"Clumsily" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gifts. What suggested the "first book" idea was an uncertainty of method, a hesitation between the new realism and the older romanticism. In both moods the author is successful, but the joints show something clumsily. This, however, is technical merely. I commend the book to all who are interested, approvingly or critically, in the Jew. A dramatic theme runs through the book, the ethical question as to whether a man may be justified in killing, ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... and Duke have so earnestly pressed him to remain secretary at war, that he could not refuse. The King would not hear of any of the newer court; and Legge, who of the old was next oars, has managed in the Prussian business so clumsily, that the King would not bear him in his closet: but he has got the navy-office, which Lyttelton would have had, but could not be rechosen at his borough, which he had stolen by surprise from his old ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... and then returned. There were scarcely half a dozen guests now in the place. One of them, a stout middle-aged woman, who had been sitting at the long table, beckoned me to her. She had very dark eyes and a not unpleasant face; but she wore a hideous black sailor hat, and her clothes were clumsily designed, and flamboyant. ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and he saw that he had set about it clumsily. He went over to the dogged youngster, patted his head and, with a nod to the cook, led little ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... that fence enclosed a pasture, not a county," growled Endicott, as he clumsily shifted his weight to bear on a ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... led her across the hall. He had not been in the dining-room since the dance started, and he was amazed and shocked to find half a dozen couples in the big chairs or on the divans in close embrace. He paused, but Hester led him to an empty chair, shoved him clumsily down into it, and then flopped ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... off and rowed to the beach. By the time the boys got ashore all the men had landed. Jim, who had been watching them quietly, noted that most of them disembarked clumsily, more like landlubbers than sailors. They separated into two groups of very unequal size. One, numbering six, including the men with handkerchiefs over their burnt faces, withdrew from the others and began to talk in low tones, with earnest, excited gestures. The remaining twenty ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... as to give an engraved portrait of his hero, just as we were to see later, at the beginning of a book destined to make some noise in the world, the portrait of "Captain Lemuel Gulliver of Redriff." Undoubtedly his opinions on men and life, his analysis of sentiment, are rather clumsily blended with the story and savour of the awkwardness of a first attempt; but there was however merit in making the attempt, and it is not impossible at distant intervals to discover under the crust of pedantry some ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... dinner they could hardly restrain their impatience, and Smith introduced the topic, rather clumsily, as soon as the fish appeared. Brown stared at them and said nothing. Jones, plucking up courage, presently asked him a question about the dominant fifth of the scale used by the natives of Quang-Tung. He answered evasively. ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical—never mind. Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value. It is the expression, however clumsily put, of a personal something which was loved, and will ever be missed, that alone brings solace to those who are left. Your message may speak merely of a small incident—something so trifling that in the ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... has taken his narrative of these days. Dalrymple's words are, "Dundee refused without ceremony," which may mean anything. It is, I think, not improbable that William employed Burnet to sound Dundee, and that the good bishop, among whose qualities tact was not pre-eminent, managing the matter clumsily, met with an unceremonious refusal for his pains. The point, however, is of no importance. It is clear enough that William, would have been glad to see both men in his service, and that they both declined to enter it. As Macaulay has called Dundee's conduct disingenuous, ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... is a study in what Browning in his Fifine terms "mental analysis"; it attempts to shadow forth, through the fluctuating moods of the dying man, a series of spiritual states. The psychology is sometimes crude; subtle, but clumsily subtle; it is, however, essentially the writer's own. To construe clearly the states of mind which are adumbrated rather than depicted is difficult, for Browning had not yet learnt to manifest his generalised conceptions ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... he was so unseasonably blunt, that curiously enough, I had almost suspected him of taking that odd sort of interest in one's welfare, which leads a philanthropist, all other methods failing, to frustrate a project deemed bad; by pretending clumsily to favor it. But no inuendoes; Jarl was a Viking, frank as his fathers; though not so ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... arouse echoes and reflections of them in the hearts of the hearers. But this it can do only in association with other elements of the drama, and when these are presented only in part, and then crudely and clumsily, it must fail of its purpose. And so it happens that Puccini's music discloses little of that brightness, vivacity, and piquancy which we are naturally led to expect from it by knowledge of Mrger's ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... gave, for one swift instant, a glance at Trenchard, who was, very clumsily, climbing into the carriage. Nikolai looked at him gravely. His round, red face was quite expressionless as he turned back and began to abjure his horses in that half-affectionate, half-abusive and wholly human whispering ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... was worse) hear him again. But one morning he presented himself with two youngsters, so brimful of joy that he quite forgot his previous caution and reserve. They perched in plain sight on the fence, and while the little ones clumsily struggled to maintain their footing, the father turned his head this side and that, jerked his tail, and uttered a low cry as touch as to say, "Can anybody beat that ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... round-headed doorways, with key stones after the Roman or Italian semi-classic style now beginning to prevail; square-headed windows with plain vertical mullions, and the heads of the lights either round or obtusely arched, and generally without foliations; pointed windows clumsily formed, with plain mullion bars simply intersecting each other in the head, or filled with tracery miserably designed, and an almost total absence of ornamental mouldings. Indications of this style may be found in many country churches which have been repaired ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... leisurely, and the echoes of his heart swirled up through his open mouth. And Leothric stepped sideways from his onset, and came between him and the village and smote him on the nose, and the blow of the stick made a dint in the soft lead. And Tharagavverug swung clumsily away, uttering one fearful cry like the sound of a great church bell that had become possessed of a soul that fluttered upward from the tombs at night—an evil soul, giving the bell a voice. Then he attacked Leothric, snarling, and again Leothric leapt aside, and smote ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... of beautiful color grows by exercise and discrimination, just as naturally as fine perception of music or literature. Each is an outlet for the expression of taste,—a language which may be used clumsily or with skill. ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... to the side of the road. Gallagher's rough, hairy fingers were still trembling, but they knew their job. In a few minutes the tire was fixed. Clumsily but successfully, the great Irishman turned the car ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... supernatural, and to deter the explorer of the great ocean. The half-decked vessels that crept along the Mediterranean shores were but ill-fitted to bear the brunt of the furious waves of the Atlantic. The now indispensable sextant was but clumsily anticipated by the newly invented astrolabe. The use of the compass had scarcely become familiar to navigators, who indeed but imperfectly understood its properties. And who could tell, it was objected, ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... soon, I turned, and rather clumsily followed my friend. I dislodged a piece of granite in my descent; but, fortunately Slattin had gone out into the hall and could not well have ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... nervousness, of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating in the emotional crisis and Rosalind's abrupt decision—the strain of it had drugged the foreground of his mind into a merciful coma. As he fumbled clumsily with the olives at the free-lunch table, a man approached and spoke to him, and the olives ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... "I talk French clumsily, yet get on somehow.... My French having been chiefly mathematical, I do not know the names of many ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... at them, which only made them the more uneasy. They did n't understand. He snapped his arms harder, as he lifted his voice to the rafters; still they only stared. At last Dad thought he saw through him. He bravely stood up and looked hard at the others. They took the hint and rose clumsily to their feet, but just then the hymn closed, and, as no one seemed to know when to ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... Our modern glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate in its cutting. We are proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of it. The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it. For there is this difference between the English and Venetian workman, that the former thinks only of accurately matching his patterns, and getting his curves perfectly true and his edges perfectly sharp, and becomes a mere ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... be heard on the stairs. They were slow and clanking because the carpets were up and the house full of echoes. To Thor's fevered imagination it seemed as if Claude dragged his feet like a man wearing chains, going haltingly and clumsily before some ominous tribunal. The sensation—it was more that than anything else—caused the elder brother to withdraw into the depths of the library, where he ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... a species of portable leathern skiffs, which seem to have been in the main common oared boats, but on the west coast of Gaul the Santones, the Pictones, and above all the Veneti sailed in large though clumsily built ships, which were not impelled by oars but were provided with leathern sails and iron anchor-chains; and they employed these not only for their traffic with Britain, but also in naval combat. Here therefore we not only meet for the first ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... a firelock in his hands ... he was fumbling with it, very clumsily, by reason of his shattered fingers. He had wandered down a narrow street, and was groping at an iron-studded door. "Won't open," he told the ghosts beside him. "Must try the patent key." He put the muzzle ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... lighter; a load was lifted from me. "To trace the unfamiliar to the familiar," came back a sentence I had read somewhere, "is to understand." It was a real relief. I could talk with Frances now, even with my hostess, no danger of treading clumsily. For the key was in my hands. I might even help to dissipate the Shadow, "to get it straight again." It seemed, perhaps, our long invitation ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... clumsily removed his cap. The odor of Seton's cheroot announced itself above the oriental perfume with which ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... evening. Towards nine he went out on the pretext of seeing to a cow that had lately calved and was in a weakly state. He gave the animal her food and clean litter, doing everything more clumsily than usual. Then he went into the stable and groped about for a lantern that stood in ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Hedrick turned clumsily, and began to stalk back in the direction from which they ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... Wolgast, and hastened forward to the anchor cable. This he seized and shook clumsily several times. The vibrated motion must have been imparted downward, for soon Dan Dalzell's head ...
— Dave Darrin's Fourth Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... a twisted stump of a tail and feet like small boxing gloves and ears almost as big as rabbits' hopped clumsily in view. He lifted it down, gave it a pat. Then, nodding familiarly to Effie, he unstrapped a little pack from his back and laid ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... lighting a fresh cigarette from the dying stump so clumsily that the trembling of the ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... safe, whilst giving the theft the appearance of a night burglary; granting that he was disturbed in his nefarious project by his wife, who, failing to persuade him to make restitution, took his side boldly, and very clumsily attempted to rescue him out of his difficult position—why should he, at nine o'clock the following morning, fall in a dead faint and get cerebral congestion at sight of a defalcation he knew had occurred? One ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... effect of Blackletter with the Roman form is likely to result clumsily. The celebrated Roman faces designed by William Morris (too familiar to require reproduction here) are, despite their real beauty, over-black on the page, and awkward when examined in detail. While the stimulus Morris's ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... walking by the ravine and had clumsily fallen in. He would report it after he had got Curtis back into ...
— Martians Never Die • Lucius Daniel
... head. Then he clumsily unbuttoned the wet waist, glancing rather sheepishly at the window to see if anyone ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... colour and texture to have come to her at second hand, and to have originally belonged to a much larger person, for it bagged and hung in flaps about her jowls and bosom, like an ill—cut maintopsail, which sits clumsily about the clews. I think I could have reefed her with advantage, below ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... my cousin Damaris," he answered as he felt clumsily, being taken unaware in more respects than one, and, for all his ready adaptability, being unable to keep a note of surprise out of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... hearty greeting, but the task was beyond her strength. She found that she no longer held her former social position—in fact, that she had no social status. The best people of the church were coolly polite and clumsily sympathetic. She preferred their coolness. The poorer people were frankly afraid of her. The innocent victim of a tragedy, the world held that she was somehow to blame—perhaps was equally guilty ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... swim, and advised me to extend my hands against the glass to break my fall. I did as he directed, and thrust my feet against the bales of food cases and air cylinders to prevent their falling upon me. Then with a click the window flew open. I fell clumsily upon hands and face, and saw for a moment between my black extended fingers our mother earth—a planet in a ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive islands. We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Bartja out of the way, he had induced a Greek merchant to dispatch a letter to the prince, asking him, in the name of her he loved best, to come alone in the evening to the first station outside the Euphrates gate. Unfortunately, the messenger managed the matter clumsily, and apparently gave the letter to Gaumata. But to counteract Bartja's proof of innocence, Boges had managed to get hold of his dagger, which was conclusive evidence. And now Nitetis was sentenced to be set astride upon an ass and led through the streets of Babylon. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... a short and crooked mast lay, unstopped, along the side. Lashed to it was a sail of rawhides, clumsily caught together with thongs, heavy and stiff, yet ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... were stacked up in an orderly untidiness, and at the far end a fire was burning and five or six men in Darkovan clothing—loose sleeved shirts, tight wrapped breeches, low boots—were squatting around it, talking. They got up as Forth and Kendricks and I walked toward them, and Forth greeted them clumsily, in bad accented Darkovan, then switched to Terran Standard, letting one of the ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... seditious pamphlets with some care, and listened to a number of underground broadcasts, and tried clumsily to sound out those of his acquaintances whom he suspected of rebellious thoughts. It all had to be done very cautiously, with occasional nightmare moments when he thought he was being spied on; and was it right that a man should be afraid to ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... lights. All the outside incandescents of dome, porte-cochre, and vestibules had been extinguished. The inside lights were limited to those in the corridors and the lobbies. The great building on Capitol Hill seemed like a cowardly giant, clumsily intent on ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... clumsily to his feet and then gave Charity a hand up, beating Rupert to it by about three seconds. "As we don't even know whether it is still in existence, there's no use in hunting for it," ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... she said, smiling, and, arranging her skirt and waist-sleeve, sat down, clumsily took the pen into her small, energetic hand, began to laugh and looked ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... military apparatus during the last few decades. The house-appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... and selection. We are, in fact, still somewhat in the same position as Michelangelo the younger. Whether any application of the critical method will enable us to do again successfully what he so clumsily attempted—that is, to reproduce a correct text from the debris offered to our selective faculty—I do not feel sure. Meanwhile I am quite certain that his principle was a wrong one, and that he dealt most unjustifiably ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... phraseology of the Dialogue (compare opos melesei tis...kaka: oti pas aphron mainetai): and the writer seems to have been acquainted with the 'Laws' of Plato (compare Laws). An incident from the Symposium is rather clumsily introduced, and two somewhat hackneyed quotations (Symp., Gorg.) recur. The reference to the death of Archelaus as having occurred 'quite lately' is only a fiction, probably suggested by the Gorgias, where the story of Archelaus is told, and a ...
— Eryxias • An Imitator of Plato
... misled—not intentionally in order to get an effect, but clumsily through amateurishness—then the construction is bad. This calamity does not often occur in fine novels, but in really good work another calamity does occur with far too much frequency—namely, the tantalising of the reader ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... gymnast struck his pupil, though he was applauded by the whole assembly. "You did it clumsily, and not as you ought, for these people would never have praised you ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... about him was the improvement in his spirits: he was losing his air of gloomy savagery; often he smiled—at a dish which took his fancy, and on setting out for the sands to join Pollyooly. At times, when he had performed some small feat, clumsily indeed, but not with a quite incredible clumsiness, he would turn to her a triumphant, but appealing, eye which begged for a word, or a smile of approval. The humane Pollyooly rarely failed to give him that word or smile ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... than that Armenian. Imagine a little shaven head with thick overhanging eyebrows, a beak of a nose, long gray mustaches, and a wide mouth with a long cherry-wood chibouk sticking out of it. This little head was clumsily attached to a lean hunch-back carcass attired in a fantastic garb, a short red jacket, and full bright blue trousers. This figure walked straddling its legs and shuffling with its slippers, spoke without taking the chibouk ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... He had caught the language, surprised it in Stella when she was veritably a child. He did not push her clumsily back into a childhood he had not known; he simply prolonged in her a childhood he had loved. He is "seepy." "Nite, dealest dea, nite dealest logue." It is a real good-night. It breathes tenderness from that moody and uneasy ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Christmas Days abides with peculiar vividness in my memory. In setting down, however clumsily, some slight record of it, I feel that I shall be discharging a duty not only to the two disparately illustrious men who made it so very memorable, but also to all young students of English and Scandinavian ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... there was one with a visage more frightfully mutilated than those of his comrades; the nose having been slit, and subsequently sewed together again, but so clumsily that the severed parts had only imperfectly united, communicating a strange, distorted, and forbidding look to the physiognomy. Clement Lanyere, the owner of this gashed and ghastly face, who was also reft of his ears, and branded on the cheek, had suffered infamy and ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... about his childhood. They are for the most part clumsily constructed and unconvincing, though probably we shall be justified in accepting the evidence they bear of a mind singularly well ordered and resourceful. At the age of sixteen he was employed by a Buddhist priest to assist in distributing amulets, and by the agency ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... she would not have been surprised. The other men she could read. They expressed either frank, simple admiration or furtive desire. But this man looked at her husband, and his eyes fell often upon his own hands, which trembled with fatigue. He handled his knife clumsily, and yet she could see he, too, had a fine hand—a slender, powerful hand, like that people call an artist hand—a ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... been found too large, and the sections had accordingly been cut down to make them fit, the result being that the carving did not match at the junctions. The trunk of the tree had also been cut off rather clumsily at the base and fitted badly to the cabin floor, while the branches had been cut through in places where the beams crossed the ceiling, and had been nailed on again in such a way as to make them look as though they had grown through the beams. Then again ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... him together, Dick and I, and so must needs fall afoul of each other clumsily, giving him time to spring back and so to miss the claymore stroke which else would have shorn him to the middle. Then ensued as pretty a bit of blade work as any master of the old cut-and-thrust school could wish to see; and through it all this ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... his eyes and hopped clumsily about while Marmot sang, "Oh, Raven, Raven, Raven, what a graceful dancer! Oh, Raven, Raven, Raven, what a fool you are!" And with a quick run, Marmot darted between Raven's legs and was safe ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... the key critically, turning it over in order to examine the workmanship. It was clumsily enough made, and he doubtless guessed how she had obtained it. Then he glanced at her as she stood breathless with a ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... time to the berth, he gave a kick to the instrument-box, the lid flew off, and diving in his fist he drew out a bundle of papers. Once more seating himself at the table beneath the swinging lamp, he clumsily undid the papers and ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... twilights, or fourteen Manvantaras; that at the beginning of every Round and at the end, and on and between the planets, there is "an awakening to illusive life," and "an awakening to real life," and that, moreover, there are "root-Manus," and what we have to clumsily translate as the "seed-Manus"—the seeds for the human races of the forthcoming Round (a mystery divulged but to those who have passed the 3rd degree in initiation); those who have learned all that, will be better prepared to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... night's rest, was no whit the worse for his battle with the storm; but he was full of fears lest Valmai's more delicate frame should suffer. He rose with the dawn and made his way over the dewy grass across the valley, and into the field where Essec Powell's cows were just awaking and clumsily rising from their night's sleep under the quiet stars. The storm had disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen, and all nature was rejoicing in the birth of a new day. Gwen was already approaching with pail and milking ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... of devotion, ranking it among the great books of the world. Its literary style, however, is less meritorious; it is difficult and involved. As Chatterton clothed his ideas in a pseudo-archaic English, so Moses of Leon used an Aramaic idiom, which he handled clumsily and not as one to the manner born. It would not be so important to insist on the fact that the Zohar was a literary forgery, that it pretended to an antiquity it did not own, were it not that many Jews and Christians ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... or tunal plant (Opuntia Tuna or Cactus cochinellifera) is indigenous on these islands as well as on the mainland of Africa. But the native growth is woody and lean-leaved; and its cooling fruit, which we clumsily term a 'prickly pear' or 'fig,' is everywhere a favourite in hot climates. There are now sundry claimants to the honour of having here fathered the modern industry. Some say that in 1823 a retired intendant introduced from ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Boris entered, clumsily filling the doorway with his great bulk and bringing with him a strong odor of garlic and Jap sake. For a moment he stood on the threshold, blinking stupidly. Then he pulled the door closed ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... shouted jovially when he saw me; but when I put my fingers to my lips he dismounted clumsily, and met me with the whispered question, "What be in the wind, ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... chair before a writing-desk. Polly wielded her broom about the feet of the Sheriff, who danced clumsily about, trying ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... the painter, he applied his strength to the arms of Mrs. Budd, and, assisted by Rose and Biddy, got her safely into the boat, over its bows. Rose now waited not for assistance, but followed her aunt with a haste that proved fear lent her strength in despite her long fast. Biddy came next, though clumsily, and not without trouble, and Jack Tier followed the instant he was permitted so to do. Of course, the boat, no longer held by its painter, drifted away from the spot, and the hull of the schooner, relieved from the weight of ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... carried 30 such warriors, and often various Greek admirals have crowded their decks with these heavy marines; but the true Athenian sea warrior disdains them. Given a good helmsman and well-trained rowers, and you can sink your opponent with your ram, while he is clumsily trying to board you. Expert opinion considers the EPIBATi somewhat superfluous, and their use in most naval battles as ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... victim is securely nailed to the wood, and the cross is slowly and clumsily lifted and falls with a shock into its socket. The soldiers huzza., the fiend in the tin barrel and another in a tin hat come down to the footlights and throw dice for the raiment. "Caramba! curse my luck!" says our friend in the tin case, and the other walks off ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... backed clumsily from under the bed, dragging with him an old coat rolled into a bundle. "I've fetched him," he muttered. Kneeling on the floor, he unrolled the coat and extracted from its heart ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... level as a table. Undoubtedly before the tipping of the bed of the lakes the water flowed over this path. Indeed, La Salle in one of his letters refers to the portaging here of canoes past an "oak grove and across a flooded meadow." The tree of which he speaks, with two canoes clumsily drawn upon it by the savages, to mark the beginning of the portage at the Wisconsin, has gone, but a monument of red granite now stands there with the names of Marquette and Joliet upon it. At the other end of ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... upon life could be taken as typical of our great and noble-hearted nation. Yet she did take us in that sense, with the result that in her conception of the United Kingdom it was a rather fantastic and clumsily-fashioned small-scale model of ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... her side in an instant, stroking, soothing, comforting her, as though she had been a child. When she partially recovered herself her head was against his shoulder, and he was drying her eyes clumsily but tenderly with ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... looking after it. Next half-a-dozen men, sleeping bolt upright or leaning against one another in their sleep. In one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms, and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents. Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... astonishing dexterity by my alert attendants. All I was provided with was my steel tomahawk and bow and arrows. I never really became expert with the spear and shield, and I knew only too well that if I handled these clumsily I should immediately ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... out at the door, and shut it behind him. And he said: Shall I tell thee the name of thy very pretty deposit? Dost thou think I do not know what thou art endeavouring so clumsily to hide? Nectar when she turns towards thee: poison ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... Dorothea slipped from her uncle's lap. "I'll be back in a minute," and before Laine could press the button which would bring Moses she had disappeared. Five minutes later she was back, in her hands a good-sized paper box, tied clumsily with red string, and as she put it on the table she patted ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the advancing line of skirmishers, usually an active fellow enough, was observed to move clumsily and irregularly. It soon appeared that he had encountered a fine specimen of the domestic goose, which had surrendered at discretion. Not wishing to lose it, he could yet find no way to hold it but between his legs; and so he went on, loading, firing, advancing, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... it was too short and thick for beauty, while occasionally it had the opposite defect, being too tall and slender. Its base was sometimes quite plain, sometimes diversified by a few mouldings, sometimes curiously and rather clumsily rounded (as in No. II., [PLATE LXI., Fig. 1]). The shaft was occasionally patterned. The capital, in one instance (No. I., [PLATE LXI., Fig. 3]), approaches to the Corinthian; in another (No. II.) it reminds us of the Ionic; but the volutes are double, and the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... pleasantly, as he clumsily rose in part from his seat—into which he dropped back, however, as he heard my kindly tone of address, and knew there was to be no severity of reckoning—"well, my boy; ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... consisted of two better than averagely dressed girls who would run somewhere in their early twenties. A little too much make-up by western standards, and clumsily applied. ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... provided with about eight rungs, but a few have as many as twelve. The women ascend these ladders carrying ollas of water on their heads, children play upon them, and a few of the most expert of the numerous dogs that infest the village can clumsily make their way up and down them. As described in a previous section all houses built during the year are consecrated at a certain season, and among other details of the ceremonial, certain rites, intended to prevent accidents to children, etc., are performed ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... livelihood by agricultural labor; or, Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; or Candide and his motley associates, at work in their cabbage-garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter was that the first energetic movement essential ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... after disposing of it started out again, only to make a trip as disastrous as the former had been fortunate. There was a week of the "dirtiest" kind of weather,—head-winds, fogs, and treacherous "breezes," which strained every timber in the old tub of a Nautilus, as she rolled clumsily about in the ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... strip for its imaginings, it was slow in coming narrower again, and need required that it be filled. But here is where the variance lay: Raphael had so much to say that he begged space in which to portray it; his imitators had so much space to fill that their heavy imagination bungled clumsily in the effort. They filled it, then, with a heterogeneous mass of foliage, fruit and flowers, trained occasionally to make a bower for a woman, a stand for a warrior, but all out of scale, never keeping to any standard, and lost absolutely in ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... similar form on the Malabar coast; and the catamaran is common to Ceylon and Coromandel. The awkward dhoneys, built at Jaffna, and manned by Tamils, are imitated from those at Madras; while the Singhalese dhoney, south of Colombo, is but an enlargement of the Galle canoe with its outrigger, so clumsily constructed that the gunwale is frequently topped by a line of wicker-work smeared with clay, to protect the deck front the wash of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... his breast-pocket, became motionless for ten seconds, then woke up again and produced her letter. He drew it clumsily from its envelope, and handed it ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... wrist bone, Jan Cuxson wrenched the ring he had loosened from the wall, and stood swaying, sick with pain. Sweat poured down his face and bare chest, and blood flowed from his wrists while his burst finger-tips fumbled clumsily with the ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... Clumsily I patted her bare shoulder. For an instant her wet cheek was pressed against my own, then she went gliding swiftly away, her face once again proud and empty of all human feeling. At the door she turned, swept her palm once over her ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... self-sacrifice, so perfect, so essential, from birth to death, as to exclude the notion of volition. She is what she does. Of course she has to put her sacrifice into words from time to time, but its true language is acts, and the acts themselves only clumsily express it. There is a kind of tyranny in it for the man, of course. It requires self-sacrifice to be sacrificed to, and I don't suppose a woman has any particular merit in what is so purely natural. It appears pathetic when it is met ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... now kill a pirate, to show Hook's method. Skylights will do. As they pass, Skylights lurches clumsily against him, ruffling his lace collar; the hook shoots forth, there is a tearing sound and one screech, then the body is kicked aside, and the pirates pass on. He has not even taken the cigars ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... upon him. He trampled the grass clumsily and tore up the earth with his front hoofs. When he had ended, he looked for the Mouse, but he could ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... same logs arranged so that the angle of incidence strikes the back of the chimney and the smoke ascends in the full and orderly manner. But both Figs. 285 and 287 are clumsily arranged. The B logs in each case should be the backlog and the small logs A and C should be ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... uncomprehending instant, something in its appearance brought a surge of sick disgust to Garfield's throat. Then the stick bent slowly halfway down its length, forming a sharp angle, and its tip opened into what could have been three blunt, black claws which scrabbled clumsily against the pavement. Very faintly, the squealing began again, and the body's back arched up as if another sticklike arm were pushing desperately against ...
— An Incident on Route 12 • James H. Schmitz
... face confronted her when she opened the door. The weather was moderating fast that morning. The sun had the warmth of spring, and the old man stood in a shower of rainbow drops from the melting icicles on the eaves. He handed her a letter, backed clumsily and apologetically from under the drops, then retreated carefully down the slippery path, his clumsy old ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... as Octavia—" she thought, "but she is very sweet—and her eyes—they have that same longing to be happy—" she sighed as she tiptoed clumsily out of the room and down the draughty stairway. She stood respectfully beside the Major's chair. "Monsieur," she said gravely, "does Miss Felicia know anything at all about all ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... Plato: [Greek: metabole tis tugchanei ousa kai metoikeois te psuche ton topon tou enthende eis allon tochon], then metabole, from 'the other place,' back to earth; then, with advancing speculation, fresh metabole again, and so on; a theory more or less clumsily united ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... quiet ship shouldered clumsily over the rollers, now gushing down till she dipped her martingale, now swooping up again, sending whole cataracts of water ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... became friends. She was so gay and grown up, so busy with parties and dances and picnics, that I would scarcely have seen much of her had we not sung together. She liked me better than she did any of the older girls, who tried clumsily to be like her, and I felt almost as solicitous and admiring as did Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Spinny. I think even then I must have loved to see her bloom and glow, and I loved to hear her sing, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... this strange, wild poem, which extends to about two hundred and fifty lines, the only copy that Lord Byron, I believe, ever wrote, he presented to Lord Holland. Though with a good deal of vigour and imagination, it is, for the most part, rather clumsily executed, wanting the point and condensation of those clever verses of Mr. Coleridge[103], which Lord Byron, adopting a notion long prevalent, has attributed to Professor Person. There are, however, some of the stanzas of "The Devil's Drive" well ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... a canoe," she said a little tremulously. He steadied her with his hand, smiling a little at her graceful awkwardness. Then he showed her how to place herself in the little seat in the centre, with a cushion at her back. He did it clumsily enough for he was embarrassed and nervous in her presence. In all his years of paddling about the lake it was but the second time he had taken a young lady into his canoe, and the first one he had rescued out of the water, and this one off a lonely point of land. So he was not ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... she has not. And yet there have been times when the poor girl has wanted to speak, and yet could not quite bring herself to take the plunge. I have tried to help her, but I daresay I did it clumsily, and scared her from it. She has spoken about my old family, and our reputation in the county, and our pride in our unsullied honour, and I always felt it was leading to the point, but somehow it turned off ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bowing to us, as a man bows when without his hat, and in a white cravat, that is to say, clumsily, blew his nose, to the great relief of his two arms which he did not know what to do with, and briskly began the little ceremony. He hurriedly mumbled over several passages of the Code, giving the numbers of the paragraphs; and I was given confusedly ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... to know that a man, clumsily disguised and answering to your description, pawned some of the Withers jewelry in Baltimore today?" ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... whip. There was no loud singing, as in southern ports, where ships are loading or unloading—no loud cursing or{269} swearing—but everything went on as smoothly as the works of a well adjusted machine. How different was all this from the nosily fierce and clumsily absurd manner of labor-life in Baltimore and St. Michael's! One of the first incidents which illustrated the superior mental character of northern labor over that of the south, was the manner of unloading a ship's ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... unvisited by civilization save as received through the medium of a few semi-barbarous travellers, may contain treasures which they are now unknown to possess; mines of copper, lead, and antimony, now clumsily worked, may be made to yield of their abundance; tracts of uncultivated lands be brought into rich cultivation, and efficient means of transport would carry their produce far and wide through the country. Katmandu itself would be on the high road for the costly trade of Chinese Tartary and ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... German Ambassador in Washington has zealously spread these reports in the attempt to create in the United States a feeling hostile to us, but the good sense of the Americans has prevented them from falling into the clumsily laid snare. I hope that the good relations between Russia and America will not suffer from ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in the seat of Counsel, your Majesty, and he hath clumsily spoiled your plans. How indeed ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... taking so much trouble; we can do it by lazy acquiescence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we hardly know a reason, by small frauds neutralized by small extravagances, by maladroit flatteries, and clumsily improvised insinuations. We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... towards such a thoroughness of mobilisation. There need be no doubt that she will completely socialise herself, completely reorganise her whole social and economic structure sooner than lose this war. She will do it clumsily and ungracefully, with much internal bickering, with much trickery on the part of her lawyers, and much baseness on the part of her landlords; but she will do it not so slowly as a logical mind might anticipate. She will get there a little late, expensively, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... thought behind it; a sixth, through a chattering, outward erudition; others still through a slashing sneer at everything that is said ... many with the terrible Russian word YERUNDA: "Fiddlesticks!"—"Fiddlesticks!" they say contemptuously in reply to the warm, sincere, probably truthful but clumsily put word. "But why fiddlesticks?" "Because it's twaddle, nonsense," answer they, shrugging their shoulders; and it is as though they did for a man by hitting him with a stone over the head. There are many more sorts of such people, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... wirelesses!) He is suffering so hideously, and so determinedly, like a fakir. He feels he must speed the parting soul with the Scriptures and he reads terrifying things about weird beasts,—lion-mouthed leopards with feet like bears—and when he goes downstairs I try—very clumsily, M.D.—to tell Dan'l about the God you know, the one who goes with you into dark alleys and dark hearts. I wish you were here ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... for this. By expressing themselves intellectual artists appeal to us aesthetically; but, in addition, by making, or seeming to make, some statement about the nature of the artistic problem they set us thinking. We feel sure they have something to say about the very stuff of art which we, clumsily enough, can grasp intellectually. With purely aesthetic qualities the intellect can do nothing: but here, it seems, is something the brain can get hold of. Therefore we study them and they become our leaders; which does not make them our greatest ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... went about rather clumsily getting the things together, picking them up by the wrong end, and laying them in ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... sliding to a stop, forefeet planted, snow and dirt flying from his hoofs. De Launay was leaping to the ground and the pack horses were galloping clumsily up. Then his arms were around her and she was lifted from ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... roomy, enough to admit clumsily-shaped shoes, such as are made in the bush; they must be broad under the sole of the foot, and also at the place which rubs against the little toe. Unless they are heavy, it is not easy to find them with the foot; ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... that you would like it no better, that it would be no better, than the bit of "builder's glazing" in the top quatrefoil of the next window, which looks like, and I fancy is, of almost the very same glass, but clumsily mixed, and, fortunately, dated for ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... very easy crossings of the fingers, put my hands in different positions, and the like—movements that they could not ever have seen—and I was surprised that some of the children at once made them deftly, whereas ordinary children, first consider a long time, and then imitate clumsily. It is doubtless this exaltation of the imitative functions in deaf-mute children which makes it appear as if they themselves invented their gestures (see above, p. 23). Certainly they do not get their first signs through "any one's suggestion," they ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... followed first one occupation and then another, or if he worked as hard as he possibly could for a definite period and then took holiday? I suspect very strongly, indeed I am convinced, that in certain occupations, teaching, for example, or surgery, a man begins by working clumsily and awkwardly, that his interest and skill rise rapidly, that if he is really well suited in his profession he may presently become intensely interested and capable of enormous quantities of his very best work, and that then his interest and vigour ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... waiter came in his blue apron. A new miracle! He was a living image of the Candidate! And now came the maid. A new amazement! A handsomer person, or one that more nearly resembled Henrik it would have been impossible to find! But she went about clumsily, and had nearly fallen down, stumbling first with this, and then with that. The host scolded her vehemently on account of her clumsiness, and scolded the waiter also till he made them both cry, at least so it seemed; whereupon he chased them both out with the order to return instantly ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... him, her spirit shining like fire in her eyes. "The whole six of them. I knew they were not our cattle. I saw how the brands had been worked, clumsily worked. Oh, my God, Steve Packard, what ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... though from inward depths clumsily fumbling for words, he always arrived at the same goal. The thought was at last as clear and lucid as a birch leaf ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... calmness, and resolution of the one great man of the revolution, George Washington. I shall in a later chapter refer to this treaty in which the boundaries between Canada and the new republic were so ignorantly and clumsily defined that it took half a century and longer to settle the vexed questions that arose in connection with territorial rights, and then the settlement was to the injury of Canada. So far as the treaty affected the Provinces its ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... a large number of chemists and physicists to the ideas of M. Arrhenius was at first very fierce. It must be noted with regret that, in France particularly, recourse was had to an arm which scholars often wield rather clumsily. They joked about these free ions in solution, and they asked to see this chlorine and this sodium which swam about the water in a state of liberty. But in science, as elsewhere, irony is not argument, and it soon had to be acknowledged that ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... southern figure, slender but strong, which makes perhaps the best representative of our American beauty. She was very bravely arrayed to-day in her best pink-flowered lawn, made wide and full, as was the custom of the time, but not so clumsily gathered at the waist as some, and so serving not wholly to conceal her natural comeliness of figure. Her bonnet she had removed. I could see the sunlight on the ripples of her brown hair, and the shadows which lay above her eyes as she turned to face me, and the ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... luck in milking, and managing the matter very clumsily, the uneasy beast began to think him very troublesome; and at last gave him such a kick on the head as knocked him down; and there he lay a long while senseless. Luckily a butcher soon came by, driving a pig in a wheelbarrow. 'What is the matter with you, my man?' said ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... go?" demanded Mr. Blithers, in the saddle. Two grooms were clumsily trying to insert his toes into the stirrups, at the same time pulling down his trousers legs, which had a tendency to hitch up in what seemed to them a most exasperating disregard for form. To their certain knowledge, Mr. ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... de kittle," she wheezed out, then relaxed into groans, and wiped clumsily at the sweat on her shining ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... beginning to see the puerility of such reproaches. It was certainly of the forty volumes of this fastidious publication that Mr. William James was thinking when he wrote that all these dissertations simply represented "a string of facts clumsily observed and a few quarrelsome discussions.'' Although he is the author of the best known treatise on psychology extant, the eminent thinker realises "the fragility of a science that oozes metaphysical criticism at every joint.'' For more than twenty years I have tried ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... apprehensions in the case of a foreign language is partially true even with the tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed, we all speak different dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another loose and meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall correspond and fit upon the truth of fact—not clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like an athlete's skin. And what is the result? That the one can open himself more clearly to his friends, and can enjoy more of what makes life truly valuable—intimacy with those he loves. An orator makes a false step; he employs ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... foreheads. Then the powerful animals would push and wrestle, trying for a chance to gore. The decision of supremacy was a question of but a few minutes, and a bloody topknot the worst damage. The defeated one side-stepped hastily and clumsily out of reach, ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... dad—I think I'll go to bed." Even this little came clumsily. I had never called ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... the defects in them. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyric and the more copious remains of Icelandic display, with no little power and pathos, and plenty of ill-organised "cry," an almost total lack of ability to sing. Every now and then their natural genius enables them to hit, clumsily and laboriously, on something—the refrain of the Complaint of Deor, the stepped stanzas of the Lesson of Loddfafni—resembling the more accomplished methods of more educated and long-descended literatures. But the poets are always in a Robinson Crusoe condition, and worse: for Robinson ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... matter when he says that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self in posse which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing centre. What then must the person do? "He must relax," says Dr. Starbuck—"that is, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... moustaches recently removed; the eyes coal black, with sinister glances sent in suspicious furtiveness from under a broad hat-brim pulled low down over the brow; the figure fairly shaped, but with garments coarse and clumsily fitting, too ample both for body and limbs, as if intended to conceal rather than ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... I dropped into the water; but somehow or other I turned over very clumsily, and, like the Ranatra, I fell through into the colander, and was transferred to ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... thing about getting stronger. He did not know what he said; he was sorry, as one is sorry for a suffering child. The figure in the bed looked at him with scared eyes. One of the pillows slipped a little, and Samuel pulled it up, clumsily to be sure, but with the decided touch of pity and purpose, the touch of the superior. That fixing the pillow behind the shaking helpless head, swept away the last traces of the quarrel. He sat down by the gloomy catafalque of a bed, and when Benjamin Wright began to say again, ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... In crowding clumsily to the window to see whether he was speaking the truth, the fellows overturned the little writing-table. As it fell over a chink of loose coin was heard. "There's money in that thing," cried the blacksmith. In a moment the top of the delicate piece of furniture was smashed ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... there sat the look of one resigned with fatalism to whatever issue might appear. She made no further speech, but was the first to step into the boat. Madame Delchasse, still grumbling, followed clumsily. Eddring helped them in, took up the oars, and the two deck-hands, who had been holding the skiff, clambered back aboard the Queen. Eddring settled himself to the oars, and they cast off. The little skiff rocked, tossed, turned, and headed toward the shore under the strong stroke of the ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... clumsily about the heads of milk-weed blossoms. Cicada droned in long, loud crescendo and diminuendo under the hot sun of mid forenoon. A sensitive plant, or as Judith herself would have said, a "shame briar," ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... Glass-Eye, half asleep, clumsily gathered up her parcels, while Lily looked round for the baggage-man. On the platform was an avalanche of bags, boxes, picture-frames, as at the departure from Euston; the basket trunks were being piled up in the theater-vans. Lily pointed out her hamper and her bike to ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... tinted infantine complexion which only accompanies red hair; his eyes were brightly blue; his features well chiselled, with the exception of the lips, which were clumsily cut and loosely held together. He came down to breakfast in a not very agreeable mood, for he had been drinking for the last week, and this was the first time he had been thoroughly sober for that period. His head ached, his tongue was hot and leathery; he kept his hands in his trousers-pockets ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... and in a remarkable speech.... It included an unparliamentary eulogium on Mr. Cobden, whom it mentioned, to the surprise of the House, by name, and it terminated with a panegyric of himself, elaborate, but rather clumsily expressed."—Lord George Bentinck, a Political Biography, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... representative of that portion of the race that has poisoned whole generations by improving the frying-pan and perpetuating "fatty bread." The impression she made upon those who saw her for the first time was one of lank flatness—to convey a vivid idea rather clumsily. But she was neither lank nor flat. The total absence of all attempts at artificial ornamentation gave the future Mrs. Poteet an appearance of forlorn shiftlessness that was not even slightly justified by the facts. ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris |
