"Unkempt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in prison, and repeated Tom's volunteer statement. The picture, though his intentions were far from designing it so, had to Richard, whose perception of humour was infinitely keener, a horrible chaw-bacon smack about it. Visions of a grinning lout, open from ear to ear, unkempt, coarse, splay-footed, rose before him and afflicted him with the strangest sensations of disgust and comicality, mixed up with pity and remorse—a sort of twisted pathos. There lay Tom; hobnail Tom! a bacon-munching, reckless, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... them; one glance singled him out. He was of that type chosen always by old man Packard to head any one of the Packard units, a sort of confident mastery in his very stride, the biggest man of them, unkempt and heavy, with a brutal face and hard eyes. Joe Woods, his name. Packard had already heard of him, a rowdy and a rough-neck but a capable timberjack to the calloused fingers of him. He followed the men into ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... to come forward, and, as he went, he caught sight of himself reflected in the polished steel shield of the bodyguard, and started back in horror! He was old, decrepit, dirty, and ragged! His long white beard and locks were unkempt, and straggled all over his chest and shoulders. Only one sign of royalty remained to him, and that was the signet ring upon his right hand. He dragged it off with shaking fingers and held it up ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... on, while over his grey quiet, generations of men pass. First came savage, warring, brown races alien to each other; then following, white races with faces tanned and burnt by the sun, and smothered in unkempt beard and hair—men restless and coarse and brave, and with ancient sins upon them; but with the Bible in their hands and the language of the prophets on their lips; with iron will, with hatred as ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a policeman out of livery. Sirdeller himself, in the clear light which streamed through the large window, seemed more aged and shrunken than ever. His eyes were deep set. No tinge of color was visible in his cheeks. His chin protruded, his shaggy gray eyebrows gave him an unkempt appearance. He wore a black velvet gown, a strangely cut black morning coat and trousers, felt slippers, and his hands were clasped upon a stout ash walking-stick. He eyed the newcomers keenly ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was a tall man, with gray, unkempt hair, and long, wizened face. He wore a black suit of clothes, of ancient cut, and a stock which had ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... said, holding up his lanthorn so that the light fell on the man's haggard face and unkempt hair. 'Tell his Excellency what you have told me, or I will skin you alive, ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... come one now," she responded, indicating a horseman, who, as he passed, looked with admiring eyes over the fence that divided the garden from the sidewalk. He was a large man, his figure hidden in a great black cloak and his face in a great black beard growing bushy and unkempt up to his eyes. A sword, notable for its ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... pass the boundary of Washington city to be fairly in the country, and ten minutes' walk in the country brings one to real primitive woods. The town has not yet overflowed its limits like the great Northern commercial capitals, and Nature, wild and unkempt, comes up to its very threshold, and even in many places ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... of whiskers and put into a correct setting, William was handsome; even more than that, he was interesting. He had that firm, chiselled kind of mouth which women and artists find so attractive, and a delightful cleft in his chin; his hair, which had hitherto always struck me as being so unkempt and disordered, now that it was brushed smoothly back from his brow and curled into the nape of his neck gave him a distinguished appearance. I directed one long look at him and then instinctively ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... the stove, where the ashes were still warm. It was not a day for fires, but he loved his accustomed corner. He was a middle-aged man, old with the suffering which is not of years, and the pathos of his stricken state hung about him, from his unkempt beard to the dusty black clothing which had been the Tiverton minister's outworn suit. One would have said he belonged to ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... foreshadowing of evil that had, somehow, a present hostage in the deep silence of Ume's room. Of what was her nursling thinking? How had it seemed to her, so guarded, and so delicately reared, this being summoned like a hired geisha to dance before a stranger,—a ragged, unkempt, hungry stranger! Even her father's well-known madness for things of art could scarcely atone to his child for ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... before she was fifteen that Kathleen's aunt, a maiden lady from Dublin, who rejoiced in the truly Irish name of O'Flynn, came to see them, remarked on Kathleen's wild, unkempt appearance, declared that the girl would be a downright beauty when she was eighteen, said that no one would tolerate such a want of knowledge in the present day, and advised that she should go to school. Mrs. O'Hara took Miss O'Flynn's hint very much to heart. Kathleen was consulted, and of ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... Wrangle's head and neck. Janet's heart sank as she tried to recognize Venters in the rider. Something familiar struck her in the lofty stature in the sweep of powerful shoulders. But this bearded, longhaired, unkempt man, who wore ragged clothes patched with pieces of skin, and boots that showed bare legs and feet—this dusty, dark, and wild rider could ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... as he spoke, a lean, unkempt figure invested with a curious dignity, and I found it almost impossible to believe that this was the same man who had sat in the bar of the Lavender Arms, sipping whisky and water. The resemblance to the ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... through the doorway upon the flagstones was darkened by the shadow of a woman. It was a poorly clad orchard worker, young, it seemed, but with a face pale, and as rough as wrinkled paper, all the crevices and hollows of her cranium showing, her eyes sunken and dull, her unkempt hair escaping from beneath her knotted kerchief. She was barefoot, carrying her shoes in her hand. She stood with her legs wide apart, as if in an effort to keep her balance. She seemed to feel intense pain whenever she stepped upon the ground. ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... frightful remnant of humanity, that remnant into which fifty years of toil, misery and social injustice had turned a man. And he ended by distinguishing Laveuve's white, worn, sunken, deformed head. Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve's unkempt beard straggled over his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the day of the Altrurian Emissary, whirs softly through the most crowded thoroughfare, far below the speed limit, with a sigh of gentle satisfaction in its own harmlessness, and, "like the sweet South, taking and giving odor." The streets that he saw so filthy and unkempt in 1893 are now at least as clean as they are quiet. Asphalt has universally replaced the cobble-stones and Belgian blocks of his day, and, though it is everywhere full of holes, it is still asphalt, and may some time be ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... outside one; far enough away from its smoke to allow of successful gardening, not too far to prevent little feet from wandering thither from narrow courts and alleys, to breathe a purer air, and gaze, with longing eyes, at the fair blossoms. It always irritated Mrs. Crook to see these dirty, unkempt little creatures clustering around her gate, or peeping through ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... of the bedraggled and unkempt figure that had crawled beneath the sheet ten minutes before, there rose before them all apparently a tall young stripling, clean and white and shining as a fair Greek god. His hair was curly, he was dressed ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... moment, Janet held her there, looking over the shoulders that crumbled against her thin breast, at the disordered room before her. She saw the crusts of bread, she saw the bed-clothes hanging to the floor. She gazed down at the unkempt head of hair that dragged lifelessly on her shoulder, and her eyes ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... brilliant and cutting like an acetylene torch. If any impurities drift there, they must be burnt up as in a clear flame. It is droll that she should work in a pants factory. —Yet where else... tousled and collar awry at her olive throat. Besides her hands are unkempt. With English... and everything... there is so little time. She reads without bias— Doubting clamorously— Psychology, plays, science, philosophies— Those giant flowers that have bloomed and withered, scattering their ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... was offended and disappeared for three days. The orderlies reported he had been seen in the country in doubtful company. At last he returned, cheerful and unkempt, with one ear torn and one eye bleeding, and asked to be let ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... weeks after the events just narrated, a youth, tanned to the swarthiness of an Indian, whose hair was long and unkempt, and whose well-worn suit of buckskin evidenced hard and prolonged travel, paced impatiently to and fro in the anteroom of Sir William's private office at Johnson Castle. Although his moccasined feet made no sound on the uncarpeted ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... miserable-looking man—tall, thin, and stoop shouldered—they saw, when they got him on his feet. Unkempt and unwashed, his long, black hair hung around a face sallow in the extreme. And he shook so, as Tom and Jasper marched him back, escorted by the body-guard of the parson and the little doctor, that the two boys put their hands under his ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... He was an unkempt urchin with an aggressive and challenging countenance, but he had solved several problems in economy. One of these was the entire elimination of stockings and garters. This was accomplished by the use of a pair of trousers with legs of such ample ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... man, shorter by nearly two inches than his wife or Lord Chadwick. His hair had once been red; it was now faded, and the tall forehead showed bald amid a slight gleaning. His beard and moustaches were thick, unkempt, and full of grey hair. The nose was small and aquiline, and the eyes, shallow and pale blue, wore a silly and vacant stare. The skin was coloured everywhere alike, a sort of conventional tone of flesh-colour seemed to have been poured over the face, forehead, and neck. His short thick ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... vagabonds, looking as though they had never a single care in all the world; the men wear long, flowing hair, and to the ordinary costume of the peasant is added many a gewgaw, worn with a careless jaunty grace that fails not to carry with it a certain charm in spite of unkempt locks and dirty faces. The women wear a minimum of clothes and a profusion of beads and trinkets, and the children go stark naked or ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... my heel, the hat without a crown— The unkempt suit of yellow hair the sun had burnt to brown— And let me go and soak myself, just where we used to walk, In that old swimmin' pool we had, ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... him as she waited at the gate of the hospital for Anna Gates, thinking of his shabby gray suit and unkempt hair, of his letter that she carried to Jimmy Conroy, of his quixotic proposal of the night before. Of the proposal, most of all—it was so eminently characteristic of Peter, from the conception of the plan to its execution. Harmony's thought ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... month—filled him with contempt for her powers. "She doesn't hurt," he explained to Maisie, who urged him to rebellion, "and she is kinder to you after she has whacked me." Dick shambled through the days unkempt in body and savage in soul, as the smaller boys of the school learned to know, for when the spirit moved him he would hit them, cunningly and with science. The same spirit made him more than once try to tease Maisie, but the girl refused to be made unhappy. "We are both miserable as it ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... stiffly up in his chair. His mass of brown hair seemed more unkempt than usual, his hard face sterner than ever by reason ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... arms entwined crossed on the grass before them, at the edge of the shadow from their tree. The sunlight fell cruelly on their pale, squashed, unkempt young faces. "We're an ugly lot!" said old Jolyon suddenly. "It amazes me to see ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the place, cloudy with its pipe-smoke and redolent with the stale fumes of fires long dead. Like some Hogarth picture against a sombre background the ungainly figures of men stood out of shadow and melted into it: men unkempt and tribal in their ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to the one unkempt corner of Mr. Battershall's garden, where in the shadow of a stone dovecot, ruinated and long disused, a rustic bench stood deep in nettles. On this she perched herself, and sat with legs dangling while she discoursed with ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... creatures with office to remind the barefooted trespasser that no charter of the isles and their wrecks is flawless, and that they are prepared to inflict curious pains and limping penalties for every incautious intrusion on their domicile. Few of the denizens of the unkempt coral gardens are more remarkable than the crabs. By reef and shore I have come literally into contact with so many quaint specimens, and they have so often afforded exhilarating diversion and sent brand-new startling ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines and weeds and scrub-oaks intertwine Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant stone 80 Is massed to one soft gray by lichens fine, The tangled blackberry, crossed and recrossed, weaves A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... else too," goes on Perpetua, this time rather angrily. "They said you were so clever that you always looked unkempt. That," thoughtfully, "means that you didn't brush your hair enough. Never mind, ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... and attended by the ever-faithful Lily. Her condition seemed as serious as when Sophy had arrived from England, ten months previously, she found the patient propped up among her pillows, weak, apathetic, and terribly wasted. She looked dreadfully ill and her whole appearance was unkempt and strange. ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... a mission and noted the contrast it made with the bare, unkempt posts of the State. It was the Catholic mission at Wombali, and it was a beauty spot of flowers, thatched houses, grass, and vegetables. There was a brickyard, and schools, and sewing-machines, and the blacks, instead of scowling ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... the carriage before Chung had descended the first half-dozen steps. He opened the door and saw a limp, unkempt form sprawled upon the seat. He recognized it instantly as Arsdale. But the man was in no condition to be carried home. He must take him somewhere and watch over him until he was in a more presentable shape. But one place ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... to start as he heard her voice, and gazed with sudden searching into her pale face in the gloaming. Then she knew him—knew, and yet could hardly believe her eyes, her ears, her instincts—could not realize that in this rough, disordered, unkempt figure, with the torn clothes and the dark stains on his ragged sleeve, she saw the handsome, graceful, debonair lover of her girlhood, the recreant bridegroom who had left her on the very threshold of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Yet it was the best they could expect to find for the little rent they were able to pay. Situated in one of the cheapest parts of Harlem, the flat was in a row of tenement-like buildings, facing a street always filled with noisy, unkempt children. The corridors and staircases were gaudily decorated and the narrow halls and small rooms, shut off from proper light and air, gave one a sense of suffocation. The furnishings were of the scantiest. Jimmie having incurred certain heavy debts, ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... that same morning were seated upon the bench—may be all observed at the Monte table, mingling with men in red flannel shirts, blanket coats, and trousers tucked into the tops of mud-bedaubed boots; with sailors in pea-jackets of coarse pilot, or Guernsey smocks, unwashed, unkempt, unshorn; not only mingling with, but jostled by ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... down! And when, at length, her years of madness o'er, Like the crowned grazer on Euphrates' shore, From her long lapse to savagery, her mouth Bitter with baneful herbage, turns the South, Resumes her old attire, and seeks to smooth Her unkempt tresses at the glass of truth, Her early faith shall find a tongue again, New Wythes and Pinckneys swell that old refrain, Her sons with yours renew the ancient pact, The myth of Union prove at last a fact! Then, if one murmur mars the wide content, Some Northern lip ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... aloof and chill, Said to me as plain as plain, "I am waiting, waiting still, Till the gods come back again; Starved and ugly, mean, unkempt, I have dreams by you undreamt, And—I hold you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... of the forest—like stars, and often covered the whole bush, so that the slopes looked like a charming carpet of the loveliest pattern. This tree, the most beautiful of the tropical forest, far surpasses the palm in elegance, whose crown too often looks yellowish and unkempt. ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... stout, but I should have said that in so small a frame one seldom saw such activity and strength. Like some pollard oak, he seemed all knotted with muscle and vigour. He went bearded and wore his hair unshaven, and thus amid those Norman lords, shorn back and front, he looked wild and unkempt. ...
— The Fall Of The Grand Sarrasin • William J. Ferrar
... the fever of the dance-hall and the glitter and the shine, The beauty, and the jewels, and the whirl, The madness of the music, the rapture of the wine, The languorous allurement of a girl! She is like a lost madonna; he is gaunt, unkempt and grim; But she fondles him and gazes in his eyes; Her kisses seek his heavy lips, and soon it seems to him He has staked a little claim ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... proceeded to the house together. A minute later we made our way over the rough, unkempt grass which once marked our brick terrace. Brutus opened the door and we were in the dark hall, lighted by a square of candle light from the morning room. He paused again and listened, and then strode across the threshold. A blaze was burning high ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... the broken roof of the ammunition shed, the dismantled platform, the unkempt glacis below it. "For what work, then, do they pay you?" ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... attention upon the other party, the mysterious one who doubtless had found poor K. K. helpless on the ground and borne him to this cavern in the quarry. He was indeed a wild-looking party, with long, unkempt hair and a sunburnt face in which his glowing eyes were deep-seated. There was that about him to convince Hugh instantly he must be deranged, although just then the man bent over poor K. K. solicitously, and seemed to be tenderly doing something ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... wet grass and looked long and silently through the clouded shade, while the second stood above her, gently oscillating to and fro to lull the muling baby. I was struck a great way off with something religious in the attitude of these two unkempt and haggard women; and I drew near faster, but still cautiously, to hear what they were saying. Surely on them the spirit of death and decay had descended; I had no education to dread here: should I not have a chance of seeing nature? Alas! a pawnbroker could not have been more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and momma vainly endeavoured to keep off the smells with her parasol. Then a region of docks and masts rising unexpectedly, and many little fish shops, and a glitter of scales on the pavement, and disconnected coils of rope, and lounging men with earrings, and unkempt women with babies, and above and over all the warm scent, standing still in the sun, of hemp, and ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... carpet of blue-grass, amid clumps of trees and wild bushes. Not far afield on either hand came the black corn-land, but up and down the bluffy sides of the brook for some distance on both sides of the King-dragged highway, ran the old wood-lot, now regaining much of the unkempt appearance which characterized it when Jim Irwin had drawn upon himself the gentle rebuke of Old Man Simms for not giving a whoop from the big road before coming ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... without her missionaries. She has her live-saving Needham; to whom was solemnly presented a 'civic sword,'—long since rusted into nothingness. Her Paine: rebellious Staymaker; unkempt; who feels that he, a single Needleman, did by his 'Common Sense' Pamphlet, free America;—that he can and will free all this World; perhaps even the other. Price-Stanhope Constitutional Association ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... in that sensational trial was reached on the second day, when David Graham, looking wretchedly ill, unkempt, and haggard, stepped into the witness-box. A murmur of sympathy went round the audience at sight of him, who was the second, perhaps, most deeply stricken victim of the Charlotte ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... unusual and in some ways most embarrassing, also. Those nine men were rough and unkempt, but they were splendid horsemen—that I knew intuitively—and to have one of their number select my very own horse above all others to speak of with unstinted praise, was something to be proud of, but to have my own self calmly and complacently disposed of with ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... a hump to his shoulders, and over this he wore an aged purple dressing-gown, which had once belonged to the vicar. The dressing-gown was an obvious refuge; but who but Peggy Saville would have thought of the trimming, which was the making of the shaggy, unkempt look so much desired? Peggy had sat with her hands clasped on her lap, and her head on one side, staring at the gown when it was held out for her approval two days before, then had suddenly risen, and rushed two steps at a time upstairs to the topmost landing, a wide, scantily furnished ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... hundred years to complete. How long this great tower of Commines took, I can only conjecture. Its semi-oriental pear-shaped (or onion-shaped, as you will) tower was certainly of great antiquity; even the unkempt little priest whom I questioned in the Grand' Place could give me little or no information concerning it. Indeed, he seemed to be on the point of resenting my questions, as though he thought that ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... as vain as though I had been skinned and the very air blowing on me hurt. Surely by now you must realise that I shall never forgive you for having found me in this wretched dressing-gown, just as I was flying at Apollon like a spiteful cur. The saviour, the former hero, was flying like a mangy, unkempt sheep-dog at his lackey, and the lackey was jeering at him! And I shall never forgive you for the tears I could not help shedding before you just now, like some silly woman put to shame! And for what I am ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... the hospitalities of the Morrises, the Binghams, and the Willings, and the bodily comforts of Philadelphia hotels and inns, were not likely to find any compensations in the unkempt, straggling village which the Government and private speculators were trying to convert into a fitting abode for the National Government. There were few comfortable private dwellings. Most of the houses were mere ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... heard footsteps approaching, and looking up saw before me a gypsy woman and a boy. She was a very gypsy woman, an ideal witch, nut-brown, tangle-haired, aquiline of nose, and fierce-eyed; and fiercely did she beg! As amid broken Gothic ruins, overhung with unkempt ivy, one can trace a vanished and strange beauty, so in this worn face of the Romany, mantled by neglected tresses, I could see the remains of what must have been once a wonderful though wild loveliness. ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... story, Benjamin Grimshaw had two sons, only one of whom he recognized. For Kate Fullerton was the mother of the other. And, in her shame and her anger and her hate, Kate resolved to follow the father of her base-born child all the days of his life; and there she stands—unkempt, repulsive, menacing—always near him, the living embodiment of the sin ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... you saw suddenly a barefooted, unkempt chap slinking amongst the bushes on the sea face of the island, and at the same time observed less than a mile from the beach, a small schooner full of niggers hauling off in a hurry, you wouldn't think the man fell there from the sky, would you? And it could be nothing else but either that ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... adjourned, a large number of delegates visited Washington, to pay their respects to the President, and among them myself. The city seemed to me hardly less repulsive than at my first visit eight years before; it was still unkempt and dirty,—made indeed all the more so by the soldiery encamped about it, and ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the varied kaleidoscope of my army life stepped the Indian Agent. And of all unkempt, unshorn, disagreeable-looking personages who had ever stepped foot into our ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... encounter what was to him a more disagreeable object—a human figure. By the bedraggled drapery that flapped and fluttered in the wind, by the long, unkempt hair that hid the face and eyes, and by the grotesquely misplaced bonnet, the old man recognized one of his old trespassers—an ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... cheerfully, addressing a slouchy, unkempt woman who sat in front of the fire with her elbows resting on her knees and a dingy cob pipe between her teeth, "punch up the blaze an' dish up a supper while I read my letter an' see what's ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... I had been caught in a lie. With her eyes, I saw the bare feet of our negro band, our ill-fitting uniforms with their flannel facings, the swagger of our officers, glancing pompously from their half-starved, unkempt ponies upon the native Indians, who fawned at us from ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... by the true love of a woman. The Burgomaster accepts his offer, believing Hans to be some grandee under a spell, or bewitched and supposing that when he claims his bride he will be restored to his proper form. Hans however assures him the lady will have to accept him as he is, unkempt and unwashed. After wishing the Burgomaster good night, Hans retires to his chamber, leaving his knapsack in the outer room. The innkeeper on the watch, waits till all is still and comes noiselessly in to steal the money ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... small, not reaching the extremity of the body, which is deeply cleft and supports four long bristles on each side of the cleft, while other bristles are attached to the legs and body, giving the creature, originally ill-shapen, a haggard, unkempt appearance. The two stigmata or breathing pores open near the cleft in the end of the body, and the external opening of the oviduct is situated between the largest and third pair of legs. No males were observed. In a species of Acarus (Tyroglyphus), somewhat like the Cheese mite, which ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... was with our heroes. The junior schoolroom was as the matron's hall and the studies thrown into one.—At first, to the untutored eyes of the visitors, it looked like a surging sea of unkempt heads and waving elbows; then, as their vision grew accustomed to the scene, they beheld faces and legs and boots; then, amid the general din, they distinguished voices, and perceived that the sea was made ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... considerably, and the uppers were just beginning to gape at the crack across the top; but the clothes were neat and clean, and his boots were brushed. His hair was of the straw-coloured variety, with a tendency to red, but it was not tousled or unkempt, but neatly combed; while his little cap was not on straight but pushed back carelessly, just showing a pair of clear but dark-blue Irish eyes and ...
— Irish Ned - The Winnipeg Newsy • Samuel Fea
... man, as he tipped the great bowl toward his face, as though it were some wild animal feeding. The clothes were patched and worn, the coat-front was spattered with stains of all kinds, the hair and beard were unkempt and long, giving him what would have been the look of a mangy lion but that the face had the expression of some beast less honorable. The eyes, however, were malignantly intelligent; the hands, ill-cared ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... bananas, or to carry away the refuse from the fish stores. The negro, in every phase of development, civilization and ignorance, could, and always can, be found within the confines of the market. The amount of folk-lore stored up in the brains covered by masses of unkempt wool astounded the novelist, who distributed dollars, in return for information received, so lavishly, that he began to be looked upon after a while as a capitalist whose wealth had driven him insane. ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... eyes and smile it became clear to me that he had ridden by to see if I was safe and to ask how I was getting along. I remember well how curiously those with him gazed at me, and I am sure that it must have struck them as very odd that such a dirty, ragged, unkempt youth could have been the son of this ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... Tall, bony, heavy-jawed, shaven with a reaping-hook, apparently. He had a thick crop of black hair—shaggy, unkempt, and full of grease, grass, and fragments of dry gum-leaves. On his head were two old felt hats—one sewn inside the other. On his back a shirt made from a piece of blue blanket, with white cotton stitches ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... see his pale, neglected brow, And unkempt tresses, once so fair,— They cried, "O where is Phoebus now? "His ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... warmth of the June day, all the windows were tightly closed. Its occupant, a lank man with a smooth but wizened face, straight white hair and dark, piercing eyes, was in accord with his surroundings,—shabby, unkempt, with cigarette ash down the front of his coat, his collar none ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a stream brawled between snow-clad banks, and the vague form of some frightened animal flitted silently towards the shade. The moon had come out of the clouds, and by its light Estein tried to scan the features of his companion. So far as a fur cap would let his face be seen, he seemed dark, unkempt, and singularly wild of aspect, but there was nothing in his look to catch the Viking's memory. He said not a word, but, with a swinging stride, hastened down the glade, ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... nearly filled with rough unkempt fellows, smoking, drinking, whistling, singing, shouting or jabbering, some in a standing, some in a sitting, posture. My entrance seemed at once to bring everything to a dead stop; the smokers ceased to smoke, the hand that was conveying the glass or the mug to the ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... cheer him. Besides, though Cassy had laughed, there had been a tugging at her heartstrings. Shabby, unkempt, in a frayed dressing-gown, his arm in a dismal sling, he looked so out of ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... imagination of the child differed from the concrete reality, but amazement and keen disappointment constrained them. Here was no figure of romance and delight. No miniature Galatea half hewn out of the block of humanity, waiting for the chisel of a composite Pygmalion. Here was only a grubby, little unkempt child, like all other children, ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... leant back, and swung Dedele round with both hands. Short and lean, with his goatee bristling, and with his wolf-like eyes glaring beneath his unkempt hair, he seemed to snap at each swing of the hammer, springing up from the ground as though carried away by the force he put into the blow. He was a fierce one, who fought with the iron, annoyed at finding it so hard, and he even gave a grunt whenever he thought ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... their rifles against a tree, And made the bright landscape And the golden morning fuller of gold and brightness By the contrast of their furrowed faces, Their shaggy eyebrows, And the gay humor laughing in their eyes, Their unkempt locks, their powder horns, and buskins, And the wild attire, in general, of their persons— Many a time have I heard them Tell of these man-effigies Lying prone on the floors of the prairie. And, in my whim ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... coach and started for that stroll in Spain which I have measured as two up-town blocks, by what I think a pretty accurate guess; two cross-town blocks I am sure it was not. It was a mean-looking street, unswept and otherwise unkempt, with the usual yellowish or grayish buildings, rather low and rather new, as if prompted by a mistaken modern enterprise. They were both shops and dwellings; I am sure of a neat pharmacy and a fresh-looking cafe restaurant, and one dwelling all faced with bright-green tiles. An alguazil—I ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... afternoon of a warm, late-summer day a number of men—twenty-five or thirty—were loitering outside this door in various attitudes of leisure and repose. They were a sorry, unkempt lot, poorly clothed and unshaven, sullen of face and weary-eyed. When they moved it was languidly, when they spoke it was with brevity, in tired, toneless voices. All of them looked hungry and many of them were, for it was the end of the third week ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the first time it occurred to him to look at his clothes, which were muddy from his tumble in the ditch. And no doubt his face and hands were dirty also, and his hair unkempt, and his aspect unprepossessing enough for an applicant for labor. At any rate it was clear that this was not the part of the town to seek it in; so he went back ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... no word from the voice for which he listened. His nerves were dulled by his night of trouble, and he waited in limp wretchedness upon his sofa. There he still sat when the doctors came down to him—a bedraggled, miserable figure with his face grimy and his hair unkempt from his long vigil. He rose as they entered, bracing himself against ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... violently that He stumbled, and often fell. The crowd which followed tried to do everything they could to hurt Him. So Jesus tottered along, bowed under the heavy weight of the wood. His gown covered with street mud, His head pierced by the thorns so that drops of blood trickled down His unkempt hair and over His agonised face. Never before was so wretched a figure dragged to the place of execution, never before was a poor malefactor so terribly ill-treated on his way to death. And never before had such dignity and gentleness been seen ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... upon the landing is the last picture, but one, I have to present of childhood days, ere I hasten, over the period that brought us all into our twenties and to strange, eventful times. The one remaining sketch is of an unkempt, bedraggled figure that I saw at the back hall door of the Faringfields one snowy night a week later, when, for some reason or other, I was out late in our back garden. This person, instead of knocking at the door, very cautiously tried it to see if it would open, and, ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... nettled, too. Then he stood. And then, just in that brief interval, his lips tightened and his mouth looked just as it used to look in the old hoodlum days—rugged, strong. The one saving, hopeful feature which Mr. Ellsworth, his old scoutmaster, had banked upon then in that sooty, unkempt countenance. They were the lips ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the sally. And now he walked and talked like a man on his own soil again, as more of the townsfolk came about—extraordinary people, Bridget thought. Loose-limbed bush-riders, really trim, some of them, in clean breeches and with a scarlet handkerchief doing duty as a belt, unkempt old men, a Unionist Labour organiser addressing a knot of station-hands out of work—even a Chinaman—a Chinky, McKeith called him, who, it appeared kept a nondescript store. That was in the days before the Commonwealth and the battle cry of ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... withstood the fury of his attack, the rural districts were plundered right and left, and laid desolate for many a year to come. The Scythians of this epoch probably resembled those whom we find represented on the monuments of Greek art two centuries later. Tall fierce-looking men, with unkempt beards, their long and straggling locks surmounted by the kyrbasis, or pointed national cap of felt; they wore breeches and a blouse of embroidered leather, and were armed with lances, bows, and battle-axes. They rode bareback on untrained ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... But the unkempt girl was not to be persuaded, and Irene presently took her leave. The conversation had perturbed her; she went away in a very unwonted frame of mind, beset with troublesome fancies and misgivings. Olga's state seemed to her thoroughly unwholesome, to be regarded as a warning; it was ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... wait until after breakfast for the elucidation of the mystery, for when Billy and I reached the beach upon which stood the nearly complete hull of the cutter, two ragged, unkempt, sunburnt scarecrows emerged from the shadow of ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... at revolutions, but he forecast events more clearly and farther ahead than did the men who engineered them. In his mind's eye he saw Honolulu a modern, electric-lighted city at a time when it straggled, unkempt and sand-tormented, over a barren reef of uplifted coral rock. So he bought land. He bought land from merchants who needed ready cash, from impecunious natives, from riotous traders' sons, from widows and orphans ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... his touch on which the craft had cleft the waves, reversed, or turned like a thing of life. "'Twas a pretty toy," he mused, "and many hours of joy have I had as I floated through life on board of her." As he moped along he beheld two unkempt Italians having a piano-organ and a violin. The music was not fine, but it touched a chord in Ayrault's breast, for he had waltzed with Sylvia to that air, and it made his heart ache. "Oh, the acuteness of my distress," he cried, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... was found in magnificent wildness and disarray, her hair quite unkempt. Great pines, shooting up immense distances in the sky skirted the path and flung their green-gray, trailing mosses abroad on the breeze; crowds of fir, spruce, hemlock, and cedar trees stood waving aloft their rich, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... hulk its decking rears. Gray, screaming kestrels wheel and sheer, Above the wasted steering gear. In moulding kelp and mackerel's sheen, The blighted log-book hides unseen. Red flash the beams of northern blaze. Through beaded clouds of Elmo's haze; While dim, unkempt, the ghostly crew Float by, ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... clubbed pigtails under their black, glazed hats. One of them was evidently ill, for he lay back against the backboard and did not speak. I noticed also that he had not been to sea for a long time, as his beard was long and unkempt. The other, who drove the cart, was a one-legged man, very short and broad, with a thick black stubble on his cheeks. He was a hearty person with a voice like a lion's roar. They had rigged up Union Jacks on the donkey's ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... own; but, no, it is not as beautiful as Italy or Ireland, and it isn't as tidy as England. If you keep away from the big manufacturing towns and their outskirts you may go by motor or railway through shire after shire in England and never see anything unkempt, down-at-the-heel, out-at-elbows, or ill-cared-for; no broken-down fences or stone walls; no heaps of rubbish or felled trees by the wayside; no ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a stoker from the hold of an ocean steamer," gibed Joe, as he looked at the unkempt figure ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... the sidewalk, and as he stood waiting for the grocer he noticed Mrs. Markham and the baby, and gave the baby an apple. This was a pleasure. He had such a hearty way about him. He on his part saw an ordinary farmer's wife with dusty dress, unkempt hair, and tired face. He did not know exactly whey she appealed to him, but he tried to cheer ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... The poor woman ran back across the road and through her door, which she would not close behind her. It seemed to shut her in with the dead. She waited in the passage. After an age—seven minutes by any honest clock—Grodman made his appearance, looking as dressed as usual, but with unkempt hair and with disconsolate side-whisker. He was not quite used to that side-whisker yet, for it had only recently come within the margin of cultivation. In active service Grodman had been clean-shaven, like all members of the profession—for surely ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... life. The Renaissance and the Revolution swept away in most parts of the country moated castle, abbaye, grange, and chateau, to replace them with luxurious but conventional piles and ruins humbly restored and humbly inhabited. Many a farmhouse with unkempt cour and dishevelled pelouse is the relic of a turreted chateau, stables are often desecrated churches, seigneurial colombiers shelter swine, and battlemented portals to fortified walls serve, as does the one of our ville, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... steps, but does not reach the toy before the DOCTOR becomes visible at the back of the stage. The DOCTOR comes in, his grey hair long and unkempt. He is wearing a tropical helmet and a hunting coat, which are exactly similar to the clothes of the STRANGER. He behaves as though he doesn't notice the STRANGER'S presence, and sits down on a ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... wild figure with his flowing beard, his long hair falling straight and unkempt about his brown throat; and his sombre monk's garment was wrought on breast and shoulders with a salient cross of natural thorns—the symbol of those monks of Troodos—the Mountain of the Holy Cross; and the ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... landed that the Pier was a contrast to Newport. The shore below the landing is a line of broken, ragged, slimy rocks, as if they had been dumped there for a riprap wall. Fronting this unkempt shore is a line of barrack-like hotels, with a few cottages of the cheap sort. At the end of this row of hotels is a fine granite Casino, spacious, solid, with wide verandas, and a tennis-court—such a building as even Newport might envy. Then come more hotels, a cluster of cheap shops, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... something bitterly enough pathetic in the profound abasement of the common tramp—frouzy, unkempt, dirty, forlorn; without ambition further than to fill his belly with the cold leavings from decent folks' tables; without other pride than to clothe his dirty body with the cast-off rags and tatters of respectability; without further motive of life than to roam hither and yon—idle, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... that we suspected the character of the strangers. As they approached we anxiously examined their appearance, which was certainly not in their favour. They were savage-looking fellows with long beards, their unkempt hair hanging over their shoulders. They pulled up suddenly when they saw us standing with our backs to a couple of large trees, our baggage and saddles piled on the ground, and Toby ...
— Adventures in Australia • W.H.G. Kingston
... when I visited Harar, in confinement: one of them since that time died, and has been buried in his fetters. The Somal declare that the state-dungeon of Harar is beneath the palace, and that he who once enters it, lives with unkempt beard and untrimmed nails until the day when ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... point where they had reached it by means of a deep coulee that wound tortuously through the breaks. Long Bill stood in his doorway and eyed the pair sullenly as they drew rein and climbed stiffly from the saddles. Alice glanced with disgust into the sallow face with its unkempt, straggling beard, and involuntarily recoiled as her eyes met the leer with which he regarded her as ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... major's asleep in that dug-out," volunteered Beale of A, pointing to a hole in a bank that allowed at least two feet of air space above Major Bullivant's recumbent form. The major was unshaven; his fair hair was tousled. He had turned up the collar of his British warm. Beale also looked unkempt, but he said he had had three hours' sleep before the barrage started and felt quite fresh. "Our casualties came just after we got the guns in," he told me. "They dropped two whizz-bangs between No. 1 gun and ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... Yonder are two men, unkempt and unshaven, their heads bent forward and their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets and, to ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... This helped him to keep them in a state of revolt. Their no less unkempt friends, who did not go to school, also found something to complain about—if not against their parents, then against the police, indeed against anything that occurred to them. But their complaints did not contain quite that ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... glance. The newcomers were dirty rogues; tipstaves, recognizable at a glance. One of them wore a ragged bob-wig—the cast-off, no doubt, of some gentleman's gentleman, fished out of the sixpenny tub in Rosemary Lane; it was ill-fitting, and wisps of the fellow's own unkempt hair hung out in places. The other wore no wig at all; his yellow thatch fell in streaks from under his shabby hat, which he had the ill-manners to retain until Lord Ostermore knocked it from his head with a blow of his cane. Both were fierily bottle-nosed, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... patched drawers, stands facing the investigating magistrate. His face overgrown with hair and pitted with smallpox, and his eyes scarcely visible under thick, overhanging eyebrows have an expression of sullen moroseness. On his head there is a perfect mop of tangled, unkempt hair, which gives him an even more spider-like air ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Captain. 'My lord!' exclaimed Hind, a blush upon his cheek, 'I protest my innocence; but willingly will I suffer the heaviest penalty of your law if I am recognised for the thief.' The victims, confronted with their robber, knew him not, picturing to the Governor a monster with long hair and unkempt beard. Hind, acquitted with apologies, fetched from his lodging the disguise of periwig and beard. 'They laugh who win!' he murmured, and thus forced forgiveness and a ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... was a Cappuccin monk, with shaven crown and coarse cassock fastened at the waist by a cord. He was blind in one eye and the lid of the other drooped so as to expose only a thin slit. Fat, awkward and unkempt, he stood holding to the back of his chair and swaying slightly from side to side. Next to him was a dandified appearing man who was very slight and thin of form but affected the dress and manners of extreme youth. Ferralti whispered to Uncle John that ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... drink; then he pours the wine on the ground by way of libation. At every step he falls, rolls in the mud, and feigns to be a prey to the most shameful drunkenness. His poor wife runs after him, picks him up, calls for help, arranges his hempen locks, which straggle forth in unkempt wisps from beneath his filthy hat, sheds tears over her husband's degradation, and pours ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs and politics with their tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a different order—skulking jail-birds; unkempt, barefoot children; big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel petticoat and short tartan shawl: among these, a few supervising constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and broken ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the son of a fireman who tended the pumping engine of the neighbouring colliery, and one of a penniless family of six children. So poor was his father, indeed, that the whole household lived in a single room, with bare floor and mud wall; and little Geordie grew up in his own unkempt fashion without any schooling whatever, not even knowing A from B when he was a big lad of seventeen. At an age when he ought to have been learning his letters, he was bird's-nesting in the fields or running errands to the Wylam shops; and as soon as he was old enough ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... traveller. Two miles farther on we came upon fourteen carts of gipsies, as wild a crew as one could meet all the world over. Some of the men struck me as handsome, but with a single exception the women were terribly unkempt-looking creatures. ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... to whom he spoke was a young fellow with long, shaggy, sunburnt hair hanging over his eyes in an unkempt mass. He shook his head, grunting, "Na—I don't know ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... the mother of Vidal. Both, of medium height, had short, saucy noses and black, pretty eyes; despite this physical similarity, however, their appearance differentiated them sharply. Vidal's mother,—called Leandra,—untidy, unkempt, loathsome, and betraying traces of ill humour, seemed much older than Salome, although but three or four years separated them. Salome had ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... in his shack. He looked as if he had been sitting where Northrup left him the night before. He was unkempt and haggard and there were broken bits of food on the untidy ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... and deer which they kill in the woods. The heat, the poor grass, their brutality, and the pest of the flies kill their ponies, and, as a rule, they lack dash and are indifferent riders, but they are picturesque in their unkempt, almost unearthly wildness. A strange effect is added by their use of large, fierce cur-dogs, one of which accompanies each cattle-hunter, and is taught to pursue cattle, and to even take them by the nose, which is another instance of their brutality. ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... Chinamen and "dagoes," of miners off shift, drawn hither by curiosity, and of gamblers of all grades from the professional expert to the "tin-horn," Houston found his way around the corner of the building, down into an alley, dark, dismal and reeking with filth. Here were groups of slatternly, unkempt women, some of whom stared at him with brazen faces, while others slunk away, not quite ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... unkempt after our hardships of the past two days, but Neddie, poor fellow, looked more like a corpse than a living man and moaned with thirst and scarcely could sit up without help. Finding about a pint of water close at hand in the hollow of a tree, we carried ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... comfortless the room, so was Miss Sophie's lonely life. She rented these four walls from an unkempt little Creole woman, whose progeny seemed like the promised offspring of Abraham,—multitudinous. The flickering life in the pale little body she scarcely kept there by the unceasing toil of a pair of bony hands, stitching, ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore |
