"Straddling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kind of pallid, unreal, water-colour exhibition, a row of blurs of faintly coloured portraits of yourself, spread on space? Do you not see how unfair it is—this spinning out of one's own little dark, tired inside, a theory for a wide heaven and earth, this straddling with one ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... flat back, those narrow shoulders and thick thighs? He felt freer to dislike the work of Verrocchio, his own teacher, and a man without Donatello's overwhelming genius; that David of his, with his immense head and wizen face, his pitiful child's arms and projecting clavicles, straddling with hand on hip; was it possible that a great hero, the slayer of a giant (Domenico's notions of giants were taken rather from the romances of chivalry recited in the market than from study of Scripture) should have been made like that? And so, like his great ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... straddling through the air, Alas! too late to win them; I saw them chase the clouds, as if The devil had been in them; They were my darlings and my pride, My boyhood's only riches,— "Farewell, farewell," I faintly cried,— ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... face of the man, who was straddling his body, and saw a gleam of malignant hatred in ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... some closeness, complete the picture: Imagine this figure, grotesque, peregrinate; and to the eye of a peasant certainly diabolical, then perch it on the stile in the midst of those green English fields, and in sight of that primitive English village; there let it sit straddling, its long legs dangling down, a short German pipe emitting clouds from one corner of those sardonic lips, its dark eyes glaring through the spectacles full upon the Parson, yet askant upon Lenny Fairfield. Lenny ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the space between his feet. He intensified his glare. He might have been posing to an illustrator of "Pilgrim's Progress" for a picture of "Apollyon straddling right across ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... of marble on the work for it, which he did not carve, as he was afterwards prevented. There were besides other statues, which represented those for whom the tombs were erected. All, in conclusion, were more divine than human; but above all, the Madonna, with her little child straddling across her thigh, of this I judge it better to be silent than to say but little, and so I pass it by.(51) We owe thanks to Pope Clement for these masterpieces; and if he had done no other praiseworthy act in his life (but, of course, he did many), this one ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... warfare knew that they would do just such a thing, which made it all the more bitter. But Red had cultivated the habit of thinking quickly and he saw at once that the remedy lay with him; he astonished the exultant savages by straddling his disgruntled horse as it scrambled to its feet and galloping away from them, bearing slightly to the south, because he wished to lure his pursuers to ride closer to his ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... adventure of his day. We see before us the long-haired followers of Braccio and the Baglioni; their handsome savage faces; their brawny limbs clad in the particoloured hose and jackets of that period; feathered caps stuck sideways on their heads; a splendid swagger in their straddling legs. Female beauty lay outside the sphere of Signorelli's sympathy; and in the Monte Oliveto cloister he was not called upon to paint it. But none of the Italian masters felt more keenly, or more powerfully represented in their work, the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... one too—care as little for the world as it cares for us; without any ado, in the seven-league boots which we bring into the world with us, we stride on directly into eternity. A most lamentable, inconvenient straddling position this—one leg in the future, where nothing is to be discerned but the rosy morn and the faces of future children, the other leg still in the middle of Rome, in the Piazza del Popolo, where the entire present century would fain seize the opportunity ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... only get them across. Getting them across was the difficulty; for though I was strong for my age, I found the first plank very contrary. After blowing out my candles I fixed one end of the board under my heavy four-post bed, pointing the other end out through the window, slanting upwards. Straddling across it, I very gingerly edged it out, a hand's breadth at a time, till I had some ten feet wagging about in the air over the lane. It was as much as I could do unaided, to aim the thing. It seemed to have a wild, contrary ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... may yield either of two results. A man may take, for the reality of himself, either the low view of human nature, in which man is but "a forked straddling animal with bandy legs," or the high view, in which he is a spirit, and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries. It is the latter view which Thomas Carlyle champions, through this and many other volumes, against the materialistic thought ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... server shall stand behind the service line with both feet on the floor and not touching or straddling the line, and serve the ball against the front wall above the front-wall service line and below the 16-ft. [4877mm] line before it touches any other part of the court, so that it shall drop directly, or off the side wall, into his opponent's court ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... to hear from Thad," explained Step Hen, as though he might himself be "up in the air," or, as he would himself have said, "straddling the fence," not knowing whether to scoff at the other's scheme, or give it ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... near to the point where what was known as the Lower Road struck off through the Rancho de Los Muertos, leading on to Guadalajara, he came upon one of the county watering-tanks, a great, iron-hooped tower of wood, straddling clumsily on its four uprights by the roadside. Since the day of its completion, the storekeepers and retailers of Bonneville had painted their advertisements upon it. It was a landmark. In that reach of level fields, the white letters upon it could be ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... to the door-sill, at the entrance to the orchard. He took a quick aim, pointing his gun a little in the air, in the direction of the cherry tree which overhung the spring. He fired. A hoarse cry rang from the tree; and the scarecrow which had been straddling the main branch for a month past came tumbling to the ground, only to jump up at once and make off as fast as its ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... shoes, for I remembered the ten miles of rock and cactus between him and home, and I climbed up on Buckles. Joel screamed and swore something fearful. But I didn't look back. And Peg, you know—maybe you don't know—but Peg is fond of me, and he followed me, straddling his bridle all the way in. I dropped Joel's clothes down the ridge a ways, right in the trail, so he can't miss them. And that's all.... Dad, was it—was ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... group of 33 coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, straddling the Equator; the capital Tarawa is about one-half of the way from Hawaii to Australia; note - on 1 January 1995, Kiribati proclaimed that all of its territory lies in the same time zone as its Gilbert Islands group (GMT 12) even though the Phoenix Islands ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... and fat, the other lean and ruddy: the one walks as if she were straddling after a go-cart, and the other takes too masculine a stride. I shall not endeavour to deprive either country of its share of beauty; but must say, that of all objects on this earth, an English farmer's daughter is most charming. Every woman there is a complete beauty, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... had a private character, I have forgotten it. I am no more a genuine brigand than I am a genuine courier. I am only a bundle of masks, and you can't fight a duel with that." And he laughed with boyish pleasure and fell into his old straddling attitude, with his back to the ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... he went, "hand over hand," root over root. I had just time to note others of his species had dropped here and there upon the ground, and were hurrying with frantic haste to the same destination when he reached the fatal branch, and was straddling victoriously down it, blind to all but love and longing. That ill-omened bird who stood above the maiden-flower let him come within a stalk's length, so near that the white splendour of his sleeping lady gleamed within arms' reach, then the great beak was opened, the ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... Proudly straddling on its four hind-claws, the insect holds its long body almost vertical. The murderous fore-limbs, at first folded and pressed against one another on the thorax, open to their full extent, forming ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... -undignified. And to shout—what? What word? What phrase? No; it was impossible. Then how? . . . She frowned, discovered it, dashed at the piano, which had stood open all night, and made the rosewood monster growl savagery in an irritated bass. She struck chords as if firing shots after that straddling, broad figure in ample white trousers and a dark uniform jacket with gold shoulder- straps, and then she pursued him with the same thing she had played the evening before—a modern, fierce piece of love music which had been tried more than ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the Capuchin did. I was young and he was old, I undecided and he perfectly clear in his intention. There was little more—even to my too charitable eyes—in his favour, certainly not his looks. He was a huge, straddling, positive kind of a fellow with an air of specious, bluff benevolence about him which gave way to examination. He had a very ugly mouth under his beard, cut up sideways by the pressure of his long tooth to emerge; his eyes were small, greedy and near together; ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... the loud cries, from the English within the fort. Their comrades on the outside hastened—scrambling, wading, straddling the log or knee-deep in the ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... thinking the horse had had some quality [208] that he would not have me know of, what did I but rid [209] him into a great river? and when I came just in the midst, my horse vanished away, and I sate straddling ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... here will I spill thy soul! And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast." In the cut he throws a dart with either hand, belching pointed flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and straddling the while across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Dwarfland? does thy horn Inform the gnomes and goblins of the hour When they may gambol under haw and thorn, Straddling each winking web and twinkling flower? Or bell-ringer of Elfland? whose tall tower The liriodendron is? from whence is borne The elfin music of thy bell's deep bass, To summon fairies to their starlit maze, To summon them ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... or the Tour du Lepreux, round which Xavier Maistre wrote his pathetic dialogue. Then, there was the cathedral with its extraordinary painted facade, like a great coloured picture-book; and the tall cross, straddling a spring in a paved street, put up in thanksgiving by the Aostans when they joyfully saw Calvin's back for ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... so that his back hair rubbed against his chair back, was laughing with his jaws wide apart and his fine teeth still gleaming in the half darkness, when Ted, general errand boy at the office, came straddling over intervening laps and laid a compelling hand ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards' start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag-end of the race she'd get excited and desperate-like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose—and always ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... was a fine tan, against which eyes, teeth, and moustache came out in brisk relief. The moustache avoided the tropical tint of the upper hair and was content with a modest brown. The owner came right along, walking with a stiff, strong, straddling gait, like a man not used ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... ought to be united near a garden. Neighbors' hens in your garden are an annoyance. Even if they did not scratch up the corn, and peck the strawberries, and eat the tomatoes, it is not pleasant to see them straddling about in their jerky, high-stepping, speculative manner, picking inquisitively here and there. It is of no use to tell the neighbor that his hens eat your tomatoes: it makes no impression on him, for the tomatoes are not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... I did what the dignity of science demanded of me—I remained silent. But the nut-shells caused such a painful tickling that I put up my hand to my nose, and found, to my great surprise, that my spectacles were straddling the very end of it— so that I was actually looking at the lady, not through my spectacles, but over them. This was incomprehensible, because my eyes, worn out over old texts, cannot ordinarily distinguish anything without glasses—could not tell a melon ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... crawled out of these and stared across the bay as down a gully came an Arctic caravan, men and dogs, black against, the deadly whiteness. Ahead swung the guide, straddling awkwardly on his five foot webs, while the straining pack pattered at his heels. Big George, the driver, urged them with strong words, idioms of the Northland, and his long whip bit sharply ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... dusty," said Peter; "look at the Aqueduct straddling slap across the valley like a giant centipede, and then the towns sticking their church spires up out of the trees like pens out of an inkstand. I ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... eyes and gazed forward. Then he came down with a thud, abruptly re-straddling his horse, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... snore, in which they were all indulging, when the raw morning air rushed in among them, as a porter with a lanthorn opened the door and announced their arrival at Newmarket. Forthwith they turned into the street, and the outside passengers having descended, they all commenced straddling, yawning, and stretching their limbs while the guard and porters sorted their luggage. The Yorkshireman having an eye to a bed, speedily had Mr. Jorrocks's luggage and his own on the back of a porter on its way to the "Rutland Arms," while that worthy citizen followed ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... set foot on the plateau, after a weary climb up the toilsome staircase which the tussock-grass and irregularities of the cliff afforded, than he startled one of these birds. It was straddling on the ground in a funny fashion over a little heap of rubbish, as the pile appeared to him. The albatross was quite in the open part of the tableland, and the reason why it selected such a spot ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... lash of his tongue, the gun's crew soon got into action, the gun-layer taking charge. Our first shot was short, very considerably so, as was also the second. Meanwhile the steamer had been keeping up a very creditably controlled rate of fire, straddling us twice, but missing for deflection, as was natural considering that we ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... house dog on his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head, The cat's dark silhouette on the wall A couchant tiger's seemed to fall; And, for the winter fireside meet, Between the andirons' straddling feet The mug of cider simmered slow, And apples sputtered in a row. And, close at hand, the basket stood With ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... into space, straddling the first line of sodden clothes as he fell. Even in that brief flight the thought came to his mind that it would have been infinitely better for him if the falling rain had not weighted and flattened those sagging lines of washing. Then he remembered, more gratefully, that it was probably ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... advanced, each with a box on his shoulder; but what those boxes might be was a puzzle; they might be hand-grenades for throwing into the cave. However, they were soon down to the rock at which the ladder was let down, and then Smallbones stood up with a musket in his hand, with his straddling legs and short petticoat, and bawled out, "Who ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... that day, nevertheless, found our sight-seer smoking cigarettes in Shir Ali Khan's garden at Dizful and listening to the camel bells that jingled from the direction of certain tall black pointed arches straddling the dark river. When Matthews looked at those arches by sunlight, and at the queer old flat-topped yellow town visible through them, he regretted that he had made up his mind to continue his journey so soon. However, he was coming back. So he packed off Gaston and the Bakhtiari to Sheleilieh, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... evidently spoken in a spirit of levity, aroused strenuous opposition above. There was an immediate movement of the object straddling the limb. Then two arms waved vigorously, and a ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... great straddling A.D. besides. Then you see a cloak, and a table, and a pot, with flowers in it, and a heap of books with all their leaves and all their clasps, and all the little bits of leather gummed in to mark the places; and last of all ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... the chimney laughed. The house-dog on his paws outspread, Laid to the fire his drowsy head; The cat's dark silhouette on the wall A couchant tiger's seemed to fall, And for the winter fireside meet Between the andiron's straddling feet The mug of cider simmered slow, The apples sputtered in a row, And close at hand the basket stood With nuts from brown ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... veranda Mr. Van Wyk put his hands in his pockets, and, straddling his legs, stared down at a black panther skin lying on the floor before a rocking-chair. "It looks as if the fellow had not the pluck to play his own precious ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... fled? Maybe some rumor of the great change reached them in their fastnesses; and then in the light of early dawn, in single file they climbed the ladder, up through the scuttle. And straddling the ridgepole with daggers between their teeth, alas, they became dizzy and toppled down the steep shingles to the gutter, to be whirled away in the torrent of an April shower. Ah me! Had only the roof been flat! Then it would have been for them a reservation where they ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... you keep putting the wrong end up! I wish Eleanor was well enough to do it," he said—and then burst into self-derisive chuckles: "Imagine Eleanor straddling that ridgepole! It would scare ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, straddling the equator, about one-half of the way from Hawaii to Australia; note - on 1 January 1995, Kiribati proclaimed that all of its territory lies in the same time zone as its Gilbert Islands group (GMT 12) even though the Phoenix Islands and the Line Islands under its jurisdiction lie on the other ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... region smell of tar. And when we got to Ekaterinburg there was rain, snow, and hail. I put on my leather coat. The cabs are something inconceivable, wretched, dirty, drenched, without springs, the horse's four legs straddling, huge hoofs, gaunt spines ... the droshkies here are a clumsy parody of our britchkas. A tattered top is put on to a britchka, that is all. And the more exactly I describe the cabman here and his vehicle, the more it will seem like ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... turns his back to the player and, bending his head low, rests his hands on his knees. This is called "Giving a back." The other boy places his hands on the first boy's back and leaps over him, by straddling his legs wide apart on each side like a frog. The second boy then assumes the stooping posture, and the third boy leaps over the first and second, and the fourth over all three, one ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... The stove, straddling out on its four iron legs, was gently humming. Aunt Martha had evidently just lighted the lamp, for she went to it and began ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... surprise and had his club only half-raised when Jason was upon him, and he swung wildly. Jason ducked under the blow and used Ch'aka's momentum to help throw him as he grabbed the club arm and pulled. Face down the armored man crashed against the stones and Jason was straddling his back even as he fell, clutching for his chin. He lacerated his fingers on a jagged tooth necklace then grasped the man's thick beard and pulled back. For a single long instant, before he could writhe free and roll over, Ch'aka's head was stretched back, and in that instant Jason ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... fifty. Limit the bet to three thousand dollars. Is that big enough for you, Lablache? Let us have a regulation 'ante.' No 'straddling.'" ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... into space. If I slip or if the support breaks, I shall come to grief in the midst of the angry Bees. I do not slip and the support does not break. With the bent switch which my brother hands me, I bring the finest clusters within my reach. I soon fill my pockets. Moving backwards, still straddling my branch, I recover terra firma. O wondrous days of litheness and assurance, when, for a few filberts, on a perilous perch we ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... said Thayor, straddling them across his neck, as the Clown had done, and with his own and Thayor's rifle spliced to the buck's head, the Clown led ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... attempt to answer that fool question; Cummings spoke for me, lawyer fashion, straddling the question, bringing up ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... the state of Washington, nestled in the Bight of Tyee and straddling the Skookum River, lies the little sawmill town of Port Agnew. It is a community somewhat difficult to locate, for the Bight of Tyee is not of sufficient importance as a harbor to have won consideration by the cartographers of the Coast ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... strained and rolled. After several changes of position, in which neither man was at all damaged except in his appearance, Barber came to the top and stayed there, like the largest potato in a basket. Then straddling the lighter man, who was blowing hoarsely, Big Tom ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... for you that you didn't. He'd never have forgiven you. Had he got on his grand uniform? Yes, he would have, to show himself off, and he does look comic in it too. You see it was made for him at a guess in London; and, my! it is rum to see him straddling about in it sometimes. He's just like a peacock, and as proud of his feathers. But if you had laughed it would have been horrible. So mind what you are about, for he's sure to ask you some day, and he'll call you 'goo-ood boy' if you eat enough. I taught the old cock parrot to say that. ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... each at my entrance taken with one motion, stroking their matted locks with both hands under their coifs, mobs, or pinners, every one of which was awry. They were all slip-shoed; stockingless some; only under-petticoated all; their gowns, made to cover straddling hoops, hanging trollopy, and tangling about their heels; but hastily wrapt round them, as soon as I came up stairs. And half of them (unpadded, shoulder-bent, pallid-lips, limber-jointed wretches) appearing, from a blooming nineteen or twenty perhaps over-night, haggard ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... other child—was a fat-cheeked boy in his eighth year, oftenest seen on horseback, sitting fast asleep with his hands clutched in the folds of the Judge's coat and his short legs and browned feet spread wide behind the saddle. It was hard straddling, but ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... his country and its laws. We Americans smile superior, as I did at the Mayor's table; and yet, I fancy, we lose some very agreeable titillations of the heart in consequence of our proud perogative of caring no more about our President than for a man of straw, or a stuffed scarecrow straddling in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... as it had to happen, the White Horse Girl and the Blue Wind Boy met. She, straddling one of her white horses, and he, wearing his strong hiking shoes in the dirt and the grass, it had to happen they should meet among the hills and along the rivers of the west Rootabaga Country where they ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... them, for lack of occupation for their hands. Yonder, huge Pomeranians, with bosks of beard stiffened out square from the chin, hurtled mountainous among the peaceable inhabitants. Troopers dismounted went straddling, in tight hose and loose, prepared to drink good-will to whomsoever would furnish the best quality liquor for that solemn pledge, and equally ready to pick a quarrel with them that would not. It was a scene of flaring feathers, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of 33 coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, straddling the equator; the capital Tarawa is about one-half of the way from Hawaii to Australia; note - on 1 January 1995, Kiribati proclaimed that all of its territory lies in the same time zone as its Gilbert Islands group (GMT 12) ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... And a white tree-maid Lifted her eyes, and listened In her rain-sweet glade. Bunnie to bunnie stamped; old Wat Chin-deep in bracken sate; A throstle piped, 'I'm by, I'm by!' Clear to his timid mate. And there was Longlegs, straddling, And hearkening was he, To distant Echo thrilling back A ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... his hairless pug face and straddling his thin, long legs. "That surprises you. I am bound to do my best for my company. They have enormous expenses. Why—our agent in Horta tells me they spend fifty thousand pounds every year in advertising all over the world! One can't be too economical in working ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... swelling, like a bruise, in the centre. There was a good deal of blood on the face which obscured the hole made by the entrance of the bullet. The eyes were half-closed. A big camera, pointed downwards, was mounted on a high double ladder straddling the body and was operated by a young man in a bowler hat who went on with his work without taking the slightest notice of the detective ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... straddling the equator in the Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and Australia Map references: Oceania Area: total area: 717 km2 land area: 717 km2 comparative area: slightly more than four times the size of Washington, DC note: includes three island groups - Gilbert Islands, Line ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... began to suspect the virtue of my fair hostess, not perceiving for some hours that it was my hostess herself; in the afternoon she made us a visit in this horrid dress,—(for horrid she appeared in my eyes)—her cloaths were white, with red cuffs and scarlet lappels; and she held in her straddling lap a large black muff, as big as a porridge-pot. By this visit she lost all that respect her superlative beauty had so justly entitled her to, and I determined she should visit me no more in man's apparel. ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... into St. James's Street; let the man it hits be your man. He, if you breed him a little to it, and tie the due official bladders to his ankles, will do as well as another this sublime problem of balancing himself upon the vortexes, with the long loaded-pole in his hands; and will, with straddling painful gestures, float hither and thither, walking the waters in that singular manner for a little while, as well as his foregoers did, till he also capsize, and be left floating feet uppermost; ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... dramas, which somehow came so close to reality with so little art—or because of so little art—had a way of straddling time like life itself. "Twenty years elapse between Acts II and III," the playbills said unblushingly, and the fact is that what most men sow at twenty they reap at forty; the twenty years do elapse between the acts. The curtain that goes down on Robert Lucas in his room at Tambov rises ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... I started up, gazing eagerly about me. There was still nothing in sight from the low elevation of the boat herself, but being awake I decided to have a look round from aloft. In another minute I was straddling the yard of the main lug, from which position, as the boat floated up on a ridge of swell, I caught a momentary glimpse of something gleaming white in the brilliant sunshine right ahead. It could, of course, be but ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... the occasion of our several pilgrimages, in beneath the great flying, or at least straddling buttresses to the left of the mighty facade, where you enter that great idle precinct of fine dense pavement and averted and sacrificed grandeur, the reverse of the monstrous medal of the front. Here the architectural monster rears its back and shoulders on an equal ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... her head and a wicker basket on her arm. Lowietje stood in his worn breeches and his torn shirt; in his pocket he had a new climbing-cord. Each dragged Poentje by one hand, Poentje who still went about in his little shirt and, with his wide-straddling little bare legs, trotted on between ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... the rocks and surf was passed, came another danger of the hideous brutes in brown skins and the briefest shirts, who came towards the boat, straddling through the water with outstretched arms, grinning and yelling their Arab invitations to mount their shoulders. I think these fellows frightened the ladies still more than the rocks and the surf; but the poor creatures were obliged to submit; and, trembling, were accommodated somehow upon ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... come like a ghost from the antique past, with his old bones straddling neither horse nor mule, but seated sidewise on a brindle bull, and to reach the place where he was to discourse music he had made a "soon start" yesterday morning and had slept lying by the roadside ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... recreative faisant metion des prouesses et vaillaces du noble Sypperts de Vineuaulx Et de ses dix septs filz Nouuellement imprime." At the end: printed for "Claude veufue de feu Iehan sainct denys," 4to. Without Date. On the reverse of this leaf there is a huge figure of a man straddling, holding a spear and shield, and looking over his left shoulder. I think I have seen this figure before. This impression is executed in long lines, in a small gothic letter. A sound copy of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... we walked the rest of the way in silence. I imagine we were both pretty busy with our thoughts; I know that I was. And several times, as we walked along, I looked back over my shoulder towards the ungainly red monster straddling on her spindling wooden legs—and towards the smiling Atlantic, glistening ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... and found Black Bart on the bed straddling the body of Whistling Dan, and growling at poor Mrs. Daniels, who crouched in a corner of the room. It required patient work before he was convinced that they actually meant no harm ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... more coffee was needed and proceeded to make it. Not until the pot was heating did he motion the boys to sit down at the kitchen table. He joined them, turning a chair around and straddling it, his chin resting on his hands on the back, his ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... chair with his legs straddling the back and his toes on the bottom side round. Keeping his feet off the floor, he advances the chair forward by jerking it with his body until it ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper
... the parallel and horizontal bars. It is obvious that pressure on the genital organs will very readily arise in these ways. But cases are reported in which the child experiences sexual excitement from exercising on the horizontal bar, not when he is straddling the bar, but when he is hanging to it by the hands. It must in these cases remain doubtful whether the sexual excitement results from the pressure of the breeches, or is a direct result of the hanging ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... they doubled up with laughter when they saw Miss Gibbie straddling the top of the wall, unable to get down either way; but suddenly, Richard said, she balanced herself on the top of the wall and sat there with her feet hanging over as if going to spend the day, and then in a flash she was down on ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... lowered; and presently the tourists flocked down with variant emotions, to be besieged by fruit sellers, water carriers, cabmen, blind beggars, and maimed, naked little children with curious, insolent black eyes, women with infants straddling their hips, stolid Chinamen; a riot of color and a ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... colt did not suffer. Becoming ever more confident of himself as the days passed, he soon revealed pronounced curiosity and an aptitude for play. He would stare at strutting roosters, gaze after straddling hens, blink quizzically at the burro, frown upon the grunting pigs, all as if cataloguing these specimens, listing them in his thoughts, some day to make good use of the knowledge. But most of all he showed interest in and playfulness ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... reached Torquemada, home of the Grand Inquisitor; crossed the Pisuerga by a long-legged bridge straddling across the river-bed; had a fleeting glimpse of Venta de Banos; came to a straight-cut canal of beryl-green water (which Dick gloomily pronounced a surprising evidence of energy in Spain), and slowed down to wonder at a village of cave dwellings, hollowed ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... still weak with laughter, but he threatened them with his gun and they fell back in mock alarm while Sam went round back of the corral and they heard him whistling for Grit. When he reappeared, straddling along on his bowed legs, his good ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... inclined to give up in despair; a complete battery seemed to have been driven in there and the guns and materiel piled, pell-mell, on top of one another. Deciding finally to take the bull by the horns, he leaped to the axle of a piece and so pursued his way, jumping from wheel to wheel, straddling the guns, at the imminent risk of breaking his legs, if not his neck. Afterward it was some horses that blocked his way, and he made himself lowly and stooped, creeping among the feet and underneath the bellies of the sorry jades, who were ready ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Tom Taylor and Charles Lamb had been O'er bottled porter and the Fairy Queen! In youth, one day, seeking forbidden fruit Tom tumbled from the branches with his loot, And broken bones compelled the lad to go On straddling crutches, warily and slow, Counting the pebbles on his path below. The noisy pleasures of the open air, The football kicked exuberant here and there. Cricket, beloved of sinewy juvenals, And golf with all its hazards, clubs and balls, Were not in Taylor's province: ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... free-black-nigger Baptist minister, or a Jesuit. Every body knows an infantry officer, with his "eyes right" physiognomy, his odious black-stock, and his habit of treading on his heels, and can distinguish him from the cavalry man, straddling like a gander at a pond side. Your medical doctor has an obsequious, mealy-mouthed, hope-I-see-you-better face, and carries his hands as if he had just taken his fingers from a poultice; while your lawyer is recognised at once by his perking, conceited, cross-examination ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... or thirty flamingoes upon it, for these birds are very gregarious. Some were standing in the water as usual, but the boys could not make out what some of the others were doing. On the flat shore were several heaps of earth, and across them some of the birds were apparently sitting with one leg straddling out each side. So comical was their aspect, that the boys burst into a laugh, which so scared the flamingoes that they all took flight instantly. The boys now waded up to the spot, and then got ashore to see what these strange heaps were for. To their great ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... him, because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... lent herself in an unusual degree to the display of this false virtuosity. The picture was one of Jack's "strongest," as his admirers would have put it—it represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of veins, a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one of the circus-clown's ironic efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted "strongly" because she was tired of being painted "sweetly"—and ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... to Exford," said he, straddling his bicycle, "for though the meet isn't to be there, there's where they keep the hounds and horses, and if we make good speed we shall get there ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... calculated to advance the interests of self-government and mankind. These officers were very comely, intelligent- looking people with the most good-natured faces. They came and went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel scabbards against the tables, or rising and straddling off with their long swords kicking against their legs. They are the most stylish soldiers in the world, and one has no notion how ill they can dress when left to themselves, till one sees them in ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... York and Philadelphia—we imagine him boldly as liberated from Boston—how could he fail to perceive them at La Rochelle? The streets of this dear little city are lined with arcades—good, big, straddling arcades of stone, such as befit a land of hot summers and which recalled to me, not to go further, the dusky porticos of Bayonne. It contains, moreover, a great wide place d'armes which looked for all the world ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... said the Professor, straddling his malleable fingers across the young man's bumpy brow—"In this head we find Ideality large—abnormally large, in fact; thurby indicating—taken in conjunction with a like development of the perceptive qualities—language following, as well, in the prominent ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... rafter, on the outside, for the base piece. The two end pairs have the B pieces (Fig. 14) nailed on to them, and r3 the tie t, which should be in line with the rafters. The other three pairs require temporary ties halfway up to prevent straddling during erection. ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... social order of the Kingdom of God with such wholeness of determination, he is the constant rebuke for all of us who are trying to live with a "divided allegiance," straddling between the iniquities of force, profit, and inhumanity, and the fraternal righteousness of the Gospel we profess to believe. Jesus at least was no time-server, no Mr. Facing-both-ways, no hypocrite; and whenever we touch his elbow by inadvertence, a shiver ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... p. 294) referred to the constriction and dilation of the vulva under the influence of sexual excitement. It is said that in Abyssinia women can, when adopting the straddling posture of coitus, by the movements of their own vaginal muscles alone, grasp the male organ and cause ejaculation, although the man remains passive. According to Lorion the Annamites, adopting the normal posture of coitus, introduce the penis when flaccid or only half erect, the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the Elevated Railway structure straddling almost its entire length, Sixth Avenue, sullen as a clayey stream, flows in gloom and crash. Here, in this underworld created by man's superstructure, Mrs. Einstein, Slightly Used Gowns, nudges Mike's Eating-Place ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... was, I met the two one evening at the Provises', and with exuberant congratulation. Then straddling as a young Colossus on the hearth-rug, and with an admonitory forefinger, I proclaimed to the universe at large that Mrs. Risby had blighted my existence and beseeched for Warwick some immediate and fatal and particularly excruciating malady. In fine, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... business, it is so soon over, I should want it again and again: it's made me so randy for a fuck. Do have me, some one at once." She had pulled up her skirts and was straddling over one end of the stool, frigging herself, so to oblige Patty, I quickly pushed her backwards, and got into her longing slit. The grind did not last long, both being so hot for it, so it came off in a very ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... results at first; as when the anatomical sculptor Pollaiolo gives scenes of naked Roman prize-fighters as martyrdoms of St. Sebastian; or when the pious Perugino (pious at least with his brush) dresses up his sleek, hectic, beardless archangels as Roman warriors, and makes them stand, straddling beatically on thin little dapper legs, wistfully gazing from beneath their wondrously ornamented helmets on the walls of the Cambio at Perugia; when he masquerades meditative fathers of the Church as Socrates and haggard anchorites as Numa Pompilius; most ludicrous of all, when he attires ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... hand, it is enough, the which you have not denied. And that it holds thus, is plain, because commanded. But let the reader know, that your putting in that way of his receiving which is invisible to us; is but an unhandsome straddling over my argument, which treateth only of a visible receiving; such as is manifest to the church. This you knew, but sought by evading to turn the reader from considering the strength of this my argument. 'The receiving then [said ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... monster with a sick feeling in his stomach, and got another surprise. The thing had stopped moving. Straddling the rail behind it, and similarly dripping, ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... the older apes were for finishing what they had commenced; but Taug, sullen, mighty Taug, sprang quickly to the ape-man's side and straddling the unconscious form warned back those who would have struck his childhood playmate. And Teeka, his mate, came too, taking her place with bared fangs at Taug's side. Others followed their example, until at last Tarzan was surrounded by a ring of hairy champions ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... intimately there on the dresser top. His shirt, awaiting studs, spread out on the bed—their bed. His suspenders straddling the chair back. The ordering of the evening beefsteak lurking back in her consciousness. He liked sirloin, stabbing it vertically (he had a way of holding his fork upright between first and third fingers) when he carved, and cutting it skillfully away from ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... breathing, for the wind had been completely knocked out of him. Ben laid him flat on his back, and, straddling him, with his knees on the ground, began to work Ted's arms with an upward, backward, and outward motion, as if he was restoring the breath to a half-drowned person. Soon a flush came into Ted's face, and he gave a gasp, and his breath came in short, painful ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... to be a woman,' she said. 'But one begins with it from a baby; one gets used to it. And I shouldn't like to be a man,—to cough so loud, and stand straddling about on a wet day, and be so wasteful with meat and drink. They're a coarse lot, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... exhaust the tuba market. Down the lane a panting carabao, with a whole family clinging to its back, is slowly coming into town. Another, covered with the dust of travel, laden with bananas, hemp, and copra from a distant barrio, is being driven by a fellow in a nipa hat, straddling the heavy load. A mountain girl, bareheaded, carrying a parasol, comes loping in to the mercado on a skinny pony saddled with a red, upholstered silla, with a rattan back and foot-rest, cinched ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... as now, it was irritating to my growing sense of self-reliance. To show how little I heeded her admonition, how well able I was to take care of myself, as I smiled loftily from my dangerous perch, with my legs hardly straddling the horse's back, I disdained to secure myself by holding to the harness, but folded my arms with the nonchalance of a ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... of her eggs, for there was more of eggs than of nest—a great deal more. A few sticks had been laid upon the ends of the bending rose-bushes, and this flimsy, inadequate platform was literally covered by the five dirty-white eggs. The hen had to stand on the bushes straddling the nest in order to brood. How she ever got as close to the nest as that without spilling its contents was hard to see; for I took an egg out and had the greatest difficulty in putting it back, so little room was there, so near to nothing for it ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... at still bore in its upper branches the remains of our tree-top retreat, a rotted beam or two straddling a crotch. "Peter Pan should rebuild it," said I. "I shall drop a line to Wendy. Do you still hesitate to ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... us was seized by five women, each holding arm or leg or head; we were lifted like children, straddling helpless children, and borne onward, wriggling indeed, but ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... cliff, and the eagles, becoming disturbed, flew away. The men were sent out in the boat, and we kept in hiding until signalled that the birds had quieted down. We gained the top of the cliff, a mere knife edge in places, where we worked our way along, straddling the rock. The birds had selected a splendid place, straight up from the water, where they had built their nest firmly into a bush on ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... little Mary had been looking at him with surprise. She did not cry, for she was not afraid of the poor spider. It was of the kind that children call a 'daddy long-legs,' and Mary thought it was very funny to see it straddling over the carpet, trying to get away as fast as ...
— Aunt Fanny's Story-Book for Little Boys and Girls • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... removed. With a round table standing in the center, with the plaster models arranged on shelves and sketches in pencil and crayon tacked against the whitewashed walls, the apartment was transformed into a delightful atelier. An open fire-place, with a brace of antiquated iron-dogs straddling the red brick hearth, gave the finishing touch. The occupant was in easy communication with the yard, from which the busy din of clinking chisels came u musically to his ear, and was still beyond the reach of unnecessary interruption. Richard saw clearly all the advantages ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... stammered. "Yes," he said thickly. "And now let no man . . ." He jerked his arm out of my grasp. I watched his back as he went away. It was a long street, and he remained in sight for some time. He walked rather slow, and straddling his legs a little, as if he had found it difficult to keep a straight line. Just before I lost him I fancied he staggered ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... in her hand. There was plenty of light to see it by. The little old, red, flat-bottomed boat out in midstream, with Billie standing, barelegged to his knees, straddling from the stem seat to the rear middle one, while he strove persuasively with a big pickerel. Kit was half kneeling in the other end of the boat, bailing for dear life, dressed in an old middy and wash skirt, with a boy's farm hat pulled low over ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... with as true an eye for nature as Raphael,—he stumbles over the blocks of the antique statues—wanders in the dark valley of their ruins to the end of his days. He has left you a few outlines of muscular men straddling and frowning behind round shields. Much good may they do you! Another lost mind. And of those who are lost namelessly, who have not strength enough even to make themselves known, the poor pale students who lie buried forever in the abysses of the great schools, no account ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... his homeward journey. The sharp ridge made it necessary for him, as before, to work his way forward astride on the rock for some time; but he soon got within sight of a part where it would be possible to go on his hands and knees, and was just about to change his straddling position for the more comfortable one of crawling, when the constant shrieking of the young vultures in his bag was answered by a piercing cry from above, followed the next moment by the loud rushing of powerful wings close to his ear. The boy uttered an exclamation of horror, and ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... paymaster (why are paymasters so fearfully inclined to fat?); the raw-boned young surgeon with the Aberdeen accent; "the ranker," erect and grizzled, and looking ever so little not quite at his ease, you know, for the languid lad with fawn-coloured moustache straddling on the chair beside him is an Honourable; the jovial portly Yorkshireman, who is in the Highland Light Infantry, naturally; and the lively loud-voiced Irishman, laughing consumedly at his own jokes—all ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... and still: the followers of the Lamb shall be down; the followers of the Beast be up, cry peace and safety, and shall be as secure as an hard heart, false peace, and a deceitful devil can make them. But behold! While they thus 'sing in the windows,' death is straddling over the threshold! (Zeph 2:14). While they are crying peace and safety, sudden destruction cometh: By that they have well settled themselves at their table with Adonijah (1 Kings 1), they shall hear it proclaimed with sound of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... On his feet, straddling Mulready's insentient body, he confronted Calendar and Stryker. The face of the latter was a sickly green, the gift of his fright. The former seemed coldly composed, already recovering from his surprise and bringing his wits to bear upon ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... be as thick as a man's arm. The moose breaks down trees of such a size by placing his big shoulder against it, and curving his powerful neck round it, and then bending it over with his massive head. Then, too, he often rides down small trees, such as birch or poplars, just by straddling his fore legs about them and using his ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... rope attached to its horns. Kicking and struggling, they were swung upwards over the side of the ship and lowered into the lighter below. Sometimes they were swung out too far and landed straddle on the side of the lighter, straddling the rail, kicking and roaring. And sometimes, when the loosely moored lighter drifted away a little from the ship's side, an animal would be lowered between the ship's side and the lighter, and squeezed between the two—so crushed that when it ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... young lady managed the whole family, even a little the small beflounced sister, who, with bold pretty innocent eyes, a torrent of fair silky hair, a crimson fez, such as is worn by male Turks, very much askew on top of it, and a way of galloping and straddling about the ship in any company she could pick up—she had long thin legs, very short skirts and stockings of every tint— was going home, in elegant French clothes, to resume an interrupted education. Pandora overlooked and directed her relatives; Vogelstein ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... had just gone to her room when somebody knocked at her door. McClane stood outside, straddling, his way when he had got something important on hand. He asked if he might come in and speak to her for ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... Diverts her with his jokes and harmless taunts. Close by the cottage door, with placid mien, The old man sits upon his seat of turf, His staff with crooked head laid by his side, Which oft the younger race in wanton sport, Gambolling round him, slyly steal away, And straddling o'er it, shew their horsemanship By raising round the clouds of summer sand, While still he smiles, yet chides them for the trick. His silver locks upon his shoulders spread, And not ungraceful is his stoop of age. No stranger ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... for it includes many sorts of grotesque inventions, whimsical incongruities, such as those arabesques found at Herculaneum, where Anchises, AEneas, and Ascanius are burlesqued by heads of apes and pigs, or Arion, with a grotesque motion, is straddling a great trout; or like that ludicrous parody which came from the hand of Titian in a playful hour, when he sketched the Laocoon whose three figures consist of apes. Annibale had a peculiar facility in these incongruous inventions, and even the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... window and rehearsed quietly their method of operation, and it was not long before a noise in the back room signalled the break-up of the card game. Half a dozen rough-looking fellows from Redmans Creek followed one another out to the saloon, headed, as usual, by McGregor, straddling his legs and swaggering, looking round with a cynical twist on his handsome face. They went ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... far and was waving his pipe-stem for the chorus when the company looked up and saw Sal straddling in the doorway with her fists on her hips. The sight daunted them for a moment: but she held up a finger, signing them to keep the news to themselves, and leaned her shoulder against the doorpost with her eyes steady on the back of her husband's scrag neck. His fate was upon him, poor varmint, ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... them, turn and turn about, year on and year off, all the gubernatorial and legislative pomps and emoluments that the said State had to bestow. On the 1st of April of every odd year the governor, preceded by citizen soldiers, straddling or curvetting through the mud—the governor, followed by twenty barouches full of eminent citizens, who were not known to be eminent at any other time, but who made a rush for a ride on this occasion as certain old ladies do at funerals—the governor, taking off ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... you have so painfully earned in the galleys, in battles and sieges. But what I stomach least is that you go to sit on the tribunal by order. Some lewd stripling, the son of Chereas, to wit, enters your house balancing his body, rotten with debauchery, on his straddling legs and charges you to come and judge at daybreak, and precisely to the minute. "He who only presents himself after the opening of the Court," says he, "will not get the triobolus." But he himself, though he arrives ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... bacon. He had escaped from her somehow, and he had been very lucky. His star had saved him. It had also saved him from a devil on a red-hot bicycle. He had stood quite still, calm and undismayed, in the awful path of the straddling Apollyon whose head was girt around with yellow fire, and had seen him swerve madly and fall off the machine. And when the devil had picked himself up, he had tried to blast him with the Great Curse of the Underworld; ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... mind, untied the dangling robe and dropped it over the parapet. One of the arena attendants carried it to Brinnaria and she put it on. But she would not stir and stood straddling the fallen lad until one of the Emperor's aides came out of one of the low doors in the arena-wall, crossed to her and assured her that the defeated retiarius would be spared and cared for. Then she ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... Straddling the limb, I took a firm hold with both hands in front of me, for no other boughs were close enough to be grasped, and thus inch by inch I moved ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... happened to have on the engine, and with this I made a flying cut in the third wire of the second cross arm. I attached the little pocket instrument, and found that upon adjusting it, I was on a commercial wire. There I was, straddling a cross arm between heaven and earth, with the instrument held on my knee, and totally ignorant of any of the calls or the wire I was on. I yelled down to the conductor and asked him if he knew any of the calls. No; of course he didn't; and he was so excited he didn't have sense enough ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... you?" cried the great stolid fellow; and he made a dash forward, straddling out his legs as if on board ship, when, to his intense astonishment, his quarry bent down, dashed at him, ducked between his knees, struggling through, and throwing the great sailor headlong flat upon ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... In his straddling wide forward-step, and his springy side-wise series of hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way of canting his head to one side upon occasion, he reminds one of the American blackbird. But the sharp resemblances stop there. He is much bigger than the blackbird; and he lacks the blackbird's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... intruding on the one affair of life. The single sitting-room was on the same principle, a chaos of boxes and old papers, and had more counting-house stools in it than chairs; not to mention a great monster of a desk straddling over the middle of the floor, and an iron safe sunk into the wall above the fireplace. The solitary little table for purposes of refection and social enjoyment, bore as fair a proportion to the desk and other business ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... intimated that he does not see the use of going home, as you can always go there when you can go nowhere else. Is seated straddling across one of the tables, on which he is beating time to the band with a hooky stick. Will not allow the state of his pulse to be ascertained, but says we may feel his fist if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... an horse, and found that, from the ground to the wither, it was just five feet four inches; which height answers exactly to sixteen hands, a growth that few horses arrive at: but then, with this length of legs, its neck was remarkably short, no more than twelve inches; so that, by straddling with one foot forward and the other backward, it grazed on the plain ground, with the greatest difficulty, between its legs: the ears were vast and lopping, and as long as the neck; the head was about twenty inches long, and ass-like; and had such a redundancy of upper lip as ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... gets tired of following, whatever the distance. This movement scarcely meets with the approval of the unruly crowd, however, and several come forward and exhibit ten-para pieces as an inducement for me to ride again, while overgrown gamins swarm around me, and, straddling the middle and index fingers of their right hands over their left, to illustrate and emphasize their meaning, they clamorously cry, "bin! bin! chu! chu! monsieur! chu! chu!" as well as much other persuasive talk, which, if one could understand, would ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... stories went into the magazine and were paid for. Strange were the ways of this office; Shakespeare might have sent in prose and poetry, but he would have gone into the wastepaper basket had he not previously straddled. For those who were in the "know" this was a matter of congratulation; straddling, we would cry, "We want no blooming outsiders coming along interfering with our magazine. And you, Smith, you devil, you had a twenty-page story in last month and cut me out. O'Flanagan, do you mind if I send you in a couple of poems as well as my regular stuff, that will ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Straddling the log, he started to get his baited hook in motion. The wriggling worms sank a little in the swirl. At first, he was unable to just master the difficult problem of how to influence the bait to float into the eddy. Twice he failed to accomplish this, but studying the rushing ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... without finding a man to dispute the passage - other than a much-surprised customs official - and reached an undefended bridge across the canal. The high road to Milan seemed deserted by the Austrians. But Napoleon's troops were drawn out in a preposterous line, straddling a river and a canal, both difficult to cross, and without any defensive positions to hold against an attack in force. He supposed that the Austrians were stretched out in a similar long line. This was not the case. Gyulai had all the advantages of ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... the Toad, straddling and expanding himself. "There's real life for you, embodied in that little cart. The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here to-day, up and off to somewhere ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... arguments were working on him. That little imp of doubt which had vexed him in the cab as he drove home from Ovington Square had not died in the night. It had grown and waxed more formidable. And, now, aided by this ally from without, it had become a colossus, straddling his soul. Derek looked frequently at the clock, and cursed the unknown cabman whose delay was prolonging the scene. Something told him that only flight could serve him now. He never had been able to ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... the children not on the arm, as our nurses do, but straddling on the hip, and usually supported by a cloth which ties in a knot on the opposite shoulder. This practice I have been told is common in some parts of Wales. It is much safer than the other method, less tiresome to the nurse, and the child has the advantage of ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head, The cat's dark silhouette on the wall A couchant tiger's seemed to fall; And, for the winter fireside meet, Between the andirons' straddling feet, The mug of cider simmered slow, The apples sputtered in a row, And, close at hand, the basket stood With nuts from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... all to be congratulated. He is the best fellow in New Orleans, and there's only one man I'd rather see your sister marry than him; that's me. Now I'm going to select a present before the rush commences. What would you think of an onyx clock with gold cupids straddling ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... bad, the fallen ones—and there seemed to be a diabolical number of them—were ten times worse. John was straddling the trunk of one and cursing vehemently when a sound struck on his ears, more intelligible than any parade-call. It came back to him from the front: the sharp ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
