"Clumsily" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... done of you, my man, and right well deserves a glass of grog. Say so to the gun-room steward as you pass; and tell him it is my orders to fill you out a stiff nor-wester." The soldier's offer was kindly meant, but rather clumsily timed, at least so thought Jack: for though he inclined his head in acknowledgment of the attention, and instinctively touched his hat when spoken to by an officer, he made no reply till out of the marine's hearing, when he laughed, or rather chuckled out ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... than by using one. 'Now, (added Johnson,) every one acquainted with microscopes knows, that the more of them he looks through, the less the object will appear.' 'Why, (replied the King,) this is not only telling an untruth, but telling it clumsily; for, if that be the case, every one who can look through a microscope will be able to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... proof of the British army's everlasting luck that one of the men, who set the great brass dish of food on the floor near King, had a swollen cheek, and that he should touch the swelling clumsily, as he lifted his hand to shake back ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... who tries to explain away coincidences to men who were the victims of them is likely to need more sympathy than he will get. The dictionary defines them clumsily as instances of coinciding, apparently accidental, but which suggest a ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... on the sail, and shipped the rudder, he contrived to set Mollie at work in the forecastle, where she could not see what he was doing; for he thought his work must be revolting to her feelings, especially as it would be very clumsily performed. Having put a sling on the box, he rigged a purchase, and hoisted it out of the cabin. Then, with suitable rigging, he lowered it into the boat, placing it across ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... American cars. It will be quite unable to buy American cars. It will be unable to make anything that America will not be able to make more cheaply for itself. But it will mean that Europe will go on without cheap cars, that is to say it will go on a more sluggishly and clumsily and wastefully at a lower economic level. Hampered transport means hampered production of other things, and in increasing inability to buy abroad. And so we go ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... policy to that end can be worked out, it is carrying emphasis even beyond specific products and services to the social ends for which these products and services exist. In these ways society too is trying, clumsily perhaps, to take a long-time view of its business and to conserve the human values that make ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss
... to his feet with a howl of terror. He gave one more glance at the men and then he ran, clumsily, but with a speed made desperate by terror. He made straight for the rocks—and at that, two of the men, at a word from their leader, raised their rifles and fired. And with a shriek that set all the echoes ringing, the sea-birds screaming, and made Audrey clap ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... relative, so quickly, so strongly had she clutched her central clue. All her scruples and hesitations, all her anxious enthusiasms, had reduced themselves to a single alarm—the fear that she really might act on her companion clumsily and coarsely. She was positively afraid of what she might do to her, and to avoid that, to avoid it with piety and passion, to do, rather, nothing at all, to leave her untouched because no touch one could apply, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... heartening power and the sky became gray and somber. I took off my long woolen comforter and wound it around Yulka's throat. She got so cold that we made her hide her head under the buffalo robe. Antonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins clumsily, and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time. It was growing dark when we got to their house, but I refused to go in with them and get warm. I knew my hands would ache terribly if I went near a fire. Yulka forgot to ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... was about thirty-five years of age, with light grey eyes, fair hair and moustache, and his complexion was a whitey drab. He was tall—about five feet ten inches—and rather clumsily built; not corpulent, but fat—in good condition. He appeared to be very well fed and well cared for generally. His clothes were well made, of good quality and fitted him perfectly. He was dressed in a grey Norfolk suit, dark brown boots and knitted woollen ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... revel, while revel we may; For the gay bloom of fifty soon passes away, And then people get fat, And infirm, and—all that, And a wig (I confess it) so clumsily sits, That it frightens the little Loves out of ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... crowd in the road brought the people surging into the middle of the street. Mahdi had opened a front window, and stepped out on to the roof of the verandah. He was dancing clumsily on the corrugated iron, and gesticulating, with his long, shaggy hands. Nickie was declaring with the warmth of absolute conviction that he was a king, but the yelling of the crowd rendered ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... emphatic answer as he lumbered away on great clumping shoes, true knight as any that used to ride away on a horse just as clumsily arrayed in armor, and perhaps that romantic rider was no better equipped in mind or heart than this glass-blower of ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... could be heard on the stairs. They were slow and clanking because the carpets were up and the house full of echoes. To Thor's fevered imagination it seemed as if Claude dragged his feet like a man wearing chains, going haltingly and clumsily before some ominous tribunal. The sensation—it was more that than anything else—caused the elder brother to withdraw into the depths of the library, where he turned on ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... restricts its subjects to doing what they can do best. Park-swans seldom fly,—and flying is something that swans should never attempt, unless they wish to be taken for geese. I felt actually desillusionne, when a princely cortege, which had been rippling their snowy necks in the sunshine, clumsily lifted themselves out of the water and slanted into the clouds, stretching those necks straight as a gun-barrel. Every line of grace seemed wire-drawn out of them in a moment. Song is as little their forte as flight,—barring the poetic license open to moribund members of their family,—and I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... once," she said, smiling, and, arranging her skirt and waist-sleeve, sat down, clumsily took the pen into her small, energetic hand, began to laugh and ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... Innocent worked steadily to fulfil certain contracts into which she had entered with the publishers who were eager to obtain as much of her work as she could give them,—but she had lost heart, and her once soaring ambition was like a poor bird that had been clumsily shot at, and had fallen to the ground with a broken wing. What she had dreamed of as greatness, now seemed vain and futile. The "Amadis de Jocelin" of the sixteenth century had taught her to love literature—to believe in ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... Channel in Caesar's time, as for long afterwards, a species of portable leathern skiffs, which seem to have been in the main common oared boats, but on the west coast of Gaul the Santones, the Pictones, and above all the Veneti sailed in large though clumsily built ships, which were not impelled by oars but were provided with leathern sails and iron anchor-chains; and they employed these not only for their traffic with Britain, but also in naval combat. Here therefore we not only meet for the first time with navigation in the open ocean, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... other clumsily about the heads of milk-weed blossoms. Cicada droned in long, loud crescendo and diminuendo under the hot sun of mid forenoon. A sensitive plant, or as Judith herself would have said, a "shame briar," caught at her skirts as she hastened. Dipping deeper into the hollow, the ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... successive births; first, as in Plato: [Greek: metabole tis tugchanei ousa kai metoikeois te psuche ton topon tou enthende eis allon tochon], then metabole, from 'the other place,' back to earth; then, with advancing speculation, fresh metabole again, and so on; a theory more or less clumsily united with the bell-doctrine.] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... beginning of the year (1847) was the production of Iphigenia. I had to act as stage manager in this case, and was even obliged to help the scene-painters and the mechanicians over the smallest details. Owing to the fact that the scenes in this opera were generally strung together somewhat clumsily and without any apparent connection, it was necessary to recast them completely, in order so to animate the representation as to give to the dramatic action the life it lacked. A good deal of this faultiness of construction ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... says about canonicity; thirdly, to prove that canonicity means infallibility. And when science, largely in the shape of the abhorred "criticism," has answered this appeal, and has shown that "antiquity" used her own methods, however clumsily and imperfectly, she naturally turns round upon the appellants, and demands that they should show cause why, in these days, science should not resume the work the ancients did so imperfectly, and carry it ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... face there sat the look of one resigned with fatalism to whatever issue might appear. She made no further speech, but was the first to step into the boat. Madame Delchasse, still grumbling, followed clumsily. Eddring helped them in, took up the oars, and the two deck-hands, who had been holding the skiff, clambered back aboard the Queen. Eddring settled himself to the oars, and they cast off. The little skiff rocked, tossed, turned, and headed toward the ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... the same logs arranged so that the angle of incidence strikes the back of the chimney and the smoke ascends in the full and orderly manner. But both Figs. 285 and 287 are clumsily arranged. The B logs in each case should be the backlog and the small logs A and C should be ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... learn things she didn't know; as, for instance, to write and read writing. She could only clumsily print ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... from her uncle's lap. "I'll be back in a minute," and before Laine could press the button which would bring Moses she had disappeared. Five minutes later she was back, in her hands a good-sized paper box, tied clumsily with red string, and as she put it on the table she patted it ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... soldiers was being marched out to exercise. He opened the case he was carrying, and laid it on the seat. He was not conscious of feeling afraid; if he had a fear, it was only lest, in his inexperience, he should do what he had to do, clumsily. In loosening the clothes at his neck, however, he perceived that his hand was shaking, and this made him aware that his heart also was beating unevenly. He stood and fumbled with his collar-stud, which he could not unfasten at once, and, while he was busied thus, the mists that blinded him ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the smith. But as the other turned toward his wagon, Fausch came slowly and clumsily out of the workshop and motioned to him. The trader's horse had already started. Hallheimer reined him in sharply. Fausch came over to him and leaned his blackened arms on the rack of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... secret marriage which was confirmed by a public ceremony in 1712, in reward for her services at Pultowa. Peter also instituted the Order "For Love and Fidelity," in her honor. A German princess describes her thus:—"The czarina was small and clumsily made, very much tanned, and without grace or air of distinction. You had only to see her to know that she was lowborn. From her usual costume you would have taken her for a German comedian. Her dress ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... driven in and the gates securely shut; and then, driving his captive still in front of him, my man led us, with a rapidity which showed that he knew every inch of his ground, to a big building at the side. Then it was my turn to understand and to stare. Within the building a big altar had been clumsily made of wooden boards and draped with blood-red cloth; and lining the wall behind it was a row of hideously-painted wooden Buddhas. There were sticks of incense, too, with inscriptions written in the same manner as those we had seen being ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... primitive man have been discovered amongst the Tuaregs. These relics are hatchets made of black rock, and arrow-heads not unlike those which the Arabs attribute to the Djinn; but as we approach the south we find the flints picked up more clumsily and unskilfully cut — a proof that they were the work of a more barbarous people with less practical skill. It is the megalithic monuments of Algeria, of which we shall speak more in detail presently, that are the most worthy of attention. As in India, we meet ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... he must do. He went to say good-bye to Bunning. He thought with surprise as he climbed the stairs that this was the first time that he'd ever been to Bunning's room. It had always been Bunning who had come to him. He would always see that picture—-Bunning standing, clumsily, awkwardly in the doorway. ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... the beginning of the end. She got employment with her old employer, Madame Fauconnier, but presently she began to be looked upon with disfavour. She was not nearly so expert; she did her work so clumsily that the mistress had reduced her wages to forty sous a day, the price paid to the stupidest. With all that she was very proud and very susceptible, throwing at everybody's head her former position of a person in business. Some days she never appeared at all, whilst ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... adventure the party again went on shore, and found a tribe of savages, numbering fifty persons, living in a collection of conical huts, rudely formed of boughs, and open on the lee side. The people, who are stout and clumsily formed, had their faces painted, and were very imperfectly covered with seal-skins. Their chief article of clothing, indeed, was a small cloak which they wore on the side on which the wind comes when walking or sitting. They lived chiefly ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... my room and brushed myself up a bit. On my bureau, in a glass of water, there was a white boutonniere, rather clumsily constructed and all ready to be pinned in the lapel of my coat. I confess to a blush. I wish Britton would not be so infernally arduous in his ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... perplex him. Nature is not like those bad poets, who, in setting a fool or a knave before us, do their work so clumsily, and with such evident design, that you might almost fancy you saw the poet standing behind each of his characters, and continually disavowing their sentiments, and telling you in a tone of warning: This ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... drawn a man thus far, does He stop? Not so. He does not leave His work half done. If the work is half done, it is that we stop, not that He stops. Whoever comes to Him, however confusedly, or clumsily, or even lazily they may come, He will in no wise cast out. He may afflict them still more to cure that confusion and laziness; but He is a physician who never sends a patient away, or keeps him waiting for ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... doubtless suddenly determined while the volume was in the press to transfer 'Troilus and Cressida' to the head of the tragedies from a place near the end, but the numbers on the opening pages which indicated its first position were clumsily retained, and to avoid the extensive typographical corrections that were required by the play's change of position, its remaining pages were allowed to ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... worth while to double the risk. I did it rather clumsily, I suppose, and my greeting was a shot fired at random in the darkness—the senator mistaking me for a burglar, as he afterward explained. There was no harm done, and the pistol welcome effectually broke the ice in what might otherwise have been ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... on a patrol, at least the military authorities thought not. Had they known that Kaspar could see in the dark, they might have kept him as a guide in night attacks, but they did not know. The promising young hussar (he rode well but clumsily) was thus left in the hands of civilians: the Grand Ducal secret might be discovered, so an assassin was sent to take off ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... infrequent spectacles would support the assertion. It gave one a positive thrill to see the margin of one's soup-plate embraced by a delicate little pink-and-white thumb that might have belonged to Hebe herself, instead of the rawly red or clumsily gloved intruder that we are all too familiar with. The waiting of the coloured gentleman is also pleasant in its way to all who do not demand the episcopal bearing of the best English butler. The smiling darkey takes a personal ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... and strictly in accordance with the powers of the settlement. Duly executed and attested, clearly though clumsily expressed, and beyond all question genuine, it simply nullified (as concerned the better half of the property) the will which had cost Philip Yordas his life. For under this limitation Philip held a mere ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Roger's nostrils. As he stared at the house a great hound crept around the corner of it, baying monotonously, but as he saw Margarita he left off and ran to her, arching his brindled head. He was a Danish hound, beautifully brindled and very massive. She fondled him quietly, smiling as he clumsily threw his great paws about her ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... with it then. What is the trouble? I'm willing to do what I can, even occasionally to doing what the little lass suggests." And with the words, his big arm went clumsily about his wife, the while he looked at Suzanna for approval. She nodded vigorously, ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... induced a Greek merchant to dispatch a letter to the prince, asking him, in the name of her he loved best, to come alone in the evening to the first station outside the Euphrates gate. Unfortunately, the messenger managed the matter clumsily, and apparently gave the letter to Gaumata. But to counteract Bartja's proof of innocence, Boges had managed to get hold of his dagger, which was conclusive evidence. And now Nitetis was sentenced to be set astride upon an ass and led through the streets of Babylon. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... with newly-awakened interest at Lettice; for the first time he thought of her as other than a school-girl; for the first time he discovered in her the potent, magnetic, disturbing quality of sex. Buckley Simmons had clumsily forced it into consciousness. A fleeting, unformulated regret enveloped him in the shadow of its melancholy, an intangible, formless sorrow at the swift passage of youth, the inevitable lapse of time. A mounting anger at ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... He was very discreet, but severe in his behaviour, confident in his criticisms and utterances, and dignified in his silence. It was obvious that he thought a great deal of himself. Asanov rarely laughed, and then with closed teeth, and he never danced. He was rather loosely and clumsily built. He had at one time served in the —th regiment, and was spoken of as ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... was a brown patch upon the girl's faded skirt at the knee; the shortness of the garment indicating its age to be something over three years, as well as permitting the knowledge to become more general than befitting that her cotton stockings had been clumsily darned in several places. Her pursuer was in as evil case; his trousers displayed a tendency to fringedness at pocket and heel; his coat, blowing open as he ran, threw pennants of torn lining to the breeze, and made it too plain that there were but ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... had picked up the ball-point pen Gail had needed to show Zani the use of. He didn't need to be shown. Without a glance at it, he began to write. A moment later he read off, slowly and clumsily and from the completely cryptic marks he'd made, the English words that Gail had taught Zani. Fran and Mal joined him. They painstakingly practiced the pronunciation of words Gail had taught Zani but ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... will give him complete satisfaction. In all fraudulent correspondence you are sure to find the true secret of it at last. It has been said by somebody, that the true sense of a letter is to be learnt from its postscript. But this matter is so clumsily managed, that, in contempt of all decency, the first thing the Nabob does is to desire he may be put into the hands of Munny Begum, and that without ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... outside. He recalls that he was greatly interested at one time in some workmen who were repairing the church, and that he constantly turned from his post of observation to try and imitate their labors, but his only building material was the furniture of the room, and chairs and tables clumsily resisted his efforts to pile them up into suitable form. He tells us that this strong desire for building and the bitter disappointment of his repeated failures were still keenly remembered when he was a grown man, and thus suggested to him that children ought to be provided ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... close to his beating heart! Though colorless and marble-like, there is beauty in every feature, and signs of suffering and pain in the dark circles about the eyes and in the lines at the corners of the exquisite mouth. Even as he clumsily but most assiduously mops with his one available hand and looks vaguely around for feminine assistance, Major Abbot is conscious of a feeling of proprietorship and confidence that is as unwarranted, probably, as it is new. 'Tis ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... orderly untidiness, and at the far end a fire was burning and five or six men in Darkovan clothing—loose sleeved shirts, tight wrapped breeches, low boots—were squatting around it, talking. They got up as Forth and Kendricks and I walked toward them, and Forth greeted them clumsily, in bad accented Darkovan, then switched to Terran Standard, letting one of the men ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... any passage he can understand without exhibiting such a warmth of enthusiasm and enjoyment that it softens the stoniest readers. He can gravely call Dante's Hell "geologically speaking a most fantastical formation" (which it certainly is), and joke clumsily about the poet's putting Cunizza and Rahab in Paradise. He can write, in the true spirit of vulgarising, that "the Florentine is thought to have been less strict in his conduct in regard to the sex than might ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... and as she was not ready to start when the rest of the fleet did, she sailed alone down the river through the quiet bay, and out into the ocean, and as she sailed, she bore little resemblance to our war vessels of to-day, so clumsily fashioned was she, being made of wood, with only one covered deck, and the open forecastle and quarter-deck above it, and had but two tiers of guns—the largest frigates carried sixty guns, besides a large pivot gun at the bow, and ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... said Wilson, clumsily, "I mean I was his attendant up to the Retreat. It was a real high-toned place, and they did not take any dangerous ones, only folks like him. His people ain't the kind that stand for price. They've got ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... observed clambering on to the entrenchments and gun emplacements, eagerly watching the development of the fight. The cavalry had by this time approached to within 1,000 yards of the zeriba, and the Arab artillery began to fire occasional round shot and clumsily fused shells. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyric and the more copious remains of Icelandic display, with no little power and pathos, and plenty of ill-organised "cry," an almost total lack of ability to sing. Every now and then their natural genius enables them to hit, clumsily and laboriously, on something—the refrain of the Complaint of Deor, the stepped stanzas of the Lesson of Loddfafni—resembling the more accomplished methods of more educated and long-descended literatures. But the poets are always in a Robinson Crusoe ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Mr. Goodge as he examined critically the glowing end of his cigar. "Lady Glanedale seems to have done the job very clumsily, now ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... name Tucutuco is given in imitation of the sound. Where this animal is abundant, it may be heard at all times of the day, and sometimes directly beneath one's feet. When kept in a room, the tucutucos move both slowly and clumsily, which appears owing to the outward action of their hind legs; and they are quite incapable, from the socket of the thigh-bone not having a certain ligament, of jumping even the smallest vertical height. They are very stupid in making ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... night's rest, was no whit the worse for his battle with the storm; but he was full of fears lest Valmai's more delicate frame should suffer. He rose with the dawn and made his way over the dewy grass across the valley, and into the field where Essec Powell's cows were just awaking and clumsily rising from their night's sleep under the quiet stars. The storm had disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen, and all nature was rejoicing in the birth of a new day. Gwen was already approaching with pail and milking stool as he crossed the field through which a path led to Abersethin. She dropped ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... wings with a struggling flutter, as if it was all he could do to keep his perch. The cat, her narrow eyes opening very wide, would start to creep up to him. The She imp would then alight on the rail behind her and nip her sharply by the tail, and go hopping clumsily off down the rail. The cat would wheel with an angry pfiff-ff, and start after this new quarry. Whereupon the He imp would again nip her tail. This would be repeated several times before the cat would realize that she was being made a fool of. Then she would bounce down from the fence and race ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... men stepped out of the "testing shed"—the huge structure that housed their Osnomian-built space-cruiser, "Skylark II." Seaton waddled clumsily, wearing as he did a Crane vacuum-suit which, built of fur, canvas, metal and transparent silica, braced by steel netting and equipped with air-tanks and heaters, rendered its wearer independent of outside ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... was beaded with sweat as he rose and stared down at the wounded man. Clumsily he attempted to help Waring, who washed and bandaged the shattered shoulder. Waring had shot to kill, but the gun was not his own, and he had fired almost as it ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... four large artificial roses, taken from an old hat of her mother's, which she had found in a trunk in the store-room. Possessing no slippers, she carefully blacked and polished her shoes, which had been clumsily resoled, and fastened into the strings of each small rosettes of red ribbon; after which she practised swinging the train of her skirt until she was proud of ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... made to change the "one" to "five" on the "one" side of the new combined note, but it was done so clumsily that the fraud would have been seen at a glance, and the only hope of passing the notes as fives would have been to pass them over with the $5 side up and trust to the man receiving it not to turn it over before putting it away. The doctored notes came to the notice ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... their seats, and after one more caravan the performances began. The trick elephant did several odd things rather clumsily. Then he stood on his head, and the boys clapped their hands with delight. He trumpeted, and the very ground seemed to shake. Then he looked around in a queer sort of fashion, as if he was ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... execution with them.' The graceful carriage of each weapon was considered a test of high breeding. The clownish man was in danger of being tripped up by his sword getting between his legs: the fan held clumsily looked more of a burden than an ornament; while in the hands of an adept it could be made to speak a language of its own. {35} It was not everyone who felt qualified to make this public exhibition, and I have been told that those ladies who intended to dance ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... tell some one or go mad. But I didn't hate him. I could no more put him out of my life than I could stop breathing. Ah, I have been so miserable and unhappy!" She laid her head upon his knees and clumsily he stroked ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... overhear all that occurred, or was said in Magde's chamber, could scarcely refrain from laughter as he saw his good uncle retreating before the virtuous woman until he arrived at the window from which he somewhat clumsily descended. Gottlieb was on the point of rushing forward to receive his loved relative in his arms and thus preventing him from injuring his precious limbs, when the sound of Magde's voice prevented him from rendering this important service to ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... condition: two days of worry and nervousness, of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating in the emotional crisis and Rosalind's abrupt decision—the strain of it had drugged the foreground of his mind into a merciful coma. As he fumbled clumsily with the olives at the free-lunch table, a man approached and spoke to him, and the olives dropped from his ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... deliberately across the wide clear space that was the flying field. It halted near the farther side. In minutes the door of a hangar swung wide. There was the sputtering of a not-yet-warmed-up motor. The big plane came slowly out, its motors coughing now and then. It swung clumsily across the field, turned in a wide circle, and stopped some forty or fifty feet ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... drying her eyes, what he could still do. "I don't care for that. Of course, as I've said, you're acting, in your wonderful way, for yourself; and what's for yourself is no more my business—though I may reach out unholy hands so clumsily to touch it—than if it were something in Timbuctoo. It's only that you don't snub me, as you've had fifty chances to do—it's only your beautiful patience that makes one forget one's manners. In spite of your patience, all the same," she went on, "you'd do anything rather ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... the lines wrapped on his arm, stopped. De Spain lay a moment, then backed her up a step, pulled her head down by the bridle, clasped his wooden arms around her neck, spoke to her and, lifting her head, the mare dragged him to his feet. Clumsily and helplessly he loosened the tugs and the whiffletree, beat his hands together with idiotic effort, hooked the middle point of the whiffletree into the elbow of his left arm, brought the forearm and hand up flat against his shoulder, and with the hitching-strap ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... Sunday afternoon I was on the point of setting forth to pay this visit, when in came Pomfret. He wore a surly look, and kicked clumsily against the furniture as he crossed the room. His appearance was a surprise, for, though I had given him my address, I did not in the least expect that he would come to see me; a certain pride, I suppose, characteristic of his rugged strain, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... remainder of the fleet hung clumsily in emptiness. And Calhoun worriedly went over in his mind the lessons he'd given in such a pathetically small number of days. If the four ships reached Dara, their pilots would be heroes. Calhoun had presented them with that estate over their bitter objection. But they would ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... passed in idle dreaming and luxurious ease; on the contrary, I had, with much ado, rethatched the broken roof of my cottage as well as I might, mended the chimney, fitted glass to the casements and a new door upon its hinges. This last was somewhat clumsily contrived, I grant you, and of a vasty strength quite unnecessary, yet a very, excellent ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... like a dandy, with a pretty varnished mask on his face. It had a curly blond mustache and a wavy wig. He looked like a wax figure from the Musee Grevin, like a strange and fantastic caricature of the charming young man of fashion plates, and he danced with visible effort, clumsily, with a comical impetuosity. He appeared rusty beside the others when he tried to imitate their gambols: he seemed overcome by rheumatism, as heavy as a great Dane playing with greyhounds. Mocking bravos ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... bank safe, whilst giving the theft the appearance of a night burglary; granting that he was disturbed in his nefarious project by his wife, who, failing to persuade him to make restitution, took his side boldly, and very clumsily attempted to rescue him out of his difficult position—why should he, at nine o'clock the following morning, fall in a dead faint and get cerebral congestion at sight of a defalcation he knew had occurred? One might simulate a fainting fit, but no one can assume a high temperature and a congestion, ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... clumsily for a moment, and kissed the hair of her bowed head, and then thrust her away, and turned towards ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... of Davis' commissioners at Hampton Roads. Campbell obtained permission to convene a meeting of the members of the Virginia Legislature with a view to speedier surrender by Lee's army. But the permission was revoked, for he somewhat clumsily mistook its terms, and, moreover, the object in view had meantime ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... him unceremoniously into a corner of the room, and taking the pigtail in his huge hand, clumsily unfastened it. Out from the thick part, some two inches below the point at which it had been cut from the Chinaman's head, a great diamond dropped ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... natural advantages, in its delightful climate, fertile soil, and industrious population. Valleys unvisited by civilization save as received through the medium of a few semi-barbarous travellers, may contain treasures which they are now unknown to possess; mines of copper, lead, and antimony, now clumsily worked, may be made to yield of their abundance; tracts of uncultivated lands be brought into rich cultivation, and efficient means of transport would carry their produce far and wide through the country. Katmandu itself would ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... Freake was making a fine sprose about me, much more applicable to Achilles or the Chevalier Bayard, I slipped off and fetched the hat and coat. He was just concluding his story on my return, and without interrupting him, I clumsily thrust the hat on her head and flung the ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... down, which is not glossy, but equally black. the Skin of the beak and head to the joining of the neck is of a pale orrange Yellow, the other part uncovered with feathers is of a light flesh Colour. the Skin is thin and wrinkled except on the beak where it is Smooth. This bird fly's very clumsily. nor do I know whether it ever Seizes it's prey alive, but am induced to believe it does not. we have Seen it feeding on the remains of the whale and other fish which have been thrown up by the waves on the Sea Coast. these I believe constitute ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... a twisted stump of a tail and feet like small boxing gloves and ears almost as big as rabbits' hopped clumsily in view. He lifted it down, gave it a pat. Then, nodding familiarly to Effie, he unstrapped a little pack from his back and ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... if you should do so suddenly or clumsily. But you must insinuate the idea very slowly and subtlely. Clarence is not for the works; Clarence is too good for this world—at least for the business of this world. I think him half an imbecile! My father ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... flung back. Silenced, the first officer donned his sea-suit, and in thirty seconds the rest of the crew had theirs on and were cluttering clumsily forward. ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... stepped from the cottage door into the chill of the bright November night, and made his way down the little path of flagstones—irregularly shaped and clumsily laid down, so that mossy turf which was still green, appeared between them—he felt that he was stepping back into a flat, stale and unprofitable world from one of the enchanted regions, "out of space, out of time," ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... beautiful and interesting, family-memoir, into which some later Jewish poet or fabulist of Alexandria wove the ridiculous and frigid machinery, borrowed from the popular superstitions of the Greeks (though, probably, of Egyptian origin), and accommodated, clumsily enough, to the purer monotheism of the Mosaic law. The Rape of the Lock is another instance of a simple tale thus enlarged at a later period, though in this case by the same author, and with a very different result. Now unless ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... him; he let it go; he scarce knew what was happening—only made out that she distinguished the right one, the one that should have been shown him, as blue or green or purple, and intimated that her other friend, her fellow-Olympian, as Berridge had thought of him from the first, really did too clumsily bungle matters, poor dear, with his officiousness over the red one! She went on really as if she had come for that, some such rectification, some such eagerness of reunion with dear Mr. Berridge, some talk, after all the tiresome music, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... high window ledge above the table, decided to have his breakfast without waiting to be called. He was an enormous cat by the name of "Grandpa," and because he was old and ponderous, and no longer light on his feet, when he leaped from the windowsill he came down clumsily in the middle of the very table full of the old lamps which were set aside for ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... intensified by the clamor of a beck which came foaming down the side of a fell until, clattering loudly, wood-pigeons, neither asleep nor wholly awake, drove out against the sky, wheeled and fell clumsily into the wood again. All this was a plain warning, and keeper Evans nodded agreement when ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... kind of a girl I always had my mind set on," pursued Jeb, who was an expert love-maker. "I like a smooth skin and pouty lips that looks as if they wanted to be kissed." He took the reins in one hand, put his arm round her, clumsily found her lips with his. She shrank slightly, then submitted. But Jeb somehow felt no inclination to kiss her again. After a moment he let his arm drop away from her waist and took the reins in both hands with an elaborate pretense that the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... unpardonable sin of the cattle country. He attacked her—dragged her from her horse. And then the pilgrim came. Purdy heard the sound of the furious hoof-beats, and grinned evilly as he watched the man dismount clumsily when he came upon the two horses grazing with empty saddles. When the pilgrim was almost upon him he flung the girl to the ground and drew his gun. There was a blinding flash—and Purdy knew no more until, hours afterward Sheriff Sam Moore and two of three ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... spirits: he was losing his air of gloomy savagery; often he smiled—at a dish which took his fancy, and on setting out for the sands to join Pollyooly. At times, when he had performed some small feat, clumsily indeed, but not with a quite incredible clumsiness, he would turn to her a triumphant, but appealing, eye which begged for a word, or a smile of approval. The humane Pollyooly rarely failed to give him that word or smile to brace him to fresh efforts. With ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... arresting Birchill for the murder of Sir Horace Fewbanks, and had recommenced inquiries with a view to bringing the crime home to somebody else. He did not know whether their suspicions were now directed against Mrs. Holymead, but they had conducted their preliminary inquiries so clumsily as to arouse her fears that they did. So much was apparent from Mademoiselle Chiron's remarks, despite the interpretation she sought to place on Mrs. Holymead's fears. He wondered if the "police agent" was Rolfe or Chippenfield. It was obvious that the cool proposal ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... served, when a man, whose dress very much resembled his own, lounged into the wine-shop. He was a tall, clumsily built fellow, with an insolent expression upon his beardless face. His coat and cap were in an equally dilapidated condition; and in the squeaky voice of the rough, he ordered a plate of beef and half a bottle of wine, and, as he brushed past Andre, upset his glass of brandy. The artist made no ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... bring them up to me." He leaned back and finished his cigar, while the men clumsily cleared the table and placed two ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... cried Blaise, and crouched on his heels. Down he leaned, down, forward, and lunged clumsily. That, too, was the work of an instant, an act concurrent with his cry, but when he straightened himself a picket had dropped into the gloom, and he who held it lay upon it, coughing and choking. "Rats!" ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... against the glass to break my fall. I did as he directed, and thrust my feet against the bales of food cases and air cylinders to prevent their falling upon me. Then with a click the window flew open. I fell clumsily upon hands and face, and saw for a moment between my black extended fingers our mother earth—a planet in a ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... "she takes liberties with herself. She never had a good constitution. She is forty-one years old. All her upper teeth are false, and she can't eat with them. Thank Heaven, I have still got every tooth in my head. How clumsily ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray |
