"Legged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the eldest, and her mother's special pride, built on the same model with her mother; Joseph Zachariah, a long-legged youth; Ann Elisabeth, a lanky girl; Susan Jane, and Jeems Henry, or "Little Jim," to distinguish him from his father; and last, but by no means least in the household, came the baby. When she was born Mrs. Tyler declared ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... us had knowed afore we shipped what kind of cargo we was after, we might have thought twice afore we signed. Niggers is niggers. Some say they is humans, some say they ain't. But this here shippin' 'em like two legged cattle be mighty resky nowadays. Less'n we make ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... it suddenly darted into her head that it was milking time. In another minute she had thrown open the door and was running across the chip-yard to the barn. There, in the old place, were all her old friends, both four-legged and two-legged; and with great delight she found Dolly had a fine calf, and Streaky another superb one, brindled just like herself. Ellen longed to get near enough to touch their little innocent heads, but it was impossible; ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... her back, The thumb was in, alack! alack! The door flew open, in he ran, The great, long, red-legged scissors-man. Oh, children, see! the tailor's come And caught our little Suck-a-Thumb. Snip! snap! snip! the scissors go; And Conrad cries out—"Oh! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard; when, .. with both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into play. Cook, said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, don't you think this steak is rather overdone? ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... goal. When we got there, we found the horses returning on a slow walk, having run far beyond the mark, and heard that the long, bony one had come in head and shoulders before the other. The riders were light-built men, had handkerchiefs tied round their heads, and were bare-armed and bare-legged. The horses were noble-looking beasts, not so sleek and combed as our Boston stable horses, but with fine limbs and spirited eyes. After this had been settled, and fully talked over, the crowd scattered again, and flocked back to ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... she reached the low wooden jetty crawling, like some giant but rather dilapidated black many-legged insect, out over the stream. Its rows of solidly driven piles were intact, but the staging they supported had suffered damage from the rush of river floods, let alone from neglect and age. Handrails were broken down, planks rotted and wrenched ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... gone about fifteen minutes, when Mr. Butterwick heard two shots in quick succession. A minute later he saw Brown coming up the road with a considerable amount of velocity, pursued by Mr. Potts and a three-legged dog. Brown kept ahead; and when he had shot through the gate, he dashed into the house and bolted the door. Then Potts arrived with his dog, which stood by, looking as if it were very anxious to lunch upon somebody, while Potts explained to Butterwick that Brown ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... the aunts, for, on that afternoon, Miss Florence Hurlbird, Senior, stopped me on my way to Florence's sitting-room and took me, agitatedly, into the parlour. It was a singular interview, in that old-fashioned colonial room, with the spindle-legged furniture, the silhouettes, the miniatures, the portrait of General Braddock, and the smell of lavender. You see, the two poor maiden ladies were in agonies—and they could not say one single thing direct. They would almost wring their ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... man left; a short-legged, long-bodied, plethoric fellow, with a very large, sandy head. He sat by himself, with a glass of port wine negus, and a spoon; sipping and stirring, and meditating and sipping, until nothing was left but the spoon. He gradually fell asleep bolt upright in his chair, with the empty glass standing ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... laugh ran around at this, for every one knew the failing of the long-legged scout, whose stowage capacity when it came time to eat had never as yet within the memory of any comrade been fully tested; for they always declared that his legs must be hollow, for otherwise it was a mystery where all the food he devoured went to, since he never ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... Stern sank cross-legged on the floor beside Curtis and gazed at him. The prickly sensation had ascended from his leg up through his chest and to his neck. But it didn't matter. Now, for a last time, he could feel the spell of that ...
— Martians Never Die • Lucius Daniel
... glow of that pleasant lantern-light little Eve Edgarton sat cross-legged on the ground with a great pulpy clutter of rain-soaked magazines spread out all around her like a giant's pack of cards. And diagonally across her breast from shoulder to waistline her little gray flannel shirt hung gashed into ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... manufacture; and this with a view to perpetuate my own name, rather than befriend my country; for, thank Heaven! I am weaned from all attachments of that kind, and look upon myself as one very little obliged to any society whatsoever. Although I presided with absolute power over this long-legged community, and distributed punishments and rewards to each, according to his deserts, I grew impatient of my situation; and my natural disposition one day prevailing, like a fire which had long been smothered, I wreaked the fury of my ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... the summer evening in the bay window of the hall. Tibble sat on a three-legged stool by him, writing in a crabbed hand, in a big ledger, and Kit Smallbones towered above both, holding in his hand a bundle of tally-sticks. By the help of these, and of that accuracy of memory which writing has destroyed, he was unfolding, down ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... very respectable appearance in his dark gray coat. To be sure, he had not a very good character for honesty, and was suspected of sometimes stealing a portion of the grain which was given him to grind. But perhaps some two-legged millers are quite as dishonest as this ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is not surprising for Mani seems to have taught that Zoroaster, Buddha and Christ had preceded him as apostles, and in Buddhist countries his followers naturally adopted words and symbols familiar to the people. Thus Manichaean deities are represented like Bodhisattvas sitting cross-legged on a lotus; Mani receives the epithet Ju-lai or Tathagata: as in Amida's Paradise, there are holy trees bearing flowers which enclose beings styled Buddha: the construction and phraseology of Manichaean books resemble ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... salts provided by Medic Tau as a necessary restorative after some hours combination of Salariki oratory and Salariki perfumes. Having thus done the duty of liege man, Dane was at liberty to seat himself, cross-legged on the ground behind his chief, as the other sons, heirs, and advisors ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... high in the air, carried about on mysterious legs. They have such a resolute look on their round faces, what wonder that nervous old gentlemen, with tender feet, wince and tremble while the long-legged ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... day, the fjord just steals in smooth and shining by ness and bay. And at low water there is a whole wonderland of strange little islands, sand-banks, and weed-fringed rocks left high and dry, with clear pools between, where bare-legged urchins splash about, and tiny flat-fish as big as a halfpenny dart away to every side. The air is filled with a smell of salt sea-water and warm, wet beach-waste, and the sea-pie, see-sawing about on a big stone in the water, lifts his red beak cheerily ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... French MAISON RUSTIQUE, or FARM-HOUSE, which, it is said, was the book that first tempted DUQUESNOIS (I think that was the name), the famous physician, in the reign of Louis XIV., to learn to read. Here are all the four-legged animals, from the horse down to the mouse, portraits and all; all the birds, reptiles, insects; all the modes of rearing, managing, and using the tame ones; all the modes of taking the wild ones, and of destroying those that are ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... wish there were a hundred books to the series the same as mine. Dear me! that was a day! Read the book. You'll just laugh at the pictures. Especially the one where I am riding the little wooden-legged squirrel on my back." ...
— Ted Marsh on an Important Mission • Elmer Sherwood
... but she explained how they might have been worse; so fed on this sop, and watching her example, Mickey grew like her. The difficult time was while she sat over a sewing machine to be with him. When he grew stout-legged and self-reliant, he could be sent after the food, to carry the rent, and to sell papers, then she could work by the day, earn more, have better health, while what both brought home paid the rent of the top room back, of as bad ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... on the little spider-legged table by her side and a mass of embroidery on her lap, but the needle had fallen from her hold, her hands lay idly upon her knee, and she was looking out over the bright waters with a dreamy, wistful gaze, which had become habitual with her whenever ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... whistle when a camera man authorized by the Government of Canada took one of the most striking pictures in our part of the war outside the zone of the shell areas. Gen. Sam Hughes, jack boots and oilskin cape flung back by the gale to show his belt and the flap of his khaki, wide-legged on a rope ladder, coming down forward from a troopship in the Gulf, almost baring his teeth to the October wind; bidding farewell to the First Contingent 33,000 strong, that steamed out of the Gulf ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... boatswain stood up in the stern with a club, ready to give him a blow should he come nearer. After swimming round the boat for some time, he seemed to consider that he could gain nothing by a battle with the four-legged strange creature, as he doubtless considered the boat, and so leisurely swam back to the rocks he had left, up which he scrambled, and sat watching the cutter as she continued her course along ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... the jingling of bells was heard, and a muleteer seated cross-legged on a mule, which preceded five others, ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... two men walking. One was an elderly savage, with a wrinkled, shrewd countenance. He was almost completely enveloped in a robe of softened skins. Followed him a younger man, dangling at the end of a thong a small three-legged stool cut entire from a single block of wood. The old man swept forward with considerable dignity; the younger, one hand held high in the most affected fashion, teetered gracefully along as mincingly as ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... kitten came walking in, innocent-eyed and grave. Mark scrambled towards her on his hands and knees. She retreated with a comic series of stiff-legged, sideways jumps, that made him roll on the floor, chuckling and giggling, and grabbing futilely for the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... mile like a scared wolf. Until it came the roan's turn to go again, no untoward incident happened, friendly timekeepers posting me at every change of mounts. But when this bolter's turn came again, he reared and plunged away stiff-legged, crossed the inward furrow, and before I could turn him again to the track, cut inside the course for two stakes or possibly fifty yards. By this time I was beyond recall, but as I came round and passed the starting-point, the judges attempted to stop me, and I well ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... the jolly world of God all round us, able to sing, to draw, to paint, to hammer and build, to sail, to ride horses, to run, to leap; having for our splendid inheritance love in youth and memory in old age, and we are to take one miserable little faculty, our one-legged, knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned, underfed, and perpetually irritated and grumpy intellect, or analytical curiosity rather (a diseased appetite), and let it swell till it eats up every other function? ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Blot in the 'Scutcheon drew near it is evident that he feared further losses and would gladly have been released from his promise to produce the play; but Browning failed to divine the true state of affairs. The tragedy was read to the company by a grotesque, wooden-legged and red-nosed prompter, and it was greeted with laughter. To make amends, Macready himself undertook to read it aloud, but he declared himself unable, in the disturbed state of his mind, to appear before the public: his part—that ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Presently they sat down, cross-legged, one on each side of the tarpaulin, and began the meal. That was the strangest supper Joan ever sat down to; it was like a dream where there was danger that tortured her; but she knew she was dreaming ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... quadrupeds; [Footnote: The first mention I have found of the naturalization of a wild bird in modern Europe is in the Menagiana, vol. iii., p. 174, edition of 1715, where it is stated that Rene, King of Sicily and Duke of Anjou, who died in 1480, introduced the red-legged partridge into the latter country. Attempts have been made, and I believe with success, to naturalize the European lark on Long Island, and the English sparrow has been introduced into various parts of the Northern States, where he is useful by destroying ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... of overwhelming warmth; men with all manner of hurts, men on crutches and in chairs stood up, or tried to stand up, to cheer him. It was in the truest sense a meeting of comrades, and when a one-legged soldier asked the Prince to pose for a photograph, he did it not merely willingly, but with ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... broad bed the fatigued or idle guest. Two chairs, the seats made of Nile reeds, with sloping back, strengthened by stays, a wooden foot-stool cut in the shape of a shell and resting upon three legs, an oblong table, also three-legged, bordered with inlaid work and ornamented in the centre with uraeus snakes, wreaths, and agricultural symbols, and on which was placed a vase of rose and blue lotus,—completed the furniture of the room, which was pastoral in its simplicity ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... always belonged to Norah, He had been given to her as a foal, when Norah used to ride a round little black sheltie, as easy to fall off as to mount. He was a beauty even then, Norah thought; and her father had looked approvingly at the long-legged baby, with his fine, well-bred head. "You will have something worth riding when that fellow is fit to break in, my girlie," he had said, and his prophecy had been amply fulfilled. Mick Shanahan said he'd never put a ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... innumerable streams intersected this forest, which always brought us Europeans to a complete standstill. The only bridges which the natives ever think of making are formed by cutting down a tree, and letting it fall across; and over these our bare-legged attendants, loaded as they were, scrambled with all the agility of cats or monkeys; but it was not so with us: for several times they seated one of us on the top of their load, and carried him over. The chief, who accompanied us, made it his particular business to see me ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... sublimated to an essence that only a Lilliputian vessel could hold. Her instincts were domestic, and her domain was the hearthstone, and there she and her attendants, miniatures of the charming damsels in Miss McGinty's peachy and strawberry-legged corps de ballet, rewarded virtue and trampled meanness under their dainty, twinkling feet. Moreover, the story was to be paid for, a condition of the greater glory, an irrefragable proof of merit. Only as evidence of worth was money thought of, and ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... parting his Hair in the Middle, in imitation of a good Bird Dog, and had been promoted to the Veteran Corps of the iron-legged Dancing Men and the insatiable Diners-Out. He would eat on his Friends about six Nights in each Week, and repay them every Christmas by sending a Card showing a Frozen Stream in the ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... his wonderful narrative, he informed the maidens that as strange an adventure as ever happened was when he fought with Geryon, the six-legged man. This was a very odd and frightful sort of figure, as you may well believe. Any person, looking at his tracks in the sand or snow, would suppose that three sociable companions had been walking along ...
— The Three Golden Apples - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... among the turkeys, and geese, and ducks, and hens!—all so hungry for breakfast, and all pushing round without the slightest regard for good manners. After them there were the calves to feed. Six long-legged shaky little things—they wondered they could ever grow into anything to be afraid of. Before they had half finished looking round nurse called them to get ready for ...
— Laugh and Play - A Collection of Original stories • Various
... acquired him in the Andes for a few centavos. Since then we have been companions. In his day he had his place in a splendid temple of the Sun Worshipers. When I rescued him he was squatting cross-legged on a counter among silver and copper trinkets belonging to a civilization younger than his own. When you've been a god and come to be a souvenir of ruins and dead things—" the man paused for a moment, then with the ghost of a laugh ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... their hands and knees, and apparently poking at it, each with a bit of wood, or about to lay the bits of wood on it, were two little girls, shock-headed, barefoot and bare-legged, clad only in coarse tunics of rusty dark wool. I am not accurate as to children's ages: I took these girls for seven and five; but they may have been six and four or eight and six. At sight of us they scrambled to their feet and fled through one of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... 'Ome.' That haitch is a funny letter, but it's a letter as I shall practise. Still, haitches or no haitches," he concluded, with a profound sigh, "I wish as I knowed 'ow I could set about coming it over that 'ere one-legged widder lidy at Putney what 'ave the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... poor. I can't look at her straight, but I love her so that I can hardly stand it. All the other girls in school love her too, and she is not at all afraid of the boys, but treats them just as if they were human beings and could be loved as such. That awful long-legged Tony walks home with her almost every day and they all laugh and ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... robustly on the terrace, a gun on his shoulder and a couple of setters at his feet. And here was the river below the park, with Guy "punting" a girl in a flapping hat—how Margaret hated the flap that hid the girl's face! And here was the tennis-court, with Guy among a jolly cross-legged group of youths in flannels, and pretty girls about the tea-table under the big lime: in the centre the curate handing bread and butter, and in the middle distance a footman approaching ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the ocean do I indulge at such times, and so respectfully do I regard the sailors who may chance to pass, that Prue often says, with her shrewd smiles, that my mind is a kind of Greenwich Hospital, full of abortive marine hopes and wishes, broken-legged intentions, blind regrets, and desires, whose hands have been shot away in some hard battle of experience, so that they cannot grasp the results towards ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... said Hesper. "He used to ride about on a long-legged horse, and talked to anybody that would listen to him. But there was always something pleasing about him, and he is much improved. Do you know, he is ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... chocolate-colored English carpet covered the middle of the floor, and a row of straw chairs stood around it, on the bare, lead-colored boards. A huge bed, with a chintz top shaped like an elephant's back, was in one corner, and a six-legged mahogany table in another. One side of the room where the fireplace was set was paneled in wood; its fire had burned down in the shining Franklin stove, and broken brands were standing upright. The charred backlog still ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... little window, and peered in through a hole in the shutter. I could see the inside of the room quite plainly; it was poorly furnished, but beautifully clean. In a corner opposite the window stood a rough settle, while on a three-legged stool by the peat fire sat an old woman knitting busily, a collie dog ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... ridiculous thing for him to say, for when Davy stepped inside he found the only seats were some three-legged stools huddled together in the back part of the cab, all the rest of the space being taken up by a large bath-tub that ran across the front end of it. Davy turned on one of the faucets, but nothing came out except some dust and a few small bits of gravel, and ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... within the cathedral, to the humbler foliated arched canopy, protecting a simple sarcophagus at the corner of many a street in Lombardy. The sculptor's work was but the low relief on the church flags, the timidly carved, outlined, cross-legged knight or praying priest, flattened down on his pillow as if ashamed even of that amount of prominence, and in a hurry to be trodden down and obliterated into a few ghostly outlines. But to this humiliated prostrate image, to this flat thing doomed to obliteration, came ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... observed and appreciated by the high ones at Peking, O Quen-Ki-Tong. Too long have they been unrewarded and passed over in silence. Nevertheless, the moment of acknowledgement and advancement has at length arrived; for, as the Book of Verses clearly says, "Even the three-legged mule may contrive to reach the agreed spot in advance of the others, provided a circular running space has been selected and the number of rounds be sufficiently ample." It is this otherwise uninteresting and obtrusive person's graceful duty to convey to you the agreeable intelligence that ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... storks up there?" he asked, pointing to a pair of long-legged birds standing beside their nest on the dome of the mosque. "The stork is the sacred bird of Albania and if it makes its nest on a building which is in course of construction all work on that building ceases as long as the stork remains. A barracks we were ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... were of the huckleberry or flea-bitten variety,—a freckled white. Perhaps the quack had fed them with his refuse pills. These knobby-legged unfortunates we of course named Xanthus and Balius, not of podargous or swift-footed, but podagrous or gouty race. Xanthus, like his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... Mark, from where he and his cousin were seated cross-legged like tailors, in the shade of one of the walls, repairing damages, as they called it—that is to say, they were very untidily sewing, up thorn-made tears in the jackets laid ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... long-legged, slender dancing gals, in tall black witch caps and long black capes, crimson-lined, and very little else. Each had long hair ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... stomach, and sat against the wall cross-legged, fixing his innocent round eyes on old Heythorp. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... dreaming what was passing through his patron's mind, settled himself cross-legged at the door of the scorer's tent, and thought of nothing for the next ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... sixteen now, long-legged, silent, and friendly, said, "Yes, mother" and helped herself so liberally to butter that her ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... be operated. He said nothing to that, but climbed up into the carriage; but while I was standing like this, buttoning up his foot-bag, he seizes me by the collar and says: 'Do you know, you little bow-legged creature!' (Kalle imitated the doctor's town speech), 'You're the best man I've ever met, and you don't owe me a brass farthing! For that matter, it was you yourself that performed the operation.' 'Then ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... said stout Abram Atwater, who had sat all the time cross-legged, a silent, gravely-smiling spectator of the scene, "you shan't fool him any more. He has got pluck; he has shown it. And now let ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... over his eyes; in his hands, conched to tremulo the sound, he held an harmonica; his eyes were aslit in the ecstasy of his own music; from the crook of his arm dangled a bridle, and he sat cross-legged high up on the quarter deck of a great four-story, full-rigged Missouri mule. He didn't salute us but called "Hi" as we passed, and then we knew that "our flag was still there" and that we were ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... expected, the burly politician was depending upon his greater brawn to overpower his antagonist. He advanced with a sidling, spread-legged gait, his knife hand against his right hip and his left hand extended in front. Verkan Vall nodded with pleased satisfaction; a wrist-grabber. Then he blinked. Why, the fellow was actually holding his knife reversed, ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... many of ourselves into their places. The change would be beneficial to both parties. We, in our dry atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser. John Bull, on the other hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted, material, and, in a word, too intensely English. In a few more centuries he will be the earthliest creature that ever the earth saw. Heretofore Providence has obviated such a result by timely intermixtures of alien races with the old ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... out again onto the porch. The girl standing there was as dark as her mother but slim and long-legged and vividly beautiful. ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault
... ranked as a sub-breed: they are of a slaty-blue colour, and their chickens are well feathered. A smaller, short-legged Dutch sub-breed has been described ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... swinging in the arc which ended upon my upturned face when a bolt of myriad-legged horror hurled itself through the doorway full upon the breast of my executioner. With a shriek of fear the ape which held me leaped through the open window, but its mate closed in a terrific death struggle with ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ane gray beard'.[71] In East Lothian, 1630, Alexander Hamilton met the Devil in the likeness of a black man.[72] At Eymouth, 1634, Bessie Bathgate was seen by two young men 'at 12 hours of even (when all people are in their beds) standing bare-legged and in her sark valicot, at the back of hir yard, conferring with the devil who was in green cloaths'.[73] Manie Haliburton of Dirlton, 1649, confessed that, when her daughter was ill, 'came the Devill, in licknes of a man, to hir hous, calling himselff a phisition'.[74] He came also as ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... in conclusion, 'don't you see the confounded absurdity of ever wasting a thought on a broken-down, bandy-legged, beggarly dragoon? Just look at him, with an old taffeta whigmaleerie tied to his back, like Paddy from Cork, with his coat buttoned behind! Isn't he a pretty figure, now, to go a-courting? You would never forsake the like of me—would you now? A spruce, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... nose above their thick lips. These singular beings stamped their way backward and forward, giving vent to yells of excitement, and causing their bodies to tremble and twitch in the most surprising manner. The last act of this strange drama represented the warriors sitting cross-legged round the fire, when suddenly they simultaneously stretched out their right arms as if pointing to some distant object, at the same time displaying their teeth and rolling their eyes, and then, springing ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... their common customs the Persians differ from the Turks. The Turks sit cross-legged on the ground; the Persians sit upon their heels. Which way of sitting should you prefer? I think you would find it more comfortable to sit like ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... attention on the gate through which the men were bound to come. First emerged a fellow in corduroys tied below the knee, with long brown moustaches decorating a face that, for all its haggardness, had a jovial look. Next came a sturdy little red-faced, bow-legged man in shirt-sleeves rolled up, walking alongside a big, dark fellow with a cap pushed up on his head, who had evidently just made a joke. Then came two old men, one of whom was limping, and three striplings. Another big man came along next, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... seated by the open door of the dining room, in the rocker with the patched cane seat. He was apparently very busy doing something with a piece of fishline and a pair of long-legged rubber boots. Captain Perez, swinging back and forth in the parlor rocker with the patch-work cushion, was puffing deliberately at a wooden pipe, the bowl of which was carved into the likeness of a very rakish damsel with a sailor's cap set upon the side of her once flaxen head. In response to ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... Venice a Turkish ship and two Greek vessels which had violated the neutrality. Their crews now mingled with the crowd. I beheld, for the first time, the haughty and turbaned Ottoman, sitting cross-legged on his carpet under a colonnade, sipping his coffee and smoking a long chiboque, and the Greeks, with their small red caps, their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... 'Finallie of the legged kinde we have not manie, neither haue I seene anie more of this sort than the Polypus called in English the lobstar, crafish or creuis, and the crab, [q.v.]. Carolus Stephanus in his maison rustique, doubted whether these lobstars ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... "Cartouches" or "Obus—7^me"; trains piled high with grain or clothing, or folded tents packed between varnished poles and piles of tin basins. Once a little excitement came to Saint-Lys when a battalion of red-legged infantry tramped into the village square and stacked rifles and jeered at the mayor and drank many bottles of red wine to the health of the shy-eyed girls peeping at them from every lattice. But they were only waiting for the next ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... paused in her knitting, pulled her spectacles a little further down on her nose, and peered over them at Silas Harper, her husband, who had just entered her room and stood with his hat in his hand. He was low of stature, small and very bow-legged. A short white beard graced his chin, while his upper lip was kept clean shaven. His head was covered with the proverbial knotty, wool-like hair, which was now the scene of a struggle for the mastery between the black and gray. Since ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... yet a mere child of nine the father died and the family was left in poverty. A friend of the Tegnr family, the judicial officer Branting, gave the young Esaias a home in his house. The lad soon wrote a good hand and was given a desk and a high, three-legged chair in the office. Branting took a fancy to the young clerk and soon fell into the habit of inviting him to accompany the master upon the many official journeys that had to be made through the bailiwick. Thus Esaias came to see the glories ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... other lady, and said it seemed contrived by Heaven, or the devil, against him, that Oliver should come into your hands, he laughed, and said there was some comfort in that too, for how many thousands and hundreds of thousands of pounds would you not give, if you had them, to know who your two-legged ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... rode horses—some of them too wild for me—and packed a rifle many a hundred miles, riding sometimes thirty and forty miles a day, and I climbed in and out of the deep canyons, desperately staying at the heels of one of those long-legged Texans. I learned the life of those backwoodsmen, but I did not get the story of the Pleasant Valley War. I had, however, won the friendship of ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... I ought to give up to him," she said, watching a furry-legged bumblebee as it moved about over the face of a yellow rosin weed flower by the roadside. "I wouldn't care if it weren't for his mother. I'd like to get some of these country ways worked out of me before I have to see too much of her. She'll never feel the same toward ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... found these humanitarians "impossible to live with." I do not wonder at that. A question far more to the point is, Did they find you impossible to live with? Come to think of it, I would rather live with a humanitarian, myself, even if his soul was carnally bow-legged. But my sort of charity is so perverse, so awry with humour, that the constant contemplation of a man trying to wriggle out of the flesh through some spiritual key-hole, made by his own imagination, into a form of existence much higher than agreeable, ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... but reckless, joyous, good-humoured, hare-brained Charley was cast into the depths of despair at the idea of spending the livelong day, and day after day, for years it might be, on the top of a long- legged stool. In fact, poor Charley said that he "would rather become a buffalo than do it." Now this was very wrong of Charley, for, of course, he didn't mean it. Indeed, it is too much a habit among little boys, ay, and among grown-up people, too, to say ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... not entirely confined to the human species. There have been instances known where dogs have been the most accomplished of poachers—generally, it must be said, in conjunction with a two-legged companion. The lurching, vagabond hound that one sees not infrequently in certain parts of the country, following suspicious-looking characters clad in coats with suspiciously roomy pockets, might, no doubt, be easily trained to take salmon from ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... Mueller's apartments consisted of three rooms. First, a small outer chamber which he dignified with the title of Salle d'Attente, but which, as it was mainly furnished with old boots, umbrellas and walking-sticks, and contained, by way of accommodation for visitors only a three-legged stool and a door-mat, would have been more fitly designated as the hall. Between this Salle d'Attente and the den in which he slept, ate, smoked, and received his friends, lay the studio—once a stately salon, now a wilderness of litter and dilapidation. On one side you beheld three ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... itself evident to him when he dismounted at the house. To the silence of the night was added the silence of slumber. No one was to be seen; a small cow, rendered lean by active climbing in search of sustenance, breathed peacefully near the tumble-down fence; the ubiquitous, long-legged, yellow dog, rendered trustful by long seclusion, aroused himself from his nap to greet the arrival with a series of heavy raps upon the rickety porch-floor with a solid but languid tail. Lennox stepped over him in reaching for the gourd hanging upon the post, and he did not consider it incumbent ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... what trouble have you not caused me!" and in his hands Uncle Joshua buried his face, while through his large red fingers the tears trickled slowly, and fell upon the ground. For a moment he wept, and then wiping his eyes, said, "But wasn't it lucky that long-legged, salmon-colored Joe got here as he did! Another minute and you'd have been clinched, but now the tempest has blowed over, and for the rest of your life you'll have nothing ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... they never could agree was legs, and many a hearty laugh did they give Miss Celia by their warm and serious discussion of this vexed question. Thorny insisted that Ben was bow-legged; Ben resented the epithet, and declared that the legs of all good horsemen must have a slight curve, and any one who knew anything about the matter would acknowledge both its necessity and its beauty. Then Thorny would observe that it might be all very well in the saddle, but it made ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... than April had showed—the scene was more picturesque, the "Gate" was taller and narrower, and the recollection of a happy first visit made me return to it with pleasure. Birds were more abundant: long-shanked water-fowl with hazel eyes; red-legged rail; the brown swallow of Egypt; green-blue fly-catchers; and a black muscivor, with a snowy-white rump, of which I failed to secure a specimen. We also saw the tern-coloured plover, known in Egypt as Domenicain and red ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... there's a first-class row goin' on outside our bloomin' cafe. No, no, don't you butt in among Arabs as though you was strollin' down Edgware Road on a Saturday night, an' get mixed up in a coster rough-an'-tumble. These long-legged swine would knife you just for the fun of it. Keep full an' by, an' let any son of a gun who comes too near have it where it'll ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... legs are bare, and their feet protected by rude sandals. Tall, large-boned, and stern of face, they hint both of Vandal and of Moslem blood. The younger men are of inferior stature, and nearly all bow-legged. They have turned the flowing trousers into modern pantaloons, the legs of which are cut like the old-fashioned gigot sleeve, very big and baggy at the top, and tied with a drawing-string around the waist. My first impression was, that the men had got ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... her knees on the dirty floor, she covered her face, and rocked herself to and fro. Socknersh sat on his three-legged stool, staring at her in silence. His forehead crumpled slightly and his mouth twitched, as the slow processes of his thought shook him. The air was thick with the fumes of his brazier, from which an angry red glow fell on Joanna as she knelt ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... bottomless in wet. Yet it was, for its size, already one of the most cosmopolitan places in the country. Of course, the population was mainly American, and they were beginning to pour in—sharp-eyed men from the towns in black coats, and long-legged, quiet-looking and quiet-voiced mountaineers in rusty clothes, who hulked along in single file, silent and almost fugitive in the glare of daylight. Quiet they were and well-nigh stealthy, with something of the movement of other denizens of the forest, unless they were crossed and aroused, and ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... audience there was the theatre and the engagement ceremony of Her Majesty's nephew, Ter Ju. The engagement ceremony, according to the Manchu custom, is performed by two of the Princesses of the Royal family going to the house of the prospective bride, who sits on her bed cross-legged, her eyes closed and awaits their coming. When they arrive at the house, they go to her bedroom and place a symbol called Ru Yee, made of pure jade about one and a half feet long, in her lap and suspend two small ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... water, with a strong flavour of cocoanut. It is a delicious beverage. The meat was so thin and soft that it could have been spooned out like the white of an egg if we had had any spoons. We all sat cross-legged round our meal, and all Laupahoehoe crowded into the room and verandah with the most persistent, unwinking, gimleting stare I ever saw. It was really unpleasant, not only to hear a Babel of talking, of which, judging from the constant repetition of the words ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Paul went to Tunis, and on landing there, was genuinely surprised. The passengers and their baggage were loaded into boats for transfer to shore, nearing which, they were met by crowds of bare legged natives who waded out as far as they could and when a boat was near enough, they grabbed the baggage and trotted off with it, regardless of the remonstrances of the owners. At the custom house, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... racing-car at the side of the road. It was empty, but from underneath it protruded a pair of long legs, while beside it stood a girl, at the sight of whom George's heart began to thump so violently that the long-legged one might have been pardoned had he supposed that his engine had started ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... woman. Every train brought to the capital some suitor with a consonated, hyphenated name and a pedigree as long as a bore's idea of a funny story. But the princess did not care for pedigrees that were squint-eyed or bow-legged. One and all of them she cast aside as unworthy her consideration. Then, like the ancient worm, the duke turned. She should marry Doppelkinn, who, having no wife to do the honors in ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... the aged languid flies, settled under the lintels and covered with white dust, he ordered the windows to be opened everywhere; they had not been opened ever since the death of Glafira Petrovna. Everything in the house had remained as it was; the thin-legged white miniature couches in the drawing-room, covered with glossy grey stuff, threadbare and rickety, vividly suggested the days of Catherine; in the drawing-room, too, stood the mistress's favourite arm-chair, with high ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... into our stories. The main part of Ficulnus's life, for instance, is spent in selling sugar, spices and cheese; of Causidicus's in poring over musty volumes of black-letter law; of Sartorius's in sitting, cross-legged, on a board after measuring gentlemen for coats and breeches. What can a story-teller say about the professional existence of these men? Would a real rustical history of hobnails and eighteenpence a day be endurable? In the days whereof we are writing, the poets of the time chose ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... exclaimed she, 'hunting for lost sheep is you? Well, you have a hard time to find 'em here. My husband lost an old ram last week, and he ain't found him yet, and he's hunted every day.' 'I am not looking for four-legged sheep,' said I, 'I am hunting for sinners.' 'Ah'; she said, 'then you are a preacher.' 'Yes,' said I. 'You are the first of that sort that's bin in these diggins for many a day.' Turning to her eldest daughter, she said in an excited tone, 'Clar out the pigs and ducks, and sweep up the ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... printed at Brussels. "The Amours of Napoleon III." Illustrated with engravings. It related, among other anecdotes, how the Emperor had seduced a girl of thirteen, the daughter of a cook; and the picture represented Napoleon III., bare-legged, and also wearing the grand ribbon of the Legion of Honor, pursuing a little girl who was trying to ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... "I am but a cripple, a one-legged man. Withdraw your forces one hundred yard from the door, and I will come. Give me a chance for my life, captain. I will never ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Vases of the same china adorned the tall marble mantelpiece, and stood on brackets here and there about the room. There were also some exquisite and wonderfully carved oak, a Queen Anne sofa, and several spindle-legged chairs. An old spinet stood in a distant window, and the drab moreen curtains ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... isle: Vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped, Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words; Has peeled a wand and called it by a name; Weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe The eyed skin of a supple oncelot; And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole, A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch, Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye, And saith she is Miranda and my wife: 'Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge; Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... to the false one's favourite brother. But they guessed that it was a thing or spirit appertaining of right to them; and they resolved, after mature consultation, to impart the secret of their discovery to an old wooden-legged villager, who had served in the army, who was the idol of all the children of the place, and who, they firmly believed, knew everything under the sun, except the mystical arts of reading and writing. Accordingly, ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was thinking, if girls fall in love with this sallow hook-nosed, glass-eyed, wooden-legged, dirty, hideous old man, with the sham teeth, they have a queer taste. THAT is what I ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... comes to the house to make a bowl of kava for the white man and Kusis before they go hunting the wild pig in the mountain forest. There is no ceremony about this kava-drinking as there is in conventional Samoa; fat-faced Sipi simply sits cross-legged upon the matted floor and pounds the green root with a rounded piece of jade ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... there was a long-legged chap launching the boat. In he jumped, shoved her off, and lay on his oars, lookin at em, as they came running along the edge of ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... to make any one feel that they are not edible, my dear," said Aunt Hannah. "What sort did you get? Not those nasty, tall, long-legged things you brought before?" ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... and I've just given my opinion of Smith here. I never liked Fowler, but he had great personal charm and Harry never would take any of my warnings about him. Brown was a short-legged Eastern college boy who worked on the local paper for his health. How he and Fowler ever met up, I don't know, but they did, and the law office was Brown's chief hang-out. Now all three of 'em were as poor as this desert. ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... was armed with the poker, I seized the hall tongs as I passed through; and on the lawn, in the coolest possible manner, were about half a dozen fellows smoking their cigars, and occasionally looking through a bright brass instrument upon a three-legged stand, and noting down the result with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... One-armed, or one-legged beggars, whose missing member, sound as your own, is strapped to their bodies so as to be safely out of sight, women wishing to bury their husbands or children, women with borrowed or hired babies, and sundry other objects calculated to excite your pity, meet you at every ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... and for this he rejects the coat for the flowing pelisse, or he goes to his meal in his shirt-sleeves. It is amusing to see the homme de bureau, or the humble clerk, endeavoring to sit on his sofa cross-legged, with his writing paraphernalia before him as formerly, or to examine the broad chair which he has had to invent, so as to suit himself to his new transitory state. It may even be doubted whether he has gained any thing by the change, as a cavalier, for the full trowsers were far more comfortable ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dimensions, surrounded by a verandah, with screens of matting all round, except in one place, where there was hung a tanned bullock's hide; to this spot he was led up, and on its being drawn on one side, he saw the lady sitting cross-legged on a small Turkey carpet, like one of our hearth-rugs, a large leathern cushion under her left knee; her goora pot, which was an old-fashioned pewter mug, by her side, and a calabash of water to wash her mouth out, as she alternately ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... defiant of discipline and impatient of restraint, hunting knives in their belts, long rifles upon their shoulders. There they drank with seamen as wild as themselves who served in the ships of Jackson's small naval force or had offered to lend a hand behind the stockades, and with lean, long-legged Yankees from down East, swarthy outlaws who sailed for Pierre Lafitte, Portuguese and Norwegian wanderers who had deserted their merchant vessels, and even Spanish adventurers from ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... of the cool green shades of dewy woods full of the fragrance of hidden flower and herb and sweet, moist earth. But most of all he bethought him of a certain wayside inn, an ancient inn of many gables, above whose hospitable door swung a sign whereon a weather-beaten hound, dim-legged and faded of tail, pursued a misty blur that by common report was held to be hare; a comfortable, homely inn of no especial importance perhaps, yet the very best inn to be found in all broad England, none the less. And, as he thought, a sudden, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... governing nature in them when they were rich than now that they are poor; they were miserable spendthrifts always. They are the drones of the hive; only whereas the actual drone is unprovided by nature with a sting, the two-legged things whom we call drones are some of them without stings and some of them have dreadful stings; in other words, there are paupers and there are rogues. These are never far apart; and in oligarchical cities, where nearly ...
— The Republic • Plato
... night hearing a woman's voice wailing a queer Hindoo chant. It came from the barrack-room door. Afterwards I discovered it was Hawk sitting on his trestle bed cross-legged, with a bit of sacking and ashes on his head imitating the death-wail of an Indian woman ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... an old woman had said, "she'll mek his heart ache many a time. She'll comb his haid wid a three-legged stool an' bresh it wid de broom. Uh, huh—putty, is she? You ma'y huh 'cause she putty. Ki-yi! She fix you! Putty women ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... hardly understood what the good-looking old man was saying, because his attention was riveted to a large, dark-grey, many-legged louse that was creeping along the good-looking ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... I could see smoke rising from the chimneys of the unseen settlement. Presently a small barefoot boy came out of the mill, looked at us a moment, then turned and legged it up the road tight as he could go. The Oneida, smoking his pipe, saw the lad's hasty flight, and ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... The one-legged man did not even give himself the trouble to offer Vogt one of his voting-papers. Everybody knew old Vogt. The blood of an old soldier ran in his veins, he was conservative ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... ground to discuss their rice and ghee,—the rajah and his chief officers partaking of the same simple fare as the men. They were thus employed—some lying at their length on the sward, others sitting cross-legged, others warming their food over numerous little fires which they had kindled from the dried branches cut from the brushwood around, the horses picketed on the spots where grass was most abundant—when Reginald, who was endeavouring to swallow the unpalatable ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... wheat and the other half outside. Thus there were three circles, one of wheat and the other two described by the horses as they dashed wildly around, the drivers shouting, the wheat flying and being quickly threshed under the swift-moving hoofs of the twelve four-legged flails! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... closet where we keep—our bugs, and where for the most part, I am truly thankful to say, they keep themselves. Besides these, we have two or three ants' nests in our bedroom, and everything we look upon seems but a moving mass of these red, long-legged, but always exemplary insects. These fellow-creatures make one's life not worth much having, and I do nothing all day long but sing the famous entomological chorus in "Faust;" and if this goes on much longer, I feel as if I should ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... this, but they got over the loss of the ship with philosophical resignation, as other midshipmen have under like circumstances done before them; and with the rest of their shipmates amused themselves very well in shooting snipe and red-legged partridges, in wandering about, in trying to talk Greek, and in doing nothing, till a brig of war arrived and carried them all back to Malta. Captain Hartland and his officers were tried for the loss of his sloop, and honourably acquitted; and Adair and Rogers rejoined the Racer, to ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... wagon, breathing hard as they came up the steps, had sought out the bedroom. But Mr. Dayne said that a soldier should lie in his tent. So they had made sure that the three-legged lounge in the office was steady, and got a fresh counterpane from red-lidded Mrs. Garland. Then, when Pond was gone, the other two had thought to make ready against the arrival of Bloom. However, they were soon brought to pause here, finding nothing to ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of the great arm-chairs that even in summer made a semicircle round the fendered hearth. Fresh from his good-night parting with Antonia, he sat perhaps ten minutes before he began to take in all the figures in their parti-coloured smoking jackets, cross-legged, with glasses in their hands, and cigars between ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... society, the State; he thinks and acts more in a minute than a hundred writers can describe and explain in a year; he is a laughing, weeping, money-making, clothes-wearing, lying, reasoning, worshipping, amorous, credulous, sceptical, imitative, combative, gregarious, prehensile, two-legged animal. He does not cease to be all this and more, merely because he happens to be at one of his thousand tricks, and you catch him in the act. How do you propose ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... made it up by eating some salt beef and biscuit, which I found to be the invariable accompaniment of every meal; the sailors sitting cross-legged on their chests in a circle, and breaking the hard biscuit, very sociably, over each other's heads, which was very convenient indeed, but gave me the headache, at least for the first four or five days till I got used to it; ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... the horses were in worse plight than we. It was forty hours since they had been watered. In no country, save Mesopotamia, did the exigencies of the campaign lie so heavily upon our four-legged comrades as in Egypt and Palestine. But for the fact that all animals in the army are better treated and looked after than any in the world, it would have fared very hardly with them. You should have seen some of the captured Turkish horses! It made us heartsick to look at them, so emaciated were ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... sleep with the vision that Snorky's avaricious imagination held out to him? All night long he tossed about restlessly, wandering in a forest of legs; white ones and red ones, black ones and yellow ones, tall ones and short ones, fat, thin, bow-legged and crooked, all the legs in the world waiting for him to rise ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... a little short-legged dog, built like a clumsy weasel; for his body was so long it seemed to plead for six legs instead of four, to support it, and no one could blame his back for swaying a little in the middle. Boswell was a brindled dog. He had yellow spots like pumpkin ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... representation of the wing-feathers of the hand. He says: "In several distinct breeds of the pigeon and fowl the legs and the two outer toes are heavily feathered, so that, in the trumpeter pigeon, they appear like little wings. In the feather-legged bantam, the 'boots,' or feathers, which grow from the outside of the leg, and generally from the two outer toes, have, according to the excellent authority of Mr. Hewitt, been seen to exceed the wing-feathers in length, and in one case were ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart |
