"Gnarled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the light, she and the man with her saw Markley lying before them with one eye shut and with half his face withered and dead, the other half around the open eye quivering with hate. He choked on an oath, and shook at her a gnarled bare arm. Her face was flushed, and her tongue was unsure, but she laughed a shrill, wicked laugh and cried: "Ah, you old goat; don't you ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... the hedge. All other colours wore the same murky hue, though the forms of objects were perfectly distinct. What was it? It could not be a flower;—that, the time of year made clear. A frozen lump of snow, lingering late in one of the gnarled tufts of the hedge? She stepped forward to examine. It proved to be a little piece of stiff writing-paper compressed into a round shape. She understood it instantly; it was the paper that had served as wadding for the murderer's gun. Then ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... are yet afar, and his limbs are yet strong, in the chase which marks him for his victim, but grows desperate with rage and fear as the day nears its close, and the death-dogs pant hard upon his track. But at that moment the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to have lost every sign both of passion and the will, and to be locked in a stolid and dull repose. At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a smile like that of an old man in ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... orchard was unique. It had originally been a fruit orchard, and as most of the trees were dead, and many of them fallen, roses had been trained over their trunks and branches. The gorgeous masses of bloom covered the old gnarled wood, and the climbing roses twined lovingly around branches and boughs. Here and there were rustic seats and arbours; and there were many bird-houses, whose tiny occupants were exceedingly tame and sociable. Several other guests were walking about, and Patty and the Earl joined a group which ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... juist ae faut, tae ma thinkin', for a' never jidged the waur o' him for his titch of rochness—guid trees hae gnarled bark—but he thocht ower ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... puts it: 'It is a gnarled division, that which is not any obstruction, and the forgotten swelling is certainly attracting. It is attracting the whiter division, it is not sinking to be growing, it is not darkening to be disappearing, it is not aged to be annoying. There ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... after tea, the squire was seated in the orchard where the stone table had been built up under the big gnarled apple-tree, and the engineer was talking to him earnestly as Dick came up from going part of the way home with ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... however, were quite alone upon the walk. Not even a hind or shart was there; and after the first two or three steps, Marlow asked his fair companion to take his arm. She did so, readily; for she needed it, not so much because the long gnarled roots of the trees crossed the path from time to time, and offered slight impediments, for usually her foot was light as air, but because she felt an unaccountable languor upon her, a tremulous, agitated sort of unknown happiness unlike ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... from an apple-tree near by, where a ten-year-old girl sat perched among its gnarled branches. She had a dog-eared book of fairy tales on her knee, and was poring over it in such blissful absorption that she had forgotten there were such things in all the world ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the north, filled with the dream of rescuing his native land. It was near the 25th of November, and the scenery was well in keeping with the dreary thoughts that flooded the horseman's mind. The stern gnarled oaks along the wayside, twisting their leafless boughs athwart the sky, seemed as perverse as the Swedes whom he had vainly sought to rouse. Even the frosty soil beneath him, unyielding to his tread, recalled the apathy with which his fellow-countrymen had listened to ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... weave the texture of our souls, not ourselves; and the web is too intensely wove and drenched in too deep a dye for us to undo or greatly change. The eagle cannot be tamed down to the softness of a dove, and no art of the husbandman can send into the gnarled and knotted oak the juices that shall smooth and melt its stiffness into the yielding pliancy of the willow. I wage no war with the work of the gods. Besides, the demands of Rome have now grown to such a size that ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... that is surrounded with a halo of romance, surely it is the dower chest! We can picture the incoming of the coffer in all the newness of hand polish, fresh from the hands of the village carpenter or the retainer who had wrought the gnarled old oak grown on the estate for a favourite daughter of his lord—that chest which was to be packed full of fragrant linen, between which was laid sweet lavender, and richly embroidered garments for the bride, who, with her personal belongings stowed ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... his feet out upon the stones, and the mud adhering to his rough, homemade boots was fast drying before the blaze and settling in coarse gray dust upon the hearth. His gnarled old palms lay upward on his knees, and his grizzled head was bowed upon his chest. At intervals he muttered softly to himself, but his words were inaudible—suggested by some far-off and disconnected vision. Aunt Verbeny was nodding in her chair, arousing herself ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... future happiness was to sit by the fireside in his declining years and pleasantly ruminate over the variety of deaths he had inflicted upon the loathsome Sebastian. In the first place, he was going to strangle him with his huge, gnarled hands; then he was going to cut off his ears and nose and stuff them into the vast slit he had made in his throat; then he would dig his heart out with a machete; then, one by one, he would expertly amputate his legs, arms and tongue; afterwards he would go through the ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... features of the polity which thus assumed a prominent organization have been already indicated. There was no revolution, no radical change. The ancient rugged tree of Netherland liberty—with its moss-grown trunk, gnarled branches, and deep-reaching roots—which had been slowly growing for ages, was still full of sap, and was to deposit for centuries longer its annual rings of consolidated and concentric strength. Though lopped of some ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that we look straight into the bottom of the scar some 200 or 300 feet below, when there is a split in the mist. The sides and bottom are made of, and strewn with, white, moss-grown masses of volcanic cinder rock, and sparsely shrubbed with gnarled trees which have evidently been under fire—one of my boys tells me from the burning of this face of the mountain by "the Major from Calabar" during the previous ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... in the moonlight while he pointed out to us, as nearly as he knew them, the confines of the Cross patent. To the left of us, over a tract covered thick with low, gnarled undergrowth, the estate stretched beyond the brow of the hill, distant a mile or more. On our right, masked by a dense tangle of fir-boughs, lay a ravine, also a part of the property. We could hear, as we passed there, the gurgle ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... a lock of that peculiar form and character which assure the spectator that it is the handwork of an ingenious smith of Duerer's day; its broad plate is decorated with a simple ornament consisting of the favourite gnarled twigs and leaves, so constantly adopted in German decorations of all kinds, at the end of the fifteenth, and during the sixteenth century. We leave the ground floor and ascend the wide stairs. The front room on the first floor commands a pleasant view ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... not a forenoon to spare, nor eyesight to waste, this much of merely necessary abstract must serve you,—that from the Drachenfels and its six brother felsen, eastward, trending to the north, there runs and spreads a straggling company of gnarled and mysterious craglets, jutting and scowling above glens fringed by coppice, and fretful or musical with stream; the crags, in pious ages, mostly castled, for distantly or fancifully Christian purposes;—the glens, resonant ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... toward Grasse, the effect of green underground and background upon Oriental foliage was shown in the olives, dominant tree of the valley and hillsides. It was the old familiar olive of Africa and Asia and the three European peninsulas, just as gnarled, just as gray-green in the sun, just as silvery in the wind. But its colors did not impress themselves upon the landscape. Here the olive was not master of all that lives and grows in its neighborhood. In a landscape where green ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... petrifaction of age; our second, of a Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide, clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand across his forehead, were angular and slow. We knew instinctively the quality of his work—a deliberate pause, a mighty blow, another pause, a painful recovery—labour compounded of infinite slow patience, but wonderfully effective ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... some obscure, are plunged more or less deeply in proportion to the heinousness of their crimes; for, like earthly streams, this has its deep and shallow. At the latter point they cross, on the back of Nessus the Centaur, and at once enter (Canto xiii.) a wood of gnarled and sere trees, in which the Harpies have their dwelling. These trees have sprung from the souls of suicides, and retain the power of speech and sensation. From one of these, who in life had been the famous statesman Peter de Vineis, Dante learns that at ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... allowed firearms at that age, so he shaped for himself a weapon that served him well. This was a slender smoothly shaved sapling with a small bunch of gnarled roots at one end. So expert was he in the launching of this primitive spear that he easily brought down birds and small game. When he reached his twelfth year, his father bought him a rifle; and he soon became a crack shot. A year later we find him setting off on the autumn hunt—after ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... How long it remained in that condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time [72] brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea-beasts, such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... innumerable torrents pour into the Settite; some of these gorges were ornamented with the dark foliage of large tamarind trees, while upon rocks that did not appear to offer any sustenance, the unsightly yet mighty baobab* grasped with its gnarled roots the blocks of granite, and formed a peculiar object in the wild ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... vain man, in thy brown and red suit!" chuckled Mary Antony, leaning her gnarled hands on the stone parapet, as she stood framed in one of the cloister arches overlooking the garden. "Is that thy little 'grace before meat'? But, I pray thee, Sir Robin, who said there was cheese in my wallet? Nay, is there like to be cheese ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... spread the bleak moor, now all white and silent. But that moor had once been a forest; great roots of old trees were still to be found in it, loosened from the soil and laid bare by the winds and rains. One of these, a rough, gnarled log, lay hard by their door, the half of it above the snow, and Spare said ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... and then slunk out of the door." The old man lit his pipe with his gnarled, trembling fingers. "It's coming, sir—perhaps not in my time—but it's coming. Big trouble. . . . All those youngsters with their smattering of edication, and their airs and their conceits and their 'I'm as good as you.'" He fell silent and stared across the road with ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... earliest recollections of a school life are connected with a large, rambling Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was above the water-line, and these trees grew in the sunshine and stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the result of some strange convulsion of the ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... he rode to the crest of a long parklike slope, where new green grass was sprouting and flowers peeped everywhere. The pines appeared far apart; gnarled oak trees showed rugged and gray against the green wall of woods. A white strip of snow gleamed like a moving stream away down ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... climb up the tree," Harry went on. "Here, this is the one, and he indicated a stunted and gnarled pine, the green branches of which would effectually screen any one who once got in it a few ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... and butterflies. The pomegranate still continues in bloom: its vividly-scarlet flowers have delighted us ever since the middle of March. The figs commenced leafing with the month: now they are green with broad leaves, and in the axil of each appears the rudiment of a fruit. They are grotesquely gnarled and twisted, taking most unthought-of shapes and positions. The mocking-birds have mated and begun the construction of their nests. Their music is delightful: nearly all the day long they sing, and sometimes in the night. It seems almost ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... imprisoned the sunshine that moss or leaf or flower sucked in, ages since, and set its crystals in the darkness of the earth,—a drop of dew eternalized? What tree of swift and sudden springing, that grows like a gourd in the night to never so stately a height, could equal in our eyes the gnarled and may be stunted trunk that has thrown the flickering shadows of its leaves over the dying pillows alike of father, child, and grandchild? The ring upon the finger is crusted thick with memories, and, looking at it, far more than in the present do you live in the past. Perhaps it is for this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... thunder As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder.— Merciful Heaven! Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt, Splits the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man! Dress'd in a little brief authority,— Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence,—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep; who, with ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... of gold between the thickly-serried ranks of the old trees—many of them with gnarled, crooked branches, covered with white lichen—some, more recently planted, spreading out straight boughs—the old and young alike all covered with the annual miracle of the spring's unfailing gift of lovely blossoms, which promised a full guerdon ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... incarnation of a summer which had taken years to ripen to its perfection. The very grass seemed to have aged into perfect youth in that "haunt of ancient peace;" for surely nowhere else was such thick, delicate-bladed, delicate-coloured grass to be seen. Gnarled old trees of may stood like altars of smoking perfume, or each like one million-petalled flower of upheaved whiteness—or of tender rosiness, as if the snow which had covered it in winter had sunk in and gathered warmth from the life of the tree, and now crept out again ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... a passionate insistence on the grand old trees with their great canopies of foliage, where hundreds of happy birds annually made their homes,—where, with every recurring Spring, the tender young leaves sprouted forth from the aged gnarled boughs, expressing the joy of a life that had outlived whole generations of men—where, in the long heats of summer broad stretches of shade lay dense on the soft grass, offering grateful shelter from ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... like the American elm, and sometimes continuous to the top. The finest specimens in open land are characterized by a rather short, massive trunk, with stout, horizontal, far-reaching limbs, conspicuously gnarled and twisted in old age, forming a wide-spreading, open head of striking grandeur, the diameter at the base of which is sometimes two or three times the height of ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... with feet that bleed among the wounding thorns, and a heart that shrinks from the heavy woe, yet, all lacerated as he is, able to walk through, because he holds by the hand of Omnipotence. The one is the unbending tree, peeled by the lightning and stripped by the North wind, lifting its gnarled head in sullen defiance to the storm, which, when the storm does overcome it, shall be broken. The other also is rooted in strength, and meets the rushing blast with a lofty front. But as "it smiles in sunshine, so it bends in storm," trustful ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... white gnarled trunk makes even the young trees seem old. The olive is like an old man with skimpy legs. It seems to me a pathetic tree. One does not like to say it is ugly; it is not ugly, but it would be puzzling to say wherein lies its charm, for it throws no shade, and is so grey—nothing ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... island life had long ended. We were tired of tropical luxuriance, and eternal summer. Glowing skies, and landscapes like a picture, had almost ceased to gratify even the eye. I longed for a glimpse of a rugged New England hill once more. A gnarled New England oak, though stripped by wintry winds of every leaf, would be a sight more grateful to me, than all those endless groves of ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... Farnum of the great figure that filled the doorway was one of masterful authority. A massive head crested a figure of extraordinary power. Gray as a mediaeval castle, age had not yet touched his gnarled strength. The keen steady eyes, the close straight lips, the shaggy eyebrows heavy and overhanging, gave accent to the rugged force of this grim freebooter who had reversed the law of nature which decrees that railroads shall follow civilization. Scorning the established ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... one of the rich grassy glades of that forest, which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... that the waves of passion were dashing over his sturdy figure, reared above the dead-level, as a lone oak upon a sandy beach, not one harsh word rankled in his heart to sour the milk of human kindness that, like a perennial spring from the gnarled roots of some majestic tree, flowed within him. He would smooth over a rough place in his official intercourse with a funny story fitting the case in point, and they called him a trifler. He would round off a logical argument with a familiar example, hitting the nail ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... the voyage the flotilla seemed to be steaming through the primeval forest. The bayou was but a few feet wider than the gunboats, and its banks were lined by gnarled and knotted old veterans of the forest,—live oaks, sycamore, and tupelo gum trees that had stood in majestic dignity on the banks of the dark and sullen stream for centuries. Sometimes majestic vistas would open; broad avenues carpeted ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... sweet peaceableness. I passed out of the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once the scene opens, wide pasture-lands on either side, and rows of old willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and vicarage and irregular street, and the little ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lower than the lowest window, a knotted wild cherry, storm-beaten and crooked,—and then, suddenly, something of uncertain shape, huddled together and falling from the balcony down the precipice,—a woman's figure, caught in the gnarled boughs of the cherry-tree, hanging and swinging over the abyss, while shriek on shriek echoed down to the swollen torrent and up to the turrets of the old inn in an agonized reverberation ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... rugged track through which the creature had been driven at full speed by his furious master, might easily see, that in more than a dozen of places the horse and rider had been within a few inches of destruction. One bough of a gnarled and stunted oak-tree, which stretched across the road, seemed in particular to have opposed an almost fatal barrier to the horseman's career. In striking his head against this impediment, the force of the blow had been broken in some measure by a high-crowned hat, yet the violence ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... were barren, just rock and more rock, a jumble of great boulders strewn along sheer precipices, everywhere save alone in this one spot. But there was a scant table land, and from it a small grove of pines rose high in the blue of the brightening sky, their gnarled limbs still and sturdy. It was above this single noteworthy clump of ancient boled trees to be seen upon these inhospitable heights that ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... exhibit a scowl. In some the scowl is very pronounced, and in one he looks not unlike a professional prize-fighter. They betray a mind jaundiced, but defiant. A restless, fiery soul, his temper, never of the best, had grown daily more gnarled and perverse. Woe betide the imprudent human who crossed him! What chance had anybody against a man who had the command of all the forcible words in twenty-eight languages! His peremptory voice everywhere ensured obedience. To all ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... fog the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled tree. Then it became a thing suspended in air. It swung back and forth like a body hanging on the gallows. The face beseeched me to believe the story the lips were trying to tell. In my mind everything concerning the relationship of men and women became confused, a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... assemblages of wood, which have a flora as well as a fauna of their own. The same shrubs and herbaceous plants, for example, are not common to Oak and to Pine woods. There is a difference also in the cleanness and beauty of their stems. The gnarled habit of the Oak is conspicuous even in the most crowded forest, and coniferous woods are apt to be disfigured by dead branches projecting from the bole. The Birch, the Poplar, and the Beech are remarkable for the straightness, evenness, and beauty of their shafts, when assembled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... two wagons Came over Antietam bridge And a tall old man behind them Strode up the turnpike ridge. His beard was long and grizzled, His face was gnarled and long, His voice was keen and nasal, And his mouth and eye ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... intends to fertilize the ground, He must needs send first of all a good thunderstorm, and afterwards slow and gentle rain, and thus make it thoroughly productive.' Elsewhere he says: 'A willow-branch may be cut with a knife and bent with a finger, but for a great and gnarled oak we must use an ax and a wedge'; and again: 'If my teeth had been less sharp, the Pope would have been more voracious.' 'Of what use is salt,' he exclaims in another passage, 'if it do not bite the tongue? or the blade of a sword unless it be sharp ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I shall not let you think nor talk of real things ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... ground they trod had been a pleasance the width of the house, bordered, doubtless, by the forest. Trees grew out of the flower beds now, and underbrush choked the paths. The box itself, that once primly lined the alleys, was gnarled and shapeless. Labyrinth had replaced order, nature had reaped her vengeance. At length, in the deepening shade, they came, at what had been the edge of the old terrace, to the daintiest of summer-houses, crumbling ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... what my wife feels, the essential superiority of the peasant—" Under cover of Mr. Flushing's words, which continued now gently reasoning with St. John and persuading him, Terence drew Rachel to the side, pointing ostensibly to a great gnarled tree-trunk which had fallen and lay half in the water. He wished, at any rate, to be near her, but he found that he could say nothing. They could hear Mr. Flushing flowing on, now about his wife, now about art, now about the future of the country, little ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... at anything, however simple, the deeper it penetrates into our being until it becomes a part of us. In time we learn to know the tree that shades our porch, but years elapse before we are on friendly terms, and a lifetime is spent before the gnarled giant admits us to intimate companionship. Trees are filled with reserve; when denuded of their neighbors, they stand in melancholy solitude until the leaves fall for the last time, until their branches wither, and their trunks ring ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... Nor was there any sign of beast or bird of any kind. No sound disturbed the stillness of the forest, no tracks were visible. As well as the hunters could make out, no foot had ever trodden the region before. Even nature seemed at rest. The trees were all old, their trunks gnarled into fantastic shapes, their leaves yellow and sere as if growth had ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... sublime scene was enacted. "Sirs!" said a voice,—it was Jim's voice, and in it sounded something so earnest and strange, that the men involuntarily turned their heads to look at him. Then this man stood up,—a black man,—a little while before a slave,—the great muscles swollen and gnarled with unpaid toil, the marks of the lash and the branding-iron yet plain upon his person, the shadows of a lifetime of wrongs and sufferings looking out of his eyes. "Sirs!" he said, simply, "somebody's got to die to get us out ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... animals of the Pamirian fauna appeared wolves and foxes, and flocks of those large wild sheep with gnarled and gracefully curved horns, which are known to the natives as arkars. High in the sky flew the vultures, bearded and unbearded, and amid the clouds of white vapor we left behind us were many crows and pigeons and turtledoves ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... model. In vain I made sign upon sign, and tried to remind him that we were not thereto paint or sketch. It was useless; the artist within him had broken loose. Sitting down at the required distance on a gnarled root, right in the open, he went on with his work with no thought but ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Liriodendron Tulipferum, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but, in its riper age, the bark becomes gnarled and uneven, while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem. Thus the difficulty of ascension, in the present case, lay more in semblance than in reality. Embracing the huge cylinder, as closely as possible, with his arms and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... heart-breaking, but for Dora, who was the stay and anchor of my tempest-driven bark. Every scratch in the scheme was a gnarled oak in the forest of difficulty, and I went on cutting them down, one after another, with such vigour, that in three or four months I was in a condition to make an experiment on one of our crack speakers in the Commons. Shall I ever forget how the crack speaker walked off from me before ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... raised to a sort of rough masculine roar, were heard all over the theatre, as she issued commands or made complaints according to her changeful humors. She sat in an elevated position above the stage on a jutting beam of wood painted to resemble the gnarled branch of a tree,—swinging her legs to and fro and clinking the heels of her shoes together in time to the mild scraping of a violin, the player whereof was "trying over" the first few bars of the new "jig" in which she was ere long to distinguish herself. She was a handsome ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... down upon the meadows and fields that separate the proud city of Hayesville and the gray and green little old hamlet of Riverfield, which nestles in a bend of the Cumberland River and sleeps time away under its huge old oak and elm and hackberry trees, kept perpetually green by the gnarled old cedars that throw blue-berried green fronds around their winter nakedness. As we rode slowly along, with a leisure I am sure all the motor-car world has forgotten exists, the two old boys on the front seat hummed and chuckled happily ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the cliffs of Glorm, but the crags were shining above us like gnarled moons, and almost lit the gloom. Louder and louder came the Irillion's song, and the sound of her dancing down from the fields of snow. And soon we saw her white and full of mists, and wreathed with rainbows delicate and small that she had plucked up near the mountain's summit ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... put it forever between him and the harrying shapes, to drown forever in its turbid depths the thronging spectres, to wash away in its yellow flood all stains and color of the past. And now he was leaping from boulder to boulder, from blackened stump to stump, from gnarled bush to bush, caught for a moment and withheld by clinging vines, or plunging downward into dusty hollows, until, rolling, dropping, sliding, and stumbling, he reached the river-bank, whereon he fell, rose, staggered ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... brought them some new object to gaze upon with loving admiration; now the gaunt spurs of some noble pine that had thrust his gnarled roots into the crevices of rock to look down in safety on the torrent roaring far below him, and now the track of a chamois, or the bright black eyes of some little marmot peering from his burrow on the side of a sunny bank, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... questions, when a gnarled voice suddenly threatened, over our head: "Broom? You. Everybody. Clean. Surveillant says. Not me, no?"—I started, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... poor rest for them—with neither grass nor water—not a blade of anything green except the artemisia plant, the wild wormwood—which, of course, neither horse nor oxen would touch. This grew all around us in low thickets. Its gnarled and twisted bushes, with their white silvery leaves, so far from gladdening the eye, only served to render the scene more dreary and desolate—for we knew that this plant denoted the extreme barrenness of the ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... and sturdy throng Of curt blue coats, a mutch without a speck, A white vest broidered black, her person deck, Nor seems their picked, stern, old-world quaintness wrong. Her great creel forehead-slung, she wanders nigh, Easing the heavy strap with gnarled, brown fingers, The spirit of traffic watchful in her eye, Ever and anon imploring you to buy, As looking down the street she onward lingers, Reproachful, with a ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... them, those Scotch firs. I delight in their forms, from James the First's gnarled giants up in Bramshill Park—the only place in England where a painter can learn what Scotch firs are—down to the little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of an untoward youth. Seven ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... indications of comfort. They seem to totter like card-houses, and all their spick-and-span finery vanishes beside a wing of the picturesque—a cottage in true rustic taste, with rudely-arched virandahs, formed of limbs and trunks of trees, intermixed with evergreens, and reminding us of the "gnarled oaks and soft myrtles" of the poet's fancy; and with trimmed arches of thatch over ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... her back to the gnarled trunk, while she looked out over the half-mile of dancing blue wavelets to where, on the other side, the brown, wooden houses of the Thorley estate swept down to the shore. She rose on seeing the visitor approach, showing a startled disposition to run away. This she might ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... masses of fog; to the left a broken wall of red, black, and blue rocks, weird and surf-beaten, stretching as far as the eye could reach—this was Iceland! All along the grim rifted coast the dread marks of fire, and flood, and desolation were visible. Detached masses of lava, gnarled and scraggy like huge clinkers, seemed tossed out into the sea; towers, buttresses, and battlements, shaped by the very elements of destruction, reared their stern crests against the waves; glaciers lay glittering upon ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... spring afternoon, fifty-seven years later, there landed at the same port, from a New Zealand liner, an aged man who received marked attention. He was as a gnarled oak of the wide-ranged British forest, and the younger trees bent in salute to him. It was Sir George Grey, returned finally to the Motherland, which had sent him ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... but most savory way. It was long since we had eaten anything of the sort, and, leaping to the ground, with the help of a clasp-knife bought in Nablous, the only eating-utensil our party could boast, we bisected our dinner, and, sitting under a gray old gnarled olive, ate it with such expressions of satisfaction as would not be honest, even if allowable, at the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... played with the children, both Ruth's couple and little Jim; he was a huge success. He ousted the grandfather—so much more vivid were his tales, so much more amusing the things he could do with a penknife and a bit of wood. Whistles, whips, boats, all seemed to grow under his gnarled old hands, with their discoloured and broken nails, as though without effort. And watching his success, knowing by some instinct he would not have told for fear of misconstruction to any but Judy, who always understood, that some malign wish to hurt lay at the springs ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... lifted the motionless form, and steadily bore it away: Inez taking the lead, and stepping cautiously. She left the Plaza and principal streets, and turned toward a broad desolate waste, stretching away from the town, and bare, save a few gnarled oaks that moaned in the March wind. The moon rose when they had proceeded some distance beyond the last house, and Inez paused suddenly, and ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... lean and tough birds in the old settlements, that lingered around the clearings and stumps of the trees, in the topmost of whose branches the fear of man compelled them to rest, but young and full fed. The trees in this new land were of no stinted or gnarled growth, but shot up tall, straight, and taper. The yellow poplar here threw up into the air a column of an hundred feet shaft in a contest with the sycamore for the pre-eminence of the woods. Their wives and children would remain safe in their present homes, until the first ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... wings Jan-an had sensed were touching her! The book was marked at passages that had appealed to the old man. Often, after Mary-Clare had read to him and left, thinking that she had made no impression, the trembling, gnarled hand had pencilled the words to ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... was an extensive garden, full of huge trees that had, apparently, stood there for centuries, so bent, gnarled and aged were they. An ancient gardener, with a flowing beard as white as snow and scanty locks of the same spotless hue, aided by two or three assistants almost as ancient as himself, attended to the lawns and vast flower-beds, the latter being kept constantly filled with ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... old stump, don't you see?' exclaimed Louis. I looked again and saw that what he said was true; a gnarled tree stump, some twisted branches, a deceiving white vapour, and perhaps, too, our own vivid imaginations, these were the elements which had given ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... our way, ever slightly climbing, along the rugged hillside, and soon broke into country very wild and dismal. The pastoral character of the scene lessened and altogether disappeared. The trees grew matted and grotesquely gnarled, huddling together in menacing battalions—save where some plunging rock had burst like a shell, forcing a clearing and strewing the black moss with a jagged wreck of splinters. Here no flowers crept for warmth, no sentinel marmot turned his little scut with a whistle of alarm to vanish like ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... a pair of rheumy eyes and a gnarled forefinger). You see vere is dat schmall voodt near de vite 'ouse? not dere, along my shdeek—so. Dat is vare PEECTON vas kill, Inglis Officer, PEECTON. Two days pefore he vas voundet in de ahum. 'E say to his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... shrewd and bitter, Gnarled by the old world's greed, Cherished the stranger softly Seeing his utter need. Shelter and patient hearing, These were their gifts to him, To the minstrel, grimly begging As the sunset-fire grew dim. The rich said ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... Gwenny; who led me along very rapidly, with her short broad form gliding down the hollow, from which she had first appeared. Here at the bottom, she entered a thicket of gray ash stubs and black holly, with rocks around it gnarled with roots, and hung with masks of ivy. Here in a dark and lonely corner, with a pixie ring before it, she came to a narrow door, very brown and solid, looking like a trunk of wood at a little distance. This she opened, without a key, by stooping down and pressing ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... problem). He finally gained a point above their reach, however, and seated himself in the branches, looking about as happy as a lone wayfarer treed by a pack of wolves. Then, they commanded him to bark at the moon, and threatened him with all sorts of penalties if he disobeyed. So he yelped and gnarled and bow-wowed till there was nothing left of his ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... think in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," of a certain "grievous crab-tree cudgel," and the impression left by this description is that the weapon, gnarled and knotty, was capable of inflicting ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... strolling in by-and-by, with his favourite tan setter, looking as cool as if there were no such thing as blazing midsummer sunshine, and found the two ladies sauntering up and down the grassy walk by the mill-stream, under the shadow of gnarled old pear and quince trees. He was charmed to see his dear Lady Laura. Clarissa had never known him so enthusiastic or so agreeable. It was quite a new manner which he put on—the manner of a man who is still interested in life. Lady Laura began almost at once with her reproaches. How could ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... snow-white stones had shot itself across a low foot-hill. But as the traveller approached he saw, with a thrill, that these were no stones, but the bleaching bones of a slaughtered army. With its dull tints, its gnarled, viprous bushes, its arid, barren soil, and this death streak trailed across it, it was indeed ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... And his ashes cast on the winds away, But the well survives, and the block of wood Stands—nay, stood where it always stood, And still was the village's pride and glory On the day of which I shall tell my story. Gnarled and knotty and weather-stained, Battered and cracked, it still remained; And thither came, Footsore and lame, On an autumn evening a year ago The wandering pedlar, Gipsy Joe. Beside the block he stood and set His table out ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... bring forth fruit in old age, they shall be full of sap and green.' A gnarled old tree may be green in all its branches, and blossom and fruit may hang together there. The ideal of life is, that into each stage we shall carry the best of the preceding, harmonised with the best of the new, and that is possible to a Christian ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... door of the cottage being locked, the pair set out together a few moments later, Lilac walking very soberly by the cobbler's side, with one hand in his. Joshua's hand was rough with work, so that it felt like holding the bough of a gnarled elm tree, but it was so full of kindness that there was great ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... old man," he whined, twisting his gnarled fingers, a suggestion of tears in his voice. "My wife is old, mein herr. You would not be cruel. We have been here for sixty years. The ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... of Jackson entirely answered to the popular prefix of Flint attached to his name. He was a wiry, gnarled, heavy-browed, iron-jawed fellow of about sixty, with deep-set eyes aglow with sinister and greedy instincts. His wife, older than he, and as deaf apparently as the door of a dungeon, wore a simpering, imbecile look of wonderment, it ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... parties into the bay at different points looking for Ojeda and any others who might have survived. A day or two after the battle they came across their unfortunate commander. He was lying on his back in a grove of mangroves, upheld from the water by the gnarled and twisted roots of one of the huge trees. He had his naked sword in his hand and his target on his arm, but he was completely prostrated and speechless. The men took him to a fire, revived him and finally brought him ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... his whip, the chaise rattled off. Leonard put his head out of the window to catch a last glimpse of the old woman. But the boughs of the pollard oak, and its gnarled decaying trunk, hid her from his eye. And look as he would, till the road turned, he ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... The wall was twelve or fifteen feet high, and from the level of the ground he could, of course, see nothing over it but tree tops. He went on for what may have been a hundred yards, but it seemed to him very much more than that, and he came to a tall gnarled cedar-tree which stood almost against the high wall. It was half dead, but its twisted limbs were thick and strong, and by force of the tree's cramped position they had grown in strange and grotesque forms. ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... the tundra meadows of the North, there was a feeling of wind-swept spaces. The air was exquisitely pure. Jean, looking about her, involuntarily drew a deep, long breath. Midway between her and the edge of the distant cliffs stood the one lone tree of Kon Klayu—a small gnarled spruce, its branches all growing from one side of the trunk, bearing mute testimony to the velocity of the prevailing gales. There was about this tree an air of almost human loneliness and—waiting. On the brow of the hill it faced the sea like a woman ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... else, and was alone and ever found himself again; he enjoyed and quaffed his solitude, and thought of good things—for hours. About the hour of noontide, however, when the sun stood exactly over Zarathustra's head, he passed an old, bent and gnarled tree, which was encircled round by the ardent love of a vine, and hidden from itself; from this there hung yellow grapes in abundance, confronting the wanderer. Then he felt inclined to quench a little thirst, and to break off ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Rich, ornate, populous,—all treasures thine, The golden corn, the olive, and the vine. Fair cities, gallant mansions, castles old, 80 And forests, where beside his leafy hold The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn, And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn; Palladian palace with its storied halls; Fountains, where Love lies listening to their falls; 85 Gardens, where flings the bridge its airy span, And Nature makes her happy home with man; Where many a gorgeous flower is duly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the drawbridge, and were admitted by a quaint, gnarled, dried-up person, who was the butler, Ames. The poor old fellow was white and quivering from the shock. The village sergeant, a tall, formal, melancholy man, still held his vigil in the room of Fate. The ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... red-skinned old Negro women was treading heavily down the dusty sidewalk, leaning on a gnarled stick and talking to a little black girl. A "sundown" hat shaded a bony face of typical Indian cast and her red skin was stretched so tight over high cheek ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... new friend. Little beauties of nature—as when a strange bird shone for an instant in vivid contrast to the mountain laurel near his window; an unusual effect of pine silhouettes near the sky; a weird, semi-poetic suggestion of one of Poe's stories implied in a contorted shadow cast by a gnarled little oak in the light of the moon—these he had noticed and remembered, and was now eager to tell his companion, with full assurance of her sympathy and understanding. Three days earlier he would ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... open? Doth she? Will she? So, as wondering we behold, Grows the picture to a sign. Pressed upon your soul and mine; For in every breast that liveth Is that strange, mysterious door;— The forsaken and betangled, Ivy-gnarled and weed-bejangled, Dusty, rusty, and forgotten;— There the pierced hand still knocketh, And with ever patient watching, With the sad eyes true and tender, With the glory-crowned hair,— Still ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... a wind-gnarled tree and disappeared. Travis stooped under a line of bush limbs. Both were working their way south, using the peak ahead as an agreed landmark, pausing at intervals to examine the landscape for any hint of ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... A gnarled and half-starved oak, as stubborn as my own resolve, and smitten by some storm of old, hung from the crag above me. Rising from my horse's back, although I had no stirrups, I caught a limb, and tore it (like a mere wheat-awn) from the socket. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various |
