"Scraggy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was small and miserable, with a few scraggy trees bowing low, like all trees of Sistan, towards the S.S.E., owing to the severe, N.N.W. winds. Here instead of the everlasting domes, flat roofs were again visible—wood being, no doubt, available close at hand. More curious, however, were actual gable roofs, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... whom he had met on the Bowery now showed his real character, and before Herbert could further defend himself, he was pounced upon by him and a villainous looking man with a scraggy red beard and most repulsive features. They threw a thick black cloth over his head, and, after binding his hands firmly together, thrust him into a dark vault, ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... further away the mountains were very dark against a yellow line of sky. Marian continued her way thoughtfully toward the garden, turned off before she reached the gate and climbed a ladder which leaned against the side of the old brick wall. From the ladder one could reach a long limb of a scraggy apple tree upon which hung early apples nearly ripe. Marian went up the ladder very carefully, taking care not to catch her frock upon a nail or a projecting twig as she crept along the stout limb to settle herself in a crotch of the tree. From ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... Miss Sophie was starving herself to death to get some luckless relative out of jail for Christmas; a rumour which enveloped her scraggy little figure with a kind of halo to the neighbours when she ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... me," said the old woman, becoming suddenly grave, and laying her thin scraggy hand on the man's arm; "why do ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... side of this is an open tract of ground, half cleared, half woodland; the former sterile, the latter scraggy. It seems to belong to no one, as if not worth claiming, or cultivating. It has been, in fact, an appanage of Colonel Armstrong's estate, who had granted it to the public as the site for a schoolhouse, and a common burying-ground—free to all desiring to be instructed, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... expression in his face, "have you heard about the trouble that old fool Theophilus has been getting into? Mark my words, before he dies, he'll land his sister in the poorhouse, as sure as I sit here. Garden needed moisture, he said, couldn't raise some of those scraggy, new-fangled things that nobody can pronounce the names of except himself, so he went to work and had pipes laid from one end to the other. When the bill came in there was no way to pay it except by mortgaging his house, so he's gone and mortgaged it. Mrs. Clay, poor lady, came ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... sugars, mouldy dried fruits; at their doors, flitches of fat bacon, cut and dusty. The meat with which the butchers' shops overflowed was not from show-beasts, as Ned could see, but the cheaper flesh of over-travelled cattle, ancient oxen, ewes too aged for bearing; all these lean scraggy flabby-fleshed carcasses surrounded and blackened by buzzing swarms of flies that invaded the foot-path outside in clouds. The draperies had tickets, proclaiming unparalleled bargains, on every piece; the whole stock seemed displayed outside ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... went on thence, they came within two days into a country all broken up into little hills and ridges, and beset with scraggy shaws, wherein were but few men and fewer dwellings, and the men either hunters or herders of neat, well-nigh wild, and this lasted them for three days more; but they knew hereof beforehand, and had made provision ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... troop of babies!' he yelled. 'Ain't you goin' into the fight? Can't you lick a blamed Yankee?' And, bless your soul! those scraggy fellows stood stock still ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... brow, and his eyes are steady and cool and brown, his lips full and sensitive, his whole personality bespeaking force and decision. Quite different was Harriman; a small, ordinary looking man, with glasses and a scraggy mustache, giving the impression of nervous force rather than of power; an irritable man, easily angered; a fighter clear through, but fighting sometimes when peace ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... It was a place fitted for such a work, being hardly more than a rock whose high sides were continually beaten upon by the waves. The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for its inhabitants, which consisted of five persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare. Vegetables and bread, when they indulged in such luxuries, and even fresh water, was to be procured from the mainland, which ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... Coman, we procured some oat cakes and milk for dinner, from an old Scotch woman, who pointed out the direction of Loch Katrine, six miles distant; there was no road, nor indeed a solitary dwelling between. The hills were bare of trees, covered with scraggy bushes and rough heath, which in some places was so thick we could scarcely drag our feet through. Added to this, the ground was covered with a kind of moss that retained the moisture like a sponge, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... dancing, singing a song, and scraping on the strings. He looked about seventy; a thin nankin overcoat flapped pathetically about his dry and bony limbs. He danced, at times skipping boldly, and then dropping his little bald head with his scraggy neck stretched out as if he were dying, stamping his feet on the ground, and sometimes bending his knees with obvious difficulty. A voice cracked with age came from his ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... guest having taken leave, Rolfe put on his overcoat, and stepped out into the cold, clammy November night. He was overtaken by a fellow Metropolitan—a grizzled, scraggy-throated, hollow-eyed man, who laid a tremulous hand ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... As sleep refreshes the weary limbs of toil, so does this milk fill up the wasted limbs and restore the vanished strength. Strange is it to see the herds feeding on this abundant pasture. They look as if it did not profit them at all. Thin and scraggy, as they wander through the thickets they look like the patients who seek their aid; yet their milk is so thick that it sticks to the ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... thin, with a ragged coat, A scraggy tail, and a hunted look; No songs of melody burst from his throat As he seeks repose in some quiet nook— A safe retreat from this world of sin, And all of its boots and stones and that— For the life of a cat is a life of din, If ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... a cheerful outlook. Nothing was to be seen but the high board alley fence with a broken chicken-coop leaning against it, the weather-beaten old stable, and a scraggy, dripping peach-tree. The yard was full of puddles, and still the rain splashed on. The sight ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... short at eggs in the rising generation, and die out and have done with it? Parents of chickens have I seen this day, followed by their wretched young families, scratching nothing out of the mud with an air—tottering about on legs so scraggy and weak, that the valiant word drumsticks becomes a mockery when applied to them, and the crow of the lord and master has been a mere dejected case of croup. Carts have I seen, and other agricultural instruments, unwieldy, dislocated, monstrous. Poplar-trees ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... should write her a letter on her fortieth birthday; she could imagine the uncouth mixture of wit, rude candour, and wisdom with which he would greet her; his was a strange and sinister personality, but she knew that he admired her. The note was written in Meshach's scraggy and irregular hand, in three lines starting close to the top of half a sheet of note paper. It ran: 'Dear Nora, I hear young Twemlow is come back from America. You had better see as your John looks out for himself.' There ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... scenery; the light native cart, or ekka, consisting of a somewhat small body screened by a wide white hood, and capable of holding far more luggage than would at first sight seem possible, and drawn by a scraggy-looking but much enduring little horse tied up by a wild and complicated system of harness (chiefly consisting of bits of old rope) between a pair ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... apparent brush-heap. Starting at the sight, she immediately ran her canoe ashore, and proceeded at once to the spot; when, closely peering under the brush-wood, she discovered three canoes, with their oars, concealed beneath a deep covering of boughs, surmounted by a scraggy treetop lying carelessly over them, as if blown from ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... herself, but only to the robber. For she delights in this forceful desire, this forceful abduction. And so she does not put the garland of her acceptance round the lean, scraggy neck of the ascetic. The music of the wedding march is struck. The time of the wedding I must not let pass. My heart therefore is eager. For, who is the bridegroom? It is I. The bridegroom's place belongs to him who, torch in hand, can come in time. The bridegroom in Nature's wedding ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... cook, a Chinese in white trousers, very dirty and ragged, and a thin white tunic, came to say that supper was ready, and when the skipper went into the cabin he found the engineer already seated at table. The engineer was a long, lean man with a scraggy neck. He was dressed in blue overalls and a sleeveless jersey which showed his thin arms tatooed from ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... inspirations—an empty pantry? We shall presently see whether an author from below is better than one from above—whether it will be more eligible that the Muses should have several more stories to descend, when their nine ladyships are invoked so to do—and that the pen should be taken out of the scraggy hand of a gentleman in rags, and be placed in the plump gripe of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... front the mountains ranged across, pale blue and very still, snow gleaming gently out of the deep atmosphere. And towards the mountains, on and on, the regiment marched between the rye fields and the meadows, between the scraggy fruit trees set regularly on either side the high road. The burnished, dark green rye threw on a suffocating heat, the mountains drew gradually nearer and more distinct. While the feet of the soldiers grew hotter, sweat ran through their ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence
... lady was for dying like Mary, Queen of Scots (to whom she fancied she bore a resemblance in beauty), and, stroking her scraggy neck, said, "They will find Isabel of Castlewood is equal to her fate." Her gentlewoman, Victoire, persuaded her that her prudent course was, as she could not fly, to receive the troops as though she suspected nothing, and that her chamber was the best place wherein to await them. ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... would sit idle. At one time she would hear the tavern-keeper's geese going at the back of the huts to her kitchen-garden, and she would run out of the hut with a long stick and spend half an hour screaming shrilly by her cabbages, which were as gaunt and scraggy as herself; at another time she fancied that a crow had designs on her chickens, and she rushed to attack it wi th loud words of abuse. She was cross and grumbling from morning till night. And often she raised such an outcry that ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... over the open space and plunged into the wilderness of rocks and scraggy brush beyond. One look the patrol leader gave, after they found themselves in the ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred "the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... war took place there, owing to the struggle of the enemy to retain a footing on that splendid line of observation, the Lorette Ridge. The Arras-Bethune Road, known as the Route de Bethune, and bordered by a few scraggy trees, ran through the sector more or less from North to South—about a mile behind the front line, and two miles in front of Mont St. Eloy. The forward area was a scene of desolation—trenches and wire, shell-holes everywhere, mine craters ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... have to deal with ordinary wrong doers as well as with turbulent mobs. Ornament of every kind is rigorously excluded from these rooms. It is all very well to aim at the development of the aesthetic faculty for children by putting pictures and scraggy geraniums in pots into schoolrooms. No one wants a policeman to be artistic. But the love of the beautiful breaks out occasionally, even in policemen who live in barracks. Constable Moriarty, for instance, had a passion for music. He whistled better than any man ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... not less miles than he said, he did not say they were English miles, which are only one-fourth the length of Dutch miles, of fifteen to a degree. The southwest point, which only has been and is still cultivated, is barren, scraggy, and sandy, growing plenty of wild onions, a weed not easily eradicated. On this point three or four houses are standing, built by the Swedes, a little Lutheran church made of logs,[202] and the remains of the large block-house, which served them in place of a fortress, ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... fourteen years, and very slender—"scraggy," Jim was wont to say, with the cheerful frankness of brothers. Norah bore the epithet meekly—she held the view that it was better to be dead than fat. There was something boyish in the straight, slim figure in the blue linen frock—perhaps the quality was also to be found ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Representative of Christ on earth, he had watched with sickening soul all the tawdry ceremonial so far removed from the simplicity of Christ's commands,—he had stared dully, till his brows ached, at the poor, feeble, scraggy old man with the pale, withered face and dark eyes, who was chosen to represent a "Manifestation of the Deity" to his idolatrous followers;—and as he thought of all the poverty, sorrow, pain, perplexity, and bewilderment of the "lost sheep" who were wandering to and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Mr. Layard states that the mountain babbler frequents low, scraggy, impenetrable brush, along the margins of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... busy at this moment with hurling wooden balls along the alley, at the further end of which a hollow-eyed scraggy youth, in shirt and rough linen trousers, was employed in propping up again the fallen nine-pins. Squire John Boatfield had ridden over from Eastry, Sir Timothy Harrison had come in his aunt's coach, and young Squire Pyncheon ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... them, lay the scene of novels and plays in them, and then pursue him and eradicate him from the soil as a burden if not a nuisance. That he makes a resort far more beautiful to the eye than the boarder there is no denying. He covers it with beautiful houses; he converts the scraggy, yellow pastures into smooth, green lawns; he fills the rock crevices with flowers; he introduces better food and neater clothing and the latest dodges in plumbing. But these things are only for the few—in fact, the very ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... and planted with bushes, whence the staircases descended to the beach. I saw Trafalgar Lodge very plainly, a red-brick villa with a veranda, a tennis lawn behind, and in front the ordinary seaside flower-garden full of marguerites and scraggy geraniums. There was a flagstaff from which an enormous Union Jack hung limply in ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... perceive any grace in such a wretched animal. I can't help thinking that if it had been a young girl you had brought me—say, a sleeping nymph—full of youth and beauty, 'twould have been a vast improvement on the scraggy jeanie contained in this box. But clear away, Bristles, we are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... was as if joy—a supreme joy apart from the joys and sorrows of this world—overflowed the great grief within her. She forgot all fear of her father, went up to him, took his hand, and drawing him down put her arm round his thin, scraggy neck. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... His scraggy hair tousled on his head, a growth of black, wiry beard covering his face, coatless and collarless, he was a picture of coarse self-indulgence. Returning to his room at three o'clock in the morning after separating from the mayor, Brennan, John and Smith following their escape ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... upon what are called "mutual principles"—that is to say, the expenses of his board and schooling were defrayed by his father in goods, not money; and he stood there—almost at the bottom of the school—in his scraggy corduroys and jacket, through the seams of which his great big bones were bursting, as the representative of so many pounds of tea, candles, sugar, mottled-soap, plums (of which a very mild proportion was supplied for the puddings of the establishment), and other commodities. ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... (half-washed and half-starved from either the mother's ignorance or from the mother's timidity), that is the chilly starveling,—catching cold at every breath of wind, and every time he either walks or is carried out,—a puny, skinny, scraggy, scare-crow, more dead than alive, and more fit for his grave than for the rough world he will have to struggle in! If the above advice be strictly followed, a child may be sent out in the coldest ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... in spite of cold and tempest and disease. His own frail body broke down, and for the first time the shadow of depression fell on the British camps when they no longer saw the red head and lean and scraggy body of their general moving amongst them. For a week, between August 22 and August 29, he lay apparently a dying man, his face, with its curious angles, white with pain and haggard with disease. But he struggled out again, and framed yet new plans of attack. On September ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... Not only did the very heaps of ruby tomatoes, and corn in delicate green casings, tremble and shine as though they enjoyed the fresh light and dew, but the old donkey cocked his ears, and curved his scraggy neck, and tried to look as like a high-spirited charger as he could. Then everybody along the road knew Lois, and she knew everybody, and there was a mutual liking and perpetual joking, not very refined, perhaps, but hearty and kind. It was ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... contrary, it had every indication of the most robust and enduring health. The cold and exposure had, together, given it a color of uniform red. His gray eyes were glancing under a pair of shaggy brows, that over hung them in long hairs of gray mingled with their natural hue; his scraggy neck was bare, and burnt to the same tint with his face; though a small part of a shirt-collar, made of the country check, was to be seen above the overdress he wore. A kind of coat, made of dressed deer-skin, with the hair on, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... at Stornham, where the servants would overhear and Rosalie be thrown into hysterics. You will NOT run screaming across the marsh, because I should run screaming after you, and we should both look silly. Here is a rather scraggy tree. Will you sit on the mound near ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... forest look like mere bushes in comparison. A hollow one, already mentioned, is 74 feet in circumference, another was 84, and some have been found on the West Coast which measure 100 feet. The lofty range of Kebrabasa, consisting chiefly of conical hills, covered with scraggy trees, crosses the Zambesi, and confines it within a narrow, rough, and rocky dell of about a quarter of a mile in breadth; over this, which may be called the flood-bed of the river, large masses of rock are huddled ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... dreadfully ashamed of the way the Saskatchewan weather was behaving after all her boasting. She was thin at the best of times, but now she grew positively scraggy with the worry of it. I am afraid I took an unholy delight in teasing her, and abused the western weather even ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... isn't romance enough for you. You'd like a horseman to wear a suit of armor, or come prancing up in a top hat and shiny boots. But these men, in their rough clothes and on their scraggy-looking ponies, can ride. I saw some of them just before supper. They can ride like the wind and pull up so short that it's a wonder they don't turn somersaults. I'm going to ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... bed and thud-thudded across the room on her heels to shut the window she glanced out into the quiet street. Her city eyes, untrained to nature's hints, failed to notice that the scraggy, smoke-dwarfed oak that sprang, somehow, miraculously, from the mangey little dirt-plot in front of the building had developed surprising things all over its scrawny branches overnight. But she did see that the front windows of the flat building across the way were bare of the Chicago-grey ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... neglect many a mother's letters from her grown-up children could tell! A few scraggy lines, a few sentences now and then, hurriedly written and mailed—often to ease a troubled conscience—mere apologies for letters, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... upon my brother to allow him to take me to London, and leave me there to myself in a lodging house. The lodgings selected faced the Regent Gardens. It was then the depth of winter. There was not a leaf on the row of trees in front which stood staring at the sky with their scraggy snow-covered branches—a sight which ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... stopped before Mr. Presto Digi's mound, he began waving one of his thin, scraggy paws and at the same time made a gurgling noise that was deep down in his throat. And his eyes rolled and twisted around in ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... Oldcastle. Certain things I laid down as premises which could not be questioned; as, for example, that I found this gracious little lady (Mrs. Oldcastle was petite and softly rounded in figure; I am tall and inclined in these days to a stooping, scraggy kind of gauntness) a most delightful companion, admirably well-informed, vivacious, and unusually gifted in the matter of deductive powers and the sense of humour. Also, that (whatever the ship's chatterboxes might say) there ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... that morning of fog and firelight, in the midst of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly seen, like spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in insane self-conceit, to write, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... The lowing of kine; How lean-back'd they shiver, How draggled their cover, How their nostrils run over With drippings of brine, So scraggy and crining In the cold frost ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... oil-stove by Rippingille of Birmingham furnished me with the means of cooking; while two great bags, the one of flour, and the other of potatoes, made me independent of all supplies from without. In diet I had long been a Pythagorean, so that the scraggy, long-limbed sheep which browsed upon the wiry grass by the Gaster Beck had little to fear from their new companion. A nine-gallon cask of oil served me as a sideboard; while a square table, a deal chair and a truckle-bed completed ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... scarcely interrupted the beautiful rhythm of his stride. At the far end of the clearing, snuggled between two great pines that reached high into the blue, his squatty cabin showed red-brown against the precipitous shoulder of Bear Top peak, covered thick with brush and scraggy timber whipped incessantly by the wind that blew ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... on Orange River Camp. Our tents are pitched on the slopes of white sand, soft and deep, into which you sink at every step, that stretch down to the river, dotted with a few scraggy thorn-trees. There are men round me, sleeping about on the sand, rolled in their dark brown blankets, like corpses laid out, covered from head to foot, with the tight folds drawn over their feet and over their heads. A few bestir themselves, ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... said no more, or if he did his words failed to reach M. Zola. The reins were jerked, the scraggy night-horse broke into a spasmodic trot turned out of the station, and pulled up in front of the caravansary which an eminent butcher has done so much ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... ferns and mosses and creepers with a light hand were beautifully indicated. But in the nook where Wych Hazel had stationed herself, there was no pretty little figure with her book on her lap; in its place, sharply and accurately given, was a scraggy, irregular shaped bush, with a few large leaves and knobby excrescences which looked like acorns, but an oak it was not, still less a tree. The topmost branch was crowned with Miss Kennedy's nodding hat, and upon another branch lay her open drawing ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... he DOES!" drawled one of the men,—a weird, withered fellow with a scraggy beard and a reflective turn ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... that as about the interest now due to the old farmer. But he was glad that the principal there had yet some time to run. However, the skinny old fellow gave him some trouble by coming after him every day or two on a scraggy old white horse, furnished with a musty old saddle, and goaded into his shambling old paces with a withered old raw hide. All the neighbors said that surely Death himself on the pale horse was after poor China Aster now. And something so it proved; for, ere long, China Aster ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... have taken very quickly and kindly to American occupation. Some have been so quick in changing that their conversion may be doubted. For instance, the editor of La Nueva Era, a daily which in two scraggy leaves purports to be a 'journal of news, travel, science, literature and freedom,' was only a few weeks ago raving at the 'American Pigs'; while now he luxuriates under the eagle's aegis and writes eulogies ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... liberally estimated value of her share. It was in order to fill up the void thus created in his finances that he had espoused the half-million represented by Constance—an ugly creature, as he himself bitterly acknowledged, coarse male as he was. Truth to tell, she was so thin, so scraggy, that before consenting to make her his wife he had often called her "that bag of bones." But, on the other hand, thanks to his marriage with her, all his losses were made good in five or six years' time; the business of the works even doubled, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... might aggrandize the heathen should prevail. The first as well as the last rocks of Japan to rise from and sink into the prodigous waters, through which we pursued our homeward way, bathing our eyes in the delicious glowing floods of eastern air, were scraggy with sharp pinnacles, and sheer precipices, grim survivals of the chaos that it was, before there was light. I have had but glimpses of the extreme east of Asia, yet the conceit will abide with me that this is in geology ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... after, Mrs. Pepper and Polly were busy in the kitchen. Phronsie was out in the "orchard," as the one scraggy apple-tree was called by courtesy, singing her rag doll to sleep under its sheltering branches. But "Baby" was cross and wouldn't go to sleep, and Phronsie was on the point of giving up, and returning to the house, when a ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... led us directly into the grove, where we were obliged to dismount, as the low, scraggy branches would not permit our riding beneath them. Securing our animals, we followed the trail on foot for some distance, when Jerry called my attention to a number of ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... veranda, she saw a man, a stranger, riding towards the house and she stood to await his approach. He belonged to what is rather indiscriminately known in that section of the State as the "piney-woods" genus. A rawboned fellow, lank and long of leg; as ungroomed with his scraggy yellow hair and beard as the scrubby little Texas pony which he rode. His big soft felt hat had done unreasonable service as a head-piece; and the "store clothes" that hung upon his lean person could never in their remotest freshness have ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... ancient Greece and modern Greece compared, furnish the most extravagant contrast to be found in history. George I., an infant of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office holders, sit in the places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and generals of the Golden Age of Greece. The fleets that were the wonder of the world when the Parthenon was new, are a beggarly handful of fishing-smacks now, and the manly people that performed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... assistant (no wages), is carried off by consumption; a second drowns herself in a bath at a charitable institution; another takes to drink; and the portraits of the survivors, their petty, incurable maladies, their utter uselessness, their round shoulders and 'very short legs,' pimples, and scraggy necks—are as implacable and unsparing as a Maupassant could wish. From the deplorable insight with which he describes the nerveless, underfed, compulsory optimism of these poor in spirit and poor in hope Gissing might almost have been an 'odd woman' himself. In this book and The ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... suppose that's a whalebone whale, Hank?" asked the boy, turning to a lithe Yankee sea-dog with a scraggy gray beard who had been busily working over the mechanism of ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... understand how the mistake arose: but Schomberg when I dropped in later to get some tiffin, though surprised to see me, was perfectly ready with an explanation. I found him seated at the end of a long narrow table, facing his wife—a scraggy little woman, with long ringlets and a blue tooth, who smiled abroad stupidly and looked frightened when you spoke to her. Between them a waggling punkah fanned twenty cane-bottomed chairs and two rows of shiny plates. Three Chinamen in ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... the high stool again before the lathe and looked through the dingy window at the scraggy trees outside, beyond ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable. Then there is such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same sense of infinite complexity which Nature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... a line from here," he said, "across the lake to that big, scraggy oak, every clear night the moon builds a bridge of molten gold, and once you walked it, my girl, and came straight to me, alone and unafraid; and you were gracious and lovely beyond anything a man ever dreamed of before. I'll have that to think of to-night. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... or to get well. What do we do with ailing vegetables? Dr. Warren, my honored predecessor in this chair, bought a country-place, including half of an old orchard. A few years afterwards I saw the trees on his side of the fence looking in good health, while those on the other side were scraggy and miserable. How do you suppose this change was brought about? By watering them with Fowler's solution? By digging in calomel freely about their roots? Not at all; but by loosening the soil round them, and supplying them with the right kind ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... commiseration. The level rainstorm smote walls, slopes, and hedges like the clothyard shafts of Senlac and Crecy. Such sheep and outdoor animals as had no shelter stood with their buttocks to the winds; while the tails of little birds trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown inside-out like umbrellas. The gable-end of the cottage was stained with wet, and the eavesdroppings flapped against the wall. Yet never was commiseration for the shepherd more misplaced. For that cheerful rustic was entertaining ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... English saddles, but I think we should have done just as well (I should certainly have seen more of the country) if we had adopted saddles like that of our Tatar, who towered so loftily over the scraggy little beast that carried him. In taking thought for the East, whilst in England, I had made one capital hit which you must not forget—I had brought with me a pair of common spurs. These were a great comfort to me throughout ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... aspect of affairs. In addition to having to spend the evening by himself, the cook sent him a very moderate dinner, smoked soup, sodden fish, scraggy cutlets, and sour pudding. Mr. Plummey, too, seemed to have put all the company bottle-ends together for him. This would not do. If Sponge could have satisfied himself that his host would not be better in a ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... about her, but I know her worth. In my fancy I always see her carrying a lamp, a humble kitchen lamp, illuminating the beams of some rustic roof—a lamp which will never go out while suspended from that meagre arm of hers, scraggy and strong ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... feeling at his scraggy throat, where an Adam's apple was working up and down. Speech was scared out of him, and he could only roll his eyes ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... The occupant of the depot wagon's rear seat was a thin, not to say scraggy, female, wearing a black, beflowered bonnet and a black gown. A black knit shawl was draped about her shoulders and she ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the scraggy part of a neck of mutton. Cut the meat from the bones, and cut off all the fat. Then cut meat into small pieces and put into soup pot with one large slice of turnip, two of carrot, one onion and a stalk of celery, all cut fine, half a cup of barley and three pints ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... simplicity of its inhabitants. The few streets that run between the straggling lines of sheds and sod-covered huts scattered over the rocks are narrow and tortuous, winding up steep, stony precipices, and into deep, boggy hollows; around rugged points, and over scraggy mounds of gravel and grit. The public edifices, consisting of two or three small churches and the amtman's residence, are little better than martin-boxes. For some reason best known to the people in these Northern climes, they paint ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... three hundred are said to have arrived. Standing on the streets, waiting for cars, lost in wandering about the streets searching for homes, the negroes presented a helpless group. The search for homes carried them into the most undesirable sections. Here the scraggy edges of society met. The traditional attitude of unionists toward negroes began to assert itself. Fear that such large numbers would weaken present and subsequent demands aroused considerable opposition to their presence. Meetings were held, exciting ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... and yet with a horrible sort of humanity about them. Hovering among these carcases was every kind of water-side plunderer, pulling the horns out, getting the hides off, chopping the hoofs with poleaxes, etc. etc., attended by no end of donkey carts, and spectral horses with scraggy necks, galloping wildly up and down as if there were something maddening in the stench. I never beheld such a ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... hammock, called Bradford's Island, where one year before I had spent my last night on the Gulf of Mexico with the "Maria Theresa," my little paper canoe. Soon it rose like a green spot in the desert, the well-remembered grove coming into view, with the half-dead oak's scraggy branches peering out of the feathery ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... fine condition," the old wretch mumbled smacking her lips. "Let me see your thumb," she demanded, and instead of sticking out his plump thumb, Haensel poked a tiny bone through the bars of the cage. "Oh! how lean and scraggy! You won't do yet"; and she called to Gretel to bring more food for him, and there she stopped to stuff him again. Then she again opened the oven door, looking all ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... shield nor spear, but only a black rod to which was bound the tail of a wildebeeste. Except for his moocha he was almost naked, and into his grey hair was woven a polished ring of black gum, from which hung several little bladders. Upon his scraggy neck was a necklace of baboon's teeth and amulets, whilst above the moocha was twisted a snake that might have been either alive ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... trees shut out so much. From here there were two exquisite perspectives. The trees and houses were so arranged that a long, arrowy ray of light penetrated through a narrow space over to a small rise of ground called Berry Hill on account of its harvest of blueberries. Two old, scraggy, immense oak-trees still remained; and she used to watch them from their first faint green to the blood-red and copper tints of autumn, when the sun shone through them. Down behind he dropped when the day was done; sometimes a ball of fire, at others bathed ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... had come to live in the house. When she returned, for she did come back alone, there were allusions made to that outing. She had to take her meals with these rather vulgar people. The woman of the house, a scraggy, genteel person, tried even to provoke confidences. Flora's white face with the deep blue eyes did not strike their hearts as it did the heart of Captain Anthony, as the very face of the suffering world. Her pained reserve had no power to awe them ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... rest. "Where's the Agent?" said I. "I'm the Agent," he answered. You could have knocked me down with a feather. "Where's John Holt's factory?" said I. "You have passed it; it is up on the hill." This showed Messrs. Holt's local factory to be no bigger than Ugumu's. At this point a big, scraggy, very black man with an irregularly formed face the size of a tea-tray and looking generally as if he had come out of a pantomime on the Arabian Nights, dashed through the crowd, shouting, "I'm for Holty, I'm for Holty." "This is my trade, you go 'way," says Agent ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... squirrels that he fed at his window, and of the shady pasture-path that led away over the brook from the very door, and up among pines and into little still nooks where dry mossy turf and warm gray rocks were sheltered in by scraggy cedars and lisping birches, so that they were like field-parlors opening in and out from each other with all sorts of little winding and climbing passages, between clumps of bayberry bushes and tall ferns; ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... dreary days he often longed for Kennedy Square and for those whom he loved, but it was not until one warm spring day, when the grass was struggling into life, and the twigs on the scraggy trees in Union Square were growing pink and green with impatient buds and leaves that he had his wish. Then a startling telegram summoned ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... calico wrapper—a scrap of it had made the doll's frock—and a blue-checked apron with holes in it. Her hair was drawn painfully back from her forehead, and there was a wispy fringe of it on the back of her scraggy neck. In her dull eyes glimmered nothing but the innate uneasiness of those who are always in need, and her mouth had drawn itself into the shape of a horseshoe. There is no luck in a horseshoe hung thus on a woman's face. One might fancy she felt no emotion, her whole demeanor ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Lord Harold Gray's a sure enough Lord, and she's his wife but—but a chippy, just the same; that's what she is, in spite of the Gray emeralds and that great Gray rose diamond she wears on the tiniest chain around her scraggy neck. Do you know, Mag Monahan, that this Lady Harold Gray was just a chorus girl—and a sweet chorus it must have been if she sang there!—when she ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... seeing her smashed to pieces, should her weak little wax-like hands relax their hold. She did not say anything, but obeyed him in spite of the terror that this exercise caused her; and she was so pitifully light in weight that she did not even fully stretch the ropes, being like one of those poor scraggy little birds which fall from a young tree without as much as ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... with a sigh before a neglected brief. In the distance the towers of the cathedral could be seen, reminding the attorney of the adjacent halls of justice in the scraggy-looking square, with its turmoil, its beggars, and apple women in the lobbies; its ancient, offensive smell, its rickety stairs, its labyrinth of passages and its Babel of tongues. Above him, however, the plaster bust of Justinian, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... of unjust things on their picturesque side. Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades. "Ah, delightful!" March took off his hat as if to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... courtesans who built pyramids. Little Thais loved Ahmes like a father, like a mother, like a nurse, and like a dog. She followed the slave into the cellar when he went to fill the amphorae, and into the poultry-yard amongst the scraggy and ragged fowls, all beak, claws, and feathers, who flew swifter than eagles before the knife of the black cook. Often at night, on the straw, instead of sleeping, he built for Thais little water-mills, and ships no bigger than his ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... he could not outrun them, and, looking about for any possible refuge, he saw, not far away, projecting ten or fifteen feet above the surface of the ravine, the scraggy branches of a tree, which ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... old woman; a miserable, scraggy, worn-out harlot, fit to take her bawd's degree: derived from the French word HARIDELLE, a worn-out jade of ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... her thin face and rather scraggy neck. Only the young should blush. After forty such involuntary exhibitions of emotion are ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... his certificated wisdom, was yet so singularly servile of habit and disposition that he might have won a success on the stage as Chief Toady in a burlesque of Court life. He was a pale, thin old man, with a wizened face set well back amid wisps of white hair, and a scraggy throat which asserted its working muscles visibly whenever he spoke, laughed or took food. His way of shaking hands expressed his moral flabbiness in the general dampness, looseness and limpness of the act,—not ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... had just come down to breakfast; Mrs. T. in her large dust-colored morning-dress and Madonna front (she looks rather scraggy of a morning, but I promise you her ringlets and figure will stun you of an evening); and having read the ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of this fact, let us analyze the word rough. In its literal application, it may designate any surface that has ridges, projections, or inequalities and is therefore uneven, jagged, rugged, scraggy, or scabrous. Now frequently a man's face or head is rough because unshaved or uncombed; also the fur of an animal is rough. Hence the term could be used for unkempt, disheveled, shaggy, hairy, coarse, bristly. "The child ran its hand over its father's rough ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... effects of the sun and their load. The last of the party was a stout man, apparently some five-and-forty years of age, dressed in a jacket and breeches of coarse brown cloth, and seated sideways on a scraggy mule, in such a position that his back was to the guard-house as he passed it. On the opposite side of the animal hung a pannier, containing cabbages and other vegetables; the unsold residue of the rider's stock in trade. The peasant's legs, naked below ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... "comforter" of Mrs. Varden. A tall, gaunt young woman, addicted to pattens; slender and shrewish, of a sharp and acid visage. She held the male sex in utter contempt, but had a secret exception in favor of Sim Tappertit, who irreverently called her "scraggy." Miss Miggs always sided with madam against master, and made out that she was a suffering martyr, and he an inhuman Nero. She called ma'am "mim;" said her sister lived at "twenty-sivin;" Simon she ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... fowls and cats had so taken possession of the out- buildings, that I couldn't help thinking of the fairy tales, and eyeing them with suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be changed back again. One old Tom in particular: a scraggy brute, with a hungry green eye (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined to think): came prowling round and round me, as if he half believed, for the moment, that I might be the hero come to marry the lady, and set all to-rights; but discovering his mistake, he suddenly ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... wood, Evening caught us ere we crept Where a twisted pear-tree stood, And a dwarf behind it slept; Round his scraggy throat he wore, Knotted tight, a scarlet scarf; Timidly we watched him snore, For he seemed ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... a little fellow that kept a small shop of hucksthery, and some groceries, and the like o' that. He was a near, penurious devil, hard and scraggy lookin', with hunger in his face and in his heart, too; ay, and besides, he had the name of not bein' honest. But then his shop was gettin' bigger and bigger, and himself richer and richer every day. Here's your man, says the old couple. ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... has some points in common with Professor Summerlee, and others in which they are the very antithesis to each other. He is twenty years younger, but has something of the same spare, scraggy physique. As to his appearance, I have, as I recollect, described it in that portion of my narrative which I have left behind me in London. He is exceedingly neat and prim in his ways, dresses always with great care in white drill suits and high brown mosquito-boots, and shaves ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cedar, as it is improperly called—is not a handsome tree, but it is a very useful one. It has a scraggy, stunted look, and the foliage is apt to be rusty; but it will grow in rocky, sandy places where no other tree would even try to hold up its head, and the wood, when made into timber, lasts for a great many years. Posts for fences are made of the juniper or red cedar, ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... appropriate, for he looked very tall and slim, though it might be the contrast with his wife's massive build that gave him a false presentment. He was more proud of her bulk than of his own height, and used to jeer at his Hottentot leader for the scraggy appearance of his weaker half, possibly with the kindly intention of reducing the number, or severity, of ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... the poor white "cracker" population that we saw, seemed indigenous products of the starved soil. They suited their poverty-stricken surroundings as well as the gnarled and scrubby vegetation suited the sterile sand. Thin-chested, round-shouldered, scraggy-bearded, dull-eyed and open-mouthed, they all looked alike—all looked as ignorant, as stupid, and as lazy as they were poor and weak. They were "low-downers" in every respect, and made our rough and simple. minded East Tennesseans look ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Around it the mountain is glowing in the summer sun, and appears soft and green. A gauze of shimmering blue mantles the crest, darkens in the coves, and becomes quite black in the gorges. The rugged rocks and scraggy trees, if there be any, are at this distance invisible, and nothing is seen but what delights the eye and ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... asked, in surprise. " Why, I 'lowed you folks from the settlemints thought hit was mighty scraggy ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... were several lots of pigs, of a bad but probably hardy sort—mostly black, round-backed, long-legged, and long-eared. In selling the animals, there was the usual chaffering, in shrill patois, at the top of the voice—the seller of some poor scraggy beast extolling its merits, the intending buyer running it down as a "miserable bossu," &c., and disputing every point raised in its behalf, until the contest of words rose to such a height—men, women, and even children, on both sides, taking part in it—that ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... was Scheffel doing at this Serpentaro in 1897? For I attended his funeral, which took place in the 'eighties. Can it be that his son, a scraggy youth in those days, inherited not only the father's name but his poetic mantle? Was it he who perpetrated those sententious lines? I like to think so. That "law of the ever-beautiful" does not smack of the old man, unless he was more disguised than ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... recollections was pressing her face against the window-panes when the first snow began to fall on the scraggy cedars in the yard; and as she began to sing softly to herself one of the ancient ditties of the children of the poor, "Old Woman, picking Geese," she would dream of the magical flowers which they ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... he watched the mountaineer, and the long, scraggy hands and whipcord neck seemed to interest him greatly. He looked at his own slim brown hands with a half smile, and it was almost as cruel as the laugh of the other. Yet it had, too, a knowledge and an understanding ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the wood thinned and the beeches failed, and they came to a country, still waste, of little low hills, stony for the more part, beset with scraggy thorn-bushes, and here and there some other berry-tree sown by the birds. Then said Roger: "Now I deem us well out of the peril of them of the Burg, who if they follow the chase as far as the sundering of us and the others, will heed our slot nothing, but will follow ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... they are all a blaze of red in every shade, from the brightest fieriest crimson to a dark purple, that is, all except those which are green or yellow. The mixture is much prettier than all one colour would be, and by contrast with the dark scraggy-looking pines, it does not look the least gaudy. Well, I'm going to shut up and do some reading. So good bye for the present, and best love to everyone under the sun ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... some of the sporting men of the cabinet, in the courtyard. There were also several stablemen, all much interested in the idea of taming the fiery steeds of the desert. The first look was disappointing. They were thin, scraggy animals, apparently all legs and manes. Long tails they had, and small heads, but anything so tame and sluggish in their movements could hardly be imagined. One could scarcely get them to canter around the courtyard. We were all rather disgusted, as sometimes one sees pretty little Arab ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... been only the scraggy little tree she had taken care of, the battered old toys, the torn dolls and the little pets she had played with and loved so well, the bird and the wild creatures she had fed and chattered to, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (illotum vulgus,) who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (gladio jugulati). The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,—the subject Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname of CHICK-PEA (Cicero) is said by some to be derived. As a lecturer is public property, we may remark, that his outer garment (toga) was of cheap stuff and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... ring and carrying a great happiness in her heart, went often to see how the cottage was progressing and how the trees were growing. For the hill-slope was covered with the gray-green of young olive trees, the dense, dark foliage of young oranges, and the stunted, scraggy boughs of the Japanese persimmon. His fruit ranch promised well, the day for their bridal was set, and they were ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... He wanted me to be an actress, and he had now gone away, so that I could not talk things over with him. He went away smiling and tranquil, after caressing me in the usual friendly way. He had gone, caring little about the scraggy child whose ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... visible, but I could not be sure of his rank, for there was no moon, and the night was dark. He was wearing an old "sugar-loaf" hat, seemingly much decayed, his blouse was covered with dust, and, in general, he looked tough. His face was covered with a thick, scraggy beard, and under all these circumstances it was impossible for me to recognize him. I was very anxious to do so in view of the trouble the officer had taken to come away out on the picket line, in the middle of the night, to see me, but I just couldn't, and ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... into an orchard and deteriorating into a scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... brave as any of them, was an old female slave of the sultan's, a native of Zamfra, five of whose former governors, she said, she had nursed. She was of a dark copper colour, in dress and countenance very much like a female esquimaux. She was mounted on a long-backed bright bay horse, with a scraggy tail, crop-eared, and the mane, as if the rats had eaten part of it, nor was it very high in condition. She rode a-straddle, had on a conical straw dish-cover for a hat, or to shade her face from the sun; a short, dirty, white bed-gown, a pair of dirty white loose ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... to turn into a bay where we found a small cluster of trees amongst big bowlders, and pitched our tent in their shelter. The snow had drifted in and filled the space between the rocks, and on this we piled armfuls of scraggy boughs and made a fairly level and wholly comfortable bed; but it was a long, tedious job digging with our hands and feet into the snow for bits of wood for our stove. The conditions were growing harder and ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... obeyed his friend; he unwound three or four yards of dingy woollen stuff from his scraggy throat, turned down the poodle collar, pulled his chair close to the table, squared his brows, and began business. He made very light of a brace of partridges and a bottle of ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... wall, they found a man, dead on his knees, leaning against the wall; his gun, still cocked and deadly, was resting against his shoulder and needing only the movement of a finger to sweep with deadly hail the cotton-bales. His scraggy hair topped the rock fence and his staring eyes peeped over, each its own way. And one of them looked forward into a future which was Silence, and the other looked backward into a ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... ruts have a very ugly look. Occasionally we pass a cottage with a garden, but no village is in sight. The brown trees have a forlorn look; the pointed leaves seem hardly to cover them. The bushes, too, that grow by the road-side, seem straggling and scraggy: but, then, I must remember that it is winter-time ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... me. A wall with many bars fixed across one minute opening. At the opening a dozen, fifteen, grins. Upon the bars hands, scraggy and bluishly white. Through the bars stretching of lean arms, incessant stretchings. The grins leap at the window, hands belonging to them catch hold, arms belonging to the hands stretch in my ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... is stone blind, and as scraggy as a scarecrow, so there's not much driving to be had out of him. Fancy if the aristocratic Power, or some other Saint Winifred's fellow saw us! Why, it would supply Henderson with jokes for six weeks," said Kenrick, getting up and touching the old ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... formerly levelled for a bowling-green, and was kept clear of shrubs or flower-beds. Beyond was a smooth, rather rapid slope towards a quiet river, beyond which there rose again a beautiful green field, crowned above by a thick wood, ending at the top in some scraggy pine-trees, with scanty dark foliage at the top of their rude russet arms. Fine trees stood out here and there upon the slope of the field; and Captain Merrifield's fine sleeked cows were licking each other, or chewing the cud, ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "shows all the faults of nature's worst handiwork. (No pun intended.) A scraggy little paw, brown, knotted and shapeless; of course every one will ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... officers looked for nothing better than life in camp. I accepted an invitation at the mess-table of the officers. Besides this sudden influx of population, there were followers and hucksters of various hues who hoped to make their profits from the soldiery. There was not a nook in the scraggy-looking little antique village but what was sought for with avidity and thronged with occupants. Whoever has seen a flock of hungry pigeons, in the spring, alight on the leaf-covered ground, beneath a forest, and apply the busy powers of claw ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... below the trees, that drow'd Their scraggy lim's athirt the road, While evenen zuns, a'most a-zet, Gi'ed goolden light, but little het, The merry chaps an' maidens met, An' look'd to zomebody to neaeme Their bit o' fun, a dance or geaeme, 'Twer ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... dwelling-house since she has lived here,—set quite a good way back from the street, and with a low stoop to one side and a piazza off that. A tall iron railing, with an ornamental gate, encloses a front yard in which are some forlorn-looking shrubs, a rosebush or two, and a couple of scraggy altheas. Workmen had been about the place for some time, putting everything in order, and of course we took the liveliest interest in all that went on, from the pruning of the shrubs to the carrying in of the furniture; and the day the new people moved in, ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus |
