"Straggling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... receive us, with such comfort as it could give, and Henry Moulton himself to cook for us a supper of fresh fish and game. The thoughts of the whole party began to turn longingly in that direction as the afternoon of the late summer day waned, and in straggling, silent file we hurried our horses, with such speed as was possible, over the blind trail. The Artist, who was next in front of me, turned in ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... Greenbriar is a straggling little town, built around a large common meadow. Mifflin's general plan in towns, he had told me, was to halt Parnassus in front of the principal store or hotel, and when a little throng had gathered he would put up the flaps of the van, distribute his cards, and deliver a harangue on the value of ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... sunset, it is hard to fancy a more forlorn crew, while waiting at the depot to get the baggage off before coming to the house. We burst out laughing as we looked at each lengthened face. Such a procession through the straggling village has hardly been seen before. How we laughed at our forlorn plight as we trudged through the hilly streets,—they have no pavements here,—looking like emigrants from the Ould Counthry, as we have watched them in ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... and drawing forth a sort of wallet, proceeded to satisfy the cravings of hunger. He ate but little, and returning the bag or sack to its hiding-place in the broad girdle which was passed about his waist beneath the blanket, stretched himself on the ground, with not even a straggling bough between him and the deep blue vault ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... of Cooling Castle, beyond wide fields—turnips or cabbages—of the colour of dark-green jade, the Church of Cliffe, with its lichgate, standing out boldly from its ridge of chalk, overlooks a straggling village of old and weather-boarded houses. It would be into the road from Cliffe to Rochester, at a point about half a mile from Cooling, that Uncle Pumblechook's chaise-cart would debouch when he took Mrs. Joe to Rochester market "to assist him in buying such household stuffs ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... Christmas festivities; being the more induced to lead a jovial life from their recent victories, and from the supposition that Washington's army was completely disorganized. In all their cantonments, which were straggling and far apart, a careless confidence prevailed, and it happened unfortunately, likewise, that one of the most critical points was entrusted to a body of Hessians, and unprovided with any defence. But while they were slumbering in fancied security, Washington was marking them ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... spermatogenesis was found on post mortem examination attached to the intestine. In this bird there was no male development of comb or wattles, a full development of neck hackles, a certain development of saddle hackles, a few straggling badly curved feathers in the tail and short blunt spurs on the legs. Lode [Footnote: Wiener klin. Wochenschr., 1895.] (1895) found that testes could easily be transplanted into subcutaneous tissue and elsewhere, and that the male characters then developed ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... is the most easterly, and the most wretched of the Barbary states. It extends straggling along a great extent of coast, where may be seen the enormous Gulf of Sidra or Sert, called by the natives 'Djou al Kabit,' or Gulf of Sulphur, and the Gulf of Bombah. Tripoli received its name from once containing three cities of considerable ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... plantations, a winding, full-flowing stream, seem only to require a suitable edifice and the hand of an artist gardener to make, at comparatively trifling expense, an abode unequalled in luxuriant and romantic beauty. We crossed the stream—not by the narrow bridge, but by the ford; and, passing through the straggling stone village of Simon's Bath, arrived in sight of the field where the Tattersall of the West was to sell the wild and tame horse stock bred on the moors. It was a field of some ten acres and a half, forming a very steep slope, with the upper path comparatively flat, the ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... fishermen, where brown old women, whose caps are as white as if they were painted, seem chiefly in possession. In this direction there is a very pretty stretch of shore, out of the town, through the fortifications (which are Vauban's, by the way); through, also, a diminutive public garden or straggling shrubbery, which edges the water and carries its stunted verdure as far as a big Etablissernent des Bains. It was too late in the year to bathe, and the Etablissement had the bank- rupt aspect which belongs to ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... palaces and churches, for the rest, play the part of great divans of repose, tables of entertainment, expanses of decoration. And somehow the splendid common domicile, familiar, domestic, and resonant, also resembles a theater, with actors clicking over bridges and, in straggling processions, tripping along fondamentas. As you sit in your gondola the footways that in certain parts edge the canals assume to the eye the importance of a stage, meeting it at the same angle, and the Venetian figures, moving to and fro against the battered scenery of their little ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... plain of great extent, surrounded on three sides by rocky hills and ridges, and patched with coarse, starveling grass or occasional bushes. By the banks of the river which framed the picture on the left stood a straggling mud village, and this, though we did not know it, was to be the field of Omdurman. It was deserted. Not a living creature could be seen. And now there were many who said once and for all that there would be no fight; for here we were arrived at the very walls of Omdurman, and never an enemy ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... an ideal, and too romantic to be viewed wholly as literal. In the unequivocally great plays of Shakespeare the action moves like the mighty flow of some resistless river. In this one it advances with the diffusive and straggling movement of a summer cloud. The drift and meaning of the piece, accordingly, do not stand boldly out. That astute thinker, Ulrici, for instance, after much brooding upon it, ties his mental legs in a hard knot and says that ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... sturdy bearded backwoodsmen, rifle on shoulder, and with grave earnest faces; but walking rather than marching, irregularly keeping together, or straggling, as they chose. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hear the loud voice of Ross urging his men to stand to their posts firmly and fight to the last, and a few obeyed, and poured straggling volleys upon the red coats. Occasionally I could hear the sharp crack of the American rifle, and I felt sorry to think that my countrymen were fighting against men who would show them no mercy if victory perched upon the banner ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... waiting line and heard the cries wrung from the throats of those in the crossing—from the paralyzing cold. Only a few succeeded. Boylan saw this, as he awaited his turn. A steady grim procession on this side, whispering, crowding —but a thin and straggling output on the far bank. Scenes enacting in the center of the current shook his heart—faces and arms against the black water, the struggles and the cries of men ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... hat. This was the largest woman he ever had seen. She was easily three inches taller than Roger and splendidly proportioned, huge of shoulder, broad of hip, but without an ounce of fat upon her. Her face was gaunt and brown: thin lips, long thin nose, gray eyes set deep, iron gray hair straggling over her forehead from under a dusty pink sunbonnet. She wore a linen duster ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... Perhaps it was partly to be accounted for by the melancholy of the landscape, that immense gloomy plain which stretches from Nanterre to Saint Cloud, broken only by a few clumps of trees or the smoke of factory chimneys. Possibly also by the disproportion that existed between the humble little straggling village which you expected to find and the grandiose establishment, this country mansion in the style of Louis XIII, an agglomeration of mortar looking pink through the branches of its leafless park, ornamented ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... trees seemed in the South of Europe; as if they had heard and seen all the happiness of history, and had set them to music with their branches. Pretty girls rode bareheaded, with sunburned men in sombreros, just outside the straggling town, between hedges of roses that ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... other parties projected tunnels and found pockets. So Smith's pocket became a settlement with its two fancy stores, its two hotels, its one express office, and its two first families. Occasionally its one long straggling street was overawed by the assumption of the latest San Francisco fashions, imported per express, exclusively to the first families; making outraged Nature, in the ragged outline of her furrowed surface, look still more homely, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... men left the footpath where it dipped down into the park and followed the rim to the left, passing through a heavy growth of manzanita to a bare hill dotted with scrubby sage, at the other side of which was a small gulch of aspens straggling down into the valley. Back of these a log cabin squatted on the slope. One had to be almost upon it before it could be seen. Its back door looked down upon the entrance to a canon. This was fenced across to ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... so many: but Phaeton's sisters seem to have danced all away from the odoriferous banks of the Po, to the green sides of the Thames, I think; meantime here is no other timber in the country but a few straggling ash, and willows without end. The old Eridanus, however, makes a majestic figure at Cremona, and frights the inhabitants when it overflows. There are not many to be frighted though, for the town is thinly peopled; but exquisitely clean, perhaps for that very reason; ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... his slow, difficult approach over the gravel. He came forward without making the slightest recognition of their presence. Stopping full in front of them, he took off his hat, applied a straggling red handkerchief uncertainly to his face, and stared ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a long time and now I began to limp and lag. I wondered what on earth would make Wetherill and the Indians tired. It was with great pleasure that I observed the giant Joe Lee plodding slowly along. And when I glanced behind at my straggling party it was with both admiration for their gameness and glee for their disheveled and weary appearance. Finally I got so that all I could do was to drag myself onward with eyes down on the rough ground. ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... city. Nearer, the ample wings of the white Art Building seemed to stand guard against the improprieties of civilization. To the far south, a line of thin trees marked the outer desert of the prairie. Behind, in the west, were straggling flat-buildings, mammoth deserted hotels, one of which was crowned with a spidery steel tower. Nearer, a frivolous Grecian temple had been wheeled to the confines of the park, and dumped by the roadside to ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... said Sammy. She looked at the burning, dry little main street, the white cottages that faced the station from behind their blazing gardens; she looked at the locust trees that almost hid the church spire, at the straggling line of eucalyptus trees that followed the country road to the graveyard a mile away. It was home. It was all she had known of the world—and she was going away into a terrifying new life. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... then brightened up, because she realized that she was turning her back upon Pottstown for two blissful days and going to Point Pleasant, which had just one straggling, elm-shaded street hedging on old-fashioned gardens and cosy little houses and trailing off into the real ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The straggling village on Frimley Moor was mainly inhabited by a colony of silk hand-loom weavers—the descendants of French prisoners in the great war, and employed for the most part by a firm at Leck. Very dainty work was done at Frimley, and very beautiful stuffs ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and fifty." I heard the same warning repeated on several of the roads about Courtrai by men and women, panting, red-faced, stumbling blindly on from they knew not what. Later, I met the same people, straggling back to their villages, good-naturedly accepting the jibes of those who ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... noon point swung light and shadow. On through the languorous May warmth travelled westward the long column. It went with marked rapidity, emphatic even for the "foot cavalry," went without swerving, without straggling, went like a long, gleaming thunderbolt firmly held and swung. Behind it, sank in the distance the noise of battle. The Army of Northern Virginia knew itself divided, cut in two. Far back in the flowering woods before Chancellorsville, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... the straggling town was a twisted one and in a very short space they were hidden from view. Dane paused as if the pace was too much for an injured man. The Medic put out a steadying hand, only to drop it quickly when he saw the weapon which had appeared in ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... was the first that rose to make reply. "So please ye, gracious king, of all the kings of Spain most high; Strange is the guise in which my Cid before you hath appeared; To grace your summoned court he comes, with that long straggling beard; With awe struck dumb, methinks, are some; some look as though they feared. The noble lords of Carrion of princely race are born; To take the daughters of my Cid for lemans they should scorn; Much more ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... artillery and baggage wagons, were horrible. Through the night he made preparations to turn back to aid his beleaguered friends. It was, however, midday before he could collect his scattered troops, from their straggling march, and commence retracing his steps. In a few hours the low sun of a November day sunk below the hills. The troops, overtaken by darkness, stumbling through the gloom, and apprehensive of a midnight attack, rested upon their arms, waiting, through the weary hours, for the dawn of the morning. ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... days Jones had never seen such miserable Indians. Dirty blankets hid all their person, except straggling black hair, hungry, wolfish eyes and moccasined feet. They crowded into the path before the cabin door and mumbled and stared and waited. No dignity, no brightness, no suggestion of ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... of ancient chivalry. There had been a representation of a tournament in one of the squares; the streets would still occasionally resound with the beat of a solitary drum, or the bray of a trumpet from some straggling party of revellers. Sometimes they were met by cavaliers, richly dressed in ancient costumes, attended by their squires; and at one time they passed in sight of a palace brilliantly illuminated, from whence came the mingled sounds of music and the ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... threaded in all directions by paths and byways, along which soldiers, laborers, and truant school-boys are passing at all hours of the day. It is so far escaping from the axe and the bush-hook as to have opened communication with the forest and mountain beyond by straggling lines of cedar, laurel, and blackberry. The ground is mainly occupied with cedar and chestnut, with an undergrowth, in many place, of heath and bramble. The chief feature, however, is a dense growth in the centre, consisting of dogwood, water-beech, swamp-ash, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... therefore worth attention. Do not habitually prop your sentences on crutches, such as Italics and exclamation-points, but make them stand without aid; if they cannot emphasize themselves, these devices are commonly but a confession of helplessness. Do not leave loose ends as you go on, straggling things, to be caught up and dragged along uneasily in foot-notes, but work them all in neatly, as Biddy at her bread-pan gradually kneads in all the outlying bits of dough, till she has one round ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... as Paul was turning the corner, coming home from Keston, he saw his mother and father, who had come to Sethley Bridge Station. They were walking in silence in the dark, tired, straggling apart. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... alone for a year or two and the 'fruitful field will be a forest,' a jungle of matted weeds, with a straggling blossom where cultivation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Who set him on our trail? Oh, bitter thought! was the hunt of the wild horse a ruse—a scheme—to separate me from my command, and thus render it an easy prey to the Mexican guerrilleros? Perhaps my straggling followers were by this cut off? Perhaps the post had been attacked by a large body of the enemy—captured? I was not only to lose life, but had already lost my honour. I, the proud captain of a boasted troop, ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... secret hoards, and many and fierce were the conflicts that took place about what ought to have been common property. They lived in a forlorn-looking house, that stood alone and had an air of starvation. A few straggling savin trees, emblems of sterility, grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveller stopped at its door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the ragged beds of pudding-stone, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... stood like a statue, staring at old Luke. The expression on his face was that of a madman, but a madman through whose brain a straggling ray of realization has dawned. It was the look upon his face that held the whole assemblage spellbound. Then ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... be a straggling adobe house, shaded by cottonwoods and built around three sides of a square. It was roomy, cool, and comfortable, with a picturesqueness all its own. To Solange, it was inviting and homelike, much ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... fugitives cranching them warily, or saw their pale and haggard faces by the blue glare of the lightning or the more unsteady glare of torches, by which they endeavored to steer their steps. But ever and anon the boiling water, or the straggling ashes, mysterious and gusty winds, rising and dying in a breath, extinguished these wandering lights, and with them the last living hope of those ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... the hour of ten on Saturday night, when a tall, powerfully built man emerged from what might be termed the fashionable portion of the city of Florence, and struck into the straggling ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... were following the great tea-road, the road by which most of the twelve million pounds of brick tea consumed by the guzzling Tibetans is carried to the frontier market at Tachienlu. At all hours of the day straggling lines of men or ponies or mules were in sight, toiling along under their precious burdens. Between Ya-chou, the starting-point of this traffic, and Tachienlu there are two high passes to cross, seven thousand feet above the level where the journey ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... has spoiled 'em, I suppose. Let 'em grow wild, Grant. I say, my lad," he continued, looking at me with a droll twinkle in his eye, "they want us to train them, and prune them, and take off some of their straggling growths, eh? I think we could make a ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... is a straggling parish of 1600 acres and 400 inhabitants. {20} It lies remote to-day, as it lay remote in pre-Reformation times, when it was a cell of St Edmundsbury, whither refractory monks were sent for rustication. Hence its name (the "south ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... soon shot beneath the railway bridge at Kew, and pass through dirty, straggling old Brentford, entered the Brent, where a short paddle brought us to the first lock. Getting through in our turn, after a short delay caused by a string of canal barges coming through to catch the morning tide, we entered ...
— Through Canal-Land in a Canadian Canoe • Vincent Hughes
... him at a distance, almost deserted by his men, yet still attempting to renew the fight, and heedless of the wounds which covered him. Transported with grief and passion, I immediately darted forward to offer him my feeble support; but, in the very instant of my arrival, he received a straggling ball in his bosom, and, tottering to a tree, supported his fainting limbs against the trunk. Just in that moment three of our savage enemies observed his situation, and marked him for their prey; they raised their hideous yell, ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... unexpected niceness. It was a good straight nose, yet it had something of the pleasant tiptiltedness of a child's. It was the sort of nose which should have complemented a mouth formed for spontaneous laughter. It looked lonesome and out of place in that set and lowering countenance, to which the red straggling stubble of beard sprouting over jaws and throat lent a ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... no furniture at all behind which a man could hide. And the room, except for the rubbish in the corner, a small, straggling heap, ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... manoeuvre rather neatly, but parties now came straggling in from other directions, and I was obliged to give up whispering and become circumspect. They all seemed rather astonished at our group, and the captain laughed heartily as he rode up and called out, "Who have you got tied ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... chill of his soaking garments, as he hurriedly faced the blast through the dimly lighted street. At the next corner he paused; he had reached another, and, from its dilapidated appearance, apparently an older wharf than that where he had landed, but, like the first, it was still a straggling avenue leading toward the higher and more animated part of the city. He again mechanically—for a part of his trouble was a vague, undefined ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... not been so very small Dale might have suspected an attempt at "kidding." He glanced sidewise and suspiciously at her but all he saw was a cherub face framed in a tilted sky-blue tam-o'shanter and straggling ends ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... about four o'clock in the afternoon, and we were straggling at no great speed through a narrow valley, when half a dozen bullets from the rocky sides ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... sea air had drawn green streaks of mould downwards from each several jointing of the stones; the long-closed shutters of some of the windows were more than half hidden by creepers, bushy and straggling by turns, and the eaves were all green with moss and mould. From the deep- arched porch at the back a weed-grown gravel walk led away through untrimmed hedges of box and myrtle to an ancient summer-house on the edge of a steep slope of grass. To right and left of this path, the ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... time the busy city looked gray. It looked drab and dirty and he thought longingly of the desert with its miles and miles of clean sand. He thought of his mine and how he had fought for it, and of all his friends in the straggling town; of Old Juan and L. W. and hearty Old Hassayamp with his laugh and his Texas yupe. And of Mary Fortune, the typist, as he had known her at first—but now she was sending ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... skylights, and from the remnants of the funnels; the deck in the middle of the steamer rose slowly, and the exploding boilers tossed broken bits of engines and deck apparatus high up into the air. The Kanga Maru listed to port and disappeared in the waves, over which a few straggling ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... up by a boat which carried passengers from one shore to the other. Middelburg, the chief town in the island, destined to become so famous in the annals of Protestantism, at that time only numbered some two or three hundred hearths; and the prosperous town of Ostend was an obscure haven, a straggling village where pirates dwelt in security among the fishermen and the few poor merchants who lived ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... colonists there had no right to interfere except in self-defence. But the Plymouth people asserted that Morton sold arms to the Indians and received runaway servants. This made him dangerous, and all the other "straggling settlements," though, like Morton's, of the church of England, united with the people at Plymouth in suppressing Morton's settlement. In June, 1628, a joint force under Captain Miles Standish was sent against Merry Mount, and Morton was captured and shipped to England ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... as messenger and carrier between the missionary stations, which—pleasant oases in the desert of barbarism—began to dot the North Island from Whangaroa as far south as Rotorua among the Hot Lakes. By 1838 there were thirteen of them. The ruins of some are still to be seen, surrounded by straggling plots run to waste, "where once a garden smiled." When Charles Darwin, during the voyage of the Beagle, visited the Bay of Islands, the missionary station at Waimate struck him as the one bright spot in a gloomy and ill-ordered ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... the road had stone factories alongside of it,—grey, dull-coloured rows of stone cottages belonging to these factories, and then we came to poor, hungry-looking fields;—stone fences everywhere, and trees nowhere. Haworth is a long, straggling village one steep narrow street—so steep that the flag-stones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, that the horses' feet may have something to cling to, and not slip down backwards; which if they did, they would soon reach Keighley. But if the horses had ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... whom Sancho's people well remembered as Nevins' clerk and assistant, despite the fact that a bushy beard now covered the face that was smooth-shaven in the halcyon days of the supply camp. Then came some thirty horsemen in long, straggling column of twos, while, straight from the flank to the gate of the corral, silent and even somber, rode the engineer, Lieutenant Loring. To him Sancho whipped off his silver-laced sombrero and bowed, while two jaded-looking ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... known from undisputed history. Their fate does not leave the mind in hopeless dejection, for they both found quiet and consolation in retirement and piety. So new and so affecting is their story that it supersedes invention, and imagination ranges at full liberty without straggling into scenes of fable. The story thus skilfully adopted has been diligently improved. Pope has left nothing behind him which seems more the effect of studious perseverance and laborious revisal. Here is particularly observable the curiosa felicitas, a fruitful soil and careful cultivation. ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... minute the whole party were straggling through the camp-like town towards the outskirts, to gather together at the very ordinary shed-like house of mud wall and fluted corrugated-iron roofing, where the wife of one of the men at the mine stared in wonder at the party, and then looked in awe at her lodger, her eyes very wide open and ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... know every creature in Grasmere, down to the two-year-old babies,' said Hammond, Mary having just stopped to converse with an infantine group, straggling and struggling over the boulders. 'Pray, do you happen to know a man called Barlow, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... slightest show of interest. From a store across the street a young woman with a thick head of red hair peeped out for an instant, staring at her. Then the door closed again. After this a monstrously big man with long, tow-colored wisps of straggling hair showing at the edges of his heavy muskrat cap, and a ragged beard of the same color, came to her as she stood upon the platform, undecided, again a prey to her fears. The man smiled at her, pleasantly, ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... but not seeing you; I would be a servant—a slave—a dog, as long as I could be with you; hear one tone of your voice, catch one glance of your eye. I scarcely see the paper before me, my thoughts are so straggling and confused. Write to me one word, Falkland; one word, and I will lay it to ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... home (which does not naturally indicate their own house), having donned their "other waistcoat" and their pin (emblematic of a blue hand grasping an egg, or of a butterfly poised on a wheel)—pop! they are gentlemen. With the hebdomadal sovereign straggling in the extreme verge of their pockets—with the afternoon rebuke of the "principal," or peradventure of some senior clerk, still echoing in their ears—they are GENTLEMEN. They are desired to be such by their mother and sisters, and so they talk about cool hundreds—and the points of horses—and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... made the narrow channel at Simoneski, the western entrance to the seas; and as there is always a strong rush of water through the passage towards the ocean, we had to steam hard against a considerable current. The town, of which I spoke in my last chapter, has a very straggling and neat cleanly appearance. There are no forts or other defences to indicate that not so long ago this town offered defiance and a short resistance to a ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... beloved, they were at the same time conscious, that their high pay, splendid appointments, and immediate dependence on the Emperor, were subjects of envy to the other forces. They, therefore, kept much in the neighbourhood of their own barracks, and were seldom seen straggling remote from them, unless they had a commission of government intrusted ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... considered my position so outrageous that he dashed through the water to me, splashing me all over, so he is baptised in Petrarch's name. The scenery is full of grandeur, the rocks sheathe themselves into the sky, and nothing grows there except a little cypress here and there, and a straggling olive tree; and the fountain works out its soul in its stony prison, and runs away in a green rapid stream. Such a striking sight it is. I sate upon deck, too, in our passage from Marseilles to Genoa, and had a vision of mountains, six or seven deep, one behind another. As to Pisa, call it ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... great body rose showed the strength of the beast. A prodigious sack, like black leather, with markings of crimson and copper!—and the straggling, ropy hairs on it were greenish-gray like the lustre of ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... there were some twenty men, slowly straggling in. There was a woman of middle age, and beside her a girl of about sixteen years, evidently her daughter. Dave's eyes approved of the girl, and though she was a stranger to his tongue, she did not fail to find ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... a country seat and had a court house surrounded by trees. It looked long and straggling in the summer dusk. Zene, riding ahead to secure lodgings, came back as far as the culvert to tell Grandma Padgett there was no room at the tavern Court, was session, and the lawyers on the circuit filled the house. But there was another place, near where they now halted, that sometimes took ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... series of small hills, which are partially cleared, but present little appearance of cultivation. Here we were shown a specimen of the upas tree: it was growing close to a small stone fountain in the vicinity of some straggling huts. It was a solitary tree, tall and red-stemmed, with the foliage branching out in a ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... Indians, from Stono, came down in straggling parties, and plundered the plantations of the scanty and dearly earned fruits of labour and industry. Being accustomed to the practice of killing whatever came in their way, they ranked the planter's ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... probably nothing loath, took advantage of the opportunity to see something of the world, wandering by night up and down the streams, and hiding by day in burrows under the banks. For a time they enjoyed it, but as the summer dragged by they came straggling home one after another. The new babies who had arrived in their absence had passed the most troublesome age, and it was time to begin work again. The dam and the lodges needed repairs, and there was much food to be gathered and laid up for ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... constructive British Imperialism of Breeze and Westerton. And there were moods when the two things were confused in his mind, and the glamour of world dominion rested wonderfully on the slack and straggling British Empire of Edward the Seventh—and Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Chamberlain. He did go on for a time honestly entertaining both these projects in his mind, each at its different level, the greater impalpable one and the lesser concrete ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... his mate came down the narrow alleyway from the after-cabin. He was a tall, lean, smooth-faced man, with moist black hair that was partly sleek and shining, partly bristling out in straggling wisps. His face was dewy, and his eyes perpetually blinking. Cospatric asked him to play something. He peered at me for a moment or two as though taking my measure, and then went to the piano and gave vent to a particularly low ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... small villages and patches of sweet potatoes; these were very inferior, owing to the want of drainage. For about two miles we continued on the banks of the Kafoor river; the women who carried the luggage were straggling in disorder, and my few men were much scattered in their endeavours to collect them. We approached a considerable village; but just as we were nearing it, out rushed about six hundred men with lances and shields, screaming and yelling like so many demons. For the moment, ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... office, a quarter of a minute after his time. The public-houses, with gas-lights burning inside, were already open. By degrees, other shops began to be unclosed, and a few scattered people were met with. Then, came straggling groups of labourers going to their work; then, men and women with fish-baskets on their heads; donkey-carts laden with vegetables; chaise-carts filled with live-stock or whole carcasses of meat; milk-women with pails; ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... had been made to train the outlying portions of his mustache in line with the lengthy, undulating "mutton chops;" but they had, for well-grounded reasons, failed to connect, and the effect was somewhat spoiled by those straggling skirmishers, bristling with importance but waiting in vain for recruits. The top of his head had got above timber line and glistened in the sun of early summer that streamed through the clear windows of Mrs. ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... man was undisturbed. His head had slipped from the folded newspaper, and the straggling unkempt hair was matted with the foxtails and burrs of the dry grass on which it lay. He was not a pretty sight. His mouth was open, disclosing a gap in the upper row where several teeth at some time had been knocked out. He breathed stertorously, at times grunting and moaning with the pain ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... the wood's edge wearing a star on her forehead, or catching sight in the wood's depths of a glistening shoulder and feet flying towards the reeds. Full of happy aspiration he wandered seeking the country through the many straggling villages that hang like children round the skirts of Dublin, and was passing through one of these at nightfall, and, feeling tired, he turned into the bar of an inn, and asked for bread ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... come in to a meetin'." And with this remark, pointing with a stubby thumb up a well-worn stair, he departed before Stephen could thank him. Stephen paused under the awning, of which there were many shading the brick pavement, to regard the straggling line of stores and houses which surrounded and did homage to the yellow pile. The brick house in which Mr. Lincoln's office was had decorations above the windows. Mounting the stair, Stephen found a room bare enough, save for a few chairs and law books, and not a soul ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... time Charlie Star and the boys who had started to run away began straggling back. They wondered why Bunny and his companions were not being chased by Mr. Morrison. And when Charlie and his chums heard about the offer to pay shares for ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Keeping Store • Laura Lee Hope
... him now too wan and weak to dream again; left him to lie torpid, faintly remembering far-off things; just able to turn his eyes and gaze through the window near his cot at the trickle of river running by in the sands, at the straggling milk-bush of the Karoo beyond. He knew what the Karoo was now, even if he had not seen a Boer roll over like a rabbit, or heard the whine of flying bullets. This pestilence had sneaked on him before ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to do this?" he demanded, as Councill and the others came straggling up, their horses panting ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... elephants would be more likely to be found in woods than in open places. Indeed, it was only near the banks of the stream that any great quantity of wood was to be seen. A broad belt of jungle extended upon each side of it. After that, there were straggling groves and clumps; and then came the open plains, almost treeless, though covered with a rich carpet of grass for some distance farther. To this succeeded the wild karoo, stretching eastward and westward beyond the reach of vision. Along the north, as already mentioned, trended the line of "bluffs;" ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... Italian states, Spain, Portugal, most of France, the southern Netherlands, the forest cantons of Switzerland, the southern Germanies, Austria, Poland, Ireland, large followings in Bohemia and Hungary, and a straggling unimportant ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... knew of her presence, for he sat with his back partly turned to the open door. As she entered and greeted him, he arose from his chair, all trembling with excitement at her visit; the long white locks, straggling and unkept, falling about his brown visage that had grown old and weather beaten with his cabin. Sinking down into his seat—the hide covered chair that had been worn smooth by years of usefulness—he gazed well pleased at Therese, who seated ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... sun looks down through murky mists;—the ground is slightly hardened with the nipping frost; here and there some hardy flower endeavours to look gay:—the tolling bell rings out its morning call, and straggling groups wend their way to worship in the village church. But on the hill, which rises high above, was stood a man in deep and earnest thought. One could scarcely have believed that the pale, aged looking man, who dressed in sombre black was standing and ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... we got about early and made for the Chamber of Deputies to hear the King's speech. The Minister and I walked over together and met a few straggling colleagues headed in the same direction. Most of them had got there ahead of us, and the galleries were all jammed. The Rue Royale, from the Palace around the park to the Parliament building, was packed ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... last, is another clean, excessively whitewashed little town, straggling up a side hill, with any amount of mountains looming up in the ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... ball given by the ladies of Juneau in our honor. Half a dozen young Indian maidens sat on a bench against the wall and munched peanuts while they smiled; a few straggling settlers gathered at the bar while they smiled; two fiddlers and a guitar made as merry as they could under the circumstances in an alcove at the top of the hall. Round dances were in vogue,—round dances ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the valley bounded by the Schoenecken wood. The Uhlans, their piebald lance-pennants fluttering in the wind, cantered leisurely round the crests of the little knolls which formed the vedette posts, despising mightily the straggling chassepot bullets which were pitched at them from time to time in a desultory way; but which, desultory as they were, now and then brought lance-pennant and its bearer to the ground—an occurrence invariably followed by a little spurt of ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... and me to come and pass a few days with her, and see her vintage. We left my son under the care of the Abbe and of Sir Francis and Lady Ommaney, and set forth together in our coach with my women, and, as usual, mounted servants enough to guard us from any of the thieves or straggling soldiers who ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of God. Far, far beyond, we sight the green of fields and hills; but ever below lies the river, blue,—brownish-gray, touched with the hint of hidden gold. Drifting through half-flooded lowlands, with shanties and crops and stunted trees, past struggling corn and straggling village, we rush toward the Battle of the Marne and the West, from this dread Battle of the East. Westward, dear God, the fire of Thy Mad World crimsons our Heaven. Our answering Hell ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... affairs are subject to organic disorder, since they are created in and sustained by a sort of half-disciplined chaos, hence he who in great things seeks success must never wait for smooth water, which never was and never will be, but, with what straggling method he can, dash with all his derangements at his object, leaving the rest ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... come into the compartment hurriedly just as the train started. He was a small, middle-aged, sandy-haired man with a straggling tufted beard, the sort of beard that looks as if it owed its origin rather to forgetfulness than to any settled design. The expression on his face and, indeed, over his whole body was a deprecating one. He reminded me of a dog who has transgressed and begs humbly for forgiveness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... for the entertainment to which they had invited themselves, and these sums, together with the amounts pressed from the reluctant estates, and the forced contributions paid by luckless peasants, enabled him to keep his straggling troops together a few weeks longer. Mutiny, however, was constantly breaking out, and by the eloquent expostulations and vague promises of the Count, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Don Pedro, every one went among the Indians as they thought fit, taking away their women and goods, and committing everywhere such outrages, that the Indians resolved to revenge themselves on all whom they should find straggling about the country. The cacique of the Magdalen, Guatiguana, had killed ten, and had privately caused a house to be fired in which there were eleven sick Spaniards. But he was severely punished by the admiral after his return; for though the cacique himself ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... black-hatted, plumed with smoke; The braes beyond—and when the ripple awoke, They wavered with the jarred and wavering glaze. The air was hushed and dreamy. Evermore A noise of running water whispered near. A straggling crow called high and thin. A bird Trilled from the birch-leaves. Round the shingled shore, Yellow with weed, there wandered, vague and clear, Strange ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... an eighth of an inch separate from the flesh, and I noticed that there was not a particle of impurity beneath any of them. But his majesty is concentrated in his head, which is set with leonine grace and dignity upon his broad, square shoulders; and it is almost entirely covered with long, fine, straggling hair, silvery and glistening, pure and white as sunlit snow, rather thin on the top of his high, rounded crown, streaming over and around his large but delicately-shaped ears, down the back of his big neck; and, from his pinky-white cheeks and top lip, over the lower part of his face, right down ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... describe the nightly scene in a typical city alley. It is cold in the pantomime season; but the folk in that alley have not much fire. Joe, the costermonger, Bill, the market-labourer, Tom, the fish-porter, and the rest come home in a straggling way; and, if they can buy a pennyworth of coal, they boil the little kettle. Then one of the children runs to the chandler's and gets a halfpennyworth of tea, a scrap of bread, and perhaps a penny slice of sausage. The men stint themselves in food and firing; but they always have a little ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... part, missing the bone; and although it cost much pain I was able, by wrapping my arm tightly to my body, to proceed. More than once I had to withdraw from the road into the fields or bushes when I heard a straggling ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... they dropped, to wish us "bon jour" and tell us the road. More lovely effects of light and shade over the hills towards Pierrefitte, with filmy clouds shrouding the tallest summits, and here and there a glimpse of the blue sky, and we passed into the straggling hamlet of Salluz, after which the path branched up—still to the left—through the trees. Winding down again, we came to Ourous, to which apparently the inhabitants from all the other villages had come, dressed in their Sunday best, to mass. "Young men and maidens, old ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... discharge of their battalion, had collected there. I recall the scene as perfectly to-day as though it were yesterday. In the midst of a broken country, all parched and dried by the hot sun of July, sparsely wooded with live-oaks and straggling pines, lay the valley of the American River, with its bold mountain-stream coming out of the Snowy Mountains to the east. In this valley is a fiat, or gravel-bed, which in high water is an island, or is overflown, but at the time of our visit was simply a level gravel-bed ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... hours slipped by when a loud cheer rang out at the appearance of a train of crazy carriages which backed towards us. The passengers scrambled in and made themselves as comfortable as they could. But where was the baggage to go? The soldiery had overlooked this item and they surveyed the straggling mass of bags and trunks littering the embankment ruefully. But they solved the problem in their own way. What could not be stacked within the trucks would ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... groping in the dark (vaga experientia mera palpatio est), who occasionally hit upon good works or inventions, which, like Atalanta's apples, distracted them from further steady and gradual progress towards universal truth. In place of these straggling efforts of the unassisted human mind, a graduated system of helps was to be supplied, by the use of which the mind, when placed on the right road, would proceed with unerring and mechanical certainty to the invention of new ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... army marched two leagues through a perpetual succession of fields of Indian corn, interspersed with straggling houses, and were frequently vexed by lurking Indians who shot off their arrows and then ran away. At the farther side of this cultivated plain, they came to a deep brook running through a wood, the ford of which was fortified by palisades or fallen ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... hail of straggling small shot hastened their movements, and then Bob proceeded to thank the young chief for saving their lives, explaining to him, as far as he knew, how it was that they had fallen into such ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... with men that all carried cash, more or less; you couldn't travel then in the country without it. We had twice the pull now, because so many strangers, that couldn't possibly be known to the police, were straggling over all the roads. There was no end of bustle and rush in every line of work and labour. Money was that plentiful that everybody seemed to be full of it. Gold began to be sent down in big lots, by the Escort, as it was called—sometimes ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... captain kept his eyes on the people all the time, and was completely convinced of their good intentions. Having made signs that water was wanting, his native friend conducted them along the coast, lined with mangroves, to a creek, on going up which, above the mangroves, a straggling village appeared; the ground around being laid out in well cultivated plantations of sugar-canes, plantains, yams, and other roots, watered by rills conducted from the main stream, whose source was in the hills. Here was an abundance of fresh water. Among other things, ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... feeding the chickens, at that quiet moment in the life of the farmyards before the afternoon milking-time. The great buildings round the hollow yard were as dreary and tumbledown as ever, but over the old garden-wall the straggling rose-bushes were beginning to toss their summer weight, and the gray wood and old bricks of the house, on its higher level, had a look of sleepy age in the broad afternoon sunlight, that suited the quiescent time. Maggie, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... white-headed little boy came straggling in, and after him, a red-headed lad, and then one with a flaxen poll, until the forms were occupied by a dozen boys, or thereabouts, with heads of every color but gray, and ranging in their ages from four years old to fourteen years or more; for the legs of the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... lived there with her, was suddenly become only a dreary, lonely lodging-room. Cheeps and Bartholomew were there, chirping and purring, the sun was shining in; the things were all hers, for Aunt Blin had written one broad, straggling, unsteady line upon a sheet of paper the last day she lived, when the fever and confusion had ebbed away out of her brain as life ebbed slowly back, beaten from its outworks by disease, toward her heart, and she lay ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... his beard shaved off, his ragged moustache trimmed into the most aristocratic shape, and his long, straggling grey hair cut and arranged ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... himself out very quietly and strolled down the drive and out of the great gates to the bridge. The perfect peace of the warm June night, the yellow moonlight on the quiet water, the wide-spanned bridge, the long straggling street of irregular gabled houses so kindly and so sheltering with their overhanging eaves, the dear familiar charm of it all seemed to grip Reggie by the throat and caused an unwonted smarting in ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... at once the stillness was broken again by quick rippling laughs immediately behind him. He turned sharply round, and saw a woman in the bushes: her eyes were large and green and sad; her hair straggling and dishevelled; she was dressed in reeds and leaves; she was very pale. She stared at him fixedly, and smiled, showing gleaming teeth, and when she smiled there was no light nor laughter in her eyes, which remained sad and ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... that I remembered that there was neither harness nor carts; but to my surprise, now that the animals had been discovered, my men were running busily around searching every likely hiding-place of the huge straggling courtyards. Like rats, they ran into every corner, turned over everything, pulled up loose floorings, and presently the body of a cart was found hidden in a loft in the most cunning way. But it was only the body of a cart; there were no wheels. And yet ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... in the flower of his age to the control of a great country, pleased, confident, and courageous. The other picture shows how the King looked in the sixtieth year of his reign. The face is old and wrinkled and weary; the straggling white locks escape from beneath a fur-trimmed cap; the bowed body is wrapped in a fur-trimmed robe. The time of two generations of men lay between the young king and the old; the longest reign then known to English history, the longest ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... charred and torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides, already half concealed by new undergrowth; winding depressions in the earth, bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the road, and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty barbed-wire, that seemed to have been put there by ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... he recognized the strokes as those he had heard when sitting on the stile. It was indispensable that he should retrace his steps and push on to Sleeping-Green if he wished that night to reach his lodgings, which had been secured by letter at a little inn in the straggling line of roadside houses called by the above name, where his luggage had by this time probably arrived. In a quarter of an hour he was again at the point where the wire left the road, and following the highway over a hill he saw the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... little stream came tumbling from the height And straggling into ocean as it might. Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray, Close on the wild wide ocean,—yet as pure And fresh as Innocence; and more secure. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... at the head of a small and straggling division of cavalry whose men ambled along and guyed one another about the management of their green livery horses who were inclined to bunch and ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... seemed to be a centre of attraction, and was brilliantly illuminated, was a neat wooden building with two towers. The streets of the village were broad and straggling; and so luxuriant was the vegetation, and so lazy the nature of the inhabitants, that it seemed as if the whole place were overgrown with gigantic weeds. Shrubs and creeping-plants grew in the neglected gardens, climbed over the palings, and straggled ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... Theron strolled aimlessly about, and did not think at all. The shadows gathered, and fireflies began to disclose their tiny gleams among the shrubbery in the gardens. A lamp-lighter came along, and passed him, leaving in his wake a straggling double line of lights, glowing radiantly against the black-green of the trees. This recalled to Theron that he had heard that the town council lit the street lamps by the almanac, and economized gas when moonshine ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... the river's bank. Here they ford, follow the course of the stream for a while, and then at a bend reach an open flat dotted here and there with shapely live-oaks. In this park-like opening the long straggling ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... "We're off, then!" And he flung himself with a sudden wild, boyish "Whoopee!" on his pony, gave a clip to Joan's horse and his own, and away they galloped, a pair of young, wild things, out from the town through a straggling street to where the road boldly stretched itself toward a great land of sagebrush, of buttes humping their backs against the brilliant sky. Down the valley they rode, trotting, walking, galloping, till, turning ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... friends and entering a country the very name of which to the outside world was a synonym for crime and outlawry. Yet some of as good men as ever it was my pleasure to know came from that State, and undaunted I held a true course for my destination. I was disappointed on seeing Fort Worth, a straggling village on the Trinity River, and, merely halting to feed my mount, passed on. I had a splendid horse and averaged thirty to forty miles a day when traveling, and early in April reached the home of my friend in Paolo ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams |
