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More "Gaunt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... French graves made afterward. I walked through this ruined city where, aside from the soldiery, the only sign of life I saw was a gaunt, prowling cat. With me past these hundreds of graves walked half a dozen French officers. They did not pause to read inscriptions; they did not comment on the loot and pillage of the graveyard; they scarcely looked ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... admitted at once. At the noise of a stranger's entrance, the criminal raised himself from the sunken attitude into which he had fallen on his stone bench, and watched, by the light of the dim lamp set in the wall, the approach of his tall, gaunt, black-garmented visitor with evident horror and fear. When,—with the removal of the shovel hat and thick muffler which had helped to disguise that visitor's personality,—the features of Monsignor Del Fortis were disclosed, he sprang forward and threw ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive water moccasins and brilliant yellow and black swamp snakes, while overhead on the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... on the throne amid the parlor floor. But, alas! as they come back the flowers have faded, the sweet odors have become the smell of a charnel-house, and instead of the Queen of Happiness there sits there the gaunt form of Anguish, with bitten lip and sunken eye, and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... his respite; and after the conquest of the place, and the departure of the troops, the adventurous son was released.... The castle then, once the residence of Pierce Gaveston,—of Hubert III,—and of John of Gaunt, was dismantled and destroyed. It is singular, by the way, that it was twice captured by men of the name of Lilburn, or Lilleburne, once in the reign of Edward II., once as I have related. On looking ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... of these groups the modelling and the varied expressions of hope, fear, love, and rage, were an immense step in advance of the old wooden school of taxidermy; specimens of which are still to be found in museums—stiff, gaunt, erect, and angular. Copies of those early outrages on nature may still be seen in the dreary plates of the anything but "animated" work of "poor Goldie," who, as Boswell said, "loved to shine" in ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... of gold and russet, and the distant hills stand out in strong blue masses. Winter also brings fascination. Strahov, its many windows severely closed and reflecting a sullen sky, seems to stand out more austerely from among the gaunt tree-trunks, their grey and sombre outlines broken by a fantasia of gnarled and twisted branches glittering under snow. But within those walls, in the high altar's mysterious depth, in the long bare corridors and tiny cells where useful work continues as it ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... the Indian railway stations. One man had corduroy trousers of a faded chewing gum tint. And they were new—showing that this tint did not come by calamity, but was intentional; the very ugliest color I have ever seen. A gaunt, shackly country lout six feet high, in battered gray slouched hat with wide brim, and old resin-colored breeches, had on a hideous brand-new woolen coat which was imitation tiger skin wavy broad stripes of dazzling yellow and deep ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... nice looking farm-house not far from the railroad, and made our wants known to the occupants. We had selected for our spokesman the oldest one of our bunch, a soldier perhaps twenty-five years old, named Aleck Cope. He was something over six feet tall, and about as gaunt as a sand-hill crane. He was bare-footed, and his feet, in color and general appearance, looked a good deal like the flappers of an alligator. His entire garb, on this occasion, consisted of an old wool hat and his government shirt and drawers. ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... them had vanished as if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... my hounds?" said he; "Draw back the lattice-bar and let them in." Through a cloud-rift the light fell noiselessly Upon the cottage floor; and, gaunt and thin, Leaped in the stag-hounds, bounding as in glee, Shaking the rain-drops from their shaggy skin; And as the maiden closed the spattered glass, A shadow faint ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes—all to show them, as she remarked, how little there was to see. There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the style of an age of ampler allowances, had nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant's, some lifelong retainer's ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... to ninepence a day, according to the cost of provisions, was allowed him. On this generous basis he was nourished for a hundred years or more, till one day early in the nineteenth century some half-score of gaunt, hungry wretches, cooped up for eight weary weeks in an East-coast press-room during the rigours of a severe winter, made the startling discovery that the time-honoured allowance was insufficient to keep ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... of death, in the charnels of time, Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime, There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung, There are heroes yet silent to speak ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... upon black. The laughing, dimpling, sun-kissed water was now a black, gloomy pool, beyond which the fall shimmered white like a water-spirit (Undine,—or was it Kuehleborn, the malignant and vengeful sprite?). The firs stood tall and gaunt, closing like a spectral guard about the ruined mill, and pointing their long, dark fingers in silent menace at the intruder upon their evening repose. Hildegarde shivered again, and held her lantern tighter, remembering how Bubble had said that the glen ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... that his journey ended, even as it had ended in 1893; but how changed the scene! He finds the station gaunt and well-nigh deserted; the few passengers are gliding away like phantoms into the morning air; the porters loiter around, and the Customs officers discharge their duties in a perfunctory, sleepy way. No crowd of Pressmen and sightseers is present; there are no delegates ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... passed through a burned and rocky country where no new growth save scant underbrush and a few scattering spruce, balsam and tamarack trees had taken the place of the old destroyed forest. The dead, naked tree trunks which, gaunt and weather-beaten, still stood upright or lay in promiscuous confusion on the ground, gave this part of the country from our hilltop view an appearance of solitary desolation that we had not noticed when we were traveling through it. But this unregenerated district ended at Washkagama; and ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... rostrum, and the tribune, as he stood to be inaugurated under the war-cloud in 1861. But there is another Lincoln as dear to the common people—the Lincoln of happy quotations, the speaker of household words. Instead of the erect, impressive, penetrative platform orator we see a long, gaunt figure, divided between two chairs for comfort, the head bent forward, smiling broadly, the lips curved in laughter, the deep eyes irradiating their caves of wisdom; the story-telling Lincoln, enjoying the ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... November, 1858.—In the evening Geo. Petrie called with "Bible Borrow." He is a man about 60, upwards of six feet in height, and of an athletic though somewhat gaunt frame. His hair is pure white though a little bit thin on the top, his features high and handsome, and his complexion ruddy and healthy. He was dressed in black, his surtout was old, his shoes very muddy. He spoke in a loud tone of voice, knows Gaelic ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... distinguished for its large bones and strong muscles. Originally a gaunt and ugly animal, it has of late years been much improved. Indeed, the prices lately realised by Lincoln sheep are extremely high. The Lincoln has a long, white face, long body, and thick legs. The wool is long, thick, and moderately fine. ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... his hair unkempt, his face a trifle haggard, working on into the day whose dawn he had seen arise, the tall, gaunt old man set aside first one minor matter, then another, leaving them all exactly finished. At last he wrote down, for later forwarding, the last item of his own knowledge regarding the new country into which he had sent his ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... the comparative obscurity of a probate judgeship simply from an innate modesty and a belief that he had found his work in life in which he might best serve humanity without hope of personal power and glory. Gaunt, tall, stoop-shouldered, gray, walking the same path each day,—home, court-house, club, neighbors, home,—with a grapevine stick as thick as a fence-post in his hand—such was ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... to regions of interlacing railway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of dingy little homes, more of them and more and more. The number of these and their dinginess and poverty increased, and here rose a great public house and here a Board School and there a gaunt factory; and away to the east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous forest of masts and spars. The congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently into tenements; I marveled more and more at this boundless ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... A great gaunt Arab, one of the true desert men, almost black, with high cheek bones, hollow cheeks, fierce falcon's eyes shining as if with fever, long and lean limbs hard as iron, dressed in a rough, sacklike brown garment, and wearing a turban bound with cords of camel's ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... from the audience, and on falling, uttered rather a baffled howl than its deep-toned and kingly roar. It evinced no sign either of wrath or hunger; its tail drooped along the sand, instead of lashing its gaunt sides; and its eye, though it wandered at times to Glaucus, rolled again listlessly from him. At length, as if tired of attempting to escape, it crept with a moan into its cage, and once more laid ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... see the effects of the storm, expecting to witness its ravages on every side. Imagine her wonder and delight when, instead of widespread wreck and ruin, a scene of indescribable beauty met her eyes! The snow had draped all things in white. The trees that had seemed so gaunt and skeleton-like as they writhed and moaned in the gale were now clothed with a beauty surpassing that of their summer foliage, for every branch, even to the smallest twig, had been incased in the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... beginning it had been impossible for that life to ignore him. Among a people knit by a common pulse, yet separated by a multitude of individual differences, he stood aloof and indispensable, like one of the gaunt iron bridges of his great railroad. He was at once the destroyer and the builder—the inexorable foe of the old feudal order and the beneficent source of the new industrialism. Though half of Dinwiddie hated him, the other half (hating him, perhaps none the less) ate its bread from his hands. The ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... from you again; and you promise to be again constant in writing. Shall I believe you, this time? Do it, and shame the Devil! I really am persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me I know right well, and have always known, what it will do. The gaunt lonesomeness of this Midnight Hour, in the ugly universal snoring hum of the overfilled deep-sunk Posterity of Adam, renders an articulate speaker precious indeed! Watchman, what sayest thou, then? Watchman, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and with no plumes to shadow the hollows in his temples, M'Alister looked gaunt and feeble enough, as he lay in the little hospital bed, which barely held his long limbs. Such a wreck of giant powers of body, and noble qualities of mind as the drink-shops are preparing ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... majority, tall, lean, muscular, not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, a face almost gaunt in its clearness of cut, a thin straight nose, chin not heavy but well curved out, the eye orbit arched and deep, a frown fixed between thick eyebrows, and few words in his firm, rather grim-looking mouth. ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... to the question and the patient courtesy of the attorney was to throw her hands into the air, toss her white head to and fro, and give up the battle. The tears came like a gush of blood from a deep wound; they poured through the lean fingers she pressed against her gaunt cheeks, and she shook with the dry, weak weeping of senility and utter desolation. Then her old arms yearned for him as ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... I saw the loom of the bark hut they lived in, on a patchy clearing in the scrub, and heard the voice of the selector's wife—I had seen her several times: she was a gaunt, haggard Bushwoman, and, I supposed, the reason why she hadn't gone mad through hardship and loneliness was that she hadn't either the brains or the memory to go farther than she could see through the trunks ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... exercising her rights in unbelievable ways. This he was going to explain to Dick, if he could manage it, while he set forth also his need of retreating from the active scene and leaving some of his formerly accepted duties on Dick's shoulders. As he sat there, gaunt, long, lean man, with a thin brown face and the eagle's look, a fineness of aquiline curve that made him significant in a dominant type, he fitted his room as the room fitted him. The house was old; nothing had been changed in it since ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the bank, and again spoke to the invisible woman. In vain. He began then to doubt his own eyes. Had it been a mere illusion produced by some caprice of the searchlight opposite? But the face!—the features of it were stamped on his memory, the gaunt bitterness of ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pitiful to see the poor fellow. Thin, gaunt, plainer than ever, if also ennobled by that almost saintly dignity which is given by illness, the first impression made on Leam was one of acute physical repulsion: the second only gave room to compassion. Fortunately, that little shudder of hers was unnoticed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... stands about half a league from Ludwigsburg. In the midst of rich orchards this gaunt rock rises abruptly from the plain like some huge fist of a heathen god, threatening the peace of the fruitful land with sombre menace. From heathen days it was named Asperg, after the Aasen or Germanic ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... and the trees were gaunt scarred trunks, without branches or leaves, reminding one of an ancient gloomy picture in the old-time family Bible, known as "Dry Bones in ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... baskets midstream lie To trap the perch that gambol by; In coves of creek the saw-mills sing, And trim the spar and hew the mast; And the gaunt loons dart on the wing, To see the steamer looming past. Now timber shores and massive piles Repel our hull with friendly stroke, And guide us up the long defiles, Till after many fairy miles We reach ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... he sat down to the table, the doorbell rang, there was a hasty step down the hall, and Strahan, pale and gaunt, with his arm in a sling, burst in upon him, and exclaimed, with his old sang froid and humor: "Just in time. Yes, thanks; I'll stay and take a cup ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... place in a side street, with dirty windows and a creaking iron gate, but the rooms were large, and the one he selected and paid for in advance was on the top floor. The landlady looked gaunt and dusty as the house, and quite as old. Her eyes were green and faded, ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... shoulders and looked expressively at Anne, before turning to receive the salutations of an elderly gentleman and a tall young woman, very plainly but handsomely clad in mourning deeper than his own. She was of a tall, gaunt, angular figure, and a face that never could have been handsome, and now bore evident traces of smallpox in redness ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... consider that he was buried here on account of his literary reputation. But this was not the case. At one time a favourite of kings, Chaucer was also a connection by marriage with his powerful patron John of Gaunt, yet he seems to have died in comparative poverty. He was Clerk of the Works at the royal palace hard by, and a dweller beneath the shadow of the old Lady Chapel; his burial in the adjoining church followed as a matter ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... very night six weeks, the moon was shining brightly over the calm sea, which dashed against the feet of the tall gaunt cliffs, with just enough noise to lull the old fish to sleep, without disturbing the young ones, when two figures were discernible—or would have been, if anybody had looked for them—seated on one of the wooden benches which are stationed ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... her father, and now that he had run off taking all the other men with him, she knew not what to do or which way to turn. To her, thus perched up on the big horse, confused and scared by the tumult, approached a tall, sallow, gaunt old woman, in a huge green sunbonnet, and a butternut gown of coarsest homespun. Her features were strongly marked, but their expression was not unkindly, though just now ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... "I'll have you boys in the Marine Hospital to-night," he informed the poor creatures, and sought the master's cabin. Lying on his bed, fully dressed, he found the skipper of the Chesapeake. The man was gaunt ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... make vivid the panorama we saw from this vantage-ground—the desert in the foreground, and far away against the sky the curiously carved pink and purple and lilac mountains, while immediately below us lay the dry river-bed over which a gaunt raven flew and croaked ominously, and a little beyond rose the various buttes, mauve and terra-cotta colored, from whose sides and at whose bases projected the petrified trees. There lay the giant trees, straight and tapering—no branching as in our trees of to-day. The trunks are often ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... and saw the old man sitting up in his bed, as ghastly as a dead man dug up again: his bushy eyebrows were wrinkled over his bleared old eyes, the long white hair dangled forlorn from his gaunt head: yet was his face smiling and he looked as happy as the soul within him could make the half-dead body. He turned now to ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... BACKGROUND. In such triumphant lines, falling from the lips of that old imperialist John of Gaunt, did Shakespeare reflect, not the rebellious spirit of the age of Richard II, but the boundless enthusiasm of his own times, when the defeat of Spain's mighty Armada had left England "in splendid isolation," unchallenged ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... towering cliffs enclosing the creek became distinguishable against the loftier background of gaunt hills. Into the gap the submarine crept with the utmost caution, until it seemed as if she were on the point of running her nose against the sheer face of the granite wall. The water bubbled slightly as her motors were reversed; then, turning in her own length, she brought ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... away, he uttered a frightful groan, and his convulsed eyes, until the doctors closed them, spoke his regret not to have been able to bequeath to science the key of a mystery whose veil had been tardily torn aside under the gaunt fingers of Death." ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... descended directly from Edward III. The first Duke of York was Edward's fifth son, Edmund Plantagenet; the first Duke of Lancaster was John of Gaunt, the fourth son of the same monarch. Richard II. succeeded his grandfather, Edward III., as the son of Edward the Black Prince, so famed in English chivalry. His arrogance and extravagance soon ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... stranger newly arrived from England, the absence of fresh complexions and of bright and cheerful faces among the male part of the creation is very striking. They are gaunt, sallow, cadaverous looking creatures; their general, far from prepossessing, appearance, in no way improved by the habit of wearing long, straight hair, combed entirely off the face, the bare throat, the never absent 'quid,' and that abominably ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... breakfast. Tom had no sort of objection to whey, but he had a decided liking for curds, which were forbidden as unwholesome; and there was seldom a morning that he did not manage to secure a handful of hard curds, in defiance of Charity and of the farmer's wife. The latter good soul was a gaunt, angular woman, who, with an old black bonnet on the top of her head, the strings dangling about her shoulders, and her gown tucked through her pocket-holes, went clattering about the dairy, cheese-room, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... With an effort, the head lifted. Ivan was gazing into a pair of clear, blue eyes, and realizing that there was no taint of vodka in the other's breath. Nay! That face spoke of very different things. Youth was there, and hardship, and suffering, and discouragement. More than that, the gaunt pallor of face and lips, the sharp outline of jaw and cheek-bone, told of want, great and immediate. They were signs that Ivan knew well. The fellow was in the final ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... was moved by the man's evident feeling. He had not struck me as an emotional man,—rather, at first, he gave me the impression of being somewhat hard and callous. His deep-set eyes, high cheek-bones, and tall gaunt form, suggested one of those men who was as hard as nails, and who could see his own mother die without a quiver ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... simplicity, has an impress of sincerity that reminds you of the drawings of Holbein. Flat pools of shallow water lie about, carpeted with mosses and mirroring the sky; the smoke of the huts rises upward gaunt and straight. No one is near; there are no passers-by; and there is no sound, except that of a waterfall, fuller in its rush than at any other season. Silence—a silence so fragile that the step of a single wayfarer on the road would be enough to break it—reigns undisturbed, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... started back as they beheld a tall, gaunt man, dressed in deer-hides, who stood leaning upon a long gun with his eyes fixed upon them. His face was bronzed and weather-beaten—indeed so dark that it was difficult to say if he were of ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... slowed down and stopped although the engine was still throbbing wildly, and the dainty veil of blue smoke still streamed forward from the back of the car before a gentle breeze. The doctor got out almost precipitately, followed by a gaunt madman, mouthing vileness, who had only a minute or so before been a decent British citizen. He made some blind lunges at the tremulous but obdurate car, but rather as if he looked for offences and accusations than for displacements ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... had been sleeping in his clothes, and he had that peculiar look of discomfort which always accompanies such rest. His black, elfish, uncombed locks, had not been cut since he left Durbelliere, and his beard for many days had not been shorn. He was wretchedly thin and gaunt; indeed, his hollow, yellow cheeks, and cadaverous jaws, almost told a tale of utter starvation. Across his face he had an ugly cicatrice, not the relic of any honourable wound, but given him by the Chevalier's stick, when he struck him in the parlour at Durbelliere. Nothing could be more wretched ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... wretched afternoon was ending, and preparations to close were in progress, a pale, thin girl, with a strange and rather reckless look, came in, and, sitting down before Belle, fixed her gaunt eyes upon her. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... when we were strangely interrupted. While we had been conversing, there stood before me, in the midst of the floor of the apartment, a man, whose figure, face, and demeanor were such that I hardly could withdraw my eye from him. He was tall and gaunt, beyond all I ever saw, and erect as a Praetorian in the ranks. His face was strongly Roman, thin and bony, with sunken cheeks, a brown and wrinkled skin—not through age, but exposure—and eyes more wild and fiery than ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... struck with it right and left. My first blow beat down a wolf close to my feet, when its hungry companions immediately set upon it, and with fearful yelps and snarls began tearing it to pieces; but others still came on, gaunt, starving animals, barking savagely. Another wolf was on the point of springing at my throat, when I happily struck that down also; but several were at the same time making at Rose and Letty. My courage rose to desperation. I must save them even though I were ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... ceased to interest us. The illness, destitution, and suffering that obtained among these people has never been adequately depicted. For one outfit with healthy looking members and adequate cattle there were dozens conducted by hollow-eyed, gaunt men, drawn by few weak animals. Women trudged wearily, carrying children. And the tales they brought were terrible. They told us of thousands they had left behind in the great desert of the Humboldt Sink, fighting starvation, disease, and the loss of cattle. Women who had lost their ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... warriors. Henry knew that they would come fast, and Mr. Pennypacker, old and not used to the ways of the wilderness, could go but slowly. Although Long Jim was sure to be ready, the embarkation would be dangerous. It was evident that Mr. Pennypacker, extremely gaunt and thin, was exhausted already by a long march and other hardships. Now he ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... his opaque shining eyes would seem to deny,) he might have thought it was not unapt or ill-placed even in the shabby, scuffed coat. A scholar, a gentleman, though in patched shoes and trousers a world too short. Old and gaunt, hunger-bitten even it may be, with loose-jointed, bony limbs, and yellow face; clinging, loyal and brave, to the quaint, delicate fancies of his youth, that were dust and ashes to other men. In the very haggard face you could find the quiet purity of the child he had been, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... writing, and presently the waiter ushered in a tall, gaunt woman, with a rugged, hard-featured face, dressed in the rustiest black, and carrying ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... sunburnt stranger was gaunt and brown, But it soon appeared that he meant to flout The iron law of the country town, Which is — that the stranger has got to shout: 'If he will not shout we must take him down,' Remarked the yokels ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... himself and tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of Freedom Smith's house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the darkness ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... everybody's way; and to get out of it, I crawl into a dark, draughty corner and crouch there among cinders. Around me, great engines fiercely strain and pant like living things fighting beyond their strength. Their gaunt arms whirl madly above me, and the ground rocks with their throbbing. Dark figures flit to and fro, pausing from time to time to wipe the black ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... him. There was something strange and unfamiliar about the river to-night. It had a voice, too, which allured and repelled him—a voice at the sound of which the grim despair within him stirred ominously at first, and then began slowly to rise up gaunt and terrible; began to move stealthily, but with ever-increasing swiftness through the deserted ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... gaunt Jack North, of the One Hundred and Fourteenth Illinois, to me, one day, as we sat contemplating our naked, and sadly attenuated underpinning; "what do our legs and feet most ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the fiercest and most irreconcilable Boers, who still waged a hopeless guerrilla warfare against all the might of the British Empire. As one English paper dramatically phrases it: "One used to see pictures of Botha in the illustrated papers in those days, a gaunt, bearded, formidable figure, with rifle and bandoliers—the most dangerous of our foes. To-day he is the chief servant of the King in the Federation, the loyal head of the Administration under the Crown, one of the half-dozen Prime Ministers ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... my hair rise to hear him, with the big, still, solemn desert outside, and the quiet moonlight, and the shadows, and him sitting up straight and gaunt, his eyes blazing each side his big eagle nose, and his snaky hair hanging over the raw cut across his head. However, I made out to get him bandaged up and in shape; and pretty soon he ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... the true spirit of romantic story, give some account of the looks and equipments of my hero and his steed. The animal he bestrode was a broken-down plough-horse that had outlived almost everything but his viciousness. He was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck and a head like a hammer; his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burrs; one eye had lost its pupil and was glaring and spectral, but the other had the gleam of a genuine devil in it. Still, he must have had fire and mettle in his ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... needs must say't o't, The Lord be thankit that we've tint the gate o't! Gaunt, ghastly, ghaist-alluring edifices, Hanging with threat'ning jut, like precipices; O'er-arching, mouldy, gloom-inspiring coves, Supporting roofs, fantastic, stony groves; Windows and doors in nameless sculptures ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... looked more like brown parchment than ever, as she sat in the lamplight, my old blue dressing-gown folded negligently round her, and taking picturesque folds which it never did when I was inside it. Those long, gaunt limbs must have been graceful once. Her feet were bare in her slippers—in my slippers, I mean. She looked ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... familiar door. Her very limbs shook as she went lightly along the dark passage and pushed open the kitchen door. It was unchanged, yet somehow sadly changed. A desolateness chilled her to the soul as she looked round the wide, gaunt place, saw the feeble fire choking in the grate, and the remains of a poor meal on the uncovered table. The light struggling through the barred windows had never looked upon a more cheerless picture. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... maples put on the splendid robes of Autumn, the pines, more gaunt and desolate than ever, covered the ground with a dense fabric of needles, lacking in fragrance. When the winds grew cool, and the Little People of the Forest pattered swiftly through the dead and scurrying leaves, there was no sound from ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... of Richard's character. When he began to write the play he evidently intended to portray Richard as even more detestable than history and tradition had presented him. In Holinshed Richard is not accused of the murder of Gloster, whereas Shakespeare directly charges him with it, or rather makes Gaunt do so, and the accusation is not denied, much less disproved. At the close of the first act we are astonished by the revelation of Richard's devilish heartlessness. The King hearing that his uncle, John of Gaunt, is "grievous sick," ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... The house also was shabby and third-rate—with its poor little glimpse of the sea. Although larger than the Cedars, it was noticeably smaller and meaner than any house on the promenade, and whereas the Cedars was detached, No. 59 was not even semi-detached, but one of a gaunt, tall row of stuccoed and single-fronted dwellings. It looked like a boarding-house (which the Cedars did not), and not all the style of George Cannon's suit and cane and manner, as he mounted the steps, nor the polish of his new brass-plate, could redeem it from the disgrace ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... before the great house that loomed gaunt and eerie in the gathering darkness the galloping hoofs drew near again, and before they were out of the ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... not that gaunt Professor Noting his man; that stark Assessor Of faulty play in the bat's possessor Clapped for his foeman, We who had seen that figure splendid Guarding the stumps so well defended Wept and cheered when by craft was ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... with a start, rubbing her eyes. Gaunt and grey in the first dim light of morning, Aunt Matilda stood over her, clad in ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... a sick room aspect. The light was lowered and the table was littered with bandages and bottles. Lydia crept up to the couch and stood looking down at the gaunt, quiet figure. ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... to avoid the anxious inquiring gaze of her sister, drew her chair to the fire, and folding her gaunt arms, composed ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... yourself. Those who once shared the knowledge with you are dead, or many years gone! Your evil genius no doubt knows it, and all your secrets; but dream not that she will liberate you. She has been awaiting this opportunity. You shall remain here to-night and many nights. Your bones shall lie gaunt on this cobwebbed floor. Only the daily sunbeam shall know of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... of land did she see actually before her? Dry and shadeless hill-sides, tilled with obtrusive tilth to their topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary olive-groves silvering to the wind, in interminable terraces; long suburbs, unlovely in their gaunt, bare squalor, stretching like huge arms of some colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and shoulders of that desecrated mountain. No woods, no moss, no coolness, no greenery; all nature toned down to one monotonous grayness. And this dreary ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... man was beside himself with anger and fear; he rose from the bed and stood upright, a gaunt, wasted figure. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... mildew that stained the ghastly gaunt angels who kept guard over the dust of the dead wife, extended yet further than the silent territory over which sexton and mattock reigned, for one dreary December night, instead of nestling for a post-prandial nap among the velvet cushions of his luxurious parlor, Daniel Grey, capitalist, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... standing fast by the bridge, the manorial appendage of the town, which I loved in my boyhood for its gaunt and crazy aspect and dim interior, whence the clapper kept time mysteriously to the drone of the mill-sluice? I think it is gone. Surely that confounded thing can't be my venerable ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... heart. It is often too the heartlessness and prejudice of those who oppose the benefactor's plans that causes the generous man anxiety and even at times despair. Poverty in its worst form is a gaunt and ravenous beast, that bites the hand of friend or foe that is stretched out toward it. So Lord Selkirk found it, when he undertook to help the poverty-stricken Celts of the Scottish Highlands and of the West of Ireland. He had the sympathising heart; he had the true ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... the inhuman hour of 5.55 a.m., the train crept out of Sousse: sixteen miles an hour is its prescribed pace. The weather grew sensibly colder as we rose into the uplands, a stricken region, tree-less and water-less, with gaunt brown hills receding into the background; by midday, when Sbeitla was reached, it was blowing a hurricane. I had hoped to wander, for half an hour or so, among the ruins of this old city of Suffetula, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Waynesburg took a fair girl, "all bathed in blushes," from her parents, and started for the first town across the Pennsylvania line to be married, where the ceremony could be performed without a license. The happy pair were accompanied by a sister of the girl, a tall, gaunt, and sharp-featured female of some thirty-seven summers. The pair crossed the line, were married, and returned to Wellsville to pass the night. People at the hotel where the wedding party stopped observed that they conducted themselves in a rather singular manner. The husband would take ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... scavengers, these pigs. Ugly brutes they are; having, for the most part, scanty brown backs, like the lids of old horsehair trunks: spotted with unwholesome black blotches. They have long, gaunt legs, too, and such peaked snouts, that if one of them could be persuaded to sit for his profile, nobody would recognise it for a pig's likeness. They are never attended upon, or fed, or driven, or caught, but are thrown upon their own resources ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... gloom of the upper turn where the flying figure was lost in the deep shade of the trees. One shadow detached itself from the others and appeared at the head of the straightaway. The muffled thud of hoofs became audible, rising in swift crescendo as the shadow resolved itself into a gaunt bay horse with a tiny negro boy crouched motionless in the saddle. A rush, a flurry, a spatter of clods, a low-flying drift of yellow dust and the vision passed, but the Bald-faced Kid had seen enough to compensate him for the early hours ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... the moor or the lonely shore, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes bent on the ground. Morva watched him from the door of her cottage, and often, as the morning mists evaporated in curling wisps before the rising sun, the sad, gaunt figure would emerge from the shadows and pass over the moorland path. Then would Morva waylay him with a ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... tall, straight woman, elderly, dressed entirely in black, with gaunt, aristocratic features and great directness of speech. She had the fine kind of hauteur which forbids persons of this type ever to speak of money, of disease, of scandal, or of too intimate personalities; in Madame Reynier's case it also restrained her from every sort of exaggerated speech. She ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," he pronounced ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Amenti—the under world—in presence of the four genii of that realm, and of forty-two assessors. To this judgment the shade was conducted by Horus, who carried him past Cerberus, a hippopotamus, the gaunt guardian of the gate. He stood by in silence while Anubis weighed his heart in the scales of justice. If his good works preponderated, he was dismissed to the fields of Aahlu—the Elysian Fields; if his evil, he was ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... there was an intangible something which marked him out as a child of the same parents. The brother on whom Margot was now gazing was considerably the younger of the two, and might have been handsome, given a trifle more flesh and animation. As it was, he looked gaunt and livid, and his shoulders were rounded, as with much stooping over ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... all Monday in which to lay his plans before the final evacuation, if evacuation there must be. The enemy had miscalculated. He figured it out two or three times over, made sure he was right, and went to bed in his large gaunt bedroom with a sense ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... away, out of sight of the rectory in a fold of the hill was this great gaunt building, erected, so popular gossip said, by one who had been crossed in love and desired to live the life of a recluse, a desire which was respected by the superstitious town-folk of Great Bradley. The Secret House had been built in the hollow ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... locks; the merry god, I trow, Uses no grizzled cords upon his bow. How will it be when I, no longer fair, Plead for his kiss with cheeks whence long ago The early snowflakes melted quite away, The rose leaf died—and in whose sallow clay Lie the deep sunken tracks of life's gaunt crow? ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... unwholesome skin, that not a bone in the anatomy was clothed, and I could clasp the arm above the elbow, in my finger and thumb. Here, lay a man with the black scurvy eating his legs away, his gums gone, and his teeth all gaunt and bare. This bed was empty, because gangrene had set in, and the patient had died but yesterday. That bed was a hopeless one, because its occupant was sinking fast, and could only be roused to turn the poor pinched mask of face upon the pillow, with a feeble moan. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... no more startling contrast could be presented by two men born under the same flag. John Brown with his bristling, unkempt beard, his two revolvers and sword hanging and dangling on his gaunt frame, his eyes glittering and red from the loss of two nights' sleep, the incarnation of Lawlessness; Lee, the trained soldier, the inheritor of centuries of constructive genius, the aristocrat in taste, the humblest and gentlest ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... the original power of the work was forever destroyed. If the reader will look carefully beneath the white touches on the left in this sea, he will discern dimly the form of a round nodding hollow breaker. This in the early state of the plate is a gaunt, dark, angry wave, rising at the shoal indicated by the buoy;—Mr. Lupton has fac-similed with so singular skill the scratches of the penknife by which Turner afterwards disguised this breaker, and spoiled his ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... Whittier. He had been present at my graduation from the theological school, and now he often attended our suffrage meetings. He was already an old man, nearing the end of his life; and I recall him as singularly tall and thin, almost gaunt, bending forward as he talked, and wearing an expression of great serenity and benignity. I once told Susan B. Anthony that if I needed help in a crowd of strangers that included her, I would immediately turn to her, knowing from her ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... allowed to perform it by deputy. In 1386 he was a member of Parliament, knight of the shire for Kent; but in that year his fortune turned—he lost all his offices at the overthrow of the faction of his patron, Duke John of Gaunt (uncle of the young king, Richard II, who had succeeded his grandfather, Edward III, some years before). Chaucer's party and himself were soon restored to power, but although during the remaining dozen years ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... shearing, sheds, tracks, and a little unionism—the Lachlan speaking in a quiet voice and with a lot of sound, common sense, it seemed to me. He was tall and gaunt, and might have been thirty, or even well on in the forties. His eyes were dark brown and deep set, and had something of the dead-earnest sad expression you saw in the eyes of union leaders and secretaries—the straight men of the strikes ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... lame and in distress and Nagger was growing gaunt and showing strain; and Slone, haggard and black and worn, plodded miles and miles on ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... He took deep drafts from his cigarette. The smoke seemed to impel some terrific force into his gaunt frame. ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... amidst the bellowing of another deep-bosomed cloud-monster, she knew that he had entered the room. A moment after, a continuous pulsation of angry blue light began, which, lasting for some moments, revealed him standing amidst them, gaunt, haggard, and motionless; his hair and beard untrimmed, his face ghastly, his eyes large and hollow. The light seemed to gather around him as a centre. Indeed some believed that it throbbed and ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... running on McMurtagh; and a robuster grin than usual encouraged even others than his chartered pensioners to come up to him for largess. Mr. Bowdoin's eyes wandered from the orange-woman to the telescope-man, and thence to an old elm with one gaunt dead limb that stretched out over the dawn. It was very pleasant that summer morning, and he felt no hurry to go ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... the whisperings of the night wind through the trees forced meanings on the expecting ear. I came to hear voices in the air, words so clearly spoken that even an incredulous mind could not ignore them. I sat in my boat one evening, out on the lake, watching the effects of the sky between the gaunt pines which, under the prevalence of the west winds, grew up with an easterly inclination of their tops, like that of a man walking, and thus seemed to be marching eastward into the gathering darkness. They gave a sudden impression of a procession, and I heard as distinctly ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... tall might easily have frightened Mr. Wordsley into a nervous breakdown by staring at him with that gaunt, hollow-eyed stare, but this creature, though manlike, was fully fifty feet tall, incredibly elongated, and stark naked. Its hair was long and matted; its cheeks sunken, its lips pulled back in an expression which might have been anything from a ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... who came to settle this region were a stalwart race, the men usually six feet in height, the women gaunt and prolific. They were descendants of English, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish who landed along the Atlantic coast at the close of the sixteenth century—around 1635, when the oppression of rulers drove them from England, Scotland, and Ireland. Some ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... railroad station through a long, lonely suburb, with dusty rows of stunted trees on either side, and some few miserable beggars, idle boys, and ragged old women under them. Behind the trees are gaunt, moldy houses; palaces once, where (in the days of the unbought grace of life) the cheap defense of nations gambled, ogled, swindled, intrigued; whence high-born duchesses used to issue, in old times, to act as chambermaids to lovely Du Barri; and mighty princes ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of Miracles," said Sanchez, hastening from the room as the gaunt figure of the old man rose, like a sheeted spectre, from the bed, "that was his old self again! Blessed San Antonio! Pereo ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... by a reliable witness. We did hear from her, and from officers who saw the rebel soldiers at Harper's Ferry, of the pitiable condition of some of the infantry, of their naked, bleeding feet, and their gaunt looks. Our landlady affirmed that we could not find a dog in the neighborhood; for they had gone before the rebel hordes in the way that such flesh disappears before the Chinese and Pacific Islanders. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... cheapest grains, and weigh them to the last fraction of an ounce. Rigidly exclude from the poor man's bill of fare any of the relishes which he so much esteems, and the cost of which is so insignificant as to be hardly worth mentioning, and yet you will find legions of gaunt, hungry men, women and children, who would greedily accept your offered regimen to-morrow, if you could only discover the wherewithal for obtaining the same, and who would gladly pay for it with the hardest and ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... already messing harmoniously together. With them I took up my quarters, and, under the liberal and wholesome gastronomic arrangements of the establishment, soon acquired my usual semi-embon-point condition, and recovered from that gaunt, hungry appearance that the hardships and scant fare of the journey from Constantinople had imparted. The house belonged to Mr. North, and he managed to give me a little room to myself for literary work, and, under the influence ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... life found silent history. She felt that her life was passing rapidly, unimproved, and aimless; she knew that her years, instead of being fragrant with the mellow fruitage of good deeds, were tedious and joyless, and that the gaunt, numbing hand of ennui was closing upon her. The elasticity of spirits, the buoyancy of youth had given place to a species of stoical mute apathy; a mental and moral paralysis was stealing ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... or three minutes presented an extraordinary spectacle. Chief Justice Marshall, with his tall and gaunt figure, bent over as if to catch the slightest whisper, the deep furrows of his cheek expanded with emotion, and eyes suffused with tears. Mr. Justice Washington at his side,—with his small and emaciated frame, and countenance more like marble than I ever saw on any ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... few carried muskets, but I saw several wantonly throw their pieces into the flood, and as the mass were unarmed, I inferred that they had made similar dispositions. Fear, anguish, cowardice, despair, disgust, were the predominant expressions of the upturned faces. The gaunt trees, towering from the current, cast a solemn shadow upon the moving throng, and as the evening dimness was falling around them, it almost seemed that they were engulfed in some cataract. I reined my horse close to the side ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... probably belonging to the same party, but scattered in the heat of the chase. Altogether, there must have been as many as fifteen or twenty of them. A tall, wild-looking savage, large-framed, but gaunt as a greyhound, and with a kind of fierce energy in all his movements, seemed to be the leader of the pursuing party. Just below us on the beach, he turned and gave some order to a portion of his followers, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... afternoon the weather changed. The New Year had come in smiling, mild as April, dust in the roads, a blue sky overhead. The withered goldenrod and gaunt mullein stalks and dead asters by the wayside almost seemed to bloom again, while the winter wheat gave an actual vernal touch. The long column, winding somewhere—no one knew where, but anyhow on the Pugh Town Road and in a northwesterly direction (even Old Jack couldn't keep them from ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... and the coasting skippers are taking risks to get to their berths before the stevedores have picked their men. In the shipyards workmen are beginning their day's toil, the lowe of their flares light up the gaunt structures of ships to be. Sharp at the last wailing note of the whistle, the din of strenuous work begins, and we are fittingly drummed down the reaches to a merry tune of clanging hammers—the shipyard chorus "Let ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... like phantoms from another world, so pale and grisly were they, faint from their wounds, their hair and beard unkempt, their armour stained, and neglected, as men must look who had hardly slept without their weapons for more than three memorable months. As they saw these gaunt heroes the rescuers burst into tears; strangers clasped hands and wept together with the same overpowering emotion that mastered relievers and relieved when Havelock and Colin Campbell led the Highlanders into Lucknow. Never surely had men deserved more nobly ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... worm-eaten chair, in which John of Gaunt had sat; and I remember that while Lady de Brantefield expressed her just indignation against the worms, for having dared to attack this precious relique, I, kneeling to the chair, admired the curious fretwork, the dusty honeycombs, which these invisible ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... smiled, for she thought Zinti lost; also she did not believe it possible that Sihamba could have recognized him from such a distance. Still before two hours were over Zinti came, gaunt and footsore, but healthy and unharmed, and sitting down before Suzanne in her private enclosure, began at the very beginning of his long story, after the native fashion, telling of those things which had befallen him upon the day when he left the mountain nearly ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... boards, Philo Gubb, paper-hanger and student of the Rising Sun Detective Agency's Correspondence School of Detecting, tiptoed to the door of the bedroom he shared with the mysterious Mr. Critz. In appearance Mr. Gubb was tall and gaunt, reminding one of a modern Don Quixote or a human flamingo; by nature Mr. Gubb was the gentlest and most simple-minded of men. Now, bending his long, angular body almost double, he placed his eye to a crack in the door panel and stared into the room. Within, just out ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... salt-water boils. All hands, with the exception of Kettle—who remained, as usual, neat—grew gaunt, bearded, dirty, and unkempt. They were grimed with sea-salt, they were flayed with violent suns; but by dint of hard schooling they were becoming handy sailormen, all of them, and even the negro stonemason learned to obey an order without first thinking ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... which position was equal in honor and dignity to that of Prophet or High Priest. He was a busy, hard-worked man, black haired and gaunt, small of stature and fiery eyed; he looked rather like an overworked department-store manager rather than like a prophet. He was finding his hands more full every day, both because of the extraordinary fertility of his own plans and ideas, and because ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... and he began to meet folk on the way, though not many; since for most their way lay afield, and not towards the Burg. The first was a Woodlander, tall and gaunt, striding beside his ass, whose panniers were laden with charcoal. The carle's daughter, a little maiden of seven winters, riding on the ass's back betwixt the panniers, and prattling to herself in the cold morning; for she was pleased with ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... "maybe not the gaunt squalor and starvation of London or Paris or New York; the climate does not tolerate that,—stamps it out before it can assume dimensions; but there is at least misery of that sort that needs recognition and aid from ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Parisian secondhand booksellers on the Quai Malaquais; at home on the writing-desk, a page of carefully prepared manuscript, yet sometimes covered by cigarette-ashes; upon the wall, sketches by Jules Lefebvre and Jules Breton; a little in the distance, the gaunt form of his attentive sister and companion, Annette, occupied with household cares, ever fearful of disturbing him. Within this tranquil domicile can be heard the noise of the Parisian faubourg with its thousand different dins; the bustle of the ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... satisfactory conclusion by the lawyer of the company, and when that gentleman was rubbing his hands over his easy victory, the good ship Gibrontus was steaming out of the Mersey on her way to New York. The stewards in the grand saloon were busy getting things in order for dinner, when a wan and gaunt passenger ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... key; and they knew when a crisis had come, when they did not know what it was. And somehow they knew subconsciously that the whole tale had taken a new and terrible turn, when they saw the prince stand in the gap of the gaunt trees, in his robes of angry crimson and with his lowering face of bronze, bearing in his hand a new shape of death. They could not have named a reason, but the two swords seemed indeed to have become toy swords and the ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... thunderbolt, the heavy column, already warned, was to seek the Union left, and strike a Stonewall Jackson blow. Its march will be covered by the friendly woods. The keen-eyed adjutants are already warning the captains of every detail of the attack. Calm and unmoved, the gaunt centurions of the thinned host accepted the honorable charges of the forlorn hope. Valois' powder-seasoned fragment of the army was a "corps d'elite." Peyton wondered, as he watched his suffering colonel, if either would see another sparkling ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... summer's day. It is within a mile of the little burg of Zell, where the people, in the time of their emperor's peril, came out with torches and bells, and the Host lifted up by their priest, and all prayed on their knees underneath the steep gaunt pile of limestone, that is the same to-day as it was then, whilst Kaiser Max is dust; it soars up on one side of this road, very steep and very majestic, having bare stone at its base, and being all along its summit crowned with pine woods; ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... toil his way. When he was eight he had carried a long route of the daily paper and he could feel now the chill dark air out into which he had slipped as his mother stood at the door and watched him down the street with sad and hungry eyes, the gaunt mother who had never smiled. He had fought and punched and scuffled in the dawn for his bundle of papers; and he had fought and scuffled for all he had got of life for many years. But a result had come—and it was rich. How he had managed an education ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... it quite deserted—the gaunt wolf and coyote alone occupying the ground, disputing with each other possession of the hide and bones of a horse—the debris of ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... bench and ponder over all this, and am sad enough. I loathe myself. My very hands seem distasteful to me; the loose, almost coarse, expression of the backs of them pains me, disgusts me. I feel myself rudely affected by the sight of my lean fingers. I hate the whole of my gaunt, shrunken body, and shrink from bearing it, from feeling it envelop me. Lord, if the whole thing would come to an end now, I ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... pell-mell out upon the porch. Stewart, dark-browed and somber, was in the lead. Nels hung close to him, and Madeline's quick glance saw that Nels had undergone some indescribable change. The grinning, brilliant-eyed Don Carlos came jostling out beside a gaunt, sharp-featured man wearing a silver shield. This, no doubt, was Pat Hawe. In the background behind Stillwell and Alfred stood Nick Steele, head and shoulders over a number ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... from the house was a tall, gaunt man, engaged in mending a fence. He was dressed in a farmer's blue frock and overalls, and his gray, stubby beard seemed to be of a week's growth. There was a crafty, greedy look in his eyes, which overlooked ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... I was reading in the same room with General Harper that there entered one day a tall, gaunt, square-shouldered, spare, light mulatto, who announced himself as Abel Hurd. He was a Bostonian by birth, and a seaman by profession. In a voyage to the East his vessel had been captured by the Malays, and he alone, if I recollect rightly, escaped ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... of grey-haired Nick, with her trick of seeing nothing but the best in everybody, transforming everybody into saints, angels, and geniuses. Her smiles and her tones were irresistible. They were like the wand of some magical princess come to break a sinister thrall. They nearly humanised the gaunt parlourmaid, who stood grimly and primly waiting until these tedious sentimental preliminaries should cease from interfering with her duties ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... the more laughable: the spare and bony figure of the cadet, sitting bolt upright like a graven image in a tight uniform, with his eyes glued to the ceiling of his barrack-room, or the young man, with gaunt features, round shoulders, and uncombed hair, who wandered alone about the streets of ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... very strange man, apparently of great age, for his long white hair fell down upon his shoulders, and his white beard reached to his middle. Once he must have been very tall, but now he was bent with age, and the bones of his gaunt frame thrust out his ragged garments. His dark eyes also were horny, indeed it seemed as though he could scarcely see with them, for he leaned forward to peer at their faces where they lay. His face was scored by a thousand wrinkles, and almost ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... If he could in some way induce the wolf-man to bring his rifle into the cabin the matter would be easy. With Bram out of the way he could shoot the wolves one by one from the window. Without a weapon their situation would be hopeless. The pack—with the exception of one huge, gaunt beast directly under the window—had swung around the end of the cabin out of his vision. The remaining wolf in spite of the excitement of battle was gnawing hungrily at a bone. Philip could hear the savage grind of its powerful jaws, ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... tall, gaunt Jack North, of the One Hundred and Fourteenth Illinois, to me, one day, as we sat contemplating our naked, and sadly attenuated underpinning; "what do our legs and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... wonderful acumen, the gaunt gentleman seized the insinuating situation, and considering himself summarily dismissed, he edged away by stealthy strides and left me ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... night at a house in the country I found myself sitting under photographs of the late General and Countess Nogi and of the gaunt bloodstained room of the depressing "foreign style" house in which they committed suicide on the day of the funeral of the Emperor Meiji[46]. One of my fellow-guests was a professor at the Imperial University; the other was a teacher of ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... army was indeed forlorn. It was worn down by marching and fighting; the men had scarcely shoes upon their feet; and, above the tattered figures, flaunting their rags in the sunshine, were seen gaunt and begrimed faces, in which could be read little of the "romance of war." The army was in no condition to undertake an invasion; "lacking much of the material of war, feeble in transportation, poorly provided with ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... burning wood. Daylight came. All hands were on foot. The wounded man appeared to be no worse. A sad change had taken place in the once picturesque appearance of the surrounding scenery. In the place of the green wood, with many noble trees, a few blackened stems, gaunt and branchless, with still smouldering ashes at their base, were the only objects to be seen on the hillside. The Gilpins scarcely liked to keep Craven and his companion from their posts, though at the same time they felt the importance of having a sufficient guard ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... old tree and must have guarded that sylvan spot for centuries. The gnarled and knotted trunk was scarred and seamed with the ravages of time. The upper part was dead. Long limbs extended skyward, gaunt and bare, like the masts of a storm beaten vessel. The lower branches were white and shining, relieved here and there by brown patches of bark which curled up like old parchment as they shelled away from the inner bark. The ground beneath the tree ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... erected a monument to his memory. Has the reader ever sailed up the Thames, beyond Westminster? And does he remember a little spot of garden-ground, walled in by dingy houses, that lies upon the right bank of the river near to Chelsea Hospital? If he can recall two gaunt, flat-topped cedars which sentinel the walk leading to the river-gate, he will have the spot in his mind, where, nearly two hundred years ago, and a full century before the Kew parterres were laid down, the Chelsea ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... 23rd.—Owing to a variety of causes, we are short of tonnage, and unless we manage to grow more and consume less we shall before very long be within reach of the gaunt finger of Famine. That was the burden of the PRIME MINISTER'S appeal to the Nation. The farmer is to have a guaranteed minimum price for his produce, the agricultural labourer is to be raised to comparative affluence by a minimum wage of 25s. a week, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... said. "I fain would show Thee what thou hast not seen in the warm glow Of thy glad home. This blighted shore of mine No verdure hath, nor bloom, nor fruits that shine 'Mong drooping boughs. Far inland gloom lone peaks O'er blackened meads; or from their bare cones leaps Gaunt, crackling flame; or crawl like ashen veins The smouldering fires across the stricken plains. Deep in these yawning caves black shadows lie That shall be lifted never more. Come, I Enter! Know thou what treasure by the sea I gathered other time." Therewith ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... could not go into the hall, the "strange woman" was walking backwards and forwards in so frightful a manner. Lady Kingsburgh therefore went herself, but stopped short at the door on seeing the stranger, whose aspect seems to have been unusually gaunt and unwomanly. Her husband, however, bade her go in for her keys, and at last she found courage ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... time he stood listening to the long-drawn and savage howl, thinned out by the distance and mist, but he knew that it was coming nearer, and that the animal that was making it was not only hungry, but that it was a master wolf. It was none of the gaunt, half-starved, cowardly brutes that follow in the pack and take what the master wolf leaves of the scraps of the murdered calf or sick cow or sheep which the leaders of the ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... moreover, to see what I could of the people, rather than to scrutinize the ways of the army. We dined at the tent of General Ashboth, and afterward rode his horses through the camp back to Rolla, I was greatly taken with this Hungarian gentleman. He was a tall, thin, gaunt man of fifty, a pure-blooded Magyar a I was told, who had come from his own country with Kossuth to America. His camp circumstances were not very luxurious, nor was his table very richly spread; but he received us with the ease and courtesy ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... Aasta drew yet farther back her hand was caught by another hand which drew her gently aside, and from behind the rock appeared the gaunt figure of old Elspeth Blackfell. And Lulach the herd boy, having overcome his fears, crept nearer and ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... when the hall door slowly opened, and Wisagun, gaunt and cadaverous, the very impersonation of famine, slunk into the room, along with Natappe, and seated himself in a corner near the fire. Mr Carles soon obtained from his own lips confirmation of the horrible deed, which he excused by saying that most of his relations had died before ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... which John also had, is manifest indifference to material ease. Silken courtiers do not haunt the desert. Kings' houses, and not either the wilderness or kings' dungeons, are the sunny spots where they spread their plumage. If the gaunt ascetic, with his girdle of camel's hair and his coarse fare, had been a self-indulgent sybarite, his voice would never have shaken a nation. The least breath of suspicion that a preacher is such a man ends his power, and ought to end it; for self-indulgence and the love ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... sixpence to ninepence a day, according to the cost of provisions, was allowed him. On this generous basis he was nourished for a hundred years or more, till one day early in the nineteenth century some half-score of gaunt, hungry wretches, cooped up for eight weary weeks in an East-coast press-room during the rigours of a severe winter, made the startling discovery that the time-honoured allowance was insufficient to keep soul and body together. They accordingly addressed ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... two shot across the river. The third dropped with shut wings to the bare crest of a gaunt old ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... closely, trying to discover if there were any secret signs of the satisfaction which the revolt of the rank and file might be supposed to awaken in an unsuccessful candidate for the official headship of the Red Butte Western. There were none. Hallock's gaunt face, with the loose lips and the straggling, unkempt beard, was a blank; and the worst wreck of the three which promptly followed the introduction of the new rules, was noted in his reports with the calm indifference ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... of annoyance and inquired of the gaunt, hollow-cheeked, muscular Deputy whose beaver overcoat was thrown open so that his gun and powder-flask ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... the sky was cloudless; along the road were passing hundreds of people (though it was only five in the morning) in detachments of from two to nine, with cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats, picturesque enough but miserably lean and gaunt: we leave them to proceed to the fair, and after a three miles' level walk through a straight poplar avenue, commence ascending far above the Romanche; all day long we slowly ascend, stopping occasionally to refresh ourselves with vin ordinaire and water, but ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... took root in the articles he was to write for the Pilgrim. He was in Hall's spare bed-room—a large, square room, empty of all furniture except a camp bedstead. His portmanteau lay wide open in the middle of the floor, and a gaunt fireplace ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... and student of the Rising Sun Detective Agency's Correspondence School of Detecting, tiptoed to the door of the bedroom he shared with the mysterious Mr. Critz. In appearance Mr. Gubb was tall and gaunt, reminding one of a modern Don Quixote or a human flamingo; by nature Mr. Gubb was the gentlest and most simple-minded of men. Now, bending his long, angular body almost double, he placed his eye to a crack in the door panel and stared into the room. Within, just out of the limited area of Mr. ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... khaki joined in the laugh, but a tall gaunt man with an authoritative glance, the Denison referred to, looked rather angry. Miss Heredith, with a hostess's watchful tact for the suspectibilities of her guests, started to talk about a show for allotment holders which ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... warriors were missing from the spectators; many chiefs were absent from the council. And there were some present from whom the others shrunk away, whose hot breath and livid faces showed that they too were stricken with the plague. There were emaciated Indians among the audience, whose gaunt forms and hollow eyes told that they had dragged themselves to the council-grove to die. The wailing of the women at the camp, lamenting those just dead; the howling of the medicine-men in the distance, performing their incantations over the sick; the mysterious sounds that came from the ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... a pung or box-sleigh drew up at the poor-house door, from which was lifted a long, gaunt figure, carefully enveloped in blankets and cloaks. As he was taken from the sleigh, he feebly murmured a few words, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... and the two survivors of this awful journey sat watching each other. The gaunt giant, his eyes gleaming with hate and hunger, sat sentinel over the dwarf. The dwarf, chuckling at his superior sagacity, clutched the fatal axe. For two days they had not spoken to each other. For two days each had promised himself that on the next his companion must sleep—and die. Vetch comprehended ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... has been mismanaged from the first," remarked a sapient-looking man with a gaunt, cadaverous face, addressing two listeners. "The Administration is corrupt; our generals are either incompetent or purposely inefficient. We haven't got an officer that can hold a candle to General Lee. Abraham Lincoln has called ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... in my hand, up to my uncle's room. He met me at the door, dressed in his trousers and shirt, his shirt-sleeves tucked up in order to perform his ablutions, exhibiting his brawny arms, scarred with many a wound,—his grizzled hair uncombed, his tall figure looking even more gaunt than usual without the military coat in which I was accustomed to see him. He ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... from their neglect the dinner had suffered not at all. Cindy, a gaunt, black woman with a fire of service and devotion to Mother Mayberry in her eyes, and apparently nothing else to excuse existence, had accomplished ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... twenty-five hundred miles to Bering Sea, traversing an almost unknown region, the remote recesses of which had never felt the moccasined foot of the pathfinder. At occasional intervals men wallowed into its dismal fastnesses, or emerged gaunt and famine-worn. But in the fall of 1896 a great gold strike was made—greater than any since the days of California and Australia; yet, so rude were the means of communication, nearly a year elapsed ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... already grown gaunt and haggard, and each scanty meal had been further cut down to the smallest portion which would keep life and power of movement within them. Still, though the weight of it hampered him almost intolerably, Wyllard clung to the one rifle that they ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... I saw several wantonly throw their pieces into the flood, and as the mass were unarmed, I inferred that they had made similar dispositions. Fear, anguish, cowardice, despair, disgust, were the predominant expressions of the upturned faces. The gaunt trees, towering from the current, cast a solemn shadow upon the moving throng, and as the evening dimness was falling around them, it almost seemed that they were engulfed in some cataract. I reined my horse close to the side of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... at last, which was the best that any lover could have wished her. But he lived on, embittered, vengeful, with gall in his veins instead of blood. He was the pale, faded shadow of that arrogant, reckless, joyous Antonio Perez beloved of Fortune. He was fifty, gaunt, hollow-eyed, and grey, half crippled by torture, sickly from long ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... Anjou—that court of minstrels—young Edward's gallant and ardent temper had become deeply imbued with the southern poetry and romance. Perhaps the very feud between his House and Lord Warwick's, though both claimed their common descent from John of Gaunt, had tended, by the contradictions in the human heart, to endear to him the recollection of the gentle Anne. He obeyed with joy the summons of Louis, repaired to the court, was presented to Anne as the Count de F——, found himself recognized ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our side, Falter, are lost in the storm. We, we only are left! With frowning foreheads, with lips 105 Sternly compress'd, we strain on, On—and at nightfall at last Come to the end of our way, To the lonely inn 'mid the rocks; Where the gaunt and taciturn host 110 Stands on the threshold, the wind Shaking his thin white hairs— Holds his lantern to scan Our storm-beat figures, and asks: Whom in our party we bring? 115 Whom we have left ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... dinner was served promptly at that hour. I was taken into the dining-room by Mr. Philip Griffith, one of the Secretaries of the British Legation. We had just finished our second course when, to the surprise of everyone, a tall and gaunt gentleman was ushered into the dining-room. It was Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, then a member of Congress and subsequently Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy. Mr. Everett at once arose and shook hands with Mr. Stephens and with an imperturbable expression of countenance ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... possibilities. It involves the physical attractiveness of every woman in History and permits one to speculate wildly as to what might have happened if Cleopatra had weighed forty pounds heavier, if Elizabeth had been a gaunt and wiry creature, or if Joan of Arc had been so bulky that she could not ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... a quilt was thrown in a fantastic manner, under which appeared a long night-gown, from which thin bare legs protruded, with bare, gaunt, skeleton-like feet. ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... smiling, Straight I wheel'd a cushion'd seat in front of bird, and bust, and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore— What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... Does gaunt poverty surround thee, With its pale and meagre train? Do they gather closely round thee, Want, and suffering and pain? Mourn not, for the chilly dew-drops, Fell upon thy Master's bed; Mourn not, for the Prince of Glory Had not where to lay ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... frost Up the mountains to be lost, Lost. No better now may be, Lost where mighty hollows thrust 'Twixt the fierce teeth of the world, Fill themselves with crimson dust When the tumbling sun down hurl'd Stares among them drearily, As a' wondering at the lone Gulfs that weird gaunt company Fenceth in. Lost there unknown, Lineage, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... Gaunt and dreary ran the mountains, With black gorges, up the land; Up to where the lonely Desert Spreads her burning, dreary sand: In the gorges of the mountains, On the plain beside the sea, Dwelt my stern and cruel masters, The black ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... in. At midnight one would have thought no new development in the life of the cafe was likely to take place, but the musician brought into the room such a crush of people that on all sides I felt packed and crammed. A tall, gaunt man, hatless, shaggy-headed, his black locks falling over a strange yellow brow; eyes that saw not, looking through deep purple spectacles; and in his arms, like a baby, a long Armenian guitar—the musician was somewhat to wonder at. Hemmed in by the crowd, he yet found a little space in ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... like a runaway lunatic, Up to the summit of our highest mount. 130 I have watch'd him at it morning-tide and noon, Once in the moonlight. Then I stood so near, I heard him mutt'ring o'er the plant. A wizard! Some gaunt slave, prowling ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... that same fateful ball Whereby Atta Troll was slain. How the lurching firelight flares O'er the witch's features gaunt! ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... were only for a few instants. I seemed to have suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a sitting position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me. A gaunt body. Not her, you know. So soon—it was not her . ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... slip-panels down, it won’t matter much now, There are none but the crows left to see, Perching gaunt in yon pine, as though longing to dine On a broken-down ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... applause the devoted people lifted him in their arms and upon their shoulders, and bore him in triumph through the streets of the city to his headquarters, despite the chagrin and helpless protestations of the victim of their admiration. Tall and gaunt, and angular in person, with his long, spare limbs dangling helplessly about him, and rocked and swayed by the movement of the masses under him, the great warrior was never in all his life before in a position more awkward and undignified. The master of men ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... face of the hill to the wide flats below. Over these flats they could see for many miles, miles of cultivated fields, of little woods, of gentle slopes. They could count the buildings of many farms, the roofs of half a dozen villages, the spires of twice as many churches, the tall chimneys and gaunt frame towers of scattered pit-heads. It had been raining all day, but now in the late afternoon the clouds had broken and the light of the low sun was tinging the landscape with a mellow ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... a mere child the degradation and helpless misery of the poor Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the Union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare subsistence kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have continued to this day and which ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... her sunken eyes from the dust of the parching fields And tapped the door with her bony hands and her fingers gaunt and thin; Ah, Hearts grow faint at the hunger-cry and the arm of the master yields When all the world is a heap of dust that ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... the summit of a spur which stands out like a bastion from the imposing mass of the Cordillera, through the very heart of which runs the mysterious waterway we have just traversed. Two thousand feet or more below is a broad plain, bounded on the west by a range of gaunt and treeless hills ribbed with contorted rocks, which stretch north and south farther than the eye can reach. The plain is cultivated and inhabited. There are huts, fields, orchards, and streams, and about a league from the foot of the bastion is ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... so called in Spain because the breed came from beyond the sea (Mer), having been introduced from England by Constance, daughter of John of Gaunt, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... new country like Canada, or parts of the United States—a land just redeemed from the wilderness, with all its untrimmed roughness, its fields half tilled and full of stumps, its snake fences, and the charred pines which stand up gaunt monuments of forest fires—are impressed, I might almost say ravished, by the sight of the lovely garden which unlimited wealth expended on a limited space has made of England. This country, too, has an immense capital invested in the funds and securities of foreign nations, and in this ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... one flash of memory and reason, came vivid understanding of the whole business; as usual, in the form of a picture, Finn saw again, from that sun-washed English hill-side, the gaunt, bald foothills around Mount Desolation. He saw the heat shimmering above the scorched rocks on which he slew Lupus in open fight, and witnessed the terrible disintegration of that fighter's redoubtable sire, Tasman, under the foaming jaws and flashing ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... and lonely the house looked, rising gaunt and dim in the uncertain light! Who would choose such a spot for a home? Surely only those whose deeds would not bear the light of day. And why that deadly silence and torpor in a house inhabited by human beings? It seemed unnatural and uncanny, ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... got within a hundred yards of it, when suddenly part of it was thrown back, and out there rushed towards us two figures, whose frantic and threatening gestures made us start back with no little surprise, if not with some slight degree of apprehension. They were both tall, gaunt men, their hair was long and matted, their eyes were starting out of their heads, and their cheeks were hollow and shrivelled. They looked more like skeletons covered with parchment than human beings. Their clothes were in ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... at once, not looking up even; and Razumov saw his gaunt, shabby, famine-stricken figure cross the street obliquely with lowered head and that peculiar exact motion of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... here," Norah said. "Please tell me if you'd like dinner in your room, or if you'd rather come down." She had a sudden vision of Mrs. West's shrill voice, and decided that she might be tiring to this man with the gaunt, sad face. ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... Time's Valhalla sure. Lo! from his Neva's banks the Scythian Czar Stretches to thee his hand Who, with the pencil of the Northern star, Wrote freedom on his land. And he whose grave is holy by our calm And prairied Sangamon, From his gaunt hand shall drop the martyr's palm To ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... side. Imagine her wonder and delight when, instead of widespread wreck and ruin, a scene of indescribable beauty met her eyes! The snow had draped all things in white. The trees that had seemed so gaunt and skeleton-like as they writhed and moaned in the gale were now clothed with a beauty surpassing that of their summer foliage, for every branch, even to the smallest twig, had been incased in the downy flakes. The evergreens looked like old-time ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... have been able to gather some idea of Hester's appearance from various sources, and I own that the situation has always seemed to me picturesque in the extreme: the tall, gaunt, silent woman in her severe, dull dress striding through the pastures, and behind her, stealthily as an Indian—or an Italian avenger—the dark, lovely child, now crouching amongst the bayberry, now ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... inside the house, and sometimes was allowed to sleep on the bench with Kotuko. He was a good seal-dog, and would keep a musk-ox at bay by running round him and snapping at his heels. He would even—and this for a sleigh-dog is the last proof of bravery—he would even stand up to the gaunt Arctic wolf, whom all dogs of the North, as a rule, fear beyond anything that walks the snow. He and his master—they did not count the team of ordinary dogs as company—hunted together, day after day and night after night, fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed, ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... cleared away to make room for the art of man, and art has not yet got beyond the inchoate unloveliness of bare utilitarianism. The beautiful woods have given place to a charred, stumpy, muddy waste, on which stand the gaunt, new frame-houses. Gardens, orchards, cornfields, and meadows are things to come; until they do the natural beauty of the place is killed and insulted. But what have we to do with sentimental rubbish? This is Progress! ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... tempt the poor gaunt cat into her arms, meaning to carry it home and befriend it; but it was scared by her endeavour and ran back to its home in the outhouse, making a green path across the white dew of the meadow. Then Sylvia began to hasten home, thinking, and remembering—at the stile that led ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... butter, and the owner of a penny is rich. Often it is shared, and the sharer, half drunk still, it may be, and foul with the mud and refuse into which he crawled, can hardly be known as human, save for this one gleam of something beyond the human. Gaunt forms barely covered with rags, hollow eyes fierce with hunger, meet one at every turn in this early morning; and for many there is not even the penny, and they wait, sometimes with appeal, but as often silently, the chance gift of ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... themselves only heavier bulks of mist. The wheat in some of the fields was still uncut, and in others, where it had been gathered into sheaves, the rooks by hundreds were noisily gleaning in the track of the reapers. From this conventionally English keeping, I passed suddenly to the sight of the gaunt, dry, gravelly bed of a wide river, such as I had known in Central Italy, or the Middle West at home; and I realized once again that England is no island of one simple complexion, but is a condensed continent, with all continental ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... watchman had joined the mob, and was at that moment selecting a rifle from a cart. Around the cart were students, still in their Carnival finery, wearing the colors of his own corps. Haeckel, desperate of eye, pallid and gaunt, clad still in his hospital shirt and trousers; Haeckel climbed on to the wagon, and mounted to the seat, a strange, swaying figure, with a bandage on his head. In spite of that, there were some ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Ireland with fresh accumulations of suffering. Gaunt famine stalked abroad; pestilence lurked in the hovels of the country, and the cellars and garrets of the great towns; cholera ravaged as fiercely in some places as if no other destroyer visited the unhappy realm; crime lurked by the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... large, gaunt-looking place in a side street, with dirty windows and a creaking iron gate, but the rooms were large, and the one he selected and paid for in advance was on the top floor. The landlady looked gaunt and dusty as the house, and quite as old. Her eyes were green and faded, ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... curving of arms. She had not visited London for many years, and this multitudinous and wholesale opulence startled her. Under other circumstances she would have enjoyed it intensely, and basked in it as a flower in the sunshine; to-night, however, she could not dismiss the image of Rose in the gaunt hospital in Lamb's Conduit Street. She knew the comparison was crude; she assured herself that there must always be rich and poor, idle and industrious, gay and sorrowful, elegant and shabby, arrogant and meek; but her ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... terrible. We had been stumbling along, feeble, gaunt, half crazed by hunger and fatigue. But the expectation of food, the certainty that we should find plenty at the Ammonusuc, had nerved us up to the effort to reach it, and now it was gone. It had been ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... scare-crows, scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, they sold, For every man with her received his gold. The heaped-up gold which beauteous maids had brought Is thus proportioned to the bidder's lot; The grisly, blear-eyed, every one is sold, And husbands purchased ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... an hour with the bundle on his knees. Little his fellow-passengers guessed of the wealth of romance, loyalty, freedom, and spacious memory hidden in that common-looking bundle on the knees of the gaunt-faced, gray-eyed man. At the foot of the hill, at a space of bare and ragged common, Horner got off. By rough paths, frequented by goats, he made his way up the rocky slope, through bare ravines and ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Sundown's society to the extent of six-bits' worth of Mexican provender, suggested a return to "The Last Chance," where the tramp was solemnly introduced to a newly arrived coterie of thirsty riders of the mesas. Gaunt and exceedingly tall, he loomed above the heads of the group in the barroom "like a crane in a frog-waller," as one cowboy put it. "Which ain't insinooatin' that our hind legs is good to eat, either," remarked another. "He keeps right on smilin'," asserted the first speaker. ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... people are there already, preparing to be ill—(I never shall forget a dreadful sight I once had in the little dark, dirty, six-foot cabin of a Dover steamer. Four gaunt Frenchmen, but for their pantaloons, in the costume of Adam in Paradise, solemnly anointing themselves with some charm against sea-sickness!)—a few Frenchmen are there, but these, for the most part, and with a proper philosophy, go to the fore-cabin ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at the edge of the sky ahead. Against it the gaunt branches of a tall tree traced themselves starkly. Below was the silent ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... the attention of the reader to our own great poet and philosopher, Shakspeare, whose subtle genius and intuitive knowledge of human nature render his opinions on all such subjects of peculiar value. Thus in Richard II., Act ii. sc. 1., the dying Gaunt, alluding to his nephew, the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... the old man raised his head. The golden shells of the collar of Saint-Michael could be seen gleaming on his neck. The candle fully illuminated his gaunt and morose profile. He tore the papers ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... a sweet new song. We all gave a shout, clapped on our caps, and ran out to the fort gate. There an almost new sensation thrilled us, for we beheld a team of dogs coming up weary and worn out of the wilderness, preceded by a gaunt yet majestic Indian, whose whole aspect—haggard expression of countenance, soiled and somewhat tattered garments, and weary gait—betokened severe exhaustion. On the sled, drawn by four lanky dogs, we could see the figure of a man wrapped in blankets ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... The gaunt, iron-visaged woman knelt down upon her knees, gazing with unshrinking eyes upon the face of her victim, as if curiously marking the effect of a successful experiment of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... privation could cut too deep, while she was fulfilling her destiny as wife and comrade to the bravest and best of men. The vast plains, heart-breaking in their utter emptiness, could only be full to her—full of life, and love, and colour; full of a happiness too great to be contained. She watched the gaunt trees rising naked from the white forest, and her mind flitted on a thousand miles in advance, while on the cold window-sill her fingers tapped time to the click of the car ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... over the display of the Parisian secondhand booksellers on the Quai Malaquais; at home on the writing-desk, a page of carefully prepared manuscript, yet sometimes covered by cigarette-ashes; upon the wall, sketches by Jules Lefebvre and Jules Breton; a little in the distance, the gaunt form of his attentive sister and companion, Annette, occupied with household cares, ever fearful of disturbing him. Within this tranquil domicile can be heard the noise of the Parisian faubourg with its thousand different dins; the bustle of the street; the clatter of a factory; ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... In 1372 he was sent abroad as a royal envoy, and on his return he was made Controller of the Customs In London. In the meantime he had married Philippa Rouet, one of the queen's maids of honor, a sister to the wife of John of Gaunt. Being thus closely related to one of the most powerful members of the royal family, he was often employed in important and honorable commissions connected with the government. In 1386 he was member ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... deeper into a wild and desolate country where he had never been before, and where there were no pathways. Arthur looked to and fro over the waste, but saw no sign of man or beast, and no bird flitted or piped. Great gaunt stones stood upright on the hillsides, solitary or in long lines as if they marched, or else they leaned together as if conspiring; while great heaps or cairns of stone rose here and there from the ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... of shell-fish. One man even gathered up all the fish bones he could find and ground them to powder to make bread. But all that they scraped together with so much pain and care was hardly enough to keep body and soul together. They grew so thin that their bones started through the skin. Gaunt, hollow-eyed spectres they lay about the fort sunk in misery, or dragged themselves a little way into the forest in search of food. Unless help came from France they knew that they must all soon die a miserable death. And amid all their misery they clung to that last hope, ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... to leap over the rude stone wall that enclosed this sheepfold instead of passing through the narrow gateway. The two great sheep dogs, gaunt and rough, who had spied him on the edge of the pasture land long before he had seen them, leaped fawning upon him with sharp yelps ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... physiognomy. Theology was written all over his person and he wore the conventional clerical hat which, owing to his absurdly small face, had the unfortunate appearance of being several sizes too large for him. Miss Deetle was a gaunt and angular spinster who had an unhappy trick of talking with a jerk. She looked as if she were constantly under self-restraint and was liable at any moment to explode into a fit of rage and only repressed herself ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... which is utterly revolting to the lad, whose childish feet had pattered beside the tender Rachel along the embowered paths of Ashfield. The lack of congeniality affronts his whole nature. In the keenness of his martyrdom, (none the less real because fancied,) the leathern-faced, gaunt Brummem takes the shape of some Giant Despair with bloody maw and mace,—and he, the child of some Christiana, for whose guiding hand he gropes vainly: she has gone ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... four on together, whereof one, a gaunt, oldish man, was saying: It is not so much how long we shall be getting there, but what shall betide when we get there. For this is not like lifting a herd of neat, whereof sharing is easy, but with this naked-skinned, ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... The black-haired gaunt Paulinus By ruddy Edwin stood:— "Bow down, O king of Deira, Before the blessed Rood! Cast out thy heathen idols. And worship Christ our Lord." —But Edwin looked and pondered, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... reach on either hand, by an unsightly village. The houses stood well back, leaving a ribbon of waste land on either side of the road, where there were stacks of firewood, carts, barrows, rubbish-heaps, and a little doubtful grass. Away on the left, a gaunt tower stood in the middle of the street. What it had been in past ages I know not: probably a hold in time of war; but nowadays it bore an illegible dial-plate in its upper parts, and near the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Killian after all had been too tragic a miscarriage: and he hurried with all his might, found the groom (for a wonder) faithful to his trust, and arrived only a few minutes before noon in the guest-chamber of the "Morning Star." Killian was there in his Sunday's best and looking very gaunt and rigid; a lawyer from Brandenau stood sentinel over his outspread papers; and the groom and the landlord of the inn were called to serve as witnesses. The obvious deference of that great man, the innkeeper, plainly affected the old farmer with surprise; but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... looked ghostly in the shady light, and gaunt armstretch of departing darkness, going as if it had not slept its sleep out. Now was the time when the day is afraid of coming, and the night unsure of going, and a large reluctance to acknowledge any change keeps everything waiting for another thing to move. What is the use of light and ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... supervision was exercised. The so-called Medical Staff looked on, and puffed their cigarettes and talked under their eye-glasses—the fools, the idle, empty-headed noodles. And whilst they smoked and talked twaddle, the grim, gaunt Shadow of Death chuckled in the watches of the night, thinking of the harvest that was ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... of that Peasant we approach'd Close to the spot where with his rod and line He stood alone; whereat he turn'd his head To greet us—and we saw a man worn down By sickness, gaunt and lean, with sunken cheeks And wasted limbs, his legs so long and lean That for my single self I look'd at them, Forgetful of the body they sustain'd.— Too weak to labour in the harvest field, The man was using his best skill to gain A pittance from the dead ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... later a broken team crawled over the snow to the Moravian Mission, urged by two men gaunt from the trail, and blistered by the cold. From the sledge came shrieks and throaty mutterings, horrid gabblings of post-freezing madness and Dr. Forrest, lifting back the robe, found Orloff lashed into ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... the brazen gates between the harem-gardens and the courts of the large palace, an old man in white robes came up to him. The sight seemed to fill Nebenchari with terror; he started as if the gaunt old man had been a ghost. Seeing, however, a friendly and familiar smile on the face of the other, he quickened his steps, and, holding out his hand with a heartiness for which none of his Persian acquaintances would have ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Norman, and a postern gate. Of its history only a few leading facts can be mentioned here. William I. entrusted it to the keeping of Peter de Valoignes; it was besieged by Louis the Dauphin, and capitulated on the Feast of St. Nicholas in 1216; it was granted, together with the town, to John of Gaunt, Earl of Richmond, in whose time Kings John of France and David of Scotland were prisoners within its walls, and after the Earl had been created Duke of Lancaster he held a court in the castle for three weeks. It was ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... beat that? If so, where?" The lady swept her gauntletted hand toward the scene below. Mrs. Waring-Gaunt was tall, strongly made, handsome with that comeliness which perfect health and out-of-doors life combine to give, her dark hair, dark flashing eyes, straight nose, wide, full-lipped curving mouth, and a chin whose chiselled ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... as monopolized by the sense of 'bewitched', or of 'lean and gaunt', related to haggard. This does not suit. The intention is probably an independent use of the p.p. of the transitive verb 'to hag'; defined as 'to torment or terrify as a hag, to trouble as ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... syphilis of syphilitic parents show the disease at birth or usually within one or two months. They present a gaunt, wasted appearance, suffer continually from snuffles or nasal catarrh, have sores and cracks about the lips, loss of hair, and troublesome skin eruptions. The syphilitic child has been described as a "little ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... they had been so disposed, I know not; but fortunately dinner was announced—a sound which startled old Quirk out of a posture of intense attention to Viper, and evident admiration of his sentiments. He gave his arm with an air of prodigious politeness to the gaunt Mrs. Alderman Addlehead, whose distinguished lord led down Miss Quirk—and the rest followed in no particular order—Titmouse arm in arm with Gammon, who took care to place him next to himself (Gammon). It was ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... squadrons I was dispatched to overtake had quitted Nancy four hours before, I came up with them in less than an hour, and inquiring for the officer in command, rode up to the head of the division. He was a thin, gaunt-looking, stern-featured man who listened to my ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... train at Havant changed: What made the people kindly smile, Or stare with looks estranged? Too radiant for a wife you seem'd, Serener than a bride; Me happiest born of men I deem'd, And show'd perchance my pride. I loved that girl, so gaunt and tall, Who whispered loud, 'Sweet Thing!' Scanning your figure, slight yet all Round as your own gold ring. At Salisbury you stray'd alone Within the shafted glooms, Whilst I was by the Verger shown The brasses and the tombs. At tea we talk'd of matters deep, Of joy that never dies; We laugh'd, ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... and down the garden-alleys that night, thinking of the blow which would fall on his daughter in Laidley's threatened disposal of his property, was not altogether unheroic. There was nothing mean in the big gaunt figure with its uncertain strides, or in the high-featured, mild-eyed face: neither was there anything mean in his wrath. It was all directed against himself. His Swedish blood had infused a gentle laziness into his temper, and he had forgiven Laidley long ago for his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... ravishment, drew forth a breath So deep, so strong, so fervid, thick with love— Blissful, yet laden as with twenty prayers, That Juno yearned with no diviner soul, To the first burthen of the lips of Jove. Th' exceeding mystery of the loveliness Sadden'd delight; and with his mournful look Dreary and gaunt, hanging his pallid face 'Twixt his dark flowing locks, he almost seemed Too feeble, or, to melancholy eyes, One that has parted with his soul for pride, And in the sable ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... was tall and gaunt as Don Quixote. His gray hair made a ragged fringe round his straight-backed head; he wore an old-fashioned neck-cloth; his long body had a perpetual stoop, as though of deference, and his spectacled look of mild ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was hit by certainly ten or twelve projectiles, and reduced more or less to a ruined state. At no time can the building have laid claims to the picturesque or the beautiful, but it had one peculiarity—namely, that of being the only two-storied building in Mafeking, and of standing out, a gaunt red structure, in front of the hospital, and absolutely the last building on the north-east side of the town. It was certainly a landmark for miles, and, but for its sacred origin and the charitable calling of its occupants, would have been a fair mark for the enemy's cannon. Very melancholy was ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... shrubs and the trees were gaunt scarred trunks, without branches or leaves, reminding one of an ancient gloomy picture in the old-time family Bible, known as "Dry Bones ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... menace of these great houses to the crown, tried to capture them in its interests by means of marriages between his sons and great heiresses. The Black Prince married the daughter of the Earl of Kent; Lionel became Earl of Ulster in the right of his wife; John of Gaunt married the heiress of Lancaster and became Duke of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock married the heiress of the Bohuns, Earls of Essex and of Hereford; the descendants of Edmund, Duke of York, absorbed the great rival house of Mortimer; and other great houses ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... mid-way up the Glen, among pasture and arable land that seems the more rich and level because it is hemmed in by gaunt hills where of old the robber found a sequestration, and the hunter of deer followed his kingly recreation. The river sings and cries, almost at the door, mellow in the linns and pools, or in its shallow links cheerily gossiping among ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... swarmed about the houses of wealthy farmers, supplicating a morsel to keep body and soul together, resembled nothing which our English readers ever had an opportunity of seeing. Ragged, emaciated creatures, tottered about with an expression of wildness and voracity in their gaunt features; fathers and mothers reeled under the burthen of their beloved children, the latter either sick, or literally expiring for want of food; and the widow, in many instances, was compelled to lay down her head ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... that never have been mine! Warm lights in many a secret chamber shine Of thy gaunt house, and gusts of song have blown Like blossoms out to me that sat alone! And I have waited well for thee to show If any share were mine,—and now I go! Nothing I leave, and if I naught attain I shall but come into mine own again!" Thus I to Life, and ceased, and spake ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humour, ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... more. When evening came the men were weary from hurrying their wagons over rugged ground or climbing lofty buttes to look ahead for signs of water. Isham the fiddler left his violin in its case; he never took it from that case again. The oxen had grown gaunt from lack of feed and drink; they wandered about the night camps nibbling disdainfully at what growth there was, low bitter ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... temporal, is left to the reader to imagine. The sufferings of the Dissenters were awfully severe at this time. Had it been a year later, we might have guessed it to have referred to the sufferings of that pious, excellent woman, Elizabeth Gaunt, who was burnt, October 23, 1685. She was a Baptist, and cruelly martyred. Penn, the Quaker, saw her die. 'She laid the straw about her for burning her speedily, and behaved herself in such a manner that all the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... once more, rose higher on the hill, echoed far off, and was twice repeated nearer head with a drooping melancholy cadence. Gaunt forms grew up straight among the undergrowth of trees, indifferent to the other pistol, and ran back or over to where ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... arms and neck, where the bubbles came out in all their perfection and brilliancy of skin, were fully displayed. As may be supposed, not a bone was to be traced in her upper neck, but all was dazzling in colour and flesh, which is such a beauty in woman. When a woman shows her gaunt collar bones, it is a proof of bad breeding, and a common nature. Aunt's truly grand bubbles rose magnificently over her bodice, which I thought at the time was their support, but this glorious woman required nothing of the sort, for when perfectly stripped, her bubbles stood out firm ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... for nothing! Here, lay the skeleton of a man, so lightly covered with a thin unwholesome skin, that not a bone in the anatomy was clothed, and I could clasp the arm above the elbow, in my finger and thumb. Here, lay a man with the black scurvy eating his legs away, his gums gone, and his teeth all gaunt and bare. This bed was empty, because gangrene had set in, and the patient had died but yesterday. That bed was a hopeless one, because its occupant was sinking fast, and could only be roused to turn the poor pinched mask of face upon the pillow, with a feeble moan. The ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... it was! The skeletons of houses stood grim and gaunt, and the sound of the wind rushing through the ruins was like the moaning of the spirits of the dead inhabitants crying aloud for vengeance. The sounds increased in volume as we neared this scene of awful desolation, and the groans became ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... sobbed Nick; "I see myself staggering from the ale-house and reeling into what should be a home, where gaunt starvation stalks the floor; where the hearth is fireless, and where a starving family die upon ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
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