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More "Wiry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the campus with him to the Museum, still chatting. Norton was a tall, spare man, wiry, precisely the type one would pick to make an explorer in a tropical climate. His features were sharp, suggesting a clear and penetrating mind and a disposition to make the most of everything, no matter how slight. Indeed that had been his history, I knew. ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... except the simple consciousness of what I am doing." Perhaps this was exactly what he desired. He sat, bending forward a little over the table, his square jaws firmly set, his eyes hidden beneath their heavy brows, and every long, wiry hair on his head in its proper place. I fixed my eyes upon him, threw my mind into a state of perfect ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... flipped a quarter over to the cashier, then turned and handed ten dollars to a wiry little chopper ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... the gate, and young Mr. Elmer Franklin of New York entered. A man to respect: an open, manly face, clear blue eyes, and a wiry, compact, and vigorous frame. A man with a sound mind in a sound body. He was dressed in a gray travelling suit, and had a knapsack strapped to his back; in his hand a stout stick looking as if just cut from the roadside, and at his side a field glass in a leather case. Immediately behind him came ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... snapped. His whole wiry, tough body quivered. He visibly held his breath as he prepared to flip back that sawed section of curious, strong ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... above, behind the promenade-deck rail, did not look on with delight. He lost no time. He did not even waste ten seconds in rushing to the little stairway which led downward from his place of vantage, but, with the wiry hand and arm of the trained college athlete to help him in the spring, he vaulted lightly clean across the barrier, and, with legs bent skilfully to break the force of the long drop, landed like a lithe and angry tiger on the deck below, within ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... ape with loathing. There was a star tattooed on one of his naked insteps. He looked no longer frail, but wiry and snakelike. The pallor behind his dark tan showed the triangles of black stain in his cheeks and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... ploughed up. Well, brother, presently he saw two men on horseback coming towards the lane through the field behind the gate; the man who rode foremost was a tall, big fellow, the very man he was in quest of: the other was a smaller chap, not so small either, but a light, wiry fellow, and a proper master of his hands when he sees occasion for using them. Well, brother, the foremost man came to the gate, reached at the hank, undid it, and rode through, holding it open for the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Creek was a wide, deep backwater, never used nowadays for any active purpose, though occasionally an old hulk was towed there, and left to rot. Chippy supposed that his men had pulled up to the very top of the creek, where there was a deserted landing-stage, and he put all the strength of his wiry frame into driving his boat down to the creek and up it as hard as he ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... days Pierre is my gardener at eleven sous an hour. On these occasions he wears voluminous working trousers of faded green corduroy gathered at the ankles; a gray flannel shirt and a scarlet cravat. On other days his short, wiry body is encased in a carefully brushed uniform of dark blue with a double row of gold buttons gleaming down his solid chest. When on active duty in the Customs Coast Patrol of the Republique Francaise ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... mantel-piece, stood the Duke, much out of temper. He was a powerfully built man, some twenty years older than his wife, with a dark complexion, enlivened by ruddy cheeks and prominent, red lips. His eyes were of a cold, clear gray; his hair very black, thick, and wiry. An extremely vigorous person, more than adequately aware of his own importance, tanned and seasoned by the life of his class, by the yachting, hunting, and shooting in which his own existence was largely spent, slow in perception, and of a sulky temper—so ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hand, "The doctrine of Election compatible with the infinite goodness of God." It is hard to say which of the two was the better, or which commended itself most to the church full of people who listened. Deacon Tourtelot,—a short, wiry man, with reddish whiskers brushed primly forward,—sitting under the very droppings of the pulpit, with painful erectness, and listening grimly throughout, was inclined to the sermon of the morning. Dame Tourtelot, who overtopped her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... two it was all that he could do to hold himself in consciousness. It appeared to him a necessity to do so. He could see a smoke-stained roof of beams and rafters, and on these he fixed his eyes, thinking that he could hold himself so, as by thin, wiry threads of sight, from falling again into the pit where all was black or blood-colour. The pain was appalling, but he thought he had gripped it at last, and could hold ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... man of thirty-five; bald as an egg and as shiny. ("Dangerous to have a hen around," Marny would say, rubbing the pate after the manner of a phrenologist.) Gaunt, wiry; jerky in his movements as a Yankee clock and as regular in his habits: hot water when he got up—two glasses, sipped slowly; cold water when he went to bed, head first, feet next, then the rest of ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... madness, she made a spring at him, and the doctor just managed to slam the door and turn the key before her little, wiry hands were upon ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... large, legs short, eyes and ears small: the feet provided with sharp claws for burrowing, three on the hind foot, and an additional one on the fore foot. They make deep excavations in the ground, and live chiefly on roots. The hide is very tough and covered with a coarse wiry hair, and with this defensive armor, and his formidable teeth and claws, the wombat is a customer not much relished by the dogs. It was not till we had stunned our new acquaintance, as he stood at bay in his den, by repeated blows of ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... unexpected visitor appeared in the shop. A tall, wiry man, past middle age, with a ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... men would furl, would employ twenty of them. This was partly from habit, perhaps, though they actually want physical force. They eat little besides rice, and are small in frame. We had a curious mode of punishing them, when slack, aloft. Our standing rigging was of grass, and wiry enough to cut even hands that were used to it. The ratlines were not seized to the forward and after shrouds, by means of eyes, as is done in our vessels, but were made fast by a round turn, and stopping back the ends. We used to take down all the ratlines, and make ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... are faithfully kept." It was the day when he had left Hannibal. His mother, Jane Clemens, a resolute, wiry woman of forty-nine, had put together his few belongings. Then, holding ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the cliffs, the formerly arid hills clothed with exuberant verdure, and beautiful villas have been built in the midst of enchanting gardens, in places where, only a few years ago, hardly enough of short wiry grass could grow to feed a goat. The gambling establishment of Monaco was opened in 1856 by a company with the sanction of Prince CharlesIII. The first house was in the Place du Chteau; whence, after sundry changes, the company commenced to build a house in 1858 on Monte ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... yet described the rest of the party round the fire. There was Bartle Won, a faithful follower, for many years, of Uncle Jeff; but as unlike him as it was possible that any two human beings could be. Bartle was a wiry little fellow, with bow legs, broad shoulders (one rather higher than the other), and a big head, out of which shone a pair of gray eyes, keen as those of a hawk—the only point in which he resembled Uncle Jeff. He was wonderfully active and strong, notwithstanding his figure; and as for ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... for a poor, quiet, old Bullfrog, as little wiry, wicked Wasp came at him, barking and yelping. He jumped with all his force sheer over a patch of bushes into the river, and swam back to his old home among the cat-tails. And always after that it was ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... The SHERIFF and HALE are men in middle life, the COUNTY ATTORNEY is a young man; all are much bundled up and go at once to the stove. They are followed by the two women—the SHERIFF's wife first; she is a slight wiry woman, a thin nervous face. MRS HALE is larger and would ordinarily be called more comfortable looking, but she is disturbed now and looks fearfully about as she enters. The women have come in slowly, and stand ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... tympanitic (caused by gas). An early symptom is vomiting and it is often repeated. There is constipation; occasionally diarrhea occurs. The temperature may rise rapidly to 104 or 105 and then become lower; it is sometimes normal. The pulse is frequent, small, wiry and beats 100 to 150 per minute; the breathing is frequent and shallow. The tongue becomes red and dry and cracked. Passing the urine frequently causes pain; sometimes there is retention of urine. The face looks pinched, the eyes are sunken, the expression ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... this sort of thing, I should imagine?' said the gentleman next beside Robert, in a particularly thin, wiry voice. ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... a fitting laboratory for a necromancer, when I was startled at beholding a human countenance staring at me from a dusky corner. It was that of a small, shrivelled old man with thin cheeks, bright eyes, and gray, wiry, projecting eyebrows. I at first doubted whether it were not a mummy curiously preserved, but it moved, and I saw that it was alive. It was another of these black-cloaked old men, and, as I regarded his quaint physiognomy, his obsolete garb, and the hideous and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... footsteps in the passage outside. The door opened, and the missing member of the family appeared. Mike Jackson was tall for his age. His figure was thin and wiry. His arms and legs looked a shade too long for his body. He was evidently going to be very tall some day. In face, he was curiously like his brother Joe, whose appearance is familiar to every one who takes an ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... said I was a true son of my father. From my childhood I was big, strong, and daring. I must add, too, that I was passionate and revengeful. My brother was neither so tall nor so daring as I; but he was, nevertheless, exceedingly strong and wiry, and although, being the older, I was the stronger of the two, I often had difficulty in proving myself the master. Especially was this seen when we used to wrestle on the soft, spongy grass that grows on the headland. I could lift him from the ground ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... came and her heart beat on. She did not even feel very ill, only weak, with a wiry throbbing of each separate nerve in her head. She had meant to use the quiet hours to decide what must be done next, but always, when she had tried to pin her mind to the question, it had escaped like a fluttering moth, and turned to self-pity, or to calling up pictures ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... or twenty persons in the room. One, a tall, wiry, muscular old man, from the west; sunburnt and swarthy; with a brown white hat on his knees, and a giant umbrella resting between his legs; who sat bolt upright in his chair, frowning steadily at the carpet, and twitching the hard lines about his mouth, as if he had ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... now returned, leading two extra ponies from the stable. One was a bay, accoutered with a man's deep Mexican saddle, whereon was secured a coiled lasso; the other was a wiry little roan mare, with a somewhat decrepit but otherwise sound side-saddle ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... his sixty-seven years preserves the figure and energy of youth. The active open-air life of India keeps men fit for the saddle when in England they would only sit their club armchairs, and it is hard for any one who sees the wiry figure and brisk step of Lord Roberts to realise that he has spent forty-one years of soldiering in what used to be regarded as an unhealthy climate. He had carried into late life the habit of martial exercise, and a Russian traveller has left it on record that ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Berkely with a grin,' and they would fain do the same to-day. 'Is not this common,' exclaimed a renowned musician, 'the least little critic, in reviewing some work of art, will say, pity this and pity that—this should have been attired, that omitted? Yea, with his wiry fiddle-string will he creak out his accursed variations. But let him sit down and compose himself. He sees no ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... long as earth has bread, Thou first and foremost shalt be fed; The Providence that is most large Takes hearts like thine in special charge, Helps who for their own need are strong, And the sky doats on cheerful song. Henceforth I prize thy wiry chant O'er all that mass and minster vaunt; For men mis-hear thy call in Spring, As 't would accost some frivolous wing, Crying out of the hazel copse, Phe-be! And, in winter, Chic-a-dee-dee! I think old Caesar must have heard In northern Gaul my dauntless bird, And, echoed in ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... girls, scattered about the room, stared for a second in blank amazement at the intruders. They were certainly unlike any other visitors who had ever come to Pendlemere. The speaker was a little, short, wiry man, in a slack-fitting, brown tweed suit, with a rather obtrusive striped tie. His raggy, grey beard straggled under his chin and up to his ears; his eyes twinkled through a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles; in defiance of European ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... regarding him for a while in silence, his one eye, as bright and as steady as that of a hawk, looking keenly from under the penthouse of its bushy brows, the while he slowly twirled and twisted his bristling wiry mustaches, as was his wont when in meditation. At last he broke the silence. "How old art thou?" ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... regular. But his sufferings when the clock was going to strike were frightful to behold; and when a Cuckoo looked out of a trap-door in the Palace, and gave note six times, it shook him, each time, like a spectral voice—or like a something wiry plucking ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... strongest of us, though I was wiry and had good staying power, and Jeff was a great sprinter and hurdler, but I can tell you those old ladies gave us cards and spades. They ran like deer, by which I mean that they ran not as if it was a performance, but as ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... and dewy mosses and dark brush,— Impenetrable briers, deep and dense, And wiry bushes,—brush, that seemed to crush The struggling saplings with its tangle, whence Sprawled out the ramble ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... and crisp well-brushed hair, and big somewhat English way of chaffing (he had gone to Oxford, where he had rowed on a winning crew) carried a sense of buoyant prosperity that went with his wiry figure and good smart London clothes. His face was almost as tawny as an Indian's with the outdoor life that he took care to lead. I was always flattered when he could spare any time to clap me on the shoulder and crack ...
— Mother • Owen Wister
... demanded Kiloliana, a lean and wiry man with a face so like a laughing faun's that one might expect to see the cloven hoofs under him. They were cloven, it was true, but the cleavages were great ulcers and livid putrefactions. Yet this was Kiloliana, the ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... years did the octogenarian walk in through the little pillared portico a moment later. Such deliberation as his movements had might as well have been the mark of a proper self-esteem as the effect of age. He was a slender but wiry-looking old gentleman, was Matthias Valentine, of Valentine's Hill; in appearance a credit to the better class of countrymen of his time. His white hair was tied in a cue, as if he were himself a landowner instead of only a manorial tenant. Yet no common tenant was he. His father, a dragoon ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... dwellings he became a thing Restless and worn, and stern and wearisome, Drooped as a wild-born falcon with clipt wing, To whom the boundless air alone were home: Then came his fit again, which to o'ercome, As eagerly the barred-up bird will beat His breast and beak against his wiry dome Till the blood tinge his plumage, so the heat Of his impeded soul would through his ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... network in which at times one's feet seem literally to stumble. Fanatics in sheepskins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the mosques, fierce tribesmen with inlaid arms in their belts and the fighters' tufts of wiry hair escaping from camel's-hair turbans, mad negroes standing stark naked in niches of the walls and pouring down Soudanese incantations upon the fascinated crowd, consumptive Jews with pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... still, gazing with astonishment on the little wiry form, as it wormed around the apartment, touching the books, and giving sudden pulls at the curtains and bed drapery. She had never seen Hannah over her threshold before, and wondered what a visit from ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... the Multifarious forsook Bo-hea, Pe-koe, and Wiry-leaf'd Gun-pow-der, To revel in the lip and sunny look Of the young stranger; spite of all they'd vow'd her, The ladies each with jealous anger shook, And rail'd against the simple maid aloud—Ah! This woman's pride is a fine thing to tell us ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... occasionally very sandy, but beyond that it is easily traversed by hackeries. Being much less cultivated and overrun with grasses, among which Andropogons are the most numerous and conspicuous, these grasses are either coarse and stout or wiry and fine, should afford excellent cover for game, which however, does not seem to be very abundant. Very few trees are visible in any direction, and although neither very much cultivation nor many villages are visible, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... dexterously raised high enough to let the beasts all into the squirrel-cage. Then handy Tim Stubbs punched a hole in the bandbox opposite to the entrance of the squirrel-cage, and one by one the leopards and the rest were allowed to make their way into the wiry prison. The tiger made a dash, but in vain; he was imprisoned like ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... breadth of shoulder which indicate vigorous constitutions. His complexion was pale and his features were thin and care-worn, but his deportment was graceful and authoritative. It was evident that he belonged to that active, wiry class of men capable of great endurance and ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... old man over as they rode along side by side. He was lean, wiry and probably sixty-five. His hair, worn long, gave him the look of the old-time ranger. He carried no reata and did not look like a ranchman. He had the southern intonation, and his eyes were wonderfully young for the ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... themselves in the lion's den with the lion in close proximity glaring upon them. He sat at a desk opening mail and looked frowningly at them over his spectacles. He was thin and wiry, his gray hair was rumpled in a way which suggested perpetual perplexity or annoyance, and his general aspect could not be said to ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... Stanley's business and, learning that the young man was a writer for the press, blinked rapidly a few times; then he scuttled off, returning ere long with the information that Buckley would "see Mr. Stanley." Soon he found himself facing a pleasant-looking man of medium height, a moustache, wiry hair tinged with gray, a vailed expression of the eyes, which indicated some abnormality of vision, but did not reveal the almost total blindness with which early excesses ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... the old road that was so seldom traveled since lumbering operations had been stopped in that district, owing to the removal of available pine and spruce. At a word from him the dogs sat down in their traces, their wiry coats giving out a thin vapor, and he went down the path to the log building. The door was closed and he had already noted that no film of smoke came from the stove-pipe. While it was evident that Ennis was not at home Stefan knocked ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... all changes again. Vast and interminable plains of grass, with an occasional sluggish stream. Cattle by the thousand in great flocks, sometimes grazing peacefully, sometimes driven by wild-looking cowboys on wiry horses with the high-peaked Mexican saddles and long whips. Here again you may travel for hours and see no habitation. Trees, too, there are none. It seems to be a country designed by nature for cattle only, and such is indeed the ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... come along the path. He is a small, thin, ridiculous little man who might be any age from thirty to fifty-five. He has sandy hair, watery compassionate blue eyes, sensitive nostrils, and a very presentable forehead; but his good points go no further; his arms and legs and back, though wiry of their kind, look shrivelled and starved. He carries a big bundle, is very poorly clad, and seems ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... and if her nerves are equal to her nerve, her body to her spirit, if the same women are working at the severe tasks at the end of the war as during the first months of their exaltation, and instead of being wrecks are as hardened as the miserable city boys that have become wiry in the trenches—then, beyond all question woman will have come to her own and it will be for her, not for man, to say whether or not she shall subside and attend to the ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... they do not mix a great deal with the Russians, and we saw little of the better class. As a race the Yakutes are not interesting, while in appearance both sexes are distinctly plain, and often repulsive. The type is Mongolian; sallow complexion, beady eyes, flattened nostrils and wiry black hair. The men are of medium height, thick set and muscular, the women ungainly little creatures, bedizened with jewellery, and smothered with paint. Some marry Russians and assume European dress, which only adds ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... fat and had none of her sister's wiry agility. She declined; her mind was attuned to other issues just then, and her soul was a-quiver with malicious, anticipatory glee; for this was the day of Split's music lesson, and her teacher was none ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... uncommon intelligence. But when half a dozen such talkers are engaged in discussion upon some trivial topic, and each employs the same means to enforce his views upon the rest (this occurs nightly in the cafes at Cahors), the Northerner is inclined to think that they are all mad. The wiry old man explained to me, in order to account for the ease and agility with which, notwithstanding his years and his awkward sabots, he stepped from block to block in the ascent, that he had been all his life a rock-blaster. At length we reached the cavern. ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... quite easy in his mind. He didn't care for the two boys, but he glanced with apprehension at the reclining figure of the tall gaunt Yankee, who was thin but wiry, and possessed of more than ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... but in truth there was nothing to shudder at in Robert Judge's appearance. He was a man of forty, bronzed, and wiry, with agreeable if not regular features. Round his eyes the skin was deeply furrowed, but the eyes themselves were bright and youthful, and the prevailing expression was one of sincerity and kindliness. He wore a loose grey tweed suit, with a soft-coloured shirt ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... or in great excitement, or with mental worry, all of which tend, as long as there is health, to increase the blood pressure. These men may add weight from the age of 40 on, or they may be thin and wiry. Besides the hypertension there is likely to be a too sturdily acting heart, which is often hypertrophied, and there is an accentuated closure of the aortic valve. There may be dizziness, or no head ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... smooth-faced man with a fresh bright complexion, and a strange air of simplicity, is a dab at housebreakers. Sergeant Fendall, a light- haired, well-spoken, polite person, is a prodigious hand at pursuing private inquiries of a delicate nature. Straw, a little wiry Sergeant of meek demeanour and strong sense, would knock at a door and ask a series of questions in any mild character you choose to prescribe to him, from a charity-boy upwards, and seem as innocent as an infant. They are, one and all, respectable-looking men; of perfectly good deportment ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... in the manufacture of paper at East Walpole, an occupation in which he continued until 1892,—always suffering from dyspepsia, but always equal to whatever occasion demanded of him. He was a tall, thin, wiry-looking man, with a determined expression, but of kind ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... like heartburn, with bilious diarrh[oe]a, rather greenish, and almost painless. 530: violent pain and sensitiveness in the region of the stomach and epigastrium, with vomiting, coated tongue, fetid breath, costiveness, and sleep disturbed by muttering and dreams, with frequent, wiry pulse. 533: sense of numbness under the right ribs. 532: sense of compression, squeezing, bruising, under the ribs, worse on the left side. 535: violent burning pains under the short ribs on both sides, worst and most permanent on the left side, where the pain ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... Birmingham furnished me with the means of cooking; while two great bags, the one of flour, and the other of potatoes, made me independent of all supplies from without. In diet I had long been a Pythagorean, so that the scraggy, long-limbed sheep which browsed upon the wiry grass by the Gaster Beck had little to fear from their new companion. A nine-gallon cask of oil served me as a sideboard; while a square table, a deal chair and a truckle-bed completed the list of my domestic fittings. At the head of my couch hung ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... long, lean, wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what he said to Miss ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... and Tarpaulin lay chatting before a fire in their hut, they heard a thin, wiry voice in ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... inspire confidence in a tenderfoot on a dark night. The features were those of a man who might have been drinking, with inconsiderable interruptions, for a very long time. He was short and stout and choleric, with a wiry moustache under a red nose; and seemed to be distinctly under the impression that Roosevelt had done something for which ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... Bonnebault, a tall, wiry fellow, had lately returned to Conches after six years' service in the cavalry, with a permanent discharge due to his evil conduct,—his example being likely to ruin better men. He wore moustachios and a small chin-tuft; ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... parked in a thick huckleberry growth just below the grade of the tracks, and Billy himself stood in the shelter of several immense packing boxes piled close to the station. It was a niche just big enough for his wiry young length with the open station window close at his ear. From either end of the platform he was hidden, which was as it should be until he got ready to arrive ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... edge of the clearing, two wiry little Florida ponies, tethered with rawhide ropes, browsed ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... entered the room, and saw before her a figure not wholly unlike what she had imagined: a wiry, resolute-looking man, with knitted brows, lips close-set, and heavy feet firmly planted on the carpet. He was respectably dressed, but nothing more, and in his large bare hands held a brown hat marked with a grease ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... found themselves. A queer boat, with high bulwarks pierced with holes for oars to go through. There was a high seat for the steersman, and the prow was shaped like the head of some great animal with big, staring eyes. The boat rode at anchor in a bay, and the bay was very smooth. The crew were dark, wiry fellows with black beards and hair. They had no clothes except a tunic from waist to knee, and round caps with knobs on the top. They were very busy, and what they were doing was so interesting to the children that at first they did not even wonder where the Amulet had brought them. And the ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... They were wiry, slender brutes of Mojave Indian blood, only lately broken to harness, and still undisciplined in temper. The lash sent them rearing into the air, where, forgetting themselves in the slackened traces and loose reins, they ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... sacrilegious for us to stay there. They all turned away but the old man, and he began to move in a stealthy way towards the fire. All the clumsiness and weight of a man seemed to be gone. He was as light and wiry as a snake, and glided round the old drift that strewed the sand, with his body prostrate, but his head held erect, and his bright eyes fixed on the fire, like some wild desert creature, which he appeared to counterfeit. The Indians think, that, by assuming the shape of any creature, they ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... rise, and impotently threatened, made her imprecations come doubly bitter; but her eye was never wet, nor did she once even by a look appeal to their pity. Her figure was bent with age, and her shaking hands brown and fleshless—her hair was gray and wiry, and escaped from beneath her cap, in short, thin, tangled masses—her eyes were dark and deep set, and her lips and mouth had fallen in as her teeth had gradually decayed. She was clad in a russet gown, much ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... delight. Plenty of dish-towels were necessary to her peace of mind; without five pair of scissors she could not be happy; and Tricopherous was essential to her well-being: indeed, she often said she would rather give up coffee than Tricopherous, for her hair was black and wiry and curly, and caps she abhorred, so that of a winter's day her head presented the most irrelevant and volatile aspect, each particular hair taking a twist on its own responsibility, and improvising a wild halo ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... with thy motley coat, That from thy vaulted, wiry dungeon singest, Like thee I am a captive, and, like thee, I have a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... corners of the stones. He looked down at his gun, which lay cocked ready on the ground at his right side; and from time to time he raised his hand automatically and fingered the cartridges in his belt. Then he stretched out his small wiry hands to the fire and warmed them. It was only half past ten, and it seemed to him he had been sitting here ten ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner
... complexion, with dark hair clustering in close ringlets all over his shapely head, dark piercing eyes, small ears, from the lobes of which depended a pair of plain gold ear-rings, and a somewhat slim yet wiry and athletic-looking figure clad in a picturesque but somewhat showy costume, I thought I identified the man I was so anxious to meet, Giuseppe Merlani. The man was badly wounded, having been run through the body by Tompion, who had been compelled to inflict the wound in order to ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... a tough, clean-shaven man, with a broken nose, over which was tilted a soft felt hat. His wiry limbs were clad in what I put down as a mail-order suit. I could have placed him by his appearance, if I had not already done so by his voice, as an East-side New Yorker. And what an East-side New Yorker could be doing in Sanstead it was beyond ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... man from Far Out; tall, wiry-framed, and very dark, and so spare and lean of figure that he did not seem to have an ounce of superfluous flesh anywhere. His face was as hard and impassive as a Red Indian's, and looked almost black ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... wiry man; "but I'm not so much interested in that as I am in the question whether or not I've got ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... was neither tall nor short, five feet eight and a half to be exact, with the well-knit frame and springy step of a young man who had been an athlete from his boyhood. He was slim, but wiry, and carried his head with a half-defiant backward slant which told of pluck and breed. His face was tanned brown, in spite of his City hours, but his hair and slight moustache were flaxen, and his eyes, which were his ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... not take long to make, and we were soon speeding across the bay, our crazy boat being propelled by two wiry Indians. The whole squadron was now well within the bay, the smaller craft lying close in, and flying the Chilian colours; but Jose directed the boatmen to ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... question weighed heavily on my mind of obtaining plucky, honest, wiry, healthy servants, of whatever caste they might be, who would be ready for the sake of a good salary and a handsome reward to brave the many discomforts, hardships, and perils my expedition was likely to involve. Both at Naini Tal and here scores ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... first or top floor, for here the ground floor was devoted to stabling. Doctor S. hastily whispered that the Governor and General of Kolasin was one of the men upstairs. On going up the rickety stairs, we were at once introduced to him, and received most friendlily. He was a small wiry man, and reminded one strongly in appearance of Lord Roberts. Also, he spoke excellent German, having studied years ago in the Viennese Military Academy. Very kindly he promised to assist us during our stay in every way, and invited us to his house ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... had he been beyond sight or sound of the bungalow, except when Lady Greystoke chose to canter across the broad plain, or relieve the monotony of her loneliness by a brief hunting excursion. On such occasions Mugambi, mounted upon a wiry Arab, had ridden close at ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... spirit of this haunt by day and night is well described as an overgrown school-boy. He is a man of a slim, but wiry figure, about five feet ten inches in height. His face at this period was juvenile and beardless. The nose and chin were shapely and prominent, the mouth firm, the forehead wide and full above, but not very high. It was shaded by dark chestnut hair, just silvered with grey. His most remarkable ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... twenty, in addition to myself, and the chief naturally elected to accompany and head his party. Those men, Bowata assured me, were the pick of the entire tribe, and I quite believed him, for, although small and slight compared with the average Englishman, they were lithe, wiry, active, and resolute-looking men, with an eager gleam in their eyes which seemed to suggest that the prospect of a fight was the reverse of distasteful to them. They were each armed with a bow, a quiver ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... presently he revealed a shiny pink skull, rising from short, wiry hair as black as his whiskers. Alone of the group, he wore no love locks or greased pigtail. In his right hand, when Desmond first caught sight of him, he held a tankard, waving it to and fro in time with his song. He had lost his left hand and forearm, which ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... Killigrew's death, the King's and Duke's Servants united, and removed to Drury Lane in 1682; so that the Dorset Gardens Theatre only flourished for eleven years in all. It was subsequently let to wrestlers, fencers, and other brawny and wiry performers. The engraving on page 193, taken from Settle's "Empress of Morocco" (1678), represents the stage of the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Wren's new theatre in Dorset Gardens, an engraving of which is given on page 138, fronted ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Cecil, as a bull terrier, three or four Gordon setters, an Alpine mastiff, and two wiry Skyes dashed at their chains, giving tongue in frantic delight at the sound of his step, while the hounds echoed the welcome from their more distant kennels, and he went slowly across the great ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... onwards manuscripts were given slightly larger pages. Owing partly to their association with the same religious order and partly to their constant duplication, Jain manuscripts had early conformed to a certain rigid type. The painting was marked by lean and wiry outlines, brilliant red and blue and above all by an air of savage ferocity expressed through the idiom of faces shown three-quarter view with the farther eye detached and projecting into space. This style was exercised almost exclusively on Jain subjects and in the year 1400 it ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... teeth, the outline of her features and figure, charms which misery, cold, and neglect had not altogether defaced, still suggested love to any man who could think of a woman. Rosina had one of those frames which are fragile in appearance, but wiry and full of spring. Her husband, a gentleman of Piedmont, had a face expressive of ironical simplicity, if it is allowable to ally the two words. Brave and well informed, he seemed to know nothing of the connections which had subsisted between his wife and the Colonel for three ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... purplish, or rarely white, butterfly-shaped, consisting of standard petal partly enfolding wings and keel. Calyx tubular, 4 or 5 toothed; 10 stamens (9 and 1); 1 pistil. (Also solitary fertile flowers, lacking petals, on thread-like, creeping branches from lower axils or underground). Stem: Twining wiry brownish-hairy, to 8 ft. long. Leaves: Compounded of 3 thin leaflets, egg-shaped at base, acutely pointed at tip. Fruit: Hairy pod 1 in. long. Also 1-seeded, pale, rounded, underground peanut. Preferred Habitat - Moist thickets, shady roadsides. Flowering Season - August-September. Distribution - ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Terrace, among a group of malcontents: Barton, grim and unkempt, prophet-eyes blazing, mouth contemptuous; the Scotchman McEwart, who had been one of the New Year's visitors to Tallyn, tall, wiry, red-haired, the embodiment of all things shrewd and efficient; and two or three more. A young London member was holding forth, masking what was really a passion of disgust in ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... called Gnito and nitongputi, a climbing fern found throughout the Philippines. Blanco gives the name of the genus as Ugena. The glossy, wiry stems are used in the making of fine hats, mats, cigarette and cigar cases, etc. See Census of Philippines, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... that for a compliment," said Ned, looking up with a smile at the tall, wiry, sun-burnt, red-flannel-shirted, straw-hatted creature that leaned on ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... passive resistance, and with his garment collected beneath him to keep his limbs from the wet pavement, Isaac sat in a corner of his dungeon, where his folded hands, his dishevelled hair and beard, his furred cloak and high cap, seen by the wiry and broken light, would have afforded a study for Rembrandt, had that celebrated painter existed at the period. The Jew remained, without altering his position, for nearly three hours, at the expiry of which steps were ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... appeared to be that of a merchantman. Six men were in her; four were pulling, and two sat in the sternsheets. One of these was a wrinkled, wiry old man, with a big red nightcap on his head, and a huge green and yellow comforter round his throat, while a thick flushing coat and trousers, and high boots, concealed the rest of his form. The other looked like the master of a merchantman. ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... older than himself; and for Dick he had a genuine liking. There was a quality very winning in the youthful East-sider and now that the chance for betterment had come his way Steve felt sure that the boy would make good. There was a lot of pluck and grit in that wiry little frame; a lot of honesty too, Stephen reflected, with a blush. He was not at all sure but that in the matter of fearlessness and moral courage the New York lad had the lead of him. Certainly he was not one ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... Septimus Smith, is lean and lanky and can stretch a long arm and a trade card for an amazing distance to just beneath your nose. But Larkin is small and wiry and has a knack of squeezing himself right into the midst of your mountain of luggage and children and porters, and earnestly informing you that Octavius Smith keeps the best bacon in the district, and promising you that if you deal with him, he, Larkin, will bring your letters with him from ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... Londoner, and when his work was done he loved nothing better than to roam the streets. He was a great walker, and thought nothing of going twenty or thirty miles a day, for though he was small and slight he had quite recovered from his childish sickliness and was full of wiry energy. The crowded streets of London were his books. As he wandered through them his clear blue eyes took note of everything, and when he was far away, among the lovely sights of Italy or Switzerland, he was homesick for the grimy streets ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... was apparently lying on his back, his face hid, his form not to be traced, a wild confusion of shawls and cushions, out of which, like some wily and dangerous reptile, glided the spiral involutions of his pipe. Next to the invisible sat a little wiry man with a red nose, sparkling eyes, and a white beard. His black turban intimated that he was a Hebrew, and indeed he was well known as Barizy of the Tower, a description which he had obtained from his residence near the Tower of David, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... say so; but the private secretary went down and was admitted under the gallery on the left, to listen, with great content, while John Bright, with astonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him too, and he knew how it was done. The manner counted for more than the words. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... quiet little figure, snapping his fingers in the new boy's eyes. Then, suddenly, he swung his wiry body and swept a stinging blow ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... crawling over the winter-locked plain. In the aching circle of its immensity they were like little black ants. One, the leader, was of great bulk and of a vast strength; while the other was small and wiry, of the breed that clings like a louse to ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... cried, struggling to be free, and trying in vain to tear down his thin wiry arms with her own strong shapely hands. 'Let me go at once,—there's a good boy, and I'll marry you on Monday fortnight, or do anything else you like, just to keep you quiet. After all, you're a kind-hearted fellow enough, and you want looking after and taking care of, and if you ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... clothes, seeming a very elegant young gentleman indeed, but his two companions were of grosser type, as far as appearances went: one, Dacey, thin and wiry, with a ferret face; the other, Chicago Red, a brawny ruffian, whose stolid features nevertheless exhibited ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... plain that they must cross on their long journey back to the village of Kovudoo, the Gomangani. The king, still roaring and shrieking, wheeled and followed him. In their wake came the handful of low country baboons and the thousands of the hill clan—savage, wiry, dog-like creatures, athirst ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... their coarse movements the music intended for it alone, as they stamped and shouted, and wheeled round with a ludicrous affectation of grace, in the space between the dancers and the bulkheads of the deck. One of these roughs, a drunken, young fellow of wiry build, whose hair, face, eyes, nose, ears, and hands were all of the color of tomato-catchup, might have made an excellent low comedian, had destiny led him upon the "boards." He had just been complaining to his companions that his hand had been refused ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... of your father's provincial correspondents, to adopt the suave term of the foreigners. I had been sent to Chicago to fit for a technical school, where I was to learn to be very clever about mill machinery. Perhaps you remember my father—a sweet-natured, wiry, active man, incapable of conceiving an interest in life that was divorced from respectability. I think he had some imagination, for now and then he was troubled about my becoming a loafer. However, he certainly kept it in control: I was to become a ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... dear old woman as one reads about in books. Her cheeks were all criss-crossed with little wrinkles, which made her look as if she were always smiling. Her forehead was smooth, her eyes kind and blue. She was small, thin, and wiry. Her laugh was as fresh as a young woman's. Mell loved her at once, and was sure that she should be happy to live with her and ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... good dancers, good tennis and golf players, good horsewomen, and good managers. All five dressed well, talked well, and played excellent bridge. The fact of their not marrying was an eternal mystery to their friends, to their wiry, nervous little father, and their large, fat, serene mother; perhaps to themselves as well. They met life, as they saw it, with great cleverness, making it a rule to do little entertaining at home, where the preponderance of ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... one might almost say into a weird gloom, the effect of which is enhanced by the solemn silence. At first such a forest gives the impression of being more open than an English wood, but a few steps are sufficient to correct this error. There is a thick undergrowth matted together by wiry creepers, and the intermediate space is traversed in all directions ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... the low lands, where trees and bushes bordered the stream, and were in a lonely valley where the hills came down close to the little stream, which sparkled among the boulders at their feet. The slopes were covered with a crop of short wiry grass through which the gray stone projected here and there. Tiny rills of water made their way down the hillside to swell the stream, and the tinge of brown which showed up wherever these found a level sufficient to form a pool ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... than just arrived. Heron's a wiry chap. It needs a good deal to knock him over. If it had happened last summer, or fall, when the big row was on, there'd have been plenty of excuse, as Mrs. Heron remarked. It appears the two had been quietly sitting together down below, in the big hall, watching the crowd, and waiting for ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... successful. There were three of them, one in the driver's seat and two others in the tonneau. But the top prevented more than a glimpse of the latter, while the cap and goggles of the chauffeur left visible only a wedge of brick-red, dust-coated skin, a thin, prominent nose and a wisp of wiry black mustache. ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... He was a little, wiry man, about forty-five years of age, with sharp, intelligent face, and an expression ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... said Creasy. "You could march a regiment of soldiers over this moorland grass for many an hour, and there'd be no footprints on it when they'd gone—it's that wiry and strong. No!—if half a dozen men had been standing about here when one fell in—or if two or three men had come here to throw another man in," he added significantly, "there'd be no footmarks. Try it—you ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... young gentlemen (connected with the Primary School) on the field as war correspondents, their accounts of the engagement are so contradictory as to be utterly worthless. On one point they all agree,—that the contest was sharp, short, and decisive. The truth is, the General is a quick, wiry, experienced old hero; and it didn't take him long to rout the Barnabee Boy, who was in reality a coward, as all bullies and tyrants ever have been, and always ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... be done with him when a feller's got chink in his pocket. You can't buy 'em, sir, they're so modest; but you can coax 'em at a mighty cheaper rate-you can do that!" "And ye can make him feel as if law and his business warn't two and two," rejoined Anthony Romescos, a lean, wiry man, whose small indescribable face, very much sun-scorched, is covered with bright sandy hair, matted and uncombed. His forehead is low, the hair grows nearly to his eyebrows, profuse and red; his eyes wander and glisten ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... the title, without bitterness. A cursory estimate of her appearance would have placed her in the profession of a trained nurse, or perhaps in the remotest analysis, a sewing woman of superior tastes. She was small, wiry, her head too large for her body; but the abounding nervous vitality, the harsh fire that burned in her large brown eyes, and the firm mouth would have attracted the attention of the most careless. Her mask, with its high Slavic cheek-bones ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... having strong, wiry limbs, ascended cheerily the steep mountain-path. His tall, spare figure, always in advance of his companion, was visible through the tender green of the young oaks, clothed in a brown coat, a black cravat, and a very high hat, which the justice, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... of red, a tossing fringe of white, a leaning, wiry, exultant form above—that was ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... accompany and head his party. Those men, Bowata assured me, were the pick of the entire tribe, and I quite believed him, for, although small and slight compared with the average Englishman, they were lithe, wiry, active, and resolute-looking men, with an eager gleam in their eyes which seemed to suggest that the prospect of a fight was the reverse of distasteful to them. They were each armed with a bow, a quiver full of arrows, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... The situation was extremely novel to him. The turning of the worm! What would happen next! He was afraid at first that Stanislaus was going to give him his long-due payment, and he had no stomach to face the reckoning. He had not noticed before how wiry and strong Stanislaus looked. But when he saw that the boy made no movement, only spoke in that quiet voice, he plucked up a little courage. He began to ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... into a light suit and went down to the post house. A quarter of an hour later a cloud of dust along the road betokened the approach of the Dak Gharry, and two or three minutes later it dashed up at full gallop amid a loud and continuous cracking of the driver's whip. The wiry little horses were drawn ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... war I have come to know Colonel Mosby personally, and somewhat intimately. He is a different man entirely from what I had supposed. He is slender, not tall, wiry, and looks as if he could endure any amount of physical exercise. He is able, and thoroughly honest and truthful. There were probably but few men in the South who could have commanded successfully a separate detachment ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of the clearing, two wiry little Florida ponies, tethered with rawhide ropes, browsed upon the short, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... was diminutive compared with Jaynes, was yet rather tall and wiry for his light weight, and had an unusually long reach for one of his size. He regretted now the great pains he had taken to train down to feather-weight weight. For when he had stepped on the scales in the gymnasium, ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... master had departed had he been beyond sight or sound of the bungalow, except when Lady Greystoke chose to canter across the broad plain, or relieve the monotony of her loneliness by a brief hunting excursion. On such occasions Mugambi, mounted upon a wiry Arab, had ridden close at her ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was unmistakably a man from Far Out; tall, wiry-framed, and very dark, and so spare and lean of figure that he did not seem to have an ounce of superfluous flesh anywhere. His face was as hard and impassive as a Red Indian's, and looked almost black by contrast with his white shirt-front. So did his hands. He had thin straight ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... was leaning against a tree, quietly lighting a pipe, was a fair type of the whole, and as he took a part in the scene which followed, I will describe him. He was tall and spare, with a swinging, awkward gait, and a wiry, athletic frame. His hair, which he wore almost as long as a woman's, was coarse and black, and his face strongly marked, and of the precise color of two small rivulets of tobacco-juice that escaped from the corners of his ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... something of a hustler himself—one of those busy Americans who opens his daily life with an office-key and closes it with a letter for the late mail. He was a restless, wiry, black-eyed little man, never still for a moment, and perpetually in chase of another eluding dollar,—which half ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... as mongrel, as tough, and as scarred as Scrap, he carried his wiry body with a devil-may-care assurance, in which Scrap may have recognized a kindred spirit. He decided in a flash. He made a dart and fell in abreast the sergeant of Company K. Muldoon ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... Bob Temple were chums, a little under 18 years of age each. It was their bitterest regret that they had been too young to take any part in the World War some years before. Frank was dark, curly-haired, of medium height and slim, but strong and wiry. Bob was fair and sleepy-eyed, a fraction under six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. A third chum and the leader of the trio was Jack Hampton, 19 years of age. He had gone to New Mexico several months before with his father, ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... on this beautiful road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them are very miserable. The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the inhabitants lean and squalid; and the withered old women, with their wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot on the top of the head, like a pad to carry loads on, are so intensely ugly, both along the Riviera, and in Genoa, too, that, seen straggling about in dim doorways with ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... along the path. He is a small, thin, ridiculous little man who might be any age from thirty to fifty-five. He has sandy hair, watery compassionate blue eyes, sensitive nostrils, and a very presentable forehead; but his good points go no further; his arms and legs and back, though wiry of their kind, look shrivelled and starved. He carries a big bundle, is very poorly clad, ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... Selah cried, struggling to be free, and trying in vain to tear down his thin wiry arms with her own strong shapely hands. 'Let me go at once,—there's a good boy, and I'll marry you on Monday fortnight, or do anything else you like, just to keep you quiet. After all, you're a kind-hearted fellow enough, and you want looking ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... and rest aisy for his sake, Miss Isabel darlint? Ye can go up the mountain in the morning, and maybe that little Miss Bathurst will like to go with ye. Do wait till the morning now!" she wheedled, laying a wiry old hand upon her. "It's no Christian hour at all for ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... mile of the way, until thick darkness settled down over the prairie, there was something behind the trooper cavalcade—several somethings—wary red men, young and wiry, who never let themselves be seen, yet followed on over wave after wave of prairie to look to it that no man went back from that column to carry the news of their presence to the little battalion left in charge of the new post ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... lie in his teeth, were Napoleon, Hamilton, St. Paul, Tamerlane, and the Rev. Dr. Jo. Belloc, President of the Western Theological College in Chicago. He was five feet high in his stockinged feet, thin and wiry, with a large gray head, a short gray beard and keen gray eyes of piercing intensity. When you saw him on the street, you hardly saw him at all; when you met him in a crowded room, you felt that the spirit behind those eyes was a strong one; and when you ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Bruce came in. Of medium height and a wiry build, his quick kindly smile of greeting did not conceal the fine tight lines about his mouth and between his eyes. His small trim moustache was black, but his hair already showed streaks of gray although ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... reasoning it out. The strength of his resolution imparted a fictitious vigor to his muscles. While unaided he could never have stirred the heavy board, his efforts made it give, loosened as it had already been, so that his thin, wiry body could slip between its edge and the rest of the wall. He had one moment of intense terror lest it slip elastically back and hold him pinioned there, but a convulsive struggle sufficed, and he stepped out, exhausted and trembling, into the gathering ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... making the loose gravel under foot well nigh as hot as the floor of an oven. Such yelling and leaping as there was in getting over this ground would be hard to surpass. We could not have crossed at all—until toward sunset—had it not been for a few small, wiry bushes growing here and there, into which we every now and then thrust our feet to cool. There was no little judgment necessary in selecting your bush; for if not chosen judiciously, the chances were that, on springing forward ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... that rides at sea, and dips and springs For ever; till at length Sir Gareth's brand Clashed his, and brake it utterly to the hilt. 'I have thee now;' but forth that other sprang, And, all unknightlike, writhed his wiry arms Around him, till he felt, despite his mail, Strangled, but straining even his uttermost Cast, and so hurled him headlong o'er the bridge Down to the river, sink or swim, and cried, 'Lead, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... civilisation—a trophy gained upon the wilderness. All were not so well lodged; yet such houses are soon reared. Posts, joined by wall plates, fixed in the ground; woven with wattle rods, plastered with mingled clay, sand, and wiry short grass, and whitened—a grass thatched roof; a chimney of turf piled on stone, a door and a window: ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... whom I have seen on several occasions, is a wiry man of medium height, always grave, intent and all-observing under a mask of stolidity. He never "talks" and seldom speaks. When he does he is terse and speaks out of one corner of his mouth as if reluctant to let the words escape. He is, however, noted for the most unfailing and perfect manners. ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... they must be too far away to hear her, she tore at the clasping bonds, trying in every way to free herself. With feet and hands she strove to loosen the tough, wiry vines, kicking and trampling with her restless feet, beating and bending with her little hands, until they were torn and bleeding, and the tormenting vines seemed only to hold her with a firmer grasp, as if to prove ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... and women and children, mounted on horses. To their right a band of youths, arrayed in coloured shirts, white linen breeches, and yellow boots, and wearing little coloured caps, jauntily set upon their heads, were careering wildly hither and thither on swift and wiry ponies. They were waving in the air long sticks, fitted with a cross block of wood at the end, and were pursuing a wooden ball. Many were the collisions, the crashes, and the falls. On every side men and ponies rolled over in the dust; but they rose, shook themselves as though ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... excelsior he drew two large gilt and glass bottles, one containing bay rum and the other camphor, that precious lotion for fast stiffening joints, little Miss Amanda heaved a sigh of positive rapture. Mr. Crabtree was small and wiry, with a hickory-nut countenance and a luscious peach of a heart, and, though of bachelor condition, he at all times displayed sympathetic and intuitive domestic inclinations. He kept the Sweetbriar store and was thus in position to know ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... free from underbrush, but a coarse, wiry grass, unfit for fodder, and scattered through them in detached patches, was the only vegetation visible. The ground was mainly covered with the leaves and burs ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... in spite of a long life of hard work, was still straight and wiry, and her brown old face, wrinkled as a withered nut, was lively and shrewd. There was only one point in which Anne had the advantage, and that was in hearing, for her mother was very deaf, and obliged ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... hath been trapt, When he hears his calling Mate, To her he flies, again he's clapt Within the wiry Grate. ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... upon the stern-sheets. Very lanky he was and very thin, with a craggy hard face, clean-shaven and sunburned, with a thousand little wrinkles intersecting it in every direction. He had lost his hat, and his short wiry hair, slightly flecked with grey, stood up in a bristle all over his head. It was hard to guess at his age, but he could scarce have been under his fiftieth year, though the ease with which he had boarded our boat proved that his strength and energy were unimpaired. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... been settling her helmet more firmly upon her wiry locks. She had a closed umbrella beneath her arm, and she drew and brandished it like a saber as she took ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... his head. He could not venture a locomotive on that frail stuff. So we lost the society of the "J.H. Nicholson." Next day the Massachusetts commander called for some one to dive in the pool for the lost rail. Plump into the water went a little wiry chap and grappled the rail. "When I come up," says the brave fellow afterwards to me, "our officer out with a twenty-dollar gold piece and wanted me to take it. 'That a'n't what I come for,' says I. 'Take it,' says he, 'and share with the others.' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... of a sort of cotton cloth manufactured by themselves, thick, harsh, and wiry, about four astas or cubits long, and two in breadth, worn round the middle, with a scarf over the shoulder. These are of mixed colours, the prevalent being a brownish red and a blue approaching to black. They are fond ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... feature in a populous town is the means of conveyance, which here, in addition to hack cabs and omnibuses, includes railway carriages. I would observe, once for all, that the horses of America, as a whole, may be classed as enduring, wiry, and active hacks. You do not see anything to compare with some of the beautiful nags that "Rotten Row" or Melton exhibits; but, on the other hand, you rarely see the lumbering, lolloping, heavy brutes so ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... instant the small wiry American, and the huge Horncastle- bred hunter, were wallowing and staggering in the yeasty stream, till they floated into a deep reach, and swam steadily down to a low place in the bank. They crossed the stream, passed the Priory ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... that looks ugly, decidedly ugly, I must confess," the wiry little professor spoke, after that ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... the studio of William Story, whom my father had slightly known in Salem before he became a voluntary exile from America. Mr. Story was at this time a small, wiry, nervous personage, smiling easily, but as much through nervousness as from any inner source or outward provocation of mirth, and as he smiled he would stroke his cheeks, which were covered with a short, brown beard, with the fingers ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... any emergency. The narrowness of the hall alone afforded West a chance, as the walls protected him, and compelled direct attack from in front. Yet this advantage only served to delay the ending. He recognized two of the fellows—"Red" Hogan and Mark—while the third man was a wiry little bar-room scrapper, who smashed fiercely in through his guard, and finally got a grip on his throat which could not be wrenched loose. The others pounded him unmercifully, driving his head back against the wall. ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... several other ponds well supplied with water, we returned. In crossing several of the scrub plains before mentioned, it was agreeable to observe that the dense vegetation which covered them was not the miserable Burr and the wiry Vervain, but Senecios and Sonchus (Sowthistle), which our horses greedily snatched as they waded through them. The soil is of a dark colour, very rich, but mild; and the rock below is basaltic. Kangaroos were feeding on the plains along the scrub; and Charley fired unsuccessfully ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... There were just two sports that my grandfather loved, fishing and fox-hunting; but he was a very busy doctor and couldn't ride often to hounds. But he kept a lot of them. He would have had a great contempt for Toby. His own dogs were a wiry little breed." ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... occasionally worn. Sometimes little brushes are attached to each end of the instrument. Another instrument, used by the Dyaks, but said to have been borrowed from the Malays, is the palang anus, which is a ring or collar of plaited palm-fiber, furnished with a pair of stiffish horns of the same wiry material; it is worn on the neck of the glans and fits tight to the skin so as not to slip off. (Brooke Low, "The Natives of Borneo," Journal of the Anthropological Institute, August and November, 1892, p. 45; the ampallang and similar instruments ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... on the morrow when we moved down the mountain-side with the army of the Tribes, fierce and savage-looking men. The scouts were out before us, then came the great body of their cavalry mounted on wiry horses, while to right and left and behind, the foot soldiers marched in regiments, each under the ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... unquestionably a small race, are wiry and capable of enduring great hardships. They are very skilful artisans, the filigree jewellery of their silversmiths, for example, is unequalled as a work of art by anything of its kind in Europe. ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... armchair above the fire, standing on the hearth-rug, his body bent and his hand on the chair arm. He is a little, feeble old man with a well-shaped head and weather-beaten face, set off by a grizzled beard and whiskers, wiry and vigorous, in curious contrast to the wreath of snowy hair that encircles his head. His upper lip is shaven. He wears an old suit—the unbuttoned waistcoat of which shows an old flannel shirt. His slippers are low at the heel and his socks loose ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... addition to this difficulty, there were numerous clumps of the tough male bamboo, which nothing will break, and which is terribly dangerous should a runaway elephant attempt to penetrate it, as the hard wiry branches would lacerate a rider in a frightful manner. There were numerous ravines in this forest, and we kept along the margin, slowly and cautiously, peering at the same time into the depths, in the expectation of ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... the door, and stood on the landing with long lean fingers scraping at his lantern jaws. He was a little man, short of stature, and sparely built. His skin was vealy in complexion, and he had wiry hair of a russet-red. Even when he was clean shaven his fingers rasped upon his hollow cheeks with a faint sound. His nose and chin were long and pointed, and his manner was meek and self-effacing even when he was alone. ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... long. Torches, held aloft, cast a flickering light over young soldiers in faded uniforms, men in deerskin, and women in home-made linsey. Colden, and his two lieutenants, Wilton and Carson, stood together. They were thin, and their faces brown, but they looked wiry and rugged. Colden shook Robert's ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to hold himself in consciousness. It appeared to him a necessity to do so. He could see a smoke-stained roof of beams and rafters, and on these he fixed his eyes, thinking that he could hold himself so, as by thin, wiry threads of sight, from falling again into the pit where all was black or blood-colour. The pain was appalling, but he thought he had gripped it at last, and could hold ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... patches with the ripe grain. Here and there a thick clump of trees or a screen of poplars broke the flatness of the long smooth hills. In the hedgerows were blue cornflowers and poppies in all colors from carmine to orange that danced in the wind on their wiry stalks. At the turn in the road they lost the noise of the division and could hear the bees droning in the big dull purple cloverheads and in the gold ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... seen everywhere, and on the streams we found larkspur, aconite, little white daisies and lungwort, lupines and the ever-present sunflower. But usually all was barren—barren hills, barren valleys, barren plains. Sometimes we came upon tracts of buffalo-grass, a thin, low, wiry grass that grows in small tufts, and does not look as if there were any nourishment in it, but is said to be more fattening than corn. Our animals ate it with avidity. Was not all this dreary waste wearily monotonous and tame? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... incomparable about such work—the long steady pull of willing and healthy muscles, the mind undisturbed by any disquieting thought, the feeling of attainment through vigorous effort! It was a steady swing and swish, swish and swing! When Dick led I have a picture of him in my mind's eye—his wiry thin legs, one heel lifted at each step and held rigid for a single instant, a glimpse of pale blue socks above his rusty shoes and three inches of whetstone sticking from his tight hip-pocket. It was good to have him there whether he led ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... endurance. To a lover of his dogs, as every Christian man must be, each one had become almost as precious as a child to its mother. They were beautiful beasts: "Brin," the cleverest leader on the coast; "Doc," a large, gentle beast, the backbone of the team for power; "Spy," a wiry, powerful black and white dog; "Moody," a lop-eared black-and-tan, in his third season, a plodder that never looked behind him; "Watch," the youngster of the team, long-legged and speedy, with great liquid eyes and a Gordon-setter coat; "Sue," a large, dark Eskimo, the image ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... one of these. He was a little wiry-looking old man, who moved with a jerking motion, as if his limbs were worked by a string like a child's toy, with dun-coloured hair lying thin and soft at the back and sides of his head; his forehead ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... sort of stupor, from which he was awakened by a knock, and the entrance of a nervous, little wiry gentleman whose clothes of rusty black had the effect of having been purchased in a fit of absence ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... seem to have suffered in reputation from their observers. "Those who inhabit," says Livingstone, "the hot sandy plains of the desert possess generally thin, wiry forms, capable of great exertion, and severe privation. Many are of low stature, but not dwarfish; the specimens brought to Europe have been selected, like coster-mongers' dogs, on account of their extreme ugliness; consequently English ideas of the whole tribe are formed in the same way, as if ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... his bruises, replied with equal tartness. Words grew high, and at length Paul, desirous of concluding the conference, clenched his fist, and told the redoubted Dummie that he would "knock him down." There is something peculiarly harsh and stunning in those three hard, wiry, sturdy, stubborn monosyllables. Their very sound makes you double your fist if you are a hero, or your pace if you are a peaceable man. They produced an instant effect upon Dummie Dunnaker, aided as they were by the effect of an athletic and youthful figure, already fast approaching to the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... could get his own lanky six feet of wiry length from the car, the man had struggled to his feet. Again the little blot of shadow began ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... did not clear. He was a wiry, tall man, of beautiful manners and a singularly urbane demeanour, but he could not hide the annoyance which this letter caused him. He finished it, turned abruptly to the beginning, and read it through again; then ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... George determined to have it out in the schoolroom with the teacher, who, expecting the struggle, had prepared for it and was as eager as the boys for the fight. As before, Dewey was the leader in the attack on the pedagogue, who was wiry, active, and strong. He swung his rawhide with a vigor that made Dewey and the others dance, but they pluckily kept up the assault, until the instructor seized a big stick, intended to serve as fuel for the old-fashioned stove, and laid about him with an energy that soon stretched ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... man, but he gave one the impression of incredible, preposterous age. He was bald; he had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. A wiry mustache, yellow with nicotine, alone remained. Great wrinkles lay below the eyes and along the jaw, under a skin stretched like parchment over the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... Gillespie?" asked a low, mellow, musical voice by my side. I turned to face a tall, dark, wiry man, with the swarthy complexion and intensely black eyes of one having strains of native blood. Among the voyageurs, I had become accustomed to the soft-spoken, melodious speech that betrays Indian parentage; and I believe if I were to encounter a descendant of the red race in China, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... 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, ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... Plaskwith), two little girls, the Misses Plaskwith, also with squints, and pinafores; a young man of three or four-and-twenty, in nankeen trousers, a little the worse for washing, and a black velveteen jacket and waistcoat. This young gentleman was very much freckled; wore his hair, which was dark and wiry, up at one side, down at the other; had a short thick nose; full lips; and, when close to him, smelt of cigars. Such was Mr. Plimmins, Mr. Plaskwith's factotum, foreman in the shop, assistant editor ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... chapps over his moleskin trousers, which give him an appearance of greater size than he possesses, for, though stout of frame, he is lean and wiry. His face is wonderfully grave for a young man, which may be accounted for by the fact that he has lived through several Indian risings. And it is a strong face, too, with a decided look of what people term self-reliance ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... no explanation of his strange behaviour. He must reach the blacks' camp as soon as possible. The wailing became louder and louder, and presently Sax heard a sound which gave such fleetness to his limbs that his wiry companion could hardly keep up with him. It was a booming voice which rose above the turmoil of native cries like a strong ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... head and fiery, strong quarters, and wiry, A loin rather light, but a shoulder superb," That's GORDON's description of Iseult. (All whip shun When riding such rattlers, and trust to the curb.) That mare was your sort, lad. I guess there'll be sport, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... and imitates, with wiry note The critics squeak, from Keats, and Tennyson, Shelly, and Hunt, and Wordsworth, every one, And many more whose works we know—by rote! But how, good sirs, if God created him Like unto these, though in their ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... little man, who always wore, except on Sundays, grey clothes—clothes of so light a grey that they would hardly have been regarded as clerical in a district less remote. He had now reached a goodly age, being full seventy years old; but still he was wiry and active, and shewed but few symptoms of decay. His head was bald, and the few remaining locks that surrounded it were nearly white. But there was a look of energy about his mouth, and a humour in his light grey eye, which ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... labored hard, or to have worked at high tension, or in great excitement, or with mental worry, all of which tend, as long as there is health, to increase the blood pressure. These men may add weight from the age of 40 on, or they may be thin and wiry. Besides the hypertension there is likely to be a too sturdily acting heart, which is often hypertrophied, and there is an accentuated closure of the aortic valve. There may be dizziness, or no head symptoms at all. Nicotin is likely to be an ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... the counting-room late one evening. Loud voices had halted me as I passed the door. Mr Greeley stood back of the counter; a rather tall, wiry grey-headed man before it. Each was shaking a right fist under the other's nose. They were shouting loudly as they argued. The stranger was for war; Mr Greeley for waiting. The publisher of the Tribune stood beside ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... first long exciting adventure was over. Ended were all the thrills, the wild fun. It was a spree I had had with the harbor, from the time I was seven until I was ten. It had taken me at seven, a plump sturdy little boy, and at ten it had left me wiry, thin, with quick, nervous movements and often dark shadows under my eyes. And it left a deep scar on my early life. For over all the adventures and over my whole childhood loomed this last thing I had seen, hideous, disgusting. ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... warmth and restfulness flowed back into his veins. He had feared chills and a serious illness, but he knew now that they would not come. Youth, wiry and seasoned by hard campaigning, would quickly recover, but knowing that, for the present, he could neither go forward nor backward, he luxuriated in the grass, while the sun sucked the damp ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... glad remembrance of my debt, I homeward turn. Farewell, my pet! When here again thy pilgrim comes, He shall bring store of seeds and crumbs. Henceforth I prize thy wiry chant O'er all that mass and minster vaunt: For men mishear thy call in spring, As 'twould accost some frivolous wing, Crying out of the hazel copse, "Phe—be!" And in winter, "Chic-a-dee-dee!" I think old Caesar must have heard In Northern Gaul my dauntless bird, And, echoed in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... superintendent of the western division of the Pony Express, came to Carson City, Nevada, to engage riders and station-agents for the Pony Express route across the Great Plains. In a few days fifty or sixty were engaged—men noted for their lithe, wiry physiques, bravery and coolness in moments of great personal danger, and endurance under the most trying circumstances of fatigue. Particularly were these requirements necessary in those who were to ride over ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... Dirkovitch's dull green uniform was the only dark spot at the board, but his big onyx eyes made up for it. He was fraternising effusively with the captain of the Lushkar team, who was wondering how many of Dirkovitch's Cossacks his own dark wiry down- countrymen could account for in a fair charge. But one does not speak ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... a little under his tan. He was a swarthy, sharp-featured fellow, slight and wiry. He looked into Sir Walter's grimly smiling eyes, then again at the white diamond, from which the candlelight was striking every colour of the rainbow. He made a shrewd estimate of its price, and shook his black head. He had quite ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... inhabitants of the steppe are delighted at the opportunity to carry travelers at post rates. The latter are saved the trouble of exhibiting their padarashnia at every station, and generally prefer to employ private teams. The horses were small, wiry beasts of Tartar breed, and utter ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... the strongest of us, though I was wiry and had good staying power, and Jeff was a great sprinter and hurdler, but I can tell you those old ladies gave us cards and spades. They ran like deer, by which I mean that they ran not as if it was a performance, but as if it was their natural gait. We remembered those fleeting girls of our ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... man, and stared at him. He was a middle-aged man, with a small wiry shape and a gait like a boy's. His name was Jake Noyes, and he was the doctor's hired man. He took care of his horse, and drove for him, and some said helped him compound his prescriptions. There was great respect in the village for Jake Noyes. He had a kind of reflected glory from the doctor, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... famous second-hand book-shop in Boston was Burnham's, whose fore-name was Thomas Oliver Hazard Perry, shortened into "Perry Burnham" by his familiars. He was a little, pale-faced, wiry, nervous man, with piercing black eyes and very brusque manners. In old and musty books he lived and moved and had his being, for more than a generation. He exchanged a stuffy, narrow shop in Cornhill for more spacious quarters in Washington ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... they came to the farther end of the platform, where a big mountain wagon was waiting. It was drawn by a pair of wiry mustangs that champed ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... money selling papers—make so much that they can start in other kinds of business for themselves, and get on very well in the world among other successful men. I have seen this kind of newsboy. They have bright, sharp, old-looking faces. They have wiry, strong bodies, good health, and seem to be ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... dressed without much care, middle-sized, wiry, ruddy of cheek, and his coarse but strong features vivid with festive energy, held a hand to her. Luckworth Crewe was his name. Nancy had come to know him at the house of Mrs. Peachey, where from time to ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... a wiry dark youth, with a little black moustache and a brisk manner of speech. "I was out on the hill after chikkor when my shikari saw Shere Ali and his crowd coming down the valley. He knew all about it and gave me a general idea ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... connections with his person. The other fellow and I went to the ground, and our struggle was of short duration, for Mac bought into the ruction with his carbine for a club, and under its soothing touch my wiry antagonist ceased from troubling. I scrambled to my feet and glanced around. The corporal was sprawled on the grass, his face ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... about three weeks, when a dashing young Englishman took the Capital by storm. One of those tall, lean, wiry-looking fellows with clothes so well-fitting that a pocket-full of bank-notes would have utterly destroyed the desired effect. He wore very long and very pointed shoes, and a peculiar little hat, made of hideous tweed, with flaps tied over the low crown ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... without my host, a lean, wiry old fellow, a bit stiff about the knees. First of all he proudly showed me his soldier's book—three campaigns in Algeria. A crowd of smelly women pressed round us—luckily we had finished our meal—while with the help of a few knives and plates he explained exactly ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... looking older than his age, and several inches taller than Peter had been when he went away; a young man deeply tanned, and very wiry and thin in figure; with a brown, narrow face, a dark streak of moustache, a long nose, and a pair of grey eyes rendered unfamiliar by an eyeglass, which was an ornament Peter had ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... a little, wiry man with a bristly, protruding chin. She could see that, even in the starlight. There was something about the point of that stubby chin that she shrank from inexpressibly. He was not a pleasant man to look upon, and even his voice was unprepossessing. She began to ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... let down her hair—a nonchalance that Molly had not been guilty of. This woman's hair was no more than a wisp. It stood out thin, wiry, almost invisible in the semilight. This was the extent of her toilet. She slipped out of her shoes, but she did not even take off her dress. Then she turned in by her child. She was very ill; it was plain to be seen. Death was fast upon this woman's track; it should clutch her ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... there," said a rough voice, and a wiry man with white handkerchiefs tied over his face below the eyes sprang with crunching strides through the bushes. "Keep up your hands, I say," he thundered at Harry, ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... remark he took his paunch and himself away into retirement, leaving Dr. Dean and young Murray facing each other, a singular pair enough in the contrast of their appearance and dress,—the one small, lean and wiry, in plain-cut, loose-flowing academic gown; the other tall, broad and muscular, clad in the rich attire of mediaeval Florence, and looking for all the world like a fine picture of that period stepped out from, its frame. There was a silence between them for a moment,—then the ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... the most unselfish thing in a selfish world. They met awkwardly and sheepishly at the stage, and greeted each other with grunts, and became inseparable. Bob came back tall, lanky, grinny, and rather dumb, and he found John undersized, wiry, masterful, and rather mooney, but strong and purposeful, for a boy. But each accepted the other ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... they ran in a troop beneath; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would already have taken up their march, with faint, wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the young when I could not see the parent bird. There too the turtle doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white pines over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing down ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Flying fish, the butterflies of the sea, came up, flitted along for a distance, and then sank again into the depths. Strange beings of fantastic shapes and indescribable colors, some gayly striped like tigers, others in mournful black, some huge and chubby, others small and wiry, some with cavernous mouths and tiny bellies, others with enormous bodies and ridiculous little snouts, swarmed around the old boat, as though the Garbosa were one of those mythological craft that used to lead processionals ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... was a young lady of thirty-two or three, with long corkscrew curls, a wiry figure—a smile, of the description called "simper," on her lips, and an elegant mincing carriage of the person as she moved. She carried a fan, which seemed to serve for a number of purposes: to raise artificial breezes, cover imaginary blushes, and flirt itself against the hands or other ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... fashion. Rastignac was at her left hand on a low chair, in which he looked settled like an Italian lady's "cousin." A third person was standing by the corner of the chimney-piece. As the shrewd doctor had suspected, the Marquise was a woman of a parched and wiry constitution. But for her regimen her complexion must have taken the ruddy tone that is produced by constant heat; but she added to the effect of her acquired pallor by the strong colors of the stuffs she hung her ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... go and ask the price of the blade, and bring it to be looked at. When he returned to the court he found, in front of the building where finished suits were kept for display, a tall, thin, wiry, elderly man, deeply bronzed, and with a scar on his brow. Master Headley and Tibble were both in attendance, Tib measuring the stranger, and Stephen, who was standing at a respectful distance, gave Giles the information that this ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... early; petals 5 to 6, inconspicuous, like club-shaped columns; stamens numerous; carpels few, the stigmatic surfaces curved. Leaves: From the base, long petioled, divided into 3 somewhat fan-shaped, shining, evergreen, sharply toothed leaflets. Rootstock: Thread-like, long, bright yellow, wiry, bitter. ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... carried their men off in triumph in the trap, and the wiry little pony, rejoiced to find his head turned homewards, trotted on right merrily, requiring neither whip nor word to urge him on to express speed, in total ignorance of the vindictive feelings that animated the breasts of three at least of the ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... relief, and the men of the expedition gazed curiously at the bronzed, well-armed horsemen of the plains, who sat their wiry, swift little steeds as if they were part and parcel of themselves, when they rode up to exchange ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... linen clout fastened to the nethermost regions seemed as if it were to signify a shirt. A very large straw hat, that had certainly been driven over several times, was stuck sideways on his head, and allowed the boy's wiry, flaxen hair to grow freely through the opening where the crown should have been: the naked brown shoulder and upper part of the arm, which was just as brown, were the ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... that I should find her mixed up with the dreary drama of my life—that some new sickening vision would reveal her to me as an evil genius. When at last I did unavoidably meet her, the vague dread was changed into definite disgust. She was a tall, wiry, dark-eyed woman, this Mrs. Archer, with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard nature the odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry. That was enough to make me avoid her, quite apart from the contemptuous feeling with which ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... the propriety of cooking the food of stock, we believe there ought not to be a doubt as to the desirability of mechanically treating the harder kinds of feeding stuff. It is quite evident that a horse fed upon hard grains of oats and wiry fibres of uncut hay or straw must expend no inconsiderable proportion of his motive power in the process of mastication. After a hard day's work of eight or ten hours he has before him the laborious task of reducing to a pulp from 12 lbs. to 20 lbs. weight of exceedingly ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... had been sand-papered, had prominent teeth, like those of a baboon, in a wrinkled, wizened monkey face, across which were three tattooed bands, and possessed a little, long-armed, spare figure, bent and wiry. He clambered up and down his mast, fetching 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 ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... not a handsome person. He was short, shorter than Mr. Polly, with long arms and lean big hands, a thin and wiry neck stuck out of his grey flannel shirt and supported a big head that had something of the snake in the convergent lines of its broad knotty brow, meanly proportioned face and pointed chin. His almost toothless mouth seemed ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... the polka dots, though, don't seem to notice the stir she's causin', or don't mind if she does. A slim, wiry young female she is, well along in the twenties, I should say. What struck me most about her was the tan on her face and hands and the way her hair was faded in streaks. Sort of a general outdoor look she had, which is odd enough to see on Broadway ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... above some masses of porphyry a wide plain extends, which is truly characteristic of Patagonia. The surface is quite level, and is composed of well-rounded shingle mixed with a whitish earth. Here and there scattered tufts of brown wiry grass are supported, and still more rarely, some low thorny bushes. The weather is dry and pleasant, and the fine blue sky is but seldom obscured. When standing in the middle of one of these desert plains and looking towards the interior, the view is ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... any normal man under well-earned praise, Nelson shook one wiry fist after another, while Alden chatted with the Emperor. Nobles, officers and courtiers all pressed close to fawn upon the new hero—but, far back in the council chamber, a group of dark robed priests were crowded ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... squirrel-cage. Then handy Tim Stubbs punched a hole in the bandbox opposite to the entrance of the squirrel-cage, and one by one the leopards and the rest were allowed to make their way into the wiry prison. The tiger made a dash, but in vain; he was imprisoned ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... malefactor was less minutely described. A native five feet eight, perhaps. Very tall for a Tagal, slender, sinewy, and with a tuft of wiry hair and sixteen inches of shirt missing. "For further particulars and the missing sixteen inches, as well as the hair, inquire at Colonel Brent's, Number 199 Calle San ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... This was a wiry, shrewd-looking individual, whose hair was all touseled and who was only partially dressed, as if he had been aroused from sleep. He moved to a chair and drew toward him a little package of documents with a rubber ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... sheets of water, as if they held firmly the extent of sand which belonged to the ocean and which would be soon overflowed by it. This promontory brings to one's memory the mounds of ashes at Vesuvius; for here one sinks at every step, the wiry moor-grass not being able to bind together the loose sand. The sun shone burningly hot between the white sand hills: it was like a journey through the deserts ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... bound hand and foot, fagged and filthy; our beards two inches long, our faces scratched and bloody. Cavor you must imagine in his knickerbockers (torn in several places by the bayonet scrub) his Jaegar shirt and old cricket cap, his wiry hair wildly disordered, a tail to every quarter of the heavens. In that blue light his face did not look red but very dark, his lips and the drying blood upon my hands seemed black. If possible I was in a worse plight than he, on account of the yellow fungus into which ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
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