"Gnarled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eastern sky Is set thy glancing eye; And though its gracious light Ne'er riseth to my sight, Yet every star that climbs Above the gnarled limbs Of yonder hill, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... animals, first decked the rude pavement of the ocean. The lichen and the moss reared their tiny fronds on the first rocks that emerged from the deep; land-plants, evolving the various forms of fruit and flower, next arose,—the Upas and the bread-fruit tree, the gnarled oak and the lofty cedar. Animal life appeared when the granary of nature was ready with its supplies. A globule, having a new globule forming within itself, which is the fundamental form of organic being, may be produced in albumen by electricity; ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... slaughter, but with innocence feigned, keeping her vain secrets to the last. The oak resists, as he resists the axe, having spent all his energy in building a stout and perfect body, proud of his twisted arms and gnarled hands. The pine rebels, and noisily to the swift end, saying: "I do not believe in cremation. I believe in breaking down alone and apart, as I lived. I am clean without the fire. You should let me alone, and now I shall not let you think nor talk of real things until I am gone...." Each ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that might mingle with the incense atmosphere of his chapel, of every cry of human passion which might break through ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... door. The offstage hammering I had heard, tiny bell tones like a fairy xylophone, began again as the door opened, and we passed into a workroom which made me remember nursery tales from a half-forgotten childhood on Terra. For the workers were tiny, gnarled trolls! ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... plain, between groves of olive and almond trees with gnarled stems and branches white with dust, mounted by the twisting road, terraces upon his left and pine-clothed mountainside upon his right, past Valdemosa to the Pass. The great sweep of rock-bound coast and glittering sea burst ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... am old enough to be your mother"—as indeed she was. She had at once the resignation in repose and the agitation in action of extreme old age. I have seen her dozing in her chair in the salon, as I passed through the hall, with her gnarled hands extended on her knees in just that attitude of quiet waiting which one associates with the well-known engraving in which Death is figured as the coming of a friend. But when she was on her feet she moved about with a kind of aimless activity, opening drawers and shutting them and reopening ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... uniform thicket. The mangrove is here a tree growing to a height of twenty or thirty feet, branching thickly, and bearing a dark, luxuriant foliage. At high water, the mangrove swamps present the appearance of thickets growing out of the water. When the tide recedes, their gnarled and twisted stems are laid bare, often covered with clinging oysters. Below, in the mud, are boundless stores of pipi (cockles), and other ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... is an old stump, don't you see?' exclaimed Louis. I looked again and saw that what he said was true; a gnarled tree stump, some twisted branches, a deceiving white vapour, and perhaps, too, our own vivid imaginations, these were the elements which had given birth to ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... in him from his birth the makings of a Lord Mayor—he had the golden mediocrity which is the surest harbinger of success. But to Amyntas the world seemed cold and grey, notwithstanding the sunshine of the morning; and the bare branches of the oak trees were gnarled and twisted like the fingers of evil fate. At last he came to the top of a little hill whence one had the last view of the village. He looked at the red-roofed church nestling among the trees, and in front of the inn he could still see the sign of the 'Turk's Head.' A sob burst from him; he felt ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... "A gnarled tree may bear good fruit, and a harsh nature may give good counsel," thought the Lord of Glenvarloch, as he retreated to his own apartment, where the same reflection occurred to him again and again, while, unable as yet to reconcile himself ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... Munich, together with a huge onion. How they enjoy themselves! What splendid jokes they have! How they laugh and roar and sing! At one table sit four old fellows, playing cards. How full of character is each gnarled face. One is eager, quick, vehement. How his eyes dance! You can read his every thought upon his face. You know when he is going to dash down the king with a shout of triumph on the queen. His neighbour looks calm, slow, and ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... salt marshes he followed them, through the rank sedge and past the glassy pools in which his own inverted image stalked beneath as he stalked above; on and on, until at last they had reached a belt of scrub pines, gnarled and gray, that fringed the foot of the white ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... Gaston took the gnarled fingers in his. It had never struck him how dreadful a thing it was—so used had he been to death in many forms—till he had told the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... old forest which had been replaced by the streets of Crofield and the farms around it. Jack's pull on the left rein was obeyed only too well, and it looked, for some seconds, as if the plunging beasts were about to wind up their maddened dash by a wreck among those gnarled trunks and projecting roots. Jack drew his breath hard, and there was almost a chill at his young heart, but he held ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... Josh poked a gnarled thumb down into the bowl of his pipe, reflectively. "You ain't got a match about you, have ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... quite a common kind of Kafir, gone a little gray with age, a tuft of white wool on his chin, and little patches of it here and there on his head. But the other was a small twisted yellow man, with no hair at all, and eyes like little blots of fire on a charred stick; and his arms were so long and gnarled and lean that he had a bestial ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... sighed through the leafless branches of the gnarled and crooked oaks, as with a step so light as hardly to rustle the dry leaves on which she trod, Frances moved forward to that part of the hill where she expected to find this secluded habitation; but nothing could she discern that in the least resembled ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... half-way across the back-yard—worse, if possible, than the front as to the condition in which it was kept—and had passed through the little gate into the orchard. It was full of old gnarled apple-trees, their trunks covered with gray lichen, in which the cunning chaffinch built her nest in spring-time. The cankered branches remained on the trees, and added to the knotted interweaving overhead, if ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... have much admired Mr. Wilmarth, but it knows nothing against him, and his romantic marriage was in his favor. So he is buried with all due respect in that depository of so many secrets, marred and gnarled and ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... it is," he said, with a smile, "it seems too sweet and wonderful to be true, that the most beautiful woman on this earth should love a gnarled brute like me. ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... and let's see," said Bart; and once more they climbed on for quite half-an-hour, when they emerged from the trees on to a rugged piece of open rocky plain, with scattered pines gnarled and twisted and swept bare by the mighty winds, and as far as eye could reach nothing but one ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... when I arose and started on a night-journey for the Mesa Verde, where I intended next morning to greet an old gnarled cedar which grew on its summit. When I arrived at the top of the Mesa, I looked back and saw a pyramid of golden flame standing ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... advance most difficult. Through this chaos of fallen timber the young spruce had grown with extreme vigour, and I never experienced greater difficulty in making my way than in this tangled and obdurate mass of long trunks of gnarled trees, and branches lying at every angle, intergrown with the green boughs ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... not alien-born. From earliest childhood I had known and loved these forest solitudes. Yet now, as when I was a little lad, the twilight shadows awed me. Here it was a gnarled and twisted tree-trunk so like a crouching panther that I sprang aside and had the steel half out before the clearer vision came. There it was the figure of a man gliding stealthily from tree to tree, it seemed; keeping even pace with me as if ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... continental divide, is a gnarled and jagged rampart of snow-splashed granite facing the eastern plains, from which its grim summits may be seen for many miles. Standing out before it like captains in front of gray ranks at parade rise three conspicuous mountains, Longs Peak, ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... head and looked at his comrade, a little gnarled fellow, like the bleached root of a ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... other side into another water-shed—a great, stately sequoia gigantea fully three hundred feet high and of immense circumference. There wasn't a branch on it within one hundred feet of the ground. It was in good leaf, except at the top, which was gnarled and weather-beaten. Its base had been cruelly burned. This tree bears a striking resemblance to the grizzly giant which we saw later in the Mariposa big tree grove near Wawona. Not far from this fine old guardian of the pass, were groups of noble trees, fully ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... whole, resembled an oak, with a gnarled swelling base and wide-spreading branches. Picturesque rocks of every conceivable form adorned its banks, among which glided the numerous tributaries, mottled with black and red and gray boulders, from the fountain peaks, while ever and anon, as the deliberate centuries ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... through such a lane as this that the coarse, animal shape of a peasant was walking toward us. His legs and body were horribly twisted; the dangling arms and crooked limbs appeared as if caricaturing the gnarled and tortured boughs and trunks of the apple-trees. The peasant's blouse was filthy; his sabots were reeking with dirty straw; his feet and ankles, bare, were blacker than the earth over which he was painfully crawling; and on his face there was the vacuous, sensuous ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... and he crept closer and closer. The kindly aspect of the tree, the sweetness of the shade which it cast, the cool depths of its foliage, the gentle swaying of the boughs in the soft north wind—all invited him to approach. This he did, until he arrived at the gnarled old bole, and then he leaped into the branches and was filled with delight. The little birds took flight. Romulus sat upon a limb, and then stretched himself at full length upon it and enjoyed the peace and comfort of the moment. But he was an ape ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... upon the blackened plain, His red beams revealed the lover Back at Old Man's Bend again. Waist deep in its soothing waters Bathing blistered brow and hands; While near by, in pain a-tremble, Faithful Zeb impatient stands. Through the bend he searched and wandered, But except the furrowed bark, Of a gnarled and aged elm tree Which revealed one bullet-mark, Naught was left save blackened embers; And the words he "knew in part"— "Dust to dust and then to ashes"— Told the ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... and climb up a few worn steps on to a platform surrounded by a railing. Out of the middle of it there grows a gnarled and ancient tree with crooked boughs splitting asunder with hardly ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... answered to the popular prefix of Flint attached to his name. He was a wiry, gnarled, heavy-browed, iron-jawed fellow of about sixty, with deep-set eyes aglow with sinister and greedy instincts. His wife, older than he, and as deaf apparently as the door of a dungeon, wore a simpering, imbecile look of wonderment, it seemed to me, at the presence of such unusual and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... in the east, The earth is gray below, And, spectral in the river-mist, The ship's white timbers show. Then let the sounds of measured stroke And grating saw begin; The broad-axe to the gnarled oak, The mallet ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... water, their trunks supported upon a network of naked, twisted roots that strongly suggested to me the idea of spiders' legs swollen and knotted with some hideous, deforming disease. The trees themselves, however, apart from their twisted, gnarled, and knotted roots, presented a very pleasing appearance, for they had just come into full leaf, and their fresh green foliage was deeply grateful to the eye satiated with a long and wearisome repetition of the panorama of unbroken sea and sky. Beyond ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... horse. On the bed lay a girl in the middle stages of the disease, her eyes glittering with delirium, her black hair matted and wet. She was evidently alone. Estenega spurred his horse and galloped around to the back of the hut. In the kitchen, the only other room, huddled an old crone, brown and gnarled like an old apple. She was sleeping; by her side was a bottle of aguardiente. Estenega called loudly ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... in the cluster of flowers and her thoughts flew back again to the trees at Chatsworth, not the orderly, trimmed ones like these of Normandy, but old and gnarled and twisted. The dream she had had on the steamer came back to her and again she felt Edwin Green leaning over her, looking at her with his kind brown eyes and saying: "Molly, this is ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... we look at anything, however simple, the deeper it penetrates into our being until it becomes a part of us. In time we learn to know the tree that shades our porch, but years elapse before we are on friendly terms, and a lifetime is spent before the gnarled giant admits us to intimate companionship. Trees are filled with reserve; when denuded of their neighbors, they stand in melancholy solitude until the leaves fall for the last time, until their branches wither, and their trunks ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... found like the lean and tough birds in the old settlements, that lingered around the clearings and stumps of the trees, in the topmost of whose branches the fear of man compelled them to rest, but young and full fed. The trees in this new land were of no stinted or gnarled growth, but shot up tall, straight, and taper. The yellow poplar here threw up into the air a column of an hundred feet shaft in a contest with the sycamore for the pre-eminence of the woods. Their wives and children would remain safe in their present homes, until the ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... considerably altered its aspect. Frequent landslips occurred, and in many places deep chasms rifted the ground; great gaps furrowed the fields, and trees, half uprooted, overhung the water, remarkable by the fantastic distortions of their gnarled trunks, looking as though they had ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... happy,—the return home, when the shades of evening, closing round, give a fantastic, curious, mysterious aspect to familiar road-side objects! Loosely lounging on your saddle, with half-closed eyes, you almost dream—the gnarled trees grow into giants, cottages into castles, ponds into lakes. The maid of the inn is a lovely princess, and the bread and cheese she brings (while, without dismounting, you let your thirsty horse drink his gruel), ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... to him stood an old, gnarled tree, who slapped the little oak on the head with one of ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... of rain had run down the slope, circling, eddying in depressions, wearing deep round holes. There had been dry seasons, accumulations of dust, wind-blown seeds, and cedars rose wonderfully out of solid rock. But these were not beautiful cedars. They were gnarled, twisted into weird contortions, as if growth were torture, dead at the tops, shrunken, gray, and old. Theirs had been a bitter fight, and Venters felt a strange sympathy for them. This country was hard ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... channels, and thus made to wash out impassable gulfs. Every bridge had disappeared, and all the surrounding timber rendered useless for constructing more; while, for mile after mile, one continued mass of gnarled and crooked trees, here pitched together in seemingly inextricable tangles, and there piled mountains high, had been felled into the road, which even now had scarcely been made passable by the toiling thousands who, for weeks, had been employed upon it. In ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... forever in its turbid depths the thronging spectres, to wash away in its yellow flood all stains and color of the past. And now he was leaping from boulder to boulder, from blackened stump to stump, from gnarled bush to bush, caught for a moment and withheld by clinging vines, or plunging downward into dusty hollows, until, rolling, dropping, sliding, and stumbling, he reached the river-bank, whereon he fell, rose, staggered forward, and fell again with outstretched arms upon a rock ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... but our guide evidently knew it well, for he never hesitated. He swung us on, panting as we were, along the clearer parts, till we came to a part where our way seemed stopped by gorse-bushes. They rose up, thick and dark, right in front of us. Our guide stopped and told us to look down. Among the gnarled gorse-stems there seemed to be a passage or "run" made by some beast, fox or badger, going to ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... texture of our souls, not ourselves; and the web is too intensely wove and drenched in too deep a dye for us to undo or greatly change. The eagle cannot be tamed down to the softness of a dove, and no art of the husbandman can send into the gnarled and knotted oak the juices that shall smooth and melt its stiffness into the yielding pliancy of the willow. I wage no war with the work of the gods. Besides, the demands of Rome have now grown to such a size that they ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... placing a gnarled hand on my shoulder, "you begin to talk like a Marylander. It's a race, my boy, a race across this continent. There are two trails—one north and one mid-continent. On these paths two nations contend in the ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... Gnarled blue trunks, half-hidden by yellow leaf-needles stretching twenty feet into the sky. Something like the hoary mountain hemlocks she and Ted had been forever photographing on their Sierra ...
— Tree, Spare that Woodman • Dave Dryfoos
... lifted the motionless form, and steadily bore it away: Inez taking the lead, and stepping cautiously. She left the Plaza and principal streets, and turned toward a broad desolate waste, stretching away from the town, and bare, save a few gnarled oaks that moaned in the March wind. The moon rose when they had proceeded some distance beyond the last house, and Inez paused suddenly, and ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... three churches are embowered in verdure. The little garden of Santa Sabina, the birthplace of the Dominican order, is closed on all sides and affords no view: it slumbers in quiescence, warm and perfumed by its orange-trees, amongst which that planted by St. Dominic stands huge and gnarled but still laden with ripe fruit. At the adjoining Priorato, however, the garden, perched high above the Tiber, overlooks a vast expanse, with the river and the buildings on either bank as far as the summit of the Janiculum. And ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the wild flowers, she had gradually collected a regular bundle, of which Monsieur de Lucan accepted the burden with cheerful resignation. Noticing that he was almost bending under the weight, she sat down upon the gnarled roots of an old oak, in order, she said, to make a selection among all this pell-mell. She then took upon her lap the bundles of grass and flowers, and began throwing out everything that appeared to her of inferior quality. She handed over to Lucan, seated ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... precise locality where you were so pleased? Why not mention the exact hedge, the particular meadow? Because no two persons look at the same thing with the same eyes. To me this spot may be attractive, to you another; a third thinks yonder gnarled oak the most artistic. Nor could I guarantee that every one should see the same things under the same conditions of season, time, or weather. How could I arrange for you next autumn to see the sprays of the horse-chestnut, scarlet from ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... immediate effect on Farnum of the great figure that filled the doorway was one of masterful authority. A massive head crested a figure of extraordinary power. Gray as a mediaeval castle, age had not yet touched his gnarled strength. The keen steady eyes, the close straight lips, the shaggy eyebrows heavy and overhanging, gave accent to the rugged force of this grim freebooter who had reversed the law of nature which decrees ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... a worn steamer rug over the little beast's back; Caroline was a luxurious lounger and rarely traveled without her sumpter mule and his impedimenta. She led him with practiced quiet away from the house and paused under the gnarled old sweet-bough tree: the greenish-yellow, almost translucent globes dotted the lush, warm grass, their languorous sweet filled the air. Selecting a dozen thoughtfully, she added them to the donkey's load, and they went ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... say, I'm sure, I shouldn't like to say, Why all the birds should chirp of you, Who live so far away. Robin and oriole sing to me From the leafy depths of our apple-tree, With trunk so gnarled and gray— But why your name should their burden be I shouldn't ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... that seem paradoxical, but are not. They adopted a vegetable diet and for two years they eschewed meat. They worshiped in the woods, feeling that the groves were God's first temples; and sitting at the gnarled roots of some great oak, they would read aloud, by ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... lifted itself with charming lightness from its solid, baronial-like foundation! It adorned the spot, merged into the landscape. Behind, the forest, a dark line, penciled itself against the blue horizon; before the ancient stone pile lay a park. Noble trees guarded the walks, threw over them great gnarled limbs or delicately-trailing branches. Between, the interspaces glowed bright with flowers; amid all, a little lake shone like a silver shield bearing at its center ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... selected for camp was a large glade, fifty paces or more from the precipice far enough, the cowboys averred, to keep our traps from being sucked down by some of the whirlpool winds, native to the spot. In the center of this glade stood a huge gnarled and blasted old pine, that certainly by virtue of hoary locks and bent shoulders had earned the right to stand aloof from his younger companions. Under this tree we placed all our belongings, and then, as Frank so felicitously expressed it, we were free to ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... Persia from Asiatic Turkey, it was given to us to understand at last a little of the why and wherefore of our marching unmolested. We came to a crack in a rock by the wayside. And in the crack had been thrust, so that it stood upright, a gnarled tree-trunk, carried from who knows how far. And there, crucified to the dry wood was our daffadar Gooja Singh, with his flesh all tortured and torture written in his open eyes—not very long dead, for his flesh was scarcely cold—although ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... stick of wood into the broken old cook-stove that had served him and Frank for fifteen years and was feeling its age. Lorraine's breakfast was in the oven, keeping warm. Brit looked in, tested the heat with his gnarled hand to make sure that the sour-dough biscuits would not be dried to crusts, and closed the door upon them and the bacon and fried potatoes. Frank Johnson had the horses saddled and it was time to go, yet Brit lingered, uneasily conscious that his habitation was lacking ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... looked at him that he was just the sort of man that you would expect to hear of as having been in queer places—a sort of gnarled and stubbly man, with a wealth of seams and wrinkles about his face and what could be seen of his neck, and much grizzled hair, and an eye—only one being visible—that looked as if it had been on the watch ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... up in the windows over the village and a night breeze was showering down a fall of apple-blow from the gnarled old tree that stood like a great bouquet beside the front steps of the Briars. All the orchards along the Road were in bloom and a fragrance lay heavy over the pastures and mingled with the earth scent of the fields, newly upturned by the ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... canebrakes swept past them. In those tangles of gnarled trees, matted vines, interlacing rank grasses, and clusters of towering plants, so dank with the odor of wet and decay that the air even up where the flyers were seemed charged with it, lurked many a monster reptile and ferocious beast. Often ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... gnarled and dirty, and these old overalls are the mark of my degradation." He flung his hat passionately on the ground. "But I'm not always this way. Back in Chicago I dress—sometimes. There I'm what I like to be, what I can be. Not ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... holiday resorts of Bessie and Rudolph was a lovely spot in the forest, not a quarter of a mile from the house. Shaded by giant oaks, whose gnarled roots lay like serpents, half hidden in the moss, ran a streamlet, covered with sunny speckles, where parted leaves admitted the sunshine. Flowers grew along its banks in wild profusion, and it held its wayward course with many a rippling fall and fantastic turn, until ...
— Po-No-Kah - An Indian Tale of Long Ago • Mary Mapes Dodge
... bay at different points looking for Ojeda and any others who might have survived. A day or two after the battle they came across their unfortunate commander. He was lying on his back in a grove of mangroves, upheld from the water by the gnarled and twisted roots of one of the huge trees. He had his naked sword in his hand and his target on his arm, but he was completely prostrated and speechless. The men took him to a fire, revived him and finally brought him back ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... hair's-breadth from his; and fifty years of arrogant port had stiffened a neck too stiff at birth. Even now in the dim light his large square form stood out against the sky like a cromlech, and his heavy arms swung like gnarled boughs of oak, for a storm of wrath was moving him. In his youth he had rebelled against his father; and now his own son was a rebel ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of light sped on, in which joy was her companion, when, looking into a deep but very clear pond, she saw a gnarled cork-tree, which seemed to have been struck by lightning. Long did she stand there gazing into it wondering where she had seen that tree. All at once she spied a canoe passing close by the tree, in which stood a young man, whom she recognized ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... stately growth, the pine-trees (there should be NAMES for trees, as there are for rocks or ancient strongholds). Mr. Edgeworth showed us the oak from Jerusalem, the grove of cypress and sycamore where the beautiful depths of ground ivy are floating upon the DEBRIS, and soften the gnarled roots, while they flood ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... hoofs on the broken and rugged track through which the creature had been driven at full speed by his furious master, might easily see, that in more than a dozen of places the horse and rider had been within a few inches of destruction. One bough of a gnarled and stunted oak-tree, which stretched across the road, seemed in particular to have opposed an almost fatal barrier to the horseman's career. In striking his head against this impediment, the force of the blow had been broken in some measure ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... no order, no discipline, with only blind fury and the rushing, pulsing blood—that has won many a battle for England against a common foe—the men of Ireland hurled themselves upon the soldiers. They threw their missiles: they struck them with their gnarled sticks: they beat them with ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... a water-mill, old, thatched, and with an unprotected wheel, like the one in the valley below. Some gnarled willows stretched across the water, whose trunks seemed hardly less time- worn and rotten than the wheel below. This foreground subject was in shadow, and strongly drawn, but beyond it, in the sunlight, lay a bit of delicate distance, on the rising ground of which stood one of those small wooden ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... laughter and cheering broke out from the sailors, and redoubled as a private of Marines, holding a concertina in his gnarled fists, walked on to the stage. Even the officers put their hands up to smile behind them; one or two nearest the First Lieutenant leaned over and patted him on the back as if ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... of painted wood, which poise above the toy chapel carved out of the live rock. The chapel and the crucifix are at one end of a lime-tree avenue a third of a mile long, and the trees are aged beyond strict local knowledge, gnarled and warty and bulbous and great of girth. You climb to Lorette by a gentle ascent, and below the rock-carved chapel lies a precipice—not an Alpine affair at all, but a reasonable precipice for Belgium—say, two or even ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the wetness of the wood, prevented our enjoying a fire. Except a transient view into Nepal, a few miles west of us, nothing was to be seen, the whole mountain being wrapped in dense masses of vapour. Gusts of wind, not felt in the forest, whistled through the gnarled and naked tree-tops; and though the temperature was 50 degrees, this wind produced cold to the feelings. Our poor Lepchas were miserably off, but always happy: under four posts and a bamboo-leaf thatch, with no covering but a single thin cotton garment, they crouched ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... boots with the assistance of his wife, and looking at himself once more in the looking-glass, the schoolmaster took his gnarled stick and set off for the dinner. Just before the factory manager's house, where the festivity was to take place, he had a little mishap. He was taken with a violent fit of coughing . . . . He was so shaken by it that ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... unsophisticated bee-hunter, turning abruptly to his aged friend. "The meanest insect that skims the heavens, when it has got its load, flies straight and honestly to its nest or hive, according to its kind; but the ways of a woman's mind are as knotty as a gnarled oak, and more crooked than the windings ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... at his companion, telling him that the supposed vision must have been the offspring of his over-excited fancy. Angry at being thus doubted, the earl walked off, and plunged into the haunted dell. The duke followed, but though they paused for some time beneath the gnarled oak-tree, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hung loosely on the angles of his round-shouldered, bony form. His long, thin legs, about which the baggy trousers draped in ungraceful folds, were slightly knock-kneed and terminated in large, flat feet. His arms were very long even for such a tall man, and the huge, bony hands were gnarled and knotted. When he removed his bowler hat, as he frequently did to wipe away with a red handkerchief the sweat occasioned by furious bicycle riding, it was seen that his forehead was high, flat and narrow. His nose was a large, fleshy, hawklike ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... thousand feet above the level of the ocean. I am under the deep shadows of a forest. Huge trunks grow around me, hindering a distant view. Where am I? Not in the tropic, surely, for these trees are of a northern sylva. I recognise the gnarled limbs and lobed leaves of the oak, the silvery branches of the mountain-ash, the cones and needles of the pine. The wind, as it swirls among the dead leaves, causes me to shiver; and high up among the twigs there is the music of winter in its moaning. ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... without saying more. He fancied he was in the Valley of Dwarfs already, about to meet Marie. He saw the weird, gnarled trunks of trees on either hand, that grew among—sometimes writhed around—the huge fantastic boulders: the dark cave-like recesses, formed strangely between and under them where the dwarfs lay hidden to emerge at dusk: the sides of the ravine towering up stern and gloomy on ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... the beach there was a fantastic rock, moss-grown and deep in a dell. It was insulated by a shallow brook, which, dividing its waters, flowed on both sides until united below. Twisting its roots round the rock, a gnarled "Aoa" spread itself overhead in a wilderness of foliage; the elastic branch-roots depending from the larger boughs insinuating themselves into every cleft, thus forming supports to the parent stem. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... grove my sighs shall consecrate; in shape Of some fair tomb, here will I heap the turf And call it Adelbright's. Yon aged yew, Whose rifted trunk, rough bark, and gnarled roots Give solemn proof of its high ancientry, Shall canopy the shrine. There's not a flower, That hangs the dewy head, and seems to weep, As pallid blue-bells, crow-tyes and marsh lilies, But I'll plant here, and if they chance to wither, My ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... thunder 110 As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, For every pelting, petty officer Would use his heaven for thunder. Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven, Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt 115 Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, 120 Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens, ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... in a lane; So gnarled was he and full of pain That kindly Death was struck with pity— "Come you with me, Old man," said he, "I'll set you down in a ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... hardly to be felt. It was a richly-wooded scene, with interesting figures forming a procession in the centre and foreground of the landscape. The original might have been painted by Ruysdael. "Those old oaks," she exclaimed, "with their gnarled and crooked branches, look as though they might have formed part of the Druidical groves whose solemn mysteries inspired even the arrogant Roman with awe. This picture, however, belongs to a later period—that of the Crusades, perhaps, for here is a procession ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... yonder, those three figures, dark and gaunt against the sky.... Who are they? What are they? One of them is pointing with rigid arm towards the gnarled trees that from the hillside stretch out their storm-broken boughs and ragged leaves against the sky. Shifting thither, my eye discerns through the shadows two horsemen, riding slowly down the incline. Hush! I hold up a warning finger ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... shields, and pointed as steel spears, made a barrier against cattle, ostriches, and human beings that was impassable except by the appointed gaps. No doubt it had a beauty all its own, but beneath its fantastic, isolated blooms and leaves of Madonna blue, the gnarled roots sheltered a hundred varieties of poisonous reptiles and insects. That is why, in Africa, no one likes blue aloes—they always ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... the tulip-tree, or Liriodendron Tulipifera, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but, in its riper age the bark becomes gnarled and uneven while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem. Thus the difficulty of ascension, in the present case, lay more in semblance than in reality. Embracing the huge cylinder, as closely as possible, with his arms and knees, seizing ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... peaceableness. I passed out of the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once the scene opens, wide pasture-lands on either side, and rows of old willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and vicarage and irregular street, and the little red-gabled Hall ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cedar and started across with the last broken line of the grey. Going down the crumbling bank his spur caught in a gnarled and sprawling root. The check was absolute, and brought him violently to his knees. Before he could free himself the grey had reached the opposite crest, fired its volley, and gone on. He started to follow. He heard the blue coming, and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... in the shape and setting of his yellow eyes gave them the provoking silent intensity which characterised his glance. But the face was thin, furrowed, worn; I discovered that through the bush of his hair, as you may detect the gnarled shape of a tree trunk lost in a dense undergrowth. These overgrown cheeks were sunken. It was an anchorite's bony head fitted with a Capuchin's beard and adjusted to a herculean body. I don't mean athletic. Hercules, I take it, was not ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... not heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for the public cause—which was to minister to his appetites. He was true man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bonnet, took off her apron, tied a new boot-lace round her umbrella, and after listening for a long time at door and window, opened the door and sallied out into a perilous world. The umbrella was under her arm and she clutched the bundle with two gnarled and resolute hands. It was her best Sunday bonnet, and the two poppies that reared their heads amidst its splendours of band and bead seemed instinct with the same tremulous ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... to be gnarled and twisted by her words, like a tree in a fierce wind. "I talked to her about you," she continued, "and it was my hope—but now let us be kind to her memory, if indeed we are to regard her simply as ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... ribbon dropped down upon the meadows and fields that separate the proud city of Hayesville and the gray and green little old hamlet of Riverfield, which nestles in a bend of the Cumberland River and sleeps time away under its huge old oak and elm and hackberry trees, kept perpetually green by the gnarled old cedars that throw blue-berried green fronds around their winter nakedness. As we rode slowly along, with a leisure I am sure all the motor-car world has forgotten exists, the two old boys on the front seat hummed and chuckled happily while I breathed in great gulps ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... precipitous road he went with a ravine on either hand: he went down the narrow path, thick with sharp stones, among which coiled the gnarled roots of the little stunted oaks: he did not know where he was going, and yet he was more surefooted than if he had been moving under the lucid direction of his will. He had not slept, he had hardly eaten anything for several days. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... perspiring all the way and gasping with heat and thirst. We tore all the skin off our arms and legs in forcing ourselves through the prickly patches of jungle, and almost splintered our feet against the rocks and gnarled roots of some of the trees, besides bruising our bodies all over with the repeated falls we had; and, all the while, we were suffering the most unmitigated pangs of hunger and thirst that mortal man could ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... small wicket window which opened and two grotesquely smiling eyes peered out at me. Those eyes inspected me from head to foot and then, apparently satisfied, they twinkled and the wicket closed with a snap. Then the door opened and out stepped a quaint and curious figure with gnarled limbs and arms and a peculiar misshapen head, completely covered with a short growth ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... into the dark crypt, and running considerable risk in climbing to the summit of the tower. Since the spiral stone steps had vanished long ago, the only means of getting to the top was by climbing the gnarled stem of the ivy which grew profusely on the face of the building. The tower was roofless, a low, partly demolished parapet encircling it on three sides, while a couple of weather-worn oak-beams supporting a few planks formed ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... side by side, without a word. They reached a paved road that stretched out as far as the eye could see, between two lines of lanterns, between two rows of gnarled trees that held aloft handfuls of bare branches and cast their slender, motionless shadows on high blank walls. There, in the keen air, chilled by the evaporation of the snow, they walked on and on for a long time, burying themselves in the vague, infinite, unfamiliar depths of a street that ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... left on the household. In the sawing of blocks there would always be some too knotty or gnarled to split into shingles. These were what were known in the vernacular as "on-marchantable shingle-bolts." They formed in many a pioneer's home and in many a pioneer school-house good solid seats for children and even grown people to sit on. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... seemed without the little troop! The wind sighed in the pines, and the moonlight cast fearful shadows from the gnarled and knotty boughs. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... strangely no part of the man, but something, like the child, that has grown away from him and has taken a life of its own— Strong for a sixteen-foot sweep, delicate to handle the silken snood of a line— A man that the winds and the spray have blown on, gnarled and bent to the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... work and the masonry had fallen into disrepair, and from the crevices sprang huge trees, under whose thick shade the breeze blew freshly, and on whose balmy branches the birds sang sweetly; the grey squirrels [FN48] chirruped joyously as they coursed one another up the gnarled trunks, and from the pendent llianas the longtailed monkeys were swinging sportively. The bountiful hand of Sravana [FN49] had spread the earthen rampart with a carpet of the softest grass and many-hued wild flowers, in which were buzzing swarms of bees and myriads of bright ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... the town is a narrow but close belt of timber, mostly gnarled mulga and gidgee, with here and there a sprawling stunted creek gum. The cattle were making for this shelter. But already the tremendous pace was beginning to tell. The bellowing had ceased and the mob was stringing out, the stragglers ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... and if there is a worse pair to-day in the United States, or a pair that are as bad, I should certainly like to have a look at them. His fingers were bent and twisted out of all shape and looked more like the knotted and gnarled branches of a scrub oak than anything else that I can ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... the garden called the Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, behind locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion of tender grey-green tones, such a company of gnarled and twisted little miniature trunks— dwarfs playing with each other at being giants—and such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west! At the end of the wood is a steep, circular mound, up which the short trees scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Pyramids, with the soft air blowing in his face, trees waving overhead, and birds singing merrily; or, in the blood-red sunset, passing down the Choubra Road, the fashionable drive of Cairo, with its shade of gnarled old sycamores, and crowded with conveyances of every description. Sometimes he led the way for the harem carriage, very ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... charming as the God of Love; and that he often, for many an hour, sought repose under the spreading foliage of the tree, which then sighed more musically over the two. He called her his dryad, she said, and the tree his tree. The mighty, gnarled, majestic oak was just to his taste, with its broad roots sunk deep into the earth, its trunk and its coronal rising so high in the free air, meeting the drifting snow, the cutting winds, and the bright sunshine, before they had reached the ground. All this she said, and she continued: ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... to turn more towards the east, as Callitris scrubs were before me. In avoiding these, I again came upon the more open and firm ground adjacent to the river, and saw its course in the line of large Yarra trees, which always point out its banks with their white and gnarled arms. I may here state that the scrubs generally consist of a soft red sandy soil; the land near the river, of clay, which last is by far the best of the two soils for crossing with wheel carriages; the soft red sand being almost as formidable an impediment in ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... worthy of Lycurgus. Modern Quakerism is like one of those gigantic trees which are seen in the forests of North America,—apparently flourishing, and preserving all its greatest stretch and spread of branches; but when you cut through an enormously thick and gnarled bark, you find the whole inside hollow and rotten. Modern Quakerism, like such a tree, stands upright by help of its inveterate bark alone. Bark a Quaker, and he ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the pictures lay mossy, gnarled, and twisted branches, gray and green, framing them in a forest arabesque; and great pine cones, pendent from their boughs, crowned ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the town of Dorchester, looking out over Boston Bay. It takes its name from the stiff black savins with which it is covered, and which contrive to find nourishment and support in the rock to which they cling. Some of these trees show their great age by their gnarled and knotted trunks and boughs. Black and impassive they stand, alike in the brightest summer or the grayest winter, sighing restlessly in the breeze, but wailing piteously when the sea-winds sweep over the hill. Partway up the little rocky eminence stands an old house, ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... center built well, and their dwellings abound in architectural interest, but really great houses are rare. On the 700 block of Prince Street, behind a picket fence, guarded by a tall magnolia and several gnarled box trees stands what is called in England a "Georgian cottage," which in Alexandria is an ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... never to lose for an instant the scent I was following—even though I stopped in a low spot to admire a mass of thrifty blue flags, now beginning to bloom—and came thus to the pines I was seeking. They are not great trees, nor noble, but gnarled and angular and stunted, for the soil in that place is poor and thin, and the winds in winter keen; but the brown blanket of needles they spread and the shade they offer the traveller are not less hospitable; nor the fragrance they give off less enchanting. ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves. Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina—a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the geometrical precision of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... The moon, from behind them, cast fitful, silvery glances at the weary heads bent in anxiety and watchful expectancy: on old heads and young heads, dark, curly heads and heads grizzled with age, on backs bent with toil, and hands rough and gnarled like seasoned timber. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... base, and on its sides let the surface of the soil be seen to slide, together with the small roots of the bushes, denuding great portions of the surrounding rocks. And descending ruinous from these precipices in its boisterous course, let it dash along and lay bare the twisted and gnarled roots of large trees overthrowing their roots upwards; and let the mountains, as they are scoured bare, discover the profound fissures made in them by ancient earthquakes. The base of the mountains ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... are quite sure is real. So it was with me this time. I did not dream any story or see any people; I only dreamt of a plant. In the dream no one told me anything about it: I just saw it growing under a tree: a small bit of the tree root came into the picture, an old gnarled root covered with moss, and with three sorts of eyes in it, round holes trimmed with moss—you know the kind. The plant was not one I should have thought much about, though certainly it was not one that I knew: it had no flowers ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... half-emptied body that lay beside her and uttered these strange sentences, even forcing her own singular choice of words. The horrible, dim enchantment of the trees was close about them in the room—gnarled, ancient, lonely trees of winter, whispering round the human ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... women was treading heavily down the dusty sidewalk, leaning on a gnarled stick and talking to a little black girl. A "sundown" hat shaded a bony face of typical Indian cast and her red skin was stretched so tight over high cheek bones ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... foot at her buryin'." She spoke shrilly, moved by a hidden spite, but the Governor, without stopping, went on along the line of open doors. In one a field negro was roasting chestnuts in the embers of a log fire, and while waiting he had fallen asleep, with his head on his breast and his gnarled hands hanging between his knees. The firelight ran over him, and as he slept he stirred and muttered something ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... planted by the hands of the old Dutch Governor himself. Spring-time after spring-time, until within a year or two past, the Stuyvesant pear-tree used to blossom, and its blossoms run to fruit. It lived, in a very gnarled and rheumatic condition, until the 26th of February last, when it sank quietly down to rest, and nothing but the rusty old iron railing is left to show where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... sprightly solo of the supercricket is interrupted rather than joined by a new sound—the melancholy wail of an erratically fingered flute. It is obvious that the musician is practising rather than performing, for from time to time the gnarled strain breaks off and, after an ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... blighted by frost, shivering in their death chill; and from a neighboring willow stripped of curtaining foliage, a lonely bird piped its plaintive threnody, for the loss of one summer's mate. At the extremity of the little garden, under shelter of an ancient, gnarled tree, that screened a semicircular seat from the observation of those passing on the street, Beryl sat down to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Captain Darby wore a wig designed for a larger man, and that the visage beneath was gnarled and weather-beaten, marked with the signs of ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... scavengers, plying their brooms among the great trees of the avenues, bore so strong a resemblance to the pixies who lurk in caves and woods, that we almost expected to see them vanish into some crevice in the gnarled roots of the trunks. Even the tiny acolytes trotting gravely in the funeral processions had their heads and shoulders shrouded in ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... not in sight. He got off unsteadily, and for a moment his legs felt like wisps of cotton. He balanced his machine against the grassy edge of the path and sat down panting. His hands were gnarled with swollen veins and shaking palpably, ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... manner acted like a lighted torch to gunpowder. Roger swung round upon him furiously, his hands clenched, his forehead suddenly gnarled with ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... torso to compare with that which, brown and glistening, now bent over Nayland Smith. The muscular development was simply enormous; the man had a neck like a column, and the thews around his back and shoulders were like ivy tentacles wreathing some gnarled oak. ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... bower could be more beautiful,—because the coppice foliage was fresh and tender overhead, and the old leaves soft and elastic to the prickles below,—because the young oaks sheltered us behind, and we had a charming outlook over the brook in front, between a gnarled alder and a young sycamore, whose embracing branches were the ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... man raised his sunken eyes, all their keen humour gone, and spoke as though each word were dug from his heart. "Say no more, Father Halen." Then he reached out, caught the priest's hand in his gnarled fingers, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... battered resigned themselves to suffering, wound across a flat expanse broken by a few hills. These were little more than mounds, and for the most part were veiled from sight by the low-lying sea-mist, through which gnarled and stunted oaks rose mysterious, to fade as strangely. Weird trees they were, with branches unlike those of this world's trees, rising in a grey land without horizon or limit, through which our travellers moved, weary phantoms in a clinging nightmare. At a walk, at a trot, more ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... the big apple-tree. It was very big and old and wonderful. No wonder Mr. MacNairn and his mother loved it. Its great branches spread out farther than I had ever seen the branches of an apple-tree spread before. They were gnarled and knotted and beautiful with age. Their shadows upon the grass were velvet, deep and soft. Such a tree could only have lived its life in such a garden. At least it seemed so to me. The high, dim-colored walls, with their ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a pleasant English country town, with that air of cleanliness and quiet prosperity, of excellent sanitation and odd historic corners, side by side with big new modern buildings and exquisite green gardens where the old gnarled apple-trees are afroth with blossom in the spring, which is the peculiar flavour of an English country town. The incongruity is the charm; you step from a modern drapery store, with a respectable display of plate-glass, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... light of the flickering coals that Gunnar had aged. His face was more seamed. The knots of muscle at each jaw were larger. His hair was gray-streaked and thinner. But those huge shoulders were huger still, and the big gnarled hands kept closing and unclosing as though they were ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... of a high bank situated at the point of junction between Swanside Beck and the Ribble, stood an old, decayed oak. Little of the once mighty tree beyond the gnarled trunk was left, and this was completely hollow; while there was a great rift near the bottom through which a man might easily creep, and, when once in, stand erect without inconvenience. Beneath the bank the river was deep and still, forming a pool, where the largest and fattest fish ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... travelled through the endless, boundless white, over wind-swept rocky hills so inhospitably barren that even the snow could not find a lodgment on them, or over wide plains where the few trees that grew had been stunted and gnarled into mere shrubs by winter blasts. On every hand the mountains began to raise their ragged austere heads like grim giant sentinels placed there to guard the way. Finally they turned into a pass, which brought them, on the other side of the ridge it led through, ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... breathed, looking aghast at the gnarled knotted fingers, thick and roughened by work and weather, picturing to himself the delicacy of the miniature ship that lay so snugly in its transparent walls. "How in the world could you get ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... ten times as thick and twice as tall as they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as great as a man could embrace, and evidently long ago some of its branches had been broken off and its bark scarred. With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands and fingers, it stood an aged, stern, and scornful monster among the smiling birch trees. Only the dead-looking evergreen firs dotted about in the forest, and this oak, refused to yield to the charm of spring or notice either the spring or ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy |
