"Unkempt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was black, but much larger than Pixy, was shaggy and unkempt, and had a cross and savage look, very different from ...
— Pixy's Holiday Journey • George Lang
... the doorway to the unkempt yard about whose tumbled fences the woods advanced thickly. He recognized the place. For some time he stood ashamed, yet fair enough to seek the cause of his experience in some mental unhealth deeper than any reaction from last ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... in his shack. He looked as if he had been sitting where Northrup left him the night before. He was unkempt and haggard and there were broken bits of food on the untidy table, and stains ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... to the third floor, on the left, door 32. At first, she was surprised that he should be there, having read in The Era ... but he might have moved. On the whole, she was not sorry to show herself to Jimmy in her pretty frock, he having seen her last in her room in Berlin, looking ill, unkempt and frightfully ugly. She was not sorry, either, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... "full-marrows"), the ordinary seamen (or "half-marrows") never dreamed of signifying their pleasure to him save with a kick or an open-handed blow. His only time of peace came when it was his watch below, and he could lay his poor little unkempt head easily in his hammock. In bad weather he took his chance with the men. The icy gusts roared through the rigging; the cold spray smote him and froze on him; green seas came over and forced him to hold on wheresoever he might. Sometimes the clumsy old brig ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... a startling change in my relationship to it. The shining city in which I had lived for seven years, and which had become so familiar to me (and so necessary to my progress), had begun to dwindle, to recede. The warm, broad, unkempt and tumultuous west, with its clamorous movement, its freedom from tradition, its vitality of political thought, re-asserted its power over me. New England again became remote. It was evident that I had not really ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... shapeless and waistless, was garbed in a rough man's shirt and in a ragged flannel petticoat that had once been red. But it was her face, wrinkled, withered and weather- beaten, surrounded by an aureole of unkempt and straggling wisps of greyish hair, that caught and held me. Neither drifted hair nor serried wrinkles could hide the splendid dome of a forehead, high and broad without verging in the slightest ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... house together. A minute later we made our way over the rough, unkempt grass which once marked our brick terrace. Brutus opened the door and we were in the dark hall, lighted by a square of candle light from the morning room. He paused again and listened, and then strode across ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... of streets which converged into the broad lagoon before the palace, boats began arriving. Boats crowded with slaans. Disheveled, unkempt men and women with primitive weapons of steel and wire brandished aloft. They surged into the lagoon. A murderous, frenzied mob—thoughtless of itself, suicidal to attack us, yet daring ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... broad walk, Regent's Park, where, I remembered, Norah often walked before breakfast. A park-keeper, the only other human creature within sight, was eyeing me suspiciously. I saw myself—without a looking-glass—unkempt, ragged. My intention was to run, but Norah was holding me by the arm. Savagely I tried to shake her off. I was weak from my recent illness, and, I suppose, half starved; it angered me to learn she was the stronger of the two. In spite of my ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... gray hair, unkempt, touched his shoulders; a white beard, scraggly, dirty, hid all of his face except the beak-like, awry nose. Beady, viciously glowing eyes gleamed out ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the woods, the snows and the interminable way, had left me ill-suited for the place, and I was ashamed. I sat outside a cafe, opposite the cathedral, watching its pinnacles of light; but I was ashamed. Perhaps I did the master a hurt by sitting there in his fine great cafe, unkempt, in such clothes, like a tramp; but he was courteous in spite of his riches, and I ordered a very expensive drink for him also, in order to make amends. I showed him my sketches, and told him of my adventures in French, and he was kind enough ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... falls, rolls in the mud, and feigns to be a prey to the most shameful drunkenness. His poor wife runs after him, picks him up, calls for help, arranges his hempen locks, which straggle forth in unkempt wisps from beneath his filthy hat, sheds tears over her husband's degradation, and pours forth ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... walls, there were twenty-four such altars, called sacraria Argeorum. Two facts speak in favor of their remote antiquity. The priestess of Jupiter was not allowed to sacrifice on them, unless in a savage attire, with hair unkempt and untrimmed. On the 17th of May, the Vestals used to throw into the Tiber, from the Sublician bridge, manikins of wickerwork, in commemoration of the human sacrifices once performed on the ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... the afternoon, drawing towards the close of this memorable day. She was handed over to the governor of the prison, a short, thick-set man in black trousers and black-shag woollen shirt, and wearing a dirty red cap, with tricolour rosette on the side of his unkempt head. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... flat face was surmounted by an immense white plume, and whose person was adorned by an enormous white scarf, and a sword with elaborate hilt. This dignitary was considerably excited when he beheld the strangers; he clapped his hat more firmly on his head, stroked his unkempt beard, and began to give audience. After a few preliminary remarks, the travelers told him that they had weighty business to transact with the heads of the government. They refused, however, to give any account of its purport. This statement ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... Sebastian's usual method, so far from his lax comprehension of a father's duty, that Barlasch paused and looked at him with suspicion. With the back of his hand he pushed up the unkempt hair which obscured his eyes. This unusual display of parental ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... thrilling moment in that sensational trial was reached on the second day, when David Graham, looking wretchedly ill, unkempt, and haggard, stepped into the witness-box. A murmur of sympathy went round the audience at sight of him, who was the second, perhaps, most deeply stricken victim ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... hens and my ducks! In my despair I drove a long way to consult a "duck man." He looked like the typical Brother Jonathan, only with a longer beard, and his face was haggard, unkempt, anxious. He could scarcely stop to converse, evidently grudged the time, devotes his entire energies from dawn to twilight to slaving for his eight hundred ducklings. He also kept an incubator ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... slimness of limb—were all very noticeable in Doe, there was yet much of the original Baby about his appearance. It could be marked in his soft, indeterminate mouth, whose flower-like lips seemed always parted; in his inquiring eyes and unkempt hair; and, at the present moment, in an artless excitement that I had not seen for many ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... is to me," said Mrs. O'Shanaghgan, "I must take you in hand myself. But I do wish your Uncle George would invite you over to stay with them at The Laurels. It will do Terence a wonderful lot of good; but you want it more, you are so unkempt and undignified. You would be a fairly nice-looking girl if any justice was done to you; but really the other day, when I saw you with that terrible young person Bridget Murphy, it gave my heart quite a pang. You scarcely ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... days—wet leaves and lowering horizons. The long winter within doors. Faces appeared to him, faces of old, an endless procession of faces clear-cut as ever . . . his brother monks, bearded and unkempt . . . debauched acolytes . . . pilgrims from the Holy Land . . . glittering festal robes . . . vodka orgies, endless chants and litanies, holy lamps burning, somber eikons with staring eyes . . . the smell of greasy lukewarm ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... them, the less he liked them. It was dreadful how dusty and unkempt their feather dresses were—as though they knew neither baths nor oiling. Their toes and claws were grimy with dried-in mud, and the corners of their mouths were covered with food drippings. These were very different birds ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... a pity," we hear people say, "that, with all his brains, he hasn't sense enough to make himself presentable?" But the worst phase of the situation is that the unkempt man sooner or later loses faith in himself and either ceases to hoard at the expense of his gentility or he gives up his opportunity to mingle with others and lapses into ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... picturesque though unkempt appearance. Jack was eating a slice of bread and jam; Dick had Babs—somewhat in a soiled condition from watering the garden—on his back; Charlie, the incorrigible, with a tear in his knickers and a brimless hat on the back of his curly head, ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... to clip back and get a seat in the front row. But he would not hear of it, and the way he refused reminded me of his old stubborn independence; all I got was a promise that he would have a bite with me after the performance. And so I left him in the frosty dusk, ill-clad and unkempt, with the new-lit lamp over the pit door shining down upon the haggard mask that had once been the eager, memorable face of my ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hair unkempt, and hat awry, maudlin tears in her swollen eyes, and swaying as she held the rail, looked shiftily up ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... that wound tortuously through the breaks. Long Bill stood in his doorway and eyed the pair sullenly as they drew rein and climbed stiffly from the saddles. Alice glanced with disgust into the sallow face with its unkempt, straggling beard, and involuntarily recoiled as her eyes met the leer with which he regarded her as ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... came in with him added to the strangeness of his aspect as he stood there; his hair rather long, unkempt, and wet with fog; his hands gloveless, and high boots spattered with mud and soaked with half-molten snow. There was more of the brigand in his aspect than of the honest man, and yet his drawn, agitated face was well featured and not ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... "you know Mr. St. Clair says, 'Dress is one of the fine arts,' and if it is, why of course we ought to cultivate it. Certainly, well-dressed men and women are more agreeable objects than rude and unkempt ones. There must be somebody whose mission it is to preside over the agreeable arts of life; and I suppose it falls to 'us girls.' That's the way I comfort myself, at all events. Then I must confess that I do like dress; I'm not cultivated enough to be a painter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... that the 5th are noticeable throughout the brigade for the long, slovenly and unkempt condition of men's hair. The Commanding Officer considers that this reflects on the credit of the battalion and directs Company Commanders to take immediate steps to have this slight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads toward Haslingfleld and Coton Where das ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... even a table in it; and only a railroad time-table and advertisements of land sales hung on its rough pine walls. Jernyngham, however, looked in keeping with his surroundings. The dirty bandage still covered his forehead, his clothes were stained and untidy, and he had an unkempt, dissipated air. ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... alone. Then the door opened, and a strange hand was thrust in. The door closed, but Thompson had not entered. Again it opened, again it shut. At the third attempt a waif of a man came in. No such figure had been looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes, he found my father at a loss for words. 'You must have had access to many books when you wrote that essay,' was what he said. 'That,' said Thompson, ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... The straggling, unkempt, and forlorn town of Parkville, Missouri, was crowded with strangers when the emigrants arrived there after a long and toilsome drive through Iowa. They had crossed the Mississippi from Illinois into Iowa, at Fulton, on the eastern shore, and after ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... them. Yet it was the best they could expect to find for the little rent they were able to pay. Situated in one of the cheapest parts of Harlem, the flat was in a row of tenement-like buildings, facing a street always filled with noisy, unkempt children. The corridors and staircases were gaudily decorated and the narrow halls and small rooms, shut off from proper light and air, gave one a sense of suffocation. The furnishings were of the scantiest. Jimmie having incurred certain ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... is no longer Jemmy Button, but again the savage Orundelico, he too having gone back to barbarism. His dress, or rather the absence of it, his greasy and mud-bedaubed skin, his long unkempt hair, and the wild animal-like expression of his features—all attest his relapse into a condition of savagery, total and complete. Not a vestige of civilised man remains with him to show that he has ever been a mile from the ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... not wished to remain longer than was necessary because of the unkempt impression she knew she made, had hastened down to the kitchen. And now Eleanore came in, after having knocked at the door with all imaginable timidity. She had heard the strange voice, had rushed out into the hall, and, unable ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Mrs. Deacon Whittle's dream parlor, with its marble-tops and plush-upholstered furniture, had become a solid reality, other parlors burgeoned forth in multi-colored magnificence. Scraggy old shrubs were trimmed; grass was cut in unkempt dooryards; flowers were planted—and all because of the lavish display of such improvements at Bolton House, as "that queer Orr girl" persisted in calling it; thereby flying in the face of public opinion and local prejudice in a way which soured the ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... On either side and across the way were vacant houses, lonesome and forbidding. Indeed, the residence of Asbury Fuller was itself scarcely less lonesome and forbidding. The grass of the plot before it was long and unkempt and heavily covered with mats of autumn leaves. The bricks of the front walk were sunken and uneven and the steps leading to the high piazza were deeply warped, as by pools of water that had lain and dried on their unswept surface ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... seemed more defined; and they saw no more deer, but here and there were inclosures where wheat and barley were growing, and black timbered farm-houses began to show themselves at intervals. Herd boys, as rough and unkempt as their charges, could be seen looking after little tawny cows, black-faced sheep, or spotted pigs, with curs which barked fiercely at poor weary Spring, even as their masters were more disposed to throw stones than to ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... orchard bore signs of neglect. They saw a man in a barn painfully rolling along a heavy cylindrical bundle which had just come off a waggon. As they advanced to ask him the way, he left his work and came to meet them, a being as unkempt as his farm, and with an unpleasant ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... Sammy hastened up, bearing in their arms the slim war-hatchets, cased in holsters of bright-beaded hide, and we took our weapons and started, piloted by Harry through the door, and across the shady, unkempt ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... the door of the dirty shanty, looking upon an unkempt, copper-eyed girl, and a great squat, ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... cavalry had gone into billets in the surrounding villages, and were behaving splendidly. The people took to them very kindly, and the men themselves looked so clean and happy that it was difficult to realize that they were the same unkempt, dirty individuals who had been seen not so long before wading through the mud and ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... in, thinking of the years gone, of Fu Shan, who used to sit, sucking his porcelain pipe on Sadler's porch, and looking down on the creek where the boys were rowing with his countrymen, and looking down on Saleratus that was a pretty unkempt community, and saying, "Vely good joss house, gleen dlagon joss house by Langoon;" and then of Sadler saying: "Stuck-up little cast-eyed ghost! Speak up, Asia, if you've got ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... forward deck, and a stream of frowsy humanity that had just been released from overpacked emigrant boarding-houses poured up it. There were apparently representatives of all peoples and languages among that unkempt horde—Britons, Scandinavians, Teutons, Italians, Russians, Poles—and they moved on in forlorn apathy, like cattle driven to the slaughter. One wondered, from the look of them, how they had raised their passage money, and how many years' bitter self-denial ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... floor, in a dream. In the dimness of the room the coal fire shone through the front draught of the stove, and threw a faint rose on her crossed hands. Taller she seemed, and more commanding. Her head was back, her eyes sparkling. She was clean-cut and strong against the unkempt walls. ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... friend—Dr. Nassau told me he was called in in this capacity—comes in and "lifts them up," bringing to them a small present, a factor of which is always a piece of soap. This custom is now getting into the survival form in Libreville and Glass. Nowadays the relatives do not thus sit, unwashed and unkempt, keenly requiring the soap. Among the bush Igalwa, I am told, the soap ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... are past masters in the art of "standing off and on." The boat came alongside—a big, substantially-built craft of the whale-boat type, but twice the size—manned by ten sturdy-looking fellows, as unkempt and wild-looking as any pirates. They were evidently put to great straits for clothes, many curious makeshifts being noticeable in their rig, while it was so patched with every conceivable kind of material that it was impossible to say which was the original or "standing part." ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... dress—the coat or cloak, often an odd combination of several varieties of skins pieced together, with fur side in; breeches sometimes of the same material, but oftener of coarse duck or corduroy; and the slouched hat, under whose broad brim whatever of the face that was not concealed by a shaggy, unkempt beard shone out red from exposure to sun and weather. The American Fur Company had dotted the country with forts, which served the double purpose of storehouses for the valuables collected and of places where the employes could barricade themselves against the too-often troublesome ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... slope of the quiet, suburban avenue; to take pause before a small, detached house displaying the hatchet boards of the Estate Agent. Here we found unkempt laurel bushes and acacias run riot, from which arboreal tangle protruded the ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... these roadside talks and confidences never did I hear one word of complaint or breath of criticism. The spirit of discipline was as palpably shown amongst these scattered groups of unkempt, overstrained, tired soldiers, as on any "King's Birthday" Review ever held on the Horse Guards Parade. Their one repeated question was: "When shall we turn round and face them again?" And they would add: "We can drive them ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... the quay, limping, with his hat on the back of his head, his beard unkempt, and dragging an old carpet-bag. He was almost repulsive; yet, in spite of his fifty years of age, he looked young, so clear and lustrous were his eyes, so much ingenuous audacity had been retained in his yellow, hollow ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... stranger's knees, insinuated his cool and expressive nose into an unresisting hand, and wagged his stump of a tail with all his loving might. It was the longed-for touch of a vanished paw, the lick of a tongue that was still. He was unkempt, uncombed, uncared for, but he was another Punch, and he knew a friend when he saw one. "If that were my dog he would not live forgotten in a stable: he would take the place in the society to which his birth and his evident breeding entitle him," was the ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... too, are settling down into unkempt grounds with dilapidated porches and blinds. Such eyesores as one finds on the trolley-lines in any direction! They may have town-water supply, or they may depend on wells, but they are ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... other beauty looked on another occasion—and she felt as she read like a spell-bound princess in a fairy tale, mewed up in a battlemented tower, and deprived of her legitimate share in all the pleasures of earth. She had no patience with Mary—that wild, unkempt, ungraceful creature, who could be as happy as summer days are long, racing about the hills with her bamboo alpenstock, rioting with a pack of fox-terriers, practising long losers, rowing on the lake, doing all things ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... years ago when the world was on the point of freezing to death, an unkempt and unwashed cave-man, pulling the feathers out of a half-dead chicken with the help of his brown fingers and his big white teeth—throwing the feathers and the bones upon the same floor that served him and his family as a bed, felt just as happy and just ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... evening, looking out at the cheering prospect of dripping roofs and muddy pavement. She sat with her chin resting on her hands, staring vacantly at the passers-by, with eyes that took no interest in what she saw. She was quite young, and had been very pretty, for the loose, unkempt hair was of brightest auburn, the dull eyes of hazel brown, and the features pretty and delicate. But the look of intense sulkiness the girl's face wore would have spoiled a far more beautiful countenance, and there were traces ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... long. As I stood by the still water I saw the reflection of myself, and the sight made me more hopeless than ever. I saw in the water a tall, wild-looking youth, with bare head, save for a mass of unkempt hair; a face all scratched and bruised, and made to look savage and repulsive by vindictiveness; the clothes were dirty, bedraggled and torn, while the riding boots ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... words. His hands were clenched; yet still he wore that half-frightened look as of an animal that will spring when goaded, not before. His hair hung black and unkempt about his burning eyes. His face was ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... look for him, and he would probably never have been discovered if he had not run down the goat that had discovered his secret in the first place. Even then, no one would ever have looked for Waldemar von Oldenbach in the person of that swarthy, unkempt laborer, if it had not been for the sharp eyes of Sahwah the Sunfish, who noticed everything, and never forgot anything she saw. Her remembering the peculiar gesture of the artist had been ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... and sheep. His poetry reflects these features, reflects the high moral and historic significance of the European landscape, while the poetry of Emerson, and of Thoreau, is born of the wildness and elusiveness of our more capricious and unkempt Nature. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... nature in such a way that neither of them spoils the other; the art is natural, and the nature artistic. I have found the oasis that you and I have dreamed of when reading novels,—nature luxuriant and adorned, rolling lines that are not confused, something wild withal, unkempt, mysterious, not common. Jump that green railing and ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... the paths were so soaked that they squashed under her feet; on both sides, lay layers of rotten leaves from the autumn; the trees were only a net-work of blackened twigs, their trunks surrounded by an undergrowth that was as ragged as unkempt hair. And everything was mouldering: the smell of moist, earthy decay reminded her of open graves. Not a soul was visible but herself. She sat on a seat, the only living creature in the scene, and the past rose before her with resistless force: the intensity of her happiness; ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... picture. With what eagerness the day's earnings are counted! There is a motherliness in the girl's face that makes us sure that she is at once mother and sister to the boy. What luscious grapes—what a back-ground, unkempt like themselves, but thoroughly in keeping with the rest of the picture! In his works of this sort what broad sympathy he shows! so broad, indeed, that they prove him as belonging to no particular nation, but ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... had enjoyed the hospitalities of the Morrises, the Binghams, and the Willings, and the bodily comforts of Philadelphia hotels and inns, were not likely to find any compensations in the unkempt, straggling village which the Government and private speculators were trying to convert into a fitting abode for the National Government. There were few comfortable private dwellings. Most of the houses were mere huts occupied by laborers. Great ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... bed-ridden people to hobble along on their sticks and crutches; others led the smaller children, or carried the gaily-painted chests containing the holiday clothes of the family; while the boys dragged along the rough unkempt horses, and the few cows and oxen they had been able to drive in from the ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... been frightened at first sight of the man—for the tramp had the timidity of his kind; now he began to feel cheered. This stranger in the hollow had not been shaved recently, his clothing was unkempt, his shoes bore the marks of a long hike. He was cooking in the open—plain indication of ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... contains not a single inhabitant. Moreover, gentlemen, while you were sleeping I have taken a pretty extensive stroll. The vineyards lie unkempt, the vines themselves unthinned, up to the edge of the forest. The olive-trees have not been tended, but have shed their fruit for years with no man to gather. Many even have cracked and fallen under the weight of their crops. But no trace of beast, wild or tame, did I discover; no ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... a scraggly beard stepped away from the corral and approached the group by the fire, his stubby fingers twining in and out of his unkempt whiskers as he walked along, his eyes fixed on the fire and ...
— The Boy Scout Camera Club - The Confession of a Photograph • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the ground, close against the hut wall, two low-looking half-breeds in gaudy shirts, and wearing their black hair long and unkempt, were filling in the time waiting for breakfast, shooting "crap dice." The only words spoken between them were the filthy epithets and slang they addressed to the dice as they threw them, and the deep-throated curses as money ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... it occurred to him to look at his clothes, which were muddy from his tumble in the ditch. And no doubt his face and hands were dirty also, and his hair unkempt, and his aspect unprepossessing enough for an applicant for labor. At any rate it was clear that this was not the part of the town to seek it in; so he went back ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... fair-sized club. The wild man was running like a deer, pausing occasionally to turn and brandish his long arms at them savagely. They could see that his clothing was in tatters and that his hair and beard were long and unkempt. ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... voluptuous light of the low sun: there was a sense of music, of things that sparkled, of pearly lustres, of shimmering jewels, of softness, of delight, of luxury. Bhopal looked over the ragged valley like a sultan from the window of his zenana regarding afar off an unkempt hermit in his solitude. My companion had arranged for permission to enter the town, and it was not long ere we were installed in the house of a friend of Bhima Gandharva's, whose guests we remained during ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... now, And Putney's evening haze The dust that half a hundred kine Before my window raise. Unkempt, unclean, athwart the mist The seething city looms, In place of Putney's golden gorse ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... came at last, signaling the release of the port watch from the deck and the tension of the officer's presence. The forecastle received them, the stronghold of their brief and limited leisure. The unkempt, weather-stained men, to whom the shifting seas were the sole arena of their lives, sat about on chests and on the edges of the lower bunks, at their breakfast, while the pale sunlight traveled to and fro on the deck as the Villingen lurched in her gait. Conroy, haggard and drawn, let ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... the remark, but broke off with a sigh. He had no doubt seen trouble himself. For it is not always the ragged and unkempt who have been sore buffeted by the world, but also such as have a ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... to the sidewalk, and as he stood waiting for the grocer he noticed Mrs. Markham and the baby, and gave the baby an apple. This was a pleasure. He had such a hearty way about him. He on his part saw an ordinary farmer's wife with dusty dress, unkempt hair, and tired face. He did not know exactly whey she appealed to him, but he tried to ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... ambrosial-whisker'd flunkey Eyes thy boots and thine unkempt Beard and melancholy monkey More in ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... the condition of demigods. A language was devised that was to express the fervor of the adorers who were suddenly allowed to penetrate into Olympus, and the strange, misapplied terms whereof seemed to the uninitiated the language of insanity. For instance, if, after a dozen little unshaved, unkempt poetasters had been called "sublime," Victor Hugo vouchsafed to recite one of his really best Odes, what was the eulogistic form to be adopted? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... stroking that firm chin of his, on which the erstwhile stubble had now grown into a straggling, unkempt beard—and it plagued him not a little, for a close observer might have discovered that it was of a lighter colour at the roots. His hair, too, was beginning to lose its glossy blackness. It was turning dull, and presently, no doubt, it would begin to pale, ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... him as he watched the worshippers, his eyes resting now on a figure of a woman on her knees before the small altar at his left, her half-naked baby flat on its back beside her; and again that of an unkempt gray-haired man, his clothes old and ragged, his body bent, his lips trembling in supplication. All at once, and for the first time in his life, he began to realize the existence of a something all-powerful, to which these people appealed, a something ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Their hardened faces, unkempt appearance, and other earmarks caused a little apprehension in the hearts of the girls and Mrs. Vernon; but soon after the new arrivals started their fire to cook supper, the three tramps got ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... and spoke sadly. Then, by the distant gleam of the lanterns on the engine, Bert saw that the man was ragged and quite unkempt. In short, ...
— The Young Firemen of Lakeville - or, Herbert Dare's Pluck • Frank V. Webster
... the lone and lovely Isle denoted a paradise of unkempt vegetation, unfeared birds. No stump was there to betray the passing of the devastating axe. No footprint except that of birds—erratic, rectangular, scribbling—dented the sand. No human being had ever visited those groves ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... wishes, but instead of doing as bidden, the young chief visited with the head-chief's wife. The hunters were gone four days, at the end of which time they returned with much game, weary and very hungry. To their surprise they found the camp in a very unkempt condition and no bread baked in anticipation of their return. The messenger was called before the head-chief at once and questioned as to the directions he had given the women. He explained that he had told the chief of the women what they were expected to do, but she refused to listen to him, ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... the ideal servant in his dark-blue suit, high collar, and stiff white waistcoat. A wave of revulsion passed over Mostyn. He was thinking of the crude dining-room in the mountains; Drake, without his coat, his hair unkempt; Mrs. Drake in her soiled print dress and fire-flushed face, nervously waving the peacock fly- brush over the coarse dishes; Ann and George, as presentable as Dolly could make them, prodding and kicking each other beneath ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the hall, put his shoulders against the boarding, shoved his hands into his trousers pockets, and gazed into the faces of his constituents. He was still amiable. But Presson sulked. It was hot in there, and the proletariat was unkempt ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... showman turned and winked at the Rector. To think that such a piece of audacity could be! A dingy fellow in a velveteen coat, with a spotted handkerchief round his neck, and a battered hat on his unkempt locks, with Pan's pipes at his mouth and a drum tied round his waist—winked at the Rector! Mr. Hudson fell back a step, and his very lips were livid with the indignity. He had to support himself on the back of the chair he had just given ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... bread was so light that it went up the chimney, when it was not so heavy that it fell through the oven; invisible hands plucked bricks from that same oven and pelted him until he was blue; his wife became deaf, his children went unkempt, and his trade went elsewhere. Thrice the old woman reappeared, and each time was sent anew to the devil; but at last, in despair, the baker called on Saint Nicolaus to come and advise him. His call was answered with startling quickness, for, almost ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... ceaseless roll of the Atlantic. I used to like to go down there and fraternize with the blue-fishers, or the annual squads of sea-bass takers. Sometimes, along Montauk peninsula, (it is some 15 miles long, and good grazing,) met the strange, unkempt, half-barbarous herdsmen, at that time living there entirely aloof from society or civilization, in charge, on those rich pasturages, of vast droves of horses, kine or sheep, own'd by farmers of the eastern towns. Sometimes, too, the few remaining Indians, or half-breeds, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and unkempt had I become that at first my shipmates did not know me, but when they recognized me I was given a ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... small-pox, and hideously painted with vermilion and ochre; while, from his ears, were suspended, heavy rings of brass wire. These, with the paint, gave him a most diabolical expression, that was in no manner relieved by the shaggy locks of unkempt black hair ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in the impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion that Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in fancy all over the house—the attics, my aunt's bedroom so miraculously neat, and mine so unkempt, and the dark places in the corridors where ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... him, and shot very wide of the mark. In fact, the slow-witted young man went to Vienna on a false rumour—but it boots not recount his wanderings. Six months after he left Ancona, ragged, hatless, unkempt, hungry, he came within sight of the strong towers of Gratz; and as he went limping by the town ditch he heard a clear, ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... Theologians will argue no more in the columns of the halfpenny papers. For you are going to be the lion of the season. Comb your mane and have it neatly curled and scented, for we do not like our lions unkempt; and learn how to flap your tail; be sure you cultivate a proper roar because we expect to shiver delightfully in our shoes at the sight of you, and young ladies are already practising how to swoon with awe in ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... breakfast. She was a gentle woman with a sweet, kind face, and a little air of quiet dignity that made her doubly dear to Nick by contrast with his father's unkempt ways. He used to think that, in her worsted gown, with its falling collar of Antwerp linen, and a soft, silken coif upon her fading hair, she was the most beautiful woman in all ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... sir," answered, the impersonal-eyed servant. Blake made an effort to keep himself in perfect control. He knew that his unkempt figure had not won the good-will of ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... children kicked and tumbled with naked limbs on the ground; many women leaned half-dressed and much unbuttoned from ground floor windows, or came out into the passage-ways slatternly. In one court two unkempt vile-tongued women of the town wrangled and abused each other to the amusement of the neighborhood, where the working poor were huddled together with those who live by shame. The children played close by as heedlessly as if such quarrels were common events, ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... view of the courtyard from the dining-room and of attics and chimney-cowls from the drawing-room, the closed anthracite stoves in lieu of fires, the crockery, the wine-bottle, the mustard, the grey salt, the unconventional gestures and smiles and exclamations of the unkempt maid—all these strange details enchanted him, and they all set off very vividly the intense, nice, honest, reassuring Englishness of the host ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... the world's greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... With unkempt hair and long beards, covered with dust, tattered and weary, no wonder mother and sister failed to ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... 1840 but action was delayed because of Pat Kelly's wheat, and when eventually the trees were planted—tradition has it they were locusts—they were soon destroyed by insects. Andrew D. White describes the Campus when he came to the University in 1857 as "unkempt and wretched. Throughout its whole space there were not more than a score of trees outside the building sites allotted to professors; unsightly plank walks connected the buildings, and in every direction ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... day—though it must be confessed that his appearance was something of the satyr, still had he been Phoebus Apollo in person, he would scarcely have excited sincerer admiration. More than one fair creature sketched his unkempt head, and loudly wished that its owner was a bandit; more than one bright eye discovered beauty in his open countenance—though a little soap and water might have made it more distinguishable. Well—well—honest Ben—they looked, and wisely looked, at ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... dropped on her knees beside him, listening to his words with happy wonder. Joseph, just beyond, looks on with an expression of inquiry. He carries two turtle doves as the thank offering required of the mother by the religious law. His unkempt appearance and bare feet contrast with the neat dress of Mary. The tall priest standing before them extends his hands towards the group in a gesture of benediction. A broad ray of light gleams on ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... laughing. "You are like my friend, Dr. Watson, who has a bad habit of telling his stories wrong end foremost. Please arrange your thoughts and let me know, in their due sequence, exactly what those events are which have sent you out unbrushed and unkempt, with dress boots and waistcoat buttoned awry, in search of advice ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to see what I took to be a wild man, with unkempt beard and ragged hair, pursuing a giant ...
— Options • O. Henry
... in his chair. His mass of brown hair seemed more unkempt than usual, his hard face sterner than ever by reason of ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... boundary of Washington city to be fairly in the country, and ten minutes' walk in the country brings one to real primitive woods. The town has not yet overflowed its limits like the great Northern commercial capitals, and Nature, wild and unkempt, comes up to its very threshold, and even in ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... sufferings of the women; of British ladies going barefoot and giving up their stockings as cases for grape-shot; of Mrs. Moore's journeys across to No. 2 Barrack; of the hapless gentlewomen, "unshod, unkempt, ragged, and squalid, haggard and emaciated, parched with drought, and faint with hunger, sitting waiting to hear that they were widows." And what a place it was which the garrison had to defend! Not a foot of all the space bomb-proof, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... curved like rockers. An old pipe clamored at his nostrils, though it was on the table near the window, the full length of the room from him. Papers and books were strewn about everywhere. It was difficult to believe these unkempt and uncouth surroundings, and the personality that had created them, were actually being harbored behind the walls of ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... her, on the broken roof of the ammunition shed, the dismantled platform, the unkempt glacis below it. "For what work, then, do they pay you?" she ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... molto (to use the old lady's phrase)—at seeing the place where such lofty destinies began. On the wall of the same room is a portrait of Napoleon himself as the young general of the republic—with the citizen's unkempt hair, the fierce fire of the Revolution in his eyes, a frown upon his forehead, lips compressed, and quivering nostrils; also one of his mother, the pastille of a handsome woman, with Napoleonic eyes and brows and nose, but with a vacant simpering mouth. Perhaps the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... yard or so within the dead line, a group of officers in the Federal uniform—evidently men of culture and refinement, spite of their hatless and shoeless condition, ragged, soiled raiment, unkempt hair, and unshaven faces—sit on the ground, like their comrades in misfortune, ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley |
