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More "Scrubby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cement and sand and corrugated iron walls and roofing came rattling and banging past the Higgins's back-door. Day and night this continued; and a little way beyond they knew that a two-mile square of scrubby waste was being laid out with roads and tracks and little squat buildings, set far apart from each other. In a few months the frightened family would lie awake at night and listen to trains rattling past, coming out from the explosives plant, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... reach this, if it existed, they would be obliged to force a path through miles of reeds. Therefore they thought it safer to follow the river bank. Their progress was very slow, since continually they must make detours to avoid a quicksand or a creek, also the stones and scrubby growth delayed them so that fifteen or at most twenty miles was a ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... stream. On the opposite shore, one giant eucalyptus stood by itself and cast its shadow across. Beyond, lay the gum-peopled immensity of the bush. The stony walls of the knoll, curving inward and sheltering a thick growth of ferns and scrubby vegetation, closed in the bridal chamber. Creepers festooned the rocky ledges and crevices. Here and there, a young sapling slanted forward to greet the morning sun when it should rise behind ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... think she did, but last night I 'xamined her only pair and they look awfully scrubby. There isn't any more blacking in the house, and the ink I sopped onto them made them worse than ever. Besides, I—it would look mean to get us some shoes and not any ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... active then; and so few faces did you see (though a considerable town was within a few hundred yards), that the appearance of one made you rush about and bark tremendously. Cross a field, pass through a hedgerow of very scrubby and stunted trees, cross a railway by a path on the level, go on by a dirty track on its further side; and you come upon the sea-shore. It is a level, sandy beach; and for a mile or two inland the ground is level, and the soil ungenial. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... justified, I think, in making this appeal:—"I am very anxious, if possible, to get a Brigade of Gurkhas, so as to complete the New Zealand Divisional organisation with a type of man who will, I am certain, be most valuable on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The scrubby hillsides on the South-west face of the plateau are just the sort of terrain where those little fellows are at their brilliant best. There is already a small Indian commissariat attached to the Mountain Batteries, so ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... Nursery. He found noxious weeds, rather, and brambles galore. And they were planted there, not by his father or mother, but by those who have a lien upon the souls of these poor people. For the priest here is no peeled, polished affair, but shaggy, scrubby, terrible, forbidding. And with a word he can open yet, for such as Khalid's folk, the gate which Peter keeps or the other on the opposite side of the Universe. Khalid must beware, therefore, how he conducts himself at home and abroad, and how, in his native ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... very disagreeable. But the assertions in this advertisement will gain him credit. As I live with but one set of people, I do not hear all the animadversions that are made upon this affair, but I believe there is a certain monde where my two friends pass but for very scrubby people; a bold assertion, and a great deal of dirt thrown, although by a very mean hand, must inevitably have ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... the view which met their eyes as they rounded the turn at the top of the canyon. Turning, the narrow trail wound its way around the mountainside until one looked down upon the tops of foothills, green with scrubby vegetation. Then it stretched in an irregular line down the mountainside, to disappear in their midst. Beyond lay another ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... were thus engaged I thought I heard a sound of crying. We both listened, and it came again. Leaving our tasks we followed the sound and behind a scrubby willow tree came upon a most beautiful young woman crouched on the ground weeping and moaning, and at the same time digging into the earth with a small wand as if in search of something. She did not appear to ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... graves; to his left the dam; in his hand was a large wooden post covered with carvings, at which he worked. Doss lay before him basking in the winter sunshine, and now and again casting an expectant glance at the corner of the nearest ostrich camp. The scrubby thorn-trees under which they lay yielded no shade, but none was needed in that glorious June weather, when in the hottest part of the afternoon the sun was but pleasantly warm; and the boy carved on, not looking up, yet conscious of the brown serene earth ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... to East Wellmouth is not a good one; even in dry weather and daylight it is not that. For the first two miles it winds and twists its sandy way over bare hills, with cranberry swamps and marshy ponds in the hollows between. Then it enters upon a three-mile stretch bordered with scrubby pines and bayberry thickets, climbing at last a final hill to emerge upon the bluff with the ocean at its foot. And, fringing that bluff and clustering thickest in the lowlands just beyond, is the village of East Wellmouth, ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... marketable timber on the lower Pacific slopes," he replied, "where there is excessive precipitation and the influence of the warm Japan current, but along the streams on the other side of the divide there are only occasional growths of scrubby spruce, hardly suitable for telegraph poles or even railroad ties." He paused an instant then went on mellowly: "Gifford Pinchot was thousands of miles away; he never had seen Alaska, when he suggested that the Executive set aside ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... wildest bit of forest I had seen anywhere in this neighbourhood. At one side, not far off, rose a huge gray rock, partly covered on one side with moss, and round about were oaks and a few ash trees of a poor scrubby sort (else they would long ago have been cut out). The earth underneath was soft and springy with ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... still in the hut, and his thoughts wandered backwards. He looked out over the bare, scrubby stretch of land which had been cleared for this encampment to the mass of bush and flowering shrubs beyond, mysterious and impenetrable save for that rough elephant track along which he had travelled; to the broad-bosomed river, blue as the sky above, ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Scrubby coat and trousers, dirty shirt, scarf, and cap, socks more like anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy "pelerine" ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... find him quite so scrubby as he sounds. He's very proper and clean-shaven, with a good pair of dark, Dutch eyes, which he gets from his mother; and I wish he had got her business ability with them, and her horse sense, if the lady will excuse me. She runs the property and he spends it, as far as she'll let him, on the ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... able yet, during the several hours of their journey, to take any pleasure in the scenery or in her mount. For in the first place there was nothing to see but scrubby little gnarled cedars and drab-looking rocks; and in the second this Indian pony she rode had discovered she was not an adept horsewoman and had proceeded to take advantage of the fact. It did not help Carley's predicament to remember that Glenn had decidedly ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic^; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen^, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c (narrow) 203; granular &c (powdery) 330; shrunk &c 195; brevipennate^. Adv. in a small compass, in a nutshell; on a small scale; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of a Russian village is not attractive, and there is little choice in the surrounding country between a wide grey plain with a distance of scrubby pine forest, or the scrubby pine forest with distant grey plains. The peasants' houses are scattered up and down without any order or arrangement, and with no roads between, built of trunks of trees, unsquared, and mortised into each other at the ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... years, winter and summer, this coachman had driven this monotonous, uninteresting route, with always the same sandy hills, scrubby firs, occasional cabins, in sight. What a time to nurse his thought and feed on his heart! How deliberately he can turn things over in his brain! What a system of philosophy he might evolve out of his consciousness! One would ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live, and then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to the more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit her, and how her appearance would change by degrees, and how she would fly to London, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... a few steps—then stopped a second time, and made a sign for Leon to come up. Without speaking, he pointed to a little thicket of scrubby bushes, through the leaves of which they could just make out some large brown object perfectly at rest. That was the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... known by the name of the "Devil's Gap," Captain Bowline had caused a narrow bridge, of two planks in width, to be built, protected on the outside by a light railing. On the side next the hill, it was sufficiently guarded by the crooked branches of a knurly and scrubby oak tree, that grew on the very ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... won't ax you.—Why, sir, he ain't even one o' the shoe-brigade. He 'ain't got a red coat. Bless my soul! he 'ain't even got a box—nothin' but a scrubby pair o' brushes as I'm alive! He ain't no shoeblack. He's a thief as purtends to black shoes, ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... before closin' time and mingles with the Jersey commuters in a lovely hot ride across the meadows. It's a scrubby station where I gets off, too; one of these fact'ry settlements where the whole population answers the seven o'clock whistle every mornin'. There's a brick barracks half a mile long, where they make sewin' machines or something, and snuggled close up ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... a podgy young man with small eyes and a scrubby moustache, wearing a tailless evening-coat and a wrinkled white ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... scrubby little terrier followed him home from Twin Palms one day and Ethel let him keep it. He fed the pup and washed it and named it Dugan, and after that he never said anything more about going to Michigan to find Charlie. It was only natural, ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... incredulously. "I have lost faith in Southern manor-houses. Ever since I came South I have sought them vainly. All the way from Atlanta I risked my life, putting my head out of the car windows, to see the plantations. At every scrubby-looking little station we passed, the conductor would say, 'Mighty nice people live heah; great deal of wealth heah before the wah!' Then I would recklessly put my head out. I expected to see the real Southern mansion of the novelists, with enormous piazzas and Corinthian pillars and beautiful ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... "Seventy." "Thank you," said I, and turned away. "Buy that horse," said Mr. Petulengro, coming after me; "the dook tells me that in less than three months he will be sold for twice seventy." "I will have nothing to do with him," said I; "besides, Jasper, I don't like his tail. Did you observe what a mean scrubby tail he has?" "What a fool you are, brother!" said Mr. Petulengro; "that very tail of his shows his breeding. No good bred horse ever yet carried a fine tail—'tis your scrubby-tailed horses that are your out-and-outers. Did you ever hear of Syntax, brother? That tail of his puts me in mind ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... time, and as we descended into the desert, the air became warmer, the scrubby cedar growth began to fail, and the bunches of sage were few and far between. I turned often to gaze back at the San Francisco peaks. The snowcapped tips glistened and grew higher, and stood out in startling relief. Some one said they could be seen two hundred miles across the desert, and ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... money, and there's little chance of our getting any. That scrubby old uncle won't leave anything to us; I feel too sure of it. I often feel disposed to go and beg him on my knees to think of us in his will.' She laughed. 'I suppose it's impossible, and would be useless; but I should be capable of it if I knew ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... because it's less liable to have lice than some others and because it looks well all by itself on the lawn. That spirea is a specially good variety of spirea because it does well almost anywhere, and also it is very showy and the foliage is handsome all summer long. Some shrubs look scrubby after awhile." ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... portions of ironstone in it. A few small tea-trees of the colonists grew in the sand that formed the dry bed of the stream. Our course continued afterwards uninterrupted, over a gradually rising plain, of a sandy scrubby nature, until reaching the foot of Mount Fairfax, when we crossed another small watercourse, trending South by West where, for the first time, we noticed a solitary stunted casuarina. Mount Fairfax is the southern and most elevated part of an isolated ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... Peuquenes, we descended into a mountainous country, intermediate between the two main ranges, and then took up our quarters for the night. We were now in the republic of Mendoza. The elevation was probably not under 11,000 feet, and the vegetation in consequence exceedingly scanty. The root of a small scrubby plant served as fuel, but it made a miserable fire, and the wind was piercingly cold. Being quite tired with my days work, I made up my bed as quickly as I could, and went to sleep. About midnight I observed the sky became suddenly ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... made an effort to keep the place neat, and Hal noticed a row of books on a shelf. Because it was cold in these mountain regions at night, even in September, the old man had a fire in the little cast-iron stove, and sat huddled by it. There were only a few hairs left on his head, and his scrubby beard was as white as anything could be in a coal-camp. The first impression of his face was of its pallor, and then of the benevolence in the faded dark eyes; also his voice was gentle, like a caress. He rose to greet his visitors, and put out to Hal a trembling hand, which resembled ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... glass in carriage windows made the landscape look as if covered with snow. Stopped for baths and refreshments at one of the stations en route. Breakfasted later in train. Passed through a dreary country, a saltpetre desert, relieved by occasional scrubby trees. Interesting people at wayside stations—Sindhis, Beloochees, Afghans, Persians, ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... much of the forest as the beech. On the verge of woods the oaks are far apart, the ashes thin; the verge is like a wilderness and scrubby, so that the forest does not seem to begin till you have penetrated some distance. Under the beeches the forest begins at once. They stand at the edge of the slope, huge round boles rising from the mossy ground, wide fans of branches—a shadow under them, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... surrounded by grim and massive walls, so high that I could scarcely see the top of them. At noontime in summer the sun visited one little corner, where there was a stone bench; but in winter it never showed itself at all. There were five or six small, scrubby trees, with moss-grown trunks and feeble branches, which put forth a few yellow leaves at springtime. We were some thirty children who assembled in this courtyard—children from five to eight years old, all clad alike in brown dresses, with a little blue handkerchief tied about our shoulders. ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... drifts that left bare ground between, Marion stopped and listened, her head turned so that she could watch the winding trail behind her. She thought she heard the scrunch of Kate's feet down there, but she was not sure. She looked at the scrubby manzanita bushes at her right, chose her route and stepped widely to one side, where a bare spot showed between two bushes. Her left foot scraped the snow in making the awkward step, but she counted on Kate being unobserving enough to pass it over. She ducked behind ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... flint. drive a bargain, drive a hard bargain; cheapen, beat down; stop one hole in a sieve; have an itching palm, grasp, grab. Adj. parsimonious, penurious, stingy, miserly, mean, shabby, peddling, scrubby, penny wise, near, niggardly, close; fast handed, close handed, strait handed; close fisted, hard fisted, tight fisted; tight, sparing; chary; grudging, griping &c v.; illiberal, ungenerous, churlish, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... deep breath. His head spun and for the first time he realized that he was still alive. He gazed across the shimmering desert to a ridge of scrubby hills. Blue mountains rose up beyond them. Great floes of black lava had rolled down onto the desert floor at some distant time. They were spotted with clumps of gray grass even as was the desert. The hills were studded with weird trees standing stiff, branches ...
— The Quantum Jump • Robert Wicks
... to walk to the actual Falls. A new path had just been cut in the wooded part of the north bank, and we were almost the first visitors to profit by it. Formerly the enterprising sight-seers had to push their way through the scrubby undergrowth, but we followed a smooth track for two miles, the roar of the cataract getting louder and louder, with only occasional peeps of the river, which was fast losing its calm repose and degenerating ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... susceptible of cultivation. I have often been struck with the great general similarity between the barren and sandy tracts of this district, and many parts of New South Wales, where sandstone is the prevailing rock. In both countries there are the same low scrubby bushes, at the Cape consisting of Heaths and Proteae, and in Australia of Epacridae and Banksiae—the last the honeysuckles of the Colonists. Even the beautiful sunbirds of the Cape, frequenting especially the flowers of the Proteae, are represented by such of the ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... his head-quarters—and Park's Mill was a marge of firm soil, along which a column could pass, in scrubby country, and between the bogs was a sort of bridge of dry land. By these two avenues the English might assail the Scottish lines. These approaches Bruce is said to have rendered difficult by pitfalls, and even ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the light-house, they felt the salt sea-wind strong in their faces. The bluff was so gale-swept that the trees, few, small, and scrubby, had caught a slant to westward, and the scanty vegetation clung timidly to the ground, like some tiny state whose existence depends upon its humility. From the edge of the bluff rose the light-house,—a round stone building, dazzling in its coat of whitewash. Far up in the air its ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... woods. I had one fair view of the country before the sun went down, but I was too thirsty to waste any light in viewing the prospect, and set out directly to find water. First, going down a well-beaten path for half a mile through the low scrubby wood, till I came to where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had carried travellers up, I lay down flat, and drank these dry, one after another, a pure, cold, spring-like water, but yet I could not fill my ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... are they?" Warble sniffed. "Looking at me through the footle, distorted little microscope of their own silly scrubby little souls! Pooh, they couldn't, one of them, make a ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... Dallas. It will explain itself. I have not answered it. This comes of doing people good. At one time or another (including copyrights) this person has had about fourteen hundred pounds of my money, and he writes what he calls a posthumous work about me, and a scrubby letter accusing me of treating him ill, when I never did any such thing. It is true that I left off letter-writing, as I have done with almost everybody else; but I can't see how that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... number of members of the university who bore that name. He claimed to have tabulated from the university almanac 256 men so christened, and offered to go into the life history of any or all of them. He said that he was happy to say that the only Joseph who seemed at all likely to be a poet was a scrubby little man at Teddy Hall, who wore spectacles and a ragged exhibitioner's gown and did not seem to threaten a serious rivalry to any Scorpion bent on supplanting him. "I also find," he added, "that the master of the ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... stood by and allowed them to pass, although he looked searchingly at Granet. They walked slowly up the scrubby avenue to the house. Once Granet paused to look down at the long arm of the ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... boats going up. It was curiously lonely, with great reaches of stunted pines and scrubby hemlocks, then a space of rather sandy shore and wiry grasses that reared themselves stiffly. There was nothing to read. And now she wished for some sewing. She was glad enough when night came. The next morning the sky was overcast and there ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... said until they reached the wood and flung themselves panting under the shade of a scrubby live oak. ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... does not despair; but, putting forth two short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. Some of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that I have ever seen, as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches as of ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... regiment took a conspicuous part. The close of our own share in this contest is, as it were, burnt into my memory with every least detail. It was about six P. M., when we found ourselves in line, under cover of a long, thin row of scrubby trees, beyond which lay a gentle slope, from which, again, rose a hill rather more abrupt, and crowned with an earthwork. We received orders to cross this space, and take the fort in front, while a brigade on our right was to make a like movement ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... journey to us, who knew only the Western Desert, to note the difference between it and Sinai. To our eyes Sinai did not appear to be a desert at all, as there were scrubby bushes of sorts growing in nearly every hollow, various kinds of camel grass, and even a few flowers—such as poppies and one or two species of lilies. After the waste of misshaped lumps of limestone and volcanic looking boulders, which were ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... glittering surface of the river Bystryanka, sprinkled here and there with snow, stand two peasants, scrubby little Seryozhka and the church beadle, Matvey. Seryozhka, a short-legged, ragged, mangy-looking fellow of thirty, stares angrily at the ice. Tufts of wool hang from his shaggy sheepskin like a mangy dog. In his hands he ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the basilica of the Sacred Heart; but to reach the house itself one had to skirt the wall and climb to the Place du Tertre, where one found the facade and the entrance. Some children were playing on the Place, which, planted as it was with a few scrubby trees, and edged with humble shops,—a fruiterer's, a grocer's and a baker's,—looked like some square in a small provincial town. In a corner, on the left, Guillaume's dwelling, which had been whitewashed during the previous spring, showed its bright frontage and five lifeless windows, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Pine, the first conifer met in ascending the range from the west, grows only on the torrid foothills, seeming to delight in the most ardent sun-heat, like a palm; springing up here and there singly, or in scattered groups of five or six, among scrubby White Oaks and thickets of ceanothus and manzanita; its extreme upper limit being about 4000 feet above the sea, its lower about from ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... my first recollection of life. I was barely three. I can remember the majestic gum-trees surrounding us, the sun glinting on their straight white trunks, and falling on the gurgling fern-banked stream, which disappeared beneath a steep scrubby hill on our left. It was an hour past noon on a long clear summer day. We were on a distant part of the run, where my father had come to deposit salt. He had left home early in the dewy morning, carrying me in front of him on a little brown pillow which my mother had made for the purpose. We ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... nothing of this as we slowly rolled along. The spires and the tall chimneys of the factories rose in the distance very much as they had in other Cities we had visited. We passed a single line of breastworks of bare yellow sand, but the scrubby pines in front were not cut away, and there were no signs that there had ever been any immediate expectation of use for the works. A redoubt or two—without guns—could be made out, and this was all. Grim-visaged war had few wrinkles on his front in that neighborhood. They were then seaming his ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Diogo's Bay, which Barbot calls "Bay of Pampus Rock." Thence we entered Alligator River, a broad lagoon, the Raphael Creek of Maxwell's map, not named in the hydrographic chart of 1859. Leading south with many a bend, it is black water and thick, fetid mud, garnished with scrubby mangrove, where Kru-boys come to cut fuel and catch fever; here the dew seemed to fall in cold drops. After nine miles we reached a shallow fork, one tine of which, according to our informants, comes from the Congo Grande, or Sao Salvador, distant a week's march. Leaving ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... a gradual change as they progressed north, slanting a bit eastward. The heavy timber gave way to a sparser growth, and that in turn dwindled to scrubby thickets, covering great areas of comparative level. Long reaches of grassland opened before them, waving yellow in the autumn sun. They crossed other rivers of various degrees of depth and swiftness, swimming ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... much to see at first; the banks are lined by scrubby bushes, and on them, in a sandy open patch, we see a man falling and bowing at his evening devotions; a few camels pass along the raised bank, looking like gigantic spiders against the illuminated sky, and there comes faintly to us the distant ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... since a good friend had told me of some lyrics by Miss Frances Wynne; and the little volume, charmingly entitled Whisper, was close under my arm as I turned from the road across the heath—a wild scramble of scrubby chance-children, wind-sown from the pines behind. And then presently, like a much greater person, 'I found me in a gloomy ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... snow, miles in extent, cover the mountain sides. Great brown patches, which the professor thinks are washings from the fine examples of erosion, but which look to me like patches of brown grass as we see in Penobscot Bay on the islands, vary with what is apparently a scrubby evergreen growth and bald, bare rocks. As we are about 18 miles off, the blue haze over all makes an enlarged, roughened and much more deeply indented Camden mountain coast line. The bays are in some cases so deep that we can look into narrow entrances ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... waters spring, Waters spring From chinks the scrubby copses crown; And we shall trace their oncreeping To where the cascade tumbles down And sends the bobbing growths aswing, And ferns not quite but almost drown. "—We shall," I say; but who may sing Of what another moon ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... A small and scrubby-looking Frenchman, with red eyelids and moustaches that drooped over a pendulous underlip, now begged Madame to follow him through a small doorway beyond which could be seen three just shot gazelles lying in a ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... that if her mother were cast upon a desert island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden, and find something to preserve. Preserving was almost a mania with Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She had experimented even ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... proposing it to our aristocracy to take up his other ideas, or reject them on pain of the forfeiture of their caste and headship with the generations to follow, and a total displacing of them in history by certain notorious, frowzy, scrubby pamphleteers and publishers, Lord Ormont thought amazingly comical. English nobles heading the weavers, cobblers, and barbers of England! He laughed, but he said, 'Charlotte ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... we could see the leading squadron file to the right—clear the low hedge—and then disappear over the crest of the hill. Twenty or thirty pioneers, who had been carried forward behind as many of the cavalry, were now seen busily employed in filling up the ditch, and cutting down the short scrubby hedge; and presently, the artillery coming up also, filed off sharply to the right, and formed on the very summit of the hill, distinctly visible between us and the grey cold streaks of morning. By the time we had noticed, this, the clatter in our immediate neighbourhood ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... what we've just heard. He's been used to comfort and to having someone to look after him. How long do you think it'll be before he gets tired of a scrubby room in a scrubby hotel? Besides, he hasn't any money. He ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... feet of rock bulged into the great masses characteristic of chalk, but at the end of the ledge a gully, a precipitous groove of discoloured rock, slashed the face of the cliff, and gave a footing to a scrubby growth, by which Eudena and Ugh-lomi went ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... passed a tall elderly individual, dressed in rather a quaint fashion, with a skin cap on his head and stout gaiters on his legs; on his shoulders hung a moderate sized leathern sack; he seemed fond of loitering near sunny banks, and of groping amidst furze and low scrubby bramble bushes, of which there were plenty in the neighbourhood of Norman Cross. Once I saw him standing in the middle of a dusty road, looking intently at a large mark which seemed to have been drawn across it, as if by a walking stick. 'He must have been a large one,' the old man muttered ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... to the uninstructed eye was—now in April—but a wilderness of scrubby stunted thorns. In the midst of it he found Mrs Bosenna, gloved, armed with a pair of secateurs, and engaged in cutting the thorns back to a ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... first glimmer of light between the stars over Bulwan, those few who had stayed the night under roofs began creeping away to the holes in the river bank or the rough, scrubby ground at the foot of the hills south-west of the town, where the Manchesters guard the ridge. Then we all waited, silent with expectation. The clouds turned crimson. At five the sun marched up in silence. Not ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... quite full grown when I first laid my eyes upon him. He was sitting in the sun, on top of a rail fence, blinking at me consideringly. The fence skirted a little trail that led from my back yard down to Calapooia Creek. It seemed trying to push back a fringe of scrubby underbrush which ran down a hillside; a fringe which was, in truth, but a feeler from the great forest of Douglas fir which one saw marching, file upon file, row upon row, back and back to the snows of ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... very well. It was, for the most part, very uneven ground, covered with heather and dark-green bushes, with here and there a scrubby thorn tree. There were also open spaces of fine, short grass, with ant-hills and mole turns everywhere—the worst place I ever knew ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... of the bay grew wider, until Carroll could see most of the forest-girt shore on one side of it; but the surf upon the point was growing unpleasantly near. Wisps of spray whirled away from it and vanished among the scrubby firs clinging to the fissured crags behind. The sloop, however, was going to windward, for Vane was handling her with nerve and skill. She had almost cleared the point when there was a rattle and a bang ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... even. About them, his new tone was no doubt a trifle patronising, but still, quite tolerable. Ewen Hooper, he vowed, was "a magnificent scholar," and it was too bad that Oxford had found nothing better for him than "a scrubby readership." But "some day, of course, he'll have the regius professorship." Nora was "a plucky little thing—though she hates me!" And he, Falloden, was not so sure after all that Miss Alice would not land her Pryce. "Can't ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... just back of that bush, and see what you find," and Paul pointed while speaking to a particular little scrubby plant that had evidently been partly broken down by the passage of some ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... numerous, were on a level with the soil. They were hastily arranged temporary sepulchres, for five-year grants were the only ones to be obtained, and families hesitated to go to any serious expense. Thus, the stones sinking into the ground for lack of foundations, the scrubby evergreens which had not yet had time to grow, all the provisional slop kind of mourning that one saw there, imparted to that vast field of repose a look of poverty and cold, clean, dismal bareness like that of a barracks ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... and nodded to Tahn-te, who leaped on the horse and rode where the yells of the victors sounded in the pinyons towards the hills. Beyond all the other horsemen he rode, and saw far above in the scrubby growth, the enemy seeking footholds where the four-footed animals could not follow. Then, when Ka-yemo had called the names of the trailers who were to follow the enemy beyond the summit, Tahn-te the Po-Athun-ho ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Great Britain, the town with the harbour, as you say of a feller who has a large handle to his face, the man with the nose, that place that is destined to be the London of America, which is a fact if it ever fulfils its destiny. The little scrubby dwarf spruces on the coast are destined not to be lofty pines, because that can't be in the natur of things, although some folks talk as if they expected it; but they are destined to be enormous trees, and although they havn't grown an inch the last fifty years, who ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Laramie we left the Platte River, and, bearing northwesterly, entered the Black Hills, a region of low, rolling uplands, sparsely grown with scrubby pine trees; the soil black, very dry; where little animal life was ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... waited torpidly. A few moments later came a voice, and then the soft patter of bare feet in the thick dust without. Carmen was talking as she approached. Jose rose in curiosity; but the girl was alone. In her hand she held a scrubby flower that had drawn a desperate nourishment from the barren soil at the roadside. She glanced up ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... poor boy, "shure, it was not me, plase your honour, only the parrot, Captain." "What parrot, you lying rascal?" "There, Captain, Sir, look forenenst you." The captain did look up, and saw me perched on the branch of a scrubby hawthorn-tree. Surprised and amused, he exclaimed, "By Jove! how odd! What a magnificent bird! Why Poll, what the deuce brought you here?" "Eh, sirs," I replied at random, "it was aw' for the love of the siller." The captain, and his little groom Midge, who ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... beyond this village the wild country begins, and Hambantotte is the next station, nearly ninety miles from Yalle. The country around Hambantotte is absolutely frightful-wide extending plains of white sand and low scrubby bushes scattered here and there; salt lakes of great extent, and miserable plains of scanty herbage, surrounded by dense thorny jungles. Notwithstanding this, at some seasons the whole district is alive with ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... that passed from saddle to saddle. The Indians were already within gunshot, but too sure of their game to lose any time in shooting; nor was Stanley willing to waste a shot upon them. As he dodged in between a broken wall of granite and a scrubby clump of cedars, closely followed by Bucks, their pursuers could have picked either ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... the Highlanders not only had failed to carry the Magersfontein heights, but that they required instant reinforcement. He accordingly desired Major R. Bannatine-Allason, the battery commander, to move north-east over the scrubby ground, and not to come into action until he was stopped by the bullets or could get a clear view of what was going on at the front. The battery, with an escort of 12th Lancers and mounted infantry, advanced at a trot, and its commander, having obtained information from scattered ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... the Plaza, since called Portsmouth Square. At that time it was a wind-swept, grass-grown, scrubby enough plot of ground. On all sides were permanent buildings. The most important of these were a low picturesque house of the sun-dried bricks known as adobes, in which, as it proved, the customs were levied; a frame two-story ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... face that was looking down at him. It was a white man's face, covered with a scrubby red beard. The beard was new, but the eyes and the voice he would have recognized anywhere. For two years he had messed with Rookie McTabb down at Norway and Nelson House. McTabb had quit the Service because of ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... through which flowed innumerable streams, winding their way to the river of the plains. Sometimes the solitary bushman or prospector, looking across a deep valley, saw, nestled amongst the opposite hills, a beautiful meadow of grass. But when he had crossed the intervening creek and scrubby valley, and continued his journey to the up-land, he found that the deceitful meadow was only a barren plain, covered, not with grass, but with the useless grass-tree. There is a little saccharine matter in the roots of the grass-tree, ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... rough and foul mouthed. bush: originally referred to the low tangled scrubs of the semi-desert regions ('mulga' and 'mallee'), and hence equivalent to "outback". Now used generally for remote rural areas ("the bush") and scrubby forest. bushfire: wild fires: whether forest fires or grass fires. bushman/bushwoman: someone who lives an isolated existence, far from cities, "in the bush". (today: a "bushy") bushranger: an Australian "highwayman", who lived in the 'bush'— scrub—and attacked ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... the native path which we had quitted yesterday; but it now became wide, well beaten, and differing altogether by its permanent character from any I had seen in the southern portion of this continent. For the first five miles we traversed scrubby stony hills, thickly wooded with banksia trees; but the limestone here again cropped out and we entered a very fertile valley, running north and south and terminating in a larger one which drained the country from east to west. This valley is remarkable as containing one Xanthorrhoea ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... casual inspection showed nothing outside but the hillside sloping away from the mine, with here and there a clump of bushes or small, scrubby trees. But every once in a while the grass would stir, or a clump of bushes would be agitated strangely, as some concealed form crept up yet closer to the stockade. Evidently, as Buck had said, the intention of Madero was to "rush" ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... when they talk of Equality!—As for me, am I not as good as another woman, I that was one of the finest women in Paris, and was called La belle Ecaillere, and received declarations seven or eight times a day? And even now if I liked—Look here, sir, you know that little scrubby marine store-dealer downstairs? Very well, he would marry me any day, if I were a widow that is, with his eyes shut; he has had them looking wide open in my direction so often; he is always saying, 'Oh! what fine arms you have, Ma'am Cibot!—I ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... for cattle: Such should be cut so near the earth, as till you can lay them thwart, that the top of one may rest on the root or stub of the other, as far as they extend, stopping the cavities with its boughs and branches; and thus hedges which seem to consist but only of scrubby-trees and stumps, may be reduced to a tolerable fence: But in case it be superannuated, and very old, 'tis advisable to stub all up, being quite renewed, and well guarded. We have been the longer on these ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... tree planting, unless the growers are provided with proper cultural directions. The tendency in the past has been to plant nut trees in out-of-the-way places, and let nature take her course. Nature took her course; the result, scrubby trees and disgruntled planters. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two white wooden churches. There are some American elms of a weeping kind, and sycamores, i.e. planes; but the wood is mostly pine—white pine and yellow pine—somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, and marshy hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook runs through to the Concord River.'[3] The brook flowed across the few acres that were Emerson's first modest homestead. 'The whole external appearance of the place,' says one who visited him, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... Morgan gives the following naive account of its genesis: 'I was just setting off to Ireland—the horses literally putting-to—when Mr. Colburn arrived with his flattering proposition [for a new book]. Taking up a scrubby manuscript volume which the servant was about to thrust into the pocket of the carriage, he asked what was that. I said it was one of my volumes of odds and ends, and read him my last entry. "This ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... slightly coherent, which crumble in the hand with ease. The gravel and the sand drain away the water so effectually that the trees are exposed to the heat during a portion of the year without any moisture; hence they are not large, like those on the Zambesi, and are often scrubby. The rivers are all of the sandy kind, and we pass over large patches between this and Tete in which, in the dry season, no water is to be found. Close on our south, the hills of Lokole rise to a considerable height, and beyond ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Huron sparkled beneath the keel of our steamer. All the way over the lake we kept the shores of Michigan in sight, beaches of white sand alternating with others of limestone shingle, and the forests behind, a tangled growth of cedar, fir, and spruce in impenetrable swamps, or a scanty, scrubby growth upon a sandy soil. Two hours were spent at Thunder Bay, where the steamer stopped for a supply of wood, and we went steaming on toward Mackinaw, a hundred miles away. At sunset of that day the shores ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... I might wander, It should be toward the sun; The blessed South Should fill my mouth With ripeness just begun. For bleak hills, bare, With stunted, spare, And scrubby, piney trees, Her gardens rare, And vineyards fair, And her rose-scented breeze. For fearful blast, Skies overcast, And sudden blare and scare Long, stormless moons, And placid noons, And—all sorts ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... merely instrumental scene, which would otherwise make too great an impression for the harmony of the entire illusion. Had the panorama been invented in the time of Pope Leo X., Raffael would still, I doubt not, have smiled in contempt at the regret, that the broom twigs and scrubby bushes at the back of some of his grand pictures were not as probable trees ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... he recognized the eyes with the drooping corners—and he smiled and bowed. And the Princess, as she looked into his face and forgot the wild hair and scrubby beard, the stains, the rags, and the nakedness, met a pair of unusually cheerful, honest eyes, and impulsively held ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... the mighty river a low chain of hills, fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch, willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... limitless wastes are covered by a scrubby plant known as mountain sage. It rises from a tough gnarled root in a number of spiral shoots, which finally form a single trunk, varying in circumference from six inches to two feet. The leaves are grey, with a strong offensive smell resembling true sage. In other places there appear mixed with ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... that? On and on he went. Suddenly the horse stopped. Ben doubled up the reins to give him a cut, when "WHOA!" he roared so loud that the horse in very astonishment gave a lurch that nearly flung him headlong. But he was over the wheel in a twinkling, and up with a bound to a small thicket of scrubby bushes on a high hill by the road-side. Here lay a little bundle on the ground, and close by it a big, black dog; and over the whole, standing guard, was a boy a little bigger than Ben, with honest gray eyes. And the bundle ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... one lone, scrubby little lilac bush that has a dozen blossoms, and it doesn't take much mental work to connect lilacs with mother. Then, too, the distant whistle of a train 'way down the valley reminds me of how you would listen for ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... as their best highway from their farms to their best market. In those days—and those days were not very long since—the building of small ships was their chief trade, and they valued their land mostly for the small scrubby cedar-trees with which this trade ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... was sitting outside the hotel, taking his coffee at one of the little round iron tables, by the inevitable trio of scrubby orange trees in green tubs, when Caffyn, whom he had not seen since leaving the table, came up and sat down beside ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... rubus, and Amelanchiers, under the shade of which he makes his lair, and upon the berries of which he partially subsists. He lives much by the banks of streams, hunting among the willows, or wanders along the steep and rugged bluffs, where scrubby pine and dwarf cedar (Juniperus prostrata), with its rooting branches, forms an almost impenetrable underwood. In short, the grizzly bear of America is to be met with in situations very similar to those which are the favourite haunts of the African lion, which, after ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... of the second day Stair was finding himself unfit for human society, because he had not been able to shave since he left the prison. Of course he had brought nothing with him. There was no time. His hand went unconsciously every other minute to his scrubby chin. In truth, his Norse blondness did not allow it to show as much as he supposed. But that did not detract from the pervading sensation ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... ran up, gleaming like curved glass in the sunlight, and broke in a million sparkles against a shelf of shingle. Above the shingle rose the soft cliffs, clothed with scrubby grass ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... the ear during the night in a far off place like this, are peculiar. The old owl hoots mournfully, the frogs bellow hoarsely along the reedy shore, while the tree toads are quavering from among the branches of the scrubby trees that grow along the rocky banks; the whippoorwill pipes shrilly in the forest depths; the breeze murmurs among the foliage of the tall old pines, while the everlasting roar of the waters, as they go tumbling down the rocks, is always heard. ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... whenever they chose, without being seen, and had little to fear from the Union artillery, which the past had given them much cause to dread. It was a region also to disgust the very soul of a cavalryman; for the low, scrubby growth lined the narrow roads almost as effectually as the most scientifically ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... touched, she seizeth the poor wretch with iron arms, and opening herself, hales him inside her, and there pierces him through and through with two score lances. Secondly, in all great houses the spit is turned not by a scrubby boy, but by smoke. Ay, mayst well admire, and judge me a lying knave. These cunning Germans do set in the chimney a little windmill, and the smoke struggling to wend past, turns it, and from the mill a wire runs through the wall and turns the spit on wheels; beholding which I doffed my bonnet ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... an addition to their small family. A little, wiry-haired, scrubby, melancholy Irish terrier followed O'Connell for miles. He tried to drive him away. The dog would turn and run for a few seconds and the moment O'Connell would take his eyes off him he would run along and catch him up and wag his over-long tail and look up at O'Connell with his sad eyes. ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... the visitor himself, who, pushing the servant aside, broke into the room. It was a young man of no very distinguished appearance, thin, red-haired, with a pasty complexion and a scrubby moustache; his clothes were approaching shabbiness, and he had an unwashed look, due in part to hasty travel on this hot day. Streaming with sweat, his features distorted with angry excitement, he shouted as he entered, 'You've got to see me, Daffy; I won't be refused!' ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... his fortitude] Anthony: I adopt you as my father. Thats the talk! Give me a man whose whole life doesnt hang on some scrubby woman in the next street; and I'll never let him go [she slaps him ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... 'Upon my word! Do you know, sir, that the Fortune-teller would give five thousand guineas (if it was quite convenient to him, which it isn't) for the lovely piece I have cut off for you? You can form no idea, sir, of the number of times he kissed quite a scrubby little piece—in comparison—that I cut off for HIM. And he wears it, too, round his neck, I can tell you! Near his heart!' said Bella, nodding. 'Ah! very near his heart! However, you have been a good, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... first as if it were to be no more fortunate than its predecessor. The covert was a patch of scrubby woodland at a little distance below the road, at the head of one of the long deep glens that were the terrors of the Broadwater country. The wind blew from the west, across the wide cleft of Gloun Kieraun, and the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... before us," she added, as Cricket's muscular little arms sent the light boat along towards the small island ahead of them. It consisted of little more than a mass of rocks, with a bit of shelving beach on the west side, and, here and there, a scrubby pine. ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... Pemberton's. He's got a tan shirt on, plaited in front, and every time Aunt Anne moves he's up like a jumping-jack till she gets sat down again. He says 'My word!' and 'in the States'—like that. He's got a mustache the color of your hair, Split, a scrubby, stiffy little mustache. His eyes are little twinkling things, and I believe—" she paused in her indictment to give the criminal the benefit of the doubt—"I do believe he had gloves on when he first came! I won't be sure; but, ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... they did—and then disappeared, whereupon every one was immensely relieved. Even the fact that he generally brought them a packet of expensive sweets was as nothing beside the harrowing knowledge that they must kiss him, thereby having their faces brushed with a large and scrubby moustache. Aunt Margaret and nurse did not have to endure this infliction—which seemed to Bob and Cecilia obviously unfair. But the visits did not often happen—not enough to disturb seriously an existence crammed with interesting things like puppies and kittens, the pony cart, boats on ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... pastures we find, further, the alpine accentor (Accentor collaris) and the alpine pipit (Anthus spipoletta). The crag-martin (Cotyle rupestris) haunts lofty cliffs in the alpine region. On the upper verge of the pine forests, or in the scrubby vegetation just beyond, the following are not uncommon — black woodpecker (Picus martius), ring-ousel (Turdus torquatus), Bonelli's warbler (Phylloscopus Bonellii), crested til (Parus cristatus), citril finch (Citrinella alpina), siskin (Chrysomitris ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... "Pretty scrubby-looking cars," commented Armorer; "but get our new ordinance through the council, we can save enough to afford some fine new cars. Has Lossing said anything to you about the ordinance and our petition to be allowed to leave off ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... cried, as he approached Tim, who was gazing intently at a patch of low scrubby trees a short distance off; "seen ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... with few or no objects worthy observation: it appears to be the uneven summit of a sandy submarine mountain, covered here and there with sorrel, grass, a few cedar bushes, and scrubby oaks; their swamps are much more valuable for the peat they contain, than for the trifling pasture of their surface; those declining grounds which lead to the seashores abound with beach grass, a light fodder when cut and cured, but very good ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... and called Jung Frau; but lo, a spring is touched, she seizeth the poor wretch with iron arms, and opening herself, hales him inside her, and there pierces him through and through with two score lances. Secondly, in all great houses the spit is turned not by a scrubby boy, but by smoke. Ay, mayst well admire, and judge me a lying knave. These cunning Germans do set in the chimney a little windmill, and the smoke struggling to wend past, turns it, and from the mill a wire runs through the wall and turns the spit on wheels; ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... nearer the light-house, they felt the salt sea-wind strong in their faces. The bluff was so gale-swept that the trees, few, small, and scrubby, had caught a slant to westward, and the scanty vegetation clung timidly to the ground, like some tiny state whose existence depends upon its humility. From the edge of the bluff rose the light-house,—a round stone building, dazzling in its coat of whitewash. Far up in the ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... made good time, and as we descended into the desert, the air became warmer, the scrubby cedar growth began to fail, and the bunches of sage were few and far between. I turned often to gaze back at the San Francisco peaks. The snowcapped tips glistened and grew higher, and stood out in startling relief. Some one said they could be seen two hundred ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... of the cliff. Overhead, forty or fifty feet of rock bulged into the great masses characteristic of chalk, but at the end of the ledge a gully, a precipitous groove of discoloured rock, slashed the face of the cliff, and gave a footing to a scrubby growth, by which Eudena and Ugh-lomi ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... nearly ran into a little man who was loafing in the doorway. He was a wizened, scrubby old fellow wearing a dirty peaked cap with a band of tarnished gold. I knew him at once for one of those guides, half tout, half bully, that infest the railway termini of all ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... which overlooked the woods. I had one fair view of the country before the sun went down, but I was too thirsty to waste any light in viewing the prospect, and set out directly to find water. First, going down a well-beaten path for half a mile through the low scrubby wood, till I came to where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had carried travellers up, I lay down flat, and drank these dry, one after another, a pure, cold, spring-like water, but yet I could not fill my dipper, though I contrived little siphons ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... a sky that seemed almost black. The houses and trees, the thick scrubby bushes and long grass, were just visible in all the shades of monochrome that ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... was halted by the view which met their eyes as they rounded the turn at the top of the canyon. Turning, the narrow trail wound its way around the mountainside until one looked down upon the tops of foothills, green with scrubby vegetation. Then it stretched in an irregular line down the mountainside, to disappear in their midst. Beyond ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... put that blamed sun-dial of his right in the middle of this plot,—and these doggoned gravel-walks running every which way give me the blind-staggers. Why, A. A., you got more gravel walks here than they've got in Central Park. And all these scrubby hedges, stone walls, fountains, flower-beds, cedar freaks,—my God, Perce, I'd hate to come home a little squiffed if I lived in that house of yours, 'specially at night. Look at old Pedro and Philippa over there, setting out that stuff that looks like sparrowgrass. And that ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... materials four or five feet high, and as many yards across, completely encircled the Island, which was not a quarter of a mile in diameter. Inside this regular ridge was a small sandy plain. The encircling ridge was occupied by a belt of small trees, while on the plain grew only a short scrubby vegetation, a foot or two in height. Some vegetable soil was found, a few inches in thickness, the result of the decomposition of vegetable matter and birds' dung. On the weather side of the island was a coral reef of two miles in diameter, enclosing a shallow lagoon. In this lagoon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... upon the ear during the night in a far off place like this, are peculiar. The old owl hoots mournfully, the frogs bellow hoarsely along the reedy shore, while the tree toads are quavering from among the branches of the scrubby trees that grow along the rocky banks; the whippoorwill pipes shrilly in the forest depths; the breeze murmurs among the foliage of the tall old pines, while the everlasting roar of the waters, as they go tumbling down the rocks, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live, and then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to the more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit her, and how her appearance ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... it existed, they would be obliged to force a path through miles of reeds. Therefore they thought it safer to follow the river bank. Their progress was very slow, since continually they must make detours to avoid a quicksand or a creek, also the stones and scrubby growth delayed them so that fifteen or at most twenty miles was ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... hills, known locally as kopjes—red, rocky prominences, flaunting in the sunshine—diversified the distance. But the road itself, such as it was, lay all on the high plain, looking down now and again into gorges or kloofs, wooded on their slopes with scrubby trees, and comparatively well-watered. In the midst of all this crude, unfinished land, the mere sight of a bicycle, bumping over the rubbly road, was a sufficient surprise; but my astonishment reached a climax when I saw, as it drew ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... very happy, aunt; but Brighton is almost by Beachey Head; and if I could get so far, I could not expect to be welcome in such a smart place as that—poor scrubby midshipman as ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... closed his desk. The thin man with an eloquent gesture turned and rushed out of the office, past Isabelle, who caught a glimpse of a white face working, of teeth chewing a scrubby mustache, of blood-shot eyes. John locked his desk, took down his hat and coat, and came into the outer office. He kissed his wife, and they went to drive behind the Kentucky horses, talking of pleasant matters. After a ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the face of the crag. They reached the heap of rocks, and crept in amongst them by means of another narrow passage, close to the inner end of which the fire was, and this is what they saw through the twigs of a scrubby bush which ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences casting laced shadows across the burning ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... commandant ahead on his roan. Come along!" We near the horsemen. The last man dismounts as we approach; his companions are disappearing over the rise; he shifts his saddle forward, staring at us intently. A tall, well-built fellow, red hair, chin scrubby, dust-covered features. A bayonet at ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... being a strayer, he managed to tie him to a small, scrubby bush, after which he moved forward, with caution and stealth, in the direction whence came the whinny that had arrested his attention. His purpose was to prevent the other animal discovering his approach—an exceedingly difficult task, as the mustangs of the Southwest ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... country. The commonest oak is a low, scrubby bush. The "cedars of Lebanon" have almost disappeared. The carob tree, white poplar, a thorn bush, and the oleander are found in some localities. The principal fruit-bearing trees are the fig, olive, date palm, pomegranate, orange, and lemon. Grapes, apples, apricots, ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... was dere, suah," put in the negro cook, with great dignity. "I'se feel mean as a pore white if yer was ebbah come to my galley an' fin' sich a scrubby lot tings! Dere was nuffin' fit fo' a decent culler'd pusson ter eat—dat feller Morris Jones ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses, painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two white wooden churches. There are some American elms of a weeping kind, and sycamores, i.e. planes; but the wood is mostly pine—white pine and yellow pine—somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, and marshy hay-land between, very brown now. A little brook runs through to the Concord River.'[3] The brook flowed across the few acres that were Emerson's first ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic^; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen^, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c (narrow) 203; granular &c (powdery) 330; shrunk &c 195; brevipennate^. Adv. in a small compass, in a nutshell; on a small scale; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked and sodden,—wild, shagged with scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable dejection, with their ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... a lonely stretch of road with gently rolling land on either side of them, dotted with a scrubby growth of trees. Not a house was in sight, and they had passed only one team, a pair of mules harnessed to a wagon filled with ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... a good little flat, with a big mountain in front, and a scrubby, rangy country at the back for miles. People often asked him why he chose such a place. 'It suits me,' he used to say, with a laugh, and talk of something else. We could only raise about enough corn and potatoes, in a ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... lone, scrubby little lilac bush that has a dozen blossoms, and it doesn't take much mental work to connect lilacs with mother. Then, too, the distant whistle of a train 'way down the valley reminds me of how you would listen for the whistle of the Montreal train on Saturday morning and then ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... have often been struck with the great general similarity between the barren and sandy tracts of this district, and many parts of New South Wales, where sandstone is the prevailing rock. In both countries there are the same low scrubby bushes, at the Cape consisting of Heaths and Proteae, and in Australia of Epacridae and Banksiae—the last the honeysuckles of the Colonists. Even the beautiful sunbirds of the Cape, frequenting especially the flowers of the Proteae, are represented by such of the Australian honeysuckers ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... did then, he usually resented advice. The mouth of the bay grew wider, until Carroll could see most of the forest-girt shore on one side of it; but the surf upon the point was growing unpleasantly near. Wisps of spray whirled away from it and vanished among the scrubby firs clinging to the fissured crags behind. The sloop, however, was going to windward, for Vane was handling her with nerve and skill. She had almost cleared the point when there was a rattle and a bang inside ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... skirt and frilled petticoat, she vaulted into the man's saddle without more ado, and took the heavy reins in her small gloved hands. Her horse was scrubby, but she rode well, as do all Marquesans, her supple body following his least movement and her slim, silk-stockinged legs clinging as though she were riding bareback. When the swollen river threatened to wet her varnished slippers, she perched herself on ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Doing so brought us in a north-easterly direction to here. In the first part we came more northerly than easterly and in the latter part more easterly than northerly. The country we saw was like that seen yesterday, except being scrubby at a few places. In the middle of the day Jemmy and I waited behind the main party and I made an observation of the sun to get our latitude. As we were riding to overtake the main party we passed nets for catching emu and nets for catching fish. We then passed ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... see this bottle. I picked up the bottle and ran the boat alongside the island, and made fast and went ashore armed, with a part of my boat's crew. We found that every scrap of vegetation on the island (I give it you as my opinion, but scant and scrubby at the best of times) had been consumed by fire. As we were making our way, cautiously and toilsomely, over the pulverised embers, one of my people sank into the earth breast-high. He turned pale, and 'Haul me out smart, shipmates,' says he, 'for ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... unless the growers are provided with proper cultural directions. The tendency in the past has been to plant nut trees in out-of-the-way places, and let nature take her course. Nature took her course; the result, scrubby trees ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... watched the big mill foreman as he walked down the trail to the mill. Then, as was his custom when perturbed in mind, Pierre crossed the dusty waggon trail and seated himself on a boulder, leaning his back against a scrubby spruce. He let his eyes rest contentedly on a big, square-faced building. Rough stone steps led up to a broad veranda, from which rose, in barbaric splendour, great sheets of shining plate-glass, that gave an unimpeded view of a long mahogany bar ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... wastes are covered by a scrubby plant known as mountain sage. It rises from a tough gnarled root in a number of spiral shoots, which finally form a single trunk, varying in circumference from six inches to two feet. The leaves are grey, with a strong offensive smell resembling true sage. In other places there appear mixed ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... under favorable conditions, as upon the wooded points and islands of Lake Umbagog, attaining a height of 50-60 feet, with a diameter of 10-15 inches. Extremely variable in habit. In thin soils and upon bleak sites the trunk is for the most part crooked and twisted, the head scrubby, stunted, and variously distorted, resembling in shape and proportions the pitch pine under similar conditions. In deeper soils, and in situations protected from the winds, the stem is erect, slender, and tapering, surmounted by a stately head with long, flexible branches, scarcely ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... mind to protest against this material interpretation of his disreputable state; but the sight in the mirror of his ignominiously scrubby and battered appearance silenced him. The barber's explanation was as good as any, seeing that he himself could give no satisfactory account of the circumstances which had reduced him to his sorry pass. So Desmond held his peace ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... I noticed where the Mercutian Light had burned off the scrubby desert vegetation. As we got closer I could see it now in the sunlight, standing vertically up in the air, motionless. There were signs all about now where the light had burned. We were passing along a little gully—the country here was somewhat rough and broken up—when something came ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... enjoy a subtle self-flattery in the thought that he graciously bestows his name upon a maiden who, to all intents and purposes, may be said never to have been born at all, so did Bob Hewett feel when he put a ring upon the scrubby finger of Pennyloaf. Proudly conscious was Bob that he a 'married beneath him'—conscious also that Clem Peckover was ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... and summer, this coachman had driven this monotonous, uninteresting route, with always the same sandy hills, scrubby firs, occasional cabins, in sight. What a time to nurse his thought and feed on his heart! How deliberately he can turn things over in his brain! What a system of philosophy he might evolve out of his consciousness! ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... won't find him quite so scrubby as he sounds. He's very proper and clean-shaven, with a good pair of dark, Dutch eyes, which he gets from his mother; and I wish he had got her business ability with them, and her horse sense, if the lady will excuse me. She runs the property and he spends it, as far as she'll let him, ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... camp awoke to the new life. Whether or not they had a country, these soldiers did not know. Home to many, when they reached it, was graves and ashes. At any rate, there must be, somewhere on earth, a better place than a muddy, smoky camp in a piece of scrubby pines; better company than gloomy, hungry comrades and inquisitive enemies, and something in the future more exciting, if not more hopeful, than nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, nothing to do, and nowhere to go. The disposition ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... five miles from town on the bank of the river. It was a swift muddy river, wandering about in a flood plain a quarter of a mile wide, and at this point chewing noisily at a low bank forested with scrubby cottonwoods. ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... little face raised itself from the cushions of the sofa, on which I had placed him, and he put his arms round me as I knelt down beside him, and whispered that his back was bad, and his legs felt funny, and he was so glad I was home again, for Martha was cross, and had hard scrubby hands, and hurt him often, though she did not mean it. This and much more did Dot whisper in his ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... others were knolls; and a thick cedar growth made up for a falling off of pine. The spruce had long disappeared. Juniper thickets gave way more and more to the beautiful manzanita; and soon on the south slopes appeared cactus and a scrubby live oak. But for the well-broken trail, Jean would have fared ill through this ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... eyes with the drooping corners—and he smiled and bowed. And the Princess, as she looked into his face and forgot the wild hair and scrubby beard, the stains, the rags, and the nakedness, met a pair of unusually cheerful, honest eyes, and impulsively ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... cow's tail," Dan said, mentally reviewing the order of the procession, as, after dismounting, we walked round our find—a wide-spreading sheet of deep, clay—coloured water, snugly hidden behind scrubby banks. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the great central plateau of Mexico, which runs far into the north and which includes much of Texas. Before them lay another and great change in the country. They were now to enter a land of little rain, where they would find the ragged yucca tree, the agave and the cactus, the scrubby mesquite bush and clumps of coarse grass. But they had passed through so much that they ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... aspect of a Russian village is not attractive, and there is little choice in the surrounding country between a wide grey plain with a distance of scrubby pine forest, or the scrubby pine forest with distant grey plains. The peasants' houses are scattered up and down without any order or arrangement, and with no roads between, built of trunks of trees, unsquared, and mortised into each other at ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... Boulevards. And on the broad, dark, deserted footway, where the sound of the revelry died away, women were standing and waiting. They remained for long intervals motionless, patient and as stiff-looking as the scrubby little plane trees; then they slowly began to move, dragging their slippers over the frozen soil, taking ten steps or so and then waiting again, rooted as it were to the ground. There was one of them with a huge ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... to Deira? Well, there's no good trying to describe it, for it's the only place in the world like itself. God made it and left it to its own devices. The town is pretty enough, with its palms and green headland, and little scrubby islands in the river's mouth. It has the usual half-Arab, half-Portugee look-white green-shuttered houses, flat roofs, sallow little men in duck, and every type of nigger from the Somali to the Shangaan. There are some good buildings, and Government House was the mansion of some ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... summer they continued to arrive, until about 5,000 had settled between Parrtown (St. John) and St. Anne's. The peninsula now occupied by the city of St. John was then almost a wilderness, covered with shrubs, scrubby spruce, and marsh. Large numbers of emigrants also arrived at Annapolis, Port Roseway, and other points; and Governor Parr, in a letter to Lord North in September, 1783, estimates the whole number that had arrived in Nova Scotia and the island of St. John ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... appeal:—"I am very anxious, if possible, to get a Brigade of Gurkhas, so as to complete the New Zealand Divisional organisation with a type of man who will, I am certain, be most valuable on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The scrubby hillsides on the South-west face of the plateau are just the sort of terrain where those little fellows are at their brilliant best. There is already a small Indian commissariat attached to the Mountain Batteries, so there would be no trouble on the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... what is called personality. On the other hand, training and education have almost everything to say respecting the relative standing of the individual among the members of his kind—whether or not he shall be a blighted or a perfect specimen. A fine, sweet, juicy crabapple is more desirable than a scrubby, diseased Jonathan. ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... were five or six closets nick-named offices, and three other boys. One was the nephew of the before-mentioned Wallis, and a very imp of mischief; another, only a boy, with nothing remarkable but his stupidity; while the fourth was a scrubby, stunted, fellow, about sixteen or seventeen years of age, with a long pale face, deeply pitted with the small-pox, and an irregular crop of light hair, most ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... scrub oak also thinly scattered over large portions of fertile prairie. To a casual observer these oaks, from their stunted appearance, would be taken as evidence of poor soil. But the soil is not the cause of their scrubby looks. It is the devouring fires which annually sweep over the plains with brilliant though terrific aspect, and which are fed by the luxuriant grass grown on that same soil. If the oaks did not draw ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... and he, who has subsisted on a bone and a pat till there he squats decrepit, he turns his grateful old eyes up to her, and has not a notion that she is hugging sad memories in him: Hero, Poet, Painter, in one scrubby one! Then is she buried, and the village hears languid howls, and there is a paragraph in the newspapers concerning the extraordinary ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the limestone, and continues to the N.W. to a considerable distance over a poor and scrubby country, covered for the most part with a ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... right,—great happiness in an English post-chaise properly driven; more exhilarating than a palanquin. 'Post equitem sedet atra cura,'—true only of such scrubby hacks as old Horace could have known. Black Care does not sit behind English posters, eh, my boy?" As he spoke this, the gentleman had twice let down the glass of the vehicle, and twice put it ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... understand the sharp words that passed from saddle to saddle. The Indians were already within gunshot, but too sure of their game to lose any time in shooting; nor was Stanley willing to waste a shot upon them. As he dodged in between a broken wall of granite and a scrubby clump of cedars, closely followed by Bucks, their pursuers could have picked either man ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... trysting places! In this hospital we saw our first wounded German prisoners. We saw boys fifteen years old, whose voices had not changed. We saw men past fifty. We saw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academic type, wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick. We saw scrubby looking men who seemed to "be the dirt and the dross, the dust and the scum ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... crowds followed him in the streets. Fools and wise men alike were eager to know him, to boast that they had spoken to him or touched his hand. Yet at first sight Grant seemed to have little of the hero about him. He was an "ordinary, scrubby looking man, with a slightly seedy look," said one who saw him in those days. "He did not march nor quite walk, but pitched along as if the next step would bring him to his nose." But his eye was clear and blue, he had a determined look, and seemed ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... mountain sides. Great brown patches, which the professor thinks are washings from the fine examples of erosion, but which look to me like patches of brown grass as we see in Penobscot Bay on the islands, vary with what is apparently a scrubby evergreen growth and bald, bare rocks. As we are about 18 miles off, the blue haze over all makes an enlarged, roughened and much more deeply indented Camden mountain coast line. The bays are in some cases so deep that we can look ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... to ask it for two or three days, since a good friend had told me of some lyrics by Miss Frances Wynne; and the little volume, charmingly entitled Whisper, was close under my arm as I turned from the road across the heath—a wild scramble of scrubby chance-children, wind-sown from the pines behind. And then presently, like a much greater person, 'I found me ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... Martian fizz, suddenly very depressed. He didn't really want the false papers. He just wanted to get away from the deadly humdrum existence on Spaceman's Row. He walked wearily back to his scrubby little bedroom to wait for night to come. He hated to go back to the room, because he knew he would think about Tom and Astro and the Space Academy. Now he couldn't allow himself to think about it any more. ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... before long whole train-loads of cement and sand and corrugated iron walls and roofing came rattling and banging past the Higgins's back-door. Day and night this continued; and a little way beyond they knew that a two-mile square of scrubby waste was being laid out with roads and tracks and little squat buildings, set far apart from each other. In a few months the frightened family would lie awake at night and listen to trains rattling past, coming out ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... sort of young man's neck that has two great flutings down the back, here and here—so! And a little, meanish head with scrubby hair—And rather bad ears. Shoulders bad, narrower than the hips; turn-down collar, ready-made short jacket, trousers baggy and a little frayed at the heels. That's how he took me. I came very quietly up the staircase. I did not carry a light, you know—the candles are on the landing ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... retorted proudly, "an' a better man at that than the scrubby younglings of these days. A generation of 'em would die under the things I've been through. Did you ever hear of the Sunny South?—she that was sold in Havana to run slaves an' ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... became evident to Major-General Babington that the Highlanders not only had failed to carry the Magersfontein heights, but that they required instant reinforcement. He accordingly desired Major R. Bannatine-Allason, the battery commander, to move north-east over the scrubby ground, and not to come into action until he was stopped by the bullets or could get a clear view of what was going on at the front. The battery, with an escort of 12th Lancers and mounted infantry, advanced at a trot, ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... real anxiety. Hewitt bit his scrubby mustache. When a special correspondent married that was the ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... disappear over the crest of the hill. Twenty or thirty pioneers, who had been carried forward behind as many of the cavalry, were now seen busily employed in filling up the ditch, and cutting down the short scrubby hedge; and presently, the artillery coming up also, filed off sharply to the right, and formed on the very summit of the hill, distinctly visible between us and the grey cold streaks of morning. By the time we had noticed, this, the clatter in our immediate neighbourhood was renewed, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... towering up to the sky like mountains. Before us a pool of inky water, all worming with odd lights and lines of blue fire, like flakes of phosphorus on a bath, and alive with the hissing of hundreds of snakes. Upon our left hand a scrubby thicket and a marsh beneath it, I make sure; Czerny's devils, who had shot the poor folks on the Santa Cruz, at our heels, and we but four against the lot of them. Would any man, I ask, have believed ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... church Jose threw himself upon a bench near the door, and waited torpidly. A few moments later came a voice, and then the soft patter of bare feet in the thick dust without. Carmen was talking as she approached. Jose rose in curiosity; but the girl was alone. In her hand she held a scrubby flower that had drawn a desperate nourishment from the barren soil at the roadside. She glanced up ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... then disappeared, whereupon every one was immensely relieved. Even the fact that he generally brought them a packet of expensive sweets was as nothing beside the harrowing knowledge that they must kiss him, thereby having their faces brushed with a large and scrubby moustache. Aunt Margaret and nurse did not have to endure this infliction—which seemed to Bob and Cecilia obviously unfair. But the visits did not often happen—not enough to disturb seriously an existence crammed ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... wavering purpose. He would try to find old Giorgio if he could. God knows what might have happened to him! He made a few steps, then stopped again and shook his head. To the left and right, in front and behind him, the scrubby bush rustled mysteriously in ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... to a little rivulet; it was a mere brook of a few feet wide, and two or three yards, perhaps, from bank to bank. Over this they flew, so easily that the spring was scarcely felt, and continued the headlong course. And now a more barren country was around them. Sandy ridges and scrubby grass appeared everywhere, reminding Dick of the place where he had been so ill. Rocks, too were scattered about, and at one place the horse dashed with clattering hoofs between a couple of rocky sand-hills which, for a few seconds, hid the prairie ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... hurled against chosen positions, entrenched and with the new device of wire entanglements in front of them. "I mean," he wrote, "to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." It took summer, autumn, winter, and the early spring. Once across the Rapidan he was in the tract of scrubby jungle called the Wilderness. He had hoped to escape out of this unopposed and at the same time to turn Lee's right by a rapid march to his own left. But he found Lee in his way. On May 5 and 6 there was stubborn ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... memory would return—what would he remember? It would come back, beginning, most probably, at the very moment in which it had been interrupted. For one instant he would fancy that he saw again what he had seen then. What had he seen? That was the question. Had he seen anything but the sand, the scrubby bushes, and the trees round the cottage in the distance? Had he heard anything but the howling of the southwest gale and the thundering of the big surf over the bar and up the beach? The injury was at the back of his head, but it was a little on one side. ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... interruption. A stooping figure in a shabby, black frock-coat, the figure of a man who wore a dilapidated bowler pressed down upon his ears, who had a greasy, Semitic countenance, with a scrubby, curling, sandy colored beard, sparse as the vegetation of a desert, ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... urchins ran shouting around our carriage wheels and scrambled in the dust for the sous we threw them, my hostess pointed laughing to a scrubby little girl with tomato-colored cheeks and tousled dark hair, remarking, “I looked like that twenty years ago and performed just those antics on this very road. No punishment would keep me off the highway. Those pennies, if I’m not mistaken, will all be spent at the village pastry cook’s ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... to match was hired to convey us and our belongings to the city, which has since become so celebrated as the abode of saints. Our first outspan was in the valley of the Zwartkops River, close to a big vlei, which was surrounded by dense, scrubby jungle. I had a small single-barreled rifle, so I loaded this and went off in search of big game. In anticipation of our translation to Africa I had done a good deal of rifle practice at Springfield, and had thus become a ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... remained in the nakhil, or grove. Nothing at all was to be found in the few scrubby fields about the well now choked with masses of the insects. Whoever the people of this squalid settlement had been, all were gone. The place was almost as bare as if the sun's flames, themselves, had flared down and licked the village ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the slave population with which he was immediately surrounded. From a hundred and fifty, his slaves had decreased, until he only owned thirty, and with them did little more than make his yearly expenses. Field after field had been abandoned, and left to a fertile undergrowth of pines or scrubby oaks, until there were few signs of cultivation, except within the limits of two or three hundred acres of the rich lands contiguous ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... fashion, with a skin cap on his head and stout gaiters on his legs; on his shoulders hung a moderate sized leathern sack; he seemed fond of loitering near sunny banks, and of groping amidst furze and low scrubby bramble bushes, of which there were plenty in the neighbourhood of Norman Cross. Once I saw him standing in the middle of a dusty road, looking intently at a large mark which seemed to have been drawn across it, as if by a walking-stick. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... on Junction Hill, where the naval 4.7-inch quick-firing gun is being mounted, we have by the aid of the signalman's powerful telescope watched a significant Boer movement going on for hours. We can see them among the scrubby trees between Lombard's Kop and Umbulwaana (or Bulwaan as it is more generally called), and hurrying off behind that hill along the road that leads southwards. That road cuts the railway not more than six or seven miles out, and ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... thence into the open country, beautifully green, and undulating like the waves of the sea. Near the town and the suburb of Belgrano are a great many peach-tree plantations, the fruit of which is used for fattening pigs while the wood serves for roasting them. There is also some scrubby brushwood, and a few large native trees; but these are soon left behind, and are succeeded by far-spreading rich pasture land, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... obvious and startling things, a thousand other interesting matters were afoot. In the mass and texture of the jungle grew many strange trees and shrubs. One most scrubby, fat and leafless tree, looking as though it were just about to give up a discouraged existence, surprised us by putting forth, apparently directly from its bloated wood, the most wonderful red blossoms. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... young stallion, and Stuart followed her on a little black mule he had selected from the barn for his exact likeness to one he had raised as a pet when a boy. The youngsters came struggling after them, mounted on an assortment of shaggy, scrubby looking animals that knew the mountain path as a rabbit knows his trail ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... of forest I had seen anywhere in this neighbourhood. At one side, not far off, rose a huge gray rock, partly covered on one side with moss, and round about were oaks and a few ash trees of a poor scrubby sort (else they would long ago have been cut out). The earth underneath was soft and springy with ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... We were to start in a week, and I could scarcely believe that the whole affair was other than a dream, as I sat at the open window smoking till the pinky-gray dawn of Christmas Day broke over the scrubby garden of the hotel. I had been in a sort of dream, in which the form of Mary Deane was the chief figure, but there was another less pleasing shape, which came and went in my visions in a purposeless kind of way, one which I had seen that day lounging about the ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... brasses of my accoutrements, when the boom of cannon burst on the air, rolling heavily from away to the southward up from what we knew must be the neighborhood of the camps at Pittsburg Landing. It was after seven o'clock. The sun was mounting over the scrubby oak copse behind our camp, and the day grew warm apace. Another and still another explosion followed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... as we think their general demeanour entitles them to be called, "Blackguard Nobs," are a lot of little, scrubby, bad-blooded, groom-like fellows, who have always, even from childhood, been incorrigible, of whom nursery governesses could make nothing, and whose education tutors abandoned in despair; expelled from Eton, rusticated at Cambridge, good for nothing but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... severed by any disgusts from the country of my youth where I spent my best years, or at least the years of most enjoyment. It was then a wild moor, with some natural beauty, a picturesque den leading from the house to the noble river, wooded with native birch and scrubby oak, with some tall larches and magnificent horse-chestnuts, and even a few immemorial Spanish chestnuts planted by the old Peterboroughs, now all gone. Along that river bank were some of the broadest haughs with which I am acquainted, and some of the best salmon streams, then woods and sheep pastures ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... rear of the hall Mr. Thomas came. But the drunken rowdy of the night before had been transformed. Gone was the scrubby beard and the shabby suit. Shorn was the unkempt mop of hair and vanished the impudent swagger. He was dressed in clean linen and respectable black, and his manner was modest and subdued. Only a discoloration of one eye showed where Captain Cy's ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Luke's eyes was closed with a kind of watery rheum, and was never opened except when he thought a rabbit was about to jump into a net. The other was but half open, and so overhung with a thick grey eyebrow as to be barely visible. His cheeks were the hue of clay, his chin scrubby, and a lanky black forelock depended over one temple. A battered felt hat, a ragged discoloured slop, and corduroys stained with the clay of the ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... no tree so much of the forest as the beech. On the verge of woods the oaks are far apart, the ashes thin; the verge is like a wilderness and scrubby, so that the forest does not seem to begin till you have penetrated some distance. Under the beeches the forest begins at once. They stand at the edge of the slope, huge round boles rising from the mossy ground, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... not come up with us at about four o'clock, and being anxious to find water before dark, we proceeded along a narrow open valley covered with long grass and large pandanus trees, skirted on each side by rather scrubby forest land. At dark we reached a large waterhole. One of the men left behind shortly arrived, and stated that the rest had halted for the night. Mr. Kennedy being anxious to bring all the horses to water, and to have the party together, sent me back to conduct ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... his close, scrubby beard, and bared his teeth viciously. Behind him, from the distant sandbank, the rebel bullets rapped unceasingly at the launch's iron plating. "But I am the senior in rank," he repeated again. "Officially I could not resign ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... of light between the stars over Bulwan, those few who had stayed the night under roofs began creeping away to the holes in the river bank or the rough, scrubby ground at the foot of the hills south-west of the town, where the Manchesters guard the ridge. Then we all waited, silent with expectation. The clouds turned crimson. At five the sun marched up in silence. Not a gun was heard. "They will begin at six," we said. Not ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... coachwork—if one may dignify it by such a phrase—which was made from packing cases, had a thousand creaks and one abominable squeak, which made conversation impossible. The scenery was all grey rock and little scrubby trees; the road was magnificent and wound and twisted about the mountain side like a whip lash. Driving down these curves was no amateur's game, and we saw immediately that our chauffeur knew his job. We came ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... with the anxiety there was curiosity, and along with the curiosity fury. If they could catch the culprit, they would hurl him from the roadside down into the brook with such violence that he should never stand on his feet again! Or they would climb the mountain that rears its scrubby head behind the village and there hang him on the wind-swayed hazel-tree—after having soundly thrashed him with its switches! Then the cows and swine which the village herdsman pastured on the close-cropped field would ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... their lunch, and spend the day on the beach, or in the scrubby woods, not far away, taking to a boat if they ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... large population both of Mahomotans and Alfuros, which latter race I much wished to see. I set off one morning to examine this place myself, expecting to pass through some extent of forest on my way. In this however I was much disappointed, as the whole road lies through grass and scrubby thickets, and it was only after reaching the village of Sahoe that some high forest land was perceived stretching towards the mountains to the north of it. About half-way we dad to pass a deep river on a bamboo raft, which almost sunk beneath ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Rock." Thence we entered Alligator River, a broad lagoon, the Raphael Creek of Maxwell's map, not named in the hydrographic chart of 1859. Leading south with many a bend, it is black water and thick, fetid mud, garnished with scrubby mangrove, where Kru-boys come to cut fuel and catch fever; here the dew seemed to fall in cold drops. After nine miles we reached a shallow fork, one tine of which, according to our informants, comes from the Congo Grande, or Sao Salvador, distant a week's march. Leaving the whaler ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... no how. Do you think a man of substance, that's got above the world, is to be treated like a little scrubby apprentice? Let every man have his own, that's always my way of thinking; and this I can say for myself, I have as good a right to shew my head where I please as ever a member of parliament in all England: and I wish every body here ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... shortly to the Plaza, since called Portsmouth Square. At that time it was a wind-swept, grass-grown, scrubby enough plot of ground. On all sides were permanent buildings. The most important of these were a low picturesque house of the sun-dried bricks known as adobes, in which, as it proved, the customs were levied; a frame two-story structure known as the Parker House, and a similar ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... in the scene, due to the way in which I was viewing it—not as a pampered passenger on a 'fine steam yacht', or even on 'a powerful modern schooner', as the yacht agents advertise, but from the deck of a scrubby little craft of doubtful build and distressing plainness, which yet had smelt her persistent way to this distant fiord through I knew not what of difficulty and danger, with no apparent motive in her single occupant, who talked as vaguely and unconcernedly about his adventurous cruise ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... marshes. But the valley beyond, similar in character, had yet more of gloom at the time of which I write. In the higher part there were large plantations of firs, set too closely to attain any size, and remaining stunted in height and scrubby in appearance. Indeed, many of the smaller and more weakly had died, and the bark had fallen down on the brown soil neglected and unnoticed. These trees had a ghastly appearance, with their white trunks, seen by the dim light which struggled through the thick boughs ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. Some of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that I have ever seen, as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches as of their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... to Dracontius, and bade him lead the way to his racecourse. He merely waved his hand and pointed to where they were standing, and said, "There, this ridge is just the place for running, anywhere, everywhere." "But how," it was asked, "will they manage to wrestle on the hard scrubby ground?" "Oh! worse knocks for those who are thrown," the president replied. There was a mile race for boys, the majority being captive lads; and for the long race more than sixty Cretans competed; there was wrestling, boxing, and the pankration (7). ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... I soon made what arrangements were possible, and then set to work. The country around was pretty and novel to me, consisting of abrupt volcanic hills enclosing flat valleys or open plains. The hills were covered with a dense scrubby bush of bamboos and prickly trees and shrubs, the plains were adorned with hundreds of noble palm-trees, and in many places with a luxuriant shrubby vegetation. Birds were plentiful and very interesting, and I now saw ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... John Chinn's grave, and rose to the command of a regiment of small, wild hill-men, most of whom had known his father. His son John was born in the small thatched-roofed, mud-walled cantonment, which is even to-day eighty miles from the nearest railway, in the heart of a scrubby, tigerish country. Colonel Lionel Chinn served thirty years and retired. In the Canal his steamer passed the outward-bound troop-ship, carrying his son eastward ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... thinking and planning on the part of Elmer to make sure they did not "repeat." So far, none of the boys could say as they moved along that they had ever before seen the stretch of water and scrubby shore, covered with ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... in these days when they talk of Equality!—As for me, am I not as good as another woman, I that was one of the finest women in Paris, and was called La belle Ecaillere, and received declarations seven or eight times a day? And even now if I liked—Look here, sir, you know that little scrubby marine store-dealer downstairs? Very well, he would marry me any day, if I were a widow that is, with his eyes shut; he has had them looking wide open in my direction so often; he is always saying, 'Oh! what fine arms you have, Ma'am Cibot!—I dreamed last night that it ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... into the open sunshine of the fields beyond. A pine wood in Maryland or in Virginia is quite a different thing from a pine wood in Maine or Minnesota,—the difference, in fact, between yellow pine and white. The former, as it grows hereabout, is short and scrubby, with branches nearly to the ground, and looks like the dwindling remnant of a ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... The general landscape is scrubby, littery; ill-tilled, scratched rather than ploughed; physiognomic of Czech Populations, who are seldom trim at elbows: any beauty it has is on the farther side of the Dobrowa, which does not concern Prince ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... squat; short &c. 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic[obs3]; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen|!, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c. (narrow) 203; granular &c. (powdery) 330; shrunk &c. 195; brevipennate[obs3]. Adv. in a small compass, in a nutshell; on a small scale; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... barely diversified by a few straggling groups of cottonwoods. To the westward extended the boundless prairie, flat and bare as a floor, except where the southern fork of the little river cut its way through the soft loam, and gave rise to a scrubby growth of cottonwood and willow; while northward, across the main body of the river, the land appeared more rugged and broken, and somewhat heavily wooded with oak and other forest trees, but equally ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... world, seemed also to cut it off from light and air. The atmosphere hung lifeless, the occasional bellow of range-cattle sounded far-off and muffled. Vegetation was scant, the sage-brush grew close and scrubby, even the brilliant cactus flowers seemed to have abandoned the valley to its fate. A lone group of dead cotton-woods grew like sentinels close to the rocky walls. Their twisted branches, gaunt and bare, writhed upward as if in dumb supplication. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... beyond the field, a mile or so from the road, on an upland swell of land, but that also has gone, and had been gone for some time before I knew the field of which I write. It is a bare fold of land with one or two little scrubby spinneys alongside the plough. And for the rest, just the brown earth and the sky. There are days on which you will see a man at work somewhere within that mile, others on which it is completely deserted. Here it is that the French Revolution was preserved. Here was ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... best shepherd, but she liked him the best, and he would mind her properly and take to her ways ... for a moment he seemed to stand before her, with his head stooping among the rafters, his great shoulders shutting out the window, his curious, brown, childlike eyes fixed upon her face. Day was a scrubby little fellow, and Relf had warts all over his hands.... But she wasn't choosing Socknersh for his looks; she was choosing him because he would work for her the best, not being set up with "notions." Of course she liked him ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... side of the comma is known as "the bight." It is the anchorage of the sponging-fleet, and is the eastern limit of settlement on that side of the island. Beyond it are sandy flats and shallow, salt-water lagoons, shut in by a dense growth of leather-leaved bushes and low, scrubby China-berry, sea-grape, and Jamaica-apple trees. The highest part of the Key is occupied by the city, and the highest part of the city is the low bluff on its western side, where the slender shaft of the lighthouse stands at a height ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... in a hurry to get out of the way of any f-force of our men that might be sent to cut them off. We reached T-Ticonderoga that night. They turned us prisoners out into a pasture with some scrubby trees in it, and p-put a guard around us. And there they k-kept us, giving us hardly anything to eat, t-till at last we grew so hungry that we p-pulled the bark off the b-black birches, and ate it to stay our stomachs. I thought considerable of ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... now. All night vehicles rattled over the hard prairies. Settlers on their way home, starting for Pierre, hurried by in the middle of the night. Art Fergus's team of scrubby broncos were so tired they didn't even balk in harness. Flivvers bumped over the rough ground, chugging like ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... all home to Prencess Anne from dat ar Joe Johnson!" cried Samson, and trotted his mule through the swamp and away. Jimmy Phoebus saw him overtake the old woman in the cart and begin to speak with her as the scrubby woods ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... passed altogether into the wooded moorland. Cultivation returned at intervals, then vanished again. I was upon an undulating plateau with far-off higher hills closing the horizon all around. The reclaimed land was in the hollows or upon the surrounding slopes; but here, too, the scrubby forest might be seen stretching for miles without a break. The heat was intense, and the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... before the blacksmith's forge. Beside it was a rickety, unpainted gate opening into a snake-fenced lane feathered here and there with scrubby little spruces. It ran down a bare hill, crossed a little ravine full of young white-stemmed birches, and up another bare hill to an equally bare crest where a farmhouse was perched—a farmhouse painted a stark, staring yellow and the ugliest ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... covered an area of forty acres—broken, scrubby, uncertain side-hill acres, at that. In brief, a worked-out farm among the mountain slopes of the North Jersey hinterland; six miles ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... fringe of brush and scrubby timber separated the camp from the actual work. From the water's edge to the donkey engine was barely four hundred yards. From donkey to a ten-foot jump-off on the lake shore in a straight line on a five per cent. gradient ran a ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... began. They were short and scrubby as yet, but beautiful in the velvet of their dark green needles. Bob glanced at them critically. They were perhaps eighty to a hundred feet high and from a foot to thirty inches ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... beyond the wall, not the trimmed, well-kept kind that grew in Cousin Jasper's garden, but a scrubby growth of box elder and silver-leaved poplar such as spring up in myriads where the grass is never cut. Hanging over the top of the coping, he could peer through their branches and see a house beyond. He was astonished to see the shingled roof rising so close by, for he had not thought ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... followed one another in close succession, grew more widely apart, and finally ended altogether before many miles of the dusty road had been covered, and thenceforward their way ran through unbroken woods, not the stately "forest primeval" but the scrubby "second growth," from which those who have never been into the heart of the leafy wilderness can form but a poor conception of the grandeur to ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... lighting on something never known before. I was the Livingstone of this undiscovered land which looked as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything there, the dwarf date palms, the scrubby wild plums and the stunted jambolans, was in keeping with the miniature mountain ranges, the little rivulet and the tiny fish I ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... coming after me; "the dook tells me that in less than three months he will be sold for twice seventy." "I will have nothing to do with him," said I; "besides, Jasper, I don't like his tail. Did you observe what a mean scrubby tail he has?" "What a fool you are, brother," said Mr. Petulengro; "that very tail of his shows his breeding. No good bred horse ever yet carried a fine tail—'tis your scrubby-tailed horses that are your out-and-outers. Did you ever hear of Syntax, brother? That ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... 1815. The picture of life and color, breaking on a scene of wintry grandeur and solitude, rises before my eyes. I see the frozen, snow-covered waste of the Lake of the Woods, the surrounding evergreen forests and towering hills, the low leaden sky overhead. Along the edge of the scrubby-timbered shore, five husky dogs come at a trot, harnessed in single file to a sledge. The dogs are short-legged and very hairy, with long snouts, sharp-pointed ears, and the tails of wolves; the sledge is a simple toboggan made of two pieces ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... he gave his name to a queer-looking servant with wild scrubby hair, a dirty face, a tawdry livery, worse for wear, which had manifestly been made for a larger man, and hung upon its present possessor like a coat upon a clothes-horse; his cotton stockings, meant to be white, ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... excepting spruce, which is found in moderate quantities at the head of Rennell and Cartwright Sounds, and the inlets to the southward. We examined with considerable care those localities where yellow cedar had been reported, crossing on foot from Athlow to Skaloo Inlet, finding small bodies of scrubby growth on the shores of each, also on Tattoo Inlet, but much the largest quantity on Cypress Island, ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... see at first; the banks are lined by scrubby bushes, and on them, in a sandy open patch, we see a man falling and bowing at his evening devotions; a few camels pass along the raised bank, looking like gigantic spiders against the illuminated sky, and there comes ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... doubt about it; there were the thick lips, the fat cheeks, and the squat nose standing out with startling clearness against the flaming background. There, too, was the round skull, washed into shape perhaps by thousands of years of wind and weather, and, to complete the resemblance, there was a scrubby growth of weeds or lichen upon it, which against the sun looked for all the world like the wool on a colossal negro's head. It certainly was very odd; so odd that now I believe it is not a mere freak of nature but a gigantic monument fashioned, like the well-known ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... them thwart, that the top of one may rest on the root or stub of the other, as far as they extend, stopping the cavities with its boughs and branches; and thus hedges which seem to consist but only of scrubby-trees and stumps, may be reduced to a tolerable fence: But in case it be superannuated, and very old, 'tis advisable to stub all up, being quite renewed, and well guarded. We have been the longer on these descriptions, because ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... time I was searching the bank with my eyes. A scrubby, little bush overhung the creek and I kicked at it with my foot. There was a "plopp" as though something heavy had dropped into the water. Instinctively I knew it was the object for which we were both searching, and I turned to find the inspector ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... I did; and a terrible run I had for it, fearing at every step to hear the echo of shots in the valley, and dropping down the scrubby rocks with tearing and violent scratching. Then I crossed Bagworthy stream, not far below Doone-valley, and breasted the hill towards Slocombslade, with my heart very heavily panting. Why Jeremy chose to ride this way, instead of the more direct one (which ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... rather the Angles, for the midland counties, and, it is probable, was founded by them when they found Uttoxeter (the Uriconiam of the Romans), no longer tenable. On the conquest of the town by the Anglo-Saxons it received the name of Scrobbes- byrig; that is to say Scrub-burgh, or a town in a scrubby or bushy district, and, in the Saxon Chronicle, Scrobbesbyrig-scire is mentioned, now corrupted or polished into Shropshire. Ethelfleda, whose name we have so often had occasion to mention as the builder ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... we were on spread into a plateau of low cedars and scrubby pines; the snowy range, with Pilot Peak sticking up, was before. After we had been hiking for two or three hours, off diagonally to the left we saw a forest fire. This was thick timber country, and the fire made a tremendous smoke. It was likely to be a big fire, and ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... our coming round out of our course when we came to forests was because but little food was found in them. Kangaroos and other animals were seldom or never found there: they abounded usually in the more scrubby country. Our progress was very leisurely, and, as we met tribe after tribe, we ingratiated ourselves with them and camped at their wells. Occasionally we came upon curious rivers and lagoons that ran into the earth and disappeared in the most mysterious way, only to reappear some distance farther ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... went to strike him, Virokannas moved against him, Went to slay the ox unhappy; But his head the ox was turning, And his black eyes he was blinking. To a pine-tree sprang the old man, 70 Virokannas in the bushes, In the scrubby willow-thicket. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... affectionate animal that I have ever known; and that is saying much. He seems to think it necessary to atone for his ugliness by extra good conduct, and does so dance on his lame leg, and so wag his scrubby tail, that it does any one, who has a taste for happiness, good to look at him—so that he may now be said to stand on his own footing. We are all rather ashamed of him when strangers come in the way, and think it necessary to explain that he is May's pet; but amongst ourselves, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
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