"Ill-favoured" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Countess of Argyll, the Commendator of Holyrood, Beaton, the Master of the Household, Arthur Erskine, the Captain of the Guard, and one other—that, David Rizzio, who from an errant minstrel had risen to this perilous eminence, a man of a swarthy, ill-favoured countenance redeemed by the intelligence that glowed in his dark eyes, and of a body so slight and fragile as to seem almost misshapen. His age was not above thirty, yet indifferent health, early privation, and misfortune had so set their mark upon ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... peace; but there was among the Trojans a certain man named Dolon, son of Eumedes, the famous herald—a man rich in gold and bronze. He was ill-favoured, but a good runner, and was an only son among five sisters. He it was that now addressed the Trojans. "I, Hector," said he, "Will to the ships and will exploit them. But first hold up your sceptre ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... call made for Eirynwych Amheibyn, Arthur's servant, a red, rough, ill-favoured man, having red whiskers {116b} with bristly hairs. And behold he came upon a tall red horse, with the mane parted on each side, and he brought with him a large and beautiful sumpter pack. And the huge red youth dismounted before Arthur, and he drew a golden chair out of the ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... a good pony at bottom,' said Mr. Crummles, turning to Nicholas. He might have been at bottom, but he certainly was not at top, seeing that his coat was of the roughest, and most ill-favoured kind. So Nicholas merely observed that he shouldn't wonder if he was. 'Many and many is the circuit this pony has gone,' said Mr. Crummles, flicking him skilfully on the eyelid, for old acquaintance sake. 'He is quite one of us. His mother was ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... don't think any one got more than his share. Of course there were underhand attempts in plenty, and, at least once, open violence—a sudden rush from opposite sides, a growling and spitting like sparks from a smithy; and then, with ears laid flat, two ill-favoured beasts clawed blindly at each other, and a sly and tigerish brindle made away with the morsel. My woman took the thing very coolly I thought, served them all alike, and didn't resent (as I should have done) the unfortunate want of delicacy there was about these vagrants. ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... were of far less pleasing countenance and more ferocious aspect than our friends the Kanowits, scarcely deigning to look at the launch as we passed them, but sweeping along down stream with a scowl on their ill-favoured features. ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... death-bed. The unvarying meanness and selfishness of Mrs. Mackenzie, and of Sir Barnes Newcome, fatigue the reader; for whereas in the delineation of his amiable and high-principled characters Thackeray is careful to shade off their bright qualities by a mixture of natural weakness, these ill-favoured portraits stand out in the full glare of unredeemed ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... smile among the neighbours, and speaks of her boy's likeness to its father; nor, when the conversation turns on bygone times, does she fear to let his name escape her white lips, "My Robert; the bairn's not ill-favoured, but he will never look like his father,"—and such sayings, uttered in a calm, sweet voice. Nay, I remember once how her pale countenance reddened with a sudden flush of pride, when a gossiping crone alluded to their wedding; and the widow's eye brightened through her ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... suspicion writ athwart his round, ill-favoured face, But my motley was hidden from his sight. My cloak, my hat and boots allowed naught of my true condition to appear, and might as well have covered a lordling as a jester. Yet his inveterate surliness the ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... families, whom they entice to pass the night in some secluded place, where they are afterwards set upon by the men, and strangled. The women take care of the children. Such of them as are beautiful are sold at a high price to the brothels of Delhi, or other large cities; while the boys and ill-favoured girls are sold for servants at a more moderate rate. These murders are perpetrated perhaps five hundred miles from the homes of the unfortunate victims; and the children thus obtained, deprived of all their relatives, are never inquired ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... very substantial incarnation, indeed, of the Supernatural. About eight feet in length, extremely fat, thick-limbed, ill-favoured, heavy of movement, and generally unpretty, he did not at first sight impress his new master any ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... a right wicked place," she exclaimed in horror, as she passed by some of the foul-smelling closes, or courts, as we call them, where dishevelled hag-like old women sat on door-steps, and filthy, squalid children played in the gutter, where ill-favoured young people of both sexes hung idly about the entrances, chaffing or quarrelling with each other. "Ye police people must be a poor set out, an' ye can no do away with such dens as these!" Mrs. MacDougall cried in righteous ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and a happy bewitchment protected him for three years against the possibility of harm. He had been lying at Hatfield, at the George Inn, and set out in the early morning for London. As he neared the town-gate, an old beldame begged an alms of him, and though Hind, not liking her ill-favoured visage, would have spurred forward, the beldame's glittering eye held his horse motionless. 'Good woman,' cried Hind, flinging her a crown, 'I am in haste; pray let me pass.' 'Sir,' answered the witch, 'three days I have awaited your coming. Would you have me lose my labour now?' ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... his lady watched the fight from the battlement of the Tower. Willie, or, to be more correct, Sir William Scott, Junr., was caught and put in the dungeon. Sir Gideon Murray decided to hang him, but his lady interposed: "Would ye hang the winsome Laird o' Harden," she said, "when ye hae three ill-favoured daughters to marry?" Sir Willie was one of the handsomest men of his time, and when the men brought the rope to hang him he was given the option of marrying Muckle Mou'd Meg or of being hanged with ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... person with and without a wig that its use made a plain face presentable. There is a good election story of Daniel O'Connell. It is related during a fierce debate on the hustings, O'Connell with his biting witty tongue, attacked his opponent on account of his ill-favoured countenance. But, not to be outdone, and thinking to turn the gathering against O'Connell, his adversary called out, "Take off your wig, and I'll warrant that you'll prove the uglier." The witty Irishman immediately responded, amidst roars of laughter from the crowd, ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... no tramp, and see no reason why you should interrupt us thus with your hooting, you ill-favoured owl," he ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... makes his sorrow a welcome sight. When Ephraim bemoans himself, he is a pleasant child. So good a medicine is sorrow, so powerful to slay the moths that infest and devour the human heart, that the Lord is glad to see a man weep. He congratulates him on his sadness. Grief is an ill-favoured thing, but she is Love's own child, and her mother ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... and home. Frau Haydn was a shrew, and he finally gave up trying to live at home, seeking his consolation at court with a young and beautiful Neapolitan singer, who was unhappily married to a poor fiddler, named Polzelli. The two lovers made little secret of their hope that one or both of their ill-favoured spouses would pass away. But they both declined to "die by request," as Artemus Ward ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... thing that stood propped between them fell now upon one and now upon the other. At every repetition of the horrid contact each instinctively repelled it with the greater haste; and the process, natural although it was, began to tell upon the nerves of the companions. Macfarlane made some ill-favoured jest about the farmer's wife, but it came hollowly from his lips, and was allowed to drop in silence. Still their unnatural burden bumped from side to side; and now the head would be laid, as if in confidence, upon their shoulders, ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... flaxen-haired, and the best-eyed of men; and so say men of lore that many of the kin of the Mere-men, who are come of Egil, have been the goodliest folk; yet, for all that, this kindred have differed much herein, for it is said that some of them have been accounted the most ill-favoured of men: but in that kin have been also many men of great prowess in many wise, such as Kiartan, the son of Olaf Peacock, and Slaying-Bardi, and Skuli, the son of Thorstein. Some have been great bards, too, in that kin, as Biorn, the champion of Hit-dale, priest Einar Skulison, ...
— The Story Of Gunnlaug The Worm-Tongue And Raven The Skald - 1875 • Anonymous
... silver plating of the tent-poles. At one end rose the golden throne of the king; before it in a semicircle the stools of a dozen or more princes and commanders. In the centre stood Mardonius questioning a coarse-featured, ill-favoured fellow, who by his sheepskin dress and leggings Glaucon instantly recognized as a peasant of this Malian country. The king beckoned the Athenian into the midst and was clearly too eager to stand ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... history of Clive's uncle in the Book of Baronets, and that Gandish jun., probably with an eye to business, made a design of a picture, in which, according to that veracious volume, one of the Newcomes was represented as going cheerfully to the stake at Smithfield, surrounded by some very ill-favoured Dominicans, whose arguments did not appear to make the least impression upon the martyr of the Newcome family. Sandy M'Collop devised a counter picture, wherein the barber-surgeon of King Edward the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... celery grows only in brackish water—that is, neither in the salt sea itself nor yet in the fresh-water rivers—I had to pass down the little stream a mile or more before I came to the proper place for finding the ducks. I went in a small skiff, with no other companion than an ill-favoured cur-dog, with which I had been furnished, and which was represented to me as one of the best 'duck-dogs' in ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... Indeed he went so far as roundly to assure our hero that unless he weaned his thoughts from the object of his devoted affection, he would disinherit him. At the same time, he proposed as a suitable match the daughter of a neighbouring gentleman of a good estate, who was neither ill-favoured nor unamiable, and whose eligibility in a pecuniary point of view could not be disputed. But young Mr. Edson, true to the first and only love that had inflamed his breast, rejected all considerations of self-advancement, and, deprecating ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... it had not been by so ill-favoured a person, at all events, Tim," replied I; "I cannot return ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... to hear that you know nothing of yourself, how could you submit to that? How could you stand your ground and suffer that to be proved? Clearly not at all. You instantly turn away in wrath. Yet what harm have I done to you? Unless indeed the mirror harms the ill-favoured man by showing him to himself just as he is; unless the physician can be thought to insult his patient, when he tells him:—"Friend, do you suppose there is nothing wrong with you? why, you have a fever. Eat nothing to-day, and drink only water." Yet ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... Madge!" angrily exclaimed Giles. "Good father, heed not a woman; they are caught by the lip and the fist, like my lord's trencher-man. This Sir Osmund is both lean and ill-favoured. I wonder what the Lady Mabel saw above his shoe to wed with an ugly toad spawned i' the Welsh marshes. Had ye seen her first husband, Sir William Bradshaigh—rest his soul! he was killed in the wars—you would have marvelled ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... look, made the words extremely disagreeable, and furthermore, Ellen had an uncomfortable feeling that neither was new to her. Where had she seen the man before? She puzzled herself to think. Where but in a dream had she seen that bold, ill-favoured face, that horrible smile, that sandy hair? She knew—it was Mr. Saunders, the man who had sold her the merino at St. Clair & Fleury's. She knew him, and she was very sorry to see that he knew her. All she desired now was to get out of the house and away; but on turning she saw another man, ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... "An Aethiop woman posted at the door, With blubber lip and nostril, he descries. Nor will he see again, nor e'er before Had seen a visage of such loathsome guise: Ill-favoured — such was Aesop feigned of yore: If there, she would have saddened Paradise. Greasy and foul and beggarly her vest; Nor half her ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... under the bank to work the springes, Christian himself pausing and pricking with his sword's point at the nearest noose, and pale discomfortable mountains rising on the farther side; or yet again, the two ill-favoured ones that beset the first of Christian's journey, with the frog-like structure of the skull, the frog-like limberness of limbs—crafty, slippery, lustful-looking devils, drawn always in outline as though possessed of a dim, infernal luminosity. Horrid fellows are they, one and all; horrid ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ship. "Hands shorten in cable!" shouted Ben Snatchblock, his pipe sounding shrilly along the decks. Pango remained forward, concealing himself behind the foremast, though he every now and then took a glance at the ill-favoured pilot, a big, cut-throat, piratical-looking individual, who was standing aft near the master, while his boat ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... stood in a dreamy mood, and rubbed my eyes as if I were not wholly awake, and half expected to see the gay-clad company of beautiful men and women change to two or three spindle-legged back-bowed men and haggard, hollow-eyed, ill-favoured women, who once wore down the soil of this land with their heavy hopeless feet, from day to day, and season to season, and year to year. But no change came as yet, and my heart swelled with joy as I thought ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... Austrian family, she has a fresh complexion and lovely blue eyes, and gives a promise of beauty which as empress she never fulfilled. Her young attendants, girls of thirteen or fourteen, contrast agreeably with the ill-favoured dwarf beside them; they are very pretty, especially Dona Isabel de Velasco, who died a reigning beauty, and their hands are painted with peculiar delicacy. Their dresses are highly absurd, their figures being concealed by long stiff ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... be outweighed by the difficulty of the enterprise; all that could result from a campaign would be the destruction of one or two villages, the acquisition of a few hundred refractory captives, of some ill-favoured cattle, and a trophy of nets and worm-eaten boats. The kings, therefore, preferred to keep a close watch over these undisciplined hordes, and as long as their depredations were kept within reasonable limits, they were left unmolested to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... estimation as "skeletons"; that is, they had been picked pretty clean by "buzzards" in other climes before gravitating to his "boneyard." He considered himself a good judge of men, and he did not like the looks of this ill-favoured pair. He had made up his mind that he did not want them hanging around the "shanty"; men of that stripe were just the sort to give the place a bad name! One of them had recalled himself to Barry Lapelle the night before; said he used to work for a ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... to her; adding—'Rosevale not good house to lib by himself in—plenty "padres" die dere, plenty doppies (ghosts) come up dere from de grabe-yard!' Now my dread was not of the 'doppies,' but I did fear the return of the recent ill-favoured visitor. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... after that. I am afraid my poor mother thought me a sad rogue, for I would slip away from the shop for a whole afternoon together, on the plea of needing a walk; but my walk always led me to that terrible inn. I soon became a familiar figure to its ill-favoured master and his beautiful niece. The landlord of the Skull and Spectacles had been a seaman in his youth, and told tales of the sea to guests who paid their score. He had a cadet brother who was a seaman still, and who drifted out of longshore knowledge for great gaps of time, ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... expected to find the Grand Inquisitor of Madrid a kindly and intelligent, though ill-favoured, prelate; but so it was, and he did nothing but laugh from the beginning to the end of my story, for he would not let me call ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... extinguished instantly those sparks of better humour kindled by the dinner and the chest. The group fell again to an ill-favoured silence, and Hemstead began to touch the banjo, as was his habit of an evening. His repertory was small: the chords of Home, Sweet Home fell under his fingers; and when he had played the symphony, he instinctively ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... but fortunately the sky was clear, for the Strand was ill lighted. St. Mary's Church, not long since consecrated, St. Clement's Church, loomed large and shadowy in the narrow roadway, narrowing still more towards Temple Bar past the ill-favoured and unsavoury Butcher's Row on the north side of the street, where the houses of rotting plaster and timber with overhanging storeys frowned upon the passer-by and suggested ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... there are so many along the Somersetshire coast, are often very lonely,—they are dangerous to traffic, as no two ordinary sized vehicles can pass each other conveniently within so narrow a compass,—and in summer especially they are haunted by gypsies, "pea-pickers," and ill-favoured men and women of the "tramp" species, slouching along across country from Bristol to Minehead, and so over Countisbury Hill into Devon. One such questionable-looking individual there was, who,—in a golden afternoon of July, when the sun was beginning to decline towards the west,—paused ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... dropped to lower depths of buffeting dripping darkness, till he found his hand on the gate-latch and swung to the black lane below the wall. Thence on a run he wound to the tanners' quarter by the river: a district commonly as foul-tongued as it was ill-favoured, but tonight clean-purged of both evils by the vehement sweep of the storm. Here he groped his way among slippery places and past huddled out-buildings to the piles of the wharf. The rain was now subdued to a noiseless ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... I observe how difficult it is to get rid of a phrase, which the world is once grown fond of, though the occasion that first produced it, be entirely taken away. For several years past, if a man had but an ill-favoured nose, the deep-thinkers of the age would some way or other contrive to impute the cause to the prejudice of his education. From this fountain were said to be derived all our foolish notions of justice, piety, love of our country, all our opinions of God, or a future ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... like to part wi' my gudesire aff the grund. Dougal was glad to see Steenie, and brought him into the great oak parlour, and there sat the Laird his leesome lane, excepting that he had beside him a great, ill-favoured jackanape, that was a special pet of his; a cankered beast it was, and mony an ill-natured trick it played—ill to please it was, and easily angered—ran about the haill castle, chattering and yowling, and pinching, and biting folk, especially ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... about the year 1741. Deserted by her relations in youth, and possessing only an imperfect education, she was led into a course of irregularities which an early moral training would have probably prevented. She was lame and singularly ill-favoured, but her manners were spirited and amusing. Her chief employment was the composition of verses, and these she sung as a mode of subsistence. She published, in 1805, a volume of doggerel rhymes, and was in the habit of satirising in verse those who had offended her. Her one happy effort in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... been abducted, and confined during her absence in a house on the Hertford Road, from which she had just escaped. This house she afterwards identified as that of one Mother Wells, a person of very indifferent reputation. An ill-favoured old gipsy woman named Mary Squires was also declared by her to have been the main agent in ill- using and detaining her. The gipsy, it is true, averred that at the time of the occurrence she was a hundred and twenty miles away; but Canning persisted ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... incapacity of a self-constituted critic will make him regard his poorest fancy as an emendation; seldom has he the insight of Touchstone to recognize, or his modesty to acknowledge, that although his own, it is none the less an ill-favoured thing. ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... going on. Tremendous crowds everywhere. "I am never so lonely," as somebody said, "as when I'm in a crowd." That's just what I feel, especially when the crowd doesn't talk a single word of English. The Russians are not ill-favoured but ill-flavoured, that is, in a crowd. I cheered with them, "Hiphiphurrahski! Hipski! Hurrah-ski!" What I was cheering at I don't know, but I like to be in it, and when at Petersburg do as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... that she was forced to retreat after a great battle which took place at Whitehall, between her ladyship and Lady Dorchester, Tom Killigrew's daughter, whom the king delighted to honour, and in which that ill-favoured Esther got the better of our elderly Vashti. But her ladyship for her part always averred that it was her husband's quarrel, and not her own, which occasioned the banishment of the two into the country; and the cruel ingratitude of the sovereign ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Skookum showed his hostile recognition. And in a few minutes it led them to a shanty. They slipped off their snowshoes, and hung them in a tree. Quonab opened the door without knocking. They entered, and in a moment were face to face with a lanky, ill-favoured white man that all three, including Skookum, recognized as Hoag, the man they ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Kateegoose, having been called, came forward. He was an ill-favoured savage, with various expressions on his ugly visage which were not so much Nature's gifts as the result of his own evil passions. Jealousy was one of them, and he had often turned a green eye on Okematan. There were indications ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene. 'Tis Baroco and Baralipton—[Two terms of the ancient scholastic logic.]—that render their disciples so dirty and ill-favoured, and not she; they do not so much as know her but by hearsay. What! It is she that calms and appeases the storms and tempests of the soul, and who teaches famine and fevers to laugh and sing; and that, not by certain imaginary epicycles, but by natural ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... marle, sir, you wear such ill-favoured coarse stockings, having so good a leg as ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... thou feare? Th'ill-favoured lake they tell thee thou must passe, And the[92] blacke frogs that croake ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... him from head to foot: "Now but for that little tuft on your chin I should take you for a girl; and by the finger-nails of St. Luke, no ill-favoured ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... again, and this time for a private, if a generous end. And the man whom he had reproved for stealing corn he was now to set stealing treasure. And then there was Madame von Rosen, upon whom he looked down with some of that ill-favoured contempt of the chaste male for the imperfect woman. Because he thought of her as one degraded below scruples, he had picked her out to be still more degraded, and to risk her whole irregular establishment in life ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eat grass as a dog does when he is sick, I am no female woman. The young lord whose hand I refused when I took up with wise Jasper, once brought two of them to my mother's tan, {34b} when hankering after my company: they did nothing but carp at each other's words, and a pretty hand they made of it. Ill-favoured dogs they were, and their attempts at what they called wit almost as ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... imagination. But there is clever character-drawing in it, especially in Jamie, who from a worldly point of view is the failure of the group, making no money, and drifting through journalism to emigration; and in the finely suggested figure of Tibby, the ill-favoured kitchen drudge, who is his real centre of inspiration. But first and last it remains a dull business, partly from an entire lack of humour, partly from the absence of any settled plan that might help one to endure the dreariness of the setting. Mr. CANNAN ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... remained the same as she had been when an awkward lassie of thirteen. Out of the house there were the most contradictory opinions of her, especially if the voices of women were to be listened to. She was 'an ill-favoured, overgrown thing'; 'just as bonny as the first rose i' June, and as sweet i' her nature as t' honeysuckle a-climbing round it;' she was 'a vixen, with a tongue sharp enough to make yer very heart bleed;' she was 'just a bit o' sunshine wheriver she went;' she was sulky, lively, witty, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... come out at break of day (we must have been observed the evening before), a big schooner—full of as ill-favoured, ragged rascals as the most vivid imagination could conceive. Of course, there had been no resistance on our part. We were outsailed, and at the first ferocious hail the halyards had been let go by the run, and all our crew had bolted aloft. A ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... scent, and two balls of washing blue. He was from Tauata, whither he returned the same night in an outrigger, daring the deep with these young- ladyish treasures. The gross of the native passengers were more ill-favoured: tall, powerful fellows, well tattooed, and with disquieting manners. Something coarse and jeering distinguished them, and I was often reminded of the slums of some great city. One night, as dusk was falling, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such a thing—beyond the grave. He was not a superstitious man, but, saturated with tradition, he was a scrupulous observer of religious feast, custom, and ritual. He had lately been disturbed by what he considered to be an ill-favoured omen. One night—it was twelve nights ago he reckoned—the statues of Pan and Apollo, standing in his dining-room, which was at the end of the portico, had fallen to the ground without any apparent cause and had been shattered into fragments. ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... to do either: but some faces spare us the trouble of these dental inquiries. And what if the beast, which my friend would force upon my acceptance, prove, upon the face of it, a sorry Rozinante, a lean, ill-favoured jade, whom no gentleman could think of setting up in his stables? Must I, rather than not be obliged to my friend, make her a companion to Eclipse or Lightfoot? A horse-giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a right to palm his spavined article upon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the word "worm." The Lampyris is not a worm at all, not even in general appearance. He has six short legs, which he well knows how to use; he is a gad-about, a trot-about. In the adult state the male is correctly garbed in wing-cases, like the true Beetle that he is. The female is an ill-favoured thing who knows naught of the delights of flying: all her life long she retains the larval shape, which, for the rest, is similar to that of the male, who himself is imperfect so long as he has not ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... fist, and winkin', as much as to say, do you hear that, my boy! 'THAT I CALL INDEPENDENCE.' He was in great spirits, the old man, he was so proud of winnin' the race, and puttin' the leake into the New Yorkers, he looked all dander. 'Let them great hungry, ill-favoured, long-legged bitterns,' says he (only he called them by another name that don't sound quite pretty), 'from the outlandish states to Congress, TALK ABOUT independence; but Sam,' said he, hitting the shiners agin till he made them dance right up ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... dwell in quiet and still peace, Not filled with cares how riches to increase; I wish nor seek for vain and fruitless pleasures; No riches are, but what the mind intreasures. Thus am I solitary, live alone, Yet better loved, the more that I am known; And though my face ill-favoured at first sight, After acquaintance, it will give delight. Refuse me not, for I shall constant be; Maintain ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... I had leisure to contemplate the scene below. Wyatt was not there; but around a table, lighted by two dip-candles stuck in the necks of black bottles, and provided with abundance of liquor, tobacco, tin pannikins, and clay-pipes, sat twelve or thirteen ill-favoured fellows, any one of whom a prudent man would, I am very sure, have rather trusted with a shilling than a sovereign. The unfortunate doctor, pale and sepulchral as the death he evidently dreaded to be near at hand, was sitting propped up in a rude arm-chair; and Ransome, worse, I thought, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... borders only do we find green shoots. But it is not impossible, only difficult, for man, without renouncing the advantage of culture itself, one day to make reparation for the injury which he has inflicted: he is appointed lord of creation. True it is that thorns and thistles, ill-favoured and poisonous plants, well named by botanists rubbish plants, mark the track which man has proudly traversed through the earth. Before him lay original nature in her wild but sublime beauty. Behind ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... With its ill-favoured head protruding above the surface of the water near the banks of slow-flowing rivers, pools, and swamps, the vast anaconda lies in wait for its prey. The fish swimming along in its neighbourhood,—the birds which, rising from the reeds, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... was fetching, the butcher knelt and lifted him against his knee. He struck me as ill-favoured enough—not to say ghastly—with the dust and blood on his face (for a splinter had laid open his cheek), and its complexion an unhealthy white against his matted hair. I took note that he ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Grandet pays his debt to nature, and Eugenie is left with the millions. Until now she had waited for the wandering lover's return; but he, engaging in the slave-trade, has lost all the generous impulses of his youth, and comes back only to deny his early affection and marry the ill-favoured daughter of a Marquis. Eugenie takes a noble revenge for this desertion by paying her dead uncle's debts, which Charles had repudiated, and she marries the notary's son, who leaves ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... Painters can hardly portray suspicion, jealousy, envy, &c., except by the aid of accessories which tell the tale; and poets use such vague and fanciful expressions as "green-eyed jealousy." Spenser describes suspicion as "Foul, ill-favoured, and grim, under his eyebrows looking still askance," &c.; Shakespeare speaks of envy "as lean-faced in her loathsome case;" and in another place he says, "no black envy shall make my grave;" and again as "above ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... they put no women into nunneries but such as were either purblind, blinkards, lame, crooked, ill-favoured, misshapen, fools, senseless, spoiled, or corrupt; nor encloistered any men but those that were either sickly, subject to defluxions, ill-bred louts, simple sots, or peevish trouble-houses. But to the purpose, said ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... gesture of defiance, and sniffed the air as though she said, "Any one who wants to meddle with me will get the worst of it." There was a brief pause; suddenly a man staggered out of the gin-shop, smearing the back of his hand across his mouth as he came—a massively built, ill-favoured brute, with a shock of uncombed red hair and small ferret-like eyes. He stared stupidly at the weeping Liz, then at Mother Mawks, finally from one to the other of the loafers who stood by. "Wot's the row?" he demanded, quickly. "Wot's ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... I thought he was dead of suffocation. He had worked the gag out of his mouth, and lay as still as a corpse. But soon I saw that he was sleeping quietly, and in his slumbers the madness had died out of his face. He looked like any other sailorman, a trifle ill-favoured of countenance, and dirty beyond the ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... his mother was constrained (to avoid the complaints) to take him with her to market, or wheresoever she went or rode. But this helped little or nothing, for if he rode before her, then would he make mouths and ill-favoured faces at those he met; if he rode behind her, then would he clap his hand on his tail; so that his mother was weary of the many complaints that came against him, yet knew she not how to beat him justly for it, because she never saw him do that which was ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... life Gregory had not been unhandsome; debauchery and sloth had puffed and coarsened him. Joseph, on the other hand, had never been aught but ill-favoured. ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... is not ill-favoured, but she is poor and thin. Nevertheless say one dollar more," says ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... were nobodies in the eyes of Captain. Drawlock; they were a part of his cargo, for which he was not responsible. The important part of his consignment were four unmarried women; three of them were young, good-looking, and poor; the other ill-favoured, old, but rich. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... harder visages and higher cheekbones, well knit in their limbs, and active; not deficient in hospitality, but jealous of strangers. The women, excepting a few of the daughters of the chiefs, were in general ill-favoured, and even savage in their aspect. At the village of In-juan on the borders of the lake I saw some of them with rings of copper and shells among their hair; they wore destars round their heads like the men, and almost all of them had siwars or small daggers at their sides. They were not shut ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... ill-favoured grin, and lifted his spear. The poor victim covered his eyes with his hand and stood still. As for us, we were petrified ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... afterwards that he had ever brought with him the articles which he missed. It happened, therefore, upon the eve of Huxford's departure from Quebec, that he found, upon returning to his lodgings, that his landlady and her two ill-favoured sons, who assisted her in her trade, were waiting up for him over a bowl of punch, which they cordially invited him to share. It was a bitterly cold night, and the fragrant steam overpowered any suspicions ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it is, they have not a church fit to say mass in." "A great pity, too, that they cannot remove our hospital," would another exclaim; "as it is, they are obliged to send us their sick, poor wretches. I always think that the sick of Coruna have more ill-favoured countenances than those from other places; but what good can come ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Irish footmen. Whereas they can be proved to be no better than common toupees,[182] as a judicious eye may soon discover by their awkward, clumsy, ungenteel gait and behaviour, by their unskilfulness in dress, even with the advantage of wearing our habits, by their ill-favoured countenances, with an air of impudence and dulness peculiar to the rest of their brethren; who have not yet arrived at that transcendent pitch of assurance. Although, it may be justly apprehended, that they will do so in time, if these counterfeits shall happen to succeed ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... hands will paint similar hands in his works, and the same will occur with any limb, unless long study has taught him to avoid it. Therefore, O Painter, look carefully what part is most ill-favoured in your own person and take particular pains to correct it in your studies. For if you are coarse, your figures will seem the same and devoid of charm; and it is the same with any part that may be good or poor in yourself; it will be shown in some ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... and loaded her head with diamonds; in spite of which, she appeared so frightful, with her squinting eyes, oily black hair, crooked legs, and humped shoulder, that the persons sent by the king of the peacocks to receive her, were struck with amazement at the sight of her. Being as cross as she was ill-favoured, she asked them tartly whether they were all asleep, and why they did not bring her something to eat; and then, distributing her blows pretty freely, she threatened to have them all hung if they did not shew ...
— Bo-Peep Story Books • Anonymous |
