"Wolfish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made of the wolfish instinct to slay that springs eternal in some human (!) breasts are those brought about through the distress or errors of wild animals. By way of illustration, consider the slaughter of half-starved elk that took place in the edge of Idaho in the winter of 1909 and 1910, when about ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... him in the shoulder; but Soundwell, Tiger, and the rest of 'em were all mighty anxious. We got a bite, and saddled our horses. I went by to git a neighbor to drive for us, and off we started for the Harricane. My dogs looked mighty wolfish; they kept jumping on one another and growling. I knew they were run mad for a fight, for they hadn't had one for two or three days. We were in fine spirits, and going 'long through very open woods, when one of the strangers said, 'I would give my horse ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He's not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, "Let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them;" I say, "Let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged:" and he'd crush you like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... to myself — loud enough so they could hear me, mebbe, "Why is it that when anybody wants to do a mean, ungenerous act, they will try to quote a verse of Scripter to uphold 'em, jest as a wolf will pull a lock of pure white wool over his wolfish foretop, and try to look innocent ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... back in a day, two days, a week, or I may be gone a month. Then the winter comes back, and I have again to answer another summons. The same traps are put on the sledge, to which are harnessed the twelve finest dogs in the town,—my own team,—and, at the wildest pace with which this wolfish herd can rush along, Adam guides me to my destination. Perhaps it may be early in the winter, and the ice is in places thin. We very likely break through, and get wet, and are in danger of freezing. Perhaps we reach a crack which we cannot pass, and have to hold on, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... to suffer, at intervals, for two days more, but on the fifth day out he appeared with a little pink tinge on his cheek and a wolfish appetite. Dr. Staines controlled his diet severely, as to quality, and, when they had been at sea just eleven days, the physician's heavy heart was not a little lightened by the marvellous change in him. The unthinking, who believe in the drug system, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... he brings his wolfish pack About my legs, as, dripping from the sea, I pick my way thro' shingle and wet wrack Beleaguered by this ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... my mother to me, my loftiest and holiest ambition shall be to distance the wolfish cares and woes that have hunted her, ever since she became a widow. Any and all honest labor that can contribute to her comfort, will be welcome and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... that," said Rob, laughing. "Look over yonder." He pointed to where an Indian woman sat on the ground, cleaning a lot of fish. Around her squatted a circle of gaunt, wolfish creatures which seemed ready to devour her and ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... and her free hand fell on his head again. He slunk to her feet. But his lips were still drawn back. Thorpe was watching him. He wondered at the deadly venom that shot from the wolfish eyes, and looked at McCready. The big guide had uncoiled his long dog-whip. A strange look had come into his face. He was staring hard at Kazan. Suddenly he leaned forward, with both hands on his knees, and for a tense moment or two ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... answer, but there was something in his face—something at once so cruel and deadly and wolfish—that made the words die on her lips. For the first time it came to her that if he did not take her with him he would kill her to insure his own safety. None of the arguments that would have availed with another man were of any weight here. Her sex, her youth, the service she had done him—these ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... eyes became fixed and glaring, his hands dropped to his side, trembling nervously, and his lips parted in a wolfish expression, that displayed two ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... unaware of Latimer's gaze; he had noted the wolfish gleam in the other's eyes—and because he was interested in Latimer, ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the signs of distress among the people grew more and more pronounced. Along the route were several tiny villages whose inhabitants gathered by the roadside to beg for food, and it was awful to see the wolfish way they ate the biscuits we gave them. At many places women stood with jars of water which they offered to the camel-drivers, not, I am sure, as a quid pro quo, but because it was all ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... same story over again when Lowrie walked. Quade rode aside with Sandersen, and again, with the wolfish side glances, they eyed the injured man, while they talked. At the next halt they faced ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... should please him to come to close quarters, which he did without delay. I have said that he was a man of few words. But the Children of the King were not like Calabrian boys, children though they were. Their wolfish teeth were very white as they waited for him with parted lips, and there was an odd blue light in their eyes which is not ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... assent at once, and was forthwith ushered up into Mr. Wilks's private sanctum. The sub-editor was a dry, grizzly-bearded man, with a prevailing wolfish greyness of demeanour about his whole person; and he shook Ernest's proffered hand solemnly, in the dreary fashion that is always begotten of the systematic transposition of night ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... on the upturned faces below him, Mr. Tapster was very glad that a stout pane of glass stood between himself and the sinister-looking men and women who seemed to be staring up at him, or rather at his windows, with faces full of cruel, wolfish curiosity. He let the blind fall to gently. His interest in the vulgar, sordid scene had suddenly died down; the drama was now over; in a moment the crowd would disperse, the human vermin (but Mr. Tapster would never have used, even to himself, so coarse ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... a black, hair-raising brew, but Fred managed to force down a draught of it. About him on all sides men were tearing their meat with clawlike hands, digging their fangs into it in wolfish ferocity... A dishpan of rice was circulated. Fred took a few spoonfuls. Within fifteen minutes the meal was over and the dishpan, emptied of its rice, was passed again. Fred saw his companions flinging their spoons into it. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... physical or mental, makes right. Sentiments of right and justice are not highly developed except among human beings, and even there they are so weakly implanted that it takes but little provocation for civilized man to bare his teeth in a wolfish snarl. ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... little of that selfishness which serves lower intelligences as an instinct of self-preservation would have shown him that his most dangerous enemies were not in his front. The Administration at Washington had to deal with a people blind with rage, an ignorant and meddlesome Congress, and a wolfish horde of place-hunters. A sudden dash of the Confederates on the capital might change the attitude of foreign powers. These political considerations weighed heavily at the seat of government, but were of small moment to the military commander. In a conflict between civil ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... bodily strength and mental daring; square as a gladiator, dark as a Moor, with deep and fiery eyes, now black, now red in the lamplight, the marvellous smile wreathing his thin lips now and then, and showing white, wolfish teeth, his sinewy brown hands direct in every little action, his soft voice the very music of a lie to those who knew the terrible brief tones it had ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of dogs, wonderfully trained. The big, wolfish creatures loved him and they feared him. He almost never had to use the long walrus-hide whip. They obeyed him on the instant without hesitation—"Ooisht," and they pulled in the harness as one; "Aw," and they stopped. There was a power in his voice that governed ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... Ormaz, at most things, especially those which savor of simple good-nature and forbearance..." responded Lysia coldly. "Thou art a wolfish, youth, and wouldst tear thine own brother to shreds if he thwarted thy pleasure! For myself I see little cause for astonishment, that a soldier-hero like Zephoranim should take some pity on so frail and aged a wreck of human ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... weakness of the stomach, accompanied by nausea. The unfortunate sufferer still desires food, but with loss of strength he loses that eager craving which is felt in the earlier stages. Should he chance to obtain a morsel or two of food, as was occasionally the case with us, he swallows it with a wolfish avidity; but five minutes afterward his sufferings are more intense than ever. He feels as if he had swallowed a living lobster, which is clawing and feeding upon the very foundation of his existence. On the fifth day his cheeks suddenly appear hollow and sunken, his body attenuated, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... brother," he jeered. "I am not a brother, but a wolfish Amalekite. Come—the harvest is ripe. Send ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... hand began to sag curiously, the fingers holding it slowly slipping from the stock. And the man's face—thin and seamed—became chalklike beneath the tan upon it. His eyes, furtive and wolfish, bulged with astonishment and recognition, and his mouth ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... shadow of another night Hath darkened Pisa, many a foe shall stray Through Nino's home, with eyes malignly bright In wolfish quest, but shall not find his prey: The while those lovers in their white-winged flight Shall see far out upon the twilight grey, Behind, the glimmer of the sea, before, The dusky ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... there was a most unmannerly licking of chops. "By Gar! You sound lak' miner-man eatin' soup. Wat for you'spect nice grub? You don' work none." 'Poleon removed a layer of fat, divided it, and tossed a portion to each animal. The morsels vanished with a single gulp, with one wolfish click of sharp white teeth, "No, I ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... sidewalk, past the warehouse doors and the long teams of waiting huskies curled up in wolfish comfort in the snow. It was for this snow, the first permanent one of the fall, that the miners up-creek had waited ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... changed the guard again the new man proved surly. There was no getting a word out of him. He showed dirty yellow teeth in a wolfish snarl, and his only answer was a lifted rifle and a crooked forefinger. King let him alone and paced ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... the town. They climbed up street to the cathedral, a fine old pile trembling with music and filled with worshippers, paintings of saints in extremis, flowers, wax candles, votary offerings, and heat; then coming out, and feeling wolfish, looked round for a place where they could find dinner! Here it was! a scene that would have cheered Teniers: a very large room, its walls brown with smoke; long wooden tables, destitute of cloth, but crowded with country people eating, drinking, talking, enjoying themselves to the utmost extent. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... The very instant it struck, the bloodthirsty monster fell dead. When John reached the spot, there was scarcely the quiver of a limb, so well had the work of death been accomplished. Yet the wolfish face grinned still a savage, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... ignoble. Married women were often anti-Suffragists; they were often fat; they never seemed to go out long walks in the hills or to write poetry. She laid her hands flat against his chest and pushed away from him. "No!" she whimpered. But he bent on her a face wolfish with a hunger that was nevertheless sweet-tempered, since it was beautifully written in the restraint which hung like a veil before his passion that he would argue only gently with her denial. And at the sight she knew his whisper, "Ellen, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... was the old apple orchard of the home place; the house was yet concealed by the brow of the steep hill. Inside and along the fence, pokeberries, elders, sassafras, and sumac grew high and dense. At a rustle of their branches, both Goree and Coltrane glanced up, and saw a long, yellow, wolfish face above the fence, staring at them with pale, unwinking eyes. The head quickly disappeared; there was a violent swaying of the bushes, and an ungainly figure ran up through the apple orchard in the direction of the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... garden I also saw the wild Australian dog—the dingo. He was a beautiful creature—shapely, graceful, a little wolfish in some of his aspects, but with a most friendly eye and sociable disposition. The dingo is not an importation; he was present in great force when the whites first came to the continent. It may be that he is the oldest dog in the universe; his origin, his descent, the place ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the wolf, in some of the Indian dialects, and Hugo's friend seemed but little removed from a wolfish ancestry. He evidently did his best to bear the punishment bravely, for he never whimpered. At times, however, he sought hard to pull his muzzle away. Finally, to his great relief, the last serrated quill was pulled out and he jumped up, placing ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... nor made a sound. With an oath he turned on his heel and went out to the table. Eating his breakfast in his usual wolfish fashion, he went out into the hot sun with his team and ridding plow, not a little disturbed by this new phase of his wife's "cantankerousness." He plowed steadily and sullenly all the forenoon, in the terrific heat and dust. The air was full of tempestuous threats, still and sultry, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the range side, and when the others joined me even Harry surveyed the bear with wolfish eyes, while it did not take long to perform what the French-Canadians call the eventrer, and, smeared red all over, we bore the dismembered carcass into camp. We feasted like wild beasts—we were frankly animal then—and it was not until hunger was satisfied that we remembered the empty ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... dee-clare to gracious!" she began, "if here ain't the man I met on the boat! How'd you git away out here ahead of us? Have you saw airy buffeler? I'm gettin' plumb wolfish fer something to shoot at. Where all you goin', anyhow? An' whut you doin' ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... had drawn back his lips so that the canine teeth stood out like tusks. There was something wolfish about the face, from which all the color had been driven. It expressed something so deadly, so menacing, that the young man across from him felt a shock almost of fear. "We'd better get out of here," he said, glancing toward the group ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... dark, in one corner of which a youthful figure was crouching; and then (most intolerable of all!) a flaring gin-palace, where, among a noisy crowd, a face was looking wistfully on, while coarse and vulgar men were clustering with cruel, wolfish eyes around a beggar-girl. This I saw and more—a ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers, or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... He loomed before her as a wolfish brute, seeking his comfort at this last cost of her pride. . . . But no man, she thought tragically, should ever say that he had spent the night within ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the name of the Daily Bugle, deplored the voracity of the sensational editor, who respected neither the amity which should exist between friendly nations, nor the good name of the honoured and respected dead, in his wolfish hunt for the daily scandal. Nothing was too high-spiced or improbable for him to print. He traded on the supposed gullibility of a fickle public. But, fortunately, in the long run, these staid sheets ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... sort of aversion to models, and Renovales tried in vain to convince her of the necessity of using them. He had talent to paint beautiful things without resorting to the assistance of those ordinary old men and above all, of those women with their disheveled hair, their flashing eyes and their wolfish teeth, who, in the solitude and silence of the studio, actually terrified her. Renovales laughed. What nonsense! Jealous little girl! As if he were capable of thinking of anything but art with a palette in ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... surrounded by disconsolate friends. The history of all pioneer settlements has this legendary basis, and M'liss may live to see the day when her father's connection with the origin of the settlement shall become apocryphal, and contested like that of Romulus and Remus and their wolfish wet-nurse. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... famine, they counted the leagues of barren ocean that still stretched before. With haggard, wolfish eyes they gazed on each other, till a whisper passed from man to man, that one, by his death, might ransom all the rest. The choice was made. It fell on La Chere, the same wretched man whom Albert had doomed to starvation on a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wild-eyed Nibelung, all dappled with misty grey, as was the stately, substantial burgher to his lean, hungry-looking brother, or Dame Johanna's dignified, curled, white poodle, which was forcibly withheld from following Christina, to the coarse-bristled, wolfish- looking hound who glared at the household pet with angry and contemptuous eyes, and made poor Christina's heart throb with terror whenever ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... forget this individual called Waggoner. He seemed old, sixty at least, yet at that only in the prime of a wonderful physical life. Unlike most of the others, he wore his grizzled beard close-cropped, so close that it showed the lean, wolfish line of his jaw. All his features were of striking sharpness. His eyes, of a singularly brilliant blue, were yet cold and pale. The brow had a serious, thoughtful cast; long furrows sloped down the cheeks. It was a strange, secretive face, full of a power that Shefford ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... night, but for the lurid memories flashed down to you of later generations. Where are the Puritan folk, with their cast-iron, narrow creeds damning all creation but themselves, with their foibles of snivelling to attest sanctity, with such a wolfish zeal to hound down devils that they hounded innocents for witchcraft? Spreading over the face of the New World, making the desert to bloom and the waste places fruitful gardens? And the reason for it all is simply this: Your butchering ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... half-starved dogs hunting in a pack, having gone back to the primeval habits of their wolfish ancestors; and now it looked as though they were about to suffer from an invasion ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... He did not avoid portraiture, and to live he sometimes manufactured pot-boilers for the trade. To his supreme vision was joined a miraculous surety of touch. Baudelaire was right—those plates, the Paris set, so dramatic and truthful in particulars, could have been sold if Meryon, with his wolfish visage, his fierce, haggard eyes, his gruff manner, had not offered them in person. He looked like a vagabond very often and too often acted like a brigand. The Salon juries were prejudiced against his ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... wolf, with its pointed ears, its muzzle and chops, its great teeth and hanging tongue. The orchestra grinds, wails, quivers; then suddenly bursts out into funereal shrieks, like a concert of owls; the hag is now eating, and her wolfish shadow is eating also, greedily moving its jaws and nibbling at another shadow easy to recognize—the arm ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... In the darkness of the third night out they crossed the river themselves, and side-stepping the village and its wolfish dogs struck south once more. They had to dodge night-roving Indians, as before, but they traveled steadily; there was no sign, by any of the Indians they met, that the island had been taken. ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... objectors; any man who would not carry arms for the King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeit. A report of his reads: "The attack being made at night, no quarter could be given." Hence his wolfish fame. "Werewolf" would have been a fit name for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the daylight he was a man and, as we have ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... raised him, in a way, to a position of dominance over these people. Now the sight of presumably so efficient a person in need of aid or exercise, to be built up, was all that was required to spur him on to the most waspish or wolfish attitude imaginable. In part at least he argued, I think (for in the last analysis he was really too wise and experienced to take any such petty view, although there is a subconscious "past-lack" motivating impulse in all our views), that here he was, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... where I am to stay is one of the highest of the group, and as we passed up to it through little paths among the cottages many white, wolfish-looking dogs came out and barked furiously. My host had gone on in front with my bag, and when I reached his threshold he came forward and shook hands with me again, with a finished speech of welcome. His eldest daughter, a young married woman of about twenty, who manages the house, shook hands ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... locked his cigar-case and had gone to bed. In one corner, partly shrouded in gloom, sat a half-breed trapper who had come in that day from the Lac la Ronge country, and at his feet crouched one of his wolfish sledge-dogs. Both were wide-awake and stared curiously at Howland as he came in. In front of the two large windows sat half a dozen men, as silent as the half-breed, clad in moccasins and thick caribou skin coats. ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... wife. For a few moments there was a scene of wild disorder, of fighting Malemutes buried under a rush of angry huskies, while men shouted, and the yelling Frenchman leaped about and cut his caribou- gut in vicious slashes over the wolfish horde around ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... had promised her his protection in case Mother Mawks should persecute her. "Is that you, Jim? Come upstairs; it's better than talking out there." He obeyed, and stood before her in the wretched room, looking curiously both at her and the baby. A wiry, wolfish-faced being was Jim Duds, as he was familiarly called, though his own name was the aristocratic and singularly inappropriate one of James Douglas. He was more like an animal than a human creature, with his straggling ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... close in upon the horror; I heard a sort of wolfish yapping. The Black Death disappeared. And then I, too, was falling, falling into infinite blackness and blankness, with one red flash when ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... are willing to give him the liberty of a dog; he may sleep in your stable, exercise himself in the coachyard, and may stand or run behind your carriage, but he must not enter the house, for he is offensive, nor eat at your table, for the way he devours his food is wolfish; you unchain him, and that is all. But before the collar was unfastened he was well and regularly fed, now he has to forage for it; and if he can't pay for his grub, he can and will steal it. Abolition has done great things for him. He was ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... studying that strange face. One side of it was calm, kindly, philosophic, benevolent; but, when the other was turned, a curious twitch of the muscles at the left side of the mouth showed the teeth and made a snarl there that was wolfish. ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... dogs had been) Hid little but his bones, Once met a mastiff dog astray. A prouder, fatter, sleeker Tray No human mortal owns. Sir Wolf, in famished plight, Would fain have made a ration Upon his fat relation: But then he first must fight; And well the dog seemed able To save from wolfish table His carcass snug and tight. So then in civil conversation The wolf expressed his admiration Of Tray's fine case. Said Tray politely, "Yourself, good sir, may be as sightly; Quit but the woods, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... remote descendant of the mastiff or some other breed, or that both these and other breeds came (as is suspected) from some wolf? If not, how is the argument for design in the structure of our particular dog affected by the supposition that his wolfish progenitor came from a post-tertiary wolf, perhaps less unlike an existing one than the dog in question is to some other of the numerous existing races of dogs, and that this post-tertiary came from an equally or more different tertiary wolf? And if the argument from structure to design is not ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... him and lifted his big hands. Drennen was standing waiting for him, his own hands at his sides, his steely eyes filled with an evil light. He made no answer beyond the silent one of a slight lifting of his lip, like a soundless wolfish snarl. ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... his Indian Journal gives two remarkable instances of language and unity of work among animals which he saw at Ranee Bennore, while he was on a hunting trip. He witnessed, one morning, a striking case of wolfish generalship, which in his belief proved that animals are endowed to a certain extent not only with reason but are able to communicate their ideas to others. He was scanning the horizon one morning to see if any game was in sight when he discovered a small herd of antelopes ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... most needed, present and future. For America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without; for I see clearly that the combined foreign world could not beat her down. But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching American ideas, it behooves ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... tall Indian, naked save where he clutched his robe to him unconsciously, came staggering to his tepee, his face distorted, yelling obscene words and not knowing what he said. Patient, his youngest squaw stood by his tepee, his spear held aloft to mark his door plate, waiting for her lord to come. Wolfish dogs lay along the tepee edges, noses in tails, eyeing the master cautiously. A grumbling old woman mended the fire at her own side of the room, nearest the door, spreading smooth robes where the man's ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Scandinavian epics, are full of stories of heroes who are seized with this fierce longing for battle, murder, and sudden death. The name means bear-shirt and has been connected with the old were-wolf tradition, the myth that certain people were able to change into man-devouring wolves with a wolfish mad ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... about it in wolfish haste, hacking off great strips of flesh with patches of hide still attached to them; and it was only when he flung them half-raw out of the frying-pan that Weston roused himself. Fresh bush venison is not a delicacy even when properly cooked, ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... take care, For where my neck has bruises yours shall have wounds. The King knows of your wolfish snapping at ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... the wilderness! . . . There's never been a white woman in Katleean. It would be great sport to see one up against it here, eh, Kayak?" The White Chief turned, smiling, and the light in his pale, narrow eyes matched the wolfish ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... burglar, while the people, alternately the prey of duke, prelate, and seignor, shorn and butchered like sheep, esteem it happiness to sell themselves into slavery, or to huddle beneath the castle walls of some little potentate, for the sake of his wolfish protection. Here they build hovels, which they surround from time to time with palisades and muddy entrenchments; and here, in these squalid abodes of ignorance and misery, the genius of Liberty, conducted by the spirit of Commerce, descends at last to awaken mankind from ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... through cacti. Then the battle took place. It was the last vestige of Liberal resistance to the Empire. A few hundred men near Uruapan in Michoacan flaunted their defiance. Driscoll noticed an expectant and wolfish look in his colonel's eyes. Mendez was a strikingly handsome and gallant Indian, but his expectancy now was not for battle. It was for the battle's sequel. Michel Ney and a squad of Chasseurs had just brought him an Imperial packet from the City, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... from the ruin on the table and came bleeding to the window, his grin a rictus of wrath, his green teeth wolfish with anger. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... to be populer," says he, out from under his hand. "I thought I would branch off, and take a new turn, and not act so fierce and wolfish after office as most of 'em did. I thought I would get ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... slowly lit the candles. Then—I saw that the man opposite had but the remnant of a face, a gaunt wolfish face in which one unquenched eye, the sole remaining feature, still glittered. I was greatly moved, some suspicion of the ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... His appetite was wolfish. She could see that he was spent, so weak with hunger that he had reeled against the wall as she handed him the dinner-pail. Pallor was on the sunken face, and exhaustion in the ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... emphatic curve, was almost gaunt in the moment when she fixed her eyes on the wolfish face of that tousle-headed giant who encircled her. Her shoulder blades were pinched back; the line of the marvelous full throat lengthened; she devoured the man with a vehemence of love, brief and fierce as the summer lightning which played below ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Manos-gordas, greatly alarmed. "Don't cast those wolfish glances at me, for I come to do you a great service, and not to vex you needlessly. I have told your unfortunate story to no one. What for? Any secret may be a treasure, which he who tells gives away. There are, however, occasions in which an EXCHANGE OF SECRETS may be made ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... at first when we found ourselves shut up inside the palisades, and only able to look out through the slits we had left for our rifles. We weren't used to be confined in a place, and it made us right-down wolfish. There we remained, however, as still as mice. Scarce a whisper was to be heard. Rachel tore up old shirts and greased them, for wadding for the guns; we changed our flints, and fixed every thing about the rifles properly, while ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... was no dream, no illusion, no nightmare—there they were, three powerful desperadoes armed with bowie knives and revolvers, the nearest one crouching low and watching her with his wolfish eyes, that shone ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... but I find not in his long catalogue of crime that he slandered youthful serving maids—for a consideration. He was advocate for many an unclean thing, but it is not recorded that he ever took a fee from a negro rape-fiend—that he ever defended a lecherous son of Ham who had dared raise his wolfish eyes to the fair face of Japhet's humblest daughter. Even when put on trial for his own worthless life he did not seek to save himself by the perjured testimony of the ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... I'm any more favorably impressed with Mr. Buncombe, or whatever his name is, than I was with old Boomerang yesterday. That fellow looked like a silly, pompous, old fool, and this one like a sly, old villain. I wish he'd stop that confounded, wolfish grin of his, it makes me feel uncomfortable, he looks as if he knew he had his prey just dead easy, and his chops were watering in anticipation. I say, old fellow, I don't think much of this Buncombe-Boomerang combination of yours, and I ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... which a large cauldron is hung, bubbling and seething, with a very strong odour of fat pork; a boy, dirty and ill-favoured, with a sharp glittering axe, looks very suspiciously at you, but calls off his wolfish dog, who sneaks away. ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... was, not a mile ahead, and you can see there was no chance to get around. I intended to take the Dodge trail, from this creek where we are now, but there we were, blocked in! I was getting a trifle wolfish over the way they were acting, so I rode forward to see what the ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... all alone—resolute-calm—with bristling mane, and legs braced firmly, glancing this way and that, to be ready for an attack in any direction. There was a curl on his lips—it looked like scorn, but I suppose it was really the fighting snarl of tooth display. Led by a wolfish-looking Dog that should have been ashamed, the pack dashed in, for the twentieth time no doubt. But the great gray form leaped here and there, and chop, chop, chop went those fearful jaws, no other sound from the lonely warrior; but a death yelp from more than one of his foes, as those that ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... limbs trembled, his walk was an uncertain shuffle. Clearly he was suffering from overwork. As I paused by the wayside to speak to him a wagon loaded with hay was passing. He fixed his eyes upon it with a hungry, wolfish glare, clutched a pitchfork and leaned eagerly forward, watching the vanishing wagon with breathless attention and heedless of my salutation. That night he was arrested, streaming with perspiration, in the unlawful act of unloading that hay and putting it ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... moved on in silence. The surf grew suddenly louder, as they emerged from the forest upon a stretch of sand dunes bordering the sea. A few goats were browsing among the sandy hillocks, and a skin-clad boy, aided by a wolfish-looking dog that was only faintly reminiscent of a collie, was watching them. Mingled with the roar of the surf was a continuous, deep-throated barking or bellowing, which came from a cluster of jagged rocks a hundred yards out from shore. Here huge sea-lions hauled themselves up to ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... career had Ujarak displayed such anxiety to increase the distance between himself and his tribe. Never since that long-lashed, short-handled, heavy whip was made, had it given forth such a rapid series of pistol-like reports, and never since they were pups had those ten lanky wolfish dogs stretched out their long legs and scampered over the Arctic sea as they did on that occasion. The old ice was still sufficiently firm and smooth to afford a good road, and the new ice was fortunately strong enough to ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... undoubtedly well aware of the feelings of horror and repulsion that he inspired in the breasts of others, and seemed rather to pride himself upon it, I thought; for as I was led forward into his presence he paused in his wolfish feeding and glared upon me with an expression of concentrated malignity that seemed to freeze the very marrow in my bones. But I believed that he was deliberately striving to frighten me, and horrified though I actually was, I was determined he should not have the satisfaction of feeling that he ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... reigned. Every wolfish eye was on the leader. He smiled, rested his pair of pistols on ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... waited. A long cry, quavering at first, and then rising to a fierce top note to die away later in a ferocious, wolfish whine came through the fog. It was uttered by many throats, and in the uncanny, whitish gloom it seemed to be on all sides of them. Then shouts and shots both ceased and the ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Libergent, you can't go to heaven;" Jalbert being an adherent of the Blues in the hope of "running" Dormilliere, if they succeeded, for his license had been taken away by the new movement. The bailiff, a wolfish-looking creature, who was always to be had for drink, also sat there trailing his vast loose moustache over a table. When Grandmoulin entered, a little crowd, like the tail of a comet, followed him into the room. As he passed through he said no word, but drew his ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... infuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay'st in thine unhallow'd dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolfish, bloody, starved, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... It was an ordinary slab shack with three rooms. A slatternly woman was busy cooking breakfast in a little lean-to at the back of the larger room, a child was wailing in a crib, and before the fire two big, wolfish dogs were sleeping. They arose slowly to sniff lazily at Mose's garments, and then returned to their drowse ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... the last of the martyred band whose blood has sanctified the cause of Irish freedom. Far from the friends whom they loved, far from the land for which they suffered, with the scarlet-clad hirelings of England around them, and watched by the wolfish eyes of a brutal mob, who thirsted to see them die, the dauntless patriots, who, in our own day, have rivalled the heroism and shared the fate of Tone, Emmett, and Fitzgerald, looked their last upon the world. No prayer ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... Nine wolfish sheep-dogs were scattering, one writhed before the porch; and Denton, tasting that strange delight of combat that slumbers still in the blood of even the most civilised man, was shouting and running across the garden space. And then she saw ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... there came a change. Clouds had gathered over his head, and seemed drifting about in every direction, as if not 'shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind,' but hunted in all directions by wolfish flaws across the plains of the sky. The sun was going down in a storm of lurid crimson, and out of the west came a wind that felt red and hot the one moment, and cold and pale the other. And very strangely it sang in the dreary old hawthorn tree, and very cheerily it blew about ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... that the Rev. John Langdon's housekeeper was a very singular looking young woman for her position. Her hair was conspicuously dark at the roots and conspicuously light on the ends. Her face was hard and when she smiled her mouth, assumed a wolfish expression. She was loudly dressed and wore a profusion of jewelry—altogether a most remarkable looking woman for the ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... place?" he asked, a wolfish gleam in his eyes, and his lips curved to a smile that revealed, under the black, curled moustache, the ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... design, I have actually discovered your title page; though it is barely possible that the melancholy fate of Wolfe Tone, with the indistinct tone of ferocity that is perceptible in his name, may have suggested the compellation of that unfortunate gentleman, as more significant of the wolfish atrocities with which your tale will necessarily abound. Whatever be the name, make haste with the book, and do not wait ten years in order to have another "Sixty Years Since." You must see that congruity requires ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... begrudgedly, by all their unremitting toil, Sour, scanty bread and fevered water from the ungrateful soil; Made harder by their gloom than flints that gash their harried hands, And harder in the things they call their hearts than wolfish bands, Perpetuating faults, inventing crimes for paltry ends, And yet, perversest beings! hating Death, their best of friends! Pride in the powerful no more, no less than in the poor; Hatred in both their bosoms; love in one, or, wondrous! two! Fog in the valleys; on the mountains ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... between the male wolf and a bitch illustrates the same law; the offspring having a markedly wolfish aspect; skin, color, ears and tail. On the other hand, a cross between the dog and female wolf afforded animals much more dog-like in aspect—slouched ears and even pied in color. If you look at the descriptions and illustrations of these two hybrids, you will perceive at a glance that the ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... originated with St. Antony. He is brought up in a monastery at Culross: he is tempted by the devil in a cave in the parish of Dysart (the Desert), in Fifeshire, which still retains that name. The daemon, fleeing from him, enters an unfortunate man, who is forthwith plagued with a wolfish appetite. St. Serf cures him by putting his thumb into his mouth. A man is accused of stealing and eating a lamb, and denies the theft. St. Serf, however, makes the lamb bleat in the robber's stomach, and so substantiates the charge beyond all doubt. He works ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... now addressed the same question successively to the Koshare Naua and to the leader of the Cuirana. The dim eyes of the former began to gleam; his shrivelled features assumed a hideous, wolfish expression as he spoke in a ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... physiological fact. There are old fables about patients who have barked like dogs or crowed like cocks, after being bitten or wounded by those animals. There is nothing impossible in the idea that Romulus and Remus may have imbibed wolfish traits of character from the wet nurse the legend assigned them, but the legend is not sound history, and the supposition is nothing more than a speculative fancy. Still, there is a limbo of curious evidence bearing on the subject of pre-natal influences sufficient to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... nice new blankets was opened, as it appeared to me, for my especial benefit. The chief, his lady, two sons almost grown, two or three wolfish looking dogs which forcibly reminded me of Field's terrible scare, and myself made up the number of lodgers in that mansion that night. Late that night some warriors who had been out on a campaign came home, and learning that there was a stranger within the gates came to the king's ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... which the lady only bowed her head, seeming of all in the hut to be the least surprised or concerned at the death of her brother. As for us, the complicated horrors of the night had left us stunned and stupefied till the rapid diminution of the wolfish din, the sounds of shots and voices, and the glare of flambeaux lighting up the forest, brought most of us to the window. The wolves were scouring away in all directions, there was a grayness in the eastern sky, for Christmas-day ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... daily excited the terror and disgust of a people among whom, till lately, the worst that a soldier had to fear in a pitched battle was the loss of his horse and the expense of his ransom. The swinish intemperance of Switzerland, the wolfish avarice of Spain, the gross licentiousness of the French, indulged in violation of hospitality, of decency, of love itself, the wanton inhumanity which was common to all the invaders, had made them objects of deadly hatred to the inhabitants of the Peninsula. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... stifled in his throat. A chair overturned with a crash; a great body struck him on the chest; a hot, pestilent breath volleyed in his face, and wolfish teeth were reaching ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... he sprang down almost as rapidly as his little boy, with his welcome. Nor did Giles Headley return at all in the dilapidated condition that had been predicted. He was stout, comely, and well fleshed, and very handsomely clad and equipped in a foreign style, with nothing of the lean wolfish appearance of Sir John Fulford. The two old comrades heartily shook one another by the hand in real gladness at the meeting. Stephen's welcome was crossed by the greeting and inquiry whether all ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "Battle of the Standard," known to us only by a sketch of Rubens,[244] he gave passions to the horse—not human passion, nor yet merely equine—but such as horses might feel when placed upon a par with men. In like manner the warriors are fiery with bestial impulses—leonine fury, wolfish ferocity, fox-like cunning. Their very armour takes the shape of monstrous reptiles. To such an extent did the interchange of human and animal ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... land! loftiest Muse! O first-born on the mountains! by the hues Of heaven on the spiritual air begot: Long didst thou sit alone in northern grot, While yet our England was a wolfish den; Before our forests heard the talk of men; Before the first of Druids was a child;— Long didst thou sit amid our regions wild Rapt in a deep prophetic solitude. There came an eastern voice of solemn mood:— 10 Yet wast thou patient. Then sang forth the Nine, Apollo's garland:—yet ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... at once returned the fire and with deadly effect. Two of the warriors fell, and the rest leaped back, still shouting their war cry, which was taken up and repeated in volume at a hundred points. Far above the forest it swelled, a terrible wolfish cry, fiercest of all on its dying note. From river and deep woods came the echo, and the warriors in multitudes rushed forward ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... nomination, put it in an envelope, addressed it to the secretary of the Bellingham Home, licked the flap of the envelope with wolfish ferocity, and ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... error of a generous mind, To do no good, and shrink within itself, Sick of the jostling of the wolfish throng. Your cause is just; though devils fight for it, Heaven with its sworded angels doth enlist them: So works a wise ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... at last, but somebody else had got their nine points of the law out of it. So the man sent on beforehand had pitched a tent on the grass, which we went into like Indians just returned from a hunting-party—dusty, thirsty, and sort of wolfish for something ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... Scores of graceful birch canoes, such as the northern tribes excel in making, were drawn up on the river bank; paddles and spears leaned against the lodges, smoke-blackened kettles and other rude cooking-utensils were scattered about the smouldering fires, and a throng of wolfish-looking dogs added their discordant baying to ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... man, raising himself for the first time out of his lounging position on the saddle. "Guess you're gettin' wolfish. I'm for you—stick, fist, or whiphandle, rifle or bowie-knife. Should like to see the man ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... the old warrior came across the grass to the little court under the apple tree. The keenness of the hooded eyes that looked out at her from his grizzled locks, the gleam of the white teeth between his bearded lips as he greeted her, was unmistakably wolfish. She relapsed into a kind of lamb-like tremor as she invited them to be seated and commanded the attendance of her cup-bearer. When she caught sight of the misery of discomfort in Sebert's frank face, she lost her voice entirely and waited ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... the appetite, boys, but sometimes I've felt wolfish when my heart was heavy. Fifteen months ago I was in Californy, and down on my luck. Things had been goin' contrary, and I hadn't money enough to buy a square meal. I didn't like to tell my friends, bein' a bit proud. One day when I was feelin' so hungry that I wouldn't have turned ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... this wolfling," Hunding answered, frowning. "A wild and wolfish race, truly! Tell me, stranger, where ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... When at last the wolfish cold of the Labrador night had come, it found Trafford and Marjorie seated almost warmly on a bed of pine boughs between the sheltering dark rock behind and a big but well-husbanded fire in front, drinking a queer-tasting but not unsavory soup of lynx-flesh, which she had fortified ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... face, with wolfish fangs bared, and jaundiced eyes squinting obliquely into mine, was within two inches of me. A lean, brown hand and arm, the great thews standing up like cords, held a crescent-shaped knife a fraction of an inch above my jugular vein. A slight movement ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... The Turkish dogs are by no means beautiful as a rule, they are too much like jackals, and as they are apt to be maimed and covered with scars from fights with each other, they do not make much of what good looks they have. However, Jack was rather less wild and wolfish-looking than most of his friends. He was of a fine tawny yellow, and had an intelligent face, poor fellow. He belonged to our Quarter—in fact the cemetery was his home till he took to lying at ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... enchanted. If there is no personal prince to find the Sleeping Beauty she will simply sleep. Fables repose upon quite the opposite idea; that everything is itself, and will in any case speak for itself. The wolf will be always wolfish; the fox will be always foxy. Something of the same sort may have been meant by the animal worship, in which Egyptian and Indian and many other great peoples have combined. Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... themes for the poets and painters. Having trudged along, at least three miles, in one direction, I struck a large mot, that jutted out into the prairie. Here I concluded it was best to hang up for the night. I was soaking wet—hungry and wolfish enough. My utter desperation induced me to work for an hour with some percussion caps, powder, and a piece of greased tow linen, to get a blaze of fire, Ingins or no Ingins. I began to wish I was ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... evidence, while the manager moved quickly to his side, to inspect the find. And P. Sybarite looked up with blank eyes in a pallid, wizened face in time to see Shaynon bare his teeth—his lips curling back in a manner peculiarly wolfish and irritating—and snarl ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance |
