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Gnarled   Listen
adjective
Gnarled  adj.  Knotty; full of knots or gnarls; twisted; crossgrained. "The unwedgeable and gnarléd oak."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Gnarled" Quotes from Famous Books



... men nearly a week to split the gnarled logs, and one brisk woman carried them into the cellar and piled them neatly. The men stopped about once an hour to smoke, drink cider, or rest. The woman worked steadily from morning till night, only pausing at noon for a bit of bread and the soup good Coste sent out to her. The men got ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott

... from the wall A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, And o'er it many, round and small, The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. Hard by a poplar shook alway, All silver-green with gnarled bark: For leagues no other tree did mark The level waste, the rounding gray. She only said, 'My life is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, I would ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... bring forth fruit in old age, they shall be full of sap and green.' A gnarled old tree may be green in all its branches, and blossom and fruit may hang together there. The ideal of life is, that into each stage we shall carry the best of the preceding, harmonised with the best of the new, and that is possible ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... climb up this tree out of the way of the brute. I'll help you up, sir," he sung out, beginning to make his own way up the gnarled and ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... from which, in the rainy season, innumerable torrents pour into the Settite; some of these gorges were ornamented with the dark foliage of large tamarind trees, while upon rocks that did not appear to offer any sustenance, the unsightly yet mighty baobab* grasped with its gnarled roots the blocks of granite, and formed a peculiar object in the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker

... acting of them both. Still, there was something awry within him, which in his body found a visible counterpart. The shapely trunk, crowned with the classic head, was set upon limbs of an ungainly order, short, of coarse vigor, and "gnarled like clumps of oak." Above, all was spiritual; below, of the earth, earthy, and dragging him down. Strong souls, thus inharmoniously embodied, have often developed some irregularity of heart or brain: a disproportion, which only strength of purpose or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... office, and began to lay his pulpy white hands upon everything which directly or indirectly might produce petroleum. In due season he invited Uncle Jap to dine with him at the Paloma Hotel, in San Lorenzo. The old man, with the hayseed in his hair, and the stains of bitumen upon his gnarled hands, ate and drank of the best, seeing a glorified vision of his Lily crowned with diamonds at last. The vision faded somewhat when Nathaniel began to talk dollars and cents. Even to Uncle Jap, unversed in such high matters as finance, it seemed plain that Leveson ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... is," said the King, "we are both of us getting old." He tapped with his gnarled fingers on the blanket that lay over his knees. "The truth is also," he observed a moment later, "that the boy has very few pleasures. He ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... long-apprehended calamity fell upon Prince Akuli. The old wahine had finished her lei hala. Barefooted, with no adornment of femininity, clad in a shapeless shift of much-washed cotton, with age-withered face and labour-gnarled hands, she cringed before him and crooned a mele in his honour, and, still cringing, put the lei around his neck. It is true the hala smelled most freshly strong, yet was the act beautiful to me, ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London

... having once felt, finds himself fascinated by it, and so returns to the subject for the sake of the sensation. In that long, low drawing room of Mrs. Orton Beg's, with the window at either end, in view of the gray old cathedral towering above the gnarled elms of the Lower Close, itself the scene of every form of human endeavour, every expression of human passion, in surroundings so heavy with memories of the past, and listening to the quiet tone of conviction in which Mrs. Orton Beg spoke, with the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... riot in neglect, for across the white sanded paths thick creepers had flung their arms, and vines and climbers were scaling the gnarled limbs of the acacia trees and covering the high walls beyond. She was looking to the west where the rose and gold of sunset still hung breathless on the painted air, though the sun was hidden below the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... with stings on a June day like this that a vivid impression was made on my memory. We were expecting swarms every day. A neighbor, a quaint old man who lived very near, had gained the reputation of an expert at this business. I can see him now, with his high stove-pipe hat, and his gnarled, wrinkled visage, which he shrouded in a green veil when hiving a swarm. He was a good-hearted old fellow, but very rough in his talk. He had been to sea in early life, and profanity had become the characteristic of his vernacular. Well, word came one morning that ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... was! Up and up we struggled and toiled, perspiring all the way and gasping with heat and thirst. We tore all the skin off our arms and legs in forcing ourselves through the prickly patches of jungle, and almost splintered our feet against the rocks and gnarled roots of some of the trees, besides bruising our bodies all over with the repeated falls we had; and, all the while, we were suffering the most unmitigated pangs of hunger and thirst that mortal man could experience ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson

... the gnarled hand and tried to show that he wished he could help, but the only thing he could do was to show the love and sympathy that filled his loyal heart. That night when the light was out and everything was quiet, Jan lay wide awake ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker

... long it remained in that condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... immense cost of filling up and levelling to bring the line to the proper grade. We skirted the shores of Lake Lulu, whose blue waters glistened in the afternoon sun, as we caught a momentary glimpse through the trees of the tiny hill, where a clear fresh spring tempted us to sit on the gnarled trunk of a fallen tree and refresh ourselves. How small we felt by involuntary comparison with the gigantic rock towering above our heads, or even with the huge fragments thrown out and scattered at its base! ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon

... came upon solitary shepherds tending their piebald flocks, as David and Abner guarded their father's sheep in Judea. That these patient shepherds, watching their lean herds, these Deborahs weaving their bright blankets beneath gnarled branches of sparse cedar trees, should be living less than forty-eight hours from Chicago, was incredible, and yet here they were! Their life and landscape, though of a texture with that of Arabia, were as real as Illinois, and every mile carried me deeper into the silence ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... beyond this courtyard, was suffering from the cutaneous disease that affects plaster, eaten with leprosy and spotted with blisters, with zig-zag rifts from top to bottom, and a crackled surface like the glaze of an old jar. The dead stock of a vine stretched its gnarled black arms along ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... first prophet of Amon, an aged man long past his ninetieth birthday, squatted on a mat at Pharaoh's left hand. A pair of bright eyes, shaded by bushy white brows, glittered in his brown face—seamed and wrinkled like the bark of a gnarled oaklike gay flowers amid withered leaves, forming a strange contrast to his lean, bowed, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... weave the texture of our souls, not ourselves; and the web is too intensely wove and drenched in too deep a dye for us to undo or greatly change. The eagle cannot be tamed down to the softness of a dove, and no art of the husbandman can send into the gnarled and knotted oak the juices that shall smooth and melt its stiffness into the yielding pliancy of the willow. I wage no war with the work of the gods. Besides, the demands of Rome have now grown to such a size that they swallow up our very ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... hard old gnarled hand in her own, and her heart was full of joy. The exaltation of the day she rode home was coming to her. Love was the power that could transform the world. People everywhere, all sorts of people, craved love and would respond to it. ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung

... setting of the Indre, standing on wooden piles concealed by flowers. Farther on, in a hollow, I saw the romantic masses of the chateau of Sache, a sad retreat though full of harmony; too sad for the superficial, but dear to a poet with a soul in pain. I, too, came to love its silence, its great gnarled trees, and the nameless mysterious influence of its solitary valley. But now, each time that we reached an opening towards the neighboring slope which gave to view the pretty castle I had first noticed in the morning, I stopped to look at it ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac

... When the mistletoe boughs lay shed; But never the curse of the orphan Was breathed on the rich man's head; And when again the gentle summer Had gladdened the earth once more, No branches of gnarled oaks olden Made shadows across ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... bends only its topmost branches to the light wind, and its leaves and twigs alone are troubled by the summer breeze; but when the gale lays low the trees of the forest and whirls the leaves about like ocean spray, then the oak is stirred to wild action; tosses its gnarled limbs in the air, and moves the very earth on which it stands. So the heroes on Deal beach are sluggish and quiescent while the sun shines and the butterflies are abroad; but let the storm burst upon the sea; ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne

... miles west of the town is a narrow but close belt of timber, mostly gnarled mulga and gidgee, with here and there a sprawling stunted creek gum. The cattle were making for this shelter. But already the tremendous pace was beginning to tell. The bellowing had ceased and the mob was stringing out, the stragglers no longer being able to gallop, but lumbering ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman

... admirable command of English, could not follow the Coke variety in its careless freedom. But he knew his man. Though bewildered by strange names and stranger words, he was alive to the significance of things being made easy "for the missus and the girls." So, even this gnarled sea-dog had a soft spot in his heart! On the very brink of the precipice his mind turned to his women-kind, just as De Sylva himself had whispered a last memory of his daughter to San Benavides when their common ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... inviting spot at first. There was little pasture for the wearied mules on the almost naked rocks, and the stunted trees and gnarled roots told eloquently of the severity of winter in those high regions. There was, however, a good spring of water and an over-arching rock, which promised some degree of refreshment and shelter, and when firewood was collected, a ruddy blaze sent up, the kettle put on ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne

... reaching to snatch a shred of half-cooked meat when a woman of the tribe gave a scream that was shrill with fear. She pointed her gnarled hand upward on ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... unpainted farm house, built of logs a century ago, had changed in the passing years to a grayish tint. An addition had been built to the house several years before Aunt Sarah's occupancy, The sober hue of the house harmonized with the great, gnarled old trunk of the meadow willow near-by. Planted when the house was built, it spread its great branches protectingly over it. A wild clematis growing at the foot of the tree twined its tendrils around the massive trunk until in late summer they had become an inseparable part of it, almost ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas

... you, sir, glad to see you," said the old gentleman, holding out an enormous gnarled hand, whose back was covered with great veins, and faintly showed through its ruddy-brown a blue tattooed ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn

... saw him, he continued to regard me for a second or two; and then, taking one of the heavy candlesticks in his gnarled hand, he beckoned me to follow him; which, in silence ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... to happen; but the mate had finished with Conroy. The youth came staggering and crying down the ladder, with tears and blood befouling his face, and stumbled as his foot touched the deck. The older man, Slade, saved him from falling, and held him by the upper arm with one gnarled, toil- roughened hand, peering at him through the ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... were, along the clearer parts, till we came to a part where our way seemed stopped by gorse-bushes. They rose up, thick and dark, right in front of us. Our guide stopped and told us to look down. Among the gnarled gorse-stems there seemed to be a passage or "run" made by some beast, fox or badger, going to and ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield

... sat in his house, enjoying a ray of pallid sunshine sent through the branches of a leafless fig-tree which stretched its gnarled, grey twisted arms before his door, Yuhanna Mahbub came to him ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... well-walled Argos and the sea. From Lerna's fens a salty breeze blew free, And stirred the locks that fell his shoulders down And wreathed his forehead like a golden crown. Upon his shield—a sight to hold men mute— Was seen the head of the Nemean brute; Within one hand a gnarled club he bore, Hewn from an oak bole in the forest hoar. The shafts of Hermes, and the wondrous bow, The helm of Vulcan with its fiery glow, The fine-wrought peplus fluttering in the breeze, Proclaimed ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various

... narrower and wilder. They passed an immense tree, under which Indians may have bivouacked, and in some storm long past the lightning had plowed its way from the topmost branch to its gnarled roots. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... pistol shot, making a noiseless advance most difficult. Through this chaos of fallen timber the young spruce had grown with extreme vigour, and I never experienced greater difficulty in making my way than in this tangled and obdurate mass of long trunks of gnarled trees, and branches lying at every angle, intergrown with the green ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... and from the level of the ground he could, of course, see nothing over it but tree tops. He went on for what may have been a hundred yards, but it seemed to him very much more than that, and he came to a tall gnarled cedar-tree which stood almost against the high wall. It was half dead, but its twisted limbs were thick and strong, and by force of the tree's cramped position they had grown in strange and grotesque forms. One of them stretched across the very top of the stone ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... mushroom is like a great old oak. London is like that; an old oak, gnarled and twisted and weather-worn, with plenty of hale life and young vigour springing out ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... look of command shone in the eyes of Gabriel Druse. Leadership was written all over him. Power spoke in every motion. The square, unbowed shoulders, the heavily lined face, with the patriarchal beard, the gnarled hands, the rough-hewn limbs, the eye of bright, brooding ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... rough Document, giving Friedrich Wilhelm's regulations on this subject, from his own hand, has come down to us. Most dull, embroiled, heavy Document; intricate, gnarled, and, in fine, rough and stiff as natural bull-headedness helped by Prussian pipe-clay can make it;—contains some excellent hints, too; and will show us something of Fritzchen and of Friedrich Wilhelm both at once. That is to say, always, if it can be read! If by aid of abridging, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle

... drawn over her bright golden hair. For a moment she stood at the edge of the marshes, looking this way and that. Everywhere, as far as she could see, was the dismal bog, with pools of black water, and gnarled, fantastic-looking snags sticking up here and there amid the dank growth of weeds and grasses. There was no light save the feeble glimmer of the stars reflected in the gloomy pools; but, upon the grass where she ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac

... low, with red-tiled roof, diamond-paned windows, and a profusion of dwelling rooms with smoke-blackened ceilings and oaken wainscots. In front was a small lawn, girt round with a thin fringe of haggard and ill grown beeches, all gnarled and withered from the effects of the sea-spray. Behind lay the scattered hamlet of Branksome-Bere—a dozen cottages at most—inhabited by rude fisher-folk who looked upon the laird ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the fingers of the out-flung hands twitched, and a violent shiver shook the old frame. Slowly, very slowly the gnarled old arms were gathered in under the breast as inch by inch the Hindu priest raised himself from the floor. The lower limbs were hidden, crushed under the fallen stone, and the old head hung down between the shoulders, the grey hair tangled in a ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... a pleasant English country town, with that air of cleanliness and quiet prosperity, of excellent sanitation and odd historic corners, side by side with big new modern buildings and exquisite green gardens where the old gnarled apple-trees are afroth with blossom in the spring, which is the peculiar flavour of an English country town. The incongruity is the charm; you step from a modern drapery store, with a respectable display of plate-glass, on to the clean narrow pavement, and find ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... base, and on its sides let the surface of the soil be seen to slide, together with the small roots of the bushes, denuding great portions of the surrounding rocks. And descending ruinous from these precipices in its boisterous course, let it dash along and lay bare the twisted and gnarled roots of large trees overthrowing their roots upwards; and let the mountains, as they are scoured bare, discover the profound fissures made in them by ancient earthquakes. The base of the mountains ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... his boots with the assistance of his wife, and looking at himself once more in the looking-glass, the schoolmaster took his gnarled stick and set off for the dinner. Just before the factory manager's house, where the festivity was to take place, he had a little mishap. He was taken with a violent fit of coughing . . . . He was so shaken by it that the cap flew off his head and the stick dropped out of his hand; and when ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... contrived to dispose of the white margin of the picture, and the saint looked out from the soft ashy tint of the wallpaper. Opposite was an exquisite engraving, which was framed with dark red velvet. At the end of an avenue of old trees, gnarled and twisted into each other, a man stood. One hand grasped the stalk of a ragged vine, which ran over the tree near him; the other hung helpless by his side, as if the wrist was broken. His eyes were fixed ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... that I had my inspiration. My eyes chanced to light upon the enormous gnarled trunk of the gingko tree which cast its huge branches over us. Surely, if its bole exceeded that of all others, its height must do the same. If the rim of the plateau was indeed the highest point, then why should this mighty tree ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... municipal authorities, educational dignitaries, and prominent burgesses of Kingsmill assembled on an open space before the College to unveil a statue of Sir Job Whitelaw. The honoured baronet had been six months dead. Living, he opposed the desire of his fellow-citizens to exhibit even on canvas his gnarled features and bald crown; but when his modesty ceased to have a voice in the matter, no time was lost in raising a memorial of the great manufacturer, the self-made millionaire, the borough member in three Parliaments, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... of the beeches Lay me where no eye perceives; Where,—like some great arm that reaches Gently as a love that grieves,— One gnarled root may clasp me kindly While the long years, working blindly, Slowly change ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein

... poor rest for them—with neither grass nor water—not a blade of anything green except the artemisia plant, the wild wormwood—which, of course, neither horse nor oxen would touch. This grew all around us in low thickets. Its gnarled and twisted bushes, with their white silvery leaves, so far from gladdening the eye, only served to render the scene more dreary and desolate—for we knew that this plant denoted the extreme barrenness of the soil. We knew ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... was located well in on the point, and Walter steered to land some distance out from it. A few strokes of the paddle sent the light canoe gliding in amongst the mangrove bushes that fringed the shore. Climbing out upon the curious gnarled roots, Walter pulled the canoe far enough in to effectually screen it from sight. Next he examined his pistols to see that they were properly loaded, and with a parting word of cheer for his chum, he made his way slowly and cautiously over the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... it is as if a giant had ploughed the ground, and left the furrows without harrowing them to harden into black and brown stone. We could see again how the broad stream, flowing down, squeezed and squashed like mud, had taken all fantastic shapes,—now like gnarled tree roots; now like serpents in a coil; here the human form, or a part of it,—a torso or a limb,—in agony; now in other nameless convolutions and contortions, as if heaved up and twisted in fiery pain and suffering,—for there was almost a human feeling in it; and again not unlike stone ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... experience, the one-man perambulators; and the costume of the rickshaw-runners was delightful, and their gnarled, indefatigable legs. With their tight trunk-hose of a coarse dark-blue material and short coat to match like an Eton jacket and with their large, round mushroom hats, they were like figures from the ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... however, were quite alone upon the walk. Not even a hind or shart was there; and after the first two or three steps, Marlow asked his fair companion to take his arm. She did so, readily; for she needed it, not so much because the long gnarled roots of the trees crossed the path from time to time, and offered slight impediments, for usually her foot was light as air, but because she felt an unaccountable languor upon her, a tremulous, agitated ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... when stealthy change Hath stolen the cider-press away And the gnarled orchards of the grange Have fallen before a slow decay, Were I so cunning, I would carve From some time-scorning monolith A sculpture that should well preserve The fame of ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill

... and paced the room once or twice, grasping his extinguished pipe absently in his hand. Suddenly a blast seemed to spring out of nowhere and rush madly round the enclosed garden, tossing the gnarled and leafy branches of the old orchard trees and dragging at the long trails of creepers on wall and trellis. It blew in at the windows, hot as from the heart of the thunder-cloud, and waved the curtains before it. It rushed into the very midst of the old house with its ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... with yellow; its eyes blue.... On the left is an upright spear, resting on the ground; from this there hangs, attached to a golden cord, a garment of scarlet, also a purple robe; whilst the upper part of the spear is surrounded by a white braid of diamond pattern. To the right is a gnarled thorn stick, from which hangs a coarse, shaggy piece of cloth in yellow, grey, and brown colors, tied with a ribbon; and above it is a leather knapsack.... Evidently this work of art, by its composition, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... Cabral and live happily for ever afterward. His idea of future happiness was to sit by the fireside in his declining years and pleasantly ruminate over the variety of deaths he had inflicted upon the loathsome Sebastian. In the first place, he was going to strangle him with his huge, gnarled hands; then he was going to cut off his ears and nose and stuff them into the vast slit he had made in his throat; then he would dig his heart out with a machete; then, one by one, he would expertly amputate his legs, arms and tongue; afterwards he would ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... plain, intersected with trenches, with nothing in sight but one monster deserted tank, still camouflaged, and here and there the silhouette of a blasted tree against the lowering sky. These dead trees of the battle line! Sometimes, with their bony limbs flung forth in gnarled unnatural gestures, they remind me of frantic skeletons suddenly petrified in their dance of death. They are frenzied, and unutterably tragic. They seem to move; yet they are so dead. And I imagine their denuded tortured arms reaching toward unanswering Heaven in an agony of ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall

... indescribably blue-green, something never seen by day. Every line shone bright, graceful, curved, rounded, and all thrown with sharp relief against the sky. How magical, exquisitely delicate and fanciful! The great trunks were soft serrated brown, and the gnarled branches stood out in perfect proportions. All works of art must ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... summits, and the mist will often wrap them in gloom and give them a strange and awesome look. At the foot of the craggy pass the mountain-torrent of the Pieve roars and tumbles on its way. Far-reaching forests of trees, with weather-beaten gnarled old trunks, stand firm against the mountain storms. Beneath their wide-spreading boughs there is a gloom almost of twilight, showing peeps here and there of deep purple ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman

... blankets for the night's encampments. They safely reached the falls. Taking the canoe and freight upon their shoulders, they carried them along the well-trodden trail which constituted the portage. Here they found five or six of their Indian hunters. One of them had climbed a gnarled oak tree opposite the foaming cataract, and was offering the following prayer, which Father Hennepin took down on the spot. Peculiar moans and wails, as of penitence, were blended with ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott

... The white gnarled trunk makes even the young trees seem old. The olive is like an old man with skimpy legs. It seems to me a pathetic tree. One does not like to say it is ugly; it is not ugly, but it would be puzzling to say wherein lies ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... The gnarled and braided boughs that show Their dim forms in the forest shade, Like wrestling serpents seem, and throw ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich

... lamb led to slaughter, but with innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... juist ae faut, tae ma thinkin', for a' never jidged the waur o' him for his titch of rochness—guid trees hae gnarled bark—but he thocht ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... original Quakerism a conception worthy of Lycurgus. Modern Quakerism is like one of those gigantic trees which are seen in the forests of North America,—apparently flourishing, and preserving all its greatest stretch and spread of branches; but when you cut through an enormously thick and gnarled bark, you find the whole inside hollow and rotten. Modern Quakerism, like such a tree, stands upright by help of its inveterate bark alone. Bark a Quaker, and he is a ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... Flat, 4 miles, a famous mining-camp in the days gone by, but now consisting of a general store, a few houses, and a gnarled old log fashioned into a glorious water-trough fit for ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... columned with innumerable trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves, and sweating perpetual moisture down its dark and channelled rind; some strong in youth, some grisly with decrepit age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled and knotted with wens and goitres; roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, and swathing fallen ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for. He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals, — breakfast and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never seemed ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... laughter. He sat up suddenly and looked about, but no one was in sight. Again he heard an unmistakable peal of shrill, childish merriment, seemingly close at hand. He lay flat and looked over the ledge, holding on to a root of a gnarled pine that grew far out ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... homestead along Severn side. The forests there will not recall the forest here. How shall their stifling heat and towering palms, their gaudy birds and flowers, their roaring beasts and loathly reptiles, remind one of the cool, sweet glades, the scented bracken, the gnarled oaks, the leaping deer, and sweet-throated songsters of home? 'Tis the vision of the river, the tide, and the wheeling gulls that I shall see again in ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan

... burst of laughter and cheering broke out from the sailors, and redoubled as a private of Marines, holding a concertina in his gnarled fists, walked on to the stage. Even the officers put their hands up to smile behind them; one or two nearest the First Lieutenant leaned over and patted him on the back as if he ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... general appearance, trunk sometimes dissolving into branches like the American elm, and sometimes continuous to the top. The finest specimens in open land are characterized by a rather short, massive trunk, with stout, horizontal, far-reaching limbs, conspicuously gnarled and twisted in old age, forming a wide-spreading, open head of striking grandeur, the diameter at the base of which is sometimes two or three times ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame

... the breeze that stirred now and then in the leafless boughs of the trees was as roving and provocative as the air of spring. In the winding brick walks of the Square children were at play with the squirrels and pigeons; and old men, with gnarled hands and patient hopeless faces, sat warming themselves in the sunshine on the benches. "Life!" she thought. "That's life. You can't get away from it." Then one of the old men broke into a cackle of cheerful laughter, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... five feet long, the head of the club, for such it was, terminated in a gnarled knot, bristling with small points. This the boys recognized to be somewhat similar to the wicked thing that was carried by the Korino when ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... shall consecrate; in shape Of some fair tomb, here will I heap the turf And call it Adelbright's. Yon aged yew, Whose rifted trunk, rough bark, and gnarled roots Give solemn proof of its high ancientry, Shall canopy the shrine. There's not a flower, That hangs the dewy head, and seems to weep, As pallid blue-bells, crow-tyes and marsh lilies, But I'll plant here, and if they chance ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... hard by Bedford Street; the time, that restful hour of the afternoon when they of the gnarled faces and the bright clothing gather together in groups to tell each ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... sponge." In the language of another it is a "black ocean tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes, a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, barrenness—a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder, of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness, and all these weird shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this far-stretching waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action, of boiling, surging, furious ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson

... side by side, without a word. They reached a paved road that stretched out as far as the eye could see, between two lines of lanterns, between two rows of gnarled trees that held aloft handfuls of bare branches and cast their slender, motionless shadows on high blank walls. There, in the keen air, chilled by the evaporation of the snow, they walked on and on for a long time, burying themselves in the vague, infinite, unfamiliar depths ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... pulsating with life and light under the morning sun, as we bade our hosts " Dios!" and resumed our course up the mountain. There was no longer any path, and we had to pick our way as we were able, among blocks of blistered rocks, over fallen trunks of trees, and among gnarled oaks, which soon began to replace the more luxuriant vegetation of the lower slopes. H., dragged from his mule by a scraggy limb, was shocked to find that the first inquiry of his companions was not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... kicking had made him such a stoic, that no amount of blows could quicken his pace, and no chirruping could change the dejected drooping of his head. All his natural language said, as plainly as a horse could say it, that he was a most unhappy beast. Even the trees on Reuben's premises had a gnarled and knotted appearance. The bark wept little sickly tears of gum, and the branches grew awry, as if they felt the continual discord, and made sorry faces at each other behind their owner's back. His fields were red with sorrel, or run over with mullein. Every ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... little more than the gables and the outline of two broken walls remain, overshadowed by the ash trees that have planted themselves among the stones, the existing trees growing out of the remains of roots, all gnarled and weather-worn, of immensely greater age. In every crevice thorn, rowan, ivy, and fern have fastened themselves, softening and concealing the sanctuary's decay." ("St. Modan," by R. H. ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett

... garden, these were the only trees to be found for miles round on the windy slopes facing the open sea. In spite of storms and sand-drifts, they had, in the course of time, reached something like the height of a man, and, turning their bare and gnarled stems to the north wind, like a bent back, they stretched forth their long, yearning arms towards the south. Rebecca's mother had planted some violets ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland

... for a bit of the sunshine. Among these the black oaks deserve special mention, for in places they form dense groves upon the ridges. The cedars, with their rich brown bark and flat, drooping branches, are easily recognized. As these trees grow old they become gnarled ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks

... shadow brooded between the cliffs of Glorm, but the crags were shining above us like gnarled moons, and almost lit the gloom. Louder and louder came the Irillion's song, and the sound of her dancing down from the fields of snow. And soon we saw her white and full of mists, and wreathed with rainbows delicate and small that ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany

... back into the line, undermanned, ill-equipped, and branded with disgrace. It was the culmination of three years' service at the front, and his nerves were at the breaking-point. Mounds of earth ahead of him, and gnarled, dismembered trees, began to take the ghostly shapes that the ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... which they might find a foothold. They had good hope of success, for they had seen many such since starting from the shore. Had rest been necessary, they might have obtained it more than once by grasping a branch above, or clinging to one of the great trunks, whose gnarled and knotted sides would have ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid

... warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in the open chambers of the structure. Then, as for the town wall, on the outside an orchard extends peacefully along its base, full, not of apple-trees, but of those old humorists with gnarled trunks and twisted boughs, the olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, or burrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the gray, martial towers, crowned with ruined turrets, have been converted into rustic habitations, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... were heavily laden with fruit. It is picked twice in the year, though some is obtained throughout the whole year. A beautiful carpet of green grass is spread out beneath the trees, while high above them tower the lofty kanary-trees, which stretch out their gnarled arms as if to defend their more tender sisters committed to their charge. At a distance, indeed, the nutmeg-trees are completely hidden from view by the kanary-trees. The roots of these latter are very ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... at his gnarled hands. Any finger would have made three of mine. His wrist would have ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... to say, I'm sure, I shouldn't like to say, Why all the birds should chirp of you, Who live so far away. Robin and oriole sing to me From the leafy depths of our apple-tree, With trunk so gnarled and gray— But why your name should their burden be I shouldn't ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.

... with great effect. Phelps, of Vermont, was a somewhat eccentric yet forcible debater. Silas Wright, Levi Woodbury, and Robert J. Walker were laboring for the restoration of the Democrats to power. Benton stood sturdily, like a gnarled oak-tree, defying all who offered to oppose him. Allen, whose loud voice had gained for him the appellation of "the Ohio gong," spoke with his usual vehemence. Franklin Pierce was demonstrating his devotion to the slave-power, while Rufus Choate ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... clothed on its sides with a dense thicket scrub, the haunt of hundreds of black wallabies and wonga pigeons, and also a large variety, of brown and black snakes, with an occasional death adder. The summit, however, was beautifully grassed, and clear of timber, except for a clump or two of gnarled and knotted honeysuckle trees; and here, after our day's fishing, we would camp, and, lying beside our fire, look out upon the starlit Pacific two hundred feet below. Although only five miles from the little town, ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke

... lonely heath, where all was gray and silent as the grave. Here and there a ruined wall was still standing, or some strangely-gnarled trunk of a tree; now and then night-birds whirred through the air, and my own shadow glided long and black in the solitude beside me. They say that a primeval city lies buried here, and that Frau Venus makes it her abode, and that sometimes the old pagans rise up from ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... it all but now. The grin That gnarled old Gardener Sandy's features; My father, scholar-like and thin, Unroused, the tenderest of creatures; I saw—ah me !—I saw again My dear and deprecating mother; And then, remembering the cane, Regretted—that I'd left ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... running among trees—great old trees with dying bracken undergrowth. The palish, gnarled trunks showed ghostly, and like old priests in the hovering distance, the fern rose magical and mysterious. It was a night all darkness, with low cloud. The motor-car ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... town. The thrifty merchants of this Scottish trading center built well, and their dwellings abound in architectural interest, but really great houses are rare. On the 700 block of Prince Street, behind a picket fence, guarded by a tall magnolia and several gnarled box trees stands what is called in England a "Georgian cottage," which in Alexandria is ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore

... great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder.— Merciful Heaven! Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man! Dress'd in a little brief authority,— Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence,—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... of swamp appeared to be level, with the exception of a few very trifling elevations here and there, and seemed to consist of boggy soil covered with a rank growth of coarse grass, reeds, and stunted bush, sparsely dotted here and there with a few gnarled and unwholesome-looking trees, the whole intersected by a labyrinth of canals filled with stagnant water, which wound hither and thither in a most purposeless and bewildering fashion. That insect life abounded there was manifest at the most cursory glance, for ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... whose gnarled branches these stories were written, to you I dedicate the book. My head was so close to you, who can tell from whence the thoughts came? I only know that when all the other trees in the orchard were barren, there were always stories to be found under ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... was in the villa. Two days before, Frau von Buelow, the last of the Humboldts, had been carried forth, to rest beside her husband and children, her father William, and her uncle Alexander von Humboldt. The gnarled and twisted stem of a venerable ivy clasps with two arms one of the most majestic of the tall trees before the house, one branch bearing large leaves of a tender green, the other small and beautifully outlined leaves of ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton

... I think in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," of a certain "grievous crab-tree cudgel," and the impression left by this description is that the weapon, gnarled and knotty, was capable ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn

... the strange shabby-genteel, happy-go-lucky life with the Micawbers; the flight from intolerable ills in the forlorn hope that David's aunt will take pity on him. Here the scene changes again. Miss Betsy Trotwood, a fine old gnarled piece of womanhood, places the boy at school at Canterbury, where he makes acquaintance with Agnes, the woman whom he marries far, far on in the story; and with her father, Mr. Wickham, a somewhat port wine-loving lawyer; ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... school, and an antidiluvian wit, If the perjured they strike, and not all men alike, have they never Cleonymus hit? Then of Simon again, and Theorus explain: known perjurers, yet they escape. But he smites his own shrine with these arrows divine, and "Sunium, Attica's cape," And the ancient gnarled oaks: now what prompted those strokes? They never ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... Then a gnarled hand was stretched out and eagerly seized upon the beautiful little Marlin, which was quickly withdrawn ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne

... minutes he rode as he had never ridden before. And then he came upon them. They stood at the base of a fir-balsam, whose gnarled limbs spread flatly outward—three Circle Bar men, a half dozen from the various outfits whose herds grazed his range, and the rustler—Greasy—a rope knotted about his neck, standing directly under one of the out-spreading limbs of the tree, his head bowed, but his face wearing a ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer

... was overcast, and all that grassy space wherein the Tree stood lay in a soft rich shadow. Joan sat on a natural seat formed by gnarled great roots of the Tree. Her hands lay loosely, one reposing in the other, in her lap. Her head was bent a little toward the ground, and her air was that of one who is lost to thought, steeped in dreams, and not conscious of herself or of the world. And now I saw ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... and sombre Derbyshire moors. The path now creeps along the margin, and now rises above the bed of a clear and murmuring stream, and immediately opposite is another hill as lofty and wild, both covered with the finest trees—oaks, ash, and chestnut—which push out their gnarled roots in a thousand fantastic shapes, and grow out of vast masses of rock in the most luxuriant and picturesque manner. Yesterday I came here, a tolerable place with no pretension, but very well kept, not without handsome trees, and surrounded ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... little of the organ of locality that I suspect he could have lost his way in his own garden. But the Captain was exquisitely alive to external impressions,—not a feature in the landscape escaped him. At every fantastic gnarled pollard he halted to gaze; his eye followed the lark soaring up from his feet; when a fresher air came from the hill-top his nostrils dilated, as if voluptuously to inhale its delight. My father, with ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... and staves. A little farther, and they turned off to the left in the direction of an olive orchard enclosed by a stone wall in view from the road. Ben-Hur knew there was nothing in the place but old gnarled trees, the grass, and a trough hewn out of a rock for the treading of oil after the fashion of the country. While, yet more wonder-struck, he was thinking what could bring such a company at such an hour to a quarter so lonesome, they were all brought ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... instinct he delayed his journey to look about him and investigate. Prowling from side to side, and sniffing and peering, he presently found something that he was not looking for. In a hollow beneath a granite boulder, behind the roots of two gnarled old cedars, he came upon two glossy black bear cubs, fast asleep. The mother was nowhere in sight, but the intruder shrank back with an abashed and guilty air and ran up the nearest tree. Thence he made his way from branch to branch, and did not return to the ground ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... steep, between the gnarled roots of a rugged oak one could see a narrow aperture, dark and mysterious, which was partially hidden by weeds ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... this open space, alone, looking seaward, with one arm out-stretched, one hand laid lightly, almost caressingly, upon the gnarled trunk of a solitary old olive-tree, the other arm hanging at her side. She was dressed in some dark, coarse stuff, with a short skirt, and a red handkerchief tied round her head, and seemed in the pale and almost ghastly light in which ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... way up surrounded by awkward environments. Fundamentally, the man is a thinking humorist; but his mode of expression is strange. The perpetual inversions, the habitual irony, the mingled tenderness and mockery, give a kind of gnarled surface to the style, which is pleasant when you get familiar with it, but which repels the stranger, and to some people even remains permanently disagreeable. I think it was his continual irony which at last brought him to writing as if under a mask; whereas it would have been better to write ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... imbibed from the rich scenery of nature so often contemplated by him in the landscapes of Claude, or in those of Rubens, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, or of Titian, "the greatest of all landscape painters." Perhaps Sir Uvedale preferred "unwedgeable and gnarled oaks," to "the tameness of the poor pinioned trees of a gentleman's plantation, drawn up straight," or the wooded banks of a river, to the "bare ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton

... stiff spots from their cheeks, then, seizing the axe, Willard crawled forth into the storm and dug at the base of the gnarled bushes. Occasionally a shrub assumed the proportions of a man's wrist—but rarely. Gathering an armful, he bore them inside, and twisting the tips into withes, he fed the fire. The frozen twigs sizzled and snapped, threatening to fail utterly, but with much blowing he sustained a blaze sufficient ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach

... in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was above the water-line, and these trees grew in the sunshine and stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the result of some strange convulsion ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks

... the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled tree. Then it became a thing suspended in air. It swung back and forth like a body hanging on the gallows. The face beseeched me to believe the story the lips were trying to tell. In my mind everything concerning the relationship of men and ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson

... above the crag which faced her, and was sliding down, unable to help himself, towards the point where nothing could prevent his falling headlong into the stream below. The bank, however, was not wholly bare. There were some thin gnarled oaks upon it, ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... portion of their journey was apparently just before them, consisting of a series of narrow ledges, so widely separated and irregular as to require each to assist the other while passing from point to point. Beyond these a slender cleft, bordered by gnarled roots of low bushes, promised a somewhat easier and securer passage toward the summit. Hampton's face became deathly white as they began the perilous climb, but his hand remained steady, his foot sure, while the girl moved forward as if remaining unconscious of the presence ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... of its own sweet peaceableness. I passed out of the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once the scene opens, wide pasture-lands on either side, and rows of old willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and vicarage and irregular street, and the little red-gabled Hall ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... of the proscenium opening bore the words: "Deputy Turn." On the stage was a gnarled old man with ruddy cheeks and a muffler, a seedy top hat on his head, a coaching whip in his hand, the old horse bus-driver of London in his habit as he had lived. The old fellow stood there and just talked to the audience of a fine sporting class ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams

... is a rambling old garden at the back of the hall, a spot which the sun never leaves. Wild tangles of shadow fall now as then on the paths, from the gnarled branches of moss-eaten apple-trees. In the season of fruit, blushing peaches and plums, yellow and transparent as honey, hung from its ancient lichen-covered walls. Raspberry brambles, borne out of their ranks by the ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland

... wall of cliffs and crags drawing back upon the right, lifting their crests ever higher, topped by few scattering pines, firs and tamaracks. Here and there a giant cedar flourished in isolated majesty, lifting its delicately formed cones a hundred and fifty feet above its ancient, gnarled roots. The valley itself was for the most part clear of timber and scrub. The herds had not yet come up here this year, and would not come until the lower end had been thoroughly fed off. For here there would be grazing land in abundance until the winter ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... the fisherman was old, gnarled and sunburned so dark that he was almost black, despite the dilapidated and dirty pith helmet he was wearing. His lumpish face was deeply seamed and wrinkled. His sunken mouth told of missing teeth, and his long, unkempt hair was bleached to ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl

... stood just at the bottom of a little grassy slope of four or five yards deep, and close to the side of a small clear stream of water, which ran gurgling and rippling along, moistening the great roots of this tree; it was here, under its spreading boughs and gnarled trunk, Abe found a place for prayer. Down on his knees he cast himself, and his first utterance consecrated that spot as a closet, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" He only needed to utter the first cry, others followed in rapid and earnest ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell

... consideration there was an active and rising market and a great volume of transactions on the Stock Exchange. Apparently the day of our peace and prosperity had dawned at last. But we were not yet out of a gnarled Fate's clutches. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... thinking this would be the chief disciple or pupil of Morgan Todd, dismounted, and followed the man that had spoken, who was old and thin and gnarled, with beady black eyes. When he had examined Sir Lancelot's wound, the old man ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert

... needed a tree signifying All Creation, All Time, All Nature, and they chose the Ash. Its picturesque beauty, its lightness and easy flowing lines, combined with great strength, and at times with enormous size; its elegant depending foliage and lithe vigor in its prime, and its gnarled, ancient expression when old, well fitted it to set forth the extremes of existence. The firm hold of these trees in the earth, 'their obstinate and deep rooting—tantus amor terrae,' as Evelyn expresses it, gives us ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... dusk took on a magic more enticing, it seemed, because it grew out of such forbidding desolation. The buttes, protruding like buttresses from the ranges that bordered the river, threw lengthening shadows across the grassy draws. Each gnarled cedar in the ravines took on color and personality. The blue of the ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... fresh hides spoke for themselves. So they took us to a Russian port, and after that to a lone country, where they set us to work in the mines to dig salt. And some died, and—and some did not die.' Naass swept the blanket from his shoulders, disclosing the gnarled and twisted flesh, marked with the unmistakable striations of the knout. Prince hastily covered him, for it was not nice to ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London

... him more comfortable by placing a pillow beneath his head; and then, thinking possibly that this to herself was a "case of emergency," she withdrew to a little distance, and sitting down upon the gnarled roots of an upturned tree drank a swallow of the old Cognac, while the young man, maimed and disabled, looked ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... and petticoats, with the venerable sun-bonnets of Holland origin. The lower part of the valley was cut up into small farms, each consisting of a little meadow and corn-field; an orchard of sprawling, gnarled apple-trees, and a garden, where the rose, the marigold, and the hollyhock were permitted to skirt the domains of the capacious cabbage, the aspiring pea, and the portly pumpkin. Each had its prolific little mansion teeming with children; with an old hat nailed against the wall for the ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... heard, tiny bell tones like a fairy xylophone, began again as the door opened, and we passed into a workroom which made me remember nursery tales from a half-forgotten childhood on Terra. For the workers were tiny, gnarled trolls! ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... his gnarled grip! Leagues, leagues of seamanship Slumber in these forsaken Bones, this sinew, and ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... you might to a thing like me, And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair, Your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree,— You might turn myself!—should I know or care, When I should be dead ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... thunder As Ioue himselfe do's, Ioue would neuer be quiet, For euery pelting petty Officer Would vse his heauen for thunder; Nothing but thunder: Mercifull heauen, Thou rather with thy sharpe and sulpherous bolt Splits the vn-wedgable and gnarled Oke, Then the soft Mertill: But man, proud man, Drest in a little briefe authoritie, Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, (His glassie Essence) like an angry Ape Plaies such phantastique tricks before high heauen, As makes the Angels weepe: who with our spleenes, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... back to the gnarled trunk, while she looked out over the half-mile of dancing blue wavelets to where, on the other side, the brown, wooden houses of the Thorley estate swept down to the shore. She rose on seeing the visitor approach, showing a startled disposition to run away. This she might have done had not ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... down the garden-path, and across the brook. "Here" proved to be the great golden-russet tree. High up on a gnarled old branch, there was a little flutter of a crimson and white gingham dress, and a merry face peeping down through the dainty pink blossoms that blushed all over the tree. It looked so pretty, framed in by the ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... them up a rocky defile, with gnarled little trees growing between the crags. Ahead, the hillside rose up in a broken, rocky cliff. There was a door, like a small tunnel entrance. A woman in a long white ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings

... petrifaction of age; our second, of a Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide, clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand across his forehead, were angular and slow. We knew instinctively the quality of his work—a deliberate pause, a mighty blow, another pause, a painful recovery—labour compounded of infinite slow patience, but wonderfully effective ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... at anything, however simple, the deeper it penetrates into our being until it becomes a part of us. In time we learn to know the tree that shades our porch, but years elapse before we are on friendly terms, and a lifetime is spent before the gnarled giant admits us to intimate companionship. Trees are filled with reserve; when denuded of their neighbors, they stand in melancholy solitude until the leaves fall for the last time, until their branches wither, and their ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... raveling, entanglement; coil &c (convolution) 248; sleave^, tangled skein, knot, Gordian knot, wheels within wheels; kink, gnarl, knarl^; webwork^. [complexity if a task or action] difficulty &c 704. V. complexify^, complicate. Adj. gnarled, knarled^. complex, complexed; intricate, complicated, perplexed, involved, raveled, entangled, knotted, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... odd scene, and many must come and go before I forget it. Dark as the wood might be by day, the moonlight seemed to fill every glade of it, showing us the gnarled trunks and the flowering bushes, the silent pools and the grassy dells. And in the midst of this sylvan rest, remote from men, a lonely thicket of the great Pacific Ocean, was this figure of civilization, ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton

... on up the ascent, at length coming into open light upon a small plateau marked by huge, rugged, weather-chipped stones. On the eastern side was a rocky promontory, and close to the edge of this cliff, an hundred feet in sheer descent, rose a gnarled, time and tempest-twisted chestnut tree. Here the borderman laid down his rifle and knapsack, and, half-reclining against the tree, settled himself to rest ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey

... large bare enclosure, bounded on two sides by the convent buildings and on the other two by a yellow wall and an avenue made by a line of stone pines with heads like open umbrellas, but it had no other foliage except an old tree which reminded me of Tommy the Mate, having gnarled and sprawling limbs, and standing like a weather-beaten old sailor, ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... which Claude had chosen for the pic-nic was on one of the lower spurs of that great mountain of The Maiden's Peak, which bounds the vale of Gwynnant to the south. Above, a wilderness of gnarled volcanic dykes, and purple heather ledges; below, broken into glens, in which still linger pale green ashwoods, relics of that great primaeval forest in which, in Bess's days, great Leicester used to rouse the hart with ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley



Words linked to "Gnarled" :   crooked, knobbed, gnarly



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