"Misshapen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I have come up to frolic in the sunshine with you"; and he held out his ugly, misshapen little hands to take the hands ...
— Opera Stories from Wagner • Florence Akin
... to let it be done. Mother hearts cling to children, no matter how diseased, misshapen and miserable. Sons and daughters hold fast to parents, no matter how helpless. We do not allow the weak to depart; neither do we cease to bring more weak and helpless beings into the world. Among the dire results is war, which kills ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... country where there were no cats, nor any other living things but slugs, snails, and grubs; while all kinds of fruit grew in profusion, so that there was no difficulty in obtaining any amount of food; but one great drawback to his happiness was an ugly, misshapen little bird, which would keep running after him, and crying, "Peedle-weedle-wee, peedle-weedle-wee," or else shouting at him to ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... nature, except that he took rather too much pleasure in tormenting an ugly monster called Caliban, for he owed him a grudge because he was the son of his old enemy Sycorax. This Caliban Prospero found in the woods, a strange misshapen thing, far less human in form than an ape: he took him home to his cell, and taught him to speak; and Prospero would have been very kind to him, but the bad nature, which Caliban inherited from his mother Sycorax, would not let him learn ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... she knew by heart. This strange, bearded, greyish-haired brother of hers had come very often during the past half-year to the little book-shop, and the widow's home above it, his misshapen handbag full of papers, his heart full of rage, hope, grief, ambition, disgust, confidence—everything but despair. It was true, it had never been quite real to her. He was right in his suggestion that she had never wholly believed in him. She had not been able to take altogether seriously ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... than a poor little deformed and crippled chicken. This was precisely the one that the mother loved best. It is the way with all mothers; the weakest and most unsightly are always their favorites. This misshapen creature had but one eye, one wing, and one leg in good condition; it might have been thought that Solomon had executed his memorable sentence on Coquerico, for that was the name of the wretched chicken, and cut him in two with his famous ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... name applied by Virchow to a condition in which a limb is swollen and misshapen as a result of the extension of a neuro-fibromatosis to the skin and subcutaneous cellular tissue of the extremity as a whole (Fig. 89). It usually begins in early life without apparent cause, and it may be associated with multiple tumours of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... role; in course of time, his character degenerated into that of a clown or buffoon. It is difficult to summarize the legend, it varies so considerably in the versions. Marcolf in the best-known forms, which are certainly older than Zabara, is "right rude and great of body, of visage greatly misshapen and foul." Sometimes he is a dwarf, sometimes a giant; he is never normal. He appears with his counterpart, a sluttish wife, before Solomon, who, recognizing him as famous for his wit and wisdom, challenges ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... man. He could see little of his face, for the head was thrust forward from the stooping, misshapen shoulders, and his long, dark hair hung about his cheeks and shaded his countenance. The face seemed pale and intelligent. It was naturally quite unfamiliar to Gonzague, who knew nothing of AEsop except ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and diligence, yes, indeed. By skill in phrases and silences, by truth misshapen, by flatteries daintily fitted, artfully distributed, never overdone; by a certain slow, basal co-operation from Irby (his getting Mandeville sent out by Pemberton with secret despatches to Johnston, for example), by a deft touch now and then from Madame, by this fine pertinacity ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... features were coarse, and strangely discordant and disjointed from each other. His lips were thick, and the tone of his voice broad and unmodulated. His legs were of equal size from one end to the other, and his feet misshapen and clumsy. He had nothing spiteful or malicious in his disposition, but he was a total stranger to tenderness; he could not feel for those refinements in others, of which he had no experience in himself. He was an expert boxer: his ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... rescue from oblivion's flood, Such names as Morton, Reynolds, Dibdin, Cherry. Morton a melancholy wight, whose muse, Now sighs and sobs, like newly bottled ale, Now splits her ugly mouth with grinning.[10] Reynolds,[11] whose muse most monstrous and misshapen, Outvies the hideous form that Horace drew. Dibdin[12] a ballad monger—and for Cherry— But Cherry has ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... constitutional object, which roused the energies and fixed the attention of the people. It was a spectacle worthy the proudest days of Greece or Rome; but it passed away like the sudden gleam of a summer sun. O'Leary was exceeded by none of his contemporaries as a patriot: but, though the coarse and misshapen habit of a poor friar of the order of St. Francis forebade his intrusion into the more busy scene of national politics, his pen was not inactive in enlightening and directing his countrymen in their constitutional pursuits. A highly respectable body of the Volunteers, the Irish ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... walk from Ponte Nuovo to the hamlet in which the Paolis were born. The house is one of those gaunt, misshapen, rude structures, built of rough stones, and blackened by age, which one sees everywhere in the mountain villages; without even glass to the windows. Standing on the craggy summit of an insulated rock, the access to it is ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... cold, too gray and misshapen in that thought to see it as life. It could not be. It was only that she was exhausted. And her trust ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... distorted in form and in character, this Richard was a monster of iniquity. The hapless boy left heir to the throne upon the death of Edward IV., his father, was placed under the guardianship of his misshapen uncle, who until the majority of the young King, Edward V., was to reign under the ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... broken by which she stayed him on her knees, her whole body also haled by ropes and left ready to fall." The Queen offered a reward, but the offenders were not discovered. In 1595 the effigy of the Virgin was repaired, and afterwards "a newe sonne, misshapen (as borne out of time), all naked, was laid in her arms; the other images continuing broken as before." Soon an attempt was made to pull down the woodwork, and substitute a pyramid for the crucifix; the Virgin was superseded by the goddess Diana—"a woman (for the most part naked), and water, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... vigil. As the long hours wore on he felt creep over him the comforting sense that he need not forever fight sleep. A wan glow flared behind the dark, uneven horizon, and a melancholy misshapen moon rose to make the white night one of shadows. Absolute silence claimed the desert. It was mute. Then that inscrutable something breathed to him, telling him when he was alone. He need not have looked at the ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... the thing were gay borders—scrolls and strap-work and diapered backgrounds, a maze of colour, with small misshapen figures clambering cheerily up and down everywhere. But first I eagerly scanned what text there was in the middle, in order to get a hint of what it was all about. Of course I was not going to waste any time in reading. A clue, a sign-board, a finger-post was all I required. To my dismay ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... town of Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of the past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of this grey-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely sprezzatura ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... everywhere mingled with briars, amid the dull green of nettles. It was easily recognizable as one of the rural spots to which the great faubourgs resort on Sundays to loll about in the grass, and which resemble a lawn trampled by a crowd after a display of fireworks. Gnarled, misshapen trees were scattered here and there; dwarf elms with gray trunks covered with yellow, leprous-like spots and stripped of branches to a point higher than a man's head; scraggy oaks, eaten by caterpillars so that their leaves were like lacework. The verdure was scant and sickly and entirely unshaded, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... collecting painfully—for his strength was not great—material for the constant fires it was his duty to maintain. Often he would stand motionless in the vast frozen, creaking forest, listening with awe to the voices which spoke to him alone. There was something uncanny in the misshapen dwarf with the fixed marble white face and the expressive changing eyes,—something ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... bleak expanse added to that fancy, and the line of straggling whitewashed farm buildings, that half way across lifted themselves above it, seemed to be placed on an island in its midst. Even the one or two huge, misshapen agricultural machines, abandoned in the furrows, bore an odd resemblance to hulks or barges adrift ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to the principle that a man's surroundings should bear the impress of that man's life and occupation, the chief ornaments of the dwelling were a curious collection of calcinations, that had been discovered from time to time in the lime-kiln—misshapen ingots of strange substance, some ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... that false and vulgar opinion, that rules are the fetters of genius. They are fetters only to men of no genius; as that armor, which upon the strong becomes an ornament and a defence, upon the weak and misshapen turns into a load, and cripples the body which it ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... a stout, elderly woman interrupted the girl's persuasions. The elderly woman's back was turned, and the back-loose, bulging, and misshapen—began a ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... this leviathan, this monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, as I remember my old father used to call a certain gigantic and misshapen bull that we had on the Station, flapping a pair of ears that looked like the sides of a Kafir hut, and waving a trunk as big as a weaver's beam—whatever a weaver's beam may be—an appalling and a ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... Samaritan, by the same artist, is a large engraving on stone: an incongruous medley of palms, sorbs and oaks grown together, heedless of seasons and climates, peopled with monkeys and owls, covered with old stumps as misshapen as the roots of the mandrake; then a magical forest, cut in the center near a glade through which a stream can be seen far away, behind a camel and the Samaritan group; then an elfin town appearing on the horizon of an exotic ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... there are some paintings of no very great value, which should have been kept in the Academy; also a miniature fortress and a small mineral collection, and any quantity of specimens of Indian idols, so misshapen as to be unfit for use as images of the Virgin and of ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... found a man at the companion obstructing our way. He was standing on the ladder with his back to us, peering over the combing of the hatchway. He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders. He was dressed in dark-blue serge, and had peculiarly thick, coarse, black hair. I heard the unseen dogs growl furiously, and forthwith he ducked back,—coming ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... in the controversy. For my own part, I do not hesitate to say that I would rather be absolutely destitute of 'faith' altogether, than exercise the most absolute faith ever bestowed upon a tawdry image of the Virgin, or some misshapen beast of an idol of Hindoo ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... and B being intercepted, the image will become darker and darker until complete extinction. The image here, then, is not produced successively as in the former case, but is entire from the beginning. In this case the image of our mast cannot be misshapen, since it has been accurately ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... much—till the red lips themselves prove the contrary. Then come the anger and disgust which men ever visit upon those who deceive and disappoint them. Beauty is a dainty and exquisite vestibule to a temple; but when a worshipper is beguiled into entering, only to find a stony, misshapen idol and a dingy shrine, this does not conduce ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... dusky birds? Are these Phantasmas of the silences Outer or inner?—rude heirlooms From grovellers in the cavern-glooms, 40 Who in unhuman Nature saw Misshapen foes with tusk and claw, And with those night-fears brute and blind Peopled the chaos of their mind, Which, in ungovernable hours, Still make ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... his words, a little dwarf, whose name was "Try," met us at this juncture; and by his bright example urged us on to greater tasks. But alas! there were so many weary hearts waiting for his cheery countenance that he was forced ere long to leave us. Scarce had he gone when his enemy, a misshapen gnome, called "I Forgot," sprang up in our path, and by many devices, sought to undo the good work of "Try." Finding this impossible, he, too, soon departed, but his injured lordship, not caring to retire utterly defeated, left his first cousin, "I Didn't Mean ...
— Silver Links • Various
... was anything for her to do, Deborah worked out by the day. Denny, in spite of his poor, misshapen body, tended the garden, raising such vegetables as no one else in all Corinth could—or would, raise. From early morning until late evening the lad dragged himself about among the growing things, and the only objects to mar the beauty of his garden, ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... She's honest, well-bred, yes; and kind, but with all that there is still something about her that degenerates her into a petty, blind, even in some respects misshapen animal. In any case, she isn't a man. I tell you as a friend, as the only man to whom I can lay bare my soul. I love Natasha, it's true, but sometimes she seems extraordinarily vulgar, and then I lose myself and can't understand ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... numerous small Wattses appeared as if by magic from the direction of the creek and the cottonwood thicket. Dinner consisted of flabby salt pork, swimming in its own grease, into which were dipped by means of fingers or forks, huge misshapen slices of sour white bread. There was also an abundance of corn pone, black molasses, and a vile concoction that Ma Watts called coffee. Flies swarmed above the table and settled upon the food from which ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... conveyed to them statements which, however in some respects mysterious, were yet most literally and brightly true, as compared with their former conceptions. So that while the blind cunning of the savage had produced only misshapen logs or scrawls; the seeing imagination of the Christian painters created, for them and for all the world, the perfect types of the Virgin and of her Son; which became, indeed, Divine, by being, with the most affectionate ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... with ineffable content, the bright sun showed me the hideous marks of his many sufferings plain and manifest in his bent and twisted frame, the scars that disfigured him and the clumsy movements of his limbs misshapen by the torment, and moreover I noticed how, ever and anon, he would be seized of violent tremblings and shudderings like one in an ague, insomuch that I could scarce abide to look on him for very pity and marvelled within myself that any man could endure ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach of barbarism" which the English nation had suffered ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... pasteboard armour, and, adorned with fresh head-gear, duly presented himself as the Tudor prince. The heroic lines of Richmond delivered, the actor hurried to the side-wings, to resume something of the misshapen aspect of Richard, and then re-enter as that character. In this way the play went on until the last scene, when the combatants came face to face. How was their fight to be presented to the spectators? This omission of so popular an incident ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... peering carefully, Madden could follow the slender outline of the mysterious craft that had towed the Vulcan to this uncanny spot. It had now left the tug and was gliding away to the great misshapen fabric ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the upper curve of its huge body there were three great projections which I can only describe as enormous bubbles, and I was convinced as I looked at them that they were charged with some extremely light gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air. The creature moved swiftly along, keeping pace easily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce. Its method of progression—done so swiftly that ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pince-nez and gold watch-chair, his red rosette, and a large and remarkably fine diamond sparking on one of his little fingers, looked so eminently respectable that it was difficult to associate him with the wretched misshapen newspaper parcel—his only luggage!—which he eyed so jealously. However, as the attendants were all liberally fee'd, they remained strictly polite even if they felt amused. I ordered a hansom to be called, and we just contrived to squeeze ourselves and the precious newspaper parcel ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... years, Who longed for a maiden's smile. Till once on a day in summer My soul was touched with a gleam, And I woke from my morbid fancies Like one from an evil dream, And knew that the gods in their wisdom Had made and set me apart. Lean, misshapen, and ugly.... No toy for a maiden's heart. And I felt with a heart awakened That leapt in a riot of joy, The heart of a wise man and proud Not the heart of a moody boy. Viewing the old things anew With an inner wonder ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... they had once occupied, they could neither speak nor act so freely and so energetically as before. Thus, whilst one member of the ecclesiastical body was permitted to attain an unnatural magnitude, others ceased to perform their proper functions, and the whole eventually became diseased and misshapen. And the new arrangement entirely failed in checking the growth of the errorists. After its adoption heresies sprung up as rapidly as ever, and the multitude of its sects continued to be the scandal of Christianity even in the time of ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... small and misshapen heads are often brilliant in certain directions, and this limited brilliancy in special lines causes them to be spoken of by superficial observers as men of great ability and apparent exceptions to the phrenological ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... of thought colored with envy, jealousy, avarice, or selfishness. These are all positive obstacles to both mental and physical improvement, for thoughts are real things. The patient must actively co-operate with the healer, and make himself transparent to the truth. That which is misshapen has to grow symmetrical. Even if the mind could be instantly permeated with the belief of health, the body will need a little time to completely change its expression. Should these limitations discourage anyone? Not in the least, but rather the reverse. The fact that the cure is in the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... Akaaenga's torch drew near in the night; and the misshapen hands groped in the meshes of the net; and they took the missionary between the finger and the thumb, and bore him dripping in the night and silence to the place of the ovens of Miru. And there was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... personality of the subject. With material of this sort at hand, the autobiographer sets to work to construct a fair and gracious monument, being easily persuaded that it would be a barbarous act to mar its symmetry by the introduction of loathly and misshapen blocks like those which Cardan, had he been the artist, would have chosen ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... to his labors. She could hear his voice in the distant furnace room giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh, uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like the grunt or growl of a brute than human speech. After hours of absence, Aylmer reappeared and proposed that she should now examine his cabinet of chemical products and natural treasures of the earth. Among the former he showed her a small vial, in which, ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... first the working and general shape were excellent, yet that, after a few days, the skin shrank and puckered in so abominable a fashion as to render all the labour bestowed upon it of no avail. This was most unfortunately tried upon a twenty pound pike, and so utterly misshapen did it become as to necessitate the relaxing of the specimen—the removal of the clay—and the ultimate shaping up again, by the dry plaster process. [Footnote: Several correspondents have written as to ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... perfect stranger who used oaths! She would have gone into the house but for something that caught her eye. It was the hand of the man; that hand was a bludgeon. All grace and flexibility had gone out of it, and it had become a mere instrument of toil. It was seamed and misshapen; yet it had been carefully manicured, and the pointed nails looked fantastic and animal-like. A great seal-ring bore an elaborate monogram, while the little finger displayed a collection of diamonds and ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... Byron's club foot, he adds, "had probably not a little to do with determining his destiny as a poet. Had not his mind been embittered, and made morbid by his deformity, he might never have written a line. But his misshapen foot stimulated his mind, roused his ardour, threw him upon his own resources, and we know ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... within reach of every hand, physical characteristics would hardly affect the question. I wish that some of the passionate interpreters of love would make a work of imagination that should render with verisimilitude the love-affair of two absolutely grotesque and misshapen persons, without any sense of incongruity or absurdity. I should be loth to say that love depends upon physical characteristics; but I think it must be confessed that impassioned love does so depend. A woman ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... control tower of the field. Joe looked around. The transport ship seemed very large, standing on the concrete apron with its tricycle landing gear let down. It curiously resembled a misshapen insect, standing elaborately high on inadequate supporting legs. Its fuselage, in particular, did not look right for an aircraft. The top of the cargo section went smoothly back to the stabilizing fins, but the bottom did not taper. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... a holy and a placid grief that comes over you,—not crushing, but bringing to life from the grave of boyhood all its better and nobler instincts. In their light your wild plans of youth look sadly misshapen and in the impulse of the hour you abandon them; holy resolutions beam again upon your soul like sunlight, your purposes seem bathed in goodness. There is an effervescence of the spirit that carries away all foul matter, and leaves you in a state of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... bones, like the rest of our bodies, are made of what we eat. If our food does not contain enough of the substances which are needed to make healthy bone, the bones will become unhealthy. They may be too soft and become bent or otherwise misshapen. This is one of the reasons why bread made from the whole grain is so much more healthful than that made from very fine white flour. In making fine white flour the miller takes out the very best part of the grain, just what is needed to make strong and healthy bones. Oatmeal ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... me that he is wholly right in saying so. The difference between the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows the contours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; in Cowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need not surprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verse of Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose.' The fault of his own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. The pauses in Patmore, left ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... on my fruitless perambulations about the town. At first I only acted the intelligent foreigner, going about staring at the public buildings, and collecting curios—strangely marked pebbles, and a few military brass buttons, long shed by the garments they once made brave; rusty, misshapen bullets, mementoes of the immortal nine or ten years' siege which had won for Montevideo the mournful appellation of modern Troy. When I had fully examined from the outside the scene of my future triumphs—for I had now ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he wounds us by monstrous music. Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... place of the workingman in society! After a full and candid survey of his plays, Bottom, the weaver with the ass's head, remains his type of the artizan and the "mutable, rank-scented many," his type of the masses. Is it unfair to take the misshapen "servant-monster" Caliban as his last word on ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... culture and hypocrisy and expose to our gaze the dark sufferings of gaunt humanity. So have we become familiar with the everyday spectacle of distorted bodies, of harsh and frightful diseases stalking abroad in the light of day; of misshapen heads and visages of moron and imbecile; of starving children in city streets and schools. This is the true soil of unspeakable crimes. Defect and delinquency join hands with disease, and accounts of inconceivable ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... looked at it he thought that he had never seen anything so ugly and misshapen as the baby elk, with its long, shambly legs, which hung down from the body like loose stilts. The head was large, old, and wrinkled, and it always drooped to one side. The skin lay in tucks and folds, as if the animal had put on a coat that had not been made for him. Always doleful and ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... the delusions of faction, and the Tower, with all its gloomy associations, were visible in the reach of the river. Of Churches there appeared a monotonous groupe; while the houses presented a dingy and misshapen mass, as uninteresting at the distance of seven miles as an ant-hill at the distance of seven feet. Indeed, any wretch capable of setting his foot upon an ant-hill, and of destroying it, because it made no palpable ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... The main plateau before us is named Darwin Plateau, after the learned evolutionist. Take this plateau as a rude and misshapen hand, imagine the thumb and little finger gone, and it will be seen that the other three fingers radiate from Darwin Plateau in the shape of three irregularly contoured, but fairly level plateaus, Huethawali resting like a great wart upon the base of the middle one of the three. To these plateaus ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... interests of men than any similar establishment. It is in the highest degree hitherto realized, the seat of terrestrial perception and volition—the brain of the whole earth; and hitherto it has been in a narrow valley, misshapen even to deformity, and scarcely accessible to the few mail coaches which collect ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... which was universal in his own age, he pronounced those mountains monstrous excrescences. Their deformity, he said, was such that the most sterile plains seemed lovely by comparison. Fine weather, he complained, only made bad worse; for, the clearer the day, the more disagreeably did those misshapen masses of gloomy brown and dirty purple affect the eye. What a contrast, he exclaimed, between these horrible prospects and the beauties of Richmond Hill! [318] Some persons may think that Burt was a man of vulgar and prosaical mind: but they will scarcely ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... it was looking at me. I could hear the sound of the woman at her ironing in the other room. Outside there was the steady thrashing of the rain. The child was looking at me with large, round eyes filled with a terrible pathos. I noticed that the little body was misshapen. It never moved; it made no sound; but I had the feeling that out of those strangely wistful eyes something was trying to speak to me. Something was forming itself before me—not visible to my sight; but it was there, in the room. It was the man I had ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... times that it is no journey at all. Silence and darkness reign supreme. He unfastens the door with his skeleton key, lights a burner in the hallway and a safety lamp which he carries with him. How weird and ghostly these long passages look! The loom-rooms seem tenanted by huge, misshapen denizens of some preadamic world. He stands and looks, and fantastic ideas ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... friends, by a kind of apostasy they return to the mechanical arts solely to gain a livelihood, to the loss of the Church and the degradation of the whole clergy. Thus Mother Church conceiving sons is compelled to miscarry, nay, some misshapen monster is born untimely from her womb, and for lack of that little with which Nature is contented, she loses excellent pupils, who might afterwards become champions and athletes of the faith. Alas, how suddenly ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... times its head was hidden in what appeared to be wings thrown upward from its shoulders; at times its broad-brimmed hat was cocked jauntily on one side, and again the brim was fixed over the face like a visor. At one moment a drifting misshapen mass of drapery, at the next its vague garments, beaten back hard against the figure, revealed outlines far too delicate for that rude enwrapping. For it was Mrs. Rylands herself, in her husband's hat and her "hired man's" old blue army overcoat, returning from the post-office ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... pig-eyes, in the gross, sensual lips, the mandril-like jaw, the misshapen ear, I see not merely a lifelike portrait of a Hun but a composite photograph of all Huns, something which should hang in every house in the kingdom until the terms of such a peace have been imposed which will make the shambles in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia an eternal nightmare ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... and beauty: there is no deformity but in monstrosity, wherein notwithstanding there is a kind of beauty, nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts that they become sometimes more remarkable than the principal fabric. To speak yet more narrowly, there was never anything ugly or misshapen but the chaos; wherein, notwithstanding, to speak strictly, there was no deformity, because no form, nor was it yet impregnate by the voice of God; now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature, they being ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... half the charm of verse, and we cannot say that Mr. Todhunter has given us much that consoles us for its loss. Part of his poem reads like a translation of an old Bardic song, part of it like rough material for poetry, and part of it like misshapen prose. It is an interesting specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art. It is amorphous and inchoate, and the same must be said of the two other poems, The Doom of the Children of Lir, and The Lamentation for the Sons of Turann. Rhyme ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the harder blocks and masses piled in a colossal grotesque confusion. Along the sloping sides of the gap stood bowlders, pillars, needles, and strange shapes of stone, peering over each other's heads into the gulf below. It was as if an army of misshapen monsters and giants had been petrified with horror, while staring at some inconceivable desolation and ruin. There was no hope for this concrete despair; no imaginable voice could utter for it a word of consolation; the gazer, like Dante amid the tormented, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... where in ghostly files The dead slept with their toys. Miles, miles, and never-ending miles, Along the valley's mournful aisles, The voiceless, vague, misshapen piles Of men ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... earless head and gibbous profile; the great straggling limbs, callous at the knees, and ending in broad, wide splitting hooves; the slender hind-quarters, and tiny, tufted tail,—both ludicrously disproportioned,—the tumid, misshapen trunk; but, above all, the huge hunch rising above the shoulders, at once proclaimed the creature ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... as if everything were well ordered; the irregularity is of our nature; our political world is like our globe, a misshapen thing which always preserves itself. It would be mad to wish that the mountains, the seas, the rivers, were traced in beautiful regular forms; it would be still more mad to ask perfect wisdom of men; it would be wishing to give wings to ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... wife, that your son is the child of a true man, and who, in his own respect, despiseth Death, and all his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time, when all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... and the Dragon, and he almost expected to see fire issuing from its mouth. It was a huge lizard, with a body about three feet long, covered with bright scales. It had a long, thick tail. Its head was clumsy and misshapen, and altogether its aspect was very horrible. Before either Martin or Barney could fire, the hermit dropped his gun and spear, sprang quickly forward, caught the animal by the tail, and, putting forth his great strength to the ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... one! He could clearly perceive that the little blue lights were borne by Dwarfs whose pale clay-coloured faces, with their huge noses and red eyes, disfigured too by birds' bills and owls' eyes, were supported by misshapen bodies, and they tottered and wabbled about here and there, so that they seemed to be at the same time merry and in pain. Suddenly, the circle opened; the little ones retired on each side, and Guru—who was the woman Guru, whom Orm recognised immediately, though she had risen in stature ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... inwardly, as the monstrous and misshapen figures of the two medicine men careered back and forth in the flaming light. They knew that at this moment their power over the warriors was supreme. The more Alloway raged the more ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... carefully back over the misshapen shoulders, and then lighted a candle. It showed the little parlour to be dingy, but orderly and clean. She stood it on the mantelshelf, remote from the dressmaker's eyes, and then put the room door open, and the house door open, and turned the little low chair ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the wind rose to a gale. In a few minutes the Spaniard was in the hands of the pirates, and the slaves, being only an encumbrance, were tossed overboard to the sharks, as one might fling away a damaged cargo. One of the black men was a dwarf, gnarly, wrinkled, misshapen, with eyes that blazed like a cat's in the dark. No sooner had this man been pushed over the side than he uttered an ear-splitting yell, and seemed to bound back to the deck. It was a cat, however, not a human being, ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... air, like the weatherwheel of a steam—boat in a sea—way. The new comer was strong and broad—shouldered, with long muscular arms, and a chest like Hercules; but his legs and thighs were, for his bulk, remarkably puny and misshapen. A thick fell of black wool, in close tufts, as if his face had been stuck full of cloves, covered his chin and upper lip; and his hair, if hair it could be called, was twisted into a hundred short plaits, that bristled out, and gave his head, when he took his hat ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the uninitiated little ones of Yuen-ping are wont to amuse themselves and pass the winter evenings. From time to time harmonious sounds could be plainly detected, flowers and branches of wood were scattered sparsely here and there, persons claimed that passing objects had touched their faces, and misshapen forms of smoke-like density (which some confidently recognised as the outlines of departed ones whom they had known), revealed themselves against the glass. When this had been accomplished, the lights were recalled, and the barbarian maiden, sinking into a condition of languor, announced and ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... Begin at the top and look down him—a long look, for he was tall and gaunt. His cap in winter was of coon-skin, with the tail of the animal hanging down behind. In summer he wore a misshapen straw hat with no hat-band. His shirt was of linsey-woolsey, above described, and was of no color whatever, unless you call it "the color of dirt." His breeches were of deer-skin with the hair outside. In dry weather these were what you please, ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... unhallowed rites, peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs; and these beings, though existing only in the imagination, nevertheless possess such truth and consistency that even with such misshapen abortions as Caliban, he extorts the assenting conviction that, were there such beings, they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries a bold and pregnant fancy into the kingdom of nature, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... came, one characteristic that had seemed most amiable in his prosperity was turned against him—a fondness for oddly grown or even misshapen, yet potentially happy, children; for odd animals also: he sympathised with them all, was skilful in healing their maladies, saved the hare in the chase, and sold his mantle to redeem a lamb from the butcher: He taught the people not to be [63] afraid of the strange, ugly creatures which the light ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... time. When she came back again she bore in her arms a bundle, large, knobby and misshapen. It was wrapped in newspapers which had cracked away here and there over the end of a rib; but it was enclosed in a network of strings that crossed and crisscrossed ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... Carlos was as misshapen as his mind. His head was disproportionately large, his limbs were rickety, one shoulder was higher, one leg longer than the other. With features resembling those of his father, but with a swarthy instead of a fair complexion, with an expression ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... before the travellers, and was traversed by the old Roman trackway. Dreary indeed it looked in the darkening twilight; here and there some huge crag overtopped the road, and then the track lay along a flat surface. It was after passing some huge misshapen atones, which spoke of early Celtic worship, that suddenly, in the distance on the right, the ruined temple ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... misshapen dwarf, with a huge jolter-head like that of Boerhave on the Bridge,[278] his limbs and ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... earthquake? If so, New Mexico and Arizona must have been her favorite playgrounds. At many points her rock formations look like whimsical imitations of man's handicraft, or specimens of the colossal vegetation of an earlier age. Some are gigantic, while others bear a ludicrous resemblance to misshapen dwarfs, suggesting, as they stand like pygmies round their mightier brethren, a group of mediaeval jesters in a court of kings. In the faint dusk of evening, as one flits by them in the moving train, their weird, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... white shrouds floating in the wind, while behind all, goading them on with cracking whip, ran a many-colored harlequin—and I was the harlequin! Suddenly from the black waves the sea monsters raised their misshapen heads, snatched at me with extended claws, and I awoke ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... where the elders of the tribe sat in judgment upon the child. If they thought it well-built and strong, they ordered the father to bring it up, and assigned one of the nine thousand plots of land to it; but if it was mean-looking or misshapen, they sent it away to the place called the Exposure, a glen upon the side of Mount Taeygetus; for they considered that if a child did not start in possession of health and strength, it was better ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... work would drive him with thong and spur: he would rush to his craters, to his laboratories, to his ledger for the purpose of entering unintelligible commentaries. He had some peculiar contrivance, like a misshapen retort, with which he collected gases from the craterlets. Whenever I'd hear one of those smash, I knew it ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... I hurried on. Gangs of men were shovelling for the dead. Every now and then a shovel would strike a hand or a skull. Then a shout would be raised and the poor misshapen body turned out. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... sketching sheep with one stone on another; talent took genius and fed it and showed it the way, and presently genius overtopped talent by a mountain's head and shoulders. Cimabue took Giotto from his father, glad to be rid of the misshapen child that had to be fed and could do nothing much in return; and from the smoky hut in the little Tuscan valley the lad was taken straight to the old nobleman painter's house in the most beautiful city of Italy, was handed over to Brunetto Latini, Dante's tutor, to be taught ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... shadow ceased drifting, for the boat had come to anchor. Then in a very few minutes, because the creatures of the sea seem unable to fear what does not move, the life of the sea-floor again bestirred itself, and small, misshapen forms that did not love the sunlight began to convene in the shadow ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... opened and, as I turned, I found myself looking into the wrathful eyes of a stunted little man with an enormous head. Any one who has once seen Zalnitch can never forget him. His wizened, misshapen body is a grotesque caricature of a man's, which, surmounted by his huge head with its bushy hair, makes him look for all the world like some scientist's experiment. In the doorway to Zalnitch's private office stood Schreiber, a heavy-jowled, ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... murderous, ill-visaged curs of the savage kill! And the leader of the pack was a very demon wolf. A monstrous female, almost pure white, huge, misshapen, hideous—the ultimate harridan of the wolf-breed—she stood a full two hands above the tallest of the rank and file of her ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... for one instant—er, ah—that I am going to let the public see me like this?" and Mr. Towne glanced at his wet and dripping garments—garments that, but a short time ago, had been a walking testimonial of the tailor's art. Now they were wet and misshapen. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... intimately; have known him many years. I knew him when he was eleven feet high and of a faultless figure. But he is very pasty and tough and misshapen now, and hardly ever interests himself about anything. As to his present size—well, he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly misshapen bodies, so narrow-shouldered and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all ...
— Keep Out • Fredric Brown
... the shrill voice, the uncouth gestures, and the strange deformity of the Huns. * These savages of Scythia were compared (and the picture had some resemblance) to the animals who walk very awkwardly on two legs and to the misshapen figures, the Termini, which were often placed on the bridges of antiquity. They were distinguished from the rest of the human species by their broad shoulders, flat noses, and small black eyes, deeply ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... cultivation. These flats are certainly not adapted for cattle; the grass is too swampy, and the bushes, swamps, and lagoons, are too thickly intermingled with the better portions to render it either a safe or desirable grazing country. The timber is universally bad and small; a few large misshapen gum trees on the immediate banks of the river may be considered as exceptions. If however the country itself is poor, the river is rich in the most excellent fish, procurable in the utmost abundance. One man in less than an hour caught eighteen large fish, ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... threw them a horn smeared with fat to lick, and so, at slight cost, appeased their most furious rage. High up the gates lay open to enter, and they climbed to their level with ladders, entering with difficulty. Inside the town was crowded with murky and misshapen phantoms, and it was hard to say whether their shrieking figures were more ghastly to the eye or to the ear; everything was foul, and the reeking mire afflicted the nostrils of the visitors with its unbearable ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... behold it; we may lie Sepultured and forgotten, and the mold Of e'er-renewing earth may first enfold New matter to its bosom, and the sky New nations arch beneath its canopy, Ere this misshapen thing, the world, be rolled And sphered to perfect freedom, ere the old Incrusted statutes that our God defy Be crushed in its rotation, and those die That lived defiance through them. Then man's gold No more shall manhood buy, or men be sold For pottage messes. We may not be nigh To see the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hanged corpse; and on her very nightgown of the other night, dreadfully familiar, shrinking, poor ghost of an abomination, in its corner. And under them, in a row, the shoes that her feet had gone in, misshapen, trodden down at heel, gaping to deliver up ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... in armour, and fat peasants drinking, dimmed and half obliterated. Beneath were legends and proverbs, printed in quaint, old-German characters; while across one end, like a frieze, ran a ledge carven with gargoyles, rude and misshapen. On the ledge were beer mugs of every size and description, with queer tops and crooked handles. Above, suspended from the ceiling by chains, hung a huge Fass; and from the throats of the gargoyles, ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... the silver radiance of the moon spread itself on the high curtain of the dark. Then the edge of her orb appeared above the hill and an arrow of white light fell into the little valley. It struck upon and about the jutting rock, revealing a misshapen, white-headed figure squatted between its base and the ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... have followed if the child had been homely, misshapen, peevish, or all three, can scarcely be conjectured. Had Jennie been less tactful, even in the beginning, he might have obtained a disagreeable impression. As it was, the natural beauty of the child, combined with the mother's gentle diplomacy in keeping her in the background, ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... room, on a threadbare divan, lay a man. He sat up to welcome Christophe. At once Christophe recognized the emaciated face, lit up by the soul, the lovely velvety black eyes burning with a feverish flame, the long, intelligent hands, the misshapen body, the shrill, husky voice.... Emmanuel! The little cripple boy who had been the innocent cause.... And Emmanuel, suddenly rising to his feet, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the hallway, blotching like some misshapen toad in the shadowy light, lurching in his walk, that was, nevertheless, almost uncannily noiseless. Mechanically she followed him. She was trying to think; striving frantically to bring her wits to play on this sudden and unexpected denouement. ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... in their bed, and sat for hours on the threshold of the cabin door, looking out through the darkness and praying silently for the return of her loved ones. The wind was rising and driving across the sky black masses of clouds which looked like misshapen specters of evil. The blast whistled through the leafless trees and howled round the cabin. Hours passed, and still the sorrowful wife and mother sat gazing into the gloom as if her eyes would pierce it and lighten ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... grotesquely smiling eyes peered out at me. Those eyes inspected me from head to foot and then, apparently satisfied, they twinkled and the wicket closed with a snap. Then the door opened and out stepped a quaint and curious figure with gnarled limbs and arms and a peculiar misshapen head, completely covered with a ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... duty bound to offer to supply their place. But the lady was not so easily won; and though she did not absolutely reject him, gave him very slight hopes. Mr. Marvel, therefore, remained on his probation. Behind Mrs. Spurling stood her negro attendant, Caliban; a hideous, misshapen, malicious monster, with broad hunched shoulders, a flat nose, and ears like those of a wild beast, a head too large for his body, and a body too long for his legs. This horrible piece of deformity, who acted as drawer and cellarman, ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... room was filled with eaters, just as the vast court was filled with vehicles of every sort—wagons, gigs, chars-a-bancs, tilburies, innumerable vehicles which have no name, yellow with mud, misshapen, pieced together, raising their shafts to heaven like two arms, or it may be with their nose on the ground and their rear ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the misshapen, starved, sick, stumbling hulks of men who trod the dreary round of the windlass. Mr. Pike was right. These were not the brisk, devilish, able-bodied men who manned the ships of the old clipper-ship days; who fought their officers, who had the points of their sheath-knives broken off, who killed ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... last, and a man came in,—Dr. Knowles, the principal owner of the factory. He nodded shortly to her, and, going to the desk, turned over the books, peering suspiciously at her work. An old man, overgrown, looking like a huge misshapen mass of flesh, as he stood ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... hear his report, but at the same time I took his address—Eugene Falloon, Rue Pre Fleuri—where I could give him an appointment in case I missed him at the terminus. He was a long, lean, hungry-looking fellow, clumsily made, with an enormous head and misshapen hands and feet; but he was no fool this Falloon, and his ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... so far as the State could control circumstances they were not allowed to exist. Children who were defective in any way were put to death. In Sparta this measure was carried out under government supervision. Even Plato in his model republic has all children of wicked men, the misshapen, or the illegitimate put out of existence, that they may not be ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... painted I'd be shot, Were I, great sire, a bear.' The bear approaching, doth he make complaint? Not he;—himself he lauds without restraint. The elephant he needs must criticize; To crop his ears and stretch his tail were wise; A creature he of huge, misshapen size. The elephant, though famed as beast judicious, While on his own account he had no wishes, Pronounced dame whale too big to suit his taste; Of flesh and fat she was a perfect waste. The little ant, again, pronounced the gnat too wee; ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... in the atmosphere of despair. "Every man must live his dark hours alone," a broken-down actor once said to Stafford as he tried to cheer him when the last thing he cared for had been taken from him—his old, faded, misshapen wife; when no faces sent warm glances to him across the garish lights. "It is no use," this Roscius had said, "every man must ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... By nine, carriages began to roll up to the awning that stretched from the heavy arched doorway across the sidewalk, and ladies that would soon glide through the spacious rooms in elegant drapery, now seemed misshapen bundles in their wrapping, and gathered up dresses as they hurried out of the publicity of the street. The dressing-rooms where the spheroidal bundles were undergoing metamorphose became buzzing centres ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... kind of cotton stuff, including corduroy, velveteen, etc. 2. Re-solved', made clear, disentangled. 4. De-form'i-ties, misshapen persons. Stunt'ed, checked in growth. Mea'ger, thin, lean. 5. Gro-tesque' (pro. gro-tesk'), fanciful, absurd. Ad-min'is-tered, gave, dispensed. In-stall'ment (literally, part of a debt), part, portion. Cor-po're-al, ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... thought, when some of us, raising our eyes, uttered an exclamation of horror. Each instantly looked around him, and beheld a plain trampled, bare and devastated, all the trees cut down within a few feet from the surface, and farther off craggy hills, the highest of which appeared to be the most misshapen. It had all the appearance of an extinguished and destroyed volcano. The ground was covered all around with fragments of helmets and cuirasses, broken drums, gun-stocks, tatters of uniforms, and standards ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... walk, with its strangely misshapen shrubbery, was bright and cheerful in the morning sunlight, and the lake rippled like silver, and gave no hint of ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... last term at F., I was expecting a box of 'goodies' from home. So when the message came, 'An express-package for you, Miss Fanny!' I invited all my specials to come and assist at the opening. Instead of the expected box, there appeared a misshapen-bundle, done up in yellow wrapping-paper. Four such dejected-looking damsels were never seen before as we, standing around the ugly old thing. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... everything is moulded, before going into the fire, one-fourth larger than it is intended to come out of the fire, because it shrinks in that proportion in the intense heat; how, when a figure shrinks unequally, it is spoiled - emerging from the furnace a misshapen birth; a big head and a little body, or a little head and a big body, or a Quasimodo with long arms and short legs, or a Miss Biffin with neither legs nor ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... copious secretion from the borders and the conjunctiva; the lips are tumid and the angles of the mouth ulcerated. In fact the human face divine, deprived of all lineaments and expression, is now a foul, misshapen mass. Associated with this state are swelled throat, rendering deglutition very painful—salivation, cough—occasional vomiting, delirium, sometimes phrenitical, sometimes evidencing itself in low ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... they had hopes to bring her through. They brought the little one and showed her to me, and she seemed so different from what she was when we went away. Then she could run about camp climb out and in the wagons, and move about so spry that she reminded one of a quail. Now she was strangely misshapen. Her limbs had lost all the flesh and seemed nothing but skin and bones, while her body had grown corpulent and distended, and her face had a starved pinched and suffering look, with no healthy color ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... from the sand and pulled sharply across the water to the Gar. A reddish, misshapen moon hung in the east, and when he had mounted to his deck it was suddenly obscured by a high, racing scud of cloud; the air had a damper, thicker feel. He instinctively moved to the barometer, which he found ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... floor as a tablecloth, and put down on it bowls containing the fowl and sweet potatoes, and the unfailing calabash of poi. Tea, coffee and milk were not procurable, and as the water is slimy and brackish, I offered a boy a dime to get me a cocoanut, and presently eight great, misshapen things were rolled down at the door. The outside is a smooth buff rind, underneath which is a fibrous covering, enormously strong and about an inch thick, which when stripped off reveals the nut as we see it, but ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... come to me," he assured her. "I have long desired to revenge myself upon your impudent mistress. Often she has made sport of me with her tricking shadows. Often she has even dared to make my own form flicker and dance before me—not as it is—indeed, but twisted and misshapen to please her own mischievous fancy." His eyes glinted with malice, and Black Shadow was well pleased to find him so willing to give ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... snorting engines—streams of vehicles moved slowly up and down their channel. At a reckless speed motorcyclists, carrying urgent messages, swerved through it all; and in the ditches that ran alongside, refugees were stumbling on, fleeing from the new terror, their crouching, misshapen figures like players from a grotesque drama ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... was not preaching the religion of Fear. But I think we shall scarcely understand the religion of Love unless we recognise that dread is a legitimate part of an unforgiven man's attitude towards God. My fear should be to me like the misshapen guide that may lead me to the fortress where I shall be safe. Oh, do not tamper with the wholesome sense of dread! Do not let it lie, generally sleeping, and now and then waking in your hearts, and bringing about nothing. Sailors that crash on with all sails set—stunsails and all—whilst ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... was advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands and jerked her away from the bed. ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Meroo, the misshapen cook-boy. He was an odd fellow, all long limbs and broad smiles, who, when his time arrived, shambled forward, cast himself in lowliest reverence full length on the ground and blubbered out his delight—now that the princely baby could ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... and beyond, a range of purple snow-covered peaks. From the slight elevation or "bench" upon which he sat he looked down upon a greasewood flat where patches of alkali gleamed dazzling white under the noon-day sun. The flat was quarter-circled by a waterless creek upon whose banks grew a few misshapen and splintered cottonwoods. ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... the genius of the misshapen body, the pale eyes which reflected the fires of a Satanic soul, set deeply in the midst of the face of an angel; and wondering if he would be able to arrive in time, sorry that he had not returned ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... the sky. There, blazing with light, like a great misshapen moon, was a giant airship moving swiftly over the city. As it sailed along, streams of fire fell from it, and immediately there followed the terrible thunder of bursting bombs. When it passed out of sight, it seemed as if the voice of the city itself must rise in anguish at the ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the happiness of his wooing as a thunder-cloud darkens and blots the smiling life out of a fair valley. There rushed in on him a hundred chilling thoughts, each gloomier than its forerunner. Ravens croaked within him; misshapen imps whispered evil omens; ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... in italics are written in strange, misshapen letters, inclining to the right hand, in imitation of Stella's writing" (Deane Swift). (Italics replaced by capitals for the transcription of ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... which I shall call mystic fear. It is a crushing anxiety about something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which does not actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realised, at this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable, horrible misshapen fact." This "frenzied anguish" is a familiar stigma of epilepsy. Its presence denotes the approach ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... watched his misshapen body as it disappeared through the entry. Then he gazed at the banker and finally remarked: "Can't say that your friend pleases ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... attention of one lettered man, a man of curious and somewhat misshapen body and mind, of features satyr-like in ugliness, yet moody and mystical in their very earthiness; a man essentially of the senses, yet imperfect in them, without taste or smell, and, over and above, with a marvellously supple intellect; weak and coarse and idealistic; and at once ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... themselves on the ridge of the hills which can be seen from Grindelwald; but he was still far from his new home. They pointed out to him other clefts, other meadows, other woods and rocky paths, and other houses. Strange men made their appearance before him, and what men! They were misshapen, wretched-looking creatures, with yellow complexions; and on their necks were dark, ugly lumps of flesh, hanging down like bags. They were called cretins. They dragged themselves along painfully, and stared at the strangers ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... and the stars were unusually brilliant. Not a cloud appeared and the long lines of troops resting on their arms looked like misshapen hedgerows in the faint light. The roar of the French artillery came distinctly to the ears of these men who stood and waited. Every man knew why it was that its activity was so greatly increased that night. Their guns were playing a stream of metal death on every yard and foot and inch of the ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... misshapen objects could just be discerned, and the guttural voices of several Hessians could be heard. Then a light glimmered as one of the approaching party drew an old horn lantern from under his cloak. Two others, by aid of the light, clambered into the pen, leaving outside the one with the lantern ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... also be open to difference of opinion. "Who would want to paint you when no one wants to look at you?" said an old epigrammatist to a misshapen man. "Not so," says the artist; "I will paint you though people may not like to look at you and they will look at my portrait not for your sake but for my art, ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... partnership of the men. Likewise she felt that McFann would not have embarked upon any such crime alone. The thought of Talpers recurred so steadily that the lithe figure of the half-breed in front of her seemed to change into the broad, almost misshapen form of ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... regular order. Around them, the spectators closely pressing, with morbid curiosity, discussing with loud approval the value of whatever of strength or beauty met their eyes, and occasionally greeting some undersized and misshapen victim with jeers of derision. And closing up the straggling line, more soldiers, marching in well-formed ranks, poising aloft myrtle-decked lances, and, while interchanging salutations with the eddying crowd, singing in measured cadence their songs ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Rituparna heard those very words, Excellent Princess; but he answered nought; And no man answered, out of all the throng Ofttimes addressed. But when I had my leave And was withdrawn, a man accosted me Privately—one of Rituparna's train, Vahuka named, the Raja's charioteer (Something misshapen, with a shrunken arm, But skilled in driving, very dexterous In cookery and sweetmeats). He—with groans, And tears which rolled and rolled—asked of my health, And then ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... before the doctors came, I held in my arms that merry baby, all lilies and roses, the blossom of my life, my pride, and my joy, lifeless as a piece of wood; and his eyes! I cannot think of them without horror. My pretty Armand was a mere mummy—black, shriveled, misshapen. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the ark. Therefore he put the curse upon the last-born son of the son that had prevented him from begetting a younger son than the three he had. The descendants of Ham through Canaan therefore have red eyes, because Ham looked upon the nakedness of his father; they have misshapen lips, because Ham spoke with his lips to his brothers about the unseemly condition of his father; they have twisted curly hair, because Ham turned and twisted his head round to see the nakedness of his ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... against evil spirits. Snatching it up, she darted after the wer-bear and flung the contents of it in its face, just as it was about to descend the stairs with Signi. In a moment there was a sudden and startling metamorphosis, and in the place of the bear stood the ugly, misshapen man, Rerir. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... success of this, his first hunting in the unknown land, the wolf slept for a few hours in his bushy retreat, and then, when the misshapen moon was up, went prowling cautiously around the outskirts of the scattered little settlement. Everywhere the man-smell kept him on his guard. Once he was careless enough to get between the wind and a farmyard, whereupon ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... our country had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the Captain. The fast-anchored isle never gave birth to a more unmitigated blackguard. His awkward, unwieldy misshapen body, was but a fair lodging for a low, depraved, licentious soul. Although liberally educated, he seemed insensible to any other enjoyments than those of sense. No human being could in his desires or habits ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... We passed a place which was overgrown, in broad patches, with misshapen stunted bushes—a rare occurrence in this part of the country, where wood is scarce. My driver bestowed upon this tangled brushwood the high-sounding name of jungle. I should rather have compared them with the dwarfed bushes and shrubs of Iceland. The country beyond this ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... women coming to speak with their husbands, fathers, brothers, and lovers; most of whom were sailors or owners of craft in the harbour. Their dress is very becoming, and some of them were pretty. The black silk mantilla is a very beautiful head dress, and much to be preferred to the misshapen bonnet with which fashion commands the fair to disfigure themselves in other parts of Europe. The petticoat is also of black silk, with the body of white muslin. Some one likened them to magpies: i'faith, they talked as fast; but who would not wish to hear the beautiful Arabic flowing ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... followed, calling 'guss-guss' to the pig routing on the bank; finally a third figure—short, misshapen—a hunchback, as the watcher noted, who called 'coop-coop' to a rough pony cropping grass in the intake beyond ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease |
