"Ragged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to happen to them. But the miles fled under their swift feet. The trim villas near the township gave place to scattered farms. These in their turn became further and further apart, and then they entered a wide belt of timber, ragged and wind-swept gums, with dense undergrowth of dogwood and bracken fern. The metalled road gave place to a hard, earthern track, on which the spinning tyres made no sound; it curved in and out among the trees, which met overhead and cast upon it a waving ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Ink-coloured rain clouds hanging close over the hills, their fringe-like lower edges showing ragged across a pale sky, against which the hills themselves rise dark and sharp. Now and again a shower of rain falls, but not energetically; the wind blows, the clouds shift, the rain ceases, and the sky darkens or gleams ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... perfectly justified his faith. As the palaces rose from the ground, making a magnificent walled city, they looked solid and they looked old and they had distinct character. Moreover, through having the color in the texture, they would not show broken and ragged surfaces. ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... must suffice to suggest the nature of her activities in connection with this and kindred philanthropies: "It is now just ten, and I have come up from the City Hall, in whose dismal St. Giles precincts I have been to see a colored ragged school.... My Sundays are not days of rest.... My whole soul is sickened; and to-day when I went to church filled with people in their fine summer clothes, and heard a magnificent sermon from Dr. Dewey, and thought of the streets ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... fall on her to capture her and hurry her along with them perforce of the allayed, once fatal, inflammable element in herself, shook the warmth from her limbs: causing her to say to herself aloud in a ragged hoarseness, very strangely: Every thought of mine now has a physical ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fisticuffs, like bolts from the twisted strings of a catapult. The voices of many are threatening and formidable. They are quick to anger, but quickly appeased. All are clean in their persons; nor among them is ever seen any man or woman, as elsewhere, squalid in ragged garments. At all ages they are apt for military service. The old man goes forth to the fight with equal strength of breast, with limbs as hardened by cold and assiduous labor, and as contemptuous of all dangers, as the young. Not one of them, as in Italy is often the case, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... dragging on the halter rope, the pack horse white and lame, stopping at every step, the man crunched, huddling fore done, down in his saddle; then dragging far to the rear, just cresting the sky line as the other two disappeared, swaying from side to side, a ragged wreck lying almost forward on his horse's neck; ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... tumblers with an excessively ugly pattern printed on the sides, then softened in a glory-hole, and brought to a workman, who, by means of plyers and battledoor, elongated and shaped the neck, leaving a queer, ragged lip at the top. The decanter was then passed to Miselle's confidant, who struck off this lip with the edge of his plyers. An attendant then presented to him a lump of melted glass on the end of his pontil, and the workman, deftly twisting it round the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Manchesters have just marched in to trumpet and drum. When I think of those ragged camps of peasants just over the border the pomp and circumstance seem ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... returned he thrust the card into his hand, and walked out between the tall poplars, waiting, like ragged ghosts, silver with moonlight. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Harrison, rubbing his blue fingers before the fire. "His clothes are ragged, and frozen stiff. I suppose he has been out in the storm ever since it set in. There were icicles upon his beard and hair, his hat having fallen off. It is a miracle he did not freeze to death long ago. It is ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... bureau and the piano would never have been dusted. In one corner of the room were a pile of shoes which need an epic to describe them. The top of the bureau and that of the piano were encumbered by music-books with ragged backs and whitened corners, through which the pasteboard showed its many layers. Along the walls the names and addresses of pupils written on scraps of paper were stuck on by wafers,—the number of wafers without paper indicating ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... object in the perspective of this picture,—the most venerable appendage to the establishment,—a huge barn, with an immense roof hanging almost to the ground, and thatched a foot thick with sun-burnt straw, which reaches below the eaves in ragged flakes. It has a ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... mere name recalled! How many hours, how many days she had passed there, leaning on that damp sill, without rail or balcony, looking toward the factory. At that moment she fancied that she could see up yonder little Chebe's ragged person, and in the frame made by that poor window, her whole child life, her deplorable youth as a Parisian street arab, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... common men! One ragged rogue sleeps after another and feels no need of washing: he will not go to work till his wife brings a barley cake; while I, a great lord, must wander about, like a thief in the night, through the desert, without a drop of water ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... last on the grey pile, half monastery and half fortress, and went our way through the stunted forest that straggled downward to the Vienne. Between these narrow strips of woodland, through which the path wound, rose ragged knolls clad in short, dark green juniper, and here and there were bright splashes of colour, where flowering wild weeds clustered at the bases of the brown ribs of rock that stood up starkly over all. We crossed the river ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... while they lay there waiting for the rain to slacken before he launched the bird. The men across the hog-back never stirred. Nobody approached from the rear. At last, behind Mount Terrible, the tall edges of the rain veil came sweeping out in ragged majesty. Vapours were ascending in its wake; a distant peak grew visible, and suddenly brightened, struck at the summit by ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... no illness gives, but which says to the physician, "Go your ways!" and is, as it were, a standard which Death plants on his conquests. He clutched in one hand his pen, his poor last pen, inky and ragged, in the other a crust of his last piece of bread. His legs knocked together, so as to make the crazy bed crackle. I listened carefully to his hard breathing; I heard the rattle with its hollow husk; and I recognised Death in the room as a practised sailor ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... fortunes out of the French wars,[2] and lived in regal splendor. This Earl, it is said, had at his different castles and his city mansion in London upwards of thirty thousand men in his service. Their livery, or uniform, a bright red jacket with the Warwick arms—a bear erect holding a ragged staff—embroidered on it in white, was seen, known, and feared ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... not attend to the needed general mending and refitting of the old comfortables and bedspreads, though some were ragged and filthy, or worn so thin as to be but little better than so many strainers. The cells on the lower floor were exceptions. But few of these were used. All the beds were kept well filled; having good spreads, ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... she spoke upon one of the rough stone seats which are scattered about the cape. Mr. Dollond had ensconced himself behind them, and was phlegmatically starting on a rough study of the old town, which rose in a ragged, compact mass a hundred yards away, with its background of sad olives and ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... some strange new power within urged her on. She went on slowly, reluctantly, with dragging feet, but still she went on. There were no men about the place at this hour—they were at work—but untidy women sat on their doorsteps or rocked at the windows, and a horde of ragged barefooted children catching sight of the girl swarmed out into the road to stare at her. Some begged for pennies, and getting none, yelled after her and threw stones till she took to her heels and ran "just like the other bunny!" she told herself in miserable scorn, when once she was safely past ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... where are very great woods for many miles together, the third part of trees are Walnut trees. The one kind is of the same taste and forme, or little differing from ours of England, but that they are harder and thicker shelled: the other is greater, and hath a very ragged and hard shell: but the kernel great, very oily and sweet. Besides their eating of them after our ordinary maner, they breake them with stones, and punne them in morters with water, to make a milke which they vse to put into some ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... put it into your milke when it boiles, work it very well with the Spanish Instrument called Molenillo between your hands: which Instrument must be of wood, with a round knob made very round, and cut ragged, that as you turne it in your hands, the milke may froth and dissolve the Chocolate the better: then set the milke on the fire againe, untill it be ready to boyle: having the yelke of two eggs well beaten with some of the hot milke; then put your eggs into the milke, and Chocolate and ...
— Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke • Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma
... Earl of Warwick reached London, he proceeded at once to the Tower to release old King Henry from his confinement. He found the poor king in a wretched plight. His apartment was gloomy and comfortless, his clothing was ragged, and his person squalid and dirty. The earl brought him forth from his prison, and, after causing his personal wants to be properly attended to, clothed him once more in royal robes, and conveyed him in state through London ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... very pleased with his idea, and by the time he reached home, he had planned out just what he wanted to say. He ate his supper of hard black bread very happily, and when, soon after, he crept into bed and pulled up his cover of ragged sheepskin, he went to sleep with his head so full of the work of the past few months, that he dreamed that the whole world was full of painted books and angels with rose-coloured wings; that all the meadows of Normandy were covered with gold, and the flowers ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... plenty of room for compromises, for the formation of a great national party out of the scattered units of a disunited opposition. She believed Mannering strong enough to do this. She saw in it greater possibilities than might have been forthcoming even if he had been chosen to lead the somewhat ragged party represented by Lord Redford and his followers. For the rest, she had been very near the success she so desired. Only an accident had robbed her of victory. If once they had reached the rose-garden she knew that she ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and gentry of England were astonished at the intelligence displayed in the opposition, by the rural population of America. They fancied the colonists to be an ignorant, ragged people, living in log cabins, scattered through the wilderness, and, in social position, two or three degrees below European and Irish peasantry. Great was their surprise to hear from all the colonies, and from the remotest ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... of my ill-fated and admirable friend. Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe—gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy. When he heard the sound of my approach, he ceased to utter exclamations of grief and horror and sprung towards the window. Never did I behold a vision so horrible ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... of corporals, lieutenants, gentlemen of companies, slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton's dogs licked his sores; the cankers of a calm world and a long peace; ten times more dishonorable ragged than an old-faced ancient: and such have I, that you would think I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals lately come from swine-keeping, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... and reached only the 4th grade. When he was living with the uncle he caused much trouble, and the uncle warned her. He has run away from home twelve times, stays away perhaps two weeks at a time, and comes home ragged and filthy. He has had many jobs, but stays only a day or two at work. He steals in petty ways, takes money from home when he runs away. He is very lazy, but a great reader, especially ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... granted to all Protestant sects, and would even have consented to make alterations in the Liturgy, for the purpose of conciliating honest and candid Nonconformists. But such latitudinarianism was held in horror by the country parson. He took, indeed, more pride in his ragged gown than his superiors in their lawn and their scarlet hoods. The very consciousness that there was little in his worldly circumstances to distinguish him from the villagers to whom he preached led him to hold ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... stranger and dost rather choose The smoaky reedes and sedgy cottages Then the proud roofes and wanton cost of kings. O sweet dispised ioyes of poverty, A happines unknowne unto the Gods! Would I had rather in poore Gabii[68] bin Or Ulubrae a ragged Magistrate, Sat as a Iudge of measures and of corne Then the adored Monarke of the world. Mother, thou didst deservedly in this, That from a private and sure state didst raise My fortunes to this slippery hill of greatnesse Where I can neither stand ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... and a cross, he cannot be a man-wolf,' said the child, as a man with the snow heavy on his long, ragged beard, and on the matted hair, that fell over his shoulders and nearly to his waist, and dropping from the tattered cloak that but half-covered his withered brown body, came in and looked from face to face ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... let him make another cut on the opposite side of the tube and try again. In general, the tube will yield the first or second time the hot drop of glass is applied. Never apply the drop at the centre of the scratch, or a ragged crack, which may run in any direction, will result. Very often, with a large tube, the crack formed by a successful operation will only extend a short distance. In this case it is desirable to entice the crack round the tube, and not ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... tourist who looks upon the Irishman as the merry-andrew of the English-speaking world, and who expects every jarvey he meets to be as whimsical as Mickey Free, will be disappointed. I have strong suspicions that ragged, jovial Mickey Free himself, delicious as he is, was created by Lever to satisfy the Anglo-Saxon idea of the low-comedy Irishman. You will live in the Emerald Isle for many a month, and not meet the clown or ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... dreaming dolt, Still walking like a ragged colt, And oft out of a bush doth bolt, Of purpose to deceive us; And leading us makes us to stray, Long winter's nights, out of the way; And when we stick in mire and clay, Hob doth with ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... take Maggie." Pitying glances were cast on her wan and wasted form and thoughts were troubled on her account. Mothers brought cast-off garments and, removing her soiled and ragged clothes, dressed her in clean attire. The sad eyes and patient face of the little one touched many hearts, and even knocked at them for entrance. But none opened to take her in. Who wanted a ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... beautiful?" he said to Denzil, pointing to the ragged sky and the dripping eaves. ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... bags, and wallets! Here's to all the wandering train! Here's our ragged bairns and callets! One and all cry ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... world's most influential teachers if he had not felt that the thing he was trying to do was a big thing, a vital thing in the life of his country, and if he had not had a real love in his heart for his work among the ragged and untrained urchins whom ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... chief Hole-in-the-Day, another big mongrel, fat, plodding and reticent, and a young Indian who could speak a few English words, but was destitute of ideas in either English or Chippewa. Their motive-power was grazing on the open prairie back of the ragged village. The Reservation Indian, denied liquor at home, reckons upon a trip out of bounds as fair opportunity for a spree, so that catching and harnessing the ponies and cattle was a tedious task that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... But it being somewhat trouble some to carry to the canoes, we thought to have made these men to have carried it for us, and therefore, we gave them some old clothes; to one an old pair of breeches, to another a ragged shirt, to the third a jacket that was scarce worth owning, which yet would have been very acceptable at some places where we had been, and so we thought they might have been with these people. We put them on them, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... forced the Russians to consider how they could do away with such anomalies. Their main idea is that the transport of coal in a modern State is an almost inexcusable barbarism. They have set themselves, these ragged engineers, working in rooms which they can hardly keep above freezing-point and walking home through the snow in boots without soles, no less a task than the electrification of the whole of Russia. There is a State ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... unmoved by their frivolity. He tugged at his ragged red beard for a moment or two while they ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... light glimmering in the distance. Gradually more and more lights appeared, and at last we passed several smoke-dried huts clinging like swallows' nests to the rocks. As the night was warm, the doors stood open, and I could see into the lighted rooms, and all sorts of ragged figures gathered about the hearths. We rattled on through the quiet night, along a steep, stony road leading up a high mountain. Soon lofty trees and hanging vines arched completely over us, and anon the heavens became ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... was a man of forty or so, inclined to corpulence, and untidy. He bore the evidences of failure in the process of becoming. He wore a beard that was scanty and ragged, there were bald patches of skin on the jaw; one inferred that he wore that beard only to save the trouble of shaving. He was sitting next to me, the middle passenger of the three on my side of the carriage, and he was absorbed ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... one of the mainland villages south-west of us, on the evening flood, as it seemed just the right opportunity, if we were to visit one of those "siels" at all. Davies was very lukewarm, but events overcame him. At 3.30 a black, ragged cloud, appearing to trail into the very sea, brought up a terrific squall. This passed, and there was a deathly pause of ten minutes while the whole sky eddied as with smoke-wreaths. Then an icy puff struck us from the north-west, rapidly veering till it reached north-east; there it ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... they crashed, involuntarily the five men started as if a bomb had struck. Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep. Not far off, sucked close to a ragged reef, stretched the black bulk that had once been the Brian Boru. Continually it leaped out of the water, threw itself like a live creature, breast-forward on the rock, clawed furiously at it, retreated a little more shattered, settled back in the trough, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... "Wherefore, Mistress of the Forest, Dost thou wear thy work-day garments, Dirty ragged thresher's garments? You are very black to gaze on, And your whole appearance dreadful, 110 For your breast is most disgusting, And your ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... jogged along. At last the old gates were in sight, and the ragged little negroes stood ready to open them. Here we should begin to be patriotic, but do not fear being troubled with a dissertation on this worn-out subject. I will not even observe that by the very gate that was opened for the Westons did the Father of his ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... shall see them come and go O'er the wistful sea, Where rosy oleanders blow Round blue Lake Galilee, Kings with fishers' ragged coats And silver nets across their boats, Dipping through the starry glow, With crowns for him and me! Ah, no; ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... taken from a leader in The Times of February 11th, 1918, bring me back to the starting point of these ragged reflections. There will be no permanent stablishing of our agriculture, no lasting advance towards safety and health, if we have not vision and a fixed ideal. The ruts of the past were deep, and our habit is to walk along without looking to left ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... mesas the steel trail of the railroad runs east and west, diminishing at either end to a shimmering blur of silver. South of the railroad these level immensities, rich in their season with ripe bunch-grass and grama-grass roll up to the barrier of the far blue hills of spruce and pine. The red, ragged shoulders of buttes blot the sky-line here and there; wind-worn and grotesque silhouettes of gigantic fortifications, castles and villages wrought by some volcanic Cyclops who grew tired of his labors, abandoning his unfinished ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... square. Little direction was needed to band them into a marching mob, waving clubs, pikes, and bottles, dancing, quarrelling and howling, with ribald songs and shouts of "To the execution!" In one thing they differed notably from a similar crowd in this century, could such be imagined. Ragged and wretched though they were, they wore colour in profusion. The mass was a ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... the Grand Canon is an even more inspiring and amazing performance than going down. But by now—anyhow this was my experience, and they tell me it is the common experience—you are beginning to get used to the sensation of skirting along the raw and ragged verge of nothing. Narrow turns where, going down, your hair pushed your hat off, no longer affright you; you take them jauntily—almost debonairly. You feel that you are now an old mountain-scaler, and your soul ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... who cheat us. Count Mannsfeld will come to-day; I know it, and I have also learned that he will bring everything except what is our due, what we need, what we intend to demand, what we require for our bare feet, our ragged bodies; money, money he has not to offer! This is so, I swear it; if not, stand forth, you parleyers, and give me the lie! Have you inclination or courage to give the lie to Navarrete?—You are silent!—But ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... one, but she was a poor ragged thing, of no account, and fit for nothing in the world but to tend ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... a mountain deer, Festing would have approved, for he had noted Helen's easy balance and fearless grace as she crossed the ragged blocks of stone. Then a rumble of distant thunder rolled among the crags and Miss Jardine resumed: "We ought to fix ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... ever seen: their thieving instincts had no bounds; so they had hardly entered Nueva Vizcaya when they started to give themselves up furiously to robbery, looking upon all things as loot; in the very shadow of these soldiers the province was invaded by a mob of adventurous and ragged persons from Nueva Ecija; between the two they picked Nueva Vizcaya clean. When they had grown tired of completely shearing the unfortunate Vizcayan people, leaving them poverty-stricken, they flew in small bands to the pueblos of Isabela, ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... POWER DESIGN was not a giant corporation, but it did pretty well for a one-man show. The outer office was a gantlet that Mike the Angel had to run when he came in the next morning after having spent the night at a hotel. There was a mixed and ragged chorus of "Good morning, Mr. Gabriel" as he passed through. Mike gave the nod to each of them and was stopped four times for small details before he finally made his way to his ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... cold water came bubbling up out of the ground just as it always had, and ran off down into the Green Forest in a little stream that would grow and grow as it ran and became the Laughing Brook. Farmer Brown's boy took off his ragged old straw hat and scowled down at the bubbling water just as if it had no ...
— The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver • Thornton W. Burgess
... interest, and installments on the furniture, they had left sixty dollars, and deducting the coal, they had fifty. They did without everything that human beings could do without; they went in old and ragged clothing, that left them at the mercy of the cold, and when the children's shoes wore out, they tied them up with string. Half invalid as she was, Ona would do herself harm by walking in the rain and cold when she ought to have ridden; they bought literally nothing but food—and still they could ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... who abandoned all the conveniences and comforts of life, voluntarily encountering poverty and exposure to the inclemency of the seasons. His garments were of the meanest kind, his beard neglected, his person filthy, his diet bordering on starvation. To the passers-by this ragged misanthrope indulged in contemptuous language, and offended them by the indecency of his gestures. Abandoned at last by every one except Diogenes of Sinope, he expired in extreme wretchedness. It had been a favourite ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... was so assured of its identity, that she ran out under the awning and looked up and down the platform in front of the station buildings. The rain had ceased, but drops still pattered from the tin roof, and a few stars peeped over the ragged ravelled edge of slowly drifting clouds. By the light of a gas lamp, she saw an old negro man limping away, who held a stick over his shoulder, on which was slung a bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief; and while she stood watching, he vanished in some cul de sac. With ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... view profited him nothing. Half a mile to westward the ragged tree-line still showed as before, with vacancy behind it, and as far as Stern could see to north, to south, it stretched away till the dim blue of distance swallowed it. Yet, straight across the gulf, no land appeared. Only the sky itself was visible there, as calm and ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the beggar on the rock remove his ragged turban, rewind it, and then leisurely remove himself from sight. The system of signals was pretty obviously simple. The whole intriguing East is simple, if one only has simplicity enough ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... and many prisoners, among them an American officer of artillery, whom he shot the next day, AS USUAL. Oajaca has fallen into the hands of the clergy. The Liberals under Carbajal attacked Tulancingo, and were disgracefully beaten by a lot of ragged Indians. They are losing ground everywhere; and if the United States does not take hold of this unhappy country it will certainly go to the dogs. There is a possibility of compromise between Juarez and Miramon, the effect of which is this: the constitution of '57 ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... and contemplated with a melancholy air the deserted landscape. For the first time since the beginning of her journey she was not welcomed on her arrival. Nobody seemed to know or care that it was the queen who was seated in the carriage. Only a few tow-headed peasants' children, in ragged, dirty dresses, rushed toward the superintendent's house and stared at her, without saluting or thanking ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... But as he drew near to Chili, the Spanish commander became entangled in the defiles of the mountains, where no vestige of a road was to be discerned. Here his progress was impeded by all the obstacles which belong to the wild scenery of the Cordilleras; deep and ragged ravines, round whose sides a slender sheep-path wound up to a dizzy height over the precipices below; rivers rushing in fury down the slopes of the mountains, and throwing themselves in stupendous cataracts into the yawning abyss; dark forests of pine that seemed to ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... nearly finished eating, when, all at once, the bushes near where Bunny was sitting were pushed to one side, and two rough-looking men, one large and one smaller, with ragged clothes, and red handkerchiefs tied around their necks in ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on Grandpa's Farm • Laura Lee Hope
... hair and beard encircled a shrivelled, hawklike face, the mouth was sucked back in a toothless eddy that brought tip of nose and tip of chin into whispering distance, the eyes glittered from behind the overhanging, ragged brows like those of a hungry animal searching through ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the house was raised, but which was now converted into a store room, for old barrels, old baskets, old hats and bonnets, and, in fine, a great variety of old things. In one corner stood a little old bedstead, with an old flock bed, covered with patched sheets and a ragged quilt, where James slept. The loom was in that room and the spinning wheels; an old churn and many other things, too numerous ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... in England having been thus much injured. Some such habit must also be common to the puma, for on the bare hard soil of Patagonia I have frequently seen scores so deep that no other animal could have made them. The object of this practice is, I believe, to tear off the ragged points of their claws, and not, as the Gauchos think, to sharpen them. The jaguar is killed, without much difficulty, by the aid of dogs baying and driving him up a tree, where ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Esculentus,' is absolutely needful in the fabrication of the stuff, which being occasionally two or three yards wide and fifty long, are composed of small pieces of the bark. The women employed at this work wore very old and ragged clothes and their hands were ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... door of a little closet, lighted only by a skylight in such a way that prying eyes could not see into it. The two friends unstopped the flue which opened into the chimney of the stove in the workroom, where the girls heated their irons. Eve and Basine spread ragged coverlets over the brick floor to deaden any sound that David might make, put in a truckle bed, a stove for his experiments, and a table and a chair. Basine promised to bring food in the night; and as no one had occasion to enter her room, David might defy his enemies one and all, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... spent a part of every Sabbath—after morning service—in this sumptuous home, the rest of it they spent in Europe, or in dawdling around in their private yacht. Six days of sordid and plodding fact life at home on the ragged edge of Lakeside and straitened means, the seventh in Fairyland—such had been their ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... his degradation, and at times he regarded them (happening to see himself in a shop mirror) with pleasurable contempt. The same spirit often led him for a meal to the poorest of eating-houses, places where he rubbed elbows with ragged creatures who had somehow obtained the price of a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and butter. He liked to contrast himself with these comrades in misfortune. 'This is the rate at which the world esteems me; I am worth no better provision than this.' ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... other those instincts are but sleeping. I have seen men and women collected from the rice-fields by the hundred, at the very instant of transition from slavery to freedom. They were starved, squalid, ragged, and ignorant to the last degree; but I could not call them degraded, for they had the instincts of courtesy and the profoundest religious emotions. There was none of that hard, stolid, besotted dulness which seems to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... read. Very small causes are sometimes followed by the greatest results. Less than a book often settles a person's destiny. A picture created that life of purity and usefulness which we find in Dr. Guthrie, the renowned English champion of the Ragged School enterprise. His case is so interesting, that we close this chapter by letting him speak for himself. ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... threading in a zigzag through the gleam of bright silver, the glitter of white linen, the crimson of deep carnations. Maurice's in its own way was admirably tasteful; as distinctively quiet and smooth in its manners and rich hangings as it was distinctly loud in its lights and ragged in its music. No after-theatre corner of Broadway had a crisper American accent of vice, or displayed vice itself more delicately lacquered. The place was as openly innocent as a street, with a street's sightless and irresponsible ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... below a fifty-center transient—a wall-eyed, yellow frame-house of a horse, sent up to board from a livery-stable in town, where they called him "The Lamb," and never let him out except at night and to strangers. My companion, who knew and had broken most of the horses, looked at the ragged hammer-head as it rose, ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... the bigness of my tongue: Since truth must out, I own it wrong." On this, a hue and cry arose, As if the beasts were all his foes. A wolf, haranguing lawyer-wise, Denounced the ass for sacrifice,— The bald-pate, scabby, ragged lout, By whom the plague had come, no doubt. His fault was judged a hanging crime. What! eat another's grass? Oh, shame! The noose of rope, and death sublime, For that offence were all too tame! And soon poor ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... rubbing his knotted fingers up and down the ragged knees of his corduroys. Roseen heaved a deep sigh, and folded one dimpled hand over the other, her eyes meanwhile fixed unwinkingly on the face of the narrator. The interest of the ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... where the direct rays of the sun could not reach, the light was yet abundant, but cool and tender,—and here the vivid berries were beginning to lose their colour, as a curved moon, just rising over the far, ragged rim of the forest, touched them with phantom silver. Everywhere jutting rocks and sharp crevices broke the soft mantle of the blueberry thickets; and on the southerly slope, where sunset and moonrise mingled with intricate shadows, ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of purple and fine linen are vorbei. You'll have to put up with me in a threadbare coat and frayed cuffs and ragged hems to ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... woman did exactly as I should have done, under the same circumstances. In the first place, I should never have had the heart to doubt a man who carried an honest face, and was cold, hungry, and ragged. I should have regarded his condition as a claim upon my charity. In the second place, I should have had no time to call upon his family, and satisfy myself with regard to their circumstances; and in the third place, I should have felt very delicate about putting direct ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... would spit up blood, but that when attended to at once, and the wound dressed, it would be a matter of only eight or ten days when he would be again in fairly good condition. He said, however, that wounds from fragments of shrapnel were of quite a different character; that they were ragged, unclean and usually gave much concern. He said, also, as a matter of fact, that the gun or rifle was performing a less and less important function in warfare. That many were even in favor of abandoning the rifle entirely as a weapon. That the war, as carried on today, is carried ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... huckster's stall, and there was the owner herself, superintending the sale of her small wares—a few loungers and ragged idlers were hanging round her stall—for Biddy was 'a character,' and, in her way, was one of the ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... the forest broke and the ragged land leapt into full view with magical abruptness. It was as though Nature had grown her forest within the confines of a field embraced by an imaginary hedge. There were no outskirts, no dwindling away. It ended in one clean-cut line. And beyond lay the rampart hills, fringed and patched ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... lodging-houses and temperance restaurants; and thus they endeavour to rescue the fallen, to fight the drink evil, and to care for the bodies and souls of beggars and tramps, of unemployed workmen, and of starving and ragged children. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to balk All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... swing. Desire pushed; after three vibrations they saw the ragged figure standing in the doorway, watching, turning its head from side to side as the ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Among the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen only rarely some figures remind one of the fact that this is Eastern Europe: tall, thin Jews in their long caftans and Jewish women with their unnatural wigs; male and female beggars there are in great numbers, and they are so hungry looking and ragged, so deep-eyed and sickly, that one can hardly manage to swallow one's food in their vicinity, if one happened to have chosen a seat on the terrace of one ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... my notion, is pleasant cheer, To lie all alone on a ragged heath, Where your nose isn't sniffing for bones or beer, But a peat-fire smells like a garden beneath. The cottagers bustle about the door, And the girl at the window ties her strings. She's a dish for a man who's a mind to be poor; Lord! women ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... contains; so that very little or none of the smoke will escape into the open air, which is incumbent upon it. It is remarkable, that the upper surface of this smoke, floating in the fixed air, is smooth, and well defined; whereas the lower surface is exceedingly ragged, several parts hanging down to a considerable distance within the body of the fixed air, and sometimes in the form of balls, connected to the upper stratum by slender threads, as if they were suspended. The smoke is also apt ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... gaining body rapidly, and rising a certain height clear from the ground, then seeming to hover, a thick cloud poised between earth and sky, not touching either, but drawn horizontally over the fields like a pall with ragged edges through which the trees showed in blurred outline, their leaves dripping miserably with an intermittent patter of uncertain drops as the moisture collected upon them and fell, and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... her on the street and in her carriage; memory marks the spots by a glow of light; they are my holy places. I saw her open her purse for a blind man begging on a church step. I watched her turn and speak politely to a ragged newsgirl. One day, when Quinet and I, coming down from College and seeing a little boy fall on the path, threw away our books and set him on his feet, it was her face of approval that beamed out of a carriage window on the opposite side ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... silence except when Mayne gave an order. White upheavals broke the passing swell on both sides of the ship. She rolled with violent jerks and at regular intervals the bows swung up. When they sank, a dark mass with a ragged top cut off the view from the pilot-house, and Kit knew it was a mangrove forest. He could see no break in the wall of trees that grew out of the water, but they were not far off when there was a heavy ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... body text begins in column 1 and is set ragged right with a line length of 70 characters. The choice of 70 characters is arbitrary and was made to avoid overly long and therefore less readable lines in ...
— People of Africa • Edith A. How
... town, and stands fronting upon the river, only a short distance from the bank, nearly at the point where the pontoon-bridge touches the Virginia shore. In its front wall, on each side of the door, are two or three ragged loop-holes which John Brown perforated for his defence, knocking out merely a brick or two, so as to give himself and his garrison a sight over their rifles. Through these orifices the sturdy old man dealt a good ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... countless designs in clay. But from this image of the beauty of the race, his deepening insight drove him to interpret the tragedy also, and he sought out from the slums and small synagogues of the East End strange forlorn figures, with ragged curls and wistful eyes. It was from one of these figures that he learnt to his astonishment that the dream of Zion, whereof he imagined himself the sole dreamer, was shared by myriads, and had even ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... armed against Indians, and selling whiskey. Variety in their vocation of drinking and killing was brought them by the travellers. These passed and passed through the glaring vacant months—some days only one ragged fortune-hunter, riding a pony; again by twos and threes, with high-loaded burros; and sometimes they came in companies, walking beside their clanking freight-wagons. Some were young, and some were old, and all drank whiskey, and wore ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... just sugaring and creaming the prince's reward before applying to her dish on the fire for the crowning coffee; when her eye was caught by a spectator lately come upon the scene. No other than a somewhat ragged little boy, who eyeing them from the bank had been irresistibly lured nearer and nearer, by the grace of the preparations and the steam of the hot coffee perhaps, till he now stood by the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... there was power; but they had no comforter." If this report had been written by one who had been climbing with me through the tenement houses of not less than a score of Boston streets, conversing with the sewing-women, looking on their poverty-lined faces and their ragged children, breathing the poisonous air of the quarters where they work, and listening to their heart-rending stories of cruelty and oppression, it would be an appropriate summary of our observation. It is my purpose, ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... and if you do not find me faithful, honest, and true to you, tell your men to string me up to a bough. I do not drink, and have been in so many services that, ragged as you see me, I can yet behave so as not to ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... the bar that protected the window. The saloon was full of men, foul with tobacco smoke, and the floor was filthy. Flies sluggishly buzzed about the pools of beer on the bar counter. The men were talking excitedly; a few thin, ragged hangers-on were looting the free-lunch dishes surreptitiously. Miss Hitchcock's face expressed her disgust, but she said nothing. She had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... He swept them away impatiently from time to time. Squatting on his heels in a corner, his inscrutable yellow face damp and glistening, Yoshio was cleaning a revolver with his usual thoroughness and precision. A ragged square of canvas beside him held the implements necessary to his work, set out in methodical order, and as he cleaned, and oiled and polished assiduously without raising his eyes his deft fingers selected unerringly the tool he required. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... related entities within the general fact there for discernment. This peculiarity of knowledge is what I call its unexhaustive character. This character may be metaphorically described by the statement that nature as perceived always has a ragged edge. For example, there is a world beyond the room to which our sight is confined known to us as completing the space-relations of the entities discerned within the room. The junction of the interior ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... straw full of dust and vermin, with the stems of boughs sticking up therethrough, for the cattle had eaten all the straw that was placed at the head and the foot. And upon it was stretched an old russet-coloured rug, threadbare and ragged; and a coarse sheet, full of slits was upon the rug, and an ill-stuffed pillow, and a worn-out cover upon the sheet. And after much suffering from the vermin, and from the discomfort of their couch, a heavy sleep fell on Rhonabwy's companions. But Rhonabwy, ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... what might be before them; but he was not going to confess it. He was a lean and gaunt fellow, blue-eyed and broad-shouldered, of a Cumbria type commonly held to be of Scandinavian origin. His eye was a little wandering and absent, and the ragged gray whiskers which surrounded his countenance emphasized the slight incoherence of its expression. Quiet he was and looked. But his wife knew him for one of the most incurably obstinate of men; the inveterate critic moreover of everything and every one ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "you 'ave 'it the right nail on the 'ead, there, sir. They go into the 'otels and work like niggers, knowing that if a single thing goes wrong they will be bully-ragged and sworn at till they don't know whether they are standing on their 'ead or their 'eels. But they 'ave their hours; the gal knows when 'er work is done, and when the clock strikes she is a 'uman being once again. She 'as ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... the arch under the portico gateway, and Festus passed under, Uncle Benjamin singing, Twen-ty-three and a half from N.W. with a sort of sublime ecstasy, feeling, as Festus had observed, that his money was safe, and that the French would not personally molest an old man in such a ragged, mildewed coat as that he wore, which he had taken the precaution to borrow from a scarecrow in one of his fields ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... when you come back, Edward, one of us must go to Lymington, for I require some tools, and Pablo is very ragged. He must have some better clothes than these old ones of ours, if he is to be sent ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... of the tramcar the girls made the unpleasant discovery that in Italy begging is not forbidden, but quite a recognized profession with certain of the poorer classes. They were immediately surrounded by a ragged rabble, some of whom exhibited sores or other unsightly afflictions to compel compassion, and all of whom held out dirty hands and persistently clamored for money. The blind, the halt, and the maimed were there, evidently regarding tourists as their legitimate prey, ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... however, what was my surprise, when on awaking I found myself lying in my first humble lodging, stripped of my rich vestments, and saw on the ground my former mean attire; namely, an old vest, a pair of tattered drawers, and a ragged turban, as full of holes as a sieve. When I had somewhat recovered my senses, I put them on and walked out in a melancholy mood, regretting my lost happiness, and not knowing what I should do to recover it. As I strolled towards the palace, I beheld sitting in ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... nodded in time to his hammer, was presented to you. When he paused to speak, and glanced up, he showed a face that the gas jet, with the aid of many secluded years, had tinctured with its own artificial hue, a face puckered through a long frowning intent on old boots. He wore an apron that had ragged gaps in it. He was a frail and dingy little man, and might never have had a mother, but could have been born of that dusty workroom, to which he had been a faithful son all his life. It was a murky interior shut in from the day, ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... crumbling surface, channelled and sunken from its plane, its gray rents held together here and there by a leafy strap of ivy which could scarcely find substance enough for the purpose. The rafters were sunken, and the thatch of the roof in ragged holes. Leaves from the fence had been blown into the corners of the doorway, and lay there undisturbed. The door was ajar; Farfrae knocked; and he who stood before them was Whittle, ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... sleep until a disgruntled picket roused us for another day. Occasionally some sybarite would be seen using the remains of his evening tea as shaving-water and laboriously scraping a three days' growth of hair from his face; but he was the exception. We were a ragged, unwashed, unshaven ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett |
