"Clumsy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Thais appeared, her hair unloosed and streaming over her shoulders, barefooted, and clad in a clumsy coarse garment which seemed redolent with divine voluptuousness merely from having touched her body. Behind her came a gardener, carrying, half hidden in his long beard, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... he had made only fifteen miles in that long day of effort. And he was ravenously hungry. Well, he was too tired to go farther that night; and in default of a meal, the best thing he could do was sleep. First, however, he unlaced his larrigans, and with the thongs made shift to set a clumsy snare in a rabbit track a few paces back among the spruces. Then, close under the lee of a black wall of fir-trees standing out beyond the forest skirts, he clawed himself a deep trench in the snow. In ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... painful trepidation, the answer and requirements of Monsieur de Nucingen to the inattentive ears of du Tillet, who was looking for the bellows and scolding his valet for the clumsy manner in which he ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... escape no more," cried his late gaoler, and brought his axe down with a mighty rush. Alfgar leapt nimbly aside, and before his bulky but clumsy antagonist could recover his guard, passed his keen sword beneath the left arm, through the body, and the giant staggered and fell, a bloody foam rising to his lips, as he quivered in ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... middle of a great war with all his soldiers. I had just firmly established fire superiority and was actually on the verge of launching a huge offensive—the one that was going to win the war, in fact—when, as I said, in butted this great clumsy elephant and knocked ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... we would wait and wait Through Time and to Eternity! Ah Heaven! we could conquer Fate With more than Godlike constancy I cut the date upon a tree— Here stand the clumsy figures still: "10-7-85, A.D." Damp with ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... word insome folks' dictionaries fitly to describe it—there is no such word in mine; but when you have said that much you have said all there is to say. A French woman's feet are not shod well. French shoes, like all European shoes, are clumsy ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... water, the complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the cribs were whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats groaned and ground each other in the eddy that swung round the abutment, and their clumsy masts rose higher and higher ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... hour to thaw and the tea was just warm enough for practical purposes when I made an awkward move in the crowded tent and kicked over the tea-pot! Never did men keep their tempers better under more aggravating circumstances. Not a word of reproach or indignation greeted my clumsy accident, although poor Corporal Gamarra, who was lying on the down side of the tent, had to beat a hasty retreat into the colder (but somewhat drier) weather outside. My clumsiness necessitated a delay of nearly an hour in starting. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... sun of the valleys; shepherds in great sheepskins, be it ever so hot; and haughty Turks, hodjas, and veiled women, all in a crowded confusion, haggling and bartering. Quaint wooden carts drawn by patient oxen, their huge clumsy wheels creaking horribly; gypsies with thunderous voices acting as town criers; madmen shrieking horribly; blind troubadours droning out songs of heroes on their guslars. If the tourist has witnessed and understood all this, then ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... wide-awake hat, looked at first sight more like a country gentleman having a stroll over his farm, than a man whose hands were hard with the labors of the forge. He took off his hat as she approached—if not with ease, yet with the clumsy grace peculiar to him; for, unlike many whose manners are unobjectionable, he had in his something that might be called his own. But the best of it was, that he knew nothing about his manners, beyond the desire to give honor where ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... river above the bridge, which they cannot now do. And should the project be carried into effect, it is likely that the small sized coasting vessels, when nothing better offers for them to do, will go on to the Laguna, and supersede the clumsy cascos which now solely navigate the lake and bring down the produce of the fruitful country which surrounds it, to dispose of in the market ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... study the verses themselves we see that the first three lines are rather fine, but the fourth line is clumsy and matter-of-fact compared with the others. In the second stanza "lowly thatched cottage" may be a poetic description, but the home longing is not confined to people who have lived in thatched cottages. Tame singing birds are interesting, but home stands for higher and holier ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... burst out a-laughing in the rudest manner possible:—"Very likely, truly," said one of them, "that such a clumsy foot as your's should fit the ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... 'it 'er on the 'ed with sumpthin' pretty quick. I don't think I could abide a grizzler," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I'd liefer 'ave a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I'd make 'er stop laughing after a bit for all 'er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went.... ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... "Timon," a fragment only of which is Shakspere's. The pen fell from the tired hand; the worn and distracted brain refused to fulfil the task of depicting the depth to which the poet's estimate of mankind had fallen; and we hardly know whether to rejoice or to regret that the clumsy hand of an inferior writer has screened from our knowledge the full disclosure of the utter and contemptuous cynicism and want of faith with which, for the time being, Shakspere ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... pension. But he carried still with him a look of youth, and he had been a splendid creature in his time. The other was short of stature and of neck, bent besides by field work. A broadly-built, clumsy man, with something gnome-like about him, and the cheerful look of one whose country nerves had never known the touch of worry or long sickness. The name of the taller man was Peter Halsey, and ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Lady Bolsover's, and on each occasion seemed to consider himself of more importance. So far as Barbara could judge he knew nothing of her reason for leaving the Abbey. He asked no questions, but delivered himself of many clumsy compliments framed to express his delight that the most charming creature on earth had brought sunshine again to town. It was impossible to make Judge Marriott understand that his attentions were not wanted, and Barbara, who had no desire to make an enemy of him, endured them as best she ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... body that contains them, also must grow to make room for them. So the hips begin to grow broader. Other parts of the body grow faster at this time, too, and often some parts grow so much faster than others that they are out of proportion, and the child becomes clumsy and feels awkward. But that will not last long, for after a while the parts that are growing slowly will catch up to the ones that grew fast, and then the body will be graceful again. Have you ever watched a young puppy? You know how clumsy and awkward ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... reverently ponder what Christ revealed to us by the cry that cleft it, witnessing that He then was indeed bearing the whole weight of a world's sin. By the side of such thoughts, and in the presence of such sorrow, the clumsy jest of the bystanders, which caught at the half-heard words, and pretended to think that Jesus was a crazy fanatic calling for Elijah with his fiery chariot to come and rescue Him, may well be passed by. One little touch of sympathy moistened His dying lips, not without opposition from the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... stupid and clumsy of Spinrobin to drop his teacup and let it smash noisily against the leg of the table; yet it was natural enough, for in his ecstasy and amazement he apparently lost control of certain muscles in his trembling fingers.... Though the change came gradually ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... conversed with Pizarro as well as they could by signs. It was cheering to the adventurers to hear that these Indians also knew of a rich country lying to the southward, and to see that the large ornaments of clumsy workmanship which they wore were of gold. When after six weeks the ship returned, those on board were horrified at the wild and haggard faces of their comrades, so wasted were they by hunger and disease; but they soon revived, and, embarking once more, they joyfully left behind them the dismal ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... to such modes of finish, since the sight of the walls swaying and wriggling before his eyes could only be satisfactorily explained as the result of intoxication, or of temporary insanity. The same stranger would have stopped short in surprise, on entering the Everetts' clumsy log-house. In spite of its unattractive exterior, it was a cosy, luxurious dwelling, with furniture, draperies and pictures which would do credit to any Eastern city house; for Mrs. Everett had loved pretty things, and had gathered them ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... how small appeared to us now the trouble we had taken about the food, how clumsy our ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... protected me, at least, against the curious glances that pass right through me. The murderer Maurice and his mistress! You don't love me any longer, Henriette, and no more do I care for you. To- day you are ugly, clumsy, insipid, repulsive. ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... to the thoughtless refrain, 'Nought ye know about to-morrow,' they now re-echoed with a cry of 'Penitence;' for times had strangely altered, and the heedless past had brought forth a doleful present. The last stanza of Alamanni's chorus is a somewhat clumsy attempt to adapt the too real moral of his subject to the customary mood of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... armor, and found it extraordinarily uncomfortable, and over all I drew on the chain mail. I know nothing about armor, but from what I have learned since, I must have put on parts of two suits. Anyway, I felt beastly, clamped and clumsy and unable to move my arms and legs naturally. But I knew that the thing I was thinking of doing called for some sort of protection for my body. Over the armor I pulled on my dressing gown and shoved my revolver into one of ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... clumsy bridges," said Nettie again, pointing to the drawbridges of white painted wood which they saw at every little distance; they were made of large, heavy beams overhead, and lifted by chains for ...
— Eric - or, Under the Sea • Mrs. S. B. C. Samuels
... as he had done at the Chartreuse. Only as, in all probability, the good folks at the humble tavern were far from being conspirators, the traveller was kept waiting longer than he had been at the monastery. At last he heard the echo of the stable boy's clumsy sabots. The gate creaked, but the worthy man who opened it no sooner perceived the horseman with his drawn pistol than he instinctively tried to, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... a second marriage creditable, natural, or a clumsy expedient which only the entire hollowness of the whole plot of false noting as to Hero renders endurable? Can you imagine any way of acting the part of Claudio that would ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... were through, and in plenty, I was convinced, and so every able-bodied youth I could muster was enrolled in my infantry battalion and spent most of his time in vigorous bayonet practice. And for the same reason I had discarded the idea of armor. I felt it would be clumsy, and questioned its value. True, it was an absolute bar against the disintegrator ray, but of what use would that be if a Han ray found a crevice between overlapping plates, or if the ray was used to annihilate the very ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... extensively before putting the plan into operation. He had also done the same thing with the library door, as there were marks of more than one operation. Furthermore, he was wiser than to take the risk of so clumsy a tool as ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... clustering men in front of him. The moonlight shone in between the birches, and something dusky and rigid lay athwart it in the snow. One man was lighting a lantern, and though his hands were mittened he seemed singularly clumsy. At last, however, a pale light blinked out, and under it Breckenridge saw a white face and shadowy head, from which the fur ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... best spare bedroom, had heard the gist of Ralph's remarks to his brother, I think she would have risen up and confronted him then and there on the stairs. As it was, she meditated on her couch with much satisfaction, until the sleep of the just came upon her, little recking that the clumsy hand of brutal man had even then torn the veil from her carefully concealed and ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... better now that my joints are oiled," returned the Tin Woodman, with a sigh of pleasure. "You and I, friend Scarecrow, are much more easily cared for than those clumsy meat people, who spend half their time dressing in fine clothes and who must live in splendid dwellings in order to be contented and happy. You and I do not eat, and so we are spared the dreadful bother of ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... divine; and soon works round to the conclusion that it is no proper sonship at all. In his irreverent hands the Lord's deity is but the common right of mankind, his eternity no more than the beasts themselves may claim. His clumsy logic overturns every doctrine he is endeavouring to establish. He upholds the Lord's divinity by making the Son of God a creature, and then worships him to escape the reproach of heathenism, although such worship, on his own showing, is mere idolatry. ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... set to work. Steve knew next to nothing about such things, but was willing to do whatever his comrade asked of him. And while Max professed to be a clumsy butcher, he certainly did his work in a way to draw out words of praise from ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie
... hot sun-dazzled earth? Life, he realized, was too amazing to be frittered out in this aimless sickness of heart. There were truths and wonders to be grasped, if he could only throw off this wistful vague desire. He felt like a clumsy strummer seated at a dark shining grand piano, which he knows is capable of every glory of rolling music, yet he can only ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... clay was the only available material, each cell had to be made rather heavy and clumsy in appearance, and was baked when completed. Each was ten inches deep and three by six and a half inches within. The electrodes, made of zinc, were each one-half inch thick, six inches wide, and nine inches long. The copper ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... and is from without, not only with respect to the individual but to the race; that it is an external, God-given rule, awakening, explaining, developing man's natural religious instinct, correcting his own clumsy interpretations thereof, is just what gives it its claim to pre-eminence over all, even the most highly conceived, man-made interpretations of the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the village lived old Dame Shoemaker; she sat and sewed together, as well as she could, a little pair of shoes out of old red strips of cloth; they were very clumsy, but it was a kind thought. They were meant for the little girl. The little ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... sake no," she declared. "I would rather put up with your own efforts, however clumsy. Love-making at first hand is dull enough. At second ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I present any lady Whose conduct is shady Or smacking of doubtful propriety; When Virtue would quash her I take and whitewash her And launch her in first-rate society. I recommend acres Of clumsy dressmakers - Their fit and their finishing touches; A sum in addition They pay for permission To say that they ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... was faithless and faithful, having favourites to whom she gave up her heart, and a husband for whom she kept her bed. As a Christian she was a heretic and a bigot. She had one beauty—the well-developed neck of a Niobe. The rest of her person was indifferently formed. She was a clumsy coquette and a chaste one. Her skin was white and fine; she displayed a great deal of it. It was she who introduced the fashion of necklaces of large pearls clasped round the throat. She had a narrow forehead, sensual lips, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... evening came on they made a clumsy landing and had supper. This time Nap fed her the titbits, though she protested. "White meat for you," he said, "with your skin ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... of the book is devoted to expression of the author's ideas on the subject of reform, and especially of association as a means thereto. As her thoughts are yet in a very crude state, the execution of this part is equally bungling and clumsy. Worse: she falsifies the characters of both Consuelo and Albert,—who is revived again by subterfuge of trance,—and stains her best arrangements by the mixture of ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... they lay on the gracefulness of it; nay, Cicero goes farther, and even maintains that a good figure is necessary for an orator, and particularly that he must not be vastus; that is, overgrown and clumsy. He shows by it that he knew mankind well, and knew the powers of an agreeable figure and a graceful manner. Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts, than by their understandings. The way to the ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Mrs. Marshall. "I wouldn't be in the way, would I?" he said, with a clumsy pleading. He hesitated obviously over the "Mother" which had risen to his lips, the name he had had for her during the momentous visit of five years before, and finally, blushing, could not bring it out. "I'd like it like anything! ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... precipitated by diplomats and rulers, and, assuming that all these statesmen sincerely desired a peaceful solution of the questions raised by the Austrian ultimatum, (which is by no means clear,) it was the result of ineffective diplomacy and clumsy diplomacy at that. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... him with my own eyes," said the boy; "he was one of the officers commanding the men; but there was another over him, a big, clumsy, noisy man; he it was I saw first of all, and Denot was behind him; and then there was a crowd of horsemen following them. Both drawing-rooms were full before we knew they were in ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... versed in the world, that she had not the whole catechism of men at her finger-ends. All who glanced at her glanced again—with sympathy and curiosity; and the second glance pricked Audrey's conscience, making her feel like a thief. But her moods were capricious. At one moment she was a thief, a clumsy fraud, an ignorant ninny, and a suitable prey for the secret police; and at the next she was very clever, self-confident, equal to the situation, and enjoying the situation more than she had ever enjoyed anything, and determined to prolong ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... feathers and shells as sufficient ornaments, and to paint their bodies of different colours, to improve or ornament their bows and arrows, to form and scoop out with sharp-edged stones some little fishing boats, or clumsy instruments of music; in a word, as long as they undertook such works only as a single person could finish, and stuck to such arts as did not require the joint endeavours of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy, as much as their nature would admit, and continued to enjoy with ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... debt which a city would be allowed to incur under any circumstances. Clothing the mayor with the veto power is now seen to have been a wise step; and arbitrary limitation of the amount of debt, though a clumsy expedient, is confessedly a necessary one. But beyond this, it was in some instances attempted to take the management of some departments of city business out of the hands of the city and put them into the hands ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... watch, and sung out, as the bell struck twice, his accustomed long-drawn cry of 'All's well!' Just beyond her, in saucy propinquity, lay a slaver, bound for the coast of Africa—a beautiful, graceful craft. Still farther out the crew of a clumsy French brig were chanting the evening hymn to the Virgin. Ships from every civilized country lay anchored, in picturesque groups, in all directions, and far down, her tall white spars standing in bold ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... while he went outside, with the double purpose of watching for enemies and trying to find something to eat. He fashioned a club from a stout branch and made several attempts to get a squirrel or a bird by hurling it at them. But the weapon was too clumsy and they were too quick, and this forlorn hope came to nothing. So that when night at last dropped down upon him he was more hungry than ever and had ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... Sheriff of Nottingham was eager for the King's favor and the deeds of Robin Hood were soon brought to his notice. He sought more than once to capture the bold outlaw, but always failed, and he was so clumsy and so cowardly that Robin Hood became emboldened to defy him openly, and enter the town of Nottingham under his very eyes. On one occasion an outlaw who had been taken by the Sheriff was rescued by Robin from a formidable array of men-at-arms just as ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... myself. She said it to my face and tittered. You bet I'll pay her out somehow. Miss Stephanie Radford needs taking down a peg. Oh, don't alarm yourself, I'll do it neatly! There'll be no clumsy bungling about it. Well, if you won't go down and play basket-ball I shall. It's more fun than sitting ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... artistic needs of the masterpiece to be performed. It implies a clear understanding of the essentials in bringing out the composer's idea. The pupil must not be confused with inaccurate thinking. For instance, we commonly hear of the 'wrist touch.' More pupils have been hindered through this clumsy terminology than I should care to estimate. There cannot be a wrist touch since the wrist is nothing more than a wonderful natural hinge of bone and muscle. With the pupil's mind centered upon his wrist he is more than likely to stiffen ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... prairies, but gentle zephyrs almost breathless that rustled softly and musically through the little blades of grass just as the wind was rustling through the stalks now as he walked slowly with the heavy stride of the clumsy farmer, hoeing the corn. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... President Low, went with the other members of the delegation to Haarlem, where we saw the wonderful portraits by Frans Hals, which impressed me more than ever, and heard the great organ. It has been rebuilt since I was there thirty-five years ago; but it is still the same great clumsy machine, and very poorly played,—that is, with no spirit, and without any effort to exhibit anything beyond the ordinary effects for which any little church organ ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... desolate shore. When twenty of his men were dead of starvation, the ship came back with supplies. In one of their excursions, during this wait at Starvation Harbor, they had stumbled upon and surprised an Indian village in which they found some clumsy gold ornaments, with further tales of the El Dorado to the southward. Instead of yielding to the request of his men that they immediately return in the ship, therefore, the indomitable Spaniard made sail southward. He landed at various places, getting everywhere little ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... so often been mischievous that it is well to have as little of it as possible. The masses are uneducated, the prey of impulse and passion; politics are corrupt; to submit the genius of free ENTREPRENEURS to the clumsy and ill-fitted yoke of a popularly wrought legal control is to stifle their enterprise and interfere with their chances of success. After all, every one knows his own needs best; and if we leave people ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... imbued with Stoic philosophy and accordingly with the doctrine of the "double truth" in the field of religion—the real philosophical truth which was their own peculiar property and which showed them clearly that all the forms of religion were vain, and its doctrines at best a clumsy statement in roundabout parables of a truth which they saw face to face; and that lower "truth" intended for the masses and dictated by the pressure of necessity, the concrete state religion in all its details, which must be preserved among the lower classes in the interest of the state and of ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... had permanent quarters in an old mansion near Bruneck, called Mayr-am-Hof. Here William was able to indulge in his favourite occupation of gardening. He dug indefatigably in a field allotment with his English spade, a unique instrument in that land of clumsy husbandry, and was amazed at the growth of the New Zealand spinach, the widespread rhubarb, the exuberant tomatoes, and towering spikes of Indian corn. Thanks to the four great doctors before mentioned, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... there, keeping up a steady, dropping fire on the house. McNamara sat propped against a rock, a clumsy, dirty bandage around his thigh; Isaacs lay prone, a stained rag twisted tightly around his shoulder; Lovel sat with his legs crossed, staring stupidly down to the steady drip of blood from ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... wasting for ever; and never a glimpse of it. Delicate work this! Here's a needle might serve for a genuine stiletto! No matter,—it is the cause,—it is the cause that makes, as my mother says, each stitch in this clumsy fabric a grander thing than the flashing of the bravest lance that brave ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... any significance had Borrow told us nothing himself. Some of the anecdotes lap a branch here and there; some disclose a little rotten wood or fungus; others show the might of a great limb, perhaps a knotty protuberance with a grotesque likeness, or the height of the whole; others again are like clumsy arrogant initials carved on the venerable bark. I shall use some of them, but for the most part I shall use Borrow's own brush both to ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... stove was suspended a wooden rack, black with age, its compartments holding German, Austrian and Hungarian newspapers. Against the opposite wall stood an ancient walnut mirror, and above it hung a colored print of Bismarck, helmeted, uniformed, and fiercely mustached. The clumsy iron-legged tables stood in two solemn rows down the length of the narrow room. Three or four stout, blond girls plodded back and forth, from tables to front shop, bearing trays of cakes and steaming cups ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... things; but I am sure that I never have been able to get anything done well but by patience. Don't you remember, Carlo, how you and even Rosetta laughed at me the first time your father put a pencil into my awkward, clumsy hands?" ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... minute—any single minute—and nothing done yet, not even the table set. Mrs. Ford, you better cut the bread. Here's a lot of it in a tin box, and a knife with it, sharp enough to cut a feller's head off. You best not touch it, Helena, you're so sort of clumsy with things. Now I'm off to boil ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... destruction sailing on her wings! Around her scream a hundred harpies fell! A hundred demons shriek with hideous yell! From where, in mortal venom dipt on high, Full-drawn the deadliest shafts of satire fly; Where Churchill brandishes his clumsy club, And Wilkes unloads his excremental tub, Down to where Entick, awkward and unclean, Crawls on his native dust, a worm obscene! While with unnumber'd wings from van to rear 220 Myriads of nameless buzzing drones appear: From their dark cells the angry insects swarm, And every ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... the system of mutual assistance in the construction of houses. This childishly amicable system, which is as clumsy as the block-houses erected, can be developed on much ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... accident should suddenly flash favouring light on his now impersonal and indiscoverable individuality, seems clear enough when we take into account the double and final disproof of his imaginary identity with Marlowe, which Mr. Dyce has put forward with such unanswerable certitude. He is a clumsy and coarse-fingered plagiarist from that poet, and his stolen jewels of expression look so grossly out of place in the homely setting of his usual style that they seem transmuted from real to sham. On the other hand, he ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... she went in, and put out again with the clumsy heap of netting towering at her feet. The thing she meant to do was stupendous for a girl to attempt alone, but she was going to attempt it. The shabby old net had lain in its corner, useless, for two years. Now it should be ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... crowded in front to peer through the puzzling fog to see the questionable boulder, but IT unexpectedly got upon its clumsy feet and started for the girls. In the fog it loomed up as big as ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Then appeared again. And now it moved a little faster. A little faster still. Now it moved along at an even, steady rate. The long, hard pull up Cheery Hill was over, and the horses were jogging along the road. Oh, how well Hervey knew that lantern which hung under the rear step of the clumsy, lumbering ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... momentary flash. He settled back into the easy-chair with invalid languor, and began to tell me good-naturedly about his old velocipede, describing its construction, and the feats he had been able to perform on it, clumsy though it was. He could keep up with a fast horse in riding into Boston, but at the cost of a good pair of shoes. The contrivance supported the weight of the body, which rolled forward on the wheels, ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... the Scotch earl of —, Lord R-M—, and another young officer. The first was a man of a very genteel figure and amorous complexion, danced well, and had a great deal of good-humour, with a mixture of vanity and self-conceit. The second had a good face, though a clumsy person, and a very sweet disposition, very much adapted for the sentimental passion of love. And the third, Mr. W— by name, was tall, thin, and well-bred, with a great stock of good-nature and vivacity. These adventurers began their addresses in general acts of gallantry, that comprehended ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... the disclosures which might be expected on the trial of a pettifogging attorney. The obscurity and intricacy which they communicate to the whole story, must be very painfully felt by every reader who tries to comprehend it; and is prodigiously increased by the very clumsy and inartificial manner in which the denouement is ultimately brought about by the author. Three several attempts are made by three several persons to beat into the head of the reader the evidence of De Wilton's innocence, and of Marmion's guilt; first, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... "done to." This is a necessarily clumsy tag to represent the "nominative" (subjective) in ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... classes work neatly in leather; they weave a few coarse barracans, and make iron-work in a solid, though clumsy manner. One or two work in gold and silver with much skill, considering the badness of their tools, and every man is capable of acting as a carpenter or mason; the wood being that of the date tree, and the houses being built of mud, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... an antique door-key of a clumsy pattern, and opened the door into the living-room. She ran across to the windows and threw them open, then turned to see what expression might be at the moment illumining Mr. Marcy's face. He was glancing about him with curious eyes, which rested finally upon the portrait of ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... performances came the deluge and the country was flooded with women indecently unclad, who flapped about on the stage displaying their persons and their incompetence lavishly. The authorities have been very lax as regards such performances, many of which were so obviously crude and clumsy that it was clear that a succes de scandale was sought deliberately. Of course some of the performers may have had merit. Later on (in 1910) there arrived some brilliant Russian dancers whose work is of too great ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... my foot off. Are you ready to put yours on? Don't be clumsy! Wait a minute, I'm not ready. I'm not ready, ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... and behind this roll of linen, fastened to a ring under the seat of the saddle, was swung a bundle tied up in a large blue-and-white checked cotton neckkerchief. Whenever she fidgeted in the saddle, or whenever the horse stumbled as he often did because he was clumsy and because the road was obstructed by stumps and roots, the string by which this bundle was tied slipped a little through the lossening knot and the bundle hung a little lower down. Just where the wagon-trail passed out into the broader public road leading from ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... please. But one thing I want you to understand: if you are not going to act in the matter, I shall do so. I willingly confess that I am a selfish woman; but I am very fond of Lillie, and if you abandon her in this cruel and clumsy way, I shall have her to live with me here, and I shall do my best to console her for the loss of an ungrateful husband and a pack of ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... it is then impossible to shoot them. Their food consists of aquatic plants, and grasses of many descriptions. Not only do they visit the margin of the river, but they wander at night to great distances from the water if attracted by good pasturage, and, although clumsy and ungainly in appearance, they clamber up steep banks and precipitous ravines with astonishing power and ease. In places where they are perfectly undisturbed, they not only enjoy themselves in the sunshine by basking half asleep ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... else were out of temper, there was always one person he could be sure of finding the same, and that was John-James—good, kind, reliable John-James, whom he adored. Did he want a boat made? John-James would do it with those big hands which looked so clumsy and were so sure and careful. Had he broken the rope reins with which he and Jacka's John-Willy played at horses? John-James would mend them. All of kindness and consideration to be found for him in that house he extracted from ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... an alliance of which he was not the head was delicate work. A clumsy speaker in debate might do infinite mischief. When a party is in opposition, all its members can talk, and are encouraged to talk, to the utmost; little harm can be done to one's own side by what is said in criticism of ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... curious observations on Barbarians and Eutrapelia and the character of Mr Quinion. We may have too little of such things in English politics—no doubt for a good many years before Mr Arnold's day we had too little of them. But too much, though a not unpopular, is a very clumsy and very unscientific antidote to too little; and in Mr Arnold's own handling of politics, I venture to think that there was too much of them ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... and change our clothes in order to receive this lady. The dresses we wore that day were very simply made and short. The reason we wore this kind of costume was that there was no carpet and the bare brick floor had ruined our beautiful red velvet gowns, also the clumsy eunuchs had kept stepping on our trains all the time. We had made up our minds that short dresses for general wear every day would be more practical. Her Majesty said: "Why must you change your clothes? I see you look much better without that ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... "Wombat. This clumsy, but well-known animal (Phascolomys wombat), during the day conceals himself in his gloomy lair in the loneliest recesses of the mountains, and usually on the banks of a creek, and at night roams about in search of food, which it finds ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... four rode in silence, Tex in the lead with Bat Lajune close by his side. An occasional backward glance revealed the clumsy efforts of the pilgrim to ease himself in the saddle, and the set look of determination upon the tired face ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... give them such a thorough thrashing that they may once for all be cured of the fatal illusion that they have established a monopoly in the dear Lord God, and that the rest of humanity is destined only to serve as a stool for their clumsy feet!—PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... avoid a permanent tete-a-tete with realities that are too heavy for us." Is there not a more excellent way than this? Let us carry our sorrows to Christ, and we shall find that in Him they have lost their sting. It is a clumsy mistake to call Christianity a religion of sorrow—it is a religion for sorrow. Christ finds us stricken and afflicted, and His words go down to the depths of our sorrowful heart, healing, strengthening, rejoicing with ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... been returned to the lockers, and they had broken open only one, and had got hold of a jar of brown sugar and another of flour, which, in their clumsy endeavours to eat, they had sprinkled about the cabin. We calculated from this that they had not been there long; for if they had, they would have routed out everything eatable they ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... or you won't know how sweet and cool the water is!" She cupped her hands and drank; but his own efforts to bring the water to his lips were clumsy and ineffectual. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... in repeating to herself the deadly consequences to Scotland if its nobility ever consented to her being 'subject to an unfaithful husband.' It was unanswerable, except by a new passion of tears, under which the Reformer stood at first silent and unmoved. He broke silence at last with a clumsy attempt to explain or to console; and Mary's indignation was not diminished by Knox's quaint protest that he was really a tenderhearted man, and could scarcely bear to see his own children weep when corrected ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... of the mania, India-rubber stock began to decline, and Roxbury itself finally fell to two dollars and a half. Before the close of 1836, all the Companies had ceased to exist, their fall involving many hundreds of families in heavy loss. The clumsy, shapeless shoes from South America were the only ones which the people would buy. It was generally supposed that the secret of their resisting heat was that they were smoked with the leaves of a certain tree, peculiar ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... young days at school, my friend—the tingling cheeks, burning ears, bursting heart, and passion of desperate tears, with which you looked up, after having performed some blunder, whilst the doctor held you to public scorn before the class, and cracked his great clumsy jokes upon you—helpless, and a prisoner! Better the block itself, and the lictors, with their fasces of birch-twigs, than the maddening torture ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... even in his friendliest moments, much away from home, and unable to meet the boy on his own level when he was there, deprived of the wife who might have been his interpreter, he had no way of becoming acquainted with his son. Anxious in some way to share in Jim's life, he took the clumsy and mistaken method of letting him ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... England in the year 1850. This, of course, would of itself be sufficient to make ten Dr. Dickkopfs turn to and prove the contrary; and any one of them, I imagine, might, and probably would, thus reply. Excuse his clumsy ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... get over the way his head dropped down on his arms, when we were riding out uh sight. As if—oh, hell! If it was a josh, I'll just about beat the head off him for spoiling my sleep this way. Get your foot off that rein, yuh damned, clumsy bench!" ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... object in the intellectual heavens, disdaining to justify its right to exist on any other grounds than the mere fact of its existence; and, certainly, not more ridiculous than Saturn himself, as we look at him through a great equatorial telescope, swinging through space encumbered with his clumsy ring, and his wrangling family of satellites, but still, in spite of peculiarities on which M. Taine might exercise his wit until doomsday, one of the most beautiful and sublime objects which the astronomer can behold in the whole phenomena of ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... cut on the brow," said Harry, "and a slight one behind the ear. I won't move the clumsy bandage, though, till we get him up, when it can be made more ship-shape. Now, Tom, you must let us put you in the potatoe-bag and ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... shout across to the enemy trenches. We would ask pertinent questions about their commanders and impertinent ones about the affairs of their nation. One thing I can say for Hans—he is never slow in answering. His repartee may be clumsy, but it is prompt ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... obtained for events in the Mediterranean, and in March the Sussex, a cross-Channel passenger boat, was torpedoed in plain violation of the German promise of September 1. There followed another interchange of notes, but the usual German efforts to deny and evade were somewhat more clumsy than usual. On April 19 the President came before Congress and announced that "unless the Imperial Government should now immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of submarine warfare against passenger and freight carrying vessels" diplomatic relations ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... trace much of the ground plan with accuracy. The corner of an old house still stands, some 6 or 8 feet high, extending about 15 feet on one face and about 10 feet on the other. The wall is over 3 feet in thickness, but of very clumsy masonry, no care having been exercised in dressing the stones, which are of varying sizes and laid in mud plaster. Interest attaches to this fragment, as it is one of the few tangible evidences left of ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... a very small octavo, the type and execution are creditable, the woodcut at the beginning is clumsy. It is a perfect copy, page for page, of the English editions of Mose's Hodder, of which the one called seventeenth is of London, 1690. There is not a syllable to show that the edition above described might not be of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... poetry spread over Europe; in Italy, its home, it assumed a French color, and thence the heroes of French tragedy went with the Anjous to Spain; it passed with Henrietta Maria to England, and we Germans, as a matter of course, built our clumsy temples to the powdered Olympus of Versailles. The most famous high-priest of this religion was Gottsched, that wonderful long wig whom our dear Goethe has so admirably described ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... gaze, saw, among the gaily painted pleasure craft moored at the wharfs, a clumsy little boat with rusty sides and dingy sail. An old man stood in the stern waving a tattered flag that, caught out by the breeze, showed in large ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... rather clumsy, I'm afraid. But it cannot be helped. I must go blundering on. I'm groping in the dark, you know, but it's a thousand pities I shall have ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... sparks of scepticism.[23] Hammer meant praise in calling Polo "der Vater orientalischer Hodogetik," in spite of the uncouthness of the eulogy. But another grave German writer, ten years after Marsden's publication, put forth in a serious book that the whole story was a clumsy imposture![24] ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... you are!" Warrington said; "and, what is worst of all, sir, a clumsy humbug. I saw you look to see that the fire was out before you sent 'Walter Lorraine' behind the bars. No, we won't burn him: we will carry him to the Egyptians, and sell him. We will exchange him away for money, yea, ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... little trembling. It was Rougon who took them from the boxes, and each man present, as he received his gun, the barrel of which on that December night was icy cold, felt a sudden chill freeze him to his bones. The shadows on the walls assumed the clumsy postures of bewildered conscripts stretching out their fingers. Pierre closed the boxes regretfully; he left there a hundred and nine guns which he would willingly have distributed; however, he now had to divide the cartridges. Of these, there were two large barrels full in the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... exceedingly rude to William. She does not like him, I know, but he was after all our guest, and she was not justified in remarking, when he upset his wine on the tablecloth, and knocked over an adjacent salt-cellar, 'If there's anything in the world I loathe, it is a clumsy man.' ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... lasts from May to August, but the majority of the birds lay in June and July. It builds in trees, at heights of from 10 to 30 feet, usually towards the extremities of lateral branches, constructing a huge clumsy nest of straw, grass, twigs, roots, and rags, with a deep cavity lined as a rule with quantities of feathers. Occasionally, but very rarely, it places its nest in some huge hole in a great arm of a mango-tree. I have ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... this time, and Armand St. Just, who loved her so dearly, felt that he had placed a somewhat clumsy finger ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... "a monstrous man crushing a tender slug under his clumsy hoofs. Birds I can tolerate. They are not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... The young thoroughbred at the head of the table who had given him a swift all-embracing look, an enigmatical smile and a light laughing question as to whether he would like to be called "Father, papa, Uncle George or what" awed him. He couldn't help feeling like a clumsy piece of modern pottery in the presence of an exquisite specimen of porcelain. His hands and feet multiplied themselves, and his vocabulary seemed to contain no more than a dozen slang phrases. He was conscious of the fact that his collar was too high and his clothes a little ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Dugall Mackenzie having conferred together for some time discussing matters of importance to each as neighbours, Glengarry took his leave, but while being convoyed to his boat, Dugall suggested the impropriety of his going home by sea in such a clumsy boat, when he had only a distance of two miles to walk, and if he did not suspect his own inability to make the lady comfortable for the night, he would be glad to provide for her and see her home safely next morning. Macdonald declined the ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... clumsy Landy who met with these mishaps; but even such things did not seem to subdue his ambition ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... ignorant assurance, and with bitter sarcasm said: "Since you know, do it then," and this is why the wood pigeon's nest is so untidy in our days. In its own mind it knew all about nest building, and was above receiving instruction, and hence its present clumsy way of building its nest. This fable gave rise to a proverb, "As the wood pigeon said ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... lined the bay. Gunboats began to stand in, laden with red-coated marksmen discharging their new pattern fire-locks. The militiamen on their part waded into the sea and gave such answer as they could from their clumsy old matchlocks: making good the deficiency—so far as noise was concerned—by shouts of vituperation; and calling on their assailants as "Rebels," "Traitors," and "Murderers of their King." The landing ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... compiling a history of printing from a collection of title-pages appears to be both a clumsy and a costly one, but it seems probable from entries in the diary of Oldys, and from Gough's memoir of Ames, that that bibliographer wrote his Typographical Antiquities with ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... to appear unconcerned. Then, as I nursed my sudden hope of freedom, a little fearfully lest it should prove an illusion, a new and enchanting idea came to me. I slipped from the room, ran upstairs to my bedroom and, standing by the side of my bed, tore open my waistcoat and shirt with clumsy, trembling fingers. One, two, three, four, five! I counted the spots in a triumphant voice, and then with a sudden revulsion sat down on the bed to give the world an opportunity to settle back in its place. I had the measles, and therefore I should not have to go back to school! I shut my eyes ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... fuss to pick with you, young man," he said with clumsy joviality. "You beat me upon the purchase of that Westmarsh property. Very shrewd, indeed, Mr. Burnit; very like your father. I suppose that now, if I wanted to buy it from you, I'd have to pay you a pretty advance." And he rubbed his hands as if to ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... that activity has a use, arises from a need. The "robber trusts" and the political bosses are interesting examples of this basic truth. They have arisen because science, revolutionizing human society, has compelled it to organize. The organization is crude and clumsy and stupid, as yet, because men are ignorant, are experimenting, are working in the dark. So, the organizing forces are necessarily crude ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... touches with the root the sod that blocks the nest, it will fly violently out of the hole. Then spread the red cloth quickly under the tree, so that the woodpecker may think it is a fire, and in her terror drop the root. Some people really light a fire and strew spikenard blossoms in it; but that is a clumsy method, for if the flames do not shoot up at the right moment away will fly the woodpecker, carrying the root ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... stood—for an instant in dumb amaze—balancing himself upon his rocking raft with the pole he had been using. To attempt to swim ashore would have been useless. He was a clumsy swimmer at best; and the cold, rushing waters and floating ice ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... merrymaking would be complete without one?—and Colonel Washington walked a minuet with a certain Mistress Patience Burd, with a grace which excited the admiration of every swain in the room, and the envy of not a few,—myself among the number, for I was ever but a clumsy dancer, and on this occasion no doubt greatly vexed my pretty partner. But every night must end, as this one did at last. Colonel Washington was much better next morning, for his illness had been more of the mind than of the body, and our kind reception had done wonders to banish his ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... reached some high timber on the north, and encamped just above an old channel of the river, which is now dry. We saw vast quantities of buffaloe, elk, deer, principally of the long tailed kind, antelopes, beaver, geese, ducks, brant, and some swan. The porcupines too are numerous, and so careless and clumsy that we can approach very near without disturbing them as they are feeding on the young willows; towards evening we also found for the first time, the nest of a goose among some driftwood, all that we have hitherto seen ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... afar in earlier and simpler days. He found him a very amiable fellow, by no means haughty, who began to tell him funny stories, and who even let him take the helm for a while. The rudder-handle was of polished iron, very different from the clumsy wooden affair of a freight-boat; and the packet made in a single night the distance which the boy's family had been nearly two days in travelling when they moved away ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... was settled, in a few embarrassed and clumsy phrases. Martie's heart sang with joy and triumph. She really felt a wave of devotion to the big, gentle man beside her; all the future was rose-coloured. She had reached ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... a woman of tact and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we got our knowledge; and, while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel, and fly, and dart hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing when we come to write, and, without suggestion from another mind, to declare the positive amount of thought that is in us. Because ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... which verse invents for itself, once agreed on, a necessary and perilous license makes up the rest of the code. Literature can never conform to the dictates of pure euphony, while grammar, which has been shaped not in the interests of prosody, but for the service of thought, bars the way with its clumsy inalterable polysyllables and the monotonous sing-song of its inflexions. On the other hand, among a hundred ways of saying a thing, there are more than ninety that a care for euphony may reasonably forbid. All who have consciously practised the art of writing ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... Zayla as "a small island, on the very coast of Adel." To reconcile discrepancy, he adopts the usual clumsy expedient of supposing two cities of the same name, one situated seven degrees south of the other. Salt corrects the error, but does not seem to have heard of ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... turban of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of Lear! Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him. Most of our elderly English painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degraded the invisible arts into the ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... seeking to wound his fellow-workers with biting words. For this reason, besides certain insults aimed at him by the craftsmen, he had only himself to blame when Michelagnolo told him in public that he was a clumsy fool at his art. But Pietro being unable to swallow such an affront, they both appeared before the Tribunal of Eight, where Pietro came off with little honour. Meanwhile the Servite Friars of Florence, wishing to have the altar-piece of their high-altar ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... wide and open; the apartments, except the hall, low, narrow, and inconvenient, divided by partitions of oak, clumsy, and ill-carved with many strange and uncouth devices. The hall was, on the right of the entrance, lighted by one long low window; a massy table stood beneath. The fireplace was on the opposite ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... push suddenly out or retract. Before this mouth under the beak or nose hang four tendrils some inches long, and which so resemble earth-worms that at first sight they may be mistaken for them. This clumsy toothless fish is supposed by this contrivance to keep himself in good condition, the solidity of his flesh evidently shewing him to be a fish of prey. He is said to hide his large body amongst the weeds near the sea-coast, or at ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... States colours flying—but with whom he did not know. Enlightened Frenchman! Or this may teach us a lesson of humility, as showing us how little is thought in Europe of the American Revolution. The brig was a clumsy specimen of architecture, and was out forty-two days. We detained her less than half-an-hour, and permitted her to go on her course again. Our ill-luck seems to culminate; for two out of the only three sail we have seen in thirty-nine ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... from fighting anything and everything from the Turk at Tangiers to the wild bulls of Madrid, seems to have fallen in love with Thynne's betrothed wife, and to have thought that the best way of obtaining her was to murder his rival. The murder was done, and its story is recorded in clumsy bas-relief over Thynne's tomb in Westminster Abbey. Koenigsmark's accomplices were executed, but Koenigsmark got off, and died years later fighting for the Venetians at the siege of classic Argos. The soldier in Virgil falls on a foreign field, and, dying, remembers sweet Argos. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... on the porch with her clumsy needlework when Sarah brought her the letter, and after she had read it, she tore it up angrily. "He was in Mercer a week ago; I know he was, because there is always that directors' meeting on the last Thursday in April, so he must have been there. ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... times. Whenever he did so the waiter smiled blandly at him. He did it the last time just as the lady was walking down the room. Seeing her coming he drew back and held the door open for her with a clumsy, apologetic bow. She smiled scornfully and passed through. The waiter stood grinning in the middle of the room, and when I, in my turn, rose, he whispered to me, 'It's all right, sir.' I went to bed ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... lagoon around the city are numerous exasperating sand islands, exposed to view at low tide. The amateur gondolier seeks this lagoon, to be safe from scoffers at his clumsy rowing, and often, right in the midst of his "getting the knack of it," the tide leaves him stuck fast on a sand island, to wait for ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the same luxuriousness and yet the same courage. But the later decadents were far worse, especially the decadent critics, the decadent illustrators—there were even decadent publishers. And they utterly lost the light and reason of their existence: they were masters of the clumsy and the incongruous. I will take only one example. Aubrey Beardsley may be admired as an artist or no; he does not enter into the scope of this book. But it is true that there is a certain brief mood, a certain narrow aspect of life, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... water-colours, but whether that is a mitigation or an aggravation of the original offense the relater knoweth not. He speedily took to painting Tina amidst various combinations of lake and mountain scenery. Tina over the garden wall as he first saw her; Tina under an arch of roses; Tina in one of the clumsy but picturesque lake boats. He did his work very well, too. Old Landlord Lenz had the utmost contempt for this occupation, as a practical man should, but he was astonished one day when a passing traveller offered an incredible ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... not be looking into it; because you never look into mirrors, dear Duchess, excepting to see whether the scolding you are giving your maid, as she stands behind you, is making her cry; and whether that is why she is being so clumsy in her manipulation of pins and things. If it is, you promptly promise her a day off, to go and see her old mother; and pay her journey there and back. If it isn't, you scold her some more. Were I the maid, I should always cry, large tears warranted to show in the glass; only I should ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... brightness. The deck was still damp, however, and the whole prospect seemed to the emerging Stefan cheerless in the extreme. His eyes swept the gray, huddled shapes upon the chairs, the knots of gossiping men, the clumsy, tramping youths, with the same loathing that the whole voyage had hitherto inspired in him. The forelocked Scot, tweed cap in hand, was crossing the deck. "There goes the brute, busy with his infernal concert," he thought, watching balefully. Then he actually ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... for an animal of his clumsy bulk, the bear swarmed up the hillock. He gained the summit; not three yards from where Laddie struggled. And the collie knew the rope was not more than half gnawed through. There was no further time for biting at it. The enemy was ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... swim," said Roy, arranging the pillows carefully behind Mollie's straight little back. To quote the latter: She would much rather do things for herself—boys were so clumsy—but they always looked so funny and downhearted when she told them about it, that, just in the interest of ordinary kindness, she ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... preparation for the ministry, in fully equipped theological seminaries. If ever it has been a just reproach of the church that its frequenters were so absorbed in the saving of their own souls that they forgot the multitude about them, that reproach is fast passing away. "The Institutional Church," as the clumsy phrase goes, cares for soul and body, for family and municipal and national life. Its saving sacraments are neither two nor seven, but seventy times seven. They include the bath-tub as well as the font; the coffee-house and ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon |
