"Gnarled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a high bank situated at the point of junction between Swanside Beck and the Ribble, stood an old, decayed oak. Little of the once mighty tree beyond the gnarled trunk was left, and this was completely hollow; while there was a great rift near the bottom through which a man might easily creep, and, when once in, stand erect without inconvenience. Beneath the bank the river was deep and still, forming a pool, where the largest ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... its native dust, in the arid sands of Florida; for, as we rode on, we saw gigantic pine, cedar, and hiccory trees, torn up by the roots, and scattered over the surrounding country, by by-gone hurricanes, many of them hundreds of yards from the spot that nurtured their roots—while the gnarled branches lying across our track, scorched black-with the lightning, or from long exposure to a burning sun, impeded our advance, and made the ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... steep, between the gnarled roots of a rugged oak one could see a narrow aperture, dark and mysterious, which was partially hidden by ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... this tree out of the way of the brute. I'll help you up, sir," he sung out, beginning to make his own way up the gnarled and ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... them, dank and chill. It was as if the clock had been put back four hours. Only a jagged strip of sky, between projecting crags, announced the advent of day. No living thing seemed to inhabit this region of perpetual twilight. At intervals a gnarled and twisted bush grew out of a cleft, lifting spectral foliage toward where the sun should be, and was not. Silence pervaded the dusk like a living presence; unseen, but so poignantly felt that the whisper of the stream and the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder.— Merciful Heaven! Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man! Dress'd in a little brief authority,— Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence,—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... least over their rough looks and dress. They knew something of the real men that usually dwelt within these rough exteriors—the men who hewed the way for civilization through the wilderness, the men of the rifle, the trap, and the ax, strong and sturdy and as gnarled and knotted as the oaks of their own forests, yet as true to a friend or to the right as they saw it, as the balls in their rifles were to their sights—and neither boy hesitated an instant to accept their invitation to "jog along" with ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... some three hours after sunrise, when they made halt in a hollow of the hills not far from Fabriano. They tethered their horses in a grove of peaceful laurel and sheltering mulberry, at the foot of a slope that was set with olive trees, grey, gnarled and bent as aged cripples, and beside the river Esino at a spot where it was so narrow that an agile man might leap its width. Here, then, they spread their cloaks, and Zaccaria unpacked his victuals, and set before them a simple meal of bread ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... ripened, above on the tree, The world is wasted with fire and sword, But the apple of gold hangs over the sea, Five links, a golden chain, are we, Hesper, the dragon, and sisters three, Daughters three, Bound about All round about The gnarled bole of the charmed tree, The golden apple, the golden apple, the hallowed fruit, Guard it well, guard it warily, Watch it warily, Singing airily, ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... flower, the blighted bud, the gnarled oak, the ferocious beast, - like the discords of disease, sin, 78:3 and death, - are unnatural. They are the fal- sities of sense, the changing deflections of mor- tal mind; they are not the eternal realities ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... blackness, and his body was covered with a hairy growth that matted like a dog's on his chest and shoulders. He was deep-chested, thick-legged, large-muscled, but unshapely. His muscles were knots, and he was gnarled and knobby, twisted out of beauty ...
— The Game • Jack London
... them, during their life, to their juices or dust, and not allowed sensibly to pollute the air, I should like the scholar to re-read pp. 251, 252 of vol. i., and then to consider with himself what a grotesquely warped and gnarled thing the modern scientific mind is, which fiercely busies itself in venomous chemistries that blast every leaf from the forests ten miles round; and yet cannot tell us, nor even think of telling us, nor does even one of its pupils think of asking ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... dad!" Harold squeezed his gnarled hand. "And you, mother! You have lifted the trouble from my heart. I feel another man. You have saved my honor, my good name, everything. I cannot owe you more, for I owe ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the villa. Two days before, Frau von Buelow, the last of the Humboldts, had been carried forth, to rest beside her husband and children, her father William, and her uncle Alexander von Humboldt. The gnarled and twisted stem of a venerable ivy clasps with two arms one of the most majestic of the tall trees before the house, one branch bearing large leaves of a tender green, the other small and beautifully outlined leaves of dark maroon exquisitely veined. Beds ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... smile lit up the gnarled face, and Nancy remembered what Jack had so often said as to Mere Bideau's clever way of dealing with visitors, especially ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... both Ruth's couple and little Jim; he was a huge success. He ousted the grandfather—so much more vivid were his tales, so much more amusing the things he could do with a penknife and a bit of wood. Whistles, whips, boats, all seemed to grow under his gnarled old hands, with their discoloured and broken nails, as though without effort. And watching his success, knowing by some instinct he would not have told for fear of misconstruction to any but Judy, who always understood, that some malign wish to hurt lay at the springs of his brother's ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... tender-hearted garden crowns, No bosomed woods adorn Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs, But gnarled and writhen thorn— Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim, And through the gaps revealed Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim Blue goodness of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... locked up in a leafy embrace. But when the leaves have shredded away and the solid barriers of green stand revealed as only thin fringes of easily penetrable woodland, the eye moves with surprise over these wide reaches of colour and freedom. Beyond the old ruined farmhouse past the gnarled and rheumatic apple tree is that dimpled path that runs across fields, the short cut down to the harbour. The stiff frozen plumes of ghostly goldenrod stand up pale and powdery along the way. How many tints of brown and fawn and buff in the withered ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... had been enough, there never would have been a Calvary. No one for a moment dreams that the God of nature could have brought forth such a fruit as the life and ideas of Jesus without a tree of such a history, a tree rooted in the ground, storm-twisted, gnarled, and valuable only for its fruit. We are not asked to eat the roots and bark and branches; only the fruit has an appeal to us. Its appeal is to our hunger, its authority lies in the fact that ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... swimming in shallow and shallower water, and the flats seemed almost bare when I neared the shore, where the great gnarled branches of the live-oaks hung far over the muddy bank. Floating on my back for noiselessness, I paddled rapidly in with my hands, expecting momentarily to hear the challenge of the picquet, and the ominous click so likely to follow. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Sokwenna saw his master walk across the open, and something in the manner of his going brought back a vision of another day long ago when Ghost Kloof had rung with the cries of battle, and the hands now gnarled and twisted with age had played their part in the heroic stand of his people against the oppressors from ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... gleaming; Thunders rolling dread, Shake the mountain's head; Nature's war Echoes far, O'er ether borne, That flash The ash Has scath'd and torn! Now it rages; Oaks of ages, Writhing in the furious blast, Wide their leafy honours cast; Their gnarled arms do force to force oppose Deep rooted in the crevic'd rock, The sturdy trunk sustains the shock, Like dauntless hero firm ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of a hill, facing the east, a tuft of old, moss grown willows, whose rugged bark disappeared beneath the climbing branches of wild honeysuckle and harebells, formed a natural harbor; and on their gnarled and enormous roots, covered with thick moss, were seated a man and a woman, whose white hair, deep wrinkles, and bending figures, announced extreme old age. And yet this woman had only lately been young and beautiful, with long black hair overshadowing her pale ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... against a gnarled and twisted oak, His soul a listening intensity, And all his strength, seemed leaving him; he drew A quick and stifled breath of sharpest pain, As they rode on, and thought of Agathar, Watching and waiting ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... the dearest little picnic place, with soft green grass for a carpet, and gnarled roots of great ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... dissolving into branches like the American elm, and sometimes continuous to the top. The finest specimens in open land are characterized by a rather short, massive trunk, with stout, horizontal, far-reaching limbs, conspicuously gnarled and twisted in old age, forming a wide-spreading, open head of striking grandeur, the diameter at the base of which is sometimes two or three times the height of ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... and fields that separate the proud city of Hayesville and the gray and green little old hamlet of Riverfield, which nestles in a bend of the Cumberland River and sleeps time away under its huge old oak and elm and hackberry trees, kept perpetually green by the gnarled old cedars that throw blue-berried green fronds around their winter nakedness. As we rode slowly along, with a leisure I am sure all the motor-car world has forgotten exists, the two old boys on the front seat hummed and chuckled happily while I breathed ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... fast to himself and making slight, restless efforts to move. At last he grew quiet, and presently his half-open gnarled right hand came groping out over the covers. I took it in mine, and at once I felt it close on mine with a quick, convulsive strength. His hand was moist, his eyes saw nothing. I sat there thus for a long ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... and Mrs. Burgoyne. Eleanor was sitting in the deep shade of the avenue that ran along the outer edge of the garden. Through the gnarled trunks to her right shone the blazing stretches of the Campagna, melting into the hot shimmer of the Mediterranean. A new volume of French memoirs, whereof not a page had yet been cut, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... darkness; but out of the depths shone many a bright star in infinite brilliancy. The scene was picturesque in the highest degree. The flickering firelight, our Serbians in their quaint dresses moving about the gnarled roots and antlered branches of the trees, upon which the light played fitfully, and the mystery of that outer rim of darkness, all helped to impress the fancy with the charm ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture of this roof-garden, with (by way of local colour) on one of the copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... rough Document, giving Friedrich Wilhelm's regulations on this subject, from his own hand, has come down to us. Most dull, embroiled, heavy Document; intricate, gnarled, and, in fine, rough and stiff as natural bull-headedness helped by Prussian pipe-clay can make it;—contains some excellent hints, too; and will show us something of Fritzchen and of Friedrich Wilhelm both at once. That is to say, always, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... So saying, she made him more comfortable by placing a pillow beneath his head; and then, thinking possibly that this to herself was a "case of emergency," she withdrew to a little distance, and sitting down upon the gnarled roots of an upturned tree drank a swallow of the old Cognac, while the young man, maimed and disabled, looked wistfully ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... up and paced the room once or twice, grasping his extinguished pipe absently in his hand. Suddenly a blast seemed to spring out of nowhere and rush madly round the enclosed garden, tossing the gnarled and leafy branches of the old orchard trees and dragging at the long trails of creepers on wall and trellis. It blew in at the windows, hot as from the heart of the thunder-cloud, and waved the curtains before it. It rushed into the very ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... of an old hawthorn is more gnarled and rough than, perhaps, that of any other tree; and this, with its hoary appearance, and its fragrance, renders it a favourite tree with pastoral and rustic poets, and with those to whom they address their songs. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... unsophisticated bee-hunter, turning abruptly to his aged friend. "The meanest insect that skims the heavens, when it has got its load, flies straight and honestly to its nest or hive, according to its kind; but the ways of a woman's mind are as knotty as a gnarled oak, and more crooked than ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... they walked along, side by side, without a word. They reached a paved road that stretched out as far as the eye could see, between two lines of lanterns, between two rows of gnarled trees that held aloft handfuls of bare branches and cast their slender, motionless shadows on high blank walls. There, in the keen air, chilled by the evaporation of the snow, they walked on and on for a long time, burying ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... old gnarled trees on the southern ramparts, a wind that sounded like the sigh of swiftly ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the weight of years, grew round the house. The patriarch among them had let fall one of his gnarled supplicating arms in the winter, and there it still lay where it ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... among the gnarled roots of an old elm, where they could look across at Paradise and down on a bed of gorgeous rhododendrons, over which great moths, more marvelously colored than the flowers, flitted lazily in the twilight. Then Betty plunged into ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... gnarled hand was stretched out and eagerly seized upon the beautiful little Marlin, which was quickly ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in the open chambers of the structure. Then, as for the town wall, on the outside an orchard extends peacefully along its base, full, not of apple-trees, but of those old humorists with gnarled trunks and twisted boughs, the olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, or burrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the gray, martial towers, crowned with ruined turrets, have been converted into rustic habitations, from ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... holiday resorts of Bessie and Rudolph was a lovely spot in the forest, not a quarter of a mile from the house. Shaded by giant oaks, whose gnarled roots lay like serpents, half hidden in the moss, ran a streamlet, covered with sunny speckles, where parted leaves admitted the sunshine. Flowers grew along its banks in wild profusion, and it held its wayward course with many a rippling fall and fantastic turn, ...
— Po-No-Kah - An Indian Tale of Long Ago • Mary Mapes Dodge
... Dunfer—or, as he was familiarly known in the neighborhood, Whisky Jo.—was a very important personage in those parts. He was apparently about forty years of age, a long, shock-headed fellow, with a corded face, a gnarled arm and a knotty hand like a bunch of prison-keys. He was a hairy man, with a stoop in his walk, like that of one who is about to spring upon something ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... base of a great China-berry on whose gnarled protruding roots she rested an arm languidly, Therese looked out over the river and gave herself up to doubts and misgivings. She first took exception with herself for that constant interference in the concerns of other people. Might not this propensity be carried too far at ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... the April sun smiles upon the meadow grass till it is very green and long enough to wave in the wind, and all amongst it the blue scilla flowers are like dewdrops reflecting the blue that hangs above the gnarled arms of the still leafless walnut trees. The cottage where Celeste lived was out from the village, among the meadows, and to the most hidden side of it young Fernand came on the eve of the day on which she must leave it for ever. Very far off the snow mountains had ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... entirely answered to the popular prefix of Flint attached to his name. He was a wiry, gnarled, heavy-browed, iron-jawed fellow of about sixty, with deep-set eyes aglow with sinister and greedy instincts. His wife, older than he, and as deaf apparently as the door of a dungeon, wore a simpering, imbecile look of wonderment, it seemed to me, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... in primitive short gowns and petticoats, with the venerable sun-bonnets of Holland origin. The lower part of the valley was cut up into small farms, each consisting of a little meadow and corn-field; an orchard of sprawling, gnarled apple-trees, and a garden, where the rose, the marigold, and the hollyhock were permitted to skirt the domains of the capacious cabbage, the aspiring pea, and the portly pumpkin. Each had its prolific little mansion teeming ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... the lean and tough birds in the old settlements, that lingered around the clearings and stumps of the trees, in the topmost of whose branches the fear of man compelled them to rest, but young and full fed. The trees in this new land were of no stinted or gnarled growth, but shot up tall, straight, and taper. The yellow poplar here threw up into the air a column of an hundred feet shaft in a contest with the sycamore for the pre-eminence of the woods. Their wives and children ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... unusual with the old!" (Here Mr. Pinto thrust his knuckles into his hollow eyes; and, I am sorry to say, so little regardful was he of personal cleanliness, that his tears made streaks of white over his gnarled dark hands.) "Ah, at fifteen, poor child, thy fate was terrible! Go to! It is not good to love me, friend. They prosper not who do. I divine you. You need not say what ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tall tree that stood on the slope of the hill they found a scene that was uproar rampant. Five maddened dogs gazed aloft into the gnarled branches of the persimmon king and danced and jumped to the accompaniment of one another's insane yelps. A half-dozen negro boys were in the same attitude and state of mind, and the ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the gnarled hand and tried to show that he wished he could help, but the only thing he could do was to show the love and sympathy that filled his loyal heart. That night when the light was out and everything was quiet, Jan lay wide awake trying to puzzle out what it all meant, and then he heard ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... grass, in the open spaces between, was sparse, and there was much moss and lichen and drifts of withered leaves, dried by the sun of more than one summer; and here and there in the northern shadow of some gnarled trunk and in dipping hollows the leaves were packed close in a damp and moulding compress. Great streamers of wild grape-vine hung precariously from weary limbs and swayed to and fro gently in the wind that came mounting up the slope from the west and went dipping away to the eastward, leaving ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... nor eyesight to waste, this much of merely necessary abstract must serve you,—that from the Drachenfels and its six brother felsen, eastward, trending to the north, there runs and spreads a straggling company of gnarled and mysterious craglets, jutting and scowling above glens fringed by coppice, and fretful or musical with stream; the crags, in pious ages, mostly castled, for distantly or fancifully Christian purposes;—the ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... country spot, but I was surprised to observe that by the gate there stood two soldierly men in dark uniforms, who leaned upon their short rifles and glanced keenly at us as we passed. The coachman, a hard-faced, gnarled little fellow, saluted Sir Henry Baskerville, and in a few minutes we were flying swiftly down the broad, white road. Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but behind ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... extended a gnarled forefinger and pointed toward the rear of the house. Billy looked in the direction thus indicated and espied a woodpile. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... out among ye. Shakee, nephew! Shakee, Hector! And now who's the boy in the window? My eyes aren't what they used to be, but he don't seem to favor the Westonhaughs over-much. One of Salmon's four grandchildren, think 'e? Or a shoot from Eustace's gnarled old trunk? His gals all married Americans, and one of them, I've been told, was a yellow-haired giant ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... river had no distinguishable banks at all, for it is the nature of the mangrove to grow in the water—using its roots as legs with which, as it were, to wade away from shore. When darkness fell suddenly on the landscape, as it is prone to do in tropical regions, the gnarled roots of those mangroves assumed the appearance of twining snakes in Nigel's eyes. Possessing a strongly imaginative mind he could with difficulty resist the belief that he saw them moving slimily about in the black water, and, in the dim mysterious light, tree-stems ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... growth, the pine-trees (there should be NAMES for trees, as there are for rocks or ancient strongholds). Mr. Edgeworth showed us the oak from Jerusalem, the grove of cypress and sycamore where the beautiful depths of ground ivy are floating upon the DEBRIS, and soften the gnarled roots, while they flood ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... of the lane a row of elm-trees displayed their gnarled, knotted roots. Human beings were seated there, whose matted hair clung round their tired faces. Their gaunt limbs were clothed in rags; each had a stick, and some sort of dirty bundle tied to it. They were asleep. On a bench beyond, two toothless old women sat, moving their eyes from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... decked the rude pavement of the ocean. The lichen and the moss reared their tiny fronds on the first rocks that emerged from the deep; land-plants, evolving the various forms of fruit and flower, next arose,—the Upas and the bread-fruit tree, the gnarled oak and the lofty cedar. Animal life appeared when the granary of nature was ready with its supplies. A globule, having a new globule forming within itself, which is the fundamental form of organic being, may be produced in albumen by electricity; and as such globules may be identical with ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... medlar tree, very warped and gnarled, was at the bottom of the lawn, and beyond this a small kitchen-garden, with abundance of gooseberry and currant-bushes, and vast resources in the shape of mint, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... elements of natural beauty; but among us the love of what is new so predominates, that we have known the largest oak in a county to be cut down by the selectmen to make room for a shanty schoolhouse, simply because the tree was of "no account," being hollow and gnarled, and otherwise delightfully picturesque. Our people are singularly dead also to the value of beauty in public architecture; and while they clear away a tree which the seasons have been two centuries in building, they will put up with as little remorse a stone or brick abomination that shall ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... as he tasted the rain. Who, O ye men, is the strongest among you here, ye shakers of heaven and earth, when you shake them like the hem of a garment? At your approach the son of man holds himself down; the gnarled cloud fled at your fierce anger. They at whose racings the earth, like a hoary king, trembles for fear on their ways, their birth is strong indeed: there is strength to come forth from their mother, nay, there is vigor twice enough for it. And these sons, the singers, stretched out the fences in ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... ourselves; and the web is too intensely wove and drenched in too deep a dye for us to undo or greatly change. The eagle cannot be tamed down to the softness of a dove, and no art of the husbandman can send into the gnarled and knotted oak the juices that shall smooth and melt its stiffness into the yielding pliancy of the willow. I wage no war with the work of the gods. Besides, the demands of Rome have now grown to such a size that they swallow up our very existence as a free and sovereign state. They leave us ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... put his gnarled hand up and passed it over his eyes and over his forehead and then he did answer in ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the war, which had been fought over the region of twelve hundred miles of coast, had proved the repellent differences of the various districts. The slave-breeder and the slave-owner of Virginia and the States of the South had little in common with the gnarled descendants of the later Puritans in New England. What principle could be found to knit them together? The war had at least the advantage of bringing home to all of them the evils of war which they all instinctively desired to escape. The ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... asked: Why have you not indicated in every case the precise locality where you were so pleased? Why not mention the exact hedge, the particular meadow? Because no two persons look at the same thing with the same eyes. To me this spot may be attractive, to you another; a third thinks yonder gnarled oak the most artistic. Nor could I guarantee that every one should see the same things under the same conditions of season, time, or weather. How could I arrange for you next autumn to see the sprays of the horse-chestnut, scarlet from frost, reflected in the ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... Beneath the gnarled old Knowledge-tree Sat, like an owl, the evil sage: 'The World's a bubble,' solemnly He read, and turned a second page. 'A bubble, then, old crow,' I cried, 'God keep you in your weary wit! 'A bubble—have you ever spied 'The colours I have seen ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... and sea, The dreadful snatchers, who like women were Down to the breast, with scanty coarse black hair About their heads, and dim eyes ringed with red, And bestial mouths set round with lips of lead, But from their gnarled necks there began to spring Half hair, half feathers, and a sweeping wing Grew out instead of arm on either side, And thick plumes underneath the breast did hide The place where joined the fearful natures twain. Gray-feathered ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... at that moment that I had my inspiration. My eyes chanced to light upon the enormous gnarled trunk of the gingko tree which cast its huge branches over us. Surely, if its bole exceeded that of all others, its height must do the same. If the rim of the plateau was indeed the highest point, then why should this mighty tree not prove to be a watchtower which commanded ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to whom the persons were known. Later in his room, face to face with the facts which it signified, he had an intolerable hour. He had extinguished his candle, and sat, partially undressed, in a mood of singular blankness by the fire of gnarled olive logs, which had smouldered down into one dull, red mass; and Eve's face was imaged there to his sick fancy as he had seen it last in Dick's studio in the vague light of an October evening, and yet with a certain new ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... creak and you clog up. And the next thing you know, you break down. Work that you like to do is a blessing. It keeps you young. When my mother was my age, she was crippled with rheumatism, and all gnarled up, and quavery, and all she had to look forward to was death. Now me—every time the styles in skirts change I get a new hold on life. And on a day when I can make a short, fat woman look like a tall, thin woman, just by sitting here on my knees with a handful of pins, and ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... above another that is surrounded with a halo of romance, surely it is the dower chest! We can picture the incoming of the coffer in all the newness of hand polish, fresh from the hands of the village carpenter or the retainer who had wrought the gnarled old oak grown on the estate for a favourite daughter of his lord—that chest which was to be packed full of fragrant linen, between which was laid sweet lavender, and richly embroidered garments for the bride, ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... rainy, soft of temperature; with skies of unusual depth and brilliancy, while the weather is fair. In that soft rainy climate, on that wild-wooded rocky coast, with its gnarled mountains and green silent valleys, with its seething rain-storms and many-sounding seas, was young Sterling ushered into his first schooling in this world. I remember one little anecdote his Father told me of those ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... plain below; it was in this plain that limitless fields of grain clothed the flat adobe soil; here the Mission garden smiled over its hedges of fruitful vines, and through the leaves of fig and gnarled pear trees; and it was here that Father Pedro had lived for fifty years, found the prospect good, and had ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... feet slip from beneath him, sitting down with greater force than grace, back supported against a gnarled juniper, loosening the clothes at his neck while using his other hand to ply his crumpled ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... her lap was an infant. Three bare-footed children, as if hatching eggs, sat motionless on the edge of a peat fire, which appeared to be almost touching their naked toes; above the embers was demurely hanging a black pot. Opposite sat, like a bit of gnarled oak, the withered grandmother. The furniture was composed of a dingy-coloured wooden wardrobe, with a few plates on the top, and one bed close to the fire. There was no chimney but the door, on the threshold of which stood, looking exceedingly unhappy, four dripping wet fowls; at the far end of ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... fisherman was old, gnarled and sunburned so dark that he was almost black, despite the dilapidated and dirty pith helmet he was wearing. His lumpish face was deeply seamed and wrinkled. His sunken mouth told of missing teeth, and his long, unkempt hair was bleached to ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... when Dickens was on his reporting expedition in Suffolk during the electoral campaign of 1835, he stayed at the "Angel" and, tradition says, slept in room No. 11. Mr. Percy FitzGerald, on visiting it some years ago, ventured to seek of the "gnarled" waiter information on the momentous question of Mr. Pickwick and ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... excuses, but he overruled them all. We left the brilliantly-lighted rooms and stood beneath the solemn shadow of the trees. It was a warm, soft night; the harvest moon shone down upon us; a south wind moaned among the branches. We walked silently on till we reached a rustic seat, formed of gnarled boughs fantastically bound together; here he made me sit down and placed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... hoofs on the broken and rugged track through which the creature had been driven at full speed by his furious master, might easily see, that in more than a dozen of places the horse and rider had been within a few inches of destruction. One bough of a gnarled and stunted oak-tree, which stretched across the road, seemed in particular to have opposed an almost fatal barrier to the horseman's career. In striking his head against this impediment, the force of the blow had been broken in some measure by ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... above mentioned had evidently dragged two or three of his victims to his den, which was under an impenetrable mat of bull-berries and dwarf box-alders, hemmed by a cut bank on one side and a wall of gnarled cottonwoods on the other. Round this den, and rendering it noisome, were scattered the bones of several deer and a young steer or heifer. When we found it we thought we could easily kill the bear, but the fierce, cunning beast ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... Gothic, with sadly decaying traces of graceful ornament. The little plot of enclosed ground, which should be planted in grass or with a few flowers, is a mere dirt court, tramped over by the few worshippers who enter the Cathedral this way. Two or three trees grow as they will, gnarled or straight. The sense of peaceful melancholy which the traveller had felt in the Cloister of Beziers is wanting here. This is a place of deserted solitude; and with a sigh for the beauty that might have been, the traveller crossed the enclosure and entered the ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... On another occasion a gnarled and fervent Radical of the bootmaking persuasion hobbled to the door of his establishment, and waving clenched and uplifted fists, called down upon us and our retreating equipage all the curses at the ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... Rush, my old tutor. I hurried eagerly from the spot, and regaining my quarters, locked the door, and with a beating heart broke the seal and began, as well as I was able, to decipher his letter. The hand was cramped and stiffened with age, and the bold, upright letters were gnarled and twisted like a rustic fence, and demanded great patience and much time ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... little babies! Oh!" And so she gathered them to her breast and bore them away, even though a curly head over each shoulder gazed back longingly at the gnarled freighter on his wagon seat. Tom Osby picked up his reins and drove back across the arroyo. Thus, without unbecoming ostentation, Heart's Desire became possessed of certain features never before ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... a sport while the hounds are yet afar, and his limbs are yet strong, in the chase which marks him for his victim, but grows desperate with rage and fear as the day nears its close, and the death-dogs pant hard upon his track. But at that moment the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to have lost every sign both of passion and the will, and to be locked in a stolid and dull repose. At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a smile like that of an old ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... tortuous and rocky trail, down through the mountains toward the valley below. The aspect from the great gate was one of quiet and rugged beauty. A short stretch of barren downs in the foreground only sparsely studded with an occasional gnarled oak gave an unobstructed view of broad and lovely meadowland through which wound a sparkling tributary ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sake of old memories and for the love of its own sweet peaceableness. I passed out of the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once the scene opens, wide pasture-lands on either side, and rows of old willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and vicarage and irregular street, and the little red-gabled Hall ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... silvery gray, with a faint moony sparkle, and out came the lovely carving of the rodent waves. All about, its sides were fretted in exquisite curves, and fantastic yet ever graceful knots and twists; as if a mass of gnarled and contorted roots, first washed of every roughness by some ethereal solvent, leaving only the soft lines of yet grotesque volutions, had been transformed into mingled silver and stone. Like a soldier crab that had found a shell to his mind, he gazed through the yawning mouth of ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... that in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was above the water-line, and these trees grew in the sunshine and stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the result of some strange convulsion of ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... but one opinion of the country in the vicinity of the supposed Port Grey, namely, that it is comparatively sterile. All the soil passed over, during our two days' journey, was of a sandy nature; and the gumtrees, particularly in the open country, were stunted and gnarled. Isolated clumps, however, of a taller, straighter, and smoother character, were met with in the dried watercourses. Near Wizard Peak, the warran, or native yam seemed to grow in great abundance, and to some ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... heavily laden with fruit. It is picked twice in the year, though some is obtained throughout the whole year. A beautiful carpet of green grass is spread out beneath the trees, while high above them tower the lofty kanary-trees, which stretch out their gnarled arms as if to defend their more tender sisters committed to their charge. At a distance, indeed, the nutmeg-trees are completely hidden from view by the kanary-trees. The roots of these latter are very curious, looking like enormous snakes with ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... fellows sat upon the bench beneath the pleasant shade of the wide-spreading oak in front of the inn door, drinking ale and beer, and all stared amain at this fair and gallant lad. Two of the stoutest of them were clothed in Lincoln green, and a great heavy oaken staff leaned against the gnarled oak tree trunk ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... cold, dim room at the convent. This was like the dreams and the stories told by Peter, only better; for nothing could give a true idea of the glimmering olive groves. Under the silvery branches delicate as smoke-wreaths, and among the gnarled gray trunks, it seemed that at any moment a band of nymphs or dryads might pass, streaming away in fear from ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... were smooth patches which we called bowling-greens, but hard and slippery as polished marble, with much the same translucent appearance. Practically all the country, however, was a jumbled mass of small, hard sastrugi, averaging perhaps a foot in height, with an occasional gnarled old veteran twice as high. To either side the snow rolled away for miles. In front, we made our first acquaintance with the accursed next ridge, which is always ahead of you on the plateau. Generally we passed from one ridge to another so gradually that we ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... plunged more or less deeply in proportion to the heinousness of their crimes; for, like earthly streams, this has its deep and shallow. At the latter point they cross, on the back of Nessus the Centaur, and at once enter (Canto xiii.) a wood of gnarled and sere trees, in which the Harpies have their dwelling. These trees have sprung from the souls of suicides, and retain the power of speech and sensation. From one of these, who in life had been the famous statesman Peter de Vineis, Dante learns that at the judgement ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... of some well! They who were obliged, from sheer ennui, to create dramas out of their Puritan prejudices. Can't you breathe contagion in the very atmosphere? Julia, I've had enough of it; I'm glad we're going. If I stayed here a month longer, I should get to feel as indigenous as that gnarled old apple-tree; the ghosts of the soil would ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... peaks turned from red to yellow. It was absolutely silent. No trees rustled in the morning air. There were no trees. Only, here and there, a few stunted evergreens, two or three feet high, had rooted on the rock and clung there, gnarled and twisted ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... my insistent questioning led my uncle to show me the notes which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... up pictures of my ancestral homestead along Severn side. The forests there will not recall the forest here. How shall their stifling heat and towering palms, their gaudy birds and flowers, their roaring beasts and loathly reptiles, remind one of the cool, sweet glades, the scented bracken, the gnarled oaks, the leaping deer, and sweet-throated songsters of home? 'Tis the vision of the river, the tide, and the wheeling gulls that I shall see again in ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... the terrible stench of the other's foul breath and his filthy body. He teetered on his gnarled legs and side-stepped a vicious kick and then stepped in to gouge with straightened thumb at the other's eye. The thumb went true and Ouglat howled ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... ploughed down, filling and obliterating the creeks and springs. Most of the forest had been cut, and stood in corn. My old catalpa in the fence corner beside the road and the Bartlett pear under which I had my wild-flower garden were all that was left of the dooryard, while a few gnarled apple trees remained of the orchard, which had been reset in another place. The garden had been moved, also the lanes; the one creek remaining out of three crossed the meadow at the foot of the orchard. It flowed a sickly current over a dredged bed between bare, ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... watching the neighbors gently let down into the shallow trench a home-made coffin, rudely hollowed from the half of a bee-gum log, and, unnoticed, slipped away at the first muffled stroke of the dirt—doubling his fists into his eyes and stumbling against the gnarled bodies of laurel and rhododendron until, out in a clear sunny space, he dropped on a thick, velvet mat of moss and sobbed himself to sleep. When he awoke, Jack was licking his face and he sat up, dazed and yawning. The sun was dropping fast, the ravines were filling with blue shadows, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... Something peculiar in the shape and setting of his yellow eyes gave them the provoking silent intensity which characterised his glance. But the face was thin, furrowed, worn; I discovered that through the bush of his hair, as you may detect the gnarled shape of a tree trunk lost in a dense undergrowth. These overgrown cheeks were sunken. It was an anchorite's bony head fitted with a Capuchin's beard and adjusted to a herculean body. I don't mean athletic. Hercules, I take it, was not an athlete. He ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... washing the breakfast dishes and put a stick of wood into the broken old cook-stove that had served him and Frank for fifteen years and was feeling its age. Lorraine's breakfast was in the oven, keeping warm. Brit looked in, tested the heat with his gnarled hand to make sure that the sour-dough biscuits would not be dried to crusts, and closed the door upon them and the bacon and fried potatoes. Frank Johnson had the horses saddled and it was time to go, yet Brit lingered, uneasily conscious that his habitation ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... bed of mint which spread hardily beneath the back windows of the dining-room, the place was left now a prey to such barbarian invaders as burdock and moth mullein. On the brow of the hill, where the garden ended, there was a gnarled and twisted ailanthus tree, and from its roots the ground fell sharply to a distant view of rear enclosures and grim smoking factories. Some clothes fluttered on a line that stretched from a bough of the tree, and turning away as if they offended her, Virginia closed her eyes and breathed ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... lesson-night, and had gone to seek him, he had discovered him lying in wait, like a fowler, to catch the sweet sounds that flew from the opened cage of her instrument. He leaned against the wall with his ear laid over the edge, and as near the window as he dared to put it, his rough face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard—his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... columned with innumerable trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves, and sweating perpetual moisture down its dark and channelled rind; some strong in youth, some grisly with decrepit age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled and knotted with wens and goitres; roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... around the devoted almond-tree: a gnarled old personage, of a great age and girth, having that pathetic look of sorrowful dignity which I find always in superannuated trees—and now and then in humans of gentle natures who are conscious that ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... chrysanthemums blighted by frost, shivering in their death chill; and from a neighboring willow stripped of curtaining foliage, a lonely bird piped its plaintive threnody, for the loss of one summer's mate. At the extremity of the little garden, under shelter of an ancient, gnarled tree, that screened a semicircular seat from the observation of those passing on the street, Beryl sat down to rest; to collect ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... head has a hawthorn bonnet, His gnarled gaunt hand has a gay green staff With new-blown rose-blossom on it: But his laugh is a dead ...
— A Dark Month - From Swinburne's Collected Poetical Works Vol. V • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I tried to enlist his sympathy and aid. He sat pensive for a while and then said that it seemed to him "a goose-quest." I replied, "You have always a phrase for everything, Tom, but always the wrong one." He covered his face, and presently, peering at me through his gnarled fingers, said "Mon, ye're recht." I discussed the problem with Renan, with Emerson, with Disraeli, also with Cetewayo—poor Cetewayo, best and bravest of men, but intellectually a Professor, like the rest of them. It was borne in on me that if I were to win to the heart of ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... pails and other rubbish. The house, beyond this courtyard, was suffering from the cutaneous disease that affects plaster, eaten with leprosy and spotted with blisters, with zig-zag rifts from top to bottom, and a crackled surface like the glaze of an old jar. The dead stock of a vine stretched its gnarled ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... sublime scene was enacted. "Sirs!" said a voice,—it was Jim's voice, and in it sounded something so earnest and strange, that the men involuntarily turned their heads to look at him. Then this man stood up,—a black man,—a little while before a slave,—the great muscles swollen and gnarled with unpaid toil, the marks of the lash and the branding-iron yet plain upon his person, the shadows of a lifetime of wrongs and sufferings looking out of his eyes. "Sirs!" he said, simply, "somebody's got to die to get us out of dis, and it may as well be ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... climate and soil will permit. Then comes a season of fiercer storms, intenser cold and invading ice upon the peaks. Havoc is wrought, and the forest drops back across a zone of border warfare—for war belongs to borders—leaving behind it here and there a dwarfed pine or gnarled and twisted juniper which has survived the onslaught of the enemy, Now these are stragglers in the retreat, but are destined later in milder years to serve as outposts in the advance of the forest to recover its lost ground. Here we have a border scene which is typical in nature—the belt ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... wood galloped Pharaoh, and into a stretch of age-old furze, or gorse, if you like, beyond. That showed strategy. The furze was a maze of a million spikes, and branches, and twisted, gnarled stems tough as wire-rope; a wonderful place, all honeycombed with ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... broaden and flow out majestically, like a river sunward. The smile still on his lips, he lit a second candle and a third; a fire stood ready built in a chimney, he lit that also; and the fir-cones and the gnarled olive billets were swift to break in flame and to crackle on the hearth, and the room brightened and enlarged about him like his hopes. To and fro, to and fro, he went, his hands lightly clasped, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... road he went with a ravine on either hand: he went down the narrow path, thick with sharp stones, among which coiled the gnarled roots of the little stunted oaks: he did not know where he was going, and yet he was more surefooted than if he had been moving under the lucid direction of his will. He had not slept, he had hardly eaten anything for several days. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... caught sight of us. He was short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward like some old root ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... yet towers the Sycamore on the crown of the hill—the first great Tree in the parish that used to get green; for stony as seems the hard glebe, constricted by its bare and gnarled roots, they draw sustenance from afar; and not another knoll on which the sun so delights to pour his beams. Weeks before any other Sycamore, and almost as early as the alder or the birch—the GLORY OF MOUNT PLEASANT, for so we schoolboys ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... somewhere, I think in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," of a certain "grievous crab-tree cudgel," and the impression left by this description is that the weapon, gnarled and knotty, was capable of inflicting grievous ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... tide. For weeks it would be rolled along the shallows; its leaves and twigs rotting off, its smaller branches breaking short, until at last, hundreds of miles, perhaps, below the scene of its fall, it would lodge fair in the channel. The gnarled and matted mass of boughs would ordinarily cling like an anchor to the sandy bottom, while the buoyant trunk, as though struggling to break away, would strain upward obliquely to within a few inches of the surface of the muddy water, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... ashamed to tell him that I weighed one hundred and seventy pounds, or over twelve stone, so I contented myself with taking his measure. Poor, misshapen little man! His skin an unhealthy colour, body gnarled and twisted out of all decency, contracted chest, shoulders bent prodigiously from long hours of toil, and head hanging heavily forward and out of place! ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... switched back to Tom, and in that instant Chow jumped the intruder. With surprising agility for his rotund bulk, the cook bore down on him and let fly a gnarled fist at the stranger's jaw. Tom followed up like lightning, grabbing the man's wrist and yanking his hand out of ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... many prickly pears in different places, but never such specimens as those that were growing among the stones in this old quarry. They had gnarled and knotted trunks of hard wood, and were as big as pollard-oaks; their age must have been immense; but, unfortunately, one could not measure it, or it would have been a good criterion of the age of the quarry, which ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered among ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... typical Lakonians, it was all the more surprising that a gracious creature like Liane could have sprung from their midst. They were a beetle-browed, dark race, with gnarled muscles and huge, knotted joints, speaking a guttural language all their own. Few ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... Conroy. The youth came staggering and crying down the ladder, with tears and blood befouling his face, and stumbled as his foot touched the deck. The older man, Slade, saved him from falling, and held him by the upper arm with one gnarled, toil- roughened hand, peering at him through the early ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... orchard was unique. It had originally been a fruit orchard, and as most of the trees were dead, and many of them fallen, roses had been trained over their trunks and branches. The gorgeous masses of bloom covered the old gnarled wood, and the climbing roses twined lovingly around branches and boughs. Here and there were rustic seats and arbours; and there were many bird-houses, whose tiny occupants were exceedingly tame and sociable. Several other guests were walking about, and Patty and the ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... of the poor white "cracker" population that we saw, seemed indigenous products of the starved soil. They suited their poverty-stricken surroundings as well as the gnarled and scrubby vegetation suited the sterile sand. Thin-chested, round-shouldered, scraggy-bearded, dull-eyed and open-mouthed, they all looked alike—all looked as ignorant, as stupid, and as lazy as they were poor and weak. They were "low-downers" ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... man," he whined, twisting his gnarled fingers, a suggestion of tears in his voice. "My wife is old, mein herr. You would not be cruel. We have been here for sixty years. The ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... her back to the gnarled trunk, while she looked out over the half-mile of dancing blue wavelets to where, on the other side, the brown, wooden houses of the Thorley estate swept down to the shore. She rose on seeing the visitor ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... the little clearing into which I now emerged. A couple of decrepit apple-trees grew on the edge of it, and dropped their scanty and gnarled fruit to feast the squirrels. A little farther on, a straggling clump of ancient lilacs, a bewildered old bush of sweetbrier, the dark-green leaves of a cluster of tiger-lilies, long past blooming, ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... and brought the billy and pint-pots to the head of my camp. The moon had grown misty. The plain horizon had closed in. A couple of boughs, hanging from the gnarled and blasted timber over the billabong, were the perfect shapes of two men hanging side by side. Mitchell scratched the back of his neck and looked down at the pup curled like a glob of mud on the sand in the moonlight, and an idea struck him. He got a big old felt hat he had, lifted ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... knew. He put his gnarled hand over one of hers. Rosie looked up curiously from the speckled beans she was counting into a bag, and then went on singing to herself an unformed, baby song. "Folks'll talk," said Enoch gently. "They do now. A man an' woman ain't never ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... never missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves. Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina—a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... drew Natalie close to him, passing one arm across her shoulders, so that his gnarled hand rested firmly on the delicate fabric of her sleeve. Between these two there had always lain a sympathy, an affection, a mutuality of comprehension, more like the relation of husband and wife than that of ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the cylinder and pointed with a gnarled and horny finger. The men closed in and gazed in silence. One of the shells ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... knoll, still known by the name of 'Wattie's Knowe,' or 'Sheriff's Knowe,' for Scott enjoyed both the familiar title of 'Wattie' and the official one of 'Sheriff.' It is a lovely spot, this Wattie's Knowe. The trees are old and gnarled; the grass is overrun with green moss and graceful fern-leaves, and if you are quite still, you can hear the murmur of Glenkinnon Burn, as it leaps over its pebbly bed, and hastens on to the Tweed. Here, between the branching trunks of a huge elm, Scott had fixed a rustic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... the Lord Protector's opening speech in the Painted Chamber, now numbered as Speech V, of the Cromwell series. It was very long, of extremely gnarled structure, but full of matter. The pervading topic was the war with Spain. This was justified, with approving references to the published Latin Declaration of Oct. 1655 on the subject, entitled Scriptum Domini Protectoris, &c. (Milton's?), and ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... the Kangaroo men repair to a place called Undiara. It is a picturesque spot. By the side of a water-hole that is sheltered by a tall gum-tree rises a curiously gnarled and weather-beaten face of quartzite rock. About twenty feet from the base a ledge juts out. When the totemites hold their ceremony, they repair to this ledge. For here in the days of long ago the ancestors who are now reincarnated in them cooked ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... the tulip-tree, or Liriodendron Tulipifera, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but, in its riper age the bark becomes gnarled and uneven while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem. Thus the difficulty of ascension, in the present case, lay more in semblance than in reality. Embracing the huge cylinder, as closely as possible, with his arms and knees, seizing with his hands some projections, and resting his ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... to say, I'm sure, I shouldn't like to say, Why all the birds should chirp of you, Who live so far away. Robin and oriole sing to me From the leafy depths of our apple-tree, With trunk so gnarled and gray— But why your name should their burden be I ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... west of the town is a narrow but close belt of timber, mostly gnarled mulga and gidgee, with here and there a sprawling stunted creek gum. The cattle were making for this shelter. But already the tremendous pace was beginning to tell. The bellowing had ceased and the mob was stringing out, the stragglers ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... A gnarled and half-starved oak, as stubborn as my own resolve, and smitten by some storm of old, hung from the crag above me. Rising from my horse's back, although I had no stirrups, I caught a limb, and tore it (like a mere wheat-awn) from the socket. Men ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... laughter. He sat up suddenly and looked about, but no one was in sight. Again he heard an unmistakable peal of shrill, childish merriment, seemingly close at hand. He lay flat and looked over the ledge, holding on to a root of a gnarled pine that grew far out at ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... dried up and blowed away, and here they are—all the rest of 'em—ready to bloom—and may God help 'em and keep 'em." He pauses, "Help 'em and keep 'em and when they have dried up and blowed away—let 'em remember the perfume clean to the end!" He turns away from the girls, wipes his eyes with his gnarled fingers, and after clearing his throat says: "Well, girls, how about ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... of grey shadows. As we entered by a narrow trail leading from the road, the golden day outside was soon closed from us by the thick veils of hanging creeper and parasitical plants of all sorts that entwined round the gnarled and aged trees, and crossing and re-crossing from one to ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... summer born with the earliest buds. The road through the forest one of those wagon-tracks that were being opened from the clearings of the settlers, and that wound along beneath trees of which those now seen in Kentucky are the unworthy survivors—oaks and walnuts, maples and elms, centuries old, gnarled, massive, drooping, majestic, through whose arches the sun hurled down only some solitary spear of gold, and over whose gray-mossed roots some cold brook crept in silence; with here and there billowy open spaces of wild rye, buffalo ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... a strange trail, Rosalind Benham came to a thicket of gnarled fir-balsam and scrub oak that barred her way completely. She had ridden hard and her horse breathed heavily during the short time she spent looking about her. Her own breath was coming sharply, sobbing in her throat, but it was more from excitement than from the hazard and labor of the ride, ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the details were admirably conceived and rendered,—the crumbling, lichened wall, in cold gray, with the gnarled root of the creeper and the wreath of purple blossoms, in sharp contrast to the pallor of the face and the bold assurance of the figure. The light fell across the canvas, leading down to a slab of vivid purple water in the far distance. There was nothing pretty or ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... "A gnarled tree may bear good fruit, and a harsh nature may give good counsel," thought the Lord of Glenvarloch, as he retreated to his own apartment, where the same reflection occurred to him again and again, while, unable as yet to reconcile himself to the thoughts of becoming his own fire-maker, he walked ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott |
