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More "Gnarled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sunken eyes, all their keen humour gone, and spoke as though each word were dug from his heart. "Say no more, Father Halen." Then he reached out, caught the priest's hand in his gnarled fingers, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... my morning rations," he crooned, as he stumped forward to his chair. "The cold nips me without 'em. See to my fingers!" He held out his distorted hands, all blue at the tips, wrinkled and gnarled, with huge, ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... chief of a headlong race, no will must depart a hair's-breadth from his; and fifty years of arrogant port had stiffened a neck too stiff at birth. Even now in the dim light his large square form stood out against the sky like a cromlech, and his heavy arms swung like gnarled boughs of oak, for a storm of wrath was moving him. In his youth he had rebelled against his father; and now his own son was ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... river Reddy, which runs down to the sea, there forking into two channels on the landward side; towards the sea the ground was bare, full of sand-hills covered with a short grass. Towards the land was a small wood of gnarled trees, the boughs of which were all brushed smooth by the gales; looking landward there was the green flat, in which the river ran, rising into low hills; hardly a house was visible save one or two lonely farms; two or three ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lava flow—a black ocean which was tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes—a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, and barrenness—a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder—of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness that mimicked branching roots, great vines, trunks of trees, all interlaced and mingled together: and all these weird shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this stormy, far-stretching ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... starts with overwhelming havoc, do not threaten the explorer of the Western mountains; and ordinarily he passes from height to height—from the base with its wreaths of evergreens to the zone where vegetation is limited to the gnarled dwarf-pine, from the foot-hills to the basin of the crisp alpine lake far above the life-limits—without once having to scale a cliff, supposing, of course, that he has chosen the best path. The trail may be narrow at times, with nothing between it and a gulf, and it may be pitched at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... shook her head. She felt tired, she said, with the heat. So Mrs. Furnese drove, and Joanna sat silently beside her, watching her thick brown hand on the reins, with the wedding ring embedded deep in the gnarled finger. ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... perfect place, old as the hills that surround it, and wild in its loveliness. To right and left great trees, gnarled and moss-grown, and dipping tangles of blackberry and fern; patches of sunlight, amidst the gloom, that rests lovingly upon a glowing wilderness of late bluebells, and, beyond all these broad glimpses of the glorious, restless ocean, as it sleeps in ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... Cricket, throwing herself on the grass, for they were in the orchard. "Let's rest awhile." She clasped her hands above her head, and lay back on the grass. Archie drew himself up on to one of the low gnarled trees and balanced himself in a very precarious way directly ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... primitive short gowns and petticoats, with the venerable sun-bonnets of Holland origin. The lower part of the valley was cut up into small farms, each consisting of a little meadow and corn-field; an orchard of sprawling, gnarled apple-trees, and a garden, where the rose, the marigold, and the hollyhock were permitted to skirt the domains of the capacious cabbage, the aspiring pea, and the portly pumpkin. Each had its prolific little mansion teeming ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... lean and tough birds in the old settlements, that lingered around the clearings and stumps of the trees, in the topmost of whose branches the fear of man compelled them to rest, but young and full fed. The trees in this new land were of no stinted or gnarled growth, but shot up tall, straight, and taper. The yellow poplar here threw up into the air a column of an hundred feet shaft in a contest with the sycamore for the pre-eminence of the woods. Their wives and children would remain safe in their present homes, until the first ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... see what Winter has been doing for so many months in forest and meadow, on the broad hill-side and in the valley. The old ice-king has had a merry time of it, playing with the long branches of the graceful maiden-like elm, and wrestling with the gnarled and haughty oak. You might have heard him roaring in the depths of the woods, had you been here, venerable DEIDRICH, day and night for a sevennight, apparently just for the sake of making a noise, and compelling the obeisance of the forest. Like any other demagogue, he gains ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... at one o'clock to the appointed address, where he found himself one of a dense miscellany of men waiting in front of the door. They ranged from a messenger-boy evidently misusing his company's time to an immemorial individual with a gnarled body and a gnarled cane. Some of the men were seedy, with sunken cheeks and puffy pink eyes—others were young; possibly still in high school. After a jostled fifteen minutes during which they all eyed one another with ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... with it, says: "There all is wild, desolate, and lugubrious. Thicket, undergrowth, and jungle, stretch for miles, impenetrable and untouched. Narrow roads wind on forever between melancholy masses of stunted and gnarled oak. Little sunlight shines there. The face of Nature is dreary and sad. It was so before the battle; it is not more cheerful to-day, when, as you ride along, you see fragments of shell, rotting knapsacks, rusty ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... beside the invalid's bed. Helpless though he was, the jovial Toine still provided them with amusement. He would have made the devil himself laugh. Three men were regular in their attendance at the bedside: Celestin Maloisel, a tall, thin fellow, somewhat gnarled, like the trunk of an apple-tree; Prosper Horslaville, a withered little man with a ferret nose, cunning as a fox; and Cesaire Paumelle, who never spoke, but who enjoyed Toine's society ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... A gnarled and half-starved oak, as stubborn as my own resolve, and smitten by some storm of old, hung from the crag above me. Rising from my horse's back, although I had no stirrups, I caught a limb, and tore it (like a mere wheat-awn) from the socket. Men show the rent ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... not until the end of the second act that her name was called, and she went scampering up the stairs as fast as her clumsy suit would permit. The stage was set for a forest scene, with gnarled trees and hanging vines and a transparent drop that threw a midnight blue haze ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... charge. I know it's risky, and I hate to do it, but it seems to me that you ought ter have sense enough to know that if you take all I've got you would be jest that much wuss off;" and before Haldane could remonstrate or reply he took a curiously twisted and gnarled cane ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... than he needeth. And as I wait at his coucher, betimes I can drop a word in his ear that may, an' it please God, be to his profit. He is yet tender ground, and the seed may take root and thrive: and I am tough gnarled old root, that can thole a blow or twain, and a rough ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... eaten anything of the sort, and, leaping to the ground, with the help of a clasp-knife bought in Nablous, the only eating-utensil our party could boast, we bisected our dinner, and, sitting under a gray old gnarled olive, ate it with such expressions of satisfaction as would not be honest, even if allowable, at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... old forest which had been replaced by the streets of Crofield and the farms around it. Jack's pull on the left rein was obeyed only too well, and it looked, for some seconds, as if the plunging beasts were about to wind up their maddened dash by a wreck among those gnarled trunks and projecting roots. Jack drew his breath hard, and there was almost a chill at his young heart, but he held ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... being convinced that it is the most essential. It is but recently that any of us have approximated to a right appreciation of the value of pure air. But look for a moment at one of those great forest trees; and then reflect that all that knotted and gnarled bulk has been mainly formed out of air. We, in our gross conceptions, were wont to think that the fatness of the earth was the tree's chief source of nourishment. But it is not so. In some cases this is almost perceptible to the eye, for we see ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... a school life are connected with a large, rambling Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... panniers of freshly cut grass passed by, with a pretty girl in a capaline sitting between the green piles, or an old woman spinning with a distaff as she went. Brown, soft-eyed children ran out from the quaint stone hovels to offer nosegays, or bunches of oranges still on the bough. Gnarled olive trees covered the hills with their dusky foliage, fruit hung golden in the orchard, and great scarlet anemones fringed the roadside, while beyond green slopes and craggy heights, the Maritime Alps rose sharp and white against the blue ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... He leaned against a gnarled and twisted oak, His soul a listening intensity, And all his strength, seemed leaving him; he drew A quick and stifled breath of sharpest pain, As they rode on, and thought of Agathar, Watching and waiting for his ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... smile lit up the gnarled face, and Nancy remembered what Jack had so often said as to Mere Bideau's clever way of dealing with visitors, especially with possible ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... I don't care about it to-day." Winfield rose and walked to the other end of the porch. The apple trees were in bloom, and every wandering wind was laden with sweetness. Even the gnarled old tree in Miss Hathaway's yard, that had been out of bearing for many a year, had put forth a bough of fragrant blossoms. He saw it from where he stood; a mass of pink and white against the turquoise sky, and thought that Miss Thorne would make ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... streaming, Lightnings now are gleaming; Thunders rolling dread, Shake the mountain's head; Nature's war Echoes far, O'er ether borne, That flash The ash Has scath'd and torn! Now it rages; Oaks of ages, Writhing in the furious blast, Wide their leafy honours cast; Their gnarled arms do force to force oppose Deep rooted in the crevic'd rock, The sturdy trunk sustains the shock, Like dauntless ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... found nowhere else in the world but on this solitary mountain summit. It has a tall, stout stem, sometimes more than three feet high, the root leaves are eighteen inches long, and it bears several whorls of cowslip-like flowers, instead of a terminal cluster only. The forest trees, gnarled and dwarfed to the dimensions of bushes, reach up to the very rim of the old crater, but do not extend over the hollow on its summit. Here we find a good deal of open ground, with thickets of shrubby Artemisias and Gnaphaliums, like our southernwood and cudweed, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Beneath the gnarled old Knowledge-tree Sat, like an owl, the evil sage: 'The World's a bubble,' solemnly He read, and turned a second page. 'A bubble, then, old crow,' I cried, 'God keep you in your weary wit! 'A bubble—have you ever spied 'The colours I ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... features of the polity which thus assumed a prominent organization have been already indicated. There was no revolution, no radical change. The ancient rugged tree of Netherland liberty—with its moss-grown trunk, gnarled branches, and deep-reaching roots—which had been slowly growing for ages, was still full of sap, and was to deposit for centuries longer its annual rings of consolidated and concentric strength. Though lopped of some luxuriant boughs, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... had taken for the gnarled and knotted branches of a tree, at a short distance from the spot where he was lounging, gradually assumed a human shape, and he saw the old Scotch shepherd ...
— Up! Horsie! - An Original Fairy Tale • Clara de Chatelaine
... located well in on the point, and Walter steered to land some distance out from it. A few strokes of the paddle sent the light canoe gliding in amongst the mangrove bushes that fringed the shore. Climbing out upon the curious gnarled roots, Walter pulled the canoe far enough in to effectually screen it from sight. Next he examined his pistols to see that they were properly loaded, and with a parting word of cheer for his chum, he made his ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... through the pine-needles. Grasshoppers chirp from deep tangles of bracken. The song of a skylark drops from the sky like soft rain in summer; in the evening, a nightjar croons to us his monotonously passionate love-wail from his perch on the gnarled boughs of the wind-swept larch that crowns the upland. But away below in the valley, as night draws on, a lurid glare reddens the north-eastern horizon. It marks the spot where the great wen of London heaves and festers. Up here on the free hills, the sharp air blows in upon ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... appearing strangely no part of the man, but something, like the child, that has grown away from him and has taken a life of its own— Strong for a sixteen-foot sweep, delicate to handle the silken snood of a line— A man that the winds and the spray have blown on, gnarled and bent to the sea's ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... see," said Bart; and once more they climbed on for quite half-an-hour, when they emerged from the trees on to a rugged piece of open rocky plain, with scattered pines gnarled and twisted and swept bare by the mighty winds, and as far as eye could reach nothing ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... like a lamb led to slaughter, but with innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... ribald boys and depraved men,—you are quite correct, Sir, in stating that she is not my daughter. On the contrary, she is the daughter of an Hungarian nobleman who had the misfortune to incur my displeasure. I had a son, crooked spawn of a Christian!—a son, not like you, cankered, gnarled stump of life that you are,—but a youth tall and fair and noble in aspect, as became a child of one whose lineage makes Pharaoh modern,—a youth whose foot in the dance was as swift and beautiful to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... with valuable trees stunted and poor ones vastly overgrown according to nature's law which provides for the survival of the fittest. This was the law too, which was to be applied to Peter. Would he grow straight and true in this foreign soil or gnarled and misshapen like the cedars and the maples that he saw? Yes. He would grow and straight ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... he rode as he had never ridden before. And then he came upon them. They stood at the base of a fir-balsam, whose gnarled limbs spread flatly outward—three Circle Bar men, a half dozen from the various outfits whose herds grazed his range, and the rustler—Greasy—a rope knotted about his neck, standing directly under one of the out-spreading limbs of the tree, his head bowed, but his face wearing a mocking, ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... a moment to consider, he ascended the tree, and, a short distance from the ground secured the very position he wanted. Here the limbs crossed and recrossed, and gnarled themselves in such a way, that the most pleasant kind of bed imaginable was found, and he stretched out his weary limbs upon it, thanking Heaven that had guided him ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... hillside, beneath deep shade of big forest trees, grew the ferns, their long, graceful fronds waving softly. Tree toads sang on the cool rocks beneath them, chewinks nested under gnarled roots among them, rose-breasted grosbeaks sang in grape-vines clambering over the thickets, and Singing Water ran close beside. So the Harvester left digging these roots until nearly the last, because he so disliked ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... Jackson, that fierce Tennessee spirit who broke down the traditions of conservative rule, swept away the privacies and privileges of officialdom, and, like a Gothic leader, opened the temple of the nation to the populace. She gave us Abraham Lincoln, whose gaunt frontier form and gnarled, massive hand told of the conflict with the forest, whose grasp of the ax-handle of the pioneer was no firmer than his grasp of the helm of the ship of state as it breasted the seas of civil war. She has furnished to this new democracy her stores of mineral wealth, that dwarf ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... speeding body the gnarled, bomb-torn terrain of Nevada hurtled by. A rather sad frown creased Lance's prematurely old brow as he glimpsed it. Thousands of lives had been thrown into that ground; the hot, tumbled waste was doused with freely-sacrificed blood, the blood of whole regiments of America's heroic ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... tree of our life's doings has to grow, like those contorted pines on the slopes of the Alps, in many storms, with heavy weights of snow on its branches, and beaten about by tempests from every quarter of the heavens; and so it gets gnarled and knotted and very unlike the symmetrical beauty that we dreamed would adorn it. We begin with saying: 'Come! Let us build a tower whose top shall reach to heaven'; and we are contented at last, if we have ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... seated with her back to the gnarled trunk, while she looked out over the half-mile of dancing blue wavelets to where, on the other side, the brown, wooden houses of the Thorley estate swept down to the shore. She rose on seeing the visitor approach, showing a startled disposition to run away. This she ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and kicking had made him such a stoic, that no amount of blows could quicken his pace, and no chirruping could change the dejected drooping of his head. All his natural language said, as plainly as a horse could say it, that he was a most unhappy beast. Even the trees on Reuben's premises had a gnarled and knotted appearance. The bark wept little sickly tears of gum, and the branches grew awry, as if they felt the continual discord, and made sorry faces at each other behind their owner's back. His fields were red with sorrel, or run over with mullein. Every thing seemed ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered among ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... but no ill thought of my darling, I sent Watch home, and followed Gwenny; who led me along very rapidly, with her short broad form gliding down the hollow, from which she had first appeared. Here at the bottom, she entered a thicket of gray ash stubs and black holly, with rocks around it gnarled with roots, and hung with masks of ivy. Here in a dark and lonely corner, with a pixie ring before it, she came to a narrow door, very brown and solid, looking like a trunk of wood at a little distance. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... continued to put questions to her until, crossing a ridge, we came at last within sight of the inn, a lonely house of stone, standing in the hollow of the moor and sheltered on one side by a few gnarled trees that took off in a degree from the bleakness of its aspect. The house was of one story only, with a window on either side of the door, and no other appeared in sight; but a little smoke rising from the chimney seemed to promise a better reception than the desolate landscape ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... or three limbs were gnarled and twisted in such a way that he could seat himself and arrange his body in such a way that he could have enjoyed a night's slumber with as much refreshment as if stretched out upon a blanket on the ground. But the serenade below was not calculated to soothe his nerves into soft, downy ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... very old man," he whined, twisting his gnarled fingers, a suggestion of tears in his voice. "My wife is old, mein herr. You would not be cruel. We have been here for ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... with his walk, and then remembered that the professional eye had already noted them and laid their lines away for some suggestive use. As he looked, Marshby stopped in his approach, caught by the singularity of a gnarled tree limb. It awoke in him a cognizance of nature's processes, and his face lighted with the pleasure ...
— Different Girls • Various
... at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we never missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves. Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina—a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the geometrical ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... forth fruit in old age, they shall be full of sap and green.' A gnarled old tree may be green in all its branches, and blossom and fruit may hang together there. The ideal of life is, that into each stage we shall carry the best of the preceding, harmonised with the best of the new, and that is possible to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... order, no discipline, with only blind fury and the rushing, pulsing blood—that has won many a battle for England against a common foe—the men of Ireland hurled themselves upon the soldiers. They threw their missiles: they struck them with their gnarled sticks: they beat them ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... tired of play, lay fast asleep in the nest she had made in one of the haycocks close by, and Rose leaned against the gnarled old tree, dreaming daydreams with her work at her feet. Happy and absorbing fancies they seemed to be, for her face was beautifully tranquil, and she took no heed of the train which suddenly went speeding down the ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... many tears;" honest sensible Letter (though indifferently spelt), "Berlin, 1st June, 1740;"—lies now in State-Paper Office: "ROYAL LETTERS, vol. xciv., Prussia, 1689-1777."] An unwedgeable and gnarled big block of manhood and simplicity and sincerity; such as we rarely get sight of among the modern sons of Adam, among the crowned sons nearly never. At parting he said to Roloff, "You (ER, He) do not spare me; it is right. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... itself in shadows over the sparkling water, as soon as through the river-side belt of gnarled arbor-vitae sunbeams flickered, we pushed off, rowed up-stream by a pair of stout lumbermen. The river was a beautiful way, admitting us into the penetralia of virgin forests. It was not a rude wilderness: all that Northern woods have of foliage, verdurous, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Turning towards the door, he now caught sight of us. He was short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward like some old root in ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... dreary the woods seemed without the little troop! The wind sighed in the pines, and the moonlight cast fearful shadows from the gnarled and knotty boughs. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... at that moment that I had my inspiration. My eyes chanced to light upon the enormous gnarled trunk of the gingko tree which cast its huge branches over us. Surely, if its bole exceeded that of all others, its height must do the same. If the rim of the plateau was indeed the highest point, then why should this mighty tree not prove to be a watchtower which commanded the whole ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... setting upon one of the rich grassy glades of that forest, which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... beeches, and, being sheltered from the fiery rays of the sun, she put down her sunshade and John took off his hat. The silence and gloom, the great gnarled trees, with their thews and sinews, their arms and thighs and loins, the gentle rustle of the breeze in the branches overhead, the deep accumulation of dead leaves underfoot, the fluttering of wings, the low cooing of pigeons, and all the mystery and wonder ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... smell, flowed down to the shore of the bay. The olive trees were of immense size, and I can well believe, as Fra Carlo informed us, that they were probably planted by the Roman colonists, established there by Titus. The gnarled, veteran boles still send forth vigorous and blossoming boughs. There were all manner of lovely lights and shades chequered over the turf and the winding path we rode. At last we reached the foot of an ascent, steeper ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... sighed our mother, When the mistletoe boughs lay shed; But never the curse of the orphan Was breathed on the rich man's head; And when again the gentle summer Had gladdened the earth once more, No branches of gnarled oaks olden Made ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... leads the way.... Behind them the tremendous glow deepens;—before them the gloom. Enormous gnarled forms of ceiba, balata, acoma, stand dimly revealed as they pass; masses of viny drooping things take, by the failing light, a sanguine tone. For a little while Fafa can plainly discern the figure ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... the river's bank in a series of irregular terraces, upheld by rough stone walls. The gnarled old trees bent towards each other and away like dwarfs and crook-backs dancing a fantastic minuet; and in the grass beneath them, where the sun shot his fiery darts and cast his net of shadows, Chloris had ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... chasm are lined with cultivation, descending in successive stages. Sorrento is thus built on three deep ravines. All these hollows contain gardens, crowded with masses of trees overhanging each other. Nut-trees, already lively with sap, project their white branches like gnarled fingers; everything else is green; winter lays no hand on this eternal spring. The thick lustrous leaf of the orange-tree rises from amid the foliage of the olive, and its golden apples glisten in the sun by thousands, interspersed ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... fog the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled tree. Then it became a thing suspended in air. It swung back and forth like a body hanging on the gallows. The face beseeched me to believe the story the lips were trying to tell. In my mind everything concerning the relationship of men and women became confused, ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... voyage the flotilla seemed to be steaming through the primeval forest. The bayou was but a few feet wider than the gunboats, and its banks were lined by gnarled and knotted old veterans of the forest,—live oaks, sycamore, and tupelo gum trees that had stood in majestic dignity on the banks of the dark and sullen stream for centuries. Sometimes majestic vistas would open; broad avenues carpeted with velvet turf, and walled in by the massive tree ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... near night-fall. A splendid scene burst upon our view, on rounding a precipitous rock, from the crevices of which some magnificent trees shot up—their gnarled trunks and twisted branches overhanging the canal where we were pulling, and anticipating the fast falling darkness that was creeping over the fair face of nature; and there we floated, in the deep shadow ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... men thunder, As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet: For every pelting, petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder Merciful Heaven! Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle. O but man, proud man! Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... lived aloft, exultant, unafraid. All things were good to him. The mountain old Stretched gnarled hands to help him climb. The peak Waved blithe snow-banner greeting; and for him The rav'ning storm, aprowl for human life, Purred like the lion at his trainer's feet. The grizzly met him on the narrow ledge, Gave gruff "good morning"—and ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... raveling, entanglement; coil &c (convolution) 248; sleave^, tangled skein, knot, Gordian knot, wheels within wheels; kink, gnarl, knarl^; webwork^. [complexity if a task or action] difficulty &c 704. V. complexify^, complicate. Adj. gnarled, knarled^. complex, complexed; intricate, complicated, perplexed, involved, raveled, entangled, knotted, tangled, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... encounters with the deadliest of foes, the mind, which is enraged, is never perturbed; the style, which leaps like the fire of heaven, is never disordered. As in Guido's picture of St. Michael piercing the dragon, while the gnarled muscles of the arms and hands attest the utmost strain of the strength, the countenance remains placid, serene, and undisturbed. In this great quality of mental dignity, Mr. Webster's speeches have become more and more eminent. The glow and luster ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... tea under the big apple-tree. It was very big and old and wonderful. No wonder Mr. MacNairn and his mother loved it. Its great branches spread out farther than I had ever seen the branches of an apple-tree spread before. They were gnarled and knotted and beautiful with age. Their shadows upon the grass were velvet, deep and soft. Such a tree could only have lived its life in such a garden. At least it seemed so to me. The high, dim-colored walls, with their curious, low corner ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lifted the motionless form, and steadily bore it away: Inez taking the lead, and stepping cautiously. She left the Plaza and principal streets, and turned toward a broad desolate waste, stretching away from the town, and bare, save a few gnarled oaks that moaned in the March wind. The moon rose when they had proceeded some distance beyond the last house, and Inez paused suddenly, ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... same open air; that is, his two only meals,—breakfast and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... reached the yonder bank when we set forward through a wood which was marked by no path. Not green leaves but of a dusky color, not smooth boughs but knotty and gnarled, not fruits were there but thorns with poison. Those savage beasts that hold in hate the tilled places between Cecina and Corneto have no thickets so ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... went, and before long they were come up on to the down-country, where was scarce a tree, save gnarled and knotty thorn-bushes here and there, but nought else higher than the whin. And here on these upper lands they saw that the pastures were much burned with the drought, albeit summer was not worn old. Now they went making due south toward the mountains, ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... his nature, and to awaken that sweet sympathy which carries with it, to those who suffer, all the comfort the human heart can crave. Those who have heard him, as many have, relate such touching episodes of the war, cannot recall without emotion the quivering lip, the face gnarled and writhed to stifle the rising sob, and the patient, loving eyes swimming in tears, which mirrored the tender pity of his gentle and loving nature. He seemed a stranger to the harsher and stormier passions of man. Easily grieved, he seemed incapable of hate.... ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... ditches, where the dark water scarcely moved, all fringed with tall reeds; while here and there was the gleam of a white flower upon the erect stem of a marsh-mallow. But what gave to this spot a strange and almost weird character was the number of great hoary willows, thirty or forty feet high, with gnarled and twisted boles, scattered over the dark green grass. It was a melancholy grove of fantastic dream-haunted willows, such as belongs to the South and ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... into the rushing tide. For weeks it would be rolled along the shallows; its leaves and twigs rotting off, its smaller branches breaking short, until at last, hundreds of miles, perhaps, below the scene of its fall, it would lodge fair in the channel. The gnarled and matted mass of boughs would ordinarily cling like an anchor to the sandy bottom, while the buoyant trunk, as though struggling to break away, would strain upward obliquely to within a few inches of the surface of the muddy water, which—too thick to ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... led them up a rocky defile, with gnarled little trees growing between the crags. Ahead, the hillside rose up in a broken, rocky cliff. There was a door, like a small tunnel entrance. A woman in a long white robe ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... of a student was swift and bitter; it was like beginning a new life with a new identity, though Clayton suffered less than he anticipated. He had become interested from the first. There was nothing in the pretty glen, when he came, but a mountaineer's cabin and a few gnarled old apple-trees, the roots of which checked the musical flow of a little stream. Then the air was filled with the tense ring of hammer and saw, the mellow echoes of axes, and the shouts of ox-drivers from the forests, indignant groans from the mountains, and a little town sprang ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... shattered; his back begins to look mossy and dilapidated; but after all, there is a piquant, decided air about him, that speaks the old age of a tree of distinction, a kingly oak. To-day I see him standing, dimly revealed through the mist of falling snows; to-morrow's sun will show the outline of his gnarled limbs—all rose color with their soft snow burden; and again a few months, and spring will breathe on him, and he will draw a long breath, and break out once more, for the three hundredth time, perhaps, into ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... depressed—why had I not white hair?—for a few minutes had shown me that I was not old enough for the child despite my forty years. She was quite happy with the little black cat, which lay in the small lap blinking its yellow eyes at the sun; and presently an old man came by, lame and bent, with gnarled twisted hands, leaning heavily ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... fair," cried another. "The youngsters who are gone sing well; and one of them has a harp I should be glad you should see. He made it himself from a gnarled olive-root." And he turned to ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... were smooth patches which we called bowling-greens, but hard and slippery as polished marble, with much the same translucent appearance. Practically all the country, however, was a jumbled mass of small, hard sastrugi, averaging perhaps a foot in height, with an occasional gnarled old veteran twice as high. To either side the snow rolled away for miles. In front, we made our first acquaintance with the accursed next ridge, which is always ahead of you on the plateau. Generally we passed from one ridge to ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... anything, however simple, the deeper it penetrates into our being until it becomes a part of us. In time we learn to know the tree that shades our porch, but years elapse before we are on friendly terms, and a lifetime is spent before the gnarled giant admits us to intimate companionship. Trees are filled with reserve; when denuded of their neighbors, they stand in melancholy solitude until the leaves fall for the last time, until their branches wither, and their trunks ring ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... of forest trees, with rank grass and underwood, abounding in game of all kinds, and infested by tigers. Bullocks are often taken by them, but men seldom. The sal (alias sakhoo) trees are here stunted, gnarled, and ugly, while in the Tarae forest they are straight, lofty, and beautiful. The reason is, that beyond the forest their leaves are stripped off and sold for plates. They are carried to distant towns, and stored up for long periods, to form ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... great roses in his garden, pink and white and cream and yellow, clambering over the walls and up to the very roof of his picturesque and peaceful home—the white doves nesting in the warm sun—the ripe apples hanging on the gnarled boughs, the simple peasantry walking up his garden paths, coming to him with their little histories of pain and disappointment and sorrow; which were as great to them as any of the wider miseries of sufferers ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... come, when stealthy change Hath stolen the cider-press away And the gnarled orchards of the grange Have fallen before a slow decay, Were I so cunning, I would carve From some time-scorning monolith A sculpture that should well preserve The fame ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... Well, you are in a nice fix!" and Ben's eyes began to twinkle with mischievous merriment, as well they might, for Sam certainly was a spectacle to convulse the soberest person. Perched unsteadily on the gnarled stump, with his muddy legs drawn up, his dismal face splashed with mud, and the whole lower half of his body as black as if he had been dipped in an inkstand, he presented such a comically doleful object that Ben danced about, laughing like a ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... long silence. Brother William's gray head sagged on his shoulder, and the hymn-book slipped from his gnarled old hands. The knitting sisters began, one after another, to stab their needles into their balls of gray yarn and roll their work up ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... into the dizzy chasm. The most difficult portion of their journey was apparently just before them, consisting of a series of narrow ledges, so widely separated and irregular as to require each to assist the other while passing from point to point. Beyond these a slender cleft, bordered by gnarled roots of low bushes, promised a somewhat easier and securer passage toward the summit. Hampton's face became deathly white as they began the perilous climb, but his hand remained steady, his foot sure, while the girl moved forward as if remaining unconscious ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... and all the details were admirably conceived and rendered,—the crumbling, lichened wall, in cold gray, with the gnarled root of the creeper and the wreath of purple blossoms, in sharp contrast to the pallor of the face and the bold assurance of the figure. The light fell across the canvas, leading down to a slab of vivid purple ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... for the purpose of enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto, it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give light if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still burned, a gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the disorder of the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a small cake, a crumpled napkin or two,—there were never enough to go round,—and on ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... then the low peak of the roof of the main building. For miles these seemed to grow no closer, but the steady trot of the little horses ate up the distance, and Franklin found himself again at the spot with which he was already so well acquainted that every detail, every low building and gnarled bit of wood, was tabulated surely in his mind. The creak of the windmill presently came to his ears as a familiar sound, but rasping and irritating on his strong nerves as the croak of the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... arid sands of Florida; for, as we rode on, we saw gigantic pine, cedar, and hiccory trees, torn up by the roots, and scattered over the surrounding country, by by-gone hurricanes, many of them hundreds of yards from the spot that nurtured their roots—while the gnarled branches lying across our track, scorched black-with the lightning, or from long exposure to a burning sun, impeded our advance, and made ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... himself, and brought the billy and pint-pots to the head of my camp. The moon had grown misty. The plain horizon had closed in. A couple of boughs, hanging from the gnarled and blasted timber over the billabong, were the perfect shapes of two men hanging side by side. Mitchell scratched the back of his neck and looked down at the pup curled like a glob of mud on the sand ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... Lexley Park after the funeral had passed through, and recollect the soreness of heart with which I lifted my eyes towards the house, of which every trace has since disappeared. At that moment there seemed to rise before me, sporting among the gnarled branches of the old thorn-trees, the graceful form of Mary Stanley, followed by old Sergeant, bounding and barking through the fern; and the General looking on from a distance, pretending to be angry, and desiring her to come out of the covert and not disturb the game. Exactly thus, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... Tato dressed in his scarlet robes like the noble Florentine, striking the pavement with his staff to scare the dogs. He was talking with a group of shepherds from the mountains, swarthy men twisted and gnarled as vine shoots, in brown jackets, leather sandals, and thonged leggings; women with red kerchiefs and greasy and mended garments that had descended through several generations. They had come down from their ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in his youth, but—it was Youth itself, and so was that which the ringers were so soon to toll for; and for some remote and unformed reason, to his scores of years they were pitiful and should be cheered. He bent forward himself and put out his ancient, veined and knotted, gnarled and trembling hand, to timorously touch the arm of her he ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... philology as common men are with the passing events of the day. His memory has such a limitless grasp that he is able to quote sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, from a gnarled and knotty ancient literature that ordinary scholars are capable of achieving little more than a bowing acquaintance with. But his memory is the least of his great endowments. By the testimony of the gentlemen above referred to he is able to critically analyze ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... fire. And that horrible monstrosity is the cause of all—that loathsome, misshapen, hideous abortion has banned and cursed my whole life! He is my first recollection. As far back as I can look through the dim eye of childhood's years, that horrible face, that gnarled and twisted trunk, those devilish eyes glare at me like the eyes and face of a wild beast. As memory grows stronger and more vivid, I can see that same face still—the dwarf! the dwarf! the dwarf!—Satan's true representative on earth, darkening and ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... night under the huge spreading branches of a gnarled birch, a few versts from the scene of our exploit, and early Friday morning were off for Sidanka. When about fifteen versts from the village Dodd suggested a gallop, to try the mettle of our horses and warm our blood. As we were ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the examinations was Lector Booklund, teacher of Latin in Lower and Upper Sixth. He was short and stocky and gnarled by gout. Instead of speaking, he emitted a series of verbal explosives, and the boy whose answers didn't come quick enough became the object of withering scorn. Most of his life seemed concentrated in his eyes where twinkling merriment ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... poorly seasoned sashes came occasional little puffs of the furious wind, which whistled and howled like a demon without. The gunners seated themselves around the huge fireplace, in which a pile of dried gnarled roots filled the room with light and warmth, and lighting pipe or cigar, as fancy dictated, gave a respectful attention to ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... stone-cast from the wall A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, And o'er it many, round and small, The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. Hard by a poplar shook alway, All silver-green with gnarled bark: For leagues no other tree did mark The level waste, the rounding gray. She only said, 'My life is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, I would ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... publicly declared he never would dispose of, a threat that seemed harmless enough, there not being the slightest possibility that any one else would be willing to hold such a miserable waste on any pretext whatever:—a half acre down by the railroad, slabsided, full of gnarled stumps and brake, and about equally distributed into rock, black mud, and water. Had the original trees been standing, it must have approached quite as near the correct type of the 'howling wilderness,' the horrida inculta, as could ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... last hundred yards at a gallop. Judith, his foster sister, stood up in her stirrups, lashed Swift vigorously over the flanks with the knotted reins and when Buster slid on his haunches to the very doorstep, Swift brought her gnarled fore legs down on his sweeping tail and slid with him. She brought up when he did with her nose under his saddle blanket. The boy and girl avoided a mix-up by leaping from their saddles and ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... touched me lightly in the face. I threw out my hand and touched a cold, clammy substance strangely suggestive of the leafy branch of a tree. Yet nothing was to be seen. I felt again, and my fingers wandered to a broader expanse of something gnarled and uneven. I kept on exploring, and my grasp closed over something painfully prickly. I drew my hand smartly back, and, as I did so, distinctly heard the loud and angry rustling of leaves. Just then one of my friends called out to me from ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... between her sister and Sir Ronald, struck smilingly in. He was small and he was homely, but he was a baronet and worth eight thousand a year, and Rose brought all the battery of her charms to bear. In vain. She might as well have tried to fascinate one of the gnarled old tamaracks out-of-doors. Sir Ronald was utterly insensible to her brightest smiles and glances, to her rosiest blushes and most honeyed words. He listened politely, he answered courteously; but he was no more fascinated ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... day and all night and came at last to the grim city of green stones with towers like aged fingers of gnarled wood in the midst of which the Princess Myrtle held her court in an old red castle set about with small, stiff trees. Now the Princess had not long been married to the Prince Merlin. So full of love were they for each other that for them many days had drifted away ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... their own wives; the women were in primitive short gowns and petticoats, with the venerable sun-bonnets of Holland origin. The lower part of the valley was cut up into small farms, each consisting of a little meadow and corn-field; an orchard of sprawling, gnarled apple-trees, and a garden, where the rose, the marigold, and the hollyhock were permitted to skirt the domains of the capacious cabbage, the aspiring pea, and the portly pumpkin. Each had its prolific little mansion teeming with children; with an old hat nailed against the wall ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Tsoay slipped behind a wind-gnarled tree and disappeared. Travis stooped under a line of bush limbs. Both were working their way south, using the peak ahead as an agreed landmark, pausing at intervals to examine the landscape for any hint of a man ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... In the language of another it is a "black ocean tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes, a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, barrenness—a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder, of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness, and all these weird shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this far-stretching waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action, of boiling, surging, furious motion was petrified—all stricken ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... Children come running with mats for seats. Bedridden, blind, maimed are carried on litters, if only they may touch the garments of these wonderful beings. One old chief with skin like crinkled leather and body gnarled with woes of a hundred years throws his most precious possession, a headdress, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... environs the island. The Arab riders go pacing over the plains of Sharon, in the rosy twilight, just before sunrise; and I can see the ghastly Moab mountains, with the Dead Sea gleaming before them, from the mosque on the way towards Bethany. The black gnarled trees of Gethsemane lie at the foot of Olivet, and the yellow ramparts of the city rise up on ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... man raised his sunken eyes, all their keen humour gone, and spoke as though each word were dug from his heart. "Say no more, Father Halen." Then he reached out, caught the priest's hand in his gnarled fingers, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... girth, festooned with wild honeysuckle and other creepers. In the open were broad orchards bending under their harvest of red and yellow fruit—apples and plums, peaches, nectarines and cherries—and extensive vineyards. Huge sugar maples challenged giant pear trees, whose gnarled trunks had resisted the storms of a century. To the north the floor of the forest was interlaced with trails, which, with the intention of deceiving Hull's spies as to the strength of Brock's forces, had been crossed and recrossed, ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... Abbey the monks were trooping in. Under the long green-paved avenues of gnarled oaks and of lichened beeches the white-robed brothers gathered to the sound. From the vine-yard and the vine-press, from the bouvary or ox-farm, from the marl-pits and salterns, even from the distant iron-works of Sowley ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was above the water-line, and these trees grew in the sunshine and stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the result ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... occupied a trellis in one angle of the walls which surrounded the garden on two sides. Along the third side was the church itself, while the fourth was open, the wall having crumbled away, its site marked only by a line of eight great pear trees, older even than the grapevine, gnarled, twisted, bearing no fruit. Directly opposite the pear trees, in the south wall of the garden, was a round, arched portal, whose gate giving upon the esplanade in front of the Mission was always closed. Small gravelled walks, well kept, bordered with ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... pines and bushes were scattering and the field of daisies, now in full bloom, began, when I heard a slight sound at my left. I looked in the direction of the sound and saw her. She was standing beneath a gnarled, moss-draped old pine by the bluff edge, looking ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to tea under the big apple-tree. It was very big and old and wonderful. No wonder Mr. MacNairn and his mother loved it. Its great branches spread out farther than I had ever seen the branches of an apple-tree spread before. They were gnarled and knotted and beautiful with age. Their shadows upon the grass were velvet, deep and soft. Such a tree could only have lived its life in such a garden. At least it seemed so to me. The high, dim-colored walls, ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... same color predominated—a russet brown. Their faces were bronzed and thin. Their beards were long and faded, and tangled like autumn corn silk. Their gaunt, gnarled, and knotted hands held the reins over their equally sad and sober teams. The women looked worn and thin, and sat bent forward over the children in their laps. The dust had settled upon their ill-fitting dresses. There were no smart carriages, no touch of gay paint, ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... blue sky thinly veiled from them by the crinkled brown-green leaves. The peculiar dry mossy smell of an oak-tree was disturbed into the air by the least motion of their feet or hands against the bark. They could hardly see the ground, and all around, other gnarled trees barred ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... summits, and the mist will often wrap them in gloom and give them a strange and awesome look. At the foot of the craggy pass the mountain-torrent of the Pieve roars and tumbles on its way. Far-reaching forests of trees, with weather-beaten gnarled old trunks, stand firm against the mountain storms. Beneath their wide-spreading boughs there is a gloom almost of twilight, showing peeps here and there of deep purple ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... her back to the gnarled trunk, while she looked out over the half-mile of dancing blue wavelets to where, on the other side, the brown, wooden houses of the Thorley estate swept down to the shore. She rose on seeing the visitor approach, showing a startled disposition to run away. This she ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... Memnon, who sauntered half-bashfully over to greet the strangers, is proud of his home. We turn now to the west along the county line. Great dismantled trunks of pines tower above the green cottonfields, cracking their naked gnarled fingers toward the border of living forest beyond. There is little beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon that suggests power,—a naked grandeur, as it were. The houses are bare and straight; there are no hammocks or easy-chairs, and few flowers. So when, as here at ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... swung out the cylinder and pointed with a gnarled and horny finger. The men closed in and gazed in silence. One of the ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... The golden corn, the olive, and the vine. Fair cities, gallant mansions, castles old, 80 And forests, where beside his leafy hold The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn, And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn; Palladian palace with its storied halls; Fountains, where Love lies listening to their falls; 85 Gardens, where flings the bridge its airy span, And Nature makes her happy home with man; Where many a gorgeous flower is duly fed With ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we never missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves. Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina—a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... force its way up surrounded by awkward environments. Fundamentally, the man is a thinking humorist; but his mode of expression is strange. The perpetual inversions, the habitual irony, the mingled tenderness and mockery, give a kind of gnarled surface to the style, which is pleasant when you get familiar with it, but which repels the stranger, and to some people even remains permanently disagreeable. I think it was his continual irony which at last brought him to writing as if under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... forest is the evergreen coniferous woodland of the north. Its pines, firs, spruces, hemlocks, and cedars which are really junipers, cover most of Canada together with northern New England and the region south of Lakes Huron and Superior. At its northern limit the forest looks thoroughly forlorn. The gnarled and stunted trees are thickly studded with half-dead branches bent down by the weight of snow, so that the lower ones sweep the ground, while the upper look tired and discouraged from their struggle with an inclement climate. Farther south, ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... couple of furnished rooms in one of the villas. It has a decayed bit of front garden in which a gnarled, stunted stick is planted, and it is called The Laburnums. My landlord, the owner of the villas, is a builder. What profits he can get from building in Murglebed, Heaven alone knows; but, as he mounts a bicycle in the morning and disappears for the rest of the day, I presume he careers ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... she exclaimed. "How sweet they are! See the way the sunshine touches the old, gnarled trunks, and what a lovely light filters through the leaves. One never sees it anywhere except in an olive grove. I should like to ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... way, past answering with a mind of her own. The man, as he stood there, was wicked and cruel, every line in his ugly face and angular body a line of sin. The woman was bent, broken, a wreck. In her face there was no sign of a living soul. Her eyes were dull, her heart burned out, her hands gnarled with toil under the slavedom of a beast. Yet even Peter, quiet as a mouse where he lay, sensed the difference between them. He had seen the girl and this woman sobbing in each other's arms. And often he had crawled to the woman's feet, and occasionally her hand had touched him, and frequently she ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... his home. Over his head, trees without leaves stamped their gnarled and intricate contours on the shadowed air. A pallor covered the roofs. It was afternoon but a moon-like ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... following—even though I stopped in a low spot to admire a mass of thrifty blue flags, now beginning to bloom—and came thus to the pines I was seeking. They are not great trees, nor noble, but gnarled and angular and stunted, for the soil in that place is poor and thin, and the winds in winter keen; but the brown blanket of needles they spread and the shade they offer the traveller are not less hospitable; nor the fragrance they give off less enchanting. The odour of ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... brick pavement, and climb up a few worn steps on to a platform surrounded by a railing. Out of the middle of it there grows a gnarled and ancient tree with crooked boughs splitting asunder with ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... creek, and then the rock cliff, it must be about as high as—about twice as tall as the trees that grow along the foot of it, and it's highest at the upper end, then there's a big tree standing alone almost in the middle of the valley, and the gnarled, scraggly trees that grow along the top of the rocks, and the valley must be as wide as from here to that clump of trees beyond my wood-pile—about a block, I guess. And there's the big crack in the cliff that starts straight," ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne. Eleanor was sitting in the deep shade of the avenue that ran along the outer edge of the garden. Through the gnarled trunks to her right shone the blazing stretches of the Campagna, melting into the hot shimmer of the Mediterranean. A new volume of French memoirs, whereof not a page had yet been cut, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... noticed; he also noticed that Dicky the Idiot was allowed to be present as a very great favour because it was Christmas Eve and snowing so hard, that the room was more crowded than he had ever seen it, and that Mother Figgis, with her round face and her gnarled and knotted hands, was at her very merriest and in the best of tempers. All these things Peter had noticed before Frosted Moses (so called because of his long white beard and wonderful age) made his remark about Courage, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... safe appeal of truth to time, there gradually evolved, as between man and man, the method of voluntary submission to a judicial tribunal. Twisted and gnarled was this growth however, for even under Anglo-Saxon law the right of trial by battle was jealously guarded, and lasted for many years. A noble knight charged with an offense could always demand trial by battle; and if he succeeded in running through the body or otherwise disabling the man ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... no amount of blows could quicken his pace, and no chirruping could change the dejected drooping of his head. All his natural language said, as plainly as a horse could say it, that he was a most unhappy beast. Even the trees on Reuben's premises had a gnarled and knotted appearance. The bark wept little sickly tears of gum, and the branches grew awry, as if they felt the continual discord, and made sorry faces at each other behind their owner's back. His fields were red ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... old locusts was blackened by the smoke that crept continually up the valley, and their feathery foliage, so merry in its movement and so yellow and joyous in its color, seemed peculiarly precious under that somber sky. There were sycamores and copper beeches; gnarled apple-trees, too old to bear; and fall pear-trees, hung with a sharp, hard fruit in October; all with a leafage singularly rich and luxuriant, and peculiarly vivid in color. The oaks about the house had been old trees when my great-grandfather built his cabin ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... numbers from adjacent swamps, with an occasional "To-whit, to-whoo!" from the sombre owl, altogether make a native choir anything but conducive to calm repose. And yet, amid such a serenade, with a few boughs for a bed, and the gnarled root of a tree for a pillow, did many of our fathers spend their first nights in the wilderness ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... west and from it ran the tortuous and rocky trail, down through the mountains toward the valley below. The aspect from the great gate was one of quiet and rugged beauty. A short stretch of barren downs in the foreground only sparsely studded with an occasional gnarled oak gave an unobstructed view of broad and lovely meadowland through which wound a ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... once more; but now the studies were of a less severe character, and Hester spent one of her first happy half-hours over a drawing lesson. She had a great love for drawing, and felt some pride in the really beautiful copy which she was making of the stump of an old gnarled oak-tree. Her dismay, however, was proportionately great when the drawing-master drew his pencil ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... which Peter passed. It was primeval forest even here, with valuable trees stunted and poor ones vastly overgrown according to nature's law which provides for the survival of the fittest. This was the law too, which was to be applied to Peter. Would he grow straight and true in this foreign soil or gnarled and misshapen like the cedars and the maples that he saw? Yes. He would grow and ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... piles concealed by flowers. Farther on, in a hollow, I saw the romantic masses of the chateau of Sache, a sad retreat though full of harmony; too sad for the superficial, but dear to a poet with a soul in pain. I, too, came to love its silence, its great gnarled trees, and the nameless mysterious influence of its solitary valley. But now, each time that we reached an opening towards the neighboring slope which gave to view the pretty castle I had first noticed in the morning, I stopped to ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... chose, Ideal graces rose Like flowers on gnarled boughs; For he was nursed and fed At beauty's fountain head And to the goddess pledged ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... the parasites—the huge llianas, with branches like tree-trunks, black and gnarled; the cane-vines, with pretty star-like flowers; the muscadine grape-vines, with their dark purple clusters; the bignonias, with trumpet-shaped corollas; the smilacae, among which are conspicuous the Smilax rotundifolia, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... sending up a flash which threw into relief the narrator's gnarled red face under its grey-black stubble. Pressed into the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes; then the fire sank and in the shaded lamp-light ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... fine weather, bends only its topmost branches to the light wind, and its leaves and twigs alone are troubled by the summer breeze; but when the gale lays low the trees of the forest and whirls the leaves about like ocean spray, then the oak is stirred to wild action; tosses its gnarled limbs in the air, and moves the very earth on which it stands. So the heroes on Deal beach are sluggish and quiescent while the sun shines and the butterflies are abroad; but let the storm burst upon the sea; let the waves ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... overcast, and all that grassy space wherein the Tree stood lay in a soft rich shadow. Joan sat on a natural seat formed by gnarled great roots of the Tree. Her hands lay loosely, one reposing in the other, in her lap. Her head was bent a little toward the ground, and her air was that of one who is lost to thought, steeped in dreams, and not conscious of herself or of the world. And now I saw a most strange ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... from the rising sun, radiated across his temples. His skin was tanned to the hue of old hickory and deep down in its furrows were lines of white. He had a big nose that was always sunburned, powerful hands with a reddish fuzz on their backs, and gnarled fingers that bore the scars of innumerable nautical disasters. But the chief glory he possessed was a neatly tattooed schooner that sailed under full canvas upon his forearm and ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... ago the Barstows had a parched little farm on the outskirts of what is now the near-metropolis of Okoochee, but what was then a straggling village in the Indian Territory. Ma Barstow was a woman of thirty-five who looked sixty; withered by child-bearing; scorched by the sun; beaten by the wind; gnarled with toil; gritty with dust. Ploughing the barren little farm one day Clem Barstow had noticed a strange oily scum. It seeped up through the soil and lay there, heavily. Oil! Weeks of suspense, weeks of disappointment, weeks of hope. Through it all Ma Barstow had washed, scrubbed, cooked ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... spray, and leaf and flower, The growths of summer. Here the palm upreared Its white columnar trunk and spotless sheaf Of plume-like leaves; here cedars, huge as those Of Lebanon, stretched far their level boughs, Yet pale and shadowless; the sturdy oak Stood, with its huge gnarled roots of seeming strength, Fast anchored, in the glistening bank; light sprays Of myrtle, roses in their bud and bloom, Drooped by the winding walks; yet all seemed wrought Of stainless alabaster; up the trees Ran the lithe jessamine, with stalk and leaf ...
— The Little People of the Snow • William Cullen Bryant
... and M. Coquenil, followed by a splendid white-and-brown shepherd dog, was walking down the Rue de la Cite, past the somber mass of the city hospital. Before reaching the Place Notre-Dame he stopped twice, once at a flower market that offered the grateful shade of its gnarled polenia trees just beyond the Conciergerie prison, and once under the heavy archway of the Prefecture de Police. At the flower market he bought a white carnation from a woman in green apron and wooden ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... observer of rural beauties. He had so little of the organ of locality that I suspect he could have lost his way in his own garden. But the Captain was exquisitely alive to external impressions,—not a feature in the landscape escaped him. At every fantastic gnarled pollard he halted to gaze; his eye followed the lark soaring up from his feet; when a fresher air came from the hill-top his nostrils dilated, as if voluptuously to inhale its delight. My father, with all his ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... were on the moraine, and after splashing through a dozen little glacier streams came on a track which led up the hillside. Wake nodded feebly when I asked if this was right. Then to my joy I saw a gnarled pine. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... in on the point, and Walter steered to land some distance out from it. A few strokes of the paddle sent the light canoe gliding in amongst the mangrove bushes that fringed the shore. Climbing out upon the curious gnarled roots, Walter pulled the canoe far enough in to effectually screen it from sight. Next he examined his pistols to see that they were properly loaded, and with a parting word of cheer for his chum, he made his way slowly and cautiously over the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... dank and chill. It was as if the clock had been put back four hours. Only a jagged strip of sky, between projecting crags, announced the advent of day. No living thing seemed to inhabit this region of perpetual twilight. At intervals a gnarled and twisted bush grew out of a cleft, lifting spectral foliage toward where the sun should be, and was not. Silence pervaded the dusk like a living presence; unseen, but so poignantly felt that the whisper of the stream and the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... whole, resembled an oak, with a gnarled swelling base and wide-spreading branches. Picturesque rocks of every conceivable form adorned its banks, among which glided the numerous tributaries, mottled with black and red and gray boulders, from the fountain ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... been said before, that Abby Rock was not fair to outward view. Nature had been in a crabbed mood when she fashioned this gaunt, angular form, these gnarled, unlovely features. An uncharitable neighbour, in describing Abby, once said that she looked as if she had swallowed an old cedar fence-rail and shrunk to it; and the description was apt enough so far as the body went. Her ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... evidently knew it well, for he never hesitated. He swung us on, panting as we were, along the clearer parts, till we came to a part where our way seemed stopped by gorse-bushes. They rose up, thick and dark, right in front of us. Our guide stopped and told us to look down. Among the gnarled gorse-stems there seemed to be a passage or "run" made by some beast, fox or badger, going to and from ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... Jan licked the gnarled hand and tried to show that he wished he could help, but the only thing he could do was to show the love and sympathy that filled his loyal heart. That night when the light was out and everything was quiet, Jan lay wide ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... of light became a cone of dazzling radiance; the rocks throbbed, and the gnarled pines shook as the roar swelled into a tremendous harmony of many different notes. Then there was sudden darkness as the locomotive leaped past, and huge box-cars rushed, lurching and rocking, out of the thick, black smoke. Flying ballast crashed ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... between two gloamings. The features of the town had a keen interest for Elizabeth's mother, now that the human side came to the fore. As soon as they had wandered about they could see that the stockade of gnarled trees which framed in Casterbridge was itself an avenue, standing on a low green bank or escarpment, with a ditch yet visible without. Within the avenue and bank was a wall more or less discontinuous, and within the wall were packed the ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... are quite sure is real. So it was with me this time. I did not dream any story or see any people; I only dreamt of a plant. In the dream no one told me anything about it: I just saw it growing under a tree: a small bit of the tree root came into the picture, an old gnarled root covered with moss, and with three sorts of eyes in it, round holes trimmed with moss—you know the kind. The plant was not one I should have thought much about, though certainly it was not one that I knew: it had no flowers or berries, and grew quite squat in the ground; ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... began to prepare them for cooking. He soon built a fire of some sticks which he gleaned from one or two twisted and gnarled evergreens that had wandered above timber line and cooked the birds over the embers. He gave a brace to me, and sitting on a boulder with our feet hanging over the edge we ate our evening meal without salt or pepper, and then each of ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... we came to a deep hollow, planted with one gigantic palm-shaft, belted round by saplings, springing from its roots. But, Laocoon-like, sire and sons stood locked in the serpent folds of gnarled, distorted banians; and the banian-bark, eating into their vital wood, corrupted their veins of sap, till all those palm- nuts ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... cliff of the great granite bowl. The peaks turned from red to yellow. It was absolutely silent. No trees rustled in the morning air. There were no trees. Only, here and there, a few stunted evergreens, two or three feet high, had rooted on the rock and clung there, gnarled and twisted from ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... vain man, in thy brown and red suit!" chuckled Mary Antony, leaning her gnarled hands on the stone parapet, as she stood framed in one of the cloister arches overlooking the garden. "Is that thy little 'grace before meat'? But, I pray thee, Sir Robin, who said there was cheese in my wallet? Nay, is there like to be cheese in a wallet already containing ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... sombre Derbyshire moors. The path now creeps along the margin, and now rises above the bed of a clear and murmuring stream, and immediately opposite is another hill as lofty and wild, both covered with the finest trees—oaks, ash, and chestnut—which push out their gnarled roots in a thousand fantastic shapes, and grow out of vast masses of rock in the most luxuriant and picturesque manner. Yesterday I came here, a tolerable place with no pretension, but very well kept, not without handsome trees, and surrounded by ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... of his congregation do, Deacon Goodsole believes in him most implicitly. Deacon Goodsole is a believer—not I mean in anything in particular, but generally. He likes to believe; he enjoys it; he does it, not on evidence, but on general principles. The deacons of the stories are all crabbed, gnarled, and cross-grained. They are the terrors of the little boys, and the thorn in the flesh to the minister. But Deacon Goodsole is the most cheery, bright, and genial of men. He is like a streak of sunshine. He sensibly radiates the prayer-meeting, ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... old man in a lane; So gnarled was he and full of pain That kindly Death was struck with pity— "Come you with me, Old man," said he, "I'll set you down in a ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... precise locality where you were so pleased? Why not mention the exact hedge, the particular meadow? Because no two persons look at the same thing with the same eyes. To me this spot may be attractive, to you another; a third thinks yonder gnarled oak the most artistic. Nor could I guarantee that every one should see the same things under the same conditions of season, time, or weather. How could I arrange for you next autumn to see the sprays of the horse-chestnut, scarlet from frost, reflected in the dark water of the brook? ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... great men thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder.— Merciful Heaven! Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man! Dress'd in a little brief authority,— Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence,—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep; who, with our ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... little Lydia used to tell that during that entire drive she thought she was going through an English avenue leading up to some great estate, for the trees crowded up close to the roadway on either side, giant forest trees—gnarled oaks, singing firs, jaunty maples, graceful elms—all stretching their branches overhead. But the "avenue" seemed endless. "When do we come to the house?" she asked, innocently. "This lane is ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... from the cell a tall cross is planted in the ground; and, at the other end of the platform, a gnarled old palm-tree leans over the abyss, for the side of the mountain is scarped; and at the bottom of the cliff the Nile swells, as it were, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... softly, as he laid his fresh young hand upon the gnarled and withered fingers that rested upon the sword across ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... lying outspread below. Even the Call building, highest eminence piled up by man in that vista, presented its roof to the eye. I can picture that site no better than by this; Over Judge Tiffany's front wall hung an apple tree, gnarled, convoluted, by the buffets of the sea wind. In autumn, when the fruit was ripe, stray apples from this tree had been seen to tumble from the wall and roll four blocks down into the ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... walked along, side by side, without a word. They reached a paved road that stretched out as far as the eye could see, between two lines of lanterns, between two rows of gnarled trees that held aloft handfuls of bare branches and cast their slender, motionless shadows on high blank walls. There, in the keen air, chilled by the evaporation of the snow, they walked on and on for a long time, burying themselves in the vague, infinite, unfamiliar depths ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... betrayed that Captain Darby wore a wig designed for a larger man, and that the visage beneath was gnarled and weather-beaten, marked with the signs of a ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... convinced that it is the most essential. It is but recently that any of us have approximated to a right appreciation of the value of pure air. But look for a moment at one of those great forest trees; and then reflect that all that knotted and gnarled bulk has been mainly formed out of air. We, in our gross conceptions, were wont to think that the fatness of the earth was the tree's chief source of nourishment. But it is not so. In some cases this is almost perceptible to the eye, for we see the towering pine springing ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... with no difficulty, over the rough contorted crags, worn by the surf into deep ruts and uneven ridges, gnarled protuberances, and crater-like hollows. The fossiliferous beds are still very numerous, and largely charged with remains. We see dermal bones, spines, scales, and jaws, projecting in high relief from the sea-worn surface of the ledges below, and from the weatherworn faces ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the fisherman was old, gnarled and sunburned so dark that he was almost black, despite the dilapidated and dirty pith helmet he was wearing. His lumpish face was deeply seamed and wrinkled. His sunken mouth told of missing teeth, and his long, unkempt hair was ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... peril from the black man, but it is a peril secondary to the peril of the black man upon this soil. I do not apprehend any uprising by Uncle Tom; but Uncle Tom is dead, and his son is here and his friends of a younger generation. These men are being gnarled and corrupted and imbruted, and are massing themselves, touching elbows one with another; and under the influences of the age in which we live are becoming a factor in our civilization which, unless we modify and change ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... mare and spider, too. Moreover, Eybel, who is a bright boy, and has a head upon his shoulders, wants a slim rogue of a fellow that talks Engelsch to worm himself in over yonder"—he jerked his gnarled thumb in the direction of Gueldersdorp—"and bring back a plan of the defences on the west, where the native stad lies. Perhaps I will let you keep two hundred of that five hundred if you are the man to go.... But whether you go or stay, by the Lord! you will find it best ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... is a dell—a deep, hollow cup, lined with turf as green and short as the sod of this common. The very oldest of the trees, gnarled mighty oaks, crowd about the brink of this dell. In the bottom lie the ruins ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... gnarled forefinger and pointed toward the rear of the house. Billy looked in the direction thus indicated and espied a woodpile. He grinned ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... placed here and there within the shade, where, as in Miss Bronte's time, the externals eat the luncheon brought with them to the school; and overlooking it all stand the great old pear-trees, whose gnarled and deformed trunks are relics of the time of the hospital and convent. Beyond these and along the gray wall which bounds the farther side of the enclosure is the sheltered walk which was Miss Bronte's favorite retreat,—the "allee defendue" of her novels. It is screened by shrubs and perfumed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... avalanche which an ill-timed footstep starts with overwhelming havoc, do not threaten the explorer of the Western mountains; and ordinarily he passes from height to height—from the base with its wreaths of evergreens to the zone where vegetation is limited to the gnarled dwarf-pine, from the foot-hills to the basin of the crisp alpine lake far above the life-limits—without once having to scale a cliff, supposing, of course, that he has chosen the best path. The trail may be narrow at times, with nothing between it and a gulf, and it may be pitched at an angle that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... alien-born. From earliest childhood I had known and loved these forest solitudes. Yet now, as when I was a little lad, the twilight shadows awed me. Here it was a gnarled and twisted tree-trunk so like a crouching panther that I sprang aside and had the steel half out before the clearer vision came. There it was the figure of a man gliding stealthily from tree to tree, it seemed; keeping even pace with me as if ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... Of earthy stuff, As honest as the fruitful soil, Gnarled as the friendly trees, and rough As hillsides that had known his toil; Of earthy stuff—let it be told, For earth-born men rise and reveal A courage fair as beaten gold And the ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... for breath just in front of us. She was pushing a heavy cart and her poor old body was trembling from the strain. Her legs were bare, and her feet were cut by the stones. There was absolute stolidity in her weather-beaten face, and the hands that lighted her pipe were gnarled and black. Miss Lessing has a perfect genius for getting at people, I think it is her good kind face through which her soul shines. She asked the old woman if she was very tired. The woman looked up, as if seeing us for the first time and nodded ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... and made a fire and put the billy on. The country looked wretched—like the ghost of a burnt-out land—in the moonlight. The banks of the creek were like ashes, the thin, gnarled gum-bush seemed dry-rotting fast, and in many places the surface of the ground was cracked in squares where it had shrunk in the drought. In the bed of the creek was a narrow gutter of water that looked ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... parted. The immediate effect on Farnum of the great figure that filled the doorway was one of masterful authority. A massive head crested a figure of extraordinary power. Gray as a mediaeval castle, age had not yet touched his gnarled strength. The keen steady eyes, the close straight lips, the shaggy eyebrows heavy and overhanging, gave accent to the rugged force of this grim freebooter who had reversed the law of nature which decrees that ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... of the court is quiet and stately, and notably carries out its spirit, with the gray-green of foliage plants and eucalyptus trees and the gnarled stems of gray old olive trees. In its vistas from any angle or point of view, the Court is ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... road leading from the town of Staunton out to the forest-crowned hills beyond, stood alone a little, gray stone cottage, in the midst of a garden inclosed by a low, moldering stone wall. A few gnarled and twisted fruit trees, long past bearing, stood around the house that their leafless branches could not be said to shade. A little wooden gate led up an old paved walk to the front door, on each side of ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... leaned against a gnarled tree with the slightly constrained air of a person unused to sylvan abandonments. Her beautiful back could not adapt itself to the irregularities of the tree-trunk, and she moved a little now and then in the effort to find an easier position. But her expression was serene, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... point of terror. Swiftly we made our way, ever slightly climbing, along the rugged hillside, and soon broke into country very wild and dismal. The pastoral character of the scene lessened and altogether disappeared. The trees grew matted and grotesquely gnarled, huddling together in menacing battalions—save where some plunging rock had burst like a shell, forcing a clearing and strewing the black moss with a jagged wreck of splinters. Here no flowers crept for warmth, no sentinel marmot ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... roots, twined in one unbroken snarl, clung frantically to the black soil. The vines and bushes fought back with thorn and bramble. Zora stood wiping the blood from her hands and staring at Bles. She saw the long gnarled fingers of the tough little trees and they looked like the fingers of Elspeth down there beneath the earth pulling against the boy. Slowly Zora forgot her blood and pain. Who would ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... farmer boy with a very dirty face and huge gnarled hands stood open-mouthed before the brilliant poster displayed before the small-town recruiting office. In his rather dull mind he pictured himself as he would look, straight and dignified, in the khaki uniform, perhaps even with the three stripes ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... "A gnarled tree may bear good fruit, and a harsh nature may give good counsel," thought the Lord of Glenvarloch, as he retreated to his own apartment, where the same reflection occurred to him again and again, while, unable as yet to reconcile himself to the thoughts of becoming his own fire-maker, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... certain sort of rest and happiness may come with it; but—they have never gone a-sketching! Hauled up on the wet bank in the long grass is your boat, with the frayed end of the painter tied around some willow that offers a helping root. Within a stone's throw, under a great branching of gnarled trees, is a nook where the curious sun, peeping at you through the interlaced leaves, will stencil Japanese shadows on your white umbrella. Then the trap is unstrapped, the stool opened, the easel put up, and you set your palette. ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... free by his captors, old Bildad, towed from the house by Caesar Napoleon, who strained savagely at the leash until his face bulged, burst upon the scene with impressive dramatic effect! It was difficult to decide, without due consideration, which was the more interesting. Bildad, a huge, gnarled old Viking, with matted gray hair, bushy eyebrows, a flowing beard, and leathery face, a fierce-looking giant, was appalling to behold, but so was Caesar Napoleon, an immense bulldog, cruel, bloodthirsty, his massive jaws working ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... one of those Provencal structures of a single story, with discolored tiles and four walls washed with a bright yellow. Before the facade extended a narrow terrace shaded by ancient mulberry trees, whose thick, gnarled branches drooped down, forming an arbor. It was here that Uncle Macquart smoked his pipe in the cool shade, in summer. And on hearing the sound of the carriage, he came and stood at the edge of the terrace, straightening his tall form neatly clad in blue cloth, his head ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... down the garden-path, and across the brook. "Here" proved to be the great golden-russet tree. High up on a gnarled old branch, there was a little flutter of a crimson and white gingham dress, and a merry face peeping down through the dainty pink blossoms that blushed all over the tree. It looked so pretty, framed ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... crowns, No bosomed woods adorn Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs, But gnarled and writhen thorn— Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim, And through the gaps revealed Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim Blue goodness ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... I had ever heard of it. I had always regarded him as a gnarled old bachelor without human ties. Where he had kept the sons and the necessary mother I had not the ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... long ease and indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered flatteries; its forked lightnings pointed sarcasms; for "the gnarled oak," he gives us "the soft myrtle:" for rocks, and seas, and mountains, artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a china jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... rose from the river's bank in a series of irregular terraces, upheld by rough stone walls. The gnarled old trees bent towards each other and away like dwarfs and crook-backs dancing a fantastic minuet; and in the grass beneath them, where the sun shot his fiery darts and cast his net of shadows, Chloris had scattered innumerable wildflowers: hyacinths, the colour of the sky; violets, ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... moment disastrously shattered. A bed of shrubbery lay within a few feet of where they sat. What had appeared to be a gnarled stump in its midst now quivered, broadened, fell into a line with the straightening back ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... strange trees creep out upon the ragged ledges almost to the water's edge. These cypresses are quite as instinct with individual life and quite as fantastic as any that Dore drew for his "Inferno." They are as gnarled and twisted as olive-trees two centuries old, but their attitudes seem not only to show struggle with the elements, but agony in that struggle. The agony may be that of torture in the tempest, or of some fabled creatures fleeing and pursued, stretching out their long arms in terror, and fixed ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... the staple of his dreams; they garnish his dishes, they spice his cup, they enter into his very prayers, and they make his will altogether. His oaks and elms in his park, and in his woods—they are sturdy timbers, in troth, and gnarled and knotted to some purpose, for they have stood for centuries; but what are they to the towering upshoots of his prejudices? Oh, they are mere wands! If he has not stood for centuries, his prejudices have; for they have come down from generation to generation with the family and the estate. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... But you're not going to browbeat me as you did poor papa when you had him on the stand?" said Miss Wayne, exploring the gnarled ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... violently atheistic, and at the same time decidedly religious: things that seem paradoxical, but are not. They adopted a vegetable diet and for two years they eschewed meat. They worshiped in the woods, feeling that the groves were God's first temples; and sitting at the gnarled roots of some great oak, they would read aloud, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... instinct he delayed his journey to look about him and investigate. Prowling from side to side, and sniffing and peering, he presently found something that he was not looking for. In a hollow beneath a granite boulder, behind the roots of two gnarled old cedars, he came upon two glossy black bear cubs, fast asleep. The mother was nowhere in sight, but the intruder shrank back with an abashed and guilty air and ran up the nearest tree. Thence he made his way from branch to branch, ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Eumolpid, first citizen of Eleusis, stood to the east of the temple. On three sides gnarled trunks and sombre leaves of the sacred olives almost hid the white low walls of the rambling buildings. On the fourth side, facing the sea, the dusty road wound east toward Megara. Here, by the gate, were gathered a rustic company: ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... to the construction of a tree hut—a building that would be perfectly dry and yet shaded and cool. Bill had read of such houses in the Philippines and felt confident that we could build one. We couldn't decide at first where to locate our hut until Dutchy moved that we build it in the gnarled oak tree overlooking the "Goblins' Dancing Platform." Immediately the motion ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... southern sky-line. In fair {48} weather the long pink ridge of the Olympics could be seen towards Puget Sound. Inland from Nootka were vast mountain ridges heavily forested to the very clouds with fir trees and spruce of incredible size. Lower down grew cypress, with gnarled red roots entangling the rocks to the very water's edge, Spanish moss swinging from branch to branch, and partridge drumming in the underbrush. For a month the deep-sea travellers enjoyed a welcome furlough on shore. One night the underbrush surrounding the encampment ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... unmerited Happiness; for well did I know the disparity in Age that existed between us—how Rough and Weather-beaten was I; and she, how Tender, Delicate, and Good! "But does not the Ivy twine round the Oak?" quoth the Physician, as he smote me cheerfully on the Shoulder. And behold, now, gnarled and battered old Jack Dangerous, with this delicious little Parasite creeping toward ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... the white gate of a large orchard, at the back of which, among groups of old, gnarled apple-trees, appeared a cottage with blue shutters, the cottage ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... clustered round us to carry out our luggage. It was a sweet, simple country spot, but I was surprised to observe that by the gate there stood two soldierly men in dark uniforms, who leaned upon their short rifles and glanced keenly at us as we passed. The coachman, a hard-faced, gnarled little fellow, saluted Sir Henry Baskerville, and in a few minutes we were flying swiftly down the broad, white road. Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old gabled houses peeped out from amid ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... and had gone to seek him, he had discovered him lying in wait, like a fowler, to catch the sweet sounds that flew from the opened cage of her instrument. He leaned against the wall with his ear laid over the edge, and as near the window as he dared to put it, his rough face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard—his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God, when of old it moved on the face of the waters that clothed the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... a poor rest for them—with neither grass nor water—not a blade of anything green except the artemisia plant, the wild wormwood—which, of course, neither horse nor oxen would touch. This grew all around us in low thickets. Its gnarled and twisted bushes, with their white silvery leaves, so far from gladdening the eye, only served to render the scene more dreary and desolate—for we knew that this plant denoted the extreme barrenness of the soil. We knew that, wherever it grew, ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... animals, and animals ape men, and all nature rears its head with a loose rein, as if defying method, law, order and construction! Why, merely to walk through some of the tropical houses at Kew gives one a sort of lawless feeling! If I stay long among the queer gnarled plants—all spiky and speckled and hairy; squatting, plump and ungainly on the ground, or spreading huge knotted arms far overhead, as if reaching out for things they never visibly attain—I always emerge into the ordinary English ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through the well-ordered sweetness of his chants. No; ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... wealthy Stockholmers. Its natural advantages are superior to those of any other park in Europe. Even in April, when there was scarcely a sign of spring, its cliffs of grey rock, its rolling lawns of brown grass, and its venerable oaks, with their iron trunks and gnarled, contorted boughs, with blue glimpses of ice-free water on all sides, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... have come within the ancient builder's province; possibly on account of its coldness in winter and for the reason that it is open to the incursions of warlike hunting tribes. Sage brush and greasewood grow abundantly near the villages, and these curious gnarled and twisted shrubs furnish the principal ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... way.... Behind them the tremendous glow deepens;—before them the gloom. Enormous gnarled forms of ceiba, balata, acoma, stand dimly revealed as they pass; masses of viny drooping things take, by the failing light, a sanguine tone. For a little while Fafa can plainly discern the figure of the Woman before him;—then, as the path zigzags ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... threw gleams of gold between the thickly-serried ranks of the old trees—many of them with gnarled, crooked branches, covered with white lichen—some, more recently planted, spreading out straight boughs—the old and young alike all covered with the annual miracle of the spring's unfailing gift of lovely blossoms, which promised a full guerdon ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... not help laughing at his companion, telling him that the supposed vision must have been the offspring of his over-excited fancy. Angry at being thus doubted, the earl walked off, and plunged into the haunted dell. The duke followed, but though they paused for some time beneath the gnarled oak-tree, the spirit ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hardly at first see the strength that is there; A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet, So earnest, so graceful, so solid, so fleet, Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet; 'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood, With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood Should bloom, after cycles of struggle and scathe, With a single anemone trembly and rathe; His strength is so tender; his wildness so meek, That a suitable parallel ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... of the voyage the flotilla seemed to be steaming through the primeval forest. The bayou was but a few feet wider than the gunboats, and its banks were lined by gnarled and knotted old veterans of the forest,—live oaks, sycamore, and tupelo gum trees that had stood in majestic dignity on the banks of the dark and sullen stream for centuries. Sometimes majestic vistas would open; broad avenues carpeted with velvet turf, and walled in by the massive tree ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... howbeit, the light yet aglow and my patience waning, I stole forward, keeping ever in the shadows, and, ascending the terrace, came where grew ivy, very thick and gnarled, overspreading this wing of the house. Groping amid the leaves I found that I sought—a stout staple deep-driven between the bricks with above this another and yet other again, the which formed a sort of ladder whereby, as a boy, I had been wont to come and go by ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... the room. The servants whispered in the hall. Nick held his father's gnarled hand in his own, and looked curiously up into his face, as if for the first time knowing what it ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... a look at his gnarled hands. Any finger would have made three of mine. His wrist would have made three ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... the weight of years, grew round the house. The patriarch among them had let fall one of his gnarled supplicating arms in the winter, and there it still lay ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... I think in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," of a certain "grievous crab-tree cudgel," and the impression left by this description is that the weapon, gnarled and knotty, was capable of inflicting grievous ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... the currents of the mountain stream, like the arrows of Diana, shoot down the slopes. And now a vague mist is among the trees, and when it clears away they seem shrunken, as under a spell, to half their size. They grow smaller and smaller still, oak and chestnut and beech, but dwarfed and gnarled like some old orchard. And suddenly they cease, and the vast grassy dome uprises against the sky, in which the moon is paling into a dull similitude of itself; no longer wondrous, transcendent, but like some lily of opaque whiteness, fair and fading. ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... in the windows over the village and a night breeze was showering down a fall of apple-blow from the gnarled old tree that stood like a great bouquet beside the front steps of the Briars. All the orchards along the Road were in bloom and a fragrance lay heavy over the pastures and mingled with the earth scent of the fields, newly upturned by ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... giving Friedrich Wilhelm's regulations on this subject, from his own hand, has come down to us. Most dull, embroiled, heavy Document; intricate, gnarled, and, in fine, rough and stiff as natural bull-headedness helped by Prussian pipe-clay can make it;—contains some excellent hints, too; and will show us something of Fritzchen and of Friedrich Wilhelm both at once. That is to say, always, if it can be read! If by aid of abridging, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... Casa Lesca swung in, admitting Lawrence to a damp stone-flagged room. At the farther end it opened on a little cortile, where gnarled rose-bushes were in bloom. A broken Venus, presiding over a dusty fountain, made the centre of the cortile, and there a strapping girl from the campagna was busy trimming the stalks of a bunch of roses. The signorina had not arrived; Lawrence lounged against the gunwale of a gondola, which ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... description of the buildings, "is strong and rough, but little more than the gables and the outline of two broken walls remain, overshadowed by the ash trees that have planted themselves among the stones, the existing trees growing out of the remains of roots, all gnarled and weather-worn, of immensely greater age. In every crevice thorn, rowan, ivy, and fern have fastened themselves, softening and concealing the sanctuary's decay." ("St. Modan," by R. ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... her courage to do so. She had never been able to speak to him about his work and what did her opinion matter to him? As she turned away the stillness was broken by a humming sound gradually rising to a crescendo, so she ventured slowly around the house and into the orchard of gnarled apple trees on the slope until she came insight of a little white building beside the brook. The weathervane perched on the gable, and veering in the wet breeze, seemed like a live fish swimming in its own element; and through the open window she saw Insall bending over a lathe, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... said, "but those dashed human beings have become so troublesome. They killed my wife and one of my brothers the other day and I must look out for a place where I can dwell in peace. There is hardly a spot left for an honest bear to live in. Good-bye, you gnarled ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... of Hayesville and the gray and green little old hamlet of Riverfield, which nestles in a bend of the Cumberland River and sleeps time away under its huge old oak and elm and hackberry trees, kept perpetually green by the gnarled old cedars that throw blue-berried green fronds around their winter nakedness. As we rode slowly along, with a leisure I am sure all the motor-car world has forgotten exists, the two old boys on the front seat hummed and chuckled happily while I breathed in great gulps of a large, meadow-sweet ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... time the hunters finished the meal. Then the campfire had burned low. One of the three dragged branches of dead cedars and replenished the fire. Quickly it flared up, with the white flame and crackle characteristic of dry cedar. The night wind had risen, moaning through the gnarled, stunted cedars near by, and it blew the fragrant wood-smoke into the faces of the two hunters, who seemed ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... silent; but when Dickens was on his reporting expedition in Suffolk during the electoral campaign of 1835, he stayed at the "Angel" and, tradition says, slept in room No. 11. Mr. Percy FitzGerald, on visiting it some years ago, ventured to seek of the "gnarled" waiter information on the momentous question of Mr. Pickwick ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... scavengers, plying their brooms among the great trees of the avenues, bore so strong a resemblance to the pixies who lurk in caves and woods, that we almost expected to see them vanish into some crevice in the gnarled roots of the trunks. Even the tiny acolytes trotting gravely in the funeral processions had their heads and shoulders shrouded in the ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... squadrons, companies, squads, and single riders. Bullets whistled and comrades fell, but the command spurred on to increased speed—shouted, yelled and still dashed on. Over fences and gullies, and then a wide ravine; through brush and dense timber, whose gnarled and low-hanging branches literally tore men from their saddles; across a great marsh where horses almost swamped—onward the resistless force rushes and strikes the enemy fully and fairly. Sabers flash in the air, pistols and carbines belch ...
— Bugle Blasts - Read before the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of - the Loyal Legion of the United States • William E. Crane
... otherwise. Before the submerged weir was reached a kindly branch among the willows, stretching gnarled hands just above the flood level, gave the ready aid that no louts could offer. Here Dale contrived to hang until people came from the mill and fished him and his now unconscious burden ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... made him more comfortable by placing a pillow beneath his head; and then, thinking possibly that this to herself was a "case of emergency," she withdrew to a little distance, and sitting down upon the gnarled roots of an upturned tree drank a swallow of the old Cognac, while the young man, maimed and disabled, looked ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... or Liriodendron Tulipiferum, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but, in its riper age, the bark becomes gnarled and uneven, while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem. Thus the difficulty of ascension, in the present case, lay more in semblance than in reality. Embracing the huge cylinder as closely as possible with his arms and knees, seizing with his hands some projections, ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... see, yet towers the Sycamore on the crown of the hill—the first great Tree in the parish that used to get green; for stony as seems the hard glebe, constricted by its bare and gnarled roots, they draw sustenance from afar; and not another knoll on which the sun so delights to pour his beams. Weeks before any other Sycamore, and almost as early as the alder or the birch—the GLORY OF MOUNT PLEASANT, for so we schoolboys ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... or four gnarled, little green-skinned, sour, speckled apples, poorly flavored. He called attention to them very carefully, and then because an apple was a treat, however poor it might be, he asked them to notice the flavor as they ate. Then he produced three ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... strolling in by-and-by, with his favourite tan setter, looking as cool as if there were no such thing as blazing midsummer sunshine, and found the two ladies sauntering up and down the grassy walk by the mill-stream, under the shadow of gnarled old pear and quince trees. He was charmed to see his dear Lady Laura. Clarissa had never known him so enthusiastic or so agreeable. It was quite a new manner which he put on—the manner of a man who is still interested ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the old settlements, that lingered around the clearings and stumps of the trees, in the topmost of whose branches the fear of man compelled them to rest, but young and full fed. The trees in this new land were of no stinted or gnarled growth, but shot up tall, straight, and taper. The yellow poplar here threw up into the air a column of an hundred feet shaft in a contest with the sycamore for the pre-eminence of the woods. Their wives and children would remain ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... the sandy plain. There, presumably, it burrowed into the bosom of the earth, for no vestige of running stream could the Cababi Valley show. The walls about him were in places grimy with the smoke of cook fires. Overhead, not fifty feet away, a gnarled and stunted little cedar jutted out from some crevice in the rocks and stood at the edge of the cliff. A soldier was clinging to it with one hand and pointing out towards the east with the other. Drummond recognized the voice as that ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... drawbridge, and were admitted by a quaint, gnarled, dried-up person, who was the butler, Ames. The poor old fellow was white and quivering from the shock. The village sergeant, a tall, formal, melancholy man, still held his vigil in the room of Fate. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the continental divide, is a gnarled and jagged rampart of snow-splashed granite facing the eastern plains, from which its grim summits may be seen for many miles. Standing out before it like captains in front of gray ranks at parade rise three conspicuous mountains, Longs Peak, fifty miles northwest of Denver, Mount ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... wanting. Age is one of the prime elements of natural beauty; but among us the love of what is new so predominates, that we have known the largest oak in a county to be cut down by the selectmen to make room for a shanty schoolhouse, simply because the tree was of "no account," being hollow and gnarled, and otherwise delightfully picturesque. Our people are singularly dead also to the value of beauty in public architecture; and while they clear away a tree which the seasons have been two centuries in building, they will put up with as little remorse a stone or brick abomination ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
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