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More "Humped" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... riding slowly and in silence, out of the unknown east. It was the multitudinous beat of their horses' hoofs which caused that low throbbing in his ears. Some were so close to him as he looked down upon them that he could see clearly their thin wiry horses, and the strange humped figures of the swarthy riders, sitting forward on the withers, shapeless bundles, their short legs hanging stirrupless, their bodies balanced as firmly as though they were part of the beast. In those nearest he could see the bow and the quiver, the long spear and the short sword, with the coiled ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... meant more to me than anything else. I was never so happy as when I was sitting humped up over a book, in some obscure corner of the house, where Uncle Landon, now grown the incarnate demon of my life, could ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... searched the eyes of the white man. They seemed to beg of him the answer to a terrible question. It was always the same question. It had been asked of Pharaoh. They asked it of Leopold. For hours, squatting on the iron deck-plates, humped on their naked haunches, crowding close together, they muttered apparently interminable criticisms of Everett. Their eyes never left him. He resented this unceasing scrutiny. It got upon his nerves. He was sure ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... limb looks light, almost slender,—such is the perfection of that miraculous marble. I never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... the works in the morning, he found Mills humped on a box beside the fireplace in the old cabin, reading "The Man Who Couldn't Die." At noon he was gone somewhere. Over the noon meal in the split-cedar mess-house, the other bolt cutters spoke derisively of the man who laid off work for half a day to read a book. That was beyond ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Wild Fire stood quivering. The girl's hat swept through the air in front of its eyes. The horse woke to galvanized action. The back humped. It shot into the air with a writhing twist of the body. All four feet struck the ground together, straight and stiff as ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... landscape; old oak woods, hale and hearty as ever; old temples buried in ivy; old shrines of old heroes, deep buried in broad groves of bay trees; old rivers laden down with heavy-freighted canoes; humped hills, like droves of camels, piled up with harvests; every sign and token of a glorious abundance, every sign and token of generations of renown. Rare sight! fine sight! none rarer, none ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... no answer. It had humped itself up into a little ball, and was eyeing Jim with the ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... garden—perhaps less than two feet square—contrived within an ornamental shallow basin of porcelain or other material, and placed in the alcove of a guest-room by way of decoration. You may see there a tiny pond; a streamlet crossed by humped bridges of Chinese pattern; dwarf trees forming a grove, and shading the model of a Shinto temple; imitations in baked clay of stone lanterns,—perhaps even the appearance of a hamlet of thatched cottages. If the toko-niwa be not too small, you may see real fish swimming in the pond, or a ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... low tones while the professor sat to one side, humped over and buried in thought. He was a strange looking spectacle when buried in thought. His countenance then became all wrinkles, with a kind of turned-up nubbin in the middle that I knew to be a nose, only because I'd previously seen it—otherwise it might have been almost anything ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... contract, money or no money, men must eat. That fact loomed biggest on her daily schedule, left her no room to think overlong of other things. Her huff over, she felt rather sorry for Charlie, a feeling accentuated by sight of him humped on a log in the sun, too engrossed in his perplexities to be where he normally was at that hour, in the thick of the logging, working harder than any of ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... mud-spattered; his face was haggard, his hair unkempt, his left shoulder humped up and held stiff. He stopped near the door, and stared from face to face, frowning because of the sudden invasion of his eyes by the bright candlelight. When his glance fell upon Margaret, it rested; and thereupon, just as if he were not returned ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... hues; the middle-aged people have soft colouring, grey greens and palish shades; and the children are very gay, in every imaginable colour and often all mixed together. The girls have all a broad sash called an obi, humped up in a funny way behind their bodies; in the children this becomes a great bow like the wings of a butterfly. The people are small, and were it not for the clogs they would look smaller still; their country is not little, for Japan is larger than ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... awoke in the grey dawn Joe had already risen, lit the fire, packed his swag, and brewed our last pinch of tea in the billy. We drank to each other's good fortune in silence. Then, after a hand-press, Joe humped his swag and strode away, leaving me with moistened eyes. I felt I had lost my only friend. I have foregathered with much worse ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... one, in single file like a line of enormous marching insects, they crawled down the wall and humped along on their tentacles—around the ditch ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... where camels, with their heads out straight, and their feet bent under in front, are sitting in hundreds. They used to be here in thousands, but since the opening of the Transcaspian railway some years ago now, the number of these humped beasts of burden has sensibly diminished. Just compare one of these beasts with a goods ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... ever. He was flat on his side, with his spine humped up, moaning and straining at intervals. But now relief was in sight—so thought the men. With a tin dipper they tried to pour some relief into the open mouth of the sufferer, who had so little appreciation that he simply taxed his remaining ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... century, and the buffalo first appeared in Italy about A.D. 600, though it is unknown whence or by whom he was introduced. [Footnote: Erdkunde, viii., Asien, 1ste Abtheuung, pp. 660,758. Hehn, Kuttonpflanzen, p. 845.] The Arabian single-humped camel, or dromedary, has been carried to the Canary Islands, partially introduced into Australia, Greece, Spain, and even Tuscany, experimented upon to little purpose in Venezuela, and finally imported by the American Government ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... an arrow of sunlight breaks through the shields of clouds, and kisses the brown earth with a quivering spot of light. Across the sloping, unkept lawn, about midway between the house and the whitewashed gate leading from the yard, a rabbit hops, aimlessly, his back humped up, and his white tail showing plainly amid his sombre surroundings. I can see the muscles about his nostrils twitching, as he stops now and again to nibble at a withered tuft of grass. A lonely jay flits from one ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... to him that, on this occasion only, the visit being for the purposes of parley and not of attack, pistols might be looked on as non-essentials. Whatever his arguments, they were successful, for, finally, humped as to the back and muttering, Buck ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... see it. Jonathan took ship for the States, but I went shepherding, and grew so lazy that if my stick dropped to the ground I wouldn't bend my back to pick it up. But when I heard of the diggings, I woke up, humped my swag, and ran away—I was always man enough for that— and I don't intend ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... the two-humped Bactrian camel which the Syrians and Egyptians compare with an elephant. See p. 221 (the neo-Syrian) Book of Kalilah ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... legs seemed to have lost their desire to walk. She felt glad of that, too, because she was too tired to walk, anyway, and the baby was very sweet. Then, once more, a long shadow came between her and the moon and someone bent over her. Ah, 'twas Daddy Skinner, the same beloved, heavy humped-shoulders—the same precious face, and he was fondling the moon baby, and twice kissed her with tender, twitching lips. She smiled happily and moved a little in the snow. She tried to catch Daddy's hand, tried to call his dear name, but only a little sound ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... shoulders. He took a turn of the rope around the saddle horn. At last he had mastered the knack of the thing! Why, it was as easy as rolling pie-crust! He was about to wonder what he was going to do next, when the cow—which happened to be a large and active steer—humped itself and departed ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... he was alone. About him the room, save for the yellow night-light above his head, was dark, humped with shadows, with grey pools of light near the windows, and a golden bar that some lamp beyond the house flung upon the wall. Ernest Henry lay and, now and again, cautiously felt the bump on his forehead; there was butter ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... assumed is far from what it should be in order to insure health. As a rule, we sit humped forward, with a decided bend in the spine, ultimately developing splendid examples of what we call round shoulders. The spine, while sitting, should be held as nearly straight as possible. The position of the head, to a very large extent, determines the general posture ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... Demavend, rich in lapis-lazuli, and as yet untrodden by any king of Assyria.* Having reached his destination, he captured two petty kings, Eparna and Shitirparna, and exiled them to Assyria, together with their people, their thoroughbred horses, and their two-humped camels,—in fine, all the possessions of their subjects. Shortly after this, three other Median chiefs, hitherto intractable—Uppis of Par-takka, Zanasana of Partukka,** Ramatea of Urakazabarna—came to Nineveh to present the king with horses and lapis-lazuli, the best of everything they possessed, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... set to its limpid depths with the heavenly gems, glittered and darkled with its million diamond incrustations. The humped-up lump of Clinch's Dump crouched like some huge and feeding night-beast on the bank, ringed by ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... Brewer; "no wonder his shoulders air humped. But you never hears as much as a grunt from him. He knows he ain't never give her no ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Lady Evelyn humped her eyebrows and gave me one look. "No," says she, "I shouldn't call it brutal, exactly," and then she swallows a polite, society snicker in a way that made me mad from the ground up. Jarvis didn't lose any of that, either. I got ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... colours formed his flapping wings. A truly noble bird, whose legs had the genuine strut, whose eyes shone watchfully, and whose voice had a ring that evidently struck terror into the catterpillar's soul, if it was a catterpillar. He squirmed, he wriggled, he humped as fast as he could, trying to escape; but all in vain. The tufted bird espied him, gave one warbling sort of crow, pounced upon him, and flapped ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... succeeded his mental exertion and passion of thought. Increased age marked him, as though Time, thrusting all at once upon him bitter experiences usually spread over many years of a man's life, had weighed him down, humped his back, thinned his hair, and furrowed his forehead under the load. Within his eyes, behind the reflected blue of the sky, as he raised them to it, sat mad misery; and an almost tetanic movement of limb, which ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... clear view of a vast body, great humped shoulders, and sharp, crooked horns. But now that the danger had come his pulses ceased to leap and hand and heart were steady. The arrow sang from the bow and buried itself deep in the great bull's ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... potent to stir Caracunan officialdom to undue speed. Hence the observer from the heights, supposing that he had a personal interest in the proceedings, might have assured himself of ample time to reach the coast before the formalities could be completed and the ship put forth to sea. Had he presently humped himself to his feet with a sluggish effort, abandoned his field-glasses in favor of a pair of large greenish-brown goggles, and set out on a trail straight down the mountains, staggering a bit at the start, a second supposititious observer of the first supposititious ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... green of the wooded hills. Picturesque junks are lying in ranks at anchor; there are two deep-sea vessels likewise, of modern build, ships from Osaka. And there is a most romantic little breakwater built of hewn stone, with a stone lantern perched at the end of it; and there is a pretty humped bridge connecting it with a tiny island on which I see a shrine of Benten, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... That in no way diminishes my esteem for you. A well-considered esteem. I have a profound respect for the bullies who honour me with their custom. There are deformed folks amongst you. They give me no offence. The lame and the humpbacked are works of nature. The camel is gibbous. The bison's back is humped. The badger's left legs are shorter than the right, That fact is decided by Aristotle, in his treatise on the walking of animals. There are those amongst you who have but two shirts—one on his back, and the other at the pawnbroker's. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... a time he had this pleasant dream. He thought it was summer, and he was playing, all alone, in the fair meadow called Goodman's Fields, when a dwarf only a foot high, with long red whiskers and a humped back, appeared to him suddenly and said, "Dig by that stump." He did so, and found twelve bright new pennies—wonderful riches! Yet this was not the best of it; for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... crawled a dwarf bowed of leg, mighty of shoulder, humped of back, and with arms very long and thick and hairy. In one great fist he grasped a ponderous club shod with iron spikes, and now, resting his hands on this and his chin on his hands, he scowled at the Knight, yet ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... neck was massive, and an angry red, sprinkled with long, wiry hairs. It fastened his flat-backed head to a body that was like a gorilla's, thick and wide and humped. And his arms gave an added touch of the animal, for they were so long that his great palms reached to his knees; and so sprung out at the shoulder, and so curved in at the wrist, that when they met at the fingers they formed a pair of mammoth, muscled ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... about this business," said Hugh, "but never hoped to see it. What are these Australian buffaloes? I thought they were just humped cattle ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... Mark came on Sylvia by the logan-stone, it was less surprising to him than if he had not known she was there—having watched her go. She was sitting, all humped together, brooding over the water, her sunbonnet thrown back; and that hair, in which his star had caught, shining faint-gold under the sun. He came on her softly through the grass, and, when he was a little way off, thought it best to halt. If he startled her she might run away, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... strange as it may seem, was the time of our greatest enjoyment. Winter, when "Old Gray," who used to scamper with me astride his bare back down the lane, stood munching his fodder in the stall; when the cattle, no longer lolling or browsing in the peaceful shade, moved around the barn-yard with humped backs, shaking their heads at the cold north wind; when the trees were stripped of their foliage, and the icicles hung in fantastic rows along the naked branches, glittering like jewels in the sunshine, or rattling in the northern ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... waiting at a water-tank for a freight, should have unhesitatingly classified him as a "gay-cat." Gay-cat is the synonym for tenderfoot in Hobo Land. This gay-cat was well along in years—somewhere around forty-five, I should judge. His shoulders were humped a trifle, and his face ...
— The Road • Jack London
... a very nice boy. He wore a light grey-green Palm Beach suit and carried a big brown leather briefcase that looked too heavy for his soda straw-thin legs and arms. He was queer-looking because his waist was so narrow and his back so humped. And when he took off his tan Panama hat, a white fuzz exploded from his scalp. His face was pale as the moon in daylight. His broad smile showed teeth that Jack ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... or partly filled, and this time with a native,—a specimen of what may be called the cornstalk breed of Virginia; a slender, furtive, long-geared heifer just verging on cowhood, that in spite of my best efforts would wear a pinched and hungry look. She evidently inherited a humped back. It was a family trait, and evidence of the purity of her blood. For the native blooded cow of Virginia, from shivering over half rations of cornstalks in the open air during those bleak and windy winters, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... him unwaveringly; it was almost bitter and righteous enough to be funny. Waters surveyed it for a space of moments with a faint interest in its mere grotesqueness; it did not change nor shift under his scrutiny, but continued to glare inhumanly like a baleful lamp. He humped a thin shoulder in resignation and turned away. When he was halfway to the gate, he heard behind him the foreman ordering the gatekeeper not to admit ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... ornamented ruth or family bullock-cart, with a broidered canopy of two domes, like a double-humped camel, which had just been drawn into the par. Eight men made its retinue, and two of the eight were armed with rusty sabres—sure signs that they followed a person of distinction, for the common folk do not bear arms. An increasing cackle of complaints, orders, and ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... was a quiet chap. He humped over a little more when I told him, and looked thinner, and I had to help him more when he got out at the farm than I did when he got aboard at the stable. He allowed he'd go to the farm just the same. Said he didn't have any money, or any other place ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... things at his master's behest; leapt nonchalantly for our rail or his own spar, as the case might be, across the staggering abyss; clung so well with his toes that he might almost have been classified with the quadrumana; and between times squatted humped over on the rail, watching us with bright, elfish, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... giggle a little. She giggled and opened the automobile door. She giggled and lifted Posie out. She giggled and carried Posie to the Witch's chariot. She giggled and tied the Witch's hat under Posie's chin. She giggled and tied the humped-back cape around ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... fair skin of Densuke and be fairer in his eyes. O'Mino had suffered both from fate and fortune. She had been born ugly; with broad, flat face like unto the moon at full, or a dish. Her back was a little humped, her arms disproportionately long, losing in plumpness what they gained in extension. She seemed to have no breasts at all, the chest forming a concavity in correspondence to the convexity of the back, with a smoothness much like the ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... a feedle, That's what Renzo had, tiddy hi! 'Twas humped up in the meedle, So haul the bowline, haul! He played a tune, and the old cow died, And the skipper and crew jumped over the side, And swum away on the slack of the tide, So ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... heard, but it wasn't my fault. Vere and I were alone, and when we saw Jim coming she got into a state of excitement, and made me vow and declare that I would not leave her. I couldn't possibly refuse, for she isn't allowed to be excited, but I twisted my chair as far away as I dared, humped up my shoulders and buried myself in my book. Jim knew I would do my best for him, but it's disgusting how difficult it is to fix your attention on one thing, and close your ears to something still more interesting. I honestly did try, and the jargon that the book and the conversation ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... lifted a woeful face, gave her one vague look, and reverted to his former posture. Mayme stopped laughing. She advanced and put a friendly hand on one of the humped shoulders. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... serpent had darted straight down the throat of the other. For a moment there was a fearful lashing. The choking serpent, with protruding eyes, like small green coals, and jaws distended in agony, strove to dislodge his suffocating enemy, and the other humped his back and leapt backward in frantic efforts to reach the air again. But suddenly their struggles ceased; they flattened to the ground, only the tails moving automatically. What was left looked ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... but the head and shoulders were seemingly enormous, and stood sharply silhouetted against the skylight in the roof immediately above. The idea flashed into my brain in a moment that I was looking into the visage of something monstrous. The huge skull, the mane-like hair, the wide-humped shoulders, suggested, in a way I did not pause to analyze, that which was scarcely human; and for some seconds, fascinated by horror, I returned the gaze and stared into the dark, inscrutable countenance above ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... before the fire-place in the long sitting-room. He still wore a heavy frieze travelling coat, the fronts of it hanging open. His shoulders were a trifle humped up and his head bent, as he looked down at the black and buff of the tiger skin at his feet. When Theresa approached with her jerky consequential little walk—pinkly self-conscious behind her gold-rimmed ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... sat in the midst of his spider-web, as some old Giant used to sit in his fortress waiting to pounce upon innocent people to kill them and eat them. Stingy's shoulders were all humped up, and his eight claws looked very ugly. He had already tangled up one Noisy Fly, and now he sat waiting for another. Everybody hated him; even Toadie Todson went out of his way to give a ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... said, and pointed to our single steed, humped up in the wind, one hip high, his head ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... Canidae have been tamed, and that their blood, in some cases mingled together, flows in the veins of our domestic breeds. In regard to sheep and goats I can form no decided opinion. From facts communicated to me by Mr. Blyth, on the habits, voice, constitution and structure of the humped Indian cattle, it is almost certain that they are descended from a different aboriginal stock from our European cattle; and some competent judges believe that these latter have had two or three wild progenitors, whether or not these deserve to be called species. This conclusion, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... heads the invisible carriers of death jarred the air with shrill crescendoes, and near them a comrade sat hacking with his bayonet at a lump of hard bread. He sprawled contentedly in the hot sun, with humped shoulders and legs far apart, and with his cap tipped far over his eyes. Every now and again he would pause, with a piece of cheese balanced on the end of his knife-blade, and look at the twisted figures by him on the grass, ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... Ericson, a back-yard boy, was going to rise and disturb all these learned people. He was frightened again. But he stood up, faced the president, affectedly folded his arms, hastily unfolded them and put his hands in his pockets, one foot before the other, one shoulder humped a little higher than ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... two effects resulted from a rear knowledge of St. John's; our front view was always worthy of picture and poem, having wide portals, over which was the date of their last repair in 1622, humped Tudor gables, and mullioned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... north of China, Mongolian ponies, splendid mules, and donkeys are seen in large quantities; also the two-humped camel, which carries heavy loads across the plains of Mongolia. In the south, until the advent of the railway, travellers had to choose between the sedan-chair carried on the shoulders of stalwart coolies, or the slower but more comfortable house-boat. Before steamers began to ply on the coast, ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... have become crystallized, as it were, in age and decrepitude, and advanced no further in either—was pottering around the garden, eying askant, like an old robin, the new plough furrows. Pauper women humped their calico backs over the green slopes of the fields, searching for dandelion greens, but not digging, because ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... legs straightened. His powerless arms were braced. Astonished, he glanced round for an instant, and beheld Zonla, with a world of love burning in her large lambent eyes, wreathing her round white arms about his humped shoulders. Then the poet knew the great sustaining power of love. Solon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the Farmer's dog came by, and away went the little rabbit, and up went Miss Pussy Cat's back, and her tail grew so big that had she tried to get back into the hollow stump I guess she would have had to leave her tail behind her! But she didn't. No sireemam. She just humped her back and meowed, and the Farmer's dog kept right on after Little Jack Rabbit, but of course ...
— Little Jack Rabbit and the Squirrel Brothers • David Cory
... humped and foul, and shambles like an ape; And stealthily he barricades the door, Then lays his goblin head against my lonely bed, With a "Wolf, wolf, ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... not been observed, owing to the difficulty of finding many of the species in their stations of natural repose. Caterpillars are also similarly protected. Many exactly resemble in tint the leaves they feed upon; others are like little brown twigs, and many are so strangely marked or humped, that when motionless they can hardly be taken to be living creatures at all. Mr. Andrew Murray has remarked how closely the larva of the peacock moth (Saturnia pavonia-minor) harmonizes in its ground colour with that of the young ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... They humped it, making the other alley's mouth by a margin slim indeed, followed by human howls and a clattering volley of sticks ...
— A Night Out • Edward Peple
... Egypt and Syria is not the two-humped animal described by that name in books of natural history, but is, in fact, of the same family as the camel, to which it stands in about the same relation as a racer to a cart-horse. The fleetness and endurance of this creature are extraordinary. It is not usual to force ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... There is no better land, I swear, in all the wide world round — I smelt the bush a month before we touched King George's Sound! And now I've come to settle down, the top of my desire Is just to meet a mate o' mine called 'Dunn of Nevertire'. Was raised at Nevertire — The town of Nevertire; He humped his bluey by the name of 'Dunn ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... upon a high hill, which rises from an extensive plain, but several of its circles extend for some distance beyond the base of the hill, which is of such a size that the diameter of the city is upwards of two miles, so that its circumference becomes about seven. On account of the humped shape of the mountain, however, the diameter of the city is really more than if it were built on ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... Flahaut, who has married M. de ——, now ambassador to Holland, it is believed. This lady lives sometimes at Falaise and sometimes in Paris, where she is at present. This individual is small, dark and slightly humped; he has great intellect, and possesses the talent for intrigue in a high degree. The other personages are rich. The declarant cannot state their number. Le Chevalier informed her that affairs were going well in Paris, that they were awaiting news of the Prince's ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... the ranch-house. He maintained a stubborn silence after the first outburst of rage. His hands tied behind his back, a rope run round his waist and down on each side through a cinch-ring, he sat idly humped forward, ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... the other, the man is deformed; because there is something wanting to complete the whole idea we form of a man; and this has the same effect in natural faults, as maiming and mutilation produce from accidents. So if the back be humped, the man is deformed; because his back has an unusual figure, and what carries with it the idea of some disease or misfortune; So if a man's neck be considerably longer or shorter than usual, we say he is deformed in that part, because men are not commonly made in that manner. But surely every hour's ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... him. He had been conscious of the fact, but it had not disturbed him. He had no more thought of this middle-aged, harsh-featured New Jersey farmer's daughter than he had of one of the dining-chairs. Gordon sat humped upon himself, as he sat nowadays, a marked stoop of age was becoming visible in his broad shoulders, and he ate perfunctorily without a word. James, after a number of futile attempts to talk to Clemency, subsided himself into ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... got up was like some strange old child. He wore a number of little capes to hide his humped back, and his body, one thought, under his clothes was strapped together. He got on his feet nimbly like a spider, and they heard the click of a pistol lock as he whipped the weapon out of an open drawer, as though it were a habit thus always to keep a weapon at his hand to make ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... strong was the pleasure of the actual physical contact as yielding soil and fine hard edge met—his hands sensitively aware of the texture of that meeting through the iron frame of the plough. Up and down the field, over its humped back, widening the strip of brown between him and the hedge, always with pleasure at sight of that long rich fold of earth turning over perpetually under the sideways impact of the blade, turning over till the green turf was hidden by the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... column. I watched him with a curious fascination, and as I grew sleepier and sleepier that part of my consciousness which was not counting steps, recognized him as a cripple who had come out to Mesopotamia in this special role 'to do his bit.' His humped back, protruding under his mackintosh as he labored forward, bent into a hoop, must have suggested the idea which was accepted as fact until I pulled myself together at the next halt and heard the mechanical and unimaginative half of me repeat 'Four thousand, seven hundred, and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... farther distance lingered upon the burnt-brick buildings of an outlying village. Beyond the river, in the broad meadow beneath the turret-clad mound, half-naked, sunburnt boys drove home the small humped cows to the milking, scaring away, as they went, the troops of white horses that pastured in the same field, clapping their hands and crying out at the little black foals that ran and frisked by the side of their white dams. ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... too long. He's stronger'n Samson and the Philippines rolled together, and he's humped up his back so much on the way acrost that he's started most of the nails in them slats over top of him. I tell ye what you do: Give him a bone or a chunk of tough meat to chaw on. Then he'll rest easy for a spell. Goodbye. I wish ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... effect of floating off from some busy mill of thought within him. Hitherto Mr. Direck had been inclined to think this silent observant youth, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders a little humped, as probably shy and adolescently ineffective. But the ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... of no less a person than Marshal Jeff Calkins. His shoulders were humped and his short legs bowed from continual riding, and his head was slung far forward on a gaunt neck; so that when he turned his head from one to another in speaking it was with a peculiar pendulum ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... good taste, she wore a dress of doubtful shade, puffed up by means of an extravagant pannier, and buttoned obliquely across the chest, according to that ridiculous and ungraceful style invented by flat or humped women. ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... the long ridge which divides Chin Coulee from Quitter Creek. Pink, riding point, opposite the Silent One, twisted round in his saddle and looked back at the slow-moving river of horns and backs veiled in a gray dust-cloud. Down the line at intervals rode the others, humped listlessly in their saddles, their hat brims pulled low over tired eyes that smarted with dust and ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... tidying herself up, feeling as she did so a little thrill of anticipation. And then she stuck her head through the kitchen door and announced that she was leaving. "Don't burn the whole place up, Maida," she cautioned with a laugh as she caught sight of her sitting, humped forward in a kitchen chair, fat elbows resting on a table, placidly viewing a vast clutter of dishes that had not yet been ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... red blanket the old Indian sat humped forward a little, smoking slowly his cigarette and studying the sketch Luck had drawn for him. With aching head and parched throat and hungry stomach, Luck sat cross-legged on the hot sand and waited, and would not let ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... He was anything but handsome. The truth is he was the homeliest, clumsiest-looking fellow in all the Green Forest. He was a little bigger than Bobby Coon and his body was thick and heavy-looking. His back humped up like an arch. His head was rather small for the size of his body, short and rather round. His neck was even shorter. His eyes were small and very dull. It was plain that he couldn't see far, or clearly unless what ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... We humped our saddles and swags ourselves; a stiffish load too, but the night was cool, and we did our best. It was no use growling. It had to be done, and the sooner the better. It seemed a long time—following father step by step—before we came to the place where I thought ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... descended again into the Nile valley by the way he had come and wandered toward the mouth of the gorge. From a little distance he looked upon a scene of great activity. In the shadow of one of the dilapidated hovels, four humped oxen stood, their heavy harness still hanging upon them, though the sledges they drew, covered with stone dust and broken pieces, were some distance away from them. A company of half a score of children were ascending in single file, along a slanting plane of planks, into the hollow ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... through the copse by it in summer, just as you or I might use the passage between the trees. Towards the evening the partridges may run through to join their friends before roost-time on the ground. Or you may see a covey there now and then, creeping slowly with humped backs, and at a distance not unlike hedgehogs in their motions. The spot therefore should be approached with care; if it is only a thrush out it is a pleasure to see him at his ease and, as he deems, unobserved. If a bird or animal thinks itself noticed ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... came scudding down out of the darkness of the upstairs to dress tumultuously at the kitchen stove. They humped and shivered, holding up their bare feet from the cold floor, like chickens in new fallen snow. They were irritable, and snarled and snapped and struck like cats and dogs. Mrs. Markham stood it for a while with mere commands to "hush up," but at last her patience gave out, and she charged down ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... asked Fulkerson. "Well, we must see what can be done. I supposed you would be all settled by this time, or I should have humped myself to find you something. None of those places I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... words out of his mouth than something happened, something so sudden and surprising that Peter lost his balance and nearly fell over backward. The long bill which Peter had seen sticking forth from between those humped-up shoulders darted out and down into the water like a flash. Behind that bill was the longest neck Peter ever had seen! It was so long that Peter blinked to be perfectly sure that his eyes had not been playing him a trick. But they hadn't, for ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... nature of the sport of Deer-stalking to the Chief and the Bulgarian Count. The former, who has been listening attentively, says that, from my description, stalking a stag must be very much the same as hunting the double-humped bison in Mwangumbloola, and that the only weapon he shall take with him will be a pickaxe. I have pointed out to him that I don't think this will be any use, as in deer-stalking I fancy you follow the stag at some distance, but he seems resolute about the pickaxe, and so, I suppose, I must let ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... Spence; Belzoni, a giant of six feet five, the centre of a group of eager auditors of the Egyptian marvels; Hallam, affable and unpretending, and a copious talker; Gifford, a small, shriveled, deformed man of sixty, with something of a humped back, eyes that diverge, and a large mouth, reclining on a sofa, propped up by cushions, with none of the petulance that you would expect from his Review, but a mild, simple, unassuming man,—he it is who prunes the contributions and takes ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... into an animal car and laid down in the straw with the sacred cow. She bellowed all night 'cause the sacred bull, her husband, had been attached for debt at Vicksburg, but when pa got in the car in his shirt sleeves and humped his shoulders up on account of the cold, the cow thought maybe she had been unnecessarily alarmed, and ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... Krishna, upon Christ, upon Gotama the Buddha, upon Rama and Sita, upon Brahma, upon Zoroaster; strange carriages shaded by red domes that compressed a whole dream of the East in small, and drawn by humped oxen, alternating with palanquins, with stylish turnouts of the latest mode, with cavaliers upon Arabian horses; half-naked workmen, crouched in uncomfortable workshops and ornamenting sandal-wood boxes; dusky curb-stone shopkeepers, rushing at me with strenuous offerings ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... outside that store. We were figuring how we were to break it in when two men came along. They went in and came out with a bag or two, and as they left the door open we figured they were coming back for more. We humped out a moderate load, and had just got it down to the boat when we saw those men, or two others, in the haze. I was for lying by, but Charly would ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... mother to study braces and to fear that he will develop consumption. Yet you can study the world's health records and never find a line to prove that any man with "occupation or profession—novel reading" is recorded as dying of consumption. The humped-over attitude promotes compression of the lungs, telescoping of the diaphragm, atrophy of the abdominal abracadabra and other things (see Physiological Slush, p. 179, et seq.); ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Phillyloo Bird, his cadaverous structure humped over like a turkey on the roost, "our Hicks hath sallied forth on the trail of a full-back, a Hercules who will smash the other elevens to infinitesimal smithereens! He told the squad to just leave it ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... looked up to'n we be," said Caleb Rivers, who had been so tardy in bestirring himself that he formed a part of the women's corps. "I guess, if the truth was known, Tiverton covers more land'n Sudleigh does, on'y Sudleigh's all humped up together into a quart bowl. I guess there's countries that 'ain't heard o' Sudleigh, an' wouldn't stan' much in fear ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... fires burned low in the grove, and at one of them near the grove gate I found our young commander. On a bench made of a fence-rail and two forked stakes he sat between Quinn and the first-lieutenant of the Louisianians. The doctor whom I had seen before sat humped on his horse, facing the three young men and making clumsy excuses to Ferry for leaving. The other physician would stay for some time yet, he said, and he, himself, was leaving his instruments, such as they were, and would return in the morning. "Fact is, my son's a surgeon, and he taken all ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... reached Mrs. Gelbraith's, Penrod sat patiently humped upon a gilt chair during the lengthy exchange of greetings between his mother. and Mrs. Gelbraith. That is one of the things a boy must learn to bear: when his mother meets a compeer there is always a long and dreary wait for him, while the two appear to be using strange symbols of speech, talking ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... wild light in O'Reilly's eye and for once Mr. Slack took orders from an underling. He humped himself. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... valley is connected with a remarkable historical event it is also associated with one of the wildest tales of mythology. Here according to old tradition died one of the humped oxen of the team of Hu Gadarn. Distracted at having lost its comrade, which perished from the dreadful efforts which it made along with the others in drawing the afanc hen or old crocodile from the lake of lakes, it fled away from its master, and wandered ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... there, on the launch turned over amidship, we beheld the ghost of the black tom cat, so large, so black, with the broad moonlight shining on it; and so thin, it was the skeleton of the cat, only it looked as black as ever; its back was humped up and its tail curved; and, as it stood out in the broad moonlight, it did look twice as big as the original cat, which was the biggest I ever saw. Well, the men actually screamed; they ran aft, upsetting ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... dim light, cursing volubly in patois and shaking his fist at Gard; but at last, to Gard's great relief, he humped his back and stumbled away up the cutting ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... as he sat humped over in the Morris Chair, holding on to the Head, lest it should fall off and roll across the floor, that he had been Snooted for Fair, Plastered, Ossified, Benzoated, Piped, Pickled, Spifficated, Corned, Raddled, ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... was so very ugly and ill-shapen that not one of the youths of the village would have aught to say to her by way of courtship or marriage. She squinted very much; her face was very long and thin; her nose excessively large and humped; her teeth crooked and projecting; her chin almost as sharp as the bill of a loon, and her ears as large as those of a deer and similarly shaped. Her arms, which were very long, were nothing but fleshless ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... almost certainly the descendants of more than one wild form, in the same manner as has been shown to be the case with our dogs and pigs. Naturalists have generally made two main divisions of cattle: the humped kinds inhabiting tropical countries, called in India Zebus, to which the specific name of Bos Indicus has been given; and the common non-humped cattle, generally included under the name of Bos taurus. The humped cattle were domesticated, as may be seen on the Egyptian monuments, at ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... the handsome couple pass across the room, the cynosure of all eyes. Luderic Hetherington, the rising and gifted night-watchman at the Lone Star slaughter house, and Mabel Grubb, the daughter of the millionaire owner of the Humped-backed Camel saloon, are standing under the oleanders as they ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... o' the one they shot," was Washburn's laconic observation. He looked the animal over admiringly and slapped him so vigorously under the belly that the horse grunted and humped ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... tropical fairyland, possesses neither architectural beauty nor salient character; wooden warehouses, Malay shanties, and white-washed streets being merely attractive from the ever-changing scheme of colour painted by varieties of race and costume. Tamils of ebon blackness drive picturesque teams of humped white oxen in red waggons laden with purple sugar-cane. Noble-looking Sikhs, in spotless linen, stride past with kingly gait. Brown Siamese, in many-coloured scarves and turbans gleaming with gold thread, chaffer and bargain at open stalls with blue-robed Chinamen, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... and upon it impacted the early music at the dawn of things. In the planetary slime he heard the screaming struggles of fishy beasts; in the tanglewood of hot, aspiring forests were muffled roarings of gigantic mastodons, of tapirs that humped at the sky, beetles big as camels, and crocodiles with wings. Wicked creatures snarled crepitantly, and their crackling noises were echoed by lizard and dragon, ululating snouted birds and hissing leagues of snaky lengths. Stannum fled from these disturbing dreams seeking safety ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Ruminantia.—The Gaur Oxen Humped cattle Encounter of a cow and a leopard Draft oxen Their treatment A Tavalam Attempt to introduce the camel (note) Buffaloes Sporting buffaloes Peculiar structure of ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... one. We followed a big bull. When he came up to blow we saw a yellow moving space on the water, then a round, gray, glistening surface, then a rugged snout. Puff! His blow was a roar. He rolled on, downward a little; the water surged white and green. When he came up to sound he humped his huge back. It was shiny, leathery, wonderfully supple. It bent higher and higher in an arch. Then this great curve seemed to slide swiftly out of sight and his wonderful tail, flat as a floor and wide as a house, emerged to swing aloft. The ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... could have a good look at him getting out of the car and going into the theater. At these tidings Mrs. Makebelieve roused for a moment from her strange apathy. Since tea-time she had sat (not as usual upright and gesticulating, but humped up and flaccid) staring at a blob of condensed milk on the outside of the tin. She said she thought she would go out and see the great actor, although what all the women saw in him to go mad about she did not know, but in another moment she settled back ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... He sat opposite to her in the cab, so that when he leaned forward to speak, with his hat pushed impatiently back, his big insistent face was thrust forward close to hers, and his great shoulders humped as though ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... Master drew his cloak about his humped shoulders, and in the flickering dim light from overhead his face stood out in all its ghastly pallor, accentuated by the dead black hair and mustache. But his eyes were burning strangely, and when they saw it the men drew back, and more than one ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... closer together. With dawn, which came at about eight o'clock, Kazan and his blind mate sallied forth into the day. It was fifty degrees below zero. About them the trees cracked with reports like pistol-shots. In the thickest spruce the partridges were humped into round balls of feathers. The snow-shoe rabbits had burrowed deep under the snow or to the heart of the heaviest windfalls. Kazan and Gray Wolf found few fresh trails, and after an hour of fruitless hunting they returned ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... Ahead lay a barren stretch of beach, humped with sand dunes. It was skirted beyond by ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... driving the spring-cart, toward sundown, after a variety of unforeseen delays. Of a sudden out of the pink haze came a galloping figure, slightly humped, in the inspector's coat and wideawake, with a bare foot through one stirrup and only a ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... and blistered the tongue, and humped the back, and broken the legs, and eviscerated the stomach, of every person who dares to think, or even dream of harming it! May the heaviest curses of time fall upon his scoundrelly soul! May his juleps curdle in his mouth. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... said Fritz, quite perplexed for the moment; but he was soon reassured, for the animal, which had hitherto presented itself end on towards them, so that its head and body were humped up together, now turning sideways, its change of position enabled him better to judge of its proportions. "Pshaw!" he cried out, "it's only a ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the general and myself many long drinks and things to eat that were not bananas. The general man trotted along at my side, leavin' all the arrangements to me. I led him up to Lafayette Square and set him on a bench in the little park. Cigarettes I had bought for him, and he humped himself down on the seat like a little, fat, contented hobo. I look him over as he sets there, and what I see pleases me. Brown by nature and instinct, he is now brindled with dirt and dust. Praise to the mule, ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... erect, with his hamstrings in tension, and his arms folded on his gun barrel; on the other, the lion, a gigantic specimen, humped up in the straw, with blinking orbs and brutish mien, resting his huge muzzle and tawny full-bottomed wig on his forepaws. Both calm in ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... creature winked and blinked, and balanced for a moment on sleepy legs; then at the uncontrollable shout that burst from Bertram's throat, he faced the man, humped his tiny back, bristled his diminutive tail to almost unbelievable fluffiness, ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... five men in the moonlight That by their shadows stand; Three hobble humped on crutches, And two lack each ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... Ministers, whose functions are particular and peculiar—since Confederation. To Ottawa, Sir Thomas is little short of a miracle. The frame of mind on both sides of politics regarding Sir Thomas is not unlike that of the farmer who saw a two-humped camel for the first time. "Hell," said Ottawa, "they ain't no such animal!" Now it calls Sir Thomas White 'great'—and even ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... who exhibited many deformities. Shoulders were slanting, humped, pulled this way and pulled that way. And notable among these latter men was the little fat man who had refused to allow his head to be glorified. His pudgy form, builded like a pear, bustled to and fro, while he swore in fishwife fashion. It appeared that some article ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... buffalo (Bos bubalus) exists as a wild animal in North Australia; it is very liable to revert to a wild state, being little altered from its still-existing wild ancestor. A more curious case is that of the one-humped camel (Camelus dromedarius), a beast only known in domestication, and that in arid countties; yet a number of these have become feral in the Spanish marshes, where they wade ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... fallen, how changed," from the youth who had climbed the hill as the sun went down! A mere contempt to himself, the self that contemned was a coward with the self it contemned! There lay the shapeless black of a buffalo, humped upon the grass: he made a wide circuit, and swept on like a shadow driven in the wind. For the wind had arisen, and added to his terror: it blew from behind him. He reached the brow of the valley, and shot down the steep descent like ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... this trim, nervous mare better than any other thing in the world. When he rode, perched like a monkey, with his thin legs held close to her sides, and his short, humped back doubled over, and his head with its long hair bobbing about as though his neck were loose-coupled somehow, he was eternally caressing her mighty withers, or feeling for the play of each iron tendon under her satin skin. And ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... Jase, humped over a heap of sprouting potatoes, blinked up apathetically into the sudden flood of sweet, spring air and sunshine. "Why, hello, Billy Louise," he mumbled, his ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... last she was moved to action. The mare became troublesome. The girl could no longer keep her still. The distracted animal humped her back and began to show signs of "bucking." Then came a rush of animals along the trail; they came racing for dear life, and their numbers were augmented from the wooded depths which lined ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... erect, with a frame of iron and sinews of steel, as became a master stone-mason, stood gazing at the poor little atom of misshapen humanity who tottered over the polished wooden floor. The spinal column was sadly bent, and from between the humped shoulders the pale face peered with an old, uncanny look. Yet the boy was not otherwise ugly. His forehead was broad and smooth, and his dark blue eyes were well and deeply set. The artisan watched him for a minute in painful silence, then turned to his ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... pitch. He just humped up a few times," replied Flo, and then when she saw how Carley was going to take it she burst into a merry peal of laughter. Charley, the sheep herder was grinning, and some of the other men turned ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... become a frog almost within an hour. Three things I hastened to observe: the pupils of her eyes were vertical, revealing her genus Phyllomedusa (making apt our choice of the feminine); by a gentle urging I saw that the first and second toes were equal in length; and a glance at her little humped back showed a scattering of white calcareous spots, giving the clue to her specific personality—bicolor: thus were we introduced to Phyllomedusa bicolor, alias Guinevere, and thus was established beyond doubt her close ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... the shoulders. He took a turn of the rope around the saddle horn. At last he had mastered the knack of the thing! Why, it was as easy as rolling pie-crust! He was about to wonder what he was going to do next, when the cow—which happened to be a large and active steer—humped itself ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... establishment of John Burnit, and, leaving instructions for his chauffeur to call for him at twelve, made his way down the long aisles of white-piled counters and into the dusty little office where old Johnson, thin as a rail and with a face like whittled chalk, humped over his desk exactly as he had sat ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... whipped down his head, And humped his back and gave a squeal, And bucked into the drinking shed, Revolving like a Cath'rine wheel! Men ran like rats! The atmosphere Was filled with oaths and pints ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... ruled by her daughter, and the daughter because she would emulate the fair skin of Densuke and be fairer in his eyes. O'Mino had suffered both from fate and fortune. She had been born ugly; with broad, flat face like unto the moon at full, or a dish. Her back was a little humped, her arms disproportionately long, losing in plumpness what they gained in extension. She seemed to have no breasts at all, the chest forming a concavity in correspondence to the convexity of the back, with a smoothness much ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... sundown an' the air got kinder chill, I didn't hear Jerry singin' no more. I'd seen him, off'n on, flittin' 'bout the yard all day. When I come in here to light the hangin'-lamp cal'latin' to make supper, I looked over there at the window. I'd shut it. There was Jerry on the window sill, humped all up like an old ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... rolled upon the deck a single object. It broke apart as it fell. The moonlight, released by his humped shadow, fell upon something sparkling, at which he leaped with a sudden thirst, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... might use the passage between the trees. Towards the evening the partridges may run through to join their friends before roost-time on the ground. Or you may see a covey there now and then, creeping slowly with humped backs, and at a distance not unlike hedgehogs in their motions. The spot therefore should be approached with care; if it is only a thrush out it is a pleasure to see him at his ease and, as he deems, unobserved. If a bird or animal ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... and wonderful ideas these remarkable amateur experts publish they won't "go down" with the man who has humped his pack and ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... most of the wild bovine animals the horns are both longer and thicker in the bull than in the cow, and in the cow-banteng (Bos sondaicus) the horns are remarkably small, and inclined much backwards. In the domestic races of cattle, both of the humped and humpless types, the horns are short and thick in the bull, longer and more slender in the cow and ox; and in the Indian buffalo, they are shorter and thicker in the bull, longer and more slender in the cow. In ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... mirror, tidying herself up, feeling as she did so a little thrill of anticipation. And then she stuck her head through the kitchen door and announced that she was leaving. "Don't burn the whole place up, Maida," she cautioned with a laugh as she caught sight of her sitting, humped forward in a kitchen chair, fat elbows resting on a table, placidly viewing a vast clutter of dishes that had ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... things I hastened to observe: the pupils of her eyes were vertical, revealing her genus Phyllomedusa (making apt our choice of the feminine); by a gentle urging I saw that the first and second toes were equal in length; and a glance at her little humped back showed a scattering of white calcareous spots, giving the clue to her specific personality—bicolor: thus were we introduced to Phyllomedusa bicolor, alias Guinevere, and thus was established beyond doubt her close ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... light, which lay upon the ground, casting all shadows upwards and making a grotesque shadow figure of himself and his bearers on the airship sides, fusing all three of them into a monstrous animal with attenuated legs and an immense fan-like humped body. The lights were on the ground because as far as possible all poles and standards had been dispensed with to prevent complications ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... something in his eyes that shimmered and glistened in the dull light. And then, as he sat silent, his eyes clearing, he saw that the little mouse had climbed back to the edge of the table. It did not eat the food he had placed there for it, but humped itself up in a tiny ball again, and its tiny shining eyes looked in ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... suddenly there rose up before her a figure so strange that for a moment she felt almost like a scared child. It sprang from the bushes and stood facing her like an animal at bay—a short creature neither man nor boy, misshapen, grotesquely humped, possessing long thin arms of almost baboon-like proportions. The head was sunken into the shoulders. It was flung back and the face upraised—and it was the face that made her pause, for it was the most pathetic sight she had ever looked upon. It was the face of a lad of two or three and twenty, ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... saw but two kinds of palm, the fan-palm, and Phoenix: the latter is characteristic of the driest locality. Then, for the animal creation, men, women, and children abound, both on the banks, and plying up and down the Ganges. The humped cow (of which the ox is used for draught) is common. Camels I occasionally observed, and more rarely the elephant; poneys, goats, and dogs muster strong. Porpoises and alligators infest the river, even above Benares. Flies and mosquitos are ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... much horrified by the wretched conditions among the farmers, which had resulted from a long period of drought, and one forlorn picture was fairly burned into my mind. A number of starved hogs—collateral for a promissory note—were huddled into an open pen. Their backs were humped in a curious, camel-like fashion, and they were devouring one of their own number, the latest victim of absolute starvation or possibly merely the one least able to defend himself against their voracious hunger. The farmer's wife looked on indifferently, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... this mornin' tellin' Sam to go an' look after you, or write a note, or somethin'! Why can't you come round oftener? I've no patience with you! You just sit at 'ome an' get humped, an' what's the good o' that, I should like to know? I thought you'd took offence with me, an' so I told Sam. Do you want to know how baby is? Why don't you ask, then, as you ought to do the first thing? He's a good deal better than he deserves to be, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... verity, as we stayed but to glance, I perceived that there lay humped things about the fire, and some to be black-seeming, and some to have a seeming of whiteness, but with no sureness in the colour ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... very nice boy. He wore a light grey-green Palm Beach suit and carried a big brown leather briefcase that looked too heavy for his soda straw-thin legs and arms. He was queer-looking because his waist was so narrow and his back so humped. And when he took off his tan Panama hat, a white fuzz exploded from his scalp. His face was pale as the moon in daylight. His broad smile showed teeth that Jack knew ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... sacred cow. She chewed the lettuce as peacefully as could be, and swallowed the cayenne pepper, and then stopped to think. You could tell by the expression on her face that when the pepper began to heat her up inside she wanted to swear, although she was a sacred cow. She humped herself, and shivered, and then bellowed like a calf who has been left in the barn to be weaned, while its mother goes out to pasture, and the sacred bull, her husband, he came and put his nose up to her nose, as much as to say: "What ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... deformed; because there is something wanting to complete the whole idea we form of a man; and this has the same effect in natural faults, as maiming and mutilation produce from accidents. So if the back be humped, the man is deformed; because his back has an unusual figure, and what carries with it the idea of some disease or misfortune; So if a man's neck be considerably longer or shorter than usual, we say he is deformed in that part, because men are not commonly made in that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... but no girls. Once in a while a forlorn bunch of age would sit humped in a chair, now and then a victrola record sang forth its worn contents, twice the piano was heard. After some ten days my large fat friend from the help's pantry informed me that she and I weren't supposed to be there—the ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... greeted her—a touch of the confidential, which added to her curiosity. He sat opposite to her in the cab, so that when he leaned forward to speak, with his hat pushed impatiently back, his big insistent face was thrust forward close to hers, and his great shoulders humped as though in effort. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... kvicker, der more petter," said Vanderzee, and humped his shoulders up with a convulsive shrug. "Maype you prink it back und anchor ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... boy humped into the shelter of a shrub which leaned over the station fence. He was reading. Before him was a hand-cart lettered "Humphrey Monk, Grocer and General Dealer, Clayton." The boy wore spectacles which, when he looked at me, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... might be applied. Upon one point they were agreed. There was no doubt in any little head among them that Aunt Hannah had at some time sold herself to Satan, and that he had placed this deformity upon her as a mark of ownership. Then she had a humped back, poor woman, the result of the cruel weight of many weary years; and she leaned upon an old-fashioned staff with a curved and crutch-like handle; and her bleared eyes were bent forever on the ground; and her thin lips twitched convulsively, and she muttered ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the King, was suddenly seen to grow hoary, his hairs to whiten, his forehead to wrinkle, his eyebrows to grow bristly, his eyes to sink in, his face to be furrowed, his mouth to become toothless, his beard to grow bushy, his back to be humped, his legs to tremble, and, above all, his glittering garments to turn to rags ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... on Sylvia by the logan-stone, it was less surprising to him than if he had not known she was there—having watched her go. She was sitting, all humped together, brooding over the water, her sunbonnet thrown back; and that hair, in which his star had caught, shining faint-gold under the sun. He came on her softly through the grass, and, when he was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bad again. Beauty is a snail and a saint beside this jumping, plunging, squealing creature that never by any chance was on his feet properly—except when he came down hard on all four of them at once with his back humped right up in the middle in a perfectly frightful fashion—and I suppose that wasn't 'properly.' Anyhow, I shouldn't have thought it was, if I had had to try to ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... sped, and nothing followed him. "How fallen, how changed," from the youth who had climbed the hill as the sun went down! A mere contempt to himself, the self that contemned was a coward with the self it contemned! There lay the shapeless black of a buffalo, humped upon the grass: he made a wide circuit, and swept on like a shadow driven in the wind. For the wind had arisen, and added to his terror: it blew from behind him. He reached the brow of the valley, and shot down the steep descent like a falling star. Instantly the whole upper country ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... skipped for the verandas of weather-board shanties out of which other souls popped to see the runaway. They saw a weird horseman, or rather, something like a camel (for Harry rode low, like Tod Sloan with his long back humped—for effect)—apparently fleeing for its life in a veil of dust, along the long white road, and some forty rods behind, an unaccountable tilted coach careered in its own separate cloud of dust. And from it ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... people they had to git, For the blame old engine it had a fit! But when the train got onto the track, Them children they clum right onto its back, And they tickled it so that all to once It gave 'em a lot of shivers an' grunts, And it humped itself way up in the air, And p'raps it ...
— The Purple Cow! • Gelett Burgess
... triumph on her face. Emma had never liked him. He had been conscious of the fact, but it had not disturbed him. He had no more thought of this middle-aged, harsh-featured New Jersey farmer's daughter than he had of one of the dining-chairs. Gordon sat humped upon himself, as he sat nowadays, a marked stoop of age was becoming visible in his broad shoulders, and he ate perfunctorily without a word. James, after a number of futile attempts to talk to Clemency, subsided himself into bewildered silence, and ate with very little appetite. ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden patch by the wall, hams dangling from a beam, bats of light at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated by a small glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott bending over a body which was humped under a sheet—the surgeon, his bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale-yellow rubber gloves, loosening the tourniquet, his face without emotion save when he threw up his head and clucked at the farmwife, "Hold that light ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... over a gas-fixture, behind and through any openings he could find. Should some bird in the room disapprove of this behavior, and scold, as the finch was quite apt to do, the mocking-bird instantly alighted beside him, humped his back till he looked deformed, sidled two or three steps towards him, stopped, and stared at his critic; then two or three steps more, stopping again, and in every way acting more like a mischievous monster ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... for generations. By nine all the fire and confusion had gone out of the sky, leaving wedges of apple-green and plates of pale yellow; and by ten the lanterns on the boat were making twisted colours upon the waves, elongated or squat, as the waves stretched or humped themselves. The beam from the lighthouse strode rapidly across the water. Infinite millions of miles away powdered stars twinkled; but the waves slapped the boat, and crashed, with regular and ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... and with one eye, and the leprous with their sores, some emerging from little streets adjacent, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing, yelping, all limping and halting, all flinging themselves towards the light, and humped up in the mire, like snails after ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... commonland to the east. From the rising ground between the two Frensham ponds there is a fine panorama of pine and heather. Crooksbury Hill juts up dark and commanding to the north; the level line of the ridge on the left, a few hundred yards away, is broken and humped with barrows; far away to the east lies Charterhouse, grey in the haze by Godalming; behind, to the south-east, the Devil's Jumps, three little squat, conical hills whose very oddity is one of their attractions. They edge the horizon like inverted pudding ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... to achieve a reputation for profound and ponderous wisdom, so long as one looks very solemn and says nothing. This is the stork's recipe. Go up to Billy here, or one of the marabous, as he stands with his shoulders humped up about his head, and make a joke. He won't see it. He will lift his eyebrows with a certain look of contempt, and continue to cogitate—about nothing. If the joke is a very bad pun—such a frightful pun that even a stork ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... bought for the general and myself many long drinks and things to eat that were not bananas. The general man trotted along at my side, leavin' all the arrangements to me. I led him up to Lafayette Square and set him on a bench in the little park. Cigarettes I had bought for him, and he humped himself down on the seat like a little, fat, contented hobo. I look him over as he sets there, and what I see pleases me. Brown by nature and instinct, he is now brindled with dirt and dust. Praise to the mule, his ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... of the avengers of blood humped the black boulder. On the border of its shadow lay a dead sheep; and standing beside the body, his coat all ruffled by the hand of the storm—Owd ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... seemed to have become crystallized, as it were, in age and decrepitude, and advanced no further in either—was pottering around the garden, eying askant, like an old robin, the new plough furrows. Pauper women humped their calico backs over the green slopes of the fields, searching for dandelion greens, but not digging, because it ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... then, and blistered the tongue, and humped the back, and broken the legs, and eviscerated the stomach, of every person who dares to think, or even dream of harming it! May the heaviest curses of time fall upon his scoundrelly soul! May his juleps curdle in his mouth. May he smoke none but New Orleans ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... lot about this business," said Hugh, "but never hoped to see it. What are these Australian buffaloes? I thought they were just humped cattle like ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... was scrambling up the opposite bank. A few seconds later he was leaping into the depths of the forest, his back humped, looking in the half light like a great ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... untrodden by any king of Assyria.* Having reached his destination, he captured two petty kings, Eparna and Shitirparna, and exiled them to Assyria, together with their people, their thoroughbred horses, and their two-humped camels,—in fine, all the possessions of their subjects. Shortly after this, three other Median chiefs, hitherto intractable—Uppis of Par-takka, Zanasana of Partukka,** Ramatea of Urakazabarna—came to Nineveh to present the king with ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... be funny. Waters surveyed it for a space of moments with a faint interest in its mere grotesqueness; it did not change nor shift under his scrutiny, but continued to glare inhumanly like a baleful lamp. He humped a thin shoulder in resignation and turned away. When he was halfway to the gate, he heard behind him the foreman ordering the gatekeeper not to admit ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... cortical lute of three thousand strings, and upon it impacted the early music at the dawn of things. In the planetary slime he heard the screaming struggles of fishy beasts; in the tanglewood of hot, aspiring forests were muffled roarings of gigantic mastodons, of tapirs that humped at the sky, beetles big as camels, and crocodiles with wings. Wicked creatures snarled crepitantly, and their crackling noises were echoed by lizard and dragon, ululating snouted birds and hissing leagues of snaky lengths. Stannum fled from these disturbing dreams seeking safety ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... stood sharply silhouetted against the skylight in the roof immediately above. The idea flashed into my brain in a moment that I was looking into the visage of something monstrous. The huge skull, the mane-like hair, the wide-humped shoulders, suggested, in a way I did not pause to analyze, that which was scarcely human; and for some seconds, fascinated by horror, I returned the gaze and stared into the dark, inscrutable countenance above me, without knowing exactly where I was or what I was doing. Then I realized ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... place. I heard a bang, a clatter, a rattling of hoofs. I peered around the bay and saw the blue pony performing some of the most finished, vigorous, and varied bucking it has ever been given me to witness. He all but threw somersaults. He stood on his upper lip. He humped up his back till he looked like a lean cat on a graveyard fence. He stood on his toe calks and spun like a weather-vane on a livery stable, and when the pack exploded and the saddle slipped under his belly, he kicked it to pieces ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... horse near the office, and, putting his head among the morning-glories curtaining an open window, stated his errand to Hilliard, whose vast bulk was humped ludicrously upon a high stool. The big fellow stopped thumbing his ledger, greeted him with a jovial shout, and directed him toward a stratum of rock which ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Voices strove together in advising this "facer of facts" to get into khaki and to go to where he could obtain precisely the same kind of little local knowledge—perhaps, a few wounds as well. His presence was dishonourable—contaminating. We filed out and left him sitting humped in a chair, looking puzzled and pathetic, murmuring, "But I ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... our rail or his own spar, as the case might be, across the staggering abyss; clung so well with his toes that he might almost have been classified with the quadrumana; and between times squatted humped over on the rail, watching us ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... worse than ever. He was flat on his side, with his spine humped up, moaning and straining at intervals. But now relief was in sight—so thought the men. With a tin dipper they tried to pour some relief into the open mouth of the sufferer, who had so little appreciation that he simply taxed his remaining strength to ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... full remembrance came to Grace. Now she knew why that face was strangely familiar. The man she had seen was none other than "Larry, the Locksmith." In her mind's eye Grace saw him sitting in the court room with humped shoulders, his eyes bent fiercely upon her, as she related what she had seen with her face pressed close to the window pane of the haunted house. It had all happened during her senior year at high school. To Grace it ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... was like some strange old child. He wore a number of little capes to hide his humped back, and his body, one thought, under his clothes was strapped together. He got on his feet nimbly like a spider, and they heard the click of a pistol lock as he whipped the weapon out of an open drawer, as though it were a habit thus always to keep ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... back-yard boy, was going to rise and disturb all these learned people. He was frightened again. But he stood up, faced the president, affectedly folded his arms, hastily unfolded them and put his hands in his pockets, one foot before the other, one shoulder humped a little ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Sam's dejected appearance—blue nose and humped back—and realizing doubtless that it was futile to reason with him further, Jim yielded and emptied the sacks of dirt just dug upon the ground. They now started out for the nearest shelter, the hotel in Angel's Camp, kept by Coon Drayton, formerly a Mississippi River pilot. Imagine the ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... umbrageous tail, and a shawl of many colours formed his flapping wings. A truly noble bird, whose legs had the genuine strut, whose eyes shone watchfully, and whose voice had a ring that evidently struck terror into the catterpillar's soul, if it was a catterpillar. He squirmed, he wriggled, he humped as fast as he could, trying to escape; but all in vain. The tufted bird espied him, gave one warbling sort of crow, pounced upon him, ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... many of the species in their stations of natural repose. Caterpillars are also similarly protected. Many exactly resemble in tint the leaves they feed upon; others are like little brown twigs, and many are so strangely marked or humped, that when motionless they can hardly be taken to be living creatures at all. Mr. Andrew Murray has remarked how closely the larva of the peacock moth (Saturnia pavonia-minor) harmonizes in its ground colour with that of the young buds of heather on ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... weren't hinting. Tell you a story of what happened once: I was up here in Salem at a man's Named Sanders with a gang of four or five Doing the haying. No one liked the boss. He was one of the kind sports call a spider, All wiry arms and legs that spread out wavy From a humped body nigh as big's a biscuit. But work! that man could work, especially If by so doing he could get more work Out of his hired help. I'm not denying He was hard on himself. I couldn't find That he kept any hours—not for himself. Daylight and lantern-light ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... who should bounce out at him but a big black cat. And, oh, dear me. Her claws were sticking out of her feet like pins and her eyes were yellow as fire and her teeth glittered and her whiskers stood out like bayonets, and her tail was as big as a rolling pin and her back was humped up worse ...
— Billy Bunny and Uncle Bull Frog • David Magie Cory
... who was smoking a pipe in the chimney-corner, as humped and gloomy as a fowl on a wet day, and he was as surprised as me at getting a letter with a London postmark, and registered too; and he was that surprised that he kept turning it over and over, and wondering who it could have come from, till we thought it would be the best way to open and ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... was that the Judas boat had just bumped Univ., exactly opposite the Judas barge. The oarsmen in either boat sat humped, panting, some of them rocking and writhing, after their wholesome exercise. But there was not one of them whose eyes were not upcast at Zuleika. And the vocalisation and instrumentation of the dancers and stampers on the towing-path had by this time ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... gorge or valley is connected with a remarkable historical event it is also associated with one of the wildest tales of mythology. Here according to old tradition died one of the humped oxen of the team of Hu Gadarn. Distracted at having lost its comrade, which perished from the dreadful efforts which it made along with the others in drawing the afanc hen or old crocodile from the lake of lakes, it fled away from its master, and wandered about, till coming ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... at the wooden figure a long time: a little hunchbacked man, not so very much taller than himself, on a low wooden box, holding out in one hand a packet of black wooden cigars. His back was terribly humped up between his shoulders, his face was square and bony, if wood can be said to be bony, he was bareheaded and bald-headed, he had a wide mouth, and his high nose curved down over it and his pointed chin curved up under it; and his breast stuck out in front almost as much as his shoulders ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... when he slowly retraced his steps towards his attic home, his feet were very tired and he shuffled more than he had in the morning. His back humped and his head drooped more, and the tears nearly blinded him. He had to stop and rest at each flight of stairs and he fell to his knees just as ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... describe what followed those luckless words? Even as I spoke the magic carpet quivered responsively under my feet, and an undulation went all round the fringe as though a sudden wind were shaking it. It humped up in the middle so abruptly that I came down sitting with a shock that numbed me for the moment. It threw me on my back and billowed up round me as though I were in the trough of a stormy sea. Quicker than I can write it lapped a corner over and rolled me in ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... coming of the cattle, driven up from the south by wind-browned, saddle-weary cowboys who sang endless chanteys to pass the time as they rode with their herds up the long trail. He saw the cattle humped and drifting before the wind in the first blizzards of winter, while gray wolves slunk watchfully here and there, their shaggy coats ruffled by the biting wind. He saw them when came the chinook, a howling, warm wind from out the southwest, cutting the snowbanks as with a knife that ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... of the child assumed the appearance of deformity and distortion, as, with his back humped up, and his master's stick in his hand, he hobbled about the room, his childish face drawn into a doleful pucker, and spitting from right to left, in imitation ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... has the power of storing up water, and bringing it back into its mouth for several days after it has drunk it. This enables it to make long journeys, without needing a brook by the way. Its feet, too, are just fitted for the sandy wastes which it has to tread. The one-humped camel is found in Africa, and the two-humped, or Bactrian camel, in Asia. The Llama of South America is like the camel in some respects, but, as you know, is very much smaller; I knew one which had a disagreeable habit of spitting at those ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... a frozen look, Sary examined her hands for a moment, then humped her shoulders and stamped back to the kitchen-range where she had been boiling soap-fat and straining out the scum before the arrival of ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tea and bacon, even in the gross darkness and mental tension which precede a Big Push. Presently various humped figures in greatcoats, having gathered in the open ditch which did duty for Officers' Mess, broke into spasmodic conversation—conversation rendered even more spasmodic by the almost ceaseless roar of guns. There were guns ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... growin', Sonny never asked nobody no odds. He thess stayed stock-still ez long ez he found pleasure in bein' a little runt, an' then he humped hisself an' shot up same ez a sparrer-grass stalk. It gives me pleasure to look up to him the way I ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... for the sunflower seed Jay came along and leaned over the fence. "Jack," he drawled, "you look like a kangaroo all humped over making that furrow. Why don't you ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... are almost certainly the descendants of more than one wild form, in the same manner as has been shown to be the case with our dogs and pigs. Naturalists have generally made two main divisions of cattle: the humped kinds inhabiting tropical countries, called in India Zebus, to which the specific name of Bos Indicus has been given; and the common non-humped cattle, generally included under the name of Bos taurus. The humped cattle were domesticated, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... the welt-raising cut of a vicious, unreasoning whip. It was not a pleasurable prospect; and at the first shake-up, Lauzanne pictured it coming. All thoughts of overtaking the horses in front fled from his mind; it was the dreaded punishment that interested him most; figuratively, he humped his ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... she would sit doing nothing. Then she was so ugly and ill-shaped that not one of the youths of the village would have aught to say to her by way of courtship or marriage. She squinted very much; her face was long and thin, her nose excessively large and humped, her teeth crooked and projecting, her chin almost as sharp as the bill of a loon, and her ears as large as those of a deer. Altogether she was a very odd and strangely formed woman, and wherever she went she never failed to excite ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... agreed Brewer; "no wonder his shoulders air humped. But you never hears as much as a grunt from him. He knows he ain't never give her ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... with rain and sleet; toward the sea was the same mist, flying with the wind over such a huddle of tossing green and white as Ralph had never seen. The surf poured in in rollers that leaped over each other's humped backs in their savage energy to get at the shore, which trembled as they beat upon it. The ripples from one wave had not time to flow back before those of the next came threshing in. Great blobs of foam shot down the ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... two-wheeled cart drawn by a humped bullock were a couple of Hindu ladies, under a canopy supported by four poles. Then came a camel bearing two bearded men on his back. Two or three palanquins were seen; but they were an old story, and they turned ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... struggles, the graves of past hopes. A dead apathy of mind and muscle succeeded his mental exertion and passion of thought. Increased age marked him, as though Time, thrusting all at once upon him bitter experiences usually spread over many years of a man's life, had weighed him down, humped his back, thinned his hair, and furrowed his forehead under the load. Within his eyes, behind the reflected blue of the sky, as he raised them to it, sat mad misery; and an almost tetanic movement of limb, which ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... the stocking stretched, and Penrod manipulated the cat; but she left her hearty mark on both of them before, in a moment of unfortunate inspiration, she humped her back while she was upside down, and Penrod took advantage of the concavity to increase it even more than she desired. The next instant she was assisted downward into the gloomy interior, with excelsior already beginning to block the means ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... cautiously, however, to the edge of the thicket, to a point where she could see the fire. A man sat humped over the glowing embers, whereon sizzled a piece of meat. His head was bent forward, as if he were listening. Suddenly he looked up, and she gasped—for the firelight showed the features of ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... away, with his two-horse wagon, to get a load of manure. Lewis is the farmer (colored). He is of mighty frame and muscle, stocky, stooping, ungainly, has a good manly face and a clear eye. Age about 45—and the most picturesque of men, when he sits in his fluttering work-day rags, humped forward into a bunch, with his aged slouch hat mashed down over his ears and neck. It is a spectacle to make the broken-hearted smile. Lewis has worked mighty hard and remained mighty poor. At the end of each whole year's toil he can't show a gain of fifty dollars. He had borrowed money of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in came another ugly old hag. She had a back so humped and broad, she had hard work to get through the door. Up jumped the bride in a trice, and greeted her with ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... narrow shoulders humped, and his whole figure testifying to his annoyance, and Hartley sat alone, watching the moonlight and thinking his own thoughts. He was interrupted by a woman's voice, and Mrs. Wilder sat down in the chair left ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... rarely met; still more rarely civilised man; and rarer yet his dwelling-place. If at times a human being appeared among the prairie groves, he was not there as a sojourner—only a traveller, passing from place to place. The herds of cattle, with shaggy frontlets and humped shoulders—the droves of horses, long-tailed and with full flowing manes—the proud antlered stags, and prong-horned antelopes, were not his. He had no control over them. The turf he trod was free to them for pasture, as to him for passage; and, as he made way through ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... have worn exactly the same fashioned clothes as this woman, and doubtless Leah had become pink-eyed through the tears of vexation she had shed over the ancestral humped quadruped she had ridden; and most certainly Lot's wife, Ruth, Solomon's wives and appendages, Jezebel, and every other woman mentioned in the Bible once watched just such a dawn rise across just ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... each weary back is humped, And bowed each jetty pate; For Fishy, though he looks so ...
— Fishy-Winkle • Jean C. Archer
... off. Scarcely had he put out the sculls than a new passenger arrived. It was Koko. He would often accompany them to the reef, though, strangely enough, he would never go there alone of his own accord. He made a circle or two over them, and then lit on the gunwale in the bow, and perched there, humped up, and with his long dove-coloured tail feathers presented to ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... one of his followers he carefully fired the stores of kindling wood which filled part of the ground-floor of the ancient Wark of the Cassillis folk. In ten minutes, before even the cavalcade was entirely mounted, the flames were bursting through the humped roof in a fiery fountain of gold sparks and ruddy jags of flame, while the pillar of smoke rose many hundreds of feet into ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... Products of the warmer plains. 2. Humped oxen and fat-tailed sheep. 3. Scarani. 4. The Karaunahs and Nigudarian Bands. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... great creature stood humped in the level light; the twin horns back-curving and silhouetted against the sky told him ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... flies, also known as black flies, are about one-eighth of an inch long and have a characteristic "humped" back (fig. 3). They breed in running water and appear in swarms during spring and summer, often in enormous numbers, causing great annoyance to stock and human beings, on account of their bites and their entrance into the eyes, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... her mind all would be well. He put his clothes on feverishly, but before he had half finished he heard her running up the stairs, and his heart sank. She came with the step that indicated something important on her mind. He knew as well how she looked as if he could see her coming. She was humped over slightly, her head was down, both hands grasping her skirts in front, and her feet fairly glimmering at ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... Robb humped his big shoulders and slouched up to his desk, there to bury his head in a gigantic ledger for the balance ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... of that, too, because she was too tired to walk, anyway, and the baby was very sweet. Then, once more, a long shadow came between her and the moon and someone bent over her. Ah, 'twas Daddy Skinner, the same beloved, heavy humped-shoulders—the same precious face, and he was fondling the moon baby, and twice kissed her with tender, twitching lips. She smiled happily and moved a little in the snow. She tried to catch Daddy's ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... crept into that infernal court, that infernal torture chamber, they were just finishing the case of the child. This solicitor chap—chap with a humped back and a head as big as a house—was just finishing fawning round a doctor man in the box, putting it up to him that there was nothing to suggest deliberate suffocation of the baby. Oxalic acid poisoning—was it not the case that the girl would have died in great agony? Writhed on ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... says she, 'he's their brother,' says she. 'Lord 'a' mercy!' says I, 'don't tell me there's another one!' 'Yes, there he is,' says she, an' she points to him. He was settin' on the edge of a long seat, all humped up, an' queer, watchin' everything, without sayin' a word, but if I live to be a hundred I'll never get the look o' that child's face out o' my mind. It was so kind o' awful lonesome an' forsaken an' hungry-lookin', an' so fearful old, ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... had the effect of floating off from some busy mill of thought within him. Hitherto Mr. Direck had been inclined to think this silent observant youth, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders a little humped, as probably shy and adolescently ineffective. But the head was manifestly ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Gregorio," was his constantly recurring formula. "Keeps me from sleeping and's very troublesome when I want to turn over, as I often do on account of the pains in my poor humped shoulders. Now, why need you put it on? Surely you're not afraid of me trying to get away? Ha, ha! that would be turning one's back upon best friends. Cascaras! I fare too well here to think of changing quarters. Above all, going into ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... slipped happily away, until war swept the continent. Professor Morris refused to believe in its nearness until it was too late to escape, and they were forced to remain until the day when Warsaw fell. Now Warsaw, beautiful and proud, Warsaw the brilliant lay in ruins. Professor Morris, sitting humped over on the rude bench, thought of the wonderful chance that had brought him were history, tragic and important, was being made. He did not worry greatly over the disappearance of Elinor. He remembered several ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... valley neatly divided into patches—each hedged off in squares in which flourished all sorts of vegetables, including sweet corn and potatoes and several other less familiar varieties. In pastures, fenced in with mathematical regularity by hedges of the African cactus thorn, herds of humped cattle were feeding contentedly in the mellow glow of the setting sun, occasionally lowing softly, which latter made Billy, as he expressed it, "long ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... was slow and sullen. The smaller cattle sheltered in the lee of the larger, moving compactly, as if the density of the herd radiated a heat of its own. The saddle horses, southern bred and unacclimated, humped their backs and curled their heads to the knee, indicating, with the closing day, a falling temperature. Suddenly, and as clear as the crack of a rifle, the voice of Dell Wells was ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... gesture Dud lifted a frying-pan from the red-hot stove and clapped it against the rump of the jester. The redskin's head hit the roof. His shriek of agony could have been heard half a mile. He clapped hands to the afflicted part and did a humped-up dance of woe. The carving-knife lay forgotten on the floor. It was quite certain that he would take no pleasure in sitting down for ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... stood quivering. The girl's hat swept through the air in front of its eyes. The horse woke to galvanized action. The back humped. It shot into the air with a writhing twist of the body. All four feet struck the ground together, straight and stiff ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... of fur in the crotch of a slim forest elm. Presently it uncurled, cautiously; a fluffy ringed tail unfolded; the rounded furry back humped up, and the animal, moving slowly into the tangent foliage of an enormous oak, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... spectacular plans—in mind. He put them into execution at once. The moment he felt his burden slipping over his back that active end grew busy again. Jumbo humped himself, letting out a volley of kicks so lightning-like in their swiftness that ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... cold snake, and the sun will not thaw me." He struck himself fiercely on the breast and stared at her. "Look at me, humped and hideous. How could this rugged hull prove an ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
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