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More "Straggling" Quotes from Famous Books



... lights on the wharfs of Dyea, sparkling like jewels against the gray night. Their radiant promise helped over the last mile miraculously. We were wet to the knees and covered with mud as we entered upon the straggling street of the decaying town. We stopped in at the first restaurant to get something hot to eat, but found ourselves almost too tired to enjoy even pea soup. But it warmed us up a little, and keeping on down the street we came at last to a hotel of very comfortable ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... plums does well in the same districts as the Japanese varieties just dealt with, but has the advantage of being resistant to the fruit fly. The trees are usually more or less straggling growers, the fruit is of small size, but good for cooking or jam-making. One or more of the varieties of this plum are bad setters, though they blossom profusely, but this may be overcome either by working two varieties which bloom ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson

... old Joel, and Rube turned to the stable, while Dolph kept an eye on the sheep, which were lying on the road or straggling down the river. As Rube opened the stable-door, a dirty white object bounded out, and Rube, with a loud curse, tumbled over backward into the mud, while a fierce old ram dashed with a triumphant bleat for the open gate. Beelzebub, as the Turner mother had ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox

... with the haze of morning hanging over it. A few horsemen passed us, pricking along, too much engrossed in their own errand to inquire ours. A couple of carts and a long string of pack-horses, laden principally with bales of wool, came straggling along a byroad, and the drivers waved their broad hats to us and wished us God-speed. At Dunbridge the folk were just stirring, and paused in taking down the cottage shutters to come to the garden railings and watch us pass. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... bearded backwoodsmen, rifle on shoulder, and with grave earnest faces; but walking rather than marching, irregularly keeping together, or straggling, as they chose. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... again. Afterwards, side by side, they did much journeying to and from the nearest sawmill—each trip through a day and a night—thirty odd miles away. The mill was a small, primitive affair, almost lost in the straggling box-elders and soft maples that bordered the muddy Missouri, producing, amid noisy protestations, the most despisable of all lumber on the face of the globe—twisting, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... companion on a walk," writes Mr A. Egmont Hake, "whether across country or in the slums of Houndsditch. His enthusiasm for nature was peculiar; he could draw more poetry from a wide-spreading marsh with its straggling rushes than from the most beautiful scenery, and would stand and look at it ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... When morning purifies the earth; He leans upon a gate and sees The pastures, and the quiet trees. Low, woody hill, with gracious bound, Folds the still valley almost round; The cuckoo, loud on some high lawn, Is answer'd from the depth of dawn; In the hedge straggling to the stream, Pale, dew-drench'd, half-shut roses gleam; But, where the farther side slopes down, He sees the drowsy new-waked clown In his white quaint-embroider'd frock Make, whistling, tow'rd his mist-wreathed ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... character of the landscape changed. The semi-tropical vegetation grew gradually sparse, and after a while in the distance, seemingly in the midst of the path, a great rock loomed gigantic and gaunt, cutting in two the blue dome of the sky. Still farther on, they came upon stretches of straggling wild peach, olive, and lemon trees. Beyond again, tangles of hawthorn were interspersed with patches of dried weeds and grass. But as they neared the mining district the soil was bleak and barren. The mountain rivers were dry, and their beds made ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... moment the Emperor stood like a statue, staring at old Luke. The expression on his face was that of a madman, but a madman through whose brain a straggling ray of realization has dawned. It was the look upon his face that held the whole assemblage spellbound. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... every creature in Grasmere, down to the two-year-old babies,' said Hammond, Mary having just stopped to converse with an infantine group, straggling and struggling over the boulders. 'Pray, do you happen to know a man called Barlow, a very ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... women can't keep a secret after this," cried Josie, rocking to and fro in paroxysms of laughter. And in the straggling explanations that followed they learned that Mr. Montgomery had been ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... through dust and sunshine, past orchards of lemons and oranges, among prickly pears and agave overgrown with pink and red geranium, by rocky slopes of mesembryanthemum, yellow marguerites, broom and sweet peas, between white walls with roses straggling over them and occasional glimpses of the sea dotted with fishing boats and, now and then, of the land covered with olives, ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones

... plaguey Peace!—shipped here seventeen men that were Dutch. Though we looked upon our hardships as being now pretty well over, several Ran from us here that had come out of England with us, being straggling, lazy, good-for-nothings, that can't leave their old Trade of deserting, though now they had a good sum due to each of 'em for Wages. Their shares for Plunder of course were forfeited, and equitably divided among those that stuck by us. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... thus, the girl once down the hill caught hold of Ragamuffin and spun him along the valley between the hills till she came to the coastguard station, straggling like a flock of ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... of Samuel McCombs, two days after. When the smoke rose, after the first discharge of the rifles, the commander, nine men and two horses lay dead or wounded on the ground. The trumpets immediately sounded a recall. But by the time the scattered dragoons had collected and formed, a straggling fire from a different direction, into which the patriots had extended, showed the unerring aim of each American marksman, and greatly increased the confusion of the surprise. Perfectly acquainted with every foot of the grounds, the patriots ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter

... danger, I requested the governor's permission to erect a tent upon a spacious plain, at about two miles distance from the town, called Green Point, and to send my people on shore thither during the day, under the care of an officer, to prevent their straggling. This permission the governor immediately granted, and gave orders that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... view; warm fancy had revelled there, and her airy dance had left vestiges, scarcely visible to a mortal eye. Some perpendicular lines pointed out that melancholy had predominated in his constitution; yet the straggling hairs of his eye-brows showed that anger had often shook his frame; indeed, the four temperatures, like the four elements, had resided in this little world, and produced harmony. The whole visage was bony, and an energetic frown had knit the flexible ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... rose, and stepping to him laid a hand on his straggling dark hair. "What is more, he has deserved it, not to-day only but by his goodness over many years. The Lord shall be his illumination," she said gravely, quoting the motto of the University which (amazing thought!) was to be his University. "May the light ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the palm-tree grove, through a village crowded with dirty, straggling Arab children, on to the cultivated plain, beyond which the Pyramids stood, now full before them; the two large Pyramids, a smaller one, and the huge sphynx's head all in a ...
— An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids • Anthony Trollope

... half-continent. The three million people have grown to eight, and the west of the wandering Indian holds cities greater than the largest of the east at Confederation. From a people overwhelmingly agricultural they have become a people almost equally divided between town and country. The straggling two thousand miles of railways have been multiplied fifteen-fold, forming great transcontinental systems unmatched in the United States. An average wheat crop yields more than ten times the total at Confederation, and the output of the mine has increased at even a more rapid rate. Great manufacturing ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton

... were floating in the air, I could not feel my feet touching the floor. All the lights merged into one dazzling glow and my heart kept time to the rhythm of the music. When the music stopped, the glorious illumination seemed to go out and leave only a little straggling light from a few badly smelling kerosene lamps. The beautiful, fantastic music had been in reality only a harsh horn accompanied by a concertina or some other stupid instrument jangling vile music. The young boys and girls ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... bygone lords, who had died in rebellions and crusades, were too ancient to grip the imagination. At first his veneration for the race which he served inspired an outward show of respect on the part of his hearers. But soon, in straggling twos and threes, they lagged behind to explore and pluck wall-flowers from the crannies. Girls, feeling the pressure of lovers' arms about their waists, giggled shrilly. They wandered off to shady nooks in the grass-grown ramparts where woolly ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... when he looked at Mookoomahn's ghastly face, framed in a mass of long, straggling black hair; at other times he was overcome with a heart-rending pity for Mookoomahn that brought tears to his eyes. But tears froze, and ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace

... the courtyard. The first guests came in a straggling fashion, and then suddenly everyone seemed to be rushing in at once. Patricia laughed as she recognized the tall, lanky figure of Bob Wetherill, whose attachment to Rosamond Merton was the bane of that young lady's life. Then she gave a little cry. ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther

... of Hopituh stock had been building their straggling dwellings along the canyon brinks, and grouping in villages around the base of the East Mesa, other migratory bands of Hopituh had begun to arrive on the Middle Mesa. As already said, it is admitted that the Snake were the first occupants of ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... made very happy this morning by the messages from home, and especially Fred's and Jamie's baby efforts. They wanted to send mamma their love, and the straggling characters meant for words, convey as much meaning as though they were in good English, for they speak to me in unmistakable language. Why do I understand so well? Ah, John, I see. Because, being filled with love for them, I recognize the same quality in what they feel ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... dinnertime; about a dozen boarders straggling in, with Vida in a pretty frock anxious because darling Clyde was ten minutes late and of course something fatal must of happened to him in crossing a crowded street. But nothing had. He showed up ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... where the bare walls, the scanty furniture the brand-new photographic apparatus, the little fireplace a la prussienne, also new, which had never seen a fire, were disastrously apparent in the bright light that fell from the glass roof. The drawn features and straggling beard of the young man, whose very light eyes, high, narrow forehead, and long fair hair thrown back in disorder gave him the appearance of a visionary, all were accentuated in the uncompromising light; and so was the dogged will expressed in that ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... foundation was sawn through, clean and straight. He gazed at it for a moment in astonishment. Then he turned back towards the cottage, to receive another shock. About forty yards up the lane, drawn in close to a straggling hedge, was a small motor-car, revealed to him by a careless swing of his torch. He turned sharply towards it, keeping his torch as much concealed as possible. It was empty—a small coupe of pearl-grey—a powerful two-seater, with deep, cushioned ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... village straggling below—white houses with russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream, an old stone cross. He had been fourteen years struggling up from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... old people, women and children formed a long straggling cortege; while on the other—brilliant youth constituted a homogeneous and solid mass, marching to ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard

... labyrinth. Such as choose to follow her may. For our part, we prefer accompanying the youthful Becky to her chamber, whither she was also attended by the lady of the mansion. Becky's destiny for the night lay at the top of one of those little straggling wooden stairs common in old houses, which creaked in all directions. The bed was placed in a recess dark as Erebus, and betwixt the bed and the wall, was a depth profound, which Becky's eye ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

... passed, sometimes we met at breakfast, sometimes at supper, sometimes we fished together or sat in the straggling orchard and talked; she neither avoided me nor sought me. She is the most charming mixture of child and woman I ever met. She is a dual creature. Now I never met that in a man. When she is here without getting ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various

... the O. A. C., and Western representative of the syndicate that owned the big mine and stamp mill to the south of town. It was the mine that had made the straggling ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish

... of victory on that day of September 25th—of victory and its price. I met great numbers of the lightly wounded men, mostly "Jocks," and they were in exalted spirits because they had done well in this ordeal and had come through it, and out of it—alive. They came straggling back through the villages behind the lines to the casualty clearing—stations and ambulance-trains. Some of them had the sleeves of their tunics cut away and showed brown, brawny arms tightly bandaged and smeared with blood. Some of them were wounded in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... Auckland. To right and left the ground rises abruptly and steeply, and the streets become irregular in outline. Nor is the shore a straight and continuous line; these heights on either hand are promontories jutting out into the stream, and hiding deep bays behind them, round which, straggling and irregular, sweeps ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... onwards the people began to assemble, coming from all parts of the large and straggling district, and sat about in groups gravely talking. Towards eleven o'clock a large number of peasants had arrived, and the altar was covered with not a fair white cloth as usual, but with something suspiciously resembling a long and ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... the first spells Africa puts upon those whom she means to make her own. Ever after, with the poignant memory of that Cross of straggling stars there is a thought of Africa, and the two cannot be torn apart. For April there was always to be a memory of Vereker Sarle, too, associated with it, for he it was who first picked out the Cross for her in the luminant heavens, and he it ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... across the meadow-like bottom of the halting-ground, till he was near the narrow gap through which the regiment had passed, to recommence his furtive movements, seeking the shelter of stone after stone till he disappeared between the folding rocks, while in his track came in a straggling body quite a hundred active-looking men of the same type—strongly built, fierce-looking, bearded fellows, each carrying a long jezail, powder-horn, and bullet-bag, while a particularly ugly ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn

... of the 20th, three of the officers set out on a shooting party, rather contrary to my inclination; as I found the natives, at least some of them, were continually watching every opportunity to rob straggling parties, and were daily growing more daring. About three o'clock in the afternoon, I got intelligence that they were seized and stripped of every thing they had about them. Upon this I immediately went on shore with a boat's crew, accompanied ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... and stood leaning there weakly. With fumbling fingers she brought from inside her dress a soiled sheet of folded paper and drew a long breath of resolution, passing one hand over her face where the hair fell wispy and straggling. Then she braced herself with all the strength and self-will that ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... in its long, low meadows and level gardens, close to the little town, straggling red roof above red roof, up its ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... through the expanding force of heat; when she had not yet attained her definiteness of form and had neither beauty nor purpose, but only heat and motion. Gradually, when her vapours were condensed into a unified rounded whole through a force that strove to bring all straggling matters under the control of a centre, she occupied her proper place among the planets of the solar system, like an emerald pendant in a necklace of diamonds. So with our soul. When the heat and motion ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore

... Padre Esteban sauntered leisurely up the garden, that gradually ascended the slight elevation on which the greater part of the pueblo was built. Through a low gateway in the wall he passed on to the crest of the one straggling street of Todos Santos. On either side of him were ranged the low one-storied, deep-windowed adobe fondas and artisans' dwellings, with low-pitched roofs of dull red pipe-like tiles. Absorbed in his fanciful dreams, he did not at first notice that those dwellings appeared deserted, ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... the poet's walk in the shrubbery, where, pacing up and down the live-long morning, he composed his Lalla Rookh. It is a little confined gravel-walk, in length about twenty paces; so narrow, that there is barely room on it for two persons to walk abreast: bounded on one side by a straggling row of stinted laurels, on the other by some old decayed wooden paling; at the end of it was a huge haystack. Here, without prospect, space, fields, flowers, or natural beauties of any description, was that most imaginative poem conceived, planned, and executed. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various

... instead of a straggling town with a few muddy streets and about three thousand inhabitants, Jefferson would find our national capital one of the most beautiful cities on the face of the earth, with a population of nearly three hundred thousand; and on March 4 he would behold a scene such as he never dreamed ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various

... sun, lifting above the eastern hills, found long irregular lines of horses straggling across dewy fields to water at the rushing streams of the Manawatu River. On one bare-backed horse of every four sat a trooper, clad sketchily in shirt and breeches tugged on hastily, as a sergeant had called the roll. They played the fool as they passed, laughing and chattering, losing ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie

... themselves Josephites, and do not practise polygamy. There is probably not a sect or schism in the United States that has not its representative in California. Until 1865 San Bernardino was merely a straggling settlement, and a point of distribution for Arizona. The discovery that a large part of the county was adapted to the orange and the vine, and the advent of the Santa Fe railway, changed all that. Land that then might have been bought for $4 an acre is now sold at from $200 to ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... the western entrance to the seas; and as there is always a strong rush of water through the passage towards the ocean, we had to steam hard against a considerable current. The town, of which I spoke in my last chapter, has a very straggling and neat cleanly appearance. There are no forts or other defences to indicate that not so long ago this town offered defiance and a short resistance ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... pamphlets lay heaped on the floor, and in the corners were four desks, at one of which three men, whom I learned later to be an Italian, an Englishman and a Spaniard, were talking together intensely. They took no notice of my entrance, for many other visitors, burly, sooty creatures, were constantly straggling in and out. ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... shown that, whether he tried or not, he had not forgotten. Even that last one received three weeks ago, the note scrawled in the handwriting of a child, from Wadi Halfa, with the large unsteady words straggling unevenly across the page, and the letters running into one another wherein he had told his calamity and renounced his suit—even that proved, and perhaps more surely than its hopeful forerunners—that he had not forgotten. As she waited at the window she understood very clearly that ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... the stitches, if they may be so called, are threads laid side by side—and bound down at intervals by cross stitches, or fastenings—upon rather a fine linen cloth; and that the parts intended to represent flesh are left untouched by the needle. I obtained a few straggling shreds of the worsted with which it is worked. The colors are generally a faded or bluish green, crimson, and pink. About the last five feet of this extraordinary roll are in a yet more decayed and imperfect state than ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... idyl of Beirut came now the wrestler from Aleppo, Ahmet Ali, and the occurrence irritated Campbell to a degree which he had not conceived possible. There he passed the door with his dreamy Syrian face, his red rose, his white burnoose, his straggling followers. And Fenzile smiled her ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... through openings in the brush, scrambling over the dwarf fir, then down through the fallen timber. It was half-past seven o'clock when we descended the last slope and found the path to Glenora. Here we met a straggling party of whites and Indians just starting out to ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young

... Skenk—whom we had seen on arrival—sitting on her front porch, satchel in hand, patiently awaiting us. Ajax helped her to mount—no light task, for she was a very heavy and enfeebled woman. I drove. As we trotted down the long straggling street our passenger spoke with feeling of the changes that had taken place in the old ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... be a straggling adobe house, shaded by cottonwoods and built around three sides of a square. It was roomy, cool, and comfortable, with a picturesqueness all its own. To Solange, it was inviting and homelike, much more so than the rather cold luxury ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... they professed an enmity to the soldiers of both parties, their hatred was in most places levelled chiefly against the royalists, from whom they had met with the worst treatment. Many thousands of these tumultuary peasants were assembled in different parts of England; who destroyed all such straggling soldiers as they met with, and much ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... miles wide, by about eighteen deep; it is fronted by a group of straggling islands of low coral formation, crowned with small trees and bushes: the centre of the northernmost islet is in latitude 11 degrees 41 minutes 50 seconds, longitude 134 degrees 10 minutes 5 seconds. To the eastward of Cape Stewart, the western head of the bay, the coast is ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... a straggling little town of one street and rows of villas overlooking the sea. La Panne, with the guns of Nieuport constantly in one's ears, and the low, red flash of them along the sandy beach; with ambulances bringing in their wounded now that night covers their movements; with ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... colony would literally starve to death. Yes, starve to death with untold millions of fruitful acres all about us. Had we strength to fight I would not care so much. With but two companies of undisciplined troops, a mere straggling handful, officered by drunkards, we could not defend this post a day against ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson

... a job somewhere, and cannot come home; they must have bread to eat, and he must work. This is the house,' pointing to a low white cottage at the end of a long straggling street of similar houses; two or three untidy-looking children were playing in the front garden with some oyster-shells and a wooden horse without a head. One little white-headed urchin clapped his hands when he saw Mr. Hamilton, and a pretty little girl with a very dirty ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... blue veil, "was ware," as old chronicles say, of a country-looking gentleman coming down the street in a mild, lazy, dreamy fashion, his hat pushed up at a considerable elevation from his forehead, leaving a mass of light hair straggling out at the back, his eyes bent thoughtfully on the pavement, and his hands ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... speckled over, like Jacob's sheep; each man had one of the weeds stuck rakishly in the corner of his mouth, and was knocking off the ashes upon his deviled biscuits; and, to the right of the president's chair, a long straggling regiment of empty bottles gave dumb but eloquent proof of the bibulous capabilities of the company. Each man was talking vehemently to his neighbour, and every one for himself; in order, as a wag among them said, to get through the work quickly, and jump at once ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton

... the following week. The grounds were located a mile from the straggling little village which was the center of the county's activities. All religious denominations used the spacious auditorium for their services. The Methodists camped there an entire month. The Baptists stayed but two weeks. The Baptist temperament frowned on the social ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon

... Straggling members, who had met to enjoy the generous political banquet, and who still remain to see the night "through" with appropriate honour, are apprised of the sudden disappearance of this very valuable piece of property. They are ready for any turn of excitement,—anything for "topping off" ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... quite superfluous, civilians clogged every movement and made confusion worse confounded. "The march," says Sherman, who commanded a brigade, "demonstrated little save the general laxity of discipline; for, with all my personal efforts, I could not prevent the men from straggling for water, blackberries, or anything on the way they fancied." In the whole of the first long summer's day, the sixteenth of July, the army only marched six miles; and it took the better part of the seventeenth to herd its stragglers back again. ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood

... gone when there came to her a little package, through the Tiverton mail. It was tied with the greatest caution, and directed in a straggling hand. Mary opened it just as she struck into the Gully Road, on her way home. Inside was a little purse, and three gold pieces. She paused there, under the branches, the purse in one hand, and the gold lying within her other palm. For a long time ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... finding ourselves cheated out of our dream of summer coolness, we resolved on substituting for it what the Italians call 'un bel giro.' So we went to Ancona ... where we stayed a week, living on fish and cold water." They found Ancona "a straggling sea city, holding up against the brown rocks, and elbowing out the purple tides," and Mrs. Browning felt an inclination to visit it again when they might find a little air and shadow. They went on to Loreto, and then to Ravenna, where in the early dawn of a summer morning they stood by the tomb ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... behind the leaders, since it takes a generation or two for the ideas of the old leaders to permeate any society. Now and then a great leader finds a great following in his own lifetime, but his leadership rarely involves a new principle. There will always be a few ground breakers, behind them a few straggling followers, and far, far behind, the great mass ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... Rogron off to walk if the weather was fine. Sure of seeing the colonel and being able to question him, Sylvie dressed herself as coquettishly as she knew how. The old maid thought she was attractive in a green gown, a yellow shawl with a red border, and a white bonnet with straggling gray feathers. About the hour when the colonel usually came Sylvie stationed herself in the salon with her brother, whom she had compelled to stay in the house in his dressing-gown ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... and children, all in panic flight before the dreaded invaders, fleeing for refuge in Paris. At various places these stricken multitudes joined the army ambulances, taking the shortest routes. Rumors of the coming of the uhlans ran along the straggling lines with tales of the grievous havoc and ruin which these horsemen, vanguards of the German columns, had wrought in the land. Hardly had the retirement begun, when a body of uhlans entered Amiens and demanded from the mayor the surrender of the town. This was formally given, and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... close under the low, turf-constructed battlement, and, as we were in the act of scrambling over it, we received a straggling and ill-directed fire ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... between each action. Though the events are scattered over such an extent of surface, and relate to such a variety of characters, yet the links which bind the different interests of the story together are never entirely broken. The most straggling and seemingly casual incidents are contrived in such a manner as to lead at last to the most complete development of the catastrophe. The ease and conscious unconcern with which this is effected only makes the skill more wonderful. The business ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... crased, and he was indeed! Into the town at dead of night Forlorn and weary, half dead with fright, Into the town the company came, Draggled and straggling, half dead with shame, That they should have marched and tramped about At a lunatic's whim, now in, now out, The livelong night, through garden and hall, Would they ever forget Ben ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore

... one corner of the school, makes a line almost like a reversed "s" to the corner diagonally opposite, and comes back to the track on the left hand, the others straggling after with about as much precision and grace as Jill followed Jack down the hill; but, before they are fairly aware how very ill they have performed the manoeuvre, they perceive that their teacher not only aimed at having them learn how to turn to the left ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne

... his scanty wallet and bade farewell to father and mother, and the few friends and neighbors he knew in the straggling forest hamlet, Bernard Palissy closed the first chapter of his life. The second was a long period ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... which a sunbeam filtered here and there—one striking her hair which had darkened to a duller gold—striking it eagerly, unerringly, as though it had started for just such a shining mark. Below her was outspread the little town—the straggling, wretched little town—crude, lonely, lifeless! She could not be happy in Lonesome Cove after she had known the Gap, and now her horizon had so broadened that she felt now toward the Gap and its people as she had then ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.

... Technical College had just begun to ring, and a stream of students appeared out of the long straggling buildings and poured through the gate, breaking up then into little knots and groups that went their several ways into ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer

... Tarn, a small lake belonging to the property, studded with little islands, each of which is covered with its own thicket of hollies, birch, and dwarfed oaks. The house itself is poor, ill built, with straggling passages and low rooms, and is a sombre, ill-omened looking place. When Josephine Murray was brought there as a bride she thought it to be very sombre and ill-omened; but she loved the lakes and mountains, and dreamed of some vague mysterious joy ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope

... river obstructions to the free passage of our little craft between Pontoise and L'Isle-Adam, above Auvers. We were going by easy stages now, even the long tows of grain and coal-laden barges were gaining on us, for we were straggling disgracefully and stopping at ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... were merely indicated by a few fine and very short hairs; the free edges of the eyelids were without cilia, but the bulb of each of these was indicated by a small, whitish point. The beard was so thin and weak that Beauvais clipped it off only every three weeks. A few straggling hairs were observed on the breast and pubic region, as in young people on the approach of puberty. There was scarcely any under the axillae. It was rather more abundant on the inner parts of the legs. The voice ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... wheeled round, and put themselves in position for the advance. Another blast from those same trumpets, given with all the verve and joyousness of coming victory, and the horses of their own accord sprang forward to the attack. Then the straggling and dismayed body of Frenchmen who had been pushing on in advance of their fellows to fall upon the flying English, found themselves opposed to one of those magnificent cavalry charges which made the glory and the ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... this massacre was, that during Richard's first campaign after Philip's departure for France, Saladin put to the sword all the Christians taken in battle or caught straggling, and ordered their bodies to be left without burial, as those of the garrison of St. Jean d'Acre had been. Some months afterwards Richard conceived the idea of putting an end to the struggle between Christendom and Islamry, which he was not succeeding in terminating by war, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... saw several dolphins and bonnettas about the ship, and the next day some straggling birds, which were brown on the back and the upper part of their wings, and white on the rest of the body, with a short beak, and a short pointed tail. The variation was now decreased to 4 deg. 43' E. our latitude was 24 deg. 30' S. our ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... they found a piece of paper—a significant document, for it explained the motive for the crime. Kid Wolf read it and understood. It was written in straggling handwriting: ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens

... considered meet that such as purchased the buildings of monasteries should in the same grant have the Libraries (the stuffing thereof) conveyed unto them. And now these ignorant owners, so long as they might keep a ledger-book or terrier by direction thereof to find such straggling acres as belonged unto them, they cared not to preserve any other monuments. The covers of books, with curious brass bosses and clasps, intended to protect, proved to betray them, being the baits of covetousness. ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... holding together along its mountainous vertebrae some eight southern states; northeastern Kentucky, all of West Virginia, the eastern part of Tennessee, western North Carolina, the four northwestern counties of South Carolina, and straggling foothills in northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama. The broad valley of the Tennessee River separates the mountain system on the west from the Cumberland Plateau which is an extension of the West ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... impressed by a disappointment of its own momentary gratification than by the most obvious well-being of a nation; but, glad or sorry, of Fort Edward was not left one stone upon another. Several single stones lay about promiscuous rather than belligerent. Flag-staff and palisades lived only in a few straggling bean-poles. For the heavy booming of cannon rose the "quauk!" of ducks and the cackling of hens. We went to the spot which tradition points out as the place where Jane McCrea met her death. River flowed, and raftsmen sang below; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... note to her. She took it into the companion, where a light was burning; her name and that of the yacht were in straggling handwriting that she ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty

... far up on the mountain-side was their own dear home sad and lonely without them. Up there, too, the sun still shone, doubtless,—at least there were the rose-glow and the Silver Lake to look at, while down here there was nothing, nothing but gray shadows, a long dreary road, and a straggling house or two in sight. From above, the valley might look to be a fairyland of loveliness, but in reality it was nothing but a dismal ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter

... seton bobbed up and down on its breast. Lost in a saddle that swallowed him up, supported at the back by a valise and in front by the mail-bag, which was passed through the saddle-bow, its rider sat huddled on it like a monkey. His small face, adorned with straggling blond whiskers and as wrinkled and rough as a winter apple, was hidden by a large oil-cloth hat lined with felt; a sort of gray coutil coat was drawn up to his hips and bagged around his stomach, while his trousers stopped at the knees and disclosed his bare legs reddened by the rubbing of ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert

... will be as well to have one with you, in case of your not getting a good chance to cast either of the others. But just now the less noise that's made the better. Who knows, but that some of these traitorous redskins may be still straggling about? Hearing shots they'd be sure to come up to us; which we don't want, though ever so much wishing to come up with them. Therefore, I say, use either the balls or ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid

... soil. Fields of oats waved gray and yellow in the afternoon sun; an immense green pasture was divided by a willow-bordered brook, and here were droves of horses, and out on the rolling bare flats were straggling herds of cattle. ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey

... of the story is easily told. Emerson was born in Boston, then a straggling town, in 1803. When his turn came he went to Harvard, and largely supported himself there by such odd jobs as only a poor student knows how to find. Wasted time he called it; for he took little interest in college ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... survivors of the bloody contest, thirteen in all, came straggling wearily into a white settlement on the Kanawha River in Virginia. Of the remainder of their party and their gallant leader nothing was ever heard again. One of the men reported that he had stayed with the wounded colonel during ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... up in front of an unpainted farm-house straggling beside the road, a farm-house which began with the dignity of fluted pilasters and ended in a tumble-down open shed filled with a rusty sleigh and a hundred nondescript articles—some of which seemed to be moving. Intently studying this phenomenon from her runabout, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... pony too! A new arrangement had just been made, that the Friarswood letters should be fetched from Elbury every morning, and then left at the various houses of the large straggling district that depended on that post-office. All letters from thence must be in the post before five o'clock, at which time they were to be sent in to Elbury. The post- master at Elbury asked if Mrs. King's sons could undertake this; and accordingly she made a great effort, and bought a ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge

... twigs and branches, now feasted upon the succulent tops of the mimosas. Throngs of women and children mounted upon camels, protected by the peculiar gaudy saddle hood, ornamented with cowrie-shells, accompanied the march; thousands of sheep and goats, driven by Arab boys, were straggling in all directions; baggage-camels, heavily laden with the quaint household goods, blocked up the way; the fine bronzed figures of Arabs, with sword and shield, and white topes, or plaids, guided their milk-white dromedaries through the confused throng with the usual ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker

... upon the greensward Where his straggling hoofs had trod, Pure and bright, a fountain flowing From ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... padding; but to carry off the width of Andy's shoulders required a very ample and voluptuous outline indeed, and Andy could not help wishing the straw was a little sweeter which they were packing under his nose. At last, however, after soaping down his straggling hair on his forehead, and tying a bonnet upon his head to shade his face as much as possible, the disguise was completed, and the next move was to put Oonah in a ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... the air, until we disappeared again down the opposite and more gradual slope. Late in the afternoon we emerged upon the plain, but no post-road or station-house was in sight, as we expected; nothing but a few Kirghiz kibitkas among the straggling rocks, like the tents of the Egyptian Arabs among the fallen ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... entirely forget the panting herd straggling on far behind him, choking and coughing in its own dust. He must arrange somewhere, somehow for pasturage. So he made a detour and looked in on Brocky Lane first, then on Rod Norton. Both old friends were glad to see him and gave him hard ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... perhaps some one had beat him to it with news from the Blue Duck, but he put it from him. There were tears in her eyes and one was straggling down between the crimples of her cheeks where it looked as if she had lain on the folds of her handkerchief all night. There came a new tenderness in his voice. This was Mark's mother, and this was the way she felt. Well, ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... (D.) A spoiled and scattered form; the seeds too conspicuous, but the flowers very delicate, hence 'Gratiola minima' in Gesner. The confused ramification of the clusters worth noting, in relation to the equally straggling fibres ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... said Madame, as she took off her bonnet and tenderly put back the straggling hair. "No wonder, after all you have gone through, my ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... the marks of an earthquake. A long flight of steps led up to the door of the mosque, and as we ascended we were rewarded by the most charming view of the city and the grand plain. Konia lay at our feet—a wide, straggling array of low mud dwellings, dotted all over with patches of garden verdure, while its three superb mosques, with the many smaller tombs and places of worship, appeared like buildings left from some former and more magnificent capital. Outside of ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... the fact urged is true. But even now a straggling street extends to the river, ending in a large suburb on its banks, and a famous bridge there crosses the river to the south side where now the foreign settlements are. There may have been suburbs on that side to justify the por le mi, or ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... mother of the two lads stretched out her hand, and took the paper, and looked at the straggling marks. The fat baby, that she carried in the hood of her reindeer suit, crowed over her shoulder at the piece of paper, and Anvik forgot to be angry. He put his pencil in his mother's hand. She looked curiously ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford

... cup or indusium. But some observations led me to suspect that nevertheless insect agency here comes into play; for I found by holding a camel-hair pencil parallel to the pistil, and moving it as if it were a bee going to suck the nectar, the straggling hairs of the brush opened the lip of the indusium, entered it, stirred up the pollen, and brought out some grains. I did this to five flowers, and marked them. These five flowers all set pods; whereas ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... blazing crimson and gold, and the mountains behind us were growing purple when we entered the little settlement where the Bishop lives. We drove briskly through the scattered, straggling little village, past the store and the meeting-house, and drew up before the dwelling of the Bishop. The houses of the village were for the most part small cabins of two or three rooms, but the Bishop's was more pretentious. It was a frame building and ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart

... and I think I had fallen asleep over the cup of coffee which the servant set before me after my meal, when I was awakened by a sudden uproar from outside, and, starting up, I went out to see what was happening. Down the road I saw several straggling natives—every one of them was running, and every one of them was shouting or crying or blubbering, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... in the discourse, and soon the van descended the hill leading into the long straggling village. When the houses were reached the passengers dropped off one by one, each at his or her own door. Arrived at the inn, the returned emigrant secured a bed, and having eaten a light meal, sallied forth upon the scene he had known so well in his early days. Though flooded with ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy

... comfortably, and drawing forth a sort of wallet, proceeded to satisfy the cravings of hunger. He ate but little, and returning the bag or sack to its hiding-place in the broad girdle which was passed about his waist beneath the blanket, stretched himself on the ground, with not even a straggling bough between him and the deep blue vault ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans

... in a little straggling town in the southeast of Ireland, and was succeeded by a languor proportioned to the wild excitement it never failed to create. But of all in the village, its publicans suffered most under the reaction of great bustle. Few of their ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... pause of silence. The eyes of both were turned to the colliery village far below, at the foot of the hill. From this high stretch of garden one looked across the valley and its straggling line of houses, to the pits on the further hillside, the straight black line of the "bank," the pulley wheels, and tall chimneys against the sky. To the left, along the ascending valley, similar chimneys and "banks" were scattered ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... and Barry watched her, taking a strange sort of delight in the skipping grace with which she negotiated the stepping stones of the swollen little stream which intervened between her and the cabin of Ba'tiste Renaud, then clambered over the straggling pile of massed logs and dead timber which strewed the small stretch of flat before the rise began, leading to where he rested. More like some graceful, agile boy was she than a girl. Her clothing was of that type which has ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... some twenty men, slowly straggling in. There was a woman of middle age, and beside her a girl of about sixteen years, evidently her daughter. Dave's eyes approved of the girl, and though she was a stranger to his tongue, she did not fail to find an immediate means of ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell

... comeliness. It was a day or two before Fleda found out that it was all one; she thought at first that it was a collection of several houses that had somehow inexplicably sat down there with their backs to each other; it was so straggling and irregular a pile of building, covering so much ground, and looking so very unlike the different parts to each other. One portion was quite old; the other parts ranged variously between the present and the far past. ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... journey they entered a small, straggling village, so completely buried in mountains that its existence was unknown save to its own rustic inhabitants. The appearance of a monk evidently caused an unusual excitement, which was speedily explained. The chief of the villagers approached Father Ambrose, and, addressing ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... chance Cyril had in his pocket the oil-can of his father's bicycle; he put the carpet down at the foot of the stairs, and he lay on his back, with his head on the top step and his feet straggling down among his young relations, and he oiled the bolt till the drops of rust and oil fell down on his face. One even went into his mouth—open, as he panted with the exertion of keeping up this unnatural position. Then he tried again, but still the bolt would not move. So now he tied his handkerchief—the ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... contributions wherever they pass. The inevitable consequences of this system are universal pillage and a total relaxation of discipline; the loss of private property and the violation of individual rights, are followed by the massacre of all straggling parties, and the ordinary peaceful and non-combatant inhabitants are converted into bitter and ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck

... more than three thousand miles from ocean to ocean, and so situated in geographical configuration and commercial relations as to make the very idea of disunion absurd, save for men in whose minds fanaticism for the moment usurped the place of sound judgment. The men of 1783 dwelt in a long, straggling series of republics, fringing the Atlantic coast, bordered on the north and south and west by two European powers whose hostility they had some reason to dread. But nine years had elapsed since, in the first Continental ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske

... cannot be very different from the Tilford of the days of Cobbett. It is a straggling little hamlet, lying about the triangle formed by its cricket-green. The Wey runs halfway round the green, and is crossed by two grey and ancient bridges. But the chief glory of Tilford is its mighty oak, one of the greatest of English trees. Its ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... rolling blue waves, back of the long water trail over which he had come, there were chapel and bell and robed priest, and the word which made all fast forever. But back of the wilderness mission, back of the straggling settlements of Montreal and Quebec, back of the blue waters of the ocean, there, too, were church and minister; and there dwelt a woman whose figure stood now before his eyes, part of this mental picture of the white road lined ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... they had been detained three days without tasting food. Some hundreds died of famine or fatigue; and those who lived to return to their own habitations found them plundered and sacked by the papists, so that the greater number perished for want, or were murdered by straggling parties of the enemy. Yet these very people had for the most part obtained protection from King James, to which no respect ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... of the city, Where the straggling huts are piled, At a casement stood a pretty Painted thing, almost a child. "Greet thee, maiden!" "Thanks—art weary? Wait, and quickly I'll appear!" "What art thou?"—"A Bayadere, And the home of love is here." She rises; the cymbals she strikes as she dances, And whirling, and bending with grace, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... lead," said the Doctor, "and be prudent, Youngster. You know where a letter will reach me. See that the girls get off safely!" He shook hands all round. The cars shot out of the gate, tooted for a passage through the straggling line of tired men in Khaki, took the first turn to get out of the way, and shot down the ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... was of a different sort, and illustrates the Italian love of bargaining, and their notion of a sliding scale of prices. One of our expeditions to the hills was one day making its long, straggling way through the narrow street of a little village of the Piano, when I lingered behind my companions, attracted by a handcart with several large baskets of oranges. The cart stood untended in the street; and selecting a large orange, which would measure twelve ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... put in M. Flocon. "When he wrote the early part, he was calm and collected; the last entries, so straggling, so ragged, and so badly written, were made when he was fresh from the crime, excited, upset, little master of himself. Naturally he would ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths

... Near the straggling settlement at the cove a group of shacks had sprung up to shelter the "Portygees" from the stranded-vessel. As her bones were slowly engulfed in the marching sands, through the decades that passed, the people who had come ashore from the big wreck ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper

... poor littery place; standing white-washed, but much unswept: in two straggling rows, now wide enough apart (no Konigseck need now get burnt there): utterly silent under the hot sun; not a child looked out on us, and I think the very dogs lay wisely asleep. Church and steeple are at the farther or south ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... the deserted way, from a lane among the straggling shacks, a figure issued. I disregarded it, only to hear it pattering behind me and ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... and after they had partaken freely of wine the conspirators were to be introduced, disguised as women, and to complete their work by the assassination of the polemarchs. On the day before the banquet, Pelopidas, with six other exiles, arrived at Thebes from Athens, and, straggling through the gates towards dusk in the disguise of rustics and huntsmen, arrived safely at the house of Charon, where they remained concealed till the appointed hour. While the polemarchs were at table ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith

... almost say that Margaret Mackenzie was ungainly. Her brown hair was rough, and did not form itself into equal lengths. Her cheek-bones were somewhat high, after the manner of the Mackenzies. She was thin and straggling in her figure, with bones larger than they should have been for purposes of youthful grace. There was not wanting a certain brightness to her grey eyes, but it was a brightness as to the use of which she had no early knowledge. At this time her father lived at Camberwell, and ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope

... battle-field of Guasimas about noon, without stopping to examine it, and pushed on toward Sevilla with a straggling, disorderly column of soldiers belonging to the Second and Twenty-first Infantry, who were following a battery of light artillery to the front. The men seemed to be suffering intensely from the heat, and every few hundred yards we would find one of them lying unconscious in the ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan

... my business, as an officer of the United States, to see that no soldier strays from camp unauthorizedly, or depredates upon private property. I will take your names, and report you, first for straggling, secondly ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... just rising. In two years of mutation and change it had seen the little cottage clinging like a swallow's nest to the rocky caves of a great Sierran canyon give way to a straggling, many-galleried hotel, and a dozen blackened chimneys rise above the barren tableland where once had stood the lonely forge. To that conservative orb of light and heat there must have been a peculiar satisfaction in looking down a few hours earlier upon ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... Coon!" shouted Blackhawk, and the boys skurried through the dark woods, getting many a scratch and fall. As it was, Yan and Wesley arrived together and touched the tree at the same moment. The rest came straggling up, with Char-less last and Guy a little ahead of him. Guy wanted to relate the full particulars of his latest glorious victory over Char-less, but all attention was now on old Turk, who was barking savagely ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... these are amongst the most variable of our domestic productions. It has been remarked (Marshall) that some of the most highly kept breeds of sheep and cattle are truer or less variable than the straggling animals of the poor, which subsist on commons, and pick up a bare subsistence{213}. In the case of forest-trees raised in nurseries, which vary more than the same trees do in their aboriginal forests, the cause would seem ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... returns upon itself; it has recurrent melody and poetic justice; it has artistic constancy and artistic revenge. It preserves the unities; even to some extent it preserves the unities of time and place. The story circles round two or three symbolic places; it does not go straggling irregularly all over England like one of Mr. Pickwick's coaches. People go from one place to another place; but not from one place to another place on the road to everywhere else. Mr. Jarndyce goes from Bleak House to visit Mr. Boythorn; but he comes ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... Here there was a colony of rooks, where the birds were busy all day long sometimes, and from which they were sometimes absent from early morning till sundown, when they came back cawing by ones and twos and threes, a long straggling procession of them, their dark iridescent forms with broad black wings outspread, distinct and decorative, against the happy blue. Beth loved the birds, and even as she worked she watched them, their housekeepings and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... shouldered his scanty wallet and bade farewell to father and mother, and the few friends and neighbors he knew in the straggling forest hamlet, Bernard Palissy closed the first chapter of his life. The second was a long period of ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... a sinister expression without speaking, while she continued stirring the pot boiling on the huge wood fire. Her eyes were bleared with the smoke, and her face was wrinkled and dried, with a few white hairs straggling over her brow, while the long yellow tusks which protruded beyond her thin lips gave her a peculiarly hag-like look. ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston

... heights, at the distance of two or three miles from the city; and as they sent out detachments of horse even to the very suburbs, for the purpose of watching our motions, it would have been unsafe to permit more straggling than was absolutely necessary. The army which we had overthrown the day before, though defeated, was far from annihilated; it had by this time recovered its panic, began to concentrate itself in our front, and presented quite as formidable an appearance ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... thoughts do twine and bud About thee, as wild vines about a tree Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see Except the straggling ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... streets of straggling homes and those long impersonal rows depressing in their middle-class respectability, and lowered the veil over her smarting eyes. She also squared her shoulders and strode along with an independent swing that must convince the most investigating mind she ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton

... with a dense forest, so thickly matted, that in some places it was scarcely possible to penetrate it. It grew thinner, however, as they advanced, dwindling by degrees into a straggling stunted vegetation, till, at the height of somewhat more than 13,000 feet, it faded away altogether. The Indians, who had held on thus far; intimidated by the strange subterraneous sounds of the volcano, ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous

... statement. He crouched behind a little tree, with his eyes burning hatefully and his teeth set in a curlike snarl. The awkward bandage was still about his head, and upon it, over his wound, there was a spot of dry blood. His hair was wondrously tousled, and some straggling, moving locks hung over the cloth of the bandage down toward his forehead. His jacket and shirt were open at the throat, and exposed his young bronzed neck. There could be seen spasmodic gulpings ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... had dissolved. Van Heemskirk's grandson, Lieutenant Hyde, was hastening towards Broadway; and the lovely Cornelia Moran was sauntering up the garden of her home, stooping occasionally to examine the pearl-powdered auriculas or to twine around its support some vine, straggling out of ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr

... got it all into five lines. Five lines, rather straggling, rather shapeless lines that told him with a surprising brevity that his wife had decided on an informal ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... the astounding news that Brasidas was preparing for a sally. Cleon at once resolved to retreat. But his skill was equal to his valour. He conducted his retreat in the most disorderly manner. His left wing had already filed off and his centre with straggling ranks was in the act of following, when Brasidas ordered the gates of the town to be flung open, and, rushing out at the head of only 150 chosen soldiers, charged the retreating columns in flank. They were immediately routed; but Brasidas ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith

... sun streamed in through the window of his little chamber, a relief from the sombre gloominess of the lofty library, where the straggling rays seemed to make the great hall more shadowy by contrast. But Meschini did not stop to look about him. In a closet in the wall he kept his stores, his chemicals, his carefully-composed inks, his bits of prepared parchment, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

... advocates, who have eschewed sectarianism, and lost their caste in the circle in which they moved, for their strong adherence to your views and measures, declare that they would sooner forego their Abolitionism than their party.... Now, these are not the views of here and there a straggling Abolitionist, but of seven-tenths of all the voting Abolitionists of the State.... They are entirely unconscious of the demoralizing influence of their course. They need light, warning, entreaty, and ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... purposes and its existence. There were a few great public buildings, a few large private houses, a few hotels and boarding houses, and a large number of negro shanties. The general effect was of attempted splendor, which had resulted in slovenliness and straggling confusion. The streets were unpaved, dusty in summer, and deep with mud in winter, so that the mere difficulty of getting from place to place was a serious obstacle to general society. Cattle fed in the streets, and were milked by ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... parts of the zillah: now you hear of 'Lahee,' blight on some field; now it is 'Ihirka,' scorching, or 'Pilooa,' caterpillars. In some places the seed may have been bad or covered with too much earth, and the plant comes up straggling and thin. If there is abundant moisture, this must be re-sown. In fact, there is never-ending anxiety and work at this season, but when the plant has got into ten or fifteen leaf, and is an inch or two high, the most critical ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... all under his own hat. How much more Friedrich Wilhelm, who had no logic whatever; and whose kingdom lay without him, far and wide, a thing he could not withdraw from. The rugged Orson, he needed to be right. From utmost Memel down to Wesel again, ranked in a straggling manner round the half-circumference of Europe, all manner of things and persons were depending on him, and on his being right, not wrong, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle

... Roman Catholic Church at the close of the sixteenth century the Italian states, Spain, Portugal, most of France, the southern Netherlands, the forest cantons of Switzerland, the southern Germanies, Austria, Poland, Ireland, large followings in Bohemia and Hungary, and a straggling ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... informed me of a considerable tract of the ancient forest, still in existence about ten miles distant. There were many fine old oaks in it, he said, that had stood for centuries, but were now shattered and "stag-headed," that is to say, their upper branches were bare, and blasted, and straggling out like the antlers of, a deer. Their trunks, too, were hollow, and full of crows and jackdaws, who made them their nestling places. He occasionally rode over to the forest in the long summer evenings, and pleased himself with loitering ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving

... location could hardly have been surpassed, for it stood on a rise of ground so that in any direction one looked across fertile valleys to encircling hills. A porch ran about three sides of the house, shaded here and there by vines. In spite of a certain look of neglect, emphasized by the straggling branches of the untrimmed vines, and the cobwebs everywhere visible, its appearance ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith

... knew that elephants would be more likely to be found in woods than in open places. Indeed, it was only near the banks of the stream that any great quantity of wood was to be seen. A broad belt of jungle extended upon each side of it. After that, there were straggling groves and clumps; and then came the open plains, almost treeless, though covered with a rich carpet of grass for some distance farther. To this succeeded the wild karoo, stretching eastward and westward beyond the reach of vision. Along the north, as ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid

... shoot at them from the shelter of the surrounding forest. If a man strayed from the fort he was sure to return wounded if he returned at all; and in this sort of warfare the stolid English were no match for the wily Indians. "Our men," says Smith, "by their disorderly straggling were often hurt when the savages by the nimbleness of their ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... boards and canvas, sometimes mere corrals or inclosures open to the cloudless sky, or more often the unhitched covered wagon which had brought them there. The singular resemblance to a circus, already profanely suggested, was carried out by a straggling fringe of boys and half-grown men on the outskirts of the encampment, acrimonious with disappointed curiosity, lazy without the careless ease of vagrancy, and vicious without the excitement of dissipation. For the coarse poverty and brutal economy of the larger arrangements, the dreary ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte

... and befriended by Cooper, he could not be satisfied, because their common publisher looked upon the latter as the "greatest literary genius in America." The reception given by the public to the "long, dirty, straggling tales" of the novelist disgusted him. "I ask nothing," he wrote in April, 1823, "of a people who will lavish their patronage on such a vulgar book as "The Pioneers." They and I are well quit. They neglect me, and I despise them." In a later letter he returned to this work. "It might ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... long, however, for when Ona began to cry, Jurgis could not stay angry. The poor fellow looked like a homeless ghost, with his cheeks sunken in and his long black hair straggling into his eyes; he was too discouraged to cut it, or to think about his appearance. His muscles were wasting away, and what were left were soft and flabby. He had no appetite, and they could not afford to tempt him with delicacies. It was ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... complex construction that one hesitates whether to describe them as houses with canvas roofs, or tents with board sides. The population consisted of a few whites, a number of Chinese railway labourers, an occasional straggling miner, native, or cattleman, and last but not least, at the small railway-station eating-house, honoured by the patronage of emigrant-trains, his highness Ah Chug, the cook, whose dried-apple pies, at twenty-five cents apiece, I have never ceased to enjoy, for ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... announcement of the death of Major-General Sir Alexander Cameron, G.C.B. This heroic man had served in nearly every country of Europe, where the standard of England floated over the field of battle. At Corunna he, with Sir John Hope, carried to a boat the last wounded Highlander, that could be descried straggling near the scene of action. Marshal Soult and his staff observed this act of heroism, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... eyes upon it. It was perhaps seventy or eighty feet high, and at its summit it measured, as nearly as I could guess, about two hundred yards long. It was hog-backed in shape, and was strewn here and there with great, tumbled masses of dark-coloured rock, among which grew a few straggling bushes. The most remarkable thing about this particular kopje, however, was that, notwithstanding its close proximity to the town, it appeared to be the haunt of innumerable vultures, some forty or fifty of which were ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... midst of the little reed island, and flicking their round stumpy tails, the moor hens swimming away, to the great disgust of the white ducks, who said they were only impostors, and had no business to swim, because they had no webs to their feet, but only long straggling toes. And what ducks those were! white as snow, with red legs; and often and often they would put their beaks in the soft warm white feathers on their backs and sit upon the water for hours together. All the birds loved the pond, ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn

... track which I have passed over only once before. We stopped an hour and a quarter at Wolverhampton, and I walked up into the town, which is large and old,—old, at least, in its plan, or lack of plan,—the streets being irregular, and straggling over an uneven surface. Like many of the English towns, it reminds me of Boston, though dingier. The sun was so hot that I actually sought the shady sides of the streets; and this, of itself, is one long step towards establishing a resemblance between an ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... that his curiosity concerning the procession was short-lived, for when he reached the scene, he plunged contemptuously between the straggling columns, and gained the further curb. Then he turned down a side street, without one backward look, and took his way forlornly toward St. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... give him the completest idea of the ne plus ultra of BOOK-PHRENSY in a private collector? Rawlinson would have cut a very splendid figure, indeed, with posterity, if some judicious catalogue-maker, the Paterson of former times, had consolidated all these straggling Bibliothecal corps into one compact wedge-like phalanx. Or, in other words, if one thick octavo volume, containing a tolerably well classed arrangement of his library, had descended to us—oh, then we should all have been better able to appreciate the extraordinary treasures ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... held on in his mad lead! Perhaps even he might upset all clever calculation and last long enough to win. Already the gray, White Moth, had drawn out from the bunch and was second; the other three were dropping back in straggling order to The Dutchman, who was still running as he had been, strong. That was at the mile. At the mile and an eighth, White Moth was at the Indian's heels; The Dutchman had moved up into third place, two lengths ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser

... had been welded by hardship and warfare, into compact and self-governing bodies. These loosely bound masses of men, women, and children, straggling down to find room and food, are now, in 1400 A. D., France, England, Austria, Germany, Scotland, and Spain. The same spirit and vigor that roamed the coasts all the way from Sweden and Norway to the mouth of the Thames, and to ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... rocks along, And unto ears as rugged seemed a song! In scattered groups upon the golden sand, They game—carouse—converse—or whet the brand; Select the arms—to each his blade assign, And careless eye the blood that dims its shine; 50 Repair the boat, replace the helm or oar, While others straggling muse along the shore; For the wild bird the busy springes set, Or spread beneath the sun the dripping net: Gaze where some distant sail a speck supplies, With all the thirsting eye of Enterprise; Tell o'er the tales of many a night of toil, And marvel where they next ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... Helena, which I hope will accompany this safe, and one from Lynn, and the one before spoken of from me, to Canton. But we all hope that these latter may be waste paper. I don't know why I have forborne writing so long. But it is such a forlorn hope to send a scrap of paper straggling over wide oceans. And yet I know when you come home, I shall have you sitting before me at our fireside just as if you had never been away. In such an instant does the return of a person dissipate all the weight ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... choked with thickets, where clearings had become brakes, and vistas and prospects were screened by aged upstarts that knew no law; when they followed the broken roads, where fallen banks sprawled on the fairway, and the laborious rain had worn ruts into straggling ditches, where culverts had given way and the dammed streams had spread the track with wasting pools, where sometimes time-honoured weeds blotted the very memory of the trail into oblivion; when they stood before an old grey mansion, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... felt that she knew almost as much about Murewell as he did. She could imagine the wild beauty of the Surrey heathland, she could see the white square rectory with its sloping walled garden, the juniper common just outside the straggling village; she could even picture the strange squire, solitary in the great Tudor Hall, the author of terrible books against the religion of Christ of which she shrank from hearing, and share the anxieties of the young rector as to his future relations towards a personality so marked, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... meetin'." And with this remark, pointing with a stubby thumb up a well-worn stair, he departed before Stephen could thank him. Stephen paused under the awning, of which there were many shading the brick pavement, to regard the straggling line of stores and houses which surrounded and did homage to the yellow pile. The brick house in which Mr. Lincoln's office was had decorations above the windows. Mounting the stair, Stephen found a room bare enough, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... during our stay at the inn, and gleamed upon the straggling frame-houses which then formed the now populous and thriving town of Peterborough. We crossed the wild, rushing, beautiful Otonabee river by a rude bridge, and soon found ourselves journeying over the plains or level heights ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... plan, having wide paved streets at right angles to each other, and the buildings in line. The older cities, whose growth had been determined by the chances and changes of centuries, were characterised by no such regularity. Their houses stood in a maze of blind alleys, and narrow, dark, and straggling streets, with here and there the branch of a canal, almost dried up during the greater part of the year, and a muddy pond where the cattle drank and women came for water. Somewhere in each town was an open space shaded by sycamores or acacias, and hither on market days came the ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero

... with Howe, whose men came marching up in a rather confused and straggling fashion, but were only perplexed, not in any wise disheartened, by the roughness of the road. When the column had regained something like marching order, the word was given to start, and Lord Howe with a bodyguard of Rangers marched ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... violin-case, at which he cast an affectionate look from time to time. As he approached the village, his glances became more and more keenly intelligent. He seemed to be greeting a friend in every tree, in every straggling rose-bush along the roadside; he nodded his head, and spoke softly from time ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards

... along the empty highway; slowing down only as it spun through half-awakened villages; or checked its pace to allow a sleepy boy to drive a straggling bunch of cows across the road ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... seamed with gullies. The line of the forest here receded some distance from the shore, leaving a broad rounded point, embracing a large area of low and barren ground, covered thinly with a growth of stunted shrubs, and a few straggling, solitary looking trees. The lagoon was at this point quite shallow, and low rocks and coral patches appeared above the surface, at short distances apart, nearly to the centre of the channel. The ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... A broken, straggling traffic was on the roads from dale to dale. There were men who went gaily in spring carts and in wagons. There were men on horseback and on foot who drove their sheep ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair

... aloud, and Mr. Hammond shouted to the operator to "repeat." The dense underbrush had parted behind the upper tier of Indians and in the aperture thus made appeared a face and part of the figure of a man—a wild face with straggling hair and beard, and the upper part of his body clad in the rags ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson

... of Heald's Hall, a friend of Mr. Bronte's who has left a deep impression of himself on the public mind. He lived near Heckmondwike, a large, straggling, dirty village, not two miles from Roe Head. It was principally inhabited by blanket weavers, who worked in their own cottages; and Heald's Hall is the largest house in the village, of which Mr. Roberson was the ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell

... There were Jews, with Sunday papers and fruit; there were couriers and servants straggling about; there were those bearded foreign visitors of England, who always seem to decline to shave or wash themselves on the day of a voyage, and, on the eve of quitting our country, appear inclined to carry away as much as possible of its soil on their hands and linen: there were ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray

... patriotic oration, were invited in to an informal luncheon. While waiting, they naturally enough spent their time in singing national songs, and Halfdan's clear tenor did good service in keeping the straggling voices together. When they had finished, Edith went up to him and was quite effusive in her expressions ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... was "situate in Maiden Lane"; whether on the north side or the south side is of less importance. More important is the nature of the site. Strype, in his edition of Stow's Survey, gives this description: "Maiden Lane, a long straggling place, with ditches on each side, the passage to the houses being over little bridges, with little garden plots before them, especially on the north side, which is best both for houses and inhabitants." In Maiden Lane, near one of these ditches or "sewers," ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams

... locally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, Hedda Gabler is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian of all Ibsen's plays, and it presents, not of course the highly civilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rural little straggling town of forty years ago. When I visited Norway as a lad, I received kind but sometimes rather stiff and raw hospitality in several tastefully decorated villas, which were as like that of the Tesmans as pea is like pea. Why Ibsen chose to paint a "west end of Christiania" ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... church in a pretty spot on the banks of the Itchen. At the far end of the village the Roman road to Basingstoke leaves the way taken by the pilgrims from Winchester to Canterbury at Worthy Park, and the straggling houses on its sides soon become the hamlet of Abbot's Worthy, a name reminiscent of the time when the countryside was parcelled out among the great religious houses. This village was once in the possession of Hyde Abbey and afterwards became the property of that Lord Capel who defended Colchester ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... straggling back. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy ran to meet them. So when two on one horse came with a third riding close beside, helping to hold an injured man on, we knew some one was hurt. Mrs. O'Shaughnessy was, as usual, ready ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart

... thought he was crased, and he was indeed! Into the town at dead of night Forlorn and weary, half dead with fright, Into the town the company came, Draggled and straggling, half dead with shame, That they should have marched and tramped about At a lunatic's whim, now in, now out, The livelong night, through garden and hall, Would they ever ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore

... friends dancing their dances in the Northern sky; clouds of every kind and colour; spirits flying about the air. Now he felt keen winds, and now warm breezes; now he passed a company of storms marching down upon the earth; or a lightning or two straggling back again to the skies; or a thunder riding a cloud; or a troop of hail rushing to battle with a deal of bluster and fury; or a crowd of snows looking for colder weather and a roosting-place. At last, he reached ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... morning with 200 men, but they soon fled. In the pursuit our people found a broad road, leading through a wooded and rocky country, which they followed for four leagues, but found not the least appearance of any inhabitants, and therefore turned back. On their return they took two straggling mulattoes, who said the broad road led to the city of Oarrah,[182] four long days journey into the country, and that these men came from that city to protect the Manilla ship, which was expected to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... their first day with the pigskin. Even to the youth in the straw hat it was tiresome work, although not new to him, and after practice was over, instead of joining in the little stream that eddied back to the academy grounds, he struck off to where a long straggling row of cedars and firs marked the course of the river. Once there he found himself standing on a bluff with the broad, placid stream stretching away to the north and south at his feet. The bank was some twenty feet high and covered sparsely with grass ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour

... persons and children, all in panic flight before the dreaded invaders, fleeing for refuge in Paris. At various places these stricken multitudes joined the army ambulances, taking the shortest routes. Rumors of the coming of the uhlans ran along the straggling lines with tales of the grievous havoc and ruin which these horsemen, vanguards of the German columns, had wrought in the land. Hardly had the retirement begun, when a body of uhlans entered Amiens and demanded from ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... extravagant enthusiasts, not only for intending to overthrow the government, but as binding themselves to kill all that would not accede to their opinion, and he gives several instances of such cruelty being exercised by them, not only upon straggling soldiers whom they shot by the way or surprized in their quarters, but upon those who, having once joined them, had fallen away from their principles. Being asked why they committed these cruelties in cold blood, they answered, 'they ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... green of fields and hills; but ever below lies the river, blue,—brownish-gray, touched with the hint of hidden gold. Drifting through half-flooded lowlands, with shanties and crops and stunted trees, past struggling corn and straggling village, we rush toward the Battle of the Marne and the West, from this dread Battle of the East. Westward, dear God, the fire of Thy Mad World crimsons our Heaven. Our answering Hell rolls ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... married ladies, who either from love of old-world ways, or from stern necessity, consent to dwell in their husbands' chambers. If such ladies can at the present time be found, the writer of this page would look for them in Gray's Inn—that straggling caravansary for the reception of money-lenders, Bohemians, and eccentric gentlemen—rather than in the other three Inns of Court, which have undoubtedly quite lost their old population of lady-residents. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... was found on post mortem examination attached to the intestine. In this bird there was no male development of comb or wattles, a full development of neck hackles, a certain development of saddle hackles, a few straggling badly curved feathers in the tail and short blunt spurs on the legs. Lode [Footnote: Wiener klin. Wochenschr., 1895.] (1895) found that testes could easily be transplanted into subcutaneous tissue and elsewhere, and that the male characters then developed normally. ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... monotonous, Hallett, but there is always something to see to; to keep the men from straggling, to give a little help, sometimes, to the ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty

... is," was Mrs. Wilkins's quick, surprising reply; surprising because it was so much unlike the rest of her—the characterless coat and skirt, the crumpled hat, the undecided wisp of hair straggling out, "And just the considering of them is worth while in itself—such a change from Hampstead—and sometimes I believe—I really do believe—if one considers hard enough ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... the village was changing. Pots of bright flowers stood in the windows, creepers and roses climbed over the walls, patches full of straggling weeds were now well-kept gardens; in fact, as Mr. Brook said one day to the vicar, one would hardly know ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty

... a small, sure-footed pony; and beside him Mr. Tiny Mouse, reefer, on a high mule, with a scrubbing-brush mane, looking like a fly pennant at the mast-head of the frigate, kicking his little heels into the old mule, as if that mule minded it even so much as to shake his long ears! Then straggling in the centre were Darcantel, Stingo, and Paddy Burns; and behind them came a tall, muscular man, on a mettled barb, which he controlled by a touch of his little finger. And at his side, on the most diminutive of the donkey breed, with feet touching the ground, clung stout Jacob Blunt, the sailor, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... despised, Her straggling warriors hasten to defeat; By wounds distracted, and by night surprised, Fall where death's darkness and oblivion meet: Yet, yet: O breast how cold! O hope how far! Grant my son's ashes lie where ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... had disappeared, nor was there a man or an officer of their company in sight. About them were soldiers, singly or in little groups, from all the regiments, a weary, foot-sore crew, knocked up at the beginning of the retreat, each man straggling on at his own sweet will whithersoever the path that he was on might chance to lead him. The sun beat down fiercely, the heat was stifling, and the knapsack, loaded as it was with the tent and implements of every ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... beautiful, perhaps, before in her life—suppressed excitement lent her such sparkle and color. She finished her song and arose. And presently the evening was over, and it was half-past eleven, and one by one they were taking their candles, and straggling off to bed. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... It was a straggling little settlement which they saw, with one long, broken street running through the center. There was a church spire, to be sure, and a square little wooden building in which some business men had started a bank for the sake of the coming settlers now beginning to ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough

... is attained: it then soars into this impressive refrain: "Lickity-cut, lickity-cut, lickity-cut, lickity-cut," repeated as often and as rapidly as possible. All the world goes by in two dizzy landscapes, yet the song is unvaried until you approach a town with a straggling and unfinished edge, where the houses are waltzing about as if they had not yet decided upon any permanent location. Here you slacken speed and drop into a third movement, as monotonous as the others and far more drowsy, for it suggests all that is soothing and nerve-relaxing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various

... a place of great strength, and still contains a magazine, and is fortified with batteries. In the old citadel on the height, the remains of a Hindu palace with some interesting carvings indicate the former importance of the place. The town, which consists of one or two straggling streets, contains a handsome English church. Chunar is first mentioned in the 16th century, when in possession of Sing Joanpore. In 1530 it became the residence of Shere Shah the Afghan, and forty-five years later was recovered by the emperor Akbar ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... beyond the last scrub timber and straggling copses, into the heart of the Barrens where the niggard North is supposed to deny the Earth, are to be found great sweeps of forests and stretches of smiling land. But this the world is just beginning to know. The world's explorers have known it, from time to time, but hitherto they have ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London

... allowed to mount without any precaution against their escape, save that which was afforded by the slowness of their beasts. Then, with a shouting of men and a roaring of camels, the creatures were jolted on to their legs, and the long, straggling procession set off with its back to the homely river, and its face to the shimmering, violet haze, which hung round the huge sweep of beautiful, terrible desert, striped tiger-fashion with black rock ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... gets the Coon!" shouted Blackhawk, and the boys skurried through the dark woods, getting many a scratch and fall. As it was, Yan and Wesley arrived together and touched the tree at the same moment. The rest came straggling up, with Char-less last and Guy a little ahead of him. Guy wanted to relate the full particulars of his latest glorious victory over Char-less, but all attention was now on old Turk, who was barking ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... time, a dozen families, perhaps, respectable for intelligence and morality, were zealous acceptors of the new ideas; and about these, to their great scandal, gathered the straggling, rude spirits and doubtful characters that lightly float on the wave of emigration, to ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle

... can only say that the log-book from which I have quoted was found some years later in the stomach of a whale, along with some shreds of clothing, a few buttons and several decayed life-belts. It contained only one new entry, in a straggling handwriting, as if it had been ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... the great, glittering dark eyes stared blankly at the dingy houses opposite, at the straggling pedestrians, at the thickening gloom. The short February day was almost night now, the street-lamps flared yellow and dull athwart the ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming

... within its limits, which had been broken up and the colony dispersed in 1613, by Captain Samuel Argall, under the authority of Sir Thomas Dale, governor of the colony at Jamestown, Virginia. A desultory and straggling French population was still in occupation, under the nominal governorship of Claude La Tour. Sir William Alexander and his associates naturally looked for more or less inconvenience and annoyance from the claims of the French. It was, therefore, an object ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain

... of threats, reproaches and profanity the Belgian officer succeeded in persuading his trembling command to fire a volley after the retreating apes. A ragged, straggling volley it was, but at least one of its bullets found a mark, for as the jungle closed about the hairy rescuers, Chulk, who bore Werper across one broad shoulder, staggered ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... (said he) a chief so greatly brave, His life to hazard, and his country save? Lives there a man, who singly dares to go To yonder camp, or seize some straggling foe? Or favor'd by the night approach so near, Their speech, their counsels, and designs ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke

... in no small consternation at this sight; and, as they found that the fellows went straggling all over the shore, they made no doubt but, first or last, some of them would chop in upon their habitation, or upon some other place where they would see the token of inhabitants; and they were in ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... of the Plymouth jurisdiction, the colonists there had no right to interfere except in self-defence. But the Plymouth people asserted that Morton sold arms to the Indians and received runaway servants. This made him dangerous, and all the other "straggling settlements," though, like Morton's, of the church of England, united with the people at Plymouth in suppressing Morton's settlement. In June, 1628, a joint force under Captain Miles Standish was sent against Merry Mount, and Morton ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler

... I could hardly open it. Before I had read a word, the sight of the writing struck a sudden chill through me. The body of the note was written by the hand of a stranger! And the signature at the end was traced in the large straggling childish characters which I remembered so well, when Lucilla had written her first letter to Oscar in the ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... he. "We're off, then!" And he flung himself with a sudden wild, boyish "Whoopee!" on his pony, gave a clip to Joan's horse and his own, and away they galloped, a pair of young, wild things, out from the town through a straggling street to where the road boldly stretched itself toward a great land of sagebrush, of buttes humping their backs against the brilliant sky. Down the valley they rode, trotting, walking, galloping, till, turning westward, they mounted a sharp slope and came ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt

... little boy came straggling in, and after him, a red-headed lad, and then one with a flaxen poll, until the forms were occupied by a dozen boys, or thereabouts, with heads of every color but gray, and ranging in their ages from four years old to fourteen years or more; for the legs of the youngest were a long ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... I would stand by them as long as I had a nickel. An ambulance was sent for and the dead and wounded were placed in it, and we went back to town, a sad procession. There was no need to detail any mourners for this occasion, and there was no straggling for watermelons. Everybody was full of sorrow. The next day there was a Union funeral in that Southern town, and the three Union boys were laid side by side, while a little, to one side my Confederate was buried, ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck

... general education and average efficiency, the power now available for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the disregard ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... one of the prettiest cities I have seen; not one of your large straggling ones that can afford to have twenty dirty suburbs, but, clean and compact, very new and very regular. The king's palace is not of the proudest without, but of the richest within; painted, gilt, looking-glassed, very costly, but very tawdry; in short, a very popular palace. We were last night at ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... of Anglo-Saxons from the mouth of the Elbe, and their hard-won conquest of Eastern Britain during the 5th century, is certain. The western half of the island, from Clydesdale southwards, resisted much longer, and, in spite of its long and straggling frontier, held together for more than a century. Not till the decisive victory of the Northumbrians at Chester (A.D. 607), and that of the West Saxons at Beandune (A.D. 614) was this Cymrian federation finally broken into three ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... smoothly boys," suggested Doctor Pelton as the straggling buildings of the coast town ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman

... the King saw coming through the sky the great straggling, sprawling, wicked shape of the Red Dragon. And he knew at once what he must do. He caught up The Book of Beasts and jumped on the back of the gentle, beautiful Hippogriff, and leaning down he whispered in the sharp, white ear: "Fly, dear Hippogriff, fly ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit

... made it a rule to join the nearest command when separated from our own, and those who had been so unfortunate as to lose their way altogether were, both colored and white, straggling up from the time the line was established until far into the night, showing their determination ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson

... Britain, it is your business—it is your duty,—to give to negro slavery no rest, but to put it down—not by letting the trunk alone, while you idly busy yourselves in lopping off, or in aiding others to lop off, a few of the straggling branches—but by laying the axe at once to its roots, and by putting your united nerve into the steel, till this great poison-tree of lust and blood, and of all abominable and heartless iniquity, fall before you; and law, and love, and God and man, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... Jocelyn and his companion reached Tottenham, they were made aware by the ringing of bells from its old ivy-grown church tower, and by other joyful sounds, that some festival was taking place there; and the nature of the festival was at once revealed, as they entered the long straggling street, then, as now, constituting the chief part of the pretty little village, and beheld a large assemblage of country folk, in holiday attire, wending their way towards the green for the purpose of setting up a May-pole upon it, and making the ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth









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