"Ragged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford (first-class in classics, 1822); Member of Parliament 1826; bore a leading hand in legislation for improving condition of laboring classes; President of Ragged School Union, etc.; succeeded to the earldom on the death of his father, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... slouched listlessly in the saddle, it was almost impossible to think of him as a matured man. The receding chin, and coarse, loosely opened mouth, the pale, lifeless eyes set too closely together under a low forehead, with a ragged thatch of dead, mouse-colored hair, and a furtive, sneaking, lost-dog expression, proclaimed him ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... a certain dignity about the man when he spoke, that, despite his ragged clothing ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... gown was green, of fine cloth enough; but not very new: welts of needle-work it had on it, and a wreath of needle-work flowers round the hem of the skirt; but a cantle was torn off from it; in the scuffle when she was taken, I suppose, so that it was somewhat ragged in one ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... clambering over shale-strewn gullies, up sun-baked watercourses, and we found ourselves toiling up the ragged slope of a bluff; and soon we stood upon a rocky ledge with the thunders beneath us. Damp gusts beat upward over the blistering scarp of the cliff. I lay down, and crawling to the edge, looked over. Two hundred feet below me—straight down as a pebble drops—a watery ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... troops seem to have kept up their organization and their fighting qualities, for whenever they met the Indians they always whipped them; but they were on the retreat, which gave every advantage to the Indians. When Cole's troops reached Port Connor they were in a deplorable condition—ragged, barefooted, and almost without rations ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... shoulder; but the negro made no response. He was dead. His hat was off, his head was bent, and a smile was on his face. It was as if he had bowed and smiled when death stood before him, humble to the last. His clothes were ragged; his hands were rough and callous; his shoes were literally tied together with strings; he was shabby in the extreme. A passer-by, glancing at him, could have no idea that such a humble creature had been summoned as a witness before the ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... the background; an air of quietude, half pastoral, half genteel, pervades it; but this ecclesiastical rose has its thorn. Only in its proximate surroundings is the place semi-rural and select. As the circle widens—townwards at any rate—you soon get into a region of murky houses, ragged children, running beer jugs, poverty; and as you move onwards, in certain directions, the plot thickens, until you get into the very lairs of ignorance, depravity, and misery. St. Augustine's "district" is a very large one; it embraces 8,000 or 9,000 persons, and their characters, like their ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... upon it, 2 Cor. v. 1-4. If it were possible, says he, we would be glad to have the society of the body in this glory, we would not desire to cast off those clothes of flesh, but rather that the garment of glory might be spread over all, if it were not needful because they are old and ragged and would not suit well, and our earthly tabernacle is ruinous, and would not be fit for such a glorious guest to dwell into, and therefore, it is needful to be taken down. Well, then, here is an overplus, and, as it were, a surcharge of consolation, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... from the spire of blossom in its midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom; then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins, daffodils, and so on, till the lowest stage was reached. Thomasin noticed all these, and was delighted that the May revel was ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Botany Bay. He lives at that mud cottage, with the broken windows stuffed with dirty rags, just beyond the gate which divides the upper from the lower moor. You may know the house at a good distance by the ragged tiles on the roof, and the loose stones which are ready to drop out from the chimney; though a short ladder, a hod of mortar, and half an hour's leisure time would have prevented all this, and made the little dwelling tight enough. But as Giles had never learned any thing that was good, so he did ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... the doorsteps weary mothers are nursing little babies who will never know the meaning of innocent childhood, but will be versed in the immoral lore of the Underworld before they learn their alphabet. Ragged children covered with filth play about the pushcarts and the horses in the street, while their mothers chatter in greasy doorways, or shout from upper windows into the hordes below, or clatter about ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... day. More frequently still, the owner of the van is the prime mover in the business, but then the trip is not so cheap. The members club their funds, the men paying 1s. each, the wives, 6d., the children, 3d. or 4d.; and any poor little ragged orphan urchin, who may be hanging about the workshop, gets accommodated with a borrowed jacket and trousers, and a gratuitous face-washing from Mrs Grundy, and is taken for nothing, and well fed into the bargain. The cost, something ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... definition, that sometimes we wonder at a phenomenon without judging that it might have been expected to be otherwise. When I first became a student at Strassbourg, I wondered, subconsciously, when I heard the ragged gamins talk French fluently. I knew, indeed, that it was their mother- tongue, but I was so accustomed to viewing all French as a sign of higher education that this knowledge in the gamins made me marvel. When I was a child I once had to bid my grandfather adieu very early, while he ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... from bad to worse. He tried to get work, but no one would hire him, and it was not very long before the Heir of Linne, who had been so proud and reckless in his brighter days, was going about in ragged clothes, begging his bread from door to door. No one who saw him now would have known him to be the bright-faced, handsome lad of whom the old lord had been so proud a ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... was not hard to see that he was uncommonly in earnest. Galors turned over in his mind all possible plots against an Abbey's peaceful being—tale-bearing to the Archbishop, a petition for a Papal Legate, a foreshore trouble, a riot among the fishermen of Wanmouth, some encroachment by the ragged brethren of Francis and Dominic—and dismissed them all as not serious enough to lose ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... remember how, a year or two since, that contemptible Rat-catcher's Daughter, without a thing to recommend it, with no music, no wit, no sentiment, nothing but vulgar brutality, might be heard in every separate town of England and Scotland, sung about the streets by every ragged urchin; while the other songs of the vivacious Cowell fell dead from his lips. The will of the sovereign people has decided that so it shall be. And as likings and dislikings in most cases are things strongly felt, but impossible to account for even by the person who feels them, so is it ffith ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... school among the Freedmen was established at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, by the American Missionary Association on September 17, 1861. This school became the foundation of Hampton Institute, to which the ragged urchin wended his way on foot and slept the first night under a wooden pavement, that has since been ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... thousand dollars in the pocket of my ragged trousers and a forty-four-calibre revolver at my hip. Gottlieb drew me back into the shadow and whispered harshly in ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... exac'. (Everybody hed looked fur me ter deny it, or ter git mad, or suthin', an' they war toler'ble s'prised.) 'Fambly' did eat out'n the pot permiscuous, an' made a mighty pore dinner thar many a day. An' 'Fambly' washed thar clothes ez described, infrequent enough, an' no doubt war ez ragged an' dirty ez they war hongry. But, I said, Mr. Markham hedn't told the haffen o' it. Cold winter nights, when the snow sifted in through the cracks, an' the wind blew in the rotten old door, 'Fambly' liked ter hev friz ter death. They hed the pneumonia, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... cream of something with baby crabs. There was also a fish,—boiled,—with slices of hard boiled eggs fringing the dish, ovaled by a hedge of parsley and supplemented by a pyramid of potatoes with their jackets ragged as tramps. Then a ham, brown and crisp, and bristling ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... sleighbells, while the streets were thronged with a motley collection of equipages, from the luxuriously upholstered double sleigh with its swaying robes and floating plumes, down to the shapeless home-made "pung" with its ragged, unlined buffalo skin snugly tucked in about the shawled and veiled grandma, who smilingly awaited her good man while he purchased the week's supply ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... singular penchant for fancy and high-sounding names. Among her scholars there were, for the girls, respectively—Alcestine Alameda, Boadicea Beatrice, Claudia Clarinda, Eugenia Eurydice, Venetia Ignatia, and so on, indefinitely; and among a group of ragged, bare-footed boys, a number of time-honored Bible names, and such distinguished modern ones as George Washington, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Edward Everett, and even down to one ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... O'Rourkes, O'Tooles, The ragged royal-blood of Tara; Or place me where Dick Martin rules The houseless wilds ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... And a prayer-carpet would have pleased the Professor tremendously. But no, after all, it wouldn't have done. Sylvia couldn't go about in pearls the size of new potatoes, and the Professor would only have ragged me for more reckless extravagance. Besides, if I'd taken any of the Jinnee's gifts, he might keep on pouring more in, till I should be just where I was before—or worse off, really, because I couldn't decently refuse them, then. So ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... believe me ere I have done," he declared, with an evil grin, stroking his ragged beard, and fixing his ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... creature like Mistress Mary, with enough potential maternity to mother an orphan asylum; too busy, too absorbed, too radiantly absent-minded to see a husband in any man, but claiming every child in the universe as her very own. There was never anywhere an urchin so dirty, so ragged, so naughty, that it could not climb into Mistress Mary's lap, and from thence into her heart. The neophytes partook of her zeal in greater or less degree, and, forsaking all probability of lovers (though every ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... with anybody; that is, if you're a girl, and the other person a man. Mr. Barrymore and Maida seemed hardly to have gone before they were back again; which pleased me very much. In attendance was a man with a mule—a grinning man; a ragged and reluctant mule; which was still more reluctant when it found out what it was expected to do. However, after a fine display of diplomacy on our Chauffeulier's part, and force on that of the mule's owner, the animal was finally hitched to ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... good enough," she said. "We should have to get a new machine, and pay for the expensive films. Our pictures do shake, and our films are rather ragged." ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... "I'll take Maggie." Pitying glances were cast on her wan and wasted form and thoughts were troubled on her account. Mothers brought cast-off garments and, removing her soiled and ragged clothes, dressed her in clean attire. The sad eyes and patient face of the little one touched many hearts, and even knocked at them for entrance. But none opened to take her in. ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... I perceived a light glimmering in the distance. Gradually more and more lights appeared, and at last we passed several smoke-dried huts clinging like swallows' nests to the rocks. As the night was warm, the doors stood open, and I could see into the lighted rooms, and all sorts of ragged figures gathered about the hearths. We rattled on through the quiet night, along a steep, stony road leading up a high mountain. Soon lofty trees and hanging vines arched completely over us, and anon ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... a kind that the knights, in whom scorn had vanquished mirth, found envy vanquishing scorn. As for the ladies, they had ceased to smile at the mention of Rosalind, whom none had seen, though all had heard of the girl who had been turned from her ruin at Maudlin's whim; and that this ragged lady should be vaunted over their heads was an insult only equaled by the presence among their shining champions of the Rusty Knight. For by this name only was ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... drawing on—he came back, followed by a somewhat ruffianly-looking half-breed Rajput-Punjaubi. The new man was rather ragged and lacked one eye, but with the single eye he had he looked straight at his prospective master. Mahommed Gunga glared at him, but the man did ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... the room, on the seats which were usually empty, a number of the village elders seated and silent like the rest of us; old Hansor with his cocked hat, the former mayor, the old postman, and a lot of other people. Everybody looked melancholy; and Hansor had brought an old spelling book, ragged at the edges, which he held wide open on his knees, with his big spectacles laid ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... on the bottom; higher the flecked white, the pink, and the yellow with brown. Then for a shelf among rocks the milk-worts, the sky-blue, the white and the pink; with these I float out May like Fra Angelico. For June there are Ragged Robins like filaments of rosy cloud, and Forget-me-not to drift like wood-smoke over the chalk rubble. In July I have a pageant. Foxglove and Eglantine make melodious my woods; Ladies' Slipper gives a golden cope to ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... In a ragged school in the neighborhood of Posen where the children could hardly speak German they could sing; in a public school in Charlottenburg fifty boys, aged between eight and fifteen, sang the part-song known to every college man in America, "On a Bank Two Roses Grew," as well as a ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... an essential condition in the vulgar creed that she should be, as Gaule ('Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches,' &c., 1646) represents, an old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back, a skull-cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, a dog or cat by her side. There are three sorts of the devil's agents on earth—the black, the gray, and the white witches. The first are omnipotent for ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... hills were split by many such valleys and many such bare, grassy ridges sloped up toward the mountains. Upon the side of one ridge, the highest, there stood a solitary mustang, haltered with a lasso. He was a ragged, shaggy, wild beast, and there was no saddle or bridle on him, nothing but the halter. He was not grazing, although the bleached white grass grew long and thick under his hoofs. He looked up the slope, in a direction indicated by his pointing ears, and watched ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... the district which has been allotted to me, I have found an unusual number of ignorant, vicious boys, cared for by no one, growing up for the prison or the gallows. I have thought of making some effort to gather them together and start a ragged school. Some friends have agreed to provide the means. But the pay would necessarily be small, and the labor and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... she had so cherished was unfolding before her eyes! And what was its quality to be? No modest daisy or violet certainly, nor yet a gaudy, flaunting tulip, but something bright, sweet, surprising, and enticing, all at once; and she thought of a carnation-pink shooting up from amid its ragged foliage, vivid, brilliant, and of a spicy fragrance. She watched the guests, also, with a critical eye, and was much pleased to note that Molly had shown good taste in their selection. They were all ladylike girls, evidently from good, well-guarded homes, and, though merry ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... the cause of temperance, and in all philanthropic movements they are busy; they have organised schools for the deaf, dumb, blind, and crippled, and look after night shelters, mothers' unions, ragged unions, rescue homes, working homes for children, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... country, a hungry penniless army had been thrown upon the citizens of Plymouth. An enormous debt had been created in equipping it, and the soldiers' allowances were hopelessly inadequate to provide them with a proper supply of food or clothes. 'A more ragged, ribald, and rebellious herde never gathered on the eve of an important expedition. Mutiny was common in the town, and the ringleaders were tried at Drum-head, and shot in the nearest open space.... Incensed at the disregard of ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... Valencia, in white duck suits and Panama hats, toying with tortoise shell canes, which could be converted, if the occasion demanded, into blades of Toledo steel. In the streets were priests and bare-legged mule drivers, and ragged ranchmen with red-caped cloaks hanging to their sandals, and negro women, with bare shoulders and long trains, vending lottery tickets and rolling huge cigars between their lips. It was an old story to Clay and King, but none of the others had seen a Spanish-American city before; they were ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... after a while, I saw the importance of doing it in aid of my memory. Very often, therefore, I made memorandums on loose scraps of paper, taken out of my pocket in the moment, and laid by to be copied fair at leisure, which, however, they hardly ever were. These scraps, therefore, ragged, rubbed, and scribbled as they were, I had bound with the others by a binder, who came into my cabinet, did it under my own eye, and without the opportunity of reading a single paper. At this day, after the lapse of twenty-five years, or more, from their dates, I have given to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... moment—which, to be precise, was four o'clock in the afternoon—no invitation could have been more unwelcome to Captain Dieppe. He had received his note from the hands of a ragged urchin as he strolled by the river an hour before: its purport rather excited than alarmed him; but the rendezvous mentioned was so ill-chosen, from his point of view, that it caused him dismay. And he had in vain tried to catch sight of ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... some one removing the bars and a moment later the gate swung open, and a huge, bewhiskered man in ragged garments and a Winchester rifle in his hand stood ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... must all be with one up there in heaven!" Then he saw a poor gray-haired man who was coming along the road towards him, and he spoke to him, and asked, "How can I get to heaven?" The man answered, "By poverty and humility. Put on my ragged clothes, wander about the world for seven years, and get to know what misery is, take no money, but if thou art hungry ask compassionate hearts for a bit of bread; in this ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... a distance, who have toiled, and collected, and borne to a throne of grace the burdens of their beloved sister in the Lord, Miss Macpherson, will like to know every detail, even to the outward appearance of those once ragged, shoeless wanderers. Now they stood in ranks ready to depart, dressed in rough blue jackets, corduroy suits, and strong boots, all made within the Refuge, the work of their own hands. All alike had scarlet comforters and Glengarry caps; a canvas ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... the park was, this portion seemed much more uncivilized, in spite of the ragged remains of box and laurel hedges that stood here and there amidst the nettles and brambles, and the luxuriant swarm of tall wild-flowers, valerian, mullein, hemlock, ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... front of a deserted ducal mansion struck a note of protest and mourning amid the noise and whirl and colour of a seemingly uncaring city. On the other side of the roadway, on the gravelled paths of the Green Park, small ragged children from the back streets of Westminster looked wistfully at the smooth trim stretches of grass on which it was now forbidden, in two languages, to set foot. Only the pigeons, disregarding the changes of political geography, walked about as usual, ...
— When William Came • Saki
... they stand in the midst of a populous town and we ride through long streets between dirty houses, swarming with ragged women, filthy men, and screaming children; suddenly we come to the dilapidated entrance of our temple, pass through a courtyard, close the huge gates and ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... could drink from the flask, which made our work shorter. One of these unfortunate men was frightful to look at. A shell had taken all the clothes from the upper part of his body, with the exception of two ragged sleeves, which hung from the arms at the shoulders. There was no trace of a wound, but his poor body was marked all over with great black patches, and the blood was oozing slowly from the corners of ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... companions walked toward the village. Nothing very hopeful was to be seen as they looked up the dirty little streets. The wretched mud cottages stood each one apart, their yards separated by scraggy willow-hedges, upon which ragged old garments were hanging in the sun to dry. Between the hedges were muddy pools, over which the ducks were wrangling for the bits of weed that floated on the surface of the foul waters. On their ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... strike, he rushed from the car as precipitately as he had rushed in. I was angry,—not because I was to have been cheated, for I have been repeatedly and atrociously cheated and only smiled, but because the rascal dared attempt on me such a threadbare, ragged, shoddy trick as that. Do I look like a rough-hewn, unseasoned backwoodsman? Have I the air of never having read a newspaper? Is there a patent innocence of eye-teeth in my demeanor? Oh, Jeru! Jeru! Somewhere in your virtuous bosom you are nourishing a viper, for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... was very much like that about Captain Jabe's residence. There were low rolling hills covered with coarse grass and ragged shrubbery, with here and there a cluster of trees. Not a sign of human habitation was in sight. Reaching the top of a small hill, I saw at my right, and not very far before me, a wide expanse of water. This I concluded must be the bay, ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... neighbors. All the smells and noises of the East Side seemed to be penned up here in a sort of canyon. The masses of dirty clothes hanging from the fire-escapes increased the atmosphere of depression. Groups of ragged children ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... dive into black dens of infection and despair, they, rushing about all day from lane to lane, with their life in their hand, are found to do their function; which is a much more rugged one than Howard's. Or what say we, Cholera Doctors? Ragged losels gathered by beat of drum from the overcrowded streets of cities, and drilled a little and dressed in red, do not they stand fire in an uncensurable manner; and handsomely give their life, if needful, at the rate ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... abandoned the idea of risking their battleships; and while these still served effectively in port as a fleet in being, their crews were turned to commerce warfare or transport flotilla work for the army. Bonaparte's ragged heroes were driving the Austrians out of Italy. Sardinia made peace in May of 1796. Spain closed an offensive and defensive alliance with the French Republic in August, putting a fleet of 50 of the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... the heathy hills and ragged woods The roaring Fyers pours his mossy floods; Till full he dashes on the rocky mounds, Where, thro' a shapeless breach, his stream resounds, As high in air the bursting torrents flow, As deep-recoiling surges foam below, Prone down ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... thousand simple incidents of daily life, such as the mother welcoming her child which is on this Portail des Libraires and was copied from it (as is the case in six other instances) in the misericordes of the choir in 1467, or the man who steals clothes from the line as Falstaff's ragged regiment did (a ruffian who is no doubt commemorated also in the name of Rue Tirelinceuil at Rouen), or the burglar walking off with a chest upon the southern transept, while the owner soundly kicks him and tries ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... crossed over to the wounded man upon whom the three had so unceremoniously turned their backs, as though he did not also belong to the interesting museum of shell holes that they had come to inspect. He was cowering near the dirty ragged little Red Cross flag, with his head between his knees, and did not hear me come up. Behind him lay the brown spot which stood out from the green still left on the field like a circus ring. The wounded soldiers who gathered here every ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... the strains of the national anthem floated up to Dick's ears. A band was playing in the White House grounds. The tune was ragged, and the drum came in a fraction of a second late, but an immense pride ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... ragged and poor, With nothing to do and plenty to say, By the merest chance he enter'd our door To ask for a meal and a bed by ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... (Court Entertainment or Dole), and in others of his earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. But his later {53} poems were mostly written in a verse of his own invention, called after him Skeltonical. This was a sort of glorified doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional intermixture of French ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... food, always in front when we were marching toward Belfort, and in the rear when returning by the Jura. Of our brigade, that had numbered twelve hundred men on the first of January, there remained only twenty-two pale, thin, ragged wretches, when at length we succeeded in reaching ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... art. We ascended a hill on the border of this section, which afforded us a complete view. To describe it in one sentence, it is an immense basin, from two to three miles in diameter at the top, the edges of which are composed of ragged hills, and the sides and bottom of which are diversified with myriads of little hillocks and corresponding indentations. Here and there is a small sugar estate in the bottom, and cultivation extends some distance up the sides, though this is at considerable ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... before, the force that accompanied him was in forlorn case, reminding me strongly of Shakspere's description of Falstaff's ragged regiment. It consisted chiefly of raw, undrilled troops, quite unused to discipline, but, perhaps, as effective as veterans in the service in which they were employed, the adroitness of the enemy, accustomed to the interminable swamps, hammocks, and cane-brakes which abound in ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... conspicuous, or showy, as when we speak of plain but neat attire; the same idea of freedom from the superfluous appears in the phrases "a neat speech," "a neat turn," "a neat reply," etc. A clean cut has no ragged edges; a neat stroke just does what is intended. Nice is stronger than neat, implying value and beauty; a cheap, coarse dress may be perfectly neat, but would not be termed nice. Spruce is applied to the show and affectation of neatness with a touch of smartness, and is always ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... short on one bridle-rein and making Buntie, his mustang-pony, pirouette just as the wicked-tempered Briquette sometimes pirouettes when his father is in the saddle. Yet Dinky-Dunk's nerves are a bit ragged and there are times when he's not always just with the boy, though it's not for me to confute what the instinctive genius of childhood has already made reasonably clear to Dinkie's discerning young eye. But I can not, of course, encourage insubordination. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... being asked how he distinguished his "ragged veterans" in their tattered and unlettered bindings, answered, "How does a shepherd know his sheep?" It has been observed that, "Touch becomes infinitely more exquisite in men whose employment requires them to examine the polish of bodies than it is in others. In music only the simplest and plainest ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... a grizzly bear in bad repair. He had an old fur cap on his head that concealed his ears and most of his face. He wore a ragged coat that was generally gray, but had white lines along the seams. Under this he wore another coat still more ragged, and the whole was belted at the waist with an old surcingle. Like his father, he ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... towards the residence of old John Potter. On reaching the door he extinguished the little pipe by the summary process of thrusting the point of his blunt forefinger into the bowl, and deposited it hot in his vest pocket. His tap was answered by a small servant girl, with a very red and ragged head of hair, who ushered him into the presence of the aged couple. They were seated in the two chairs—one on each side of the fireplace—which they might almost be said to inhabit. Little Nora was stirring a few embers of coal into a cheery flame, for she knew the old people loved the ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... civilisation of human life! What an air of decency and respectfulness about the servants! what a feeling of homeishness in a house exclusively our own! The modes of life may be easier on the Continent,—but it is the ease of a beggar's ragged coat which has served twenty masters, and is twitched off and on till it scarcely holds together, in comparison with the decent, close-fitting ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... they went out and were confronted with sheep, blatting sheep, stinking sheep, devastating sheep, Dot sheep. On the south side of the coulee, up on the bluff, grazed the band. They fed upon the brow of the hill opposite the ranch buildings; they squeezed under the fence and spilled a ragged fringe of running, gray animals down the slope. Half a mile away though the nearest of them were, the murmur of them, the smell of them, the whole intolerable presence of them, filled the Happy Family with an amazed ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... it with his finger and seemed unable to give up all hope. The child, with curly hair and a brown face, like the angels in a fifteenth-century picture, seemed to be in breeches, for his trousers ended at the knee in a ragged fringe of brambles and dead leaves. This necessary garment was fastened upon him by cords of tarred oakum in guise of braces. A shirt of the same burlap which made the old man's trousers, thickened, however, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... thinner are the heads of purple clover; pluck one of these, and while meditating draw forth petal after petal and imbibe the honey with the lips till nothing remains but the green framework, like stolen jewellery from which the gems have been taken. Torn pink ragged robins through whose petals a comb seems to have been remorselessly dragged, blue scabious, red knapweeds, yellow rattles, yellow vetchings by the hedge, white flowering parsley, white campions, yellow ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... Bunker's taste. She was pulled by eight oars, and the redoubtable leader of the gang sat in the stern-sheets as coxswain. Forward floated a blue cotton rag, with the letter "T" daubed upon it in white paint, and surrounded by half a dozen ill-shaped stars. At the stern was a ragged piece of bunting, which had once been the flag of the Republic, but which had been curtailed of nine of its stripes and a part ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... picked it up. It was a bit of grimy, white paper roughly folded into a ragged square. Opening it they found a crude message printed almost illegibly, and with many evidences of ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... he lay and looked up with a lazy and listless apathy, which belied the general expression of his dark and rugged features. He seemed a very tall man, but was scarce better clad than the younger. He had on a loose Lowland greatcoat, and ragged tartan trews or pantaloons. All around looked singularly wild and unpropitious. Beneath the brow of the incumbent rock was a charcoal fire, on which there was a still working, with bellows, pincers, hammers, a movable anvil, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... earth, perhaps, so curious and inquisitive a people as the lower class of French: noise seems to be one of their greatest delights. If a ragged boy does but beat a drum or sound a trumpet, he brings all who hear it about him, with the utmost speed, and most impatient curiosity.—As my monkey rode postillion, in a red jacket laced with silver, I was obliged to make ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... urchin, dirty and so ragged that there was more of his bare body than clothes upon him, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... on adheres in visible squares with uncouth edges, a ragged affair; then the gilder takes a camelhair brush and under its light and rapid touch the work changes as under a diviner's rod, so rapidly and majestically come beauty and finish over it. Perhaps no other art has so delicious a one minute as this is to the gilder. The first work our prisoner ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... mouth And lay there heavily, while dancing motes Whirled through his brain in endless, rippling streams, And a grey mist weighed down upon his eyes So that they could not open fully. Yet After some time his blurred mind stumbled back To its last ragged memory — a room; Air foul with wine; a shouting, reeling crowd Of friends who dragged him, dazed and blind with drink Out to the street; a crazy rout of cabs; The steady mutter of his neighbor's voice, Mumbling out dull obscenity by rote; And then... well, they had brought him home ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... complained, he was told that his father did not pay his board: so he ran away. He lived in the streets with rough boys. He ran on errands for pay, like the other little street boys. But still the boys knew that Jemmy was the son of a lord. Strangers were surprised to hear a little ragged boy called "my lord" ...
— Stories of American Life and Adventure • Edward Eggleston
... not a more agreeable visitor than the book-canvasser who, upon the same day, circulated about the village. He came into my office with a portfolio under his arm. Placing it upon the table, removing a ruined hat, and wiping his nose upon a ragged handkerchief that had been so long out of wash that it ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... machine day and night now, enclosed in the booths for twelve or more hours a day, driving themselves and the machine's regular staff to near-exhaustion. When they gulped their meals, between duels, they were physically ragged and sharp-tempered. They usually fell asleep in Leoh's office, while discussing the results of the ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... who was I that she should love me instead of him? All the years I had known him I had known but little of him. God only knows the hearts of these men who rove or drift, who, anchorless and rudderless, beat upon the ragged reels of life till the breath leaves them and they pass through the mystic channel into the serene harbor of eternity. A sudden wave of dissatisfaction swept over me. What had I done in the world to merit attention? What had I done that I, and not he, should know the love of woman? Why ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... popular, in Donnybrook or St Stephen's, out it will. "Show me the man who'll tread on my coat!" shouts ragged Pat, flourishing his shillelagh as he hurls his dilapidated garment on the shebeen-house floor. From his seat in the senate, a joint of the "Tail" intimates, in more polished but equally intelligible phrase, his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... road, not far from the house, a gulch ran zig-zag up among the rugged hills. It was no mere ragged and unsightly drain for water from the higher land. Flower-brightened and vine-hung, it was deliciously cool, and gorgeous at every turn. At the bottom babbled a rivulet, a bit of summer sky melted and poured among the green-tipped ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... of the place, that they were afraid, for a moment, to venture in. Then they crept to the door and took a trembling peep. They saw a weed-grown, floorless room, unplastered, an ancient fireplace, vacant windows, a ruinous staircase; and here, there, and everywhere hung ragged and abandoned cobwebs. They presently entered, softly, with quickened pulses, talking in whispers, ears alert to catch the slightest sound, and muscles tense and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is justly proud is John Pounds, who though only a poor shoemaker, originated and superintended the first ragged school in the kingdom. Near the Soldiers' Institute is the John Pounds' Memorial Ragged School, where a large number of poor children are cared for. It is very gratifying to know that many of our brave soldiers and sailors are also serving under the great ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... he is receiving the attack of a lion on his arm, covered with a mantle; and then, with a raised sword, cutting at the proboscis of an elephant. I have seen, also, an older specimen, I think, of the same manufacture; the subject being the "Bear and Ragged Staff," on alternate rows, with figures of trumpeters. I know not if this subject is of sufficient interest for your "Notes and Queries," but I trust you will make what use ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... from that, yet looked to a certain degree comfortable. But just as Norton and Matilda got out, and were about to enter the building, where an enormous painted canvass with a large brown lion upon it told that the Menagerie was to be seen, Matilda stopped short. A little ragged boy, about as old as herself, offered her a handful of black round-headed pins. What did he mean? Matilda looked at him, and at ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... to Jerry Blazes and hung over him with ostentatious anxiety, while Simmons, weeping with pain, was carried away. ''Ope you ain't 'urt badly, Sir,' said Slane. The Major had fainted, and there was an ugly, ragged hole through the top of his arm. Slane knelt down and murmured: 'S'elp me, I believe 'e's dead. Well, if that ain't my blooming ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... In it, there is a man sitting with his arms over his knees fanning a little fire. In the right panel another native sits on his heels cooking a meal; a bamboo slopes across the cell behind him, and supports a poor ragged cloth, a purda, I suppose, and behind, are just discernible his wife and child. These wayfarers make me at once think of a new and original treatment for a holy family, but hold! These passages of light and colour, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... by an attack upon two fortified villages. These were situated on the lower slope of a steep and ragged hill, near enough to give support to each other, and protected by rocky spurs. The inhabitants sallied out to attack, but were checked by the appearance of our cavalry. The force then pressed ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... by extravagance and other questionable methods dissipated the funds of the Brotherhood. This widened the breach, and Roberts became the popular idol with the majority of the American Fenians. Yet O'Mahony held on to office with a ragged remnant of his old retainers to support him, until finally Roberts triumphed and became the star around which all of the other ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... is nott idle. Evil befall hym who callyth her a mere lylye of ye vallie. For shee oftetymes goeth among ye poore; yea, teacheth in ragged schooles; scoldeth ye bone-pickers' children in German, and ye hand-organ man his olyve-colored whelpes in Italyan; seweth for ye armye; vysiteth the starvynge familye of which ye home-missionarye hath told her; and makyth up a class for ye poore little ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... some call'd arbor vitae, (brought us from Canada,) is an hardy green all the Winter, (though a little tarnish'd in very sharp weather) rais'd to a tree of moderate stature, bearing a ragged leaf, not unlike the cypress, only somewhat flatter, and not so thick set and close: It bears small longish clogs and seeds, but takes much better by layers and slips, as those we have before mentioned, and may be kept into the same shapes, but most delights in the shade, where the roots ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... this led along near the canal, the Champlain or the Erie, and I had a chance to see something of the canal boys' life. The boy who drove the horses that drew the packet boat was a well dressed fellow and always rode at a full trot or a gallop, but the freight driver was generally ragged and barefoot, and walked when it was too cold to ride, threw stones or clubs at his team, and cursed and abused the packet-boy who passed as long as he was in hearing. Reared as I had been I thought it was a pretty wicked part of the world we were ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... witnesses against Caroline of Brunswick were held by her sympathizers and the general public, and Robert's political views naturally inclined him to take the popular side. Those who saw them before they were housed in Cotton Garden, describe them as swarthy, dirty looking fellows, in scanty ragged jackets and greasy leathern caps; at the bar of the House, however, they looked as respectable as fine clothes and soap and water could make them. To this a caricature of Robert's, entitled, Preparing the Witnesses—a View in Cotton Garden, refers. Three dirty foreigners ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... never so ragged clothes is a gentleman still. You may be sure nothing has charmed me more than my meeting with Isaac in his mealy clothes and brown-paper cap. His manner had a grand dignity, because he was universally related by his diligent labor, and my conversation with him was as earnest and happy as ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... edge of the old swimming hole—it seems safe and easy at first, but before a fellow knows it he has stepped off the edge into deep water. The wheat pit is only thirty feet across, but it reaches clear down to Hell. And trading on margin means trading on the ragged edge of nothing. When a man buys, he's buying something that the other fellow hasn't got. When a man sells, he's selling something that he hasn't got. And it's been my experience that the net profit on nothing is nit. When a speculator wins he don't stop till he loses, and when ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... sort of antechamber, almost as large as a handkerchief (decorated by the Fortins with the name of dining-room), a bedroom, and a closet called a dressing-room in the lease. Nothing could be more gloomy than this lodging, in which the ragged paper and soiled paint retained the traces of all the wanderers who had occupied it since the opening of the Hotel des Folies. The dislocated ceiling was scaling off in large pieces; the floor seemed affected with ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... Paul. He can learn the life of the saint from that picture almost as well as if he read it in a book. He sees the saint dressed in a cassock, and that tells him St. Vincent was a priest. He sees him surrounded by little ragged children and holding some of them in his arms; that tells him the saint took care of poor children and orphans, and founded homes and asylums for them. He sees on the saint's table a human skull, and that tells him St. Vincent ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... thee, Agib, for my feet deny, No longer friendly to my life, to fly. Friend of my heart, O turn thee and survey! 15 Trace our sad flight through all its length of way And first review that long extended plain, And yon wide groves, already past with pain! Yon ragged cliff, whose dangerous path we tried! And, last, this lofty ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... heat and cold sculpture high mountains to sharp, tusklike peaks and ragged, serrate crests, where their waste ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... he has stolen. Frederick followed him, tall and slender for his age, with delicate, almost noble, features and long blond curls that were better cared for than the rest of his exterior appearance would have led one to expect; for the rest, ragged, sunburnt, with a look of neglect and a certain hard melancholy in his countenance. Nevertheless a strong family resemblance between the two could not be mistaken, and as Frederick slowly followed his leader, with his eyes ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... that their guns had so crushed the French forces that they would be unable to present any serious defense, the German hordes swept on to attack on a front of about three miles. Their reception was hardly what had been anticipated. Great ragged gaps were torn in their formations as the French brought rifles, machine guns, and heavy artillery into play. Their dead lay in heaps on the ground, and along the whole front they were only able on the right to penetrate a French trench south of Chaufour Wood. The greater part of this was subsequently ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... destroyed, but of the wondrous holy man—this prophet—this inspired Hakim, whose touch to the fiery, throbbing wound was softer than that of a woman, and who caused a gentle sleep to fall upon him in whose flesh that ragged bullet lay deep, or in whom the broken spear-top was rankling and stabbing at every movement, while it refused to give way to the cutting and poulticing ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... enemy was supreme. They did not even trouble themselves to post sentries by night, but slept calmly inside a slender thorn fence, unwatched save by their tireless foes. And so it came to pass that in the half-light of the early morning of the 7th of June the Mahdi, his ragged Khalifas, and his almost naked army rushed upon them, and slew them to ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... cloak from under Darduraka's arm.] Look, gentlemen, look! The man in the ragged cloak calls ten ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... ragged, and filthy, to a degree I had never before witnessed. There was apparently but little discipline on board, but a great deal of disputation and a continual jabbering. A ruffianly-looking fellow, with a swarthy complexion and big black whiskers, who proved to be the commander, beckoned ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... been sworn than he ordered the bailiffs to crowd three or four more chairs alongside his table, and then blandly invited a considerable portion of the audience to take their seats inside the railing. The persons indicated included a tall, shabbily dressed woman and seven ragged, pinched children, ranging in years from twelve down to three. Immediately the prosecution fell into the trap. Two agitated Assistant District Attorneys jumped to their feet and barked out an objection to the presence of ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... little grizzly bear had suddenly sprung up in the path and begun hugging her, Miss Patricia could not have been more amazed than she was at the sight of the ragged child who clung to her. She pushed back the old silk muffler from the tousled curls, and looked wonderingly on the child's blood-stained face with the blue bump still ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... few bold spirits had been drawn by curiosity to its borders, and on their return had reported that they had caught a glimpse of a ruined house in a grove of thick trees, and round about it were a crowd of beings resembling men, swarming over the grass like bees. The men were as dirty and ragged as gipsies, and there were besides a quantity of old women and ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... out of the taxi in a short, untidy, indeterminate street that was a cul-de-sac. The prospect ended in a garage, near which two women chauffeurs were discussing a topic that interested them. A hurdy-gurdy was playing close by, and a few ragged children stared at the hurdy-gurdy, on the end of which a baby was cradled. The fact that the street was midway between Curzon Street and Piccadilly, and almost within sight of the monumental new mansion of an American duchess, explained the existence of the building in ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... him, but dare not wear his wealth My goods are true (though poor) I love no stealth But if I did I durst not send them you Who must reward a Thief, but with his due. I shall not need, mine innocence to clear These ragged lines will do 't when they appear; On what they are, your mild aspect I crave Accept my best, my worst vouchsafe a Grave. From her that to your self, more duty owes Then water in the boundess Ocean flows. Anne Bradstreet. ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... 6.2: 'puggish.' 'Pugging' means 'thieving,' and J. W. Ebsworth suggests that here it implies ragged clothing, like a tramp's. 8.2: Five of the broadsides give ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Kelley sitting with his feet on a table, while he smoked a strong-smelling cigar. There were illustrated sporting papers on the table, crumpled and ragged. ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish |
