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More "Ungainly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the Borinage coal field exceeds twenty million tons a year. Its ungainly features of shafts, chimneys, and mounds of debris are relieved in places by woodlands, an appearance of a hilly country is presented where the pit mounds have been planted with fir trees. Apart from its mining aspect, Mons is a city of historic importance. It contains a Gothic cathedral ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... of the day!" cried Molly, "and here's my gift." She had in her arms a large and rather ungainly bundle, loosely wrapped in white ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... He was a man of remarkable character. He had great strength of will and immense determination; and Maggie, his only child, took after him. She resembled him in appearance also, for he was very plain of face and rather ungainly of figure. Maggie's mother, on the other hand, was a delicate, pretty, blue-eyed woman, who could as little manage her headstrong young daughter as a lamb could manage a young lion. Mrs. Howland was intensely ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... standing, gazing intently at a significant quartette of tiny models under glass. First came a ship of graceful outline, having a miniature figurehead of an angel at its prow and every sail set. Beside this was an ungainly side-wheeler with scarce a line of beauty to commend it. Next in order came an exquisite, up-to-date ocean liner; and the last in the group was a modern battleship with guns, wireless, ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... Nashville and the Windom. You will remember that the Nashville fired the first gun in the war with Spain. She is not a pretty boat at all. She is built differently from other vessels of her class, and her two tall funnels, or smokestacks, give her an ungainly appearance. Her commander was a splendid officer, though, and her crew were the bravest of the brave. I must tell you a little of her work after she captured the first prize ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... very few minutes the cattleman was mounted and away. Paisano, well named after that ungainly but swift-running bird, struck into his long lope that ate up the ground like a strip of macaroni. In two hours and a quarter Raidler, from a gentle swell, saw the branding camp by a water hole in the Guadalupe. ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... recognizable, and seated on a double saddle was Alden, skillfully guiding the ungainly monster by means of a curious bridle, by shifting his weight and by pressing certain nerve centers between ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... of the cobwebby black silk stocking that ensnared his wits, perhaps it was the delight of kneeling to Kate even in this humble capacity. In either case, the result was equally grotesque; Kate found her dainty feet neatly enclosed in the professor's ungainly arctics, while he hopelessly contemplated her overshoe and the size ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... creature yet discovered by man. Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental claims to all, the penguin is at home in none. On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops. As if ashamed of her failure, Nature keeps this ungainly child hidden away at the ends of the earth, in the Straits of Magellan, and on the abased sea-story ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout—though Walden is deeper than that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... lieutenant had not changed his attitude; only his cap had fallen off his stomach and was lying on the floor. His thick black eyebrows were knitted by a frown, while he looked at her out of the corners of his eyes. And their sideways glance in conjunction with the hooked nose, the whole bulky, ungainly, sprawling person, struck Freya as so comically moody that, inwardly discomposed as she was, she could not help smiling. She did her best to give that smile a conciliatory character. She did not want ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... they ought to obey him; so that they were angered, and began to read the laws, and wonder how much power properly belonged to him. Now, when he died, his son Charles was a much pleasanter person; he was a gentleman in all his looks and ways, and had none of his father's awkward, ungainly tricks and habits. He was good and earnest, too, and there was nothing to take offence at in himself; so for some years all went on quietly, and there seemed to be a great improvement. But several things were against him. His friend, the Duke of ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to do with May Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety; he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of self-defense which the Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen seem to hold dear — the exterior roughness assumed to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental nature. Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker ancestry, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... small and sunken, brown eyes. Her eyes had, however, a light in them, and her wide lips were framed in smiles. She must have been a women of about fifty, but her broad forehead was without a wrinkle. Undoubtedly she was very plain. She had not a good feature, not even a good point about her ungainly figure. Never in her youngest days could this woman have been fair to see, but the two children, who gazed at her with beating hearts, thought her beautiful. Goodness and loving-kindness reigned in that homely face; so triumphantly did they reign, these rare and precious things, ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... and clay, cut off any view of the country behind. All that could be seen was a fringe of thick, low trees, the edge of the forest that ran back from the river. Conspicuous among them was the ill-omened "fever tree," with its gaunt, bare, ungainly arms and yellow bark—the tree whose presence indicates a pestilential air. Here was no luxuriant variety of form, no wealth of colour, no festooned creepers nor brilliant flowers, but a dull and sad monotony, as we doubled point after point and saw reach after ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... had left Maud Matchin in a state of high excitement and anger. The admiration of a man so splay and ungainly was in itself insulting, when it became so enterprising as to propose marriage. She felt as if she had suffered the physical contact of something not clean or wholesome. Besides, she had been greatly stirred by his reference to her request for ghostly counsel, ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... carved articles of many kinds. The little calves that go wandering about by the sides of their mothers are so curious and so top heavy, and yet they are strong even when small. Carabao sometimes go crazy, and when they do, they tread down everything in their way. Notwithstanding their ungainly bulk they can run as well as a good horse, and can endure long journeys quite as well. They are urged to greater speed by the driver taking the tail and giving it a twist or ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... to bark deafeningly again, and Val looked around for the heron which must have aroused his displeasure. There was none. But across the swamp crawled an ungainly monster. ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... plants—a Cycad, that botanical paradox, combining some of the characteristics of the lie palm and of the pine with the appearance of a tree-fern, while being of distinctive order, which flourished during the age when the Iguanodon and the Polacanthus and other monstrous and ungainly reptiles roamed ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... good fellow. But there now—he doesn't satisfy the mistress, she says his appearance is ungainly. And now they've gone and told tales about him for letting some peasants into the kitchen yesterday. It is a bad look-out: they may dismiss him. And ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... find hollowed through and through by a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch,—if pier we may term it,—worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-like angle, presents the appearance of a thin ungainly leg and splay foot, advanced, as if in awkward courtesy, to the breakers. But in a winter or two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yielding nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root, consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... recovered. The one proof that blood ran in her veins was the pimply quality of her ruined complexion, and the pimples of that brickish expanse proved that the blood was thin and bad. Her hands and feet were large and ungainly; the skin of the fingers was roughened by coarse contacts to the texture of emery-paper. On six days a week she wore black; on the seventh a kind of discreet half-mourning. She was honest, capable, and industrious; and beyond the confines of her occupation she had no curiosity, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... certain issue.' What the Irishman said is totally obliterated from my mind; but I remember that he became very warm and intemperate in his expressions; upon which Johnson rose, and quietly walked away. When he had retired, his antagonist took his revenge, as he thought, by saying, 'He has a most ungainly figure, and an affectation of pomposity, unworthy of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... in a season unfavorable for wild beasts), and the other edifices dropped through the social scale to some picturesque barns thatched with straw. These he excused to his Americans, but added that the ungainly thatch was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the cattle toward the end of an ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... rows... (No sign of the abject life— Not even a blasphemy...) But the spindle legs keep time To a limping rhythm, And the shadows twitch upon the snow Convulsively— As though death played With some ungainly dolls. ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... born fool,—and he is apt to complain bitterly of the accents of strangers, whereas, to all but his own countrymen, it is his accent which appears to be the real grievance. He is plain of face, fat, ugly, and ungainly of body, huge as to the hands and feet, not scrupulously clean in his person and habits, and, like most very fleshy people, he is blessed with an exceedingly even temper, and is excessively happy, good-natured, and stolid. He can break open a door by butting it with his head, and the door is ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... that you and I went to church as much as they do. These people are not wicked BECAUSE of their religious observances, but IN SPITE of them. They are too dull to understand humility, too blind to see a tender and simple heart under a rough ungainly bosom. They are sure that all their conduct towards my poor friend here has been perfectly righteous, and that they have given proofs of the most Christian virtue. Haggarty's wife is considered by her friends as a martyr to a savage husband, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... softly, and we walked the rest of the way in silence. I imagine we were both pretty busy with our thoughts; I know that I was. And several times, as we walked along, I looked back over my shoulder towards the ungainly red monster straddling on her spindling wooden legs—and towards the smiling Atlantic, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... hall and the Marchese Sanviano entered with Cesare Orsi. The window was deserted, and the women trailed gracefully toward the bubbling minor note of the alcohol lamp. Both Sanviano and Orsi were big men—the former, like Bembo, wore English clothes; but Orsi's ungainly body had been tightly garbed by a Southern military tailor, making him—Lavinia thought—appear absolutely ridiculous. His collar was both too tight and too high, although perspiration ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... ducking, Seized both his legs, and chucking Dobbs sideways, splash he went,— The wherry swayed, then righted, While I, somewhat excited, Over the water bent; Three times he rose, but vainly I clutched his form ungainly, He sank, while sighs and sobs Beneath the waves seemed muttered, And all the night-winds uttered In sad tones, ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... are distinctly plain, and often repulsive. The type is Mongolian; sallow complexion, beady eyes, flattened nostrils and wiry black hair. The men are of medium height, thick set and muscular, the women ungainly little creatures, bedizened with jewellery, and smothered with paint. Some marry Russians and assume European dress, which only adds to their grotesque appearance. Notwithstanding their defects the Yakutes are extremely proud of ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... that would seem incredible if it were not true. That is, that when Pinocchio and Candlewick discovered that they were both struck with the same misfortune, instead of feeling full of mortification and grief, they began to prick their ungainly ears and to make a thousand antics, and they ended by going into bursts ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... representatives were John A. McClernand, James Shields, William A. Richardson, and other men who rose to national distinction. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig representative from Sangamon County, was already well known for his ungainly length of body, for his habit of reasoning in parables which were now scriptural and now vulgar to the point of obscenity, and for a quaint and rare honesty. He was four years older than the new member from Morgan, and nearly two feet taller. ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... daughter was Bithiah, and of the other, Akuzit. The first-born of the sons of the king was an idiot, precipitate and heedless in all his actions. Adikam, the second son, was a cunning and clever man, and versed in all the wisdom of Egypt, but ungainly in appearance, fleshy and short of stature; his height was a cubit and a space, and his beard flowed ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... the success which marked French diplomacy with the tribes was due to this versatility. Beneath an ungainly exterior the habitant often concealed a surprising ability in certain lines of action. He was a master of blandishment when he had an end thereby to gain. Dealings which required duplicity, provided the outcome appeared to be desirable, did not rudely shock his conscience. He ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... Bismarck-Bohlen—the nephew and aide-decamp to the Chancellor—and Doctor Busch were seated facing us. The conveyance was strong, serviceable, and comfortable, but not specially prepossessing, and hitched to it were four stout horses—logy, ungainly animals, whose clumsy harness indicated that the whole equipment was meant for heavy work. Two postilions in uniform, in high military saddles on the nigh horse of ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... fallen steed, as devils flock around the deathbed of a defaulting deacon. A soldier on the outer edge of the extended line swings his rifle with swift, backhanded motion over his shoulder, and brings the butt amidst the crowd of carrion. The vultures hop with grotesque, ungainly motions from their prey, and stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward from eyeless sockets; ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... moose flounders in its rush. It is the ungainly roll of a rudderless ship. It stumbles. A second, and its mad rush ends. With a curious gasping sigh ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... swings the cumbrous grub-axe, whose wide edge clears the earth from the larger roots. Then he puts his pipe in his pocket, and settles to the serious work of the 'great axe,' as he calls it. I never could use this ungainly tool aright: a top-heavy, clumsy, awkward thing, it rules you instead of you ruling it. The handle, too, is flat—almost with an edge itself sometimes—and is quite beyond the grasp of any but hands of iron. Now the American axe feels balanced like a sword; this is because of the peculiar curve ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... But the antagonism so long suppressed broke out at last. The progress of the Greek insurrection brought Austria and Russia not indeed into war, but into the most embittered hostility with one another. It was on this rock that the ungainly craft which men called the Holy Alliance at length struck and went to pieces. Canning played his part well in the question of the East, but he did not create this question. There were forces at work which, without his intervention, would probably have made an end of the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Lord Robert is an impressive or at least a striking and unusual figure; he is tall, lank, and ungainly, almost Lincolnesque in the carelessness of his apparel and the exceeding awkwardness of his postures and manners. His angular features, sharp nose, pale face, and dark hair suggest the strain of ascetism, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... talks with Richie—perhaps the happiest talks in her life, for Richie, whose mind and body had undergone for long years the exquisite discipline of pain, was delightfully unexpected in his views, and his whole lean, ungainly frame vibrated with the eager joy of ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... because he knows that the rest of the people on the beach are watching his spindle shanks or perhaps the bathing suit would reveal his narrow, undeveloped chest. The young man is afraid to go onto the dance floor because everybody is sure to see his ungainly gyrations. He stammers and stutters when he speaks because others are paying particular attention to his words, when in truth he is attracting little or no attention. Whether working or playing, those whose good opinions are worth ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... a breathing-hole. Here they got out, hid the sledge and dogs behind a hummock, and, getting ready their spears and harpoons, prepared for an encounter. After waiting some time a walrus thrust its ungainly head up through the young ice that covered the hole, and began to disport itself in elephantine, ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... with a curious variation from this, the negative survives, while the affirmative is gone; thus 'wieldy' (Chaucer) survives only in 'unwieldy'; 'couth' and 'couthly' (both in Spenser), only in 'uncouth' and 'uncouthly'; 'rule' (Foxe) only in 'unruly'; 'gainly' (Henry More) in 'ungainly'; these last two were both of them serviceable words, and have been ill lost{153}; 'gainly' is indeed still common in the West Riding of Yorkshire; 'exorable' (Holland) and 'evitable' only in 'inexorable' and 'inevitable'; 'faultless' remains, but hardly 'faultful' (Shakespeare). In ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... and its interests, to try and shake the poor German Hodge out of his thousand years' sleep in his hole? What good did I get by it? Hodge opened his eyes, only to shut them again immediately; he yawned, only to begin snoring again the next minute louder than ever; he stretched his stiff ungainly limbs, only to sink down again directly afterwards, and lie like a dead man in the old bed of his accustomed habits. I must have rest; but where am I to find a resting-place? In Germany I ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... may be likened to A desert ship. (This is not new.) He is a most ungainly craft, With frowning turrets fore and aft We little realize on earth, How much we owe to his great girth, For should he ever shrink so small As through the needle's eye to crawl, Rich men might climb the golden stairs And so ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... on Patience's bed, or penned behind chairs, sprawled and pranced in unsteady mimicry of their elders. Ungainly farmers, stiff with labor, recalled their early days and tramped briskly as they swung their wives about with a kindly pressure of the hard hands that had worked so long together. Little pairs toddled gravely through the figures, or frisked promiscuously in a grand conglomeration ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... operation as I approached and was about to step aside. But I paused and smiled at him, much, I fear, as one smiles at a dog of unknown disposition, for I could hardly feel that this ungainly creature was exactly human. He smiled back ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... notion of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could be stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... full of life. Each cultivated acre had its dark-hued laborers with hoes, or bare-legged toilers drawing water from the ditches for irrigating the thirsty land, or plowmen guiding teams of ungainly, striding camels or dark gray, crooked-horned oxen. In the lush meadows many of these curious-looking animals were grazing. The camels, the small donkeys, and the gray oxen or water-buffaloes as the natives called them, tied to stakes, were restricted to the pasturage within reach of their ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... so very little, for it was of ungainly sprawling structure, pushing out an odd limb that might have been cut off with a curtain. The walls nodded fixedly to one another so that the ceiling was only half the size of the floor. The furniture comprised but the commonest necessities. This attic of the Ansells ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... however, no sign of life; and not a sound broke the awful silence of the desert, as we breasted the rise. Then a vulture flapped lazily up in front of us, and another and another and a tiger- wolf (hyena) lurched its gorged and ungainly carcass down ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... up by Faye and Harkness in 1881.[788] The methods employed in its investigation fall (as we have seen) into three separate classes—the trigonometrical, the gravitational, and the "phototachymetrical"—an ungainly adjective used to describe the method by the velocity of light. Each has its special difficulties and sources of error; each has counter-balancing advantages. The only trustworthy result from celestial surveys, was at that time furnished by Gill's observations of Mars in 1877. But the method ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... hour, was ready to receive us, taking our two black friends, Aboh to act as interpreter, we carried with us the leopard skin, some venison, and three strings of beads of various colours. His majesty was a tall, ungainly looking man, with as hideous a countenance as can well be imagined. His appearance was not improved by the glare of the torchlight and the terror under which he was suffering. Having presented the leopard skin ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... religious life marked him out as a fit person to represent his county in parliament. He at once became the associate of such men as Hampden and Pym. He did not make very graceful speeches, and he had an ungainly person; but he was eloquent in a rude way, since he had strong convictions and good sense. He was probably violent, for he hated the abuses of the times, and he hated Rome and the prelacy. He represented the extreme left; that is, he was a radical, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... are in the habit of piercing the upper lip, and gradually enlarging the orifice until they can insert a shell. The lip then appears drawn out beyond the perpendicular of the nose, and gives them a most ungainly aspect. Sekwebu remarked, "These women want to make their mouths like those of ducks;" and, indeed, it does appear as if they had the idea that female beauty of lip had been attained by the 'Ornithorhynchus paradoxus' ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... bridges, small, dark, oblique eyes, with heavy lids and imperceptible eyebrows, wide mouths, full lips, thick, big, projecting ears, deformed by great hoops, straight black hair nearly as coarse as horsehair, and short, square, ungainly figures. The faces of the men are smooth. The women seldom exceed five feet in height, and a man is tall ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... trick it was impossible to say. There was in the man something strong and good and calm—a manner never acquired by one who has anything to conceal. His dignity was perfect. One forgot his stoutness, his heavy breathing, his ungainly size. He was essentially manly, and a presence to be feared. The strength of ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... this weight of nightmare which oppresses us. Passing by the ruinous gate yonder with its wild-looking sentry, we reach the open space where crouching hill-men are reposing on the stunted grass, and ungainly camels, kneeling in a circle, are chewing the cud in patience, or venting that uncanny half-whine, half-bellow, which is their only attempt at conversation. Let us take a long look at the country beyond with its gardens teeming with fruit and musical with ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... weird and wild, That noble stripling haunted; For weeks the stripling stood and smiled, Unmoved and all undaunted. The sombre ghost exclaimed, "Your plan Has failed you, goblin, plainly: Now watch yon hardy Hieland man, So stalwart and ungainly. ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... like a cage; we beat the bars, We bruise our breasts, we struggle vainly; Up to the glory of the stars We strain with flutterings ungainly. And then—God opens wide the door; Our wondrous wings are arched for flying; We poise, we part, we sing, we soar . . . Light, freedom, love. . . . Fools ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... Johnny for Plough Monday, and finished him with an admiring exclamation of—'Lawks, John! thou dost look smart, surely!' Some also wore small bunches of corn in their hats, from which the wheat was soon shaken out by the ungainly jumping which they called dancing. Occasionally, if the winter was severe, the procession was joined by threshers carrying their flails, reapers bearing their sickles, and carters with their long whips, ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... high-strung temperament of the English commander; and the grey, inaccessible city still rose grimly to mock his schemes. Only the most invincible spirit could have borne so frail a body through those weeks of hope deferred. A vague melancholy marked the line of his tall ungainly figure; but resolution, courage, endurance, deep design, clear vision, dogged will, and heroism shone forth from those searching eyes, making of no account the incongruities of the sallow features. Straight red hair, a nose thrust out like a wedge, and a chin falling back from an affectionate ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... nest or two up in a corner under the roof. They are for the domestic hens and are ungainly things, made ordinarily out of a piece of old matting. In these the hens lay their eggs, after meandering around the rafters and disturbing the inmates of the house with their cackling. After the eggs are laid, it is frequently necessary to drive the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... intellectual life and then hurled down by the caprice of circumstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the soap and candle factory. Dickens would have given a touch of the grotesque to Grail's gentle but ungainly character; but at the end he would infallibly have rewarded him as Tom Pinch and Dominie Sampson were rewarded. Not so George Gissing. His sympathy is fully as real as that of Dickens. But his fidelity to fact is greater. Of the Christmas charity prescribed by ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... than deep ones. The batter must run freely. Half fill the tins and set in a hot oven, taking care not to scorch before rising is finished. Butter tins very freely—it is economy in the end. Be sure the tins sit level in the oven—thus you escape an ungainly final loaf. Get filling ready as baking goes forward so as to put your layers together while still warm and pliable. Let cool before frosting, so as to trim sides smooth. Take care fillings are not too watery, ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... Dudley. Thy mind is given to levity, Faith, in the matter of this young man. It is not seemly that one of thy years and sex should manifest so great displeasure at the name of a youth, who is of an honest nature, and of honest habits, too, though he may appear ungainly to the eye, and have so little favor with one ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... the fair debutante (it is only the unmarried who dance), but she borrows from her friends. The men dance round the outside of the circle, waving fly-flaps, and prancing (often nowadays, wearing huge boots) with ungainly strides. The music necessary for the dance consists of tangmuri (pipes), drums, and cymbals. This is ka shad kynthei, or the dance of the women. Then there is ka shad mastieh, or the dance of the men, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... held all the pride of a child with a new toy, but he released the grip, and the ungainly gun swung smoothly back ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... some new monster came in sight, the ungainly head would shoot up amazingly to a distance of five or ten, or even fifteen feet, on a swaying pillar of a neck, in order to get a better view of the stranger. Then it would slowly sink back again to its ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... She felt very shy about this, but that was because she did not know her own power. To her astonishment, Priscilla found that she could act. If the part suited her she could throw herself into it so that she ceased to be awkward, ungainly Priscilla Peel. Out of herself she was no longer awkward, no longer ungainly. She could only personate certain characters; light and airy parts she could not attempt, but where much depended on passion and emotion Priscilla could do splendidly. Every day her friends found fresh ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... air of suspicion to the whole assembly, will suggest merely a notion of their grotesqueness. By and by we shall grow used to the deformities, and recognize the primitive truthfulness of attitude and expression, the spirit which animates these ungainly forms and faces, until at length we look at the painter with the eyes of his contemporaries, and judge him by the standards of his own time, on which his claims rest. Then we shall admire him. The Venetians of the sixteenth century are the easiest to look at, however much of their genius and wonderful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... intruders by harsh squawks, stupidly betraying the presence of pale blue eggs or helpless brood. When the blue heron flies with his long neck stiffly tucked between his shoulders, he is anything but graceful; but under other circumstances he is not an ungainly bird. Occasionally my casual observations are made afar off, with the medium of a telescope. Then the birds are seen behaving naturally, and without fear or self-consciousness. The other day the cute attitudes of a beach curlew interested me, as he stood upon a stone just awash, and ever and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... dangerously near the melodramatic heroine, and yet she is not a melodramatic but a tragic figure. Far more than Pompilia, who knew the joy of motherhood, is she the martyr of love. And yet, before she quits life, in her protective care of that somewhat formidable, somewhat ungainly baby, the huge boy, her champion, hero and snob, she finds a comforting maternal instinct ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... tall man, somewhat ungainly of figure and homely of face. But his large, deep eyes of velvety nut-brown were very beautiful and marvellously bright and clear for a man of his age. He wore a little pointed, well-cared-for ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as he always did, and involuntarily poured out a libation on the hearth, as he almost always did. Good-natured, ungainly, long-suffering men seldom achieve the art ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... boys for tradin' with; they shell out their cash like a sheef of wheat in frosty weather; it flies all over the thrashin' floor; but then they are a cross-grained, ungainly, kickin' breed of cattle, as I e'enamost ever seed. Whoever gave them the name of John Bull, knew what he was about, I tell you; for they are bull-necked, bull-headed folks, I vow; sulky, ugly tempered, vicious critters, a-pawin' and a-roarin' the whole time, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Dickens, his wife, and "Phiz,"—Hablot K. Browne,—the illustrator of "Pickwick," journeyed together abroad for a brief time. On his return, Dickens first made acquaintance with the seaside village of Broadstairs, where his memory still lives, preserved by an ungainly structure ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... bare, rocky promontory far up in the north country, where the turbulent waters of the Little Vermilion cut through lanes of pointed fir and dark spruce, a gigantic moose stood, his ungainly body and huge antlers silhouetted against the sky of sunset. Below him the noisy, hurrying waters were churned into foam over innumerable hidden rocks; to the rear lay the ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... Cydalise were standing, side by side, admiring Madame Frehlter's poodle. Madelon could afford to be civil to the poodle before company. The contrast between the two girls was sufficiently striking. Cydalise was fair and bright-looking—Mademoiselle Frehlter was square and ungainly of figure, swarthy of complexion, dark ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... he?" remarked the inspector as they watched the ungainly figure disappear round the bend of ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... place of David Gamut. Hither the faithful singing-master had now brought himself, together with all his sorrows, his apprehensions, and his meek dependence on the protection of Providence. At the precise moment when his ungainly person came under the observation of the scout, in the manner just mentioned, the woodsman himself, though in his assumed character, was the subject of ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... at Matlock) some person with whom she was wholly unacquainted, on her resuming her seat, Byron said to her pettishly, "I hope you like your friend?" The words were scarce out of his lips when he was accosted by an ungainly-looking Scotch lady, who rather boisterously claimed him as "cousin," and was putting his pride to the torture with her vulgarity, when he heard the voice of his fair companion retorting archly in his ear, "I hope you like ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... The ungainly cow-puncher slid out of his saddle like an eel, and slipped the saddle and bridle off his pony, and, giving it a slap on the haunch, sent ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... of Narcisse Bachelard, was a clerk in an insurance office. Directly after office hours he used to meet his uncle, and never left him, going the round of all the cafes in his wake. "Behind the huge, ungainly figure of the one you were sure to see the pale, wizened features of the other." He said that he avoided all love affairs, as they invariably led to trouble and complications, but he was ultimately caught by his uncle ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... his better days, said that Burke's oratory was too rich and overloaded. This is true, but it is equally true that Burke is the only orator of the eighteenth century that still continues to be read. He had a faulty delivery and an ungainly figure, but if he emptied the benches in the House of Commons he secured a larger audience in coming generations. The material of his speeches is of such a vital quality that it possesses a value wholly apart from the time ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... and wrinkled like a new-born child; it had the funniest feet, or hands, or flippers, with which it tried to walk, but only tumbled and flopped about. In the water it was graceful enough, but on dry land so ungainly and ridiculous that the vast concourse of Bears was thrown into fits ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... not consider a part of the joy of all the earth—the neighbors' dogs. On the next hill-top is an Airedale with a voice like a fog-horn. He is an ungainly creature and thoroughly disillusioned, because his family keep him locked up in a wire-screened tennis-court, where he barks all day and nearly all night. He can watch the motors on the coast road from one corner of his cage, and that seems ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... the Crystal Palace, and was waiting on the railway platform for his train, when a drunken man started a commotion a few paces from him. Exhibiting signs of violence, two porters came forward to remove him. That was, apparently, exactly what he wanted. He slipped off his coat and danced round in ungainly fashion. The porters advanced. He lunged out and caught the foremost man a heavy blow under the chin. The man reeled back and collided violently with an immaculately dressed man who was standing on the edge of the platform. The ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... steel out of English iron mines, smelted, forged and fashioned in English works, and so to him it's a bit of England, however far away from Mother Earth it may be; and if you ever see Andrew Murgatroyd's big head and good, ungainly body outside the Astronef in any of the worlds, dead or alive, that we're going to visit—well, when we get back to Mother Earth you ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... edifices were built without any thought of the possibility of such comfortable furniture, they had to be adapted as best they might to the ungainly and unsightly great stoves which were usually placed in the central aisle of the building. From these cast-iron monsters, there extended to the nearest windows and projected through them, hideous stove-pipes that too ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... but it was a good-humoured roar, not very offensive to any man and apparently acceptable enough to some ladies. He was a big, burly man, near to fifty, as I suppose, somewhat awkward in his gait, and somewhat loud in his laugh. But though nigh to fifty, and thus ungainly, he liked to be smiled on by pretty women, and liked, as some said, to be flattered by them also. If so he should have been happy, for the ladies at Rome at that time made much ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... eyes on the pavement, and the shiny toes of his patent leather boots turned well out. His bowed legs were encased in loose black trousers, and had as many angles as the forepaws of a Dachshund or a Dandie Dinmont. The peculiarities of his ungainly gait and figure were even more apparent than usual, and as he walked he swung his long arms, that ended in large black gloves which looked as if they were ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... power. Teeth and eyes alike were gleaming. Albert scarcely knew what to do first. Should he run, taking to the deepest snow, where the wolves might sink to their bodies and thus fail to overtake him? But in his own haste he might trip himself with the long, ungainly snowshoes, and then everything would quickly be over. Yet it must be tried. He could see ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... less than ten minutes it loomed up before him, a mass of deeper black in the blackness. No white vision floated on the broken battlements this night, as Sir Norman looked wistfully up at them; but neither was there any ungainly dwarf, with two-edged sword, guarding the ruined entrance; and Sir Norman passed unmolested in. He sought the spiral staircase which La Masque had spoken of, and, passing carefully from one ancient chamber ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... of grace in the dance. Constant in attendance upon the court, he frequently took part in the masques performed before it. Like the King, he was fully equipped for hunting; but greater contrast could not have been found than between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... rovings, Markheim's eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... by his humming; but he stopped short in an improvised variation on the theme of Vulcan's song in "Philemon and Baucis" when he heard a subdued but none the less poignant cry of distress from Joan. In order to turn his head he was compelled to twist his ungainly body, and Joan, who was standing well away from her canvas, was aware of the movement. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... a sad, ungainly skeleton, is possessed by grass and weeds. On the raised centre many flower-pots were neatly arranged once: they stand in orderly lines, but each separate one is broken: none contain flowers any more, but only grass. And the glass of the greenhouse lies there in showers, all grey. No one ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany
... huge place—huge, ungainly, and uselessly extensive; built at a time when, at any rate in Ireland, men considered neither beauty, aptitude, nor economy. It is three stories high, and stands round a quadrangle, in which there are two entrances ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... woman moves with an unsteady quick step, and whenever her black mantilla is flung back by the violence of her movements, a small rope of hair with a crucifix at the end is plainly seen to bind her waist. This ungainly woman is the quondam authoress, Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn, who has turned a Catholic, and is now preparing for a pilgrimage to Rome to crave the Pope's absolution for her ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... lying in the yard started from under the horses' feet, and stood staring in round-eyed surprise. The barn was half full of hay, and in the dry pungent odour Mike and Lady Edith rested an hour. Sometimes a bullock filled the doorway with ungainly form and steaming nostrils; sometimes the lips of the lovers met. In about half an hour the groom returned with the news that the fog was lifting, and discovering a cart-track, they followed it over the hills for ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... across the glass roof before he noticed the presence of the strangers; but then he stopped abruptly. There was no expression of either fear or surprise upon his tranquil face, yet he must have been both astonished and afraid; for after his eyes had rested upon the ungainly form of the horse for a moment he walked rapidly to the furthest edge of the roof, his head turned back over his shoulder to gaze at ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... colonists as "blauw wildebeest" (blue wild-ox). It is of a bluish colour—hence the name, and "brindled," or striped along the sides. Its habits are very similar to those of the common gnoo, but it is altogether a heavier and duller animal, and still more eccentric and ungainly in its form. ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... interval of restlessness, an observant person might have noticed, sitting in the back part of the room, the rather ungainly figure of the tall fellow, Brent Gaylong, organizer of the Church Mice of Newburgh. He seemed to be the center of a ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... leading from his bedchamber, and was apparently suffering great pain. An extraordinary change had taken place in him since I had formerly known him. His person was emaciated almost to a skeleton, showing his angular and ungainly form at a distressing disadvantage. His face had withered away to a narrow point under the large bones of his head, which looked larger than ever, with his great shock hair starting out from it on all sides. The skin of his face had become crimped and yellow; but ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door— Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "Burke has a most ungainly figure. His gait is awkward, his gestures clumsy, his eyes are covered with large spectacles. He is careless of his dress. His pockets bulged with papers. He spoke rapidly and with a strong Irish brogue. Power is the thing his face and form express. His knowledge ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... passage towards the row of Professors. He was a young man of spare figure and unhealthy complexion, his age not easily conjectured. Embarrassment no doubt accounted for much of the awkwardness of his demeanour; but, under any circumstances, he must have appeared ungainly, for his long arms and legs had outgrown their garments, which were no fashionable specimens of tailoring. The nervous gravity of his countenance had a peculiar sternness; one might have imagined that he was fortifying his self-control with scorn of the ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... shut behind his broad, ungainly figure in its gray clothes, when Boris Sobashnikov at once commenced speaking ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... apathy into Desmond's sympathetic ears. Being both plump and energetic, she suffered cruelly in the heat; mopped her face without shame between her sentences; and, according to Frank Olliver, lived chiefly on lime-squash, and a limitless admiration for her missionary husband,—a large, ungainly man, with the manners of a shy schoolboy, and the wrapt gaze of a seer; a man who, in an age of fanaticism, would have walked smiling to the rack. As it was, he walked with no less equanimity through the pestilential mazes of the city and ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... knees and shoulders. Follow a couple of hours of simple patience, with nothing to entertain one's thoughts but the steady roar of the line under the wheels, the blinking and dripping of the oil lantern, and the more or less ungainly wretchedness, and variously sullen compromises and encroachments of posture, among the five other passengers preparing themselves for sleep: the last arrangement for the night being to shut up both windows, in order to effect, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... lines," Jeff pursued, after parting with his mother. "Jackson's done it, and he can't imagine anything else. I don't say it isn't well done in its way, but the way's wrong; it's stupid and clumsy." When they were got so far from the hotel as to command a prospect of its ungainly mass sprawled upon the plateau, his smouldering disgust burst out: "Look at it! Did you ever see anything like it? I wish the damned thing would burn ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... body, for all the world like a ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him. In most cases this lower jaw —being easily unhinged by a practised artist —is disengaged and hoisted on deck for ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... have derived some pleasure from displaying a figure so beautiful, with no adornment except its native gracefulness; but how great must have been the chagrin of the Princesses, of many of the Court ladies, indeed, of all in any way ungainly or deformed, when called to exhibit themselves by the side of a bewitching person like hers, unaided by the whalebone and horse-hair paddings with which they had hitherto been made up, and which placed the best form on a level with the worst? The prudes who practised illicitly, and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... certainly nothing can be more sickening than to see one so highly endowed, and who might command the applause of listening senates, gradually sinking below the level of manhood by habitual indulgences. In personal appearance, he was rather awkward, of an ungainly figure, his countenance not highly intelligent, but cheerful and rather pleasing. After the ostracism of the great bulwark of Democracy, Douglas, from the councils of his party, Senator Green became the leader of that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... most ungainly countenance, yet did well enough: he was very thankful for a blister on his loins to ease rheumatic pains, and presented a huge basket of porridge before starting, with a fowl, and asked me to fire ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... raw, ungainly, but powerful looking youth from Kintail was seen staring about, as the Mackenzies were starting to meet the enemy, in an apparently idiotic manner, as if looking for something. He ultimately came across ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... every decaying log or stump. One species with very long legs, Scutigera forceps (Raf.), is often found in damp houses or in cellars. It is sometimes called the "wall-sweeper," on account of its rapid ungainly gait, and is even reputed to prey upon cockroaches and other ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... known to their species. He had no schooling to speak of; but, for all that, was haunted, like Joseph, by dreams foreshadowing his future greatness. Guided by this premonition he started, at the age of fourteen, for Copenhagen, a tall, ugly, and ungainly lad, but resolved, somehow or other, to conquer fame and honor. He tried himself as a dancer, singer, actor, and failed lamentably in all his debuts. He could not himself estimate the extent of his own ignorance, nor could he dream what a figure he was cutting. Undismayed by all rebuffs, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and the Windom. You will remember that the Nashville fired the first gun in the war with Spain. She is not a pretty boat at all. She is built differently from other vessels of her class, and her two tall funnels, or smokestacks, give her an ungainly appearance. Her commander was a splendid officer, though, and her crew were the bravest of the brave. I must tell you a little of her work after she captured the first prize of ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... on this particular morning was talking composedly to his wife, as she was about to climb to the saddle. His tent had been taken down, and soldiers were placing his furniture in a wagon. A greater contrast I never remarked, than the ungainly, awkward, and rough General, with his slight, trim, pretty companion. She had come to visit him and had remained until commanded to retire. I fancied, though I was separated some distance, that the little woman wept, as she kissed him good by, and he followed her, with frequent gestures of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... proportion as flaxseed; otherwise it rates in value the same as grain. A little, not too much, fed whole is well relished by fowls and is said to give luster to the plumage in fitting birds for shows. Sunflower is greatly overrated for poultry purposes. It is an ungainly plant of no use for forage and its seed is so well liked by the sparrows that the only way to keep them till ripe is to cover the heads ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... Saxon. The nearest parallel to them is to be found in the imposts of the chancel arch at Worth in Sussex, a place far away from Roman sites. The Worth imposts, like the bases at Bosham, are huge and ungainly, testifying both to the general love of bigness in the Saxon builder and to his comparative ignorance of the normal features which in the eleventh century were everywhere else crystallising into Romanesque. ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... nobody can tell what it means. To analyze it is to discover that it is extremely melodious; that it reflects a gloomy mood; that at the root of its sorrow is the mysterious "lost Lenore"; and that, as in most of Poe's works, a fantastic element is introduced, an "ungainly fowl" addressed with grotesque dignity as "Sir, or Madame," to divert attention from the fact that the poet's grief is not simple ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... various branches of the family, as they parted off, and took up separate ground, became marked by external features so peculiar. Why are the Africans black, and generally marked by coarse features and ungainly forms? Why are the Mongolians generally yellow, the Americans red, the Caucasians white? Why the flat features of the Chinese, the small stature of the Laps, the soft round forms of the English, the lank features of their descendants, the Americans? ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... mind at his square ungainly house, full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. 'I think, do you know, I ought to ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... one who became a singer of songs for the king. Him they called the Bug, because he was small and ungainly of face and limb and excelled not in work or deed. He loved the fattest marrow bones, the choicest fish, the milk warm from the goats, the first corn that was ripe, and the snug place by the fire. And thus, becoming singer of songs to the king, he found a way to do nothing and be ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... measure six feet from tip to tip of the wings, or about the size of a large Rhode Island turkey. Employing these birds for the removal of refuse is a remedy almost as bad as the disease, since the habits of the huge, ungainly, ill-omened creatures are extremely disgusting. Clouds of them roost upon the eaves of the houses, the church belfries, and all exposed balconies, and would invade the patios of the dwellings were they not vigorously ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... face of an old man on young shoulders. His hair was long, thin, and prematurely streaked with gray; his face was pale and deeply furrowed; his eyes were hollow, and their stare gleamed, cold and stolid, under his bent and shaggy brows. The figure was at once fragile and ungainly, and the narrow shoulders curved in a perpetual stoop. It was a person, once noticed, that you would easily remember, and associate with some undefined, painful impression. The manner was humble, but not meek; the voice was whining, but without pathos. There was a meagre, passionless dulness about ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cartridge pointed at both ends. He had at his sides an immense number of little paddles that went flapping, flapping all the time, keeping him constantly in motion, whether the little fellow wanted to go or not. So he kept scudding along in the water, dodging from right to left, to avoid the ungainly creatures that wanted to eat him. There were crabs and clams, of a fashion that neither you nor I will ever see alive. There were huge animals with great eyes, savage jaws and long feelers, that sat in ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... holds a scroll, the other rests upon a pedestal. The likeness is said to be well preserved. The sculptor was Bacon. There was the capacious forehead, the thick bushy eyebrows, the large mouth, the double chin, the clumsy person, and the thick, ungainly legs, which had been rendered familiar to me through the portraits which I had seen in the Johnsonia. As I gazed on that marble tribute to genius and worth, I could not but remember, Charley, how Johnson had frequently walked the streets of London all night, because he had not the wherewithal ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... field, where a dainty little freshman with soft, appealing brown eyes, half hidden under a mist of yellow hair, occasionally managed to foil T. Reed's pursuit and sent them pounding back into the outstretched arms of a tall, ungainly home who tossed or dropped them—it was hard to tell which—into the freshman basket. It was a shame to let her play, the sophomores grumbled. She was a giantess, not a girl. But as the score piled up in their favor, they grew more amiable and laughed good- humoredly at the ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... Though love's guerdon she defer, If her lover look on her, 40 The very breath of life enjoy; And two lovers, love's curse under Kept asunder, Will I leave to grieve apart, And achieve by this my art 45 Things at which you'll gaze in wonder. For a lady most ungainly For a halfpenny at night Will I cause without a light To look nor ill nor well too plainly. 50 To another loveliest, As star in heaven Shall this destiny be given That of noblest men and best None against her ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... own,—which is convincing evidence to non-Kelantan Malays that he is a born fool,—and he is apt to complain bitterly of the accents of strangers, whereas, to all but his own countrymen, it is his accent which appears to be the real grievance. He is plain of face, fat, ugly, and ungainly of body, huge as to the hands and feet, not scrupulously clean in his person and habits, and, like most very fleshy people, he is blessed with an exceedingly even temper, and is excessively happy, good-natured, and stolid. He ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... looked at the bridge, half sadly, half in reverie. He paused to admire the neat work; then slowly walked over the bridge still thinking deeply. Suddenly he plumped himself right into the arms of a tall, ungainly man, who had crossed from ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... puzzling his brain as to how he could raise the necessary funds to pay off his friend, he saw the tall, ungainly form of a backwoods planter shuffling down the ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... loves him; even if he never laid his hand (and this little thing he does rarely) on his friend's shoulder, it would be plain that he loves his friend. His happiness appears in his moody and charming face, his ambition in his dumbness, and the hopes of his life to come in ungainly bearing. How does so much heart, how does so much sweetness, all unexpressed, appear? For it is not only those who know him well that know the child's heart; strangers are aware of it. This, which he would not reveal, is the only thing that is quite unmistakable ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... the older women in the rear, who with their heavy nailed boots were running towards us, plunging about in the deep ground in clumsy attempts at juvenile activity. A few of the young women were very pretty, but, as usual in Cyprus, their figures were ungainly, and their movements, hampered by baggy trousers and enormous high boots, ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... anxious to part from the man and return with the news to Lady Chepstow, and was casting round in his mind for some excuse to avoid going indoors with him and wasting precious time in breaking bread and eating salt, when there lurched out of an adjoining doorway an ungainly figure in turban and sandals and the full flower of that grotesque regalia which passes muster at cheap theatres and masquerade balls for the costume of a Cingalese. The fellow had bent forward out of the deeper darkness of the house-passage into the murk ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... thousand conflicting feelings, Malcolm roamed up and down his chamber, writhed, tried to sit and think, then, finding his thoughts in a whirl, renewed his frantic pacings. And when dire necessity brought him again into the ladies' chamber, he was silent, blushing, ungainly, abstracted, and retreated into the farthest possible corner from ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the court, he frequently took part in the masques performed before it. Like the King, he was fully equipped for hunting; but greater contrast could not have been found than between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the profound salutations of the assemblage, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... approached the ungainly woman doubtfully. Surely daddy could not have seen her before hiring this very peculiar-looking person. He must have accepted her services over the telephone, ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... to the prospect of intellectual life and then hurled down by the caprice of circumstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the soap and candle factory. Dickens would have given a touch of the grotesque to Grail's gentle but ungainly character; but at the end he would infallibly have rewarded him as Tom Pinch and Dominie Sampson were rewarded. Not so George Gissing. His sympathy is fully as real as that of Dickens. But his fidelity to fact is greater. Of the Christmas charity prescribed by Dickens, and of the untainted ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... reputation, but he lost the election in the Legislature, his party being in the minority. After his accession to the Presidency, his history, like Washington's, is identified with that of his country. He was a tall, ungainly man, little versed in the refinements of society, but gifted by nature with great common sense, and everywhere known as "Honest Abe." Kind, earnest, sympathetic, faithful, democratic, he was anxious only to serve his country. His wan, fatigued face, and his bent form, told of the ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... of these canine giants, however, was not at first very satisfactory, as although plenty of bone was obtained, many were most ungainly in appearance and ill-shaped animals that had very little about them to attract attention. Captain Graham, however, stuck to his work, and very soon the specimens that he brought forward began to show ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... the knotted handkerchief in two. The hobo needed no urging. He spun on his heel and fled like a rabbit. The Professor watched him go, and as the fat, ungainly figure burst through a hedge and disappeared he fired the revolver into the air to frighten him still more. Then he tossed the weapon into the pool ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my little pretensions to wisdom. I have met with few who understood men, their manners, and their ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly integrity, and headlong, ungovernable irascibility are disqualifying circumstances; consequently, I was born a very poor man's son. For the first six or seven years of my life, my father was gardener ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... and crackling in a huge, yawning fire-place at its farthest extremity. She was chilled, and sat down before the glowing hearth to warm her benumbed fingers. Presently a tall woman, in a short-sleeved frock and large deer-skin moccasins, strode into the room, and with a deep, ungainly courtesy asked, "What the lady would be thinking to take for a ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... sides of their mothers are so curious and so top heavy, and yet they are strong even when small. Carabao sometimes go crazy, and when they do, they tread down everything in their way. Notwithstanding their ungainly bulk they can run as well as a good horse, and can endure long journeys quite as well. They are urged to greater speed by the driver taking the tail and giving it a twist or kicking them in ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... by Tony Stickles' arrival in Glendow. He had always laughed at the lad, considering him a stupid, ungainly creature. Occasionally he had overtaken Tony on the road trudging wearily along, but it had never occurred to him to offer him a seat in his ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... said, an unessential one, else the mood of the observer changes from happiness to unhappiness, and the comic becomes the pathetic. A fall on the ice which seemed to offer only a ludicrous contrast between the dignity and grace of the man erect and the ungainly attitude of the falling figure ceases utterly to be funny when it is seen to entail some physical injury; and wit which burns and sears is not amusing to its victim."[12] The ability to appreciate the humorous in life is a great gift and should ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... of the dead boy, the "grim, ungainly, gaunt, and ominous bird" peers with sidelong glance into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... to him during the service, came to him, as he passed out, to give him greeting and a word of condolence. For that time only he passed them by, as if they had been wooden images. His spirit had been strained to its uttermost, and would bear no more. He made his way home with an ungainly, swift gait,—home to the dear bedside,—down upon his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... beauty of line of a well-shaped bust. I might show how thorough acquaintance with the ideal nude foot would probably have much modified the foot-torturing boots and high heels, which wring the foot out of all beauty of line, and throw the body forward into an awkward and ungainly attitude. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... in these reflections, and continued eating with an abstracted air, Reine Vincart was rapidly examining the reserved, almost ungainly, young man, who did not dare address any conversation to her, and who was equally stiff and constrained with those sitting near him. She made a mental comparison of him with Claudet, the bold huntsman, alert, resolute, full ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... you would. I realise I seem ungrateful. I—" Of a sudden, interrupting, Chantry arose precipitately: a thin, ungainly figure in shiny, thread-bare broadcloth, exotic to the point of caricature. Unconsciously he started pacing back and forth across the room, restlessly, almost fiercely. Never in the years he had previously known the man had Landor seen him so, seen him other than the impassive, almost ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... Olympus on the twelfth day she would win him over. Ascending to heaven, she obtained the promise of Zeus' assistance, not without raising the suspicions of Zeus' jealous consort Hera; a quarrel between them was averted by their son Hephaestus, whose ungainly performance of the duties of cupbearer to the Immortals made them forget ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... Fians looked up and beheld upon the hillside a huge man, looking like some Fomorian marauder, black-visaged and ugly, with a sour countenance and ungainly limbs. On his back hung a dingy black shield, on his misshapen left thigh he wore a sharp broad-bladed sword; projecting over his shoulder were two long lances with broad rusty heads. He wore garments that looked as if they had been buried in a cinder heap, and a ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... to march. We tramped along under our bulky and ungainly loads, and found we were being escorted to the enclosure which we had fenced in. We swung through the gate, which was closed behind the last man, and a soldier mounted guard over it. In a flash the truth ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... happened to Andrew in a swirl. They were shaking hands with him. They were congratulating him on the killing of Bill Dozier. They were patting him on the back. Larry la Roche, who had been so hostile, now stood up to the full of his ungainly height and proposed his health. And the other men drank it standing. Andy received a tin cup half full of whisky, and he drank the burning stuff in acknowledgment. The unaccustomed drink went to his head, his muscles began to relax, his eyes swam. Voices boomed at him out of a haze. ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... Africa with a composure and lordly grandeur, as if it were the most beautiful bird in the world. Its body feathers are of a dull metallic green color, and its wings and tail are dingy black. Looking at the awkward creature, no one would suspect that under its ungainly wings it carried the most exquisite and fairy-like little plumes, so airy that it takes basketfuls of them to weigh an ounce. They are pure white, and so much desired for trimming that the bird is vigorously hunted by the natives, who sell these dainty ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... necessary for a blind child, with proper instruction and careful training, to become awkward and ungainly, than for one in full possession of all the senses, the drawback of blindness simply demanding a little more patience and perseverance to attain the ease and grace, which is as ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... simplicity.' He speaks of the army of occupation as 'rascals in red coats waiting for embarkation.' 'English education,' he says in another letter, 'may be all very well to instruct the hemming of handkerchiefs, and the ungainly romps of a country-dance, but nothing else; and it would be a poor consolation to your declining years to see your daughters come into the room upon their elbows, and to find their accomplishments limited to broad native phraseology in conversation, or thumping the "Woodpecker" upon a discordant ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... His capacity was considerable; but fitter to discourse on general maxims, than to conduct any intricate business: his intentions were just; but more adapted to the conduct of private life than to the government of kingdoms. Awkward in his person, and ungainly in his manners, he was ill qualified to command respect; partial and undiscerning in his affections, he was little fitted to acquire general love. Of a feeble temper, more than of a frail judgment; exposed to our ridicule from his vanity; but exempt from our hatred ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... suffer. A thing I found unbearable was the requirement to share my bed with another Hussar. The regulations allotted only one bed for two soldiers. N.C.O.s alone were allowed to have a bed each. On the first night which I spent in the barracks, I had already gone to my bed when a tall, ungainly Hussar, who arrived an hour after the others, approached it, and seeing that it was occupied, he unhooked a lantern and stuck it under my nose to examine me more closely. Then he got undressed. As I watched him, I had no idea that he intended to get in beside me; ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... board, one after the other, with his teeth, and carry them along the deck. Nobody gave him the opportunity, but I dare say he could have done it; for he was a gallant, noble figure of a man, even in the Cappuccino dress, which is the ugliest and most ungainly that can well be. ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... by his concessions went on growing together. By his fondness for worthless minions, and by the sanction which he gave to their tyranny and rapacity, he kept discontent constantly alive. His cowardice, his childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person, his provincial accent, made him an object of derision. Even in his virtues and accomplishments there was something eminently unkingly. Throughout the whole course of his reign, all the venerable associations by ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... being encouraged, he had his peculiar reason for delay, though now he could offer her wealth. She had once in his hearing derided the unpleasant hiss of the ungainly English matron's title of Mrs. There was no harm in the accustomed title, to his taste; but she disliking it, he did the same, on her special behalf; and the prospect, funereally draped, of a title ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters' whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... motions of hands and knees she drew herself a few steps back to one of the exclusive bunches of balsams, and began with her two hands to root it up. Actually she was grubbing, might and main, at the ungainly stalks of the balsams, pulling them up as fast as she could and flinging them aside, careless where. Daisy came to help with her trowel, and together they worked, amicably enough but without a word, till the task was done. A great space was left clear, and Molly threw herself back in her wonted position ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the general scheme in France towards the end of the fifteenth century. Under Henri IV and under Louis XII trees were often trimmed in ungainly, fantastic forms, but with the advent of Le Notre the good taste which he propagated so widely promptly rejected these grotesques, which, for a fact, were an importation from Flanders, like the gloriettes. Not by the remotest suggestion could a clipped yew in the form ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... as an ungainly man, and so he was; and yet on occasions he appeared to me to be superior in dignity and nobility to almost any other man whom I have ever seen. I was present when the committee from the National Convention, that gave his ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... a poor ungainly character, all awry, and not in a straight line." James certainly wrote a slovenly scrawl, strongly indicative of that personal negligence which he carried into all the little things of life; and Buchanan, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... have been a mistake, and most probably it was, as they fell in with the great body in the course of half an hour. The space from the quays, including the great sweep in front of the Custom-house, was swarming with men, and women, and small children, and the big ungainly crowd bulged out in Gardiner-street, and the broad space leading up Talbot-street. The ranks began to be formed at eleven o'clock amid a down-pour of cold rain. The mud was deep and aqueous, and great pools ran through the streets almost level with the paths. Some of the more prominent ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... of the antique statues, the smoked-up walls of the Sistine Chapel, and the cracks in Raphael's frescos. He condemns everything as rubbish which has not an external perfection; forgetting that, as in human nature, the most precious treasures are sometimes allied with an ungainly exterior. Yet in this he only echoes the impressions of thousands of others who have gone to the Vatican and returned disconsolate, because amid a perplexing multitude of objects they knew not ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... and drew him out into the open. A few paces away stood a couple under a tree. And toward them Dolly hastened, now holding to the arm of her companion. Then he recognized Ann and saw that she was with a tall, ungainly young man of eighteen or twenty. The ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... king, in spite of the lateness of the hour, was ready to receive us, taking our two black friends, Aboh to act as interpreter, we carried with us the leopard skin, some venison, and three strings of beads of various colours. His majesty was a tall, ungainly looking man, with as hideous a countenance as can well be imagined. His appearance was not improved by the glare of the torchlight and the terror under which he was suffering. Having presented the leopard skin and venison, Charley, who acted as spokesman, threw ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... a good fellow. But there now—he doesn't satisfy the mistress, she says his appearance is ungainly. And now they've gone and told tales about him for letting some peasants into the kitchen yesterday. It is a bad look-out: they may dismiss him. And ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... the river, rows of brilliant red flamingos were standing in the shallow water, fishing, and here and there a pelican with his ungainly beak. Our Chinese crew were having their meal of rice when we walked forward, and the national chopsticks were hard at work. We talked to several of them. They could all speak a little Spanish, ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... left on the skins. The sketch with this will explain better than any description. The guanaco pelt being of a woolly nature makes it unnecessary to run it all the same way and the entire skins are utilized in spite of their ungainly shape, the flaps and tabs trimmed off filling the indentations around the outer edge of the robe. They make an excellent camp blanket as light and warm as the malodorous, hairy rabbit skin robe of Hudsons Bay, and no Patagonian ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... best-mathematicians in England of his day, and was likewise deeply skilled in other branches of science and philosophy. The Greek language was as familiar to him as the English; he was said to know every line of Homer by heart. In public life, on the contrary, he was shy, ungainly, and embarrassed. From his first onset in Parliament, he took part with vehemence against the administration of Sir Robert Walpole." Bishop Secker says, that Lord Stanhope "spoke a precomposed speech, which he held in his hand, with great tremblings and agitations, and hesitated frequently ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... satirist is such a one as Hazlitt somewhere mentioned who called Wordsworth a dunce. Hazlitt was quite incapable of such a solecism. He knew, nobody better, that a telling caricature must be a good likeness. If he darkens the shades, and here and there exaggerates an ungainly feature, we still know that the shade exists and that the feature is not symmetrical. De Quincey reports the saying of some admiring friend of Hazlitt, who confessed to a shudder whenever Hazlitt used his habitual gesture of placing ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... feeling of alienation to my brother as a duty, than strove to repress it. Yet not for the world would my father have grudged him anything that money could purchase. That was, as it were, in the bond when he had wedded my mother. Gregory was lumpish and loutish, awkward and ungainly, marring whatever he meddled in, and many a hard word and sharp scolding did he get from the people about the farm, who hardly waited till my father's back was turned before they rated the stepson. I am ashamed—my ...
— The Half-Brothers • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the clayey roads of the Ornain Valley are anything but inviting wheeling; but a longer stay in Tronville is not to be thought of, for, among other pleasantries of the place here, the chief table delicacy appears to be boiled escargots, a large, ungainly snail procured from the neighboring hills. Whilst fond of table delicacies, I emphatically draw the line at escargots. Pulling out toward Toul I find the roads, as expected, barely ridable; but the vineyard-environed little valley, lovely in its tears, wrings from one praise in spite ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... fountains are few enough for it, even though one is that famous Fountain of Bernini, in which he has made one of the usual rivers—the Nile, I believe—holding his hand before his eyes in mock terror of the ungainly facade of a rival architect's church opposite, lest it shall fall and crush him. That, however, is the least merit of the fountain; and without any fountain the Piazza Navona would be charming; it is such a vast lake of sunshine and is so wide as well as long, and is so mellowed with ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Pompey Taylor. But the T. Tallman Taylor, whose whole appearance was pronounced unexceptionable by the New York belles, from the points of his boots to the cut of his moustaches, was a very different individual from the good-looking, but awkward, ungainly youth, introduced to the reader two or three years since, at Wyllys-Roof. He had, in the mean time, learned how to stand, how to sit, how to walk, how to talk in a drawing-room. He had learned what to do with his cane and his hat, how to manage his pocket-handkerchief and his gloves; ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... all smiles, and Toby returned her welcome something sheepishly. He cut a quaint figure with his broad, ungainly shoulders supporting his rather pumpkin face. Then his arms were a little too long and terminated ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... exceed the capacities of a normal body." It was eloquence particularly well calculated to sway a popular assembly which yet had none of the characteristics of a mob. A sonorous voice; a figure and bearing which, though stiff and ungainly, were singularly dignified; an inexhaustible copiousness of grandiloquent phrase; a peculiar vein of sarcasm which froze like ice and cut like steel—these were some of the characteristics of the oratory which from 1782 to 1806 at once awed and ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... cast a quick glance at the somewhat ungainly figure of Father John. Another disappointment—not the father he was waiting for. But the luminous eyes of the preacher seemed to pierce into the boy's soul. When he looked once, he looked again. ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... orchestra; and thereby sustain such a compound fracture, attended by loss of substance, as should put it out of their power, for that night at least, to torture our fastidious ears. Being of a melancholy temperament, we are unfortunately, at times, subject to most ludicrous fancies; and as these ungainly instruments loom on our disgusted eye, we cannot, for the life of us, help imagining them moulds for a couple of enormous gooseberry puddings; and we verily pant at the idea of the sea of melted butter, or yellow cream, requisite to mollify their acidity—and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... and believing that the world was made in six days, was one woman; but Mrs. Maloney, standing with bare arms over the smoke of a wood fire under the pine trees, was another; and Peter Sangree, the Canadian pupil, with his pale skin, and his loose, though not ungainly figure, stood beside her in very unfavourable contrast as he scraped potatoes and sliced bacon with slender white fingers that seemed better suited to hold a pen than a knife. She ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door— Bird or beast ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... and laid under the day of God's power, when Christ is opening his ear to discipline, and speaking to him that his heart may receive instruction, many times that poor man is as if the devil had found him, and not God. How frenzily he imagines; how crossly he thinks; how ungainly he carries it under convictions, counsels, and his present apprehension of things! I know some are more powerfully dealt withal, and more strongly bound at first by the word; but others more in an ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... they use that word) a goodly number of the trees. But though I have been wont to esteem the poorest tree as better than none, I am almost ready to forswear my opinion at sight of these slender trunks, so ungainly and unsupported. The first breeze, one would say, must bring them down upon the roofs they were never meant to shade. Poor naked things! I fancy they look abashed at being dragged thus unexpectedly and inappropriately into broad daylight. If I were to see the householder lifting his axe against ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... woods with Jack and his rifle. And he hungered for spring to come again when he should go with the Turner boys to take another raft of logs down the river to the capital. Spring came, and going out to the back pasture one morning, Chad found a long-legged, ungainly creature stumbling awkwardly about his old mare—a colt! That, too, he owed the Major, and he would have burst with pride had he known that the colt's sire was a famous stallion in the Bluegrass. That spring he did go down the river again. He did not let the Major know he was coming ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... suits. The boats were next. They were typical landing craft, shaped like rectangular boxes. There was no need for streamlining in the vacuum of space. They were not pressurized. Only men in space suits rode in the ungainly boxes. ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... any other Chinese restaurant, my hosts at least, who had not learned that bananas are sustenance for men as well as "food for gods," were famished. As we ate "clem pie" or "dined with Duke Humphrey," two water buffaloes, dark gray ungainly forms, with little more hair than elephants, recurved horns, and muzzles like deer, watched us closely, until a Tartar drove them off. Such beasts, which stand in the water and plaster themselves with mud like elephants, are the cows and draught oxen of China. Two nice Chinese boys sat by us, and ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... flock around the deathbed of a defaulting deacon. A soldier on the outer edge of the extended line swings his rifle with swift, backhanded motion over his shoulder, and brings the butt amidst the crowd of carrion. The vultures hop with grotesque, ungainly motions from their prey, and stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the black ruin of war. The ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... come, and on every slope graze herds of winter-worn gun-horses and transport mules. The new grass has gone to the heads of the latter and they make continuous exhibitions of themselves, gambolling about like ungainly lambkins and roaring with unholy laughter. Summer has come, and my groom and countryman has started to whistle again, sure sign that Winter is over, for it is only during the Summer that he reconciles himself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... the quaint little train on to the flower-bedecked platform of this Devonshire hamlet amongst the hills, to receive a surprise so immeasurable that for a moment he could do nothing but gaze silently at the tall, ungainly figure whose unpleasant smile betrayed the fact that this meeting was not altogether accidental so ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and old cows were in the rear of the herd, and it was not a little comical to witness their ungainly attitudes. They would stretch their clumsy necks, and shake their heads, as if they did not rightly understand what was going on. Finding that if they stopped too long to indulge their curiosity, there was a danger of their getting separated from the fighting ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... pitched, as I have said, against the bulwarks, where he lay like some horrible, ungainly sort of puppet, life-size, indeed, but how different from life's colour or life's comeliness! In that position I could easily have my way with him, and as the habit of tragical adventures had worn off almost all my terror for the dead, I took ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was still barren, when suddenly the right arm of the statue descended like lightning, and the harpoon shot perpendicularly into the pool with the speed of an arrow. What river-fiend answered to the summons? In an instant an enormous pair of open jaws appeared, followed by the ungainly head and form of the furious hippopotamus, who, springing half out of the water, lashed the river into foam, and, disdaining the concealment of the deep pool, he charged straight up the violent rapids. With extraordinary power ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... would not have gone on. And; had he turned back then, the history of a certain kingdom of Europe would have been changed. Maps, too, and schoolbooks, and the life-story of a small Prince. But he went on. Stronger than his young guide, he did not crawl, but bent aside the stiff and ungainly branches of the firs. He battled with the thicket, and came out victorious.. He was not so old, then, or so feeble. His arm would have been strong for the King, had not— "There ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... from the uniform of a parcel of drunken marines sent ashore on a holiday from a man-of-war. But, in spite of the ornaments, the dress was not exactly the thing. From the tightness of the cloth across the shoulders, his elbows projected from his sides, like an ungainly rider's; and his ponderous legs were jammed so hard into his slim, nether garments that the threads of every seam showed; and, at every step, you looked for ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... true that all men—even critics—have their redeeming points and failings, then was there no Charles and no Joseph Surface at this unique matinee. For the ungainly gentleman who essayed the part of Charles made, or rather meant to make, him spotless; and Mr. Henley's Joseph was twin-brother to Mr. Irving's Mephistopheles. Perhaps the idea of Mr. Labouchere and his friend, Mr. Henley, was that they would make one young man between them. ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... belated flake passed now and again across the picture. But the broad stretch of level before them was a ghastly white, broken only by gigantic masses and moving shapes and lengthy strips of impenetrable darkness, vast ungainly Titans of shadow. All about them, huge metallic structures, iron girders, inhumanly vast as it seemed to him, interlaced, and the edges of wind-wheels, scarcely moving in the lull, I passed in great shining curves steeper and ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... up with elbows flapping loosely, as was his ungainly habit. His grin was wide and golden as of yore, his hat at the same angle over ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... and he was greatly concerned as to what would become of his attendant, who would thus be left in a foreign country without the means of leaving it, or of obtaining support. My father had not been favourably impressed by the appearance of Mr Laffan, who was tall and gaunt, with awkward manners and ungainly figure; but after some conversation he found him to be a man of considerable attainments and intelligence, and ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... her co-Vestals were immediately liked and speedily loved by Brinnaria. Meffia, a month older than herself and looking six years younger, was a small, awkward, ungainly girl, with pale blue eyes, pale yellow hair and babyish pink complexion. She had never had an ill hour in her life, yet she always appeared ailing, shrank from any effort, hated exercise and exertion and at every necessity for movement asserted that she was tired, ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... suppressed characters of history. His political achievements, as is perhaps natural in a community which courts the voter and despises the soldier, have put out of sight the means by which he mainly won them; namely his genius as a cavalry and partisan commander. An ungainly, narrow-minded, bigoted, bucolic squireen of Huntingdon, lacking in every quality which we are accustomed to associate with a cavalry officer, inaugurated an era in the history of Mounted Troops. His methods are studied on the Continent, and the German ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... not, however, so very little, for it was of ungainly sprawling structure, pushing out an odd limb that might have been cut off with a curtain. The walls nodded fixedly to one another so that the ceiling was only half the size of the floor. The furniture comprised but the commonest necessities. This attic of the Ansells ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... extract from him some hint as to what he should do. This absorption seemed to ignore completely the other occupants of the room, of whom he was the central, commanding figure. The head nurse held the lamp carelessly, resting her hand over one hip thrown out, her figure drooping into an ungainly pose. She gazed at the surgeon steadily, as if puzzled at his intense preoccupation over the common case of a man "shot in a row." Her eyes travelled over the surgeon's neat-fitting evening dress, which was so bizarre here in the dingy receiving ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... a large farm with immense fields, the ponderous and ungainly steam, tackle gives one a sensation of intrusion. Such a field can be found on a farm between Evesham and Alcester; it contains 300 acres. The occupier, speaking of it, mentioned that it was all wheat that year except one corner. To a ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... Marchese Sanviano entered with Cesare Orsi. The window was deserted, and the women trailed gracefully toward the bubbling minor note of the alcohol lamp. Both Sanviano and Orsi were big men—the former, like Bembo, wore English clothes; but Orsi's ungainly body had been tightly garbed by a Southern military tailor, making him—Lavinia thought—appear absolutely ridiculous. His collar was both too tight and too high, although perspiration ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... life in courts and palaces, in fields and villages, is all seen there. Royal folk in wonderful jewels sit enthroned, with minions offering gifts and burning incense before them warriors kneeling and maidens dancing. The peasant ploughs the rice-fields with the same wooden stick and ungainly buffalo, and carries the rice-sheaves from the harvest field with the same shoulder poles, used in all the farther East to-day. Women fill their water-vessels at the tanks and bear them away on their heads as in India now, and scores ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... begin under the roof of one of those long, ungainly piles of brick and mortar which make the colleges of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... the man had made a brave effort, and he walked at once to his camel and mounted, Frank standing by as the ungainly beast see-sawed to and fro and sprawled out its legs, and grumbled and ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... by side, admiring Madame Frehlter's poodle. Madelon could afford to be civil to the poodle before company. The contrast between the two girls was sufficiently striking. Cydalise was fair and bright-looking—Mademoiselle Frehlter was square and ungainly of figure, swarthy of complexion, dark ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... said Warburton, a tall ungainly boy of fourteen, as boy after boy was eager to take the quarrel ...
— Wilton School - or, Harry Campbell's Revenge • Fred E. Weatherly
... Culver's voice held all the pride of a child with a new toy, but he released the grip, and the ungainly gun swung smoothly back ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... of herons stretching away to some lonely water-home. And then another sound greeted his ear. It was shrill, sharp and insistent. A great serpent was stealing out of the East and moving down upon Lebanon. It gave out puffs of smoke from its ungainly head. It shrieked in triumph as it came. It was the daily train from the East, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... some eight feet in diameter. The lower edge of this hole stood about six inches above the level of the pool, and water ran out of it in a thin stream. Passing down this stream, half swimming and half waddling, appeared that huge and ungainly reptile which was the real object of the worship of the People ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... Dryden, assuming the wreath in 1689. We have referred to his origin; Langbaine gives 1642 as the date of his birth; so that he must have set up as author early in life, and departed from life shortly past middle-age. Derrick assures us that he was lusty, ungainly, and coarse in person,—a description answering to the full-length of Og. The commentators upon "MacFlecknoe" have not made due use of one of Shadwell's habits, in illustration of the reason why a wreath of poppies was selected for the crown of its hero. The dramatist, Warburton ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... your chintz. Have two rolls made, to use at the head and foot (which are now of equal height) and cover these and the bed with chintz, or, if preferred, with sun-proof material in one of the other colours in your chintz. By this treatment your cheap iron bed of ungainly proportions, has attained the quality of an interesting, as well as ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... learned lawyer, a generous friend; and his interest in education led him to make several gifts and bequests for educational purposes, including the foundation of a free grammar school at Redgrave. His figure was very corpulent and ungainly. Elizabeth visited him several times at Gorhambury, and had previously visited him at Redgrave. He was twice married and by his first wife, Jane, had three sons and three daughters. His second wife was Anne (d. 1610), daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, by whom he had two sons. Bacon's eldest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... lose flesh daily, from pure lack of provender. However, there was no time to make a change, so I was fain to hope that easy journeys at first, and a light weight on his back, might gradually bring the ungainly beast into better form. It appeared that he was just recovering from the distemper and "sore tongue," which had followed each other in rapid succession. These two diseases are the terror and bane of Virginian and Maryland stables. An animal who has once surmounted them ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... here I kept a craft, half boat and half punt, which I used for my fishing, and in which mother and Kate could lie on cushions while I rowed them on the river on warm summer nights. It was heavy and ungainly, but very comfortable, and ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... been provided by Tony, was towed to the shore, where an abundance of rocks were to be had. It was their intention to load it with "lighthouse material," and tow it to the island. It required all their skill to accomplish this object, for the raft was a most ungainly thing to manage. The Zephyr was so long that they could not row round so as to bring the raft alongside the bank, and when they attempted to push it in, the paint, and even the planks of the boat, ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... himself before the King, overwhelming him with blessings, and these royal commands were in due course executed. So it came about that Lesueur's frescos led to startling revelations, and enabled the Carthusians to keep their splendid property intact, ungainly though this was and out ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the brutes stood with stiffly erected ears, then they poured from the grove toward the river's bank, covering the distance with great, ungainly leaps. ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... him he would not put it in his power to give him the slip again, held fast by his arm during the remaining part of the entertainment, to the no small diversion of the company, whose attention was altogether engrossed in the contemplation of such an awkward, ungainly, stalking apparition. At last Pickle, being tired of exhibiting this raree-show, complied with the repeated desires of his companion, and handed her into the coach; which he himself had no sooner entered, than they were surrounded by a file of musqueteers, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... ill-luck had not been eluded. The airship was moored upon a raft which was to be towed out into the lake to enable the dirigible to ascend. But something went wrong with the arrangements. A strong wind caught the ungainly airship, she dipped her nose into the water, and as the motor was set going she was driven deeper into the lake, the vessel only being saved by ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... maladroit, gawky, inelegant, ungainly, loutish, unskillful, unwieldy, uncourtly; embarrassing. Antonyms: graceful, dexterous, deft, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... rolled the huge carcass down the river to a point below Rainbow Falls, within sight of his mother's home, where she could view daily the evidence that none might threaten her and live. And there the ungainly form lies today—a long, black-rock island known as Moo Kuna, between the rapids—where every freshet, every heavy rain, beats upon it as though in everlasting punishment for plotting the death ...
— Legends of Wailuku • Charlotte Hapai
... out upon her neck in a great ruff, which accentuated the fiendish ferocity of her, adding a hyena-like slope to her ungainly body. But it was in the expression of her face that she reached the climax of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... the walls of which were adobe, and it was indescribably filthy; yet the place was laid out with some pretension to regularity, being divided up into several wide streets, while in the centre of the town there was a wide, open space, or square, one side of which was occupied by a hideous and ungainly idol of gigantic proportions, with a long sacrificial altar at its feet, while on the other three sides stood dwellings of such pretentious character that they could only belong to the chief dignitaries ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... Must I wear up the rags Of mortal perished beauty and be old? Or is there power left upon my mouth Like colour, and lilting of ruin in my eyes? Am I still rare enough to be your mate? Then why must I shame at feasts and bear myself In shy ungainly ways, made flushed and conscious By squat numb gestures of my shapeless head— Ay, and its wagging shadow—clouted up, Twice tangled with a bundle of hot hair, Like a thick cot-quean's in the settling time? There are few women in the Quarter now Who do not wear a shapely fine-webbed ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... this performance is, of its kind, most complete. Keeley's Snozzle was quiet, rich, and philosophical; and Saunders made a Judy of himself with unparalleled success. Frank Finch got his deserts in the hands of a Mr. Everett; for being a lover, no matter how awkward and ungainly an actor is made ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... new ways so easily that those who do not have this faculty have no explanation for it but that of fickleness. A frequent surprise to a missionary in Japan is that of meeting a fine-looking, accomplished gentleman whom he knew a few years before as a crude, ungainly youth. I am convinced that it is the possession of this set of characteristics that has enabled Japan so quickly to assimilate many ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a more ungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has done its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood with anecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only talent which ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... and without alarm, though so weird an object might well have aroused a pardonable distrust, and even timidity. He saw a misshapen dwarf, not quite four feet high, with large, ungainly limbs out of all proportion to his head, which was small and compact. His features were of almost feminine fineness, and from under his shaggy brows gleamed a restless pair of large, full, wild blue eyes. His thick, rough flaxen hair was long and curly, and hung in disordered ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... than boys and are actually taller and heavier than boys at corresponding ages. From fifteen onward, however, the boys rapidly outstrip the girls in growth. Lack of muscular co-ordination is responsible for the awkward movements, ungainly appearance, ungraceful carriage, with their attendant self-consciousness, so characteristic of both boys and girls in ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... of these cheap urns and obelisks for his employers' retailing. But the question why numberless people will profane the memory of their departed by these public advertisements of Slap & Dash, and their evil trade, is a more difficult problem. For surely nothing could be more unmeaning or more ungainly than the monumental urn, unless it be the monumental obelisk. The plain cross, by contrast, has the tenderest meaning, and is a simple and fitting monument ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... grizzled veteran of the Franco-Prussian war, the breast of his rusty velveteen jacket proudly bearing a row of medals, stood talking to Mrs. Frayling, hat in hand. His right foot had suffered amputation some inches above the ankle, and he walked with the ungainly support of a crutch-topped peg-leg strapped to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... joint in his body independently of the rest. He cracked his fingers persistently when he talked after a fashion that would have been intolerable in anyone but Capper. His hands were always in some ungainly attitude, and yet they were wonderful hands, strong and sensitive, the colour of ivory. His eyes were small and green, sharp as the eyes of a lizard. They seemed to take in everything and ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... into my school, I will do my utmost. I do not mind simple manners, for the noblest natures are to be found among such people; nor do I mind rough, ungainly clothing, for that, indeed, only belongs to the outward girl and can quickly be remedied. I will keep these girls, and do all that woman can for them, provided I see no deceit in any of them; but that, you will clearly understand, ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... a second visit, and so much experience as my opportunities afforded, enter my protest against the sweeping ridicule it has pleased some writers to cast upon these doings here; since I saw none of those outrageously unpresentable women, or coarsely habited and ungainly men, so amusingly arrayed by some of my more observant predecessors. I can only account for it by referring to the rapid changes ever taking place here, and to which I have alluded in my introduction ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... dirty as his master was clean. I felt a certain envious reverence for this unprepossessing youth, seeing in him a much more efficient counterpart of myself; but how he and his little master ever managed to work their ungainly vessel was a miracle I never understood. Phlegmatically impervious to rain and cold, he steered the Johannes down the long grey reaches in the wake of the tug, while we and Bartels held snug gatherings down ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... become the servant of Jesus. It is said of the great John Hunt, that when a young man, he gave no promise of the talents he shewed in the work of the Ministry. We have spoken with one who knew him before his conversion, who made us smile as he described his gait and style of life. Yet this ungainly ploughboy became a man whom to know was to admire. It was in Christ's hands, though, he improved ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... blackberries and chestnuts and lilies and cardinal and other rare flowers. We used to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the "trainers," and he had a long, measured stride and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of the beak ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... humor. Once, indeed, he was touched to the quick by a piece of schoolboy pertness. After playing on the flute, he spoke with enthusiasm of music, as delightful in itself, and as a valuable accomplishment for a gentleman, whereupon a youngster, with a glance at his ungainly person, wished to know if he considered himself a gentleman. Poor Goldsmith, feelingly alive to the awkwardness of his appearance and the humility of his situation, winced at this unthinking sneer, which long rankled in ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... scarce begun to die away towards Shoreby, before fresh hoofs came echoing in their wake, and another deserter clattered down the road; this time a single rider, and, by his splendid armour, a man of high degree. Close after him there followed several baggage-waggons, fleeing at an ungainly canter, the drivers flailing at the horses as if for life. These must have run early in the day; but their cowardice was not to save them. For just before they came abreast of where the lads stood wondering, a man in hacked armour, and seemingly beside himself with fury, overtook the waggons, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fact a sickly narrow-faced young man with thick obstinate lips and a slight lameness that made his walk ungainly; but though no way resembling the ermine-cloaked king of the chapel at Pontesordo, he yet knew how to put on a certain majesty with his state wig and his orders. As for the newly married Duchess, who sat at the other end of the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... felt at home. Ignacio's mother, a lady with white hair, was always making stockings, and after dinner she recited the rosary with the maid; Alzugaray's sister, Celedonia, a tall ungainly lass, was ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... sent his rough boots flying, one after the other, across the room, and then, without more ado, curled up his ungainly figure on the settle, and before Humphrey could have believed it possible, he was snoring loudly, his arm thrown under his head, and his tawny red locks in a tangled mass, spread upon the softest cushion on which the cowboy ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... of the town, where gaudily painted door jambs and window frames and wonderfully prosperous gardens proclaim the immigrant from sunny Italy. Not infrequently an old warehouse, store, or church is transformed into an ungainly and evil-odored barracks, housing scores of men who do their own washing and cooking. Those who do not dwell in the cities are at work in construction camps—for the Italian has succeeded the Irishman as the knight of the pick and shovel. The great bulk of these swarthy, singing, ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... hour ago, Dr. Knott, "under plea of waiting cases, had hitched his ungainly, thick-set figure into ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... called a leather tongue. At the back of the boot is a small strap, which is used to fasten the ski heel-strap securely to the boot. Once fixed on the ski, the foot is so secure no fall can loosen it, and the only way to extricate the foot is to undo the three straps. Outside these huge ungainly hair stockings and strangely comfortable boots very thick gaiters are worn. It is very necessary to keep the feet and legs warm in such a cold land as Norway, where the mercury freezes oft-times in the thermometers, and snow six or seven feet deep covers the land sometimes ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and fine exquisiteness of suggestion, are disappointed in Burke: they even find him stiff and over-coloured. And there are blemishes of this kind. His banter is nearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said, and often unseasonable. As is usual with a man who has not true humour, Burke is also without true pathos. The thought of wrong or misery moved him less to pity for the victim than to anger against the cause. Again, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... two individuals of very ungainly aspect came there. Each had his arm upon the other's shoulder; both were ill-dressed. They said these words, 'Thou owest me nothing. I really owe thee. If we dispute in this way, here is the king who ruleth ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... more slowly, as if overcome by the effort which he had been forced to make, and seemed scarcely able to totter onward, stumbling at every stone. But with the change of direction, his life came back to him, and with a whisk of his tail and an ungainly flourish of his hind legs, he started off at a trot, turning neither to the right nor the left, but only intent ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... shaped, ill-proportioned; crooked &c (distorted) 243; hard featured, hard visaged; ill-favored, hard-favored, evil-favored; ill-looking; unprepossessing, unattractive, uninviting, unpleasing. graceless, inelegant; ungraceful, ungainly, uncouth, stiff; rugged, rough, gross, rude, awkward, clumsy, slouching, rickety; gawky; lumping, lumpish^; lumbering; hulky^, hulking; unwieldy. squalid, haggard; grim, grim faced, grim visaged; grisly, ghastly; ghost like, death like; cadaverous, grewsome^, gruesome. frightful, hideous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Henry might be good for, people thought that to call himself a lawyer was a mere laughing matter. An awkward, stooping, ungainly fellow, dressed roughly in leather breeches and yarn stockings, and not knowing even how to pronounce the king's English correctly, how could he ever succeed in a learned profession? As a specimen of his manner of speech at that time we are told that once, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... distance. "I really do not think, Kennedy, even by your own showing that you did the right thing by that girl. There was only one little thing which you appeared not to know, and I can supply it. Miss Saunderson was engaged to a poor ungainly devil of a student, and his name ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... family for supper in her shabby working clothes and presented her mother with her unopened pay envelope every Saturday night. She began this life at the age of fourteen after her Polish mother had beaten her because she had "elbowed" the sleeves and "cut out" the neck of her ungainly calico gown in a vain attempt to make it look "American." Her mother, who had so conscientiously punished a daughter who was "too crazy for clothes," could never of course comprehend how dangerous a combination is the girl with an unsatisfied love for finery and the opportunities ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... see that Julia carries a crimson face, and smiling look; although she stoops considerably, and her long arms and loping gait, make her appear to many, ungainly; she is ruddy as a rareripe peach, and smiles from her forehead and eyes, ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... I have said, against the bulwarks, where he lay like some horrid, ungainly sort of puppet; life-size, indeed, but how different from life's color or life's comeliness! In that position, I could easily have my way with him, and as the habit of tragical adventures had worn off almost all my terror ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... day!" cried Molly, "and here's my gift." She had in her arms a large and rather ungainly bundle, loosely wrapped in ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... were beardless, but one had the ghost of a moustache on his upper lip. He was dapper, clean and deferential. The other was short and somewhat ungainly in build, and his face showed evidence of the recent shaving off of a heavy beard. He had no graces, and evidently no thoughts but of service—service of any kind, so long as he recognized the authority demanding it. His clothes did not suit him; they ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... on the skins. The sketch with this will explain better than any description. The guanaco pelt being of a woolly nature makes it unnecessary to run it all the same way and the entire skins are utilized in spite of their ungainly shape, the flaps and tabs trimmed off filling the indentations around the outer edge of the robe. They make an excellent camp blanket as light and warm as the malodorous, hairy rabbit skin robe ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... older, was a gaunt, ungainly girl with red hair and irregular features. Her name was Nessy, and, having an instinctive sense of her dependent position, she was very humble and subservient and, as Tommy the Mate used to say, "as smooth as an old threepenny bit" to the ruling powers, which always meant my Aunt, ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... flounders in its rush. It is the ungainly roll of a rudderless ship. It stumbles. A second, and its mad rush ends. With a curious gasping sigh it ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... possible to recognise the equine form, do their duty in highly creditable style, and go along at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, under no stronger incentive then the voice of the yamstchik. Indeed, the capabilities of these lean, slouching, ungainly quadrupeds are often astounding when they are under the guidance of a man who knows how to drive them. Though such a man commonly carries a little harmless whip, he rarely uses it except by waving ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... lie there, and many a sailor. It would seem unlikely that any living thing should seek rest in such a place, or find it. Nevertheless, frail and delicate flowers bloom there, flowers of both the land and the sea; heavy, ungainly seals disport in the swelling waves, and find grateful retreats back in the inmost bores of its storm-lashed caverns; while in many a chink and hollow of the highest crags, not visible from beneath, a great variety of waterfowl make homes and ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... An ungainly shape floundered out of the churned water, lumbered over the shale of the beach, its supple neck outstretched, its horned nose down for a gore-threatening charge. Ross had not realized that the salkars could operate out of what he thought was their natural ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... were a motley crew, armed with every conceivable sort of knife or war club, but sturdy fellows, ready and willing enough to give a good account of themselves. Watkins was forward, swallowed up in the smother of mist, but Schmitt held a place next me, a huge, ungainly figure in the dull light. So still it was I began to doubt having heard the voice at all—could it have been imagination? But no; that was impossible, for the sound had reached all of us alike. Somewhere out yonder, that boat was creeping along silently, ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... was ready to receive us, taking our two black friends, Aboh to act as interpreter, we carried with us the leopard skin, some venison, and three strings of beads of various colours. His majesty was a tall, ungainly looking man, with as hideous a countenance as can well be imagined. His appearance was not improved by the glare of the torchlight and the terror under which he was suffering. Having presented the leopard skin and venison, Charley, ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... ripe Granada wine; and now behold me ambling over the Vega, accoutred in a gay Andalusian jacket, a sash woven by Mateo Ximenes, and one of those bandboxy sombreros, which I at first thought so ungainly, but now consider ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... curtain was drawn from the long canvas Patricia's eyes were on the faces of those in whose impressions she was most interested, and they gave her great satisfaction. Mrs. Bingham's eyes were wide and startled as those of the small hen who discovers that her ungainly child ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... wrinkled like a new-born child; it had the funniest feet, or hands, or flippers, with which it tried to walk, but only tumbled and flopped about. In the water it was graceful enough, but on dry land so ungainly and ridiculous that the vast concourse of Bears was thrown into fits ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... portraits of the Scroopes for many generations past, some in armour, some in their robes of state, ladies with stiff bodices and high head-dresses, not beauties by Lely or warriors and statesmen by Kneller, but wooden, stiff, ungainly, hideous figures, by artists whose works had, unfortunately, been more enduring than their names. He was pacing up and down the room with a candle in his hand, trying to realize to himself what life at Scroope might be with a wife of his aunt's choosing, and his aunt to keep the house ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... tall, hollow-chested man, with a dark, sallow face and an ungainly figure. There were suggestions of both ill-health and wretchedness in his appearance, and his manner was awkward and embarrassed. Two human beings more utterly unlike each other than himself and the man who held his hand could not possibly have been found. It was Baird who held his hand, not he ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... giants, however, was not at first very satisfactory, as although plenty of bone was obtained, many were most ungainly in appearance and ill-shaped animals that had very little about them to attract attention. Captain Graham, however, stuck to his work, and very soon the specimens that he brought forward began to show a fixity of type both in head and in general ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... attendance upon the court, he frequently took part in the masques performed before it. Like the King, he was fully equipped for hunting; but greater contrast could not have been found than between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the profound salutations of the assemblage, his eye ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... much effort, forced, ungainly, To entice the rugged door To yield up its wondrous lore, With a sudden burst of thunder All its frame is dashed asunder; The gulfy silence, lightning-fleet, Shooteth hellward at thy feet. Take thou heed lest evil terror Snare thee in a downward error, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... other friend at Bishopsgate Street—the dog of the monastery. It was a half-bred bloodhound, and nobody seemed to know whence he came and why he was there. He was a huge, ungainly, and most forbidding creature, and partly for that reason, but chiefly because it was against rule to fix the affections on earthly things, the brothers rarely caressed him. Unnoticed and unheeded, he slept in the ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... of the river, rows of brilliant red flamingos were standing in the shallow water, fishing, and here and there a pelican with his ungainly beak. Our Chinese crew were having their meal of rice when we walked forward, and the national chopsticks were hard at work. We talked to several of them. They could all speak a little ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... portrait painter until eighteen centuries after Christ, our idea about the Saviour's personal appearance is all guess work. Still, tradition tells us that He was the most infinitely beautiful being that ever walked our small earth. If His features had been rugged, and His gait had been ungainly, that would not have hindered Him from being attractive. Many men you have known and loved have had few charms of physiognomy. Wilberforce was not attractive in face. Socrates was repulsive. Suwarrow, the great Russian hero, looked almost an imbecile. And some whom you have known, and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... apparition. The cattle which were lying in the yard started from under the horses' feet, and stood staring in round-eyed surprise. The barn was half full of hay, and in the dry pungent odour Mike and Lady Edith rested an hour. Sometimes a bullock filled the doorway with ungainly form and steaming nostrils; sometimes the lips of the lovers met. In about half an hour the groom returned with the news that the fog was lifting, and discovering a cart-track, they followed it over the hills for ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... the woodsman, in the clearing stood, Hemmed by the solemn forest stretching round; Stalwart, ungainly, honest-eyed and rude, The genius of that solitude profound. He clove the way that future millions trod, He passed, unmoved by worldly fear or pelf; In all his lusty toil he found not God, Though in the ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... taste, of environment and experience, not these alone make up the sum of their unlikeness. You had only to look from the fresh simplicity of white muslin blouse and olive-coloured cloth in the one case, to the ungainly expensiveness of the black silk gown of the married woman, in order to get from the first a sense of dainty morning freshness, and from Mrs. Fox-Moore not alone a lugubrious memento mori sort of impression, but that more disquieting reminder of the ugly and over-elaborate thing ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... about was not calculated to prepossess one in favor of the country. Somehow, it seemed to the detective that Black Hollow was half a century behind the age. Mrs. Bragg was a shy, ungainly female, ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door— Bird or beast upon the sculptured ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... quiet as he led them through the wood, strange ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in motion. A pinafore, which Joan had worn at breakfast, was served to them for an indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at it languidly for some seconds. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the church edifices were built without any thought of the possibility of such comfortable furniture, they had to be adapted as best they might to the ungainly and unsightly great stoves which were usually placed in the central aisle of the building. From these cast-iron monsters, there extended to the nearest windows and projected through them, hideous stove-pipes that too often spread, from every leaky and ill-fastened joint, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... inches in height and built in proportion, he was a fine figure of a man. Despite his weight and bulk, there was nothing ungainly or awkward about him. If he had not the grace of an Apollo, he had what was better—the mighty thews and sinews of a twentieth century Hercules. His massive chest and broad shoulders were capped by a leonine head, from which looked the imperious eyes of a born ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... his mind at his square ungainly house, full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. 'I think, do you know, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... a boy's throat and in the same instant the lifting cry of a younger child. Clear in the door-space of the tent, behind them, two little figures clung together in the opening—and just at one side, close to the children, a dark, ungainly shape! Skag sprang three jumps toward the opposite side, dropped on one knee and fired. The shape bounced up, ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... garment, or an ungainly manner, will sometimes outweigh the acquirements of the finest scholar; and the cause of religion has suffered more, from the absence of the softer graces, in its clerical representations, than from all the logic of its adversaries. A laugh is more effectual to subvert ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... feeding moose and scan the lay of the land, calculating his chances of escape. The banks are high,—perhaps one hundred and fifty feet—and sheer, but there are two gullies which afford runway to the bench above. What an ungainly creature he looks as we draw in nearer, all legs and clumsy head,—a regular grasshopper on stilts! He reminds me of nothing so much as those animals we make for the baby by sticking four matches into a sweet biscuit. And now at last ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... How they must have puzzled my correspondent!—My letters are generally charged as double at the Post office, from their inveterate clumsiness of foldure. So you must not take it disrespectful to your self if I send you such ungainly scraps. I think I lose L100 a year at the India House, owing solely to my want of neatness in making up Accounts. How I puzzle 'em out at last is the wonder. I have to do ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... down the stairs with boyish impetuosity, looking so fine that Uncle Ith hardly knew him. It was difficult to realize that the ungainly, ignorant boy of a few years back, had become this nice-looking, graceful young gentleman. Thus readily does the rough diamond of a good heart and brain, under the guiding hands of Ambition and Love, take its polish from contact with the world and ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... flowers. We used to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the "trainers," and he had a long, measured stride and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... said, and in silence led the way to a pleached alley out of sight of the windows. There they stood still. It was a strange meeting of two who had not seen each other for fourteen years, when the one was a tall, ungainly youth, the other well-nigh a child. And now Giles was a fine, soldierly man in the prime of life, with a short, curled beard, and powerful, alert bearing, and Aldonza, though the first flower of her youth had gone by, yet, having lived a sheltered and ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of feathers is so comical as a crow baby, with its awkward bows and ungainly hops, its tottering steps on the fence and its mincing, tight-boot sort of gait on the ground, its eager fluttering when it has hopes of food, and its loud and ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... followed them; for it seemed as if the living images of night and day were walking side by side over the land. Fausch's clothes were dark and coarse, such as he always wore. They hung loose and heavy about his ungainly form, his hands were blackened, and his large head, which was set upon his broad shoulders as if thrust forward to meet some obstacle, matched them in color; his thick curly hair was deep black, and his face looked as if tanned by the hot sun of some foreign land. Beside him ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... comfort him. He changed not his mood for all that; but said: 'This is ill for thee also; for thou wilt be worser without me than with me in these lands.' Even so I deemed, and withal I was sorry for him, for though he were uncouth and ungainly, he was no ill man. So against my will I tumbled into the samelike mood as his, and we both fared along drearily. But about sunset, as we came round a corner of the cliffs of those mountains, or ever we were ware we ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... very hungry, and flock around a small colt, manifesting their delight by rubbing it with their noses, licking it with their tongues, kicking up their heels, and making a variety of other grotesque demonstrations of affection, while the poor little colt, perfectly unconscious of the cause of these ungainly caresses, stood trembling with fear, but unable to make his escape from the compact circle of his mulish admirers. Horses and asses are also used as bell animals, and the mules soon become accustomed ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... loping up with elbows flapping loosely, as was his ungainly habit. His grin was wide and golden as of yore, his hat at the same angle over ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... At length the tall, ungainly figure and ungracious visage of Ebenezer presented themselves. The upper part of his form, notwithstanding the season required no such defence, was shrouded in a large great-coat, belted over his under habiliments, and crested with ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... then made a sudden movement. With two or three motions of hands and knees she drew herself a few steps back to one of the exclusive bunches of balsams, and began with her two hands to root it up. Actually she was grubbing, might and main, at the ungainly stalks of the balsams, pulling them up as fast as she could and flinging them aside, careless where. Daisy came to help with her trowel, and together they worked, amicably enough but without a word, till ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... eyes whose oblique glance imparts an air of suspicion to the whole assembly, will suggest merely a notion of their grotesqueness. By and by we shall grow used to the deformities, and recognize the primitive truthfulness of attitude and expression, the spirit which animates these ungainly forms and faces, until at length we look at the painter with the eyes of his contemporaries, and judge him by the standards of his own time, on which his claims rest. Then we shall admire him. The Venetians ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... early in 1834 was Charles Sumner, then a tall, slim, ungainly young man, twenty-three years of age, who was a student at law in Boston, but not admitted to practice. He was introduced by his friend, Mr. Justice Story, to Chief Justice Marshall and Justices Thompson, Duval, and McLean, and was ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... are the largest of all the petrels, and measure about seven feet from tip to tip when on the wing. The colour ranges through various shades from almost pure white to a dark greyish-brown; some even appearing almost black. Very large and ungainly when on the ground, they become most graceful when in the air, and soar about without the slightest effort even on the stormiest days. I have seen them flying into a forty-mile wind with absolute ease, never moving a wing, but occasionally adjusting their balance. They ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... it was possible that she might develop into a pretty girl; at the present moment she despised appearances, and certainly failed to make the best of her good points. Now, as she sat by the piano-stool, with shoulders hunched up and head poked forward, she looked so awkward and ungainly that Ruth's tried nerves ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to him all smiles, and Toby returned her welcome something sheepishly. He cut a quaint figure with his broad, ungainly shoulders supporting his rather pumpkin face. Then his arms were a little too long and terminated ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... all the Fians looked up and beheld upon the hillside a huge man, looking like some Fomorian marauder, black-visaged and ugly, with a sour countenance and ungainly limbs. On his back hung a dingy black shield, on his misshapen left thigh he wore a sharp broad-bladed sword; projecting over his shoulder were two long lances with broad rusty heads. He wore garments that looked as if they had been buried ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. I have it here in a corner of my library. I keep it hid behind a curtain,—it is such a rough, ungainly thing. Yet there are about it touches, grand sweeps of outline, that show a master's hand. Sometimes,—to-night, for instance,—the curtain is accidentally drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... chin. The Borneo Malay women are as plain as the men, although at Sincapore, Mauritius, and the Sooloos, they are well favoured; and they wind their serang, or robe, so tight round their bodies, that they walk in a very constrained and ungainly fashion. Many of these tribes are intermixed with the natives of the Celebes, such as the inhabitants ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... from displaying a figure so beautiful, with no adornment except its native gracefulness; but how great must have been the chagrin of the Princesses, of many of the Court ladies, indeed, of all in any way ungainly or deformed, when called to exhibit themselves by the side of a bewitching person like hers, unaided by the whalebone and horse-hair paddings with which they had hitherto been made up, and which placed the best form on a level with the worst? The prudes ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Borinage coal field exceeds twenty million tons a year. Its ungainly features of shafts, chimneys, and mounds of debris are relieved in places by woodlands, an appearance of a hilly country is presented where the pit mounds have been planted with fir trees. Apart from its mining aspect, Mons is a city of historic importance. It contains a Gothic cathedral and town ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... was many a one that the world would bow down to as a model, whose intrinsic worth was poor compared to unoffending Jan's. Lady Verner would tell Jan he was undutiful. Jan tried to be as dutiful to her as ever he could; but he could not change his ungainly person, his awkward manner. As well try to ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... however, was the great attraction of Nepaug to Flint, for in one of its coves lay an ungainly boat of which he was the happy owner. She was a bargain, and, like most bargains, had proved a dear purchase. True, the hull had cost only five dollars and the sails ten; but she yawed so badly that a new rudder had become a necessity, and that ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... again and again looked round upon my fellow-prisoners, and felt my anger rise, and choked upon tears, to behold them thus parodied. The more part, as I have said, were peasants; somewhat bettered perhaps by the drill-sergeant, but for all that ungainly, loutish fellows, with no more than a mere barrack-room smartness of address: indeed, you could have seen our army nowhere more discreditably represented than in this Castle of Edinburgh. And I used to see myself in fancy, and blush. It seemed that my more elegant carriage ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... funereal moss adhering to them,—and the palmetto, shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by vines or branches, with a disproportionately small cap of leaves at the summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and coat-of-arms to the State. Besides these, are the pine, the red and white oak, the cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash. The soil is luxuriant with an undergrowth of impenetrable vines. These interlacing the trees, supported also by shrubs, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Prioress there followed a nun, tall also, but ungainly. Her short-sighted eyes peered shiftily to right and left; her long nose went on before, scenting possible scandal and wrong-doing; her weak lips let loose a ready smile, insinuating, crafty, apologetic. She walked with ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... insipid, pedantic, useless, and directly opposite to the real knowledge and practice of the world.' Insomuch that 'a gentleman,' says another excellent writer, 'cannot easily bring himself to like so austere and ungainly a form: so greatly is it changed from what was once the delight of the finest gentlemen of antiquity, and their recreation after the hurry of public affairs! From this condition it cannot be recovered but by uniting ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... were standing about in crowds in the queerest and most ungainly attitudes in the world, croaking and barking, according to their usual wont, at the unexpected visitors who had so unceremoniously come to disturb the quietude of their island home. They looked excessively funny, waddling about awkwardly on their short legs and flapping their wings ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... large farm with immense fields, the ponderous and ungainly steam, tackle gives one a sensation of intrusion. Such a field can be found on a farm between Evesham and Alcester; it contains 300 acres. The occupier, speaking of it, mentioned that it was all wheat that year except ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... much-knotted piece of string, and he seemed to possess the power of moving any joint in his body independently of the rest. He cracked his fingers persistently when he talked after a fashion that would have been intolerable in anyone but Capper. His hands were always in some ungainly attitude, and yet they were wonderful hands, strong and sensitive, the colour of ivory. His eyes were small and green, sharp as the eyes of a lizard. They seemed to take in everything ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... same house of representatives were John A. McClernand, James Shields, William A. Richardson, and other men who rose to national distinction. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig representative from Sangamon County, was already well known for his ungainly length of body, for his habit of reasoning in parables which were now scriptural and now vulgar to the point of obscenity, and for a quaint and rare honesty. He was four years older than the new ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... strive to appear easy and natural. Nothing is more distressing to a sensitive person, or more ridiculous to one gifted with refinement, than to see a lady laboring under the consciousness of a fine gown; or a gentleman who is stiff, awkward and ungainly ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... the grim picture, a mere cluster of rude, unpainted houses, poorly erected shacks, grimy tents flapping in the never ceasing wind swirling across the treeless waste, the ugly red station, the rough cow-pens filled with lowing cattle, the huge, ungainly stores, their false fronts decorated by amateur wielders of the paint brush, and the garish dens of vice tucked in everywhere. The pendulum of life never ceased swinging. Society was mixed; no man cared who his neighbor was, or dared ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... with those bad eyes; of too much girth, you might have said, to be nimble, yet somehow suggesting to the swift intuition of youth, as Rodriguez looked at him standing upon his door-step, the spirit and shape of a spider, who despite her ungainly build is agile ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... suffered cruelly in the heat; mopped her face without shame between her sentences; and, according to Frank Olliver, lived chiefly on lime-squash, and a limitless admiration for her missionary husband,—a large, ungainly man, with the manners of a shy schoolboy, and the wrapt gaze of a seer; a man who, in an age of fanaticism, would have walked smiling to the rack. As it was, he walked with no less equanimity through the pestilential ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... consented to let his little shanty and come, with good Molly his wife, to look after the lad's comfort, for they had no child, and Archie was nearer to them than any living being. Good Molly was of rough and ungainly exterior, but within, the very impersonation of tenderness and love, and this happy and blessed temperament had gained for her so flattering an appellation wherever she was known. Little children would gather around her in the street and hold ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... with the leech, a man of middle height, whose shrewd and well-formed head, bald but for a little hair at the sides, was set on a somewhat ungainly body. His sharp eyes looked hither and thither, and there was something jerky in his quick movements; still, their grave decisiveness made up for the lack of grace. He paid no heed to the bystanders, but ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the beacon was so far advanced and secured that it was deemed capable of withstanding any gale that might blow. As yet it was a great ungainly pile of logs, iron stanchions, and bracing-chains, without anything that could afford shelter to man from winds or waves, but with a platform laid from its cross-beams at a considerable height above ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... could do was to swing her round, so as to place her between his adversary and himself. As it proved, it was the very best thing that he could have done. The rough, half-blinded and maddened by the blows which he had received, struck out with all his ungainly strength, just as his partner's head swung round in front of him. There was a noise like that of a stone hitting a wall, a deep groan, her grasp relaxed, and she dropped a dead weight upon the pavement, while the Admiral sprang back and raised his stick once more, ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you, Bob, I say," came from Susan Lanham, and poor, ungainly Bob blushed to his hair to find himself the hero of ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... walls and the window. He turned again to the window, and threw it open. The cool night air came in refreshingly. In the distance, the dark shapes of the mountains stood out forbiddingly in the moonlight. Millions of stars winked and twinkled. Gaunt cacti reared their ungainly shapes—beautiful because of their ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... indescribably filthy; yet the place was laid out with some pretension to regularity, being divided up into several wide streets, while in the centre of the town there was a wide, open space, or square, one side of which was occupied by a hideous and ungainly idol of gigantic proportions, with a long sacrificial altar at its feet, while on the other three sides stood dwellings of such pretentious character that they could only belong to the chief dignitaries of ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... motley crowd that followed them, found no one on any road round about the court save Johan, the player's boy, riding in most ungainly fashion on Mistress Judith's nag in the direction of the Ogilvie woods. He had seen naught, he had heard naught, of any fugitive highwayman. He shivered and crossed himself when the Black Devil's name was mentioned. He even begged one of the guards to mount ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... approach of an acquaintance afar off, and the wise, slow smile gleamed about his mouth as he drew near. "How do you do?" was sometimes his greeting; but more often, "Good-bye!" or "Good-night!"—an original and more sensible greeting. Though ungainly in formation, he was not ungraceful in bearing and action; there was a fitness and harmony in his manifestations even on the physical plan. On the lecture platform he stood erect and unadorned, his hands hanging folded in front, save when he changed the leaf of his manuscript, or emphasized ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... instinctively reject as superstitious does not date from what they would regard as the ages of superstition. There really are bad pictures but they are not barbaric pictures; they are florid pictures in the last faded realism of the Renascence. There really is stiff and ungainly decoration, but it is not the harsh or ascetic decoration of a Spanish cloister; it is much more like the pompous yet frivolous decorations of a Parisian hotel. In short, in so far as the shrine has really been defaced it has not been defaced by the Dark Ages, but rather if anything ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... not be able to tell his rock from any other. The heavy body, its ungainly movement and thin bones would explain everything. Besides, there was no motive for killing the Martian and what penalty could there be? It ...
— Martians Never Die • Lucius Daniel
... doesn't live who's heard me whimper," Gordon began loudly; but his angry protest trailed into silence. There was no comfort, no redress, to be obtained from that absorbed, ungainly figure. He slipped out of the baggy trousers, the worsted slippers, and, extending himself on ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... cogency of logical reason. Those who insist on charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and fine exquisiteness of suggestion, are disappointed in Burke: they even find him stiff and over-coloured. And there are blemishes of this kind. His banter is nearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said, and often unseasonable. As is usual with a man who has not true humour, Burke is also without true pathos. The thought of wrong or misery moved him less to pity for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... especially when he lay asleep, he had a majestic and graceful appearance; for he was tall, but not slender. His grey looks became him well, and he had a full neck. But his knees were feeble, and failed him in walking, so that his gait was ungainly, both when he assumed state, and when he was taking diversion. He was outrageous in his laughter, and still more so in his wrath, for then he foamed at the mouth, and discharged from his nostrils. He also stammered in his speech, and had a tremulous motion (323) of the ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... when Marshall was still a practicing attorney. An old farmer who was involved in a lawsuit came to Richmond to attend its trial. "Who is the best lawyer in Richmond?" he asked of his host, the innkeeper of the Eagle tavern. The latter pointed to a tall, ungainly, bareheaded man who had just passed, eating cherries from his hat and exchanging jests with other loiterers like himself. "That is he," said the innkeeper; "John Marshall is his name." But the old countryman, who had a hundred dollars in his pocket, proposed to spend it on something ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... carefully and calculatingly up at the sky and across the square in the direction she meant to take, moved back again and picked up her basket, set it firmly on her arm, stepped out and commenced to hobble at an ungainly cumbersome trot across the square. She was no more than half-way across when the shriek of another shell was heard approaching. She stopped and cast a terrified glance about her, dumped the basket down on the cobbles, ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... head inside the fishbowl helmet of his spacesuit and saw, over his right shoulder, the figure of Hector—lank and ungainly even with the bulky suit. For a moment, Odal puzzled over the weapon to be used. Then Hector bent down, picked up a loose stone, straightened, and tossed it softly past Odal's head. The Kerak major watched it sail by and off into the darkness of ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... descended like lightning, and the harpoon shot perpendicularly into the pool with the speed of an arrow. What river-fiend answered to the summons? In an instant an enormous pair of open jaws appeared, followed by the ungainly head and form of the furious hippopotamus, who, springing half out of the water, lashed the river into foam, and, disdaining the concealment of the deep pool, charged straight up the violent rapids. With extraordinary power he breasted the descending ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... Centre, and Tompkins Markets. With the exception of Tompkins Market, they are, as far as the houses are concerned, unmitigated nuisances to the city. They are in the last stages of dilapidation, and from without present the most ungainly spectacles to be witnessed in New York. The streets around them are always dirty and crowded, and in the hot days of the summer the air is loaded with foul ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... turned out to be the auctioneer's brother) noticed the wistful look in my eye, and observed that that was a very remarkable horse to be going at such a price; and added that the saddle alone was worth the money. It was a Spanish saddle, with ponderous 'tapidaros', and furnished with the ungainly sole-leather covering with the unspellable name. I said I had half a notion to bid. Then this keen-eyed person appeared to me to be "taking my measure"; but I dismissed the suspicion when he spoke, for his manner was full of guileless candor and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not only the head of the Roman religion, but one who might actually have claimed something like divine worship, had he cared to do so. Though the fantastic pretensions of Caligula had brought some contempt [215] on that claim, which had become almost a jest under the ungainly Claudius, yet, from Augustus downwards, a vague divinity had seemed to surround the Caesars even in this life; and the peculiar character of Aurelius, at once a ceremonious polytheist never forgetful of his pontifical calling, and a philosopher whose mystic speculation encircled him with a sort of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... by his word, and James was forced to go. When he showed the photograph, Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace looked at it with a curious expression. It was the work of a country photographer, awkward and ungainly, with the head stiffly poised, and the eyes hard and fixed; the general impression was ungraceful and devoid of charm, Mrs. Wallace noticed the country ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... of Capulet's house, and Romeo in his pilgrim's dress had entered with Mercutio and his other friends. The band, such as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began. Through the crowd of ungainly, shabbily-dressed actors, Sibyl Vane moved like a creature from a finer world. Her body swayed, while she danced, as a plant sways in the water. The curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... with a face that told no tales, stepped into a hansom with a pretty air of being overruled by a will stronger than her own, and only insisted on keeping up her ungainly sized parasol because "the sun in one's ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... look on her, 40 The very breath of life enjoy; And two lovers, love's curse under Kept asunder, Will I leave to grieve apart, And achieve by this my art 45 Things at which you'll gaze in wonder. For a lady most ungainly For a halfpenny at night Will I cause without a light To look nor ill nor well too plainly. 50 To another loveliest, As star in heaven Shall this destiny be given That of noblest men and best None against her love protest. 55 And the better to display ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... unskilled in the matter of driving; and so it came about that old Jack was so confused at the start that he made a most awkward and wretched appearance in his effort to get off, being all "mixed up," as the saying is,—so much so that the crowd roared at his ungainly efforts, and his flying rivals were twenty rods away before he even got started. But at last he got his huge body in a straight line, and, leaving his miserable shuffle, squared away to his work, and, with ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... came down slowly in her most ungainly manner, believing herself in too great disgrace to be noticed by anybody, and she was quite surprised and comforted to be greeted by her brothers and ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to this were the skin and horns of several buffaloes. In other places there were more horns, and heads, and hides of bears of various kinds, as well as of deer, and, conspicuous above the entrance, hung the ungainly skull and ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... nests, of which the last was half as large as the others, produced no less than a thousand eggs; eight hundred were deposited in the larger nests and two or three hundred in the smaller. Truly a fine family, but a thought ungainly, were it not that only a few of its members ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... black dress-coat, and a cheap brown wig, which made no pretense of being his own natural hair. Short black trousers clung like attached old servants round his wizen legs; and rusty black gaiters hid all they could of his knobbed, ungainly feet. Black crape added its mite to the decayed and dingy wretchedness of his old beaver hat; black mohair in the obsolete form of a stock drearily encircled his neck and rose as high as his haggard jaws. The one morsel of color ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... say the best-mathematicians in England of his day, and was likewise deeply skilled in other branches of science and philosophy. The Greek language was as familiar to him as the English; he was said to know every line of Homer by heart. In public life, on the contrary, he was shy, ungainly, and embarrassed. From his first onset in Parliament, he took part with vehemence against the administration of Sir Robert Walpole." Bishop Secker says, that Lord Stanhope "spoke a precomposed speech, which he held in his hand, with great tremblings and agitations, and hesitated frequently ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the moment. There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. And meanwhile the doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the too facile ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Markheim's eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... every slope graze herds of winter-worn gun-horses and transport mules. The new grass has gone to the heads of the latter and they make continuous exhibitions of themselves, gambolling about like ungainly lambkins and roaring with unholy laughter. Summer has come, and my groom and countryman has started to whistle again, sure sign that Winter is over, for it is only during the Summer that he reconciles himself to the War. War, he admits, serves very well as a light ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... time, two individuals of very ungainly aspect came there. Each had his arm upon the other's shoulder; both were ill-dressed. They said these words, 'Thou owest me nothing. I really owe thee. If we dispute in this way, here is the king who ruleth individuals. I say truly, thou owest me nothing! Thou speakest ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... a raw, ungainly, but powerful looking youth from Kintail was seen staring about, as the Mackenzies were starting to meet the enemy, in an apparently idiotic manner, as if looking for something. He ultimately came ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... waiting to change horses one had time to wonder how the people living there managed to be such a stolid, dirty, thriftless-looking set. Mountaineers should be intelligent, active, and hardy; but these men were a most ungainly crew, and Lavinia's ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... all charmed with the splendid country, and looked with never-failing delight on its fertile plains, its numerous hills, and majestic mountains. In some of the passes we saw bramble-berries growing; and the many other flowers, though of great beauty, did not remind us of youth and of home like the ungainly thorny bramble-bushes. We were a week in crossing the highlands in a northerly direction; then we descended into the Upper Shire Valley, which is nearly 1200 feet above the level of the sea. This valley is wonderfully ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... him greeting and a word of condolence. For that time only he passed them by, as if they had been wooden images. His spirit had been strained to its uttermost, and would bear no more. He made his way home with an ungainly, swift gait,—home to the dear bedside,—down upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... concierge, who, in all German houses, attends at the common door, and who, in this case, lived in a couple of musty little closets opening into the lower hall, and eked out his official salary by cobbling shoes. He was an odd, grotesque humorist, of most ungainly exterior, black haired and bearded, with a squint, a squab nose, and a short but very powerful figure. Dirty he was beyond belief, and he was abominably fragrant of vile tobacco. For my part, I could not endure this fellow; but Paton, who had much more of what he called human nature in him than ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... through the crouching form. He seemed to awake, his mind returning as it were from a far distance. He turned his head, and Stella saw that he was not blind. For his eyes took her in, for the moment appraised her. Then with ungainly, ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... at a premium; scowls would be valued according to their blackness and depth; a ghastly grin would be desirable; while a general cadaverousness might be utilized as suggesting to drunkards the probable end of their career. The gods of Olympus laughed loudly when the swart, ungainly Vulcan for once replaced Hebe as their cup-bearer; but it would be no joke for the young idlers of Melbourne to find stern, grim men frowning over the counters where once they were received with "nods and becks ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... toes. She turned her face, which was overshadowed by a hood, to look at Shere Ali as he rode by. He saw the heavy stud of silver and enamel in her nostril, the withered brown face. He turned and looked at her, as she walked flat-footed and ungainly, her pyjamas of pink cotton showing beneath her cloak. He had no part or lot with any of these people of the East. The face of Violet Oliver shone before his eyes. There was his mate. He recalled the exquisite daintiness of her appearance, her ruffles of lace, ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... philosophy which I glean from the top of a London motor-bus. From my point of vantage I look down upon pedestrian humanity as a Superman might look down upon it. It seems to consist of a vast multitude of ignorant folk who are predestined to immediate annihilation. As the ungainly machine on which I am seated rushes down the street, it seems admirably adapted for its mission of destruction. The barricade in front of me, devoted to the praise of BOVRIL, is just high enough to prevent my seeing what actually happens, but it gives a bloodcurdling ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... mistaken. If she had but broken up the ice, she would have found that the water below was not shallow. The duke, in fact, like many other Englishmen, though he did not like the trouble of showing forth, and had an ungainly manner, was a man who had read a good deal, possessed a sound head and an honourable mind, though he did not know what it was to love anybody, to care much for anything, and was at once perfectly sated and yet perfectly contented; for apathy ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... presented no feminine charms to view; and her short coarse petticoat showed her red legs nearly to the knee; for, except on Sundays, she knew not the use of shoes and stockings. But though Kate was ungainly and ugly, she was useful, and grateful—very fond of the whole family, and particularly attached to the two young ladies, in whose behalf she doubtless performed many a service, acceptable enough to them, but of which, had she known of them, the widow would ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... with the habits of the immense beasts they were now to kill. Their horses, too, were as unused to the sight of a buffalo as their riders, and in consequence were badly frightened at the first sight of the ungainly animals. The men, of course, used their rifles, which in those days were altogether too cumbersome ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... and charming plant, which sends up numbers of stems from the bottom in place of continually growing upward and thus becoming ungainly; it bears a profusion of elegantly curled, tasseled, and variegated foliage, very catching to the eye, and unlike any of its predecessors. The other, P. dumosum, is of similar habit, the foliage being crested and fringed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... were ever afterward firm friends. All of these people loved Andersen, not because of his fame, but because of the stories which had brought him fame, and because he was distinctly lovable in spite of his oddity; for Andersen was still odd. He was ugly and ungainly, and, owing to his fondness for decoration, often dressed in the most peculiar fashion. Then, too, he was so childishly vain of the fame which had come to him that he was at any time quite likely to stop in a crowded street and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the river, with elms and maples and clumps of lilac bushes about it, was almost bare of the cheerful white paint that had once adorned it, and the green blinds were faded and broken; the barns never had been painted, and were huddled close to the house, hiding its fine Colonial lines, black, ungainly, and half fallen to pieces; all kinds of farm implements, rusty from age and neglect, were scattered about, and two dogs and several cats lay on the kitchen porch amidst the general litter of milk-pails, half-broken chairs, and rush mats. There was no one in sight as the two ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... and we were gliding towards the trenches. At 1200 feet we switched on, flattened out, and looked for movement below. There was no infantry advance at the moment, but below Courcelette what seemed to be two ungainly masses of black slime were slithering over the ground. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. One of them actually crawled among the scrap-heaps that fringed the ruins of the village. Only then did the thought that they might be Tanks ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... ultimately turn up. The fact was, I meant to follow the policy of the Aberdeen government when starving to death one of the bravest armies that ever faced a foe. Instead of expanding plains and undulating hills, such as Smooth had pictures to his mind in his boyhood, I found the seat of war an ungainly mud-puddle, with ramparts of savage-looking citizens menacing each other from its opposite banks. Between these banks the amusement of war was every now and then kept up with doubtful results. That something more than ordinary was to pay I felt assumed by the ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... cat, to extract from him some hint as to what he should do. This absorption seemed to ignore completely the other occupants of the room, of whom he was the central, commanding figure. The head nurse held the lamp carelessly, resting her hand over one hip thrown out, her figure drooping into an ungainly pose. She gazed at the surgeon steadily, as if puzzled at his intense preoccupation over the common case of a man "shot in a row." Her eyes travelled over the surgeon's neat-fitting evening dress, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... halls Costigan stalked to a certain storage room, where with all due precaution he donned his own suit of Triplanetary armor. Making an ungainly bundle of the other Solarian equipment stored there, he dragged it along behind him as he clanked back toward his prison, until he neared the dock at which was moored the Nevian space-speedster which he was determined to take. Here, he knew, was the ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... had intimated, James, wearied by several hours in the saddle, for it was his pleasure to hunt or horseback in Waltham forest and in other royal chases, had retired early to his bed chamber. He had eaten heartily, for despite his ungainly person the First of the Stuarts was a famous trenchman. Freed from his quilted clothes and mellow with strong wine, he admitted to his presence two gentlemen ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... very great man; but Squire Mountmeadow, scarcely deigning to avail himself of their proffered assistance, and pausing on each step, looking around him with his long, lean, solemn visage, finally reached terra firma in safety, and slowly stretched his tall, ungainly figure. It was at this moment that Dr. Masham's servant approached him, and informed his worship that his master was at the inn, and would be happy to see him. The countenance of the great Mountmeadow relaxed at the mention of the name of ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... inhabit it. The extraordinary clearness of the water there is particularly favourable for the inspection of these fairy bowers. One day I determined to try for a Jew-fish, just to see how such a huge, ungainly monster would act. Anchoring, we threw the bait over, and in a short time I pulled in a rock cod of nearly 7 lbs. weight. My boatman coolly threw the still hooked fish overboard again, telling me it would be excellent bait ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... penetrating. The vulgar satirist is such a one as Hazlitt somewhere mentioned who called Wordsworth a dunce. Hazlitt was quite incapable of such a solecism. He knew, nobody better, that a telling caricature must be a good likeness. If he darkens the shades, and here and there exaggerates an ungainly feature, we still know that the shade exists and that the feature is not symmetrical. De Quincey reports the saying of some admiring friend of Hazlitt, who confessed to a shudder whenever Hazlitt ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... no less a person than the Son of Mr. Pompey Taylor. But the T. Tallman Taylor, whose whole appearance was pronounced unexceptionable by the New York belles, from the points of his boots to the cut of his moustaches, was a very different individual from the good-looking, but awkward, ungainly youth, introduced to the reader two or three years since, at Wyllys-Roof. He had, in the mean time, learned how to stand, how to sit, how to walk, how to talk in a drawing-room. He had learned what to do with his cane and his hat, how to manage his pocket-handkerchief ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... and interest them. The constant plash of falling fruit showed that birds were feeding overhead. Sometimes a flock of parrots or bright blue chatterers swept from tree to tree, or atrogon swooped at a falling bunch of fruit and caught it ere it reached the water; while ungainly toucans plumped clumsily down upon the branches, and sat, in striking contrast, beside the lovely pompadours, with their claret-coloured plumage and ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Those years were not altogether happy ones, for Johnson's huge ungainly figure, and shabby, patched clothes were matters for laughter among his fellow- students. He became a sloven in his dress. His gown was tattered and his linen dirty, and his toes showed through his boots. Yet when some one, meaning no doubt to be kind, placed a new pair at his ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... he continues the Legislature, and gives this picture of Minister Harris: "He is six feet high, bony and rather slender; long, ungainly arms; stands so straight he leans back a little; has small side whiskers; his head long, up and down; he has no command of language or ideas; oratory all show and pretence; a big washing and a small hang-out; weak, insipid, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mixed breed, and was supposed to have a strain of Dandy Dinmont blood which gave him his name. A big ungainly animal with a rough shaggy coat of blue-grey hair and white on his neck and clumsy paws. He looked like a Sussex sheep-dog with legs reduced to half their proper length. He was, when I first knew him, getting old and increasingly deaf and dim of sight, otherwise in the best of health ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... There was great applause at the finish, which excited the envy of the Camel and made him desire to win the favour of the assembly by the same means. So he got up from his place and began dancing, but he cut such a ridiculous figure as he plunged about, and made such a grotesque exhibition of his ungainly person, that the beasts all fell upon him with ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... heterogenous character and pursuits of its inhabitants. Nature was certainly in no passive mood when last it flung its constituents together; for, with the exception of a few circling acres forming a rim around the harbor, high, broken, and frowning battlements of rock, ungainly and sterile, look down upon you as far as the eye can reach. No sprig, or tree, or blade of grass takes root in its parched soil or stony bed, or survives the blasting heat. Scattered and dotted on crag, hilltop or ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... earth-tiller, or the misplaced buffoonery of a seventh-grade body-writher taking the least significant part in an ill-equipped Swatow one-cash Hall of Varied Melodies." Assuredly, if your striking and well-chosen metaphors were not more unbalanced than the ungainly attitude of a one-legged hunchback crossing a raging torrent by means of a slippery plank on a stormy night, they would cause the very acutest bitterness to the throat of a dutiful and always high-stepping son. There is an apt saying, however, "A quarrel ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
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