"Wiry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said Orton to us feebly. Turning to a tall, spare, wiry chap, of just the build for tunnel work, where fat is fatal, he added: "This is Mr. Capps, my first assistant. He will show you the way down to ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... tartars and brimstones than any ten families in the place; and so truly did he inherit this family peculiarity that he had not been a year in the government of the province before he was universally denominated William the Testy. His appearance answered to his name. He was a brisk, wiry, waspish little old gentleman, such a one as may now and then be seen stumping about our city in a broad-skirted coat with huge buttons, a cocked hat stuck on the back of his head, and a cane as high as his chin. His face was broad, but his features were sharp; his cheeks ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... grin; "we are making money, your ladyship; we shall be afther moving out of this cellar before long, and away from the likes of them," (pointing in the direction of the curtain); "and, savin' your ladyship's presence," said he, running his fingers through his mop of wiry hair, "Irish people sometimes understhand dhriving a thrade as well as Yankees;" and Michael drew himself up as though General Washington couldn't be named on the ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... when the youthful bloods set off on Christmas day to race the frozen strait for the hand of buffer Beauvais's daughter Claire, but when her lover's horse, a wiry Indian nag, came pacing in it fled before their happiness. It was twice seen on the roof of the stable where that sour-faced, evil-eyed old mumbler, Jean Beaugrand, kept his horse, Sans Souci—a ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... situation was extremely novel to him. The turning of the worm! What would happen next! He was afraid at first that Stanislaus was going to give him his long-due payment, and he had no stomach to face the reckoning. He had not noticed before how wiry and strong Stanislaus looked. But when he saw that the boy made no movement, only spoke in that quiet voice, he plucked up a little courage. He began to bluster ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... me to a light-built, active, wiry, middle-sized man of about thirty-two years of age, in the undress uniform of the Royal Engineers. The countenance bore a pleasant frank appearance, eyes light blue, with a fearless look in them, hair crisp and inclined to ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... It involves the physical attractiveness of every woman in History and permits one to speculate wildly as to what might have happened if Cleopatra had weighed forty pounds heavier, if Elizabeth had been a gaunt and wiry creature, or if Joan of Arc had been so bulky that she could not ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... or two it was all that he could do to hold himself in consciousness. It appeared to him a necessity to do so. He could see a smoke-stained roof of beams and rafters, and on these he fixed his eyes, thinking that he could hold himself so, as by thin, wiry threads of sight, from falling again into the pit where all was black or blood-colour. The pain was appalling, but he thought he had gripped it at last, and could hold it ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Hawk Carse that he never even considered calling on Wilson's resources of men and weapons to help him. A Hawk he was: wiry, fierce-clawed, bold against odds and danger, most capable and deadly ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... but her color was high and her look strained when he helped her across the stones. Harry Vernon was a tall, thin, wiry Canadian, with a quiet face. When he got to the tent he opened the curtain, and beckoning Mrs. Cartwright, pushed ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... master should come to no harm; and where a danger appeared an earthly one, he was quite willing to bear the brunt of it. It was thought of the Yellow Woman which dried up all the courage in his small, wiry body. ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... impression of frontiersmen had been shaped by the loud threats, the swagger, and much profanity of the border people of the Territorial and Civil War days. Here were quiet men who made no boasts. Strong, wiry men they were, tanned by the sun of the Plains, their hands hardened, their eyes keen. They were military men who rode like centaurs, scouts who shot with marvellous accuracy, and the sturdy settlers, builders of empire in this stubborn West. Had I been older I would have felt ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... hemispherical Arenaria, another type of sterility, rose here and there, and tufts of Myosotis, Artemisia, Astragali, and Adrosace, formed flat cushions level with the soil. Grass was very scarce, but a running wiry sedge (Carex Moorcroftii) bound the sand, like the Carex arenaria of our ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... been happening to the cook. The tenseness had gone from his usually wiry little body; his eyes were milder; a curve was softening his mouth. Kneeling before the child, he ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... descended from Gallus bankivus, the jungle fowl of Eastern India. How they came here history records not: perhaps the gipsies brought them. They appear now in strange and diverse guise, the ponderous and feather-legged Cochin-China, the clean-limbed and wiry game, the crested Houdan, the Minorca with its monstrous comb, and the puny bantam. In Japan there is a breed that carries a tail seven or eight feet in length, which has to be "done" regularly like a lady's hair, to keep it ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... Colonel Askerton and his wife together, and she certainly would ask no such question in his presence. He was a slight built, wiry man, about fifty, with iron-grey hair and beard who seemed to have no trouble in life, and to desire but few pleasures. Nothing could be more regular than the course of his days, and nothing more idle. He breakfasted ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... high road, bordered by a vegetation new to me. Low trees, with wiry branches and shining evergreen leaves, which belonged, I was told, principally to the myrtle tribe, were overtopped by Jagua palms, and packed below with Pinguins; with wild pine-apples, whose rose and purple flower-heads were very beautiful; and with a species of palm of which I had ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... addition to this difficulty, there were numerous clumps of the tough male bamboo, which nothing will break, and which is terribly dangerous should a runaway elephant attempt to penetrate it, as the hard wiry branches would lacerate a rider in a frightful manner. There were numerous ravines in this forest, and we kept along the margin, slowly and cautiously, peering at the same time into the depths, in the expectation of seeing ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... or over the shoulder. Squire Boone, who has done with Quakerdom and is leading all that he holds dear out to larger horizons, is ahead of the line, as we picture him, ready to meet first whatever danger may assail his tribe. He is a strong wiry man of rather small stature, with ruddy complexion, red hair, and gray eyes. Somewhere in the line, together, we think, are the mother and son who have herded cattle and companioned each other through long months in the cabin on the frontier. ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... tactics. He discovered at his banker's one day a keen, communicative, wiry, shrewd, etc., etc., enterprising, etc., 'made a hundred thousand dollars' sort of a little man, named Briggs, who was traveling in order to travel, and grumble. Mr. Shodd 'came the ignorant game' over this Briggs; pumped him, without obtaining any information, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... men, constantly obstructed, and made a thousandfold more difficult by the velocity of his passage. Imagine shooting an arrow from the strongest bow in such a manner that it might travel about seven inches above the ground—how far would it go before it would strike a tall buttercup, a wiry bennet, or stick into a slight rise of the turf? You must imagine it given the power to rise over hedges, to make short angles about buildings, slip between the trunks of trees, to avoid moving objects, as men or animals, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... than he knew Dion, but both Dion and he were glad to be together and to exchange impressions in the new life which they had entered so abruptly, moved by a common impulse. Worthington was a dark, sallow, narrow-faced man, wiry, with an eager intellect, fearless and energetic, one of the most cheerful men of the ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... be a man with a real passion for the work, and in tongue a Hellene, about twenty years of age, of wiry build, agile at once and strong, with pluck enough to overcome the toils imposed on him, (2) and to take pleasure ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... to get a firm hold on the shoulder of his master's coat—twelve inches under water—and had braced himself with all his wiry strength for a tug which should ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... wouldn't I quickly gather together a thousand of these white slaves and sail merrily off with them to the Land of the Silver West! And men would learn to laugh there who hardly ever smiled before, and tendons would wax wiry, and muscles hard, and pale faces grow brown with the tints of health. And health would mean work, and work would mean wealth, and—but, heigho! what is the good of dreaming? Only some day—yes, some day—and what a glorious sunrise it will be for this empire—Government will ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... tough, wiry young fellow, struggled desperately, and freeing his right arm struck one of the Chilenos a blow that sent him down as if he had been shot, and cried out loudly, "Murder!" "Mutiny!", Mancillo meanwhile making savage thrusts at him with his knife, and the other man trying to run him ...
— The South Seaman - An Incident In The Sea Story Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... the world are found in Southern Asia and Central Africa. Their flesh-colored heads are only partially covered with stiff, wiry feathers, and hanging on the breast they bear a disgusting pouch, which answers the purpose of a crop. One of the largest of these storks is the marabou. It stalks about the great sandy plains of Central Africa with a composure and lordly grandeur, as if it were the most beautiful bird in the world. ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... underbrush, but a coarse, wiry grass, unfit for fodder, and scattered through them in detached patches, was the only vegetation visible. The ground was mainly covered with the leaves and burs ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... toward the plain that they must cross on their long journey back to the village of Kovudoo, the Gomangani. The king, still roaring and shrieking, wheeled and followed him. In their wake came the handful of low country baboons and the thousands of the hill clan—savage, wiry, dog-like creatures, ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rattling noise of the stones accompanied our descent, growing in volume, bewildering our minds. We had missed the indistinct beginning of the trail on the side of the ravine, and had to follow the course of the stream. A growth of wiry bushes sprang thickly between the large fragments of fallen rocks. On our right the shadows were beginning to steal into the chasm. Towering on our left the great stratified wall caught at the top of the glow of the low sun in a rich, tawny ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... route-marching that the Castle garrison practiced on occasional, bright spring mornings was always a delightful surprise to the small boys and dogs of Edinburgh. Usually the soldiers went down High Street and out to Portobello on the sea. But a regiment of tough and wiry Highlanders often took, by preference, the mounting road to the Pentlands to get a whiff of heather ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... coming into the counting-room late one evening. Loud voices had halted me as I passed the door. Mr Greeley stood back of the counter; a rather tall, wiry grey-headed man before it. Each was shaking a right fist under the other's nose. They were shouting loudly as they argued. The stranger was for war; Mr Greeley for waiting. The publisher of the Tribune stood beside the latter, smoking a pipe; a small man leaned over the counter ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... penalty of the abortion, but what is left of the organism suffers sadly. When this sort of arrest of development occurs in a man, it takes the element of masculineness out of him, and replaces it with adipose effeminacy. When it occurs in a woman, it not only substitutes in her case a wiry and perhaps thin bearded masculineness for distinctive feminine traits and power, making her an epicene, but it entails a variety of prolonged weaknesses, that dwarf her rightful power in almost every direction. The persistent neglect and ignoring by women, and especially by girls, ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... muscles, the mind undisturbed by any disquieting thought, the feeling of attainment through vigorous effort! It was a steady swing and swish, swish and swing! When Dick led I have a picture of him in my mind's eye—his wiry thin legs, one heel lifted at each step and held rigid for a single instant, a glimpse of pale blue socks above his rusty shoes and three inches of whetstone sticking from his tight hip-pocket. It was good to have him there whether ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... snows she sweeps, Hurling the haven behind, The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps, For the infinite air is unkind, And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow, Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind; Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow Spins to the widow-making ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... we found the bush torn up by the roots, and all the earth about it ploughed up where we had fought. The ground was also dyed with blood for several yards round, and where it had fallen the grass was withered up to the roots, as if scorched with fire. We also picked up a cluster of hairs—long, wiry, crooked hairs, barbed at the ends like fish-hooks; also three or four scales like fish-scales, only rougher, and as large as doubloons. The spot where the fight took place is now called La Canada del ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... Glittershield was slim and wiry in his body, as long as Old Rattler himself, but not so large around. His coat was smooth and glossy, not rough and wrinkly like Old Rattler's, and his upraised head was small and pretty—for a snake. He was the best dressed ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... gave a loud cry of triumph, as he leapt into the water and dragged out a large salmon-like fish called "utu", which was at once brought ashore for my inspection. The man who had struck it—an active, wiry old fellow named Viliamu (William) was panting with excitement. Some large gatala, he said, had just made their appearance with the utu and were pursuing the small fish; therefore would we please hurry forward with our preparations. Then the leader of the entire party stood up and bellowed ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... Well, it's a dead straight, open-an'-shut fact, an' no gittin' round. Bulk's all well enough for a mighty big effort, but 'thout stayin' powers it ain't worth a continental whoop; an' stayin' powers an' bulk ain't runnin' mates. Takes the small, wiry fellows when it comes to gittin' right down an' hangin' on like a lean-jowled dog to a bone. Why, hell's fire, the big men they ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... painless. 530: violent pain and sensitiveness in the region of the stomach and epigastrium, with vomiting, coated tongue, fetid breath, costiveness, and sleep disturbed by muttering and dreams, with frequent, wiry pulse. 533: sense of numbness under the right ribs. 532: sense of compression, squeezing, bruising, under the ribs, worse on the left side. 535: violent burning pains under the short ribs on both sides, worst and most permanent on the left side, where the pain is felt for ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... Hannibal, it was decided that Little Sam was now ready to go to school. He was about five years old, and the months on the farm had left him wiry and lively, even if not very robust. His mother declared that he gave her more trouble than all the other children ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... laughed the voice of the newcomer. He snatched off a wig of black, wiry hair and stood revealed ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... muttered hoarsely, and loosened the long rapier in the shabby sheath at his side. For, with the closing of the door, he had become a Huguenot gentleman, over forty and a little grizzled perhaps, but modest and unassuming; wiry, alert, lightning-quick, with a wrist of steel and a heart of gold; and he was about to ascend the stairs of an unknown house at Blois in total darkness. He went up, crouching, ready for anything, without a footfall, not even causing a hideous ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... elbow resting upon the mantelpiece, was staring at Morrison—his penetrating gray eyes as hard as steel. Colonel Warrington twisted his chair around, fixing his monocle more closely in its place. He had the wiry white mustache and fiery red face of the ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... waterman by the name of Tremenjous Hosken, very useful for his weight, though a trifle thick in the waist. As for strength, he could break a pint mug with one hand, creaming it between his fingers. Then there was Jago the Preventive man, light but wiry, and a very tricky wrestler: "a proper angle-twitch of a man," said one of the company; "stank 'pon both ends of 'en, and he'll rise up in the middle and laugh at 'ee." So they picked Jago for boat-oar. For No. 5, after a little dispute, they settled on Tippet Harry, a boat-builder ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for July, 1865, he writes: "Though the intellectual man had greatly grown meantime, few persons would recognize the hearty, blithesome, genial, and wiry Abraham Lincoln of earlier days in the sixteenth President of the United States, with his stooping figure, dull eyes, careworn face, and languid frame. The old clear laugh never came back; the even temper ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... was not told just then. A small, wiry boy steered his bicycle up on the sidewalk and pedaled toward ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... mister," said Creasy. "You could march a regiment of soldiers over this moorland grass for many an hour, and there'd be no footprints on it when they'd gone—it's that wiry and strong. No!—if half a dozen men had been standing about here when one fell in—or if two or three men had come here to throw another man in," he added significantly, "there'd be no footmarks. Try it—you can't grind an iron-shod heel ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... was a short, thick, swarthy young gentleman, with wiry black hair, a nose somewhat flat, sharp eyes, and tusky mouth; altogether not very unlike a terrier. His tastes were unknown: he had not travelled, nor done anything very particular, except, with a few congenial spirits, beat the Guards in a rowing-match, a pretty ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... populous town is the means of conveyance, which here, in addition to hack cabs and omnibuses, includes railway carriages. I would observe, once for all, that the horses of America, as a whole, may be classed as enduring, wiry, and active hacks. You do not see anything to compare with some of the beautiful nags that "Rotten Row" or Melton exhibits; but, on the other hand, you rarely see the lumbering, lolloping, heavy brutes so common in this country. Then, again, a horse in this country is groomed ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... temperate habits, a wiry man at the height of his physical powers, with lean flanks ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... Hussein was a well-known employee of Abou Saood. This ruffian was an Arab. He was a tall, wiry fellow, with a determined but brutal cast of countenance, who was celebrated as a scoundrel among scoundrels. Even his fellows dreaded his brutality. There was no crime that he had not committed; and as his only virtue was extreme daring, his reputation ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... summoner, though rambling and filled with endless legal reiteration, was only too clear in its essence. Red Swire, with his angry face framed in white bristles, was led in, and confessed to his ill treatment of the official. A second culprit, a little wiry nut-brown archer from Churt, had aided and abetted in the deed. Both of them were ready to declare that young Squire Nigel Loring knew nothing of the matter. But then there was the awkward incident of the tearing of the writs. Nigel, to whom a lie was an impossibility, ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... poor, quiet, old Bullfrog, as little wiry, wicked Wasp came at him, barking and yelping. He jumped with all his force sheer over a patch of bushes into the river, and swam back to his old home among the cat-tails. And always after that it was observable that he was ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... its wiry stem, Its fringed border nicely spin, And cut the gold-embossed gem, That, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... dismay, at him)—"and Mr. Snap"—(This was the junior partner, having recently been promoted to be such after ten years' service in the office, as managing clerk: he was about thirty, particularly well dressed, slight, active, and with a face like a terrier—so hard, sharp, and wiry!) Of Mr. Gammon himself, I have already given the reader a slight notion. He appeared altogether a different style of person from both his partners. He was of most gentlemanly person and bearing—and at once acute, cautious, and insinuating—with a certain something ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... blacksmith's. It was high and Roman half-way down, but just there was a little dent, and the rest of the nose was straight. His complexion, excepting the freckles and charcoal, was chiefly sunburn, down to the neckband of his blue checked shirt. He was a tough, wiry-looking boy, and there was a kind of smiling, self-confident expression in his blue-gray eyes ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... three months had sent to Cairo two hundred of the best that could be found between Khartoum and Senaar. His business, of which Ebn Ezra Bey had due knowledge, had now been with Nahoum. The business of the other Arab, a noble-looking and wiry Bedouin from the South, had been with Ebn Ezra Bey, and each hid his business from his friend. Abdullah murmured to himself as David passed—a murmur of admiration and astonishment. He had heard of the disfavour in which the Inglesi was; but, as he looked at David's face with its quiet smile, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rain fell while we were in the train, and the heat was far less oppressive in Croydon than in town. Holmes had sent on a wire, so that Lestrade, as wiry, as dapper, and as ferret-like as ever, was waiting for us at the station. A walk of five minutes took us to Cross ...
— The Adventure of the Cardboard Box • Arthur Conan Doyle
... brow; iron folds, hard and unchanging, ran perpendicularly down his cheeks; his nose was the iron beak of some thin, delicate bird of rapine. He had brown eyes, set in sockets rimmed with iron; round them the skin was dark, as though it had been charred. Dense wiry hair covered his skull; it had been black, it was turning grey. His ears were very small and fine. His jaws, his chin, his upper lip were dark, iron-dark, where he had shaved. His voice, when he spoke and especially when he raised it in preaching, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... however, in a testy old huntsman, as hot as a pepper-corn; a meagre, wiry old fellow, in a threadbare velvet jockey-cap, and a pair of leather breeches, that, from much wear, shone as though they had been japanned. He was very contradictory and pragmatical, and apt, as I thought, to differ from Master Simon now and then out of mere captiousness. ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... guest had departed. On the morrow we were sitting in our small dingy room after dinner, when a cavalcade hastened up to our inn, and a few minutes later we were surprised to hear ourselves addressed in our native tongue. Before us stood a dark-complexioned young man, and at his side a small wiry old gentleman, who proved to be a native Austrian Tyrolese, who followed the profession of an artist in Paris. He was now making his way to Erivan, in Russia, on a sight-seeing tour from Trebizond. His companion was a Greek from Salonica, who had ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... influence on Malcom's wiry frame, and his spirit of energetic, cheerful industry was contagious. Once aroused and interested, Edith lost all sense of time, and the afternoon passed ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... a glance toward him I leaped for the great switch; but, quick as I was, that wiry old fellow was ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... all my efforts, Brutus made straight to the grey. I was not in such difficulties as might have been expected, for I happened to know Miss Gittens slightly, as a lady no longer in the bloom of youth, who still retained a wiry form of girlishness. Though rather disliking her than not, I found it necessary just then to throw some slight effusion into my greeting. She, not unnaturally perhaps, was flattered by my preference, and begged me to give her a little instruction in riding, which—Heaven ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... Molloy, secretary to the congress, short, smooth-faced, and wiry, a man whose pleasant eye and manner were often misleading, since he was in truth one of the hottest fighting men of a fighting movement; and Wilkins, a friend of Casey's—ex-iron worker, Union official, and Labour candidate for a Yorkshire division—an uneducated, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was a firm set, healthy-looking woman of—about forty. She had large, dark, glassy eyes, which were bright without sparkling. Her cheeks were very red, having a fixed settled colour that never altered with circumstances. Her black wiry hair was ended in short crisp curls, which sat close to her head. It almost collected like a wig, but the hair was in truth her own. Her mouth was small, and her lips thin, and they gave to her face a look of sharpness that was not quite agreeable. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... reach him, and he wavered a moment. "Perhaps," he began haltingly; then he backed several paces. "No!" he cried, all his small wiry figure suddenly tense. "No! You are a dangerous man. You carry brandy, and no one knows your errand. If I let you go, I may save one man from torture,—which, after all, is but an open door to the blessed after life,—but I ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... ape with loathing. There was a star tattooed on one of his naked insteps. He looked no longer frail, but wiry and snakelike. The pallor behind his dark tan showed the triangles of black stain in his cheeks and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Gomez, father of patriots, bulwark of the Cuban cause, was seated in a hammock, reading some letters; O'Reilly recognized him instantly from the many pictures he had seen. Gomez was a keen, wiry old man; the color of his swarthy, sun-bitten cheeks was thrown into deeper relief by his snow-white mustache and goatee. He looked up at Judson's salute and then turned a pail of brilliant eyes, as hard as glass, upon O'Reilly. His was ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... of 1860 Bolivar Roberts, superintendent of the western division of the Pony Express, came to Carson City, Nevada, to engage riders and station-agents for the Pony Express route across the Great Plains. In a few days fifty or sixty were engaged—men noted for their lithe, wiry physiques, bravery and coolness in moments of great personal danger, and endurance under the most trying circumstances of fatigue. Particularly were these requirements necessary in those who were to ride over the lonely route. It was no easy duty; horse and human ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... situated midway between the valley and the mountain-tops, would be enclosed last of all. The agony which the shepherd endured, therefore, during these weeks of early autumn was long-drawn-out. He still pursued his calling, leading the sheep, when the hot sun had burnt the short wiry grass of the hill-slopes, down to the boggy ground where runnels of water furrowed their courses through the peat and kept the herbage green. But go where he might, he could not escape from the sound of the wallers' tools. It was a daily crucifixion of his proud spirit, and every blow of the ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... window, in fine weather, flapping dazzlingly in the sun; and sometimes her feather-bed lay, the whole day long, on the green slope outside, called by Dilly her "spring," only because the snow melted first there on the freedom days of the year. The new editor of the Sudleigh "Star," seeing her slight, wiry figure struggling with the bed like a very little ant under a caterpillar all too large, was once on the point of drawing up his horse at her gate. He was a chivalrous fellow, and he wanted to help; but Brad Freeman, hulking by with his gun ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... With some difficulty the master found the house. There was a man and woman sitting in the shade on the stoop. Reading the letter he was asked to sit down. The master described the man as short and thin and well up in years, but wiry and active. His wife was comely for her years, with a placid expression. In reply to his first question, the master addressed him as Sir. 'Use not that word again; all men are equal before God; use not the vain distinctions by which so many try to magnify themselves and ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... tracks—sharp, nervous, and wiry—have their histories also. But how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating a state of torpidity, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... he realized that something was to be said affecting his whole career. It would, he was sure, alter his foot-steps in the future. He had a profound respect for the little wiry man, with the firm ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... forest that in spots was so thick they could scarcely pass. The jungle contained every kind of tropical growth, including ferns, which were beautiful beyond description, and tiny vines so wiry that they cut ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... having passed any length of time in tropical countries. You may also alter the development of the muscles very much, by dint of training; all the world knows that exercise has a great effect in this way; we always expect to find the arm of a blacksmith hard and wiry, and possessing a large development of the brachial muscles. No doubt training, which is one of the forms of external conditions, converts what are originally only instructions, teachings, into habits, or, in other words, into organizations, to a great extent; ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... vestige of vegetation. In one of these 'siccos,' at the time of my visit, no less than 50,000 head of oxen and sheep and horses perished from starvation and thirst, after tearing deep out of the soil every trace of vegetation, including the wiry roots of the pampas-grass. Under such circumstances the existence of an unprotected tree is impossible. The only plants that hold their own, in addition to the indestructible thistles, grasses, and clover, are a little herbaceous oxalis, producing viviparous ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... instead of going to his work in the pit, had been rambling, without aim or purpose, over the dreary uplands; here and there stretching himself upon the wiry heath, where the sun had dried away the snow, and hiding his face from the light, while he gave way to an anguish of grief, and broke the deep silence with a loud and very bitter cry. It was death, sudden death, he was lamenting. Only yesterday morning little Nan was clinging strongly ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to a hitching-bar where two farm-wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the front ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... thy motley coat, That from thy vaulted, wiry dungeon singest, Like thee I am a captive, and, like thee, I have ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... charge without an attempt at mitigation. He asked frankly for a place in the troop, the lowest, as his chance of redemption, or rather demanded it as a grace due from man to man. Drake was taken by his manner, noticed his build, which was tough and wiry, and conceded the request. Nor had he reason to regret his decision on the march out. Gorley showed himself alert, and vigilant, a favourite with the blacks, and obedient to his officers. He was advanced ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... this morning very much his keen, wiry self—Bowers is quite himself to-day. Cherry-Garrard is slightly puffy in the face and still looks worn. It is evident that he has suffered most severely—but Wilson tells me that his spirit never wavered for a moment. Bowers has come through best, all things considered, and I believe he is the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... House. A nobleman has entered whose movements you will do well to follow. He takes his place just at the left of the Lord-Chancellor, but remains seated only for a moment. If you are familiar with the pencil of Punch, you will recognize him at a glance. A thin, wiry, yet muscular frame, a singularly marked and expressive face and mobile features, a nose that defies description, a high cravat like a poultice covered with a black silk bandage, clothes that seem to have been made for a much larger man, and always a pair of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... example of this lymphatic and contented animal, and the active Orkney, who is half goat in his habits, of the restless and unprofitable. The rich pasture of our midland counties would take years in making the wiry Orkney fat and profitable, while one day's fatigue in climbing rocks after a coarse and scanty herbage would probably cause the actual death of ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... systematically. From the moment that Tom saw him approaching, he felt an immediate and revolting horror at him, that increased as he came near. He was evidently, though short, of gigantic strength. His round, bullet head, large, light-gray eyes, with their shaggy, sandy eyebrows, and stiff, wiry, sun-burned hair, were rather unprepossessing items, it is to be confessed; his large, coarse mouth was distended with tobacco, the juice of which, from time to time, he ejected from him with great decision and explosive ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... shark's voraciousness. He had grown old in the study of this particular branch of natural history. Bansemer was fifty-five years old in this year of 1898. He was thinner than in the old New York days, but the bull-like vigour had given way to the wiry strength of the leopard. The once black hair was almost white, and grew low and thick on his forehead. Immaculately dressed, ever straight and aggressive in carriage, he soon became a figure of whom all eyes took notice, even in the most crowded ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... anticipations, she entered the room, and saw before her a figure not wholly unlike what she had imagined: a wiry, resolute-looking man, with knitted brows, lips close-set, and heavy feet firmly planted on the carpet. He was respectably dressed, but nothing more, and in his large bare hands held a brown hat marked with a grease spot. One would have judged him a skilled mechanic. When he began to ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... hour of lunch with fingers much stained with ink, and it was generally supposed that on those occasions he had been counting up taxes and calculating the effect of great financial changes. He was a tall, wiry, strong man, with a bald head and bristly red beard, which, however, was cut off from his upper and under lip. This was unfortunate, as had he hidden his mouth he would not have been in so marked a degree an ugly man. His upper ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... serious, I hope," said Rachel, kneeling to coax the fire with a short, wiry poker. "Only you never know. I'm just going in again.... She seems to lose all her vitality—that's what's apt ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Mybus was indignant at the resigned manner in which the police accepted their defeat. She was a little bright-eyed wiry woman; and ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... was a very heavily built man, with a bullet-shaped head, and a square resolute jaw, partially cloaked by a short sparse beard of coarse wiry hair. His voice and his laugh were both loud and boisterous, and he usually affected an air of open, noisy good-fellowship, which was but little in keeping with his character. When he saw Imam Bakar approaching him, with the slow and solemn tread of one who believes ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... different stages in his career, but most particularly when he had retired from the Force and entered the coal business in Winnipeg. Later on he was the Civil Governor of the Yukon Territory. Clean-cut in figure, athletic, wiry and always faultlessly dressed, Walsh was a good-looking type and bore in his carriage the unmistakable stamp of his cavalry training. In Winnipeg he was popularly known as the man who had tamed Sitting Bull, the redoubtable ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... children, mounted on horses. To their right a band of youths, arrayed in coloured shirts, white linen breeches, and yellow boots, and wearing little coloured caps, jauntily set upon their heads, were careering wildly hither and thither on swift and wiry ponies. They were waving in the air long sticks, fitted with a cross block of wood at the end, and were pursuing a wooden ball. Many were the collisions, the crashes, and the falls. On every side men and ponies ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... of the clearing, two wiry little Florida ponies, tethered with rawhide ropes, browsed upon ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... strong, wiry limbs, ascended cheerily the steep mountain-path. His tall, spare figure, always in advance of his companion, was visible through the tender green of the young oaks, clothed in a brown coat, a black cravat, and ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... eyed his dishevelled appearance with curiosity, but they all made way for him, and at last he stood in the presence of the great man. Helmar waited in respectful silence until the Chief looked up. He found himself in the presence of a thin, wiry-looking man, with iron-grey hair, and a keen, sharp face, the aquiline features of which were lined from exposure and care. He spoke abruptly, and in the usual tone ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... and bananas— wares which the owners wished to exchange for different articles required for the festa. Soon after I went ashore. The head man was a tall, well- made, civilised Tapuyo, named Marcellino, who, with his wife, a thin, active, wiry old squaw, did the honours of their house, I thought, admirably. The company consisted of fifty or sixty Indians and Mamelucos; some of them knew Portuguese, but the Tupi language was the only one used amongst themselves. The festival was in honour of our Lady of Conception; and, when ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... consisted of only two individuals—John Douglas and his wife. Douglas was a remarkable man, both in character and in person. In age he may have been about fifty, with a strong-jawed, rugged face, a grizzling moustache, peculiarly keen gray eyes, and a wiry, vigorous figure which had lost nothing of the strength and activity of youth. He was cheery and genial to all, but somewhat offhand in his manners, giving the impression that he had seen life in social ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... she couldn't abide Mrs. Freddie Alden the Poetry Girl once said epics could have been written. Janet was gaunt and wiry, the relict of the late Jock MacGregor, who had cared for Uncle Peter Alden's horses for a lifetime and died leaving his savings and a bit of life insurance to Janet, together with an admonition to "keep an eye on ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... vaqueiros with their wives and families were housed on the two sides of the field in which our tents were pitched. On one side was a big, whitewashed, tile-roofed house in which the foreman dwelt—an olive- skinned, slightly built, wiry man, with an olive-skinned wife and eight as pretty, fair-haired children as one could wish to see. He usually went barefoot, and his manners were not merely good but distinguished. Corrals and outbuildings were near this big house. On the opposite side of the field stood the row of steep-roofed, ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... ilimu-flowers or brilliant scarlet pomegranate-blossoms strung on a fibre of the banana-stalk—sometimes they are woven of ferns or of a fragrant wild vine called maile. Maria was seated astride on a wiry little black horse, and instead of slipping her bare feet into the stirrups she clasped the irons with her toes. Besides her long, flowing black dress she wore a width of bright red-flowered damask tied around her waist, caught into the stirrup ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... little man who might be any age from thirty to fifty-five. He has sandy hair, watery compassionate blue eyes, sensitive nostrils, and a very presentable forehead; but his good points go no further; his arms and legs and back, though wiry of their kind, look shrivelled and starved. He carries a big bundle, is very poorly clad, ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... Guenic was a tall, straight, wiry, lean old man. His oval face was lined with innumerable wrinkles, which formed a net-work over his cheek-bones and above his eyebrows, giving to his face a resemblance to those choice old men whom Van Ostade, Rembrandt, Mieris, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... In personal appearance, what a contrast to his renowned opponent. Six feet and four inches high, long, lean and wiry in motion; he had a good deal of the elasticity and awkwardness which indicated the rough training of his early life; his face genial looking, with good humor lurking in every corner of its innumerable angles. Judge Douglas once said, "I regard Lincoln as ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... brown, some approaching whiteness, according to age and the condition of the sap. Their tops, too, are never the same, whether the pollen clings to the surface or whether it has gone. Here the green is almost lost in red, or quite; here the grass has a soft, velvety look; yonder it is hard and wiry, and again graceful and drooping. Here there are bunches so rankly verdant that no flower is visible and no other tint but dark green; here it is thin and short, and the flowers, and almost the turf itself, can be seen; then there is an array of bennets (stalks which bear the ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... miles), and marched past the General in the Market Square on the 25th, remaining there until the 27th. It had been on the move for nearly a month with very little rest, during which time men and horses had undoubtedly got very wiry and fit. But beyond collecting a certain amount of stores, cattle, and forage, it is doubtful whether all the forced marches and strenuous exertions had been of much benefit, or whether they served to bring hostilities much nearer to a conclusion. Although the enemy, in more or less force, had ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... active and wiry; but the cramped life and squalid worry of a year-in year-out, semi-detached, suburban existence had, as he told himself, played the mischief with his nerves, and now to this was added the ghastly vista of impending actual beggary. Whatever he did and wherever he went ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... He left no name. A little wiry shrimp of a fellow who seemed to know all about our family, Fred included; so Duke, in his ultra hospitality, took the creature in for the night, and this morning drove him over to Kingcombe Holm. There, don't let us bother ourselves about him. How do you feel ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... a long, lean, wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what he said to Miss ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... about us, and the chewink and cuckoo were heard near at hand. The summit consists of a few acres, destitute of trees, covered with bare rocks, interspersed with blueberry bushes, raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, moss, and a fine wiry grass. The common yellow lily, and dwarf-cornel, grow abundantly in the crevices of the rocks. This clear space, which is gently rounded, is bounded a few feet lower by a thick shrubbery of oaks, with ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... wiry, and almost skips some beats. I'm not much of an authority on such subjects, but I believe a boy of your age ought to have a normal pulse. Where do you expect to wind up with your ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... the truth, slightly ashamed, rang at the gates, arrived at the house door, announced himself as Mr. Underwood, asked to see his sisters; and after a long labyrinth of matted passages, found himself in a pretty countrified room, where a wiry, elderly, sensible lady, with grey hair and a keen face, gave him a friendly reception, drew a favourable, but not enthusiastic, picture of Robina's steadiness and industry, and said that Angela was a more difficult character. By this time Robina ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... clear eyes, a smooth-shaven, humorous, determined mouth, and full ruddy cheeks, the immobility of which suggested the habit of deliberation. Physically and temperamentally he appeared to be the antipodes of the reporter, who was thin, nervous, and wiry, with quick, snappy ways and electric mental processes. It occurred to him now at once that the offer concealed a trap, and he recalled, knowingly, the warning contained in the classical adage concerning Greeks who bear gifts. But, on ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... man, with a spare, wiry body, iron grey hair and whiskers carefully arranged, a keen, old-fashioned face sharpened by much spiritual thinking, and eyes that looked at you from beneath shaggy eyebrows as from some other world. His face had an irresistible suggestion of a Skye terrier, the most serious of animals, ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... I have noticed that a thin, poor soil grows little but weeds. I am inclined to think that the substratum is the same, and that the only choice in this world is what kind of weeds you will have. I am not much attracted by the gaunt, flavorless mullein, and the wiry thistle of upland country pastures, where the grass is always gray, as if the world were already weary and sick of life. The awkward, uncouth wickedness of remote country-places, where culture has died out after the first crop, is about as disagreeable as the ranker and richer vice ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was quite willing to do so; and at that moment my young pupils entered the apartment, with their two younger sisters. Master Tom Bloomfield was a well-grown boy of seven, with a somewhat wiry frame, flaxen hair, blue eyes, small turned-up nose, and fair complexion. Mary Ann was a tall girl too, somewhat dark like her mother, but with a round full face and a high colour in her cheeks. The second sister was Fanny, a very pretty little girl; Mrs. Bloomfield assured me she ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... to it, the young man lifted his cap to Claire, showing straight, wiry, rope-colored hair, brushed straight back from a rather fine forehead. "Gee, I was sorry to have to swear and holler like that, but it's all Adolph understands. Please don't think there's many of the folks around here like him. They say ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... them is an old woman I took across in my felucca to pleasure my girl's brother—she tended him once when he chopped through his foot near her hut just on the edge of the hills. Seventy years, or nearly, and tough and wiry yet, and can help neatly with a boat. And money laid by, too, but is she idle? Never. She spins her hemp and weaves osiers into baskets and changes them for goats' hams. That with polenta keeps her all winter—and ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... Gyp, his wiry arms, and legs flying in more directions than seemed possible, his shoes, that were many sizes too large for him, clattering on the hard-trodden ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks
... Quiet in manner, wiry in build, clear of eye, with an atmosphere of earnestness about him, Ross G. Marvin had been an invaluable member of the expedition. Through the long hot weeks preceding the sailing of the Roosevelt, he worked indefatigably looking ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... young fellow just turned twenty-three, who was "connected with" the staff of the great brokerage firm of Gretry, Converse and Co. He was astonishingly good-looking, small-made, wiry, alert, nervous, debonair, with blond hair and dark eyes that snapped like a terrier's. He made friends almost at first sight, and was one of those fortunate few who were favoured equally of men and women. The healthiness of his eye and skin persuaded to a belief ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... at both coachman and guard, and the same voice, which was thin, distinct, and wiry, proceeded—"Keep all steady now, boys, and shoot the first that attempts to move. I will see what's to be ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... forgotten her existence, and it was a shock to him to meet her again. Good heavens, had he ever admired her? That white blanc-mange of a woman in her ruby-red French gown, cut open lower than one of Yvonne's without the saying of Yvonne's wiry slimness? Remembering the summerhouse at Bingley Lawrence blushed with shame, not for his morals but for his taste: he was thankful to have gone no further and wondered why he had gone so far.—He had not yet realized that during three months among women of a different stamp his taste had imperceptibly ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... valley, for we came suddenly upon a large party of Indians who seemed very different to the quiet, stolid-looking beings we had been accustomed to see with their skin canoes, or busy fishing along the side of the river. These were swarthy, fierce-looking fellows, mounted on sturdy, wiry-looking ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... English bred horses worthy of the name. "Brave fat Horses" an amazed officer under Braddock called the mounts of five Quakers who unexpectedly rode into camp as though straight "from the land of Goshen." These animals, crossed with the Indian "pony" from New Spain, produced the wise, wiry, and sturdy pack-horse, fit to transport nearly two hundred pounds of merchandise across the rough and narrow Alleghany trails. This animal and the heavy Conestoga horse from the same ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... Borland, but we were amply repaid by finding him in and ready to see us. Borland was a typical Yankee, tall, thin, evidently predisposed to indigestion, a man of tremendous mental and nervous energy and with a hidden wiry strength. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... despite the paralytic stroke it was less than a quarter of an hour late. On one side of the bag and the book were ranged the older women,—Mrs. Lessways, thin and vivacious, and Mrs. Grant, large and solemn; and on the other side, as it were in opposition, the young, dark, slim girl with her rather wiry black hair, and her straight, prominent eyebrows, and her extraordinary ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... small: the feet provided with sharp claws for burrowing, three on the hind foot, and an additional one on the fore foot. They make deep excavations in the ground, and live chiefly on roots. The hide is very tough and covered with a coarse wiry hair, and with this defensive armor, and his formidable teeth and claws, the wombat is a customer not much relished by the dogs. It was not till we had stunned our new acquaintance, as he stood at bay in his den, by repeated blows of our sticks on his head, that we were able to drag him ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... scattered over the tropical ocean, especially, to which might well be given Herman Melville's name, "Las Encantadas," the Enchanted Islands. These islands, usually volcanic, have no vegetation but cactuses or wiry bushes with strange names; no inhabitants but insects and reptiles—lizards, spiders, snakes,—with vast tortoises which seem of immemorial age, and are coated with seaweed and the slime of the ocean. If there are any birds, it is the ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... and wrote a note to Messrs. Smith and Hanson, and said that he would like to have a consultation with a member of their firm. He sent this note by messenger, and an hour or so later a wiry little person, with a much-wrinkled face and a shrewd look in his eyes, came into his office and introduced himself ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... fell, the wiry Frenchman clicked his heels together, and throwing down his foil, he stood erect and rigid as a marble statue before his master. White and livid was his tense drawn face, but ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... I haven't a penny myself. Of course I will never marry him without your consent, uncle dear, but then I am going to get it," and she sat on his knee and drew her soft hands over his bald head, turning his face up like a cherub's, and pressing her full red lips on his wiry moustache. ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... no explanation of his strange behaviour. He must reach the blacks' camp as soon as possible. The wailing became louder and louder, and presently Sax heard a sound which gave such fleetness to his limbs that his wiry companion could hardly keep up with him. It was a booming voice which rose above the turmoil of native cries like a strong swimmer battling ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... gale, without obstruction of any kind to break its force, buffeted us remorselessly as, having descended from the car which had brought us from the station, we struggled up the path to the door. Half a mile of blowing sand, with sparse, wiry grass sticking through, was between us and the breakers; yet the ocean, cold and lead-coloured, was beyond, and not so much as a finger-breadth of impediment ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... dry voice again. "What have you to say? It is hanging, Monsieur, hanging by the neck." The speaker was a man of sixty, white of hair, but wiry and active. "Ha! in a mask, eh? That looks bad for you. You are not a common thief, then? . . . That was a good stroke, but not quite high ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... morning early Geoffrey proceeded with the two men who had been selected to accompany him to his usual look-out. Both were active, wiry men, and entered fully into the spirit of the undertaking when Geoffrey explained its nature to them. They looked out of the dormer-window at the sharp roof slanting away in front of them and ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... Frenchmen, who pressed upon him Pernoud, rum, and the delicate wines of France. So great was his absorption in his new friends, and so unbounded their hospitality, that M. Lontane laid him by the heels to rest him. Simoneau was wiry, talking the slang of the New York waterfront, swearing that he would "hike for Attleboro, and hoe potatoes until he died." I was forced to seek Steve Drinkwater. Short, pillow-like, as red-cheeked as a winter apple, and yellow-haired, he was a Dutchman, unafraid of anything, stolid, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... howled. "Just you wait till after dinner! I'm as brave as you are, and as strong, though you are the biggest." Which was true. Bernadine was sallow, thin, wiry, and muscular; Beth was soft, and round, and white. She had height, age, and weight on her side; Bernadine had ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... our chances, Kriijorl?" Mason felt the familiar nervousness returning to his wiry body, yet this time it was in some way different. Not the kind that ate your insides out from too much Space, ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... drinking had been heavy at his end of the table, he seemed quite unaffected, was now tripping from man to man, peering into the eyes of each, "to find an appropriate subject," as he said. Delavan Eyre roused himself out of a semi-torpor as the wiry little prowler stared down ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... we know where you have been," said a small fellow, who wore a yellow chevron on his arm. He had a thin moustache and a sharp nose, and rode a wiry, dull sorrel horse. "You may just as well tell us all about it. We know you've been to see 'em, and we are going to make you carry ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page
... over land and sea. The hour was come; the whole impulse and persistence of her nature went out in vivid life, and, filling the very stones which the winds had gathered and piled against her breast, cleft them with its sentient spell, clothed them with lean flesh and wiry sinews, shaped them after the fashion of the Desert men, and sent them out alive with intellect and will, but with hearts of flint, into the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... is like the last but more yellowish. Their nests are made of a wiry grass compactly woven together and partially suspended to mistletoe twigs growing from cottonwood trees; nests of this type are perfectly distinct from those of the preceding, but when they are made of fibre and attached to ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... already been described as the face of Black Bill. But he was respectably dressed in black, he wore a beaver hat, and had lost something of his desperate air. The fact is, the police had taken Black Bill into their employ, and he was doing very well in his new occupation. The other was a sharp, wiry man, with a cunning face and a restless, fidgety manner. Both he and Black Bill looked carefully at the boy, and at length the sharp ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... of the city was incredibly still. As the light ebbed slowly, and broad blue shadows crept across the patch of turf, they sat in a silence broken only by the wiry cheep of sparrows and the distant moan of trolley cars. The arrows of the decumbent sun gilded the ripening grapes above them. Suddenly there were two loud bangs and a vicious whistle sang through the arbor. Broken twigs eddied down ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... enforce a solicitation. I was fortunate enough, however, through the aid of my guide, to make my way into the kitchen of the illustrious Ditmus, and I question whether the parlor would have proved more worthy of observation. The cook, a little wiry, hook-nosed woman, worn thin by incessant action and friction, was bustling about among her kettles and saucepans, with the scullion at her heels, both clattering in wooden shoes, which were as clean and white as the milk-pails; rows of vessels, of brass and copper, regiments of pewter ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... the Russians, and we saw little of the better class. As a race the Yakutes are not interesting, while in appearance both sexes are distinctly plain, and often repulsive. The type is Mongolian; sallow complexion, beady eyes, flattened nostrils and wiry black hair. The men are of medium height, thick set and muscular, the women ungainly little creatures, bedizened with jewellery, and smothered with paint. Some marry Russians and assume European dress, which only ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... is not unprepossessing. The crinal hair is hard and wiry, growing, like that of a half-caste West Indian, in stiff ringlets which sprout in tufts from the scalp, and, attaining a moderate length, which they rarely surpass, bang down. A few elders, savans, and the wealthy, who can afford the luxury of a turban, shave the head. More ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... stove, which in summer was relegated to the corner of the room, sat Harry Hobbs, a man of any age from his appearance, thin and wiry, with keen, darting eyes, which now, however, were fastened upon the preacher. All other eyes were, too. Even the smallest of the children seated on the front bench were gazing with mouths wide open, as if fascinated, upon the preacher who, moving up and down with quick, lithe steps, ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... erected, the barns have been filled with plenty, costly roads have been cut through the cliffs, the formerly arid hills clothed with exuberant verdure, and beautiful villas have been built in the midst of enchanting gardens, in places where, only a few years ago, hardly enough of short wiry grass could grow to feed a goat. The gambling establishment of Monaco was opened in 1856 by a company with the sanction of Prince CharlesIII. The first house was in the Place du Chteau; whence, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... seven children, five girls and two boys; there was the gracious, genial mother at the head and the wiry, gray-haired and gray-bearded surgeon at the foot; there was, as usual, Jim Studdiford, and to-day, besides, there was Aunt Sanna, an unmarried younger sister of the doctor, and a little black-eyed, delicate ten-year-old ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris |
