"Straggling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the saddle and went into the house, to the front yard of which the little gate opened. Daisy looked after him. It was a yard full of grass and weeds, among which a few poppies and hollyhocks and balsams grew straggling up where they could. Nothing kept them out of the path but the foot-tread of the people that went over it; hoe and rake were never known there since the walk was first made. The house was a little, low, red-front house, with one small window on each ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Brook-Green was sitting outside his door. The vicarage which he inhabited was a straggling, irregular, but picturesque building,—humble enough to suit the means of the curate, yet large enough to accommodate the vicar. It had been built in an age when the indigentes et pauperes for whom universities were founded supplied, more than they do now, the fountains of the Christian ministry, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... endeavor had been made to train the outlying portions of his mustache in line with the lengthy, undulating "mutton chops;" but they had, for well-grounded reasons, failed to connect, and the effect was somewhat spoiled by those straggling skirmishers, bristling with importance but waiting in vain for recruits. The top of his head had got above timber line and glistened in the sun of early summer that streamed through the clear windows of ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... to the most furious anger, to savage and desperate rage. I dashed at the heavy old creature. I flung her against the wall. I put my hand to her throat. I felt of her face, her breast, the straggling locks of her gray hair until I was thoroughly convinced that she was a human ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... stock had been building their straggling dwellings along the canyon brinks, and grouping in villages around the base of the East Mesa, other migratory bands of Hopituh had begun to arrive on the Middle Mesa. As already said, it is admitted that the Snake were ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... now alone with the hounds, who, with a cold scent as the fox led them through the angular corner of a thick pheasant covert, stuck like wax to the line, and working him out, viewed him once more, for one wild, breathless, tantalizing second; and through the straggling street of a little hamlet, and got him out again on the level pasture and across a fine line of hunting country, with the leafless woods and the low gates of a park far ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... A straggling house is Brooklyn, larger, at the first glance, than it in reality is, and distinctly comfortable, yet with its comfort, a thing very far apart from luxury, and with none of the sleepiness of an over-rich prosperity about it. In spite of the late June sun, there is a general air of life, a ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... placed a strong body of the Knights of St. John there to keep them off. These knights were well armed, and they were brave and well-trained warriors. They beat back the Saracens whenever they came near. Still, many of the knights were killed, and straggling parties, from time to time, were cut off, and the whole army was kept in a constant state of suspense and excitement, during the whole march, by the continual danger of an attack. When, at length, they approached the sea-shore, and turned ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... he sauntered listlessly down into the garden, which was wilder and more overgrown than ever—a tangled mass of weeds and brambles. He mechanically directed his steps towards the straggling eglantine that had had a little rose ready for each of the fair visitors that accompanied him when last he was there, and was surprised and delighted to see that it again held forth, as if for his acceptance, two lovely little blossoms that had come out to greet him, and upon each ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... wide-rolling, sandy plain of great extent, surrounded on three sides by rocky hills and ridges, and patched with coarse, starveling grass or occasional bushes. By the banks of the river which framed the picture on the left stood a straggling mud village, and this, though we did not know it, was to be the field of Omdurman. It was deserted. Not a living creature could be seen. And now there were many who said once and for all that there would ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... try to forget her, and each letter which she had since received had shown that, whether he tried or not, he had not forgotten. Even that last one received three weeks ago, the note scrawled in the handwriting of a child, from Wadi Halfa, with the large unsteady words straggling unevenly across the page, and the letters running into one another wherein he had told his calamity and renounced his suit—even that proved, and perhaps more surely than its hopeful forerunners—that he had ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... Gage tremblingly, when they met upon the gravel street in the straggling little camp, each white-faced from fatigue, "tell me ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... woman's answer could not be heard; evidently it was a whispered one, and therefore of utmost importance. Came a pause, a clink of glasses, and then a few straggling words ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... rite. March cast his eyes below, and through the transparent medium of the clear water, which was almost as pure as air, he saw what Hetty was accustomed to call "mother's grave." It was a low, straggling mound of earth, fashioned by no spade, out of a corner of which gleamed a bit of the white cloth that formed the shroud of the dead. The body had been lowered to the bottom, and Hutter brought earth from the shore and ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... transport fleet had no habit of manoeuvring together; the captains, many of them, were without interest in the war, and with much interest in their owners, upon whom they commonly depended for employment; straggling, and panic in case of attack, could be surely predicted; and, finally, as we scarcely had men enough for the work before them, why incur the hazard of sacrificing even one ship-load of our most efficient but all too small regular army? For ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... ornament-shops than drawing-rooms or parlours. There is scarcely space enough to turn in them without fracturing some frail and costly bauble. Where a garden is over-planted the whole place is darkened, the ground is green and slimy, the grass thin, sickly and straggling, and the trees and shrubs deficient in freshness ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... virgin forest, the axe and plough bring strange secrets to light: huge pits, close packed with skeletons and disjointed bones, mixed with weapons, copper kettles, beads, and trinkets. Not even the straggling Algonquins, who linger about the scene of Huron prosperity, can tell their origin. Yet, on ancient worm-eaten pages, between covers of begrimed parchment, the daily life of this ruined community, its firesides, its festivals, its funeral rites, are painted ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... aroused fellow-townsmen were straggling in from the street, for in Green's Ferry a sprinkling of the citizens spend the warm afternoons sitting in absolute tranquillity on boxes and barrels here and there, under the awnings of the several business blocks; and the knowledge that a row was at last on between Judge Garvey ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... bigger and turning to the left, I knew I was wrong. At the crossroads I realized we were at the entrance to Villa Vedia, but I would not give up, I took the left-hand turn and went down stream. Beyond the first bend in the road we found ourselves approaching a long, straggling, one-street village of tall, narrow stone houses along the eastern bank of the little river. By the road, just before the first house, watching five goats, was a boy, a boy with ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... await passengers. Le Creusot is on the southern slope of one of the wooded hills which enclose this valley, 1 mile long and mile wide, occupied by the coal-pits, forges, and foundries of Schneider et Cie, bought by them from the former owners, Manby, Wilson, and Co. Detached straggling suburbs occupy the other slopes of the hills. In all the general feature is the same, rather untidy streets and houses, with parks, shops, and cafes to suit. The streets are full of children, but few priests, policemen, and beggars. In the principal ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... art of war, which enabled the Norman to crush, piecemeal, with inferior numbers, the vast but straggling levies of the English. His men, mostly outlaws and homeless, kept together by the pressure from without, and free from local jealousies, resembled rather an army of professional soldiers than a country posse comitatus. And to the discipline which he instilled into them; to his ability in marching ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... fifty barrels of his spurious flour:-thence it flew, as it might be without an effort, with a grand and stately bound into the very centre of the barrels, exploding at the moment it struck. All saw the scattering of flour, which was instantly succeeded by the heavy though slightly straggling explosion of all the powder on the island. A hundred kegs were lighted, as it might be, in a common flash, and a cloud of white smoke poured out and concealed the whole ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... freckled; her eyes are not grey, but greenish, like those of a cat, and generally inflamed; her hair is of a sandy, or rather dusty hue; her forehead low; her nose long, sharp, and, towards the extremity, always red in cool weather; her lips skinny, her mouth extensive, her teeth straggling and loose, of various colours and conformation; and her long neck shrivelled into a thousand wrinkles — In her temper, she is proud, stiff, vain, imperious, prying, malicious, greedy, and uncharitable. In all likelihood, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... northern coast, having drawn on my boots while I was gathering together my straggling plants and seaweeds, a white bear approached unawares the verge of the rock on which I stood. I wished to throw off my slippers and move off to an adjacent island, which I expected to reach over a rock whose head towered above the waves. With one foot I reached the rock; I ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... little curtain-raiser which took me a morning to knock off, and the news of which was flashed from China to Peru immediately, whereas the eulogies of my book were dribbled out in monthly instalments, and belated testimonials kept straggling in long after its successor had been published. In those days I belonged to a Press-cutting Agency, and I discovered that—to measure Fame by the square inch—you may get many more yards of reputation by the most flippant playlet than by your literary magnum opus; to say nothing ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... hard as a floor under me and I almost ran along it toward the sanded cottage. The merest glance at it showed that no one watched there; the windows were dark. I skirted the rocky wall that protected its back and sides; no one was stirring in stable or outhouse. On the shore side a straggling grass stretch ran down to a sheltered, inland bay; a fair sized vegetable garden, glistening with dew, and a few fruit trees gave a domestic air to the place, utterly unguessed from the forbidding sea front. I wandered toward this little bay and sat in a delightful natural ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... my friend, that this once apparently so mighty Herr Bull and his watchman should again by the Hooliganish crowd have been defeated?" Or perhaps, "This is what comes of your big businesses and your straggling premises with no one to protect them. How much better to have a small compact business (though it's not so small either, mind you) like my Emporium, by a large number of properly trained watchmen defended!" And Dubois would say,—so that it ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... the surrounding forest. If a man strayed from the fort he was sure to return wounded if he returned at all; and in this sort of warfare the stolid English were no match for the wily Indians. "Our men," says Smith, "by their disorderly straggling were often hurt when the savages by the nimbleness of ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... that was worth having, an hundred and twenty millions of people under the wings of that one eagle. Where is she now? Ask Gibbon, the historian, in his prose poem, the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Ask her gigantic ruins straggling their sadness through the ages, the screech owl at windows out of which world-wide conquerors looked. Ask the day of judgment when her crowned debauchees, Commodus and Pertinax, and Caligula and Diocletian, shall answer for ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... little skirmishes happened between straggling parties of the two armies; and the Russians went on pillaging and laying waste every thing before them, till at length the two armies having approached one another in Brandenburgh-Prussia, mareschal Lehwald, finding it impossible ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... us and turned up a narrow channel, the Parana- mirim dos Ramos (the little river of the branches, i.e., having many ramifications), on the road to his home, 130 miles distant. We then continued our voyage, and in the evening arrived at Villa Nova, a straggling village containing about seventy houses, many of which scarcely deserve the name, being mere mud-huts roofed with palm-leaves. We stayed here four days. The village is built on a rocky bank, composed of the same coarse conglomerate ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... were engaged in this chief attack, and the light now permitted the besieged to direct their fire from cannon, demi-cannon, culverin, and snaphance, with fatal effect. The assailants, thinned, straggling, but undismayed, closed up their ranks, and still came fiercely on. Never had Spaniards, Walloons, and Italians, manifested greater contempt of death than on this occasion. They knew that the archduke ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... with the silver one, and said, 'Tis not this neither, you may e'en take them again. At last he takes up his own hatchet, examines the end of the helve, and finds his mark there; then, ravished with joy, like a fox that meets some straggling poultry, and sneering from the tip of the nose, he cried, By the mass, this is my hatchet, master god; if you will leave it me, I will sacrifice to you a very good and huge pot of milk brimful, covered with fine strawberries, next ides ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... a stand. The desperate conditions of the march had divided the French army into scattered portions, and when, quite suddenly, the Russian troops confronted them, only a hundred and twenty-eight thousand men were available, the others straggling behind. The Russians had a hundred thousand men, but the French superiority was not enough for them to secure a final victory. The great battle of Borodino began before sunrise, and the setting sun, red ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... the ice is melting in the river, our earliest and straggling visitors make their appearance. Again does the old Teian poet sing, as well for New England ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... Big Shanty lay buried under tons of snow and ice. The broad bed of the stream became unrecognizable; its roar muffled. Along its wild course the boulders showed above the heavy drifts, capped with a sea of white domes, like some straggling city of sunken mosques. Along the bed of the brook open wounds gaped here and there, while at the bottom of these crevasses the treacherous black water chuckled and grumbled through a maze of passages, breaking ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... breast-pocket in which Polly's letters lay—he often carried them out with him to a little hill, on which a single old blue-gum had been left standing; its scraggy top-knot of leaves drooped and swayed in the wind, like the few long straggling hairs on ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... straggling place of scarcely any importance, except in connection with the naval establishment kept up here—dockyard, hospital, etc.—this being the headquarters of the Cape station. It is distant from Cape Town twenty-three ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... another white-headed little boy came straggling in, and after him, a red-headed lad, and then one with a flaxen poll, until the forms were occupied by a dozen boys, or thereabouts, with heads of every color but gray, and ranging in their ages from four years old to ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... guides in the pursuit, became, in a short time, confused and at fault respecting the courses to be taken; and, after hallooing and running about the woods and pastures at random, nearly an hour, without discovering any traces either of the lost cattle or the missing pursuers, at length came straggling back to the Town House, and, by way of saving their own credit, reported to Fitch, Peters, and the small party remaining there, that their swiftest runners were last seen nearly up with the cattle, and would soon be in with them, or that ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... of straggling pines ranged down the gradual slope from the first low ridge of the hills for which they were heading. Rathburn swung north and gained the shelter of this screen just as the other rider again began firing. The trees now were between ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... last, is another clean, excessively whitewashed little town, straggling up a side hill, with any amount of mountains looming up in the ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... five in the afternoon, the whole area would be picked over. The fields would be left to meadow-larks and quails, whose liquid notes well replaced the songs and cries of the pickers. Here and there a mule-cart would come straggling in. By night, all signs of life were concentrated around the barns and paying booth; but even from these one after another would drift away to the city, till at last scarcely a vestige of the hurry and business of the day would be left. The deep hush and quiet that settled ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... picnic was an accomplished fact. At four o'clock, in the full glare of a late March sun, a business-like detachment of twenty horses, and one disdainful camel, proceeded at a brisk trot along the lifeless desolation of the Bunnoo Road. The party kept in close formation, straggling of any sort being inadmissible when the bounds of the station have been left behind. Ten of the riders were English, and an armed escort guarded them in front and rear; the camel, in gala trappings of red and blue, being responsible ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... cocks to keep them from the dew against our return at daybreak; and we made the cocks as tall and steep as we could, for in that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier also to spread them after the sun has risen. Then we raked up every straggling blade, till the whole field was a clean floor for the tedding and the carrying of the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was but a little over two acres; for that is all the pasture on my ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... his station by the wheel-house, and was gazing ahead. Some straggling lights were gleaming on the right bank of the river, a mile farther up. The sight of these caused him to start, and ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... girl once down the hill caught hold of Ragamuffin and spun him along the valley between the hills till she came to the coastguard station, straggling like a flock of sheep across ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... years after 1806 was perforce despotic, but for the most part, with some exceptions, it was a benevolent despotism. "They had the difficult task of controlling a straggling white community, at first almost exclusively composed of Boers, who had been too sturdy and stubborn to tolerate any effective interference by the Netherlands Company and other authorities in Holland, ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... afternoon, evening, night, crawled by—leadenly, as far as the men in the straggling column were concerned. That dash which had carried them through from the Virginia border, through the old-time whirling attack on Mount Sterling only days earlier, and which had brought them into and beyond Lexington, was seeping from tired men who slept in the ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... wooden chairs were ranged about it. She showed me where the Gentleman used to sit, and, at the last part of the time, the Schoolmistress next to him. The chairs were like the rest, but it was odd enough to notice that they stood close together, touching each other, while all the rest were straggling and separate. I observed that peculiar atmospheric flavor which has been described by Mr. Balzac, (the French story-teller who borrows so many things from some of our American loading writers,) under the name of odeur de pension. It is, as one may say, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... Marta, her old black dress for once cast aside, arrayed in yellow and red, leads the van, as she has at every wedding for twenty years. Following her come three musicians; Pedro, in the center, his gray, thin hair straggling over the collar of his well-brushed long black coat, with young Vicente and Arturo, the bridegroom's brothers, one on either side, accompanying Pedro's weird, thin-blooded strain with thrumming mandolins. Next come, by two and two, six little girls, pretty as angels, ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... saunter in the same direction, in twos and threes, straggling along the waist, but again gathering into a group around the capstan. There the moonlight, falling full upon their faces, betrays the expression of men in mutiny; but mutiny unopposed. For on the quarterdeck no one meets them. The traitorous first officer has spoken ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... youth, and being once engaged with some of his rakish friends in a trip into the country, in which they had spent all their money, it was agreed they should try their fortune separately. Holt arrived at an inn at the end of a straggling village, ordered his horse to be taken care of, bespoke a supper and a bed. He then strolled into the kitchen, where he observed a little girl of thirteen shaking with ague. Upon making inquiry respecting her, the landlady told him that she was her only child, and had been ill nearly a year, notwithstanding ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... last,—a straggling remnant of it,—was seen pushing up the hill. A remnant indeed! The children, and those having charge of them, had withdrawn. The Committee-men had sought shelter. The Progressive Guard was decimated. Every moment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... turned and retraced his steps. The drunken soldiers were gone on their way to join others in some tavern beyond the church, and the street was deserted. The moon, long past the full, was just rising above the hills to eastward, and shed a melancholy light upon the straggling village. Resentful of the Queen's mysterious silence, and profoundly sad from the impression made upon him by the drunken throng through which he had forced his way, Gilbert slowly climbed the hill and went back to his lodging near ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... artillery up to within a certain distance of the enemy's guns, unlimbered, and by his fire drove the enemy's gunners from their guns. This promptitude of the gallant officer saved many lives. The defenders of the village were chiefly hillmen, who, after firing a straggling volley, fled, leaving the Sikh artillerymen to be slaughtered by the conquerors. The British cavalry of the right made at the same time a sweeping and successful charge, and one half of the opposing ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... your father," the outraged lady said to Sophonisba. "It's positively disgraceful, straggling out in this way. But I might have known what it was likely to be before I ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... when they come in to a meetin'." And with this remark, pointing with a stubby thumb up a well-worn stair, he departed before Stephen could thank him. Stephen paused under the awning, of which there were many shading the brick pavement, to regard the straggling line of stores and houses which surrounded and did homage to the yellow pile. The brick house in which Mr. Lincoln's office was had decorations above the windows. Mounting the stair, Stephen found a room bare enough, save for a few chairs and law books, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... old gray shawl on head. Straggling locks of white hair show beneath shawl. Red patches. Face heavily lined with gray grease paint. Very old and ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... the spring the outlying settlers began again to suffer from the deeds of straggling Indians. Horses were stolen, one or two murders were committed, the inhabitants of the more lonely cabins fled to the forts, and the backwoodsmen began to threaten fierce vengeance. On April 16th, three traders in the employ of a man named Butler were attacked by some of the outlaw Cherokees, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... almost as high as the peas, the purple and white phlox, the yellow evening primrose, and the many-colored asters. Stooping here and there, she carefully trimmed the rank-growing geraniums and the clusters of chrysanthemums, cut off the straggling branches of the mignonette and removed every passing bloom of ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the position, which they had taken at the forks of Ohio, the greater part of the adjacent tribes removed farther west. So that when improvements were begun to be made in the wilderness of North Western Virginia, it had been almost entirely deserted by the natives; and excepting a few straggling hunters and warriors, who occasionally traversed it in quest of game, or of human beings on whom to wreak their vengeance, almost its only tenants ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... the Capitol wants a city. There it stands, reminding you of a general without an army, only surrounded and followed by a parcel of ragged little dirty boys, for such is the appearance of the dirty, straggling, ill-built houses which lie at the foot ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... occupied that post all luncheon time, comporting herself with great discretion. There was something touching in the sight of the tenderness of the young father, taking off her bonnet, and settling her straggling curls with no unaccustomed hands; and Mrs. Calcott's heart was moved, as she remarked his worn, almost hollow cheeks, his eyes still quick, but sunk and softened, his figure spare and thin, and even his dress not without signs of poverty; and she began making kind volunteers ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stream came tumbling from the height And straggling into ocean as it might. Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray, Close on the wild wide ocean,—yet as pure And fresh as Innocence; and more secure. Its silver torrent glittered o'er the deep As ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in the morning, I found the whole region filled with a white mist, hiding the mountains around. Now and then a peak looked through, and again retired into the cloudy folds. In the wide, straggling street, below the window at which I had made them place my breakfast-table, a periodical fair was being held; and I sat looking down on the gathering crowd, trying to discover some face known to ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... ends of the earth are drawn upon to bring the perfected beverage to his lips. The trail that ends in his breakfast cup, if followed back, would be found to go a devious and winding way, soon splitting up into half-a-dozen or more straggling branches that would lead to as many widely scattered regions. If he could mount to a point where he could enjoy a bird's-eye view of these and a hundred kindred trails, he would find an intricate criss-cross of streamlets and rivers of coffee forming a tangled pattern over the tropics and reaching ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the ground. The outside garden wall was reached and leaped, and now the three adventurers had a fair run for it along the beach towards their boat with the red-capped gentlemen, as Adair called them, in hot pursuit. A long straggling branch of a tree had been thrown upon the beach. Adair did not observe it, and suddenly he found himself toppled over on his head. He thought that he had ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... prospect on all sides. Black moor, bleak fell, straggling forest, intersected with sullen streams as black as ink, with here and there a small tarn, or moss-pool, with waters of the same hue—these constituted the chief features of the scene. The whole district was ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... next hill, perceived what appeared to be a beautiful lake a few miles distant; he continued the march, intending to camp there; so we marched and marched, but no lake appeared; the men, worn and fatigued, lagged behind, some straggling back for five miles, and curses, loud and deep, were heard on every hand,—the lake turned out to be a mirage, a sight not uncommon in this region. Failing to arrive at the lake, we finally camped in the prairie grass, without wood or water; and, the rations being short, we went to sleep, supperless, ...
— History of Company E of the Sixth Minnesota Regiment of Volunteer Infantry • Alfred J. Hill
... clouds of every kind and colour; spirits flying about the air. Now he felt keen winds, and now warm breezes; now he passed a company of storms marching down upon the earth; or a lightning or two straggling back again to the skies; or a thunder riding a cloud; or a troop of hail rushing to battle with a deal of bluster and fury; or a crowd of snows looking for colder weather and a roosting-place. At last, he reached the country of the stars. He found ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... periods of his waking moments, he knew both his son and his dear friend Mr Harding, the archdeacon's father-in-law, and would thank them tenderly for their care and love. Now he lay sleeping like a baby, resting easily on his back, his mouth just open, and his few gray hairs straggling from beneath his cap; his breath was perfectly noiseless, and his thin, wan hand, which lay above the coverlid, never moved. Nothing could be easier than the old man's passage from this world to ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... became the foregathering place of all the farmers in the settlement. At noon the stable yard presented a lively appearance as the "boys" unhitched their steaming teams and led them to the long, straggling straw-roofed stables. The hay that John Corbett had cut on the meadows of Black Creek and stacked beside the stables was carried in miniature stacks which completely hid the man who carried them into the mangers, while the creaking windlass of the well proclaimed ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... level, large and small, bare, rocky, pastoral, or covered with wood. Immediately under my eyes lay one large flat island, bare and green, so flat and low that it scarcely appeared to rise above the water, with straggling peat-stacks and a single hut upon one of its out-shooting promontories—for it was of a very irregular shape, though perfectly flat. Another, its next neighbour, and still nearer to us, was covered ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... resembling a blazing fire arrived at the spot, they worshipped him who deserved their worship with all the honours of a guest arrived in their abode. When at last that slayer of hostile heroes, Kesava, came to Vrikasthala, the sun seemed to redden the sky by his straggling rays of light. Alighting from his car, he duly went through the usual purificatory rites, and ordering the steeds to be unharnessed, he set himself to say his evening prayers. And Daruka also, setting ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... had passed over in a little straggling town in the southeast of Ireland, and was succeeded by a languor proportioned to the wild excitement it never failed to create. But of all in the village, its publicans suffered most under the reaction of great bustle. Few of their houses appeared ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... yawning at present. It is to be hoped the reader is not. And so I burned daylight the while we drove through a country reputed to be pregnant with surprises of scenery until, at long last, the diligence drew up in the straggling street of Tolosa. We halted here for dinner, and resumed our journey with a fresh team at an enlivening speed, until about two miles outside the town we came to ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... New England country-side, lay familiar—how familiar!—to our eyes. To the left, back among the oaks and hickories, stood a solid, simple house, painted yellow with green blinds. To the right almost opposite was a smaller house of white, with an orchard straggling up to the back door. And in one of them I was born, and in the other Old Hundred. Down the road was another house, a deep red, half hidden in the trees. Smoke was rising from the chimney now, and drifting rosily against the first ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... the almond-slant of the Oriental. The idea occurs to us that the full appearance of the cheeks of the women is more likely to be caused by the exercise of chewing skins and boots than by an accumulation of fatty tissue. The men are distinguished by the thin, straggling growth of beard and moustache which adorns their Asiatic progenitors. The labrets of the men are offset by the long pendant earrings of the women, which are made from H.B. Co. beads and shells brought by Alaska Indians from the Pacific, It is only the women ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... been gleaned. The road was the ordinary African bush-path, intensely winding and only foot-sole wide; the little army, with Kettle at its head, could only march in single file, and Clay, who brought up the straggling rear, sweated and panted quite half a ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... the jutting rock the few appeared, Like the last remnant of the red-deer's herd; 60 Their eyes were feverish, and their aspect worn, But still the hunter's blood was on their horn. A little stream came tumbling from the height, And straggling into ocean as it might, Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray, And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray; Close on the wild, wide ocean, yet as pure And fresh as Innocence, and more secure, Its silver torrent glittered o'er the deep, As the shy chamois' eye ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... were closed, with the exception of one small opening, that, in daylight, would have admitted a straggling ray of light to fall upon the corpse. Now, however, that the sombre shades of evening had wrapped everything in gloom, the room appeared in total darkness, so that the most of those adventurers who had ventured into the place shrunk back ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the first afternoon, and met no one. They only overtook little straggling parties of rebels, making one and all for Jailpore, who bolted at the sight of them, imagining them probably to be the advance-guard of a larger force. The very idiocy of marching eleven strong through a country infested by their enemies was in their ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... tell you that that company of Rangers would never amount to a row of pins?" exclaimed Tom Randolph, when the members rode straggling into town that afternoon, and reported that their organization had been knocked into a cocked hat by General Lacey's attempt to muster it into the service of the Confederacy. "I knew by the way the election went that it would bust up sooner or later, and I am heartily ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... Norfolk, the solitary seaport, which, with its six or seven thousand inhabitants, formed the most glaring exception that any rule solicitous of proof could possibly desire. Williamsburg, the capital, was a straggling village, somewhat overweighted with the public buildings and those of the college. It would light up into life and vivacity during the season of politics and society, and then relapse again into the country stillness. Outside of Williamsburg and Norfolk there were various points ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... persons at once, namely, the Earl of Strathmore, his heir-apparent, and any third person whom they may take into their confidence. The extreme antiquity of the building is vouched by the thickness of the walls, and the wild straggling arrangement of the accommodation within doors. As the late Earl seldom resided at Glammis, it was when I was there but half furnished, and that with movables of great antiquity, which, with the pieces of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... reflections, Padre Esteban sauntered leisurely up the garden, that gradually ascended the slight elevation on which the greater part of the pueblo was built. Through a low gateway in the wall he passed on to the crest of the one straggling street of Todos Santos. On either side of him were ranged the low one-storied, deep-windowed adobe fondas and artisans' dwellings, with low-pitched roofs of dull red pipe-like tiles. Absorbed in his fanciful dreams, he did not at first notice that those dwellings ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... the MS. of the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold' in his portmanteau, I paid him a visit at Newstead. It was winter—dark, dreary weather—the snow upon the ground; and a straggling, gloomy, depressive, partially inhabited place the Abbey was. Those rooms, however, which had been fitted up for residence were so comfortably appointed, glowing with crimson hangings, and cheerful with capacious fires, that one soon lost the melancholy feeling of being ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... girl like that to be living her young life in this out-of-the-way corner of the world with no women companions to keep her company. Then he remembered that for all he knew she might not be the only one of her sex on the Shoe-Bar, and when the meal was over and the men were straggling back toward the bunk-house, he put the question to Bud Jessup, who walked ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... marching efficiency of an organization is judged by the amount of straggling and elongation and the condition of the men at the end of ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... said Andrews suddenly talking fast and excitedly while he brushed the straggling yellow hair off his forehead, "I'd almost be willing to be shot at the end of a year if I could live up here all that time with a piano and a million sheets of music paper...It ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... also present two transport officers—Captain North, of the 47th Regiment, and Captain Duncan, R.A.—three surgeons, and two control officers; and in the palace, which was situated in the main street of the long straggling town, and used as a hospital, were 24 European soldiers and sailors, convalescents. The pickets had reported Ashantis in the neighbourhood early in the morning, and had been reinforced; but the village was far too large to be capable of defence by this ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... steps she mounted, looking sharply to right and left as she did so! And in a moment, turning inwards from the sea, she caught sight of a movement among some straggling bushes a few yards to one ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... I learned the pack didn't get back till late that evening, straggling in one by one, and the valet having to go out and look for the last two with a lantern. Also, these last two had been treated brutally by some denizen of the wildwood. Rex II had darn near lost his eyesight and Lady Blessington was clawed something ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... transferred the laws established for building in stone to architecture in wood, they displayed no thorough skill of adaptation, and by the lowness of their roof and the wide intervals between their columns gave to their temples, to use the language of an ancient architect, a "heavy, mean, straggling, and clumsy appearance." The Latins found in the rich stores of Greek art but very little that was congenial to their thoroughly realistic tastes; but what they did adopt they appropriated truly and heartily as their own, and in the development of the polygonal ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... with her, and see her vintage. We left my son under the care of the Abbe and of Sir Francis and Lady Ommaney, and set forth together in our coach with my women, and, as usual, mounted servants enough to guard us from any of the thieves or straggling soldiers who infested ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a solitude, very rugged and sublime—mountains upon every side, with their tops covered with snow, while through the dark clouds in the sky a few straggling sunbeams find their way to the valley. Upon the border of an immense cliff stands a group of men whose costume denotes them to be brigands of the Apennines. Upon the very edge of the precipice, erect and calm, is a young man, surrounded by the brigands, who are ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... the distance; and John Murphy followed a hollow in the plain, and succeeded in finding a fine lagoon, about half a mile long, partly rocky and partly muddy, surrounded by Polygonums, and fields of Salicornia. A few gum trees, and raspberry-jam trees grew straggling around it; but no dry timber was to be found, and we had to make a fire with a broken down half dried raspberry-jam tree. Our meat bags were now empty, and it was necessary to kill another bullock, although the spot was by no means favourable ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... home or sit down on the sand and wait, Georgina stood looking idly about her. And while she hesitated, Manuel and Joseph and Rosa came straggling along the beach in ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of Sam and flung itself upon the man on the ground who with angry imprecations was trying to struggle to his feet. His hand had gone to an inner pocket, as he fell and in a moment more there was a flash of light and Michael felt a bullet whiz by his ear. Nothing but the swerving of the straggling figures had saved it from going through his brain. It occurred to Michael in that instant that that was what had been intended. The conviction that the man had also recognized him gave strength to his arm as he wrenched the revolver from ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... "No" which Nature always returns at first to your eager questioning. It provoked me, this staring reticence of the scenery, and stimulated me to a sort of dogged exertion. I think I walked steadily for about three hours over the jagged rocks and burning sands, interspersed with a few patches of straggling grass,—all the time up hill, with never a valley to vary the monotonous climbing,—until the bushes began to thicken in about the same manner as they had thinned into the desert, the grass and herbage herded closer together under my feet, and, beating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... bard, the waves have ebbed away from Gwyddno's weir, and left a broad stretch of marsh and meadow between it and the present coast, where stands the fishing village of Borth. The village fringes the sea-line with half a mile of straggling cottages; but the eye is caught at once by a massive building of white stone, standing at the head of the long street, and forming a landmark in the plain. This building is the Cambrian Hotel, reared on a scale that would suggest the ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... stands in its long, low meadows and level gardens, close to the little town, straggling red roof above red roof, up its steep ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... to be made for young men taken from the society of their kind and thrust out hundreds of miles in the wilderness to sit down for a year or two at one of these isolated spots. They may see no women save those amongst a straggling band of Indians for the whole time of their exile; they may see no white man save a mail-carrier—and in many places not even a mail-carrier—for weeks together. Time sometimes hangs very heavily on their hands, for trees are not always blowing ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... storms did far more to destroy fleets and naval expeditions than battles during the entire age of the oar. The opposite extreme was reached in Nelson's day. His lumbering ships of the line made wretched speed and straggling formations, but they were able to weather a hurricane and to keep the sea for an indefinite ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... the first of a long series of introductions. Compton Poynsett was a straggling village, with the church, schools, and Rectory, ten minutes' walk from the park gates. It had not been neglected, so that Julius had not the doubtful satisfaction of coming like a missionary or reformer. The church, though not exactly ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the enemy's horse, followed us as far as Leicester, and killed all that they could lay hold on straggling from the body, but durst not attempt to charge us in a body. The king expecting the enemy would come to Leicester, removes to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, where we had some time ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... lap is full Of sweetest flowers;—haste to gather more, That before sunset we may make our crown. Last night as we strayed through that glade, methought The wind that swept my cheek bore on its wings The scent of fragrant violets, hid Beneath the straggling underwood; Haste, sweet, To gather them; fear not—I ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... child ten years of age. The features of the fair boy reminded Vergniaud of his beloved sister, and awoke mournfully in his heart the remembrance of departed joys. When the child saw his uncle imprisoned like a malefactor, his cheeks haggard and sunken, his matted hair straggling over his forehead, his long beard disfiguring his face, and his clothes hanging in tatters, he clung to his father, affrighted by the sad ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... see for myself what the movement of which this is the brief historical outline was like that I had gone down from Philadelphia to Woodbine, some twenty-five miles from Atlantic City. I saw a straggling village, hedged in by stunted woods, with many freshly painted frame-houses lining broad streets, some of them with gardens around in which jonquil and spiderwort were growing, and the peach and gooseberry budding into leaf; some of them ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... two million refugees who are overcrowding Moscow and Petrograd, to the great detriment of the health average of the two Russian capitals, many thousands came there several hundred weary miles on foot. And others, less determined or weaker, are still straggling in or are lingering by the way, some of the latter dying and some finding shelter in small towns between the twin big ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which I found the late tenant's rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... hurried. It was a low-lying offshoot of the town, leading along the water meadows, with a straggling row of houses on each side, the perennial haunts of fever and ague. Before them, on each side the road, and fringed with pollard willows and tall poplars, ran a tiny branch of the Whit, to feed some mill below; ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... the Blue Boar who spoke. He stopped me in the village street—if you can call a straggling lane with a score of thatched cottages and half a dozen barns a street—evidently bursting with great tidings. He is an old soldier himself, and his views on the war are held in great esteem. I hadn't heard the news, but, whatever it was, I could see from the landlord's immense smile that ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... glorious Woodvilles, all speckled over, like Jacob's sheep; each man had one of the weeds stuck rakishly in the corner of his mouth, and was knocking off the ashes upon his deviled biscuits; and, to the right of the president's chair, a long straggling regiment of empty bottles gave dumb but eloquent proof of the bibulous capabilities of the company. Each man was talking vehemently to his neighbour, and every one for himself; in order, as a wag among them said, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... points, especially in the northern part of the battle area, the Germans surrendered freely. Many civilians were rescued from the towns and districts captured, and little processions of these were straggling rearward out of range of the guns, and out of the way of the fighting troops. At times liberated Belgian women could see their sons, brothers or husbands going forward into battle. On October 17th the German retreat in Flanders became a rout. The enemy were fleeing ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... together with a defiant set to her chin, which promised trouble. In front of her, carelessly resting on the table, his feet dangling in the air, was a sturdy-looking fellow of forty or so, with red, straggling beard covering all the lower half of his face, and a weather-worn black hat pulled so low as almost to conceal his eyes. His attire was nondescript, as though he had patronized the junk-shop of ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... on the few open plots skirting the river: all else was waste and solitude. One brother died comparatively early; but the father of mine host lived long to enjoy the fruit of his labours. He lived to see industry and self-denial metamorphose that forest and its straggling Indian band into a land bursting with the rich fruits of the soil, and buzzing with a busy hive of human energy and intelligence. Yes; and he lived to see temple after temple, raised for the pure worship of the True God, supplant the ignorance and idolatry which reigned undisturbed at ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... would ride toward the Last Ridge, taking it upon himself to gather up the straggling stock there, and, purely incidentally, he would look in upon the Longstreets. He had not seen them for three days. But the night was destined to bring events to alter his plans. In the first place, some of his cowboys whom he had dispatched to outlying districts of the ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... and another, stood in an enclosure surrounded by a low white picket fence, which gave to the place a certain home-like look, spite of the neglected condition of the ground, which was bare sand, or sparsely tufted with weeds and wild grass. A few plants, parched and straggling, stood in pots and tin cans around the door of the dwelling-house. One hardly knew whether they made the place look less desolate or more so. But they were token of a woman's hand, and of a nature which craved something ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... a little too much brandy, fell asleep; however, one of them, waking a little sooner than the other, and finding the boat too fast aground for him to stir it, hallooed out for the rest, who were straggling about; upon which they all soon came to the boat; but it was past all their strength to launch her, the boat being very heavy, and the shore on that side being a soft oozy sand, almost like a quicksand. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... surely his by right of good Cornish descent, he thought their use in America a folly. This disturbed Ann Penhallow very little, but when they first came to Grey Pine the headings of her notepaper were matters of considerable curiosity to the straggling village of Westways, where she soon became liked, respected, and moderately feared. A busy-minded woman, few things in the life of the people about her escaped her notice, and she distributed uninvited ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... are descended by cuttings from the Holy Thorn still exist in and about Glastonbury. One of them, of somewhat scanty and straggling growth, occupies the site of the original thorn, on the summit of Weary-all Hill. Another, a much finer tree, compact and healthy, stands on private premises, near the entrance of a house that faces the abbot's kitchen. These descendants of the Holy Thorn inherit the famous ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... very deep; Dove and Beadle's lots lay about thirty miles from the nearest house; and a straggling, lonely sort of place that was too, five miles out of the village, with nobody but a dog and a deaf old woman in it. Sometimes, as I was telling you, we had been in a hundred miles from any human creature ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... day long, while they were absent, the cattle, too, made their pilgrimage, straggling in singly, in pairs, in bunches, in long files, leisurely, ruminantly, without haste. There, at the long troughs filled by the windmill of the blindfolded pump mule, they drank, then filed away again into ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... reefs were out of sight in the evening of Oct. 21, and our course was continued for Torres' Strait; but the barrier was yet at too little distance, not to cause apprehension of straggling reefs; and I thought it too hazardous to run in ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... settlement was so slow during the first one hundred and fifty or sixty years of our history. New England had, it is true, been largely subjugated and reclaimed; a considerable body of emigrants, wedge-like, were driving slowly up through the Mohawk Valley towards Niagara; a weak, thin line, was straggling with difficulty across the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, towards the Ohio, and a more compact and confident battalion in Virginia, was pushing into Kentucky. But how scattered and feeble that picket-line compared to the army which ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... childhood. Scarcely able, much of the time, to obtain food by day, or lodging by night, still she undauntedly pursued her way, and kept her eyes straight forward toward the end. Foraging parties, and straggling soldiers, passed occasionally, yet not one syllable of disrespect or insult was offered to the lonely woman as she passed along, the living impersonation ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... adventures among the red-skins, but have only time to tell you that I started from Cheyenne, October twenty-eighth, accompanying two herders who were on their way to Salt Lake City with a small drove of mustangs and Indian ponies. We were attacked on the thirty-first of the same month by a straggling band of Arrapahoes, near Skull Rocks, on the Laramie Plains. One Indian was killed, and my companions and myself were made prisoners after using up nearly all our ammunition in the effort to repulse our assailants. The herder whose fire ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... families would recite the stories from memory for the delectation of the younger fry, when all foregathered in a crescent before the kitchen fire to wear out the long winter evenings. In this manner, under the dim-flickering light of an "oilie cruizie," in a straggling village in Perthshire, did I learn first of Blue Beard and Jack the Giant Killer, and many another hero of chapbook literature. And my experience, I am sure, was by no means singular. Rather, I feel certain that while telling thus my ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... some poor, small houses, and in a moment came to a standstill in the midst of a straggling village. The young conductor still slept on, his head fallen so far on his shoulder that his breathing was difficult. The motorman, getting no signal to go on, looked back through the window, putting his face close to the glass to see, for it had grown dusky outside and the electric ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... broke the back of the Texas Cavalry. We began straggling back towards New Orleans, and by that time the War was over. The soldiers began to scatter. They was a sorry-lookin' bunch of lost sheep. They didn't know where to go, but most of 'em ended up pretty close to the towns they started from. They was ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... the fresh tracks of numerous buffalo, but had in no case secured a shot. The last great herd had, in fact, been exterminated six months before, and though the Ferrises and Merrifield had killed a half-dozen within a quarter-mile of the Maltese Cross early that summer, these had been merely a straggling remnant. The days when a hunter could stand and bombard a dull, panic-stricken herd, slaughtering hundreds without changing his position, were gone. In the spring of 1883 the buffalo had still roamed the prairies east and west of the Bad Lands in huge herds, but moving in herds they ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... filled with drift-wood; these gray hoary trees, half choked and killed with gray moss and lichens, those straggling alders and black ash, look melancholy; they are like premature old age, gray-headed youths. That island divides the channel of the river: the old man takes the nearest, the left hand. And now they are upon the broad Rice Lake, and Catharine wearies ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... decided the fate of the day. The royal army, electrified by the heroism of its leader, soon dispersed the straggling battalions. The rebels, having nothing more to hope, sued for pardon, and their prayer was granted by ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... up the wide bottom of the valley the construction camp sprawled its ugly mass. From where he stood in the doorway he looked down on it over the grade—its straggling unformed planning; the flimsy shacks, half unhewn logs, half canvas, without respect for streets or angles or lines; its half-hearted struggle to lift itself up the slope to the sheltered ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... was left about it except a considerable herd of pigs, which the father with great difficulty had succeeded in accumulating from a very small beginning. The pigs had not been disturbed by the Indians, but the straggling troops soon disposed of them, and then turned their attention to the cabbages and potatoes in the garden, with the intention, no doubt, of dining that day on fresh pork and fresh vegetables instead of on salt junk and hard bread, ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... one unbroken mass of darkness, unrelieved even by a single pile of clouds. The animals, where they could, had betaken themselves to shelter; the fowls of the air sought the covert of the hedges, and ceased their songs; the larks fled from the mid-heaven; and occasionally might be seen a straggling bee hurrying homewards, careless of the flowers which tempted him in his path, and only anxious to reach his hive before the deluge should overtake him. The stillness indeed was awful, as was the gloomy veil which darkened the face of nature, and filled the mind with that ominous terror which presses ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... A few straggling beams still fell on the field clear of trees. Thirty feet distant was the gate of the corral, which appeared to be closed. This thirty feet, which it was necessary to cross from the border of the wood to the palisade, ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... long bridge there were abundant evidences of the reported disasters. Straggling troops, army wagons, etc., were pouring in from the "front" in great disorder. I reached camp about three o'clock P.M. and found Colonel Oakford out with the regiment on battalion drill. An hour later I reported ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... ignorance of Spanish and his very slight knowledge of English, precisely what he feared I could not discover. In the end we started, and towards evening Antonio pointed out to us the hacienda of Concepcion, a large white building standing on a hill which overshadowed San Jose, a straggling little place, half-town, half-village, with a population of ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... travellers, with regard to the fate of those eleven cities of Asia. Seven or eight are totally destroyed: Hypaepe, Tralles, Laodicea, Hium, Halicarnassus, Miletus, Ephesus, and we may add Sardes. Of the remaining three, Pergamus is a straggling village of two or three thousand inhabitants; Magnesia, under the name of Guzelhissar, a town of some consequence; and Smyrna, a great city, peopled by a hundred thousand souls. But even at Smyrna, while the Franks have maintained a commerce, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... pathway, in and out, Winds upwards like a straggling chain; And, when two toilsome miles are past, Up through the rocks it leads at last Into a high and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... great strength, and still contains a magazine, and is fortified with batteries. In the old citadel on the height, the remains of a Hindu palace with some interesting carvings indicate the former importance of the place. The town, which consists of one or two straggling streets, contains a handsome English church. Chunar is first mentioned in the 16th century, when in possession of Sing Joanpore. In 1530 it became the residence of Shere Shah the Afghan, and forty-five ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... tints in which God's world is clothed of early morning, and which city people have so seldom the chance of beholding. The plain over which we rode looked yellow and gloomy; the cultivation little or none; the land across the roadside fringed, for the most part, with straggling wild-carrot plants; a patch of green only here and there. We passed several herds of lean, small, well- conditioned cattle: many flocks of black goats, tended now and then by a ragged negro shepherd, his long gun slung over his ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rough patches of stone just so, as often as the sun had set. Close to the Joyces', Mick met Peter Maclean driving home a brood of ducklings. A broad and burly man, who says "shoo-shoo" to a high-piping cluster of tiny yellow ducks, and flourishes a long willow wand to keep them from straggling out of their compacted trot, does undoubtedly present rather an absurd appearance; yet I cannot explain why the sight should have seemed to prick like a sting through the wide weary disgust which Mick experienced as he stood in the twilit boreen waiting ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... and got his leather jacket and woollen muffler. He met the jury straggling out with the crestfallen air of men conscious of an inglorious performance. The judge and the district attorney stood just within the door, waiting ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... could be more outrageous, for example, than to see one rose growing in the shape of a bush on the top of the stem of another? "Think of all the pruning necessary," cried he, "to keep the poor thing in the round shape so much admired! And what is the matter with the beautiful straggling branches, that they are to be cut off as fast as they appear? Why not allow the healthy Rose Tree its free and glorious growth? Can it be too large or too luxuriant? Can its flowers be too numerous? Oh, Rose Tree, you know your own surpassing merits ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... childish desire to see a real beggar was gratified. Straggling petitioners for "cold victuals" hung around our back yard, always of Hibernian extraction; and a slice of bread was rewarded with a shower of benedictions that lost itself upon us in the flood of its own ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... that keenness of vision so peculiar in savages, soon descried some natives on the other side, and pointed out to me a tribe filing in a straggling line through the woods at a distance. I made him cooey to them, they answered the call, and in a short time appeared on the opposite bank. Our first interview with these sons of the woods was highly creditable to them. They advanced in a numerous group, but in a silent and submissive manner, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell |
