"Scarecrow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he had the most outlandish rig on a fellow ever saw!" exclaimed Luke. "I think he must have borrowed it from some scarecrow." ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... scarecrow,—what's your meaning?' retorted Quilp. 'Why do you talk to me of combining together? Do I combine? Do I know ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the sight of the staggering and tattered scarecrow, barefooted, and stained with blood and dirt, who stumbled into the camp at dusk, too weary to talk, almost too spent to eat; and to this day he is convinced that I was actually detained by the "debil-debil," whom I had overcome ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... scattered the birds for a while, but they soon came back, for they were not going to be frightened away by a bundle of twigs, when they did not even care for a scarecrow, but used to go and sit upon its head; while the tomtit declared it was a capital spider trap, and used to pick out no end of savoury little spinners ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... dusk, and in the open space round which the bark wigwams were built, dark figures moved to and fro in a kind of measured dance, slow and solemn, and marked at intervals by dismal cries. As the boats touched the shore and the white men sprang out, a boy, stationed as scarecrow upon the usual scaffold in the midst of the maize fields, raised a shrill whoop of warning which brought the lamentation of the women and the dance of the men to a dead stop. The latter rushed down to the river side, brandishing their weapons, and yelling; but there ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... failings and eccentricities of the family had been reviewed before the public eye, like a succession of cinematograph pictures. It did not occur to Stephen that he was an object of pity, but he felt that through his own folly and that of another, he had become a kind of scarecrow, a figure of fun: and because until now the world had laughed with instead of at him, he would rather have faced a shower of bullets than a ripple ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "What a scarecrow!" he muttered, looking back at the individual in black. "What a gorgon!" he continued, as his eyes travelled to the man in motley. "Gog and Magog, by Heavens!" he commented, as he surveyed the ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... significance; his trousers were most atrociously rent and tattered; he walked with a limp, and shivered in the cold night air. This unpromising-looking person approached the priest and addressed him with an elaborate courtesy oddly out of keeping with his scarecrow-like appearance, but with words appropriate enough to the ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... centuries of Godless French statesmanship—engineered by men who, though nominal Christians or Catholics, discarded God in affairs of state, and attempted to rule without God in the world, except to use Him (pardon the expression) as a sort of scarecrow for the 'lower orders'—resulted in gradually drying up those intermediary institutions which had served at once to develop a manly civic life and to protect private liberty, and in reabsorbing and concentrating ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... ceremonies practised by the tribe. Among the other structures was the sacred "medicine lodge" distinguished by three or four tall poles planted before it, each surmounted by an effigy looking much like a scarecrow, and meant as an offering to ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... was born in Crown Office Row, in his exquisite way has sketched the benchers of the Temple whom he had seen pacing the terrace in his youth. Jekyll, with the roguish eye, and Thomas Coventry, of the elephantine step, the scarecrow of inferiors, the browbeater of equals, who made a solitude of children wherever he came, who took snuff by palmfuls, diving for it under the mighty flap of his old-fashioned red waistcoat. In the gentle Samuel Salt we discover a portrait of the employer ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... his hands with a desperate gesture. He was a strange scarecrow standing there in the sun with half his old face peeled off, and half another face glaring and grinning ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... task and the exposure which it would entail. I must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes. False ideas may be refuted indeed by argument, but by true ideas alone are they expelled. I will vanquish, not my Accuser, but my judges. I will indeed answer his charges and criticisms ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... old scarecrow there makes out that nobody ever knew who my father was. He is a... li-li-liar. Excuse me, one moment, ladies and gentlemen. (To the PRINCE.) That head up there on the right, which I beg your Royal Highness graciously ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... got up and trotted along until they came to a cornfield. And sure enough, the first thing they saw was a big, black crow sitting on a scarecrow as unafraid as if it had been a tree. ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... "Eh, you scarecrow!" said Yozhov, convincingly and pitifully, with a shrug of the shoulder. "Is there anything in that? Why, I am anyway half dead already from ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... intellectual charity that made his whole countenance shine with kindness. Yet his clothes belied the promise of his brow. They were ill-fitting, with an air of Sunday-bestness that gave him an incongruous scarecrow effect. It was easy to see why Market Street was beginning to call him that "Mad Adams." As he lifted his glance from the floor, his eyes met Laura Van Dorn's, then flitted away quickly, and the smile she should have had for her own, he gave to his audience. He began speaking with ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... 1880-81 swept over these places with tremendous fury, and the most experienced shepherds, whose whole lives had been spent going to and fro on the downs, frequently lost their way. There is a story of a waggoner and his lad going slowly along the road after the thaw, and noticing an odd-looking scarecrow in a field. They went to it, and found it was a man, dead, and still standing as he had stiffened in the snow, the clothes hanging on his withered body, and the eyes gone from the sockets, picked out by the crows. It is ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... garment that draped so charmingly those of the living statue hired to parade before her. Jacqueline could not help laughing as she watched this way of hunting larks; and thought the mirror might have warned them, like a scarecrow, rather than have tempted them ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... with his ragged shirt fluttering like a scarecrow's, nodded. "Yes, so do I. But I guess they need our help or Hero Giles wouldn't have risked his life to ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... is to have his attention fixed long enough to form a new habit. Find out how this can be done, and it may in many cases be the simplest and most mechanical thing in the world to cure him. Men have been frightened by a scarecrow into thorough repentance. "A question of a few vibrations of ether, more or less, makes for us all the difference between perception and non-perception," or between sight and blindness. Accustom ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of the place, and were ready to go back. But in the East things are not done like that. So we waited and waited long after the hour the omnibus was said to return, and when at last the driver did saunter up, the scarecrow horses had to be sought for, and then the harness, of course, had to be mended with string, and that wasn't nearly the end, because, after waiting again a long time for nothing at all that anyone could ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... With scoffs and scorns, and contumelious taunts, In open market-place produced they me, To be a public spectacle to all. Here, said they, is the terror of the French, The scarecrow that affrights our children so. Then broke I from the officers that led me, And with my nails digg'd stones out of the ground, To hurl at the beholders of my shame. My grisly countenance made others fly, None durst ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... crutched beggar, who had performed a deed of singular intrepidity in himself kindling a fire at the door of one of the principal buildings besieged by the people, and who showed perforated rags with a comical ejaculation of thanks to the Austrians for knowing how to hit a scarecrow and make a beggar holy, was the object of particular attention. Barto seated him on his gun, saying that his mistress and beauty was honoured; ladies were proud in waiting on the fine frowzy old man. It chanced during that morning that Wilfrid ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... down and buy her winter coal, and she hasn't bought any clothes for ten years. Some one gives her an ex-dress and Mary does her best to make it over, but she never looks much more enticing than a scarecrow in ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... he should want to have such a thing in his home no one can say. Some naturalists believe that he uses it as a scarecrow to frighten his enemies away. But I do not think he could give a reason if he ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... fellow?" said Desmond heartily. "I am a bit of a scarecrow, no doubt, but we've won the trick, man. The real guy is down below, dead from fright by this time, ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... him to see if anything else that was useful could be found, and his eyes fell upon the gun. It struck him that it might be made serviceable as a scarecrow in forcing their way through the inlet, and he determined to lodge it on the roof of the launch, for the present, at least, and to throw it overboard as soon as they got into rough water, if indeed they should be so fortunate ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... joli Polichinelle!" said a comely matron, whose robe his obtrusive and angular elbows cruelly discomposed. "But how could one expect gallantry from such a scarecrow!" ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... somewhat remarkable for design, answered the purpose well enough. Jones' coat was somewhere along the canyon rim, his shoes were full of holes, his shirt in strips, and his trousers in rags. Jim looked like a scarecrow. My clothes, being of heavy waterproofed duck, had stood the hard usage in a manner to bring forth the unanimous ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... to make the semblance of a human being, with two laths for legs, a pumpkin for a head, etc., of the rudest and most meagre materials. Then a tailor helps him to finish his work, and transforms this scarecrow into quite a fashionable figure. At the end of the story, after deceiving the world for a long time, the spell should be broken, and the gray dandy be discovered to be nothing but a suit of clothes, with a few sticks inside of them. All through his seeming existence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... it!—Saturday, February 1st. Well, I know that chest too! I met your wine merchant on the Place du Louvre, and he wasn't precisely enjoying himself: one of his creditors wanted to seize the chest, the wine, the whole kettle of fish! A little man, isn't he?—a scarecrow?" ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... reached the summit And drove along past orchards, past a field Level and green, kept like a garden, rich Against the coming harvest. Here we met A scarecrow man, driving a scarecrow horse Hitched to a wobbly wagon. And we stopped, The scarecrow stopped. The scarecrow and Hosea Talked much of people and of farming—I Sat listening, and I gathered from the talk, And what Hosea told me as we drove, That once this field ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... part of the afternoon in throwing stones at a scarecrow. His aim was fairly good, and he succeeded in knocking off the hat and finally prostrating the wooden framework. Followed—an exciting ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... was a veritable scarecrow. A man with a torn coat and rent trowsers, and a battered hat which barely held together upon his head. He was covered from head to foot with mud. His face was ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... fear of me or of Moll turning tail at a scarecrow," says Jack, adding with a sneer, ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... person, but, as the perfumer said, a simple straightforward head of hair. "It seems as if it had grown there all your life, Mr. Woolsey; nobody would tell that it was not your nat'ral colour" (Mr. Woolsey blushed)—"it makes you look ten year younger; and as for that scarecrow yonder, you'll never, I think, want ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... block! The word has turn'd your Highness pale; the thing Was no such scarecrow in your father's time. I have heard, the tongue yet quiver'd with the jest When the head leapt—so common! I do think To save your crown that it must come ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... south, excepting Mt.!! Darwin!!). We then shall scud away for Concepcion in Chili. I believe the ship must once again steer southward, but if any one catches me there again, I will give him leave to hang me up as a scarecrow for all future naturalists. I long to be at work in the Cordilleras, the geology of this side, which I understand pretty well is so intimately connected with periods of violence in that great chain of mountains. The future is, indeed, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... would have a nameless horror, far more killing than a stony fall. The women stand about frowsy and unkempt, with wild Irish eyes, all wearing the shawl as a hood, many in picturesque tatters, like the cast-off rags of a scarecrow, rags and flesh alike unwashed and of evil odour. The children look healthy and strong, though some of them are almost in puris naturalibus. Their faces are washed once a week; one of them said so, but the statement lacks confirmation, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... the range, knitting her ever-present muffler. She looked up, and caught her breath at the apparition that danced in—Norah, more like a well-dressed scarecrow than anything else, with her grey eyes bright among the mud-splashes. She held up Mrs. Hardy's velvet skirt in each hand, and danced solemnly up the long kitchen, pointing each foot daintily, in the ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... regular scarecrow!" cried the Doctor. "I will not pay for good things for him to go cliff-climbing and wading and burrowing in caves.—Here: what ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... only upon the word of those, who have no more idea of him than themselves. Our nurses are our first theologians. They talk to children of God as if he were a scarecrow; they teach them from the earliest age to join their hands mechanically. Have nurses then more true ideas of God than the children whom ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... glad? Well, I guess he was twice over and maybe three times. And after that he said good-by and hopped away, and after he had traveled for a long, long ways he came to the field where his old friend the Scarecrow lived. ...
— Billy Bunny and Uncle Bull Frog • David Magie Cory
... valley is very empty—my father and my mother are long since dead; I should wish, of all things, to establish myself near you. Although lame, I am still good for something, if only to serve as a scarecrow to hinder the birds from eating your apples and cherries. I will forget that you are 'my lord:' I will call you 'Master James,' I will call the duchess, 'Dame James,' your children shall call me Father Polypheme; I will tell them ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... spite of herself, she wished to know him better, though she already hated him. His face attracted her strangely, and his voice was pleasant, close to her ear. He had not in the least the look of the traditional lady-killer, of whom the tradition seems to survive as a moral scarecrow for the education of the young, though the creature is extinct among Anglo-Saxons. He was, on the contrary, a manly man, who looked as though he would prefer tennis to tea and polo to poetry—and men to women for company, ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... should take advantage of the negligence of our fleet to escape at once from siege and capture. It is not pestilence —by the God that lives! it is not either plague or impending danger that makes us, like birds in harvest-time, terrified by a scarecrow, abstain from the ready prey—it is base superstition—And thus the aim of the valiant is made the shuttlecock of fools; the worthy ambition of the high-souled, the plaything of these tamed hares! But yet Stamboul ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... "No, last night. Then, if you like, you had. But yesterday morning? Fortune and you, scarecrow? Go ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... sort of dinner would be on my father's table-cloth if I were to sit under one all day?" said she in answer to Harriet's representation of the fitness of things. "La, my dear, what matters it what an old scarecrow like ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... places that they know. . . . And my comrades of the Social-Democracy, they are also cheering, but to another tune.—'To-morrow! To St. Petersburg! Russian ascendency, the menace of civilization, must be obliterated!' The Kaiser waving the tyranny of another country as a scarecrow to his people! . ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... He says my brother cut off the gold tassels from my father's coffin, at night because they're worth a lot of money!' says he. Why, I can get him sent off to Siberia for that alone, if I like; it's sacrilege. Here, you—scarecrow!" he added, addressing the clerk at his side, "is it sacrilege ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of the Supreme Court, who had shown partiality, it was claimed, in the trial of Fries and Callender five years before. The requisite two-thirds of the Senate did not vote him guilty, and this method of curbing the Judiciary failed. "Impeachment is not even a scarecrow," admitted the disappointed President. The enemy had retired into the stronghold of the Judiciary, as he said, to be fed from the treasury, and from thence to beat down Republicanism. "By a fraudulent use of the Constitution," he explained, ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... seek the harvest's guerdon While the tree is yet in bloom? Wherefore drudge beneath the burden Of an unaccomplished doom? Wherefore let the scarecrow clatter Day and night upon the tree? Brothers mine, the sparrows' chatter Has ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... time than in eternity. No question Pends here of individual life; our sight Must broaden to embrace the scope sublime Of this trans-earthly theme. The Jew survives Sword, plague, fire, cataclysm—and must, since Christ Cursed him to live till doomsday, still to be A scarecrow to the nations. None the less Are we beholden in Christ's name at whiles, When maggot-wise Jews breed, infest, infect Communities of Christians, to wash clean The Church's vesture, shaking off the filth That gathers round her skirts. A perilous germ! Know you not, all the ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... used to proceed to Tunis, and stay there wasting its time while the Turkish ministry and those diplomats who were hostile to our influence amused themselves by waving the Capitan Pasha's attack before us like a scarecrow. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... the leaf, highly intellectual; but the old Scotch cloak, the broad-brimmed hat of the covenanter, the loose under vest, the thread-bare coat shaking in the wind, like the unmeasured garment of the scarecrow, and the colour-driven nankeens, grown short by age and frequent hard rubbings; then, too, the flowing locks of iron gray straggling over the shoulders like the withered tendrils of a blighted vine—all conspire to arrest the attention of an inquisitive eye; yet the Chelts know but little 233about ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... black legs, visible because he had tucked his one long garment up about his waist, were a mass of scars. He was lean, angular, yet peculiarly straight considering his years. As he stood before us he let his shirt-like garment drop, and the change from scarecrow to deferential servant was instantaneous. He was so wrinkled, and the wrinkles were so deep, that one scarcely noticed his sightless eye, almost hidden among a nest of creases; and in spite of the wrinkles, his polished, shaven head made him look ridiculously youthful ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... evening I shot the head off a scarecrow he had put up in the cherry tree when I was hiding around a corner to keep out of his sight. All the Springvale boys learned how to ride and shoot and to do both at once, although we never had any shooting to ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... my boys, and for that matter the business will be settled by the day after to-morrow. I will go round to speak to this Fraisier; for Dr. Poulain tells him everything that goes on in the house, and it is a great bother to keep that scarecrow quiet." ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... remember in order that from the retrospect we may gain practical wisdom. It is astonishing what unteachable, untamable creatures men are. They learn wisdom about all the little matters of daily life by experience, but they do not seem to do so about the higher. Even a sparrow comes to understand a scarecrow after a time or two, and any rat in a hole will learn the trick of a trap. But you can trick men over and over again with the same inducement, and, even whilst the hook is sticking in their jaws, the same bait will tempt them once more. That is very largely the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... heavens with an experienced weather eye, then began to look for a possible shelter from the coming shower. On either side, the fields stretched away in undulating lines, with no sign of a habitation in sight. A dejected old scarecrow, and a tumble-down shed in the distance were the only objects ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... appearance frightened me very much. He wore the whole of his beard, which was of iron-grey colour and reached down to his waist. His garb was composed of rags, tied to his body by the free use of rope. He once told my mother that he had more than once changed clothes with a scarecrow. Sometimes this queer person would never be seen by mortal man for months together, unless it were that I disturbed his solitude occasionally; but then, of course, I was only a boy. "Luke" had a bad name amongst ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... the street, and no man stands more upon't that he is the king's officer. His jurisdiction extends to the next stocks, where he has commission for the heels only, and sets the rest of the body at liberty. He is a scarecrow to that ale-house, where he drinks not his morning draught, and apprehends a drunkard for not standing in the king's name. Beggars fear him more than the justice, and as much as the whip-stock, whom he delivers over ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... that McNutt is implicated. This avenger may be the stranger who posed as a physician and said Captain Wegg died of heart disease, in order to prevent the simple people from suspecting a murder. His fishing was all a blind. Perhaps McNutt was his accomplice. That staring scarecrow would do anything for money. And then we come to the robbery. If Hucks did the murder he took the money, and perhaps West, the hardware dealer, knows this. Or West may have arrived at the house after the mysterious ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... handsome. There was too much of one universal brown. This was relieved only by the nurseries of young plants, small fields here and there just showing a delicate downy growth of green, delightful to the eye. They were not long sown. For each still lay cradled under its scarecrow, a pole planted in the centre of the rectangle with strings stretched to the four corners, and a bit of rag fluttering from the peak. The scarecrows are, no doubt, useful, since they are in general use; but I counted seven sparrows feeding in reckless disregard of danger ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... able to present the scarecrow of such an alliance to covetous princes, for we have a firm ally in Prussia, have we not?" ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... skin: He's never skirled, as you made me. By gox, You gave me gip: my back still bears the stripes Of the loundering I got the night I left. But I bear no malice, you old bag-of-bones: And where's the satisfaction in committing Assault and battery on a blasted scarecrow? 'Twas basting hot young flesh that you enjoyed: I still can hear you smack your lips with relish, To see the blue weals rising, as you laid on, Until the tawse was bloody. Not juice enough In your geyzened carcase to ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... But how could she doubt her final success, when her plans were already affording her so much more than she had expected? Who would have looked for the great red stag himself to come browsing so soon about the scarecrow! He was too large game, however, to be stalked without ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... with elbow pinionings, As if he meant to fly with linen wings. But when I look, and cast mine eyes below, What monster meets mine eyes in human show? So slender waist with such an abbot's loin, Did never sober nature sure conjoin, Lik'st a strawn scarecrow in the new-sown field, Rear'd on some stick, the tender corn to shield; Or if that semblance suit not every deal, Like a broad shake-fork with a slender steel. Despised nature, suit them once aright, Their body to their coat, both now misdight. Their body to their ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Karl. Yes, this pitiable being was the descendant of the great emperor, and for that sufficient reason, although he was an impotent and shivering idiot, although he could not sleep without a friar in his bed to keep the devils away, for thirty-five years this scarecrow ruled over Spain, and dying made a will whose accomplishment bathed the Peninsula in blood. It must be confessed this institution of monarchy is a luxury ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... to any petty greengrocer in the village, who thought it worth his while to walk up to the Hall, and drive a bargain with the stingy Squire. He not only assisted in gathering the fruit, for fear he should be robbed, but often acted as scarecrow to the birds, whom he reviled as noisy, useless nuisances, vexatiously sent to destroy ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... been roughly sewn. Everything was wrinkled in the folds of too-bigness. As though to accentuate the note, the man stood very erect, very military, and supported in one hand the staff of an English flag. This figure of fun, this man made from the slop-chest, this caricature of a scarecrow, had been put forth by heavy-handed facetiousness to the post of greatest honour. He was Standard-Bearer to the occasion! Surely subtle irony could ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Miss Moreton's, a respectable clergyman. Mrs. Freke was so much incensed by his insolent interference, as she was pleased to call it, that she made an effigy of Mr. Moreton dressed in his canonicals, and hung the figure up as a scarecrow in a garden close by the high road. He was so much beloved and respected for his benevolence and unaffected piety, that Mrs. Freke totally failed in her design of making him ridiculous; her scarecrow was torn to pieces ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... have heard of my friend Paddy changing clothes with the scarecrow. I don't know which name is the most distinguished, that of the English ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was the howl of a wolf for the shepherds, who bolted at once towards the bush: it was the yell of bull-dogs for the fossikers who floundered among the deep holes, and thus dodged the hounds: it was a scarecrow for the miners, who now scrambled down to the deep, and left a licensed mate or two at the windlass. By this time, a regiment of troopers, in full gallop, had besieged the whole Eureka, and the traps under their protection ventured among the holes. An attempt to give an ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... place for himself. He was employed by his guardian, Farmer Rodel, in the capacity of scarecrow, an occupation which required him to swing a rattle in the farmer's orchard all day long, for the purpose of frightening the sparrows away from the early cherries and vegetable-beds. At first this duty appealed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... wife any corresponding rights to get rid of her husband. These, and a hundred other difficulties all too visible to duller eyes, he utterly ignores as he proceeds on his violent way of deliverance from what he calls "imaginary and scarecrow sins." Nothing is allowed to stand in his path. For instance, the awkward texts in the Bible, whose authority he accepts, are given new interpretations with which it is to be feared his temper had more ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... it!" Pee-wee shouted "Do you think I'm a dunce? Do you think I'm going to march up and down Main Street with that thing on, like a—like a scarecrow—with all you fellows laughing ...
— Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... momentary cessation, then up and pressing on again. Here a fiery spirit grows pugnacious, but is restrained by his class-mates; there another has his shirt torn off him, and presents the picturesque appearance of an amateur scarecrow. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... daws Flock hither to advance their caws, And, with a sudden courage armed, Devour the foe who once alarmed— In life and death a fair deceit: Nor strong to harm nor good to eat. King bogey of the scarecrow host, When known the least affrighting most, Though light his hand (his mind was dark) He left on earth a straw ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... time that the Malthusian doctrine,—the fear of over-population as a hindrance to social reform,—was dismissed from consideration. It is at best but a worn-out scarecrow shaking its vain rags in the wind. Population, it is true, increases in a geometrical ratio. The human race, if favored by environment, can easily double itself every twenty-five years. If it did this, the time must come, through sheer power of multiplication, when there would not be standing ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... truth, nevertheless. At any rate, so long as you have to be my sister, I rejoice in the fact that you are an extremely pretty one. It is a great relief. You might have turned out to be a scarecrow. I don't mind confessing that last night I said to myself, 'There is the most beautiful girl in all the world,' and I can't begin to tell you how shocked I was this morning when Striker informed me that you were my half-sister. He knocked a ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... help being rather short with him, but he appeared not to mind it. We went the nearest way, without conversing much upon the road; and he was so humble in respect of those scarecrow gloves, that he was still putting them on, and seemed to have made no advance in that labour, when we ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... their argument. But, in the present case, we should reflect how apt mankind are to relent after they have inflicted punishment;—so that, perhaps, the same men who would have detested the noble Lord, while alive and in prosperity, pointing him as a scarecrow to their children, might, after being witnesses to the miserable fate that had overtaken him, begin in their hearts to pity him; and from the fickleness so common to human nature, perhaps, by way of compensation, acquit him of part of his crimes; insinuate that he was dealt ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... must be said, had a certain cachet of distinction. They were made of calico-print, with a design of little black skulls sprinkled over a yellow background. Some parts hung flat and limp as if upon a scarecrow; others pulsed, like a fire-hose in action, with the pressure of flesh compressed beneath, while at other points they bulged pneumatically in little foot-balls. The right leg dropped to the ankle; the left stopped discouraged, a few inches below the knee. The seams looked like ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... sense enough to obey. He hung upside down like a limp scarecrow, while his farm hands gaped up at him and the hired girl was busy pouring buckets of water over his wife who ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... agitated as a prima donna making her debut with the Metropolitan: Opera Company, decorated the Bannister bench, arrayed in one of the substitutes' baseball suits. It was too large for his splinter-structure, so that it flapped grotesquely, giving him a startling resemblance to a scarecrow escaped from a cornfield. With the thermometer of his spirits registering zero, the dismayed youth, whose punishment was surely fitting the ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... thing on your head, making you look so like a scarecrow, do you?" he said gently, as with a jerk he broke the strings and then threw the discarded cap ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... trial to-night," he said "I want to see what it will do to a dummy figure. Guess I'll make a sort of scarecrow and stuff it with straw. I'll get Eradicate to help me. Rad! I say, ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... the heath came a jolly knave, Like a scarecrow, all in rags: It made me crow to see his old duds All abroad in the wind, like flags;— So up he came to the timber's foot And ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the day from one of our O.P.'s I began a sketch of the whole panorama of the battle. Desolate ragged country, torn with shell wounds; the poor scarecrow trees like arms stretched up to heaven for help. Fields that once were golden with corn now grey and scarred with white trenches that look like a network of pale worms ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... wicked songs in broad daylight, he must expect to be heard. A little more and thou, too, wilt go to feed the lions and offer entertainment to the thousands who are weary of other amusements and seek something new. Turn pale, scarecrow, and tremble. Thy day will come, the day when those and others—shall suffer. Ha! ha! it strikes home, doesn't it? Thou fearest, ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter was, that the first energetic movement essential to one downright stroke of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... never rented a room and meals from the mother of Cake. In this boarder drink and debauchery had completely beaten out of shape what had once been a very noble figure of a man. His body was shrunken and trembling; the old, ragged clothes he wore flapped about him like the vestments of a scarecrow. His cheeks had the bruised congested look of the habitual drinker, his nose seemed a toadstool on his face, and his red eyes were almost vanished behind puffy, purple, pillow-like lids. His voice was husky and whispering, except when he raised it. Then it was surprisingly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... upturned face, while her body swayed with the vehemence of her feelings. Her garb, too, lent a pathos, for it was naught but a faded calico dress that hung from her attenuated frame like the raiment of a scarecrow. It may have been the shadowy room or the mournful dirge of the nearby ocean that added an uncanny touch to her words and looks, but from the moment she arose until her utterance ceased, Albert was spell-bound. So peculiar, and yet so pathetic, ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... we had no stabling at the old "Benbow." I followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow, and his bright black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he—the captain, that is—began to pipe up ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for an animated scarecrow on the way?" laughed Ruth. "Better 'bide a wee,' Tommy. Sister will get here with your rompers pretty ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... Amy, with a mingled sigh and laugh. "There you were growing as gaunt as a scarecrow, and I loving you all the time. What a little goose I was! If you had looked at Gertrude as Burt did I should have found myself out long ago. Why hadn't you the sense to employ ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... Mabel. Where is the mater? In the house, I suppose? I say, Kate, what a hole you have pitched upon for living in? I positively couldn't ride down upon the thing they offered me at the station. It wasn't even clean. Look at it, my dear girls! It holds my respectable belongings, and not me. It's the scarecrow or ghost of the ordinary station-fly. Could you have imagined the ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... rolled off my mare with laughter, though well I knew the screeching scarecrow up the pole would have me drawn and quartered for that day's work. I whipped the hounds off in the end, took 'em by road to Fermoy that same evening and boxed 'em to my brother-in-law in Carlow. 'Twas fortunate I did, for my kennels were burnt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... gave him to understand that she was to marshal him to the altar, Balder, never more heroic than at that moment, offered her his arm, which she accepted with an air of scarecrow gentility. Either the change of costume had struck in, or it was the symbol of inward change. She seemed struggling against her torpor, her dimness and deadness. She tried, perhaps, to recall the day when that dress was first put on,—the day of Helen's marriage, when Salome ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... dress consisted of a loose pair of trousers and shirt of blue cotton check; and, on the top of his white woolly head was fixed on in some mysterious fashion a battered fragment of a straw hat, just of the sort that would be used by an English farmer as a scarecrow to frighten off the birds ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... compeers, to tilt for municipal rewards at the water-quintain; which, unless I sent my lance clean through the ring, emptied a full bucket over me; to fend off which, the competitors wore grotesque old scarecrow hats. Or, being French-Flemish man or woman, boy or girl, I might have circled all night on my hobby- horse in a stately cavalcade of hobby-horses four abreast, interspersed with triumphal cars, going round and round and round and round, we the goodly company ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... little exceeding 400 lbs. on his sledge and caved in altogether on the second part of the march. The load was reduced to 200 lbs., and finally Forde pulled this in, leading the pony. The poor thing is a miserable scarecrow and never ought to have been brought—it is the same pony that did so badly in the ship. To-day it is very fine and bright. We are giving a good deal of extra food to the animals, and my hope is that they will soon pick up again—but they ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... me to present myself in this scarecrow aspect," he said. "I've had no time or chance for anything better. I can soon report to your father all that is essential, and then can go ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... altogether. She was absolutely unattainable to me, for Heaven knows I didn't want the real Lisa Fitch—"real" meaning, of course, the one who was real to me. I suppose in the end Carter's Lisa Fitch was as real as the skinny scarecrow ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... Lady Portarles, "you are still young enough to turn your back on that French scarecrow that sits ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... trabetajxo. Scanty malsuficxega. Scapegoat propekulo. Scapula skapolo. Scar cikatro. Scarabaeus skarabo. Scarce malsuficxa. Scarcely apenaux. Scarcity malsuficxo. Scare timigi. Scarecrow timigilo. Scarf skarpo. Scarlatina skarlatino. Scarlet skarlato. Scatter disjxeti, dissemi. Scene scenejo. Scene (painted) sceno. Scenery pejzagxo. Scent odoro. Scent flari. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes |
