"Cramped" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sort of one he had been accustomed to, that, in fact, he belonged by birth and upbringing to a state of things very different from hers. He looked wretchedly uncomfortable and, doubtless, as his limbs seemed cramped, they were cold. She would find a rug to ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... came back to him and he tried to raise himself up, only to fall back on Mr Mackay's supporting knee; and, then, he called out piteously what had probably been his cry for hours previously as he lay cramped up in the ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... "I am cramped for space," returned the ci-devant millionaire; "and I do not deny the fact that sometimes it rains on my pallet. It is a trifling inconvenience. And on fine nights I can see the moon, symbol and confidant of men's loves. For the moon, Madame, since the world began, has ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... tramp had wallowed her way around the Horn to San Francisco and back again as far as Rio Janiero when Captain Enoch received his first mail from home. A travel-stained letter, bearing Abner Crowell's cramped handwriting, threw the captain into ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... quitted the night before, and looked with some anxiety in the direction of "Mountain Ranch." Its white walls and little orchard were untouched, and looked peacefully over the blackened and deserted village. M'liss rose, and, stretching her cramped limbs, walked briskly toward the town. She had proceeded but a short distance when she heard the sound of cautious and hesitating footsteps behind her, and, facing quickly about, encountered the figure ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... general dealer bawled and shouted downstairs for his long worsted stockings. They could hear that he was peevish and cross because he had to put on his sea-jacket and cramped water-boots, and go out again into the ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... meaning glance with his brother, who was a single man, and when it was also agreed that he, too, might embark on the sea-voyage he shook hands with Rufinus on the bargain. Then, giving himself a shake, as if he had thrown off something that cramped him, and sticking his leather cap knowingly on one side of his shaven head, he drew himself up to his full height and scornfully shouted back to the Arab—who had before now treated him and other Egyptian natives with insolent haughtiness—that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... free the cramped muscles of his spirit to meet her quite on her own ground; it was his fate sometimes to reach the laugh just as all the others grew suddenly serious, and as often he took their airy interest heavily, and chained them with facts, from ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... retreat; they are a set of base fellows. I do not imagine we shall go much further this campaign, but just force them to go towards New England. I heard from Col. Campbell the other day. He is well and anxious to be relieved. I write on my knee very cramped, and have lain in a waggon for three nights past, one ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... been made by robbing the castle of brick and stone, as La Turbie was built of the Trophy. The castle itself grew out of the rock, so that it was difficult to see where nature's work ended or men's began; and the old, old houses crowding up to and huddled against its foundations had cramped themselves into ledges and boulders like men making their last stand in a mountain battle. The streets were tunnels, with vistas of long, dark stone stairways running up and down into mystery. Here ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... made up her mind that it was women, in the end, who had paid for everything. In the last resort the whole burden of the human lot came upon them; it pressed upon them far more than on the others, the intolerable load of fate. It was they who sat cramped and chained to receive it; it was they who had done all the waiting and taken all the wounds. The sacrifices, the blood, the tears, the terrors were theirs. Their organism was in itself a challenge to ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... from its drunken sire; the form she gave it soft-boned and angle-headed, more like overgrown embryo than child of the boasted Australian land. Even the milk it drew from her unwieldy breasts was tainted with city smoke and impure food and unhealthy housing. Its playground was the cramped kitchen floor and the kerb and the gutter. Its food for a year had been the food that feeds alike the old and the young who are poor. All around conspired against it, yet for two years and more it had clung to its life ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... cramped form to an upright position, my hand came against a hard, round piece of iron. A feeling of security, of advantage, of longing for battle ran through me as my hand rested on the cold steel. It was one of the captain's bomb-guns, which was so despised by him, but which ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... dusk now, but the two enjoyed their walk back along the Embankment, for it did not occur to them to take a bus or train; three miles was nothing to them. Moreover, they had had tea, and were in no hurry to get back to their cramped lodgings. It was well that Vava could not see her sister's amused smile, which broke out several times on the way home at the remembrance of the younger girl's suggestion that the junior partner might be a rogue; and it is to be feared that Stella would not have been sorry if her employer—whom ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... family. He was shaken out of his strong opinions; but it is doubtful how far this was good for him, for he was a man of warlike disposition, and not to have something which he could go to the stake for—something which he could think the devil's own stronghold to assail, was a drawback to him, and cramped his mental development; but he was happy in his home with his pretty Ursula, which is probably all the reader will care to know. He paid Tozer's hundred and fifty pounds. And he made no inquiries, and tried not to ask himself what all that strange scene had meant—and whatever it ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... find the whole aristocracy—one captain—not to say all their populace, out on the green to do us honour. They had been informed by telegraph of our august decision to sleep in their wooden village. When we got off our horses our knees were so cramped that we could scarcely stand, and we hobbled after the captain into a bitterly cold room without furniture. Various Montenegrins came and looked at us, and an old veterinary surgeon, also en route, but in the opposite direction, conversed in bad German. The old vet. was a Roumanian, and the only ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... confusion and noise there were naturally greater, the space being more limited and the noise confined. There was the addition of bad air and disagreeable smells here; and Miles could not help reflecting on the prospect before him of long voyages under cramped circumstances, in the midst of similar surroundings. But, being young and enthusiastic, he whispered to himself that he was not particular, and was ready to "rough it" ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... again and reread its contents carefully. No other man, living on Earth or Mars, could have done as much for me as had Almos this night. He had not only saved my life, but had given to me the thing that was far dearer. It was a princely gift, and my mind, trained as it had been to the cramped confines of a sordid existence in a mercenary world, was slow to comprehend the limitless wealth of happiness and love which it bestowed upon me. Sleep was impossible, and I longed for the morning, that I might hasten to my beloved, ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... In the distance he saw the night as they would pass it—cramped up, trembling with vigilance in the deep darkness, at the bottom of the listening-hole whose ragged jaws showed in black outline all around whenever a gun hurled its dawn ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... besides these two which we saw, when, at the third turn of the hill, the advance-guard came upon another, which we had not been able to see. They commenced to fight bravely from below it, but because the position of the stockade was very strong, and that of our men very cramped—hemmed in by formidable precipices, and exposed to all the guns and other weapons of the enemy (especially sompites, bacacayes, and stones)—no sooner would some of our men gain the little open place before the stockade than they would fall dead or wounded. For this reason, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... consul who, with head hanging upon his breast, had turned his rein the moment he had given the word. What if the dust did swirl up in blinding sheets from the south? Before them lay the Roman battle, horse and foot—such an army as the city had never sent forth. What if its masses were somewhat cramped? its front narrow? its general an amateur? They were to fight at last, and how should a mongrel horde of barbarians, but half their number, stand firm against the impetus of such a shock. A moment's hush; then measured ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... He was too cramped to stand on his feet so Chick-chick kneeled down at his side to rub some circulation into his wrists and ankles. Suddenly a great noise of running was heard. Chick-chick looked out through the ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... colors. Thus they learn colors, forms, smoothness, roughness, etc. She teaches them how to dress and undress and how to take their baths. She lets them go about the schoolroom instead of compelling them to sit still at their desks in cramped positions. In this way they get knowledge that they never forget. They learn to read and write and figure in playful ways through the proper direction of their curiosity. Little tots of four, or even younger, are often able to read, and there has been no ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... relief to be able to actually stand upright once more, so as to stretch the cramped muscles in their legs. Some of the boys even started to dancing, though Seth scorned to do anything like this, and pretended to make all manner of fun of ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... cramped by the constrained position in which I had remained all night, I reached the fort, and, unbarring the gate, with my rifle knocked at the door of one of the wooden houses. After a little, a man opened the door in the costume, scant and unpicturesque, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... crowded inhabitants of small islands often have the run of the coco plantations and fishing grounds of an entire archipelago. The smaller, less desirable islands are retained as fish and coco-palm preserves to be visited only periodically. Of a low, cramped, monotonous coral group, often only the largest and most productive is inhabited,[942] but that contains a population surprising in view of the small base, restricted resources and low cultural status of its inhabitants. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... was written in a remarkably cramped hand, on several very dirty sheets of blue ruled foolscap, folded with much care and crookedness, and fastened with a red wafer which bore the distinct impression of an extremely hard knuckle. ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... her; well, she appeared pleased to have met with this unexpected companion; and she was very cheerful and talkative as they went down to the quay, these two together. And whether it was that she was glad to be relieved from the cramped position of the carriage, or whether it was that his being taller than she gave countenance to her height, or whether it was merely that she rejoiced in the sweet air and the exhilaration of the sunlight, she seemed to walk with even more than her usual proudness of gait. This circumstance ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... poor man; without the means from his limited sales to extend his business in a profitable manner or to protect his known and acknowledged rights from the depredations of others. His shops—and I speak from personal knowledge—are for the most part dilapidated sheds—too confined and cramped up to do any part of his work to the best advantage, and from a personal knowledge speaking as a practical machinist of some 25 years experience, I do know that his profits are far less than some other machine makers—not the half of ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... transfigured me. The poor little country lad struggling vainly to emerge from his shell, had been developed into a young man of ready and quick intelligence. There was, I know, one thing wanting in my education, and until that void was filled up I was very cramped in my powers. The one thing lacking was positive science, the idea of a critical search after truth. This superficial humanism kept my reasoning powers fallow for three years, while at the same time it wore ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... unadorned nature, that it looks a little repulsive; but it is beautiful for all that. Though it be a black foot and an unwashed foot, it shall be exalted. It is a thing of life amid leather, a free spirit amid cramped, a wild bird amid caged, an athlete amid consumptives. It is the symbol of my order, the Order of Walkers. That unhampered, vitally playing piece of anatomy is the type of the pedestrian, man returned to first ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... or three hundred years hence? Waller's verses please us now. The people who come after me can please themselves, and may read Comus to their hearts' content. I know his lordship reads Milton, as he does Shakespeare, and all the cramped old play-wrights of Elizabeth's time. Henri, sing us that song of Waller's, 'Go, lovely rose.' I would give all Mr. Milton ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... If you work by the hour, you gently sail on the stream of Time, which is always bearing you on to the haven of Pay, whether you make any effort or not. Working by the hour tends to make one moral. A plumber working by the job, trying to unscrew a rusty, refractory nut, in a cramped position, where the tongs continually slipped off, would swear; but I never heard one of them swear, or exhibit the least impatience at such a vexation, working by the hour. Nothing can move a man who is paid by the hour. How sweet the flight ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... lagging required but made working on the centers more difficult and resulted in loss of tools from dropping through the openings. Work on the centers and forms was tiresome owing both to the difficulty of moving around on the lagging and to the cramped positions in which the men labored. Carpenters were hard to ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... map later proved most prized possessions of our young explorers, so they were glad they kept them up, although it ever was rather unwelcome work to sit in a cramped-up tent, or out in the air among the mosquitoes, and write or draw for a long time while still tired and wet. Both of them, however, persisted till the end, and later ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards. The descent was effected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of the well, and these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller and lighter than myself, I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the descent. And not simply fatigued! One of the bars bent suddenly under my weight, and almost swung me off into the blackness beneath. For a moment I hung by one hand, and after that experience I did not dare to rest again. Though my arms and back were presently acutely ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... respites of ten minutes or so at a time on station platforms. Jan had traveled before in an English train; but that had been as a passenger, and with passengers, in an ordinary compartment. In the dark, cramped, and incredibly noisy hole of a dog-box on "No. 93" (as this particular west-bound train was called) Jan realized that railway traveling could be a very unpleasant business for a hound. A month earlier the experience would have exhausted him, because he would ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... with which she hastened on foot to meet him, running across the Gardens, on his return from the Continent, have been made the subject of satire. She was generally accompanied by her five daughters, a pathetic little band, cramped in the fetters of royalty, so stringent toward their sex. Portraits of two of them may be seen ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... then. A clock on the kitchen shelf struck eight, but Nicholas was afraid to move. His arms were cramped, and he was racked with anxiety for Faith, but he sat doggedly on until the kindly neighbour and the doctor came ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... we ought not to do: To run or play hard just before or after eating; to strain our muscles by lifting too heavy weights; to exercise so violently as to get out of breath; to lie, sit, stand, or walk in a cramped position, or awkward manner; to wear the clothing so tight as to ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... he, with that villainous kind of courtesy which the agents of the coup d'etat willingly blended with their crime, "you must be uncomfortable with those three men in the fiacre. You are cramped; ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... called the serious business of life is simply and solely necessitated by bodily needs, and is really entirely temporary and trivial, while the real life of the soul, which underlies it all, stifled and subdued, pent-up uneasily and cramped unkindly like a bright spring of water under the superincumbent earth, finds its way at last to the light. On earth we awkwardly divide this impulse; we speak of the relation of the soul to others and of the ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... are cramped, you say?—Oh, I forgot to tell you that this home I am describing is to be a floating home, and that my wife and I are to journey around the world in it for the matter of seven years or more. I forgot ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... cramped lab space trying to classify the little moss he was able to gather, and Jones and Pat are up front watching the white specks revolve on ...
— The Dope on Mars • John Michael Sharkey
... the turf and smoked pipes afterward. Jeanne paced up and down within sight of their glances that she knew were fixed upon her in spite of the half-closed lids. It was so good to be free in the fragrant air, to stretch her cramped limbs and feel the soft short grass under her feet. Dozens of wild plans flashed through her brain. But she knew escape was impossible, and she wondered what was to be the next move. Were they awaiting the trader, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... exception of Poyor, was so cramped as to be in great pain: but all knew that the slightest unusual noise among the ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... he found himself in bed, undressed, and noticed the water-bottle and Pavel, but it did not make him any more comfortable nor easy. His legs and arms, as before, felt cramped, his tongue clove to his palate, and he could hear the chuckle of the Finn's pipe.... By the bed, growing out of Pavel's broad back, a stout, black-bearded ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... special rumination. It consists in the veritable contents of his private note-books, containing his communings with his own heart and his imagination. They were written on small slips of paper, in a hand direly cramped and minute; and lest this should not be a sufficient protection to their privacy, a portion was committed to certain ciphers, which their ingenious inventor deemed, no doubt, to be utterly impregnable. In stenography, however, the art of ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... and bolted for the door. His buggy wheel protested stridently as he cramped the vehicle at the horse-block, reassuring Mrs. Bowers that his natural force was not abated; and his flight down town affronted the ordinance against reckless driving which ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... There the passions, cramped no longer, shall have scope and breathing-space; I will take some savage woman, she shall ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Sigurd Ring's little son high on his shield when he heard the shout which acclaimed his name, and presented the boy to the assembly as their future king, publicly swearing to uphold him until he was of age to defend the realm. The lad, weary of his cramped position, boldly sprang to the ground as soon as Frithiof's speech was ended, and alighted upon his feet. This act of agile daring in one so young appealed to the rude Northmen, and a loud shout arose, "We choose thee, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... stalking mists, heard the frantic squallings of craft in the harbor, frenzied howls of alarm, hoarse hootings of protests and warnings, he was suddenly and pointedy anxious to have his elevation to the pilot-house of the Montana deferred. Better the smoky, cramped office of the little hotel where he had been chafing in dismal waiting. He was perfectly willing to sit there and study over again the advertising chromos on the walls and gaze out on the everlasting procession of rumbling drays. But at eight o'clock ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... man; even as Columbus was he inspired. Through his agency a colony was started near the dismal Salt Lake. Through his agency, and by the aid of his apostles or followers, the hardy men and women from the overcrowded population of Europe, cramped by man, and priest-ridden, have been brought across the ocean into republican America. They have been placed in this seemingly unpropitious Salt Lake country. There they have founded a city; they have erected ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... while the other was completely occupied by a diminutive Arabian bedstead, hung with curtains of pink-and- white chintz. On the inside of the bed there was a narrow channel, about a foot wide, between it and the wall of the hut. Into this cramped retreat Viviette slid herself, and ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... neither cordial nor cold, for she was not received at all. She had not been invited and she was not welcome. For the first eighteen months after reaching the fort she could often hear in the nighttime the movement of a moccasin, as some tired Indian spy changed his cramped position, for she was religiously watched and irreligiously suspected. They could not understand why she, an unmarried white woman, should leave her home and spend ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... overestimated the value of his service in financiering the business; at least he came to believe that he earned, and ought to have a larger interest than James Ingram. Ingram, became so cramped by assessments and money obligations that he was obliged to sell to Harris most of his interest in the steel plant. Harris's interests increased, till practically he was the owner of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Works, and much property besides. He was quoted as a millionaire, while James ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... the ship and the passengers in the lounge began to stir and move toward the door, to stretch limbs cramped like Bart's by tranced watching, to talk ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the waggon with the crowd of jaded conscripts and mingled with that common and cosmopolitan crowd which now defiles the city of the Caesars. The fatigue of his body, and the cramped pain of his aching spine, added to the moral and the mental suffering which was upon him as he moved a stranger and alone along the new, unfamiliar streets where, alone here and there, some giant ruin, some stately arch, some marble form of god or prophet, recalled ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... the Colonel to an orderly, "and tell him to build a fire against that rock there, and make us some coffee. We will not be able to get across the ford before midnight." The orderly rode off, and the Colonel dismounted and walked forward with the cramped gait of a man who had been long ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... arose and separated, to wander about the camping ground, to stretch their cramped limbs before returning to their seats ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... In addition, some of the German officers who had before given up their cabins to some of the married couple prisoners naturally did not want to do so again, as it meant that all the officers' quarters became very cramped. The German doctor, too, protested against further crowding of the Wolf, but all ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... the pencil was developed when he was only three years of age. One of his early efforts attracted the attention of Flaxman the sculptor, who advised that he should "not be cramped with lessons in drawing; let his genius," he said, "follow its own bent, and he will astonish the world." This advice was so far followed, that we believe we are justified in saying that beyond ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Doctor, with her expansive style, always seems cramped in any story of under a couple of hundred thousand words or so. Perhaps the best things in her new book of short stories, Earth to Earth (HEINEMANN), concern The Macwaugh, a shocking bad artist with an immense thirst and the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... the vessel, every one on board was cramped for room, and my father's accommodation seems to have been small enough: "I have just room to turn round," he writes to Henslow, "and that is all." Admiral Sir James Sulivan writes to me: "The narrow ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the shipwreck of the Antoine, and as soon as sufficient finery could be got in Quebec, it was accomplished, the fate of Jean Jacques. How proud he was to open his cheque-book before the young Spanish maid, and write in cramped, characteristic hand a cheque for a hundred dollars or so at a time! A moiety of this money was given to Sebastian Dolores, who could scarcely believe his good fortune. A situation was got for him by the help of a good abbe at Quebec, who was touched by the tale of the wreck ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and flabby, but given him instead vigorous development of chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar. In the river valley she attaches him to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas and ambitions by a dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of his farm. Up on the wind-swept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... long cloud and stared at the fire; at the smoke mounting and the grey ash dropping; at David Faed dealing the cards and licking his thumb between each. Long Ede shifted from one cramped elbow to another and pushed his Bible nearer the blaze, murmuring, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... helplessness that from week to week crept upon him. The winter, to make bad worse, was a very cold and stormy one. The growing sluggishness of his blood showed itself in chilblains, not only on the feet but the fingers, and his handwriting becomes more and more cramped and confused.—Life, vol. ix. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... soup with some of the birds' nests we found on board. We had all gone through so many adventures that it scarcely appeared strange to find ourselves floating about on the Indian Ocean in a Chinese junk. It was so much more pleasant, indeed, than being cramped up in a canoe, that we felt no inclination to leave her; and no one seemed more delighted than Ungka, who scrambled about and poked his nose into every hole and corner. However, at a cabinet council which I called, consisting of the whole of our party, including Ungka, who, ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... Twenty years he wandered,—twenty years and more; and yet the hard rasping question kept gnawing within him, "What, in God's name, am I on earth for?" In the narrow New York parish his soul seemed cramped and smothered. In the fine old air of the English University he heard the millions wailing over the sea. In the wild fever-cursed swamps of West Africa he ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... all the rest of the afternoon upon the roof, not daring to leave his cramped position against the coping. He felt absolutely safe there from observation, Mexicans would not be prowling through dismantled and abandoned houses at such a time. Now and then gay shouts came from the streets below. The Mexicans of Bexar were disturbed ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... passed and tarried not, Groping his way from spot to spot, Towards where the cavern flare glowed hot:— An old, old mortal, cramped and double, Was peering into a seething-pot, In a world ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... since he had joined the firm, that he had been conscious of any great strain. College had given him a glimpse of a larger life, and the office cramped him. He felt vaguely that there were bigger things in the world which he might be doing. His best friends, of whom he now saw little, were all men of adventure and enterprise, who had tried their hand at many things; men like Jimmy ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... appreciation of the value of his recent work on general relativity which has the high merit of first disclosing the way in which mathematical physics should proceed in the light of the principle of relativity. But in my judgment he has cramped the development of his brilliant mathematical method in the narrow bounds of a very ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... truly divine, for it became infinite, and was thrown open to all. He first of all opened the consolations of free thought, of freedom from old superstition, of love, and strength, and inward joy, to the whole race of mankind. No narrow limits of sect or caste or nationality cramped him, the first great Cosmopolite. We cannot sufficiently admire the infinite adaptability, the universal knowledge of humanity, the boundless sympathy with man, which are everywhere manifest in the original Christian philosophy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hard to give you so long a letter, so dull an one, and written in so cramped a hand, to read in this hardworking part of your week. But you can read a bit at odd times, you know: or none at all. Anyhow 'tis time to have done. I am going to walk ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... The writing was cramped and foreign, as if the pen were wielded by a hand more accustomed to form German script than English letters. ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... the glory of a smart address. Miss O'Dwyer's house, for instance, boasted a spacious hall and lofty sitting-rooms, with impressive ceilings and handsome fireplaces; yet she paid for it little more than half the rent which a cramped villa in Clyde Road would have cost her. Even so, it was somewhat of a mystery to her friends how Miss O'Dwyer managed to live there. A solicitor who had his offices on the ground-floor probably paid the rent of the whole house; but the profits of verse-making are small, and a ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... fire, "if by new associations you mean Henry Warner, it must not be. Alas, that I should tell this! but Henry is your brother—your father's only son. Oh, horror! horror!" and dreading what Margaret would say, she covered her face with her cramped, ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... a day as that on which the immortal Pickwick "bent over the balustrades of Rochester Bridge contemplating nature and waiting for breakfast," the club (in June, 1903) had journeyed to Rochester to do homage to the fame of their master. The mediaeval, cramped High Street, "full of gables, with old beams and timbers carved into strange faces," seems to bask and grow sleepier than ever in the glaring sunlight. It is all practically just as Dickens saw it for the last time three days before his death, as he stood against ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... a ladder and entered his cramped office out of breath. Avis Page looked up from her desk and wrinkled her freckled snub nose at him. "You ought to take a shower, but there isn't time," she said. "Here, use my antistinker." She threw him a spray cartridge with a deft motion. "I got your suit and ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... was destined to plant upon the stern shores of New England. Had they directed their course to the warm and fragrant islands of the East, an independent Christian commonwealth might have arisen among those prolific regions, superior in importance to any subsequent colony of Holland, cramped from its birth by absolute subjection to a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sofa uncomfortable. The boards underneath cramped him; the sun, too, for some reason or other, became too hot, and the breeze fidgeted him; the last sandwich he had eaten had had too much mustard in it; he was ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... behind this perennial youth. No haggard spectre, reflected from a turbid soul, sat moping in the prow of his boat, or kept step with him in the race. Like the Sun-god, he was buoyant and beautiful, careless, free, elastic, unfading. Years never cramped his bounding spirits, or dimmed the lustre of his soul. He was ever ready for prank and pastime, for freak and fun. Of all his loves at Elleray, boating was the chief. He was the Lord-High-Admiral of all the neighboring waters, and had a navy at his beck. He never wearied of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... against the pure turquoise sky. These hills Grom was thirsting to explore. They might contain caves more roomy than those of his own hills—spacious and suitable to give shelter to his tribe, which was now finding itself somewhat cramped. Moreover, it had always seemed to Grom that there might be a mystery behind those hills, and to his restless imagination a mystery was always ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the plateau, become formidable obstacles in their deep beds. The horseman's occupation is greatly limited, for he can neither reconnoitre nor gallop. Marches must, therefore, be made painfully in battle formation, for every advance may entail an action. Thus strategy is grievously cramped by the constant necessity for caution, and still more by the tedious movements of the mass of transport, without which no army can continue to operate in a country sparsely inhabited, and ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... room to relieve his cramped limbs, and now, peeping through a crevice in the window curtains, he said suddenly, 'Who's for a transformation ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... slowly, for the handwriting was cramped and irregular, and then looked up questioningly to ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... the ground, signals were flashed from the flagship, the Prince George, and within four minutes the squadron was under way to the south-eastward. After what had happened the Admiral in command promptly and rightly decided that to keep his ships cramped up in the narrow waters was only to court further disaster. His place was now the open sea, and a general fleet action offered the only means of preventing an occupation of almost defenceless Portsmouth, and ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... If the Chateau de Vaux possessed a single fault with which it could be reproached, it was its grand, pretentious character. It is even at the present day proverbial to calculate the number of acres of roofing, the reparation of which would, in our age, be the ruin of fortunes cramped and narrowed as the epoch itself. Vaux-le-Vicomte, when its magnificent gates, supported by caryatides, have been passed through, has the principal front of the main building opening upon a vast, so-called court of honor, inclosed by deep ditches, bordered by a magnificent stone balustrade. Nothing ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... that he finally installed as his wife up at the Ettersberg the daughter of his housekeeper, a young widow, and thus became not only a landed proprietor but the husband of a nice little woman to boot. He sat perched like a falcon above the cramped little town, where so many strange and remarkable things were going on, things that seemed quite unnecessary to the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... excellent. On entering the place you are perfectly surprised at its capaciousness. Nothing cramped, nothing showy, nothing dim, grim, nor shabby-genteel enters into its proportions. It is finely expansive, airy, light, and well made. Goodness of build without gaudiness, sanctity without sadness, and evenness of finish without ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... hung over the windows of the second floor. Within the door was a little entry—(for years and years the pastor's hat and cane used to lie upon a table that stood just within the door); from the entry a cramped stairway, by three sharp angles, led to the floor above. To the right and left were two low parlors. The sun was shining broadly in the south one when the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Still we had that 'balm of Gilead,' hope, to keep us alive, and our good spirits. Many a longing eye did I cast to the shore, where, in spite of the bloodhounds, I should like to have stretched my cramped limbs. Ten or twelve days passed in dodging about, doing nothing but keeping a good look-out, and we almost began to despair, when one fine morning we saw a large brig, evidently a slaver, running in towards the shore with a fresh breeze. Our boats were painted like fishing boats, ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... of marriage is too apparent to be glossed over any longer. "A.Y.Z." and "A Woman of No Importance" deserve the thanks of every honest heart for their brave outspokenness. Too long has this mediaeval monstrosity cramped our lives. The beautiful word "Home" conceals a doll's house or whitewashes a sepulchre. Marriage is misery in two syllables. How can people be happy chained together like galley-slaves? It contradicts all we know ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... soldiers, and the railway system—that pentagram for exorcising the evil spirit of dulness from the lives of little boys and girls. And first, there is a kind of lark we call Funiculars. There are times when islands cease somehow to dazzle, and towns and cities are too orderly and uneventful and cramped for us, and we want something—something to whizz. Then we say: "Let us make a funicular. Let us make a funicular more than we have ever done. Let us make one to reach up to the table." We dispute whether it isn't a mountain railway ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... the copy being finished, opened and shut her cramped little hand, looked gravely at the page, half in pride and half in doubt, and got up, and dropped me ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the south side, on a steep cliff overlooking the sea. The peel tower itself looked high and strong, but to Grisell, accustomed to the widespread courts of the great castles and abbeys of the south, the circuit of outbuildings seemed very narrow and cramped, for truly there was need to have no more walls than could be helped for ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Gate the High Street slopes down to the Itchen. On the right stands the old Butter Cross, in rather a cramped position. Two reasons have been given for its name: one, that during Lent, those wishing to eat butter could do so by consuming it by the cross; the other, and more probable, explanation is that here came farmers wishing to dispose of their butter, which they exposed for sale on the steps of ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... their own; it was partly secondhand, but on the whole it seemed cheerful to my eye, and my aunt's bias for cheap, gay-figured muslin had found ample score. In many ways I should think it must have been an extremely inconvenient and cramped sort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking everything, as being there and in the nature of things. I did not see the oddness of solvent decent people living in a habitation so clearly neither designed nor adapted for their needs, so wasteful of labour ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... civilization his descendant permits his back to bend. The chest caves in, squeezing the heart, lungs and liver. One is more liable to pneumonia and tuberculosis, and can not fight them successfully as these organs have lost much of their vital force because of their cramped conditions. ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... extraordinary effects. Some of the things my sister did were perfect—I speak now of her acting: they were as fine as some of Pasta's great effects, and her whole performance reminded me forcibly of that finest artist. I cannot help thinking, however, that she is cramped by the music, and I confess I should like to see her act Bianca without singing it, as I am satisfied that she would represent most admirably all characters of power and passion, and find in the great ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... to hear them, the rascals, that they were speaking like honest merchants whose affairs were momentarily cramped by a commercial crisis? Who would believe that, instead of sacks of coffee or casks of sugar, they were talking of human beings to export like merchandise? These traders have no other idea of right or wrong. The moral sense is entirely ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... that poverty could not daunt, an ambition which shrank from no hardship, and no amount of labor. They have been years of toil, for it takes time to transform a raw and ignorant country lad into a college president; but the toil has not harmed him—the poverty has not cramped him, nor crippled his energies. "Poverty is very inconvenient," he said on one occasion, in speaking of those early years, "but it is a fine spur to activity, and may be made a ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the half a crown a week which your leaders demand," Maraton told them. "Your masters—may God forgive me for using the word!—will pay to that extent. But—if there is any justice beyond this world, how, indeed, will they meet the debt built upon your sufferings, your cramped lives, and the graves of your little children. That half a crown a week, I say, will come to you. Don't dare, any of you, to be satisfied when it does come. It isn't a few shillings only that are owing to you. It's another social system, a rearrangement of your ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with a cordial welcome from the master of the house. But the accommodations in the villages were quite different. The servants with their horses were provided with straw, and the family themselves were cramped into a low, small room, with floor of earth, and lighted by a miserable candle, while their fare was coarse bread and cheese. The little sledge going ahead closed every castle against Idalia and her party, by spreading ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... birth; Gloom over, Grime under; Soaked clover. Hail, thunder; Wind, wet, Squelch, squash; Gingham yet, Mackintosh; Lawns afloat, Paths dirt; Top-coat, Flannel shirt; Lilacs drenched, Laburnums pallid; Spirits quenched, Souls squalid; Tennis "off," Icy breeze; Croak, cough, Wheeze, sneeze; Cramped cricket, Arctic squall; Drenched wicket, Soaked ball; Park a puddle. Row a slough; Muck, muddle, Slush, snow; Hay-fever (No hay!) Spoilt beaver, Shoes asplay; Lilies flopping, Washed-out roses; Eaves dropping, Red noses; Pools, splashes, Spouts, spirts; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... I found myself on board the new vessel, and with her visited San Francisco, as well as other ports already named. Our crew were somewhat diminished; we were short-handed for a voyage round Cape Horn in the depth of winter, and so cramped and deadened was the Alert by her unusually large cargo, and the weight of our five months stores, that her channels were down in the water; while, to make matters even more uncomfortable, the forecastle leaked, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... across the waters and the island rose like a mountain of night against the darkening sky. Dalgetty stretched cramped muscles and ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... on pulling. For three, for four days—a week—for ten days—they tugged at the oars, except when a favouring breeze came. The water was reduced to a few pints, the food to a few days' half-rations. Their limbs were cramped so that they could not move from their places in the boat, their bodies were becoming covered with sores; and the wind had now died away entirely, the sea was without a ripple, and for ever shone above them the ...
— "The Gallant, Good Riou", and Jack Renton - 1901 • Louis Becke
... in the broad and spacious atmosphere of the Great Court suggestive of the change from the narrow and cramped thought of pre-Reformation times to the age when a healthy expansion of ideas was coming like a fresh breeze upon the mists which had obscured men's visions. But even as the Reformation did not ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... effectual person to combat opposition than he seemed, and sensing that in the present instance it was easier to yield than to argue, he allowed himself to be cowed into submission and meekly gave the pen to Melvina who with blind faith inscribed her name on the crisp white paper in a small cramped hand. Caleb Saunders, the witness Mr. Benton had brought with him, next wrote his name, forming each letter with such conscientiousness that Ellen could hardly wait until the painstaking and ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... would have been hard to find. Don Quixote was present at the entrance of the Judge with the young lady, and as soon as he saw him he said, "Your worship may with confidence enter and take your ease in this castle; for though the accommodation be scanty and poor, there are no quarters so cramped or inconvenient that they cannot make room for arms and letters; above all if arms and letters have beauty for a guide and leader, as letters represented by your worship have in this fair maiden, to ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since he had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content, cheerfulness, nay, a passionate interest in every hour, had been quite compatible for ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wives followed his example, and resisted a shock with great determination, and after many attempts she succeeded in extracting a necklace from a basin of water so highly charged, that her hand was completely cramped and paralysed. ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... Square, when a telegram was handed to him. He opened it and spread the thin paper out upon the table-cloth. A word from that far, wild country, which seemed so much fitter a background to his simple bulk and strength than the cramped ways of London society—a message from the very heart of the dark ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... work of the bureau has greatly outgrown the facilities of its cramped quarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, and now at the close of its second decade and under the influence of the great movement of awakened sympathy between the American republics, the Union stands upon the threshold of more ample opportunity ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... grown-ups say that they would give me some medicine later on. Medicine for me signified the nauseous powders of Dr. Gregory, so I pretended to be asleep every time anyone came into the room, in order to escape my destiny, until at last some one stood by my bedside so long that I became cramped and had to pretend to wake up. Then I was given the medicine, and found to my surprise that it was delicious and tasted of oranges. I felt that there had been a mistake somewhere, but my head sat a little heavily ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... vast powers, a collective greatness beyond our dreams. For that we did not work, and that has come. But how is it with the little lives that make up this greater life? How is it with the common lives? As it has ever been—sorrow and labour, lives cramped and unfulfilled, lives tempted by power, tempted by wealth, and gone to waste and folly. The old faiths have faded and changed, the new faith—. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... kind of cramped by the presence of her husband. Every once in a while, when she would be about to paint something in lurid colors, he would drop in a word and she would roll her phrases around in her mouth, so to ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... sprang at once from their own car and ran quickly, glad of the chance to loosen their tired and aching muscles, stiff, sore and cramped from the confinement in one position that the wild race had forced, toward the group that was gathered around the captured car. Colonel Abbey, himself, the type of a true cavalry leader, was ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... had ended by deciding to follow his two friends, and had secured fairly spacious rooms facing the Cathedral; and then he, who had always lived cramped in tiny apartments, at last understood the provincial comfort of vast spaces and books ranged against the walls, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... if our own bones were not enough, if we'd give them a chance to do their duty," growled the Doctor, yielding up the bone of contention with a last shake of contempt. Then his face cleared suddenly, and he held up his finger, saying, with a smile, "Hear those girls laugh; cramped lungs could not make hearty ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... released his hold of the thief instantly, and then jumped up in the hope of catching the man before he could escape. But the thief was too quick for him. The room was in darkness, and, before Charlie could make his way out of his cramped quarters at the side of the table, the thief had climbed up the ladder and closed the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... tied to certain agreements that cramped her? Especially in a case of this kind. For the sake of saving expense Mr. Hammond was likely to insist that the artistic part of "The Long Lane's ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... platform seemed to have their gaze drawn by the engine, and somebody ahead there was shouting. Sir John Crang, without a backward look, flung the door open and stepped out. Mr. Molesworth was preparing to follow—and by the cramped feeling in his fingers was aware at the same instant that he had been gripping the arm-rest almost desperately—when the guard of the train came running by and paused to thrust his head in at the open doorway ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... already driven him even to the edge of death; and must it now come on him again with its sweet madness, its drugging scent? What was it? Why was it? Why these passionate obsessions that could not decently be satisfied? Had civilization so outstripped man that his nature was cramped into shoes too small—like the feet of a Chinese woman? What was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... all moved out into the moonlight, and there was Champion Harrison with a big bundle on his arm,—and such a look of amazement upon his face as would have brought a smile back on to mine had my heart not still been cramped with fear. ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... preparing magnets, winding wire, constructing batteries, etc., in the University for an experiment on a larger, but still very limited scale, in the little leisure that each had to spare, and being at the same time much cramped ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... that compels me to exist, young sir," said Gueldmar,—"in the mysteries of the universe about me,—the glory of the heavens,—the wonders of the sea! You have perhaps lived in cities all your life, and your mind is cramped a bit. No wonder, . . . you can hardly see the stars above the roofs of a wilderness of houses. Cities are men's work,—the gods have never had a finger in the building of them. Dwelling in them, I suppose ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... knife from his girdle, and feeling of the cords that bound his brother's ankles, cut the knots. Timokles sighed with relief, as he moved his cramped feet. The feet of two of the other Christians were bound with thongs, and these Heraklas cut also, but the other five Christians were bound hand and foot with chains, and for them Heraklas' knife could not ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... seemed to be much as before. The silence of a brooding nature is a terrible thing; and it is more common in narrow, dull lives than in any other. Uneducated men and women in villages, or servants cramped together in one house, I have known to brood over some injury in an awful silence for twenty or thirty years. If Molly's future life had been in Mrs. Carteret's hands, the sense of wrong would have burrowed deeper and been even better ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... to 1; Ambrose Churchill at 12 to 1, and Pharaoh was held at 15 and 20. The bookmakers had heard that the Curry horse had been taken from the car at noon, and wondered at the obstinacy of his owner in starting him, stiff and cramped from a long ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... excuse than defend him; but upon the whole, his character appears to have been very amiable, particularly, that of his bearing a tide of prosperity with so much, evenness of temper; and his universal benevolence, which seems not to have been cramped with party principles; as appears from his piety towards the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... to smile at her daughter when she heard the door open, and Julia would be sent to the delicatessen store for the component parts of a substantial meal. Julia loved the cramped, clean, odorous shop that smelled of wet wood and mixed mustard pickles and smoked fish. A little cream bottle would be filled from an immense can at her request, the shopkeeper's wife wiping it with a damp rag and a bony hand. And the pat of ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... plate on the seat beside me, Fruen at the table, looking out of the window all the time, and hardly eating anything at all. Now and again she exchanges a word with the old woman, or glances at my plate to see if it is empty. The little place is cramped enough, with but two steps from the window to where I sit; so we are all sitting together, ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... ideas of his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign sources 'enfeebles all internal strength of thought,' as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... finished. The builder of so many castles died without being able to finish his own house. It was better thus. Conceived in a manner which had then its distinction and its value, but which seems to-day banal and outlandish, having lost little by little its large frame of gardens, cramped now between the walls of the tall buildings, Philippe Dechartre's little house, by the roughness of its stones, by the naive heaviness of its windows, by the simplicity of the roof, which the architect's widow had ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... detrimental and misleading, since it appears to give as well as to receive a color of verisimilitude from the usual written description, which represents Shelley as "feminine," "almost girlish," "ideal," "angelic," and so forth. The accounts of him by firmer hands are still cramped by the individuality ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... sleeping awoke. The spirit of Ellsworth, cramped by a few weeks' intercourse with politicians, sprang up full-statured in the Northern gale. He cut at once the meshes of red tape that had hampered and held him, threw up his commission, and started for New York without orders, without assistance, without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... night she awoke in the pitchy darkness to hear the wind blow and the rain roar. The dawn broke cold and gray, and the storm gradually diminished. Allie lay alone for hours, beginning to suffer by reason of her bonds and cramped limbs. The longer she was left alone the ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... chest, and in this position he paced his study; then he threw himself, dressed as he was, upon a sofa, less to sleep than to rest his limbs, cramped with cold and study. By degrees every one awoke. Villefort, from his study, heard the successive noises which accompany the life of a house,—the opening and shutting of doors, the ringing of Madame de Villefort's bell, to summon ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... tore on through the night, mane flying, bridle loose. And there, crouched on the saddle, two men swayed, locked in a death-clench—an Uhlan with ghostly face and bared teeth, and Brocard, the poacher, cramped and clinging like a panther to his prey, his broad knife ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... rural peasantry on the line of travel from Belfast to Dublin, which I had understood formed an exception to the general misery of Ireland. Out of the towns not one habitation in ten is fit for human beings to live in, but mere low, cramped hovels of rock, mud and straw; not one-half the families on the way seem to have so much as an acre of land to each household; not half the men to be seen have coats to their backs; and not one in four of the women and ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... prove, as to the Pyrenees region, first scarce and then scanty. The few we unearth in the stores are armed only with the usual perfunctory fasces of facts,—cording information into stiff, labeled bunches, marshaling details into cramped and characterless order, scrutinizing the ground with a microscope, never surveying it in bird's-eye view. Two recent novels we eagerly buy, hearing that their scenes are laid in that vicinity; but each merely speaks, in easy omniscience, of the "distant chain ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... does him no good; for, for him history has no meaning. He is only alive to the impositions of innkeepers and couriers, and the disagreeableness of travelling for days amidst great mountains, among peasants and sheep, cramped up in a carriage. Picture galleries he feels to be a bore, and he looks into them because other people do. These "pleasures" soon tire him, and he becomes blase. When he grows old, and has run the round of fashionable dissipations, and ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... open and terraced everywhere into gardens. Our progress was most satisfactory. When night came we drew into the bank, and I coiled up in my crib and made myself comfortable. Space was cramped, and I had barely room to stretch my legs. My cabin was 5 feet 6 inches square and 4 feet high, open behind, but with two little doors in front, out of which I could just manage to squeeze myself sideways round the mast. Coir matting was next the floor boards, then ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... He leaned over upon it backward and managed to get the hilt between the partly-cramped fingers of one hand. With a clumsy, sawing movement, he scraped the blade over the rope that held his arms together. He was far from certain of success, but he stuck to the task with grim determination. More than once the blade slipped and cut ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... the missive, and sitting down, rapidly covered a sheet of paper with small, cramped, but legible writing, while I stood on guard and alert, half expecting a sudden ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... biped in its paper cof- Fin, cramped and plump and neat, Had scratched its very toenails off In making ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... and, though I have not clapped eyes on them yet, they are being highly praised by the American press. I shall see that you get copies. So far, we have been about but very little. Our finances are too cramped to admit of our doing or seeing much. But we may be happy yet. Julia joins me in ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... someone proposes some little—what shall we call it?—transaction to an honest person, it must be accompanied by justifications sufficient to quiet all qualms of conscience. I shall prove to Mme. Fauvel and her niece that Prosper has shamefully deceived them. I shall prove to them that he is cramped by debts, dissipated, and a reckless gambler, openly associating with a woman ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the fire, a vase of carnations filling the air with perfume, and the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish's cramped flat, with its cheap conveniences and hideous wall-papers. No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton |
