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More "Lithe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into the car, and turned her head to look at him. He saw that she was younger even than he had thought. She seemed quite mature when she was still, but when she moved she had the lithe motions of immaturity. As a boy, he now infallibly ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... die, as the Marquis of Montrose had done before him, for the Stuart line and their rightful place. One can see as he stretches himself, raising his arms above his head with a taking gesture, that he is not more than middle size and slightly built, though lithe and sinewy as a young tiger, but what catches one's eye is the face, which is lit up by a sudden flash of firelight. It is that of a woman rather than a man, and a beautiful woman to boot, and this girl face he was to keep through all the days of strife and pain, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... full swing when the deputy entered; scores of lithe dark men and their black-eyed partners were whirling in the fervid Spanish waltz; but as he crossed the threshold a discordant note arose: disturbance broke out in a corner of the hall; a woman screamed; a knife-blade flashed. Clark shoved his way through the crowd and reached the ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... the mast. And now I saw the sail was ill-stowed, the canvas lying all abroad and as I rose I beheld this canvas stirred as by a greater wind; then as I stared me this, it lifted, and from beneath it crept a shape that rose up very lithe and graceful and stood with hands reached out towards me, and then as I ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... world, gossiping over the nuts and wine; the marvels of 'Zanoni' and 'A Strange Story' must be portrayed with a resonance and exaltation of diction fitted to their transcendental claims. But between the stark mechanism of the Englishman and the lithe, inspired felicity of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... looked! He had lost that curious chunky appearance which Barber's old clothes gave him, and which was so misleading. On the other hand, his thin arms and pipelike legs were concealed, respectively, by becoming cloth and canvas. As for his body, it was slender, and lithe. And how straight he stood! And how smart was his appearance! And how tall ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... at his fellow-creatures when he speaks to them. If this man was honest, his eyes showed a singular perversity in looking away and denying it. Possibly they were affected in some degree by a nervous restlessness in his organization, which appeared to pervade every fiber in his lean, lithe body. The rector's healthy Anglo-Saxon flesh crept responsively at every casual movement of the usher's supple brown fingers, and every passing distortion of the usher's haggard yellow face. "God forgive me!" thought Mr. Brock, with ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... his eyes followed the line and balance of Mike's neck and shoulders, which showed at this moment upon a dark shadow falling obliquely along an old wall. Soft, violet eyes in which tenderness dwelt, and the strangely tall and lithe figure was emphasized by the conventional pose—that pose of arm and thigh which the Greeks never wearied of. Seeing him, the mind turned from the reserve of the Christian world towards the frank enjoyment of the Pagan; and John's solid, rhythmless ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... decent axe-helve, much less a substantial axletree. The Sierra Nevada are heavily though not densely wooded nearly to their summits, but mainly with stately evergreens, including a brittle and worthless live oak; but the tough, enduring hickory, the lithe and springy white ash, the ironwood, beech, and sugar maple, are nowhere to be seen. A low, scrubby cedar and a small, scraggy white pine thinly cover a portion of the hills and low mountains of Utah; the former is shorter than it should be for telegraph poles, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... trees had nothing pleasant in their appearance, as forest trees usually have. The branches seemed destitute of sap, as the leaves were of verdure; they had not reached maturity, and yet possessed none of the lithe grace ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... surprise I noted the perfection of his face. The angle was absolutely correct as the old Hellenic marbles, and to every curve was that final warmth which stone can only distantly suggest. Then he was tall, but so light and lithe——" ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... title of Miss Mary Shepard Greene's graceful canvas. The lithe and youthful figure of a girl is extended upon a straight-backed settle in somewhat of a Recamier pose. She is intently occupied in the perusal of a book. The turn of the head, the careless attitude, and the flesh tints of throat and face are all admirably ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... lithe alertness of a leopard she evaded him; the next instant the bed was between them and she had whipped a negligee about her. For an instant they faced each other; then she pointed a quivering arm, gasping in a voice that sounded strange and throaty ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... it," smiled Dick, nodding. "I believe it's the light, lithe, spry fellows who stand the best show of getting through the ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... "Lithe and listen, gentlemen, To sing a song I will beginne; It is of a lord of faire Scotland, Which was the unthrifty heire ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... from a halt to a gallop, following a long, lithe tawny animal that loped easily into view, coming from the distant willow thicket. In an instant, Kay was ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... straight to Mrs. Farrington's chair. Resting his hands on her shoulders, he bent down and laid his cheek against hers, and Theodora, regardless of the people about her, turned and cast herself into his arms. Tall and lithe and singularly alike in face, it scarcely needed a second glance to show that they were not only brother and sister, but twins as well. Moreover, in spite of Hubert's successful business life and Theodora's devotion to her husband, the twins were as necessary to each other as the blades ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... A lithe old man came into the parlor. His waxed moustache and his white imperial made him look like an old soldier; but his glance betrayed, under his glasses, the fine softness of eyes worn by science and voluptuousness. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... saw them pace silently to and fro, and delighted in the resentful glances they cast at each other. This joy increased as the one in the long coat, embroidered on the shoulder with birds, and then the other, whose court costume well became his lithe, powerful limbs, sat down, each on one of the chains connecting the granite posts between the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a Russian. He was a tall man, lithe and sinewy rather than muscular, but he had a handsome, Patrician face; and despite his condition of insensibility, or perhaps because of it, he seemed strangely out of place in the predicament in which he ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... the spectators. It was a pretty sight. Kitty, with her floating locks, flushed face, trim, light figure, and unerring accuracy of eye, was well measured against Hugo's lithe grace and dexterity. The two went on until eight hundred and twenty had been reached; then the shuttlecock fell to the ground. Kitty had glanced aside ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... A long, lithe shape, strangely suggestive of a greyhound, crept out of the darkness around us and came up alongside, and a brief conversation, ending in "All right, full ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... Lithe as a panther, Frank sprang to his feet, leaped over the hedge and landed heavily on the stooping form, knocking the breath out of the ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... Imagine a woman, lithe, blonde, beautiful, intense; with features regular as the carver's hand could make them, but informed with a spirit so venomous, passionate, and perverse, that you lost sight of her beauty in your wonder at the formidable nature of the character she ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... want? Yet he wished she hadn't walked so fast. One might be vivacious, audacious, brilliant, at an Indian trot; but impassioned—never! The pace increased; they were actually hurrying. More than that, Maruja had struck into a little trot; her lithe body swaying from side to side, her little feet straight as an arrow before her; accompanying herself with a quaint musical chant, which she obligingly explained had been taught her as a child by Pereo. They stopped only at the hedge, where she had ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... smother! The dumb life in me fumbles out to the shade Thou lurkest in. In vain—evasive ever through the glade Departing footsteps fail; And only where the grasses have been pressed, Or by snapped twigs I follow a fruitless trail. So—give o'er the quest! Sprawl on the roots and moss! Let the lithe garter squirm across my throat! Let the slow clouds and leaves above me float Into mine eyeballs and across,— Nor think them further! Lo, the marvel! now, Thou whom my soul desireth, even thou Sprawl'st by my side, who fled'st at my pursuit. I hear thy fluting; at my shoulder ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... in the body or in the upper part of a leg. Hurriedly he pursued, entering the strip of woodland towards the brook, when something fell upon him, and two keen qualms of pain shot through his breast. Then he lay insensible. Meanwhile, a lithe active form, leaving a horse tethered at the gate, had sprung to meet a second intruder, issuing from the front door of Bridesdale. The opposing forces met, and Mr. Bangs had his hands upon the younger gaol breaker. A loud shout brought Timotheus ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... movements were slow and a little hesitating, as happens when the mind is busied with other things than the occupation of the moment; her exquisite white hands hovered over the cups with the airiness of butterflies, and from her whole lithe form there emanated an indefinable charm which enveloped ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... fifty now, and his keenness of observation in respect to feminine charms is not perhaps so great as it once was; but even he cannot fail to see, with a pride that he makes no great effort to conceal, the admiring looks that follow the lithe, graceful figure of Adele, wherever their journey may lead them. Nor, indeed, were there any more comely toilettes for a young girl to be met with anywhere than those which had been provided for the young traveller under the advice of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... slender, lithe, with merry brown eyes and thick, brown hair, with a touch of auburn in it, and just enough suspicion of a curl to give him several minutes' hard brushing each day trying to keep it down. Harry Underwood, taller even ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... undulated hair, a rounded bust, and pretty features smooth and plump, with a retrousse nose and rich, full lips, and a manner of easy assurance. The brunette was younger and less developed, slim and lithe, her curling black hair rebellious, her features more clean-cut and clear, with wide, eager lips and warm brown eyes ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... had ordered Vermilion to release her, and who had fired the shot that had killed him, stood calmly watching four lithe-bodied canoemen securely bind the arms of the two scowmen ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... approached to No. 34, in the more life-like colors did the enchanting vision of Miss Schrappe stand before his eyes; the blonde hair curling over the forehead, the lithe figure, and ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... in an actual sand storm is food upon which the reminiscent may ruminate many a day, being much more pleasant in memory than in the making. First come the scurrying outriders, lithe and limber whisking gusts, dancing and whirling like Moslem dervishes, coyly brushing the traveler or boldly flinging fierce fistfuls of dirt into his eyes; then off with a swish of invisible skirts—vanishing possibly in the same direction whence they came. They go leaving ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... seventeenth century, in an English country district, two lads romped on the same lea and chased the same butterflies. One was a little brown-eyed boy, with red cheeks, fine round form, and fiery temper. The other was a gentle child, tall, lithe, and blonde. The one was the son of a man of wealth and a noble lady, and carried his captive butterflies to a mansion-house, and kept them in a crystal case. The other ran from the fields to a farm-house, and thought of the lea as a grain field. It might have been the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... suddenly, to my astonishment, opened the door and slipped in, closing it instantly behind him. At the sound of his voice the huge, lithe creature rose, yawned and rubbed its round, black head affectionately against his side, while he ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of some combination of black and yellow which carried upward the tones of the great rug. Her bare arms—long, and tapering to lithe wrists and hands—were clasped by dull-gold bracelets of twisted serpents. Over shapely shoulders, the flesh of which looked white and young, there was thrown a wrap like feathery snow, from under which drooped down over the ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... before, when his friend and classmate, Jack Strawn, had presented him to his sister. No comrade knew Dru better than Strawn, and no one admired him so much. Therefore, Gloria, ever seeking a closer contact with life, had come to West Point eager to meet the lithe young Kentuckian, and to measure him by the other men of ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... an assistant surgeon confided to us—was the mistress of an officer at the front, a prostitute of the Berlin sidewalks, who enrolled for hospital work when her lover went to the front. She Was a tall, dark, handsome girl, who looked to be more Spaniard than German, and she was graceful and lithe even in the exceedingly shapeless costume of blue print that she wore. She was less deft than either of her associates but very willing and eager. As between the three—the noblewoman, the working woman and the woman of the street—the medical officials ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... grouped beyond the border of my feminine nature and sought to waste no thought upon them. It was a shock to come, suddenly, in my own breakfast room, face to face with a type of man I had never before met. The enemy was astonishingly large and lithe and distinctly resembled one of the big gold-colored lions that live in the wilds of the Harpeth Mountains out beyond Paradise Ridge. His head, with its tawny thatch that ought to have waved majestically ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... talked with his friends, and made other such symposia as he has given us a taste of at the house of Callias the Athenian; here he ranged over the whole country-side with his horses and dogs: a stalwart and lithe old gentleman, without a doubt; able to mount a horse or to manage one, with the supplest of the grooms; and with a keen eye, as his book shows, for the good points in horse-flesh. A man might make a worse mistake than to buy a horse after Xenophon's instructions, to-day. A spavin or a wind-gall ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... death of the one who gave it but for the intervention of the second Indian, who seemed to take but a couple of bounds from the tree near which he was standing when he landed on the spot. The infuriated Winnebago was in the act of clambering to his feet, when he caught sight of the lithe, graceful warrior, standing only a couple of steps away, with loaded rifle ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... Ida, quietly, as she looked at the graceful horsewoman, at the lithe, full figure, the cold perfection of the Grecian face. "That is Miss Falconer: it is, ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Burd so blithe Had driven them in this haste; But the old, old man, so lean and lithe, That afar behind us paced; So lean and lithe, with shoulder'd scythe, And a whetstone ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... little grunt of startled rage, was upon her. She fought and scratched like a cat. The blanket tumbled down and curtained them, the plumed hat fell from the woman's disheveled head, a chair was overturned. But he was too strong and too quick for her. With one lithe arm he pinioned her two hands close down to her sides, crushing the very breath out of her body. With his other he beat off the muffling blanket, and dragged her away from the door. Then he shook her, passionately, and held her off from him, and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... it would be dark in a short tune, Ned remained crouched low in the bushes, hoping to escape detection in that way, but footsteps came closer and closer to his hiding place, and he sprang up just in time to see a lithe figure hurtling toward him, the figure of a tall, slender man with ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... of her head was superb; and she wore her hair, which was truly a glory in itself, somewhat like a crown, which left her finely curved ear liberty to show itself and to hear everything that was going on. Many would have rhapsodised over her lithe, slender form. Not we. More admirable that faithful approach to those olden models of the human form that exist in artists' studios and adorn grand rooms ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... simultaneously with the rifle, landing with both feet on Furneaux's back, and thus completing the little man's discomfiture. By that time the two policemen were nearly upon him, but he was lithe and fierce as a cobra, and had seized the rifle again before they could close with him. Jabbing the nearer adversary with the muzzle, he smashed a lamp and sent its owner sprawling backward. Then, swinging the weapon, he aimed ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... the innocent hind, When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood, The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve, And the lion effulgently ramped. Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood, By right of the better in kind. But now will it breed yon bestial brood Three-fold thrice over, if bent to bind, As ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... breaking through a thicket of brushwood away from the trail, only to come back to it breathless farther on, when some alarm of the wind in the trees or deer on the move had proved false. Only muscles of iron strength, lithe as elastic, could have endured the strain. Nightfall at last came, hiding him from pursuers; but still he sped on at a run, following the trail by the light of the stars and the rush of the river. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... eyelids trembled with great rapidity. This state perhaps would be followed by general convulsive movements in which she would put herself into the most grotesque postures and make the most unlovely grimaces. At last the fit ended, and exhausted and in tears she was put to bed. The patient was a lithe, muscular woman and to restrain her movements during the attack with the assistance at hand was a matter of impossibility, so all that could be done was to prevent her injuring herself and to sprinkle her freely with cold ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... unwelcomed—a lithe, alert figure in European attire, bare-headed, eager-faced. He was smiling to himself as he came, but when he reached her the ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... pony, had thrown his rifle to the ground, and was attacking a latticed window with an old bayonet he had been carrying in his hand. With half a dozen furious blows he sent the woodwork into splinters, and, springing up with a lithe, tiger-like jump, he clambered through the gap, big man as he was, with surprising agility. Then there was a dead silence for a few seconds and we waited in suspense. But presently oaths and protests came from far back and drew nearer and nearer, until I knew ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... was slight, and tall, and dark, with a quantity of glossy black hair coiled behind her head. Her black eyes had not yet acquired that sleepy look which advancing life and stoutness had put into her mother's, as a sort of sign of the difficulty of quick motion. Her figure was lithe, though she was not a very active girl, and one might have predicted that at forty she, too, would pay her debt to time in pounds of flesh. There are thin people who look as though they could never grow stout, and there are others whose leisurely motion and deliberate step foretells ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... terrible than itself.) Into the station it came blustering, with cloud and clangour. Ere it had yet stopped, the door of one carriage flew open, and from it, in a white travelling dress, in a toque a-twinkle with fine diamonds, a lithe and radiant creature slipped nimbly ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... strokes she brought up in shallow water. There was a quick rush of lithe feet, the sound of sweet, high laughter, then a little, good-natured gurgle of protest from the golden-haired, blue-eyed girl curled up on the sand as she found herself being dragged into the water by a pair of sturdy ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... harmony with every other. He was struck, too, with the gracefulness of Isa's figure. Her face was not handsome, but the good genius that gave her the feeling of an artist must have molded her own form, and every lithe motion was full of poetry. You have seen some people who made upon you the impression that they were beautiful, and yet the beauty was all in a statuesque figure and a graceful carriage. For it makes every difference how ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... her pleasure, and—for they had gone back to the lighted room now—Hetty presently found herself seated face to face with the stranger. He was a tall, well-favoured man, slender, and lithe in movement, with dark eyes and hair, and a slightly sallow face that suggested that he was from the South. It also seemed fitting that he was immaculately dressed, for there was a curious gracefulness about him that still had in it a trace of insolence. ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... floor to something white that lay on a board, a candle at the head, and drew off the sheet. A girl of fifteen, almost a child, lay underneath, dead,—her lithe, delicate figure decked out in a barred plaid skirt, and stained, faded velvet bodice,—her neck and arms bare. The small face was purely cut, haggard, patient in its sleep,—the soft, fair hair gathered off the tired forehead. Margaret leaned over her shuddering, pinning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Indians' money was gone by this time, and the fun was getting rougher. The toll-keeper, after a weary day, was dozing beside his candle. He did not see nor hear the stealthy forms which crept up the bridge. A board creaked, and he jumped up and swung about, to find himself quickly overpowered by a dozen lithe redskins. ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... furniture. Then she approached Jeanne and asked her for her "things," calling her "my little lady!" Where-upon the little lady, giving up her cloak and hat, exposed to view a very graceful neck and a lithe figure, whose outlines were beautifully relieved against the great glow of the open window; and I could have wished that some one else might have seen her at that moment—some one very different from an aged housekeeper, a schoolmistress frizzled like ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... him, Stanger," this to the second mate, a lithe, sun-browned, handsome lad who knew English but hated ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... was safely across the Fulton Ferry before he had realized the startling change in Fritz Braun's appearance. The flowing golden beard, the blue glasses, the padded clothes of middle-age cut were gone. Fritz Braun, lithe, sharp-faced, with piercing eyes, a dashing cavalry mustache, and dapper Wall Street tailoring, was twenty years ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... were walking side by side in the procession, and it was impossible to help being struck by the contrast in their appearance—the one supple and lithe in every limb, with dark, restless eyes, and quick, nervous temperament; the other, the English boy, with his brown hair, his sunburnt, yet handsome features—the fruit of country air and exercise—far stouter and sturdier than his ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... the Leopard Woman. Her head rested against his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her muscles had all gone slack, so that her body felt soft and warm. Kingozi, waiting, remembered her as she had looked the evening of his call—silk-clad, lithe, proud, with blood-red lips, and haughty, fathomless eyes, and the single jewel that hung in the middle of her forehead. Somehow at this moment she seemed smaller, in her safari costume, and helpless, and pathetic. He felt the curve of her breast against him, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... you.'" The girl put the brush under her arm, still further spread her feet, put her hands behind some pretended coat-tails, let the brush slip from under her arms, so that it fell to the floor with a racket, stooped with an affectation of clumsiness which seemed impossible to the lithe figure, while mumbling something inarticulate in an apparent paroxysm of embarrassment,—which quickly became a genuine inability to speak ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... his lithe body was quivering in an ecstasy of the muscles. His face radiant with a savage joy, he fastened his glance upon Patsy, his eyes gleaming with a gloating, murderous light. A most unspeakable, animal-like rage ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... by this time begin to prefer a new and stronger representative—all these things alike combined to fire the drunk and maddened savage with the energy of despair. He fell upon his enemy like a tiger upon an elephant. He fought with his tomahawk and his feet and his whole lithe body; he foamed at the mouth with impotent rage; he spent his force on the air in the ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... been thinking matters over. Being lithe and strong, he was not tired nor much out of breath, but he was trembling with the plan and the prospect he had laid out for himself. "Set 'em up," he said to Ephraim. "Set 'em ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... thirty, perhaps a thought under the middle size, but very neatly made,—a sunburnt Corporal with a brown peaked beard,—faced about at the moment, addressing voluble words of instruction to the squad in hand. Nothing was amiss or awry about the Corporal. A lithe and nimble Corporal, quite complete, from the sparkling dark eyes under his knowing uniform cap to his sparkling white gaiters. The very image and presentment of a Corporal of his country's army, in the line of his shoulders, the line ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... now than when she had fascinated Sir Florian. She was small, but taller than she looked to be,—for her form was perfectly symmetrical. Her feet and hands might have been taken as models by a sculptor. Her figure was lithe, and soft, and slim, and slender. If it had a fault it was this,—that it had in it too much of movement. There were some who said that she was almost snake-like in her rapid bendings and the almost too easy gestures of her body; ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... is called Wangara. This race of warmen and horsemen surprisingly resembles the Somal, who hold the same parallels of latitude in Eastern Africa, as to small heads, semi-Caucasian features, Asiatic above the nose-tip and African below; tall lithe figures, high shoulders, and long limbs, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Freischuetz, that he played; and as he played Sheila's poor little piano suffered somewhat. Never before had it been so battered about, and she wished the small chamber were a great hall, to temper the voluminous noise of this opening passage. But presently the music softened. The white, lithe fingers ran lightly over the keys, so that the notes seemed to ripple out like the prattling of a stream, and then again some stately and majestic air or some joyous burst of song would break upon this light accompaniment, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... beyond, forever burn Gleams of a grace without return; Upon thy shade I plant my foot, And through my frame strange raptures shoot; All of thee but thyself I grasp; I seem to fold thy luring shape, And vague air to my bosom clasp, Thou lithe, perpetual Escape! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Through the dense deep drift up to the emperor's throne From the under steaming sands With clamour of all-applausive throats and hands, Mingling in mirthful time With shrill blithe mockeries of the lithe-limbed mime: So from somewhence far forth of the unbeholden, Dreadfully driven from over and after and under, Fierce, blown through fifes of brazen blast and golden, With sound of chiming waves that drown the thunder Or thunder that strikes dumb the ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... astride a noted outlaw known as Jazz. The horse was a sorrel, and it knew all the tricks of its kind. It went sunfishing, tried weaving and fence-rowing, at last toppled over backward after a frantic leap upward. The rider, long-bodied and lithe, rode like a centaur. Except for the moment when he stepped out of the saddle as the outlaw fell on its back, he stuck to his seat as though he were glued ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... how it is that I shall find words in which to write down the loveliness of that Gouverneur of Old Harpeth. He was not as tall as my Uncle, the General Robert, and he was slender and lithe as some wild thing in a forest, but the power in the broadness of his shoulders and in the strength of his nervous hands was of a greatness of which to be frightened; that is, I think, of which a man should be frightened but in which a woman would ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... each ruddy cheek Where bright mischief peered and hid, And with limbs robust and lithe, Waking ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... pick up something else, and curve Her lovely neck, with cunning, bird-like grace, And watch the mirror while she put it on, With such a sweetly grave and thoughtful face; And then to view it all would sway, and swerve Her lithe young body, like ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... stiff balloon sleeves, for example, without which a woman's dress was nought in those days. You and I, too, reader, have our weakness, have we not? which makes us think foolish things now and then. Perhaps it may lie in an excessive admiration for small hands and feet, a tall lithe figure, large dark eyes, and dark silken braided hair. All these the Countess possessed, and she had, moreover, a delicately-formed nose, the least bit curved, and a clear brunette complexion. Her mouth it must be admitted, receded too much from her nose and chin and to a prophetic eye threatened ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... and Berrand were eagerly talking of the snake, praising its lustrous skin, marvelling at its jewelled eyes, foretelling its lithe progress through Society. She heard the murmur of their voices until far into the night. And sometimes she thought that distant murmur sounded like the hum of evil, or like the furtive ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... 'an mine ever heerd on." His eyes followed the boy as he went out to stand by Jack's elbow and ply this slow-witted gentleman with quick, eager questions. He was slender and rather tall for one of his age, but lithe and agile, as the skipper noted. "One o' mine could jes' trip him with a turn o' his hand," thought he; yet he regarded the lad with a mixture of kindness and respect, after all. There were other ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... experience was one which he remembered with cunning wariness rather than with actual terror. Yet this had been a real peril, one of the gravest with which he could be confronted in the guarded precincts of Golden Pool. One day he saw a little lithe black body swimming rapidly at the surface, its head above the water. It was about ten feet away from his lair, and headed up-stream. The strange creature swam with legs, like a muskrat, instead of with fins like a fish, but it was longer and slenderer than a muskrat; and something in its ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sneezing, he remembered with a shudder his flight from those solid silver hair-brushes through Regent's Park; he recalled how, behind him, long after the heavier feminine aristocracy had given up the chase, one youthful, fleet, supple, and fearsome girl had hung to his trail—a tall, lithe, incarnation ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... group sat up, shoved away a burned-out torch, and yawned with a noisy, doglike whine Stern got a quick yet definite glimpse of the sharp canine teeth; he saw that the Thing's fleshless lips and retreating chin were caked with dried blood. The tongue he saw was long and lithe and apparently rasped. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... skins and stood erect. He was a mere youth, but of such shape and appearance that one could easily understand the epithet "romantic" Rosebud had applied to him. He stood at least four inches over six feet, and dwarfed even Nevil's height. But it was in the perfect symmetry of his lithe, sinuous body, and the keen, handsome, high-caste face where ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... OLD MORALITY? Last time he was seen was on the Thursday preceding the holidays. He had come back newly elected for the Strand; took part in business of sitting; just before dinner Members had watched his lithe figure disappearing towards the doorway, and he had been seen no more. House had met again on the following night; had adjourned for the truncated holiday; had met again; and still OLD MORALITY's seat was vacant, and there dwelt in the fond memory ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 6, 1891 • Various
... The lithe fingers on his arm clutched it hard for a moment, and Manetho averted his face. When he turned again, his features seemed to express exultation, mingled with a sinister flavor of some ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... expression for emotion, and Lark promptly struck out at a pace that did full credit to her lithe young limbs. Down the street they raced, little tendrils of hair flying about their flushed and shining faces, faster, faster, breathless, panting, their gladness fairly overflowing. And many people turned to look, wondering what in ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... matron—careful, I thought, not to ask too much of general society; careful not to notice whether or no she received too little; careful, most of all, not to let it appear that she was careful. Perhaps it was this care which made up a part of her general strain—and enabled her to keep the lithe slenderness of ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... a lithe, tall girl, with a small young, wicked face; and meekly demure. Her hair was sleeked down provocatively over her ears, in which emerald drops dangled. She was an Enemy. As she took her client's hand and dabbled the finger-tips in ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... a space, our eyes fixed on the ground picturing that chase through dim subterranean passages, smelling of spring showers; Charles Augustus, wasted, febrile, panting with agitation; Ernestine, lithe, ardent, awful in ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... Springs, Alabama, in 1804, leaned across the pine table to extend a cordial hand to his visitor. Abram Mordecai, who stood before him, although almost fifty, gave one the impression of a much younger man. Lean and lithe as a panther, with shaggy black hair and keen eyes, his distinctly Jewish features were so tanned and weather-beaten that he looked far more the Indian than the Jew. He nodded gayly to his employer before he flung himself into ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... killed the joy of the other. If love was jealousy, and jealousy was pain, the one must be healed for sake of the other. With this girl to think was to do, and with that last discovery she was upon her feet, straight and lithe as a young animal beside the door. She would go to this man and tell him that the red flower was less than nothing to her, its ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... face, lighted up by a pair of large, soft, dark eyes, and was altogether very fair to look upon. Her lithe, slender figure bounded from rock to rock with movements as graceful and almost as swift as ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... remonstrances of his heirs. He could write clever verse, he was a devotee of belles-lettres, and a sceptic in the fashion of the time. Self-indulgent, he was likewise bitterly opposed to all family discipline. His figure was slight and lithe, his expression alert and intelligent, his eyes gray blue and his head large. He was ambitious, indefatigable as a place-hunter, suave, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... I remember my first meeting with Tekahionwake, the Indian girl! I see her yet as she stood in all ways the ideal type of her race, lithe and active, with clean-cut aquiline features, olive-red complexion and long dark hair; but developed by her white-man training so that the shy Indian girl had given place to the alert, resourceful world-woman, at home equally in the salons of the rich ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... also been alert. The very instant the figure of the officer-of-the-day disappeared from view behind the high back fence, out from the shadows of the shed there sprang a lithe, slender form, clad in soldier overcoat, and, in less time than it takes to tell it, around it darted behind the shed, was one instant poised at the top of the fence that separated the yard of Davies's quarters from that of their next-door neighbor, then noiselessly dropped out of ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... admitted the moment I appeared. I had had one glimpse of this tall, graceful creature, who so exactly reproduced the beautiful traits of her twin sister that she might indeed at a distance be taken for her double. There was the same proud carriage of her head, the same lithe figure, even her musical voice when she greeted me with shy cordiality might have been the ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... with the day and the scene. He had a cheering figure, lithe and erect, with a springy stride, bespeaking the Montezuma blood said to flow in his Indian veins. Clad in a colored cotton shirt, blue jeans, and Spanish girdle, and treading the path with brown feet never deformed by shoes, ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... the guide for the young girl's costume. The dewy bloom of the cheek, the clear young eyes, the soft rosebud lips, the sweet curves of the lithe form that come but once in a lifetime, are what we want most ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... the sunlight as he flung it forward with far-stretched palm. It fell with the faintest splash, and there was a little puff of spray as his head dipped and the water washed across his lips. Then the white limbs flashed amidst the green shining of the river, and the long, lithe form contracted, gleaming as a salmon gleams when it breaks the surface with the straining line. The still river rippled, and a sun-bronzed face shot half-clear again. Miss Kinnaird watched the swimmer's ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... first love. And the gay old city of Paris smiled, and in that bantering way of hers she brought to me in a cafe one night a perfect young tigress of a girl, a lithe, dusky beauty ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... lean, lithe figure, and the wind in that old black dress, and soon she was gone from the cobbled street and under the town's high gateway. She turned at once to her right and was hid from the view of the houses. Then they all ran down to their doors, and small groups formed on the ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... [118] The lithe figure of a pretty girl is often likened by Eastern poets to the waving cypress, a tree which we associate with the grave-yard.—"Who is walking there?" asks a Persian poet. "Thou, or a ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... at him. With his lean, strong face to the sun, his lithe body swinging rhythmically to his stride, he looked like an Indian chieftain. So he would have stalked through virgin forests. So, under different conditions, she might have been following his lead. But conditions were as they were. That is what she must keep in mind. He was here merely ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... beautiful,—though, no doubt, her loyal subjects, as in such cases commonly occurs, pictured her to themselves as a very Helen of Troy. If her cheeks had something of the rosy hue of health, cheeks, and arms, too, were well tanned by frequent exposure to the sun. Neither tall nor short, but with a lithe figure, a natural grace and sweet dignity of carriage, the result of sufficient healthy exercise and a pure, untroubled spirit; hands and feet, mouth and nose, not such as a gentleman would particularly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... certain tribes, offshoots, and clans remained impassive either to Iroquois threats or proffered friendship. They, like certain lithe, proud forest animals to whom restriction means death, were untamable. Their necks could endure no yoke, political or purely ornamental. And so they perished far from the Onondaga firelight, far from the open doors of the Long House, self-exiled, self-sufficient, ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the race-track a steer was loosed, and a cowboy on a small lithe broncho rode after it at top speed. Round the head of this man the lariat whirled like a live snake. In a flash the noose was tight about the steer's horns, the brilliant little horse had overtaken the beast, and in an action when man and horse seemed to combine as ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... precious stones. Their appareille is verie diuers: and in fewe, one like another. Some go in Mantles of Wollen, some of Linnen some naked, some onely brieched to couuer the priuities, and some wrapped aboute with pilles, and lithe barckes of trees. Thei are all by nature blacke of hewe: euen so died in their mothers wombe acordyng to the disposicion of the fathers nature, whose siede also is blacke: as like wise in the Aethiopians. Talle men and strongly made. Thei are very spare fieders, namely ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... had done well by him. Like the spruce themselves he had grown straight and tall, but his form was sturdy too. There was a lithe strength about him that suggested the larger felines; the hard trails of the forest had left not a spare ounce of flesh on his powerful frame. His mold, except for a vague and indistinct refinement in his long-fingered and ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... his arms about her now and buried his face in the great waves of her inky, shining hair, wildly kissing the nape of her neck; but with a deft twist of her lithe body she slipped almost away from him, although his arms still held her. "Care? Of course I care. But what's that got to do with it when I love you like I do? Pearl, if you were a good deal blacker than you're painted it wouldn't make ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... was not ungraceful Jim flung wide the door. Indeed, Rose-Marie told herself, as she stepped into the Volsky flat, Jim was never ungraceful. There was something lithe and cat-like in his slightest movement, just as there was something feline in the expression of his eyes. Rose-Marie often felt like a small, helpless mouse when ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... what by strength, what by cunning, into the daylight through the rent in the roof. So when he was without he made a rope of his girdle and strips from his raiment, for he was ever a deft craftsman, and made a shift to heave up therewith the sad man, who was light and lithe of body; and then the two together dealt with the elders one after another, till they were all four on the face of ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... called, to our right, the Moose Watchi, and to our left, the Tuskanatchi—the Moose and Raspberry Mountains—loomed in the distance. Here, and when only a few miles from the lake, a York boat came tearing down stream full of lithe, young half-breed trackers—our long-expected assistants from the Hudson's Bay Company's post, as we would have welcomed much more warmly had they come sooner, for we had little but the lake now to ascend, up which a fair breeze would carry us ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... another night in his house on their return. Our hunters had not gone far when a growl in one of the bushes induced them to land and search for the growler. They found him in the person of a large tiger, which Will Osten caught a glimpse of sneaking away with the lithe motions of a gigantic cat. A hurried shot wounded the beast, which, instead of flying, turned round suddenly, and, with a bound, alighted on our hero's shoulders. The shock hurled him violently to the ground. During the momentary ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... to throb as the handsomest and most gallant figure of them all walked into the red glow of the firelight, a tall man, young, lithe, athletic, fair of hair and countenance, his manner at once graceful and proud, a man to whom the others turned with deference, and perhaps in the case of De Courcelles and Jumonville with a little fear. He wore a white uniform with ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... waiting train, glanced at him, then at each other, and, apparently without the slightest reason, burst into unrestrained merriment. Percival continued to survey them calmly and haughtily through his monocle. His first glance had revealed the fact that the girl was strikingly pretty. Her lithe young body showed round and comely in its khaki suit and brown leggings. Her black mane was braided in two short, thick plaits with a dash of scarlet ribbons at the ends. Blue eyes, full of daring, danced under the blackest of brows, and the smile she flashed at her ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... her figure magnificently developed, though slender-waisted and lithe as a serpent. She walked as if she had been bred in a basquina, and her foot and ankle were hardly to be matched on this side of the Pyrenees; the nose slightly aquiline, with thin, transparent nostrils; and the forehead rather low—it looked more ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... Stratton, to rest for an instant on Flint Kreeger, who sat just beyond McCabe. What he saw there Buck did not know, but it must have been something of warning or information. When his eyes returned to Stratton their expression was veiled under drooping lids; his lithe figure relaxed into an easier position against the door-casing, both hands ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... first supposed case would ever be true of him. Further, I felt sure that no one would ever be hardy enough to give the supposed occasion. I can hardly tell how I knew; it was by some of those indescribable natural signs. We were slowly mounting the hill; and in every powerful, lithe movement, in the very set of his shoulders and head, and as well in the sparkle of the bright eye which looked round at me, I read the tokens of a spirit which I thought neither had known nor ever would know the sort of indignity ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... descended into the dory. The other passengers—what there were of them—gathered to see the little group depart. Dr. Frank offered Dr. Dare a hand, which she accepted, like a lady, not needing it in the least. She was a climber, with firm, lithe ankles. No one spoke, as these people got in with the negro, and prepared to drift down with the scorching tide. The woman looked from the steamer to the shore, once, and back again, northwards. The men did not look at all. There was an oppression in the scene ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... storm. The leafless trees Lash their lithe limbs, and, with majestic voice, Call to each other through the deepening gloom; And slender trunks that lean on burly boughs Shriek with the sharp abrasion; and the oak, Mellowed in fiber by unnumbered ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... should be the guide for the young girl's costume. The dewy bloom of the cheek, the clear young eyes, the soft rosebud lips, the sweet curves of the lithe form that come but once in a lifetime, are what we want ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... No more, thou lithe and long-winged hawk, of desert-life for thee; No more across the sultry sands shalt thou go swooping free: Blunt idle talons, idle beak, with spurning of thy chain, Shatter against thy cage the wing thou ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of steam upon those waters, which, in giving up their Indian patronymies, gave up the bold hunter and his lithe canoe to the progress of "manifest destiny," few are those who pass the venerable site of the first colony in Virginia, Jamestown, without paying a tribute of a sigh, and perchance a tear, to that solitary ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... not see, or, more correctly, did not appear to see—for I do not know what he saw and what he pretended not to see, really—the lean, lithe, long, low weasel that passed, climbing and sniffing, beneath him—within six inches—possibly scenting out a rat. He did not hear, or show that he heard, the blackbird—she was rusty, dark brown, as a matter ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... minutes later, as Doctor Mayberry was unsaddling his horse in the barn a lithe figure enveloped as to head and shoulders in one of Cindy's kitchen aprons darted under the dripping eaves and stood breathless and ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... village, in a wilderness of shrubbery, trees, and giant ferns, we came upon a cross-trail, a thin line of travel hardly breaking the dense growth, and saw a woman appear from among the leaves. She was large, perhaps five feet, ten inches, tall; a Juno figure, handsome and lithe. Such a woman of her age, about twenty-two years, does the work of a man, makes copra, fells trees, lifts heavy stones, and is a match for the average man in strength. She was dark, as are all Marquesans who live a hardy and vigorous life unsheltered from sun ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Lithe and listen, gentlemen, To sing a song I will beginne: It is of a lord of faire Scotland, Which was the ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... defined, looking larger than usual. Clear space and air soft with colour were about him. Across this space, on a little sloping plateau near him, there crept an animal. It seemed to Lawless that he could see the lithe stealthiness of its muscles and the ripple of its skin. But that was imagination, because he was too far away. He cried out, and swung his gun shoulderwards in desperation. But, at the moment, Pourcette turned sharply round, saw his danger, caught his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Suffrage Association. The Woman's Journal said: "Those of us who have for years admired Mrs. Stetson's remarkably bright poems were delighted to meet her, and to find her even more interesting than her writings. She is still a young woman, tall, lithe and graceful, with fine dark eyes, and spirit and originality flashing from her at every turn like light from a diamond. She read several poems to the convention, made an address one evening and preached twice on Sunday; ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... through Regent's Park; he recalled how, behind him, long after the heavier feminine aristocracy had given up the chase, one youthful, fleet, supple, and fearsome girl had hung to his trail—a tall, lithe, incarnation of her ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... cadence as, prone on his face, the young fellow kicks, struggles and puffs up the dust. Meanwhile a tall, dour man in a straw hat is rolling up a shirt-sleeve, and alternately bending and stretching a long arm, whilst a lithe, white-headed young stripling is hopping, sparrow-like, from one onlooker to another, and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... have said enough; a nose more delicate than symmetrical; a mouth rather thin-lipped, but well curved; a chin rather small, I confess;—but did any one ever from the most elaborated description acquire even an approximate idea of the face intended? Her person was lithe and graceful; she had good hands and feet; and the fairness of her skin gave her brown hair a duskier look ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... my smooth-faced Coney," she said, "that I was as lithe and limber as you are, and was called Jaunty Peg. And now poor old Moll cooks collops for those that are born to dance jigs in chains for the north-east wind to play the fiddle to. Time was when a whole army followed me, when I beat the drum ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... had hit his man, and that Rawdon was wounded in the body or in the upper part of a leg. Hurriedly he pursued, entering the strip of woodland towards the brook, when something fell upon him, and two keen qualms of pain shot through his breast. Then he lay insensible. Meanwhile, a lithe active form, leaving a horse tethered at the gate, had sprung to meet a second intruder, issuing from the front door of Bridesdale. The opposing forces met, and Mr. Bangs had his hands upon the younger gaol breaker. A loud shout ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... Tad was lithe and supple. As the champion wrestler of the high school, back in his home town in Missouri, he was possessed of many tricks that had proved useful to him on more than one occasion since the Pony Riders set out on their ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... perpetual sadness that was visible there when she was not momentarily interested or amused. Had he suspected her paleness and air of secret suffering to be the result of any physical infirmity, she would not have interested him so much. But Mrs. Goddard's lithe figure and easy grace of activity belied all idea of weakness. It was undoubtedly some hidden suffering of mind which lent that sadness to her voice and features, and which so deeply roused the sympathies of the squire. At the end ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... together, return to the fray. One against the other rides, and so fiercely they smite each other that both lances break and the horses fall beneath them. But they, being seated on their steeds, sustain no harm; so they quickly rise, for they were strong and lithe. They stand on foot in the middle of the garden, and straightway attack each other with their green swords of German steel, and deal great wicked blows upon their bright and gleaming helmets, so that they hew them into bits, and their eyes shoot out flame. No greater efforts can be made ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... and thread with her. Whipping up the skirt of her dress on her knee, she bent forward over it, and set herself industriously to the repair of the torn trimming. In this position her lithe figure showed charmingly its firm yet easy line. The needle, in her dexterous brown fingers, flew through its work. The locker was a broad one; Launce was able to seat himself partially behind her. In this position who could have resisted the temptation to lift up her great ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... knew the use of the dreaded instrument itself. But there was only one among them who comprehended its immediate purpose. The glance of cruel meaning which the tyranness, after having examined the lithe, twisted rod critically for an instant, cast upon the object of her malice, probably banished the last lingering hesitation from the breast of the latter,—who turned away ostensibly to the performance of her accustomed duties, but in reality to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... sight to see Ben Brace, at the approach of a sudden squall, "swarming" up the shrouds to reef a topsail, his fine bushy curls blowing out behind, while upon his face sat that calm but daring expression, as if he defied the storm and could master it. He was a large man, but well proportioned—rather lithe and sinewy than robust, with a shock of dark-brown hair in their thick curls somewhat matted, covering the whole of his head; for he was still but a young man, and there were no signs of baldness. His face was good, rather darkish in complexion, and he wore neither beard nor ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... corrupted Virginie's fidelity; the cruel disappointment and suffering of her lover; all these things pressed themselves upon her reeling brain, and gave birth to the suggestions of madness. Stooping down, she put her lithe hand upon the belt of the dead man. There was, as she expected, a second pistol in it, the fellow of that with which he had shot himself. It was loaded. Julia drew it out, wrapped her mantle round it, and climbed noiselessly into her chamber through the still open ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... her moods. She wore the usual every-day attire of the women of the region,—mistresses as well as "hired girls,"—a dark-print gown, but, like Ophelia's rue, "it was worn with a difference," fitting her lithe, graceful figure to perfection, and set off by a dainty band of white and knot of ribbon ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... tattered robes that hoard a glittering trace Of bygone colours, broidered to the knee, Behold her, daughter of a wandering race, Tameless, with the bold falcon's agile grace, And the lithe ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... the poet hath hymned The writhing maid, lithe-limbed, Quivering on amaranthine asphodel, How can he paint her woes, Knowing, as well he knows, That all can be ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... more, she sped away all lithe and vigorous grace; when she was out of sight, I lay upon my and, staring up at the rustling canopy above, became lost in thought, wondering, among other things, if I could ever possibly attain unto that ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... sleep I lay, Right as I was wont for to do'n, And fell asleepe wonder soon, As he that *weary was for go* *was weary from going* On pilgrimage miles two To the corsaint* Leonard, *relics of To make lithe that erst was hard. But, as I slept, me mette I was Within a temple made of glass; In which there were more images Of gold, standing in sundry stages, And more riche tabernacles, And with pierrie* more ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... on his knees, looking up at his fellow-prisoner with a lively look for a prison. A sunburnt, quick, lithe, little man, though rather thickset. Earrings in his brown ears, white teeth lighting up his grotesque brown face, intensely black hair clustering about his brown throat, a ragged red shirt open at his brown breast. Loose, seaman-like trousers, decent ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... curving stem, leaves drooping. When I would fain view the world as a whole, it rushes into vision—man, beast, bird, reptile, fly, sky, ocean, mountains, plain, rock, pebble. The warmth of life, the reality of creation is over all—the throb of human hands, glossiness of fur, lithe windings of long bodies, poignant buzzing of insects, the ruggedness of the steeps as I climb them, the liquid mobility and boom of waves upon the rocks. Strange to say, try as I may, I cannot force my touch to pervade ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... why were we apprehensive? In disobedience to the scriptural injunction, we had observed the clouds and the birds. Twice a flock of lesser frigate-birds, those dark, fish-tailed high-fliers which are for ever cutting animated "W's" in the air with long lithe wings—had appeared. Seldom do they come unless as harbingers of boisterous weather. On each recent occasion they had been absolutely trustworthy messengers. Watching them soaring and swooping, we said one to another: "Behold the cyclone cometh!" But it did not. With ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... dark figure, lithe as a leopard in his tight fitting trousers and jacket with his robe now discarded, went swiftly down the spider incline ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... are, you must remember, here as steep as house-roofs, the last spurs of true mountains) is covered with a grass like tall rye-grass, but growing in tufts. That is the famous Guinea-grass {78e} which, introduced from Africa, has spread over the whole West Indies. Dark lithe coolie prisoners, one a gentle young fellow, with soft beseeching eyes, and 'Felon' printed on the back of his shirt, are cutting it for the horses, under the guard of a mulatto turnkey, a tall, steadfast, dignified man; and between us and them ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... may be interpreted into human speech. In the language of the apes it means Killer. Now the Killer rose upon the branch of the great tree where he had been sleeping with his back braced against the stem. He stretched his lithe young muscles, the moonlight filtering through the foliage from above dappling his brown skin ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... had discoursed. Now, in spite of his weather-beaten face and hardened hands, he appeared what he was, a man of education and some refinement, and his resolute expression, erect carriage, and muscular frame, rendered lithe and almost statuesque by much swinging of the ax, gave him an indefinite air of distinction. Again she decided that Geoffrey Thurston was a well-favored man, but remembering Musker's stories, she set herself to watch for some trace of inherent barbarity. This was unfortunate for ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... vitality of the man seemed to live in every line of his lithe body as he looked in, but it subsided again as he entered, and ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... Strong, athletic, lithe in her movements, Mehetabel was a match for the small muscular Jonas. If he succeeded for a moment in twisting the gun out of her hands it was but for an instant. She had caught the barrel again ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... cane out of her desk which stood by the wall. I heard the desk opened with an impatient clash and then closed with an angry bang. I was as sure as if I had had eyes in the back of my head, that the schoolmistress was holding the cane in both hands and bending it to see if it was lithe and limber. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... his bunk with the lithe, delicate grace of a cat. The monotony of sleep and labor was ended. Something had broken. Life was once again ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... young captain whose personal affairs had been a subject of comment between Cap'n Ira Ball and his wife. He was a heavy-set, upstanding, blue-jerseyed figure, lithe and as spry on his feet as a cat. Tunis Latham was thirty, handsome in the bold way of longshore men, and ruddy-faced. He had crisp, short, sandy hair; his cheeks, chin, and lip were scraped as clean as ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... pretty brown feet went catlike over the sharp stones, as she led the way down a rocky path to the shore. Her garments were scanty and torn, and her hair blew tangled in the wind. She seemed about five-and-twenty, lithe and small. Her long fingers kept clutching and pulling nervously at her skirts as she went. Her face was very gray in complexion, and very worn, but delicately formed, and smooth-skinned. Her thin nostrils were tremulous as eyelids, and her lips, whose curves were faultless, had no colour ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... choir approaching, the dusky flash of brown bodies swaying, palpitating to the intoxicating rhythm of the song. Slowly and with great dignity they entered the clearing and stood, a score of slender creatures, in the full blaze of the moon, their lithe-limbed bodies clad only in ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... suffices. Blue eyes and light colourless hair, high cheek-bones and lithe limbs, mark the Scandinavian. Strong, wiry fingers and an indescribable something proclaim the sailor, and though Von Shmit can hardly say 'yes' in English, he looks the most ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... and, the blankets falling off him, showed me that he was nothing but a living skeleton. Oh! how changed from that lithe and handsome chief whom I used to know. Moreover, his lips quivered and his eyes were ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... affairs on May 29th, 1842, when there arrived in Auckland the Right Reverend George Augustus Selwyn to take up the position of bishop of the divided flock. This remarkable man was then in the prime of early manhood, and he brought with him not only a lithe athletic frame well fitted to endure hardship; not only the culture of Cambridge and of Eton, where he had learned and taught, and the courtly atmosphere of Windsor, where he had exercised his ministry; but above all he brought with him ideals. These took the ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... particularly of Miss Caruthers. He could not have been a moment over twelve or thirteen, yet he was by far the cleverest of the gang. He was the favorite of his crowd, and its leader. Though there were a number older than he, they acknowledged his chieftaincy. He was a beautiful boy, a lithe young god in breathing bronze, eyes wide apart, intelligent and daring, a bubble, a mote, a beautiful flash and sparkle of life. You have seen wonderful glorious creatures—animals, anything, a leopard, a horse-restless, eager, ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... near the middle of the car. They would have drawn more than a passing glance wherever seen. Tall, well set up, muscular, they served as splendid types of young American manhood. None of them were over twenty, and their lean, bronzed faces, as well as the lithe alertness of their movements, spoke of a life spent largely in the open. They were brimming with life and high spirits. Exuberant vitality shone through their eyes and betrayed itself in every gesture. ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... barricade was broken through, and the rout pressed on the second line. Tom Breeks, the orator, and Jim, transformed from a lurching yokel to a lithe dog of battle, kept the retreat of Ipley, challenging any two of Hillford to settle the dispute. Captain Gambier attempted an authoritative parley, in the midst of which a Hillford man made a long arm and struck Emilia's harp, till the strings jarred loose and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of the sagacious, affable man of the world, gossiping over the nuts and wine; the marvels of 'Zanoni' and 'A Strange Story' must be portrayed with a resonance and exaltation of diction fitted to their transcendental claims. But between the stark mechanism of the Englishman and the lithe, inspired felicity of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... vehicles of the latest design to drive home their trade-weary fathers or brothers, relatives or friends. The air was gay with a social hope, a promise of youth and affection, and that fine flush of material life that recreates itself in delight. Lithe, handsome, well-bred animals, singly and in jingling pairs, paced each other down the long, wide, grass-lined street, its fine homes agleam ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... weird sweet shock passed through him, and all his veins tingled as if thrilled by new life. Opening his eyes in wonder, he saw verily bending over him the charming being of whom he had dreamed, and he knew that her lithe hand really caressed his throbbing forehead. But the flame of the fever was gone, a delicious coolness now penetrated every fibre of his body, and the thrill of which he had dreamed still tingled in his blood like a great joy. Even at the same moment the eyes of the gentle visitor met ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... days no more remembered, Ages nearer the beginning, When the heavens were closer to us, And the Gods were more familiar, In the North-land lived a hunter, With ten young and comely daughters, Tall and lithe as wands of willow; Only Oweenee, the youngest, She the wilful and the wayward, She the silent, dreamy maiden, Was the fairest of ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... him for a moment as he tried to mount; his big young thoroughbred resented the idea of anyone on his back, and Jim had to hop beside him, with one foot in the stirrup, while he danced round in a circle, trying to get away. Jim seized an opportunity, and was in the saddle with a lithe swing; whereupon the horse tried to get his head down to buck, and, being checked in that ambition, progressed down the paddock in a ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... the steps which led to the lawn, and Bias saw that she stumbled on the last one and would have fallen had not her lithe body ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seconds, the lynx-like creature made a sudden lightning-like dash at the motionless antelope, which I fully expected to see go down instantly, with the formidable fangs of its enemy buried deep in its throat. Not so, however, for as the lithe, spotted form darted through the grass the antelope rose from the ground, as though shot into the air by a powerful spring, descending fair and square upon its enemy's back, its four sharp-pointed hoofs digging viciously through the spotted hide and extorting a scream ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... lovely now, than when we saw her last, asleep. She moves through the garden with a light quick step, her white morning robe with its wide sleeves falling in graceful drapery over her lithe limbs, the thick brown hair straying from beneath the purple kerchief over her head, and a merry, roguish smile lurking round her rosy mouth and in the dimples of her cheeks ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sir," said Will eagerly; and Mr Temple watched him closely as they stood once more out in the bright sunshine, and, lithe and strong, he began to climb up the rocks, Dick following him almost as quickly, but without his cleverness in making his ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... a distinct command, and after a very decided pause he responded to it. He rose with a quick, lithe movement, and handed her the letter with a ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... holes, and cut at the horses as they passed, to hamstring or maim them; and good-bye to the poor fellow whose horse fell! We ought to have had lances, and it would have been a very different tale. But the troopers' swords could not reach the beggars, who are as lithe as monkeys. If they had run it would have been easy to get a cut at them; so it would if they had stood up. But they were as cool as cucumbers, and dodged just at the right moment. Of course some were not ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... started. It was hard work, for the way was very rough, and poor Hannah weak. But Ann had a good deal of strength in her lithe young frame, and she half-carried Hannah over the worst places. Still both of the girls were pretty well spent when they came to the last of the bits of wool on the border of Bear Swamp. However, they kept on a little farther; then they ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... the fence, and halfway down the lane now, paused and looked about him, straining his eyes through the blackness—then with a lithe spring he caught the top of the fence, swung himself over, and dropped to the ground on the other side. The rear of a row of low buildings now loomed up before him across a narrow yard. Window lights showed here and there from the houses on ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... almost universally liked by both men and women, and, while unspoilt by popularity, thoroughly deserved it. He was about twenty-six years of age, above medium height, with a lithe and graceful figure which the riding costume that he was wearing well set off. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, with good though irregular features, he was pleasant-faced and attractive rather than handsome. The cheerful, ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... rays Round her soft Theban tissues! All will be as She says, When that dead past reissues. Matters not what nor where, Hark, to the moon's dim cluster! How was her heavy hair Lithe as a feather duster! Matters not when nor whence; Flittertigibbet! Sounds make the song, ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... about eighteen. There was a suggestion of effeminacy about the lad's small, well-shaped hands and feet. He was a slender, smooth-faced youth with mild blue eyes. It occurred to Webb, too, that the stranger might have imagined the Apaches. But in his motions was something of the lithe grace of the puma. It was part of the business of the cattleman to judge men and he was not convinced that this young fellow was ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... full moment, then slowly raised his arms above his head in a gesture of supple grace and ease. The afternoon sun struck across his wind-ruffled brown hair and smiling face, as he gave a brief nod to the catcher and dropped his arm with a lithe, swift movement and turn of his whole body. The white ball shot across, swerving almost at the plate, and crashed into ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... people have been fooling me? I don't believe it," said I. "There's one that can't talk English, and I'll make a bet on it." I indicated a passing brave with an eagle-feather head-dress which reached far down his naked legs. He was a magnificent animal; he was young and lithe, and as tall and straight as a sapling. "I've tried him twice, and he simply ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... the way out." But when at last the picador, having spurred his flinching horse close up to the bull's side, jabbed at his glossy neck with his lance and the pain convinced the great monarch they were hostile, he threw up his head with a snort and in a lithe, agile bound he passed by them and trotted ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... "Patsy" Raymond and against the wall near the door. He was obviously unconscious of himself, of the possibility that he might be observed. His eyes were pouncing from blaze of jewels to white neck, to laughing, sensuous face, to jewels again or to lithe, young form, scantily clad and swaying in masculine arm in rhythm with the waltz. It gave Arkwright a qualm of something very like terror to note the contrast between his passive figure and his roving eyes with their wolfish gleam—like Blucher, when he looked out over London and said: "God! What ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... her whole lithe body into a setting for the prettiest yawn that Kirby had ever seen. "So the Jat is missing! Yes, he came here, sahib. He was never invited, but he came. He sat here saying nothing until it suited him to sit where another man ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... novelists have introduced as the leading character; the women who come in contact with him seem to be fascinated by his disdainful mien, his giant strength, and his brutal manner. He is broad across the shoulders, heavily moulded, yet as lithe as a cat; has an ugly scar across his right cheek; has been in the four quarters of the globe; knows seventeen languages; had a harem in Turkey and a Fayaway in the Marquesas; can be as polished as Bayard in the drawing-room, but is as gloomy as Conrad ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... jasmine and sweet brier-rose. Death, a giant form, veiled in grey draperies, is passing in with inevitable and mysterious power, breaking through all the flowers. One foot is already on the threshold, and one relentless hand is extended, while Love, a beautiful boy with lithe brown limbs and rainbow-coloured wings, all shrinking like a crumpled leaf, is trying, with vain hands, to bar the entrance. A little dove, undisturbed by the agony of the terrible conflict, waits patiently at the foot of the ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... a horse, nor a cow—nothing upon four legs. This creature had only two; but they were long, straight and strong. And it had a lithe active body, and a curly head of black hair. It was a boy about the Prince's own age—but, oh! so different. His face was almost as red as his hands, and his shaggy hair was matted like the backs of the sheep he was tending. But he was a rather nice-looking ...
— The Little Lame Prince - Rewritten for Young Readers by Margaret Waters • Dinah Maria Mulock
... prepared to start, the overseer having selected a trusty llanero as our guide. It was difficult to say to what race he belonged. He called himself a white, but his complexion and features betokened Indian and African progenitors. He was a fine, athletic-looking fellow, lithe yet muscular, and evidently capable of enduring continued and violent exercise without fatigue. A broad-brimmed hat, a shirt and trousers, and a coloured poncho over his shoulders, completed his attire; his weapons ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... lady's arms, the lithe, active youth was in the house in an instant, following the Voice of Fernley. There it came again, rising, rising,—the cry of a lost soul, the wail ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... Lisle reported himself to their commander. He was at once put in charge of a company, and began his duties. When, two days later, they marched up the country, he felt well pleased with his command; for the men were for the most part lithe, active fellows; very obedient to orders and ready for any work, and evidently very proud of their position as British soldiers. They had for the most part had very little practice in shooting; but this was of comparatively little consequence, as what ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... delayed, and I stood for a quarter of an hour at the bottom of a flight of steps, watching the continuous stream of descending passengers, mostly women, and generally young. Some among the less young were swollen, heavy, and awkward; most were slack, drooping, limp, bony, or bent; a few were lithe and lissom; one or two had the emotional vivacity and muscular tone of abounding vitality. Not one plainly indicated that, stripped of her clothing, she would have transformed those Underground steps into the Golden Stairway ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... fervid black gleam of her hair; her lips are pursed in a half-smile as if she were stifling a secret. She walks round the stage slowly, one hand at her waist, the shawl tight over her elbow, her thighs lithe and restless, a panther in a cage. At the back of the stage she turns suddenly, advances; the snapping of her fingers gets loud, insistent; a thrill whirrs through the guitar like a covey of partridges scared in a field. Red ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... fair: to be quite fair is best. Why, two nights hence I dreamed that I could see In through your bosom under the left flower, And there was a round hollow, and at heart A little red snake sitting, without spot, That bit—like this, and sucked up sweet—like this, And curled its lithe light body right and left, And quivered like a woman in act to love. Then there was some low fluttered talk i' the lips, Faint sound of soft fierce words caressing them— Like a fair woman's when her love gets way. Ah, your old kiss—I know ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... last, the stag, a noble animal with wondrous horns, lithe body and beautifully shaped limbs was at bay. Straight and true, at its throat, flew the leader of the pack, and sank its teeth deep into it, while above the King blew loud and long the death note of the chase. No need for other hounds nor for ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... of Irish descent, and middle size, but compact, lithe, and muscular, with a not unkindly face, which, however, showed but too plainly the marks of habitual dissipation. A rigger by occupation, a sailor and pilot at need, a skilful fisherman, and ready shot, with a roving experience, which had given him a smattering of half a score of ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... to wheel and gallop away; so she remained with her hand fumbling at the butt of the revolver, and her eyes fixed on the flicker of the fire. Not a voice accosted her. As far as she could peer among the lithe trunks of the saplings, not a sign of ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... so many excellent qualities. His was the wisdom of the serpent combined with the gentleness—I will not say of the dove, but rather of the cat, our little tiger on the hearthrug, the most beautiful of four-footed things, so lithe, so soft, of so affectionate a disposition, yet capable when suddenly roused to anger of striking with lightning rapidity and rending the offender's flesh with its ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... round her; they propelled her towards the house. They were lithe, supple creatures of twenty and twenty-one. Between them walked Neville, with her small, pointed, elfish face, that was sensitive to every breath of thought and emotion like smooth water wind-stirred. With her great violet eyes brooding in it under thin black brows, and her wet hair hanging in loose ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... eyes curtained slightly by the drooping lids, the cheeks oval and rosy rich, the lips full and deep with dimpling in the corners, and all the grace of the tall lithe figure. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Col...." His eye-glasses slip downwards on his nose. The girls are not listening. Gretchen is entirely absorbed in the fascinating appearance of an Italian who has just passed, and who by unmistakable signs conveyed to her that she is adorable. His flashing eyes, his jet-black hair, his lithe figure, his pointed toes, the nimble way in which he managed to press her hand behind the very back of her father, have stirred her imagination. Hedvig is shocked. The elder daughter is permeated with respect for her father's professorial dignity. Every gesture betrays the capable ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the moving shadow was the half-caste Oola, shrouded in the dark blue blanket she had given her, and that the gin had halted at the casement window of Maule's bedroom. Now, Oola, with her hands on the sill, curved her lithe body, drew her bare feet to the window ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic as I remember that Judic long ago—Judic clad in bourgeois black from wrist to ankle, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... his type. To keep physically fit for the hardest campaigning and mentally fit for the highest problems of modern strategy and to boast about neither the one qualification nor the other—these were the articles of his creed. In appearance he was a little younger than his years, lithe, long in the leg, with a thin brown face and grey eyes which twinkled with humour. Harold Hazlewood was intensely proud of him, though he professed to detest his profession. And no doubt he found at times that the mere ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... art bronzed, thy limbs are lithe; How I laugh as through the crosse-game, Slipst thou like red elder withe. Thou art none of these pale-faces! When with thee I'll happy feel, For thou art the Mohawk warrior From thy ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... the evening of the same day, a Mexican sailor dodged in the front gate and slipped down to the side of the house. He stopped by the window and tapped on it with his finger. In a moment a woman opened the door. She was tall, lithe, and splendidly proportioned, with a dark Spanish face and straight hair. The man stepped inside. The woman bolted ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... favorably with the Kickapoos of the Vermilion river. The Kickapoo warriors were generally tall and sinewy, while the Potawatomi were shorter and more thickly set, very dark and squalid. Numbers of the women of the Kickapoos were described as being lithe, "and many of them by no means lacking in beauty." The Potawatomi women were inclined to greasiness and obesity. The Potawatomi had little regard for their women. Polygamy was common among them when visited by the early missionaries. The warriors were always gamblers, ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... the poet's language and gestures told. Only half comprehending, the majority stamped and huzzahed. Pinchas swelled visibly. His slim, lithe form, five and a quarter feet high, towered over the assembly. His complexion was as burnished copper, his ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... equipped for her call, and Phillip Stanley's glance rested appreciatively on the lithe, graceful figure in its dainty robe of pale yellow chambrey, with its soft garnishings of lace and black velvet. The nut-brown head was crowned with a pretty shade hat of yellow straw, also trimmed with black velvet ribbon, and a white parasol, surmounted by a great, gleaming ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... to whistle before you are out of the wood, and Brady's triumph was short-lived. Swift as a shadow, a lithe figure darted out from among the trees and planted ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... yelled Fred Hatfield, and as he shouted, the lithe cat sprang over the brush heap and landed in the road, right beside ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... this time there was another in their ranks. A man in his shirt sleeves with his hands bound behind his back marched with head erect between the two middle ranks. He was a tall, muscular man, broad of shoulder and lithe of limb. His face was pale, but the expression was calm and determined. His step was firm and the soldiers at his back found no need to urge him on. They marched straight to the wall of the yard that faced the jail, and at a command from the officer, the soldiers parted, leaving ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... tall and slender and graceful, and once you knew her the lithe form could never be mistaken. She walked with the easy spring that comes from a perfectly arched foot. To-day she swept swiftly down Marais Street, casting a quick glance here and there from under her heavy veil as if she feared she was being followed. If you had peered under the ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... business college, and had been engaged as his private stenographer and secretary. This girl had blossomed forth into something exceptional, as American children of foreign parents are wont to do. You would have scarcely believed that she, with her fine, lithe body, her good taste in dress, her skill in stenography, bookkeeping, and business details, could be the daughter of a struggling Pole, who had first worked in the Southwest Chicago Steel Mills, and who ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... "barb-wire" was the brand of "hooch" to which he most inclined. They knew him far; his igloos are on Kittiegazuit strand. They knew him well, the tribes who dwell within the Barren Land. From Koyokuk to Kuskoquim his fame was everywhere; And he did love, all life above, that little Julie Claire, The lithe, white slave-girl he had bought for seven hundred skins, And taken to his wickiup to ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... outlaw known as Jazz. The horse was a sorrel, and it knew all the tricks of its kind. It went sunfishing, tried weaving and fence-rowing, at last toppled over backward after a frantic leap upward. The rider, long-bodied and lithe, rode like a centaur. Except for the moment when he stepped out of the saddle as the outlaw fell on its back, he stuck to his seat as though he ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... familiar streets which led to his former home. He found Mrs. Johnson, but she had aged very fast since the war. She was no longer the lithe, active woman, with her proud manner and resolute bearing. Her eye had lost its brightness, her step its elasticity, and her whole appearance indicated that she was slowly sinking beneath a weight of sorrow which was heavier far than her weight of years. When ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... as sweet as the flowers that grow, By the side of the brooklet that runs near her cot; Her brow is as fair as the fresh fallen snow, And the gleam of her smile can be never forgot. Her figure is lithe and as graceful I ween As was Venus when Paris awarded the prize, She's the wiles of a fairy,—the step of a queen, And the light of true love's ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... thereafter he had this additional incentive, the future meeting with a tall, lithe girl with dark-brown hair and gray eyes—brave, deep eyes, and slightly swarthy cheeks, which were crimson as she ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... like lightning, and seized him by both wrists at the very instant that his pistol exploded; the bullet grazing the left side of my head, and neatly clipping off a lock of my hair. The fellow was as lithe as an eel in my hands, and made the most desperate efforts to stab me with his long, murderous-looking knife; but I had him fast in so powerful a grip that, after a furious struggle of a few seconds, he dropped both his weapons with a gasp ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... along so fast that it was as much as Dick and Steell could do to keep up with him. The night was dark and foggy, and at times they could not see him for the mist. But as he came within the glare of each lamp post, they could make out his lithe figure, scurrying along as if the devil himself were at ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... part of it. "Back and forth across the garden the little yellow birds were flitting, dodging through currant and gooseberry bushes, hiding in the lilacs, swaying for an instant on swinging sprays of grape vines, and then flashing out across the garden beds like yellow sunbeams. They were lithe, slender, dainty little creatures, and were so quick in their movements that I could not recognize them at first, but when one of them hopped down before me, lifted a fallen leaf and dragged a cutworm from beneath it, and, turning his head, gave me a sidewise glance with his victim still struggling ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... out before her, lithe-limbed and big-chested, the atmosphere of that firelit place seemed filled with a sense of safety. His deliberate manner of speech, quite different from the slowness of a drawl, was the natural voice of that ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... intensified in the tightened muscles of the temples. As many feet again; but a few more minutes—then liberty and life. The better to guard his movements, his gaze fell. Out and down went his right hand, then his left, as his lithe body slid forward. Again he glanced up, paused—and on the instant every muscle of his tense body went suddenly lax. Instead of the closed eyes and sleeping face he had expected, two steady eyes were giving him ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... true-love convoyed o'er the main To Mitylene—though the southern blast Chase the lithe waves, while westward slant the Kids, Or low above the verge Orion stand— If from Love's furnace she will rescue me, For Lycidas is parched with hot desire. Let halcyons lay the sea-waves and the winds, Northwind and ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... Fair forms, smooth with the ruddy glow of health, And ripening time, whose every motion seemed The wak'ning of ethereal gracefulness To life, and on whose lineaments the light Of a seraphic imagery play'd; Forms lithe and rounded by the art of youth To be the shrines of spirit excellence, And hold the fusion of immortal grace Unblemish'd by corporeal defect. What found he then? Flower-wreathed chalices Tinted with rosy ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... decisively, and passing up the stone steps of the entrance strode into the hall. There was a large sitting-room upon the ground floor, through the open door of which the visitor saw a sight which arrested him for a moment. A young girl was sitting in a recess near the window, with her lithe, supple figure bent forward, and her hands clasped at the back of her head, while her elbows rested upon a small table in front of her. Her superb brown hair fell in a thick wave on either side over her white round arms, and the graceful curve of her beautiful ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... often bandied about when the black coffee is being served. The marriageable young men of Morovenia had learned of the calamity in Count Malagaski's family. They knew that Kalora weighed less than one hundred and twenty pounds. She was tall, lithe, slender, sinuous, willowy, hideous. The fact that poor old Count Malagaski had made many unsuccessful attempts to fatten her was a stock subject for jokes of an unrefined and ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... of white water springing through or leaping over its rocks. Your boat for voyaging here must be stout enough to buffet the rapid, light enough to skim the shallow, agile enough to vault over, or lithe enough to slip through, the barricade. Besides, sometimes the barricade becomes a compact wall,—a baffler, unless boat and boatmen can circumvent it,—unless the nautical carriage can itself be carried about the obstacle,—can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... into a firm triumvirate, mates in the work and play of an Australian cattle-run; watched over by the silent grey man whose existence centred in his motherless son and daughter—with a warm corner in his affections for the lithe, merry Queensland boy, whose loyalty to Billabong and its people had never wavered since ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... him. Hyvert was the son of a rich merchant of Lyons, who had offered the sub-officer charged with his deportation sixty thousand francs to permit his escape. He was at once the Achilles and the Paris of the band. He was of medium height but well formed, lithe, and of graceful and pleasing address. His eyes were never without animation nor his lips without a smile. His was one of those countenances which are never forgotten, and which present an inexpressible blending of sweetness and strength, tenderness ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... regards love and marriage, we seem to be entering, with all our sails spread, upon what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, its apostle and evangelist, calls a Gothic Revival, but what one of the many newspapers that so greatly admire Mr. Hepworth Dixon's lithe and sinewy style and form their own style upon it, calls, by a yet bolder and more striking figure, "a great sexual insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race." For this end we have to avert our eyes from everything ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... garments of soft-toned linens, reaching from neck half-way to the knees and unbelted, are ideal for garden work, and to the young and slender, add a distinct charm, for one catches the movement of the lithe form beneath. ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... chords of a harp rang through the hall, and the throng burst into loud acclamations. All eyes were fixed on Salome, who paused in her rhythmic dance, placed her feet wide apart, and without bending the knees, suddenly swayed her lithe body downward, so that her chin touched the floor; and her whole audience,—the nomads, accustomed to a life of privation and abstinence, the Roman soldiers, expert in debaucheries, the avaricious publicans, and even the crabbed, elderly priests—gazed ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... my lord, certainly; and besides, they are very highly decorative too. Nothing looks better to my mind at a banquet than bright gay faces and lithe young figures set in a shining framework of mail. By the way, my Lord Lysimachus, it was kind of you to provide our procession with a strong detachment of fine young soldiers from Bosphorus. I have secured a prominent place for them, and ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... and gazed at her. She was a lithe, supple-looking woman, at once graceful and fully developed; a dark beauty of the style peculiar to the South, with wonderful animation in her face, and dark flashing eyes. At the same time the play ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... leggings, he stood lithe and erect at the bedside, and with his fist at her face, delivered a short charge, the point of which was, that unless she lay like a mouse till morning he'd have her life, though he hanged for it. And with that he drew the curtain, and was hidden ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... send them to St. Ives; Strong men have cried like babes, bydam, To hear what happened at Babraham. But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester! There's peace and holy quiet there, Great clouds along pacific skies, And men and women with straight eyes, Lithe children lovelier than a dream, A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream, And little kindly winds that creep Round twilight corners, half asleep. In Grantchester their skins are white, They bathe by day, they bathe ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... life. But sometimes he would find silence on one bank for a goodly stretch where there was neither marsh-chorus nor cadences of insects. The hush would be profound and an affrighted air of suspense was apparent. And there at the river-brink the author of this breathless dismay, some lithe flesh-eater, would stride, shadow-like, through the high reeds to drink. Now and then the woman-like scream of the wildcat, or the harsh staccato laugh of the hyena would startle the marshes into silence. Sometimes retiring shapes would halt ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... back on the cushions and looked at them—lean lithe little men with rapid eyes and supple bodies and great repose. They gave him the same sense of strangeness that he had felt in the presence of the prince and of the woman in the Bitley Reformatory—as if, it whimsically flashed to him, they some way rhymed with ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... with you.'" The girl put the brush under her arm, still further spread her feet, put her hands behind some pretended coat-tails, let the brush slip from under her arms, so that it fell to the floor with a racket, stooped with an affectation of clumsiness which seemed impossible to the lithe figure, while mumbling something inarticulate in an apparent paroxysm of embarrassment,—which quickly became a genuine ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... moment the man came sweeping into the dining-room. He was carrying a heavy hunting-crop and his flabby face was livid. Behind him came Alma. She was in riding costume and was bending a lithe whip in ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... or that his mother, guessing the truth, was in pain with terror, or to feel that a rescuing party coming at the wrong time would bring on a fight in which the girls would be killed. Only the picture of Jane Mason, fine and lithe and strong, with the pink cheeks of twenty, and the soft curves of childhood still playing about her chin and throat as he saw it from the ground at her feet,—that picture was etched into his heart, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... grape dissolved melancholy. When the last of it had flowed the dance was resumed. The women began a spirited danse du ventre. Their eyes now sparkled, their bodies were lithe and graceful. McHenry rushed on to the lawn and taking his place among them copied their motions in antics that set them roaring with the hearty roars of the conquered at the asininity of the conquerors. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... But, thanks to cleanliness, to wholesome and sufficient food, to a calm and well-regulated life, to the pure, healthy air they breathe, the natural hues and the joyousness of youth soon reanimate the little faces; and with lithe, invigorated limbs, and happy hearts, these young creatures join merrily in the games of their new companions. They have entered the institution old; they will leave ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... arm-chair. The soft lamp-light fell on his clean, bald, Michael-Angelo head, across which a few pure hairs glittered. His chin was sunk on his breast, so that his sparse but strong-haired white beard, in which every strand stood distinct, like spun glass lithe and elastic, curved now upwards and inwards, in a curious curve returning upon him. He seemed to be sunk in stern, prophet-like meditation. As a matter of fact, he was asleep ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... She remembered it plainly now—that treasured, highly colored lithograph of a brigand holding up a coach in a mountain pass! There was in this face the same mocking deviltry; his figure had the same lithe grace; he needed only the big hoop earrings ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... us—was the mistress of an officer at the front, a prostitute of the Berlin sidewalks, who enrolled for hospital work when her lover went to the front. She Was a tall, dark, handsome girl, who looked to be more Spaniard than German, and she was graceful and lithe even in the exceedingly shapeless costume of blue print that she wore. She was less deft than either of her associates but very willing and eager. As between the three—the noblewoman, the working woman and the woman of the street—the medical officials ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... morning conventions on the beach. As a general thing, he only watched the people in groups, and entertained himself with making shrewd guesses as to the probable relationships existing in those groups. Only two individuals made distinct impressions upon him. One of these was the tall, lithe girl in the black suit, who walked as well as she swam; the other was also a girl, but younger and less good-looking, and Gifford Barrett found himself wondering how she could possibly be in so many places at once. He appeared to be always falling over her, always coming ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... a nurse's charge) was to watch acrobats and riders at the circus. This was not so much for the skillful feats as on account of the beauty of their persons. Even then I cared chiefly for the more lithe and graceful fellows. People told me that circus actors were wicked, and would steal little boys, and so I came to look upon my favorites as half-devil and half-angel. When I was older and could go about alone, I would often hang around the tents of travelling shows in hope of catching a glimpse ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... figures and faces disappear from that diurnal stage! It seems but yesterday since we met there Dr. Francis's cheering salutation, or listened to Dr. Bethune's and Fenno Hoffman's genial and John Stephens's truthful talk,—watched General Scott's stalwart form, Dr. Kane's lithe frame, Cooper's self-reliant step, Peter Parley's juvenile cheerfulness,—and grasped Henry Inman's cordial hand, or listened to Irving's humorous reminiscence, and met the benign smile of dear old Clement Moore. As to fairer faces and more delicate shapes,—to encounter which was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... out, but it would sink back into the ground and return. John again gave thanks for the splendid pair of high boots that he wore, and also he often searched the air for Lannes. But he saw no sign of the lithe and swift Arrow and his anxiety for Julie increased steadily. She must now be at Chastel, but he had not yet found any excuse that would release him from the trenches and let him ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... she had the eye of a person of aristocratic tastes for what was in good form, and she saw that Mr. Harrison's turnout was all of that, with another attraction for her, that it was daring; for the horses were lithe, restless creatures, thoroughbreds, both of them; and it looked as if they had not been out of the stable in a week. They were giving the groom who held them all ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... banks of flowers,—waters so sweet that who drank would drink again, and with every draught would throw off years and pain until at last he was a youth once more,—a youth with hot blood, sparkling eyes, lithe muscles; a youth who saw the world full of beauty and adventure. Ah, to be once more as he was when the princess beamed on him; to throw away his cares, his ails, his conscience, his regrets; to sing and dance, to ruffle it with other cavaliers, ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... rare gem of thy own; take care no one gets it who is not likely to pay a worthy price. That pretty Greek has a lithe sleekness about him, that seems marvellously fitted for slipping easily into any nest he fixes his ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... commenced to build a raft. There were logs enough of every size and length in the forest, and we selected those only which we could drag with ease to the water's edge. Lithe vines, of which there were plenty hanging to the trees, served instead of ropes, and with these we bound our logs together. As the pine-wood was heavy, we formed a platform on the top of the logs with smaller poles and lighter branches, interwoven, and bound together as tightly as we considered ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... have loved your mother! She was most beautiful, and of the type so dear to you. Her skin was almost as white as Leah's, her eyes almost as black, her hair even blacker; like Leah, she was tall and slim and lithe and graceful. She might have been Leah's mother, too, for the likeness between them. How often you remind me of her when you laugh or sing, and when you're funny in French; those droll, quick gestures and quaint intonations, that ease and freedom and deftness as you move! ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... hailed him in chorus he was bewildered for a moment, and stood in the gateway leaning on his rifle, his coonskin cap thrust back on his brown hair, his bright, steady gray eyes concentrated as he listened. His tall, lithe figure in his buckskin hunting shirt and leggings, the habitual garb of the frontiersmen, grew tense and gave an intimation of gathering all its forces for the defensive as he noted how the aspect of the station differed from its wonted guise. Every house of the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... upon the group, would have found it a curious and interesting study. Mr. Balfour was a tall, lithe man, with not a redundant ounce of flesh on him. He was as straight as an arrow, bore on his shoulders a fine head that gave evidence in its contour of equal benevolence and force, and was a practical, fearless, straightforward, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... more remembered, Ages nearer the beginning, When the heavens were closer to us, And the Gods were more familiar, In the North-land lived a hunter, With ten young and comely daughters, Tall and lithe as wands of willow; Only Oweenee, the youngest, She the wilful and the wayward, She the silent, dreamy maiden, Was the fairest of ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... intercept me. He came by a series of leaps and bounds and at an astonishing pace, and the way he moved somehow inspired me with a fresh horror, for it did not seem the natural movement of a human being at all, but more, as I have said, like that of some lithe wild animal. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... climbed the mountains with his father, fished in the fjords, collected the mosses on the rocks, and wrote out at length all of their amateur discoveries. The boy grew strong in body, lithe of limb, clear of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... the last spurs of true mountains) is covered with a grass like tall rye-grass, but growing in tufts. That is the famous Guinea-grass {78e} which, introduced from Africa, has spread over the whole West Indies. Dark lithe coolie prisoners, one a gentle young fellow, with soft beseeching eyes, and 'Felon' printed on the back of his shirt, are cutting it for the horses, under the guard of a mulatto turnkey, a tall, steadfast, dignified man; and between us and them are growing along the edge of the gutter, veritable ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Wo to the sons of the far-off land, Weak in heart and pale in face, Deer in battle, moose in a race, Panthers wanting claw and tooth Wo to the red man, strong of hand, Steady of purpose, lithe of limb, Calm in the toils of the foe, Knowing nor tears nor ruth Wo to them and him, If, cast by hard fate at the midnight damp, Or an hour of storm in the dismal swamp, That skirts the Lake of ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... The species is the most widely distributed of all beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from Greeland's spicy mountains to India's moral strand. The popular name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the American variety (felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... up again and tried to seem not to notice. The Boy saw and watched her brave attempts at self-control with deep appreciation. But suddenly, as they rode and talked, a dark form appeared across their way a little ahead, lithe and stealthy and furry, and two awful eyes like green lamps glared for an instant, then disappeared silently among the ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... dozen long-forgotten pictures lanced themselves poignantly into his brain,—dingy, uncontrovertible old recitation rooms where young ideas flashed bright and futile as parade swords,—elm-shaded slopes where lithe young bodies lolled on green velvet grasses to expound their harshest cynicisms! Book-history, book-science, book-economics, book-love,—all the paper passion of all the paper poets swaggering imperiously on boyish lips that would have died a thousand bashful deaths ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... her. She was a lithe, supple-looking woman, at once graceful and fully developed; a dark beauty of the style peculiar to the South, with wonderful animation in her face, and dark flashing eyes. At the same time the play of her features was not pleasing, Salve thought. It reminded ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... wore the garb of a Japanese merchant. His feet were sandaled. His straight, lithe figure was robed in an expensive gray silk kimono. Jammed tight to his ears, in good Nipponese fashion, was a black American derby. His eyebrows were penciled in a fairly praiseworthy attempt to reproduce the Celestial slant, and he carried a ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... you speak the tongue of the master whom you serve. No more do you know of us the "Masters" than you know of them the "dogs." We are above you, they below. And between us you stand, guarding the street, erect and splendid, lithe and male. Your scarlet turban frames your neat black head, ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... Ryder's lithe strength was swift. There was one breathless moment of pursuit, then his hand fell with gripping fierceness upon the huddled dark figure that had sped so frantically to the tiny door in the garden's end.... A moment more and she would ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... in the look of them, in the trained, springy strides, in the lithe, erect forms, in the assurance in every move. Every detail of that practice photographed itself upon Ken Ward's memory, and he knew ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... his fire kindled fire in return. When he was not at Crownlands she could laugh at him, even though her thoughts were full of him. But when he was there, life to her was more radiant, more full, more glowing with colour and fragrance. The books he touched, the chair he had at breakfast, his young, lithe body in its golfing knickerbockers, or his sleek black head above the dull black of evening wear, haunted her oddly. He troubled her, but she had neither quite the power nor quite ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... lion-tamer, a Mr. Van Amburgh, was to perform with some trained animals. Oh, what a crowd there was!—most people going early so they could walk around and view the animals in their cages. There were two beautiful striped hyenas, lithe as cats, and so restless you were almost afraid they would find some loose bar and spring out at you. The two lions roared tremendously when disturbed. A great cage full of the funniest chattering monkeys, ready for nuts or cake or bits of apples, and who ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... seats under the gallery. And a hardy lot they were, as brown and brawny as their fathers, but tingling with life to their finger-tips, ready for anything, and impossible of control except by one whom they feared as well as reverenced. And such a man was Alexander Murray, for they knew well that, lithe and brawny as they were, there was not a man of them but he could fling out of the door and over the fence if he so wished; and they knew, too, that he would be prompt to do it if occasion arose. Hence they waited for the word of God with all due reverence ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... moment it raged at one extreme of the lists, the next at the other; and so well inured, from their very infancy, to the weight of mail were these redoubted champions, that the very wrestlers on the village green, nay, the naked gladiators of old, might have envied their lithe agility ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dark, graceful head was turned toward the fiery fete on shore, and his busy thoughts were with that lithe, dripping figure he had seen through the sea-glasses, climbing into a distant boat. For the figure reminded him of a girl he had known very well when the world was younger; and the ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... performances still went on. Finally, as the other children were not geniuses, but merely boys and girls in search of fun, the little company broke up. Its success, however, had determined for ever the career of Adrienne. With her beautiful face, her lithe and exquisite figure, her golden voice, and her instinctive art, it was plain enough that her future lay upon the stage; and so at fourteen or fifteen she began where most actresses leave off—accomplished and attractive, and having had a ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... they patted the leathery cakes with persuasive slaps as a dairymaid pats butter. Low-caste sweepers glided like shadows to and fro. Suddenly some one crossed the gangway and the sentry stiffened and presented arms. The O.C. looked down from the upper deck and saw a lithe, sinewy little figure with white moustaches and "imperial"; the eyes were of a piercing steel-blue. The figure was clad in a general's field-service uniform, and on his shoulder-straps were the insignia of a field-marshal. The colonel stared ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity, even when his words were kindest. Through this dull consciousness, which never left her, came, like a sting, the recollection of the dark blue eyes and lithe figure of the little Irish girl she had left in the cellar. The recollection struck through even her stupid intellect with a vivid glow of beauty and of grace. Little Janey, timid, helpless, clinging to Hugh as her only friend: that was ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... little while she awoke and uncoiling her figure, rolled softly over on her back and stretched like some drowsy feline of the jungle; then sitting up with lithe grace she looked down at the print of her head on the pillow and deftly smoothed it out. The action was characteristic: she was careful to hide the traces of her behavior, and the habit was so strong that ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... is the title of Miss Mary Shepard Greene's graceful canvas. The lithe and youthful figure of a girl is extended upon a straight-backed settle in somewhat of a Recamier pose. She is intently occupied in the perusal of a book. The turn of the head, the careless attitude, and the flesh tints of throat and face are all admirably ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... have brought such super-physical equipment to the strenuous work of the movies. Fairbanks, in addition to being blessed with a strong, lithe body, has developed it by expert devotion to every form of athletic sport. He swims well, is a crack boxer, a good polo player, a splendid wrestler, a skilful acrobat, a fast runner, and an ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... the topsail shivers, The bowlines strain and the lee shrouds slacken, The braces are taut, the lithe boom quivers, And the waves with the coming ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... girl stands in wondering amaze, her velvety brown eyes lustrous with emotion. Lithe, graceful, with a supple strength in every rounded limb, in the slightly compressed red lips, the broad, dimpled chin, and the straight, resolute brows. The quaint gray costume, nun-like in its plainness, cannot make a nun ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... is fair, as might be expected from the swan, soft as down (she was hatched from an egg, you know), and such a lithe, graceful figure; and only think, she is so much admired, that there was a war because Theseus ran away with her; and she was a mere child then. And when she grew up, the very first men in Greece were suitors for her hand, and she was given to Menelaus, who is descended from ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... his breath. Always lithe and graceful, to-night Patty looked like a veritable spirit. Her floating draperies, her golden hair, and her perfect face, crowned with the single silver star, seemed to belong to some super-human being, ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... With her lithe step she continued ascending the stairs. She had remained essentially a foreigner, a Frenchwoman, too different from those among whom she lived to be influenced by her environment. On reaching the second floor she resumed: "There, on the left, are Donna Serafina's rooms; ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... said Browne, going down the bank, followed eagerly by the little Sanford, who had also his interest in the arrival of the parcels from London. There came after them presently a lithe young negro boy of fifteen, not yet two years out of Africa. He was clad in nothing but his native blackness, which was deemed sufficient for a half-grown negro in that day. Mrs. Browne had sent black Jocko after the ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... said. "That's how I held the little devil. Now grip hard and try to crush the pencils and you'll have something of the same sensation as I had. Holding it thus, I could feel its head jerking this way and that, violently, and its tail, long and lithe, lashing at my wrist. The little claws were trying to tear, but they were evidently softish. I could hear, or thought I could, the snap of its little jaws. It was about the nastiest sensation that I ever experienced. I don't know why ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... fro in front of the wires, eager for escape. Strong inclosures, containing both rats and ferrets, were ranged along the sides of the small room; the latter, long, yellow, pink-eyed, and pink-nosed creatures, lithe as a willow wand, courting notice; while the rats, on the contrary, moved their whiskers in defiance, and, with bright, black, determined eyes, sat lumped up in the distant corners of their dens, ready 'to die game,' if die they ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... had appeared, began the arrival of the young athletes from across the plain to the left. Swiftly them came, and gracefully, their lithe brown bodies glistening in the early sunlight, across the level lowland, then up the steep trail, to be met at the mesa edge by a picturesque individual carrying a cow bell and wearing a beautiful garland of fresh yellow squash blossoms ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... community house of split cedar planks with carved totem poles for corner posts, and called his young men to take care of our canoe and to bring wood for a fire that he might feast us. The wife of this chief was one of the finest looking Indian women I have ever met,—tall, straight, lithe and dignified. But, crawling about on the floor on all fours, was the most piteous travesty of the human form I have ever seen. It was an idiot boy, sixteen years of age. He had neither the comeliness of a beast nor the ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... of about thirty. A fellow with a handsome face and a lithe well-made figure which he managed with some grace. He had the air of one who had seen better days. I remember, one day when the captain was bestowing upon him some especially choice oaths, seeing him clap his hand to his side as though he expected to ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... his tender mouth and his strong hands. The very thought of that killed the joy of the other. If love was jealousy, and jealousy was pain, the one must be healed for sake of the other. With this girl to think was to do, and with that last discovery she was upon her feet, straight and lithe as a young animal beside the door. She would go to this man and tell him that the red flower was less than nothing to her, ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... scarred limbs and fierce visage fasten their eyes curiously upon a white man who, standing against the bole of the elm, comes to them as white man never came before. He is a young man of about eight and thirty, wearing about his lithe and well-knit figure a sash of skyblue silk. He is tall, handsome and of commanding presence. His movements are easy, agile and athletic; his manner is courtly, graceful and pleasing; his voice, whilst deep and firm, is soft and agreeable; his face ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... girl's face was of that mold which invariably draws first the eye of a man, then his intellect, then his heart, and sometimes all three at once. The face was as lovely as a rose of Taormina. Dark brown were her eyes, dark brown was her hair. She was tall and lithe, too, with the subtle hint of the woman. There were good taste and sense in her garments. A bunch of Parma violets was pinned against ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... and looked at her. She was altered by time, as much as I was. The slight and graceful shape was gone; not that I remembered anything of her figure, if you please; for boys of twelve are not yet prone to note the shapes of women; but that her lithe straight gait had struck me as being so unlike our people. Now her time for walking so was past, and transmitted to her children. Yet her face was comely still, and full of strong intelligence. I gazed at her, and she at me; and we ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... perfectly clean-shorn from the nose to the heels, through the aperture of his separate enclosure. With the same effort apparently he calls out 'Wool!' and darts upon another sheep. Drawing this second victim across his knee, he buries his shear-points in the long wool of its neck. A moment after a lithe and eager boy has gathered up fleece number one, and tossed it into the train-basket, the shearer is halfway down the sheep's side, the wool hanging in one fleece like a great glossy mat, before you have done wondering whether ...
— Shearing in the Riverina, New South Wales • Rolf Boldrewood
... ever-moving, O lithe and free! Fast in my linen prison I press On impassable bars, or emptily Laugh in my great loneliness. And still in the white neat bed I strive Most impotently against that gyve; Being less now than a thought, even, To you alone ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... Nehushta heard the trampling of the beasts that were being got ready for the journey, in the court without, and the cries of the drivers and of the serving-men. She rose quickly from her bed—a lithe white-clad figure in the dawn light—and pushed the heavy curtains aside and looked out through the lattice; and she forgot her evil dream, for her heart leaped again at the thought that she should no more be shut up in Ecbatana, and ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... rapidly did his figure now reveal itself, beyond all doubt, as the figure of a man. A few minutes more and Arnold fancied he recognized it. Yet a little longer, and he was quite sure. There was no mistaking the lithe strength and grace of that man, and the smooth easy swiftness with which he covered his ground. It was the hero of the coming foot-race. It was Geoffrey on his way ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... boys race their half-broken broncos. These lads are as lithe and lean as the ponies they bestride. Across the bay, the Sierras of Santa Cruz lift their virgin crests (plumed with giant redwoods) to the brightest skies on earth. Flashing brooks wander to the sea unvexed by mill, unbridged in Nature's unviolated ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the next day, the 19th, the squadron had hewed its way by sundown to within eight hundred yards of Rolling Fork. They rested that night, and the morning of the 20th again started to work through the willows, but the lithe trees resisted all their efforts to push through, and had either to be pulled up one by one or cut off under water, both tedious processes. Meanwhile Ferguson, having collected 800 men and six pieces of artillery, attacked Murphy's ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... and middle size, but compact, lithe, and muscular, with a not unkindly face, which, however, showed but too plainly the marks of habitual dissipation. A rigger by occupation, a sailor and pilot at need, a skilful fisherman, and ready shot, with a roving experience, which had given him a smattering of half a score of the more common ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... a servant, and presently judge Ackroyd stalked into the room. As Average Jones was being presented, he took comprehensive note and estimate of the broad-cheeked, thin-lipped face; the square shoulders and corded neck, and the lithe and formidable carriage of the man. Judge "Oily" Ackroyd's greeting of the guest within his gates did not bear out the sobriquet of his public life. It was curt ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to the engineers, and he cast off the rope sling. Then cautiously he stepped out to the end of the timber. It tottered, but the lithe figure moved on to within striking distance. He swung the twenty-four pound sledge in a circle against the butt of the timber. Every muscle in his body from the ankles up had helped to deal the blow, and the big stick bucked. The boss sprang erect, flinging ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... And it was to this Captain Scott that our Dorothy Q. gave her hand in a second marriage three years later. She outlived her second husband many years, residing at the end of her life on Federal Street in Boston. When turned of seventy she had a lithe, handsome figure, a pair of laughing eyes, and fine yellow ringlets in which scarcely a gray hair could be seen. And although for the second time a widow, she was as sprightly as a girl of sixteen. In her advanced years, Madam Scott received another call from Lafayette, and those who ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... as we are in the South Gardens, we might take the time to investigate the two fountains on either side of the center, towards the Horticultural Palace on the left and Festival Hall on the right. There we find a very lithe mermaid, used alike on either side, from a model by Arthur Putnam. Many of us who for years looked forward to the great opportunity of the Exposition, which would give Arthur Putnam a worthy field for his great genius, ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... His anger was much too great for words; but there was something more than anger: there was a revulsion of feeling, that made the woman he had loved seem hateful to him—hateful in her fatal beauty, as a snake is hateful in its lithe grace and silvery sheen. She had deceived him so completely; there was something to his mind beyond measure dastardly in her stolen meetings with George Fairfax; and he set down all her visits to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard to that account. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... sat near the window, lazily rocking, her long lithe arms clasped about her knees, her face a dream of the day. The seasons single out their favorite moods: a violet of spring-time woos one, a dusky June rose another; to-day the soft, languorous air had, unconsciously to her, charmed the ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... when the Limited slowed down beside the old frame station—a new one of brick was rising across the tracks—a young woman descended from a Pullman at the front of the train. She was lithe and graceful, rather tall and slender, and was dressed with effective simplicity in a blue tailored suit and a tan straw hat with a single blue quill. Her face was flushed, and there glowed an expectant brightness in her brown eyes, as though happiness ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... faintest intention of permitting Lize to go to Cavanagh's aid, that intention came to no issue, for with the coming of the third night Wetherford was unconscious and unrecognizable to any one who had known him in the days of "the free range." Lithe daredevil in those days, expert with rope and gun, he was as far from this scarred and swollen body as the soaring eagle is from the carrion which he sees ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... some other place below. We were told, however, that two 'pups' were now at the hospice; and as we sallied out for a walk over the hills, we heard a violent scratching at an adjoining door, which being opened, out burst the pups. They were perfect monsters, though very young, with huge paws, lithe and graceful but compact forms, full of life and activity, and faces beaming with instinct. Darting out with us, they seemed frantic with joy, snuffed the keen air as they rushed about, sometimes tumbling over each other, and at times bursting against ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... fires that sometimes burst into flame, the lustrous mass of undulating hair that sparkled in the sunlight like an aureole to her face or framed it in heavy splendors with its shadows, and the supple erectness of her graceful carriage, the lithe dignity of ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... help it," advised Rupert. Rischenheim's answer was to make for the door at a great speed. Rupert watched him go, and then returned to the window. The last his cousin saw was his figure standing straight and lithe against the light, while he looked out on the city. Still there was no stir in the streets, still the royal standard floated at the top of the ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... a certain boyish admiration for the tall, lithe girl who bore such a record for bravery, though not for the world would they have admitted the fact, even to each other; and they could not resist plaguing her on the sly whenever a chance presented itself. But to tease her openly was out of the question; so Gloriana received a double share of tormenting, ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... on a farm in Westchester County, New York, where she had acquired some knowledge of farming and woodcraft, by assisting her husband in his labors, or by accompanying him while hunting and fishing. She was strong and healthy; and quite, unlike her delicate sisters of modern days, her lithe frame was hardened by exercise in the open air, and her face was tinged by the kisses ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... forecastle, to watch the channel and give timely warning of anything barring the way that might escape the wider-ranging eye of the intrepid young pilot; and as the Cayuga pressed on, receiving the first shock of the outburst from the forts, what finer subject for the painter, than that lithe young figure standing up in bold and unflinching relief, at the extreme bow of the ship, peering ahead in the morning starlight to pilot her safely on her way, amid the blinding flame and screaming bolts, the hurtle of shot and crash of shell, the explosion and deafening roar of a hundred shotted ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... Hewn with the lithe grace of Praxiteles; Globed pearls to please A sultan; golden veils that drop like lawn — How happy I could be with but a tithe Of your ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... hard, relentless frown by which it was answered, as well as they knew the use of the dreaded instrument itself. But there was only one among them who comprehended its immediate purpose. The glance of cruel meaning which the tyranness, after having examined the lithe, twisted rod critically for an instant, cast upon the object of her malice, probably banished the last lingering hesitation from the breast of the latter,—who turned away ostensibly to the performance of her accustomed duties, but in reality to settle the details ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... two natives standing at the edge of the wood quietly watching us. One of them I at once recognised as the lithe and active leader, whom I had seen upon the shore in swift ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... development was in the direction of power. In order to face the constant danger of hurt and even of destruction, his predatory and protective faculties were unduly developed. He became quicker of movement than the other dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with ironlike muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious, and more intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would not have held his own nor survive the hostile environment in ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... manner black and scarlet counterchanged. And yet, somehow, whether from the way of wearing it, or from the effect of the gold embroidery meandering over all, the effect was not distressing, but more like that of a gorgeous bird. The figure was tall, lithe, and active, the brown ruddy face had none of the blank stare of vacant idiocy, but was full of twinkling merriment, the black eyes laughed gaily, and perhaps only so clearsighted and shrewd an observer as Tibble would have detected a weakness of purpose ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... scarcely dawn when I was roused by a little arm round my neck, and waked to think I had one of Raphael's cherubs by my side. Fingers of waxen softness were ruthlessly at work upon my eyes, and the little form that met my touch felt lithe and elastic, like a kitten's limbs. There was just light enough to see the child, perched on the edge of the bed, her soft blue dressing-gown trailing over the white night-dress, while her black and long-fringed eyes shone through the dimness of morning. ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... few minutes later, as Doctor Mayberry was unsaddling his horse in the barn a lithe figure enveloped as to head and shoulders in one of Cindy's kitchen aprons darted under the dripping eaves and stood breathless and laughing in ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... lovely when the pale moon flings down her rays on the chalice of the Datura arborea, brimming with nectareous dew—her own most favoured flower, delicate of scent and chaste in beauty. Yet the night of the tropics has many drawbacks: noxious, unsightly creatures then forsake their lair, lithe snakes uncoil their glossy rings, bats flutter in the moonbeams, and croaking frogs disturb the silence ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... the pair of you,' said Mr. Jim Elliott, marking the brown faces, the lean, lithe look of the ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... delightful twilight of the fresh and gentle May; the dew was heavy on each bush and flower and stem, as they went to bring Deirdre forth from the green knoll where she stayed. Many a youth was there who had a lithe leaping and lissom step when they started whose step was faint, failing, and faltering when they reached the bothy on account of the length of the way and roughness of ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... the dory. The other passengers—what there were of them—gathered to see the little group depart. Dr. Frank offered Dr. Dare a hand, which she accepted, like a lady, not needing it in the least. She was a climber, with firm, lithe ankles. No one spoke, as these people got in with the negro, and prepared to drift down with the scorching tide. The woman looked from the steamer to the shore, once, and back again, northwards. The men did not look at all. There was an oppression in the scene which no one was ready to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of him. Never. Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields? He is no longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a shadow passes ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... hasty look behind her, when a shot out of the dark from the direction of the river-bank struck her ears with a suddenness and a portent which seemed to carry the pain of death. She was facing that way; she saw the flash of it; she saw Jerry Boyle leap with lithe agility, as if springing from the scourge of flames, and sling his pistol from the ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... not until the gong sounded and the two men rose from their chairs that the contrast between the toughened ex-professional and the lithe, graceful amateur brought forth a little murmur of delight ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... have been employing his time so much more pleasantly in the very room. For, flitting in and out of the bar during the game, and every now and then stooping over the old lady's shoulder to examine her hand, and exchange knowing looks with her, was the lithe little figure of Miss Patty, with her oval race, and merry eyes, and bright brown hair, and jaunty little cap, with fresh blue ribbons of the shade of the St. Ambrose colors. However, there is no accounting for tastes, and it is fortunate that some like ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... something more than even pretty. The lithe gracefulness of her figure spoke of familiarity with both tennis and tango, and her face with its well-chiselled profile denoted intellectuality from which no touch of really feminine charm had been removed by the fearsome process of the creation of the modern woman. Sincerity as ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging with the lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing him nearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon he would be crunching the glass of the house under that confident ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... double brick house which was taking its share of the storm. There were piles of snow on the steps and broad piazzas, huge drifts against the fences, and great banks on the terraces of the gardens. The wind lashed the lithe limbs of the leafless trees of the orchard, shrieked through the sooty caverns of the wide chimneys, whistled merrily as it drove the snow against the windows, and rattled the casements with howls of glee as it went ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... country, nor indeed in any other, where the Normans were still strangers. As the Knights advanced on horseback, in their metal coating, they looked more like iron cylinders filled with flesh and blood, than like lithe and limber human combatants. The man-at-arms, whether Knight or Squire, was almost invariably mounted; his war-horse was usually led, while he rode a hackney, to spare the destrier. The body armour was a hauberk of netted iron or steel, to which were joined a hood, sleeves, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... at her, taking in her tallness, her slenderness, the lithe and beautiful line of her body, curved slightly backward as she ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... and lithe as a young white-stemmed birch-tree; her hair was like a soft dusky cloud, and her eyes were as blue as Avonlea Harbor in a fair twilight, when all the sky is ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... chatty as an Andalusian, and as frank as a Tyrolese, he formed a remarkable contrast to the men with whom we had hitherto come in contact. He had long black hair, wicked black eyes, and a mouth which laughed even when his face was at rest. Add a capital tenor voice, a lithe, active frame, and something irresistibly odd and droll in his motions, and you have his principal points. We walked across the birch-wooded isthmus behind Vik to the Eyfjordsvand, a lake about three miles long, which ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... He fussed with the ball and took a long while to pitch. Reddy's lithe form whirled around and seemed to get into running motion with the crack of the ball. Martin made a beautiful pick-up of the sharply bounding ball, but he might as well have saved himself the exertion. The championship sprinter beat the throw ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... over." And a moment later he was splashing through the shallow brook, holding the lithe, warm figure of his client high above the water. As he set her down upon the opposite bank she gave a pretty sigh of satisfaction, and naively told him that he was very strong for a man in ...
— The Day of the Dog • George Barr McCutcheon
... perhaps a thought under the middle size, but very neatly made,—a sunburnt Corporal with a brown peaked beard,—faced about at the moment, addressing voluble words of instruction to the squad in hand. Nothing was amiss or awry about the Corporal. A lithe and nimble Corporal, quite complete, from the sparkling dark eyes under his knowing uniform cap to his sparkling white gaiters. The very image and presentment of a Corporal of his country's army, ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven. Nearly twenty years have passed since men heard his voice, looked on his strong, lithe, active form, saw the gleam of his honest eyes, and felt the presence of a man—a man who wanted nothing and gave everything—a man who gave ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... without warning to strike him, Victor recoiled and for an instant stood gibbering. And she took advantage of this moment in one lithe bound to put the table ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... home that night with Elizabeth. She was a tall blonde girl, lithe and graceful, and with a calculated ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... progress which any vehicle would make over the blind and broken paths of that uncultivated realm. Either thus, or on foot, as was the common practice with the mountain hunters; men who, at seventy years of age, might be found as lithe and active, in clambering up the lofty summit as if in full possession of the winged vigor and ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... raise his spirits. Angelica came down to dinner dressed in pale green, with something yellow on her head. Mr. Kilroy admired her immensely; she was the only subject upon which he ever became poetical, and somehow the combination of colours she wore on this occasion, with her lithe young figure and milk-white skin, made him think of an arum lily, and he told her so, and was very pleased with the pretty compliment when he had paid it, and with the dinner, and everything. The fatal age was forgotten, and he allowed ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... brilliant display of beauty and fashion that lighted up the classic walls as with living sunbeams. Such clusters of mimic blossoms and flowing ringlets wreathed together round fair, blooming faces; such a cloud of soft, airy drapery floating over lithe figures, swaying forward like light boughs agitated by the wind; such a fluttering of snowy fans, making the cool, pleasant sound of rain drops pattering among April leaves; such bright eager eyes, turned at every sounding step towards ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... beltless Milesians now despotically rule the traffic as effectually as the London bobbies. It is characteristic that the youngsters about the streets should be keener, sharper, more active even than the youngsters of London. The lithe, thin, cigarette-smoking gamins that sell newspapers down town are a study in themselves as they dart and double through the traffic and the crowded sidewalks, selling innumerable editions of voluminous ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... always something in Carolus-Duran’s attitude when at work which recalls the swordsman. With an enormous palette in one hand and a brush in the other, he has a way of planting himself in front of his sitter that is amusingly suggestive of a duel. His lithe body sways to and fro, his fine leonine face quivers with the intense study of his model; then with a sudden spring forward, a few rapid touches are dashed on the canvas (like home strokes in the enemy’s weakest ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... assistant had a good basis to start from. He was 5ft. 11 ins.—tall enough for anything on two legs, as the old ring men used to say—lithe and spare, with the activity of a panther, and a strength which had hardly yet ever found its limitations. His muscular development was finely hard, but his power came rather from that higher nerve-energy which counts for nothing upon a measuring ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Kentucky, had arrived on the previous evening at Detroit and had crossed the river to Canada as quickly as possible. He had been a mason but understood gardening and attending to horses and had other accomplishments. He was engaged and proved a satisfactory servant "respectful, cleanly, capable, lithe and active as a panther." His former master came from Kentucky and reclaimed him after the lapse of six months. The recognition was mutual and immediate. The Kentuckian, offered $2000 to Baby for the return of Andrew his former slave, but the offer was indignantly refused. It turned out that ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... The natives are lithe in figure, with but slight muscular development, and are yet quite strong, appearing at all times as nearly naked as would be permitted among white people. They give up nearly all branches of occupation, trade, and industries to the Chinamen, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... gravely, but did not answer; rose, and walked indolently up and down to keep himself warm. A lithe, slow figure, a clear face with delicate lips, and careless eyes that saw everything: the face of a man quick to learn and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... opaque hood, made the safe door a glare, and was thrown back into her intent, masked face, throwing out in sharp silhouette her lithe, sweet body, indisputably identified by the individual poise of her head and shoulders and the gracious contours of ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... from the usual Johnnie Smith he looked! He had lost that curious chunky appearance which Barber's old clothes gave him, and which was so misleading. On the other hand, his thin arms and pipelike legs were concealed, respectively, by becoming cloth and canvas. As for his body, it was slender, and lithe. And how straight he stood! And how smart was his appearance! ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... yere is a long time ago. Them is days when I'm young an' lithe an' strong. I can heft a pony an' I'm six foot two in my moccasins. No, I ain't so tall by three inches now; old age shortens a gent up a ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... raised to strike when something happened. A lithe, muscular form glided under the upraised fist, and the next moment there was a sharp crack as the newcomer's fist collided with the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... recalled old memories of their love, and Stephanie would run towards him lightly as a fawn. She saw the colonel so often that she was no longer afraid of him; before very long she would sit on his knee with her thin, lithe arms about him. And while thus they sat as lovers love to do, Philip doled out sweetmeats one by one to the eager Countess. When they were all finished, the fancy often took Stephanie to search through her lover's pockets with a monkey's quick instinctive dexterity, till she had ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... face the black brute, which stood looking at him with wicked eyes, its ears flattened like those of a panther. In spite of its evil temper Ted admired it for its lithe beauty. It was as clean of limb as a thoroughbred, and its black skin shone like polished ebony. While he was looking at it thus it suddenly sprang at him, reared on its hind legs, striking at him like a boxer. Had he not wheeled on the ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... greet the lithe, familiar form, Amid the surging smoke, with deaf'ning cheer; No more shall soar above the iron storm, Thy ringing voice in accents sweet ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... press-gang who were nearest to the scene of conflict. They rushed to the rescue, and reached the spot just as Ruby leaped over his prostrate foe and fled towards Arbroath. They followed with a cheer, which warned the two men in ambush to be ready. Ruby was lithe as a greyhound. He left his pursuers far behind him, and dashed down the gorge leading from the cliffs to the ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... full length on the carpet, absorbed in a book, was Robert, a boy on whom the same capacious brow as Janet's sat better than on the feminine creature. He was reading on, undisturbed by the pranks of three younger children, John Lucas, a lithe, wiry, restless elf of nine, with a brown face and black curly head, and Armine and Barbara, young persons of seven and six, on whom nature had been more beneficent in the matter of looks, for though brown was their prevailing complexion, both had well-moulded, childish features, and really ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fairest members Of our lithe society; June's glories and September's Show our love ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the man. He lifted his pipe to his lips and blew a joyous succession of swift, unhesitant notes, as throbbing as the heat, as vivid as the sunshine. His lithe throat bubbled and strained with his effort, and his warm vitality poured through the mouthpiece of the pipe and issued melodiously at the farther end. Noon deepened through many shades of hot and slumberous splendor, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... have recognised him as my brother. He had gone away but little more than a boy, he had returned a handsome, cultured man. He was not big and clumsy like myself, but tall and lithe, and yet exceedingly muscular. There was grace in his every movement, while refinement was stamped upon his handsome face. I could not help feeling the contrast between us. I was a great boorish country clown, ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... consuming us, the gates of the city were broken and the hand of Rome did have us in its power. With many of my fellows was I taken away and made fast to a great tree near by the tent where a Roman chieftain did collect spoil. Of the lithe of limb who were taken captive, some were to be made gladiators, but the fierce screams of others of my countrymen, mingled with Roman curses, told of a more ignominious fate than the arena. For this was I marked. Fierce was the passion of my bosom that my heritage of the gods ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... man, with a face somewhat of the type of Lord Derby's. There was Professor Huxley, young in years, dark, heavy-browed, alert and resolute, but not moulded after any high ideal; and there was Professor Tyndall, also young, lithe of limb, and nonchalant in manner. When his name was called he sat as if he had no concern in what was going on, and then rose with an easy smile, partly of modesty, but in great ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... fancies went back to the old time when he had first seen and admired her wild ways, her fearless occupations by sea and shore, and the delight of active work that shone on her bright face and in her beautiful eyes. How lithe and handsome her figure used to be in that blue dress, when she stood in the middle of the boat, her head bent back, her arms upstretched and pulling at some rope or other, and all the fine color of exertion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... for they whirl about as if moved by frenzy .... When I first saw such a band of dancers, I could imagine myself watching some old Dionysiac revel;—their furious gyrations certainly realized Greek accounts of the antique sacred frenzy. There were, indeed, no Greek heads; but the bronzed lithe figures, naked save for loin-cloth and sandals, and most sculpturesquely muscled, might well have inspired some vase-design of dancing fauns. After these god-possessed dancers—whose passage swept the streets clear, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... as if the alien officer had read his thoughts, for the warrior uncrossed his black legs and got nimbly to his feet with a lithe movement, which Raf, cramped by sitting in the unfamiliar posture, could not emulate. No one appeared to notice their withdrawal. And when Raf hesitated, trying to catch Hobart's eye and make some explanation, ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... that the hole was yet there, for a tall weed growing in its mouth had caused it to be overlooked by those whose duty it was to mend the fence. With her assegai she widened it a little, then drew her lithe shape through it, and lying hidden till the guard had passed, climbed the two stone walls beyond. Once she was free of the town, she set her course by the stars and started forward ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... were silk petticoats with torn frilling, and shoes and slippers. But nothing was marked with name, or even initials. Kit, though gaudily coquettish in her taste, was apparently careless in her habits. Clo no longer visioned Kit large, masculine, and determined, a tigress woman. Instead she saw a lithe, cat-like creature, strong, no doubt (it had taken strength to strike that blow and Clo would have staked her life that it had been struck by Kit) but not ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... eighty-five, and Ursula Winwood's heart had been buried in his sandy grave. That was the beginning and end of her sentimental history. She had recovered from the pain of it all and now she loved the bumble-bee for invoking the exquisite memory. The lithe Sussex spaniel crept farther on her lap and her hand caressed his polished coat. Drowsiness disintegrated the exquisite memories. Miss Ursula ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... for the lithe creature and dread of the poison fangs of which it might be the bearer, but at the same time he could not help feeling a certain admiration for its wondrous activity, the power with which it intertwined itself among the twigs and in loops and wreaths and ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... describe its peculiar dress; her cap plain, but white as snow; and a black silk gown, that had seen its best days, was pinned and primmed on, so as to sit as close as possible to a figure which would have been greatly improved by heavy and abundant drapery. Mabel, lithe and restless, buoyant and energetic, unable even to wish for more luxury or more happiness than she possessed, so that her active mind was forced to employ its longings on trifles, as it really had nothing else to desire; her face was round as those faces ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... youthful memories. What was it? It flashed upon her with the suddenness of a forgotten word. She remembered it plainly now—that treasured, highly colored lithograph of a brigand holding up a coach in a mountain pass! There was in this face the same mocking deviltry; his figure had the same lithe grace; he needed only the big hoop ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... Fielding gripped the firm, lithe hand, looking at him hard and straight. "You're very cussed," he said slowly. "I wish I'd ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... sprawling in the large grey arm-chair. The soft lamp-light fell on his clean, bald, Michael-Angelo head, across which a few pure hairs glittered. His chin was sunk on his breast, so that his sparse but strong-haired white beard, in which every strand stood distinct, like spun glass lithe and elastic, curved now upwards and inwards, in a curious curve returning upon him. He seemed to be sunk in stern, prophet-like meditation. As a matter of fact, he was asleep after a ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... handed me was a fine specimen, perhaps four and a half feet long. I lifted the smooth, lithe bulk in my hands, and then let it twist its coils so that it rested at ease in my arms; it glided to and fro, on its own length, with the sinuous grace of its kind, and showed not the slightest trace of either nervousness or bad temper. Meanwhile the doctor bade his attendant put on ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... you would, dear. So it's just as well—all things considered—that you are not going to meet. Well, I must go and get respectable." He rose with a quick, lithe movement, but paused, looking down at her quizzically to ask: "What did you think of my friend the moonstone-seller? Pretty, ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... proportion to its actual strength in mere numbers. Evidently the last Minoans succeeded in creating an atmosphere for themselves in Palestine, and in impressing the surrounding peoples with a wholesome terror of them. We may imagine the men from Crete, lithe and agile, as we see them on the Boxer Vase of Hagia Triada, swaggering in their bronze armour among the weaker Orientals, much as the later Greek hoplite of the times of Psamtek I. or Haa-ab-ra ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... forlorn the Damsel, crowned with rue, Lactiferous spoils from vaccine dugs, who drew Of that corniculate beast whose tortuous horn Tossed to the clouds, in fierce vindictive scorn, The harrowing hound, whose braggart bark and stir Arched the lithe spine and reared the indignant fur Of Puss, that with verminicidal claw Struck the weird Rat, in whose insatiate maw Lay reeking malt, that erst in Ivan's courts we saw Robed in senescent garb that seems in sooth Too long a prey ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... in ambush. Some other animal, with a long, sinuous body, crept down to the margin and lapped the water. Paul did not know what it was, and he could not break the silence to ask the others; but after drinking for a few minutes it drew its long, lithe body back through the undergrowth, and passed out of sight. Then nothing came for a while, because this was a ferocious beast of prey, and to the harmless creatures of the wilderness the air about the drinking place was filled ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the colonel, pointing out to the eastward where some lithe-limbed hounds were coursing over the prairie with Ralph on his fleet sorrel racing in pursuit. "Look at young McCrea out there where there are no telegraph poles to help you judge the distance. If he were an Indian whom you wanted ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... pebble into the lake, and watched the ripples roll away and disappear, and ruminated on a life full of color and vicissitude. He remembered the Arizona days, the endless burning sand, the dull routine of a cavalry trooper, the lithe brown bodies of the Apaches, the first skirmish and the last. From a soldier he had turned journalist, tramped the streets of Washington in rain and shine, living as a man ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... the glade Departing footsteps fail; And only where the grasses have been pressed, Or by snapped twigs I follow a fruitless trail. So—give o'er the quest! Sprawl on the roots and moss! Let the lithe garter squirm across my throat! Let the slow clouds and leaves above me float Into mine eyeballs and across,— Nor think them further! Lo, the marvel! now, Thou whom my soul desireth, even thou Sprawl'st by my ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... her. Lithe, sparkling, graceful, she gathered her soft drapery about her, and stood poised delicately on one foot, while she looked around the apartment in which she found herself. Fred could see that she was moulded more beautifully than the Graces,—by so much more as Nature is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... Murphy looked after the lithe swaying figure. She paused, plucked a yellow flower, looked over her shoulder. Her eyes, yellow as the flower, lucent as water-jewels, held his. Her face was utterly expressionless. She turned, tossed away the flower with a jaunty gesture, ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... he rose,—a low, gloomy loft, devoid of comfort. At the nearer table, a weazened little man bent eagerly over a pictorial paper; at the farther, chalking their cues, stood two players, one a sturdy Englishman with a gray moustache, the other a lithe, graceful person, whose blue coat, smart as an officer's, and swarthy but handsome face made him at a glance the most striking figure in the room. A little Chinese imp in white, who acted as marker, turned on the new-comers ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... woman never left me; she died in my house, in my arms, loving to the last. Well, when I think of her, it is with a feeling of rage. If I strive to recall her, the same as I ever saw her during those five years, in all the radiance of love, with her lithe yielding figure, the gilded pallor of her cheeks, her oriental Jewish features, regular and delicate in the soft roundness of her face, her slow speech as velvety as her glance, if I seek to embody that charming vision, it is only in order the more fiercely to cry ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... was almost universally liked by both men and women, and, while unspoilt by popularity, thoroughly deserved it. He was about twenty-six years of age, above medium height, with a lithe and graceful figure which the riding costume that he was wearing well set off. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, with good though irregular features, he was pleasant-faced and attractive rather than handsome. ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... thoughtlessly indulgent to the boy from whom she hoped and expected more than she thought it wise to let him know. The story used to be current that in their younger days this father and mother were the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show. This son of theirs was "rather tall," says Mr. Phillips, "lithe, very graceful in movement and gesture, and there was something marked and admirable in the set of his head on his shoulders,"—a peculiar elegance which was most noticeable in those later days when I knew him. Lady Byron long afterwards spoke of him as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sat I would be watching a sailor with a knife at his hip, and the lithe swing of the mountaineer in his carriage—a Skye man, I was thinking; but he stood silent against the jamb of the fireplace, and his eyes were dreamy and sad, and in myself I knew he was seeing his own place, and him outward bound. When the night was wearing on it came his turn to sing, and with ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... of the table that stood on the dais athwart the hall, and stood there panting, holding forth in his outstretched hand something which not all could see in the dimness of the hall-twilight, but which all knew nevertheless. The man was young, lithe and slender, and had no raiment but linen breeches round his middle, and skin shoes on his feet. As he stood there gathering his breath for speech, Thiodolf stood up, and poured mead into a drinking horn and ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... terror, and compresses his body into the narrowest and most inaccessible cleft or endeavours to bury himself in the loose, soft sand—and that foe is the orange-coloured or sage-green rock eel. Never do you see one of these eels in the open water; they lie deep under the stones or twine their lithe, slippery bodies among the waving kelp or seaweed. Always hungry, savage-eyed, and vicious, they know no fear of any living thing, and seizing an octopus and biting off tentacle after tentacle with their closely-set, needle-like teeth and swallowing it whole is ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... the slightest reason, burst into unrestrained merriment. Percival continued to survey them calmly and haughtily through his monocle. His first glance had revealed the fact that the girl was strikingly pretty. Her lithe young body showed round and comely in its khaki suit and brown leggings. Her black mane was braided in two short, thick plaits with a dash of scarlet ribbons at the ends. Blue eyes, full of daring, danced under the blackest of brows, and the smile she flashed at her companion ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... at the edge of the ancient terrace where broad-leaved clover grows in the broken urns. A girlish form, slender and lithe, swinging a great, old-fashioned straw hat, having a shawl wound crosswise over throat and waist, has stepped forth from the decaying old gate. She carries a little white bundle under her arm, and looks tentatively to the right and to the left as one who is about ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... revealed himself to the birds whom his splashings had attracted to the branches above the pool. If the birds' twitterings were comments on his appearance, they must have been admiring comments. The man's skin was white and he was lithe and tense and muscular. Breeding showed in him as it shows in the muscles and conformation of a race-horse. When he was dried he threw down the makeshift towel and combed his shock of brown hair ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... Nothing better than a frontal attack, well sustained and driven home to the hilt, occurred to Hugh John; and, indeed, after all, that was the best thing that could happen on such a day. A yell, a charge, a quick batter of snowballs, and then a rush straight up the bank—Maid Margaret, lithe as a deer-hound, leading, her skirts kilted "as like a boy" as on the spur of the moment she could achieve with a piece of twine. Right on Sweetheart she rushed, who,—as in some sort her senior and legal ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... with all his might he tried to construct an image of the two girls from their voices. The one with the crystalline laugh was little and lithe, quick in movement, of a mobile face, with gray eyes and fair hair; the other was tall and pale, with full, blue eyes and a regular face, and lips that trembled with humor; very demure and yet very honest; very shy ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... moon flings down her rays on the chalice of the Datura arborea, brimming with nectareous dew—her own most favoured flower, delicate of scent and chaste in beauty. Yet the night of the tropics has many drawbacks: noxious, unsightly creatures then forsake their lair, lithe snakes uncoil their glossy rings, bats flutter in the moonbeams, and croaking frogs disturb the silence of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... Sartoris on the fender, granting a brief unsmiling nod to one or two friends, and eying the group between the loose locks of her smoky, cropped black hair with the inscrutable, almost brooding, expression that was her favorite affectation. Her lithe, loosely built little body was as flat as a boy's, she clasped her crossed knees with slender, satin-smooth little brown hands, exposing by her attitude a frill of embroidered petticoat, a transparent stretch of ash-gray silk stocking, and smart ash-gray ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... West was prominent as a frontier scout. Rev. J. M. McWhorter, who saw him frequently, gives this description of him: "A tall, spare-built man, very erect, strong, lithe, and active; dark-skinned, prominent Roman nose, black hair, very keen eyes; not handsome, rather raw-boned, but with an air and mien that commanded the attention and respect of those with whom he associated. Never aggressive, he lifted his arm against the Indians ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... was that bound Us twain together, beauteous river; And, though these limbs just crawl around That once would scarcely touch the ground, And alcohol upsets my liver, Still, in a punt or lithe canoe I can revive my vernal heyday, Pretend the sky's ethereal blue, The golden kingcups' cheery hue, Spell my, as well ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... and wait, and yet they get through the day alive. I am distracted between the desire to ride in the baby cart and the fear of the language, mixed with the greater fear of the pain of being drawn by a fellow-being. They are a lithe set of little men and look as if they had steel springs to make them go when you look at their course. Still I have been only in autos, of which there are not many here. I get tired with the excitement of the constant amusement. This morning a ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... apparently had already found out how to cross her. Indeed, he did not disguise his contempt for his bride's origins, and sometimes decorum was badly strained at the dinner-table. Sadie was little and lithe and was something of the gamine—her "tricks," as the girls called her daring maneuvers, had always pleased men. But the Count did not like "tricks." He wished more dignity in the wife of a Zornec and did not ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... rattling mills. 'Ye foundries, ye shall cast my church a bell,' Loud cried the Future from the farthest hills: 'Ye groaning forces, crack me every shell Of customs, old constraints, and narrow ills; Thou, lithe Invention, wake and pry and guess, Till thy ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... particularly attracted to a man who daily, in fact almost hourly, stood at an opposite corner, and who frequently arrived, or drove away, in a buggy drawn by two rather small, black, spirited horses. He was a tall, lithe, dark-complexioned man, with black eyes, rather long black hair, and a full beard; extremely restless, and constantly moving back and forth. He addressed many passers-by, a fair proportion of whom stopped to ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the delight of the two hard pressed boys when they heard a cheery shout close by, and saw a lithe figure, also in running trunks, ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... passed so stately by, they all walked so gracefully, Balancing their bodies on lithe unstable hips, As if music moved them that swelled in their bosoms And was ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... with a lithe figure and smooth black hair brushed straight back from his forehead had paused at the table on his ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... seated upon the ground, with a young girl by his side. He could not distinguish their faces, but they were evidently listening with rapt attention to a young woman who was standing nearby playing upon a violin. Douglas noted with admiration her lithe form, and the graceful poise of her head. So the musician was a woman! It came to him as a surprise, for in his mind he had pictured a man alone on the shore, giving expression to his feelings. He longed to draw nearer, that he might see her better and look into her eyes. A soul and ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... Swallows from their way of flying. All are officers who rank high in the guild of Sky Sweepers, being constantly in the air seizing their insect food on the wing; thus they kill all sorts of flies, flying ants, small winged beetles, midges, and mosquitoes. They have lithe and shapely bodies, strong, slender wings, wide mouths, and flat, broad bills coming to a sharp point, which makes it easy for them to secure whatever they meet in the air. So swift and sure is their flight that they can feed their newly flown nestlings in mid air; but their ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... bottom of the hollow a mighty wallop, and bounced and upended to the steep pitch of the climb. Miss Drexel, seized by inspiration or desperation, with a quick movement stripped off her short, corduroy tramping-skirt, and, looking very lithe and boyish in slender-cut pongee bloomers, ran along the sand and dropped the skirt for a foothold for the slowly revolving wheels. Almost, but not quite, did the car stop, then, gathering way, with the others running alongside and shoving, it ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... illumination over the Lungarno, through which a solitary vehicle moved. Lavinia idly watched it approach, but her interest increased as it halted directly opposite where she stood. A man got quickly out—a lithe figure with a broad-brimmed hat slanted across his eyes. It was, she realized with an involuntary quickening of her blood, Abrego y Mochales. A second man followed, tendered him a curiously shaped object, and stood by the waiting ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Indian, who seemed to take but a couple of bounds from the tree near which he was standing when he landed on the spot. The infuriated Winnebago was in the act of clambering to his feet, when he caught sight of the lithe, graceful warrior, standing only a couple of steps away, with ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... briskly across the meadow-land road in the direction of the woods that lay ahead, a soft ruddy glow crept up to her cheeks, and a sparkle of joy into her eyes. She walked strongly, rapidly. Her straight, lithe young figure was a joyous thing to behold. High boots, short skirt, a loose jacket and a broad felt hat made up her costume. She was graceful, adorable; a young, healthy, beautiful creature in whom the blood surged quickly, strongly: the type of woman men are wont to classify ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... gold-fringed canopy near the choir; and the abbot said mass, having his mitre on his head. Yet, as I watched him, it seemed to me that he must have something on beneath his priest's vestments, for he looked much fatter than usual, being really a tall lithe man. ...
— The Hollow Land • William Morris
... other woman. A healthy, firm outline of face, wholly unacquainted with nervousness; quiet, self-reliant, hard-working; perhaps of a Dutch type of character. Her husband was a sturdy broad-set man, with lithe limbs, and quick senses looking out from his clear-featured countenance: he had a roving unsubdued eye, befitting the hunter more than ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... man, all twisty on one side, and a feather sticking out. Ralph said they always were like that;" and Phil's imitation, with his lithe, graceful little figure, of Ralph's clumsy mimicry was sufficient to show that there was some foundation for this story, and she did not answer at once, so that he added, "I am seven, Nana; do you ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... household are often bandied about when the black coffee is being served. The marriageable young men of Morovenia had learned of the calamity in Count Malagaski's family. They knew that Kalora weighed less than one hundred and twenty pounds. She was tall, lithe, slender, sinuous, willowy, hideous. The fact that poor old Count Malagaski had made many unsuccessful attempts to fatten her was a stock subject for jokes of an unrefined and ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven. Nearly twenty years have passed since men heard his voice, looked on his strong, lithe, active form, saw the gleam of his honest eyes, and felt the presence of a man—a man who wanted nothing and gave everything—a man who gave ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Jerry—saw his face grow ghastly with fear when Jerry's yell rose, and then grow taut with ferocity as he tugged at his sheath to meet the murderous knife flashing toward him. The terrible Dillon twins were come together at last, and Dan shuddered, but he saw no more, for he was busy with the lithe Yankee in whose arms he was closed. As they struggled, Dan tried to get his knife and the Yankee tugged for his second pistol each clasping the other's wrist. Not a sound did they make nor could either see the other's ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... the Audrey of the woods, a creature lithe and agile and strong of wrist as of will, had thrown herself upon him, clutching the hand that held the knife. He strove to dash her from him, but in vain; the house was in an uproar; and now Haward's hands were at his throat, Haward's voice was crying to that fair devil, that Audrey for ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... 1842, when there arrived in Auckland the Right Reverend George Augustus Selwyn to take up the position of bishop of the divided flock. This remarkable man was then in the prime of early manhood, and he brought with him not only a lithe athletic frame well fitted to endure hardship; not only the culture of Cambridge and of Eton, where he had learned and taught, and the courtly atmosphere of Windsor, where he had exercised his ministry; but above ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... affianced husband, a handsome young doctor of the town, a man of sterling ability and sound common sense, who very soon made Caper at home, insisted on his dancing the Tarantella and Saltarella Napolitana with a lively, lithe young lady, who cut our artist's heart to fiddlestrings before they had danced five minutes together a polka—for let the truth be told, Caper never could ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... bull had the best of it, and had got out of the yard. A long lithe lad, stationed outside on horseback, was in full chase, and Jim, leaping on one of the horses tied to the rails, started off to his assistance. The two chased the unhappy bull as a pair of greyhounds chase a hare, with their whips cracking ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... government at Pole Cat Springs, Alabama, in 1804, leaned across the pine table to extend a cordial hand to his visitor. Abram Mordecai, who stood before him, although almost fifty, gave one the impression of a much younger man. Lean and lithe as a panther, with shaggy black hair and keen eyes, his distinctly Jewish features were so tanned and weather-beaten that he looked far more the Indian than the Jew. He nodded gayly to his employer before he flung himself into a chair, his gun-stock between his knees, his great ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... stile two steps high in the separating fence, and it had long been made a thoroughfare by the families. On the top step sat Clethera, Melinda Cree's granddaughter. Clethera had been Honore's playmate since infancy. She was a lithe, dark girl, with more of her French father in her than of her half-breed mother. Some needle-work busied her hands, but her ear caught every accent of the conference at the gate. She flattened ...
— The Mothers Of Honore - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... minutes 'an mine ever heerd on." His eyes followed the boy as he went out to stand by Jack's elbow and ply this slow-witted gentleman with quick, eager questions. He was slender and rather tall for one of his age, but lithe and agile, as the skipper noted. "One o' mine could jes' trip him with a turn o' his hand," thought he; yet he regarded the lad with a mixture of kindness and respect, after all. There were other things in the world beside bone and muscle, he remembered, and when the boy came slowly along the deck, ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... lot they were, as brown and brawny as their fathers, but tingling with life to their finger-tips, ready for anything, and impossible of control except by one whom they feared as well as reverenced. And such a man was Alexander Murray, for they knew well that, lithe and brawny as they were, there was not a man of them but he could fling out of the door and over the fence if he so wished; and they knew, too, that he would be prompt to do it if occasion arose. Hence they waited for the word of God with all due ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... understood in the first place that she was very lovely;—much more so, indeed, now than when she had fascinated Sir Florian. She was small, but taller than she looked to be,—for her form was perfectly symmetrical. Her feet and hands might have been taken as models by a sculptor. Her figure was lithe, and soft, and slim, and slender. If it had a fault it was this,—that it had in it too much of movement. There were some who said that she was almost snake-like in her rapid bendings and the almost ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... whistle before you are out of the wood, and Brady's triumph was short-lived. Swift as a shadow, a lithe figure darted out from among the trees and planted ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... can be made naughty, and no doubt often is; but then so can many another form of innocent amusement. The Nautch dance is a decorous and artistic performance when properly danced; the graceful motions and elegant proportions of the human form, as revealed by lithe and graceful dancers, are to be viewed with an eye as purely artistic and critical as that with which one regards a Venus or other ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... deep breath he straightened himself to the height of a tall man. The bent contorted limbs became lithe and strong. The cringing humility slipped from him like a garment. He stood upright and faced Ralph Dacre—a man in the ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... marsh for their meadow-land, their young trees were growing finely, their vineyard was thriving in a sunny selected nook, their sheep flecked the hills all about them. A deep fish-pond had been made where now two monks sat fishing. Padraig wondered if they had caught anything as good as the lithe trout he had taken from ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... St. Cricq was just seventeen, lithe, slender, and of "angelic" beauty, with a complexion like a lily flushed with roses, open, "impressionable to beauty, to the world, to religion, to God." The countess, her mother, appears to have been a charming woman, very partial to Liszt, whom she engaged to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... eat so much, Poppet!' drawled Charles Annesley to a Spanish danseuse, tall, dusky and lithe, glancing like a lynx and graceful as a jennet. She was very silent, but no doubt indicated the possession of Cervantic humour by the sly calmness with which she exhausted her own ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... back a little space, and left Lying in dust his son, since now no more Lived in the once lithe limbs the olden strength, For the years' weight lay heavy on his head. Back leapt Thrasymedes likewise, spearman good, And battle-eager Phereus, and the rest Their comrades; for that slaughter-dealing man Pressed hard on them. As when from mountains high ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... California Suffrage Association. The Woman's Journal said: "Those of us who have for years admired Mrs. Stetson's remarkably bright poems were delighted to meet her, and to find her even more interesting than her writings. She is still a young woman, tall, lithe and graceful, with fine dark eyes, and spirit and originality flashing from her at every turn like light from a diamond. She read several poems to the convention, made an address one evening and preached twice ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... and that accomplished bowler, Fortune, ball in hand, at the other end; will it be swift round-hand, or a slow twister, or a shooter, or a lob? Eye and hand, foot and bat, he must stand tense, yet flexible, lithe and swift as lightning, ready for everything—cut, block, slip, or hit to leg. It was not altogether pleasant. The stakes were enormous! and the suspense by no ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... would have loved your mother! She was most beautiful, and of the type so dear to you. Her skin was almost as white as Leah's, her eyes almost as black, her hair even blacker; like Leah, she was tall and slim and lithe and graceful. She might have been Leah's mother, too, for the likeness between them. How often you remind me of her when you laugh or sing, and when you're funny in French; those droll, quick gestures and quaint ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... some solitude Were ours, in woodlands deep, Where, with lucent eyes, Living lithe and limber-thewed, Our life's shape might arise Like mountains fresh ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... clear around the block, came up behind her, and took up a position on a dry-goods box; it lacked an hour to dinner time, and I had leisure. The lady maintained her attitude, but with momently increasing impatience, which found expression in singular wave-like undulations of her lithe figure, and an occasional unmistakeable contortion. Several gentlemen approached, but were successively and politely dismissed. Suddenly she experienced a quick convulsion, strode sharply forward ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... yet he was by far the cleverest of the gang. He was the favorite of his crowd, and its leader. Though there were a number older than he, they acknowledged his chieftaincy. He was a beautiful boy, a lithe young god in breathing bronze, eyes wide apart, intelligent and daring, a bubble, a mote, a beautiful flash and sparkle of life. You have seen wonderful glorious creatures—animals, anything, a leopard, a horse-restless, eager, too much alive ever to be still, silken ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... the stairs, clattering hobnails among them, and Annie returned, accompanied by Katie Cotton, the dairymaid, and her sweetheart, Philip Jacka. Philip was a lithe, restless youth, with curly hair that caught the light and bright, glinting eyes. He was far better-looking than his girl, and far more at his ease; sturdy, high-bosomed Katie was guilty of an occasional sniff of feminine sympathy; Philip looked on with ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... shapes and the most gorgeous colours; of birds, insects, ay, and even fish, that flashed and glittered with all the hues of the rainbow; of monkeys who followed their course up the river in troops of a hundred or more; of the lithe and graceful jaguar lying stretched upon some trunk or branch that closely overhung the water, watching with ready paw to seize any unwary fish that might chance to swim past within reach; of alligators ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... fore, took control of that feline man-shape that was his, struggled to its feet and moved in a lithe bound to the opposite side of the chamber. A clawed hand reached up where Gaddon knew the release mechanism of the ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... coming in by the Porta Romana, the Porta Camollia, the Porta Pespini. The oxen had been fed and left in their stalls; there was no ploughing in the fields on this day, no gathering of figs, no sound of singing voices and laughter in the vineyards. The brown wrinkled old men and women, the lithe, slender youths in their suits of black broadcloth—wood gods disguised by cheap tailoring—all had left their work and come many a mile along the dusty roads and across fields to the town for the dear Madonna's sake, and to see the Palio. ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... bulky form with a degree of lithe activity that proved him to be not less agile than athletic, and, with several others, sprang to obey the order. A few seconds later the sails were swelled out by a light breeze, and the schooner moved through the water at a ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... on a cot in one corner, exploring the interior of a big blue canvas bag; a professor or doctor person, who gave me one keen glance, briefly said "Good day," and went on with his occupation. A second bed, already neatly set up and equipped, stood in another corner. Its owner, lithe and keen, a fellow of about twenty-five, was watching a third, man-sized but boy-faced, who was struggling with a cot in its chrysalis stage, being apparently quite unable to unfold it. I knew the lad at a glance, young David Ridgway ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... only a little fellow not yet fourteen, but he was strong and lithe as a young Indian, and as to fear—he did not know what it was. As he saw the horses dashing toward him he leaped into the middle of the street and stood there, eyes alert and limbs ready, directly in their pathway. They swerved ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... the uttermost ocean go heaving by; and the long lithe brutes that are toothed to their tails: and below, where gloom dipped down on gloom, vast, livid tangles that coiled and uncoiled, and lapsed down steeps and hells of the sea where even the salmon could ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... suddenly and we came face to face with the gate between us. For a moment we stared at each other, I reflecting that she really was very pretty with her delicately-shaped features, her fresh, healthy-looking complexion, her long dark eyelashes and her lithe and charming figure. What she reflected about me I don't know, probably nothing half so complimentary. Suddenly, however, her large greyish eyes grew troubled and a look of alarm appeared upon ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... mingled with other faces—horrible as antique masks—wrought by the magic of the moon from the gigantic flowers that adorned the narrow strip of carpet by the bedside. Her dresses, suspended from a row of hooks in the corner—and showing, in gentle swells and curves, the lithe, graceful form of the little wearer, like moulds,—would have looked to any open eye, that dreadful night, like women hanging against the wall. This startling idea would have been helped along by two or three shadowy bonnets depending from pegs above them. The white somethings carelessly ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... apparently without the slightest reason, burst into unrestrained merriment. Percival continued to survey them calmly and haughtily through his monocle. His first glance had revealed the fact that the girl was strikingly pretty. Her lithe young body showed round and comely in its khaki suit and brown leggings. Her black mane was braided in two short, thick plaits with a dash of scarlet ribbons at the ends. Blue eyes, full of daring, danced under the blackest of brows, and the smile she flashed at her companion revealed ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... shaded on the cheek by a light rose-color. The position of the head and neck announced a rare mixture of grace and dignity. A sort of tunic or robe, of glossy black material, came as high as the commencement of her shoulders, and just marking her lithe and tall figure, reached down to her feet, which were almost entirely concealed by the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... abruptness, the end of all this fascination,—a serpent's bite and a basilisk's sting. The kind of poisonous snake meant in the last clause of verse 32 is doubtful, but certainly is one much more formidable than an adder. The serpent's lithe gracefulness and painted skin hide a fatal poison; and so the attractive wine-cup is sure to ruin those who look on it. The evil consequences are pursued in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... In disobedience to the scriptural injunction, we had observed the clouds and the birds. Twice a flock of lesser frigate-birds, those dark, fish-tailed high-fliers which are for ever cutting animated "W's" in the air with long lithe wings—had appeared. Seldom do they come unless as harbingers of boisterous weather. On each recent occasion they had been absolutely trustworthy messengers. Watching them soaring and swooping, we said one to another: "Behold the cyclone cometh!" But ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... beauteous plaisance: we glide in the picturesque imaginings of the oriental poet from the charm of all that is languorously seductive in nature into the shadowy realms of the supernatural. At one moment the sturdy bowman or lithe and agile lancer is before us in hurrying column, and at another we are told of mystic sentinels from another world, of Djinns and demons and spirit-princes. All seems shadowy, ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... you must remember, here as steep as house-roofs, the last spurs of true mountains) is covered with a grass like tall rye-grass, but growing in tufts. That is the famous Guinea-grass {78e} which, introduced from Africa, has spread over the whole West Indies. Dark lithe coolie prisoners, one a gentle young fellow, with soft beseeching eyes, and 'Felon' printed on the back of his shirt, are cutting it for the horses, under the guard of a mulatto turnkey, a tall, steadfast, dignified man; and between ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of men— The agonists! Their hearts beat deep as a brazen gong For their strength's behests. Their arms are lithe as a seasoned thong In games or tests When they run or box or swim the long Sea-waves crests With their slender legs, and their hips so ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... went to one of the beautiful mushrbiyeh windows which, on the level of the story above the ground floor, bayed graciously, overhanging the street. One man standing below held the ladder firmly in place, while another, small and lithe as a monkey and enjoying the task as a monkey might, ran up to the top that leaned against the window. Evidently he was a skilled worker, for before I knew what he would be at, he had with some small, sharp instrument, prized out without breaking it, one of the sections of ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... awoke and uncoiling her figure, rolled softly over on her back and stretched like some drowsy feline of the jungle; then sitting up with lithe grace she looked down at the print of her head on the pillow and deftly smoothed it out. The action was characteristic: she was careful to hide the traces of her behavior, and the habit was so strong that it extended to things innocent as slumber. Letting her hands drop to the ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... after her in undisguised, ardent admiration. I saw it, and if I remember well, a vague wish was creeping into my heart at the time, that I had been as lithe and fair a creature as Alice Merivale. Before I had dwelt much upon it however, silence was again restored and our charming hostess ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... all nations and classes. The sturdy German, the lithe and gay-hearted Irishman, went shoulder to shoulder in defence of their adopted country. The man of money, the man of law, the merchant, the artist, and the artisan swelled the lines hastening to the scene of action, armed either with musket, pick, or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... could well afford to do so, lithe and supple as he still was, with flabby Mr. Venables in ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... experience is, in the highest degree, pleasurable and exhilarating to her, yet she may be conscious of absolutely no sexual stimulation. On the other hand, the young man experiences most exalted pleasure in the company of his young lady friend—through the pressure of her hand upon his arm, the lithe, graceful movement of body and limbs, the smile, the light in the eye and the soft voice. All of these give him an exquisite pleasure that he will be unable to analyze, even if he ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... long. It was not the face of an easy-going man as God had made it. But years had made it the face of a man that nothing could rouse. He was of medium height, with rather narrow shoulders, but upright and lithe. He was clean shaven and of a pleasant ruddiness. His eyes were a bluish gray, and looked out upon the world with a reflective attention through gold-rimmed eye-glasses, with which he had a habit of amusing himself while talking, examining ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... now further increased by a great accession of power and dignity. Cardinal Campeggio had been sent as legate into England, in order to procure a lithe from the clergy, for enabling the pope to oppose the progress of the Turks; a danger which was become real, and was formidable to all Christendom, but on which the politics of the court of Rome had built so many interested projects that it had lost all influence on the minds ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... chance to use it. All the strength and fury of Grant's lithe, steel sinews and bone were behind the solid smash that landed squarely on the Ganymedan's chin. He went down in ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... long time ago. Them is days when I'm young an' lithe an' strong. I can heft a pony an' I'm six foot two in my moccasins. No, I ain't so tall by three inches now; old age shortens a gent ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... the reply; and I was so intent upon the fierce lithe savage that I forgot all about Jack Penny till I ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... Ray that pleased all the senses. His lithe form seemed instinct with life; any sudden movement was suggestive of stored lightning. His position at the plate was on the left side, and he stood perfectly motionless, with just a hint of tense waiting alertness. Dorr, Blake and Babcock, the outfielders for the Grays, trotted ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... the footprints they had lately made, watched the lithe figure tripping to and fro, and, as he looked, murmured to himself the last line of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... other, advance, shake hands, or salaam, leisurely tie up their back hair, slap their muscles, rub a little earth over their shoulders and arms, so that their adversary may have a fair grip, then step by step slowly and gradually they near each other. A few quick passages are now interchanged; the lithe supple fingers twist and intertwine, grips are formed on arm and neck. The postures change each moment, and are a study for an anatomist or sculptor. As they warm to their work they get more reckless; they are only the raw material, the untrained ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... Robert's hand, quickly threw off his clothing and sprang into the water, swimming with strong strokes toward the dense, high bushes that lined the opposite shore. Robert watched the lithe, brown figure cleave the water, disappear in the bushes and then reappear a moment or two later, rowing a boat. All had fallen out as the Onondaga had said, and he quickly came ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ordered Vermilion to release her, and who had fired the shot that had killed him, stood calmly watching four lithe-bodied canoemen securely bind the arms of the two scowmen who ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... rattle went on for a second or two, then gradually subsided. Bob lay white-faced, and still as death. Jeremy drew a step closer and then gave a choked cry of relief. The snake's smooth, diamond-marked body remained coiled for the spring. Its lithe forepart was thrust forward from the top coil and the venemous, blunt head—but the head was no more. Jeremy's ball ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... delicate-scented wood-flowers. It is Theocritus again, with the civilization of the added centuries contributing its spangles of reason, philosophy, and grace. Who among all the short-kirtled damsels of all the eclogues will match us this fair, lithe, witty, capricious, mirthful, buxom Rosalind? Nowhere in books have we met with her like,—but only at some long-gone picnic in the woods, where we worshipped "blushing sixteen" in dainty boots and white muslin. There, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... graceful head was turned toward the fiery fete on shore, and his busy thoughts were with that lithe, dripping figure he had seen through the sea-glasses, climbing into a distant boat. For the figure reminded him of a girl he had known very well when the world was younger; and the memory was ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... fruit-trees, as pomegranates and figs. In the latter they are trained upon tall trees resembling firs, round whose stems they twine themselves, and from which their rich clusters droop. Sometimes the long lithe boughs pass across from tree to tree, forming a canopy under which the monarch and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... dark, homely face, only redeemed from positive ugliness by her deep, expressive eyes. Her figure was superb; rather slender, lithe and sinewy, but without an angle or thin curve. Like Diana, she was long limbed, so that she seemed taller than she really was. The sweep of neck and shoulder was exquisite, and her simple dress was admirably adapted to display the lines of her supple form. As she walked down the studio, setting ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... them to St. Ives; Strong men have cried like babes, bydam, To hear what happened at Babraham. But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester! There's peace and holy quiet there, Great clouds along pacific skies, And men and women with straight eyes, Lithe children lovelier than a dream, A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream, And little kindly winds that creep Round twilight corners, half asleep. In Grantchester their skins are white, They bathe by day, they bathe by ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... drift covering Wisconsin and Minnesota and some of the larger moraines of the residual glaciers in the California Sierra. I found a pit eight or ten feet deep with raw shifting sides countersunk abruptly in the rough moraine material, and at the bottom, on sliding down by the aid of a lithe spruce tree that was being undermined, I discovered, after digging down a foot or two, that the bottom was resting on a block of solid blue ice which had been buried in the moraine perhaps a century or more, judging by the age of the tree that ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... wall. Cornish, who was quick and observant, remembered now how the room was shaped and furnished. He gathered himself together, drew in his legs, and doubled himself, with his feet against the desk, his shoulder against the door. He was long and lithe, of a steely strength which he had never tried. He now slowly straightened himself, and tore the screws out of the solid wood of the door, which remained hanging by the upper hinge. His head and shoulders were now out in the open ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... the traveler, however faulty to the eye of the traveler's wife. When about to dance, the Alme puts on a lighter and more diaphanous dress, eschews her slippers, and with a slow and measured step advances to the centre of the room—her lithe figure undulating with a grace peculiarly serpentile. The music is that of a reed pipe or a tambourine—a number of attendants assisting with castanets. Perhaps the "argument" of her dance will be a love-passage with an imaginary young Arab. The coyness of a first meeting ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... began to sprinkle the ground with it; and in an instant she was the centre of a cloud of birds. Peter was at liberty to watch her, to admire the swift grace of her motions, their suggestion of delicate strength, of joy in things physical, and the lithe elasticity of her figure, against the background of satiny lawn, and the further vistas of lofty sunlit trees. She was dressed in white, as always—a frock of I know not what supple fabric, that looked as if you might have ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... wilderness of rock and river and lake. You did not see it all, but you felt it. They had markedly Indian faces and those of the older men showed plainly the battle for life they had been fighting. They were tall, lithe, and active looking, with a certain air of self-possession and dignity which almost all Indians seem to have. They wore dressed deer-skin breeches and moccasins and over the breeches were drawn bright red cloth leggings reaching from the ankle to well above the knee, and held in place ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... stubborn, crisping hair, leads his Highland brigade tip the hill against the Vladimir columns, till "with the sorrowful wail which bursts from the brave Russian infantry when they have to suffer loss," eight battalions of the enemy fall back in retreat. Lord Lucan, tall, lithe, slender, his face glittering and panther- like in moments of strenuous action, wins our hearts as he won Kinglake's, in spite of the mis-aimed cleverness and presumptuous self-confidence which always criticised and sometimes ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... upon the lithe, naked body, and—the body was not there. Quick as was the great cat, the ape-boy was quicker. He leaped to one side almost as the panther's talons were closing upon him, and as Sheeta went hurtling to the ground beyond, Tarzan was racing for the safety ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... straightened up again and tried to seem not to notice. The Boy saw and watched her brave attempts at self-control with deep appreciation. But suddenly, as they rode and talked, a dark form appeared across their way a little ahead, lithe and stealthy and furry, and two awful eyes like green lamps glared for an instant, then disappeared ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... with blazing eyes Dora Mayhew threw herself in front of him. Tall, lithe, and slender herself, she seemed just the height of the young trooper she defended. "If you raise hand or foot against Rawdon, Sergeant Fitzroy, it's the last time you come inside our gate. No, I'll not stand aside! Before you strike him ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... when Mary is at home by a perpetual banging of doors,' said Lesbia, which was a sisterly exaggeration founded upon fact, for Molly was given to impetuous rushing in and out of rooms when that eager spirit of hers impelled the light lithe body upon some new expedition. Nor is the society of fox-terriers conducive to repose or stateliness of movement; and Maulevrier's terriers, although strictly forbidden the house, were for ever breaking bonds and leaping in upon Molly's retirement at all unreasonable hours. She and ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Neuve Chapelle, where the British took over five miles of trenches and four miles of front from the enemy, the Hindu troops distinguished themselves in magnificent charges. They leaped out of the trenches almost before the word of command had reached their hearing. Fleet of foot and lithe of action, they had sprung into the enemy trenches and slashed the Hun to submission before the heavier white men had got across the intervening country. They were wonderful, full of dash and courage, but the difficulties of the situation called for ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... the dipped oar with long antennae, and chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of their leaves. And the river wanders and thither hither among the islets, and is smothered and broken up by the reeds, like an old building in the lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy. You may watch the box where the good man of the inn keeps fish alive for his kitchen, one oily ripple following another over the top of the yellow deal. And you can hear a splashing and a prattle ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ensign, just come upon the town. She actually spent an hour longer at her toilette, and made her appearance with her hair uncommonly frizzed and powdered, and an additional quantity of rouge. She was evidently a little surprised and shocked, therefore, at finding the lithe, dashing ensign transformed into a corpulent old general, with a double chin; though it was a perfect picture to witness their salutations; the graciousness of her profound curtsy, and the air of the old school with which the general took off his hat, swayed it gently in his hand, and bowed ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... arrivals on the scene, one joyfully welcomed by all and the other rather unexpected but not less welcome to many of the boys. 'Siah Bolderwood entered the clearing from a forest-path at almost the same instant that a lithe young figure appeared from the direction of the creek. Enoch ran to his old friend and hugged him in his delight. "Ain't I glad you've come, 'Siah! We got most of the work done; we're goin' to get lots of nice ashes, ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... out upon the surface of the lake. His breath was coming quickly, but with excitement rather than fatigue. Behind him, less than half a mile away, he could hear the rapidly approaching cry of the hunt-pack, and for an instant he bent his lithe form close to the snow, measuring with the acuteness of his race the distance of the pursuers. Then he looked for his white companion, and failed to see the motionless blot that marked where the other had fallen. ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... boulder, stood the thing that had screamed; in this light its great body was weirdly magnified, so that the entire length of seven or eight feet appeared to Gloria's frightened eyes twice that. Long-bodied and lithe, small-headed and merciless, steel-muscled and chisel-clawed, the big cat in silhouette twitched its restless tail back and forth nervously, and from snarling jaws sent forth its almost human call to cut across ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... arm round her; they propelled her towards the house. They were lithe, supple creatures of twenty and twenty-one. Between them walked Neville, with her small, pointed, elfish face, that was sensitive to every breath of thought and emotion like smooth water wind-stirred. With her great violet eyes brooding ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... With the lithe alertness of a leopard she evaded him; the next instant the bed was between them and she had whipped a negligee about her. For an instant they faced each other; then she pointed a quivering arm, gasping in a voice that sounded strange ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... upon its wings descended, And every golden feather gleamed therein— Feather and scale inextricably blended The serpent's mailed and many-colored skin Shone through the plumes, its coils were twined within By many a swollen and knotted fold, and high And far, the neck receding lithe and thin, Sustained a crested head, which warily Shifted and glanced before the ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... against the possible evils of an excessive specialising which the very progress of knowledge in all departments seems to make inevitable. I do not need to speak, either, of the flow, and sometimes the torrent, of eloquence ever at his command, nor of the lithe and sinewy force of his extraordinarily nimble, as well as massive, mind; nor need I say more than one word about the remarkable combination of qualities so generally held and seen to be incompatible, which put ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... upon the causeway above, a dim shadow against the star-lit sky, was another figure—unperceived by, yet completing, the group below. The arms were raised, half threateningly, half imploringly, and the lithe, vigorous form swayed in unison with the wild throbbings of a heart in which sated hate did mortal battle with outraged love. Chona had conquered; but even in the first flush of her triumph she knew that love and hope and happiness, that everything which ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... equipments had yet been seen in that country, nor indeed in any other, where the Normans were still strangers. As the Knights advanced on horseback, in their metal coating, they looked more like iron cylinders filled with flesh and blood, than like lithe and limber human combatants. The man-at-arms, whether Knight or Squire, was almost invariably mounted; his war-horse was usually led, while he rode a hackney, to spare the destrier. The body armour was a hauberk of netted iron or steel, to which were joined a hood, sleeves, breeches, hose ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... deadly eyes, staring, unearthly yellow in the lantern light. Within two yards of Clay, who stood helpless with fear and uncertainty, it crouched to spring, growling and snapping at its own sides, and Helen screamed again as she saw Travis's quick, lithe figure spring forward and, grasping the dog by the throat from behind, fling himself with crushing force on the brute, ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... Quair, looking at the lithe, modeled figure, and then half turning to include the model, who had seated herself on the lounge, and was now gazing with interest at the composition sketched in by Drene for the facade of the ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... word, a tall and lithe figure stepped swiftly, and with a sort of athletic certainty, out of the omnibus, turned at once towards it, and, with a movement eloquent of affection and almost tender reverence, stretched forth an arm and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... from the inner room a trim, lithe, almost boyishly slim figure attired in a bewitchingly skittish-looking garment consisting of knickerbockers and snug brassiere of king's blue satin messaline. Dainty black silk stockings and tiny buckled slippers set ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... years. I remember with what a shock of surprise I noted the perfection of his face. The angle was absolutely correct as the old Hellenic marbles, and to every curve was that final warmth which stone can only distantly suggest. Then he was tall, but so light and lithe——" ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... he gloried in the look of them, in the trained, springy strides, in the lithe, erect forms, in the assurance in every move. Every detail of that practice photographed itself upon Ken Ward's memory, and he knew he would ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... and rugged hills swarming with a jubilant enemy. For at the first signs of evacuation the Mahsuds came out in greater numbers; harrying and pressing in upon the dogged little column on all sides, yet rarely offering a mark for riflemen; their lithe bodies and marvellous activity enabling them to find ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... preliminary remarks, I hasten to assure you, that as a woman, Honora Eloise Houghton, is a goodly person to behold. One inch less than six feet in height, straight as an arrow, broad of shoulder, and round of limb, swift of hand and foot, lithe and willowy in every motion, her commanding figure possesses the grace and beauty, of a Venus and a Diana combined. Her large, full, well turned neck and throat, fittingly supports a symmetrical, well poised head, of the same noble proportions. A long, thick, luxuriant ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... pick up a book from the window sill and glance studiously at its pages. He saw the book was called 'Lucile.' And he looked her over some more—between mouthfuls, of course—the neat-fitting black dress revealing every line of her lithe young figure, like these magazine stories say, the starched white apron and the look of sad dignity that had probably come of fresh drummers trying to teach her how to take a joke, and the smooth brown hair—he'd ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... mould Of those two lips, which should be opening soft In the pure profile; not as when she laughs, For that spoils all: but rather as if aloft Yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff's Burthen of honey-coloured buds to kiss And capture 'twixt the lips apart for this. Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround, How it should waver on the pale gold ground Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts! I know, Correggio loves to mass, in rifts Of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb Breaking its outline, burning shades absorb: But these are only massed there, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... of the blouse her deeply tanned throat rose like a bronze column; the roses in her cheeks and on her lips relieved the sun-darkened skin. Her hair was in two great plaits and it was evident that she seldom troubled about a hat. She was lithe, graceful as she could be, and bubbling over with good ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... faint tan. He flung back his crimson robe as if he felt the heat, and stood forth, lithe as a wrestler, in his close-fitting cote-hardie and hose ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... thy speech-friend, if thou be Arthur the Black Squire. He spake not, but still gazed on her till she reddened. She knew not whether to deem him less goodly than the other twain. He also was a young man of not over five and twenty years, slim and lithe, with much brown hair; his face tanned so dark that his eyes gleamed light from amidst it; his chin was round and cloven, his mouth and nose excellently fashioned; little hair he had upon his face, his cheeks were somewhat ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... The dark, lithe young mother who led her boy by the hand down the crowded aisle of the improvised brush arbor that day performed a deed which was destined to change the history ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... flung herself into an easy-chair beside him. Carroll remained standing. She leaned her head back and crossed her hands behind her neck in a way she had. She was a thing of lithe grace in her soft red silk. The dim light obliterated all the worn lines in her face. Carroll regarded her even in the midst of the distressful stress of affairs with a look of admiration. It was an absent-minded ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... flower under glass. There were no traces of the dust of life's battles on her anywhere. She did not like him very much in the afternoons, in his white drill suit and planter's hat, which seemed to her an unduly Bohemian costume for calling in a house where there were ladies. But in the evening, lithe and elegant in his dress clothes and with his pleasant, slightly veiled voice, he always made her conquest afresh. He might have been anybody distinguished—the son of a duke. Falling under that charm probably (and ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... black-and-white warbler, is not, after all, so expert a creeper as is the nuthatch, which may be called the arboreal skater par excellence. The warbler does not go scuttling straight down a vertical bole or branch as the nuthatch does, but swings his lithe body from side to side, as if he did not loosen the hold of both feet simultaneously but alternately. Besides, both in ascending and descending he must have more frequent recourse to his wings to tide him over the difficult places. While the nuthatch can glide over ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... beforehand, but do not go to the extreme of ignoring the importance of acquiring mastery of your physical movements. A muscular hand made flexible by free movement, is far more likely to be an effective instrument in gesture than a stiff, pudgy bunch of fingers. If your shoulders are lithe and carried well, while your chest does not retreat from association with your chin, the chances of using good extemporaneous gestures are so much the better. Learn to keep the back of your neck touching your collar, hold your chest high, and keep ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... lady, and she dwelt with us until we bore her to the little churchyard on the hill-side, where there is a clump of trees to break the cold sough of the winds into a lullaby. By that time another Marget, beautiful of face like the Forbeses, lithe of limb like the Gordons—we never could agree whom she most resembled!—had been given to us. She was our guerdon of the reverent gospel of home, which is the high altar of this world, the source and sanctuary of our well-being as ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... do nothing to avert this catastrophe? Is there no hope? For mankind is in itself so noble, so beautiful, so full of all graces and capacities; with aspirations fitted to sing among the angels; with comprehension fitted to embrace the universe! Consider the exquisite, lithe-limbed figures of the first man and woman, as they stood forth against the red light of their first sunset—fresh from the hand of the Mighty One—His graceful, perfected, magnificent thoughts! What love shines out of their great eyes; what goodness, like dawn-awakened flowers, ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... her. She could, he thought, be daring to the verge of coarseness, and he did not admire her pessimism, which was probably a pose; but there was a vein of elfish mischief in her that appealed to him. Sitting among the heather, small, lithe, and felinely graceful, watching him with a provocative smile in her rather narrow eyes, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... not ungraceful Jim flung wide the door. Indeed, Rose-Marie told herself, as she stepped into the Volsky flat, Jim was never ungraceful. There was something lithe and cat-like in his slightest movement, just as there was something feline in the expression of his eyes. Rose-Marie often felt like a small, helpless mouse when Jim ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... stars around the walls, and the chant was renewed with a passionate abandon. The figures hitched and sprang around the homely iron stove like lithe animals. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... is more objectionable on the latter than on the chest, as a speck of white on chest is frequently to be seen in all self-coloured breeds. SIZE AND SYMMETRY—The most desirable weight in show condition is, for a dog 24 lb., and for a bitch 22 lb. The dog must present an active, lively, lithe, and wiry appearance; lots of substance, at the same time free of clumsiness, as speed and endurance, as well as power, are very essential. They must be neither cloddy or cobby, but should be framed on the lines of speed, showing a graceful ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... miles in width, and is about twelve miles long, with a depth of many hundreds of feet. It is motionless to the eye, yet it descends into the plain continually. It is hard and unyielding in its nature, yet it flows as really and steadily, if not with as lithe a motion, as a liquid river. It is not a half solid mass like mud, which might roll slowly down an incline; it is solid, clear, transparent, brittle ice, which refuses to bend, and cracks sharply ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... narrowest and most inaccessible cleft or endeavours to bury himself in the loose, soft sand—and that foe is the orange-coloured or sage-green rock eel. Never do you see one of these eels in the open water; they lie deep under the stones or twine their lithe, slippery bodies among the waving kelp or seaweed. Always hungry, savage-eyed, and vicious, they know no fear of any living thing, and seizing an octopus and biting off tentacle after tentacle with their closely-set, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... appearance which Barber's old clothes gave him, and which was so misleading. On the other hand, his thin arms and pipelike legs were concealed, respectively, by becoming cloth and canvas. As for his body, it was slender, and lithe. And how straight he stood! And how smart was his appearance! And ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... Amy had entered it, the roses that she had touched, admired, and kissed with lips that vied with their petals grew tenfold more beautiful, and the spot seemed sacred to her alone. He could never enter it again without thinking of her and seeing her lithe form bending to favorites which hitherto he had only associated with his mother. His life seemed so full and his happiness so deep that he did not want to think, and would not analyze according ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... he was never old-Patrick. He came to us thirty-six years ago. He was our coachman from the day that I drove my young bride to our new home. He was a young Irishman, slender, tall, lithe, honest, truthful, and he never changed in all his life. He really was with us but twenty-five years, for he did not go with us to Europe; but he never regarded that a separation. As the children grew up he was their guide. He was all honor, honesty, and affection. He ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Dicky is slender, lithe, with merry brown eyes and thick, brown hair, with a touch of auburn in it, and just enough suspicion of a curl to give him several minutes' hard brushing each day trying to keep it down. Harry Underwood, taller even than Dicky, who is above the ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... the cold northern countries of Asia are a little different from those in the hot southern countries. For the tigers in the cold countries have thick fur on their skin, and a layer of fat under their skin—just to keep them warm. So they are too fat to be as muscular and active as the slim and lithe tigers that live in the hot countries ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle, Book Two • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... to the lantern," said the old man. Old, but lithe, strong, and keen-eyed. He is particularly fond of this lantern, and was remarkably lucid in explaining everything concerning ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... crest, rode like an Amazon, at ease, and with mastery. The same moment the mare was away, up hill and down dale, almost at racing speed. Had the coming moon been above the horizon, the Amazon farm-girl would have been worth meeting! So perfectly did she yield her lithe, strong body to every motion of the mare, abrupt or undulant, that neither ever felt a jar, and their movements seemed the outcome of a vital force common to the two. Kirsty never thought whether she was riding well or ill, gracefully or otherwise, but the mare knew that all was ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... the horse's hoofs the reader marked his page with his apple, and with a single movement of his lithe body was on his feet, a-stare to see a visitor where for many days visitors had been none. Declining autumn and snowy winter and greening spring, he could count upon the fingers of one hand the number of those who had come that way where once there had been gay ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... from point to point, browsing as they went, when suddenly from the tree-tops, fell a long lithe figure. ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... have it understood that these little vaquero girls were not the ordinary Texas product, fed on corn-meal and bred in the chaparral, but the much looked after darlings of a fond mother. They are taken South every winter, that their bodies may be made lithe and healthy, but at the same time two or more governesses crowd their minds with French, German, and other things with which proper young girls should be acquainted. But their infant minds did not carry back to the days when they had not felt a horse under them. ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... natives standing at the edge of the wood quietly watching us. One of them I at once recognised as the lithe and active leader, whom I had seen upon the shore in swift pursuit ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... annoy her. His mule had strayed off among the bleating sheep. Jean drove it back and then led his horse up to where the girl stood. She appeared taller and, though not of robust build, she was vigorous and lithe, with something about her that fitted the place. Jean was ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
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