"Spindle-shanked" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... house, we saw the whole garrison assembled before the door. It consisted of a dozen dwarfish, spindle-shanked Mexican soldiers, none of them so big or half so strong as American boys of fifteen, and whom I would have backed a single Kentucky woodsman, armed with a riding-whip, to have driven to the four winds of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... least shady trees on the very spot where shade is needed most. A single wide-spread acacia did something to restore the balance. Here Hilary Joyce slumbered in the heat, and in the cool he inspected his square-shouldered, spindle-shanked Soudanese, with their cheery black faces and their funny little pork-pie forage caps. Joyce was a martinet at drill, and the blacks loved being drilled, so the Bimbashi was soon popular among them. But one day was exactly like another. ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... over the Piazza in his sark, before the Conclave sing Veni Creator. Judge of your Emperor with a swollen nose, blacken your Dukes in the eye: if they remain Dukes and Emperors you may safely obey them. They are men, Borso, they are men! Yes, you spindle-shanked rascal, you may well wince. Do you ponder how you would stand assay? So do I ponder it, brother, and doubt horribly." He clapped his hand to his face. "Steady now, steady, here comes another bout. Ah, Madonna of the Este—but this is a shrewd twinge! Fare you well, brother Fat-chops. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... recollects himself as he was at the time, young and gamesome; and forgets that his hearers have no other idea of the hero of the tale, but such as he may appear at the time of telling it; peradventure, a withered, whimsical, spindle-shanked old gentleman. With married men, it is true, this is not so frequently the case; their amorous romance is apt to decline after marriage; why, I cannot for the life of me imagine; but with a bachelor, though it may slumber, it never dies. It is always liable to break out again in transient ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving |
