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More "Rakish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thousand hairpins next time," she said angrily, as she fastened the coils to the best of her ability, and straightened the rakish hat. "You had better see that your hair is safe, Mollie, before you have your turn. I am going to sit down on the grass and jeer at you for a change. It's so easy to be superior when you are ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hands heartily. She was smartly dressed in a wine-colored velveteen, the over-short skirt of which barely reached to the tops of her freshly whitened spats. Her wide hat was tipped to a rakish angle. She was young (twenty-eight or thirty at most, but she looked less) and distinctly pretty. Her features were regular, her face oval, if too thin—with the thinness of one who is underfed. And this appearance of being ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... obliterated. Her deck was flush. The house, pierced by the main companionway, was divided into three sections—a small lounging room, a wireless room, and the captain's cabin, over which stood the bridge and chart house. The single funnel rose between the captain's cabin and the wireless room, and had the rakish tilt of the racer. Wanderer II could upon occasion hit it up round twenty-one knots, for all her fifteen years. There was plenty of deck room ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... hoods." This imposing dress, in perfect harmony with the dignity of the office of those who wore them, degenerated towards the fifteenth century. So much was this the case, that an order of Francis I. forbad the judges from wearing pink "slashed hose" or other "rakish garments." ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... with a piece of fishline and a pair of long-legged rubber boots. Captain Perez, swinging back and forth in the parlor rocker with the patch-work cushion, was puffing deliberately at a wooden pipe, the bowl of which was carved into the likeness of a very rakish damsel with a sailor's cap set upon the side of her once flaxen head. In response to his companion's remark he lazily turned his sunburned face toward the cane-seated ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... on the left, called the old Milltown road, she saw a white horse and wagon, driven by a man with a rakish, flapping, Panama hat, come rapidly around the turn and disappear over the long hills leading down to the falls. There was no mistaking him; there never was another Abner Simpson, with his lean height, his bushy reddish hair, the gay cock of his hat, ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a steed that looked like Sunday afternoon, with brand-new reins and bit, and in a suit that fit him to perfection, with gleaming spurs and shining buttons, the rakish and indomitable Pancho, his long-lost friend, returned to greet him. He could scarcely believe it. For since that memorable night when he had left them, to return to the interior of Mexico, never a word had he had from him. Meantime, the great happiness had come to him; and when the baby came ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... of the roadstead from the Esplanade is very striking, and is generally alive with shipping of all kinds and nations, from the smart and trim British man-of-war to the grimy collier, and from the rakish Malay prahu to the clumsy junk laden with produce from China. These latter are, however, fast dying out, and most of the larger Chinese ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... he failed to subdue. That was Teddy, a rakish sorrel that had never yet been ridden. Many had tried it, but none had stuck to the saddle to the finish; and some had been carried from the corral ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... the unexplored depths of a Victorian forest, were very evidently unaffected by the grim fancies of the evening. They were not laughing certainly, and when they spoke it was in whispers, but the younger man hummed a music-hall tune under his breath. There was something rakish, not to say reckless, in the way the elder sat his mount. They went carefully, though, taking every possible precaution against making needless noise. Once the horse of the elder man stumbled and set a stone rolling down a ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... All he could learn with regard to the latter point was, that on the day following that on which it occurred, a pilot boat and several fishing vessels had fallen in with a large schooner of a very rakish appearance, under French colours, steering a course apparently with the intention of running between Shetland and Orkney, into ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... Mauchline belles, Ye're safer at your spinning-wheel; Such witching books are baited hooks For rakish rooks, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... long slender ship of extremely low freeboard, rakish rigged as a single-master, both sails and oars being used as a means of propulsion; two small cannon were mounted forward, and a round dozen arquebuses were also carried. The total company and passengers of the three ships were only ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... the knickerbockers tilted his hat at a rakish angle, stuck a tooth-pick in the corner of his mouth, put his thumbs in his jacket arm holes, shot Wayland a quick look of questioning, grinned at the old man and nodded towards a white pergola standing apart from the veranda of the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... figure to him that she was to the other soldiers. But she was none the less welcome for that, after the monotony of the day, and Roderigo as she came nearer straightened up self-consciously and tilted his black patent leather hat with its rakish cluster of cock feathers a little more ...
— Lucia Rudini - Somewhere in Italy • Martha Trent
... such circumstances of distress, make any reflections, but what should be to your honour, and in abhorrence of such actions. I am so convinced of this, that by this rule I would judge of any man's heart in the world, better than by a thousand declarations and protestations. I do assure you, rakish as Jackey is, and freely as I doubt not that Lord Davers has formerly lived (for he has been a man of pleasure), they gave me, by their behaviour on these tender occasions, reason to think they had more virtue ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... a burning glance at Crevel; but, like Dubois, who gave the Regent three kicks, she affected too much, and the rakish perfumer's thoughts jumped at such profligate suggestions, that he said to himself, "Does she want to turn the tables on Hulot?—Does she think me more attractive as a Mayor than as a National Guardsman? Women are ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... wheel, in a puddle of his own blood, lay old Ding-dong, grey and ghastly. His eyes were closed; his cocked hat with a rakish forward tilt sat on his nose. He lay with shoulders hunched, his legs spread helplessly along the deck before him, stubborn chin digging into the ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... refuse, they accepted. On the Saturday following the company came: the corpse was put into a velvet hearse; and eighteen mourning coaches, filled with company, attended. When they were just ready to move, the lord Jefferies, son of the lord chancellor Jefferies, with some of his rakish companions, coming by, asked whose funeral it was; and, being told Mr. Dryden's, he said, 'What, shall Dryden, the greatest honour and ornament of the nation, be buried after this private manner! No, gentlemen, let all that loved Mr. Dryden, and honour his memory, alight and join with me ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... naughty, sensitive boy," said Mrs. Mowbray, "I will come here by myself, and tell dear Miss Dalton all about you behind your back. I will tell her about some of your adventures in London, and she will see what a naughty, wicked, rakish fellow you have been. He is sadly like me, dear Miss Dalton—so sensitive, and so ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... pale-blue undershirt, white flannel trousers girt round the waist with a red silk handkerchief, very gaudy moccasins, and a rakish Panama hat with a band of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... huge gauntlet, and examining it with the deliciously foolish bewilderment of the accomplished clown. After one or two failures, brilliantly improvised, he fixed it firmly on his head. The huge gauntlet, with its limp five fingers dangling over his left ear, became a rakish kepi with a five-pointed flap. Max—I mean Prosper Panne—wore it with an "air impayable." Out of his round, soft, putty-coloured face he made fifteen other faces in rapid succession, all incomparably absurd. He lit a cigarette and held it ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... the telegraph and of steam-driven ships settled for ever the account of the pirates, except in China, when even to this day accounts reach us, through the Press, of piratical enterprises; but never again will the black, rakish-looking craft of the pirate, with the Jolly Roger flying, be liable to pounce down upon the unsuspecting and ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... eyes and mouth wide open, in great surprise. Yes, it was really true. The bed was gone; there it went, tramping down the middle of the street. Its pillow had fallen a little to one side, which gave it a jaunty and rakish air. 'Humph!' said Willy. 'Well, I'm glad the ugly old thing is gone. Now I shall not have to ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... policeman standing at the top of the Gut. Up he looked; down he looked; Seacombe was orderly. Stepping as if to arrest a malefactor, he marched down the Gut.... Where was the policeman? A battered billycock and a rakish pipe looked round the corner, then withdrew. The battered billycock knew where the policeman was. The price of a glass, and billycock would have been ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... father a few years before. But M. Rubempre was bent on business, and the delightful scenery was an old story to him. They took a boat at a pier, and for an hour a negro pulled them about the harbor. There were quite a number of steamers in the port, long, low, and rakish craft, built expressly for speed, and some of them must have been knocked to pieces by the blockaders before the lapse of many weeks, though a considerable proportion of them succeeded in delivering their cargoes ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... exactly in the latitude of Guadaloupe, with the usual breeze, when, at daylight, a rakish-looking brig was seen in chase. Captain Digges took a long survey of the stranger with his best glass, one that was never exhibited but on state occasions, and then he pronounced him to be a French cruiser; most probably a privateer. That he was a Frenchman, Marble ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... pushed on towards Gandeln. On the way we had a bit of lunch, and I left a pipe behind. As there was nothing doing I pushed on past the column, waiting for a moment to watch some infantry draw a large wood, and arrived with the cavalry at Gandeln, a rakish old town at the bottom of an absurdly steep hill. Huggie passed me with a message. Returning he told me that the road ahead was ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... 'e's bought two since 'e bought that one—a soft felt, and a cowboy what he never wore but once or twice because it wasn't becomin'. You'll 'ave noticed, miss, that 'e 'ad one o' them fyces what don't look well in nothink rakish—a real gentleman's fyce 'e 'ad—and them ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... a hand to his mouth and surreptitiously removed a chew of tobacco almost fresh. With some effort he pulled his feet closer together, and he lifted his old Stetson and reset it at a consciously rakish angle. He glanced at the car, behind it and in front, coming back to the depressed male individual before him. "Yes, ma'am, I'll get you out, all right. ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... dinner, in his comfortable lodgings. He is not even in evening dress, but he does wear a lounge jacket, which we devoutly hope will give him a rakish air to Amy's eyes. He would undoubtedly have put on evening dress if he had known she was coming. His man, Richardson, is waiting on him. When we wrote that we deliberated a long time. It has an air, and with a little ...
— Alice Sit-By-The-Fire • J. M. Barrie
... Johannes returned home, looking as dirty and rakish as he possibly could. Lars Peter had to help him out of the cart, he could hardly stand on his legs. But he was not at loss for words. Lars Peter was silent at his insolence and dragged him into the barn, where he at once fell asleep. There he lay like a dead beast, deathly ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... which, in size and situation, took precedence of all the rest, I read, MR. TURVEYDROP. The door was open, and the hall was blocked up by a grand piano, a harp, and several other musical instruments in cases, all in progress of removal, and all looking rakish in the daylight. Miss Jellyby informed me that the academy had been lent, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... broad decked craft, built somewhat on the order of the primitive Rob Roy. The Imp was narrow and rakish, with a low cockpit and a high bow and stern. Nugget regarded it with the affection that one feels ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... tarpaulin hat and the blue ribbons and the Captain himself, all in this state of violent excitement; and down they bore at once upon the ancient mariner, as if he were a regular bluff-bowed old East Indiaman, full of golden ingots, and they were clipper-built, copper-fastened, rakish fore-and-afters of ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... of being so rudely roused, had pushed his nightcap very much on one side of his bald head. This gave him a rakish eccentric air which, now that he had leisure to observe it, charmed Mr Swiveller exceedingly; therefore, by way of propitiation, he expressed his hope that the gentleman was going to get up, and further that he would ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... farther out at sea. Sometimes a scattered flock remained in sight for the greater part of a forenoon. With their long, sharp wings and their outstretched necks,—like loons, but with a different flight,—they were rakish-looking customers. Sometimes from a great height, sometimes from a lower, sometimes at an incline, and sometimes vertically, they plunged into the water, and after an absence of some seconds, as it seemed, came up and rested upon the surface. They were too far away to be closely observed, ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... deeply-lined, impassive face and slightly glazed eyes. He had yellow-brown eyes like Ciccio. But in the uncle the eyelids dropped in a curious, heavy way, the eyes looked dull like those of some old, rakish tom-cat, they were slightly rimmed with red. A curious person! And his English, though slow, was beautifully pronounced. He glanced at Alvina with slow, impersonal glances, not at all a stare. And he sat for the most part impassive and abstract as ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... farewell, he would shoulder his mimic gun to the delight of the spectators, and proceed to march to battle to the time of the drum. Honor knew the routine perfectly. Meanwhile his expression of sleepy indifference under the rakish khaki cap as he blinked and chewed the nuts offered by the public, was human in its comprehension. When the crowd grew pressing, Honor left with her party, hearing for some distance the man's monotonous sing-song voice urging Johorun to dance for her reward, failing ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... manifestation of the growing ill-feeling towards France was not confined to poor but harmless poetizing. The first open rupture took place at Savannah. In the port of that city were lying two long, rakish schooners flying the French tricolor. Their decks were crowded with men, whose rough actions and brutal countenances showed them to be no respecters of law or order. It did not need the rows of cannon ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... ironically nicknamed the ambassador's strut; still, his dignity had a touch of the theatrical. Though his features were handsome and imposing, his hat, from beneath which thick black curls stood out, was perhaps tilted a little too much over the right ear, and belied his gravity by a too rakish effect. His eyes, inattentive and half closed, looked down disdainfully ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... inspires you with no haste to obtain it. Josiana wanted to remain free, David to remain young. To have no tie until as late as possible appeared to him to be a prolongation of youth. Middle-aged young men abounded in those rakish times. They grew gray as young fops. The wig was an accomplice: later on, powder became the auxiliary. At fifty-five Lord Charles Gerrard, Baron Gerrard, one of the Gerrards of Bromley, filled London with his successes. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Belford.— An account of Lovelace's delirious unmanageableness, and extravagant design, had they not all interposed. They have got Lord M. to him. He endeavours to justify Lovelace by rakish principles, and by a true story of a villany which he thinks greater than that ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... shores of Culebra, while they were telegraphing bunting one with another as fast as the bright-colored flags could talk. And, as luck would have it, as I swept the glass round, what should I see but a long rakish corvette in company with a huge whale of a line-of-battle ship, with her double tier of ports glimmering away in the slanting rays of the sun, both on the wind, and coming out from under the lee of Culebra Point, just a mile or two astern of us. By the blood of Barabbas, caballeros, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... About dusk our rakish cutter drifted into the shelter of the hills along the north shore of the bay, and with a chorus of enthusiastic cheers we dropped anchor in two fathoms of soft mud. We felt called upon to sing such songs as marines are wont to sing upon the conclusion ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... shabby pot-hat to a still more rakish angle, buttoning up an equally shabby coat the while against the east wind. He was a tall fair-haired fellow, half a Dane in race and aspect: broad-shouldered, loose-limbed, with a Franciscan passion for poverty and the poor. But ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... chase was lost sight of. The rain fell in torrents, and the ship was going seven knots through the water. On the clearing up of the fog, the chase was again visible. The sun broke forth, and the rakish-looking brigantine appeared to have carried on all sail during the squall. They could see, under her sails, the low black hull pitching up and down; and, approaching within range, one of the forecastle guns was cleared away for a bow-chaser. The British ensign had been for some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... London. He had been to Little Barlingford, and had spent his brief holiday among old friends and acquaintance. The weather had not been in favour of that driving hither and thither in dog-carts, or riding rakish horses long distances to beat up old companions, which is accounted pleasure on such occasions. The blustrous winds of an unusually bitter March had buffeted Mr. Sheldon in the streets of his native town, and had almost blown him off the door-steps ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... present presentment, is a medium sized man, attired in garments that have once been elegant, but are now frayed, threadbare, travel worn; his feet are encased in boots that have once been jaunty; his hat is as rakish as it is battered; his face wears that dull reddish hue, common to fair complexions that have been long exposed to sun and wind; his hair and beard, somewhat matted, somewhat disordered, may have borne some tinge of auburn or yellow once, but they ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... which abounds in abbreviated words, suppressed s's, unlisped z's, and s-sounding c's. After singing the 'Candelita,' a favourite Cuban ditty, Juana discourses upon her master Don Gabriel's objections to 'lo mocito,' as she calls them, and describes their rakish habits. ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... meal for the very young or the very hungry. The uncompromising coldness and solidity of the viands was enough to appall a man conscious that his digestion needed humouring. A huge cheese faced us in almost a swashbuckling way. I do not know how else to describe it. It wore a blatant, rakish, nemo-me-impune-lacessit air, and I noticed that the professor shivered slightly as he saw it. Sardines, looking more oily and uninviting than anything I had ever seen, appeared in their native tin beyond the loaf of bread. There was a ham, in its third quarter, ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... what was going on at first, and was, therefore, extremely surprised at noticing George hurriedly smooth out his trousers, ruffle up his hair, and stick his cap on in a rakish manner at the back of his head, and then, assuming an expression of mingled affability and sadness, sit down in a graceful attitude, and try to hide ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... as to say, the great staff, or staff of staffs; and that it has applied itself to astronomy with great success, after the example of our aforesaid forefather. The descendants from Longstaff, the second son, were a rakish disorderly sort of people, and rambled from one place to another, till in Harry II.'s time they settled in Kent, and were called Long-tails, from the long tails which were sent them as a punishment for the murder of Thomas-a-Becket, as the legends say; they have been always ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... top-hat a rakish tilt, the old gentleman ambled indoors, satisfied that he had dropped a guarded hint in a pleasant ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... suspenders made of rawhide strips, fastened to his trousers with wooden pins, and the strangest of old boots, which turned high up at the toes like canoes (being much too long for his feet), and which had a rakish aspect. ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... to his hat, jerked the brim at a rakish angle over his eyes—and he sprawled himself out on a chair. He heard the Tocsin's voice at the front door, and a man's voice, low and guarded, answer her. Then the door closed, and their steps approached the room. It was rather curious, that—a ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... already Bobby had grown into big boy's estate. He knew his sled would arouse derision and contempt. It had flat runners! And it curved far up in front! And it was built on a skeleton framework! What Bobby wanted, if he were to join the coasting world at all, was a long, low, solid, rakish-built affair with round "spring runners." Even "three-quarters" would not do ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... acquisition of larger and more powerful vessels of this design, being now in the position to contest every step that is made by Germany in this field. The type has also been embraced by the Russian military authorities. The Astra-Torres airship has a rakish appearance, and although the lines of the gas-bag are admitted to increase frictional resistance, this is regarded as a minor defect, especially when the many advantages of the invention ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... man, ye're a deevil!" he told himself, giving his hat a rakish cock. "Ye're a deevil wi' the weemen, ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... Conventions, should read Prayers before them. For then those that are afraid of stretching their Mouths, and spoiling their soft Voice, will learn to Read with Clearness, Loudness, and Strength. Others that affect a rakish negligent Air by folding their Arms, and lolling on their Book, will be taught a decent Behaviour, and comely Erection of Body. Those that Read so fast as if impatient of their Work, may learn to speak ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... velveteen; he had a rakish way of smoking a cigarette between his songs that was worth money in itself; he underlined his comic points, so that the dullest numskull in Castel-le-Gachis had a notion when to laugh; and he handled his guitar in a manner worthy ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... savagery called to mind African queens despite her typical pale complexion—very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From the inside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran up between her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until it disappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left corner ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... appearance during the somewhat long interval since Verdant had last seen him, and his handsome features had assumed a more manly, though perhaps a more rakish look. He was lolling on a couch in the neglige attire of dressing-gown and slippers, with his pink striped shirt comfortably open at the neck. Lounging in an easy chair opposite to him was a gentleman clad in tartan-plaid, whose face might only be partially discerned through the glass ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... sports a motor-car, a rakish little craft, built long and low, with racing lines, and a green complexion, and a nose that cuts through the air like the prow of a swift boat through water. Von Gerhard had promised me a spin in it on the first mild day. Sunday turned out to be unexpectedly lamblike, as ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... Frenchman?' asked Slivers, pouring himself out some liquor, and winking at her in a rakish manner with his ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... Lowestoffe—"but, first, let me have the honour of trussing you. Now, observe, I have left several of the points untied, of set purpose; and if it please you to let a small portion of your shirt be seen betwixt your doublet and the band of your upper stock, it will have so much the more rakish effect, and will attract you respect in Alsatia, where linen is something scarce. Now, I tie some of the points carefully asquint, for your ruffianly gallant never ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... on his delicate pale face A quizzical thin smile is showing, His cheeks are wrinkled like fine lace, His kind blue eyes are gay and glowing. He wears a brilliant-hued cravat, A suit to match his soft grey hair, A rakish stick, a knowing hat, ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... John," she answered a little judicially, "that Jane is at some of the quality houses tonight; and she'll be singing or dancing or playing bridge with one or other of that pale, rakish lot I see when I ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... day Jack's fleet held on its course, and the weather continued unbroken and fine. Day after day the phantom Frenchman hovered somewhere about, afraid perhaps to try conclusions with that rakish, spiteful-looking British frigate, or ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... a Mr. Rumbald, a maltster (which was all I thought him then), who frequented the Mitre tavern, without Aldgate, where I went one day, dressed in one of my sober country suits, wearing my hat at a somewhat rakish cock, that I might seem to be a simple fellow ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... his left shoulder showed that he was a lord-in-waiting. He was a handsome man, with clear-cut features, somewhat rakish from late hours and dissipation, but not the less interesting on that account. But his natural advantages were so over-run with the affectation of the Court that you did not see the man at all, being absorbed by the studied gesture to display ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... sailer, formerly chiefly applied to the sharp-built raking schooners of America, and latterly to Australian passenger-ships. Larger vessels now built after their model are termed clipper-built: sharp and fast; low in the water; rakish. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... pathless ocean in order to build an iron foundry upon the spot. Suppose they had excavated for a cellar! Why during the time that Capt. Kidd, Lafitte and I infested the coast thereabout, sailing three "low, black-hulled schooners with long rakish masts," I forced hundreds of merchant seamen to walk the plank—even helpless women and children. Unless the sharks devoured them, their bones are yet about three feet under the floor of that iron foundry. Under the lee of the Northernmost promontory, near a rock marked with peculiar crosses ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... experts have great difficulty in running week in and week out without serious breaks and delays. To use a slang phrase, "They will not stand the racket." However "stunning" they look on asphalt and macadam with their low, rakish bodies, resplendent in red and polished brass, on country roads they are very frequently failures. A thirty horse-power foreign machine costing ten or twelve thousand dollars, accompanied by one or more expert mechanics, may make a brilliant showing ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... general incontinence. Very nearly half the registered births are illegitimate, to say nothing of the illegitimate children born in wedlock. Of the servant-girls, shop-girls, and seamstresses in the city, it is very safe to say that scarcely ten out of a hundred are chaste, while, as rakish young Swedes have coolly informed me, many girls of respectable parentage, belonging to the middle class, are not much better. The men, of course, are much worse than the women, and even in Paris one sees fewer physical signs of excessive debauchery. Here, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... broken by a little gap to seaward, and in the centre is a miniature emerald isle. The ships lying at anchor seemed like children's boats in a pond. To the right, where a river empties in, were scattered groups of queer, rakish craft, each with four slanting pipes and a tiny flag floating from her halyards; a flag—as the binoculars revealed—of crimson bars and stars on a field of blue. These were our American destroyers. And in the midst of them, swinging to the tide, were the big "mother ships" we ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... His legs were white with black spots on them. His back was gray with a huge patch of yellow on one side and a black patch on the other. His tail was yellow with a gray tip. One ear was black and one yellow. A black patch over one eye gave him a fearfully rakish look. In reality he was meek and inoffensive, of a sociable disposition. In one respect, if in no other, Joseph was like a lily of the field. He toiled not neither did he spin or catch mice. Yet Solomon ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... who undertook the formation of the future wives and mothers of England (the last words in a lower voice, as requiring to be communicated in confidence) were really bound (voice coming up again) to set a better example than one of rakish habits, wrappers were put in requisition, and the two young cavaliers volunteered to see the ladies home. It was soon done, and the gate of the Nuns' House ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... as would be palatable to the most skeptical Bishop in all the Oecumenical Council, and of which be might justly say: Whosoever dare think that he ever tasted a better schema, or ever dreamed in his deepest consciousness that a better could be made, let him be anathema maranatha! A most rakish looking wooden button, noiselessly stealthly and sly, gave entrance to this treasury of dainties; and then what a rare array of disintegrated meals intoxicated the vision! There was the Athlete of the Dairy, commonly called Fresh Butter, in his ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... distinguished-looking, handsome, with a face full of character, the strong lines and features of which were further accentuated by his silvery hair. He was a smart old gentleman, too, well and scrupulously attired and groomed, and his blue bird's-eye necktie, worn at a rakish angle, gave him the air of something of a sporting man rather than of a follower of Thespis. His fellow members of the Oliver company seemed to pay him great attention, and at various points of the proceedings whispered questions to him ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... ten minutes past seven, the rakish recklessness of a quarter past, the drooping weariness of twenty-five minutes past, must have ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... bookcases, stuffed with volumes fat and thin, and they all looked interesting and hard-used. One of the brothers had been to a party the night before, and on coming home had put his dress-tie about the neck of a little plaster bust of Byron that stood on the mantel. This head, with the tie at a rakish angle, drew Claude's attention more than anything else in the room, and for some reason instantly made him wish ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... blood, the French tricolor, the banner of the great North German empire, and the Italian and the Spanish colors—sometimes, of an afternoon, the whole scene enliven'd by a fleet of yachts, in a half calm, lazily returning from a race down at Gloucester;—the neat, rakish, revenue steamer "Hamilton" in mid-stream, with her perpendicular stripes flaunting aft—and, turning the eyes north, the long ribands of fleecy-white steam, or dingy-black smoke, stretching far, fan-shaped, slanting diagonally ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... arranged her hair in two long braids. Her hat, no longer the flat straw or the flaring, rose-laden bonnet of the city, was now simply a man's cavalry hat, and almost her only mark of coquetry was the rakish cockade which confined it at one side. Long, heavy-hooped earrings such as women at that time wore, and which heretofore I had never known her to employ, she now disported. Brown as her face was now becoming, one might indeed, at a little distance, ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... clothes sat tilted back in one of several chairs beside the door. He wore a little black moustache and because his head was pressed against the brick wall behind him, his hat was pushed forward giving him a rakish look which was rather heightened by an unlighted cigar sticking up out of the corner of his mouth like a ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... home in little over a day. He hurried on, oftentimes when we wanted to rest. He seemed as anxious to emerge from the African desert as he had been to explore the deeps of it. He looked rakish and wretched as he bumped about upon his mule. His face was livid, and his black beard, that he used to cut so formally, desperately out of trim. His ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... pillar, like wreckage from a storm, and settles herself down upon it with a sigh of relief. She remains unmoved amid the turmoil, save when a passing gun-case tips her bonnet to one side, giving her a very rakish air, and a good-natured retriever on a neighbouring box is so much taken with her appearance that he offers her a friendly caress. Restless people—who remember that their train ought to have left half an hour ago, and cannot realise that all bonds ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... sterile in spite of their wit that they did not achieve between them the output of Moliere's single lifetime; and they were all (not without reason) ashamed of their profession, and preferred to be regarded as mere men of fashion with a rakish hobby. Goldsmith's was the only saved ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... South-east, and you behold on the same day, in 1620, a low rakish ship hastening from the tropics, solitary and alone, to the New World. What is she? She is freighted with the elements of unmixed evil. Hark! hear those rattling chains, hear that cry of despair and wail of anguish, as they die away in the unpitying ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... the Federal ships were firing at the chase; but they might as well have spared their powder and shot, for they could not reach her into at least a quarter of a mile. The wind was still at the south-west, and already there were signs of fog. The rakish steamer had probably come from the Bermudas, where she must have obtained a skilful pilot, for without one she would have had no chances at all; and she stood boldly on her course as though she had nothing to fear ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... has given his word for the fete on a particular day, before London runs quite dry. His pledge of his word is notoriously inviolate. The Countess of Cressett—an extraordinary instance of a thrice married woman corrected in her addiction to play by her alliance with a rakish juvenile—declares she performs the part of hostess at the request of the Countess of Fleetwood. Perfectly convincing. The more so (if you have the gossips' keen scent of a deduction) since Lord Fleetwood and young Lord Cressett and the Jesuit Lord ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... coming towards them, and between them a bedraggled M'lama, her skirt all awry, her fine hat at a rakish angle, stepped defiantly. ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... of the mush-snow, a long team of rakish Malemutes, driven by an Athabasca French-Canadian, raced wildly into the clearing about the post. A series of yells, and the wild cracking of a thirty-foot caribou-gut whip, announced that the big change was at hand—that the wilderness was awakening, ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... black skirt and black-and-white silk blouse. The blouse was buttoned wrong, and it did not meet the skirt in the back; and she had quite overlooked her neckgear, but of that she was pleasantly unconscious, also of the fact that there was a large black smooch beside her nose, giving her both a rakish and a sinister air. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... London, Tom thought, as he sat upon the box, and looked about him. Such a coachman, and such a guard, never could have existed between Salisbury and any other place. The coach was none of your steady-going, yokel coaches, but a swaggering, rakish, dissipated London coach; up all night, and lying by all day, and leading a devil of a life. It cared no more for Salisbury than if it had been a hamlet. It rattled noisily through the best streets, defied the Cathedral, took the worst corners sharpest, went cutting ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... Jimmie made out a speck of smoke upon the horizon, and saw it turn into a group of swiftly-flying vessels. He marvelled at the skill whereby they had been able to find the transports on this vast and trackless sea; he marvelled at the slender vessels with their four low, rakish stacks. These sea-terriers were thin skins of steel, covering engines of enormous power; they tore through the water, literally with the speed of an express train, leaving a boiling white wake behind. Seeing them rock and swing ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... a time, some three or four years previous to this, when a rakish fashion began to be introduced of wearing white-topped boots. It was a mere conceit of the wearers, such a fashion not existing beyond College,—except as it appeared in here and there an antiquated gentleman, a venerable remnant of the olden time, in whom ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... down the walk, his spurs jingling. In spite of his years the little officer carried himself jauntily, his wide hat tilted at a rakish angle. Just now he ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... the changing front that the Hun was about to lose. And as they left, the men were mostly silent; though they looked debonair enough with their swinging quickstep and easy carriage, and their frying-pan hats set at all sorts of rakish angles. Their officers would nod, glance enviously at the apple-trees and tents in our pleasant little orchard, and pass on to the front of the Front, and all that this implied in the way of mud, vermin, sudden death, suspense, and damnable ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... Puritan of the meaner sort, in his battered steeple-hat and cloak of rusty black. The other was closely wrapped in a red mantle, uptilted behind by a sword of prodigious length, and for all that his broad, grey hat was unadorned by any feather, it was set at a rakish, ruffling, damn-me angle that pronounced him no likely comrade for the piously clad ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... late one afternoon (I was painting the sunset glow) just as Loretta reached the edge of the quay on her way home, a young fellow, in white duck with a sash of dark red silk binding and hanging from his waist and a rakish straw hat tipped over his handsome face, shot his gondola alongside mine and leaned over to whisper something in Luigi's ear. And that was why the girl in her long black shawl stopped, and why Luigi immediately changed gondolas and made ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the door reopened, to discover, among the party it admitted, his old acquaintance of Vercelli, the Count of Castelrovinato. The latter, whose dress and person had been refurbished, and who now wore an air of rakish prosperity, greeted him with evident pleasure, and, while their entertainer was engaged in seating the ladies of the company, gave him a brief account ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... begun with her gray hair in neat little curls, deranged one so with convulsive hand that it came all down her cheek, and looked most rakish and unbecoming. Even Zoe and Fanny had turned from lambs to leopardesses— patches of red on each cheek, and eyes like ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... who stood in the middle of the freight-car, looking down in wonder at the fugitives, was a tall vagabond of the most picturesque type. No ragamuffin was ever so tattered and torn as this rakish individual. His clothes barely hung together on his lank frame; he was barefoot and hatless; a great mop of black hair topped his shrewd, rugged face; coal-black eyes snapped and twinkled beneath shaggy brows and ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the other, 'she's the very thing; she's a rakish-looking craft, and will do admirably. Any repair we want, a few days will effect; ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... a score of steps and stopped again. Sure enough, there she sat at the steering-wheel of a long, rakish touring-car, the slump of her shoulders vaguely hinting at despair and perhaps a stalled engine. His grin widened joyously. He touched his horse with his one spur, assumed an expression of vast indifference, and rode on. She jerked ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... the larrikin [in Brisbane]. . . . The slouch-hat, the rakish jib, the drawn features are not to be seen; nor does the young larrikiness—that hideous outgrowth of Sydney and ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Bindo took the young man, whose name I discovered to be Paul Clayton, for a run on the car to Bridlington. Bindo drove, and I sat upon the step. The racing-body gave the "forty" a rakish appearance, and each time we went up and down the Esplanade, or across the Valley Bridge, we created considerable interest. After lunch we went on to Hornsea, and returned to ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... metamorphosis came to Jimmie Dale's appearance. The neat, well-fitting Fifth Avenue tweeds did not fit quite so perfectly—the coat bunched a little at the shoulders, the trousers were drawn a little higher until they lost their "set." His hat was pulled still farther over his eyes, but at a more rakish angle, and his tie, tucked into his shirt bosom just below the collar, exposed blatantly a diamond shirt stud. But on Jimmie Dale's lips there was an ominous smile not wholly in keeping with the somewhat jaunty swagger ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... scores of other gentlemen under whose protection they were walking here and there; and she thought that her gentleman was handsomer and grander looking than any other gent in the place. Of course there were votaries of pleasure of all ranks there—rakish young surgeons, fast young clerks and commercialists, occasional dandies of the guard regiments, and the rest. Old Lord Colchicum was there in attendance upon Mademoiselle Caracoline, who had been riding in the ring; and who talked her native French very ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the pepper-and-salt suit which distinguishes the country excursionist taking the day off in London. He had little side whiskers and a heavy brown mustache. His golf cap was new and set at a somewhat rakish angle on his head. Across his waistcoat was a large and heavy chain hung at intervals with small silver medals. For all his provincial appearance his movements were decisive and suggested authority. He elbowed his way through the little crowd, ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... framing round blue eyes, shadowed by a hat that was almost an exact counterpart of the shabby one Miss Gray had hung each morning for the past three winters on her peg in the dressing-room. But there was something about the rakish tilt of the hat that was in such strange contrast to the severe spectacles and the thin, frosty nose, that it gave the snowlady the appearance of staggering and made her ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... time, this prudent reserve shielded him from the attacks he dreaded. But Mr. Grossman soon began to throw out hints about the sly hypocrisy of Puritan Yankees, and other innuendoes obviously intended to annoy him. At last, one day, he drew the embroidered slipper from his pocket, and, with a rakish wink of his eye, said, "I reckon you have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... one side and the horse—well, moved. Robin gazed down at his mother with the faint hint of an almost shy smile, Dion saluted her with his whip, and the glorious day was fairly begun. Traveling with a sort of rakish deliberation the dogcart skirted the velvet lawn of the Green Court and disappeared from sight beneath ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... clashed with the first glimmer of dawn; and in the dimness Evelyn's face showed pale and indistinct, save for two dusky semicircles where her lashes rested on her cheek. Desmond saw all this, because at night the shade was discarded, though the rakish bandage still eclipsed his right eye. He lay lapped in a pleasant sense of the unreality of outward things, and his wife—dimly seen and motionless—had the air of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... as I had read of in books, but never before witnessed. These little animals were put to rout by a huge elephant which lumbered in with Rudyard Kipling riding high on its trunk. The elephant changed suddenly to "a rakish craft." (I do not know what a rakish craft is; but this was very rakish and very crafty.) It must have been abandoned long ago by wild pirates of the southern seas; for clinging to the rigging, and jovially cheering as the ship went down, I made out ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... of men stood playing for money with impassive faces and greedy, grasping hands. There was no mixture of race among the men who gambled; they were all Chinese, most of them clad in indigo-blue trousers and tight vests, though some of them wore white shirts and rakish straw hats. The young men had close-clipped hair and looked like clever bull-terriers, but the older men wore long pigtails wound round their heads in black, rope-like coils. The noise of dominoes thrown out by the man who held ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... the discovery of criminals. Spies of all kinds are met with in these places, from the secret agent who tracks a criminal and flirts at the same time with the prostitutes, to the counter-spy employed by the proxenets to watch the secret agent. It is here that the criminal world acquires its rakish manners, but its weakness for women and alcohol cause it to fall early into the traps of the secret police. It is here also, as well as in the salons of high-class proxenetism, that we meet with those ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... arm, to the baths. It was a very different Alfred Burton indeed who, an hour or two later, issued forth into the streets. Gone was the Cockney young man with the sandy moustache, the cheap silk hat worn at various angles to give himself a rakish air, the flashy clothes, cheap and pretentious, the assured, not to say bumptious air so sedulously copied from the deportment of his employer. Enter a new and completely transformed Alfred Burton, an inoffensive-looking young man in a ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had he failed to subdue. That was Teddy, a rakish sorrel that had never yet been ridden. Many had tried it, but none had stuck to the saddle to the finish; and some had been carried from ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... up with candlesticks: gas burned only in the corridors and the restaurant— asthmatic jets that, spluttering blue within globes obese, semi-opaque, and yellowish, went well with furnishings and decorations of the Second Empire to which years had lent a mellow and somehow rakish dinginess; ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... the window and looked out at the whole panorama of the school that ran beneath him, from the long, rakish lines of the Upper, by Memorial Hall, to the chapel and the circle of Houses that ended at the rear with the Dickinson. Below, boys were streaking across the green depths like water-bugs over limpid surfaces, or hallooing joyfully from window to terrace, greeting one another with bearlike hugs, ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... the most skeptical Bishop in all the Oecumenical Council, and of which be might justly say: Whosoever dare think that he ever tasted a better schema, or ever dreamed in his deepest consciousness that a better could be made, let him be anathema maranatha! A most rakish looking wooden button, noiselessly stealthly and sly, gave entrance to this treasury of dainties; and then what a rare array of disintegrated meals intoxicated the vision! There was the Athlete of the Dairy, commonly called Fresh Butter, in his gay yellow jacket, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... machine I stretches my neck around and takes a look at this wayside group. Three little girls are huddled panicky around this young party who wears a brown velvet tam at such a rakish angle on top of her wavy brown hair. And cuddled up in her left arm she's holdin' a chubby youngster whose face is smeared ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... sat there in her kitchen, wearing her soap-stained and faded blue gingham, and the dust-cap pushed back at a rakish angle, a simpering little smile about her lips, she was really very much like the disappointed old maids you used to see so cruelly pictured in the comic valentines. Had those letters obsessed her a little more strongly she might have become quite mad, the Freudians would ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... Ararat. The father of all living men bows before the incense of sacrifice, streaming up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness, near the long-necked giraffe, type of his Africa,—his magnificent wife, seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her long black hair flowing over crimson drapery and covered ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... La Trappe, and Ignatius Loyola; in boyhood, and someway into manhood, both devil-may-care bloods, and yet, in the end, the wonders of the world for anchoritish self-command. These two examples, by-the-way, we cite to such patrons as would hastily return rakish young waiters upon us. 'Madam, or sir—patience; patience,' we say; 'good madam, or sir, would you discharge forth your cask of good wine, because, while working, it riles more or less? Then discharge not forth this young ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... ever bled as did the English when the greedy hands of Spain were clutching at their shores. The light ships hung near the Spaniards at a distance and did not board until spars were down and the great rakish hulls were part helpless. Then—with a wild cheer—the little galleons—often two at a time—would grapple with the enemy and board—cutlasses swinging, pistols spitting, and hand-spikes hewing a way through the struggling, yellow-faced ruffians of ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... 'Relapse' or the 'Provoked Wife,' save that (Shirley being a confessed copier of the great dramatists of the generation before him) there is enough of the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson kept up to hide, at first sight, the utter want of anything like their matter; and as one sickens at the rakish swagger and the artificial smartness of his coxcombs, one regrets the racy and unaffected blackguardism of the earlier ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... matter off entirely. Make love to her yourself, Percy, if that is what she wants - you know you have always been rather good at that sort of thing"; and she smiled at her own astonishing wordly wisdom, feeling almost rakish at having framed ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... "t'aint much in my line, that, me not being a scholar, but I can give a general idea, d'ye see, master. A tallish, good-looking chap, as the women 'ud call handsome, sort of rakish fellow, you understand. Dressed very smart. Blue serge suit—good stuff, new. Straw hat—black band. Brown boots—polished and shining. Quite the swell—as Netherfield always was, even when he'd got through ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... placed for his convenience, and resumed the inspection of a number of reports. He had a gaunt, tight-lipped face framed in luxuriant whiskers, a severely moral aspect oddly contradicted by trousers of tremendous sporting plaid, a waistcoat of green buckskin cassimere, while his silk hat held a rakish, forward angle. The Constable and Sheriff punctuated their converse by prodigious and dexterous spitting into a dangerously far receptacle, and the clerks and police murmured together. The Mayor, finally glancing at a watch enamelled, Jasper ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... ungrateful top. It was of burnished copper. A rebellious lock was then blowing in the wind, and there was a wide, rakish crown of rice-white straw. There was also a soft skin of creamy satin, lips blood red, a velvet patch near a dimple, and two gray eyes that danced behind the hat's filmy curtain. An ungrateful top, out of ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... let me have the honour of trussing you. Now, observe, I have left several of the points untied, of set purpose; and if it please you to let a small portion of your shirt be seen betwixt your doublet and the band of your upper stock, it will have so much the more rakish effect, and will attract you respect in Alsatia, where linen is something scarce. Now, I tie some of the points carefully asquint, for your ruffianly gallant never appears ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... a slashed dolman trimmed at throat, wrists and edges with fur; his breeches were buff; his boots finished at the top with a yellow cord forming a heart-shaped knot in front; at his heels trailed the most dainty and rakish of sabres, light, graceful, curved almost ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... of blood, the French tricolor, the banner of the great North German empire, and the Italian and the Spanish colors—sometimes, of an afternoon, the whole scene enliven'd by a fleet of yachts, in a half calm, lazily returning from a race down at Gloucester;—the neat, rakish, revenue steamer "Hamilton" in mid-stream, with her perpendicular stripes flaunting aft—and, turning the eyes north, the long ribands of fleecy-white steam, or dingy-black smoke, stretching far, fan-shaped, slanting diagonally across ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... at ten o'clock, or possibly to-morrow afternoon; and although bound for Iloilo or Cebu, you can not be at all sure what her destination really is. She may return after a month from a long rambling cruise among the southern isles. The Spanish mariners, in rakish Tam o'Shanter caps, lounge at the entrance to the warehouse, or the office of the Compania Maritima, dreamily smoking cigarettes, sometimes imperiously ordering the laborers to "sigue, hombre!" (get along!) ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... very hungry. The uncompromising coldness and solidity of the viands was enough to appall a man conscious that his digestion needed humouring. A huge cheese faced us in almost a swashbuckling way. I do not know how else to describe it. It wore a blatant, rakish, nemo-me-impune-lacessit air, and I noticed that the professor shivered slightly as he saw it. Sardines, looking more oily and uninviting than anything I had ever seen, appeared in their native tin beyond the loaf of bread. ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... A rakish little stern-wheel steamer lay in the stream, bound for Pittsburg, and sorely was Miselle tempted to take passage down the Alleghany in her; but lingering memories of home and the long-suffering Caleb at last prevailed, and, with a sigh, she turned her back upon the beautiful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... This imposing dress, in perfect harmony with the dignity of the office of those who wore them, degenerated towards the fifteenth century. So much was this the case, that an order of Francis I. forbad the judges from wearing pink "slashed hose" or other "rakish garments." ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... there had been when he had first set eyes upon it. There were more automobiles; four of them altogether. At the wheel of each sat a soldier driver in grey uniform, and with a cloth covered helmet. Each car was of the same type, a long rakish grey body, low to the ground. As he neared the house an officer wearing a long, grey coat came out, accompanied by two or three younger men. He turned to speak to them, then got into one of the cars, which immediately drove off. As it went a peculiar call was sounded, more like a trumpet than ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... up, handed Lynch his cap and disappeared without a word. Lynch stared mournfully at it. The emblem was crushed and the cap looked rather worn and useless. He put it on his head, where it assumed the rakish tilt of a hobo's favorite tam-o'-shanter, and said: "I hope you're not thinking of blaming me ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... dog with a preoccupied eye. The knot adjusted to his satisfaction, he knelt and drew a large box from beneath the bed. From the box he took an immaculate and exceedingly wide-brimmed Stetson with an exceedingly high crown. He dented the crown until the hat had that rakish appearance dear to the heart of the cowboy. Then he took the foot-square looking-glass from the wall and studied the effect at various and more or less unsatisfactory angles. Again he knelt—after depositing the hat on the ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... short for her breadth, and her skirts too short for her figure; her jacket was too short over her hips, and her gloves too short over her wrists; her hair was too short on her neck and her veil too short over her nose. Yet the rakish hat settled, and the fobs and seals shaken out, she appeared mentally fresh and charming, and the rich cadences of her cultivated voice gave Ringfield pleasure, slightly recalling Miss Clairville's accents, and he was happy in experiencing for the first time in his life that ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... cruel the difference between us. Here's my forehead low and bumpy, and my little nose, scarcely any of it, and what there is turned right up to the sky; and my wide mouth, and my little eyes, and my hair just standing straight up as rakish as you please. And look at you, with your elegant features and your—oh, but it's genteel you are!—and I love you, Nora alannah; I love you, and am not ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... nodded while he pulled at a scarlet handkerchief about his neck. Adams noticed that though he was stunted and anaemic in appearance, he wore his shabby overcoat with an almost rakish swagger. His mouth was filled with chewing-gum which he rolled aside in his ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... are too rakish and privateerish for Major Fane; and as for Jack, I am afraid he has the bad taste to prefer Bluebells ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... country, the "pheasant" of the South and Southwest. There are scores of tiny lakes, deep and pure and tenanted, and babbling streams, and there are the knighted speckled trout, the viking black bass and that rakish aristocrat, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... like these show-window models you see in department stores. She's costumed cheap but gaudy in a wrinkled, tango-colored dress that she must have picked off some Grand street bargain counter late last spring. The ninety-nine-cent soup-plate lid cocked over one ear adds a rakish touch that almost puts her in ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... brown-paper parcel to be carried under the arm; and, having paid for his bedroom, he went out at about eight o'clock, walking boldly through the streets—just as Mr. Dale of Rodchurch, dressed in blue serge and not in his best black coat—Mr. Dale dressed for the holidays, with a rakish go-as-you-please soft hat instead of the ceremonious hard-brimmed bowler, and not too proud to carry his bag and parcel ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... wrong, and it did not meet the skirt in the back; and she had quite overlooked her neckgear, but of that she was pleasantly unconscious, also of the fact that there was a large black smooch beside her nose, giving her both a rakish and a sinister air. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the fete on a particular day, before London runs quite dry. His pledge of his word is notoriously inviolate. The Countess of Cressett—an extraordinary instance of a thrice married woman corrected in her addiction to play by her alliance with a rakish juvenile—declares she performs the part of hostess at the request of the Countess of Fleetwood. Perfectly convincing. The more so (if you have the gossips' keen scent of a deduction) since Lord Fleetwood and young Lord Cressett and the Jesuit Lord Feltre have been seen confabulating with very ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... they watched another column of foot-soldiers moving like a procession of ants erect; and beyond, on the dim plain, a field battery, just replenished to war footing, was toiling with tired beasts and untried pieces. Mowbray thought of the human meat being herded in Austria for those great rakish guns, as the infantry below was being trained ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... to lie flat upon the ferry gunwale, his cheeks supported by his hands, and talk to W—— and the Doctor as if they were old friends. He was a dealer in nitroglycerin cartridges, he said, and pointed to a long, rakish-looking skiff hard by, which bore a red flag at its prow. "Ye see that? Thet there red flag? Well, thet's the law on us glysereen fellers—over five hundred poun's, two flags; un'er five hundred, one flag. I've two hundred and fifty, I have. I tell yer th' steamboats ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... hairpins next time," she said angrily, as she fastened the coils to the best of her ability, and straightened the rakish hat. "You had better see that your hair is safe, Mollie, before you have your turn. I am going to sit down on the grass and jeer at you for a change. It's so easy to be superior when you are ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Lane affords Can paint the rakish "Charles" so well, Or give such life to "Mirabell" ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... "Isn't he rakish?" But Poppy got no answer from the sonneteer. He had wheeled round from her, carried away in the triumph and rapture of the sestette. His steps marked the beat of the iambics, he turned on his heel at the end of every line. For the moment he was ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... nonplussed; he was not even embarrassed by his immediate environment. In fact he turned it to his own advantage, for his hairs, duly watered and soaped down on to his cranium, lost their rakish look and gave him the appearance of a gentleman of perfect integrity, great intellect and no little financial stability. As between one man and another, he did not attempt to deny the truth of my assertion, gave me ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... and imperial, just beginning to turn gray, with deep-set eyes under bushy brows, and a keen, shrewd face, rather deeply lined. There was a look of dissipation there, a shade of shabbiness about his clothes, a rakish cut to the entire personality that had caused Folsom to glance distrustfully at him more than once the previous afternoon, and to meet with coldness the tentatives permissible in fellow travelers. The stranger's morning had been ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... to the window, and through the grey curtain of crepuscule recognised the rakish topsail schooner that had excited Molly's admiration some days before. He gazed forth upon ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... of that white head peering from the blackness was uncanny. The shaft of light struck straight across the peaked chin and twisted mouth. The snow had made him a cap which covered his horns and which gave him the look of a rakish old tipster. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... From Congreve to Sheridan they were so sterile in spite of their wit that they did not achieve between them the output of Moliere's single lifetime; and they were all (not without reason) ashamed of their profession, and preferred to be regarded as mere men of fashion with a rakish hobby. Goldsmith's was the only ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... stuffed with volumes fat and thin, and they all looked interesting and hard-used. One of the brothers had been to a party the night before, and on coming home had put his dress-tie about the neck of a little plaster bust of Byron that stood on the mantel. This head, with the tie at a rakish angle, drew Claude's attention more than anything else in the room, and for some reason instantly made him wish he ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... criminals. Spies of all kinds are met with in these places, from the secret agent who tracks a criminal and flirts at the same time with the prostitutes, to the counter-spy employed by the proxenets to watch the secret agent. It is here that the criminal world acquires its rakish manners, but its weakness for women and alcohol cause it to fall early into the traps of the secret police. It is here also, as well as in the salons of high-class proxenetism, that we meet with those indefinable individuals who are to-day secret agents of the government, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... parole or countersign. I caught hold of her and kissed her, and showed my pistols. She laughed. As I was armed with dirk and pistols, wore a sash, and was unmistakably a Latin Quarter etudiant, as shown by long hair, rakish cap on one side, red neck-tie, and single eyeglass, I was everywhere treated as a man and brother, friend and equal, warrior, and—by the girls—almost like a first-cousin. Field shared the glory, of course. And we made a great deal out of it, and were thought all the more of ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... coming along at the moment, still some five hours' flight out from the system. She was a small ship with lean, rakish lines, a hot little speedster, gliding placidly through subspace just ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... bars across his left shoulder showed that he was a lord-in-waiting. He was a handsome man, with clear-cut features, somewhat rakish from late hours and dissipation, but not the less interesting on that account. But his natural advantages were so over-run with the affectation of the Court that you did not see the man at all, being absorbed by the studied ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... with the serpent's shape. When any other animal barters away his legs he buys either fins or wings with them; this is a generally-understood law, invariably respected. But the snake goes in for extravagance in ribs and vertebrae; an eccentric, rakish, and improper proceeding; part of an irregular and raffish life. Nothing can carry within it affection, or even respect, for an animal whose tail begins nowhere in particular, unless it is at the neck; even if any creature may esteem it an animal at all ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... or her sails flapping about in every direction with the eddying winds. We steered for her, and were very soon in the same situation, not more than a quarter of a mile from her. The quarter-boat was lowered down, and I proceeded to board her; but as she was large and rakish, O'Brien desired me to be careful, and if there was the least show of resistance to return. As I pulled up to her bows they hailed me in French, and desired me to keep off, or they would fire. This was quite sufficient; and, in obedience to ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... glided through the still smooth water faster than we had done for many a day. For some hours we ran on till a sail was reported right ahead still becalmed. As we drew near we discovered her to be a large topsail schooner, with a very rakish appearance. She was still becalmed, but as we brought the breeze up with us her sails bulged out, and she began to glide through the water. There were many discussions as to what she was; some thought her an honest trader, ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... haste to obtain it. Josiana wanted to remain free, David to remain young. To have no tie until as late as possible appeared to him to be a prolongation of youth. Middle-aged young men abounded in those rakish times. They grew gray as young fops. The wig was an accomplice: later on, powder became the auxiliary. At fifty-five Lord Charles Gerrard, Baron Gerrard, one of the Gerrards of Bromley, filled London with his successes. The young and pretty Duchess of Buckingham, Countess of Coventry, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Mutiny we are in the clearer and lighter atmosphere of the contemporary social novel. We have left behind the theoretic enthusiast, perplexed by the contrast between the semi-barbarism of the country and the old-fashioned apathy of its rulers; we have no more descriptions, serious or sarcastic, of rakish subalterns and disorderly regiments under ancient, incapable colonels; we are introduced to a reformed Anglo-India, full of hard-working, efficient officers, civil and military, and sufficiently ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... come just when you did," he remarked solemnly, "I should have been devoured by sharks. Already I had noticed a black fin circling about the island—I mean a LEAN, black fin,—or is it a low, rakish, black fin? No; that's a craft,—a low, rakish, black craft. It was a ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... trait I have to mention, yet more significant, is the afterpiece. Really, in this fashionable circle, life is a carnival as free and almost as rakish as that of Venice. The play commonly terminates with a parade borrowed from La Fontaine's tales or from the farces of the Italian drama, which are not only pointed but more than free, and sometimes so broad that they cant be ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... him that she was to the other soldiers. But she was none the less welcome for that, after the monotony of the day, and Roderigo as she came nearer straightened up self-consciously and tilted his black patent leather hat with its rakish cluster of cock feathers a ...
— Lucia Rudini - Somewhere in Italy • Martha Trent
... with his bright green coat, his faultless white vest, and sea-green tights, became rather the popular favourite. He seemed just rakish and gallant enough to fulfil ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Now is your time, Miss, to submit with a grace, and to make your own terms with him:—else, I can tell you, were I Mr. Solmes, it should be worse for you: And who, Miss, of our sex, proceeded the saucy creature, would admire a rakish gentleman, when she might be admired by a sober one to the end ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... a long slender ship of extremely low freeboard, rakish rigged as a single-master, both sails and oars being used as a means of propulsion; two small cannon were mounted forward, and a round dozen arquebuses were also carried. The total company and passengers of the three ships were ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... of miles out in the Pacific Ocean. He was doing his best on this particular morning, and under his influence, so brightening everything, two little boys and a little jackass were having a good time near a long, low, rakish, but far from piratical-looking house upon the hillside already mentioned. One of the boys was white, one of the boys was brown, and the little jackass was gray. The name of the white boy was William Harrison, though he was ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... of the act. All he could learn with regard to the latter point was, that on the day following that on which it occurred, a pilot boat and several fishing vessels had fallen in with a large schooner of a very rakish appearance, under French colours, steering a course apparently with the intention of running between Shetland and Orkney, ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... in hand they walked toward the house, ceremonious beyond naturalness in acting out the spirit summoned by a woman steeped in the essences of high-flown books. "The trumpet," she said when they heard Margaret's dinner horn, and not even Tom, who could have recalled many a rakish bout of a Saturday night and many an unholy laugh in church of a Sunday, dared to smile at her. "You've caught me all right, auntie, and I'm strutting like a bantam cock in the ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... iron foundry upon the spot. Suppose they had excavated for a cellar! Why during the time that Capt. Kidd, Lafitte and I infested the coast thereabout, sailing three "low, black-hulled schooners with long rakish masts," I forced hundreds of merchant seamen to walk the plank—even helpless women and children. Unless the sharks devoured them, their bones are yet about three feet under the floor of that iron foundry. Under ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... found out who it was that her former pretended lover had been recommended to, and she found means to have it insinuated to her by a woman-friend, that he was not only rakish and wicked, but, in short, that he had a particular illness, and went so far as to produce letters from him to a quack-doctor, for directions to him how to take his medicines, and afterwards a receipt ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... his hat, jerked the brim at a rakish angle over his eyes—and he sprawled himself out on a chair. He heard the Tocsin's voice at the front door, and a man's voice, low and guarded, answer her. Then the door closed, and their steps approached the room. It was rather curious, that—a visit from the Magpie! What could the ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... lord,' said the other, 'she's the very thing; she's a rakish-looking craft, and will do admirably. Any repair we want, a few days will effect; secrecy ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... twigs and rustling leaves marked his going, however; and Patsy leaped the brook and settled herself, tailor fashion, in the midst of the sunshine and the lady's-slippers. She unpinned the rakish beaver and tossed it from her; off came the Norfolk jacket, and followed the beaver. She eyed the rest of her costume askance; she would have sorely liked to part with that, too, had she but the Lord's assurance that ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... miniature racing sled—his most prized possession—and a perfect reproduction of the one "Scotty" used in the Big Races, being built strongly, but on delicate lines. Danny pulled another, only a trifle less rakish, beside it. They were conversing in low tones. "We got pretty nearly half an hour t' wait, Dan, an' it's fierce t' have all these people that don't know a blame thing about racin' standin' round here givin' us fool advice. Why, if we was t' do what they're tellin', we'd be down an' out before ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... left eye almost hidden by the rakish cock of his hat, one hand tucked away under the skirts of his plum-coloured coat, the other supporting the stem of a long clay pipe, at which he was pulling thoughtfully. The pipe and he were all but inseparable; indeed, ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... the turning on the left, called the old Milltown road, she saw a white horse and wagon, driven by a man with a rakish, flapping, Panama hat, come rapidly around the turn and disappear over the long hills leading down to the falls. There was no mistaking him; there never was another Abner Simpson, with his lean height, his bushy reddish hair, the ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... years older, with fair hair, blue eyes, and a pink and white, almost doll-like complexion. Indeed, I knew quite well that she had long had a host of admirers, and that just prior to her marriage with Courtenay it had been rumoured that she was to marry the heir to an earldom, a rather rakish young cavalry ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... whatever task they were set to, and of finding the trail home again. There were active, clean-built, precise Frenchmen, with small hands and feet, and a peculiarly trim way of wearing their rough garments; typical native-born American lumber-jacks powerful in frame, rakish in air, reckless in manner; big blonde Scandinavians and Swedes, strong men at the sawing; an Indian or so, strangely in contrast to the rest; and a variety of Irishmen, Englishmen, and Canadians. These men tramped in without a word, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... the middle of the freight-car, looking down in wonder at the fugitives, was a tall vagabond of the most picturesque type. No ragamuffin was ever so tattered and torn as this rakish individual. His clothes barely hung together on his lank frame; he was barefoot and hatless; a great mop of black hair topped his shrewd, rugged face; coal-black eyes snapped and twinkled beneath shaggy brows and a delighted, knowing grin spread slowly over his rather boyish countenance. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... depress me. My nose is of a lively scarlet, which the warmth of the room is quickly deepening into a lowering purple. My quick passage through the air has set my hat a little awry, giving me a falsely rakish air, and the wind has loosened my hair—not into a picturesque and comely disorder, but into mere untidiness. And, meanwhile, how admirably small and cool her nose looks! What rest and composure in her whole pose! What a neat refinement in the disposition of her hair! What ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... leaping wave. Joan was in the humor to profit by any arrangement that would break her bondage to sheep; Tim Sullivan had been bringing her up, unconsciously, but none the less effectively, to fit into this scheme for marrying her to his old friend's rakish son. When the day came for Joan to know of the arrangement, she would leap toward it as toward an ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... shook hands heartily. She was smartly dressed in a wine-colored velveteen, the over-short skirt of which barely reached to the tops of her freshly whitened spats. Her wide hat was tipped to a rakish angle. She was young (twenty-eight or thirty at most, but she looked less) and distinctly pretty. Her features were regular, her face oval, if too thin—with the thinness of one who is underfed. And this appearance of being poorly nourished showed in her skin, which was ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... civilian clothes sat tilted back in one of several chairs beside the door. He wore a little black moustache and because his head was pressed against the brick wall behind him, his hat was pushed forward giving him a rakish look which was rather heightened by an unlighted cigar sticking up out of the corner of his mouth like a ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... sentences which he did not finish, Trenchard was quite silent. We entered the horrible room of yesterday. The dirty plate and the sardine-tin were still there with the flies about them: the highly coloured German supplement watched us from its rakish position on the wall, the treatise on New Mexico was lying on the table. I picked up the book and it opened naturally at a place where the last reader had turned down the corner of the page. The same page happens to be quoted exactly in Trenchard's ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... partake of it. He departed on this errand; and great was Odo's wonder, when the door reopened, to discover, among the party it admitted, his old acquaintance of Vercelli, the Count of Castelrovinato. The latter, whose dress and person had been refurbished, and who now wore an air of rakish prosperity, greeted him with evident pleasure, and, while their entertainer was engaged in seating the ladies of the company, gave him a brief ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... instantly at a smart walk; the rigid straddle of his legs, the turned-out feet, the stiff back, the rakish slant of the sombrero above the square, motionless set of the shoulders expressing an ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... a rakish little craft, built long and low, with racing lines, and a green complexion, and a nose that cuts through the air like the prow of a swift boat through water. Von Gerhard had promised me a spin in it on the first mild day. Sunday turned out to be unexpectedly lamblike, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... in the knickerbockers tilted his hat at a rakish angle, stuck a tooth-pick in the corner of his mouth, put his thumbs in his jacket arm holes, shot Wayland a quick look of questioning, grinned at the old man and nodded towards a white pergola standing apart from the veranda of ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... untenanted and, to a great extent, the unexplored depths of a Victorian forest, were very evidently unaffected by the grim fancies of the evening. They were not laughing certainly, and when they spoke it was in whispers, but the younger man hummed a music-hall tune under his breath. There was something rakish, not to say reckless, in the way the elder sat his mount. They went carefully, though, taking every possible precaution against making needless noise. Once the horse of the elder man stumbled and set a stone rolling down ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... With rakish eye and plenished crop, Oblivious of the farmer's gun, Upon the naked ash-tree top The Crow sits basking ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... changing front that the Hun was about to lose. And as they left, the men were mostly silent; though they looked debonair enough with their swinging quickstep and easy carriage, and their frying-pan hats set at all sorts of rakish angles. Their officers would nod, glance enviously at the apple-trees and tents in our pleasant little orchard, and pass on to the front of the Front, and all that this implied in the way of mud, vermin, sudden death, suspense, and damnable discomfort. And returning ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... beginning of the mush-snow, a long team of rakish Malemutes, driven by an Athabasca French-Canadian, raced wildly into the clearing about the post. A series of yells, and the wild cracking of a thirty-foot caribou-gut whip, announced that the big change ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... growing ill-feeling towards France was not confined to poor but harmless poetizing. The first open rupture took place at Savannah. In the port of that city were lying two long, rakish schooners flying the French tricolor. Their decks were crowded with men, whose rough actions and brutal countenances showed them to be no respecters of law or order. It did not need the rows of cannon protruding from the ports, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... did he relax his vigilance. Observing every precaution when he left The Chancery Agency, he spent the intervening time at one of his clubs, from which, having made an early dinner, he set off for Pall Mall at ten minutes to seven. A rakish-looking gray car resembling a giant torpedo was approaching slowly from the direction of Buckingham Palace. The driver pulled up as Paul Harley stepped into the road, and following a brief conversation Harley ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint of man ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... rakish lot they were—this flower of the Mexican forces who the Viceroy was only too willing should explore all lands, and seas, so they kept themselves away ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... bear it to the hospitality of Mr. Edward Wright, better known under the abbreviated title of "Ned," and without the prefatory "Mr." That one social quality, without which a seat at Ned Wright's festive board cannot be compassed, is Felony. A little rakish-looking green ticket was circulated a few days previously among the members of Mr. Wright's former fraternity, bidding them to a "Great Supper" in St. John's Chapel, Penrose Street (late West Street), Walworth, got up under the auspices of the South-East London Mission. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... cheered by seeing the energetic Shirley reappear, pushing open the doors of the garage, which was connected with the stable. He hurried to the deserted taxicab, where he seemed busied for several minutes, the glow of his pocket lamp shooting out now and then. Through the door of the garage a long, rakish-looking racing car was being pushed out by Jim and his sleepy groom. There was a cheery shout from the taxi, and Helene heard a ripping sound. Shirley reappeared, carrying an ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... of smoke upon the horizon, and saw it turn into a group of swiftly-flying vessels. He marvelled at the skill whereby they had been able to find the transports on this vast and trackless sea; he marvelled at the slender vessels with their four low, rakish stacks. These sea-terriers were thin skins of steel, covering engines of enormous power; they tore through the water, literally with the speed of an express train, leaving a boiling white wake behind. Seeing them rock and swing from side to side ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... with beating heart, his eyes fixed on the trim rakish- looking little gunboat lying at anchor immediately off the Mole. He was suddenly breathless. His light oil-skins oppressed him. There was a vague feeling within him that he had only begun to live within the last two weeks—all before that had been merely ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... afternoon, a rakish-looking brigantine was perceived standing towards the Dores; and judging her to be a slaver, the young officer called his crew together, and having loaded the muskets and got the cutlasses ready, they silently awaited her coming up, determined to defend themselves. To their great joy, when ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... Third Season we find him steering a long, low, rakish Chariot of Fire, with a Clock, a Trunk-Rack, an Emergency Ice- Box and all the other Comforts of Home. He had learned to smell a Constable a Mile off and whenever he ran up behind a Pewee Coffee- Grinder he went into the High and made the ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... will much import, Whence spring their scenes, from common life or Court; Whether they seek applause by smile or tear, To draw a Lying Valet, [12] or a Lear, [13] A sage, or rakish youngster wild from school, A wandering Peregrine, or plain John Bull; All persons please when Nature's voice prevails, Scottish or Irish, born in Wilts ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... ye Mauchline belles, Ye're safer at your spinning-wheel; Such witching books are baited hooks For rakish rooks, like Rob Mossgiel; Your fine Tom Jones and Grandisons, They make your youthful fancies reel; They heat your brains, and fire your veins, And then ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... seminary never stirred in me any "vives impressions" except it might be occasionally some of anger. I broke from M. Pelet, and as I strode down the passage he followed me with one of his laughs—a very French, rakish, mocking sound. ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... light trailed along the heavens in the west, and beneath it were steamboats so gigantic in proportions that they resembled illuminated palaces vaulting over the sea; while close off our starboard bow, there appeared advancing toward us a fairy like fleet, with low, rakish hulls, taut rig, and sails made whiter by the moonbeams playing upon them. The whole fleet seemed to skim over the sea, though the "Two Marys" scarce moved. One, more tiny than the rest, and which appeared to have made an offing, bore down for us, and seemed intent ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... of ten minutes past seven, the rakish recklessness of a quarter past, the drooping weariness of twenty-five minutes past, must have been ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... strive for the prize—a big field, and the pace would be killing. From the West came Sweet Silver, a gray, gallant, and fearless in jumping. A rakish old nag who walked over the sticks, had been sent for the Cup from Kentucky; On a bay, Little Jack, who was fast, they had put but a hundred and thirty. But I knew that North Star, a big brown—even the Black was no gamer- With a pull of ten pounds in ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... window, and looked out, with eyes and mouth wide open, in great surprise. Yes, it was really true. The bed was gone; there it went, tramping down the middle of the street. Its pillow had fallen a little to one side, which gave it a jaunty and rakish air. 'Humph!' said Willy. 'Well, I'm glad the ugly old thing is gone. Now I shall not have to go to bed ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... has completed arrangements for the acquisition of larger and more powerful vessels of this design, being now in the position to contest every step that is made by Germany in this field. The type has also been embraced by the Russian military authorities. The Astra-Torres airship has a rakish appearance, and although the lines of the gas-bag are admitted to increase frictional resistance, this is regarded as a minor defect, especially when the many advantages of the ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... vagabond—older, more serious, the laugh gone out of his eyes, the cheeks pale as if from long confinement. Dressed in dark clothes, his face cleanshaven; linen neat, a plain black tie—the hat worn straight, not slouched over his eyes with a rakish cant as in the ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... refused to admit Tavistock. But at half-past nine he entered, tall, lean, lithe, sharp of face, shrewd of eye, rakish of mustache; by Dumont's direction he closed and locked the door. "Why!" he exclaimed, "you don't look much of a sick man. You're thin, but your color's not bad and your eyes are clear. And down-town they have ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... House, and that we who undertook the formation of the future wives and mothers of England (the last words in a lower voice, as requiring to be communicated in confidence) were really bound (voice coming up again) to set a better example than one of rakish habits, wrappers were put in requisition, and the two young cavaliers volunteered to see the ladies home. It was soon done, and the gate of the ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... minute's hesitation she agreed, and they ran upstairs eagerly to get ready. They all had black suits, and all but Grace wore snug-fitting rubber caps, designed more for use than looks. Grace wore a rakish little Scottish cap affair that was immensely becoming but not at all comfortable to ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... Federal ships were firing at the chase; but they might as well have spared their powder and shot, for they could not reach her into at least a quarter of a mile. The wind was still at the south-west, and already there were signs of fog. The rakish steamer had probably come from the Bermudas, where she must have obtained a skilful pilot, for without one she would have had no chances at all; and she stood boldly on her course as though she had nothing to fear on account ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... is concerned," said the tranter, "I don't for my part see that a fiddle is much nearer heaven than a clar'net. 'Tis further off. There's always a rakish, scampish twist about a fiddle's looks that seems to say the Wicked One had a hand in making o'en; while angels be supposed to play clar'nets in heaven, or som'at like 'em, if ye ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... conjures up a vision of all that is brilliant, rakish, and bibulous in the expiring days of the seventeenth century! It is easy to picture him, as he stands near the congenial bar of the tavern, entranced by the liquid tones and marvellous expression of Nance's youthful voice. He has a whimsical, good-humoured face, perhaps showing ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... middle and filled at both ends. Picturesque he was and always would be, but his present costume scarce fitted the presence of a lady. Yet of this he gave no sign. He was leaning back in a morris chair, rakish, debonair, and at his ease. Evidently, he had been giving appreciative ear to the music, and more appreciative eye to ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... evidence that time may stand still, withal, as this lank, stooping figure, line for line exactly what it had been five years before. Hiram helped me into the pung, took his place beside me, and threw a conversational "huddup" to the rakish-looking sorrel colt. We dashed sluing away down the country road, and then I turned to look at my old friend. He was steadfastly gazing at the landscape ahead, the while he passed one wiry hand ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... the great cities the army of the degraded swarm. Here is the loose-lipped rakish wit, who tells stories in the common lodging-house kitchen. He has a certain brilliancy about him which lasts until the glassy gleam comes over his eyes, and then he becomes merely blasphemous and offensive. He might be an influential writer or politician, but he never ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... at Crevel; but, like Dubois, who gave the Regent three kicks, she affected too much, and the rakish perfumer's thoughts jumped at such profligate suggestions, that he said to himself, "Does she want to turn the tables on Hulot?—Does she think me more attractive as a Mayor than as a National Guardsman? ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... throw open his vest and bare his broad bosom to any breeze that might chance to gambol through the forest. With characteristic nonchalance he pushed his wideawake off his forehead for the sake of coolness, and in so doing tilted it very much on one side, which gave him a somewhat rakish air. He carried his heavy double-barrelled gun on one of his broad shoulders with the butt behind him, and his right hand grasping the muzzle, while in his left he held a handkerchief, with which he occasionally wiped his heated brow. It was evident that Tom experienced the effects ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... her coat, but she wore a green hat with a gold ornament that suited her to perfection, set on her dark head at rakish angle. ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... quartermaster felt very much like prisoners, though they had no evidence that the Killbright was a ship-of-war, except that she had hoisted the Confederate flag, and fired upon the Bellevite. But the rakish-looking steamer continued on her course, while the Bellevite had not moved since the first broadside. She had already made a mile, and the shots from her enemy did not seem to ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... sort out from the limited vocabulary of Morovenia the words that could express his boiling emotions, he saw Popova standing shamefaced in the doorway. Was it really Popova? The tutor wore a traveling-suit with large British checks, a blue four-in-hand, and, instead of a fez, a rakish cap with a peak in front. As he edged into the room the young women attendants filed timidly behind him. Horror upon horrors! They were in shirt-waists, with skirts that came tightly about the hips, ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... shadow of a mighty bridge I stepped into a very smart launch manned by sailors in overalls somewhat grimy, and, rising and falling to the surge of the broad river, we held away for a destroyer that lay grey and phantom-like, low, rakish, and with speed in every line of her. As we drew near, her narrow deck looked to my untutored eye a confused litter of guns, torpedo tubes, guy ropes, cables and windlasses. Howbeit, I clambered aboard, and ducking under a guy rope and avoiding sundry other obstructions, shook hands with her ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... first observed stopped near the horses' heads and peered intently at her from beneath a broad and rakish hat. He was tall and appeared to be more respectably clad than his fellows, although there was not one who looked as though he possessed a complete outfit ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... From the same.— An interesting conversation between the lady and him. No concession in his favour. By his soul, he swears, this dear girl gives the lie to all their rakish maxims. He has laid all the sex under obligation to ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... lighters, tier upon tier of it, piled high upon the wharves, and merchant vessels, chiefly under the British flag, loading with it. Here and there in the crowded harbor might be seen a long, low, rakish-looking lead-colored steamer with short masts, and a convex forecastle deck extending nearly as far aft as the waist, and placed there to enable the steamer to be forced through and not over a heavy head sea. These were the genuine blockade-runners, built for speed; and some of them survived ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... to investigate with his fleet; after an eventful cruise they overtook, one night, a piratical looking craft with black hull and rakish rig. Again and again the chase eluded the Admiral. Finally, the pursuit led the fleet to the neighborhood of an island uncharted and hitherto unknown. Circumnavigation seemed to prove it bare and uninhabited, ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... refreshments, a very popular move. Betsy and I walked as far as the baseball field in the course of the evening, and caught a glimpse of the orgies. The braves were squatting in a circle about a big fire, each decorated with a blanket from his bed and a rakish band of feathers. (Our chickens seem very scant as to tail, but I have asked no unpleasant questions.) The doctor, with a Navajo blanket about his shoulders, was executing a war dance, while Jimmie and Mr. Witherspoon beat on war drums—two of our copper kettles, ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... he looked much more distressed than rejoiced as he lumbered from his table to grasp the outstretched hand of a classmate. The opera-hat of this Mr. Richard Giddings was cocked at a rakish angle, his blue eye twinkled good cheer and youthful hilarity, and his aspect ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... rapid acts on bare-backed steeds; none of them were at all particular in respect of showing their legs; and one of them, alone in a Greek chariot, drove six in hand into every town they came to. They all assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor letter on any subject. Yet there ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... days of his sojourn at Plessis-les-Tours king Louis, not wishing to hold his drinking-bouts and give vent to his rakish propensities in his chateau, out of respect to her Majesty (a kingly delicacy which his successors have not possessed) became enamoured of a lady named Nicole Beaupertuys, who was, to tell the truth, wife of a citizen of the town. The husband he sent into Ponent, and put the said Nicole in a house ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... Evidently she saw something there that interested her keenly. She hurried to the dressing room and in a moment emerged looking strangely unlike the Josie her friends knew. Her sandy hair was completely covered by a henna wig, bobbed and crimped. Her sedate sailor hat was cocked at a rakish angle and draped with a much-ornamented veil, and mirabile dictu! a lipstick had been freely and relentlessly applied to her honest mouth and her cheeks were touched up with a paint of purplish hue. Her sober Norfolk jacket was as much disguised as its wearer by a ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... gray joss on a rustic shelf, Rakish and shrewd, with his collar awry, Sang impolitely, as though by himself, Drowning with his bellowing the nightingale's cry: "Back through a hundred, hundred years Hear the waves as they climb the piers, Hear the howl of the silver seas, ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... disfigurement is only temporary, but none the less does the consciousness deeply, deeply depress me. My nose is of a lively scarlet, which the warmth of the room is quickly deepening into a lowering purple. My quick passage through the air has set my hat a little awry, giving me a falsely rakish air, and the wind has loosened my hair—not into a picturesque and comely disorder, but into mere untidiness. And, meanwhile, how admirably small and cool her nose looks! What rest and composure in her whole pose! What a neat refinement ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... basket flung up against a pillar, like wreckage from a storm, and settles herself down upon it with a sigh of relief. She remains unmoved amid the turmoil, save when a passing gun-case tips her bonnet to one side, giving her a very rakish air, and a good-natured retriever on a neighbouring box is so much taken with her appearance that he offers her a friendly caress. Restless people—who remember that their train ought to have left half an hour ago, and cannot realise that all bonds are loosed on the eleventh—fasten ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... may you be?" he inquired, and a brown eye, rakish and roving in its glance, played briskly over the Parisian, whilst Garnache himself returned the compliment, and calmly surveyed this florid gentleman of middle height with the ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... of the second room (for there were two, one opening from the other) stood a blackened, broken-nosed, plaster bust of Voltaire, upon the summit of whose august wig some irreverent customer had perched a particularly rakish-looking hat. Just in front of this alcove and below the bust stood a marble-topped table, at one end of which two young men were playing dominoes to the accompaniment ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... and beneath it were steamboats so gigantic in proportions that they resembled illuminated palaces vaulting over the sea; while close off our starboard bow, there appeared advancing toward us a fairy like fleet, with low, rakish hulls, taut rig, and sails made whiter by the moonbeams playing upon them. The whole fleet seemed to skim over the sea, though the "Two Marys" scarce moved. One, more tiny than the rest, and which appeared to have made an offing, bore down for us, and seemed intent upon crossing our bows. The major, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the Neptune, a broad decked craft, built somewhat on the order of the primitive Rob Roy. The Imp was narrow and rakish, with a low cockpit and a high bow and stern. Nugget regarded it with the affection that one feels ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... short; wears gold rimmed glasses; a Southern Colonel's Mustache and Goatee—and capitals are need to describe the style! He had his comical-serious little countenance topped off with a soft felt hat worn at the most rakish angle. He can't carry a tune, and really is not musical. His adopted daughter with whom he lives is rated the town's ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... He caught a face scowling at him over a brown wire blind bearing the words "Wines and Spirits" on it in letters of dull gold. It was a commonplace type of face, small-featured, ginger-moustached, and crowned by a billy-cock hat set at a rakish angle. Its most marked characteristic was the positive hatred which glowed in the sharp, pale-blue eyes. Grant wondered who this highly censorious young man might be. At any rate, he meant to ascertain whether or not the critic was ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... and of steam-driven ships settled for ever the account of the pirates, except in China, when even to this day accounts reach us, through the Press, of piratical enterprises; but never again will the black, rakish-looking craft of the pirate, with the Jolly Roger flying, be liable to pounce down upon the unsuspecting and ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... and more powerful vessels of this design, being now in the position to contest every step that is made by Germany in this field. The type has also been embraced by the Russian military authorities. The Astra-Torres airship has a rakish appearance, and although the lines of the gas-bag are admitted to increase frictional resistance, this is regarded as a minor defect, especially when the many advantages of the invention are ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... the Oecumenical Council, and of which be might justly say: Whosoever dare think that he ever tasted a better schema, or ever dreamed in his deepest consciousness that a better could be made, let him be anathema maranatha! A most rakish looking wooden button, noiselessly stealthly and sly, gave entrance to this treasury of dainties; and then what a rare array of disintegrated meals intoxicated the vision! There was the Athlete of the Dairy, commonly called ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... Southborough. It bore, as I should guess, some pleasure party upon their return from Brighton or from Eastbourne. There were three gaily dressed women, all young and beautiful, one of them with a Peking spaniel upon her lap. With them were a rakish-looking elderly man and a young aristocrat, his eyeglass still in his eye, his cigarette burned down to the stub between the fingers of his begloved hand. Death must have come on them in an instant and fixed them as they sat. Save that the elderly ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ourselves outside the walls of the Nuns' House, and that we who undertook the formation of the future wives and mothers of England (the last words in a lower voice, as requiring to be communicated in confidence) were really bound (voice coming up again) to set a better example than one of rakish habits, wrappers were put in requisition, and the two young cavaliers volunteered to see the ladies home. It was soon done, and the gate of the ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... everybody is familiar, is as plain and prosaic as if it had been the production of a pig-headed prerogative lawyer. Now, in all this we see a sensible, sagacious, cautious, persevering man, who certainly was free from the rashness and (excepting the closing scene, if old Aubrey is to be believed) rakish extravagance too often characteristic of genius at any time, and perhaps particularly so of Shakspeare's time. It is apparent that Shakspeare, at least from the time the plays commenced, never had to shift for his living: he had always money to lend and money to spend; and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... it was that her former pretended lover had been recommended to, and she found means to have it insinuated to her by a woman-friend, that he was not only rakish and wicked, but, in short, that he had a particular illness, and went so far as to produce letters from him to a quack-doctor, for directions to him how to take his medicines, and afterwards a receipt for money for the cure; though both the ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... suit which distinguishes the country excursionist taking the day off in London. He had little side whiskers and a heavy brown mustache. His golf cap was new and set at a somewhat rakish angle on his head. Across his waistcoat was a large and heavy chain hung at intervals with small silver medals. For all his provincial appearance his movements were decisive and suggested authority. ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... affluence by as promptly spending a goodly portion of that wealth. He had bidden a cadaverous animal painter named Mershon and two equally hungry-eyed Michiganders yclept Albright to his room with the rakish back wall, where the feast had been a ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... of a mighty bridge I stepped into a very smart launch manned by sailors in overalls somewhat grimy, and, rising and falling to the surge of the broad river, we held away for a destroyer that lay grey and phantom-like, low, rakish, and with speed in every line of her. As we drew near, her narrow deck looked to my untutored eye a confused litter of guns, torpedo tubes, guy ropes, cables and windlasses. Howbeit, I clambered aboard, and ducking under a guy rope and avoiding sundry other obstructions, shook ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... serpent's shape. When any other animal barters away his legs he buys either fins or wings with them; this is a generally-understood law, invariably respected. But the snake goes in for extravagance in ribs and vertebrae; an eccentric, rakish, and improper proceeding; part of an irregular and raffish life. Nothing can carry within it affection, or even respect, for an animal whose tail begins nowhere in particular, unless it is at the neck; even if any creature ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... up to his hat, jerked the brim at a rakish angle over his eyes—and he sprawled himself out on a chair. He heard the Tocsin's voice at the front door, and a man's voice, low and guarded, answer her. Then the door closed, and their steps approached the room. It was rather curious, that—a visit from ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... nickname of "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge." The saucy French of that has a touch beyond any English rendering of "the girls with the red pompon." "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge" paints their picture at one stroke, for they thrust out the face of a youngster from under a rakish blue sailor hat, crowned with a fluffy red button, like a blue flower with a red bloom at its heart. I rarely saw an aging marin. There are no seasoned troops so boyish. They wear open dickies, which expose ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... with all the vivacity of comedy. Moses and his spectacles, the vicar and his monogamy, the sharper and his cosmogony, the squire proving from Aristotle that relatives are related, Olivia preparing herself for the arduous task of converting a rakish lover by studying the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the great ladies with their scandal about Sir Tomkyn's amours and Dr Burdock's verses, and Mr Burchell with his "Fudge," have caused as much harmless mirth as has ever been caused by matter packed into so ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not catch what was going on at first, and was, therefore, extremely surprised at noticing George hurriedly smooth out his trousers, ruffle up his hair, and stick his cap on in a rakish manner at the back of his head, and then, assuming an expression of mingled affability and sadness, sit down in a graceful attitude, and try to ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... observed are strips of chain mail attached to portions of their clothing as guards against sword-cuts, noticeably on the sleeves. Some are wearing steel helmets, some huge turbans, and others the regular Afghan military hat, this latter a rakish-looking head-piece something like the hat of a ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... was not without a certain knowledge of human nature, particularly Skippy-nature, so without further interest he proceeded to disrobe, flipping the five-dollar bill on the table with a rakish gesture and saying carelessly: ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... perfect harmony with the dignity of the office of those who wore them, degenerated towards the fifteenth century. So much was this the case, that an order of Francis I. forbad the judges from wearing pink "slashed hose" or other "rakish garments." ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... costumed cheap but gaudy in a wrinkled, tango-colored dress that she must have picked off some Grand street bargain counter late last spring. The ninety-nine-cent soup-plate lid cocked over one ear adds a rakish touch that almost puts her in ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... age, slim, athletic, with heavy mustache and imperial, just beginning to turn gray, with deep-set eyes under bushy brows, and a keen, shrewd face, rather deeply lined. There was a look of dissipation there, a shade of shabbiness about his clothes, a rakish cut to the entire personality that had caused Folsom to glance distrustfully at him more than once the previous afternoon, and to meet with coldness the tentatives permissible in fellow travelers. The stranger's morning had been lonesome. Now he held his newspaper where it would ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... entered the room alone; the rector remained below in the library. She found her father well propped up with pillows, and his skull-cap, with the long white tassel, was drawn down over one eye, giving him a curious leer. The rakish angle of the cap, with the piercing eyes beneath, the hawk-like beak, and the shriveled old mouth, puckered into a sardonic smile, made him an almost comic figure. Trimmer stood at attention by the ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... suspected some attempt at a swindle, or at any rate something unpleasant, but of course consented with a great show of rejoicing. Accordingly the next evening, after sunset, Abdulla came, accompanied by several other grey-beards and by his nephew. That young man—of a very rakish and dissipated appearance—affected the greatest indifference as to the whole of the proceedings. When the torch-bearers had grouped themselves below the steps, and the visitors had seated themselves on various lame chairs, Reshid stood apart in ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... said Saltash airily. "But I doubt if I live to a rakish old age. I'm a man that likes taking chances, and those who dice with the high gods are bound to throw a blank some day." For a moment the mockery died down in his eyes, and he looked more nearly serious than Bunny had ever seen him. He patted the shoulder ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... early days of his sojourn at Plessis-les-Tours king Louis, not wishing to hold his drinking-bouts and give vent to his rakish propensities in his chateau, out of respect to her Majesty (a kingly delicacy which his successors have not possessed) became enamoured of a lady named Nicole Beaupertuys, who was, to tell the truth, wife of a citizen of ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... Lynch his cap and disappeared without a word. Lynch stared mournfully at it. The emblem was crushed and the cap looked rather worn and useless. He put it on his head, where it assumed the rakish tilt of a hobo's favorite tam-o'-shanter, and said: "I hope you're not thinking of blaming me ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the rifle to his shoulder and fired. The bullet whined off the sphere as if it were steel. Pember jerked his head in despair. Angrily he fired again. His tin hat slid to one side of his head at a rakish angle. ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... under the shelter of a small island, and all hands being tired from a long row in a hot sun, I let my men go to sleep during the short tropical darkness. As soon as the day was breaking all hands were alert, and we saw with delight a beautiful rakish-looking brig, crammed with slaves, close to the island behind which we had taken shelter, steering for a creek on the mainland a short distance from us. I ought to mention that the island in question was within four miles of this creek. We immediately ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... seats removed from Prince Ugo, while Savage was on the other side of the table, almost opposite Quentin. On Dickey's right sat the Duke Laselli, and next to that individual was the American millionaire. Directly across the broad table from Quentin was the tall rakish-looking Count ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... the dressing room and in a moment emerged looking strangely unlike the Josie her friends knew. Her sandy hair was completely covered by a henna wig, bobbed and crimped. Her sedate sailor hat was cocked at a rakish angle and draped with a much-ornamented veil, and mirabile dictu! a lipstick had been freely and relentlessly applied to her honest mouth and her cheeks were touched up with a paint of purplish hue. Her sober Norfolk jacket was as much disguised as its wearer by a silly lace frill pinned around ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... o'clock, a rakish-looking schooner made her appearance, which, from her manoeuvres, such as frequently altering her course, as if she wished to avoid us, we suspected to be a slave-vessel; we, therefore, made full sail in chase, and at ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... through the still smooth water faster than we had done for many a day. For some hours we ran on till a sail was reported right ahead still becalmed. As we drew near we discovered her to be a large topsail schooner, with a very rakish appearance. She was still becalmed, but as we brought the breeze up with us her sails bulged out, and she began to glide through the water. There were many discussions as to what she was; some thought her an honest trader, others a slaver; some said she was ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... face A quizzical thin smile is showing, His cheeks are wrinkled like fine lace, His kind blue eyes are gay and glowing. He wears a brilliant-hued cravat, A suit to match his soft gray hair, A rakish stick, a knowing hat, A manner ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... looked interesting and hard-used. One of the brothers had been to a party the night before, and on coming home had put his dress-tie about the neck of a little plaster bust of Byron that stood on the mantel. This head, with the tie at a rakish angle, drew Claude's attention more than anything else in the room, and for some reason instantly made him ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... table, or promenade, looks sentimental when we are alone, and frowns at anyone else who ventures to speak to me. Yesterday at dinner, when an Austrian officer stared at us and then said something to his friend, a rakish-looking baron, about 'ein wonderschones Blondchen', Fred looked as fierce as a lion, and cut his meat so savagely it nearly flew off his plate. He isn't one of the cool, stiff Englishmen, but is rather peppery, ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... him. At sixty Clint Darrow, a widower now and reverent in speech of the departed one whose extravagance he had deplored, came to live at the hotel in three-room grandeur, overlooking the lake. A ruddy, corpulent, paunchy little man, and rakish withal. The hotel widows made much of him. Hannah, holding herself aloof, was often surprised to find her girlhood flame hovering near now, speaking of loneliness, of trips abroad, of a string of pearls ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... and the other holding a pile of newspapers, while she drones out in a hoarse voice, "'ERALD, third 'dition, one penny!" until the ear wearies of the constant repetition. Cabs rattle incessantly along the street; here, a fast-looking hansom, with a rakish horse, bearing some gilded youth to his Club—there, a dingy-looking vehicle, drawn by a lank quadruped, which staggers blindly down the street. Alternating with these, carriages dash along with their well-groomed horses, and within, the vision of bright eyes, white ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... it before him, he went into the Aged's room with a clean white cloth, and tied the same under the old gentleman's chin, and propped him up, and put his nightcap on one side, and gave him quite a rakish air. Then he placed his breakfast before him with great care, and said, "All right, ain't you, Aged P.?" To which the cheerful Aged replied, "All right, John, my boy, all right!" As there seemed to be a tacit understanding that the Aged was not in a presentable state, and was therefore ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... just finished dinner, in his comfortable lodgings. He is not even in evening dress, but he does wear a lounge jacket, which we devoutly hope will give him a rakish air to Amy's eyes. He would undoubtedly have put on evening dress if he had known she was coming. His man, Richardson, is waiting on him. When we wrote that we deliberated a long time. It has an air, and with a little low cunning we could ...
— Alice Sit-By-The-Fire • J. M. Barrie
... n.; wallow in voluptuousness &c n.; plunge into dissipation. revel; rake, live hard, run riot, sow one's wild oats; slake one's appetite, slake one's thirst; swill; pamper. Adj. intemperate, inabstinent^; sensual, self-indulgent; voluptuous, luxurious, licentious, wild, dissolute, rakish, fast, debauched. brutish, crapulous^, swinish, piggish. Paphian, Epicurean, Sybaritical; bred in the lap of luxury, nursed in the lap of luxury; indulged, pampered; full-fed, high-fed. Phr. being full of supper and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... with the toe of his boot. Underneath it lay a little heap of silver coins. John blinked at it a moment. 'There it is. Dessie's shorely got principle. No two ways about it.' He shifted the stone back to place, tilted back in his chair, and patting his foot began to whistle a rakish tune. He was still whistling as I rode ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... or nonplussed; he was not even embarrassed by his immediate environment. In fact he turned it to his own advantage, for his hairs, duly watered and soaped down on to his cranium, lost their rakish look and gave him the appearance of a gentleman of perfect integrity, great intellect and no little financial stability. As between one man and another, he did not attempt to deny the truth of my assertion, gave me to understand, with a jovial smile, ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... girls, extravagantly veiled, made room in comfortable touring-cars for feminine guests whose extravagant veils were yet to be unpacked; slim young men in leather trappings, caps adorned with elaborate masks or goggles, manipulated rakish steering-gears; preoccupied machinists were fussing with valve and radiator or were cranking up; and, through the jolly tumult, the melancholy bell of the locomotive sounded, and the long train moved out through the September sunshine amid clouds of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... rival helmsman, with a bow in honor of Sylvia, while the other two caused a perceptible increase in the speed of the "Juanita," whose sentimental name was not at all in keeping with its rakish appearance. ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... glance at Crevel; but, like Dubois, who gave the Regent three kicks, she affected too much, and the rakish perfumer's thoughts jumped at such profligate suggestions, that he said to himself, "Does she want to turn the tables on Hulot?—Does she think me more attractive as a Mayor than as a National Guardsman? Women are ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... the Third Season we find him steering a long, low, rakish Chariot of Fire, with a Clock, a Trunk-Rack, an Emergency Ice- Box and all the other Comforts of Home. He had learned to smell a Constable a Mile off and whenever he ran up behind a Pewee Coffee- Grinder he went into the ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... man of style When he first began unpacking the pile Of the dollars and dimes Whose jingling chimes Had clinked to the tune of his father's smile; And he strewed his wealth with such lavish hand, His rakish ways were the talk of the land, And gossipers wise Sat winking their eyes (A ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... engulf him like a leaping wave. Joan was in the humor to profit by any arrangement that would break her bondage to sheep; Tim Sullivan had been bringing her up, unconsciously, but none the less effectively, to fit into this scheme for marrying her to his old friend's rakish son. When the day came for Joan to know of the arrangement, she would leap toward it as ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... on her lap, and stared before her with blank eyes. Through the curtains could be seen a glimpse of the house opposite, the blind at Bridgie's window drawn up at its usual rakish angle. ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... man stood to one side and the horse—well, moved. Robin gazed down at his mother with the faint hint of an almost shy smile, Dion saluted her with his whip, and the glorious day was fairly begun. Traveling with a sort of rakish deliberation the dogcart skirted the velvet lawn of the Green Court and disappeared from sight beneath the ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... at night, they drove through its picturesque streets in broad daylight. Both Royson and the captain were delighted with the lines of the Aphrodite when they saw her in the spacious dock. Her tapering bows and rakish build gave her an appearance of greater size than her tonnage warranted. Royson was sailor enough to perceive that her masts and spars were intended for use, and, when he reached her deck, to which much scrubbing and vigorous ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... garnished with a profusion of rings and seals, hung low from his white waistcoat; and the adaptation of his nankeen inexpressibles to his well-shaped limbs was a masterpiece of art. His whole dress and air was not what could properly be called foppish, it was rather what at that time was called "rakish." Few could so closely approach vulgarity without being vulgar: of that privileged few, Mr. Vernon was ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... parting from his patron, he ran right into the arms of a pair of merry fellows, who announced their playful purpose to detain him. Both wore their fezzes at a rakish angle, both had a rosary dangling fashionably from the left hand, both talked and laughed uproariously—secure in their employment by a foreign tourist agency from the disgust of the Muslim population, whose scowls shadowed them. Elias Abdul Messih was ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... sharply-defined lines of distinct objects surprise the Northern eye. Marseilles is always a picturesque city. No commercial town in the world can compare with it in this respect. On the water float the Mediterranean craft, rakish boats, with enormous latteen sails; long, low, sharp, black vessels, with a suspicious air redolent of smuggling and piracy. No tides rise and fall—advance and retreat. The ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... ease to lie flat upon the ferry gunwale, his cheeks supported by his hands, and talk to W—— and the Doctor as if they were old friends. He was a dealer in nitroglycerin cartridges, he said, and pointed to a long, rakish-looking skiff hard by, which bore a red flag at its prow. "Ye see that? Thet there red flag? Well, thet's the law on us glysereen fellers—over five hundred poun's, two flags; un'er five hundred, one flag. I've two hundred and ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... to Belford.— An account of Lovelace's delirious unmanageableness, and extravagant design, had they not all interposed. They have got Lord M. to him. He endeavours to justify Lovelace by rakish principles, and by a true story of a villany which he thinks greater than that of ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... was heard, and a rather fast and rakish-looking chap, named Stagger, spoke up. "How d'ye do, miss," he said politely to Efficiency, with a side glance out of his wicked old eye. "I'm a bit of a knut, and without the slightest trouble I can easily minimize the disadvantage that old reprobate Drift has been frightening you with. ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... horns of the bloody chase—the cors de chasse of the legendary Roland and knights of the Nibelungen. Humble civilians grew fonder of the habit of donning their military or hunting uniforms and big marching boots, and sticking cock's feathers in their hats at rakish angles, recalling the war of 1870 or reviving dreams of the sporting Tyrol. They drank daily more pints of beer and swallowed the hot-headed Rhine wines as if thus renewing their blood in that of their fiery ancestors. Meals mounted to seven or eight a day, for it was proper to gorge ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... they only knew what they did for them. The Doctor was so used to being well dressed, that he never asked why. That his wig always sat straight and even around his ample forehead, not facetiously poked to one side, nor assuming rakish airs, unsuited to clerical dignity, was entirely owing to Mrs. Katy Scudder. That his best broadcloth coat was not illustrated with shreds and patches, fluff and dust, and hanging in ungainly folds, was owing to the same. That his long silk ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... Being somewhat negligently braced, however, and, moreover, but imperfectly buttoned, they fell in a series of not the most graceful folds over a pair of shoes sufficiently down at heel to display a pair of very soiled white stockings. There was a rakish, vagabond smartness, and a kind of boastful rascality, about the whole man, that was ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... silver bars across his left shoulder showed that he was a lord-in-waiting. He was a handsome man, with clear-cut features, somewhat rakish from late hours and dissipation, but not the less interesting on that account. But his natural advantages were so over-run with the affectation of the Court that you did not see the man at all, being absorbed by the studied gesture ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... sprightly little old gentleman. With his brisk air, natty eye-glasses, cane and gloves, and other items of dress in the most correct taste, he was quite the old beau. His white hair was crispy, brushed back, and his snowy mustache had rather a rakish effect. ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... eager glance swept the river's widening reach. Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... had Shard, captain of pirates, and all his merry men wore pearls in their ear-rings; and now the English fleet was after him under full sail along the coast of Spain with a good North wind behind them. They were not gaining much on Shard's rakish craft, the bad ship Desperate Lark, yet they were closer than was to his liking, and they interfered ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... join his party. We had seen him at various places along our way, so that it was not entirely out of a clear sky. He was wall-eyed—if that is the opposite of cross-eyed—which gave him so decidedly rakish a look that it was some time before I could persuade my conservative relatives that it would be safe for me to accept the invitation, but as the party numbered ten, mostly female, they finally gave me their blessing. Being the last comer, ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... off instantly at a smart walk; the rigid straddle of his legs, the turned-out feet, the stiff back, the rakish slant of the sombrero above the square, motionless set of the shoulders expressing ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... thick haze surrounded the ship, and the chase was lost sight of. The rain fell in torrents, and the ship was going seven knots through the water. On the clearing up of the fog, the chase was again visible. The sun broke forth, and the rakish-looking brigantine appeared to have carried on all sail during the squall. They could see, under her sails, the low black hull pitching up and down; and, approaching within range, one of the forecastle guns was cleared away ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... a suit of grey flannel at the local tailoring establishment. When completed—of course it couldn't be paid for at once—it was at least two sizes too large for him, such being the accepted fashion at Brimfield just then; had the pockets set at rakish angles, exhibited a two-and-a-half-inch cuff at the bottom of the trousers and contained a cunning receptacle for a fountain pen and pencil in the waistcoat, (Clint called it a vest, but the tailor set him right.) Amy viewed that suit with frank envy, for the coat was fully two inches wider ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... it's cruel the difference between us. Here's my forehead low and bumpy, and my little nose, scarcely any of it, and what there is turned right up to the sky; and my wide mouth, and my little eyes, and my hair just standing straight up as rakish as you please. And look at you, with your elegant features and your—oh, but it's genteel you are!—and I love you, Nora alannah; I love you, and am not a ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... sanctity of a Hindu pilgrim by the purchase of a tight-ankled pair of white trousers to replace the voluminous baggy ones of a Patan, and a blue shot-with-gold-thread Rajput turban. He shoved the Patan turban with its conical fez in his saddle-bags, and wound the many yards of blue material in a rakish criss-cross about his shapely head, running a fold or two beneath his chin. The Patan sheepskin coat was left ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... young or the very hungry. The uncompromising coldness and solidity of the viands was enough to appall a man conscious that his digestion needed humouring. A huge cheese faced us in almost a swashbuckling way. I do not know how else to describe it. It wore a blatant, rakish, nemo-me-impune-lacessit air, and I noticed that the professor shivered slightly as he saw it. Sardines, looking more oily and uninviting than anything I had ever seen, appeared in their native tin beyond the ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... up for the War. Presently the pair would embrace in farewell, he would shoulder his mimic gun to the delight of the spectators, and proceed to march to battle to the time of the drum. Honor knew the routine perfectly. Meanwhile his expression of sleepy indifference under the rakish khaki cap as he blinked and chewed the nuts offered by the public, was human in its comprehension. When the crowd grew pressing, Honor left with her party, hearing for some distance the man's monotonous sing-song voice urging Johorun ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... and murmuring drowsily. As she peeped among them, her glance fell upon Sassy, outlined against the small square window beyond and roosted comfortably with her beak toward the manger, all unconscious of her nearing doom. The little girl was certain that it was she, for there was no mistaking the rakish lop of the serrated comb, or the once white under-feathers soiled ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... guarded it with a sword. She sternly demanded the parole or countersign. I caught hold of her and kissed her, and showed my pistols. She laughed. As I was armed with dirk and pistols, wore a sash, and was unmistakably a Latin Quarter etudiant, as shown by long hair, rakish cap on one side, red neck-tie, and single eyeglass, I was everywhere treated as a man and brother, friend and equal, warrior, and—by the girls—almost like a first-cousin. Field shared the glory, of course. And we made a great deal out of it, and were ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... years before. But M. Rubempre was bent on business, and the delightful scenery was an old story to him. They took a boat at a pier, and for an hour a negro pulled them about the harbor. There were quite a number of steamers in the port, long, low, and rakish craft, built expressly for speed, and some of them must have been knocked to pieces by the blockaders before the lapse of many weeks, though a considerable proportion of them succeeded in delivering their cargoes at Wilmington ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... (German), denotes a quality; like rakish, knavish, churlish, Danish. Ish is also employed ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... watched as the huge mast dipped slowly backward, triangular sail and all, until it lay nearly flat on the deck. The boat slipped under the bridge with room to spare. On the other side, the mast slowly went up to its normal rakish position again, the sail filled, and wind and current bore the boat ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... her work sympathetically yet professionally. The effect of the white cloth riding aslant over the round glasses and academic countenance was wonderfully rakish and devil-may-care. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... first getting it '58, that Dr. Sevier, as one morning he approached his office, noticed with some grim amusement, standing among the brokers and speculators of Carondelet street, the baker, Reisen. He was earnestly conversing with and bending over a small, alert fellow, in a rakish beaver and very smart coat, with the blue flowers of modesty bunched ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... the present from any further information connected with the Associated Shades and their beautiful lounging-place. Had they not been so intent upon the inner beauties of the House-boat on the Styx they might have observed approaching, under the shadow of the westerly shore, a long, rakish craft propelled by oars, which dipped softly and silently and with trained precision in the now jet-black waters of the Styx. Manning the oars were a dozen evil-visaged ruffians, while in the stern of the approaching vessel there sat a grim-faced, weather-beaten spirit, ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... cloaks and overcoats. They found Pancrazio a seat at the far end, and there he sat, with his deeply-lined, impassive face and slightly glazed eyes. He had yellow-brown eyes like Ciccio. But in the uncle the eyelids dropped in a curious, heavy way, the eyes looked dull like those of some old, rakish tom-cat, they were slightly rimmed with red. A curious person! And his English, though slow, was beautifully pronounced. He glanced at Alvina with slow, impersonal glances, not at all a stare. And he sat for the most part impassive and ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... one August morning as I drove along one of Delaware's flat, flat roads, to know what could possibly have produced the brilliant, blazing scarlet banner that hung across a distant wood as if a dozen red flags were being there displayed. Closer approach disclosed one rakish branch on a sugar maple, all afire with color, while every other leaf on the tree yet ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... ouvriers suddenly appeared. Lady Sligo described them exactly as they are to be seen in Gavarni's wonderful drawings in The Illustrated London News of 1848—strange beings with long beards and rakish caps, sometimes of liberty and sometimes of less pronounced cut, with belts round their trousers through which their shirts were pulled, and heavy, strange- looking muskets in their hands. The queer crowd who surged round the carriage were a deputation ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... out, and tugging fretfully in the yellow current, were the aliens of the blue seas, high-hulled, their tracery of masts and spars shimmering in the heat: a full-rigged ocean packet from Spain, a barque and brigantine from the West Indies, a rakish slaver from Africa with her water-line dry, discharged but yesterday of a teeming horror of freight. I looked again upon the familiar rows of trees which shaded the gravelled promenades where Nick had first seen Antoinette. Then ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Wagner's eyes were suddenly attracted by a large galley, with three masts—looking most rakish with its snow-white sail, its tapering spars, its large red streamer, and its low, long, and gracefully sweeping hull, which was painted jet black. On its deck were six pieces of brass ordnance; and stands of fire-arms were ranged round the lower ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... thanked Heaven that they filled up that pathless ocean in order to build an iron foundry upon the spot. Suppose they had excavated for a cellar! Why during the time that Capt. Kidd, Lafitte and I infested the coast thereabout, sailing three "low, black-hulled schooners with long rakish masts," I forced hundreds of merchant seamen to walk the plank—even helpless women and children. Unless the sharks devoured them, their bones are yet about three feet under the floor of that iron foundry. Under the lee ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... connected with the stable. He hurried to the deserted taxicab, where he seemed busied for several minutes, the glow of his pocket lamp shooting out now and then. Through the door of the garage a long, rakish-looking racing car was being pushed out by Jim and his sleepy groom. There was a cheery shout from the taxi, and Helene heard a ripping sound. Shirley reappeared, carrying ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... for it was the Bangor. Enfeebled and nearly famishing, we headed toward it and rowed for life. How we regretted having left our sails on the island. The prau had sighted us and was bearing down in full pursuit; we soon could distinguish its wide-spreading, rakish sails almost touching the water as it sped on. Then we made out the naked forms of the Illanums hanging to the ropes, far out over the water, and then we could hear their blood-curdling yell. It was too late; their yell was one of baffled rage. It was answered by the deep bass tones of the swivel ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... were firing at the chase; but they might as well have spared their powder and shot, for they could not reach her into at least a quarter of a mile. The wind was still at the south-west, and already there were signs of fog. The rakish steamer had probably come from the Bermudas, where she must have obtained a skilful pilot, for without one she would have had no chances at all; and she stood boldly on her course as though she had nothing to fear on account of ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... in civilian clothes sat tilted back in one of several chairs beside the door. He wore a little black moustache and because his head was pressed against the brick wall behind him, his hat was pushed forward giving him a rakish look which was rather heightened by an unlighted cigar sticking up out of the corner of his mouth like a ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... better known under the abbreviated title of "Ned," and without the prefatory "Mr." That one social quality, without which a seat at Ned Wright's festive board cannot be compassed, is Felony. A little rakish-looking green ticket was circulated a few days previously among the members of Mr. Wright's former fraternity, bidding them to a "Great Supper" in St. John's Chapel, Penrose Street (late West Street), Walworth, got up under the auspices of the South-East London Mission. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... and saw it turn into a group of swiftly-flying vessels. He marvelled at the skill whereby they had been able to find the transports on this vast and trackless sea; he marvelled at the slender vessels with their four low, rakish stacks. These sea-terriers were thin skins of steel, covering engines of enormous power; they tore through the water, literally with the speed of an express train, leaving a boiling white wake behind. Seeing them rock and swing from side to side in the waves, hurled this way and that, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... Titian madonna. She came down and lay among great black and gold satin cushions, and lit a scented cigarette and opened a new French novel. Black and gold was her new scheme for her drawing-room; she had had it done this spring. It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope. The note of the room was really ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... dash of ten minutes past seven, the rakish recklessness of a quarter past, the drooping weariness of twenty-five minutes past, must have been observed ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... don't know but what 'e's bought two since 'e bought that one—a soft felt, and a cowboy what he never wore but once or twice because it wasn't becomin'. You'll 'ave noticed, miss, that 'e 'ad one o' them fyces what don't look well in nothink rakish—a real gentleman's fyce 'e ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... did not fit quite so perfectly—the coat bunched a little at the shoulders, the trousers were drawn a little higher until they lost their "set." His hat was pulled still farther over his eyes, but at a more rakish angle, and his tie, tucked into his shirt bosom just below the collar, exposed blatantly a diamond shirt stud. But on Jimmie Dale's lips there was an ominous smile not wholly in keeping with the somewhat jaunty swagger ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... buckled on. They had no boarding-nettings, and their only hope of victory was by showing so bold a front at first, that the enemy might be driven off without coming to close quarters. As the stranger drew near she was seen to be a most wicked, rakish-looking brigantine, and neither Murray nor Adair had any longer the slightest doubt in their minds that she was a slaver. They hoisted the English ensign, but she showed no colours ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... waste for weeds and brambles to flourish undisturbed. An old scarecrow still stood knee-deep in the tangled green, left there after the field had been abandoned, to drop slowly to pieces in the wind and rain. The grotesque figure, with its outstretched arms and hat set at a rakish angle, looked familiar for some incomprehensible reason. As Oliver clung to the wall, squinted through the leaves, and wondered why that should be, the mystery was suddenly solved. The door of the house opened with a squeak of rusty ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... no gainsaying the likeness; even the rakish tilt of the jaunty felt hat, caused by the wind and that wild dash across country, was painstakingly reproduced. And the fanciful tucks on the sleeve of the gown—"and I didn't suppose he had deigned so much as a glance!" was ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... eager-eyed, forgetful of his companion, lost to all but the stir and bustle, the rush and roar of the wonderful city about him. The which Mr. Smivvle duly remarked from under the curly-brimmed hat, but was uncommonly silent. Indeed, though his hat was at its usual rakish angle, though he swung his cane and strode with all his ordinary devil-may-care swagger, though his whiskers were as self-assertive as ever, yet Mr. Smivvle himself was unusually pensive, and in his bold black eyes was a look very like anxiety. But in a while, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... horses would strive for the prize—a big field, and the pace would be killing. From the West came Sweet Silver, a gray, gallant, and fearless in jumping. A rakish old nag who walked over the sticks, had been sent for the Cup from Kentucky; On a bay, Little Jack, who was fast, they had put but a hundred and thirty. But I knew that North Star, a big brown—even the Black was no gamer- With a pull of ten pounds in the weight, was almost a match for Crusader. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... efficient race of short, thick-set men. His hair curled in little rings of iron gray all over his round bullet head. As for his countenance, it was strongly marked, deeply pitted with the small-pox. For the rest, there was a fierce little squint out of one eye; the nose had a rakish twist to one side; while his large mouth, and great white teeth, looked absolutely sharkish when he laughed. In a word, no one, after getting a fair look at him, would ever think of improving the shape of his nose, wanting in symmetry as it was. Notwithstanding his pugnacious ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... hat and refurbished, appeared at the windows; the old tin syrup cans, pasted over with dark green paper, were made to disgorge their mouldy stores and transform themselves into flower-pots holding scarlet geraniums; even the disreputable, rakish old rocking chair assumed a belated air of youth and respectability, wearing as it did a cushion of discreetly patterned chintz; and the packing-box table hid its deficiencies under a simple cloth. All these magic transformations Nora had achieved with various odds ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... bled as did the English when the greedy hands of Spain were clutching at their shores. The light ships hung near the Spaniards at a distance and did not board until spars were down and the great rakish hulls were part helpless. Then—with a wild cheer—the little galleons—often two at a time—would grapple with the enemy and board—cutlasses swinging, pistols spitting, and hand-spikes hewing a way through the struggling, yellow-faced ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... could see the pretty women in their slate-gray and rust-colored cloaks, in their rakish little toques from under which their sophisticated eyes peeped out in search of homage. Some had the expression of those for whom love is an assured phenomenon solving all questions. Others seemed to be waiting impatiently for its advent or its departure. But all, Lilla thought, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... prominent. Fox had been taught to gamble by his father and took to it readily. Cards and horse-racing kept him in constant bankruptcy; many of his nights were spent in debauchery and his mornings in bed; and his close association with the rakish heir to the throne was the scandal of London. In spite of his eloquence and ability, the loose manner of his life militated against the success of Fox as a reformer. His friends knew him to be a free-hearted, impulsive sympathizer with all who ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... then let us procure some rakish fellows, and after we have made them sufficiently drunk, and given them a good sum of money, let us order them to go and debauch this virgin, promising them, if they do it, ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... and lines of iron in their faces, hardened by the life they led; and some, again, were smooth-shaven, so often and so closely that their faces were blue with the beard beneath the skin. But, oh, to Nicholas Attwood and the rest of Stratford boys, they were a dashing, rakish, admirable lot, with the air of something even greater than lords, and a keen knowingness in their sparkling, worldly eyes that made a common wise man seem almost a ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... too hot. I wish every slaver that sails these muddy seas was hung at the yard-arm of his own nasty rakish schooner." ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... when she came downstairs again she could only puff and gasp above her muffler, declare that she was choking, and fan herself with her muff. Choking or not, the eyes of the companions brightened as they looked at her, for the scarlet tam-o'-shanter was set at a rakish angle on the dark little head, and Peggy the invalid seemed to have made way for the Peggy of old, with dimpling cheeks and the light of mischief ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... saw a policeman standing at the top of the Gut. Up he looked; down he looked; Seacombe was orderly. Stepping as if to arrest a malefactor, he marched down the Gut.... Where was the policeman? A battered billycock and a rakish pipe looked round the corner, then withdrew. The battered billycock knew where the policeman was. The price of a glass, and billycock ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... enough, on a steed that looked like Sunday afternoon, with brand-new reins and bit, and in a suit that fit him to perfection, with gleaming spurs and shining buttons, the rakish and indomitable Pancho, his long-lost friend, returned to greet him. He could scarcely believe it. For since that memorable night when he had left them, to return to the interior of Mexico, never a word had ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... with in these places, from the secret agent who tracks a criminal and flirts at the same time with the prostitutes, to the counter-spy employed by the proxenets to watch the secret agent. It is here that the criminal world acquires its rakish manners, but its weakness for women and alcohol cause it to fall early into the traps of the secret police. It is here also, as well as in the salons of high-class proxenetism, that we meet with those indefinable individuals who ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... of it. I haven't been on a horse since Dorothy came; I hope I haven't grown too stout for my habit. What are you going to wear, Rob? The blue cloth? You are perfectly irresistible in that! Do wear that rakish-looking soft hat with the scarf; it's wonderfully becoming, if it isn't quite so correct; and I'm sure Richard Kendrick won't take us to any stupid fashionable hotel. He'll arrange an outdoor affair, I'm confident, with ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... long-legged rubber boots. Captain Perez, swinging back and forth in the parlor rocker with the patch-work cushion, was puffing deliberately at a wooden pipe, the bowl of which was carved into the likeness of a very rakish damsel with a sailor's cap set upon the side of her once flaxen head. In response to his companion's remark he lazily turned his sunburned face toward the cane-seated rocker ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... following, the company being assembled, the corpse was put into a velvet hearse, attended by eighteen mourning coaches. When they were just ready to move, lord Jefferys, son of lord chancellor Jeffreys, a name dedicated to infamy, with some of his rakish companions riding by, asked whose funeral it was; and being told it was Mr. Dryden's, he protested he should not be buried in that private manner, that he would himself, with the lady Elizabeth's leave, have the honour of the interment, and would ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... a very shabby pot-hat to a still more rakish angle, buttoning up an equally shabby coat the while against the east wind. He was a tall fair-haired fellow, half a Dane in race and aspect: broad-shouldered, loose-limbed, with a Franciscan passion for poverty and the poor. But a certain humorous tolerance for all sorts and conditions of men, together ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... flowers,—they don't think if she has a husband who ill-uses her, or a child dying at home. She has come there to make them sport. Well, there came an old lord,—a man of sixty or seventy,—who has led a wild rakish life all these years, and now he thinks 'tis time to settle down, and he wants me to help him to make people think he's become respectable. And they say I shall marry him. Phoebe, they say I must,—there is to be no help for it. And I can't bear him to look ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... like the tail of a fish, was quite full, sweeping round under her counter in a semicircle. Then it was that I understood why her counter was so abnormally long; it was not merely a fancy on the part of her designer, intended to give her a smart, rakish appearance, it was for the purpose of giving her, despite the fulness of her run, a clean, easy delivery. Yes, as I looked at her critically, studying her lines from every possible point of view, I could believe that she would prove a quite extraordinary sailer; for there was nothing in that ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
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