"Ungainly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the long, pendulous, funereal moss adhering to them,—and the palmetto, shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by vines or branches, with a disproportionately small cap of leaves at the summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and coat-of-arms to the State. Besides these, are the pine, the red and white oak, the cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash. The soil is luxuriant with an undergrowth of impenetrable vines. These interlacing the trees, supported also by shrubs, of which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... I wondered where I could have seen that ungainly shape, that arched back with triangular fringes along it, that strange bird-like head held close to the ground. Then it came back, to me. It was the stegosaurus—the very creature which Maple White had preserved ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gentleness and sincerity of her character. Her cheeks were loose, puffy, and permanently of the hue which is produced by cold; her forehead generally had a few pimples; her shapeless chin lost itself in two or three fleshy fissures. Scarcely less shy than in girlhood, she walked with a quick, ungainly movement as if seeking to escape from some one, her ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... supposed to be very well managed, and very successful. As I looked at the class to whom a lesson was then being read, all the urchins from eight to eleven or twelve years old, I thought I had never seen a congregation of more unpromising and ungainly heads, and accordingly they are the worst and lowest specimens of humanity; starved, ill-used children of poor and vicious parents, generally arriving at the school weak and squalid, with a tendency to every vice, and without having received any moral or intellectual cultivation whatever; but the ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... scarcely be called long, was a trifle longer than the conventional cut. His collar, while not Byronic, was low, and he wore a Windsor tie, of a sickly, pale green. He was a big man, but loose-jointed and ungainly of build. His manners were careless, and his voice was low and soft. He had big grey eyes, which seemed especially noticeable by reason of enormous tortoise-rimmed glasses, whose long, thick bows hooked ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... of the Borinage coal field exceeds twenty million tons a year. Its ungainly features of shafts, chimneys, and mounds of debris are relieved in places by woodlands, an appearance of a hilly country is presented where the pit mounds have been planted with fir trees. Apart from its mining aspect, Mons is a city of historic importance. It contains a Gothic cathedral ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... of the day!" cried Molly, "and here's my gift." She had in her arms a large and rather ungainly bundle, loosely wrapped in white ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... He was a man of remarkable character. He had great strength of will and immense determination; and Maggie, his only child, took after him. She resembled him in appearance also, for he was very plain of face and rather ungainly of figure. Maggie's mother, on the other hand, was a delicate, pretty, blue-eyed woman, who could as little manage her headstrong young daughter as a lamb could manage a young lion. Mrs. Howland was intensely ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... standing, gazing intently at a significant quartette of tiny models under glass. First came a ship of graceful outline, having a miniature figurehead of an angel at its prow and every sail set. Beside this was an ungainly side-wheeler with scarce a line of beauty to commend it. Next in order came an exquisite, up-to-date ocean liner; and the last in the group was a modern battleship with guns, wireless, ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... Nashville and the Windom. You will remember that the Nashville fired the first gun in the war with Spain. She is not a pretty boat at all. She is built differently from other vessels of her class, and her two tall funnels, or smokestacks, give her an ungainly appearance. Her commander was a splendid officer, though, and her crew were the bravest of the brave. I must tell you a little of her work after she captured the first prize ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... very few minutes the cattleman was mounted and away. Paisano, well named after that ungainly but swift-running bird, struck into his long lope that ate up the ground like a strip of macaroni. In two hours and a quarter Raidler, from a gentle swell, saw the branding camp by a water hole in the Guadalupe. ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... recognizable, and seated on a double saddle was Alden, skillfully guiding the ungainly monster by means of a curious bridle, by shifting his weight and by pressing certain nerve centers between ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... of the cobwebby black silk stocking that ensnared his wits, perhaps it was the delight of kneeling to Kate even in this humble capacity. In either case, the result was equally grotesque; Kate found her dainty feet neatly enclosed in the professor's ungainly arctics, while he hopelessly contemplated her overshoe and the size ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... creature yet discovered by man. Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental claims to all, the penguin is at home in none. On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops. As if ashamed of her failure, Nature keeps this ungainly child hidden away at the ends of the earth, in the Straits of Magellan, and on the abased sea-story ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout—though Walden is deeper than that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... lieutenant had not changed his attitude; only his cap had fallen off his stomach and was lying on the floor. His thick black eyebrows were knitted by a frown, while he looked at her out of the corners of his eyes. And their sideways glance in conjunction with the hooked nose, the whole bulky, ungainly, sprawling person, struck Freya as so comically moody that, inwardly discomposed as she was, she could not help smiling. She did her best to give that smile a conciliatory character. She did not want ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... they ought to obey him; so that they were angered, and began to read the laws, and wonder how much power properly belonged to him. Now, when he died, his son Charles was a much pleasanter person; he was a gentleman in all his looks and ways, and had none of his father's awkward, ungainly tricks and habits. He was good and earnest, too, and there was nothing to take offence at in himself; so for some years all went on quietly, and there seemed to be a great improvement. But several things were against him. His friend, the Duke of ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a different class. Forster had nothing whatever to do with May Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety; he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of self-defense which the Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen seem to hold dear — the exterior roughness assumed to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental nature. Kindly he had to be, if only by his inheritance from a Quaker ancestry, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... small and sunken, brown eyes. Her eyes had, however, a light in them, and her wide lips were framed in smiles. She must have been a women of about fifty, but her broad forehead was without a wrinkle. Undoubtedly she was very plain. She had not a good feature, not even a good point about her ungainly figure. Never in her youngest days could this woman have been fair to see, but the two children, who gazed at her with beating hearts, thought her beautiful. Goodness and loving-kindness reigned in that homely face; so triumphantly did they reign, these rare and precious things, ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... and clay, cut off any view of the country behind. All that could be seen was a fringe of thick, low trees, the edge of the forest that ran back from the river. Conspicuous among them was the ill-omened "fever tree," with its gaunt, bare, ungainly arms and yellow bark—the tree whose presence indicates a pestilential air. Here was no luxuriant variety of form, no wealth of colour, no festooned creepers nor brilliant flowers, but a dull and sad monotony, as we doubled point after point and saw reach after ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... had left Maud Matchin in a state of high excitement and anger. The admiration of a man so splay and ungainly was in itself insulting, when it became so enterprising as to propose marriage. She felt as if she had suffered the physical contact of something not clean or wholesome. Besides, she had been greatly stirred by his reference to her request for ghostly counsel, ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... carved articles of many kinds. The little calves that go wandering about by the sides of their mothers are so curious and so top heavy, and yet they are strong even when small. Carabao sometimes go crazy, and when they do, they tread down everything in their way. Notwithstanding their ungainly bulk they can run as well as a good horse, and can endure long journeys quite as well. They are urged to greater speed by the driver taking the tail and giving it a twist or ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... to bark deafeningly again, and Val looked around for the heron which must have aroused his displeasure. There was none. But across the swamp crawled an ungainly monster. ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... plants—a Cycad, that botanical paradox, combining some of the characteristics of the lie palm and of the pine with the appearance of a tree-fern, while being of distinctive order, which flourished during the age when the Iguanodon and the Polacanthus and other monstrous and ungainly reptiles roamed ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... good fellow. But there now—he doesn't satisfy the mistress, she says his appearance is ungainly. And now they've gone and told tales about him for letting some peasants into the kitchen yesterday. It is a bad look-out: they may dismiss him. And ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... find hollowed through and through by a tall rugged archway; while the outer pier of the arch,—if pier we may term it,—worn to a skeleton, and jutting outwards with a knee-like angle, presents the appearance of a thin ungainly leg and splay foot, advanced, as if in awkward courtesy, to the breakers. But in a winter or two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yielding nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root, consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... recovered. The one proof that blood ran in her veins was the pimply quality of her ruined complexion, and the pimples of that brickish expanse proved that the blood was thin and bad. Her hands and feet were large and ungainly; the skin of the fingers was roughened by coarse contacts to the texture of emery-paper. On six days a week she wore black; on the seventh a kind of discreet half-mourning. She was honest, capable, and industrious; and beyond the confines of her occupation she had no curiosity, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... certain issue.' What the Irishman said is totally obliterated from my mind; but I remember that he became very warm and intemperate in his expressions; upon which Johnson rose, and quietly walked away. When he had retired, his antagonist took his revenge, as he thought, by saying, 'He has a most ungainly figure, and an affectation of pomposity, unworthy of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... in a season unfavorable for wild beasts), and the other edifices dropped through the social scale to some picturesque barns thatched with straw. These he excused to his Americans, but added that the ungainly thatch was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the cattle toward the end of an ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... rows... (No sign of the abject life— Not even a blasphemy...) But the spindle legs keep time To a limping rhythm, And the shadows twitch upon the snow Convulsively— As though death played With some ungainly dolls. ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... born fool,—and he is apt to complain bitterly of the accents of strangers, whereas, to all but his own countrymen, it is his accent which appears to be the real grievance. He is plain of face, fat, ugly, and ungainly of body, huge as to the hands and feet, not scrupulously clean in his person and habits, and, like most very fleshy people, he is blessed with an exceedingly even temper, and is excessively happy, good-natured, and stolid. He can break open a door by butting it with his head, and the door is ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... that you and I went to church as much as they do. These people are not wicked BECAUSE of their religious observances, but IN SPITE of them. They are too dull to understand humility, too blind to see a tender and simple heart under a rough ungainly bosom. They are sure that all their conduct towards my poor friend here has been perfectly righteous, and that they have given proofs of the most Christian virtue. Haggarty's wife is considered by her friends as a martyr to a savage husband, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... softly, and 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, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... hall and the Marchese Sanviano entered with Cesare Orsi. The window was deserted, and the women trailed gracefully toward the bubbling minor note of the alcohol lamp. Both Sanviano and Orsi were big men—the former, like Bembo, wore English clothes; but Orsi's ungainly body had been tightly garbed by a Southern military tailor, making him—Lavinia thought—appear absolutely ridiculous. His collar was both too tight and too high, although perspiration ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... ducking, Seized both his legs, and chucking Dobbs sideways, splash he went,— The wherry swayed, then righted, While I, somewhat excited, Over the water bent; Three times he rose, but vainly I clutched his form ungainly, He sank, while sighs and sobs Beneath the waves seemed muttered, And all the night-winds uttered In sad tones, ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... are distinctly plain, and often repulsive. The type is Mongolian; sallow complexion, beady eyes, flattened nostrils and wiry black hair. The men are of medium height, thick set and muscular, the women ungainly little creatures, bedizened with jewellery, and smothered with paint. Some marry Russians and assume European dress, which only adds to their grotesque appearance. Notwithstanding their defects the Yakutes are extremely proud of ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... that would seem incredible if it were not true. That is, that when Pinocchio and Candlewick discovered that they were both struck with the same misfortune, instead of feeling full of mortification and grief, they began to prick their ungainly ears and to make a thousand antics, and they ended by going into bursts ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... representatives were John A. McClernand, James Shields, William A. Richardson, and other men who rose to national distinction. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig representative from Sangamon County, was already well known for his ungainly length of body, for his habit of reasoning in parables which were now scriptural and now vulgar to the point of obscenity, and for a quaint and rare honesty. He was four years older than the new member from Morgan, and nearly two feet taller. ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... daughter was Bithiah, and of the other, Akuzit. The first-born of the sons of the king was an idiot, precipitate and heedless in all his actions. Adikam, the second son, was a cunning and clever man, and versed in all the wisdom of Egypt, but ungainly in appearance, fleshy and short of stature; his height was a cubit and a space, and his beard flowed ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... the success which marked French diplomacy with the tribes was due to this versatility. Beneath an ungainly exterior the habitant often concealed a surprising ability in certain lines of action. He was a master of blandishment when he had an end thereby to gain. Dealings which required duplicity, provided the outcome appeared to be desirable, did not rudely shock his conscience. He ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... Bismarck-Bohlen—the nephew and aide-decamp to the Chancellor—and Doctor Busch were seated facing us. The conveyance was strong, serviceable, and comfortable, but not specially prepossessing, and hitched to it were four stout horses—logy, ungainly animals, whose clumsy harness indicated that the whole equipment was meant for heavy work. Two postilions in uniform, in high military saddles on the nigh horse of ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... fallen steed, as devils flock around the deathbed of a defaulting deacon. A soldier on the outer edge of the extended line swings his rifle with swift, backhanded motion over his shoulder, and brings the butt amidst the crowd of carrion. The vultures hop with grotesque, ungainly motions from their prey, and stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward from eyeless sockets; ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... moose flounders in its rush. It is the ungainly roll of a rudderless ship. It stumbles. A second, and its mad rush ends. With a curious gasping sigh ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... swings the cumbrous grub-axe, whose wide edge clears the earth from the larger roots. Then he puts his pipe in his pocket, and settles to the serious work of the 'great axe,' as he calls it. I never could use this ungainly tool aright: a top-heavy, clumsy, awkward thing, it rules you instead of you ruling it. The handle, too, is flat—almost with an edge itself sometimes—and is quite beyond the grasp of any but hands of iron. Now the American axe feels balanced like a sword; this is because of the peculiar curve ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... But the antagonism so long suppressed broke out at last. The progress of the Greek insurrection brought Austria and Russia not indeed into war, but into the most embittered hostility with one another. It was on this rock that the ungainly craft which men called the Holy Alliance at length struck and went to pieces. Canning played his part well in the question of the East, but he did not create this question. There were forces at work which, without his intervention, would probably have made an end of the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Lord Robert is an impressive or at least a striking and unusual figure; he is tall, lank, and ungainly, almost Lincolnesque in the carelessness of his apparel and the exceeding awkwardness of his postures and manners. His angular features, sharp nose, pale face, and dark hair suggest the strain of ascetism, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... talks with Richie—perhaps the happiest talks in her life, for Richie, whose mind and body had undergone for long years the exquisite discipline of pain, was delightfully unexpected in his views, and his whole lean, ungainly frame vibrated with the eager joy of ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... because he knows that the rest of the people on the beach are watching his spindle shanks or perhaps the bathing suit would reveal his narrow, undeveloped chest. The young man is afraid to go onto the dance floor because everybody is sure to see his ungainly gyrations. He stammers and stutters when he speaks because others are paying particular attention to his words, when in truth he is attracting little or no attention. Whether working or playing, those whose good opinions are worth ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... a breathing-hole. Here they got out, hid the sledge and dogs behind a hummock, and, getting ready their spears and harpoons, prepared for an encounter. After waiting some time a walrus thrust its ungainly head up through the young ice that covered the hole, and began to disport itself in elephantine, ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... with a curious variation from this, the negative survives, while the affirmative is gone; thus 'wieldy' (Chaucer) survives only in 'unwieldy'; 'couth' and 'couthly' (both in Spenser), only in 'uncouth' and 'uncouthly'; 'rule' (Foxe) only in 'unruly'; 'gainly' (Henry More) in 'ungainly'; these last two were both of them serviceable words, and have been ill lost{153}; 'gainly' is indeed still common in the West Riding of Yorkshire; 'exorable' (Holland) and 'evitable' only in 'inexorable' and 'inevitable'; 'faultless' remains, but hardly 'faultful' (Shakespeare). In ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... and its interests, to try and shake the poor German Hodge out of his thousand years' sleep in his hole? What good did I get by it? Hodge opened his eyes, only to shut them again immediately; he yawned, only to begin snoring again the next minute louder than ever; he stretched his stiff ungainly limbs, only to sink down again directly afterwards, and lie like a dead man in the old bed of his accustomed habits. I must have rest; but where am I to find a resting-place? In Germany I ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... may be likened to A desert ship. (This is not new.) He is a most ungainly craft, With frowning turrets fore and aft We little realize on earth, How much we owe to his great girth, For should he ever shrink so small As through the needle's eye to crawl, Rich men might climb the golden stairs And so ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... on Patience's bed, or penned behind chairs, sprawled and pranced in unsteady mimicry of their elders. Ungainly farmers, stiff with labor, recalled their early days and tramped briskly as they swung their wives about with a kindly pressure of the hard hands that had worked so long together. Little pairs toddled gravely through the figures, or frisked promiscuously in a grand conglomeration ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... operation as I approached and was about to step aside. But I paused and smiled at him, much, I fear, as one smiles at a dog of unknown disposition, for I could hardly feel that this ungainly creature was exactly human. He smiled back ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... notion of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could be stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... full of life. Each cultivated acre had its dark-hued laborers with hoes, or bare-legged toilers drawing water from the ditches for irrigating the thirsty land, or plowmen guiding teams of ungainly, striding camels or dark gray, crooked-horned oxen. In the lush meadows many of these curious-looking animals were grazing. The camels, the small donkeys, and the gray oxen or water-buffaloes as the natives called them, tied to stakes, were restricted to the pasturage within reach of their ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... so very little, for it was of ungainly sprawling structure, pushing out an odd limb that might have been cut off with a curtain. The walls nodded fixedly to one another so that the ceiling was only half the size of the floor. The furniture comprised but the commonest necessities. This attic of the Ansells ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... however, no sign of life; and not a sound broke the awful silence of the desert, as we breasted the rise. Then a vulture flapped lazily up in front of us, and another and another and a tiger- wolf (hyena) lurched its gorged and ungainly carcass down ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... up by Faye and Harkness in 1881.[788] The methods employed in its investigation fall (as we have seen) into three separate classes—the trigonometrical, the gravitational, and the "phototachymetrical"—an ungainly adjective used to describe the method by the velocity of light. Each has its special difficulties and sources of error; each has counter-balancing advantages. The only trustworthy result from celestial surveys, was at that time furnished by Gill's observations of Mars in 1877. But the method ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... hour, was ready to receive us, taking our two black friends, Aboh to act as interpreter, we carried with us the leopard skin, some venison, and three strings of beads of various colours. His majesty was a tall, ungainly looking man, with as hideous a countenance as can well be imagined. His appearance was not improved by the glare of the torchlight and the terror under which he was suffering. Having presented the leopard skin ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... religious life marked him out as a fit person to represent his county in parliament. He at once became the associate of such men as Hampden and Pym. He did not make very graceful speeches, and he had an ungainly person; but he was eloquent in a rude way, since he had strong convictions and good sense. He was probably violent, for he hated the abuses of the times, and he hated Rome and the prelacy. He represented the extreme left; that is, he was a radical, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... are in the habit of piercing the upper lip, and gradually enlarging the orifice until they can insert a shell. The lip then appears drawn out beyond the perpendicular of the nose, and gives them a most ungainly aspect. Sekwebu remarked, "These women want to make their mouths like those of ducks;" and, indeed, it does appear as if they had the idea that female beauty of lip had been attained by the 'Ornithorhynchus paradoxus' ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... bridges, small, dark, oblique eyes, with heavy lids and imperceptible eyebrows, wide mouths, full lips, thick, big, projecting ears, deformed by great hoops, straight black hair nearly as coarse as horsehair, and short, square, ungainly figures. The faces of the men are smooth. The women seldom exceed five feet in height, and a man is tall ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... trick it was impossible to say. There was in the man something strong and good and calm—a manner never acquired by one who has anything to conceal. His dignity was perfect. One forgot his stoutness, his heavy breathing, his ungainly size. He was essentially manly, and a presence to be feared. The strength of ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... this weight of nightmare which oppresses us. Passing by the ruinous gate yonder with its wild-looking sentry, we reach the open space where crouching hill-men are reposing on the stunted grass, and ungainly camels, kneeling in a circle, are chewing the cud in patience, or venting that uncanny half-whine, half-bellow, which is their only attempt at conversation. Let us take a long look at the country beyond with its gardens teeming with fruit and musical with ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... weird and wild, That noble stripling haunted; For weeks the stripling stood and smiled, Unmoved and all undaunted. The sombre ghost exclaimed, "Your plan Has failed you, goblin, plainly: Now watch yon hardy Hieland man, So stalwart and ungainly. ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... like a cage; we beat the bars, We bruise our breasts, we struggle vainly; Up to the glory of the stars We strain with flutterings ungainly. And then—God opens wide the door; Our wondrous wings are arched for flying; We poise, we part, we sing, we soar . . . Light, freedom, love. . . . Fools ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... Johnny for Plough Monday, and finished him with an admiring exclamation of—'Lawks, John! thou dost look smart, surely!' Some also wore small bunches of corn in their hats, from which the wheat was soon shaken out by the ungainly jumping which they called dancing. Occasionally, if the winter was severe, the procession was joined by threshers carrying their flails, reapers bearing their sickles, and carters with their long whips, ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... high-strung temperament of the English commander; and the grey, inaccessible city still rose grimly to mock his schemes. Only the most invincible spirit could have borne so frail a body through those weeks of hope deferred. A vague melancholy marked the line of his tall ungainly figure; but resolution, courage, endurance, deep design, clear vision, dogged will, and heroism shone forth from those searching eyes, making of no account the incongruities of the sallow features. Straight red hair, a nose thrust out like a wedge, and a chin falling back from an affectionate ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... nest or two up in a corner under the roof. They are for the domestic hens and are ungainly things, made ordinarily out of a piece of old matting. In these the hens lay their eggs, after meandering around the rafters and disturbing the inmates of the house with their cackling. After the eggs are laid, it is frequently necessary to drive the ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... intellectual life and then hurled down by the caprice of circumstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the soap and candle factory. Dickens would have given a touch of the grotesque to Grail's gentle but ungainly character; but at the end he would infallibly have rewarded him as Tom Pinch and Dominie Sampson were rewarded. Not so George Gissing. His sympathy is fully as real as that of Dickens. But his fidelity to fact is greater. Of the Christmas charity prescribed by ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... than deep ones. The batter must run freely. Half fill the tins and set in a hot oven, taking care not to scorch before rising is finished. Butter tins very freely—it is economy in the end. Be sure the tins sit level in the oven—thus you escape an ungainly final loaf. Get filling ready as baking goes forward so as to put your layers together while still warm and pliable. Let cool before frosting, so as to trim sides smooth. Take care fillings are not too watery, ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... Dudley. Thy mind is given to levity, Faith, in the matter of this young man. It is not seemly that one of thy years and sex should manifest so great displeasure at the name of a youth, who is of an honest nature, and of honest habits, too, though he may appear ungainly to the eye, and have so little favor with one ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... the fair debutante (it is only the unmarried who dance), but she borrows from her friends. The men dance round the outside of the circle, waving fly-flaps, and prancing (often nowadays, wearing huge boots) with ungainly strides. The music necessary for the dance consists of tangmuri (pipes), drums, and cymbals. This is ka shad kynthei, or the dance of the women. Then there is ka shad mastieh, or the dance of the men, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... held all the pride of a child with a new toy, but he released the grip, and the ungainly gun swung smoothly back ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... some new monster came in sight, the ungainly head would shoot up amazingly to a distance of five or ten, or even fifteen feet, on a swaying pillar of a neck, in order to get a better view of the stranger. Then it would slowly sink back again to its ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... She felt very shy about this, but that was because she did not know her own power. To her astonishment, Priscilla found that she could act. If the part suited her she could throw herself into it so that she ceased to be awkward, ungainly Priscilla Peel. Out of herself she was no longer awkward, no longer ungainly. She could only personate certain characters; light and airy parts she could not attempt, but where much depended on passion and emotion Priscilla could do splendidly. Every day her friends found fresh ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... air of suspicion to the whole assembly, will suggest merely a notion of their grotesqueness. By and by we shall grow used to the deformities, and recognize the primitive truthfulness of attitude and expression, the spirit which animates these ungainly forms and faces, until at length we look at the painter with the eyes of his contemporaries, and judge him by the standards of his own time, on which his claims rest. Then we shall admire him. The Venetians of the sixteenth century are the easiest to look at, however much of their genius and wonderful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... intruders by harsh squawks, stupidly betraying the presence of pale blue eggs or helpless brood. When the blue heron flies with his long neck stiffly tucked between his shoulders, he is anything but graceful; but under other circumstances he is not an ungainly bird. Occasionally my casual observations are made afar off, with the medium of a telescope. Then the birds are seen behaving naturally, and without fear or self-consciousness. The other day the cute attitudes of a beach curlew interested me, as he stood upon a stone just awash, and ever and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... dangerously near the melodramatic heroine, and yet she is not a melodramatic but a tragic figure. Far more than Pompilia, who knew the joy of motherhood, is she the martyr of love. And yet, before she quits life, in her protective care of that somewhat formidable, somewhat ungainly baby, the huge boy, her champion, hero and snob, she finds a comforting maternal instinct ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... tall man, somewhat ungainly of figure and homely of face. But his large, deep eyes of velvety nut-brown were very beautiful and marvellously bright and clear for a man of his age. He wore a little pointed, well-cared-for ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as he always did, and involuntarily poured out a libation on the hearth, as he almost always did. Good-natured, ungainly, long-suffering men seldom achieve the art ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... boys for tradin' with; they shell out their cash like a sheef of wheat in frosty weather; it flies all over the thrashin' floor; but then they are a cross-grained, ungainly, kickin' breed of cattle, as I e'enamost ever seed. Whoever gave them the name of John Bull, knew what he was about, I tell you; for they are bull-necked, bull-headed folks, I vow; sulky, ugly tempered, vicious critters, a-pawin' and a-roarin' the whole time, ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Dickens, his wife, and "Phiz,"—Hablot K. Browne,—the illustrator of "Pickwick," journeyed together abroad for a brief time. On his return, Dickens first made acquaintance with the seaside village of Broadstairs, where his memory still lives, preserved by an ungainly structure ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... bare, rocky promontory far up in the north country, where the turbulent waters of the Little Vermilion cut through lanes of pointed fir and dark spruce, a gigantic moose stood, his ungainly body and huge antlers silhouetted against the sky of sunset. Below him the noisy, hurrying waters were churned into foam over innumerable hidden rocks; to the rear lay the ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... Cydalise were standing, side by side, admiring Madame Frehlter's poodle. Madelon could afford to be civil to the poodle before company. The contrast between the two girls was sufficiently striking. Cydalise was fair and bright-looking—Mademoiselle Frehlter was square and ungainly of figure, swarthy of complexion, dark ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... he?" remarked the inspector as they watched the ungainly figure disappear round the bend of ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... place of David Gamut. Hither the faithful singing-master had now brought himself, together with all his sorrows, his apprehensions, and his meek dependence on the protection of Providence. At the precise moment when his ungainly person came under the observation of the scout, in the manner just mentioned, the woodsman himself, though in his assumed character, was the subject of ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... at Matlock) some person with whom she was wholly unacquainted, on her resuming her seat, Byron said to her pettishly, "I hope you like your friend?" The words were scarce out of his lips when he was accosted by an ungainly-looking Scotch lady, who rather boisterously claimed him as "cousin," and was putting his pride to the torture with her vulgarity, when he heard the voice of his fair companion retorting archly in his ear, "I hope you like ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... The ungainly cow-puncher slid out of his saddle like an eel, and slipped the saddle and bridle off his pony, and, giving it a slap on the haunch, sent ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... of Narcisse Bachelard, was a clerk in an insurance office. Directly after office hours he used to meet his uncle, and never left him, going the round of all the cafes in his wake. "Behind the huge, ungainly figure of the one you were sure to see the pale, wizened features of the other." He said that he avoided all love affairs, as they invariably led to trouble and complications, but he was ultimately caught by his uncle ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... his better days, said that Burke's oratory was too rich and overloaded. This is true, but it is equally true that Burke is the only orator of the eighteenth century that still continues to be read. He had a faulty delivery and an ungainly figure, but if he emptied the benches in the House of Commons he secured a larger audience in coming generations. The material of his speeches is of such a vital quality that it possesses a value wholly apart from the time ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... and wrinkled like a new-born child; it had the funniest feet, or hands, or flippers, with which it tried to walk, but only tumbled and flopped about. In the water it was graceful enough, but on dry land so ungainly and ridiculous that the vast concourse of Bears was thrown into fits ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... not consider a part of the joy of all the earth—the neighbors' dogs. On the next hill-top is an Airedale with a voice like a fog-horn. He is an ungainly creature and thoroughly disillusioned, because his family keep him locked up in a wire-screened tennis-court, where he barks all day and nearly all night. He can watch the motors on the coast road from one corner of his cage, and that seems ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... the Crystal Palace, and was waiting on the railway platform for his train, when a drunken man started a commotion a few paces from him. Exhibiting signs of violence, two porters came forward to remove him. That was, apparently, exactly what he wanted. He slipped off his coat and danced round in ungainly fashion. The porters advanced. He lunged out and caught the foremost man a heavy blow under the chin. The man reeled back and collided violently with an immaculately dressed man who was standing on the edge of the platform. The ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... steel out of English iron mines, smelted, forged and fashioned in English works, and so to him it's a bit of England, however far away from Mother Earth it may be; and if you ever see Andrew Murgatroyd's big head and good, ungainly body outside the Astronef in any of the worlds, dead or alive, that we're going to visit—well, when we get back to Mother Earth you ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... edifices were built without any thought of the possibility of such comfortable furniture, they had to be adapted as best they might to the ungainly and unsightly great stoves which were usually placed in the central aisle of the building. From these cast-iron monsters, there extended to the nearest windows and projected through them, hideous stove-pipes that too ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... but it was a good-humoured roar, not very offensive to any man and apparently acceptable enough to some ladies. He was a big, burly man, near to fifty, as I suppose, somewhat awkward in his gait, and somewhat loud in his laugh. But though nigh to fifty, and thus ungainly, he liked to be smiled on by pretty women, and liked, as some said, to be flattered by them also. If so he should have been happy, for the ladies at Rome at that time made much ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... eyes on the pavement, and the shiny toes of his patent leather boots turned well out. His bowed legs were encased in loose black trousers, and had as many angles as the forepaws of a Dachshund or a Dandie Dinmont. The peculiarities of his ungainly gait and figure were even more apparent than usual, and as he walked he swung his long arms, that ended in large black gloves which looked as if they were ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... power. Teeth and eyes alike were gleaming. Albert scarcely knew what to do first. Should he run, taking to the deepest snow, where the wolves might sink to their bodies and thus fail to overtake him? But in his own haste he might trip himself with the long, ungainly snowshoes, and then everything would quickly be over. Yet it must be tried. He could see ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... less than ten minutes it loomed up before him, a mass of deeper black in the blackness. No white vision floated on the broken battlements this night, as Sir Norman looked wistfully up at them; but neither was there any ungainly dwarf, with two-edged sword, guarding the ruined entrance; and Sir Norman passed unmolested in. He sought the spiral staircase which La Masque had spoken of, and, passing carefully from one ancient chamber ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... of grace in the dance. Constant in attendance upon the court, he frequently took part in the masques performed before it. Like the King, he was fully equipped for hunting; but greater contrast could not have been found than between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... rovings, Markheim's eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... by his humming; but he stopped short in an improvised variation on the theme of Vulcan's song in "Philemon and Baucis" when he heard a subdued but none the less poignant cry of distress from Joan. In order to turn his head he was compelled to twist his ungainly body, and Joan, who was standing well away from her canvas, was aware of the movement. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... a sad, ungainly skeleton, is possessed by grass and weeds. On the raised centre many flower-pots were neatly arranged once: they stand in orderly lines, but each separate one is broken: none contain flowers any more, but only grass. And the glass of the greenhouse lies there in showers, all grey. No one ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany
... huge place—huge, ungainly, and uselessly extensive; built at a time when, at any rate in Ireland, men considered neither beauty, aptitude, nor economy. It is three stories high, and stands round a quadrangle, in which there are two entrances ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... woman moves with an unsteady quick step, and whenever her black mantilla is flung back by the violence of her movements, a small rope of hair with a crucifix at the end is plainly seen to bind her waist. This ungainly woman is the quondam authoress, Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn, who has turned a Catholic, and is now preparing for a pilgrimage to Rome to crave the Pope's absolution for her ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... lying in the yard started from under the horses' feet, and stood staring in round-eyed surprise. The barn was half full of hay, and in the dry pungent odour Mike and Lady Edith rested an hour. Sometimes a bullock filled the doorway with ungainly form and steaming nostrils; sometimes the lips of the lovers met. In about half an hour the groom returned with the news that the fog was lifting, and discovering a cart-track, they followed it over the hills for ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... across the glass roof before he noticed the presence of the strangers; but then he stopped abruptly. There was no expression of either fear or surprise upon his tranquil face, yet he must have been both astonished and afraid; for after his eyes had rested upon the ungainly form of the horse for a moment he walked rapidly to the furthest edge of the roof, his head turned back over his shoulder to gaze at ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... colonists as "blauw wildebeest" (blue wild-ox). It is of a bluish colour—hence the name, and "brindled," or striped along the sides. Its habits are very similar to those of the common gnoo, but it is altogether a heavier and duller animal, and still more eccentric and ungainly in its form. ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... interval of restlessness, an observant person might have noticed, sitting in the back part of the room, the rather ungainly figure of the tall fellow, Brent Gaylong, organizer of the Church Mice of Newburgh. He seemed to be the center of a ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... leading from his bedchamber, and was apparently suffering great pain. An extraordinary change had taken place in him since I had formerly known him. His person was emaciated almost to a skeleton, showing his angular and ungainly form at a distressing disadvantage. His face had withered away to a narrow point under the large bones of his head, which looked larger than ever, with his great shock hair starting out from it on all sides. The skin of his face had become crimped and yellow; but ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door— Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "Burke has a most ungainly figure. His gait is awkward, his gestures clumsy, his eyes are covered with large spectacles. He is careless of his dress. His pockets bulged with papers. He spoke rapidly and with a strong Irish brogue. Power is the thing his face and form express. His knowledge ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller |
