on one prey Come rushing down together from the clouds, One from the east, one from the west; their skulls Dashed with a clang together, and a din Rose, such as that the sinewy woodcutters Make often in the forest's heart at morn, Of hewing axes, crashing trees,—such blows Rustum and Sohrab on ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... glow falls on the old woman's face, neck, and breast—a face worn away to a skeleton, with shrivelled skin and sunken eyes, red and watery with smoke, dust, and working by lamplight—a long goitre neck, wrinkled and sinewy—a hollow breast covered with faded, ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... womb we must understand the channel that lies between the above-mentioned knobs and the inner bone of the womb, which receives the penis like a sheath, and so that it may be more easily dilated by the pleasure of procreation, the substance is sinewy and a little spongy. There are several folds or pleats in this cavity, made by tunicles, which are wrinkled like a full blown rose. In virgins they appear plainly, but in women who are used to copulation they disappear, so that the inner side of the neck of ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... its congress of peoples—a comprehensive collection of specimens of every tribe in Hindustan and of nearly every other race in the world besides: red-bearded Delhi Pathans, towering Sikhs, lean sinewy Rajputs with bound jaws, swart agile Bhils, Tommies in their scarlet tunics, Japanese and Chinese in their distinctive dress, short and sturdy Gurkhas, yellow Saddhus, Jats stalking proudly, brawling knots of sailormen from the Port, sleek Mahrattas, polluted Sansis, Punjabis, Bengalis, ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... too much for the captain. With a look of fury on his face, he dashed toward Harry, and there is no doubt that our hero was in serious danger. He paled slightly, for he knew he was no match for the tall, sinewy captain, and was half regretting his independence when he felt himself drawn forcibly to one side, and in his place stood the mate, sternly eyeing the ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... him. He no longer saw the brilliant flashes of lightning that at intervals lighted up the scene, nor heard the voices of his companions frantically calling upon him to come back. The mountaineer's sinewy fingers had closed in an iron-grip ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... also brief. A thrust, a parry, and Frank drove his weapon through the shoulder of his opponent. The latter reeled and fell. Frank strove to pull out his weapon, but it stuck fast, and just then a pair of sinewy hands fastened on his throat and he looked into the reddened eyes of the antagonist ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... next instant, uninjured, but leaping madly for life, Bre'r Rabbit was streaking eastward out of harm's way, a liberated victim whose first huge leap owed much of its length to the impetus of Stuyvesant's long, lean, sinewy arm. ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... post, tugged at his moustache with his left hand, while his sinewy right hand was clenched into a fist, hard as iron, and ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... wounded hearts, crucifixes, death's-heads, and even of flowers with broken stems; all of them clearly enough of very old fabrication, though unfortunately none of them dated. How many gallant spirits have here pined and fretted themselves into eternity; how many noble minds and sinewy arms have long confinement and scanty fare, bowed down to this damp floor and withered. What a record of misery and wrong would not these walls give forth, were they for one little hour gifted with the power of speech, like the talking woods in ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... respect he had the advantage of the soldier, who, not choosing to play barefooted, was obliged to retain his heavy boots. In apparent activity, too, the advantage was greatly on the side of the Navarrese, who was spare and sinewy, without an ounce of superfluous flesh about him, but with muscles like iron, and limbs as elastic and springy as whalebone. His very face partook of the hard, wiry character of his person; the cheekbones were slightly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... his own hand. The young man, with none but himself to think of, scattered his money to the winds. Is money earned with such expenditure of force worth the having? Look at the arm of a woman labouring in the harvest-field—thin, muscular, sinewy, black almost, it tells of continual strain. After much of this she becomes pulled out of shape, the neck loses its roundness and shows the sinews, the chest flattens. In time the women find the strain ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... the savages around, was placed a cloth cap, with a gold tassel that hung down to his shoulder; his mustaches were trimmed with care, and a silk kerchief of gay hues was twisted round a well-shaped but sinewy throat; a short jacket of rough cloth was decorated with several rows of gilt filagree buttons; his nether garments fitted tight to his limbs, and were curiously braided; while in a broad parti-coloured sash were ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of Bergstein's discharge the gang at the lower shanty struck. The bar-room at Morrison's became packed. Little else was talked of but the injustice of the owner of Big Shanty. Later in the day a delegation of awkward, sinewy men came upon his veranda. They were for the most part sober. It might be said they were the soberest. Le Boeuf was among them. Men of the sea and men of the woods air their grievances in the same way—a ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... party and scatter the sacred corn meal on the ground. Navajo horsemen dismount and pick up pinches of this sacred meal to put in their pouches for good luck. The twenty-four priests with their snakes twisting in their sinewy brown hands turn together and with a common movement all dart up to the place where the meal lies. They circle about the spot. Paul raises Helen up a little higher so that she can throw a horrified gaze into that astonishing scene. For a moment the only thing she and the rest can see ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... adviser for installing Rama as regent of the kingdom. And all those great ministers were agreed that it was time to do so. And, O scion of Kuru's race, king Dasaratha was greatly pleased to behold his son,—that enhancer of Kausalya's delight—possessed of eyes that were red, and arms that were sinewy. And his steps were like those of a wild elephant. And he had long arms and high shoulders and black and curly hair. And he was valiant, and glowing with splendour, and not inferior to Indra himself in battle. And he was well-versed in holy writ and was equal ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... fish-like and aloof, about him. He seemed to swim like a fish in his own little element. Strange it all was, like Alice in Wonderland. Alvina understood now Lottie's strained sort of thinness, a haggard, sinewy, sea-weedy look. The poor thing was all the time ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... man she had ever seen, and they made him appear rather short. But his lithe, powerful limbs proved he was not short. Whenever he moved the muscles rippled. His hands were clasped round a knee—brown, sinewy hands, very broad, and fitting the thick muscular wrists. His collar was open, and he did not wear a scarf, as did the men Ellen knew. Then her intense curiosity at last brought her steady gaze to Jean Isbel's head and face. He wore a cap, evidently of some thin fur. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... nocturnal melody. Mr. Zacharias was angered; for the first time since she had sworn to love, honour, and obey, this female was in open rebellion. He decided upon prompt and vigorous action. He quietly moved over to the back side of the bed and braced his shoulders against the wall. Drawing up his sinewy knees to a level with his breast, he placed the soles of his feet broadly against the back of the insurgent, with the design of propelling her against the opposite wall. There was a strangled snort, then a shriek of female agony, and the ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... his seat now before the rougher's hackle, turned up his shirt sleeves over a pair of sinewy arms and powerful wrists ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... Point, and steered into False Bay. Near these rocks were two whales; and one or more of what seamen call thrashers were engaged in a furious combat with them, at a less distance than half a mile from the ship. The sinewy strength of the thrasher must be very great; for besides raising his tail high out of the water to beat the adversary, he occasionally threw the whole of his vast body several feet above the surface, apparently to fall upon him with greater force. Their ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... old Indian, who belonged to a distant settlement, and only visited our lakes occasionally on hunting parties. He was a strange, eccentric, merry old fellow, with a skin like red mahogany, and a wiry, sinewy frame, that looked as if it could bid defiance to every change ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... and, fastening the reins about the whipstock, Gordon swung out over the wheel and walked. He was a spare man, sinewy and upright, and past the golden age of youth. He lounged over the road in a careless manner that concealed his agile strength, his tireless endurance. This indolent carriage and his seemingly slight build had, on more than one occasion, been disastrously misleading to importunate ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... used to add weight to the blow, it was afterwards continued up the fore-arm, and formed also a weapon of defence. Mr. Morrissey, or any other "shoulder-hitter," would hardly need more than a few rounds to settle his opponent, if his sinewy arm were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... capacious, and the environment harmonizes with the tales that are told. It is an informal club of coastwise skippers and the old energy begins to show itself once more. They move with a brisker gait than when times were so hard and they went begging for charters at any terms. A sinewy patriarch stumps to a window, flourishes his arm at an ancient two-master, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... that may be near; and this was evidently the case with that which Cudjo had surprised. When they can hide their heads, like the ostrich they fancy themselves safe; and so, no doubt, thought this one, until he felt the sinewy fingers of Cudjo grasping him by the tail. It was evident the animal had run into a shallow crack where he could get no farther, else we would soon have lost sight of his tail; but it was equally evident, that pulling by that appendage ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... themselves in extemporaneous costumes, cut from the cloth which they had at last received in payment of their sufferings and their blood. Broadcloths, silks, satins, and gold-embroidered brocades, worthy of a queen's wardrobe, were hung in fantastic drapery around the sinewy forms and bronzed faces of the soldiery, who, the day before, had been clothed in rags. The mirth was fast and furious; and scarce was the banquet finished before every drum-head became a gaming-table, around ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was disarming the sinewy warrior, Hay-uta explained his wish to show him such consideration as to win his friendship. That being done, probably some way would open by which he could be ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... Caspian to the Red Sea, displayed no less variety in arms and accoutrements than in their personal appearance, varying from the sturdy-looking Kourd, mounted on his strong powerful steed, to the swarthy, spare, and sinewy Arab, with his long reed-like spear, his head encircled with the Kefiah, or thick rope of twisted camels' hair; whilst the flowing 'abbage' waved gracefully down the shining flanks of the high-mettled steed of the desert. In short, such an assemblage ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... angular decision, give the effect of illustrative diagrams to his studies. Harmony of proportion and the magic of expression are sacrificed to energy emergent in a powerful physique. Redundant life, in sinewy limbs, in the proud carriage of the head upon the neck, in the sway of the trunk backward from the reins, the firmly planted calves and brawny thighs, the thick hair, broad shoulders, spare flanks, and massive ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... from a multitude of boats strung along the river front, and stood out in striking contrast against the leaved branches of the trees on the shore. The boats were moored to strong trunks and huge sinewy roots; and the larger number of them turned out "to grass," that is, leased as shops and dwelling houses. Signboards and figure-heads from the boats were set up along the shore, facing the levee; and back of them, up the gentle slopes of the hills lying between the Sacramento and the American ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... The steel-like muscles and sinewy strength of the Hungarian now stood him in good stead. He must either free himself, or perish there in the hideous carnage of a quarry. He seized with both hands, in a viselike grip, Ortog's enormous neck, and, at the same time, with a desperate jerk, shook free his shoulder, leaving ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... powers that were growing up in Europe. Pacific ideas prevailed. Spain ceased to make war in every direction, and husbanded her resources, and began to renew her native strength. The skeleton bequeathed by Philip II. became clothed with flesh, and sinewy. Could this policy have been continued for a generation, Spanish history might have been made to read differently from the melancholy text it now presents. But the process of rehabilitation was not allowed to go on. There had always been a strong party opposed to Lerma, and that statesman's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... flourishing in their green boxes! There he had spent the best years of his childhood. The little boys who in those days used to be hiding behind the wide portal, waiting for a chance to play with the son of the powerful don Ramon Brull, were now the grown men, the sinewy orchard workers, who had been parading from the station to his house, waving their arms, and shouting vivas for their ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and sinewy, hitched to the lever underneath the gin-house at The Gaffs, sweated until they sprinkled in one continual shower the path which they trod around the ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... perhaps a hundred and fifty men, almost all of them farmers. Among them was only one landowner of the aristocratic class, the Comte de——, who had walked over from his chateau about three miles off. He was a type of the old-fashioned French country gentleman, tall and sinewy, with finely cut features, simply, not to say carelessly, dressed, but with an unmistakable air of distinction, and a certain peremptory courtesy of manner which would infallibly have got him into trouble in the days when, near Baume-les-Dames, Arthur ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... well matched. The pistol had fallen at the first onset, and for a few minutes it seemed doubtful which should prove the victor, as they swayed to and fro, straining their dark and sinewy forms in deadly conflict. At last the strength of Talaloo seemed to give way, but still he retained a vice-like grasp ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... short struggle amidst the dust of the road, all bluish with moonlight. The Brother, finding himself the weaker of the two, tried to bite. But Jeanbernat's sinewy limbs were like coils of rope which pinioned him so tightly that he could almost feel them cutting into his flesh. He panted and ceased to struggle, meditating some ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... tall, sinewy young Englishman, with ruddy hair and beard, grave blue eyes, and an unmistakable air of good breeding. He wore a blue flannel shirt and high boots like Clarence's, yet somehow he made Clarence look a little rough and undistinguished. He was quiet in speech, reserved in manner, and seemed ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... after this act, a hundred men assembled at Doolana, determined upon his destruction. They were all picked elephant-hunters—Moormen; active and sinewy fellows, accustomed to danger from their childhood. Some were armed with axes, sharpened to the keenest edge, some with long spears, and others with regular elephant ropes, formed of the thongs of raw deer's ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... thought he was dreaming. Then, convinced that he was awake, an Irishman scorned and insulted, he dashed in to the attack. Both fists shot out from the brawny shoulders; both missed the agile dodger; then off went the blanket, and with two lean, red, sinewy arms the Sioux had "locked his foeman round," and the two were straining and swaying in a magnificent grapple. At arms' length Pat could easily have had the best of it, for the Indian never boxes; but, in a bear hug and a wrestle, all chances favored the ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... forehead, thought the night warm. Joan's eyes, dark, solemn, frightened, spurred him on to greater effort. He dug furiously, flinging earth in all directions. Hughie marvelled at his madcap speed and the strength of his sinewy arms. His jaw was set. His face, dark and vivid in the lantern light, shone with a boy's excitement. But when the wind came he looked defiant. They could not know that to him, then, the spirit of Adam Craig seemed to come with a sigh and a rustle ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the air, light, the stars, the happiness of going whithersoever the sinewy limbs of one-and-twenty chance to wish to ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... centre of the court-yard. On some cushions in front of it sat a man, whom he recognized as the leader of the party who seized him. Other Arabs were squatted on the ground or standing round. The chief was past the prime of life, but still a powerful and sinewy man. His features were not prepossessing; but Edgar, looking round, thought that the expression of his face was less savage than that of the majority of ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... extracted this treasured heirloom he felt the "power," that men of magic possess, creep up his sinewy arms. It entered his heart, his blood, his brain. For a long time he sat and chanted songs that only great medicine men may sing, and, as the hours drifted by, the heat of the forest fires subsided, the flames diminished into smouldering blackness. At daybreak the forest ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... out her small right hand, and he put his rather large and sinewy brown hand into it. The small hand folded itself upon his in a curious way—feeble and fierce at the same time, it seemed—and held him. The hand was warm, almost hot, and soft, and dry as a fire is dry—so dry that it hisses angrily if ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... with eyes on fire; Beneath their blows the parting ranks retire; In whirlwind-sweep their meeting axes bound, Wheel, crash in air, and plow the trembling ground; Their sinewy limbs in fierce contortions bend, And mutual strokes with equal force descend, Parried with equal art, now gyring prest High at the head, now plunging for the breast. The king starts backward from the struggling foe, Collects new strength, and with a circling blow ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... to a request or suggestion was always, 'If you please, sir.' Throughout the day she went so tranquilly about her domestic duties, that Godwin seldom heard anything except the voice of the cuckoo-clock, a pleasant sound to him. Her son, employed at a nurseryman's, was a great sinewy fellow with a face of such ruddiness that it seemed to diffuse warmth; on Sunday afternoon, whatever the state of the sky, he sat behind the house in his shirt-sleeves, and smoked a pipe as he contemplated the hart's-tongue which ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... from his own vehemence. Fairfield had seen him in moments of danger, yet never had he seen him so roused out of himself. He could see one of the sinewy hands actually trembling, and that alone was proof enough of the violence of the hunted man's emotion. He went to a side table, and pouring out a generous dose of brandy from a decanter, squirted a little soda-water in it and handed it to Grell. But his face ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... corner of the place, amongst the straw and litter of the lair, lay the Burmese dacoit, his sinewy fingers embedded in the throat of the third and largest leopard—which was dead—whilst the creature's gleaming fangs were buried in the tattered flesh ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... she raised her eyes, and smiled on him as the weeping infant returns the earnest and tender regard of its mother. The effect of that glance on Jacopo was so powerful that his sinewy frame shook, until the wondering Carmelite heard the clanking of ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... alarmed him. The approach was stealthy no longer. A quick, nervous tread, a rustling of the boughs, and as the hunter rose to his feet his elder brother emerged from the undergrowth, taller than he as they stood together on the margin of the lick, more active, sinewy, alert. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... with his head up, his eyes looking out over the abysmal scene below. Behind his back he had gripped tight together his long and sinewy hands. He was a lean and broad man, so she thought. He stood in the uniform of his country, made for manly men, and beseeming only such. The neatness of good rearing even now was apparent in every line of him. Dust seemed not to ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... And I am bound to admit that my first impression of the men was that their appearance was in perfect accord with their surroundings. They most undoubtedly were, as Forbes had said, as rowdy-looking a set of ruffians as one would care to meet. Tough, sinewy desperadoes, swarthy as mulattoes by long exposure to the fierce southern sun, with long, dense, tangled thatches of hair mingling with a thick, neglected growth of beard and whisker that permitted scarcely a feature, save the nose and eyes, to be seen, clad in the remains ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... rites the Indians, according to Adair, cut out the sinewy part of the thigh; in commemoration, as he says, of ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... beast, ever docile and submissive, has cringed at his feet, fawned to his touch, and licked the hand that snatched away the half-devoured morsel. Obedient to voice and eye, the giant strength and sinewy grace have been debased to make the sport of multitudes; the noble, pliant frame has contorted itself to execute the mean antics of the low-comedy ape—to counterfeit death like a poodle dog; to leap through gaudily-painted rings at the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... of Hockheimer was a thin, sinewy man, with long, carroty hair, eyelashes of the same colour, but of a remarkable length; and mustachios, which, though very thin, were so long that they met under his chin. Vivian could not refrain from noticing the extreme length, whiteness, and apparent sharpness of ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... could show anything more pleasing than this rider of the plains. It was not alone his face, with the likable blue eyes that could say so many things in a minute, but the gallant ease of his bearing. Such a springy lightness, such sinewy grace of undulating muscle, were rare even on the frontier. She had once heard Webb Mackenzie say of him that he could whip his weight in wildcats, and it was easy of belief after seeing how surely he ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... small but proud array of Spanish chivalry, as it paraded, with that stateliness possessed only by Spanish cavaliers, through the renowned gate of Elvira. They were struck with the stern and lofty demeanor of Don Juan de Vera and his sinewy frame, which showed him formed for hardy deeds of arms, and they supposed he had come in search of distinction by defying the Moorish knights in open tourney or in the famous tilt with reeds for which they were so renowned, for it was still the ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... to lay his hand casually on any part of his person without its coming into contact with a deadly weapon ready for instant use. Cap'n Abernethy picked up a cutlass, "hefted" it thoughtfully, rolled his sleeve back upon a lean and sinewy old arm that was tanned until it looked like a piece of weathered oak, spat upon his hand and whirled the weapon till it whistled in the air. "I come of a seafarin' fambly," said ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of his being by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, the great, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been all his days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells: "Disgrace and exile await thee. Honors and power ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... for, when at length, without a warning sound, he issued from the bushy shadow of a fence into the bright door-yard. In his person he was not formidable. He was of less than medium stature, lightly built, and apparently neither sinewy nor agile. But in his grasp was something long and slender, much concealed by his own shadow, but showing now a glint of bright metal and now its dark cylindrical end; something that held the eye of the one who watched him from out the shadow. Neither the features ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... may not appear, man may not look on God and live. Jehovah is seen as a glory behind the cloud of smoke shrouded by winged cherubim. From one side of the cloud comes a mighty hand meeting with power the force of Assyria. From the other side, a lithe and sinewy hand thwarts the subtlety of Egypt. But Jehovah ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... edge, two inches wide, and the curiously exact equipoise of its fashioning causing it to bowl swiftly along a great distance, to fall only when the original impetus should fail; his competitor, Wyejah, a sinewy, powerful young brave, his buckskin garb steeped in some red dye that gave him the look when at full speed of the first flying leaf of the falling season, his ears split and barbarically distended on wire ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... a touch of bitterness, and held out his hand, fresh from the soil, hardened by the plough. It was a powerful hand, brown and sinewy, with distorted knuckles and broken nails. "Oh, not that," he said. "I don't mean that. That shows work, but I know you—Genia—you will tell me work is manly. So it is, but is ignorance and poverty and—and ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... hut a few miles away, while Gomez went into the town with the guide to get the stores they required. Pita's comrade returned with them. Stephen was greatly surprised at the man's appearance. Pita himself was, for an Indian, tall; he was spare in frame, but very sinewy; his muscles stood up beneath the brown skin like cords. Hurka was so short that he was almost a dwarf, and, save for his face, he might have been taken for a boy of fourteen. He possessed none of Pita's ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... astonished whites that the entire population had gathered along the shore to receive them. Several strange sights impressed them. The men were large, sinewy, bushy-haired and athletic. Some sported bows and arrows, but the majority by far carried the spears which the explorers held in such dread. There was no native, so far as they could see, who was the equal in size ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... brown, sinewy hand on his shoulder, a hand protruding from a well tailored gray sleeve and lilac striped cuff, that caught Hamdi Bey by the epauleted shoulder and ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the field, work began immediately—they peeled off their shirts for calisthenics. This was the only part of the day that Anthony enjoyed. Lieutenant Kretching, who presided at the antics, was sinewy and muscular, and Anthony, followed his movements faithfully, with a feeling that he was doing something of positive value to himself. The other officers and sergeants walked about among the men with ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon her, though ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... frame of great bone and smooth sinewy muscle, he is an imposing figure. He wears no blanket, just the buckskin, beaded as ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... periods, the rounded and decorative sentences that she puts into the mouths of her characters under the extremest pressure of emotion or suffering, the italics, the sentimentalities, are of another age than the sinewy English and hard sense of 'Jane Eyre' or 'Adam Bede.' Doubtless her peculiar, sheltered training, her delicate health, and a luxuriant imagination that had seldom been measured against the realities ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... confidence that they have not been altered, the phraseology in which they were expressed has been entirely set aside, and the flimsy graces, common to the style of annuals and souvenirs, substituted for the Spartan brevity and sinewy grasp of Indian speech. We can just guess what might have been there, as we can detect the fine proportions of the Brave whom the bad taste of some white patron has arranged in ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... half vanquished. A single glance at Bog's clear, courageous eye, and his sinewy proportions, assured young Van Quintem that he had more than ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... The Pioneer sits his horse, a thin, sinewy, nervous figure; old, too,—as old as that frontier which has at last moved round the world. (See p. 87.) The statue, which is by Solon Borglum, is immensely expressive of that hard, efficient type of frontiersmen ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... but, looking closer, and marking how straight and firmly and lightly every footfall was planted, you gave the narrow arched instep, and the slender rounded ankle, the credit they well deserved; marveling only that so delicate a symmetry could conceal so much sinewy power. Upon this occasion, she was evidently accommodating her pace to that of Mrs. Danvers; and no racing man could have seen the two, without thinking of one of the Flyers of the turf walking down by the side of the ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... lion with a blow of his sinewy right arm; its body lay in the middle of the stage, and the busy bees were at work filling its carcase with honey. He observed them, commented upon their industry, tasted the honey ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... shake? When Sam cried out for war His potent hand spread many a coat of tar, That sinewy hand the feathers scattered o'er Till Tories' jackets made their bellies sore. Say, for whose sake has Time, that Barber gruff, O'er his wise noddle shook his powder puff? Was the task hard to hear the sage's ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... literature of all ages; Bunyan the prose writer is a poor, self-taught laborer who reads his Bible with difficulty, stumbling over the hard passages. Milton writes for the cultivated classes, in harmonious verse adorned with classic figures; Bunyan speaks for common men in sinewy prose, and makes his meaning clear by homely illustrations drawn from daily life. Milton is a solitary and austere figure, admirable but not lovable; Bunyan is like a familiar acquaintance, ruddy-faced, clear-eyed, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... those who tried it, while the self-respecting persons who would not so demean themselves were no less bitter in their diatribes. It was useless to argue that the horse was a "clean" animal. He was deemed too useful, too tough, too sinewy, too hard-working to be digestible. We could not connect a horse-chop with what was fit for human consumption. Most of us indulgently spared the butcher the trouble of weighing it; we preferred—with an air of dignity—to ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... as bravely as she could, trying not to alarm or distress them unduly, but there could be no disguising or softening one terrible fact. Jack, strong, sinewy, broad-shouldered Jack, whose strength had been his pride, lay as helpless as a baby, and all the hope the physicians could give was that in a few months he might be able to go about in a wheeled chair. They had had three surgeons up from Phoenix for a consultation. A trained nurse was with him ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... went his way. But as he passed Landless, suckering a plant with angry energy, he touched him, as if by accident, with his sinewy hand. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... returned! That was her instant thought. And clearly enough it was the thought shared by all of Poke Drury's guests. To be sure he carried no visible gun and his face was unhidden. But there was the hugeness of him, bulking big in the doorway, the spare, sinewy height made the taller by his tall boot heels, the wide black hat with the drooping brim from which rain drops trickled in a quick flashing chain, the shaggy black chaps of a cowboy in holiday attire, the soft grey shirt, the grey neck handkerchief about a brown throat, ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... calling for the energetic efforts of his sinewy arms? Can we, in fact, live without him? But while we want his labor he wants our lands, our capital, our industry, our influence in the commerce and finances of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... might, I 1 The Queen of soft delight Still ranges onward with triumphant sway. What she from Kronos' son And strong Poseidon won, And Pluto, King of Night, I durst not say. But who, to earn this bride, Came forth in sinewy pride To strive, or e'er the nuptial might be known With fearless heart I tell What heroes wrestled well, With showering blows, and dust ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... now, sitting in my office-chair, the smoke of the cigar curling about his bronzed, weather-tanned face, my eye taking in his slim waist, slender thighs, and long, sinewy arms and hands that have served him so well all his life, I can hardly believe that twenty years have passed over his head since we worked together on Shark Ledge. But for the marks chalked on his temples ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... may not pass with his common-sense rule and test. Sleep with softest touch locks all the gates of our physical senses and lulls to rest the conscious will—the disciplinarian of our waking thoughts. Then the spirit wrenches itself free from the sinewy arms of reason and like a winged courser spurns the firm green earth and speeds away upon wind and cloud, leaving neither trace nor footprint by which science may track its flight and bring us knowledge of the distant, shadowy country that we nightly visit. When we come back from the dream-realm, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... Harry were taller than in the old High School days, but they had not quite reached the height of Dick and Greg. Both of the young civil engineers, besides being heavily bronzed, were thin and sinewy looking. Thin as they were, both looked the pictures of health. Though Tom and Harry did not "advertise" their tailors as well as did the two West Point cadets, nevertheless the pair of young civil engineers looked prosperous. They had the general air of being the kind of young men ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... to see the result of his shot—so well did he trust his unerring aim—he climbed down the steep bank and brushing aside the vines entered the cave. A stalwart Indian lay in the entrance with his face pressed down on the vines. He still clutched in his sinewy fingers the buckhorn mouthpiece with which he had made the calls that ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... muscular hand across the table. His sinewy fingers closed around a glass paperweight. He held this poised steadily. "One more crack out of you, Eric, and I'll slam this against your head. You're a pretty good chief of police—but you're ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... several affairs which demanded his attention was more flattering still. He was also, in such surroundings, almost admirable as he stood before her bareheaded and dripping, the river frothing at his feet and the sliding mists behind him. Deerskin jacket and stained and faded jean, lean, sinewy figure, and bronzed face were all in keeping with the spirit of the scene. Then a voice ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... waiting at the dentist's when you get there, it being early. You are willing to wait. At a barber shop it may be different but at a dentist's you are always willing to wait, like a gentleman. But the sinewy young man who is sitting in the front parlor reading the Hammer Thrower's Gazette, welcomes you with a false air of gaiety entirely out of keeping with the circumstances and invites you to step right in. He tells you that you are next. This is wrong—if you were next you would turn and flee like ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... measured him from head to foot; but the sight of the sinewy young Spaniard did not reassure him. His own muscles were somewhat flabby, and by no means fit for a struggle ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... his limbs: they were long, large, and sinewy. His frame was of equal breadth from the shoulders to the hips. His chest, though broad and expansive, was not prominent, but rather hollowed in the centre. He had suffered from a pulmonary affection in early life, from which ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... If they were to escape it must be accomplished now, shadowed by darkness, while those savage watchers were safely beyond sound. His lean jaws set with fierce determination, and he grimly hitched his belt forward, one sinewy hand fingering the revolver. He would have to trust to that weapon entirely for defense; he could not carry both the rifle ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... reply, and, with a view of arousing him, I tapped one sinewy hand as it gripped the wheel, and even tried ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... Olympic contest. Homer too shows his love of the athlete by his warm description of the body and limbs of Ulysses, who "showed his large and shapely thighs, his full broad shoulders, his chest and sinewy arms," when he stripped ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... birthday, more especially since at no time in my life have I studied the arts of the Stone-Cutter, or been a master in the Science of Quarrying. Nor is it easy at my advanced age, with a back no longer sinewy, and muscles grown flabby from lack of active exercise, for me to lift a virgin sheet of stone from the ground to the surface of my writing-desk without a derrick, but these are, after all, minor difficulties, and I shall let no such insignificant obstacles stand between me and the ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... it is pulled out, a part of his lungs is dragged forth on the barbs, and his blood is poured forth, with his life, into the air; but no single wound reaches the unshaven Damasicthon. He is struck where the leg commences, and where the sinewy ham makes the space between the joints soft; and while he is trying with his hand to draw out the fatal weapon, another arrow is driven through his neck, up to the feathers. The blood drives this out, and itself starting forth, springs up on ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... In the father's heart, mingling with the deep joy at this reunion with his son, there wells up sudden, irrepressible sorrow. "Ah, God!" he thinks. "Could his mother but have lived to see him now!" Perhaps Philip reads it all in the strong yet tremulous clasp of those sinewy brown hands, but for the moment neither speaks again. There are some joys so deep, some heart longings so overpowering, that many a man is forced to silence, or to a levity of manner which is utterly repugnant to him, in the effort to conceal from the world the tumult of emotion ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... work young Carberry had for a boon companion one "Sandy" Hollingshead, a sinewy chap, whose most prominent trait was his faculty for disappearing suddenly in a pinch. He was considerable of a boaster, but could always invent a most remarkable excuse for going before the storm broke. But Percy, no coward himself, ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... of logs, and covered with the branches of trees. In front of it, sitting on the stump of a tree, which perhaps had been spared for that purpose, sat a tall man, with very brown complexion, clad in a rough hunting suit. His form, though spare, was tough and sinewy, and the muscles of his bare arms seemed like whipcords. A short, black pipe was in his mouth. The only covering of his head was the rough, grizzled hair, which looked as if for months it had never felt the touch ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... almost completely epitomized by the riveting-machine, the sweat-shop, and the slum. There we discover that this poet's vision has pierced straight through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty shimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, heroic forms of the builders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings and nonchalantly hurling red-hot rivets through space, are so many young gods at play with elemental forces. The sweat-shop is transmuted into as grim and glorious a battlefield as any Tours ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... you here, my love," said the Irishwoman, "you make what use you can of this yere arum," and she stretched out a most powerful, sinewy member for Bet's edification. "This arum shall come atween you and trouble, Bet Granger. You ask anybody round what they know of Mother Bunch, and a mimber such as this. You have no call to be fretted, honey, with this atween you and ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... flung open and a man staggered blindly over the sill, reeling and clutching at his breast with both gnarled, sinewy hands. ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... big gray beard only frowned and passed on. He and the girl made their way down the side of the rocky hill to the shore, and here there was an open boat awaiting them. When they approached, a man considerably over six feet in height, keen-faced, gray-eyed, straight-limbed and sinewy in frame, jumped into the big and rough boat and began to get ready for their departure. There was just enough wind to catch the brown mainsail, and the King of Borva took the tiller, his henchman sitting down by the mast. And no sooner had they left the shore and stood out toward one of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... smote the air, Eunuchs ran through Hell and met Round about Hell's gate, to stare At great Juan riding by, And like these to rail and sweat, Maddened by that sinewy thigh. ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Berthold Auerbach. The latter introduced, in a time of literary poverty, a wide range of new subjects for epical treatment,—the life of German peasants, with their simple, healthy, vigorous natures undepraved by a spurious civilization. In painting these sinewy figures, full of a character of their own, he was very felicitous, had an enormous success, and drew a host of less gifted followers after him. Herr Ludwig is one of these. We shall not despair of his becoming, at some future time, a second Auerbach; but he is not one yet. There is, in this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... stood as if under a spell; his meeting with his "brother," the old master, had come and gone. But he had played no part in it. He looked at his rough, sinewy hands. "Those are hands for you!" he cried in his heart. "To gain nothing but a halfway-decent suit of clothes, four shirts, two pairs of shoes, and a miserable hole to live in, they have become as rough and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... generation; and although their names are retained in literary histories, no line or sentence of theirs has found a place in human memory. The Scottish contemporary of Chaucer was Barbour, who although deficient in tenderness and imagination, deserves praise for his sinewy and occasionally picturesque verse. "The Bruce" is really a fine poem. The hero is noble, resolute, and wise. Sir James Douglas is a very perfect, gentle knight. The old Churchman had the true poetic fire in him. He rises ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Paused a moment and reflected, 130 And he pondered for an instant, Though his hands to shoot were ready, One would shoot, and one restrained him, But his sinewy fingers forced him. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... With stir of crouching forms that wait to kill? Ah, look! See there! and there! and there again! Great yellow, glassy eyes, close to the ground! Look! Now the clouds are lighter I can see The long slow lashing of the sinewy tails, And the set quiver of strong jaws that wait—! Go there? Not I! Who dares to go who sees So perfectly the ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... paddles with a bit more of skill, have kept the course a little straighter, or skimmed the turns a trifle more close; but neither could have put more of life and vim into the strokes. A large, thick-set youth was Harvey, strongly built, with arms bronzed and sinewy—clearly a youth who had lived much out of doors, and had developed in ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... and promised to be as big a man as his father, who was a fine specimen of the hardy Northumbrian race—tall, strong, and sinewy. He had felt hurt when his father had refused to allow him to take part ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... papers into his mouth with the evident intention of swallowing them, but Tom's sinewy hands were at his ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... received little notice; but those dusky barbarians not only knew Carson by name, but looked upon him as the greatest white warrior they had ever seen. He could have secured a score of braves had he wanted them, but he desired only one—a sinewy, daring fellow whom he knew could be relied on in any emergency. This Indian required no more time than Carson himself to make ready, and, shortly after Kit's arrival in the village, he rode forth again with his faithful friend ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... her might, I 1 The Queen of soft delight Still ranges onward with triumphant sway. What she from Kronos' son And strong Poseidon won, And Pluto, King of Night, I durst not say. But who, to earn this bride, Came forth in sinewy pride To strive, or e'er the nuptial might be known With fearless heart I tell What heroes wrestled well, With showering blows, and dust ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... aeroplane upon the water and in the aeroplane a tall young man with considerable length of sinewy limb, lazily rolling a cigarette. Diane unconsciously approved the clear bronze of his lean, burned face and his eyes, blue, steady, calm as the waters of ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... white paint on their faces, giving a ghastly and wild appearance to them. On their shoulders were skins of lions and other wild animals. They carried short bows, and heavy clubs studded with iron. By them were the Bedouin cavalry, light, sinewy men, brown as berries, with white turbans and garments. Near these were the cavalry from Syria and the plains of Assyria—wild horsemen with semi-barbarous armor and scarlet trappings. Here were the solid lines of the Egyptian infantry, ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... thought the people very ill-favoured by nature here, but perhaps they are not more so than others in the district. The harshness of nature is strongly reflected in all faces. Having passed a man on the bank of the stream washing his linen—presumably his own—with bare arms, sinewy and hairy like a gorilla's, I was again in the open country; but instead of following donkey-paths and sheep-tracks I was upon the dusty highroad. Well, even a, route nationale, however hot and dusty, so that it be not too straight, has its advantages, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... foreign importation, and her alias is founded on a long sinewy throat or pescuezo which the ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... it?" remarked O'Riley, smacking his lips, as he swallowed a savoury morsel of the walrus and tossed the remnant, a sinewy bit, to Dumps, who sat gazing sulkily at the flame of the lamp, having gorged himself long before the bipeds ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... convulsion shook his sinewy frame from head to foot, and he writhed in desperate agony. The officer put an arm under his head, and made an expressive sign to the awed witnesses of the scene. Helmsley, startled at this, came hurriedly forward, trembling and ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... him now, sitting in my office-chair, the smoke of the cigar curling about his bronzed, weather-tanned face, my eye taking in his slim waist, slender thighs, and long, sinewy arms and hands that have served him so well all his life, I can hardly believe that twenty years have passed over his head since we worked together on Shark Ledge. But for the marks chalked on his ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... were considered modest and attractive. The men were more striking in appearance and character. Of medium stature and powerful mold, with black hair, fine teeth, and piercing eyes; with well-formed, agile, and sinewy limbs; sober, brave, trustworthy, and endowed with many other primitive virtues as well, the Corsican was everywhere sought as a soldier, and could be found in all the armies of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... confidence. I hope you will outride this storm!" He held out his hand, nervous and sinewy as that of Mars. Le Gardeur seized it, and pressed it hard in his. "Don't you think it is still able to rescue a friend ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... A tall, sinewy man in a serge suit, whom Hartley recognized as Captain Walsh, was standing by him. His attitude was that of an indulgent policeman with a refractory prisoner, and twice Hartley saw him lay hold of the captain by the coat-sleeve, and call his attention to something in the window. Anxious ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... reached the field, work began immediately—they peeled off their shirts for calisthenics. This was the only part of the day that Anthony enjoyed. Lieutenant Kretching, who presided at the antics, was sinewy and muscular, and Anthony, followed his movements faithfully, with a feeling that he was doing something of positive value to himself. The other officers and sergeants walked about among the men with the malice of schoolboys, grouping ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... as an Etruscan cameo; his limbs were elastic and moulded into the supple finish of one whose life has not been set upon level roads. At a speculative distance he appeared a straight specimen of a Burgundian youth—sinewy, clean-formed, and graceful, though slender to gauntness; and it was only on nearer contact that one marvelled to see the soul die out of him, as a face set in the shadow of leafage resolves itself into some accident of twisted ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... to the cavity she stopped with a terrible growl. The sinewy body of a great snake—a bushmaster,—was gliding rapidly into the opening; in fact, half its scale-covered length had already disappeared from view. This was an advantage to the Jaguar for the head with its death-dealing ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... completed his wish, and some copy of the rough old poem having, as it seems, been found among his papers, it was in after time inserted in the manuscripts of his works as the "Cooke's Tale." As it stood in the fourteenth century this story recited mere deeds of valour, of strong, sinewy fighters; love and women played no part in it; and it is a great loss for us not to know whether old Chaucer would have made this very necessary addition, and what sort of mediaeval Rosalind he ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... here. There was not a breath of air. Freeman could hear his heart beat, and the veins in his temples and wrists throbbed. The sweat rose on the surface of his body, but without cooling it. The pony which he bestrode, a bony and sinewy beast of the toughest description, trod onwards doggedly, but with little animation. Freeman had no desire to push him. Were the little animal to overdo itself, nothing in the future could be more certain than that his master would never see the Trednoke ranch again. ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... by lessons. Lemm's exterior was not prepossessing. He was short and bent, with crooked shoulders, and contracted chest, with large flat feet, and bluish white nails on the gnarled bony fingers of his sinewy red hands. He had a wrinkled face, sunken cheeks, and compressed lips, which he was for ever twitching and biting; and this, together with his habitual taciturnity, produced an impression almost sinister. His grey hair hung in tufts on his low brow; like smouldering embers, his little ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... And all those great ministers were agreed that it was time to do so. And, O scion of Kuru's race, king Dasaratha was greatly pleased to behold his son,—that enhancer of Kausalya's delight—possessed of eyes that were red, and arms that were sinewy. And his steps were like those of a wild elephant. And he had long arms and high shoulders and black and curly hair. And he was valiant, and glowing with splendour, and not inferior to Indra himself in battle. And he was well-versed in holy writ and was equal to Vrihaspati in wisdom. An object of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... further; the reader will, perhaps, be pleased with a likeness of the man. I should say, in height, he was about five-feet eleven-inches; of spare and sinewy frame, with an elastic tread, that those who knew him, and seeing him in the distance, might truly say, as Ulysses of Diomede in Shakspeare's play ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... surge, Where they had sunk together, would the snake Relax his suffocating grasp, and scourge The wind with his wild writhings; for, to break That chain of torment, the vast bird would shake The strength of his unconquerable wings As in despair, and with his sinewy neck Dissolve in sudden shock those linked rings, Then soar—as swift as smoke from ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... a very tall, broad-shouldered old fellow, but stooping a little from age: I should think he must have been at least sixty, if not more; still, he was a powerful, sinewy man. His nose, which was no small one, had been knocked on one side, as he told me, by the flukes (i.e., tail) of a whale, which cut in half a boat of which he was steersman. He had a very large mouth, with very few teeth in it, having lost ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... waited for, when at length, without a warning sound, he issued from the bushy shadow of a fence into the bright door-yard. In his person he was not formidable. He was of less than medium stature, lightly built, and apparently neither sinewy nor agile. But in his grasp was something long and slender, much concealed by his own shadow, but showing now a glint of bright metal and now its dark cylindrical end; something that held the eye of the one who watched him ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... flung back against the wheel and the revolver knocked from my hand. Sinewy fingers gripped my throat and forced me down until I thought my back would break. Close to my ear a gun exploded. The pressure on my jugular relaxed instantly. The body of my opponent sank slowly to the floor and lay ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... cantered off upon two magnificent horses which the king had, at the last moment, added to his gift of oxen. The animals were superb specimens of their kind, jet black without a white hair upon them, standing about fifteen-two in height, perfectly shaped, with fine, clean, sinewy legs not too long, splendid shoulders and haunches, skins like satin, perfect in temper, courageous as lions, speedy, easy-paced. They jumped like cats, and were tough as whipcord, as they found to their great satisfaction before many days were past; they were, in fact, perfect ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... sorrow and disappointment, it proved to be an adverb modifying broiled (we hope we parse the matter correctly). At any rate, the wretched fowl was blue and pallid, a little smoked on the exterior, raw and sinewy within, and an affront to the whole profession of innkeeping. Whereupon, in the days that followed, looking back at our fine mood of expectancy as we entered that hostelry, and its pitiable collapse when the miserable travesty of victuals was laid before us, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... the water-skin must have been great at first, but it grew lighter as the man went on; and one moment I was thinking of what strength there was in his thin sinewy legs and arms, the next of the clever way in which the pattern was formed upon the pavement, and lastly of what a clumsy mode it was of watering the place, and how much pleasanter it would be if there were greater power in the fountain, and it sent up a great ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... them. Kenny, pausing to wipe his forehead, thought the night warm. Joan's eyes, dark, solemn, frightened, spurred him on to greater effort. He dug furiously, flinging earth in all directions. Hughie marvelled at his madcap speed and the strength of his sinewy arms. His jaw was set. His face, dark and vivid in the lantern light, shone with a boy's excitement. But when the wind came he looked defiant. They could not know that to him, then, the ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... attitude of the backwoods people as with sinewy, strenuous shoulder they pressed against the Spanish boundaries. The Spanish attitude on the other hand was one of apprehension so intense that it overcame even anger against the American nation. For mere diplomacy, the Spaniards cared little ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... * * It is pitiable to find these unhappy Africans, whose clumsy frames are no match for the sinewy and agile white American, thus led on to be destroyed by a merciless enemy. Should the war proceed in this manner, it is possible that the massacre of Africans may not be confined to actual conflict in the field. Hitherto the whites have been sufficiently ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... the poor man's son inherit? Stout muscles and a sinewy heart, A hardy frame, a hardier spirit; King of two hands, he does his part In every useful toil and art; A heritage, it seems to me, A king might wish to hold ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... almost alongside, and at the first sight of the enemy's crew the General saw that Gomez's gloomy prophecy was only too true. The three men at each gun might have been bronze statues, standing like athletes, with their rugged features, their bare sinewy arms, men whom Death himself had scarcely ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... Robert Burns, the chief of Scottish poets: in his person he was tall and sinewy, and of such strength and activity, that Scott alone, of all the poets I have seen, seemed his equal: his forehead was broad, his hair black, with an inclination to curl, his visage uncommonly swarthy, his ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... herself from his grasp, but he renewed it with all his sinewy strength, enforcing, with a vicelike gripe, the consciousness, in her mind, of the futility of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... right hand, and he put his rather large and sinewy brown hand into it. The small hand folded itself upon his in a curious way—feeble and fierce at the same time, it seemed—and held him. The hand was warm, almost hot, and soft, and dry as a fire is dry—so dry that it hisses angrily if water ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... ineffectual for their purpose. A throng of far more resolute and more sinewy people swept them aside, and seized every vacant place on the top of the vehicle. Only with much struggle did they obtain places within. In an ordinary mood, Nancy would have resented this hustling of her person by the profane public; as it was, she half enjoyed the tumult, and looked forward ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... Albion. These favorites of the Prince, each wearing full-brimmed, three-cornered hats, very flat and very wide-spreading, beneath which grinned their swarthy, tanned, and wrinkled faces, lighted by three pairs of twinkling eyes, were noticeably lean, sinewy, and vigorous, like men in whom sport had become a passion. All three were supplied with immense horns of Dampierre, wound with green worsted cords, leaving only the brass tubes visible; but they controlled their dogs by the eye and voice. Those noble animals were far more faithful ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... one easily to forget or lightly to yield her resentments. There was something perdurable in them as well as in her gaunt, sinewy frame. As she stood there menacing him, she wanted but three years of seventy. She had battled too with many a storm—wind and weather, suffering and persecution, sorrow and privation, had beat upon her hard—very hard. They had but served to stiffen and ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... were strange and wild, sinewy, powerful, almost as dark as Indians, their eyes watchful and wary and roving from side to side, their clothing wholly of skins and furs, singular and picturesque. They seemed almost to have come from another world. But Daniel Poe was never lacking either in the qualities of hospitality ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... liberty, the flowers, the air, light, the stars, the happiness of going whithersoever the sinewy limbs of one-and-twenty chance to ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sit up in bed. Had he been dreaming? Was it one of those strange appeals which cross the dreams of disquieted minds? No, he heard it still, that reverberating cry,—which had entered at his ears and remained in his flesh,—to the tips of his sinewy fingers. Certainly, somebody had cried out, and called: "Ulrich!" There was somebody there, near the house, there could be no doubt of that, and he opened the door and shouted: "Is it you, Gaspard?" ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... broad in proportion to his height, as, notwithstanding the lean and lathy appearance of his frame, gave him something the air of being too square in respect to his stature; and his arms, though round, sinewy, and strong, were so very long as to be rather a deformity. I afterwards heard that this length of arm was a circumstance on which he prided himself; that when he wore his native Highland garb, he could tie the garters of his hose without stooping; and that it gave him great advantage in the ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a life which required some of the qualities of the hero, had nothing particularly heroic in his outward aspect. He was a man of medium size, and sinewy, well-knit frame. He had keen, gray eyes, which noticed everything, and could penetrate to the inner core of things; close-cropped hair, short serviceable beard, of that style which is just now most affected by men of restless energy; a short, straight nose, and a general air of masterful ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... of any meat, but mutton is the best. Take a slice from a tender piece, not sinewy, a slice of ginger, and a slice of onion, put them on a silver skewer alternately, and lay them in a stewpan, in a little plain gravy. This is the kabob. Take rice and split peas, twice as much rice as peas; boil them thoroughly ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... man ever offered to another. As the crowd cheered for Felix Marchand, he made his way up towards the bar slowly. He must have been tall when he was young; now he was stooped, yet there was still something very sinewy ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... has a sinewy litheness, beside his height. His antagonist has the solidity of a rock, and though his body is much shorter, his arms are Briarius-like, everywhere, and more than once Grandon is lifted from his feet. It seems as if the awful struggle went on for hours while the fire ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... itself happened suddenly. One moment he was peering out into the darkness in an effort to locate his enemy; the next strong sinewy hands were around his throat choking the life out of him. With that clarity of vision that comes to a man perhaps once in a lifetime, he saw, even in the all-pervading darkness, the shadowy face that was pressed close to his own. The eyes that looked into his were dim pools of evil light, faintly ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... garments, with the dishevelled mass of flowing, curly, iron-grey hair, with the long, heavy beard and moustache, the hollow cheeks, and the wonderfully solemn eyes—could that be Zeppa? It seemed impossible, yet there was no mistaking the well known and still handsome features, or the massive, sinewy frame— still less was it possible to doubt the deep, sonorous voice. But then—Zeppa had been seen on Ratinga Island, and the description given of him by those who had seen him had been so exact that Rosco had never doubted his return ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... their fine heads elegantly draped in the coquettish and always graceful mantilla. But you would look in vain among the men of Madrid for such fulness and liberality of structure. They are thin, eager, sinewy in ap' pearance,—though it is the spareness of the Turk, not of the American. It comes from tobacco and the Guadarrama winds. This still, fine, subtle air that blows from the craggy peaks over the treeless plateau seems ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... a loose, dark, seaman's shirt, belted at the waist. About his neck is a plaited cord with a ring attached to it, in which, as if the attitude was familiar, one of his fingers is slung, displaying a small, delicate, but long and sinewy hand. When at sea he wore a scarlet cap with a gold band, and was exacting in the respect with which he required to be treated ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... cases, if the foot and ankle have lost a certain moderate plumpness, and assumed a certain sinewy or bony appearance, the woman has generally passed the ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... and dripping mane, And reeling limbs, and reeking flank, The wild steed's sinewy nerves still strain Up ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... moment both male and female stood together, stretching their bodies out to their full length, and lashing their flanks with their long sinewy tails. Then, uttering another prolonged roar, they bounded simultaneously forward, passing, at a single leap, over a space of full twenty feet. A second spring brought them upon the crest of the ridge, ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... among the travellers; she liked to watch the French Canadian girls who slipped quietly up the broad cathedral steps. They were the daughters of the rank and file, but their movements were graceful and they were tastefully dressed. Then the blue-shirted, sinewy men, who strolled past, smoking, roused her curiosity. They had not acquired their free, springy stride in the cities; these were adventurers who had met with strange experiences in the frozen North and the lonely West. Some of them had hard faces and a predatory air, but that ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... is the cry of one possessed and consumed in every fiber of his being by that single consciousness. It is as though Moussorgsky, the great, chivalric Russian, the great, sinewy giant with blood aflame for gorgeousness and bravery and bells and games and chants, had been all his days the Prince in "Khovanchtchina" to whom the sorceress foretells: "Disgrace and exile await thee. Honors and power and riches will ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Zephirine insisted on looking after everything. Her attention being never distracted, she knew, without going up to verify her knowledge, how large was the heap of nuts in the barn; and how many oats remained in the bin without plunging her sinewy arm into the depths of it. She carried at the end of a string fastened to the belt of her casaquin, a boatswain's whistle, with which she was wont to summon Mariotte by one, and Gasselin by ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... whispering. He liked to hear them and to look at the banded heads, the long, twisted rolls of black hair tied with white cords, the still dark faces and watchful eyes, the silver ear-rings, the slender, shapely brown hands, the lean and sinewy shapes, the corduroys with a belt and gun, and the small, close-fitting buckskin moccasins buttoned with coins. These Indians all appeared young, and under the quiet, slow demeanor there was fierce blood ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... a pretty sight. His muscular arms and legs were all a-sprawl and his head hung back at a strange angle to his body, so that his fiery red beard pointed upwards, exposing all the thick sinewy throat beneath it. His eyes were half open and looked bleared and unhealthy, while his thick lips puffed out with a whistling sound at every expiration. His dirty brown coat was thrown open, and out of one ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that lurks in every strong man's blood leaped up in Gilbert Redmond's, as, with a single gesture of his sinewy right arm he swept Manuel to the verge of the narrow ledge, saw him hang poised there one awful instant, struggling to save the living weight that weighed him down, heard a heavy plunge into the black pool below, ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... rude garb, to conceive a more gallant and striking specimen of the lawless and daring tribe to which he belonged; the height, strength, beauty, and exquisite grooming visible in the steed; the sparkling eye, the bold profile, the sinewy chest, the graceful limbs, and the careless and practised ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seemed to be that of a naked man, of slender, sinewy limbs, who carried a bow, and whose head was ornamented with long, waving feathers. Now he stood motionless against the sky, looking like a figure cut out of stone or bronze; now he shaded his eyes with his hand, evidently gazing across the ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... a troop of horse headed by Soraka Ibn Malec. Abu-Bekr was again dismayed by the number of their pursuers; but Mahomet repeated the assurance, "Be not troubled; Allah is with us." Soraka was a grim warrior, with shagged iron-gray locks and naked sinewy arms rough with hair. As he overtook Mahomet, his horse reared and fell with him. His superstitious mind was struck with it as an evil sign. Mahomet perceived the state of his feeling, and by an eloquent appeal wrought upon him to such a degree that Soraka, filled ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... was a bay-brown, whose slender limbs and sinewy form declared him also to be descended from an oriental race. The ease with which his rider managed him, and his firm graceful seat in the saddle, betokened a ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... cooked their morning food," said the Baggara chief, shading his eyes with his tawny, sinewy hand. "Truly their sleep has been scanty; for Hamid and a hundred of his men have fired upon them since the rising ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... life in the deserts and steppes discourage obesity. The Koko-Nor Mongols of the high Tibetan plateau are of slight build, never fat.[1138] The Bedouin's physical ideal of a man is spare, sinewy, energetic and vigorous, "lean-sided and thin," as the Arab poet expresses it.[1139] The nomadic tribesmen throughout the Sahara, whether of Hamitic, Semitic or Negro race, show this type, and retain it even after several generations ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... arrows," shooting away, with a charming disregard of the safety of their fellow-citizens. Banished by the authorities to secluded spots, the members of the club set up their targets and practiced indefatigably, especially Ben, who soon discovered that his early gymnastics had given him a sinewy arm and a true eye; and, taking Sanch into partnership as picker-up, he got more shots out of an hour than those who had ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Ptolemaic period in Egypt itself we find, for the first time, that the goddesses are represented with plump and well-developed outlines. Examination of the mummies shows that the earlier ideal was based upon actual facts, and that in ancient Egypt slender, sinewy forms distinguished both men and women. Intermarriage with other races and harem life may have combined in later times to alter the physical type, and with it to change also the ideal of beauty." (A. Wiedemann, Popular Literature ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... plunged through and through the breakers, those who had little floundered in the edge of the foam, and those who had none sat upright under the awnings, lorgnette in hand, and passed judgment upon their fellows. The tall, sinewy bathing master sat on the shore, his yellow collie beside him, enjoying an interval of well-earned leisure, for at this season he was the most conspicuous and the most popular figure on Quantuck beach. Just now, he was looking on in manifest pride at ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... weeding out of the weak ones, they are now all picked men. The campaign has sorted them out, and every battalion is so much solid gristle and sinew. They show their condition in their lean, darkly-tanned faces; in the sinewy, blackened hands that grasp the rifle butts; in the way they carry themselves, with shoulders well back and heads erect, and in the easy, vigorous ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... of the party, a lean, wide-shouldered, sinewy youth, blue silk kerchief knotted loosely around his neck, broke in with a gesture that swept the sky. "Funny about all them buzzards. What ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... a large, sinewy man, his face rendered hideous by streaks of yellow and red, wearing a high crown of eagle feathers, with a scalp of long light-colored hair, still bloody, dangling at his belt. For a moment he and Captain ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... shadows through which he moved, the great beast slunk through the midnight jungle, his yellow-green eyes round and staring, his sinewy tail undulating behind him, his head lowered and flattened, and every muscle vibrant to the thrill of the hunt. The jungle moon dappled an occasional clearing which the great cat was always careful to avoid. Though he moved ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... threading unfrequented hill trails armed with a revolver and a brown leather jug?" No answer suggested itself, and summoning her haughtiest, coldest look, she met the glance of the man who drew rein beside her. His features were clean-cut, bronzed, and lean—with the sinewy leanness of health. His gray flannel shirt rolled open at the throat, about which was loosely drawn a silk scarf of robin's-egg blue, held in place by the tip of a buffalo horn polished to an onyx luster. The hand holding the bridle reins rested carelessly upon the ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... mercifully puts an end to his fast-ebbing life. His canine teeth seem unusually large and formidable, and the dog bears the marks of them in many deep gashes upon his face and nose. His pelt is quickly stripped off, revealing his lean, sinewy form. ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... the frontal and the occipital development, and a good deal of straight, rather dry brown hair. His complexion was brown, and his nose had a bold well-marked arch. His eye was of a clear, cold gray, and save for a rather abundant mustache he was clean-shaved. He had the flat jaw and sinewy neck which are frequent in the American type; but the traces of national origin are a matter of expression even more than of feature, and it was in this respect that our friend's countenance was supremely eloquent. The discriminating observer we have ...
— The American • Henry James
... confusion. He wanted to gain time; he wanted to think over very carefully what he should say and what he could conceal. He cast one glance at Daniel, and saw that it was not possible to expect mercy from him. He was afraid of Daniel's bold, lean, sinewy face. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... soil. Keen were their spears of steel. Hardy was he who dared to encounter their rage. Fillan the great was there. Thou Oscur wert there, my son! Fingal himself was there, strong in the grey locks of years. Full rose his sinewy limbs; and wide his shoulders spread. The unhappy met with his arm, when the pride of ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... struggling for mastery. More than once he feels one finger of his left hand caught in the stranger's grasp, then, as with a cry of triumph which rends the air with hideous mirth, super-human strength seems to possess the masked man. He picks up Quinton in his sinewy arms, whirls him once wildly above his head, and drops him over a rock, down a bank—a fall of only a few feet, on to thick undergrowth below. Then leaping back into his saddle, he gallops at full speed towards ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... meekly folding her arms on her bosom, bent her head with humility. She next looked towards the smith with a strong expression of thankfulness, then, raising her eyes to heaven, took his passive hand, and seemed about to kiss the sinewy fingers in token of ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... named Periclides, was older than the others. His frame, still upright and, sinewy, was yet lean almost to emaciation, his face sharp, and his dark eyes gleamed with a cunning and sinister light under his ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... was getting under way, a young man in "whites" and a sun helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his helmet, I noted, was a military one. Perhaps I looked as I felt; that it was a pity to see so good a man go back to such a land, for he looked up at me from the swinging ladder and smiled understanding as though we had been ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... wanting in generous curves and in tenderness—an actor's mouth, constructed merely for speech. Forgot the harsh quality of the triangular redness on either cheek, fixed and feverish. Ceased to remark how the angle of the jaw stood away from and beyond the sinewy, meagre neck, or note the rise and fall of Adam's apple so prominent in his throat.—No longer were annoyed by the effeminate character of the hands, their retracted nails and pink, upturned finger-tips, offering so queer a contrast to the rather inordinate size ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... of a civil rejoinder dealt him a blow on the left temple, which sent him with violence against the bulwarks. Allen recovered himself, however, and sprang on the mate like a tiger, clasped him in his sinewy embrace, and called upon his ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Russian converse with everybody and realizing that he needed affection more than Pavel, spoke to him. Andrey answered her gratefully, smiling, joking kindly, as always a bit droll, supple, sinewy. Around her the talk went on, crossing and intertwining. She heard everything, understood everybody, and secretly marveled at the vastness of her own heart, which took in everything with an even joy, and gave back a clear reflection ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... coppery cast characteristic of the native American; the teeth were strong, indicating and befitting a largely carnivorous diet, little worn by sandy foods, and seldom mutilated; the hands and feet were commonly large and sinewy. The Siouan Indians were among those who impressed white pioneers by the parallel placing of the feet; for, as among other walkers and runners, who rest sitting and lying, the feet assumed the pedestrian attitude of approximate parallelism rather than ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... encounter, upon which depended something more precious to me than even my own life. Although outwardly cool and even haughty, I was really in a state of most terrible anxiety. I fixed my eyes intently upon the spare but sinewy chief, and without moving a muscle allowed him to throw his spears first. The formidable weapons came whizzing through the air with extraordinary rapidity one after the other; but long experience of the weapon and my own nimbleness ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... vermin,—in short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon her, though her influence on my boyish life and character ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... and perhaps a night if the St. Luke got in late, for Clark is five hours' train journey from New York, and during all that time Mrs. Twist would be uncared for. She thought Edith surprisingly thoughtless to be so much pleased to go. She examined her flat and sinewy form with disapproval when she came in hatted and booted to say good-bye. No wonder nobody married Edith. And the money wouldn't help her either now—she was too old. She had missed ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... considerable attention by their orderly, measured tread, and the almost soldierly precision with which they maintained the line. They numbered about four or five thousand, and there were few who were not young, sinewy, stalwart fellows. When they had reached the further end of Abbey-street, the ground about Beresford-place was gradually becoming clear, and the spectator had some opportunity afforded of glancing more closely at the component parts of the great crowd. All round the Custom-house was still packed ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... had been dimly conscious that the headache had returned, that his face was flushed and hot, but the fast pumping blood seemed to energize his faculties. Never had he felt so keyed-up, so sinewy of nerve. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... they will be continually determining the distribution of the antagonist's forces, directing the fire of continually shifting great guns upon the apparatus and supports in the rear of his fighting line, forecasting his night plans and seeking some tactical or strategic weakness in that sinewy line of battle. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the best of Master Phil for once," muttered George; and then he thrust his sinewy hands into the depths of his trousers-pocket, and indulged in a silent laugh, which displayed his strong square white teeth to perfection. "I flatter myself I took a rise out of Phil to-day," ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... face downward firmly across a sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one of those hard catgut ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... qualities, he was at once a powerful fighter and an habitual peace-maker. His long, gaunt, sinewy frame, and his tough courage, made him a formidable antagonist, but it was hard to provoke him to combat. Lamon,—whose biography is a treasury of good stories, sometimes lacking in discretion, but giving an invaluable ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... nobody waiting at the dentist's when you get there, it being early. You are willing to wait. At a barber shop it may be different but at a dentist's you are always willing to wait, like a gentleman. But the sinewy young man who is sitting in the front parlor reading the Hammer Thrower's Gazette, welcomes you with a false air of gaiety entirely out of keeping with the circumstances and invites you to step right in. He tells you that you are next. This is wrong—if you were next ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... menage was well managed. Mrs. Gillis saw to that. Jim, aged fifty, slim of build, sinewy, even-tempered, quiet, willing, was the farmer and handyman. Crops grew, orchards bloomed, vines bore a full vintage, and bushes yielded because he made them do so. Without splutter or fuss, he did his work, and liked to ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... oak—sturdy, vital, green-five feet thick at the butt. I sit a great deal near or under him. Then the tulip tree near by—the Apollo of the woods—tall and graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could walk, if it only would. (I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and received into his the sinewy hands of the Crusader, who made the acknowledgment of his homage, and was then guided off by Count Baldwin, who walked with the stranger to the ships, and then, apparently well pleased at seeing him in the course of going on board, returned ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Sinewy, spare, and wiry, with keen gray eyes under straight brows, narrow temples, a sunburnt face, and alert, upright bearing and quick step, William Ferrars was every inch a soldier; but nothing so much struck Mr. and Mrs. Kendal as the likeness to their ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... door opposite, an elderly man of middle height and spare and sinewy frame walked briskly in, shook hands with Lord Evelyn, was introduced to the tall, red-bearded Englishman (who still stood, hat in hand, and with a portentous stiffness in his demeanor), begged his two guests to be seated, and himself sat down ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... the paddles plied by sinewy arms drove the canoes up the stream. A lake {301} was passed, which later was called Lake Pepin, in honor of one of a party of their countrymen whom they met a short time afterward.[2] On the nineteenth day after their capture, the prisoners landed, along with their ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... complete the striking of his match, and for an instant his arm touched a glass; it trembled and hung in the balance, and he shot out a sinewy hand to stop it, and as he did so the sleeve of his dinner jacket caught. On the brown flesh of his forearm I saw a queer, ragged white cross—the scar a snake bite leaves when it is cicatrized. I meant to avoid his eyes, but somehow I caught them instead. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and sketch him for the reader. Guy Heavystone was then only fifteen. His broad, deep chest, his sinewy and quivering flank, his straight pastern, showed him to be a thoroughbred. Perhaps he was a trifle heavy in the fetlock, but he held his head haughtily erect. His eyes were glittering but pitiless. There was a sternness about the lower part of his face,—the old Heavystone ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... hunger have also made their marks upon him; but not as with those of Occidental race. It may be that his bronze skin does not show so plainly the pallor of suffering; but, at all events, he still looks lithe and life-like, supple and sinewy, as if he could yet take a spell at the oar, and keep alive as long as skin and bone held together. If all are destined to die in that open boat, he will certainly be the last. He with the hollow eyes looks as if he would ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... significant gestures, pressed her hand to her heart, then pointed in the direction of the tents, and then rushed away, soon reappearing with a short thin man, inclining to middle age, but of a compact and apparently powerful frame, lithe, supple, and sinewy. His complexion was dark, but clear; his eye large, liquid, and black; but his other features small, though precisely moulded. He wore a green jacket and a pair of black velvet breeches, his legs and feet being bare, with the exception of slippers. Round his head was twisted ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... skill, have kept the course a little straighter, or skimmed the turns a trifle more close; but neither could have put more of life and vim into the strokes. A large, thick-set youth was Harvey, strongly built, with arms bronzed and sinewy—clearly a youth who had lived much out of doors, and had ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... over the sea, stared absently at the jocose revelers, for he was a stranger in a strange land. He leaned back on the granite railings with the easy indolence of an invalid, though his frame was robust and sinewy as a mountaineer's. The hidden power of his bronzed and Moresque features, if developed, might inspire a certain amount of wonder; but then you would as readily have sought expression in the statues below. His gaze was almost indifferent; ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... saying about him: but he thought he was called, and he had a sense of duty; and besides, he was wishful to show proper courtesy to well-dressed and respectable strangers. He was a great dog, thirty inches high at the shoulder; broad-chested, with straight, sinewy legs; and covered with thick, wavy, cream-coloured hair from the tips of his short ears to the end of his bushy tail—all except the left side of his face. That was black from ear to nose—coal-black; and in the centre of this storm-cloud his eye ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... we cannot tarry here, We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... muttered Nehushta, and lifting the swooning woman in her sinewy arms, she fled on towards the port, crying, "Way, way for my lady, the ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
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