"Sagging" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which having lost its principal support swayed upward, in peril of being torn away by the sagging jib. Vane first rounded up the boat into the wind and then followed him; and for several minutes they had a savage struggle with the madly-flapping sail before they flung it, bundled up, into the well. Then they ran in the bowsprit, and Vane felt ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... and weight of the bottle sagging down his pocket and threatening to injure the set of his coat, Mr. Middleton held his acquisition on his knee. A tall, serious-looking individual was his seat mate, who after regarding the bottle intently for some time, addressed him in a ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... for a ritual so antiquated and a gift so obsolete, could do naught but depart. Miss Susie had somehow managed to keep the advantage, and the two white women watched the departing figure shuffle down the walk, out through the sagging, screaky gate. The clouds had broken in the west and a soft golden radiance suffused the row of maples that lined the fence along the street, and the swelling branches gleamed with promise. Over toward the east a patch of blue ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... excitement. At intervals figures crowded to the narrow door; at intervals faces crowded in the narrow window. Sometimes it was Lulu, swollen and purple and broken with weeping. Sometimes it was Chiquita, pale and blurred and sagging with tears. Often it was Peachy, whose look, white and sodden, steadily searched the distance. Below on the sand, Clara, shriveled, pinched, bent over, her hands writhing in and out of each other's clasp, paced back and forth, her eye moving always on the path. Suddenly she stopped ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... also another reason for a sagging of prosperity. Beauvais was rapidly gaining in size and importance under the patronage of the king and the wise rule of its administrators. Beauvais with her high- and low-warp looms, her artists from Paris and her privilege to sell in the open ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... alone of earthly things bring its actual force to our physical perception, to our daily life. We see the sea in movement and power before us heaving up whatever it may bear, and we feel in an immediate way its strong backward sagging when the rocks appear above it as it falls. We have our hand on the throb of the current turning in a salting river inland between green hills; we are borne upon it bodily as we sail, its movement ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... thought that one could fall into a loose, sagging net in any position and not be hurt. But this is not so. A fall into a net from a great height is often as dangerous as landing on the ground. Circus folk must ...
— Joe Strong on the Trapeze - or The Daring Feats of a Young Circus Performer • Vance Barnum
... she entered it, trailing in, tall and thin, in her sagging grey coat and skirt, her wispy grey hair escaping from under her floppy black hat, and with the air of having till a moment ago been hung about with parcels (she had left them in the hall), looked altogether unsuited to her environment, like a dowdy ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... peaked cap showed the bearded face and the white of strained eyes gleaming through dust and sweat. The man was too tired to smile and talk. The weight of the pack, the weight of the clothes, the dust, the smiting sun—all weighted down the man, leaving every line in his body sagging ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... a heroic struggle, on the part of some valet of infinite pains, to efface them. The nose lost outline in the discolorations of the puffed cheeks; the chin, tufted with a small imperial, trembled beneath a sagging, gray lip. And that this bruised and dissipated mask should suffer the final grotesque touch, it was decorated with the moustache of a coquettish marquis, the ends waxed and ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... brooder, or Philo box, as it has been popularly called, is the chief item in a system of poultry keeping that has been widely advertised. The principle of the Philo box is that of holding the air warmed by the chick down close to them by a sagging piece of cloth. The cloth checks most of the radiating heat, but is not so tight as to smother the chick. This limits the space of air to be warmed by the chicks to such a degree that the body warmth is used to the greatest ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... distant sounds broke the forest silence, grew vague, died out,—the fairy clatter of a falling leaf, the sudden scurry of a squirrel, a feathery rustle of swift wings in play or combat, the soft crash of a rotten bough sagging earthward to enrich the ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... the sheriff climbed back into the sagging buckboard and departed. Casey returned to his quarters and began to gather an outfit by the only practical method; that is to say, by piling everything he wanted in a heap. He was engaged in this occupation when Clyde knocked ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... the encounter and stood surveying herself in the long mirror set into the closet door of her bedroom she had to admit that she had missed none of her points. Most women at her age would have been sagging a bit, the cords of youth slackened by the weight of maternity or the continual pull against ill health and genteel poverty. Or they would have been smothered in the plump content of Mrs. Hilmer. Helen Starratt's slenderness had still a virginal quality and she knew every artifice that ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the position in his office the slow fires of hatred that had been burning beneath the surface of Walter Savers' life had already eaten away much of his vigor and energy. His body sagged in the office chair and there were heavy sagging lines at the corners of his mouth. Outwardly he remained always kindly and cheerful but back of the clouded, troubled eyes the fires of hatred burned slowly, persistently. It was as though he was trying to awaken from a troubled dream that gripped him, a dream that frightened ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... have often tested myself by these conditions, when weeks, and perhaps months, have passed without some answer to prayer, and there has come a conscious spiritual sagging. As the discerning soul can plainly see, all the conditions mentioned in the list below may be included in the ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... some of his daylight hours in bed; some in moving about the room spiritlessly. He looked out with lack-lustre eyes at the sagging wires, and seemed to be wondering how they could ever have interested him. His mother, as soon as she saw him, put him at death's door—at least she saw him headed straight for that dark portal. She began to insist, after a few days, that he go home with her: he would be hers, by right, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... boat deck, where the rail was not so crowded as it was forward. Her arm was about the drooping, pathetic figure of her aunt. They were staring intently out over the water,—the girl's figure erect, vibrant, alive with the spirit of youth, her companion's sagging under the doubt and scepticism of age. He hesitated a moment before accosting them. Nicklestick, the Jew, was excitedly retailing the news to them. He went so far as to declare that he could see land quite clearly,—and so could they ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... twenty-ninth day, as marked on stick, when I had about given up hope, that I heard a cheerful voice shouting "Whoa!" and recognized it as the voice of Harrington. A criminal on the scafford with the noose about his neck and the trap sagging underneath his feet could not have welcomed a pardon more eagerly than I welcomed my ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... A, of a common form of truss for roofs. It is strictly a tie intended to prevent the sagging of the tie beam, B, in the middle. If there are struts, C, supporting the rafters, D, they extend down to the foot of the ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... All else continuing—the stars shining, The winds blowing—the notes of the bird continuous echoing, With angry moans the fierce old Mother incessantly moaning, On the sands of Paumanok's shore, grey and rustling; The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching; The boy ecstatic—with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere, dallying, The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting; The ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... insupportable. Of course there were minor annoyances—the children across the hall, for instance, and the maid in the kitchen—but these faded into insignificance when contrasted with the leaky plumbing, sagging doors, rattling windows and the like on the part of Mr. Griffin, the landlord, and new arbitrary rulings concerning the supply of steam for the parlor, coal for the kitchen range, the taking away of refuse, and the austere stairway restrictions ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... might have tipped the scales at a scant one hundred and thirty pounds; now his sagging body was a load in excess of seven hundredweight. With that load upon him, and glorying in the effort it cost, Luke staggered on toward the triple red glow, which, even in the blinding whiteness of the snowfall, marked the location of ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... at the corners. Cut out the top and bottom of the two sides; lay them on the floor so as to form a perfect rectangle, and nail them together. The strut is then prepared, care being taken to get a good fit, as any shortness of strut will sooner or later mean sagging of the door. Cut the angles as squarely as possible, to ensure the strut being of the same ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... rider turned him and faced back toward the group, coming at a stiff gallop. Soon Wildfire breasted the slope, and halted, snorting, shaking before the men. The lasso was still trailing out behind, limp and sagging. There was no weight upon ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... which they could reach either Fort Moultrie or their home, for both the little girls realized that they might wander about the sand-hills all night without finding their way back to the fort. It was chilly and dark, and the old cabin with its sagging roof and open doorway was not a very inviting shelter. Indeed, Estralla was quite sure that a lion, or at the very least a family of wolves, was at that moment safely hidden in one of the dark corners of ...
— Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter • Alice Turner Curtis
... first crooked street I came to. I stared at the house-fronts, at the little square panes of the sagging window-sashes, at the dingy doors, with those short, steep flights of steps leading down to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... tinged with the gloom of his unhopeful mood; and his body sagged with his sagging spirit. Before he had walked four miles, his legs refused to carry him ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the sound of advancing steps lifted Frederick's face from hers. Muttering an oath, he threw Tess forcibly from him, for there in the path was Ebenezer Waldstricker, about whose sagging lips played a ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... pulling it in on one side of the dory, picking off the fish, rebaiting the hooks, and passing them back to the sea again—something like pinning and unpinning linen on a wash-line. It is a lengthy business and rather dangerous, for the long, sagging line may twitch a boat under in a flash. But when they heard, "And naow to thee, O Capting," booming out of the fog, the crew of the We're Here took heart. The dory swirled alongside well loaded, Tom Platt yelling for Manuel ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... Miss Kirk had twice been up in night court. Her mother alternated under three aliases and was best known on the night boat that plied between New York and Albany. Occasionally this mother visited upon her daughter, her laughter hitting through the store like cymbals. She had the sagging flesh of an old fowl and cheeks that had not been cleansed of rouge long enough for the pores to breathe in and keep the flesh alive. To Lilly she was as terrible as a plucked hen on a butcher's block, with her head dyed to a vicious cock's-comb red and the wattles of loose skin ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... ruins of an old mill, the moss-covered water-wheel forever silent, the roof sagging and falling in, the windows broken out by mischievous boys, the whole presenting a most ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... were standing rifle in hand, waiting for the sudden cessation of fire which would be the signal for them to mount the parapet. Bombers and bayonet-men alternated in series of two. The bombers wore their mediaeval-looking shrapnel-proof helmets and heavy canvas grenade coats with twelve pockets sagging with bombs. Their rifles were slung on their backs to give them free ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... good look at the house, and was about to retrace his steps down the highway, when he saw the sagging front door of the old mansion slowly open. It creaked on the rusty hinges, and Mark stared with all his might as he saw a man emerge, a man who did not look like a tramp, for his clothes were of good ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... appeared beneath the firs, and she saw that two of them carried a litter between them. Then she saw her husband walking very wearily, and she ran forward with a little cry. She grasped one of the poles between which a sagging blanket hung, and Weston, who held the ends of ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... handcuffs on "Slim" and the two "bashers" and then the room began going around and around and the figures before him began floating up and down. There was a roaring sound in his ears and everything went black. His knees sagging, he sank slowly to ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... go to New York, and I won't." Peter Knight tried to look forceful, but the expression did not fit his weak, complacent features. He was a plump man with red cheeks rounded by habitual good humor; his chin was short, and beneath it were other chins, distended and sagging as if from the weight of chuckles within. When he had succeeded in fixing a look of determination upon his countenance the result was an artificial scowl and a palpably false pout. Wearing such a front, he continued: "When I say 'no' I mean it, and the subject ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... all their varied experiences had Max and his three comrades looked on a more remarkable spectacle than the one by which they were now greeted. The man's face could not be plainly seen on account of his coat sagging down partly over his head, so they could not immediately tell what he looked like; but he certainly possessed a bull-like voice that, properly trained for opera use might have won him a fair amount of fame and money, for it was more ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... while Cochrane carefully controlled his features. After a few moments Holden came back, his face sagging. ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... tastes. I could look up from my homely tasks and cast a potato almost in the midst of that cataract of marble steps that flows out of the north wing of the patriotic pile. Ah! when that creaking and sagging back gate closed behind me in the evening, I was happy; and when it opened for my egress thence in the morning, I was not happy. Inside that gate was a miniature farm, redolent of homely, primitive life, a tumble-down house and stables and implements of agriculture ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... for her when she came out into the yellow evening light, squatting there in his buckboard, reins sagging. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... gardens. If it was plant life of a different, dangerous sort, with other billions of years of development behind it, that just made the call stronger. Mitch just sat and thought, now, the mouth organ he seldom played sagging forward ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... loosened the upland snows and filled the canons and arroyos with a red turbulence of waters bearing driftwood and dead leaves. With a companion ranger he mended trail and rode along the telephone lines, searching for sagging wires; made notes of fresh down timber and the effect of the snow-fed torrents ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... glitter. Brokaw, with the fumes of liquor thick in his brain, tried to nod an invitation for him to enter; his head rolled grotesquely and his voice was a croak. David rose slowly to his feet, thrusting back his chair. From contemplating Brokaw's sagging body, Hauck's eyes were levelled at him. And then his lips parted. One would not have called it a smile. It revealed to David a deadly animosity which the man was trying to hide under the disguise of that grin, and he knew ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... upon the broad rump of a big gray horse which galloped around a saw-dust ring with the regularity of movement that suggested a machine, while a sober-clothed man in the center cracked a whip and yelped commands. Andy had jumped through blazing hoops and over sagging bunting while he rode—and he was just a trifle ashamed of the fact. Also—though it does not particularly matter—he had, later in the performance, gone hurtling around the big tent dressed in the garb of an ancient Roman and driving four deep-chested bays abreast. As has been explained, ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... sagging old head, up the sagging old shoulders! Old '61 was back in "Georgy," marching through mud and pine-barrens, in cold and hunger and weariness—with the boys, from Atlanta to the sea. Hurrah! hurrah! the flag that made ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... Anderson sharply. "She wears a veil, asleep an' awake. Hold on! Put your hands down! She's signalin' somebody, sure as you're alive," he burst out, turning to the group of mouth-sagging, eye-roving gentlemen who followed every graceful curve and twist of those ivory arms. "What's the matter with you, Sim? Didn't I order you to go in there an' ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... interrupted. A near-drunken rowdy (upon whom I had kept an uneasy corner of an eye) had been careening over the platform, a whiskey bottle protruding from the hip pocket of his sagging jeans, a large revolver dangling at his thigh, his slouch hat cocked rakishly upon his tousled head. His language was extremely offensive—he had an ugly mood on, but nobody interfered. The crowd stood aside—the natives laughing, the tourists like myself viewing ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... returned to his capital the day before, and had busied himself until late that night with matters of state. He had slept well, and wakened to a sense of well-being. But, during the afternoon, he became uneasy. Olga Loschek haunted him, her face when he had told her about the letter, her sagging figure when he had ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... by this time was pushing her nose past the spit of rock hiding our creek from seaward. As she came by with both large sails boomed out to starboard and sheets alternately sagging loose and tautening with a jerk, I caught sight of two of her crew in the bows, the one looking on while the other very deliberately unlashed the anchor, and aft by the wheel a third man, whom I made out to ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... either by Arch Braces or by the addition of Arches, as the heavy strains from the weight of bridge and load bearing on the feet of the braces near the abutments, tend to cripple and distort the truss by sagging, although the Baltimore Bridge Co. have built a Wooden Howe Bridge of two Trusses of 300 ft. span, 30 ft. rise, and 26 ft. wide, without any arch, but it has a wrought iron lower chord, and is only proportioned for ...
— Instructions on Modern American Bridge Building • G. B. N. Tower
... course of his round, looked with curiosity at this crowd of suppliants before the shrine of the oracle. He had a great desire to see how Mr. Scogan played his part. The canvas booth was a rickety, ill-made structure. Between its walls and its sagging roof were long gaping chinks and crannies. Denis went to the tea-tent and borrowed a wooden bench and a small Union Jack. With these he hurried back to the booth of Sesostris. Setting down the bench at the back of the booth, he climbed up, and with ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Instead of concentrating in that steady delighted survey of herself to which she was accustomed, he alternated between an almost excessive interest in what she was saying and complete abstraction, during which he would turn suddenly aside and drive his stick through the ice on the little pools at the sagging outside edge of the promenade, his mouth contracting as if he really hated it. She hovered meekly by while he did that. If one went to see a dear friend, whose charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished home, and found ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... for a while, Judith's thin young body sagging dejectedly in the saddle. The lavendar twilight was gathering. White stars hung within hand touch. Prince returned to the trail and a coyote barked derisively from beyond an ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... Barton wretchedly. With a really desperate effort he struggled almost to his feet, tottered for an instant, and then came sagging down to the soft earth again—a great, sprawling, spineless heap, at little ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... beneath the table and sat back, hands deep in pockets, and a toothpick hanging limp from between lips that were sagging. ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... any chance you have seen a man in a coat with sagging pockets, and a cloth hat of the latest fashion but two—a hat which I may say is precious to him (old friends, old wine, old hats)—emerging from his house just short of noon, do not lay his belated appearance ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... topped the slight rise that hid the town from view, and it was four hours later that I saw or heard the next human being, or any other evidence of his existence except a stretch of barb-wire and one lone telegraph wire sagging from one crooked stick to another. The four stony dry but flat leagues along the valley floor had brought me to San Antonio, all the population of which was loafing and mildly celebrating New Year's, as they would celebrate any other possible excuse not to work. Here I obtained water, and ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... head raked the clothes from one side of my body, and sent me, sprawling and breathless, into the welter of sagging weeds. ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... came Alice lay in the big bed under the sagging ceiling with a lamentably small baby in her arms, and Greatorex sat beside her by the hour together, with his eyes fixed on her white face. Rowcliffe had told him to be on the lookout for some new thing or for some more violent sign of the old obsession. But nine ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... Eleanor and the girl's subsequent flight had made the old lady suffer was evinced by the pinched look of her nostrils and the heavy, sagging lines about her mouth; but in her grim old eyes there ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... characterized New England. The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct influence of that province over the country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the emigration of its more vigorous sons, its typical institutions sagging under the weight of immense immigrations from Europe, its political importance growing more and more negligible, that ancient promontory of ideas has continued to lose its relative literary significance. In one field of literature only has New England maintained ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... days the crumbling adobe buildings that abutted on the old garden wall of the convent were the haunts of lawless Mexicans and vagabond peons. As the roadway began to be rough and uneven, and the gaunt outlines of the sagging roofs of tiles stood out against the sky above the lurking shadows of ruined doorways, he was prepared for the worst. As the crumbling but still massive walls of the convent garden loomed ahead, the tall, graceful, black-gowned ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... me to tell her which was daisy and which was fennel. My ignorance caused many a blunder, to her high amusement; but at last I discovered that the daisy's head was larger than that of its humble brother. A half-mile's walk along the pike brought us to an old sagging gate, which I pushed open, and we went through. A grassy hill was before us, sloping down to a cool hollow where a spring bubbled out from beneath a moss-grown ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... there came a lurch, a swift sagging of the arch supports at the western face of the arches; the roof quivered a little, then was still. It could now, from the open end, be seen that the supports in several places were wrenched loose ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... on and half off his head. Ginsburg stooped, putting his hands under the pits of the captain's arms, and gave a heave. The burden of the body came against him as so much dead heft; a weight limp and unresponsive, the trunk sagging, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... appropriated, for they knew that the railroad men no longer wanted them and that sooner or later a bonfire would be made of them. The heavy timbers were piled up on the bank of the brook as fast as the scouts could find them, and by the time Bruce and his helpers had hitched the block and tackle to the sagging bridge the crib builders ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... big branching white lilac tree was an old, sagging, wooden bench; and on this bench a girl was sitting, playing on an old brown violin. Her eyes were on the faraway horizon and she did not see Eric. For a few moments he stood there and looked at her. The pictures she made photographed itself ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... day, its excellence consisted in its alertness to its day, and not in slavish following of its yesterdays. Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey. Even the man who most feels himself "settled" is not settled—he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... pans, and the rancid odor of frying bacon, bespeaking the fact that somebody's breakfast was under way in the next room to mine. I stepped across the bare, cold floor to the window, and, rolling up the sagging black-muslin blind, looked out upon the world. Bleak and unbeautiful was the prospect that presented itself through the interstices of the spiral fire-escape—a narrow vista strung with clothes-lines and buttressed all about with ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... had a low sagging ceiling on which shone a low glow of firelight, making colder still the patch of eastern sky beyond the roofs and the cowls and hoods of chimneys framed by the square of the single window. The glow on the ceiling was reflected dully in the old dark mirror over the mantelpiece. An open ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... the Algonkins and the Hurons. The governor came up. In a grand peace council Chief Kiosaton, the head ambassador, made a long address. After each promise of good-will he passed out a broad belt of wampum, until the line upon which the belts were hung was sagging with ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... overlooked the harbor mouth. Clematis had swarmed over the bricks, a tangle of dead and living vines. The paint was chipping from the doors and window ledges. Here and there a shutter had broken loose and was sagging on rusted hinges. Houses are apt to follow the ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... cheery and wholesome expression I had ever seen in either youth or age. Over his broad bronzed forehead and white hair he wore a low-crowned, wide-brimmed black felt hat, somewhat rusted now, and with the band grease-crusted, and the binding frayed at intervals, and sagging from the threads that held it on. An old-styled frock coat of black, dull brown in streaks, and quite shiny about the collar and lapels. A waistcoat of no describable material or pattern, and a clean white shirt ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... clear sparkling stream of salt-water that gushed from the spout of the pump when the sound of a loud snap overhead caused me to look aloft, and I saw that the royal halyard had parted, and that the yard was sagging down with its own weight, and the sail bellying out with the pressure of the wind in it. Jones, the acting boatswain, who had charge of the deck, instantly observed the trifling mishap, and shouted an order for the sail to be temporarily clewed up, and for a hand to go aloft and bend the halyard ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... proprietor declared that the trunk had not been touched—whoever heard of taking off a trunk to adjust a carburetor? But a repairman coming in just then, heard the talk about the trunk and said he was the man who had made the adjustment on the car and he noticed that the trunk rack seemed to be sagging and took off the trunk to fix it. He had not put the trunk on again, because just then he had been called to help install new gears in a car for a man who was in a great hurry and had called one of the helpers to ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... the wet cloth and made a deft bandage for the head of Conklin. With his shaggy hair covered, and all his face sagging with lines of weariness, the gun-fighter seemed no more than a middle-aged man asleep, worn ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... far. Shluker, hastening along, still muttering to himself, turned into a cross street some two blocks away, and from there again into a lane; and, a moment later, led the way through a small door in the fence that hung, battered and half open, on sagging and broken hinges. Rhoda Gray's eyes traveled sharply around her in all directions. It was still light enough to see fairly well, and she might at some future time find the bearings she took now to be of inestimable worth. Not that there was much to remark! They ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... waves and weathers that confront it. She had picked up some knowledge of the amazing twists a ship encounters at rest and in motion—stresses in still water, with cargo and without, hogging and sagging stresses, seesaw strains, tensile, compressive, transverse, racking, pounding; bumps, blows, collisions, oscillations, running aground—stresses that crumpled steel or scissored the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... dry with singing—there had been so many hurt, and she had found that it helped them to hear her, so when a moaning, groaning, cursing ambulance load stopped a moment, she sang; when walking wounded came through sagging with pain and dreadful weariness, she sang; and when night fell, and an engine was stalled, and she took in her own car a man who must be rushed to the first collecting station, she found herself still singing—. And this time it was "The Battle ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... drawn loosely back from her face, and hung in a long, fair plait down her back. She was not beautiful, only wholesome looking, with a clear, healthy color, and large, honest eyes. Her dress was a simple, inexpensive shirtwaist suit, but every article about her was in order. There was no sagging ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... next mail the turquoise brooch arrived, and Christopher, putting it in his pocket, went over to Sol Peterkin's to bear the message to the girl. As it happened, she was swinging on the little sagging gate when he came up the lane, and at sight of him her eyebrows shot up under her flaxen curls, which hung low upon her forehead. She was a pretty, soulless little animal, coloured like peach-blossoms, and with a great deal of that ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... struck the sagging body a few more times with the dagger, then threw the weapon on top of ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... sense of utter carelessness and grace Of pure abandon in the slumb'rous scene,— As if the June, all hoydenish of face, Had romped herself to sleep there on the green, And brink and sagging bridge and sliding stream Were just romantic parcels ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... hard together, began to slide slowly backward toward the opening through which he had crawled into the roof. When he had crawled in he had not noticed the springiness of the poles, but now his imagination tormented him with the sensation of sagging and swaying. When his feet pushed through the opening he had to grit his teeth to hold himself steady. It seemed as if someone were reaching up in the dark to catch him by the legs and pull him out. Nothing happened, however, ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... moment it dropped unheeded on the ground beside him, and he sat motionless, staring at the pool. He did not see the green of the undergrowth; he did not hear a thrush pouring out its little soul from a bush close by. He saw a huddled, shapeless thing sagging into a still smoking crater; he heard the drone of engines dying faintly in the distance and a voice whispering, "The devils . . . ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... troubled curiosity sent Stratton swinging briskly across the street. Keeping inside the long hitching-rack, he crossed the sagging porch and stepped through the open door into the store. For a moment he thought it empty. Then a chair scraped, and over in one corner a short, stout, grizzled man dropped his feet from the ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... was sagging sideways over the armrest of this chair, head lolling backwards. The gun slid from his hand, ...
— Oneness • James H. Schmitz
... It is rather a diminution—a thinning out of atoms, by wasting without replenishment. Such a condition is always negative, and requires treatment under the negative pole. On the contrary, relaxed parts, such as appear in prolapsus uteri, and in the sagging down of the diaphragm, with the thoracic and abdominal viscera, exhibit no lack of nutrition or of vital action. Relaxation is a loosening of atoms from each other, more or less, without loss of aggregate weight; and implies a condition electrically positive in excess, and calls for treatment ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... in the case of Mrs. Volsky she could see the point of Dr. Blanchard's assertion! She had known many animals who apparently were quicker to reason, who apparently had more enthusiasm and ambition, than Mrs. Volsky. She looked at the dingy apron, the unkempt hair, the sagging flesh upon the gray cheeks. And she was conscious suddenly of a feeling of revulsion. ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... on a table, and then built up, as it is termed. This consists in running wax upon the portions where large spaces occur between type, in order that corresponding portions in the electrotype may not be touched by the inking roller, or touched by the sagging down of the paper ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... been going on in this way for about an hour when one of the scouts working down at the edge of the roof called to Blythe who was up at the peak that the roof beneath him was sagging. ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... up the sagging lines to turn out for Watts McHurdie's buggy. He had just let Nellie Logan out at the Wards', where she lived. After a "Hello, Watts; getting pretty late for an old man like you," Hendricks answered: "Well, you know John—when he gets a thing in his head he's a regular tornado. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... sagging, shivering, softly groaning on the back of the Muscat donkey, and Hamoud, ever pacing beside her, and the askaris with their rifle barrels glinting against their fezzes, and the porters and the camp boys, were only the instrument that her ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... knocked, then, without waiting for a summons to enter, lifted the wooden latch and shoved the sagging door open. ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... teeth. And the wolf-dog, with ears flattened down and crouching, would slide silkily away, only to circle up to the foal from the other side and give cause to the mare for new alarm. Then Daylight, urged on by Dede's solicitude, uttered a low threatening cry; and Wolf, drooping and sagging in all the body of him in token of his instant return to man's allegiance, slunk off ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... going across this sagging morass. Uncle Moses told me that we were in no danger of sinking into it so long as we took short and rapid steps; but we were both mightily fatigued, and my feet as I lifted them seemed heavy as lead. The negro was in far worse case than I, and had I not grasped him firmly ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... youngest nephew. She smiled her downward, sagging smile, wrung from a virginity sadder than Grannie's grief. ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... bits of quartz, brought up into the light from the depths of a sagging pocket. The quartz indicated high-grade ore; it was streaked and pitted with ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... Ambarkhana or Elephant-stable on the hill top. It is a picture of great desolation which meets the eye. The fragment of a wall or plinth, covered with rank creepers, an archway of which the stones are sagging into final disruption, and many a tumulus of coarse brown grass are all that remain of the wide buildings which once surrounded the Ambarkhana. The latter, gray and time-scarred, still rears on high its double row of arched vaults; but Vandalism, ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... the canyon on the right hand side of the road. It was a little wooden shack, sagging and discolored, its windows broken and its whole appearance denoting that utter desolation to which only a deserted homestead can attain; not even a human wreck can equal this silent abandonment. It had been a fairly decent place once; there were outbuildings ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... sagging body to a couch and then Andrieff, who was something of an amateur surgeon, examined ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... thought, turned up her nose at him and, seeking to keep her feet hidden as she walked by sagging a little at the knees, went to the door. Turning there, she saw in Lee's eyes the hint of a smile, a very ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... let break, deeming themselves fortunate if they could see "just a little bit of the rail." Inaudible, but convincing, the great inventor expounded his discovery, and sent his obedient little model of the trains of the future up gradients, round curves, and across a sagging wire. It ran along its single rail, on its single wheels, simple and sufficient; it stopped, reversed stood still, balancing perfectly. It maintained its astounding equilibrium amidst a thunder of applause. The audience dispersed at last, discussing how far they would ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... was given a big room all to herself. The slat bed, the iron wash-stand, the broken-legged chair, and the wavy mirror were the only articles that Mrs. Snawdor was willing to part with, but Uncle Jed donated a battered stove, which despite its rust-eaten top and sagging door, still proclaimed itself a ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... the jagged crisscross coral—a string of these long enough to go twice round her neck, and yet hang down in front to her waist. If she owned a string as long as that she might be able to cut enough off to make a slender wristlet. She would have loved to see such a wristlet sagging down ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... cats sing at night?" called back Mr. Hildreth, having recovered his breath. "Any cat that's a good singer, will make good violin strings. Miss—er—what's her name?" he questioned Richard who was holding up one end of the sagging wire. ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... ready to be congratulated on a good piece of work, though perfectly aware ha could never in this world, at least, collect his fee for medical attendance. Bartholomew's complacent self-importance almost straightened his bowed shoulders and redeemed the weakness of his sagging lips and feeble chin. Lizzie, his wife, spent and pallid, her gaunt temples hollowed and her face chiseled by suffering, smiled contentedly as she lay against her pillow, a creature lifted for the moment above the petty weaknesses, pitiable fruit ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... tall, slender man, and had he stayed slender he might have carried his flesh gracefully. But Warden had lived well, denying himself nothing, and the flesh which had been added had formed in flabby bunches, drooping his shoulders, sagging his jaws, swelling the back of ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... was at last beginning to work its too oft repeated and now nearly exhausted influence on the sagging and much frayed nerves of the old man. A yellowish remnant of withered rose began to smear his far-off west: he dared not look to the east; that lay terribly cold and gray; and he smiled with a little curl of his lip now and then, as he thought of this and that ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the rear lines. But lassitude weighs upon all of us, our faces are jaundiced and the eyelids reddened; through long watching we look as if we had been weeping. For several days now we have all of us been sagging ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... increase—drawing irony instead of pity to his petitions for aid—was heaped against the arm of the bench in a shapeless mass. His red face, spotted by tufts of vermilion, week-old whiskers and topped by a sagging white straw hat, looked, in the gloom, like one of those structures that you may observe in a dark Third avenue window, challenging your imagination to say whether it be something recent in the way of ladies' hats or a strawberry shortcake. A tight-drawn belt—last ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... they were, and raced Weimer in his boat, with the American flag clinging to the pole, to the side of the big steamer as she drew slowly into the bay. Other row-boats and launches and lighters began to push out from the wharves, men appeared under the sagging awnings of the bare houses along the river-front, and the custom and health officers in shining oil-skins and puffing damp cigars clambered over ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... Lawrence River, commanding an enticing view of the Canadian shore, and rising in several stages above the lower level, where the factory once stood; but it is a somnolent village. No longer do river packet steamers call at the sagging pier, no longer do trains thread their way between the factory buildings and chug to a halt at the adjacent station. No longer do hope-giving pills and elixirs, or almanacs and circulars in the millions, pour out of Morristown destined for country drugstores ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... chimney, piling up the bricks on the bed in the guest-chamber, fortunately not occupied at the time. But the outlook was ghastly, for the house stood high on its clean-swept hill like a lonely outpost in a great waste of cinders, half-fallen chimneys, and sagging walls. In two weeks' time, while they still smoked, the ruins took on a strangely old look, and it was like standing in the midst of the excavations of an ancient city. Around the solitary house on the hill the wind howled, making a mournful moaning sound through the broken ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... her more than an hour to do it, to pull and lift and shove the inert figure! Afterward she used to wonder how she had done it; wonder how she had given the final push, which got his sagging body up on to the floor of the wagon! It had strained every part of her;—her shoulder against his hips, her head in the small of his back, her hands gripping his heavy, dangling legs. She was soaking wet; her hair had loosened, and stray locks were plastered ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... back-stick; The knotty forestick laid apart, And filled between with curious art The ragged brush; then, hovering near, We watched the first red blaze appear, Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, Until the old, rude-furnished room ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... of the hill in front of him was the chapel, its sagging roof silhouetted against the blue of the morning sky, the tombstones, irregular and rude, rising from the billowy sea of grave-mounds that lay around their base. Beyond him, in grandly distant sweeps, rose the moors. How well he knew all their contours, their ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... Jack, and see what the message is," urged Tom, as his chum stood with the scrap of damp paper held between his fingers, having allowed the sagging little toy balloon ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... course the little gray house where she was born would seem a poor abode after the splendours of her aunt's home. Old Man Shaw walked through his garden and looked at everything with new eyes. How poor and simple everything was! How sagging and weather-beaten the old house! He went in, and up-stairs to Sara's room. It was neat and clean, just as she had left it three years ago. But it was small and dark; the ceiling was discoloured, the furniture old-fashioned and shabby; ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... date in our acquaintance Aldrich and I attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat. But he would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he imagined the suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge, truly deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock. After his measure had once been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman who had been in the service of the family from the earliest days of his marriage, and accepted the result without criticism. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... alarms drove me once more on deck. A gloomier interval I never passed. Johnson and Nares steadily relieved each other at the wheel and came below. The first glance of each was at the glass, which he repeatedly knuckled and frowned upon; for it was sagging lower all the time. Then, if Johnson were the visitor, he would pick a snack out of the cupboard, and stand, braced against the table, eating it, and perhaps obliging me with a word or two of his hee-haw conversation: how it was "a son of a gun of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... windlass turns to rust; the sagging sluice-box falls; The holes you digged are water to the brim; Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls Are deathly now and mouldering and dim. The battle-field is silent where of old you fought ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... horse forward," he said. "I know the trail. All you need do is to follow me." And, shouldering his rifle, he walked leisurely into the woods, the cartridge belt sagging en bandouliere across ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... in his chair. Old age seemed to have descended upon him within the hour; with sagging shoulders, mouth half open in terror, and the wrinkled skin around his thin jaws and the corners of his eyes hanging in greenish-white folds, he looked very tired and very pitiful. Despite his terror, however, he was not yet daunted; for with the picture of two skeletons before ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... streamed across the ruined city with its crowding forests, its blank-staring windows and sagging walls, its thousands of gaping vacancies, where wood and stone and brick had crumbled down—the city where once the tides of human life had ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... trees, if they are any, are home dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking asp. They grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems have a permanent curve toward the down slope, as you may also see in hillside pines, where they have borne the weight of sagging drifts. ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... slightest, this boy made Green Valley listen as it had never listened before. For an hour he talked and for that length of time Green Valley neighbored with India, saw it as plainly as if it was looking over an unmended, sagging old fence ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Em agreed. "Now, how'd you like to have a real good time?" She disposed herself upon her elbow, so that the sagging bulk of her body was emphasized through its straining apparel; one leg, incredible, leviathan, was ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... old craftsmen who knew how to achieve beauty by restraint lined the straggling single street of a forgotten farming town. Despite weatherbeaten clapboards and sagging roofs, the fine ornamental detail of doorways and window frames assured similar ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... persuasive speech, for the desert steed scented water, and plodded back to the edge of the arroyo, where in a secluded circle of mesquite he halted. The horse snorted his relief at the removal of the heavy, burdened saddle and accoutrements, and sagging, bent his knees, lowered himself with slow heave, and plunged down to roll in the sand. Gale poured the contents of his larger canteen into his hat and held ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... her—a young woman of the working classes, her plump face sagging and mottled with terror, her eyes staring, her ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... sagging landing from which Barzil's schooners sailed trading with the West Indies; and back of it, and of his house, stood the small office. His mind had turned to this inconsiderable commerce when Kate Vollar entered and told him that her ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... from the tunnel into a coal bin, crossed to a sagging door, found themselves in a boiler room. Stairs led up to sunlight. In the street, in the shadow of tall buildings, a boxy sedan was parked at the curb. Brett went to it, tried the door. It opened. Keys dangled from the ignition switch. He slid into the dusty seat. ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer |
