"Straggle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Clavering, "that the rebels succeeded in getting away. If we had cut off their retreat we might have had some hard fighting. There is nothing nastier than tackling a rat in a corner. It is a much simpler business to cut up flying men. All beaten troops straggle and desert. Irregulars, operating in their own country, simply melt away after a defeat. They sneak off home, hide their arms in hay stacks, and pretend they never left their ploughs. I know their ways, and, by God, I'll track them. I'll ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... glorious genius of the one, and the patient zeal and talent of the other. I am, therefore, content, and with regard to that I have nothing to say. But I have a word to say, which no advocate, however anxious and devoted he may be, can utter for me. I say, whatever part I may have taken in the straggle for my country's independence, whatever part I may have acted in my short career, I stand before you, my lords, with a free heart and a light conscience, to abide the issue of your sentence. And now, my lords, this is, perhaps, the fittest time ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... doing? After Rosser was driven from the field, it was found that there was a line of infantry not far to the right and rear. Indeed, the left of the infantry line overlapped the right of the cavalry. Attention was called to the fact when, after the fight, some of the cavalrymen began to straggle to the rear and returning, said that the Twenty-sixth Michigan infantry was only a little way off, and a good many of the men went over for a brief ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... is thrown across it, or it would sink beneath the tread, and bury the visitor in the gloomy depth beneath. The desolation and decay impress themselves on all the senses. The air has a mouldering smell, and an earthy taste; any stray outer sounds that straggle in with some lost sunbeam, are muffled and heavy; and the worm, the maggot, and the rot have changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch, as time will seam and roughen a smooth hand. If ever Ghosts act plays, they act them on ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... buried him ashore, and then went out again, after giving us the precise date at which the world was coming to an end, and saying what a hell of a poor millennium it was going to be for anybody save them! Oh, yes, the usual straggle of vessels that happened our way, with months between; and, once, the smoke of ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... your ranks," Sir John said; "remember that any who straggle may be attacked by a score of these wild men, and slain before others can come to their help. Ride forward in perfect silence, till we are ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... that convict cut. Besides, it isn't becoming. And if you're going to be an American violinist you'll have to look it—with a foreign finish." He let his hair grow. Fanny watched with interest for the appearance of the unruly lock which had been wont to straggle over his white forehead in his schoolboy days. The new and well-cut American clothes effected surprisingly little change. Fanny, surveying him, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... you are devising means of subsistence for the widows and orphans of the men who will straggle out to be slaughtered to-night,' said Luciano; 'you have occupation ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cannon which St. Clair had brought into the wilderness with immense waste of time and toil, proved useless under the fire that galled the artillerymen. The weak, undisciplined, and bewildered army was hemmed in on every side, and the men were shot down as they huddled together or tried to straggle away, till half their number was left upon the field. Of course none of the wounded were spared. The Americans were tomahawked and scalped where they fell; one of the savages told afterwards that he plied his hatchet until he could hardly ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... the foremost of the throng—not much of a feat, considering his advantages. He placed himself in the lead, his wooden sword still in hand, and solemnly directed the march, conforming his pace to theirs and occasionally turning as if to see that his forces did not straggle. Surely such a leader never before had such ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Highness arrived there. As I had formerly known something of a Highland army, the first thing I did was to advise the Prince to endeavour to get proper people for provisors and commissaries, for otherwise there would be no keeping the men together, and they would straggle through the whole country upon their marches if it was left to themselves to find provisions; which, beside the inconveniency of irregular marches, and much time lost, great abuses would be committed, which, above all things, we were to avoid. I got many of the men to make small knapsacks of sacking ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... straggle in next week. Coneways' isn't due until the 31st—the very last minute! But he's always prompt, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... that looked unnaturally white and ghostly in the pale dawn of the early morning. It was down hill for about a mile, and traveling was comparatively easy at first, but when the road reached the bottom of the valley it stopped and seemed to straggle off into numerous little foot-paths. The broadest and most traveled looking path Lucia followed, picking her way carefully for fear of stumbling and thus losing some of the ...
— Lucia Rudini - Somewhere in Italy • Martha Trent
... Oceanica in cultural achievements, whose origin he therefore assigns to that vast congeries of islands stretching from Asia toward South America in latitude 25 deg. south. These islands, closely clustered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with widening spaces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the indestructible memorials of a strange civilization, through Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the Peruvian ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... on, the forest assumed the appearance of those towards Khegumpa. Q. robur, recommences, cedars straggle down; Pinus pendula, more common, Arenariae sp., Lomaria of Khegumpa, Hottoneoides ranunculofolia common, Luzula, Sedi sp., Sambucus common throughout in shady spots, Radsurae sp., Daphne papyracea, rare, Acer sterculiacea ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... other mule, doesn't care—some one'll have to keep him moving. I usually carry a little rubber sling shot in my pocket, and when Nigger gets too lazy and begins to straggle off I turn around and peck him one with a pebble. Then you ought to see him get into his place ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... come back from their Southern rambles among the rice, all speckled with gray; and, singing no longer as they did in spring, they quietly feed upon the ripened reeds that straggle along the borders of the walls. The larks, with their black and yellow breastplates, and lifted heads, stand tall upon the close-mown meadow, and at your first motion of approach spring up, and soar away, and light again, and with their lifted ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... figures which astronomers still allow to straggle over their star maps no longer have any real scientific interest, they still possess a certain charm, not only for the student of astronomy, but for many who care little or nothing about astronomy as a science. When I was giving a course of twelve lectures in Boston, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... did the last of the scouts straggle in. None of these bore any news, and all agreed that no signs could they find of any large band of men, nor of any men at all. Turlough heard their reports, letting Brian sleep, and only when the last man came in were any tidings brought. This ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... followed hers, roaming over the little flower plot in search of room for the geranium, which did not appear; prince's feather and marigolds so choked up the ground where balsams did not straggle over it. Molly looked as Daisy did at the possibilities of the case, looked again at the strange sweet little face which was so busy in her garden; and then made a sudden movement. With two or three motions of hands and knees she drew herself a few steps back ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... on his, as if beseeching him to forgo his irony, which hurt her. They sat silent for some time. The sheep broke their cluster, and began to straggle back to the ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... neared the margin. At the apex it changed to a reddish brown tinge that surrounded the typical eye-spot of all the Attacus group for almost three-fourths of its circumference. The bottom of the eye was blackish blue, shading abruptly to pale blue at the top. The straggle M of white was in its place at the extreme tip, on the usual rose madder field. From there a broad clay-coloured band edged the wing and joined the dark colour in escallops. Through the middle of it in an irregular wavy line ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... in number, straggle in from the dining-room by twos and threes, chatting in low tones. The men and women with few exceptions separate into two groups, the women congregating in the left right angle of chairs, the men sitting or standing in the right right angle. In appearance, most of the patients are tanned, healthy, ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... is Ts'ao Kung's interpretation. Chang Yu adopts it, saying: "We must quickly bring up our rear, so that head and tail may both reach the goal." That is, they must not be allowed to straggle up a long way apart. Mei Yao-ch'en offers another equally plausible explanation: "Supposing the enemy has not yet reached the coveted position, and we are behind him, we should advance with all speed in order to dispute ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... Colonel Graves sadly. "Plenty of men would volunteer, but, much as every one is suffering—the ladies almost as bad as your wounded, Morton—I dare not send them, for they would never get back with their loads. Many of the brave fellows would straggle back, of course, but instead of bringing ice, Doctor, they would be bearing their wounded and ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... de Lamotte?" inquired a particularly dirty woman, whose cap, stuck on the side of her, head, allowed locks of grey hair to straggle from under it. "Ah! is that Monsieur ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... learnt them by heart afterward from the trumpeter, who was always talking about Mayorga and Rueda and Bennyventy.—'We made the rear-guard, after General Paget; and drove the French every time; and all the infantry did was to sit about in wine-shops till we whipped 'em out, an' steal an' straggle an' play the tom-fool in general. And when it came to a stand-up fight at Corunna, 'twas we that had to stay seasick aboard the transports, an' watch the infantry in the thick o' the caper. Very well they behaved, too—'specially the Fourth Regiment, an' the Forty-Second Highlanders and the Dirty ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... at attention, order your men to march at ease and to light cigarettes and eat bananas. Then, having fixed bayonets, give the order: Across the road—straggle! ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... despondent, denouncing and renouncing the game, once and for all, absolutely and finally, until the afternoon, when they return like thieves in the night and venture out in a desperate hope; two more come stamping back in even more offensive enthusiasm; and the remainder straggle home moody and disillusioned, reviving their sunken spirits by ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... mistake for a rope-ferry on the Mosel. The cottage looks like the dilapidated lodge of an old monastery, and here, at least, is no trimness. Two walls with a flight of steps in each enclose a grass terrace between them, and trees and bushes straggle to the edge of the river, hardly keeping clear of the swinging rope. Coracles are sometimes used for ferrying—also punts. Bangor is a familiar name to students of church history, and to those who are not, the startling tale of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Gallery. Contained in two vast edifices on both sides of the Arno; united by long corridors, which from the Uffizi straggle down to the river, cross the bridge, and reach the Pitti Palace by the upper story of the houses bordering the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... a gallop, though the horses obtained at Windsor were already jaded, and very slowly the bluff grew higher. Glancing over his shoulder, Grant saw a few moving objects straggle across the crest of the rise. They seemed to grow plainer while he watched them, and ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... old walls of its immense abbey the town of Villeneuve has built itself a rough faubourg; the fragments with which the soil was covered having been, I suppose, a quarry of material. There are no streets; the small, shabby houses, almost hovels, straggle at random over the uneven ground. The only im- portant feature is a convent of cloistered nuns, who have a large garden (always within the walls) behind their house, and whose doleful establishment you look down ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... had taken up their residence in the rushes and flags of the upper end of the lake. These birds are not such exclusive westerners as their ebon-hued cousins just described; for I found them breeding at Lake Minnetonka, near Minneapolis, Minnesota, a few years ago, and they sometimes straggle, I believe, as far east as Ohio. A most beautiful bird is this member of the Icteridae family, a kind of Beau Brummel among his fellows, with his glossy black coat and rich yellow—and even orange, in highest feather—mantle covering the whole head, neck, and breast, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... abstraction of soil from the uses of cultivation. There are some side-hills so rocky and sterile as to defy human industry, and these are given up to brush-wood, which I presume is cut occasionally and bound into faggots for fuel. Some of it may straggle up, if permitted, into trees, but I saw little that would fairly justify the designation of Forest. Of Fruit-trees, save in the villages, there is a deplorable ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... important as its localities, and it is hard to follow the course of the struggle if the narrative loses itself in the different threads of the various corps engaged. For all were fighting at the same time, and the only generalizations possible are that the straggle tended to concentrate from both wings towards the apex at Ypres and to culminate in the combat of the last day of ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... to retake it would have led to certain disaster. The only just criticism to which the regiment is open is that, having just come off blockhouse duty, they were much out of condition, which caused the men to straggle and the ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as may be supposed, retaliate. Should any animal straggle from the main body, it is certain to be carried off. Major Denham lost a favourite dog, which was captured ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... framed prospects, and solemn vistas opening at every turn across the lowland. One of these views might be selected for especial notice. In front, irregular buildings losing themselves in country as they straggle by the roadside; then the open post-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far away ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... showing no impatience for the meeting. The end of the world, not the beginning of it, that was what spring would mean to him, and that is a graver catastrophe at eighteen than at eighty. The boy who was facing it had passed the outlying straggle of houses, and had come to the edge of the town, and to the end of the long, hilly street that led down past the court-house, straight into Post Office Square, the heart of the town. It was still empty of traffic at ten, and looked sunny and empty and clean, wide-awake ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... could not then approve, That clung to Nature with a truant's love, O'er Gallia's wastes of corn my footsteps led; 45 Her files of road-elms, high above my head In long-drawn vista, rustling in the breeze; Or where her pathways straggle as they please By lonely farms and secret villages. But lo! the Alps ascending white in air, [11] 50 Toy with the sun and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... on. Two clumsy water-towers give height without dignity—a quality denied to military architecture in Alaska. To the right the town begins, and an irregular row of one and two story buildings, stores, warehouses, drinking shops, straggle along the water-front. ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... hour passed. The bit of wreck that was jammed between the rocks went to pieces and came ashore. Ben's mate came with it, but no Noll. The men began to straggle homeward, weary and worn with the night's vigil, till only Dirk and Hark Darby were left to keep the stricken master of the stone house company. Oh, such a weary waiting it was!—the ceaseless pouring of the waves upon ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... she loves the country, and the boughs that bear the thriving fruit. Her right hand is not weighed down with a javelin, but with a curved pruning-knife, with which, at one time she crops the {too} luxuriant shoots, and reduces the branches that straggle without order; at another time, she is engrafting the sucker in the divided bark, and is {so} finding nourishment for a stranger nursling. Nor does she suffer them to endure thirst; she waters, too, the winding fibres of the twisting root with the flowing ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... rare, yet a still week Leaves hardly ten yards anywhere uncrossed; Tempest spreads all revirginate like snow, Half burying dead wood snapped off from tossed trees, Since right along the foreshore, out of reach Of furious driven waves, three hundred pines Straggle the marches between sand and soil. Like maps of stone-walled fields their branching roots Hold the silt still so that thin grass grows there, Its blades whitened with travelling powdery drift The besom of the lightest breeze sets stirring. ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... ambition, and in any country but England she would have been a conspirator, and in old times might have risen to be a queen; but as it was, she was only a proud, discontented woman. She knew, too, that it was all she could be—all that her sex allowed her to be—yet did she not the less straggle and toil on. The fate of her father still haunted her; her promise and his death-bed still rose oft and solemnly before leer; the humiliations she had known in her early condition—the homage that had attended her later career—still ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... burning, when I returned, and everything undisturbed. They must have entered noiselessly, and carried her off without a straggle," replied Sir Norman, with a ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... the French dared not straggle. Every man who left the ranks or lagged behind was killed. The Arabs were seldom seen, but they lay concealed behind every inequality of the ground, every clump of bushes. Occasionally, when there seemed ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... fact, we learned later that all the servants were out except the nursery governess. There were two small children. There was a servants' ball somewhere, and, with the exception of the butler, it was after two before they commenced to straggle in. Except two plain-clothes men from the central office, a physician who was with Elinor in her room, and the governess, there was no one else in the house but the ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... natural beauty, in which the village church and the ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens, with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such old-fashioned flowers. At one ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... the crooked trail along which straggle the cabins, I saw something white in a tree at the far end. Supposing it to be a White-rabbit in a snare, I went near and found, to my surprise, first that it was a dead house-cat, a rare species here; second, under it, eyeing ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... get out of him except more chuckles. I files away the name, though; and that afternoon, while we was waitin' for a quorum of directors to straggle into the General Offices, I springs it ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... nobler portion of the town The curling billows roll their restless tide: In parties now they straggle up and down, As armies, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... said tersely. "One, with the address written in the clear, bold hand of a gentleman, and one, the straggle of a ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a sound that seemed to burst something inside my ear. "You are expected on board," said the sergeant to my convict; "they know you are coming. Don't straggle, my man. ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... straggle in my restlesse thoughts, And lively forms with orient colours clad Walk in my boundlesse mind, as men ybrought Into some spacious room, who when they've had A turn or two, go out, although unbad. All these I see and know, but entertain None to my friend ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... edge of fields to the front, thus compelling their foes to advance over open ground exposed to a deadly fire. The early superiority of the attacking army wore gradually away, and while it continued to gain ground its dead and wounded were numerous and close behind it, causing, doubtless, many to straggle or stop to care for their comrades. It has been charged that much disorganization arose from the pillage of the Union captured camps. The divisions of Hurlburt and W. H. L. Wallace were soon, with the reserve artillery, actively engaged, and, save for a brief period, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... WEST.—A third result was a straggle for the trade of the West. Favored by the river system, the farmers of the West were able to float their produce, on raft and flatboat, to New Orleans. Before the introduction of the steamboat, navigation up the Mississippi was all but impossible. Flatboats, rafts, barges, ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... one from their nest of gunny-bags under the cart-tilts. There were always many who could do no more than breathe, and the milk was dropped into their toothless mouths drop by drop, with due pauses when they choked. Each morning, too, the goats were fed; and since they would straggle without a leader, and since the natives were hirelings, Scott was forced to give up riding, and pace slowly at the head of his flocks, accommodating his step to their weaknesses. All this was sufficiently ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... shepherd has a sheep dog, partly for the sake of companionship and partly for assistance. A good sheep dog is a very useful and valuable animal. He aids the shepherd in keeping the flock together whenever any of them show a disposition to straggle, and the sheep speedily learn to know him and regard him as their friend. He never injures them, though he frequently makes a great pretense of doing so. Sometimes he takes a refractory sheep by the ear, or seizes it by the wool on his neck, but the case is ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... much of a spieler. Raucous-voiced, red- faced, greasy, he stands outside his gaudy tent, dilating on the wonders within. One or two, perhaps, straggle in. But the crowd, made wary by bitter experience of the sham and cheap fraud behind the tawdry canvas flap, stops a moment, laughs, and passes on. Then Temptation, in a panic, seeing his audience drifting away, summons ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... trumpeter, who was always talking about Mayorga and Rueda and Bennyventy.'—We made the rear-guard, under General Paget; and drove the French every time; and all the infantry did was to sit about in wine-shops till we whipped 'em out, an' steal an' straggle an' play the tomfool in general. And when it came to a stand-up fight at Corunna, 'twas we that had to stay seasick aboard the transports, an' watch the infantry in the thick o' the caper. Very well they behaved, too—specially the Fourth Regiment, ...
— The Roll-Call Of The Reef • A. T. Quiller-Couch (AKA "Q.")
... grown wonderfully popular there since he was taken prisoner and tied hand and foot. To do faction justice, it is of no cowardly nature; it abuses while it attacks, and loads with panegyric those it defeats. We have nothing in Parliament but a quiet straggle for an extension of the Habeas Corpus.(871) It passed our House swimmingly, but will be drowned with the same ease in the House of Lords. On the new taxes we had an entertaining piece of pomp from the Speaker: Lord Strange (it was in a committee) said, "I will bring him down from ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... when the sharper lines of nature are softened by the haze, some came to us from across the mountains to make up for the deserters. From time to time a little group would straggle to the gates of the station, weary and footsore, but overjoyed at the sight of white faces again: the fathers walking ahead with watchful eyes, the women and older children driving the horses, and the babies slung to the pack in hickory withes. Nay, some ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... councils, their daily work, their feasts, or their attendance at church, they are generally behind the appointed hour. If a council is called to commence at noon, three or four Indians will have perhaps assembled at that hour; others straggle in as the day wears on; they sit or lie about, smoking their pipes, chewing tobacco, and talking; and it will probably be three o'clock before ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... being talked about outside on account of the gold deposits along the upper reaches of the Stanley—largely mythically I believe. However that may be, prospectors began to straggle in, and in the summer of the year following Ernest's return from college, the government sent in a surveyor, one Frank Starling, to survey the claims, and adjust disputes. Starling brought with him his daughter Clare, a young lady ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... offenders speedily. The scouts sent down the Kanawha returned and reported two fires and five Indians within fifteen miles of the Ohio. It was plain that the Indians were dogging our steps day and night, and the men were warned not to straggle. ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... saddled with care, Nor cumber'd myself with corselet nor casque (Being loth to burden the brave brown mare). Young Clare kept watch on the wall—he cried, "Now, haste, Ralph! this is the time to seize; The rebels are round us on every side, But here they straggle by twos and threes." Then out I led her, and up I sprung, And the postern door ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... more I think fit to add; That it may be convenient once in four, or five, or six years, to cut off the strings and roots which straggle into the borders, with a very sharp spade, that they may not prejudice the flowers, and what else one plants ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Antoinette," said Josepha, with a smile, "that you would not submit tamely to death. You have a brave soul, my little sister, and will know how to straggle against misfortune. But I—I have no spirit, I can only suffer and obey; and before I die, I must open my heart to you—you shall receive ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the enmity of Austria, which had massed troops on the Wallachian frontier, remained on the defensive, but in October Omar Pasha assumed the aggressive, sending a small force across the Danube at Vidin, and it was thought that the straggle between the contending forces would take place in 'Lesser Wallachia.' Omar Pasha, however, either intended this as a feint, or changed his plan, for he soon afterwards occupied strong positions on the Danube ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... the other boys began to straggle down and cluster round the fire, and Paul withdrew from the aggrieved Tipping, and looked drearily out of the window on the hard road and bare ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... received its peculiar impress: the delicately blown breath of the first cold. The stubbles straggle wanly sunwards, and the falling leaves rustle to the earth, with a sound as of ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... under its disadvantages ever since those days. The town has been pinched between the steep hills, and forced to straggle back for miles along the harbour inlet. On the southern side of the basin the slope has beaten the builder, and on the dominant green hill, through the grass of which thrusts grey and red-brown masses of the sharp-angled rock stratum, there are ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... line and down to Thorlakson on a handcar or a freight train. But again he had not reckoned on the number of men with whom he would have to deal at the camp. McIvor's party proper consisted only of three men beside himself; but the half-breeds and others who had been invited for a spree began to straggle in till escape became almost impossible. They caught him the first time he tried it and after that he had been guarded more closely. It was plain to him that Nickleby, knowing of this McIvor expedition, had paid McIvor's agent to carry him into ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... world. Well,—if you march along one of these streets, you must ride as I rode, when I came up to you. You must not let your knights go first, and your men-at-arms straggle after in a tail a mile long, like a scratch pack of hounds, all sizes but except each others'. You must keep your footmen on the high street, and make your knights ride in two bodies, right and left, upon the wold, to ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... to us, and that he had stripped the thievish emissaries of their property as a punishment. Our guides thought these were only spies of a larger party, concealed in the forest through which we were now about to pass. We prepared for defense by marching in a compact body, and allowing no one to straggle far behind the others. We marched through many miles of gloomy forest in gloomier silence, but nothing disturbed us. We came to a village, and found all the men absent, the guides thought, in the ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Commonwealth Entrusted to chastise All knaves that straggle up and down To raise ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... time of the year, in 48-sized pots filled with rather firm soil; and as the seedlings straggle through and show two pairs of leaves, pot them off singly, and give the shelter of a close pit or frame until they become established. They must not be allowed to suffer for lack of water, but there is no necessity to give them manure water ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... her foot up tenderly and examined it with care. "My, my!" he murmured. "You poor little soldier. If I hadn't looked around that time I expect you'd been willing to walk all the way to Richmond on a foot that would make a whole regiment straggle. Just see where you've cut it—right under the second little piggie. We'll have to tie it right up and keep the bothersome old dust from getting in. By morning you'll hardly ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple |
