"Scrubby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a ghost," he said, "unless it was one night when we boys was out with our dogs 'possum hunting. The dogs treed a possum in a little scrubby tree. I was always a good climber; so I went up the tree to shake the 'possum out. I shook and shook but the 'possum would not fall out of the tree. I shook so hard that my hat fell off and I told the niggers not to let the dogs ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... Hill, where the naval 4.7-inch quick-firing gun is being mounted, we have by the aid of the signalman's powerful telescope watched a significant Boer movement going on for hours. We can see them among the scrubby trees between Lombard's Kop and Umbulwaana (or Bulwaan as it is more generally called), and hurrying off behind that hill along the road that leads southwards. That road cuts the railway not more than six or seven miles out, and their movement threatens our line of communications ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... is scrubby, littery; ill-tilled, scratched rather than ploughed; physiognomic of Czech Populations, who are seldom trim at elbows: any beauty it has is on the farther side of the Dobrowa, which does not concern Prince Leopold, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Scrubby coat and trousers, dirty shirt, scarf, and cap, socks more like anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy "pelerine" ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... not unlike a kiosk, was opened by a man-servant who might easily have been mistaken for a waiter from Delmonico's or Sherry's. He did not have the air or aplomb of a butler, nor the smartness of a footman. On the contrary, he was a thick-set, rather scrubby sort of person with all the symptoms of cafe servitude about him, including the never-failing doubt as to nationality. He might have been a Greek, a Pole, an ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... Presently we could see the leading squadron file to the right—clear the low hedge—and then disappear over the crest of the hill. Twenty or thirty pioneers, who had been carried forward behind as many of the cavalry, were now seen busily employed in filling up the ditch, and cutting down the short scrubby hedge; and presently, the artillery coming up also, filed off sharply to the right, and formed on the very summit of the hill, distinctly visible between us and the grey cold streaks of morning. By the time we had noticed, this, the clatter in our immediate neighbourhood ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... a brisk canter, and were soon out of sight of the post and settlements. Our course lay to the east of north, over an elevated, arid plain, covered with a thick growth of prickly-pear, and scrubby mesquite. ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... John Rex had fallen was shaped like a huge funnel set up on its narrow end. The sides of this funnel were rugged rock, and in the banks of earth lodged here and there upon projections, a scrubby vegetation grew. The scanty growth paused abruptly half-way down the gulf, and the rock below was perpetually damp from the upthrown spray. Accident—had the convict been a Meekin, we might term it Providence—had ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... might be possible. At first sight it did not appear that there was the least bit of cover of any description available, for the spit or peninsula on which we were encamped was just bare sand for a distance of fully a mile from the spot whereon our camp was pitched, and then there began a growth of scrubby bush which gradually became more dense as one proceeded in a southerly direction; but I solved the difficulty by causing each man to scoop a little pit for himself in the loose sand, in which it was easy for him to crouch perfectly concealed particularly as there was no moon, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... way, along a road lined with brush and scrubby cedars, the trees which in years gone by had ...
— The Rover Boys on the Ocean • Arthur M. Winfield
... Bang said, that she must rather have gone to be delivered from confinement; and, in truth, Crooked Island was a most desolate domicile for a lady; our friend the postmaster's family, and a few negroes employed in catching turtle, and making salt, and dressing some scrubby cotton—trees, composing the whole population. In the evening the packet did arrive, however, and ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... croft.' On this unpromising ground, grow those grapes which produce the finest wine in the world. As for the vines themselves, they have about as much of the picturesque as our drills of potatoes at home. 'Fancy open and unfenced expanses of stunted-looking, scrubby bushes, seldom rising two feet above the surface, planted in rows upon the summit of deep furrow-ridges, and fastened with great care to low, fence-like lines of espaliers, which run in unbroken ranks from one end of the huge fields ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... high, and as many yards across, completely encircled the Island, which was not a quarter of a mile in diameter. Inside this regular ridge was a small sandy plain. The encircling ridge was occupied by a belt of small trees, while on the plain grew only a short scrubby vegetation, a foot or two in height. Some vegetable soil was found, a few inches in thickness, the result of the decomposition of vegetable matter and birds' dung. On the weather side of the island was a coral reef of two miles in diameter, enclosing a shallow lagoon. In this lagoon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... down on a rock and looked around. There seemed to be nothing in sight but rocks and scrubby bushes, and already twilight ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... into the country, and before long whole train-loads of cement and sand and corrugated iron walls and roofing came rattling and banging past the Higgins's back-door. Day and night this continued; and a little way beyond they knew that a two-mile square of scrubby waste was being laid out with roads and tracks and little squat buildings, set far apart from each other. In a few months the frightened family would lie awake at night and listen to trains rattling past, coming out from the explosives plant, piled to the tops with loads ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... some fifty yards from that inanimate ragged little body, lying prone, face downwards, among the scrubby bushes that sprouted in the hot sand. Little crowding tiny ants already blackened the bloodstains on the ground, and the wild dogs would not have stayed long from the feast if the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Rennell and Cartwright Sounds, and the inlets to the southward. We examined with considerable care those localities where yellow cedar had been reported, crossing on foot from Athlow to Skaloo Inlet, finding small bodies of scrubby growth on the shores of each, also on Tattoo Inlet, but much the largest quantity on Cypress ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... of men. The men did not like these reversals of their sex, and the greater part of them were in the worst possible humor on these occasions, because they felt themselves to be hideous in such disguises. The women looked like scrubby little boys, while the more aged among them had thick short legs which were any thing but ornamental. The only woman who looked really well, and completely a man, was the empress herself. As she was very tall and somewhat powerful, male ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... our first wounded German prisoners. We saw boys fifteen years old, whose voices had not changed. We saw men past fifty. We saw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academic type, wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick. We saw scrubby looking men who seemed to "be the dirt and the dross, the dust and the scum ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... was to pass them. After passing the village of Kara Koei, we left the valley of the Rhyndacus, and commenced ascending one of the long, projecting spurs thrust out from the main chain of Olympus. At first we rode through thickets of scrubby cedar, but soon came to magnificent pine forests, that grew taller and sturdier the higher we clomb. A superb mountain landscape opened behind us. The valleys sank deeper and deeper, and at last disappeared behind the great ridges that heaved themselves out of the wilderness of smaller ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... of forty acres—broken, scrubby, uncertain side-hill acres, at that. In brief, a worked-out farm among the mountain slopes of the North Jersey hinterland; six miles ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... corner of the square—our house was a few doors up—and she appeared, on the opposite side of the road, by the square railings. But Gwenny was not alone. Gwenny, rigged out in the height of Bloomsbury florists' fashion, was ostentatiously accompanied by a young man, a very scrubby, pallid, ignoble young man; his arm was round her waist, and her arm was around his, in the approved enlinkment of couples in her class who are keeping company, or, in other words, are, or are about to be, engaged to be married. A curious ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... doctor—"Scrubby," by name; so called because of the inability of his chin to make up its mind if it would have a beard or not—was very amusing, without of course meaning to be. He liked to write the reports of the patients in the Sister's book himself, and was very proud of his English, ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... which my regiment took a conspicuous part. The close of our own share in this contest is, as it were, burnt into my memory with every least detail. It was about six P. M., when we found ourselves in line, under cover of a long, thin row of scrubby trees, beyond which lay a gentle slope, from which, again, rose a hill rather more abrupt, and crowned with an earthwork. We received orders to cross this space, and take the fort in front, while a brigade on our right was to make a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... the great mountain. This opening is known as Cache Creek. Passing the willow patch at its mouth, where previous camps had been made, we pushed up the creek some three miles more to its forks, and there established our base camp, on 10th April, at about four thousand feet elevation. A few scrubby willows struggled to grow in the creek bed, but the hills that rose from one thousand five hundred to two thousand feet around us were bare of any vegetation save moss and were yet in the main covered with snow. ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... little man of forty, with coarse black hair and scrubby moustache, not of the type that readily appreciates the delicacies of a situation. Paul conceived ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... remember? It would come back, beginning, most probably, at the very moment in which it had been interrupted. For one instant he would fancy that he saw again what he had seen then. What had he seen? That was the question. Had he seen anything but the sand, the scrubby bushes, and the trees round the cottage in the distance? Had he heard anything but the howling of the southwest gale and the thundering of the big surf over the bar and up the beach? The injury was at the back ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... sea, and its sequestered situation. Longwood, however, has better roads, more space for riding or driving, and in summer must have been much cooler than the less sheltered parts of the isle. As we turned through the lodges the old house appeared at the end of an avenue of scrubby and weather-worn trees. It bears the exterior of a respectable farm-house, but is now fast running to decay. On entering a dirty courtyard, and quitting our horses, we were shown by some idlers into a square building, which once contained the bed-room, sitting-room, and bath of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... Hall, six miles from Spalding, in Lincolnshire; at Downington-in-Holland, in the same county; at Brockley Woods, near Bristol;[11] at Brownsea Island, near Poole, in Dorsetshire; and, in Scotland, Colonel Montagu mentions one in a small island, in a lake, where, there being only a single scrubby oak, much too scanty to contain all the nests, many were placed on the ground.[12] Besides these, we are acquainted with a small one in the parish of Craigie, near Kilmarnock, in Ayrshire.[13] We have little doubt but there are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... life,—their color and the queer earthy smell of those which particularly concerned me: because I was picked up from a fall and tenderly handled by a rough working-man so clothed, whom I regarded for a long time afterward as an adorable object. He and I lived to my recognition of him as a wizened, scrubby, middle-aged man, but remained good friends after the romance was over. I don't know when the change in my sense of beauty took ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... quite so scrubby as he sounds. He's very proper and clean-shaven, with a good pair of dark, Dutch eyes, which he gets from his mother; and I wish he had got her business ability with them, and her horse sense, if the lady will excuse me. She runs the property and he spends it, as far as she'll ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... they had an addition to their small family. A little, wiry-haired, scrubby, melancholy Irish terrier followed O'Connell for miles. He tried to drive him away. The dog would turn and run for a few seconds and the moment O'Connell would take his eyes off him he would run along and catch him up and wag his over-long tail and look ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... I noticed where the Mercutian Light had burned off the scrubby desert vegetation. As we got closer I could see it now in the sunlight, standing vertically up in the air, motionless. There were signs all about now where the light had burned. We were passing along a little gully—the country here was somewhat rough and broken up—when ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... it from my windows at Quebec, I could see the blue, serrated ridge of highlands beyond which the surveyor has never yet run his lines,—beyond which the surveyor's lines would be superfluous, indeed, and futile; for the soil is of the barren, rocky kind, and the timber of the scrubby. Not quite so savage is this frontier, indeed, as the wild precincts described by the Nebraska editor, whose meditations for a leader used to be cut short, occasionally, by the bellowing of the shaggy bison at his window, or the incursion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... alarmed. Rockets fired to scare them away. They again advance in the morning. Men advance towards them holding up their firearms. They retire, and we continue our journey. Again followed by the natives. Danger of the party. Long march through a scrubby country. Dismal prospect. Night without water or grass. Heavy rain. Again make the Murray. Strange natives visit ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... was sitting outside the hotel, taking his coffee at one of the little round iron tables, by the inevitable trio of scrubby orange trees in green tubs, when Caffyn, whom he had not seen since leaving the table, came up and sat down ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... of four days' hard marching through scrubby grounds the troops began to climb the almost trackless hinterland, where water was scarce and vegetation scanty. It was much of the same nature as the veldt in the dry season, kopjes being plentifully in evidence. There were unpleasant traces of Fritz ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... woman of the name of Mrs. B., it seems, wants a teacher. I wish she would have me; and I have written to Miss W. to tell her so. Verily, it is a delightful thing to live here at home, at full liberty to do just what one pleases. But I recollect some scrubby old fable about grasshoppers and ants, by a scrubby old knave yclept AEsop; the grasshoppers sang all the summer, and ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic^; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen^, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c (narrow) 203; granular &c (powdery) 330; shrunk &c 195; brevipennate^. Adv. in a small compass, in a nutshell; on a small scale; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... having gone out again from neglect, he strapped and locked the trunk, glanced at his watch and took up his hat. He passed out through the immaculate kitchen, odorous of soapsuds and sunlight, and down through the orchard, which Zenas Third with his saw and shears had converted from a neglected and scrubby riot into a spruce and orderly parade. Unconsciously his feet led him over the same course he had taken on that first walk of his, which ended in an unintentional and disconcerting visit to The Cedars. As before, he followed the brook, ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... East." Later we were shocked by rumours of a canoe trip through Canadian waterways. Hereupon the usually benevolent Dennis protested as he glanced approvingly at the well-kept Tuscan landscape. "Crocker needn't rub it in," he opined. "Why, it's the same scrubby spruce tree from the Plains of Abraham to James's Bay-and Emma, who hated being bored! Why, it's marriage by capture; it's barbaric." "It's worse; it's rheumatic," shuddered Harwood as he declined Marsala and took whisky. ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... existence, have been a great lake full of islands; now it is a grassy swamp, the water clear as spring water, studded with groups of high rocks of varied size and shape, overgrown by tall pines, birch, scrubby underbrush, ferns, and moss. We had been getting on with such comparative ease that we began to think our fears of the "corduroy road" had been groundless; but before night we experienced the wisdom of the warning not to "halloo before we were out of the bush." We took our lunch on some flat rocks, ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... by the view which met their eyes as they rounded the turn at the top of the canyon. Turning, the narrow trail wound its way around the mountainside until one looked down upon the tops of foothills, green with scrubby vegetation. Then it stretched in an irregular line down the mountainside, to disappear in their midst. Beyond ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... himself, Wilton Brown turned away his eyes, and rode on, gazing quietly over the wide extent of bleak common, which, to say sooth, offered a picturesque scene enough, with its scrubby trees, and its large masses of tall gorse, lying in the calm evening air; while deep blue shadows, and clear lights resting here and there in the hollows and upon the swells, marked them ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... phenomenon—being, beyond all comparison, the most faithful, attached, and affectionate animal that I have ever known; and that is saying much. He seems to think it necessary to atone for his ugliness by extra good conduct, and does so dance on his lame leg, and so wag his scrubby tail, that it does any one who has a taste for happiness good to look at him—so that he may now be said to stand on his own footing. We are all rather ashamed of him when strangers come in the way, and think it necessary to explain that he is May's pet; but amongst ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... comparatively little level ground, and scarcely any susceptible of cultivation. I have often been struck with the great general similarity between the barren and sandy tracts of this district, and many parts of New South Wales, where sandstone is the prevailing rock. In both countries there are the same low scrubby bushes, at the Cape consisting of Heaths and Proteae, and in Australia of Epacridae and Banksiae—the last the honeysuckles of the Colonists. Even the beautiful sunbirds of the Cape, frequenting especially the flowers of the Proteae, are ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... a little to the left, so as to get nearer to the snow, and where it seems easy walking we'll take to it; but for the most part I shall keep to the division-line between the snow and the scrubby growth. It will be rough travelling; but we shall not have to cut our way through briars. I'll lead ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... Plaza, since called Portsmouth Square. At that time it was a wind-swept, grass-grown, scrubby enough plot of ground. On all sides were permanent buildings. The most important of these were a low picturesque house of the sun-dried bricks known as adobes, in which, as it proved, the customs were levied; ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... with thickly-gloved hands, he grasped the wooden ledge on which he sat. In front O'Shea was like an image carved of the same wood as the cart, so firmly he held to it. Well, such hours pass. After a while they came out upon the soft, dry sand beyond the scrubby flat, and the horse, with impeded footsteps, ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... enough to do; and then, anyway, she knew it was lots more fun to work when two did the job than for one person to work alone. She picked up all the papers, and emptied the waste baskets, and cleaned the bathroom washstand and the kitchen sink—she liked those jobs the best because they were so scrubby and grown-up and interesting—and put out clean towels and dusted the living-room. Of course this was after the dishes were washed and put away; that was a job with which Alice helped too, before she ...
— Mary Jane's City Home • Clara Ingram Judson
... the River Seine, a short distance from Paris. Was anything ever more simple? Slender willow-trees almost leafless, bare rocks with a few scrubby bushes, a tiny village sheltered in a curve of the river—what is there to suggest a picture? And yet something grips us. We seem to be at the beginnings of creation. Nature is confiding in us. We are hearing the winds play on the harp to the listening river. See how lovingly ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... and the torrid Kalahari plains, down to the 34th parallel at Cape point, a great diversity of climatic conditions is met with. To the north and north-east are the steaming, death-breeding low lands, abounding with dank virgin forests and scrubby stretches; and to the north-west extend the arid, sandy, and stony levels. There are the temperate and fruitful inland reaches along the southern and south-eastern littoral, and again further inward the vast plateaux at 2,000 to 6,500 feet elevation, which represent nearly one-half ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... disgust. Sconner, sicken. Scraichin, calling hoarsely. Screed, a rip, a rent. Screed, to repeat rapidly, to rattle. Scriechin, screeching. Scriegh, skriegh, v. skriegh. Scrievin, careering. Scrimpit, scanty. Scroggie, scroggy, scrubby. Sculdudd'ry, bawdry. See'd, saw. Seisins, freehold possessions. Sel, sel', sell, self. Sell'd, sell't, sold. Semple, simple. Sen', send. Set, to set off; to start. Set, sat. Sets, becomes. Shachl'd, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... looks like snow, and is so dry and light that it is lifted about by the wind. Some places it will drift several feet deep. The railroad company kept men employed all the time shoveling sand from the track. Nothing but some scattering, scrubby bushes grows in the deserts. Almost any time looking from the cars there seems to be smoke away off in the distance. This is nothing but the dry sand being blown ...
— A Soldier in the Philippines • Needom N. Freeman
... as he approached Tim, who was gazing intently at a patch of low scrubby trees a short distance off; "seen ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... There was not the slightest semblance of a trail, but the girl had traversed the place several times that day, so was quite sure of her way. Nevertheless, she glanced somewhat anxiously around as she hurried onward, especially so where the bushes and scrubby trees stood the thickest. ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... weeds, rather, and brambles galore. And they were planted there, not by his father or mother, but by those who have a lien upon the souls of these poor people. For the priest here is no peeled, polished affair, but shaggy, scrubby, terrible, forbidding. And with a word he can open yet, for such as Khalid's folk, the gate which Peter keeps or the other on the opposite side of the Universe. Khalid must beware, therefore, how he conducts himself at home and abroad, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of the Finke is the most boggy creek-channel I have ever met. As we had travelled several miles in the morning to the pillar, and camped eighteen beyond it, it was late in the afternoon when we encamped. The country we passed over was mostly scrubby sandhills, covered with porcupine grass. Where we struck the channel there was a long hole of brine. There was plenty of good grass on the river flat; and we got some tolerably good water where ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... his right in the middle of this plot,—and these doggoned gravel-walks running every which way give me the blind-staggers. Why, A. A., you got more gravel walks here than they've got in Central Park. And all these scrubby hedges, stone walls, fountains, flower-beds, cedar freaks,—my God, Perce, I'd hate to come home a little squiffed if I lived in that house of yours, 'specially at night. Look at old Pedro and Philippa over there, setting out that stuff that looks like sparrowgrass. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... West Philadelphia, starts you off with a ferry ride and a background of imperial campaniles and lilac-hazed cliffs and summits in the superb morning light. And the Reading route, also, takes you through a green Shakespearean land of beauty, oddly different from the flat scrubby plains traversed by the Pennsy. Consider, if you will, the hills of the idyllic Huntington Valley as you near Philadelphia; or the little white town of Hopewell, N.J., with its pointing church spire. We have often been struck by the fact that ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... himself upon a bench near the door, and waited torpidly. A few moments later came a voice, and then the soft patter of bare feet in the thick dust without. Carmen was talking as she approached. Jose rose in curiosity; but the girl was alone. In her hand she held a scrubby flower that had drawn a desperate nourishment from the barren soil at the roadside. She glanced ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... from Owens river valley. But he was not in the least such a Leading Man as Donna had pictured in her dreams. He was tall enough but his hair was not crisp and curly and golden. Most people would have called it red. Not, praise be, a carroty red, a dull negative, scrubby red, but a nicer red than that—dark auburn, in fact. And he had an Irish nose and an Irish jaw and Irish eyes of bonny brown. In but one particular did he resemble the dream man. He did have a cleft in his chin. But even that was none of nature's doing. A Mexican with a knife was solely ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... almost incredible. The great barrier of mountain-range, that cut it off from the rest of the world, seemed also to cut it off from light and air. The atmosphere hung lifeless, the occasional bellow of range-cattle sounded far-off and muffled. Vegetation was scant, the sage-brush grew close and scrubby, even the brilliant cactus flowers seemed to have abandoned the valley to its fate. A lone group of dead cotton-woods grew like sentinels close to the rocky walls. Their twisted branches, gaunt and ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Russell's multitudinous husbands settled the "vexatious question" forever and for aye. But perhaps Tyler has been too busy raising politicians to keep pace with the psychological procession. Eve hypnotized Adam and made him cast away the empire of the earth for a scrubby apple, and ever since her fair daughters have been making men imitate their ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... set my heart on being the 'little scrubby lawyer's clerk,'" said Busy Bee; "it is what I am just fit for; and let me see—Fred shall be Antonio, and that will make you plead from your very heart, and you shall ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his head-quarters—and Park's Mill was a marge of firm soil, along which a column could pass, in scrubby country, and between the bogs was a sort of bridge of dry land. By these two avenues the English might assail the Scottish lines. These approaches Bruce is said to have rendered difficult by pitfalls, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... green wave ran up, gleaming like curved glass in the sunlight, and broke in a million sparkles against a shelf of shingle. Above the shingle rose the soft cliffs, clothed with scrubby grass and crowned ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... troops and strong reserves, thanks to this intricate system of galleries on Sabotino's crest. The attack was watched by countless observers, who, on other mountains, were hanging breathless on the result of this hour's work. Innumerable patches of scrubby undergrowth had been set on fire by the Italians to prevent their serving Austrian snipers and were now wrapped in low-hanging clouds of black smoke. Between these black patches the Italians crept ahead ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... order to reach this, if it existed, they would be obliged to force a path through miles of reeds. Therefore they thought it safer to follow the river bank. Their progress was very slow, since continually they must make detours to avoid a quicksand or a creek, also the stones and scrubby growth delayed them so that fifteen or at most twenty miles was ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... with few or no objects worthy observation: it appears to be the uneven summit of a sandy submarine mountain, covered here and there with sorrel, grass, a few cedar bushes, and scrubby oaks; their swamps are much more valuable for the peat they contain, than for the trifling pasture of their surface; those declining grounds which lead to the seashores abound with beach grass, a light fodder when cut and cured, but very good when ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... Lucma the next day, forded the Vilcabamba River and soon had an uninterrupted view up the valley to a high, truncated hill, its top partly covered with a scrubby growth of trees and bushes, its sides steep and rocky. We were told that the name of the hill was "Rosaspata," a word of modern hybrid origin—pata being Quichua for "hill," while rosas is the Spanish word for "roses." Mogrovejo said his Indians told him that on the "Hill of Roses" ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... of lighting on something never known before. I was the Livingstone of this undiscovered land which looked as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything there, the dwarf date palms, the scrubby wild plums and the stunted jambolans, was in keeping with the miniature mountain ranges, the little rivulet and the ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... wide apart), and having a beautiful view over the bay. However, I soon made what arrangements were possible, and then set to work. The country around was pretty and novel to me, consisting of abrupt volcanic hills enclosing flat valleys or open plains. The hills were covered with a dense scrubby bush of bamboos and prickly trees and shrubs, the plains were adorned with hundreds of noble palm-trees, and in many places with a luxuriant shrubby vegetation. Birds were plentiful and very interesting, and I now saw for the first ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... thick-set, scrubby, wiry nag, tough as a pine knot, and self-willed as a pig. He was moreover exceedingly lazy, as well as prone to have his own way, and take his own jog—preferring a walk or gentle trot to a canter; and so deep-rooted ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... after evening prayer, He gathers all the parish there, Points out the place of either Yew: Here Baucis, there Philemon grew, Till once a parson of our town, To mend his barn, cut Baucis down; At which, 'tis hard to be believed How much the other tree was grieved, Grow scrubby, died a-top, was stunted: So the next parson ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... same extract, and similar requests from "The Universal Notice-Mongers," and "The British Cutting Company (Limited)." I decided in favour of the U.A.C.P., sent them two guineas, and waited. Three days afterwards there came a scrubby little roll of paper, with a halfpenny stamp on it. I saw the magic letters U.A.C.P. upon it, and tore it open. It contained a newspaper cutting, which nothing but my desire to be truthful would force me to publish. But here it is:—"The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... the Platte River, and, bearing northwesterly, entered the Black Hills, a region of low, rolling uplands, sparsely grown with scrubby pine trees; the soil black, very dry; where little animal life was visible, ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... across a rising plain, very wild and scrubby, as I imagine, by the frequent deviations of our beast, and then through a forest of cork oaks, which keep their leaves all the year through, and here, by reason of the great shade, we went, not knowing whither, as if blindfold, only we were conscious of being on rough, rising ground, by the jolting ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... double the Marines came over the scrubby ground, and, running beside the officer in command was a figure ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... was quite full grown when I first laid my eyes upon him. He was sitting in the sun, on top of a rail fence, blinking at me consideringly. The fence skirted a little trail that led from my back yard down to Calapooia Creek. It seemed trying to push back a fringe of scrubby underbrush which ran down a hillside; a fringe which was, in truth, but a feeler from the great forest of Douglas fir which one saw marching, file upon file, row upon row, back and back to the snows ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... a little terrace of clean grass. Above it and below stretched the rough hillside, covered with scrubby bushes and weeds. It was in this rough ground that the ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... brought him into a country of stunted pines and red sandstone, and so to the summit of a ridge which formed part of the rim of a saucer-shaped basin. He looked down into an open park hedged in on the far side by mountains. Scrubby pines straggled up the slopes from arroyos that cleft the hills. By divers unknown paths these led into the ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... pursued was one of 180 degrees and we soon fell in with the native path which we had quitted yesterday; but it now became wide, well beaten, and differing altogether by its permanent character from any I had seen in the southern portion of this continent. For the first five miles we traversed scrubby stony hills, thickly wooded with banksia trees; but the limestone here again cropped out and we entered a very fertile valley, running north and south and terminating in a larger one which drained the country from east to ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... 'held out,' were five or six closets nick-named offices, and three other boys. One was the nephew of the before-mentioned Wallis, and a very imp of mischief; another, only a boy, with nothing remarkable but his stupidity; while the fourth was a scrubby, stunted, fellow, about sixteen or seventeen years of age, with a long pale face, deeply pitted with the small-pox, and an irregular crop of light hair, ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... the slope, straight against the face of the crag. They reached the heap of rocks, and crept in among them by means of another narrow passage, close to the inner end of which the fire was; and this is what they saw through the twigs of a scrubby bush which effectually ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... this waste, and on the thirteenth it began to mend somewhat, and there was a little grass, and sweet waters, and they saw ahead the swelling hills of a great woodland, albeit they had to struggle through marshland and low scrubby thicket for a day longer, or ever they got to the aforesaid trees, which at first were naught but pines; but these failed in a while, and they rode a grass waste nearly treeless, but somewhat well ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... was stony and deserted. On either side the rocky cliffs, with their scrubby growth, were beginning to rise from the fields, and before them ranged the bluish rocky landscape of the heath or moorland. "As soon as we've been home, I shall travel; I must cross the sea and find out what they do really intend there," ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... fixed his wavering purpose. He would try to find old Giorgio if he could. God knows what might have happened to him! He made a few steps, then stopped again and shook his head. To the left and right, in front and behind him, the scrubby bush ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the residents look to the sea, with its narrow creeks, as their best highway from their farms to their best market. In those days—and those days were not very long since—the building of small ships was their chief trade, and they valued their land mostly for the small scrubby cedar-trees with which ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... been able yet, during the several hours of their journey, to take any pleasure in the scenery or in her mount. For in the first place there was nothing to see but scrubby little gnarled cedars and drab-looking rocks; and in the second this Indian pony she rode had discovered she was not an adept horsewoman and had proceeded to take advantage of the fact. It did not help Carley's predicament ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... desolating and depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked and sodden,—wild, shagged with scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable dejection, with their legs ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... clear away soon after they landed, and the brilliant light of the southern constellations revealed to them dimly the appearance of the coast. It was a low sandy beach skirting the sea and extending back for about a quarter of a mile in the form of a grassy plain, dotted here and there with scrubby underwood. Beyond this was a dark line of forest. The light was not sufficient to enable them to ascertain the appearance of the interior. Barney and Martin now cast about in their minds how they were to ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... don't mind admitting that I am as near to being beaten on this enterprise as I've ever been on anything in any life. But if I am beaten, it will not be by Mr. Ellins. It will be by a hard-headed old Scotch farmer who owns sixty acres of scrubby land which I must cross in order to complete my right of way. He won't sell a foot. I've been trying for six months to get in touch with him; but he's as stubborn as a cedar stump. And if I don't run a car over rails before next June my ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... a few straggling groups of cottonwoods. To the westward extended the boundless prairie, flat and bare as a floor, except where the southern fork of the little river cut its way through the soft loam, and gave rise to a scrubby growth of cottonwood and willow; while northward, across the main body of the river, the land appeared more rugged and broken, and somewhat heavily wooded with oak and other forest trees, but equally devoid ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... were clothed in small tracts of scrubby pine timber, and altogether it was not a pleasant country to travel over ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... ax you.—Why, sir, he ain't even one o' the shoe-brigade. He 'ain't got a red coat. Bless my soul! he 'ain't even got a box—nothin' but a scrubby pair o' brushes as I'm alive! He ain't no shoeblack. He's a thief as purtends to black ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... Wurtz, nor Doguereau, were the printers," said Lousteau, "for they employed correctors who revised the proofs, a luxury in which our publishers might very well indulge, and the writers of the present day, would benefit greatly. Some scrubby ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... extends as far as Tangalle, fifty miles. A few miles beyond this village the wild country begins, and Hambantotte is the next station, nearly ninety miles from Yalle. The country around Hambantotte is absolutely frightful-wide extending plains of white sand and low scrubby bushes scattered here and there; salt lakes of great extent, and miserable plains of scanty herbage, surrounded by dense thorny jungles. Notwithstanding this, at some seasons the whole district is alive with game. January and February are the best months for elephants and buffaloes, ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... friends rode side by side for miles through the jungle of fern and palm, and then began to enter a more open but scrubby country. The scouts could be seen half a mile ahead. Not a sign of natives had been discovered on the march. More than once Barre had expressed his anxiety at this. He knew it pointed to concentrated trouble ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... mind to protest against this material interpretation of his disreputable state; but the sight in the mirror of his ignominiously scrubby and battered appearance silenced him. The barber's explanation was as good as any, seeing that he himself could give no satisfactory account of the circumstances which had reduced him to his sorry pass. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... common very well. It was, for the most part, very uneven ground, covered with heather and dark-green bushes, with here and there a scrubby thorn tree. There were also open spaces of fine, short grass, with ant-hills and mole turns everywhere—the worst place I ever ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... being a strayer, he managed to tie him to a small, scrubby bush, after which he moved forward, with caution and stealth, in the direction whence came the whinny that had arrested his attention. His purpose was to prevent the other animal discovering his approach—an exceedingly ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... came near he made a sign to speak. Blantyre drew the rein a little. "To the common, to the common, sir; she has turned off there." I knew this common very well; it was for the most part very uneven ground, covered with heather and dark-green furze bushes, with here and there a scrubby old thorn-tree; there were also open spaces of fine short grass, with ant-hills and mole-turns everywhere; the worst place I ever knew for ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... finical, finikin[obs3]; fiddle-faddle, fingle- fangle[obs3], namby-pamby, wishy-washy, milk and water. poor, paltry, pitiful; contemptible &c. (contempt) 930; sorry, mean, meager, shabby, miserable, wretched, vile, scrubby, scrannel[obs3], weedy, niggardly, scurvy, putid[obs3], beggarly, worthless, twopennyhalfpenny, cheap, trashy, catchpenny, gimcrack, trumpery; one-horse [U. S.]. not worth the pains, not worth while, not worth mentioning, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... second-growth stands will never approach in value or quality the original forests. Over large areas, poplar, white birch, and Jack pine trees now predominate on lands which formerly bore dense stands of white pine. In many places, scrubby underbrush and stunted trees occupy lands which heretofore have been heavy producers of marketable ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... keeping that question to ask it for two or three days, since a good friend had told me of some lyrics by Miss Frances Wynne; and the little volume, charmingly entitled Whisper, was close under my arm as I turned from the road across the heath—a wild scramble of scrubby chance-children, wind-sown from the pines behind. And then presently, like a much greater person, 'I found me in a ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... not much to see at first; the banks are lined by scrubby bushes, and on them, in a sandy open patch, we see a man falling and bowing at his evening devotions; a few camels pass along the raised bank, looking like gigantic spiders against the illuminated sky, ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... was scrubbing the room, and looked at me with very scrubby looks; but la belle Fanny was not au logis; and as I heard that she was in Captain Strong's apartments, Bonner and I mounted au troisieme to see this famous beauty. Another disappointment—only the Chevalier Strong and a friend of his in the room: so we came away after ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... beard? O father—beard will never do! No proper knight a beard ever grew.' No knight could really romantic be Who wore a beard! So, father, to please me, No beard; they are, I think, such scrubby things— ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... largest size and with a team to match was hired to convey us and our belongings to the city, which has since become so celebrated as the abode of saints. Our first outspan was in the valley of the Zwartkops River, close to a big vlei, which was surrounded by dense, scrubby jungle. I had a small single-barreled rifle, so I loaded this and went off in search of big game. In anticipation of our translation to Africa I had done a good deal of rifle practice at Springfield, and had ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... he had time to answer, leaving him standing by the roadside, waiting for the promised coach. It was not long before the rumbling of a heavy vehicle was heard, and but a few minutes more when an antiquated stage with four scrubby horses emerged from the shadow of a giant oak into the open moonlight, scarce fifty yards away. Mr. Henley hailed the driver, who stopped, and looked at him as if frightened. The man was a Negro, and, when convinced that it was nothing more ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... Koyukuk. The cold had given place to wind, and though the gale did not approach the fierceness of last year's storm, it gave great trouble in following the track. These high headwater basins are always windy; the timber is scrubby spruce with many open places, and in such open places the trail is soon ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... liked him the best, and he would mind her properly and take to her ways ... for a moment he seemed to stand before her, with his head stooping among the rafters, his great shoulders shutting out the window, his curious, brown, childlike eyes fixed upon her face. Day was a scrubby little fellow, and Relf had warts all over his hands.... But she wasn't choosing Socknersh for his looks; she was choosing him because he would work for her the best, not being set up with "notions." Of course she liked him ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Now move, and now in order stand. The building, as the Poet writ, Rose in proportion to his wit— And first the prologue built a wall; So wide as to encompass all. The scene, a wood, produc'd no more Than a few scrubby trees before. The plot as yet lay deep; and so A cellar next was dug below; But this a work so hard was found, Two acts it cost him under ground. Two other acts, we may presume, Were spent in building each a room. Thus far advanc'd, he made a shift To raise a roof with act the fift. The epilogue ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... their lunch, and spend the day on the beach, or in the scrubby woods, not far away, taking to a boat if they felt ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... fantastic cap or turban;"—by No. 11, a bearded man, "wearing a conical Phrygian cap, his mouth wide open," and his expression "obstreperously animated;"—and by No. 12, "a middle-aged or old man, with a snub nose, high forehead, and thin, scrubby hair," we will go on to the fairer examples of Divine ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... little square stone cabin. It stood on a bold height overlooking the Saline River. Far away in every direction the land billows lay fold on fold. Treeless and wide they stretched out to the horizon, with here and there a low elevation, and here and there the faint black markings of scrubby bushes clinging to the bank of a stream. The stream itself, now only a shallow spread of water, bore witness to the fierce thirst of the summer sun. Up and down the Saline Valley only a few scattered homesteads ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... continued to arrive, until about 5,000 had settled between Parrtown (St. John) and St. Anne's. The peninsula now occupied by the city of St. John was then almost a wilderness, covered with shrubs, scrubby spruce, and marsh. Large numbers of emigrants also arrived at Annapolis, Port Roseway, and other points; and Governor Parr, in a letter to Lord North in September, 1783, estimates the whole number that had arrived ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... remember what we've just heard. He's been used to comfort and to having someone to look after him. How long do you think it'll be before he gets tired of a scrubby room in a scrubby hotel? Besides, he hasn't any ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... as upon the wooded points and islands of Lake Umbagog, attaining a height of 50-60 feet, with a diameter of 10-15 inches. Extremely variable in habit. In thin soils and upon bleak sites the trunk is for the most part crooked and twisted, the head scrubby, stunted, and variously distorted, resembling in shape and proportions the pitch pine under similar conditions. In deeper soils, and in situations protected from the winds, the stem is erect, slender, and tapering, surmounted by a stately head with long, flexible ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... days when they talk of Equality!—As for me, am I not as good as another woman, I that was one of the finest women in Paris, and was called La belle Ecaillere, and received declarations seven or eight times a day? And even now if I liked—Look here, sir, you know that little scrubby marine store-dealer downstairs? Very well, he would marry me any day, if I were a widow that is, with his eyes shut; he has had them looking wide open in my direction so often; he is always saying, 'Oh! what fine arms you have, Ma'am Cibot!—I dreamed last ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... glade that ran down to the tree-fringed bank of the stream. On either side of the glade was a fence, of the old stake-and-rider type, though little of it was to be seen, so thickly was it overgrown by wild blackberry bushes, scrubby oaks and young madrono trees. In the rear, a gate through a low paling fence led to a snug, squat bungalow, built in the California Spanish style and seeming to have been compounded directly from the landscape of which it was so justly a part. Neat and trim and modestly sweet ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... tree so much of the forest as the beech. On the verge of woods the oaks are far apart, the ashes thin; the verge is like a wilderness and scrubby, so that the forest does not seem to begin till you have penetrated some distance. Under the beeches the forest begins at once. They stand at the edge of the slope, huge round boles rising from the mossy ground, wide fans of ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Petulengro, coming after me; "the dook tells me that in less than three months he will be sold for twice seventy." "I will have nothing to do with him," said I; "besides, Jasper, I don't like his tail. Did you observe what a mean scrubby tail he has?" "What a fool you are, brother," said Mr. Petulengro; "that very tail of his shows his breeding. No good bred horse ever yet carried a fine tail—'tis your scrubby-tailed horses that are your out-and-outers. Did you ever hear of Syntax, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... But so scrubby the poor sedan, the batter'd Frame-work, nobody there nor here could ever Lift it, painfully ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... founded by them when they found Uttoxeter (the Uriconiam of the Romans), no longer tenable. On the conquest of the town by the Anglo-Saxons it received the name of Scrobbes- byrig; that is to say Scrub-burgh, or a town in a scrubby or bushy district, and, in the Saxon Chronicle, Scrobbesbyrig-scire is mentioned, now corrupted or polished into Shropshire. Ethelfleda, whose name we have so often had occasion to mention as the builder of castles and churches, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... country before the sun went down, but I was too thirsty to waste any light in viewing the prospect, and set out directly to find water. First, going down a well-beaten path for half a mile through the low scrubby wood, till I came to where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had carried travellers up, I lay down flat, and drank these dry, one after another, a pure, cold, spring-like water, but yet I could not fill my dipper, though I contrived little siphons of grass-stems, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... and that something had crawled under his bed and out of the door, that had roused the suspicions of the men in the house—and he slept at night on the coal in the cellar. He was actually tearful when he rubbed his hand over his scrubby chin, and said he hadn't had a shave for a week. He took somebody's razor, he said, but he couldn't get hold of a portable mirror, and every time he lathered up and stood in front of the glass in the dining room sideboard, some one came and he had had to run and hide. He told, ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... scrubby tree was at hand, and to that Humphrey made fast the horses and dog. "No fire to-night. Thy cloak must be thy protection from the damp," he said. "But the swamp is not so damp as the king's dungeon, nor so dismal. So let ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... ax you.—Why, sir, he ain't even one o' the shoe-brigade. He 'ain't got a red coat. Bless my soul! he 'ain't even got a box—nothin' but a scrubby pair o' brushes as I'm alive! He ain't no shoeblack. He's a thief as purtends to ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... on scrubby looking horses, which would have excited the derision of any respectable cowboy in the West, Rob and his two chums, accompanied by Anthony Wallenhout, the Belgian guide, passed out of the ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... manner which said plainly that they were not entertaining that night, at all events before the edge had been taken off their own appetites. So old Tufter got nothing more nutritious than a few scraps of scrubby fur. ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... herself with her parasol. So she stood up and looked about herself for shade;—for shade in some spot in which she could still look out upon "her dear wide ocean, with its glittering smile." For it was thus that she would talk about the mouth of the Clyde. Shelter near her there was none. The scrubby trees lay nearly half a mile to the right,—and up the hill, too. She had once clambered down to the actual shore, and might do so again. But she doubted that there would be shelter even there; ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... down below the distant mountain peaks when Jacky and her lover reached the scrubby bush of willows and reeds upon the evening before the day of the sale of Bill's ranch. As they drew up their panting horses, and dismounted, the evening twilight was deepening over the ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... wears a terribly forbidding aspect. There is nothing of the grandeur of snow, or glaciers, or deep forests, to excite curiosity or adventure; no trace of gardens or waterfalls. From base to summit all seems gray, barren, silent—dead, bleached bones of mountains, overgrown with scrubby bushes, like gray moss. But all mountains are full of hidden beauty, and the next day after my arrival at Pasadena I supplied myself with bread and eagerly set out to ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... man went to strike him, Virokannas moved against him, Went to slay the ox unhappy; But his head the ox was turning, And his black eyes he was blinking. To a pine-tree sprang the old man, 70 Virokannas in the bushes, In the scrubby willow-thicket. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... rocks among the reeds, with the breakers playing about them, while the distant sea stretches out to a horizon, with dark, stormy clouds brooding over the solitary waste. A remarkable union of the beauty of land and water is produced by a foreground of brilliant fancy flowers relieved by a scrubby tree in the background, with the faint responsive touch of yellow in the clouds over a calm sea, where gentle motion is only indicated by the little ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... ridges, some high; others were knolls; and a thick cedar growth made up for a falling off of pine. The spruce had long disappeared. Juniper thickets gave way more and more to the beautiful manzanita; and soon on the south slopes appeared cactus and a scrubby live oak. But for the well-broken trail, Jean would have fared ill ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... thought to myself, for it was the wildest bit of forest I had seen anywhere in this neighbourhood. At one side, not far off, rose a huge gray rock, partly covered on one side with moss, and round about were oaks and a few ash trees of a poor scrubby sort (else they would long ago have been cut out). The earth underneath was soft and springy with ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... clank of the hoofs behind. I stepped over the horse, and drew my sword. A short distance ahead was a clump of scrubby pines; there I would turn and make ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... spiteful! All along, 115 Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng; The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was, rolled by, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... forgotten that I met Ethan while he was on a vacation from his work here, and roughing it. When I married him, I had hardly seen him in anything except his Navy flannel shirt, scrubby trousers, ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... surface of the river Bystryanka, sprinkled here and there with snow, stand two peasants, scrubby little Seryozhka and the church beadle, Matvey. Seryozhka, a short-legged, ragged, mangy-looking fellow of thirty, stares angrily at the ice. Tufts of wool hang from his shaggy sheepskin like a mangy dog. In his hands he holds a compass made of two pointed sticks. Matvey, ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... dere, suah," put in the negro cook, with great dignity. "I'se feel mean as a pore white if yer was ebbah come to my galley an' fin' sich a scrubby lot tings! Dere was nuffin' fit fo' a decent culler'd pusson ter eat—dat feller Morris ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson |
