"Straggler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he once wrote, "a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools, so-called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond "readin', writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three. If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... tie straggling far in the rear. Redruff, yards behind, preening his feathers on a high log, had escaped the of the squirrel, whose strange perverted thirst for birdling blood was roused at what seemed so fair a chance. With murderous intent to cut off the hindmost straggler, he made a dash. Brownie could not have seen him until too late, but Redruff did. He flew for that red-haired cutthroat; his weapons were his fists, that is, the knob-joints of the wings, and what a blow he could strike! At the first onset he struck the squirrel square on ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... his lonely errand, he carried Henri's bicycle back of the hedge. Then he mounted his own, and coasted down the hill. His object was to seem entirely indifferent, should some German scout or straggler spy him, but plainly the Germans had decided ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... The shops were all shut, and the voices of business and amusement were hushed. The market place, which yesterday was full of swarming life, and sent forth a confused uproar, was deserted and dumb—not a straggler was to be seen of all ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... had become by 1540 similar to an estate which has been shot over too frequently; birds had become both wild and scarce, it was hardly worth while to go over the ground, except now and again on the chance of picking up a straggler. Towns and islands, on the other hand, even if they did not yield much in the way of actual plunder, were always good cover to beat for slaves, which had a certain value in the markets of Algiers and Tunis. Another circumstance which had led to ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... being no shops in the old village of Saint Ronan's, the said commercial emissaries, for the convenience of their traffic, always took up their abode at the New Inn, or Hotel, in the rising and rival village called Saint Ronan's Well, unless when some straggler, by chance or dire necessity, was compelled to lodge himself at the Auld Town, as the place of Meg's residence began to be generally termed. She had, therefore, no sooner formed the hasty conclusion, that ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... at frequent intervals, and the men soon held that to fall out on the march was a disgrace. Before a month "had passed," he says, "the brigade had learned how to march, and in the Valley with Jackson covered long distances without leaving a straggler ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the countless graves that hold the youth of France, the men who had known the Marne, the Yser, Champagne, who had known death for nearly two years, night and day, almost constantly. Yet during the fifteen minutes I watched there was not one order, not one straggler; there was a sense of the regularity with which the blood flows through the human arteries in this tide, and it was the ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... and decide what they'll be like. When I see a man that takes my fancy, I add him to the list. Mostly they're clean-shaved, but I saw one the other day with a beard—" She lifted a warning finger to stay Bridgie's cry of protest. "Not a straggler, but a naval one, short and trim; and you wouldn't believe how becoming it was! I decided then to have one with a beard. And they are mostly tall and handsome, and rolling in riches, so that I can buy anything I like, nose included. But one must be poor and sad, because ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... back, in '47, I were fighting in Mexico. It wasn't much regular up and down fighting we had, though we had some toughish battles too, but it were skirmishing here, skirmishing there, keeping one eye always open, for man, woman, and child hated us like pison, and it was little mercy that a straggler might expect if he got caught away from his friends. Their partisans chiefs, half-soldier, half-robber, did us more harm than the regulars, and mercy was never given or asked between them and us. Me and Rube Pearson worked mostly together. ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... going on all through the system, while the natural love of repose is being gratified as an independent emotion, constitute the very perfection of mere animal enjoyment. The musquitoes at midday have gone to their rest, or if a straggler comes buzzing and singing about your ears, you are lulled rather than disturbed by his song. If he takes his drop of blood from your veins, the tickling of his tiny lance is but a pleasant titilation, and you let him feed ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... had turned southward and gone jogging leisurely away towards their reservations, until warned of the pursuit by ambitious young braves still hovering about the troops in hope of slicing off the scalp of some straggler. Then, every man for himself, they had apparently scattered over the face of the country, laughing gleefully to think what fun the white chief would have in deciding which trail to follow. The situation on the third day out had been summarized by Crounse, the guide, about as follows: "So ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... they didn't care for much, and the cakes of soap which they began to eat could not honestly be said to be an entire success as comestibles. But while we watched them at these hors d'oeuvres to the banquet at which we were expected to take a prominent part, a straggler came up with some reserve supplies; I saw them; tins of dynamite—we carried dynamite for blowing up the snags that obstructed the narrower reaches of the river. We watched the thieves crowd around the bearer of the tins, and we saw that the general impression that prevailed ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... secluded life among her duties; it occurred to him that perhaps she went out, possibly to market, earlier than he came, or later, after he had left the office. In this belief he arrived one morning after an early walk in a smart spring shower, the lingering straggler of the winter rains. There were few people astir, yet he had been preceded for two or three blocks by a tall woman whose umbrella partly concealed her head and shoulders from view. He had noticed, however, even in his abstraction, that she walked well, and managed the lifting of ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... found Shawn enjoying the surprising event of being cordially welcomed by the inhabitants of the town. The worst sort of straggler is often astonished at the kindly interest accorded him upon returning to his old home. Old Doctor Hissong greeted him by saying, "Hello, been seeing the world, have you?" When he went up to the Alden home, he found the same good friend there; the same sweet smile and the kind ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... thereon, both in war and peace, are by no means proper to be discussed in this place; but they will easily offer themselves to the skilful in maritime affairs. However, as the Manilla ships are the only ones which have ever traversed this vast ocean, except a French straggler or two, which have been afterwards seized on the coast of Mexico; and as, during near two ages, in which this trade has been carried on, the Spaniards have secreted with the utmost care all accounts of their voyages from the rest of the world; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... of most of them is tangled and difficult of passage beyond description; the air is sultry and stifling; an intolerable thirst is provoked, for which no running stream offers its kind relief. In a few hours, under an equatorial sun, reduced by these causes to entire exhaustion, woe betide the straggler at the Enchanted Isles! Their extent is such-as to forbid an adequate search, unless weeks are devoted to it. The impatient ship waits a day or two; when, the missing man remaining undiscovered, up goes a stake on the beach, with a letter of regret, and a keg of crackers and ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... address and daring which were delightful to look at. He waved an urgent hand from three or four hundred yards away towards Polson, who responded by a gesture indicating the route he meant to take. The last straggler having been thus rounded up, the officer turned and reined in his charger for a final look at the retreating forces of the enemy; and somewhere from the black middle mass of them down in the shadow of the valley there came ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... have eggs still, and squab-young. The last swift I observed was about the twenty-first of August; it was a straggler. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... evaporating in pale mists from the river, and the celebration itself spasmodically taking flight here and there in Roman candles and rockets. An occasional outbreak from revellers in the bar-room below, a stumbling straggler along the planked sidewalk before the hotel, only seemed to intensify the rustic stillness. For the future of Indian Spring was still so remote that Nature insensibly re-invested its boundaries on the slightest relaxation of civic influence, and Mr. Ford lifted ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... Thou, straggler into loving arms, Young climber up of knees, When I forget thy thousand ways, Then life and ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... with all speed; the lathering ponies of the Dalhousie Road staggered into Pathankot, taxed to the full stretch of their strength; while from cloudy Darjiling the Calcutta Mail whirled up the last straggler of the little army that was to fight a fight, in which was neither medal nor honour for the winning, against an enemy none other than "the sickness that destroyeth in ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... concerned more sensible of its advantages than myself, who had no title to be included in it. Having already satisfied myself as to the several modes in which the four others attained felicity, I next set my mind at work to discover what enjoyments were peculiar to the old "Straggler," as the people of the country would have termed the wandering mendicant and prophet. As he pretended to familiarity with the Devil, so I fancied that he was fitted to pursue and take delight in his way of life, by possessing some of the mental and moral characteristics, ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Juno's eyes, or Cytherea's breath." How the brother and sister would croon over him "with murmurs made to bless," calling him their "tender novice" "in the first bloom of his nigritude," their belated straggler from the "rear of darkness thin," their little night-shade, not deadly, their infantile Will-o'-the-wisp caught before his sins, their "poor Blot," "their ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... range of hills, where we expected to find Antonio Fontano, who had separated from us in the morning. In crossing towards these hills I fell through the ice into the lake, with my bundle on my shoulders, but was soon extricated without any injury; and Mr. Back, who left us to go in search of the straggler, met with a similar accident in the evening. We put up on a ridge of sand hills, where we found some pines, and made a large fire to apprize Mr. Back and Fontano of our position. St. Germain having killed a deer in the afternoon, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... spoiling it by attacking them, although the numbers were about equal; besides, they had got all the plunder and spoil, and a battle would only endanger the success already obtained. So they lay in cover until the last straggler had disappeared in the direction of Aescendune, and then continued their course, with many a jest at the expense of ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... roosted there all night. As soon as the air became clear and pleasant they were all on the wing at once; and, by a placid and easy flight, proceeded on southward towards the sea; after this I did not see any more flocks, only now and then a straggler. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White |
